Erebus (38 page)

“We’re going to get a lot closer before we have the chance to get away, and the antimatter torch will only give us a little time,” Tasker murmured. I could tell she was working furiously, hands moving about like she was dancing as she manipulated her HUD’s virtual console. “And we are going to have to do this before we get spaghettified.”

“Spaghettified?” I mouthed at Phillips, who simply shrugged. I got the impression that Sagi wasn’t going to force-feed us pasta.

“Laser link with
Gagarin
is back up,” one of the techs called out. An image of our ship from the perspective of
Gagarin
washed across a screen wall. Erebus was back-dropped by thick golden clouds and glowing a dim red.

“
Erebus
,
Gagarin
.” the voice was speeding up even more. I would have found it comedic if I didn’t know what it meant. “We estimate—”

“Buffer their coms and clear it up,” Tasker growled at Frain, who simply nodded and began his own dance.

“
Erebus
,
Gagarin
.” The voice slowed to normal, and I recognized it as Captain Vasily’s. “We estimate eighteen minutes, your time, before we can’t maintain communications anymore. We are going to have a lot more time than you because of the dilation. We’re using it to crunch numbers. We will send our best escape solution to you. If you can fire any parts requests over to us, we can shoot them into Sagi after you.”

“Roger that. We haven’t had the chance to fabricate replacement parts after you took a chunk out of our A-drive. I’ll upload what we need,” Tasker said as she manipulated her console.

There was a delay of many seconds and then, “We have the component list. It’ll take us a few days.”

It dawned on me what Tasker had meant as we were plunging down toward the event horizon.
Gagarin
, and the rest of the universe, for that matter, was speeding up. Or we were slowing down. Whichever way you looked at it, they would have as long as they needed to make us replacement parts. The bottleneck was that we would not have long to actually fix the damn A-drive if they could get them to us.

“Everyone left, get out and start stripping out the damaged components. I don’t care if you’ve never done it. Buddy up and use your damn HUDs to walk you through it. Expect a care package shortly.” Tasker gave out the repair orders for her ship in short order. I was beginning to like the woman. She may have been a total hard-ass, but she was a competent one.

The graphic of
Erebus
began to spin, pointing us back toward the edge of the hole. I felt pressure build as the torch activated. Out of all the rides I had taken on this crazy journey since Sahelia, this was without a doubt the wildest. To escape, we were going to have to keep our orbit as wide as possible.

The forces we were going to be subjected to would be harsh, and I decided I was better off sitting. I found a chair and seated myself in it next to the battle-damaged Frain. Might as well get two birds with one stone. “So, Xander, seeing as we’re plunging ass-backward into a black hole thousands of light-years from home, fancy telling me just what the hell I’m doing here?”

He turned and looked at me. For some reason, in that moment, he seemed human, vulnerable. He gave a smile, but on his chrome-glinting, half-destroyed face, it was a sad reminder of his tenuous humanity.

“Victor.”

I blinked. “What?”

“My name is Victor. Victor Talbot. Frain was just my cover.”

“I can’t say I’m please to meet you, Victor.”

“Everything I’ve done, everything the people who sent me have done, Layton, was for the greater good.”

“Yeah, many of my predecessors in War Crimes had to deal with that line. Bottom line: you’ve killed a lot of people. At least tell me why, dammit. We’ve chased your arse half-way across the galaxy, and there is the very real prospect we’re both going to die in the next couple of hours. I don’t know what the fuck spaghettfication is, but if that’s the way I’m going to go, at least let me die knowing!”

Frain nodded. He was silent for a few moments before he spoke. “The gravity of Sagi will begin acting on the part of your body closest to Sagi more than the part furthest away. That’s how acute the gravitational forces here are. You will be quite literally pulled apart. Don’t worry. I imagine the ship will break up long before that, although I would suggest you leave your visor open just in case you survive the disintegration of
Erebus
.” He flashed me a wry grin.

“Yeah, well, thanks for that.” It was strange; I think I’d been through so much that not even the prospect of such a gruesome end was particularly raising my blood pressure. That, or it hadn’t quite sunk in yet. I watched as the graphic of
Erebus
slowly crept down the wireframe funnel of Sagi. “And not exactly what I meant.”

Frain looked forward, focusing on the holotank. “I don’t know everything, Layton. What I do know is that what happens here decides humanity’s future.”

I still couldn’t get my head around that thought. “What do you mean?” I prompted.

“What I mean is that the things living here, in this place, are going to make us, humans, extinct.”

“No one lives here! The place is a tomb,” I said incredulously. “There are some ruins and the remains of a gateway network but no one left to threaten anyone.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Layton. They’re still here, and they know about us. They have since Helios first tested the FTL gateway in Sirius decades ago.”

“Since Helios first tested the gate? You mean
Helios
started all this?”

Frain leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes. He’d clearly let something slip that he wasn’t supposed to.

“Look, Victor, you’ve seen this place. There is no one left. Whoever they were—whatever they were—they’re gone. You, Helios, killed those people and dragged us here for nothing.”

“No!” Frain’s…no,
Talbot’s
normally calm face was now angry, a scary sight when he literally glinted at me. “The intelligence all pointed to one thing. Someone from this system—from that planet, or whatever the hell it is orbiting Sagi—is the home base of something that’s going to kill us all.”

“So why not tell anyone? Why all the secrecy?”

“I don’t know!” Talbot held his hands up in frustration. “Maybe someone felt that knowing the sword of Damocles hung over humanity would panic people. Maybe telling would somehow speed things up.”

“Panic people? More than the destruction of a bloody moon?”

“You know what I know now. I had orders to destroy the FTL gateway network and Io. I was then told that I needed to speed up phase two of the operation—a first strike here, at Sagi.”

“And just how were you going to conduct a first strike?”

“If we were alone, then use
Erebus
the same way that
Magellan
was used. When you destroyed our A-drive, my only choices were to either commandeer
Gagarin
and use her to strike or drop every speck of antimatter I could on that world and hope that would be enough to do the job.”

I had to admire him; Talbot was relentless, a one-man weapon of mass destruction dispatched to end this alleged threat.

“And presumably
Erebus
and her crew…?” I gestured with my hand.

“Were always tasked with this job. She was at my disposal the whole time.”

Erebus…
an E-ship…a Helios ship.

“Watch,” Talbot said.

He offered to link his HUD with mine to share what he was seeing. I was reluctant but finally decided,
what the hell
; I was likely dead anyway.

The KIs were sweeping toward the world, separated in a long line so the world’s very rotation would create an even spread. They were moving a lot faster in space than I expected them to. As we fell deeper toward Sagi, time was slowing more and more for us; thus, the missiles seeming to move faster. Then each of the blinking dots multiplied. There must have been hundreds bearing down on the small planet.

“We configured them as MIRVs,” Talbot said quietly. “Each KI will split into several missiles, each equipped with an antimatter warhead.”

A blinding light bloomed from the surface; the first KI had struck. Then the second. Then the third. A staccato of antimatter explosions smashed the world brutally. Within moments, nowhere on the surface of the planet would be unaffected by the horrendous power of the antimatter explosions.

Talbot leaned back and closed his eyes. “It’s done.”

“Those KIs back at Iwa,” Talbot said.

“What?” I was now little more than a fifth wheel, watching the bridge crew frantically working away. I could hear the coms chatter of the work pods in the golden space outside, desperately ripping the damaged components out of the A-drive.

“The KIs we fired at
Gagarin
, I ordered them to self-destruct,” Talbot said quietly. He was staring across the bridge at the holotank. “Just before we escaped through the FTL gateway. You were right; I never wanted to kill anyone.”

“Yeah, that didn’t help Dev, though,” I muttered.

“Who’s Dev?”

“A young cop who died a long way from home who just wanted to help people,” I said quietly. “Let’s just say the EM pulse from Io’s destruction came at a bad time and leave it at that.”

“I’m sor—”

“
Erebus.
” Captain Vasily’s image appeared on the screen, interrupting him. Christ, he had a beard; only five minutes ago he’d been clean shaven. It must have been weeks for him. “The care package is underway. It’s at high burn and should catch up with you in less than two minutes your time.”

“We have less than three minutes left on the link,” the tech said.

Three minutes. Not much time. Like Frain, I had a mission, and it occurred to me that being stuck here didn’t need to stop me from completing it. Three minutes was long enough. I cached up everything that had happened and had been stored in my implants: every log, the total video recording of what I had seen and heard, including Frain’s, or Talbot’s, final confession.

“Can I send a message back to
Gagarin
?” I asked. “You know, for if we don’t make it?”

Tasker shrugged. “I don’t see why not. Even if we get out of this, God knows how much time will have gone by.” She switched on the general channel. “All crew, you may record a message for linking to
Gagarin
. Just be quick about it.”

I looked at Talbot. He knew what I was going to do, and he either didn’t care, or he wanted me to. Hell, even there and then, he could have killed me with a single blow. Our eyes met, and he gave the slightest nod before finishing his sentence from earlier. “I’m sorry.”

I just nodded back. It wasn’t my place to accept his apology, but I did acknowledge it.

Erebus
gave a long echoing groan,
and I looked up uneasily. The very ship itself was moaning in pain from the horrific gravitational differential between sections. Sagi was literally trying to pull us apart.

We didn’t have long.

I glanced around one last time, making sure I captured everyone on the bridge: Major Ava Phillips standing a couple of meters behind Victor Talbot, a Zen-like calm over her face. Captain Beverly Tasker and the other bridge crew of
Erebus
desperately working, fighting to the end to save her ship and us. Sonia Drayton, pale, afraid. Maybe this last image would be seen by their families back home. Maybe it wouldn’t.
Erebus
would be frozen in time on the edge of a black hole just as her namesake had been frozen in the ice of the arctic. I had no idea if we would ever escape our hell or if we would just disappear like the crew of the original
HMS Erebus
so many centuries ago.

On my HUD, I clicked
send
. Everything I knew, everything I had experienced since the start of this mess, was fired along the laser link back toward
Gagarin
and then home.

***

The crew of
Gagarin
waited for months, watching as
Erebus
slipped deeper and deeper into the space-time pit created by Sagi’s massive gravity well.

They had soaked up every bit of data that the trapped ship could send. Communications from
Erebus
slowed; every word drawn out, lasting minutes and then hours. Finally, there were no more words, simply static. Slowly,
Erebus
froze, becoming trapped in the amber of the black hole’s accretion disk before gradually fading out of sight. Even if the ship survived—even if the plan succeeded—it wouldn’t escape Sagi for hundreds of years.

As
Erebus
slowly sank into the black hole,
Gagarin
dispatched probes to the small dark world. Every inch of the planet was scarred and pockmarked. Vast craters rent the surface. Whatever had been there, whatever Frain had spoken about, must have been reduced to dust—if ever it had been there.

Finally, alone,
Gagarin
turned and headed for the FTL gateway. The crews that both
Erebus
and
Gagarin
had dropped to get the FTL active had long since signaled that it was back online and functional. As the FTL gate powered up, as the beam of light lanced out of the pagoda, at the point of commitment to the gateway, the sensors of the
Gagarin
heard it.

A radar pulse of incredible power burst forth from the dark world circling the black hole.

Something was still down there.

Curt Paskett’s mind-eye was filled with a cascade of data. He could access everything about the vast organization that was Helios simply by wishing it.

But some things were still done the old fashioned way.

“The second-quarter fiscal report is still showing a downward trend across the powersat industry. We need to get some traction in the antimatter sector, or we’re going to fall out of the top five providers.” Chad Struber, the chief operating officer of Helios, grimaced.

None of this was new to Paskett. But hearing it articulated somehow helped him process it. He stood up from his imposing leather chair and walked to what he called his Wall of Memory, hands behind his back. There hadn’t been many new additions to it in recent years. Somehow the newer things he, and Helios of course, had championed didn’t hold a torch to the glory days of his youth.
Ha, youth. I was older physically then than I am now!
he scoffed to himself. He looked at the small model of
Endeavour
. She looked quaint, modular, a direct descendent of the first spacecraft like the Apollo craft,
Zheng He,
and
Trident,
which had tentatively pushed out from Earth centuries ago. He still burned with pride that
Endeavour
was out there, even now on a quest, which the crew didn’t know the half of. And his old friend Marcus Caison, of course.