“This could be a big problem,” Hallonen cautioned, reverting to doctor mode. I’d gotten used to her being the hard-nosed Fleet medic for years now, and it was still jarring when she actually sounded worried about our health. “If we can’t treat this with medical nanites, there might be no way to stop it.”
“This was two years ago,” I reminded her. “If it is treatable, then surely they’ve figured out a way to do it by now. And if anywhere is safe, it’d be Earth. They’d never let this thing take hold on Earth. They’d shut down all access to the solar system first.” And I hoped that didn’t sound as much like wishful thinking to everyone else as it did to me. “How long will it take, Captain?” I asked Nance. A question I knew the answer to already and had to shush Jim from repeating to me again. This wasn’t for my benefit.
“With this drive?” He snorted, joy at the thought of the abilities of the Ellen Campbell apparently overriding his concern about the colony at Plateau at least for a moment. “A week. Maybe a little under.”
“That fast?” Lt. Springfield asked, her eyebrows shooting up in disbelief. “From all the way out at the edge of the Cluster?”
“You have to understand, Lieutenant,” Commander Yanayev explained with the patience of a tech-head helm officer talking to a Marine grunt, “that the Transition Lines don’t work based on physical proximity. That’s why it takes less time to get from Earth to 82 Eridani using the Transition Drive than it does to get to Proxima Centauri. It’s all based on the intensity of the gravito-inertial connections in T-space. That’s not how this… spacetime inflation drive works.” She turned over a palm. “Of course, it’s also a hell of a lot faster since, as far as I can tell, the speed is based on how much power you have to draw from, and this thing has a small black hole at the heart of its reactor.”
“Then get us out of here, Captain,” I told Vance, putting a commanding tone into the words to remind him that just because we were back in the Cluster didn’t mean this operation had turned into a democracy. “Set course for Earth, as fast as this damned thing will go.”
“Aye, aye, Captain Alvarez,” he acknowledged, throwing me a salute I assumed was ironic, since he’d bothered to remind me of the disparity in our actual military ranks.
He was a Fleet captain, an O-6, the equivalent to a full bird colonel in the Marines, while I was still an O-3, a Marine captain. Yeah, he’d agreed along with everyone else that I should take charge once Colonel Hachette fell in combat, mostly because no one else was crazy enough to want the job—surely not him, even though he was the ranking officer—but that didn’t mean he was going to let me forget it.
Everyone turned back to their stations, a sigh running through the collective as if everyone realized simultaneously they weren’t going to get any answers for at least a week and would have to deal with it. I indulged in a heavy sigh myself, not from the delayed satisfaction but out of relief that the conversation was over.
“We should PMCS our suits,” I told Vicky, an excuse to get the hell off the bridge before anyone else asked me a question. She nodded, understanding in her expression, and we headed out.
I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy. Nagarro stood in the corridor, arms folded, waiting for us, an ebon statue of some ancient warrior goddess guarding the road to the afterlife.
“You know what’s going on, don’t you?” she accused. Well, the woman was in Fleet Intelligence, which was supposed to mean she was smart, though I couldn’t swear to that after dealing with intelligence types for way too long. “I could tell from the minute you both got back that you both know something.”
“We don’t know anything,” Vicky insisted, leaning into the words like she was pushing back against Nagarro’s pressure. “You’ve seen as much as we have. And we don’t plan on guessing and getting everyone worked up over nothing.”
Nagarro glanced back at the bridge, and her stance changed as she took a step closer.
“I understand that, but I’m your intelligence analyst. If there are possibilities to be planned for, I need to know what they are.”
The look on her face said she was sincere, but I’d heard that one of the first things they taught Intelligence officers was how to lie convincingly. She might just be as curious as everyone else. Vicky shrugged, leaving it up to me.
“If I hear of this on the grapevine, or from anyone else, even Nance,” I warned her, “then you’re going to be out of a fucking job. Even if it’s only until we get to Earth and someone has the brains to bust me back to a company commander, or right out of the service, you’ll be cleaning the damned toilets on this ship. We clear?”
“Yes, sir,” she said, nodding firmly.
I took one last look around, then motioned for her to walk with us away from the bridge, just in case.
“You know what happened to me, right?” I tapped the side of my head. “Back on Homecoming? Before I fought Lilandreth?”
“Of course,” Nagarro confirmed. “That AI changed your brain structure so you could access the… whatever you call it. The power.”
“The network,” I suggested. “But do you know how the AI rewired my brain?” She shook her head and I went on. “It used an engineered, self-replicating nanovirus.” I made an equivocating gesture. “Specifically tailored for my DNA, as I understand it, since the AI assured me it wouldn’t affect Vicky when she entered the lab. But if one of those AI can tailor one to me, I can’t imagine it would be much trouble for them to make one that would… infect anyone.”
Nagarro’s eyes went wide and she halted mid-step, hand going to her gut like she’d been punched.
“And you said it would drive you insane, eventually,” she whispered.
“Now you’re getting it,” I agreed. I started to go on, then rubbed at my eyes. They felt like they had sand in them, which was one of the side effects of stasis. “This is just speculation. Probably paranoia, though God knows, if they’re really out to get you, then paranoia is just good sense. Either way, it’s been two years. Whatever was going to happen has already happened.”
She nodded.
“And the worst-case scenario?” she wondered.
I had to think about that for a second. When I reached a reasonable conclusion, I looked to Vicky. I had no one left on Earth that I gave a shit about, but she’d left her mother and brothers behind. Her uncles. I could see it on her face that she understood very well the worst-case scenario.
“The worst case,” I told Nagarro, my eyes not leaving Vicky, “is that when we get home… there may not be a home to go back to.”
[ 4 ]
No one spoke.
They hadn’t spoken much the whole week, the days passing slowly, like we were all still frozen in stasis. The ship had grown us cots, provided bathing facilities after a little prompting from Jim, and we’d managed to sleep, eat, and pretend things were normal, but the fevered anticipation everyone had felt cruising into Plateau had faded away into a low-level dread.
It was worse now that we could see it. The Ellen had dipped below lightspeed somewhere inside the orbit of Jupiter, and I think we’d all known it then before we’d seen it. The quiet had told us. Once we’d slowed under the velocity of an EM signal, the comms board should have been flooded with them. Even though we weren’t in any of the normal Transition zones for the system, the Fleet sentinel stations would have spotted us and a dozen cruisers would have been all over us in under a half an hour, micro-Transitioning right in our path.
That didn’t happen. No hailing messages, no traffic control warnings, not so much as an advertisement for the latest in virtual reality visors. Silence.
“Maybe it’s the drive,” Yanayev had suggested. “It distorts the fabric of spacetime. It could be shutting out signals. Hell, it might be keeping sensors from even noticing us.”
“That would make it a hell of a defense shield,” Wojtera added, his professional curiosity getting the better of him for a moment.
The notion that it was just us and not everyone else had lasted all the way until we’d reached Martian orbit.
“Jesus God,” Nance breathed, as close to a prayer as I’d ever heard from the man.
“Station keeping,” I rasped, because Nance wasn’t about to order it.
Yanayev was enough of a consummate professional that she obeyed, though she didn’t acknowledge the command. Mars—the Mars we’d left—had been the heart of industry in the solar system. Mineral resources came in from the Belt, sometimes as processed ore, sometimes the whole rock pushed in with fusion drives dug right into the surface of the asteroid to be smelted into shapes and sizes fitting the needs of the Fleet or the Corporate Council. Metallic hydrogen from the gas giants, and finally, exotic matter from the massive particle accelerators well within the orbit of Saturn, powered by solar collectors kilometers across.
