Victory (35 page)

It clicked—she remembered, and she felt foolish for even bringing him down to Engineering in the first place. Afterburners—the bar—was a deck above them and down the hall, right where she’d found him four months ago.

Proctor lifted him onto her shoulders. He was mumbling under his breath, still unconscious, but slowly coming out of it.

“Wait, what about the black hole? The link? We’ve failed our mission.”

Polrum Krull closed her eyes for a moment, before opening them, looking at the slumped form of Granger on her shoulders. “No. We have not failed. Granger seals it now. Sealed with his own blood. It is an omen—the Swarm shall never rise again.”

Proctor shook her head at the mumbo jumbo, and strode toward the exit. Granger was light—just like she remembered from last time. His body still freshly ravaged by cancer, his muscles and tissue wasted away, he lay limp as a rag doll. She ran up the stairs away from engineering, turned left down the long hall, and emerged in Afterburners. She grabbed a chair from near the wall and dragged it behind her, placing it right in the middle of the room, facing the window, just as when she’d found him before.

“Might as well give you a hell of a view, Tim.”

She started to walk away, toward Polrum Krull waiting for her in the hallway, toward the escape pod, but stopped in her tracks when she heard a low mumble.

“Tim?”

“Goodbye, Shelby.”

Polrum Krull’s cryptic words came back to her about Granger sealing the black hole with his blood, and she turned back with a start. “Tim?”

His eyes were open to slits. She reached down for his hand, and another mumble escaped his lips. “Goodbye, Shelby. Thank you.”

Polrum Krull clapped impatiently. “Commander. The singularity’s chamber will open in less than two minutes. My Children and I must leave.”

“Coming,” she said. She squeezed the hand harder. “Goodbye, Tim. See you in a few.”

He fell back into unconsciousness, and as she ran down the hallway with Polrum Krull, she wondered. Was that old Tim, or current Tim, reaching across the lightyears through the Ligature to bid her goodbye? She had half a mind to ask the Skiohra matriarch, but soon they were scrambling into the escape pod and strapping their restraints. With seconds to spare, she launched the pod, and it shot away from the
Constitution
.

A moment later, the Old Bird disappeared with a familiar, blinding flash.

Chapter Eighty

Bridge, ISS Victory

Near Penumbran Black Hole

Granger stood at the antimatter torpedo station on the bridge of the
Victory
. On the viewscreen, the event horizon loomed large, taking up over half the viewable area. The stars all around it seemed warped and contorted near the edges, flickering and shifting rapidly as he approached the black hole.

Fishtail was gone—the Swarm with her—and the singularity she fell into seemed to have collapsed, since it disappeared in a flash as soon as she vanished.

All that remained was the final act. His last stab at the Swarm, the beings reaching across the ages and incomprehensible distances between universes, connected by the tenuous link of the singularities—natural or otherwise.

But how to do it? He supposed that, whatever happened, the antimatter needed to go in first, before any reaction with regular matter had occurred. It seemed to make sense in his mind. As Fishtail had said the words, he’d reached out through the Ligature and tried to comprehend, to read the Swarm’s collective mind, and the answer seemed to lie in unreacted antimatter.

So he loaded up as many antimatter torpedoes as he could, keying in the commands to have the warheads launch from the torpedoes without initiating. As such, they would fall into the black hole unactivated. The antimatter of the warheads and the matter of the torpedoes might eventually touch as they fell, but he hoped against hope that, long before then, the antimatter would somehow poison the link.

The torpedoes launched with the press of a button. Watching the viewscreen, he saw he still had time to launch another few volleys, so he set himself to work, sending out hundreds of torpedoes from the bow of the
Victory
, which split apart and sent their antimatter warheads tumbling into the abyss ahead of the great warship.

On the sensor readout, he watched something strange. The ships he’d left behind—the Skiohra dreadnoughts and the Dolmasi fleet still engaged in mortal space combat with the remnants of the vast Swarm and Russian fleet—they seemed to speed up. The battle increased in pace and intensity, and Granger marveled at how fast the ships were darting around, until he realized that time all throughout the universe was speeding up relative to him. As he approached the event horizon, time for him, as viewed from the outside, would slow down to an almost incomprehensible crawl. Lifetimes and whole ages of civilization would pass as the kilometers separating him from the curtain of the universe eventually shrunk to zero.

Before it was too late, he reached out across the Ligature, searching for Polrum Krull, attempting to let her know what he was doing. If he failed, then she at least needed to be aware of what he’d tried. He needed to make that contact before time had sped up so fast for the outside universe that all the relevant events were long since past. Soon, he supposed, everyone he knew would be long dead. And a few minutes after that, Earth’s sun would go nova. Eventually, he supposed he’d get to watch the Andromeda galaxy slam into the Milky Way, and he’d have a front row seat to the creation of billions of more stars as the collision stirred up latent clouds of interstellar hydrogen. He’d get to watch civilizations rise and fall. Galaxies birth and die.

He found her, and the feeling in reply suggested the Skiohra understood. Then he turned his attention to a sensation that felt familiar. Something close by Polrum Krull.

It was himself. Now freed from the Swarm. He reached through the Ligature, as hard as he could, and thought he could feel himself open his heavy, tired eyes.

She
was there. Looking at him. He could feel it. He projected a farewell, wanting nothing more than to somehow reach out, and hold her hand, and tell her that everything was going to be ok, that Earth was saved, that it was up to her now, that she’d be the Hero of Earth, that next time—if there was a next time—she’d be the one to step up and save their civilization from the next threat, when it came.

But he stopped himself. She’d already stepped up. She was the Hero of Earth. Just like him. Just like his whole crew, and the crew of the
Victory
, and the
Lincoln
, and the marine task force that executed the ill-advised mission to the
Benevolence
, and Scythia Krull—she was another Hero of Earth. And Polrum Krull. And the entire Skiohra civilization. And for that matter, the Dolmasi, for all their self-serving flaws.
 

Malakhov? Isaacson? Avery? Norton? He supposed even they had their parts to play, for good or ill. Even self-interested maneuvering could eventually be twisted and redeemed and made to serve the common good.
Shit, except Isaacson, that bastard.

And then she was gone. Escaped, he hoped, but for him, gone forever.

And now he was alone. A moment later, he watched the stars blueshift until they were no longer on the viewscreen. With a quick alteration to the sensors, the view appeared again as the screen adjusted to show ultraviolet light, then x-rays. The event horizon loomed ahead. He wondered if he’d notice when he passed.

He wondered if the universe would end as he fell in, time sped up so fast on the outside that he could simultaneously witness both the beginning and final moments of reality.

He wondered why he had never let himself love. Could he have loved Shelby? Someone else? Only another life, another time, could tell him the answer.
His
time was gone.

He wondered if he’d still be awake when he crossed the horizon, if he’d survive the brief fall to the singularity—not some tiny, artificial thing that the Russian equipment could produce, but a raw, incomprehensibly dense point, where time and space and matter became one.

He wondered if he’d pop out the other side, like he had with the smaller singularities. Perhaps he’d meet the actual beings that controlled the Valarisi. The true Swarm. If he did, he hoped they had bodies, and that he still had a few torpedoes handy, and if not, a hefty assault rifle.

He wondered if it was all worth it. If he’d done everything he could.

He wondered if they’d still call him the Hero of Earth.

He wondered.

He wondered....

Chapter Eighty-One

Omaha, North America, Earth

Sally Danforth Veterans Memorial Medical Center

Ballsy thought he was dreaming. His dreams had been so vivid lately, ever since his own
vacation
. He wondered if he’d ever fully remember what happened. Floating through space, weightless, safety line wrapped painfully around his waist, reaching ... reaching ... reaching out for her, always just a hair too far away.

“Ballsy,” said the voice.

His eyelids felt incredibly heavy. But he knew that voice.

“Ballsy, wake up.”

He opened his eyes. She was there. But ... not the
she
he was expecting.

“Spacechamp?”

The pilot beamed down at him and slapped him on the shoulder. Pain shot down his arm and he cried out.
 

“Oh, sorry, bud. Your shoulder was dislocated when Pew Pew grabbed your fighter with a tow cable. And a concussion. And ... four broken bones on your left side. And ... well, let’s just say you’ll be in that bed for awhile.”

Another voice from behind him was so loud that he wanted to stuff his ears full of gauze and shut his brain off—his head pounded with groggy pain. “Is he awake? Finally, Ballsy, we were beginning to think you didn’t like us or something.”

Pew Pew finally came into view, circling around his bed. Half his face was covered with thick bandages, and his own arm was in a sling.

“You’ve looked better,” Volz said groggily. It hurt to talk.

“Things got a bit rough there when that singularity took out the debris field. But, as usual, I threaded my way through. Dragging not just my sorry ass, but your sorry ass out of the way. Was touch and go there for awhile.”

Pew Pew lifted a bottle up to his mouth and chugged his beer. “You can’t drink in a hospital, man, what the hell are you thinking?” said Spacechamp, but with a wide grin.

“Screw that,” said Pew Pew, taking another swig. “We saved Earth. We deserve a god-damned medal. At the very least I deserve to get drunk off my ass. Besides,” he swallowed a few more times, before wiping his mouth on his good shoulder. “I’m drinking for two now.”

At first Volz didn’t understand, thinking Pew Pew was making a pregnancy joke, but that made zero sense. Then he remembered Fodder. They all fell silent for a moment, remembering the lost brother.

Ballsy’s gaze drifted out the window. Wherever he was, it was sunny, with late-winter rays lighting up the windows. Luckily, a nurse interrupted the uncomfortable silence, setting a meal tray on Volz’s lap. She didn’t even stop to ask if he was doing ok—she seemed quite rushed, in fact, and Volz finally realized she was probably attending to dozens, if not hundreds of people in the aftermath of the battle.

With effort, he grabbed the juice box on the tray and punched the top open, and dumped out the fruit from the fruit cup, holding it out the Pew Pew, who dutifully poured in a few inches. Volz passed the beer-filled fruit cup off to Spacechamp, then lifted his own juice box in the air.

“To Fodder,” he said. Spacechamp repeated him.

Pew Pew raised his bottle, and held it there for several moments, before composing himself. “To Fodder. Don’t fly like my brother.”

They touched their containers together, Ballsy’s juice box, Spacechamp’s fruit cup, and Pew Pew’s bottle, and they drank.

The question was burning inside of him. He didn’t want to distract from Pew Pew’s moment, and disrespect his brother, but he had to know.

“So...” he began.

“Yes?” Spacechamp set the empty cup back onto his tray.

“Where is she?”

Spacechamp and Pew Pew exchanged knowing, heavy looks.

“Guys?”

Spacechamp fumbled in her pocket for something, looking solemn.

“Guys? Please tell me. After all that, I deserve to know.”

Out of her pocket, Spacechamp pulled a small folding electronic pad and tossed it at him. He examined it—it was an average video screen comm device. Spacechamp smiled when he shot her a questioning look. “She left a few hours ago. Right when she woke up. She insisted—had to go to Sacramento and surprise her kid.”

Volz breathed a heavy sigh of relief. Pew Pew pointed at the device. “She said she’d be expecting your call.”

With a touch of his finger, the screen turned on, and initiated a call to a preset location. He unfolded the device and rested it on his lap, and moments later, there they were.

Fishtail. Her eyes bloodshot from exposure to vacuum and bandages on her head. But she was smiling. And Zack Zack bounced next to her.

“BALLSY! YOU FOUND HER!” said the kid, in his too-loud kid voice.

“We sure did, Zack.” He still couldn’t believe he was looking at Fishtail, her cold smirk replaced by warmth. Control and corruption replaced by life.

“DID YOU FLY FAST?”

Volz nodded, and, watching the kid bounce out of his chair from pent-up excitement and run around the room behind his mom, all he could do was laugh.

Chapter Eighty-Two

Senate Hearing Room, Old Supreme Court Building

Washington D.C., Earth

“Do you, Shelby A. Proctor, promise to tell the entire truth, and nothing but the truth to this committee, on penalty of perjury?”

“I do, sir.” She held her hand high for all the cameras to see.

“You may be seated,” said the senator. She couldn’t remember his name, and she didn’t care.

On the raised dais before her sat the armed services committee of United Earth’s senate—sixteen men and women from across the surviving worlds that formed the core of the government. Behind her, filling the giant hall, thousands of congresspeople, journalists, celebrities, government officials, and regular citizens hushed as she sat down.