“Yeah. Phoebe is—”
“Look, save it, okay? You’ll just have to repeat it all to the captain.” Kyla motioned to the door. “Out you go.”
“Hold on,” said Phoebe. “We’re not going anywhere with you until we get some answers.”
Kyla sighed. Again that exhausted look. “What exactly would you like to know?”
“First of all,” said Phoebe, “where are we?”
“You know that doorway you saw? We call it a portal, and we’re on the other side. In another universe. You’ll see for yourselves in a minute.”
Another universe . . . Liam felt a chill deep inside. Not another star system, not even another galaxy, but outside of everything they’d ever known. “You say we’ve been here eight hours. How long have you been here?”
Kyla’s face scrunched, like she was doing math. “Twelve days, thirteen hours. . . . Feels more like a year with everything that’s happened.”
“Twelve days?” said Liam. “For us, the Artemis went missing over sixty years ago.”
Kyla stared at them in shock for a moment; then her face fell. “Sixty years . . . I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“You’ve really only been here twelve days?” said Phoebe.
Kyla nodded. “Time moves differently on this side of the portal. What year did you come from?”
“When we left it was 2256.”
“Okay, then maybe you can tell me . . .” Kyla’s voice softened. “The starliners . . . the fleet. Did it work? When we left, everyone was still on Mars. Did they make it out of the solar system before the supernova?”
“Yeah,” said Liam. “The fleet got out.”
Kyla’s shoulders sagged with relief, a smile tugging at her mouth, and yet at the same time, her eyes brimmed with tears. “Where are they now?”
“Past Delphi. The first few fleets were past Danos, but then everyone rerouted to Destina.”
“Destina?” said Kyla. “That was the code name for a military position.”
“We’re kind of at war.”
“With who?”
Don’t look at Phoebe, Liam thought. “It’s probably easier to explain it to the captain, right?”
“Ha,” Kyla muttered. “Good one. Fine, like I didn’t have enough to worry about already.”
“I don’t get it,” said Phoebe. “Why didn’t you guys just fly back through the portal? Why have you stayed here?”
“The ship sustained too much damage on the first trip,” said Kyla. “We’re down an engine, not to mention about a thousand other problems. Captain was afraid if we tried going back through, it would tear us apart completely. . . .” She trailed off.
“Is there something else?” asked Liam.
“To say the least, but . . . we need to get going. It might not surprise you to hear that we’re on a tight schedule.”
“But—”
“Look, I’m not trying to keep anything from you. I just want you to see things for yourselves—that way it will be easier for you to accept.”
“What kind of things?” asked Phoebe.
Before Kyla could answer, Liam said: “It’s Dark Star, isn’t it?”
She peered at him. “How did you know about that?”
“It, um . . . I heard about it.”
“From who? Do people know about Dark Star sixty years in the future?”
“Just us,” said Liam. “A man in a metal suit told me, part of the Drove.” When Kyla looked at him quizzically, Liam added, “They’re another race of aliens, I think. Don’t you know about them? I mean, they’re from Dark Star, I thought . . . ?”
“Never heard of the Drove,” said Kyla, “but Dark Star is here. That’s where we’re going. We have a team over there, including the captain. And he is definitely going to want to meet you two, now.”
“Is he the one who took my watch?” Liam asked.
“I took your watch,” said Kyla. “And yes, I gave it to him.” She stepped out onto the walkway.
“What if we don’t want to go to Dark Star?” said Phoebe. “What if we want to go home?”
“My orders are to take you over there, and that means by force if necessary. So you can decide for yourself how exactly you’d like that to go, but that’s the way it’s going.”
Phoebe glanced at Liam, raising her eyebrows as if to say, Ready?
No. Not even close. He wanted to leave this moment altogether, but he steeled himself and stepped out the door.
They emerged onto one of the walkways of the Artemis’s single core. The same red emergency lights had been flashing when Liam and Phoebe had ended up here previously.
“All nonessential personnel are still in stasis lockdown,” Kyla said. “For their safety . . . and sanity.” She led them past door after door, some locked with red lights, some green indicating they were empty; the Artemis was the prototype starliner and had launched with a skeletal crew of ten thousand, far fewer than could fill a starliner core.
A deep rumble shook the floor and walls, and for a moment gravity weakened, causing Liam and Phoebe to stumble.
“Stay alert,” said Kyla. “With one of the engines down, we have fewer redundant systems. Might have to shut off the gravity soon just to conserve power for air and heat.”
They reached the end of the core, where stairs led along the wall to the main platform and a row of airlock doors. They stopped and waited for a staircase to rotate into position.
Liam noticed Phoebe shivering beside him. She zipped her hoodie up to the top and put on the hood. “From the space jump?” he said.
She nodded. “Head hurts. My fingers and toes are still tingling.”
A staircase synced with their position, and they started up, their footfalls echoing hollowly against the metal. Gravity shifted as they went, so that they were always upright, even as the walkway they’d come from rotated overhead.
They reached the main platform and moved through one of the six sets of airlock doors that led from the core to the forward section of the ship. They passed the map kiosk, which showed a schematic of the Artemis. Corridors and compartments branched off on either side of the hall, but nearly all their doors were sealed. Two crew members knelt by one, making a shower of sparks as they worked on a large circuit board that they’d pulled from the wall. Ahead, a wide set of open doors revealed the staircase to the bridge.
Kyla’s link flashed and she paused. “What’s up, Jordy?”
“Just heard from Captain,” a male voice said. “Mission accomplished. He’s on his way back.”
“Roger that. We’ll be right there.” Kyla motioned to Liam and Phoebe. “Follow me.”
She led them through an airlock and down a side corridor. They entered a large compartment lined with racks of hanging suits and helmets. They looked like older models of the pressure suits Liam and Phoebe had worn, the fabric bulkier, the helmet, while still attached to the neck of the suit, made of a thicker clear material.
“Take any one you want,” Kyla said, pulling one off the rack.
As Liam ran his fingers over the collars, looking for his size, he heard a noise behind him. Another uniformed officer exited the bathroom doorway on the far side of the room. The tall man had his arms crossed, head sagging, and was sniffling and wiping at his nose. He glanced at the two of them, nodded solemnly at Kyla, and walked out. Behind him, a warm light flickered from the doorway, like flame. Phoebe had noticed it, too.
“Take a look, if you want,” said Kyla, eyes on the floor.
Liam and Phoebe shared a look and moved to the doorway. They entered the bathroom, passing the sinks, the light getting stronger. Ahead was a large communal shower. They peered inside and saw that its floor was covered with candles, most with diode lights but some with real flickering flames, pools of wax melted around them. In between were photos, portable holoscreens, video charms. Some showed still pictures of people, others played short snippets of video at a low volume. Moments with people smiling, or laughing, sometimes blowing a kiss at t
he screen, all wavering and ghostly. A delicate murmur that reverberated in the tiled shower space.
“We keep it in here so the candles don’t set off the smoke detectors,” Kyla said from behind them. “Last thing we need is another fire alarm.”
“It looks like a memorial,” said Phoebe.
“More or less. Not everyone approved, but some of us felt it was important.”
“These people died?” asked Liam.
“We weren’t sure . . . and we couldn’t help but fear the worst. There’s some hope now that you say the fleet made it out, but then if there’s a war . . .” Kyla bit her lip. “Anyway, it reminds us of who we are. Of what we’ve done.”
Liam bent down to examine a holographic moment of a woman with long black hair who was crossing her arms and smiling. He recognized her from their first visit to the Artemis. “Isn’t that Lieutenant Lyris? She was in command last time we were here.”
“Lieutenant Lyris is deceased,” Kyla said quietly, her eyes trembling with tears. She brushed them quickly away and strode out of the bathroom.
Another ominous rumble through the floor.
“Something weird is going on here,” Phoebe said as Liam stood.
Liam’s insides knotted tighter. The seething red star flashed in his mind, burning a hole behind his eyes.
“What?” said Phoebe, peering at him. “You keep getting this blank look like you’re not all there.”
“Sorry. It’s nothing. Just feeling strange from our trip here.” Liam felt that anxious urge again, to leave this moment. He could return to this exact point in time, and nobody would even notice that he’d been gone. Maybe spend an hour playing Roid Wraiths in their apartment back on Mars, just to calm his nerves. There were plenty of times when it was unoccupied.
“Hey.” Phoebe rubbed his arm and smiled. “Did I thank you for saving my life?”
Liam returned the smile as best he could. “You don’t need to. I think we saved each other.”
Her hand traced down to his and gripped it. “Well, thank you anyway.”
“No problem.” He managed a quick smile.
They returned to the locker room. Kyla was zipping up her pressure suit. “Are you okay to change in here?” she asked Phoebe. “Or . . .”
“It’s a co-ed changing room, right?” said Phoebe.
“Yeah.”
“I’m a girl.”
Kyla looked away. “Sorry, I just . . .”
Phoebe huffed. “I’m also a Telphon, okay? From the planet Telos, which you called Aaru-5. I’m safe to touch and I don’t bite and I’m one of the very last survivors after your colonization project nearly exterminated my people. We’re the ones humans are at war with, but Liam and I are trying to stop it, together. How’s that for an answer?”
“You mean Phase One?” said Kyla. “It killed your people?”
“Billions of us. It’s not your fault. Not personally.”
A shadow passed over Kyla’s face. “I don’t know about that . . . but you’re an alien. For real.”
“No more than you.”
She considered this and then shrugged. “Fair enough.”
Liam and Phoebe slipped on their pressure suits, leaving their helmets off as Kyla had, and followed her back to the main corridor. They reached a working bank of elevators and rode down to a hangar, nowhere near the size of the one they’d been in on the Scorpius but still with multiple levels full of an assortment of boxy military ships. Liam noticed earlier models of Cosmic Cruisers and a rack of primitive skim drones.
But the ship that Kyla led them to was unlike anything around it, or anything Liam had ever seen. It was a sleek, low triangle with almost no features. In fact, it was almost as if you couldn’t see it at all when you looked straight at it, until Kyla put her hand against its oily presence and an oval-shaped doorway appeared in its side.
“It’s from Dark Star,” said Kyla, noticing their perplexed gazes. “We nicknamed it the Carrion. Pretty morbid, I know.” She ducked inside.
Liam steeled himself and followed her, Phoebe close behind. The ship’s corridors were narrow and cramped. Liam had to bend and turn his shoulders as they made their way to the cockpit. The walls inside were textured with angular panels of circuitry, all of which were made of dark, smoky glass. There were no wires that Liam could see, only thin tubes with pulses of multicolored light zipping through them.
“Buckle in.” Kyla sat in one of four seats in the cockpit, arranged two and two. As Liam and Phoebe squeezed into the narrow chairs, she tapped the console and a liquid spherical map appeared. It was the size of a helmet and floated over a concave depression. She slipped her hand into the sphere and pinched and tugged on one of many dots of light. This dot expanded and became a strange picture of some sort of circular, ringed structure. Now a target appeared on the windshield, with symbols scrolling beside it, odd letter-like shapes that had a blur to them as if they were at least three—if not more—dimensional. Almost immediately, they morphed and became words and numbers that Liam could read.
“The map is in Telphon,” said Phoebe. “Is that just for me?”
“Yeah, the ship has some kind of translation technology,” said Kyla. “Like it can adapt to whoever’s in here. It and Dark Star seem to be scanning us constantly.”
“Is that a good thing?” Phoebe asked. “To have a ship reading your mind?”
“I’m not sure. But we never would have figured out how to fly this thing otherwise, and it saves us using a cruiser, and the battery power it would draw from the Artemis.”
“Maybe it wants to help us,” Liam said quietly.
“Not sure about that,” said Kyla, “but it is nice having this ship.”
The Carrion hummed to life, rising smoothly from the hangar floor. Kyla tapped her link. “Artemis bridge, this is Kyla. We’re departing for Dark Star, over.”
“Copy that, Lieutentant,” said a woman’s voice.
Yellow lights flashed and the heavy airlock doors began to slide open.
She switched channels. “Jordy, we’re thrusters hot. ETA three minutes.”
“Roger that. Should be just in time.”
Kyla guided them into the airlock, where they hovered as the inner doors closed. The air sucked out in a violent rush, the outer doors slid silently open, and the Carrion flew into space with a strong burst.
They proceeded parallel to the front section of the Artemis. Liam looked back along the core, which was dotted with burn marks. One of the engines was indeed dark, and while the other was glowing blue, an errant jet of flame intermittently flared from its side. Ahead, on the front section, a team of about ten crew members in space-grade suits floated around a twisted comms antenna, sparks showering from their tools.
“As you can see,” said Kyla, “the damage is pretty bad. But we’re making progress.”
“Do you think you’ll be able to fix it before your fuel and life support run out?” Phoebe asked. “Or at least enough to get back through the portal?”
“Actually,” said Kyla, “she could probably make it back right now, but we’ve got bigger problems that need solving before we can leave here.” As she said it, Kyla brought the craft over the front array, and they were greeted with a wide view of space.
“Whoa,” Phoebe said quietly.
Before them was a vast, eerie expanse, made of layer upon layer of watery, dimly glowing gas clouds. Most were pale green, while some were lavender. They seemed to be in the middle of an enormous nebula, the waves of color stretching as far as they could see in all directions. There was something odd about it, and Liam couldn’t quite put his finger on what—
But then his breath caught in his throat when he saw what was dead ahead. At first it looked like a giant shadow, but then Liam began to make out the details of a massive structure, so enormous that he could barely wrap his mind around it. It was made of great black arms curving out and around from a central core. There were eight arms, maybe more—it was hard to tell in the dim nebula
light. Each was larger than a starliner, curving and crisscrossing one another and making an overall shape that was something like a sphere but also reminded Liam of pictures he’d seen of the octopus from old Earth oceans. Almost the entire structure was dark, and he sensed that it had been dark for a long time. There was, however, one faint white light glowing far off on the top of the core section.
The only other light came in flashes from beneath the structure, but it was like no light Liam had ever seen. Directly beneath that central core was a disk of infinite, pure black, a perfect circle, wide and broad—or it might be above them; there was no real up or down in space. They could only tell this pure black patch was there by the utter absence of nebula glow, and also by the strange flashes of lightning that momentarily coalesced and spiraled around its perimeter before disappearing. Now a huge bolt erupted from the tip of one of the arms, toward the black spot, where it immediately circled and disappeared, warping like water going down a drain.
“Welcome to Dark Star,” said Kyla.
Even though Liam had glimpsed this briefly before, when they’d first encountered the doorway, and then again when the Artemis had been investigating it, the sight of it now made his heart race, and a chill ran through him. It looked nothing like the pleasant, light-filled form of Iris. In fact, it looked the opposite, and its very presence caused a cold sensation of dread inside him.
“How did you know to call it that?” Liam asked.
“The station has the same translation technology as this ship. When we started studying its systems, that was how it referred to itself in logs and schematics.”
“And you haven’t seen the Drove?” he asked.
Kyla shook her head. “Maybe the captain will know what you’re talking about, but not me. Okay, we’re on approach.”
She brought them in low over the nearest arm of the leviathan structure, angling toward where that single light showed atop the core.
Liam looked down at the distant surface of the arm they were passing over and saw that it was covered by a gridwork of structures like domes and towers, but also like pyramids and temples of old Earth, stuff made by the Egyptians or Greeks—except instead of being made from stone, all these structures were formed of a black glassy metal. There were other trapezoidal buildings that reminded Liam of structures he’d seen briefly on Telos, some that seemed to be spirals, and so many others.
The Shores Beyond Time Page 8
