The Endless Sky

by Adam P. Knave

  “Because Olivet is going to have some sort of attack if you keep waving him off,” Steelbox said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  Chellox came off-board the Arrow while Olivet and Steelbox talked. “Mud, I should—”

  “Nope, stay here, help them shut down the Ratzinger and start up the Amalfi with Olivet. Besides, I need you here in case someone needs to come rescue us,” Mud said. “You and Olivet stay here and get yelled at by Mills. He’ll feel bad about taking it out on you, and it’ll defuse him.”

  “Mud!” Bee punched his shoulder. “Are you seriously playing Mills like that?”

  “A little. Maybe.” Mud shrugged. “Look, can we just go?” He waved Steelbox back over, and the three of them finished their equipment checks. “All right, Chellox, we’ll send a beacon back through when we breach. Past that...do your jobs, and we’ll see you in a bit.”

  They walked quickly to the edge of the gravity shield that still closed off the hangar. A shared glance between them, a quick nod from Mud, and all three leapt from the edge of the hangar into open space.

  They slaved their GravPacks to Mud’s, who targeted the Ratzinger at three different points, creating an angle of entry that, he guessed, should avoid the pseudopods and drop them into the Fold. Remembering that the probe accelerated instantly on entry, Mud primed the GravPacks for max throttle, just in case. The light from the Fold had continued to dim, allowing them to look directly at it, to see where they were headed. It provided cold comfort.

  They drew closer to the Fold, speeding toward it, accelerating the entire way.

  One of the tentacle-esque feelers from the creature in the Fold whipped in their direction.

  Mud held course, not wanting to target the creature itself. Instead he sped up, repelling the Ratzinger quicker, trying to skirt the angle and breach the Fold without being touched directly. The pseudopod drew closer to their side. Mud drew the others in closer to him and accelerated harder still.

  The Fold itself sat only a few seconds away. Steelbox shuddered as he watched the gelatinous-seeming mass come alongside him.

  The Fold was a few arms’ lengths away.

  Steelbox screamed as the thing from the Fold brushed against him, grabbing at his side.

  They pushed through the Fold, tearing Steelbox away from the creature.

  And just like that, they were through. Their GravPacks heated, the internal components going from a usual acceleration to acting as if they’d pushed themselves past normal physics and into faster than light territory.

  Vision blurred, more so for Bee and Steelbox than for Mud, his Hurkz eyes adjusting faster to the strange way light behaved in the Fold. Clean lines seemed fuzzy at the edges now, blurring indistinctly, as if their shape remained only a firm suggestion. Colorwise, everything in sight shifted either red or blue depending on how it moved in relation to them. Open space, which Mud thought they had to still be in, didn’t look like normal space at all. It glowed faintly, looking like an atmosphere without end, reaching into infinity. Which made less and less sense.

  Bee keyed her comm and hoped. “Steelbox, are you all right?” she asked, glancing at him, still wincing in pain.

  “I think so?” he replied, shaking his head. “You sound really odd.”

  “Never mind that,” Mud said, “What happened?”

  “That thing touched me. My arm feels...it isn’t broken, I can move it,” he waved his arm, showing them, “but it feels...soft.”

  “All right, important safety notice. Don’t touch living things here.”

  “I feel distinctly unwell,” Bee said, looking at Mud.

  “Me too. And Steelbox is right, you sound...wrong. Sound is being affected too.”

  “For all of us. Look at this place, though!” They hung in Non-Space, gazing out into another universe, taking a moment to try to orient themselves.

  The rear end of the creature from the Fold floated to one side of them, and Mud maneuvered them further away. They could see blurry, solid masses in the distance, but nothing that made concrete sense to them.

  Mud shifted his GravPack’s HUD display to a wide setting, targeting what looked like one of the possibly solid masses. He set an attraction thread to it and tried to direct them there, but the pull worked maybe half as well as usual.

  Reporting that to the other two, they all started to deploy sensor gear while they moved toward the large mass. Steelbox worked slowly, obviously in more pain that he felt like letting on.

  “We’re sending you back,” Mud said, “instead of a beacon.”

  “Cap, no, you’ll need the help. I’m fine.”

  “You’re not,” Bee said, nodding at Mud. “Mud can shoot you out the way we came in and the Arrow will pick you up. The data from a touch will be invaluable anyway. Plus you can start to tell them what we’ve found so far. We won’t be far behind, trust me.”

  “Yeah, this is a crap vacation spot. We’ll do some recon and come right back.”

  “But Cap...Mud. I’m—”

  “Going back, is what you’re doing.” Steelbox spun in space, realizing his GravPack was still slaved to Mud’s controls.

  “Come on!” he yelled, starting to switch back to free flight.

  “You fight me on this and you’re really benched,” Mud said. “Now go.”

  Steelbox’s GravPack, already heating, started to whine as Mud forced it to repel toward the Fold as fast as it could manage. Steelbox stopped fighting and took control when Mud gave it back to him, but he didn’t stop his flight.

  “You guys better make it back,” he said.

  “Promise,” Bee said as her teammate and planetmate shot off toward the Fold. “And watch the reentry, you’ll slow down really hard!” she yelled into her comm. “Brace for it, and just shut down the GravPack. Reboot it and you’ll be fine.”

  Watching Steelbox go, Mud and Bee both noticed movement around them. They still flew toward the planet mass but watched carefully, trying to work out what they watched as they went.

  The sky seemed full of pellets. Small, round objects moving quickly, cluttering the entire space. They hadn’t noticed before, only now starting to be able to truly discern finer details as their eyes adjusted. Mud shifted his goggles slightly, wishing he could remove them.

  Along the space above them, the pellets were vanishing when they hit the creature in the Fold. Other, larger shapes also moved around them, destroying pellets. The other shapes resolved, as they concentrated, into hexapedal forms—obviously living creatures now that they could force their eyes to focus.

  The forms wielded wide-sweeping energy beams, scouring the space of the pellets. They acted like, Mud thought, they were under attack. The pellets came far less frequently where they were fighting back, but outside of their range, pellets swarmed freely. Now they worked out part of cause of the fuzziness around them: pellets passing around them, making shapes seem indistinct. They realized the objects passed through them as well.

  “It’s like the worst case of air pollution I’ve ever seen,” Bee said. “Do we help them?”

  “We need to find out what the them is,” Mud said, still aiming them at the large, solid-seeming mass their GravPacks were working on reeling them toward. “I think we need to get their attention.”

  “I thought we were doing just recon,” Bee reminded him.

  “We are, but that includes meeting the natives.” Mud shifted the GravPacks to reel them closer to one of the Sweepers, as he thought of them. They drew nearer, able to make out not only six limbs, but that the creature possessed an internal spinal column, head and neck, eyes and a mouth. Obviously intelligent, it held a technological device to fire the wide beam. It seemed to swim along the strange, hybrid skyspace they floated in.

  “How do we get its attention?” Bee asked. “No, how do we let it know we’re not a threat?”

  “First Contact rules apply,” Mud said, “follow my lead.” Mud held his arms out wide, hands open, fingers splayed. Bee followed suit, and they drifted
closer to the Sweeper. “Hello!” Mud shouted, unsure of the sensitivity of the Sweeper’s hearing.

  It looked directly at them, bringing its weapon to bear. Opening its mouth, it spoke in what sounded to Bee like static being used as a whale song, or an unbalanced engine perhaps. Nothing close to any language she’d heard.

  Mud didn’t have a reference point for the language either, but he’d expected that. He kept still, showing no threat and no weapons drawn. “Mud,” Mud said, slowly moving one arm in to point to himself. “Bee,” he said next, pointing at her just as slowly. He repeated the process, still drifting closer to the Sweeper.

  The Sweeper watched, holding its device at the ready. “Bee, record everything,” Mud said, softly so only she could hear him, trying to not move his mouth much and confuse the name repetitions.

  “I already was,” she said. “Not sure we’ll get anything usable, though.”

  “Need to try,” he said, stopping their forward movement as he noticed the Sweeper start to back off. “Mud. Bee,” he repeated.

  A static-filled burst of notes emanated from the Sweeper. Instead of pointing at itself with any of its limbs, the Sweeper repeated itself, they thought, and jabbed the device in its hands toward them.

  “Not a hello, then,” Mud said. “A stop, probably.” He nodded at the Sweeper. “Sure, we can do that.” Holding steady, Mud went back to slowly repeating names.

  “Mud, I don’t think they care about our names.”

  “Trust me on this, all right? We don’t have many other options just now.”

  The Sweeper jabbed toward them again with its device, stopping to raise it and fire a wide flat beam, wiping out more pellets. It lowered the device—the weapon, Mud corrected himself—at them once more. Other large creatures, same as had poked through the rift, moved into some of the larger clusters of pellets.

  “Mud—”

  “We’re fine,” he said without looking.

  “No, we’re not, damn it, the Fold is closing!” Bee said loudly, reaching out to turn Mud to look back toward where they’d come. Sure enough, the Fold looked to be closing itself up, the creature that had been half in it moving back, and clear. Sweepers surrounded it, looking as if they were busy herding it back. Perhaps, thought Mud, the whole thing had been a mistake.

  Either way, they needed the Fold to get home. Mud started to point at both himself and Bee and then at the Fold. “We go,” he repeated over and over, as he started to work out where and how to use the GravPack to get them home before the Fold closed fully. The skyspace around them shifted as they went.

  He wasn’t entirely sure it could be done.

  Another jab, and the Sweeper shouted something else at them. Mud couldn’t remember if it matched what he assumed was a ‘Stop’ before. He also couldn’t afford to stop, regardless. Lashing out with a few strands from the GravPack and starting to move, Mud pushed the pack as hard as it would go. He could feel the heat from it against his back, hoping neither his pack nor Bee’s would actually burn them, much less fry their circuits.

  Under them, the wide beam fanned out, the Sweeper firing a warning shot. Mud kept going. Another warning shot, closer still. They pushed on. The Fold closed quickly, though, snapping shut without ceremony before they could reach it. Speeding right through where it had been, Mud cursed and brought them to a halt.

  “Now what?” Bee asked, not trying to hide the frustration in her voice.

  “We find another Fold, I suppose,” Mud answered.

  “That’s your entire plan?”

  “I’m working on it. But look,” Mud pointed, waving his hand some to indicate the Sweepers. Masses of them moved away toward somewhere else, no longer firing beams to destroy the pellets, the rate of pellets far less.

  “All right, what does it mean?” Bee aimed sensors at the area the Sweepers had left.

  “Not sure, but something about this feels familiar.” Mud held out his hands again as the Sweeper after them drew closer. “Here we go again.”

  The Sweeper started to gesture with his weapon, moving it to one side, pointing, and swinging it back toward Mud and Bee. They took the meaning and started to move, as smoothly as Mud could get them, in the direction requested.

  “Hey Bee?” Mud asked quietly as they continued to go where the Sweeper led them.

  “Yeah?”

  “Notice that even when we move in tiny amounts, the GravPacks, they’re acting...strange?” Mud set her to free flying. “See?”

  “The probe did the same, from what I could tell. Strained like it leapt to somewhere above light speed.”

  “Sure, because this place is so different, it tries to compensate, but it’s more than that. It’s like distance doesn’t match up.”

  Bee checked her readouts, then checked them again. “I believe you, but I don’t follow.”

  “The GravPacks are straining, not just trying to keep up to a speed they’re not going at, but they’re feeling like they’re burning miles they aren’t. I think distance doesn’t mean the same thing here as it does in our universe.”

  “But distance isn’t a fixed thing, it’s relative to speed,” Bee said, looking over data as best she could.

  “Right, which would mean—”

  “Time isn’t the same, either,” Bee said, sounding vaguely horrified. “Oh, Mud, that’s not good. That’s potentially really not good. But if time works different, if space itself isn’t the same, how are we—”

  “Because the universe is stranger than we like to admit,” Mud said, “and that might hold true across different universes, too.”

  “Really?” Bee said. “You’re going to tell me your entire answer is ‘sometimes things make no sense’ and expect me to just accept it?”

  “Until we have time to unpack it, yeah. For now just note it and file it away and shake your head at it.”

  “How’s that plan coming?” she asked, glancing at the Sweeper herding them.

  “So far they’ve done nothing to us. Could’ve shot us in the back. So we follow them for now and learn something.”

  “We shouldn’t have come blazing in here, Mud.”

  “It’ll be fine.” The Sweeper gestured again and pointed them to a gathering of Sweepers. They all hung in open space, no visible suits or protection. Six limbs, but in no way insectoid in construction. The Sweepmeet, as Mud decided it should be called, allowed them to see more of the beings up close and start discerning differences between individuals. Head size and shape, limb length, and mouth size all varied in what he considered normal parameters.

  They organized themselves carefully, he noticed. There was firm societal structure at work. Individuals were given preference in placement near the newcomers, and the staticky sounds of their voices rose and fell depending on who talked.

  None of this helped him understand what was said, but the data allowed him to start working out how their hierarchy worked. Knowing that could let him, he thought, survive the encounter and get them both home safely.

  Muttering to Bee to just follow his lead, Mud waved his arms to get the Sweepers’ attention. He started to gesture wildly, trying to mime the Fold and their entrance. Reaching back to pat his GravPack, he mimed their flight.

  “Bee, take over,” he said, stopping his movements.

  “Wait, what?”

  “Mime the flight, and the Fold and all of it.”

  “Seriously?”

  “We need them to know you are my equal. Trust me on this. Just go through it and add bits.”

  Bee shook her head and started to mime the flight and Steelbox’s leaving, and so on. She felt ridiculous, but Mud could see it worked. Whereas the Sweepers only paid attention to him, they now split their focus, paying attention to Bee, but still glancing at Mud to see if he would join in.

  He did, near the end of Bee’s story. She looked at him and picked up his cues as he worked off what she mimed. Together they told the story of the Fold closing, and of following the Sweeper to where they were now.

>   “Do you think they understood any of that?” she asked.

  “No idea,” he said, “but they know we’re a team, and that we’re equals. It really is key. The last thing we want is for them to consider you disposable, or just an extension of me. We don’t know how they view us, as organisms. Well, we do now. But we didn’t before.”

  “You had the strangest upbringing,” Bee told him. “I’m pretty sure the Gov doesn’t have classes in First Contact.”

  “They do, actually,” Mud told her, “but they’re kind of...not great...at lower levels. And based off of the original Insertion Team’s work, mostly, regardless.”

  The Sweepers conferred amongst themselves, the one who led them here speaking constantly to the others. It would point at Mud and say a phrase, then at Bee and say a different phrase. Mud grinned. He pointed at himself and said his name, then at Bee, saying hers.

  The original Sweeper pointed emphatically at them both when that happened, and Mud looked at Bee. “Survival rates just went a lot higher. They know we have names, and they’re learning them.”

  “Great, can they call us a cab, maybe?”

  “Hey, once we get the Fold through to them, they can maybe just...open another? We’ll find out.” Mud mimed the Fold again, pointing back in the direction where it had been.

  The Sweeper who seemed to be in charge mimed at them slowly, using four of their six limbs. Good, Mud thought, they probably stood on the last two. He cataloged the info in memory and watched.

  “Did they just say that the big beast thing...do they think we mean it?” Bee asked Mud, watching.

  “Possibly.” He mimed back, trying to make sure they understood the Fold from the creature that had poked through it. Back and forth they went, in circles, Mud worried. They distinctly did not want the creature brought over to them. Mud circled back and held his hands up, palms facing the Sweepers, trying to get the concept of waiting across. No go.

  “We need to stop,” Mud told Bee, “and define yes, no, and hold the hell on.”

  “Can’t we just use math?”

  “Yup,” Mud said, looking at the Sweepers and holding up one finger. He lowered it, and held up his fist. Then repeated. A few more repetitions and he started to point at a single object when he raised his finger. One. Then he pointed at empty space when he closed his fist. Zero. Basic binary to get the idea of something and nothing established and agreed upon.