“How do you know about this planet?” Shakti demanded over the audio.
“I found it last week while I was looking for places we could use for refuge in case it ever came down to it,” She explained. “It was about as far out as anything I’ve ever seen and the reports suggested the planet was too far away to be of use to anyone. I don’t see as what we have to lose right now. In most cases, the power needed to pump the Schrodinger drive would be too much. But if we channel the blast from the nukes just right, it can give us what we need.”
Shakti glanced back at the display floating in front of her. Wasp attack ships were in formation from several different planes. The only reason they were still alive was the wasps wanted to take the ship intact. With the Schrodinger drive on board, it would be a sweet prize.
“Kamala, start the detonation procedure on the nukes,” Shakti ordered. “We don’t need to launch the torpedoes and….”
“I’m on it already,” Kamala responded. “We have five minutes and then every one of those nukes will blow.”
The warbrides unsnapped themselves from their acceleration chairs and grabbed what they could carry to the shuttles. As Shakti gave orders, the other women finished the final preparations for the last effort they would make against the wasps.
“Bravi and Dharma are with me,” Chimata announced. “You and Kamala have the other shuttle. We need to get there quick.”
Once outside the command center, the rotational nature of the Widowmaker took over and they were back in a simulated gravity field. They quickly grabbed their weapons and ran down the corridors to the shuttle launch area while the timer inside their helmets began the nuke countdown. They ran as hard as they could while the counter numbers began to dip.
A few minutes later, a message popped up on the communication display of her helmet and Shakti laughed as she ran in front of the other women.
“What’s so funny?” Kamala, a few steps behind her, demanded. The sound of their boots echoed through the corridor even though they could only hear it through the exterior audio feed into the helmets.
“Last message from the war college,” Shakti gasped. “Our husband has called us traitors. He ordered the fleet to kill us on sight.”
“A least he didn’t call us whores,” Bravi wheezed through the filtered suit air. She hated those armored suits.
Chimata took the left set of doors and punched in the code as her co-wives stopped to catch their breath. Shakti opened the doors on her side with another set of codes. The moment they were open, each group jumped inside their respective shuttles.
“See you when we arrive,” Chimata transmitted to Shakti the moment she was in her shuttle.
“Does this place we’re going to have a name?” Shakti transmitted to the little pilot. She and Kamala locked down their weapons and strapped themselves into the acceleration chairs.
“No,” Chimata sent back. “Guess we get to name it. All the coordinates are in your database. So is the procedure for the jump.”
“You took care of the Schrodinger generator?” Shakti asked.
“No, I did,” it was Bravi. “Just detach and wait. The generators will punch us through to the other side a microsecond before the nukes…”
There was a brilliant flash of light from the other side as the nuclear torpedo heads detonated at the same time. Shakti felt the shift and disorientation from the drive, but this time it was a little different. She felt her entire level of perception spin out of control as the shuttle made the jump and folded space behind it. This time there would be no return journey. From the figures she saw in front of her, the shuttle had enough fuel to make planet fall on this new green world if they came out close enough. Self-aware life had never been found before in the universe before the wasps arrived; perhaps they would discover it on the new world.
She could see herself inside the cabin of the shuttle as it was sent into the void and across the abyss of space. Matter folded behind them. She saw Kamala shift as the entire cabin began to distort. In theory, this shouldn’t happen. In theory, she shouldn’t be able to see anything after the generator kicked into power. But this time they were outside the vehicle where the generator had activated a microsecond before the nukes detonated. Kamala thought about the way she’d rigged the nukes to explode: in a series so they would have the maximum effect. They still had one thermonuclear torpedo on board the Widowmaker and she’d sequenced them all. The bombs would both destroy as much of the wasp fleet as possible and push them toward the green planet on the other side of the universe.
They both watched in the form of disembodied entities as small suns erupt inside the wasp fleet under construction. The small suns merged into a bigger one. The ball of light spread out and swallowed the wasp attack ships, which were supposed to capture the Widowmaker intact and the Schrodinger generator with it. The sun bloomed across the fleet and vaporized most of it before it was completed. They watched the energy generated by the explosion reach the Widowmaker and push them into the bubble formed from the fabric of space.
They saw the other shuttle move one fraction of a second in the wrong direction. They realized their co-wives were finished and there was nothing they could do about it. A great sensation of sadness swept over them as the material form of Bravi, Chimata and Dharma were reduced to atoms as the pulse from the explosion reached their shuttle. They realized only one shuttle could make it across the void to the green planet. Chimata had made a calculation based on her figures that two shuttles stood a better chance of making the jump than one. She didn’t know which shuttle could do it, but saw no other way for any of them to survive.
In the last second of eternity, Chimata, and the warbrides with her, wished them luck on the new world. They made Shakti and Kamala promise to protect the planet should they reach it. It was far away from both the wasps and the empire. Much further than Chimata had told Shakti and the others. If nothing else, the new world might someday find the remains of a shuttle from another civilization. Then they would know they were not alone in the universe, even if there were alien, intelligences out there that would do them harm.
The individual realities of Chimata and Kamala separated and they knew no more.
Chapter 16
The planet lay before them. It wasn’t exactly green as they expected. Shakti spent hours watching it turn in the low orbit she selected for the shuttle after they came out of the jump. Kamala hadn’t said much to her. Something the nukes had sent them across the universe and briefly mixed their souls together until they separated again. For a moment in eternity, they were one consciousness and watched the vaporization of the other shuttle. Chimata was right. Only one shuttle would make it across the galaxy on the one-way voyage to the green planet. It hadn’t been her shuttle, but at least some of the warbrides survived.
“Do you think they know we are here?”
“I doubt it,” Shakti responded to Kamala’s question. “We’d have received some form of communication from them if they did.”
They had returned to consciousness hours after the shuttle made the jump. Shakti turned to Kamala and stared at her for a long time. Kamala did the same thing too, since they now had each other’s personal knowledge. It was a terrifying thing to know someone else knew your every secret. However, there wasn’t much they could do about it and the important thing was to reach the new world. It meant they could anticipate each other’s moves, so there was little need to discuss anything.
The Schrodinger generator had dropped the shuttle two hundred thousand miles from the new planet. It was a small green and blue world, much like the ancestral home world of Terra. The shuttle had enough fuel to reach the planet, but just barely. It wasn’t designed to make planet fall, but it could in an emergency. In any case, this was going to be a single trip.
“What have you been doing?” Kamala asked Shakti when she woke after a very bad dream. She could still see the faces of her co-wives in her sleep and doubted they would ever leave her.
�
��Watching the planet’s activity,” Shakti told her. “They look just like us, but they don’t have much in the way of technology. I’ve found a way to monitor their transmissions. Let me bring them up on a display.”
A flat panel formed in the space over their heads, Kamala watched as grey men, and women in strange clothes went about their daily lives. They appeared to resemble the humans left behind in the empire, which wasn’t a surprise since the planet was optimized for them. No one knew the extent of the planets terraformed by the First Empire. No one knew where they’d originated either.
“Do you think this could be home?” Kamala asked her. “The place where humanity began?”
“If it is, they’ve lost a lot since the First Empire,” Shakti pointed out to her. “Look at this, barely able to send images with electromagnetic radiation and most of what they show is crude. I don’t think they’ve even developed space travel.”
It took them another week at the slow electrostatic engine speed to reach the planet’s orbit. Kamala was sick of free-fall by the time they arrived. Shakti spent most of her time in observation of the transmissions from the planet and identified several language groups by the time the shuttle was parked over the planet. The computers on board the shuttle weren’t designed to do much in the way of field surveys. She was forced to adapt the reconnaissance part of them to gather information from the planet.
“What about diseases?” Kamala asked her. “We don’t have any natural resistance to the bugs on that planet.”
“True,” Shakti responded, “but the bugs won’t know what we taste like either. I don’t expect we’ll suffer from much. And you have to remember, we really don’t have any other place to go.”
“No argument there. Have you seen much in the way of war and violence on the surface? Anything we need to watch out for when we land?”
“We’re in for a real treat. They’ve just finished some kind of major conflict down there. Pretty bad one too, from what I can tell. I can’t make much of the local languages out on the surface, but I should have some basic phrases down in a few days. I’ve already found us a place to land where we won’t attract much attention. It’s near a lake in the mountains.”
“You sure that is such a good idea?” Kamala asked her. “We need flat land to coast to a stop. Can’t you find us a desert someplace?”
“Too many people around those places. Plus, where will we hide the shuttle once we land? You have to figure we’ll be obvious. Our best bet is to land in a lake and sink it. We can come back for the shuttle later once we’ve figured out how we’ll fit into this new world.”
“If we do,” Kamala countered. “There are many races down there, but they don’t seem to mix very much. I don’t know if you’ve checked a mirror lately, but we don’t look very much like them.”
“We’ll worry about it when we get down there,” Shakti told her. “No matter what we plan, it will all change the moment we reach the surface.”
They decided it would be best to split up if they reached an area where one racial group dominated over another one. In the empire, there were many racial types and mixtures, but everyone tolerated each other because the emperor was supreme. It hadn’t always been that way and there were stories in the official histories of entire planets destroyed because they appeared different from their neighbors. The same situation could exist on the world they were about to reach.
As for linking back up, they could find a way to reestablish contact when needed. They were survivors if nothing else. Both of them knew how to thrive in hostile environments. Now they could use the memories of each other. They had no idea what to expect when they made planet fall, but both of them assumed the worst.
Two standard days later, they were over the planet in a low orbit when Shakti decided it was time to descend.
“We’re going to make for this lake,” she told Kamala, as Shakti pointed to a symbol on the display. “It’s in a crater left over from a meteorite collision thousands of years ago. It’s filled with water. The lake is remote enough that no one will notice us land. I’ll skip across the atmosphere and make for it. If we skid just right, the water will break our landing and we’ll be fine. Then we can take the raft and make for the shore.”
“It sounds so easy,” Kamala commented as she buckled herself into the chair. She already had her suit armor on and helmet in place. “Why don’t I feel better?”
“I won’t feel better until we’re down there. At least they don’t have a lot of air traffic to interfere with our descent. I’ve haven’t noticed anything flying over the crater, so we should be alright.”
Shakti fed the information into the guidance system on the shuttle and felt the small craft change position as it began the long fall toward the new world. She planned to let it guide the shuttle into the atmosphere and make a controlled fall to keep the outer skin from overheating. Either she or Kamala could override the system if they needed to do so. It was Shakti’s plan to take control of the shuttle the moment she was in range of the crater.
The fall went as planned. They watched the display over their heads as the outside windows were shielded on entry. The display showed the descent as planned. The outer skin heated up, but not too hot, as the shuttle made its final pass over the continent where they planned to land.
The acceleration slowed as they neared the crater. Shakti took over the pilot controls of the shuttle as the crater lake was targeted by the guidance system. They were very close.
It was a good thing she was guiding the shuttle because an aircraft from the planet nearly collided with them.
It came out of a part of the sky they didn’t monitor. Shakti saw it appear on the display and forced the shuttle to bank right. She narrowly missed the craft, but it put their final descent in jeopardy since the course correction would take them far from the lake. With speed, her gloved hands worked at the panel in front of her to find another landing zone.
“What the hell did we almost hit?” Kamala yelled as it vanished from the display.
“I have no idea,” Shakti responded. “I never saw it until it popped up in the display. I deliberately chose this location because the air traffic was non-existent. Now I need to find something else because we don’t have the fuel to make orbit again.”
“Look at that!” Kamal yelled as she pointed at something on the display. “I think it’s big enough. Try for that body of water!”
Lenny was out in his car that night. He liked his new Chevy, it was much better than the Olds he used to drive. The car gave him the opportunity to get out of the house. He didn’t like watching TV that much, even after spending all the money so he could watch the latest Dumont 5-inch screen. He really needed to get a magnifying glass to put over that screen. Ever since the neighborhood learned he had a TV, everyone wanted to come over and see it. Now his house was the center of activity in the neighborhood and he was sick of it.
The car allowed him to indulge in another one of his passions: astronomy. Lenny might be a lowly lab technician at the local government laboratory, but he had ambitions. Years ago, he’d found a magazine on the drug store rack which told him about travel to other planets and rockets to Mars. Then the war came and he had to put away all those dreams so he could kill Nazis. But the war was long gone and the world was supposed to be at peace. Well, “supposed to be” was right. Now the damn commies had the bomb and no one was safe.
He had his telescope balanced on the roof of his car. Was that Mars or Venus? Probably neither, he needed to get a better lens. It might be Jupiter for all he knew. He’d left the house in a huff that evening and couldn’t be bothered to go back and get his textbook. He really loved that college astronomy textbook he’d found at the used bookstore, it was the pride of his life and he spent hours at home reading it.
His other passion was concealed under the floor of the car. Lenny found something else at another drugstore in a bad part of town a year ago and it hit him with the speed of a comet. The women in those pictures were
n’t obscene or anything; they had most of their clothes on. It was what they did which made him pant. Here was a magazine that featured women who could act aggressive and powerful. Where did these women come from? There was a contact address in the magazine, but he hadn’t dared to respond to it. Just as soon as he determined which planet was over the reservoir, he would pull out the latest magazine and look at it again. The moon was full tonight and he had the light. Yes, that is what he would do just as soon as he figured out what planet it was that had risen this evening.
He thought about that magazine a lot lately. He had a “good paying job” at the army base in the testing lab, but it was not the same thing as a “good job”, as his father once told him. He went in every day and tested soil samples sent in from a location in the South Pacific. The soil samples were always the same, even though they were taken from different parts of the island. They looked identical to him and he dutifully performed the same twelve tests on them every day. Lenny recorded the information in the lab notebook they gave him on the first day. The sample was there in the morning and more came in during the evening. It was the same every day and never changed.
It didn’t seem his life would end up this way when he was flying in the bomber. Life was so much different in those days during the war. He was sure several times he’d die. Lenny promised himself he’d write that great book if he survived. Every time the plane took off with him in it, he felt as if he was one of those rocket pilots he used to read about in Planet Adventures. He manned a gun on the top of the bomber and imagined the German planes were the advance guard of Heinel the Merciless, the ruler of Jupiter and he the rocket pilot on his way to save the Princess of Earth.
Every time he returned from a mission, Lenny promised himself again he’d start on the book once he returned home. The stories and experiences he had in the war could be changed into space battles. He could write something very impressive, he just knew it. All he had to do was find a publisher and get to New York City.
Angels of Eternity: The Complete Novel Page 22