Instead she slumped in her chair, arms flopping weakly to drape over the armrests. Her instruments would have been able to keep a lock on the portal long after it had passed from visual sight. But now….
“Must be a distance limit on the signal to keep it open. Dammit.”
Caleb had stood to pace behind the cockpit. In the wake of their discovery of the alien armada she had quickly deduced he did his best thinking while roving. Had it been only weeks ago? It felt like a lifetime had transpired since they had uncovered the terrifying secret at the heart of Metis.
“Can we use the TLF as a guidance mechanism? A sort of beacon?”
“So long as we don’t lose track of which way is forward and which is back. The key is going to be…” she swiveled to the dash, magnified one of the HUD screens and began inputting commands “…I’m setting the navigation system to record our relative movements. It will create a mapping of our path, in essence. If all else fails we can retrace our steps.”
“Will it work?”
“It’ll work.” Instructions completed, she sank back to stare out into the yawning abyss once more.
It was a bleak panorama. Forbidding. Oppressive. She yearned for stars to light the way, to shepherd and inspire her. But there were none.
In lieu of stars she reached behind her, somehow knowing his hand would soon be in hers, warm and comforting. Solid. Real.
On finding what she sought, she sucked in a deep breath and continued on.
They had been flying for what felt like hours when the first blips emerged on the long-range scanner.
Bored to tears and craving reassurance life remained possible in this desolate wasteland, she was curled up in Caleb’s lap when the alert sounded. In her chair in his lap, on account of it being larger and more comfy and all.
She leapt up and magnified the USAR data while motioning him out of the chair impatiently.
“What do we have?”
“Looks like—” More blips materialized on the scanner. Then more…and it occurred to her she didn’t technically have a plan for this particular scenario. “We found them.”
She yanked the ship sixty degrees starboard and pushed the impulse engine to its limit. The inertial dampeners prevented them from being thrown to the floor, but she engaged the safety harness in her chair, as did he.
“Let’s see if…” what was now a veritable sea of increasingly larger red dots shifted on the screen “…hell. They can track us. Worse, they are tracking us.”
“Their dimension, their rules. Can you outrun them?”
She checked the numbers beneath the display tracking the vessels to see how rapidly they were approaching. “No.”
“Can you beat them back to the portal?”
She swerved one more time to confirm and watched in dismay as they tracked her course yet again. “Not a chance. They’ll be on us in minutes.”
“What can I do to help?”
She magnified the longest-range scans of the region. She wanted to FTL. At superluminal speeds she’d outrun them, or at a minimum they wouldn’t—surely couldn’t—be able to track her. But she had no sense of how large or small this space may be or what might even happen if she initiated a warp bubble.
“Alex?”
“You can shut up and let me think.”
“Right.”
The tightness in his voice jarred her. She softened her own tone. “Sorry. Just…hang on.”
In the corner of her eye she noted the muscles in his jaw twitching. “Okay.”
The last time she had been in a firefight she had been shooting at him. The irony would have been amusing if not—
—the first of the blips came in range of the visual scanner. It was one of the insectile tentacled vessels from the alien armada.
“We’re being chased by an army of squid. And goddamn are they fast squid.”
Her gaze raced across every display, every sensor, every reading…but perceiving no answers, it fell to the oblivion outside the viewport. They couldn’t run; the ships were almost upon them. They certainly couldn’t fend off what now constituted a solid one hundred pursuers.
She thought Caleb might have said her name, but it was background radiation accompanying the hum in her ears and the symphony in her head—a song of quantum mechanics and trajectory calculations and astroscience physics and where to go, where to go, where to….
With a long sweep of her hand the entire HUD vanished. At the end of the gesture her wrist flicked and the lights in the cabin shut off. The inside of the ship was now as featureless as the landscape outside it.
She engaged the autopilot, unfastened her harness, stood and stepped up to the viewport. Her eyes closed.
Moya milaya, do not be afraid of the dark, for there is always light within it struggling to shine through. Be fearless, and you will see it.
She reopened her eyes, and the world outside was no longer cast in charred ebony. More of a dull charcoal now really, except…there. An absence within the emptiness. Hollow. An echo of the space around it.
She fell back in the chair, re-latching the harness with one hand while disengaging the autopilot with the other and pulling the ship up in a long arc before veering another twelve degrees starboard. Once the harness was engaged she reactivated the HUD and the lights.
“What do you see?”
Anyone other than him would have quizzed her when she shut everything off, or questioned her sanity. But he had recognized she needed the silence and held his inquiry until now.
“Somewhere darker than black.”
A few adjustments and she coaxed another two percent out of the impulse engine, but their pursuers were still gaining on them. It was going to be close.
What was going to be close? She was flying headlong into another black hole, and she couldn’t fathom what waited inside it.
It hardly mattered now. She had no other option.
The lead row of vessels fired, scarlet-hued lasers bursting out from flaming crimson cores. The writhing arms of the attacking ships ignited, lengthening to amplify the beams and direct them to their target.
In the instant before the beams impacted she flung the Siyane into a full spin, praying the rapid revolutions might cause the beams to lose tracking or simply cause them to miss.
Her stomach joined the Siyane in its spins as the inertial dampeners failed miserably to compensate for the speed of the revolutions. In the cabin ‘up’ and ‘down’ lost meaning.
“Jesus, Alex….”
A growl escaped through gritted teeth. “Just…hang…on….”
It took every iota of her concentration to keep the nose of the ship pointed toward what was a perfect eclipse of infinite blackness. The walls blurred away, along with everything else in her peripheral vision. She kept her focus directly ahead on the void within the void, for if her attention drifted a millimeter off-center she would be lost.
The ship shuddered in her grasp as a laser beam grazed off the lower hull. She ignored it to stay locked on the chasm racing toward her; yet as it consumed the viewport terror bubbled up into her throat. Dad, I don’t think—
—they breached the edge and plunged in—
—and were inexplicably careening through an atmosphere. Shadow became brilliant sulfur as light flared to life around them.
Utterly unprepared for light, of all things, she was temporarily blinded. She fought to pull out of the roll she had created while blinking furiously and begging her ocular implant to give her something before the atmospheric forces tore her beloved ship to pieces and them with it. “I can’t see.”
“I can, in infrared. Let me help you.”
Then he was beside her. One of his arms wound tightly around the armrest; the other curled over hers on the controls. She willed her grip relaxed and let her hand respond to his guiding touch.
It took a few seconds, but the spinning diminished to wild gyrations, then to mere turbulence. Down and up returned to their proper positions, and the bright halos overw
helming her vision began to fade.
“I…I’m okay. Mostly. Enough.”
He collapsed to the floor next to her chair. “Good job, baby.”
His voice sounded terribly weak, trembling from the effort of speaking. She didn’t understand how he had managed to get to her side, much less remain there without a harness, much less stay focused ahead and be her eyes. She wanted to wrap her arms around him and cradle him against her, but she still needed both hands.
The atmosphere did show signs of thinning, though. With a deep, steadying breath she transitioned to the pulse detonation engine for planetary flight and allowed her fingers to sink into his hair.
A moment later the haze coating the sky evaporated away.
“When you can, you’re going to want to look up….”
He steadied himself by resting one palm on her thigh and the other on the armrest, and rose to his knees. “I’ll be damned.”
“Possibly. But not today, I think.”
They flew high above savanna grassland. The sky was the deep cornflower blue of a sunny late afternoon on Earth…exactly the color of a sunny late afternoon on Earth.
Only there was no sun. Whatever was lighting this planet, it wasn’t a star.
2
GAIAE
INDEPENDENT COLONY
* * *
BREATHE OR DIE.
The acrid odor in the air burnt Seraphina’s nostrils with every breath, searing away filaments and delicate skin on its way to her lungs. She didn’t want to take another breath, dreading the pain it would bring. But it was that or die.
As if there was any choice other than death anymore.
She crawled through the singed remains of a grassy meadow in the darkness and tried not to think about how the odor had shifted over the course of the last hours, becoming less the scent of scorched flora and fauna and more the aroma of cooked, spoiling flesh. As soon as the thought crept into her mind she gagged, dry heaves welling up from her stomach and stalling her progress through the meadow. Her diaphragm spasmed, but there hadn’t been anything in her stomach to expunge for two days.
She blinked away hazy tears and tried to focus on the building in the distance. She needed water. The Retreat Center would have water.
The attack had been relentless and unforgiving. Her sheer stupidity had been the only thing that saved her from dying in the first hour; she had been in such a blind panic when she ran screaming that she ended up lost deep in the forest jungle beyond the pond. Exhausted, her skin scraped and welts bubbling up from brushes against numerous poisonous plants as she fled, she had finally collapsed to the ground—only to gape in horror as billowing mushrooms of flame erupted from the direction of the town center and the spaceport beyond.
Enormous void ships soared across the sky, plasma beams the color of arterial blood eighty meters in diameter burning the landscape in savage bursts.
Her parents had ensured she received a quality education, and she earned decent marks before leaving her family and school behind for Gaiae. She didn’t believe ships of such size and breadth should be able to hover within the atmosphere of a planet. Yet evidently she was incorrect.
Perhaps she had misunderstood the lessons. Or perhaps these ships did not obey the laws of the universe. They plainly did not obey any laws of nature.
Hundreds of the writhing tentacled creatures—she couldn’t convince herself to think of them as ‘ships,’ so malevolent was their appearance—prowled the landscape, eager to direct a blood-gorged eye of death on any living creature they found. She had survived these last days solely because the dense tangle of vines and trees of the forest proved a challenge for them. Even with their slithery form they were too large to fit through the small gaps in the weald.
But then one of the void ships had casually turned its attention to her forest, and the encroaching flames drove her steadily back toward town.
And now she had to find water. Her formerly supple, carefully-moisturized skin cracked and bled. The effect of a lack of internal hydration was magnified by the fact that the air had long since been sucked dry of every drop of humidity. Simply existing in the world drained moisture from her skin and her soul.
The water in the small ponds and streams of the region, while not technically poisonous, was also not especially healthy for humans. She’d been told consuming it was akin to drinking ocean salt water. Still, she’d come dangerously close to doing it anyway when her tongue swelled and her throat became sandpaper scraping against every breath. She was rather proud of herself for resisting. Who knew she possessed such willpower?
She wished there was someone for her to brag smugly to…but everyone was dead. On a world once overflowing with life, there was only death.
She had broken down and messaged her parents on New Orient within hours of the attack to cry for help, but of course no communications were available. Why would there be? Blocking communications must be a triviality to these beasts.
So the galaxy could not hear her cries. She didn’t know if it would care if it did hear them, but it hardly mattered. She had also long since given up on speculating what sin they had committed to deserve such punishment. She didn’t even care anymore.
Her hands clawed at the dirt, and she was again crawling toward the Retreat Center. She’d tried the spaceport first, harbored the tiniest spark of hope she might locate a working shuttle…but the spaceport was gone, replaced by a smoldering crater.
A charred body lay to her left; she scurried past it. It may have been Eliza, or Ariel, she wasn’t sure. Another body among hundreds of others. Thousands, if she crawled far enough.
If she could just get her hands on a little water, she…well, she had no idea what she might do then. It didn’t matter. She would live another minute. It surprised her to realize how much she wanted that.
The shadow of the building drew her in with the promise of safety. Nearly there. The glow of burning buildings and burning trees and burning air lit the night to a terra cotta dusk. Most of the buildings on Gaiae were constructed from indigenous timber; they made for excellent kindling.
Out of the glow one of the tentacled creatures materialized in the distance. It patrolled the street, its spindly arms twisting about as though they sensed where life still dwelled. She clung to the façade and shimmied toward the door. The creature veered the other way, and she slipped in.
The air was no less dry inside, the environmental controls having shut off long ago when the power station exploded. Yet for the first time in endless days she was inside, and it felt glorious.
She reminded herself to stay low and below the windows as she hurried toward the kitchen area. The refrigeration system, much like the temperature and humidity controls, had ceased functioning days earlier. She didn’t care.
All thoughts of caution fled as she pulled open the formerly refrigerated drawer and yanked out several packets of water. They spilled across the floor—she scrambled after them, frantic they might vanish. She halted the closest one’s escape and greedily tilted it up.
Bliss more wondrous than even the most fantastic orgasm flooded through her as the tepid water coursed down her throat. She laughed until she choked, coughed half of it up, caught her breath and grabbed another packet.
She was giggling hysterically, water streaming over her chin and down her neck, when the beam from the tentacled ship sliced through her. She was dead before her brain had put aside the euphoria to recognize it had happened.
3
SPACE, NORTH-CENTRAL QUADRANT
DESNAN STELLAR SYSTEM (BORDER OF SENECAN FEDERATION SPACE)
* * *
WERE IT ANY OTHER WORLD, someone might have noticed when Gaiae disappeared from the grid. But the denizens of the Milky Way were preoccupied with their own problems—most notably an escalating war amongst themselves—and simply couldn’t be bothered with the well-being of a tiny planet in the middle of nowhere inhabited by pseudo-religious zealots.
Track. Drop. Invert. Lock. Fire.
“Down.”
Senecan Federation Commander Morgan Lekkas, for instance, was preoccupied with the eight—well seven now—missiles which had been launched from what was, by all appearances, a solitary Alliance ship protecting the planet of Desna.
Eight missiles normally would not have been much of a problem for her fighter squadron, but her team now constituted a ‘squadron’ only in the official military records. Already down two ships after the Arcadia mission, Commodore Pachis had taken Flight 2 from her to bolster the 1st squadron for the primary offensive on the planet.
Most of the formations comprising the 3rd Wing of the Senecan Federation Southern Fleet had suffered heavy losses in the earlier battle less than a parsec from here. Still, Desna was not believed to be strongly defended either in space or on the ground, so officials far above her rank decided the depleted 3rd Wing possessed the necessary firepower to complete the operation on its own.
With a population of less than fifty thousand, the colony constituted little more than an outpost as the closest Alliance-controlled world to Federation space. Desna possessed a single orbital array and no ground forces. Recent intel acquired on Alliance defense protocols now enabled their electronic warfare vessels to scramble an array’s targeting mechanism, rendering it ineffective while their frigates destroyed the weaponry.
They should have been able to walk in and take it without suffering so much as a scratch.
But it turned out the space above Desna was not entirely undefended. A single stealthed ship using the shadow of Desna’s moon for additional camouflage had launched four missiles before they knew it was there. It had then accelerated fully behind the moon and launched four additional missiles while peeking out the other side.
If she could get to this ship she could take it out, even hampered by a mere five fighters at her side. But before she could do so they needed to take out the missiles which sped on trajectories leading to each of the Senecan frigates, by now spread over megameters as they worked to neutralize the array weapons.
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