by Nick Webb
“Admiral Mullins. I’d expect no less from the CEO of Shovik-Orion. Tell me how that job is working out for you? Invested heavily into meta-space singularity research, I presume?”
He smiled, thinly, strained. It was clear the fact she was on to him had caught him off guard. But knowing he was on camera for all of Earth to see, he had to keep playing his part. “You are hereby under arrest. Your authority over this mission vacated. All security credentials revoked. You are ordered to—”
She turned to Qwerty and cut her hand across her throat. “Shut him the hell up.” A moment later the admiral’s angry face was replaced by the image of Earth. The camera had zoomed in to the missile which was still falling down to the vulnerable surface below. “Lieutenant Whitehorse. Are the lasers charged, at least?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Give me a targeting option, and open fire when ready.”
Whitehorse nodded and worked her controls, but then hesitated again. “Ma’am, I’m reading an odd sensor signature coming off the missile.”
Odd? “How so?”
She knew before Whitehorse could reply. Somehow, Mullins had done it. If they’d smuggled a nuke onto the Independence, then surely they’d smuggled the other part too.
“A meta-space background signature.” She shook her head. “It’s just … odd, is all. Shall I fire?”
The meta-space shunt. If that nuke blew, dumping not just one warhead’s worth of energy into the meta-space shunt, but fifteen, who knew what the consequences would be? The Skiohra Matriarch, Krull, had claimed that the earlier explosion over Sangre had momentarily incapacitated every living Skiohra, and implied the Dolmasi fared far worse.
Was that Mullins’s angle? Incapacitate the known alien races? Or start a war? Wars were profitable things, after all, and the new CEO of Shovik-Orion might have brought a new revenue stream with him.
“No. Do not fire.”
“Ma’am?” Whitehorse looked up at her in surprise. As did the whole bridge crew.
“Do … not … fire,” she said, slowly, urgently. “We need another option. There is a device on that thing that will—”
She noticed that everyone’s heads were turned not towards her, but towards a point behind her. She turned. Commander Yarbrough stood there, a sidearm pointed at her chest. “Admiral Proctor, I’m sorry. You’re under arrest.”
Chapter Fifty-Three
Terran Sector, Earth
Bridge, ISS Independence
She stared down the barrel of the gun. What caliber was it, she wondered? Would it hurt? It was pointed straight at her heart—death would come quickly. Her blood pressure would plummet within a second, resulting in rapid loss of consciousness. She would stumble, probably grab for her chair, and fail as she blacked out. Would they try to take her to sickbay and attempt to revive her? She went through the odds: revival from a bullet through the heart? They’d have to quickly hook her up to the life-support machine to have even the remotest possibility of saving her, then they’d have to patch her heart, inject it with stimulants, and hope for the best.
It was strange what the mind thought of when confronted with existential danger, the thought occurred to her. She almost laughed. In the face of death, she’d slipped back into scientist mode, looking at her situation with the cold, clinical eye of someone studying an interesting problem.
It felt good.
“Commander Yarbrough. Trust me. You don’t want to do this.” She slowly put her hands up.
He flipped the safety off. “Oh? You’ve betrayed us all, Admiral. First you and your nephew colluded with Admiral Tigre to bomb Sangre, trying to make it look like a GPC false-flag attack on its own people. And now you’re willing to write off tens of millions of people down in Europe. No, I think I really do want to do this.”
So. Yarbrough was in on it too. Figures.
“Commander Yarbrough,” she repeated, slower. “You don’t want to do this. Lower your weapon, now.”
He sneered. “Why?”
Two seconds later, a fine pink mist exploded out of the side of his forehead, and a hole bloomed blood. He instantly collapsed. Behind him, covered in soot, grime, and blood of his own, stood Ballsy.
“That’s why,” she said, considering the body on the floor in mild dismay. She’d prefer he didn’t die, but given the circumstances, better him than her.
“You ok?” asked Ballsy.
“Fine. You?” She looked closer at his grimy face. His cheeks, temple, and forehead were scored with cuts and gashes, and one eye was swollen shut.
“Been better. You were right about that data file. I checked everything, and found something strange. The timestamps for the sensor logs of several supply shipments were dated to an hour ago. Someone overwrote them. And then the fighter bay exploded. I figured that and us launching that nuke, there had to be someone on board who was in on the whole thing. Someone on the bridge, no less. He must have been GPC all along,” he said, indicating the body.
“Or Shovik-Orion.”
Ballsy shrugged. “Does it matter?”
“It will eventually. But right now?” She glanced up at the screen, at the nuke still tumbling down towards northern Europe. “Ballsy we’ve got to disable that thing within the next ten minutes.”
“Fine. Shoot it.”
“Can’t.”
The realization on his face was easy to ready. “Oh. Meta-space shunt? If we hit it, the nuke explodes and the Skiohra get juiced.”
“And the Dolmasi. Fifteen times as powerful as the one on Sangre. And Ballsy, the more I think about this, the more I’m of the opinion that the mystery ship did not show up at random. This was not a coincidence.”
He was still gripping the gun, staring down at his gruesome handiwork. The entire bridge crew was still too shocked to say anything, and so they listened. “Right. So. Stop the nuke.” A shadow passed over his face. “I know just the man to help us.”
Proctor considered. She knew what he was suggesting, but it didn’t seem likely, or possible. “The fighter bay is in ruins, isn’t it?”
“It is.” He turned back to the exit and before he left he called back, “but shuttle bay’s ok.”
Before she could reply or protest, he was gone, and she was left staring at the corpse bleeding out on the deck.
Godspeed, Ethan.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Terran Sector, Earth
Sickbay, ISS Independence
Zivic grunted. “Ow! Careful!”
“Sorry!”
He steeled his jaw while she tried again. After all the advances in medical technology, it seemed peeling away crusty wound dressings would always hurt. She worked slowly, gingerly, but with eyes that made clear she thought it was the coolest thing in the world. “You’re like a machine, you know.”
He mustered a chuckle. “Why, uh, thank you. I get that a lot.”
She play-slapped him on the knee before returning her attention to his shoulder. “No, dumbass. I mean your body. My body. Like machines. I became a mechanic because I liked taking things apart, but, shit, this is fun.” She peeled off another wrap, tearing away some crusty coagulated blood and fluid with it.
“Sh … it!” He bit down on a fist as another wrap came off. “You can take them apart, yes, but can you put them back together?”
“Oh, don’t be a baby,” she said, pulling another wrap away, a little too quickly. He grunted in pain.
“Can’t we call a nurse over or something?” he said through gritted teeth. “How many are left?” He craned his neck to see, but half the bandages were on his back, where the direct rays from the shuttle’s explosion had hit him.
“Just a few. And, no,” her tone became grim. “They’re all busy. With casualties.”
“I’m a casualty.”
She pulled the last one off. “You’re alive. That’s more than half of the people who came through those doors can say.
He glanced out the window of their little examination room, out onto the main f
loor of sickbay. Nearly every bed was full, and, to his chagrin, he saw she was right. Many of the beds held figures completely draped in a sheet. The doctor and nurses on staff were rushing between the dozen or so patients that were alive, but only just. “Guess I had it lucky.”
The door to sickbay burst open. It was him. Volz scanned the room, then caught his eye through the window.
“We have company,” he said, watching his father make his way through the maze of temporary beds laid out.
Volz wasted no time once he passed the threshold. He glanced once over his raw, exposed side and back, and nodded, as if he were saying, it’s not all that bad. “Come on. We’ve got a mission.” The tone of his voice said he wasn’t there for an argument. That shit was serious.
“Can I get these replaced?” Zivic said, inclining his head towards his side.
“No. No time. Europe is going to get iced within eight minutes unless we move now. We’ve got a nuke to catch.”
Batak whistled.
Zivic stood up and followed Volz out, without another word. Bandages could wait. As they jogged down the halls towards the shuttle bay, his shirt still off and the breeze soothing his raw skin, his father gave him the rundown.
“So we can’t just blow it up because of the shunt, otherwise bad aliens show up. Got it.”
“Can’t we just remove the shunt?” said a voice behind him. He glanced back, surprised to see Batak running behind him.
“What the hell are you doing?” he said, as they passed the threshold of the shuttle bay’s anteroom.
“Sounded like you guys needed a mechanic,” she said, shrugging.
Volz waved them both towards a shuttle, which was already idling. “Join the party. You may be right, we could use an extra set of hands, especially ones that know what they’re doing.”
Zivic stopped halfway up the ramp. “Wait, you’re not coming too, are you?”
“Of course I am. You’re going to do some fancy flying while I suit up, jump out, and lasso us a nuke.”
Zivic wanted to protest more, but he knew time was running out. “Sounds like as good a plan as any.” He sat down in the pilot’s seat and didn’t even wait for them to sit before he punched the engines and pushed the shuttle out of the bay. Out of the corner of his eye he saw both his father and Batak shimmy into vacuum suits.
“Six minutes,” he said, glancing at the timer displayed on the console—he’d noticed the tactical crew on the bridge had linked up to his computer and were sending him all the telemetry data he’d need to maneuver safely up to the missile. Safely, though, was a relative word.
Had the situation not been so dire, he might have enjoyed the breathtaking view. Coming down through Earth’s atmosphere was always a treat. Other planets had continents and shining atmospheres and green landmasses and blue cloud-dappled oceans, but none of them looked like this.
And none of them were where he’d killed his own mother and step-father. He grimaced. He had promised himself he wouldn’t think about it, but the memory was unavoidable, now that he was descending down through the exact same airspace where it had happened.
You’ll love Paris, his mother had said. You and Jerusha should come with us. Jerusha had been busy with exams and couldn’t come, but Zivic had gone, flying the shuttle himself from Westphalia station down through IDF’s western European airspace. His buddies from the academy were stationed at EURWESCOM, and so he knew they’d be watching his descent. He thought he’d show off a little. Give them a little show. Give his step-father a little thrill—the man hated flying, after all….
“Ethan! Head in the game!” Volz yelled.
He’d been staring out the viewport, and now he snapped to. “Nearly there,” he announced. He glanced back. Both his father and Batak had finished suiting up. “So, I suppose you have a plan?”
Volz shrugged. “It’s in development.” He pulled open a compartment and hefted out a tow of utility cable. “I suppose we could latch onto it somehow and arrest its descent. That’ll at least buy us time.”
“You’re the boss, boss.” He angled the shuttle up above the tumbling missile now that it showed up on his scopes. “It’s spinning. You’ll never be able to latch on. Not without clanging into it, and wouldn’t it be just our luck if that initiated detonation.”
Volz nodded. “Once it hits the upper atmosphere the tail fins will right it. We’ll have to move fast before it gets any lower into the atmosphere, though.”
His father fiddled with the cable and hooks while Zivic maneuvered the shuttle to just a few dozen meters away from the missile.
A familiar voice came over the comm. “Ethan, it’s Jerusha.”
Like ghost from his past. He shoved his complicated, conflicted feelings down deep and answered. “What is it?”
“The nuke. We’ve been scanning it, and it looks like the hair trigger is engaged.”
“What does that mean for us?” Though he knew the answer already. It meant that their current plan was shit.
“Just one tap and that thing blows. It can handle atmospheric re-entry, and the stray particle of dust or sand flying at a thousand kph, but it’s triggered to go off at the slightest touch of anything bigger than that.”
No one said a word. Zivic could hear his father mutter a stream of profanities under his breath. Finally, Batak leaned over his seat and spoke into the comm. “What about just a person touching it? Enough to disengage the shunt?”
Whitehorse hesitated. “I … I suppose that might be ok. Honestly, I don’t know. I just know that if your plan is to try and wrangle that thing into the shuttle’s cargo hold while that trigger is engaged, you’re toast. Not just toast. Vapor, is more like it.”
Volz dropped the cable. “Ok. I’m going out there. Ride that thing like one of the horses of the apocalypse until I can pry the damn shunt off.”
Batak was studying the sensor readout of the missile, tracing her finger along lines only she could see. “No. You can’t pry it off without severe dislocation stress at the point of attachment. It’s got to be disabled, not detached.”
“Can you do that?” Zivic called back to his father.
Before he could respond, Batak nodded. “No, he can’t.” She yanked open a utility drawer and pulled out a repair kit and slung it over her shoulder. “But I can.”
Chapter Fifty-Five
Terran Sector, Earth
Bridge, ISS Independence
Proctor watched the scene unfold on the monitor as a small figure emerged from the hatch of the shuttle. She gripped her armrests tightly, holding her breath, silently willing the bomb not to explode. The background murmur of the bridge dropped away completely as everyone watched in silence.
The missile had righted itself as the upper atmosphere finally created enough drag on the tail, and the figure holding onto the shuttle’s hatch crouched down.
And jumped.
Miraculously, she reached out and grabbed onto a small protrusion on the missile and pulled herself in, straddling the thing like she was riding a horse. Proctor almost couldn’t believe her eyes, until she looked around at the rest of the bridge crew to confirm they were watching the same thing. The figure was clutching onto the missile with her thighs, a cable dangling off her ankle and flapping slightly in the thin atmosphere, leading back up to the shuttle where another figure—Ballsy, she supposed—stood at the hatch, one hand on the cable where it connected to the shuttle.
“Admiral, the Vanguard is maneuver to intercept,” said Whitehorse.
She pointed to Qwerty. “Open a channel.”
“Open, ma’am.”
Proctor stood up. “Admiral Mullins, this is Proctor. Hold your distance, Ted, or things get messy.”
A chuckle. “Was that a threat, Shelby?”
She knew the whole world was listening, including the top brass of IDF, the government of UE, and President Quimby himself. Most of what she was about to say was classified. Screw it.
“Mullins, back the hell off. That thing has a
device on it that will shunt half the energy into meta-space. For all we know it will summon the Golgothic ship here.”
Another laugh. “And how would you know that, Shelby, unless you had designed the thing? You’re digging your own grave here, Admiral. Now get out of the way so I can take the shot. Lives are at stake, you know. I’m not going to stand by while you let Europe burn.”
Bastard. If nothing else, that confirmed for her that he was the one who’d arranged for the meta-space shunts to be designed and built, and somehow smuggled onto the Independence. No other reason to pin the blame on her for all of humanity to hear.
“Ensign Riisa, keep us between the Vanguard and the shuttle. Match their every move.” She turned to tactical. “Status?”
“From these readings, looks like the shunt is still active.”
The comm crackled. It was Batak, breathing heavily. “Ok, guys, I’m about to cut into the shunt. I want you far away from this thing when I do.”
“Bull,” said Zivic, his voice answering her over the comm. “We’re not going anywhere. We’re pulling you out the second you get that thing off.”
On the screen, the tiny figure of Batak reached down to her ankle, fiddled a moment, and pulled the utility cable off. It flapped away.
“Sara!” Zivic yelled.
“Get the hell out of here, Ethan. You can come back for me when I’m done. Go. Now!” She was breathing heavily.
The timer on the viewscreen was down to under a minute. After a moment, the shuttle wavered a bit, as if the pilot were going back and forth with a decision, before finally pulling off and shooting upward into the sky as the missile continued its descent. It was entering the stratosphere now, and the winds looked to be terrible, since Batak had hunched over and hugged the missile tightly, one hand still poking something into the protrusion on the warhead.
“Almost there,” she breathed. “Cutting through the power source….”
