Inspiration dawned.
"If you can teleport all the human beings in your ship safely back to Earth," she said, "we have a deal."
"Agreed," said the alien. "I would've offered that anyway."
"Really?"
"Of course. We're not monsters. This will require a little time. Please be patient."
Moments ticked by like the slow clacking of a clock with rusted gears as Jamie waited to learn the fate of thousands if not millions of beings. The alien could be using his advanced technology to disarm the MAME while she hovered there waiting. She didn't believe they were malevolent, but that didn't mean she could trust them or that she understood their motives. This alien, Mikenruah – Michael? – seemed like a "regular guy," but that could be just another one of their illusions.
A man emerged from the sphere. A real, flesh-and-blood person, as opposed to the projection or avatar who'd first appeared beside her. Or so she assumed. Jamie didn't spot any openings in the sphere: he'd simply emerged, wearing a skintight blue and gold suit, and flew over to her as if he was as accustomed to flying as she was.
"Have you teleported them back to Earth?"
"Yes."
"Prove it."
"Come with me."
Jamie slipped in alongside him, the MAME following behind on an invisible tether.
"Have the people been teleported to a safe place?"
"Yes. They've all been returned to their countries of origin."
They flew at what Jamie considered a sedate pace for a kilometer or two in silence back toward the outer rings of virtual chambers and the hull.
"You never told me your name," he said. "Or anything about yourself."
"What would be the point?"
"I'm curious."
"Why? Don't you already know everything? Isn't that what it would take to make godlike judgments about other civilizations? To have the certain knowledge that a race is going to destroy itself?"
"Many of your own people suspect that will happen."
"But they're not certain enough to kidnap or kill people." She glanced at him. "And you do sentence some civilizations to death, don't you?"
"You must be in contact with at least one of us."
It wasn't a question. Jamie didn't respond. It might've been fun and educational to have a freewheeling conversation, to tell him what she'd gone through, to gain his perspective, but that didn't strike her as a good idea with someone who was – or might be – her enemy.
"Yes, such death sentences do occur," said Mikenruah. "But I was telling you the truth. Your race was not marked for extinction. However, if you destroy this ship that status may change."
More anxieties to lump on her smorgasbord of worries. The ultimate, horrific irony: destroying this ship, rather than saving humanity in this universe, would condemn it. Or was Mikenruah just playing mind games with her? He made no apology for their deceptions.
They encountered the black wall that Jamie now saw as a sphere which enclosed the webs of energy light and their nucleus. A sphere within a sphere. She guessed they were seven or eight kilometers from the nucleus. Would the MAME have broken through it? The alien seemed to assume so. She had broken through and she doubted she could come close to matching the explosive power of an antimatter bomb.
But there was no resistance this time. A small section of wall opened and they coasted through, encountering the first rows of virtual reality chambers. They were empty. Jamie employed her telescopic vision to confirm that every chamber in sight – several thousand – was empty. Yes. She enjoyed a second or two of quiet satisfaction before the worrisome future returned.
"Our teleportation gateways work from here," Mikenruah announced, settling down on one of the walkways between the chambers while Jamie and her bomb hovered overhead. He rested his fingers on a glowing orb. "I regret not having the chance to discover your mysteries."
Jamie felt herself resisting before she knew what she was resisting – her body responding before she knew why. Dematerializing. She lashed out instinctively in the direction of the perceived force. A symphony of light burst around her. The force withdrew.
Mikenruah lay on the walkway, hands twitching, groaning, blinking up at her. She didn't remember striking him, but then everything had happened too fast for thought. Only now was she consciously recognizing the symptoms of imminent teleportation. On some level, somehow, she'd learned a defense.
Jamie dropped down beside the sprawled alien. His oversized blue eyes pleaded with her.
"Save me," he whispered.
"How?"
"Transfer..." He motioned weakly toward the nearest chamber. "Inside..."
Jamie raised him telekinetically toward the chamber, spreading the force as evenly as she could under his body. He tapped the side and its transparent lid slid open. The lid closed when she lowered him inside. He was instantly unconscious. Hundreds of varicolored light beams lit him up like a marquee. His face relaxed into the semblance of a smile.
Then he was gone. Jamie wondered where. And where was he planning to send me? But she was fairly sure, in his case, he'd gone to a better place – among his people where he could be healed. She felt no small relief over that idea. Mikenruah had asked for it by attempting to teleport her, but he didn't deserve death. Unless he'd been trying to kill her, which she doubted.
"Okay." Her voice sounded hollow and distinctly unheroic in the dead silence. "Let's do this."
Jamie ferried the hutch back through the inner wall and the crackling lightshow to the central sphere. After a brief inner debate, she set the timer for three minutes. She was an estimated fifteen miles from the hull, which she could easily reach in less than a minute. A few seconds to break through the hull and then she could blaze away from the ship on her million MPH "afterburners," placing her far beyond the MAME's blast radius. She wasn't even sure there would be a blast radius beyond the ship considering the ultra-tough material opposing the explosion.
She hit the START control and was on her way, punching through the inner sphere wall in seconds and making a beeline between the spiraling virtual reality chambers straight to the exterior wall. Jamie telekinetically struck a spot on the wall, preparing her passage, and the wall seemed to strike back with an unnerving level of resistance. She bore down her telekinetics on a body-sized circle of the dense black material. The circle softened and turned misty. Jamie kept pushing, slowing her flight to a mere one to two hundred miles per hour.
Her body registered a mild shock and then she was stuck. Like a fly in amber, she thought. Or maybe a fly strip? Ratcheting up her power, Jamie squeezed forward as if she were swimming through tar, battling extreme claustrophobia reminiscent of the time the Hibat Allah agent had teleported her hundreds of feet into the ground. Just keep moving forward. You'll get there.
But now there was issue of time. A three-minute fuse on a thirteen gigaton powder keg was burning down behind her. How much time had passed? Less than two minutes, she was sure, but she was really bogging down now. She redoubled her efforts, and had the disquieting impression that the wall was mounting resistance in proportion to her power. When she eased up, she actually started to move faster. Make haste slowly, as some famous Roman had once said. But he probably hadn't had an antimatter bomb about to go off behind him.
Jamie lost a clear sense of time. The hull had to be several times thicker if not stronger than the inner wall. Nothing to do but keep moving, she thought. And maybe pray.
The walls of her moving tomb lit up suddenly – a low-watt glow building in the space of two seconds into an all-encompassing incandescence. A heat beyond anything she'd ever known since her transformation registered an instant later. In that same instant, Jamie felt the resistance give.
Go!
Jamie blew out into space as if the giant ship had spat her out in utter disgust. She accelerated hard, risking a backward glance only after she'd been flying at full speed for a few seconds. The middle of "Mothra" was glowing a bright yellow. It appeared to be b
ulging outward. The bulge ruptured, birthing a mini-nova starburst of searing white light. She faced forward, pushing herself to full speed. There wouldn't be a shockwave in space, she knew, but there would be plenty of energy, along with fast-moving debris. Not nearly as fast-moving as she was, fortunately. She couldn't outrun light or electromagnetic radiation, but if that was going to kill her she'd already be dead. Of course her jeans and t-shirt had burned off. Maybe she should just give up and open a nudist camp if she ever made it back to Earth?
The light-burst lasted many seconds longer than Jamie expected, to the point where she was wondering if the alien ship itself had been ignited. When it finally dissipated, the alien ship's usual glowing circles running along its length had gone dark. It was now a black crescent detectable only by the stars it blocked. The MAME had done its job. For now.
Jamie halted her momentum away from the ship and performed a slow, circling inventory of the heavens around her. She remembered the disorientation she'd felt when she'd awakened from a brief sleep during her trip to Mars – that chilling moment where she wasn't sure she hadn't gone fatally off course before spotting the Red Planet. This was like that cubed. Nothing looked familiar in any direction. For all she knew, the alien ship was perched at the far end of the galaxy a million light years away. And I just destroyed my only way home.
The most promising object was a nearby star, about the size of a pebble held at arm's length. With unaided vision. Jamie zoomed in until the star was bigger than a beach ball. It could be her sun, or it might be one of countless trillions of stars strewn throughout the galaxy. But confirmation or disconfirmation shouldn't be too difficult, she thought.
She focused her telescopic vision on one of the largest and most promising planetary bodies –
Saturn. It had the classic rings, the right colors. It looked picture perfect. But maybe its double existed outside her solar system? Still, the odds were starting to look good. Just another planet or two...
Got it! The tiny blue marble with the grey-white pearl attending it could only be Earth and its moon. Jamie's body relaxed and she grinned wide enough to collect stars on her teeth. Not that far from home, then. Now it was a question of whether the secret U.S. space fleet had spotted the MAME detonation as planned. If necessary, she thought she'd have a chance of returning to Earth and pointing them in the right direction. Something the size of the alien craft with its seventy or eighty mile length by ten to fifteen mile width couldn't be that hard to find if they knew what they were looking for.
As much as Jamie wanted to race back to Earth, she decided to be patient and give the US Space Command starships a chance to arrive. They had "superluminal" drives, after all. If they detected the explosion, it shouldn't be too long. She'd only been gone an hour or so since leaving Brian's basement. No need to rush.
Jamie amused herself by identifying Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, and Saturn – with possible IDs of Uranus and Neptune. She played one of her dad's favorite songs, America's Horse with No Name, in her head. Though she couldn't remember many of the lyrics, much of what she could remember seemed to fit. In space, you can't remember your name... The enormity of it sucked out her sense of individual identity. Becoming "one with the cosmos" might not be an avoidable option if she stayed out here long enough.
A pale glimmering of light within one of the huge circular panels on the alien ship scattered Jamie's abstruse contemplations. Like a spark catching flame, that glimmering spread to the other circles. She'd never known what they were, but the glowing circles obviously represented a functioning ship.
The power's being restored! The ship's self-healing capabilities or was someone remotely directing the repairs? The glimmering steadied into a soft glow in the smaller end circles. Jamie looked on in a helpless, growing horror. Her mission's success was reversing before her eyes. The alien ship was coming back to life!
Jamie was heading back to the ship before the conscious decision had formed. Flickering lights from within told her that the hull was still breached. She could enter the ship without running the "fly in amber" gauntlet. As the ship neared, Jamie questioned going back inside. What could she do that a 13 gigaton explosive failed to do? And if the explosion had drawn the attention of distant aliens, what if they could attack her – marshalling its resources – in ways that the apparently automated system hadn't? But she had to see for herself.
Passing through the ruptured hull, Jamie gained a perspective on what she'd passed through – twenty to twenty-five feet of the super-strong material. No wonder she'd had to work so hard. Inside, the floors and VR chambers bulged in tangled and twisted fused lines. Lights flickered and bloomed among the damaged sections like wildflowers seeking purchase in torched soil after a forest fire. Further below the spiraling rows thinned and finally vanished. The inner sphere's wall appeared mostly blown out. The intricate spider-web network of lights inside now consisted of a few stray beams.
Flying around the huge craft attempting to oppose the repair process seemed pointless. She had to come up with something bigger, assuming the USSC starships didn't show.
Jamie flew out, an idea slowly forming. She'd flown to Mars at a few million miles per hour dragging along a small satellite array weighing six or seven hundred pounds. But a seven hundred pound object moving millions of miles per hour would pack a pretty large kinetic punch, she thought. Accelerating the communication array to that speed hadn't presented much of a challenge. If she could find an object that size or larger in the immediate "neighborhood," maybe she could launch it at the ship to do some serious damage?
Out a few hundred miles from the ship, Jamie cast around for a likely prospect. Space, she'd learned from her science studies, was mostly empty of large objects. What she'd learned from actually traveling through space was that it was strangely, hauntingly devoid of any objects. Even in the asteroid belts, popularly portrayed in SF movies as teeming with space rocks, the average distance between them was something like eight times the distance between the Earth and the moon.
Jamie had one intriguing notion: the debris from the alien ship itself. Countless tons of it had to be spreading out into space. If she could gather a good-sized chunk of it together and accelerate it at high speed, she might have something. What could be better equipped to harm the ship's ultra-tough materials than the very materials that composed it?
With a sense that she was probably missing something, she flew out in search of debris. She was surprised at how easy it was to spot and overtake a cloud of fragments. Their several thousand miles per hour was a snail's pace to her top speed.
Gathering them wasn't hard. Jamie was soon attending a mass of wreckage the size of a Walmart Supercenter – most of the pieces no larger than her hand. When she concentrated on fusing them into a ball she was startled when they joined together with little telekinetic urging, as though that was what it desired. Jamie wasn't sure she liked the idea of material fragments having desires, but in this case she was happy to give them what they wanted.
The ball grew. A small boulder, big boulder, hot air balloon, small hill. She kept piling on the pieces, wondering about its mass, but if it was as heavy as the Object-cylinder it would be pretty damn massive.
Jamie was startled by a sudden movement. Not in herself or the debris but seemingly in the space around her – like the powerful shift of an ocean tide or a powerful gust of wind. She'd never felt anything like it in space.
The abrupt appearance – materialization, really – of several spacecraft nearby indicated the likely source of that tidal shift. Only their initial bright blue glow caught her eyes. When that dimmed they were no more than flea-sized specks. Had they emerged from hyperspace? Decloaked? She zoomed in on them: four ships, two large, two small, all bearing U.S. flags. She guessed they were a few hundred miles away and they all were several thousand miles from the alien craft.
The alien ship's six circular lights had settled into a steady but still somewhat dim glow. The gaping hole near the center of
its boomerang shape was shrinking. Soon the ship would be whole again. She had no idea what its defenses might be, but they could only improve as it repaired itself. The time to strike was now.
The U.S. starships must've shared her thought because the two larger vessels launched one missile each. Keeping an eye on the missiles, Jamie cruised in closer to the U.S. ships, dragging the giant alien-debris ball along. A small light flared on the side of one of the smaller craft. A tiny blue ball approached her, gaining size by the second.
They just fired a missile at me! In the three seconds it took Jamie to reach that conclusion, the missile was almost on her. She lashed out with a telekinetic strike. Light burst in her eyelids.
Jamie drifted for a while in a warm, hazy greyness, neither awake nor unconscious. Her thoughts were warm and calm and only about the sensation of drifting.
She wasn't sure how much time had passed when she opened her eyes. A dull ache in her head and a dry throat felt like a hangover – something she'd only experienced twice in her life. The ball of alien debris was still following ten or so meters away. The small ship that had fired on them was no longer in their path. Jamie craned her neck a bit to locate it: high above her at "twelve o'clock" or whatever the correct nomenclature was, and many miles more distant.
The craft had obviously interpreted her approach as possibly hostile. Had that been a MAME missile? Since it had detonated less than a kilometer away, she doubted it. Some lesser explosive but still strong enough to knock her out?
Directing her gaze to the alien ship, she spotted the two missiles still en route, closing in. But as she watched, bracing herself for the blast, a black mist obscured them. Then nothing. The rockets had vanished. The black mist dissipated.
Jamie felt her optimism drain out of her. Mothra's defenses – or some of them – were still in place. Damn it! So close, only to be defeated in the final round by superior technology. And the ship wasn't even fully recovered yet.
But maybe...maybe if she worked with the starships? Was it possible, working together, that they could deflect or weaken the alien ship's defenses? She needed to make contact with the U.S. space fleet. Like right about now.
Super World Two Page 18
