The Endless Sky

by Adam P. Knave

  “The second part’s easier,” Olivet said. “We don’t. I mean, the physics difference between the two universes works like a heat exchange. Open the door and stuff goes from here to there, but not the other way.”

  “We’ve moved between them,” Mud said.

  “Sure,” Steelbox agreed, “but we can’t push a star. And I think we’d have to.”

  “But Bercuser flips back and forth,” Mud said, chewing the problem over.

  “That would be the worst case,” Olivet said. “Imagine Claudia 64-TU just reappears somewhere else with no warning. A sun just popping into a system. I hope it can’t.”

  “I don’t think it could. If Bercuser was an experiment with gravity engines gone sideways, something in that caused the constant shifting. Claudia won’t have that,” Steelbox said. “I hope.”

  “None of which answers the how,” Mud said. “And we need the how.”

  “Those big creatures, like the one that broke the Ratzinger,” Steelbox said, growing excited. “They’ve been near every breach and soft spot we’ve seen, right?”

  “Sure,” Mud agreed.

  “All right, so what if they’re doing it? By accident—they didn’t seem malicious, they don’t attack, just seem to want the energy from fuel packs.”

  “The light from breaches does the same, though,” Olivet pointed out.

  “But the tentacled beasts, they seemed to want more,” Steelbox said. “Let me call you back, I want to run some tests with Bee and be sure about this.”

  “We can—”

  “No, the data I need will be right here,” Steelbox insisted. “Just get here and have a plan in place to get these people safe long term.”

  “You got it,” Mud said. “We’re still just under three hours out.”

  “We know. Sun goes in one. We’ll be fine, but let me send you the coordinates for where we think the planet will be when you get here.”

  “Copy,” Mud said, “and get back to us when you work the rest out.”

  “Copy.” Steelbox broke the connection.

  Mud and Olivet sent the data to Mills and confirmed their end of the plan was well underway.

  On Claudia Seven, Steelbox pulled Bee from her work and caught her up quickly. She sighed, nodding as he explained, and asked him for the same data he was already calling up.

  “Look at it,” he said, pointing at the screen. “Communication spike.”

  “Massive one,” she agreed, “a day or so before the sun breach started. They reached out to the central Gov outpost about a host of issues and had to transmit reams of data. Way above normal for anywhere. What happened here?” Bee tasked one of the assistants still rushing in and out of General Bennet’s office to find the General himself and get him in there.

  “General,” Bee started as soon as the man entered the room, “a few days ago you had a huge communications spike. What happened?”

  “A few days ago?” he said, thinking. “Ah yes, of course. We’d been running some data testing for the central offices. Large A.I. stuff, huge amounts of data. A few days ago we sent it all through. Why?”

  “Just confirming a theory,” Steelbox said, smiling. “Thanks.”

  “That...that will fix he sun?”

  “Not at all,” Bee admitted, “but we have to focus on why, now. So we can prevent it from happening anywhere else.”

  “Not,” Steelbox added quickly, “that it would. Don’t go saying that, please. Please.”

  “Of course not,” Bennet said, sounding insulted, “I would never—”

  “Great,” Steelbox said, giving him another smile.

  “We need to work the math out on this, General, sorry,” Bee said. “We’ll let you know.”

  “Uhm...all right,” he said, leaving his own office, still not quite sure why he accepted that so easily. An aide went with him, taking notes as the General started to list recipients of a memo so he could update people along the chain of command.

  “So the pseudopod things eat certain types of energy,” Steelbox said.

  “And when really large bursts of communication come through, they can cause a soft spot—but then why haven’t they until now?” Bee mused.

  “This is where I desperately want to say it’s above our pay grade.”

  “Yeah, sadly it’s our job.”

  Steelbox sighed and tapped his fingers along his leg, “You know, I joined up thinking it would be more punching and less thinking.”

  “Ha! I agreed to join hoping it would be the reverse.” Bee called up the data on her screen and started running through it again.

  “You win, then.”

  “Do I?” she asked. “I’m the one talking about punching more, remember?”

  “I suppose,” Steelbox told her, switching the screen in front of him to current readouts of the bunker plan. “We should finish saving these guys either way, huh?”

  “Might as well, right? Mud said they had a plan.”

  “He said he was working on it.”

  “They won’t be here for another few hours, so he’ll work fast.” Bee looked at Steelbox’s screen. “Hey, reach out to that bunker on the night side of the planet, something looks off.”

  “Which?” he asked, looking where she pointed. “Oh, damn it, yeah, let me get them on comms.” They both glanced at the clock but didn’t say anything about it. Instead, they got back to work and adjusted how people were filtering into the bunkers, calling for troop deployments to settle small scuffles and outbreaks of chaos as best they could. The job needed at least six other people, but they dispersed the responsibility, trusting local members of the Gov forces to report in regularly.

  They worked, and they waited.

  CHAPTER 27

  AN HOUR OR SO LATER, Claudia 64-TU finished vanishing into the other universe, winking out of sight completely with a final flicker and burst of white other-universe light. The light didn’t bleed out far enough to hit Claudia Seven, thankfully, so their fuel packs weren’t drained. In the mayhem of the final hours, Steelbox and Bee had missed the possibility of this surge—only when the light shone forth, as the last embers of the star left their universe, did they realize they had dodged a much bigger problem.

  Claudia Seven’s orbital path vanished fully as Claudia 64-TU did, and the planet wobbled before heading off into space at large. As it did, giant windstorms erupted around the planet, followed by earthquakes. Those, at least, they’d remembered to plan for, and kept damage to minimal amounts for anything with people in it.

  They kept working—checking, then double- and triple-checking, everything from the status of the launched vessels to the bunkers, making sure to contact each one themselves. They were in the final throes of their third check when the door to General Bennet’s office flew open forcefully.

  “Someone called for a pickup?” Mud said, working his way into the room slowly. “You guys found a nice workspace.”

  “Someone,” Steelbox said, not looking up from his screen, “tossed a General out of his office and never looked back.”

  “Seemed like it would be quiet,” Bee said, then held up a hand as she pinged another bunker. “Sorry, still finishing a check. You have a plan for the rest of this?”

  “We do,” Mud said. “Did you work out what caused it?”

  “We did,” Bee told him. “Let’s trade.”

  Mud patched Mills in and he briefed the Insertion Team on the fleet of resuscitated ships already underway. They’d cut it close, as far as supplies in bunkers and ships went, but the margin would work out for them as best it could.

  While the plan continued to spin up, Bee briefed the rest of the team on what her and Steelbox had discovered: that the pseudopod creatures seemed to be pushing through and making soft spots.

  “We have no good choice, then,” Mud said, after making sure Mills and his parents were patched in. “We have to breach and find a way to explain.”

  “Agreed,” Mills said. “I can spare the same routes for pickup. Go. Before anothe
r sun gets yanked in.”

  “We can’t use this soft spot,” Bee said quickly, “there’s a sun on the other side—we don’t want to breach right into it.”

  “Right, so we head back to the Ratzinger site,” Mud said, “on GravPacks. We don’t have time to waste. Mills, get someone to follow us in the Arrow and set up other pickups.” He looked around the room at his Insertion Team. “Let’s move, people.”

  They hurried to the Arrow, Mud keeping up as best he could, which, he noticed, was faster than when he’d walked in. He hefted his walking stick and tapped it on the ground hard. This would work. It had to.

  Aboard the Arrow for long enough to strap on GravPacks and gather supplies, Bee resynced her translation devices, stuffing them in carry pockets along her thinsuit. “Mud, if this doesn’t—”

  “If this doesn’t work, we find something else—but Bee, this will work.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because all the alternative options are terrible.”

  They finished suiting up and left through an airlock without ceremony. Before he could request it, Mud saw the team activate slaving to his lead, and he pushed their GravPacks hard, staying just clear of the boundary.

  “Brace yourselves,” Mud said hours later, the team having flown back to the wreckage of the Ratzinger in silence. None of them knew how they could pull this off, but they each went over their jobs in their heads. There was nothing to say, no overall plan to go over. The mission remained simple on the surface of it: breach, find a way to get the problem across, find a solution, get out.

  The details left them each frustrated, if only because there were none. Mud felt the worst about it, considering it a failing of his that he couldn’t see the angles needed to get the job done. He tempered his own annoyance with an acceptance that no one could see what lay ahead enough to predict how things would unfold. There wasn’t enough data available to any of them, to anyone at all.

  As they approached the wreckage, Mud sped them up, recalling data to find the exact point of their previous breach. He aimed them straight on and felt his own GravPack shudder and whine a little. His staff, strapped along his back, made his jaw ache with its vibration—but better to have it than not. Just in case.

  Breach.

  CHAPTER 28

  HOW DO WE FIND the same group?” Olivet asked, shaking his head to try to clear it. Breaching still sat low on their collective ideas of fun, and it didn’t seem to get easier with repetition.

  “Do we even want to?” Steelbox asked. “They weren’t the friendliest.”

  “We need someone,” Bee said, pointing at a group of Sweepers who had noticed them, “and can build from there.”

  The Sweepers swam over and Bee activated her translation devices, hoping the newest data would let them work faster. “We need to talk about the breaches,” Mud said, and waited. A series of static and noise came from Bee’s thinsuit and one of the Sweepers stopped, tilting its head.

  It opened its mouth and spoke to them, and a few seconds later the translation came through. “You are the strangers, from the (untranslatable) side.”

  “Can we pin that to ‘other’?” Mud asked Bee. She nodded and he considered his phrasing carefully. “We are from the other side, yes. The other universe. We need to solve both our problems.”

  The Sweeper waved two of its arms toward the packets that filled the sky. Steelbox made note of the large creatures starting to slowly converge along a particularly large mass of packets, and he fought back a wince. “You send these, they fill the (untranslatable). You must stop.”

  “At least the translations are better,” Chellox said. “Can we ask about a leader?”

  “Good idea,” Mud said, then spoke toward Bee’s translator again. “Is there a leader we could discuss this with?”

  The Sweepers listened and then spoke amongst their own in hushed tones the translator couldn’t pick up. Mud tried to be patient, giving Steelbox a shrug. They kept still, otherwise, waiting.

  The Sweeper who had been speaking to them turned back to the team and waved three of his arms excitedly. “Our (untranslatable) does not speak for all of us, but many. We will take you to them.”

  “Did we just manage a ‘take me to your leader’?” Olivet asked.

  “Jonah did the same, once, with my people,” Chellox said. “Surprisingly, it works more often than you would think.”

  They followed the Sweeper across the open skyspace of the other universe. They were lead to one of the landmasses that still looked soft-edged, if not actually blurry, to Mud’s eyes. “Can we actually stand on that?” Bee asked.

  “I think we’re about to,” Steelbox replied as they landed. Their feet sank an inch or so into the soft ground, and they noticed that the blurriness of the landmass wasn’t a mere visual problem with how light worked in this universe. The ground itself seemed to fray, loose edges of spongy matter waving in some sort of cosmic breeze. “This place makes less sense the more time I spend in it,” Steelbox said.

  “Except that I agree, I would point out that I often feel the same about you,” Chellox said.

  “Yeah, fair enough,” Steelbox told him.

  Lumps of the landmass, mounds of it, sat in front of them. One of them opened up, a curtain of mass acting like a door—or possibly a curtain, Mud couldn’t be sure. Three Sweepers came out of the opening and talked in hushed tones to the one who had led them to the planetary body.

  “You are in charge of the other side?” one of the three asked them, at length.

  “We can speak for it, yes,” Mud said, knowing that to be enough of the truth to pass muster right then.

  “You will stop this invasion,” another of the three said quickly.

  “We need to discuss that, with you and with our people,” Mud said slowly, considering how to approach this. “We need your scientists and ours to meet.”

  “Your technicals,” the last of the three Sweepers said, “need to stop. There is no talking.”

  “Your animals? The large beasts,” Mud pointed to one in the distance, “are breaking into our universe, pulling things through. A sun, for example, most recently. This needs to stop. We must have talks to find a solution.”

  “You stop, then no need for talks,” the second Sweeper said. Their guide backed away as the exchange continued, entering the building the three Sweepers had emerged from. Bee wanted to follow but couldn’t.

  “There is danger to us both,” Mud said. “Please, let us return with some of your scientists.”

  “No need,” the second Sweeper repeated.

  Bee leaned over to Olivet and Steelbox. “Can either of you go follow that Sweeper who led us here and talk to him?” She handed Steelbox a smaller translation unit. “It’s my backup. I think he might be helpful.”

  “I don’t know how we can break away,” Olivet said.

  Steelbox nudged Mud. “Cap, let’s go on a walk with them, have them show you around and try to get through to them, but Bee has a plan, so some of us need to vanish a few.”

  Mud nodded, never taking his eyes off the trip of Sweepers. “Show me, if you could, how this affects you.” He swept his hand across the horizon line slowly and started to walk away. The Sweepers followed quickly, clearly upset. “This area, for example, is it bad here?”

  The team trailed behind the Sweepers, and after a few feet, Steelbox and Olivet snuck away as one of the Sweepers said, “This area, no, our sky is affected. You must stop.”

  “We can stop it if we can discuss with your scientists,” Mud insisted.

  Steelbox and Olivet pushed the entranceway of the building, finding the soft door easy to open. Inside their contact Sweeper sat, seemingly in meditation. Olivet fired up the spare translator and cleared his throat. “Scientists. You know where they are?”

  “These leaders will not help,” the Sweeper said. “They want stop and will not give to help.”

  “But you will?” Steelbox asked.

  “Our technicals wi
ll help you, help us. All. With yours,” the Sweeper agreed. “But leaders see short and (untranslatable).”

  “All right,” Steelbox said, relaying the information to Mud softly through his comms.

  “How do we find them, and how do we get back to our universe with them, without your leaders noticing?” Olivet asked.

  “We will need to (untranslatable) and (untranslatable)” the Sweeper said, reaching into a small structure near him and coming back with a box. “This makes the other easier to reach.”

  “A breach box?” Olivet asked.

  The Sweeper tilted his head, not understanding, but Steelbox looked the box over. “It looks like the thing they used to shove us out last time, so...that wasn’t a great trip.”

  “No, but if it could breach the other way, we should at least take it and study it,” Olivet said.

  “No hurt, use second flip,” the Sweeper said.

  Turning the box over, Steelbox saw what he meant. There sat two switches. He pointed at one and the Sweeper nodded. “All right, so the first switch breaches and the second makes it painful? Who builds that?”

  Olivet laughed, “Sorry, no, I bet it’s just a speed issue. Not an intentional pain thing.”

  “I hope so. No,” Steelbox corrected himself, “I take that back. You better be right. If these people built this specifically to...no, that changes things for me, I think.”

  “We have weapons, too,” Olivet pointed out.

  “Sure, but not ones that throw someone out of a universe,” Steelbox said.

  “If we could, we would,” Olivet insisted. “But that’s not the point. We don’t know why they have this set the way they do. We do know that we need it.”

  “Fine,” Steelbox said, turning back to the Sweeper. “How do we find the scientists?”

  “I will bring them here,” the Sweeper said, and it walked out of the building. Steelbox and Olivet just looked at each other for a second, wondering what the catch would be.

  “They’re going to bring scientists to us, and we have an exit plan,” Steelbox said over comms. “Have they noticed we’re gone yet?”