by Nick Webb
And that was perfectly fine with Sarah. She and her imaginary friend Sam were both swinging this time, in a contest to see who could go higher.
Higher, higher. Pump the legs forward, swing the legs back, just like daddy taught her.
It was hot that day, and the breeze on her face as she swung was nice. She wished the sun would go away.
And it did.
Covering it was another one of those Granger moons. She thought maybe her mom would start screaming again, so she looked back at the bench she was sitting on.
No screaming, just talking nervously into her handset as she eyed the sky. The sudden twilight making it a little difficult to see her face.
So Sarah wouldn’t scream either. She would just go higher, and higher.
And when she got the highest, winning her game with Sam, it seemed the whole sky erupted in fireworks, as if to applaud her. To celebrate her.
It made her want to go even higher, and so she did.
The light got brighter, and she heard an odd noise nearby. She turned back to her mother.
Her mother wasn’t screaming. She was crying. Her handset was on the ground, and she’d stood up, still staring at the sky. And now with the fireworks Sarah could see her face. She looked petrified. And she wouldn’t stop crying.
Crying. Moaning.
And Sarah could not understand why. The sky was beautiful. More beautiful than she’d ever seen it, illuminated by a ball of light that grew bigger and bigger.
And so she swung higher.
Chapter Forty-Eight
“Where are we?” She sat back down, cautiously, and breathed.
“About a hundred thousand clicks from Britannia, ma’am. Titan is off our port bow.” Case maneuvered the ship until Titan appeared on the viewscreen, and behind it, looming much larger, was Britannia, green and blue and beautiful with clouds and coastlines and wilderness that extended for thousands of miles on both continents, forests and mountains and tundra and plains, and the billions of people bustling about their day, trying to get back to their normal business, a continent and center of human civilization going about the daily mundane tasks of staying civilized, and her brother and his wife, she knew, were down there somewhere. All this and more flashed across her mind in the next moment. The moment seemed to slow down. It was an eternal moment. Almost a peaceful moment. She supposed it was exactly opposite what Granger experienced in the black hole, as he looked out at the universe outside and saw it speed up. But for her, time stopped in that moment. And even during that moment, she knew the image would be seared into her memory for the rest of her life. It would give her nightmares, she knew. Everything would change.
Titan exploded.
The crust expanded outward in a rapidly growing white sphere, followed by titanic streams of magma.
It took more than ten seconds, but eventually the blast front nearest Britannia overtook it, slamming into the surface, rendering everything on the near side of the planet a red maelstrom of boiling lava and billowing clouds as the entire ocean evaporated in a flash and exploded outward into space as if a giant white parachute had unfurled from the planet. But instead of saving it from a crash landing it was the grotesque and heartbreaking sign of its death.
Britannia was gone. In its place, a shell of a world.
Britannia. It was gone.
Britannia.
“Ma’am?” Case’s voice was strangely calm. “Ma’am? What do we do?”
“Lieutenant Case. I … I…” she looked down at the box still clutched tightly to her chest with white knuckled hands. She let it drop onto the floor with a clatter. One last, desperate, childish hope was extinguished as the box did not disgorge a genie in the shape of Tim Granger, beatific and triumphant and ready to wave a magic resurrected Jesus Granger hand and make everything better.
She looked up at him, too broken to even cry. “Jeremy. I don’t know.”
Chapter Forty-Nine
Bridge
ISS Independence
Near Britannia
“Firing torpedoes, sir! All mag-rail crews are focused on that main weapons spire pointing at Titan,” Whitehorse called out. On the viewscreen Zivic watched as torpedo after torpedo leapt away and raced across space towards the Swarm ship moving implacably towards Titan.
Zivic noticed his father pace back towards the weapons station to watch the progress from there. The captain bent low to peer at one of the screens and tapped it, perhaps to scroll through the tracking of the damage the sensors were seeing on the enemy ship.
“Captain?” Zivic said. “Orders for the flight crew? Are we deploying, or not?”
His father ignored him. Instead, he finished at the weapons station, nodded to himself as if lost in thought, and returned to the center of the bridge.
“Dad? Yay or nay? Moonshine is squawking at us, wondering what’s up.”
“No need, son.”
His father hadn’t even turned away from the viewscreen to tell him. He was transfixed.
“Uh, captain,” began Whitehorse, studying her screen at the weapons station. “We just launched a torpedo. And … it’s behaving oddly.”
“We’ve launched lots of torpedoes, Lieutenant,” he replied, still watching the process of the battle on the screen.
“Yes, sir, but this one just veered off its course towards the Swarm ship. Something wrong with its avionics, and it’s not responding. I can’t control it. It’s a loose cannon at this point. We should send a message out to the fleet to be on guard in case it heads their way.”
He gave a short, single nod. “Proceed.”
Lieutenant Qwerty signaled out to the rest of the defenders about the rogue torpedo, but halfway through his message it became clear something was terribly wrong.
“Sir, it’s not just flying randomly. It’s heading towards Titan. And not just towards it, but targeted directly on what looks like a giant hole. Like an access port or something that whatever is in there has tunneled.”
“The false savior reaps the whirlwind,” murmured Ballsy.
Zivic cocked his head, then glanced back at Whitehorse. She shrugged, and mouthed what does that mean?
“Dad? What’s going on?”
“Just watch, son. That Swarm ship will never know what hit it.”
He felt an impending sense of unease, but turned towards the screen and watched. The weapons spire on the Swarm ship was clearly charging, and all the fleet’s combined strength was having little effect on it. Within a few minutes it would fire, and Titan was toast.
“The torpedo entered Titan. And … oh my god.” Whitehorse looked like she’d seen a ghost. “I’m detecting strange quantum fluctuations coming off of it. Gravitational distortions and eddies. Sir, I think something is not just wrong with that torpedo. I think it’s been altered.”
“Indeed it has, lieutenant.”
Zivic and Whitehorse were speechless, and the rest of the bridge crew was quieting down as they noticed something was up. And in another minute, words failed them completely.
Titan’s death was breathtaking. It would have been a spectacular show especially since its main blast front tore through the nearby Swarm ship as if it were tissue paper.
But Britannia was behind it. And it died too. It happened so quietly, so matter-of-factly, so quickly, that Zivic felt like he was watching a simulation. A movie. It couldn’t be true. This couldn’t be reality.
But it was. And Britannia burned. A plume of white blasted off the entire surface nearest them and billowed upward. The ocean evaporating and blasting into space.
“And the false savior dies. Just like he said,” murmured Ballsy.
Zivic turned and walked towards the marine standing guard at the door. With a nod and a pointed finger, he indicated the man’s stun gun, and the marine unholstered it and passed it over. He turned and approached the center of the bridge. A raised arm. He fired.
Ballsy shook momentarily, then collapsed onto the deck.
It was another surreal e
vent, against the backdrop of the impossible, and so the entire bridge crew watched it happen without saying a word.
“Nobody touch him!” yelled Zivic. He pointed at the marine whose gun he took and said, “get a body bag or something. Blankets. Whatever. Don’t touch his skin. No skin contact. Am I clear?”
The marine nodded. “Yes, sir,” he stepped out and returned a few moments later with a body bag he’d retrieved from the supply closet next to the bridge.
“Get him in quarantine. Tell Nurse Cunningham that he’s not to be touched.”
The marine, with help from an ensign at ops and a yeoman at damage control, gingerly wrapped the captain up in the body bag and lifted him up. Soon, they were gone.
“Commander Mumford. I believe you’re in charge,” said Zivic. “What are your orders, sir?”
The bridge was still frozen in silence. Titan still disintegrated and Britannia still burned on the viewscreen. Scores of ships that hadn’t been overtaken by Titan’s blast front were flying like hell away from the vicinity. The whole scene was surreal. It couldn’t be real.
“I’m no battle commander, lieutenant, I’m a scientist. Under regulation sixteen C, I defer command to Lieutenant Commander Whitehorse,” said Commander Mumford. “We’re in a war, not a science mission. You’d be ill-served by me in command.”
Zivic swallowed hard, still watching the destruction unfold. “With respect, commander, you’re wrong. This is not a battle. This is where we flee. That blast front is going to hit us within a minute.”
Mumford couldn’t even reply. He was rooted to the spot, staring at the screen like the rest of them, watching their civilization go up in smoke.
Whitehorse took a deep breath, and spoke softly. “Ensign Riisa. Plot a q-jump. Take us out to Wellington Shipyards. Take us to Calais. We can regroup there and plan any … rescue operations.”
She hesitated on the word rescue. It was clear to everyone present that there was probably going to be no rescuing going on that day.
“Aye, aye, SIR!” Riisa yelled, suddenly unfrozen. She sprung into action, and that served as a trigger for everyone else.
Qwerty opened a fleet-wide channel and glanced back at Whitehorse. “You’re on, ma’am. I assume you’ll want to make sure everyone else gets out too. And to the same place.”
“Yes, thank you Mr. Qwerty.” She cleared her throat. “All ships. Every ship within the reach of this transmission. Get away from Britannia. The blast front from Titan will destroy you. Nothing is safe for millions of kilometers out from it. Get out now. The Independence is heading towards Calais. Wellington Shipyards. Lieutenant Commander Whitehorse repeating, all ships, get out now. Go to Calais.”
Calais was only a few dozen million kilometers away, and the q-jump calculations were simple. In another ten seconds, the scene of destruction disappeared off the screen, replaced by the deceptively tranquil peace of Calais’s methane storms. Wellington Shipyards, a massive structure orbiting the gas giant, hung in the foreground.
“No. No, Jerusha. We need to go back. Away from the blast front. There have to be survivors. Ships that could make it out if they just had some assistance.” But even in his own ears his words sounded hollow and unrealistic. He remembered the speech his father had just given him, just minutes earlier. Sometimes you had to be a hero. But sometimes you just had to be a human.
And the only human thing available to them now, was to mourn.
Chapter Fifty
Bridge
Interstellar One
Near Britannia
“He betrayed me. He played me.”
President Sepulveda felt a rush of … something. He didn’t recognize it. It was like a foreign substance in his body. Could it be? Could it really be … the Swarm? Had Huntsman’s betrayal gone that far?
He closed his eyes, breathed deep, shook his head a few times, and then looked back up at the viewscreen on the bridge of Interstellar One. Britannia was still drowning in fire and ballistic moon debris. And … his mind was still his own.
No. It was impossible. He couldn’t be infected. He was no man’s bitch.
But the feeling was still there. It needed a name. It needed to be categorized and therefore understood, exposed for what it was, and then discounted and ignore.
It was … fear.
Hopeless fear. Dread.
“Sir, we need to get you out of here. Now,” said Tom. Right. The secret service’s number one job. The President’s survival. Even as humanity burned down before their very eyes.
“Right.”
“Where to, sir? Lieutenant Commander Whitehorse on the Independence is calling a retreat to Calais. Admiral Oppenheimer is ordering the Earth Defense Fleet back to Earth and is accompanying them there on the Resolute. And we’re just now detecting a signal from what appears to be Admiral Proctor on board the stealthed Defiance.
“Audio? Visual?”
“Audio. Encrypted, but we’ve got decryption software that deciphers just about everything.”
“Let me hear.” He leaned forward in his chair.
The communications officer on the bridge tapped her console. “—don’t think we can do that. Our civilization is in ruins—” Proctor was speaking so low it was almost a whisper. But she was interrupted.
“So is ours, Motherkiller. This war, though we have through our very best efforts tried to avoid it, has touched even us. It has ruined us. Tens of thousands of my sisters are dead, as are millions of their children—”
“And billions of ours. Billions, Krull. An entire world. The center of our civilization after Earth. My … brother. His wife. My students. Almost everyone I’ve ever known. All incinerated. And you have the temerity, the gall, to ask me to go find a ship? I’m not a courier. I’m not your messenger girl. My civilization is burning down around me as we speak!”
“Motherkiller, please. I believe it is … important.”
“My god, Krull! Wake up! Listen to yourself. Fine. Ok. Tell me, what is so important about that ship that you need it to meet you at Calais? And why the hell can’t you go meet it somewhere yourself? Why me?”
“Because, Motherkiller, we … are at war. They would never come. Not if I ask. They would think it’s an ambush. And as for the what, I can’t tell you yet. Not over an open channel like this. The risks are too great. But suffice it to say it’s … important. Monumentally important. To stop the Swarm.”
“Then my answer is no. Go do your own shit, I’ll go do mine. If you can’t even tell me, then we’re done. Proctor out.”
Silence. Sepulveda stroked the stubble on his chin.
“Interesting,” he murmured.
“Sir? We still need a heading. That blast front will overtake us in a few minutes.”
“Open an encrypted channel to the Benevolence. And then I’ll tell you our destination after that.”
Peel frowned, but waved to the communications officer, who tapped the console a few times. “Ok, Mr. President. You’re on.”
“Polrum Krull. This is President Sepulveda of United Earth. Pleasure to make your acquaintance. I overheard your conversation with Admiral Proctor. Tell me. What’s so important about that other ship?”
Krull’s voice came sonorously over the speakers overhead. “President Sepulveda. Your name rings of death.”
“Yeah … I get that a lot. Now answer my question, please.”
“My answer is the same as to the Motherkiller. The stakes are too high over an open channel.”
“I assure you, ma’am, no-one will ever decrypt this particular channel. We’re in a sealed, locked-down, airtight, electromagnetically isolated, hermetic box right now, you and me.”
A long, long pause. “There’s a room. A room I’m now prepared to open. It’s here, on the Benevolence. That is all I can tell you. And I need someone to meet me at Calais.”
“Why Calais?”
“Because, if I’m right, not just anyone can enter that room.”
“Who,” he said with exasperation. “
Who? What ship?”
“Vishgane Kharsa. On the Dolmasi flagship.”
“You … need a Dolmasi … to go into one of your rooms?” The alien woman had lost her marbles.
“Not just Kharsa. But the others that will enter are already on their way.”
Sepulveda sighed. What choice did he have? He could go back to Earth and help muster the defense. But who was he kidding? Oppenheimer and the admirals didn’t need him tripping them up. He’d already fucked things up enough ordering Oppenheimer to use the singularity against the Swarm—clearly he shouldn’t have entrusted it to him, seeing how Huntsman, that traitor, somehow managed to steal it and send it towards Titan instead. He’d trusted someone—two someones—he shouldn’t have, and now eight billion people were dead.
“All right. I’ll go. But what makes you think a Dolmasi general—who right up until two weeks ago we were shooting at—would agree to come with me?”
Krull laughed. It was the first time he’d heard her do so, and he’d read in briefing books that it often sounded like she was simply mimicking human mannerisms every time a human had a conversation with her. But this laugh sounded absolutely genuine. “Mr. Death. You are slippery enough to become president of United Earth. I’m sure you’ll find a way to convince just about anybody to vote for you. Kharsa included. Now go, please. And good luck.”
The transmission ended. Peel was tapping his wristwatch. “Mr. President? We need a decision, or we’ll just take you to Earth in the absence of one.”
It was s struggle to say the words. They’d most likely kill him. Take him prisoner. Or worse, ignore him. After over ten seconds of uncomfortable silence, he spoke. “Dolmasi space.”
“You’re joking. You’re the goddamn president.”
