Fiction
Science Fiction
Day 19
Command pressed down on Ti Morgenstern like the weight of an ocean. She could run a trade mission, but this voyage had just become a war. What did she know about war? The stranger's kind might well have traveled space before humans had worked flint. The Wilbee Pharr had survived only because the aliens hadn't expected an attack. If they returned, the ship was doomed.
Ti took the command seat. What Ti didn't know, she would learn.
"Engage the luminal accelerator," Ti said, without emotion. "We're going after them." The crew could mourn their dead later. The terrible events of the last few moments replayed themselves in Ti's head …
Space exploded into a purple-white plasma inferno. The alarms' demanding maternal voices babbled layered, incomprehensible warnings. The final voyage of the Wilbee Pharr, before the ship was scheduled to be recycled, had become anything but the routine trip Ti had expected.
"There's a gap in the Great Wall." Wonder filled the voice of Kylie Chandra, elected commander at the voyage's start. The Great Wall—a five-hundred-light-year energy sphere centered on an icy, double-ringed planetoid between the stars Ross 154 and Lacaille 8760—bottled in humanity's expansion. It had done so since the first probes had reached it three centuries earlier. "St. Elmo knows when we might have another chance," Kylie continued. "Take Wilbee Pharr through."
Zhing Lao, the voyage's helmsman, acted. The ship turned away from St. Alfwold's World and its separatists, awaiting their shipment of flechette guns. It shot out beyond the Great Wall. Ti swallowed hard as space returned to normal and the Great Wall closed behind them. Without another breach, Wilbee Pharr couldn't go home.
"Three ships within two AUs," Zhing called. Zhing preferred the 'astronomical unit' system to the light-second—the AU stayed fixed, while a luminal accelerator could increase light's speed. With 499 unaccelerated light-seconds per AU, the unknown craft were close. "Small. Unfamiliar design," Zhing continued, the virtual reality headpiece that melded his consciousness with the ship muffling his voice. "Largest holding steady, others approaching at three times unaccelerated light speed."
Without a luminal accelerator, anything approaching light speed dissolved into a battering quantum cannonade. But the strange ships, resembling feathery antennae, somehow overcame relativity's relentless rules. Centuries of exploration had uncovered no non-human sentients. Suddenly, aliens—real ones, not classical literature's bumpy-forehead-honor-fixated type—had become believable.
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Copyright 2008, Lawrence Barker. All rights reserved. Lawrence Barker's novel Mother Feral's Love, which tells the story of a heroic ghoul, is available from Swimming Kangaroo Press. Lawrence's fiction and poetry have appeared in a variety of venues, including Weird Tales, The Night the Lights Went Out in Arkham, Damned in Dixie, and many others. When not writing, he works as a senior epidemiologist.
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