by Nick Webb
A pulsing sensation throbbed through the vast bay. A sensation he recognized very well by that point. In confirmation, he brought up the sensor readings, and nodded. There it was. A forced singularity was forming just three kilometers off the starboard bow, in the middle of the four remaining alien ships.
He scanned the rest of the field of battle and saw the remains of all the ships that had been mustered for this final, desperate fight. They were almost all in pieces, billowing smoke and debris. The few that survived hobbled along, pockmarked and broken, pelting the four remaining alien vessels with whatever paltry, ineffective weaponry they had left.
And the Congress continued its flaming descent through the atmosphere, with a fiery tail like a comet.
“Goodbye, Bill,” he murmured. “I’m sure you and Proctor made a good team.”
Too many goodbyes.
Checking the main engine status, he winced when he saw that five of the six main thrusters were almost completely destroyed. Luckily, the sixth seemed operational. Barely.
The pulsing intensified, indicating the growing size of the singularity. He checked the time. Assuming a similar growth rate to the previous ones, he had less than three minutes.
With a glance at the escape pod status screen he confirmed that nearly all the main pods had launched, leaving the handful reserved for the bridge crew, and soon those, too, began to zip away from the broken and beaten ship.
No, not beaten.
That left one pod. The main command pod, reserved for the CO and a few key bridge officers. He tapped a button on the screen and confirmed it was still operational, but not launched. Had she gone in one of the others?
In answer to his unspoken question, Proctor’s voice sounded over the speakers. “If anyone’s still here, this is the final warning. Evacuate immediately. The ship will not last more than a few minutes. CO out.”
And a moment later, the indicator for the command escape pod turned red, indicating it too had blasted away.
Granger was alone. Just he and the dead. A fit of coughing overcame him, and his hand once again came away dripping red, and a wry, gallows-humor grin tugged at his face—a dead man piloting a dead ship full of the fallen, to save those who still lived.
He pulled up the navigational controls and nodded in approval when he saw that Proctor had set the ship on autopilot, on a heading that would take it directly into the singularity.
But it would not be enough. That was his suspicion, his fear. The aliens would not stand by and permit them to disrupt another singularity, and in confirmation, the ship rocked and shuddered as one of the alien ships laid into the Constitution with a full barrage of energy beams. He pulled up the tactical display and watched the four ships, with the singularity in their midst, pull away from him, eluding the autopilot, which, after all, could only move towards a specific point in space—not follow a randomly changing location.
“Oh no you don’t. I see you, you bastards.”
Chapter 65
Low Earth Orbit
Command Escape Pod
Commander Proctor settled into one of the cramped seats on the escape pod, gritting her teeth against pain—she’d twisted her ankle during the last violent barrage of fire from the aliens.
“Heading?” asked Ensign Prince, who squeezed into the limited nav controls—escape pods weren’t built for maneuverability, rather escape, but they could at least guide the craft towards a target.
Proctor racked her brain, trying to think of the most appropriate destination. If her last gambit didn’t succeed and the Constitution failed to disrupt the alien ships by slamming into the singularity, then Earth was doomed, and in a sense it mattered very little where they landed. In that scenario, it might make the most sense to steer towards a lightly populated wilderness area in an attempt to evade the alien’s destruction and live to fight another day.
But if the plan succeeded, IDF would regroup, and this surely would not be the last wave of Swarm vessels. If Earth survived the day, it would need to prepare itself for the unavoidable reprisal that would soon follow.
“Omaha. CENTCOM HQ was destroyed in the singularity explosion under Miami. Omaha is the auxiliary HQ, and is where IDF will regroup, most likely.”
“Aye, sir. Setting course for Omaha.”
The atmosphere started blazing around them as the compression shock wave enveloped the pod, and the little craft shook violently. The things were not designed with comfort in mind, only survival.
“Sir! They’re firing on the Constitution!”
Proctor craned her neck to look out the tiny viewport. Sure enough, the alien ship was pounding the Old Bird with a heavy barrage of its energy weapon, blasting chunks off into space. The fresh punctures briefly belched fire before the deadening vacuum of space quenched the flames.
“It’s not going to help, you bastards,” she muttered to herself, smiling darkly.
But then her heart sank as she watched the formation of alien ships pull away, with the singularity following them in their midst. They passed over and to starboard of the Constitution, moving out of the targeted heading she’d entered into the autopilot.
“Shit,” she breathed.
So it was over.
Within a minute, the aliens would teleport the singularity down underneath yet another North American city—most likely Los Angeles, as that was the closest obvious target below them—and after that would continue raining down destruction upon city after city, remorselessly and mercilessly vaporizing human civilization from the map.
And from there the destruction would spread. The Veracruz Sector was most likely already lost, but dozens of other sectors and scores of worlds would follow. And without Earth, without the center of humanity’s strength, how could they even think of prevailing against such a deadly and persistent enemy?
“Uh, sir?”
“What now?” she snapped.
Lieutenant Diaz pointed out the viewport. “The Constitution. She’s changing course.”
She jumped to her feet and stared out the window. Sure enough, in a wide arc, the Old Bird soared through the debris field, aiming straight for the shimmering singularity, even as the aliens tried to evade her.
“Impossible.” She brought up the sensor display on her tiny console. “I thought you told me no life signs remained on board!”
“That’s what the internal sensors said, sir!”
“Then how the hell is that thing changing course?” she hollered, pointing out the window.
The comm beeped softly, and Proctor almost missed the sound in the commotion and the shaking of re-entry. She stared at the amber light indicating the signal. Finally, she tapped it to accept the incoming transmission, still eyeing the old ship out the window suspiciously.
A familiar voice sounded over the speaker, and somehow, she wasn’t surprised in the slightest to hear it. “Commander Proctor. Job well done.”
Her voice caught. “Sir, I—”
She didn’t know what to say.
“I hope this fireworks display will be worth it—I’m sure giving away the farm here.”
Lieutenant Diaz murmured, “He’s closing fast. Less than a kilometer now.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Proctor. “For everything.”
“Ah hell, don’t get all weepy on me, Commander. The captain goes down with his ship—you know that.”
“I’m sorry I tried to take her away from you, Tim.”
A silence.
“No. You helped me find her again.”
The pulsing light from the singularity intensified, and Proctor knew the aliens were preparing to teleport it to below the surface, deep underneath Los Angeles. Waves of gravitational energy buffeted the escape pod.
The tip of the Constitution was close to the singularity, and it started to visibly stretch as the space distorted all around it.
Granger’s voice sounded out again, this time distorted by heavy static, but defiant. “Take that, you bastards—”
And sev
eral things happened simultaneously.
With a blinding flash, the Constitution plunged into the singularity, disappearing in a violent flare. For a split second, the invisible quantum tethers that had connected the singularity with the reactor cores inside the alien ships became visible, shimmering with an unearthly green glow, and in the next moment, all four ships erupted in massive explosions.
Proctor shielded her eyes with a hand. The viewport dimmed automatically under the intense radiation, but it was still too dazzlingly bright to look at.
When she opened her eyes, the remains of the four deadly alien vessels were smoldering shells, husks of twisted metal and armor, debris and smoke and the alien’s organic liquid spewing out into the void. They were gone. Defeated.
The singularity was gone.
The Constitution was gone.
Granger was gone.
“The old bastard did it,” she murmured.
Somehow, against all odds, he did it. Against overwhelming firepower. Against unthinkable odds.
With an unthinkable sacrifice.
They did it.
She shuddered, angling her head so her two fellow bridge crew members wouldn’t see her face as it contorted. When she first boarded the Constitution, she thought of her assignment as a chore. An unpleasant little detail that needed doing in order to check a box, to advance her to the next stage of her career, hopefully on to newer and more prestigious ships, where she could travel the galaxy to see hundreds of new worlds. And Granger was the cantankerous old fart that was deliberately standing in her way. Intentionally making her life difficult.
But with the emergency, he changed. He transformed into a leader. And even when humiliated by the doctor’s not-so-discrete intervention, he still managed to foresee the inevitable, decide on a plan, and do what needed to be done.
And saved them all.
She touched the viewport, pressing her hand against the spot where the Old Bird had disappeared, taking Granger with it.
Something far off to the side caught her eye. She almost missed it in the atmosphere blazing past the viewport, but the sight of another explosion was unmistakable.
Out of nowhere, a ship snapped out of the ether and into existence, just a handful of kilometers from the destruction of the four ships.
“Impossible….” Proctor stood up again and pressed her nose to the viewport.
It was impossible. The singularity should have chewed up anything caught in its wake.
But there she was. Even more broken and hobbled than she’d looked just moments ago:
The Constitution, blazing fire and debris, hurtling down towards the atmosphere.
Chapter 66
Low Earth Orbit
Command Escape Pod
“GET A SENSOR LOCK!” she bellowed at Lieutenant Diaz. “Get a lock, dammit! I want to know if anything’s alive over there!”
Her fingers danced across the tiny computer console screen, bringing the emergency thrusters online and pushing them to their limit. “Get us out of the atmosphere!”
“But, sir—”
“NOW!”
“But, sir, we may have descended too far into Earth’s gravity well. These things weren’t designed to enter orbit.” Ensign Prince’s face was flushed—he knew what was at stake, Proctor could tell, as his eyes flitted back out the viewport towards the Constitution, which itself was falling precipitously towards the atmosphere.
She seethed. “Try. Try, dammit!”
“Trying, sir,” he replied, frantically working the controls, desperately trying to arrest their descent and enter orbit.
“Sir,” Lieutenant Diaz began, shaking his head in disbelief, “picking up one life sign in engineering. Very faint.”
He’s alive.
“Ensign Prince, if you don’t get us over to that ship in the next two minutes, I’m going to toss you out when we hit the stratosphere.”
Ensign Prince’s face went white, apparently not picking up on her gallows humor. “I think I can get us over there and intercept her trajectory, but we’ll never break our own descent, sir.”
“Fine. Get us over there.”
She held her breath as the escape pod drifted ever closer towards the Constitution, which itself began billowing red and orange compressed atmosphere all around it.
“Are we going to be able to re-dock with the escape pod port through that compression shock front?” Lieutenant Diaz eyed the fiery air streaming past the Constitution warily.
“If not, it’ll be a hell of a story, won’t it?”
And in another thirty seconds, they were there. As soon as the pod hit the compression shock front, the entire craft shook violently, buffeted by the hyper-compressed, ultra-heated air. But the next moment, with another burst of the thrusters, they were in. Nuzzled safely into the port. But safety was relative.
Proctor fingered the controls to open the airlock. Lieutenant Diaz protested and pointed at his console’s screen. “Sir, the seal is damaged. We’re partially open to vacuum.”
“Screw it. I’m going in. You should have enough air if you close the door fast behind me.”
“And you, sir?”
She flashed a dark grin. “Guess I’ll have to hold my breath.” She stood and stepped to the door. “Ready?” They both nodded. She wrenched the lever, and the door burst outward towards the compromised airlock as a rush of air from the escape pod flooded past her.
She sprang out into the airlock and pushed the escape pod’s hatch closed with a grunt. She felt the air grow thin as she dashed the two meters across the airlock and opened the hatch into the ship. Another blast of air nearly knocked her over, but gripping the door frame, she pulled herself into the corridor beyond, fighting the air rushing inexorably against her.
With a balled-up fist, she bashed the door controls, which closed the hatch behind her, and the violent wind whipping past calmed considerably.
But it didn’t stop. She glanced down the hallway where the wind was going, understanding that there must be a hull breach in that direction.
Turning into the wind, she limped down the debris-littered corridor. She nearly tripped over a figure huddled against the wall, and reached down to feel his neck. At her touch, the figure slumped backward onto the floor—most of the man’s face had burned away, along with his clothing and most of his skin. She shuddered, straightened herself, and resumed her sprint to engineering.
She recognized the fighter bay up ahead, which meant that engineering was only three more decks down. The temperature was rising, but, oddly enough, the ride through the atmosphere was strangely smooth. Apparently the buffeting of re-entry was no match for the sheer mass of the Constitution.
The Earth’s surface, though, would be less forgiving.
Sprinting two steps at a time down the staircase, she felt her lungs scream for air and her sprained ankle protest—she didn’t know how much time she had, but the sooner they could get out, the better.
Rounding a loop to another landing, she saw something odd out of the corner of her eye. She’d seen a few more bodies on her mad dash through the ruined ship, but except for the burned man crouched against the wall, they were all laying prostrate.
Down this hallway, which she recognized ended in the Afterburners bar on the observation deck, she saw a figure seated in a chair in front of the huge windows that looked out at the maelstrom of atmospheric fire beyond, slumped to the side as if asleep. Was it another body? But why in the world would a body be propped up in a chair in front of the observation deck’s windows?
“Captain!”
There was no response. No indication he heard her. Swearing, she half bolted, half limped down the corridor, grabbed his shoulders, and gently shook him.
No response. His head was lolled back and his eyes closed. She felt for a pulse at his carotid, and found it, but it was deathly faint.
“Captain!” she repeated, but he didn’t stir.
She eyed the window. The surface of the Earth was looming up cl
oser now. They’d broken through to the stratosphere, and were descending rapidly like a fireball through the sky—the trail of fire stretched away from the window, and she could just glimpse below them the telltale white salt flats of western Utah, and to the northeast, the Great Salt Lake.
Stooping over, she pulled Granger forward and draped him across her shoulders. She’d never carried a man before in her life—just her sister when she was younger when they’d play in the back yard.
With a grunt, she lifted.
He was surprisingly light. Still heavy as a sack of potatoes, but bearable. She’d never noticed what a thin, haggard, rail of a man he was.
She struggled down the hallway, her ankle screaming in pain, racking her brain to remember the location of the nearest escape pods. Would they even be there? Wouldn’t they have launched during the evacuation? Only one way to know. At the stairwell landing, she held on to the railing as she descended the remaining level to engineering. The door to the giant bay stood wide open.
Hadn’t Commander Scott warned them about lethal levels of radiation? She glanced at the rad warning lights, but they were dark. Normal radiation levels. Odd.
Struggling across the engineering bay, she finally found the airlock that led to the escape pods for engineering.
She checked the control panel outside the door.
They were all gone. Every single pod.
“I think I tried that already,” came a murmur from near her shoulder.
“Sir!”
She bent forward and let him down as gently as she could, but he still slid off the last two feet and landed with a grunt on the floor. “Sorry!”
He vaguely waved her off. “Fine. I’m, I’m fine.”
“What happened? How did you get up to the observation deck? I found you in Afterburners!”