by Nick Webb
Impossible.
More than impossible. It was utterly crazy. Completely, utterly, batshit crazy, as Ballsy said. As the contractor, Sara Batak, would say, it don’t rain but it shitstorms.
But the only thing she could say, as she collapsed into her chair, was a name.
“Tim.”
Chapter Sixty
Terran Sector, Saturn System, Titan
Bridge, ISS Independence
Mumford shook his head. “No, Admiral. I can basically scan the whole ship now, and I can confidently say there is no organic material anywhere over there. Captain Timothy Granger is not—”
“I know that! I’m not a friggin’ Grangerite,” she snapped. “But … but … still. The evidence is here. The data is … data. Could he have … could he have sent something back out of that black hole? How? Why?”
She wracked her brain, even as she watched the pieces of the ship fall down towards the hole it had carved on the surface of Titan.
“Replay the video. The moment it finally exploded.” She waved at the screen.
The image of the piece of hull with the faded imprint of “ISS VIC” disappeared, replaced by the video from the final moments of the battle. Hundreds of explosions peppered the surface of the alien ship. The drilling beam was still lancing out towards the surface. It fluttered erratically, then disappeared, and the ship exploded.
“Slow it down and repeat.”
The video repeated, this time at a quarter speed.
The beam. The realization struck her, and she remembered how Rex had tapped out a pattern on that safe-house door. The code.
She watched it flutter, this time … in a pattern she recognized.
“Holy shit. Ballsy, are you seeing what I’m seeing?”
He shrugged. “A high-powered anti-matter drilling beam?”
She turned around. “Morse code. Mumford—slow it down. And Qwerty, please translate—I can’t remember everything like I used to.”
“Yes’m,” he drawled.
The video repeated, slower this time, and the fact there was a pattern there was unmistakable. Qwerty finally looked over at her. “Coming.”
Coming?
“That’s it?” she said, though even as she said it she felt foolish. She’d finally made contact with the aliens behind the construction and operation of this ship, and all she could say was that’s it?
“Just one word, ma’am,” said Qwerty. “Coming.”
She shook her head. “No, that can’t be it. There has to be more. Analyze the entire video sequence, from the moment it started the beam until the end.”
Mumford worked, and she watched the pieces fall lower towards Titan. The data feed to the side of the live video indicted the debris was only a few dozen kilometers from crashing on the surface.
“Nothing. Just that one word at the end. And I checked all bands, all wavelengths.”
Coming.
“Check the other videos. Ido. El Amin. Check those.”
It took Mumford a minute to retrieve the files and display them on the viewscreen, but when Qwerty looked up at them, lips mumbling, she saw the answer bloom on his face. There was more.
“Lieutenant?”
He gulped. “It says, Shelby, they’re coming.”
Shelby, they’re coming.
Chapter Sixty-One
Terran Sector, Saturn System, Titan
Bridge, ISS Independence
“Oh, my God,” she breathed.
Volz bolted across the bridge and gripped her armrest as he bent low to her. “What does it mean?”
She didn’t want to say the words. She didn’t want to say them because they couldn’t be true. They couldn’t be.
She said them anyway. “It means … that the Swarm is back.”
The bridge, already quiet, fell to a dead silence.
“No,” said Volz. His finger jabbed at the viewscreen, punctuating almost every word. “No. You killed the last of their ships. Granger piloted the Victory and a hundred anti-matter bombs into that black hole, and the Skiohra themselves confirmed that the meta-space link through that thing was shut. Permanently.”
They all stared at the falling fragments.
Shelby, they’re coming.
“Admiral! Reading a power surge from one of the pieces of the alien ship!” Whitehorse yelled from tactical.
“What is it doing?”
The video zoomed in on the falling pieces. One large chunk of the ship was pulling away from the rest, as if it had thrusters propelling it. “That’s the central core section, Admiral,” said Mumford. “It appears to … have its own thrusters.”
“Shoot it down,” she said. “Now.”
Whitehorse shook her head. “Sorry, Admiral, it’s at the bottom of the atmosphere now. Rail-gun slugs will never hit it, and lasers would be too dissipated at that distance.”
She stood up and dashed to the helm. “Riisa, get us down there. Full thrusters. Now.”
A hand on her shoulder. “Shelby, it’s already gone,” said Ballsy. “Look.”
The roughly spherical chunk of the alien ship plunged lower and lower, accelerating, and with an anti-climactic puff of dust and debris, disappeared into the hole it had bored into the crust.
Moments later, the rest of the ship collided with the surface, landing with catastrophic force all around the hole, sending up huge billows of brown dust which plumed into a massive mushroom cloud, as if the area had been hit by a nuclear blast.
“Sensors reading that the impact of the rest of the ship on the surface has closed the hole up with rock and debris.” Whitehorse looked up from tactical. “It’s gone.”
But she knew it wasn’t gone. She knew it in her gut, deep down. It wasn’t gone.
Shelby, they’re coming.
Epilogue
Terran Sector, Earth
Elysium Fields Memorial Gardens, Nashville, Tennessee
For every funeral Shelby Proctor had even gone to, it had rained. Granger’s funeral. Her sister’s when she was young. All the friends she’d lost in the intervening years. Rain. Every single one.
Except, this one, and she found it ironic. The sun was shining on a glorious spring morning at the cemetery outside Nashville, completely out of place in her mind. Not only was her nephew dead, not only was Admiral Mullins still on the loose, not only was the mass of Titan slowly but perceptibly increasing just as Ido’s and El Amin’s had, not only was the GPC increasing in influence due to the Sangre incident, compounded by the recently exposed video from Danny’s suit of the ISS Vanguard docking with the Magdalena Issachar, but in addition to all this, the message encoded in the alien ship’s drilling beam never left her mind. Not for a moment.
Shelby, they’re coming.
Shelby, they’re coming.
Shelby, they’re coming.
The words of warning repeated themselves in her mind like a mantra. Like a dirge.
The sun shone anyway, oblivious to her dread.
Her brother squeezed her hand. He smiled at her, but it was a strained, hollow smile. He was putting on a good show for her. The priest had paused the service momentarily to drink from a water bottle, and her sister-in-law, standing on the other side of her brother, said, “It’s so beautiful here.” A cross rested on her chest. She was a believer, and from the peaceful look on her face it looked like she meant it.
It won’t look so beautiful when the Swarm comes back, Proctor thought. In her mind’s eye the tranquil scene of trees and grass and blue sky was overwritten with death and destruction—the only thing the Swarm had ever brought them.
Somehow, he’d come back to warn them.
But that was silly. That was Patriarch Huntsman talking. Tim was dead. The scientists were beyond sure. They even had video evidence of the old ISS Victory being stretched by the extreme tidal forces of the black hole, beyond what anyone could live through.
But somehow, against all probability, he, or someone, had sent her the warning. Shelby, they’re coming. At le
ast, she assumed the word they meant the Swarm, and Shelby meant that the message was for her, probably from someone close to her. Who else but Tim? And coming?
That meant soon. She felt it in her gut.
The priest continued, and concluded, and everyone lined up to throw soil on the coffin. The funeral officially over, she lingered by the grave, standing next to her brother who’d sat on the bench nearby. “Thank you, Shelby, for finding him.”
The words felt hollow in her mouth. “I’m sorry I didn’t find him in time.”
“There was nothing you could have done. He was dead before you even knew about Sangre.” He sighed. “But it means a lot to me that you dropped everything to find him. To bring him back here.”
She squeezed his shoulder. “Are you coming back to Britannia? I can give you a lift. I’m heading out that way on the Independence in a few days.”
He shook his head. “Jess’s family lives here in Nashville. I think we’re going to move here to be closer to them. At least for now. She’s more devastated than she lets on.”
Proctor nodded. She bent low to hug him one last time, then made for the Marine transport she’d arrived in.
Fleet Admiral Oppenheimer was waiting for her.
“What do you want?” she said, starting to climb up into the car.
His face was ice. “I want you to retire. Disappear. Go lay on your beach. You’ve done your part, you’ve done what I asked of you, and now it’s time to leave it alone.”
She paused, and climbed back down to the ground. “You haven’t talked to President Quimby yet, have you? Because he told me something quite the opposite this morning.”
Oppenheimer grunted. “I’m well aware of your conversations with President Quimby. He’s scared. Scared shitless. The alien ship striking so close to home, and the news about the Victory’s hull has him spooked. Of course he wants you to stay. He’s deluded. He thinks you can save us from what’s coming. When all that’s coming is cleaning up the mess Mullins caused and getting a handle on the GPC political situation, which, frankly, is neither of our jobs. So I’m telling you again, leave. Go home. Go back to where you belong: a well-deserved retirement.”
She stared at him for a moment, seeing the twitch in his eye. It was a tell. She knew he wanted nothing more than for her to disappear and get out of his hair. But it was clear he was hiding something. He wanted her gone for reasons other than his ego.
And she wasn’t going to let him get away with it.
“See you on Britannia, Christian.”
“Shelby, I’m—”
She stepped back up into the entrance hatch of the ground car. “I know you’re serious, Christian, but so am I. I’m not leaving. You’re stuck with me.” She sat down in her seat, and before the waiting marine closed the door she smiled back up at the fleet admiral through the open window. “And I’m going to get to the bottom of it. All of it. It’s what I do. I figure shit out.” She motioned to the marine to shut the door. Through the window she could see Oppenheimer silently fuming.
Good. Let him fume. It wouldn’t change her resolve to get to the bottom of Danny’s death. Of Mullins’s schemes, of Oppenheimer’s possible involvement in those schemes.
It wouldn’t change the fact that they were coming, whoever they were.
It wouldn’t change the fact that, in spite of being dead, Tim Granger had sent her a message. Somehow, against all the laws of nature, he’d sent her a message from the center of a black hole.
A message that had taken thirteen billion years to reach her.
She waved to the driver.
“I’m ready.”
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