The Final Dawn

by T W M Ashford

  The corrosive slug had passed through the photograph on its way to his flesh. Amber's smiling face had been completely burned from the picture, as had most of Jack. Plenty of the stunning coastline remained, but beyond that the photograph was nothing but a black, curling crisp.

  "I'm sorry," said Tuner.

  "How is this happening?" asked Jack, raising his voice. "Seriously – how is this happening to me?"

  "Don't worry," said Tuner. "You'll get back to Earth and—"

  "No I won't!" Jack's voice broke as it grew even louder. "I have no idea where the hell I am, or where I'm going! And if you guys won't help me find Earth, why in this godforsaken galaxy will anyone else?"

  He waved the burned photograph in Tuner's face.

  "This is all I have of her, do you understand?" Tears rolled down his face, though he wouldn't realise he was crying until afterwards. "If I don't get back home, then this is all I have. And now it's gone."

  He laid back down on the bunk and covered his face with his hands.

  "I never should have agreed to that damn experiment,” he said. "And I never should have got myself mixed up in everyone else's mess."

  Tuner bowed his head again.

  "Jack…"

  "Go away, Tuner." He didn’t remove his hands from his face. "Please. I just want to be left alone."

  Tuner watched Jack lie there for a moment longer, and then slunk off towards the door.

  The door opened again a few minutes later.

  "I told you before, Tuner," said Jack, sitting up. "I'm not in the mood to see anyone right now."

  He craned his neck, but he couldn't see anybody standing in the doorway. When the door hissed shut again, he relaxed.

  Then he heard the sound of miniature tank treads rolling across the metal floor.

  He peered over the side of the bunk and saw Kansas approach the small dresser to the right of him. It was carrying a small metal bowl.

  "Erm, hello?"

  Kansas came to a stop. It lifted the bowl up onto the top of the dresser using a pair of thin, retractable arms extended from within its cylindrical body.

  "In case you're hungry," it said in a small, timid voice. A circle of lights flashed around the top of its head. "Hopefully you like it better than the stuff you ate from that tin."

  "Oh. Thank you."

  "You're welcome."

  He watched as Kansas trundled back out of the room. The door opened and shut behind it.

  With immense suspicion, he turned his head towards the bowl.

  He counted nine golden-orange cubes inside. They were perfectly diced, as if prepared by somebody who believes that sustenance ought to follow a strict mathematical formula. They also looked incredibly juicy.

  His stomach growled just looking at them.

  Ah, what the hell. He'd survived being shot by a bounty hunter. He couldn't back down from a bit of fruit.

  He picked up a cube and gently squeezed it. It had a light, spongey texture. He gave it a quick sniff. It smelled citrusy.

  He popped it into his mouth.

  For the first half a second, Jack wasn't sure what to make of it. After that, he was certain it was one of the best things he'd ever tasted in his life.

  It was as if somebody had married together the genes of a mango, a passionfruit, a clementine and – bizarrely – an angel cake, resulting in a beautiful Frankenstein fruit that dissolved like sherbet upon his tongue.

  He devoured all nine cubes in less than a minute and, much to his surprise, found his hunger immediately quenched. Not long after that, he noticed the pain in his chest had grown a little less intense, too.

  He wondered if the fruit carried medicinal qualities as well as a perfect flavour. His hysterical urge to trash his quarters had certainly diminished since eating it.

  There was no point in getting upset or angry. Neither would he get any closer to re-discovering Earth by lying on his bunk feeling sorry for himself. Losing the photograph may have been heartbreaking, but it changed nothing.

  It certainly didn't make getting back home any less urgent.

  That said, he’d been indebted to the automata ever since they saved his life. They needed his help if they were to ever make it to Detri. He'd saved them on Haldeir-B, and now their fates were tied… whether Jack liked it or not.

  It was simple, really.

  The best way to get back home was to help the automata find a new one.

  15

  The Ceros Gate

  The second time Jack woke up in his quarters – having deliberately fallen asleep this time, and having suffered no nightmares of despotic suns – the stars were back outside his window.

  The Adeona had exited subspace.

  He sat up on his bunk and marvelled at how much better his chest felt already. A dull ache still lingered, but he could hardly believe he'd been shot only a few hours before. If it weren't for the nasty scar above his heart, he may well have chalked it all up as another bad dream.

  The arms of his spacesuit had been left propped up against the dresser following his operation. Jack pulled them over each arm and twisted them into position. He felt like he was wearing the spacefaring equivalent of a tank top without them.

  He stood up, picked up the empty bowl, and carried it out to the pantry. When he found the pantry deserted, he headed for the cockpit instead.

  All of the automata were crowded around the consoles and hologram table, bickering over what to do. A number of them looked up as Jack entered. 11-P-53 gave him a respectful nod.

  "Feeling better?" asked Rogan, giving him a dry, amused smile.

  "Much." Jack leaned against one of the terminals. "What was in that fruit?"

  "You mean the kwagua berry," she replied, nodding. "It's native to the Kw'ek system. The locals grow them for their hallucinogenic qualities, but for most other species, they make for a great painkiller."

  Tuner peeked out from behind the other side of the hologram table.

  "How you doing, buddy?" Jack raised his hand.

  Tuner enthusiastically waved back.

  "So, what's the holdup?" asked Jack. "We've stopped, haven't we?"

  "No holdup." 11-P-53 pointed out the cockpit's windows. "We're here."

  Before the Adeona lay a new star system, one more claustrophobic than Jack ever thought possible. All the planets were within visible distance of one another, orbiting a pale blue sun that could have been no bigger than Jupiter. In the middle of it all, half in black silhouette and half cast in shimmering silver-blue by the geriatric sun, was an enormous space station shaped like a stretched-out spinning top. Scores of tiny drones spread out from the station in every direction and at seemingly infinite length, linking together to form a faint, flickering, golden forcefield.

  "Here?" asked Jack, turning back to the automata. "Where's here?"

  "The Ceros system." Tuner pointed at the forcefield. "And that golden monstrosity is the Ceros Gate."

  "Why in God's name is everything behind it so… cramped?"

  "It didn't use to be." Rogan brought up a flickering blue diagram of a more regular-looking solar system on her hologram table. "Not until the Negoti Corporation bought it a couple decades back. The system has no species of advanced intelligence, but the planets themselves are unusually rich with minerals – Somnium crystals in particular. But the planets were also very far apart from one another, and the levels of fuel required to bring the unrefined ore to the central processing facility would have dug deep into the company's profits. So the Negoti Corporation cut costs by bringing them all closer together."

  "What? How?"

  "By dropping artificial gravity wells around the star," continued Rogan. The holographic diagram changed to illustrate the trajectory for each of the eleven planets, all spiralling inward towards the centre of the solar system. "It took about a year for the planets to get as close to one another as they are today, by which point the wells had drained most of the sun's energy too. Which was good for Negoti, as a larger star might
have devoured the very planets they were trying to mine."

  Jack looked back out at the planets and asteroids and swarms of spacecraft, all busying around the space station like particles around an atom's nucleus. He shook his head in disbelief.

  "They can do that?"

  Rogan smirked.

  "You won't believe what people can do with a star these days," she said.

  Jack smiled in excitement. They could change the size of a sun – maybe they could fix a dying one, too.

  Then his expression of wonder transformed into one of concerned puzzlement.

  "Wait, did you say Ceros? Isn't that the star system you said you needed clearance codes for?"

  "The one and the same," replied 11-P-53.

  "Sorry, am I missing something?" Jack shot a quick glance at Rogan. "You don't have the codes… do you?"

  She went to reply, but 11-P-53 got there first.

  "No, we don't. But we don't have enough fuel to change course, either. If we're to reach Detri, we have to continue through Ceros as planned."

  11-P-53 tilted its head as if daring Jack to argue. He didn't.

  "Okay. So what is the plan?"

  "We were just ironing out the last few wrinkles when you joined us." 11-P-53 gestured for Tuner to step forward and explain.

  "The Adeona is a mining vessel, right?" said Tuner, wandering around from the other side of the hologram table. "She might not be the same model of ship as the ones that the Negoti Corporation uses, but I reckon she can blend in amongst the crowd for a short while… providing I scramble Negoti's radar signal, that is.

  "Every ship has to pass through the security checkpoint here." Tuner pointed at the space station in the centre of the gargantuan golden forcefield. "Every ship except the cargo trains that carry ore and equipment from one side to the other. They can deactivate sections of the forcefield if they need to. If we're patient we can follow one of them through, bypass the Gate completely, and then skip off into subspace before anyone notices."

  He stood back from the table and looked proud of himself.

  "Okay…" Jack was determined to be as tactful as possible. "That's not too bad a plan. But it sort of presumes a corporation powerful enough to shrink down an entire solar system has installed an access code system that fundamentally doesn't work. Maybe you can keep the ship hidden while we're still far out, but I bet we get swamped with code requests before we're within even a thousand clicks of that forcefield. And even if we do get through, you can be sure there'll be Negoti ships waiting for us on the other side."

  "Jack's got a point," said Rogan. "The Ceros Gate is there to make sure rogue mining vessels can't sneak in and steal Somnium crystals from the planets Negoti has paid for. If anything, being a non-approved mining vessel rather than a civilian ship might make us stand out even more."

  "And maybe I'm wrong about this," said Jack, a little more cautiously, "but doesn't the skip drive boot you out of subspace if you come too close to an object of large mass? Isn't that what you told me, Tuner?"

  Tuner nodded, a little embarrassed.

  "How would we jump to subspace then?" Jack pointed at the cluster of planets outside the cockpit's windows. "Look at that mess. There's barely a spot on the other side that isn't a large mass."

  "Another good point," said Brackitt, spinning around in his chair up front. "The only clear path into subspace is directly on the other side of that security checkpoint. If we sneak through anywhere else on the Gate, we'll still have to go around the planets before we can make the jump."

  11-P-53 tapped its metal foot, clearly irritated.

  "Like I said, there are still a few details we need to work through."

  Everyone fell silent, thinking.

  "Are we safe, floating around out here?" asked Jack, after a while.

  "We're outside the range of their scanners," replied Brackitt, nodding. "Since they shrunk the star system, we're not technically trespassing into its heliosphere. Yet."

  More silent thinking.

  "What's this Negoti Corporation like?" asked Jack, squinting out the windows. "Any chance they might be sympathetic enough to turn a blind eye?"

  11-P-53 laughed. This time it was Rogan who answered.

  "The Negoti Corporation is one of the most powerful and profitable companies in the whole galaxy," she replied. "They're run by the Ghuk, for the most part. Nasty insect humanoids with limited emotional range. And they didn't get where they are today without being just as reliant on automata to pad out their workforce as everyone else."

  "So that's a no, then?"

  "Unless everyone here wants to spend the rest of their life cracking rocks, that is indeed a no."

  "So what do we do?" asked Tuner. "We can't wait here forever."

  "We go ahead with the original plan," said 11-P-53, boldly marching over to the captain's chair. "We'll be gone before they even know we're here."

  "Wait." Jack darted to the hologram table. "Rogan, can you bring up a map of the Ceros system as it looks right now?"

  "This is the most up-to-date one we have," she replied. The hologram changed to reflect the scene outside the windows. She enlarged the image with a sweep of her hand. "It should be reasonably accurate. The planets don't have much of an orbit anymore."

  "What are you looking for?" asked Tuner.

  "So we have to go through this system, right?" said Jack, circling the table. "The Gate is too wide to go around. Yet if we try our luck at the checkpoint, Negoti will either send us back or shoot us down. So what we need is a backdoor or shortcut of some kind – a route that's short enough for our limited fuel reserves, keeps us clear of their radars, and gives us a clean shot into subspace once we're on the other side. Come on, guys. There has to be something."

  Everyone studied the map without much luck.

  "This is a waste of time." 11-P-53 crossed its arms. "I don't see anything."

  "How about through there?" Tuner pointed at a planet not too far from the central station. Unlike the other planets lurking safely behind the Ceros gate, its decayed orbit had left it floating halfway through the forcefield. "Aside from a few dozen patrol ships, it looks mostly unguarded. And there's not too much blocking our way out once we're on the other side, either. I know it's a bit close to the security checkpoint, but…"

  Rogan zoomed in further. As the image grew more detailed, Jack began to suspect that it wasn't a planet at all, but rather a tight cluster of asteroids. Then, with a dawning sense of both awe and horror, he realised it was a planet – one cracked into hundreds of thousands of chunks, from rocks no greater than a car to a few the size of whole continents.

  "What happened to it?" asked Jack, appalled.

  "Negoti blew it apart," said Rogan. "It's the easiest way to get to the precious minerals near the core. There were thirteen planets before they bought the place."

  She spun the hologram around and shook her head.

  "This won't work. That forcefield is super tight. It won't have left any gaps around the surface of the planet."

  "No, not around the planet. Through it." Tuner shrugged innocently. "Hey, you said you wanted to find the shortest route from here to the other side of the Gate. There won't be any forcefield on the inside."

  Everyone took a closer look at the chasms and cracks between floating chunks of dead planet. It was a dark and deadly labyrinth.

  "You realise those pieces won't be stationary in real life, right?" said Rogan. "They'll be moving in and out, creating new passages and destroying others. Even while they're open, some of those gaps won't be much wider than the Adeona."

  "She won't be able to plot a course for herself, either." Brackitt shook his head. "Her nav systems are fried and the terrain is too unpredictable. Somebody would have to fly her through manually."

  "No way." 11-P-53 shook its head. "I can't do it. Besides, it's too reckless. I won't endanger my crew like that."

  "I'll do it," said Jack, quietly.

  Everyone turned to look at him.
/>   "I can do it," he said, a little louder despite his dry throat. "I trained as a pilot before I became an engineer. Did hundreds of simulations, a few of which involved flying heavy supply ships through some pretty tight gullies."

  "Simulations?" asked 11-P-53. "No actual flights?"

  Jack shrugged. His face turned red.

  "If I don't crash, what's the difference?"

  "What's the difference?" 11-P-53 threw its arms in the air. "What's the difference? You haven't even been in space before, let alone flown through it!"

  "She wants him to do it," said Brackitt.

  Jack and 11-P-53 stopped bickering and turned to face him. So did all the other automata. Brackitt cradled the cable running from his head to the ship's dashboard in his hand.

  "Sorry, what?" asked Jack.

  "The Adeona – she says she wants you to fly her," said Brackitt, shrugging. "She thinks you have what it takes."

  11-P-53 went as if to protest, then thought better of it.

  "Well it's her choice, I suppose," it said, shaking its head. "Is everyone else okay with a fleshy taking control of the ship?"

  One by one, all of the automata nodded or bleeped in the affirmative.

  "Then she's all yours," said 11-P-53, disappointedly gesturing to the captain's chair.

  Jack took a deep breath to steady himself, suddenly aware that everyone's eyes (or lenses, or diodes) were boring into him. The expectant automata backed away from the hologram table, clearing a path to the front of the ship.

  Jack glanced over at Rogan as he walked down the steps. She gave him a subtle, reassuring nod. Tuner stood by her side, looking up at him with quiet, excited apprehension.

  He lowered himself into the captain's chair. The leather was thick and heavily cushioned. It was designed for a species slightly larger than a human, yet its soft padding settled to fit the contours of his body. He felt almost cradled within its curved, half-eggshell-shaped frame. It was surprisingly comfortable.

  "Be careful with her," said Brackitt, leaning across. "I think she has a crush on you."

  "What, the ship?"