Excelsior (42 page)

Now, hours later, Caty sat on a couch in the police captain’s office, waiting for him to take her home so she could go pack her things. Dorian was exhausted from crying and had settled for absently chewing on a soother the police captain had found for him. His bright baby eyes were wide and staring.

Caty bounced him on her knee and rubbed his back. “We’re going to be okay, Dorian.”

He made a babbling sound that sounded agreeable to her. She smiled and pulled him close for a hug. “Yes, there’s nothing to worry about anymore. We’re going far away.”

Dorian sounded like he wanted to cry again, but she shushed him and patted his back. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

She really believed that. She’d read the brochures. Warm, tropical jungles. Sparkling blue oceans, reams and reams of land to settle… nothing dangerous and nothing harmful, just one big, natural paradise. Best of all, they’d be leaving Earth and all of its problems far behind, including and especially David.

He’d eluded police custody so far, but it didn’t matter. Even if they didn’t catch him for years, he would never be able to follow her and Dorian to Wonderland. They would be safe. Being forced to make it on her own still scared her, but Dorian was older now, and the Alliance had promised ample benefits for colonists on Wonderland.

Dorian started fussing again and she began bouncing him on her knee once more.

“Shhh. It’s okay. We’re okay. We’re going to be okay,” she amended, this time more to reassure herself than Dorian.

*

“Davorian, set course and cruising speed. Forward thrust three Gs,” Alexander ordered.

“Aye-aye, setting course.”

Alexander felt himself growing progressively heavier until he weighed almost six hundred pounds. It became hard to speak, hard to breathe, hard to move, but his thoughts remained free to interact with his control console and to think about recent developments.

The Confederate fleet had preceded them into the wormhole and they were now more than a light second apart. The Alliance was determined to catch up and hold to that distance rather than let them get any further ahead. Alliance colonists would end up trailing behind them by nearly a week, but that was better for their safety anyway.

The part that bothered Alexander was why the Alliance fleet wasn’t hanging back, too. The fact that they insisted on keeping no more than 300,000 klicks between them and the enemy told him that there was still a chance that the two fleets might clash. One light second was well out of effective laser range, but it was still well within missile range, and it wouldn’t take much time for Alliance missiles to catch up with the Confederate fleet. That made him wonder whether the Alliance was planning a sneak attack. The entire fleet was on a yellow alert, but their missiles were all locked and loaded, with firing solutions and targets all already set. No doubt the Confederacy had taken similar precautions, but so far everyone was sticking to the terms that Carter had negotiated.

For now.

Alexander gritted his teeth through what seemed like hours of high-G exposure. His lungs and muscles began to ache, and his heart labored with the strain. It felt like he had an elephant sitting on his chest.

Soon they passed through the mouth of the Looking Glass and Alexander watched the starfield curve up and warp around them like the inside of a fish bowl. Suddenly the elephant got up, and Alexander could breathe again.

“Range and cruising speed attained,” Davorian announced.

“Finally…” Carter muttered.

Alexander rolled his shoulders, feeling suddenly light as a feather. “Stay sharp everyone.” He turned his attention from the main holo display to the tactical map hovering between his and Carter’s control stations. Space was represented as a three dimensional grid with a wireframe model of the wormhole around them, showing how space curved into a funnel shape. Racing down the center of the funnel was a cluster of red dots—almost thirty confederate warships, and easily twice as many colony ships—followed by a smaller cluster of friendly green dots. Being a destroyer-class, the Lincoln was best suited to intercepting missiles and enemy drones, so it was leading the charge down the gullet of the wormhole with a group of six other destroyers.

This time literally hours did pass with no detectable change between the two fleets. Both sides seemed content with the standoff. Alexander tried to cover a yawn, but his hand hit glass and he remembered he was wearing a helmet. He shook his head and blinked the glaze from his eyes. He needed to keep his head in the game.

“Captain, I’m detecting a change in the enemy fleet. They’re accelerating, sir. Five Gs. Wait… ten, no twelve.”

“Confirm that, Vasquez. Take your time.”

“Confirmed,” she said a moment later. “They’re holding steady at twelve G.”

“They must’ve hit the G-tanks already. Someone’s in a hurry.”

“Captain, I have orders coming in from Admiral Wilson,” Hayes reported from the comms. “We’re to set the autopilot to match speed and heading with the Confederate fleet and configure the auto-fire controls to launch our missiles in the event that sensors detect incoming weapons fire from the enemy fleet.”

“Acknowledged—Cardinal, Davorian, set the autos. Everyone else lock your stations and stand by. Hayes, alert the rest of the crew. Wonderland, here we come. Again.”

Silence answered that quip. A few crew members groaned, others grumbled. Alexander knew just how they felt. This wasn’t exactly the homecoming they’d expected.

Over the next few minutes all stations reported ready and Alexander gave the order for them to leave the bridge and head down to the G-tanks.

This time as Alexander stripped and placed his pressure suit and clothes in the locker beside his G-tank, he didn’t take pains to avoid looking at McAdams, he admired her openly, and she regarded him back with a sly smile. Doctor Crespin came and configured McAdams’ tank. It swished open, and Alexander watched her turn and give him a parting salute before crossing the threshold. On the other side of him, he heard Seth Ryder make a lewd comment about the look McAdams had given him. Alexander ignored it, and Crespin came by to configure his tank. A moment later it swished open, too, and in he went.

He hooked himself up to life support in a fraction of the time it usually took. As the water rose past his lips and his liquid ventilator whirred to life, Alexander’s mind drifted away on a lullaby of drugs into the random nonsense of dreams.

He dreamed about him and McAdams back on Wonderland, but this time as colonists of the new world. Somehow, they already had a baby together, a girl. In his dream she was already walking and talking, playing outside in a fenced garden, teasing the plants to life. Next door Alexander saw a familiar face peer over the fence.

It was Catalina.

“You left me,” she said, her blue eyes sad and accusing.

He shook his head, his mouth agape. What was she doing there? “You moved on,” he explained.

“You told me to move on.” Catalina’s gaze slid away, and Alexander followed it to where McAdams was busy trying to make peace between their daughter and an angry red-leafed sapling. “You told me to move on so you could be with her,” Catalina said.

Alexander shook his head, feeling sick to his stomach. “No, that’s not true.”

“Yes, it is.” Catalina turned away, disappearing from sight.

An angry klaxon burst through the air and the sky flashed with a strange crimson light. Alexander’s head snapped up, and he saw missiles streaking through the sky, thousands of fighters buzzing and roaring, trying to intercept. The war had followed them to Wonderland.

“No!” he screamed, his gaze darting to McAdams and their baby girl once more. They were still playing with the plants, oblivious to the danger all around them. A flaming piece of debris fell screaming from the sky and engulfed them both in an angry flare of light.

Alexander’s eyes snapped open and the klaxons sounded suddenly louder and clearer than they had in his dream. Red lights flashed, shimmering off the wet, glistening sides of his G-tank. He felt his throat burning with the invading pressure of the tracheal tube. Doctor Crespin had checked him out after the last time and said it was a mild irritation—nothing to worry about.

Alexander fought through mental sludge to understand what was happening. The color-coded lights made a faster connection in his brain than the more ambiguous klaxons—someone sounded general quarters.

An electric jolt of adrenaline spurred him to action and he hurried to disconnect himself from life support.

Something had gone badly wrong.

 

Chapter 40

Catalina sat strapped into an acceleration couch on the floor of a large passenger cabin with row upon row of seats, though she wasn’t sure they could be called seats when everyone was lying down on the deck.

She lifted her head and studied the orderly row of shiny white helmets at her feet. It was unnerving to see so many people in the cabin with her, yet hear none of the noise. Their helmets were near-perfect insulators, making the cabin so quiet that Catalina could actually hear her heart beating.

Looking left, she saw baby Dorian, wearing a miniature version of the colonists’ standard-issue white pressure suits. He was strapped into a baby seat that looked a lot like a front-facing car seat to her. Catalina studied his face through the glass visor of his helmet. He was blowing spit bubbles as he stared up at the live holo recording from the ship’s bow cameras projected on the ceiling above them.

Looking away, she joined her son in admiring the view. She couldn’t blame him for drooling.

Earth appeared directly above them, curving away with vast, sparkling blue oceans and thick blankets of cloud. She couldn’t see even a single dot of land, just endless reams of ocean. Catalina imagined this was what Wonderland must look like—an earth-type planet with only one major landmass and one all-encompassing ocean.

It was exciting to finally be here. She’d spent the past week training at NAS Key West, where she’d learned how to negotiate a ship in zero-G using either handrails or micro maneuvering jets. They’d also taught her how to don a pressure suit and control the basic functions of both her suit and Dorian’s by giving mental commands. Then she’d learned how to use an acceleration couch and a G-tank.

But after barely a cursory introduction to all of that, she’d been whisked away to the Alliance’s new Anchor Station off the shore of Curacao and filed into the next available climber car headed for orbit. Then she and Dorian had spent the next two days in that climber car, riding up to Freedom Station at the top end of the elevator, followed by a further six hours waiting aboard the station to board their colony ship.

Theirs was the last ship to join a fleet of more than fifty waiting in geosynchronous orbit over Earth. She could see at least a dozen matching colony ships in the distance, all of them gleaming specks of silver against the black of space. From this distance they seemed tiny, but she knew better. She’d seen hers up close from Freedom Station’s viewports. The ships were massive, five hundred meter-long spears with detachable shuttles clinging to them like barnacles.

Catalina was amazed by how much the Alliance had managed to do in such a short time. The first space elevator had taken over a decade to build, but this one had gone up in a year. Granted they’d fished the old elevator ribbon out of the ocean, and Freedom Station was actually a decommissioned Alliance battleship rather than a brand-new station, but one year was not a lot of time to do anything, let alone carry a 100,000 kilometer-long elevator ribbon back into space, section by section. Then there was the matter of mass-producing spaceship components and sending them up the elevator to assemble the colony fleet.

No wonder there hadn’t been enough government aid for the war refugees.

Dorian began making noises like he was about to start crying. She had his comms set to the same channel as hers so she could use them like a baby monitor. “Num num!” he said, smacking his lips.

He was hungry. She didn’t have to wonder why. They hadn’t eaten or drunk real food for days. Instead, they were fed and hydrated with an intravenous nutrient solution, but that didn’t immediately stop their stomachs from feeling achingly empty and burning with hunger. Mission trainers had warned them that first-time space travelers would go through some initial discomfort during the switch from solid to liquid food. Personally, Caty found the self-inserting relief tubes that snaked up from their seats to be much more uncomfortable than the IV, but Dorian was probably pleased with his perpetually dry diaper.