by Steve Rzasa
Well. It wasn’t like I had anybody else to ask. “Hey, Nil?”
“Yes.” He didn’t look away from the monitor.
My throat was constricted, my breathing difficult. You’d think I was being buried alive instead of sitting in a comfy alien chair. “What do you see? When you go through the Big Ring.”
“Everyone sees something different, Caz, and none share the same scent.”
“Oh.”
Swirling space loomed in front of us. Earth was reflected as a twisted oval. Our ship was a bent arrow.
“Fisk . . .”
“I heard you two back in the cells,” he said, cutting me off. “Talking about baptism and God and all the rest. Forget about it. Out here, there’s cold space and everything safe inside the hull. That’s what matters. Begging didn’t get me or my boys anywhere. Didn’t do Jordan any good.” He closed his eyes. “They’re who I saw last time I made transit. The guys who bought it on a Ghiqasu battleground. Maybe I’ll see them again.”
I couldn’t close my eyes, no matter how much my brain screamed at me to do so—louder than the alarms screamed. The ship’s hull groaned around us.
“Caz.”
“Kinda busy now, Nil.” Yeah, busy freaking out.
“I . . . am afraid of death.”
He said it so matter-of-factly, so calmly, he could have been picking up laundry. His arms were shaking under the cables binding us to the bulkhead. From the rough ride? Or fear? Not once had he shown even the slightest hint of being afraid. Of anything.
But this? You could smell it on him. A musk I hadn’t noticed before.
There was a lot of stuff I could say to him right then. But only one made sense. The same thing that kept me from totally losing my wits. “Many sparrows, Nil. Little bird, you know? We’re a whole lot more valuable to Him than them. We don’t have to be afraid. Because if we do die, He’s got us.”
Nil stared at me.
And everything smeared out of existence. I hoped I was right.
Dead meat.
Yep. That was me.
Being dead felt like August. Hot, sticky, barefoot on Revere Beach. The sun was blazing bright, washing out the color of the sky until it was just white, making me squint. Sand burned my toes. Okay, so I really was standing on Revere Beach. There was the apartment building right behind me. My home. That was the only building around.
The sand was immaculate, without a single piece of trash. No candy wrappers, water bottles, or doggie presents. The water was blue, I mean Caribbean Sea crystal clear blue. Definitely not North Atlantic.
No Ghiqasu spaceship. No alarms. No Nil or Fisk. No Big Ring.
Umm, okay.
A guy walked toward me. He was dressed in a loose white shirt, short-sleeved with buttons, and had on green khakis. His sandals shuffled in the sand. Besides the soft hiss of waves rushing up the shore, that was the only other sound. No seagulls, no traffic.
He smiled and waved. Something about that face, the neatly trimmed red beard and curls of orange hair poked me in the brain.
Wait, him?
“Casimir Fortel.” His voice was high pitched, more so than you’d expect from a broad-chested, thick armed guy who, even though he was a couple inches shorter than me, looked quite able to play defense for the Patriots. “Now there’s a sight I’d never thought I’d see this side of the Rapture.”
My brain gears locked up. “Uh, hey.”
“Hey, yourself. What’s the matter?”
Lacking the ability for polite greeting at this point, I blurted, “You’re dead, Pastor Sullivan.”
Bryan Sullivan shrugged. “And you?”
I slapped my hands all over my body. Fully intact. No hull breaches. But I was dressed just like him. Minus sandals. “I don’t get it.”
“Sure you do. You’re just thinking about it too hard. Which you always did, mind.”
Man. Even dead he liked yanking my chain. “No, I didn’t.”
“That was your problem, Caz. You couldn’t accept things. Too simple, you said. Respond like a child, I said.”
Yeah, I remembered those debates. Late nights at Barnes & Noble. The smell of sugary sweet coffee filled my nostrils. Flimsy Bible pages stuck between my fingers. But there was nothing there. Just sand, sea, and my old dead pastor. “You killed yourself.”
His cheeriness faded. Smile intact, check. But I could see it in and around his eyes. Mournfulness. “There’s no excuse for that. The Lord has forgiven me. I only hope my family did too. Forgiveness is a tough nut, Caz.”
“You’re telling me.” I rubbed the sides of my head. “I’m sorry, are you interrupting me being dead for a Dr. Phil moment? Is this the part where I get to see my life flash before us? Because you’re going to have to censor out a lot.”
“Have I even said you’re dead? Have I even told you where and when you are? No. So pay attention, please.” He pointed at me with both index fingers. The old pay-attention-this-is-important gesture. “You’ve got a job to do.”
“Yeah. I was working on that before I got blown up.”
“There’s a lot at stake, Caz. It doesn’t seem like it, but you’re in a tremendous position to change things. The gospel needs you at work. Look how you’ve already impacted galactic events.”
“Impacted what? I’m pretty sure all I’ve impacted is my body’s atoms against a bulkhead.”
Bryan. He was always big on drama. Everything was of heavenly importance to him. Though this time he did say galactic, which was strange. Never once heard him talk of space.
“I was wrong. So were you. But that’s all changed now. You’ve already seen it change and heard the pronouncement. There’s been a few before this. From here on out, it will only spread.”
“What are you talking about?” I snapped.
“Do you think Aphu Nil Hemilh Jeq is the first of his kind to believe the Word of God?” He knew about Nil?
“Didn’t really think about it.”
“Think about this, then: he isn’t. There have been others. A few. Their impact was only the preparation. Nil, though . . . his posting can change. He visits other worlds as a Hounder, has access to all strata of various societies.” Bryan raised his hands, like leading a good old-fashioned college worship service. “He can do so much. That is the plan.”
I stared at him. “What does that have to do with me?”
“He believes because of you.”
I laughed aloud. So hard, I had tears. “You’re kidding! Look, if you’re dead, you’ve seen how I live, what I say, what I do, how I treat people. Some role model for Christ. There’s no way Nil got turned on to the Good News by yours truly.”
“You and he were put in the same place for a reason.”
“Don’t say that!” Suddenly I was mad. Furious. Why? Too many reasons. Try a decade worth of feeling like a failure at the one thing that mattered on an eternal time scale. World without end. That’s what I wanted. More than anything. “I’m a mess! You think I don’t know it? Nil was a moron for choosing me for this job. He should’ve picked someone . . . who was . . .” I groped for the words.
“Better?” Bryan smiled again. “You thought I was better than the vast majority of people. And I gave in to despair because a new life appeared in our midst. I couldn’t believe that that life was a part of Creation, and I threw my earthly life away because I lacked faith. So you needn’t tell me about ‘better,’ Caz.”
I glared at him, clenching and unclenching my fists. What kind of penalties are there for punching your dead pastor in the afterlife? Time to find out.
Bryan took me by the arm. I didn’t punch him, so miracles happen. “Walk with me.”
We did walk, right up a rainbow. No joke—actual rainbow. It felt like hot asphalt. Memories of summers at the beach with my parents, my family, washed over me and doused all the black anger roiling inside. Suddenly I wanted nothing else but to see Mom and Dad again. How many years had it been since I called them?
When you lie for a living an
d change your appearance every six months, life gets lonely.
The rainbow bridge rose up from the sand, right to the roof of the apartment building. Three more people were waiting at the top. They were where all the bright sun was coming from.
Wait a second.
Guy in the middle was plain enough—white robes, white beard. Blazing white eyes, skin like gold, and pulsing waves of power, raw energy, pounding off his body.
To his right was a regular-looking guy in faded brown robes with a scruffy black beard and curly hair. He had the friendliest, most welcoming face I’d ever seen. The middle guy scared me silly; this one made me want to rush him for a hug.
On the left was a guy who looked an awful lot like John de Lancie. As in, Q. Really? Loved his work. He had big bronze wings and was wearing a glowing blue jumpsuit.
Okaaay.
My legs gave out and I collapsed to my knees. Without the slightest idea why, there were tears flowing down my face. Rivers of them. Everything dark and wrong I’d stuffed away was leaching out.
The guy with the black beard knelt with me and clapped me on both shoulders. “Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it,” He said.
Heard it before. Knew it. Never got it.
The one in the middle, the Boss, He held out His hand before me. Wind blasted from it, and from the wind, a storm that exploded across the entire beach. Waves thrashed and sand churned. Rain blasted down on us, and my hair was soaked in seconds. When He spoke to me, my head throbbed like it would explode, but my heart pounded with excitement like it’d never experienced. The voice was a hurricane: “I am the LORD, and there is no other, besides me there is no God; I equip you, though you do not know me, that people may know, from the rising of the sun and from the west, that there is none besides me; I am the LORD, and there is no other.”
My God.
And as for the third guy . . . well, He just stood there, smirking. Two out of three so far gave me a good idea which one He was. Didn’t dare say it aloud, but I couldn’t resist thinking, Do I get my own tongue of flame?
“You’ve already had it,” He said. “You’ve been baptized by fire and by water. Let it not be wasted.”
He snapped his fingers.
Everything exploded in white light.
Spoiler: I didn’t die.
That is, I don’t think I did. But there I was, back on the bridge of Ghantaqa. Memories came back like an old PC with a dusty processor booting up. The run for the Big Ring, getting blasted at, chasing Carpenter’s ship . . .
Carpenter. He had the Sozh Uqasod. Was going to sell it to the enemies of the Consociation.
“Caz.” It was Nil. He was doing something to retract my restraints. “Are you well? Your scent is changed.”
My whole body felt pinched, squeezed through the peephole of a door and stretched back out to size, and he comments on my smell. “Yeah. I’m going to say it’s body odor.”
Nil scowled at me. “Your perspiration is revolting.”
Perspiration? Yeah, my face was damp. Hang on. My hair was wet. Water dripping down in front of my ears, from my sideburns, dribbling off my chin. I wiped it away and rubbed at the top of my head with my sleeve.
That was a lot of sweat.
It made me shiver. Not any malfunction in the ship’s environmental controls. Just the feeling that the weirdness had passed and left me with more questions. How long had it been? My watch.
Fourteen seconds.
“Nil, what you said about the transit. Is it all in your mind? I mean, like dreams? Or is it something more than that?”
“No one sleeps through the transit. The experiences are not fully explained by space warp specialists. But we have all gone through it. We have all detected something.” Nil stared off at the display screen. “Space is pinched together at two points when the Nor-i-Nanq is activated. When that happens, it is not our universe we inhabit for those brief moments. We are between the folds of our space.”
Not dreaming then. Could’ve been hallucinating. “Tell me about what you saw.”
“I see different things each time.”
“No. I mean—” I ground my teeth. “When you said you smelled the right way to go, to come to Earth. Looking for believers. Was it something you envisioned in between transits?”
Nil didn’t answer.
Beside us, Fisk worked out a crick in his neck. “You boys know what I saw this round? Giant dragons. Purple ones. The innards of heavy machine guns. Dead Ghiqasu and people, men I served with, walking around with parts hanging off and moaning. Don’t talk about the purpose of what you saw there. It’s your brain misfiring, trying to deal with the strain.”
He stalked off toward the other side of the bridge. Touchy. I turned to Nil but he’d already walked up to Dac at the command chair.
Okay then. So the next time I get philosophical I won’t be talking to Fisk, at least.
“Damage across the board is heavy, Zamuq,” one of Dac’s crew said. “Acceleration is diminished by 20 percent. Seven compartments are vented to space. Limited weapons capability, but we have crawlers in the fire control linkages working on restoration as we speak.”
“It could be worse,” Dac grumbled. “They fired on us in a civilian traffic zone. The stench of their conspiracy is overpowering.”
I joined them, noticing for the first time the glowing pink and purple swirl of color on the screen. There was a greenish tinge, too, in the background. Stars were muted pinpricks of light beyond it. Their pattern sure didn’t look anything like constellations I knew. “Where are we?”
“In our language we call it Naan-Qasanat,” Nil said. “It sits at the boundary of the respective spheres of influence between the Consociation and the Nivax realm. Nothing to recommend to the idle visitor, but the Consociation maintains listening posts in this region.”
“Doesn’t seem like we got a welcoming committee. You guys guard this thing or what?”
“There should be sentinels. Their absence suggests further collusion.”
I couldn’t stop staring at the light show on the screen. “And that?”
“Your astronomers call it the Helix Nebula.”
The Helix Nebula? That’s about 700 light years from Earth. My head spun with a severe case of vertigo. I grabbed the nearest railing so my feet didn’t let me topple into the holographic tank.
“A lot to wrap your brain around, isn’t it?” Fisk leaned on the railing. “My first transit dropped us in a triple-star system. Set us in the orbit of Trojan planets spinning around each other. One green, one brown. Blows your mind.”
I nodded and tried not to hurl. Willed myself to straighten up, let go of the railing, and not fall over. Never would have guessed seeing a sight like that would throw me off balance. Literally.
What had happened to me during the transit?
“Shouldn’t have ripped into you like that. Sounds like your thing was a doozy.” Fisk went quiet for a moment, staring out at the glowing nebula. Around us, the Ghiqasu ship’s crew scurried to deal with damage reports and flickering readout screens. Holograms shorted. Even the lights flashed erratically. “What did you see?”
I opened my mouth. Tried to explain but couldn’t think of anything clever. “God.”
Fisk gawked at me.
More alarms screamed. This time the sounds came from the holograph of local space, the giant bowl below us that showed just our blue arrow. Scratch that. It showed our arrow and a smaller red arrow nearby. Both ships were moving in the same direction at about the same speed. But a third bigger indicator—a flashing red circle—was blazing in from the edge of the display. One of those tech guys played around with a nearby console. The red dot leapt in magnification and resolved into something that looked like a big gun, minus the trigger. A gun surrounded by girders, boxy structures arranged in sixes, and a brace of antennas at the bottom. Not as sleek as Ghantaqa, but still looked tough.
“Nivax destroyer,” the crewman
said. “Range one point six enqar, time to intercept point 91 qil.”
“Not encouraging news,” Dac said. “How long until we intercept the surveyor ship? Give me the sensor readings.”
The view switched and zoomed in on a craft that looked a quarter Ghantaqa’s size with a long, narrow body and so many projections from the hull it could have been a hedgehog. A hedgehog mixed with a trout. We were closing on it, yeah, but not nearly as fast as the Nivax ship was coming for us.
“Riqasona is a Class Three galactic surveyor with a crew of twenty, meant for long-range exploration. Not bothering to evade our pursuit, Zamuq.”
“I smell that.” Dac gripped the rests of his chair with all four hands. “Our damage situation.”
“Torpedo chutes Aeqx and Beux need mending. The other four are intact. Minimal casualties, no fatalities. Repairs are ongoing, but the space-warp mechanists tell us we’ll be restricted to 60 percent of our maximum acceleration.”
Great. None of that sounded good. The worst part was the gut-chewing feeling that I couldn’t do anything about it.
“They’re contacting us, Zamuq.”
Dac snarled. It was worse than the angriest growl I’d heard from Nil so far. “The Nivax. I have nothing to say to them. They can smell my reply from here.”
“Apologies, Zamuq, but it is an incoming tight-beam communication from the Riqasona. They are asking to speak directly with Prime Nil and the human.”
Oh, this was gonna be fun.
A column of the main screen replaced a third of the nebula. Carpenter. He smiled, same smile, same suit and tie and American flag on the lapel. “I have to say, I’m impressed. You three are the first to ever escape custody under my watch. Part of me didn’t expect you would have such robust help. I assume Special Agent Manzano had a hand in your unauthorized release.”
“You will stop your ship or be destroyed,” Dac said. “You have stolen the Sozh Uqasod, and it is a crime—”
“I was not speaking to you,” Carpenter said icily. “Prime Nil. What did you hope to accomplish? A grand rescue of a priceless cultural artifact by a disgraced Hounder and his human lackey?”
