“Five hundred light seconds?” Garek echoed. “What’s our ETA to reach that point at max thrust?” Garek asked.
“Almost a full standard hour,” Addy replied. “And that’s probably an Etherian standard hour, which is even longer. By the time we get there, a month or more could have passed on Astralis, but that’s probably a lot less than the overall time it will take for us to get this fleet back to Etheria.”
“And just where is Etheria?” Garek asked. “Have any of you thought to check that yet?”
Lucien shook his head. “We’re probably going to have to dig through the ship’s star charts to find it. Why don’t you and Brak go find control stations and help us look? We’ve got an hour to kill, we may as well use it for something.”
Garek didn’t need to be told twice. He stormed over to the nearest control station and took a seat. Brak hesitated for a moment before doing the same, and Lucien busied himself looking through various holo displays for the Etherian star charts.
After a few seconds, he found a link to something called Universal Map. He opened that, and was immediately greeted with a kind of pinched sphere, wrapped with stars. He blinked in shock, his heart suddenly racing with excitement. With all the drama surrounding their dealings with the Faros, they’d lost sight of their original goal in traveling beyond the Red Line. Astralis’s mission was to discover the true nature of the universe, its shape, extent, and whatever else they could learn. And here, both its shape and extent were clearly marked.
The universe appeared to be wrapped around a distorted sphere, pinched together at the poles, and bulging out at the rim/equator, with an infinitesimally small hole in the center. It was a type of torus.
“I don’t believe it...” Lucien whispered.
“What?” Garek called back.
“The universe,” Addy replied. “It’s... a donut?”
Lucien smiled at that. “A horn torus, actually, but yeah I guess that’s kind of a donut.” Lucien zoomed in on the torus and manipulated it with his hands, watching the stars glitter. “This is a 2D simplification,” he realized. “We can’t picture a 3D torus from the outside. We’d need to be able to see an extra spatial dimension to do that.”
“Maybe we can ask the Polypuses what it looks like,” Garek said.
“I don’t think we’d understand their description even if they could explain,” Lucien replied.
“Simplification or not, it conveys the concept clearly enough,” Addy said. “Why’s the bottom half of the map dark and fuzzy?”
Lucien studied the torus and frowned. Addy was right. The top half was bright with stars, but the bottom half was blurry and kind of grayed-out.
“I bet that’s the universe on the other side that Oorgurak mentioned,” Addy said.
Lucien nodded slowly. “I forgot about that.”
“Whatever it is, it looks like not even the Etherians have been there,” Garek said.
“I wonder why,” Lucien mused. “Seems like you could get there easily enough...” Then he noticed the dark band of empty black nothingness running around the equatorial rim of the torus, separating the top from the bottom.
“The Great Abyss lies between the two universes,” Addy said, again noticing the same things as him.
“So maybe it can’t be crossed?” Garek suggested.
Lucien shook his head. “Maybe...” He found a search button to one side of the display, and tapped it. A holographic keypad appeared in his lap, and he typed in Etheria.
A green dot appeared near the center of the torus, in the funnel-shaped hole leading up from the fuzzy bottom half.
“Etheria is—”
“On the other side of the universe,” Addy finished for him.
“No wonder we’ve never been able to find it on our own,” Lucien said.
“Fascinating. How long will it take us to get there?” Garek asked. “Try plotting a jump, see what the ship says.”
“Hang on,” Addy replied.
While he waited, Lucien played around with the Universal Map, zooming in to smaller and smaller scales. He picked a random spiral galaxy, and from there a random star...
Only to be assaulted by a plethora of information about the system, its sun, planets, moons, intelligent species, governments, space stations... even large starships were listed on the contacts panel of the star system. As he watched, one of those ships disappeared, and the locations of the others shifted subtly as they moved through space.
Lucien blinked in shock. The system wasn’t inside the Red Line, so where had all of that information come from? More importantly, how could any of it be live data?
He tried searching for Laniakea, which the Red Line encompassed, just to be sure that the system he’d chosen wasn’t inside of it. The map zoomed all the way out to show him a red dot at the center of the universe.
“Ah... guys, try searching for Laniakea.”
“Why?” Garek asked. “Where is it?”
“At the center of the universe,” Lucien replied.
“What?” Garek asked. “You’re joking.”
“No, he’s right...” Addy replied.
“It would be funny if it weren’t so sad,” Lucien said. “Galileo must be rolling in his grave.”
“Gali-who?” Garek asked.
“Galileo. The inventor of the telescope... he was the first person to propose that Earth wasn’t the center of the universe.”
“Actually that was Copernicus,” Addy said.
“I’ll take your word for it,” Garek replied. “It’s been a long time since I studied any of that stuff.”
Lucien tried zooming in on another random system, and this time he made sure that it was far from the red dot of Laniakea at the center of the universe.
The system was called Tekken Prime. It had two suns, six planets, and twenty-seven moons, with just one intelligent species—the Tekken—and a unified feudal government. The Faros were not mentioned, which Lucien took to mean that they hadn’t found or enslaved the Tekken yet. Again the contacts panel for the system was populated with live data for all the ships and space stations in the system.
“That’s impossible...” Lucien breathed, shaking his head.
“What’s not possible?” Garek asked.
He explained what he was seeing, but it sounded even more absurd when he said it out loud.
“There’s no way our sensors can detect that level of detail from here,” Addy said.
“Exactly—there’s no way, and yet the Etherians seem to have found one,” Lucien replied.
“Then maybe Etherus is God. Or at least a god. He has to be,” Addy said.
“Maybe, yeah...” Lucien replied. “At the very least, it means the Etherians have found a way to tap into a truly instantaneous form of communication.”
“I wonder if the Faros have this technology?” Garek asked.
“If they did, then they wouldn’t need to find the lost fleet in order to find Etheria,” Lucien replied.
“Then I guess they don’t have the same tech. You realize what this means,” Garek said.
Lucien shook his head. “No, what?”
“It means we can probably find Astralis from here. We don’t have to risk looking for them by jumping to random systems around their last known location. And it also means we can identify a safe route to get there, checking systems for signs of the Faros before we make a jump.”
“Garek’s right,” Addy said. “This changes everything. Now we have a clear tactical edge over the Faros.”
Lucien frowned, unconvinced.
“I think we need to re-take the vote,” Garek said.
“Hang on,” Lucien said. “Before we get carried away, let’s be sure we really can find Astralis. It’s a big universe. Searching every system for it will literally take forever.”
“Found it!” Garek crowed.
Lucien’s frown deepened. He tried searching for Astralis this time. Almost instantly, a new star system appeared, and sure enough, his view of that s
ystem was centered on a green dot labeled Astralis. Lucien selected that contact to read more about it, just to be sure.
“The size and shape match,” Addy said, beating him to it. “It’s them all right.”
“They’re twenty-nine billion light years away,” Lucien pointed out. “It could still take a long time for us to reach them.”
“Plotting a course...” Addy said. “Got it!”
“You calculated a jump there already?” Lucien asked, suddenly wondering if Etherian jump tech was somehow instant, too.
“The route is finished calculating—” Addy clarified. “—not the actual jumps. There’s over a hundred stops along the way, and the time to reach our destination is estimated at... twenty-six days, eight hours, and thirty-eight minutes.”
“Less than a month!” Garek said.
Lucien’s brow felt heavy, his eyes tight. “We’d have to make sure all those stops are safe before we jump to them.”
“We can adjust the route as we go,” Garek suggested. “Zigging or zagging by a few light years here or there isn’t going to make a difference to our arrival time. So?” Garek prompted. “All in favor of going to Astralis, and then Etheria?”
Everyone stuck their hand up except for Lucien. Seeing that, he gradually raised his own hand.
Garek twisted off his helmet and set it beside him. “It’s unanimous,” he said, looking around and nodding with a rare smile on his face. “We’re going home.”
“Yeah...” Lucien replied, feeling unsettled by that decision. If this was such a good idea, then why had the Polypuses been so adamant about them going to Etheria first? Lucien had a bad feeling they were making a big mistake. “What if Astralis overrules our decision to take the fleet back to Etheria?” he asked. “They might want to use it to continue their mission. With perfectly accurate recon data we wouldn’t have to worry about running into Faros again.”
“There’s an easy solution to that—don’t give the fleet to them,” Garek said. “By rights of salvage it’s ours, so they can’t force us to hand it over. After we arrive, we can ask the people of Astralis to join us, or not. Anyone who wants to come, can, and those who don’t are welcome to stay. It’ll be a second chance for everyone, a way to go back safely. After everything we’ve been through with the Faros, I think most people will want out of Astralis’s mission. Besides, with what we’ve learned from the Etherians’ Universal Map, Astralis’s mission is somewhat redundant now, anyway.”
“Agreed,” Addy said. “I can’t see any risks associated with this plan. In fact, right now we’re sitting along the outermost edge of the universe, near the Great Abyss. By flying back to Astralis first we’ll be covering almost half of the distance back to the Red Line. Astralis is actually on the way to Etheria, so there’s no reason not to go there first. In fact, if our comms are instant, we could use them to send Astralis a message,” Addy suggested. “Let them know we’re coming.”
“Bad idea,” Garek replied. “Instant or not, we don’t know if the Faros will be able to detect any message we send.”
“True,” Lucien said, and let go of his misgivings with a sigh. As he did so, a smile crept onto his face. “I guess it will be nice to see some fresh faces.”
“What’s wrong with our faces?” Addy asked, arching an eyebrow at him behind her helmet.
Lucien laughed. “You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I do,” she replied with an audible smile. She twisted off her helmet, and Brak did the same.
Lucien followed suit, and took in a deep breath of the ship’s air. Despite how stale and sterile it smelled, somehow it still smelled sweet. “We’re going home,” he whispered.
Chapter 38
Astralis
“Is something wrong?” Atara asked, her gaze flicking from her mother to her father and back again.
“No sweetheart, I just need to have a talk with your father about grown-up stuff. We’ll be right outside on the deck, okay? If you need us, all you have to do is come get us.”
“How come Theola gets to listen?”
Lucien adjusted his grip to keep her from sliding down his hip.
“Because she’s just a baby, and you’re too young to babysit,” Tyra explained.
“It’s about me, isn’t it.” Atara crossed her arms over her chest and pouted.
“No, sweetheart, it’s not,” Tyra replied, shaking her head. “Why don’t you go play in your room? We won’t be long.” With that, Tyra led the way to the balcony. She opened the sliding door and a blast of frigid air hit them.
Lucien shivered as he turned and shut the door behind them. Tyra wasted no time activating the balcony’s heat shield. While she did that, Lucien waved at the fire pit to ignite it. The artificial logs burst into flames, and they sat on a bench by the fire, warming their hands and feet. The sky was clear and blue today. No wonder it was so cold.
“Are your ARCs offline?” Tyra asked.
Lucien nodded.
“Good. Then it’s safe to speak.”
“What are we going to do?” Lucien asked.
Tyra appeared to consider that. “We don’t know how many people have been affected by this, but we do know who the key ones are.”
“Chief Ellis, Admiral Stavos, General Graves... and someone in the Resurrection Center, possibly Director Helios,” Lucien said.
“And Atara,” Tyra said.
“But why her? She’s just a kid. What’s she got to do with anything?” Lucien asked.
Tyra shook her head. “I don’t know, but I do know how to fix it. We need to get to the Resurrection Center. From there we can roll back the changes to the people we know are infected.”
“We’re not going to have an easy time securing the Resurrection Center,” Lucien said. “It has better security than almost anywhere else on Astralis, and you can bet that as soon as we trip the alarms, General Graves is going to send thousands of Marines in after us.”
“How long do you think we’ll have?”
Lucien shook his head. “Not long enough to get access to the data or roll back any changes.”
“Maybe we don’t need to. All we really need to do is prove that there’s been tampering with people’s memories, and identify what the Faros did to Ellis and the others. At that point even the Marines will stop following their orders.
“You haven’t had a lot of experience with military discipline, have you? The squad sergeants aren’t just going to take our word for it.”
“So we show them,” Tyra said. “We find a way to convince them. We have to. The question is how do we hold them off until we’ve had a chance to find incriminating evidence?”
“Hold the center ransom,” Lucien decided. “If we’re threatening to destroy everyone’s clones and the backups of their consciousness, the Marines will have to negotiate. We demand that one or more of them come and witness what we’ve found, giving us a chance to prove our suspicions. That should get their attention. What kind of terrorists would make demands like that? At the very least they’ll have to concede that we believe Astralis has been taken over by Faros.”
“That might just work,” Tyra said. “But we’re going to need help, and we don’t even know who we can trust.”
“We know we can trust ourselves, and I know I can trust Brak.”
“How do you know that?” Tyra asked.
“He was with me the whole time when the Faros were invading, and they never touched him.”
“Are there any others you could ask?”
“That I know for sure haven’t been compromised?” Lucien shook his head. “No.”
“I might know someone,” Tyra said. “Commander Wheeler. She was with me on the bridge when the others were affected. They didn’t get to her. She was the acting commander of Astralis while Admiral Stavos was out of commission.”
“You think you can convince her to help us? If you can’t, she could have us arrested.”
“Then we’ll have to make sure we’re convincing,” Tyra said.
<
br /> “What would she add to our team?”
“She has access to the bridge. She could let us know when the Marines have been alerted, how many, and where they’re coming from,” Tyra said. “She might even be able to help us get into the center.”
“She’s an asset, then. What about you?” Lucien asked, staring pointedly at her.
Tyra blinked. “What about me?”
“You’re not trained for this kind of thing. You’re a politician, and before that, a scientist.”
“I’m not sitting on the sidelines.”
“I didn’t say you were, but you could compromise the whole operation by coming along.”
“So what do you propose I do?”
Lucien considered that for a moment. “We could use a distraction, something that will also allow us to get Ellis, Stavos, Graves, and maybe even Director Helios all in one place. Can you think of anything that might work for that?”
Tyra’s brow furrowed. “They’ve all been subverted by the Faros, so we might just raise their suspicions by trying to do that.”
“There’s got to be some kind of legitimate excuse to get them all in one place, but not just them.”
“What about a charity banquet to raise funds for the families who lost their homes in Fallside?”
Lucien smiled. “That sounds perfect. And as the councilor of Fallside, it makes sense that you’d suggest and organize such an event. While you’re hosting the banquet, you’ll be able to keep an eye on everyone for us. At the same time that you’re doing that, Brak and I will find a way to sneak in to the center and plant our bomb.”
Tyra blinked. “I thought you were just going to threaten to blow the center?”
“I am, but if it’s a bluff, it won’t be long before the ship’s cameras and sensors give us away and Marines storm the place. We need a real bomb, or this isn’t going to work.”
Tyra’s eyes went huge. “Where are you going to get a bomb?”
“I know a few illegal arms dealers.”
“Aren’t all of them in the correctional center?”
“Some. Not all. One guy was particularly slick. We couldn’t pin him with anything. Joe Coretti.”
Dark Space Universe (Books 1-3): The Third Dark Space Trilogy (Dark Space Trilogies) Page 54
