by Letts,Jason
As the Balboa and the Cortes made their approach, Loris hunched over to get a better view of the monstrosity of modern engineering before him. Shaped like a long tube with protrusions of differing lengths coming out at various angles and a ring at one end, the overall design was similar to that of a key. While the shape had specific purposes for mobility and energy conservation, the significance was lost on no one that the Magellan was destined to unlock the solar system.
“Making our final approach to fleet dock D,” Lopez said, the first utterance in what seemed like forever.
Already they could catch glimpses of people inside through large bay windows. Most appeared to be walking from one place to another at a normal pace as they would on any other day. Some were watching the pair of ships latch onto the docks against the backdrop of the giant ball of swirling hydrogen and helium gas nearby.
Unsure what state the occupants of the station were really in, Loris led the others in the Balboa through the narrow hatch and along the shaft toward the station’s main port. The grate under their feet rattled and echoed.
The docking port area was large enough for a good game of baseball. A few silver steel polymer walkways crossed the cavern above their heads. It was lined with people looking down at them as they emerged from the tunnel, as was the port’s control room in the back. At least three-hundred people had crammed in to see them enter. Loris stopped suddenly at the sight and tried not to look surprised at all of the eyes.
He felt a tinge of nerves in his stomach, an opportunity to say something that would matter enough to pull people out of their despair, if only for a minute. But he didn’t have any idea what he would say, or even who he was speaking to.
A pair of uniformed officers cut through the crowd to greet them, a tall man and a stocky woman. The round-faced man of blond hair was so thin it looked like his tucked-in shirt was the only thing keeping his pants from dropping. The woman had her black hair in a tight bun and a look on her face like she was already disappointed in him. They picked up their pace as if they were racing each other to meet him, both extending their hands while still a dozen steps away.
“Commander,” the woman said before she was nudged out by the man.
“It’s an honor to meet you, Commander. These are dark times,” he said in a somber tone.
“Excuse me,” the woman said, successfully taking Loris’s hand. “It’s my pleasure. I’m Sonia Firth, Chief of Operations.”
“We spoke over the com,” the man cut in. “I’m Kelly Reid. I had been Acting Commander, but now I’ll be assuming the role of Chief of Personnel.”
“Thank you very much for the warm welcome,” Loris said, offering a faint smile. “Where can we talk in private?”
“The other chiefs are waiting for us in the pinnacle conference room,” Firth said.
“Good. Let’s go now.”
The pair showed him the way. As he walked, he gave a firm nod to the people in the crowd, most of them staring at him blankly. He searched for one face in particular, sure it would be in the rows or along the walkways, but for the life of him he couldn’t find it.
Loris and the two chiefs took a lift to the uppermost part of the station and entered a room that could’ve easily passed for an observation deck. Windows arched fully overhead, offering a magnificent view of the planet looming large nearby and even Saturn farther off in the distance. A half dozen of the senior-most officers stood up from what was commonly called a chip table, a dark glassy surface that could read and project material from the data storage bands Unified officers wore around their wrists. Already a detailed representation of Earth’s fragments hung over the table in the center of the room.
“Commander Roderick,” Reid said. “This is the Magellan’s brain trust. Chief of Defense, Atsushi Yamaguchi. Chief Engineer, Marta Aylward. Chief of Technological Research, Development, and Life Support, Trynton Quade. Chief Liaison to Unified Command, Armand Iotache. Chief of Scientific Research, Riki Lala. And who are you again? Oh, right. Chief of Waste Management, Penny West. I’m just kidding. She’s Chief of Economic Development.”
“Now that you’re not my superior anymore, I don’t have to hold back from calling you an ass,” West said.
“If you have a complaint, you can file it with the Chief of Personnel’s office,” Reid replied, chuckling to himself. West rolled her eyes and the rest of them seemed completely humorless. Loris could sympathize.
“Let’s get to the meat of it. What have you learned while we were in transit? You may be seated,” he said, settling into a tall-backed chair at the end of the table. A slight woman who wore gloves and a tight mask covering everything but her mouth and eyes remained standing.
“Sir, we’ve analyzed the trajectories of the debris to create a model of the explosion and identify the blast point,” Lala said. Strands of light flickered between the table and the band on her left wrist. The Earth fragments in the projected image began to fall back into place around a bright point near the center, just outside of the inner core.
“The insertion point was on the northern end of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge here. The bomb produced a two-tiered explosion that first cracked open the planet’s mantle and then blew the pieces outward in different directions. What’s interesting about this is that the force generated from the explosions was exactly what was required to produce this effect. Someone calculated this attack with a precision that frankly we would find difficult to match.”
In the projection, the explosion shattered the planet in slow motion. They could see the exact moment the atmosphere popped like a bubble, allowing cold space to rush in to freeze and kill anything not directly inundated by the inferno. Within Loris, the discomfort and exasperation always so near to the surface wouldn’t be held back any longer.
“But how could such a thing ever happen? The Silica haven’t gotten near the planet since the shield went up. The level of sophistication of this attack is so far beyond anything we’ve seen from them, and precision isn’t exactly part of their repertoire. Blunt, brute force is all they know. It just doesn’t add up!”
He had to hold onto his composure, even after this unimaginable tragedy.
“You’re right. It doesn’t,” Lala continued, emotionless. “There is no way the Silica could’ve executed this attack.”
“But the Silica are the only form of extraterrestrial life we’ve come in contact with. Are you suggesting that one of us, a human, destroyed Earth?” asked Marta Aylward, a woman with dark skin and reddening eyes that seemed to be holding back tears.
The possibility that someone on Earth had been responsible for its destruction was a new thought to Loris. The Unified Government composed about eighty percent of the planet’s countries and even more of its landmass and economic power. There were a few tiny belligerent nations and some violent groups out there, but for any of them to drill to the core and plant a bomb without anyone noticing was beyond implausible.
“No, humans were not responsible for this attack. In fact, I suspect that at the time this explosive device was deployed, humans were drawing in caves and the most advanced piece of technology we had was the spear,” Lala said.
“What?” Loris asked. The other chiefs murmured and exchanged disturbed glances.
“We may never know the exact composition of the bomb unless some part of it is retrieved from the debris, but my initial analysis strongly suggests the use of Plutonium 239 as an explosive agent in at least some quantity. The half-life of that isotope is over twenty-four thousand years. That’s how long this time bomb could’ve been ticking under our noses.”
Riki Lala took her seat, never at any point betraying any feeling about anything taking place. The rest of them sat in silence for a moment. Loris was at a loss for what to say. Could the doom of humanity have been sitting there for almost as long as humanity even existed?
Armand Iotache, the liaison to Unified Command, leaned forward over the table and extended both arms in something of a shrug. He was an older man an
d frail.
“Not for nothing, the Silica aren’t the only other lifeforms we’ve come in contact with. There is another. I guess there’s no chance of getting clearance for that now, but it has to be said.”
“What do you mean? What are they?” Loris asked, shocked.
“We don’t exactly know. Never seen ’em and don’t have the slightest clue where they come from. Almost as soon as man achieved space travel, we began intercepting small probes sent to Earth from who-knows-where. They were these dense black boxes with strange runes in the side that no one could decode. One was found every hundred years with the most recent turning up just a month ago. No one knows what they mean, why they were sent, or who sent them. We called them the Ciphers and kept them in secret,” Iotache explained.
Loris nodded.
“At least we’ve got a lead on something. We’re going to have to figure out the situation with these Ciphers and see if there’s any link to the blast,” Loris said.
He had more to say, most notably some questions about if they had files documenting the runes on the probes, but Kelly Reid spoke up to Loris’s right.
“This is all well and good to discuss, except there are some pressing matters about what we need to do right here and now that need some attention,” Reid said, striking a sensible tone.
Loris leaned forward and extended a hand toward Reid, who seemed relieved to finally be speaking.
“Can we just take a moment to consider that eleven billion humans were killed today? We’re nearly wiped out. I’ve done a count. There are only one-thousand and sixty-six of us left and just five-hundred and thirty women. We need to institute a breeding program immediately, as in right now. All women between the ages of twelve or when they hit maturity and age forty need to have one child each year to rebuild the species,” he said.
A disgusted snarl came from Sonia Firth at the other side of the table.
“The biggest tragedy is that your genetic material now makes up such a large portion of the gene pool. But you forget that you’ll have one less woman each time one is set to sleep with you because she’ll quickly exit the ship without a space suit on.”
Reid snorted and threw back his head.
“We have to do something. Waiting around for you to get a date could take a hundred years,” he said.
“Why don’t you try breeding with an electrical receptor?” Firth said, crossing her arms. Reid scoffed at her and turned to the others in the room.
“I’m working on developing a match-making algorithm that would maximize genetic diversity…”
“That’s code for saying there are women on the ship he’d like to sleep with who would never do so while they had free will. I know I won’t be surprised when Brina Morse is first on your list,” Firth said. Reid’s face went red and Loris blinked.
“That’s preposterous,” he stammered, shifting in his seat.
“Are they always like this?” Loris asked. Grumbling and murmuring ensued among the others.
“My apologies, Commander,” Firth said, clearing her throat. “Moving on to something more serious, surely beyond the untold human deaths it’s worth sparing a thought for the nearly complete obliteration of every plant and animal species we know in the universe. Immediately returning to Earth and collecting samples for genetic reconstitution or cloning attempts would be best. Other than a few dozen food-producing species found in the horticultural nursery here, there are only a few more plants and a few animals, none of which have mates.”
“My algorithm can match you up with the animals, if you like,” Reid muttered.
“Enough!” Loris said. He could see that they were all on edge and beset by grief. The best thing for any of them would’ve been to spend some time alone to deal with the immeasurable loss in their own ways, but they had to take responsibility for what happened to everyone else next.
“While we’re throwing out ideas, it’d be useful to remember that the resources of the Magellan cannot be maintained indefinitely,” Chief Aylward said. “Although many of these potentially devastating problems are years away from being felt, issues with reactor stability, general maintenance, food supply, even things as basic as efficiently managing non-edible supplies are all potential threats to us without regular contact from passing vessels.
“Take soap, for example. Currently we have three years’ worth of soap and no facility designed to produce it. We will have to make one when the time comes, and that means taking space on the station away from something else. And that’s just one small thing that we take for granted. I could point out that our medical facilities, while advanced, aren’t equipped with the kinds of extensive resources we’d need because for many types of chronic maladies we always thought we could ship people back home.”
Loris nodded grimly, beginning to get a sense of the colossal amount of work every living individual would need to put in to survive. The feeling that he was in over his head began to surface, but he wasn’t the type of person to back down from a challenge. Already the belief that his finest hours lay before him solidified in his chest.
Armand Iotache cleared his throat to get the others attention.
“That’s a good point. Here’s another. Unified Central Command is gone. I’ll readily admit that my position as liaison is now pointless. The mission we were ordered to go on is gone. The laws and rules that we had are at our complete discretion.”
“What’s your point?” Lala asked.
“Unified sent us an untested Commander largely as a tribute to his mother, which might’ve been fine while we took up space in a distant part of the galaxy. No disrespect to Loris Roderick, but he must realize that the task at hand is very different now and we would be better off choosing another leader.”
CHAPTER 4
Loris couldn’t have escaped to his quarters a moment too soon. Stepping inside for the first time and closing the door behind him, he immediately looked for solace in his new personal space. It was large to the point of decadence, featuring a sitting room, kitchenette, and physical training area beyond the bedroom and bathroom everyone else had. The words of Chief Aylward came back to him. Giving up all but the bare essentials was inevitable.
He spent several minutes face down on the bed in the dark. Wandering to the bathroom, he tested the faucet and the light. In the mirror his own face seemed older and harder than he thought possible. The apartment was conspicuously free of any modern technology at all. Paper briefs stood a foot tall on the table, waiting to tell him everything he needed to do for a job he might not be able to carry out. He stared blankly as he flipped through a few pages before going to a window near an exercise mat.
The window looked out onto undifferentiated, empty space, but he imagined the remnants of Earth were out there. His heart ached. Time passed.
The door opened suddenly, jarring him from his thoughts and the feeling of solitude that had been so comforting. He wondered if Reid or one of the other chiefs had come to deliver some more bad news. Instead he approached the door to find a beautiful young woman in a sleek tan jumper standing there holding a small gift-wrapped package tied to a blue balloon. She startled when she saw him, her straight black hair rolling over her shoulders.
“Brina.”
“Loris, I didn’t think you’d be in here yet, or if you were you’d figure out how to lock the door.”
An instant later they were clutching each other. The smell of her hair and the feel of her pressed against him were enough to melt any last bit of resistance he had. He could only guess what she’d been going through, but if anyone would be able to handle what just happened, she could.
“I can’t believe it, Brina.”
“It’s the worst day of everyone’s lives.”
Loris had spent a long time imagining the moment he saw her and what he would do, but none of it seemed right. All he needed was to have her there. The unpleasant details could come later.
“How are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m ostensibly
fine, feeling at once better and worse about this shit job the firm sent me out here to do,” she said.
“And unostensibly?”
“I would never want to be dead, no matter what the alternative was. I keep telling myself that. Here, I managed to trade for this a month ago. Welcome to the Magellan. You’ll like it.”
When she handed over the small package, he noticed it had a few small holes in it. A faint sound came from inside. Curious, he opened it up and found a small turtle inside. It scratched the surface of the box with a tiny claw.
“Oh, wow! That’s amazing you got this.”
“Wherever you go, take your home with you,” she said, smiling and looking at him. “It’s a spotted turtle, obviously.”
Loris rummaged around in the cabinets for a small dish, put some water in it, and set the turtle in it on the table.
“I’ll call him Survivor.”
Brina took a seat on the edge of the bed and looked down at her empty hands.
“How have you been handling it all?” she asked.
Loris leaned against a nearby wall and crossed his arms over his stomach.
“It’s been a shock, but I’ve been too busy for it to really feel real. Mostly when I can spare a thought I think about this one memory I have. I don’t know why it keeps coming back to me. We spent every summer at a lake when I was a kid, and one year when I was about twelve a bear came into our campsite and started wreaking havoc on the tents in the middle of the night. The bear shredded the side of my tent, stuck its head in, and roared so loud I thought I would go deaf.”
“What happened then?” Brina asked after Loris paused.
“I’d been in charge of the campfire and had a small fire extinguisher with me. I sprayed it until the tent was a billowing cloud. It irked the bear enough to get him to leave, and I just remember sitting there with this foggy cloud all around that seeped out of the hole in the tent. The taste was awful, but I remember feeling safe in that cloud. I loved going to that lake. Now I’ll never see it again.”
