“Seventy point one days elapsed for us since we entered the tanks while approximately four hundred and twenty days elapsed on Earth.”
The bridge grew quiet. Everyone had been expecting that, but somehow it was only really hitting them now. Their loved ones back on Earth had already been waiting more than a year for them to return. Alexander wondered if Caty had moved on already.
“Good work, Davorian. Send that data to Hayes so that he can attach it to our message home. They can check your math on their end once the message arrives.”
“Yes, sir. One minute to arrival in the Wonderland System.”
“Better hurry up and send that message then. Hayes—did we receive anything from Earth while we were in the tanks?”
“A few pings went back and forth, but nothing more substantial than that.”
“Guess the president was serious about comm silence. Well, at least we know someone’s still alive and checking on us.” Alexander winced as he said that. Not the best idea to remind everyone about the war that had broken out before they left.
“Message sent,” Hayes reported.
“Good. Get ready to send a second one. Another snapshot from sensors. Coordinate with Vasquez to send it at the exact instant that we emerge from the wormhole.”
“Yes, sir.”
“ETA thirty seconds!” Davorian called out.
The countdown appeared at the top of the main viewscreen, and Alexander watched stars and space ripple around them as they approached the end of the wormhole. It looked as if they were trapped inside a glass bottle looking out. The countdown reached 10 seconds and a robotic voice began echoing through the bridge.
“Ten, nine, eight… three, two, one.”
A dazzling flash of light blinded Alexander and he called out, “Punch it, Hayes!” Bright spots danced before his eyes in a sea of darkness. He was blind!
A more rational thought occured to him—no matter how bright that burst of light had been, it couldn’t have flash-blinded him. There were no physical viewports on the bridge, and holoscreens couldn’t generate enough lumens to blind him.
Alexander looked around. All the crew stations were dark. He felt weightless, so the engines were offline, too. But most troubling of all was the ringing silence. Even life support was offline.
The Lincoln was completely dead in space.
CHAPTER 15
The crew exclaimed about the situation in a confusing babble of voices. A light snapped on, and absolute darkness peeled away to reveal a world of shadows that shifted and danced as that light swept around the room. More lights swelled out of the darkness, and dimly-lit faces appeared.
Helmet lamps. Alexander yelled to be heard above the rising tumult. “Quiet!” Silence fell, and he continued, “McAdams, what the hell just happened?”
“I don’t know, sir. Everything is offline, so I can’t exactly run a system diagnostic to find out.”
“Then give me your best guess.”
Davorian answered first. “That flash of light could have been caused by some kind of arcing. Positively-charged particles and negatively-charged ones coming into contact with each other. The outer hull must have built up either a strong positive or negative charge while we were traveling through the wormhole, and when we emerged we came into contact with a cloud of oppositely-charged particles.”
“You mean like the ionized hydrogen in a nebula?” Alexander asked, remembering the reddish strands he’d seen between the stars in Wonderland’s galaxy. “Wait a minute—are you saying we just got hit by space lightning?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Vasquez said.
“You have a better theory?” Davorian replied.
“Hold on,” Alexander said. “Why doesn’t it make sense, Vasquez?”
“Because the gas particles inside a nebula are too spread out to cause lightning. They need to be in close contact, brushing up against each other, exchanging electrons.”
“So what if this nebula is dense enough to cause that?” Davorian asked.
“A dense nebular cloud in the middle of a star system?”
“Why not?” Davorian asked.
“Because any free-floating clouds of gas would gravitate toward the system’s sun and nearby planets, not collapse in on themselves,” Vasquez replied.
“Not if the wormhole has a stronger gravitational pull,” Davorian insisted.
“What kind of data do we have from the previous probe missions?” Korbin asked.
“A few unlovely tunnel-vision snapshots like the one we took just before we emerged from the wormhole,” Vasquez said.
That set off alarm bells in Alexander’s head. “Wait a minute—you mean we don’t have any real sensor data from the Wonderland side of the wormhole?”
“I thought you knew that, sir?”
Alexander recalled his briefing with Admiral Flores. She’d said the probes all stopped transmitting soon after they arrived, not before. Alexander smacked his palms into the armrests of his acceleration couch. “Damn it!”
“What’s wrong?” Korbin asked.
Alexander switched to a private comms channel with his XO. “They tricked us, Commander. They sent us out here without even knowing whether we actually could make it through the wormhole alive. They knew that all the probe missions failed before arrival, and they sent us anyway. They didn’t even give us the dignity of the truth. This whole mission was one big fat shot in the dark—literally!”
“Well, I knew,” McAdams said before Korbin could reply to his rant. “It was part of my briefing on Orbital One.”
Alexander blinked and mentally switched back to the bridge’s comm channel. “Did everyone here get a different briefing?”
McAdams went on, “Maybe they told me because I’m the only one who can do something about it. Our redundant systems were all upgraded to provide extra protection against electrical surges. The mission planners knew what they were up against, but for some reason, they didn’t think to tell everyone.”
“And you didn’t think to mention this until now.”
“I didn’t think it was important until now, sir. And I didn’t realize that no one else knew. Sorry, sir.”
Alexander grunted. “Well that doesn’t explain why we’re all still sitting in the dark. The backups should have come online by now.”
“Some of the circuitry for the automatic switch-over must have been fried, but I should be able to get things running again. All I need to do is get to the engine room and manually switch to the redundant systems.”
Alexander activated his helmet lamps and unbuckled his harness. “Then what are we waiting for? Let’s go.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Davorian—”
“I have the conn?”
“You’re a mind reader. Korbin, you’re with me and McAdams.”
“Yes, sir.”
Alexander pushed out of his chair and floated back toward the elevators. With power out all over the ship, the elevators weren’t working, but that’s what the access ladders in the shafts were for. Alexander mentally activated the microjets in his pressure suit and fired a few bursts from his palms to keep himself on course. He reached the elevator doors and grabbed one of guide rails to keep from bouncing away.
Korbin and McAdams reached the guide rail on the other side of the doors and waited while he opened an access panel to expose the manual crank. He worked the crank with one hand while he held onto the rail with his other. Once the doors were open wide enough for them to climb through, they piled in and McAdams opened the access hatch in the floor of the elevator, exposing the fathomless depths of the shaft below them. As they climbed down, Alexander’s mind went to the problem at hand—what had disabled the Lincoln in the first place?
Space lightning? Alexander didn’t buy it. Vasquez was right; it would take a very dense nebula to cause that. Something on the order of a planetary atmosphere. But what else might have happened?
&
nbsp; Alien interference? He recalled Admiral Flores telling him that the wormhole probably wasn’t naturally-occurring, and Max Carter was assigned to the Lincoln in order to handle first contact if the need arose, but Alexander still didn’t give the idea of alien involvement much credence. If there were aliens guarding the exit of the wormhole, then why hadn’t they traveled through to visit Earth?
Reassuring as that logic was, his certainty eroded steadily as they crawled down the elevator shaft. Their head lamps cast deep shadows in every doorway on every level, and Alexander’s heart pounded, his mind conjuring alien monsters to fill in the blank spaces.
Suddenly all of those shadows vanished. Lights snapped on inside the elevator shaft, and the ship lurched back into motion, accelerating at a full G.
The ladder rungs ripped free of Alexander’s hands and he fell head first toward the bottom of the elevator shaft. McAdams and Korbin went tumbling down ahead of him, both screaming. The acceleration stopped just as suddenly as it began, but the damage was already done. The bottom of the elevator shaft came rushing toward them at more than 10 meters per second.
Smack!
All the shadows came rushing back.
CHAPTER 16
Alexander woke up lying in the ship’s infirmary. A nurse came in, followed by Doctor Crespin. The nurse checked his vital signs, and Doctor Crespin came to stand beside his bed.
“How are you feeling, Captain?”
Alexander struggled to remember what had happened to bring him to the infirmary. Then he recalled hitting the bottom of the elevator shaft, and he winced. “I’m okay, I think.”
“You took a nasty fall.”
Alexander tried to sit up, but Crespin placed a hand on his chest to stop him. “Easy. Let me help.” He reached out and adjusted something below the cot, and the top half of it began to rise, lifting him into a sitting position.
“How’s that?” Crespin asked.
“Fine. How long was I out? And where are McAdams and Korbin?”
“We’re still monitoring them, but there were no serious injuries. And to answer your question, you’ve been unconscious for about an hour.”
“That sounds like a pretty bad concussion to me.”
“We’re going to keep you here under observation while we make the approach to Wonderland.”
“We’re on approach already? What did I miss? And how the hell did this happen? There are fail-safes to prevent the engines from coming online suddenly after a power failure.”
“Easy, Captain. From what I understand, the power surge fried the safeties.”
“But not the engines? Great. I’ll have to congratulate the engineers who built this ship when we get back to Earth. They built more surge protection into the engines than they did into the emergency cut-outs that might stop them from turning us all into pancakes.”
“Bad luck, Captain. Fortunately, Davorian was able to kill thrust manually.”
“What about the wormhole? Did it collapse? And did we confirm the source of the power surge?”
“I don’t know, but you should be resting. I can check into all of that for you.”
“No, where’s my comm band? If you need to keep me here, at least let me stay in touch with my crew.”
Crespin hesitated, but then he nodded and ordered the nurse to bring Alexander his personal belongings. A moment later the nurse returned and passed a bundle of clothes to the doctor. Crespin found the comm band and handed it to him. Alexander put it on and made a call to Davorian.
“It’s good to hear from you, sir.”
“Report, Lieutenant.”
“We are three days out from Wonderland at a steady one G of deceleration. Repair crews are busy getting our systems back online, but the critical ones came back by themselves.”
“What caused the power surge?”
“Well, it wasn’t lightning. We ran into a belt of intense radiation around the exit of the wormhole. The crew is calling it the David Davorian Belt. If we’d known the belt existed we could have shut down the ship’s systems ahead of time and cruised safely through.”
“We’ll keep that in mind for next time. What about the wormhole? Did it collapse?”
“Not yet, sir.”
Alexander blinked. “We’d better send Earth an update before it does.”
“I don’t think the wormhole is going to collapse, sir.”
“Really?” Alexander tried not to get his hopes up. “What makes you say that?”
“For one thing, we were able to see straight through to the galaxy on this end while we were still inside the wormhole. That means it was already open; we didn’t have to force it open. The radiation belt explains the failed probe missions. I’m not sure how scientists came up with the collapsing gateway theory that you mentioned in your mission brief, but I think we’ve effectively disproved it.”
“So we don’t need anyone to rescue us.”
“No, sir.”
“That’s really good news, Lieutenant. I hope you’re right.”
“So do I, sir.”
“Has Hayes sent a mission update back through the wormhole?”
“Not yet.”
“What’s he waiting for?”
“Are you sure you want to send an update?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“We already know that our probe data fell into enemy hands. Whatever we send now could be intercepted or leaked to the enemy as well.”
“Encrypt the transmission and keep it short on details. All the Alliance really needs to know at this point is that we made it here safely, the wormhole is open, not shut, and we’re on our way to Wonderland to assess the planet’s habitability. Oh, and tell them about the David Davorian Belt and how to avoid radiation damage for future missions.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Let me know if there are any other interesting developments.”
“Yes, sir.”
Alexander ended the call and settled back against his cot.
Doctor Crespin had stuck around to eavesdrop. “Sounds like good news, Captain,” he said.
“The best.” Alexander couldn’t help grinning. He was going to see Caty again! Maybe in just a few short months—from his perspective anyway. From hers, two and a half years would have passed. That wasn’t an insignificant amount of time, but it wasn’t a whole decade either. Now he regretted giving her permission to move on without him. What if she’d already moved on?
“You may as well get some rest, Captain,” Doctor Crespin said on his way out.
“I’m not tired.”
“Maybe not, but your body needs time to recover.”
Alexander sighed. “Yes, Doc.”
“I’ll have one of the nurses bring you your dinner.”
* * *
387 Days Ago - April 11, 2790
(Earth’s Frame of Reference)
The passenger compartment was full of dirty, shell-shocked faces. Caty had been expecting to see sick and injured people, but the ones rescued were all like her—more or less intact. People eyed her with unblinking stares, and she eyed them back. She clutched her pack of survival gear to her chest like a teddy bear—her shield against the world.
From the air the devastation was immense. Caty looked out the window and felt ill. There were mountains of debris and rubble in all directions. LA was a wasteland all the way out to the smoke-clouded horizon, and there wasn’t a single shred of anything green.
Caty shuddered and looked away. The pilot came on the intercom and told them they were going back to the shelter now to drop them off and re-fuel before continuing their search. Relieved sighs and exclamations bounced from one passenger to another. Then someone came back into the passenger compartment to ask if any of them were natural-borns and to raise their hands if they were.
The rescue worker said something about radiation sickness being more likely if they were natural-born. Caty scanned the dirty faces around her, her gaze flicking from one person to the next. They all had colorful eyes
and hair—but that didn’t mean much, hair and eye color could be changed with retroactive treatments. Caty had opted for those treatments herself; she’d been born with brown eyes and hair, but had later changed her eyes to blue and hair to blond. More telling (and impossible to change after birth without surgery) were the passengers’ exaggerated feminine and masculine features. Skin tones ranged the gamut, but all of them were stunningly beautiful, and that could only mean one thing: they were all geners. Besides her, no other natural-borns had been rescued. Maybe that was just an unfortunate side effect of the fact that geners had the money to afford shelters in their homes and so-called degenerates typically didn’t, but Caty wasn’t too sure.
“Ma’am?” someone asked close beside her ear.
Caty flinched and turned to see who it was.
It was the rescue worker. “Are you a natural-born?” he asked.
She nodded without thinking.
The man smiled and went back into the cockpit. Then the pilot announced that they would be arriving at the shelter in Irvine soon. Irvine… Caty thought, trying to picture it on a map.
Smack in the middle between the blast craters in LA and San Diego.
Twenty minutes later as the van hovered down, Caty saw a vast field of tents and camp fires. So much for shelter. More like a refugee camp. Still, it was better than nothing.
The van touched down with a muffled thump and she rose to her feet. She was eager to get out of the cramped passenger compartment. Caty dragged her pack over to the doors at the back of the van. She was first in line. No one else seemed to be in a hurry to get up.
The doors slid open, and a rescue worker came up behind her. “Head to the circus tent for processing,” he said, pointing dead ahead.
It was hard to miss the big red and white pinstriped tent. “I guess it’s too much to ask for someone to hold my hand,” Caty said.
“I have to get back out there,” the worker replied.
Caty nodded and started down the ramp, dragging her pack behind her as she went. Everywhere she looked dirty, bleak faces turned to stare at her. None of them were wearing hazmat suits, but at this distance the fallout wouldn’t be too dangerous. She was relieved to see that all of the people in the immediate area seemed to be natural-borns even though everyone in the van had been a gener.
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