Operation Chimera

by Tony Healey

  From opposite sides of the room, they sized each other up.

  “Nicholas,” the Chief said.

  “David.”

  Macintosh’s face was impassive. “I thought I better come up here, iron a few things out. I’d have seen you sooner.”

  “Shoot,” Driscoll said. “Get it off your chest.”

  “You know if I could’ve got another posting, I would have,” Macintosh said. “But I couldn’t, not in such a short space of time. And besides, I was pretty much ordered to remain with the Manhattan as her Chief of Engineering.”

  “I didn’t want anyone else, either,” Captain Driscoll said. “You’re the best. I know we’ve had our differences. But despite what’s gone on in the past―”

  “Differences? I’d say they’re a lot more than that, Nick, wouldn’t you?” the Chief spat. “Last time I looked, I was not the one responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent men and women.”

  Driscoll didn’t say anything.

  I should’ve expected this at some point. It’s been coming a long time. Years I’ve avoided this confrontation. Now’s the time to face it.

  “Last time I looked, I wasn’t the one with the blood of his shipmates on his hands…” Macintosh continued.

  Now, he snapped.

  “The last time I assessed the situation, I was your Captain,” Driscoll said, his voice louder and more stern.

  Does he not think I’ve thought about these things, too? Does he not realize the pain it has caused me over the years to think about what happened? About the colleagues I failed to protect when the time came?

  The Chief looked away. “You are.”

  “Look, I never pictured us working together again, but here we are. And we both have to deal with it. This ship needs you down there—” he pointed in the exact direction of the engines— “and me up there. It’s just the way it’s worked out,” Driscoll explained. “I tried my best, but there was no one who could replace you. And you know the ship inside out.”

  “You should’ve chosen another ship to order about,” Macintosh said.

  A klaxon fired briefly somewhere, sounding like a distant horn in a fog. For a split second, they might have been a battleship on the open sea.

  “There’s not going to be a problem, is there, Chief?” Driscoll asked.

  The Chief shook his head. “No. No problem. I’ll keep things professional because I know you’ll do the same. Whatever I think of you, I won’t let that get in the way of me performing my duties.”

  “You have my word,” Driscoll told him. “And for what it’s worth, I do appreciate it, David.”

  “Good. Because let’s get one thing straight. They might put you up on some kind of pedestal. The tabloids might paint you as a hero. But me? I know the real Nick Driscoll. Maybe not the man you are now, but the man you used to be. A failure who let everyone under his command, apart from me, die. Until I see that you’re a different man, that’s who you’ll always be for me. That junior Officer who screwed up. All because you didn’t know when to call it a day. You didn’t know there are limits to how far you can push men, women and ships.”

  Driscoll’s eyes became hard pits of darkness. “I do now.”

  He sat motionless, staring through steepled fingers as the Chief turned on his heel and strode out. The dimness suited him; the memories returned, and he shut his eyes.

  The Resolute had been a standard Clayton-class starship, tasked with patrolling the region of space known as the Daifon Warf that stretched from the Tykaran and Olva systems. Whilst the Draxx had a definite presence in the area, the Resolute’s real task was to watch for pirates and smugglers. The last thing they’d expected to see was a Draxx dreadnought come out of nowhere, guns blazing.

  The crew of the Resolute fought valiantly, but the small ship was no match for the enormous Draxx vessel. The Resolute’s Captain ordered a message of surrender be sent to the opposition, at which they stopped firing. He then left in a shuttle craft to talk with the Draxx in person, however before he could dock they opened fire and destroyed the shuttle. They’d only been toying with their human prey. The Draxx had given them a few minutes of hope at survival before dashing it in a fiery bloom of plasma cannons.

  Nicholas Driscoll took the conn as the most senior officer aboard, and ordered the Resolute’s evacuation. The life pods were capable of speeding away while they broadcast a wide-ranging emergency beacon. David Macintosh was one of the officers who opposed Driscoll’s order. They told him it was suicide to leave the ship.

  “We’ve got a better chance than if we stay,” Driscoll had shot back.

  Driscoll repeated the order to abandon ship. He set the auto-pilot to direct the Resolute toward the Draxx dreadnought at full speed in the hope it would destroy the enemy—or at least slow them down enough to give them a chance at survival.

  Driscoll dragged Macintosh into one of the life pods, and together they fled the battered Union starship, watching through the pod’s tiny viewport as the Resolute grew smaller.

  But it didn’t mean they were blind to what happened―before the Resolute could turn, before its engines could fire, before his plan could be executed by the on-board computer―the Draxx delivered several crippling strikes and the Resolute exploded. A series of rippling flashes of yellow, orange, and white filled in the space behind a racing ring of faint energy.

  From the hurtling escape pod, Driscoll and Macintosh were helpless to do anything but gaze on in horror as the dreadnought picked the life pods off one by one. Every hand aboard the Resolute, lost.

  “You killed them all,” Macintosh said over and over again. “You killed them…”

  Driscoll didn’t know how they were ever going to work together, given their history. He had made a call, and it hadn’t paid off. In the process, everyone aboard the Resolute had died. His heart ached just at the memory of that time―his greatest failure. He’d sworn never to allow people to die like that again, never to abandon a ship and put their lives in the hands of fate. He understood why Macintosh felt the way he did.

  But it was imperative the two of them got along.

  There was no choice. Somehow, they had to make it work.

  An hour later, the Manhattan penetrated the outer edge of the Chimera Cluster. It stood before them, a wall of dense peach nebula marbled with violet clouds of disruptive materials. In many ways, its mysterious beauty belied the inherent danger―only a fraction of its interior had been mapped and catalogued by the Terran Union. Space was full of such dangerous areas, the most notorious of which, the Mobius Formation, was a turbulent stretch of nebulous gases, driven by a hurricane of stormy pulsar winds. The gravitational pull of several surrounding pulsars kept it from drifting.

  Then there was the Rishi Drift. Pilots often said it was like riding shotgun on a thunderbolt to fly through the Drift… you were lucky if you got to the other side intact.

  The Cluster’s danger came not so much from her disruptive properties, but that so little was known about it. And to head into uncharted territory, into the unknown, was the greatest danger a starship could ever face.

  Lieutenant Hardy handled the helm with resolve, slowing from Jump at just the right moment. The Manhattan crossed the perimeter of the Cluster at near-Jump speed and Hardy let her coast through on thrusters as she decelerated to galactic standard. The ship jittered as it cut through the nebulous material at the fringe of the Cluster, the volatile elements that comprised the Cluster struck against the hull plating. In many ways, the Manhattan was like a cruise liner plowing through a dense fog on a rough sea.

  Already, the bizarre effects of the Chimera Cluster were causing the ship to shudder and shake. The dampeners worked to lessen its effects and stabilize her.

  Captain Driscoll grabbed a bar overhead. “Well handled, Lieutenant. Okay everyone, let’s get to work. This’ll be rough.”

  The Manhattan passed through hammerhead mountains of volatile cumulus, and in its wake the nebulous gases interacted with the dr
ive plasma, creating rivers of electrical discharge behind them.

  “Rear view,” Driscoll ordered.

  The viewscreen changed to show a panorama of space, as if looking from the aft; the entire bridge flashed shades of blue-violet and white from the storm of space lightning that signaled their passage through the skin of the Cluster. Driscoll imagined a huge balloon, with the Manhattan a pin piercing the rubber membrane. And within the balloon? Peachy colored layers of dense nebula, marbled violet, illuminated here and there by explosions of light. But at its centre was darkness, deep and foreboding.

  And that’s where we’re going. Straight for the mouth of hell. I wonder what Dante would’ve said had he lived to see it.

  He thought of the Joseph Conrad novel Heart of Darkness―hadn’t the narrator of that book similarly headed straight for the dark core of a mysterious land? Down the river, into the jungle, into madness…

  The Manhattan pushed through the last of the Cluster’s outer edge, and burst into the less compacted interior.

  Details of the Conrad novel drifted through Driscoll’s mind at random, offering greater detail though it had been years since he read it. For a time he’d tackled all of the classics. Most he finished, some he didn’t. He remembered the title of that novel, in particular, referred as much to the mission as the narrator himself. True, he had journeyed into darkness, to find a man possessed by shadow. But along the way? Driscoll had come to realize that the narrator had been consumed as much with darkness as his quarry.

  Am I? The incident, other missions I’ve led over the years… am I a ‘Man O’ War’ as the saying goes? Do I have a heart of darkness? Is that why they really wanted me for this? Because they know I’ll cross the line if it comes to it.

  Up ahead the viewscreen changed to show the bow.

  They’re right. I’ll break every rule in the book if it means I can stop something like the Resolute happening again. The Chief doesn’t know…

  “Lieutenant,” Commander Teague addressed Hardy. “Prepare to execute the next Jump.”

  There was simply no way the Manhattan would have been able to make it through the outer edges of the Cluster at Jump speed. At such velocity, her field emitters would have been overcome by the density of what they were travelling through. For the same reason, a starship travelling at Jump speed could not leap through the heart of a sun. Gravity wells and black holes also played hell with navigation. Courses had to be plotted with the utmost precision to take all of that into account. There were occasional accidents, it was true, but on the whole, Jumping was safe. It was the only feasible way to travel among the various star systems. Without it, only generation ships could cover the distance, and one cannot fight and win wars six families later than when one takes off.

  A whine filtered in from below decks as the Jump Drive re-spooled.

  “Ready.”

  “Jump,” Driscoll ordered, his mouth suddenly dry.

  Lieutenant Hardy keyed the controls. The Manhattan leapt at his touch. Once more, the space on the viewscreen rippled, a black pond disturbed by a stone before it surged forth to devour them.

  Down the river, into the jungle…

  he shuttle doors opened, blinding Michael with long-absent sunlight for a moment. He lingered off to the side of the aisle as other pilots and crew filed past him, out to the adoration of waiting people. Reporters, family, and the curious, showered the arriving heroes with love and adulation. When the last of them had disembarked, he made his way down the ramp, skirting the crowd. He offered a pleasant smile at the one reporter to notice him, but did not linger to speak as he traversed the tarmac at a brisk walk and took a seat in the terminal monorail.

  Michael glanced through the window at the cheering faces, glad to be home, but thinking too much of the ones who did not make it to feel joy, or even true relief. It was just as well, his mother would feel enough happiness for both of them. The tram jostled him as it got underway, drawing his attention to the box of medals in his lap. Metal trinkets from some unknown number of fallen that he had to deliver to their loved ones. A part of him wanted to open it and count them, but he could not find the will to do it.

  The Draxx threat had abated, for now. He tilted the case, listening to the trinkets clatter inside. Would anyone even remember the names of the people these insignias once represented? Even now, the saviors of the Terran Alliance endured the accusation of being warmongers. Fringe groups plastered cartoon-cute images of the reptilian Draxx, as if all humans did were melt down baby lizards in their cribs. They couldn’t know what really happened out there; they never saw the gleaming teeth of a murderous Draxx so close their breath fogged a human’s visor. They never heard the last breath of a brother spent on a helmet-shaking scream, never stared at an expanding debris cloud in the heart-rending silence thereafter.

  Idealists, university students, socialites―what did they know.

  The tram stopped. Michael rose to his feet, tucking the case of mourning under his left arm. Brilliant white light flooded in from the doors as they slid open with a pneumatic hiss; a row of silhouettes in black funeral garb waited. Their number indistinct, parents, siblings, and children of the fallen waited. A dozen unreadable faces turned to look at him all at once.

  At what price, glory?

  Emma stood before a full-length mirror, checking to make sure that her dress whites were perfect in every detail. The only real difference from her duty uniform was a knee-length skirt that replaced the trousers. She fidgeted with her lapel, smiling at the lack of medals. Only a tour of duty ribbon for The Manhattan sat there. To hell with prestige, at least she made it home. She did what she had to do. The Draxx had been dealt a blow that would take them generations to recover from, and with the help of the Terran Union, it would be unlikely they could present a threat again.

  She closed the wardrobe door after adjusting her cap and left her room with the giddy bounce of a schoolgirl in her step. It had been too long since she’d seen her sister, Sarah. A pair of Milsec honor guard stood on either side of the door at the end of the corridor. It was already open, and neither man reacted to her approach. That was their way though. Small children could kick them in the shin and they would stand there, stoic as ever, not flinching.

  Inside, chairs were lined up in rows facing a podium. People filled the room: a few other pilots, family, friends, and family of friends. Emma stood up on her toes to wave over the crowd at her father, who stood near the front of the room in conversation with three other men. He didn’t notice her, focused on his words.

  She moved to the left to the edge of the room, moving past the periphery of the crowd toward the front. In the first row of chairs, she found Sarah sitting one space from the end, wearing an elaborate dark violet dress with white stockings, pouting at her gloss black shoes. A large blue-butterfly clasp held her long hair off her face. Emma smiled, remembering high school notebooks festooned with doodled butterflies. Sarah had no doubt worn that as a gesture to her. Her little sister didn’t seem too much different than the last time she had seen her. Given the expected length of the mission, it struck her as odd that the girl did not look any older.

  “Hey, kiddo.” Emma sat in the last seat.

  Sarah looked up, red around the eyes. “Hey.” Her pout deepened.

  “War’s over. We won.” Emma winked. “I’m home now.”

  “Yeah,” droned Sarah.

  Emma held her arms out. “Aren’t you happy to see me? Where’s my hug?”

  “I told you not to go.” Sara looked back down, making no move to embrace her sister.

  “Oh, come on.” Emma let her arms fall slack. “You can’t still be upset with me.”

  Someone in the back of the room burst out sobbing. Emma glanced, unable to find the source in the seated crowd. Sarah did not react. As she turned to look at Sarah again, her eyes caught sight of a large silver box behind the podium; a military casket. The lid was up, yet the person inside was out of sight.

  Chills spread throu
gh her body. She looked again at all the people, so many of her own family were here. Her breath stalled in her chest. On shaking legs, she stood, and tiptoed past her father to the display. A wisp of black hair drifted into view beyond the bare-steel casket edge, then clasped hands. The left one was obvious in its artificiality; a mortician’s prosthetic.

  Tightness squeezed her heart. The sound of Sarah breaking into uncontrollable tears made her turn back. Her father and mother both rushed over, consoling the girl.

  Sarah pointed at Emma. “She’s here, she’s standing right there.”

  “Oh, Sarah,” said Mother. “Wishing her back isn’t going to change what happened.”

  Emma shivered, a slow turn brought her around to face the casket. She leaned over the edge to peer at the face of the deceased, but shot bolt upright in her bunk before she could see.

  Aaron jogged down the shuttle boarding ramp, waving at the assembled crowd. Reporters mostly, as well as fans and curiosity seekers, surged against portable barricades as he made his way across the tarmac to a waiting car. No fewer than six women tried to leap the fences just to touch him. At the end of the red carpet, two men in suits greeted him with handshakes and back pats.

  “So you’re Commander Vorys? I expected someone older,” said the man on the left.

  “After a thousand kills, they decided to promote me. They had to, considering how we kicked the Draxx back under their home rock.”

  “Have you considered our offer,” asked the man on the right.

  “Do you really think an episodic series will earn more than a full-length feature?” Aaron fell in step with the two suits.

  “That all depends on how we market it.” The man on the left did some quick mental math. “We could position the pilot episode as a feature-length production and then split it off into its own series.” He moved his hand across the sky as if tracing words. “Wings of Glory – The Aaron Vorys story”

  “That sounds a little hack. How about ‘Hunter Squadron?’ Putting my name in the title seems a bit vain, don’t you think?”