by Rick Partlow
We have maybe a couple minutes, he thought, blinking the camera feed out of his eyes.
Best- and worst-case scenarios ran through his head, and the best wasn’t that good: the barge would destroy the freighter, kill dozens of crewmembers and send the antimatter storage containers careening off into the black. The worst-case scenario was one or more of the pods would rupture and only Gaia knew what would happen then. He didn’t think it was too likely, and if whoever had set this up had been familiar with antimatter storage, they would have known that. Those pods were designed to be fail-safe, both because of the sheer destructive power of antimatter and the fiendishly high cost of producing it.
That means it’s Earthers, probably, he reasoned, trying to keep his mind off how long it was taking Patel to get through the hatchway to Magenta Level, trying to keep himself from screaming at the man. Belters would know better because they’ve dealt with us before.
Then he was out of the chute and bounding across the deck in the lower gravity of the innermost layer of the station, with Patel and Propanca and six or seven other crewmembers ahead of him, some clambering out of other emergency access tubes, others having taken the chance of using the lift cars. Some of them were half-dressed, woken out of a sound sleep; all of them were close to panicking, rushing for the shelter hatch like it was deliverance from evil instead of a few extra centimeters of alloy and some honeycomb-boron armor.
He didn’t see Telia yet, but Danabri was in the open hatchway, yelling orders in a knee-length puce housecoat and maroon slippers, pushing people inside, shoving them through roughly, with little patience. Sam paused, letting the others go ahead of him, and tried linking with the Control Center computer one more time, while he had the chance.
He’d barely re-established contact before the barge’s forward fusion drives ignited, abrupt and unexpected enough to make him jump. He had just enough time to feel the bottom fall out of his stomach as everything seemed to emerge into sudden, terrifying clarity. Plasma flared in the distance and then a flash brighter than any supernova in the history of the universe washed the cameras out, overwhelming their ability to filter one bit of data from another.
He could only guess what happened next. He wasn’t a physicist, but you needed to know something about the science and the math of it all to pilot a starship, which was how he’d begun his career, or to be the captain. The initial explosion was straight-forward, if horrific, just a blast of annihilated matter and antimatter, heat beyond the interior depths of the brightest star and a wash of radiation so intense it should have killed them all immediately, even from tens of thousands of kilometers away. But it didn’t, and he thought he knew why: the Gate. It was mostly complete, all it needed was power.
Something solid slammed into the station, something very much like a shock wave even though there was no atmosphere to propagate it, a concussion Sam could feel in his soul…and his shoulder. The snap of his clavicle breaking was almost louder than the roaring vibration of the station’s outer hull, almost louder than the thump of his body against the bulkhead. He cried out, not quite a scream because he lacked the breath for it, but damned close, and sank to the floor…no, he realized, not the floor, he was sinking to what had been a wall only a moment ago.
Gravity shouldn’t be this heavy. He felt as if something was stomping on his chest, grinding the broken bones in his shoulder against each other. His vision seemed blurry, and he couldn’t tell if the encroaching darkness was a power outage or impending unconsciousness, but he could still see there was someone on the deck in front of him, someone short and bearded, with their face covered in blood, their eyes wide open.
Man’s neck shouldn’t be able to bend like that, he mused, and then the blackness closed over him and washed consciousness away.
***
Telia Proctor was pushing the last of the stragglers ahead of her to the emergency access tubes when it happened.
She couldn’t rightly say what happened. If she’d been forced to describe the feeling afterward, she might have said it was very much as if a deep-space station the size of a small island had run aground on the shores of something much, much larger. At the moment, her only sensation was a huge, jarring impact and the bulkhead racing straight at the back of her skull.
If she’d been fully biological, if she’d ever got around to accepting Sam and Priscilla and Mawae Danabri’s offers to have her bionics replaced by cloned limbs, she’d have died right there, her head split open like a ripe melon. Instead, she tucked and rolled in mid-air and her feet slammed into the thin plastic lining over the bulkhead with enough force to shatter it. Flakes of white polymer sprayed out from the spider-web patterns where her feet had hit, revealing the dull, grey metal concealed under its decoration.
She stuck to the wall for just a heartbeat, as if gravity were having a difficult time making up its mind which way it should pull her, and then it abruptly decided this way was as good as any other. What had been sideways only seconds ago was now down, and that made as little sense as the idea that anything solid should have hit the station at all.
A dull, unfocused pain ran through her whole body, not unfamiliar; it was the bruising of her flesh and bone where it wrapped around the bionics. The metal and machinery could shrug off impacts that what was left of her biological material could not, and if she could keep going anyway, she’d pay for it later.
If there was a later.
The lights in the corridor were flickering fitfully, and in moments the only illumination was from the emergency chemical striplighting lining what had once been the deck. The pale, green light cast eerie shadows and turned the blood pooling around the bodies an inky black. She moved to check on the two Resolution crewmembers, a man and a woman, but both were clearly dead. The blood came from the man; he’d fractured his skull.
There was a lot of blood inside a man’s head, so much more than you’d have thought. She knew his name was Georges Darnold, but couldn’t remember a thing about him, not what he ate for breakfast, not what shift he worked, not even if he had a family. His face was rounded and soft and looked oddly peaceful from the front; but everything that had made him Georges was splattered across the bulkheads and the deck.
The woman’s name was Edina…something. Something long and multisyllabic and Telia couldn’t wrap her tongue around it. She was short and stocky and cute in a pixie sort of way, with short, blond hair and green eyes, and her neck was broken. Her head was turned nearly 180 degrees. Telia thought about another day, another accident, with broken and bleeding bodies all around her and she forced the bile back down her throat. These people, Georges and Edina, she didn’t know, didn’t care about. She had to remind herself of that.
She looked over at the emergency access chutes, horizontal now, and wondered if the others were still inside. They could be dead, stuck in there, but she’d have to go in, have to chance being stuck with them unless she could get some help down here. She touched the control for her personal link, hoping against hope it might still be working despite the loss of power.
“Mawae, are you there?”
Nothing. She tried a different channel.
“Captain Avalon?”
Damn. She switched to general address and tried one last time.
“Does anyone read me?” She was yelling and she forced herself back under control. The network was down and shouting wasn’t going to bring it back up.
She sucked in a shuddering breath and pushed herself away from Georges and Edina, pausing to check herself for blood or broken bones before she moved again. Something was missing. The light was low; she could see through her bionic eye’s infrared filters, but the shadows made it hard to pick out the details and she had to slug her brain into focus.
The alarms. That was what was missing, there were no alarms sounding. The corridor was totally silent but for a distant metallic wrenching, as if the loose ends torn from the station were swaying back and forth in the wind.
I am not concussed, she told
herself firmly. But why am I so…hazy? Has the air gone bad?
If it had, the sensors and alarms weren’t detecting it and there weren’t any emergency suits on this level. She had to get to the shelter. She tried to shake her head clear, but it didn’t seem to do any good; she gave up and went down on a knee, crawling into the access tube. The chute was lined with the ubiquitous chemical light-strips, one of the few things actually replaced by the Belters before they’d shipped the station out here. The things lasted for years, but the station had probably gone through seven or eight sets of them since its construction. Telia had come to hate them, come to hate the pale green glow and the elongated, unnatural shadows they threw, and she hated them even more crawling through that tunnel sideways.
She hadn’t been a small woman before the bionics, and with them, her shoulders were as broad as a good-size man’s and she could feel one and then the other scraping on the sides of the tunnel. She kept telling herself there was plenty of room, but the dead silence and the eerie, green-tinted lighting and a growing conviction something very, very bad had happened gnawed at her hind-brain, trying to convince her she was about to be stuck in there alone and helpless.
Just the way she’d been stuck in the wreckage of the shuttle, as the fire burned away her arms and legs…
“Shut up!” she snarled aloud, pulling herself forward with the ladder rungs, hearing them clank and clunk off the metal of her legs.
At least there were no bodies in the tunnel. She’d dreaded finding the ones she’d sent ahead broken and bloody, but they’d made it out somehow. That was a good thing, and so was the fact she was still breathing, which meant the hull had to be more or less intact…
Was it getting lighter? Or was it just a different tone to the light, as if the chemical strips ahead at the next level weren’t there anymore. She’d been trudging along, head down, but now she craned it upward, an awkward position and difficult for her to do with the spine reinforcements.
Her mouth dropped open and she stopped scooting forward.
It suddenly made sense why there were no bodies stuck in the tubes, and why there was no atmosphere leak, and why it had felt as if they’d slammed into something solid.
A spear of nothingness sliced through half the tunnel, through half the station. Not a vacuum, not the empty darkness of outer space, but a palpable Nothing defying description. Spacers called it The Null, but she knew that wasn’t accurate. There was something there, and you could just sense it like a teasing flicker out of the corner of your eye, but never perceive it because the human brain hadn’t evolved for it.
It was Transition Space. The station was half in and half out of Transition Space.
Chapter Sixteen
Priscilla clawed back to consciousness through a gauze of unreality. She couldn’t remember passing out, but she remembered what had happened just before, remembered the explosion, and what the explosion had triggered.
She flexed numb fingers and rubbed at her eyes, forcing them open. The shuttle’s viewscreens were dark and inactive, as were the displays on the control panel; only the emergency lights remained. She took in a deep breath and decided the air wasn’t stale and they weren’t in any immediate danger of suffocating. If there were any hull leaks, they were too small for her to hear them.
A moan from her left drew her attention toward Sully; he was awake as well, unstrapping his helmet and pulling it off with the jerky, uncertain motions of someone not totally confident of their own limbs. He let the headgear go, as if he lacked the strength to hold onto it, and it floated listlessly across the cockpit, bouncing off the fuselage with a dolorous clunk.
Beneath the helmet, his face was pale, incomprehension in the set of his eyes.
“What. The. Fuck.”
Priscilla ignored his expulsion and motioned at the grey blankness where the main cockpit display should have been.
“Can you get everything back up?” she asked. “We need to see what’s going on out there.”
He nodded, wincing at the motion, and yanked the quick-release for his seat harness. He kept one hand on the acceleration couch to steady himself as he stretched under the main console, pulling open a maintenance cover and tinkering with something inside.
“Yeah, it’s just an overload,” he said, his voice muffled by the machinery and control console between them. “I think the batteries are still charged.”
There was a thump-snap sound and power began to flicker on across the cockpit, first in the light panels above their heads and then across the instrument panel. The viewscreens came last, flashing white and grey and white again before images began to resolve. She thought at first there was a problem with the cameras or perhaps the display projectors, until the details seemed to sort themselves into a pattern she could make sense of.
Where the Gate assembly had been was a…hole? An absence, she decided. That was the better word. An absence deeper and emptier than space itself, a sense of nothingness rather than an actual darkness. It was a rift in spacetime, jagged and irregular, stretching away from the source of the explosion like a shadow on the sidewalk in the late afternoon. It was the sort of opening into Transition Space a starship made with its Teller-Fox warp generator, except those were a few hundred meters across and closed within seconds. This one yawned over twenty thousand kilometers long and shrank slowly, unevenly.
Spears of it had pierced right through Gateway Station, slicing it nearly in two, peeling strips of hull away in jagged chunks, freezing it in place with its own gravity, its own laws of physics, different enough to be fatal for a human caught up in it. She rasped out a breath she hadn’t been aware she was holding, her eyes frozen on the sheer, incredible spectacle of it, the eerie otherworldliness.
“Ma’am,” Sully asked, his voice subdued and almost reverent, “what the hell happened?”
She stared at him askance, as if it should have been obvious.
He’s from Earth, she chided herself, and he’s probably never even been out of the Solar System. The words were her own but somehow, she heard the rebuke in Sam’s voice and her breath caught in her chest at the thought of him dead inside the station.
“The barge’s engines penetrated the antimatter containment pods,” she said, keeping her voice calm and modulated, holding onto patience as tightly as she could. “When the antimatter blew, the energy was absorbed by the Gate’s Teller-Fox warp units.”
“You mean…” He nodded at the screen, face screwed up in a disbelieving scowl. “That’s a wormhole? I’ve seen footage from starships in pilot training, and the wormholes they open don’t look nothing like that!”
“That’s the sort of wormhole you get when you detonate a hundred kilograms of antimatter all at once.” She felt like smacking the kid in the back of the head, but she clenched her fingers in the padded armrests of the acceleration couch and tried to think.
“It’s shrinking,” she said, watching the tendrils of nothingness slowly contract back towards the center, where the Gate had been. “When it pulls out of the gaps it’s made in the station, they’re going to lose atmosphere. Do we have communications?”
She didn’t wait for his answer, just reached across the instrument panel and activated the shuttle’s transmitter. It was probably a waste of time with the sort of electromagnetic interference the wormhole would be causing, but they were out of fuel and there wasn’t anything else they could…
“Ma’am, why aren’t we moving?” Sully wondered, a bit of outrage in his voice as if this whole business was contrary to the science he’d learned in school and he didn’t want any part of it. “We were accelerating pretty hard when we went bingo fuel, we should be heading out into deep space at a pretty good velocity still.” He waved at the readout on the navigation display. “We’re sitting stock-still, or near as. We’re at least in matching velocities with the station, and that’s fuc…freaking impossible!”
“Transition Space cancels out momentum. That’s why the station isn’t rotating. That wormh
ole must have been close enough to eat our velocity.”
She’d been playing with the frequency on the transmitter, but now her eyes popped up, her thoughts churning.
“Do we have any maneuvering thruster fuel left?” she demanded urgently, grabbing Sully by his flight harness.
“Well, yeah, some,” he said, nodding. “We drained all the reaction mass for the main engine, but each steering jet has its own tank.”
“We’re only a few hundred kilometers from the docking ports,” she told him, pointing at the lidar return readings. “Can we get there with the steering jets?”
Sully peered at the readings, then at the screen. The antipolar docking hub was gone, swallowed up in the thickest of the tendrils of Transition Space, but the polar end was intact, and there were at least two shuttles docked there they could see from their position, along with a row of intact docking ports.
“Yeah, we can do that,” he judged, nodding slowly. “It’s gonna take a bit, but we can do it.”
“As quick as you can,” she urged him, watching the tentacles of nonexistence retracting back toward the center. “I’m not sure how long they have.”
***
“How long do we have?”
“Hard to say. Maybe minutes, maybe hours.”
The voices cut through the darkness and seemed to grab Sam Avalon by the scruff of the neck and drag him back up into the light. Well, it wasn’t that light, to be honest, more green-tinted shadow than anything else, but it was lighter than the inside of his head.