by Ramy Vance
He considered the challenge of trying to pick the lock and go digging through her quarters. After all, if he couldn’t figure out who he was, maybe he could help figure out who she was.
But no, he decided it wasn’t worth pissing her off. He paced the chamber, reading the names on the personal quarters as he passed. LT Greenley. SM Forrest. Q. S. Warrick.
For shits and grins, he tried to open Warrick’s door and wasn’t surprised when it didn’t respond to his biometrics. He’d had to press Jaeger’s hand to her door earlier before it would open for them. He reached the end of the line and froze, his eyes fixed on the name stamped on the last hatch.
“Toner?” Virgil sounded suddenly suspicious. “You are unusually quiet. Are you attempting to access quarters you are not authorized to access?”
“Nah. Nah, it’s nothing.” Toner scratched his neck anxiously. “I just…got an idea. I’m gonna go hop on the weight bench and see how many tons I can squat.”
He turned and hurried away from the hatch labeled Captain Percival LeBlanc.
Chapter Nine
Seeker Delta Three
“To seek order for the Tribe. To send the lost lamb home.
By any means necessary.”
The seeker blinked and squinted, waiting for his vision to clear. The words carved into the bulkhead panel above his face clarified. He reread them. He licked his dry lips, smelling the stale scent of atmosphere from a can. He had a pounding headache. He couldn’t remember where he was, or how he got here, or what he was supposed to be doing.
Any means necessary, he mouthed.
Well, that part felt right.
The seeker coughed, swallowing the lump of phlegm lodged in the back of his throat. Cigarette. The random thought came with a burst of longing. I want a cigarette.
However, he was locked in a cockpit, and the viewer screens in front of him displayed an endless starfield. He probably didn’t have the time or spare oxygen for a smoke break in this tin can.
He turned his head and coughed again, pounding his chest. His throat was raw, and his head throbbed. “Hello?” he barked. “Hey, anybody copy?”
The banks of monitors and interfaces curving around him flickered dimly at his voice but did not activate.
He patted his chest, found the harness buckle holding him in place, and unlatched it. He drifted free of the pilot’s seat— but not very far. The cockpit was the size of a double-wide port-a-john and crammed with gear.
He found a comms panel mounted overhead and toggled a few of the switches. “This is…” He glanced up at the mission statement. “Uh. Seeker Delta Three.” I guess. “Anybody copy? I’ve encountered some trouble.”
He winced and rubbed his throbbing temples, waiting for some inkling of memory to return. He must have hit his head in a fight or something.
The comms panel activated, but if anybody heard him, they were keeping mum.
Seeker doubled over in another fit of coughing. A few more monitors flickered to life around him and when he straightened, eyes watering and lungs burning, he saw the ship’s status monitor running through basic readouts. He squinted at the tiny letters rolling over the screen.
Engine status: Standby
Life support: Online
Weapons: Online
Comms: Online
Hull status: Intact
Location: Unknown
A ship silhouette schematic appeared on screen. It displayed a single-pilot fighter craft meant for short-range combat. All systems blinked green. The ship was in good shape.
“That’s damned odd.” Seeker squinted at the display monitor showing the surrounding starfield. No drifting wreckage, telltale signs of some battle or other. No dust of cosmic clouds that would have jammed his sensors. No damage to his little fighter.
So why couldn’t he remember anything?
He toggled the comms screen again. “Hey. This is Seeker Delta Three. Does anybody read me?”
Silence.
“Well…shit.” He squeezed his eyes shut and scrubbed at his face. He patted his flight suit and felt a lump in a pouch over his chest. He reached into it and drew out a thin twist of dried meat and an electronic tube half the size of a pack of cigarettes.
He recognized that, at least, and hated it for not being a pack of cigarettes.
Still, he brought the vape pen to his mouth and inhaled. It had a little charge left. The impotent scent of clove and vanilla filled him. He stuffed the pen back into his pocket in disgust. Damned hippy bullshit.
He tore off a length of the jerky and studied his monitors as he chewed, square jaw grinding. Detection equipment purported to be functioning just fine, so he ordered a long-range scan and let out a long, low whistle at the results that scrolled down the screen.
“Display on visual,” he said. The little fighter didn’t have much of an AI, but it understood basic voice commands. The primary display monitor in front of him went blank and flared back to life.
A sleek warship—Raptor-class, according to the readout—filled the display. Sensors detected it drifting in space half an AU away.
“Oh, hello you stuck-up bitch,” Seeker muttered. “Why aren’t you answering my calls?”
By the faint lights active across the hull, she wasn’t a derelict. However, the fighter also wasn’t reading much activity coming from her comms network. Seeker noted the fresh scars of weapons damage across the hull of her port wing. The faint lines of droid hull sealant foam were pale and fresh. Maybe there had been a fight, after all.
Still, he wasn’t reading any other fighter-class ships in the sector, and a raptor like that would have at least a dozen in her bays at any given time. Certainly, she would have deployed more than one in the event of hostilities.
So why was he the only fighter around?
Why wasn’t the raptor answering his calls?
He was about to attempt a radio hail again but thought better of it. Unease was creeping up the back of his neck. Something had gone down. Best to keep a low profile until he remembered what.
The sensors detected another nearby stellar object, and he switched the display screen.
“What in the left hand of fuck?”
Seeker had seen close-up video feeds of black holes. He remembered that much—if not where, or when, or how. They were empty points in space, a void darker than the gap between stars, surrounded by a faintly glowing halo of the charged particles that made up the accretion disk.
The object hanging on the screen before him was a flat white mass, without the lively glowing brilliance of a star, surrounded by an inverted black halo. Scanners pegged it as having the mass of a small star, despite being barely half the size of an Earth-like planet. Dense as hell.
Seeker scrubbed his eyes, but the object remained the same. There was an analysis blinking at the bottom of the screen:
Celestial Phenomena? Unknown.
He stared at the readout for a long time, watched the string of numbers beneath the anomaly shift and slowly decrease. Whatever the thing was, his ship thought it was decaying—and pretty rapidly, given its size.
Seeker found his vape pen again and chewed on the tip, longing for soft papery tobacco to gnaw instead. The metal taste of the damned thing hurt his teeth. He turned it over, considered crushing it in his big palm, then saw the message scratched into the bottom.
Daddy
Remember—you promised.
Love, CiCi
Seeker sighed and put the pen away again. “Computer, run a search for the name…CiCi.”
The screen in front of him went blank and flashed. No results found.
“Great.” He rapped his knuckles thoughtfully against the console before opening the comms channel again. The warship wasn’t responding to his hails, but maybe its AI would recognize and patch with his fighter.
When he requested access to the localized AI network, however, he met a big red flashing firewall. Access denied.
He tried three more pathways into the AI network, and al
l met with silent refusal.
“Well, what the hell.” Seeker tipped his head back, eyes closed to think.
He had a headache, but he wasn’t injured or starving. He hadn’t been out in the fighter terribly long—no more than twenty-four hours, and the craft could sustain basic life support for weeks before it would need a recharge.
He recognized the warship before him—by class, if not by name. It was one of his. It should be friendly. Yet, it was silent. He was the only detectable fighter out in space, and there was a big-ass celestial anomaly decaying behind them.
There had been a fleet of ships, hadn’t there? He couldn’t tell if that was a real memory or something from a dream. It was a distant, unreal idea. Had there been some kind of accident? An explosion or warp core meltdown that turned the rest of the fleet to slag and created that anomaly? Had he and the stranded raptor been the farthest away? Is that why they’d survived?
Or maybe there’d been a mutiny on the raptor? He peered at the ship through the screen. It would explain the silence—if the crew were dead or injured or occupied in a coup. It wouldn’t explain the scarring on her hull.
He glanced up at the motto carved into the bulkhead. To bring the lost lamb home. By any means necessary.
He shook his head and turned to slip his fingers into the thruster controls. Well. Today he was the lost lamb, and that ship—be she friend or foe—looked more like home than anything else out here. If he wanted answers, he was going to have to get them.
He was about to activate the primary thrusters when his long-range scanners began to flash. There was an object moving in his direction, half a million kilometers out. It was moving under its own power—a ship.
He froze, breath held as he waited for the scanners to ID its silhouette.
Blinking words filled the screen.
Silhouette Origin: unknown.
Chapter Ten
By the time Jaeger summoned Toner back to the observation deck, he had unzipped the front of his jumpsuit and tied the arms around his waist. He looked strangely vulnerable and pale in a too-small white undershirt.
Jaeger stared at the damp wet spots under his armpits. “What have you been doing?”
“Working out.” Toner folded his bare arms. He was as skinny as she had initially thought, but there was not an ounce of fat over the tightly corded muscles of his forearms. “We need more weights on the bench. There are only three hundred kilos there, and I was squatting that pretty easy.”
If he hoped this would impress her, he was wrong.
“You’re in outer space.”
“There’s gravity.” He pointed to the floor beneath them.
“Point-six earth gravities at best. And, really? That was the best use of your time?”
“I am learning about vampires, Jaeger.” He pointed at a damp patch under his armpit. “Benching a world record isn’t doing much to my heart rate, but apparently I do sweat.”
She wrinkled her nose and turned, gesturing for him to follow.
This chamber was different from the others of the central column. It didn’t roll like a wheel—instead, its shape resembled a grain silo or very tall planetarium: domed on one end, flat on the other, and slowly turning head over heel. There were cushy lounge chairs bolted to the floor. The walls and domed ceiling were a rare semi-conductive alloy that was, at this moment, utterly transparent.
“Whoa.” Toner stepped out of the access tunnel and into what looked like open space.
The Osprey’s wingtips arched far overhead, angled cargo bays and equipment arrays splayed along their length like pinfeathers. They appeared to rotate slowly as the observation deck turned in a lazy spin that kept their feet stuck to the surface.
An endless starfield stretched around them with distant clouds of luminescent dust dwarfing the ship and everything on it.
Toner reached one of the lounge chairs and sank slowly.
In the distance, someone was playing the clarinet.
“What is that?” Toner turned to study the long body of the Osprey stretching out behind them, where the crew and storage quarters looked like giant spinning tin cans.
Jaeger grinned, feeling a rush of pride at the sight of her ship. “Virgil, increase volume.”
The faint dabble of clarinet swelled into an epic river of trumpets and booming drums.
“Howard Shore.” Her grin broadened. “The Ring Goes South. It’s music from the twenty-first century holo-drama called Lord of the Rings. I found it in the media files and remembered how it helps me focus.”
She was, absurdly, a little disappointed when he made a dismissive wave and turned to point at a large, flat white object drifting over the Osprey’s port wing.
“Is that it?” He asked. From this distance, the wormhole appeared to be the size of a beach ball.
Jaeger activated her personal computer. “Yep. It’s a white hole. It’s emitting all kinds of weird radiation, but our hull should be filtering all that out.”
“Should be? I don’t know if I’m immune to cancer.”
“I figure it’s safe to be in here for a while at least. Worth it for the view. I was right. The thing is unstable. It’s decaying rapidly, but we have some time left before we’ll lose any chance of getting back through it.”
“Going back through it?” Toner yelped and whirled on her. “I’m no expert, but I’ve heard about spaghettification. It means if you go through a black hole or white hole or whatever, your atoms get stretched so thin you could use them to play hackneyed violin scores.”
Jaeger’s grin wavered. Toner glanced at her face and looked away. “Sorry,” he said. “That came out harder than I—”
“Under normal circumstances, hole travel will undoubtedly rip anyone apart.” She cut him off in a clipped tone. “But we came through it safely once. I’m sure of that. I dug through our shield generator records and found what I was looking for. The ship’s shields had modifications that allowed the Osprey to go through it safely. I think we can reverse engineer those modifications to generate an oscillating field that will protect us from the gravitational forces as we travel back through the hole.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I’m sorry? What is that supposed to mean?”
Toner rubbed absently at the back of his neck and turned, still not meeting her eye. “I mean you don’t really know we made it safely, do you? It messed with our memories, right?”
Jaeger grimaced. “Yes, that’s our best theory. Somehow traveling through messed with our emotion-based long-term memory.”
Toner gave Jaeger a blank look.
“I had Virgil run some scans and simulations. I can’t remember my name, who I am, or my family, but I remember their emotions. I remember feelings, just not the information associated with those feelings. That,” she pointed at the screen, “messed up the part of our brains that holds that information.” Jaeger shrugged. “All in all, I consider that a minor side effect given what we went through. I don’t think anybody’s ever made it through a hole intact before.”
Toner lifted an eyebrow. “What about the other side effects?”
“The systems damage? We can patch that up.”
Toner shook his head slowly. “No. I mean…the others.”
“What others?”
“Exactly.” This time, Toner met her gaze and held it steady for a long moment. “Where’s the rest of the crew, Jaeger?”
“I have no idea,” she said through gritted teeth. “I’d be going to rescue them if I knew. Believe me. I could use their support right now.”
“How do you know they didn’t get…like, obliterated? Vanished away in transit?”
“That’s absurd. Why would they have been poofed out of existence but not us, or any of the gear, or the stuff in No-A?”
Toner shifted his weight and rolled his shoulders uncomfortably. “I don’t know. I just…”
A speaker on the personal comm activated, and Virgil said, “I should point out that this vessel has thi
rty-two escape pods on the register. All but two are absent from the pod bays.”
Jaeger turned to the speaker, blinking in surprise. “Really? The rest of the crew abandoned ship?”
“It would appear so,” Virgil said coolly.
Jaeger cocked her head. “Well, that makes sense. We’re getting pulled into a hole. I order the others to abandon ship and stay behind to try to save her. Or go down with it. That’s a captain’s job, right?”
Toner looked unconvinced, and she added: “And you…I don’t know. You didn’t make it to the pods in time?”
Toner hesitated and slowly allowed a nod. “Sure. I guess we can go with that for now.”
“Good.” Feeling a little steadier, Jaeger turned back to her charts. She didn’t have time to dissect Toner’s strange, distrustful expression. “Virgil thinks we’re at least a thousand light-years from known charted space. At best possible speed, it would take us over a hundred years to find our way back to…to where we were.”
“You don’t remember where we were.”
Jaeger ground her teeth. “We were part of a fleet. I know that much. The other ships, the other tribes are out there somewhere. We have no hope of regaining contact with them from this far away. We have to get back through that hole before it decays past the point our shields can compensate for. Are you with me?”
Toner let out a long breath, looking from the numbers on her comp screen to the white hole rolling far overhead. “It’s not like I have a better idea.”
Reluctant trust was better than no trust, so Jaeger slid into the cushy armchair and leaned over her computer. “Great. We have eighty-seven hours to get the thrusters operational and shields back to maximum capacity. Based on our equipment lists, I think we should be able to do that with time to spare.”
“What happens after eighty-seven hours?”
