by Jake Elwood
"One hundred meters," said a lieutenant to the right. "Fifty meters. Ten meters."
Velasco held her breath.
Her screen shimmered, and she saw a matching shimmer on screens all around the bridge. Then the stars appeared, cold and bright.
They were through.
Velasco exhaled, careful to do it quietly. "Very good, Cadet." I'll have to learn his name. "Take us around behind the Gate." That would take the Alexander out of the path of any ships coming through. "Stop us at a range of, oh, a kilometer." She stood. "Someone tell our Gate technicians we've arrived."
The bridge doors slid open. Hammett came in, nodded gravely, and said, "You are relieved."
"Thank you, Sir." Was that a hint of a twinkle in his eye? It couldn't be coincidence that he showed up right after they came through the Gate. Had he been monitoring her?
If he had any sense, he was. She supposed she should have felt relieved, but she felt unsettled. Hammett took his seat and she walked out of the bridge, heading for her quarters. She had more to do than she could possibly accomplish, but the thought of office politics and procedure papers left her strangely hollow.
I thought it was me. I thought he was trusting me to get us through the Gate. I thought the whole ship was counting on me …
In a way they were, she decided. After all, she could have found some way to screw it up, even with Hammett monitoring her. The pressure had been sickening at the time, but now that it was over, she felt … different.
She'd had a glimpse, she realized, of why so many officers wanted to serve on ships when it took them so far away from the Admiralty and the fast track to promotion. The sense of responsibility she'd felt was terrifying, but it was addictive, too. It wasn't just commanders who felt it, either. That cadet at the helm. He'd felt it. Every officer on the bridge would have felt it, to a lesser degree.
Velasco reached her quarters, glanced at her data station, and instead stretched out on her bunk. She was suddenly drained. For pity's sake, Anna, you didn't even do anything. You just told a cadet to fly us through a Gate. It's not as if you …
She fell asleep before she could complete the thought.
CHAPTER 8 - HAMMETT
Hammett and Carruthers walked down a broad, empty corridor along the spine of the ship. The Alexander was losing the air of quiet efficiency he'd seen during his earlier walk with Velasco. He sighed. "Give me the bottom line, Jim."
"We can still generate a wormhole," Carruthers said, giving him a sympathetic smile. "It'll still have decent range, too. Over ninety percent." He didn't add that they weren't going to generate any wormholes on this trip. Carruthers knew perfectly well that it wasn't the point.
"Well, if that's all that goes wrong, we'll be lucky." He told himself that he shouldn't grumble, then gave in. "She's a good ship, and she deserves better."
Carruthers nodded. He loved the Alexander too, probably almost as much as Hammett did.
"We're last in line for every kind of service." Hammett made a frustrated gesture. "Susan reported the generator problem, what? Six months ago? Back then, it was a maintenance issue, not a repair. Now the wormhole generator's borked, and instead of a day in drydock we'll need over a week."
"Not that we'll get it," Carruthers said gloomily.
He was right, of course. Spacecom wasn't going to pay for nonessential repairs to a ship that was due for decommissioning. Hammett balled up a fist, thought about punching a bulkhead, and decided against it.
Carruthers gave him a cautious look. "You ready for more bad news, Chief?"
Hammett nodded. "Sure. Hit me."
"The rest is just little stuff," Carruthers said. "It's in the category of hardware troubles, but really, it's personnel issues. Tony ordered the guns stripped and cleaned." Lieutenant Tony DiMarco was the ship's weapons officer. "They didn't need it, but he wanted the cadets to get the experience." Carruthers shook his head. "Some young genius loaded explosive rounds in the belly gun without the steel casings."
The ship carried ballistic rounds, essentially steel canisters with a lead slug in the center to give them mass, and explosive rounds, much more delicate and expensive, with a detonator and a payload of chemical explosive. Each explosive round had to be loaded into a steel container sized for the barrel of the rail gun.
"How bad?" Hammett asked.
"Well, there were no explosions," Carruthers said. "Still, it was bad enough. The magazine jammed, and the kid decided he wasn't pushing hard enough. He just kept ramming in more rounds." He shook his head. "I haven't seen a mess like that since I did the exact same thing, twenty years ago on the Atlas."
Hammett looked at him, startled, then laughed. "I never did that," he said. "I did once load a magazine with empty canisters, though." He chuckled, remembering. "I had this fire-eating gunnery sergeant taking a bunch of us through a drill. She had a couple of second lieutenants firing on a derelict hull." Hammett felt a belly laugh start to build. "The rounds kept hitting, dead on target, but they bounced off the hull like so much popcorn." He gave in to the laugh, hearing it echo down the corridor. "You should have seen the look on her face! I tell you, Jim, if I'd known what it was going to do to her, I'd have done it on purpose!"
They continued on their way, inspecting the dorsal rail gun (which hadn't jammed) and then descending several decks to examine the equipment that would generate a wormhole if the ship needed to make a faster-than-light jump without the use of a Gate. Neither man had the advanced engineering degrees they would need to actually understand a wormhole generator, but they had years of experience on the Alexander. Hammett could tell by the background hum, by the hint of vibration he felt through the deck plates, by the very feel of the air, whether his ship was running properly.
They finished their tour in the missile bay. "Apparently there's a comet wandering through the system," Carruthers said. "It's coming within a couple of million kilometers."
"Practically scratching distance," Hammett said, wondering what he was getting at.
"Might make some good target practice," Carruthers said. "We could lob the nukes at it."
"No." The refusal came without thought, and Carruthers looked at him, raising an eyebrow. Hammett felt himself flush. "They're the last six nuclear missiles in the entire fleet," he said, feeling irritable and embarrassed. "I know we're supposed to blow the damned things up." He spread his hands, unable to articulate what his instincts were telling him. "Not yet," he said at last. "Not on a bloody comet."
Carruthers nodded without remark.
A chime sounded in Hammett's ear. He tilted his head to bring up a menu, accepted the incoming message, and watched text scroll through the air in front of him. The Gate technicians were done their inspection and back aboard the ship.
He called the bridge, reached a lieutenant named Chen, and told her to set a course for Gate Five. The Naxos system had two Gates, Four, which led to Earth, and Five, which led to Deirdre. The Gate technicians would inspect Gate Five, after which they would expect Hammett to take them back to Earth.
The sensible thing to do was to go home. Even better, fire half a dozen nukes at an orbiting snowball, give a bunch of cadets some experience they would never be able to apply, and then go home. His orders were vague—aside from inspecting Gates Four and Five, he was to give the cadets training opportunities—but those orders certainly didn't include travelling through another Gate.
Still, what was Spacecom going to do? Take away his command? Put him out to pasture?
Toss his ship on the scrapyard?
"Come with me to the bridge," he said. "You can watch me trash my career."
Carruthers gave him a quizzical look, then followed him toward the bridge. "What's up?"
"I'm going to take a very broad interpretation of my orders," Hammett said. "I'm taking us through Gate Five." He watched as the lieutenant's eyebrows climbed his forehead. "That way more cadets get to fly through Gates."
Carruthers said, "Okay …"
"Spaceco
m thinks everything will be fine on the other side. I want you on the bridge when we go through, though, in case Spacecom is wrong."
Carruthers stopped. "What's going on, Richard?"
"That's a good question," Hammett said. "Three Gates have failed, one after another. Each new failure is closer to Earth than the one before. And we're supposed to believe that it's just mechanical malfunctions."
Carruthers shrugged. "What else could it be?"
Hammett hesitated. It sounded absurd when he put it into words, but he was damned if he was going to be afraid to speak. "It could be an attack."
Carruthers's eyebrows went higher. "An attack? By who?"
The word "aliens" hung in the air between them. Instead, Hammett said, "It's a big galaxy, and we've explored, what? A tenth of one percent of it?"
"Less than that," Carruthers said. "Spacecom must be sending someone to take a look."
"I'm sure they are," Hammett said. "They'll send a corvette, when they can spare it from all those terribly important customs duties." He scowled. "What if it's an invasion, Jim? That's a job for a warship, and we're the only warship left."
We're a broken-down warship that hasn't had proper maintenance in a decade, armed with a lot of decaying missiles, and crewed by cadets. He didn't put the thought into words. He just looked at Carruthers, who said, "It's probably just mechanical failures, Captain."
"Probably," Hammett agreed.
"Well, if it isn't," Carruthers said, "I guess we'll have an interesting flight."
CHAPTER 9 - KASIM
When the Alexander was ten minutes from Gate Five, Kasim climbed into a shuttle and turned on the cockpit controls. He wanted to know the exact moment they popped through the wormhole. He didn't believe the rumors that were floating around about rogue colonies rising up, or aliens sweeping in from the deep dark. It was absurd.
Still, if something strange was going on, he didn't want to miss it.
The shuttle itself was blind while sitting in the landing bay, but it connected automatically to the Alexander's scanners. He watched the Gate loom larger and larger, then braced himself when the screens flickered. A moment later he saw the Deirdre system, majestic, serene, and utterly boring, splashed across the shuttle's displays.
An icon glowed green in the corner of his screen, and he touched it. It was a transponder signal from Freedom Station. There were no flags, no alerts. All was normal in the Deirdre system.
"I suppose I shouldn't feel disappointed," he murmured. Still …
Feet clomped on the entrance ramp. "Lieutenant? Are you on board?"
"I'm here, Doc." He looked back over his shoulder as a trio of technicians filed into the shuttle.
Roberts, a sour-faced old geezer who looked as if he wanted to be home telling kids to get off his lawn, dropped into a seat and said, "Let's get this over with. We're supposed to be headed back to Earth already."
Behind him Sally MacKinnon met Kasim's gaze, rolled her eyes, and grinned. He grinned back. He liked Sally. She stayed cheerful no matter what got thrown at her.
The third technician, a young man named Sanchez, was already buckling himself in, eyes squeezed shut. Sanchez was a very poor flyer. Everything about space travel seemed to terrify him. Kasim was perpetually torn between the urge to fly as gently as possible and an unkind impulse to try a few stunts, just to wind the guy up.
"Welcome aboard once again," Kasim said. It was barely twenty minutes since the trio had left the shuttle. So far every Gate inspection had turned up nothing at all. "Maybe this is the trip where you figure out what's been going on."
"Just get on with it," Roberts said.
"Thank you," Sally added. "We appreciate your help." That earned her a sour glance from Roberts, which she ignored.
The bay doors slid open and Kasim took the shuttle out, slow and gentle. He wouldn't be back behind the controls again until they got back to Earth, and he wanted to savor the experience of flying free in a new system.
He took them along the underside of the Alexander, the belly of the ship like a steel sky above them. Laser turrets bristled like thunderheads, and a parabolic dish gleamed like a glimpse of sunlight through clouds.
They passed the bow of the ship. A fat yellow star hung off to the right. He squinted in the direction of Freedom Station, but couldn't make it out. There was nothing else to see. Deirdre had only one planet, a cold lump of rock half a light-year from the star. Human activity in the system centered around the station, a deep-space oasis with a few hundred people on board.
He brought the shuttle around in a gentle, sweeping turn. The Gate glittered in the light of the star, a sparkling ring hundreds of meters across. He massaged the controls, bringing the little shuttle to a halt a few meters from the edge of the ring. He was always surprised by how flimsy the Gate hardware was. The ring was only a couple of meters deep, and less than a meter thick. And yet it was able to do so much.
"Here we go again," Roberts grumbled, reaching for his helmet. Kasim grabbed his own helmet and sealed it in place. When everyone was suited up he started the fans that would reclaim at least a little of the air in the shuttle. It also gave everyone plenty of time to notice an open seal on their suits as the pressure dropped.
"Everyone sealed up?" he asked, looking over his passengers. A tiny green light glowed on the point of each person's left shoulder, an easy way to tell that the suits were sealed and ready for hard vacuum. He checked all three lights, returned Sally's cheerful smile, and ignored Roberts's frown. Sanchez looked terrified, but he always did before the shuttle opened. He would be fine once he got outside and started working.
"Opening," Kasim said, and popped the hatch. The three technicians left one at a time, bracing themselves in the hatch before kicking off to float over to the ring. Kasim watched them go, then settled back in his chair to wait. He wasn't bored. He didn't mind having the stars to himself.
His console beeped, and he looked down.
Gate Eleven, a couple of thousand kilometers away, showed as a round blue icon on his screen. Half a dozen yellow triangles surrounded the blue circle.
Unidentified ships.
Kasim leaned forward, feeling his pulse quicken. He magnified the view. The shuttle's sensors were poor things, but he was still connected to the sensor grid on the Alexander. The image on his screen expanded, and ships appeared, clear and sharp.
Kasim sucked in his breath, his muscles going rigid with shock.
There were six ships, each of a different design and shape. He muttered, "Computer. Scale," and a grid appeared on the display. The smallest ship measured about three meters by three meters. The largest ship was perhaps ten times that size.
As he watched, though, the smallest ship, a strange craft with protrusion sticking out in four directions, drifted over to the ship beside it. The two ships seemed to latch together.
Then another medium-sized ship broke into two pieces. Each piece drifted sideways and merged with a larger craft.
Kasim shook his head, baffled, then zoomed in. He was seeing a collection of tiny ships which clumped together to form larger craft, or broke apart to form separate ships. It was like nothing he'd ever seen, nothing he'd ever even heard of. Nowhere on Earth and nowhere in the colonies was anyone flying a ship that was even remotely similar.
"Aliens," he said. Then, louder, "Aliens!" He squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head, and looked again. He was just in time to see the last few smaller craft latch themselves onto an amalgamated ship about thirty meters across. The ship expanded on the screen as the alien vessel surged forward.
Toward the Alexander.
Toward the Gate that led home.
Toward Kasim.
He toggled his helmet microphone and shouted, "Everybody back on board. Now!"
There was an immediate babble of voices, which went silent a moment later. A crisp voice said, "Shuttle Five. Get your ass back into the landing bay."
"Working on it," he said, then cut the connection. "Oh my God. Oh
, God. Oh my God." He squeezed his eyes shut, tried to lift his hands to his face, and had to settle for pressing his gloves against the faceplate of his helmet. First contact. I'm witnessed to the single most significant event in human history.
No I'm not. First contact was weeks ago, in Calypso. Then they came through the Gate to Tanos. Then Aries, then here. The three systems, and not one ship ever got away to raise the alarm.
His initial panic was starting to subside, aided by the fact that he had absolutely nothing to do until the technicians were back on board. He found himself analysing the situation, if not calmly, at least without hysteria. I bet they were hiding on the far side of Gate Eleven. Then they saw a warship come through, and they knew they had to do something.
We need to keep them from coming through Gate Six. We have to keep them out of Naxos. There are hundreds of thousands of people there.
His stomach constricted as realization hit him. We have to destroy the Gate.
He switched his microphone back to the suit network. "Hurry up! It's an emergency, and if we don't get back to the Alexander in time …"
The ship will pop through the Gate and destroy it from the other side. We'll be left behind.
With the aliens.
It's war. There was no way to be certain but he knew it in his gut. Three Gates had gone silent. That wasn't something caused by diplomacy.
War. They could put me into the cockpit of a fighter. I could fly actual combat missions. A prickle of excitement washed over him, quickly followed by sour disgust. If there are dogfights, they will be fought by drones. Maybe, if I'm really lucky, I'll fly a drone by remote control. It was the bitter reality of modern combat. Drones were smaller, harder to hit, and could take vastly more acceleration. No pilots died when a drone was destroyed. And the reactions of a computer were infinitely faster than those of a human being.
Did those enemy vessels contain pilots? It was one vessel now, a ship just smaller than the Alexander, closing at high speed. Even as his heart thumped madly in his chest he wondered how it worked. Did the ship get better thrust with all those smaller ships locked together? Did it make communication faster? Maybe it let them share shielding.