The Revered

by Terrance Mulloy

  Matt kept his eyes on the vacuum of space while he held her. “I’m so sorry, Ally. I’m so sorry I wasn’t there for you.” And with that, Matt let go and raised his arm. The time band started shimmering with a weird, electric-blue pulse, which caused Ally to look up fearfully. “Hold onto me,” Matt said. “This might feel a little weird.” With his heart now pounding, he looked out the bridge’s viewport to see the immense starfield around the ship beginning to warp like a fish-eyed camera lens. There was also a strange shriek rising through the interior of the ship. When the ship began to shudder, Matt held Ally tighter and clenched his jaw. He could hear her breathing intensify alongside his. How this alien technology worked was both unfathomable and terrifying, but they were now at its complete and utter mercy.

  Matt pressed his forehead against Ally’s as the dark ocean of space was suddenly replaced with blinding strings of white ethereal light.

  And then, the ship was no longer there.

  Thirty-One

  In another corner of the galaxy, light-years from Earth and twenty-five years into the future, the Wraith Interceptor reemerged into existence. Against the cold infinity of stars, the ship drifted silently through a frayed curl of a blood-red nebula.

  Up ahead, Ally and Matt could see Epsilon along with its four small moons as tiny reddish-yellow dots, glimmering in the intense crimson light of its Red Dwarf star. It had been estimated that Epsilon’s star was eight times larger than Earth’s, and the punishing sunlight was impossible to look at directly - even through polarized viewports. Fortunately, they were facing away from the star as they approached the planetary system.

  The view in front of Matt conjured memories of the safety briefings he had received before his last trip out here. The threat of severe retina burn was very real. He’d heard the stories of USC Vets who had gone completely blind from simply glancing at Epsilon’s sun without any eye protection – as well as the countless others who were back on Earth, suffering horrible UV-induced cataracts. For a long time, USC scientists suspected this was the reason why the Wraith’s pale-grey eyes had evolved to become milky and featureless. It was the only way they could look at the sun without going blind. As a species, the Wraith held many genetic and biological defects, so Matt wondered why evolution had been so generous in that regard. A blind enemy would have been a lot easier to defeat.

  Ally was now piloting with Matt standing behind her, embedded in a circular gunnery brace, manning the bomber’s cannons and payload system. Despite the Moonbase collapsing all around her, Ally had enough foresight to ask the pilot monk how they worked. There was no point jumping through time and space to get here if they were unable to release the missiles.

  “Seems so peaceful this far out,” Ally said, her hands holding the steering horn steady as the ship’s primary thrusters kicked in. “Almost pretty.”

  “I can assure you, it’s not. They’re probably already tracking us.”

  “This far out?”

  Suddenly a piercing shrill began echoing throughout the bridge. Ally snapped to her control console, his face twisting with concern. “What the hell? Is that an alarm?”

  Matt’s eyes watched a yellow glyph in front of him start blinking. It had appeared over his console too. “No, I think it’s an authorization request. Our sudden appearance must have triggered it.”

  “So now what?”

  “Now we wait. With a little luck, they’ll recognize it as one of their own.”

  “Right. One of their own that’s somehow been missing from their inventory.” Ally let go of the steering horn and waved off the rear bank of primary thrusters. The ship was still gliding towards its destination, but she was no longer piloting.

  Matt could see the trouble etched across her face. It was the same look he glimpsed on the Moon before they jumped. Something was weighing heavily on her. “What is it?”

  Ally waited a moment before responding. “Back on Earth, you asked me whether grandma and grandpa suffered after they got sick.”

  Matt glared at her, unsure if he wanted to hear this right now. Perhaps it was a question he no longer needed an answer to, but he could see the deep sadness set in her eyes. This was something she needed to tell him, no matter how much he did not want to hear it.

  “I locked them in the hay shed behind the house… I didn’t know what else to do. Every night I could hear them making these horrible noises. Wailing and screaming - it must have gone on for days. I thought, maybe if I just sat in my room and waited it would go away. Maybe somehow they’d get better…” Ally smeared a tear away from her cheek before continuing. “Then one morning it stopped. There was nothing but silence. When I opened the shed up, there was blood everywhere. There was so much blood, I didn’t think it was real… I found them on the ground, lying next to each other in a pool of blood…” Trailing off, she looked at Matt again, this time her eyes were glazed with battle-weary exhaustion. Tears streaked down her face as she struggled to get through her next words. “They had no faces, dad… I could see their bones...”

  Matt looked away, fighting to hold back his tears.

  “I just remembered thinking about how much they loved each other. I couldn’t understand why they would have done such a horrible thing to each other.”

  “It was the virus that made them do it.”

  “I know. And there will be millions of stories on Earth, just like that one. Possibly billions. People who will never get the chance to save themselves or their loved ones. An entire civilization is about to suffer because of what that bastard Cromwell did.”

  “Ally, I know. That’s why we’re here.”

  “No, Cromwell might be dead, but the Wraith are still launching their attack. If not Cromwell, there’s going to be a hundred other Generals and Commanders down on that planet who would gladly take Rossiter’s virus and use it for their own benefit. I won’t allow it.”

  Matt held his glare on her for a beat, confusion seeping into his expression. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I want you to understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “What I’m about to do.” Ally swiveled back around and took hold of the steering horn.

  Matt could not believe what she was implying, but there was no way he was going to allow his daughter to become some type of martyr. Not after all they had been through together to make it here. He reached over to her and gently grabbed her arm. “Ally, let me pilot the ship. You’re not thinking clearly.”

  Ally ignored his plea and ripped the steering horn down. The ship’s thrusters kicked in again and they began to sear towards Epsilon. “I’ve never thought so clearly in my life, dad.”

  “Ally, you’re not gonna do this. We need to be smart here.”

  “I’m not waiting around to see if they open the door for us. I need to get down there.”

  Matt watched the blinking glyph suddenly turn red as the ship accelerated; a clear warning sign that authorization had not yet been approved by Epsilon’s orbital defenses. “Ally, there’s a good chance the space between here and the planet is heavily mined.”

  Ally ignored him; her teary eyes now replaced with steely resolve as they fixed on Epsilon. Through the noxious clouds, some surface features were vaguely taking shape; unfamiliar continents – mostly barren and desolate, but some with thin swathes of blackened vegetation.

  Matt also stared at the approaching planet with rising dread. Never in a million years did he imagine he’d be back here – on the eve of interstellar war – about to drop a pathogen on their most sacred capital. “Ally, a direct flight path won’t work. We need to sling around one of their less inhabited moons before we attempt to breach their atmosphere. We’ll be harder to track.”

  Again, she ignored him.

  “We can’t just bum-rush our way past the entire Wraith military.”

  “Watch me.”

  Ally had the ship at full capacity now. Matt could feel the bridge shuddering underneath him. Realizing Ally was g
oing to do this her way – and only her way - Matt grunted with frustration. “Ah, shit. This is gonna suck.” He grabbed hold of the two inverted cannon triggers that drooped down from the overhead bracket he was standing under. As he pulled them down to position them in front of him, an enormous, over-the-shoulder restraint clipped him into the gunnery brace. He looked like he’d just been horse-collared into a futuristic roller coaster car that was about to ride him straight into hell. A series of holographic images suddenly projected themselves in front of him. There were pod-shaped balls of light everywhere, teeming like ants. “Oh, no,” he gulped. “They’re coming.”

  Ally could see what was headed their way; a massive force of heavy war machines, led by a seemingly endless swarm of Death Ponies. A defensive armada was already growing like tiny barnacles out of the planet’s surface. The Wraith were responding to their presence by scrambling half their fleet to intercept them. “How long do we have?”

  “Not long enough,” Matt growled as he began firing the ship’s cannons, every bone in his body vibrating madly like he was operating a giant Jackhammer in each hand.

  Swallowing her fear, Ally pitched the ship directly into the jaws of the armada, wading into battle. The Ponies attacked with a feeding frenzy; molten-blue bolts stabbing into the Interceptor as the larger armored ships closer to the planet spat huge bolts of plasma at them.

  Matt kept firing as Ally ripped the horn and banked sharply to avoid a salvo of hot tracers. They arced through space at ballistic speeds, peppering the ship’s underbelly. He saw the Death Pony now coming up on his left flank. It released three tow-bombs in rapid succession. The bombs tumbled through space, opening like the petals of some carnivorous plant before hurling three smaller balls of sizzling white energy at them. Matt immediately knew they were something akin to EMP bombs, designed to cancel the ship’s navigation and weapons systems. He reacted quickly, hitting the first one, and the second, just before it reached them. The fire washed over the bridge’s canopy shielding before being sucked away into the nothingness of space. He fired at the third one but missed. It clipped the tail of the ship and detonated with the brilliance of a newly formed star. The nearby Ponies dodged the shockwave and continued to rake the ship with fire.

  Wrestling with her controls, Ally could see the damaged thrusters that were now causing the ship to corkscrew out of control. “I can’t stop this spin! My guidance systems are fried.” With no idea how to cancel their spin, she decided to use it to her advantage.

  She accelerated.

  They were getting closer and closer to Epsilon now, and the other ships waiting in the distance were taking on macabre details. Aside from the defensive line of fearsome-looking frigates, some of the warships further back were no less than city-sized hunks of black seething metal, floating silently at the edge of Epsilon’s frothy atmosphere.

  Fire suddenly belched up from below the bridge, nearly tossing them both out of their restraints. A flurry of plasma bolts had just chewed up the underbelly of the ship. Several console instruments exploded in a shower of sparks, and the bridge’s main lights died, plunging the ship into darkness. With no illumination, except for the dim glow of what remained on their consoles, and the several small fires that had now broken out around them, they were at the mercy of the ship’s last remaining power source. Another direct hit and they’d be unable to do anything except wait to be vaporized.

  Ally looked out at the dizzying kaleidoscope of stars and alien metal, realizing the impact had spun them out of their potentially endless corkscrew. However, they were now spinning in another direction like a bottle top from their starboard. She wrenched the horn left and fired the last remaining thrusters on the ship’s portside, hoping it would cancel the wild spin. It did, but now she was pinwheeling in long, vertical rotations. “Oh, come on, you hunk of crap! Goddamn it, work with me here!” Remembering the forward thrusters she had used earlier to dampen her approach on the Moon, she tapped the glitchy icon above her, silently praying they still worked. Almost instantly, the ship’s pinwheeling halted, leveling out as she corrected her angle and continued surging forward. Crisis averted. But there were other problems she would soon have to deal with. The main one being the growing fire inside the bridge. She could feel heat behind her somewhere – against the back of her neck, getting more intense with each passing minute.

  Matt’s fingers were completely numb as he swung his massive cannons like a bullwhip, firing at anything that moved. Fortunately, the Interceptor had an extremely tough hull, but how they would ever manage to punch through that line of defense was something he was yet to comprehend. While their unannounced appearance may have thrown a spanner in their launch plans, it was a very minor setback. One that all Wraith Commanders would be scrambling to rectify. “There’s too many of them. Go down.”

  “What?” Ally barked over her shoulder; eyes still peeled on the relentless onslaught outside.

  “Down! Go down and under!”

  “That won’t make a difference. They’ll just follow us.”

  “The capital is on the other side of the planet, nearest their equator. We need to go underneath their line of defense. The Ponies will follow us, but the bigger warships won’t. They’re too slow.”

  “What about ground defenses?”

  “Let’s just get there first. Do it. Go under them. It’s our only way!”

  Their stomachs pitched as Ally wrenched the steering horn up and the ship swooped down, the last remaining bank of thrusters erupting in defiance.

  “Christ, this thing can move,” Ally muttered as she kept the horn locked in an upright position.

  Several Death Ponies reacted to the maneuver, trailing after them like an obedient swarm of bees.

  Ally’s grip tightened as the ship’s nose reached its tipping apex and shot back up towards the south pole of the planet. They were roughly three-hundred kilometers from breaching the atmosphere. There was no ice at the Southern pole - just a tortured landscape of sheared cliffs and towering mesas, all carpeted in black volcanic rock. The thick scarves of boiling clouds that swirled around the mesa tops, made the planet seem even more primeval and foreboding.

  Matt stared up at the godawful lump of rock, wondering if it was intentionally kicked off its axis by the Combine as a form of punishment. How could such a place exist? He could feel a familiar fear swelling inside his chest.

  “Open the payload doors!” Ally snapped, jolting Matt from his grim stupor. He saw the glyph symbolizing the payload doors hovering over his console and swiped it. Something flashed red and the glyph disappeared. He ran his fingers over it again like he was reading braille. The payload glyph appeared once more. He swiped it and the same warning sign flashed red before vanishing.

  Shit.

  Matt wheeled around to her. “Payload doors are damaged. I can’t open them.”

  Oddly, Ally did not react to that. She kept the ship steady, her eyes ticking methodically between the viewport ahead and the periphery data surrounding her – much of it she could not decipher, apart from the few symbolic glyphs that resembled critical components of the ship. “You need to go, dad,” she said, her back still facing him. “I can do this.” Her voice was calm, yet firm.

  “What?” Matt asked, unable to confirm whether he had heard her correctly.

  Before Ally could respond, a massive explosion rocked the bridge, violently flinging them from their restraints. They flew aimlessly across the room and slammed into the hull, a heavy trail of debris showering them. Alarms wailed over ruptured instruments that now vomited sparks and flame. Coolant and steam gushed from the mechanical guts of the ship below. The Death Ponies had continued to gnaw away at the ship’s reinforced hull like a pack of Piranhas until finally crippling its propulsion system. The Interceptor continued to blast forward like a mad dying animal, banking and rolling towards the intestinal tangle of Epsilon’s upper cloud system.

  Bloodied and battered, Ally wearily raised her head to look at the unrelenting swe
ll of Death Ponies outside. This bucket of steel would be blasted into smithereens before it reached the surface. The Wraith would make sure of it. She had to take control of whatever was left working on the ship. She tried to move, but everything hurt. That’s when she felt a hand reach down and pull her up onto her feet.

  Matt stood there, battered and bloody as she was. “You’re not doing this alone. If we’re gonna go out, we go out together.”

  Ally rejected that with a dismissive headshake and brushed past him, staggering like a drunk towards the damaged pilot console. “The ship is already vectoring towards the capital. I think a pre-ordained flight path must’ve kicked in not long after we arrived. All I need you to do is find a way to open those bay doors and its bombs away.”

  Matt grabbed her before she could climb into the pilot brace. “We do this together, and then we jump. That was what we agreed on.”

  She yanked her arm from his grip and proceeded to climb in. “No, that’s what you agreed on. Not me.”

  Matt watched her climb in, unable to understand the death wish she seemed determined to carry out. “Ally, there are people back home counting on us. People in your future.”

  She looked at him with an almost cynical smirk. “I have no future, dad. Haven’t you figured that out yet? I can’t go back or forward. My world is done for. You, however – you just need to make it back to Earth.”

  “Ally, I’m not leaving this ship. If I can’t save you, I’ll die here with you.”

  Through the blood and grime, Ally’s face softened, her eyes welling once again with those stubborn tears. “You already have saved me, dad.”

  Matt pinched his eyes shut and shook his head, refusing to accept what she was saying. He began frantically clawing at the time band on his forearm. “Then you have to take this. Not me!” But the device was not going to budge unless the Combine allowed it to - and bringing Ally back with him was never part of the deal he had struck with them. “No!” In a fit of anger, he started bashing the device on a nearby support beam. It never made a scratch or dent. “Fuck the Combine. Fuck them. I’m not going to leave you here—”