by Amie Kaufman
Just outside the portal is a figure in Kali’s bloodstained tac armor, face hidden behind her darkened visor. As DJ lumbers over to the door, the figure lifts her hand to tap at the side of her helmet, then draws a finger across her throat, confirming her comms are indeed dead.
“Kali’s rig looks fine to me on the monitor,” Mantis says, though she’s distracted—still conducting sweeps, trying to work out where Ella’s gone, whether the Little Spider has spun a web in some dark corner to bide her time until she strikes again.
“Well, she’s right here saying they’re not,” DJ replies, dialing in the security code to open up the door. “So how about we go with that? Unless you want to come over here and mime to her that we’re going to leave her locked outside?”
Mantis merely scowls, turning back to her work, and DJ rolls his eyes as the door hisses and releases its seal. It swings open slowly, and the figure in Kali’s armor steps inside.
“Kali, all your systems look green to me,” Mantis says, without looking up. “Clearly you’re not transmitting, but are you receiving anything?”
The figure steps close to DJ, lashes out with one gauntleted fist right into the big man’s larynx. He drops to his knees, gagging, clutching his throat as Mantis spins in her seat to find a VK-85 burst rifle pointed at her face.
“I’m sorry.” Hanna Donnelly’s voice is ice. “Kali couldn’t make it.”
She stands tall in Russo’s tac armor, all kevlar and plasteel. Twenty-four hours ago, she was clad in a Danae Matresco jumpsuit worth the GDP of a small moon. She shed it for the workmanlike WUC maintenance gear, then covered that with her grubby white envirosuit. And now, born from the ashes, she’s a warrior in bloodied black, gun in hand.
Mantis stares for a long moment, but she’s pro enough to crunch the odds here. Whoever’s standing in front of her isn’t Kali, but she’s wearing Kali’s armor—and there’s only one way that happens when you’re dealing with an operator like Fleur Russo.
So Mantis raises her hands. Real slow.
DJ has recovered enough from the punch to his throat to be up on all fours, one hand moving in slow motion toward the gun at his hip.
“Uh-uh, big boy,” Donnelly says, swinging the rifle toward him, taking a couple of steps to the left so she can keep both him and Mantis in view. Resolutely keeping her gaze away from her father’s workstation, away from Jackson’s. She nods to Mantis. “You. Stand up slowly and come over here to join the Neanderthal. I don’t want to shoot you, but—” A pause. “Scratch that. I do want to shoot you. Feel free to give me a reason.”
Mantis rises to her feet, visibly grinding her teeth as she walks across to a still-gasping DJ and hauls him to his feet. Looking for an opportunity Donnelly refuses to give her.
“Earpieces out,” the girl says softly, and the goons comply, pulling away their headsets, their only means of contacting Falk, and dropping them to the ground. “Thank you.” Donnelly sounds almost polite for a moment. Conversational. It’s clear from their faces that neither DJ nor Mantis considers her friendly tone to be a good thing—then again, they work for Falk, so they’d know. “Now,” says Hanna, “let’s get you settled so I can get comfortable. This armor is really sticky—she just bled all over it.”
Three and a half minutes later, both DJ and Mantis are restrained, backs against the large pillars in the middle of the room, arms stretched behind them, wrists joined with electrical cord that looks far too tight to be comfortable. Hanna Donnelly is drinking Mantis’s can of Mount Russshmore® as she stands at her father’s workstation, the door to C & C locked securely once more. She guesses his password on her second try and reaches up to thumb her headset to life.
“Okay, Chief, I’m here. Let’s talk about this defense grid.”
A pause, as a voice in her ear guides her through the menus. DJ and Mantis watch with twin glares, and if looks could kill, their revenge would be very, very sweet. Donnelly ignores them, navigating through another layer and throwing the defense radar up onto the big screen.
Her eyes go wide.
The Mount Russshmore® can slips from her fingers.
“…Oh ****,” she whispers.
Footage is taken from external Heimdall cams.
The station looks amazing from the outside. There’s no sign of the trauma going on inside. No bullet holes or bodies or bloodstains on the walls. A circular city, forever spinning around a shimmering hole in the universe’s side.
The wormhole is beautiful, chums. There’s no other way to describe it. It almost looks like a pool of water illuminated from within, though it sheds almost no light on the station around it. And although it doesn’t really have a surface, it looks like that not-surface is rippling a million beats per second, a soft light shining in its heart. It’s vaguely blue (I’m told this has something to do with Doppler shift—don’t ask me) and looks a trillion miles deep. Which isn’t even close to the truth of it.
There’s a sharp black scar burned on the station’s skin, just near the wormhole’s lip—the place Nik Malikov and the Betty Boop crossed the horizon as the portal opened again. Other than that, the entire picture is perfectly serene.
For the next thirty seconds, at least.
You can hardly see them in the dark. They’re moving quickly. Like sharks. Phalanx formation. It’s only the radiance from the station, the micro-flares from their thrusters as they adjust course, and maybe some ambient light from the distant Yggdrasil Nebula that pick them out in all that dark. Twenty-four Shinobi-class hunter-killers. Speeding like black daggers out of the void, right at the heart of that shimmering blue pool.
Assault Fleet Kennedy.
You save a lot of space on a vessel when you don’t have to man it with a live crew. Each Shinobi is four hundred meters long, sleek and sharp. It’s basically an engine, an A7-X artificial intelligence system with pre-programmed action/reaction parameters, and a fuel tank. All that space that’d be taken up by crew, living quarters, mess halls, rec spaces and storage? Well, you mostly fill it with weapons and ammo, chum. Which means these things are bristling with more missile turrets than any sensibly designed ship their size has a right to be packing.
But you know the scariest thing about them?
No lights.
See, on a ship with a living crew, that crew needs to see what the hell they’re doing. You look at Heimdall’s skin, it’s picked out by hundreds of tiny pinpricks of light. The atrium, filled with all those imprisoned partygoers. The entertainment center, with its sparkling casino levels and bars, now scattered with small knots of frightened residents and guests, wondering why their Voice of the Resistance has gone silent. A few lights in the now-empty Habitat Sector, left on by people who expected to stagger home after Terra Day too drunk to find the switch.
But there’s nothing alive inside the drone ships. Their AIs don’t need light to see. So the hunter-killers are completely black, just like the space around them.
Probably a metaphor in there somewhere.
They speed in from the void, hundreds of klicks per second, not slowing for a beat. Their sensors confirm the reports from Mantis—the Heimdall wormhole is online, the Kerenza waypoint is returning inquiry pings. The way is clear.
Forward. To gut the Hypatia and X-out the witnesses inside it. Then on to the planet Kerenza to purge whatever remains of the colonists and BT ground troops left behind after former Director Taylor’s disastrous invasion.
To wipe the slate clean, then self-destruct in a brief flare of fuel and fire off the shoulder of a now-dead planet.
Not for them to question why.
They’re not programmed to, see?
DR-782xii: AUDIT TEAM F-XII, THIS IS KENNEDY ASSAULT. RESPOND, OVER.
Cerberus: Kennedy, this is Audit Team. We read you, over.
DR-782xii: REQUEST CLEARANCE TO TRAVERSE HYPERSPATIAL UMBILICUS, OVER.
Cerberus: Roger that, Kennedy. Good hunting.
DR-782xii: ACKNOWLEDGED, AUDIT TEAM. KENNEDY ASSAULT OUT.
The assault fleet draws closer to the spinning city. Deathly silent. Totally lifeless. Thin strands of data spilling back and forth between the ships, electronic fingertips touching briefly in the moments before the plunge.
SYSTEMS: NOMINAL.
APPROACH VECTOR: CLEAR.
UMBILICUS ACCESS: CONFIRMED.
NEGATIVE IMPEDIMENT. PROCEED?
YES/NO.
And without a sound, they dive into that rippling blue.
RADIO TRANSMISSION: BEITECH AUDIT TEAM—SECURE CHANNEL 642
PARTICIPANTS:
Travis “Cerberus” Falk, Lieutenant, Team Commander
Bianca “Mercury” Silva, Corporal, Engineer
DATE: 08/16/75
TIMESTAMP: 18:48
CERBERUS: What the hell was that?
CERBERUS: Mercury, this is Cerberus, respond!
CERBERUS: Bianca!
MERCURY: I hear you! Jesus, Travis, take a ****ing zee!
CERBERUS: What the ****ing hell was that?
MERCURY: I don’t know! Surge! Hyperspatial! Systems are redlining everywhere!
CERBERUS: Mercury, what the hell is happening? What’s going on with the internal insulation? It looks like there’s live current running through the structure down here.
MERCURY: Control network is trashed! Power surge, off scale! Buffers are totally fried. Secondaries axed. Sensors dead. I’ve got no diagnostics. No internals. And three…no, four of my engineers just got cooked.
CERBERUS: Cooked?
MERCURY: Their terminals overloaded. Christ, it smells like fried ****ing bacon in here…
CERBERUS: Did Kennedy make it through?
CERBERUS: Mercury, this is Cerberus. Confirm Assault Fleet Kennedy successfully traversed the umbilicus to Kerenza Sector, over.
MERCURY: I don’t know.
CERBERUS: Bianca, talk to me!
MERCURY: Travis, I don’t know!
MERCURY: I don’t know what the **** is happening…
RADIO TRANSMISSION: BEITECH AUDIT TEAM—SECURE CHANNEL 4824
PARTICIPANTS:
Hanna Donnelly, Civilian
Isaac Grant, Chief Engineer
DATE: 08/16/75
TIMESTAMP: 18:48
GRANT, I: Oh God, no.
DONNELLY, H: I can’t get a read on the Hypatia!
GRANT, I: No, no. No!
DONNELLY, H: Chief, help me, I’m trying to get a—
GRANT, I: No, they can’t— Helena, Kady…Please…
DONNELLY, H: ****, what’s happening? The whole station’s shaking!
GRANT, I: Helena…
DONNELLY, H: Chief, please. Something’s happening with the wormhole.
GRANT, I: …It wasn’t ready.
DONNELLY, H: What?
GRANT, I: Do you know how few people know [coughs] how to tune one of these things properly? How long it takes? How many…arguments I had with your father about the man-hours we were spending on calcs?
DONNELLY, H: Systems are blinking out all over the board, what do I do?
GRANT, I: I can’t— There’s nothing. My family…
DONNELLY, H: Chief, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I tried. I can’t get a read on anything on the other side. Maybe…
GRANT, I: Maybe what? Maybe the drone fleet we just watched head through didn’t kill them all within seconds?
DONNELLY, H: There are still hundreds of people here.
DONNELLY, H: I don’t have anyone left either.
DONNELLY, H: But they do. The people trapped here. They have families out there.
GRANT, I: I’ve…I’ve lost a lot of blood, Hanna. I don’t know how much…longer I’ll last.
GRANT, I: Or the station, for that matter…Did you feel that?
DONNELLY, H: Chief. We have to try.
GRANT, I: Try what? We’re out of options.
DONNELLY, H: The civilian ships. Freighters. Miners. In the docks.
DONNELLY, H: We can use them. We have to get our people out of here.
GRANT, I: I…
DONNELLY, H: We can’t stop, Chief.
DONNELLY, H: I want to. I just want to lie down and wait for it to be done. But we can’t.
GRANT, I: Okay.
GRANT, I: All right. I’ll…I’ll narrow down the ships…nearest our people.
DONNELLY, H: Just a little longer, Chief.
DONNELLY, H: Then we can rest.
GRANT, I: Your father, Hanna…
DONNELLY, H: What about him?
GRANT, I: God, he’d be 0so proud of you.
DONNELLY, H: …I hope so.
DONNELLY, H: Let’s get to work.
RADIO MESSAGE: COMMAND CHANNEL HYPATIA
PARTICIPANTS:
Kady Grant, Head of CommTech (Acting), Hypatia
Ezra Mason, 2nd Lieutenant, Air Wing Leader (Acting), Hypatia
DATE: 08/16/75
TIMESTAMP: 18:48
GRANT, K: Ez, you hear me?
MASON, E, 2ND LT: I hear you. I’m next in line to launch. Got about a minute.
MASON, E, 2ND LT: Not enough flight deck crew. Taking too long.
MASON, E, 2ND LT: We’ve got ****ing shuttle pilots at the stick. We’ll be lucky if we don’t take each other out before the drones show up.
MASON, E, 2ND LT: Don’t TOUCH THAT— Yeah, you, don’t— That’s right.
GRANT, K: Ez…
MASON, E, 2ND LT: Don’t. Please don’t say it.
GRANT, K: Can’t reason with drones. Can’t beat them.
MASON, E, 2ND LT: Have to try.
GRANT, K: I know.
MASON, E, 2ND LT: I love you. I love you so much, Kady Grant.
GRANT, K: I love you, too.
MASON, E, 2ND LT: We almost made it.
GRANT, K: I’ll stay on the radio with you as long as I can. This frequency’s just us. Anything your wing says will override it—you won’t miss anything.
MASON, E, 2ND LT: Then stay. I want to hear your voice.
GRANT, K: I’m right here.
MASON, E, 2ND LT: I’m up to launch. Here goes.
MASON, E, 2ND LT: The stars, Kades. They’re so beautiful.
GRANT, K: I’ve seen them. AIDAN showed them to me on the Alexander.
MASON, E, 2ND LT: It’s not right. After all we went through…to end like this…
GRANT, K: I wanted to tell our story. I wanted people to know.
MASON, E, 2ND LT: Maybe someone on Heimdall will tell it for us.
GRANT, K: Maybe.
[STATIC BURST]
[GARBLED VOICES]
MASON, E, 2ND LT: Holy ****, Kades, are you getting these visuals?
GRANT, K: Everything just lit up, we’re on it. Is the wormhole meant to do that?
GRANT, K: It looked like a lightning strike.
MASON, E, 2ND LT: I don’t know, shields were always down when I went through them as a kid. It was nothing like this.
MASON, E, 2ND LT: God, the things we got to see, Kady…
GRANT, K: I know. I just wish…
MASON, E, 2ND LT: Me too.
GRANT, K: Um, Ez…
MASON, E, 2ND LT: What?
GRANT, K: …Aren’t those drones meant to be murdering us by now?
HYPATIA ONLINE MEETING SPACE
Proudly hosted by Wallace Ulyanov Consortium VirtuMeet™ Software
MEETING ROOM created
PASSWORD PROTECTED
INCEPT: 19:15, 08/16/75
INVITEES:
BOLL, Syra
Captain (Acting)
IDENT: 448fx29/WUC
GRANT, Kady
Head of CommTech (Acting)
IDENT: 962/Kerenza/Civ/Ref
HIRANO, Yuki
Navigator (Acting)
IDENT: 293ip13/WUC
MASON, Ezra
Air Wing Leader (Acting), 2nd Lieutenant
IDENT: UTN-966-330ad
McCALL, Winifred
Head of Security (Acting), 1st Lieutenant
IDENT: UTN-961-641id 001/UTA/Transfer
>
ZHUANG, Yulin
Head of Engineering
IDENT: 447/Kerenza/Civ/Ref
McCALL, Winifred has logged in.
BOLL, Syra has logged in.
GRANT, Kady has logged in.
MASON, Ezra has logged in.
HIRANO, Yuki has logged in.
ZHUANG, Yulin has logged in.
ZHUANG, Yulin: I only have a few minutes. Stabilizers are at redline.
McCALL, Winifred: What the hell is happening? I’m bouncing off the walls down here. Feels like we’re in a thunderstorm?
MASON, Ezra: And where the hell is this drone fleet?
BOLL, Syra: I don’t think they’re coming.
GRANT, Kady: What?
MASON, Ezra: What?
HIRANO, Yuki: What?!
BOLL, Syra: I’ll make this quick as I can. For those who don’t know, my postdoctoral research was in hyperspatial quantum theory— specifically, potential interplay between Rosenstein and Einstein-type hyperspatial bridges across real spacetime. This is going to sound all kinds of crazy, but I’m going to lay out what I think has happened, as best I can.
MASON, Ezra: I’m already confused.
BOLL, Syra: Fact 1: We have datalogs showing a BeiTech fleet heading into the wormhole at Heimdall about half an hour ago.
BOLL, Syra: Fact 2: When the BT fleet entered the wormhole at Heimdall Station, there were several tremendous energy fluctuations. I’m talking off the charts here.
BOLL, Syra: Fact 3: However, the fleet never emerged on this side of the wormhole.
ZHUANG, Yulin: Which leads us to a fairly pressing question, Captain.
