Keystones: Tau Prime (15 page)

Pushing himself away from the alien attacker, Deklan landed back on the floor and saw the hooks sink further into
Serenity
’s hull, ripping away the walls separating him from space.

“Vent the shuttle bay!” he screamed into the com system.

New hooks replaced the ones that had first attacked. They speared past him and tore away the section leading to Jamie and Jonny. Deklan was knocked over by the blast of air that came from the shuttle bay and fell out of
Serenity
into open space. Moments later Jonny and Jamie also were propelled into the vacuum.

The alien ship completely filled the wormhole, the part visible past the curve being bigger than
Serenity
. The attacking warship tore at her like a vulture feasting on a carcass.

“Jamie!” screamed Deklan.

She had one arm wrapped around Jonny as they hurtled toward the pulsing purple wall. Bursts of air slowed their momentum, and Jamie slowly powered back in Deklan’s general direction.

The hooked tentacles then tore into
Serenity
’s starboard engine. A gout of green and yellow light erupted from the opening before the entire compartment blew open. Cracks like seismic faults opened on
Serenity
’s aft section before the engine room and shuttle bay separated from the ship.

The two halves of the ruptured craft flew in opposite directions. As the cockpit hurtled away, Calm erupted out of the ship, one hand thrust forward and jets of air streaming behind him. “I have a plan,” he managed to say. His voice wasn’t tinged with fear, terror, or doubt. Instead there was a hint of deep pleasure. In that moment Deklan knew that Calm was enjoying the chaos. “Everyone cluster.”

Jamie had been moving toward Deklan but then disappeared. Deklan craned his head in every direction before seeing her again. Now she and Jonny were behind him on a direct collision course with the wall.

“Jamie, teleport again! Come to me!” His throat was raw from his shouts.

Jamie vanished again, and something hit Deklan from behind. An arm wrapped around him as a body swung by. Deklan turned and saw her face. There was no hint of missing features, no hint of Slate.

Jonny hung from one of the creature’s hands, a limp mass. With her other hand locked onto Deklan’s arm, they formed a daisy chain in space. Her eyes looked past him and grew wider than they already were.

Just then Calm shot past and stopped, killing his momentum without using his thrusters. “No, back!” It wasn’t the voice of Deklan’s captain; it wasn’t the voice of a man about to die. The voice conveyed power and authority. It demanded obedience.

The plunging arm came to within meters of Calm and stopped. The green lights died; the appendage shriveled.

“We have only one option, only one chance,” said Calm. He pirouetted and turned his back on the alien ship. Calm wrapped his arms around the trio of Deklan, Jamie, and Jonny. “It’s time,” he declared. As a group they shot into the wormhole’s wall.

Debris that hit the wormhole’s walls had always flared purple and burned away in the rippling surface. When Deklan, Calm, Jamie, and Jonny came to the wall, it bowed away from them in a perfect half-sphere of raging light. An arm crashed after them and faded, losing its glow. As the four pressed more deeply into the wall, the purple energy crept around them. Then the wormhole’s interior suddenly vanished, leaving them enclosed in a wall of shifting indigo.

Yellow light flared on all of their EVA suits, bathing them like a living soul. To Deklan it looked as though they were in the center of a ball of fire. He’d expected fear, but with their escape from the aliens the adrenaline had left his body and taken with it his temporary strength.

As the yellow light faded, they found themselves hovering in the hallway of a Victorian mansion. A young man stood within arm’s length of Calm, his mouth open and eyebrows raised. His clothing didn’t match the surroundings. Instead of the top hat and cane that one would expect, he wore utilitarian grey garments that had seen better days. “Calm?” said the young man. “What are you doing here?”

Deklan tapped his hand against the side of his helmet in an effort to clear his head, but the scene didn’t change.

“Cay?” replied Calm. Deklan had never heard him sound so surprised.

“How did you get here? How did you find me?” The boy’s questions were insistent. His hand lashed out to wrap around Calm’s. “You’re real. You’re here. But how?” The words were directed less at Calm and more at himself.

“Cay, where are we?”

“I . . . I don’t know. This is where I go when I sleep.”

“We just crashed through the side of a wormhole and. . . .”

Purple light sprang up around them, jagged dark lightning that outlined Calm, Deklan, Jamie, and Jonny as well as the sphere of protection into which Calm had brought them. Chaos replaced the image of the Victorian mansion. Cay faded away along with the mansion, looking translucent like a ghost. His mouth worked, but no sounds came as he vanished.

Again they were surrounded by a storm of raging purple energy that heaved and bulged like plastic under strain. Peaks of black mixed with stars became visible. The yellow light concentrated on the weak patches of black, eating away at them like insects enlarging a hole.

Suddenly the purple walls surrounding them flickered, and the windows of light merged as the four adventurers passed into normal space dotted with stars. There was a brief but intense flash that held all of the fury of the wormhole’s destructive walls. Then they floated in empty space alone, save for the arm that had come with them.

Calm chuckled over the com system. “What do you know? It worked.” He sounded cheerful for a man stranded in space with no hope of rescue.

“It worked?” said Deklan, almost too weary to fight over the fact that Calm had gambled their lives. “Why didn’t you just board the ship and take it over? No one could have stopped you. Now we’re going to die.”

Jamie looked around slowly, oblivious to their conversation. Deklan could only assume that her com system was broken. Jonny’s face retained its waxen sheen, but he was breathing.

Calm’s voice lost its mirth and turned serious. “What if you’re wrong? What if I couldn’t have? Then what? Aliens would attack the Terra Rings using what they’d learned from us.”

Deklan didn’t deny Calm’s reasoning but couldn’t help resenting where it left them. “So what now?” he said. “We just drift and die?”

The mirth was back. “No.” Calm held up his hand. “We use this.” He had an emergency distress beacon that was small enough to fit on his belt unnoticed.

“Is that really going to help?” replied an unimpressed Deklan. Space was huge, and they had no idea where they were. They could drift for a thousand years with that beacon sending signals and still never be found.

Not wanting to focus on how dire their situation was, Deklan waved his hand near Jamie’s face to get her attention. She just smiled at him. With a combination of exaggerated lip movements and hand gestures, he asked whether she was okay.

Her smile broadened, and she winked at him. Then her eyes closed. Her eyelids looked blue, and she was still.

Deklan grabbed her and shook her. Her head lolled inside her helmet. Deklan realized that she couldn’t breathe, but there wasn’t anything to do except cradle her in his arms and crush her to his chest.

The reality of their plight crashed down on him: they were all going to run out of air, and no one was ever going to find them. Somehow, though, it didn’t matter because they’d done their best. Deklan yawned. He felt warm and comfortable and sleepy.

“Mr. Tobin, we’re going to be okay.”

The words came from a great distance away. Deklan closed his eyes but snapped them back open. It was very bright, and there were no sounds. He tried to use the com system in his EVA suit, but his mouth was blocked. Everything was blurry and wet. He was warm and naked. Deklan fluttered his eyelids and tried to concentrate. He’d been in space, and now he was here. There was an opaque slurry in his eyes. He could see just enough to be confused. Clarity slowly returned: he was in a rejuvenation tank, though he had no idea how he’d gotten there. Outside, through the foggy haze, he could see moving figures. Deklan rapped the glass with his knuckles. The motion was slow and impeded by the liquid’s thickness, but he thought that there was a response.

When the top of the tank opened, the bars connected to the strap around his waist lifted him out. The strap lowered him down on his right foot, and he waited for contact with his left before realizing that the foot wasn’t there. He’d lost it on
Serenity
, and it hadn’t grown back. Removing the mask from his face, he pulled the long tube from his throat. It was like gagging on a snake, not something you ever got used to. His first mouthful of air was bitter and metallic, like sucking on a piece of cutlery. He worked his tongue over his teeth and the roof of his mouth to rid himself of the sensation, then wiped the muck from his eyes and blinked a few times to clear his vision.

There was one man in the room, who had looked like several from inside the glass tank. His clothes were odd and impractical, not exactly robes but flowing red garments that didn’t look designed for ease of use in space. It was the same type of clothing that
The Burningsworth
’s captain had been wearing. It covered the unfamiliar man from head to foot and obscured everything except his face and arms. It dawned on Deklan that he didn’t know whether he was still in space, but that wasn’t his most pressing question.

“Who are you, and where are my crewmates?” He wanted to speak with authority; instead, his voice was a rasping croak.

The man knelt down by Deklan and said, “I’m Dr. Almsworth. Your crewmates are fine. You and Dr. Beal were suffering from severe hypoxia when we found you.” His odd accent was similar to that of Captain Cranston of
The Burningsworth
.

“What’s hypoxia, and is Jamie okay?”

“Hypoxia is brought on by a lack of oxygen,” the doctor began in a clinical voice. “You and Dr. Beal have made rare full recoveries. Your suits were malfunctioning. We think that the cold shielded your brains.” The doctor didn’t look up as he fitted a primitive-looking stump to the end of Deklan’s leg. “You’ll need to learn how to walk with this.”

Deklan didn’t like practitioners who made you feel like a cog in a machine, but he remained polite. “Thank you. How are the rest of the crew?”

“Resting. You’ll have to earn your keep soon, though. We’ve almost reached Tau Prime.”

Deklan’s did not want to go to Tau Prime. It was a human colony that had been deployed in a Lagrange point between Pluto and one of its moons, Charon. It was somewhat infamous. After its founding by extreme isolationists, there had been an uprising or revolution eighty-two years ago, and communication between Tau Prime and all other human settlements had ceased. It had become a black hole of speculation.

The mention of Tau Prime explained Almsworth’s outlandish clothing. The red attire was strange, even for someone from an outer colony. Deklan thus was nervous about his next question. “Can I see them before we get there?” he asked.

Muscles tightened around Dr. Almsworth’s eyes, and his right bicep flexed. “Yes,” he answered tersely. His voice was less welcoming than when he’d made Deklan feel like a clinical specimen.

“Soon?” inquired Deklan.

Almsworth’s nose twitched as though there were something unpleasant in the room. He grabbed Deklan’s damaged uniform from
Serenity
and threw it to him. “Follow me,” Almsworth said, opening the door to the ship’s hallway without giving Deklan a chance to dress. Deklan hurried to don his clothes, tangling the prosthesis in his pants. Not wanting to further antagonize the irritable doctor, Deklan stumbled to the door.

There he looked at the handle, which was anachronistic for a spacecraft. You had to turn it rather than let a sensor open the door for you. Hardware like that was normal on Earth, but Deklan had understood that it was superseded everywhere else.

The hallway was a vivid blue that clashed with Almsworth’s red garments. The colors and fabric conspired to make the hallway feel dated, like a museum. It had been less obvious when Deklan was recovering from the rejuvenation tank, but the ship looked
old
. None of the fittings were new; the lights came from yellowed panels; the fabric was stained and worn.

Almsworth was standing a dozen meters down the hallway at a doorway and glaring at him to catch up. Deklan was amazed that a doctor would be so hostile to a patient. “Hurry up,” said Almsworth curtly.

Deklan walked as best he could. The prosthesis wasn’t the right length, and his balance was off. He hoped that the foot would grow back soon.

Almsworth again was disdainful. “You can spend the rest of your time in here,” he announced. “Don’t try to leave. You’ll be fed once we get to Tau Prime.”

That also was odd. You weren’t supposed to be hungry after being in a rejuvenation tank.

Deklan entered the spartan room, which was stripped of everything except a table, three chairs, and four bunks, in two of which Calm and Jonny were sleeping. Calm just lay there, but Jamie sprang up from the table where she had been reading a paper book when he came in. Her smile was bright and open, much more inviting than the looks he’d received in the hours leading up to the attack.

Deklan returned her smile before turning to thank Almsworth, but the doctor was already walking down the hallway. Deklan shrugged it off and faced forward just in time to be lifted off the ground in a bear hug by Jamie. “You’re okay!” she effused.

His ribs creaked under her encircling arms. “Yes,” he choked out in a strained voice, “and you are too.” Her solid grip made it hard to inhale. “Jamie, I can’t breathe.” The last words came out as a gasp.

Jamie loosened her grip and let go. “Sorry,” she said, looking suddenly bashful.

“I was worried when you fell asleep,” replied Deklan. “Very worried, but I wasn’t far behind you.”

“Calm said that we were both out for over an hour before they found us.”