by Tom Shepherd
Rosalie leaped into the conversation. “Tyler, we need firepower, or we all die.”
Tyler cursed under his breath. No matter how his instincts screamed otherwise, Rosalie had a point. “All comm links hot. Talk to me!”
“Will do,” J.B. said.
Shoving worries aside, he focused on textbook execution and recalibrated the optics package so the monitors gave him a 360-degree field of vision, bow to stern. With the comms locked open, he would hear and see almost everything.
“Suzie, close viewports. Full power to shields one through four, seven and nine. I want to plow the rooftop like a continental glacier.”
“Are you absolutely sure the building won’t collapse?”
“No.”
Suzie paused a moment before asking. “Have you ever done this before, Tyler?”
“Not exactly.”
“You could have bloody lied. Now I’m scared.”
“I’ve done combat simulations. We’ll be okay.” He took several deep breaths to shake off the panic. Everybody is counting on me. Keep calm. We’ll be okay. We’ll be okay. Keep saying that to yourself.
Suzie wrapped the selected screens around the forward two-thirds of the scout ship like impenetrable, transparent armor. Tyler crossed the roofline and went for the deck, praying Yumiko and Platte were clear of his chosen set-down spot.
“Our Father, Who art in heaven…” Tyler muttered as the Sioux City’s force fields gouged a jagged trench in the surface of the roof, destroyed open-sided office spaces, scraped away stone blocks and metal siding, and sent rattan chairs and heavy desks tumbling into the street below. On the cargo bay monitor Tyler watched his brother release the hatch. It thumped on the splintered rooftop.
“J.B., talk to me!”
“The place is a mess, Ty. Don’t see anybody.” He took a few steps down the ramp and called for Platte and Yumiko, but the only person to approach the lowered hatch was an azure alien, hands raised. When Esteban took aim at his head, J.B. shouted to hold fire.
“It’s Mr. Blue,” J.B. said. “The Quirt lawyer.”
“Yes, yes! Please take me with you. Yumi-san and Demarcus are wounded—over there!”
“I don’t see anyone.” A burst of kinetic rounds bounced off the Sioux City’s starboard shields. “Damn! We’re taking fire, Tyler!”
Tyler’s pulse spiked. “Get Indigo aboard. We’re outta here.”
Rosalie ordered the shivering blue lawyer to strap into a safety seat for immediate take-off.
“Wait!” J.B said. “Somebody’s waving from that rubble pile. North corner.” J.B. unhooked his safety harness from its deck ring and took a few extra steps down the ramp.
“Where?” Tyler demanded. “I’m on optics.”
“Eleven o’clock.”
In the back corner, a lone figure rose from a heap of broken cinder blocks. Demarcus Platte bled from kinetic blaster hits and was covered with grit from shattered concrete. Platte’s left arm, marred by a blaster hit and oozing blood, hung limply at his side.
“I’m going for him.” J.B. said.
“No!” Rosalie said. “That’s an open field of fire.”
J.B. hopped onto the wrecked rooftop and rushed toward Inspector Platte. For the first time, he saw Officer Matsuda crumpled behind the broken stone barrier. She was alert, but not moving. “Come on!” J.B. cried.
Demarcus protested. “My officers—”
“All dead. Pirates are ready to blast this building from space. Let’s go, now!”
Platte thumbed at Yumiko. “She can’t walk, and I can’t carry her.”
J.B. rushed across the rubble-packed roof and picked up the tiny Asian, who gasped in pain as her feet dangled over his arms.
“Your ankles are broken, ma’am.”
“Yes, but not arms.” She grasped J.B. tightly. “How is Zenna-san?”
“Who?”
“Mister Blue.”
“Aboard safely. Let’s go.”
They started back to the ramp, but a trio of pirates popped out of hiding and opened fire. The attackers had miraculously survived the Sioux City’s train-wreck landing and caught J.B. in the open. He dropped to a knee with a thigh-hit on the first volley. Somehow, J.B. managed to hang onto Yumiko. Tyler’s heart froze as he watched the monitors. They might not make it out of this alive.
Demarcus Platte returned fire with one good arm. Back at the Sioux City, Esteban shrieked and ran down the ramp, blasting wildly at the pirates. More shots rang out, and abruptly the attackers were gone. Esteban carried Yumiko while J.B. and the Inspector leaned on each other to hobble aboard.
“Ty, we’ve got them!” Rosalie power-raised the ramp.
Never more glad to leave an area, Tyler lifted off before the hatch fully closed. The Sioux City climbed a few thousand feet, banked hard into a 180-degree turn, and headed out to sea. As soon as they cleared small arms range, he executed a sharp, descending turn to hug the coastline, figuring the enemy would be looking for them to escape the atmosphere immediately. In the distance flashes of high-impact artillery repeatedly struck Safe Harbor from far above. Tyler whispered a prayer for Judge Wildermuth and Lovey Frost and all the innocent victims of this rampage. The pirates blasted facilities respected by all spacefaring civilizations of the outer Perseus. There would be hell to pay for this.
“Suzie, talk to me about the bandits above us.”
“How far above? At least eight ships in orbit. See the tactical display. I also have six flights of small craft running high speed search patterns inside the atmosphere.”
Crap. Would this never end? “When can you give me FTL?”
“Faster than light is available as soon as we clear the Sedalian gravity well.”
“Recalculate for upper atmosphere FTL entry.” Risky, but they were desperate. He couldn’t guarantee how much longer their luck would hold.
“Are you completely off the trolley?”
“It’s been done.”
“By multi-phasic battlecruisers with tertiary backup systems.”
“Are we equipped to outrun them or outfight them?”
A moment of silence passed before she answered. “No.”
“Do you want your cheeky silicon consciousness spread over a hundred kilometers of ocean floor? We’ve gotta do something.”
“All right. Let’s give it the fully Monty.”
“That’s my girl. Power climb—increase airspeed to Mach 8 and standby with FTL soon as we clear the mesosphere. And please compensate for the g-force this time.” The Sioux City’s nose lifted from skimming whitecaps and swooped into a cloudless, late afternoon sky.
This defined a desperate gambit. Starships were not built for atmospheric flight. The delicate balance between anti-matter and dark matter required maximum shielding from graviton interference to keep quantum fluctuations stabilized for entry into the madly irrational alternate universe of FLT travel. Multi-dimensional physics were impossibly complex, and like most deep space voyagers, Tyler never really understood how FLT worked. He was a user of the technology, not a space-time physicist or propulsion engineer. But he knew what all good pilots know—there are redlines you do not cross. Until you do.
He was about to cross one.
Suzie reported the Sioux City had cleared the lower troposphere and zoomed into the stratosphere, heading for the mesosphere, fifty kilometers above Sedalia-3.
“Ready with FTL?”
“Fifteen seconds to the mesosphere. Tyler, if we die—I mean, cease functioning, I wanted you to know—”
“You’re not gay.”
“Yes and no. I’m programed multi-gendered, multi-oriented. But the straight female part of me—shit! Hostiles approaching at Mach 10, with weapons charged.”
“FTL, now.” Tyler’s pulse thundered and his breathing became labored. He tapped up the cabin O2 levels a few percent.
“Still too low. We could explode this close to the planet’s magnetic field. Oh, bugger it! They’re firing.”
Suz
ie broke left and rolled into a shallow dive, throwing the pirate tracking system off target. The first volley seared the air above them with bright blue energy beams. One shot deflected off Suzie’s dorsal screen package, but the others streaked by harmlessly. The interceptors overshot their prey, executed sharp turns, left and right, to come about and finish the unarmed Sioux City on the next pass.
“Up, not down!” Tyler shouted. “They won’t miss again—do it!”
Suzie pulled the ship into a vertical climb, thirty percent over redline. “They’re launching a nuke! Engaging FTL in five, four, three…”
Tyler grasped the seat arms and whispered words unspoken since brash adolescence. “Hail Mary, full of grace—get me out of this fucking place.” He hung on tight and watched the viewports.
Just as the Cosmos began to shift, a blinding flash bleached all the monitors. The ship pitched from a brutal hit. The blue-black at the edge of space collapsed around Tyler and exploded like a recreation of the Big Bang.
At first, he thought they were looking at the inside of a thermonuclear detonation. All Suzie’s readouts spiked, and her optical monitors went offline, then rebooted as the blast faded. For at least a minute, perhaps two, they tumbled out of control in white space peppered with black stars.
Suzie’s sensors and communications package remained offline, not because they were malfunctioning, but for lack of anything to scan or any signals to receive. If the instrumentation was operating correctly, even the background noise of the Big Bang, persistent throughout the Universe, was silent for the first time in 13.8 billion years.
Was this the Nirvana dimension, the legendary antimatter Cosmos where distances did not exist? Sometimes called the Apex Channel, ancient civilizations discovered Nirvana technology, but the secret died when the Galactic Empire collapsed a millennia ago. With one possible exception—which many believe to be a fictionalized narrative, set at the dawn of human spaceflight——no Terrans had never witnessed the Nirvana dimension first hand. Tantalizing, archival descriptions from the ruins of long-dead, high space cultures paralleled what Tyler glimpsed through the Sioux City viewports.
To rediscover the science behind this super-dimensional avenue would give travelers the ability to enter FTL at any location and emerge at the destination of choice almost instantaneously, regardless of distance. If it existed, the Nirvana/Apex Channel was nothing less than a portable Gate system, jump-point to jump-point, giving the user powers to shape time-and-space. A swinging door to anyplace in the Cosmos. Mythologies on a million worlds equated such capability with the power of Divinity Itself.
Matthews Interstellar researchers had never penetrated the antimatter dimension itself, or proved it exists, but the new Apexcom communications system was capable of transmitting real-time messages across the galaxy. Some Matthews Corp scientists believed the signal traveled into the Nirvana/Apex Channel and exited instantly at the point of reception. If Tyler’s ship had entered this nearly mythical space…
And then it was over. The Sioux City dropped from white nothingness to normal black space and sublight speeds. The navigational array indicated 18. 3 light years from Sedalia. He blinked. They had survived.
“Suzie, was that the Nirvana dimension?”
“I’m not certain. Almost no literature on the Apex Channel is available in my databases. However, black stars in white space strongly suggest an antimatter Cosmos.”
“If so, how did we get back here?”
“No data available. According to my chronometers, three shipboard minutes passed during the whiteout, but no time elapsed beyond the Sioux City. We slipped into oblivion and returned.”
“Okay, now you’re creeping me out.”
“They nuked us at the point of FTL entry. Maybe that pushed the ship beyond hyperspace into an alternative dimension, and as the blast contacted antimatter particles the whiplash brought us back.”
“Can you duplicate the process?”
“Theoretically, but sling-shooting off a thermonuclear device is a bad way to travel. Instead of 18. 3 light years from Sedalia, next time we might emerge on the opposite side of the Universe.”
“Radiation levels?”
“Higher than normal but dropping fast. Nothing lethal seeped through my shield array.”
“Thanks, baby. You’re the best.” He drew in a deep breath, his nerves unwinding. “We did it,” he whispered, more to himself than her.
Suzie’s voice cracked, like she was on the verge of tears. “Tyler, this time I really thought we were going to die.”
“Yeah, I’ve been having that feeling with alarming regularity.”
“Shut up and let me say this. If I weren’t a jumble of equations housed in silicon and you weren’t a sexist prat, I’d kiss you.”
He grinned. “Toldja—you’re hot for me.”
“Oh, fuck off.”
He laughed.
After allowing her a few minutes to run a quick systems diagnostic, he tasked Suzie to set a course for their rendezvous with Paco León, using the coordinates he issued earlier. Meanwhile, he ran a quick in-flight check for structural damage and engine status.
After about an hour, Tyler was satisfied the Sioux City was flyable. He activated the navigational array and checked the flight plan to reach Paco. Seven hours to bring them together. He spooled up the FTL drive and went light-plus. When the normal, comforting, swirling colors of the Cumberland Tunnel flooded the viewscreens, he put the ship on autopilot, giving Suzie the conn.
Before Tyler left the flight deck to check on passengers and crew, Suzie’s message alarm beeped to announce incoming traffic. He returned to the pilot’s seat and accepted a transmission from Terran space, certain this would not be a fun conversation.
Noah Matthews appeared in the monitor. “Tyler, what the hell is going on out there? I’m getting ‘Mayday’ calls from Sedalia. Are you okay?”
“Yes, Dad. We’re fine. J.B. took a kinetic round through the thigh, but he’ll be okay.”
“Jesus Christ—how about Rosalie, Esteban?”
“Perfecto.” Tyler leaned back, trying to look relaxed. “Let me bring you up to speed.”
“I want the whole story.”
“Of course…” But he omitted the part about his little sister getting kidnapped by slavers and the standoff in the street with J.B., Esteban, and Rosalie ready to throw down on a mob of pirates until a bull appeared from nowhere. When dealing with Dad, an abbreviated ‘whole story’ was usually best.
“So, we got away, but they fucked up Safe Harbor pretty bad.”
“Sedalia is a neutral port. Did they really fire on Parvian warships awaiting maintenance?”
The Parvian Republic, an ancient civilization of non-Terran humanoids centered in the Perseus Arm, periodically went from expansionist to consolidation phases which lasted centuries. They currently lingered in an extended consolidation cycle, adding no new territories for thirteen hundred Terran years.
Nevertheless, Parvians maintained a powerful star navy, which patrolled most of the galaxy, ostensibly for exploration, with a secondary mission of training and military coordination with nonbelligerent species. The last time they were attacked, the Parvians hunted down the culprits and destroyed their spacefaring capabilities before surface-blasting the enemy’s home world until its flattened cities smoldered in planetary darkness. The universal mantra about dealing with the Parvian Republic was simple.
Don’t fuck with the Parves.
“Yes, sir,” Tyler acknowledged. “Fired on the Meks, too. Pirates were blasting everybody. Messed up the place pretty bad. Looking for us, apparently.”
“Goddamn it.” Noah turned away from the screen and barked a series of orders at his assistants. “I’ll take care of Sedalia. Where are you?”
“In hyperspace, at the outer edge of the Perseus. We’re meeting our long-distance FTL ship in a few hours.”
“I’m tempted to turn your mother loose, let her join you at the Rim with a couple of battle grou
ps.”
“You can’t, Dad. We’re outnumbered here. Too many weaponized spacefaring cultures. Humans haven’t encountered most of them before. If we show up with muscle, we’ll fight every day to keep the Jump Gate to Andromeda open. We need to win this one diplomatically and in court.” Odd. He was using his father’s own words. Tyler swallowed the bitter realization.
His father smiled. “When did you become the peacemaker?”
“You always said, ‘Work with the tools at hand.’”
“Don’t hold back. Break open the whole tool chest and nail a guarantee of full access to the Alpha Site under Suryadivan law.”
“Yes, sir.” And then you’ll owe me the farm.
“I’ll tell your mother everyone is fine. Trip has been boring so far.”
“See? That’s where I get my peacemaking skills. I come from a long line of distinguished liars.”
Noah laughed and signed off. Tyler stared at the dark screen after his father’s face disappeared.
Dad’s laughter should feel good, but it doesn’t. If I disappoint him again—damnit! I’m still trying to get that story before bedtime. Grow up, Tyler. Dad doesn’t know how to play.
The viewports pulsed with the kaleidoscopic streaks of the Cumberland Tunnel, God’s eternal domain of space-time, twisted into a rainbow vortex by a vessel built with human hands. As the colors swirled past, Tyler felt swept up by the mystery of this sea of stars.
The Sioux City’s flight path skimmed the galaxy like a sailing ship tacking a deep ocean. Mariners crossed its expanse, but had no idea what mysterious lands awaited beyond the horizon, nor the unnumbered creatures who dwelled in silent depths below. With FTL and Jump Gates, star sailors crossed the Milky Way in a matter of weeks, or months for Rim-to-Rim voyages. But some regions were so densely packed with stars that Homo sapiens had explored less than eight percent after seven centuries of spaceflight.
Tyler smiled at the majesty of clouds concealing billions of unknown worlds. Even with FTL, the pace of human exploration was more turtle than hare. Eight percent, so far. If Terran starships somehow managed to visit four hundred new star systems per day, it would take two million years to cover the remaining ninety-two percent. Vast quadrants of the galaxy remained unvisited, and if unexplored space proved anything like the shoals already reached, civilizations undreamed and histories unknown awaited in the starry depths.
