A Sword Into Darkness (43 page)

In terms of balance, there was none.  One crewman had died during the battle, at the location of the Deltan laser burn-through.  Another five had died after the ship had been cut in half, three due to malfunctioning air systems, and one due to a broken neck.  The final death had been hard to explain, until he noticed the empty IV drug reservoirs in her pod.  It had malfunctioned, overdosing her on a lethal cocktail of the normally balanced flows of stimulants and depressants used to keep her alive during the extended high acceleration.

Two hours after commencing repairs, the remaining thirteen crewmembers of the
Sword of Liberty
gathered in the ship’s single mess.  Nathan looked around at the assembled spacers.  In a space built to hold a crew of 35, and which had supported 30 for a year and a half, thirteen was a depressingly spare assembly.  He hoped against forlorn hope that Kris and her engineers were alive, and would soon be with them all here again.

Nathan glanced back at Edwards, who manned the environmental control panel on the aft/dorsal bulkhead of the mess.  Those areas of the mission hull that could be properly patched had been.  Anyplace too far gone—from either the laser attack or the nanobeam—had been sealed off forever.  Now they each felt the air pressure rise in the room, and with it came a rising sense of safety and hope, even though they all knew that the air and power were both depressingly finite.

Edwards finally looked over and nodded to his Captain.  Nathan reached up and unsealed his helmet.  He removed it and took a deep breath for all to see.  Exhaling, he nodded to them all and they each removed their helmets.  Edwards did as well, and then wrinkled up his nose.  “Damn, you guys smell like shit.”

Everyone laughed, just as he had intended.  Nathan turned to regard them all.  “Good work, everyone.  And I mean that—both in the battle and now, with our repairs.  You’ve achieved something very real and important here.  Together, we have faced a superior, unknown, and completely alien force—and have shown not only that humankind can survive against such a force, but that we can persevere and win.  The
Sword of Liberty
and each of you are a force to be reckoned with.  I want each of you to know that what we’ve done, and what we’ve shown can be done to the folks back home, has assured Earth its survival.”

They all nodded back to him, solemnly accepting his praise.  Nathan saw in each pair of eyes, though, the truth of what he left unsaid—that whatever happened back home when the aliens reached it in a few years, they had at most a few days, even assuming the Deltans left them alone, and they had no guarantee of that.  They had been brought aboard for some purpose, and whatever it turned out to be, it was likely to be counter to their continued survival.

Nathan turned to Wright.  “XO, what’s next on the schedule?”

Wright smiled.  “Well, Captain—”

unbearable brightness

fluttering, jostling motion

shadows flitting about madly

insane shapes among them all

Stasis ended, and there were suddenly five more suited figures among them, still wearing helmets.  They each floated above the deck, clawing at their sealing rings.  Nathan spun around and searched the new faces.  Seeing Kris, he dove forward, catching her up.  He unsealed her helmet and pulled it free, tossing it behind him to bounce off the bulkhead.

She gasped and coughed, pulling in heaving gulps of air.  Nathan smiled and hugged her close, squeezing her fiercely, his heart pounding in his ears.  He whirled around and saw that the other engineers were also free of their helmets and being cared for.  He turned back and refocused on Kris.

She had her breath again and looked around the mess, wide-eyed.  He kissed her, but it took a moment for her to regain her bearings and kiss him back.  They kissed again, and then she pushed him back, confused and slightly afraid.  “Nathan,” she said, her voice raspy, “what the hell is going on?”

He smiled.  “You’re back and you’re alive, that’s what’s going on.”  He squeezed her again, breathing in the smell of her hair, covered by the unfortunate scent of hours spent in a vacuum suit, but still there.

Kris returned his embrace, also thankful to be alive and to see him again.  Eventually she pulled away again.  This time he allowed it, and neither of them said anything about the tears welled in their eyes, or about the contented smiles on both their faces.  Kris asked again, “Nathan, what is going on?”

He shook his head.  “Nope, you first.  After the ship broke apart, what happened in Engineering?”

She shrugged.  “Well, everything went offline, but not before the drive crashed us into the forward hull like a couple of billiard balls.  We went spinning away, unbalanced, with no coolant for the reactor, and no energized helium for the drive, and no way to see where we were going, much less control our path.  I tried to jury-rig some way to tap into the camera feed or use the auxiliary antennas, to see what was going on with you guys, when, somehow, we lost our spin.  Once it was safe to move around, me and the others broke out of our pods and got to work on our repairs.

“That’s when I found out it was just me, Viera, Maxwell, Tambourge, and Blake.”  Her eyes welled with tears again, such that she had to wipe them away as they would not fall.  “The others were all dead.  There were electrical fires, and the reactor was scrammed, and, damn it, nothing worked.  The air was compromised—we were on suit reserves only and there was so much damage, we thought we’d never be able to re-air the hull.  And we kept having these blackouts, or whiteouts, I guess, brought on by a lack of oxygen.  We kept working though, up until we started choking out.”

She looked back at him and smiled wanly.  “Then we had another whiteout episode and I woke up here.  With you.”

He smiled back and kissed her.  “That’s pretty much what we experienced, except for two things.  First, we seem to be somewhere inside the Control Ship, and second, those weren’t whiteouts from a lack of oxygen.  It appears to be a sort of stasis or suspended animation.”  Nathan went on to explain everything that had happened to them in the forward half of the hull.

Kris’s eyes grew wider and wider as he went on.  When he finished, she just stared.  A smile began to tick up one corner of her mouth.  “That … is … awesome!”

Nathan arched an eyebrow.  “Not exactly the word I would use to describe being captured by hostile aliens, but sure, ‘awesome’ works, I guess.”

“No, no, no!”  She pushed off from him and turned around to capture the attention of everyone in the mess.  “Don’t you see?  This explains so much.”

Edwards regarded her from where he was talking with one of the other engineers.  “What does what explain so much, CHENG?”

“The Deltan’s stasis field—it’s why they don’t mind taking 80 some odd years to get from one star to another.  To them it’s not 80 years, or whatever it would be with relativity thrown in.  To them, it’s in the blink of an eye!”

Wright moved to the front of the crowd.  “They’re putting themselves in stasis?  But they seem to move around with impunity when we’re under the field.”

Kris nodded.  “Sure.  If you’ve got stasis, why not anti-stasis?  That’s probably what those frameworks they put around us do—those generate the stasis field, and if they have to move around while we’re frozen, they wear an anti-stasis doohickey on their belts, or whatever.”

Nathan smiled at her.  “All right, I grant you it’s pretty neat, but I’m not as excited as you are about it.  To me, that means we can’t oppose them effectively unless we can get one of the anti-stasis devices for ourselves, and the chances of that are piss-poor.”

She nodded.  “Sure, if you wanted anti-stasis, but that’s the last thing we need right now.  We only have a few days of life support, right?”

Wright answered, “Seventy-two hours at the outside, unless you can improve our setup.”

Kris grinned.  “Seventy-two hours running continuously, but what about if they put us in stasis?  There’s no reason we can’t survive for years on what we have left—long enough to get back home.  We still have a chance of reaching Earth!”

The crew all looked at her now, with expressions ranging from joy, to shock, to worry.  Nathan carried one of the worried looks.  “Assuming they do put us in stasis to bring us back to Earth, why?  Why have they captured us instead of letting us die out there?  What do they need from us?  I’m excited about the prospect of seeing Earth again, too, but not as the pawn or tool in some alien attack on our home planet.”

She smiled at him, and this time her smile had a slightly evil cast to it, much as she had back when she first described the Excalibur missile to him.  “We’re only pawns if we allow ourselves to be pawns.  Just because they took our weapons away doesn’t mean we aren’t armed.  Were the auxiliary drives still intact when you isolated their capacitor banks?”

“Yes, but why … .”  Nathan’s eyes grew wide.  He pushed off from where he was and caught her up in an embrace.  He leaned in and whispered to her.  “Can I be in love with you and completely scared of you at the same time?”

She smiled and kissed his cheek.  “It’s not very healthy emotionally, but sure, why not?”

Edwards and Wright exchanged a look and a shrug, but that was all.  The XO moved over to Nathan and Kris, who turned arm-in-arm to regard him.  “Captain,” he asked, “what are your orders?”

Nathan sobered.  “We need to take stock on what we have thus far.  Divide up the crew into maintenance teams—some for checking air integrity and supplies, the engineers and some of the twidget-types for getting whatever systems we can online, comms especially, another team to check out the SSTOS.  We may need to use it as a final redoubt once the systems in the rest of the ship fail due to lack of power.  The shuttle has its own reactor.  We could potentially survive there for several weeks.  And, lastly, we need to arm ourselves from the weapons locker—”

an infinity of white

crew reaching out blindly

something else

something among them

Stasis fell away and Nathan whirled around.  He caught sight of it just as several of the crew gasped and cried out.  Bodies surged back from the mess’s open hatchway, crowding up against the furthest bulkhead.  It took a moment for them to clear away and give him an unobstructed view, but soon he, Wright, Edwards, and Kris were at the forefront of the assembled crew.

An alien held its position steady in the hatch’s frame.  The creature they had long referred to as a Deltan was nothing that could be encapsulated by such a pedestrian, human name.  This thing was the product of a different biology, a different environment, a different science.  It was alien in all senses of the word.

Nathan’s mind, recoiling from the sight of something so strange, struggled to classify it, to break it down into parts which would make sense to him.  In the broadest sense, it looked like the impossible crossing of a wasp and a squid.

Its upper body was hard and segmented, though its segments were not differentiated as cleanly into head, thorax, and abdomen as a terrestrial insect would be.  Instead, the glossy gray segments grew narrower and longer at the top, with the last segment covered in a mix of a dozen simple multicolored eyes and four black compound eyes, with slits of unknown purpose alongside upper and lower pairs of mouths, ringed in cilia.

The segments lower on the body grew wider and shorter, eventually breaking up into overlapping plates, between each of which emerged scaled, ringed tentacles.  Nathan saw at least a dozen tentacles of varying thickness supporting the creature in its position at the hatchway.  The tentacles themselves appeared quite complex, branching again and again into smaller limbs and cilia, such that each one would have been capable of either delicate work or heavy lifting.

The Deltan was wrapped in a dull blue, translucent shift, and either ornamentation or instrumentation of unknown purpose.  The entire alien and its garment also appeared to be covered in a uniform layer of plastic, to which a square-ish pack was attached at its back.  Nathan wondered whether it was an environment suit of some sort, or if it was part of the creature’s anti-stasis generator, allowing it to move when they were frozen in place.  Perhaps both?

He shook himself.  Here was their first contact, the first chance they would have to perhaps avert the war over Earth that seemed inevitable now.  Nathan pushed off from the crowd to approach the alien who had captured them.

He was grabbed at the last moment by the XO.  Wright pulled him back to the rest of the crew and placed a hand on his chest.  “No, sir.  You’re not going to be the first one to talk to that thing.”

Nathan looked incredulous.  “Pardon me, XO?”

Wright’s features were firmly resolved.  “Not a chance, sir.  You’re our captain, our leader.  We live or die on your word, and you are first and foremost in charge, but you also planned this to happen a certain way.”

Nathan frowned.  “I don’t know if you’ve noticed over the past year and a half, but our plans have had a depressing tendency to go by the wayside.”

“Not this one, sir.  True, originally we were supposed to have a US ambassador and a couple of xenologists along for this purpose, but stealing the ship made that a moot point.  And though our roles have changed to better fit the actual mission, I was originally supposed to be their liaison to the crew.  With my background and training, I’m the closest thing you have to an ambassador and a linguist.”

“You’re stretching things a bit, XO.  The situation has changed.”

“No, sir.  Just as I led the first communiqués aboard ship, I need to lead these negotiations.  You’re the captain, Nathan, but first contact has been—and is going to remain—my game.  Right, Master Chief?”

Nathan turned toward Edwards.  “COB?”

Edwards looked at them both, then gave the Deltan by the hatchway a critical appraisal.  He faced Nathan again.  “I’m with the XO on this one, Skipper.”

Nathan turned red at the seeming betrayal.  “Damn it, Master Chief—”

Edwards interrupted him.  “Need I remind you that last time you spoke directly to these guys, they started shooting?”