by G. P. Eliot
“Maybe we’re all slaves to something, Jackal,” Hank said heavily. “At least in my case, I can take control of my actions. I can decide what to do with my life…And I still have my crew and my friends at the end of it all.” He said the words in just as low a whisper as the Jackal had talked to him in.
This is what makes us different, Hank realized as he sighed deeply and took a step backwards. I have friends. I have a crew who believe in me, even despite my past. And I believe in them.
Hank felt a certain sort of peace settle over his crooked heart at that moment. The knot of anger and frustration that had been tormenting him ever since he had heard the Jackal say that they were alike was gone.
“Maybe we were alike, once,” Hank muttered out loud, speaking more to himself than the Jackal. “But I’m changing. I’m becoming more than who I was.”
I am not the same as you, the Captain now knew. This man, his prisoner, had no hold over him now.
“Then you’re a fool!” the Jackal burst out, as a vein throbbed along his temple. “Think of what you could achieve, if you let go of your stupid morals and honor and your…friends!” the Jackal spat the last word at him.
But the words simply bounced off of Hank like star dust scattering over the Dalida’s prow.
“They’re holding you back!” the Jackal continued to heckle him as Hank turned around. “Imagine what we could achieve if you worked with me! You and I, Hank Snider–we’d be unstoppable! Even the Elites would fear us!” the Jackal’s tone rose to a near hysterical pitch.
“I think they already do,” Hank said in a calm voice as he nodded to Lory at his side, smiling proudly at him.
“Commander Cox? I think we’ve got work to do; don’t you agree?”
“Aye-aye, sir…” Lory said, and then added in a lower voice for his ears alone “Hank.”
The rebel Captain of the Dalida was smiling as he sauntered out of the Brig, as the Jackal continued to rail and heckle at his back, his words as impotent as he was himself.
“Captain, it is…unprecedented!” the Professor Serrano said. Hank could hear the awe in the man’s voice and wondered if ‘unprecedented’ was perhaps the best sort of compliment that he could say of anything.
“The Ubix Crystal has an exponential rate of power oscillation–within the confines of the material super-structure that the Dalida can safely transfer, that is…” the Professor was saying in his super-fast, double-time speak that he used whenever he was excited.
The Professor currently stood back at the Science console of the Dalida, with Hank in the command chair, and Lory at the Operations command console, Steed on Communications, and Madigan on Armaments. Cortez was currently below decks in the Engineering room, running a live feed to the Professor’s desk from the new Ubix reactor system.
“Full integration achieved!” Cortez called out over the ship’s intercom in a joyous fashion.
“In plain English please, gentlemen,” Hank groaned.
“The Ubix crystal is really, really powerful,” Serrano said simply.
“And it works with the ship,” Cortez added.
“Fine. That it all I needed to know,” Hank said. “Now–how much have we got left of that Message to decode?”
“Well, with the amount of power available to us now sir, I can radically reconfigure the equation parameters, to a factor of a hundred or more…” Serrano started to say, before he saw Hank’s glare. “I’ll see what I can do, sir,” Serrano said.
“Get it done, Professor,” Hank said.
As it turned out, the Professor really hadn’t been joking about the ‘radically different equation parameters’ at all. Hank saw him activate the code sphere of the Message once more. The large holo-ball jumped into the intervening space, made of glittering brighter nodes and arcing lines. At least two thirds of it was green, with several parts that were still an untranslated blue.
“Running translation software…” the Dalida’s automated computers announced, and a small green circle appeared to circle as it calculated on the forward-viewing screen.
Hank settled back into the command chair, expecting to be sitting here for a rather long time indeed–but the whole process finished in just the time that he took to adjust his seat.
“Translation complete.” The automated voice said. “Applying translation keys as we speak…”
The entire crew watched as more and more segments of the holo sphere started to flash and settle into a steady neon green. It was like watching a digital version of a planet get colonized, Hank thought, and then finally it was done. The entire code sphere was an accessible green.
“We’ve done it,” the Professor said. “We’ve translated the Message.”
“Then give us the coordinates, Professor!” Hank laughed. “Input them straight into the navigational drive, and let’s see where this baby wants to take us!”
“Aye, aye, Captain…” the Professor did so, examining the lines of galactic coordinates as he did so.
“The Message has construed a long and complex series of FTL jumps,” Serrano indicated, throwing a massive star map onto the overhead screens, as racing green lines raced from one end to the other in a zig-zagging pattern.
“That doesn’t look like any FTL Jump that I’ve ever used,” Hank said warily.
What was before them was truly an incredible feat of travel. Hank’s mind boggled at the processing power and mathematical skills that were needed to be able to get from one point to the next. There were numerous ‘longer’ jumps, Hank thought. The length and the duration of which were probably as far as any regular FTL engine could handle on its own.
But these were then mixed with a multitude of smaller jumps as well, even apparent micro-jumps within the same system.
“The distance that the Message wants us to travel is so vast,” Serrano explained. “That even with the Ubix crystal, it wants us to make use of the dead spots of space, where there are only small amounts of gravitational interference,” the Professor said. “What you are looking at there, Captain, is an impossible journey that has been turned into its most efficient use of power.”
“Right,” Hank frowned at the scene. He still didn’t quite understand why they needed to make all of these jumps in short order, but he had long since learned on this adventure to expect the unexpected.
“Everyone brace for jump,” Hank called, hitting the command panels on his chair that sent the alert throughout the ship. All through the Dalida, automated security measures were put into place. On the outer hull of the generation ship, metal panels closed off over grills and extra layers of shielding slid into place over the reactors. Non-flammable gases were pumped into the spaces between the bulkheads to ease the shock and stress that the metal would be put under.
“We’re ready, Captain,” Lory said as soon as the last of the security measures were in place.
“Then, let’s get out of here,” Hank said, and punched the jump controls.
The viewscreens ahead of them flushed a storm of colors as the Dalida ripped through the fabric of the universe and skipped along the edges of the inner dimensions. Plasma fire burst along its hull, and other, stranger molecules and particles were created and destroyed in a corona of fantastic lights about its shape.
FTL travel was beautiful, in a way, Hank had to admit.
Well, it would be if it also wasn’t so disorientating, he thought.
Long swathes of binary numbers swept down over the screens, interspersed with strange mathematical symbols and lowercase letters. It was a sight that Hank had seen many times before–hundreds of times before–as it was the navigational computers using fixed stars and galactic coordinates to constantly triangulate their position.
But he had never seen the code move so fast, nor there to be so much of it.
The overhead Bridge lights of the Dalida flickered, and suddenly, with a jolt they had burst into a patch of empty space. There were no planets or satellites here, only the endless blanket of stars all around them
.
“We can’t be here yet, surely…” Hank was saying as the FTL warning lights flushed a preparatory orange.
“No, Captain, this is only—” Serrano was halfway through saying, as the Dalida jumped again.
This time, the FTL jump was rockier than the last one. Hank wondered if that meant that the engines weren’t used to two consecutive jumps in such a short space of time. It went on for much longer, with tiny vibration tremors rolling through the deck, before they smacked into normal reality once again.
“That was only the first jump,” Serrano managed to finish. He looked a little pale at his console.
“Better sit down, Professor—” Hank was saying, as the Dalida jumped once again on its automated route.
A burst of light flashed as this jump was far smaller than the previous two, not even enough time to draw a breath before they were moving again—
The generation ship; powered by the unprecedented power of the Ubix crystal jumped through the universe without pause. The greater computing power that the new crystal matrix gave them allowed the ship to calculate several jumps ahead. That meant that its FTL engines were running faster than even the warning systems that the automated Dalida had installed.
No sooner had they completed each jump, then they were already being hurled into the next. Hank saw a dizzying array of colors and lights, and started to feel a sick sense of vertigo–before the scenes flickered to reveal distant patches of strange, alien stars.
At least twice, he saw the fabulous cloud-like shapes of the nebula that they ran past; and one huge planet the color of rust; and even the expanding halo of a supernova, caught in perfect detail and brilliant light.
And then blackness.
“What?” Hank and the others were looking out at a black void of night, with just the dimmest haze of lighter greys far, far away.
“Hank, turn your head!” Lory said, pointing to one of the side view screens. Hank did so, and gasped.
There, laying out before them was the long ribbon of silver and white. It was the edge of the galactic arms itself. They had jumped to the very outer limits, to the edge of the galaxy—
Have we overshot our mark? Hank had a moment of terror. Could the navigational computers have made a mistake?
What if the Message hadn’t been a message at all–but a trap? The Elites had let it be known that the Message that the Union had received was in fact a virus sent by a far-advanced alien species. The same sort of virus that supposedly destroyed ancient Earth and led to the founding of the Union and the Confederacy themselves.
What if that wasn’t a cover story?
But then all of the ship’s screens burst with plasma fire and the Dalida was jumping once again, and this time faster as if it had only paused momentarily to gather momentum.
Hank started to feel sick. The deck of the generation ship was visibly shaking now, and a warning light was starting to show on the ship’s outermost force shield.
“It’s too much! The ship can’t take it!” Hank heard himself shout as his eyes started to throb with pressure. Had any human ever jumped these many times in quick succession? Or this far? What would be the side-effects for biological life?
Hank heard a growl of discomfort–it was Madigan, his eyes rolling white and his teeth gritted as he gripped onto the straps of his seat’s X-harness. Elsewhere around the Bridge, the rest of his crew were in similar patterns of distress.
I have to stop this. We can’t do this entire journey at once–Hank raised a hand that felt heavier than normal and started to throw his fist down to the FTL jump controls. There was a kill switch that would immediately kick them out of their jump. It was supposed to throw them to the nearest safe location that they were currently skipping past–not deposit them in the middle of a black hole or a planet or a star’s violent corona.
Hank didn’t want to do it–but everything they had done would be meaningless, and this entire mission would be useless if their ship broke apart.
He slammed his fist down.
But he was clearly not quick enough, as the ship had broken into normal space in the microsecond before. The Dalida was now hovering over a planet, and the FTL drives were powering down.
They had reached their destination. They had found the source of the Message that had started a war back home.
Epilogue
“It’s an M-Class planet sir,” Serrano called out from the science desk.
“I want a report from Cortez,” Hank said immediately, before he would even permit himself to think about the planet below them. “I want to know if the Dalida has any lasting damage from all of those jumps, and how soon she’ll be running at peak efficiency again,” he commanded.
“Aye-aye, sir,” Serrano sent the orders.
“M-Class, large, and with a breathable atmosphere,” Lory took over the scans of the planet. “And, initial scans suggest…” she looked up at the view screens. “She’s nothing short of a paradise.”
“Aye,” Hank agreed as he looked at what was clearly visible in front of their very noses. The planet below was large and was scudded with bands of white cloud strata. She had the large and small fantastical shapes of continents and islands beside deep blue seas. The land masses appeared to have a good variety of landscapes, from white-topped mountains to deep swathes of living green.
“Fresh water, Oxygen, human-optimal gravity, rich in natural minerals…” Lory was ticking off all of the elements that made it the sort of place that both the Union and the Confederacy would kill for. Perhaps they had killed for.
“Then let’s get down there and say hello,” Hank said, already hitting the release of his X-harness and bouncing to his feet. “I want the ship put in automated orbit. Ida can replicate her processes to look after it, I’m sure,” he said.
“I can do that, flyboy,” Ida purred in his ear.
“I want everyone else with me on the surface,” Hank said. He wanted every scrap of expertise that he could if he was about to be the first human diplomatic liaison with an alien civilization.
The crew of the Dalida jumped into one of its shuttles and wasted no time in roaring towards the surface of the new Eden. Hank could see the rest of his crew trying not to grin as the surface grew closer, filled with forests and lakes and rivers and trees—
“Weapons at the ready, people,” Hank pointed out though, hefting his medium blaster in front of him as the shuttle finally touched down. “They may live on paradise, but that doesn’t make these aliens angels…” he said lowering the blaster, as the shuttle doors hissed open.
“Greetings!” A voice called from the dense jungle foliage in front of them, and its owner followed it. The words it spoke were human English, and the being who spoke it was bipedal.
The alien was, in fact after all–undeniably a human…
“I…I don’t understand,” Hank said in a confused voice. He had been expecting some kind of alien. Some kind of super-advanced, intelligent race who had beamed the secrets of a new industrial age across the entire galaxy…
But what he was looking at, instead, was definitely a human, albeit a strange sort of one. It didn’t wear an all-in-one service suit, but instead a jacket made of some kind of close-fitting plant-leather, and heavy trousers. It was a man, with auburn-blonde hair and clear grey eyes, and who looked healthy and robust–if weathered. Hank noticed that this person didn’t have the ageless smooth skin that many Union humans did, thanks to their constant applications of gene-therapeutics. The colors of his clothes, too, were soft pastel earth-tones–not the blues, silvers and pragmatic greys of the Union.
And isn’t that…? He saw a badge on the edge of the jacket. It was one of the old-style embroidered badges, actually embroidered with gold thread. The Union hadn’t used those things for about…
The last three or four hundred years! Hank realized.
The man saw him looking at the large embroidered patch on his breast, as he walked forward. He was unarmed, save for a long knife in a scabbard
on his thigh. “You recognize it?” He said, straightening his jacket a little for them to see.
It was mostly a gold, white and black splodge, but Hank could just make out the design of a fuzzy set of three gold stars, and a white bird ascending to them.
“That’s an old Union design,” Hank whispered.
“An old human design,” the man corrected him. “My name is August Bradbury, elected Councilor of New Earth,” he beamed at them.
“New Earth?” Lory whispered, frowning.
“Come, I’ll show you,” August said, inclining his head to lead them back down the path.
