“So that arbitrary line that Etherus told everyone not to cross is a political boundary?”
Ellis nodded. “Part of a treaty that the Faros signed with Etherus before humans even existed. It divides the Farosien Empire from the Etherian Empire.”
Tyra scowled. “Etherus might have mentioned that before we left.”
“He might have mentioned a lot of things,” Ellis replied. “Anyway, their leader calls himself Lucien, and he—”
Tyra held up a hand to stop Ellis there. “Lucien? You mean like my Lucien?”
“I know. I thought that was strange, too. Might be a coincidence, but we’re going to have to look into it. Anyway, the alien Lucien seems to know a lot about us. He claims to have met our people aboard the Inquisitor eight years ago, and apparently he killed several of them personally, or one of his clones did, anyway.”
Tyra gaped at Ellis. “Did he say why? Did they provoke him somehow?”
“They refused to submit to slavery. The very same offense we are busy committing now. Admiral Stavos pretended to surrender and then jumped through their jamming field without warning, despite the high risk of scattering.”
Admiral Stavos nodded along with that. “Lady luck is definitely with us. Let’s hope it stays that way.”
A female lieutenant rushed up to the admiral, breathless, her golden eyes wide and flickering with images from her ARCs. “Admiral, we have a problem!” she said.
He turned and nodded for her to continue. “Yes?”
“Reactors sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen are all registering unusual activity.”
“Define unusual, Lieutenant Ruso.”
“Radiation spikes well outside normal bounds. Power output is erratic. If it continues like this, there’ll be a containment failure and they’ll all go critical.”
“So shut them down. We have hundreds of reactors. We can live without three of them.”
“I tried, sir. They’re not responding.”
“Then send teams to shut them down manually!”
“I would, sir, but two of those reactors are behind enemy lines.”
The admiral’s expression froze somewhere between horror and dawning realization. “Clever little kakards... How long do we have before those reactors blow?”
“Ten, maybe twenty minutes.”
“At least those sections are evacuated. If we’re lucky the blue-skins will blow themselves up and save us the trouble.”
“Hopefully, sir, but one of the affected reactors is behind our lines. The operators on site say the manual overrides aren’t working.”
Admiral Stavos ran a hand through his beard. “They don’t have access to that one, so they must be hacking our control systems.”
“That’s what I thought, but it might also be a physical data probe traveling through the coolant pipes or electrical conduits. Whatever the case, the effects are spreading from one reactor to another, and fast... I think we’re going to have to shut down all of our other reactors preemptively until we can find the source of the problem.”
Admiral Stavos shook his head. “If we do that, the whole ship will be running on fumes. Gravity, life support, lights, jamming fields—all of that will be running on reserve power, and when reserves start to run dry, systems will fail all over the ship—including the comms jammers that are keeping the enemy from calling in their fleet.”
“Yes, sir, but if we don’t shut everything down now, the enemy is going to keep turning our reactors into bombs, one after another, until Astralis rips itself apart.”
Tyra couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “How could something like this happen?”
“Shut them down,” Admiral Stavos growled.
“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Ruso replied, already turning to leave.
“And find the problem before we run out of power! I want every available man and bot on the job.”
“Aye, sir,” she said, and took off at a run.
Admiral Stavos turned back to Tyra and Ellis. “Excuse me, councilors.”
“Wait—” Tyra said. “How long do we have before power starts to fail?”
“That depends. We’re going to have to ration it, so some systems are going to go down immediately. Gravity sucks the most power, so I’m going to have to kill that first.”
Tyra blinked in shock and shook her head. “You can’t. There’s millions of people on the surface level! Our water reservoirs are there. You kill the gravity, and there’ll be nothing to hold them in place. The tiniest shift in our momentum will send trillions of gallons floating free, bulldozing homes, uprooting trees, and drowning everyone in their path.”
“I have no intention of maneuvering the ship while gravity is offline, so Newton’s first law should save us—an object in motion stays in motion unless acted on by an unbalanced force.”
“You’re assuming that an unbalanced force needs to come from the engines, but we’re talking about a complex system of forces, including weather forces that are constantly engaged all over Astralis. One rain drop, falling at the moment that you turn off the gravity, will sail on until it hits the surface of a lake, and when it does, it will knock a dozen more raindrops free and send them flying back up into the sky.”
The admiral’s lips quirked into a grim smile. “So find an umbrella.”
“You’re missing the point, Admiral. You can’t predict what the effects of this will be. There’s too many variables, too many tiny fluctuations.”
Stavos leveled an accusing finger at her. “No, you’re missing the point, Councilor. You think I don’t understand chaos theory? I was schooled in science by the Academy, the same as you. The difference is, I also studied war, and war is all about minimizing casualties.
“There are three hundred million people living in Astralis, and over ninety percent of them live either above or below the surface. To them, turning off the gravity will only be a minor nuisance, and I can protect them by doing so. As for the other ten percent who live under boundless skies—yes, their homes might be bulldozed, or they might temporarily lose their lives in the chaos, but when it’s all over, the other ninety percent will still be around to resurrect them. My way, everybody lives—your way, everybody dies. I think that makes the choice obvious, don’t you?”
Tyra had nothing to say to that. All she could think about was a tidal wave the size of Planck Lake crashing into Hubble Mountain, cracking it open, and drowning her children.
Admiral Stavos turned and stalked away, heading for the comms control station. Ellis followed him there, and Tyra listened in horror as the two of them delivered a dire warning to everyone on board, saying they had just five minutes to secure themselves and their belongings as best they could.
Before they’d even finished speaking, Tyra placed a call to her husband.
“Tyra? I—”
“Lucien! Get back to the shelter! They’re going to turn off the gravity. Find the girls and keep them safe!”
“I know. I’m already on my way,” Lucien replied, sounding out of breath. “I’ll let you know when I get there. You’d better find someplace safe, too.”
Tyra nodded. “I will. I love you.”
“Love you, too,” he replied.
Chapter 9
Astralis
As the patrol car raced out of the station, Lucien glanced at his old partner, Brak, sitting in the back beside him. Before he’d been promoted to chief of security, they’d worked together every day, but now they only did so occasionally, whenever Lucien could find an excuse to leave the station and go out on patrol.
“Thanks for coming with me, buddy,” Lucien said. Brak’s presence made this look more like official police business, and less like the chief of security for Fallside abandoning his duty in the middle of a crisis.
“It is nothing to mention,” Brak growled, and bared his dagger-sharp black teeth in a fearsome grimace that was probably meant to be a brotherly smile.
They’d been friends forever, since long before Astralis had left
New Earth, and the Etherian Empire, since before they could even count to ten. Well, at least before Lucien could; Gors grew up a lot faster than humans. Their relationship had oscillated from Lucien acting like the big brother, to Brak doing so, and back again until their respective levels of maturity had more or less equalized and they’d graduated together as Paragons and peers.
Soon after that, Lucien had decided to join Astralis’s mission to the cosmic horizon. Brak had followed him with the plan to change his mind, but when that plan failed, the Gor had decided to join Astralis’s mission, too, supposedly for the adventure, but Lucien suspected otherwise. Brak had fallen back into their old pattern. He was being the big brother again.
Lucien glanced at the timer on his ARCs, counting down until gravity switched off all over Astralis.
Thirty seconds until the picturesque surface level became a nightmare. There were fail-safes in place to prevent gravity from ever failing. It was supposed to be impossible. More than ninety percent of the ship’s reactors would have to go offline before the gravity did, and even then it would have remained at a fraction of normal strength.
But this wasn’t some kind of unforeseen systems failure. Chief Councilor Ellis and Admiral Stavos were shutting off the ship’s gravity intentionally—pre-emptively, they said. Before something worse happens.
It was hard to imagine something worse. What they were about to do was unconscionable. Lucien gazed fixedly out the side window of the hover, watching the scenery roll by beneath them...
Then the timer hit zero, and the hover bucked under them. Lucien’s guts twisted, but didn’t surge up into his throat as he’d expected. The hover’s grav lifts were now an unbalanced force, sending it rocketing up and pushing him down into his seat.
The driver program detected the problem and negated their vertical thrust, but they sailed on with their momentum until Lucien heard the dorsal maneuvering jets firing to push them back down. The contents of Lucien’s stomach surged, and his seat restraints dug into his shoulders, holding him down. Acid burned in the back of his throat and he grimaced with distaste.
“We are experiencing a gravity malfunction. Please make sure your seat buckles are securely fastened,” the driver program said.
Unused seat belts floated up to eye level with Lucien before the buckles reached the end of their slack and bounced back down. Simultaneously, thousands of individual strands of his hair went through the same vertical whiplash effect.
But outside nothing appeared to be happening. Astralis wasn’t in motion like his hover was, at least not changing motion, so there was nothing to knock anything loose from its initial state of rest relative to the rest of the ship.
Lake water stayed in lake beds. Trees remained rooted. Parked hover cars still sat on their landing pads.
Lucien breathed a sigh of relief.
Then a sudden flash of light dazzled his eyes, and he winced against the glare. Had Astralis just jumped again? But no, that couldn’t be. They couldn’t jump out while running on reserve power...
A titanic boom, rumbled through the sky, stealing his attention.
Thunder? Lucien wondered, as he peered up at the cloudless blue sky over Fallside. As he watched, the sky shivered; then it caved in, and fire gushed out between tumbling chunks of molten orange metal. The debris fell like meteors, each the size of a house or building. A gaping black hole appeared in the clear blue sky. Smoke swirled inside that opening, and molten debris plummeted.
The shock wave hit next. A blast of heat knocked the hover sideways, and Lucien’s seat restraints dug into his chest and shoulders with terrifying force. Alarms screamed in the cockpit, and the driver program issued a banal warning: “We are experiencing turbulence, please make sure your seat buckles are securely fastened.”
“What is happening?” Brak shook his skull-shaped head, his gaunt cheeks slack and black teeth bared in a quizzical sneer.
Wind roared, buffeting their hover car with stifling heat. Lucien blinked as rivers of sweat ran into his eyes. Wake up. He thought. This couldn’t be real.
Just as the force of the shock wave was abating, the hover lurched upward again, pinning them in their seats. So much for zero-G, Lucien thought. He had yet to experience more than a moment of it.
“Driver, what’s going on?” Lucien demanded. “Why are we ascending?”
“We are experiencing turbulence, please do not be alarmed.”
Lucien scowled at the unhelpful answer, and turned to look out the side window of the hover, hoping he’d be able to see for himself. He did, but he still couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
The chunks of debris tumbling to the ground had slowed and were now reversing their course, flying back up into the sky. Trees, water, dirt, rocks, houses, hover cars, and everything else gradually followed, lifting off and swirling in circles below the gaping hole in the sky.
An inverted tornado. Lucien watched as it gathered strength, quickly darkening into a black funnel. The oily tip snaked up and touched the hole in the sky, where it remained.
“No!” Lucien slapped the window with his palms as hard as he could, vainly hoping that the stinging pain would wake him up.
But the chaos only amplified, quickly reaching clear across Fallside. Wind roared deafeningly around the hover once more, and writhing tentacles of water snaked up from lakes and rivers; waterfalls pouring from Hubble Mountain inverted their course, falling up into the spinning vortex in the sky.
The hover shuddered and the engines moaned as the driver program tried to compensate. It was like wading to shore against the backwash of a tidal wave, except the ocean they were being carried into was cold hard vacuum.
Hover cars were atmospheric vehicles, not spacecraft. If they got sucked out, they’d be dead within seconds.
Lucien fumbled with his seat restraints, hands shaking as he unbuckled.
“Death comes for usss,” Brak hissed.
“Death can go frek itself!” Lucien replied as he broke free of his restraints. He jumped up and grabbed the bottom of the bench seat facing theirs. Folding it to either side and folding the seat back down into that space, he revealed a narrow passage leading into the cockpit.
Lucien crawled through. It was cramped inside the cockpit, built for one rather than two to maintain the patrol hover’s speedy, aerodynamic profile.
He managed to wrestle himself into place, legs in their slots, feet resting over rudder pedals. Reaching around he unfolded the back of the pilot’s chair, blocking the passage behind him once more. All patrol model hover cars had space for a human pilot in addition to the nine seats in the back—six for officers, three for detainees.
Lucien deactivated the autopilot and grabbed the flight yoke. He slammed the flight yoke down and pushed the throttle up past the stops into overdrive. The hover shook like a leaf, and the thrusters screamed, but the range to Hubble Mountain began dropping steadily.
Thunk! A rock bounced off the nose of the hover. Then a handful of pebbles and leaves skittered across the windshield, followed by a curling column of water, invisible until the last second. It splashed over them, slapping the hover with a noisy bang. Collision alert warnings screamed belatedly. Another rock hit, this time slamming into the canopy and drawing a spider’s web of fractures in the glass.
Lucien grimaced and activated a sensor overlay to shade and highlight the debris. Fuzzy red clouds of dirt appeared; larger specks for pebbles and rocks; a writhing red tentacle of water...
A spinning boulder the size of a house sailed up in front of him, and the cockpit turned solid red. Lucien jerked the yoke to starboard and rolled in the same direction. A collision alert screamed, and Lucien fired the grav lifts at full strength.
They bounced off the boulder with a brief crushing sensation, and then the rest of Astralis snapped into focus once more. Lucien breathed a sigh of relief—
But it caught in his throat. The inverted pyramid of the Academy was cracking away from its perch atop Hubble Mountain. A shatter
ed rain of glinting blue glass fell from its walls.
Lucien felt a flash of satisfaction as the symbol of his wife’s abandonment was ripped away. Then he remembered that there were thousands of people inside that building, and all of them were about to suffocate in the dark. He grimaced and dove for the base of Hubble Mountain, heading straight for Shelter Twelve.
Debris continued to assault the car on the way down, but the effects were milder closer to the surface. The shelter’s garage doors swept up in front of him, and Lucien fired the grav lifts to halt his momentum, followed by a steady blast from the dorsal jets to keep the car hovering in front of the entrance.
He keyed the comms. “Shelter Twelve, this is Chief of Security Ortane, requesting emergency landing clearance. Please respond, over.”
Static hissed back at him over the comms. Something scraped by the hover car, pushing it out of line. Lucien compensated with both lateral and dorsal jets. A second later he caught a glimpse of a tree branch waving at him as it sailed by the port side of the cockpit.
“Shelter Twelve, I repeat this is Security Chief Ortane, requesting emergency landing clearance, Over!”
More static...
And then a reply slithered back: “I read you, Lucien. Please proceed.” That was not the voice of the shelter’s comm operator. The voice was androgynous and silky smooth, with an accent like nothing Lucien had ever heard before.
“Who is this?”
The static was back. In lieu of a reply, the garage doors began rumbling open.
Fear clawed at Lucien’s heart as he realized he must have just spoken with one of the aliens. They’d taken over the shelter. Lucien keyed the comms once more and switched channels to his station’s band. “Central, this is Sierra one zero, requesting backup at Shelter Twelve. Hostages taken. Over.”
Lucien throttled up and glided forward, fighting unpredictable gusts of air to keep them from slamming into the roof of the garage on the way in.
A reply came, but the comms crackled with a burst of interference that garbled the message.
“Say again, Central,” Lucien commed back.
Dark Space Universe (Book 2): The Enemy Within Page 6
