by Max Carver
While she slowed the spin, Eric and Naomi half crawled, half jumped their way to the door.
They'd set up armored spacesuits, one for almost every crew member, in jump-ready formation by the nearest airlock. Eric and Naomi quickly stripped out of their mining coveralls—inscribed with the logo of Hernandez-Brinkman Development, the long-defunct corporation that had built the ship—and into their armed suits.
The spin had slowed more by the time they emerged onto the hull. The charred worm lifted away as the spin slowed. It tumbled toward the pink and red gas giant below.
They followed Bartley's tether line across the burned and battered hull to his suit. Bartley floated limply, his suit badly damaged, reminding Eric of a crushed soda can. Everything, including his faceplate, was coated with a layer of charred filth left by the worm.
“Bartley?” Eric said, but the man hadn't responded over the radio since the worm hit him.
“I am sorry.” Malvolio trudged toward them, his own spacesuit wrecked, helmet missing altogether. “I was unable to prevent the worm from burying us 'neath its unnatural girth. Oh, I am truly a failure, unsuited to the task of soldiering—”
“Malvolio, help me get Bartley to sick bay right now,” Naomi said.
“I'll finish cleaning up out here.” Eric started toward a robotic snake that was half-buried in the hull, and he blasted it to pieces with .50-cal incendiary rounds.
While the others returned through airlock, Eric took a final pass, wiping out the last few robotic critters, which were also the last remaining traces of the alien worms.
Eric looked up at the glowing remnants of the spaceport, its skeletal infrastructure sagging and dissolving in the cloud of plasma. They had won against the aliens...yet he felt uneasy. Iris had seen the worms in multiple star systems. There was no telling how many more were out there, or what their plans might be for the rest of the human species.
He half-expected another round of attack from the worms, more of them emerging to try to capture or destroy their ship just before they finally got their chance to leave this star system behind.
But nothing came.
Eric headed inside.
Chapter Thirty-One
Bartley lay in a mostly transparent sanitized capsule down in sick bay. Small robotic arms held his broken bones in place; fluids flowed into his arteries. He remained unconscious and unresponsive, and he'd suffered a smashed septum and cracks all over his limbs and ribs. But he was alive.
Eric had joined Naomi down in sick bay. Malvolio was outside, patching up the damaged hull armor, following the directions of Ras. The ship's AI seemed mostly stable...in between its bizarre glitches.
Everyone else was on the bridge, running tests and checks to make sure the mining ship could handle the rigors of a wormhole jump.
“You think Bartley's okay to travel like this?” Eric asked.
“He needs a doctor and a fully equipped hospital,” Naomi said. “We don't even have a failed medical student anymore. Besides, Bartley would want us to hurry the hell up and get out of here.”
“True, he hates waiting.”
“Everyone to the bridge.” Ras's bored-sounding voice droned over the speaker. “Everyone to the bridge, in case you didn't hear me the first time a second ago. Get your seatbelts on and prepare your mind and body for the long suck down the wormhole.”
“We'd better go.” Naomi touched her hand to the clear plastic shell over Bartley. “Get better soon, pal. You still owe me fifteen credits from the bar the other night. Don't think you're getting off that easy.”
Then she left. Eric was preparing to follow her when he heard another voice whisper: “Eric.”
He turned back toward Bartley, but the man hadn't stirred. The voice had sounded female, anyway.
Iris had appeared on the other side of Bartley's medical capsule.
“Uh, hey,” Eric said. “Aren't you supposed to be up there, getting us through the wormhole?”
“I am up there.”
“Oh, right. You prefer talking by hologram.”
“Who doesn't? Eric, I wanted to talk to you alone before we go. Nobody up there can hear us. I shut down the audio link from my room. This is just you and me.”
“Okay.” Eric felt uneasy, not sure what this was all about.
“I meant what I said before. You can't just go home now. You're the bearer of the relic.”
“I thought that was more like a...figure of speech. You're making it sound like a job title. And I don't remember applying for that job.”
“Eric, I need you to stay by my side until we figure this all out. At least until we can deliver the relic to the Antikytheran Society. And it's going to take a few jumps to get there. And I'd really prefer that the Allies not know where we're going. This could end up being just you and me.”
“I'm not sure my girlfriend will like the idea of me running off with some other woman to distant worlds,” Eric said. In reality, though, he wasn't worried Suzette would be jealous. He was more afraid that she wouldn't care too much at all, that she'd be happy to go even longer without seeing him.
“There are bigger issues here than you rushing home to kiss little Suzy,” Iris said, sounding exasperated. “This is about the future of all the settled worlds, of the entire human race. Including your mommy and daddy and girlfriend back home. You understand that?”
“Okay, okay. I'll just send a video to her and my folks, once we're back in civilized space—”
“You will send no communications back home. For the moment, we must treat everything we've seen and done as highly classified. Especially the relic.”
“But news will get out about Caldera, if it hasn't already,” Eric said. “They'll think I'm dead.”
“For the moment, it's better to let everyone think we're dead. There will be time in the future to repair whatever needs repairing in your personal relationships—but only if the human species survives.” Iris's hologram floated closer, sitting cross-legged in midair, reaching out a hand to him. Her fingertips passed along his jawline. He thought he felt an electric tingle where she touched his face, but that had to be in his mind. She was made of nothing but light from the nearest projector. “You're important to me, Eric—” she began, in a soft voice. Then she looked away from him and shouted, “Almost ready!” She turned back to Eric. “Better buckle up. Let's hope the next star is luckier than this one.”
She vanished. Eric wondered what she'd been about to say at the end. Maybe something personal. Maybe something manipulative. Maybe something true.
He returned to the bridge and strapped into his seat. He nodded quietly at the others. Hagen, Carol, and Alanna barely spared him a look; everyone was focused on the view ahead.
The mouth of the wormhole was a sphere rather than a simple round hole, reflecting its multidimensional nature—a doorway through space and time. The surface looked like rippling, fluid white metal, with thousands of tiny symbols racing in all directions at high speed, forming complex shifting configurations with each other.
Eric looked through the clear window at Iris and the mass of ceiling-mounted cables attached to her head. She gave him a slight smile before closing her eyes.
“Jumping gate in four...three...two...” Carol warned them as the metallic sphere filled their vision. The flowing white-metal surface faintly reflected the Omicron Rex, the bulky, ugly old asteroid-cutter that had saved their lives. If they were quick enough, it might even help protect all of humanity.
They passed through the metallic surface of the wormhole gate as if it were no more than a mirage.
Eric had ridden through a few wormholes on the roundabout journey from Gideon to Caldera, but he was hardly accustomed to the gut-wrenching experience yet.
It felt like he was rocketing forward at impossibly fast speed, while also getting stretched out in all directions, while also getting crushed down to microscopic size. His body seemed to turn inside out, his innards scattered across millions of kilometers of deep space.
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Time was strange in a wormhole, too. He saw multiple overlapping versions of everyone around him, each one multiplying in all directions, like an infinite number of clones.
He closed his eyes against it, but then began to travel through his own memories, all of them surrounding him in no particular order.
He lay on a hospital bed, his legs shattered, nerves cut into slices. Suzette leaned over him, her body soft against the muscles of his chest, her lips nervously pressing against his, their first kiss.
He gazed up in awe at a Christmas tree towering above him, reaching almost to his parents' ceiling, impossibly far above. Red and gold ornaments glowed all over the tree, scattered among fascinating figurines of reindeer, elves, and angels. A wooden train and a stuffed bear sat beside him, as big as Eric himself.
A moment later, he lay cold in the soil, worms picking at his bones.
Then Eric was back on the bridge, looking ahead at darkness alternating with dazzling patterns of millions of lights, as though entire globular clusters were flashing past. This confused Eric—there certainly weren't any such giant clusters within the tiny slice of the galactic arm that humans had begun to explore and colonize, all of them within a thousand light-years of Earth, most of them within a hundred. But Eric supposed he didn't know much about wormholes or how they worked.
The ship rushed ahead, faster and faster, into whatever future awaited them on the other side.
The End
FROM THE AUTHOR
I hope you enjoyed Resistance, and there will be a second book in the series coming up in a few months, so I hope you come back for that. If you subscribe to my newsletter, you’ll get a free novella, a prequel to this story set in the Relic Wars universe. It may just involve one or two of the same characters.
Join the Relic Wars army and get the free novella at: https://www.instafreebie.com/public/fs03H
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Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you back next time!
Max Carver