After Earth (12 page)

“If we try to navigate out, the pull of our own graviton
wake could set the thing off,” Cypher said. “Just hold course … and let’s hope I’m wrong.”

The storm seemed to be holding its
own
course as the men kept their eyes on the cockpit readouts. Lewis, doing his best to keep everything stable, asked Cypher with forced casualness, “Just out of interest, sir … how often are you wrong?”

Without so much as cracking a smile, Cypher replied, “My wife would give an interesting answer to that question.”

A long, excruciating silence followed. Only the digital chirping of the computers in the cockpit could be heard. Beyond the forward observation port there was only a star-pricked expanse of space.

Studying his instrumentation closely, the navigator called out, “Graviton count’s decreasing. Eight hundred parts per million … Six hundred and fifty …”

Upon hearing that, the pilot exhaled in relief. With the graviton count diminishing, whatever danger they might have been in was sliding away. “Well, sir,” he began to say, “there’s a first time for every—”

That was when the asteroids, which hadn’t even been factored into the calculations until that split second, made their presence known.

It was like being witness to a star going supernova. One instant the space in front of them was empty, and the next instant a massive wave of asteroid fragments was expanding in their direction. The icy chunks of rock were coming in so fast that there was no time for Lewis or Bellman to react. All they were able to do was cry out in shock as the asteroid field engulfed them, hitting them like a freight train. The ship shook violently as the rock storm pounded them, creating the kind of turbulence that moments before would have seemed unimaginable.

Cypher grabbed an overhead handhold to stay on his feet as Lewis wrestled with the control yoke.
“Turn into it! Match bearing!”
Cypher shouted, and the pilot did his best to obey.

But it was doing no good. The cockpit instruments went completely haywire, multiple alarms sounding as the ship tilted wildly out of control. Sizable asteroids continued to pummel the ship. The cockpit computer snapped on and announced,
“Caution, critical hull damage. Caution, main power failure.”
It spoke in a simple, flat, even mildly pleasant monotone, as if the total catastrophe it was announcing were really nothing to get all that worked up about.

The tail of the ship suddenly was struck by a violent force. It swung the entire vessel around and continued to spin it several times. Lewis managed to slow the whirl eventually, but then he called out, “She’s a dead stick! Engines one and two are off-line! We’re losing her!”

At no time during the entire struggle did Cypher so much as blink. Instead he remained calm, certain, stern. If the pilot and navigator had ever wondered why Cypher was the Prime Commander, that answered the question. He stepped forward, placed a hand on the pilot’s shoulder, and said, “Can you travel us out of here?”

Lewis turned his frightened gaze to Cypher. “Where?”

“The anchorage on Lycia. It’s the closest.”

On hearing that suggestion, the navigator reacted so negatively that it sounded as if his head was about to explode.
“Negative, sir! We cannot wormhole travel in the middle of this!”

Cypher knew that technically speaking, the navigator was absolutely correct. Generating a miniature wormhole was a tricky enough endeavor under even the best of circumstances, and these were certainly not the best. But he saw no other option and suspected that if he’d taken the time to push Bellman on the topic, Bellman wouldn’t have seen any other way out as well. He simply ordered, “Do it,” just as another mammoth asteroid slammed into them, hitting them square.

That was all the incentive Bellman required. Hurriedly he started entering the coordinates online.

For a heartbeat, Cypher was taken out of the current
situation. He imagined his son, wearing the lifesuit by now, strapped securely into his seat, terrified over what was happening. Cypher had no idea why Kitai had been screwing around with an Ursa, nor did he care. All he cared about was that his son was very likely horrified by what was going on and he couldn’t be there to try to talk him down. And there was nothing he could do about it right now.

He could only watch with an escalating sense of dread as the navigator worked with barely functioning equipment to accomplish what he’d been ordered to do. After what seemed an eternity, he called above the ruckus, “Coordinates for anchorage at Lycia locked in, but no confirmation signal, sir.”

Cypher saw only one option. “Travel us now.”

“Sir, without confirmation …”

He didn’t want to hear it. “That’s an order!” he shouted as he pulled out the extra jump seat from a compartment in the floor. He buckled the double strap harness over his shoulder as the pilot threw open the protective cover of a control lever. Lewis placed both hands on it as the ship listed toward another asteroid.

“We’re hot!” Bellman shouted.
“Go, go!”

There was yet another violent strike by an asteroid as Lewis slammed the emergency lever forward. Dark space began to grow outside as the wormhole generation began. Some asteroids that had been heading toward the ship were abruptly pulled away into the darkness, yanked clear of the vessel as the dark of space continued to widen all around it.

Then the wormhole snapped fully into existence, and the ship was slammed forward. Cypher had just managed to finish fastening his straps when he suddenly was shoved backward into his chair. He saw the pilot and navigator similarly being slapped around by the forces of space and time that converged on the vessel simultaneously.

Cypher glanced at the chronometer on his wrist. It had stopped dead. Then, for a few moments, it ran backward
before it abruptly hammered forward again at five times the speed. Then they were in complete and utter blackness. It was as if all the light around them were being dragged forcibly into the wormhole along with them.

Kitai
, was the only thing that went through Cypher’s head at that moment.
Kitai, Kitai—

And then they were out of it, just like that.

One moment they had been surrounded by the blackest and most featureless space that Cypher had ever seen, and then they were out of it.

But they were hardly out of trouble.

Cypher saw pieces of the ship hurtling past them in different directions. They had sustained all sorts of damage, and he hadn’t the faintest idea if they were going to survive long enough to reach Lycia. Hell, for all he knew, they weren’t anywhere near Lycia.

The pilot was apparently ahead of him. He struggled with the controls while the navigator scanned readouts that were continuing to fluctuate. “Can’t get a star fix!” he shouted. “We are
way
off the grid.”

“I still got nothing here,” the pilot agreed. He struggled with the stick but could not get a proper response from the ship’s guidance systems.

“Caution, life support failure,”
offered the cockpit computer with the same apparent indifference it had displayed before.

The navigator checked the specifics of what the computer was talking about. “Cabin pressure dropping,” he agreed moments later. “Heavy damage to outer hull. Breach possible in middle cabin!”

The pilot had no interest in hearing about the bad shape the ship was in. He already knew that. What he needed to know now was what to do about it. “Find me something I can land on!”

Quickly the navigator combed immediate space, hoping against hope that there was something close enough to put down on. Seconds later, he managed to pull up a blue-green world on the holographic imager.

“I got something! Bearing three-four-zero by nine-five, range eighty-six thousand. Looks like a C class—nitrogen, oxygen, argon. Can’t get a volumetric—”

At that moment, a wholly unknown voice recording sounded inside the cockpit. Apparently they had managed to trip some manner of space buoy that had been left there to issue an advisory against any vessels that were even considering landing on the blue-green world.

The advisory sounded throughout the cabin:
“Warning. This planet has been declared unfit for human habitation. Placed under class 1 quarantine by the Interplanetary Authority. Under penalty of law, do not attempt to land.”

The ship had turned just enough in its approach that Cypher was able to make out the world’s details for the first time. The advisory buoy continued its warning; it obviously had been designed to keep doing so until the ship had turned around or was so far gone that any caution was hopeless. Cypher’s eyes widened as more details of their likely target presented themselves. For a moment he thought he recognized it, but then he dismissed the notion as crazy.

Then he looked again and realized that it wasn’t only not crazy, it was in fact damned likely.

“It’s not possible …” he whispered.

“Repeat, do not attempt to land,”
the computer voice sounded.

“Shut up!” the navigator shouted as he, too, recognized where they were heading. Bellman then turned to Lewis and Cypher. “The computer might have defaulted back to a known demarcation point …”

At that moment Cypher didn’t give a damn why it had happened. All he knew was that it had to
un
happen immediately. “Can you travel us again?”

“Negative, sir!” Lewis shouted as the ship bucked furiously all around him. “We either land there or we break apart out here.”

There was absolutely no choice being provided them. His voice even, Cypher said, “Set her down,” even as he
unbuckled his jump seat and moved back toward the main cabin.

From behind him, the pilot was calling out, “Mayday, mayday, this is Hesper-Two-Niner-Niner heavy in distress! We took sustained damage from an asteroid storm and are going down with bingo power! Request immediate rescue, repeat, request immediate rescue!”

The radio provided nothing but static in response.

The main cabin was shaking so violently that Kitai was convinced the entire ship was going to break apart around him. He didn’t know which was more terrifying: the sensation that the ship was about to blow apart or the fact that his father was nowhere around.

Part of him wanted to condemn his father for being somewhere other than next to his son, but he quickly dismissed any such notion. If the ship was in danger of falling apart, there was only one place his dad was going to be, needed to be: in the heart of it, trying to prevent it from happening.

Kitai had put the lifesuit on as he’d been instructed and also had donned an oxygen mask handed to him by a Ranger passing by. But none of that made any difference. It was obvious that the ship was badly injured and spiraling downward toward … what?

He twisted in his chair to get a glimpse out the observation port and perhaps see what they were heading for, but things were moving too quickly. He saw pieces of debris flying off the ship, bounding away into the unlit darkness, and felt a new swell of terror. As near as he could determine, they were heading toward nothing. They were just a spiraling cloud of debris with only complete destruction awaiting them.

Kitai saw that Rangers were endeavoring to reinforce the bulkhead area, whose warning lights were flashing
above them. They passed the equipment back and forth effectively and moved with great precision.

I’m not doing any good sitting here. Chances are, I won’t do any good on my feet, either. But at least I’ll feel as if I’m contributing
.

He began to unbuckle the straps that restrained him, and that was when he saw Cypher heading toward him, lurching violently from side to side as he went. Cypher paused only to take a mask a Ranger shoved at him so that he could be as safe as Kitai was. Kitai, however, already had unbuckled his strap and was halfway out of his seat.

Cypher didn’t hesitate; he slammed Kitai back down into the seat. Kitai let out a startled grunt into his oxygen mask but quickly recovered himself. His father was back. That was all that mattered.

Suddenly there was a noise that sounded like a thousand bones breaking at once. The sound was so catastrophic that it drowned out all other noises.
What is that?
Kitai wondered.

Cypher froze for a long moment, looking around to try to see whence the noise had originated. Then he shook it off and refocused his attention on Kitai. He helped Kitai relock his belt and harness and pull them in tightly. Once he was satisfied that Kitai wasn’t going to be going anywhere anytime soon, Cypher placed his own oxygen mask on his face.

Then Cypher and Kitai’s eyes locked, and Cypher very slowly, very carefully, worked on restoring his son to a clear frame of mind. His face only inches away from Kitai, Cypher began breathing very steadily and very slowly. To try to get Kitai’s breathing even, he raised and then lowered his hand with simple, quiet steadiness. Kitai copied him in the breathing manner, and felt the exercise was starting to calm him. Another five or ten seconds and Kitai was positive that everything was going to be just fine.

Everything seemed to happen all at once.

One moment Cypher was right there in front of Kitai,
urging him to breathe steadily, and the next moment he was gone. Just
gone
. Cypher was lifted up off his feet and propelled down the hallway and slammed into the far corner of the main cabin like a rag doll.

Kitai, his mouth covered by his mask, screamed as the winds howled around Cypher, banging him around mercilessly against the end of the corridor. Kitai realized for a moment, to his shock, that his father was actually holding on to something embedded in a wall, some extended rod, as the wind smashed against him. Then, a second later, it tore Cypher away from his grip and sent him hurtling out of Kitai’s sight.

Kitai was tempted to unbuckle and go after him, but he realized that he would be a goner if he did. Despite the fact that it went against his instinct, Kitai stayed right where he was, continuing to scream for his father even as the ship shuddered from one end to the other.

He heard something tearing away and realized that the ship had snapped in half.
In half
. The entire cargo section had broken off and fallen away from the vessel.