by Ralph Kern
“Yeah, that I get.” I cut the com and linked the pilot. “How long have we got before we reach decision point?”
“Minutes.” The pilot’s voice was tense. “We’re falling deeper into Sagi’s gravity well every second. I’m redlining the engines, but they’re not in great shape after that hit coming in.
“Just keep us moving,” Phillips interjected.
“Captain, please.” Vasily was a good man; I knew it. I just had to get through to him. “If you don’t give us the docking solution, twelve people are going to die onboard this thing. Too many have already.” The faces of Dana, the trooper, Mike, the man from the corridor, and those we were forced to leave behind flashed through my mind.
“I understand your concerns, Captain,” Frain broke into the private coms channel. It didn’t surprise me in the slightest he was able to. “You have my word that I will not attempt to subvert your ship.”
“Layton, I ca—”
A loud bang reverberated through the hull. “Goddamn it! Coolant system has just popped. We’re losing engine two. I’m going to have to throttle down,” the pilot barked.
I felt the pressure easing on my chest, but the ride was getting rougher.
“You keep your pedal to the metal, pilot,” Phillips shouted out.
“Hawk, what’s your situation? We’re showing debris coming from one of your engines.” Captain Vasily’s voice had gone from angry to concerned.
“We’ve got a malfunction in engine two. We’re losing it. It must have taken more damage than we thou—”
A loud crash cut him off. It sounded as if a demolition ball had slammed into the side of the shuttle. The view through the cockpit window started to spiral.
“The engine’s gone. Gagarin, you’re going to have to come get us,” the pilot shouted, fear in her voice.
“I’m sorry—” the captain murmured.
“Vasily, don’t do this,” I virtually shouted. “You’ll kill everyone on this ship.”
“You don’t understand. We can’t.”
“Can’t or won’t?” Phillips demanded.
“Can’t, dammit. The conventional drive won’t give us the delta-v to head in to get you, and we don’t have the precision on the A-drive. We stand as much chance of landing over the event horizon as not, and that’s if we don’t wipe you out when the A-drive bubble collapses.”
Our remaining engine was definitely running rough now. “Gagarin, we only have engine one. With our current cut thrust, we have less than sixty seconds before we reach the point of no return.”
“We can’t even yaw round in sixty seconds,” Vasily said. “I’m sorry.”
“Then we can’t make it out of the gravitational well,” the pilot almost whispered.
I felt the pressure easing on my chest. What the hell did we do now? I looked out the window, the malevolent black heart of the golden accretion disk just sitting there—the thing that would kill us.
“There is an option,” Tasker coughed. I looked across at her, strapped into the seat. I guessed that she had come round a while ago. “Erebus.”
“Erebus is just as fucked as we are,” Phillips scoffed.
“No, you don’t understand. She has everything we need, an A-drive, a nano-fabricator. If we can repair her, we might just be able to escape.”
“But nothing escapes a black hole; even I know that,” I said.
Tasker gave a harsh laugh. “Last time I checked, no one had actually tried to use an A-drive to get out of one.”
“Yeah, but that thing is going to eat us up in a couple of hours.” I waved my hand toward the stern of the shuttle. “Are you telling me you can repair the A-drive in that time?”
“Trent”—she gave a bitter laugh—“you’re going to learn a thing or two about space-time. Probably more than you ever wanted to know. Get us back and don’t mess around. The clock is ticking.”
“Hawk,” Captain Vasily’s voice was getting quicker, like he was on a cocktail of helium and amphetamines. “We are getting to safety. We will stand fast for as long as we still have a coms link.”
Once again, the view spiraled as the assault shuttle came around to limp back toward Erebus on its remaining engine. Already the ship was little more than a dot.
We had so nearly gotten away.
CHAPTER 59
EREBUS
Tasker got the habitat ring spinning, and we were back up to about one-third-g, which at least allowed us to work—something we needed to do damn fast.
One of Erebus’s engineers had hauled himself to the aft after telling us that the engine could only be fired manually now that Phillips and Frain’s fight had trashed the bridge. Still, the holotank was functional, though I wasn’t liking what it showed. On the screen was a wireframe image of a funnel. A blinking blue light, Erebus, was trickling down the side. I didn’t need Frampton to explain what it meant.
“We’re going to get a lot closer before we have the chance to get away, and the antimatter torch will only give us a little time,” Tasker murmured. I could tell she was working furiously, hands moving about like she was dancing as she manipulated her HUD’s virtual console. “And we are going to have to do this before we get spaghettified.”
“Spaghettified?” I mouthed at Phillips, who simply shrugged. I got the impression that Sagi wasn’t going to force-feed us pasta.
“Laser link with Gagarin is back up,” one of the techs called out. An image of our ship from the perspective of Gagarin washed across a screen wall. Erebus was back-dropped by thick golden clouds and glowing a dim red.
“Erebus, Gagarin.” the voice was speeding up even more. I would have found it comedic if I didn’t know what it meant. “We estimate—”
“Buffer their coms and clear it up,” Tasker growled at Frain, who simply nodded and began his own dance.
“Erebus, Gagarin.” The voice slowed to normal, and I recognized it as Captain Vasily’s. “We estimate eighteen minutes, your time, before we can’t maintain communications anymore. We are going to have a lot more time than you because of the dilation. We’re using it to crunch numbers. We will send our best escape solution to you. If you can fire any parts requests over to us, we can shoot them into Sagi after you.”
“Roger that. We haven’t had the chance to fabricate replacement parts after you took a chunk out of our A-drive. I’ll upload what we need,” Tasker said as she manipulated her console.
There was a delay of many seconds and then, “We have the component list. It’ll take us a few days.”
It dawned on me what Tasker had meant as we were plunging down toward the event horizon. Gagarin, and the rest of the universe, for that matter, was speeding up. Or we were slowing down. Whichever way you looked at it, they would have as long as they needed to make us replacement parts. The bottleneck was that we would not have long to actually fix the damn A-drive if they could get them to us.
“Everyone left, get out and start stripping out the damaged components. I don’t care if you’ve never done it. Buddy up and use your damn HUDs to walk you through it. Expect a care package shortly.” Tasker gave out the repair orders for her ship in short order. I was beginning to like the woman. She may have been a total hard-ass, but she was a competent one.
The graphic of Erebus began to spin, pointing us back toward the edge of the hole. I felt pressure build as the torch activated. Out of all the rides I had taken on this crazy journey since Sahelia, this was without a doubt the wildest. To escape, we were going to have to keep our orbit as wide as possible.
The forces we were going to be subjected to would be harsh, and I decided I was better off sitting. I found a chair and seated myself in it next to the battle-damaged Frain. Might as well get two birds with one stone. “So, Xander, seeing as we’re plunging ass-backward into a black hole thousands of light-years from home, fancy telling me just what the hell I’m doing here?”
He turned and looked at me. For some reason, in that moment, he seemed human, vulnerable. He gave a smile,
but on his chrome-glinting, half-destroyed face, it was a sad reminder of his tenuous humanity.
“Victor.”
I blinked. “What?”
“My name is Victor. Victor Talbot. Frain was just my cover.”
“I can’t say I’m please to meet you, Victor.”
“Everything I’ve done, everything the people who sent me have done, Layton, was for the greater good.”
“Yeah, many of my predecessors in War Crimes had to deal with that line. Bottom line: you’ve killed a lot of people. At least tell me why, dammit. We’ve chased your arse half-way across the galaxy, and there is the very real prospect we’re both going to die in the next couple of hours. I don’t know what the fuck spaghettfication is, but if that’s the way I’m going to go, at least let me die knowing!”
Frain nodded. He was silent for a few moments before he spoke. “The gravity of Sagi will begin acting on the part of your body closest to Sagi more than the part furthest away. That’s how acute the gravitational forces here are. You will be quite literally pulled apart. Don’t worry. I imagine the ship will break up long before that, although I would suggest you leave your visor open just in case you survive the disintegration of Erebus.” He flashed me a wry grin.
“Yeah, well, thanks for that.” It was strange; I think I’d been through so much that not even the prospect of such a gruesome end was particularly raising my blood pressure. That, or it hadn’t quite sunk in yet. I watched as the graphic of Erebus slowly crept down the wireframe funnel of Sagi. “And not exactly what I meant.”
Frain looked forward, focusing on the holotank. “I don’t know everything, Layton. What I do know is that what happens here decides humanity’s future.”
I still couldn’t get my head around that thought. “What do you mean?” I prompted.
“What I mean is that the things living here, in this place, are going to make us, humans, extinct.”
“No one lives here! The place is a tomb,” I said incredulously. “There are some ruins and the remains of a gateway network but no one left to threaten anyone.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Layton. They’re still here, and they know about us. They have since Helios first tested the FTL gateway in Sirius decades ago.”
“Since Helios first tested the gate? You mean Helios started all this?”
Frain leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes. He’d clearly let something slip that he wasn’t supposed to.
“Look, Victor, you’ve seen this place. There is no one left. Whoever they were—whatever they were—they’re gone. You, Helios, killed those people and dragged us here for nothing.”
“No!” Frain’s…no, Talbot’s normally calm face was now angry, a scary sight when he literally glinted at me. “The intelligence all pointed to one thing. Someone from this system—from that planet, or whatever the hell it is orbiting Sagi—is the home base of something that’s going to kill us all.”
“So why not tell anyone? Why all the secrecy?”
“I don’t know!” Talbot held his hands up in frustration. “Maybe someone felt that knowing the sword of Damocles hung over humanity would panic people. Maybe telling would somehow speed things up.”
“Panic people? More than the destruction of a bloody moon?”
“You know what I know now. I had orders to destroy the FTL gateway network and Io. I was then told that I needed to speed up phase two of the operation—a first strike here, at Sagi.”
“And just how were you going to conduct a first strike?”
“If we were alone, then use Erebus the same way that Magellan was used. When you destroyed our A-drive, my only choices were to either commandeer Gagarin and use her to strike or drop every speck of antimatter I could on that world and hope that would be enough to do the job.”
I had to admire him; Talbot was relentless, a one-man weapon of mass destruction dispatched to end this alleged threat.
“And presumably Erebus and her crew…?” I gestured with my hand.
“Were always tasked with this job. She was at my disposal the whole time.”
Erebus…an E-ship…a Helios ship.
“Watch,” Talbot said.
He offered to link his HUD with mine to share what he was seeing. I was reluctant but finally decided, what the hell; I was likely dead anyway.
The KIs were sweeping toward the world, separated in a long line so the world’s very rotation would create an even spread. They were moving a lot faster in space than I expected them to. As we fell deeper toward Sagi, time was slowing more and more for us; thus, the missiles seeming to move faster. Then each of the blinking dots multiplied. There must have been hundreds bearing down on the small planet.
“We configured them as MIRVs,” Talbot said quietly. “Each KI will split into several missiles, each equipped with an antimatter warhead.”
A blinding light bloomed from the surface; the first KI had struck. Then the second. Then the third. A staccato of antimatter explosions smashed the world brutally. Within moments, nowhere on the surface of the planet would be unaffected by the horrendous power of the antimatter explosions.
Talbot leaned back and closed his eyes. “It’s done.”
CHAPTER 60
EREBUS
“Those KIs back at Iwa,” Talbot said.
“What?” I was now little more than a fifth wheel, watching the bridge crew frantically working away. I could hear the coms chatter of the work pods in the golden space outside, desperately ripping the damaged components out of the A-drive.
“The KIs we fired at Gagarin, I ordered them to self-destruct,” Talbot said quietly. He was staring across the bridge at the holotank. “Just before we escaped through the FTL gateway. You were right; I never wanted to kill anyone.”
“Yeah, that didn’t help Dev, though,” I muttered.
“Who’s Dev?”
“A young cop who died a long way from home who just wanted to help people,” I said quietly. “Let’s just say the EM pulse from Io’s destruction came at a bad time and leave it at that.”
“I’m sor—”
“Erebus.” Captain Vasily’s image appeared on the screen, interrupting him. Christ, he had a beard; only five minutes ago he’d been clean shaven. It must have been weeks for him. “The care package is underway. It’s at high burn and should catch up with you in less than two minutes your time.”
“We have less than three minutes left on the link,” the tech said.
Three minutes. Not much time. Like Frain, I had a mission, and it occurred to me that being stuck here didn’t need to stop me from completing it. Three minutes was long enough. I cached up everything that had happened and had been stored in my implants: every log, the total video recording of what I had seen and heard, including Frain’s, or Talbot’s, final confession.
“Can I send a message back to Gagarin?” I asked. “You know, for if we don’t make it?”
Tasker shrugged. “I don’t see why not. Even if we get out of this, God knows how much time will have gone by.” She switched on the general channel. “All crew, you may record a message for linking to Gagarin. Just be quick about it.”
I looked at Talbot. He knew what I was going to do, and he either didn’t care, or he wanted me to. Hell, even there and then, he could have killed me with a single blow. Our eyes met, and he gave the slightest nod before finishing his sentence from earlier. “I’m sorry.”
I just nodded back. It wasn’t my place to accept his apology, but I did acknowledge it.
Erebus gave a long echoing groan, and I looked up uneasily. The very ship itself was moaning in pain from the horrific gravitational differential between sections. Sagi was literally trying to pull us apart.
We didn’t have long.
I glanced around one last time, making sure I captured everyone on the bridge: Major Ava Phillips standing a couple of meters behind Victor Talbot, a Zen-like calm over her face. Captain Beverly Tasker and the other bridge crew of Erebus desperately working, fighting to
the end to save her ship and us. Sonia Drayton, pale, afraid. Maybe this last image would be seen by their families back home. Maybe it wouldn’t. Erebus would be frozen in time on the edge of a black hole just as her namesake had been frozen in the ice of the arctic. I had no idea if we would ever escape our hell or if we would just disappear like the crew of the original HMS Erebus so many centuries ago.
On my HUD, I clicked send. Everything I knew, everything I had experienced since the start of this mess, was fired along the laser link back toward Gagarin and then home.
***
The crew of Gagarin waited for months, watching as Erebus slipped deeper and deeper into the space-time pit created by Sagi’s massive gravity well.
They had soaked up every bit of data that the trapped ship could send. Communications from Erebus slowed; every word drawn out, lasting minutes and then hours. Finally, there were no more words, simply static. Slowly, Erebus froze, becoming trapped in the amber of the black hole’s accretion disk before gradually fading out of sight. Even if the ship survived—even if the plan succeeded—it wouldn’t escape Sagi for hundreds of years.
As Erebus slowly sank into the black hole, Gagarin dispatched probes to the small dark world. Every inch of the planet was scarred and pockmarked. Vast craters rent the surface. Whatever had been there, whatever Frain had spoken about, must have been reduced to dust—if ever it had been there.
Finally, alone, Gagarin turned and headed for the FTL gateway. The crews that both Erebus and Gagarin had dropped to get the FTL active had long since signaled that it was back online and functional. As the FTL gate powered up, as the beam of light lanced out of the pagoda, at the point of commitment to the gateway, the sensors of the Gagarin heard it.
A radar pulse of incredible power burst forth from the dark world circling the black hole.
Something was still down there.
PART THREE 2202 CE