by Richard Fox
“Okay, reverse thrust on my mark. Three…two…”
Carson unlocked her mag boots.
“One.”
Carson activated her jet pack and went flying into the void.
****
“She did what?” Hale jumped from his seat. “A slingshot from that distance? No one can be that reckless.”
“I have a feed from external sensors,” announced Hue, Enduring Spirit’s navigation officer.
“Let me see it.”
Every display on the bridge lit up, all showing the same image: a shot of Spirit’s outer hull against a backdrop of stars and a Mule rapidly decelerating. It took a moment for Hale pick up the tiny speck of light flying through the void, but as soon as he found it, his blood began to boil.
The bridge crew watched in silence as the figure crossed the gulf. Every few seconds, small jets of vapor shot out from the pack as the Pathfinder made minor course corrections.
“She’s coming in way too fast,” Commander Edison said.
“Alert Crucible search and rescue,” Hale barked. “She’ll either overshoot the ship and go Dutchman or…” He stopped, not wanting to think about the other option. “Get a medical team to Bay Two, just in case.”
A two-tone alert sounded on the bridge that would echo throughout the ship.
Hale looked at his wife.
“This is why I wouldn’t have approved Carson,” Hale said. “She’s just as arrogant as ever. I can’t believe her—”
“Gall?” Marie asked, reminding Hale of her old fighter call sign and the inherent play on words tied to her French heritage.
Hale checked the mission clock: 4 minutes 37 seconds.
“I don’t want to christen this voyage with a Pathfinder smashed against the hull,” Hale said.
“Nothing’s gone wrong,” Marie said. “Yet. I’ll give you a ‘yet.’” She crossed her arms and watched intently as Carson closed on the Enduring Spirit.
****
Carson tweaked her course again, manipulating the grav lining in her boots to change her flight vector and releasing spurts of air from the propellant cans to nudge her onto the course her HUD displayed. She focused on the colony ship’s open bay doors and the deck beyond. Both were approaching fast.
Too fast, she realized.
“Bad,” she said as her HUD flashed velocity warnings. “Very bad.”
She checked her trajectory again, then kicked her heels toward the Spirit and activated the jet pack. She groaned as the rockets ignited, the sudden pull feeling like a giant had snatched her off the ground. The straps dug into her chest as the jet pack cut her forward momentum.
On her HUD, Carson appeared as a red dot, the colony ship a green rectangle, both connected by a broken orange line. Her course was dead-on, but at her current speed, she’d shoot right through the bay and become so much paste on the far bulkhead. The maintenance crew would be mopping her up for weeks.
She typed a command into her wrist terminal, trying to increase the jet pack’s thrust, but the rockets were already firing at full capacity. She brought up the jet pack’s command settings and began scrolling through the menus.
“Come on, come on. There!”
She found a function surrounded by hazard warnings and hit the command. A secondary confirmation box appeared.
“Yes, goddamn it, override!” she shouted, jamming her finger down on the button.
The jet pack’s thrusters roared and her legs stretched out straight as vector mechanics played hell with her body. Warning chimes sounded as her suit’s integrity wavered. Heat seeped through the protective plates on her legs, and she could practically smell her skin burning. The jet pack’s fuel level dropped alarmingly fast, and moments later, the thrusters deactivated.
Flipping over, she came face-to-face with the Spirit and saw that she was on a direct course for the hull a few feet over the open bay. She pointed the hand thrusters straight up and squeezed the handles, blasting propellant nudging her down. She passed through the force field separating the hangar bay from the vacuum of space. Her left leg hit the edge of the bay and a bolt of pain made her wince.
As soon as she crossed the threshold, Carson realized that the ship’s artificial gravity field was active, and she plummeted to the deck. She slapped the emergency release on her jet pack and it smashed against the ceiling as she swung her feet forward and tried to manage a slide along the deck. The back wall grew closer, looking firm and unforgiving. Carson managed to right herself just before she hit and bounced hard off her back, knocking the breath from her lungs. She landed again and spun around, feet facing the void as she slid across the deck.
Carson activated the grav plates in her boots and grunted as they tried to adhere to the deck. She gritted her teeth; it felt like the boots were going to rip her legs free of her body. She craned her head to look ahead and saw the bulkhead racing toward her. Slapping her hands against the deck, she tried to grab anything to slow her down, but it was no use as she slid across the deck like it was ice.
A panel popped open from the floor near the rear of the deck, and a wall of dark webbing shot up between her and the oncoming bulkhead. She skipped off the deck and hit the emergency barricade designed to stop out-of-control fighters, the net barely giving as she crashed into it. Her body felt like it was in a vise as she lost her forward momentum. She opened her mouth to scream but was cut off as she bounced off the net and slammed into the deck. She barely had time to register that the webbing had saved her life when it retracted with a rustle of reinforced fabric and servos.
She rolled to a stop, the large lighting panels on the bay’s ceiling spinning around as her inner ear kept turning.
A crewman appeared, concern and disbelief spread across his face. “Holy shit, that was crazy! Are you dead?”
Carson popped open her visor and got a whiff of burnt carbon alloy. She coughed as air filled her lungs again and pain throbbed down her left calf.
“I hurt too much to be dead,” she said, grimacing. “I think something might be—” She bent her left knee and white-hot pain shot down her leg, like someone rammed a phantom blade into her shin. She gritted her teeth against the pain. “Son of a bitch.”
Ignoring the pain, she tried to sit up, but the crewman put a hand on her shoulder. “Whoa there, Chief, let’s stay right there until the doc gets here. Probably want to make sure that leg and a death wish aren’t your only problems.”
She clenched her jaw against the pain and glared up at the crewman. He couldn’t have been more than twenty or twenty-one. His face looked as if it had never needed a razor’s touch, his light-brown hair trimmed high and tight. She looked at the nameplate on his chest and saw the same winged badge Carson wore. “Determination and drive isn’t quite the same thing as a death wish, Pathfinder Nunez.”
The man frowned and cocked his head to one side.
“Hold on—you’re Carson?” He paused, looking over his shoulder, then lowered his voice slightly. “Carson from the Belisarius, Carson?”
Carson hesitated for a moment, trying to read his thoughts through his large brown eyes, then said, “That’s right.”
She knew right then that she might leave Earth—and the rest of the Milky Way—behind with the Enduring Spirit, but her past would travel with her.
Another man appeared carrying a med kit. His dark beard was neatly trimmed, his matching hair combed to one side. Even through the overalls, Carson could tell the medic was built like a brick house.
Without a word, the medic raised a hand over her head and the fingertips of his gauntleted hand lit up. He ran the scanner down the length of her body, pausing to let the scanner get a deeper reading on her left leg. After several moments, the scanner lights on his fingers dimmed and he shook his head.
The winged rod and two snakes of a caduceus badge were just below the Pathfinder wings on his chest.
“Saw your landing, ma’am. I know the colonial administration requested motivated personnel for this mission,”
the medic said, “but there is such a thing as too motivated.”
“I like to make an impression.”
“You’ve got a transverse fracture of your left tibia. The pain you feel on your back and the rest of your legs comes from simple contusions.”
“Broken leg and a load of bruises,” Nunez said. “Doc Moretti had to go through two years of trauma school to figure that out.”
“A fact that you should appreciate after I patched you up after that bad landing you had on New Fredericksburg. Or would you have rather I left that tree branch in your abdomen?”
Moretti glanced from the holo screen on his gauntlet to Carson. “I need a litter to move you to sick bay. Injuries are relatively minor, but you should still have a full exam.”
“Now hear this,” boomed through the speakers. “Now hear this. Crucible jump in T minus three minutes.”
“I don’t need a full workup,” Carson said. “And the med bay will be a madhouse after the jump. You can fix a simple break, can’t you?”
The side of Moretti’s face twitched, like the thought of helping her disgusted him, but he pulled a hypo injector off his gauntlet and pressed it against Carson’s neck. “This will help with the pain for a minute. Nunez, help me get her to our locker room and I’ll work on her.”
Carson grunted as the pain suppressant flowed into her veins, relaxing her body. There was a certain abruptness to the sergeant’s tone, not quite disrespectful but definitely not friendly.
She lay back on the deck as the anesthetic spread through her body, looking at the panel in the floor where the emergency barricade that had saved her life had deployed. “That was some quick thinking with the arrestor. Whoever was behind that deserves some big kudos.”
Nunez shrugged and turned his palms to the air.
“Seemed like the sane thing to do, and I always wanted to hit that big red button.” He helped her up and slung one of her arms over his shoulders.
She wobbled and managed to keep her broken leg off the deck.
“Could’ve hit her with the happy juice after I got her up, doc,” Nunez said.
Moretti looked at the dent in the ceiling where Carson’s jet pack had struck it and the many broken pieces of the pack strewn across the deck.
“The squids can take care of that when they get off action stations,” Moretti said.
“Medical emergency.” Nunez nudged Carson forward. “Let’s get out of here before some petty officer shows up and gets all pissed off.”
A two-tone alert echoed through the expansive cargo bay. The lights blinked from white to amber, and a moment later, Ken Hale’s voice boomed over the ship’s comm.
“All crew, prepare for jump.”
Carson looked back through the open bay doors and got a final glimpse of Earth as the reinforced doors shut with a clang.
A white haze crept across her vision and she felt Nunez’s grip her on her shoulder tighten. The wormhole materialized around them, drowning them in a brilliant white light that pierced through her shut eyes.
Second thoughts about her decision to join the second Terra Nova colony mission came to her, but she forced the useless doubts away. She and the fleet were about to leave home forever. Her path was set.
Outside, the Crucible’s thorns twisted against each other, writhing like an undersea creature in the tide. A wide plain of white light filled the center of the great crown…and the Enduring Spirit, her sister ships, and forty thousand souls vanished from the galaxy.
Chapter 2
The brilliant light faded away after a heartbeat; the nausea, however, remained. Hale clenched the arms of his chair, gritting his teeth against the stomach-turning sensation. Travelling the galaxy might be instant, but it wasn’t without cost.
He took another second to compose himself, from both the queasiness in his stomach and his simmering anger at Carson’s arrival. He made a note to have a long conversation with Carson once they were safely in orbit. For now, Hale had more pressing issues to see to.
Ahead, a small marble of blue and white hung against a backdrop of stars. If Hale hadn’t known any different, he could’ve been looking at Earth—the resemblance was uncanny—but the resemblance to the solar system ended there. A gossamer green and white nebula stretched across the right side of the viewport, and a single bright moon orbited the planet, smaller than Luna and covered in snow and ice.
“All stations, report in sequence,” Hale said.
“All ships made transit and are reporting green across the board,” Commander Edison said.
“Telemetry and positioning are good, Director Hale,” Hue said. “Astrogation is running a pulsar triangulation, but we’ve never done one beyond the Milky Way.”
“Second round of status reports from the fleet, sir,” Figueroa said. “The Old Forge reports some power spikes in her drive systems, but it’s minor.”
“Minor but unexpected,” Hale said. “Tell Captain Jennings I want regular updates.”
“Aye, sir.”
If that was the height of their problems for today, Hale would gladly take it. Murphy hadn’t smiled on him in a long time, which meant that he was due to show up at any moment. A trip of this scale and distance was bound to attract the old Law’s attention.
“Internal systems are green across the board, sir,” Hue reported. “All decks reporting no issues. External sensors coming online.”
Hale felt fingers slipping into his and looked up to see his wife smiling at him. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” he asked, nodding to the planet in the distance.
Marie nodded. “Welcome home, my love. I can’t wait to see the look on Jared’s face when we show up on his doorstep. Talk about unexpected guests,” she said.
“He wanted me to come on the first mission,” Hale said, “but I wouldn’t leave my Marines…and we were a bit preoccupied with the war against the Xaros when Jared left.”
“What’ll surprise him more? That you’re here or that you’re here with a wife and two sons?”
Hale snorted. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
“Hmm, that’s unusual,” Edison murmured from his station to Hale’s right.
“What’s that, Edison?” Hale took his hand away from Marie and got out of his chair.
“We can detect the colony’s beacon, but it isn’t responding to any of my pings.”
“Is it off-line?” Hale asked.
The commander shook his head slowly, typing on his console. “No, I’m getting a solid connection, but no acknowledgement.”
Hale tapped a command into the terminal next to Edison, scrolling through the sensor data flooding into the Spirit’s computers. After a second, he found what he was looking for and grunted. “That’s impossible. There aren’t any signals coming from the planet, not even IR. Figueroa, run a diagnostic.”
“Working on it, sir,” the communications tech said, tying back her long, black hair. It wasn’t strictly military regulation, but their mission wasn’t a strictly military one. She began working the problem, chewing on her bottom lip. A minute later, she looked up, her face a mask of confusion. “Nothing, sir. Not even a latent HD signal. It’s like the entire planet is on radio silence.”
Damn it, not today, Hale thought. He felt his blood pressure rising as bad memories of the first days of the Ember War and an uninhabited Earth came back. “But the systems are in place?”
“As far as I can tell, yes. It’s just no one’s using them.”
“Keeper did send us to the right place?” Marie asked. “We weren’t redirected to some colony still in the initial phases of being settled, were we?”
Hale frowned. Her suggestion was the most obvious answer…and one that would mean the entire mission was a bust.
“We’re in the Canis Major star cluster,” Hue said. “Pulsar spot has us in the Terra Nova system.”
“Then why aren’t they talking to us?” Hale asked. “The first mission knew a second phase was coming. The window for making the jump only opens every few deca
des…I could believe one or two systems failing, but all of them? Doesn’t seem likely.”
“A threat from beyond this star system?” Commander Edison said. “If there’s another civilization a few stars away broadcasting on radio…the colonists might not want to advertise that they’re here?”
“I thought the Qa’Resh swore this dwarf galaxy was uninhabited,” Marie said, “that there would be no threats to the colony.”
“That is what they said,” Hale said, trying hard to keep his frustration from boiling over. “OK, forget communications for a minute. It’s been fifteen years—there must be settlements. Are we picking up any signs of life on the planet? Where’s the ship they came in, the Christophorous?”
Hue shook his head. “We’re too far out for our scans to be effective. I might be able to bounce a radar pulse off the moon, see if we hit anything.”
Hale shook his head. “No, that’ll light us up like a Christmas tree. If there are hostiles around, I don’t want to give away our position any more than we already have. What about orbitals?”
“No orbital traffic either,” Hue said. “Wait…I’m picking up a slight signal relay from one of the moons. It’s weak, but it’s there. I’m going to run it through the scrubbers and see if I can clean it up.”
“I don’t like this,” Marie whispered so only Hale could hear.
“You’re not the only one,” Hale said.
“Got it,” Hue said. “The signal’s extremely weak, but the transponder code matches what we have in the computer. It’s the Christophorous. The old colony ship’s holding in a stationary orbit at the Lagrange point on the far side of the planet.”
“Okay,” Hale said. “Set a course for Terra Nova and bring the fleet into high orbit. Keep trying to raise the colony over direct comms. Set the fleet to infrared laser communications. Everything goes ship-to-ship, no wide-band frequencies.”
“Let’s assume that if anyone’s here, they didn’t notice the giant wormhole that brought us,” Marie said.
“It will take some time for the fleet’s drives to warm up, sir,” Edison said. “Even then, we’re at essentially zero velocity. It will take…eighteen hours for the Spirit to make orbit, less for the smaller ships.”