Endless Sky (An Island in the Universe Trilogy Book 1)

by Greg Remy

  They were still surrounded by CF ships, hundreds, if not thousands, of them. Zoe stared at the enormous vessel closest to them. All its navigation lights were off, and its many windows were darkened. She then realized the vessel wasn’t even stationary; it was drifting! The entire ship had been powered down and was now simply floating along in space. She looked beyond it. All the CF ships had been disabled! The entire armada!

  “Zoe, what did you do?” asked Darious in a mesmerized tone.

  Just then, a projectile came into view and tranquilly glided by, only meters from their port bow. Zoe followed it with her eyes until it passed beyond her window’s panorama. She looked at Darious and then sat in her chair. With steadied keystrokes, she analyzed the area around them.

  “Darious, all of the Copper ships, everything... engines are offline, weapons are offline, navigational systems are offline, but their life systems are on—though they are being powered by their last remaining back-up cells. Everything has been shut off somehow.”

  “Everything except for us,” said Darious.

  Zoe did a quick scan of her own ship’s systems. He was right. Minor damage was evident, but overall her ship was operational and quite capable of spaceflight. She wasted no time.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Zoe eased her ship forward to make sure there were no more surprises and then they shot out from the sea of petrified driftwood.

  Chapter 47

  Rise

  The pair had completed close to 5 floating-parsecs before Zoe turned off the afterburners and gave the red-hot engines a much-needed reprieve. She had spent the entire time at her console, staring with unflinching eyes at long-range scans. For the last hour, not even the blip of a passing semi had appeared. The mood had finally calmed within the ship.

  Zoe kept replaying in her mind what had happened when she had launched the Z-Pulsers in on themselves. It was like for a moment she was lifeless, or like some nescient creature, but at the same time, she felt as if she had been spread across the cosmos. The sensation was odd; it was hard to pin down and her memory was just too fuzzy. What struck her as even more odd was the fact that she didn’t feel shaken up by the experience. Somehow it had felt natural in a very raw sort of way.

  “Zoe,” said Darious from behind her. “If you do not mind, I would much like to take a hot shower.”

  “Oh, please do!” she said, turning in her chair and smiling at him. “They can smell you all the way from Gamma-9.”

  Darious smirked and held her hand.

  “I have a question.”

  “Shoot,” she said.

  “How did you know Doctor Earl Saknussemm’s algorithm would work?”

  Zoe looked at him for several seconds before responding. “I had a gut feeling.” She then shook her head. “It was a last resort. We got lucky.” This didn’t seem to satisfy Darious, so she continued. “I thought perhaps it would pull us out of phase from all the matter around us and we could just pass through everyone while giving them the finger.” She smiled. “Well, I figured either that would happen, or we’d be turned to goop.”

  “But neither occurred.”

  “I know. I... I’m not sure what happened. But I do know we are alive. And I am sure thankful for that.” She gave his hand a squeeze. Darious then gave her a brief kiss and headed for the shower.

  As Zoe stared off into space, continuing to repeat that seemingly arcane event, a soft ding came from her computer. She sat straight up. The ship was beginning to receive the data from her subspace worm, Wormy. Zoe brought up the download screen. 40%. 65%. 85%. 95%. She stared at it with silent anticipation. Download complete. Zoe’s fingers shook as she opened the repository of information collected from the furthest reaches of the galaxy, all ready to be compiled into a great galactic map of her home viewed from an angle never before observed.

  Zoe loaded a predefined atlas of the Milky Way. It projected outwards in front of her, expanding over her cockpit window. Zoe could feel her heart tremble as she steadied her breathing. In blues and brilliant whites, the galaxy lay before her. From the top-down view, each of its swirled arms displayed millions upon millions of star systems, many of which humans inhabited. Zoe looked at the Milky Way’s dazzling center, where the central black hole kept the entire arrangement in celestial balance. She placed her hands on the projection console and prepared to overlay Wormy’s data. Zoe dimmed the interactive map of the galaxy and removed its coloring so that only a ghostly image remained. Then she had her computer superimpose all the accumulated readings from that higher-energy form of space. Instantly, orange dots appeared across the Milky Way, millions of them, present in every sector. Her eyes moistened as she marveled at the site and her mouth stood agape.

  Zoe quickly picked an outer region and used her fingers to zoom in on it until the view was narrowed to a dozen star systems. She picked out random orange points for inspection. Some were cigar shaped, others were nearly spherical. Some were massive—the size of stars—while others remained as tiny illuminated specks. Zoe swiped the digital map to a completely different region; a similar view presented itself. She shrunk the map and expanded it in another area and then another. The higher stable-state readings were present over the entirety of the Milky Way! Her mouth opened wider. What were they? They couldn’t all be—

  “Zoe!” called an odd voice from the central chamber. The utterance sounded so etiolated, it took Zoe a second to recognize it was Darious’. She got up at once and headed to him. He was standing, with his back to her, frozen in place and pointing to the table at the center of the main room. Zoe looked past him, out to where his limb was directing, and nearly jumped back. There, on the metal table was something that Zoe definitely did not have onboard before. Moreover, she had never even seen anything like it before.

  A wondrous shining statue, about a meter tall, stood on the table. It was a thin tower-like structure composed of several knife-like spiraling curves intertwining with one another as they rose to a flowering top. The sculpture reflected with hues like that of Kapteyn, but with even more radiance, as if it were the substance in its purest form. The object was almost ethereal; Zoe could nearly see through some of the intertwined helices and on the whole, the entire statue seemed to glow by its own hidden illumination against the backdrop of her ship. A band of light contoured its silhouette, adding to the transcendental nature of the mysterious object. It was beautiful.

  Inching toward it, Zoe spoke slowly. “Where did it come from?”

  “I... I don’t know,” replied Darious in a low voice. “I was getting the antiseptic cleaner from the compartment there.” His arm twitched toward the direction, but he was apparently too stunned to move beyond that. “When I... I turned back I saw it there.”

  Zoe cautiously edged right up to the table. The object seemed harmless enough. She bent low and peered in closer. It was more than otherworldly; the overlapping curves were blurred, as if somewhat out of phase.

  “Out of phase!” Zoe turned and sprung to a drawer, pulling out a device with an antenna. A quick scan confirmed her suspicion. “Those spirals are vibrating at largely different ground frequencies at nodes coinciding with the algorithm from Dr. Saknussemm’s work. They are all near enough to our norm, so they can be seen.” As Zoe’s curiosity peaked, she added, “I bet we could even feel them.” She took in a deep breath and reached her hand out.

  “Careful,” said Darious.

  Zoe put her fingertips to the strange object. If felt cold to the touch and produced a tingling sensation. She used the device in her other hand to complete a closer scan.

  “Look at that,” she said. “Each loop exists independently, slightly out of phase with the next. They aren’t actually physically touching each other. This is amazing.”

  The tingling sensation began to extend beyond Zoe’s fingers. She retracted her hand and stared at it. The feeling quickly traveled up her arms and spread through her body, infusing deeper and deeper until she felt it within the
core of her being.

  Complete understanding suddenly swelled through Zoe: those orange readings showing higher-energy stable-state bodies, the Kapteyn, the semi drivers with their sensor ghosts, the secrets inducing sacrificial blood offerings… all the mismatching evidence, all the data, all that had occurred, the Grandeur’s words—it all fit perfectly together... there was one absolute truth here and Zoe now saw it clearly.

  “Darious.” Zoe slowly stood up straight and began backing away from the object. “Darious, we are not alone.”

  “Zoe, what do you mean?”

  Her mind was a flurry of excitement as variables and unknowns were guided to their correct positions, finally clicking into place and interlocking. The one truth was this: Intelligent life existed independent of mankind. Moreover, these aliens inhabited the entirety of the galaxy alongside mankind. There was an entire civilization, hidden just beyond sight, and this artifact on her table was a token from them.

  An abrupt outpouring of stimulated emotion flowed from Zoe.

  “The Grandeur! This is what he was referring to! Pantheon knew about this!” She kicked her foot out. “Those bastards have been exploiting alien technology for their own gain. Ohhh I really, really like it when I’m right!” She began rapidly pacing around the table. “But Dr. Saknussemm... what were they trying to have him do? Oh my! Oh my! Recall the info from his data stick saying that they were trying to destroy natural Kapteyn? Natural occurring Kapteyn? No, it’s manufactured by Pantheon Industries. But who obviously created it first? Not us. Oh my!” She stopped mid-step. “Darious, I think Pantheon has been at war with an alien species. And the Grandeur was using Dr. Saknussemm to plan something big before he was able to get away.”

  “But why?” Darious asked.

  “As the Grandeur said himself, ‘control.’”

  “And think about this,” Zoe continued, “They must be peaceful. I mean, Pantheon has been exploiting them for who knows how long and they, with obviously superior technology, have done what? Well, I do suppose they have acted out a couple times, like hitting semis brandishing the corporation’s logos.” She then thought of the two punctures on Captain Henry’s ship. “But even in those instances, they never killed anyone, they just disabled their ships. Oh, and then Pantheon comes and hushes it all up. Oh man.”

  Just then a beeping sounded from the cockpit. Zoe ran and pitched herself into her seat. Darious was close behind, though his stance was positioned to be on the defensive, lest the statue try anything funny.

  “It’s the Z-Pulsers?” Zoe said confused. She typed into the virtual console.

  “Are they malfunctioning?” asked Darious.

  “I don’t think so. They are offline... energy isn’t going out, it’s coming in.” Zoe stared at Darious wide eyed. “I think we are receiving a message from higher order space.” She quickly keyed in more commands for her computer and a large screen popped up with a repeating numerical sequence.

  “It’s a set of spatial coordinates,” said Darious awestruck.

  Zoe typed in the location. “It’s close to us.” Her skin was still tingling all over. “Darious. This is it. We have reached the rise.”

  Chapter 48

  Interlude to a Showdown

  In space, there cannot be sound for there is no medium by which to apply it, yet there are echoes—self-contained memories scribed to quanta and stone all through the corpus of the continuum. Such recordings are present in the Milky Way, each one dispersing its perspective, like a message in a bottle upon the sea, on the meaning of what is to be an island in the universe. Alas, in the vastness of the cosmos, a time-dependant inverse-square law applies to these memories, to history, and to knowledge.

  Rotating from the memory of its last grazing influence with a foreign body nearly four thousand years ago, an asteroid glided through frictionless space. For over 200,000 years, since its creation from the passionate impact of its progenitors, this stone had drifted among the stars, among worlds so foreign to its own. The spacefaring rock showed evidence of wear along its oblique profile in the form of small craters. After all, it had spent hundreds of thousands of years in space. Once, it had even passed close to a space station endemic to the species of man.

  The asteroid had recently become evoked by the gravitational field of a planet. This was not the first time this had happened, but now something was different. There was no turning back. Heat whipped at its russet and grey exterior. The asteroid was in complete freefell, heading toward the world. Internal pressures of expanding gases fractured the icy rock’s outer layers. Speeding nearer and nearer to the celestial sphere, the red-hot meteor reached its physical breaking point and exploded into a billion burning fragments. In that final burst of glory, lasting mere seconds, the ancient stone had been grated to dust against the dense atmosphere. A new life had been given to it; a new knowledge.

  Chapter 49

  In the Thick of It

  Zoe and Darious reached the specified location within the hour. During their travel, the repeating higher-order communication had continued nonstop. Zoe could not trace the signal or gain any insight as to its origin. What was discomforting was the fact that it seemed to be transmitting throughout the entire galaxy. More than that, during their hour of travel, the signal’s resonant nodes had been continuously lowering, like someone was turning down a dial, and now it could easily be perceived by any communications device. Everyone in the galaxy was undoubtedly at this moment reading the same message. All eyes would be upon this spot in space.

  Zoe completed a quick scan of the surrounding region. It was void of life and nearby planetary systems, though she suspected not for long—not with the Copper Force on their tail and a galactic wide communication pointing toward a singular location, which they were centered on.

  “What do you think Darious?” she asked.

  “I am unsure Captain.”

  Zoe anchored her ship on the exact coordinates. She went over to Darious, who was at his computer station, and put her arms around him.

  “Soon the CF will be here. I’m not sure what will happen either. But I know in my heart, we are meant to be here.”

  “Zoe,” he said turning and looking up at her. “I strongly agree.”

  Zoe walked to the entryway of the main chamber and stared at the marvelous artifact still on the table. It was absolutely radiant. A beeping sound suddenly started from Zoe’s console. Long-range scanners had picked up the first signs of inbound CF vessels.

  “Here we go,” said Zoe taking a seat. “Strap in.” Darious nodded and secured himself as Zoe reviewed the scanners’ analysis. Her hands twitched upon reading it. “Oh my. The… the entire CF is heading this way.”

  Thousands upon thousands of ships were converging on them from all directions.

  “Orders, Captain?”

  Her ship was still in lockdown mode from their recent encounter with the CF, so there was little to do. Zoe took in a deep breath. “We wait, Darious. We wait.”

  Soon enough, CF ships began to arrive on scene. First to arrive were interstellar fighters—heavy artillery first-responders purposed to intervene during a military crisis, to keep the peace, naturally. Next came the destroyers and dreadnaughts. Hundreds, then thousands, of ships dotted the region. The nearest battalions immediately locked their weapons onto Zoe’s craft, but none powered them up. The sheer size of the CF’s army imprinted upon Zoe the true scale of a galactic force. The CF hailed twice, but Zoe didn’t accept any messages from them, knowing full well the dirty tricks that could be accomplished through normal communications.

  “There are so many crafts, Zoe,” said Darious from his station.

  “Never mind your console. Come over and take a look,” she said. “There’s no way we are going anywhere today.” Darious sat next to her, staring out in awe. Just from their sample of space, beyond the cockpit window, thousands of ships with gleaming metal and blinking lights filled the night sky; the closest bearing their ammo teeth while the further, larg
er ones loomed as brown dwarfs in the shadows.

  “Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been the center of so much attention.” Zoe smirked, though internally she could feel small flickers of dread.

  A high-pitched alert came from her computer. Zoe quickly centered it on her main screen. “The Z-Pulsers.” The galactic-wide transmission had just been altered and a new communication sequence was now coming through. Zoe typed into her console, bringing up the message. It made no sense. The communication seemed scrambled; it was a bizarre string of letters and numbers. Suddenly alerts rang out. The CF fleets had begun powering their weapon banks and charging shields. Zoe brought up her various scanning utilities.

  “What are they doing!?” exclaimed Darious. “It is not us; we have not moved a millimeter!”

  “No, look,” said Zoe, pointing to her projection console. Out in the space around them, something was starting to happen. Her sensors were barely picking up the change. It was like a whisper in the foggy night. Zoe had a flash of insight and booted up Dr. Saknussemm’s program. She synced its resonance rhythms to the incoming Z-Pulser message. Bingo. It was a match.

  “An attempt at contact?” she asked herself.

  Zoe’s thoughts were abruptly arrested as small dots of white light began to speckle cosmic space. In the gaps between CF vessels, small but brilliantly bright nodes of light ignited across the eternal night, illuminating the many ships in the area. From these light sources, Zoe could now see the true extent of the CF. Vessels shone as far as the eye could see to a horizon that never ended.

  The light-points intensified, each a tiny pin-prick version of a star. Continuous alerts cropped up on Zoe’s screen; every CF ship was powering up weapons, but she ignored them, instead remaining captivated by the sight around her. There was a sudden flash and all the lights simultaneously vanished. Blackness once more surrounded them and Zoe, realizing she had been starving herself of breath, gulped down several large lungfuls.