by Nick Webb
“Initiate final t-jump.”
The screen shifted, and in place of a brilliant starfield appeared a blue and white-dappled world, with a strike terminator separating night and day on the surface. Bolivar.
And on the night side of the planet, the surface burned.
Chapter Seven
Irigoyen Sector, Bolivar System, Bolivar
Bridge, ISS Independence
Something inside her snapped. Something latent, and visceral. Proctor gasped—for the briefest moment, images of scores of eviscerated Skiohra flashed before her eyes, their small, alien blue bodies torn, their thousands of embryos stored within their bodies oozing red blood, as if she were momentarily transported to a waking nightmare, but the next moment her vision snapped back to the rising smoke plumes on the planet below.
What the hell was that?
She turned to the tactical crew. “Lieutenant Whitehorse, scan the surface. What the hell are we seeing?”
Something odd about the woman—the tactical officer was staring at her console, her face muscles occasionally making twitching or jerking motions, as if she were having a minor seizure. “Lieutenant?” she repeated.
Whitehorse shook her head. “Uh, yes, ma’am.” The officer focused on her data console, her face still screwed up as if in intense concentration, but she finally shook herself out of whatever had come over her. “Widespread fires on the surface, mainly from the densely populated areas. The cities, towns—anywhere with a high concentration of people—lots of fires. Some have spread to the forests.”
“Why?”
“No idea, ma’am.”
She turned back to the viewscreen covering the front of the bridge. The fires themselves weren’t actually visible on the day side of the terminator since they were orbiting over five hundred kilometers above the surface, but the sight of the giant plumes of smoke rising from the cities was disturbing, to say the least.
And she couldn’t shake the overwhelming feeling of … what the hell was she feeling? Fear? Anger? Something inside of her was writhing, raging, seething to the surface, making her either want to lash out, or run, or both. She balled her fists and bit her lip in an attempt to ground herself.
“Scan all orbits. Search for the alien vessel.”
“Scanning,” said Whitehorse. She reached up and scratched furiously at the back of her neck—Proctor could see the hand shake. Damn—they could all feel it too. Something was wrong.
Proctor wheeled around to face Commander Yarbrough. “Now’s the time, Commander. Where the hell are all the new fangled defensive capabilities you were talking about?”
“Admiral?” The man looked puzzled.
“We’re being hit with … something. It’s affecting our brain chemistry—can’t you feel it?”
Yarbrough paused, looking down at his arms as if in a moment of introspection. “I suppose I could catalogue my feelings and compare them to prior baseline feelings, though I haven’t been as diligent at cataloguing my feelings lately—”
Proctor couldn’t tell if the man was joking or not. Yarbrough hadn’t seemed like the type to ever kid, and so the remark made even less sense. Whatever the aliens, or Golgothics, were hitting them with, it was clearly affecting him too—his eyes darted back and forth over his handheld datapad, and he spoke almost twice as fast as he usually did. “I suppose if I tapped into the ship’s medical logs and compiled a spreadsheet of baseline neurotransmitter levels and kept a running log of—”
“Commander. Snap out of it. We need to block this, whatever it is. What can the Independence do for us?”
Yarbrough’s eyes continued darting back and forth, and he was at a loss for words. Flustered, Proctor spun around to the comm station. “Ensign Qwerty—”
“Billy-Bob,” interrupted the man.
Proctor closed her eyes in annoyance and struggled not to lash out. Surely that was a normal response to the officer’s breach of decorum. “Ensign Billy-Bob Qwerty, are you reading anything on regular channels?”
“No ma’am,” he began, his voice heavily tinged by a deep-American-south accent. He was either from Ganymede, or Alabama. “All the comm channels quieter than a hibernatin’ coon.”
“Broaden the spectrum. Look at the whole band. Adjust harmonics to look for meta-space carrier frequencies.”
“Yes’m. Any idea what I’m lookin’ for Ad’mril?” he twanged. At least his fingers were dancing deftly over the console.
“Anything.” She had to keep herself from rolling her eyes—Commander Yarbrough had assured her that Ensign Qwerty was the best of the best—polyglot, linguist, a virtual communication genius. But all she could see and hear was a redneck, and—was that chew bulging in his cheek? Shit. Before she lashed out at him—was that a normal feeling?—she turned to Mumford, the boxer-turned-science chief. “Can we disrupt it? Whatever it is?”
He shrugged—his massive shoulders bouncing up, mirrored by his eyebrows. “We can’t block it if we don’t even know what it is.”
“We could try the new anti-laser EM shielding,” said Yarbrough, apparently in a moment of clarity. “Though I’d be more comfortable if I could compile a list of failure modes and run a few Monte-Carlo simulations on the—”
Proctor snapped her finger—she remembered the new shielding back from her days as fleet admiral of IDF. In fact, if she remembered correctly, the signature authorizing the release of funding for the project was hers. The research and deployment must have finally happened. “Brilliant,” she said, cutting Yarbrough off, and, pointing to Mumford, “Could it work? I mean, assuming this signal, whatever it is, is EM-based?”
Mumford, in spite of being the science chief, was built like a bull. His shoulders heaved as he lifted his hands to his terminal—damn, why was she so fixated on those shoulders? Those huge, meaty shoulders, rippling like—
Yarbrough kept right on speaking, not even giving Mumford the chance to reply, his mousy features and flimsy mustache reminding Proctor of some old television caricature of a dopey, nameless worry-wort—someone who usually ate it when the monster or the alien or the big bad showed up. “Admiral, I strongly protest. If we want to use the EM shielding for something other than its intended purpose, we need to run tests. We need benchmarks. Baselines. Error analysis. We can’t get sloppy, especially now with our lives on the line.”
Proctor just stared at him. What the hell was he talking about? Running engineering tests now? In the middle of a red-alert all-hands-to-battlestations situation? She shook her head and glanced back at Mumford, who was himself looking skeptically—scornfully—at Yarbrough, his broad shoulders bulging underneath the too-tight uniform—
Shit. They were all going crazy, herself included. But no, not exactly crazy, just … exaggerated. Whatever this was, it seemed to be amplifying whatever their basest and most fundamental mental processes were compelling them to do. Amplifying and hyperbolizing their thoughts. For Yarbrough, it was amplifying his urge to cross the t’s and dot the i’s, to proceed with maximum safety, to understand whatever threat they faced in gory, unnecessary detail. For Mumford, well, who knew what he was feeling—he seemed to be acting very hesitantly, at least, in spite of those beef-cake shoulders, while Proctor herself seemed overly focused on doing something. Anything. But that was rational, right? Was that her only tic? The doing something? And the shoulders?
A voice came from right behind her—Captain Prucha had crept over to the captain’s chair and spoke near her ear. “We need to get the hell out of here. Now.”
Leave? She turned to face him. “Are you suggesting we just turn tail and run? We’re supposed to be the rescuers, remember.”
Prucha’s face was tightening by the second, his brow furrowed more than she’d ever seen it. He seemed on the verge of screaming at her. “We can’t be rescuers if we go crazy, Shelby. Our ability to render aid is severely curtailed if we can’t even trust our own judgement skills.”
“But we’re all these people have—”
His
eyes twitched even more. “We are steering the most advanced warship humanity has ever known towards one of the most populated planets in United Earth space. Do we really want our twitchy fingers on the triggers of these new weapons?”
He had a point. And the overwhelming feelings she—and all of them—were experiencing could just be the tip of the iceberg. Judging from the thousands of fires ravaging the surface, things could get a whole lot worse.
On the other hand, they had to do something. They had a mission. There were people to save. A planet to save. Hell, a civilization to save. If what she was seeing down on the surface was all caused by the alien ship, then this was not only a threat, but an existential threat.
“Any progress locking down that signal’s spectrum?” she said to no-one in particular while she watched the surface burn.
“No, ma’am,” said Lieutenant Whitehorse as a new alarm sounded in the background. “But now reading a sensor contact coming on fast.” She looked up, her face flushed red—probably from holding in an outburst of some kind. “It’s the alien ship. It’ll be here in two minutes.”
Chapter Eight
Irigoyen Sector, Bolivar System, Bolivar
Watchdog Station, High orbit
When Lieutenant Zivic woke up, he wished he hadn’t. His head throbbed—he had no idea why, though as he lifted his head from the deckplate his cheek stuck to the surface. A probing finger revealed his face was covered in blood—likely his head too, if the pain back there was any indication.
A glance to his left told him that Commander Smith had fared worse. A hole where his face had been didn’t bode well for the man’s health.
“That shouldn’t be there,” he mumbled, gaping at the bloody space where Smith’s nose, skull, and brain should have been. The gore still hadn’t registered as something real to his mind—it was like watching a movie. He knew he should be repulsed, he knew he should be doubled over and vomiting at the sight of the gruesome scene, but all he could think about was trying to remember what was going on. He tried to remember what had happened before he blacked out, but failed. There was a battle. Weapons fire. But with whom? His head hurt too badly to remember.
Klaxons. Alarms. Shouting. Everything in the background was chaos—was the battle still going on? Groaning, he pushed himself to his knees and tried to stand. As he swayed, he caught sight of a hole in the bulkhead, about the same size as the hole in Smith’s face. A shimmering field covered the opening, an emergency measure to prevent the loss of atmosphere. But emergency hull containment fields were energy-intensive, and if it wasn’t physically patched soon the field would fail and expose the room to vacuum.
At that thought, the room spun and he doubled over again, vomiting all over his boots. He glanced to his left at the gory sight of Smith’s former face, and felt his mouth water again before another fit of vomiting overtook him. Reality was starting to set in. The foul aroma of alcohol and stomach acid assaulted his nose and pierced the hazy veil over his memory. He’d been drinking. Heavily. And he was starting to remember why.
The ship.
He jumped to his feet, suppressing another wave of nausea, and slid into his chair at the command station. Where was the ship? A quick glance over the sensor data revealed no unknown contacts within hundreds of kilometers. Just a few hundred ships over Bolivar in various stages of falling through the atmosphere. Merchant freighters, cargo carriers, military patrol ships, colonial transports—all of them, almost every single one, either burned through the atmosphere or were falling quickly towards it. A few lucky ships appeared to be in stable orbits around Bolivar along with Watchdog Station.
The planet wasn’t faring any better than the ships. Smoke billowed up from the major towns, dozens of kilometers into the atmosphere, some forming great mushroom clouds as if nuclear explosions had flattened entire cities. Did the governments of Bolivar have secret tactical nukes? Or were those from the alien ship?
Where the hell was that ship? He tapped into the planetary sensor network, giving him access to data from the other side of the planet, and, sure enough, a weather satellite confirmed the presence of the unknown vessel, orbiting slowly. The defensive satellites seemed to be all knocked out or disabled: the ship seemed to glide right on by without a single defensive shot from the defense network.
It was headed towards another ship. An IDF ship—one he didn’t recognize. He keyed in a command to read the ship’s transponder. ISS Independence. Never heard of it.
He shook his head. The earlier conflicting emotions had subsided. Fear still threatened to paralyze him, and the urge to liquor up still gnawed at him, but for the most part, his head was clear. Did those feelings … did they come from that alien ship? Luckily, it was on the other side of the planet now.
The sensor readout changed. Something was happening. The distinct signature of weapons fire, though he couldn’t tell who was shooting. Perhaps both the Independence and the alien ship. All he knew was that the power readings from the Independence were starting to fluctuate.
Shit. They needed help. Otherwise they’d end up just like Watchdog Station, broken and bleeding. As if to punctuate his thought, another klaxon sounded in the distance. Another hull breach. The energy field over the hole in the bulkhead nearby started to shimmer and fluctuate. If there were more of those holes in other parts of the station, say, a few dozen, then the power draw to maintain atmospheric integrity would be substantial. And a quick glance at the operations console monitor nearby told him even more bad news.
The station’s reactor was going critical. Whereas before he was worried that they’d be dead within the hour, now he knew he only had a few minutes if he was going to do anything at all.
And from the station he could do very little. There was really only one choice at this point, though it was the one choice he dreaded. But given the alternative, it was all he had.
He hadn’t flown a ship for over a year. He’d sworn he wouldn’t ever again.
Watchdog Station had a handful of fighters stationed in its bay, and a quick glance at another readout on his console told him that all of them were disabled except for two. The rest had holes in them the same size as the hole in Smith’s face. In fact, the entire bay was at vacuum—the fighter pilots on standby could be dead, for all he knew.
His stomach seemed to lurch into his mouth and his head spun again, though at the sight of a coffee mug flying past his face he knew this wasn’t just his queasiness again. Artificial gravity was out. The rest of life support would probably soon follow. If he was going to do this, it had to be now.
Launching himself out of his seat, he swore as he collided with the ceiling. Dammit—his zero-g training certification had lapsed earlier in the year. He hated zero-g. He hated all g’s that weren’t regular g. It was part of why he’d turned in his fighter pilot wings a year ago, much to the chagrin of his father. If his mother were still alive, he imagined she’d kick his ass. Flying fighters was in his blood. It was his heritage. It was the family business, it seemed, and he’d turned his back on it and on his dead mother and his living, and livid, father.
He shook his head clear of the collision with the ceiling and pushed himself towards the door. Luckily, it sensed his impending approach and slid open at the last second, allowing him to sail through into the hallway beyond, though he needed to make a last-minute adjustment to his trajectory to avoid crashing into the limp body of Commander Smith which had floated up, along with dozens of globules of his blood.
One of the floating red spheres splashed onto his shoulder as he passed, making his stomach churn again. You can do this, Zivic, you can do this, Zivic, he chanted to himself over and over again, like a mantra.
He flew down the ruined hallway, seeing an occasional hole in the floor. When he glanced up, he saw a matching hole in the ceiling. Beyond each he could see the chaos in the deck below or above. At one, he paused to look through the oval-shaped hole, peering through at least four deck’s worth of destruction, terminating in a hole o
f exactly the same shape in the exterior bulkhead. Stars twinkled on the other side of the shimmering blue screen. Shit. I’ve got no time.
At the lift, he pushed the call button, but nothing happened. He wondered if the lifts depended on the artificial gravity system, but even as he thought it he realized he didn’t need the lift. Keying in the emergency override code, the door slid open, but stopped halfway. With effort, he managed to push it back into its sleeve, and he pulled himself into the empty elevator shaft.
Luckily, the lift seemed to be stuck above him, though with the zero-g, he now thought of that direction as behind him, and he sailed forward through the shaft, counting the decks down until he arrived at the fighter bay. With another override entry and more grunting, he managed to force the door open and push himself into the ante-chamber of the bay, which, luckily, was not at vacuum.
Distant explosions punctuated his panic. Was that the core? No—if that were the core exploding, he wouldn’t be here right now. Nevertheless, another explosion—this one close enough to make him instinctually cover his ears—pushed him to hurry even more.
Except that wasn’t an explosion.
It was a gunshot.
Who the hell was shooting a gun, on a station whose core was about to go critical? Had that mysterious ship dropped off a boarding party?
But the questions could wait for now, since shouting voices nearby made him dash for an armaments container in the corner. He yanked it open, and swore under his breath—he’d been hoping to find at least a sidearm there, if not an assault rifle. It was completely empty.
The voices were getting louder. With no other choices left, he pulled himself into the container and yanked the lid mostly shut, leaving just enough of a space to see out into the launch bay’s anteroom. He’d hid just in time. The door into corridor slid open and a man, handcuffed and thrashing, flew through and collided into the far wall, bounced off, and drifted back towards the door. He was wearing a contractor’s uniform—probably from one of the commercial vendors that regularly serviced the station.