Injection Burn Read online

  “Which brings me,” Gloria said, “to the other classified part of all this. Xavi, this new Mark 5 imploder is…well, Beth here, and her team, optimized it. Increased its tolerance for space-time curvature.”

  “Oh, now I really don’t like where this is going.”

  “Dawson took her ship to Kepler-22, yes, but inside the restricted zone. Way, way inside.”

  “Impossible.”

  Gloria turned her gaze to Beth. “You explain.”

  If the engineer felt any remorse or responsibility for what her invention had now potentially caused, she showed no sign. Her Asian features were clipped and focused. All business. “The Mark 5 is a dramatic improvement to the field cavitation device—the ‘imploder,’ as you call it. It allows for perturbations in the exit curvature as much as nine times what the—”

  “How about in English?”

  “It enables exit much closer to the gravitational body—planet, star, et cetera—than was previously possible. Provided the vessel’s mass is quite low.”

  Xavi’s frown deepened. “So that’s why we stripped the Wildflower bare, and left the rest of the crew behind.”

  “Yes,” Gloria said to him. “I’m sorry to keep this from you, Xavi.”

  Her navigator nodded absently, but the frown remained. After a moment he shook his head as if to clear it. “What’s done is done. Let me see if I can guess the rest, yeah?”

  “Sure.”

  “So Daw is meant to test this new imploder, but gets it in her head to lay in a new course because she wants to be the first ship to get in close to Kepler-22. So off she goes, folds space, boom she’s off to make history. The first captain to get a close look at Carthage, find out what’s so damn important about the place. Find out why an entire solar system has been barricaded off, and why our ancient ancestors were almost wiped out.”

  “So far so good.”

  Xavi grunted a sardonic laugh, swallowed, went on. “And I’m guessing something went wrong. They got in close and then the Scipio fleet caught up with them. Or are about to. And of course, other than protecting their precious world of Carthage, there’s two things the Scipios desire more than anything else in the entire fucking universe: our imploder tech, or barring that, the location of Earth. And Daw’s just given them both.”

  “May have given them both,” Gloria corrected. “It’s all as you say, I’m afraid, except that there’s been no sign of Dawson’s ship other than an initial beacon ping about six hours after they arrived.”

  “And now…what? We’re throwing good after bad? Sending us in to…to what, exactly?”

  Gloria glanced at both of them in turn. “It’s Sutter’s ship that has the task. Discover the fate of the Lonesome, recover or destroy it, as necessary. We cannot, above all else, let the Scipios get their hands on a functional imploder.”

  Neither of her crew spoke, so Gloria went on. “Any problems, we bug out. Your safety is in my hands, and I take that seriously, but know that even more important than our objective is the primary mission of the OEA: Do not let the enemy acquire our technology. Under any circumstances. Understood?”

  “Of course,” Beth said.

  Xavi nodded. He knew the code as well as anyone. “If it’s Sutter’s mission to find Daw, what’s ours?”

  “We’re the fail-safe. If something happens to Sutter, if he’s in danger of being captured, we make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  A chime sounded. Two minutes to fold-maneuver initiation. Gloria gripped Xavi’s shoulder. “I know it’s a mess.”

  “It’s a clusterfuck.”

  “Hence the need to clean it up. If the Scipios gain the ability to fold space…if they come to Earth, it could become another prison, just like Carthage.”

  Xavi considered this, and she took his prolonged silence as tacit agreement. Gloria gave him the most reassuring smile she could muster. “Both of you return to your stations. We’re going to fold in there and watch Sutter like a hawk. If all goes as planned, he docks with Daw, takes her crew aboard, scuttles her ship, and we all fold home safely.”

  Drifting back to her captain’s couch, Gloria could already see the ruse in that plan. Her ship, and the twin that was Sutter’s, had been stripped to the bare minimum to meet the mass requirements of the Mark 5.

  Sutter wouldn’t be taking on any rescued crew. He’d be making sure there was nothing left for the Scipios to study.

  The Wildflower

  4.AUG.3911 (Earth Actual)

  GLORIA TSANDI STRAPPED herself into the captain’s couch, set it to full recline, and tried to soak in the last few moments of weightlessness, an environment she’d come to feel utterly at home in. Gravity, as the saying went, sucks. She called up feeds from around the ship.

  On a normal flight she’d check in with her medical officer first. A last-minute precaution that everyone was mentally and physically ready to ride an implosion—to fold—before actually doing it. But the medical berth was empty, so Gloria scanned the biofeedback displays with an unpracticed eye. Nothing of note stood out, other than Beth’s obvious nerves.

  Gloria decided to start with her. “Engineering?”

  On the screen, Beth Lee stared back at her with the determined face of someone trying to mask a profound fear. “All systems go, Captain,” she said.

  Gloria gave her a reassuring nod and shifted her focus to Xavi. “Navigation?”

  “All clear, Captain!” Xavi barked with exaggerated military bluster. “Let’s get this over with.”

  “Stand by,” Gloria said, and waited. The countdown timer stood frozen in place at thirty seconds, ready to move once the diversionary fleet had made their folds. That group of ships was much farther away, and not equipped with the new imploder. They had a different task today.

  Captain Sutter’s voice came over the comm. “Should be any second now,” he said, “then we go.”

  There were twelve other ships, several light-hours distant, in a formation that spaced them apart by ten million kilometers each. All were under heavy thrust as they worked up the speed needed to use their Mark 4 imploders. Then, in near-perfect unison, their blips vanished from Gloria’s screen as they dove headfirst into holes punched through the very fabric of the universe. This had all actually happened two hours ago, the light of it only now reaching the Wildflower’s sensors.

  Gloria’s outside-view screens blossomed with brilliant white explosions, brighter than the Sun itself if only for an instant. She swallowed, her eyes scanning the readouts all around her. Everything looked good. Everything according to plan.

  “Diversion fleet is away,” Sutter said for the benefit of both ships. “Launching imploders.”

  From a nacelle protruding from the Wildflower’s belly, one of her two Mark 5 field cavitation imploders detached and propelled itself forward on a growing white flame.

  “Prepare for injection burn,” Gloria said. She knew full well that Xavi would be ready, a veteran of folding, but she couldn’t be sure about Beth.

  “Accelerating to impact velocity,” Gloria said, as if she were the one giving the command. In truth she had no such option, even if she’d not given control of her ship to Sutter. All Gloria could do in this situation was simply not cancel the preprogrammed fold sequence. The timing involved had to be precise to impossibly small fractions of seconds. A human had no hope to pull off such a thing. As captain she was just there to put a stop to things if the situation called for it, and even that option waited behind hundreds of layers of safeguards.

  The Wildflower shuddered as her engines powered up, and Gloria felt the weight of an impossibly heavy blanket drape over her, pressing her back into the couch, smartfoam cushioning her as best it could.

  From somewhere below came a deep thud that vibrated up through the hull and made Gloria’s teeth rattle. “Status, Beth!”

  “Clear to fold!” the engineer replied.

  On Gloria’s forward view, the imploder’s engine stage winked off and then detached. It fired again to mo
ve rapidly away, leaving only the imploder device itself—an orange resin sphere—dead ahead.

  The Wildflower raced to catch up to the projectile. Gloria studied readouts as her ship’s engines roared to maximum power. The force of it pushed her so hard into her seat that she thought she might pop through the back of it.

  “Ramming speed!” Xavi shouted from below, as the Wildflower chased the imploder, which had now begun to glow. Proximity alarms began to wail. Gloria’s forward screen began to shimmer as the imploder built the required energy for its task. Within seconds it glowed like a star, washing everything out.

  Gloria watched that eerie fireball grow as the Wildflower closed the final few meters.

  She shut her eyes. Nothing to do now but hope.

  A billionth of a second before the nose of the ship touched it, the sphere imploded. The force of the anti-blast was carefully and expertly shaped to plunge a massive flood of energy inward in a very specific geometry. Physics far beyond Gloria’s understanding took place. A pocket of space, turned inside out for the briefest instant, calculated with exhaustive precision. Had the Wildflower arrived a split second earlier it would have collided with the sphere in catastrophic fashion. A split second too late and the blast would have stretched the vessel and its occupants across the hole punched in space. Spaghettification, the scientists called it, with absolute seriousness.

  But Beth, and all those she worked with, had done their jobs. The Wildflower, going at just the right speed, arriving at exactly the right time, found its way into a small pocket of safe space amid all that violence. A bubble that would be pulled across the sudden bridge between two incomprehensibly distant points.

  Almost a thousand light-years away, in the vicinity of the star known as Kepler-22, two white-hot flares of energy erupted from nothing, and spat out a pair of identical ships exactly ten thousand kilometers apart from each other.

  One, the Zephyr, emerged in what should have been empty space only to slam broadside into a massive alien vessel.

  And the other, the Wildflower, was tumbling out of control.

  The Wildflower

  4.AUG.3911 (Earth Actual)

  EVERY FOLD MADE Gloria sick with nerves. Not because of any knowledge of the extraordinary physics involved, but the sheer violence of how it worked.

  Fire the implosion device out ahead of the ship, then race toward it at incredible speed. Be within a fraction of a millimeter before it implodes to ensure being sucked in, and yet be moving fast enough that, when you come out the other side, you outrun the inverse effect at the destination. The timing and velocity had to be so precise that it had taken a dozen years before a ship capable of carrying passengers could attempt the transit. Space-time had to be almost perfectly flat, too. Attempt this anywhere near a star, planet, moon, or other significant body and the results were catastrophic.

  Until the Mark 5, at least.

  In the solar system dominated by the star known as Kepler-22, somewhere between the worlds humanity had named Palmyra and Skara Brae, there were for a brief instant two objects as bright as suns. Dual explosions that looked, on edge, like spheres of energy cleaved in half. And from that brilliance, two ships emerged.

  More or less.

  The Mark 5 had just allowed the twin craft, Zephyr and Wildflower, to arrive closer to Kepler-22 than any previous expedition save one—the one they’d come to rescue. In all other attempts to explore here, Earth’s vessels had emerged from warp just beyond the system’s outermost planet, Hatra. The closest they could get.

  It wasn’t long until the alien race known as the Scipios had put up a vast fleet of seek-and-destroy ships in this region. Known as the Swarm Blockade, the enemy ships numbered in the millions, forming a sphere around Kepler-22 and all of her planets, ready to move to and intercept anything that approached. A prison the size of a solar system, and a graveyard to hundreds of ships that had attempted to enter.

  To emerge here, though, so close to the star, was uncharted territory, for no one knew what waited inside the blockade. No one knew what was so important about the world of Carthage that the entire system had been made off-limits.

  Gloria’s body was tugged and shoved a dozen times as shock waves buffeted the ship. The sound of rending metal and electrical fires assaulted her ears. Before her, the Wildflower’s control displays winked and died, the whole cockpit plunged into darkness save for the bits of glowing tape used to label bins and exits. Below someone shouted in pain. Xavi, she thought, gritting against her own agony as the ship rocked and swayed in the violence of space-time being pinched hard and then abruptly released. Shudders spread through the area as the universe evened itself back out, the Wildflower riding it all like a boat dropped onto a stormy sea.

  Finally, the ripples abated. All sensation of movement ceased, all sound vanished.

  “Status!” Gloria shouted.

  From far below, Beth coughed. The air reeked of smoke and ozone.

  “Fire,” Xavi said. He sounded close by. She heard him clambering about. Then a light winked on and began to sweep across the interior of the ship, creating lurching shadows that made Gloria’s stomach flutter.

  Gloria remembered her own flashlight, then, tucked somewhere under her seat. She couldn’t remember ever needing it, and hoped the ultracap inside it still held a charge. It took several seconds of groping under there before her fingers brushed the small metallic tube. She pressed the button and sighed with relief when blue-white light splashed into the cockpit. “Status!” she shouted again, floating over to the hole in the floor that led aft. “Xavi?”

  “Here,” he said. The air had become quite hazy, and stung her nose. Below she heard the hiss as he unleashed a fire extinguisher on some unseen flame. “It’s bad, Captain.”

  “Let’s have some specifics,” she said. “Beth? Talk to me.”

  No reply.

  Hell. Gloria took mental stock. Total power loss, that much was obvious. Circuitry fried, but the extent of that damage would be impossible to ascertain until they could get a power source back online. That had to come first, then…after that she’d figure out where the hell they were, and if the new imploder had performed as advertised. If it had worked, then right now they were adrift somewhere well within the Scipios’ blockade. Close enough, perhaps, to finally get a clear look at Carthage, the planet that mythical Dutch pilot Skyler Luiken and his cohorts had set off for almost two thousand years earlier. The explorers had never been heard from again, their mission to save Carthage still unfulfilled.

  Time was Gloria’s enemy now. Residual effects of their punch through space were spreading outward at the speed of light like an inflating balloon. In minutes—maybe hours if she was really lucky—the Swarm would detect what was now a familiar phenomenon to them, and rush to deal with the threat. With any luck, the diversionary fleet, arriving earlier and much farther out in interplanetary space, might draw off the Scipios and buy a bit of time.

  “Power first!” she shouted aft even as she drifted in that direction. Xavi flashed her a thumbs-up as she passed through the navigation bay. She pointed at him. “After that, find out where we are.”

  “Got it,” he said, and let out another blast from the extinguisher.

  The white plume merged with already hazy air, and Gloria found herself all but blind as she floated on toward the tail of the ship. She hauled on the lip of a bulkhead and flew downward, through the empty science station, then crew quarters, the mess. Storage and medical drifted by, all empty, their crew and most of their contents left behind to reduce the Wildflower’s mass. Gloria’s overwhelming sense of concern began to twist and coalesce toward something dangerously close to dread. Part of that weight-saving effort had been leaving behind most of the spare parts they typically carried.

  Gloria continued down. “Beth?!”

  A second of silence followed, turning the dread in Gloria’s gut into abject fear. Then a voice in the darkness. “Down here!”

  “Where? I don’t—” The q
uestion died on her lips as a splash of light played across one of the spokelike access passages that led outward from the tiny control room a few meters to one of the nacelles. The Wildflower had long ago been converted to a dual-engine, dual-imploder design, with a powerful mini-thor reactor at her heart. All of it now lay dormant, all the usual hums and shudders eerily gone from the sonic landscape. Gloria followed the voice, and found Beth at the end of the short maintenance tunnel, around a corner. She’d taken off several access panels that surrounded feed lines from the reactor, and stared at them with deep concern.

  “Tell me truthfully,” Gloria urged. “Do we need to evacuate?”

  Beth glanced at her, the beam of her helmet light momentarily blinding. She looked away when Gloria winced. “Sorry. No. I don’t think so. The reactor is stable. However, both conduits sheared when the ripple hit us.”

  “Please tell me we didn’t leave the spares behind.”

  “I…I can’t remember. Checking the inventory.” Tiny lines and shapes of light appeared in front of her as she accessed the ship’s computer via a p-comm worn over her right ear.

  “Any idea what happened?” Gloria asked.

  Beth turned and pushed herself toward the control room, then up the central shaft toward storage. Gloria followed. In an even tone the engineer said, “Misshapen curvature in the local field. Probably.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning there is some object nearby that our models didn’t account for. Something massive enough to cause a non-flat exit landscape.”

  “Does this mean we’re off course?”

  Beth considered that, then shook her head. “We’re where we should be, the real question is what else is around.”

  “Something big?”

  “Either big and distant or small and close…no way to know yet.”

  Beth rummaged through one of the wall cabinets and found what she was looking for. Her hands emerged holding a silvery bag with two thick cables coiled inside. Spare parts. Without a word she turned and began to push back toward the tail of the ship.