The Void (34 page)

“So you've come again. One last chance. One last try to stop me. Your last gambit. Right? After all, we've killed the captain. We've killed Jack. And now Cyrus. So I guess all you've got left is me.”

“It's not that,” he said, circling Aidan slowly, staring at him all the while. “It's not that at all. I know what you're going to do. You're going to destroy the ship, aren't you? But before you do, I want you to consider what I've told you.”

“If this is all in my head, if this ship's not real, then what difference does it make to you?”

“Because,” he said, “I am you. I'm all the sanity you've got left. If you blow up this ship, it will mean you turned your back on me. It means you will have decided that I’m the enemy. You will have chosen the irrational. You will have picked a fantasy over reality.

“There's no coming back from that, Aidan. If by some miracle they do find you—if they do find us—out here in the nothing, it won't make any difference. You'll never wake up, not really. You'll just keep on living this fantasy. Until real life ends and this dream goes with it. Think about that. Think about the dreams. How real they were. So real you couldn't tell the difference. And the only way you knew they were an illusion is because you knew it going in. This seems real to you, too? Doesn't it? So what?”

“I'm done with your lies,” Aidan said. “I'm done with all of this.”

“Lies? Has everything I told you been a lie? Can you say that for sure? What about the
Vespa
, Aidan? You know I spoke the truth about that, even when you lied to yourself. You know what really happened on that ship. You destroyed it. Out of fear and uncertainty, you killed the other men. Your shipmates, your captain, your friends. And now, you are faced with a choice.

“You can embrace that same fear, that same uncertainty and you can destroy this ship. Or, you can do what you failed to do before. You can be brave. You can do your duty. Think how close you are. The engine's repaired. The warp drive's intact. All you have to do is move the ship away from the black hole. And then you can take the
Chronos
and the
Singularity
home. I promise you, the world won't end. Not for you especially. For you, it will be a whole new beginning.”

Aidan glanced down at the control panel, at the schematic of the warp bubble that covered two ships. The
Singularity
and the
Chronos
, connected by the thin cables of the grappling hooks. He looked up at the other Aidan, the one who appeared so much younger than he. The one from before he made his fateful choice, his most terrible decision. The weakest moment of his life. He saw Lieutenant Felix in his mind's eye.

“A time will come where you will be called upon,” he had said. “In your hands will rest the fate of many. Perhaps then you can redeem your lost soul.”

That time was now, he thought. This time, he would be strong.

“So,” he said, “if I destroy the ship, I'll go crazy. Is that right?”

“You're already crazy,” said the other, “but this is your opportunity to get it all back.”

“Well, then I guess I better not destroy the ship, huh?”

Relief passed over the other's face. “No, Aidan. No you shouldn't. You've made the right decision.”

Aidan grinned. “I know.”

It happened so fast that Aidan's doppelgänger, the shadow that wore his face, didn't even realize it till it was too late. Then the mask slipped; he lost his composure, howling “No!” in a voice that was not Aidan's.

Aidan reached down and, with a flick of his finger across the computer screen, set the warp drive for maximum. Another half second and Aidan had changed the destination as well, adjusted it from the minuscule distance he had intended to travel—just enough to fry the
Chronos's
circuits and cause a hard reboot—to someplace much different. Somewhere near, but impossibly far at the same time.

To the heart of the black hole, the one he had almost forgotten about till the shadow mentioned it. The one that was oh-so-close.  Then, as the beast howled impotently, Aidan Connor punched the engine.

*  *  *

The demon in red raised his blade high above his head. Gravely took Rebecca's hand and squeezed it. Then, in that instant, something changed. Above the wail of the calliope, slashing through the canned carnival music, there was a screech that could only come from one of the shadows, and yet sounded entirely unlike any they had heard before. A scream that cut across time and space.

“No!”

The shadows had no faces, not really. But if they had, Rebecca imagined the waves of emotion that would be passing over them. Shock, confusion, maybe even fear. In the end nothing but pure, helpless, hatred.

Rebecca and Gravely felt themselves lifted from that place. Bodily, as if the hands of God Himself snatched them up. They sailed through the air, leaving the dead town and the ghost carnival and the horrible fires behind. Up, up, up they went, until they were so high that even the shadow wall could not reach them. And as they flew upwards, terror washed away and joy replaced it. They awoke back on the
Chronos
, away from the darkness and shadow.

Chapter 28

They weren't sure exactly what had happened until they stood on the bridge, staring out into empty space. The computers had shut down, just as Aidan had expected. And, as he had predicted, upon reboot Jack's lockdown was erased and forgotten.

The soft female voice—for it was always female—asking for Captain Gravely's command had returned. She had backed the ship slowly away from the black hole, the one that the computer suggested had been frighteningly close, the event horizon perhaps only an hour away. As she did, they watched on the screens above them the video of what had happened.

The ships had been together, floating there in the warp bubble, moving almost imperceptibly lest the gravitational pull of the black hole tear them apart. Then, in one sudden movement, the direction of the
Singularity
changed.

Immediately after, Gravely and Rebecca watched as the warp engines fired in their full glory. What had happened next was precisely what Aidan had expected. The sudden change of direction and dramatic increase in speed had snapped the thin lines of the grappling hooks, shattering the warp bubble that surrounded the
Chronos
, leaving it behind as the
Singularity
vanished.

Like most people, Rebecca and Gravely had witnessed a warp signature before. Seen the telltale distortions in space, like the contrails of airplanes of old. But this one was different. For as the
Singularity
and the space around it moved into the distance, there came a point where they simply vanished. As if they and everything with them had passed behind a great cloak, one perhaps even thicker and all concealing than the shadow walls.

“So he's gone then,” Rebecca said.

Even though Gravely knew it was not a question, she felt compelled to answer. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I think he's gone. He was a good man.”

“He was the best.”

For a long time, they simply stood staring out into that infinite darkness. Looking into the abyss. There was much left to say, but not on this subject. Not when there was already so much left unsaid. But there were decisions to be made. Hard ones at that.

“Seems to me,” Gravely said finally, “that we have a choice to make.”

“I know.”

“Well, what do you think?”

After everything she had seen, there was little that Dr. Rebecca Kensington could say with certainty anymore, but there was one thing. She would never have the dreams again, which meant she would never go to warp again. It was a decision one might make with ease on Earth, where the limitations thereof were relatively insignificant. Here, in the farthest reaches of space, she knew exactly what it meant.

“We can't do the sleep again. We don’t know if we would make it out alive even if we did. And we can't stay awake during warp either.”

“No,” Gravely said, “not after everything we know.”

“They would come for us then and all that he did,” she said, pointing out toward empty space, “the sacrifice he made, would be for nothing.”

Gravely nodded. “The engines on this ship can take us to 90% of light speed. We're two light years from Anubis, four from Riley.”

“Then Riley it is, I guess,” Rebecca said, “I hear they don't like strangers on Anubis.”

“No,” said Gravely, “and from what I know of that place, I wouldn't want to go anyway.”

An hour later, Gravely and Rebecca returned to the stasis chamber. Rebecca had sent a hyperspace communiqué that contained the entirety of their story. All that they had discovered. What had happened to the
Singularity
. That Jack had gone crazy and how they had discovered the truth about the warp.

“Do you think they'll believe it?”

“I don't think it will matter,” said Rebecca. “Whether they believe it or not, they need the warp jumps. They'll just cover it up, until they figure out something else. But at least they'll know. I think we can be certain of one thing—what we tried with the
Singularity
will never be tried again.”

So there they were, lying down once more. This time, to sleep for years. Four and change, at least as they counted time. To everyone else, it would be more like eighty. The women had not discussed it, for they shared at least one common bond. Everyone they knew, everyone they loved, was dead. They had nothing to lose and nothing to leave behind. Rebecca only hoped that in eighty years the colony of Riley would still exist.

She buried deep her greatest fear. That they would arrive to find that the shadows had returned. That they had finally found a way to cross over, the way that she knew Aidan had denied them when he took the
Singularity
back into the black hole.

No, she forgot that fear. As she laid her head on the pillow and the capsule closed around her, as the air filled with fragrant scents and she felt herself drift away, just as she had on the porch in Pensacola all those years before, she knew. Whatever dreams might come, they would be happy. Somewhere within them, he would be waiting.

Epilogue

Aidan Connor awoke to darkness. When his vision cleared and his mind with it, he realized he was staring up at the black void above the glass dome of the
Singularity
. The computers hummed gently, the glow of their screens the only light in the room. He pulled himself to his feet, running his finger along the console screen.

“Command, Aidan Connor?” it asked. Aidan felt a shiver ripple across his skin. He had expected this, somehow, even as he prayed he was wrong.

“Location?” he asked.

The answer didn't come instantly, even though he knew it should. He bowed his head, interrupting the calculations before they came to their inevitable conclusion.

“Computer,” he said, “locate the nearest gravity wells. Maximum zoom.”

The screen changed, the image stretching and expanding. He had seen the image before, but never in waking life. The thousands of black holes that appeared confirmed it, the hand that fate had dealt him. How long had he slept, drifting in that infinite shade, that impossible vista where time and space meant nothing? Millions, billions of years perhaps, until everything—people, stars, nebulae, galaxies—had died. Leaving nothing but the darkness, nothing but the empty, cold, void. Only shadows. Aidan slumped down in a chair and waited.

They came for him. Creeping in the unlit corners of the ship. Rising up from where they had spent untold thousands of years. Seeking their revenge. They formed one entity, one wave of black death and hatred. In an instant, they would crash down on him with all the fury of a billion years of hate.

But then it happened, as Aidan stared up into the great void above. Something appeared. Something that had not been in the dream of before. A single, solitary, point of light.

It grew in strength and luminosity, until it formed a powerful beam that burst forth into the bridge and struck the shadows, splitting the wave asunder. They fled before the might of that morning glory, wailing as they fell back to their hiding places, to the dark holes from whence they came.

Aidan rose and gazed at that aurora, watched as it massed and expanded itself into a mighty wall of brilliance that shone from one side of the bridge to the next. Aidan stood before this great, radiant wall, felt its warmth on his face, and heard the call that came from beyond. Not in some alien tongue, but in words he understood.

THE END.