Launch Sequence (Genesis Book 2)

by Travis Hill

  “Admiral,” Captain Jun’s voice said. “We are five-by-five for translation to the G-18 system.”

  “Roger that,” my father said.

  I began to dig deeper into Icarus’ information systems to find out exactly what kind of ship Icarus was. Most of the data was too technical (or boring) for me to focus on. Tonnage, weight and power distribution, things like that would have been fascinating at any other time, but none of it gave me any insight on why the ship seemed to both reflect light as well as absorb it. None of the information told me why just over six hundred humans had been rushed aboard and launched in the middle of an invasion other than to avoid extermination at the hands of the Kai.

  As I dug deeper, the rest of reality faded into a low background noise. I felt excitement growing within me as I finally uncovered the stealth systems Icarus was designed around. The quicksilver skin was a new technology that while useful, couldn’t defeat the advanced technology the Kai possessed. As I browsed through test results I saw the reason why it was put to use in our case. Unmanned drones made of the same material had successfully avoided Kai sensors just over fifty percent of the time, which was a lot higher than the typical zero percent success of standard Coalition hulls.

  The materials’ composition data sheets were too technical for me, though I could have had them translated into layman’s terms by Icarus’ AI. Same with the engine housing that kept the ship from trailing a stream of fire during acceleration. None of that was as interesting as the test data from the Navy when it came to acceleration and top speed.

  Icarus hit 26g on its initial test run in the outback regions. Over the months while the engineers fine-tuned Icarus’ systems, the ship broke all known records for top speed during an unmanned flight, pushing the strange new stealth cruiser to just over 71g. Tied to this information was data concerning the acceleration creches, which were rated for a maximum of 48g, though even that was far too much for a human being. 42.29g was the tested limit of human survival within the creches, and that was only after the passengers were put into long-term hibernation. I tried not to think about how they found out 42.30g was lethal but 42.29g wasn’t.

  I wasn’t surprised to find out Icarus only had the initial defensive batteries I’d noticed on my first glance through the files. Icarus wasn’t a warship. It was an escape ship.

  While browsing through the data, I saw a number of links leading to something called “Operation Nightfall.” I remembered the name from what my father said as we’d traveled up the stairs at the base on Daedalus. I avoided viewing any info about Nightfall as long as possible, gleaning as much as I could about the odd ship I rode in. Even though I had open access to the AI’s libraries, at least half of the information was locked behind classified barriers. It made me wonder if my father was unable to view the data, or if he’d somehow forgotten to unlock the portals for me. When I finally knew enough about Icarus to consider myself an expert, I allowed myself to follow a link to Nightfall.

  “Operation Nightfall” stunned me. I almost forgot to breathe as I read through the initial synopsis. Icarus was to make twenty-four translations until we hit the Gamma Delta-III system, where we’d rendezvous with three more ships that were identical to Icarus. TCN Dante and TCN Athens were in transit from the Alpha Nexon system. Alpha Nexon had fallen to the Kai almost two years earlier.

  TCN Osaka had launched only three months ago from the Liandris system. Military intelligence reports predicted the Liandris system would be invaded in the next six to nine months. None of that information was as interesting as what came next.

  According to the unlocked information streaming across my vision, after three more translations, the four stealth ships would rendezvous with a ship named Genesis-3. All passengers from the stealth ships would transfer via shuttle to Genesis-3, with any overflow of passengers boarding -3’s sister ship, Genesis-4. Once the transfer was complete, Dante, Athens, Osaka, and Icarus would then launch themselves into GS-38.1, the larger star of the GS-38 binary system.

  I didn’t know much about economics, but the self-destruction of four ships that each cost over one trillion credits seemed extremely wasteful—or maybe just overly cautious. The notes attached to the order seemed to focus more on not letting the Kai ever know of the ships’ existence to keep them from specifically scanning for such vessels more than any worry the Kai would steal the technology and use it against humanity.

  I couldn’t help wondering if the ships’ AI understood they were to take their own “lives” by flying into a star. My mother always complained that I had too much science fiction in my diet whenever I questioned her about AI being capable of human emotions or feelings. My follow-up questions as to why we’d never developed what scientists called “true AI,” which were capable of such feelings, seemed to annoy her even more.

  Once we were zipped up aboard Genesis-3 and -4, the two “seedships” were to proceed to Havelid, where they would refuel at the massive gas giant Havelid-VII using automated drones, before translating to Epsilon Zeta on the outer fringe of human-explored space. Once translation was complete, the two seedships would accelerate until they reached 16g for nineteen weeks before decelerating for another six months. The final rendezvous would be with a Coalition Navy fleet named “Task Force Nightfall” in the Rathalan Outback.

  At first, I was afraid of the boredom and worse, the discomfort that I’d face locked aboard a starship under heavy acceleration. 16g was far more than the 7g we were currently speeding along at. A trickle of fear seeped through me after I’d read that all passengers were to be put into long-term hibernation. Me, my father and mother, all of us would go to sleep and instead of waking up four years later after our meet-up with Task Force Nightfall, we would continue to travel in hibernation for… I blinked.

  I walked back through the text to make sure I read it correctly. According to the report, I wasn’t scheduled to wake up for anywhere between six hundred Earth-standard years to upwards of five thousand years. I tried sifting through the data to find exactly where we were supposed to eventually end up, but that information was locked behind another classified barrier. I frowned as well as I could with the solidified gel holding me in place.

  —|—

  I woke to the all-clear alarm. My head felt as if someone had stacked an entire mountain range on it. My feet ached as if they’d ran a dozen marathons back to back. The gel softened then disappeared into the creche. I felt my body rise slowly, which told me we were either stopped or traveling at low speed.

  Instead of exiting the creche and stretching my legs, I activated my comm and pulled up the tactical logs to see if anything exciting had happened. Two weeks earlier, after ten days of heavy acceleration, deceleration, and multiple FTL jumps, Icarus translated into a system that had two Kai battle groups stationed between the star and the fourth planet. The ship’s AI initiated an emergency hibernation protocol and began a series of evasive maneuvers and jumps through quantum space to be sure the Kai couldn’t follow us easily. I felt a chill run through me when I saw that Icarus had jumped within forty light-years of Earth before making its way toward GS-23, almost eight thousand light-years away.

  I stopped the replay when I noticed an amber alert begin to flash. As I forwarded the replay at 10x speed, the alert changed to red, then a few seconds later became a steady red X. I paused it and clicked the alert button, then felt horrible when it took me to the medbay module and flashed two names of our crew with KIA in angry red letters below their profile pictures. I didn’t want to read the automated report generated by the creches but couldn’t stop myself. 2nd Lieutenant Ferin Wells had died of internal injuries when his creche’s suspension system failed—basically turning him into Ferin-butter.

  Private Lorraine Paulson had suffered cardiac arrest during the emergency hibernation prep but the pressures were too great to allow a doctor to resuscitate her. I suddenly understood “adult decisions” and why my parents didn’t want me exposed to certain realities. Even though it was
the ship’s AI that ultimately decided it had to let one human perish to save six hundred others from certain doom at the hands of our enemy, it was a human being who programmed that course of action if such a scenario arose.

  Death was still a mystery to me in the sense that I’d never had to face it up close before. My friends, family, teachers, everyone on Daedalus-IV was either dead, dying, or would die soon, but it was too far away, too detached from my suddenly-expanding bubble of growing up. My only real experience with death came from the few trips to see my grandma in the hospital—but that was years ago, and the visits had been so brief that all I remembered beyond the tubes and wires was the antiseptic odor that permeated everything. I wondered if the programmers ever took a moment to think about someone dying because of their code. I told myself if they did, they did it with the knowledge the code’s execution was a necessary action that hopefully saved more lives than it took.

  I blinked away the beginnings of tears and returned my attention to the tactical playback module. Icarus initiated a series of jumps for five straight days, zigzagging across the Orion Spur toward the coreward borders of the deep black, sometimes almost doing a complete loop as if trying to throw off hunters by backtracking. I rewound the log for a few seconds when I saw something crazy. Just before an FTL jump in the outback of the Horus Wastes, a mostly dead region of space that lacked a stellar wind of any kind, Icarus had climbed to 29.254g. I rubbed my temples, suddenly remembering how bad my headache was.

  “You alive in there?” a muffled voice said, followed by a muffled knock on the creche’s canopy.

  I triggered the release with a voice command and saw Sergeant Valmon grinning at me. He held out a hand and I took it, thankful he was there to steady me on my aching feet.

  “Whoa, Private,” he said, pretending to straighten my collar and imaginary tie before dusting off my imaginary name tag. “First time is always the worst.”

  “My head feels like it was squeezed into a bottle,” I said, rubbing my temples once again.

  “Pro tip,” the sergeant said with a wink. “Don’t get drunk before you have to zip up. It’s way worse.”

  “Yes, Sir,” I said, trying to keep a gross-out face from forming.

  “Ah, I see you’ve partaken of the magical liquid before.”

  “It’s so nasty!” I said, embarrassed at hearing my voice crack.

  “What’s nasty?” Mom said. She stopped behind Sgt. Valmon and gave us both a suspicious look. “What are you two up to?”

  “Private Shaw was just relaying his intense dislike for alcohol, Ma’am,” Valmon said, giving her a respectful salute.

  “Private Shaw, eh?” my dad rumbled from beside Mom. “It’s probably a good thing, since drunk pilots end up as flight instructors instead of blasting bad guys or infiltrating enemy territory to drop off Terran Marines.”

  Mom gave him a funny look before slugging him in the shoulder. Sgt. Valmon saluted my father and went to the next creche to check on its occupant.

  “Come on, we’ve got almost a week at 1g while the reactors recharge,” Dad said. “Let’s go see what this rust bucket has for a mess deck.”

  It took us nearly twenty minutes to make it to the ship’s version of a mess hall thanks to everyone saluting my parents every few seconds. Dad grumbled about sending out a ship-wide directive ordering everyone to stop all their damn saluting so we wouldn’t starve to death. Mom smiled, saluted, shook hands, and hugged practically every passenger, whether they were Marines, Navy, or even the few civilians who were aboard. Dad grumbled some more about how if he did order everyone to stop saluting them, they’d mutiny and toss him out of the airlock for insulting Captain Lara Shaw. Mom pretended to be annoyed by his complaining, but as embarrassed as I knew she was over the attention, I saw how much she genuinely cared for everyone.

  The cafeteria looked like some of the refugee camps I’d seen in documentaries and news stories, though I was sure I didn’t look so hot myself. I tried my best to not stare at a small group of soldiers who hugged and wiped tears from their eyes. I imagined they were sad for 2LT Wells or PFC Paulson and felt ashamed and guilty that I was being morbid. What I really wanted to do was run over and hug them and let them know I was sad as well.

  I turned my attention instead to the woman who had stopped to talk to my parents. She looked down at me and smiled, turning my insides to jelly for some reason. I wanted to run away when she took a few steps toward me and held out her hand.

  “Shake her hand, Denny,” my father whispered, loud enough for the citizens of Earth to hear.

  “Hello, Captain Jun,” I said, my voice sounding like broken glass.

  Instead of shaking her hand, I saluted her. She was more beautiful than her profile picture. A camera couldn’t capture the light in her eyes that made her seem bigger than life, more real than real. I closed my eyes, praying that my first real crush on a girl would end before I burst into flames or became a quivering ball of boneless ooze.

  “At ease, Private,” she said, giving me a solemn salute in return. “Let’s go get some chow while your parents do all that boring stuff officers have to do.”

  I glanced at my parents who both nodded their heads. I hoped my face wasn’t as red as it felt, but I recognized the knowing smirk on Mom’s face before she turned away and led my father into a knot of officers heading toward the lift. Captain Jun tilted her head toward the line forming at the counter. I almost fell down twice when my legs refused to work right.

  For the first few minutes, I felt like a nobody as Captain Jun greeted everyone near her along with a dozen more who specifically sought her out. When her arm wrapped around my shoulder and she pulled me close, I thought I might shiver myself right out of my jumpsuit. The Marines and pilots grinned at me, some giving me jealous looks followed by a wink to let me know they weren’t really thinking about pounding me into shredded meat. When we finally got our food, she led me to an empty table and nodded for me to sit next to her instead of across from her.

  “Special Forces operatives always sit with their backs against a wall so no one can sneak up on ‘em,” she said in a serious voice when I gave her a questioning look.

  “You’re in the Special Forces?” I asked, more awed than ever.

  “No, but they’re the best for a reason.” She nudged me with her elbow. “You don’t have to be a spook to know what they know. You just have to be as good as they are to actually be a spook.”

  “Do they really have to assassinate someone to get their stripes?” I asked, unsure of why a rumor from the Wire suddenly blew up in my brain.

  The pilot laughed and nudged me with her elbow again.

  “That rumor is still going around, huh? They probably started it themselves just to make them seem even scarier.”

  “Have you ever met one?” I asked, only slightly deflated that she wasn’t also one of the most highly trained infiltration and sabotage agents in the galaxy. She nodded. “Are they really that scary?”

  “Scarier than scary. They always look at you like they’re trying to decide if they can kill you in three moves, or if they can do it in two.”

  I shivered, imagining a faceless SF agent using all manner of martial arts to fight his way through overwhelming odds. I opened my mouth to say something but was interrupted when a tall, muscular man in fatigues and a tight t-shirt approached our table. Captain Jun stood up and hugged him, then they kissed each other like my parents did when they thought I wasn’t paying attention.

  I immediately hated whoever the jarhead was. He had to be a Marine, and though he was huge and looked like he could snap me into little pieces with one hand, he was stupid and had a stupid face and a stupid grin. He must have seen my expression as he gently pushed Captain Jun away and stared at me for a few seconds.

  “Who’s the junior recruit?” he asked. Even his voice was stupid. “And why is he trying to steal the best pilot in the galaxy away from me?”

  The way he looked at me made me suddenly afraid
he might actually pick me up and start breaking me into smaller chunks with both of his hands to get the job done faster. Captain Jun cleared her throat loud enough to get his attention.

  “You mean the second best pilot in the galaxy,” she said, staring into my eyes.

  “Oh yeah?” the jarhead asked, turning back to stare at me intently. “Is that why he’s on your arm instead of me? What do you say, Private? Are you the best pilot in the galaxy?”

  “No,” Captain Jun said before I could yell insults at him. “But his mother is Captain Lara Shaw.”

  The stupid Marine’s face changed in an instant. The goofy, joking, trying-to-be-friendly mannerisms were replaced by a look of pure respect. I still wanted to punch him in the face for kissing the girl I was suddenly dreaming about marrying one day, but the way he acted when he heard Mom’s name made me like him a little bit. Just a little.

  “I’m sorry, Private Shaw,” he said in a formal voice. “I apologize for interrupting your date with Miss Jun. It was very rude of me.”

  “It’s okay,” I said in a small voice.

  I didn’t know whether to feel embarrassed or ashamed that I had hated a person so much just because he kissed another person who wasn’t my girlfriend. I hated the explosion of feelings that seemed to never stop crashing around in my body. I’d been feeling them for the last few months, especially around Dya, but ever since Mom woke me up and practically kidnapped me, the sensations had been so strong I felt like throwing up most of the time.