by Tim Pratt
“On it. Crap, Shall, what am I looking at?”
“We fired three simultaneous beams, targeting four pods – two were on a fortuitous linear arrangement – and while all three beams appeared to strike home, the pods are still coming.”
“Wait,” Callie said. “We fired directed energy weapons at them, and hit, and they’re still coming? What the hell are those pods made of?”
“It’s the stealth tech, cap,” Ashok said. “Gotta be. The same deflection technology we’ve got – Warwick got it from Liars in the first place. We’re shooting at the places where the pods aren’t. But if they are using the same tech we are… Hold on, I can calculate the likely offsets… Permission to unleash hell, cap?”
Callie gripped the jumpseat, wishing she was the one running the board. “Yes.”
A tense few seconds passed, and then Ashok whooped. “Got ’em! We fired on empty space a few degrees off from their apparent location, and now our sensors are showing debris and the false images have disappeared.”
“We only got five of them,” the ship said. “One of the pods adjusted its course dramatically and we only struck it a glancing blow. Let me see. There it is, sailing past us, on a trajectory to nowhere in particular. We must have disabled it.”
“Nice shooting, boys,” Callie said. “And the EMP torpedoes?”
“Should impact in under a minute,” Ashok said. “Drake, do you want to slow us down? We’re getting awfully close to our friends there, and I’m not a hundred percent sure how big an effective radius those torpedoes have on impact. Experimental Liar tech is notoriously short on documentation, and the station personnel hadn’t done much in the way of testing yet.”
“Affirmative,” Drake said. The ship decelerated, and the pressure on Callie’s body eased. She unstrapped herself and walked over to the tactical board, her magnetic boots keeping her steady. The board showed little glowing representations of the two ships: the sharklike contours of the White Raven and the seven-armed star-shape of the Liar craft, with the EMP torpedoes a spray of converging blips–
That converged on nothing. They appeared to pass through the Liar ship, and continued moving on the other side.
“Stealth tech,” Ashok said. “Same deal as the pods. Makes sense. Send another volley?”
Before Callie could answer, Janice said, “Incoming message from the ship.”
“Put it on my screen here,” Callie said.
The visual blurred and flipped and then she was looking into the bridge of a Liar starfish ship. A Liar in some sort of combination powered armor and environment suit peered at her with a cluster of eyes in various colors and shapes, slightly distorted behind a curved faceplate. “White Raven. You are in violation of the occulted treaties. Prepare to be boarded.” The Liar’s voice was so deeply bass it was almost subsonic.
“You prepare to be boarded, you spider-faced shit. You blew up Meditreme Station, and as a sworn officer of the Trans-Neptunian authority I am placing you under arrest–”
“We answer to a higher authority. However, we do regret the destruction of the station. We deemed it necessary to avoid greater loss of life. We realize you violated our treaties in ignorance, but the protocols are clear. Is the Axiom device still on your vessel?”
“You mean the bridge generator?” Callie said. “Of course not. Something that valuable? We put it somewhere safe until we can have it properly appraised.”
“You will reveal its location. You will–”
“Cut them off,” Callie said, and the screen went back to a tactical view. “Blow them up, Ashok, with everything. They admitted their guilt on the record, and since a proper trial isn’t feasible I’m authorized to deliver summary justice.” She paused. “Besides, I doubt my lie about the bridge generator is going to buy us more than a couple of minutes before they decide to destroy us anyway, since their boarding party failed.”
“Firing.”
Callie looked at the tactical screen, and the spray of projectiles flying from the kinetic cannons… which all spun harmlessly off in different directions. “Energy weapons!”
“I’m trying, but they aren’t moving,” Ashok said. “It’s like the cannons are locked in position, and it’s not a useful position. Drake, can you adjust the ship’s position, get the beam weapons lined up?”
“Reaction wheels won’t move,” Drake said. “The mechanisms check out, but… it’s like they’re frozen in place or something.”
“That’s what happened to our ship.” Elena hadn’t spoken in so long that Callie had forgotten her presence. “All the systems seemed operational, but nothing would move. Some kind of inertial control.”
The comms came back on, the same Liar peering out of the screen. “We have scanned your ship and taken control of your systems.”
“They’re right, captain,” the ship said. “It’s like everything’s suddenly locked up behind glass. I can’t access anything.”
“Your airlocks are under our control. Prepare to be boarded.”
“Anyone who tries to get on my ship is going to die,” Callie said.
“We have disabled your weapons systems.”
“We’ve got sidearms, you blob of shit in a spacesuit, and if it comes to it, I’ll beat you all to death with a wrench.”
The Liar turned its body and seemed to consult with another of its kind. “Tell us where the Axiom device is located. Otherwise, we will be forced to investigate all possible hiding places, and sanitize them all. Many humans will die.”
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Callie demanded. “Liars don’t fight!”
“That is incorrect. We simply choose our battles. Enough. We will sanitize your ship. Your vessel is small enough for us to collect and catalogue the debris and determine whether the device is present. If not… our investigators will annihilate every place you might have plausibly concealed it.”
“Wait!” Callie said, but the screen went blank. “Fuck. Ashok, is there any way we can take them down with us, at least?” Callie thought uncomfortably of Elena’s story; of Robin trying to blow up their ship, to at least make their attackers pay. It was terrible to put Elena in that position again.
“I could manually rig the engine to blow, sure, but it would take a little time, and cap… we don’t have it. They’re powering up something big in one of those starfish arms. I’m reading energy signatures like whoa.”
“I am so sorry,” Elena said. “I got you all into this.”
“There is no anguish beyond death,” Stephen rumbled over the PA.
“Fuckity fuck fuck fuck,” Janice said.
“I could tear open a panel here, physically mess up some systems, and cut off the oxygen,” Drake said. “We’d pass out before we died. Might make it more peaceful.”
“I think we’ll be vaporized so fast it won’t hurt much,” Ashok said. “Besides, I’m pretty sure we’ve got about eleven more seconds to live. Damn it. There are five colony systems I never even got to visit. I was hoping to see them all.”
“I love you, Callie,” the computer said. “I never stopped loving you.”
“Oh, Michael,” she said. “I never meant for this to–”
The bridge generator hummed, a single sustained note, somewhere just north of middle C.
Chapter Twelve
“Something’s happening,” the ship said. “I’ve got systems control again.” The screens all shifted to exterior views from the hull cameras, trained on the distant (but close enough to kill them) shape of the starfish ship.
A dark spot, like a visual artifact on the screen, appeared in the center of their ship. Then the darkness grew, like a drop of ink in a pool of water, then like a crack spiderwebbing across a window. The starfish ship came apart, fragments of the hull falling and spinning away, all seven legs drifting like they’d been cleanly severed.
“It’s a bridgehead.” Ashok’s voice was awe and horror all at once. “Opening right in the middle of the Liar ship.”
“They’re tran
smitting,” Janice said. “But not toward us – some kind of tight-beam pulse, sent out toward the Oort Cloud.”
“Ship, did you activate the generator?”
“I didn’t – I was locked out of the system. I think… it activated itself.”
“That’s comforting,” Stephen said.
“Let’s get out of here, Drake–”
The ship lurched, hard, and the spreading wine-stain of the bridgehead grew notably larger.
“The bridge is pulling us toward it!” Drake said. “I’m trying to turn about, but it’s like swimming against a riptide.”
“Ashok, where does that bridge lead? To the station Elena found?”
“I have no idea, cap. I figured out how to access the generator’s history, which has a grand total of one entry, but I don’t know how to enter coordinates or even how the coordinate system works. If this is some kind of emergency protocol then I don’t know who to tell… oh shit we’re going in there aren’t we?”
The screens filled with wet-looking blackness. “We’re almost in,” the ship said.
“It looks like a normal bridgehead,” Ashok said. The inky shadow seemed to drift toward them, tendrils reaching out to surround the ship. “Let’s see if–”
The screens all went dead. “All sensors offline,” the ship said. “As per usual.”
“This is supposed to be happening?” Elena was still strapped firmly into her seat, but her hair drifted around her in the absence of gravity, as if she were underwater. There was a thready note of panic in her voice. She’d slept through her last journey by bridge.
“It lasts twenty-one seconds,” Callie said. “Usually. When you enter a bridgehead, there’s twenty-one seconds of dead time while you pass through… something. A place of darkness. The sensors go dead, but even if you look out the forward viewport, it’s just black–”
“Not this time, captain.” Drake’s voice trembled, agitation audible even on the PA. “This time it’s different.”
Callie launched herself toward the ladder leading to the nose of the ship. She grabbed the rung, stopped her forward momentum, then pushed down hard with her arms to launch herself up. She passed the level with the crew quarters and the galley, and sailed into the nose, the hatch sliding open when it sensed her approach. The trip took under ten seconds, but she was already too late: the view out the window had changed to distant stars and a large, dark planet mostly eclipsing a nearby star that looked like a red dwarf. They were in a solar system, but not one Callie recognized, and she had been to all twenty-nine colony systems, except the interdicted one, and even that one, she’d seen charts for.
“What did you see, Drake?” She faced the back of the egg-shaped chair, and couldn’t see any part of his body except his bifurcated forearm, reaching out from the chair to play across a control panel with all of his nine fingers.
“The interior of the tunnel was bright, and the lights strobed, flickering past, like we were racing through a tunnel with lights embedded on all sides at regular intervals. The lights were white, and they whipped by so fast I couldn’t get a sense of what the tunnel was made of. Janice? Did you see anything else?”
“It was a tight squeeze, a space barely big enough for us to pass through, and it sort of undulated, like it was a flexible tube – the tunnel wasn’t rigid. Otherwise, no, just flashing lights, like Drake.”
“This bridge generator we have works differently than the others, then,” Callie said. “That’s… Huh. That’s a point of information, and that’s all it is, right now. So where are we?”
“Some solar system somewhere,” Drake said.
“That’s about the best I can come up with, too,” the ship said. “The stars are entirely unfamiliar. I’ll try to run some database searches, and see if any groupings or patterns match up, but… we could be anywhere. I can’t even say for sure we’re in the same galaxy, though Ashok seems to think the generator is limited and won’t send us farther. Even so, the galaxy is vast. There’s a good chance we’re farther from our home system than any human has ever been.”
Callie grunted. That wasn’t a claim to fame she’d ever sought. “I don’t necessarily care where we are, if we can get back. Ashok? Is there another entry in that black box’s history now? Can you take us back where we came from?”
“There is another entry, and since I know exactly where we left from, I might have a kind of Rosetta stone to start figuring out how the coordinate system works on this thing. Want me to try to get us home?”
“Very much so. Open a bridge and take us back. Maybe we can trace the communication those Liar maniacs sent and find the rest of their group and figure out what the hell is going on.”
No answer. “Ashok?”
“Sorry, cap, this– Nope. The generator isn’t responding.”
“What?”
“It’s throwing errors, but it’s not like I know what the errors mean. There’s no manual, and once you get beyond the bits of the interface that are purely mathematical and spatial, it’s all literally alien to me. Maybe if I had a biomechanical brain-spider humping the back of my head I’d have some special insight, but as it is… all I can tell you is, the magic box isn’t working.”
“Maybe it doesn’t think we’re safe yet,” Stephen said over the PA. “What’s the point in an emergency escape protocol if it allows us to return immediately to a dangerous area? Perhaps there’s a cooling-off period.”
“It could just be recharging,” Ashok said. “With the bridgehead out by Jupiter, and all the others we know about, you have to bombard them with radiation to get them to open. You blast them with the right energy and they activate. This thing, though, it’s totally different. I have no idea where it even draws power from – not from the ship, anyway. I assume there’s some kind of power source inside the black box. Maybe it’s a battery that gets drained and has to recharge. Or maybe it’s a disposable two-use item, designed to get you where you’re going and back again and nothing else. I genuinely have no idea.”
“So we might be stuck here?” Callie said.
“I am not helping to repopulate the human race,” Janice said. “Fuck y’all.”
“We’re stuck here for now,” Ashok said. “Shall and I will keep working on the box, see if we can figure out how to run diagnostics, try to decipher these messages. In the meantime, I dunno. You guys should look out the window at the amazing strange new vistas or whatever. Sights ne’er glimpsed by human… whatevers.”
“Assuming this is temporary, our situation is not yet dire,” Shall said. “We are amply provisioned. We have plenty of fuel, and there are icy asteroids in the vicinity we can harvest for hydrogen if we do run low. We have plenty of ammunition, even after our abortive struggle with the Liar vessel.”
“So we’re looking at a slow and comfortable death. That’s nice.” Callie wanted to pace back and forth, but the cockpit was small, and anyway, it was annoying to pace when you had on magnetic boots in a weightless environment. She went back down the ladder to the forward compartment, where she usually ran the tactical board and otherwise used as an observation deck. She’d spent a lot of time standing here, watching space go by, on the way from one place to another, in pursuit of money or bad guys.
Now she stood and looked at a strange dark planet and thought furiously. She needed to be doing something, because if she stopped doing things, she’d start thinking about Warwick and Herm and all the others who’d died on Meditreme Station, and the dark waters of despair would rise around her, and she would drown.
“Hey, Callie,” the ship said, speaking just to her, through her earpiece. “Back there, that thing I said, I know you told me to never say it again. I wanted to apologize. I just–”
“It’s OK. We thought we were going to die. It’s understandable. I’m not angry.”
“It was nice to hear you say my name again,” he said, tentatively.
“I’m busy right now, ship.” She wanted something to think about, but thinking about this was a
wful too.
“Of course, Captain Machedo.”
Turn away from the past, turn toward the future. She reopened the shipwide channel. “Fine. We’re stuck here, for a little while anyway. We might as well make ourselves useful, increase the sum total of all human knowledge, stuff like that. Right?”
“I hate new things,” Janice said. “New things is how I ended up the way I am now.”
“Yeah, but you and Drake have experience as surveyors, so we might as well do some surveying.” They’d once been professional explorers, charting the systems beyond the bridgeheads, before their accident and reconstruction had soured the whole enterprise for them.
Drake said, “This ship is meant more for going fast and blowing stuff up than it is for doing mineral surveys, captain, but I’ll see what we can come up with. Shall? Private conference with me and Janice to talk strategy?”
“Ashok, you keep poking at the cube.”
“I’m on it. This data must be decipherable. I mean, maths is maths.”
She opened a private channel to Stephen. “Hey, big guy. How are you?”
“When I stormed out of my father’s house thirty-five years ago, I told him my ambition was to travel so far the sun would be invisible, not even a speck among the stars.” Stephen paused. “The young are very stupid, aren’t they?”
“They are. I’m not sure the old are any better, though. What’s your take on all this?”
“You know I am, at heart, a pragmatist. That’s why I seek chemical assistance to have less pragmatic experiences. Pragmatically, I think we are likely to die soon. Either we die here, in unknown space, or we make it back home, and we die at the hands of the Liars, who clearly had allies they managed to contact before they were destroyed. I think we have accidentally uncovered something momentous, Callie. The Liars have technology far beyond anything they’ve revealed to us, and a secret agenda all their own. They opened the bridges, and created an illusion they wish desperately to protect.”
“What do you mean?” Callie thought she knew, but wanted to hear his thoughts without prejudicing them.
