45 · Three Ships

Cole came to in a cloud of smoke and a noisy din, the confusion and fog of a mighty crash swirling around him. He heard people coughing and groaning, heard wails erupting from the gravely injured, heard and smelled electrical fires pop and hiss and the sickening peals of stressed metal as wings and broken fuselage sagged under their own weight.

Looking down at himself to see if he’d been injured, Cole saw Penny looking back up at him, her eyes wide and unblinking against the smoke. He saw that she had punched her remaining hand through the bulkhead of the Bern ship, anchoring them in place. What was left of her other arm was wrapped around Mortimor, all three of them having braced together prior to impact.

Cole let go with his own mechanical hand and saw that his fingers had pierced the hull plating as well, leaving behind five black holes in the dull steel. He met Penny’s eyes again. They both eventually broke the shocked stare to look down at Mortimor, who lay between them, unmoving.

Cole groped for a pulse with his non-mechanical hand. He wanted to shout to the dying to shut up, to end their racket, to give him a chance to feel.

Penny’s hand went to Mortimor’s forehead. She brushed his dark hair back over his head and stroked his cheek with one of her thumbs. Cole looked to Penny as he fumbled for a sign of life. Her wild red hair hung around her face, almost seeming like the source of the smoke fogging in all around them. Beyond, the coughing and hacking from the survivors seemed to morph into the crackle of flame. Soot and dirt had lightly covered her face everywhere except for the thin tracks shoveled aside by falling tears.

In his peripheral, surviving aliens moved dimly through the dust, tending to others and pushing heavy equipment off bodies. Someone worked one of the hatches open, letting in a shaft of light that seemed to multiply the smoke. The entire scene wrapped itself around Cole, holding him there, nothing in his awareness truly real other than Penny and Mortimor—an enigmatic and mostly metallic woman revealing to him the first signs of real life, and a man he’d sworn to protect and rescue slowly giving up the last of his.

••••

Parsona banked herself wide to approach the rift from the edge. The expanded tear between Lok’s atmosphere and hyperspace had the shape of a weather balloon pressed flat: tall and thin, rounded at the top, and tapering to a pinprick at the bottom, right in the foundation of Ryke’s old house. The rift was difficult to look at directly, both with eyes and with sensors. The harsh photons escaping from the cone-shaped land had much of their primal fury intact. They faded, however, as they slammed into the different set of physical laws governing the universe to which Lok belonged. Those hyperspace particles quickly wilted as they arrived, melting in the atmosphere along with the sideways-drifting snow.

The strange combination of light and glistening flakes seemed out of place as they billowed over a notoriously dry and dark frontier planet. They seemed, at least at a distance, anything but awful. The entire rift appeared more like some visiting angel from a race of blob-giants, the creature’s surface boiling with light and throwing off dying sparks like little fairies.

Suddenly, though, a black lozenge protruded from the angel’s rounded head. It looked like a small, deadened tongue by scale, but it was just another Bern ship pulling through the rift high off the ground, continuing the long line of crafts filing out over the planet for weeks.

However, instead of increasing thrust to pull up to orbit, instead of falling into formation with the others, this black shape nosed down, no longer a tongue, but now something deadly spit from the angel’s mouth. This new arrival continued its chase of group two’s ship, arcing toward the downed craft and toward Parsona . . .

“Contact on SADAR,” Ryke said.

“I see it, but I don’t think it’s coming for us.” Parsona banked a few degrees more to the side, stiffening her angle to swing wider around the rift. The Bern ship stayed on course, heading out over the ruins of the old village and several kilometers beyond.

“They’re heading for Mortimor’s ship,” Ryke whispered.

“You should get back with the others. Make sure everything’s ready.”

“They’re heading for Mortimor’s ship,” he said again. “They’re gonna finish the job.”

“Ryke, see to the console. We don’t have much time.”

Two more contact alarms flashed on SADAR, pressing home the point. Only these two were swooping down from orbit rather than coming through the rift. And their vectors had them heading straight for Ryke’s house: the locus of the great tear in space. It seemed the orbiting fleet had finally become aware of the local threat to their rift.

Parsona quickly calculated that she would beat them there, but only by minutes. And the procedure to seal the rift, according to Ryke, would take half an hour, give or take. Fighting the urge to increase thrust, Parsona swooped low over the prairies, constrained by the forces she could inflict on Ryke and the others. For an AI routine trapped in a life of so many eternal seconds, she suddenly felt a level of impatience and desperate anxiety that recalled a more Human existence, and not in a good way.

••••

Lady Liberty popped out of hyperspace in a high orbit over Lok, Anlyn and Edison taking point in the raid from Darrin. The single jump maneuver had worked perfectly, even if the hyperdrive would never operate again. With the press of a button, their ship had moved from one quadrant of the galaxy to another, with no care for what lie in between or how much gravity was encountered upon arrival. Anlyn felt as amazed and grateful as she had during hers and Edison’s previous experimental jump—the one to the center of that alien star so many sleeps ago, leading them to hyperspace.

Her thankfulness, however, didn’t last. They had a problem. It showed up on SADAR the size of a small moon.

Anlyn didn’t even need her instruments to know it was there. Glancing up through the carboglass, she could spot the massive vessel with her naked eye, its steel hull reflecting Lok’s sun with the brightness of an unnatural albedo. It was shining, not smoking. It was perfectly intact.

The rest of Anlyn’s wing began popping into orbit around her, each a few seconds apart.

There’s no way to warn the others before they arrive, she thought grimly.

Her SADAR flashed with a targeting alarm, and then a gravity alert.

With little other warning, Lady Liberty went dead, just like the Navy pilots had said their StarCarrier had. The ship began falling toward Lok in a flat, lazy spin, the pull of some bizarre artificial gravity dragging it out of orbit and toward a very real death.

Anlyn’s wing of ships followed, spiraling down after her. So too did every other craft jumping in from Darrin, wing after wing materializing in Lok’s orbit, then beginning their long plummet down. They were like a flock of canaries appearing in the vacuum of space only to realize they couldn’t breathe there—and that there was nothing for their mighty wings to flap against.

••••

Parsona’s cargo ramp slammed to the grass in the commons, and Scottie and Ryn shuffled sideways through the door, lugging the heavy control console between them. Resting on top was the makeshift cross Ryke had cobbled together. The anxious engineer followed along behind, playing out coils of wire. He dropped the loops to the grass as the three men shuffled toward the foundation of his old home.

As he went, Ryke tried to concentrate on the simple task before him, worrying over the trivial threat of a snag yanking them to a halt. It was better to focus on such things than to fret over the massive ships roaring down to destroy them. Better to note the squeak from one of Parsona’s struts as the ship’s cooling thrusters lowered the rest of her bulk to the commons than dwell on the massive rift he had too little time to close.

“That strut needs greasing,” Ryke mumbled to himself.

He wondered if he would die worried about such a minor thing.

Ahead of him, Scottie and Ryn weaved through a gap in the crumbling, rocky perimeter of his old home, carrying the console between them. Ryke followed, dropping his coils of wire where his front porch once stood. His mind warped back to promised dreams he’d had while living in hyperspace, dreams of making it back to Lok and rebuilding his old home from scratch. Dreams of getting his workshop back together and tinkering with hybrid combustion electric engines, or something equally boring.

His foot caught on a bit of rubble. He nearly tripped and fell, but managed to catch himself. As he regained his footing and remembered the task at hand, the wire trailing behind him pulled taut. Ryke dropped the few loops that remained and saw they had just a few more meters of wire than they needed.

Scottie and Ryn left the console in a bare patch, right beside an old worklight someone had left lying on its side. Ryke pointed them to the exact spot in a now nonexistent wall, right over a gap in the foundation where the frame of the cellar door once stood. The boys paid no attention to him, knowing as well as anyone where the old rift lay. They approached the paper-thin opening to hyperspace edge-on to stay out of the harsh glare leaking out to either side. All around them swirled melting flurries of the strange and twinkling snowfall.

Ryke powered on the console and fanned his hands over the top of it, as if the drifting flakes would shoo away like bugs. As the other two arranged the cross at the rift’s base, he resisted the urge to look up at the massive hole in the sky above him, at the widening body of that great tear soaring thousands of meters overhead, taking a scale and shape he had known to be theoretically possible but had never imagined coming to life. He concentrated instead on the thin crack right in front of him, on the sliver of light and drifting ice no thicker than foil at that angle and yet the source of so much consternation.

Even though the rift was narrow near the planet’s surface, the escaping photons—energized and angry—were difficult to look at. As Ryke concentrated on his console, fiddling with its knobs, he could see a vertical green bar in his vision where his retinas had been seared from just the briefest of glances at the relatively tame leakage. Working as fast as he dared, he began repairing the rift, closing up the old opening for the second time in his life. But now, so many years later and with a ton more experience, it would be different.

“This time,” he said to himself, “you’ll stay closed.”

A rumble in the atmosphere disturbed the determined promise. Ryke looked up; he shielded his eyes from the rift, and saw the source of the sound. Three enemy ships were screaming through the atmosphere directly toward them. One seemed to be coming from the rift; the other two arced down as if from orbit.

“I guess there won’t be any this time,” Ryke said to himself, sadly.

••••

Arthur Dakura staggered from the cockpit and into the smoke-filled cargo bay, shouting Mortimor’s name. Cole looked up and saw him, saw the older man’s face smeared with blood and grime.

“Over here!” Cole shouted.

Arthur turned, his body stiff and unsure of itself, reinforcing the likeness he shared with his robots. He stumbled stiffly over and sank to his knees by Mortimor’s side, groping his neck for a pulse.

Cole shook his head softly, unable to speak.

“Get him flat,” Arthur demanded, grabbing Mortimor by the armpits.

Cole and Penny helped, untangling themselves from their crash positions and doing most of the heavy lifting while Arthur cupped the back of Mortimor’s head with one hand, lowering it to the deck.

Penny crouched over the scene, her face intent, her eyes wet and wide. Cole settled back against the bulkhead, his ears ringing, both his body and mind weary and sore. He watched with a sort of wounded detachment as Arthur—a quadrillionaire famous for both his obsession with immortality and his lack of real human bonds—dealt horribly with the death of his closest friend.

Arthur locked his arms and began performing stiff thrusts to Mortimor’s chest. He stooped now and then to force air into the man’s lungs. But the textbook resuscitation methods soon slurred into textbook depression. Perfect form degenerated into pounding fists as denial slipped into rage.

It all took place in slow motion but seemed to happen so fast. Time toyed with them, as if its governing particles could reach through hyperspace with the melting snow and the perishing photons. It seemed to usher along the most wicked of events, then force them to linger at their worst.

A muffled haze filled all of Cole’s senses, like cotton balls forced in his ears, his mouth, even a wispy gauze of it over his vision. The coughs in the smoky hull came slow and quiet, the wails muffled to a background hum. Someone’s shouts became whispers. He heard it, over and over, someone saying his name, mere whispers—

“Cole!”

He finally heard the shouts when Penny shook him by the collar. She forced his chin up with her one hand, caught his eyes with hers, then pointed to the side.

“Cole!”

Larkin, the translator from his raid group, stood by the rear of the cockpit hallway. Cole realized the young man had been yelling his name for a long while.

“Larkin,” he croaked. He waved an arm to help him locate them in the haze. He felt himself rising from the floor, his back scooting up the bulkhead.

Larkin turned and peered through the smoke. His eyes widened; he ran over, glanced down for a moment at Arthur, who had taken to silently cradling Mortimor’s head.

“There are ships incoming,” Larken said. He pointed toward the cockpit. “The rest of our squad is gone.”

Why tell me? Cole thought to himself. He started to complain, then saw Larkin’s countenance: the wild, unblinking look in his eyes. He realized Larkin was in shock and looking for a chain of command to padlock his sanity to.

Cole felt like explaining the futility of it all. He wanted to say that he was no more in charge than anyone, but Larkin pulled him upright before he could complain and tugged him toward the cockpit.