Noumenon Infinity

by Marina J. Lostetter

  The smell of gunpowder was foreign, disconcerting. It had no place on a spaceship. All at once it dawned on Steve that guns were a very bad idea in a place where a tiny hole could kill them all.

  What did we do?

  What we had to, he thought with conviction.

  Steve looked for the captain’s shoes. They’d been shiny black this morning. Well polished. When he found them now, they were scuffed—one leather toe had been cut into, snagged on a sharp edge.

  The captain himself was stumbling backward, pushing off a lieutenant commander, dodging a fist as he went.

  With a heavy grunt, Steve pushed himself upright, grabbed for the lieutenant commander’s collar and yanked him away.

  Bodies thrashed together nearby, knocking into Steve before he could grab Baglanova to shield him.

  The bridge door began to open, then swiftly shut again. Those doors were supposed to be on lockdown—Steve had people in place to see to it. But Savea’s team was attempting to force them open, which meant that Steve’s people were overwhelmed.

  Soon Savea’s team would be inside.

  This chaos had to end, this panic had to stop. Baglanova needed to take control again. He was the authority here, why was no one respecting that? How had they abandoned him so quickly?

  And for what? To honor Tan’s cowardice? To stand by as victors these next few minutes, until the Lùhng killed them all?

  He punched his way back to the captain. “Don’t worry, sir, I’ll get you—”

  Bang!

  The gun had gone off again.

  Baglanova swayed. Steve jerked back in surprise.

  The left side of the captain’s head turned red, his sandy hair stained crimson. The color splattered, oozed.

  Swiveling, Stone looked for the pistol.

  Stalker no longer had it. No one was pointing it.

  Everyone near the captain stumbled backward. Steve pitched forward instead, catching Baglanova as he began to fall.

  “Captain?” he implored. “Captain, can you hear me?”

  Baglanova’s head lolled to the side. His eyes were open—wide with shock. But it was an empty shock.

  Aksel Baglanova was dead.

  Stunned, Steve dropped him. The body slumped, its splattered head bouncing grotesquely when it hit the floor.

  The crowd froze.

  The smell of vomit overwhelmed Steve, filling his nostrils with a vengeance.

  No. No no no!

  The bridge was silent. Savea’s detail still banged on the door outside.

  For an instant, Steve thought that was it, that everything was over.

  But it was the startled calm before the true frenzy. Before everyone began fighting each other, trying to delineate friend from foe.

  The gun. The gun. Who in the hell has the gun?

  He felt dazed, lost. His ears rang, and yet he heard nothing. People were screaming, and Steve was locked in his own mind with one thought.

  Who has the motherfucking gun?

  He searched hands, the decking. Scanned the tops of the command stations and kicked at nooks and crannies between equipment.

  A fist caught him in the side of the head. A glancing blow, so he didn’t care. He just kept searching.

  Is the same thing happening on Pulse? he wondered.

  Did that ship still have its captain? Or had the mutiny succeeded, only to find Tan’s replacement dead? Was Tan dead, too?

  Were they all adrift without a leader?

  The thought scared him, but he didn’t feel good and truly lost until Savea finally succeeded in forcing the door. Using a shock baton, he propped it open. A battalion’s worth of security personnel streamed inside, their shock batons at the ready. Savea ordered everyone to stop fighting, to kneel down and put their hands behind their heads.

  Most people complied.

  As the crew followed orders, descending to their knees, Guy de Roux was one of the few left standing.

  He had the gun now.

  It swiveled in Savea’s direction, ready to blast through his body, tear into his chest, pierce his lungs or burst his heart.

  Steve had a choice. Savea was so close, he could dive for him, knock him out of the way.

  Or he could do as he was told. Stay on the ground, hands behind his head.

  He didn’t move.

  He wasn’t sure when he’d come to hate Mac so much. Why he was content to let Guy kill him. Perhaps it had started back on the Lùhng ship. Perhaps it had been just now, when he realized Savea would always be Tan’s stooge.

  Guy pulled the trigger—

  —just as Kexin grabbed for the firearm. She took the shot straight through the hand. Everyone gasped, and Kexin clubbed Guy with her shock baton.

  The bullet never reached Savea.

  “Stupid bastard!” Kexin shouted, her palm streaming blood, dripping buckets onto the floor.

  The universe wouldn’t even give Steve that one little satisfaction. It had taken Baglanova, but wouldn’t take Mac, too.

  “Aksel?”

  The room went quiet. It was Captain Tan.

  “Aksel, I’m still here. I expect to speak with you shortly. Let us pray the Lùhng don’t kill us before then.”

  Steve leaned forward, pressing his cheek to the thin carpet.

  Now he understood why that man hadn’t stepped in all those years ago.

  Why stick your neck out in a world that doesn’t care? Why try anything when it can get you and everyone you know murdered by future freaks millions of miles from home?

  Why step up for people who might hate you for it?

  Now he’d have to live—no matter if the Lùhng made the time he had left long or short—with everyone’s contempt. He kept his head down, averting his eyes as he was dragged off to the brig.

  Chapter Ten

  Joanna: All That Maddens and Torments

  Convoy Seven

  One Hundred and Twenty-Four Years Since the Convoy Reunion

  February 11, 1237 Relaunch

  8172 CE

  No matter what we do, we never arrive in time.

  Fleet Admiral Joanna Straifer the Forty-Ninth stood statuesque on Mira’s bridge, staring out the main viewing screen. A thin haze pooled and swirled before the ships: all that was left of the Web’s last meal.

  Seven, her mind screamed. It’s eaten seven stars since LQ Pyx. If we keep doing things the same old way, it’ll eat through the galaxy before it’s caught.

  At that moment, she’d had enough.

  I’m done following my great-grandparents’ methodology.

  “Shall we drop back into SD and reinitiate pursuit?” asked the nav specialist, already keying in the commands.

  “No.” She held out a hand to stop him, and he responded with an expression of confusion. “We stay put. Wait for my orders. Before we chase that thing another meter I’m calling a cabinet meeting.” She pivoted on her heel and stomped off the bridge, arms clasped tightly behind her back. Her knuckles were white against her wrist. She knew if she let go of herself she’d lash out at the nearest object—be it inanimate or not.

  Captain Nakamura and First Officer Hansen’s gazes followed her out the door. Joanna’s line was no longer captain of Mira. Captain Nwosu, Revealer of Rejoining, had shuffled the crew. They weren’t builders any more. They’d become warriors, soldiers—antibodies of the galaxy, out to destroy an infection. And so everyone needed new purposes, new positions. Their political and command systems had undergone a complete overhaul in the first few years following Convoy Seven becoming whole again.

  He’d known they needed a lone leader like they never had before—someone who could give executive orders. An Admiral.

  And he’d dubbed Joanna’s line the most qualified. Joanna Straifer the Forty-Ninth was the sixth to occupy the position. She had no cycle partner—for the first time in convoy history, no other clone line shared the power or the burden.

  It’s just me. Me before, me now, and me after.

  Her heavy footfalls
propelled her down the hall, toward the shuttle bay. “I.C.C., alert the cabinet members and tell them to meet me—except Nakamura, tell her to hold—on Eden. They’re too comfortable in that damn war room.”

  Eden’s temperate quarter was as warm and welcoming as the last time she’d visited, which had not been long ago. She never let more than a few weeks pass without a stint aboard. It was where she felt safest and strongest. The brightest spot in her bleak life.

  It had provided her with comfort and a means of escape on the day of her first command failure. A day not long after she’d been appointed to her station, when she’d lost the Killer for the first time. Her father had been so angry that day he’d punched the frame that held her mother’s picture. “I knew it!” he’d screamed at her. “What a waste of command training!” He’d screamed as she cowered by the front door, screamed as she’d bolted from the cabin, screamed as she’d run down the hall.

  She’d finally found solace and silence on Eden. It was a place for calmness and clarity.

  And now it would be the site of a coup. A coup against failed strategy.

  The cabinet members arrived in trickles instead of a wave. They all walked into the artificial sunlight with their arms up, shielding their eyes. She almost made them sit in the grass—so soft and pliable—but instead gave them leave to stand. When the last one arrived, she began.

  “We’re here because we needed new surroundings in order to generate a new strategy. This process of running after the Star Killer, only to arrive too late, has got to stop. It doesn’t matter how many or what kind of weapons we build on Slicer. If we can’t get close enough to the sucker to use them, what’s the point?”

  She turned to the chief mechanical engineer, Ivan. “Are you positive we can’t get any more speed out of the fleet?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Not without risking meltdown. Especially not the older ships.”

  “We are working on something that can attack from a light-year away,” said Anatoly, Chief of Weapons Engineering.

  “The last time the convoy was within a light-year of the thing, none of us had been born yet,” she said.

  “I’ve had more and more of my people request time in the dream state these past couple of years,” he said. “They’re putting in double hours—double lifetimes—that way. We can do it.”

  Lots of the Infinitum crew had begun adopting Ultra’s ways. When your work could be the key to averting interstellar destruction, you take every advantage you can get, even if it means sacrificing your consciousness.

  Joanna shook her head. “Look.” She chopped her hands through the air in small, concise movements, punctuating her words. “This is what I’m thinking. We’re not waiting around to see what path it takes next. None of this follow-the-leader crap anymore. I want to cut it off at the quick. Put me one step ahead. I want projections of where it will go after its next target. And I want to get there first.”

  “But how are we supposed to know that?” Dr. Ka’uhane, the chief astronomer asked.

  “It always attacks a main sequence star, right? So far, all of K to M typing. The stars are small enough for the Web to get its arms around, and have medium to low energy outputs. We know where it’s going now, so let’s figure out where it’s going next, after that. I want possibilities calculated. Because I want us to finally kill the damn thing. To finish what got dumped on us. We’re not going to dump it on our children, got it?”

  They all nodded.

  Through gritted teeth she said, “Make it happen.”

  As the group broke apart, Joanna felt like she was about to break herself. She was tired. Exhausted. She’d been exhausted since the day she was born. She’d been told—everyone had been told—of the convoy’s glory days, when hope reigned. When their purpose had been to discover and to build. She wondered what it would be like, to live in such a time, when every day was full of bright potential.

  Instead, she lived in a world where every second weighed on the crew members, each leaden with dread. There was no happiness in this pursuit of the Killer, no pleasure to their purpose. How could there be when every waking minute drew you closer to the realization that the Killer could not be stopped, that it would continue forever, destroying all that lay before it?

  She refused to accept that their lives were forfeit to the past. They would accomplish this task, and they would accomplish it with her at the helm.

  Joanna the Forty-Fourth may have been declared the first fleet admiral, but this Joanna would declare herself the last.

  In a few hours, the astronomy division turned in their findings.

  After the Killer’s current mark, there were seven candidate stars. According to I.C.C., most of them had under a 7 percent chance of being the Web’s meal-after-next, and only one—An M class star they dubbed Ishmael—had anything approaching positive odds: a 58 percent chance.

  It will have to be enough, she thought.

  Back on the bridge, she gave the orders. “Captain Nakamura, tell your crew to head for these coordinates. Come malfunction or malediction, we’ll beat this monster to its victim.”

  She knew the calculations could be wrong, knew a different star entirely could turn out to be the target. But she was an all-or-nothing kind of person. They’d send a probe to trail the Killer, to keep them apprised of its movements via SD communications. She was confident in her decision, and they would not lose track of the Web.

  August 4, 1254 Relaunch

  8319 CE

  Years went by as the convoy staked out the star. They’d spent a decade and a half racing toward a guess, then two years lying in wait.

  Joanna had squashed doubt at every turn. She espoused her confidence in this new approach every chance she got—not just for their sake, but for hers as well.

  You have to get this right, said a stern male voice inside her head. You have to do it, there’s no one else. All this chasing is driving you mad. You can’t let anyone else fall to this thing’s dark need.

  I will, she told the voice. I can do it.

  You won’t have to be angry anymore, added a childlike version of herself.

  Her confidence bordered on arrogance. She wouldn’t let the faintest scrap of chance into her consideration—chance that things might not happen as she willed them to.

  On a mid monsoon day, she was summoned from the refreshing humidity aboard Eden’s tropical quarter into the ever-constant conditions of Holwarda. She didn’t even bother to dry off before answering the beckon. There, Dr. Ka’uhane revealed her team’s latest findings. Her office was papered in long-range snapshots of the Seed and the Web. Many of the ‘flex-sheets on her desk bore ring stains from where she’d placed her tiny espresso cup, but the scent that lingered in the air wasn’t coffee. The room smelled of ink and alcohol; instead of typing up the data, she’d drawn on the ‘flex-sheets with permanent markers. Joanna wasn’t even aware the fleet manufactured such things.

  “I get them printed special,” she explained, a proud lilt to her voice. She seemed blissfully unaware that she’d ruined reams of reusable sheets. In the next instant her tone turned grim, “But this—this is what I wanted to show you.”

  “No,” Joanna whispered. She pushed the dripping strands of her graying hair away from her face to get a better look at the sheet.

  “The Killer has consumed another star and its orbiting planets, and as predicted, has moved on. However, it hasn’t turned toward Ishmael.”

  “How could we be wrong? We were sure. All this time, wasted.”

  Joanna glared out the window toward the nearby star. She’d intended only a glance, but the light held her gaze. It was bright, yet left her cold. They’d spent two years orbiting this star, proposing to save the shining orb, though they’d been unable to save the others.

  But it had never been a target. They were investigators trying to keep ahead of a serial killer whose logic was dimensions away from their own.

  She’d just said they’d been sure, but the truth was, that
was a farce. She’d been sure. She’d needed this, counted on it.

  So you lost a goddamned coin flip, railed her father’s voice, so what? Aren’t you used to losing, to failing?

  At the edge of her hearing, Dr. Ka’uhane was trying to explain why precedents didn’t matter. But she could barely parse the words. Joanna was too busy balking at the time wasted. The convoy had spent seventeen years aiming for a star that would go untouched by the Web.

  Joanna knew the deep lines of her face made her look aged well beyond her actual years. Every crease felt hot now, though the sensation was overshadowed by the tough tug of an intense frown that barely hid her gritted teeth. Grasping at whatever she could, she said, “You told us this was the most likely target. Where has it gone, then? Toward our number two choice? Our number three?”

  The willowy woman appeared at a loss for a moment, as though unsure how to explain. Her tongue seemed to rush ahead of her thoughts as she said, “It’s not something we could have predicted. It’s changed trajectory, and there are no stars within its typical range of pursuit. We had no reason to think it wouldn’t continue on as usual. But it’s not following its pattern. There was no reason to suspect it wouldn’t go—”

  “Can we cut it off?” But Joanna waved the astronomer silent before she could answer.

  Would the nightmare never end?

  She asked another question instead. “What’s in its line of sight?”

  Ka’uhane let a beat pass before answering. Then, “It’s aimed directly at Earth’s system.”

  The admiral’s skin pricked, the muscles underneath going cold. The air suddenly smelled rancid in her nostrils. “Tell me that’s a sick joke.”

  Ka’uhane turned up her palms, half imploring, half shrugging.

  If Sol was indeed the Killer’s target, the megastructure would take the better part of a century to reach the system. Joanna would issue a warning, but it would do little good if Earth couldn’t receive the message. They hadn’t been in contact with the planet in what felt like an eon, and SD communications—the only signals fast enough to get there before the Web—were outmoded planet-side. If Earth wasn’t looking for an SD packet, sending one would be about as effective as screaming into the vacuum of space.