Chapter 9

Chapter 9 of Moebius

Chapter 9

 

As the Tarran fleet entered high orbit distance above Mithra, Callum gave the signal for his secret project. Through the radio, he said, “Initiate Code V.” The console in front of him lit up with ready lights as his crew initiated all of their charges.

“Why call it Code V?” Veronica asked.

Callum looked at her with a grin. “V for Veronica, of course.”

“Aw.” Veronica put her hand on her chest.

The last of the ready lights lit up, and a confirmation prompt appeared. Callum grinned. “Time to test these babies out.” He pressed the button, and a swarm of relativistic missiles launched from the Second Light. They had no warheads, only the power of kinetic energy they would build up with speed. But these missiles were special; one of them had a hyperdrive. It engaged, and a green hole appeared and swallowed them up.

Callum imagined the missiles on their course. They would appear by one of the dwarf planets in the stellar system in no time---well, less than no time actually; hyperspace was weird---with the correct velocity to slingshot around the planet. Then they would enter hyperspace again, appearing by a slightly larger planet for a larger slingshot boost, and the process would repeat until the missiles were going very, very fast. And then . . .

Callum’s grin widened as he turned his attention back to the battles at hand. Once the missiles were finished with their jaunt, they would return for a big surprise.

The Tarran fleet reached a distance where they decided it was worth it to start firing on the planet. In response, Trace ordered the Resistance ships to intercept with point defense targeting. What they couldn’t neutralize with point defense, they blocked with their armored battleships. What they couldn’t block, Mithra’s ground defense took out. And when ground defense had to choose, they let through fire that would land in the ocean. And as the Tarran fleet continued to get closer, they would keep the heat on until one of the two sides gave out.

A hyperspace window opened up beside the Tarran flagship, the Righteous Judge. Almost simultaneously, shrapnel erupted from its opposite side. The Righteous Judge buckled, and then split in two, prompting the crew of the Second Light to burst out rejoicing.

“Congratulations, Callum,” Vice Admiral Setcher said. “Your plan worked beautifully.”

“As promised,” Callum replied.

“It’s a shame we don’t have more expendable hyperdrives. It sure would be nice to dish out more doses of that.”

“Maybe we can produce more for the next war.”

Rian chuckled, and then said. “Don’t let your guard down. Taking out Grand Admiral Taris-Ka and the Righteous Judge is a blow, but it isn’t going to stop them. They’re mad now.”

“Let’s make ‘em madder.”

Veronica congratulated Callum. “That was a neat trick. Hypothetically, how close to the speed of light could you get a relativistic missile to go if you used enough gravitational assist?”

“That depends on the source of gravity,” Callum replied. “Once you get going fast enough, it’s hard to get close enough for the gravity to have a significant effect.” He templed his fingers in thought. “Well I guess if you use black holes, there’d be no limit. Well that’s not true. The interplanetary medium would set an upper limit.”

“Interplanetary medium?” one of the petty officers in the room asked.

“Yeah. Space isn’t empty, not totally. It’s full of atomic dust so thin we can usually pretend it doesn’t exist.” Callum chuckled. “It’s funny to think of it, but if we got to ultra-relativistic speeds---and I’m talking suuuuuper fast---it could actually have strong enough drag friction to disintegrate a projectile.”

“So no getting a missile so fast it could, like, explode a planet or something,” Veronica said.

“Ha, no. In order to do that, it’d have to be made out of a practically indestructible material. . . .” he trailed off.

Veronica’s face fell. She had made the connection too. “Superium,” she whispered.

Callum’s breathing slowed to a snail’s pace. He gulped, almost choking on just the motion of his throat. “I need to talk to Rian. And Trace.”

 

* * *

 

“Are you sure this is the right place?” Taea asked. The team stood in front of a door with peeling paint in a brick wall on a back street.

“Only one way to find out,” Skipper said. He stepped forward and knocked.

The door opened, revealing a tall, muscled boy with wispy stubble on his chin. “What are you doing here?” He said. “Get lost.” But he didn’t close the door.

“We’re looking for something,” Skipper said, “and we’re wondering if we’ve come to the right place.”

“Oh yeah?” the boy said. “Whom do you serve?”

Taea stopped herself from reflexively saying Spellcaster. It was a common loyalty test, and they’d had to answer it several times since arriving on Tantalus. But if this was a hideout for the Aventari, Spellcaster would not be the correct answer, and in fact might get them kidnapped or killed.

“Drucan,” Taea said, at the same time as Skipper said, “The Disassembler.”

“And the Disassembler,” Taea amended.

The boy glared at them for a long moment, and Taea had a sinking feeling that he was about to turn them in to the police. Then he grunted and stepped aside. The four entered into a hallway and were ushered down a flight of stairs. From behind them, the boy said, “Unlikely for a bunch of ghosties to be for the Disassembler.”

“That’s racist,” Skipper retorted.

“Don’t care.”

At the bottom of the stairs was a large room full of people, a small number of whom were racial minorities. Some of them looked up to watch the newcomers enter the room, but they lost interest quickly. The air stank of depravity.

“What’s that stench?” Core said, screwing up her face.

“I don’t know,” Skipper replied, “but I’m betting it comes from something addictive.”

The aura of the place threatened to put Taea in a panic, and she had to fight hard the reflex to run. “I don’t like it here,” she said, her voice surprising her by being louder than she had intended.

“None of us do,” a boy near her said. “But then, we don’t like it out there either. Faced with two choices I don’t like, I’d rather pick the one that lets me do something about the situation.”

Taea looked back at the room again. The boy’s words made sense. She found that if she looked at the place with a mindset of choosing this version of discomfort in order to make a change, it became something she could face.

A boy stepped up onto a stage. he was not very tall, but he held himself with presence and confidence. “All right everyone,” he said, “listen up.”

“You can’t let him see me,” Conner hissed, ducking behind Core. “I know him.”

Taea looked back at the speaker, a renewed sense of fear easing into her.

“Tonight,” the boy continued, “we are making a move. The Imperial Tower is getting two new teams of night shift maintenance workers and janitors. We have managed to take their new hired personnel hostage, and we will take their place; Senna’s group is the maintenance crew, and we get janitorial duty.”

“Janitorial?” someone complained. “So we’re going to be scrubbing floors and toilets for Spellcaster and his dogs?”

“Considering that you’re under his spell,” the boy said, “I’m sure you’re going to like it.”

The girl cried out in angry protest, and Taea felt a rotten happy feeling swirling in her belly, which brought with it a wash of shame, anger, and self-loathing. This boy was Tantalian, fighting Spellcaster and serving the Disassembler. How could he be so casually cruel?

The room and its chatter faded away, and Taea found herself once again in that noxious place within herself where the forest of black vines wriggled and writhed. They parted like a curtain around the eye, the enormous yellow eye. She stood before it, so small, so insignificant. It stared directly at her, its slit pupil like a chasm to the abyss. It spoke, a slow, mighty rhythm, the sound so powerful it drove her to her hands and knees, sinking in a thick layer of mire. You will like this.

“Taea?” A hand on her shoulder pulled her out of her dream state. “The meeting’s over,” Skipper said. “We’re ready to leave.”

Taea looked around, her muscles moving as if through invisible mud. The attendance was thinning, the people filtering out the door. “Okay,” she said quietly.

 

* * *

 

Mara fired the guns while Oliver popped the Black Fire into and out of hyperspace. Their squadron, under Lawrence, had been deployed to harass a small new wave of enemy ships that had crossed half the distance between the edge of the jamming zone and Mithra. It was kind of like hunting. Except instead of stealthy it was intense and aggressive. And her targets were people instead of animals.

A bolt of plasma streaked their way, and Oliver barely managed to slip into hyperspace in time, emerging almost instantly two kilometers away. “Whoa!” Mara cried. “Let’s try not to cut it that close again.”

“Believe me,” Oliver replied, “I would be quite happy to oblige.” Mara fired, and Oliver jumped the Black Fire again, this time several hundred kilometers away from the battle. “This hyperdrive is gonna overheat if we don’t take a breather.”

“So am I,” Mara said, breathing heavily, hands clammy on the controls, a bead of sweat rolling down beside her eye.

“We can rest a little,” Oliver said, “but we have to get back to the fight as soon as possible.”

A bright streak moved across the view out the windshield. It looked like a plasma bolt, but there was no ship in the direction it had come from. “What’s that?” Mara asked.

Oliver followed her finger. “Looks like a comet,” he said. Then leaned forward. “Wait.” He furrowed his brow and stared at it for a long moment. “The tail,” he said.

“What about it?”

“It’s pointing straight behind it. That’s the wrong direction. Comet tails point away from the sun because the sunlight is vaporizing its surface.” He pushed some buttons to scan the object. When the results came back, his eyes widened and all of the color drained from his face.

“What is it?” Mara asked.

Oliver keyed the comm. “Lawrence, we just found something extremely urgent. I need you to forward this information up the chain of command to Admiral Archaea immediately.” He turned to Mara. “It’s a missile. A really, really powerful one.”

 

* * *

 

“You were right, Callum,” Trace said over the intercom to the bridge of the Second Light. “It’s a superium missile, so extremely relativistic that it’s leaving a trail of fire in the interplanetary medium, and its length has contracted so much it is essentially a flat disk. There’s so much kinetic energy in that thing that if it hits the planet, it will strike with the force of a thousand nuclear bombs, triggering a global catastrophe.”

“Oh, the curse of being right all the time,” Callum replied sardonically.

“How long until impact?” Rian asked.

“One minute, forty seconds.”

“So quickly?”

“It’s traveling at the speed of light.”

“I’m going to break off my current target to intercept.” The Second Light leaped into hyperspace and immediately reemerged between Mithra and the direction of the incoming missile. The Emergence immediately reestablished connection.

“You should know,” Trace said, “that firing on it won’t do much, since it’s going so fast and it’s so structurally sound that it will plow right through anything you throw at it.”

“I intend to divert it through hyperspace,” Rian said.

“The missile is equipped with a hyperspace jammer,” Trace said, “and in order to take it out you have to hit it in its unprotected rear, which will be extremely hard, because it’s traveling at the speed of light.”

“We may not need to,” Callum said. “If we can open a hyperspace window big enough that the jammer can’t tell it’s entering hyperspace.”

“Can you do it in one minute?”

“Yeah, if we blow the safety regulator and reroute all power to the hyperdrive.”

Rian gave the command, then opened a channel to the hyperdrive engineering chamber. “Whoever’s there, drop whatever you’re doing and listen closely.” He beckoned Callum.

Callum leaned over the console. “All right, we’ve gotta do this fast. Here’s what you’re gonna do.”

 

* * *

 

Behind the Second Light, a hyperspace window expanded. It grew to five times the size of the ship. Ten times. Twenty. A hundred times larger than a normal hyperspace window for a ship that size. Noticing that Mithra’s hyperspace jammers had been shut down in that area, a number of Tarran battleships, including the new flagship, the Judge’s Hand, leaped in and began to pummel the Second Light with fire.

Trace responded by sending in the Emergence, bringing along several other ships.

“Defend Second Light at any cost,” she ordered. “Tight cluster formation.” The ships grouped around the Second Light, pounded on all sides by enemy fire.

From this position, the sky was split in two. Half showed the usual sphere of stars infinitely far away, the other half a monstrous green maw, ribbons streaking down an endless abyss.

“Admiral,” Callum said frantically, “we’re not aligned. The missile is going to be too close to the edge of the window and cancel it out!”

Trace looked at the timer. Ten seconds until the missile reached the window. Weapons weren’t powerful enough to knock it off course, and there was no chance of catching a light-speed projectile with a force tether. With no time left, Trace did the only thing she could: she engaged a last-resort emergency procedure. While inputting her authorization code at record speed, she breathed, “I’m sorry.” She pressed the confirm key, the hyperdrive initiated, and the engines fired full blast.

For eight seconds, the Emergence accelerated at ten thousand g’s. A smaller craft would have been able to handle it, but the inertial dampeners couldn’t sustain the structural integrity of a battleship the size of the Emergence. The ship groaned, pieces of it breaking off, its crew undoubtedly being crushed, spaced, or splattered against the walls, the bridge one of the last safe havens.

It had to be worth it. A sacrifice of a few lives to save billions. She had ordered other ships into positions that ended up getting them killed. This war was a crucible of death, the soldiers accepting the inevitability that many of them would not live to see it end.

Still, pulling the trigger on her own crew made her feel like a monster. An action she knew in her head was right, but every fiber of her being screamed was wrong. And she wondered if this was how it felt to fight for the Resistance for people under the Shroud. If so, they were the most courageous comrades she had ever had the honor of serving with.

Trace’s last thought was one of amusement. How many people could say they died being struck by a doomsday missile tearing through them at the speed of light?

At eight hundred kilometers per second, the Emergence collided with the missile, traveling three hundred thousand kilometers per second. The missile shredded the Resistance flagship, its power vaporizing a tube through the middle and throwing the rest out in a globulating wave of molten metal. The missile continued out the other side, unharmed.

However, the collision had given the missile an amount of sideways momentum. Not enough to make it noticeably change course, but enough to redirect it a fraction of a fraction of a degree. And this imperceptible change was enough that it crossed the threshold and disappeared into the green abyss of hyperspace.

As it did so, something strange happened, which had thus far only been theorized in obscure scientific circles. The missile’s hyperspace jamming field passed close enough to the edge of the window to make it buckle. The rim of the hyperspace window bent upward, swept around, and scooped up all of the ships in front of it, Resistance and Tarran alike, before closing and disappearing.

 

* * *

 

“Cease fire.” The order came from Lawrence.

Around the Black Fire, plasma and missiles disappeared, zipping away into space. Hyperspace windows stopped opening, and fighters stopped swarming the enemy battleship.

“The enemy has surrendered,” Lawrence said, with apparent effort. “Our orders are to escort them into high Mithra orbit and disarm and disable their ships for use as prisons.”

“We won?” Mara said.

“Yes,” Lawrence said, “we won.”

“We won!” Oliver shouted, leaping to his feet and throwing his hands toward the ceiling. He laughed, and Mara found herself laughing with him.

“We won,” Mara said, her hands shaking, her awareness fuzzy from adrenaline overdose. Before and during the battle, a part of her had convinced itself that it knew they would win. Another part had hoped, but hadn’t believed. And yet another part had been constantly convinced they were about to die. All of this had kept her unable to think. All she could do had been to trust her hands to point and shoot.

Mara found herself on her feet, jumping in the air, her legs so full of energy they seemed to spring of their own accord. Oliver grabbed her in a fierce hug which she readily returned, and the two of them rocked around the cabin, laughing and crying. The room seemed to be spinning and Mara lost all sense of orientation, yet their feet somehow kept them from falling over.

She held Oliver out at arm’s length. “We won,” she said, feeling a smile on her face as wide as the one on his.

“Yes, we won,” Oliver replied. His eyes lowered to her mouth, and then he pulled her roughly into a kiss.

Mara returned it, but a part of her was startled. He had always been gentle when they had kissed in the past. This forcefulness was new. It was because of the victory high, of course. Mara found herself pulling him to her just as aggressively, her muscles straining to crush his chest to hers as if trying to force the air from his lungs. But a part of her was unnerved, and she was relieved when he pulled away without trying to go further.

“See?” Oliver said, “This is why we help people. So that the good guys can triumph over the oppressors. Doesn’t it feel great?” He grabbed her hands, squeezing too tightly.

Mara’s mouth opened and she sucked in a breath at the pain of his grip.

Seeing her discomfort, Oliver eased up. “Sorry,” he said with a laugh. Then he let go, placed one hand gently on her shoulder, and leaned in and kissed her cheek. She kissed his in return, to show she wasn’t upset, but also put her hand on the front of his shoulder to signify she expected him to step back.

Thankfully, he did. “All right,” Oliver said, “Let’s join the procession home for celebration!”

Home. Of course, Oliver was being metaphorical. Mithra was home for the Resistance, but it would never be home for either of them. Although, it was much more like his home than hers.

The image of Oridion appeared vividly in Mara’s mind’s eye. Ever under a dark ceiling in the caverns of Proserpine, the light of the lamps illuminating the streets, the warmth of the stoves and boilers filling the buildings.

She and her friends would explore the tunnels together, the dangerous parts blocked off, signs at every intersection telling the way home or to other towns, set up by generations upon generations of travelers.

She remembered helping prepare Community Supper every sixth day, tending the boiling slugs and sauce with the other girls while the boys and Martha---er, Mark---cleaned the game. That was right, just a few weeks ago Mark had declared that, even though he had the body of a girl, he was a boy on the inside and that meant he was a boy. The other boys he hung out with had long ago accepted him into their pack, and Mark’s declaration and change of name had merely been the final strike of the chisel.

When the meal was ready, all the people of the town came to the tables set out in the plaza. The food was brought out, and musicians played “Dancing in the Endless Tunnel,” “The Great Hunt,” and hundreds of other folk songs. The people sang, joked, and talked about life. Her people. Her tribe.

And here she was, sitting in a metal box surrounded by emptiness on all sides, pushing buttons and pulling levers so that other metal boxes surrounded by emptiness would break, spilling the members of another tribe out to their deaths, in defense of yet another tribe. How far this was from the world she belonged to. She looked at her hands, spreading open her palms. Did these hands belong to her, or someone else?

“Is something wrong?” Oliver asked.

Mara started, and then smiled wanly at him. “No, just post-battle fatigue, I guess.”

Oliver shook his head, chuckling. “I feel like I won’t be able to sleep for a week.”

And that’s why . . . Mara shook her head to clear it. Why what? She had felt so sure of the sentence’s meaning as she began to think it, but now she didn’t know how it was supposed to end. It was as if some deep realization of herself had been plucked away from her.

Well, she could figure it out later. For now, it was time to celebrate victory.