From Silence, Song
Flash-fiction - by Brandon Nolta
None of the crew of the Heaven’s Path could have predicted the hyperspace shear wave. Such an event had never been observed, and those few who understood hyperspace physics well enough to describe the concept would have said it was entirely theoretical. Now, after losing nearly half the crew and a good chunk of the ship, Captain Drexler knew better.
“Options?” Drexler asked his chief engineer.
“We can enter this universe next to us, and that’s it. Grav propulsion is gone, and the jump engines will soon follow. Heaven’s Path is limping along as best she can, but we’re in dire need of a dry dock. Best case, we’ll be sucking vacuum in 36 hours,” Lieutenant Commander Marrow said, the clench of her jaw her only sign of distress at the news or having inherited her new position.
“That’s the good news,” Commander Chen, Drexler’s XO, chimed in. “Bad news, we’re parked on the existence boundary of a textbook Big Empty universe. Totally flat, hydrogen atoms equally distributed in all directions, no perceptible gravitational distortions. It’s as close to a perfect vacuum as I’ve ever seen.”
“I’ll be sure to put that in the log,” Drexler said, his voice projecting calm. “Can we evacuate the crew?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Chen said, projecting a set of diagrams on the conference room holographic display. “We have life pods, but they don’t have jump engines. The crew would just drift in interstitial space until they were picked up, and the odds of any ship picking up rescue beacons in hyperspace are, at best, terrible.”
“Then there’s the core,” Marrow said, pointing to a power consumption graph. “The containment fields took a massive hit from the wave, so on top of everything else, we’re going to be without juice probably in 24 hours. That’s if I can keep the failure from being catastrophic and blowing up what’s left of us. Frankly, sir, not the way to bet.”
Drexler sighed, and glanced at the communicator display on his left wrist. The display was on dosimeter mode, showing an angry red number a couple digits too high. Drexler hadn’t bothered figuring out how much time he had left. It would be enough for whatever he could do, and then…it wouldn’t matter anymore. He could live with that. So to speak.
“Are the life pods working?” Drexler asked.
Marrow nodded. “We have enough to support the remaining crew. All stasis beds report functional.”
“An infinitesimal chance beats no chance,” Drexler told his officers. “Life pods have some maneuvering and docking capability, so we can link them up, correct? Let’s get everybody in a pod, eject them from the ship, band them together in a linked formation, and set one up as an emergency beacon screaming an SOS to hell and gone.”
Chen nodded, though Drexler could see he wasn’t thrilled about the prospect of going into stasis for what could be forever. Drexler could also see that Marrow had an objection, and he thought he knew what it was. That was fine; it was the captain’s prerogative to ignore such considerations.
“Let’s get to it,” Drexler said.
Chen and Marrow left the conference room, already giving orders to what remained of the Heaven’s Path crew, leaving Drexler in his seat. He was sure Marrow caught his glance at the dosimeter view and knew what he’d left unsaid. Even if she hadn’t, she knew he’d been near the shear edge at Engineering when the wave hit, and the likely exposure wouldn’t have slipped her attention. Of all the times to check on system upgrades…
Drexler closed his eyes and pondered their options. In stasis, his crew had a chance, but the pods weren’t smart enough to coordinate and link up by themselves, and there weren’t enough experienced pilots in the survivors to make it work manually. To get all the pods linked and running together in real time, someone would have to stay behind. Who better than me? Drexler thought. Captain should go down with the ship anyway; it’s tradition.
For a moment, he pictured how his death would come. Before the Heaven’s Path died, he would run the jump engines for their final go, crossing the existence boundary from interstitial space into the emptiness of a universe doomed to stillbirth, a flat emptiness from a fatally flawless cosmic egg. There, Heaven’s Path would either explode into shattered debris or peter off into death, an irradiated corpse at the helm, his last actions bent on keeping the life raft of his surviving crew from the potential high-energy sleet of Heaven’s Path’s death.
And then, a thought occurred to him.
“Computer,” he said, “run a simulation with the following parameters.”
Drexler fed the stats on what was left of the Heaven’s Path into the computer, followed by the conditions of the universe next door. Given what behavior they had observed, he had the computer extrapolate the physical laws at play, gave the computer a variety of timelines, and let the machine run. For a few minutes, the computer crunched numbers, calculated variables, asked for clarifications. Reports and decisions came his way, and he responded, waiting for the machine to tell him what he hoped was true.
Finally, the simulation cycle concluded, and Drexler asked for a summary report. The timelines differed, but for nearly all variations, the outcome was the same: The wreckage of Drexler and the Heaven’s Path would disrupt the Big Empty equilibrium, introducing enough mass and velocity that eventually, an accretion disk would form. Given enough time, a star would form, and then, a stellar nursery could begin.
For the first time since the wave, Captain Drexler smiled. In death, he and his ship would be the ignition of a new existence, the forever mysterious spark that began a universe. At that moment, already feeling the beginning symptoms of terminal radiation exposure, he couldn’t imagine a better fate.
Drexler got to his feet and, whistling, left to save his crew and, maybe, get a new Creation going.
***