“Why don’t you make yourself useful,” I grumbled at the AI, “and figure out how long we have left?”
You could do that yourself, Jim chided. Three minutes and thirty-five seconds, approximately.
Three minutes. I’d know in three minutes. So many disappointments, so many times the rug had been pulled out from beneath us, and in three minutes we’d be back in the Cluster, back in the Commonwealth. I wondered how the Fleet would deal with us. They’d surely written us off as KIA years ago, and getting anyone to believe our story would be a miracle. I mean, the ship and the aliens—Jay and Bob and Dr. Spinner—would give some evidence, along with the helmet camera records from the surviving Vigilante suits. But none of that would explain the network, or the powers it gave to the Predecessors, or how it had destroyed them.
Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
“Was that you, Jim, or just my memory?”
Both, technically. If you don’t remember it, then neither do I.
A flashing yellow light in the main display warned that we were less than a minute away from the drive deactivating. No braking involved, because the ship wasn’t technically moving at all. Instead, she expanded the fabric of spacetime behind her and contracted that in front of her, sort of like a cosmic boat propellor. All we had to do in order to stop was cut off power to the field, no bruising deceleration necessary. What I wouldn’t have given to have a ship like this from the beginning. So many of my friends would still have been alive.
The contorted vision of the universe expanded into the sort of star field I was used to… and, more importantly, the ones I knew.
“Jim,” I hissed, half a question, half a prayer, “tell me…”
According to the files you had me download from the Orion, we are, indeed, back in the collection of star systems you call the Cluster, at the system catalogued as C63452-9, colloquially known as Waypoint at the edge of the group of stars constituting the Commonwealth.
I sank back in my chair, disbelief warring with relief, sapping all my strength, and I couldn’t bring myself to move or even speak for what might have been minutes. We’d done it.
We were home.
“Jim,” I said finally, “wake them up.”
“Where are we?” Vicky asked, rubbing at her eyes as she sat up in the stasis chamber. Blinking, she looked around at the other transparent coffins popping open around us and the blank confusion on her face changed to annoyance. “Why didn’t you wake me up for your shift?”
I didn’t answer immediately, just staring at her. Hers was the first human voice I’d heard in three months, and even the plaintive tone sounded beautiful to me. Grinning like an idiot, I leaned in and kissed her, not caring about the stale taste of months in stasis, just happier than hell to see her.
“We’re back,” I told her, on the verge of tears. “We’re back in the Commonwealth. We finally did it!”
Her eyes lit up and she laughed, throwing her arms around my neck.
“What did you say?” Chase asked, leaping out of his chamber and tripping on the side of it, sprawling face first but ignoring the embarrassment and pain and scrambling back to his feet. “Sir? What did you say?”
“We’re back,” I told him, laughing, not holding it against the young communications officer that he’d been one of the crewmembers who’d been willing to allow me to sacrifice my life to get them back here. I’d been ready to do it, but he didn’t have to be so ready to let me. “We reached the Commonwealth.”
“Put some damned clothes on, Chase,” Captain Rafael Nance grumbled, pushing himself out of his chamber and grabbing the uniform tucked beneath it. I didn’t mind Vicky emerging from stasis in her underwear and I hadn’t noticed Chase because I’d been too distracted by his pratfall, but Nance was over twice my age and didn’t wear it well, and I was grateful he took his own advice. He nodded to me as he pulled on his pants. “We’re in the Waypoint system, right?”
“We are,” I confirmed, handing Vicky her clothes. “We’re at station keeping right now, but once we get the crews to their stations, we can head to the colony world. I think it’s called Plateau.”
He grunted, stroking his beard.
“Been there once before. It’s high and dry, like southern Utah except where it’s more like Antarctica.” I nodded, despite never having been to either of those places. “Settlements are all down in a canyon over a kilometer deep, down where the big river runs through the northern continent. You can’t even see ‘em from orbit. And unless we catch a ship on a cargo run, they won’t see us either.”
“Why so grumpy, Cap?” Commander Yanayev asked, stretching her arms toward the overhead to loosen the kinks from stasis, though there was no danger she’d reach it, not in a ship designed for Predecessors who were all over two meters tall. “You’d think we hadn’t just gotten home against all odds after years of trying.”
The Orion’s helm officer was as casual as if we’d just pulled into a refueling stop on the way to routine cargo run, but then she never did seem to lose her cool. Well, hardly ever.
“Cap’n Nance is just mad because the Fleet’s going to make him shave off his beard,” Wojtera cracked, fastening the straps of his boots. He didn’t even try to keep the broad smile off his face and seemed ready to burst into song at any second. “Me, I can’t wait to get back to the R&R center on Eden and hook up with some willing females. The opportunities for companionship have been a little sparse since we left Yfingam.”
“You mean since that Vergai chick dumped you,” Yanayev said sotto vocce.
“Bellina didn’t want to leave her family,” Wojtera said peevishly, following Nance as he headed up to the control room. “And who can blame her? She would have been leaving behind everything she knew to go with us to a whole civilization of complete strangers.”
“Well, it worked for us!” Jay said, hurrying to catch up to us as we trailed behind Nance.
Bob nodded silently, and he would. The two of them were from the same world as Dr. Spinner, though he didn’t appear nearly as enthusiastic about being along for the ride. Maybe that was because he’d had his mind taken over by Lilandreth the Resscharr and spent months as a vegetable after I killed her. One of the last things I’d been able to do with the power of the network before I’d lost it was repair his damaged brain.
Jay and Bob came from one power bloc on their world, Spinner from another, but I couldn’t tell the difference between any of the bronze-skinned humanoids except that Jay was taller and skinnier, Bob was shorter and stockier, and both of them were younger than Spinner. Jay and Bob had come along with us in the hopes of a better life than the isolation and unimportance that was all they had to expect from their lives back home, while Spinner had come along out of a sense of scientific curiosity. Maybe that curiosity had an expiration date.
“You guys help Doc Hallonen make sure everyone is thawed out and ready for duty,” I told them, motioning at the hatch for the next compartment. “Tell Lt. Springfield to get a squad armored and ready just in case. And get my armor ready.”
I didn’t wait to see if they did it since it had mostly been busy work to get them all out of my hair. Which needed cutting badly after three months. Grasping Vicky’s hand tightly as if she might slip away like a dream if I let go, I watched as the bridge crew took up their spots at the stations Jim had instructed the ship’s systems to fabricate for us. The Predecessors had relied heavily on their gravity-control technology to keep them from flying around the bridge in battle and didn’t have to sit down for comfort since their knees bent backward. Lacking both the anatomy and the trust in technology they had, I preferred acceleration couches with safety harnesses.
Though there was something to be said for that gravity-control technology… and the warp drive this thing had. By the time we made it to the bridge, the ship was already moving, the stars shifting in slow motion compared to the speed we’d managed on the way here, yet a thousand times faster than we would have been able to manage on the Orion. Fast enough that the planet—Plateau, Nance had called it—grew from a rust-red spot to the size of a basketball in mere minutes.
Not completely red, of course, not like Mars, though the world showed the threat of meeting that dead world’s fate eventually. There were no oceans, just long inland seas that cut the continents into slices, but I also noted a lack of green along their shores.
“Why isn’t there any plant growth on the shores of the seas?” I asked… of Nance, I supposed, since he was the only one who’d spoken of a familiarity with the place.
“They’re all more dead salt lakes than seas,” Nance said, making a face. “Salinity is over thirty-five percent on all of them. Nothing grows, not even algae. The only fresh water is underground—or deep in the canyons. That’s where the life is.”
And those were definitely visible from space, again resembling the deep chasms of Mars, at least a few hundred kilometers long and God only knew how deep.
“Y’see that one?” Nance went on, pointing at a scar across the upper end of the northernmost continent. Well, the section of continent, since the entire planet was essentially one big continent. “That’s the Rift. Shadewater is near the center. Chase, you figure out the comms on this boat yet?”
