by Jamie Sawyer
It was like stepping back in time.
“I shouldn’t even be sending this,” came a disembodied voice – female, faltering. “But I wanted my children to hear me speak one last time. I want you all to know that I love you, that I’m sorry that I left…”
“This is the UAS Atreides.” A strong male voice: the voice of a Naval officer. “We have fallen back to the Rift. The Krell continue to give chase. Our Q-drive is damaged…”
“…Help us all! God help us all!”
The messages were retained by Damascus Space: by the triangulation of space debris, so many moons and planets, and the presence of the Rift itself. They would bounce around for ever, trapped in the void.
I discarded all of those messages. I knew exactly what I was listening for, even if I didn’t really want to admit it.
This was where Elena disappeared.
I was searching for Elena. For her ship, for some scrap of who she used to be. I needed to know what had become of her.
I cycled through the tuning bands, searching every possible frequency, to no avail. Eventually, my body won the war against my mind. I drifted into a fitful and shallow sleep.
And just then, I heard a voice.
“…This is the UAS Endeavour. We’ve found it. The results of our examination have proved inconclusive…”
The speaker was a reedy male voice; pitched, frightened. It wasn’t Elena, but just the mention of her ship – the Endeavour – was enough. Although I tried to wake up, my limbs were solid, as inert as a disused simulant’s. I didn’t know whether the voice was real, or a fabrication of my imagination. I wanted to investigate, to find the provenance of the transmission. But more than anything I wanted to believe that Elena was still out there.
In the twilight between wake and sleep, the voices kept coming from the squawk box, and all I could do was listen.
“I am sending messages home, to our loved ones. These people deserve a proper funeral. We have their bodies in the freezers. If we ever make it back, they can be honoured. Christo protect us all…”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
FUNERAL
Thirty years ago
A few years after we found the soldier in the storm drain, my father died.
Killed himself.
Committed suicide.
Dress it up however you like. Only in retrospect could I recognise that finding his body had been one of the most difficult things in my young life. He’d been on Mars for a long time, only back home a week.
What with my mother gone as well, it was rough on Carrie and me. At the time, being so young, the experience was difficult to process properly. Because it had hurt so much, I made sure not to let anyone else know. Carrie and I became insular; became guardians of each other’s pain. Outwardly, I was a street tough just like the youngers around me. Just another face on the street with too much time on my hands and a hungry stomach. Carrie was going down an even darker path. She hadn’t long turned fifteen when it happened. I was an adult eleven.
There was no money for a proper ceremony, so one of my father’s old squad mates arranged it. He was an ex-Army vet, settled somewhere out in the Michigan state, who called himself Nelson. He booked the local church – the old religious centre on the corner of Baker and Eighth – and although it was only a few minutes’ walk from our apartment, Aunt Beth insisted that she couldn’t attend.
“Not right, what he did,” she would regularly say, shaking her old head. “Leaving you two behind to fend for yourselves. Not right.”
Although she mostly kept her beliefs to herself, Beth was a devout Latter Day Catholic. The topic of my father was one of the few on which she would express very strong views.
“Suicide is wrong, all wrong. Not God’s way. He wouldn’t be pleased. It’d be wrong if I attended the ceremony. Make me a proper hypocrite. You wouldn’t want to make me into one of those, would you?”
“No, Aunt Beth,” Carrie muttered. “Of course not.”
I didn’t understand what hypocrite meant, and I doubted that Carrie did either. We were still only children.
The signpost outside the church declared that the place was THE HOUSE OF THE BELOVED BRETHREN. It felt like an impression of a church – nothing particularly denominational about the place, nothing particularly spiritual. Didn’t make me feel beloved or like brethren. Just a building dressed up as a church. Lifeless and drab; it would’ve disappointed Martinez. The LED board outside – dripping with half-thawed snow – showed a list of funerals being conducted that day. The name JONATHAN HARRIS (UA CITIZEN) was at the top.
“No one ever called him Jonathan,” I whispered. “Except for you.”
“That was his name,” Carrie bit back.
Inside, the centre was all white-washed walls now filled with cracks and plastic graffiti-scrawled pews. It smelled vaguely of urine.
Nelson and another man attended.
“Be brave, kids,” Nelson said, nudging me on the shoulder.
Nelson wore a khaki Army uniform with frayed fabric medals on the lapels. The outfit looked older than him, but had matured a deal more graciously. He clutched his service cap to his chest; as though it was a shield against the rest of the world. I vaguely recalled meeting him a few times before. He’d been drinking in our apartment.
The other man was also an Army veteran – about the same age, equally used up. He milled around nervously in the background.
“Thanks for coming,” I said to Nelson. It sounded like the right thing to say.
“Wouldn’t have had it any other way.”
Something had changed about Nelson, since the last time I’d seen him. From the cuff of his left shirt sleeve poked a prosthetic hand. Not a good prosthetic, either – not an organic graft, rather a metal and plastic hybrid. An ugly claw-hand: functional, made for anything but looks. Nelson’s silent colleague had the same affliction, except it was his right hand that had been replaced. When he noticed me looking, Nelson covered it with his good hand – smile becoming fixed, embarrassed. I smiled back; didn’t want to press him for an explanation.
“Sit down,” Carrie said to me, tugging on my arm. “Let’s get this over with.”
It wasn’t a long service. My family weren’t religious sorts in life and in death they were no better. The priest gave a brief eulogy about grief and loss, trying his best to avoid talking about God. Thin, haggard and tired: he wasn’t much of a public speaker.
The attendees for the next funeral were waiting in the foyer. That sounded to be a bigger and bolder affair; with much wailing and gnashing of teeth. I kept looking to the back of the room, glaring at the big woman who was crying uncontrollably.
Carrie just sat, eyes forward, emotionless.
“We commit this body to flame, in accordance with Michigan state law, and we remember the deceased for the man that he was…” the priest finished. He looked down at the terminal set into his pulpit. “Jonathan Harris. May his memory be everlasting.”
Then the casket disappeared into the furnace and Jon Harris was gone.
We slowly filtered out of the centre – not through any sign of respect, but because the Spanish family were so tightly crammed into the entrance hall.
It was February and had been snowing. Just as the Detroit summer could be hot, the winter could be damned hard. Dirty white drizzle coated the buildings; had turned to a yellow frost in places. It looked like ash – grey powdered fallout, the remains of the New York bomb. Maybe that’s what it really is, I thought. The second bomb had only fallen a few months ago: a Christmas present from the Directorate that the people of NYC had never asked for, and certainly never wanted.
The four of us – Carrie, me, and the two Army vets – stood in a huddle, shivering in the cold. Nelson and his colleague looked particularly affected by the weather. They didn’t even have winter coats.
“He was a good man,” Nelson said. Nodded back into the church. “Shame he felt that he had to do that. He’ll be missed.”
“Sure,” Carr
ie said, with feigned indifference. She was getting so good at that. “We know.”
“Take these,” Nelson said. “You two look like you need them more than me. Least that I can do.”
He produced two yellowed ration vouchers from his jacket pocket, thrust them into my hand. I knew that Beth would be grateful for the slips and so I took them without comment.
“Sometimes,” Nelson said, shifting from foot to foot to ward off the cold, “life just happens like that. Your pa was on Mars with me. He saw things; real bad things.”
I found my sightline drifting unconsciously down to Nelson’s metal hand. He did nothing to hide it this time. I noticed, with mild repulsion, that the claw was polished and clean: like some perverse badge of honour, the marker of some great sacrifice to the Alliance and the military.
“We were the lucky ones,” he said. “The Directorate are unkind. They know the right buttons to push.”
“And I think that they will keep pushing them,” Nelson’s quiet colleague added. “They’ll be damned angry over what happened on Mars.”
Even at eleven, I knew about the Martian War. The Rebellion, I’d heard it called. It had been quelled the month after the NYC bombing.
“The Directorate sure do have their ways,” Nelson said. For a moment, I didn’t know whether he was referring to the Rebellion, or to the metal hand.
The Alliance and the Directorate had fought long and hard over that turf, both sides eager to prove that they could hold the objective. If you ignored Earth, Mars had been the last shared Alliance–Directorate holding. In a sense, it was the final possible bridge between the two super-pacts: the last demonstration that the power blocs could work together.
I already knew that my father had been there. Before my mother had died, late at night, I’d heard the word shouted through the tenement walls. Usually happened when they were arguing – when the shouting was at its worst.
“We don’t agree with the war,” Carrie said, definitively. “We’re pacifists.”
“That ain’t no way to be,” Nelson said. His voice sounded sad and his face contorted into a confused scowl. “Your father wouldn’t want to hear you talking like that.”
“He’s dead,” Carrie said. “He can’t do anything about it.”
Nelson looked on with that same expression, but said, “You two need anything, just let me know. I don’t live far out-state. Got a decent place in the hills. I’d be glad to help. There’s a veterans’ association. They might be able to get you two somewhere to stay.”
“We’ll be fine,” I said. “We already have somewhere.”
“Come on, Con,” Carrie said. “We have places to be.”
She turned to leave. I immediately followed.
The two old men walked off down the road, taking it slow and easy through the ice.
Icicles had formed on the roof of the religious centre. Some of those had started to thaw: drip-drip-dripping onto the ground below. The liquid looked like falling tears.
That reminded me that I had forgotten to cry at the ceremony.
We didn’t go straight home – or at least, we didn’t go straight back to Aunt Beth’s. That didn’t feel like home: nowhere did any more.
Instead, and without explanation, Carrie guided us to a street diner. She picked a table by the window and settled down. The close press of so many patrons made the diner warm inside.
The waitress eyed us cautiously but Carrie made clear that we had a means of payment.
“Let’s put those ration vouchers to good use,” she said, loud enough so that the old woman could hear.
The waitress gave a blunt nod.
Carrie ordered us two cups of black filter coffee and a minute later we both sat huddled over the potent sludge. I breathed in the fumes. The stuff smelled overpowering.
“What are we going to do?” I asked.
“Keep going. Stick together. Do what we always do.”
“Without Dad?”
“What difference will that make?” she said. Strands of steam played around her face, made her cheeks flush. She sighed, sipping at the scratched plastic cup. “Jonathan was out of your life more often than he was in it.”
She was right, of course, but that didn’t mean that I wanted to hear her say it. My father had been taking more and more distant tours of duty. I’d barely recognised the man who came home to Detroit on the last occasion. Not just emotionally, but physically.
“That’s what time-dilation does to a man,” Carrie added. “Someone has to pay the debt.”
I’d heard it called that before. “The debt”: that ever-increasing gap between objective and subjective time. That distance that serving soldiers put between themselves and their families. My father hadn’t aged right: had fallen out of kilter with those around him. Those were the combined and very real effects of relativity, of the Q-space drive and of protracted periods in hypersleep. I involuntarily shivered, despite the collective warmth of the diner.
“It was his choice,” Carrie went on. “He decided to live his life that way.”
“So you have all the answers now?”
Carrie smiled. “Just some.”
“I don’t want to end up like that.”
“Like Jonathan?”
“Like those old men. The vets.”
The vision of the two old soldiers with their crippled hands had struck an unpleasant chord. Maybe affected me more than the funeral itself.
“Probably in our genes,” Carrie muttered, sipping at the coffee again. “Maybe war is a Harris family tradition.”
“Then I’ll break the tradition.”
“Yeah, just like Granddad? That didn’t end so well for him.”
My grandfather had been a veteran as well, had served in Cambodia and on Charon. He’d mustered out of the Army but civilian life hadn’t suited him. Last we’d heard, he’d been sectioned in a medical centre somewhere upstate. My father had forbidden any discussion about his condition and I suspected that there was more to his sudden incarceration than I knew.
“We’ll be okay,” Carrie said. She waved over the waitress, who begrudgingly refilled her cup. “Whatever happens, we have each other. Like I said, we’ll stick together. Just like before.”
“There has to be a way to change all of this,” I said, not really listening to her any more. “I don’t want to end up like them.”
Carrie nodded. “Me neither, little brother. Me neither.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
EQUIPPED FOR WAR
Two days after the meteor strike, the fleet assembled in Damascus Space.
Admiral Loeb summoned all command crew to the CIC. The Legion, the Warfighters and most of the Sci-Div staff attended.
I watched as the Colossus moved on the Rift. It was, I supposed, a significant achievement. Save for those poor souls who had fled here during the First Krell War, very few expeditions had made it this far. That it was now possible was the Key’s legacy; the result of the Helios operation. But more than that: I was retracing Elena’s journey – a route that her ship had taken years ago.
“Battlegroup adopting approach formation,” a lieutenant declared. “We have open comms throughout the fleet.”
“Good,” Loeb said, still ensconced in his command throne. “Keep it that way. Maintain battle readiness.”
“Aye, sir. Shields at maximum polarity.”
The fleet comprised starships of varying designation but all made the approach at the same ponderous speed. The battlegroup adopted a pattern – a perversion of the fighter squadron aero-acrobatics, played out in slow motion. Every vessel was running null-shields and the oily shimmer of their protective barriers was just visible against the blackness of space. The shields overlapped in places, creating a nighimpenetrable wall for any spaceborne attacker to overcome. Hornets and Dragonflies swarmed between the bigger starships.
One of the Dragonflies broke formation, conducted a brief series of zero-G manoeuvres.
“That’d be Lieutenant James, I gues
s,” I said. “He’s probably out there leading the charge…”
“Deploy buoys,” Loeb ordered.
“Aye, sir.”
Vacuum buoys floated in a wide cordon around the fleet, flashing amber warning lights.
Saul sat beside me. His anxiety prickled about him like an aura; more than once Loeb had told him to sit still and be quiet.
I felt the same nervous energy. Was Saul’s intel correct? All of this might be a terrible waste of time – something for Loeb to use against Sim Ops when he took his complaints back to Command.
“Any returns on the scanners yet?” Loeb asked.
“Just one, sir. A weak energy signal.”
Saul almost leapt from his seat.
“Easy, Professor,” Martinez said.
“Take us in,” Loeb said. “Nice and slow.”
Beyond the assembled flotilla, I could make out withered blue stars. They cast a muted, dying light over the ship hulls. Several planetoids hung in surrounding space. All of them looked dead: populated by swirls of grey desert and empty lunar plains. Those worlds seemed closer than they really were, but near-space was a tumble of rocks, shattered moonlets and jagged-edge asteroids. Beyond, dwarfing all, was the green glow of the Damascus Rift.
“I want eyes on that signature,” Loeb rumbled.
And suddenly, he had them.
The Artefact drifted almost serenely among the flotsam and jetsam.
I had expected it to look like the Artefact on Helios. Vast, angular; upturned like a knife to the sky. This was nothing like that, nothing at all. Although it had been hewn from the same material, the shape was all wrong. Broadly spherical, the outside was irregularly studded. At this range I couldn’t tell what those features were. It was bigger than any Alliance starship and cast from blackest obsidian – from something blacker than space itself. As it moved, the starlight flickered over cuneiform patterns all over the structure.