The End of All Things Read online

  “I don’t imagine the captain would be happy about that.”

  “No, probably not,” Ocampo agreed.

  “There’s also the problem that the ship, and its owners and crew, would take a loss because their trade route was messed with.”

  “If something like that were to happen, in theory, the ship, and its owners and crew, would be fully compensated by the Colonial Union for any losses, with additional compensation for time and other incurred expenses.”

  “Really.”

  “Oh, yes,” Ocampo said. “And now you know why it doesn’t happen very often. It’s expensive as hell.”

  “And you told the captain all this.”

  “I might have,” Ocampo said. “But if I did, I don’t imagine it made her any happier. No captain likes being ordered about on her own ship. But at this point there’s nothing to be done for it. How do you feel about it, Mr. Daquin?”

  “I don’t know. Better, I suppose, because I have some idea what’s going on. At least, if what you’re telling me is accurate, sir.”

  “I haven’t told you anything, Mr. Daquin,” Ocampo said. “We’re just having a conversation about possibilities. And this seems like a reasonable possibility to me. Does it seem like a reasonable possibility to you?”

  I thought it did.

  * * *

  The next day, I got shot in the head.

  Before that happened, though, I fell out of my bunk.

  The falling out of the bunk was not the important part. The important part was how I fell out of it. I was shoved—or more accurately, the Chandler was shoved, and I pretty much stayed where I was. Which meant one second I had a bunk under me and the next second I didn’t, and then I was tumbling through the air, toward a bulkhead.

  When this was happening I had two thoughts. The first thought, which if I’m truthful about it took up most of my brain, was Whaaaaaa, because first I was airborne, and then I smacked into the wall.

  The second thought, in the part of my brain that wasn’t freaking out, was that something serious had happened to the ship. The artificial gravity field on the Chandler and nearly all space ships is incredibly robust—it has to be, or even simple acceleration would turn human bodies into jelly. It also acts to dampen skew and yaw inside a ship. It takes a lot of energy, basically, to shove a ship so hard that people fall out of their bunks.

  There was also the fact that while I was shoved out of my bunk, I wasn’t falling. Which meant the artificial gravity wasn’t working. Something happened to knock it out.

  Conclusion: We either hit something or were hit by something.

  Which meant that the part of my brain that was previously going Whaaaaaa was now going, Oh shit we’re all gonna die, we’re dead we’re dead we’re so fucking dead.

  And then the lights went out.

  All of this took maybe a second.

  The good news is I peed before going to sleep.

  Then the emergency lights clicked on, as did the emergency gravity, rated at .2 standard G. It wasn’t a lot, and it wouldn’t be on for long. The whole point of it was to give the crew enough time to strap things down and lock them away. Everything that had been previously flying around in my quarters—toothpaste tubes, unhampered clothes, me—began to settle to the floor. I touched down, quickly put on some pants, and opened the door to my room.

  And immediately saw Chieko Tellez running down the hall.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Power’s out,” she said as she passed me. “We skipped and then the power went bye-bye.”

  “Yeah, but how?”

  “Hey, man, I’m just a cargo monkey,” she said. “You’re bridge crew. You tell me.” And then she was gone.

  She had a point. I started my way to the bridge.

  Along the way I saw Secretary Ocampo, who looked mussed and like he hadn’t gotten much sleep. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Power’s out.”

  “How’d that happen?”

  I just had this conversation, on the other side. “I’m heading to the bridge to find out.”

  Ocampo nodded. “I’ll come with you.” I didn’t think this was a particularly great idea, but I just nodded and kept going, assuming that Ocampo was following me.

  The bridge was busy but controlled. The first-shift bridge crew were at their stations, offering up status reports to Thao, who took them in and asked questions. I nodded to Ocampo, who had indeed followed me in, and then went over to Han.

  “You’re not on duty,” he said to me as I came up.

  “Thought you might want some help.”

  “We already have a pilot.” Han nodded to Bolduc.

  “Available for other things.”

  “Fine,” Han said. “See if Womack needs help with the sensors.” I headed over to Sherita Womack, handling the sensors. Han then turned his attention to Ocampo. “You’re not part of this crew, Secretary Ocampo. You’re officially in the way.”

  “Thought I might be useful,” Ocampo said.

  “You’re not,” Han said. “Go back to your stateroom.”

  “Belay that,” Thao said, turning to the conversation. “I want him here. I’ve got questions for him, and he damn well better have answers for me. Don’t you move, Secretary.”

  “I’m at your service, Captain,” Ocampo said.

  Thao said nothing to this, and switched her attention to Womack. “Sensors. Report. Tell me if we hit anything coming out of skip.”

  “Doesn’t appear so, ma’am,” Womack said. “If we hit anything, we’d probably be dead.”

  “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 Uni
on’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.