Lacuna: The Prelude to Eternity (2 page)

Thick blast doors protected that most secure facility against direct nuclear strikes, and even the Toralii worldshatter devices hadn’t been able to penetrate the huge mountain housing the critical structure. They had food, water, supplies enough to last. If anyone had survived inside, they could still be alive.

Mace held up one of the heavy-duty lasers they had brought for the job, attached to a long set of industrial electricity cables. A thick fiberglass and reinforced Kevlar collapsible airlock took up most of the cargo bay, a giant snake ready to unfurl on a ring of wheels near its mouth. “Don’t you think it’s better to just knock?”

“Pretty sure they won’t hear us.” Shaba pulled her gloves back on and checked her suit. The others did similarly. “Those blast doors are too thick.”

“Assuming anyone’s alive in there.” Bobbitt struggled with his helmet, until it clicked on with a faint hiss. “They’re not answering their radios.”

His negativity was frustrating. Shaba double-checked her gloves pointlessly. Why had she even taken them off? “All the antennas would have been on the surface, destroyed in the blast. With no active satellite connections remaining, they probably turned everything off after the first few weeks.”

“Or they could all be dead.” Mace rolled his shoulders. “Just saying.”

“Yeah, well,
don’t
just say,” said Shaba. “We’re here to make sure that they’re alive and, if they’re not, recover anything we can. Survivors are important—technology too. It’s all very well fabricating simple computers and the like, but if we want new ships, we need plans. Schematics. Anything we can use to build stuff.”

“Surprisingly,” said Mace, “I actually did read the mission briefing.”

She glared at him. “That’d be a first.”

A moment of uncomfortable silence pervaded.
 

“Hey,” said Bobbitt, “you okay, Shaba?”

“No.” There was no sense denying it, not to the crew with whom she had flown and fought for what seemed like a lifetime. “I am pretty far from okay right now.”

“Yeah,” said Mace. “It creeps me out just being here.”

How could they understand? How could she explain it to them? She didn’t try and just forced herself—as she had been doing for most of the trip, most of her life—to put the whole thing out of her mind and focus on the task at hand.

“Yeah,” she said and, confident that her team had their suits on correctly, pressed the button to lower the launch ramp. The howling wind once again whipped through the open door, blowing dust and grime into the otherwise clean cargo bay.

That was less than ideal. The true effect of the worldshatter devices wasn’t completely known. The weapon didn’t leave radioactive debris, but the background radiation of an Earth made uninhabitable was substantial. Cleaning the bay was a job for another day.

With Mace leading the way, the four of them walked down the long tunnel toward the facility, Shaba and Bobbitt wheeling the collapsible snake behind them. The further in they went, the darker it became.
 

“No lights,” said Bobbitt. “Not a good sign.”
 

They all switched on their suit-mounted lights.

Shaba focused on pulling the heavy airlock. “They probably just turned them off to save power.”

Bobbitt mumbled something into his microphone too quiet to understand. Nobody bothered to answer. They carried on. Soon, the heavy, reinforced blast doors of the facility loomed out of the dusty dimness, scratched and faded but intact.

“It’s closed,” said Bobbitt. “That’s a good sign.”

“Beats the alternative,” said Shaba.

They worked together, aligning the umbilical to the blast doors, sealing it with a faint hiss. The ship’s atmosphere flowed into the tunnel.

Mace unfolded the laser’s tripod and set it down. “You know,” he said, “there was this one missile silo I visited as a kid, right? It had blast doors like these, but on the front was the logo of Domino’s Pizza. Right below that, they had the words:
Delivery in thirty minutes or less, or your next one is free!
” He sighed into the microphone. “Was kinda hoping these guys would have a sense of humour too.”

The others laughed. Shaba didn’t. “Well,” she said, “let’s get to knocking.”

Bobbitt shrugged off his backpack and pulled out a hemispherical device the size of a football. With a pained grunt, he lifted it and magnetically attached it to the blast doors. It was an ultra low frequency emitter, one of the pieces of technology the
Washington
had for transmitting sound through objects, a device that was specifically engineered for large solid masses.

“Should be on,” he said. “There’s a second set of doors behind this one, but they might still be able to hear us.”

Shaba touched a button on her suit’s wrist. The half sphere lit up, shivering as if in anticipation. “Attention, Cheyenne Mountain facility. This is Lieutenant Kollek of the Israeli Air and Space Arm.” She could feel the vibrations in the floor below her feet, could hear it as though her own voice was coming from the floor. “We’ve arrived with a ship to transport you away.”

Nothing immediately—that was expected. She gave them a moment to let the message sink in, assuming it had been received at all. “The blast door is linked to our ship; it’s safe to open, as long as you do so slowly.”

More stretches of nothing. The
Piggyback
crew waited patiently.

“Maybe no one’s home,” said Bobbitt.

Shaba had come a long way to stand in front of that metal door. She wasn’t going to give up just yet. “Procedure is to wait twenty-four hours. If there’s no sign from within, we cut our way in and see what we can salvage.”

“A whole fucking day.” Bobbitt folded his arms. “Great.”

He was always that way. Shaba knew how to handle him. “Go play video games back on the ship if you can’t be bothered. We don’t need you here if you’re going to be a useless cunt wasting oxygen, complaining about things we can’t change.”

Again, everyone stared at her. Nobody said anything. The silence was worse than words. Maybe she’d gone too far.

Fortunately, it was broken by a series of faint tapping sounds coming through the blast doors—morse code.

.... . .-.. .-.. --- --..-- -.. --- -. --- - --- .--. . -. .-.-.-

Hello, do not open.

“Well,” said Shaba. “Guess we won’t be needing to shoot our way in.” She thumped back on the door.

.- -.. ...- .. ... ..-- .... . -. .-. . .- -.. -.-- .-.-.-

Advise when ready
.
 

“Now we wait, I guess,” said Mace.

The minutes ticked away. Almost half an hour later, the immense steel door groaned as it cracked open, the high-pitched whine of engines working to pull the metal wall apart.

Air rushed out, a side effect of the overpressure, to prevent gasses leaking in. A man in his sixties, wearing a dirty uniform, was waiting for them, his neatly cut black hair streaked with grey. The secondary blast door behind him was, wisely, closed. As the outside and inside equalised, he approached.

“I’m Brigadier General Andrew Decker-Sheng, United States Air Force.” He extended his hand. “Thank you for coming back for us.”

Shaba took it, shaking firmly. “Not a concern. Would have done the same for anyone.”

“What’s the situation?” asked Decker-Sheng. “How bad’s the damage?”

She bit her tongue. How could she tell him the Earth was gone? Shaba gestured to the tunnel. “Grab what you can and leave,” she said. “We’ll explain on the way.”

“Where are we going?”

Away from the bones. Away from the death. Away from here.
“Eden.”

Decker-Sheng guided the evacuation. The facility’s personnel filed out one by one, uniforms dishevelled, faces tired and hungry, all endlessly gushing about how grateful they were to be saved. They had been living in an underground facility for months, with little hope that any members of their species were alive at all. Could they even see the outside world, or was their only comfort the faint radiation-inspired hiss of static on their radios?

They grasped her hands as though she were offering them a life raft, doing the same to all her crew. Such a breakdown of discipline was staggering. Mace was practically engulfed in hands, each trying to shake his, clap him on the shoulder, or hug him. Some laughed. Some cried. Some practically ran out the blast doors.

All Shaba could think of was him.

There was little time to get to know each other. Together, the crew and survivors looted the place, filling the belly of
Piggyback
with anything that whirred, clicked, or beeped. Her ship was crammed with people and hard drives and filing cabinets.

Finally, the ship was powered up again. It groaned in protest as it lifted off, its body bloated and every available space filled with useless crap.

She worried that the ship would not make it out of the atmosphere, but Lockheed and Chengdu had overengineered it sufficiently well. The extra weight was not without its cost. It slowed acceleration, and it would be hours until the ship reached the Lagrange point. Shaba flicked on the autopilot, letting the ship guide itself. It would accelerate for half the journey and decelerate for the other half. Radar would watch for obstacles. There was nothing she could do here.

Time to meet the survivors.

She pushed herself out of the pilot’s seat and headed back to the stern of the ship, to the cargo bay. She melted into the sea of United States Air Force uniforms, following the voices of her crew.

Mace, Ginger, and Bobbitt worked with the survivors, breaking out MREs and water canisters, chatting energetically with the survivors. Space was at a premium, as was talking time. Each one juggled several conversations at once, with the same information being repeated verbatim, over and over. She joined in, adding her voice to the chorus.

The Toralii Alliance had attacked Earth. Everything was gone. NORAD had housed the only survivors who had not escaped with the three Pillars of the Earth. They had settled on the world of Velsharn, in a city called Eden.

The Toralii fleet that had attacked Earth had been destroyed. Since then, the Alliance had been eerily silent. Travel was now possible. Other colonisation options were being considered.

Captain Liao had been critically wounded.

An alarm cut over the hubbub, a radar contact. Conversation ceased. Shaba readied herself to fight through the crowd, but they parted and let her through. She returned to the cockpit, studying her instruments with practised, concerned eyes. Decker-Sheng followed her.

“What is it?” he asked.

A lone contact, large and reflecting plenty of radar, had arrived in the L1 Lagrange point. It hadn’t been there when
Piggyback
had jumped in-system. She analysed the results of each radar ping. It was far too large to be a Forerunner, the style of probe used by the Toralii Alliance used to scout distant worlds, too big even to be a freighter, and too spherical and oddly shaped to be a cruiser.

“Trouble,” she said.

If they had to run, escape would be easy. Even though they were ballistic, adjusting the ship’s course to avoid the jump point would take minimal adjustment. They could swing around the Moon and head for the L2 point or even swing out farther to the L3 or L4.

However, their strange contact didn’t seem to be moving. Radar pings came back evenly and without weapons fire, hovering in the same spot. The target was changing its shape, possibly, based on the view through the long-range thermal camera, but doing precious little else. As far as Shaba could tell, it was just sitting there.

Whoever it was, that contact was not hunting them, but not shooting didn’t mean it was friendly.

“Contact,” said Shaba, touching the internal comm unit. “All hands, action stations, action stations. Weapons tight—go to condition two.” The radar screen betrayed no telemetry information. Whoever the contact was, it wasn’t identifying itself. “We have a single bogey in the L1 Lagrange point.” She flipped switches in the panel above her, bringing the ship out of its idle, cruising state and increasing the reactor to full power.

The unidentified ship didn’t react to their presence. It just sat there. The
Piggyback
should have been visible for some time now. They could run, but she knew, deep down, she should at least talk to them to find out who those intruders in their system were and what they wanted.

Or let them blast her and her crew to atoms—dead, just like everyone on the graveyard planet at their six.

The other ship didn’t fire. It just sat there.

“What’s the plan?” asked Decker-Sheng.

Some people used to ask her, why she dated the guy after he’d raped her, why she continued to date him after he continued to rape her.

Her abuser was her terror, her creator of pain and fear, but also her saviour. When he was kind, the badness instantly went away. Suddenly, everything was okay. Suddenly, they were just a normal couple in love—a normal, healthy situation.

That familiar feeling returned when her console lit up. The strange ship was hailing them.

Were these people abusers too?

“The plan is to talk to them,” she said, reaching for the radio call button.

Time for some answers.

A
CT
I

C
HAPTER
I

Green

*****

Medical Bay

TFR
Rubens

Location Unknown

C
OMMANDER
M
ELISSA
L
IAO
WAS
TORN
from unconsciousness by tingling pain all over her body, with something stuffed down her nose and throat, smothering her to death. Air came as a trickle.

Bright-green water surrounded her. Her instincts revolted—she snatched at the something with her left hand, yanking at it frantically, trying to dislodge the blockage in her airway.

“Commander,” said a voice, thin and robotic as it filtered through a radio. “It’s Doctor Saeed. You need to relax. Everything’s going to be okay. You can breathe. You’re in a recovery chamber—you’re not on Eden anymore.”

The words held no weight for her. She sloshed and thrashed, lashing at nothing, her feet kicking against glass. Plugs extended from her body, thick black cables running to the edges of the tank, restraining her movements. Her skin was pruned and wrinkled as though she were a hundred years old, pale and bleached by a lack of sunlight.