Lacuna: The Ashes of Humanity

by Adams, David

  "Coolant level, coolant level, coolant level…"

  Rowe dragged her finger across the touch screen, bringing up a stream of numbers. Her eyes fed them to her brain as fast as they could, mentally drinking from the fire hose as numbers flew across her console's screen.

  She could handle it. Remaining in an upright position helped keep your breathing steady. It wasn't as good as a shot from an inhaler, but it was something. "Coolant level six percent. Fucking hell, fucking God damn it, we can't replenish that shit. But with no ship left, well, there's no point in having coolant, is there? Shit."

  Rowe talked to herself more when she was alone. Normal people would think she was crazy, and she had long ago trained herself out of that habit. But when she was alone, stressed, her old habits came back in force.

  "This piece of shit's going to shit. Going to go critical. And I gotta stop it. Gotta make it good. But there's not enough coolant. Coolant, need coolant. Some kind of coolant. Anything to take the heat away."

  Thermal properties ran through her head, a lifetime's worth of information absorbed at the prestigious University of Sydney, knowledge crammed into her mind with energy drinks for mortar. She knew so much more than everyone around her, and people often mocked her for it, but her brain was her most valuable asset.

  Distractions. Distractions. She needed to clear her mind. Think only of coolant. Not of video games, or college life, or Alex Aharoni.

  Only of coolant.

  The Cracker had consumed a chunk of their liquid nitrogen. It could be replenished, of course, but it took time. Time. Time was something they didn't have.

  "Temperature. Temperature. The hotter it gets, the weaker the containment. Reactor meltdown. That would be bad."

  She could fire the ship's emergency core ejection rockets, blast the reactor chamber free from the ship, but they only had eight. To lose one would be an irreparable blow. They couldn't just fabricate more nuclear reaction chambers—

  Or could they? They had the constructs now, wherever they were. Rowe had named them Gypsy, Darkhorse, Sparrow, Willow, Stinker and Roadrunner. She hadn't thought of a name for the new one. Maybe Porcupine, or something cool like Snake or Viper or Killer or—

  He brain was doing it again. Rambling things, irrelevant things, unable to keep itself focused.

  She used to take Ritalin for it. Amphetamines under a different name, used to control adult ADHD. Hyperactivity disorder, it was called, but it was a strange name. That state was normal for her. Manic in a way, getting forty hours of work done in twenty-six with no breaks, her only enemy the constant side-tracking. Thoughts. Ideas. Too many ideas, spinning around in her head. Sometimes Ritalin took the distractions away.

  But Ritalin made her a zombie. A predictable, flat, hollow shell of a person.

  "Bad. Reactor meltdown bad. Shit, fuck, shit, shit, shit. Sum', get it together. Fucking hell."

  Her fingers flew over the console's keyboard at manic speed, hundreds of words coming out per minute, her commands pouring out at a frenzied pace. She diverted coolant from all the other reactors, giving the chamber before her a short shot of each. Minimal effect. She tried inserting the control rods to stop the cascade, but the mechanical arms controlling them were a pile of molten slag. Fortunately, the damage had not breached the core itself.

  "Why didn't they make these things pebble-bed reactors? That shit doesn't melt down, just fucking doesn't. It's completely un-fucking-possible. Typical Chinese fucking garbage, just trying to make everything as cheap and dodgy as possible, fuck. This is why the Australians should have overseen the fucking reactor construction, except those pussy shitfuckers will never embrace nuclear power. Fucking hippy bullshit."

  External sources of coolant. The river was an obvious answer, and it was not far away. But they could not port enough water here in time. No way. Water was too heavy. One litre of water weighed a kilogram. They would need thousands of litres of water to cool a reactor like this. She had no time.

  The core ejection button was right in front of her. It shone with a red light, mocking her, teasing her.

  You failed, she could imagine it saying, a voice as clear in her head as the corporeal one she used to speak. That reactor's about to blow. No bonus round. No 100% completion. Life's not a video game.

  Video games were poor teachers. Not everything in life had a perfect completion rate, but video games assumed everything was perfect, always. There was always that one fucking mission in a game that would kill you the first time around. Sometimes there were two or three, and they were deliberate. The game didn't want you to finish without experiencing some loss. Some defeat. You had to lose before you could win.

  But video games allowed you to reload. They would crunch you up and spit you out, but you could try again. Would take hours, days, or weeks of practice to beat, but you could always win with enough repetition. Experienced gamers knew the first time they engaged the boss was just a trial run. To see how the scripts played out, so you could find the chinks in their armour, beat them, and win.

  "Fucking hell, fucking reactor. I just want to save here. Lemme save. Save the game. Reload if I fuck it up. Gotta save the reactor."

  Maybe she should have saved sooner. She considered venting a small amount of superheated radioactive material into the atmosphere. Velsharn was a big planet, a windy planet, and the prevailing winds would take that over the ocean where it would be absorbed into background radiation.

  Possible. Might work. Might buy her some time. Enough time to find a solution, but how long until the Toralii shot their deathbeamlaserthing at them again?

  Rowe looked up to the ceiling, some part of her mind unable to shake the expectation that death was only moments away. She imagined the ceiling glowing again, another beam of white blasting through the ship like it was nothing, blowing her to dust. Just like what had happened in Operations.

  Her console had protected her from the blast, but it had been loud as fuck. Painfully loud, as much as the time she had been crushed up against a speaker at a death metal concert, the volume so loud it made her whole body vibrate.

  That concert had probably damaged her hearing, and the blast in Operations had probably done so again, but she had no time to dwell on that. Her body was stuffed anyway. A lifetime of sleep replaced by energy drinks and exercise replaced with Mario Kart had seen to that. Despite bragging about wanting to live forever, her entire retirement plan was to die before she got old.

  Fuck. The reaction was getting stronger. The digital temperature gauge on her console climbed. If it got too hot, it might ignite the gunpowder in the rockets that functioned as its emergency override, except the mooring clamps would still be attached. Instead of propelling the dangerous nuclear device away from the ship and to safety, it would tear its guts out as it did, or fail to go anywhere.

  Or explode. Explosions or explosions. Not much of a choice. Nobody knew what it would do; nobody had dared test it, and their theoretical projections had been ambiguous.

  "Everything's always ambiguous. Everything's always… bendy. Fluid. Changing. Fluid. We need fluid."

  Water from underground? No, she'd thought of that already. Not enough time to get enough.

  But what if she moved the ship? Could the ship even take off in this state? It was unlikely, given it had a huge hole through the middle. That would do hell for its structural integrity, and the Beijing was not designed for atmospheric flight at the best of times. It would probably just break in half.

  And it was probably still full of people.

  And she couldn't steer it anyway.

  She couldn't debate any more. Rowe ordered the ship's computers to vent material into the atmosphere, ejecting it out the bow port, down the valley and towards the ocean. It would buy her three or four more hours, and hopefully anyone outside wouldn't get too irradiated.

  The console lit up with red lights and a speaker emitted a faint, sad warble. The port was damaged. It wouldn't vent material, not even to the other reactors.
She was running out of options.

  Think, think, think, she urged herself. There had to be a way out of this; there was always a way out. She had once nearly failed an exam in university because she hadn't studied, but by borrowing a friend's cheat sheet and chugging enough of the hated Ritalin to turn herself into a shuffling brain-dead dullard, she had managed to pull enough marks to get a supplementary exam. Desperate measures.

  "Yeah, desperate a'right. If the Toralii don't fuck me, then the nuke reactor fucks me…"

  She inhaled, her air coming in a faint wheeze. The beginnings of an asthma attack.

  "Or my lungs fuck me. Fuck me."

  Rowe snatched the asthma inhaler from her pocket, typing with one hand as she jammed the vent into her mouth and depressed the trigger.

  Nothing happened. No puff of lung-relaxing chemicals. Nothing except the pressure on her finger.

  Empty.

  "Well, fuck," she wheezed, throwing it over her shoulder. No time to deal with it. She had to find a way to get herself out of this problem—the ship was going to go nova. Everything was dependant on her. Everything. Not just something as petty as her academic career, or any number of mundane trivialities that clogged up her life, stealing her focus away from where it should have been.

  Like on Alex.

  Alex Aharoni filled her thoughts as she considered her third option: cracking open the ship's reactor and flooding the inside of the ship with radiation.

  It would kill her. Of course it would. But so would the resultant explosion. The others would be okay. The sealed internal bulkheads on the ship would absorb most of the radioactivity and then, using expertise and material from the Tehran, Washington and Madrid, radiation suits and the like, they could clean the ship up. It would be restored to operating levels, eventually.

  Eventually.

  It wasn't a bad plan. She almost impulsively executed it, but then a thought occurred.

  The ship was evacuating. The bulkheads weren't sealed.

  No third way existed. No other option. The temperature rose to critical levels; it was now or never.

  The edges of Summer's vision dulled, like black smoke filling in from the outside, and she became lightheaded. It had been how long since she breathed? Wheezing, frantic gasping didn't really count. It mostly just hurt. A distraction, another one, and one she definitely couldn't afford.

  One quick check. No more asthma inhalers. Rowe grit her teeth. She'd felt this before. She was about to pass out.

  Couldn't happen. She slammed her fist down on the core ejection button.

  The roar of the evacuating reactor core was deafening inside the reactor room, but she could barely hear it. She lay on her back, trying to breathe, to keep her body anchored to the mortal coil as darkness crept in from the outsides of her vision like a thick mist covering a lake.

  Darker…

  Darker…

  Darker.

  Operations

  TFR Washington

  Space above Eden

  Captain Anderson, with a pain in his abdomen so raw and vivid it was physical, watched the bright lance pierce the heart of the Beijing, his fresh cup of coffee forgotten. He put it down on his console, staring wide-eyed at the magnified image of the Beijing, smoke pouring out of its superstructure.

  "Status report on the colony?"

  His Operations room was a hive of activity. All around him, his crew were coordinating strike craft, firing the ship's weapons, or performing any one of the hundreds of tasks that made a battleship function. The newer Pillars, the Washington and the Madrid, were more automated than their predecessors, but Humans were still a critical part of the ship's functions.

  Nobody had any answers for him. The line of Toralii ships pouring out of the L2 Lagrange point told them in no uncertain terms they were doomed. The lead cruiser had sailed straight through their melee, firing on the Beijing as soon as it was in range. The Madrid, Tehran, and Washington had all poured fire into it, and one of the Beijing's Broadswords had partially flooded the hostile ship with some unspeakably evil flammable material. But despite the flames still burning on one side and the obvious physical damage to all sections of the Seth'arak, the Toralii cruiser continued to exist, disregarding their efforts with a contemptuous indifference to their firepower.

  "How long until they can use their device again?"

  "Four minutes, Captain," said Wolfe, his XO. The man had a short-cropped beard, neatly trimmed, and was known for being quite proud of it. "Based on current estimates of their capabilities."

  "Let's make it three, then." He tapped on his command console, mumbling to himself as he repeated the keystrokes back to himself, then spoke up. "Wolfe, bring our railguns to bear on the target, maximum yield. Use the autoloader to load nuclear devices. Have our strike craft attack as well. Empty their nukes, missiles, guns, everything. Tell the Tehran and the Madrid to coordinate with us. I want that ship in flames."

  "Aye aye, sir." Wolfe touched the headset he wore. "Washington to all assets, priority alert: engage target designated Seth'arak with everything you have. Target cannot be permitted to fire again."

  The radar screen lit up as missiles, strike craft, and railgun projectiles leapt towards the target, raining hate down upon the ship that had attacked their people. The long-range optics showed the Seth'arak's hull shimmering with the force of multiple impacts, fire, smoke and radiation partially obscuring the target.

  Such punishment would be crippling for any ship, but Anderson would not consider merely crippling sufficient. "Continue firing," he ordered, the ship humming from the force as their railguns spoke once again. "Keep going until we see their reactors ignite."

  "Captain," said Lieutenant Cole, his radar operator, "the second Toralii cruiser is coming into effective range. Captain de Lugo requests permission to engage."

  "Negative. Continue fire on the Seth'arak. They're the biggest threat to the colony at this point. We can deal with this second cruiser later."

  The ship shook with a faint vibration. "The second cruiser is firing," said Wolfe. "They aren't making for the colony as the Seth'arak did."

  It didn't matter if the second cruiser danced a jig in a bowler hat and tie. If the Seth'arak laid down another blast on the colony, the Beijing and all the rest of humanity were all doomed. "Divert extra power from reactors six through eight to the hull plating. Fortify the aft hull; if the Seth'arak is going to ignore us, then we're going to ignore their other ships." A glance at the command console showed that the Tehran and Madrid were engaging the Seth'arak with all their might.

  "Two minutes, Captain."

  More. They needed more. Anderson gripped his command console as though the force could make his railguns fire faster. The Toralii built their ships tough and their hulls thick, but they were made of matter, and matter had limits. Physics was a harsh mistress; she booked no betrayal, and she passed out her judgements with cold, indifferent logic.

  He needed some of that judgement right at that moment.

  "Captain," said Cole, "thermals are blind on the target due to the weapons fire, but our radar patterns are not returning a uniform pattern. It's possible that the hull is deforming."

  "We're breaking them," Anderson said, a hint of satisfaction in his voice. He sipped his coffee then replaced it. "Good. Keep up the fine work, Lieutenant. Melt the missile tubes if you have to. Keep firing until there's nothing left but vapour."

  Wolfe consulted one of his monitors for a moment. "Captain, the strike group are regrouping. They're rendezvousing with the strike groups from the Madrid and the Washington. Captain Harrison reports only two Broadswords survived the impact with the Seth'arak, but we have two dozen Wasps moving to engage the Seth'arak as well. SAR has been dispatched, but they're not hopeful of finding anyone."

  Nothing could survive that massive wall of steel slamming into them at speed. He knew that, everyone knew that, but the SAR people needed to see for themselves. It wasn't just protocol; it was the right thing to do. "Tell the fig
hters to cover the Broadswords. Their missiles won't do much compared to the gunships nukes. Keep the big birds safe, let them hit hard."

  "Aye aye, Captain."

  He relayed the orders, and the Operations crew scurried about, speaking into their headsets as the command was passed from division to division, taking his simple command and making the entire ship work as one to complete it. The strike craft on his monitor formed up in a defensive sphere, surrounding their remaining Broadswords.

  Anderson had not expected the Seth'arak to plough through the fighter brawl, taking as many of their fighters with them as enemy ones. Nobody had. That move was costing the Toralii now, though. The damage to the front of the alien ship was visible even at their great distances. While they had been able to ignore the Humans for some time, the remaining Broadswords fired their nuclear-tipped missiles, thin streaks of light flying towards the enemy ship.

  The distances involved in space combat were often vast, but everyone was moving relative to each other. The magnetic launch tubes of the Broadsword bombers could accelerate the missiles to extraordinary speeds, enough to catch the speeding Seth'arak.

  The missiles leapt towards their target, along with a swarm of autocannon fire, railgun slugs, and missiles launched from the Washington.

  "One minute, Captain."

  They didn't have one minute.

  "Ram them," said Anderson. "Hit them at speed. Take those bastards down with us."

  The Tehran had done the same thing to the Seth'arak in their first confrontation, and it had proven to be remarkably effective. If the ship had not been equipped with an experimental jump drive, it would have been destroyed.

  No such get out of jail free cards would work for their enemies now, but they would get to fire again. The Washington accelerated, but his command console told him the simple, unavoidable truth. They could not possibly close the gap in the time allowed.

  He knew that, rationally and logically, but the savage, primal part of his mind—the part that still thought he was a cave dweller who speared a zebra every morning to survive—would not permit the killer of his species to walk away. They would pay with their lives.