2216: The sun goes supernova, obliterating humanity’s home.
2223: The Scorpius arrives at Delphi, the first waypoint on the journey to Aaru, and is immediately attacked by a Telphon strike team. The Scorpius sustains massive damage and charts an emergency course to rendezvous with the rest of the fleet at Destina, in the Alpha Centauri star system.
2256: The Telphons intercept the starliners Scorpius, Rhea, and Saga in the Centauri system. After a fierce battle, the three starliners attempt to escape before Centauri A goes supernova. . . .
1
EARTH YEAR: 2223
WAYPOINT STATION DELPHI
Perhaps the greatest talent of the human species is the ability to convince itself of nearly anything. To tell yourself something is true and to believe it, sometimes even in spite of the facts. This is a skill both useful and dangerous: useful when it can provide hope, courage, and understanding; dangerous when it is used to deny the truth, to deceive, or to justify. Your history on Earth was a pageant of examples both grand and terrible. And yet there is no doubt that this human talent is essential when traveling across the vast depths of space.
To imagine you are walking on solid ground, when really there are scant meters of material between you and a fathomless, frigid void. When that certainty of gravity is, in reality, just the product of your spacecraft spinning. To imagine that the light on your face is from your home star, and to forget, even if only for a moment, that your sun, the one that made you, is gone. To ignore how many forces just outside the window could knock out those lights, could stop that spinning, could tear a hole in your spacecraft and leave it just another cold, dead object, floating endlessly through space.
To believe you have a destination, one that will welcome you.
To imagine that, soon enough, you will feel like you are home again.
Faith, trust, belief in yourself—there would be no crossing the local arm of your galaxy without it.
And yet: no matter how strong your power of imagination is, in this universe, a reminder of the truth, of the odds you are really up against, can arrive at any moment.
“Red alert! All passengers report to your cabins and prep for emergency stasis lockdown. Repeat! Red alert! We are under attack. This is not a drill.”
“Go!”
“Wait!”
Mina gripped Arlo’s hand. She wanted to hug him one last time, but he pushed her hard toward her walkway and leapt onto the staircase that led to his own, thirty flights up.
The elevators had shut down, solar lamps out, only red emergency lights flashing all around.
Mina backed away, her gaze still locked with Arlo’s. How could this be happening? Just a moment ago they’d been standing there in line, smiling, arms around each other, waiting for the next drop shuttle to the surface of Delphi, when the first blasts had rumbled through the Scorpius. Wearing their neoprene bathing suits beneath their clothes for their scheduled turn in the thermal steam baths, so happy to be with each other again after that strange, formless decade in stasis. Everyone around them had been smiling, too, brimming with hope. One interval down, fourteen to go on the way to Aaru-5. Sure, there had been that trouble back at Saturn—most people had accepted that it was some kind of terrorist attack—but that was nearly a light-year ago, far behind them now—
“Mina, GO!” Arlo shouted again. “I’ll be okay.” And with a last look he turned and bounded up the stairs.
“All passengers report immediately—”
Mina fell in with the crowd around her scrambling to get to their compartments. Oh my god. Oh my god. They were going to die. The thought was like a knife slicing through her mind—but no. She had to focus. One thing at a time.
The floor shuddered again, more distant booms of explosions. Parents dragging wailing children, younger people slamming into elderly folks on their hover walkers.
Smash! One of the spherical cable transports tore free and crashed into the wall.
A whump of fire and smoke. Mina was thrown against the wall, her shoulder barking in pain. She shoved herself upright, kept going—
And then a searing, humming sound, a brilliant flash of light and a deafening explosion above her. Screams, alarms, the lightening in her limbs as the ship’s rotation ground to a halt and artificial gravity failed, the roar of wind as air sucked out of core. Mina looked up and saw a giant circular hole with melted edges, debris funneling out of it into the dark void of space.
Arlo’s deck was up there.
People around her stumbling. Her feet losing connection with the floor. She dragged herself along by the railing, slammed the controls to open her compartment door, and tumbled inside and spun and hit the close button.
No response.
Wind howled. Her guitar toppled over, sliding across the floor and smashing against the door frame. She grabbed the manual handle, struggling to move it, her head already starting to feel light from the lack of oxygen—
The door slammed shut.
What about Arlo??
No time. Not now. As Mina shoved herself toward her pod, she performed that special talent: He’ll be fine, she told herself. If he made it to his compartment in time. Got into his pod. . . .
And yet, even then, didn’t she know?
Shutting the door had quieted the roar from the core somewhat, and now Mina heard the urgent announcement flooding her compartment:
“Core integrity failure. All passengers prepare for stasis pod ejection.”
They were shooting her off into space! How would she survive? It’s okay, the pods have life support systems. She knew this from the on-board orientation. You could be in space for months, years even. . . . Or forever.
Mina changed into her thermal wear, scrambled over the side of her pod, beside three others that were closed and dark—where was Liam? Where were her parents? Would they ever find out what had happened to her? She was going to die in space, she—
Come on!
She fumbled with the wires for the muscle stimulators, attaching them at her wrists and ankles. Another deep rumble and the red lights in the room died out, along with the warning voice. Only the mellow amber light from inside the pod remained. But beyond, tearing and crunching sounds, now a shriek as the door itself began to curl up from the floor, being ripped out into the depressurizing core.
GO!
Mina held the fluid line with trembling fingers, trying to press it into the port that had been surgically implanted in her forearm. Faster! The rumbling and tearing getting louder, like a wave. She finally secured the line, buckled herself in and slammed her fist against the power button.
Screaming wind. As she lay back, she saw the door frame peeling apart, the whoosh of everything sucking away—
The pod sealed shut. All those terrible sounds distant, just the hiss of the stasis gas and beneath that, the thundering of her heart.
“Pod evacuation system engaged. Launch in three, two, one . . .”
A whine and a crash, a blur and a shove and a flash of thrusters—
But everything around her was fading away, the stasis gas pulling her under. The last thing Mina saw, through foggy vision, was the side of the starliner core, alight in flashes of ejecting pods, and then the dark of space, stars everywhere, and bursts of light, explosions in the sudden silence, a brief glimpse of the shadow-blue world of Delphi.
Please find me, she thought. Arlo . . . Liam . . . Mom and Dad . . . Please be okay. . . .
EARTH YEAR: 2223
DISTANCE FROM DELPHI: 9.3 BILLION KM
The core is tearing apart, but Mina doesn’t make it to her room, is instead sucked away, arms and legs pinwheeling, through the gaping hole in the starliner core and out into the darkness and cold, breath getting tight as she reaches in vain for the ship, as she freezes—
“Miss, please lie back,” a voice said, as if from a far distance.
Forms in a brightening fog. Movement. Faces . . .
“This is just a routine check of your vitals and your
pod. Assuming all is well, we’ll be putting you right back in stasis.” The voice sounded closer now. Beyond it was a babble of sounds: other voices, machinery, someone wailing.
Mina blinked and saw the crisscrossing beams of a ceiling far above. The outlines of ships in the corners of her vision. A blurry silhouette beside her.
Frantic, terrified shouting somewhere nearby. The urgent beeping of a grav lifter.
“Where are we?” Mina asked, not even sure the words had left her lips.
“Four days out from Delphi,” said an older woman’s voice. Mina blinked and saw a medic leaning over the side of her pod. She was pressing a bio scanner to Mina’s arm. “Your pod was salvaged from space after Core Three was destroyed. We’re en route to Destina, the emergency rendezvous location near the fourth waypoint, at Centauri B. Hopefully, the rest of the fleet can interpret the few transmissions we were able to send before comms went down, and meet us there.” She moved the scanner to Mina’s forehead.
Mina pushed herself up onto her elbows and saw that she was in a hangar. The huge space was dimly lit, only a few of the light banks glowing, maybe to save power. There were hundreds of other pods interspersed among the smaller ships, making haphazard aisles. Most were closed, while teams of medical personnel hovered over open ones here and there. The moaning, wailing, and questions were coming from these open pods, the voices echoing.
Mina winced at a dull throbbing pain in her head.
“Headache, some nausea, muscle cramps,” said the medic, “all normal symptoms of the rapid stasis procedure you went through when evacuating.”
I was in space, she remembered, like it was a dream. But they’d found her. And yet, looking around the hangar, that couldn’t have been the case for everyone else who ejected. There were far too few pods. “Who attacked us?”
“That is unknown at this time,” said the medic. “It was a single ship, but with advanced capabilities and weaponry unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”
“More like didn’t even think was theoretically possible,” said a younger man, a medical assistant, who was standing behind the medic, busily swiping a large tablet screen. “And those reports from the one ship of survivors who escaped the surface of Delphi? About the enemy soldiers’ faces?”
“None of that is confirmed,” scolded the medic.
“Are you saying they weren’t terrorists?” said Mina.
“We don’t think they were human at all,” said the assistant.
The medic frowned at him.
“Where are they now?” Mina asked.
“We don’t know.”
“Are they attacking other ships in the fleet?” Mina thought of her grandparents, asleep on the Starliner Osiris, not to mention countless other friends and acquaintances scattered throughout the fleet.
“We can’t be sure. We have almost no information from the other starliners.” The medic put away her scanner and started tapping at the control screen on Mina’s pod. “If they’d wanted, they probably could have destroyed the whole ship, but they broke off the attack almost right after it began. Knocked out the refueling station, disabled our comms, and destroyed Core Three, and then just . . . vanished.”
“But why? They—”
“You’ll receive a full debriefing when we reach Destina,” said the medic. “For the moment, we have thousands more pods to check and clear, and a thousand more injuries throughout the ship. The best thing you can do is let us get you back into stasis.”
The medic held her link close to Mina’s pod controls, her fingers moving from one to the other. She noticed Mina’s gaze. “We’re updating the software protocols for the upcoming journey. There we go.” She shuffled through a shoulder bag, turned back to Mina, and held out a foil packet. “Eat this while your pod is rebooting. It’s slow fuel with an extra vitamin and electrolyte concentrate. It’s a thirty-three-year trip to Destina.”
“Thirty-three . . .” Mina’s heart started to race. “Is that even safe?”
The medic smiled darkly. “None of this is safe anymore.” She stood.
There was a clunking sound beside them. Two zebra-striped bots had activated the magnetic levitation system on the stasis pod next to hers and were pushing it toward a large lifter with a stack of pods. Mina realized she would soon be just another body in that stack, and a shudder racked her body. Suddenly the walls of the pod were too narrow, the space too cramped.
“Here, take this too,” said the medic. She held out a lozenge. “It’s a relaxant.”
Mina nodded and let the medic put it on her tongue.
“As soon as the reboot is complete, please reengage stasis so we can get you safely stored. I know all this is overwhelming, but take my word for it, you’re one of the lucky ones. If all goes well, we’ll see you in a blink.” The medic motioned to her assistant and they turned toward the next pod.
One of the lucky ones . . . Mina couldn’t avoid the dark, painful cloud any longer. “Wait. I need to know . . . one of the passengers from Core Three. If he made it . . . Arlo Breton.”
The medic frowned. “Family?”
“No, my boyfriend, but we’d been together over a year,” she added, as if she needed to justify the terrible hammering of her heart.
The medic glanced at the assistant. “Check the manifest.”
He ran his finger over his tablet, frowned, loaded another screen. . . . “I’m sorry.”
Mina’s breath hitched with fresh tears.
“If you want,” said the medic, “there’s been an impromptu memorial set up.” She motioned toward the far end of the hangar. Through the gaps between ships and landing gear, Mina saw an area of wavering golden light, a few silhouettes in front of it. A wide spread of electric candles, video clips blinking from portable frames here and there.
“I can light a candle for him there,” the medic added, “if you want.”
“Thank you.” She shuddered, her breath halting in her throat, and fought back the oncoming tears. “One more thing . . . my parents and brother, they were in a ship that was en route to Delphi, behind us, a Cosmic Cruiser. Is there any way to find out if they’ve caught up, or been in contact, or—”
The medic shook her head. “Like I said, comms were completely knocked out in the attack. We’re flying blind. I know all this is difficult. We all lost people back there . . .” A shadow crossed over her face. The assistant looked at the floor, blinking at tears.
“I understand.”
There was a beep from the pod controls and the medic stood. “Your settings are all ready. Stimulators are engaged, fluid line in. So, just eat your slow fuel and engage stasis. All right?”
Mina nodded, her throat tightening, a hole tearing open inside her, all her hope sucking out—NO. Arlo might be gone, but she wasn’t giving up on her family yet.
As the medic walked away, Mina gulped down the pasty, bland slow fuel, but then instead of lying back down, she checked her link. She scrolled through her apps and opened a special one that Shawn’s dad, Wesley, had designed for her as they were leaving Saturn, after they’d sent a link through space for Liam to pick up. A fresh flash of worry: Had Shawn and Wesley made it? Or were they lost too? She should have asked. . . .
The app opened. It used her link’s light sensor to monitor the blinking of Mina’s necklace: a silver chain that held a slim rectangular pendant with a rounded, green glass button at the end. Liam wore its twin around his neck. The necklaces were paired radio beacons, and Mina and Liam had been communicating with tap code, a laborious but effective method of using flashes of light to send messages, one letter at a time. The beacons were made of such retro technology that they did not save the messages they received, simply blinked in real time. This was part of what was supposed to make them cool, and why Mina had gotten the pair to share with Arlo. Just so they could blink at each other now and then, when they were on each other’s minds—oh, Arlo . . . She’d given one to Liam just for the day on Mars, to test them out while she was on the Scorpius and
he was stuck at the research station, never imagining that it would be her only link to her family across the galaxy.
When Mina had awakened at Delphi, before the attack, she’d found nine messages recorded by the app. The first ones had been from over six years earlier, as Liam was refueling. He’d said their parents were doing all right, and that their ship was steadily catching up to the Scorpius but also having trouble with their navigation systems—apparently they kept drifting ever so slightly off course for some reason—so they kept having to refuel. They were still going to make it to Delphi, but not until the fourth day after the Scorpius arrived.
His most recent message had been from about three months ago:
hi
If the Scorpius was four days out from Delphi, Liam and their parents should be arriving there at any moment. If the enemy ship—the alien enemy? Was that actually possible?—had really broken off its attack almost immediately, then her family might be safe. And yet what would they make of the wreckage? And would they even know where to go next?
“Miss . . .” Mina looked up to see the two bots approaching her pod. “Please engage stasis so that we may load you.”
“One sec.”
Mina pulled up the tap code key and began quickly tapping a message to Liam.
we’ve been attacked, she wrote, painstakingly, letter by letter.
heading for destina
It occurred to her that if the Cosmic Cruiser’s long-range comms were also still down, as Liam had reported back at Saturn, they might not even know where Destina was.
near the fourth waypoint, second planet of centauri b
hurry
“Miss, please.” The bots had positioned themselves at either end of her pod. “We need to get this deck clear in case we have to scramble our military craft. It’s for your safety.”
“Okay.” Mina kept watching the beacon. Come on . . . How long would it take her message to get back to Delphi? Was Liam even out of stasis yet? As she watched, she pulled off the necklace and hung it from a small hook that Wesley had attached to the inside lip of her pod. She’d forgotten to do this in the rush back at Delphi. Once the beacon was hung, she snapped the silver casing off its rectangular body, revealing its delicate circuit board. Then she slid her link off her wrist and secured it with a strap to the opposite side of the pod, so that the link and the necklace were across from each other.
The Shores Beyond Time Page 3