by Jason Letts
A minute later the alarms went off.
Rubbing his eyes, he glanced around at the flashing lights to see that it was the station-wide alarms. They weren’t out of the woods yet.
“What is going on?” Loris said as he stumbled out of his room and nearly collided with someone rushing past. His first thought was to head to the bridge.
“One of them followed us through the window. I guess it was already extremely close to the station and managed to get inside before we flew away,” Panic said.
“So one of them is in the station?”
Considering how little luck they had against them in the vicinity of Nova, having one of them running amok on the Magellan seemed like the worst news imaginable.
“Don’t worry. We’ve got some ideas.”
“Don’t worry?” Loris was beside himself. “If we can’t fight it, just one of these things could wipe us out.”
“We’ve already shut the heat off. We’re working to contain it with the scientific research team,” she said.
“Contain it? We should think about powering down the reactor,” he said, hoping Marta Aylward would come on the line next.
“No, that’s our bait,” Panic said.
“Bait?”
“Is there an echo in here? I’m telling you that we’ve got it under control.”
“Will you at least tell me where it is?” Loris asked.
“It’s in the concourse and moving toward the rear,” she said.
“OK, I’m on my way.”
“No! We’re trying to get people clear of that area.”
But Loris was already on his way, and it would be a good thing too if there were still people down there in harm’s way. As it was there wasn’t a whole lot of distance between the concourse and the reactor, so whatever they did would have to work fast.
When he stepped out of the lift at the concourse, the first thing that hit him was the freezing cold air. It was like stepping into a freezer and it made his breath visible. Whether that temperature difference would really impede the alien from absorbing more energy from the air was anybody’s guess.
People were running this way and that as they dashed from one room that lined the concourse to another. Most of them had tall windows that reflected some light, making it difficult to tell where the gaseous shape was in the large space, but after a while he noticed tiny bits of metal floating within a faintly smoky cloud.
“Don’t go any closer,” said an officer who grabbed him by the arm, but Loris shook him off to try and get a better grasp of how people were trapped in the area. There were at least a handful of them and just as many Unified officers on the defense team trying to get them out. One of them was crouching behind a wide statue base when the cloud drifted in his direction.
“Look out!” Panic shouted from the upper level railing near the rear. Beside her was Riki Lala and a hefty metallic tank that Loris recognized was a cryogenic storage dewar, which had layered walls buffeted by a vacuum in order to store things below room temperature.
The officer attempted to get up and run, but he was lifted off his feet and drawn into the cloud, where he appeared to be pulped for his mitochondria. His skin burst as the creature digested him, eventually dropping a bloody mess of clothes and bones on the floor.
“Is there any way we can increase the reactor’s heat signature?” Panic asked, disgusted. “Rev the engine, so to speak?”
“I’ll think of something,” said Aylward over the com.
After that gruesome display, no one else ventured anywhere near the concourse floor. Loris watched and waited to see if the creature would drift toward anyone trapped in the side rooms. For all he knew, it could turn around and start coming for him at the other end.
A humming noise and a subtle rattling in the floor became perceptible to Loris, who understood that they had managed to ratchet up the reactor. The effect on the Agarthanon stowaway was immediate. Rather than hanging about, it drifted toward the rear in a more deliberate fashion.
From the balcony, Panic extended a hose over the edge of the railing in the path of the amorphous shape. Riki Lala was kneeling down by a wheel attached to the tank, peering through the railing as the cloud drifted in their direction. All of a sudden she yanked on the wheel while Panic held the hose steady.
A clear liquid came pouring out that could’ve been water from the looks of it, but before it hit the floor, it had already changed into a puff of smoke. The cloud became more distinct, darker, and its wafting movements slowed.
“The liquid helium isn’t going to work. It’s boiling too fast,” Lala said. “We don’t have enough of it to see if it would have a real solidifying effect, which we can’t be certain would kill it anyway. On to Plan B.”
At that, the two women abandoned their equipment and fled through an exit along the rear.
“How many plans are there?” Loris asked.
“Just two,” Panic responded. Loris decided not to ask what would happen if the second one didn’t work.
The creature reached the wall on the opposite side of the concourse and began to pass through it. The wall screened out the metal pieces, which clattered against the floor once the cloud had passed through. While the officers helped those who were trapped get out of the area, Loris continued through the large room in an attempt to tail his foe, helpless though he was.
Beyond the concourse was a long hallway illuminated only by emergency lights in the floor. He stood at the entrance, unwilling to move forward without some sign that the space was safe. The shortness of the hallway suggested that the Agarthanon was straddling the floor above as well. After a few minutes, some chatter on the com suggested that it had moved on to the reactor wing’s entryway area, around the engineering department’s offices.
Loris hustled through the darkness and activated the sliding door on the far side, unsure of what he would see. The wide, tall space had a funnel shape as it narrowed at the door to the reactor’s main core, a towering tube of pulsing blue light. In front of the door were Panic, Lala, and a cart supporting a machine composed of a motor, a belt, and a large steel ball. To his surprise, the two women were wrestling with each other over a metal pole linked to the machine.
The alien creature floated toward them.
“I can’t let you,” Panic argued during the struggle, but Lala wasn’t giving up.
“These are my calculations,” Lala said. “If they are incorrect, I will be the one who pays for them.”
Panic relented and let Lala strip the pole from her before backing away. With a hard look, the Chief of Scientific Research straightened out her uniform, shook out her shoulder-length hair, and flipped on the machine. The motor started running, the belt spun, and the ball began developing a positive charge.
Wearing insulated gloves, Lala held the end of the pole out into the air ahead of her. The cloud drifted closer and closer, getting dangerously near to the unflappable scientist. When the creature touched the pole, a spark appeared that made it draw back. But Lala pressed forward, thrusting the metallic end deeper. That one spark quickly led to a second and a third, and soon there were so many tiny bolts that it was like a miniature version of what the umbrella formation had done to Nova.
The Agarthanon seemed unable to move fast enough to escape. Its kneading motions produced no movement, and instead the cloud began to lose its cohesiveness. The nearly transparent grains fell away as the creature collapsed, growing smaller until it was a layer of dust on the floor so unapparent that no one would notice it. And even that soon faded away into nothing.
Loris approached them feeling at once relieved that the danger was over and unnerved that their reactor had gotten within striking distance.
Expressionless, Lala placed the pole on the cart and switched off the motor.
“Well done,” Panic said to Lala, taking the shorter woman by the shoulder and giving her a firm shake.
“To be honest, the voltage nearly wasn’t enough. I could feel it lifting me. But as soon as I saw them at w
ork near Nova, I knew that we’d invented the means to beat them hundreds of years ago. If one had the time and inclination, it would be possible to design a drone ship with this method in mind, fly it directly into the Agarthanon pod, and leech the electrons out of all of them,” she said.
“That sounds great and I’m glad we dodged this bullet. I just wish I’d had a better idea of what we were doing. If something had gone wrong, there wouldn’t have been a chance to make up for it,” Loris said.
“We didn’t exactly have a ton of time ourselves to do anything more than transport this equipment down here. But I told you we had it covered,” Panic said, still reveling in the victory. Loris needed to make sure she didn’t miss his point.
“Still, if I’d been informed, I could’ve done more than watch from the wrong end of the room. I’m trying to be helpful,” he said.
Panic’s smile faded and she squinted at him a little.
“You just personally flew most of the Novans to the Incubator for a day straight, and now you’re upset that you weren’t involved enough in fighting off the one alien that followed us through the window? You can’t do everything yourself, Loris,” she said.
“Respectfully, delegating is one of a commander’s primary responsibilities,” Lala chimed in.
“I don’t try to do everything,” Loris said, aghast at the accusation. “I think I’d hear about it if I did.”
Lala bit her lip and looked askance before heaping on another scoop of criticism.
“The reason you might not hear about it is because our Chief of Operations doesn’t think you’ll listen to her if she brings it up. I know you’re trying to be hands-on, but there are times when you end up doing Sonia Firth’s job for her.”
Maybe it was the exhaustion, but Loris found himself swept up in his annoyance.
“I can’t believe that. All I want is to have greater awareness of what’s going on so that I can step in and help when it makes sense to do so. Let’s increase the communication going forward, all right?” he asked.
The point seemed self-evident to Loris, but it somehow produced a smirk and raised eyebrows from Panic.
“Make sure you don’t bite off more than you can chew. I don’t know where we’d be without you,” she said.
Even though he was the commander, their friendship seemed to allow her to get the best of him in the conversation when a simple “Yes, sir” was all he was looking for.
“Great,” he said, ready to abandon the issue. “Do you have any other observations for me?”
“You look tired and should get some sleep,” Lala said.
After a few days spent resting and acclimating their no-longer-Novan refugees aboard the Incubator, Loris arrived at the conference room for a report on their current predicament. It seemed to him that it had taken a phenomenally long time for the meeting to be called, and he was anxious to find out what the hold-up was.
As he met the other chiefs, he recalled the conversation near the reactor.
“I’d like to start by saying that I’m by no means a perfect commander. In some ways the job is still new to me, and especially in extraordinary circumstances like these it can be hard to get it all right. I hope you won’t hesitate to approach me if you have concerns or suggestions,” he said.
Kelly Reid’s raised hand extended into a shrug as he spoke.
“You could try not being the last one to show up for meetings for a change,” he said, provoking a sigh from Loris.
“It’s also acceptable to approach me in private later. Let’s focus on the issue at hand. The window that we came through did not reopen, correct?”
“That’s right,” Firth answered. “We don’t know how quickly the Agarthanons consumed the planet, but they must’ve moved over it quickly enough that the three probes were never close enough again to produce the same effect.”
“And that leaves us…where?” Loris asked, not hesitating to get to the most pressing question on his mind.
“We’re having difficulty determining that,” Lala said.
“What’s the issue?” Loris asked.
“The stars keep changing. Even though we don’t know where we are, there are enough other discoveries to cover to warrant calling a meeting,” she said, bringing up a model of the area above the chip table. “If you keep an eye on these stars in the model, you’ll notice that they vanish completely when the Magellan reaches this point. Some of them are replaced by different stars at different distances with unique chemical makeups.”
“What does that mean?” Marta Aylward asked.
“My theory is that we’re in a sort of hall of windows, similar to the one that we came through to get here. The exception is that the lack of movement among the probes results in invisible lines along the edges. It appears that a number of these portals exist throughout the galaxy in stable condition similar to the first one we discovered underground on Detonus. In fact, I believe that the window to Detonus is located right here on the model not more than a few hours away from our current position.”
Loris, thrilled and amazed, got up from his seat to look closer at the model around the center of the table. He nearly had his face in the projection.
“This is where the probes came from that the Detonans took as a sign to end their experiments. One flew from here through this window all the way to Earth. But where exactly did it originate? There’s nothing around,” he noted.
“Not so,” Lala said. “You may remember that we noticed an inexplicable gravitational constant as soon as we entered this area. Between the force exerted on the Magellan and the Incubator, we can determine that the source of the pull is this exact spot on the model. While it looks like nothing is there, my theory is that if we ceased to counteract the gravitation force, we could move into orbit.”
“Orbit? You think there’s a planet there that we can’t see?” Kelly Reid asked incredulously. The derisive look he got from Riki Lala made Loris glad he hadn’t voiced his same thought.
“We are in the presence of a dark matter planet,” she said. “About twenty-seven percent of mass in the universe is dark matter, and sixty-eight is dark energy, leaving what we can see and detect at close to five percent. This is physical material that is wholly invisible to the electromagnetic spectrum. Light, x-rays, infrared, and radio waves have no effect. My working theory is that there is a planet of solid matter nearby that we are looking directly through.”
Gasps and low comments echoed around the room. Panic was shocked. Trynton Quade, again on the wall monitor, shook his head in disbelief. Loris didn’t know what to think. Something out of the wildest academic papers was now staring them in the face.
“So the probes came from this planet that we can’t see or detect except for its gravitational force,” Loris surmised. It was a simple observation now, but it opened the door to countless more questions. His mouth could only ask one at a time, and picking one out was like grabbing one specific hair on his head. “If we can’t see this planet, how come we can see the probes?”
Riki Lala hung her head to the side as if that were a better position to access information from her mind.
“The more you think about it, the more you realize what poor tools eyes are for observing phenomena in the universe. When looking at these probes, you’ll remember that it takes a short while for the writing to become visible, but even the cubes themselves always appear fuzzy, out of focus, or inherently out of place amongst everything we know in our observable surroundings.
“The chemical composition of the probes was beyond our ability to discern with the equipment we have on the station, but this compound appears to straddle the edge between the visible light spectrum and what we can call for simplicity’s sake the dark matter spectrum.”
She folded her hands on her lap as a silent moment commenced. If what she was saying was correct, it introduced a high degree of uncertainty to their new surroundings. They had no idea what was around them.
“I’ve got a stupid question,” K
elly Reid said.
“That’s in line with my expectations.”
“If the station runs into the dark matter planet, does it crash?”
“Yes,” Lala said. “At the atomic level, all of us are so porous that it would seem you could pass something through without nearly any resistance. We don’t know the true density of what we’re dealing with, but just because it doesn’t reflect light, doesn’t mean there isn’t much of it or it isn’t solid or it isn’t hard. Any other questions, stupid or otherwise?”
Loris looked around the table as the Chiefs perused their notes. It wasn’t long until Marta Aylward spoke up.
“I would not consider this a stupid question. It’s all well and good that there’s likely to be a planet nearby that we can’t see, but what are we supposed to do now? We don’t know where we are. We’re floating around with over eleven thousand of us up here, which can’t last forever. Between the jellyfish, the purple plastic people, and the slimy zombies, pretty much anything could wipe us out.”
Suddenly, Loris found that all eyes were on him. If they were looking for a plan about how to make everyone safe or finish off the Detonans like he wanted, that was going to take time to put together. He’d finally figured out how to respond when Kelly Reid opened his mouth to fill the void first.
“Stupid question number two. We’ve got a secret back door to the center of Detonus. Why don’t we toss a bomb through it and blow the planet up? Seems to be the thing to do, you know?”
“That’s actually not a bad idea,” Loris couldn’t help but saying. While that probably wouldn’t take care of the Detonan fleet, that would certainly stunt their rebuilding efforts and provide a satisfying sense of payback.
“I’m not an expert when it comes to designing and creating bombs or any kind of demolition,” Lala said. “It’s possible someone on my team could, but we don’t have those kinds of radioactive isotopes lying around. Even if we did, it would take a lot of testing to make sure they would work at all, and creating the force required to destroy a planet is not exactly something we have a lot of data on. And before you can ask, I don’t believe we could expel the station’s reactor through that window and have it produce the desired effect.”