After everything he’d seen out there in the cosmos, Everett wondered if perhaps that wasn’t the better outcome.
Below the command chamber, Garnidia swelled and groaned. Everett could already feel the faintest of gravitational waves rippling beneath his feet. As he watched, an impossibly dark maw tore open across the star’s flank. It was as if somebody had cut away the very fabric of the universe. The hole grew wider as if gasping for air… and then closed up again.
He smiled. The collapse was beginning.
“It’s over, Charon. Shut this thing down right now.”
Rogan marched through the chamber’s lone door, followed by Jack Bishop, the Krettelian daughter, and a hulking robot Everett didn’t recognise. His smile didn’t falter.
“Jack! Perfect.” He turned back to his monitor. “How wonderful of you to join me.”
Klik deployed her bone-blades ready to cut off Charon’s head, but Jack held out his hand and made her wait. They’d agreed to try and convince him to shut the Iris down voluntarily first. For one, it would be a lot simpler than trying to stop the black hole themselves. And special consideration had to be made given that, besides Jack, Everett was the only other human left in existence.
Klik didn’t like it. She hadn’t even agreed to it, technically. The monster in front of them murdered her father, and she wasn’t about to let that go unpunished. But she gave Jack a minute just the same.
“Everett, please.” Jack approached him alone. “I understand what you’re trying to do, but stop. You’ve doomed Proxima Delta already. Don’t do the same to this system.”
“Proxima Delta was an unfortunate sacrifice,” Everett replied. “One which wouldn’t have been necessary had you given me an active Solar Core instead of a hollow one. That’s on you, Jack. That’s on you.”
Jack wasn’t sure if Everett had grown mad during his years out in the dark cosmos or from how close he now came to success. Either way, he didn’t like the desperation he heard in the man’s voice.
“Is that why you ordered Minister Keeto to have me killed?” he asked. “As revenge for switching the Cores around?”
“Minister Keeto? Who?” Everett looked up again, confused. “My anger towards you notwithstanding, I don’t want you dead. The two of us are all that’s left of humanity. We’re going to be heroes, Jack.”
“What about the council?” Jack waved his hands in exasperation. “Why did you want the Grand Ministers dead?”
Everett shook his head as if Jack were the madman, not him. He went back to his screen again.
“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. Why would I want the council dead when humanity will soon be taking its seat amongst their number?”
The once white-blue star had adopted a yellow coat. From inside it came an almighty grumble powerful enough to shake the whole Iris station.
“Shut it down!” Jack screamed. “Everyone back on Earth is dead, Everett! There’s no reason everybody in this system and the next needs to die too.”
“They’re not dead!” screamed Everett, spit flying. The bulging veins on his ageing temple looked ready to pop. “Or at least, they won’t be once I bring them back through.”
“But don’t you see? We’ve both been to Earth. We both know that humanity is already gone.”
“So?”
“So time is linear, Everett! Even if you can go back to the past, nothing you do will change it. Of all people, you should know that!”
Everett slammed his fist down on his monitor. He marched across the chamber and brought his face within an inch of Jack’s own.
“Unless what I do has already happened, Jack. Unless I’m not changing anything. Did your small grease-monkey brain ever think of that? What if humanity’s gone not because they’re dead, but because the future me has already travelled back and saved them in the past, and the only reason I haven’t brought them back through the wormhole into the present is because I haven’t made it yet?”
Another quake. Everyone stared as a fresh gravity well ripped the star apart, sucking its own light back into itself in epic golden waterfalls before reverting to its previous, violent form. Next time they wouldn’t be so lucky.
“Enough of this!” Rogan marched forward and grabbed Charon by the throat. “I don’t care what you think is going to happen. Either you revert the stream this second or Klik here is going to start cutting bits off you. Do you understand?”
“I can’t,” he croaked. “It won’t stop until the collapse is complete. Then the stabilisers kick in. Once it’s stable, I go through. It will happen because it has happened. It’s inevitable.”
“The man’s a lunatic,” Rogan snapped, throwing Charon across the chamber as if he were a dirty rag. She raced to the monitor but discovered it full of reports and nothing else. “Bolts. He’s right. There’s no stopping it from here.”
“There has to be a way,” said Jack. “We’re not leaving here until it’s shut down.”
“If we don’t shut it down, we’re not leaving here at all.” Rogan watched as Charon groggily sat up against the glass chamber wall. “I don’t care how smart this nutcase thinks he is. The Iris won’t stop the black hole from consuming everything around it, including the station itself.”
“The plasma cannon,” said Tuner. He stood by the window and pointed down at the beam blasting out from beneath their feet. “Maybe we can turn it off from there?”
“Good idea.” She pointed at Jack and Klik. “You two stay here and make sure Charon doesn’t try anything stupid. Tuner and I will shut the beam down at the source.”
She paused before heading back to the door.
“Try not to let him escape this time. Oh, and Klik? Don’t kill him. Not until this is over, at least. He may still be of some use yet.”
They left the three of them alone in the chamber – Klik, Jack and Everett. The latter wiped blood from his lip with the back of his hand.
“You realise that nothing they do will make a difference, right?”
“And do you realise how mad you sound, Everett? What the hell happened to you?”
Everett barked out a laugh.
“If you’d been through what I have, you’d probably be mad too.” He staggered to his feet. “And besides – what happened to you, Jack? What happened to the man who would sacrifice everything to save the woman he loves? Where did he go?”
Jack gritted his teeth and said nothing.
“What was her name again? Emma?”
“Amber,” growled Jack. “Don’t talk about her. Just… don’t.”
“How do you think Amber would feel to know that her husband was giving up on her? That faced with a chance to save her life, he would choose to let her die?”
“Don’t listen to him,” said Klik. “He’s just trying to get you riled up. Like Rogan said, remember what’s important here.”
“I have risked everything to get back to her,” snapped Jack. His anger was matched only by his rising grief. “I’ve risked my life, my friends’ lives – even galactic security, apparently! I was willing to die if it meant getting her a ticket on one of those Arks, and I’d do the same again now in a heartbeat.”
Everett, inching closer, gestured to the tumultuous star outside.
“Then what’s stopping you?”
“Because she’s already dead, Everett!” The words came out choked. “Because we’d be torn apart before we got within even a mile of the black hole you’re trying to create! I loved Amber more than anything in the world, but I’m not going to die for somebody who’s already gone.”
“No, Jack. What’s stopping you is that you’re a coward.”
“I’m not a coward for being sane,” Jack spat. He clenched his fists. “And I’m not a coward for thinking that the billions of lives out here are any less valuable than the lives of however few humans you think you might be able to save.”
Everett brought his contemptuous face right up to Jack’s visor. His eyes were hauntingly familiar, the rest ravaged
and wrinkled by time. Klik edged forward, anxious to intervene.
“And that’s just one of the many differences between you and me, Jack Bishop. I would sacrifice a thousand species if it meant humanity got the chance to live on. I persevere where you give up.” He sneered. “You’re a disappointment, Jack. Sometimes I wonder if I care more about saving your wife than you do.”
“That’s it,” snapped Klik, raising her blades. “Back off—”
But it was too late. Jack had already thrown the first punch.
Rogan and Tuner hurried through the corridors in search of the plasma beam’s source. When they couldn’t find any stairs to the level below, the new-and-improved Tuner improvised by punching a hole through the floor instead.
They dropped down into a cramped hall full of pipes and tubes. The walls were painted a stark red colour. Then their colour switched to a deep, lush orange, and Rogan realised that the walls weren’t painted but rather illuminated by the shifting light of an immense reactor. Plasma dripped into it from the tiny Solar Core suspended above. This was then channeled through the vast interior of the ring before finally being blasted out of the Iris through an industrial cannon the size of an aircraft carrier.
The plasma beam – they’d found it. But the Core was almost depleted. They didn’t have much time.
They heard the distant rattles and booms of laser gunfire overhead. Were there still automata fighting to free their enslaved brothers and sisters elsewhere on the station? Perhaps the Mansa had started boarding the Iris too. She wondered if anyone from the Adeona’s crew ought to still be around when their forces reached the command chamber.
“Right,” said Tuner, flexing his sizeable metal arms. “Which bits should I start smashing?”
“Nothing!” Rogan hurried in front of him with her hands splayed. “Don’t smash anything! Blowing the reactor up will only release the energy and hasten Garnidia’s collapse. We need to find a control terminal or something.”
Tuner pointed across the hall.
“What about that?”
A large, black and almost completely featureless computer unit was built into the side of the cannon’s funnel. It appeared to be automating the entire process. They raced over to it, unaffected by the drastic rise in temperature as they got close. Rogan made short work of the initial security system but was taken aback when she came across the software inside.
“This is way more complicated than I expected,” she said. “No way did Charon develop all of this on his own.”
“How complicated? Are you saying you can’t do it?”
“Nothing’s that complicated,” Rogan replied. “But it’s going to take more time than I think we have.”
Tuner opened a compartment on the side of his large body and pulled out a data transfer cable. He plugged one end of it into the computer and the other into a port on his arm.
“Then we’ll do it together. If Charon had help, then you ought to have some too.”
“Two minds in the same mainframe at once?” Rogan raised a mechanical eyebrow. “Could get messy.”
“You know me.” Tuner shrugged. “Messy is what I do best.”
Despite everything, Rogan smiled.
“It’s good to have you back, Tuner. I missed you.”
“I know,” said Tuner. “I missed me too.”
The two humans traded blows inside the command chamber. Jack’s helmet lay on the floor a short distance away. Everett had pulled it off so he could get in a few good punches of his own.
Jack’s lip was bleeding. He could taste iron, though he wasn’t sure if it was from the blood or the adrenaline. He wasn’t even sure why they were fighting, really. Everett’s deliberately antagonising comments had been quickly forgotten – now, each new punch was simply retaliation for the last one.
Klik circled around them, furious that Jack was allowed to attack Charon whilst her own revenge went unserved. Yet she was helpless to intervene. They were moving about too much. If she tried to slash Charon, there was a fair chance she’d cut Jack instead.
She was angry with him, but she wasn’t that angry.
Jack’s fist connected with Everett’s nose. He didn’t think he broke it, but it certainly looked like it hurt. He tried not to dwell on the fact he was punching a man almost twice his own age. Everett was the reason he was out here in space instead of at home with his wife, and that was all the justification he needed.
Everett swung his own fist into Jack’s ear. Everything started to ring. He was about to land a second punch on Jack when the Iris suffered its most violent quake yet. They both fell to the floor, as did Klik.
Outside, the star wrestled with itself. As the gravity wells grew denser, multiple black patches sprouted across her surface like pustules from the bubonic plague, threatening to ooze and bleed into one another. Her light had dimmed considerably. The whole universe seemed to ripple, just as the air inside Everett’s machine had rippled before the wormhole tore it apart.
Jack lay there mesmerised, but it was not the sight of a collapsing star that took his breath away. Standing by the dark glass of the chamber wall was a ghostly figure, a silhouette in white. The more the black gravity wells spread across the star, the more she seemed to flicker into existence. Despite her lack of physical detail, there was something eerily familiar about her.
“Amber?”
Everett knelt over Jack while he was distracted and snatched Gaskan’s pistol out of his holster. Suddenly Jack realised why the old man had been so keen to start a fight in the first place… and how stupid he’d been to take the bait.
Everett quickly switched from pointing the gun down at Jack’s face to pointing it up at Klik… or the spot where Klik had been lying a second earlier, at least.
“Where’s the insect?” he snapped, desperately.
He caught a flash of movement in the corner of his eye, but it was too late. Klik’s blade swung upwards, severing Everett’s right hand at the wrist. He let out a scream of horror as blood spurted out from his bisected spacesuit.
Jack hurriedly kicked backwards away from them. Claret had sprayed across his chest, and the miniature black holes’ growing influence over space and time was giving him a headache. Numb and disoriented, he grabbed his helmet and twisted it back on. Its artificial oxygen helped a little, but not a lot.
Klik booted Everett in the chest while he sat cradling his bleeding stump. His eyes were wide with disbelief. She raised the blade ready to decapitate him as promised.
“Stop!” Jack screamed. “Don’t do it, Klik. Please.”
“You cannot be serious,” she replied, spinning around. Her dark eyes burned with fury. “Charon has killed millions. He murdered my father. He just tried to kill us both… and you want to spare him? Are you goddamn kidding me?”
“Not for his sake.” Jack staggered to his feet. “For yours. Killing Everett won’t bring your father back any more than it’ll save Amber. They’re gone… but you’re not. Not yet. You won’t fill that hole you feel inside yourself with revenge, Klik. It’ll only take more of you away.”
Klik looked from one bloody human to the other. Finally, with a frustrated snarl, she made a decision.
She stomped down on Charon’s face, knocking him out.
“Death is too good for him anyway,” she said, sulking back over to where Jack stood. “Now he’ll have the rest of his life to think about who gave him that stump.”
“Exactly. See, you’re looking for silver linings already. That’s progress.”
“Don’t push me, Jack. I’ve still got a bloodlust.”
There was a sharp jolt. A humming noise, which neither of them had even noticed until its absence, suddenly stopped. They looked at one another in a cold panic, then raced over to the windows.
“The plasma beam,” gasped Jack. “It’s stopped.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the star has hit critical mass or something. Just… get ready to run.”
“Run where?”
“I don’t know!”
Suddenly, with another almighty quake, the plasma beam burst back into life. Klik screamed and shielded her eyes as fresh light washed across the curved glass of the command chamber. A couple of seconds later, the sound of Jack’s relieved laughter made her open them again.
“It’s going the other way,” he shouted, teetering on the verge of hysteria. “Look!”
The stream was flowing backwards. Using the Solar Core as a means of containment, the cannon sucked plasma up from Garnidia’s surface just as it had harvested the star from Proxima Delta. The gravity wells and infant black holes receded as the star’s mass was steadily brought back from the brink of collapse.
“They did it,” he sighed, sagging into a seated position on the floor. “Rogan and Tuner actually did it.”
He suddenly remembered the ghostly white figure he’d glimpsed standing by the window.
Jack desperately searched the chamber, but she was nowhere to be seen. Of course she wasn’t. Now that the beam was reversed and spacetime was returning to normal, he started to doubt she had ever existed. It had just been his warped mind trying to make sense of the nonsensical by adding something familiar, that’s all.
No. He didn’t really think that.
It had been Amber. Not a ghost – he didn’t believe in that sort of thing – and not some weird cyber-spirit brought through the black hole from a past version of Earth either, but a projection of memory no more or less real than that which had sat down beside him on board the Pelastar. She hadn’t miraculously come back as his heart had secretly hoped. She was fading… fading to white.
She had come to say goodbye.
Jack sat and stared lifelessly out the window as the sun grew ever more stable and the various ships inside the system – automata, Mansa, and still others he didn’t recognise – closed in around the Iris. But he didn’t really see them. He didn’t even notice when Rogan and Tuner came racing triumphantly back into the room.
It was over. Everett was defeated. His black hole was shut down. If there had been any hope of Jack finding a way back to Earth – the Earth he knew, not the baked husk stamped with a horrid alien designation – that hope was now dead. Neither of them were ever going home again.
A Dark Horizon (Final Dawn, Book 3) Page 20
