"Maybe I do." Safa jumped down off the bench and moved back toward the bridge far faster than she had made her way downstairs. She didn’t seem even a little unsteady on her feet, not anymore. She was a woman on a mission, and for once Evie had no intention of staying off the bridge. She needed answers as much as anyone else.
"The viewscreen isn't broken," Safa said quietly before Evie had even made it all the way back up to the top level of the Lexiconis. "What we're seeing is what's out there."
Evie arrived back on the bridge to find Captain Briggs staring uncomfortably at Safa. Lincoln’s eyes were locked on one of the screens behind him.
Safa didn't bother waiting for anyone to ask her to explain, instead words tumbled out of her mouth faster and faster. "At first, I thought we'd been hit with some kind of energy barrier, something I wasn't familiar with. It was a long shot, but if anyone's going to come up with something completely new, it would be SolTek. Fine. Then we lost power, and it felt like the ship was moving, but only for a second."
"I followed that much," Captain Briggs said. "What we need to know now is what actually happened?"
"The Lexiconis did move, but not in the way we're used to. At least, not just in that way. Not simply forward, backward, left, or right. But through. Whatever hit us knocked us clear out of regular space and into … something else. I'm not sure. But if you look out any window in the ship you'll see the same thing as we're seeing now. Nothing. We're not seeing stars, because there are no stars. Our navigational controls aren’t working at all, but not because they've been damaged. They don't recognize where we are. Usually, our location is calculated based off stellar bodies we can count on to be where they should be at any given time. Now, the ship can't find anything. Not Earth, not Mars, not Polaris or any other star we're familiar with."
"Lincoln?" the captain asked, probably looking for confirmation.
Lincoln answered in a series of rapid hand movements, but from the crease in the pilot's brow it wasn't hard for Evie to guess his meaning. Evie had hoped he'd step up to offer an alternative theory, but it didn't look like he knew anything for sure.
"Then, where are we?" Captain Briggs asked, turning back toward Safa.
"I don't know. Subspace maybe? It's only ever been theorized, but it's one option. The only other guess I have is that we all died when the power surged and the afterlife isn't at all what I was expecting."
Captain Briggs frowned, straightening his shoulders. "I'm not sure I like that answer. Let's go with the other one, even if I'm not loving that answer either. Subspace. Or other space. Whatever this is, it's not something we should be dealing with. So how do we get back out again?"
"That, I really don't know the answer to. I got us this far, so it's someone else's turn to step up with answers."
The captain shook his head. "No, answers are going to have to wait. We can't do anything until we're in fighting form again. Repairs first, then we regroup and deal with the rest."
Evie let out a huff of air she'd been holding in, and with it, any hope that the vessels leader would have a solution to this new reality that still hadn't quite sunk in.
All six of them were stuck somewhere that shouldn't even be possible, with no idea how they got there or how to get out again.
"I'm going to check on the others," Captain Briggs said. "And to fill them in about all of this." He gestured at the screen. "Do what you can and I'll be back soon."
Do what you can? Evie pondered the question, watching the captain's back disappear.
One way or another, Evie had gotten them into this mess. She wasn't about to trust herself to be the one to find a way out of it. "What can I do to help?" she asked the room, hoping the answer wasn't simply to shoot herself out an airlock.
Chapter Seven – Oliver
Quietly, Oliver closed the door to his office behind him. He’d never had any intention of going down to the engine room, though he supposed he’d have to end up there sooner or later.
“Damnit,” he said, grumbling, barely resisting the urge to slam his fist against the wall.
Before he did anything else, he needed a minute to think, alone with his ship.
The Lexiconis’ previous owners had been a middle-aged couple, devoutly religious. They’d first purchased the ship as a way to give those living in more remote areas a way to worship among the stars. Oliver had even heard about them in a news special, but so too had thousands of other people living throughout the system. Far more people than a ship like the Lexiconis could hold—back then it had been called the S.S. Holy Light. There was too much demand and not nearly enough supply, so much so that some had begun to offer to pay for the privilege of using the ship.
By the time Oliver had purchased the vessel, the couple had been selling because they no longer had any use for any ship that couldn’t hold at least a few hundred people at a time. Their fleet had nearly twenty large ships, a handful to cover each of the major religions.
When he’d toured the ship, silently working out how much to offer, he’d nodded along politely to the couple’s story. He didn’t care where this ship had come from, only that he wanted to be the person who decided where it would go next. Back then, he’d had nothing but big plans and a settlement payment burning a hole in his pocket. And the Lexiconis had been beautiful. Even stripped of all religious accoutrements, its design was both sleek and practical. There was more space than he had ideas for what to do with, and it had the coolest looking room he’d ever seen on a ship this size. His office.
He’d selected his office before he’d picked his bedroom, technically, before he’d even purchased the Lexiconis. Even though the room was stuck in the middle level of the ship, it still faced the front of the ship and had an entire wall of windows he could look out at while he worked at his desk.
In the end, he’d never had much of a need to plant himself at a desk for hours on end. And now those very same windows he’d once fallen in love with, mocked him.
They might as well not be there at all, for all the good they did. And looking outside to where the stars were supposed to be and seeing only an eerie blackness disturbed Oliver right down to the soul he wasn’t sure existed.
Growing up, he’d always loved looking out among the stars. They represented the life he wanted for himself, and all of the possibilities that lay beyond the mining colony where his parents had worked for their entire adult lives.
As a boy, he’d devoured all the classic sci-fi shows that dreamed what it would be like for humanity to spread themselves out throughout the galaxy, interacting with alien life forms. He’d loved them as much as the modern movies that had given up on the idea that humanity was not alone and dreamed of a human race that transformed whole solar systems and invented the impossible.
He'd never cared which version of the future the human race was headed toward, only that he was a part of it. He wanted to explore, to do more and see more than his parents had.
And then Evelyn Casseract had shown up at his office, disrupting a lousy day and offering him the possibility to do all of that. He’d taken his crew and catapulted all of them toward what he hoped would be an adventure, even if where they were going wasn’t exactly unexplored territory.
And he’d brought them all here, where there was nothing to see, and even the stars were hidden away.
That one decision was going to get someone killed. Or all of them. And no one would ever know what had happened to the Lexiconis. If it weren’t for the fact that their ship had disappeared with Allen Casseract’s daughter on board, there was a good chance no one would have even bothered to look for them, no matter how hard Elise begged the authorities.
God, if Oliver didn’t manage to get everyone killed, Sprocket was going to kill him.
Oliver took a breath and turned his back on the window he’d once loved, sitting down on the small gray sofa he’d brought with him from his apartment on Centuri Station.
The worst part of all of this—besides the potential death of al
l of the people who trusted him with their lives—was that there was a part of him that had been wishing for something like this to happen for as long as he could remember. A day like this one was exactly the reason he'd taken the time to build himself the best crew he could afford. In case they were ever called on for something more than getting supplies from A to B.
Every television or movie captain had gotten into scrapes worse than this one, and as Oliver watched and re-watched he tried to imagine new and more interesting ways they could have resolved all of their problems. All while SolTek Industries and their imitators made it seem entirely possible that one day he could get out there and really find out what he was made of, what kind of captain he’d be.
The reality was mediocre at best. Oliver had only been able to afford to be a captain at all due to a mining accident that had killed both of his parents. Not exactly a heroic origin story. And then he’d crewed his ship with not just the best and the brightest, but the most interesting. because interesting people made for interesting adventures. And then he’d waited, flying around the most heavily populated parts of the system, waiting for adventure to find him while he let his new team upgrade the ship however they wanted.
Adventure had never come. And the money had run out faster than it should have, sucked into gadgets, wiring, and programs. And payroll. The home Oliver and his team had created for themselves was one he could be proud of. Unfortunately, it was ultimately useless.
They needed work if they wanted to keep flying. Hell, since there was no home to go back to, Oliver needed work if he wanted to keep eating.
So they’d taken the kind of job that no one would ever tell stories about. Boring and practical, but quick. The kind of job that paid the bills. And then they took another one, and another. And they did it well, which continued to bring in more business. Until that was their life. No one else had ever batted an eye. It was the kind of work his crew had always expected to be doing. At least they’d had the skills to do it well.
He’d probably only been a few months away from having to let Safa go. She was probably the most interesting member of his crew, and certainly the smartest, but he needed someone with muscle who could move cargo more than he needed someone like her.
Then Evelyn Casseract had come along and offered him everything he’d ever thought he wanted.
And look where that had gotten him. The stars were gone, and any hope of being a legendary captain had disappeared right along with them.
Chapter Eight – Gwynn
Whatever had happened to the ship had done a number on its central computer. After finishing up with Sprocket, Gwynn had arrived in the electronics hub on the third level to find the desk she'd pulled in there on its side, looking like it had slammed into the computer casing, along with her leftover soup.
Thankfully, none of the damage she'd found so far had been irreparable, even if it did look like she'd be replacing wiring all over the ship for years to come. But that could wait. There weren't any issues that were going to get them all killed if they weren't dealt with right away, which meant it was time to deal with the issue that everyone else had been avoiding for a week.
There was someone on board who knew more than she was letting on, and who might very well know how to get them out of the mess she'd gotten them into. All Gwynn had to do was prove it. And in an age as digital as the one they lived in, knowing your way in and out of any computer usually meant that no secrets were safe for long.
It took all of two minutes for Gwynn to realize that, secrets or not, Evelyn Casseract was pretty damn boring for a rich girl who had probably done and seen more than anyone else on board. Money couldn't buy personality.
From the looks of the files she'd accessed—both through the Lexiconis' system, and through the devices she'd brought on board and stupidly networked with the ship's system—Evie had spent most of her time since coming on board playing games, reading books, and watching movies.
Boring. And not at all deceptive.
Getting to the end of the file chain, Gwynn was about to give up and go directly to the source when she saw it. One file, timestamped from just before the Lexiconis disembarked. When apparently Evie had been connected both to the Lexiconis’ system, and to Centuri Station’s internal network.
As soon as Gwynn opened the file, Evie’s face appeared, her smooth skin and artificially colored hair filling far too much of the screen.
“Hey Orin.” Evie's voice shook a little as she spoke. “I made it onto the Lexiconis and I think I’m all set. I’m getting the latest backup of Mason’s system now since I’ll have some time before we get there to try and figure out what the hell is going on." Hmm. “Thanks again for everything. Two more weeks and then we see how all of this plays out. I owe you one. Or two. Even if this all turns out to be nothing, you took a huge risk to help me.”
Now that was interesting. It didn’t spell out exactly what Evie had expected upon coming here, and bringing the Lexiconis’ crew along with her, but this trip hadn’t been entirely innocent either.
Yes, very interesting. Before, Oliver might not have cared about what his client’s motives were, or even if she had any. But now, things were all too different.
In an instant, the offending file had been copied to Gwynn’s personal account, making it that much easier to access later. If she’d wanted to, she could have broadcast it on every screen in the ship at once, but there was no sense giving Evie a chance to come up with her excuses, to invent a new cover story. Besides, everyone else’s screens were probably currently busy, trying to fix the ship and undo whatever Evie, or her family, had done to them.
Just to make sure no one could accuse her of being too busy looking for someone to blame to do her actual job, Gwynn ran one last system check. It was just about finished, still not coming up with any serious glitches, when the scent of singed metal filled her nostrils.
Fire! The first thought that entered Gwynn’s mind was easily the most terrifying. A ship in flames was never good, but a damaged ship in flames with a million other issues to deal with was probably a death trap.
Acting on instinct, Gwynn leapt up and searched the room, looking for any immediate threat. There was nothing, and yet the smell persisted. It was only as she peered upward, searching for smoke, that Gwynn found the most likely culprit. An uneven patch on the ceiling was glowing red hot, expanding so slowly that she couldn’t be sure she wasn’t imagining things.
And seeing how the room right above this one was Safa’s bedroom and makeshift secondary lab, there was a very real possibility that something was currently burning through the ceiling, destroying the ship molecule by molecule.
“Safa,” Gwynn yelled as she thundered up the stairwell to the next floor. “Safa, I need you. Now! Safa!”
Gwynn saw her friend coming down from the bridge at the same time as she entered through the other side of the corridor. Safa’s delicate features contorted in alarm, but as soon as she saw Gwynn running toward her, she did the same. The two met near the middle, right outside of Safa’s room.
“Something is burning through the floor from your room,” Gwynn said, out of breath. She hadn’t taken a single opportunity over the last week to use the ship’s gym, and for the first time, she was starting to regret it.
“Shit.” Safa swung herself from the hall into her bedroom but was immediately forced to slow down to navigate around the array of items scattered all over the floor. Any other day, hearing Safa curse would have made Gwynn’s week. Today? Not so much.
There was no need to try and figure out where the damage had been done based on where the angry splotch had been on the ceiling below. The massive hole was easy to find, right behind where Safa’s chair had landed in the middle of the room. Whatever it was that was making its way through the ship had already eaten half a portascreen.
“It’s one of my quick-burn formulas,” Safa said, which didn’t sound like a good thing to Gwynn. “It can’t affect glass, but the container must have shatt
ered. I just need to neutralize it.”
“Oh, is that all,” Gwynn said, holding back a smirk as Safa started moving around the room like a hurricane, moving furniture and pieces of equipment out of the way with surprising ease.
“I can’t find anything!” Safa’s gaze searched the room while Gwynn studied her stoic expression and shallow breathing. Gwynn had been able to calm herself down a little once it didn’t look like whatever this stuff was would be able to destroy the ship any time soon, but if Safa started to panic, so would she.
“Tell me what we’re looking for. I can help.”
“It’s a grayish-blue solution, about the consistency of water. It was in a sealed vial on my dresser when I left it.”
"On it." Gwynn moved to a crouch, slicing her finger open on something metal and sharp almost as soon as her hand hit the ground, but this was no time to go crying for a bandage. Shifting debris with both hands in front of her, Evie searched the room around her, looking up every few seconds for any hint of the prize elsewhere in the room.
"This is what you get for leaving every room you enter as a disaster zone." Gwynn regretted the comment as soon as she let it slip out. Just because Gwynn was a neat freak that didn't leave any requirement that the people she cared about had to be too. And when it came to Safa, things like this happening were usually an inevitability.
But having Safa around was well worth the trouble.
So long as she didn’t get them all killed.
Safa didn't answer, but both women started moving a bit faster. How long until whatever this substance was, started dripping from Safa's floor to Gwynn's and then down into the engine room?
Something bright blue in a reflective casing caught Gwynn's eye as she turned. By the time she whipped her head back, she was sure she'd never been able to find whatever it had been again in time. But there it was, right under Safa's bed. A vial with something blue settled inside.
Into the Void (Beyond Humanity Book 1) Page 6
