Keystones: Tau Prime

by Alexander McKinney

  “I’d like to join them,” Deklan said.

  “I’d like to join them, please.”

  “I’d like to join them, please!”

  “Excellent, excellent, and you will.” Cheshire reached for the controls to Deklan’s restraints. “One other thing, though. You’re going to have to give up your quest to find Ms. Anthony for now. Otherwise everyone you care about will die.” Cheshire snapped his fingers one last time and winked. “But, hey, other than that, have a great day.” He hit the release controls and vanished.

  Deklan’s restraints snapped open. Now that Serenity had been attacked, he wondered what he was supposed to do. In any event he knew that he needed an EVA suit. He had seen what happened to The Burningsworth, and there was already a decompression alert.

  When he opened the door, he felt the immediate breeze of atmospheric movement. Wherever the hull breach was, it wasn’t small. The hallway of the ship no longer looked well provisioned and factory-fresh. Now Deklan saw only an expensive tomb. With firm handholds he pulled himself along to the EVA locker. Jamie was already there with Calm. She looked wild about the eyes; he looked unruffled. Neither had completely donned their EVA suits.

  Obviously surprised to see him, Jamie asked, “Deklan, how did you get loose?”

  The truth was not a good option. Calm already thought that he was crazy. Saying that another teleporting Keystone had freed him seemed like a terrible idea. He spoke in a rush. “Can we talk about this another time? I’d rather not suffocate.”

  Calm threw him a suit. “Get dressed and be helpful.”

  That was a set of orders Deklan was delighted to follow. “Where’s Jonny?” he asked.

  “He’s on the bridge buying some time while Jamie and I get dressed.” Calm slipped an arm into a sleeve. “Why?”

  As Deklan pulled the EVA leggings on, he replied, “I wanted to be sure he was still alive.”

  “Oh.” Somehow that simple comment seemed to relax Calm far more than Deklan could account for.

  “I’d like to see an image of who’s attacking us,” added Deklan.

  Calm’s only indication of surprise was a subtle lilt to his voice. “How’d you know that we were under attack?”

  Deklan improvised a response. “After I saw The Burningsworth, did you think I’d assume that this was an accident?”

  Jamie put a hand on Calm’s arm. “He’s not telling us something.”

  “That’s rich coming from you,” chided Deklan, “but you need to shelve this matter. There isn’t time to argue. In fact, this conversation has taken too long as it is.” Deklan grabbed the rest of his gear without fastening it. “I’d like to see what we’re up against.”

  Jamie looked as though she were going to object, but Calm nodded his assent. “Of course, but finish with your suit first. Then meet us on the bridge.”

  Deklan rushed through the rest of his preparation and sped to the bridge. Jonny didn’t even look up as he entered. His eyes were glued to the display of the ship that was pursuing them, and sweat poured down his face.

  Deklan needed only one glance at the screen to be certain that the marauding ship was not of human design or origin.

  It didn’t fly through space so much as undulate like an eel. Long and thin, it had wriggling arms that sprouted from its main body. They were in constant motion and hard to count. With magnification Deklan could see that each of the arms was covered in still tinier moving parts.

  The surface of the craft wasn’t solid like the surface of Serenity. Instead, it was a mesh of dark material lit from behind by an eerie dark blue light. Gouts of the light erupted down the body like miniature volcanoes. No eruption came from the same spot twice. Toward the end closest to Serenity the eruptions were more frequent, and the lights were a venomous green.

  The panic that Deklan half-expected didn’t come. His hands didn’t shake; his stomach didn’t clench; his heart didn’t pound. A cool tranquility washed through Deklan. All of his other concerns vanished as though they had never existed. This was important: they had to survive to warn others.

  “Jonny,” asked Deklan in a steady voice, “can you get us away from it?”

  Jonny grimaced. “Maybe, with a lot of evasive maneuvers and even more luck.” He nervously wiped a hand across his brow. “I’m not even sure how we’ve made it this far. Right now it seems as though they’re just toying with us.”

  “So you’re open to suggestions then?” asked Deklan.

  Jonny wiped his face again. “Anything.”

  “First off, does anyone think that craft is of human origin?” No one spoke. “I’ve got an idea, but it’s unorthodox. Jonny, just how much beer can you make at one time?” Deklan was aware of Jamie and Calm’s exchanging looks at the question.

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  Deklan’s plan was like an elaborate stunt, albeit one with high stakes. “I’m going to need all of the probes and a lot of ice. We’re also going to need to sacrifice Whirlwind after we do some fast jury-rigging.”

  When no one raised immediate objections, Deklan explained his plan, and they set to work.

  Ten minutes later Deklan sat alone aboard Whirlwind in the shuttle bay. Calm had programmed the autopilot to fly straight at the alien craft. With the preflight checklist completed, Deklan waited on the doors to open. Every second gave him a chance to rethink his decision. There were a lot of variables, each of which needed to pan out.

  Whirlwind hummed to life as its engines warmed up, and Deklan patted the console in front of him. He was asking a lot of the little shuttle. Once he left Serenity, there would be no turning back.

  The doors opened.

  Deklan held his breath. He just needed to resist the urge to escape until the autopilot took them out. His hands formed tight fists, and he bit down on his lip.

  The little craft moved up and out. Deklan’s vantage point changed as he passed through the doors and into space. Only once before had he been in a ship as small as Whirlwind, and that was with Calm. He also had stood on the surface of a derelict vessel wearing only his EVA suit. This, however, was different. He was flying to face an alien vessel alone.

  He prepared for the next step. Still close to Serenity, he was held within the local distortion of the Doppler Bubble Drive. It was going to be a bumpy ride. He hit the second of the commands that Calm had programmed into the autopilot.

  Whirlwind’s engines flared to full power now that it was clear of the mother ship. “Good luck, Mr. Tobin,” Calm called over a channel. The voices of Jonny and Jamie echoed the sentiment a heartbeat later.

  As Whirlwind shot over the spatial interface, it was tossed about like a dinghy in a hurricane. Seat straps pressed against Deklan’s chest with bruising force, and the starry sky spun away in all directions amid the turbulence.

  Deklan forced himself to train his gaze on the screens. Onboard sensors registered Serenity as a distant pinprick. They also showed the alien ship, which was nearly where they had estimated it would be. Calculations like that were always tricky with faster-than-light travel because you couldn’t trust what you saw.

  Up close the ship was even more imposing than from a distance. Aboard Serenity Deklan had failed to take in the full scale of the beast. It was massive, several kilometers long and in constant motion. Serenity could have fit within it a hundred times over with space to spare. The immense size meant that it took time for the undulations he’d noted earlier to ripple down the full length of its hull.

  The ship matched velocities with Deklan. He breathed a sigh of relief. The first gamble had succeeded.

  The others had been against his going, but he’d argued that they didn’t know what technology this alien vessel had. If they sent out an empty shuttle, the enemy might somehow know and ignore it. He therefore was sitting in the shuttle as bait. Deklan also hoped that they’d wanted him alive. Otherwise the trip would be short indeed.

  Whirlwind lured the ship away from Serenity, Deklan hoping that his craft’s slowness wou
ld buy some time. If the ship used faster-than-light technology to pursue, it would in all probability overshoot him.

  The ship didn’t turn or alter its orientation but moved directly toward him, perpendicular to its previous course. From Deklan’s point of view what had been the belly of the ship was now a long prow. As the distance between the two craft closed, sensors showed him that the ship moved with more sub-light speed than he’d hoped for. Appendages curled and pointed toward him, blue eruptions gathered at their tips.

  On Serenity’s screen the arms had looked thin, here, but now they appeared enormous. Each arm was several times wider than Whirlwind, and as on the main hull the mesh surface was lit by blue light from within. The blue light moved in a chaotic and unpredictable manner that illuminated some areas while leaving others shrouded in darkness. Deklan saw exotic patterns covering the arm wherever the light went.

  The arms extended past Deklan as the alien craft came closer. He couldn’t help but think of them as prison bars in space. As they surged past him, an opening widened in a section of the hull below Whirlwind and grew to a circle large enough to swallow the shuttle ten times over.

  Deklan saw the opening and licked his lips even as his heart palpitated. If this went wrong, there was no way to know what they’d do with a live specimen that could regenerate. His imagination conjured up visions of his being locked in a room and dissected on a daily basis for years. He couldn’t let that happen. He had to get the next maneuver right.

  It was time for gamble number two.

  He cued the probes. They burst out from Whirlwind like a fireworks display, dozens scattering in every direction. Return fire from the enemy ship was immediate but far from accurate. Deklan lost signals from three of his probes but not from the most critical one. He watched the countdown from a simulation as that probe reached its target.

  A second later he saw the fallout from an explosion with his own eyes. He had just detonated a fusion bomb made from scraps left over from Tempest’s salvaged engines. All they’d had to do was to disable the safety governors.

  Red light erupted, and chunks of the hull flew off as the bloom of destruction spread farther and farther across the ship below him. The segments that tumbled through space lost their blue glow and became dark, almost invisible against the blackness of space. Deklan watched shockwaves continue to radiate out from the epicenter of the blast. Three of the arms closest to the impact area tore free.

  As the last of the eruptions died away, it was time for gamble number three.

  Deklan left the cockpit and grabbed the last probe in Whirlwind’s main cabin. He ran his hands over the tethers that trailed from it. Deklan thought of Cheshire and his escape from Boa Vista. He had used tethers in space before, with results that could have been called successful, but this time he hoped for a less dramatic experience.

  Snap by snap he connected the tethers to his EVA suit. Four lines, each less than ten centimeters long, had to hold if Deklan were to survive. He then sent a command to all of the remaining probes.

  Opening a hatch, he heard this hiss of escaping air. A red warning lit up on the bottom left of his faceplate. Deklan didn’t need to know what the warning said; he heard the problem. Air was leaking out, and he could feel it, near his left foot. The small probe was his only hope of survival. Upon activation the probe released seven squid-like tendrils, each uniformly long and multi-jointed, tapering to a narrow tip. None of them touched him.

  As the probe engaged its Doppler Bubble Drive, the tethers went taut, and Deklan was pulled out of Whirlwind, carried along within the probe’s local field of spatial distortion. He was helpless, and there was no turning back. He had to hope that the rest of the probes would swarm nearby and act as a shield when he tried to get back to Serenity.

  The stuntman in Deklan derived no little pleasure from knowing that he was now traveling faster than any human ever had in space wearing only an EVA suit, even though he was streaking toward a wormhole. Just then a new icon flashed on his faceplate. It was a stopgap measure that was supposed to give the wearer minutes more, maybe fifteen, but if Deklan didn’t reach Serenity within the hour it wouldn’t help at all.

  Moving at the speed of a probe rather than a ship, Deklan had no time to appreciate his entrance into the wormhole. It was almost as sudden as teleporting. One second he was moving in a black starscape; the next he was careening through a purple tunnel with fluctuating walls. He was distracted by the cold that still beset his left ankle.

  He desperately hoped that Jonny had prepared for gamble number four.

  The probe slowed and dropped out of sight faster than light, giving Deklan time to see the next obstacle. He gasped because he hadn’t believed that Jonny could do it.

  The wormhole was filled with menacing dark shards that glinted in the purple light and obscured the passageway. Some were larger than Whirlwind had been. The only constant was their opacity.

  Deklan and his cohorts hadn’t been sure whether the alien ship could fit into a wormhole or whether it could travel faster than light in one. Most of all, they hadn’t been sure of what would happen if the ice crystals hit the wormhole’s walls. They had hoped that the same uncertainty would give the aliens pause too.

  The probe dragged Deklan through a narrow passageway between crystals. He could have reached out and touched one if he hadn’t been worried that the contact would cut his suit open. The probe must have had a sensor that guided it through the maze. Minutes passed as they penetrated deeper and deeper into the dark blizzard.

  All that illuminated their progress through the stygian darkness were the lights from the probe and the lights on Deklan’s helmet. Pain from his ankle seared him as he and the probe made their slow way through the dark field. Then, suddenly, they broke through the purple maze.

  The remaining probes that survived after acting as a shield for Deklan’s escape had made their way through the dark maze and sat behind it, ready to engage their drives and send shockwaves of ice back the way they had come.

  Ahead of Deklan the passage was blocked by a forbidding behemoth. The size of the wormhole, it was many times larger than Serenity. Its surface was jagged and cracked from uneven freezing, and turrets of ice jutted from the lower layers. Deklan’s breath caught in his throat. How was he supposed to get past that brute?

  The probe knew. Without hesitation it dove straight at the obstacle, specifically a narrow gap between the wormhole and the ice. Through this gap they passed with less than a meter to spare on either side. Deklan could have reached out and dipped his fingers into the glowing matter.

  Close up it wasn’t a simple purple but hues and variations that defied his ability to label them. The colors danced and cycled in a chaotic manner that would have been entrancing had it not looked so dangerous.

  As they passed around the far curve of the giant, a new field of wheat-colored icebergs came into view. These were not the sharp-edged monoliths of before but still imposing structures in their own right. Again the probe didn’t hesitate as it wove a passage through the icebergs, picking up speed and dodging through the spaces between them. There was no darkness here, and Deklan didn’t get the sense of traveling through an abyss. Purple light splashed around him as the probe took him through the region.

  Passing the last boulder, he heaved a sigh of relief. There she was, Serenity. Two figures stood in the shuttle bay warding off new icebergs. Deklan didn’t have more than a second to take in the sight before the probe engaged its Doppler Bubble Drive and streaked toward the ship. It slowed just before contact, but Deklan’s relief quickly vanished: they’d forgotten to program the probe to return to the shuttle bay.

  He slammed against the entry to the probe’s return tube, hitting it with his right shoulder. His scream echoed in his helmet. The tethers that secured him to the probe snapped, and Deklan rebounded off Serenity to spin in the wormhole.

  “Serenity! Serenity!” he called frantically. The wormhole tumbled around him, and he scrambled to reach
his EVA thruster controls with his left hand. Blasts of air slowed his spin and brought him upright.

  “Report,” said Calm over the com system, his voice a soothing presence.

  Speaking to someone else reduced Deklan’s feeling of isolation. “The probe smashed me against the return tube,” he replied. “I’m returning to the ship now.” He could hear fear in his voice, but it wasn’t as intense as before.

  Two figures watched him from the shuttle bay, their postures indicating a readiness to assist him.

  Deklan aimed at the open doors and fired his thrusters at maximum power. He closed the distance to less than ten meters. He was almost there before his thrusters went wild.

  Flipped upside down, Deklan careened toward the pulsing wormhole wall. He pressed buttons to no effect. The controls were dead. “Serenity!” he yelled again.

  No answer came over his com system, and his faceplate went dark. He could see out, but there was no incoming information.

  The side of the wormhole was coming up fast, and he couldn’t do anything but wave his arms and legs. His breath came in short, sharp gasps: he was going to die again. Cold sweat drenched his face and head.

  Suddenly something slammed into his back, and he was on board Serenity again. His still firing thrusters shot him to the ceiling, where his first point of contact was his dislocated shoulder. His EVA suit pressed him into the ceiling at full power. He could only scream.

  Deklan tried to push back, but the force from his suit was too much. Then, abruptly, it failed. He pushed off with his one good hand and turned so that he could see the bay. The doors were closing, and two figures were standing as far from each other as possible. He ignored them both and shoved off with his good leg to the lock that led to the rest of the ship. He needed medical attention. He knew what the teleporting meant, but for now it could wait.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN