by Nick Webb
Her voice blared throughout the cabin after a few seconds. “You’re not the CAG. Where’s Moonshine?”
“He’s in his bird. Still a little shaken from the last mission. Don’t worry, he’ll get over it.” He glanced out his viewport. “But we’ve got him, Barbie, Ace, Spectrum, and me.” We’re good to go.
“Ok, stand-by for T-jump in five.”
“Five minutes?”
“Five seconds. Four. Three. Two. One. Now, Ensign Riisa.”
Huh. His father must not be on the bridge. Maybe with the admiral in his ready room.
He felt the tell-tale disorientation from the T-jump, markedly more noticeable than a standard q-jump. A quick shake of his head drove the vertigo away.
“We’ve arrived at destination. All pilots cleared for launch. Good luck, Zivic.”
“Uh … mission? I mean, besides escorting our burly friends to wherever they’re going?”
“Let us do the talking, but if they start shooting at you, shoot back. Whitehorse out.”
Well. He could handle that. “All right people, look sharp,” came Moonshine’s voice over the comm. “We’re cleared for launch. Escort pattern M-Two. Keep the three troop carriers in the middle of us at all times. Zivic and Barbie you take point. Ace, Spectrum, and I will hang back. Go.”
Just seconds later, he was out. Maneuvering around the Independence, stars blazing all around him, craning his head this way and that to see if the troop carriers had gotten out yet, and looking to see their target, which, he noticed, no one had told him anything about yet.
Then he saw the planet. Deep green and blue and brown, dappled with clouds. He didn’t immediately recognize it, but he recognized the giant ship hanging over it.
He punched the comm. “Whitehorse, just to confirm … are you saying we might be getting into a shooting match with the Skiohra?”
“Confirmed, Batship. Standby for further orders.”
Zivic shook his head. “The world’s gone to hell.” He punched the accelerator once he saw the troop carriers assemble, and soon the eight ships were blazing towards the massive alien ship. Once a friend. And now? He didn’t know what to think anymore.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Bridge
ISS Defiance
Saturn’s moon Titan
Near Britannia
“Lieutenant Case, any change in its status?”
“No, ma’am. The shaft looks stable.”
Proctor leaned forward in her chair and stared at the screen. Below them, several thousand kilometers down, was Titan. And, magnified so she could see its gleaming metal edges, a hole. The end of a shaft, leading down to who knew where. Their sensors couldn’t penetrate far into it since some strange jamming field rendered all their scans useless. Any wave of any frequency or energy level seemed to just … disappear once it went a few kilometers into the shaft. Even visually, they couldn’t see much beyond the first few dozen kilometers, since the shaft seemed to curve towards the north.
“Power levels coming off the core?”
“Unchanged, ma’am. Everything looks … well, normal. As normal as a moon can be that’s been transformed into a giant cannon by a god.”
“Tim’s not a god, Case. He’s a man. A very, very, very old man.”
Case inclined his head to the side to speak back at her. “A thirteen billion year old man? Sounds like a god to me.”
“I thought you didn’t believe?”
“I don’t, ma’am.”
She pat her armrests. Bracing herself for the order she knew she had to give. “All right. Take us in. Nice and slow. And let’s all just hope the very, very, very old man doesn’t yell at us to get off his lawn.”
The Defiance surely but slowly descended into Titan’s gravity well. Off towards the south pole they could still see the glowing slag and magma—scars from where the moon had collided with the first Swarm ship they’d seen two weeks ago over Earth. But within a few minutes the shaft loomed ahead. Or below. She wasn’t sure how to orient themselves in her head.
“Passing through the entrance in ten seconds, ma’am.” Case was keeping his voice steady and level. But she could feel the underlying nervousness. Something about the tone. Just slightly higher than usual.
“Steady,” she said.
And they were in. She watched the walls of the shaft in amazement as they passed by, descending lower and lower. They were made out of some dark, gleaming metal alloy. The spectroscopic sensors caught glimpses of rhenium and iridium and titanium and carbon and oxygen, but the orbital lines were all off. It wasn’t a spectrum she or the computer recognized. It was utterly … alien.
“Ten kilometers, ma’am. And the shaft is starting to bend towards the north.”
“Steady,” she repeated. “Nice and slow. No rush.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Another several minutes passed with no change. Just more dark, gleaming metal all around them, forming a tube that was carrying them further and further into Titan’s crust. Soon, they’d be in the mantle. In fact….
“Are the walls … glowing?”
Case nodded. “Yes, ma’am, it appears so.” He peered at his console and cocked his head. “Something called blackbody radiation, adjusted by unknown elemental lines.” He looked back at her. “I don’t know what that means, ma’am.”
“It means it’s hot, but that the computer has no idea what the hot thing is made of. But it’s no surprise it’s so hot. I bet just outside the walls is a sea of magma. What’s the air temperature outside?”
Case glanced back down at his console. “Four hundred and twelve degrees, ma’am.”
“Fahrenheit?”
He snapped his head back towards her in confusion. “Ma’am?”
“It’s a scientist joke, lieutenant. We haven’t used Fahrenheit in over three hundred years.”
“Oh. I—I hadn’t even heard the word.”
My god, he’s so young. “Oh. Well. It’s an old word. As you were, lieutenant.”
Several more minutes passed, and they descended deeper and deeper into the moon, the walls of the shaft becoming increasingly redder as they went. Soon they were bright crimson, and Proctor started to worry if it was going to get too hot for the Defiance’s hull. All starships were built to withstand exterior heat and to radiate its own waste heat, but these conditions were most likely far more extreme than even the most pessimistic designers had in mind.
“Ma’am, we’re coming up on something. Sensors aren’t telling a clear story here, but it looks like there may be a … some type of open space ahead.”
Proctor adjusted her uniform top and steeled herself. “Things are about to get interesting.”
Within a minute, the image on the viewscreen changed. Where before had been the ever-descending red walls of the shaft, now there was … an expanse. A massive red space. Massive was an understatement. It was unfathomably large. If their sensors weren’t telling her otherwise, she would have guessed it was a million kilometers across, but her armrest display showed that it was only a few hundred. The walls.
The walls.
“What … in the … everlasting … hell….” she breathed. “Lieutenant Davenport, analysis. What are those walls made of?”
The marine at the ops station shrugged. “Unknown, ma’am. In fact,” he looked up at her. “It … looks like—”
“That there are no walls?” She stared at the viewscreen. It was red all around them. Magma. Trillions of trillions of tons of red hot magma. Held back by … nothing. The sea of boiling rock roiled against some unseen material or force that held it at bay. “Well, Tim. Looks like you’ve made a few discoveries since we last saw each other. Can’t wait to pick your brain.” She squeezed her legs, an almost nervous motion that she quickly suppressed. She couldn’t be nervous. She didn’t have time to be nervous. And yet, the sight of a moon’s worth of lava held back by nothing, that could all come crashing down on her in a fiery wave was … unnerving. “Case. There’s something there
in the middle. A black speck. What is it? How far away is it? How big?”
Case hunched over his terminal and pecked at the controls. “About a hundred and fifty kilometers away. Right in the center of the space. It’s a … structure, of some kind. A ship? Looks more like a giant ball of rock. About a dozen kilometers across.”
There he was. She was sure of it. “We’re coming, Tim,” she whispered.
“Ma’am?” Case cocked his head back towards her.
“Take us there, Mr. Case,” she said, louder this time.
They plunged forward into the empty abyss in the middle of the sea of magma. The pocket of empty space created by forces unimaginable.
Forces. Forces required energy.
Incredible energy. Vast amounts of energy.
“Well that explains it.”
Both Case and Davenport glanced at her. “Ma’am?” said Davenport.
“The mass. Remember the early reports? How the mass of Titan seemed to be steadily increasing? And all the other moons?” She waved a hand at the screen. “Well here it is.”
Case shook his head. “Looks like a whole lot of nothing to me, ma’am.”
“A whole lot of very energetic nothing, Mr. Case. I’m sure you’re familiar with Einstein.”
“The parrot?”
Good Lord. “No, not the blasted cartoon.” She remembered how Danny, as a small child, had sat on her lap and they’d watch the very intelligent parrot go off and solve mysteries with its friends. These marines were Danny’s age. “The scientist. Relativity. You know.”
“I … really don’t, ma’am.”
She sighed. Kids these days. “Matter, energy, in all it’s forms, is all energy. The rest mass energy is E equals M C squared. And the energy required to keep this much magma at bay is … off the charts. We don’t see that energy from the outside of Titan, but it surely registers as extra mass. It has to.”
“I thought energy was massless. Light? It weighs something?” Case was scratching his head.
“Photons are massless, yes. But they have momentum. And when they finally hit a particle with mass, that particle’s mass increases. There is some kind of unimaginably powerful field holding this whole thing together. And whenever the momentum of whatever particles of that field hit the magma it’s holding back, that magma gets very, very, very slightly heavier. I’m sure there’s more going on there, but at the end of the day we see it as Titan gaining weight.”
The structure at the center of the void had been growing on their viewscreen the entire time, and now it filled the screen. Indeed, it looked like an average rocky asteroid.
But it was no normal asteroid.
“Sensors picking up a—a landing pad,” said Case, incredulously.
“Tim’s rolling out the welcome mat for us. Take us there.”
Chapter Thirty
Bridge
Granger’s Heel
Debris cloud of El Amin
Betrayal.
It was a regular part of her life since she was two when her father fed her an habanero pepper, claiming it was candy.
The memory of the pain was as vivid as if it was yesterday. She’d choked, and stopped breathing, and by the time the emergency room had revived her and fixed her and sent her home with her parents, she’d learned the lesson well.
Trust … no … one.
Learning at such a young age that trust was a thing whose only purpose was to be broken made her the most fortunate person in the world, in Fiona Liu’s humble opinion. It had saved her from years of bullshit. She’d managed to get through high school and college without a single dipshitty boyfriend cheating on her or even hurting her, ever, because by the time they’d gotten close enough to even be able to, she’d already moved on. Used them for their hot college boy bodies and moved on.
The lessons betrayal taught had saved her, many times over. It was her religion: cynicism, doubt, and distrust were her holy trinity.
Former Special Agent Fiona Liu adjusted the course slightly, seeing that she was coming in at an angle that someone watching might suspect meant she knew where she was going. The little freighter swerved and jerked a bit as the control software kept throwing her errors and warnings that, no, no-one in their right mind would be flying such an old bucket of shit.
Another betrayal. Proctor had promised her a ship from one of her rich friends, and said rich friend had simply laughed in her face and tossed her a docking bay pass with the parking slot scribbled on it, and slammed the door in her face. She’d expected a ship. Not a semi-functioning collection of scrap held together by shoddy weld patches and desperate hopes.
She didn’t fault the admiral. No. She was quickly becoming the one person she could trust. The only one. It was the asshole rich guy. The rich guys were always assholes. When she’d worked in the red light district in Cherdh for a summer, it was always the rich guys that didn’t tip.
But she was mistaken. It wasn’t just Proctor. The automatic way in which her mind placed Proctor as the only person she trusted told her that she didn’t quite believe it. She didn’t quite believe that image was real. That it was really him.
That he was alive.
“I’m coming, Danny.”
The dispersed cloud of tumbling rocks and dust was getting thicker now, and she hoped against hope that the deflector shielding on the hull would hold. She ran another sensor scan over the entire vicinity, calibrated to search for rare metals that any rock-hopper like her would be after. That was her disguise, anyway. An unlicensed black market prospector, too cheap to buy a license, too much of a loner to work in a union. Anyone watching her scan the cloud of rocks that used to be El Amin would think she was looking for iridium or tantalum or rare earths, due to her sensor calibration.
At least the sensors still worked.
Betrayal.
It had only hurt one time. It was all she needed. The next time it happened, it was just a thing. An event, nothing more. Something that happened some random afternoon, like the mail being delivered at two instead of three, or like toilet getting clogged. It just happened—no big deal. Plunge and move on. It didn’t mean anything. The betrayals piled up as a young woman trying to succeed at the IDF Intelligence Academy, and she’d learned not only to trust no-one, but to believe no-one, to rely on no-one, and to love no-one.
Until Danny.
If the avionics and engine control software on board the freighter were garbage, the computer package and analysis software was worse. It couldn’t even do a particle size spectrum analysis or mass/density scan. That would have been an easy way to, at bare minimum, determine if there was, in fact, a ship out here with Danny on it. So she’d have to rely on her eyes instead.
It took her hours. Her eyes were red and dry from looking at the sensor data for so long, though in fairness that could be any number of other things—the lethal radiation, having her face burned off in an explosion, take your pick—and finally, she needed to rest.
An alarm sounded.
“Well … shit.”
A fighter patrol. Dammit. Whatever ship was out here was big enough to have a docking bay that could fit a fighter. At least it was only one. And that in itself was comforting—it was only one, which also meant that once she got on board the main ship, there wouldn’t be too many guards. Nothing she couldn’t handle, anyway.
“Unidentified freighter, you are advised to leave this area immediately. The Black Fists have staked a mineral claim here and you are infringing upon it. Leave now.”
“Like hell,” she muttered. The Black Fists were a militant faction of the GPC. She’d infiltrated a different faction in the GPC last year, the Dying Rose, and gained valuable intel from it. But the Black Fists were another matter entirely. They wouldn’t hesitate to shoot her without another word.
The fighter accelerated and blazed across her path, arcing around her and doing it again, coming within a meter of her nose. A warning. The next warning would be live fire.
“GPC pilot, this is the
Granger’s Heel, coming out of San Martin. Please hold your fire. Just on a prospecting run here. Had no idea you folks were out here already.”
She wagered that whoever was out here might be Grangerite as well and so chose a fitting name for the ship, on the off-chance that would be her ticket in.
“This is your last warning, heathen.”
Guess not.
Time to do what I do.
She cut the engines and flipped a switch which triggered a series of commands to the computer she’d set up earlier. On cue, her right auxiliary thruster exploded, sending the freighter into an uncontrolled tumble and her slamming against the wall. She tasted the iron tang of blood in her mouth as she pushed herself up from the floor. “Damn. That was bigger than I thought it’d be.”
“Granger’s Heel, are, uh, you all right?”
She sat back into the pilot’s chair and flipped the comm back on. What would a normal person be doing right now? She started breathing heavily into the receiver and dropping swears every second breath. “Ahhh… uh, I think I need help. Shit shit shit shit shit shit….”
She heard an audible sigh on the other end, and she could tell the pilot was doing some quick moral calculus. She recognized it well. He thought of himself as a good person. Most people do. But she was also an inconvenience, and if she died, no-one would ever know what happened to her, or that he played any part. What to do, what to do. So she stepped in to help him make the decision. “Uh, what’s your name, sir?” She made her voice as small and vulnerable and feminine as humanly possible.
“Eli. Eli Chen.”
She made her teeth chatter, loud enough for the receiver to pick it up. She needed to be a helpless damsel in distress who’d never harmed anyone. Nope. Not her. “Eli Chen … that’s a nice name. I’m Tina. Tina Woodsby. G … G … glad to meet your acquaintance.” She manufactured the whole experience, right down to which vowels to put in her name to trigger the appropriate chemical reactions of sympathy in his brain. If she’d chosen a name like Heather Pike, for instance, odds were he’d just take off and let her crash into a larger asteroid. Hell, if she picked a name like Cho Chichery, he’d likely just shoot her. But, just from his voice, his tone, his choice of words, she knew his type. More than he knew himself, most likely.
