The Endless Sky

by Adam P. Knave

  On the Arrow, Mud went over the data as well, having shifted to sit in the navigation seat, leaving Olivet to stand watch over the engines. Chellox flew comfortably, not needing active navigation, his flight plan established and locked in. Mud watched his pilot, his friend, fly with a natural ease Mud would never know.

  Chellox seemed to only gesture toward the controls and the ship would respond. Constant tiny corrections, the softest of touches, to keep their path optimized. He paid the flight the sort of attention parents reserve for their children. Mud forced himself to stop watching Chellox’s hands flick over control surfaces and cycled back to the problem at hand. It loomed.

  An entire sun being destroyed out of nowhere sat as the stuff of nightmares. A tale told to children so they would behave. Total instant solar collapse simply didn’t happen. Mud chuckled to himself silently. His entire life, his job—his calling, it seemed—was dealing with things that “simply didn’t happen.” Until they did.

  Back before he’d taken his parents’ old job over, he’d been lost, in a sense. Some light troubleshooting on a per-contract basis, but never for the Gov—stupid retrieval jobs to secure enough funds to keep going, sure, but no real direction. He’d been raised for this job, for the Insertion Team, and had instead struck out anywhere but, trying figure out what he wanted. All roads, though, lead right back. He’d admitted that truth to himself and taken up the job happily, thinking that would be the end of it.

  Now, as they raced toward a huge unsolvable problem, the uncertainty threatened to come back. An entire planet of people was about to die. His team were the first responders. Realistically, no one wanted that pressure settling on them. But here he sat, he knew, offering himself, and his team, for the job and the weight of it.

  And maybe, he thought suddenly, that remained the point, at the end of everything. No one wanted the job, no one enjoyed it, but someone had to do it. And if you could stand up and be that person, why wouldn’t you? Because of the fear, the chance of failure? Everything that existed came with those ingredients, but you couldn’t let people suffer for your own inability to face forward. Mud stiffly flexed his right leg and felt a soft vibration from the brace. Better, he decided, than needles all over your body pushing down and injecting you.

  CHAPTER 25

  BEE AND STEELBOX SLOWED down as they reached the Claudia 64-TU system. The star, even from the edge of the system, could be seen to be in trouble. From their distance, the star stood out only as a small disc of light, but one that seemed to shake in ways that stars never did in normal situations. They sped back up to get in-system rapidly and approached Claudia Seven as fast as possible. The planet’s orbit was full of ships. The problem, they could both see quickly, stood out in that the ships had achieved orbit but didn’t look to have a destination in mind. They floated, directionless, generally just pointing away from the star.

  “Steelbox, run some quick math for me. Rate of star decay against mass left. We need to know when the gravity will dip low enough that Claudia Seven’s orbit will actually cease.”

  “Got it. Yah, I’m going to need to shoot that to the Arrow to have them run the rest of the system as well. We need to see where this all hits.”

  Bee nodded, and Steelbox started the calculations. They both knew that once Claudia 64-TU’s gravity well dropped below a threshold, every rock in the system would fly off like its strings had been cut.

  Though only Claudia Seven held life in the system, the planet wasn’t alone as far as planetary bodies went. Six other large rocks spun in orbits around Claudia 64-TU, and each one of them became another problem for the math. Steelbox loaded all the orbital data he could collect, added the solar data, and fired it off to the Arrow for them to work on. They needed to know when the sun would lose its grip on the planets and where each one would go after that. Hopefully, best case, none of them would hit Claudia Seven. That scenario would only mitigate the damage—but then, they would happily take any lessened degree of problem.

  “I’m calling up whomever thinks they’re in charge,” Bee said, “or trying to. There’s a bit of panic, you can imagine.”

  “Yeah,” Steelbox agreed. “We’re first on scene, and no heavy cruiser nearby yet, but there must be a Gov building on the surface we can talk to, no?”

  “We’ll have to go down there,” she said, jerking a thumb toward the planet, “and find someone. Let me get Mills to clear some red tape and find me a name.”

  They started to drop into the planet’s atmosphere, slower than usual as they needed to keep changing vectors to avoid panicked launches coming right for them. No one seemed to be in charge of airspace currently, and they both knew it would only be a matter of time before collisions started and everything got even worse. But, for now, they could only wait for the data and start triage as best they could manage. A tone from her wrist told Bee the information from Mills she needed had arrived, and they started down to the planet’s surface, nervously watching the sky.

  Aboard the Arrow, Mud and Olivet crunched numbers. They ran them a second time and then a third, hoping for better results and never turning them up.

  Mud slapped the keyboard in front of him in frustration. “Is there at least a sign of what’s causing it? A way to stop this?”

  “Not without deep solar scans, I don’t think,” Olivet said, “which we won’t be able to get until we arrive.”

  “Six hours,” Chellox said over his shoulder, “and even that should be impossible.”

  “No one is blaming you for the size of the universe, Chellox,” Mud said.

  “Good, because any faster—”

  “And we won’t have a ship to get us there,” Mud finished. “No, you’re doing the impossible, Chellox. No worries.”

  “But, Mud, what can we even do?” Olivet asked.

  “Bee and Steelbox will rough out a plan,” Mud replied, trusting in his team. “But we have to get them this data.”

  “Sending now.”

  “Six hours, huh?” Mud asked.

  “Size of the universe, Mud, not my fault,” Chellox said briskly.

  “I know, I know.” He stretched his leg and set a timer on his thinsuit so he wouldn’t ask Chellox again.

  Steelbox landed in front of a Gov building, Bee alighting by his side. A mass of people crowded outside, demanding entry from the four guards who stood in front of the gate. Trying to be as gentle as possible, Steelbox worked his way to the front of the crowd, Bee following close.

  Holding up ID for the guards, Steelbox waited. The guards weren’t inclined to let anyone in and didn’t seem to want to call inside for authorization.

  As they waited, Bee’s communicator went off and she looked at the data stream coming in. “We don’t have time to wait,” she said, as much to the guards as to Steelbox.

  “Ma’am, you’ll have to—” the guard stopped midsentence as Bee cursed softly and took off in her GravPack, going over the fence.

  Steelbox followed her within seconds. “Bee, we can’t just—”

  “I meant it when I said we don’t have time.”

  The guards yelled after them and Bee turned long enough to yell back, “Shoot if you think it’ll help.” She landed at the doors and yanked them open hard. They went inside, finding it less crowded but no less chaotic.

  Bee made straight for the office Mills had told her to look for. Resisting the urge to break into a run, she still pushed people aside and ignored their yelps of surprise. Steelbox, normally the crowd shifter of the two, followed her, apologizing to people as he went. “I get you’re channeling your inner Madison, Bee, but—”

  “Four hours,” Bee said. “The Arrow won’t be here for six, we have four until lights out.”

  “That’s—”

  “Not nearly enough time. So to hell with nice.” Bee found the door she’d been told to look for and yanked it open without knocking.

  “Excuse me!” General Bennet said, looking up from his desk. Around the wide, wooden desk stood several aides
, all showing him various printouts.

  “Insertion Team, General,” Bee said quickly, moving across the dark olive carpet to lean her hands on the desk. “You should have a notice telling you to expect us and that we’re here to run extraction.”

  “Run extraction, is it?” Bennet shook his head. “We don’t have the ships to evacuate a whole planet and we aren’t even sure what’s going on.”

  “We’re aware of what you don’t have. We’re here to use what you do,” Bee told him.

  Steelbox linked his thinsuit’s data comm to a wall screen facing the desk. “As for what’s going on, sir,” he said, “Claudia 64-TU is collapsing in on itself.”

  “I know that, you—”

  “Then you also know you only have four hours until the sun’s completely gone?” Steelbox asked.

  “What?!” Bennet looked at his aides. “Why haven’t you told me that?”

  “We didn’t—”

  “And,” Bee added, “you must know that there’s a twenty-six percent chance that once it blinks out, Claudia Seven will hit one of the other planets in the system as it flies free.”

  “That high?” Bennet looked at his desk, the color draining from his face. “Where did you get—”

  “We’re very good at what we do, sir,” Bee said, softer, easing into gentle, knowing how wretched the General must feel. “We’re here to help. Let us.”

  “What do you need?”

  “Everything you have,” Steelbox said quickly. “A command post, full auth codes for everything going on in or out of orbit, and command auth to direct traffic.”

  Bee sat on the edge of the desk and got to work, calling up data feeds on the wall screen. Another set of screens were brought in, and quickly they established their command post. General Bennet felt his ire rise as these strangers took over his office, but he tamped his feelings down, knowing they were rushed to the point of not caring.

  Steelbox worked up a constant display, rotating and showing the decaying orbits of everything in the Claudia 64-TU system. The smaller the star got, the less of a dent in the universe it made, the less gravity. When you’re on a planet, you don’t often realize, but they move fast. Very fast. And small changes in the gravity well they rotate around cause big changes in orbital paths.

  Bee worked out flight paths for any ships leaving orbit, adjusting paths in real time to compensate for the widening arc of Claudia Seven’s orbit. She also relayed the info to all ships still too close to the planet. “Where,” she asked Steelbox, “are we putting these people?”

  “Into whatever can fly, I guess,” he said. “We can try to put people here into bunkers and keep them warm once Claudia 64-TU goes out, but—”

  “No, I mean, where do we land them? These ships are packed. They don’t have proper supplies or fuel to make another system with passengers alive.” She shook her head. “How do we save them instead of just prolonging their suffering?”

  “We hope the others have a plan, and we just get this done,” he said. “This is your Op, Bee, you call it.”

  “Don’t put this on me, I can’t—”

  “Really?” Steelbox asked. He barked a few course corrections to an assistant standing near him, the room milling with people rushing in and out to deliver status updates. While Bee directed ships, Steelbox directed resources on the ground as best he could, all while keeping up star charts and pattern guesses.

  “Really!” Bee shouted. “I can’t be responsible for this many—”

  “Right up until you stared at it, you were running this operation,” he said. “So stop thinking about the weight of it, maybe. You’re as bad as Mud, sometimes.”

  “Ha! He’s been trained forever in this.” Bee forced a launching freighter to adjust course. The ship made the correction, but sloppily, causing a cascade of issues. Bee and Steelbox lost their conversation to work for a while, both of them muttering under their breath between frantic communications.

  An hour passed, and then two. They were brought drinks and bits of food that they picked at. Closing her eyes as the second hour ticked away, feeling them burn with exhaustion, Bee cracked her neck. “He really has been at this since birth, you know?”

  “Mud?” Steelbox asked. “Sure. And he still doubts himself all the time and tries to hide it. The both of you.”

  “Fine,” Bee said, grinding the heels of her palms into her closed eyes, trying to rub away the tiredness that had settled on her. “Hey, you doing new solar scans?”

  “Trying to,” Steelbox said, “but I keep getting interrupted by other fires.”

  “Prioritize it. I got most of what could carry people into orbit and I’m just arranging paths at this point, for a while at least. I’ll take point on ground resources. But we need to know what’s causing this before it ends.”

  “You think we can save Claudia?”

  “Not at all. Even if we did, we can’t exactly reignite it to size, and it’s already to a point where we’d have to manually shift Claudia Seven’s orbit to sustain life long term. No, but I want to know what did this.”

  “Sure, and then?”

  “I’m going to find a way to hit it, I think.”

  Steelbox laughed and set up a new set of solar scans. He added a few other, deeper scans of the area around Claudia 64-TU as well, just to see what he could see. Bee shifted screens around and took over the ground operations while he worked. Not much remained on their list. Bee knew that if she didn’t find something to do, she would spend the rest of their time fretting about the countdown.

  She started to work, instead, on the bunker plans. A lot of the personnel on the base, and across the planet, simply couldn’t leave. Claudia Seven contained nowhere near enough ships for an evacuation on that scale. But once they lost Claudia 64-TU fully, a deep freeze would start, even as they spun off into the universe. Their atmosphere would stay put, mostly. Should. It’d be thin, and they’d trail a bit of it behind, but the lack of a sun would remain the biggest instant problem. Within a week, the surface of the planet wouldn’t be habitable.

  Of course, finding space to house the large number of people left on Claudia Seven proved its own challenge. Even with the population seriously decreased and in space at the moment, nothing served as a long term-plan.Bee shook her head and took a deep breath. Long term wasn’t her issue, it was the rest of the team’s. She just had to hold on to that and put the stress out of her head as best she could.

  They continued to work, trying to hold back death for as many people as they could, trusting in their teammates to find a way to shut the door.

  CHAPTER 26

  THE ARROW’S CREW knew they were fighting time and would lose. They couldn’t arrive before the sun went out, but they could, hopefully, be prepared for when they arrived. Mud worked with Mills over comms, amassing a truly heroic number of large cargo ships and transports. They recommissioned a bunch of ships, spread staff too thin, and had everything underway, or close to it, in record time.

  Assuming Bee and Steelbox could keep much of the population of Claudia Seven alive for a few days, they could be transferred and rehomed. Where they would be rehomed still remained a big, glaring issue. In the current human circles of space, there simply didn’t sit an empty habitable planet. That did not happen.

  Mud ran some math to pull up a list of sparsely populated planets that were in a few days’ range. There weren’t any. Temporary rehoming could be achieved if they scattered the population of Claudia Seven to enough planets. Mud got Mills on board with the plan and started him working on getting the appropriate approvals up the chain of command.

  Knowing the pressures Bee and Steelbox were under, Mud resisted the urge to check in with them, knowing they’d burst in with a call if they needed help. Until then, Mud knew, all he could really manage would be to distract them.

  While they were still about three hours out from Claudia Seven, the comms lit up. “Data burst from Steelbox,” Olivet said from the back of the ship, where he was still keeping a
n eye on the engines. “This is a lot of data.”

  “They’d be able to crunch it faster where they are,” Mud said. “Toss it to my screens, too?”

  Olivet shared the data stream and they both looked over the results in front of them. “All right, so why send it to us now?” Mud asked.

  “Look at the surrounding scans he did,” Olivet said, “he isn’t sure about this bit.” Olivet let the engines watch themselves for a moment and walked up the ship, leaning on the back of Mud’s chair. “It looks familiar, but I don’t know why.”

  “We could just ask.”

  “Let’s,” Olivet agreed.

  “Steelbox,” Mud said, opening the channel, “we got your data. What’s up?”

  “We’re in a holding pattern here, got as many evac’d as we could, getting as many into bunkers now as possible. Hoping you have a long-term plan.”

  “We’re working it,” Mud told him, “but the data you sent, what’s the score?”

  “Right,” Steelbox said. “Olivet, check the surrounding scans. It looks familiar, sort of like Bercuser. Can you verify that one for me?”

  “Oh,” Olivet said, looking over the data again, trying to match it up with memory. “Don’t we have good scans of Bercuser?”

  “Not really,” Mud said, “at least nothing reliable. Because of the—” he trailed off, seeing the pattern.

  “Yeah, that was my thinking, too,” Steelbox said. “Olivet?”

  “It could be a nimbus of the same breaching that Bercuser does,” he admitted, “but I can’t be sure.”

  “It’d look different,” Steelbox said. “Suns work different than solid planets, to be sure, but if we’re all right on all this—”

  “This is a Breach event?”

  “Inside the sun, I think,” Steelbox said. “It would explain why the sun is vanishing and at the speed it’s doing it. Think about it.”

  “I am,” Mud said, “and that’s the problem. So the breach opens in a sun, sucking it into the other universe, but why? And how do we stop it?”