by Joshua James
You are needed, said The Hate.
And then a voice whispered harshly in his ear. “Your nightmare is just starting.”
27
Dust Off
Lucky jerked his head upright, crashing into the faceplate of Nico leaning over him, and felt his head bang back down.
“Lucky!” said Nico, falling back. “You okay?”
He felt his head bounce hard against the ground again. And again. He couldn’t stop the rattling. His teeth shook, his head shook, his everything shook.
“Stop shaking me, asshole,” he growled.
Nico looked over his shoulder, then back at Lucky. He wasn’t shaking him. Everything around him was shaking him.
“How long—”
“You passed out as we were climbing up. Malby grabbed you.”
Great, now he owed the little asshole.
“What the hell is going on?”
Dawson and Cheeky were bracing themselves against a wall of gray ore. The composition was similar to the rock that seemed to be draped over the outside of the alien ship.
It struck him that the gray ore wasn’t draped over the ship. It was the ship. Maybe he already knew that. Or maybe the scientists did. But he hadn’t really believed it until this moment.
How can a ship be made entirely of rock?
He reached out to the vibrating rock wall beside him. The composition seemed to be overlocking sheets of this banded gray ore. They were fused together, but in such a way that the bands of darker colors that permeated them seemed to flow from one sheet of ore to the next. As if the ore had grown together naturally.
The cavernous space they were in was enormous, at least five-hundred meters in each direction and twice that in height, Lucky guessed. Several pathways led away from it that looked almost like caves thanks to the gray rock composition of the walls.
It was also empty.
At the far end, near the recessed script, were a half-dozen grooved arches spaced evenly across the sheer rock. He glanced at the alien script and sensed they were something like access points to allow whatever was supposed to fit in here easy entry and egress.
How did I know that? Just an educated guess, he told himself.
But it was more than that. Looking at the script had seeded the idea in his mind.
He started to ask Rocky when she echoed him.
“There has been an … incident.”
“You don’t say?” he replied sarcastically.
Rocky didn’t take the bait.
He surveyed the room. Orton and Vlad were huddled together whispering harshly.
“Well, I just had another experiment nightmare. And it was triggered by this ship.”
“You think the experiment was here?”
Lucky looked around.
“No, the symbols are wrong, and the space was even bigger,” he echoed. “But it’s related. Closely related.”
“Yeah. I think the ship knows us. Or me.”
What did that—
Before he could respond, Malby lunged at Orton.
“You said it wasn’t possible!” he screamed, pinning the scientist to the ground.
“It isn’t possible!” rasped Orton.
Jiang and Cheeky were beside Nico.
Lucky was still sitting.
Once again it was left to Dawson to step in and pull Malby back.
Lucky stood shakily, the rumble almost gone now.
“What’s the situation out there?”
No one said anything.
“The nukes. Are the nukes hitting yet? Will this thing hold up?”
Jiang said, “That’s not the concern at the moment.”
He stared at her incredulously. “Oh?”
“You’ve been … out for a few minutes,” she said, looking at him pointedly again. Lucky was sure he’d jumped with her before. She had his number.
Finally, Malby spoke. “We’re no longer on the surface of the planet.”
Lucky whipped his head around so fast it hurt. “What?”
The room was silent. He glanced from face to face.
Orton’s wasn’t beet red for once. It was white as a sheet.
Vlad was staring directly at him. The intensity of the gaze suggested more than a passing glance, but he couldn’t read her expression.
He was about to ask Malby how he knew, then realized the tech specialist was still the only one with some drone net access. He probably had a front-and-center view of—
Of what? Of the multi-billion-year-old ship taking off?
Impossible.
“How—”
“Beats me. But we have positive pressure in here. It’s sealed up.”
“What’s propelling us? Did the aliens leave the tanks half full or something?”
Malby waved in his face. “Hello, asshole. I’m in here with you, idiot. How should I know? That’s what I’m asking the brain trust back here.” He hooked a thumb back at Orton.
The pudgy scientist just shook his head and mumbled to himself.
Then Rocky told him.
“I’m flying the ship, Lucky.”
28
In Charge
“You’re doing what?”
The shock must have registered on his face.
Vlad pointed at Lucky. “It’s you,” she said calmly.
All heads swiveled to look at him.
“I didn’t say anything about it back there because I didn’t see any point in alarming anyone. But when the original landing party got here, they couldn’t figure out how to get in. I knew there would be a way. There always is. But I didn’t know how fast we’d be able to find it.”
Lucky realized what she was saying.
“That ramp. It wasn’t there when the first landing party came here?”
She nodded. “And it wasn’t there when we first got dumped off those ridiculous drones,” she said, motioning skyward. “But it was there when you got here.”
Lucky said, “When we all got here.”
But it was true. He had arrived a full minute after the rest of the Marines.
“You two were nowhere to be found when I got here,” he shot back. “What’s to say you didn’t trigger it somehow? You know,”—he waved his arms—“lean on a lever or something.”
Orton rolled his eyes.
Lucky scowled at him. “Well, it’s either that, or I’m alien magic.”
The Marines looked at each, clearly now uncomfortable.
“Guys? Seriously? Alien magic?” He laughed, holding his hands up in a shrug.
No one else moved or spoke.
“So am I alien magic?” he asked Rocky. “Or are you?”
“A little of both, I think.”
This was the point where jumping with a totally different division on the opposite side of the galaxy was not working in his favor.
Finally, Dawson laughed. “This fucker is a lot of things, but he’s no ship driver. I mean, no offense, but has your AI ever run anything bigger than drones?”
Vlad walked toward him.
Lucky kept his face a mask. He was a decent poker player.
She stopped inches from his face. Her breath was warm on his lips. “As soon as you got here, you passed out and this ship came to life. That is a hell of a coincidence,” she said.
“We have a problem,” said Rocky.
“You mean, other than this bitch in my grill and my AI piloting an ancient alien starship?”
“Yes.” She hesitated. “My understanding is that we are exposed to the nukes as we ascend.”
“It’s your understanding?”
There was a pregnant pause. “The ship told me different.”
Lucky worked overtime on his poker face. Vlad wasn’t backing down.
He turned over Rocky’s statement. It was one thing to say she was flying the ship; it was another to be talking to it.
“So there is an AI on board.”
“Something like an AI.”
“And you’re talking to it.”
&nbs
p; “Easily, yes.”
“You can’t even jack into Union AI traffic without a workaround, but you’re telling me you can just interact with the AI system on a ship that is, what, eight-billion-years-old? And why couldn’t Vlad and her team just jack in the same way?”
“I don’t know.”
Lucky exhaled. He hadn’t realized he was holding his breath. It probably smelled like shit because Vlad stepped back.
He looked around at the others. Despite Dawson’s words, he could tell the room wasn’t with him.
“I’m going to tell them.”
“Do you think that’s a good idea?”
“Do you have a better one?”
Lucky looked at Vlad. “You have it wrong. I’m not in charge.” He glanced at Jiang. “My AI is.”
29
T’ket’ka
Jiang gasped.
“Bullshit,” said Malby.
“I’m not going to explain how, because frankly, I don’t understand how. And I don’t think Rocky does either.”
It was strange to say the name of his AI aloud. It wasn’t something he ever did, or ever heard other augmented Marines do. They would mention their AI copilot in terms of assistance in combat, but beyond that, it wasn’t something that came up in ordinary situations.
As if reading his mind, Malby said, “Who?”
“My AI.”
“You named your AI Rocky?”
It sounded even weirder when Malby said it.
“I’m not a pet! I wasn’t named!” Rocky insisted.
Lucky knew he had an unusual situation with Rocky. But since he spoke of it so seldom, he didn’t know just how unusual.
“What’s yours named?”
Malby looked incredulous. “It doesn’t have a freaking name! It’s my AI. It controls my drones. It feeds me data dumps. It overlays the combat theater. I don’t have chats with it over beer.”
“His loss,” said Rocky.
“Can we not do this now?” said Jiang. “I don’t care what you call your AI. If it is in control, as you say, then where exactly are we going?”
“Good question,” he shot to Rocky.
“Not sure,” she volleyed back.
“That might not go over well with the peanut gallery here.”
Vlad was right back in Lucky’s grill, and he still wasn’t liking that one bit.
“Hang on,” Rocky said.
“What is that supposed to—”
Suddenly the floor shifted dramatically under them. For a split second they all were lifted off the ground and the floor tilted at a sharp angle.
Something in the gravity altered wildly around them, and they were all swung over to match the floor. And then it was level again.
Lucky felt the pit of his stomach jump and stretch. He held back vomit that welled up in his throat.
Orton made no such effort and blew chunks all over Nico, which seemed appropriate.
“We can’t dodge these nukes as we get higher in the atmosphere. We have to do something.”
Lucky sighed. “For the first time in my life, I wish everyone could hear what you are saying.”
He relayed Rocky’s message to Vlad.
In an amazing turn of events, the scientists seemed to have their heads screwed on better than the Marines. Only Jiang had moved past the Rocky revelation.
Vlad frowned and looked back at Orton.
“The T’ket’ka,” he said, as if it was obvious.
Vlad’s eyes got huge. “But I told you—”
“I know what you said. But—”
A tremor went through the ship.
“Another nuke?”
“No, I think the ship … I think the ship was reacting to his suggestion.”
“I assume it isn’t a fan of these T’ket’ka things.”
“Quite the opposite. It doesn’t want to lose any of them.”
Orton was still arguing with Vlad.
“We have more than a dozen,” he said. “We can risk one.”
“We don’t know what it will do! It might kill us all. We might lose everything.”
“Whoa!” said Malby, finally emerging from his daze.
“Whoa is right,” drawled Dawson. “How might it kill us?”
Orton was exasperated. “It’s what we came here for.”
“Orton!” said Vlad.
“It’s the holy grail,” he said, ignoring her. “We’re almost sure of it. It seems to be what the Union is building all their new tech around. It’s a power source of some kind.”
“And it still works?” Jiang asked. “How is that even possible?”
“It’s a perpetual energy source. Undamaged, it cannot be depleted. It’s one of the only things in the universe we are sure would survive a multi-billion-year hibernation.”
He looked at Vlad.
She sighed.
“He’s right,” she said. “It must be what the Union has. We have hypothesized something like this was out there. We just didn’t imagine that the Union would stumble upon it, or know how to use it. We still don’t quite understand how they know what to do with it.” She motioned outside the ship. “It might be what’s behind everything that’s happening to them as well.”
Orton shook his head. “No, that is from the second anomaly,” he said firmly.
This argument was getting old.
Without warning, the ship performed another puke-inducing shift.
Lucky felt as if his internal organs moved a split second after the rest of him. It actually hurt.
Orton puked again. Nico had the good sense not to be next to him this time.
“A little warning, Rocky!”
“Here’s a warning. It’s going to get worse.”
“Bottom line,” Lucky said, trying to compose himself. “What we’re referring to, is …”
He glanced between Vlad and Orton expectantly.
Orton wiped puke off his chin. His hands were trembling. “A form of antimatter is probably the easiest way for you to think of it.”
Even facing death, he was a condescending prick.
“Obviously,” said Lucky.
“Dammit,” said Malby.
Dawson whistled to himself.
“So we have something”—Lucky shook his head—”antimatter-ish on board. How does this help us?”
Rocky answered for him. “We drop it. We destabilize it. We run like hell.”
“But the ship doesn’t want you to do it,” said Lucky. “Why?”
“Beats me. But look, I have drones outside still. Those Union skreamers are going to have a clean shot at us as we crest the atmosphere. As far as I can tell after talking to this thing, it doesn’t have weapons. I’m out of ideas.”
Lucky relayed the message to the group.
Orton nodded. He was on the ground and wasn’t getting up. “Do it.”
Vlad looked like she was going to be sick too, but it wasn’t the motion.
Of the two of them, Lucky suspected she was the one with her neck on the line. The Empire had something bad in store for her if she didn’t deliver on some weaponizeable tech. That was how the Empire played this game.
“You get that, Rocky? It sounds like you’re good to go.”
“Oh good,” she replied. “I did it two minutes ago.”
30
Trouble
“It’s dropping with a drone following. It’s going to shoot it when we get some distance from it.”
“How big is it?” Lucky imagined a huge object composed of the same rock ore as the ship.
Rocky showed him an image of a smooth pearl-white sphere, no more than fifty-centimeters across.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it,” she said. “The ship AI tells me it should be quite a show.”
Lucky jerked his head up. “Hey, Tech Specialists. You still got orbitals?”
Malby shook his head, then stopped. “Wait, yeah,” he said. “Now that we’re nearing space, I see maybe,”—he paused, eyes unfocused—“two hal
f-functional. Nothing weaponized.”
“Can you get us visuals?”
Malby frowned.
A moment later, Rocky had pumped through the view from Malby’s AI to his mind’s eye.
Lucky had the same strange out-of-body experience he always had when using far-range drones to look down on his own position. He could see the alien ship streaking out of the planet’s upper atmosphere.
He could also see the massing Union destroyers now in low orbit with the other view. Several squadrons of skreamers were heading their way. They were in the same V-formation they had used to slice their own Empire destroyers into pieces just a few short hours ago.
They were going to be easy pickings out here in orbit, especially if Rocky was right and this old bucket didn’t have weapons.
And then something else caught his eye. A pinpoint of light near the planet’s surface.
At first he thought it was another nuclear mushroom. More than two dozen were clouding the surface.
Malby grunted. “Some weird reading on that … on that …” His voice trailed off.
The pinpoint was expanding with lightning speed.
“That isn’t possible,” said Malby.
Distance and perspective made even the most dramatic scenes unfold in excruciating slowness from orbit. But not this. It was spreading faster than anything Lucky had ever seen.
“What are we seeing?” Jiang asked.
Wherever the bright flame danced, the planet’s surface retreated. It simply ceased to be. Everywhere matter existed, the leaping flame extinguished it. Within seconds, the hemisphere of the planet that had just been below them was gone.
The effect on gravity was turbulence-inducingly immediate. Space shifted and twisted around them, unable to cope with the sudden deforming of matter.
The flame continued onward across the surface of the planet, but as it did Lucky noticed the color was changing. It was growing redder. And moving closer to the view from the drone.
“It’s riding up the atmosphere!” yelled Malby.
Orton turned wide-eyed to Vlad, and for the first time it dawned on Lucky that the scientists couldn’t see what the Marines were seeing.
“The antimatter is eating the planet,” he said. “It’s literally disappearing before our drone eyes. And now it looks like it is eating its way up through the atmosphere.”
Orton’s face blanched.
Vlad closed her eyes. “Yes,” she said quietly. “That makes sense. It will be hungry for matter. It’s going to gorge on the planet, but once that is gone it will turn on the particles in the atmosphere. It won’t stop until it reaches space.”