by Ellis, Don
“Is it my imagination, or is it getting lighter?” he finally asked.
“I think it’s getting lighter,” Raedawn replied.
“Got any idea which direction we’re pointed?”
“I don’t think it matters,” David said.
“I hope not,” said Raedawn. “I’d hate to—” She stopped, her mouth agape. Right in front of them, a huge black shadow loomed out of the mist.
It didn’t look like the holes back into normal space that they had seen before. It looked like a flat black wall rushing toward them, a wall filled with speckles of light, but not like starlight. It looked more like patches of brightness outlining the edges of deep night. Then the mist suddenly cleared, and they saw it for what it was: city lights around rivers, lakes, and coastlines. They were about to smash into the night side of the Earth.
22
Evasive!” David yelled, but Raedawn was already on it. She lit the engines and angled them away, then reached up and flipped the gravity back on and ran the thrust up to full.
It wasn’t going to be enough. They were heading straight for the middle of the planet, and they were only seconds away from hitting it. There was no way they could dodge thousands of kilometers to the side in that short a time.
David had always heard that time seemed to telescope when death was imminent. Your life was supposed to flash before your eyes, and all your triumphs and regrets were supposed to parade past to haunt you. It didn’t work that way this time. He felt his heart thud once in his chest, struggled for breath, and just had time enough to think of one thing: they had been that close to making it. They had actually seen clear space in the middle of the bomb blasts. Hell, they had gone through some of it.
“Wait a minute. Fire a missile!” he said.
“At Earth?” asked Rick.
“Yes, but blow it up right out of the tube. Right in front of us. Do it!”
Maybe Rick thought he meant to fragment the ship before it hit so it wouldn’t do so much damage to the people below, or maybe he was just used to obeying orders without question, but he immediately launched one of the six “ass-busters” and stabbed at the detonate button in the same motion. Fortunately, his finger missed the screen’s hot spot on his first try, and by the time he could hit, the missile was a kilometer or so away.
The explosion was blinding just the same. Shrapnel slammed into the ship, and an ominous shriek of breathing air began to howl somewhere in back.
“Yow!” Raedawn yelled, shoving hard on throttles that were already at full extension.
“No, back off!” David said. “Shut ’em down!”
“Are you nuts?”
“Look!” He pointed out the front window. Everyone’s eyes were filled with afterimages, but they could see one thing clearly enough: Earth was gone. Star-filled space extended away on all sides.
“Holy shit,” Raedawn said softly. “We made it.”
“But did we—did we blow up the Earth?” asked Rick.
David felt as if he were balanced on a knife blade. A moment ago they were going to die, and now—what? Something had connected in his subconscious mind, something that had made him try firing the missile, but he hadn’t done it to blow up the Earth. He tried to think it through aloud. “We couldn’t have. We just opened a hole between us and it. The missile wasn’t big enough to shatter a planet, anyway.”
“But it was big enough to shatter the nebula,” Raedawn said. “We’re home.”
“Not for long.” Rick pointed out the window. The stars were already flickering out. Dark tendrils of chaos were erupting back into space around them.
Raedawn whirled the ship around, but it was doing the same thing behind them. She tried pitching the nose up, then down, but the stars had vanished completely. The ship was surrounded, and the noose was tightening fast.
“No!” she yelled, pounding on the console in front of her.
“Should we try another missile?” asked Rick.
“Sure,” David said. What did they have to lose? “One more, straight ahead. See what it does when it goes in from this side.”
Rick fired one, waited with his finger above the detonator until it just reached the blackness, then blew its warhead. This time it was far enough away that the flash was merely bright. There were no more impacts, but the steady howl of air rushing into vacuum reminded them that they needed to patch the hull soon even so.
The bomb had an effect, but it was the wrong one. A tendril of energy wrapped around the blast, then shot out hundreds of lightning bolts in all directions—five or six of them disconcertingly close to the ship.
“Take us away from—” David began, but he had no chance to finish. There was no place to go. In an instant, the sphere of darkness constricted like a fist.
The ship lurched hard, even with the agrav to compensate, and the howl of air grew even more intense. David caught a flash of motion out the window, and for a moment it looked like they were surrounded by rock. Red rock, stacked in layers that rushed past faster than the eye could follow. It was just a subliminal impression, followed immediately by a flash of blue, then dark red and brown and green, then more blue. The ship shuddered and screamed.
They were tumbling. Tumbling away from the Earth. Roaring out of a canyon on the day side of the planet.
“Oh,” he said, trying to catch his breath.
“What?” asked Rick.
“We went through it.”
Raedawn and Rick both tilted their heads and narrowed their eyes in the same comic expression of disbelief. “No, really,” David said. “We were about to hit it at—what?—six hundred kilometers per second? Then we slipped into another universe for twenty seconds or so. When we popped back out, we were on the other side.”
The buffeting had already stopped. Raedawn scrambled to stabilize the ship and aimed their nose back along their flight path, and sure enough, there was the Earth. It already looked like an inverted blue-and-white bowl, visibly receding, with an incandescent streak of ionized atmosphere pointing straight up at their ship. Theirs had been the most spectacular—and the quickest—ground-to-orbit launch in history. Too fast to even heat up the hull, but the air they had punched through was hot enough to glow in daylight.
Rick pointed with a shaky hand. “Is that the Grand Canyon?”
Their ion trail began in the middle of a winding scar in the ground. On either end of the scar were long, contorted lakes. David had seen that sight before. “I think so.”
Raedawn was breathing hard. He couldn’t tell if she was about to yell at him or what. She had to swallow a couple of times just to find her voice, but when she spoke, it was surprisingly controlled. “Tell me how you knew that would work.”
He didn’t feel like he could take credit for it. “I wish I could, but it was just a hunch. The other little pocket universes that the missiles opened up seemed to last a few seconds each, so I guessed that a bigger blast would hold one open longer. I didn’t have time to think it through. In fact, in retrospect, I think I must have been expecting us to move a lot farther while we were in regular space.”
She didn’t say anything, so he went on. “I mean, we weren’t even aiming anywhere near Earth when we ran through that first one, and look where we wound up. But evidently that was from all the maneuvering we did inside the nebula. It looks like the distance we traveled in real space matched the Earth kilometer for kilometer.”
Still no response. He realized he was babbling, but the silence was like an accusation. “We were actually very lucky,” he said. “If we’d been going a little bit slower, or if we hadn’t popped out in the middle of the canyon, we’d have fallen short. We would have materialized inside solid rock.”
That’s not what she wanted to hear. She stared at him for a few more seconds, then unbuckled her harness and got out of her chair. “I’m going to go patch that leak,” she said.
“That’s . . . that’s a good idea.”
She walked down the narrow corridor between their
tiny bunkrooms and descended the stairs. When she reached the cargo hold, they heard her scream. “Aaaaaaaaaarrrrrrggghhhh!”
Rick immediately slapped the emergency release on his harness, but David put out a hand and held him in his chair. “Believe me, you don’t want to go back there right now.”
“But she—”
“She’s all right. In fact, I can practically guarantee you she’s doing better now than you or me. But she undoubtedly wants to be alone.”
Rick sat back down. “So do I,” he admitted. He looked at the Earth, now small enough to see the entire globe in the window. “Actually, I want to go home.”
David hit the button that slaved the navigation controls to his side of the console and shot Rick a shaky grin. “Let’s see if there’s still any chance of that.”
It quickly became clear that there wasn’t much hope in salvaging their original plan. The roiling white nebulosity had roared through Earth as well, or around it or past it, depending on how big a hole the Union and the Neo-Soviets had blown in it. It had passed their ship while they were inside the Earth, and the planet’s magnetic field had acted like a huge lens, focusing it back into a small but intense knot of activity that shrank faster than mere recession into the distance could account for. It was already too far away for the ship’s drive to have any effect on it, and shrinking too fast to catch even with an EMP missile.
David watched it go, hoping it would rebound when it reached some critical density, but he knew that was only wishful thinking. There was no density to begin with. It was all energy, a topological abstraction, an effect of twisted space and nothing more. There was nothing to stop it from collapsing completely, a fact that became evident when the roiling white nebula diminished from a planet-swallower to a thundercloud to a weather balloon to a golf ball . . . to nothing.
He trained the telescope on the space where it had been and ran the magnification all the way up, but he saw only distant planets and the Tkona beyond them.
“That,” he said, “was the sight of our doom and our last hope both vanishing at once.”
The howl of leaking air changed pitch, then a moment later stopped altogether. He looked back over his shoulder. “Since we’re still breathing, I guess we’re probably going to live a while longer. Yee-ha.”
Rick didn’t reply to that. The tone of David’s voice didn’t leave much room for response. When Rick did speak, it was to say, “I’ve got a wife and a son back on Earth.”
“Oh.” David had been on his own so long he’d forgotten what it felt like to have family.
“What am I going to tell them?” Rick asked.
David turned the ship back toward Earth and lit the drive. It would take a while to cancel their velocity, and a while longer to go back the other way. “I guess I’d tell ’em to carpe that old diem. Live each day like it was your last, because it may very well be. Not exactly the cheeriest advice, but hey, lots of people don’t have ten good days in their entire lives. If you make a point of it, the odds are you can be happier than most people inside the first month.”
“Hmm.” It didn’t sound like he was buying it.
“It’s possible Earth might outlast us. The Kalirae have been around for centuries.” David looked out his side window at the outer ring. “And who knows, we might be able to outlast the Earth. We’ve got spaceships, and the planets are close enough together here that we could shuttle whole populations from place to place if things get too bad in one spot. If we can learn to cooperate with the aliens, this could turn out all right. A lot more interesting than our old solar system, anyway.”
“May you live in interesting times,” Rick said softly.
“What?”
“An old curse. I always thought it was kind of dumb. I mean, don’t people want an exciting life? But now I think I know what it means. I want concerts and movies and trips around the world. I don’t want a war with the Soviets and spatial anomalies and trips through the world.”
David couldn’t help the silly grin that spread across his face. They had actually gone straight through the planet. “It’ll make a great story to tell your grandkids.”
“Grandkids? Are you serious? What’s the point in bringing up grandkids if this is all they have to look forward to?”
“People have been saying that since the dawn of time,” David said. “Everybody thinks their time is the worst there ever was. When you’re a teenager life hardly seems worth living, and then when you get older you get a job and house payments. The next batch of teenagers listens to crappy music and the generation ahead of you flies too slow. People somehow still manage to have babies.”
Raedawn came up the steps again and stood in the doorway. “What are you babbling about?”
“Just trying to spread a little cheer.”
“Talking about babies? Get real.”
“He’s already got one.”
“Oh.” She waved her right hand toward the back of the ship. “I had to seal off one of the missile-loading ports. Whatever we hit whacked the door.”
“Which one?” Rick asked.
“Number three.”
He poked at his tactical screen, locking that missile out of the firing order. “No telling how bad the one in the tube is damaged. I’d hate to have it blow prematurely if we tried to launch it. Might screw up our whole day.”
“Right,” she said. “It was going so well.” She squeezed past him into her seat again. “So what’s the plan?”
David shrugged. “Go home. Get court-martialed. Rot in prison. Maybe learn to draw.”
“Hmm. Dreamer.” She looked at Earth, still receding even though the engines were laboring at full power to reduce their outward velocity. Then she craned her head forward and looked from side to side. “Where’d the anomaly go?”
“Back where laps go when you stand up,” said David. “We’re stuck here now.”
She bit her lower lip. “That explains the talk about babies. Men always want to procreate at the strangest times.”
Rick snorted, then burst into a coughing fit.
“Don’t blow a lung, there, soldier,” she said.
“Sorry,” he said when he got it under control again. “Caught me by surprise.”
“After what we just went through, I don’t think anything could surprise me,” Raedawn grumbled.
David saw a flicker of motion out the window. When he looked up to see what it was, he nearly leaped out of his seat. Four sleek, silvery spacecraft had just flashed past them on a course for Earth. They looked familiar, with three large fins in back and wedge-shaped noses with tiny cockpits a third of the way back, but it took him a second to realize where he’d seen a ship like that before. They weren’t Union ships, nor Neo-Sov, nor did they belong to any other nation on Earth.
He turned to Raedawn. “You, uh, were expecting a Kalirae fleet?”
23
What the hell are they doing here?” Raedawn asked. “And why now?”
David aimed the telescope dead ahead and tried to catch the ships amid the cloudscape of Earth. “I’d guess they want to catch us with our pants down.”
Rick said, “Four ships isn’t exactly a fleet, unless they’re a lot more technologically advanced than we are.”
“We hit one with a missile,” Raedawn pointed out. “They’re not invincible.”
He looked at their receding images in the ’scope screen. “They must know that. Are they asking for permission to land?”
David switched on the radio again and began scanning through the standard comm channels, but there was so much traffic it was impossible to tell if the Kalirae were transmitting as well. As he listened to situation reports and calls for assistance, he realized Earth and Luna were in total panic over what had just happened. The Soviets were blaming the Union for it, and the Union was blaming the Soviets.
“That’s not right,” he said when he heard that last accusation. “The least they could do is have the decency to blame us.” He switched on the transmitter and
ran the power all the way up, then said, “That’s a total load of crap! Nyet, false, bullshitski! I’m the person responsible for what just happened. David Hutchins, acting completely on my own. I brought the spatial anomaly back to Earth, and I take full responsibility for that, but the responsibility for failing to use it properly falls directly on all of you. You were supposed to blow it open when it got there! If you’d done that, we’d have all gone back to where we came from, and we’d all be celebrating now instead of bickering about whose fault it is.”
People heard him, that much was clear, but the response from hundreds of transmitters on the same frequency overwhelmed the signal processors’ ability to sort them out. All that came through was a babble of voices filled with static.
Closer at hand, though, the reception was crystal clear. “Thanks a lot, idiot,” said Raedawn. “You just blew any chance we might have had of fading into the woodwork.”
“We had no chance of that anyway. We’re screwed.” He looked out at Earth again, then back inside. “Rick might not be. He did try to stop us. If we testify to that, he could—”
“Something’s happening up ahead.” Rick pointed at the telescope screen, where one of the Kalirae ships had reversed course and was coming back toward them.
“Oh shit,” David said. “They heard our transmission, too.”
“How could they tell what you said?” Raedawn asked.
“I don’t know, but get ready to fight if they shoot at us.”
Rick double-checked his tactical display. “It’s just one ship. That’s a hopeful sign.”
Then the radio boomed with a signal strong enough to override all the others. “David Hutchins. Do you hear?” The accent was foreign. Not just unusual; this was unearthly.
Deep and gravelly, filled with overtones from nonhuman vocal cords. There could be no doubt where it came from.
“I hear you.” He turned down the outgoing power so he wouldn’t be broadcasting all the way to Earth, and he lowered the volume so the aliens’ response wouldn’t blast them out of the cockpit again. The background chatter faded to a whisper as well.
