The Endless Sky

by Adam P. Knave

  “Just hit the button, Captain.”

  Mud activated the command structure and Bee’s GravPack started to accelerate around them, spinning them in place as the tow line went taut. Mud’s GravPack kept up with the angle shifts, pushing the other pack away even as it tried to pull itself closer. They were locked in a battle that spun them around the solo GravPack faster and faster. By making sure to start slow and center the movement against the outer GravPack, Mud ensured they wouldn’t spin around each other, but that the rotation would happen according to plan, pushing them ever harder away from the solo GravPack.

  Gravitational forces built around them quickly, causing Mud’s GravPack to grow ever hotter against his back. He hadn’t thought about the heat bleed—normally space is a good enough differential that heat just leeches freely, but the constant forces at play were trapping it against him and threatening to add a new wrinkle to their problem. If his thinsuit melted or charred through, he would be exposed to open space and die.

  Then again, he reasoned, if he did, Bee would be fine and she could still control his GravPack and get home. So all wasn’t lost, regardless. The forces continued to build, with their spinning happening ever faster. The tow line held, and Bee was glad they weren’t in an atmosphere that could carry the sound of the cable straining. She knew that sound would drive her to utter distraction.

  Though, she admitted to herself, a distraction from the forces pushing in on them might be nice. Their protective field started to strain, letting some of the force through. Bee felt her joints creak, cartilage compressing and allowing bone to touch bone in spots.

  Mud felt his neck pop and tried to move it, slowly, to see if it was just a case of compression or if he’d broken his damn neck. Compression, thankfully, but the fact he wasn’t sure left him uneasy. They were still only at about two-thirds of the speed they needed for this work.

  Their speed continued to build. Bee’s GravPack, at the center of the storm, sparked once that Mud noticed and he started to worry. If it gave out before they got up to speed, they were dead. If it, instead, exploded, they were also dead, just in a whole different way—and stranger still, to him, would then also fly off in a random direction.

  Mud bit back a scream as his left shoulder dislocated. His head pounded, eyes feeling like they were going to explode in his head. He struggled to blink, his eyelids fighting against opening again, and activated his HUD. They were close to speed.

  Close, but not there yet.

  Mud’s eyes closed again and he sank into darkness.

  CHAPTER 19

  MUD’S EYES OPENED SLOWLY, first noticing the lack of pressure against them. He looked and the starfield moved past him in a straight line. He exhaled slowly. Thankfully.

  “Bee?” he asked sluggishly.

  “Sir,” she said, as lightly as possible. “I ejected us from spinning death in time. I think we have enough speed to reach the range of a gravity well before we stop breathing.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem, it was my ass on the line, too,” Bee said. “What’s your status?”

  “Shoulder dislocated, vision blurred, and I think my toes might be messed up somehow, but I can’t tell. You?”

  “Dislocated all the fingers on my right hand,” Bee said. “Which is surprisingly painful. I can snap them all back into place, no problem, but I didn’t want to risk the pain. One of us has to be awake.”

  “Go for it, I can fly us for now,” he said. “Actually, I can snap them back for you, if you want. It’ll be easier.”

  Bee moved her hand over in front of Mud and he gripped her wrist firmly under his arm, pinning it with his elbow. Using his one good hand, he rotated and popped each of her fingers back into socket.

  “Oh hell!” Bee yelled. “I wish I had passed out. Want me to get your shoulder?”

  “Are you,” he said, “asking as a form of revenge?”

  “I will not lie, it’ll make me feel better.”

  Mud rotated his body relative to hers, making sure she didn’t let go of his side and drift clear of the single gravity field moving them both through space. “Go for it.”

  He inhaled and bit back a scream as she popped his shoulder back into its socket. His vision swam and he fought back bile, struggling to neither throw up nor pass out again. “We’re even,” he choked out. “Happier?”

  “Not really, but I’m also not in more pain, so I’ll take it.”

  “Great. I show a planet-sized gravity well in range in about an hour. We’ll get closer than just on the edge of it and stop, adjust course, and hard burn home. Sound good?”

  “Sounds good. Do long-range comms work?”

  “I think so. Want to send a burst home, just a status and arrival time and that we’ll fill them in when we get there?” he asked. He still didn’t like the idea of using long-range comms when they didn’t absolutely need to.

  “Exactly my thought,” Bee agreed.

  Bee prepped the message and sent it, then shut her comms back off. It was about as far from protocol as you could get, but she agreed with Mud’s feeling on the comm units just now and wasn’t in the mood to argue with anyone at base over it.

  They continued in silence, both of them nursing their pains, until they reached the nearest gravity well. Mud slowed them to a stop and they floated free for a minute, gathering themselves.

  They used the remaining tow cable to redo Bee’s anchoring to Mud, then set up a new route home. Before they launched, Mud unstrapped his GravPack and opened it to space, insisting they both give it as good of a once-over as possible in their current conditions. The internals were lightly singed, but nothing seemed as if it would give out during a hard-burn faster than light for the amount of time they’d need it.

  They hoped.

  Shutting the access panel, Mud slung the GravPack back on and called up his HUD, triple-checking their route home. Everything checked out. He took a deep breath and accepted the parameters. The GravPack sprang to life and they shot forward, gaining speed until reality itself seemed to stop caring about them and they broke the light-speed barrier.

  Up until just a few hours ago, he’d never given that much consideration, Mud thought. Going faster than light via GravPack was a quirk, a bonus feature in a world that often needed them to survive. It had never mattered how it all worked because it just worked. There didn’t seem to be a downside, except for the scientists who tore their hair out wondering how it kept working every single time.

  None of them, that Mud had ever even heard a whisper of, not even his grandfather, had seen the problem. Hell, Mud wasn’t even sure he and Bee were correct yet, but everything pointed in that direction. They were seemingly messing with, in different ways, another universe. Mud tried to imagine how he would feel if something like that happened to his universe and then stopped.

  What if, he thought, it was happening to his universe. How would he know? The entire thing would just be events that seemed completely normal for how things worked. Mud laughed to himself and tried to get off the paranoia train his brain was riding. Not an easy task, but he focused, instead, on how they would go about proving or disproving their theory, sure that Bee already stood three steps ahead of him on the plan.

  He wasn’t wrong. Bee’d spent the entire trip back so far working on what she’d need to discover the reality behind their guesses. She trusted herself, and Mud, but trusted actual provable facts more whenever possible. She had a plan. Now, she knew, she’d just need to put it in motion and gather the proper resources.

  In silence, each lost in their thoughts of the future, they continued on through the darkness of space. They came around to where the Fold had stood, now long gone, and saw a large Gov ship, broken in two, dead, each half spinning, floating away from the other. Ragged edges exposed to space with spires of ice sprouting from broken pipping.

  “Is that—”

  “Ratzinger,” Mud confirmed. “What happened while we were gone?”

  “And where’d
the Amalfi go?” Bee asked. She turned her comms back on and sent a location ping request to both the Amalfi and the Arrow. They came back quickly, from the same location. “I have a location, so that’s something. Here,” she said, showing Mud the coordinates, “zero in and let’s work this out.”

  Mud followed the readings and there, behind a relatively close rock the size of a small moon, hung the Amalfi. The ship looked fully operational, and they headed right toward it, thankful.

  They remained that way right until they docked, landing on a hangar deck next to the Arrow, waved in with simple voice commands now that their short-range comms could take over. The Insertion Team, plus Bushfield and Mills, met them on the deck, all of them looking angry.

  “Don’t even try to explain yet. Follow me,” Mills said, turning as he spoke and walking away. The team followed him and Mud and Bee trailed along, unhappily.

  “Sarah,” Bee asked Bushfield softly, “what’s going on?”

  “Your long-range comms worked,” Bushfield told her, “but you turned them off. No data, no anything, after you vanish in the Fold? You got a lot of people mad at you. Including two you don’t want angry in your direction.”

  “Oh no,” Mud said, overhearing.

  “Yup,” Bushfield confirmed. “And thanks for that. We’ve been getting our asses chewed for a while now. Mills figures it’s your turn.”

  They took a lift up a few levels, no one else talking, and moved down a hallway full of executive offices until they came to Mills’ newest office. Larger than his old one—the Amalfi, in its day, treated staff well. A looming desk stood on one side of the room, with chairs in front of it. Against the far wall, a good fifteen feet away, an oversized screen hung. Bee realized Mills’ office might be larger than her little apartment on Bercuser and sighed.

  “All right, you two,” Mills said, moving behind his desk, “you have a lot to explain.”

  “Yeah, look, Mills, there’s a reason for everything. But how’s Steelbox?” Mud asked, looking at the man in question. His arm seemed fine, no cast or sling or even bandages visible. “And what happened to the Ratzinger?”

  “Hold on,” Mills said, typing on a control pad on his desk, “let me just...there.”

  The screen at the end of the room sprang to glowing life. On it were two people, both with tight-buzzed haircuts. In their sixties, they both still seemed more active than people a third of their age. Lines creased their faces but their eyes shone, currently flashing with anger and worry.

  “Mills, thanks, son,” said Jonah Madison from the screen. “This is your op and all, but mind if Shae and I take a whack at this first?”

  “Oh, Jonah, it would be my pleasure,” Mills said. He stood behind his desk—the Insertion Team stood in front of it, making sure Mills could be seen. Mud and Bee stood off a bit to the side.

  “Uhm, hi, Dad. Mom,” Mud said, feeling suddenly like a ten-year old caught shoplifting.

  “Newt—” Jonah started, using Mud’s childhood nickname.

  “Soldier, no,” Shae stopped him, a hand on his arm. “Mud, be grateful Mills is letting us run this show. You went on an illegal op, disobeyed direct orders on timing, and then willingly turned off communications after? This should be a full-on inquiry right now.”

  “Do you have,” Mud asked in reply, “Granddad’s gravity research? All of it? The GravPack testing and more?”

  “What does that have to do with—”

  “Jonah,” Bee cut him off, “it has everything to do with everything.” Mud and Bee looked at each other, and Mud nodded. “Long-range communications use gravity tech, don’t they?” she asked the room.

  “Yes, I’m not sure how, but yes,” Mills said.

  “Sure,” Jonah agreed.

  “That’s the problem,” Bee continued, “somehow they cross into a different universe, and the other universe is sick of it.”

  “You broke the barrier?” Shae asked quickly. “That’s not...you should never—”

  “You pulled it off?” Jonah asked, cutting his wife short. “We never could figure out how to safely.” He went from angry to impressed and curious as if a switch had flipped.

  “Yeah, we did. That’s what the Fold was,” Mud said. “So we did our job and investigated. Mills,” he said, turning, “the Fold was an active possible threat. So we went in. That’s what you pay us to do. I’m sorry it wasn’t on your timetable, but the universe doesn’t allow us to work that way sometimes.” He turned back to the screen. “Mom. Dad. Quick question. Hell,” he looked at his team, bringing them into the conversation, “all of you, tell me. If you found out that long-range comms caused problems for an innocent culture, if they seemed to be possibly harming them, would you continue to use them?”

  Everyone stood silent for a few seconds while they digested the concept.

  “Well,” Steelbox said, “no, of course not.”

  “All right, so let’s move past that and solve this.”

  “Now hold on,” Mills said, “you can’t just wave a wand and make this vanish, this was a mistake on every front.”

  “Maybe,” Shae said, “let’s work through it. I’m not sure anymore. Jonah?”

  “I’ll get the plans and shoot them over. But Mud, if long-range comms are a problem, should we come down there instead of this?”

  “No,” Bee said, almost too quickly, “we understand we have to use them sometimes, but we made a call out there and both stand by it. So let’s move on.”

  “We can’t just move on,” Bushfield said, “you might’ve been dead, or in trouble, or—”

  “Or doing our jobs,” Bee said softly. “Let’s keep doing them.” She looked at Bushfield and the two spoke without words for a moment, settling their anxiety about each other. “Because this is bigger than even that, possibly.”

  “Oh, right,” Mud said, “Olivet, we solved the Bercuser mystery and know what the mists are.”

  “Wait, what?” Olivet said, shaking his head.

  “Dad, get those plans and let’s find a better space to work in, and we can go over everything. All right?”

  “Sounds good,” Jonah said. “Mills, we’ll wait for a call. Say reconvene in thirty?”

  “Thirty is good. And thanks, guys,” Mud said, turning away from the screen as it went dark. “So, Mills, got a workspace for us?”

  CHAPTER 20

  THIRTY-SEVEN MINUTES LATER, in a workspace best described as ‘cluttered,’ Mud and Bee spread out their sensors, each hooked up to a terminal to display findings. Along with that, a set of cameras ringed the table, showing the view to Jonah and Shae, who were visible on a screen at one end of the large table. A two-screen display showed the original gravity research and notes from Doctor Williams.

  “Where’s Steelbox?” Chellox asked, even as the one missing member of the team came rushing into the room.

  “Sorry, I had to find where I put them in all the evac rush,” he said, laying out the two star charts he’d been studying.

  “Bee,” Mud said, “it’s your show.”

  “I haven’t had time to really dig into the Williams research,” she said. “But I can already see that Mud and I were right. Long-range comms work by wrapping packet data in small gravity shields and accelerating them, the same as GravPacks, so they can move at highly insane speeds.”

  “Wait, but then how does that work?” Olivet asked. “If that’s true, then they’d have to all be point to point, but multiple ships can pick up, even intercept, long-range comm traffic, which would indicate they’re broadband, not focused.”

  “Sure,” Bee agreed, “if normal physics applied. But they don’t, the same way they don’t apply to the GravPacks. It turns out that if you can accelerate something fast enough, it can slide out of our universe—either just a bit and ride the barrier, like a GravPack does, or, if it’s even smaller, breach completely. It’s that total breach that allows the impression of broadband. Doctor Williams didn’t actually solve long-range instant communications, he faked it. Th
e other universe runs on slightly different rules. Space isn’t the same, and neither is time. I’m not entirely sure how this all works, and I don’t know that Doctor Williams was either, honestly. But it does, and this is a large part of how.”

  “The problem starts,” Mud said, looking at Bee for her approval to continue—she nodded and he went on, “with the realization that the packets, when crossed, are flooding the other universe, which we’re going to need a name for. Anyway,” he continued, “they’re fighting back. They have these guns, or something, that cast a wide beam and destroy the messages.”

  “I’ve been thinking about them. Look at this data,” Bee said, calling up one of her sensor’s readings. “The beam from those guns disrupts gravity—well, our version of it, at least. Which is off from theirs, which is why the GravPacks stuggled over there. Similar, but not quite the same. The guns disrupt it, and the packets either pop back into our universe or are dispersed, I’m not sure. Either way, those weapons pose a serious problem for us. If one hit us square, it could destroy a GravPack and, like the packets, I don’t know what happens next.”

  “I think the beings on the other side are natural disruptors of our version of gravity,” Mud said. “It’d explain what happened to Steelbox when he brushed against that creature. A localized disruption of his own internal gravity along one arm? It’d hurt like a bitch but cause no lasting harm if contact was brief enough.”

  “But then,” Chellox said, “wouldn’t it have been in extreme pain when it was sliding along the Ratzinger?”

  “Yup,” Bee confirmed. “And we saw a few of those larger beasts on the other side. My guess is that the Fold wasn’t planned. The beast was in pain, probably from so many packets hitting it, and it breached at a soft spot and tried to work out why the Ratzinger kept hurting it.”

  “All right, then why did it,” Mills asked, “decide to break the ship in half later, just before the Fold closed?”

  “Dumb beast, caused itself more pain trying to stop the pain, so it lashed out?” Mud guessed. “There’s still a ton we don’t know.”