But The Stars

by Peter Cawdron

  “How many?” she asks, desperately wanting to know who survived.

  “One of the men. Two other women.”

  And just like that, the crew of the Acheron has been decimated, having gone from nine to seven at the hand of their captors. Now they’re down to four. Dante nods, fighting back tears.

  A medic scans her chest and sprays something on the blisters that have broken out on her sternum and the numerous chemical burns coming up as welts on her frail body. The spray is cool and refreshing, helping her focus her mind.

  “I’m sorry,” Coe-Voy says. “We set cocoons on a couple of others but they didn’t survive the process.” He has a hunk of foam in his hand, looking down at it as he says, “This stuff is designed to protect suit breaches in mining accidents.” He shakes his head, adding, “Never been applied to a naked body before.”

  A medic helps her onto a gurney. As her head rests on the pillow, her strength gives out and she sags into the thin foam mattress, looking up at Coe-Voy and saying, “Thank you,” as she’s led away.

  Kindness

  “Good morning.”

  Dante blinks in the bright light. She’s lying on a medical bed wearing a thin smock. Looking around the room, she sees several smiling medical staff. It’s as if they know something she doesn’t. They’re waiting, but for what? Their eyes. They’re watching, being patient, knowing the realization will kick in any second. Her hair falls across the side of her face. She raises her hand, pushing her thick, lush hair away.

  “You can have it cut,” one of the doctors says.

  “Wait,” she says, running her fingers through her hair and examining it carefully. It’s fine, much finer than she’s used to and a dark brown in color. There are no split ends—that’s a first. When she awoke in the enemy warship, her hair was stringy.

  Her eyes settle on her palm. The skin is unusually soft and pink. She rolls her wrist over, looking at the back of her hand. No wrinkles. Even considering her actual elapsed age of 36, she had a few veins showing, let alone after hundreds of years of captivity. Her nails are long, far longer than she’s ever grown them before, reaching the best part of an inch from her petite fingertips. Being a doctor, Dante keeps her fingernails trimmed so they won’t puncture gloves or become microbial traps. She rotates her hand, looking at the soft, smooth skin, but she’s hundreds of years old—or she was. Wait. She has fingers on both hands!

  “How is this?”

  “Medicine has advanced a lot since your day,” the doctor says.

  Dante’s used to gene repair and stem cell therapy, but those are targeted treatments and tend to be limited in effect. This is a complete rebuild.

  “We’ve never brought someone back from so far, but the substitution worked well and I’m pleased to say, you have the body of a twenty two year old.”

  “Twenty two?” she says with disbelief, noticing how her own voice sounds different. Clearer. Younger.

  “It’s the optimum age for peak physical efficiency.”

  Dante laughs, letting out a solitary huff as she flexes her arms, checking out the muscle texture. Even when she was in training for the star shot program, Dante always had a little flab under her arms. Her younger brother would tease her, calling them bat wings and, like brothers everywhere, happily exaggerated something that was barely visible to trigger his sister’s self-esteem. Even with weight exercises focusing on the tricep, Dante always had a bit of skin hanging there, but no more. She touches at her arm, unsure whether it’s real.

  “I don’t think I ever felt this good.”

  One by one, the medical staff leave, giving her a smile, a wave, and a few kind words, leaving her wondering just how arduous the treatment was. It seems they were all involved, and given her exposure to the camaraderie that rises out of critical care medical teams, her procedure must have been intense to elicit this response from them.

  The remaining medic says, “We’ll keep you here for a couple of days, but we don’t foresee any issues and can have you back on deck within a week.”

  Dante nods, unsure what that means.

  “Would you like anything?” he asks. She shrugs, so he says, “To celebrate? Ice cream? Chocolate? Wine?”

  Alcohol on waking. Oh, wow, the future is not what she expected.

  “No. I’m fine.”

  “Anything? Anything at all?”

  “Ah.” She’s stalling for time, trying to let the moment pass. “What the hell. When in Rome, right?”

  The medic has no idea what that means. His brow furrows and his eyelids flutter. He must be accessing his neural net, probably trying to find some drink called ‘Rome.’

  “Strawberries in champagne?” she asks, figuring her most outlandish request is probably lame by his standards.

  “Sure.”

  He smiles, being polite, and pours a tall glass of water from a faucet. Oh, this is going to be good. Perhaps it’s a touch too biblical for Dante, with water being turned into wine bordering on sacrilege, but she watches with intense interest. He tries not to grin, clearly relishing her delight as he places the glass under a clear dome. Within seconds, tiny bubbles form on the inside of the glass. To her amazement, bubbles begin streaming up toward the surface, but they’re far too fine to be mistaken for liquid boiling. It’s as though he popped a cork and poured a fresh glass of bubbly. There at the bottom of the glass is a brilliant red strawberry, complete with a few green leaves. It formed within seconds, appearing as a tiny red blob and then suddenly a succulent piece of fruit. Her eyes are as wide as a harvest moon.

  “Here,” he says, handing the glass to her as though such a feat were entirely normal. “I’ll be on station down the hall. If you need anything, let me know.”

  “Ah, thanks.”

  He excuses himself, leaving her alone with her thoughts. Dante turns the glass in her hand, holding it up to the light and marveling at the sight. She sniffs, savoring the smell. She can feel the bubbles bursting on top of the drink, speckling her cheeks. She closes her eyes and sips at the champagne, being transported to another time.

  Two months before the Acheron launched, Dante was a bridesmaid at a girlfriend’s wedding. The day began with a champagne breakfast and only got better from there. For just a moment, she forgets. Bubbles dance on her tongue. The bouquet swells and she breathes deep, savoring the sweet smell. Alcohol rushes to her head, but not in a bad way, she’s had far too little to drink for that, but she gets a slight buzz, the kind that says, ‘Welcome home.’

  “Dee,” a familiar voice says.

  “Mags,” Dante says, getting to her feet. She leaves the champagne on the side table and rushes to hug her friend. “Oh, it is so good to see you.”

  “We made it, Dee,” the taller woman says, lifting her off her feet and turning her through 360 degrees as she embraces her. “We made it!”

  “We did.”

  Mags releases her and says, “Look at us.” Her eyes glance down at her own body dressed in a skin-tight jumpsuit and then across at Dante still wearing a surgical smock but smiling in delight.

  “Look at us indeed,” Dante replies, feeling drunk with the euphoria of the moment.

  “Get dressed,” Mags says, pointing to a neatly stacked pile of clothes on the counter. “I’ll show you around.”

  “I’m supposed to be here for a few more days,” Dante says, gesturing to her messy bed as though that somehow reinforces the need for rest.

  “Nonsense. They say that to everyone.”

  “Wh—Who?” Dante asks, picking up the clothing, unable to complete her sentence, knowing the question ‘Who made it?’ invariably excludes those that have died.

  “You, me, Angel and Mac,” Mags replies with less enthusiasm than before. “Mac’s been up for several days. They’re still to wake Angel. I think there were complications.”

  “How long were we out?”

  “From what I can tell, about six months.”

  Dante pulls her lips tight, nodding as she sheds her smock, dropping
it to her feet. Her skin is flawless, while her stomach is as flat as a board. Without turning away from Mags, she steps into the flight suit. It’s loose but no sooner has she worked it over her shoulders than it shrinks, tightening without constricting. She can feel a little extra support beneath her bust, along with threads pulling the material firmly along the inside of her leg and up around her hips, ensuring a snug fit. There aren’t any buttons or a zipper, but the seam running up the middle simply weaves itself together, running the length of her torso in under a second.

  “Oh, wow.”

  “Cool, huh? The shoes are the same.”

  To Dante, the shoes look flimsy. There’s barely a sole and little to no support for the arch or ankle. To her, they’re socks, but as soon as she slips one on, the heel inflates slightly and the material around her ankle pulls tight.

  “I could get used to this.”

  “I know, right?” Mags says, leaning against the wall and clearly relishing Dante’s surprise and delight.

  For Dante, this is the first time she’s been able to relax in what feels like forever. For once, there’s nothing to do, no clues to decipher or mysteries to unravel. She can just be herself with her friend. Enjoying life is such a novel concept it feels wrong, but being reunited with Mags brings back memories from before P4. Life is normal again. Well, as normal as it can be hundreds of years into the future and at least a hundred light years removed from a home neither of them will ever see again.

  “Welcome to the Empyrean,” Mags says, gesturing for Dante to follow her. “Oh, you might be interested to know we’re on our way back to WISE 5571.”

  Dante feels her heart flutter. Her throat constricts, tightening at the thought of going back to P4.

  “What? Why? I thought we never made it there.”

  “Officially, we never did,” Mags replies, walking past the nurse and waving as she leads Dante out of the medical ward. “But that’s where this all started.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “They’ve been fighting these guys for hundreds of years, only fighting is a bit of a misnomer. A craft intercepts a wreck or sets down on a moon, a planet, an asteroid, doesn’t really matter, and suddenly it’s on their side.”

  “They’re fighting themselves?”

  “Apparently,” Mags replies. “Anyway, like us, it was some time before anyone knew what the hell was actually going on. The first battles came decades after contact.”

  “Oh.”

  “They think our flight records were altered during that time. They’ve never searched WISE 5571 for these guys because no one ever went there. Officially. Every other lead has been a dead-end, but now they think P4 is the home world, the source of the contamination.”

  “And?”

  Mags looks sideways at her. “And they’re going to destroy it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “These things. These creatures. They’re parasites. They need a host to move between stars. They lie dormant, conserving their energy for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years, like seeds in the desert awaiting the rains. Then along comes some intelligent species and they hop on board. We’ve been stamping them out, but we haven’t been able to find their home.”

  “Til now,” Dante says.

  “Exactly.”

  As they approach the end of the curving walkway, a set of doors open to reveal an atrium unlike anything Dante’s ever seen in space. Birds flitter through the branches of tall trees. Bees drift on an artificial breeze, dancing between flowers. A squirrel scoots along the side of a branch, turning as he climbs higher, hiding himself from view.

  “What the?” Dante says, surprised to see woodland animals on a starship.

  “Yeah, I thought you’d like this place.”

  As the ground curves upwards away from Dante, following the circular shape of the outer rim on the Empyrean, Dante can see the entire park at once, which is at least two hundred yards long and roughly fifty yards wide. This is the first chance she’s had to gauge the overall size of the Empyrean. The shape and styling appear to be similar to the Acheron, using artificially induced gravity by spinning the craft, but as this starship is well over twice the size, the internal volume is at least eight times larger.

  A glass dome allows her to look up at the axis of the Empyrean, which is considerably thicker and longer than the Acheron. There are four levels between her and the axis. From what she can tell, the garden occupies the outer third of the lowest portion of the baffle and, like the mini-farm on the Acheron, has been arranged so that as the umbrella-like baffles open, the gardens always face inward, getting the benefit of the craft’s centrifugal pseudo-force.

  Given the similarities with the Acheron, as the baffles close, the orientation probably shifts in accordance with the acceleration of the Empyrean, meaning the ecosystem wouldn’t be subject to more than a gee during transition. The result would be the atrium is far more stable than the likes of the Caribbean islands back on Earth. Out here, there are no hurricanes to ravage the forest. The trees would sway a little during transition, but no more so than they would in a storm.

  Dante’s astonished by the design as it means humans have been able to take birds, beetles and bugs with them to the stars. She wonders about the enclosed ecosystem, breeding program, species selection and management. On the Acheron, the single biggest limiting factor was microbial outbreaks which could destroy crops and upset the atmospheric balance.

  The Acheron was only capable of supporting dirt-bound microbes and plants grown for food, with crops of micro-corn, wheat and soy destined for the reconstructors that manipulated organic proteins and simple sugars into meals. The Acheron’s farm had to be handled with extreme care. Naz was paranoid. He’d berate anyone taking a shortcut through the farm to get to engineering without telling him in advance. ‘One open door for one minute,’ he’d say, and then make a gesture akin to a nuclear explosion, ‘Boom!’ He was exaggerating, or so Dante thought. This, though, this is opulent beyond belief for 22nd century astronauts. Naz would have loved it!

  The mission psychs back on Earth knew what they were doing when they set up the Empyrean. There’s something soothing about having a touch of Earth among the stars. The sound of water running over a brook, cascading gently over rocks and stones before reaching a waist-high weir/waterfall and falling into a pond is hypnotic.

  Dante feels overwhelmed. “How do they?”

  “I know,” Mags replies. “And this is what they call a warship! Can you imagine the colony craft?”

  Dante shakes her head, still struggling to take the atrium in.

  “How do you go to war with squirrels?” she asks.

  “Apparently, they have smaller craft that go out in advance. I think this is like the flag ship or something. We’re part of a fleet.”

  “Ah.”

  The sheer size of the undertaking is baffling. A fleet. An entire fleet. Not just one craft out on its own. Wow. Back in her day, the idea was to spread as far and as wide as possible in the search for microbial life and habitable worlds. Seems humanity has shifted to colonization on an astonishing scale.

  Dante reaches down, touching at the grass beside the path, feeling the soft blades flex against her fingers, remembering the grassy meadows in rural Alabama. No tornadoes here.

  There’s running behind her, feet pounding on the boardwalk, but she doesn’t care, breathing in deeply and savoring the subtle hints on the breeze. There’s no one scent but rather a blend that speaks of life, reminding her of home.

  “Mags. We need you in engineering.”

  Dante stands, turning back toward Mags, curious as to who this is beside her and why they would need the technical assistance of an engineer from hundreds of years ago, but he seems to know her quite well. Typical Mags. Engineering was probably the first place she visited on waking, and she would have made dozens of friends in minutes given her bubbly personality, but before Mags can say anything, the stranger says, “It
’s Mac.”

  As a group, they rush back to the carousel and take an elevator up one of the ribs leading to the axis of the craft.

  “He’s lost it,” the young man says. It’s only then Dante grasps that everyone on the Empyrean is roughly twenty-two years old in terms of physical age and that someone’s apparent age is meaningless and utterly misleading. Some of these guys could be centuries old. Age has no significance at all. Whereas once it was a measure of experience, exposure and sometimes wisdom, now it’s a relic of past prejudices.

  Mags is silent. Dante is invisible, simply tagging along.

  “He heard we were heading to WISE 5571 and he freaked.”

  The elevator doors open. Soldiers line the far wall, dressed in black, with full face masks and gloves, not showing any skin. They have what appear to be rifles drawn, only unlike the firearms of her day, they look flimsy. The scopes open out into a screen roughly the size of a small book, while the stock and barrel are stunted.

  Metallic spiders crawl across the roof. Their chrome bodies and thin, flexible legs move with utter silence. As Dante’s coming up behind the soldiers, she gets a brief glance at several screens. They reveal the corridor as seen from the vantage point of the spiders, only their view is in false color, highlighting hints of light not visible to the human eye. She catches the end of a comment by someone that’s presumably the commander.

  “—then kill the lights and take him out.”

  “No,” she blurts out.

  Coe-Voy turns to face Dante, but at first he doesn’t recognize her. To be fair, she barely recognizes herself. He blinks and she can see the realization in his eyes. Some kind of neural net has kicked in, identifying her.

  “I’m sorry, Dante. He’s taken one of the engineers hostage.”

  “What?”

  “We can help,” Mags says. “We know him.”

  “We can talk him down,” Dante says. “Mac trusts us.”

  For a moment, no words are exchanged, but Dante understands what’s happening. Neural nets were emerging technology when the Acheron left Earth. The prototypes they took to the stars were buggy, and for her, annoying, but she realizes that wouldn’t be the case now. At a guess, Coe-Voy has got some artificial intelligence running the numbers, testing scenarios, looking at the probability of success. She can see the angst in his eyes. Ultimately, predictions are just a clever guess. They’re generally close, but machines can’t account for every variable, especially the erratic behavior of humans. He has to decide. Take the easy way. Trust the computer or take a chance on them.