by Nick Webb
Oppenheimer turned back to Ballsy and sneered. “Well how about that. Even the great Spacechamp wanted nothing to do with you. She hated you so much that she made sonny boy here renounce your name. Face it, Tyler. You’re a failure. Your whole life, your whole career. One big fat failure after another. Your only moment of glory was a few short weeks during the war that you’ve been milking ever since.”
Zivic had been sidling over towards Whitehorse the entire time. He bent back to whisper in her ear. “What … the hell … happened?”
“The admiral lost it when your father refused to initiate a meta-space pulse that would summon the Swarm.”
“Sounds reasonable,” he whispered. In the background the two men were still yelling. “Is he off his meds or something?”
“He’s off his rocker, at least.” She pulled his arm until he looked back at her. She looked him in the eyes. “Ethan. Do something. This is … terrible. For morale, for … everything and everyone. It has to stop.”
He turned back to the men and cleared his throat.
They kept on yelling. “When we get back to Earth there’s going to be hell to pay, Tyler. Your career is over!” Oppenheimer’s hair shook as he jabbed the air with a finger for emphasis.
Ballsy folded his arms. “I could say the same for you, Christian. You’ve made a complete ass of yourself here today. I’m willing to bet Sepulveda relieves you over this.” He swept his arm across the bridge. “Plenty of witnesses.”
Zivic cleared his throat again. They didn’t even notice and kept right on yelling. He leaned back to Whitehorse. “Well, I tried.”
“Oh for the love….” She took a deep breath and strode forward to the center of the bridge. “Gentlemen! Please!”
She hadn’t exactly shouted, but she hadn’t exactly spoken in her inside voice. Oppenheimer and Ballsy both snapped towards her. “Commander? Something to say?” said Admiral Oppenheimer.
“Yes, sir, I do. There’s a compromise option here. Until we can get confirmation from the president like the captain wants, we can still proceed with the admiral’s plan. Modified. Slightly.” She shifted on her feet, clearly uncomfortable.
“What’s your idea, commander?” said Ballsy.
“Ask Polrum Krull. Tell her your plan. She just may go for it.”
Oppenheimer audibly scoffed. “What a joke. Commander, dismissed. To your station.”
Ballsy waved him off. “Continue, please, commander. What makes you think she would go for it? What could she possible have to gain from this embarrassment of a plan?” He held up air quotes around the word plan.
“Well, it’s clear she’s in the middle of a civil war. Whatever they’re fighting over is of such magnitude that they’re willing to kill for it. Thousands over there are dead. Which means that when you count all their Interior children, the death toll could be in the millions. You don’t fight over something petty with that kind of stakes. It’s huge. So huge, in fact, that….”
She hesitated momentarily. Oh my god, Zivic thought. She’s just making this up as she goes along.
“… that Krull may just want to adopt your plan as her own. Summon the Swarm with a meta-space pulse, and then send out a call to the other ships to come assist with the defense of their homeworld and temporarily pause their internal fight. And then, during the ensuing battle, do exactly what we were trying to do. Get them to kill each other.”
Oppenheimer paused for a moment. “That’s … not terrible. You really think Krull would listen to us? Why would she do that? We just took her ship. That’s not a great start to a parlay.”
Whitehorse nodded towards Ballsy. “Captain Volz has been at Admiral Proctor’s side during exchanges with Krull. He’s well known to her. And the Skiohra hold Proctor, in spite of her nickname Motherkiller, in rather high regard. Some of that regard might well transfer over to Captain Volz.”
Oppenheimer stared at her stone-faced. Finally, after the longest, most uncomfortable silence Zivic had ever experienced, he nodded. “Fine. Make the call. But at the same time we’re sending a priority meta-space message to the presidential mansion to lay this bullshit to rest and get on with the original mission. Fine with you, captain?”
Ballsy nodded. “Fine. Thank you, admiral.”
Oppenheimer, still just inches from Ballsy’s face, finally turned and marched back towards the comm station. There was an almost audible collective gasp of relief from the entire bridge as the crisis was temporarily averted.
Zivic came up behind her. “You … are … a badass,” he whispered in her ear.
Ballsy caught her eye, raised his own eyebrows and gave her a nod as if to parrot what Zivic had just whispered.
“Yeah, until Krull tells us to take a hike. Then what?” she said.
Ballsy shrugged. “We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Bridge
Granger’s Heel
Debris cloud of El Amin
“There you are, you little bugger,” said Liu. The other ship was nestled up against one of the larger chunks of El Amin, which dwarfed it like a mountain looking over a tiny cabin. It wasn’t large—just a frigate, and old at that. Probably salvaged from the war.
A faint red at the back of the ship told her its engines were probably firing up. “Oh no you don’t, you bastards.”
She was coming in hot, and she maneuvered the frigate so it was pointing straight at their landing bay where Eli’s fighter would have parked. The bay door was closed, but that wouldn’t matter.
This was a one-way trip.
The frigate started to move, but it was too late. She braced herself. The nose of her freighter slammed into the bay door with the screeching of metal that made her ears hurt, and with a crunch her whole ship wedged into the opening.
She opened her eyes. “Well how about that. I’m alive.”
Her vacuum suit was already on, helmet sealed, before the collision, and a good thing too because the air rushed out of the cabin thanks to the long gash where the wreckage of the bay door had torn through. She climbed down the short ladder into the hold and rushed forward to the front loading bay door.
It opened. She was worried it would be jammed, but soon she was running across the airless flight deck of the frigate and towards the doors which had sealed themselves against the vacuum. Right next to the door, his body broken and bleeding from where the front of her freighter had collided with him, lay a dead man. Whether he’d died from the blunt force or died from the ensuing vacuum was unclear, but it didn’t matter. She approached the doors, knowing they were locked tight, impervious to almost any force outside of a mag-rail slug. A normal person would have looked at those doors and determined that the only way through was around.
Fiona Liu was not a normal person. She pulled a tiny device out of her vacuum suit pocket and pressed it up against the door controls nearby. She’d been kicked out of IDF Intel, but some of the gadgets still worked.
The doors slid back into their pockets and the air in the hallway beyond rushed out into the bay. She grabbed the edge of the door and pulled herself against the storm of wind, across the threshold, and into the hallway beyond. With her last strength she clutched onto a handhold on the wall with one hand while she pressed the gadget up to the door controls with the other.
The doors shut, the rushing air stopped whistling past her helmet, and she collapsed onto one knee, breathing heavily.
She tucked her electronic lock pick back into her pocket and unsnapped her gun in its holster. The corridor wasn’t all that long, but it had several doors off to the sides—perfect places for an ambush.
Most people—most marines, most anyone with half a brain for tactics—would have found cover and progressed methodically down the hallway, flushing out any enemies with careful precision, keeping as safe as possible—as far as any gun battle could be safe.
But she wasn’t most people. She wanted surprise. She wanted to give them as little time to think and prepare
as possible. In a situation where you were potentially outmanned fifty to one, you didn’t have time to let the enemy get their feet under them.
She sprinted down the hallway as fast as she could. Before she passed the first open door she stretched her legs forward and leaned back, letting the momentum carry her past the door as she made a controlled fall, one arm aiming the gun and one arm steadying it. She saw a torso. Two shots. Blood, and she skidded past the door before the body even fell.
Anyone in the open doors up ahead would surely look out now to see who had fired and whose body had fallen.
Sure enough, a head appeared around the opening two doors down, just long enough for her to put a bullet in it.
She jumped to her feet and sprinted, reaching the door at the end which she supposed led to another corridor, or maybe a ladder or elevator that would take her to the next level. Around the corner was the lift. Perfect. She tapped the destination—bridge—and mashed the lift initiator with a palm, tossed in her one and only miniature grenade, and then ran the other direction, wrenching open what she knew had to be an access hatch for the emergency ladder behind the bulkhead, which most ships had in case the lift were damaged.
It was a race. Could she climb faster than the lift? Normal people couldn’t.
But with the implants IDF Intel had installed, Fiona Liu could. She blinked the pattern. SOS. Just once, as fast as possible. Instantly, she felt a surge of adrenaline that almost made her yell with wild, unbridled energy. The downer was going to be a bitch afterwards, but hopefully she’d get a breather up there.
She grabbed the bars of the ladder and hurtled herself into the air. Luckily, the ship was only at a standard one-half g, and she was able to take four rungs at a time, launching herself upwards with each pull. Four, eight, twelve, sixteen, twenty, twenty-four … and after only ten seconds she was at the bridge level, right in the center of the ship. Her hand quivered on the handle to the access hatch, and she waited.
Right on schedule, the grenade detonated, which meant the door to the lift had opened. She wrenched the hatch open and launched herself through, her gun pointed ahead of her as she fell to the deck. Two shots.
Two more shots as she swiveled in midair.
A hard landing. A boot colliding with her hand, sending the gun flying across the bridge and hitting a wall. She thrashed her legs out, using them to launch herself upright while simultaneously landing her forearm across the man’s exposed neck, ruining his windpipe. He choked, and before he even had time to die on his own, she helped him with a snap of his neck.
She grabbed the gun and whirled it around to the remaining two people sitting hunched and quivering at one of the bridge stations with their hands in the air, shaking.
Assured that they were unarmed, she strode over, turning this way and that, aiming her gun around the cover of the stations that she passed, but there was no-one else. She grabbed the first man by the hair. He yelped in fear and she noticed the wet spot on the front of his trousers. A well-placed blow from the gun, at just the right spot on his crown, knocked him out and she let him fall to the deck.
She finally breathed. Long, deep, slow breaths, her gun aimed squarely at the forehead of the final man, who had tears in his eyes.
“This is what you’re going to do. If you do it well, you’ll live. Understand?”
He nodded quickly, or rather, his head bobbled up and down almost uncontrollably.
“First, calm down. Take a deep breath. Breathe. That’s right. Breathe. Calm down. I’m not going to kill you. You’re safe. Breathe.” She waited patiently for nearly ten seconds as the man nodded again, this time much more slowly and deliberately. His quick, rapid-fire breathing slowed down to more measured breaths. “That’s right. Good. I killed three downstairs. How many more on the ship?”
“F … F … Fix. Six. I mean four,” he stuttered.
She couldn’t immediately tell if he was lying, or just scared as hell. Probably the latter. “Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to get on the PA. You’re going to tell them I’m dead, and give the all-clear. Understand?”
His eyes got wide.
She raised her gun again. “Understand?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“Make it convincing.”
He reached over to the PA controls, and in a remarkably calm voice that even surprised her, he said, “We got her. She’s dead. Bullet right through her brain. We lost Taylor here on the bridge, but otherwise we’re fine. Roberts, Sivranathan, Wei, get down to the bay and try to patch that hole the bitch left before we lose all our air. Dr. Avasar, make sure the patient is stable—the swing in air pressure could have hurt him. We don’t want to let Patriarch Huntsman down.”
They waited for a response. “Wei here. Roger that. Need any help up there? All good?”
“Yeah. We’re fine. Taylor’s a mess. Shame we lost him. Was a good man. But he died for the mission. Peace and victory. Gephardt out.” He finished with the customary Grangerite farewell. Well. That must mean poor old Eli Chen must have been a contractor and not a part of the organization. Poor kid.
“Good. You did good. You earned your life. Now. Show me a layout of the ship, and where the patient is.”
I’m coming, Danny.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Inside Titan
Near Britannia
“Days? What do you mean, days?”
Granger sounded tired. Like it was a burden to speak the words. “I mean that literally. You have days. Humanity has days of existence left if we don’t figure out a way to stop the Swarm.”
“I assume you have a plan?”
He finally chuckled. A strange sound, given the slight changes to his voice. “Look around you, Shelby. You could say I’ve been planning something.”
She ran her hand again over the smooth metal, and then looked down at the palm reader. She gently pushed Case out of the way and rested her hand on it. It pulsed with the same yellow glow, and this time, instead of disappearing, it turned to a soft green illuminating her glove.
The door opened.
Proctor gasped.
The hallway looked familiar, but different. The lights, the markings, the worn tread on the ground, the various wall terminals. And there, just inside the door, letters.
“Oh my god.” She stepped forward and ran her hand over the ancient symbols. Ancient, and at the same time, not that much older than her. “I … S … S … V … I … C…” her hand traced over them, and then stopped at the door, where the letters terminated. “This really was the Victory.”
“It was. It’s … had a few bumps and bruises since then.”
They walked down the corridor. It was like something out of a dream. She had only served on the Victory with Captain Granger for a very short period—less than a day or so—before he kicked them all off and made his suicide run into the Penumbra black hole, luring the Swarm ships in after him.
“So, Tim … I think you owe me a bit of an explanation.”
“A bit, yes.”
She laughed. “A bit more than a bit. You owe me thirteen billion years of explanations, if our sensor readings were correct.”
“They were correct.”
“The isotopic of this tungsten are such that it’s aged thirteen billion years, plus or minus … a lot. Is that true?”
“It is.”
They reached the end of the corridor. Not everything was the same. Additions and retrofits had clearly been made here and there. New and strange looking consoles and monitors, all showing various status updates using symbols that at first looked like they might be English and Arabic numbers, but upon closer examination was gibberish.
“Ok, Tim. You have the floor. Tell me a story.”
A long pause. “Remember the part where we only have days, Shelby?”
“Oh come on, Tim. I need more than that. What happened after you crossed the event horizon?”
“From your perspective or mine?”
“Let’s start with
yours.”
“The Valarisi, controlled by the Swarm, followed me in. I fired the anti-matter torpedoes once we were close enough to the event horizon and that disrupted the phase distortions in the quantum field that was allowing the influence of the Swarm in their universe to pass through the modified Einstein-Rosen bridge and into our own. Permanently. And then I kicked back in my chair and started watching your future history speed up. It was actually quite fascinating. But … I had a problem.”
They turned a corner and followed the new corridor until they came to another door, which opened at their approach. Another corridor lay beyond, this one with doors off to the side every dozen meters or so. “You were about to be spaghettified?”
“Not at all. It was a stable modified Einstein-Rosen bridge, of course. The gravitational field was perfectly balanced right at the tunnel’s edge by an exactly tuned anti-gravity field—”
“Hold on. What’s a modified Einstein-Rosen bridge.”
“An Einstein-Rosen bridge is a wormhole, Shelby. I thought you knew that.”
She scowled. “I’m a scientist. Of course I knew that. But what about a modified bridge?”
“It’s a wormhole into a different universe. At the surface of the expanding multi-verse there are an infinite number of universes being continually created, and an even greater number—infinitely greater—of universes that have already been created, and many that are already expanding so quickly from dark energy that they are generating new universes at their own edges. This particular bridge took me to one of those universes. It’s an ancient one. Trillions of trillions of trillions of years old. It had already died a heat death … for the most part. But at its center?”
She knew the answer. “The Swarm.”
“They originated from there. Near the beginning of their own universe’s time. Over their history they expanded out, conquered, destroyed, assimilated, pillaged, until their own universe was nearly barren. An entire universe, Shelby. Think of it. Think of the scale. Nearly all matter transformed into scattered, useless, high-wavelength energy. An entropic death was near for them. So, they did what any war-like civilization does. They expanded their horizons and looked for new territory to conquer when the old territory is completely depleted. They overran countless universes over trillions of their years. Countless, Shelby. There are almost innumerable universes that are all dead because of the Swarm. And when the time was ripe for each of those universes, its matter and useful energy was … shunted into their own to sustain it for another eon or so. Until they came to our universe. Ours was their next target. But they hit a speed bump.”