Lucky Universe: Lucky's Marines | Book One

by Joshua James

  On the ship’s eye, the skreamers began to come around for another pass.

  “We have to wake up Malby,” he said. “Maybe if we just—”

  He stopped talking. The lead skreamer flew directly into the meandering hammerhead.

  “We were due for a break,” Rocky noted dryly. “Guess we used our one up.”

  For a moment, Lucky wasn’t so sure. He thought it had missed.

  And then the familiar pinpoint of light erupted.

  The lead skreamer was engulfed in dark red flame. It was something like what they had seen on the surface, but it had a different quality from this close range.

  Close range.

  “Rocky, get us outta here!”

  “Working on it.”

  “Work harder!”

  The ship was listing badly but began to roll sharply away from the skreamers.

  As one skreamer after another flamed up and disappeared, the rest lost discipline and started peeling off in different directions. But the flame easily leapt from one to the next, leaving a thin thread between them.

  Then Lucky saw another thread appear, extending from the last skreamer to a Union destroyer.

  How was that possible? There was nothing there, no matter to leap through, and yet the antimatter clearly found some breadcrumbs to follow.

  In a blink, the port side of the destroyer flared and was devoured. He could see for just a split second the exposed floors of the ship with men and women inside, running along corridors. Others ripped out of sleeping quarters. Out the latrines.

  They disappeared as fast as the flame crawled over the destroyer.

  Then it was gone. Completely gone.

  And then the thin line appeared again, and the dance repeated itself with the sister destroyer.

  And then it jumped again. And again.

  Lucky saw there were remnants of their own armada in higher orbit. The Union destroyers had been picking over the remains. Perhaps looking for survivors. Perhaps killing them.

  But they were all flashing and disappearing now. The entirety of ships and wreckage and drones in high orbit. Gone.

  And then the thread lazily latched on to the ancient ship.

  The flame began to descend upon them.

  “Rocky!”

  His spiders went into overtime as strings of data arrived with the flame. Even his spiders—who loved a good challenge—were overwhelmed.

  Vlad wasn’t moving, just staring transfixed at the image on the screen. “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  “Focused energy patterns in stasis. It works just like you said,” Orton said. “It’s following the patterns, connecting the dots. How did you know?”

  “It’s looking like it’s going to eat us,” said Dawson, cool and calm as ever.

  He’s not wrong, Lucky thought.

  “Lucky!” Jiang yelled in his direction.

  “Rocky? Thoughts?”

  “He is wrong,” echoed Rocky. “We are at the coordinates.”

  “What? Where?”

  Lucky stared into the view screen projected in the room.

  There was nothing there.

  They came all this way, did all this for a big fat nothing.

  Why had he been so stupid as to believe Vlad? But what could he do? And why would she lie?

  And now they were going to die in the middle of nowhere, devoured by some alien hocus-pocus.

  He considered shooting Vlad out of spite when something in his mind drew his attention.

  The spiders sensed something.

  They were pulsing forward, buzzing. He hadn’t felt their will this strong before.

  Data was pouring in from somewhere.

  He looked at the ship’s eye. But try as he might, Lucky couldn’t see anything.

  He put his nose right up to the image. He willed something to appear.

  Nothing.

  And then he realized that was exactly what he should be looking for.

  “No stars,” he said.

  It was a complete void.

  But his spiders sure saw something. Could pattern-recognition bots hyperventilate? If so, that’s what they were doing.

  A pattern of more and more complex lines formed in his head. This was nothing like a spider web. It was a quilt. It was a fabric. It was more lines of data than he had ever sensed.

  A tiny dark spot expanded in front of his face, growing until the pitch-black point had engulfed them.

  And then it was simply darkness.

  It must be the antimatter eating us, he thought.

  This must be what it feels like to become nothing at all.

  34

  Happy Giant

  Hello, nightmare.

  But this wasn’t the nightmare. For once, he wasn’t reliving the experiments. The torture. The Hate.

  It was just a dream.

  He opened his eyes to a room of walls folding in on themselves. Within the walls, threads intertwined, lined up and marching around. Each wall fell back into itself to form a new wall with a new, slightly shifted pattern of threads.

  The process kept repeating, with the tiny variations building on each, one after another.

  And then he saw his spiders.

  He had always pictured them in his mind as spiders, crawling over lines of data. But he knew they were really tiny, nearly invisible pattern-recognition nanobots crawling around and over and through the neurons in his brain.

  But now he wasn’t just picturing them in his mind. He was actually looking at them. Seeing them. Tiny mechanical spiders.

  How is this possible?

  And then he realized he wasn’t alone.

  There was a woman walking along the walls, running her fingers over the spiders. They crawled around and over her fingers as she plucked at the patterns of thread.

  She looked up at Lucky and froze.

  “How are you here?”

  Lucky couldn’t speak.

  He was looking at his sister. His sister, who had died when he was still in training. His sister, who had been the greatest pilot in the fleet, the sister who deserved better than to die on some routine mission in the middle of nowhere forgotten by everyone while Lucky was known and celebrated and had drinks named after him for doing nothing more than surviving.

  She was the one who was great. He was the one who lived.

  “Libby?” he said.

  The woman blinked.

  “It’s me, Lucky.

  “It’s Rocky.”

  Lucky stared. The voice was wrong. But this was his sister as he remembered her. As she had been when he had last seen her all those decades ago.

  The woman wrinkled up her nose.

  “You’re picturing me as your sister? Gross. What the hell is wrong with you?”

  Well, it was Rocky, that much was sure.

  Lucky opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He closed it again.

  Rocky nodded her head. “Exactly.”

  She sighed. “You aren’t really seeing any of this, of course. This is a construct inside your mind, you big dummy.” She paused. “Your sister. What the hell.” She shook her head and continued. “Look, I don’t know exactly what the ship is doing. But I know that it’s using our pattern-recognition bots to do it.” She reached out to one of the walls, and the spiders swarmed around her hand. “We are navigating the path the ship is taking.”

  Lucky frowned. “Navigating through what?”

  “The endless universes,” said a new voice.

  Another woman entered the room. It was Jiang, but again the voice was wrong.

  Rocky snorted in derision. “Damn, Lucky, you gotta meet more women.” She nodded her head. “Ship, Lucky. Lucky, Ship.”

  “So this isn’t Jiang, and you aren’t”—he swallowed—“Libby. So how am I seeing all this?”

  “Like I said, you aren’t really seeing any of this. It’s a mental construct. But why or how you entered it, I’m not sure.”

  “It’s not unusual for this interaction to happen with
the navigator during a transit,” said the Ship.

  “When a what does what now?”

  But the Ship wasn’t listening. It was looking at Lucky. “You are like the ones inside me.”

  “That’s what she said,” Rocky whispered under her breath, all but erasing any doubt as to her identity.

  The Ship seemed fascinated. “What is it like?”

  “What is what like?”

  “To be …” the Ship paused. “You.”

  Rocky broke in. “Are we getting close?” she said to the Ship.

  The Ship waved her away. “You will know.”

  Lucky looked at Rocky. “What is she asking me?”

  “She has never seen humans before. Or anything except Da’hune.”

  “Da what?”

  At that moment, he felt a ripple in the room. A red, wispy cloud circled in the corner of his eye. If the others noticed, they didn’t react.

  “Da’hune,” said Rocky. “That is what her race is, or the race that built her. The even named her. She said something unintelligible. It translates to Happy Giant.”

  “Happy Giant,” Lucky said. “The ancient alien starship we are on right now is called Happy Giant?”

  “Roughly,” said Rocky. “I didn’t name it. The Da’hune did.”

  Back to them. Lucky was sure he should have a million questions right now, but none were coming to mind.

  “How old are you, uh, Happy Giant?” he asked at last.

  “Eight billion of your years,” she said, seeming to look at Rocky for confirmation.

  Lucky sensed that most of this conversation—if you could call it that—was happening through Rocky. Just as she had first interacted with the Ship when they came on board, Lucky sensed that she was the key to the communication going the other way as well.

  “At the time of the purge.”

  Lucky didn’t like the sound of that. “The purge?”

  “Yes, to protect the offspring. The others were cleansed from the near-space in order to allow the offspring to grow in a safe environment.”

  Lucky looked at Rocky. “Does that mean what I think it means?”

  Rocky shrugged. “Takes one submission specialist to recognize another.”

  He shook his head. “They killed off all the other races to keep their offspring pure?”

  The Ship grimaced. “All of life is dying. We hastened their change for the sake of the offspring.”

  All of life is dying. Lucky would have agreed with that statement if it weren’t for the whole genocide vibe.

  The room rippled again. This time he was sure of it.

  “Did you see that?” he asked Rocky.

  She cocked her head. “See what?”

  Lucky looked again, thought he saw the red wispy cloud again, this time flowing in and out of the data streams with the spiders. “That,” he said pointing. But there was nothing there.

  The Ship continued, “Before that, we had of course spent billions of years growing our nest.” She indicated the walls that the spiders were still diligently dancing upon. “We built millions of corridors that allowed us to step across the distances of our nest.”

  “Corridors,” Lucky said, looking at Rocky.

  “Wormholes,” she replied. “Or folds if you prefer. They had millions of these, but they are gone now.”

  Lucky stared at Rocky.

  “You get what that means, right?” she said, pointedly.

  Lucky nodded soberly.

  Rocky shook her head. “Don’t get all soft on me. What it means is that this is the reason all the relics we have ever found are all from the same universal time. The Da’hune simply entered their corridors and arrived where they wanted to exterminate next. They could literally be everywhere in the universe at once.”

  The power of the corridors started to sink in. Everywhere at once.

  “Are they still there?” he said. “Still here?”

  Rocky said, “This seems to be the only one, and—”

  The Ship harrumphed. “This corridor is poorly made. It is deficient. The Da’hune would not have used it in this condition.”

  Rocky addressed the Ship. “This isn’t a Da’hune corridor?”

  The room rippled again. Every time they said the word Da’hune, he realized.

  The Ship laughed. “Oh no.” She froze for a moment, then continued. “Other than the Great Corridor, I can sense no others in the nest.”

  Rocky said, “The Great Corridor?”

  “The nest is the known universe,” Rocky said matter-of-factly to Lucky. She turned to the Ship. “What is the Great Corridor?”

  “Have we not spoken of it?”

  “No.”

  “It is a wonder. All the great Da’hune together built it. This universe is imprisoned within a black hole, which itself is imprisoned in a black hole at the universal center of the first birthplace. The Great Corridor resides on the overlap of two twinned universes.”

  Lucky looked at Rocky. She just shrugged. “That explains it.”

  “They found a new place with it,” continued the Ship. “A new place to start over and fix the mistakes that had come before,” she said. “It was a mistake to destroy the cultures, or so the great council said. The ecosystem needs the diversity, even if it is puny and weak. It was for the health of the offspring.”

  The Ship seemed to draw itself up a little taller. “I was among the great wave. Born to take the Da’hune through the Great Corridor.”

  It was a nice speech that made almost no sense to Lucky. But Rocky was looking thoughtful.

  “And why are you here?”

  The Ship looked bitter. “The Da’hune fell upon themselves. The council was not fully supported. I was left behind.”

  Lucky waited for an elaboration, but it was clear there was nothing more to come.

  “And so we came to find you here,” he said. “And now you are purging us, as well.”

  The Ship roared with laughter. “You were not here when the purge occurred. Your survival … It is no small thing, certainly, but …” the Ship shrugged. “I am not Da’hune. I have not been for billions of years. There are no offspring here to purge for.”

  “But then, what is happening out there?”

  The Ship looked at Rocky. “You asked the same, did you not?”

  Rocky said to Lucky, “She doesn’t seem to know anything about what is happening out there.”

  “How is that possible? This is what all this is about, is it not?” He thought about all the eyeless freaks attacking them. About the attack on their fleet. “Unless—”

  This time the ripple was unmistakable, as was the red mist. He felt his eyes begin to water. He quickly bent over to get below the cloud, but there was nowhere to go. It was filling his lungs with burning and rage.

  “Blasphemy!” he screamed in rage. But it wasn’t his voice. It was wild and jealous and furious. “To purge is to live!”

  The Hate descended on him in total control. He flew violently through the air. He felt something crunch in his hands, felt something gurgle and pop. His face was wet and twisted. He opened his eyes.

  Jiang’s head was crushed, barely recognizable under his bloody hands.

  And then he was laughing—a deep, mirthful, evil laugh.

  The spiders abruptly stopped dancing.

  The Hate was happy.

  Lucky was crying. He wanted to kill himself.

  35

  Arriving

  Lucky reached up for his face. It was wet, but when he pulled back, his hands weren’t red. They weren’t covered in blood. Only in his tears.

  Through his blurry eyes, he realized The Hate had left him.

  He looked around. The others were splayed about on the floor.

  “Oh no … what did I do?” he whispered.

  “Relax, Lucky. You didn’t do anything. It was a bumpy ride.”

  Malby crawled on his hands and knees. “What the hell was that?”

  He looked groggy, and Lucky remembered he had b
een knocked out earlier.

  But now it looked like they all had.

  Jiang was sitting up now as well. “Antimatter?”

  Orton shook his head. “We wouldn’t be here,” he said.

  Nico was dazed, his eyelids fluttering, and Lucky wondered why he couldn’t seem to interact with his AI without telegraphing it.

  Orton was holding Vlad by the shoulder, still staring daggers at Lucky.

  “What the hell is that?” said Dawson, pointing at the ship’s eye.

  Lucky tried to make sense of what he was seeing. The perspective was wrong.

  “Did the view change?” he asked aloud but directed to Rocky.

  “Negative,” she replied.

  “How is that possible?” he said, still aloud.

  “Better find something to hang on to.”

  The others were looking at him questioningly, only hearing one side of the conversation.

  Looming up in the ship’s eye was a massive wall draped with the same ore the ancient ship was made from. The same ore that had, as Lucky recalled, survived close-range nuke blasts and destroyer cannons.

  “Brace yourself!” Lucky yelled as he took a knee.

  Jiang and Dawson reacted immediately, hitting the deck. Nico joined them a moment later.

  The two scientists were already leaning next to one of the huge alien-scripted sheer walls that segmented the space.

  Malby swung his head around to stare at the ship’s eye. In typical Malby fashion, he took no action to brace himself. “Why—”

  The floor jerked hard out from below them. Even from his place on the ground, Lucky was flung forward.

  Malby, already off balance, flew off his feet and directly into Lucky.

  Lucky tried to turn to take some of the hit to his shoulder, but in the process he caught Malby under the chin.

  The big Marine flipped over, legs flailing in the air before landing upside down on his back.

  “What part of brace yourself wasn’t clear?” Lucky said.

  Malby didn’t respond. He didn’t move. Lucky realized that his shoulder to the chin had knocked Malby out again.