All of it converged at the Martian shipyards to be molded into cruisers, Intercept cutters, drop-ships, Corporate freighters, and whatever else the Commonwealth needed. The shipyards were a silvery web woven by a spider the size of a moon, visible from thousands of kilometers away. Or they had been.
What was left of the installation drifted in tatters, a spiderweb in the corner of the ceiling of our living room back on Hausos that Vicky had brought down with a broom. Glittering in the distant sun with a ghost of its former grandeur, it dwarfed the burned-out husks of the partially built starships still clinging to the errant strands in a failed promise of what might have been.
Still, there was a chance that Yanayev had been right about the drive field stopping signals.
“Helm,” I told her, an exercise in tradition now, because I could have carried out the order myself through my headcomp or given it silently to Jim, “shut down the drive field.”
Yanayev glanced back at me sharply, but again, she carried out the order. Nothing seemed to change from our view on the bridge, but she shook her head, cursing under her breath.
“Without the drive on station keeping,” she told me, “we’re being pulled in by Martian gravity. We’re not in a stable orbit.”
“It’s only for a few minutes,” I assured her. “Chase, are you picking up anything?”
The comms officer peered at the display floating above his station, not speaking for a long moment, but then he shook his head.
“All I’m getting are automated navigational beacons. Not a thing from the surface, nothing from Deimos or Phobos.”
“Send a broad-wave transmission,” I told him. “Use the Orion’s ID codes.”
Chase nodded, his expression bleak as he complied. I watched the curve of the red planet on the main viewer with a nostalgia for a place I’d never been. I’d never had the chance to visit Mars, and now I’d probably never have a reason.
“Tactical,” I asked in rote recital, knowing the answer before I asked the question, “what are you reading on the surface?”
“Radiation,” Wojtera reported, the word dragged down by a grim fatalism. “No thermal readings… nothing above the background levels. Not so much as a functional reactor. It’s the same everywhere we can see from this orbit—Lowell City, Bradbury, Zubrin, Olympus…”
“I’m not getting any response,” Chase added, shaking his head.
I looked around the bridge, noticing the same look on every face. Hopelessness. The same thing I felt. We were the hobbits returning home to the Shire after the ring had been destroyed, but instead of finding an industrial nightmare, we’d found burned-out ruins. Thank God Tolkien hadn’t written that ending, or no one would have still been reading his books.
Unfortunately, it seemed like God wasn’t as keen on happy endings as Tolkien.
“I remember when I sailed my first command right out of those yards,” Nance said, his wistful reminiscence unexpected. He stared at the screen, a muscle twitching in his cheek as if he was about to cry. “The troop carrier Tarawa. She was a beauty. Lost her during the war.”
“I was on Mars when we got the news that the war had ended,” Chase put in hesitantly, glancing around like he thought the rest of us would make fun of him for sharing a lame story. “I was a freshman at the Academy, spending my summer in training at Phobos base. I was too young to drink, but the bartender at the O-club there served me anyway. That was the first time I ever got drunk.”
I’d always thought of Chase as a kid, but until that moment I don’t believe I’d ever realized how much of a kid he’d been when he signed on for this mission. Now… my chest tightened, Now he’d left his youth in strange systems far from home, given up a chunk of his life, and here at the end of our mission he’d come home to this. All of them would be facing the same thing, all the ones who’d traveled through that gateway so many years ago, not just the people here on the bridge but everyone on the ship… and I would be the one they’d turn to. That was more terrifying than the devastation on Mars.
The stars streaked by outside the ship, so fast it didn’t seem real, as if this wasn’t a real spacecraft but a simulator and we weren’t moving at all. That was the problem with all this ancient alien technology, from day one. It didn’t feel real. At first I’d thought it was because the tech made things too easy, but the death, the sacrifice, the terror made it clear that wasn’t the case. The problem was that it took the humanity of it. Everything we’d come across out here had removed us one more step from our origins, from that little piece of land my parents had with chickens and goats. Once upon a time, I’d thought every step I took away from that past was a step forward, but lately I’d started to think that every step had been in the wrong direction.
Blackness swallowed us again, interplanetary space so far from Mars and the desolation there that we might have been in another solar system, and if we’d been on the Orion, we’d have spent an hour getting out of the gravitational influence of the red planet before we micro-Transitioned into minimum safe distance from the Earth-Moon system. Not with this thing. It was minutes between Mars and Earth, days between systems. If we’d had a fleet of these things, the war with the Tahni would have lasted a month.
“Any other spacecraft?” Nance asked Wojtera.
“No, sir.” The Tactical officer’s answer was as redundant as the question. Any of us could have told by looking at the sensor readout that there was nothing around, no sign of civilization, no trace of the defense platforms that had once guarded every approach to Earth.
Part of me expected to find the planet gone, a lifeless rock with the atmosphere stripped away and a huge chunk of it splintered and tumbling the way we’d found out there, where the infected Predecessors had opened wormholes and killed off entire populations. But it was only a few minutes before the big, blue marble showed up ahead of us, the same as it had been the last time I’d seen it.
“Oh, thank God,” Chase murmured, seeing it at the same time as I did, half the sphere lit up by the Sun, half shrouded in darkness. The Moon made its way around the mother planet in a stately dance like a wind-up doll, everything proceeding as it had for billions of years.
“Still no signs of activity,” Wojtera cautioned, as if trying to point out to Chase that it was too early to celebrate. He frowned, staring harder at the display. “There’s… vestiges of radioactivity on the Moon. Might be from a reactor leak. Might be from a fusion blast. Not a recent one.”
I didn’t respond, waiting until we were closer, knowing that the readings from Earth would be masked by the atmosphere this far out. There was no back-and-forth of order and confirmation the way I’d grown used to on the Orion, and not just because the ship was new to us. None of them wanted this to be real any more than I did, and the entire crew seemed to be holding their breath as the Earth grew ever larger in the holographic projection at the center of the bridge.
“Low orbit, Helm,” Nance said, his face abashed as if he’d just realized that he’d been neglecting his duty as captain.
The Ellen Campbell skidded into orbit like a baserunner sliding into third, shrugging off the laws of physics, though by now I was getting used to it, as if the abilities of the ship were a reflection of my own impatience to find out what had happened. Asia slipped below us, still bearing the scars of a nuclear war fought two centuries ago, and thank God I knew enough history to recognize the stained, blackened swathes of desert as old wounds or I might have panicked.
A glance at Chase showed that the comm officer already had his ears open, searching for signals, so I didn’t bother jostling his elbow. There wouldn’t have been much coming out of the ruins of old China anyway, though once the south Pacific rolled blue and wild beneath us, the entire bridge seemed to lean forward in anticipation. The Hawaiian islands had the largest ground-based sensor array in the western hemisphere, and if anyone was left, they’d have to see us.
We passed over the islands without a word from comms, without a single intercept fighter launched to meet us.
“No energy readings,” Wojtera told us. “Nothing from the North Pacific fusion plant, nothing from Trans-Angeles.”
“Hey,” Yanayev spoke up, squinting at the sensor display. “Where the hell is McAuliffe?”
I blinked. I hadn’t thought about the station, mostly because I’d never been there, but McAuliffe was the largest orbital facility in the Commonwealth, built up around the kernel of what had once been the first commercial space station.
“It’s there,” Wojtera said grimly, pointing to a dim sensor reflection coming over the terminator. He didn’t have to say anything else. We could all see it. No reactor readings, no thermal output at all. No sign of activity around it other than a hazy cloud of debris.
Close to a hundred thousand people had called that station home.
“Wait!” Wojtera exclaimed, light coming into his eyes for the first time since we’d come out of FTL. “I’m getting something! It’s not much… a reactor, but a tiny one, about the size of the power plant on an Intercept cutter.” He turned and met my hopeful stare. “It’s active. There’s something down there, some kind of settlement, if not a city.”
“Where?” I asked him.
“Just outside of Jackson, Wyoming.”
“That’s the middle of fucking nowhere,” Chase murmured. “Why would there be anyone out there at all?”
