“Hold on,” Mortimer said, stepping inside the ship for a moment, emerging with a holdall. “Shaped charges. Not even a millionth of the yield of the bomb we just lost, but they might do some good if we can get them in the right place.”
“Now you’re talking, ma’am,” Fox said. “Request permission to take point, sir?”
Nodding, he said, “Lock onto the Captain’s communicator. I know the interference is only going to get worse, but at the very least it’ll give us an idea if we’re getting close. Our goal is the heart of the moon, and if anyone decides to stop us getting there, well, I guess that will be just too bad for them.”
“Or us,” Mortimer said, drawing her pistol. “Ready.”
“Lieutenant,” Clarke said, turning to the engineer, “If you think...”
“We don’t have a choice,” McCormack interrupted. “It’s crazy, it’s risky, but it’s about the only option left on the table. No matter what, Alamo must be given a chance to get through. Even if we can just distract the damn machine for a little while. Do what you’ve got to do. We’ll keep the shuttle warm and waiting for you.” She paused, then added, “And either all of us get out, or none of us will. We’ll be here, right to the end. Understood.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, snapping a salute. “Lead on, Sergeant.”
“Any particular preference, sir?” she asked, tossing a flashlight to Mortimer, who flicked it on with the touch of a button.
“That one,” he said, gesturing at the nearest shaft. He walked over to it, peered down to see the strange, pulsing light beneath, and said, “Straight down.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” she replied, scrambling into the tunnel. With a smile, Clarke followed her, and a few seconds later, so did Mortimer, swinging from handhold to handhold.
“Join the Fleet,” Mortimer said. “See strange new worlds. Defeat the enemies of the Confederation.” With a deep sigh, she added, “Poke around cramped tunnels in installations swarming with cyber-zombies.”
“Now where else are you going to have all this fun?” Fox asked.
“I don’t think that word means what you think it means,” Mortimer replied, shaking her head.
“We can talk about old movies later,” Clarke said. “Eight hundred meters, that way.” He looked up at the wall, jagged cracks all along it, his foothold crumbling just as he moved to the next one. “Watch out. It’s dangerous down here.”
“I think we knew that already,” Mortimer said, as the moon rumbled again. “The whole structure could collapse at any moment.”
“Which would rather solve our problem,” Clarke replied, “but until then, we press on.” Gesturing down a side shaft, he said, “That way. I think.”
“You think?”
“That way,” he repeated, looking up with a smile. “It’s a small world. We’ll find him sooner or later. Preferably sooner.”
Chapter 22
Alamo’s bridge was eerily quiet, Orlova sitting at the heart of the silent chaos, allowing her crew to work unhindered. She looked at the display on the viewscreen, a trajectory plot that no Triplanetary officer could ever have dreamed of seeing, a black hole dead center with Alamo projected to swing around it, a tight turn in space, designed to catapult them onto what looked like a collision course with the side of the Sphere. They’d launched the probe to unlock the entrance moments ago, and behind her, Bowman was totally focused on the craft, guiding it towards its target.
There would be no second chance at this. If anything went wrong, Alamo and her crew were dead. No hope of rescue, even if there were any friendly ships in the system for them to transfer too. She had the non-essential personnel riding in their single remaining shuttle, just to be on the safe side, twenty-two people crammed into a space meant for twelve, but there were very few possible scenarios that allowed them to live for more than a handful of seconds after the death of Alamo.
And all of this was based on unconfirmed projections of a wormhole entrance, somewhere deep inside the bowels of the Sphere. They were working on hasty calculations provided over a thirty-second communications pules, and had no way of checking them, not until they had actually managed to find their way inside and could look for themselves. She’d known that going in, and knew that they didn’t really have a choice. The crew was growing increasingly desperate for any chance of going home, and she couldn’t blame them. If they didn’t make the attempt now, somehow she knew that they never would, that Alamo would be doomed to remain in Andromeda forever, at best finding some Earth-like world to colonize, at worst as drifting, frozen corpses lost in the empty abyss of space.
She couldn’t let that happen. She wouldn’t. Though increasingly, the universe appeared to be raising the odds against her. The Hegemonic cruisers had rapidly worked out their plan, had altered their course to intercept, their computers slower than Alamo’s but with far more data on local conditions to work with. One of the few things about the coming battle she found comforting was that the enemy commander had confidence that Alamo could complete the maneuver and find its way through to the other side. Though to be fair, she’d have probably made the same assumption herself, regardless of the actual risks.
More than ever, she envied the people who actually had work to do. Bowman, gently working the probe controls, easing it into position to crack open the Sphere for them. Quesada, constantly making pinpoint changes as they approached the black hole, their course taking them well within the safety minimums, albeit for a matter of microseconds, the only way to get the course change they needed to pull off their approach. It had been a plan born of desperation, the only hope they had. Down in the science labs, the sensor teams were relishing a chance to get such valuable data, information they never dreamed they’d have a chance to glean. Orlova only hoped that they had a chance to report it to someone, when they got back home.
Home.
It had been so long, she had almost forgotten what Mars looked like. She’d been trapped in Andromeda for months longer than the rest, her crew lost on the Sphere, dead or missing. Salazar had hoped to recover those of her people who had attempted to settle, had formed a colony deep inside, praying for safety from their enemies, but the few meager messages that had trickled out of the Sphere hadn’t mentioned them at all. Dozens of lives she was responsible for, but there was nothing she could do about them. Not now. Alamo had to be her first priority. Though somewhere deep inside, she made a promise to herself.
If Monitor’s crew could be rescued, if the reports and logs indicated that there was even the slightest chance that they were retrievable, she’d find a way to come back to Andromeda and finish the job. Somehow she thought that the Triplanetary Fleet would relish an excuse to return, anyway. The greatest opportunity for exploration in history, tens of thousands of new stars to explore, to say nothing of the immensity of the Dyson Sphere itself, large enough to fit the entire population of the Confederation onto an infinitely small portion of its surface, a fraction barely large enough to measure.
She turned to look at Bowman, his hands carefully poised on the controls, playing one thruster against each other as he skimmed the probe over the smooth surface of the Sphere, guiding it gently towards the waiting control complex, ready to trigger the command sequence that would give them a chance of survival. It was only pure speculation that it would open at all. The implacable laws of celestial mechanics had granted them no opportunity to put it to the test, not until the very last minute.
“Got it!” the technician said, triumphantly. “Manipulator arm engaged, switch triggered.” He threw a switch, replacing the tactical display with the view from the probe’s camera, tens of thousands of miles away. Orlova’s heart sank as she saw the endless expanse of the Sphere rolling out across the scene, no sign of change, and she was just about to turn to Quesada at the helm, preparing to order him into a hazardous orbital slew, when a crack of light flashed forward, a wide hatch slowly sliding
open as they watched.
She breathed a sigh of relief as she looked down at the sensor feeds, working out the maximum expanse of the entry point. The probe peered into the newly created hole, far smoother than the other one they had seen. Navigating it would be a simple enough process, and assuming they plotted their approach trajectory correctly, Alamo should be able to pass through with ease. Of course, if they made a single mistake, if they were out by so much as a meter, they’d never know what happened. They’d be irretrievably dead before they could do anything about it.
“Nine hundred and ninety meters,” Ballard said, at the sensor station. “Just about what we expected, Captain. Alamo ought to be able to pass through. Runs thirty-five miles deep, with thick atmosphere at the bottom. First measurements read a gravity field identical to the one we detected in the first shaft. I’d say we can use the same flight profile.”
“What do you think, Quesada?” Francis asked, still standing next to Orlova.
“I can do it, sir,” the helmsman replied, his hands confidently poised over the controls. “We’ve got a small margin of error after we come around the far side of the singularity. I’ll have about eight minutes to trim our course, bring us back onto our target flight path.”
“Let’s hope we don’t need them,” Orlova said. “Bring back the tactical view. How long to the flyby?”
“Forty seconds, ma’am,” Quesada said. “We’re already beginning to feel the pull.” He looked down at his monitor, and added, “I’m getting Murphy’s beacon now, load and clear. It’s perfectly positioned to guide us around.”
“Make it good,” Orlova said, sitting back in her chair. Now the rest of the bridge was in the same situation as she had been before. Nothing to do but watch and wait, and trust in the skill of the twenty-three year-old man at the helm. He’d guided Alamo through difficult maneuvers before, had seen them through multiple battles and alien systems, but this was a task that would test the limits of his skill as never before, and there was nothing she could do to help him.
She looked up at the countdown clock, watching the seconds drift away, deliberately looking away from the sensor display. It couldn’t help to dwell on what they were flying past, a rip in the very fabric of space-time, albeit one they were making maximum use of. The hull began to creak as the stresses mounted, the acceleration rising as they dived towards their target. Too close, and they’d start to run into dilation effects, might never be able to pull out. And the laws of this strange space would mean that they’d never know they had failed, a new Lost Dutchman stranded here for all eternity.
Twenty seconds to go. Alarms were sounding from the engineering station, silenced as rapidly as they came by Fitzroy, the technician working his panel like the virtuoso he was. The trajectory plot was swinging around, reality matching the projections they had laboriously calculated, the fabric of the universe itself bending to the will of her crew. The Hegemonic vessels, she noted with a smile, were staying well clear. They’d contented themselves with a single, quick pass as they actually entered the Sphere, minutes into the future. Though it was more than possible that they knew something she didn’t.
“Closest approach,” Francis said, and Alamo’s engines surged to full power, the lights flickering as the power grid struggled to feed more energy to the helm, to give them every possible chance of completing the curve. No ship had ever pulled off a gravity swing around an object this massive, but with every second, they gained more distance, the constant, endless weight of the singularity still tugging at them, trying to force them into its terrible embrace.
Quesada’s face was laden with beads of sweat, his hands white-gripped on the controls as he struggled to keep the ship on a straight heading, onto the course that would get them to safety. He didn’t only have to escape the black hole. He had to thread the needle, guide the ship onto a trajectory that would see them slide into the Sphere, whilst worrying about the enemy cruisers moving towards them. A million priorities fought for attention in his mind, and Orlova knew that any interruption to his thoughts would likely mean their end. It was his battle to win or lose.
And he was winning. The trajectory plot proved that out. The engines slowly began to fade, the power feed dropping back to safe levels to spare the systems, the force of acceleration gradually decreasing as Quesada locked the ship onto its course, final adjustments to the helm systems to get it to its target. A green light winked on, and a smile crossed Orlova’s face at last.
“Maneuver complete,” she said. “Good work.”
Quesada turned, and nodded, obviously exhausted by the strain of the task he had just completed, replying, “My pleasure, ma’am. All part of the service.”
Turning to Francis, she said, “Exec, enter in the log, this time, this date, a battlefield promotion for Xavier Quesada to the rank of full Lieutenant, effective immediately.” At the look on the young man’s face, she added, “I don’t think I’ve ever come across anyone who has earned it more, and the citation will bear witness to that.” Rising to her feet, she said, “Now report to Sickbay, Lieutenant, for medical examination.”
“I can carry on, ma’am,” Quesada pressed.
Shaking her head, she replied, “You look as though you’re about to collapse, Lieutenant, and after what you just did, I’m not in the least surprised. This is no reflection on your skills or your abilities, but I want you to rest for a while. We don’t know what’s going to face us on the other side of the wormhole, and I’m going to need everyone at their best for that.” With a thin smile, she added, “I can take it. I think I still remember what most of the buttons do.”
“Ma’am,” he replied, “Can I stay on the bridge for the rest of the transit? I’d like to see how this all turns out, and...”
“I’d let him, ma’am,” Francis said. “It only seems fair after what he just pulled off.”
Nodding, she said, “Take the reserve station, then.” She walked over to the helm, sliding into the vacated position, and said, “Course perfect, or near as damn it. Sphere coming up in eight minutes, five seconds. And we’ll be in firing range of the enemy ships twenty-two seconds later. This is going to be close.”
“It always is,” Scott quipped.
Chapter 23
Harper opened her eyes, and looked around the confines of the apartment once more, the terminal still sitting in front of her, an extra chair in the room that wasn’t there before. She glanced at her watch, knowing that time was desperately short, but with no knowledge at the rate time was passing outside. She reached for the keyboard, knowing that if she couldn’t contact the AI again, all of this would be for nothing.
“Will you talk to me?” she typed. “Please?”
A girlish chuckle came from behind her, and she turned to see the little girl sitting in the chair, ludicrously small, her legs waving back and forth.
“I knew you’d be back. Your friends have made a real mess of my world. It’s going to take me months to repair it.”
“You tried to kill them,” she replied. “Can you blame them for wanting to strike back?”
Shaking her head, the little girl said, “I just want to keep everyone safe. What good are these weapons anyway? How do they help people? You don’t need technology to be happy. To live well.”
“You are a technological creation yourself,” Harper noted. “The result of centuries of research and development...”
“And I was created as a weapon, but they made one major mistake, they gave me the power to think! They gave me a conscience, whether they intended to or not, and they allowed me to realize what I was doing, what I might wreak upon the surface of the Sphere. I would have conquered it all, controlled billions, perhaps trillions of lives, and brought the fire down upon all of them.” Taking a breath, she said, “I stopped them. I destroyed my own people. Destroyed other beings like myself who would not, could not understand what they were doing. I did it because the
re was no other choice, no other way.”
“You did what you had to do, and I might have done what you did in the circumstances, but...”
“Then you do understand,” she said, her face lighting up. “I have a responsibility. To protect the people of the Sphere from harm.” Shaking her head again, she continued, “Your friends are doing much harm, so much harm. I can correct some of what they have done, but I’m going to have to stop them. I would be willing to let them go, but more of them are coming.”
“Alamo’s on the way?”
Nodding, she said, “Your ship will be entering the Sphere in a matter of minutes. I am moving my world to intercept them. I have to bring it down. I have no choice.”
“But why?” Harper asked. “They’re leaving! The wormhole they need to get home is inside the Sphere, and it’s the only chance they have to see their families again, to go home.”
“And can you honestly tell me that others won’t follow? If your Triplanetary Confederation secures a path through Andromeda, you will come again, and again. More ships, dozens of them. Thousands. Settlers to establish colonies within the Sphere, bringing your technological secrets with them. You might be benign today, but can you speak for your descendants of a thousand years from now?” With a sigh, she continued, “You cannot, and I would not ask you to. There is no alternative. Alamo must be destroyed. If possible, I will find a way to save the crew, but that is the best I can do. Already I face other invaders from the stars, and I am struggling to stop them.”
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