Right Ascension

by David Derrico

  Run by a crew of only eight people, the Apocalypse, though magnificent to look at, gave no outward hint of her true potency. Smaller than large frigates or cargo ships, the Apocalypse's combination of power and agility was unparalleled. The ship’s average size and absence of outwardly-visible weaponry belied its unique formidability. Though larger than any standard fighter, the vessel’s voluptuous lines reminded one of nothing so much as an aerodynamic and nimble fightercraft. The bridge of the ship was located where the cockpit would be, but accommodated the five members of the bridge crew. The engineering section, located toward the aft, housed the remaining three crewmen. Just about the fastest ship known to exist, the Apocalypse’s energy weapons and shields were the match of all but the mightiest Battlecruisers.

  And it had its own, highly miniaturized version of the Omega Cannon.

  Humans throughout history had never been comfortable with merely being superior militarily, Admiral Atgard mused, they always had to be dominant to the point of overkill. For once, human military paranoia had been well founded. Her very existence and nature unknown to anyone but a handful of the highest-ranking Confederation officers and her own crew, the Apocalypse contained within her sleek hull the most amazing conglomeration of high-tech, experimental, and innovative systems ever created. Utilizing an advanced version of the ultra-dense armour of the Indomitable—armour that, Daniel remembered solemnly, proved useless against the alien’s awful weapon—the Apocalypse, at a tiny fraction of its size, was as well protected as its larger and older cousin. The miniaturized Omega Cannon, somehow engineered to fit within the moderately-sized ship, was theoretically about as powerful as the original version. And then there was the Quantum Refractor.

  Though Daniel considered himself well versed in many areas, from philosophy to supralight propulsion, he had to admit he knew very little about how the Quantum Refractor actually worked. Originally theorized by an incredibly brilliant and equally eccentric physicist only 20 years ago, the concept behind the Quantum Refractor was immediately concealed by the military and all documents hypothesizing its possibility were summarily seized. Once the military discovered the theory, which postulated that matter could be manipulated in such a way as to make it seemingly disappear from existence, they quickly worked to develop the technology to create the perfect cloaking device. To this day, no one was sure exactly where the matter went when it was cloaked, but once the military scientists found out how to perform the manipulation on an entire ship and, more importantly, bring it back, they immediately incorporated the device into the nearly-completed Apocalypse. Being exorbitantly expensive and prohibitively experimental, the Apocalypse was the only ship on which it was equipped.

  Personally, Daniel was slightly uncomfortable entrusting his life and that of his crew to a device that neither he—nor anyone else—understood completely, and thus he used it rather sparingly. Hypothetically, in essence all it did was vibrate the atoms of the ship and everything aboard to a certain frequency that caused them to seemingly vanish without a trace. When the device was activated, the ship “phased out” of existence and became incapable of sending electromagnetic transmissions—including radio communications and sensor scans—to the outside world, but was still able to detect incoming signals as they passed through the cloaked vessel. One postulation was that the oscillations of the atoms actually distorted space-time, somehow enveloping them in a bubble that distorted matter around them. In fact, asteroids, energy weapons, or even living beings seemingly went right through the cloaked ship as if it weren’t there, undetectably flowing around it, following the distorted path of space-time. Sensor, radio, and radar beams were not reflected by the cloaked ship, theoretically rendering them completely undetectable. It was as if they were hidden in a pocket that was not part of normal space-time, existing not in time nor space, but somewhere else. Where exactly that was, not even the device’s creator could surmise.

  Furthermore, what would happen if the Quantum Refractor were to malfunction, or if the ship were to try to fire a weapon while cloaked, was anybody’s guess.

  Abruptly, Daniel rose and brought up the lights in the room. He walked slowly over to gaze at the portrait of his son that hung on the wall. The picture was of Chad on his graduation day, and his son was wearing the same genuine smile he wore when he was killed. Turning quickly away, the Admiral fought to push his son from his mind. He knew that if he didn’t come up with some way to stop these aliens, he, and the rest of his crew—not to mention everyone on Earth—would be joining his son soon enough.

  It was up to him, he knew. And him alone. Confederation Command could not risk broadcasting a tight-beam message to him without compromising the secrecy of their location. And they couldn’t just send out an omni-directional message for anyone with prying ears and a receiver and descrambler to listen in on. It hardly mattered, he knew. With Fleet Admiral Cole and most of the military leaders dead after the Indomitable Massacre, ConFedCom must be in a state of chaos.

  But what could he do? The alien vessel had demolished the Indomitable like it was a minor annoyance. But why hadn’t it gone after Earth? What was the point of jumping in, destroying the flagship and jumping right back out? Did they want to capture Earth and not destroy it? Were they just sending a message? Or was there a limitation to the power of the awesome enemy vessel? Perhaps it could only fire once before it needed to recharge or reload or …

  Flopping down on his bed, the Admiral fought to think clearly. He replayed all the great battles of history in his head, looking for anyone that had ever used such a strategy, anything that might give him some inkling as to what was going on in the minds of these new enemies. Trafalgar, The World Wars, The Alliance Wars, the Korgian Annihilation. He wondered what history would call the Indomitable Massacre, or if there would be anyone left to remember it.

  What did they want, these aliens who could kill millions seemingly on a whim? Were they looking for a planet to colonize? Were they afraid of the Omega Cannon; did they want it destroyed? Or were they just cold-blooded killers? Was it possible, Daniel wondered, for a species to advance to the superior level of technology they obviously possessed without any regard for life?

  Daniel had always thought with chagrin that mankind’s technology had advanced far faster than its morality. Over three millennia ago, great thinkers pondered ethics and morality and answered questions about right and wrong. Over the centuries, as man became able to kill in greater and greater numbers with greater and greater ease, his morality had stagnated. In fact, the most recent human philosopher Daniel could recall was Glaucynon, but even his theories had come too late, as, by the 25th century, man was already too mired in the depths of the Alliance Wars to listen to reason.

  There were no great philosophers anymore, Daniel lamented. There were scientists who built bigger and bigger bombs and stronger lasers and some madman who had envisioned and developed the Omega Cannon. He wondered if that man’s ethical theories were as sound as his scientific principles.

  How could one justify such a weapon of mass destruction? As a doomsday weapon, perhaps? Not so much a weapon as a tactical bluff, the threat of which would save billions of lives? Maybe we felt it was needed to ensure our very survival. How would ethical considerations stack up against that? Daniel had to come to terms with such weighty questions before he even took command of the aptly-named Apocalypse, much less thought about using the weapon.

  Many had given a Utilitarian justification of the Korgian Annihilation. They reasoned that the greatest good for the greatest number would be brought about by the slaughter. Daniel wondered what kind of calculus could outweigh nine billion lives.

  Besides, Daniel knew, morality was not about numbers. It was not about math. It was about rights, and each one of those Korgians had a right to live. Of course, so did the billions of humans the Korgians were trying to conquer. Was there any right answer in such cases? Could such a horrendous genocide ever truly be justified? Was it ethically permissible to ever build
such a weapon in the first place?

  It wasn’t just weapons, Daniel realized. Abortion, cloning, eugenics—technology made them all possible. But just because something was possible didn’t mean that it should be done. Without a firm base in morality—a base that was lacking in humans and evidently nonexistent in these new aliens—technological advance heralded the doom of civilization. How could such an amoral society as these faceless butchers develop past the nuclear age without killing themselves? That was the balance that held technology in check: Daniel had seen it on many worlds he had explored personally, and read about it on many others. They would find an unexplored world, sometimes with the radiation dust still clouding the atmosphere, centuries after the Armageddon. There would be precious little left for the xenoarchaeologists to sift through by then. Whole civilizations—their people, their culture, their arts and philosophies—reduced to ash once technological progress overcame philosophical evolution. Mankind had barely avoided such a fate, and it was a good thing, Daniel thought solemnly, that species too violent to do the same killed themselves off before they learned to take to the stars.

  Evidently, that particular cosmic system of checks and balances had failed.

  • • •

  Admiral Atgard strode resolutely onto the bridge. All was silent as the bridge crew turned to face him. He studied them wordlessly, and felt emanating from them a combination of shock, despair, and—most stridently—fear. Intense fear that humanity, just yesterday the master of the known galaxy, was about to be destroyed in an awful, instantaneous genocide and that there was nothing anyone—even the Admiral—could do about it.

  Bravely speaking up, Zach’s words echoed the crew’s unspoken thoughts. “It’s all over, isn’t it, Admiral? They’re gonna come back to fry Earth, we’re gonna try to stop them, and they’re gonna obliterate us too. ‘Cause it’s either that or we turn tail and run like cowards, and I, for one, am not going—”

  “You’re wrong, Zach,” the Admiral declared. He spoke in a deep, resonant voice, a voice copious in its vehemence and persuading in its solemnity. “We’re not running. And it’s not over. We shall not go gently into that good night.”

  The crew stared silently at the Admiral. He tried unsuccessfully to determine if they thought he was crazy, brave, stupid, or all three.

  “And you’re wrong about one other thing, Zach,” he added. “They are not going to come back to Earth to destroy us.”

  “How are you so sure, Admiral?” Dex interjected. “Why wouldn’t they come back? Tactically speaking, it only makes sense for them—”

  “They’re not coming back,” the Admiral assured them, “because we’re going after them.”

  CHAPTER 4

  The starlines sped past on the viewscreen and the steady hum of the Apocalypse's mighty engines gave little hint of the tremendous speed at which the vessel was traveling. Barely 24 hours after the attack, Daniel watched the viewscreen as he catapulted his ship and crew ever closer to the horrible confrontation that awaited them, the confrontation with the aliens Anastasia had dubbed the Gens Laniorum, which translated roughly from Latin as “The Race of Butchers.”

  “How long until we reach the Arcadian System, Nathan?” Daniel asked.

  “ETA: seven minutes, Admiral,” he replied, speaking in his low, gurgling Fedoran voice. “Do you really think we will find anything?”

  “It’s our best bet, Lieutenant. Someone has to know something.”

  Daniel knew that exploring the far-away systems that lay along the aliens’ approximate flight path was a long shot at best, but right now it was all they had. Maybe these aliens had attacked somewhere else; maybe some other society that lay closer to their home planet knew something about them; maybe, with more than a little luck, eventually they would stumble right upon the aliens’ home world. Daniel wondered what in the hell they would do then.

  Though at first glance the Arcadian System seemed tactically unimportant, Admiral Atgard had decided to begin the search there, as he had reason to believe something could be learned from the trip. The Arcadian System was situated roughly along Nathan’s best approximation of the aliens’ flight path, far from Earth on an adjoining limb of the Milky Way galaxy. The Admiral had skipped the nearer systems, due to the fact that if the aliens had attacked there, they would have known about it almost instantly. Though not yet to the point of true instantaneous interstellar communication, communications technology had advanced a long way in recent decades. Due to the newly-completed Hypervelocity Transmission Accelerator Net installed throughout most of the systems around Earth, near-instantaneous communications to and from systems nearby were accomplished by relaying data at faster-than-light speeds amongst the many planet-based and orbital transmission accelerator stations now in place, resulting in a lag of only a few seconds or so. Transmissions to systems outside the transmissions net, however, took some time to reach their destination, as the increased distance between stations and lack of accelerators caused a disproportionate lag in transit time. The delay was governed by a variant of the inverse-square law, so beaming a transmission to a receiver three times as far away took nine times as long. Once outside the reach of the relatively closely-spaced accelerator stations of the HTAN, the delay often stretched from seconds into hours.

  Daniel knew that the Arcadians, due to their distance from Earth, backwards communication technology, and nearly nonexistent planetary defense systems, probably would not have had the time to beam a transmission if they were attacked. In addition, Nathan had calculated that the time it would take to beam a message to them and wait for a reply would take almost as long as it would take the swift Apocalypse to travel there. Thus, combined with the transmissions blackout of hyperspace, Admiral Atgard was essentially arriving at the system blind.

  They were almost at the Arcadian System now, home of the peaceful and enigmatic Arcadians. Humanity hadn’t had much contact with the Arcadians, partly due to their distance from Earth, and mostly due to the fact that they were a relatively unadvanced race, having just recently been contacted by the Confederation when they launched their first primitive rockets beyond the confines of their own solar system. If the Gens Laniorum had decided to attack them on their way to Earth … . Admiral Atgard winced as he thought about the Arcadians trying to fight the aliens and their awful death ray.

  Daniel wondered if the aliens would have stopped at such a tactically unimportant system. On the one hand, it made little sense to attack such an undeveloped race. On the other, Daniel had no real idea what the Gens Laniorum were after. He still had precious little knowledge of their motives. If they were truly barbarians on a killing rampage, there was no reason why the Arcadians should be spared. If they were looking for worlds to colonize, there was also little reason to bypass the lush, unexploited planet of Arcadia. When he saw what, if anything, had happened to the Arcadian System, he would have a better idea of what these aliens were after.

  “Approaching Arcadia Prime, Admiral,” Nathan reported.

  Daniel’s muscles tensed involuntarily over the armrests of his command chair. “Slow to sublight.”

  The starlines on the viewscreen quickly gave way to a bloated red giant sun that dominated the three small planets of the Arcadian System. The second, Arcadia Prime, was merely a small splash of green awash in the radiant sea of ruby light spewed forth by the massive star.

  “Dex, tactical scans,” barked the Admiral. “Give me long range, life forms, residual.”

  “Tactical: no starships in system,” Dex reported. “Long range: no ships in range. Life forms: approximately two billion; normal. Residual: there’s no evidence of a battle of any kind, Admiral.”

  The Admiral’s muscles relaxed slightly. He could feel Anastasia’s eyes burning into the side of his head. He knew what she was thinking, what they all were probably thinking. Why not Arcadia? The conclusion was unavoidable: they were after humans, and humans alone. They had gone out of their way to leave the defenseless Arcadians untouched.r />
  The next question was: why? If they had avoided the unadvanced Arcadians, why would they go after mankind? The answer, again, was unavoidable: they went after humans because we were too advanced—too powerful. Humanity was, after all, the dominant force in the sector, at least until 24 hours ago. Maybe humanity had crossed some unmarked technological line and the Gens Laniorum were the Galactic Police who had come to rein us back. Maybe some species far more advanced than ourselves had decided that we were not allowed to possess such power or devastating weaponry. But why now? The Indomitable had been operational for 40 years. Surely they couldn’t have just found out? Or just gotten here?

  It was Zach who interrupted the Admiral’s thoughts. “Admiral?” he asked in his slightly squeaky voice. “I guess the Arcadians didn’t tick them off like we did, huh? They passed right by them.”

  “Apparently they did,” replied the Admiral. “Let’s go down and see if we can find out why.”

  • • •

  Descending through the hazy atmosphere, the Apocalypse must have been a magnificent sight to the simple people below. Landing on a small airfield, the Apocalypse descended vertically, its powerful antigrav repulsors slowing the ship as it alighted on the paved surface. Although there was no formal Human Embassy on Arcadia Prime, humans were far from completely unheard of in the area. In fact, there was now a handful of humans living permanently on Arcadia Prime, apparently favoring the simple life it afforded to the advanced, highly-technological society of Earth. To an extent, Admiral Atgard could sympathize with them.