by M. R. Forbes
It was another chilling thought. They might not be able to tell their enemies apart from their allies. In fact, every soul on the Schism could be one of them, and he would never know.
"That was the last thing I thought would happen today."
Millie laughed. "Yesterday, now." She leaned into him and kissed him softly. "I'm glad you're still alive."
"I'm glad medical wasn't damaged in our run. I take it Cormac carried me down?"
"Yes. We had to leave Watson unattended for a while. Fortunately, the troops are a bit more concerned with saving humanity than putting down a child molester right now."
"I owe him a cigar or something. Do you think Hubble can get me one?"
"I'll see that he does. It might be a while if he doesn't have one squirreled away somewhere already."
"Thanks. I do have one question: why did you send Cormac up, instead of just using the implant kill switch to take him out for me?"
She stared at him for a moment, and he understood.
"There is no implant kill switch."
"No. I lied about that. Most recruits figure it out in a couple of days. You've been too busy with other things."
"Like not dying. It doesn't matter, I never intended to run."
"I know."
They started moving again, heading towards the lift.
"So what's the plan?" Mitchell asked. Each step sent a shiver of fire through his side. It would take a few days for the pain to fade.
"We keep going. I have to admit, every hour that passes I get more restless, more frustrated. Watson estimated that their ships are moving at least three times faster than the Schism."
"It didn't help that I was offline for eight hours."
"No. If Lopez weren't dead, I would have crushed his throat before I airlocked him." The scary, endearing part was that she wasn't joking. "For now, let's get you back to your bunk so you can rest and watch the streams. I'd bring you back to my quarters, but they're a disgusting mess. I'm going to be in Yasil's room for the foreseeable future."
"Who was Yasil?" Mitchell asked.
"Our one and only doctor. He was sent here after he was court-martialed for accepting a bribe to let a patient die. He swore he didn't do it, that he was set up, the entire year he was here. He didn't report for duty one day, and we found hm hanging in his room."
"Suicide?"
"I would wonder, except he was a doctor. Nobody on this ship wanted anything to happen to him. That was before we got the newest tech to field trial from Command." Her voice dropped, and she looked down. "We lost a lot of people because we had no one to patch them up. We don't have the resources to carry dead weight."
Mitchell swallowed the lump that ran into his throat. "You mean-"
"Yes. I had to, and it was killing me. I begged Cornelius for another doctor, for bots, for something. He came through for me on that one, but it took some arguing."
They reached the lift and took it up to B-deck. Mitchell noticed a chill in the air when they arrived.
"Two of the heating units are malfunctioning. Singh is going to bring Alice up to help her fix it once we finish reviewing the data."
"Alice?"
"One of Shank's grunts. She's an exo mechanic, so she's already good with her hands."
Ilanka was in her bunk when they arrived, her own eyes closed and twitching. She seemed to sense he was there because her eyes opened as he entered the room.
"Mitchell," she said loudly, jumping to her feet and holding out her arms before pausing. "Better not, it will hurt, no?"
"I've had worse, but it's pretty sore."
"I told you that you need more practice with sticks. Stick is like knife."
"You did, and I wish we'd had more time for it."
"Is good to see you back on your feet. Captain, any news?"
"Not yet," Millie said.
Ilanka frowned. "I am hopeful but worried. Exelon is not too far from Liberty, depending on which direction they go."
Mitchell put his hand on her shoulder. "We'll stop them."
"Or die trying," Ilanka said.
"Let's get back to it," Millie said. "Ilanka, with Lopez gone and Mitchell injured, would you mind playing nurse a little bit and making sure he eats and drinks?"
"It is no thing."
"Thank you," Mitchell said.
"I'm going to head over to engineering to see how Singh and Watson are coming along. They started putting together a more systemic approach to the data a few hours ago and-" She paused. Her focus shifted inward. "Cormac? Cormac, slow down. What? Damn it, Firedog, shut up!" She huffed a breath of frustrated air, and then Mitchell heard the tone of the channel opening on his p-rat.
"I said I found something," Cormac said. He was breathing heavy, excited. "Me, of all people. I've never done a good thing in my life that didn't involve my dick."
"Cormac!" Millie snapped.
"Sorry, Captain. I'm just excited. Nobody's paying attention to Watson, so I got bored and started watching the streams. I found something, I'm sure of it."
"Meet us in engineering," Millie said.
"Yes, ma'am."
The channel closed. Mitchell and Millie looked at each other.
"What is it?" Ilanka asked.
"Cormac thinks he found something," Mitchell said.
"Cormac?"
They hurried back to the lift and down to engineering, finding Cormac, Watson, and Singh waiting for them. They had pulled up the stream onto a holo-projector, which Singh was controlling through her ARR.
"I was just watching the diaries, you know," Cormac said. He was still excited about his find, his voice shaking and the words flowing quickly. "So I'm watching the ancient girl's selfie, and I'm thinking, wow, she's so damn hot, and I'm not really paying attention to what she's saying, you know? And that's usually a bad thing, because I need to do better paying attention when people talk, at least that's what Shank keeps telling me well that's what everyone keeps telling me and-"
"Cormac, get to the point," Millie said.
"Just go through the videos slow, really slow," he said.
Singh followed his direction. "This is one frame per second," she said. It barely moved. "It will take fourteen days to get through the entire set at this speed."
"We can't wait fourteen days," Millie said.
"Can't you guys write a program or something?" Cormac asked. "Like I was saying, I wasn't really paying attention to her, except I could see the very top of her cleavage through her flight suit. Then I notice that for a blip, just a blip really, that her tits are gone and there's something else there. I didn't see what it was, but there was a lot of red. I thought it was just a problem with the stream, but then it happened a few more times while I was watching and I was like, 'Firedog, this can't be right,' and so I waited for it to show a few more times and then I decided to tell you, Captain, because you said if we have anything at all no matter how small..." His voice trailed off.
Watson had gone to sit at his desk, and was doing something on the embedded touchscreen.
"You said red?" he asked.
"Yeah, I remember seeing red."
"Give me a few minutes."
They all waited, the tension building in the room. Every minute that passed was a minute they couldn't get back, and they all knew it.
"Singh, let me take the projector," Watson said. "I already have an algorithm to filter video by colors. Another little side project I was working on during my downtime, since there isn't much else to do on board. It will only play back frames with a red element in the lower center quadrant." It was the area where Katherine's chest was sitting on the streams.
The stream skipped between frames but was mostly steady. It showed Katherine standing in the same position as the other videos, except now she had a red scarf around her neck.
"Goliath is waiting," she said to the camera, her face calm and serious. "25.6, -69.6, -123, -7.85, -24.5, -6.49."
That was it. Three words and a string of numbers.
"Can you save that separately?" Millie asked.
"I already did," Watson said.
"Send it to Briggs, and tell her to get her ass to the bridge. We're leaving now." She practically ran from the room without another word.
"What's the big deal?" Cormac asked, confused.
Mitchell couldn't hold back his smile or his sense of relief. Even the pain of his wounds vanished in his sudden excitement and joy. "You did it, Firedog. You frigging did it."
"Did what, Captain?"
He had no idea. He was a ground-pounder, not a pilot. Mitchell laughed.
"They're coordinates, you idiot," Singh said. "Star coordinates. You found Goliath."
51
If Mitchell had been a hero for taking the Shot Heard 'Round the Universe, it was nothing compared to Cormac's newfound status on the Schism. He was congratulated and thanked everywhere he went, and he even got one of the female soldiers to say yes to his propositions. He had seen through the obvious and discovered the subliminal message planted in the stream. A message that had gone undiscovered for over four hundred years.
While Cormac wasn't smart enough to consider or understand the implications, the whole idea of the thing was mind-boggling to Mitchell. Katherine Asher had left the coordinates to the Goliath before it had disappeared. That meant that she knew the trip was going to be one-way. It also meant that she knew the ship would be needed at some point in the future.
How?
He tried to work it through in his mind. He tried to talk it through with Millie, Watson, and Singh. Their best guess was the most logical. The origin timeline that M had arrived from wasn't the origin of their enemy. It was possible, likely even, that the ship that had crashed on Earth all of those years ago was one of theirs, perhaps the first to use the eternal engine to travel into the infinite future.
He had thought the war against the aliens was only starting.
For all any of them knew, it had been going on for an eternity beyond measure.
The coordinates pointed to a star near the very edge of the known galaxy, slightly beyond the Rim. It was a six-month journey from there back to Earth for them. Two months for the enemy. From their position near Liberty, it was still going to be a three-week trip.
"What do you think the odds are that it will take them two weeks to find the hidden message?" Shank asked. He was sitting with Mitchell in the mess hall, eating his share of the last of their non nutri-ration food. The concoction of oatmeal, sugar, and additives made it taste slightly better than the bars they would be stuck gnawing on for the foreseeable future. They were two weeks into their journey through hyperspace, a week out of the drop point.
"That's a question for Watson," Mitchell said.
Shank's face twisted. "I understand why he's still alive. That doesn't mean I want to be anywhere near him. I might not be able to control myself."
"I hear you. Necessity, not desire. My personal opinion is that they found the message right away, or they won't find it at all. Either way, they'll either already be there or they won't. In one case, we're dead. In the other we may have a fighting chance."
"A slim fighting chance?"
"Better than none."
"Damn straight." He finished his oatmeal and stood up. "I'll see you around, Ares. I need to go meet Alice for a lesson on exo-suit repair. Since Millie is transitioning her to systems, someone has to do the dirty work."
"Why you?"
"Not just me. My entire squad, minus Cormac. Not because he's a streamstar, because he's too dumb to handle anything as complex as a suit. To be honest, we should have done this training months ago. The shit clogging the thrusters really motivates a grunt." He laughed and started walking away.
Mitchell sat by himself for a while before leaving the mess hall and heading up to the bridge. He knew he could find Millie there, using the command chair's neural link to run simulations through the Schism's AI. They were preparing for the worst, ready to put up the most valiant fight they could if the enemy had beat them to the coordinates. There were two nukes left aboard the Schism, and she was hoping that if it came to a battle they would at least take one of the bastards with them.
Her eyes were twitching when he entered the bridge and circled around to the front of the chair. He had grown a real fondness for her in the weeks since they had started sleeping together. It wasn't anything as committed as love, but he did have a real respect for her as both an Admiral and a person. She was more than the sum of her parts: strong and decisive, intelligent and thoughtful. Her reputation on the ship had been as a cold, hard ruler. Sure, she had made tough decisions that they didn't always like. It came with the territory. The imminent alien threat had shown another side of her, and the crew was responding to it.
"Captain," Mitchell said, trying to get her attention.
She raised her hand, motioning for him to wait. He stood silently for a few minutes, until she cursed and her eyes focused on him.
"Zero out of fifty-four now," she said. "No matter what I do, this tub just doesn't have the maneuverability, especially with one of the mains offline."
Singh had instructed the AI to implement a simulation of the alien weapon, and changed the parameters for speed based on what they had observed. So far, it had left the alien ships completely unbeatable. Even when she ran simulations of Alliance battleships against the modified targets, they still lost.
"The Alliance has been dragging its heels on research and development for years," Mitchell said. "The Federation dreadnought took out two dozen warships and fired on Liberty at the same time. We only beat it because we got lucky."
"We have some of the latest Federation models loaded into the simulator. They can't beat the enemy ship either."
"Even the dreadnought?"
"We don't have parameters for one, it's still too new. It's possible that our simulations are off, that the alien ships aren't as maneuverable, fast, or shielded as we think."
"They could be more of all of those things."
She pursed her lips. "Yes. We haven't even taken into account those small missiles that your fighter has on board. They can overcome the shields on patrollers, and we don't even have that much protection."
It was a grim outlook.
"Let's pray that we beat them to the Goliath, then," Mitchell said, forcing a smile. So much of this was out of their control.
"I do. Every couple of hours or so. It isn't enough." She looked at him then, a soft look of caring mixed with a hard look of a commanding officer. "I ran some simulations based on a model Singh put together of your S-17."
He had a feeling he knew what she was about to say. "Millie, wait-"
"We haven't seen any fighters from the enemy. Your ship can outmaneuver anything it throws at you and outrun everything else. You can't fight them, but you can escape them."
"And leave you to die? I'm not going to do that."
"You said yourself that you're the one destined to beat them."
"No. M said I almost defeated them. Almost. I don't know how long this has been going on, but I don't think humanity has won yet."
"It's a chance."
"A slim chance."
"Which is better than no chance. You like to say that, too." She was starting to get angry.
"The S-17 doesn't have the FTL range. I'll be left drifting out in the middle of nowhere, and you, Ilanka, Shank, everyone will be dead. No. I'll take my chances here."
"I'm not asking you, Captain," she said, getting to her feet and putting herself in his face. "When we drop out of FTL, your orders are to launch in the S-17 immediately. If we won the race, then you come back aboard. If not, you get out of there."
"Forget my orders. Send me back down to storage. I'm not doing it. I already lost one ship, and I'm not going to lose another."
Her face was turning red, her eyes crinkled. Her bionic hand gripped his forearm, squeezing tight enough that he cried out.
She let go, tears running down her cheeks.
"Damn it Mi
tchell, I don't want you to die."
"I'd rather die than be alone again, floating in space, waiting for my air to run out while the enemy eradicates mankind. Trust me, you aren't saving me from anything." His own emotions were running hot. Leave her? Leave the Schism? Run away like a coward? Leave her?
They reached out for one another at almost the same time. They kissed, deep and passionate, the fires of their temper, their fear, and their affection mingling into an urgent desire. He could have pushed her down onto the command chair and had sex with her right there.
Of course, he didn't. They didn't. They broke apart, hearts pounding, bodies shaking. They looked at one another.
"You are," she said, her voice cold. "If Goliath is out there, you may be able to get past them to reach it. You can't argue that."
He looked into her eyes. He knew then that she had made up her mind. She would make him do it, even if it meant the end of their relationship. Even if it was the last thing he wanted. The odds that both Goliath and the aliens would be in the same space and the ship wouldn't be destroyed or under their control were even slimmer than their odds of survival.
He didn't argue, even though he could have. He had learned from Ella when to keep his mouth shut and accept his fate. He wanted to be a pilot, and not a commander? That was the price to pay.
"The good news is, you won't be alone."
52
Mitchell had never been so nervous in his entire life.
Even back on Earth, when he had driven out to the canyon with Aimee Rogers and lost his virginity under the light of a half-moon, he hadn't been anywhere near as anxious.
"Slow. Steady," he said. His foot tapped, his heart raced.
"What did you say?" Singh asked from the back seat of the S-17.
"Trying to calm my nerves," he replied.
"You should have taken some of the sedatives from medical. I have a few here, but I can't reach them through the flight suit."
He couldn't help but smile. Was that why she was always so flat?
