Pax Novis

by Erica Cameron

  Once Meida was sure the program was running smoothly, she passed the monitoring off to Cira and Riston. She joined Mika at a different console nearby to check in on the teams still hunting for the TD drive. Each time Cira glanced over, Meida was tenser and Mika was more nervous. No one had found anything useful, then. Each team had found a piece, and the map of Ghost’s invasive work was beginning to take shape, but it wasn’t enough to understand the whole yet. It might not ever be enough.

  “Chief?” Erryla’s face appearing in the corner of every screen, and her voice coming through every speaker, made everyone in engineering jump.

  Meida recovered first and cleared her throat. “Yes, Captain?”

  “The team sifting through the computer’s core code has just been booted out by the initialization of a foreign program.” Her voice sounded calm to the point of monotone, but Cira knew that meant Erryla’s emotional control was tenuous. “According to the lieutenant in command of the team, this program was buried so deep in Novis’s files they hadn’t gotten within ten light-years of finding it when they lost access.”

  Cursing, Meida braced her hands on the console and let her head drop, as though she no longer had the strength to stand straight. “How much time do we have left?”

  “How much more time do you need to get that data core off this ship?” Erryla countered.

  Cira glanced at the program’s countdown. “Five minutes and sixteen seconds until the data transfer is complete. Then all we have to do is attach a beacon and get it off the ship.”

  “Get to it.” Erryla’s voice grew brittle. “I don’t have an actual countdown, but our best estimates give you about eight minutes until something happens.”

  Something. Like the drive initiating and sending them across or beyond the galaxy. Or the drive misfiring and blowing them up. Or the ship cracking under the strain of acceleration and breaking apart. Or the power system overloading and shutting down, emergency systems and all, leaving them to die from hypothermia or asphyxiation inside a graphene tomb. Something would happen in about eight minutes, and Cira couldn’t think of a single possibility that might end well. Then again, none of the possibilities ended with Cira, Riston, and the kids getting thrown in cells on Paxis. That was positive…if Cira squinted at it and ignored everything else.

  The data dump continued to process, and it took all Cira’s focus to keep from bouncing off the walls. Waiting sucked. Riston seemed to be dealing by pushing zirself into a corner and trying to merge with the wall. Cira couldn’t stand still, so she claimed an open terminal and pulled up a real-time view of the reports being received and filed by the bridge. A few seconds later, briefs scrolled across the screen.

  Acceleration 11 percent above tolerance.

  Power surges detected on decks three, seven, and ten.

  Course change accepted and initiated. New destination unknown.

  Report from First Lieutenant Owin Keenan: Attempts to shut down the foreign program have been unsuccessful, as have all attempts to run analysis on it. Several crew have suggested forcing a shutdown of the entire ship might reset the program and at least give us some more time to tease the threads of it out of the system, but I disagree. Pieces of code I’ve seen suggest any shutdown will only trigger the drive. Or blow us up.

  Space was infinite beyond the human brain’s capacity to understand, and yet Cira suddenly felt like they were trapped between dueling, inescapable gravity wells—evading the pull of one only sent them hurtling even faster into the doom of the other. Leaving their collected data to be seen by the systems of the quadrant might be the only way for the Novis crew to still exist here. If they vanished, there might not be a way back, no matter how hard they tried.

  With shaking hands, Cira added her own update to the data flowing to the bridge and then shut the screen down into mirrorlike blackness, unable to handle any more information.

  “Ten seconds to completion.” Meida shouted the warning. Implied were several sharp orders: grab the hovercart, get your butt over here, and stop fixating on things you can’t change.

  Cira followed orders, stopping the hovercart next to Meida’s work station just as her mother unplugged the data core. The core was only about the size of Cira’s thigh, but it weighed nearly seventy kilograms. Riston grunted with effort as ze helped Cira lift it off the table and place it back on the hovercart.

  “Go!” Meida ordered as soon as the core was secure.

  Cira was already moving. With the cart between them, she and Riston rushed out of engineering. There were six sharp turns but no doors or barriers between them and the closest air lock. They blew past cargo holds, workshops, and storage compartments while screaming at the few scattered crew in the corridors to get out of the way. Slowing down for turns was bad enough. Cira refused to lose time because of an obstacle that could move itself.

  Either Meida or the captain must’ve activated the air lock remotely, because the interior door was already opening when they spotted it. The doors hadn’t entirely tucked into the walls yet, but there was more than enough space for Riston, Cira, and the narrow hovercart to squeeze through. They pushed the hovercart, core still secured on its flat surface, into the air lock and jumped out, abandoning the entire thing.

  After the complex work Cira’d had to do to stop Lasalia’s escape and the brute-force effort of disabling the gun turret, she’d been bracing for the same kind of fight here. She didn’t get it. Each menu came up when requested, each command was accepted as entered, and ejecting the air lock was exactly as easy as it should’ve been. It made some sense. Escape had clearly always been part of Lasalia’s plan, and she’d wanted a clear getaway. Cira supposed no one behind this slow invasion cared if some of the crew fled so long as the ship itself vanished.

  “We could do this, too, you know.” Riston gestured to the hall and the five additional air locks evenly spaced along the wall. “Escape. Everyone on the ship could get away.”

  Cira’s hand paused in the middle of initiating the final ejection of the air lock. For a split second, she considered it, getting everyone she loved light-years away from the target that Novis had turned into. She considered it and immediately dismissed the idea.

  “Pax citizens do not abandon a working ship.” No matter how badly Cira wanted to run, escape would be giving up, giving in, and giving the enemies what they wanted. “If we leave now, we will never see this ship again. If we survive the jump, though, I’m choosing to believe there’s a chance we can eventually turn the drive back on and get home again.”

  “If we survive the jump,” Riston repeated, quietly insistent.

  It made Cira pause. For her, there was no question—abandoning the ship wasn’t a first option, it was a final one. Why would Riston and the kids feel the same, though? She didn’t doubt they loved Novis, they proved their devotion time and again, but this was different. Maybe Riston and the kids should leave. She opened her mouth to suggest it…

  Riston shook zir head. “Don’t. If you’re not going, we’re not.”

  “You understand, right?” Cira looked back toward engineering and up as though she could see straight up to the bridge. “This isn’t a ship, this is home, and I can’t leave it if there’s a chance we can bring it back.”

  “Cira…” A breath, a twitching half gesture, and then ze released a breath and lifted zir hand to gently touch Cira’s arm. “Never justify a desire to hold on to home. I would’ve done anything—anything at all—if there’d been a way for me to keep mine.”

  She hesitantly looked down into zir eyes. “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely.” Riston spoke with such certainty Cira had to believe. “Besides, do you think it would be any good for five—” Ze grimaced and corrected zirself. “For four unregistered kids to be found in a Novis escape pod after the ship disappears? We’d be blamed for everything, data core or no.”

  “Right. Well, then…” She finished the final command sequence. After a thunk and a whoosh, there was nothing on the other
side of the door but the impenetrable silence of space.

  It was done. Success should’ve filled her with exhilaration, or at least relief, and yet it felt like losing. As soon as the pod fell out of sight, Cira felt hollowed out, only exhaustion and a resigned sort of dread left inside her.

  When had she last slept? Or eaten? She wasn’t even sure what time it was or how many days had passed since Shadow’s death. Anxiety and adrenaline had kept her going well past what she’d thought her own limits to be. She felt that limit approaching now. Her body ached from climbing through the ship and tearing into the turret, her cut arm was still sluggishly bleeding, her stomach grumbled from not enough food, and her bleary eyes burned from going too long between anything longer than a blink.

  “I’m so tired.” Riston rubbed one hand over zir face, scrubbing a few times and lightly slapping zir round cheeks. “How are you still…I don’t even know. Upright?”

  “So are you.” The urge to wrap herself around Riston and let sleep claim them was undeniably strong. She didn’t let herself do that, but she did put her hand on zir shoulder. “It shouldn’t be too much longer before we can finally stop long enough to rest.”

  Or it wouldn’t be too much longer until they died and rest didn’t matter anymore.

  The chime of a ship-wide message rang through the hall. Cira slumped against the wall, wearily raising her eyes to the ceiling and waiting for the next pronouncement of incoming doom.

  “This is an important announcement from Prometheus.” It was the same neutral voice the computer always used, but it was speaking someone else’s words. Cira straightened and shot a panicked glance at Riston, a fresh surge of adrenaline taking away at least some of the fuzziness of exhaustion. That voice speaking those words was jarringly wrong, a betrayal without a single shred of emotion. “Pax Novis is no longer under your control. Your communications have been cut off, and any attempt to slow the ship or change its course will result in a catastrophic explosion. Please, do not attempt to interfere.”

  Without a word between them, Cira and Riston bolted back toward engineering.

  “In one minute thirty seconds, your ship will undergo a dangerous transition. It is recommended that every member of the crew buckles into a safety harness to avoid injury.”

  They tore back up the same path, but this time they were moving with the crowd’s flow—every crewmember on this deck was sprinting toward main engineering. There were other harness points on the deck, but fear drew people to the safety of a group. Besides, if the ship survived this “transition,” it was likely that every available hand would be needed in engineering to fix whatever damage had been done.

  Both primary doors to engineering were wide open, and Cira could see people strapped to the padded safety boards that extended down from the ceiling and secured to slots in the floor. More crewmembers were scrambling up the ladders to the second floor where more harnesses were already filling up. Breathing hard, Cira scanned the faces, searching for her mother.

  “There,” Riston rasped. With a shaky hand, ze pointed across the room to where Meida was helping Mika fit herself into a harness meant for an adult. Treble and Greenie were already secured, their hands wrapped tight around the padded straps holding them in and their eyes bulging with fear. On the other side of Mika were three additional harnesses, empty and waiting.

  “Sixty seconds.”

  Cira took the space on the end and pushed Riston into the one to her left. As soon as zir feet were on the floor plate and zir weight rested against the brace, straps extended from the sides and waited for zem to slip zir arms through the appropriate holes. Cira was so focused on making sure ze got safely strapped to the padded board she wasn’t prepared for the sudden pressure on the center of her chest. The two sides of her own harness locked and squeezed her tight to the contoured pad. Her breath gusted out of her lungs. She was held so tight between the straps that she felt like she was being squeezed into a new shape.

  “Thirty seconds.”

  Five more people rushed into engineering and split up, sprinting toward some of the last open harnesses in the bay. They were cutting it so close. There wasn’t enough time left.

  “Twenty seconds,” the computer calmly announced.

  She and Riston moved at the same time, closing the centimeters between themselves with more desperate fear than grace. With upper arms secured to the board, all they could do was bend their elbows and flail for contact. Their fingers smashed into each other. Zir nail scratched the back of her hand before they managed to grip each other and hold on.

  Meida shouted commands to double check harnesses and secure anything that had a remote chance of flying loose and hurting someone, but Cira barely registered the words. She watched with growing horror as two more crew frantically raced through engineering toward two of the last harnesses left empty.

  “Fifteen seconds.”

  One ensign tripped and slammed chest first into the grate of the second level when they tried to leave the ladder. The impact rang through the bay. Cira’s heart tripped with them, and her hand convulsively closed around Riston’s fingers. More than a dozen voices raised at once, shouting encouragements and admonitions as though their words could make the klutzy ensign move faster. Or make time move slower.

  “Ten seconds.”

  Cira couldn’t watch. She couldn’t help, and she couldn’t stand to watch if—when?—the jump killed the ensign.

  This might be the end of us. Of everything. The realization felt like being punched. I might never get the chance to do this again.

  Cira looked sideways, barely able to see Riston out the corner of her eyes. “No matter what happens, I’m not sorry I met you. I’m not sorry you’ve been part of my life. I’m only sorry you got caught in a trap that wasn’t meant for you.”

  “I’m not.” Zir fingers tightened around hers. “I don’t want to be anywhere you’re not, Cira Antares.”

  “Five.”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered again, not even sure it was Riston she was talking to anymore. Her eyes burned with gathering tears and her legs started to shake.

  “Four.”

  Cira closed her eyes, pushing tears over the edge of her lower lashes and down the curve of her cheeks, and reluctantly released Riston’s hand.

  “Three.”

  She held her breath and brought her arms in to her chest.

  “Two.”

  And then Cira prayed.

  One.

  Video Log on Private Databank

  Excerpt from investors pitch by DLPRC,

  Weapons & Defense Systems section

  Speaker: Jeminina Kolar, Executive Vice President

  Terra-Sol date 3807.003

  Transcript Below

  Transdimensional communication is what made expansion outside of a single system feasible for humanity, and ever since that discovery, there’s been one question waiting to be answered—what might transdimensional travel do for our species?

  Some say this technology could end the war, and maybe they’re right, but I doubt it. What it will do is change the balance of power, shift the battle lines we’ve drawn across the quadrant, and make anyone who doesn’t have access to this technology all but obsolete.

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  Invest now and secure your place in civilization’s future.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Riston

  Terra-Sol date unknown

  Riston blinked, zir head spinning, and nausea fought to turn zir empty stomach inside out. The acrid smoke burning zir nose didn’t help; it had zem coughing as soon as ze took a breath.

  Pain spiked through zir chest, the force of it like an explosion. Only the tight grip of the harness kept zem from collapsing. Too tight. Whatever had happened after the countdown hit one, zir chest now felt like
a mess of deep bruises and shifting bones. Lifting zir arms sent agony through zir ribs and down zir back, but the pressure of the straps was making it difficult to breathe. Clumsily, ze swiped at the release button until ze finally depressed it and unlocked the mechanisms trapping zem to the padded backing. Ze regretted the decision immediately. Without the straps, Riston nearly fell. Each step was heavy and sent jarring, horrible vibrations up through zir bones. The pain grew exponentially worse as ze staggered toward the closest console.

  Alarms were still blaring throughout engineering, and under it were the pained grunts and cries of the others as they struggled back to consciousness. Ze barely registered it over the sawing wheeze of zir own harsh breathing. When ze finally forced zirself upright, colors danced and sparked before zir eyes. No. Wrong. The colors weren’t inside zir head, they were real.

  Sparks streamed out of one wall where a chair had slammed into a display. The lights overhead flickered between the full-spectrum UV and the unsettling blue of emergency power. Every working console and display flashed warnings and alerts from every deck and department with terrifying frequency. The burst of fear gave Riston the push ze needed to move closer. Even getting to the console was almost too much for zir battered body, but ze made it and leaned heavily against the solid surface.

  Ze stared at the display, trying to sort what ze saw into a status report that made sense.

  Fire on deck four.

  Drive power critical.

  Life-support systems critically low: decks one, two, seven, nine, and ten.

  Twenty-nine personal distress signals activated.

  Primary teams not responding to medical emergencies. Additional personnel necessary.

  All ze could do was wearily watch reports scroll in from all over the ship. No section of Novis had been left untouched, but nothing was beyond repair. The hull hadn’t been breached, and so long as that remained true, everything else could be handled. Eventually. Once the crew could take more than a couple of steps without wanting to die.