Constitution: Book 1 of the Legacy Fleet Trilogy

by Nick Webb

  She recognized the fighter bay up ahead, which meant that engineering was only three more decks down. The temperature was rising, but, oddly enough, the ride through the atmosphere was strangely smooth. Apparently the buffeting of re-entry was no match for the sheer mass of the Constitution.

  The Earth’s surface, though, would be less forgiving.

  Sprinting two steps at a time down the staircase, she felt her lungs scream for air and her sprained ankle protest—she didn’t know how much time she had, but the sooner they could get out, the better.

  Rounding a loop to another landing, she saw something odd out of the corner of her eye. She’d seen a few more bodies on her mad dash through the ruined ship, but except for the burned man crouched against the wall, they were all laying prostrate.

  Down this hallway, which she recognized ended in the Afterburners bar on the observation deck, she saw a figure seated in a chair in front of the huge windows that looked out at the maelstrom of atmospheric fire beyond, slumped to the side as if asleep. Was it another body? But why in the world would a body be propped up in a chair in front of the observation deck’s windows?

  “Captain!”

  There was no response. No indication he heard her. Swearing, she half bolted, half limped down the corridor, grabbed his shoulders, and gently shook him.

  No response. His head was lolled back and his eyes closed. She felt for a pulse at his carotid, and found it, but it was deathly faint.

  “Captain!” she repeated, but he didn’t stir.

  She eyed the window. The surface of the Earth was looming up closer now. They’d broken through to the stratosphere, and were descending rapidly like a fireball through the sky—the trail of fire stretched away from the window, and she could just glimpse below them the telltale white salt flats of western Utah, and to the northeast, the Great Salt Lake.

  Stooping over, she pulled Granger forward and draped him across her shoulders. She’d never carried a man before in her life—just her sister when she was younger when they’d play in the back yard.

  With a grunt, she lifted.

  He was surprisingly light. Still heavy as a sack of potatoes, but bearable. She’d never noticed what a thin, haggard, rail of a man he was.

  She struggled down the hallway, her ankle screaming in pain, racking her brain to remember the location of the nearest escape pods. Would they even be there? Wouldn’t they have launched during the evacuation? Only one way to know. At the stairwell landing, she held on to the railing as she descended the remaining level to engineering. The door to the giant bay stood wide open.

  Hadn’t Commander Scott warned them about lethal levels of radiation? She glanced at the rad warning lights, but they were dark. Normal radiation levels. Odd.

  Struggling across the engineering bay, she finally found the airlock that led to the escape pods for engineering.

  She checked the control panel outside the door.

  They were all gone. Every single pod.

  “I think I tried that already,” came a murmur from near her shoulder.

  “Sir!”

  She bent forward and let him down as gently as she could, but he still slid off the last two feet and landed with a grunt on the floor. “Sorry!”

  He vaguely waved her off. “Fine. I’m, I’m fine.”

  “What happened? How did you get up to the observation deck? I found you in Afterburners!”

  His eyes narrowed, and he shook his head. “Can’t remember. But”—he stared at the escape pods—“I know I tried those.”

  She grit her teeth. There really was only one option. “Then I’ll have to guide her down and make a landing.”

  He closed his eyes. “Sounds like a plan, Commander.” He laid his head back down on the deck. “I’m afraid I won’t be much help. I’m ... I’m tired....”

  She dashed across the bay to the computer stations where she could bring up the navigational controls. The indicators showed they were coming in fast. Very, very fast. Somehow, they had to arrest their speed, and come in at a shallower angle. Ships like the Constitution weren’t designed with aerodynamic landings in mind, but she knew that at least some attention was paid to that remote possibility. There were aerilons and flaps that could extend and help guide the descent, and if she could get some engine thrust there was the chance they could make a somewhat controlled landing.

  Her fingers danced on the console. All engines were dead. No, wait, engine six was still online. Barely. Applying power to it, slowly so as not the burn out the thruster, she managed to increase the thrust to nearly ten percent. She flipped the thruster into angled mode, which slightly rotated the nozzle direction downward. Between that, the flaps and aerilons, the navigation computer was telling her the ship’s speed was slowly decreasing.

  But it wasn’t enough. They were still coming in at over five hundred meters per second. Supersonic. The atmospheric drag was doing a wonderful job slowing them down, but it wasn’t doing it nearly fast enough.

  On the monitor, she eyed the Great Salt Lake below them, and on a whim, she retracted the port aerilons and leveled out the one thruster. As expected, the Constitution arced to port, beginning a giant spiral down towards the lake.

  If she could just make a few loops....

  The ship angled towards the north, then west, then swept towards the south, dipping ever lower, until finally, at still well over three hundred meters per second, they hit the water.

  The ship lurched. She was thrown into the air, halfway up to the ceiling five meters overhead, and came back down with a crash, feeling her wrist snap under her as she landed.

  Grunting against pain, she pulled herself back up to the console and watched the external view on the monitor. The Constitution glided like an angry, burning swan over the surface of the vast lake, still moving at just under supersonic speed and sending up giant waves in her wake. But the water was slowing her down quickly. Soon, the ship emerged up onto land, crashing over a superhighway that, thankfully, had been cleared of traffic, then burst through a series of embankments and sailed through onto the wide park-like meridian of the transportation line leading away from the spaceport several kilometers to the west.

  They were going to make it. The excitement rose in her chest, into her throat. Daring a glance at the speed indicator, she saw they were under fifty meters per second.

  She groaned as she saw the view up ahead. Office towers and skyscrapers. Busy city streets. But even as she watched, the streets cleared as drivers veered off down side streets, pedestrians bolted for cover, and emergency craft flew in front of the Constitution, blaring their sirens to warn people of its approach.

  They clipped a building, then another, and a third. She had no idea if they survived, but the rattling and rumbling was diminishing, until, finally, the ship ground to a halt. The monitor showed the view ahead of her, and she nearly laughed. Up ahead, just a few dozen meters from where the Constitution had come to rest, stood one of monuments to the ISS Victory, towering over the interplanetary business district of south Salt Lake City.

  She craned her head back to Granger. “Did it, sir.”

  He grunted, but fell silent, and lay unmoving on the floor. She dashed over to him, and saw new injuries sustained during the descent.

  We’re not going to lose you now. Not after all that, she thought.

  Not after all that. And especially now that she was noticing some of the details around her. There were strange modifications made to several of the consoles in engineering that she hadn’t noticed before. Maybe Commander Scott had made them sometime in the last few hours, but she thought that unlikely. The whole situation was odd, and unnerving. The alterations in engineering, the lack of radiation, the fact that Granger was seated in a chair in Afterburners on the observation deck, unconscious. Not to mention the Old Bird’s reappearance after being swallowed by the singularity.

  We’re not going to lose you now, ‘cause you got some explaining to do.

  Chapter Sixty-Seven
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br />   Omaha, North America, Earth

  Operations Center, IDF Spaceport

  Vice President Isaacson kept nodding at Yuri from across the room, hoping that the ambassador’s suspicions would not be aroused by how long he was taking. He would have supposed a basic meta-space scan would be a simple matter, but it had been over half an hour since he’d been standing over the communications specialist the Commander had assigned to the job.

  And in that half hour the pit grew in his stomach as he saw hell blazing over all the viewscreens on the massive wall. Image after terrifying image of giant gray mushroom clouds from the mysterious Swarm weapon. Miami—thank God Yuri had convinced him not to go there—Mobile, Houston, Phoenix—all gone. At one point he’d been tempted to order a shuttle to take him further north, but the alien fleet stayed well to the south of Omaha, orbiting relentlessly westward along the sunbelt of North America.

  Tens of millions lost. If Avery was alive, there was not a chance on Earth she’d stay in office longer than a week. Assuming Earth was still there.

  And then, miraculously, the alien ships exploded. No one in the operations center had any explanation, other than furious cheering and shouting and high-fiving. For the moment, no one had any time for explanations. Only relief.

  “Mr. Vice President?” He looked down at the communications specialist.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve completed the scan.”

  “Yes?” He leaned in closer, glancing to the left and right to make sure their conversation was not heard. But in the midst of the celebration it would have been miraculous for anyone to eavesdrop.

  “I integrated the scanning over half an hour. If there was any signal during that time, I would have seen it. Sorry, sir, there was nothing.”

  Another wave of relief passed over Isaacson. He glanced back at the Russian ambassador, who gave him a questioning look. He responded with a shrug, indicating he had no idea where President Avery was, even as he mumbled, “you’re absolutely sure? Not one meta-space signal from Omaha in the last half hour?”

  “Oh, sure, there was tons of meta-space traffic coming through Omaha—we’re the de-facto command and control center for all of IDF now that CENTCOM Miami is gone. We’ve been in contact with ships and worlds all over United Earth space. But coming from this room? Nothing.”

  “You’re absolutely sure?” he repeated. “What’s the resolution? How finely can you pinpoint a signal?”

  “A few meters. It’s basically just a radio signal converted into a meta-space carrier wave. We can detect the remnant radio wave as it bleeds off the receiver. It’s not a strong signal, but still easy enough to pick up and distinguish.”

  Isaacson nodded. “Good. Thank you, Ensign,” he added, glancing at the officer’s insignia and unsure of what to call him.

  The vague scowl on the officer’s face told him he got it wrong, but it didn’t matter. Earth was safe. For now. And Yuri was still just Yuri Volodin—not Yuri Volodin the Swarm-influenced agent masterminding Earth’s fall. He, Vice President Isaacson, was safe, and in control.

  And soon, he could drop the “Vice.”

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Omaha, North America, Earth

  Sally Danforth Veterans Memorial Medical Center

  “That’s what I’m telling you, Commander. I have absolutely no memory from the time I entered engineering until now.”

  He was sitting up in bed, trying to enjoy some chicken soup, but his XO, Shelby Proctor, was pestering him for more information.

  She needed to relax. They’d won. Against overwhelming odds, they’d won.

  Sure, the aliens would be back. But give a man a few moments to enjoy his victory for hell’s sake, and at least let him eat his soup! Besides, his head was splitting from the headache he’d had since he woke up. Probably from the damn tumor, or maybe from where he’d bashed it when she’d made her miraculous crash landing.

  “Nothing? But surely, sir, you remember talking to me when I came to get you?”

  He shook his head, trying hard to remember. Maybe....

  “Yeah, could be. It’s all a blur, really.”

  He glanced out the window—they were back in Omaha, and in the distance, on the horizon, stood the giant support pillars against which had once rested the ISS Congress. Other, smaller vessels sat in dry dock, some in various phases of construction.

  “Where’s the Congress?” he asked. “Where did Bill end up?”

  She pursed her lips. “Atlantic Ocean. They came in hard and plunged deep into the water about a hundred kilometers off the Azores. But they were all dead long before that.”

  Granger nodded. A noble sacrifice. At least Bill got to go down in a blaze of glory with his ship. Not like Granger. He’d live for another day. Maybe a week. Maybe a month. But he was still on his way out. Maybe the doc would let him get hospice down on Perdido Key on the Gulf Coast, right on the beach with a margarita in one hand and a cigar in the other. Go out in style.

  “I want you to find Abe’s body, and get him a proper burial. And I want to be there.”

  She inclined her head. “Of course. But, sir, you’ve got to remember. You’ve got to think. Ask the doctor for something to jog your memory—a cortical stimulant or something. You’ve got to remember.” Her voice was urgent, and persistent.

  “Got? I’ve got to? Tell me, Commander. Don’t beat around the bush. What the hell is going on? I can’t get any answers out of the IDF debriefer that keeps coming by. Just asks me questions. Same questions as you.”

  She stared him in the eye, squinting, as if she were wary or distrustful. How odd.

  “Ok. This is classified, and they haven’t decided to tell you yet, but to hell with them, I’m going to tell you. Court martial or no. You’ve earned that, at least.” She stood up and closed the door to the hospital room, and returned to his bed, leaning in close.

  “That serious?” he joked, spooning another mouthful of soup.

  “Sir, how long do you think you were gone? After you collided with that singularity?”

  “I don’t know, maybe a few seconds? That’s what Ensign Prince told me when he visited earlier. Told me the Constitution disappeared, then reappeared moments later. Like it had q-jumped just a few kilometers away.”

  She nodded, “Ok, so right away I see something wrong. That’s impossible—no q-jumping closer than at least a few thousand ship-lengths. The quantum field just doesn’t allow it.”

  He shrugged, slurping another spoonful. “Fine. But it’s a frickin’ singularity. All rules of physics break down around them.”

  “No, they don’t break down. They just asymptote to a more general, higher-energy variation of the same law. The forces unify. Symmetry unbreaks, or some physics shit that Zheng was trying to tell me.”

  “What’s your point, Commander?” He was getting a little impatient. And tired—all he wanted to do was sleep for another day. On top of the three he’d already slept.

  She leaned in closer. “Sir, the computer records on board the Constitution indeed show it was gone for approximately ten point five seconds.”

  She paused, and glanced over her shoulder to make sure the door was closed. “All except for one record. Doc Wyatt left the audio recording running in sickbay—that’s how he decided to dictate his patient notes in the flood of casualties he was dealing with. Just kept a running, continuous log. He figured he’d sort it all out later.”

  She paused again.

  “And?” he said, expectantly, spooning more soup.

  “And, that recording was left on. For over three and a half days.”

  The spoon stayed poised in the air halfway to his mouth.

  “Say again?”

  “Three and a half days.”

  “All silence?”

  “Mostly static. Except for a few snippets right at the beginning.” She paused, apparently deciding how much to tell him. “Voices. In Russian. Just a few snippets, like I said.”

  A chill ran up his spine.


  “What were they saying?”

  “Something about reviving someone. We can’t tell much beyond that—the recording descends into static, and stays that way for over eighty-five hours. Eighty-five hours of static, until the last fifteen minutes where the two of us crash land the Constitution down into the Great Salt Lake, leaving a trail of destruction straight down into the center of South Salt Lake City.”

  The spoon dropped to the floor with a clatter. “Well....” He trailed off, shaking his head slowly. “Shit.”

  “Shit’s right,” she replied, sitting down on the foot of his bed.

  Granger set his soup bowl down on his thigh. “Shelby, do you know what pissed me off so much about the Khorsky incident? I mean, besides the obvious complacency, incompetence, and collusion displayed by our own leaders?”

  She seemed taken aback by the sudden change of subject. “What’s that?”

  “In those few minutes we were engaging the Russians, and before IDF showed up to break up the fight, I saw something. Another ship. Right beside one of the Russian dreadnoughts. I swore it looked like a Swarm ship, or, at least what one might have looked like sixty years on. But it q-jumped the hell out of there when we showed up. I called Yarbrough and Zingano out on it, but....” He shrugged, picked up his soup bowl again and struggled to reach to the floor for his spoon. “Well, we all know how that ended up. And to think, after all these years, they really were somehow in contact with the Swarm. My god, Shelby, we’re looking at a galactic conspiracy here.”

  Someone knocked on the door, and entered. It was the attending physician.

  “Captain Granger? I have your test results.” He glanced at Proctor. “You’ll have to leave, ma’am.”

  The doctor sat down and shuffled some papers, looking quite nervous. Doctors always sit down when they’re the bearer of bad news.

  But Granger, still shocked at Proctor’s revelation, didn’t have the words to speak, so he motioned for the doctor to continue, and for Proctor to stay.