by James Palmer
McCoy glanced around, nodding. He had been on board his share of Galactic Navy vessels, but he had never seen a bridge quite like this one. The Star Lance was experimental in every way, it seemed. “Well, let’s do the best we can. If we can just shut down the skip engine, return to normal space, we’ll let the Navy sort it out.”
“I believe I have identified those controls. Along with some alien circuitry.”
“Alien? You mean Faash’Tan.”
“Negative. This is more advanced than what we know of Faash’Tan technology.”
“That isn’t much.” McCoy plopped himself down in the captain’s chair. “We’ve got gravity. What about life support?”
“We have basic life support. Oxygen and heating are fully operational.”
“Good,” said Mars, removing his helmet. “I was getting claustrophobic.” He sniffed the air cautiously. It was a little stale, but breathable, and the temperature, while cool, was comfortable. “You know, I’m wondering why we have any power at all. Even a Navy battle cruiser can’t go twenty-seven years without refueling. And what about that force field around the damaged areas?”
“Perhaps those are some of the experimental, top secret features.”
The Lance shuddered once more, a jarring motion that sent a section of the ceiling over the right rear section of the bridge crashing to the floor and sparks flying.
“We need to know what’s causing that,” said McCoy.
“If I had to guess,” said Betty-12, pointing toward the view port. “I would say that is the cause.”
Mars followed her gaze toward the view port, and saw something that chilled his blood.
*
When the Black Hole exited null space it was not alone. A Navy battle group of five attack cruisers formed a defensive perimeter along the outer edge of the Oort cloud, while a hundred thousand kilometers away three Orgum-Ree destroyers and four pirate vessels waited just outside the Oort cloud.
“This should be interesting,” muttered Commander Verne darkly. “Voroshilov!”
“Da.”
Verne winced, turned around. “It looks like the entire Fringe knows about the Star Lance.”
“Yes. But the Navy will crush our opposition and reclaim the Lance.”
Commander Verne shook his head. “It’s going to be an absolute bloodbath to get to that point. All personnel! Battle stations!”
The hangar bay was filled with running men and women, human, alien and android, running to their fueled and ready Black Birds and preparing for takeoff.
Voroshilov barked similar orders to his comrades aboard the Navy frigates and battle cruisers that hovered within just a few thousand kilometers of the three massive Orgum-Ree ships, their strangely shaped spires and protrusions bristling with weaponry.
One of the pirate ships skipped away into null space, its cowardly captain no longer lured by the easy pickings an unprotected, derelict Star Lance would offer. The rest of them closed in fast, hitting one of the Orgum-Ree ships with blaster-cannon fire.
“The pirate ship the Pulse is deeper within the Oort cloud,” said the Black Hole’s tactical officer. “We’re not picking up any other ships.”
“Not even a Black Bird?” asked Verne worriedly.
“No Sir.”
Verne sighed. “Thank you, Lieutenant. Voroshilov. How do you want to play this?”
“The Star Lance is top secret classified property of the Galactic Navy and cannot fall into alien hands.”
“You mean enemy hands.”
“Yes, of course.”
Verne narrowed his eyes at the Russian. The man had always been a xenophobe, but it might get the better of him here. “Launch all Black Birds. I want the Star Lance secured.”
With a roar of thrusters every Black Bird aboard the Black Hole launched into space, blaster cannons at the ready. The Orgum-Ree ships responded in kind, opening up to belch forth swarms of insect-like vessels that spit blaster fire.
“Tell the Navy to get chatty with the Orgum-Ree homeworld,” said Verne. “Or we’re gonna have an intergalactic incident on our hands.”
Voroshilov nodded, still barking commands and answering questions from unseen parties, holding an earbud in his right ear.
The Orgum-Ree launched smaller vessels, sleek craft that looked lethal to the touch. One of the Black Birds disappeared in a blossom of fire, seconds before an answering volley from that ship’s wing man sent the Orgum-Ree attackers into oblivion.
“This is going from bad to worse really quick,” said Verne, pacing the Black Hole’s command center, his boots thudding heavily against the metal decking.
“The Orgum-Ree demand we share the Star Lance’s technology with them,” said Voroshilov, his hand touching the earbud inside his right ear.
“They are, huh?” said Verne, annoyed. He knew what the expansionist Orgum-Ree meant by share.
Voroshilov nodded. “They think we are going to use the Lance to destroy them.”
“That’s crazy! We’ve had good relations with them for a hundred years.”
“We’ve had strained relations with them for a hundred years,” Voroshilov corrected. Verne stared at Voroshilov for a long moment. He knew they had to keep the Star Lance out of enemy hands, especially pirates. But what they were doing here could spark an interplanetary war, and he didn’t need that on his conscience. He also didn’t need some Navy lackey to tell him their relationship with the Orgum-Ree was tenuous at best, and that most of the mantis-like aliens would rather eat a human than look at one.
“Let’s destroy the Lance," he said at last. “That will show the Orgum-Ree that we can’t destroy them with something we don’t have, and those blasted space pirates will no longer have a target for their greed. Then we’ll blast those thugs back to Brigand.”
Voroshilov shook his head slowly. “My orders are to retrieve the Star Lance intact.”
Verne grumbled. “Very well. It’s Navy property, so it’s their show. But I’m not going to put my men in danger just so the Navy can have their toy back.”
Voroshilov scowled and went back to coordinating with the Navy fleet. The velvet blackness outside the Black Hole’s viewport was alive with blaster fire and tiny dots exploding as they were hit. The Navy vessels clearly took the lead, firing on the Orgum-Ree and pirate ships with equal ferocity. Verne hoped this wouldn’t turn into a galactic incident followed by years of war, but he was glad for the extra firepower.
“Where is McCoy?” he asked the busy command center.
*
McCoy stood frozen, after several minutes staring at the horror that looked back at them through the viewport.
It was an enormous eye or, more aptly, a hideous caricature of an eye. A vast grey bulk was shoved against the viewport, which held a gigantic pus-white orb that took up the center portion of the viewport. It quivered as it fixed them in its inscrutable gaze. McCoy had never been so frightened. He felt like the ant being stared down by a petulant child with a magnifying glass. The eye looked blind, but it looked upon them with such malevolence that McCoy knew with every fiber of his being that he and Betty-12 were being watched.
“It appears Monaik was right,” said Betty-12 without emotion. “We are not alone.”
Then, strangely, suddenly, the thing vanished.
“Either we both really saw something,” said McCoy. “Or we’re going nuts.”
“Androids cannot go nuts.”
“That doesn’t make me feel any better. I want to know exactly what happened here.”
“We should be able to pull the ship’s logs,” said Betty-12. “Whatever happened to the crew and to the ship couldn’t have happened all at once.”
“Let’s do it. The Navy keeps meticulous records; this ship would have been no different, no matter what strangeness they ran into.”
McCoy sat in the captain’s chair and reviewed the console before him. A diagram of the ship was lit up, showing sections of the hull that were breached. These areas were outlined in re
d, and McCoy surmised that this indicated the force field which seemed to protect the rest of the ship from the vacuum of space, while letting the Black Bird 5 pass through. But there were other strange things he didn’t recognize as being part of any ship he was familiar with.
“Lieutenant.”
Betty-12 walked over next to him and looked at the diagram.
“What do you make of this?” McCoy pointed to the section containing the engine room, where a small white dot pulsed and flickered.
“A power source?”
McCoy nodded. “Could be that experimental drive the legends mention. I sure would like to get a look at that thing.”
“It is not essential to our mission. I’m sure the Navy would take offense.”
“I know. I’ll get the ship’s logs called up; you work on getting us out of wherever we are.”
“Aye,” said Betty-12 and went back to work at the navigation console.
McCoy familiarized himself with the captain’s console, which really wasn’t much different from the usual Navy or Space Patrol technology he knew. Another minute and he had the last thing the captain worked on.
The viewer flickered to life, replacing the weird white light streaming through the viewport with the interior of the bridge.
A tall, middle-aged man with a military buzz cut stood before the log recorder camera.
“Ship’s log,” he said. “This is Captain John Bryson. It has been almost thirty-six hours since the anomaly as our science officer has termed it, occurred. We don’t know where we are, or how to get back, but we know that we are in a region of space, perhaps an area of the space-time continuum, that is unknown to science.”
The captain paused, lifted his left arm at the elbow, flexing his artificial hand. McCoy gasped. He stepped on that same mechanical hand in the mess hall.
“Our science officer believes what happened has something to do with the experimental drive we were testing as part of our mission. The alien technology we reverse-engineered makes use of a quantum singularity for power, and there were unforeseen side effects to using this power source.”
Captain Bryson looked down at the floor, lost in thought. “We will try shutting down the drive, to see if that returns us to regular space. With any luck, my next log entry will be done with the Lance safely in space dock. Bryson out.”
“I know what that dot on the engine room diagram is,” said Betty-12.
Before McCoy could ask what she meant, another log began playing.
“Ship’s log, Captain John Bryson speaking. “Our attempt to shut down the singularity has failed, but the ship has skipped, at least temporarily, into regular space. We are now attempting to make contact with someone who can help us, but there is a lot of null space distortion emanating, we believe, from the singularity.”
The log broke off suddenly, and was quickly replaced by the next one on the list, which was posted three days later.
“We skipped again. We are in a unknown region of space. The positions of the stars don’t match our charts, and the ones that do are so far from where our charts say they should be that our science officer, Lieutenant Tracer, believes we may have skipped through time as well. I am inclined to believe him, as the stars are redshifted as well. I think we have skipped to the end of time. The crew is uneasy, and my officers and I fear mutiny.”
The next log began, showing a very different officer. He stared, red-eyed, looking as if he hadn’t slept in days. He was unshaven and his body shook nervously as he talked, his voice a stage whisper.
“It has been . . . I don’t know. Months. Years. Does it even matter anymore? My crew, my officers, have all turned against me. My science officer has immersed himself in the alien tech. It totally consumed him. He has strange light in his eyes, and he speaks sometimes in an unknown tongue our ship’s translator can’t decipher. He brings others to his cause. They huddle in groups of three or four in the corridors, and there are symbols and markings on the walls of their crew quarters, and in the engine room. They look like circuit diagrams, and they are scrawled in metallic ink. When the lights dim during the day crew’s sleep cycle, the diagrams have a faint glow. I think Tracer tapped into the ship’s power with them somehow, and they are doing something to the ship . . . the crew.
“At first, we thought Tracer was coming down with space psychosis. I put him on light duty, the ship’s physician put him on anti-depression meds. Then I found him in his quarters scrawling numbers on his walls. Prime numbers. He didn’t stop until he listed every prime number he could think of. The man was always brilliant; now I fear he has gone mad. God and the Emperor help me, I thought he would get better. We needed him. I put him back on duty. Oh, God!”
Captain Bryson paused now, putting his good hand to his forehead and mopping sweat from his high brow.
“I don’t know how Tracer turned them against me. He told them he saw something in his quarters. Something that frightened him and gave him hope at the same time. He said he knew what happened to the aliens on that long-dead world where we found the singularity technology. He said they weren’t dead. He said he knew how to get us home, and that if we helped the aliens, they would help us.”
Captain Bryson paused again, as if collecting his thoughts.
McCoy glanced at Betty-12, who busied herself with the engine controls while she kept an eye on the viewer. Her face showed no emotion. McCoy envied her emotional detachment.
Captain Bryson mopped his brow again and continued. “There is talk of an Eater of Space. Tracer saw it in his quarters, and now others have seen it as well. Tracer said it could take us home, and he spent every moment dissecting the alien tech. I tried to stop him, throw him in the brig, but my officers and men-at-arms had already turned against me. They confined me to quarters instead. Can you believe it?”
“The ship continues to skip in and out of null space, going God knows where, while the crew busy themselves with carrying out Tracer’s insane wishes. They gather in the mess hall, which is near my quarters, and I can hear them chanting sometimes in that alien tongue Tracer sometimes spoke in the beginning. I can’t sleep when they do that. But what’s even worse is what they say in Standard English. I can hear them saying ‘Eater,’ ‘Eater,’ Eater’.”
“They are going to come for me. I know. Eaters need food. Someone’s coming!”
The ship’s log had come to an end. There were no more entries. The viewer flicked off, leaving them with a clear view of the strangeness outside. McCoy was pleased that the thing they had seen earlier was still nowhere to be seen.
“The captain went nuts.”
“It sounds like the entire crew went insane,” said Betty-12.
“So,” said McCoy, eager to change the subject. “Can we get out of here?”
“Unknown. We can probably get the thrusters going, assuming enough of them are still intact, but the skip engine is already unstable. Even if we can leave not space, as Monaik called it, there is no way to be certain where we will end up.”
“I’m more worried about being anywhere that thing outside is. Set a course for anywhere but here.”
Betty-12 turned and stared at her commanding officer, not comprehending. Then she nodded and sat down at a console, pressing buttons.
There was a shudder far to their rear, and McCoy was pleased that even in a ship this size he could still feel the familiar vibration of a ship’s thrusters.
“Nice job, Lieutenant,” said McCoy.
“That wasn’t me,” said Betty-12. “The thrusters engaged on their own. Something else is operating the Star Lance’s thrusters and feeding it navigational data.”
McCoy ran to Betty-12's side at the helm. “Can we stop it?”
“Negative. Controls are not responding. Skip engine is engaging.”
They watched through the viewport as the familiar rainbow-colored hole opened in front of the ship and enveloped it. When the light faded they were in what appeared to be normal space.
“I wonder if the scie
nce officer, Tracer, hardwired this puppy to work from the engine room,” said McCoy.
“It is a possibility,” said Betty-12.
“Maybe we can shut it down from there.”
McCoy picked up his helmet and placed it over his head, listening for the telltale snap and hiss of the environmental seal closing itself, while Betty-12 did likewise.
“Make sure your blaster is ready,” said McCoy. “We don’t know who or what we’re going to find down there.”
Betty-12 checked the diagram of the Star Lance before they left the bridge, memorizing the way to the engine room. As they made their way through now-familiar sections of corridor, McCoy noticed how much easier it was, because they knew which paths to take, at least for now, and already cleared their path from obstructions. In minutes they were back at the mess hall with its pile of bodies and, without looking at the decades-old carnage within and, turning right at the next junction, continued onward toward the engine room.
McCoy started feeling edgy, the short hairs on the back of his neck tingling. He placed a ready hand on his blaster.
“Betty, ever get the feeling you’re being watched?”
“I have heard other humans speak of this phenomena. Are all members of your species psychic?”
Something lunged from the shadows, slamming into Betty-12 and knocking her to the deck.
McCoy instinctively drew his blaster as an ungodly screech pierced the darkness. He trained his suit lights on the blackness ahead of him, but saw only more darkness. Betty-12 was sitting up now, her gaze focused on the grim corridor ahead.
“Are you all right?”
“I am undamaged.” Betty-12 quickly stood, here eyes scanning the darkness ahead of them.
“It’s gone,” said McCoy.
“It’s there.”
Betty-12 pointed to the path in front of them, her android eyes no doubt witnessing what McCoy’s human eyes could not. “It’s watching us.”
McCoy squinted into the gloom. His suit lights could make out nothing ahead but a section of corridor lined with dusty, dented storage lockers. “I don’t see anything.”
“Even so, it is there.”
She drew her blaster. “The creature we saw outside the ship isn’t the only denizen of not space.”
