Dark Matter

by S. W. Ahmed

  “We’ve got to go faster!” Marc yelled.

  Sibular made some adjustments on the dashboard, and pulled harder on the handles. The ship accelerated, clearing each layer of clouds and entering the next more and more quickly.

  The drones followed as best as they could and kept firing with their horrible aim, but fell further behind. As Zorina had explained, Volonan drones were not constructed for travel at high altitudes or in space – their primary purpose was to fly low above the ground, looking for and killing any fugitives that had somehow been able to disconnect from the Grid. The maximum speed any drone could reach was no more than 2,000 miles per hour, a far cry from the interstellar speeds this ship could reach with its kilasic engines.

  Finally, the ship broke through the last cloud layer, without getting hit even once by the drones. The sky above was clear and deep blue, a sight that gave Marc a sense of liberty he hadn’t felt in a long time. He looked back to see if the drones were still following, but there weren’t any.

  As the ship cleared Nopelio’s atmosphere and headed off into deep space, he began to relax. Glad to finally leave that hellhole of a world behind, he also felt more at ease about the ship’s reliability. So far, it was doing just fine, with all the engine gauges showing normal readings. There clearly was something to be said for Mendoken technical prowess and Volonan creativity, especially when combined with the help of a neutral, uniting human hand.

  “The closest point along the Aftaran border is 204 light years away from here,” Zorina said, pressing some icons on the navigation screen.

  Marc did the math in his head. At the vessel’s projected maximum speed of 20,000 times the speed of light, it would take almost 4 Earth days to get there, and that was assuming everything went smoothly. Then he remembered something which made him very uneasy. “Zorina, isn’t there a barrier of ships in the Volo-Gaviera system to protect the sources of purania here? That’s what we attacked when we arrived. How are we going to get past it?”

  She smiled. “Not to worry, my friend! The barrier here at Volo-Gaviera only covers the planet Lupomo and its moons. That’s where the purania is. As the furthest planet in the star system, Lupomo is quite far from our current position and our path out of here.”

  “What about other ships that might be looking for us during our journey? If one of them spots us, we’re finished!”

  “That’s highly unlikely. See, within the borders of the Empire, Volonans can’t really track anybody or anything that has disconnected from the Grid. So they have no way of finding us, unless we first provoke a ship or attempt to cross a barrier. That’s why our borders need to have such strong barriers, because if any outsiders happen to cross through it successfully, then they’re free to roam around inside the Empire with a very low risk of being detected.” She paused. “So the only thing for us to be concerned about is crossing the barrier at the border. It covers the entire perimeter of the Empire without a single gap or hole anywhere. And, believe me, it’s very difficult to penetrate, whether you’re coming in or going out.”

  “Your background as Chief Imperial Defender should help us, Zorina,” Sibular observed.

  “Yeah, you were responsible for the border defense system yourself, weren’t you?” Marc added. “Know of any vulnerabilities?”

  Zorina looked hesitant at first. “Well, I trust you both enough by now. Promise me you’ll never reveal these secrets to anyone else, even under the direst of circumstances, especially not to any foreign power. Sibular, that includes the Imgoerin and the rest of the Mendoken government.”

  Marc and Sibular both gave her their word.

  Zorina cleared her throat. “The original barrier that was set up around the perimeter of the Empire was very secure, but had a number of major problems. Over time, enhancements were added to fix those problems. Some of them were added by none others than yours truly.

  “Anyway, there’s one fix that was added long before my time that I believe we can take advantage of. There are several nebulae along the border with the Aftaran Dominion that are hyperactive hotbeds for comets, asteroids and stardust. The trajectories of many of these comets lead right through the border, and in the past, comets used to repeatedly crash with the barrier as they tried to pass through it. This kept causing considerable damage to the barrier, and continuously generated false intrusion alarms for the defense system. Eventually, the barrier was reprogrammed to let such natural phenomena pass through freely.”

  “Don’t silupsal filters do the same thing?” Marc asked.

  “Yes, except that silupsal filters aren’t designed to be defense systems. They don’t destroy everything that attempts to pass through them without prior authorization.”

  “But this ship looks nothing like a comet or any other natural phenomenon,” Sibular said. “We will immediately be detected and destroyed when we attempt to cross the barrier.”

  “A direct, simple crossing wasn’t quite what I had in mind, my man! We’re going to try something a little more adventurous.”

  As expected, they easily exited the Volo-Gaviera star system without having to pass any barrier. By sticking to some of the less traveled routes in the Yuwa highway system, they avoided encountering too many Volonan ships along the way to the border region. Those which they did encounter they kept a safe distance from, in order to avoid provoking them in any way whatsoever. The ship’s instrument clusters gave minor trouble a couple of times, but they were corrected without much effort. The engines ran smoothly throughout the journey, not once coughing or losing thrust.

  Although conditions onboard were cramped for the three occupants, the mood remained positive and upbeat. On the fourth day, they reached a nebulous region near the border commonly referred to as the Hurling Mist among Imperial Guards, a name it had earned due to the high volume of comets and meteoroids it continuously generated in its midst and flung towards the border.

  Marc was mesmerized by the view. There were brightly colored clouds of gas all around, many of them with surprisingly familiar shapes. Some looked like flowers, while others looked like raging herds of different kinds of animals. Scattered between these clouds were large chunks of icy rock, most of them stationary, others moving in random directions. Back on Earth, he had seen pictures of nebulae taken by the Hubble telescope. But, as he could now see for himself, pictures didn’t come anywhere close to witnessing the real thing.

  As he kept looking ahead, he remembered something he had learned in his college astronomy classes – nebulae were the birthplaces of stars. All the stars in the universe had once been born in gas clouds similar to the ones he was now staring at, and hence all forms of life in the universe owed their existence to such clouds. It was truly a humbling experience to be able to see them so close.

  Sibular slowed the ship down to maneuver it through the rock fields. “Well, Zorina?”

  “Hold on, my man, just hold on.” She kept looking at the navigation screen and performing calculations, then out at the sky, and then back at the screen.

  Suddenly she stood up, just as a group of five comets emerged from one of the clouds. “There, see, I told you so! Comets come out of this area all the time. Alright, aim for the second one from the left. It appears to be headed straight for the border.”

  Sibular increased speed to catch up with the comets, swaying hard to the left and right to avoid colliding with the rocks in the ship’s path.

  “Careful, Sibular!” Marc shouted, just as the ship’s right wing almost hit a rock.

  After a highly turbulent ride, the ship caught up with the comets. Having cleared the vast array of rock fields, each of the comets was starting to head off in a slightly different direction. With far easier maneuverability now in open space, Sibular steered the ship towards the second comet.

  As they approached the comet from above, Marc was able to get a good look at the icy mass that made up its core. It was a not a big piece of rock, perhaps no more than 3 or 4 miles across, but behind it lay incredibly long tr
ails of dust and ionized gas. It wasn’t glowing much, mostly because comets only glowed brightly when they heated up. That usually happened when they approached stars, and there wasn’t a star nearby in this region of space. This particular comet was probably heading for some distant star on the other side of the border, which it would orbit around before returning to its point of origin. That was just the nature of comets, at least those in this part of the galaxy.

  “Okay, get ready to land,” Zorina said. “Easy does it now.”

  Sibular slowed the ship down to match the velocity of the comet, and then gently lowered it onto the rough, uneven surface. Dust particles gathered quickly on the cockpit’s windows, blocking much of the outside view. Fortunately, Zorina’s navigation screen provided Sibular all the help he needed in setting the ship down on its target landing point – the bottom of a deep, narrow gully barely wide enough to fit the wingspan of the ship.

  Once the ship had reached the bottom of the gully, Sibular turned off the engines and all the lights. The surroundings immediately turned pitch dark, with only a tiny amount of light seeping in through the opening of the gully above. It was so dark, in fact, that Marc had to wait for more than a minute before he could see anything. He could tell that this was an ideal spot on the comet to rest the ship, as the depth and narrowness of the gully would hopefully conceal its presence at the border.

  “I guess all we can do now is to wait,” he said, stretching his arms and leaning back in his seat.

  Since comets generally moved at only a small fraction of the speed of kilasic powered ships, it took them almost 9 hours to reach the border.

  “There it is!” Zorina finally said, breaking the long silence in the cockpit. She was pointing at a solid line that had appeared on the top of her navigation screen, a line that the comet they were on had an intercept path with.

  Marc immediately got up from his seat and looked out the ship’s window, hoping to catch a glimpse of the border barrier through the opening of the gully far above. Although the dust of the comet’s trails made it difficult to see anything at all, he was still able to make out the familiar twinkle of stars in the distance. There didn’t seem to be anything unusual or new out there.

  But then, the ground shook violently for a couple of seconds, and the sky above lit up all of a sudden in a dim red color.

  “That’s it, we’ve entered the barrier!” Zorina said, bobbing her head up and down with excitement. “It’s working!”

  Through the dim red hue, Marc could make out the shadows of large, pin-shaped objects in the distance. They had flat tops resting on long stems that thinned out towards the bottom, and were spaced apart in a never-ending grid-like pattern.

  “Those are the barrier’s monitoring nodes,” Zorina explained, following Marc’s gaze. “They are spread out across the entire perimeter of the border. Not to worry, though, because they are unmanned. They only take action if they spot an alien intrusion or attack.”

  “What action do they take?” Marc asked.

  “Oh, they destroy the targets right away. But if they fail, they alert nearby Imperial Guard ships that an intrusion is taking place. You see, due to the humongous size of the border, manned ships have to be few and far between at any given point along the barrier. Otherwise, we Volonans would end up with our entire population just guarding the border!”

  As she spoke, a white flash passed by over the surface of the comet.

  “Was that a scan?” Sibular asked.

  “Yes, and there will be plenty more, but they are unlikely to penetrate this deep into the gully. We’re safe, don’t worry.”

  “Well, I certainly hope you’re right,” Marc said, looking up at those eerie, pin-shaped nodes.

  The entire 3 hour journey through the barrier was uneventful, even after multiple scans from different nodes. Just as the comet was about to exit the barrier, however, one of the last nodes performed a scan. This node was directly above the comet and extremely close. Its scan penetrated the gully from above, reached all the way down to the bottom, and swooped over the ship with its brilliant white light.

  Right away, Zorina yelled out several swear words that Sibular’s translator wasn’t able to translate into English, and then added, “Quick, Sibular! Get this ship out of here! Hurry!”

  Sibular immediately sprang the engines to life, and pulled the ship out of the gully as quickly as he could without hitting the walls. Just as the ship sped away from the comet’s surface, the node began firing at the comet with laser-like streaks of light. It took only a few such streaks to hit the comet, before the entire mass of rock blew up in a gigantic explosion.

  Sibular accelerated the ship as fast as he possibly could, trying to keep ahead of the emerging cloud of fire and debris. Several large pieces of debris barely missed the ship, mostly thanks to his skillful maneuverability. But as the ship finally exited the barrier, one piece of debris hit the left rear wing and the leftmost engine. The impact caused the ship to spiral out of the barrier into open space.

  “Is anybody hurt?” Sibular asked, as he desperately tried to bring the ship’s spiraling under control.

  Marc and Zorina both motioned that they were fine.

  But the ship definitely wasn’t. The engine gauges were showing haphazard readings, and as the spiraling continued, parts of the damaged engine and wing broke off and floated away into space.

  “Sibular, the left engine is gone, and the middle engine is overheating!” Marc shouted, staring at the gauges with alarm.

  Sibular shut the middle engine down right away, before it had a chance to blow up. With only one functioning engine remaining, it took him a while to stop the spiraling and finally resume a normal, straight course away from the barrier.

  Gazing back out of the ship, Marc could clearly see the wall of the barrier they had just passed through. It looked like a colossal canvas of dim red paint, covering the entire view of the rear sky. The nodes could still be seen, looking like black pins evenly distributed in neat rows all across the canvas.

  It was a phenomenal sight, he thought, and downright scary. “So are we finally out of the Volonan Empire?”

  “We certainly are!” Zorina said excitedly.

  “They’re not going to attack us anymore?”

  “Nope, they can’t. We’re out of the Empire’s jurisdiction. Imperial Guards aren’t allowed to follow us here. We have just officially entered the Aftaran Dominion.”

  Marc felt highly relieved. “The Aftarans don’t have any barrier like that, right?”

  “Nobody else in the galaxy has a barrier like that. Nobody cares about border protection as much as we Volonans do.”

  “That is because nobody is as hopelessly paranoid as you Volonans are,” Sibular said.

  Zorina flapped her ears in annoyance and opened her mouth to speak, but Marc cut her off. “Hey! Now isn’t the time to argue!”

  “You are right, Marc,” Sibular said. “The Aftarans generally do not have too many ships, and they have fairly loose border controls. They do have some ships that periodically patrol their borders, and the side that faces the Phyrax Federation is significantly more fortified due to their current war with the Phyrax. But this side is relatively quiet. The Aftar and Volona may be enemies, but because the Volonans do such an outstanding job in guarding the border on their side, the Aftarans do not feel compelled to waste resources on fortifications themselves. So the chances of us actually coming across an Aftaran ship in this area are quite slim.”

  “Quite slim, eh, my man?” Zorina said with a smirk. “Then how do you explain that?” She nodded towards the navigation screen.

  Marc got up from his seat to take a look. Three blips had just appeared on the top part of the screen, and they were rapidly closing in on the ship. “Aftaran ships?”

  “Evidently,” Zorina said, looking somewhat smug that Sibular’s prediction had just been proven wrong. “That’s what their identity signature says.”

  “Interesting, and surprising,
” Sibular said. “It appears a reception committee has been waiting for us.”

  “Well, hopefully they can help us repair our ship!” Zorina said enthusiastically. “Or maybe even help us get to your Republic. The Aftarans are your friends, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, but I do not understand how they could be expecting us,” Sibular said, slowing the ship down in preparation for the encounter. “That is quite strange.”

  Chapter 25

  The Afta-Raushan star system had a total of 4 planets and 9 moons. Right in the center of the Dominion, Afta-Raushan was one of the oldest living stars in the entire galaxy and also one of the smallest. Its small size, in fact, was the key to its longevity. Stars sustained themselves through the process of nuclear fusion, where their cores continuously joined hydrogen atoms to generate helium and release energy. Once their internal supplies of hydrogen fuel ran out, stars would eventually die. Since small stars burned up only small amounts of hydrogen, their fuel supplies lasted much longer than those of big stars. Afta-Raushan, less than one tenth the size of Earth’s Sun, was actually almost as old as the beginning of the current expansion wave of the universe – close to 13 billion Earth years. Aftaran scientists estimated that it would continue to burn for at least another 10 billion years, if not more.

  Meenjaza, the desert world that the Aftar had originated from, was the second planet in orbit around Afta-Raushan. To this day, it remained the seat of the Dominion’s power. The first planet was a small, hot and rocky world called Humdira, the third a gas giant called Fultafa, and the fourth another desert planet by the name of Soondaza. Apart from Fultafa, all the planets and moons in the system were inhabited by Aftarans. There were no space stations in this system or anywhere else in the Dominion, as the Aftar did not possess the level of technology needed to build and sustain such structures. And, just like the rest of the Dominion, ship traffic here was very light.