Excelsior (8 page)

There were still over 800 warheads aimed at the Lincoln.

Bright blue lasers lanced out in streams of twos and threes. Sure enough, a few extra missiles winked off the grid. Then enemy ordnance reached ELR, and both Lewis Station and the Lincoln began shooting them down in earnest. Incoming missiles winked off the grid by the hundreds. Alexander breathed a sigh of relief. Then he noticed that the number of missiles heading for the Lincoln wasn’t dropping as fast as the overall count.

That was wrong. A closer look at the tactical map revealed that Lewis Station had devoted only a small fraction of its guns to covering the Lincoln. Admiral Gaulle was still determined to save his station.

Alexander cursed under his breath.

The enemy’s laser-armed ordnance opened fire next. Something shuddered and a muffled bang reached Alexander’s ears. He froze. That sound hadn’t been simulated.

“Taking fire!” McAdams reported. “We’re venting atmosphere on decks four, five, and six!”

The ship’s storage. They were venting valuable supplies into space.

“Lock it down!” Alexander roared.

“Deploying repair drones…”

The number of incoming ordnance dropped below 400. ETA five seconds.

“Brace for impact!” Hayes warned.

“Helm! Set thrust to 50 Gs!”

There was no time to hesitate, and Davorian didn’t.

Alexander felt himself slam into a brick wall. That wall was the back of his acceleration couch. Conscious thought ceased. His chest stopped moving, and his heart froze.

After an indeterminate period of time, the acceleration stopped. It took a moment for Alexander’s lungs to remember how to breathe. As his heart went back to beating, a searing headache stabbed him behind his eyes.

A quick look at the tactical map revealed that all of the incoming missiles had been intercepted. That last-ditch evasive maneuver had bought them the time they needed.

The station had not been so lucky.

“Multiple impacts on Lewis Station!” Lieutenant Williams reported.

“On-screen!”

The MHD switched to a view from the Lincoln’s rear cameras, and they saw Lewis Station drifting in three pieces. The bones of the station’s superstructure were showing, hull plates clinging here and there, charred black and looking like torn bits of paper.

Then the rest of the missiles hit those remains and blotted out the tactical map with a wash of EM interference. When things came back into focus, Lewis Station was gone.

Alexander sighed. “Davorian, get us through the Looking Glass.”

“Yes, sir.”

Commander Korbin turned to him, her blue eyes wide and glassy. “What about Earth?”

Alexander shook his head. “Our orders are clear, Commander. We are to get to Wonderland and assess the planet for habitability.”

“You have a wife on Earth, Captain. I have two children.”

“And I have to believe that they’ll be waiting for us when we get back.”

“The odds of that are—”

“Better than nothing,” Alexander replied. He turned back to the fore. “McAdams, how are repairs coming along?”

“The hull breach is sealed, sir…”

“But?”

“We lost a lot of supplies.”

“Then we have no choice. We have to go back,” Korbin said.

Alexander shot her a look. “Williams! How long can we last with what’s left? Do we still have enough supplies to get us to Wonderland and back?” Besides being the ship’s sensors operator, Lieutenant Williams was also the ship’s quartermaster, so he would know.

“The supplies closest to the outer hull were mostly non-essential equipment, and they were all locked down before launch. In terms of food and other critical supplies, we should still have everything we need.”

“Then our mission stands. Lieutenant Stone—”

“Sir?”

“Recall our fighters and drones. Coordinate your efforts with the helm to make sure they’re all docked before we enter the wormhole.”

“Yes, sir.”

The MHD showed stars panning by as the Lincoln rotated on the spot. The Looking Glass came into view, looking like a clear glass marble. It was hard to imagine that through there lay humanity’s only hope for survival—a planet that only probes had ever seen, and even then, just for a few minutes at a time. There was no way to be sure that it really was habitable, or even that its ecology wouldn’t be completely hostile to humans. What if all the planet’s water was poisonous? Or if the air wasn’t breathable? Toxic? The planet could also be home to a host of deadly pathogens. Or maybe it was plagued by high surface winds that would make growing food next to impossible.

The list of possibilities was endless.

Chances were it would be easier to colonize than the Moon, Mars, Titan, or Europa, but it would likely still be a far cry from Earth. Alexander couldn’t believe that this was what humanity had come to.

What have we done? he wondered.

He was still wondering that long after the remainder of the 61st Squadron was aboard and the Lincoln passed through the wormhole.

What.

Have.

We.

Done?

 

Chapter 4

“Setting acceleration to point five Gs,” Lieutenant Davorian replied.

Alexander swallowed thickly and nodded.

“Acceleration set.”

“Lieutenant Williams, confirm no hostiles inbound.”

“We’re clear, sir.”

Alexander turned to look at the comms station. “Hayes, set condition green, and alert the crew.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now what?” Korbin asked, turning to him.

“Now we stretch our legs.”

The bridge came alive with the sound of seat harnesses unbuckling. Alexander unbuckled his own harness and mentally disconnected his relief tubes. That done, he manually withdrew his nutrient line. Finally, he reached up and twisted his helmet, breaking the airtight seal with a squeal of escaping air. He pulled off the helmet and attached it to the magnetic rack behind his headrest. The HUD was gone, and his mental interface to the ship went with it, but they’d have plenty of warning if something happened to change their alert status. The nearest possible hostiles were back on Earth, and that was at least a week away.

“Williams, you have the first watch.”

“Yes, sir,” Williams said, sighing as he sunk back into the sensors station.

“Everyone else, come with me. Hayes, have the rest of the crew report to the Officer’s Lounge, and then come on down.”

“Roger.”

Alexander reached up to the rails on the front of his armrests and pulled himself up out of the captain’s couch. At point five Gs, it was easy to suspend his weight above the chair and push backward to land on the deck behind the headrest. Commander Korbin landed beside him a moment later, both of them now free of their helmets.

Looking up, Alexander saw the rest of the crew climbing down the ladders from their stations. Some of them simply jumped down and landed with muffled thuds around him. Alexander frowned. That was against regulations, even in low gravity, but he wasn’t going to reprimand them now. They all had bigger problems to deal with.

Once everyone except Williams was standing on the deck, Alexander turned and headed for the elevators at the back of the bridge. He felt light and bouncy in the ship’s half gravity, and he had to consciously watch his steps to avoid walking too fast and tripping over his own feet. After spending a week seated in their chairs with nothing but a few mandatory breaks to stretch their legs, walking felt like a strange new luxury.

They reached the elevators and Alexander gestured for the doors of the nearest lift to open. The control panel tracked his gesture and the elevator opened with a whisper. Alexander walked in and selected one of the glowing green buttons, the one labeled ‘Officer’s Lounge (12).’

The doors slid shut and the lift went up two floors to the lounge on deck twelve. The doors opened to reveal a circular room with a wraparound vista of space. Furnishings and decorations were sparse and utilitarian since everything had to be bolted to the deck. Holoscreens reproduced feeds from cameras mounted on the outer hull, providing a dazzling, panoramic view of space. The geometry of spacetime inside the wormhole subtly warped that view, as if they were looking out through a fisheye lens.

“Go make yourselves comfortable. Once everyone’s here, we’ll begin.” Alexander walked over to the bar and took a seat on one of the stools. He idly glanced around the naked bar, wishing sorely for a drink, but they were all still on duty, and everything was still locked down in the cabinets. Couldn’t have whiskey bottles cracking together at 10 Gs.

A waste of perfectly good Scotch.

Damaging sensitive equipment inside the lounge was a secondary concern.

After a few minutes Commander Korbin came and sat down beside him. “Sir,” she said.

“You can call me Alex. We’re going to be off duty for a while, Sirena.”

“I see. What’s this about, Alex?”

“Morale. We lost half of the 61st Squadron out there.” He couldn’t bring himself to mention Earth.

Korbin swallowed visibly. “So this is a funeral.”

“A memorial.” One of the elevators arrived, and spilled out a group of noncoms. “Come in and take your seats,” Alexander called out to them.

Another three lifts full of crew arrived before everyone was assembled and waiting. Alexander turned to them from the bar and cleared his throat. “Everyone, gather around.” Alexander waited as the crew came together. He saw Seth Ryder, the CAG—commander of the ship’s fighters and drones push to the front of the group to stand beside Lieutenant Stone of starfighter command. Seth was a burly-looking man with dark straight hair and laugh lines all around his eyes and mouth. But he wasn’t laughing now. His gray eyes looked glassy and haunted. Alexander scanned the rest of the crew and saw Seth’s expression mirrored on dozens of other faces.

These people were like family to one another. With the exception of recent transfers, they’d all spent more time together than they’d spent with their real families. Alexander didn’t even need to do a roll call to know who was missing. Their faced left gaping holes in the assembled crowd. Even without bodies, a ceremonial funeral was called for, but they hadn’t had time to organize one yet, and Alexander wasn’t sure it would be a good idea to encourage mourning—not with Earth’s fate still so uncertain.

Making a snap decision, he nodded to the crew and said, “We lost five brothers and sisters today. That’s enough reason to mourn without thinking about who else we might have lost. The truth is, we don’t know, and without Lewis Station to act as a comm relay between us an Earth, we’re not likely to find out until we re-establish contact.

“By now some of you have probably already figured out what’s going on, and since operational security is already blown, I’m free to tell you what Operation Alice is all about.

“We’re busy traveling through a wormhole to an earth-type planet called Wonderland. In light of the recent conflict back on Earth our mission is more important than ever. We need to find out if Wonderland is really habitable, and report back to the Alliance with our findings so that we can establish a colony there before the Confederacy does.”

Alexander let that news sink in before he went on. “If you have any questions about the mission specifics, please hold them until later. I’ll be issuing a proper mission brief before the next sleep cycle that should answer all of your questions.

“But for the moment, we’re going to stop and honor our fallen brothers and sisters-in-arms by doing something unconventional. We’re going to celebrate their lives, not focus on their deaths. This is a wake, not a funeral. It’s a time to share memories of the deceased. We’ll have a few drinks, make a toast, and swap stories of the deceased. For the next four hours, we’re all officially off duty. Stone, Ryder, would you please see that everyone gets a drink?”

Lieutenant Stone nodded and started toward the bar. Seth followed a few steps behind.

“That’s all for now. Dismissed.”

Hushed murmurs bubbled from the group as everyone dispersed back to couches and chairs. One man remained where he was. Alexander didn’t recognize him, but from his lack of insignia and overly genteel appearance, he could guess who it might be.