The Mirror of Tantalus (Beta)

Part 1

Charis Samogost sat in the near total darkness of the Confluence’s flight deck, gazing out the viewports at the Milky Way’s hundred billion stars. She’d seen that stunning vista a thousand times over the past few years. Always before, it had been exactly the same, unchangeable. This time, it was different.

Tantalus made it different.

Charis shook her head. In all the hurried months of planning, selection programs, tests, training, intelligence briefings, even more tests and more training, the noisy fanfare of launch and the long, silent, brittle weeks of space travel . . . nobody had ever thought to stop and tell her how beautiful it would be.

Tantalus itself was invisible, of course, not just to human eyes but to all instruments. The interstellar anomaly, whatever it was, didn’t appear to emit electromagnetic radiation of any kind. Charis vaguely remembered a couple of visiting scientists during her training giving an explanation about dark matter or quantum something-or-other. But they’d kept getting into disagreements, and she’d been left with the impression that neither of them really had any idea.

But while you couldn’t see Tantalus itself, you could see its effects.

Tantalus tore across space, leaving behind it a long tail of expanding, dissipating eddies. They were a bit like the swirling vortices off the wings of the resource landers Charis flew back home.

But these eddies weren’t made from swirls of air or gases; they were curves in gravity. Around them, spacetime warped so severely that you could watch the light from distant stars bending in ripples. To her eyes, it looked a bit like the heat shimmer above the landers’ wings when they were sitting on the hot pavement.

Only here, the background wasn’t dried earth and rocky hills, it was the depths of space and a galaxy full of stars. And each shimmering distortion wasn’t millimeters, it was hundreds or even thousands of meters across.

When it came down to it, nobody really knew what Tantalus was or how it did what it did. All they knew was that it was small — perhaps a few tens of kilometers across — it was from beyond Earth’s system, it was invisible, and it was fast. And somehow, it was able to warp gravity in a way different than contemporary theories predicted.

The physicists speculated that, if they could capture the right telemetry, they might be able to figure out how to replicate the phenomenon.

And that could change the energy situation on earth forever.

The challenge was that to get the data, you’d need to get pretty close — within eighty kilometers. And, with Tantalus blazing through the solar system at more than two hundred thousand kilometers per hour, there wasn’t much time to catch it before it was gone.

Over the next three hours, her job was to fly them in. To get close enough to capture the precious, world-changing data. And to somehow keep them from being torn apart by the gravity vortices while doing it.

No pressure.

Charis heard a noise behind her. She turned and saw that there was someone standing silhouetted in the starboard-side doorway.

The Kratossian side.

Charis was Aretean. Her people had been locked in war with the Kratossians for more than sixty years. Under ordinary circumstances, she’d never associate with them, never even see them in her daily life.

But these were not ordinary circumstances.

When astronomers had first discovered Tantalus and its strange attributes, it had kicked off a race. The goal had been simple: get there first — and stop the Kratossians from getting there at all.

But, after a few months, as Tantalus’ speed and trajectory became more apparent and the window of opportunity narrowed, reality had set in.

Leeched by generations of conflict, neither side’s economy was strong enough for them to mount a mission on their own. Eventually, they’d come to a grudging acceptance: The only way to reach Tantalus in time would be to work together.

Turbulent weeks followed. Representatives from the two nations talked. There were endless negotiations and arguing and stonewalling. All along, Tantalus drove steadily on.

In the end, more from practicality than desire, they’d finally agreed: They couldn’t trust automated probes. It would be too easy for one side to sabotage the other. They’d have to send a manned mission. Delegates from both sides would go and collect the telemetry together.

Which brought Charis here, sitting in the dark, staring at an enemy.

“It’s quite a sight, isn’t it?” The other said, gesturing toward the viewports.

From the voice, height, and military-straight posture, Charis identified him as Captain Andros Philo, the mission leader for the Kratossian crew members. He was tall, pushing forty, confident, used to being in charge. Charis’ intelligence briefings had identified him as a career army man, influential in the Arizona campaign.

If the rumors were true, he’d been responsible for the deaths of thousands of Areteans on that battleplane alone.

Charis had mostly kept away from him and Dr. Sofia, the other Kratossian crew member, ever since she’d met them a week before launch. The fact that the mission required them to collaborate with murderers was awkward enough without socializing.

But occasionally bumping into one another had been inevitable. Even with the Confluence retrofitted with separate hab units for the two sides, quarters on the Excelsior class freighter were still cramped. Every time she was in the same space with him, it made Charis’ skin crawl.

“Sorry,” he apologized, stepping into the room. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

He strode down the short aisle of the flight deck and stopped behind the engineer’s chair beside her. He leaned forward, peering out the viewports. Whether by chance or design, he’d placed himself where he was blocking her exit.

Charis felt her shoulders tense. She casually dropped her hand to her lap, where she carried a little defensive knife in a hip pocket.

In their handful of interactions so far, Captain Philo had appeared mostly innocuous. He was polite, neutral, and focused on the mission.

But with Kratossians, an Aretean must always be wary of betrayal. The revolutionary potential of Tantalus’ data was worth enough that fighting or even killing wasn’t totally out of the question. Catching her alone like this, Captain Philo might very well decide to take advantage of the opportunity, make the odds more favorable for his side.

It would be an insane risk, eliminating the pilot ahead of the trickiest flying of the mission. But Charis had heard of the Kratossians doing even crazier things to gain an upper hand.

She glanced around. If he came at her, she’d have to slip out of her seat and step laterally to put it between them. That might give her enough time to get out the knife. She didn’t think she could physically overpower him, but the presence of a weapon might delay him, give her time to signal for help . . .

She looked at the clock. The others wouldn’t be here for another seven minutes.

Captain Philo turned and, perhaps noticing her discomfort, stepped back. He sat down in one of the jump-seats on the Kratossian side. “I came early to have a look before we got busy.” He raised an eyebrow. “Apparently, I wasn’t the only one.”

“It’s something, alright,” Charis agreed, still watching him. In the dim, reflected starlight, she could just make out his features.

He looked back out at the stars, quiet for a moment. “My wife didn’t want me to come on this mission. Said I’ve served my time. ‘Let one of the younger men go.’” He smiled to himself and shook his head. “Sometimes I think she was right.”

He looked at her, hesitated, then he continued.

“I won’t insult your intelligence by acting like energy is the only reason we want the science from Tantalus. There are those in my government who think we should use gravity technology for defense, for military strength.” He watched her, gauging her reaction.

Charis kept her face stony. It wasn’t a surprise that the Kratossians wanted to use Tantalus’ technology as a weapon. The Aretean leadership was considering the same thing. But, she was very surprised he was willing to admit it. What’s his strategy?

Captain Philo continued. “I’m not convinced. Weapons don’t make progress. Just more death. I and a few others in, shall we say, useful positions — we believe that the way out of this is not to build weapons but bridges . . .” He glanced at her again. His eyebrows rose. “However, to do that, someone must be willing to lay down arms.”

Charis felt her eyes narrow, incredulous. “You want Areté to surrender?”

He laughed pleasantly and shook his head, the tension visibly draining from his shoulders. “No. I wouldn’t expect that of your people. And I certainly have no right to demand it.” He sat back, opening his hands. “But why not us —” He gestured between them, “We, the crew of the Confluence? We’re already working together. Wouldn’t it be worth it to begin something here? Something that could, perhaps, continue and grow?”

He leaned forward, looking her in the eye, deadly earnest.

“I lost all three brothers to this war. Two in Arizona. One in Montreal. I don’t want that for my daughters. I want them to have a future.” His voice shifted slightly. “If I have grandchildren one day, I want them to grow up outside the shadow of this conflict. What if this conversation you and I are having right now were the beginning of that? Of peace for both our peoples?”

Charis looked at him, marveling at the irony.

By rights, she shouldn’t be on the mission at all. She and Alex, the other Aretean crew member, were siblings. The family relationship was a vulnerability. If the Kratossians found out, they might take Charis hostage, threaten to hurt her, use her as a lever to force Alex to compromise the mission. There had been a lot of long, hard conversations about what to do in the various contingencies — and whether it was worth the risk at all.

But they needed a good pilot, and Charis was a good pilot.

Alex had suggested her to the higher ups. It was testimony to the desperation of the situation that, in spite of the danger, they let her try out (under a fake last name, of course — Izola). To everyone’s surprise, including her own, Alex had been right. One by one, she’d outflown all the other candidates from both sides. In the end, only she was left.

So, the Aretean leaders grudgingly kept her in the running. They put her through their process, kept watching for her to fail. But she didn’t.

And now, here she was, not only piloting the mission but being approached by their enemies to broker peace?

“Captain Samogost is the ranking Aretean on this mission,” she pointed out, surprised by the neutrality of her own tone. “Why are you talking to me and not him?”

He seemed to think about that for a moment before answering. “I get the impression that Captain Samogost doesn’t value peace the way I and my colleagues do.”

She felt her eyebrows raise. “And you think I do?”

“I sense that you want the conflict to end.” He gave her an almost gentle look. “I know it’s cost you.”

Charis frowned. She had a vague apprehension that Captain Philo was closing some kind of trap around her, and she couldn’t yet see what it was. What did he know? Was he just fishing?

“I wish it hadn’t happened,” he said. “I wish many things hadn’t happened.” He paused for a moment and then continued. “But that’s why this is so important. You might be able to influence Captain Samogost, given your — ah — working relationship.”

Charis’ suspicion sharpened. His stress on the adjective . . .

“Yes,” Captain Philo admitted. “We know who you are. Relax. I’m not here to coerce you. But if you’re open to discussing possibilities, well . . . you are well-positioned.”

There it was. Nothing so coarse as torture or hostage-taking. They planned instead to manipulate her through diplomacy; to smile and shake hands and make friends . . . all the while using her as a tool to undermine and betray her own people, her own family.

It was so signature Kratossian. The only thing they did better than outright misery was underhanded betrayal. Throughout the history of the war, they’d broken treaty after treaty. In Charis’ lifetime alone, it had happened three times.

The worst of it was the hope. The promise that this time it might be different. But then, without fail, things devolved into more violence and finger pointing — usually leaving a trail of broken lives in its wake.

And now they had the gall to ask her to be a part of it.

It was sickening.

“Given what happened to you,” Captain Philo continued, “you have every reason to turn us down. I acknowledge that. And I’m sorry. But . . . at least think about it.” He held her gaze. “We can’t change the wrongs of the past, but we might be able to set the future to rights. For both our peoples.”

She was saved from having to respond by the arrival of her brother.

Alex paused in the doorway, looking at the two of them, evaluating the situation for a heartbeat before stepping in.

Charis keyed the cabin lights to come back up slowly, giving her eyes time to adjust. Alex slid into the jump-seat behind her and glanced across at Captain Philo.

“Almost time,” he said. Then he shot Charis a subtle, questioning look. Everything ok? It seemed to say.

She returned a smile to let him know she was alright.

Alex was the Aretean “ace up the sleeve.” Strong, smart, and extremely competent, he’d been in intelligence since he turned eighteen. Charis suspected he’d also been in Arizona for a while, though she could never get any hints out of him.

Officially, Alex was their side’s scientist. Thanks to intelligence, he had all the necessary documents and history — including several legitimate but uninteresting mathematics papers to his name. He could chatter away about Friedmann equations and Hawking radiation and Schwarzschild radii in a believable way.

But really, he was insurance. He was there to stop the Kratossians whenever they, inevitably, chose to betray them.

Charis felt a lot safer now that he was here.

She glanced at the mission clock as, right on time, Dr. Ellen Sofia arrived. Dr. Sofia was the Kratossian scientist, responsible for collecting the precious telemetry from Tantalus. She was a small, thin, little thing with hair she obviously kept dyed. Aretean intelligence had confirmed she was genuinely a physicist.

She took her place in the engineer’s chair next to Charis.

And just like that, they were ready to go.

Charis pulled up her instrument display and set the controls over to manual.

On the left side of the panel, she could see gravimetric readings for the area immediately surrounding them. The ship’s sensors detected distortions in the incoming light from the stars beyond Tantalus. They used that to triangulate the location of the gravity vortices. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough . . . Probably.

Charis kept her right hand resting lightly on the control yoke, ready to adjust their course if needed. She looked out the viewports ahead and then glanced back down at her console display. Everything seemed to be on track.

“Two hundred and fifty kilometers,” she reported to the others.

“Acknowledged,” Alex said behind her. “Signaling to mission control that we’re starting our approach.”

Charis nodded. It took fourteen minutes round-trip for communications to travel between their position and earth. They had to be mostly autonomous — a quarter of an hour was far too long to wait for urgent decisions — but they were supposed to give regular updates as they hit each milestone.

Charis flexed her wrists, resisting the temptation to adjust their course slightly. She preferred more active piloting, but it was important to conserve fuel. They had enough reserves for a decent amount of maneuvering, but if she used up too much, well . . . the mission planners had emphasized the suboptimal nature of most of the available contingencies.

Better to get it right the first time.

Then, on her display, she saw the first potential wrinkle in the plan. One of the edges of a gravity vortex was blooming especially far from Tantalus’ tail. It would intersect with their course briefly.

The Confluence’s computer ran some helpful calculations and projected a glowing blue line, recommending a course that would keep them safe while using the vortex’ gravity to pull them forward and save some fuel.

Charis eased them onto the new course, nudging the thruster controls lightly. She remembered the first time she’d ever piloted a ship. She must have been five or six, sitting in her dad’s lap. Her tiny hands were so small they could barely hold the yoke.

She remembered the smell of his worn miner’s jacket. The warmth in his voice. The thrill she’d felt as he dialed up the thrusters and the ship slid forward, going where she steered it.

“Push a little farther. That’s right,” he’d gently guided. “Now starboard — that way,” he’d pointed to show her which direction he meant. “A little more.”

It had been one of the rare occasions during her childhood that she’d been allowed to come up to space with her dad before a deployment.

The ship had been an old company bucket. She’d realized later that her dad had probably broken about fifty rules letting her fly. But he’d had several hours before departure, and their brief flight had been relatively harmless.

“You’re a pilot, now, Charis,” Her dad had said. “You see those stars?”

She’d nodded.

“That whole galaxy is out there for you to explore. One day, little starlet, you’re going to achieve impossible things.”

She’d craned her neck to look up at him. “How do you know, daddy?”

“I just do.” He’d smiled at her. “I love you, little starlet.”

“Beyond distance and time?”

He squeezed her shoulder and nodded. “Beyond distance and time.”

That had been their old call and response. A way to acknowledge the difficulty inherent in a collector’s life.

It took him almost two months to travel out to the collection zone. There, he’d spend eighteen months trawling, gathering the resources and minerals sent by the miners working way out in the asteroid belt.

He’d been one of those belt miners himself before Charis was born. He’d done one ten-year deployment. But he’d come back to try to make things work with their mom. They’d struggled for a few years — just long enough for Alex and Charis to enter the picture. Then their mom had left for good.

Being close to the people he loved did funny things to her dad.

She’d give anything to see him again.

Charis glanced back at her instruments.

The center of the gravity vortex was passing them on the port side by a wide, safe margin. Even still, Charis felt an odd, dizzying sensation for a moment. She made a mental note of the feeling. That could be trouble down the line. The closer they got to Tantalus, the harder it would become to maneuver around the vortices.

As if to prove the point, Charis’ console in front of her beeped. She glanced at it and made a face. The gravity vortex they were just passing had been a safe distance away, but a new one was abruptly coalescing in their path. And it was coming fast.

“Hold on,” Charis said.

She felt her throat tighten. This one threatened to be a lot stronger. And it was really, uncomfortably close. She could already sense a slight pull toward the approaching mass.

Her fingers flew over the console as she pulled up projections. They couldn’t go around it, but she might be able to aim for a place where they’d hit it on the edge rather than passing through the middle . . .

It would cost them fuel, but that’s what the reserves were for.

Then the vortex was upon them. A bright, prickly golden curve on her display marked the approaching edge, where the intense gravity seemed to nearly fold spacetime.

Charis felt the dizziness again. There was a pressure in her chest, and a faint rushing in her ears.

As she gripped the control yoke and shifted their course slightly, she found herself tensing. That was good. Tense muscles were better for blood flow under elevated gee forces. Consciously, she started using the high-gee breathing techniques she’d been taught: a rapid breath out and in followed by a pause. She could hear the others doing the same.

Around them, the bulkheads began to creak under the strain. There were some deeper, more ominous noises that sounded like they came from the hull. Charis glanced around uneasily. If the gravity was strong enough, it could tear the ship open. But the projections on the computer had this within their tolerances, and the hull integrity alarms weren’t yet going off . . .

Her vision swam a bit as the dizziness threatened to overwhelm her. She blinked hard, forced herself to focus. It wasn’t easy. She found herself bouncing oddly in her chair, lifting up off the seat and into her harness slightly, and then pressing back down. Abruptly, she felt a wave of nausea so strong that it completely consumed her focus. It was all she could do to keep from emptying her stomach.

Then, just as quickly as it had come, it was receding.

The sounds of the straining hull quieted. She felt herself settling back in her chair. Slowly, the rushing in her ears and her nausea began to fade. The spinning dizziness abated.

For a moment, they all just sat there.

“Well. That was something,” Captain Philo said with a laugh.

They glanced at one another with sober expressions. To complete the mission, they’d need to get a lot closer than this.

Dr. Sofia looked intently at her console interface. Presumably, she was inspecting the data they’d just collected. That was good. The data was what they were here for.

The scientist frowned and leaned closer.

“Strange,” she muttered, keying something into her console.

“What is it?” Alex asked.

“Not sure,” the older woman admitted. “There appears to be something approaching from . . . roughly from Tantalus’ direction.”

“More gravity anomalies?”

“I don’t think so . . . Look for yourself. Fifteen degrees port, five degrees down.”

Keeping one eye on a new set of gravity eddies beginning to form up ahead, Charis scanned the star field in the direction Dr. Sofia had indicated. She couldn’t see anything, but at these distances that didn’t mean much.

The frown in Dr. Sofia’s voice deepened. “The reading’s odd,” she said. “It doesn’t appear to be giving off any electromagnetic radiation. But it’s definitely there. It’s blocking the light from the stars behind it.”

“Could it be a piece of Tantalus breaking away?”

“Not a bad guess,” she mused.

“Can our active sensors reach that far?” Charis heard the tapping sound of Captain Philo keying something on the panel next to him.

“I think so . . .” Dr. Sofia paused. Then she let out a small gasp.

“What?” Everyone turned to look at her.

“See for yourself.” She keyed something onto her console and a miniature window appeared in the upper corner of Charis’ display.

There was a pause. Then Alex spoke behind Charis. “It’s another ship.”

“Out here?”

The four of them looked at one another.

Up ahead, flickering and rippling as the vortices swirled around it, a tiny, faint dot could now be seen. It shone dimly as the Confluence’s focused beams found it and reflected light off its surface.

Still keeping an eye on the gravity vortices ahead, Charis enlarged the image on her console. She felt her own frown deepen.

“It’s human,” Captain Philo said. He looked at Charis and Alex. “Aretean design.”

He was correct. It was one of theirs, all right. In fact, it was another Excelsior class freighter, just like the Confluence.

Charis felt a twist in her stomach that had nothing to do with gravity. How could that ship be here? Had her government sent another team? How would they have funded it? Why hadn’t they told Charis and Alex?

Captain Philo and Dr. Sofia were looking at them, clearly wondering the same thing.

“Explain to me,” Captain Philo said, “how this is not a betrayal. The agreement between our governments was that we’d go together, neither side either first or last.”

Alex shook his head. “This is just as much a surprise to us as it is to you. I swear.”

The tone of his voice . . . The others would miss it, but Charis, who knew him so well, could tell there was something he wasn’t saying.

She resisted the temptation to turn and look at him.

What do you know, Alex?

“She’s coming this way,” Dr. Sofia said. “Slowly.”

“Identification signals?”

“None so far. No signals; no lights; no radiation of any kind.”

Captain Philo gazed at Alex and Charis. Clearly, he still suspected that the other ship was a rival Aretean mission, a betrayal of the agreement between their governments.

“Let’s try to talk to them, what do you think?” He raised an eyebrow staring at Alex.

Ostensibly, both Alex and Captain Philo were leaders of this mission. Having two authorities made tie breaking tricky, but it was the only reasonable arrangement. There was no way she or Alex would submit to Kratossian leadership, and she was pretty sure they felt the same.

Charis half turned to see Alex’s reaction.

He nodded. “I’ll hail them.” He tapped on the panel beside him and leaned forward toward a microphone built into it.

“Attention unidentified vessel, this is the joint expedition ship Confluence on mission to survey Tantalus. What is your name and purpose?”

They all waited.

Charis found herself holding her breath.

On her screen, she could see a new vortex starting to materialize a bit father off.

The seconds dragged on.

“Repeat, this is the joint expedition vessel Confluence on mission to survey Tantalus. What is your name and purpose?”

After another moment with no response, Dr. Sofia spoke.

“This may not work,” she said quietly. “If we’re not getting any electromagnetic signals from them at all, it’s possible that they can’t detect signals from us, either.”

“What do you mean?”

She shrugged. “To our sensors, they look like a hole in space. What if we look the same to them?”

Alex frowned and tried to hail them one more time. Still nothing.

On her screen, Charis saw the next vortex start to dissipate. She felt herself quietly relax. There were a couple more gravity eddies forming, but their trajectories had them passing far enough away that they wouldn’t affect their course.

“And, even if they can understand us,” Captain Philo said heavily, “They may not want us to know that.” He glanced at Alex and Charis. “We appear to be at a stalemate.”

“Odd,” Dr. Sofia said, still watching the other ship. “She’s using her maneuvering jets, but . . . not for maneuvering.”

Captain Philo raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

“She’s firing omnidirectional bursts. They won’t do anything but waste fuel. Although . . .” Dr. Sofia paused. “Yes. There’s a pattern . . .”

Charis felt Captain Philo’s frown reflected on her own face. She pulled up the visual and zoomed in on the other ship.

Sure enough, with a bit of digital movement enhancement, she could see the tiny jets flaring from the thrusters.

Three short bursts, then three long ones, then three short ones again. Over and over, the pattern repeated. It was familiar somehow . . . like a word just on the tip of her tongue . . .

Then she got it. “It’s Morse.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Morse code. Patterns of dots and dashes used to represent letters of the alphabet . . .” Charis trailed off as she searched the ship’s computer. Morse was used in nautical contexts, right? Surely, there was something in the computer about it.

She hoped.

Then she found it. “Okay, okay,” she said, scrolling through the display of letters and numbers. “What is it again? Three short bursts—”

“Followed by three long bursts, followed by three short bursts.”

“Okay, so that’s an ‘S,’ followed by an ‘O,’ followed by—”

“It’s a distress signal,” Captain Philo said, looking up from his own panel. “They’re asking for our help.”

They all looked at each other. Evidently, the same thought was going through everyone’s minds. With the other vessel so far into Tantalus’ tail, a rescue attempt could well prove fatal — either from the vortices tearing the Confluence apart or from the sheer amount of fuel they’d burn up trying to maneuver in there.

And if, as Captain Philo and Dr. Sofia so clearly suspected, that other ship was from a secret Aretean mission, there wouldn’t be much incentive for the Kratossians to intervene. Why save your enemy?

“Do we give aid?”

“We should contact mission control,” said Dr. Sofia, an edge of tension in her voice.

“There won’t be time,” Captain Philo said. “By the time we hear back, we’ll already be too far past them to help. If we slow down to wait, we’ll have to burn a lot of fuel. And if this is genuinely an emergency, those minutes may make a difference for survivability.” He paused, looking at each of them. “I say we put it to a vote.”

Nobody spoke for a heartbeat. Then Alex weighed in.

“We can’t risk deviating from the mission.” He said, voice heavy. “It’s awful, I know. But they’re too far in.”

“They’re coming this way. We might be able to meet them in a safer area,” Dr. Sofia suggested. She didn’t sound convinced.

“And how long would that take? Like Captain Philo pointed out, how much fuel would we burn waiting for them? Or what about oxygen? Do we have enough air to make it back to earth if we have additional crew?”

They were all good questions.

“This is human life we’re talking about,” Captain Philo reminded them.

“Maybe,” Dr. Sofia said slowly. “Or could it be some other kind of intelligence? . . . Perhaps mimicking our own vessel in order to attempt contact?”

That gave them all pause.

It made a strange kind of sense. If it was from the same source as Tantalus, that would explain the weird electromagnetic silence of the vessel.

Out of the corner of her eye, Charis caught sight of another vortex forming on her display. Outside, the star field was rippling again, but it looked like this one would pass by at a safe distance.

“I suppose it’s possible,” Captain Philo said slowly. “But then why the Morse code? Why the distress signal?”

“If it’s another intelligence? Who knows?”

Captain Philo stared out the viewport for a moment, thinking. Then he visibly came to a conclusion. “It makes little difference,” he said. “Even if we’re unsure, we must treat this as though it were a genuine request for assistance.” He looked around. “Do we help them? Captain Samogost says ‘no.’ My vote is yes.”

Charis blinked, surprised.

He was Kratossian military. He’d been in Arizona. Yet, when an Aretean ship was asking for rescue — a ship he so obviously suspected was an act of betrayal — he was voting to risk his life to help them. What strategic advantage could he possibly gain?

There was something else going on here, something that Charis wasn’t yet seeing . . .

Dr. Sofia also looked confused. She glanced at Captain Philo. Then she turned to Charis. “Officer Izola, if we do this, will we have enough fuel to complete the mission?”

Charis was way ahead of her. While they were talking, she’d done the calculation. Twice.

“Maybe,” she admitted. “But unlikely. If we deviate too far off course, we won’t be able to use Tantalus’ gravity to accelerate back to earth.”

“Could we pass them? Continue on through the tail and then swing around the other side?”

“You mean basically invert the maneuver originally planned?”

She nodded.

“Hmm . . .” Charis pursed her lips, considering. The flight plan the engineers back home had dreamed up had them approaching Tantalus from behind and to one side. As they passed, they’d use Tantalus’ own, significant gravity to swing around and sling away back home. That would save on the ridiculous amounts of fuel the mission took. What Dr. Sofia was proposing was to go across the tail and loop around the opposite way.

Charis keyed in a command on her console, briefly diverting computer resources from tracking vortices to run the necessary simulations. “It’s possible. But there’s no way we can do that without going deeper in than even that other vessel.”

“I vote no,” Alex repeated, voice firm. “Listen, I hate it as much as you, but this is bigger than just us and them. Our people sent us here to get that data. If we fail, that changes the future for millions, perhaps billions of people. It’s rough for those folks out there,” he nodded to the little blinking dot beyond the viewport, “but it’s reality. We knew what we were getting into, taking on this mission. Presumably, so did they. They shouldn’t have risked getting so close, and we shouldn’t either.”

“So, one vote yes, one vote no,” Captain Philo said. He looked at Dr. Sofia and Charis and raised an eyebrow.

“My vote is no as well,” Dr. Sofia said with a resigned sigh. “Captain Samogost is correct. Our protocol explicitly says that the success of the mission is more important than the lives of individuals. We all agreed to that.”

“But that was our lives, not someone else’s,” Captain Philo pointed out. There was an awkward silence. Then Captain Philo continued on a different tack. “Imagine the data they’ll have been able to collect from that close into Tantalus’ tail. What if we could transfer it? Wouldn’t that be a fulfillment of the mission?”

“It doesn’t make a difference, unfortunately,” Dr. Sofia said quietly. “It’s not a risk we can afford. Even if it would theoretically play out that way, we have no guarantee.” Charis could tell that the scientist was unhappy about her answer — convinced, but unhappy.

They all turned to Charis.

“It’s up to you, Officer Izola,” Captain Philo said. “Tie breakers err on the side of the immediate preservation of human life.”

Neither Alex nor Dr. Sofia contradicted him. They just looked at her, waiting for her response.

Captain Philo was watching her closely. He knew Alex was her brother, probably expected her to side with him.

But it was never that simple, was it?

Charis grimaced, irritated. Why did it have to be up to her?

She turned away from the others, thinking hard. Outside the viewport, her eyes found the little, twinkling dot that was the other Excelsior class freighter.

If it was from Areté, it was likely military or intelligence, right? People who followed commands and were willing to sacrifice themselves?

Yet, they had called for help. They clearly wanted to be saved.

Unbidden, Charis’s father’s words floated up from memory. “When you’re out there in the Belt, three hundred and fifty million kilometers from home, there’s nobody from earth coming to rescue you. You have to help each other. If somebody’s in trouble, you go get them.”

How many of the crew on the other ship had brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and sons and daughters?

Charis thought about her own loss. About the searing agony of that wound even now, years later.

Could she be responsible for knowingly inflicting that on someone else?

Inwardly, she cursed.

Then she tapped in a new course. She felt the gentle rumble through the hull as the thrusters fired, consciously avoided looking at the others.

“Thank you,” Captain Philo said quietly.

“Don’t thank me yet,” Charis gritted. “Wait until we’re home safe.”

For a moment, she didn’t look at Alex, afraid to see his expression. But she needn’t have worried. He reached up and gently squeezed her shoulder. When she glanced back, he gave her a nod.

This may not be the call he would have made, but he respected it.

“I’ll call it in,” he said, keying the comms to notify mission control.

It wasn’t long before Charis had reason to doubt her decision.

As they eased closer, Tantalus seemed to wake to their presence. It was as though the mysterious interstellar traveler were an animal, defending its territory. A wave of multiple, spinning gravity vortices began to coalesce ahead of them.

Charis took a deep breath, inhaling slowly through her nose and exhaling through her mouth, steeling herself.

“Hang on tight,” she muttered. The warning was unnecessary. They were all watching the same thing on their displays. The star field outside the viewports was boiling with the shimmer of gravitational lensing.

Then the edges of the first vortex hit, and Charis didn’t have time to think about anything else.

She guided the nose of the Confluence first one way and then another. She pushed the thrusters full reverse to slow them enough that one horizon could dissipate a small but significant amount and then, the next moment, jammed them full forward so they could enter an empty pocket of space fractions of a second before two edges collided where they’d just been.

Then she missed a cue. The Confluence slammed into the edges of a vortex so strong that the bulkheads and hull around them screamed in protest. Charis nearly blacked out as gravity many times that of earth suddenly pressed into her and then, just as abruptly, let up.

She wanted to apologize for the slip, but she had no time. She had to immediately throw them around another vortex that was following in the wake.

Charis felt frustration and panic rising. She wasn’t up to this.

“Show them you’re stronger,” Charis’ father’s words floated up from memory.

She’d been sixteen and had just been rejected from flight school. It had been a minor setback — she’d reapplied with the next batch and got in — but at the time, it had felt world-ending.

“What if I’m not as good as the other pilots?”

He’d shrugged. “You are. But even if you weren’t, it wouldn’t matter. What matters is that there’s a way and that you’ll find it. If the Belt taught me anything, it’s that if something’s broken, you can figure out how to fix it. You just gotta sit down, work it out, and then apply yourself. It’s the same here.”

“It’s not the same, dad. This isn’t the Belt. And they don’t like me. It’s not worth it.”

“You’re right,” he admitted after a moment. “Out there, we did crazy things because we had to. We had no choice. Here, you have a choice.” He paused. “But listen, little starlet, don’t you see? That’s why you need to stick with it. When you can walk away, it’s even more important that you stay.”

He wrapped an arm around her shoulder. She tried to pull away, but he held her — gently but firmly — and craned his neck to look her in the eye.

“I don’t care whether you become a pilot or a plumber. I’ll love you either way —”

“Beyond distance and time, I know.” She rolled her eyes.

He smiled. “Beyond distance and time. What I care about is that you’re happy. That you respect yourself.”

He got a distant look that Charis could tell meant he was thinking of her mother.

“If you give up on this, it should be because you want to — because you found something better — not because it’s hard.”

Charis’ attention was drawn back by a new warning light flickering on her console. The gravity vortices were becoming too strong for the Confluence, and the stress was triggering the hull integrity sensors.

She threw them over in a tight lateral maneuver, attempting to use the pull of one vortex to swing them around and out of the way of another. She fought to keep her queasy stomach in check, forced her eyes to focus on the control panel in spite of the dizziness threatening to overwhelm her. She tried to remember her breathing.

There was something there. Something small, niggling at the back of her mind. With a tiny, spare corner of her thoughts, she searched for the source. What was that nagging feeling just on the edges of her consciousness?

Then she got it: The ship’s spin.

The Confluence was designed with an inner ring — the one with the command module and habitation units — which was continually spinning. This simulated gravity for the inhabitants. Ordinarily, that was a good thing. But right now, it was hobbling her.

With the ship’s spin, she was constantly changing directions. First an approaching vortex was above her. Next moment, it was below.

She couldn’t fly like this, couldn’t wait for the ship’s computer to tell her what to do. She needed to act faster. The only way she could do that was to fly by sense, work by instinct, feel where the gravity was coming from and respond — before her conscious brain even registered.

She jabbed at the controls. There was a lurch, and Charis felt a tremendous wave of nausea.

“What are you doing?” Dr. Sofia yelped.

“She’s turning off the spin,” said Alex. From his tone, Charis could tell he was realizing what she’d done even as he spoke.

“We can’t do that. We’ll have no gravity.”

“She knows what she’s doing.”

Charis felt herself begin to slide around under her command harness as the ship’s artificial gravity lessened.

She hoped he was right.

Floating in their chairs without a point of reference would make some things harder. It had been a long time since she’d piloted in zero gee, and her movements weren’t tuned to it anymore. She might overcorrect.

But at least, blessedly, she could feel what was going on outside. She could sense where the vortices were coming from.

Much better.

After that, it took only a moment or two to get into a groove. The gravity would begin to build, she’d correct course, they’d press down (or back or up, depending) in their seats. The feeling would intensify, like a hydraulic press, pushing down on her chest. Sometimes the hull would creak. Once, something that wasn’t properly strapped down fell with a faint crash from the direction of the Aretean hab module.

Then the pressure would begin to ease as they made it out the other side. She’d try to blink the spots out of her eyes and breathe, forcing oxygen back into her brain as fast as she could.

And get ready for the next one.

After what felt like ages, but was really only about six minutes, the onslaught began to let up. A minute after that, they found themselves momentarily free, in a pocket of quiet.

And, with the ship’s artificial gravity gone, literally floating in their harnesses.

“Well.” Captain Philo said.

“Well indeed,” said Alex. “We’ve lessened the distance by . . .” he consulted the data. “About half.”

They looked at each other. Dr. Sofia voiced the thought in everyone’s minds.

“Can we keep this up? Should we?”

“No word yet from mission control,” Alex informed them.

“I can keep flying,” Charis said hesitantly. “I’m not sure if we’d be able to dock in the middle of all that . . .”

“The other vessel’s still coming this way,” Captain Philo pointed out. “We can meet them in the middle.”

“If we don’t get torn apart in the process,” Alex grunted. “How’s our fuel?” he tapped on his panel, pulling up a status indicator.

Charis was way ahead of him. “It’ll be close.” She felt a gnawing in the pit of her stomach. It was going to be really close.

“They’re signaling again,” said Dr. Sofia.

Charis pulled up the image of the ship. Sure enough, the directional thrusters were firing in little bursts. She keyed the computer to translate the Morse code.

“S - R - D - O - Q . . .” she began reading. This message was longer and more complicated than the distress signal. Eventually, it looped, and they had the whole thing.

Not that it helped much.

“SDTNTS RDOQ SI TNHG?” Captain Philo looked at them. “Is it some kind of code?”

“A replacement code, maybe,” Alex said, looking at the words on his own display. “The question is, why? Why would a vessel in distress send a message in code?”

“Maybe it’s not meant to be a message,” Dr. Sofia suggested, a curious note in her voice. “Maybe they’re just trying to send us data.”

“Like what?”

“Coordinates, maybe. Or some simple geometry or math.”

In other words, perhaps they’d captured some crucial telemetry from Tantalus, and they wanted to ensure that the information was preserved. The implications of that were grim, Charis thought. It meant they may have given up on being rescued.

The question was, what was the data?

“Running it through the computer now,” Dr. Sofia said. “If there’s a match to a known protocol, it’ll translate it.”

They waited for a long, tense couple of minutes. Then Dr. Sofia shook her head. “Nothing. Either it’s not the kind of data I was expecting, or it is, but the message isn’t long enough for the computer to figure out how to map and decode.”

“Or,” said Captain Philo, voice heavy. “Perhaps it was just a malfunction.”

On that dour note, they all fell silent.

Charis stared at the ship on her display. It was ever-so-slowly growing larger as the two vessels approached one another. She glanced at the fuel calculations once more, wondered what to do next. There were more gravity eddies approaching. She really didn’t want to try to dock in the middle of one of those things.

But what choice did they have? If those were people out there, fellow Areteans, didn’t they deserve a chance?

Or was this a fool’s errand? Would Charis’ decision to err on the side of mercy get her and the rest of the Confluence’s crew killed for nothing?

Charis gritted her teeth, frustrated at the inescapable uncertainty.

On her display, she watched as the edge of a vortex swam by less than five hundred meters to their starboard.

“We really should wait for mission control on this,” Dr. Sofia said.

“No time,” Captain Philo reminded her. “How long until we can dock?”

“Another four, maybe five minutes.”

A couple of large gravity vortices spun into being behind them, filling the space they’d left just moments before. Mercifully, they seemed to have found a pocket of space that was peaceful.

Charis made a slight course adjustment.

They waited. The other ship slowly got closer. More vortices formed and passed.

“Two minutes left.”

“Still no word from mission control.”

Charis began to slow the Confluence slightly, to match the speed and direction of the other vessel. They could see now that she was damaged. She was facing the other way, but even from behind, it looked like part of a hab module had collapsed, and, possibly, her command module was compromised as well.

Charis hoped that when they docked, they’d find more than just a ship full of corpses.

“Any more messages?”

“None,” Dr. Sofia said, confirming what she already knew.

“Okay, um.” Charis glanced down at her display and then did a double take. She cursed under her breath. The area of quiet space around them, which had blessedly lasted for the past few minutes, was abruptly collapsing. More vortices were forming ahead.

A lot more.

“Okay, folks, there may be a slight delay,” Charis warned the others. “Hang on.”

This time, when the vortices came, they were fast and fierce. They rolled in like stormy ocean waves, so close that they stacked atop one another, sometimes interfering with each other chaotically, other times multiplying in power.

Charis’ focus collapsed down to a tiny point. Her entire world became the next response, the next reaction, the next thing necessary to navigate the onslaught and keep them alive.

She found herself driving closer to the other vessel without intentionally doing so. She approached — and they approached — merely because it was the least terrible path, the bad option among many, much worse options.

On her display, Charis watched as the little dot marking their location slammed, again and again, into the angry golden edges of the gravity vortices.

Around them, the bulkheads were popping and screaming. The warning indicators were singing. Every surface was rattling. Alex had to bat away a piece of plastic paneling that broke off and flew past as the gravity shifted under them.

This was way beyond mission parameters. The Confluence had been built to withstand some gravitational stress, but nothing like this.

And to tell the truth, humans hadn’t really been built to endure it either.

Charis fought to maintain consciousness, the intense gravity constantly threatening to make her black out. She could barely breathe. The dizziness, the pressure, her stomach roiling in unending waves of nausea. It took everything she had just to keep her mind on flying.

And it wasn’t getting better.

“This isn’t working,” Captain Philo shouted. “We need to pull back.”

The others agreed.

Charis herself agreed.

But she no longer had any choice. At any one moment there were only one or two options that wouldn’t kill them. And they were never in a good direction.

Charis threw the throttle full open and then pulled up. She twisted them to starboard hard and then back to port. It didn’t make any difference.

For a moment, they were apace, almost parallel to the other vessel.

Then they drifted apart as Charis carved a path around a stack of three vortices the size of mountains.

Next moment, they were headed back in as she dove to avoid the edge of a vortex that was strong enough it could have compressed the entire ship into a sliver of metal and plastic a centimeter tall.

Charis wanted to tell the others to hold on, but when she thought about opening her mouth, her stomach lurched warningly. She gritted her teeth, blinking hard to fight the dizziness that had the cabin spinning around her.

Then something deep in the Confluence gave out. There was a tremendous crash, a rumble in the decks strong enough to be felt above all the other chaos.

“I’ve — I’ve lost maneuvering,” Charis reported, twisting the control yoke uselessly.

The ship’s diagnostic popped up. It estimated two minutes to auto-repair.

Two minutes they didn’t have.

“We’re going to hit them,” Alex shouted, pointing.

He was right. The Confluence was headed straight for the other vessel.

“Hold on.”

Impossibly, a third, then a fourth, then a fifth vortex formed, the ones in the back moving faster than the ones in front. More appeared. Half a dozen. Then even more.

Someone gasped.

Charis stopped watching the display.

She felt the twist in her stomach intensify, the sense of pressure and dizziness that told her the first edge was almost upon them.

In the mere seconds that they had left, she did a hurried mental calculation. The vortices were stacking. It wouldn’t be exact, but they’d be nearly on top of one another when they hit.

Charis glanced at the others.

Alex’s expression was fierce, committed as always. Captain Philo was stoic, accepting. Dr. Sofia’s eyes were wide, her face drained of color, but she seemed to be holding together.

Then it hit.

Charis found herself being shoved forward under the immense gravity. It was though a colossal hand was pushing her down, pressing her into her seat, folding her into herself. Her spine was screaming in protest. She couldn’t move.

The metal of every surface around her was singing with strain. In her peripheral vision, she could see the decks and bulkheads visibly rippling in waves. There was an escalating series of loud pops and bangs. Then a sudden, deafening rushing sound.

But maybe that was just the rushing of blood in her ears, the marching of her strained heartbeat.
She could hear nothing else anymore. Her vision clouded with white spots. She tried to breathe but discovered her lungs refused to expand. She was spinning, the world heaving, her stomach roiling, tossing like a turbulent sea. Dimly, she noted the gravity swirling around them, pulling them in a hundred directions at once.

Her last conscious awareness was of her body’s protest. The pain and disorientation and pressure were still there, but she felt a sublime sense of remove — as though she were no longer present. She observed herself, scrunched into a little ball, from an infinite distance.

Then there was another thunderous crash.

She felt nothing.

---

Part 2

Charis found herself in a familiar scene, one she’d visited over and over again in her dreams. She was running down a hall, chasing her father, calling after him, apologizing, begging him to not go. If she could just get him to turn around, slow down, wait a half hour — even just a few minutes . . . Maybe she could stop it from happening. Stop him from leaving. Stop him from being there when the attack came.

Stop him from dying.

But just like all the times before, she was powerless to change it. He wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t turn around. And she couldn’t catch up to him. With each step, he was farther away. She struggled to make her sluggish feet move, tried to shout but he couldn’t hear her.

A familiar, nagging dread rose within her. A clawing, cloying desperation. It was a part of her, weighing like a drenched cloak. It permeated the space around her, worked its way into the material of the walls and floor, the very light and scent and sound. It was an alarm blaring, insistent.

Charis felt a vague sense of confusion. She’d never heard an audible alarm in the dream before.

As she slowly, reluctantly let go of unconsciousness, her sense of dread sharpened and changed focus. Something nearby was wrong — very wrong.

Charis fought to rouse herself. As she came more awake, the sound of the alarm got louder. It hurt her ears. She noticed a new, ominous noise under it, a small but persistent rushing, like a tire deflating.

With a start, Charis came fully awake, her dread spiking. The alarm — that was the hull integrity sensor. The Confluence was damaged.

The rushing sound was air leaving the cabin.

Charis jolted her eyes open, surprised to find they were closed. It didn’t help much. She was still seeing stars. She blinked and, instinctively, took a couple of deep breaths through protesting lungs. Had she been holding her breath? She willed oxygen to her brain.

Her vision started to clear, but for a second, her brain decided her eyes weren’t working properly. The proportions and angles of the control module around her were all warped. She was staring up at the ceiling, but it seemed to be tilted, and it was only about a meter away . . .

Then realization caught up to her. The ceiling had collapsed. It looked as though a giant hand had wrapped itself around the command module and squeezed, crushing everything inward like a tube of toothpaste.

She noticed pressure on her left leg. She looked down and had to bite her lip to keep from screaming. Her leg was pinned under the near edge of the collapsed ceiling. Her crushed console was probably the only thing that had saved her from losing it completely.

A tiny bit of debris flew past, sucked by on a current of moving air. Charis couldn’t see the hull breach, but she guessed it was somewhere beyond the collapsed panels that held her.

She frowned. Things floating — her bouncing a bit in her harness — they were still in zero gee.

The alarms were getting more insistent. They had a minute or two . . . maybe.

How long was I out?

She grabbed at her leg, trying to pull herself free, but her chair’s crash harness held her back. She couldn’t reach. Instinctively, she grabbed for the clasps but stopped. She didn’t want to get sucked away with the rest of the debris.

She glanced around. Where were the others?

She caught sight of Dr. Sofia. The woman was hanging onto one of the jump seats, struggling to maintain purchase in the zero gravity. The exiting air was gently pulling her horizontal, her feet pointed toward Charis. Captain Philo was on the other side, helping her. He had a hand on the inside of the door frame leading to the Kratossian’s hab unit. His other hand gripped Dr. Sofia’s, pulling her toward him.

That was the only way to safety, Charis realized. The collapsed ceiling blocked off the Aretean side. Even though it was probably closer, there was no way to get there. And the passage to the Aretean hab module — perhaps the module itself — might be crushed.

She’d have to follow them to the Kratossian hab unit. Once they were all there, they could close the door, which would — hopefully — seal off the leak.

Where’s Alex?

She couldn’t see her brother anywhere. Panic knifed through her. Had he been hurt?

Then she saw his face, pinched with worry, peering at her from beyond the passage door that led to the Kratossian hab unit.

Charis felt a surge of relief. At least he was safe.

But given the circumstances, she was likely to die.

She looked back around assessing her situation. She needed something to grab onto so she wouldn’t be sucked out.

Her console was useless. Maybe she could use her command chair as an anchor while she somehow got her leg free. Then, she’d have to reach Captain Philo’s jump seat, make her way, pulling forward from one seat to the next like she was climbing a ladder.

It was a terrible plan. But it was the best she was going to get.

She looped one elbow around the arm of her chair and then slapped at the release on her restraints, popping them open. Gingerly, she rotated as much as she could with her pinned leg and slid herself down into a crouch so she could get better leverage. She wasn’t quite sure how this was going to work . . .

Then Charis felt a tap on her shoulder. She glanced up, surprised. Captain Philo was there. He’d gotten Dr. Sofia safe and then — come back for Charis?

She stared at him.

There was too much noise in the cabin to speak, but he didn’t waste time with words anyway. He quickly slid past her and got to work, bracing his body between the distended panels and pressing up with his back and legs to pry the surfaces apart.

Charis felt the pressure on her leg begin to lessen. She grabbed more tightly onto her command chair with both hands and pulled as hard as she could. She gritted her teeth, jaw muscles tight as pain lanced up her body.

For a second, she worried she was going to tear apart. Then she was free.

She scrabbled forward from her collapsed chair, reaching for a jump seat.

But instead of pulling forward, she stumbled, surprised, and found herself falling to the floor.

Her stomach turned inside of her. For a second, she panicked, worried that another gravity vortex was upon them. But then she realized the truth.

Alex.

That’s what her brother had been doing on the other side of the door: restoring the spin. He’d brought back the cabin gravity.

The alarms were getting insistent now. More ominous than that, there was a dangerous creaking and popping in the bulkheads behind her. The rushing sound changed timbre slightly.

Charis clawed her way to her feet. Her left leg was useless, but she could hobble forward. Captain Philo caught up. He put a hand under her arm, supporting her. Together, they scrambled for the door.

Alex and Dr. Sofia reached through at the same time. They grabbed Charis’ elbows as Captain Philo pushed her ahead. They pulled her through —

Just as the hull blew open behind her.

Instantly, Charis found herself horizontal again. The flow of air that had been drifting out of the small breach had abruptly become a torrent. Alex and Dr. Sofia were both jerked toward her, slamming into the doorframe. Dr. Sofia almost let go. Then their grips tightened. In what took only a few seconds, but felt like an eternity, they dragged Charis through the opening and then threw her down against the wall just inside the door.

Charis gasped, forcing herself to breathe. Alex was shouting something. She couldn’t hear what he was saying over the roar of air. Then he was working furiously at the door controls. A second later, the door slid shut, sealing them in. The rushing stopped. The alarm quieted.

Charis lay there in the unfamiliar silence, arms trembling, chest heaving, ears pounding. For a second, she worried that too much air had left, that she couldn’t get enough oxygen. But it was just the adrenaline. Slowly, her breathing began to ease; the blood rushing to her head began to subside.

Wincing, she rolled onto one side and looked around. Alex was still standing by the controls. Dr. Sofia was slumped against the wall. They both looked about the way she felt.

She frowned.

“Where is he?”

Neither Alex nor Dr. Sofia answered. They didn’t need to. Charis realized the truth even as she asked the question.

Captain Philo had been behind her when the hull blew. She’d made it, but he’d been pulled out to space.

Charis felt her throat tighten with the realization.

Alex broke the spell. He was still in action mode.

“Into the hab unit,” he instructed. “Get me ice, medwrap, and pain killers,” he said to Dr. Sofia. Then, when she didn’t respond, he snapped. “Hey — pain killers.” She got up and went ahead of them through the second door.

Alex knelt down next to Charis. “You okay?”

She blinked her eyes clear and nodded. “I think so.”

He glanced her over with a critical eye and then helped her into a sitting position.

“Well, your neck’s not broken,” he quipped, attempting levity. “Can’t get rid of you that easy, I guess.”

He held her chin up, first turning her face first to one side and then the other, looking in her eyes. Probably checking to see if her pupils were dilated.

Charis had a vivid memory from when she was nine years old. Their dad had been away on deployment, and she’d been bullied on the way home from school. Alex had found her hiding behind a dumpster, palms and knees dirty from falling in the mud, cheeks smudged from wiping her eyes. Her shirt — the one with the frill on the sleeves — had been ruined.

Alex had knelt down like this, checked her over, taken her home and gotten her cleaned up and settled. Then he’d gone out and found the boys who’d done it.

She never had problems with them again.

“Where are those pain killers?” Alex demanded over his shoulder, still looking at Charis. “How’s your leg?”

“Not great,” she admitted. Now that the rush of adrenaline was starting to ebb, a throbbing ache was blossoming in her ankle. It spiked with pain whenever she moved even just a little.

He reached into a pocket at his waist and slipped out a utility knife. “Hold still, Officer Izola. This is gonna hurt. Sorry.”

Charis gritted her teeth as, with quick, practiced precision, Alex slipped off her boot and carefully cut the material of her flight suit high enough that he could inspect her leg up to the knee.

“Good news. No breaks and you’re not going to bleed to death.” He gave her a wink. “But you’re going to swell and bruise pretty badly. Can you stand on your other foot?”

She nodded.

“Ok.” He dipped a shoulder under Charis’. “One, two, three—” He half lifted Charis and, together, they hobbled out of the connector passage and into the hab unit. He slapped the door control as they passed, sealing them in, creating yet one more barrier between them and the hungry vacuum of space. He half carried her the few remaining steps to the hab unit’s kitchenette. There, he gently lowered her into the booth that ran against the wall and helped her prop her leg up along the bench.

“Try to keep it elevated.”

“Sure.”

Charis glanced around the Kratossian hab unit. It was the same as the one on the Aretean side.

The booth in which she sat ran most of the length of one wall. In front of it was a narrow table, barely deep enough to set a meal unit on. Behind, the wall was lined up to the ceiling with storage panels of various sizes. Dr. Sofia was rummaging around in the med panel on the other end of the booth, presumably looking for the pain killers.

On the far wall, directly across from the booth, a sort of bump-out cupola offered a view of space. It was flanked on both sides by workstations, each with a chair, console, and more floor-to-ceiling storage panels.

On either end of the unit were doors. There was the door they’d just closed, which went to the now useless command unit. On the opposite end was a door that went into the sleeping and hygiene areas.

On the flat, open surface of the end walls, the Kratossians had mounted pictures of their families. Charis glanced over the images. There was a photo of Dr. Sofia, holding some kind of certificate and standing with a man Charis assumed was her husband. Another one of the same couple standing by a waterfall in a manicured garden.

The majority of the photos, however, were of Captain Philo’s family. Birthdays, school graduations, a visit to the zoo. There was one that particularly caught Charis’ attention. It was from years ago, when his daughters were younger. The girls sat on his knees. The older one had the kind of improbable expression that children came up with when adults told them to smile for a picture. The younger one was looking at something slightly off-camera and trying to escape her father’s arms.

She was about the same age as Charis had been when her dad had taken her up to fly that first time.

Alex leaned over, interrupting Charis’ thoughts. He tapped the surface of the kitchenette’s table, pulling up a recessed console display and angling it to face Charis. “Diagnostic’s running,” he said, still breathless. “Tell me what we’re seeing.”

Charis nodded, focusing. Alex knew basic ship’s controls and the protocols for damage assessment and recovery. That was all part of their training. But nobody knew Excelsior class freighters the way Charis did. Alex would defer to her knowledge.

“Um,” Charis licked her lips, and took a breath, trying to focus.

“Looks like the hull’s weakened in a lot of spots. We uh —” she frowned, trying to interpret the display. “I think we’re okay in here. For now, at least. Some structural damage but no leaks. The other side’s not great. Command module’s fully exposed to vacuum. There’s also a small air leak in the central computer module.” She tapped a few keys to shut off the module and stop more air from leaking. “Communication system is out. Electrical system ok. Thrust system — a few thrusters down but most still functioning. Spin servomotors ok. Small fuel leak . . .”

Alex made a face at that last one. Charis knew why. If their fuel leaked too much, they wouldn’t be able to make it home.

“Good news: Auto repair rerouted the maneuvering controls, so we should be able to fly.”

Then the last line of the diagnostic rolled up, and Charis felt her chest tighten.

“Life support’s damaged. Air scrubbers are okay for now but they’re not happy.”

“Can we breathe?”

She nodded. “Yeah, we can breathe. But it looks like there was a fire somewhere. CO2 is really high. Air scrubbers are rerouting most of the breathable oxygen in here, but if they fail . . .”

“We’ll worry about that when it happens,” Alex said, voice firm.

He paused for a moment, visibly going through a mental assessment of the situation.

“Ok. Next up, we need to figure out where we are relative to Tantalus. And where that other ship is out there. And if we’re going to hit any more gravity distortions.”

Charis nodded. With the hull weak, it would be risky to put the Confluence under power. But it would be even worse if they ran through another set of vortices like the last one.

Dr. Sofia returned with an ice pack, a glass of water, and a couple of pills.

Charis looked up at the woman. She hesitated for a moment and then nodded her thanks. She wondered what the other woman was thinking.

Charis put the pack on her leg and downed the pills.

Now that she’d finished her task, Dr. Sofia crossed the room and sat down quietly at one of the consoles on the other side, near the viewports.

Charis pulled up her sensor report.

And stopped.

“That can’t be right.”

“What?” Alex stepped close and peered at the display.

Charis angled it toward him so he could see more easily. “According to the sensors there’s —”

“Nothing out there,” he said slowly, frowning. “Must be a bad reading. Maybe the sensors got damaged too.”

Charis shook her head. “Diagnostic says they’re fine . . .”

“Could that be inaccurate? Maybe the diagnostic system is messed up?”

“Possible . . .” Charis said slowly. But that was unlikely. The diagnostic system had redundancies, and she had a clear, strong signal. If it was malfunctioning, she’d expect the signal to be degraded somehow.

“Maybe it’s —”

“It’s accurate,” Dr. Sofia interjected, voice quiet.

Both Charis and Alex glanced at her, caught by her tone. “How . . . ?”

“Look outside,” she said, simply. She nodded toward the cupola’s viewports.

Alex frowned and stood up. Then he walked over and looked more closely.

Charis watched as he peered outside. His body visibly stiffened.

“What?” she asked. She couldn’t see much from where she was. It just looked like the blackness of space out there . . .

Then she felt her brow wrinkle. It looked black out there, yes, but it was too black.

She felt icy fingers walking up her back.

There were no stars. None at all.

“Alex,” Charis said, “Tell me —”

“No, I’m seeing it too.” He glanced at Dr. Sofia and then turned back to Charis.

“The sensors are correct,” he said. “There’s nothing out there.”

For a long moment, they just looked at one another. Nobody spoke.

“How could the stars disappear?”

An odd expression flickered across Alex’s face.

“Could we have been transported somehow . . . ?” Dr. Sofia wondered aloud. She tapped on her console’s input panel, frowning. “That can’t be it. Even in empty space, there would be some faint amount of background radiation. Here, the sensors are absolutely clear.” She pursed her lips. “We must be in some kind of local field that stops electromagnetic radiation.”

“Where’d it come from?”

She shrugged. “Tantalus is the obvious guess.”

Charis nodded. That made sense. Maybe it wasn’t Tantalus itself that was invisible, but a field that it created . . . She stared at the empty readout, that eerie prickle returning.

“Wait a minute . . .” Dr. Sofia frowned leaning forward and typing again. “For a second, I thought . . .” She tapped again, probably scrubbing back in time.

Alex and Charis waited.

“There.” Dr. Sofia rattled off some coordinates and a timecode and sent the feed to Charis’ console. Alex came over to look too.

Sure enough, there was a little blip. Not much, but it was definitely there.

“It’s a slightly unusual frequency profile,” Dr. Sofia said, looking over the sensor telemetry. “Not as broad as you’d expect from typical interstellar bodies . . .” she paused, thinking. “A narrow profile like this would, most likely, be artificial.”

Charis was having a hard time keeping up. “What are you saying?”

“It means created by some kind of intelligence,” Alex said.

Aliens? Charis swallowed.

“Oh of course!” Dr. Sofia exclaimed, sitting back in her chair with obvious relief. Both Alex and Charis sent her questioning looks.

“Indoor lighting,” Dr. Sofia explained. “Our own cabin lights are spilling out into space. Most likely, there’s something out there, caught in the dampening field with us. When we rotate to the right position, light from the Confluence bounces off of whatever it is, and a small amount of that light comes back to us. That’s what the sensors detect.”

“Could it be Tantalus?”

“Possible . . .” She considered. “Do we still have any functioning external lights or active sensors?”

“Sure . . .” Charis pulled up the coordinates Dr. Sofia had sent earlier, hoping they got lucky.

The problem was that, in the dampening field, the only frame of reference they had was the Confluence itself. There were no external stars or constellations from which to gauge their position. They could be tumbling wildly and have no idea. Unless both the Confluence and the other object out there were staying mostly still, they’d have a hard time finding it again.

But they weren’t exactly helpless. They could calculate based on the movement they observed when the object had briefly appeared. And Charis had picked up a few tricks in her time as a pilot.

The Confluence’s outer ring had a set of docking floodlights. Two of them were no longer functional, but the others worked. She turned them on, set them to their broadest cone, and configured the lights to rotate around in a search pattern.

They waited. An anxious moment passed. Nothing. Another moment. Then two. Still nothing. Charis began to wonder if this was going to work. Maybe they’d drifted too far . . .

“There,” Alex said, pointing out the viewport. “I saw something.”

Dr. Sofia was already on it. “You’re right — you’re right; it’s there.” She fed the coordinate data to Charis, who keyed it in to steer the floodlights.

And then, there it was, just hanging casually in space.

Alex swore.

“It’s the other ship,” Charis realized. “They’re stuck in here too.”

“We’ve got to message them,” Dr. Sofia said. “Maybe we can work together to find a way out of this.”

“Comms are out,” Charis reminded her.

“But we have our lights, right?”

Charis shrugged. “Ok, sure. That might work.”

“And we know they communicate using Morse. Officer Izola,” Dr. Sofia looked at Charis, “can you ask them to give us a status report?”

“I think so.”

Charis licked her lips. The painkillers were helping a little bit, but it was difficult to concentrate with her leg starting to throb.

She pulled up a Morse alphabet on her console, keyed in a simple sequence, and set it to repeat.

WHAT IS YOUR STATUS

On the sensor display, the other ship flickered as the Confluence’s lights flashed on and off.

They waited for a long moment, but nothing happened.

The other ship was slowly moving away. She was under power, making occasional course corrections, perhaps trying to get out of the dampening field.

“Are they ignoring us?”

“Maybe they can’t reply?”

“Their thrusters are clearly still working.”

Charis frowned, thinking. “We’re not getting any signal from them in the dampening field, right? Not even light?”

“That’s right.”

“So maybe they can’t see our lights, either? Maybe it’s only us who can see our own lights?”

Dr. Sofia nodded, a look of comprehension dawning on her face. “You’re right. When they communicated to us, they used pulses from their thrusters. Maybe this is why. Maybe . . . Maybe they were already in the dampening field . . .” She raised an eyebrow. “What if we do the same thing?”

Charis glanced at Alex. He was staring out the viewports at the tiny, flickering dot of the other ship.

She keyed in a command to stop the lights flickering and send the pulse pattern to the thrusters instead.

She set it to only repeat three times. They couldn’t afford to spend much of their precious fuel — not with that leak — but it would be worth it if they could get help. The other ship seemed to be doing fine on fuel, since they were continuing to maneuver.

Through the hull, they felt the gentle rumble of the pulses. Charis wondered, a bit uneasily, if this would do any more structural damage. But things seemed to be holding.

They watched in silence, waiting for any kind of response. The third repetition ended. Still, the other vessel continued to maneuver, its motion appearing a bit odd in the sensor void.

Across the hab unit, Dr. Sofia was staring hard. Then, all of a sudden, she gasped, and her eyes widened with realization.

“What?” Charis and Alex both spoke at the same time.

“Surely, not —” Dr. Sofia muttered to herself, rapidly tapping away at her console’s input. She paused, watching something. Tapped a bit and watched again. Then her face went pale.

“What’s going on?” Charis asked.

Dr. Sofia looked at her. “Your Morse message —” she said. Her voice was barely recognizable. As if she’d seen a ghost. “What is it backward?”

“Umm…” Charis looked to Alex, confused. He just shrugged.

“What is it backward?” Dr. Sofia asked again.

Charis thought for a moment. The last word was ‘status,’ which backward would be . . . “S - U - T - A . . .”

“No,” Dr. Sofia cut her off. “That’s not what I meant. What is the exact inverse pattern of short pulses and long pulses? To what does that resolve?”

Charis tilted her head to one side. What . . . ?

“It’s extremely important,” Dr. Sofia said. There was an intensity in the woman’s voice that Charis hadn’t heard from her before. Alex was watching the scientist closely, an indescribable expression on his face.

“I don’t —” Charis looked at them helplessly.

“It’s okay,” Alex said slowly. “What’s the last letter of the message again?”

“S”

“And what’s that in Morse?”

“Three dots.”

“Right, so that one’s the same backward or forward. What’s the next letter?”

“U”

“That one in Morse?”

“Two dots and a dash.”

“And what letter is a dash and then two dots?”

“D,” Charis said, catching on to what they were doing. “And the next letter after that’s T and then the one after that, reversed, is . . . N. And then there’s another S . . .”

“S - D - T - N - T - S,” Dr. Sofia said with quiet satisfaction. “And I bet the next sequence is R - D - O - Q.”

Charis translated the next couple of letters in her head. “Yes, that sounds right.”

She still felt confused. The other two were looking at each other like they’d had some deep, uncomfortable revelation.

“What’s going on here?”

“Think about it, Charis,” Alex said. “The sequence of letters. Isn’t familiar somehow?”

Charis frowned at him. Alex, where are you going with this?

“It’s the same message that the other ship out there sent us. Before the crash.”

“Which means,” Dr. Sofia said quietly, “that ship . . . is us. We’re seeing ourselves, just from a different moment in time.”

Charis stared at her. “But . . . how could that be possible?”

The scientist shrugged helplessly. “Who knows? Maybe it’s the interference of the gravity vortices. Maybe it’s just proximity to Tantalus. This is uncharted territory.”

Charis frowned, struggling with disbelief. Time travel? Really?

She looked back and forth between the scientist and her brother, checking to see if the two of them had contrived this as some sort of insanely inappropriate joke.

But they were both deadly serious.

“Look at the visual recording,” Dr. Sofia said. “I noticed the other ship’s motion seemed odd. That’s because it’s inverted. If I play the recording in reverse . . .”

Charis watched in silence. Dr. Sofia was right. When played backward, the only extraordinary thing about the recording was how ordinary it looked. Just another Excelsior class freighter, flying around. Only it wasn’t another freighter. It was the same one. Them — just moments earlier.

For the third time, Charis felt the uncomfortable sensation of spiders marching up her back.

“I guess that explains the apparent dampening,” Dr. Sofia said, thoughtfully. “We’re not in a true dampening field — it’s just that we’re in different moments in time. Any electromagnetic signals that we send are trapped in our moment in time, and any signals that they send are trapped in theirs.”

“Then how can we see them at all?”

“Our light waves are still in our time. We can see our own light reflecting off them. That’s why we can see the thruster pulses, in fact. It’s their movement in their time, but it’s still our light in our time.”

Charis thought that over. “Okay, but what about the backward Morse code? Why are things flipped?”

Dr. Sofia smiled wryly. “Isn’t it obvious?”

Charis shook her head.

“It’s backward because we are,” Alex said, pulling up his display and tapping on the input panel.

“What do you mean?”

“Somehow,” Dr. Sofia said, “when we passed through that stacked horizon, we became reversed in time.”

Reversed in . . . ? “You mean we’re going back in time?”

The scientist nodded. “That’s the simplest explanation that fits the evidence.”

“But how?” Charis looked between the two others, still half believing this was a joke.

“No idea,” Dr. Sofia said.

“How do we get back?”

“I don’t know.” Dr. Sofia made a face. “Maybe we don’t . . .”

Abruptly, a new alarm went off.

Charis pulled up the status display on her console, but she didn’t need to. The pitch of the alarm, together with a muted amber status light that ran around the floor, let her know what it was.

She silenced the alarm.

“Life support. Air scrubbers just went out.”

Alex glanced up from his console and looked back out the window. “How long do we have?”

She thought. “I don’t know. Depends on how much air we have in the unit . . .”

“What’s your best guess?”

“With the three of us? And the CO2 levels high from that fire?” She chewed on her lip, running the mental calculation. She felt her heart drop. “Maybe forty-five minutes, maybe less?”

“Can we lower the atmo?”

Charis nodded. A good idea. When she went on space walks to make repairs, the atmospheric pressure in the suit was usually lower than in the ship. It was more efficient.

It was similar to what a scuba diver experienced coming back to the surface from depth. And, just like a scuba diver, if they did it too fast, nitrogen would trap in their blood and give them decompression sickness.

“Not fast enough to make a difference,” she decided. “Besides, with the scrubbers out, I don’t think we’d be able to get the right mix of oxygen and nitrogen.”

Alex glanced at Dr. Sofia. Charis followed his gaze. The Kratossian scientist’s attention had drifted again, and she was staring out the viewport with a faraway look.

Then Charis felt an odd, unfamiliar sensation rising in her stomach. The deck under them and the bulkheads around began groaning. Charis felt herself lifting slightly off the bench.

The dizziness was all-too-familiar.

“Gravity vortex.”

“Can we pilot around it?”

“How?” Charis laughed. “I have no sensors. No point of reference. I can’t tell where it is.”

Keeping a hand against the bulkheads, Alex stepped over to the workstation across from Dr. Sofia and sat down.

They’d just have to wait it out.

The bulkheads continued to strain. Charis tried to breathe calmly and slowly. It wasn’t as good for dealing with gee forces, but it was better to conserve oxygen.

They waited, listening for any sign that the ship’s hull was collapsing under the strain.

Long minutes passed. Charis and Alex watched each other, faces tense, fighting the vertigo that spun the room around them.

For her part, Dr. Sofia seemed distracted. She was trying to perform some kind of operation at her console. She kept blinking hard, obviously working against the dizziness, but she was so focused on her task that the gravity distortions seemed only to ineffectually distract her from her task.

In the end, the strange feelings began to subside. Mercifully, everything had held.

They’d made it.

When the bulkheads finally stopped creaking, Dr. Sofia cleared her throat to get their attention.

They looked at her, Alex with an eyebrow raised. “Yes?”

Dr. Sofia couldn’t suppress a foolish grin, looking first at Alex and then Charis. “It’s here.” With surprise, Charis realized that the scientist was blinking back tears. Dr. Sofia gestured toward the console, expression radiant. “It’s all here.”

“Excuse me?”

“The telemetry! When that gravity vortex came just now, it got me thinking. Our purpose on this expedition is to capture the telemetry, right?”

Alex and Charis looked at each other, then back at Dr. Sofia. “Yes . . . ?”

“So, we passed from one time direction to the other,” she explained.

“And we were recording? You got it?”

“All of it. Everything. It’s —” She glanced back down at the console, scrolled some more. “It’s beautiful. Incredible. This is — “ she laughed. “This is revolutionary — paradigm shifting. And . . .”

She trailed off, peering closer. There was a long pause. Both Alex and Charis watched her, waiting.

Eventually, she looked back at them, a satisfied expression on her face. “Yes,” she said. “This is possible.” She grinned at them. “We could build this.”

“Are you sure?” Alex asked, standing from his seat and crossing toward her to take a look.

She nodded. “It would take some years,” she speculated. “We would need to develop new hardware. But . . . yes,” her smile broadened, “in principle we can create artificial gravity.”

“How strong?”

She shrugged. “As strong as you like. All it needs is energy. And once we have even a small functioning prototype, we have plenty of that.” She looked back and forth between the two of them. “We’ve done it. We’ve solved the energy problem.”

Charis laughed shakily, releasing a tension she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

If the energy problem were really solved, could that mean — she almost didn’t want to allow herself to think it — the end of the conflict? Could it really be over?

After so long?

Charis felt warmth at the corners of her eyes.

“Now we just have to figure out how to get back home.”

Alex bent over toward Dr. Sofia. For a heartbeat, Charis thought he was going to embrace her. But then she saw his expression. It wasn’t one of joy. It was grim, committed.

Dr. Sofia barely had time to look up. She let out a small, sharp breath. An expression of pain flickered across her face. Then she looked down at her chest.

Red was beginning to bloom in the material of her spacesuit. Red around the handle of the utility knife Alex had used earlier. The knife which he’d just driven into her.

Dr. Sofia frowned, confusion written across her face.

Then Alex reached up and broke her neck.

Charis gasped. She felt abruptly disconnected, as though she were observing the situation from a long way off. They were each tiny little figures in a Confluence-shaped doll house, enacting some demented child’s play.

Half catching the dying scientist, Alex leaned her body back against the wall. In a moment, she was gone, her dead eyes staring at the floor.

“Alex —” Charis hardly recognized the sound of her own voice. “What — ?!”

“The mission.” He said simply, cutting her off. He stood back up carefully, methodically checking his spacesuit for damage. He was unexpectedly calm — inappropriately calm — as if reading a weather report.

Charis felt a thrill of something not quite fear.

Her mind spun. She couldn’t stop staring at the body, replaying what had just happened — not just the death — murder — but the whole string of events that led up to it. None of it made sense . . . .

And Alex — her brother Alex — who’d partly raised her. His calmness, more than anything, brought her horror to the fore. She felt overwhelming nausea rise within her, nausea that had nothing to do with gravity. It was only with great effort that she avoided emptying her stomach onto the table in front of her.

Alex turned Dr. Sofia’s console to face himself and began tapping on the interface.

“Charis.”

She looked up, startled. His tone was quiet and warm, her brother once more. He turned from the console and looked at her with kind eyes, so familiar.

She suppressed a shudder.

“Charis, I need your help. We need to send the telemetry to the other ship.”

She blinked.

“Think about it,” he said, stepping back toward her, hands open, nonthreatening. She shied away anyway. “Our version of the Confluence is disabled, but the one in the other timeline is still okay. They can take the data back and help our people.”

There was something in the way he said it, something in his tone . . . and finally, it clicked. She remembered now his expression when they’d first seen the other ship, caught out there amongst the vortices. How throughout the last few minutes, he’d let Charis and Dr. Sofia be the ones to put the pieces together, discover the inversion . . . .

“You knew.”

His cheek might have twitched. “Charis —“

“All along. You knew about the reversal in time, didn’t you?”

He gazed at her for a long moment, face unreadable. “We knew it was possible,” he admitted.

We? “Who was in on it?”

“Head of Intelligence, the President’s office, a few key players in the Senate. Anyone who matters.”

But not everyone.

Apparently, the Aretean leadership didn’t trust that the Senate would be unanimous. That was interesting. Could there be opinions like Captain Philo’s among the Areteans? Leaders on both sides willing to seek peace?

Charis frowned as the implications unfolded.

“And this — This mission was always about time travel for you, wasn’t it? It was never about energy.”

He shrugged. “The energy benefits are a nice bonus.”

“But why?” She looked at Dr. Sofia’s body. “Why is this worth —”

“Don’t you miss dad?”

“What — ?”

“Charis, listen to me,” he stepped forward, reaching across the table and grabbing her shoulders. She tried to pull away, but he held her. He’d always been stronger.

“We could get dad back,” Alex said, slowly, deliberately, stressing every word. “We could save him. We could save everybody.”

Charis’ breath caught.

She remembered her father’s words, all those years before. Words she’d cherished as a little girl, imprinted indelibly on her memory, without fully understanding why.

“One day, little starlet, you’re going to achieve impossible things.”

It couldn’t be.

Could it?

Had her future self already gone back in time? Met her father? Is that why he’d said that?

She felt her throat catch, overwhelmed by hope and fear — by the trauma of nearly dying; witnessing death; by a newfound terror of her brother; and by a piercing, yearning desire for her father.

She looked at Alex. He was watching her with an uncomfortable level of understanding. He knew her heart. She was without armor, exposed.

“It’s possible,” he whispered, “But we must send that telemetry.”

She shook her head slowly, unsure if it was from wonder or disbelief. Her eyes finally filled with the tears she’d suppressed for so long. She took a shaky breath, half gasp, half sob. She was trembling again. Alex slid his hands off her shoulders and grasped her wrists. She felt him gently placing her hands on the interface in front of her.

“Whenever you’re ready,” he said, voice soft, encouraging. He was trying not to rush her, but she still heard an undercurrent of urgency in his tone. Not surprising given that their air was running out.

Charis sniffed and wiped her eye. “Sorry.”

She looked down at the console and took a deep breath. “Okay.” Encode the telemetry in Morse. Put the stream of pulses in reverse. Probably, she’d need to split the thrusters into groups so that she could send more data at once. That meant she’d need to include some kind of orienting signal so the other versions of them would be able to figure out how she’d laid things out . . .

The other versions of them.

Charis hesitated, feeling a new rush of dread she couldn’t place. Something else was going on here . . . .

Then abruptly, the feeling crystalized into an awful suspicion, sharp like needles and broken glass.

She glanced at Dr. Sofia’s body and then looked at Alex. “What about the Kratossian crew members on the other ship?”

“What do you mean?”

She gestured toward the other Confluence hanging out there in the dark. “You’re going to kill them too, aren’t you?”

Alex’s cheek twitched again. It was the closest he’d come to a snarl. To breaking his composure. Clearly, he was frustrated, impatient. Just as clearly, he was trying not to let her see it.

“Charis,” he said in a low voice, “you’ve gotta trust me here . . .”

“You’re a murderer —”

“I’m a warrior,” he snapped. Charis jumped back, surprised at the animal ferocity in his voice. “We’re at war, Charis. People die and people kill in war. They do it to us. We do it to them. It’s what war is.”

He took a long breath, in through his nose and out through his mouth. When he spoke again, his voice was calm. Back in control.

“Listen, I get it. It’s . . . not pretty, what I have to do. But it’s no different than what they do to us. Charis, these people are enemies. They broke treaties and killed civilians. Think about the dozens — scores — of unprovoked attacks over the course of the past twenty years. What about them, eh? The Kratossians have repeatedly murdered families, little kids.”

He looked her in the eye and spoke very deliberately, enunciating each word. “Charis, we can’t allow them to get a weapon like this.”

She felt her brow contract even more. Weapon . . .?

Then she understood. He wasn’t planning to go back in time to save Areteans. Instead . . .

“No,” she shook her head, stunned by the sheer audacity of it. “No — no way.”

His eyes narrowed. “What?”

“Alex, you can’t just go back and write the Kratossians out of history.”

“Why not?”

She blinked, caught off guard by the direct, casual admission.

“Alex, that — that’s genocide.”

“It’s not killing if they never existed in the first place.”

They looked at each other for a long moment, shoulders rising and falling with each breath. On the wall panel, the air quality sensor went from a radiant gold to a baleful, blood-tinged amber.

“You said it was a weapon,” she pointed out.

“I misspoke.”

“No. You told the whole truth.” She took a breath and shuddered. “Maybe for the first time since you suggested that I pilot this mission. Is that why I’m here? Because you thought you could use me?”

Strangely, she didn’t feel shock or surprise. Just a profound sense of loss. When did Alex stop being the brother she knew and become this person she didn’t even recognize? How long had their trajectories been diverging?

“Charis, I need you to send that telemetry.”

“Or what,” she said with a sigh. “You’ll kill me too?”

He rolled his eyes. “Of course not.” He shrugged. “Besides, you and I are going to die in a few minutes anyway. Look at our trajectory.”

Charis frowned again. She had been so focused on the conversation, she’d lost track of what else was going on.

The blackout had temporarily messed up the ship’s guidance system, and there were no stars to go by. But, extrapolating from the position of the other Confluence and the course they’d been on when they were reversed . . . he was right. Their current course would take them close enough to Tantalus that they’d likely be pulled in and crash. If they weren’t torn apart by the gravity vortices first.

“Charis, you can do this. For our people.”

His voice was tender, almost pleading.

“We can’t save ourselves, but we can save us — the other us,” he gestured toward the other ship, floating out there alone in the darkness.

“We could save dad.”

For a heartbeat, she was back in her room at seventeen, sitting on her bed, furious, glowering up at her father. They’d been fighting. He reached down to touch her shoulder, but she pulled away, dropping her gaze and crossing her arms.

“I love you, Starlet, beyond distance and time.”

She turned away from him, stared at a poster on the wall, not really seeing it, wracking her brain for the most hurtful thing she could say.

“If that were true, you’d stay. You say you love us, but you’re just like mom. Never here.”

There was a long silence. She had the guilty satisfaction of knowing she’d landed a blow.

Then she’d heard the door quietly slide open and closed again.

Instantly, she’d been stricken with remorse, sorry she’d said it before the door stopped moving. But like a stupid fool, she’d been too proud to run after him.

She’d expected him to call the next day like he always did, to let her know he was on his way and safe. But she’d waited all day, and no word came. She’d felt bad, thought that he was still upset at her.

Then the security officer had been at the door. He’d been polite, compassionate. He told her to sit, informed her about what had happened. She didn’t remember anything after the word “attack.”

Charis looked down at the console in front of her. She had the power now. She could send herself back, say “sorry” and “I love you, too.”

For a brief, insane moment she humored the fantasy. The controls were there. It would take only a moment to configure the ship’s systems and send the data. It could be done before she had a chance to change her mind.

She — this version of her — would never see her father again. But she could give this gift to her other self.

She thought about that girl out there, so full of pain long held, long buried, long bubbling back up. What she wouldn’t sacrifice for a chance to change things; to have him hold her again and tell her it was okay.

Quiet, warm tears flowed freely down her cheeks.

But there was the murdered Kratossian scientist.

And there was Captain Philo — her enemy — who had given his life to save her.

She looked at the picture on the wall. At the little girls sitting on their daddy’s knees. It struck her that they’d never get to see their father again either.

If Alex got what he wanted, they’d never even exist at all.

There might be a timeline in which some version of Charis could see her daddy again, but this wasn’t it.

“Sis,” Alex nudged, a mixture of urgency and warning in his voice.

“Okay,” She collected herself, took another shaky breath. “Okay.”

She placed her fingers on the console surface, feeling the smooth, cool plastic material. She took a heartbeat to focus. Then, keeping her eyes down, avoiding looking at Alex, she keyed in the thruster controls.

When she was done, she pulled up the system administrator settings and typed one more command. Then she hit “Save.”

She was committed now.

She felt tension rising in her body as she anticipated what was coming. But the icy grip on her heart had loosened. Whatever happened, she’d given her best.

She leaned back and finally looked at Alex. “It’s done.”

Through the walls and floor of the Confluence, they felt the gentle vibration of the thrusters firing.

Alex visibly relaxed. “Thank you, Charis. You’ve —” He frowned. His eyes narrowed.

Figured it out quick, Charis thought, biting the inside of her lip.

The ship’s vibrations weren’t pulsing in the sort of semi-random pattern that would have meant a complex data transfer. Instead, they were following a very simple, all-too-recognizable pattern. Three short pulses, three long pulses, three short pulses.

“What have you done?” Alex snarled, shoving her back and swinging the console around to face himself. She bounced against the wall, curling defensively inward, leg jolting with pain.

Alex’s fingers flew over the interface, trying to pull up menus and commands.

But nothing worked. She could see his agitation in his shoulders as he kept getting the same screen.

“What’s the password?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

He whipped around. “What do you mean, ‘you don’t know’?”

“I randomized it when I locked the controls.”

Alex gaped.

He could still try a full system restore, of course. That would reset everything, including the administrator password. But they probably had only minutes left. The likelihood of getting that done in time . . . .

Alex clearly was thinking the same thing.

“You fool,” he said, voice suddenly deathly quiet. “You’ve ruined any hope we had for peace.”

“If the only way to end a war is by killing everybody on the other side, that’s not peace.”

For a long moment, he just stared at her.

On the wall, the air quality status display went from a reddish amber to an ugly shade of crimson. It tinted his face the color of blood.

Beneath the deck, Charis felt the telltale groan that signified another gravity vortex was approaching.

She watched Alex, wondering what was going through his mind. Wondering if he was angry enough to try to hurt her for ruining his plan.

But he didn’t do anything, say anything. He stood there still, unmoving. As though dead.

Somewhere between the bulkheads, there was a moan of stressed metal. The vibration of the thrusters stopped. Something in the system had given out, most likely a wiring connection or, maybe, something in the electronics.

Charis started to feel dizzy. She felt the strange inverse-weight of the backward-moving gravity vortex. There was a faint rushing in her ears.

She wondered if they’d make it all the way to Tantalus. Would they get sucked in, collide with the dark mass? Would the gravity shearing tear the Confluence apart first? Or would they asphyxiate before even that happened?

In spite of herself, Charis felt a quirky grin spreading on her face. It was so unexpected, so ironic, this falling backward toward oblivion.

She looked at the picture of Captain Philo’s little girls on the wall. She couldn’t save their father. But maybe she could save his wish for their kids.

Charis’ dad had told her she’d do the impossible one day.

He was right.