Land of the Dead

In the kuub antispinward of Mexica space, beyond the rim

The navigator of the IMN DD-217 Calexico frowned at her console, tapping her throatmike to life: “ Chu-sa Rae? We’re at barely thirty-percent see-through in this… combat reaction range is down to less than a light-minute.”

At the other end of the narrow twenty-meter-long bridge, Captain Rae’s grimace matched the navigator’s wary expression. His destroyer had an upgraded sensor suite to match the two Deep Range scouts for which he was flying gunsight, but in this protostellar murk nothing was working quite to Engineering Board specifications.

“Are Kiev and Korkunov still in relay? Are we getting a clean telemetry feed?”

“ Hai, kyo,” the navigator responded, watching the particle collision counts on the forward transit deflectors flicker rapidly in and out of redline on her stat panel. “Feed is clean, but we’re edging towards full-stop.”

“I see it.” Rae had the same readout running on his console. Calexico lacked the new battle shielding Fleet was refitting onto the capital ships, and her transit deflectors-though upgraded to match Survey requirements-were finding it hard going in the heavy interstellar dust endemic to this region of space. “Comm, patch me through to the K and K.”

Rae waited patiently while his communications officer rounded up the captains of the two Survey ships. Watching the collision counts surging red did not ease his mind. The kuub was notorious for its hazards to navigation. Ancient stellar debris-rumor said the science team was feeling warm about a double-supernova-swirled in a hot murk glowing with radiation from the few suns still embedded in the nebula. There were solid fragments as well, the bits and pieces of planets shattered by the catastrophic detonation, mixed with cometary debris, stray asteroids… a nebula of incredible breadth and density.

There were hints of a massive gravity sink down at the heart of the region. A black hole, or maybe more than one. The navigator was starting to see queer distortions in the local hyperspace gradient, though they didn’t look anything like the usual fluctuation patterns around a singularity. She tapped her throatmike again.

“ Chu-sa, we’re approaching transit vertex pretty quickly. I think we’d better slow. I’m seeing… wait a minute. Hold one. Hold one.” Her voice turned puzzled.

Rae, in the midst of offering the Kiev an engineering team to tear down a degraded shield nacelle, caught the change in her voice and his reaction was instantaneous. He slapped the FULL STOP glyph on his main console and barked a confirming order to his crew: “All engines, go to zero-v and prepare to rotate ship! All power to transit shielding, all stations report!”

Six seconds later, amid the crisp chatter of his department heads reporting their status, the t-relay from Kiev stopped cold.

In the threatwell directly in front of Rae’s station, the icon representing the Survey ship winked out. A camera pod immediately swiveled towards the event and two seconds later the Chu-sa was watching with gritted teeth as the Kiev vanished in a plume of superheated plasma.

“Antimatter containment failure-” Rae’s voice was anguished, but then his eyes widened in real horror. The Korkunov vanished from the plot three seconds after its sister ship. A second burst of sunfire stabbed through the dust. His fist slammed the crash button on his shockframe.

“Full evasion! Guns hot, give me full active scan! Battle stations!”

A Klaxon blared and every lighting fixture on the ship flashed three times and then shaded into a noticeable red tone. Rae’s shockframe folded around him and a z-helmet lowered and locked tight against his z-suit’s neckring. A groan vibrated from the very air as the destroyer’s main engines flared and the g-decking strained to adjust. The Calexico -which had been about to rotate and slow with main drives-surged forward into a tight turn, its radar and wideband laser sensors emitting a sharp full-spectrum burst to paint the immediate neighborhood.

Down on the gun deck, a message drone banged away from the ship, thrown free by a magnetic accelerator and immediately darted back along the expedition’s path of entry into the kuub. The drone’s onboard comp was already calculating transit gradients, looking to punch into hyperspace as quickly as possible. A second drone was run out by a suddenly frantic deck crew, ready to launch as soon as the results of the wide-spectrum scan were complete.

A louder alarm was blaring in Engineering, drowning both the warble of the drive coil and the basso drone of the antimatter reactor and its attendant systems. In the number three airlock, Engineer Second Malcolm Helsdon turned in place, his z-suit already sealed, a gear-pack slung over one shoulder and ten meters of heat-exchange thermocouple looped around the other. Through the visor of his suit helmet, he peered back through the closing inner door of the lock, seeing the on-duty crew moving quickly- as they should, he thought-to action stations.

That heat exchanger is going to have to wait. Helsdon’s habitually serious expression soured.

The engineer reached out to key the lock override, but the looped thermocouple bound his arm and he paused, shifting his feet, swinging the ungainly package around to his other side, to get a free hand on the control panel. Sweat sprung from his pale forehead, and the usual shag of unkempt brown hair was in his eyes.

Through the outer door’s blast window, the blur of motion was so swift only the faintest afterimage registered in his retinas.

“What-” was that? The overhead lights in the airlock went out.

There was an instant of darkness and Helsdon knew, even before the local emergency illumination kicked in, that main power had failed catastrophically. Without a second thought, he threw himself back against the wall opposite the interior lock door and seized hold of a stanchion. As he moved, local g-control failed and he slammed hard into the plasticine panel. The Calexico was at full burn and only the armored resiliency of his Fleet z-suit kept Helsdon from breaking both shoulder and arm. For an instant, all was whirling lights and vertigo.

A moment later, the engineer steadied himself and ventured to open his eyes.

Everything was terribly quiet.

Still alive, he thought, blinking in the dim glow of the emergency lights. The thermocouple had come loose and was drifting in z-g, slowly uncoiling to fill the airlock with dozens of silvery loops. Reactor hasn’t fried me yet… He kicked to the inner lock window, bracing one leg against the side of the heavy pressure door. Streaks of frost blocked most of the view, but Helsdon had no trouble seeing out.

Grasping what he saw took a heartbeat, then another… two breaths to realize he wasn’t looking down at an engineering drawing, but rather at the heart of the Calexico herself laid bare. Somehow Engineering was falling away from him-along with the great proportion of the destroyer itself-every deck exposed, every hall and conduit pipe gaping wide to open space. A huge cloud of debris-sheets, kaffe cups, papers, shoes, the stiff bodies of men already dead from hypoxia-spilled from the dying ship.

Helsdon’s helmet jerked to one side, searching for a point of reference-anything that made sense-and fixed on a section of wall jutting out into his field of view to the left. He could see three-quarters of the hallway-flooring with nonslip decking, dead light fixtures, a guide-panel-and then nothing. Only an impossibly sharp division where the ship simply ended.

We’ve been cut in half.