Terminus

by Tristan Palmgren

  She kept watching the Earth. The Baltic sparkled sunlight. Strips of clouds buffeted the shore. The horizon developed a curve. There were no stars. The horizons and the sky were empty except for the sun. Sunlight drowned out the stars, leaving most of the monitors sheet black.

  If anything was headed their way, though, Meloku would never see it in time. Not through just the cameras. She needed sensors, too. The shuttle’s NAI still would not answer her calls for information.

  Osia had little trouble speaking against the acceleration. “NAI says we’ll rendezvous with Ways and Means in eight hours.” She did not bother to keep the tightness out of her voice. Eight hours, left exposed. They would be easier targets here than on the ground. The ground gave them cover. In a shuttle, their heat emissions shone clear as a star.

  “Can you give me NAI access?” Meloku transmitted. It was beyond irksome that she still didn’t have it. “I am an active agent.”

  “I doubt any of us are in good standing,” Osia said.

  “The shuttle NAI will speak to you,” Meloku pointed out.

  After Osia had gone into her own little exile, the rest of the crew had wondered if Ways and Means had had a special relationship with her. It had only listened to her. It certainly trusted her more than it did Meloku, though Meloku had spent the past thirty years working for it.

  Maybe it just came from the fact that Osia was a crewmember with a demiorganic body. The amalgamates had always treated crew differently than human agents.

  Abruptly, a torrent of a datastream poured into Meloku – sensor images, trajectories, flight paths. Osia had convinced the NAI to open up. It was as much punishment as gift. Too much for her to sort through, let alone comprehend. Neural impulses crossfired. Nausea bubbled up. It was like drowning in an electrified pool.

  It was hard to escape the impression that Osia was proving some kind of point.

  With work, Meloku sorted the datastream into manageable parcels. The shuttle was counting down to another burst of harder acceleration in one hundred and twenty seconds. Enough time to brace for it, and to warm Fiametta.

  The shuttle curled backward. Its dorsal hull faced the Earth. Meloku could not stop thinking of a whale, diving belly-up. The Earth hid Ways and Means. The shuttle would have to complete an arcing half-orbit before it crossed their horizon.

  The shuttle’s sensors showed no visible weapons launches. No heat signatures from missiles. No spikes in electromagnetic activity. The shuttle could hardly see through its own engine exhaust. A brilliant, staticky yellow-white fuzz covered half the cameras. It shone brighter than the sun.

  Meloku fought the gravities to swallow. She was just about to open her mouth, warn Fiametta about the impending acceleration, when a sensor alarm stopped her.

  Space beyond the Earth’s horizon was hot. About as hot as interplanetary vacuum could get, in fact. The loose particles of dust and solar ejecta that comprised the interplanetary medium were heating, boiling. They bounced about, hot and energized.

  It was nothing visible to the naked eye. The shuttle’s sensors, though, had no issues. The disturbance was ahead of them, just over the horizon. Something was pouring energy into the vacuum.

  Ways and Means lay in that direction, but it wasn’t close enough to have caused it. It was millions of kilometers away yet. This was near, closer to the Earth than its moon. So far as the shuttle’s sensors could tell, the disturbance had no source. Some of the energized particles licked the atmosphere.

  Whatever this was, it was happening on a massive scale. The total volume of the disturbed interplanetary medium was a thousand times the size of the Earth. And that was just what the shuttle could see. No wonder Osia had been reluctant to give her access to the NAI. She had been hiding this. Meloku asked, “What the fuck is going on?”

  “I don’t know.” Osia was more talkative than usual. She was agitated. Afraid. “It’s only showing up on the shuttle’s sensors. The satellites aren’t seeing it at all.”

  Meloku contacted the nearest satellite. Easier said than accomplished with the shuttle’s engines pumping out this much interference. After the third attempt, she got an answer. As far as the satellites were concerned, nothing unusual was happening.

  That was a lie. The satellites could not have missed this, not even with the bulk of the sensors and telescopes aimed at the Earth rather than its sky. A deep, numbing chill spread down Meloku’s back.

  She did not have time to repeat her question.

  A hard punch to her sternum drove her back into her seat. The breath drove from her chest. There was no warning.

  All along the ventral hull, the shuttle’s thrusters snapped on. The shuttle’s main engines followed. They hadn’t been scheduled for harder acceleration for another forty seconds. It caught Meloku mid-breath. The g-forces squeezed her ribs, her lungs. She choked.

  The shock felt so much like a deliberate blow that her demiorganics triggered their injury response functions, readied to release reserves of oxygen. This was a harder acceleration than any she’d fought so far.

  Somewhere behind all of this, the satellites were shrieking.

  Ways and Means had seeded its satellites to monitor the surface and facilitate communications, but not to think on their own. They could not take action on their own. Yet there were certain events for which Ways and Means did not want to wait, even long enough to account for seconds of light speed delay, to trigger an alarm. One of those events was happening right now. The alarm had overridden Ways and Means’ communications blackout.

  Even as the sole major power on this plane, Ways and Means remained afraid of a handful of things. The first was the creature that had exiled it here. The second was the thought of an extraplanar power finding this plane, invading, and attacking Ways and Means while it was trapped and vulnerable.

  The satellites’ sensor feeds shunted into Meloku’s visual cortex. On the other side of the world, a transplanar gateway split space open. It was vast, shining, sun-bright.

  It burned two thousand kilometers high over the eastern Americas and the Atlantic. It was a broadly linear rent in space, forcing wider every second. The satellites had sounded the alarm when it was only a meter long. By the time the images found their way into Meloku’s demiorganics, it was already a hundred times the size of their shuttle. Still growing. Even if the engines had not robbed Meloku of breath, she would not have been able to take one.

  The planar tear widened, became lenticular. Hard radiation poured out of it, boiling away into space. To the naked eye, it would have appeared blinding white. The spectrum heavily slanted to the ultraviolet and x-ray.

  It took an enormous amount of energy to open a planar tear like this. So much energy, in fact, that only a few forces in the old Unity would have been capable of it. Most of the Unity’s gateways had been tiny, micrometer-width communication gateways. Even person-sized trade gateways had been expensive. Planarships, though, were a step beyond. Much of the antimatter engine capacity of their planarships were devoted just to opening planar tears.

  An enormous object appeared at the center of the gateway, breaching the boundaries between universes. Impossible to make out any details through the gateway’s boiling radiation, other than that it was big. It took up almost the whole width of the gateway.

  The engines landed a punch in Meloku’s stomach. This time, it didn’t have any more air to expel. Her vision fringed red, into gray, and then black. Her demiorganics released their oxygen reserves.

  The gateway had opened beneath their western horizon. The shuttle’s NAI rapidly configured a new course. It dove the shuttle down, and eastward – hard and away from the intruder. The shuttle aimed to keep away from whatever was coming through. If whatever was emerging wanted to kill them, it had many means. Planarships like Ways and Means had, among other weapons, beams that could vaporize the shuttle at many times the intruder’s current range. Any ship so powerful as to open a gateway would be at least as well armed.
The shuttle had no defenses, no beam-defecting mirror-fields like Ways and Means.

  Only the Earth’s interceding bulk shielded the shuttle. If it rose above the skyline, the new arrival could snuff them out with less effort than a thought.

  It would not even need to get line of sight. In a flurry of alarms, the satellites noted several new objects emerging from the intruder. None were as large as the shuttle. The largest was the size of a short person.

  Combat drones. Missiles. Any and all of the above, plus more Meloku couldn’t think of in the terror of the moment.

  She almost missed the satellites’ other data. The intruder broadcast a Unity-standard identification transponder.

  It identified itself as Ways and Means.

  Her thoughts raced. Somewhere, deep in the back of her head, she felt a twinge of satisfaction. It was a small thing, but it was there. At least now, even this close to her end, she might find an answer or two.

  The energy expenditure of transplanar gateways meant that the amalgamates used them only when necessary, to travel from plane to plane. They could also jump from point to point in the same universe. That did not happen often. Meloku had never seen it. Not only did it burn energy, it required tremendously complex calculations. Ways and Means could do it, though. Her first thought was that this had happened: Ways and Means had gated from millions of kilometers away to the other side of the Earth.

  But that wasn’t it. The shape coming through was the wrong shape, the wrong design.

  The satellites could sense very little through the blistering radiation, but the intruder occluded the planar rift, became visible in silhouette. It was only three-quarters the length of Ways and Means.

  Ways and Means’ body comprised ten kilometer-long, rectangular, flat hull segments, arranged in a grid. The intruder coming through had only three hull segments, lined up in a row. They were the same size and shape as Ways and Means’. They could have come from the same shipyards and factories.

  The intruder was bracketed on two sides by large, half-ovoid shapes. It was like an egg had been split bilaterally, and each half mounted on the intruder’s sides. They weren’t like anything Meloku had seen on a planarship before.

  In fact, she was sure that, in spite of the hull segments, no shipyard in the Unity had produced this vessel. She knew all of the amalgamates’ planarships. Even the ones she hadn’t seen herself, she’d studied. She was confident that there had been no secret planarships, either. The amalgamates would not have trusted anyone or anything but themselves with power like a planarship.

  The rift closed rapidly behind the intruder. The radiation slimmed to nothing. The satellites’ sensors re-calibrated, revealed color. The half-ovoid segments were silver, mirror-polished. The sunlight shone bright off them.

  It didn’t seem to matter that satellite communication had been shut down; Osia was trying desperately to contact anyone. The shuttle NAI reported that Osia was spiking signals in two directions: at the intruder, and at the still more distant Ways and Means. But neither were over the shuttle’s horizon. She couldn’t reach them directly. The satellites refused to acknowledge that they had received Osia’s signals. All they sent back was their sensor data.

  As Meloku watched, the surface of the Earth-facing ovoid rippled. Shadows clouded the mirror.

  A lance of energy pierced the Earth’s sky.

  The shuttle’s sensors could not perceive the beam in vacuum, but the beam was easy enough to trace in atmosphere. It ignited the air it touched. It burned over the Atlantic Ocean. Something on the surface flared, turned to a fireball.

  A second explosion illuminated the northern continent, far above its cauldron of lakes. Then a third, on the isthmus that linked the north and south continents.

  Meloku knew those spots. She had seen them all the time on her maps. They all hosted Ways and Means’ backup communications posts, like Xati’s. Another lightning-bright spark shone on the northern continent’s west coast. Then the very farthest tip of the southern.

  The silver surface, Meloku realized, was a defensive field. The surface was perfectly reflective to incoming fire, and to sensors. It hid the planarship’s true capabilities. The mirrored ovoids were weapons platforms. Advanced, rigorously designed, and shielded. The satellites’ sensors had not even known the cannon were there until they opened fire.

  Another dazzling light split the sky, in the vacuum this time, not far from the intruder. More followed. All the explosions were in space. Meloku had no idea what the intruder was firing upon. Hidden objects, maybe. The sensors had not recorded anything there.

  The intruder left Ways and Means’ communications satellites intact. It did not seem to notice, or care, that Meloku and Osia were using those satellites to observe it.

  Spears of white-hot gas loosed from the intruder’s underside, and from one of the ovoids. It was powering its engines. The shuttle’s NAI frantically plotted the intruder’s possible flight paths. On a map at the front of the cabin, it arced lines across a globe, writing and rewriting them as new data arrived. Trajectories pulsed in and out of existence in a flicker of half-seconds. The paths bent like spider’s legs, folding around each other on the other side of the globe.

  Osia was still trying to contact the intruder. She cycled through what must have been a dozen tricks to override the communications block. Since the satellites had shown her the intruder’s transponder, the one that identified it as Ways and Means, she tried coding her message into the shuttle’s own transponder. The satellites were broadcasting their sensor data in all directions. If the intruder was paying attention, it should have seen that. Nothing. If any of Osia’s attempts to contact the intruder had reached it, it gave no sign.

  The intruder’s thrusters fired again. The possibilities began to narrow, or coalesce. Meloku did not need to keep watching to know what the final winnowing would reveal.

  It had aimed itself at the shuttle.

  In the NAI’s final estimation, the intruder’s course looped tightly around the Earth, and crossed the shuttle’s trajectory nearly exactly.

  The intruder had made no attempt to communicate. But it had never stopped broadcasting its transponder signal. It wanted them to know what it was, or what it claimed to be.

  Its engines flared. Its exhaust plumed, nearly as bright as the gateway had been. The satellites’ sensors were blinded, briefly. The combat drones it had entered with also arced about, raced toward the shuttle.

  Another sequence of heat sources chained along the intruder’s port ovoid weapons platform. Combat drones, launching. She did not need to check the calculated trajectories of those, either. The shuttle didn’t give her the chance. The g-forces amplified, adding more stones to those weighing down her chest. She forced her eyelids shut. Tears squeezed out of them, splashed hard against the cushions.

  The intruder changed its course to match the shuttle’s. It could outpace them. It accelerated harder than its crew, if it had one, could have survived.

  She lost track of time. Her demiorganics insisted that ten minutes had passed. She’d hardly felt it. Consciousness was difficult to pin down. Difficult enough to keep breathing during acceleration. Her demiorganics could only do so much.

  The intruder came at them just as hard. More and more of the Earth peeled back before it. White flashes dotted the Atlantic, striking islands. Then in Iceland, Greenland. Then in western Europe. The intruder fired relentlessly. It obliterated all of Ways and Means’ communications outposts. If its crew on the surface needed to talk to each other, they would be entirely dependent on the satellites.

  The satellites, Meloku guessed, that the intruder could easily take control of, if it hadn’t already.

  It could have done worse. Ways and Means had agents in the cities below, surrounded by innocents. The intruder left them alone.

  It was doing damage enough. Given the size of the explosions, their visibility at altitude, she had a hard time believing no natives had been kill
ed.

  The Indian Ocean slipped away underneath the shuttle, segued into a vast cloud mass that covered the world from Malaysia to the Indonesian islands. Lightning rippled across the clouds. The shuttle had stayed ahead of the intruder, for now. But the intruder was faster, accelerating harder. Its combat drones and missiles were even closer.

  She took a risk, tilted her head just enough to look to Fiametta. Of course, Fiametta had fainted. No one without demiorganics could have remained conscious. Her eyelids had been levered open by gravity, but her eyes were vacant.

  Fiametta would be lucky to get through this without lasting injury. So, Meloku realized, would she herself. A wave of claustrophobia subsumed her. She’d never felt it before, but now the webbing seemed too close, too cloying. It felt sticky, like actual spider webbing. That had to be a hallucination, a symptom of poor blood oxygenation. Knowing that didn’t make it any less real.

  She could not stand the thought of dying without knowing what was happening, without being able to control anything. The shuttle’s NAI would not listen to her. It would not even release her straps if she asked.

  Osia must have felt the same. She gave up her attempts to contact the intruder. She transmitted, “I’m taking control of the shuttle.”

  There was not much Osia could do that the shuttle’s NAI could not calculate better. But Osia could take risks that it wouldn’t. By lacing her systems with its, she could control it as easily as she could her body.

  The timbre of the engines changed. Another thunderous clap from the dorsal thrusters knocked Meloku into her harness. The shuttle spun. For a moment, she could breathe. Before she had time to do more than gasp, the ventral thrusters fired, arresting the shuttle’s roll.

  A frisson of atmosphere outlined Earth’s curve. Before long, most of the forward cameras faced the Earth. Osia had dipped the shuttle’s nose to face below the horizon.

  Meloku traced her thoughts. Speed alone would not help them outrun the intruder. They needed to cut corners, stay low, and keep as much of the Earth between them and the intruder as possible. Osia intended to dive at as shallow an angle as she could. She was going to skim the atmosphere.