So Close to Home

by Galen Surlak-Ramsey

  “You are an honor to your kind!” Jainon shouted with glee.

  The celebration was short-lived, as my hit wasn’t enough to put him down. The captain stumbled to its feet within a few seconds and charged at us once more.

  We flew through an arch at the end of the hall. As Tolby, Jainon, and I slid on the floor, trying to make a tight right turn, Jack threw himself at a nearby console on the wall. He furiously punched at its controls, and right as the Nodari captain was about to pass through, Jack brought down a ten-centimeter-thick fire door.

  The captain rammed into it at full steam. My teeth rattled in my jaw from the shock, but the door held. We all exchanged nervous glances as the captain rammed it again. I don’t know why we didn’t keep running. I guess we were in shock Jack had managed to get the controls going and we hadn’t become a Nodari snack.

  “Is that going to hold?” I asked, easing back but unable to keep my eyes from breaking away from the door.

  “Maybe,” Jainon said.

  The captain rammed the door a third time, at which point it buckled a little.

  “Maybe not,” she corrected.

  A fourth hit caved it in further and generated spall. Most of the pieces bounced harmlessly off the walls, but a few skipped off of Jainon’s armor while another particularly large piece ripped through Jack’s shoulder.

  “Son of a bitch that hurts,” he said, grabbing the wound and staggering away from the door.

  The fifth blow produced similar results, and the door caved considerably.

  Tolby’s face soured. “Less talking, more running.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  A New Ship

  “Yseri, Empress. Sitrep,” Tolby said over the comm.

  It had been a good five minutes since we dropped the fire door on the Nodari captain, and throughout that time we’d bolted through the art gallery faster than a runaway rocket booster. Although we didn’t think it was following us directly at this point, we could still hear his occasional roars which were more than close enough to keep us pushing our bodies to the breaking point.

  “We moved from our prior position, but we’re still a half a kilometer from the hangar,” Yseri said. “We had to ditch a Nodari captain.”

  “There’s one down here, too,” I said. “But Tolby nuked its acid cannon thing, and I cracked open its skull.”

  “Excellent news, tailless,” Yseri said. “Are you almost to the ship?”

  “We’ll be there in two minutes, tops,” I said, checking the map.

  “Then get ready for us,” Yseri replied. “We’ll be there soon as well.”

  We ran on, taking one last bend to the left and practically jumping down a flight of stairs before reaching the final door—a door that Daphne stood by, patiently waiting for us. Even better, she had Taz with her. The moment the ashidasashi saw me, he leaped off her metallic head and adorably savaged my shoe.

  “Taz!” I yelled with delight. “You made it!”

  Jack nudged Tolby with an elbow. “Are you getting replaced?”

  “Pshhh. Never,” I said, giving my little guy a belly rub.

  “Glad to hear,” Tolby said. “But perhaps we should spend more time on opening that door and less time cooing over your pet.”

  “Right,” I replied, feeling silly. That said, I didn’t feel that bad. Anyone who knew me for even an hour ought to know I get a case of the squirrels often. Some people find ADHD a pain in the butt to live with, but hey, I say it’s a blessing because without it, I’d miss out on all the super cool stuff the universe has to offer. I mean, the stuff is everywhere! Sometimes I wonder if when we die, we’ll get the stats on everything we found, or maybe the Easter eggs—surely there are some, right? You know, you die, get to the pearly gates or whatever, and there’s a personalized scoreboard. How fun would that be? Mine would dwarf everyone else’s; I just know it. Especially if lost socks somehow factored in. Holy snort, you could outfit—

  “Dakota!” Tolby boomed.

  I snapped back into the present. “Right, sorry. On it.”

  I turned my attention to the door and went to work. It was one of the heavy, gear-like ones we’d encountered before, which made a lot of sense when you figured a prize Progenitor spacecraft lay beyond. Right as I plugged in, the roar of the Nodari captain put the fear of God in me. It wasn’t on top of us yet, but it might as well have been.

  “I hope you can get that door open fast,” Jack said as everyone kept their weapons up and pointed to our rear.

  “Me too,” I said while my stomach knotted.

  Thankfully, I found the controls with ease once the console sprang to life, and I immediately ordered the door to cycle. It did, but the moment it began to move, I wished that it hadn’t responded at all. It slowly began to roll to the side with such a shriek that it would have caused a banshee to cover her ears.

  “Martian babes on a stick,” Jack said, shaking his head. “That can’t be good.”

  “I have calculated that there is a one-hundred percent probability that at least one Nodari swarm is now aware of our location.”

  “A hundred percent? Really?” I asked, shocked. “Nothing can be a hundred percent certain.”

  “Well, this is. Unless I forgot to carry the one. Silly me. I do that sometimes, you know.”

  “Good, let’s go with that, then.”

  “If you like,” she replied. “My revised calculations put that percent chance at a hundred and one percent.”

  I rolled my eyes and groaned right as the Nodari captain bellowed. It wasn’t a roar, not like before. This was very different. Deeper, longer, and held purpose. An unsettling feeling reigned in my stomach because I had a strong feeling about what it was. When smaller cries of Nodari answered, I would’ve given up anything and everything to have not been right. The captain was calling for others, and they were coming.

  We darted into the hangar the moment we could. Once through, I cycled the door behind us. It shut before the captain appeared, but I had no doubt he’d be on the other side in no time at all.

  “That’s a meter thick,” I said. “He can’t get through that, can he?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past him,” Tolby said. “They’re stronger than the pull of a neutron star.”

  “Lovely.”

  “We’ve got bigger problems than that.”

  I groaned. “Of course. What are they?”

  “Unless there’s another way in, everyone else is cut off.”

  “Crap.” My hands balled into fists at my side. “Crappity, crap, crap, crap.”

  “Or we just pick them up once we’re out of here,” Jack said as if the answer was painfully obvious.

  I smirked at myself because that answer had been painfully obvious. “Good point.”

  Turning around, we hurried through the Progenitor hangar. The entire thing stretched a hundred meters across and who knew how long as the only parts that were lit were in our immediate vicinity.

  To both my left and right sat a number of machines with countless pipes and thick bundles of wires coming out of them and heading every which way. Non-slip metal plates made up the bulk of the floor along the edges, although a few small drainage grates could be found scattered about. I-beams and catwalks made an intricate latticework along an otherwise smooth and unremarkable ceiling. Off to the side, a couple of fans set into the wall spun slowly with a hum, and from their cylindrical vents floated a strong, metallic smell.

  “Where’s this transport?” Jack asked.

  “I think that’s it,” Tolby said, pointing down the hangar to where the darkness swallowed it all.

  I popped over to a console and connected quickly. After surfing through the menus, I found what I was looking for and turned on the lights. A series of clunks, like the power being turned on at a stadium, preceded dozens of wall-mounted lights turning on and revealing the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen: a Progenitor ship.

  A couple of hundred meters in length, the body of the corvette was elongated an
d sleek with a steel-blue and orange color scheme. From its sides, it had a pair of reverse-swept wings, and it also had a pair of vertical stabilizers coming out the back. Mounted on the wings were four rectangular pods with vented intakes along with a couple of forward-facing antennas on the wingtips. The entire thing sat on four padded feet for landing gear, and near the aft of the ship, a ramp extended from the belly to the ground, beckoning to me like a siren calls a sailor.

  “What are you guys waiting for?” I said, laughing and running.

  If they answered, I didn’t hear, or at least I didn’t pay enough attention to remember.

  I ran up the ramp and into a short, oval hall that ended at a sealed door. Though everything was dark, thanks to my glowing skin, I managed to see well enough to find a console on the nearby wall. Plugging into it with my implants was a simple task, and the moment I did, not only did the screen light up, but the interior of the ship did as well with soft, blue lights. There was a lot to see where I was at, but even though I was only in an entryway, there was an unparalleled cool factor to it as everything around me looked both high-tech and extremely organic.

  “I can’t get Empress or Yseri on the comms,” Tolby said, joining me at my side. He had a worried look on his face, and his ears were pinned back.

  I didn’t need to pry his thoughts to know how troublesome that was. “They’ll be fine. Don’t worry. We’ll find them.”

  “At least the entrance to the hangar isn’t being battered down,” Jack said. “That’ll give us some time to think about our next move.”

  “Right now I’m thankful for any little thing I can get,” I said as I cycled the door.

  We entered a large, circular room. Monitoring stations were set up in cubbies all along the edge. Each one had a plethora of screens on the walls and hanging from the ceiling so that whoever happened to be manning them would be inundated with as much information as they could handle. In the center of this portion of the ship was a raised platform with a railing around all of it. On the end near us, there was another computer station that was raised a half meter and accessible by a few small stairs.

  “Wonder what all this does,” Jack said.

  “I don’t know,” I said, looking around in amazement. “I doubt it flies it though. We should find the cockpit.”

  Jack grinned. “How do you know this isn’t the bridge? Maybe the Progenitors like to fly from the rear.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t. But what are the chances the first room we come to happens to be the bridge?”

  “Point taken.”

  “Records from the cube indicate that like most spacefaring races, the bridge will be toward the bow of the ship,” Daphne said. “In fact, it’ll be more closely related to an extensive cockpit than anything else.”

  “Told you,” I said, putting extra smug into the smile I flashed Jack.

  We passed through to the other side where we ended up in another hall that curved around to the left. This corridor ran by a few smaller rooms, one of which reminded me of Curator’s office on a much lesser scale, as it had a dark, crescent-shaped desk like he had set in the middle, but it was nowhere near as big as his. There were also several chairs bolted to the floor sitting around it, so I assumed this was a meeting area of some sort or maybe a place for the crew to come and relax.

  The hall ended up dumping us in an egg-shaped room that housed more consoles and crew stations like the first room we’d been in, although these stations formed three sets of hexagons in the middle of the room as opposed to lining the walls. Along the walls were various alcoves which housed equipment I had no idea what they were there for, but they looked important. I particularly liked the two near the front, which looked like a combination of an ancient pipe organ and tanning booth.

  “Think this is it?” Tolby asked. He leaned over one of the console stations and tapped a screen. Nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen when he tapped it a few more times. “You know, just once in all of this, I’d like to be able to use these things right off the bat. You being the only one who can start the stuff up might come back to bite us later.”

  “You should join the implant club if it bothers you that much,” Jack said.

  “I’ll admit her implants have been handy on more than one occasion,” Tolby said. “But I still don’t trust an alien modifying my body.”

  The corner of Jack’s mouth drew back. “You know what? That’s a good attitude to have.” When I tilted my head and arched an eyebrow, he added, “Why the surprise? If there’s one thing I learned about the Kibnali, being indispensable is a key to survival.”

  “I still don’t think this is it,” I said, not knowing what I should say, especially with Tolby taking a keen interest in our conversation. “Let’s see what’s up front.”

  The front of the ship tapered down to what had to be the cockpit. A single seat sat in the middle, all the way up at the front, surrounded by more monitors and a slew of controls. Flanking that seat on both sides and set back about a meter were two more stations, each with their own consoles and monitors mounted above. Where there wasn’t hardware attached, the curved ceiling had a half dozen, clear, thick panes that gave an excellent view of the outside. Likewise, there were four similar panels to see what was going on directly in front and below. This setup reminded me a lot of the glass noses that ancient bombers used to have a thousand years ago.

  “Any idea how to fire this thing up?” I said, jumping into the pilot seat.

  “Might also want to figure out how we leave before you hit the throttle,” Jainon said. “I don’t recall seeing an exit or hangar doors.”

  “Good point.”

  I made the mental connection and felt a slight pop in my head once I did. The cockpit dash sprang to life with a menagerie of intricate information scrolling on the screens as well as a slew of electronic beeps. Holograms suddenly appeared overhead, one displaying the planet we were on as well as a blinking red cursor that I assumed was our current location, while another showed a green wireframe model of the ship we were in. Portions of the wireframe lit up yellow and blinked before cycling onto another section.

  “Welcome, Dakota Adams,” a deep voice said from seemingly all around at once. “You’re late.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Interview with AO

  I flopped back in the chair as I threw my hands up. “Run that by me again? I’m late?”

  A holographic orb popped up next to me about the size of a basketball. Fractals of reds and blues swirled across its skin, reminding me of the monstrous storms on gas giants. As the voice spoke again, the orb pulsed in synch. “Correct,” it said. “I have been waiting approximately twelve-point-six-nine-seven-one-three trillion nanoseconds longer than I should. This is unacceptable as far as forty-second first impressions go. I now have serious reservations about your refined abilities.”

  The four of us exchanged confused looks. “Any of you want to take a stab at what’s going on?”

  “I think the ship’s AI is talking to us?” Jack offered.

  “That would be my guess,” Tolby said. “Although you do have to admire its precision.”

  “Erroneous statement,” the orb said. “I was talking to Dakota Adams, version forty-two.”

  I laughed nervously. “Version forty-two? Did I miss something? Far as I know there’s only one of me.”

  “There is that brain-dead clone we left behind,” Jack said. “He must mean that. Maybe doc made more than the one we saw.”

  “Erroneous statement. The clone is not an iteration of the original Dakota Adams.”

  “You’re saying I’m not the original me?” I said with a scoff. “No way. Even if I was grown in a vat somewhere, I would know. My family would know. These guys around me would know. It’s not like I just popped up out of nowhere with an entire back story in my head that couldn’t be verified.”

  “Faulty assumptions. You’re the forty-second iteration of Dakota Adams because this is the forty-second iteration of this
universe,” the AI explained. “Minor correction. This is the forty-second iteration of this part of the universe’s timeline. The majority of the original timeline remains unchanged. Spacetime from approximately four-point-one-three-one-nine-seven Earth years ago is still in flux. Shifts from paradoxical eddies are still settling since the Progenitors vanished and you acquired the prime mover.”

  I strained all my neurons trying to understand. Somehow, I managed a coherent reply. “Okay, I think I followed that, but on the off chance I didn’t, why don’t you say all of that again, but like you’re teaching a first grader.”

  “Simplification. The original Dakota Adams acquired the prime mover and used it to make future corrections that led to the destabilization of time lines, post Progenitor disappearance. This destabilization has been slowly settling over forty-one iterations of Dakotas jumping back in time, trying to alter fates. Hence, you are the forty-second iteration of Dakota Adams.”

  “I died? No, wait. You can’t possibly know that, even if it was true.”

  “Erroneous assumption. I am Progenitor. My extra-dimensional existence is not subject to the flux of this universe’s spacetime.”

  “I don’t want to rain on anybody’s parade, but right now, we’ve got a massive Nodari invasion to avoid,” Jack said, coming up behind me and squeezing my shoulder. “So I say we skip the lesson in quantum time travel and get right to the part where we take off and get the hell out of here.”

  I blew out a puff of air and nodded while trying to refocus. As I did, I gently removed Jack’s hand from my body. “Agreed. So, if it’s all the same to you, Mister AI, what do you say we get this ship moving, get our friends, and blast out of here so we can continue our conversation where there are a few less Nodari trying to eat us.”