Fletcher stared back at the screen, stone-faced. He looked mangled. A splint covered his broken nose. He had four stitches on the brow over his blackened left eye. His chin was bruised, his lips swollen, making it difficult for him to speak, and he wore his right arm in a sling.
“I … fell,” he said.
“Ah, yes.” Hieronymus said, leaning back in his chair, his hands folded over his stomach. “A very regrettable little accident that befell our poor first officer almost immediately upon his arrival on board yesterday. But no worries, Admiral, it looks much worse than it is. Isn’t that right, Mr. Fletcher?”
“Yef, Cabtain.”
“He’s a tough little puppy, our Mr. Fletcher, and undoubtedly very assiduous, very diligent, though still trying to find his … footing. Unfortunately, his youthful enthusiasm got the better of his this time. Ah, that unstoppable drive, that boisterous tenacity. That unshakable belief in one’s abilities, that inexorable trust in the nobility of one’s convictions. The fiery eagerness to conquer the world. Oh, what am I saying? The world.” Hieronymus shook his head, laughing. “The Galaxy! For the world is not enough. To the stars and beyond! That is the only worthy goal for a brave young adventurer like our Mr. Fletcher here. We both remember it, don’t we, Admiral? The enchanting song of confidence and invincibility that the sweet bird of youth used to sing in our ears when we were young.”
“Speak for yourself, Captain,” Lily said. “I’m nearly twice your age. I can hardly remember what I’ve had for breakfast.”
“My dear Admiral, let me assure you, you don’t look a day over fifty.”
She laughed. “Stop it, Captain, you’re making me blush. Anyway, I hope Mr. Fletcher will make a full recovery.”
“I’m sure of it! In a few days he’ll be as good as new, and with his sharp mind, his strong work ethic, and—most important of all—his abiding loyalty, he will be an indispensable asset to this mission. Won’t you, Mr. Fletcher?”
“Yef, Cabtain.”
“Good man,” Hieronymus said. The two men briefly looked at each other with a silent understanding that went unnoticed by the other crew members on the bridge or the admiral down at the control center.
“Very well, Captain,” Lily said. “It’s time to say good-bye. I believe you’ve almost reached your turnaround position?”
Hieronymus looked at the navigation officer. “Mr. Nakajima?”
“Thirty seconds, Captain,” the officer said.
“All right then. Thank you for seeing us off, Admiral. I do hope that we’ll talk again soon during our weekly briefings with UNSPAG command and the other captains.”
“I’m afraid not,” Lily said. “Once all the ark-ships have left their docks and are on their way, I shall finally retire. This is in all likelihood the last you’ll see of me, Captain.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that, Admiral.”
“Don’t be. I’ve devoted the last fifty years to mankind’s dream of going to the stars, and I’ve served UNSPAG my entire adult life. With all the ark-ships on their way there is nothing left for me to do. It’s finally time for me to go, sort out my personal affairs, and prepare for the impact.”
“I understand,” Hieronymus said. “Well, Admiral, it’s been a pleasure and an honor working with you over the last few years. I shall miss you, and I—we all—wish you the best of luck for the future and a long and healthy life.”
“Thank you, Captain. Your good wishes shall forever have a special place in my heart. Please take the blessings of myself, everyone here at UNSPAG command, and indeed everyone here on Earth with you to the stars. Don’t forget us.”
“We shall never forget where we came from, Admiral.”
“We’ve reached our turnaround position, Captain,” the navigation officer said.
Hieronymus nodded. “Thank you, Mr. Nakajima.”
“Now get out of here, ark-ship Kronos,” Lily said with a wistful smile. “UNSPAG command out.”
The screen went dark for a moment before it switched to a live view of the Nephilim space dock they had just left—already hundreds of miles away—and the Earth below, glistening blue in the sunlight.
“Mr. Nakajima,” Hieronymus said, “commence turnaround procedure.”
“Aye, Captain. Commencing turnaround procedure in three … two … one …”
The view of the Nephilim and planet Earth slowly began to shift as the reaction control system fired its ion thrusters to turn the giant ark-ship around.
“How long, Mr. Nakajima?”
“Approximately five minutes, Captain.”
“All right. Miss Bergdahl?”
The communications officer, sitting at her console, turned to Hieronymus. “Yes, Captain?”
“Open the universal channel. I would like to address the passengers and crew.”
“Yes, Captain.”
As she pressed a few buttons, Fletcher turned and started walking to an area of the bridge that lay outside the range of the main camera, but Hieronymus raised his hand and motioned him to stop.
“No, no, my dear Mr. Fletcher. Stay right here with me. You’re my first officer after all. Let’s give everyone a chance to have a look at your pretty face, shall we?”
Reluctantly, Fletcher returned to his position next to the captain’s chair.
“Universal channel open,” the communications officer said.
“Thank you, Miss Bergdahl.” Hieronymus turned to the camera above the main screen and cleared his throat. “Ladies and gentlemen of the crew, my dear passengers, this is the captain speaking. I know many of you have already bid your farewells to your family and friends back home days or even weeks ago. Others have made a point of not doing so at all, since, so God will, we will be able to maintain near real-time two-way communication with our beloved planet Earth for months to come. Yet, no matter if you belong to one group or the other, I would like you—I would like us all—to take a moment and look back at where we came from. Sure, we will always have pictures and video and maps and holographic globes of Earth, but what you’re seeing on your window screens right now is the very last live and close-up view of … of everything, really. Down there, on this precious little jewel that’s gleaming blue against the black velvet background of empty space, everything that we as individuals and we as a species have ever done or ever experienced has happened. Every single creature that we know to ever have lived was born and lived their lives on this planet. For most of them it’s where they will also die—today, tomorrow, in months, years, and hopefully centuries and millennia to come. For them, the Earth is everything there ever was and everything there will ever be. But not for us, not for those who are here on the Kronos or on any of the other eleven ark-ships. We are different. We have decided, for one reason or another, to leave it all behind, to take that next big step in the history—in the evolution—of our species. The reasons for taking this step—this leap—are probably as diverse as the people on this ship. Some of you may be doing it out of fear for your lives, others out of a sense of adventurousness. Others still might regard it as something that is necessary and inevitable, something that we as a species were going to do sooner or later anyway, and so we might as well get on with it. To me, all of these reasons seem perfectly adequate and indeed reasonable and well worth any of the risks, dangers, and hardships we will undoubtedly encounter on our long journey. But whatever your background, your race, your gender, your religion, or your motivation for being on this ship may be, I would like you all to realize and to take pride in the fact that we are not refugees. We are pioneers. We are not running away. We are moving forward. I commend you all for your courage, and I wish you—I wish all of us—the very best of luck. God bless you, and God bless the ark-ship Kronos.”
The captain’s speech was met with warm yet slightly apprehensive applause on the bridge and throughout the ship. Excitement and the spirit of exploration and adventure mixed with the anguish and melancholy of leaving home and the all too human fear of the unknown.
“All right,” Hieronymus finally said and looked at his first officer. “Will you do us the honor, Mr. Fletcher?”
“Yef, Cabtain!”
“Good. Take us out of here. We have all the time in the world and none of it to lose.”
Fletcher took a step forward. “Mifter Nakajima?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Brebair inifial fiwing fequenfe.”
“Preparing initial firing sequence, sir,” Nakajima said, pressing a series of buttons and monitoring the readings on his navigation console. “Main engine ready, sir.”
Fletcher nodded. “Commenfe inifial fiwing fequenfe, Mifter Nakajima.”
“Commencing initial firing sequence, sir.”
As the xenon plasma was injected into the discharge chamber of the main engine and microwaves heated it up to over a million kelvins, a subtle vibration went through the entire ship. Slowly, the Kronos freed itself of the little microgravity that the earth was still exerting on her and picked up speed.
Here we go, Hieronymus thought as he intently stared at the screen, that big black window into the great unknown. Heaven help us, for we do not know what we do.
1.8 Evac
WEST ROXBURY, MASSACHUSETTS – APRIL 23, 2137
With a tablet device sewn into the lower left sleeve of his uniform and a machine gun dangling from a strap around his neck, nineteen-year-old Private First Class Nathan James walked up to the house. It was his fortieth or fiftieth house call this morning—he’d stopped counting at twelve, so he wasn’t quite sure—and this one didn’t look much different from the others. There were remnants of a picket fence, but most of it had been dismantled, presumably to use the wood for repairs around the house. The front lawn, like most front lawns in the area, was dry and brown, because with the rainy season still two months out, people were preserving water to avoid the hefty fines that came with exceeding their monthly water allowance. The house had once been painted in a shiny bright white, but the little paint that had not yet peeled off the wooden panels had long since turned a dirty gray. About half of the solar panels on the roof were broken, probably leaving whomever lived here with just about enough electricity for their own consumption but none to feed back into the grid to make some much-needed extra money. Like most houses in this neighborhood, this one had probably seen its best days some seventy or eighty years ago during the first Everest administration when America had finally made the switch from fossil fuels to renewables. The new energy boom of the 2060s had led to a brief reemergence of the middle class, with affluent suburbs like here in West Roxbury thriving for a decade and a half before decline had set in again and the gamma ray burst of 2079 had finally killed the middle class—and a hundred and twenty million Americans—for good.
Three wooden steps creaked loudly as Nathan climbed the porch. There was no motion sensor above the door to alert the occupants of his arrival, no doorbell to ring, and no nameplate on the door, so Nathan referred to his device to confirm the names of the people supposed to be living here before he knocked on the door.
A few moments later, a young woman with short blue hair and a spider’s web tattooed across a quarter of her face opened the door. She was chewing gum and holding a toddler on her left arm. With her sparkly green eyes examining Nathan from head to toe, she said, “Aren’t you a little short for a storm trooper?”
Nathan found himself to be temporarily dazed, although he wasn’t quite sure if it was due to the woman’s sunning beauty or the audacity of her remark. No matter how great their disillusion with the government, most people still respected men and women in military uniforms. Unlike the police and various security and intelligence agencies, the U.S. military had never turned on its own people, so the average citizen generally regarded military personnel as being on their side and looking out for their best interests. Then again, this young woman clearly wasn’t your average citizen. The color of her hair and her in-your-face tattoo indicated that she didn’t care much about social norms and conventions. Nathan imagined that she must have been a rather unruly child, not out of some inherent mean-spiritedness, but because she felt the need to protect the freedom of her mind. All things considered, her remark was probably intended to be playful rather than aggressive, so he decided to let it slide.
“Ma’am,” he said with a voice he hoped sounded firm and assertive, “I’m Private First Class Nathan James. I’m with the National Guard of the state of Massachusetts, and I’m here to deliver your twenty-four-hour emergency evacuation notice.”
“All right then,” the woman said, chewing her gum with her mouth open. “Deliver.”
“Right,” Nathan said and cleared his throat. He had given his little speech dozens of times today and hundreds of times in the last two weeks, so he could probably recite it in his sleep if he had to. Yet somehow he felt a sense of nervousness creeping up on him, so he decided to refer to the script on his device. “Tomorrow morning at 10:15 a.m. the members of this household will be evacuated and taken to West Roxbury subway station for emergency shelter to wait out the immediate aftermath of the impact of the Fat Boy meteor. Before I lay out detailed instructions for the evacuation procedure, I need to confirm the number of persons to be evacuated, their names, ages, and citizen statuses.” He looked up at the young woman. “Ma’am, please state your name and age.”
“Lyra Morgan. Twenty-one.”
With the stylus tip of his glove Nathan tapped on the screen of the device on his arm to confirm Lyra’s details.
“Are you an American citizen, Miss Morgan?”
“Yes, sir. Born and raised.”
“Marital status?”
“None.”
Nathan looked at her. “I gather that’s single, never married, yes?”
“Yes, sir.”
Nathan tapped his device and then turned to the child.
“And whom have we here?”
For the first time since his arrival, the toddler took his fingers out of his mouth. He reached his arms out to Nathan and said, “Dada!”
As Lyra burst out laughing, Nathan blushed.
“No, darling,” Lyra said and kissed the child’s head. “That’s not Dada. That’s just a very nice soldier who has come to save us from the end of the world.”
“I don’t have any children listed under this address,” Nathan said.
Lyra shrugged. “Well, he’s here. Is that a problem?”
“Of course not,” Nathan said. “But I will have to take his name and age.”
“Hengst Morgan, age two.”
Nathan tapped the information into the computer. “That’s an unusual name, Hengst.”
“It’s German. It means stallion.”
“Really?” Nathan said, raising an eyebrow.
“Really.”
“Is the father German then?”
“No,” Lyra said with a fey smile on her face. “But he sure was a stallion though.”
Nathan’s frown prompted Lyra to laugh. “I mean, not literally, of course. He was human all right. It’s just … never mind.”
Nathan stared at his device, his ears on fire. “I gather the boy’s father doesn’t live here?”
“No,” Lyra said, the last shadow of her smile desperately clinging to her face. Clearly, Nathan had touched a sore spot with the question about the boy’s father, and he briefly wondered what might have happened to him. Was he dead? Or was he simply no longer a part of Lyra’s life for whatever reason? Either way, Nathan didn’t have the time to care. If the person wasn’t living here, he was none of his business, so Nathan was glad he could tick that particular box and move on.
“I have another adult listed under this address,” he said, “by the name of Shiva Morgan?”
Lyra nodded. “That’s my mother. She’s forty-eight, American citizen, widowed.”
“Er, thanks,” Nathan said, “but I’ll have to speak with Mrs. Morgan personally, I’m afraid.”
“Why?”
“Rules and regulations, ma’a
m. Each and every evacuee must be confirmed personally. There’s no way around it, I’m sorry.”
Lyra sighed. “Fine. Hold this.”
Without further warning, she dumped Hengst in Nathan’s arms. The boy was delighted. Chuckling and chortling he groped the soldier’s baffled face, his hands dripping with saliva.
“Uh …” was Nathan’s inadequate but entirely appropriate response.
“Dada!”
“No, buddy,” Nathan whispered, “I’m not your daddy. Do I look like your daddy? Where is he then, hm? Do you know where your daddy is?”
Hengst tilted his head back and pointed towards the sky with both his hands. “Dada!”
“Up there?” Nathan asked, looking up at the sky. “Is your daddy in heaven? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
“Dada,” Hengst said.
“Aw, I’m so sorry to hear that, little man. You must miss him a lot, huh? No wonder you can’t stop talking about him.”
“Dada!” Hengst emphasized and pounded his tiny hands on Nathan’s face.
“Ow, ow!” Nathan said to the boy’s delight and held the small body away from his face. “Don’t do that. It hurts, you know? Never hurt people unless they hurt you first, okay? It’s not nice.”
In agreement, Hengst put his fingers back in his mouth.
Lyra returned to the door. She was alone.
“My mother isn’t feeling well,” she said. “She can’t come to the door I’m afraid. But I told her about the evacuation. She’ll be ready. I promise.”
“Mama!” Hengst said and stretched out his arms.
Nathan shook his head. “I’m sorry, miss, but I cannot confirm your mother until I’ve seen her. It’s not that I don’t believe you or anything, but I do have my orders.”
“Well, as I said, she’s not feeling well. She can’t come to the door.”
“May I come in then?” Nathan asked.
Lyra hesitated for a moment, then she sighed. “If you insist. Follow me.” She turned to go back inside.
“Er, miss?” Nathan said, and when Lyra turned back to look at him, he held up the boy. “I believe this is yours?”
Eschaton - Season One Page 21
