by B. V. Larson
What would happen if my ghostly being did manage to enter the reactor? Would I cease to exist? Would the entire ship go up in some catastrophic reaction?
My efforts ceased. I drifted, rather than trying to exert myself. Forcing my mind to work, I tried to build a three dimensional map of the ship. Which way would go somewhere safe? Somewhere I wanted to be?
Upward, not down. That was the key. Above the engine and the bilge were the crew quarters, consisting of perhaps a tenth of the ship’s mass. The upper decks must be safer than the bowels of the rumbling engine.
Reluctantly, I turned away from the light and heat. I took a guess as to the correct angle, based on my point of origin and the reactor, and I began to wriggle again.
To my surprise, the process became easier after a time. I was able to see… gray shapes. Movement. Shadows and faint illuminations. Could that be the inhabited decks?
Had I been going slowly before, because I’d been forcing myself to pass through metal bulkheads? Lead, titanium and God knew what else, that’s what a spaceship was made of. Layers and layers of barriers designed to keep the ship’s crew safe from the continuous controlled explosions that drove that ship. Would it be easier to move through the harsh, irradiated wasteland of near-nothing?
Movement was much easier now, no matter what the reason. I felt as if I was swimming through water rather than thick mud.
A glimmer ahead was a spot of clarity in an otherwise hazy universe. It looked like a tear in a sheet. I couldn’t see much beyond this illumination, but it was bright and… inviting.
My mind conjured a dozen fresh dangers, but I felt I had to risk it. I swam closer, and when I was right there at the bright edge of a vertical slit, I could almost see a room inside.
The light, the colors… it was the inside of a ship, seen from underwater.
Taking the biggest chance I could recall ever having taken, I reached out with my nonexistent limbs, grasped hold of the sides of the rip, and forced myself through it.
Chapter 36
It was like being born again. I crawled out of a rip in space-time, entering the world of heat, light and glorious sensation.
My skin burned with the contact of air. My eyes couldn’t open, as if I were unprotected before the sun’s blazing light. Like a creature brought up from the coldest depths of the ocean, I lay on my side, gasping and shivering for a full minute.
After this short time passed someone began shaking me. It was Logan.
“Where’d you come from, Chief? Are you all right? Did one of those aliens zap you or something?”
My mind fought to regain control of my vocal chords. At last, I managed it.
“That’s about right, Logan,” I croaked. “Big Al zapped me.”
Slowly, painfully, I got to my feet. Squinting and swaying, I tried to figure out where I was.
Then, I had it. The alien body that had lain where I was standing now had been removed, but there were still markings on the floor. A ring of tape showed the place where the corpse had been.
I stood amidst these markers like a demon who’d been summoned there.
With faltering steps, I walked away from the spot.
“That’s how they do it…”
“What’s that, Chief?”
I reached out and grabbed his shoulder, partly for support, and partly for emphasis.
“I’ve been… somewhere else. In-between dimensions. I was stuck there for a long time, it seemed like. How long was I gone?”
“A full day. Captain Jessup figured you’d become so guilt-ridden you’d jettisoned yourself into space.”
A coughing laugh erupted from my chest. “He’s almost right about that—except I wasn’t feeling guilty and I didn’t jettison myself. What about Toby? Have you seen him?”
Blank-faced, Logan shook his head.
I reached to his belt then, and I drew his pistol. He looked alarmed.
Pressing the gun into his hand, I pointed at the taped-off spot on the floor. “Watch that. It’s an easy point for them to come through. I don’t know if there are others or not, but I know they can use that one. If an alien shows his nose—blast it off.”
“Got it, Chief.”
Even as I marched down the passages toward the upper decks, my mind kept questioning my recent experiences.
Had I really been in limbo for a full day? That seemed incredible. I wasn’t hungry… I wasn’t dehydrated. I felt exactly the way I had felt the moment Big Al had screwed me by manipulating that device.
Checking the alien equipment, I saw I still had it. The translating patch was on my forehead, and I still wore the harness. The robe was around my shoulders like a bath towel, and the odd control device with all the nubs and tips was in my pocket.
Just to be on the safe side, I removed the harness and the patch. In each case the results were faintly disgusting.
Tiny hair-like tendrils had sunken into my skin. There was no pain until I removed these items, then it was like tearing off a bandage. Droplets of blood and clinging, squirming threads—I hated this alien technology. It wasn’t clean.
Stuffing all these items into a pouch meant for carrying gear into space, I slung it at my side and kept walking. Quite possibly, I’d need them in the future.
The very thought of venturing again into nonexistence was terrifying. I doubted that anyone I knew could have gotten out of there alive. Most would have gone mad—or at best, wormed their way into the reactor.
That thought was worth an additional wince of horror. To come out inside an inferno, then be burped out into space as hot molecules a moment later… What a way to go.
Reaching the bridge at last, I spotted Jessup at his command station. Or rather, I heard him bellow from there.
“That’s right, I want another full scan. We can’t have missed all of them.”
“We’re not getting anything, sir,” Lt. Allie Fletcher responded. Her voice indicated she was weary after answering similar demands countless times.
“Damned rebels…” Jessup growled.
“Don’t you mean, ‘damned aliens’, Captain?” I asked, interrupting the scene.
Everyone turned to look at me in surprise.
“Chief Gray!” Jessup roared, pointing an accusatory finger. “How did you get back aboard my ship?”
“The same way the aliens did it, sir. They call themselves Vehk and I’ve dealt with them more than any other human alive,” I said.
I proceeded to explain the process of transference from one state of being to another, and how these aliens must be highly skilled in traversing the in-between.
“Vehk? The in-between?” Cmdr. Collins asked.
“That’s what I’m calling it. Maybe it’s a rip in space-time, or another dimension. I have no idea as to the technical aspects, but they seem to be able to move into another state where a ship’s hull is merely challenging terrain. Steel and lead are highly plastic and only resist like swimming through mud.”
“Interesting…” Collins said, making notes.
“Assuming,” Jessup said loudly. “That I believe your cock-and-bull story in the first place, answer me this: Why aren’t you dead?”
“Well… because I escaped, sir.”
“You were in some kind of alternate state of matter for over twenty hours. Didn’t you need to breathe? Eat? Take a piss?”
“Apparently not, sir,” I said, and I explained further how I’d come out confused, but unharmed.
Allie opened her mouth to ask a question of her own, but Jessup waved her to silence with an irritated gesture.
“Do you think you could do it again, Gray?” he asked.
There it was. The kind of question I’d been expecting, but I’d hoped to never hear.
“I don’t know, sir… I mean, I now comprehend the process, but to willingly subject myself to such an extreme environment? I don’t know…”
“You could do it,” Jessup summarized, “but you don’t want to. Good to know. I’ll keep that in mind.”
I felt annoyance at this. Was he implying cowardice on my part? If so, he could take a swim in subspace, or wherever I’d been, then brag about it if he got back alive.
“Captain,” I said, “since I’ve brought you up to date, perhaps you could return the favor?” I indicated the zoomed-in image of the asteroid mining base on all their screens. “Are we under some kind of attack?” I asked.
“Attack? What? No, no… Not since your alien showed up. Since we destroyed their ship, everything’s been quiet.”
“What’s all the excitement about this mining base then?” I asked.
“We tracked the miner that attacked us back to here. Surprisingly, it’s quite near the fabled exit point to the Sphere.”
“I’ve heard it referred to as the aperture, sir,” I said.
The aperture was a thin point in the Sphere. A spot where objects could go the farthest without striking it and being destroyed. It was a bulge, really. A portion of our prison that allowed us to go few thousand kilometers farther from our central star than any other point. Arguments as to the nature of the aperture had spawned countless speculative papers on astrophysics.
“Your nerds already had plans to fly to this region of space,” Jessup continued, “so I figured we might as well investigate how and why the miner attacked us.”
I’d been under the impression that both the “how” and the “why” had become abundantly clear by now, but I kept those thoughts inside my head.
“So… what have you discovered, Captain?”
“Not frigging much. The base has been abandoned. The miners must be dead, or they’ve rebelled. It hardly matters which.”
Allie looked at him sternly as he said this. She didn’t sneer at rock-rats the way the rest of the navy officers seemed to. It was one of the things that I admired about her most.
“To stay on the safe side, sir,” I said, “we shouldn’t go too close to the base. It might be a ghost town, or it might be a trap.”
“What are they going to do?” he snorted. “Fire missiles at us? Throw rocks?”
“Maybe. But it’s far more likely alien invaders will jump from the base to our ship.”
“How?”
I spread my hands wide. “The same way I just traversed the length of this ship. They could be better at traversing the in-between than I am—in fact, I’m certain that they are. They could be creeping about down on the bilge deck right now.”
Jessup looked alarmed at the thought. He turned to Cmdr. Collins. “Withdraw from the area. There’s nothing to see here.”
“What new course should we set, sir?”
He hesitated a moment, then he answered firmly. “Head for the aperture. It’s time to let Colonel Hughes and her crowd execute that test they’ve been begging for. I’m tired of hearing them whine about it in any case.”
He left the bridge then, and I did the same. It was time to go talk with Colonel Hughes.
Chapter 37
When I found Colonel Hughes, she was talking to Toby. They were huddled together working on a group of computer screens. Toby’s fingers were flying over the keyboard—but he stopped typing when they caught sight of me.
“There you are, Chief Gray,” Hughes said, looking at me sternly. “It isn’t like you to take off and disappear. How did you get off the ship, anyway? There were no records, no airlocks were breached—”
I put my hand up to stop her, then looked at Toby.
“Didn’t you tell her?”
Toby shrugged. “Why bother? There was no way we could get you back, and that alien friend of yours vanished on his own this morning, anyway. Without proof, everyone would simply assume I was making it up.”
“Big Al escaped?” I demanded. “How’d he do that? I took his gear and even his robe.”
Opening up the pouch at my side, I threw both these items on the table.
Colonel Hughes was frowning at both of us. “What the hell is going on here?” she asked.
I gave her the short version of recent events, leaving out much of the details involving the ordeal I’d gone through while swimming in-between.
“That does sound preposterous…” she admitted when I was finished. “I guess Toby was right. If you weren’t standing here, after having vanished for a full day, I wouldn’t buy it even coming from you.”
“Such neuro-typical limitation,” Toby observed. “I have to deal with it constantly.”
Colonel Hughes turned on him and put her fists on her hips. “Who are you calling neuro-typical?”
“Don’t feel insulted. If anything, your relative normalcy has benefitted your life experiences. Ask yourself: would you really want to be as radical of a freak as I am?”
Hughes considered that for a moment, and I could tell she didn’t like the flavor. She waved his words away in irritation. “Forget all that. Chief Gray, you’re claiming you left our ship, transported yourself through some kind of astral plane and ended up finding your way back?”
“Ethereal,” Toby said.
“What?”
“The ethereal plane would be a better fit. Mind you, it’s all mysticism anyway, but if we’re going to draw comparisons to our metaphysical legends, the ethereal plane would more closely match—”
“Shut up,” she told him.
His shoulders slumped and his frown deepened—but he did shut up.
“Chief Gray,” she said. “I’m glad you’re back no matter what you did while off-grid. Your private life is your own.”
“My private…?” I asked, blinking. “You mean you think I ran off and hid somewhere for quiet time?”
“Why not?” Toby asked, breaking his vow of silence almost as soon as he’d made it. “I do that all the time. What did you think I was doing down there in the bilge? I find solitude conducive to deep thought.”
“Right…” I said, considering Colonel Hughes. What could she possibly have thought I was doing for twenty-some hours?
Then I noted the reproachful nature of her expression, and I caught on.
“Did you locate Dr. Brandt during my absence?” I asked her.
Colonel Hughes blinked rapidly. I’d struck a nerve.
“I checked many personnel, pinpointing their locations. Dr. Brandt may have been among them… I don’t recall.”
She looked back to the computer screens, and I dared to smile. She’d assumed I was spending some quality time with Jillian. That would have been far better than the truth.
Deciding not to needle her jealous side any further, I changed the subject.
“What are you two doing? That looks like code.”
“It is,” Toby said. “A hacked stream in the raw binary form. I’m analyzing the security transmissions of the mining base we just passed by. It’s owned by Earth companies, all private and encrypted, but such things are made to be broken.”
“Ah…” I said, catching on. “You’re hacking their security? It’s still online?”
“Power was never lost at the main environment modules. They’ve got cameras, and they are transmitting—unfortunately, we don’t have the passwords needed to log in and review what’s happening down there.”
“That’s an excellent idea,” I said, coming around and lowering my face down into the data screens with them. “If they won’t answer our radio calls, we can just take a peek ourselves.”
“Chief Gray?” Colonel Hughes said. “Please don’t crowd. We’ve got important business to attend to. There’s a limited time frame for the hack to work.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Because,” Toby answered, “we’re flying by the mining complex at a pretty good clip. Once we’ve gone a few hundred thousand kilometers downrange, I won’t be able to pick up their live feed any longer.”
“Right… Let’s get on it.”
I scooted into a chair beside Toby, while Colonel Hughes fretted behind us.
Working together, I used my access codes and Toby’s skills to get a live feed up. We were online and watching
the internals of the station within ten minutes.
What we saw was sobering. There were clear signs of a struggle. Miners were dead in every camera’s field of view. They were draped over consoles or curled up like a fetus on the cold metal decks.
“My God…” Colonel Hughes said. “They killed them all.”
“A sudden attack,” I said, “by the looks of it. Might be asphyxiation. Or possibly a blast of intense radiation.”
“I think not,” Toby said. “See here? That’s blood coming out of a flipped-up visor. I think they were suddenly depressurized.”
“Why not simply button up their suits?” Hughes asked. “They could have saved themselves.”
“Hmm…” I said fiddling with a touch-control. The camera panned and zoomed remotely.
The screen filled with a close-up view of a dead woman. She had her air hose in her hand, and she was pinching it tightly. She’d died in that odd pose, sitting at her post.
“See that?” I said. “Maybe the aliens somehow sabotaged their spacesuits. That woman is trying not to breathe the air coming from her tanks.”
“But she’d have only the air inside her suit to live off of.”
“Exactly.”
I looked at Colonel Hughes meaningfully. “I think we should take steps. Let’s protect our air tanks, check them all, and distribute fresh safe O2 to everyone aboard.”
Nodding, she left in a hurry. Toby frowned at the screens.
“Such ruthless monsters,” he said. “They coldly killed everyone and stole their ships, didn’t they? That’s how they got deeper into our Solar System.”
“Good deductive thinking,” I said. “I’m in agreement. After having experienced the in-between—”
“You mean the ethereal plane?” Toby interjected.
I rolled my eyes. “Whatever you want to call it, Toby. After having experienced how hard it is to travel through that kind of space, I can’t imagine the invaders could wriggle their way from this far out all the way to Earth. They’ve been doing small jumps, one ship to another, from ship to station and back again. They must have been working on this for months, getting closer and closer to Earth.”
Colonel Hughes looked thoughtful. “All the while idiots like Jessup assumed the rock-rats had gone mad and decided to rebel against Earth.”