Oblivion Flight

by J. R. Mabry

  “Shallit won’t like that,” she noted.

  “Fortunately, I won’t have to listen to Shallit. You will.”

  Jo scowled.

  “I’ll take the B team,” Telouse smiled.

  “Sir, I’m not sure this is a good idea. And Shallit will insist on going along to protect you.”

  “He can protest all he wants,” Telouse said, his accent mangling the normal cadence of his words. “I cannot stand the man. So you must stand him for me.” It was an incorrect use of the idiom, but it was clear Telouse didn’t care.

  “You really shouldn’t rile him,” Jo warned.

  Telouse waved the objection away. “He’s an ass.”

  “He’s a well-connected ass.”

  “That is the most dangerous kind.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m trying to say. It wouldn’t hurt you to throw him a bone sometimes, and…well, stop humiliating him in front of the bridge crew.”

  Telouse moved his head back and forth, from shoulder to shoulder. “You are probably right. Again.”

  “If I’m right all the time, why don’t you listen to me more?”

  “Because that would be a betrayal of my muse,” Telouse pushed out his bottom lip.

  “Has your muse ever been wrong?” Jo asked.

  “Not about anything that mattered,” Telouse smiled and sipped at his tea again.

  She scowled at him. “One day, your gut—”

  “Not my gut, my muse,” he corrected her. “She’s sensitive.”

  “Fine. One day you’re going to wish you had listened to me.”

  He cocked his head. “One day, commander, you will make a fine captain. Then you can make everyone jump anytime you wish.”

  “Jacques, I’m not trying to make you jump…” Her voice sounded weary, even to her.

  “No, my dear, but you are…overcautious.”

  “No one has ever said that about me,” she protested.

  “And you don’t want them to,” he added. “Not in a war like this one.”

  Jeff sat back in his command chair as if he’d been punched in the gut. “How could our universe just be gone?”

  Dr. Stewart shook her head. “I don’t know that.”

  “That may be the least of our troubles,” communications officer Susie Wall barked. “We’ve got an incoming vessel, trajectory 44T mark 811.”

  “Mr. Pho, set a course in the other direction—as fast as we can manage.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “How fast are they coming at us?” Jeff asked.

  “C7, sir. We can’t outrun them.”

  “Shit.” Their little vessel could only manage C5 for short distances. “Estimated time until contact?” Jeff asked.

  “Six minutes, sir.”

  Jeff punched at a button on his command chair. “Commander Nira, I need you on the bridge—now.”

  His Number One would be sleeping—it had only been a few hours since he had relieved her of the command chair. He’d need to bring her up to speed—but right now he needed an acting weaponer.

  “What kind of a ship are we looking at?”

  “It’s a design we’ve never seen before. It’s not battle class, but from the readings I’m getting, it’s 28.2 times our mass.”

  Jeff whistled. “Weapons?”

  “I’m picking up radiation signatures congruent with particle cannons and nuclear torpedoes. Lasers are a safe bet, but I can’t say that definitively.”

  “Lasers are the least of our troubles.” Jeff drummed his fingers on his armrest and chewed on his lip, thinking furiously.

  “Prepare to jump,” Jeff said.

  “Jeff, are you intending to…squash space again?” Emma’s voice was grave.

  “Do you have a better idea?” he snapped. He instantly regretted it, but she didn’t back down.

  “Jeff, our universe disappeared after the last jump. It’s…I don’t think it’s a coincidence.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Can we speak privately?”

  “We don’t have time for sensitivities. Just say what you need to say.”

  It was like time was standing still. Every eye on the bridge was on him, then on Emma, then on him. He felt their anxious gazes boring into his skull. He ignored them and remained fixed on Emma’s taut mouth.

  “Jeff, I need to study this. One possibility is that our last jump…destroyed our universe.”

  Jeff felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. He also felt the pit in his stomach descending into infinity.

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying…just what I’m saying. The last time you tried to squash space around a starship…well, we know what happened. Something this big…maybe something went wrong again. Maybe we pushed past what the natural elasticity of spacetime could tolerate. I think…maybe we…Jeff, we might have…” she couldn’t finish her sentence. It was too, too terrible.

  Jeff’s throat suddenly felt like a desert. His hands started shaking. His bowels started cramping. “I…I gotta…” His legs felt like rubber bands as he stood and stumbled to the head.

  When he emerged again, it was as if no one had moved.

  The aft door hissed open and Commander Nira strode in. Her black hair was mussed from sleeping, but her eyes were alert and her mouth grim. “Nira reporting, sir, what’s—”

  “Incoming alien vessel, Commander. Weaponer’s station, now.”

  It was a joke. They had no weapons to speak of. Lasers. Useless. Jeff leaned on the stations he passed on his way back to his chair. He needed to be calm and resolute. But inside his head, the only thing he could hear was a snarling voice saying, “You killed everyone—again,” over and over and over.

  “Contact in three minutes, sir,” Mr. Wall said.

  “Can we get a visual?” Jeff managed.

  “No, not…sir, we’re being hailed—audio only.”

  “In what language?” Jeff asked.

  “In English, sir.”

  Jeff blinked. “Okay, open a channel.”

  “Unidentified vessel, this is the Terran Authority vessel Kepler. Prepare to be boarded.”

  “Kepler?” Jeff said aloud.

  “We’re the Kepler,” Pho stated the obvious.

  “We’re on an adjacent string to our own universe,” Emma said. “Things might be similar…and different.”

  “What?” Commander Nira said. “What is she talking about?”

  Jeff held his hand up. “I’ll explain later.” He felt his head swimming. His stomach lurched. He was sweating. He stood and straightened his jacket. “This ship is…us…in…in the universe we’re in,” he said. “We have every reason to believe that we’re the good guys in this universe or any other. We can’t fight them, and we can’t outrun them. So let’s greet them with the same honors we’d greet the esteemed crew of any other ship in our own fleet.”

  He strode toward the bridge’s aft door and paused as it slid open. “Put everything on auto, Mr. Pho. With me, everyone.” He didn’t look to see if they were behind him. It didn’t matter. And if he could get a bit ahead of them, out of sight for a moment, maybe they wouldn’t notice the sweat, the shaking of his hands, the jerk of his knees going out from under him. He wanted to curl up in his bunk. He wanted to bury his face in Emma’s cleavage. He wanted to be alone.

  He stood at attention by the main airlock. He removed his service blaster from its holster and stabbed his finger to open the armory cabinet. It slid open, but a spider had spread its web across most of the opening. He rolled his eyes and scooped the web out, wiping it on the pants of his uniform. When the others came around the corner, looking like scared cats, he held the lid to the armory cabinet open and motioned with his eyes for them to stow their weapons. When Nira approached, she shook her head.

  He liked Nira. She was a short, compact ball of fire. Her black hair was bobbed like a boy’s, but her eyes were those of a fierce warrior. “It’s only going to endanger us, commander. It won’t
make us safer. Stow it.” She hesitated but then obeyed, placing her own blaster in the cabinet beside his. He closed and locked the cabinet with his own code.

  A proximity alert was blaring on the bridge, and they could hear it all the way in the aft of the ship. Jeff smoothed what was left of his hair and tugged again at his coat. “Make yourselves presentable,” he ordered them. “You represent the Colonial Defense Fleet.” The thought struck him that, at that moment, they were the Colonial Defense Fleet—sworn to protect colonies that no longer existed.

  He couldn’t think about that now. He had to stay focused. The feelings that had overwhelmed him after Catskill attacked him with new, vigorous fury, pummeling at him from the inside, coating his guts with a caustic bile that threatened imminent disintegration.

  His face twitched as he pulled himself to his full height. “Attention!” he barked.

  He could hear the docking rods finding their slots, felt the clamps lock into place.

  “Salute!” he ordered. As one, his crew raised their right hands to their brows.

  The airlock hissed open and within seconds six black-armored mariners with automatic blasters poured into the hangar, their muzzles trained on Jeff and his crew.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mr. Pho waver. “Salute, Mr. Pho!” Jeff said through clenched teeth.

  He saw Pho stiffen, saw his arm straighten into a regulation salute once again.

  “Secure,” one of the marines called. This was followed a moment later by, “Captain on deck!”

  Jeff stood stock still as the captain of the alien Kepler stepped through the airlock door and straightened up, adjusting his own jacket.

  Jeff’s salute faltered, and his hand slid to his side. He didn’t need to be introduced. His voice quavered as he spoke. “Hello, Danny.”

  Chapter Two

  Jo spun as the bridge door slid open with a whoosh.

  Communicator Tash Liebert darted to his station, avoiding her eyes.

  “Your duty shift started at 0100, Mr. Liebert.”

  “Yes sir,” the young man said, still not looking at her. “Sorry sir.”

  Her eyes darkened and, hands clasped behind her back, she wandered over to his station. He was sitting down, hunkered over his control panel. He stiffened as he realized she was drawing close. Good. He ought to be nervous. “I’m going to let it go, Mr. Liebert. Don’t let it happen again.”

  “No, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  A smile cracked Jo’s command face as she took the captain’s chair. “And I want a double check on all comm systems between us and the captain, stat.”

  “Yes, sir.” A moment later, he said, “All systems are transactional. Good signal strength from the surface.”

  “Good to hear it.” There was a lot of waiting on a mission like this one, and among her fears was that a signal would be dropped or a comm path broken when no one was looking. Everything was fine…for the moment. But she reminded herself to be vigilant.

  Avalon II wasn’t exactly a war zone, but it wasn’t a safe place to be, even if there hadn’t been a war on. It was in an unregulated part of space, not technically under anyone’s jurisdiction, and the locals had lobbied hard on both sides to keep it that way. It was a haven for smugglers, fugitives, runaways, organized crime, deposed monarchs, and anyone who did not want to be found or brought to justice. “It’s the fucking Wild West,” she whispered.

  They’d tucked themselves into the hollow of an asteroid, almost large enough to be a moon by some astronomers’ reckoning. This kept them in an appropriate orbit for the time they planned to be there, but shielded them from detection from all sides except directly facing the planet. It had been a real find, and Jo made a mental note to credit Lieutenant Chi in her report for making it.

  She studied the map on the view screen, showing the away team’s bio signs along the right column, and their location on a street grid covering the larger part of the screen. They were moving again, off a main street, into an alley. Her fingers dug into the leather of the command chair as she imagined what an alley on a place like Avalon II would look like. They were certainly in a more dangerous place away from public view.

  “They’re meeting up with the enemy,” Weaponer Shallit said through clenched teeth.

  Jo saw what he meant. Unidentified beings were approaching them—cautiously, it seemed. “They’re not enemies until we actually know something about them,” she corrected him. “They could be our contacts.”

  “I should be down there,” Shallit pouted.

  “But you aren’t,” Jo said, with a note of finality that warned him away from further whining.

  “I should be.”

  Jo rolled her eyes. “Mr. Shallit, that was the Captain’s call.”

  “It was the wrong one.” Shallit didn’t look away from his panel. He was on thin ice now, and he knew it.

  “You’re treading dangerously close to insubordination, Mr. Shallit.”

  He turned and looked at her now, his eyes small and angry as spent buckshot. “I’m tired of seeing opportunities wasted with weak leadership.”

  Jo felt her spine stiffen. “And now you’re a stone’s throw from mutiny.”

  It was one of the unspeakable words in the military, even among the rebels, or as they preferred to call themselves, the Freedom Fighters. At the sound of it, his shoulders slumped and he looked away. She weighed whether the utterance deserved a note in her report. She hadn’t yet decided when Navigator Chi called out, “Authority ship approaching. They’ll be passing between us and the planet in forty seconds.”

  “Power down,” Jo called.

  “But—” Shallit protested.

  “Down!” she repeated. “All the way.”

  Within seven seconds the lights were out, with only the sound of the crew’s breath and the whine of the computers spinning down cutting through the terrible silence of space.

  In her head, Jo counted until enough time had passed for them to be clear of the Authority ship’s line-of-sight sensors. “Power up,” she commanded. A moment later, the lights sprang to life again, and the familiar boot-up figures danced on the main view screen.

  “Reestablish contact with the captain, Mr. Liebert,” Jo ordered.

  “Reestablishing link, sir.”

  “On screen.”

  The street map once again filled the main view screen, and Jo could see the dots representing the away team—different colors for their respective ranks. The captain’s was red, of course—the most easily recognizable color to the human eye.

  “Sir, something’s wrong,” Liebert said. “I’m not getting bio signs.”

  “Is there something wrong with the link?” Jo asked.

  “Pinging…no, the link is fine.”

  Jo scowled at the screen. He was right, the bio signs column had no activity, except…

  “We are getting body temperature, sir.”

  “I see that, communicator. What about heartbeat or brain activity?”

  “No sir.”

  Shallit stood up, maybe out of surprise, maybe out of an instinctual effort to get closer to the view screen. “They’re not moving,” he said, his voice cold and quiet.

  Jo blinked and took a couple steps toward the view screen herself. Even if they were standing still, she should still be able to see slight oscillations in their dots as they moved a step here or a step there. But there was nothing. The dots were stock still.

  “Holy Christ,” Jo whispered.

  “They’re dead,” Shallit said, punching at his station.

  “Mr. Liebert, are they dead?” Jo turned to her communicator.

  He was shaking his head, his mouth moving, but producing no words.

  “I’m gonna fucking kill those Authority motherfuckers!” Shallit swore.

  Jo felt an icy waterfall of dread shoot down her spine.

  “Mr. Liebert, tell doctor Mbusa to meet me in the shuttle bay, and alert security that I’ll need a detail prepped to go planetside. Civilian dress.
And have Charlesworth camouflage another shuttle, ASAP.”

  “When, sir?”

  “Now, before someone else finds our people and we can’t get them back. Mr. Chi, I want a flight plan plotted and loaded by the time we launch, which should be…” she looked at her display panel, “six minutes from now.”

  “Sir,” Chi gave her a sheepish look. “Pardon the objection, sir, but if something has happened to the captain, that means that you’re captain. Do you really think you should be going down there? I mean, obviously, it’s dangerous,” she said.

  “Send me,” Shallit said, rising to his full height.

  Jo shook her head. “It’s the captain’s prerogative to lead any away mission. Captain Telouse was well within his rights, and so am I. I’m responsible for what happens down there. I need to be on the ground.” She turned and looked at Shallit. “But I need our best bridge crew in position. Let security provide the cannon fodder, I need a trigger finger I can trust up here.”

  “Then at least give me the conn,” Shallit said.

  She scowled at him. “Mr. Chi will have the conn. I need you at your weapons panel. Are we going to have trouble, Mr. Shallit?”

  He stared at her, his eyes hard, his jaw set like a rock. She held his eyes, keenly aware of every second that was passing. Neither of them blinked.

  She didn’t have time for this nonsense. Without breaking her gaze she stepped toward him, ignoring the fact that he towered over her. “You will stand down, Mr. Shallit. Now, or I can call a security detail up here for you.”

  His eyes narrowed, but he turned away and sat back down at his station. Inwardly she sighed her relief. “The ship is yours, Mr. Chi,” she said, stepping toward the doors. “Stay out of sight. Stay safe.”

  Jeff wondered why he wasn’t more shocked to see Danny. Probably it was because the Ulim—the crystalline aliens who had saved Jeff from certain death on New Manila’s moon—had taken Danny’s form, as drawn from Jeff’s memory. He had recently seen Danny alive and well again…kind of. It was both like and unlike seeing a friend after being a few weeks apart…except that this Danny was twenty years older. He smiled at his friend—for this really was his friend, or closer to it than the Ulim analog had been. This Danny had memories and feelings and ambitions that were truly his own. They just weren’t the same as the Danny he had known. I’ll take what I can get, Jeff thought to himself. “You’re looking well. For a dead man.”