There wasn’t time for Marcus to realise that he was dead – or dying. There was no longer any pain. Just one thought. A single, pure idea. He raised his left arm above his head. The energy weapon was flaming wildly and producing blue green sparks of escaping plasma energy. Marcus was blind. Again, he didn’t know or care. He was working on autopilot now. The automatic weapons behind him opened fire yet again, tearing chunks of flesh from his left arm and smashing his elbow. But it was too late.
The energy weapon dropped into the disposal chute. Marcus Connah’s left hand remained glued to the open hatch, stuck there by the pulped mess of his own shredded flesh and blood. His right eye was nowhere to be found. Little remained of it besides a wet mess on the wall some eight feet away. His left eye stared sightlessly at the floor. The left corner of his mouth might have been turned slightly upwards, but then the energy gun exploded.
2195AD - SS Glasgow.
Eight hundred now miles separated the USS Neil Armstrong from the EWS Devastation. The area between the two ships was an apocalyptic maelstrom of fire, debris and destruction. One thousand miles ahead of Armstrong, Glasgow accelerated towards the Joan Gallsin wormhole.
“We’re going to make it,” Vazquez said weakly.
Apple turned so quickly that he almost fell out of the chair. He locked eyes with his lover just as her lopsided smile was fading, her eyes rolling upwards and only the whites showing. Brooks held her tightly. He looked like he was crying, or in severe pain.
“We’re going to make it,” Apple echoed. He’d turned back to his console. The ship was veering to the left on its own. Flying straight was taking all of his attention. Even the tiny moment he’d taken to glance back at his partner had thrown the little freighter miles off course. But finding the entry point for the wormhole wasn’t a problem. It was illuminated with a faint, blue glow. It was something Apple had never seen before and didn’t understand. Julian Barrett might have been able to explain the phenomenon, which was a result of highly charged particles getting caught up in the weak magnetic field generated by the wormhole aperture. But Julian wasn’t capable of doing very much. He was in a corner, sitting like a scolded child. His head was buried in his arms and his knees were pulled up and touching his hair. He was seated in a puddle of his own urine, but he didn’t seem to know or care. He’d stopped screaming when Michelle Vazquez had screamed her final, guttural cry as the hot knife had burned her skin.
Glasgow’s rearward sensors had never worked very well. Devastation’s assault had completely destroyed the sensor emitters, circuit boards and power conduits. So Vinn Apple did not see the sudden and brilliant flare of energy that appeared at the rear of the hulking Enrilean warship and outshone the barrage of nuclear detonations made by the USS Neil Armstrong.
Marcus Connah would never know how much damage he’d caused. The Devastation’s number four oxygen fuel mixer exploded. White hot jets of fire surged upwards, breaking through the flimsy one way disposal chute seals. Connah’s body was vaporised instantly. Everything and everyone within the room was instantly and utterly destroyed. Soldiers, living and dead, were turned to dust without a moment of surprise. Glass fragments disappeared into minute black specs that joined the bedlam. The entire decontamination chamber was flooded with heat and fire, but only for a moment. The flimsy partitions inside the room melted and burned. The heavier, shielded wall between the decontamination room and the fuel storage chamber began to melt. In the next third of a second – as flame and debris flooded the derelict construction workers' showers and changing rooms. a far greater calamity was happening further down into the EWS Devastation.
The discarded Enrilean type 87 energy weapon had exploded thirty metres down the disposal chute. In another twenty metres the weapon would have been thrown out of the ship and into space. Instead, it ignited explosive cooling fluids that detonated with enough force to rip through three decks and punch a hole right out of the hull. Fire and debris jetted into the vacuum of space.
2195AD - USS Neil Armstrong.
“Sir, something’s happened to the Devastation,” Venus spoke, “They’re… veering off.”
Strange had taken over Lieutenant Harris’ console. He hadn’t noticed the explosion at the rear end of the massive warship. His entire focus was on maintaining the wall of fire between Armstrong and the deadly alien ship. He looked at the flickering display partially hidden beneath his shaking, fractured wrist.
“She’s right, Liam. Something’s happened to their engine section.”
“Sensop?”
O’Rourke’s words were unanswered. Sensor Operations Chief Deepblue was dead. He was still in his chair. His hands were still on the controls in front of him. His eyes were rolled up in his head. Only the whites were visible. His mouth was open in a contorted, soundless yell of anguish.
“Jesus Christ,” O’Rourke whispered.
Cutter was manning the auxiliary tactical station – firing heavy railgun sabots into the EWS Devastation’s heavier forward hull and launching SMART missiles that twirled and twisted in space before exploding harmlessly against the big ship’s armour. A faceless, unrecognised junior officer took over as Cutter moved into the second Sensor Operations chair. Deepblue’s left hand fell away from the controls before Cutter reached it, but his right hand was locked onto the short range sensor resolution adjuster.
“Sensor operations, aye,” Cutter bleated.
He wrenched Deepblue’s hand off the control. Medical personnel were at the dead man’s shoulders now, pulling him out of the chair. Cutter focussed on the three functioning sensor operations displays. As he had always predicted, the two holographic imagers between the third and fourth screens had failed early into the combat.
“They’ve got damage in their main propulsion system,” Cutter reported. He felt a sudden wave of relief so intense that he thought, just for a moment, that he might laugh out loud, “Doesn’t look like anywhere we did them damage, but they’re in trouble.”
“That’s good news. Let’s get out of here while we can. What about Glasgow?”
“Entered the wormhole forty five seconds ago,” Cutter hissed, “At least I think so. Sensors are…”
The ship shuddered violently. Not enough to make the executive officer’s words catch in his throat. Not quite. But there was something terrifyingly recognisable about the vibrations. Something terminal had happened deep inside the ship. O’Rourke knew it too. He caught John Cutter’s eye. There was a flash of understanding.
Cutter knew that he wouldn’t find any readings when he looked at the engineering status display. He was right, of course. All the indicators were zero and red. Armstrong continued to shudder. Cutter knew that he was feeling the EWS Devastation batter the ship with its heavy weapons.
“They’re getting through the nuclear shield,” O’Rourke rasped, “We’ve run out of missiles, exec. We’ve run out of time. She’s losing power. We’ve had it.”
The Captain was quite right. Commander Strange lacked the expertise of his subordinate. He’d taken over the weapons console, waiting for Harris’ eye injury to be tended to. But Harris would never return. She had been blown into space when the corridor she’d been helped along had been destroyed by a barrage of railgun sabots. Strange had done his best, but his nuclear furnace had contained gaps. Even though Marcus Connah’s brave actions had momentarily given Armstrong an advantage, it had been short lived. Powerful thrusters with enough force to take the massive Enrilean warship into and out of a planet’s atmosphere fired just a fraction of their might to realign the damaged vessel. All the while, Devastation had continued to fire blindly at the smaller Earth ship. Until a very small mistake in Christopher Strange’s missile launch timing opened a gap for the Enrilean sensors.
The Enrilean gunners were seasoned veterans of warfare. The moment of advantage was all they needed to target the Earth ship’s vulnerable power unit. In the wink of an eye, energy beams sliced into Armstrong, severing the power system’s conduits and control syste
ms. The ship’s main power disappeared instantly, the hybrid drive system dying and the weapons cutting out all at once. Strange’s nuclear missiles continued to fire. Fast thinking engineers had already routed battery power to the launch and control systems. He sealed the gap left by his mistake, but the Enrileans continued to fire into the maelstrom. Most of the sabots were destroyed in the furnace, but the few that made it through slammed into the Armstrong’s hull as semi molten white hot knives.
“We’re going to make it,” Jessica Venus spoke, “We’re… I mean, we have enough momentum to make it into the wormhole. Don’t we? Linda?”
Linda Jupiter was flying the ship on her own. Bronston’s body was somewhere in the corner of the command room. Nobody was really sure if he was still alive or not. When his console had exploded the blast had thrown him across the room. Medics had been called to the bridge, but nobody had arrived. Thus, Bronston lay there either dead or barely living. The medics weren’t coming. The corridor joining the bridge to the rest of the ship no longer existed.
“We’re almost there,” Jupiter didn’t look at Venus. The secret crush she had on the young, strange wayed ensign was forgotten. There was no time for it. Jupiter was trying her hardest to aim the ship at the wormhole. The energy charged distortion in three dimensional space glowed in front of the ship tantalisingly.
“We’re not going to make it,” Cutter said.
Venus was smiling. The ship was entering the wormhole. They were escaping. The dull blue glow was now a brilliant, glistening blue vortex that surrounded them. Venus turned to Cutter. She couldn’t understand why he was frowning.
“We’re going to make it,” she said.
“We’re not..”
The eight fusion reactors, deprived of their vital cooling systems, exploded almost simultaneously. The entire midsection of the ship was obliterated. Two hundred and six crewmen were vaporised. The rear section of the ship became a brilliant ball of light as the liquid fuel and oxygen stores erupted. Another eighty two people died in that next half second. The USS Neil Armstrong became a ball of fire, energy and strange forces. Large chunks of debris hurtled away from the ship, disappearing through the swirling boundaries of the wormhole and disappearing to places unknown. Smaller pieces of wreckage didn’t escape the nuclear furnace. They flared like sparks within a huge bonfire.
The forward section of the ship continued to move through the wormhole, spinning out of control as the deep, pearlescent blueness began to flicker and fade out. The wormhole was destabilising. Stars both near and far were appeared as the wormhole boundary became translucent. Constellations both familiar and new made themselves known for the briefest of moments as the wormhole moved in and out of three dimensional space, flickering in milliseconds between vantage points thousands of light years apart. The Enrilean arrow appeared for the smallest fraction of a second. The eight stars of Meyg, Slonne, Carkann, Risharr and Marttow. And the bright Apex star, Carkann. In the next millisecond the wormhole vantage point changed once more. The arrow constellation was still visible, but the position of the stars relative to this new point of observation changed the shape. The Apex star was now the tip of a group of three stars known, in the local vicinity, as Orion’s belt. Then, in another instant, all of the stars in Orion were lost in an endless puzzle of faint sparks in the velvet darkness. There was no arrow, no Apex. No Mintaka. No Orion’s belt.
The Joan Gallsin wormhole had been destroyed. Just as the leaders of Haven Colony had shut down the conduit between Earth and their precious new home, this passageway to the Enrilean Empire was too closed forever.
TWENTY SEVEN
2195AD - Jann Linn’s Ship.
Oss Linn had landed the ship. Or she’d tried to. Or whatever was left of Oss Linn had landed the ship, or crashed it. Cass couldn’t tell yet. She’d been damaged along with everything else. The ship was on a planet, somewhere, with an atmosphere of some kind. The air blew through the two metre gash in the hull just beside the buckled and now useless hatch. Through the opening she glimpsed an orange-grey sky.
The ship had not been damaged as badly as the old man called Quinn. His body was broken – held apart by skin and sinew. Quinn’s blood seemed to cover almost the whole right side of the ship’s main compartment. It spilled out the gash in the hull and out onto whatever world lay beyond. His body had stayed in one piece, but only barely. It was folded impossibly and bent into a twisted pile of elbows, knees, fingers and a horrific wide eyed scream of a face.
She’d do something about Quinn later. Or she’d do some more thinking about him later. Looking at him was frightening. The tangled mess of arms and legs reminded her of a giant insect. His face looked like nothing she could imagine. She couldn’t process the data about his staring eyes. It was too… painful for her to begin examining the information. New algorithms she created tried and failed to analyse the eyes. But it wasn’t just the eyes. It was James Quinn’s entire, traumatic expression. All of it together overloaded her emotions. She remembered a time when such episodes would cause her to shut down completely, rebooting minutes or hours afterwards. This time she slowly looked away, not fully realizing the horror of Quinn’s last moments.
Father was dead. Jann Linn. Her maker. He had ceased to live, as his own wife had done months before Cass Linn’s life had begun. Oss Linn was… offline. Father had told her about that before. It was the same as dead, she thought. So Oss was dead. Everyone was dead, or almost everyone.
Matt Silverman was alive, but there was something wrong with him. His eyes opened one moment and closed the next. He made strange moaning sounds as she manipulated his limbs. They all seemed intact. They didn’t make the terrible scrunching sounds that her father’s had. Matt was covered in blood, but she was sure that it all belonged to the man called Quinn. There was something not quite right about the shape of Matt’s head. His left eye seemed to be an inch higher than his right eye. When she checked her memory of his face the eyes were not so badly out of alignment. It was difficult to be sure, as the blood had matted his hair to his face and his skin seemed to have changed colour from a ruddy pink to a pale grey. The area around his left eye was almost pure white.
She stayed with him for a while. One hour, and then another two. He didn’t move very much and she stopped trying to move him. The inside of the ship was cold, but when she tried to remove the coat from her father. It proved very difficult. Her system restarted three times before she pulled the coat free of his stiff body. She covered him with the blood splashed garment carefully.
Another two hours had passed. She tried to feed Matt something from the food containers but he almost choked when she tried. She had to pull some of the substance out of his mouth as he thrashed in distress. It frightened her and she wanted to recoil, but she didn’t want him to die too. She realized that he might be thirsty and fetched two of the water bottles. She wiped them against her father’s coat to clean them. Matt didn’t move or react as she touched him. She resisted the urge to poke him. Instead, she emptied one of the bottles over his face. He screamed out his protest amidst mixed up curses and groans.
When she became aware again she gently tipped a second bottle of water to his lips. He was making more sounds as she did this, but they were moans and mumbles that she couldn’t understand. He felt warmer to her touch. Point two four degrees warmer on his right cheek. Underneath the coat, his temperature had jumped up by three degrees. His heart was beating quickly. Two beats every second, sometimes. Sometimes a little more.
The robot nurse climbed through the tear in the hull. It stood there, confused, and stared at the macabre scene of the tin can robot tending to the severely concussed young man.
“Could I be of some assistance, Cass Linn?” it said.
2195AD - Crantarr.
Sloane had, indeed, thrown up. Megyn Alexander had been right about that. His appetite had resurfaced with a vengeance once the tainted water had left him. Alexander had been right about knowing where he might find something to eat an
d drink too. The little orange car’s boot contained an aged, tattered wicker hamper. Opening the hamper revealed a variety of cheeses, packages meats, sweet and spicy chutney and other condiments. There were several sticks of reasonably fresh looking French bread. Sloane noted several dusty bottles of red wine hidden underneath the bread. He reached for one of the delicious looking sticks of bread. He stopped, an inch short of touching it. His eyes locked onto Megyn’s.
“It’s alright,” She said, “I brought it for you.”
“How could you bring this for me? How could you even know that I was going to be here? For Christ’s sake, I didn’t even know I was going to be here!”
She showed the palms of her hands and stepped back a pace. But she still kept smiling strangely at him. The same mannequin smile he remembered from Manchester. And from somewhere else, he suddenly realized.
“Are you really hungry?”
He almost laughed, but he would have choked on the bread. He was famished. He tore the loaf apart with his fingers and buried his mouth into the white bread inside the crackling crust. It randomly occurred to him that the bread actually was fresh. She seemed to be enjoying watching him, but it was hard to tell. He realized that her expression hadn’t changed very much.
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