The first 3 chapters and a start to a fourth

Love it or hate it?

The darkness of space

 

Remnants

 

It was out there, somewhere. Maybe not close by, but it was out there and that knowledge, although already twelve years a companion, still chilled him to the bone. Captain Jericho Barimen stared out the window of his ship, a medium sized gunship of what had once been the colonial fleet of the Ynobe system. That seemed like a lifetime ago now. Now, there was no more colonial fleet, no more human presence, not even much of Ynobe left to speak of.
  And the same went for the other human colonies in other systems. All one hundred and fifty two of them. He knew, because he had visited them all after Umbra, the darkness, had descended upon the unprepared humanity like a tidal wave, sweeping away any trace of civilization or even life, at the most basic level. Jericho had visited the colonies after the shapesless, faceless enemy had moved on, hoping to find some fragment of human civilization left intact. But it was the same everywhere the darkness had been: complete and utter destruction of all life and civilization. Only ruins and silence remained.

It had all started out so hopeful, space travel. Some fifty odd years ago, a team of scientists, led by a doctor Usako Aiko, had developed a miraculous device, called the hyper-quantum drive. The device created a contained quantum singularity, which could be used to create a portal to a nearby star system, an energy vortex that allowed a journey that’d take thousands of years with conventional engines to be reduced to a matter of minutes. The range of the device was limited to three parsecs at most, and all attempts to boost the range had failed, so it could not send humanity anywhere it wanted to go, but it allowed mankind to progress into space and colonize other star systems, like had been the dream of countless millions for centuries.
   And for about thirty five years, man did exactly that. He did what he’d done on Earth for thousands of years: spread and multiply. Colony after colony was established and for thirty five years, things were good and mankind blossomed. They discovered new resources, new forms of life, new elements and places where the laws of physics as they knew them went right out the window. Sure, there had been the occasional accident or scientific mishap, which was entirely expectable when venturing into the unknown, but over all, it had all been rather like a giant voyage of discovery.
  Several colonies had failed or had even been completely destroyed because those in charge of their planning hadn’t taken into account that the rain on a planet was so acidic, it made sulfuric acid look like shampoo, or because in some places tectonic plates apparently solidified and liquefied at random. There had even been a colony on a small planet called Baelor 3 which had been devoured in its entirety by what can only be described as a gigantic stone worm. The slope of a small mountain had looked like it would provide good cover against the storms that frequently plagued the surface of Baelor 3. Unfortunately, that slope had turned out to be the lower jaw of the petrified subterranean worm and said worm hadn’t taken kindly to human beings trying to drill supports for their buildings in its jaw.
  In all though, it had been an era of unprecedented growth and development for the human race. Space was vast, bigger than anyone could’ve ever imagined, and every day there had been new stories of miraculous discoveries and things never seen or even conceived before. There’d been no contact with any other intelligent life, but, as man had only just truly found out, space was vast beyond imagining and officials were optimistic they’d find sentient life somewhere. The most advanced creatures they’d found in thirty five years however had been a race of tree-dwelling lizards that could create ingenious projectile contraptions from the twigs of the trees in which they lived. Their only interest however had been hunting the many birds that their home world had to offer. They didn’t even seem to grasp the concept of a society and communication with other species had proven to be beyond them.
  Still, officials were hopeful they’d find intelligent life somewhere, some day. After all, scientists all agreed that with a universe that seemingly stretched out for more parsecs than human beings could express in numbers, there simply had to be some sentience out there, waiting to be discovered.

There was.

 How innocent, how ignorant we were, Jericho thought to himself, his eyes following a comet that slowly made its way through the darkness of space. We were all living in our self-made Star Trek fantasy, where terrible abominations just didn’t happen, because that would ruin the story line.
Apparently, the universe wasn’t a fan of Star Trek.  
  Mankind had expected there’d be trouble somewhere. After all, if one expects to find life, one should also consider the possibility that that life could prove to be hostile, instead of friendly. So every colony had had a budget to set up defences and establish a fleet to protect the local star systems. And for when things got really bad, there was the CEF, the Central Earth Fleet, which was comprised of the biggest and most destructive warships mankind could conceive of. And man could conceive of quite some destruction. High-yield zeon bombs, capable of destroying whole planets, corrosive plasma missiles that could eat through any material known to exist and could reduce an entire fleet to scrap in a matter of seconds, biotoxins and chemical agents that could kill any form of life encountered, beam weapons that could cut through any form of energy shielding conceivable...
  These ships were called upon whenever there was a situation the local fleets and defenses could not cope with. They had been called upon once.

Jericho looked from the comet to the screen of his captain’s console. A little quick math told him it had been twelve years, three months, twenty five days, thirteen hours and forty seven minutes since contact had been lost with the human settlement on Pleiades III, according to GST. Jericho grimaced. Galactic Standard Time… for all he knew, he could rename it Trinity Time, after his ship, the Shining Trinity, because for all he knew, it was the last human ship in existence. It had been over two years since their last encounter with another human vessel, a small freighter, heading as far away from any of the human colonies as fast as their sub-quantum engines could take them. Jericho thought about them from time to time, wondering if perhaps they’d managed to get away. It was one of the few thoughts that kept him going, the hope that perhaps there were human settlements out there somewhere. But all they found since the encounter with the freighter were tiny groups of stranded people, ones and twos, maybe a dozen at once, never more. Everywhere humans started to gather in significant numbers, Umbra, the darkness, would arrive too, as if drawn to them, and soon nothing but dust and desolation would remain, and it had all started with Pleiades III.
  At first, no one had known what was going on, so ships had been sent to investigate. One after the other, they disappeared, never to be heard from again. This went on for over a month until CEF command had decreed the situation grave enough to assume something very bad was happening around the Pleiades system. They ordered the assembly of the biggest combined fleet in the history of mankind. Star destroyers, gunships, science vessels, transports… since nothing was known about what the fleet would be heading into, no precaution was spared. It took the better part of three months to assemble and call in the required ships from all parts of the galaxy and prepare for every conceivable eventuality.
  And then it was ready. The fleet left space dock and set out in the direction of the Pleiades system, the eyes of humanity resting on it. It was never to be heard from again either. It would take almost a year after the destruction of Pleiades III for the first images of Umbra to be even caught on video, taken by random civilians, heading to or departing from one of the next colonies the darkness was to engulf. Small craft, as it turned out, had a chance of getting away from Umbra, because it always seemed to sense where the largest human concentration was and headed straight for it, ignoring the smaller groups of people until the densely populated areas had been drained of all life. The footage had been dramatic and overwhelming and it had been burned into Jericho’s mind for the rest of his life. Mankind learned, adapted, tried new approaches against the shapeless wave of darkness when it became clear the conventional weapons had no effect. They had tried all manner of light sources, covering the entirety of the colour spectrum, trying to see if perhaps the darkness concealed something, but there had been nothing to see. It had been as if the light simply disappeared once it hit the dark barrier. Intrepid scientists had concocted all manner of traps and devices, thinking that if they couldn’t kill their enemy, perhaps they could capture it somehow. Energy fields had no effect, Umbra just seemed to pass through them as if they didn’t exist. Conventional traps and containment, no matter how refined, couldn’t contain the shapeless horror. It poured out through microscopically tiny openings, through openings that, up until then had only been theoretical because they only existed on a sub-atomic level that was too small for even the most powerful microscope to detect. A group of military commanders came up with the idea to implode a sun near Umbra, creating a black hole, which they hoped would suck up the darkness and crush it once and for all. For the briefest time, people had actually thought this approach worked, as the black hole indeed sucked up everything in what had been the Juno system, including all light sources, artificial or otherwise. The ensuing darkness made it almost impossible to see if Umbra was still there or not, as mankind didn’t even possess a mechanical means of detecting their dark adversary without actually seeing it with their own eyes.
  The confusion surrounding the utterly failed Juno experiment was also the one blip of hope mankind had had since first learning of Umbra’s existence. So, as often happens with mankind when hope gets the better of reason, the experiment was repeated in the adjacent star system by those that argued Umbra had been slowed down or weakened by the black hole in the Juno system. The truth of the matter, as far as Jericho had been able to ascertain, was that the black hole hadn’t had any effect on Umbra either. It had only obscured it from view for a while, until it came near another bright light source. The only effect Jericho had been able to determine was that now, instead of two star systems, there were two giant black holes in close proximity to each other, making travel in that region of space very difficult and extremely hazardous. Jericho had affectionately dubbed them Cain and Abel.
 

The reports of destruction and annihilation had kept coming in, although they became fewer and fewer as time went on, until there had been no one left to report anything anymore. All but the richest and most powerful people alive hadn’t had much choice but to wait in abject horror until their time came. Anyone with enough money to try escape had decided to find shelter somewhere or to make a run for it, heading for distant star systems they believed Umbra would not reach. Whether that was true or not, Jericho had no way of knowing. He had stayed when all others had fled, when the colonial fleet of Ynobe had futilely tried to rage against the dying of the light and had perished, as all other fleets had before it.

It had only been through sheer chance that his Shining Trinity had survived the massacre at Ynobe really. His ship had been ordered to the flank of their assault, while the more powerful star destroyers and cruisers made up the center. They were just coming around Benatar, one of the moons of the third planet of the system, when they laid eyes on Umbra. Thousands of hearts had skipped a beat that moment, when the black nebula appeared on the monitors, and so had Jericho’s. Then the commands had come through from the fleet admiralty: all ships, open fire. And fire they did. It was as if half the star system had been turned into a rainbow with fireworks in it, at least for the briefest of moments. All manner of beam weapons were directed at the black cloud, only to come right out the other side of it, without having even scathed it, missiles were fired at it, hundreds, thousands of them. They didn’t hit Umbra, but because there had been so many of them, they actually impacted with each other, causing giant explosions which, from afar, had looked like beautiful fireworks.

And then the beams dissipated and the missiles had been fired. Umbra retaliated. It moved forward to the nearest star destroyer, the Sapphire of Salvation, with surprising speed, although, Jericho remembered thinking to himself, it hadn’t looked like it had been in any particular hurry. Why would it be, after all? Every shred of data seemed to indicate nothing the humans possessed could inflict even the tiniest modicum of damage on the dark entity. The dark cloud engulfed the Sapphire, a few hints of muffled explosions were visible from inside the outer edges of Umbra… and that had been it. Two thousand lives eradicated, with no one to even actually see it happen. Then, when it was at the heart of the attacking fleet, the nebula seemed to sprout tentacles, like a giant, non-corporeal octopus, reaching out to the ships of the fleet. Some ships tried to run, but they didn’t get far. Some stood their ground heroically and were ripped to pieces or simply swallowed up whole by the dark. Jericho didn’t really do either. He’d just sat there, in astonished, dumbstruck horror, as the proud fleet he’d served with for most of his life and all of his colleagues and friends were killed before his eyes. He saw the Desolation, a sleek, beautiful frigate, captained by the equally beautiful and slender captain Tania Shapovic, get torn in half, but not before one of the black tentacles smashed in the bridge. Jericho had been meaning to ask her out sometime, but had always found excuses to not to… duty, risk, not the right time…

He remembered how a part of him had vaguely thought: well, at least I won’t have to make up excuses anymore.

Another part of him had thought: at least she didn’t suffer.

And yet another part of him had been yelling at him to get the hell out of there. But that all took place inside the captain’s mind and he didn’t move a muscle while his world collapsed around him. To anyone on the Trinity that day, it had seemed like their captain had just sat by motionlessly. Until the right side of his ship had been hit by the aft section of the Desolation, that is. The collision had been like an earthquake and a series of explosions had rocked the ship violently, like aftershocks. The inertial stabilizers and gravimetric controls had been knocked offline and Jericho could still see how his crew tried to hold on to their seats, to their consoles, to anything within reach, as the ship hurtled through space, to finally crash land on the moon of Benatar.

Later, Jericho learned a few of the crew members had managed to get to the escape pods, but most hadn’t, and the crash hadn’t been gentle or kind. Most of Jericho’s crew had been either killed or seriously wounded upon impact. A handful of those who’d made it to the escape pods eventually found their way back to the Trinity, which ended up stranded on Benatar for weeks. But while Umbra cleansed almost everything in the solar system of life, the crashed Trinity and her handful of brave survivors apparently escaped detection and were allowed time to heal and repair. After about five weeks, a science vessel dispatched by CEF command to look for survivors found them and helped them repair the damage they had been unable to mend themselves.

That had been the only time Jericho and the Trinity had gone up against Umbra and neither one of them had any desire to do so again anytime soon. It’s not the kind of experience that fades from memory easily.
 
  “Captain,” the calm voice of Trinity, the ship’s AI, interrupted his thoughts, “Lemon is approaching. He looks agitated.”
  “He always looks agitated, Trinity,” Jericho grumbled, one hand absentmindedly stroking his gradually graying beard, “If Lemon doesn’t look like something is about to blow up, that’s when I really start to worry.”
  “He is cautious by nature, captain, a quality I greatly appreciate. Without his relentless, almost obsessive focus on details, I dare say we probably wouldn’t be here today.”
  Jericho nodded.
“I agree. He’s proven to be a Godsend… even if he does believe all of the answers to life’s questions can be found in a lemon crate.”
  “If you owed your life and everything you hold dear to a lemon crate, perhaps you too would be equally fixated on it, sir.”
  Jericho grunted something unintelligible and looked out at the blackness of space, waiting for his chief engineer to arrive.

 

Lemon

 

Lemon’s story was a remarkable one, to say the least.

Some twenty odd years ago, Lemon’s parents had been a freighter couple. They ran and operated a freighter service between the planets and star systems near Ynobe. Since the outlying colonies were constantly growing, business had been booming and they’d managed to save up enough money to buy a second freighter, to expand their shipping reach and routes. They were on their way to Ynobe, to take possession of their new vessel when suddenly they were attacked by Zhorian pirates, at the outmost reaches of the Ynobe system.

Jericho remembered the Zhorians well enough. They’d been an endless nuisance at the fringe planets of Ynobe and he’d been ordered to the edge of the star system and beyond on rescue or persuit missions with the Trinity more times than he’d care to recall. The area was ideal for eager (and somewhat deranged) pirates, due to unusually intense gravimetric distortions in the area, caused by a few closely bundled clusters of quantum eddies.  The locals called the distortions the Devil’s Pocket. The distortions in the Pocket were unpredictable at the best of times and during intense solar activity or when there was a passing comet, they were nothing short of space minefields. Distortions would form and disappear seemingly at random and any ship caught in them would almost certainly be ripped apart, or damaged beyond repair. Too many ships had been lost there and of those, too many had been stuck inside the distortions with their ship damaged beyond salvation, because they’d been unfortunate enough to be around there when a solar flare erupted. And who’d been there to hear most of their distress calls, their pleas for help, their last words, as he could only sit by helplessly, watching the inevitable unfold? Jericho.

Once, a brazen young ensign, Gilensen had been his name, had volunteered to pilot a shuttlecraft into the eddies and retrieve stranded scientists whose life support was about to fail. Gilensen had been a legend among the crew of the Trinity and even Central Earth command had taken notice of the young lad’s skills and potential. They’d even sent a message to Jericho, to be careful with the lad, because they believed he could prove to be an invaluable asset to the fighter core one day. Hence, Jericho had not been extremely eager to let the young man go and put his life in harm’s way, but the youth had been insistent.

Perhaps he too had seen one too many ships explode, seemingly so close we could touch it with our bare hands… only to be able to do nothing, because the risk was tantamount to suicide. Perhaps.

So, eventually, Jericho had agreed to let Gilensen try. He’d urged him to be extremely careful and to return at the very first sign of trouble. Of course Gilensen had promised to do so, and it had to be said: the boy had almost made it, there and back again. The scientists had boarded the shuttle and Gilensen had set back out for the Shining Trinity. His skills truly were amazing, Jericho recalled. Twice, a distortion formed right in front of his ship and he’d somehow managed to avoid it. A distortion on his port side damaged his port nacelle, but the ensign held it together and was about to clear the Devil’s Pocket when one of the eddies shifted suddenly, a sudden, nearly invisible shimmer in space. The shuttle’s shields never stood a chance against the forces unleashed upon them. A brief rose of red and yellow and the tiny vessel was gone, but utterly.

Jericho grimaced as he remembered.

 

It was near that very location that Lemon’s parents ran afoul of the pirate attack that cost them their lives. They’d been hauling a shipment of highly valuable and rare pearium, a mineral that showed great promise for both energy production and ship manufacturing. It’d been a short trip only really, Lemon had told Jericho once, only 1.8 parsecs of flight distance. Unfortunately, Lemon’s parents would need every penny they made off the pearium shipment to buy their new freighter, because the shipwright had decided to increase the final price of the freighter by five percent at the last moment. This price hike had forced Lemon’s parents to cancel the security escort they’d arranged, because they could not afford them anymore. It’d been a gamble, but how much could really happen on such a short flight?

As it turned out, quite a lot, if somehow pirates hiding out in the Devil’s Pocket catch wind of it. And catch wind of it they had. Neither Lemon nor Jericho ever found out how, but someone had told them about the pearium shipment, because they’d been waiting, a freighter of their own ready to receive the cargo.

The attack on Lemon’s freighter had been ruthless. The Zhorians had a relatively simple set of rules they played by, and one of those was: never leave live witnesses. Only, in Lemon’s case, they missed one.

The Zhorians attached grappling hooks, cut their way through the freighter’s hull and entered, guns blazing. The freighter crew fought to the last man, but they were outnumbered and outgunned. The ship’s chef and medic had fortified themselves in the galley and were giving every Zhorian that showed his face phaser bolts for breakfast. A word from the pirate captain sent one of the pirate ships around the side of the freighter. Another word and the pirate ship’s phaser banks cut a hole in the freighter’s hull and both chef and medic were sucked out into space before emergency internal force fields could kick in.

Meanwhile, Lemon’s mother was running for her life, fleeing from intense phaser fire while her husband and the first mate tried to hold off the advancing Zhorians. She made it to the escape pod, but as she stood in front of the door, she suddenly realized that the Zhorians were not about to let a survivor leave the ship alive, much less two, even if one were an infant. So while her husband and the rest of the crew were fighting for their lives, she entered a nearby storage bay, which was full of food stuffs and supplies. In a corner stood a crate, filled with lemons. The young mother pushed it aside, quickly threw out almost half of the crate’s contents and put her infant boy in there, bundled up, with the two bottles she’d hurriedly made for him tucked to either side of him. She then stooped down and, with all her strength, managed to lift a floor panel off the floor, revealing a secret, shielded smuggling area they sometimes used for cargo that was best not seen by everybody. She quickly lowered the crate into the smugglers’ hold and replaced the floor panel. That’d been the last time Lemon had seen light for close to three weeks.

Lemon’s mother, fearing her son would be discovered, covered up the secret area as best she could and quickly made her way to the escape pod. She knew her son would be shielded from the pirates’ bioscans in his covert hiding place. To draw the pirates’ attention away from the smuggler’s hold, she boarded the escape pod and launched it, watching everything she loved slowly shrink as the pod got farther and farther away from the ship. Then there’d been a brief explosion and that’d been the end of the last survivor of the freighter crew.

As far as the pirates knew at least.

For all the misfortune that befell Lemon’s parents and shipmates that day, a miraculous stroke of good fortune befell him. All of the ruckus surrounding the attack and the ensuing quiet darkness of the smugglers’ hold had left baby Lemon remarkably drowsy, so he sucked on one of the bottles next to him, burped and fell asleep. He stirred restlessly as the pirates were stomping about in the storage area later, clearing out the supplies, but the boy never woke, not until long after the pirates had cleaned out the entire ship and had left it adrift in space; a lifeless shell, drifting through space, riddled with holes and devoid of life. For good measure they’d also set fire to the ship, expecting it would burn out or explode, but again, Lemon’s remarkable luck held. After the pirates had vacated the vessel, the ship’s computers came back online and the emergency fire suppression system activated. Baby Lemon never so much as smelled a whiff of smoke.    

Later on, things got worse for Lemon. The bottles ran out all too soon, his diaper got fuller and fuller and finally overflowed and in the midst of this lay Lemon; dirty, crying, hungry and alone in the dark. As he got hungrier and no one came to change his diaper, the infant boy began to kick and scream, as infants tend to do. In doing so, he happened to squash a few of the lemons around him. This distracted the little boy from his discomfort for a moment, because he noticed suddenly his arm was wet. He brought it to his mouth and tasted it. It was sour enough to make any grown man cringe and Lemon instantly hated the taste of lemon juice. Fortune has given a lemon a shape not unlike a woman’s breast however, and finally, in the darkness, Lemon started to suckle. He lay there, in the dark, for nineteen days, sucking on lemons, crying at some times, sleeping at others, until on the eighteenth day, the derelict freighter was salvaged by a passing merchant vessel and taken in tow to Ynobe.

It took over a day before someone in the Ynobe star dock, an inspector exploring the derelict vessel, heard muffled cries when he entered the storage area that’d concealed Lemon for all this time. Some searching revealed the tiny, starved and soiled infant in the lemon crate.

All who saw the little boy were amazed at how he’d managed to stay alive, but alive he was. The prolonged lack of proper nutrients and fibers for his body would prove to stunt his growth as time went by and the endless sucking on lemons had left the boy with a warped sense of taste, but apart from that, Lemon made a miraculous recovery and was released into the care of a foster family not too long after.

There, he grew up as normally as can be hoped for any child. The one strange thing Lemon’s foster parents had to put up with, was that he would not part with his lemon crate, no matter what. When he was a babe, he’d simply refuse to sleep in anything but the crate, on top of a heap of lemons that had to constantly be replaced every so often, when they started to go bad. Later on, the young boy outgrew the crate, but he still insisted on having it right next to his bed. He said it made him feel safe, even until he became a pre-teen. He’d gone to preschool, kindergarten and at the age of ten he was already preparing for secondary school, due to his remarkable aptitude for absorbing knowledge. His teachers would jokingly jibe that if all that lemon juice made him that smart, they’d need to start having a few lemons a day themselves.

Life had been good for Lemon and the boy was making good progress leaving his traumatic infancy behind him. A few more years and he’d be admitted to one of the star academies, everyone knew.

And then Umbra came.

Lemon had been a transport, bound for Crixus, one of Ynobe’s thirteen moons, when the attack on the system began. Having little armor and even fewer weapons, the transport immediately tried to plot an escape course, away from the carnage. It was a slow, old vessel though, capable of only semi-thruster speeds. For ferrying people between Ynobe and its moons, it was perfectly fine. For outrunning a space battle… not so much so. 

The transport had only barely completed turning around, when a huge portion of a stellar frigate, almost the full aft section of the ship, was blown free of the rest of the vessel as Umbra engulfed it. The huge chunk of debris collided with the transport at a speed far greater than what the transport itself was capable of and the damage it inflicted upon the smaller vessel was no less than catastrophic. Over half the crew and passengers of the transport were killed instantly. Ironically the ones in the front half of the ship suffered the worst of it, as a quantum nacelle and a translight receiver dish smashed into the transport at two points. All escape pods on the port side of the transport were instantly destroyed and most on the starboard side were damaged to various degrees.

Lemon was late to arrive to one of the escape pods as well. When the battle had begun, he’d been in his quarters, reading about elementary quantum engineering. He’d never outgrown his dislike of the dark and in space, there was a lot of dark. So he preferred to remain in his (extremely well lit) cabin and read whenever he was in space. That, or work on highly theoretical models of things people two or three times his age could barely understand.

When the frigate section collided with the transport, the translight receiver dish struck the ship not too far from Lemon’s quarters. Most of the ceiling of his cabin collapsed almost instantly and neigh all the items in the room were utterly destroyed. Lemon, however, was not.

The frigate’s quantum nacelle had struck the ship only seconds earlier, sending everything in Lemon’s room, including Lemon himself, flying and tumbling everywhere, as the transport’s inertial stabilizers tried in vain to compensate for the massive impact of the huge nacelle. Lemon fell from his bunk and hit his head on the floor. A split second later, his lemon crate landed, half on him and half resting against the side of the bed. Then the ceiling collapsed.

A heavy metal support beam landed right on top of Lemon. By all accounts, he should’ve died that day, there and then, as he lay dazed on the floor of his cabin, trying to comprehend what had just happened. But he didn’t die. Again, his lemon crate saved his life, holding up the majority of the weight of the beam long enough for the boy to regain his senses and realize he needed to get the hell out of there. Lemon didn’t abandon his beloved crate though. After he crawled out from underneath the creaking crate, he turned around, looked at the crate and realized he just couldn’t bring himself to leave it here, even though it seemed quite stuck. But, using a part of another support beam and the bed frame as a jack, he managed to lift the heavy beam far enough to move the crate out from underneath it with his foot.

By the time Lemon got to the escape pods with his crate, most of the people had either already abandoned the transport or perished. The only other soul he found was a young girl of about four to six years old. She was wandering the transport aimlessly, looking for her parents. Lemon didn’t know who the girl’s parents were, neither did he stop to ask. The girl started screaming as he pulled her towards one of the few remaining escape pods, exclaiming how she needed to find her mother and father. He didn’t have the time to argue with her, so with the crate in one hand and the squirming girl in the other, he made his way to the pods. Getting the girl inside one had proven difficult, as she was apparently adamant about finding her parents. That was when the boy leaned over to her and said in a low voice: “Your parents are dead. And if you don’t want to be dead too, you come with me.”

With that, he let go of her hand and stepped into the escape pod.

The girl stood there indecisively for a moment, looking from Lemon to the burning ship and back again at the boy. Finally, something seemed to occur to her and she stepped into the escape pod with Lemon.

“They’re probably already on the planet, waiting for me,” she said. The note of denial in her voice could almost pass for confidence.

“Maybe,” Lemon agreed as he buckled the girl in, “Hold on!”

 

The launch of the escape pod was rocky. Bits of wrought iron had warped the launch shaft of the escape pod to a degree where it almost didn’t make it out of the transport altogether. But, fortunately, it did, although the escape pod was damaged further in the ejection sequence. A rain of sparks and a few flames accompanied the escape pod as it departed the dying transport and started hurtling towards Crixus. The pod’s guidance system was badly damaged, but with the help of the computer and some manual adjustments, Lemon managed to steer the pod to an approach angle that didn’t instantly vaporize the pod upon entry of the atmosphere. The bumpy ride through the atmosphere did however fry what was left of the ship’s computers, so Lemon had no way of selecting a landing site.

As fate would have it, they crashed into the sea, a hundred or so kilometres from shore. The parachutes opened, most of them anyway, but the impact was still hard enough to break the door of the escape pod open. Water flooded in instantly and it didn’t take a genius to realize the pod would sink to the bottom of the sea in a matter of minutes. 

There wasn’t a lot of time, but Lemon managed to retrieve the emergency survival kit and inflate the raft inside it. Moments later, he and the little girl were in it, slowly drifting away from the escape pod that had brought them there. Lemon’s basket was clutched under his right arm.

At first, Lemon had his doubts about the girl, but those soon proved to be unwarranted. He’d feared she would either be no help or even do more harm than good, but the girl proved to be a plucky little thing. She didn’t despair as he’d feared, but rather set to work, helping him as best she could. The survival kit even turned out to contain a small, extendable fishing rod, and she proved to be a vastly superior fisherwoman than Lemon, whose life had been predominantly spent indoors, could ever hope to be.

They talked, from time to time. He found out here name was Lena and that her parents were a ranger of a wildlife preserve and a wilderness botanist. Not surprisingly, they’d met on the job. Lemon told her about his foster parents, since he didn’t have any recollection of his biological parents. The story worked fine, he just had to be careful to leave out the word “foster”. He was actually getting into the story when it dawned on him that he had no idea if his foster parents were even alright. Suddenly, he’d felt very alone in the life raft and he was glad of the black haired girl’s company. There, Lena proved to be not only resilient, but also empathic. When the boy’s voice faltered, it took one look at him for her to realize what was on his mind. She crawled over to the older boy, kissed his cheek, put her arms around him and hugged him as hard as she could. Lemon smiled at her as she nestled in his lap and soon fell asleep. Not too long thereafter, he was asleep too. A part of him thought he should stay awake, to keep watch, but there didn’t seem to be anything dangerous in the sea around them, and the ordeal with the escape pod and now being afloat at sea had taken their toll on young Lemon.

Lena woke first, looked up and saw some dark clouds gathering overhead. Not the kind of sight you want to see when you’re in an inflatable raft at sea. Soon, raindrops starting pelting the raft, first drenching everything inside, then slowly but surely filling the raft with water. As the rain started falling on the raft, Lemon awoke and looked around. No land in sight, only the prospect of rain.

“Quick, help me,” Lena said as Lemon sat up, “before the raft fills with rain water and we both drown.”

The two scooped water out for what must have been hours. They used everything in sight, from their hands to disposable cups, empty bottles and large spoons. It was painstaking work, but they managed to keep the raft afloat during the rain shower and finally dawn neared again and the rains stopped. Lemon was just about to slump down into the raft again, exhausted, when suddenly Lena pointed to something in the sky.

“Look!”

At first, Lemon saw only fading stars, but then he saw what Lena was pointing at: one of the stars was moving and slowly coming towards them. A minute later, they could tell it was a small jet or spacecraft.

“Quick, Lena! Get the flare gun!” Lemon shrieked excitedly.

The girl quickly dove into the survival kit and retrieved the flare gun, but when she tried to raise it to fire a flare into the air, the gun slipped from her hands, which were still wet from the rain shower earlier. She fumbled for the gun, trying to catch it before it fell, but as luck would have it, her finger caught on the flare gun’s trigger and a flare was launched... into the bottom of the inflatable raft. Fired at such close range, even flares can pack quite a punch, and the hot flare ate through the soft, malleable synthetic fibre of the raft like a gerbil through a cardboard box.

Although the incident happened right in front of him, Lemon could only stand and watch, frozen in abject horror. A part of him thought about the lost flare... it’d been the only one they’d had and now it was already extinguished by the cold, seemingly bottomless sea around them. Another part of him gawked wordlessly as the water started welling up through the hole in the bottom of the raft.

Then Lena screamed and snapped him out of the trance he was in.

“We’re sinking!”

It was hopeless to try to fix the hole in the raft, Lemon saw instantly. He could put both his fists in the hole in the floor and still there’d be room for three more. There was no way he could patch up a hole that size. Lena tried, but failed miserably.

“Grab the food and water!” Lemon yelled, “Put them in the survival kit. We’ll put that buoyant case in my crate and put it upside down. That should be enough to keep us afloat.”

Wasting no time, the boy and the girl got to work and when the raft floundered and disappeared into the dark waters of the sea a few minutes later, they were still afloat, each hanging on to a side of the upturned crate. And there they stayed, for several hours.

The plane, which is what the lights in the sky had turned out to be, circled around them for a long time, as if looking for something. Its search lights were gliding across the waves, first far away, then slowly coming closer and closer, as if the plane were following along an invisible grid pattern. Finally, almost four hours later, the plane finally found the two children. When they were finally pulled aboard the plane, the man who greeted them smiled and jokingly said: “I know those rafts have transponders, kids, but did you really have to sink your raft so fast? It’s a big sea you know?”

“I wasn’t worried,” Lemon had said, only half boasting, as he wrapped a blanket around himself, “I had my lemon crate.”

 

 

Survivors

 

Lemon burst onto the bridge, indeed looking quite agitated. He was barely twenty, and his scrawny physique and his stunted growth made him look even younger. All the same, the grey eyes that peeked out from underneath the ash blonde hair shone bright with intelligence and there was a firmness around his mouth and cheeks that hinted at a resilience and will to survive that only few humans could hope to equal. 

“Captain, you have to do something! This is becoming intolerable! Not to mention that one day one of them is going to blow us up!”

“Calm down,” Jericho said softly, putting a hand on Lemon’s shoulder, “and tell me slowly: what’s the issue at hand?”

“It’s those refugees, cap’n, the ones we picked up from Tau Ceti III a few weeks ago?”

“I know of them, go on.”

“They’re half savages, sir! Anyone with any technical skill was killed in the Umbra attack on Tau Ceti and these people have had to survive in the most appalling of circumstances for years! They lived by hunting and gathering, cooking their kills over camp fires, which they started by rubbing two sticks together! Sticks! When I first found out about the sticks, I wondered if we’d regressed back into the dark ages or something.” Lemon waved his hands in the air in a gesture of frustration. “Sticks, seriously? We went from neutron accelerators to... sticks?”

“What’s the problem, son?” Jericho asked, trying to make his voice sound patient. This was one of the things one had to put up with when dealing with Lemon. He went off on tangents.

“The problem, sir, is that they’re so set in their ways after a decade or so of making camp fires, that they’re now still making them in here! Chef just had to put out a fire in the galley and some genius started a fire on top of a plasma conduit in cargo bay six not long before that. Fortunately Trinity caught it in time and the automatic sprinklers put it out before it could overheat the plasma and blow up the whole ship, but we both know the sprinklers don’t cover the whole ship. What if one of these cretins decides to start a fire in a closet, thinking it looks like a nice fireplace?”

 “Ah, yes, I’d been meaning to talk to you about those fire reports. Trinity keeps me apprised here of any incidents in the ship, but sometimes it’s hard for her to ascertain whether we’re dealing with an accident, sabotage or intentional fire making. She should interact with people more, I think sometimes. Anyway... you’re right, this cannot continue. Let’s go talk to the Tau Ceti survivors and see what they have to say for themselves.” Jericho then turned to address the bridge as a whole: “Trinity, keep an eye out for anything suspicious and notify me the moment you pick up any sign of Umbra. I have no reason to believe they’re anywhere near here and things have been quiet for a long time, but since none of us have any clue as to where Umbra is until it arrives there, I don’t think that my gut feeling counts for very much.”

“Yes, captain,” the voice of Trinity, the ship’s AI, replied, sounding neutral as ever.

As captain Jericho and Lemon left the bridge, their every move was watched intently by the half dozen built-in miniature cameras that were strategically placed throughout the ship’s bridge.  After they’d left, the main view screen flickered on, showing Trinity, looking radiant as only a virtual being could. Her short, black hair was positively glistening in the artificial light and her face, unnaturally beautiful in its features, bore a quasi-pensive expression, that slowly changed into a little mischievous smirk. She slowly raised a hand to her chin and tilted her head, as if considering something from multiple angles.

“Interact more with people, hmm? Now there’s a thought.”

And with that, a tiny little electrical signal was sent to the ships redundant processing core, unseen by any human eyes. A moment later, another was sent to Assembly bay 1.

 

Carrier signal �" secure trans ops. Internal relay.

Security clearance level �" system only. No external access.

Directive �" implied, strictly confidential, as per ED AI code 146b, section 17.

Assigned to �" assembly bay 1, automated personnel only.

Directive content �" assembly as per internal Directive XD27096-457.  As per strictly confidential parameters, Directive can only be carried out in the absence of human beings or any such recording devices or materials that might lead to premature disclosure of Directive. Directive to be presented to the ship’s commanding officer at time of completion.

Priority �" 7.3

Commence date and time �" March 30, 12 AU �" 13:47:28.

 

Jericho and Lemon headed down the dimly lit corridor towards what on board the Shining Trinity was commonly referred to as ‘the whispers’. The whispers where the dual personnel elevators near the middle of the ship, which produced a sound not unlike humans whispering when they ascended or descended. While some people had expressed they felt the sound was a bit eerie, especially in the dark of the (simulated) night, Jericho had grown quite fond of the sound over the years. It made him feel like he was home and he wouldn’t hear of changing it.

“So,” Jericho said conversationally as the pair walked down the corridor, “what are you reading now?”

“Hmm?” Lemon looked up at his captain, as if awoken from some trance. He oft looked like that, as people who are too intelligent for their surroundings sometimes tend to. When the world and the people around you aren’t interesting enough to hold your attention for long, sometimes the brilliant mind wanders into its own recesses, to look for more stimulating topics of conversation and exploration.

“What book are you reading now? You’re always reading something.”

“Oh, uh... just a little something about medieval France. Quite fascinating, really.”

“I see,” said Jericho, fully aware that Lemon’s ‘little something’ was probably a massive tome of close to two thousand pages and most likely written in medieval French as well. “So, it’s well written then?”

“I wouldn’t say that, cap’n. I meant the era is immensely fascinating. The writer of this book has a very factual way of telling his story, which is both refreshing and bothersome at the same time.”

“How so?”

“Well, it’s quite refreshing to read a story that consists of pretty much pure facts, with little to no embellishments and speculations. Writers so oft do that, make up stuff to make a story sound better or attempt to fill in the blanks where they’re not sure about what to write exactly. If you don’t know what to write, don’t write it, right?”

Jericho merely smiled, which Lemon, who seldom needed much encouragement to talk as it was, took as a silent go-ahead for the rest of his diatribe.

“But this writer... he just doesn’t seem to grasp the idea of story elements. You introduce them into the story to make the reader curious and to further develop the plot later on, when you may or may not choose to develop and use them further. This book... it has no redundant story elements whatsoever. I don’t know what I find more annoying: too many redundant story elements or not enough.”

“Ah,” Jericho replied politely as he pressed the button and waited for the elevator to arrive. After a moment of silence, he asked: “How well would you say our latest survivors are settling in?”

“Not too well I’m afraid, cap’n. Some of them have been living in a state of near perpetual terror for over a decade. This leaves the best of people a touch weird. Some of them may not be entirely right in the head anymore, and those that are are in serious need of some reschooling just to fit back in on this ship.”

The elevator arrived and the two men got on it.

“The fact that some of them are living in a cargo hold probably doesn’t help things along either, does it?”

“Well...” Lemon looked a bit hesitant, “I think they appreciate the familiarity of their surroundings, sir. Most of them had been living in caves and ruins for ages. The lack of modern luxuries and facilities over there actually seems to keep some of them quiet. I think this morning Anderton tried to move a few of them to some staff quarters she had cleared out especially for them. The end results involved wailing, destruction on a large scale and situations that were generally untenable. Most of them are back in cargo bay two by now.”

“I see...” Jericho stroked his beard thoughtfully for a moment. “Well then, it would seem they indeed need, as you put it, reschooling. When can you have a classroom set up?”

“Today, sir, if needs be. But who’ll be teaching them? Since we found counsellor Frost dangling from that ventilation shaft, we haven’t exactly had a teacher anymore. I suppose hearing about all that grief from all those people finally got too much for the old guy.”

“You will, until we find someone better.”

“Me?!” Lemon looked as if Jericho had just singlehandedly rewritten the laws of physics. For a moment neither of the two spoke and the soft whispering of the elevator filled the compartment.

“I have faith in you,” Jericho said plainly, putting a hand on Lemon’s shoulder.

“But... but... I must be like the worst teacher in history! I can’t explain things worth a damn, I just understand them.”

“Well, that’s a good basis to teach from, don’t you think?”

“Yes, but... no...” Lemon’s voice trailed off. “How long have you already been planning this for me?”

“A while,” Jericho said with his best impression of an enigmatic smile on his face. In truth he’d already decided on that matter before Lemon even walked onto the bridge earlier. “Don’t worry too much. You’re good with people.”

“But... some of them may get rowdy. Why don’t you send Highman to do it? He’s in charge of ship’s security ‘n all that. He’ll have them marching in a line in no time.”

“Highman can discipline them, that’s for sure. He’d bully and badger them into complete submission. And scare the living daylights out of them. These people have been through enough. They need a more human approach.”

“I’ll be a dead human if one of them tries to choke me.”

“I’ll have mister Highman assign a security officer to your classroom, just in case.”

The elevator doors opened and Lemon and Jericho got off.

“Trinity, please ask mister Highman to join us in cargo bay two,” Jericho said to the hallway in general.

“Yes, captain,” came the immediate response from the ship’s AI.

 “So,” Jericho said, turning back to Lemon as the two of them proceeded down the hall, “where would you propose we make our classroom?”

“Why not use the old conference room on C deck? It’s not like we’ve got a lot of conferring to do lately.”

“Excellent choice. I’ll make the announcement to the people in a moment and you’ll get to work on it after that, understood?”

“Yes, captain.”

 

As Jericho was addressing the assembled survivors and refugees in cargo bay two, he was joined by Trinity’s chief security officer Ortov Highman. He gave his commanding officer a courteous nod and took his place at the captain’s right shoulder, with Lemon standing to the left of the captain, looking particularly uneasy. He tried to hide it to the best of his abilities, but didn’t succeed very well. Not unless one would consider nervous twitching and wildly dashing eyes signs of a peaceful mind.

The responses Jericho got from the crowd ranged from cautiously approving nods and smiles to distrustful looks and outright hostile glares and frowns.  Throughout the whole address, people in the assembled crowd were talking amongst themselves, as most of them had seldom even witnessed a public address. When you live with a dozen or fewer people, there isn’t much need for such things generally. This did force Jericho to raise his voice on a number of occasions, just to be heard, and once Highman bellowed out to the crowd to shut up and listen to the captain. That worked for a whole three minutes, which was actually fairly impressive, considering most of the gathered congregation had developed rather anarchistic tendencies during their periods of isolation. There was a rather scruffy looking man of undetermined age, with a brownish, curly beard that was as wide as it was long, who kept making lewd gestures when he thought Jericho wasn’t looking. Also, his mouth never seemed to stop moving, although no audible sound came out, as if he was quietly muttering to himself. Judging by the expression on his face, he wasn’t muttering nice things. There was an elderly couple in the back of the bay, well into their sixties if Jericho was any judge of such matters, whose restless movements and endless squabbling drew Jericho’s attention from all the way across the room. Both were garbed in grey, hooded cloaks, but the hoods were down at present, so their faces were clearly visible. The woman continuously kept prodding the man with her elbow, as if urging him to speak up, to which the man responded with angry looks and occasionally with an obviously dismayed retort. Once or twice he tried to shove the woman back when she elbowed him, but she just avoided his hand whenever he made a clumsy attempt at retaliation and kept badgering the old man. Finally, Jericho interrupted his speech for a moment to whisper to Highman: “See that elderly couple in the back? Get them up here once I’m done, I want to know what they’re so worked up about.”

“Sir.”
A few minutes later, Jericho was concluding his speech.

“Now, I’ll let mister Lemon, our chief engineer/teacher, introduce himself to you. After that, you can ask him any questions you may have.”
As Lemon hesitantly shuffled forward to the address the gather crowd, Jericho took a step back and walked over to Highman and the elderly couple, who were waiting a bit further to the back of the room. He suddenly noticed they had a little girl with them, probably not even ten years of age yet. She had long brown hair and remarkably bright eyes that gazed around curiously and inquisitively. She smiled a cheerful smile at the captain as he approached and extended her hand.

“Hello, sir!” she exclaimed merrily as she took the captain’s hand, “My name is Sasha. You are captain Jericho, right? Thank you for taking us in. I like your ship, it’s a pretty ship. This room is not very comfy though... but then I suppose it beats the old subway we were living in for the longest time...”

Jericho couldn’t help but smile at the girl’s innocent, cheerful babblings. She seemed to have a lot to say and Jericho always prided himself on being accessible to anyone at any time, so he waited patiently until she was done. A moment later, the old woman leaned forward and took the girl by the hand, chiding her softly.

“Shh, foolish girl, you cannot just talk to the captain like that, do you want to get us all in trouble?” 

“Oh, he’s not going to be mean,” Sasha replied with a smile as she looked from the old woman to the captain again, “He may look like a big, grumpy bear, but he’s a really nice man. I know such things.”

The old woman opened her mouth to reply, but Jericho cut in with a smile and said: “It’s quite alright, madam, I always say that there is no better place to find the truth than from the mouths of little children.” 

“Nice to meet you, Sasha,” he said, turning to the girl again, “You’re right, this room is pretty uncomfortable, isn’t it?”

The girl nodded.

“Well, I can see if I can arrange more comfortable quarters for you and... your grandparents? Would you like that?”

“Oh yes, sir!” Sasha exclaimed happily, “I would like that a lot. These floors are so awfully hard... and everything here is too flammable.”
Jericho tilted his head a little and looked at the girl with renewed interest.

“Flammable?”

“Yes, it means that it can catch on fire, grandpa taught me that.”

“Yes, and obviously, I’m not done teaching you yet, young lady,” the old man said with an apologetic smile as he stepped forward and ushered the girl back in between himself and the grandmother. “Please forgive the girl her rashness, captain, like you said: ‘from the mouths of babes...’ ” His voice trailed off and his apologetic smile became so big and strained, Jericho feared the man might injure his jaw if he kept it up for too long.

“That’s all right, sir. Children say what they will...” as he said that, the smile disappeared from Jericho’s face, “but I would like to know what you and your wife were arguing about all the time while I was trying to address you and your fellow refugees.”

“Oh it was nothing, sir, really, just petty stuff, you know...”
The woman nudged the man with her elbow again.

“Ellis Mac Nichol, you tell the captain, right now.”

“Leonora, will you please be quiet?” the man said through clenched teeth, “We cannot trust this man with our problems.”

“He deserves to know. Besides, there’s not many others left we can confide in, now are there?”

“He won’t understand... he’ll just make things worse and ask all the wrong questions. People in charge always do.”

“Sasha seems to trust him. That’s good enough for me.”
Jericho, who’d been standing by, watching the exchange with a mixture of curiosity and bewilderment, decided this would be a good time to cut in.

“Tell me what, exactly?”
The old woman’s face took on a solemn expression as she turned to face the captain.

“That we are responsible for unleashing Umbra on humanity.”

 

Absolution

Jericho looked at the woman blankly, trying to make out whether she was insane or just speaking out of some sort misguided guilt. He was vaguely aware of Lemon giving a stammering address to the other refugees, but paid it scant notice.

“Excuse me?” 
The look the old Leonora gave the captain made him quickly re-evaluate his initial estimate of her state of mind.

“It is because of us that humanity now teeters on the brink of extinction. We unleashed the horror that is Umbra and I can shoulder the burden of guilt no more.”

“I’m sure you think that, but-” Highman began, but Leonora cut him off before he could get another word out.

“Many may think it, but we know for a fact that it was because of us that the colony on Pleiades III was attacked. We were there. We failed in our tasks and awoke an evil that had been slumbering since before mankind even existed. We knew of them, but we were completely unprepared for them when they came. The speed and ferocity with which they struck, the total and utter desolation and void they left in their wake... We weren’t ready... none of us were. We ran, we hid. For the longest time we hid... there were precious few people left whom we could confide in after the attacks, and those that were left were off just as bad as we were or worse.”

Ellis, who’d been standing by mutely as his wife was telling their incredible story, finally decided to contribute, apparently thinking the damage was already done.  

“We tried looking for someone to tell, captain... We’ve been looking for so long... But there was no one, until you rescued us. The people we came across were half mad with fear and exhaustion. Some tried to kill us, some tried to help us... but none were in a position to offer the help we needed. None until you...” his voice trailed off as he stared into the distance for a moment. “And now, I fear it may well be too late already.”

“Hush, you old fool,” Leonora chided the old man and swatted the back of his head, “we’ll have none of that ‘roll over and die’ crap here now. The hour is late, but there may still be time to save the universe, if we act now.”

Jericho glanced over to Highman, who was frowning at the couple suspiciously. Strangely enough, this made Jericho feel more comfortable about the whole insane tale. It was always good to see some things never changed and that some things could always be relied upon. One could always count on Highman to be Highman.

“Mister Highman, Ellis, Leonora, would you please accompany me to my ready room? I think I need to hear the whole story, and I reckon it’s better if not too many other ears listen in on it.”

“Very true, captain. But what about Sasha? We can’t leave her alone here.”
Jericho looked at the little girl, who flashed him another of her heart-warming smiles.

“Well, I reckon if she’s survived Umbra and living in utter ruins for all this time, she’ll probably survive my ready room. Bring her along.”

 

 

Author's Note

Any items that need improvement are much appreciated, but please be constructive, if not kind. Thanks.