by David Mack
A sick twist of terror in Theriault’s gut churned sour bile into her throat. “Helm! Report!”
Nizsk struggled to make the helm obey her commands. “The dark energy core is consuming the storm—and acting as a magnet for all the distortion effects it created.” She looked back at Theriault. “And to get to the core, it all has to go through us.”
“Full reverse! Get us as far from that thing as you can!”
“We can barely hold position,” Nizsk said, contending with the stuttering helm console. “Unless we restore full power in the next ten seconds, we’ll be pulled—”
The ship ceased its quaking, and the helm controls flared back to steady brightness. Nizsk keyed commands into the helm, and the cataclysmic vista on the viewscreen retreated and vanished behind a thick blanket of clouds blackened by rain and limned by lightning. Within seconds, the forward perspective recovered its view of the horizon, and the haze of atmosphere faded to reveal the perfect clarity of space.
Only then did Nizsk pause in her efforts to swivel her chair and tell Theriault, “Full power restored, Commander. We’re clear of the storm and have assumed a standard orbit.”
Too grateful and relieved to mock the pilot for stating the obvious, Theriault nodded once and replied without sarcasm, “Thank you, Ensign.” And thank you, Cahow and Threx. She made a mental note to add commendations to the two engineers’ personnel records.
Sorak left his usual post to check the readouts at the sensor console. He stared into the blue glow of the hooded display while adjusting controls with both hands simultaneously. “Good news, Commander. The imminent coronal mass ejection on Anura’s parent star appears to be abating. Based on its current dissipation rate, I predict it will degrade to an impressive but ultimately harmless solar flare in approximately one hour and eleven minutes.”
“What about the distortion field on the planet?”
He adjusted the sensors and peered once more at the hooded screen. “Fading rapidly. The implosion of the dark energy complex appears to be complete. The siphon has been disrupted, and it is no longer producing new distortion waves.” He stood and faced her. “The effects of the improbability field will taper off and vanish entirely within the next four hours.”
Theriault drew a deep breath and exhaled to expel the tension she had let build up inside her over the past day. She aimed a sidelong look at Sorak. “You don’t drink, do you?”
“If you mean intoxicants, no.”
“Your loss.” She got up from the command chair and headed aft. “You have the conn. If anyone needs me, I’ll be in the mess hall—teaching the food synthesizer how to make a gimlet.”
24
Just before Captain Terrell arrived at the door to sickbay, it opened and disgorged the eight Austaran astronauts, who each shook his hand and thanked him, one by one, before they descended the ladder to the cargo deck. Their words of gratitude and their valedictions came so quickly after one another that he barely had time to acknowledge each before the next began. Secretly, he was relieved at the brevity of their farewells, as the hectic pace of the moment made it possible for him to hide the fact that he hadn’t learned any of their names except their commander’s. Just as fortunate, Beiana was the last one to exit sickbay and seize Terrell’s hand.
“We can never thank you or your crew enough, Captain. Not just for saving our lives on the station, but for all you’ve done for our world and our people—and the risks you faced to do it.” He clasped both of his enormous, long-fingered hands around Terrell’s right hand. “You all have oceans of kindness running in your veins, and my people will remember this—always.”
Terrell bowed his head. “You’re more than welcome, Commander.” He extricated his hand from Beiana’s grasp. “We’re glad we could help in your hour of need.”
Beiana gently grasped Terrell’s shoulder. “Until we meet again, may sea and stars protect you, my friend.” With that, he followed his crew down the ladder to the cargo bay, whose ramp Terrell heard being opened to permit their departure to Anura’s surface.
Free of the parade of astronauts, he entered sickbay. Doctor Babitz stood between the two biobeds, checking the readouts from the displays above each one. In the bed on her left lay Ensign Taryl; in the other was Petty Officer Threx. To Terrell’s right, Nurse Tan Bao removed a dermal regeneration patch from Doctor Kavalas’s forearm. The Austaran scientist tested the newly formed tissue with a gingerly touch of his fingertips. “Remarkable,” he said, with hushed awe. “If not for the discoloration, you’d never know I’d been burned.”
“The color will normalize over the next day,” Tan Bao said. “The synthetic pigments in the patch will adapt to mimic the natural pigments in your epidermis. By tomorrow, no one will ever be able to tell you were injured.”
Kavalas stared in fascination at his arm. “Incredible. Simply incredible.” He looked up and noticed Terrell. “Captain! Is the report from your bridge crew correct? The improbability field vanished?”
“All except a few lingering pockets,” Terrell said. “But their intensity is now only a tiny fraction of what it was before we shut down the siphon. The last of the effects will fade within the hour. Welcome back to normal, Doctor.”
“I’m sure Commander Beiana and his crew have already thanked you—”
“They have. Thoroughly.”
After a humbled pause, Kavalas continued. “Still, it seems only right to thank you and your crew again, Captain. If not for you, my error would have condemned my entire world to annihilation.” A melancholy air overtook him. “I owe you a debt I can never repay.”
“You owe us nothing.” He picked up Kavalas’s jacket from atop Doctor Babitz’s desk and handed it to him. “But if you want to thank us, do it by learning from your mistakes and charting a new path forward for your people.”
Kavalas pulled on his jacket. “I don’t know how to do that. When I leave this ship, I’ll need to face my tribune and my people, and own up to my part in this catastrophe. After that? My career will be over. My scientific legacy will be reduced to a cautionary tale.”
“Not necessarily,” Terrell said. “Your career’s not over unless you stop working. Which means there’s still time for you to change your narrative.”
His words of encouragement were met by a dubious frown. “How? Who would ever let me near their research? Why would any of my people ever trust me again?”
“Because I’ll tell your tribune, and anyone else who’s willing to listen, that we couldn’t have saved this world without you. Yes, you’ll admit your errors. But we’ll vouch for your noble intentions—and your courage in correcting your own mistake.”
Kavalas was taken aback by Terrell’s proposal. “But—I think we both know that’s not entirely true, Captain. I played a minor part. Why give me such unearned praise?”
He led Kavalas out of sickbay, toward the ladder. “Because I think you really did have the best of intentions. And because I think that people of good conscience deserve a second chance after they’ve made an honest mistake.” He stopped beside the ladder and turned back to face the humbled scientist. “What matters now is how hard you’re willing to work to tip the scales of your life’s measure back toward virtue.”
Kavalas nodded. “Thank you, Captain. You must be a wise man among your people.”
“Not as wise as the man who once wrote ‘No man is as good as the best thing he has ever done, or as bad as the worst thing he has ever done.’ Don’t lose heart, Doctor. We all have our moments of triumph as well as our moments of shame.”
Kavalas was still processing that thought when Theriault lurched out of the mess hall holding a cocktail glass half-filled with a pale greenish-white beverage. “I did it! I mastered the synthetic gimlet! Who wants—” She collided with Terrell and sloshed half her drink across the front of his jumpsuit. “Oops! I guess that means drinks are on the captain!”
/> Terrell looked at the sodden front of his uniform, then at his besotted first officer, and finally back at Kavalas. “My case in point.”
• • •
It was the craziest game Carod had ever played, and it wasn’t even a game, really. Flipping a sun-star token, a relic from the age when Austarans had used metal disks as currency, was more of a distraction, a way to pass the time while exiled from the house by her parents, who had spent most of the last day and night fretting over some mysterious voices on the radio that they’d forbidden her to hear. Cast out onto the roofed porch of her family’s vacation cabin, she had contented herself with watching the sun set and the moons rise. With watching the stars wheel past overhead. With waking to the glow of sunlight piercing the forest.
And with flipping the coin. Its two sides were distinctive. One bore the image of a circle inside a five-pointed star; the other, a sunburst. Carod had never been good at math, but she had understood enough to know that when one flipped a sun-star coin, half the time it should come up sun, and the other half it should land stars. It was a symbol of fairness.
One idle flip after another, she had taken only passing notice of the results. Then she had realized she had counted no fewer than seven consecutive results of sun. Intrigued, she had decided to keep count, to see if what her teacher had told her was true. A hundred flips later, she’d seen a hundred more suns, and no stars. Her parents had been too involved in their own drama to pay attention to her discovery, but she had kept going anyway.
All evening, even after the sun had gone down, she had flipped the coin. All night, until she had grown too tired to keep counting. And again this morning, as soon as she had rubbed the sleep from her eyestalks. Attentive and dutiful, she had recorded the result of each flip with a notch on the posts of the covered porch. She flipped it again, watched it spin and tumble over her head, then caught it in her palm and slapped it onto the back of her hand.
For the 2,319th time in a row, it landed sun-up.
Another flip. It had almost become rote, she had repeated the action so many times. The bright coppery disk spun and flashed in the morning light, then fell back to her hand. She caught it and slapped it onto the back of her other hand once more.
Stars.
She stared at it, dumbfounded. After all this time, after what had seemed an unbreakable streak of perverted fortune, the weirdness had come to an end.
She flipped it twice more, just to see what would happen.
First it came up sun. Then it landed stars.
Carod pocketed the coin. So much for that.
All was quiet inside the cabin, so she slipped inside and made her way to the kitchen to fix herself breakfast. Her parents were asleep, but she knew she wanted to be in and out as quickly as she could. A beautiful day was dawning, and she didn’t want to miss a moment of it.
• • •
As homecomings went, this one was more subdued than most. The eight returning astronauts were welcomed back to Anura by a sizeable throng of well-wishers, and there was more than a moderate degree of surprise at the role an alien vessel had played in their rescue, despite the Austarans’ previous knowledge of the existence of starfaring intelligent species.
Terrell ascribed the muted celebrations to the fact that so much of Anura’s capital city was still smoldering from its close brush with cataclysm. Many of its great towers had been shattered by the meteoric bombardment. Others had toppled as victims of earthquakes. A few had collapsed without apparent cause, victims of nothing more than improbability run amok.
Watching the astronauts shake hands with members of the public, Terrell turned to Tribune Saranda, who stood beside him on the top level of a scaffold hastily erected in one of the capital’s sprawling, beautifully landscaped parks. “It was a lovely ceremony, Madam Tribune.”
“Thank you. A shame so many could not be here to share it with us.”
He had no words of solace that were equal to the hundreds of thousands of souls who had perished on Anura over the last day and a half. All he could offer her was a sad nod of agreement and a soft reply of, “Very true.”
She turned away from the festivities transpiring below. Terrell pivoted with her and noticed a subtle shift in her countenance, from one of quiet hope to one of somber reflection. “We have paid a terrible price for ambition. We thought we were ready to plunder the secrets of species much older and more advanced than ourselves. But we were wrong.” She turned her gaze toward the horizon. “We would have lost everything if not for the valiant deeds of you and your crew, Captain.” Her mien brightened as she faced him. “Thank you for showing us that some alien cultures are worthy of our trust. Now, tell me—how can we thank you?”
“First,” Terrell said, “you could make certain your scientists stop tinkering with dark energy technology.”
Saranda slowly inflated her vocal sac, then nodded. “That technology will be banned, Captain, I give you my word. Now that your vessel has shown us that matter-antimatter power is both safe and reliable, that will be the energy source we rely upon as we look to begin our own journeys to the stars.” She turned a despondent look at her damaged, smoke-shrouded capital. “Though I fear we have much work to do here, rebuilding our own world, before we seek to plant our banner on others.”
“The good news, Madam Tribune, is that you don’t have to do it alone—not if you don’t want to. If your people would like help rebuilding—and taking your first steps to the stars—the Federation would be glad to offer its assistance, without cost or preconditions.”
“Your people are that generous? They would give so much, and ask nothing in return?”
“Nothing but friendship,” Terrell said. “Which would be yours to give or refuse.”
She offered him her hand. “I would be a fool to deny my people such a friend.” They shook hands. “Captain, please tell your Federation that on behalf of Anura and the Austaran people, I formally request its assistance—and we will welcome its friendship.”
“It’ll be my pleasure, Madam Tribune.”
Now this, Terrell reflected, is cause for celebration.
25
The entire crew was back aboard, and all systems were once again functioning properly. All the damage the Sagittarius had sustained over the past two days had been repaired sufficiently for the ship to resume normal operations. Now that the Archer-class scout vessel was safely back in orbit above Anura, things had quieted down enough that Crewman Torvin had been able to persuade the Master Chief to let him slip out of engineering to attend to some personal business.
Now he halted in the open doorway of sickbay, a bundle of nerves in a baggy green jumpsuit, his finlike Tiburonian ears burning with the heat of anxiety and embarrassment. He had hoped to find Ensign Taryl still confined to a biobed, recovering from the injuries she had suffered during the escape from the dark energy complex. Instead, she was on her feet and rolling up the sleeves of her own green coverall.
Think of something to say, Torvin exhorted himself. Something cool or clever or—
She noticed him and turned his way. “Hey, Tor.”
“Hey.” He felt like he might just collapse and die on the spot. Real clever.
Taryl circled around the biobed and walked his way. “Doc says I’m cleared for duty.”
“That’s great. But you know, maybe you, um, should take it easy for a day or two.”
She shook her head. “Nah. I feel great.” A playful poke at his chest. “Thanks to you.”
He tried to be nonchalant. “Um, well, y’know—I helped.”
His attempt at modesty seemed to amuse her. “Dastin already told me that you were the one who saw me. He said if you hadn’t stopped him, he’d have kept on going.”
“Well, yeah, but I went first. If he’d been on point—”
“He also said you rigged that lever out of junk.” She pressed her warm, s
oft green palm to his pale cheek, preempting his next attempt to deflect praise. “I wouldn’t be alive if not for you, Tor. You saved my life.” She withdrew her hand and smiled. “You’re a good friend.”
The word friend cut him to the bone. He tried to hide his bitter disappointment.
“Thanks. I’m glad you’re feeling better.”
She tilted her head as she studied his reaction. “You sure you’re okay?”
He doubled down on his air of feigned cool. “What? Me? Sure.”
A knowing smirk magnified her charms. “This isn’t about that kiss, is it?”
“What? No. No, of course not. I mean, I know that was just—it was crazy, right? I mean, that kind of thing doesn’t happen every day. It was one in a billion, right?”
A winsome smile. “One in a billion? Yeah, I’d say so.”
“I figured.” An abashed slump of his shoulders. “I knew I couldn’t get that lucky twice in one lifetime.”
She reached up and caressed the edge of his jaw with the back of her hand, then traced his lower lip with her thumb. “There’s more to love than luck, Tor.”
He had no idea what she was talking about, but as she stepped past him and left sickbay, he beamed with joy. Right up until the moment he turned to face Captain Terrell.
“What are you smiling about, Torvin?”
Shocked back into the moment, Torvin felt his grin vanish. Theriault and the Master Chief followed the captain into sickbay. The three of them fixed their stern sights on Torvin. Like a small herbivore confronted by three apex predators, he backpedaled against a biobed, swallowed hard, and muttered, “Nothing, sir.”
The captain glanced back at the first officer and the chief engineer, then looked young Torvin in the eye. “I’ve just had a very interesting conversation with the XO and the Master Chief about your performance over the last two days.”
