by Greg Remy
“Go! Go! Go!”
He swiveled the ship about faster than it had come; the centrifugal forces nearly tossed Zoe back through the aperture. She scrambled into the cockpit.
“Zoe! What hap—”
“No time! Seat!”
Darious quickly moved and Zoe took up the reins. The ship evened out under her skilled grip. It purred from her touch and roared as she brought it up from the rooftop, continuing Darious’ swing with fluid vigor and arcing down around the side of the building.
“That man,” her lips murmured.
“The man with the brim hat?”
Zoe nodded, her mind too focused on pulling her appendages about the virtual console to form a snarky remark. She initiated various systems and compiled others in the short few seconds before the ship reached the ground level of the executive enterprise. A screen to Zoe’s left lit up and a red rectangle outlined a nearby parked craft.
“Bingo,” Zoe declared, and a grin followed. She typed into her console. “Weapons locked.”
Zoe centered her craft to face the black falcon perched on the landing pad before them. To her left, Zoe flicked open a black cover, revealing a toxic green switch. She flipped it forward. Two booms from both sides of Zoe and her companion resounded in the ship. Two rockets, both painted the same toxic green, shot out from her ship and spiraled toward the Drak-9. Darious stared wide-eyed. Zoe was already plotting a course for far, far away. Two explosions, both hitting the port wing, ignited the whole craft into a vortex of flames. Zoe’s ship veered away, and the cockpit window no longer gave a view of the explosion, though readouts continued the explanation to which eye was now blind to. They boosted away from the scene, leaving a dissipating plume of smoke in the wake of the engaged target. One target destroyed.
“Ye-ah!” cried Darious, the second half of his triumphant, arm-raised hurrah, dwindled and turned to a whimper. Zoe too paused her inbound self-approval. Her hand reached out, like death’s own, and pointed toward the display readout.
Damage: minimal–moderate
Summary:
Aft Spoiler:
44%–48%
Starboard Wing:
Intact.
Port Wing:
45TW conduit nulled; auxiliary ionizer nulled.
Ballast Thrusters:
68%–73%
Force Thrusters:
Primary Array:
Limited operations; inconclusive.
Secondary Array:
Limited operations.
Ancillary Array:
Inconclusive.
Life Systems: Inconclusive.
Gravitational Systems: Inconclusive.
Conclusion: Operations limited; space flight capable; reduced .6 f-p/hour estimated maximum speed.
Zoe, as pale as Sirius, gulped. “We had better go.”
She turned the ship fully skyward and shot through the sepulchral undergrowth of Kratos, out from its metallic tendrils and soon beyond its gravitational grasp, though she knew they were now unescapably being pulled in by its real sphere of influence.
Chapter 26
The Storm of the Century
A gold tooth grated against its biological neighbor below. Swift, hot breaths rushed out through the gaps of the entire city. Above, the glare of the clouds signaled a storm was coming. In fact, the storm of the century was inbound.
Kappa grit his teeth harder, looking at his craft. The stench of burning oil from ruined fuel lines did not concern him as much as the inevitable conversation with Mr. Achan. He tipped his hat back and looked up at the dull sky. High above him, the smoke from his battered craft was mixing with noxious vapors of the corporate wasteland. What a fucked-up place.
With a huff, he slackened his muscles and dropped down to the cement, landing on his rear. He sat for a moment, relaxing his vision, and gazed through the hull of his ship to its crippled heart and slowly tipped his brim, sympathizing with the vessel. He picked up Bessie and detached a signal generator from the gun. He unclipped its two pieces. The first was an earpiece, which he put in his ear and the second, a type pad, which he used to initialize the call to Mr. Achan.
The sound of crumpled paper came through the earpiece as the call connected. The voice of the familiar circumspect secretary answered.
“This is Mr. Achan’s office. Mr. Achan is not in right—”
“This is Kappa.”
“Ah, Mr. Kappa. Mr. Achan has spoken to me. He has been monitoring the… situation.”
She paused for several long moments, Kappa assumed for dramatic effect, which did indeed have an effect upon him. She then continued, “Mr. Achan has instructed you to extirpate the two. He insists...” She cleared her throat. “… you do so ‘fucking soon.’”
“I understand. Please give Mr. Achan my apologies. I’m on it.”
“Mr. Achan has also instructed me to tell you, if you ever feel the urge to use such weaponry inside his office again, he will place said weaponry inside your rectum posthaste.”
“Understood.”
The call abruptly ended. Kappa took in a deep breath and exhaled. A cold wind blew around him, making his overcoat flap around his arms. After up-righting himself, he stared at his ship. Kappa placed an open hand upon his chest and closed his eyes. Where had it gone? He sighed and straightened his hat.
Kappa’s eyes narrowed and his mind refocused, trained thoughts replacing his wandering visions. He slung the gun around his back and proceeded to the craft. He forced open the damaged hatchway and looked around the cabin. He knew it would fly; uncomfortably, but it would do. There were still burning embers within her and within himself too. He slammed the door shut. The ship screeched to life as its massive engines drew in monstrous breaths and exhaled fire. Kappa set the ship to autonomously seal the biggest of errors and it lumbered up from the ground.
Chapter 27
Profundity at its Simplest
“Aha!” sounded a rejoicing Zoe. “Yes! YES!!”
Darious, hearing the commotion from the cockpit, paused his studies to see what the hubbub was about. Upon entering, he was greeted by piles of books spread everywhere and all projection screens opened with layers of coding. Even Zoe’s lightcard was on the console, plotting out segments of the algorithm. He was glad to see Zoe’s determination, though if she had been a stranger, he might have described it as an almost unreserved enthusiasm.
After their pillage of Pantheon Industries, Zoe had scoured the captured files, not surceasing her investigative venture for days. Unfortunately, the ‘borrowed’ data had yielded little. Dr. Saknussemm’s prior work with the corporation was near completely redacted. As for his personal research, most of what was available Zoe had already solved herself. The last bits were jumbled and useless. As she had told him, the Doctor seemed to have gone through great measures to protect his work.
“Zoe, you have not left the cockpit for several days now. Are you okay?”
She swiveled around. “Me Zoe. Me make fire.”
Darious smiled awkwardly. “Zoe, not to be the bearer of bad news, but I do believe fire was discovered many thousands of years ago.”
“Oh, but Darious dear, you see, I have discovered that the multifarious tessellation of sectors A through E Gamma are in fact correct. It was the corresponding infinitesimal phased array subsystem that was corrupted.” Zoe pointed to a section of text on her main screen. “By replacing the stringed Eigenvalues with their complex counterparts, I was able to extract the missing pieces and create a routine recomposing their basic values. Now,” she said triumphantly, “the computer is running a quadrilateral simulation to see if any other flaws exist, but initial results show perfect harmony of the algorithm.”
“Fantastic!”
“Yup, yup.”
“Sooo... what is next?” he asked.
“Well, it looks like we will be at the coordinates of the ‘Origin Gravesite’ within the hour. Sooo... tea?” They both smiled.
“Aye, aye Captain,” replied Darious as he
set about preparing tea for two.
“I’ll clean up in here,” Zoe called over her shoulder as he left the cockpit.
Darious returned within a few minutes and saw that all the books had been thrown toward a corner of the cockpit. With his foot, he scooted a short pile away from his console and handed a steaming cup to Zoe. Darious took up a seat on the arm of her chair, sniffing at his herbal blend. He looked out to space.
“It looks to be quite barren out here. What else did the ‘Gravesite’ file say?”
“Nothing. And there’s indeed nothing on all scanners, just vast space. There’s no traffic, not even shipping lanes for thousands of floating-parsecs.”
“A desert in the sea.”
“Indeed,” said Zoe sipping her tea.
The two sat in silence for some time before Darious broke from the hypnotic view. “I have been meaning to ask: I recently finished reading ‘The States of Bose-Einstein Condensates’ and a particular chapter near the end briefly went into hyper-fluidity at regions where gravitational forcing nears infinity, and—”
“And you’re asking what is going on?” Zoe finished for him.
“Yes. I mean, how does it occur?”
“Well, simply, the strings in atoms become non-interacting with their surroundings due to the super resonance nodes reached at such small amplitudes. The strings slide around freely, and quantum motions become apparent at a scale we can measure. Add gravitational force to the mix, lots of it, and you get a phenomenon of physically moving large amounts of matter from impossibly small spots of space. See, that’s the mousetrap; this state only occurs for massive, massive things confined in tiny lots.”
“Interesting. So, could it be considered as teleportation?”
“Yeah, I’d say so. But remember, it’s also all theory. Actually, do it and you’ll definitely earn a cupcake from me.”
“I believe I understand,” Darious said. “The book inadequately described the topic. My next question is, hypothetically speaking, what happens if you brought a large amount of these quantum nodes together, by some means of a mega-forcing device, and harmonized them?”
“I’m not sure. First off, you’re right, a lot of force would be necessary; like the sort that black holes are associated with. Then, of course, the nodes themselves would have a tendency to become very unstable. Phew, the real-time calculations to control the whole thing would be staggering. But I do suppose,” Zoe tapped her chin, “if you could tune that crazy hypothetical mass of yours to the natural frequencies of certain space-time locales, then you could ‘teleport’ it. Oh, and how about this: yourself too, if you could make a shell with it. Now that would be cool. But that all seems just a bit beyond our time”
Zoe set down her tea on the console and took up the bracelet from her wrist. She stared at it for a moment. “You see this, Darious?” There was a sudden seriousness to her voice. “This is Kapteyn. I found it in Achan’s office.”
“I have noticed you wearing it since we left,” said Darious.
“This material allows for humans to pierce through the barriers of space-time for speeds faster than light, as I’m sure you’ve read about. It’s in every ship everywhere, mixed right in with my ship too. I had never thought about it before, but this too has to be beyond our time. I’ve been doing research since we left Kratos. This alloy, if that’s even the right term for it, has missing links pertaining to its scientific development. They may not be evident, but they’re certainly there. It’s like one day, nearly two thousand years ago, it was just realized, created and mass produced. But the formation of the material was really, really advanced for those days and even still today.”
Zoe held it out to him and he peered at it closely. It relayed the colors from her digital console into complimentary, yet submerged, hues. It didn’t look metallic, nor of any material he had ever seen; its appearance alone had led him to theorize it was a very unique substance. Zoe hung it from a U-bar on the ceiling and continued exuding uneasy words.
“Even in laboratory conditions—extreme conditions—this material would have been a galactic feat to initially conceive. Granted mankind is awesome, but looking into it, I now feel that this is really above and beyond. The gaps in development leading to this are too wide. The published theories for Kapteyn’s creation came after its construction. I mean, have I missed something here? Usually the theories for something new come before its actual creation, not after. After pouring over lots of research, I could see that publicly available information has been so scattered that there is no way its lifecycle could be reconstructed by anyone. I’ve come to the conclusion that this has been accomplished on purpose.”
Zoe paused and took a deep breath in. “We may be further down the rabbit hole than we think,” she said. “The pertinent information I have found regarding Kapteyn came from the Pantheon data catch; it’s not public information. It’s hard to say, as much of the information has been blotted out, but there is a definite link to Dr. Saknussemm. We know the material was made way before his time, so he didn’t invent it. But it looks like he was definitely involved.”
“Perhaps working on its next-generation iteration?”
“No,” replied Zoe. “At least not from what I can gather. It looks like they had him researching its natural occurrence. Whatever their purpose, it seemed to have been something bad. From what I’ve been able to put together, it seems they were studying how to destroy the source of Kapteyn. But Kapteyn is manufactured. By them. I mean,” Zoe rapped her fingers on the control console, evidently disconcerted. “I don’t know what it means. Pantheon Industries appears to be the only entity capable of making the stuff and it’s very apparent that they want to keep this all secret. To remain ahead in the market makes sense, but there is something more going on. Too much secrecy. And the deletion of certain semi travel routes. Which, by the way, from the records I’ve read through, seems to have been a recent undertaking by them and they have quite the thorough deletion protocol—from all information servers everywhere. What is up with that? Oh, and how about trying to kill people who are just a tiny bit curious. They are certainly hiding something, something much more than a line of products. I... I...” Zoe trailed off, aggravated.
Darious, trusting in her, felt a bit anxious of what was so unknown, even to her. “What are you thinking, Zoe?”
“I don’t know. I just—”
A soft ding came from the center console.
Darious reached across Zoe and brought up the itinerary message with his free hand. “We have arrived.”
“We can discuss it later,” said Zoe. “Let me make sure this sector of space is still clear”
The ship came to a stop and Darious took up the drinks to clean in the main chamber.
“All is well,” she called to Darious.
He shortly came back, wiping his wet hands on his shirt and looked out the window to the blackness. “An interesting expanse of space, Captain!”
“Yeah, yeah. I wasn’t expecting much either. Though I was hoping a little, considering our recent run-ins with Pantheon and its goons.”
Darious nodded and another ding sounded.
“Ah, the compiler is done!” Zoe said. She brought up a menu, with Darious looking over her shoulder, and centered on the resulting summary. “Complete with less than a millionth of a percent corruption. Now I’d say that’s a success. Everything comes with just a bit of a fudge factor. So, what do you say we fire up the Doctor’s program one more time for old times’ sake? This is as good a spot as any.” Darious put both hands on the back of her seat. “We should make some handholds for you there.” Zoe smirked. “So, do we attempt it again?”
“Certainly. I presume all safety precautions are primed?” asked Darious, to which Zoe flipped a few switches. “What do you think it will do?”
“Other than a cool, paradoxical light show, I have no idea. Let’s find out!” Zoe began typing away madly. “I’ve created a complete routine to run the program. Just gotta double check
the Z-Pulsers...” her voice trailed off as her typing became more rapid. “...and complete,” she said, with one last encore from her fingers on the projection console. A scrolling checklist appeared to their side and autonomously ticked off its line items. “All safety procedures double checked. Okay. Here we go.”
The floor began to vibrate softly. “Door open. Capacitors loading,” said Zoe. Darious clamped on the seat and firmed his stance. “Initiating.”
A similar readout as before popped up and began running through sensor feedback.
“I’ve set it for the same meter cubed in front of us.”
Darious read the summarizing display to ensure that the moment something odd was perceived they could react. Though, thus far, Zoe’s revamped program was handling things magnificently. “All operations normal,” he said. Then the shaking under his feet began to intensify.
“Look,” said Zoe, in a breath of awe.
Out in front of them, a light, an eerie twilight of white and gold, began to appear in the programmed volume of space. Its nature, so unnatural, did not come forth evenly but as a shifting haze. Coinciding with larger vibrations and humming within the ship, the globular light began to take form. It condensed and wheezed. It seemed to Darious to be spinning, though in what direction he could not tell.
“All normal,” said Zoe through the resounding vibrations of the craft. “Oh man, it’s sucking a lot of energy.”
The bound haze convulsed and surged outward with a sudden bright burst, so bright that Darious could no longer read from the console and was forced to cover his eyes. “Captain!”
“Damn, that’s bright!” shouted Zoe. A moment later, the cockpit dimmed by degrees as if being dialed down. “I’ve turned on the star shades; should auto-reduce the light coming through the cockpit window.”