Theme-Thology: Invasion

by Inc. HDWP

  * * *

  Sam stepped through the open door onto the Horizon's bridge. The bustling murmur of the remaining crew filled his ears like a busy restaurant. The normally-dim control room was brightly lit with emergency lighting and the bridge crew surrounded the captain like a celebrity. Sam stared at Bates, Simmons, and the other souls who's sole task was to pull their asses out of this mess. A sense of pride came over Sam as he remembered how much he loved this ship.

  "From one destroyed home to another," he sighed, patting the wall.

  Steps ahead stood Hue McDowell, whom held the honor of ship's captain for four years. To Sam it felt a lot shorter. In the time since Sam joined the ship, two months after McDowell, the captain watched him climb the ranks from a lowly ensign to the lieutenant he was today. The abrasive McDowell scowled and barked orders at anyone he felt wasn't up to the job and he did it with a voice that hinted he was born pissed off. Sam glanced at him wondering how he'd avoided the fear-inducing stare and had endeared himself to their leader. It proved to be a double-edged sword making his duties more bearable, but fueled the ever-persistent rumor that McDowell handed him every promotion. Even thinking about it now caused Sam to groan at the empty air in front of him.

  McDowell caught sight of Sam and waved off the others. "All patched up?" Even when concerned, his words still carried piss and vinegar.

  "For now," Sam said. He flexed his leg. "Doc gave me a nanite injection. I need to go easy on it for a few more minutes."

  "Well make sure your leg is ready sooner rather than later. Time is short and I'm not gonna slow my ass down because you didn't heal right."

  "Yes, sir."

  "While you were busy dicking around in the med bay, the last of the escape pods launched. Everyone on this bridge is all that's left."

  Sam wanted to remind him that it was on his orders that he didn't return to the bridge after assisting with the abandon ship order. He moved to speak, but McDowell's gaze extended his silence.

  "Get to your station and tell me how we're going to save her." McDowell gestured toward the ceiling.

  "Yes, sir."

  He turned and started down the long, narrow path to his seat.

  Sam sat at his monitoring station on the right side of the rectangular bridge. Relief washed over his still-healing leg. The bridge's door was positioned at the back corner, behind the Captain's chair. A long runway-like aisle of open space ran from the seat to the thick armored glass at the front. Lining the left and right sides of the path were the six monitoring stations of the bridge crew. McDowll's chair was equipped with the requisite computer built into the armrest, but the veteran captain was from a generation preferring a standalone station, so when the commission was his the first order was to have a half-sized station placed within arms reach of the chair. The captain still listened to all crew chatter as they performed their duties, but he liked to see everything they saw. One swipe with his left hand and he was able to become more than a simple observer.

  Sam's station was boxy and wrapped in a dull metal, like most of the bridge equipment. Screens and touch panels lined entire surface of Sam's station leaving a flat and lifeless sheet of glass when not in use. Sam worked to focus through the pinching within the nerves of his leg while the nanites continued their work. He took a deep breath and tapped a finger on the far-right to engage the system. In less than a second it recognized his fingerprint, closed and opened system access appropriate for his rank, and brought up his saved configuration from the last session. Sam frowned at the readout. The Horizon was in bad shape. A glance to his left caused his stomach knot at the empty adjacent navigation station. Sophia's station. Gibbons had managed to pull identical shifts with him their entire time on board. Flying solo was as foreign as hearing his father's voice.

  "Martell," the captain called from his seat. "Status."

  Sam locked his attention back to his station and evaluated each panel before answering. "Propulsion is down. Atmo fully operational. Power at sixty percent. There's a lot more here though, sir. It's gonna take me a few minutes to get you more analysis."

  "Understood," McDowell said. "Report in ten minutes."

  Sam turned to respond, but the Captain's attention was grabbed by another crewman.

  Sam checked the clock as he slid screen after screen into view, each holding intricate details of the Horizon and the beating she'd taken on this run. Each digital window simultaneously answered pieces of questions while posing five more. Every nugget of data dug the pit in his stomach deeper, the fork-like anxiety scraping against his internal organs. More screens. More data. More confirmation that tranquil Galeen system in which Sam, Sophia, and the rest of the Horizon crew had sailed so many times, would soon become a graveyard.

  * * *

  "Come in," McDowell called through the door to his ready room.

  Sam pushed the unlocked door and stepped through into the Captain's makeshift office just off the bridge. His gait still held a slight limp, though less-so than when he'd returned from the med bay. Wood-trimmed walls with a cherry stain and covered in tan carpet, the dim lighting made the small space feel cozy. Behind McDowll's desk was a floor-to-ceiling panel of armor glass looking out into the deepness of space. Thousands of stars painted a picture more valuable than any wall decoration.

  "Sir," Sam stood at attention.

  "At ease, Lieutenant." Sam picked up the tinge of concern that none of the other crew likely heard from the normally even-keeled captain. He swallowed hard, knowing the Captain's worry meant things were more serious than he knew.

  "I've completed my report. It's not good sir. Shielding is at--"

  "Spare me the numbers, Lieutenant," McDowell interrupted. The captain took a long breath and locked onto Sam's eyes. "Give it to me straight. You always have. Don't let this time be any different, Sam."

  Sam nodded, a piece of him thankful that the captain preferred more informal and honest conversation even if he was barking all the time. McDowell hadn't said he could relax, but his body did so without the command. If the captain cared, he didn't give any indication.

  "She's dying sir. If nothing changes in the next two days the Horizon's systems will start failing, first in engineering. She'll slow to the point where we lose artificial gravity. When that happens, the emergency systems will come on to compensate. That begins a chain reaction of power loss leading to atmo going down. We'll suffocate long before we get even close to a planet where we can dock."

  "What about deploying the solar array?" McDowell asked without skipping a beat.

  "No good," Sam shook his head. "At our position we wouldn't collect enough to light this room, let alone scrub the air. Even if we could dock, you and I both know we'd be quarantined indefinitely."

  "Well, it's not like she's letting us kill her first," McDowell scowled at the door leading back to the bridge.

  Sam deflated at the reference. Three times he watched McDowell activate the Horizon's self-destruct and three times he saw the ship resist and abort. It made no sense, but nothing did since they hit that pocket of space turbulence. The purple haze that had now invaded the Horizon made even less sense.

  "Any idea what we're up against?" McDowell asked. His tone grew somber as he read something on the display in his desk.

  "Still nothing. It's intelligent, it's fast, and from what Kelad told me before he died, it made him re-live past experiences. I have no way to piece that together."

  Sam's felt a stab of pain at the thought of the dead engineer. His wife serving on the Sprinter would be devastated. He'd never seen a couple so close.

  "Kelad's not the only one," McDowell said. "Gibbons woke up briefly and reported a similar experience."

  Sam's heart sped to a frantic pace at the mention of her name. No one had told him Sophia had woken up after collapsing on the bridge. "When?" he said through a hard swallow.

  "It was just for a minute or two." McDowell shook his head. I happened to be at the med bay already, so there was no ship-wide page
to get me. Did you know she survived a robbery?"

  Chills ran down his body and the hair on his arms stood upright. Nobody on board knew that story except for him.

  "Yes," Sam said after a long pause. His gaze drifted toward the armor glass and the giant vacuum just inches beyond. "At a store. She and another were held at gunpoint. The other person lunged for the gun and it went off multiple times. An inch to the left and Sophia... Gibbons wouldn't have been here."

  McDowell placed a tablet down on the desk and pulled Sam's eyes back toward him. "We need a plan and we need one quick, Lieutenant. This thing has invaded the Horizon and time is short on all our lives if we don't do something. I'm assigning you to run point on figuring out just what the hell this is and getting it off my ship. All information has been routed to your quarters. You'll work there where it's quiet. Take this." He slid the tablet across the desk. "It's additional information I didn't want to pipe through the ship's network. Too sensitive."

  Sam cocked his head, but was dismissed before he could speak. Instinctively he saluted and turned toward the door. Sam stood outside the room, his heart virtually pounding out of his chest.

  She woke up. She woke up and I wasn't there for her.

  Being at a standstill caused another yawn to form, interrupting his vision of what Sophia may have looked like for that brief time. Sam held the up dormant tablet and knew he was in for a long and intense night. He only wished Sophia could be there to help. She always knew what to do when all seemed lost.

  * * *

  Sam stood at the entrance to his quarters and glanced down the far hall. Four doors lined each side where escape pods used to be attached to the Horizon. Before giving the self-destruct order, McDowell had ordered all non-essential crew to get the hell off the ship.

  He'd bolted off the bridge once the announcement was made, feeling the hard metal deck plating dig into the soles of his shoes. Poor lighting had transformed the halls of the giant Albany class ship into a maze that would've confused even the most seasoned crewman aboard. His blood was already pumping at a frantic pace just from the klaxon blaring into his ears. Sam gritted his teeth just to keep himself focused from the sensory overload.

  "Get to your escape pods!," Sam heard repeated by senior crew through each section. McDowell handed him the farthest, and therefore toughest, assignment at the stern. Without him to key the launch sequence, the pods weren't going anywhere.

  Sam came up to the center of the Horizon's gigantic rectangular shape where the central staircase had been built. Without hesitation he gripped the yellow railing and hurdled himself over. The ship's artificial gravity took over and he dropped half a flight onto deck 6. Fire seared through his calves though his scream was completely drowned out from the alarms. The stairs spiraled downward into the bowels of the ship and Sam knew this was the fastest way to get there before she exploded on McDowell's command.

  "Fuck!" he shouted while dropping to deck 5. The impact into the landing of deck 4 had almost knocked him unconscious. It was nearly pitch black and he'd overestimated the drop. His teeth clamped together with such immense force he nearly blacked out. In seconds the fire within him had engulfed his entire body. The klaxon warbled in and out while his mind swam in a sea of confusion. The remainder of Sam's trip was fuzzy and the next solid memory he could recall was reassuring a pensive crew to get in. McDowell's order to use the escape were a wise move given each pod wouldn't deploy unless it was clean of any contaminants, including the mysterious haze. One by one he heard a loud 'thunk' as they detached from the dying ship after he'd entered in the activation code.

  Sam blinked away the blaring alarms and smoke to see the empty deck once more. The silence was haunting to the bone. Sam entered his quarters then pulled a desk and attached seat down off the wall. The compact unit unfolded it into its full shape, and he sat down. The desktop awakened. In seconds the dull surface instantly morphed into a full system terminal complete with the information McDowell mentioned in his briefing. Sam took the tablet and stood it up on the back-left corner. As he did this, the two systems began an automated link and the private details the captain gave him were copied to the desk's local storage. Sam began reviewing the sensitive data, but stopped after two minutes. It was the only way to stave off the nausea.

  "Time to switch gears," Sam said aloud as he tapped two virtual buttons on the glass. He swiveled around in the chair in time to grab a cup raising out of an access panel. Sam took a sip of the fresh coffee and all his muscles relaxed as the warm brew moved down into his stomach. He couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten. Surely it was before this shit storm they found themselves. Coffee was one of the few pieces of Sam's home that he could still find scattered across the universe. While sipping he could almost hear his parents in the next room talking as they partook in their own coffee. The desk beeped, swiping the memory aside. Sam turned back to the desk and called up everything the Horizon had been through in the short time since the haze had devastated everything.

  The data was a mess. Nothing was organized and Sam couldn't make sense of anything. None of the files had any context. One file assumed the reader knew a ventilation shaft was leaking atmosphere while the next spoke of the same shaft like everything was fine. Normally dated, each scrap of data had been automatically logged by the Horizon instead of the crew but this time the timestamps were missing. The data was just dumped into a virtual folder that was part of the trip, not part of a day or time. The simple act of removing the timestamp changed everything.

  "Terminal," he said to the empty room. Sam needed somebody to talk to and opted for the rarely-used voice command system of his room's computer.

  His cabin was filled with a brief pinging sound acknowledging his request. "Run data analysis on file location 121G. Order files in most-alike sequence, chronologically."

  The terminal beeped again and his desk dimmed with a swirling graphic that constantly changed colors, indicating it was thinking. Sam gulped down some more of his coffee and placed the red ceramic mug down just as the terminal beeped indicating it was finished. Sam pressed his fingers to the surface and opened the first file.

  "And so it begins," he muttered.

  He was only an hour into the analysis, but Sam was astounded at the sheer force in which this mysterious purple haze had invaded the Horizon. In less than a minute from hitting the pocket of FTL turbulence, various Horizon systems all reported small power drains. Sixty minutes later Kelad collapsed, later giving the first reports of the purple haze. Chills ran down Sam's arms as he saw the familiar phrase in the reporting.

  Kelad reports reliving a near-death experience from his past.

  He sighed, seeing the next piece of data was the death report.

  "Terminal off," he commanded.

  The desk went dark and Sam stood up to stretch. He walked a few feet to the wall and pressed an old-style manual button barely noticeable to anyone. A two by two square piece of the wall disengaged and Sam slid it right with his hand. Before him was the deep, dark infinity of space. It took Sam months to discover the tiny porthole and it was only after Sophia had casually mentioned stumbling upon the one in her room. Sam smiled at the memory and the mental image of how giddy the navigator was at her discovery. The achievement had earned her a high-five although later, and smaller, achievements resulted in them tangled in each other's arms with their uniforms in a puddle on the floor.

  Sam yawned and blinked his focus back to his quarters, but the exhaustion was gaining strength over him. He negotiated the tight room back to his desk. The smooth reflective surface began emitting a slight glow, acknowledging his presence and waiting for a command. His eyes grew heavy.

  I'll only close them for a minute

  In seconds his mind drifted to Ivish, the home he'd abandoned four years ago. The yellow planet was an oddity in the universe with an atmosphere filled with a thick sulfur, yet was brimming with life. Centuries of work by Ivish scientists could not explain 'the pillow'. The pillow was a ten fo
ot tall pocket of clean, fresh oxygen mixture that was perfectly safe to breathe. Because sunlight still pierced through to the surface, plants and all other forms of life were able to thrive.

  Sam recalled the huge plains of houses all built as flat as the land around them, then seeing the first tall building near the center of the Ivish capital city. Martell Tower stood an astounding thirty feet high. Its chrome siding thrusting up from the streets, disappearing into the sulfur above. The tower bore his namesake because of the massive amount of funding his father had put into the project.

  "Anything to help further our society," his father would manage to say in every interview. Martell Tower became a destination for all visitors because the only way to believe something so massive had been built was to be there and go inside. People counted steps and while windows surrounded the top floor, visibility was nothing more than a few feet. The only proof was in the exhausted legs of the visitors.

  That was when things were good. Before everyone realized such a crazy idea of building up could be done. Sam thought of his race to the docks. Seeing ship after ship lift off. Spotting the Horizon when he thought everything was lost. He was more rescued by the Horizon than joining it for a commission, but the informal boarding worked to his advantage given that he was still breathing. Sam had been running so fast up the ship's ramp that he fell forward, ass over heels. Through burning scrapes and cuts he lay on the deck and watched the door lift upward and seal off the ship. A small sulfur cloud had made it in, but it dissipated a second later when the Horizon ran its decontamination.

  It was the last time he or anyone else would see a living thing on Ivish.

  * * *

  A loud buzzing startled Sam awake. A smudge mark remained on the glassy desktop where his forehead had rested. Confusion hit Sam first, followed by the room uprighting itself as he sat up.

  "Shit," he murmured, frustrated that he'd fallen asleep. Who knew how much time he'd just wasted.