Heart of the Nebula (26 page)

Her stomach suddenly fell, making her gasp.
At the same time, her sense of direction completely reversed,
making her feel as if she were upside down on the ceiling. She
reached out frantically for purchase, but her perspective seemed to
invert like an optical illusion, leaving her on the outside of the
room looking in. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth to
scream, but before she could, darkness enveloped her.

When she opened her eyes, she found herself
lying on the floor of her bathroom. The alarms were still blaring,
but the hum was completely gone. Her sense of orientation had
returned, and other than a couple of bruises on her elbows, she
seemed to be just fine.

“
Mistress!” Nina cried, her
voice frantic even for an AI. “Mistress, are you all right? Would
you like me to call for help?”

“
No,” said Sara, standing
up. “I’m fine, Nina—I’m fine.”
Besides,
the last thing I need is someone running in here while I’m
naked.

“
Are you sure? I think you
need to see a doctor.”

“
That won’t be necessary.
Did you transmit the message?”

“
I am not sure, mistress.
There was an unknown interruption in the middle of the transmission
process.”

Sara bit her lip and
clenched her eyes shut as tightly as she possibly could.
She didn’t get it,
she
thought.
My last chance to send a message
to my mother, and it failed.

“
Are you feeling unwell,
mistress? Your body language is alarming me.”

“
Nina, go on standby until
further notice.”

“
But mistress—”

“
That is a direct order,
Nina. Go away.”

“
Very well,” said Nina.
“Going on standby now. Goodbye!”

Sara sat down the corner and hugged her
knees against her chest. Her shoulders began to shake
uncontrollably as she sobbed. More than anything else, she felt
like a lost little girl. In more than one way, perhaps she was.

Part III: The Leader

Chapter 13

James walked briskly down the main
thoroughfare leading out from the spaceport, one hand on his energy
pistol. Except for a few scattered market stalls and a handful of
customers, the hallway was empty. Merchants and customers alike
stood as if in a daze, their faces etched with the uncertainty and
confusion that precedes mass panic.

They’re an angry mob
waiting to happen,
James thought
grimly.
They’re lost and confused and
don’t know what just happened, but when they find out, things could
get ugly.

Not on his watch.

“
Attention!” he said in a
loud voice. The crowd turned to him immediately, no doubt because
of the uniform.

“
What’s going on?” someone
asked. “Can you tell us what just happened?”

“
It felt like the whole
station just… jumped.”

“
This area is closed until
further notice,” he said in a commanding tone. “You are ordered to
return to your homes and stay indoors.”

“
What?”

“
Why?”

“
Return to your homes
immediately,” he said again. “It’s a matter of station
security.”

The people stared at him for a moment, but
one by one, they complied. Instead of fomenting into a mob, the
crowd began to disperse, many of them talking in hushed tones with
each other as they went.

James let out a breath he didn’t know he’d
been holding. His hand, which had hovered next to his holster,
twitched and began to relax. There wasn’t any time to waste,
though. His work here was done, but the situation was far from
under control.

Mom and Dad,
he thought, remembering the dinner that they had
put on for him and Kayla.
I have to get
back to them—I have to make sure that they’re safe.

He activated his wrist console and quickly
put a call through to Sterling as he half-walked, half-ran to the
main elevators. To his relief, Sterling picked up almost
immediately.

“
Captain, sir! What’s going
on?”

“
I need you to rally all of
the men in your area to patrol the main concourse. If you see any
civilians, tell them to return to their homes and stay
indoors.”

“
What?”

“
Just set up that patrol,”
said James. “Make your presence felt. We’re going to get through
this crisis all right, but we need to prevent a riot.”

“
Why would the people riot,
Sir?”

“
I can’t explain it now,
Sterling, but I promise that I will later. For now, I need you to
get out there and maintain the peace. Understand?”

Sterling paused. “Understood, Sir. I’ll do
my best.”

“
That’s all I can ask of
you.”
I just hope that it’s
enough.

James stepped onto the nearest empty
elevator and punched the code for the deck where his parents lived.
As the doors hissed shut, he lifted his wrist console and put a
call through to Sara.

“
Sara? Are you
there?”

She didn’t answer.

“
Sara?”

Again, no response. His console showed that
the call had failed to go through.

James clenched his fist and swore. By
himself, he didn’t have the authority to impose the sort of
station-wide curfew that they needed to keep the mobs from forming.
Only the patrician had that power, but Sara was the only real
contact in the patrician’s office that he could go through and she
wasn’t answering. Maybe that was a good thing—maybe she had
realized how dangerous the situation was, and was busy working to
quell the unrest before it started. After all, she always seemed to
be at least one step ahead of him. But without any way to contact
her, he was completely out of the loop. All he could do was work
with Sterling to secure the spaceport and make sure that his
parents were hunkered down.

The elevator reached his deck and came to a
stop. James gripped his pistol as the doors hissed open, but the
corridor outside was quiet. Eerily quiet. He glanced both ways and
set out at a brisk pace toward his parents’ apartment, his hand
never leaving his gun.

By now, no doubt, news had begun to spread
that the Colony had somehow jumped out of its Lagrange orbit deep
into interstellar space. Confusion would turn to shock, and shock
would turn to anger. With the solar collectors no longer gathering
energy, the power grid would probably fail, and if the grid went
down while the people began to agitate, it could throw the whole
station into chaos.

As if in confirmation, the lights in the
corridor began to dim and flicker.

By the time he reached his parents’ door, he
could already hear footsteps and raised voices through the
bulkheads above. He drew his pistol and banged on the door.

“
Open up!” he shouted.
“It’s me, James!”

The door slid open, and his mother stared
out at him, a look of concern on her face. “James? Where have you
been? Why are you carrying your gun?”

Without a word, James hurried inside and
palmed the door shut. He kept watch with his pistol pointed through
the doorway until it was fully closed, then locked it with the
keypad. Only then did he slip his gun back in its holster and turn
to face his parents.

“
James?” said his father,
in a tone of voice that demanded answers.

“
It’s all right,” said
James. “I just wanted to make sure that we’re safe.”

“
Safe from
what?”

“
From—look, why don’t we
sit down? There’s a lot to explain.”

Above them, the shouting got worse, then
fell eerily silent as footsteps sounded through the bulkheads.
James ushered his parents back into the kitchen, to the table where
less than an hour ago they had come to eat dinner.

“
What’s wrong?” Kyla asked,
standing by the doorway. “Do we need to go?”

“
No,” said James. “We need
to stay here, where it’s safe.”

He claimed Kyla’s seat, which gave him a
view of the main entranceway to the apartment, and motioned for the
others to sit down.

“
We all felt something
strange after you left,” said his mother. “It felt almost as if…
well, as if we were on a starship making a jump
somewhere.”

“
That’s impossible,” said
his father.

“
Well, that’s what it felt
like.”

“
And that’s what it was,”
said James. “The Hameji attacked us, so we jumped the station out
into deep space.”

Both of his parents and Kyla stared at him.
His father frowned and furrowed his brow, while his mother’s eyes
went wide. Kyla looked as if she were ready to bolt.

“
How is that possible?” his
father asked. “The Colony is a station, not a starship—it doesn’t
have a jump drive.”

“
Actually, Dad, it
does.”

“
But—but how?”

“
Let’s open to a news
channel,” his mother said, interrupting them both. She toggled the
controls on the tabletop, and the wallscreen immediately above them
switched to a video feed.

“—
not sure, but it appears
that we have left the Karduna system altogether,” said the
announcer. “We’re receiving hundreds of videos from
citizen-journalists across the Colony, showing the, uh, much
changed view outside. As you can see, nothing is where it should
be.”

The camera panned left, and the right side
of the screen divided to show two simultaneous videos stacked on
top of each other, each one cycling through a different feed every
few seconds. Every one of them showed the milky-white starfield of
deep space, with no sign of Karduna or any of the nearby
asteroids.

“
Stars and constellations
of Earth,” James’s father muttered. “So it’s true.”

“
If you’re just now joining
us,” the announcer said, “we are reporting on the anomaly that many
of you felt just a few minutes ago. It appears now that it was in
fact an FTL device that transported the entire Colony out of the
Karduna system. We have no official confirmation from the
patrician’s office yet, or indeed any official statement on the
incident, but we expect that—”

The video feed suddenly cut to a static
emergency screen, with the word ALERT in bold letters next to the
logo of the patrician’s office. James’s parents jumped a little at
the interruption, as did Kyla. An alarm tone sounded before the
audio cut to a generic male voice program.

“
This is not a test.
Repeat, this is not a test. An emergency curfew has been declared
throughout the Colony, and all citizens are required to stay in
their homes until further notice. Failure to comply will result in
detention and arrest. Repeat, an emergency curfew has
been…”

James’s mother cycled through the channels,
but all of them were broadcasting the same emergency message from
the patrician’s office. There was nowhere to go for news on the
unfolding situation except the message board forums, which were no
doubt exploding right about then.

“
I’ve seen enough,” said
James’s father. He jabbed his index finger on the table, and the
wallscreen shut off at once.

For several moments, none of them said
anything. The silence was so tense, it was almost as unpleasant as
the newscast. James rose to his feet, mostly to clear his mind. If
there ever was a time to think, now was it.

What was the patrician doing, cutting off
the civilian broadcasts like that? The curfew was good—it would
prevent any violence in the short term, giving the citizens a
chance to recover from the chaos—but silencing the public media was
crossing a major line. With a military-enforced curfew and seizure
of all the Colony’s broadcast channels, it was as if he was setting
himself up as a dictator. Even if their democracy survived this
crisis, the people would not forget what he’d done.

At that moment, the lights flickered and
shut off. Kyla screamed, and James drew his pistol. Fortunately,
the emergency auxiliaries cut in a few moments later, but their
meager light did little to make them feel any safer.

“
Stay calm,” James said.
“It’s just a power shortage. We’re in deep space, so the solar
collectors aren’t working at capacity.”

“
Will we survive?” his
mother ask.

“
Of course,” he said,
hoping that his confidence would reassure them. “We just have to
stay calm and stay inside, just like the warning says.”

I won’t let anything happen to you.

“
God help us,” his father
said under his breath. James couldn’t help but agree.

* * * * *

Sara palmed open the door to her father’s
office. She found him hunched over his computer terminal, a
deep-set frown embedded in his face. He wordlessly motioned for her
to come in and take a seat.

She glanced around at the familiar
furnishings. An authentic wooden bookshelf housed a number of
synth-paper books, all of them antiques, while wall-screens cycled
through spectacular images of deep space. An ornate Aurigan rug
covered the gray floor tiles, giving the place an air of
self-assurance that the rest of the Colony had since lost. The
chairs in the room were made of soft brown leather, but she sat on
the edge of hers, not allowing herself to get too comfortable.