Thief of Stars (Final Dawn, Book 2)

by T W M Ashford

  Or maybe that was just because his lungs felt weak and his mouth was as dry as the Paryx desert.

  He turned his numb gaze back to Charon. Without his imposing helmet, Charon was nothing but an old man. Well, not that old. Sixty-something. Perhaps the years hadn’t been too kind.

  And yet there was no denying it. Behind the thick, white, neatly-trimmed beard, past the deep lines etched into his slim, well-worn face, were the hauntingly familiar eyes of an astrophysicist once desperate to solve the riddle of Earth’s evacuation.

  It was Everett Reeves. It was the man who had accidentally sent Jack spiralling through a wormhole into the darkest depths of space. It had to be.

  Yet that raised an even more impossible question.

  If it was Everett Reeves sat before him, why did he look about thirty years his senior?

  “Erm, Jack?” Klik sidled over to him and gave him a friendly elbow in the ribs. “What’s next? It’s starting to get a little awkward.”

  “Well, I know what I’m supposed to get on with,” said Tuner, shrugging. He waddled off towards a quiet corner of the room, paused, and then came back to yank the comm panel off the sleeve of Charon’s spacesuit.

  “I’ll be having that,” he added.

  Cursing under his breath, Charon – Everett – turned back to Jack.

  “Yes, Jack. What’s the big idea?”

  Jack opened his mouth to say something, but he still couldn’t think of the words. All his questions had formed a blockage in his throat, and now nothing could get out.

  “Oh, screw this.” Klik extended the blade from one of her forearms. “Let me cut his head off and be done with it.”

  “No!” Finally, Jack’s inertia broke. He held out a hand towards Klik, but his next words were aimed at Charon. “Everett, do you even realise who I am?”

  Charon laughed. It sounded patronising.

  “Of course I remember you, you bloody idiot! Everett, though…” He scoffed. “God. Nobody’s called me by that name in a long time. But yes, Mr. Jack Bishop. I remember you. I remember the failed pilot so desperate to leave Earth that he signed up to an experiment he knew nothing about. Why do you think I wanted you to steal the Core for me? I can rattle off three dozen mercenaries who could have done a better job, but they never would have taken it. I should know. I asked a few of them. So when I heard that you were here, that you’d survived… I thought: That’s the man I need. Well, not exactly. I thought: That’s the sort of desperation I need.”

  “Wait a second.” Klik brought her face within inches of Jack’s own. “Do you know this guy?”

  “Know me?” Everett laughed. “I’m the reason the poor guy’s stuck out here in the first place.”

  “What’s he talking about, Jack?” asked Rogan. Jack wasn’t used to seeing her confused. “What’s going on?”

  “The wormhole experiment I told you about,” he replied. “The one which accidentally flung me out into space. Charon – Everett – was the person running it.”

  “Oh, bolts. That complicates things.”

  “Wait, how did you get out here?” Jack’s chest grew tight. His skin prickled with goosebumps. “I thought I was the only one. Does that mean…”

  “That the Arks launched? That humanity escaped to the stars?” Slowly, solemnly, Everett shook his head. “If only.”

  The tightness in Jack’s chest released, but something else fell away with it. Hope, probably. He’d had a momentary vision of a fleet of Ark ships waiting for him out towards the galaxy’s edge. Now that dream turned to dust.

  “No,” Everett continued. “After what happened to you, the project got shuttered. Well, put on hold – given the circumstances, it amounted to the same thing. The budget got pulled. Everyone got reallocated onto projects developing stasis chambers and ‘sustainable interstellar environments’ and what have you, none of which were ever going to work…”

  “Sorry, ‘what happened to me?’” Blood pulsed through Jack’s temples. He tasted iron. “You shot me through a goddamn wormhole, Everett! That’s what happened! What did everyone back home think happened to me?”

  Everett stared at him as if he was crazy.

  “We all thought you were dead, Jack. The chamber buckled in on itself under the pressure from the gravitational waves. We recreated the conditions of a neutron star in there. Nobody could have survived it.”

  Jack pointed a sarcastic finger at himself.

  “But there was no body in the wreckage, Jack. We couldn’t have known. Not until I returned to the lab a couple of months later and checked the feedback we got from your spacesuit, at least. What little information you sent back after going through was… extraordinary. It completely reshaped my understanding of how time and space influence one another. But not just that – it proved that my theory worked. It showed me I was right.

  “So I secretly funnelled the budget from other projects back into my own, rebuilding the chamber according to the diagnostics your suit had sent back. If you made it through, so could somebody else. So could a ship, or a fleet of ships, given enough power. And the continued failure of every other project only strengthened my resolve. It took me a year but I got the machine operational again. There was just one tiny problem.”

  “The government wouldn’t let you have any more unsuspecting guinea pigs,” said Jack, clenching his fists. “You had to test it on yourself.”

  “I was confident in my calculations.” Everett gritted his teeth and turned his head away. “It should have worked.”

  Jack’s own gaze fell to Everett’s armour. With a cold shiver he recognised it as a customised spacesuit, not dissimilar to the ones used during the later Mars missions and his own trip through the wormhole. It had buckled and warped around Everett’s torso. The man was incredibly lucky to be alive.

  “I was marginally off,” said Everett, noticing. Jack snapped his eyes back up. “The journey through almost tore me in half. My tether got sheered and the wormhole closed behind me. I was as lost as you… though I dare say you found yourself in far more hospitable company.”

  “Boo-freaking-hoo,” said Klik, sighing. “Jack, this is—”

  “No,” shouted Jack. Rogan and Klik exchanged a worried look. He instantly wished he’d hidden the hysteria in his voice better. “I need to hear this. Please.”

  He gestured to Everett’s beard and wrinkles.

  “But… but what happened to you? Why do you look so old?”

  “Time,” said Everett, as if it were the most obvious answer there ever was. “Time happened to me, boy. Don’t you get it? Wormholes don’t just bend the three dimensions of space – they make a cut through the dimension of time as well. My calculations were skewed on both fronts.” He nodded at Jack. “By the looks of things, I arrived about thirty years ahead of you.”

  Jack felt his stomach drop.

  “You’ve been out here for thirty years?”

  “Thereabouts. I did what was necessary to survive. I did what was necessary to get back home.”

  “To get back…” Jack’s suppressed a cold shiver. “Wait, you don’t mean…?”

  “That we’re after the exact same thing, Jack?” Everett laughed. Now it was his turn to sound a little unhinged. “That this plan you’re trying to put a stop to is the only way either one of us is ever going to see Earth again? Yes, Jack. But this is so much bigger than you or me. I apologise for deceiving you before, but it had to be done. All that matters now is the mission.”

  “Mission? What mission, Everett?”

  “The same mission as before, of course! To get everyone off that damned planet of ours before the sun kills everyone!”

  “Don’t listen to him, Jack.” Rogan jabbed the muzzle of her rifle at Everett. “He could be lying.”

  “No, he’s not.” Jack’s legs turned to mush beneath him. “I wish he was – at least, I think I do – but he’s not.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Klik raised her own rifle and for a second Jack was sure she was going to
shoot Everett in the face. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She spat out a Krettelian expletive and marched off towards the locked doors, throwing her rifle against the wall as she went.

  Everett let out a long and shaky breath.

  “She doesn’t get it,” he said. “That’s fine. I don’t blame her for wanting me dead. Maybe one day she’ll get her chance. But you understand… don’t you, Jack?”

  Jack wasn’t sure he did understand. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to. But the lives of everyone back on Earth were more important than any one person’s grudge. Amber’s life alone was more important.

  “What’s the plan?” he cautiously asked.

  Everett leaned forwards in his chair. Rogan brandished her rifle in an even more threatening manner, but it didn’t make any difference. It was as if Everett couldn’t even see she was there.

  “I’ve spent decades getting myself into a position where it’s even possible to attempt this,” he said in an excited whisper. “I’ve got every single detail right. What we’re talking about is manufacturing a gravitational density so immensely strong that it distorts time and space to the exact specifications we need to reach Earth.”

  “What you’re talking about is using the Core to create a black hole,” said Rogan, horrified. “A singularity of some kind.”

  “Exactly.” Everett didn’t seem to notice the fear and judgement in Rogan’s voice. “A tiny wormhole like the ones I used to make in my lab wouldn’t be anywhere near stable enough.” He glanced down at his mangled spacesuit. “They always collapsed too quickly.”

  “Stable enough for what?” asked Jack. The more he heard the less he seemed to understand.

  Rogan looked across at him with apologetic eyes. “Don’t listen to him, Jack. Please. Remember what I told you about the dangers of wormhole travel. Forming a black hole by choice is insane!”

  “Stable enough to remain open the whole time it takes go through and bring all of the Earth’s Ark ships back with us,” Everett replied triumphantly. “If it closes before we make the return journey, it’ll have all been for nothing.”

  “Jack!” Rogan was pleading with him now. “Ignore him!”

  “I get why we’d risk using a wormhole – sorry, black hole – to get home,” Jack said, speaking slowly because he was sure there had to be something obvious he was missing. “But why to bring the Arks back through? Isn’t that a bit dangerous, given they’ll be carrying the last remnants of all humanity? Subspace is a much safer technology – surely we could just retrofit them all with skip drives instead?”

  Rogan hung her head. Jack’s skin grew cold and taut again. So he was missing something. Predictably, Rogan had beat him to the punch.

  Everett cast a curious eye over him. “Because we need the singularity your friend here mentioned, Jack. Time slows down as it enters a black hole. Eventually there’s so much gravitational pressure, it stops completely. Getting to Earth is easy. Just head over to the Pudeeta B system, first rock from the sun. But without…”

  An expression of sad realisation spread across Everett’s face.

  “Oh, God. You really don’t know, do you?”

  “Know what? If you know where Earth is, why aren’t we headed there now?”

  “Because now is the problem, Jack! When we each shot through our respective wormholes, we didn’t just travel through space – we travelled through time as well. Tens of thousands of years into the future, in fact. Earth might be physically close, but there’s no home to go back to. I’m sorry, Jack. Everybody’s long dead.”

  Jack stumbled backwards, his legs shaking. Everett’s words were like a flurry of punches to his stomach. He lost his balance and sat down hard on the carpet.

  “Jack? Jack?” Rogan ducked down. “Are you okay?”

  Klik picked up her rifle and ran back over. “What happened? Did Charon do something?”

  “It can’t be,” Jack mumbled to himself. “They can’t be gone. They can’t all be gone.”

  “Come on, Jack.” Rogan snapped her fingers in front of his face. “Stay with us.”

  “Amber?” Jack jerked his head back up, his heart racing. “What about Amber?”

  Everett’s brow furrowed. “Who?”

  “My wife,” Jack replied through gritted teeth. Something wet landed on the back of his hand. It was only then he realised he was crying.

  “Ah.” Everett shrugged uncomfortably. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say.”

  Tuner came hurrying back over from the corner of the room, having spent all his attention on the data pad he stolen from Charon.

  “All done,” he said, brightly. “They’re on their… Oh. What in the galaxy happened here?”

  “Tell me something, Everett,” said Jack, staring down at the carpet. “There never was another chamber in another lab down the runway, was there?”

  Everett hesitated, then shook his head.

  “No, Jack. We always meant to send you into the cosmos. It was the only way to gather the data we needed. But the intention was always to bring you back.”

  Jack continued to stare at the floor.

  “We would have had years,” he sighed. “We could have spent a lifetime together if I’d stayed behind.”

  “But don’t you see, Jack?” Everett grew excited again. “You still can! If you work with me to get the Iris operational, you still can!”

  Jack shook his head. He suddenly felt very weary.

  “You said it yourself. Everybody’s dead. We’re the only humans left. The past has already happened – nothing we do is going to change that.”

  “Yeah. It’s a load of crap.” Klik tried to figure it out. “Paradox, isn’t it? Because if you could change it, it already would have been changed in the past… right?”

  “Right.” Tuner tried hard to catch up. “We wouldn’t be having this conversation because humans never would have gone extinct in the first place.”

  “You can skip forward in time,” agreed Rogan, “and you can slow down time relative to somebody else. But there’s no going back and changing things. Smarter people have tried.”

  “Oh, poppycock.” Everett sneered at the lot of them. “A door opens both ways. If one can step through to the future, there’s no physical reason why one can’t step back into the past. The hole through spacetime is already there.”

  “And how do you suppose to bypass the tachyon stream?” asked Rogan, one eyebrow raised.

  “Bypass the…” Everett laughed and shook his head. “Don’t test me, bolthead. This is my life’s work. I know what I’m doing. I won’t be stopped by the likes of you.”

  “Says the idiot stuck in an armchair,” said Klik.

  “Oh, give me a break.” Everett rolled his eyes. “If you came here to kill me you’d have done it by now.”

  Jack raised his pounding head to look at Tuner. He didn’t need to ask the question. Tuner nodded.

  “It doesn’t matter. None of it does.” Jack climbed back to his feet and wiped the tears from his face with the back of his hand. “It’s over, Everett. Humanity is gone. Your grand experiment is finished. It’s time you answered for your crimes – to the automata, to the Krettelians, to everyone else you’ve hurt or killed to get here.”

  Everett burst out laughing.

  “Yeah? And who’s going to do that, Jack? You? Your little band of misfits here?”

  Everett’s smile faltered as he heard the unmistakable rumble of thruster fire. He sprung from his chair and sprinted across the room to the long panoramic window on its rear wall.

  Dozens of sleek, golden ships blinked into existence in the night sky. Others had already begun their furious descent through the moon’s atmosphere.

  “You idiot,” gasped Everett, staring up at the stars. “What the hell have you done?”

  “The Mansa want a word with you,” said Jack, smiling morosely through the heartache. “They’ve come to take their Core back.”

  21

  The Mansa Armada
/>   The Mansa Empire’s armada descended upon Everett’s grounded ship. Though dawn threatened to replace the short-lived night, the shadow of the fleet plunged the view outside into darkness. The trees bowed and groaned as the first of the battlecruisers came to a stop only a couple hundred metres above the rainforest.

  “You’re a goddamn fool, Jack,” Everett snapped, staring horrified at the advancing wave of gold. “I’m this close to saving our entire species from extinction. This close! And you want to jeopardise that?”

  Jack’s stomach lurched. No, he didn’t. In truth, that was the last thing he wanted. Had things gone differently – had Everett approached Jack before becoming Charon, before subjecting the automata to slavery, slaughtering the Krettelian resistance and God knows what else – then Jack would have been only too happy to help. But now… well, it wasn’t worth all the pain and bloodshed.

  Was it?

  Besides. Everett was talking about time travel. Even after everything he’d seen in the galaxy, Jack found that a little too far-fetched. Clearly the man had been brushed by madness during his great many lonely years in the cosmos.

  If there was another way to get home, Jack would find it.

  “It’s too late now anyway,” he said. The absurd reality that Amber was long dead rose to the forefront of his mind, and his voice threatened to break. “Things have gone far enough. Do the—”

  He doubled over in tears as an enormous wave of horror and grief came crashing over him. Tuner put a supportive arm around his waist as he sobbed. Rogan stepped forwards and took over, her rifle at the ready.

  “Do the right thing, Charon,” she said. “Surrender quietly. Face the punishment.”

  “Either with us or with them,” added Klik. Judging by the venomous look on her face, she evidently hoped he favoured one option over the other.

  “I’m not taking orders from a robot and an insect,” Everett snapped, marching back across the room. His gamble that neither Rogan or Klik was prepared to shoot him paid off. The stolen Solar Core sat in a little ceremonial claw on a wooden dresser; he snatched it up and brandished it maniacally at the ramshackle group.