A long, agonizingly quiet pause.
“I’m sorry,” said Chang. “I can’t take the risk.”
There must be something they could do, some option, some way to stop Spectre. Was it the nanobots, or… was Chang simply coming to a perfectly natural conclusion?
Did it matter?
“Come on,” said Mattis, dropping absolutely any pretense of composure. His voice warbled. “This is your homeworld too.”
“Actually,” said Chang, a telltale shift in his voice. One Mattis had been expecting. “Earth stopped being my home long ago.” His voice sounded like recordings of Corrick during her fugue states.
He was one of them too. Spears had been right to be afraid.
“Options,” demanded Mattis. “I could really use a hand here.”
Yim shrugged stiffly. “Beg more?”
Blair stammered slightly. “I-I don’t know, Mattis, I’m sorry.”
All he could do was watch as Spectre flew farther away from him, his enemy slipping past Goalkeeper’s defensive net in the Caernarvon’s own shuttle.
And then a voice came over the line, one he hadn’t heard in what seemed like a lifetime. A very Texan voice.
“This is Captain Stewart Lynch of the USS William Harrison. Captain Mattis, I heard you’re in a mighty tight bind there and could use some help.”
Chapter Sixty-Two
Bridge
HMS Caernarvon
High Earth Orbit
“Lynch?” Mattis stared incredulously. Last he heard, Lynch was in a coma and was uncertain to even recover. “Is that really you?”
“In the flesh, more or less. I’ve got a helluva story for you when we’re done here.” He could practically hear Lynch smile over the line. “Now, what can I do ya for?”
A powerful energy flooded Mattis, a flash of hope flickering in the dark. “Okay, Lynch? You’re our last hope. You see that shuttle?”
“Aye, I do.”
“That’s Spectre aboard there.” Mattis tried to get out the words as fast as they would come. “He killed Captain Spears, and he stole a Chinese engine. If he opens another portal, dammit, it’ll be just like the Pinegar System all over again. You remember that big gas giant, Lyx?”
Lynch’s tone immediately lost its joviality. “How could I forget watching a whole planet get chomped to bits and turned into a damn rift to the future?”
“It’s the same here,” said Mattis, pointing at the ship on the main monitor, even though Lynch couldn’t possibly see the gesture. “He’s about to do it again, but with Earth. You saw what it did to a huge gas giant—you know what it’ll do to Earth. You have to stop him. Blast that bastard into atoms. You gotta shoot him down before he gets close enough.”
Mattis knew he sounded desperate. Because he was desperate. He didn’t even know the range on that thing. It could already be too late.
“You know I trust you, Mattis,” he said, without a hint of hesitation. “I’m locking it up now. Going to give that little bastard a full spread from all guns, and then we’ll take a week’s leave together and pick up the pieces.” Lynch chuckled grimly. “And maybe get in some fly fishing time. The world still thinks I’m in a coma, so we got all the time in the world—”
“—Just shoot him, for God’s sake!” Blair blurted.
“I’m on it—guns are spinning up. These little frigates, they take a while to load.”
Every second was precious. Every second that tiny dot, the shuttle, inched closer to Earth.
“I’m detecting a big power buildup from that shuttle,” said Yim, anxious. “Holy shit, I think he’s about to do it.”
Admiral Chang’s voice cut in over the line. “Captain Lynch, belay Captain Mattis’s suggestions. I am ordering you to stand down. Do not engage that shuttle. It has been positively identified to be carrying a British Naval Commander, Commander Jemima Blackwood, and I’ve personally spoken to her and personally verified that it is her. I say again: stand down and hold your fire, or you, yourself, will be fired upon.”
“She’s like Jeremy Pitt,” Mattis said hurriedly. “You remember—a clone. A copy. And either Chang is too, or he’s being controlled through nanobots. It’s complicated, but I can explain everything if you just shoot him.”
“Going to be honest with you, Captain,” said Lynch, hesitating, “you’re making it real hard for me to pull the trigger here. He’s controlled by nanobots? And he’s a clone? And he’s a she?”
“I’ll explain later,” Mattis said, doing his level best to avoid shouting again. “Lynch, listen to me. Just listen. That’s Spectre. I promise you. I promise you I’ll show you the evidence later, but for now I just need you to trust me. Trust me or it’s over for all of us.”
“Stand down, Captain Lynch,” said Chang, his tone threatening. “Don’t make me kill you like I did the crew of this space station.”
The briefest pause filled the radio. And then…
“Well that just made the damn decision a lot easier.” Lynch paused for effect. “Gun crews, fire.”
A wave of gunfire flew in from off-camera, two of the shells striking the transport. One skipped of the underside of the hull, while another round hit it squarely in one of the engines.
“The buildup is continuing,” said Yim. “It’s off the charts. How is that tiny shuttle providing so much energy? It’s not possible!”
“Goodbye, Mattis,” said Spectre. “You lose.”
A flash of blue light washed out the screen. Mattis had seen this exact same sight before, and he could do nothing but watch in abject horror as the light bathed the surface of the Earth in an azure glow.
For a second, nothing happened. The blue light hung, suspended, dazzling their unbelieving eyes. Perhaps the power of the shuttle had been insufficient; perhaps the damage Lynch had done to it had been enough to disable whatever effect Spectre was trying to utilize.
The glow intensified, the Caernarvon’s screens slowly filtering it out as it grew. The light solidified, becoming hundreds of tendrils of energy that, with startling speed, wrapped themselves around the planet, clutching it like the hand of a titan.
And then it began to squeeze.
The energy involved must have been immense. There was nothing left of the shuttle at all; the strange technology must have turned its entire mass to energy, then used said energy as fuel for Earth’s dismemberment. The continents cracked; Australia lifted up in front of his eyes, then dropped back down, the ripple of the shockwave spreading out into the ocean, creating a vast tsunami that must have been terrifying to witness on the ground; Mattis could see it from orbit. Just as had happened to Zenith, just as he had seen on Lyx, the Earth crumpled and imploded like a piece of paper scrunched up by giant hands. An impossible, horrible force compacted it, the crust cracking, boiling lava meeting the oceans in colossal waves of steam that must have been supersonic or faster.
In moments, the Earth was nothing but a white hot ball of compacted matter that, trembling as though in fear, winked out of existence and became a glowing blue portal, a two dimensional oval hovering in space.
Nobody said anything. Nobody could say anything.
Spectre could have used any planet he wanted to for this, but had chosen Earth. He could have done it to an abandoned, uncharted rock out in the far edges of the galaxy.
But he hadn’t. He’d chosen Earth… and brought Mattis right to the main event, the extinction of his homeworld, just so Spectre could make him watch.
Debris expanded, broken chucks of planet drifting outward in an ever-expanding sphere. Chang’s voice drifted back through the line. “Ta-ta,” he said, and on Mattis’s command screen, he saw the command module of Goalkeeper flash bright white and explode.
Leaving nobody to even be angry at.
“My God,” said Mattis, slumping into his chair, just staring slack-jawed at the place where Earth had just been. “I… God. Oh God.”
“We just lost,” Yim said with a small whimper. “We just lost everything.”<
br />
Chapter Sixty-Three
Bridge
HMS Caernarvon
The Ruins of Earth
Having ringside seats to the annihilation of thirteen billion people in twenty seconds wasn’t something Mattis was mentally prepared to handle.
“Lord have mercy,” whispered Lynch. “No, no… no!”
Mattis had nothing. He had no guns. No weapons at all. Not even any engines…
“What should we do?” asked Yim.
Do? There was nothing left to do. Nothing but to sit there and watch the portal slowly spin, its blue light flickering. Twinkling like a star.
“Mattis?”
He let out his long-held breath. There was no answer that would satisfy. There was nothing he could say.
“Mattis?” Yim’s voice became insistent. “We have to do something. There are people on that planet—”
“They are gone,” said Mattis, his heart lodged in his throat. “Your family is gone. My—my world is gone. Martha—” he shuddered, and shook himself violently to regain composure. “Everyone is gone. And so are we. There’s nothing we can do.”
The portal continued to expand, and a shudder ran through the Caernarvon. The creation of the portal required a huge expenditure of energy used to create a gravity distortion so large and so powerful that it could rip a hole in time itself.
“Oh God,” said Blair, her hands over her mouth. “We’re getting pulled in.”
They were. And he could not give a single shit about what was about to happen to him.
“Goalkeeper,” said Mattis, his mouth dry and his lips chafed. “Listen, that portal—that portal is a gateway to the future. It’s a portal to a different timeline, and through that timeline a lot of very bad people are going to arrive. I need you to destroy them as they do, okay? It’s the only time they’ll be vulnerable. They have to come out one at a time, which means you just keep shooting. Right?”
Silence and static, punctured only by Blair’s muffled sobs, her head buried in her arms. But Mattis could just make out faint breathing on the other end of the line.
“Lynch? I know you can hear me. You gotta do this. Okay?”
“It’s gone,” said Lynch simply. “Earth is gone.”
This was not the time to lose it. “I understand,” said Mattis, firmly. “But now hear this: there are billions of people out there in the colonized systems who need us. With Earth gone—” he choked. Even saying the phrase was difficult. It felt surreal. Like he was sinking, like he was on the border between sleep and wakefulness, or falling into a complex partial seizure. But he knew it was real. “With Earth gone, those people won’t stand a chance. We need to stop these bastards here and now because this is the only place they can be stopped. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” said Lynch, his voice hollow and faint. “Y-you got it, Admiral. All guns, ready to shoot anything that comes through that portal.”
The Caernarvon drifted closer to the portal. With no engines, it was a slave to the sudden, intense gravitational pull the Avenir technology had created from the Chinese drives.
Mattis could have tried to get the engineers in propulsion back on his side. He could have begged and threatened and bargained, but he was just so… tired. The Caernarvon spun slowly toward the portal, drifting toward it like soap suds down the sink, and no part of him really wanted to resist at all. With Earth gone, everyone gone, what point was there in fighting the inevitable?
“Captain,” said Lynch, suddenly. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”
“Lynch, to be perfectly honest with you, my bridge crew is dead and although Blair and Yim are doing their best, we’re flying blind here. I’m not seeing anything.”
“Nothing’s coming out.”
Mattis couldn’t help but chuckle sardonically. “Maybe they’re having champagne before they decide to pay us a visit?”
“The portal,” said Lynch. “We hit the shuttle right before it activated. What if…” he considered. “When the Pinegar system exploded, there was a massive shockwave, one that destroyed the gas giant in the system and all its moons. But there’s no shockwave. The portal looks stable. Maybe this portal… it goes the other way?”
The other way? “What the hell are you talking about?”
“The portal’s orientation,” said a familiar voice. Modi. Modi was there too? Now that almost made him smile. “The gravitational wave is directional. It has to be precisely aligned to a local central gravitational point in order to select the rough time period that the portal will open to, and if the ship was struck and something thrown out of whack, then its possible that its alignment was disrupted. It might be this isn’t a portal from the future, it’s a portal to the future.”
Mattis watched the portal drifting closer and closer, its wide aperture threatening to swallow his ship whole. “Either way, it’s sucking us in, and—” God, he felt so tired. So empty and hollow and spent. “And even if you’re right, and we go through that thing and we end up somewhere or some-when, there will be ships on the other side. So they’ll just destroy us. Right?”
“It’s only roughly in the same time,” said Modi. “With some luck, you might arrive before any hypothetical fleet assembles, or after they’ve already departed. In theory.”
That was the key word, wasn’t it. Luck. Modi’s idea was just pure theory—absolute guesswork.
“Okay,” said Mattis. It was all he could manage.
“Don’t fret, Captain,” said Lynch, resolution creeping bravely back into his voice, his Texan accent coming through stronger. “I ain’t going to let you get sucked into that thing alone. We’ll be right behind you, don’t you worry. We’ll help you secure whatever’s on the other side.”
“Best not,” said Mattis. “Goalkeeper might need you on this side, and honestly, Lynch, there might not be anything on the other side. Including us. Because in my experience, damaged pieces of technology just malfunction or explode.”
“It doesn’t matter. You’re a Captain now, and I’m a Captain now, so we are doing this.”
Although he was genuinely touched, Mattis couldn’t stomach the idea that Lynch might follow him to his death, especially not so soon after hearing his voice again. “Don’t,” he said softly.
“I’d follow you to Hell itself,” Lynch said. “We’ll be right behind you.”
“To Hell itself,” echoed Modi. “Or any other theoretical afterlife, not that there is any evidence of any religion’s post-death experience being supported by scientific consensus—”
“Shhh!” Lynch hissed, and they heard a distinct smack. “You goddamn robot, you ruin everything, you know that? Even getting sucked in a giant-ass portal to our deaths. Somehow you managed to ruin that too.”
Despite it all, despite the incoming portal which would either catapult them forward into an uncertain fate in the future or completely obliterate them, despite the unthinkable destruction of Earth, and the deaths of his son-in-law, his grandson, Martha … everyone he knew … Mattis laughed.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “Both of you.”
“And you too,” said Lynch, with equal sincerity. “And hey, we got a nice little present for you in the state room.”
Present? He had no idea. “I… guess.”
“You are most welcome, Captain.”
The Caernarvon started to list to port as the gravitational forces drew it inexorably closer to the portal. Off to the ship’s starboard, the USS William Harrison pulled in beside them, sailing down toward the portal alongside his ship.
Maybe this could work.
“I think you just might have a good idea,” said Mattis evenly, leaning forward and steepling his fingers. “Okay. Okay. You know what? To hell with it. Let’s do this. Let’s go make the mothers in the future tuck their children into bed, hushing them and saying, No need to be scared, little one. There’s no such thing as an Admiral Jack Mattis.”
Admiral. He had said it.
Lynch laughed loudly. �
��Sure. There’s nothing left for us in this timeline, anyway.”
It was true. He had to admit that entering the portal would almost certainly kill them, but he didn’t really care. He’d lost everything, everyone, so a swift, explosive death was all he could hope for. So he would either expire, quickly and painlessly, or—
—Or actually go to the future.
The idea teased him with its potency. The Avenir had originated there. The weapons and technology humanity would develop in the future were … potent, and he’d experienced them first-hand. And if the Avenir were truly hunting Spectre, trying to kill him just as Mattis was, then it made sense to find common cause.
They needed an edge—they needed the weapons and technology and the ability to strike at their enemies.
“You know,” Mattis said,. “The court-martial said I couldn’t command a US warship again, but I’m pretty sure even the US Navy doesn’t have jurisdiction on future timelines.”
“Aye aye,” said Yim, smiling grimly. “Rock and roll.”
Spectre had taken out Earth, but Mattis was determined, suddenly, that the act would not be their last strike against humanity.
Mattis smiled. He smiled right as the Caernarvon disappeared into the portal, the bright wave of energy swallowing them whole; a flash of light, a burst of energy that washed out their instruments and overloaded everything that could be plugged in…
And then he was gone from the universe.
And appeared in another one entirely.
Chapter Sixty-Four
Bridge
HMS Caernarvon
Unknown Place, Unknown Time
The bright blue light washed over everything, blinding Mattis with its glare, causing him to squint and then finally close his eyes.
Maybe this was what dying was like.
The Last Strike: Book 5 of The Last War Series Page 25