Things Fall Apart: Chapter 13

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Forward

Arriving Gliese-581

The bridge was as full of people as it had been since the disaster. It was altogether possible that it was the most full it had ever been at all, given how rarely the compartment—which had been, after all, the auxiliary bridge—had been needed in the past.

Every seat was taken. Lieutenant Singer sat in the traditional command position, directly across from Ensign Cordé at the communications station. Lieutenant Alexander sat to Singer's right, with Lieutenant Cadotte just past zir. PO Wasserman sat the helm, to Singer's left, and PO Luchny next over. In the seats remaining, that had largely not been used, sat Chief Kasel, Señor Espinoza and his pilot, Neera Goldsmith.

Down the hall in Main Recreation, everyone who wasn't on duty had gathered to watch and wait.

"Two hundred seconds," said Alexander. They were already back down to a time-compression of 100:1. The choice had been made to baby the ship a little, easing it back into normal space.

Singer saw a motion across from her, and realized Kasel was holding up a data-pad, screen toward her, on which he had scrawled in large letters, "REMEMBER TO BREATHE!"

Despite all the tension, Singer laughed, just a little, and so, remembered to breathe.

"One hundred...," said Alexander.

"Fifty."

"Twenty-five."

"Ten."

"Five."

The entire room inhaled at once, or so it seemed, and despite Kasel's injunction, held its breath.

"Emergence."

It was far worse than they had prepared for.

Upon emergence, the first thing that should have happened was that Cordé would send a ping to a traffic control buoy. An arriving ship would then receive such information as might be useful—current control frequencies, canned orders queued up in anticipation, possible dockings for Fleet and private traffic, news updates, local calendar information, all in a standard format that should lead smoothly to a ship requesting a docking, an orbit, a data transfer; whatever the ship was there to do.

Cordé sent the ping, of course. Singer had seen the ensign's finger hovering over the control from the time Alexander had called "One hundred" and watched it descend with such decisive force Singer was concerned Cordé might have injured herself.

Before any answer could come back, the holo began to light with a rash of red dots.

Disaster beacons.

The buoy's response came back—Singer knew the timing, of course. Standard procedure would then be to break out pertinent information to other stations, and then, at the captain's command, call traffic control for a docking.

Cordé's face, however, went pale enough that Singer could tell through the haze of the holo, and the rash of red. She stared at Singer, her expression unreadable. Singer's shields were fraying under the tension, but there were so many emotions in the room that should could not parse anything in particular.

Finally, she said, "Ensign?"

Cordé looked like she was trying to speak. Several times. Finally, she closed her eyes, touched a control, and transferred the buoy response up to the holo, where it appeared in front of each station separately, so that nobody had to read it backward.

It read:

Welcome to Gliese-581.

All services currently unavailable.

And the tank continued to fill with red dots.

Singer could not have said how many seconds passed after that. It could have been ten. It could have been a kilo. What revived her from that state was seeing Kasel abruptly get up from his seat, heading toward the hatch.

She managed to croak out, "Chief?"

He looked at her, face unabashedly tear-streaked. "Main rec..." was all he managed to croak out.

She understood. Someone of standing needed to be there, now. It couldn't be her. Her place was here. Making decisions. Giving orders.

Espinoza and his pilot also stood, nodding respect to her. She understood. They also had people they needed to be with, more than they needed to be here now that they knew their worst fears and more had come to pass. She nodded back, tacit permission, and they departed.

Singer looked at the tank again, and was immediately overwhelmed. And in that moment of overwhelm, knew the first order to give. "Ensign Cordé."

Cordé looked up at her—she had buried her face in her hands at some point while Singer was swapped out. She did not verbally acknowledge, but she was clearly attending.

"Mute all disaster beacons."

She saw a protest on Cordé's face, followed by understanding. The rescues from Almaty had been barely alive. That was already a megasecond and more ago. Even if not, Bellerophon was one damaged ship. There were literally hundreds of dots on the screen, masking whatever might actually be left intact.

Cordé complied, and the schematic of Gliese-581 took on a somewhat more familiar look.

Gliese-581 was, like most human-settled systems, relatively small. Every faster-than-light drive humans had devised had the same weakness: they could only operate beyond a star's heliopause. Within that boundary, ships were confined to ordinary, boring, maddening Einsteinian physics. Thus, the human diaspora had mostly chosen systems that were comparatively easy to get into and out of.

The tank could therefore represent the system with only a limited distortion of scale. Ordinarily, it would also be representing other traffic in motion, the relative positions of all the system's orbitals, and so on.

But there was no other traffic under powered flight.

Where New Norfolk should be, orbiting the outermost planet of the system, doubling as the system's primary anchorage, a red icon flashed. Under the circumstances, the message was fairly clear: the vast city-station simply was not there.

Singer stared at that blink for a moment more, then gestured at the holo, zooming it in. She felt rather than saw Alexander bend to zir console.

A glittering ring of debris appeared, its path spiraling inward toward the gravity well of the planet known as Edward.

Intent on the display, and desperately trying not to feel everyone else's feelings, let alone her own, she was startled when she heard Cadotte exclaim, "Oh, thank G-d!"

Alexander fielded this, almost as if things were normal. "You have something, Lieutenant?"

"Yes, Lieutenant. Long story short, every wholly artificial orbital appears to be...missing. However! All of the rock villages appear to be present and accounted for, and at least some are showing normal emissions, suggesting comms traffic."

It took a moment to sink in, then Singer said, "That means the shipyard station..."

She did not finish the sentence, but looked up at Cordé. "Hail Borass Station, Ensign. Traffic control protocol, but analog voice only. No data traffic, in or out, understood?"

Cordé croaked out, "Understood, Skipper." Then, clearing her throat, she opened the traffic control calling frequency usually used for the shipyard, and said, "Borass Station, this is Bellerophon. Borass Station, Bellerophon."

Borass was a big rock nestled in the vast cometary disk that surrounded the system, right on the ecliptic. Mined almost hollow, the Tau Ceti Treaty Fleet had filled the inside with almost as much mass as had been removed, building out an industrial and administrative complex within the rock, and then more like it, within all its large-enough neighbors, rather than building wholly artificial stations. The advent of gravity generators had meant the rocks did not have to be spun at all to be comfortable for humans in the habitable parts, while a remaining hollow core could be used as docking space and warehousing in zero-g.

In short, Borass Station was likely the largest remaining intact habitation in the system. Even if the ships in its docking core had suffered the same fate as others, the habitation was shielded from that core against possible accidents. If the rock itself was intact, there would be surviving personnel.

A moment.

Two.

"Bellerophon, Borass Control. Stand by for Borass Actual."

It was strange to hear static, and the signal sounded slightly off frequency. Singer didn't care. It was music. A symphony.

At least one other person survived. No, two. Whomever was ranked high enough to count as Borass Actual also survived.

The next voice was, despite the limitations of analog transmission, familiar to her. "Bellerophon, Borass Actual, Commodore Haraldsdottir."

Singer nodded at Cordé, who nodded back after a moment. "Commodore, this is Bellerophon Actual, Lieutenant Elyah Singer. Authentication Rho Three Five Eight Seven Gamma Delta Penguin. Second factor," she looked down at her console, "Alpha Gamma Four Lima Petunia Tortoise."

If the station had intact databases at all, that should be sufficient, even without the ability to reliably voice-print her analog transmission.

The response took longer than lightspeed delay could account for. Singer wondered if there was a discussion of possible counterfeits going on.

As if reading her mind, Alexander said, quietly, "How certain are we?"

Here, however, Singer felt pretty confident. "Every evidence we've seen is AIs going rabidly insane and destroying what they could. The sole exception was the Almaty beacon, which wasn't sentient enough to have that kind of rage, but even then, its efforts to pass on the infection were brute force. We have seen no indication of nuance."

Alexander considered that for a moment, then nodded, not entirely convinced, but accepting the gamble.

Finally, the speaker crackled alive again. The commodore's voice was guarded, but she could not quite keep her relief out of it. "Authentication accepted, Lieutenant. Please authenticate Gimmel Ostrich Four Seven Five Fire Elderberry. Second factor," a pause, "Roanoke Seven Nine Six Harpoon Purple."

She saw Cordé running those codes against the database. Here was a potential weakness in their ability to trust one another—if the ship's database was out of date relative to the last time the commodore had changed her authenticator, that could get sticky.

But Cordé gave a thumbs up, and Singer said, "Authenticated, Borass."

"Report, Lieutenant."

Singer gave the briefest version of events she could. She'd practiced this part, but chose not to read it from notes. It was vain, but she didn't want to sound like she was reading. She wanted to sound like she knew what she was talking about.

Again, there was a pause longer than mere light-lag could account for. Finally, the commodore responded, "You have functioning pinnaces?"

"Yes, Commodore. The ventral boat bay was untouched."

"Please send one across for me. Traffic control will guide them in."

Singer could not quite help herself. "Ma'am?"

"We don't have anything more than worker-bee boats left over here, Lieutenant. I'll give you a full rundown of how —" she stopped herself, and Singer guessed what she was about to say. Instead, she continued, "—on the whole situation as we understand it when I see you. Listen, I understand you might be anxious right now, not to mention overwhelmed. Let me be clear right from the start: you did good. You got your ship back here. That's the good news. The bad news is, no one else has, yet. You're it. Take some time to help your crew, and then let me know when you're sending the pinnace across, OK?"

It could not be precisely said that Singer relaxed at that moment, except in relative terms. But it would have to do. "Understood, Commodore. I'll have someone on their way to you within five kilosecs."

"Good enough. Haraldsdottir out."

Singer closed her eyes, aware that her crew were waiting for orders. She, too, would have welcomed orders more than those she'd received, in this moment, but the orders were hers to give.

Finally, she looked up again, and found her crew looking at her expectantly. Their emotions were all over the place, but their trust in her was a constant.

Drawing on that to strengthen her voice, she said, "Tie down for station keeping. Then report to Main Rec. Chef?"

"Skipper?"

"In six hundred seconds, pipe the whole crew to Main Rec or, once that fills up, Main Dining."

"Yes, Skipper."

Singer went about her own tasks to set her station to standby, aware that the others around her were doing the same. It took very little time, but no one filtered out until everyone was ready, despite the implication of Singer's order that they should go when each of them was ready.

When she looked up, once again, they were all looking at her. Taking a deep breath, then letting it out, she led the way to the hatch, then down the hall.

Together, they went to be with their people.

I have literally spent five years, maybe more, wondering exactly how I would handle this moment.

It's a little weird to finally have it all written down!