by T J Mott
If one could call point-six c drifting.
The passage also seemed to have acquired a slight tumble. He couldn’t see it, but he could certainly feel it. And it definitely could have been worse, he thought. A weak glancing blow from a railgun or a nearby explosion could easily have spun up the detached corridor to hundreds, even thousands of revolutions per minute, which would certainly not be survivable for anyone unfortunate enough to be trapped inside.
A soft moan in the darkness broke the still air.
“Adelia!” he exclaimed. She had been unconscious since he awoke, though her vital signs seemed okay whenever he checked.
He pulled himself through the passage, grimacing through the pain he felt each time he moved a limb, up to where he’d used a shoelace to lightly tie her arm to a handhold and keep her from bouncing around in the slowly-rotating passage.
She moaned again as he pulled up by her. The single tiny terminal screen provided just enough illumination for his darkness-adapted eyes to see her eyelids flicker open. She looked back and forth a few times before settling her gaze on the floating dark form in front of her.
“Where are we?” she finally said. “Doesn’t look like a lifeboat?”
“No,” Thad answered. “We’re trapped in a passage. No atmosphere on the other side of either hatch.” He grimaced again and contemplated their condition. How much worse can things get? “How do you feel?” he asked.
“Hurts everywhere,” she responded. “But not too bad. And cold.” She suddenly reached out and grabbed him, pulled his form in close for an embrace with a surprising tightness and strength from such a small woman, and started weeping quietly. “Thad, I’m scared.”
He wrapped his arms around her in return and they floated together in the passage. “I know,” was all he could think of to say. He was scared, too, and wondered why. He’d faced death many times before. What was different this time? Death was more certain this time, was that it? He’d always found a way out, a way to beat the odds, but this time he was completely helpless.
And then the truth dawned on him, as he mentally connected a few puzzle pieces. His heartbeat thudded in his ears, each beat bringing a wave of pain within his head. His hands were unsteady and trembling. His stomach did not feel normal and his mouth was dry. Oh. I’m…sober…I must have been unconscious for quite a while.
“Where are we? What do we do?” she whispered.
He tried to collect his thoughts. His starship had just been destroyed and now he was drifting in a piece of debris with no life support. But he wasn’t sure how to say that to Adelia. What could he say to offer her hope? Yet nothing came to mind, and he was unwilling to lie. “There’s nothing we can do. I’m sorry.”
Neither of them said anything for a very long time.
“How will it end?”
Thaddeus had already run through the list of possibilities in his mind. There weren’t many. “Either we suffocate on carbon dioxide, or we freeze. We could also get hit by a micrometeorite or something else.”
Those were the most probable outcomes. There were several others, but they were so unlikely that Thad decided not to say. They could be lucky enough—or unlucky, depending on one’s point of view—for the detached passage to settle on a comfortable, survivable thermal equilibrium, and die of thirst several days later. They would have more time together that way, but it would get miserable, quick.
Neither of them spoke for a long while, unsure of what to say. He was unsure of what to even think. They floated within the cold passageway, silent, arms still wrapped around each other. After several minutes, Adelia’s quiet sobs stopped.
“Adelia, I’m sorry. I wanted to rescue you. I had no idea it would end this way.” He chewed his lip. “It’s all so unfair to you, to be brought out of slavery only to die days later.”
Unfair to himself too, he left unsaid. Unfair for him to spend a decade and millions of credits on searching for Earth, and then losing everything when he finally found a real clue.
Unfair for him to find the woman he’d secretly loved so many years ago, in fact the only woman he’d ever truly loved, but run out of time before he could establish any meaningful relationship with her.
“Shh,” she hissed in his ear. “Dying out here, but with you, is much fairer than anything else that has happened to me out here. You pulled me from hell and gave me a couple days of freedom. You don’t know how much that means to me. Thank you.” She surprised him with a kiss. He took it in for a moment, and then responded by pulling her closer, tightening his embrace around her petite body.
“You don’t know how long I’ve wanted to do that,” she said.
“Really?”
She laughed. “Oh, you engineers. So clueless about people. You can look at a gauge from across the room and know within seconds that some dumb gadget or another is going to stall out, and even guess what obscure defect caused it, but reading people is a different universe to you.”
“There’s a reason my best friends were always computers and reactors,” he joked nervously. “A lot of the engineer stereotypes are true.”
“You were good at it though. Do you know how many times I heard the Lunar Dawn’s crew find something broken, and they’d always say, ‘Get Thaddeus on the job. That kid will fix it twice as fast as anyone else, twice as good, and he won’t complain either.’ ”
“Oh, I complained,” he said. “But computers and reactors don’t really spread gossip.” He noticed with surprise his lightened mood, even though they would be dead within hours. Maybe this ending wasn’t so bad after all.
“I knew you liked me, but you were too shy. I watched you watch me. I’d catch you staring, then you’d pretend to look away. Used to talk with the others about you. Some of the junior officers even had a betting pool open!”
“Was I really that socially blind, to not know there was a betting pool about me?”
“Yes, you were,” she said with a laugh. “I was actually getting tired of waiting for you. If you didn’t talk to me first, I was going to talk to you.”
“Huh.” Once again, he could think of nothing to say. As the passage grew cold, he chose to remain silent and simply enjoy the relative warmth of her embrace for as long as he could.
The air inside the passage was definitely cooling down. And though they were already in a no-gravity environment, he thought the sensation of floating somehow intensified.
“Thad, my head feels…weird.”
His eyes had adapted well to the darkness, and he could tell that his peripheral vision was black. “Yeah, me too.” He shifted slightly, and rested his chin on her shoulder, pressing his cheek into hers. “That answers that question,” he whispered into her ear.
“What question?” she asked.
“How it’ll end.” Part of him said to quit talking, but the rest of his mind was losing its hold on logic and reason. “Respiration isn’t elevated, so CO2 isn’t building up. A passage this size, I think we’d choke on CO2 before we’d run out of oxygen. I think we have a slow air leak. We’re depressurizing.”
“Is that bad?”
He laughed at the question. “Not really. Could be worse. Run low on air pressure, on oxygen, and we’ll just fall asleep, and then it’s over. No pain, no freezing cold.”
“How long?”
“Not sure. Could be a few more hours.”
“At least,” she slowly whispered in his ear, “I’m not dying alone, as a slave. Just hold me. For a few more hours.” He felt a slight wetness on his face where her cheek was touching him. “Thad, thank you so much. For everything.”
“You bet.” They floated in silence, in darkness. For how long Thaddeus couldn’t tell. His mind slowed down, his thoughts became incoherent and uncontrolled, and the urge to fall asleep grew stronger.
Adelia lost consciousness first. She was still alive, though her pulse was weak and thready, her breathing rapid and shallow, and her grip on him had loosened. Thad knew he’d be joining her soon. “Adelia…I’m
so sorry.” It was freezing now. He lifted his chin off her shoulder and turned his head towards her, and then planted a kiss on her wet, tear-streaked cheek. He held his lips against her cheek for what seemed an eternity, a long goodbye and a painful reminder to him that the hopes for some kind of future with her—those hopes which had returned from the depths of his heart when he’d seen her picture back at Headquarters—were now gone, impossible, slashed from the realm of possibilities by things beyond his control. He’d rescued her, and she’d warmed up to him, and then it was over almost before it began. “I know this is dumb, I hardly knew you, really, but I love you. Wish I’d had the nerve to tell you…” His own tears clung bitterly around his eyes, and he fervently wished with the last of his remaining consciousness that things could have turned out differently. As he embraced her cooling body, he ran his fingers through her hair and tried to imagine a future with her by his side, but the pain that that would never be was overwhelming him. “Goodbye, Adelia.”
His arms and legs and face tingled, and his thoughts soon wandered off into strange, dream-like lands. He saw strange lights, heard strange sounds and voices, but could not understand them…
***
“Captain Simon, I think we’re ready to test it.”
“Good. You have the ship, Boegrin. Do whatever you need to test your repairs and get us underway.”
The Panther’s Chief Engineer nodded and left Simon’s cabin.
Using the equipment shuttled over from the Caracal before it left, Simon’s engineers had been able to bypass the melted-down portion of the corvette’s hyperdrive. It was still heavily-damaged, but might be usable if they were careful. With the remaining portion of the drive, they might be able to manage a stable half light-year per hour.
Headquarters was over a month away at that speed, Simon realized. Very troubling.
Also troubling was the phi-band broadcast they’d intercepted. It had been passed along like a chain letter by all the starships in the area, originating from a nearby nameless red giant carbon star all the way back to the Waverly system. In it, an arrogant man calling himself Commodore Sutton bragged about his battle with the Caracal and included all the relevant sensor data and comm logs to confirm the frigate’s destruction by his ship, the Crimson Flare. Furthermore, he laughed as he described all the frigate’s lifepods which had inherited its original trajectory into a nearby star, soon burning up as they crashed into it at high sublight.
Embedded within the message was an encrypted message originally sent from the Caracal itself, which nobody had been able to decrypt, and it was passed around as well via phi-band in hopes that someone could make sense of it.
Captain Simon had the decryption key, of course. It was a standard emergency key used by the Organization, used to safeguard a final broadcast in case of starship destruction. The message confirmed that the ship had been destroyed and that the crew abandoned the husk at the end of the battle. It also contained all the logs and memory dumps since the frigate’s last data sync at Headquarters.
So Admiral Marcell is gone. Things would change. He figured one of the Commodores would take overall command now, but which one was anyone’s guess. Commodore Cooper was the best choice in Simon’s mind, already second-in-command of the Organization in practice. But he was a bit of a ghost, a recluse, not likely to enjoy shifting into a higher role and leaving behind his direct involvement with the group’s cloak-and-dagger-style operations. Wilcox also seemed likely, he was by far the most assertive member of the Commodores, but Simon didn’t care for the man at all. He was overly pompous and annoying and would probably turn the entire group into his own personal pirate force. Simon had no interest in piracy.
Commodore Ghaston would be a fair compromise, he was a dependable and likable commander, but last Simon knew the Red Fleet was on loan to some small empire thousands of light-years away, completely on the other side of known space. It would be many months before they even received the news about Marcell’s death.
Who knew what direction they’d take? Certainly all the Earth-hunting nonsense would end, but aside from that, the future was very uncertain.
A weak clunk resounded through the deck and walls as the tiny warship successfully jumped into hyperspace, squeezing a very leisurely cruising speed out of the remaining parts of its hyperdrive. A moment later, his comm chimed and Boegrin reported that everything was stable as long as they continued at this pace.
***
The door to his office opened and Commodore Cooper smiled broadly as Commander Rapp entered. “We hit four-point-four light-years per hour, Rapp. Can you believe it?” He slapped the desk in excitement and laughed.
“The X-11 just made the universe seventy-five percent smaller,” Senior Captain Abano remarked. “And it’s ours.” He frowned suddenly. “Well…technically it’s Marcell’s. But I’m sure he’ll share it, if we ask him nicely.”
Cooper laughed again. “Oh no…I’m not letting Marcell anywhere near that ship until I have it reverse-engineered. I want to build more of them. It’ll change the way we run Gray Fleet forever.”
Rapp looked unimpressed by the results of the ship’s latest trials. He approached the Commodore’s desk with a scowl on his face, and sat down in the chair next to Abano. And then Cooper realized the man actually looked troubled. “You look constipated, Commander. Please tell me you figured out Marcell’s mission.”
Rapp shook his head. “No, not that. I just got some surprise news.” He licked his lips and leaned forward in his seat. “I just heard that the Emperor died.”
Cooper sat upright in his chair suddenly. “What?”
“It happened four weeks ago and we’re just now getting the news. Supposedly, he died after a long battle with an unspecified illness.”
“A long illness?” Cooper frowned. That seemed very unlikely. Gray Fleet had a number of agents within the Norma Empire, the massive confederation which existed north of the Independent Regions and was for all practical purposes considered the largest state in the galaxy. And a few of his informants had some level of access to the Imperial Court itself. “No, if he was sick I’d have heard about it by now.”
“This didn’t come through Gray Fleet,” Rapp said. “This was a public press release from a data dump that came from one of our regular supply ships.”
“If the public release got here before Gray Fleet reports,” Abano started.
“Then Norma has communications on lockdown,” Cooper finished. “That’s not good at all. He wasn’t sick. Something else happened and they’ve locked down the courier networks to keep it from getting out.”
Rapp nodded his agreement. “Seems likely. We haven’t received anything from our Norma network since a few days before the supposed date of his death. The Imperial courier network is almost certainly rejecting encrypted messages except for internal government comms, and monitoring and filtering the rest. Our operatives can’t send any messages without being identified, so they’ve all gone silent for the time being.”
“The Court must be in chaos then,” Cooper said. “What do your Norma analysts say?”
Rapp shook his head. “Frankly, we won’t know much until our agents can send messages again. I do know there was no clear successor, so I’m sure there’s a ton of infighting among the Inner Court. None of them were real friends of the Emperor. Most of them are mutual enemies, just drawn together to the center of power. It could very well turn bloody.”
“What about all the new vassal states?”
He shrugged. “The Empire has expanded a lot these past few years, and it’s been chaotic. Everyone knows that. Norma isn’t the same as it used to be. I’d guess that some of their more recent or more distant acquisitions try to break away and return to independence, or swear fealty to the neighbors.”
“Either way,” said Cooper, “Norma’s expansion will halt while the big players figure things out.” He smiled. “Maybe we can take advantage of the chaos. There could be lots of credits to be had if they sta
rt hiring up fleets to hold themselves together. And I’d really like to work some more operatives into higher places over there.”
“Of course you do. Coop, you’d recruit the Emperor’s dead body itself if you thought you could get away with it.”
Chapter 18
“Your name?” The words seemingly echoed within his mind, sounding distant and surreal. Perhaps they were not even real. Had he imagined them?
“Your name,” the voice repeated. Or maybe not. His sense of time was abnormal, dream-like. The repetition might have been half-imagined, like the surreal, wispy thoughts and images of a dream which replayed in a loop without the dreamer even realizing it.
His tongue was stuck to the inside of his mouth. “Thaddeus,” someone said. And then his tongue was free. Did he say it? Or was that the disembodied voice?
There was a strange sensation on his tongue, but his awareness of the discomfort was incomplete, like his senses were misfiring, only passing just enough perception to simply indicate that something wasn’t right but offering no detail to his mind on why that was. Maybe it was pain? Did his tongue hurt? He focused on his mouth, and decided that it was both dry and also not his mouth. He then began to wonder how his mouth could not be his mouth. It seemed twisted, yet somehow very true…
“Thaddeus.” The voice interrupted his thoughts. “What is your last name?”
“Marcell.” The name sounded awfully strange to him. There was something off about it…something bad. Sinister.
No, not sinister. Just misplaced. It didn’t belong here.
“So, your name is Thaddeus Marcell?”
Why did that name feel so wrong? “Yes.” He couldn’t wrangle his thoughts into order long enough to contemplate it. His mind broke off on a dreamy tangent any time he thought more than a few words at a time. He also wasn’t sure if it was his name, or the name of the voice.
He realized he could feel. It felt like he was lying down, on one of his sides—but whether left or right he couldn’t quite figure out. He could see some things, but could make no sense whatsoever of what he saw before him. It was like that unnerving state between sleep and wakefulness, when the twisted images of the subconscious mind could superimpose themselves onto the vision of someone who was dreaming with their eyes still open. Reality and dream danced together, twisting around and moving in a surreal painting that the mind could not understand, in colors he didn’t have names for, and for the briefest of moments, just before he forgot what he was thinking again, he wondered if he was somehow now perceiving higher dimensions.
