Lacuna: The Prelude to Eternity

by David Adams

  She had made many mistakes. She didn’t ever deny that, wearing her errors like a badge pinned to her uniform, owning them. Command was hard. Command was damn hard, and she would refute anyone who told her otherwise. Maybe someone could do a better job. No, certainly someone could do a better job—but they weren’t here, and all humanity had was her.

  If wishing for something made it true, they wouldn’t still be on that rock.

  She put the whispers out of her mind. Most of them seemed to be focused on her arm, anyway. She made no attempt to hide it or the burns on her face. They were, now, as much a part of her as her prosthetic was, and in some way, it was a relief, vindicating her choice to join the military.

  If she had chosen the easy path in life, she would not have survived the destruction of Earth.

  Liao walked toward the Beijing, the huge ship dominating the centre of the settlement. Since the bombardment, a lot had changed. Before the attack, everything had been temporary. Tents and crudely assembled structures made from bulkheads removed from the various ships of the fleet or cut from the Beijing’s hull, had largely all been replaced by demountables, properly anchored buildings, and concrete stairways leading to underground command and shelter bunkers.

  In a few short months, the tent city had been transformed into an actual city. Shepherd had been right—Americans were industrious people.

  Seeing the Beijing, though, made her smile, even if it was a sad smile. The ship was scorched, broken, defeated—it listed slightly to the left, having slumped there after being damaged by the Toralii worldshatter device. The hole where the weapon had struck, pointed towards her, was crosshatched with steel reinforcing, and a half dozen constructs worked over it, insects weaving together a new hull.

  Incredible.

  Ben itched at her mind, and Scarecrow, and the Toralii prisoners… but there was one other task that was more immediate: the relaunch of the Beijing.

  The hangar bay was open. This, in and of itself, was unusual, but more noticeable to her was that the whole open mouth of the ship was clear of debris and civilian equipment. Someone had even mopped the mud out.

  It almost, if one tilted one’s head to the side to account for the lean, looked like a real ship again.

  She knew the layout of the Beijing like the skin of an old lover. She walked through the corridors, turning down the winding passages, working her way to the core of the ship. The Marines gave her entrance to Operations although she was truly unclear if she was permitted to be there or not, and she entered to a buzz of activity.

  Operations had been completely restored. The hole in the roof was gone, as though it had never been. Even the surface had been repainted although if she looked carefully, there was a slight discolouration that betrayed the repair.

  “Good evening, Captain Liao,” said Kamal Iraj, standing in front of the command console. Liao looked up at him. He was taller and of late had, apparently, been growing his hair out. It was similar to her own although more consistent. He had a thick, jagged scar running from between his eyes down the left-hand side of his face, courtesy of a Toralii Marine’s knife. It seemed to be slowly fading.

  Liao gave her XO a warm smile in return. “Good evening, Commander. Good to see you’ve kept the ship in good order during my stay aboard the Rubens.”

  “Better than good order. The ship’s not just brand new—the heuristics on the constructs were able to provide some minor modifications to the ship itself. That repair job is actually stronger than the original material—a small percent stronger, a small percent lighter, just the cumulative difference in manufacturing capabilities and engineering knowledge. The plan is to treat this as an upgrade to this section and, eventually, replace the entire ship with the same materials.”

  “Sounds good,” she said, feeling a vague sense of relief that her ship’s injuries would be repaired and even improved.

  Her smile turned to a slight frown as she surveyed the Operations team, seeing Jiang on duty at Tactical, but the Communications console absent Hsin. He should have been here for such an occasion.

  “Where’s Lieutenant Hsin?” she asked. “Did he call in sick for the relaunch?”

  The room fell silent, the startup proceedings halted save for the low buzz of computers in the background.

  Iraj inhaled softly. “Mister Hsin was killed in the battle. A replacement from the Washington is being trained, but they have not qualified yet.”

  A memory flooded back to her, of the worldshatter device breaking through the top of Operations. Hsin’s console was—had been—at the epicentre of the blast. All that had remained was a smoking, red-ringed hole boring straight down toward the ground. She had seen it with her own eyes, but the true impact had not yet sunk in.

  “Of course,” Liao said, her voice quiet. “My apologies.”

  Liao moved to the centre of Operations, standing by Iraj, surrounded by machines and her crew—what was left of them, anyway. For the first time in a long time—she did not know precisely how long—she felt home again.

  A part of her wanted to conceal the prosthetic and pretend everything was normal, but her metal hand was the new normal. She folded her arms in front of her, defiantly displaying the faux-Toralii limb for all to see. She was actually thankful. Anywhere else, her injury would be the end of her career, but serendipity had come through for her. Her prosthetic was as good as a Human arm, more or less, and even if it still had its problems, humanity were not in a position to be picky about their crew.

  “Captain Liao?” Iraj stood back. “If you could, I think I speak for everyone when I say, we’d like you to take us up.”

  She hesitated. “I’m not at my best,” she said. “Still heavily medicated. Still getting used to”—she held up her prosthetic hand—“this.”

  “I’ll be here with you the whole time,” said Kamal. “The last time the Beijing wasn’t yours to command, look where we ended up. This time… I don’t want to make the same mistake.”

  She wanted to say no—her CO’s logical, rational mind implored her to say no and that it was a really bad idea—but she couldn’t.

  The Beijing was her ship. She was back. Everyone needed to know, most importantly herself.

  “Very well,” she said, glancing down at her command console. “All sections report.”

  [“Engineering reports the Beijing is ready for launch,”] said Saara. Seeing her at Summer’s console would take some getting used to. Saara had temporarily worked there before, during their interactions with Ben in his construct body, but seeing her there and knowing that Summer wouldn’t ever be there to take up the mantle again was sobering. [“All reactors are providing power. The reactionless drives are functional—there’s a minor fluctuation in some of the secondary conditions, but it’s well within acceptable parameters. All hatches are sealed. Decompression doors are holding. The outer hull above us is decompressed, but the constructs will continue their work even as we are in orbit, and only the outer layer is damaged. This is not a concern.”]

  Jiang spoke up from Tactical. “Prelaunch conditions are optimal. There’s not a cloud in the sky. Radar is clean. The Washington is providing launch telemetry and aligning our ascent corridor. As soon as we’re clear of the city, we’ll be moving out over the ocean.”

  A wise precaution. If something failed, crashing into the sea would not endanger the population below.

  Liao hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

  Dao, their navigation officer, was the next to report. “All ships report and cross-check that the airspace above Eden has been cleared. We have a solid uplink to the Rubens and the Tehran. They’ll be ascending with us past three thousand metres. The Madrid is on long-range patrol. They’ll come running if we need anything.”

  Hsin would have been the next to report in. Liao mentally berated herself for her earlier mistake, but she tried to put it out of her mind. Just another error. His sacrifice had been noted. Fortunately, for a brief jaunt into space, that workload could be shared bet
ween Navigation and Communications. They would need a dedicated communications officer to be combat ready—the candidate from the Washington was a promising lead—but for now, simply having the ship fly was enough.

  The people had to see it. They had to witness the Beijing rising from the ashes and taking flight to protect them. The bombardment had shown humanity that living on Eden, protected by ships above, would not save them. Eden had been a temporary reprieve, nothing more. The planet Velsharn could not remain their home forever.

  It was ever thus, for every civilization that had ever existed, on Earth or otherwise. It was not enough to find some quiet, little corner out of the way of everyone else and just hope for a quiet, simple existence where one lived out one’s days going nowhere and doing nothing. Growth was critical. Resources, territory, technology… everything had to grow. A civilization was as much a living, breathing creature as a single Human was a collection of bacteria, cells, and chemical reactions and was governed by the same, simple, unavoidable rule:

  Expand or die.

  “No time like the present,” said Liao. She reached up to her headset, touching the button that would signal the entire ship. “Attention, all hands. This is Captain Liao. We will shortly be commencing our ascent through the atmosphere. General Quarters. Damage control teams, stand by.”

  The Operations room was flooded with red light as General Quarters was sounded throughout the ship. She felt the familiar surge of adrenaline, of excitement and anticipation. “Do it,” she said to the room. “Take us up.”

  At once, the crew swung into motion.

  [“Giving power to reactionless drives.”] Saara’s large hands moved gracefully over the slightly-too-small-for-her console. [“The ship will be airborne in less than one minute.”]

  A faint, familiar hum built below Liao’s feet as the ship gained power and the tiny gravity-altering devices embedded in the floor established themselves, adding their power to the natural gravity of Velsharn. Her new limb felt heavier than it should have, her shoulder aching with the effort of keeping her arms folded, but she endured. The feeling faded as they recalibrated, adjusting themselves to dampen the inertia of the ship’s movement.

  Liao always hated it when real gravity fought with artificial gravity. At least in that case, it was all pointing in the same direction.

  The faint sound of stressed metal reverberated throughout Operations as the weight of two hundred thousand tonnes pressing on long-compacted dirt grew less and less. The ship’s weight eased, and the structures resumed their normal load-bearing requirements.

  The constructs had done good work. The Triumph-class cruisers, of which the Beijing was one, were designed to be landed in lunar gravity, not Earth or Velsharn, although they were structurally capable of doing so—a fact they had only tested in simulations and in the calculations of the engineers. It was fortunate that it was possible. The theoretical had been tested, first on Earth as the fires that consumed their homeworld ate up the last of their people, and then later on Velsharn, as the wounded, broken Beijing had limped into what many had expected to be its final resting place.

  Now the Beijing was stronger than ever. Liao hoped that her body, too, would be similarly improved.

  “Commencing ascent,” said Jiang. “All systems nominal.” The ship was airborne. It was alive once more. “Altitude ten metres, holding steady.”

  Liao’s command console showed various camera feeds from all over the ship. They were higher resolution than the old ones and, somehow, had the thermal and electromagnetic feeds perfectly overlain. The world outside was recognizable but a technicolour mismatch of strange hues and lurid colours. She could see the vibrant faces of people watching the launch, their faces shrinking away as the ship climbed.

  All of humanity was trusting her. She felt a surge of euphoria, knowing she and her crew were being entrusted with such an honour. All of their fates were in her hands. That sensation faded as another realisation set in, one much more somber: The last time hadn’t turned out so well.

  “Two hundred meters,” said Jiang. “We’ll be crossing the windbreak threshold provided by the nearby mountains. They won’t protect us from wind shear once we clear them.”

  “Acknowledged.” That was a known risk, but a ship of that size and height would not be deterred by Velsharn’s mighty winds. “Continue the ascent as planned.”

  The wind washed over the ship as a series of subtle vibrations. Turbulence rocked the vessel from end to end, but it soon faded as they rose above the choppy surface air and into the lower atmosphere. Eden disappeared below them, the drab patchwork of tents becoming a tiny dot and then fading completely into the landscape. The vast oceans of Velsharn, comprising most of the planet’s surface area, soon turned the island itself into a dot in the dot-painting that was the southern island chain. Warm, temperate waters sustained them with fish and edible sea plants, shallow waters, and sunny beaches. They could be Earth but for the colour. The predominant shade of the trees and other flora was a deep orange, blue near the shores, painting the tropical landscape in an alien hue.

  The ship was performing admirably. Its reactors hummed, its engines responded to all their commands, and as Velsharn’s atmosphere faded away and the dark, inky void of space surrounded them once more, it felt like an old friend, as though the Beijing had not been through months of seemingly constant battles, endless patch-job repairs and crippling, deep structural wounds in her bones.

  Rejuvenation.

  The three surviving Pillars of the Earth, with the two stolen Toralii ships, the Rubens and the Knight keeping watch, climbed toward the starlight.

  “Captain,” said Jiang, her smile reflecting how Liao felt, “we have cleared atmosphere. Maneuvering for low planetary orbit. We’ll be in a stable rotation in minutes.”

  “Excellent.” She couldn’t help but smile as well. “Well done, everyone.”

  Operations filled with clapping. It seemed a long time since the Operations crew had had something to celebrate. The battle of Belthas IV had been a Pyrrhic victory, Cenar a running retreat, and the devastation of Earth had cast a pallor over the victory against the Toralii fleet that had arrived at Velsharn to finish them off. They had always just-survived, barely scraping through, so it was a genuine victory to accomplish something that didn’t require anyone to die: returning the Beijing to the fight.

  The blue-green ball of Velsharn spun lazily below them as the ship settled into a low orbit. The Washington and the Tehran formed up with them, a few hundred kilometres away—within spitting distance for spacecraft—and the Beijing took the lead. They floated for just over an hour, testing all their systems and completing a full revolution around the planet.

  “Orbital test successful,” said Jiang. “We are once again over the Eden colony.”

  Liao nodded her acknowledgement. “Excellent. Bring us out of orbit and into deep space.”

  With a tap from Jiang, the preprogrammed course change occurred, a thousand tiny pieces of the ship all working in unison as it maneuvered back, tilting toward open space, and pulled away from Velsharn.

  More time passed. Space was unimaginably huge. Life in Operations was long stretches of nothing followed by bursts of activity. Liao fiddled with the pistons on her prosthetic arm, subconsciously scratching them, feeling the texture of the metal. She felt the sensations the prosthetic sent back. Bare metal was like skin, cold but sensitive, as though it were spun from flesh melted down and remoulded into a synthetic form.

  The Beijing sailed silently through the void until, well clear of Velsharn’s orbit, the three ships decelerated and came to a half, floating in the nothingness.

  The ship could sail, but could it fight?

  “Commence weapons test,” said Liao. “Deploy drones from the hanger bay. Units one through six, simulate strike craft at close ranges and surround the ship, one at the stern, one at the rear, port and starboard, then above and below. Send six waves. Test our autocannons can cover all our angles. Mister Dao
, advise the Washington and the Tehran so that they are clear of our fire. Advise the Tehran to deploy medium- and longer-range drones.”

  Her orders were repeated and confirmed. Her console showed the Beijing’s sister ships shifting themselves out of the line of fire as six drones—green dots on her screen, representing neutral craft—sailed out from the hanger bay like disturbed bees, smoothly maneuvering through the vacuum to preordained positions, forming up around the Beijing at each of its cardinal points. From the other ships, more drones flew out ahead of them, heading toward medium and long ranges.

  “Autocannons are standing by,” said Jiang. “Weapons tight.”

  “Weapons free,” said Liao. “Fire when ready.”

  Operations was too far nestled into the core of the ship to feel even the faintest vibration from the external guns. The only clue Liao had of their firing was her command console. Grey streaks leaped from the central dot of the Beijing in all directions, each stream striking the drones and blowing them into chunks.

  “Drones destroyed.”

  Five more waves of drones dutifully floated to their doom. The later waves “attacked” asymmetrically. They maneuvered, ducking and dodging instead of passively waiting for the slaughter, but the Beijing’s guns smoothly and methodically cut them down.

  There was little more testing they could do against drones. Time to test the midrange punch. “Load a dummy missile. Verify that the warhead is HE only. No sense wasting one of our nukes on a test.”

  “Cross checked, HE warhead. Loaded in tube eight.”

  “Fire.”

  A larger yellow mark, representing live ordnance, sailed lazily out from the Beijing’s missile tubes. Although firing missiles from the magnetic railguns was possible in an emergency—a situation depressingly common during Liao’s command—the missile tubes were the preferred medium-range delivery mechanism.