by Steve Rzasa
The gorilla got up off my chest, and I could breathe normally again. Red lights turned back to pale orange. The smell in the room was intense, a strange combo of aromas I couldn’t place. Maybe alien body odor?
Powder blue sky got darker, blacker, until the curve of the atmosphere gave way to midnight speckled with thousands of stars. Couldn’t help staring. You can’t see many outside Boston’s glare, and even with the Milky Way splashed overhead, Wyoming’s night sky wasn’t as impressive as this. I had nothing clever or sarcastic to say. Stunning.
Dac entered our cabin. “There is no pursuit at this time. We’ll join Ghantaqa soon.”
“Your ship is waiting for us then,” Nil said.
“Yes. We are behind Carpenter but can follow him through the Nor-i-Nanq.”
They were both ignoring me. Which I hate. “Wait up. Carpenter has his own ship? We don’t spring for those in our planet’s space budget.”
Dac eyed me with what I took for alien suspicion. “Carpenter is aboard a Ghiqasu ship with his confederates.” He crossed to the window and withdrew a small blue oval from his belt pouch. He attached it to the window.
It projected a spray of diagrams and a display of what I took for course headings in holographic images. Lines crisscrossed space above a tiny blue sphere. A red dotted stream leapt from the sphere, arcing to a red triangle. Behind it, a white dotted line slowly gained. “The target docked with the surveyor Riqasona approximately two qil ago,” Dac said.
Two qil. Nil had said 0.8-something qil was ten or eleven minutes, I think, so . . .
“Twenty-five minutes,” Fisk muttered. “That’s too much of a lead.”
“The Riqasona is in the queue for Nor-i-Nanq departure,” Dac said. “We are in position to follow in less than half a qil.”
“Okay, that sounds good to me,” I said. “This shuttle fast enough to catch up?”
“We will not transit the Big Ring in this craft. Ghantaqa is awaiting my command to meet with us. She is already coming around the curve of your world.”
A green arrow blinked to life on the display. That’s when I realized it was filled with all kinds of blips. Each one trailed alien text beside it and what looked like coordinates. My eyes widened. “How many ships are up here?”
Fisk chuckled. “Plenty.”
He wasn’t kidding. As we soared farther out into space, we passed six spaceships, by my count. Two were white spaceplanes with U.S. and Russian flags emblazoned on their sides, portholes winking lights at us. I stared as they tumbled end over end to rendezvous with Terra Orbital One, the space station. And when I say that, I mean the biggest space station in human history. The station was a big wheel, two miles across, gleaming white. Pretty impressive considering the lumpy life raft of the ISS floating miles away.
Then there were the ships. A long spindly one stamped with “USA” was docked with the Orbital One wheel. Not much to it—long silver metal stick with solar panels like iridescent blue sails, clusters of fuel tanks like Ping-Pong balls clumped together, and several arms rotating around the middle. The engines were three yawning cones at the rear. When running, they’d be lit up brighter than the glow coming from the ship of similar design that was boosting away from Earth.
I smirked. “Nice.”
“We’ve gotten a lot done in the last decade,” Fisk mused. “Makes the Apollo program the tortoise to that particular hare.”
“You think the Ghiqasu are as impressed?”
Fisk raised an eyebrow. “Not even close.”
Our shuttle cleared the night side of Earth, and the smug smirk vanished from my lips. I counted twenty ships. No, thirty. More? There were too many to keep track of. Big suckers. Putting one of our human spaceships next to it was like lining up a broom next to a telephone pole. They were of varied shapes and sizes—most of them squat, bulky, and rounded, a few of them sleek and dark and pointed. Many were covered in interlocking plates that reminded me of the Ghiqasu forehead armor. Depending on their size and shape, they were either mostly smooth all over—the sleek ones—or they were studded with antennae and other unidentifiable projections.
One more thing they had in common: they were all nimble as cats. I saw a trio of the tubby ships change into a higher orbit around Earth twice as fast as any human flying object.
Nil made a noise that sounded like a contented purr. “This is the Consociation, Fortel.”
It was difficult to find the right words. I wanted to tell him how astonished I was and how—outside of imaginary TV programming—I’d never seen anything like it. Nah. “Hey, Nil. Remember your comment a while back when you raised your hands and made that crack about you being from an interstellar civilization?”
The skin around his eyes crinkled, and his toothy grimace broadened at the corners. “I do recall.”
“Okay.” I jerked a thumb at the windows. “You win.”
The Ghantaqa popped into view a second later. A big dark gray object blocked out half the stars. Think pinecone. A really big one. Now strip off the brown scaly things, replace them with late-colored armor panels, six groups of six bulges—and that was just on the side facing us—tons of pointed antennae at the front and faint green glowing lights scattered at the plate joints. Throw in a pair of exhaust ports at the rear with sharp angles that put out a faint blue glow. Ta-da.
Alien warship.
They hadn’t said it yet, but it had to be a warship. Look, it was dark, foreboding, and had all the friendliness of a shark hunting blonde surfers. All I could do was shake my head.
Fisk was beside me. He chuckled softly. “Yeah, that’s about how I reacted the first time I shipped out.”
“You going to tell me you get used to it?”
“No. Never. If you do, you should be grounded planetside. Because none of us should ever forget what it’s like.” He nodded at the ship looming outside. It took up the whole window and was twice as close. “This is what we’re part of now. Our country, our people—we’re under the Consociation’s watch. We watch out for our own, but we have more responsibilities.”
“We’re just a protectorate.” Carpenter’s commentary pummeled my memories. Didn’t sound rosy. “You tell me we’re something better than cannon fodder and natives wowed by shiny trinkets? I don’t buy it.”
Fisk gave me that stern, steely look. “You’re here, aren’t you?”
I ignored him. So what? Nil let me tag along. Nil and Dac. Well, they did pair up with Isaac to bust us out. They agreed when I recommended we use Fisk for this—mission? Quest?
Insane Hail Mary play?
“Fortel. Fisk.” There went Nil again, ruining my reverie. “We must prepare to dock. Our window for pursuing Carpenter is closing.”
<<<>>>
Next thing I knew, we were on the bridge of the Ghantaqa.
The docking bay had been packed with three more big shuttles. Every corridor we walked through—all of which were carbon copies of the shuttle’s green and gray interior—was filled with Ghiqasu tan jumpsuits. Robots crawled the bulkheads, six-legged buggy things that made the robot we’d found at the UW museum look as advanced as preschool toys.
The bridge—well, they called it the command core but whatever—was a big cube somewhere deep in the ship’s guts. No windows. But the entire front wall, two stories of it, was a flat screen that projected the stars outside. It looked so real I wanted to open a window and peek outside. Bad idea, I know.
The upper floor was a U-shaped catwalk that ran from about ten feet off the screen all the way to the back and across. There were six consoles upstairs and two downstairs. There were monitors and holograms and rows of diagrams everywhere. Each one’s console was a concave bowl of holographic projections that showed maps, measurements, and readouts in a language that I couldn’t decipher. Pale green screens that were tall and narrow hung from the ceiling, down low to the left of each qwaddo and behind the holograms. These screens had more data crowded onto them.
Best part? The giant hologram generator
. That’s why there were only two guys down below. The bulk of the bottom floor was taken up by a forty-foot-wide concavity in the center, projecting Earth, the moon, and hundreds of pinpoints of light colored every shade of the rainbow. Lines like threads curved out from each one, overlapping each other in a bewildering web. Headache city.
The captain’s chair was smack in the middle, suspended on catwalks and a sixteen-foot-wide circular platform at the middle.Eleven guys at the brains of this ship. One guy in charge. A fair-skinned, shorter Ghiqasu stood from the chair as Dac led us toward it. The other guy bowed, bottom hands clasped and upper hands raised, elbows bent. Dac returned the gesture, without the bow.
“Zamuq Yad. Your command stands ready,” the subordinate said. He wore the same black uniform as Dac but with gray panels on the sides. He only had two bright blue bands around his arms.
Nil leaned in. “Dac commands this vessel as Zamuq, in addition to maintaining his responsibilities as a Hounder.”
Holy cow. Captain Dac? The qwaddo got immensely cooler in my eyes. He was no Picard, granted, but hey, no one’s perfect. “I smell everything is in order and the crew is focused, Zamuqthal Lor. Continue to your post.”
Dac took the seat as soon as it was vacant. “Time to Nor-i-Nanq.”
“One point five qil, Zamuq.”
“Maintain present course and velocity.”
The Big Ring? Sure enough, there it was, a circle as wide as my hand dead center in the monitor. Half of it glowed like burnished brass in the light from the sun; the other half was shrouded in darkness, which made the red lights flashing in long streams around its edge all the more visible. Pinpricks of blue light glowed in clusters ahead of us in varying sizes. Traffic jam.
“How big is that thing?” I muttered aloud.
“Five miles across,” Fisk said. “You can slide a small fleet through there.”
“Fleet of what?”
“Cargo convoy, survey expedition . . .” Fisk’s expression tightened. “Combat ops group. You name it. They have to use fusion propulsors this close up, like we do in the solar system. Sure, the Consociation has its FTL and that’s way cheaper on the fuel costs, but you don’t want to generate a space warp bubble this close to an artificial singularity. Or a planet either.”
“Yeah. Of course not.” I just stared at the thing as it grew bigger. We had to be moving fast, but I had no idea how fast. No English translations here.
The surface of the Big Ring, or at least the space between, seemed—wavy. Blurry. Suddenly there was a bright flash. One of the Ghiqasu crew barked something at Dac, who responded in kind. Neither sounded happy.
“The surveyor ship has passed through the Big Ring,” Nil said. “Dac is trying to ascertain its destination and request the same coordinates from the gateway control system.”
“The surveyor ship. It’s got Carpenter on board.”
“Indeed. It is a fast ship but not heavily armed.”
“Wait. You’re not going to shoot him down, are you?”
Nil’s face was solemn. “The Sozh Uqasod is a priceless relic. Yet if it escapes us, and the plans for the Nor-i-Nanq are recovered from it, the consequences are dire for all races in the galaxy. It should be destroyed rather than be in the hands of our enemies.”
Up until then, this was just crazy, and that craziness took the edge off the seriousness of the whole mess. But when Nil said that, I knew. This was major. They were ready to risk their own deaths to stop the bad guys.
What was I willing to put my life down for? Well, like Fisk said, I was here. Neck deep in it.
Alarms bellowed. Red lights bathed us all in blood. A couple of the crew shouted, and one of the little triangles in the holographic bowl had gone red. Red for enemy.
“Where are they?” Dac snapped.
“Bearing two one seven, mark eight, acceleration twenty-five gravities, closing on our location!” one of the crew called back. “Identification?”
“Cruiser Movatasqa. They have armed weapons and are sniffing our position. Communication: we are ordered to power down our propulsors and prepare to be boarded.”
“Movatasqa. So Zamuq Vazk is on our trail.” Dac put his upper and lower hands together in a thoughtful expression that looked like he’d copied from humans. Or maybe qwaddos contemplated that way. “Ignore the message. Stand by to accelerate.”
I glanced at Nil. “We can follow Carpenter to his last coordinates.”
“Only if they have not reset the Nor-i-Nanq. Then yes, we can do so. But if they have reset it, we will transit to whatever location is next in the queue.”
Right. So it was a race. The deck underfoot surged just enough to make us sway on our feet. A light in the hologram was flashing—a big blue four-pointed star that had to be us. The red triangle that had raced up was now lagging.
I grinned. We could outrun them.
“Zamuq, we are again contacted and warned to halt.”
“Let our silence give them something to smell,” Dac said. “Continue ahead, full propulsors.”
Nil led us to the left bulkhead, where several of the cable thingies I’d seen in the corridors were moving. Wiggling. I stared as Nil stepped up and let them wrap around his upper body.
Um, embraced by an alien wall?
Fisk did the exact same thing. “Restraints for the transit through the Big Ring,” he said, about as excited as if he’d found out boxer shorts were on sale at Walmart. “In case gravity flops.”
Well, that did it. I joined them and let the cold cables slither across my arms and legs. Nasty or not, getting smushed against unyielding walls would be bottom of my comfort list.
“Sir, their demands are insistent,” one of the crew said.
“Let me hear them,” Dac said.
Guttural qwaddo-speak poured out of speakers hidden somewhere on the bridge. Sounded like a grunting animal getting kicked. You know, the Greeks came up with the word barbarian because they thought everyone else’s language sounded so dumb and repetitive. I knew how they felt. Of course, I wasn’t the one with the interstellar warship.
Nil muttered something darkly.
“Bad news?”
“They have threatened to open fire upon this vessel if we do not cut our thrust and power down.”
“What!?” Suddenly being in the middle of a ship-to-ship fight a la every sci-fi story I enjoyed was way less fun.
“Ready defensive maneuvers,” Dac said. “Steady ahead. They will not fire on us this close to the Nor-i-Nanq and thus endanger civilian traffic. The stench of their bluff is evident.”
In the hologram, our blue triangle sprinted away from the red dotted line. Both sets of lines cut through space, with figures appearing in alien script between the other ship indicators. Distances, I figured. Suddenly tiny red flashing dots broke off from the pursuing dotted lines.
“Incoming torpedoes!” a crew qwaddo said. “The warheads are live! Set for proximity detonation! They’re tracking us!”
“Evasives and countermeasures!” Dac snapped.
The Ghantaqa lurched again. On a nearby qwaddo’s screen, I saw technical diagrams for those torpedoes. Didn’t have a clue what any of it meant, but they were nasty sharp-angled projectiles. Looked like the things were knives with engines. Big knives with engines.
On the large view screen, a bulbous ship slid by to the right—sorry, starboard—and the Big Ring expanded ahead of us. The holographic display flashed a solid red line between our triangle and a white square, and another crew guy complained about safe operating distance. Translate: we flew by close enough to scrape off paint. Good news? No one else was between us and the Big Ring.
“Zamuq, we have intercepted the routing codes and stabilized the gateway coordinates! We will follow the surveyor ship in.”
“Continue ahead. Status on torpedoes?”
“Countermeasures have disabled two. Two more still coming.
Within range of our defenses in twenty ara-qil.”
I glanced at Nil and Fis
k. They immediately tensed in the grip of their restraints. Apparently ara-qil were smaller units of measurement than qil, and whatever was happening was real soon. I grabbed on to my restraint cables, gagging at the slimy feel.
Those two tiny red marks got closer to our blue triangle. The hull vibrated again, this time a gentler rumble that felt far off. One of the marks disappeared. The other? Not so much.
“Impact imminent! Brace!” Dac shouted.
That little red square blinked out.
The ship bucked like a car hitting a pothole at a hundred miles an hour on an interstate straightaway. My shoulders slammed back, and if it’d been any other surface we’d be talking broken bones. Those slimy straps did their job. Everything got bounced around, and ear-splitting klaxons starting wailing, but I didn’t die and also I didn’t fracture any part of my body.
“Damages?”
“Sniffers report a hole in the hull in Rib Spacing Eight,” one crew said. “Stabilizing.”
“Propulsion?”
“Acceleration slipping. Down to 75 percent maximum propulsors. If we engage space warp for sub-light velocities—”
“This close to the Nor-i-Nanq we will all be destroyed,” Dac said. “Prepare for transit. Make repairs as best we can.”
“Weapons are compromised, Zamuq . . .”
“Your excuses reek!” he growled. “Do you require your scent cleansed from me? Carry out your orders!”
The ship started shaking in earnest now. Whether from the battle damage or the fact that we were so close to entering the Big Ring, I had no idea. I gripped the straps more tightly. Nothing I could do then—no amount of talking or scheming would get me out of there.
Prayer time.
Jesus? It’s been a long time. Too long, I know. Everything I’ve done . . . I’m sorry. It’s been a colossal waste of time. Anyway, I’m about to dive through an interstellar portal. Okay, You probably know that. Could You keep me from getting scrambled or blinked out of the universe? Not saying You owe me. I owe You. A lot. But . . . thanks all the same.
Can’t say it was poetry. But it was everything I had to say.
Yeah, felt pretty stupid. Especially with Nil strapped next to me, rock solid, taking those stupid deep, calm breaths of his.
