Her last job on Earth had been League Party Senator, so she wasn’t ignorant of the requirements. She’d enjoyed the responsibility—the feeling that she could make a difference in people’s lives, and with the Liberty they had a chance to write a new constitution, to organize a new and better government. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?
A woman shoved past Catalina, almost knocking her over. “Hey!” Catalina said.
The woman turned to face her from the aisle. It was Esther. “Have you seen Benjamin?” she asked.
Catalina shook her head.
“I can’t find him!”
“Maybe he’s still in the testing rooms?”
Esther looked uncertain, her eyes wide and fearful.
Catalina walked up to her and reached for her hand. “Relax, we’ll find him.”
Then the room flashed crimson and a siren roared.
“General quarters, general quarters! All hands to battle stations! All passengers belt in at emergency stations. This is not a drill. Repeat, all hands to battle stations! This is not a drill.”
Catalina blinked, frozen with momentary indecision.
People began shoving past Esther in their hurry to reach the auditorium walls, where emergency stations had been highlighted in red on their ARCs.
“All right everyone, there’s no need to rush!” Councilor Markov barked out from the podium below. “You know the drill from your mission training. Please leave the bleachers in an orderly fashion as you head to the nearest emergency station.”
Marines fanned out at the bottom of the bleachers, two below each aisle, directing people. Passengers shoved Catalina from behind, and she stumbled out into the aisle with Esther. The other woman gripped her by her shoulders. “I need to find Benjamin!” she shrieked to be heard above the rising tumult in the room.
“All right, just calm down!” Catalina said, trying not to fall over as people squeezed around her on all sides.
The intercom crackled once more. “All hands brace for emergency thrust!”
The auditorium erupted in chaos, everyone screaming at each other as they pushed and shoved through the room.
“Everyone hit the deck right where you are!” Councilor Markov bellowed, but nobody listened.
Catalina felt her mag boots auto-activate, pinning her feet to the deck. She immediately overrode them and lunged back into the bleachers, ducking under them and laying her body flat. Esther stood in the aisle, frozen in place thanks to her boots. Catalina gestured urgently for the other woman to join her.
Then the entire ship lurched into motion. Despite their mag boots, a few people went flying from higher up. Someone’s boot sailed into Esther’s throat. Her eyes bulged, and then she vanished in a sea of flailing arms as people tried to steady themselves by grabbing one another.
* * *
Commander Audrey Johnson slumped into her chair with a flask full of coffee—her third one today. It was almost lunch time, but she was still waking up thanks to Councilor Markov’s visit to her quarters last night. Audrey lifted the flask to her lips, taking a sip from the self-sealing lid.
In that instant, the shrill roar of the ship’s battle siren assaulted her ears, sending adrenaline sparking through her veins. She almost spat her coffee all over her freshly-polished mag boots. The lights dimmed and flashed red, and then the intercom crackled with a general quarters alert.
“Commander!” her comm officer screeched. “We have an urgent comms from Admiral Urikov: an unidentified contact just appeared at the mouth of the Looking Glass. We’re instructed to launch all fighters and drones in a defensive formation.”
“Flight, you heard the man!” Audrey said.
“Aye, Commander. Pilots are scrambling.”
“Target telemetry coming in from Section One...” Lieutenant Fields announced from sensors.
Audrey got up from her chair and walked up behind her sensors officer, sipping her coffee as she went. “Fields, get me a visual and put it on screen.”
“Aye, Commander.”
Everyone looked up from their stations as the main holo display switched from a 2D tactical map with colorful icons to a 3D telescopic view of the unidentified contact.
Black space and a dazzling array of stars filled the screen. Dead center of that was the Looking Glass. The wormhole looked like a perfectly clear glass marble distorting the surrounding starfield with its shape. Audrey spent a moment searching the screen, but there was nothing else there. A few tiny gray specks floated across the spherical mouth of the wormhole, but she knew those were Alliance and Solarian research stations.
“Where is it?” Audrey demanded.
The sensor officer shook her head. “According to the telemetry we received, it should be right there, ma’am.”
“Well, it’s not. Fields, use our sensors to double-check the coordinates.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Audrey continued walking down the line of control stations. “Gunnery—report!”
“Weapons hot and awaiting target data,” Lieutenant Gamble announced from the gunnery station.
“Commander!” It was Fields from sensors again.
Audrey spun around. “What is it, Lieutenant?”
“I’ve got nothing on sensors.”
“What? Then where did our telemetry come from?”
“Section One, ma’am,” Lieutenant Fields replied.
“And where did they get it?”
Fields didn’t have a chance to reply. The deck shuddered underfoot and a distant rumble reached their ears. Audrey’s eyes flew wide. “Engineering! Report!”
“I... we’re detecting hull breaches in Section Eight!” Lieutenant Reed shrieked.
“From what? We didn’t detect any weapons fire, did we?”
“No, ma’am!” Fields replied.
The intercom crackled with another announcement from Section One. “All hands brace for emergency thrust!”
Audrey lunged for her command chair, her entire body shaking with adrenaline. She fell into her chair and dropped her flask into the magnetic cup holder in the armrest.
“Secure all loose items!” she warned, reaching for her safety harness with trembling hands. She finished snapping the buckles together a split second before a sudden impulse from the engines pinned her into her seat. Audrey grimaced, thinking to herself that there hadn’t been enough time for all the passengers and crew to belt in at emergency stations.
Hopefully there weren’t too many injured.
* * *
Remo skidded to a stop in front of the drop tube. He opened the hatch via his neural link and nodded to Deedee. “Ladies first.”
The overhead speakers buzzed with another warning: “All hands brace for emergency thrust!”
Their mag boots auto-activated, and both of them dropped into emergency positions, sitting on their haunches and hugging their knees to their chests. In the next second, Remo felt an enormous weight pressing him toward the nearest bulkhead. His mag boots kept him rooted to the deck and locked his ankles to keep the stress off his joints. He gritted his teeth and counted up to ten to distract himself from the immense pressure.
“My boots won’t lock!” Deedee screamed. “My ankles are going to break! I have to disengage!”
Remo looked up to see that they were about three meters from the nearest bulkhead. Their acceleration had to be at least one G, so if Deedee disengaged her mag boots now, it would be like taking a three meter fall back on Earth.
“You’re going to break more than just your ankles if you disengage!”
“Screw it!” Deedee said.
Remo watched her go flying head-first toward the nearest bulkhead. She put out her hands at the last second, and screamed as her wrists broke. She hit her head anyway, and lapsed into silence as the ship’s acceleration sprawled her out against the bulkhead and pinned her in place. Then that acceleration eased and Deedee slid down to the deck under 0.38 Gs of artificial gravity.
“Fuck!” Remo roared. Ment
ally activating his comms, he said, “Section 7 Command, this is the CAG, I’ve got a pilot down, and I need a medical team at my location A-SAP!”
“CAG, this is Command, we acknowledge. Sending a medical team now.”
* * *
“Damage report!” Audrey demanded.
“Sections Eight, Six, and One were all breached, Commander,” Lieutenant Reed reported from engineering.
Audrey summoned the actual damage report from her control station and scanned the locations of those hull breaches.
Section Eight had been breached twice along the rings, while Sections Six and One were both pierced in three places each along the ship’s stationary core. That struck her as strange, since it was much easier to hit the rings than the core. Whoever had shot them, they had to have been aiming for the core.
“So much for dodging a bullet,” she muttered under her breath. It wasn’t her place to question Admiral Urikov’s decisions, but she couldn’t help feeling like that execution of emergency thrust had done nothing but add to their casualties. “Sensors—do we have any idea of what hit us?”
“No, ma’am. Whatever it was, it didn’t register on any of our grids.”
Her brow furrowed as she considered that. “Invisible. Same as our mystery contact, then. How can Section One detect them if we can’t?”
“Earth has ships in weapons range and they’re lighting the target up with their lasers. We’re tracking the vanishing points.”
Audrey nodded. That explained why they hadn’t seen anything on the telescopic view. Lasers were invisible in space and they were too far away for the Liberty’s combat computer to bother simulating visuals.
“So whatever we’re dealing with, it’s EM-cloaked, and so are their weapons. That rules out a human origin, unless the Terran Alliance developed the tech in secret.”
No one replied to that.
She directed her attention to the security control station where Major Bright sat. He served as both her XO and Section Seven’s ranking Marine officer. “Major, get a team of VSM drones over to Section Eight to assess the damage and seal off our section from the rest of the ship until further notice.”
“Aye aye, Commander,” Bright replied.
The passengers and crew for Section Eight had yet to arrive, so it fell to them in Section Seven to inspect and repair the damage.
“Why send Marine drones?” Reed asked from engineering. “Shouldn’t we send repair drones instead?”
“Not until we know what we’re dealing with.”
“Dealing with, ma’am?”
Audrey nodded to the main holo display. It showed a 2D tactical map. A bright blue icon marked the Liberty’s position; bright green ones marked friendly Solarian ships, while yellow ones denoted Alliance ships from Earth, and a large, ambiguous red dot represented the enemy contact.
“Sensors—have we confirmed any casualties yet, Solarian or otherwise?” Audrey asked.
“No, ma’am,” Fields replied.
“Yet we know the Alliance is firing on an invisible enemy, and we know that invisible objects punctured our hull in three different sections. If the enemy’s objective were to destroy us, their opening volley should have done more than poke a few holes in our hull.”
“You’re afraid we’ve been boarded,” Major Bright added from the security station.
Audrey nodded slowly. “Let’s hope I’m wrong, Major.”
“I’ve got three casualties on the grid!” Fields reported.
“Where?” Audrey demanded.
“Commander! Incoming priority one transmission from Section One,” Lieutenant Bates interrupted from the comms.
“Go ahead, comms.”
“We’ve been ordered to abort launching all fighters and drones until further notice.”
Audrey felt her brow furrow. “Flight, pass on the message. Tell our pilots to standby.”
“Aye,” Lieutenant Commander Ivanov replied.
“Fields, report!”
“Casualties are all fighters, ma’am—ours, from Section One. The incident report provides holo footage of the event.”
“On screen,” Audrey ordered.
The tactical map faded from the main screen, replaced by starry blackness. To either side of the camera she saw the ship’s rotating rings and the spokes that connected them to the ship’s stationary core. The recording zoomed in, and Audrey saw a glinting gray speck shoot out from the rotating ring section on the left. Soon after that another one shot out, and then a third. Audrey sat forward in her chair, squinting at the recording and wondering what to look for.
A sudden burst of light drew her eyes back to the lead fighter. A split second later, another explosion ripped through the void, and then the third fighter exploded with tentacles of fire. At that point, the recording froze, zoomed in, and re-wound. They saw the moment of the first fighter’s destruction in the gory detail of slow motion. A prolonged flash of light erupted, and hazy debris roared out in all directions. Or at least they should have.
The spread of the debris was wrong. As if reading her thoughts, the recording froze and re-wound once more. This time the debris was highlighted with bright green shading and vectors, and she noticed that the debris went leaping back toward the camera, as if it had hit an invisible wall and bounced off. Not a wall—a ship, Audrey thought.
“They’re pacing us,” she whispered.
Chapter 6
As soon as the Liberty stopped accelerating, Alexander used his ARCs to find his wife through the chaos. A green silhouette appeared, lying prone beneath the bleachers. His heart leaped into his throat, thinking Catalina had been trampled. He bounded past Marines directing people to emergency stations at the bottom of the bleachers. Medics tended to a handful of wounded on the stairs, but they were fewer than Alexander expected. By the time he reached the level where Catalina lay, she was already climbing to her feet. He snapped off the ARC overlay and held her at an arm’s length, looking her over.
“Are you okay?”
She nodded, but her gaze slipped by him to one of the wounded on the stairs. It was Esther, Benjamin’s mother. Her throat was bruised and swollen, her lips blue from hypoxia. She stared up at the ceiling, her eyes wide and lifeless.
The medic tending to her got up and shook his head. Catalina grabbed the man’s arm before he could leave.
“Where are you going?”
He regarded her grimly. “Where I’m needed. I can’t do anything more for her.”
“So you’re just going to leave her there?”
“Her mag boots will keep her in place for now.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Ma’am, we’re still at general quarters. You need to get to an emergency station.”
The medic left them on that note and Catalina turned to Alex, her expression equal parts dismay and horror. “Where’s Benjamin?”
Alexander grimaced and looked around, using his ARCs to search for the boy—now an orphan thanks to whatever freak accident had killed his mother. He found the kid through the walls of the auditorium in an adjoining room.
“Follow me,” he said, grabbing Catalina’s hand and running down the stairs to the bottom of the bleachers. A pair of Marines standing there directed them to emergency stations along the walls. Alexander nodded and pretended to head toward them, but as soon as they were past the Marines, he abruptly changed directions, moving toward Benjamin’s ARC silhouette. A door slid open revealing Benjamin and a young girl huddled around a black box, what looked to be some kind of portable speaker for music.
Alexander wondered what they were doing listening to music at a time like this. Both kids looked up sharply as he and Catalina walked in. They looked frightened.
Catalina went down on her haunches in front of Benjamin and grabbed him by his shoulders. “Ben, you need to come with us.”
“What is it?” he asked, his eyes flicking between Catalina and Alexander. “Are we in trouble?”
“We only hid in here
because of the alarm,” the girl added. “We didn’t touch anything. I swear!”
“You’re not in trouble. It’s about your mother, Ben,” Catalina explained.
“What about her?”
“There was an accident, and...” Catalina’s face crumpled and she pulled him into a tight embrace. “It’s going to be okay. We’ll be there for you,” she said, her voice thick and muffled with sorrow.
Understanding dawned in Benjamin’s eyes, and he looked up at Alexander. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”
Alexander hesitated, trying to think of some way to sugarcoat it for him, but there wasn’t one. “I’m sorry, kid.”
The little girl standing beside Benjamin burst into tears, but he remained stoic, wide-eyed and blinking.
Alexander nodded to a nearby wall marked with flashing red triangles to denote emergency stations. “We need to belt in before they decide to use the engines again.” He walked over to the wall and yanked down on one handle after another, folding out four chairs. He helped the kids to belt in before taking a seat beside his wife.
Catalina reached for his hand and held on tight. “What do you think is going on?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I wish I knew.”
* * *
“Section One is instructing us to sound out any invisible targets by firing our lasers in three hundred and sixty degree arcs,” Lieutenant Bates said from the comms. “We’re to fire on their mark and track the vanishing points, same as what Earth’s fleet has been doing.”
“Gunnery—weapons free. Stand by to fire,” Audrey ordered, hoping that whatever was hiding out there it wouldn’t choose to fire back on them. It was Admiral Urikov’s call, but it felt like a bad one to her.
“Aye, weapons free,” Lieutenant Gamble replied.
“What if they fire back?” Major Bright asked from his station, his thoughts mirroring hers.
Audrey set her jaw. “Lieutenant Fields, has the target we identified at the Looking Glass returned fire on Earth’s fleet?”
Exodus: Book 3 of the New Frontiers Series (A Dark Space Tie-In) Page 5
