by F P Adriani
“No, I don’t think YOU understand YOUR duties,” Jeremy said. “But I don’t have time to argue with you. There are ten of us and we all think the same.”
“So then come out here and talk to me about it face-to-face.”
“It’s too late, Captain. You won’t do the right thing, so we will.”
“Jeremy,” Halloway said fast and loud, but then he heard the beep of his communicator as Jeremy cut the line. “Shit!” He glanced at Carey’s flushed face and Pat’s wide-open dark eyes. “Let’s go—we’ll try to get in from outside.”
The closest hatch and ramp was on the port side of the ship, but the shuttle bay’s hatch was on the starboard side; Halloway, Carey and Pat ran down the hall and stairs to the port-hatch, unintentionally collecting another crewmember along the way. Moments later, the four of them burst outside and ran around the Rover’s nose—but it was too late: the exhaust streams from the Rover’s two shuttles were now two cloudy arcs from above the Rover to high in the bluish sky.
Halloway’s heart was painfully pounding, and his fists were shaking at his sides, but not with rage only. There was something wrong—the arcs now changed shape, too fast, as if the shuttles were abruptly maneuvering—then an instant later, two bright fire-balls exploded in the sky.
“No!” Halloway and the others on the ground screamed in unison, but even as they did, Halloway knew it was no use. He knew he—and his crew in the shuttles—really should have expected this. They had miscalculated, all of them, in one way or another….
Someone beside Halloway was crying, but he didn’t turn to see who it was. What would it matter anyway…. “Go back inside,” he said to his crew now, still without looking at them.
And then he watched as a cloud of ash, corascite, metallic dust—everything the shuttles had been and the people inside them had been—it all began falling down toward the ground in streams of gray and black and white. Halloway felt near tears himself now, and he almost didn’t care if anyone saw him, the captain, shed them.
But then a moment later, he spotted someone in the distance: Sasha.
She was in one of her colorful robes, and her hair was whipping behind her because she was moving toward him very fast. He rushed to close the gap between them even faster.
“I just watched my crewmembers get fucking incinerated!” Halloway yelled at her in an aggressive voice, but he really didn’t mean his aggression toward her. Or maybe he did. He couldn’t tell anymore. He felt both blind and blind-sided. How stupid he had been….
“I know,” Sasha called to him now. “I’m so sorry, Robert. I was coming to see you, and I could see the explosions as I moved—I—I thought. Robert—” she said in a desperate-sounding voice, but he cut her off.
“Another ten of my crew—how many will it be tomorrow? I want them back now—bring them back!”
Sasha stopped hard in front of him. “The Entity can, but you know what that will mean.”
“I don’t care!” Halloway shouted at her.
His eyes were right on hers; his breaths were coming rapidly. And his whole body was shaking when he spoke, but not shaking in only anger now. “There never was a third choice, was there? The Entity knew all along what the result would be.”
“Yes,” Sasha said, and it sounded like her Entity-voice now.
“We can’t even be sure the planet would have ever let us off anyway. Has it ever done that for anyone?”
“I don’t know,” Sasha said, her words a bit faster this time. “Every crew I’ve known has always winded up choosing to stay.”
“Just as we did in effect,” Halloway said in a sad, defeated voice now.
“Robert, I’ve always wanted to tell you something, but I couldn’t because I didn’t want to influence you as me, Sasha. I also couldn’t be certain of exactly what The Entity would do.
“But, I went through the exact same thing as you. I made the exact same choice. One of my crew—he suggested we stay a little and see what happens. I agreed and here we are still. I’m just not so sure now that it was a bad thing. Once you agree to stay you can even go back into space—you just must stay within The Entity’s major sphere of influence. But you can travel quite far in this layer. I do keep a shuttle inside my ship working for the times I need the escape.”
Halloway turned to her. “Aren’t you lying to yourself there?”
She sighed, her blues eyes sliding away from him. “I have a family here now—children, grandchildren someday probably. More children maybe.” Her eyes fell right on Halloway now. “Isn’t that a reason to remain where they know and now love?”
He didn’t answer her directly. “Will The Entity definitely bring them all back—Gene and everyone from the shuttles?”
“Oh—yes. Don’t doubt that. Raji and five others of my crew—they were dead. And I remember that seeing them alive again was one of the most gratifying moments I’d ever experienced as a captain.”
“But they would have never been dead in the first place if it wasn’t for The Entity.”
“Can I be sure of that?” Sasha asked now, staring up at the sky again, at the pale, wispy remnants of the shuttle explosions. “Sometimes I think that when your time has come, it will happen in whatever way the Universe can do it, during whatever opportunity. Getting a second chance is a blessing, not a curse.”
Halloway wasn’t exactly buying what she said, but he did wonder if, someday, he would sound like her to the people from another ship that had crashed here….
His eyes were on Sasha, but now they suddenly shifted toward the ground behind her, toward where an intense yellow light had just appeared. It was an expanding yellow light, a yellow light full of power. He could see the power, he could feel it, as if it were a sun come to show him the force of life.
That powerful force of life now picked up the soil near the powdery remains of the shuttles, then swirled the matter around, till it formed a ministorm in the middle of the brilliantly sunny, windless day.
Sasha’s eyes were also on the light now, and Halloway watched her golden profile. “You know,” she said to him finally as she turned back his way, “some of your crew may still hate your decision.”
“Well then,” Halloway said in a dry voice, as his eyes once again fell on that powerful yellow light, “I guess I’ll have to live with that.”
Destinations
The Spacebender and its crew were passing through The Saffron Layer when they received the distress signal.
For weeks their most important job had been acting as a shuttle for Admiral Andreyev, who was on a conference circuit across various planets. The Space Force was a combination police, military and rescue force for the whole galaxy, but the Spacebender was only an adjunct Space Force ship; it was normally assigned miscellaneous jobs, which often wound up being low-rank jobs anyone in the SF could do, which was why Captain Jerry Jones of the Spacebender had jumped at the chance to escort Admiral Andreyev. She was one of the biggest bigwigs in the SF, and Captain Jones had been hoping that he and his crew would be bumped up to a higher status in the SF after his five years at the Spacebender’s helm.
When the ship finally entered The Saffron Layer, Captain Jones and his crew had been enjoying an ordinary, on-schedule flight that he hoped would ultimately impress Andreyev. He had been working hard on impressing her since Day One; he knew that Andreyev’s being on board was his one big shot at improving his and his ship’s status. However, the times she was on his ship and not on a planet at a conference, her all-business demeanor gave away nothing of her opinion of either him or his crew, and at this late point in the trip, he figured that even if he slept with her, it wouldn’t move her in his direction.
Nevertheless, he had spent days either overtly or covertly mentioning his ship’s and his crew’s capabilities whenever Andreyev was in earshot; he had spent days discussing the upgrade his crew had done to the zenite-engine coils, days detailing the pros and cons of the updated weapons clusters he had chosen to replace the outdated ones
. He’d been giving impressing Andreyev everything he had, while privately urging everyone else on board to follow his orders to the letter so nothing would destroy his momentum to impress….
He was on his bridge with two of his crew when the distress signal came in. His lead pilot Simmons and his lead science officer Beth flanked him in a straight line across the white bridge platform. He was in his black captain’s chair; they were in their silver chairs, and all three of them were wearing their white SF uniforms.
The ship was finally on its way to Admiral Andreyev’s last conference destination on Martoon, and Captain Jones knew that if Andreyev walked onto the bridge right then, he and his two crewmembers would look very official. However, he had also always prided himself on being an accessible captain, Andreyev be damned: weeks ago he had insisted everyone continue to call him by his first name while Andreyev was on board. He might be ambitious, but he was never that ambitious that he would become uptight; he had always encouraged first names on his ship….
“Jerry,” Beth suddenly said, “I’m getting something over the communications-line—a brief repeating text message, asking for help, from the north, back-end zone here.”
Beth was in her chair on Jerry’s right, and he frowned at her now; he knew that there was only one accessible planet in this layer, but it was uninhabited and on the layer’s “front-end.” Private ships only rarely passed through this layer because there was no money to make. A few days ago, Jerry had told Simmons to plot a fly-through here, simply because it meant a shorter distance to their—or really Andreyev’s—final destination.
“Are there any SF ships in the vicinity?” Jerry asked Beth now.
She shook her head fast, her red hair jerking around. “I just checked: none are scheduled for a fly-through in this layer. The last time an SF ship flew through here was over 13 months ago.” A slow frown shifted across her profile as she looked down at her electronic panel-table. “I ran a database search and the ship that the distress message came from, the Carver—it disappeared 50 years ago.”
“What?” Jerry said, sitting up straighter in his black chair. The information Beth had given him seemed both worrying and like a gift….
“Good morning, everyone,” said Andreyev as she stepped onto the bridge.
Jerry glanced at her, taking quick note of her usual pinned-back brown hair and her usual serious face above her usual all-black uniform and her shiny golden rank-crests on her uniform’s shoulders. He could never tell what kind of mood she was in, or if she even had moods like other people, which always left him at a loss when gauging what his best next move around her would be.
He knew that, according to the rules of his and his ship’s position in the SF, he didn’t have to investigate the distress message. However, Andreyev was on the bridge now, standing behind him somewhere, probably near the back wall, near where there was a panel-table, which was no doubt flashing the information about the signal….
Sharply now, he turned to look over his right shoulder. “Morning, Admiral. We’ve received a distress call. Since we’re on-course to get to Martoon a bit early, I’ve decided to investigate the message—I mean, assuming going off-course is all right with you.”
Her gray eyes were down on that silver panel, which was in front of her now, and her mouth was gently frowning. “Of course you should investigate. Carry on.”
She raised cool eyes to his face, and he nodded before turning back to his own panel.
*
The Spacebender was a fairly large SF ship equipped with seven engines, including two curon-beam engines. The beam engines were used for propelling the ship sometimes, but, like most curon engines, the two on the Spacebender were also used to generate curon-bubbles, which contained their own spacetime, which allowed a ship to manipulate both time and space to get specific results while space-traveling.
Captain Jones now told his engineering crew to use both of those beam engines to create a temporary, double curon bubble—a bubble inside a bubble—to even more quickly dispatch them to near where the distress message had come from.
His plan worked, and less than half an hour after Andreyev had stepped onto the bridge, the Spacebender was approaching their alternate destination: an area of The Saffron Layer that, according to the ship’s database, hadn’t been officially explored in decades, since before the Carver had disappeared.
Jerry was still in his captain’s chair, and now he clicked his panel-intercom through to his engineering section, as well as to his medic station and his shuttle bay. “Be prepared,” he said. “We don’t know what we’ll find in this zone. All exterior shields up, first-aid at the ready and a shuttle primed to go. I’ll keep the line open when necessary.” As he clicked off the intercom, he heard Andreyev clear her throat kind of loudly and awkwardly, and he wondered if she’d rushed onto the bridge before she’d even had any breakfast.
He glanced over at her. Her eyes soon moved his way, and then he said, “We should reach that message’s zone within six minutes.”
She waved a slender hand in front of her. “I can clearly see that from the panel.”
He flushed, badly, his head jerking back around toward his own panel-table. He turned the front bridge viewscreen to its full-size setting and watched the flat black of space fill the screen; the occasional pinpoints of stars were the only bright spots in the black. He wondered about this layer’s Saffron name when there was nothing sunny-colored about this area of the galaxy. It was cold-looking, endless-looking, this zone stretching to the far beyond, to an area that hadn’t been extensively navigated, at least not in many years. Yet there was this distress signal now, and from a ship that had disappeared decades ago….
Jerry spent the next few minutes with his eyes moving back and forth between his panel and the viewscreen as he listened to his crew discuss both the Spacebender’s operation and their destination.
Matt, the ship’s co-engineer, finally said to Jerry over the intercom, “I’m getting a region of debris up ahead, but I can’t completely make out the shapes. There’s some interference with the cameras and scanning. We hope to get clearer video data within a few minutes—when Gail’s done filtering out the background interference from the excessive radiation levels here. ”
“Good,” Jerry said. And he couldn’t help glancing at Andreyev again, who, as usual, didn’t have anything to say but a toneless, “Carry on.”
He felt like sighing as he turned back to the viewscreen, where something had finally changed: he could now make out the small, not-stars flecks concentrated in one spot. The flecks of various colors moved like confetti trapped in space—isolated both from space and from each other, floating free in the cosmos, where someone had thrown them….
Not quite. More likely forces had thrown them, maybe some mad explosions.
Jerry clicked his intercom through to both Matt’s station and Gail’s station now. They were brother and sister; they’d been with the Space Force for over 20 years, and they worked well together as the Spacebender’s co-engineers. Jerry felt lucky to have them on board. He’d only been with the SF for 11 years, so he would always take any help he could get from more experienced SF members.
“Do you have anything for me?” he asked Matt and Gail, his eyes falling on Beth, to encourage her to share any of her ideas too.
But she only shook her head back at him. “Nothing’s changed about the signal. Same repeating message from the same relative spot.” Her right forefinger pointed at the screen, toward slightly to the right of the middle.
Jerry’s eyes followed her finger to where the debris field waited, just as Gail finally spoke: “Captain, the scans are showing insignias and other IDs on some of the debris pieces…. Yeah. There are five different ship names.”
“Five?” Jerry said, his fingers pushing buttons on his panel to magnify the screen view, though he only wound up with an image that was both too pixelated and too out of focus. “Why is my viewscreen so blurry?”
“Sorry, Jerry,
” Matt said fast. “Forgot to patch you through for automatic updates to the data-stream…. It should be clearer now.”
It was: the confetti changed and looked less confetti-like, as in, there was nothing positive about this view of the debris. From this angle, dozens of pieces of ship hull and ship interior were visible; some pieces had jaggedly torn edges and twisted shapes, as if the material had been yanked apart by an angry can opener.
“What are we looking at?” Andreyev asked in a subdued yet somehow curt voice from behind Jerry.
His head moved in her direction, but he didn’t quite look at her this time. “There was some kind of disaster—or, more accurately, disasters.”
“But there is the distress message,” she pointed out.
Jerry pounded at the intercom button. “Beth, Gail, Matt—someone—where the hell’s the message coming from exactly?”
“One of the unidentifiable pieces—none of the named pieces are the Carver,” Gail said. “The signal must be coming from an apparatus attached to the other flotsam there. All of the ships seem to be old, pre-the Carver even, but two aren’t registered names. Still can’t get a clear enough scan and analysis on some of the other debris. There’s this damned interference—”
Her words broke off just as Matt said in an alarmed voice, “What the hell is that back there?”
Jerry’s heart began banging into his ribcage; his eyes rapidly flicked over the viewscreen and his panel. “What’s what, Matt? I’m not getting anything here.”
“Captain,” Matt said fast, “one of the pieces in the back just darted away from the others, like it was propelled.”
“Propelled by what?” Jerry asked, and as if the piece had heard him, or maybe another piece had, he saw a sliver of gray ship-shell suddenly careen sideways and bang into a larger black piece. “Simmons,” he said, “stay alert and turn on the computer’s probabilistic analysis mode.”
