The End of All Things: The First Instalment (4 page)

“Depends on the size of what we hit,” I said. “We get peppered with tiny bits of dust all the time.”

“Those aren’t going to knock out our power,” Womack said. “They’re not going to shift us off course, either.”

“How far have we shifted?” Thao asked.

Womack shrugged. “Can’t give you a precise reading because out inertial sensors are screwed up. So are our outside sensors. I can’t tell you what’s out there, ma’am.”

“Anything before the sensors went out?”

“Nothing pinged,” Womack said. “One second there’s nothing but vacuum and the next we’re jolted and our power is screwed.” Womack stopped talking and frowned at something in her diagnostics screen. I craned my head in to look.

“What is it?” Thao asked.

“The diagnostics say the outside sensors should be working fine,” I said, going off the readings on the screen.

“But we’re not getting anything from them,” Womack said. “Communications should also be working but I’m getting nothing.”

“We’re being jammed, maybe,” I said.

“I think so,” Womack said, and looked over to Thao.

The bridge went silent at this. Thao nodded at the report and then turned her attention back to Ocampo. “You want to explain this?” she said.

“I can’t,” Ocampo said.

“You said that you were meeting diplomats from Earth.”

“Earth and the Conclave both, yes,” Ocampo said. This was slightly different than what he told me, but then he said he wasn’t actually telling me anything, so.

“Why would
diplomats
want to jam our sensors?” Thao asked.

“They wouldn’t,” Ocampo said. “This is where we’re supposed to meet. They knew I was coming and they knew I was coming on this ship. They know we’re not a threat.”

“And yet our sensors are jammed and we’re sitting here blind,” Thao said.

“It could be pirates,” Han said.

“No,” Thao said. “Pirates follow trade routes. This isn’t a trade route. We followed a route to a secret location only Secretary Ocampo’s diplomat friends would know we’d be at. Isn’t that right, Ocampo? Isn’t this trip supposed to be
top secret
?” The sarcasm of those last two words coming out of the captain’s mouth was unmistakable.

Ocampo looked uncomfortable with this line of questioning. “Information about the Colonial Union’s diplomatic missions has been leaky in the last year,” he said, finally.

“What does that mean?” asked Thao.

“It means that the State Department might have a problem with spies,” Ocampo said. “I made every precaution so this information would be secure. Apparently it wasn’t enough.”

“You have spies?” Thao said. “Spies for whom? The Conclave? Earth?”

“Either,” Ocampo said. “Or spies for someone else.”

“Who else?”

Ocampo shrugged at this. Thao shot him a look that was a textbook example of disgust. Then she turned back to Womack and me. “There was nothing on the sensors before the power went out.”

“No, ma’am,” Womack said. “Nothing but clear space to the skip point.”

“Outside sensors still down.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Womack said. “They should be working fine. They’re just not. I can’t tell you why.”

Thao turned to Han. “Tell someone to go to an airlock and look out the goddamned portal, please,” she said.

Han nodded and spoke briefly into a headset; presumably somewhere belowdecks a crew member was heading to an airlock. “We should start forming security details, Captain,” he said, after he was done.

“You think whoever it is out there is going to board us,” Thao said.

“I do,” Han said. “You said it yourself, whoever this is, they’re not your typical pirates. I think the only thing of value on the
Chandler
to whoever they are is the
Chandler
.”

“No,” Thao said, looking back at Ocampo. “There’s something else here, too.”

A ping came up from Womack’s console. We both turned to look at it.

“What is it?” Thao asked.

“An outside signal,” I said.

Womack picked up her headset. “It’s addressing you specifically, Captain,” she said to Thao a moment later.

“Put it on speaker,” Thao said. Womack switched it over and nodded to the captain. “This is Captain Eliza Thao,” she said.

“Captain Thao, you have three Melierax Series Seven missiles locked in on your ship,” a voice said. It had that metallic, grating tone that made it clear it was artificially generated. “The first will impact and detonate midships, at a point where the structural integrity of the
Chandler
is the weakest. This will not destroy your ship but will kill many of your crew, and open a direct path to your engines, where the second missile will strike. That will vaporize two-thirds of your ship instantly, killing nearly every one of your crew. The third missile is for mop up.

“As a trade ship, you have no significant defenses. Even if you had, we have jammed your external sensors. Your communications are also jammed and you are light-years away from any civilian or CDF station in any event. Your skip drone launchers are already targeted by particle beams. Your power is down and you will discover, if you have not already, that you will be unable to get it back online before your emergency battery power exhausts itself. If you were not already targeted for destruction by our missiles, you and your crew would freeze, and those who did not would asphyxiate.”

“Listen to me—” Thao began.

“If you interrupt again we will launch our missiles,” the voice said.

Thao shut up.

“This is not a negotiation or a parley,” the voice continued. “We are telling you what you will have to do in order for you and your crew to survive the next few hours.

“And it is this. You will open your airlocks for external entry. You will assemble your entire crew in your ship’s cargo hold. We will enter your ship and take control of it. If any of your crew is found outside of the cargo hold when we board, we will destroy the ship and everyone on it. If any of your crew attempts to attack us or thwart us in taking control of your ship, we will destroy the ship and everyone on it. If you attempt to abandon ship, we will target and destroy the lifepods and destroy the ship and anyone remaining on it. If you and your crew do anything other than assemble in the cargo hold and await further instruction, we will destroy the ship and everyone on it.

“You will have five minutes from right now to signal your understanding of these directions. You will then have one hour to signal that these directions have been fulfilled. If we do not receive both, then your ship and everyone on it will be destroyed.

“That is all.”

“Is that channel still clear?” Thao asked Womack.

Womack looked at her panel. “Yes,” she said. “Everything else is still jammed up.”

Thao turned to Ocampo. “These aren’t your
friends,
I assume.”

“No,” Ocampo said. “This is definitely not how they would have greeted us.”

“And what do you think has happened to your friends?”

“I don’t know,” Ocampo said. “It’s entirely possible they were attacked, too.”

“Options,” Thao said, turning to Han.

“Assuming they are telling us the truth about the missiles, none,” Han said. “Whoever that was is right. We have no real defenses. We can’t outrun them. And even if we direct all emergency power to life support, we don’t have much time.”

“And if they’re not telling us the truth about the missiles?”

“Then we launch lifepods, fight them when they arrive on the ship, and destroy the ship ourselves if necessary,” Han said. “To Hell with these guys.”

“We’ll fight, Captain,” I said. I don’t know why I said it. I wasn’t thinking about fighting at any point before. It just came up in my brain at that moment. It was like Lee Han said: To Hell with these guys, whoever they were. And if that meant fighting them with sticks, that was better than nothing.

I looked around the bridge and saw people nodding. We were all ready for a fight.

Thao smiled at me and then nodded, as a way of letting me know my comment had been registered and appreciated. Then she turned back to Han, who was not smiling. “But,” she said to him.

“But they already have knocked out our power in a way we couldn’t and didn’t track,” Han said. “They’re jamming our communications and external sensors. That says to me they have more up their sleeves. Even if they don’t, if we fight them and repel them we’ll likely take losses and additional damage to the ship. We’ll all end up on lifepods just to survive. In which case whoever
they
are—” Han motioned outward, signifying our attackers. “—can still take the ship without any of us on it. In which case, we’ve risked everything for nothing.”

Thao turned to Bolduc, who was the pilot on duty. “Any chance we could skip out of this?”

“No,” Bolduc said. “We entered this system near a planet. Under the best of circumstances we’d need three days to get to skip distance.”

“We can’t skip without engines anyway,” Han said.

“When can we get them back?” Thao asked.

“Eller estimated twenty hours,” Han said, speaking of the chief engineer. “Our emergency power is going to last six. We’d still have to get the crew to lifepods. Whoever stayed would find breathing difficult until the power’s completely back.”

“No matter what, we lose the ship,” Thao said.

Han paused an almost infinitesimally small amount of time before replying. “Realistically, yes,” he said. “Even if whoever is attacking us did
nothing,
we’d still have to get nearly all the crew to lifepods. And I don’t think it’s realistic to assume that whoever is attacking us will do nothing. They’ve already done enough.”

Thao sat for a moment, silent. Ocampo and everyone else on the bridge waited, conscious of the timeline for a response.

“Fuck,” Thao said. She nodded to Womack. “Tell them we understand their terms. The airlocks will be open within the hour. We’ll signal when the crew is in the cargo hold.”

Womack blinked, swallowed, and nodded. She turned to her console.

Thao turned to Han. “Tell the crew. We’re under a deadline here.” Han moved.

Then Thao looked over to Ocampo. “Well, Mr. Ocampo. I’m beginning to think I should have refused your request.” Ocampo opened his mouth to reply, but Thao was already ignoring him.

* * *

The three creatures approaching Captain Thao wore black, were armed, and had knees that went the wrong way. One had something resembling a handgun, and the two others had longer weapons I assumed were automatic rifles of some sort. A larger squad of the alien creatures held back and fanned out through the cargo hold, getting good vantages to fire into us, the
Chandler
crew. There were about sixty of us, totally unarmed. It wouldn’t take them long to go through us, if they wanted to.

“What the hell are they?” Chieko Tellez whispered to me. She was standing next to me in the group.

“They’re Rraey,” I said.

“Not friendly,” she said. “Not counting these ones, I mean.”

“No,” I said. The Colonial Union didn’t spend a lot of time advertising specific battles, but I knew enough to know we’d kicked the Rraey’s asses pretty seriously more than once in the last decade or so. There was no reason to believe any of this was going to end well for us.

The three Rraey reached Captain Thao. “Identify your pilots,” the center Rraey said to her. It spoke in its own language, which was translated by a small object clipped to its clothes.

“Tell me why,” Thao said.

The Rraey raised its weapon and shot Lee Han, standing with the captain, in the face. Han lifted in the low gravity and took a long time to fall to the deck.

“Identify your pilots,” the Rraey said again, after most of the shouting from the crew had subsided.

Thao remained silent. The creature raised its weapon again, this time at her head. I considered stepping forward. Tellez suddenly grabbed my arm, guessing what I was thinking of doing. “Don’t you fucking
dare,
” she whispered.

“Stop it,” someone said. I followed the sound of the voice to Secretary Ocampo. He stepped forward away from the
Chandler
crew. “There’s no need for that, Commander Tvann.”

The Rraey turned its head to look at Ocampo. So did Thao. I think she realized, like I just did, that Ocampo had called the creature by name and rank.

“Secretary Ocampo,” Tvann said, nodding its head in salute. “Perhaps you would be so kind as to identify a pilot for me.”

“Of course,” Ocampo said. Then he pointed into crew members, directly at me. “He’s one. Take him.”

Two Rraey peeled off and came at me. Tellez put herself in front of me. One of the two advancing Rraey raised its weapon at her. “You son of a bitch,” Thao shouted at Ocampo, and the crew of the
Chandler
began to agitate.

“Quiet,” Ocampo said. He said it in a loud voice that he was clearly proud of, the sort of speaking voice that had been polished by years of diplomatic speeches and the assumption that people would naturally listen to what he had to say.

And it worked; even the Rraey coming to get me stopped and looked at him.

He held up a hand to further the call for silence. The crew hushed to a low murmur.

“You will survive this,” Ocampo said, loudly. “Let me say this again: You
will
survive this. But only if you listen to me right now and do as I say. So listen. Quietly.”

The
Chandler
crew was dead silent now.

“I regret the death of Lee Han,” Ocampo said. “Rraey commanders are not accustomed to having orders questioned or refused. There will be no more killings unless you resist or disobey. I also recognize that from your point of view this looks very much like both piracy and treason. I assure you that nothing could be further from the truth. I am sorry I don’t have time to explain it to you further.

“Now. I require the
Chandler
and I require a pilot. I am taking the ship and I am taking Mr. Daquin here. As for the rest of you, very shortly you will be escorted to the
Chandler
’s lifepods. The lifepods will be launched and immediately after the
Chandler
has skipped away—three days from now—an emergency drone will be sent to Phoenix Station and the Colonial Union with the precise coordinates to this system and your lifepods. You know that the Colonial Union keeps ships at skip distance specifically for rescue missions of this type.