“Yeah, I know it is.” Mud said to his team. “I also know it’s our best first shot. Chellox, stop here, safe distance. I’ll be back.” Mud started to cycle the airlock. “I assume.”
Dropping out of the ship, Mud activated his GravPack, repelling against the Arrow, aimed at Bushfield’s fighter. He zipped toward it, keeping an eye on his thinsuit’s readings. Nothing odd, except for a big Fold in space that seemed to slowly grow like a glowing white maw against the darkness. He knew his suit would darken his view soon, and if it went too dark, he wouldn’t be able to see. He engaged a manual override and tried to ride the line between going blind and being able to see anything at all.
Changing his GravPack to attract to Bushfield’s ship, he came up on it fast, hoping Bushfield was at least still conscious. He grappled up against the ship and set his pack to keep him there. Tapping on the cockpit, he fought against the urge to hold his breath. Quickly he felt the vibrations of her knocking back in reply. Now how to tell her to stay there. He knocked out code for “Stay.” He had to assume she knew the code, since she’d stayed in her ship after Bee’s message and seemed to be expecting him.
“Copy,” came the tapped reply.
“Tow,” he tapped, thinking. “I go,” he added so she knew not to bother replying. Holding on to the front of her ship, putting himself between it and the Fold, Mud set his GravPack to reach out and attract to the Arrow. Getting underway took a moment, as the masses involved had to be slowed, stopped, and reversed from going the opposite direction. Careful to not accidently pull the Arrow toward them, Mud kept shifting his pulls. From the Arrow to a relatively nearby asteroid to the Ratzinger and then cycling back again, adding repelling strands to either the Ratzinger or the asteroid when he attracted to the Arrow. It was slow, tedious, even, and needed to be precise. Twice Mud stopped and rethought his plan, remapping everything while the ship drifted, holding tight. He wanted to give the ship some spin to point it away from the Fold, hoping Bushfield’s canopy would turn transparent again, but adding the spin to everything else would make the math even stranger for him. So he concentrated on pushing, pulling, and generally cajoling the ship toward the Arrow as best he could.
With a final nudge to stop the ship drifting, he signaled the Arrow to release a tow line, attaching it to the back of Bushfield’s ship. He moved back to the canopy and knocked out a simple message: “Out.”
Bushfield blew the canopy, a rush of air explosively escaping, which Mud barely dodged, and she pulled herself out of the ship into open space. Mud grabbed her shoulder and targeted the Arrow, quickly reaching the airlock. One cycle later and they were on board.
“Get us back to the—”
“We didn’t want to bother you and make you worry but did you happen to glance at the Fold out there?” Bee asked, cutting him off.
Mud realized that she’d stayed at her station, looking at her screens instead of greeting, or even checking on, Bushfield. He felt his adrenal system kick into high gear as his forebrain realized something must be very wrong.
“Of course not, my optics would’ve blanked and—”
“There’s something coming out of the Fold,” Steelbox said.
“There’s...what?!” Mud rushed to his station to call up the data. Bushfield followed, moving to stand behind Bee, placing a hand on her shoulder warmly. “What are we looking at? Anyone?”
“Giant bug monster,” Steelbox said slowly, “I think? Or a multi-lipped dog, maybe, the size of a heavy cruiser? It could be a—”
“It’s an incursion,” Chellox said.
“All right. From where?” Bushfield asked.
Bee turned to look at her, covering Bushfield’s hand on her shoulder with her own. “Where ever the Fold ends. So...not from around here.”
“Another point in space, or...or...I don’t even know what I’m asking,” Mud said. “Are we sending this to the Ratzinger?”
“Of course,” Olivet said. “And they’re as stumped as we are.”
“Right,” Mud said, strapping in to his station. “Bushfield, your ship is dead for now. The fuel compartment looked burnt out. Something when the Fold opened, whatever energy it unleashed on open, did it in. Obviously it isn’t still putting that energy out, my GravPack was fine, and you still had electronics so the battery stayed true, just rebooted. So why did it drain engine fuel?”
“Least of our problems,” Chellox said.
“Not at all,” Bee said. “Mud’s right, if it did that once, it could kill the Arrow, or worse, the Ratzinger. We have to add it to our list.”
“Bushfield, grab a seat,” Mud said to her, “and strap in. I have a feeling about this.” Turning to Olivet, he said, “Open communications. Let’s try to talk to it.”
“Copy that,” Olivet said. He sent a series of generic, friendly greetings in every language the ship could manage, including binary and pulse code. “No reply, yet,” he told Mud.
“Didn’t think so, but we have to try. Steelbox, shoot the data on this to the following codes,” Mud said, writing down a sequence of numbers, “and append this key to it.” Mud wrote a second code under the first.
“Cap, long-range comms are out, remember?”
“Damn it, prep the message anyway and the second comms are back up, send it.”
“Sure thing,” Steelbox said, typing in the codes carefully. “Who’re we shouting to?”
“Family code. They might know something.”
“That the Gov doesn’t?” Bushfield asked.
“I feel like if I say yes I’m incriminating a few people. So, I’m going to pretend you didn’t ask me that.”
Bushfield pinched the bridge of her nose. Of course the Madisons had their own files on everything they’d seen. And of course, she thought, they didn’t fully trust the Gov with all of it. But something like this would surely be in official records. You didn’t just ignore something this large and strange. She told that to herself a few times until she decided she believed it.
“It’s attacking the Ratzinger!” Chellox yelled over his shoulder.
“Wait, it’s what? Show me!”
Chellox fed the data to all screens, letting everyone look at what he was watching. Turned away from the Fold itself, their cameras showed some flapping piece of the thing reaching out and slapping at the Ratzinger. It didn’t seem to have come further out of the Fold, just extended part of itself—that distance, it must be huge, Bee thought.
“Can we talk to them?” Mud asked, hopefully.
“We’re in range for short comms,” Bee said. “Opening channel to Mills now.”
“Mills! You guys all right?” Mud asked as soon as the line went green.
“I have a...a what...space monster? licking my damn ship!” came Mills’ reply. “That’s about as far from all right as we could get today.”
“I doubt that,” Mud said. “Can you guys scatter?”
“Engines seem out,” Mills told him, “but shuttle craft and fighters are reporting operational.”
“Great. So don’t touch the thing. Got it. Mills, scatter. Repeat, scatter.”
“Sending nonessential crew now. Calling in the Amalfi now. Sending you coordinates.”
“We’ll coordinate evacs out here, but Mills, do not attack. Repeat, do not attack.” Olivet and Bee nodded at Mud as he said it.
“It’s attacking the Ratzinger, Arrow. We can’t just ignore that.”
“We don’t know that it’s attacking. We just know it’s touching you. Your sensors are still online, right?”
“Only engines are out.”
“Good. Keep collecting data. Bee and I will come to you.”
“How’s Bushfield?”
“She’s good. Her ship is in the same situation as the Ratzinger, but she’s fine. We’ll bring her, too.”
“Only long enough to get in a different ship,” she said.
“Of course. Your fighter group will be needed,” Mills said.
Mud turned to Bee. “Grab a GravPack and let’s go.”
MUD AND BEE EXITED the Arrow, Bushfield in tow, and locked their packs to the Ratzinger, hauling themselves in quickly. They were about halfway to the larger ship when Steelbox caught up to them. He really wasn’t a fan of the GravPack, but he used it fine, joining their group and getting safely aboard the Ratzinger.
“Steelbox, you’re staying with—” Mud started.
“One less crew member on the Arrow means one more person we can ferry off. Sorry, Cap. I’m coming with.”
“Fine,” Mud said, not wanting to waste the time arguing, “but I don’t want to hear about how I was mean and fed you to a space monster.”
“Copy.”
Bee and Bushfield said a quick goodbye, just on the air-filled side of the airlock, before Bushfield ran off to the hangar to find a ship and help evacuate the Ratzinger. Bee joined Mud and Steelbox as they ran the other direction, up to the main command observation deck.
With high, triple-reinforced windows and plenty of consoles and screens to record and check data, the command observation desk sprawled over a large footprint on the ship. Originally designed to be a research vessel, the Ratzinger changed focus as needed, not carrying a full compliment of scientists anymore, its hangar stuffed with fighters now instead of research probes.
“So what am I looking at?” Mills asked as the three entered the room.
“We’re not sure,” Mud said. They all gathered with Mills, close to the windows.
The Fold hung there, not glowing as brightly anymore. Stretching out of it, protruding in every direction, vaguely indistinct shapes reached. They were hard to look at, seeming to pulse not with light but with existence. None of the four staring at it felt they were sure they even saw anything, even while they were utterly sure about what they saw. It made headaches blossom in each of their skulls.
“Any good scanner data yet?” Bee asked as she moved toward a console. She sat, combing through the data to date.
“Nothing that makes sense,” Mills said, still staring out the window. “I’ve never even heard of anything like this. The bits of it touching the ship, they aren’t tentacles, or hands, fingers—what are they? What does the rest of it look like?”
“Closest I can guess right now, they’re pseudopods,” Bee said, “not that there’s data to really back that up. Still, look at them, changing shape, reaching out...and see how it flickers?”
“We all see that,” Steelbox said, “and it hurts.”
“Exactly,” Mud said, moving to look over Bee’s shoulder. “I’m not sure that the Fold leads anywhere at all.”
“All right, you three work this out, I have to go manage an evac,” Mills said, tearing himself away. He headed for the door, being careful to not glance back and catch sight of anything outside. “Keep me updated.”
“Let’s collate data and see if we can keep the Ratzinger afloat,” Mud said, grabbing a seat and starting to scroll through data.
Mills stopped just outside the observation deck and considered going back in. He badly wanted to know what threatened his ship, but bigger problems took precedence. Calling out over an intership channel, he demanded status on all evac work. No one had spotted the Amalfi as of yet, and long-range comms remained down. Until then, all nonessential crew were being loaded into any ship that could hold people for a while and launched.
The move would buy them at least ten hours, Mills thought, but not much longer than that. People needed to eat, they needed to breathe, and both of those acts would require docking somewhere. If they couldn’t return to the Ratzinger and the Amalfi didn’t show in time, he’d have a large problem on his hands. A cluster of small scout ships, shuttles, and fighters full of the slowly dying.
Until then, until something actually happened, Mills knew the best he could do would be to manage the evac as speedily as possible. A list of ships, and crew counts, went on steadily in his ear as crew members read out status reports.
He adjusted resources in use even as they were read out to him, reassigning crew to different ships, trying to make sure as many as possible had a medic on board just in case, and not doubling up on them anywhere.
Mills made it to the hangar and grabbed a terminal, marking off the space as his new command center. He knew that, realistically, he could only bandage the problem until the Amalfi showed up, if it did. Until long-range comms came back online, he would have to assume the ship would arrive, running on hope and desperation.
Back on the observation desk, Mud, Bee, and Steelbox did essentially the same. The only data they could really count on made no sense. The rest was, as Bee put it, ‘fuzzy at best.’ Mud kicked his chair back from his station and looked at his teammates.
“I’m going to suggest something stupid,” he said. They both looked at him, waiting. This wasn’t the time for the cheap shot, and they knew it. “We need to find out what’s in the Fold.”
“You want to go into it,” Steelbox said.
“I want to go into it,” Mud confirmed.
“Letting go of the fact that from what we can tell, the best case is that it’s a wormhole to an unknown part of space,” Bee said, “how would you do it?”
“We could—”
“Take the Arrow?” she finished for him.
“Right, if that thing touches us we lose engines. So we dodge it.”
“And if the energy in there, the energy closer to the Fold itself—what if it does the same thing?”
Steelbox looked at this terminal. “I don’t think that’s the case.”
“And on the other side? If it has another side, or whatever it is?”
“We’ll find out,” Mud said.
“Well, you were right,” Bee said, “you have a stupid idea.”
Mud got up from his chair, shifting to sit on the edge of a console, looking at Bee and Steelbox. “If we launch a probe, it’ll get caught by the long-range comm problem.”
“So would we.”
“But we could see,” Mud said, “record things. The probe would just be useless.”
“Looking at the data—” Bee pointed at her screen, “—no, really, come look at this,” she said, and waited for Mud and Steelbox to come over to her. “This Fold is either a wormhole, which no one has ever gone through or even seen, or it’s a doorway.”
“To where?” Steelbox asked, reading the data as best as he could.
“That’s the question, because it wouldn’t be to anywhere in this universe.”
Mud shook his head. “So it’s a doorway to another universe?”
“To another something,” Bee said, “quite possibly. Look, it isn’t like I have any experience with this. No one does. Not that anyone’s recorded. Nothing firm, at least.”
“We think. That message still waiting to be sent?” Mud asked Steelbox.
“Yeah, the one with the strange code? When communications are back up it’ll go. Until then...” he trailed off and scratched his chin, thinking it through. “No, wait, let me hook it to a probe and launch it. Once clear it’ll send.”
“And how will we get a reply?” Mud asked. Bee watched the exchange, wondering what they were even talking about.
“I’ll append a request for reply and a note to keep replying until a confirmation is received on receipt,” Steelbox said, smiling. “So where is this going?”
Bee looked at Mud, “You’re sending the data we gathered home, aren’t you?”
“You bet I am. If anyone has data that might help, it’s my parents.”
“They need to learn to share more.”
“They’ve been burned before. Anyway,” Mud said, nodding at Steelbox, “go take care of it.” Steelbox left quickly, opening a short comm channel to the Arrow and getting them ready to transmit the package of data to a probe once he got one lined up. They were busy, Olivet and Chellox, taking on evacuees from the Ratzinger and keeping their distance from the Fold.
The protrusions, pseudopods from the Fold, extended and glanced against the Ratzinger inquisitively. S
lowly they worked their way along the length of the ship, expanding and trailing along the huge vessel. Eventually they would reach the hangars and evacs would be forced to halt.
The evacuation continued to move slowly, a fact that Mills despised. Normally, an evacuation would simply pile people into the escape pods and fire them off. Given the Fold, and whatever the thing reaching out of it was, they couldn’t just fire the pods and hope. Under normal emergency evac procedures, the object would be to find a safe planet to land on, or a ship to hold the evacuated crew until they could get to a planet. Mills had something else in mind and still felt good about the idea, if not the execution.
Sending out the fighters with extra people limited their ability to respond to problems, but increased the number of people who could get off the Ratzinger, a metric off-set by Mills’ stacking of the other ships with a good mix per department where possible. That management added time, but they weren’t near a planet and the Amalfi still hadn’t arrived. Plus, the incoming ship had been docked; older and being considered for retirement, it didn’t have a steady crew anymore. Mills intended to rehome his people on the Amalfi and go right back to work.
All of which took planning, as file backups needed to be made, along with some bits of essential equipment and weapon stores to move as well—which managed, of course, to further slow everything about the evac down. Mills stood by his choice, though he wasn’t exactly sorry that he couldn’t be reached on a long-range comms and forced to defend it to higher ups just then. Instead, he continued to triage, waiting for the Amalfi to show up, and waiting for word from Mud and his team.
“What about GravPacks?” Mud was just then asking Bee.
“In the Fold?”
“Sure, why not? Look, the touch of that thing, the energy or light it put out when the Fold was being created, it seems to drain engine cells. But engines run off of different stuff than most of the rest of a ship uses, right? So electronics still work, sensors and so on are fine. But so is gravity.”
“Yeah, but,” Bee sighed, “then you have people with no better protection than a GravPack and shield going into who knows what. That’s still not smart, Mud.”
The Endless Sky Page 10