Micah Trace and the Shattered Gate

by Eric Swanson

  Slowly, his grip slacked until he released the black cord entirely and Tobiah fell away from the ship, arms wide.

  Tobiah’s limp body turned away from the ship as he spun to the end of the tether. A metal-on-metal clink would have come at the end of the tether’s clasp, but there’s no sound in the vacuum of space.

  “Tob-- no, buddy…” Wes looked around for a beat then took off. “Micah, take comms!” Wes screamed to the Mimic as he galloped out of the Command Center toward the corridor.

  “Ok…” Micah whispered assurances to himself as he stepped into Wes’s place at Comms. “Do we—”

  Micah looked up from his console and met Meremoth’s eyes. His expression was one of bewilderment and it unnerved Meremoth for a beat.

  “You know this room, Micah.” Meremoth said plainly, with force.

  “I do.” Micah replied with a curt nod. With that, he set about clicking on the keyboard before him. “I… think I can…” Micah started slowly. After a few clicks, a status bar popped onto the screen, all red. “ANDI, patch me through to Wes.”

  After a few familiar tones, ANDI spoke: “You are connected to the hallway outside the airlock chamber, Micah.”

  “Wes?!” Micah yelled into the open connection.

  As Micah’s broadcasted voice echoed about the corridor outside the airlock chamber for a second before Wes came around the corner at full speed. His strawberry blonde hair flipped back and forth, fast, with each step. “Mike?! Is Tob-“

  “We’re running out of time!” Micah yelled back. “I can’t automate even a partial retraction of the tether, the system doesn’t…”

  Wes groaned in frustration for a moment as he looked around the corridor. “Ok.” Wes spoke after a quiet, searching moment with his eyes set on the airlock door. “Mike, give me thirty seconds then open the airlock!”

  “Open the—” Micah scoffed in disbelief. “Wes, I’m no—”

  Wes pushed a button on the wall to the airlock chamber door’s left and mag-boots appeared in the cubbyhole. He grabbed a pair and the cubbyhole slid closed with a whir.

  “Twenty seconds, Mike.” Wes said, eyes on the black of space through the chamber door. He slipped both boots on and stepped right up to the shut door, nose nearly touching the steel. Wes reached down and pushed the same buttons Tobiah had earlier and the Mag-Tabs clanked into place against the steel corridor floor.

  Wes staggered his feet, left in front, for a better vertical base. “Ten seconds, Mike!” Wes yelled, nerves getting the better of him just a bit.

  Wes twinkled the fingers on his left hand and prepared to reach into a partially depressurized room. Wes visualized the ship’s airlock schematic and steeled himself. “The tether base is eight inches inside the door…” Wes whispered to himself. “Five SECONDS!”

  “Wes, are you sure about this? We don’t know for sure if—” Micah stopped when Wes’s voice returned.

  “NOW!”

  With the stroke of two buttons, Micah opened first airlock chamber door to the corridor then the airlock itself. A violent wind blew past Wes as both doors slid open and he used the momentum to push himself toward the rope.

  The vacuum of space wrapped around his hands like icy black fire, but Wes grabbed the tether and yanked hard. Over the rush of wind leaving the ship, Wes screamed in pain. Slowly, his fingers began to freeze, small crystals formed first at his knuckles.

  Tobiah’s limp form jerked against the tether and floated back toward the ship with speed.

  “You see him, Mike?!” Wes screamed.

  “Almost there…” Micah said over the comm system. Through a split screen view of the airlock chamber and the drone still magnetically locked onto the ship’s hull, Micah saw Tobiah drift toward the open airlock chamber. “There! Closing, Wes!”

  Tobiah’s lifeless body floated into the chamber and the door slammed shut behind him. As air began to fill the chamber again, Wes violently gasped for breath. Sweat poured down his face and Wes unlocked the Mag-Tabs on his boots before he fell backward to the floor. Once gravity came back to the chamber in full, Tobiah’s body flopped onto the steel with a low clank.

  “GALE!!!!” Eyes locked onto Tobiah’s back, Wes screamed through his last waking moment for a few hours and called for the ship’s medic.

  Six Months Later

  Chapter Fifteen

  Passing Time Not Torches

  In the months since the repair of the oxygen line and Wes’s heroics, the rest of the crew happily settled into a set of staid routines. Maintain systems, do your job. In that comfortable set of circumstances, habit and function, the entire crew nearly seemed to forget where they were and where they headed.

  Wes held four cards in his hands, the fifth laid on the table, face down. Weeks after his brush with open space, his fingers still took on a pins-and-needles feel more often than Wes preferred. “Just one.”

  A card fell across the table near his discard and Wes reached for it. Po, the game’s dealer, looked around the table at the other players for draw card counts. Gale, Aquis and Lahm all waived off new cards.

  “Better hands than mine, it seems…” Tobiah said. The right side of his face sagged just a bit, where it hadn’t before Tobiah’s repair mission. His speech was barely altered but his ever-so-slightly slacked lower lip changed it a bit. A slight lisp could be heard if one listened closely enough. Tobiah’s voice was still heavy and still rang deeply across the common area. He laid down a small pile of cards. “Three, Po.”

  In his familiar corner, Sanballat sat with a data pad in hand, as usual. Derision fell from his face as he watched Tobiah fraternize with the Hybrids Sanballat could scarcely tolerate. The process that began with the Barrister getting to know his traveling companions had accelerated with Tobiah’s near-deadly spacewalk.

  “Oh, Ahma…” Micah said as he threw his head back with a laugh. He regarded his cards lazily for a moment and waived them a little bit. “I’m all set, Po.”

  “I’m sure you ar—” Po laughed along with the Mimic for a moment before the common room’s PA clicked on after a series of ANDI’s tones.

  “Proximity alert: the Virgalis has entered the Solar system.”

  The air and levity left the common room immediately after ANDI’s announcement. Stunned faces across the room stopped whatever activities they’d been involved with and focused on the ceiling. Whenever ANDI made ship-wide communications like this, the crew all stared up, as if that were where ANDI existed.

  “It’s about time.” Sanballat spoke with a tone which bordered on boredom and slowly stood. “Machine, are we within communications range of Earth?”

  “No.” ANDI replied after a series of tones. “Expec—”

  The rest of ANDI’s response was drown by the clamor of almost everyone else in the room questioning Sanballat.

  “Why would you want to contact them now?” Wes asked.

  “Why is it going to be you?” Po asked in the same moment.

  With the same bored look, Sanballat strode through the room toward Micah. The Courtier stopped a pace or two short of where Micah stood and stared down at him hard for a moment. A beat later, the tall Ceran continued on his way out of the common room. “Come, Copy. We have choices to make, it seems.”

  Micah shrugged to Wes then turned and trotted after Sanballat and the Command Center. Micah shook his head a bit with a small smile on his face. “Sanballat, let’s really talk about this. I can’t—”

  “You can’t?” Sanballat replied without breaking stride or turning back toward Micah. His words bounced around the cold silver steel corridor but Sanballat moved right through the noise. “That’s not a problem, Copy. I can and, by all rights, should.”

  “OK, I’ll bite.” Micah said after a moment of quiet while they both strode toward the Command Center. “Should what?”

  “Lead, of course.” Sanballat said with that same disinterested tone, eyes locked forward.

  “Wha—” Micah’s words stopped with an incredulous lau
gh. “Do you really think humanity is going to respond to you?”

  “If they’re anything like your people, they’ll respond to power.” Sanballat said as the pair entered the Command Center. Long-range images of different bits of the Solar system were displayed on screens around the room.

  Light blue glows bled from the displays and keypads of each workstation and bathed chunks of the otherwise steel-gray room.

  “That’s ridiculous, Sanballat.” Meremoth said in a plain, strong voice as Sanballat moved further into the room. She’d heard his musings bounce around the hallway before he and Micah entered and was fully prepared to rebut him, simply. “The first face the human race sees must be at least half theirs.”

  “Mmm.” Sanballat responded with only a noise and a cool nod before he began surveying the images around the Command Center.

  Garreous came into the room and moved with an excited hop in his step. “What do we know, Remy?”

  “Eight planets, used to be nine...” Meremoth said with a wink toward Micah.

  A look of abject horror flashed across Micah’s face and quickly disappeared as his focus fell back on his workstation.

  “You believe that drivel, Meremoth?” Sanballat spat at his fellow Ceran.

  Long ago, before Artax and his line of monarchs, before the Gathering, tens of thousands of years before any of it, nine planets existed in Sol’s orbit. Three planets with opportunities for colonization and support of sentient life and six others of varied size and composition.

  One of the more macabre bedtime stories Cerans used to tell children was of the Solar system’s first inhabited planet: Pallas. As the story went, a race lived on Pallas much like humanity on Earth, but the Pallatans perished in a planet-killing implosion.

  Nothing lasts forever… Not even a planet…

  Ceran parents unnerved their children with a story of life’s impermanence. The Hybrids who heard the story of Pallas heard a far more horrifying tone to the tale. One of the most frequent public-house-too-many-drinks debates on Ceres centered around the full history of Pallas and its people. Little was truly known, publicly, about the Pallatans and their collective fate, but many a slurred theory existed.

  Micah spoke without looking up from his workstation’s monitor. “Terran science is convinced that there’s—”

  “Oxymoron.” Sanballat whispered just loudly enough for Micah to hear.

  “Not—Wait, what did you say?” Micah stopped speaking and stared at the back of Sanballat’s head.

  “Terran science.” Sanballat spat without looking Micah’s direction. “That phrase itself is an oxymoron. Your progenitors, Copy, are like mute creatures encountering fire for the first time. They scarcely understand where they’re seeing, let alone the thing’s implications.”

  “I—” Micah stopped another sentence short, unwilling to pursue this line of conversation with the Courtier any further. He turned to Meremoth, still hunched over her workstation, a few blinking data pads strewn on the table before her. “Remy, what do we know about this star system, as far as the humans’ ability to monitor us is concerned?”

  “Well,” Meremoth picked up a data pad and flipped through a few paragraphs before a chart rolled onto the small screen. Her fingers were shaded in the data-pads blue light. “Most of the data from Pollai and Kaymar’s recent voyages to this system suggest that they don’t really have much long-range detection capability…” She flipped through a few more pieces of information in rapt silence for a moment then continued. “I think we’ve got at least a couple days at our present speed before we approach their defensive net.”

  “We have a couple days before we’re in weapons range, Meremoth?” Sanballat said with no small amount of fear in his voice. “Shouldn’t you say that with at least a modicum of trepidation?”

  “Did you read the mission briefings, Sanballat?” Micah asked, genuine confusion on his face. “At last survey, their defensive net doesn’t really begin until just past Earth’s Moon… They do have rudimentary scanning capability from an installation on Mars, but most reports have that station unmanned, just machines.”

  “I manage the food, Copy.” Sanballat said, his response both a veiled admission of insecurity in his station on the ship and a shot at Micah for underutilizing him.

  “And that’s going quite well, Sanballat.” Meremoth assured him. “Though, that does beg the question: Why would the food supply manager, our farmer, be our mission’s mouthpiece?” The beginnings of a smile crept over Meremoth’s lips as she turned her attention back to the data before her.

  Chided, Sanballat straightened his back and looked around the Command Center for a moment. “Indeed.” The Courtier flushed with anger, his long, angular face washed with a soft pink shade. Discretion won the debate which raged within him, and Sanballat coughed once before he spoke again. “I don’t believe spending more time in here with you—” Neither Micah nor Meremoth were clear if he meant the Hybrid or Ceran in the room. “—is productive and I have a farm to manage, so I’ll take my leave of you.” With a sharply exhaled breath as his final contribution to the Command Center discussion, Sanballat turned and left the room.

  Moments later, once she was sure the Courtier was out of ear-shot, Meremoth began to laugh. Micah joined her for a moment and allowed himself a brief celebration of his cemented position of leadership on the Virgalis.

  Their laughter slowly died down and both went back to their analyses. After a few quiet moments, Meremoth spoke. “We need to get Kaymar and Pollai in here, then get everyone together and another of those fun group chats…”

  “Discussion or announcement sort of group chat?” Micah asked. He hoped for the latter.

  “’Our King gave you mission leadership for a reason, Micah…” Meremoth said. She turned toward Micah and waited until he brought his eyes up to meet hers before she continued. “Everyone else here has some specific function during the trip… Yours is to lead. The rest of us can consult, commiserate and advise… But broad mission decisions… those are yours and this one’s big.”

  It wasn’t until a few seconds later Micah realized he hadn’t drawn a breath after Remy’s statement.

  “I’m ready.” Micah said with a sharp nod.

  The Continued Debate

  TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER

  After a lengthy consultation with Pollai and Kaymar and another day-long in-depth review of their notes, Micah called another meeting of the whole crew in the common room. Sanballat sat between Tobiah and Kaymar, thumbing at the screen of his ever-present data-pad. The rest of the crew milled about the room and moved toward spots slowly.

  “You’ve got this, Mike.” Wes nodded slowly to Micah with a hand on the Mimic’s shoulder. He leaned down and nearer to Micah’s ear before Wes whispered more: “Everyone in this room knows why you’re here. Lead.” Wes clapped his friend’s shoulder once more and Micah stepped to the center of the common room.

  “Alright, everyone. You know what we’re here to discuss, so let’s just…” Micah stammered for a moment. A bit too much saliva slid down his throat at the worst possible moment and a fit of clearing coughs interrupted him.

  Concerned, Gale took a step toward him from between Meremoth and Garreous. Micah held a hand up to her and she stopped mid-stride, but not until she saw him smile. A silver steel water bottle flew from Aquis behind her and Micah caught it.

  He took a drink and smiled once more.

  “Well, if no one has any other interruptions…” Micah jabbed at himself and most of his crew chuckled with him. Sanballat, however, just scoffed. Loudly. “Let’s just get to it. Earth… We’re close. This long journey is nearly over and our objective is only a day or so away.”

  “We’re only a day from Earth, Micah?” Lahm asked. A slightly ashen look made his light skin and widened, pale sky-blue eyes seem even brighter. A nervousness shook his voice a bit and Po resolved to ask him about it later.

  “No, Lahm… We’ve got roughly a day until the people of Earth re
alize we’re headed their way.” Micah said. “The planet itself is another day or so past the outskirts of their defensive net…”

  The circled crew around Micah began to shift around on their feet with apprehension, save for Sanballat, who still sat and paged through some enthralling document on his data-pad. The crew wavered like a wind-blown flag for a few seconds as a fearful breeze passed over them.

  “Their… defensive net?” Aquis asked quietly. Unaccustomed to feeling endangered due to his size and combat prowess, Aquis began to feel that security slip away as this conversation continued.

  “I can…” Micah moved toward a display screen on the wall to his right and pressed a few buttons. While the images loaded, he gestured to Pollai, who happily stood and moved toward center stage. “Pollai and Kaymar have seen the net… up close.”

  “Yes… It is an impressive collection of…” Pollai stepped into the middle of the crew. A short breath later, his proper place as center of attention obtained, Pollai continued. “The Terran Defense Institute, or TDI as it’s known on-planet, is responsible for creation and dramatic expansion of the network of weapons and data-gathering satellites. That expansion has taken place, in earnest, over the course of the last fifteen years under the guidance of two humans in particular: Kurt McCreary, the leader of Earth First, a political party focused on…” Pollai paused for a moment, unsure how to phrase what should come next. He shrugged at Kaymar, who had scarcely ever seen his partner stumble over and words, then pressed on. “Well, us, really… Us and the mission of protecting Earth and its people from… us.”

  The screen Micah had activated flickered to life with Pollai spoke and an image of Earth, a mix of blue oceans, green and beige swirled landmasses and white clouds, spun. The Earth onscreen shrunk a bit as the view pulled out and into an orbit-view of the planet. Once the image’s perspective was further from the planet, a dense network of satellites, orbital stations and telescopes came into view.