Star’s End
by A. Reid Johnson
Catherine swept her hands across the control board. Green lights shone across the Omuma’s bridge displays. “Wormhole criticality at 92%; ready for deinsertion.”
Next to her in the captain’s chair, Tark engaged the drive system and prepared to shut it down. “On 3, 2, 1… engines off.”
He flipped the toggle.
Nothing happened.
He looked at his second in command with a furrowed brow. He flipped the toggle again. Still nothing. “Why didn’t it stop?”
Catherine opened menus, drilling deep into the ship’s performance readouts. Nothing looked amiss, yet the drive was still running. “I don’t know…”
“It says the drive pressure’s increasing. What now?” Tark’s voice wavered.
“I’ll go try the manual release valve. Stay put and be ready to turn the engine off.”
Tark flipped the control back and forth as Catherine undid her harness, grabbed a toolkit, and descended the ladder towards the engine room. As her head slid below the deck plates, she heard Tark say something.
“Use the headset!” she shouted.
The engine hum deepened as she approached. A hot oily mist pervaded the workspace, plastering her hair to her face. She brushed it away and opened the diagnostic console. Ok, how can I fix this? “I’m smelling ozone down here, and there’s oil venting from somewhere,” she said, dropping the toolkit. The carbon filaments should have absorbed that. What the hell?
“We’re up to 95%,” Tark’s voice cracked. “We’ve got to shut down.”
His calm baritone had been replaced with a tight, higher pitched voice.
If he’s nervous… should I be? Her stomach tightened.
“I’ll vent the pressure. We’ll be fine,” she replied, trying to keep her voice calm.
Catherine kicked open the tool kit, grabbed a wrench, and shuffled to a small work area. When she reached the bulkhead, the smell of ozone was even stronger. At the base of the engine mount, she tore off a protective cover. She fit the wrench to the exposed valve and strained, but it didn’t budge.
The engine hum increased in pitch once more, and the ship bounced as if it had hit something.
“What was that?” Tark’s voice was barely audible over the roar of the engine.
Instead of answering, she lifted the wrench up and slammed it down onto the vent release.
“Come ON!” she shouted.
With a jolt, the mechanism engaged. For a moment, a loud hiss replaced the hum.
“Go!” Catherine stepped back and waited for the engines to shut down.
“I still can’t turn them off,” Tark yelled. “It’s at 98 percent!”
The engine vibrated in its mounts, emitting a shrill whine. Catherine scrambled back to the console. “The release valves are open, but the pressure keeps rising; it’s like the engine inlet and outlet ports are both jammed–but that doesn’t even make sense.”
Tark breathed rapidly in her earpiece. There was a continuous clicking sound she realized was him flipping the engine toggle back and forth.
“Did you do it?” Tark asked.
“I did. It didn’t work…”
“There’s an orange light…”
“Dump the fuel!”
“Why are the lights flashing?”
A klaxon sounded as the whole ship shuddered and dimmed.
Steam hissed onto the catwalk. She grabbed the wrench and slammed the vent mechanism over and over.
“One hundred and two percent!” Tark yelled.
The ship dropped out of n-space with a bang. It pitched and rolled through multiple dimensions, throwing Catherine against the cramped walls of the engine bay. She cried out as the wrench slammed into her forehead. Her vision blurred as tears welled up. She heard blood rushing in her ears as her vision contracted to a pinpoint and faded to black.
Catherine opened her eyes to Tark’s wrinkled brow. He let out a long slow breath.
“Don’t try to move. Let me get you strapped in.”
She was on the bridge. Tark eased her into her chair and attached the harness, securing her into the seat.
“You weren’t out long, just a few minutes. Long enough for me to worry, though.”
Catherine scanned her body and felt for any major damage. It felt like she’d bounced down a flight of stairs, but she didn’t notice any sharp pain.
Tark had the medical kit out.
“I’m fine,” Catherine said.
Tark smirked, shook his head, and then pressed a bandage to her forehead.
“Ow,” she replied. “Alright, besides that, I guess.”
The bridge was dark and silent. Only a few dim emergency lights were on. Catherine stretched her arms out, confident she could use them, and then turned to Tark. “What happened back there?”
“How would I know? You’re the astrophysicist…”
“No, you. What happened to you?”
“I got scared.” Tark looked away. His face relaxed as he stared into nothingness. “When that happens, I freeze up. It’s why I had to get out of the Navy. I…”
He paused. Catherine knew there was a secret there, but wasn’t sure what it was.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Tark idly swiped at a dark control panel.
Catherine faced her console. “I’ve got this. I’ll do a manual reboot.”
“I’ll go find you a protein drink.” He glided to the rear of the bridge to a small storage cabinet.
She flipped several toggles and waited for the ship to come back to life. “All right, where are we…”
The screens remained dark. She fiddled with the diagnostics and frowned. “Basic systems online. Nav’s out. Coms out. Sensor and visual arrays are down too. This might take some work.”
Tark returned with one of her drinks. He handed it to her and she pierced the bulb with the straw. She took a long slow sip and sighed, settling back into her work station.
“That tastes pretty good.”
She took one more sip, and then squeezed the bulb slightly to put a small film of the drink inside the straw. She tethered it to the console with a magnet so it floated near her in the cabin.
The two of them stared at the bubble for a few moments.
“Keep your eyes on that bubble. If it starts to move, we’ll have to find the leak,” Catherine said.
“We have state of the art sensors, and you use bubbles to probe for leaks. That’s why I keep you on the payroll.”
Catherine smiled at him. “You keep me on the payroll because no one else will put up with your old navy stories. Besides, it’s tough to get a pressure reading on this,” she said, gesturing to the darkened electronics displays. “So, I’m going to work on bringing the sensor arrays and coms back online.”
“Alright. I’ll check the rest of the ship and make sure everything is still secured.”
Tark pushed himself out of the bridge and Catherine activated her research console. She coaxed it through its reboot and pulled up her data. When she found the visual recording of their deinsertion, she played it back, scrubbing it forwards and backwards a few times before frowning and closing the display. Corrupted data. Maybe I can remove some of the noise. She activated her processing algorithm and fed the video file into it. Then, she unbuckled herself and began pulling apart the instrument bay. Soon, the bridge was a tangle of wiring with computers half out of their racks.
Thirty minutes later, she heard Tark return. She had found several damaged components, and was replacing the last one.
“Is it that bad?” he asked.
She clicked it into place and pushed herself out of the mess. She held up one blackened cube, and pumped her arm triumphantly. “Fried relay, but I soldered in a new one that’ll last until we can get it serviced for real.”
“What would I do without you?” Tark asked. “And what can I do?”
“Well, you can start by helping me reassemble the bridge while I bring up the coms,” she replied, handing him a screwdriver.
Tark got to work fastening the computers back into their racks while Catherine strapped in to her console.
“There we go,” she said. “Coms are back up–“
The nav computer registered a nearby beacon with a short electronic ping. After a few moments, a reedy voice began playing out of the speaker.
“Hey, there. This is Jeff Williamson. I’m stationmaster here at Star’s End. I hope you’re getting your ship under control. You should have received coordinates.”
Tark let go of the screwdriver and rushed back to his workstation. “Stationmaster Williamson, this is Tark Woolsley, Captain of the Omuma. We are flying blind, and just got our main computer systems back online. We had a rough reentry. Our wormhole engines failed and most of our systems are down. Woolsley out.”
After a few seconds, Jeff replied. “That’s pretty common. There is some… anomalous… behavior out here. Don’t, uh, don’t trust your optical array. In fact… switch it off. Follow our beacon. We’ll have a berth ready.”
“Acknowledged. Our nav thrusters are functional. We should be there in about…” Tark looked over at Catherine who held up six fingers. “Six hours.”
Tark switched off the com and turned to Catherine with one eyebrow raised.
“I saw some weird readings on my visuals; maybe that’s what he means.”
“Well, we can at least follow the nav point.”
He strapped into his chair as Catherine entered the coordinates. She reached up and pocketed the screwdriver, still floating where Tark had left it. When the transponder flashed green, he engaged the thrusters.
Over the next six hours, the automatic guidance system followed the beacon to the station. Several umbilicals extended, and with a soft clunk, the ship docked into the berth.
The docking panel illuminated green, and Tark broadcast to the station, “All clear. Ready to disembark.”
Jeff met them outside the airlock. “I’ll explain everything. There is a lounge with real portholes, no tricks from the optical arrays. We maintain about a quarter gee there; it’s not much, but it’ll hold your whiskey to the table. We’ll get your ship fueled and stocked. Then I’ll give you long term coordinates. How many crew?”
“Just us,” Tark replied.
Jeff sighed, turned with slumped shoulders, and led them down a series of short ladders towards the exterior of the station, down spin from the zero-g docking bay.
The station was cobbled together from an assortment of ships. Grime was tucked into the corners; paint peeled from the walls.
They paused at a bulkhead. After a few moments, Jeff exhaled sharply and opened the door into a small lounge. There were several mismatched chairs and Jeff motioned for them to sit. Tark took the largest, which he regretted as soon as the wall behind it louvered open showing the starfield and deep space. He turned and strained in his chair to get a better view.
Jeff clanked around a small galley and returned with a tray. Tark picked up a glass and took a large swallow.
Jeff stood behind his chair. His face was flat, and he kept crossing his arms and then dropping them down again.
“Catherine here’s a first-rate crew. Keeps my ship from falling apart, though sometimes I think she just uses my ship to further her astrophysicist dreams.”
Catherine smiled. “Dreams is about right. I left my program to see actual stars. I suppose someday I’ll finish my degree.”
She flipped open her data-pad to monitor her maintenance bots swarming around the ship.
“Where are you outbound from?” Jeff asked.
“We did a resupply at Einstein,” Tark replied. “We’re headed back to Earth.”
Jeff opened his mouth, closed it, and clasped his hands behind his back. He faced the starfield. Catherine reached forward and plucked her drink from the tray. She took a sip. “I haven’t been able to confirm any anomalies on our optical sensor modules, are you sure–”
She stopped talking mid-sentence, gaping out the view port.
From the next seat, Tark laughed, adding “Catherine, what the hell? You’re acting like you’ve never seen stars before.”
When she didn’t move, Tark made an exasperated sigh. He leaned over to set down his glass and followed her gaze. The glass fell out of his fingers and made a soft clink as it hit the metal floor in the reduced gravity.
The stars had disappeared.
Both turned to Jeff, who now sank into one of the remaining chairs and picked up his whiskey, downing it in one gulp. As the station rotated, he pointed out the porthole as his only explanation. A sharp dividing line cut the universe in half. On one hemisphere, the stars appeared normal. On the other, it was pitch black.
“Like I said, welcome to Star’s End.” A number of other portholes opened showing a chaotic collection of hundreds of ships surrounding the station.
“Where did all these ships come from?” Tark asked.
“We all got here the same way.” Jeff pursed his lips and inhaled slowly before meeting Tark’s gaze. “Either by choice, or by accident, you ran your engines a bit longer. A malfunction maybe, or you were trying to save time.”
Catherine set aside her data-pad and stared at Jeff. “We only engaged for a few minutes past criticality, but then we couldn’t shut the engines off.”
“You pulled too much energy from the quantum foam,” Jeff replied. “Apparently it has a decidedly non-linear response curve.”
“Sure, we pull energy out,” Tark said, “but we put it back at the other end.”
Catherine wrinkled her brow. Jeff started to speak, but she raised her index finger. “Hang on. Our drive systems are not 100% efficient. We don’t put all the energy back. But how does that explain the missing stars?”
“Our best guess? The incomplete transfer forms a kind of anchor for the wormhole drive. When the drives fail, we get pulled all the way out here. It’s the end of stars. It just stops. We’re at the edge of the universe.”
“This must be what happened to the lost squadrons,” Tark whispered, face ashen. “General Bainbridge often had us run the drives well beyond spec.”
“And all the ships end up… here?” Catherine asked.
“Apparently,” Jeff gestured to the hodgepodge of mismatched ships extending outward along the edge of blackness. “I’ve been out here for fifteen years now. Some of the oldest ships are derelicts, trapped for more than a century. We occasionally reset their nav computers to keep them out of the way, but few have been out here longer than me.” He paused. “Lots of suicide.”
“Here be dragons…” Catherine shuddered.
Catherine sat on the Omuma’s bridge. Her wormhole optimizer flashed data, but she focused on the optical recording of their deinsertion. Holding a stylus between her teeth, she scrubbed the display forward a few frames. This can’t be right.
She pushed herself out of her chair and floated over to the astrogation computer. The forward optical arrays showed the stomach-churning black emptiness beyond the station, but aft, the stars appeared normal. She activated her pulsar camera and the display changed, rapidly centering on stars and displaying their spectral lines. As the readings continued, she gasped.
“Tark, get up here,” she said over the intercom.
Soon, he appeared on the bridge. “What’s up?”
She pointed to the monitor, selecting and labeling some of the stars.
He squinted at it. “What are you showing me?”
“My program’s picking out pulsars. We aren’t at the ‘end of the universe.’ We’re still in the Milky Way.”
“What? How?” he asked. “Why is Jeff lying to us?”
“I don’t think he is. How do you know where we are when we’re off course?”
“I ask the nav computer to locate me. It does some sort of distance calculation… right?” He looked to her to make sure he got the answer right. Her smile prompted one of his in response.
“Close enough. But look at this.”
She zoomed out on the astrogation projection to show their position as well as that of Einstein and Earth. “We aren’t a little off course; we’re over a thousand light years off course. The nav computers can’t find our location, but I can triangulate using pulsars.”
Tark still didn’t look convinced. “Why isn’t anyone else able to find our position then?”
“It should be standard practice, but do you know how to do it?”
Tark shook his head no.
“Honestly, there’s no reason for you to know. The nav systems should track all of this. Then again, the drives aren’t supposed to send us this far off course. Any astrophysicist should be able to tell us where we are, but apparently I’m the first one out here.”
Tark crossed his arms. “Well explain that, then.” He pointed to the other monitor showing the blackness of space, the edge of the universe.
Catherine smiled and pushed herself back to her wormhole optimizer.
“Check out the optical feed as we bounced back into 3-space.” She played the video. During the final milliseconds of their drop from n-space, a black object rapidly grew in size until it filled the entire forward field of view.
“I thought you said the data was corrupted?”
“I thought it was, but then I told the computer that the dark void was real and not a glitch from the compression.”
“What is it?”
“I’m not sure, but I know how big it is: 40 AU.”
Tark opened his mouth to speak, but paused.
“That’s basically the orbit of Neptune.”
Tark floated silently next to her. After a moment, Catherine spoke again. “It’s not supposed to be here. When we create wormholes, we pull energy out of the quantum foam. When we deinsert, the energy should go back. Apparently, some of the negative mass-energy stuck together and grew, rooting one end of the wormholes out here.”
Tark watched, wordlessly, as Catherine’s face relaxed. “It’s a beautiful artifact, and not unpredicted by the underlying science. Look…”
Catherine flipped her data-pad around to show a graphical representation of the multidimensional wormhole equations. Tark leaned close, rubbed his chin, and shrugged.
Catherine chuckled. “You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
“I just fly the things, Catherine. I never claimed to understand the physics.”
“Basically, we’ve created a giant bubble. I don’t know how it started, but it’s growing because we don’t put all the energy back during wormhole jumps.”
He turned his head and gazed towards the storage cabinet holding Catherine’s protein shakes, then back to her. “If it’s a bubble, we should be able to pop it.”
Catherine felt time slow. Her mind opened, like it had when she first understood the wormhole equations back in college. She pictured them, moving reference frames and graphical representations in her mind’s eye. After a few seconds, she spoke again, “Well, yes, I believe it would be possible. The barrier between regular and negative mass-energy would be expected to be…”
Catherine scribbled some equations in her data-pad.
“The barrier should be meta-stable. I’m not sure where we’d get the energy for a standing wave, but if we can achieve a high energy harmonic frequency, the barrier should disintegrate. The negative energy will collapse back on itself and return to the quantum foam.”
Catherine continued talking to herself, diving deep into the display. She barely noticed as he pushed himself away from her and opened up the com channel to the station. “Jeff, this is Tark. We need to talk.”
The next day, they flew the Omuma about twenty kilometers from the station. Tark sat at the command console, ready to engage the wormhole generator. Catherine sat in the copilot seat, her screens and readouts spewing information faster than she could comprehend.
“We’re in position,” Catherine said. “Commencing test in five minutes.”
“Whenever you’re ready,” Jeff said. “At least if your drive fails, you won’t damage the station.” He cut the connection.
Tark turned to Catherine. “Are we likely to lose drive containment?”
“We shouldn’t. We aren’t forming a sustained wormhole for propulsion. I’ll be opening the generator at a specific interval. If we can get the dark energy membrane–the bubble’s surface–to vibrate, we should be able to pop it with a sufficient influx of energy.”
Tark pressed his palms against his temples and pursed his lips. “Tell me again why we can’t activate the wormhole generator and fly inbound?”
Catherine exhaled long and slow before responding. “Our wormhole drive won’t work. It needs mass behind and negative mass yanked out of the quantum foam in front. But if we’re pointed away from it, we’ve got no mass ‘behind’ us… just a giant nothingness.”
“So, we’ll be pushing in, using the mass behind?”
“Yes. I don’t understand why you find this so difficult.”
“Because I didn’t study advanced physics. You know this stuff. The rest of us only use it.”
Tark turned away with a deep sigh and fiddled with the controls near his readout.
“I’m sorry.” Catherine reached out to touch his upper arm. “I get so excited about the math. Besides, I forget that most people can’t see what I see.”
Still turned away, Tark replied. “You’re very good at it. You’ve wasted your brain working with me…”
“That’s not true. You know I left because of the sexist politics. I wanted to see the stars. I don’t regret the time I’ve spent out here with you.”
Tark turned to face her. “I’m a washed-up deserter, running from my past.”
Deserter? That’s new. That can’t be true. “Stop it. You are the one who was thinking outside the box. It was your idea to pop the thing.” She adjusted settings on her console.
Beside her, Tark flipped a toggle back and forth. After a prolonged silence, he stopped and swiveled in his chair.
“If we get out of here, you should finish your degree.”
Catherine stopped, fingers hovering over the controls. After a long pause, she replied, almost in a whisper. “I didn’t leave just to see the stars. I was outmatched there. I felt like I was faking it…”
“Most of us do.”
They sat quietly for a few minutes, setting up the drive and monitoring instruments. Finally, Catherine indicated it was time to begin the test.
“We’ll turn on our drive in ten seconds,” Tark broadcast.
She turned it on.
The drive cycled on and off. The engine whine built in a crescendo every few seconds before resetting, but there was no visual indication that anything had happened for several minutes. Catherine monitored her displays. The corners of her mouth turned upwards.
“This is good. We’re moving back and forth about three millimeters per cycle.”
Ionized particles collected in a cloud around the Omuma as the wormhole generators attempted to pull energy out of the dark bubble before them.
There was a brilliant white flash and the automatic damping filters turned on, blocking the view from the external sensors. The engines slowly spooled down and silenced.
“What was that?” Tark asked. He sat quietly, biting his lower lip. Catherine checked the drive containment readout, and then the astrogation display.
“A new ship deinserted. That wasn’t from our drive.”
She pulled up her wormhole optimizer and scrolled through the readout. After a few moments, she smiled. “Oh, we got great data!”
Catherine stood at the side of the conference room as Jeff raised his hands to silence the gathered crowd. More than forty captains gathered in the room. Hundreds more listened by video stream. “Please, everyone, settle down.”
She moved to the front of the room and glanced around at all the faces turned her direction. Her mouth was dry. This was exactly like her preliminary defense, when she left her program. She pushed that memory aside, and focused on the task at hand.
She looked at her notes and tried to swallow her fear. The words blurred on the screen. She needed a friend; someone she could speak to without being judged. There was Tark, at the back. He met her gaze, and winked. When Catherine spoke, she spoke directly to him.
“We’re not at the end of the universe, as many of you feared. We’re edged up against a stabilized negative energy bubble. It blocks the view of the surrounding stars and prevents our drives from functioning.”
A murmur rose from the captains that drowned out her voice. She clenched her data-pad tight in her white knuckled hands. At the back of the room, Tark grinned, and gave her a thumbs up. She cleared her throat, and the room quieted.
“The bubble expands with every new arrival, increasing its pull on this end of the wormholes. But the skin separating us from it retains its thickness… if you can even talk about the thickness of a mathematical object…
“I’ve analyzed the data from our deinsertion, and calculated its exact size. Then, I calculated the antipodal points of the spherical harmonic, and the energy required to break it apart.”
She looked out at the room full of blank stares, and reached for her protein shake, piercing the bulb with the straw and holding it up so everyone could see.
“I use the bubble in the straw as an emergency pressure monitor on the Omuma. The artifact is nothing but a giant bubble, separating our universe from the negative mass-energy we’ve torn out of it during our wormhole trips. If we fire our generators at precise intervals, it will set up a standing wave. When the next deinsertion occurs, that energy will collapse the barrier in on itself, returning it back to the quantum foam, just like the influx of energy from me squeezing will pop the drink bubble.
She squeezed the shake, sending droplets of chocolate into the air. A few of the captains chuckled, and Tark beamed back, his eyes twinkling.
Jeff rose and spoke to the crowd. “Proceed to your assigned coordinates. If this works, soon we’ll be heading home.”
The captains filed out, returning to their ships. Jeff walked with Catherine and Tark to the station’s command center.
“This is the most hopeful I’ve seen anyone out here in a long time,” he said. “Everyone assumed they’d die out here. You’ve given them–us–something to work towards. Thank you.”
Catherine nodded, but words didn’t come. She stared down at her protein drink.
“Come on, Catherine.” Tark leaned close. “This is all your doing. I know you have a hard time with congratulations, but you deserve them.”
She smiled. “Honestly, I’d rather wait until we’re successful to celebrate.”
Jeff laughed. “Point taken. The first round is on me.”
With that, the two left Catherine for their ships. She fired up her remote access control module that would automatically cycle all the drive systems. She placed her drink on the nearby console, and got to work.
It took a few hours for everyone to reach their assigned locations. Catherine had placed each ship at an anti-nodal point of the sphere. The carefully timed wormhole activation would pump energy into the bubble along stress lines of a high energy harmonic frequency, but it was going to take several hours of slowly building the amplitude before she expected to see any changes.
Captains called back with reports and updates. Catherine remotely activated each drive for a fraction of a second in a carefully orchestrated pulse, puckering the dark matter barrier as the ship attempted to create a wormhole. When it switched off, the pucker released and the ship rode backwards against the barrier for a carefully calculated interval.
At first, the motions of the ships were minuscule, but gradually they increased and the underlying resonant frequency of the spherical shell became evident on the computer display.
“We’ve done it. The ships are moving exactly as calculated–in phase,” Catherine broadcast.
Her hands danced across the status board. She adjusted the timing of the drive pulses based on the response of the bubble to the input of energy.
“Bright flash,” one ship reported. and then a cacophony of voices called out in agreement over the coms. One ship had exploded about 35 kilometers away.
I knew there might be losses… but so soon? Catherine hugged herself tight.
A few more minutes passed, and each ship was now riding on a wave up and down by five millimeters. Catherine relaxed and sat back in her chair. It was working.
“I think the computer detects a wormhole,” Tark’s excited voice exclaimed over his private link from the Omuma. “Yes, on your display, it says… a ‘microscopic wormhole’ right there at the bottom.”
Catherine chewed on her thumb tip. Only a few more minutes. She watched several of the nearby ships through the visual array. The computer displayed waves rippling out towards the ship’s positions on the sphere. She imagined that she could see them moving now, bobbing like tiny corks on an invisible sea. As she watched, another of the ships lost drive containment in a blinding flash. The ship shuddered and pitched sideways, breaking apart. She pressed her lips together and gripped the arms of her chair. Then, another flash from further away told of the collapse of another drive and the loss of more lives.
She glanced at the shutdown control. How long until I stop it?
Jeff’s shrill voice came over the coms.
“I have to pull away. Wormhole engines are losing containment…”
No.
Jeff’s ship drifted away from the bubble, rotating slightly as it lost control.
“Trying to get distance–“
His voice was cut off at the same moment an explosion appeared on her visual display.
“Jeff…” Catherine called out. There was no reply.
Several captains spoke over the channel now. Multiple ships were losing containment of their wormhole engines.
I’ve killed them all…
She opened up her terminal, and poised her finger on the shutdown command.
“The Omuma’s engine systems are failing,” Tark said over their private channel.
Catherine sucked in her breath and clenched her teeth.
“Losing containment…”
The universe burst with light as a new ship deinserted. A shock wave erupted from ship to ship to ship, extending outwards as far as she could see. Explosions rocked the viewscreen, and then the station lurched, pitching her against her seat restraints. The console before her flickered and turned off, leaving only the faint glow of the emergency systems.
In the dim light, Catherine saw bubbles rising out of the straw of her drink, ejecting a spatter of droplets into the voiding atmosphere of the command center.
“Tark,” Catherine yelled, scrambling to put her helmet on. “Tark, come in.” There was no response. Catherine clicked her helmet into place and raced for the shuttle hangar.
The Omuma spun in space. Bursts of gas vented from failed mounts as Catherine made her approach in an EVA suit. With tiny blasts of air, she matched the spin of the ship, grabbed hold, and manually turned the airlock control wheel.
She pressurized the chamber, revealing a column of green lights for the oxygen and pressure sensors. The ship had air. She opened the hatch, flipped up her visor and began shouting. “Tark? Tark!”
Sparks arced from destroyed access panels, and the ship shifted around her as she made her way forward, calling his name over and over.
The bridge was a tangle of wires and cabling, but she could see a human form beneath the debris. Dark droplets hung in the air near the body.
Her stomach contracted as she sucked in her breath. She ground her teeth together, and pulled herself through the wreckage so she could see his face.
Tark’s eyes were open, and when he saw her, she saw his mouth move behind the plastic of his helmet.
She clawed the wreckage away, tearing her gloves. His face was pale, and droplets of sweat beaded up on his forehead. She opened his visor.
“Took you long enough,” he said, mustering a weak grin.
“I’m sorry.” She reached out and touched his cheek with her fingertips.
“Ship exploded. Got wedged in here, and compromised my suit. Started to panic, but I managed to seal it. I’m OK. Guess that Navy training was good for something after all.”
She shifted in the debris, displacing some wiring from the bridge panel. It knocked into the tether to a protein drink which hung, suspended in the cabin. Brown droplets floated around it, but there was no movement of the bubble.
“You taught me well…” Tark said, grimacing.
“We did it; the barrier is gone.”
She reached over and powered on the visual sensor array. To their surprise, the screen flickered and showed the external view. As the ship spun, Tark held his breath. There was a complete star field. Only then did he release a long slow sigh.
Catherine took a multitool off her suit and sawed Tark free from his restraints. Then she pried the chair out from under the console. He yelped as the pressure shifted, but then was able to slide his leg free.
Catherine activated the nav computer. She turned off the emergency transponder and spent a minute firing the thrusters to cancel out the excess spin.
Beside her, Tark broadcast to the assembled ships.
“This is Tark Woolsley of the Omuma. We will reassemble the fleet. Set your transponders with your emergency status…”
Tark stopped speaking and removed his finger from the transmitter. His breath was rapid and shallow.
“I think I need a pain pill,” he said.
Catherine continued the broadcast. “I left the nav beacon running at Star’s End. Assemble there; it is relatively devoid of debris. If you are able, please provide assistance to those in need.”
The radio array reported several thousand ships within a 7000 kilometer radius. They lit up in various shades of green, amber, and red, and those that were able began rescue efforts.
Catherine turned to her research console and ran some quick measurements. “When the dark matter barrier burst, all the wormholes collapsed, dumping you here. You only moved about 50 kilometers.”
“You’ve done it,” Tark said.
“But at what cost? Hundreds died today, Jeff…”
Tears welled up in her eyes.
Tark gently grabbed her shoulder and turned her so they were facing each other. “Everyone was going to die out here if you hadn’t come along. You saved them.”
She wiped her eyes, sending droplets across the bridge. “You’re the one who asked me if we could just ‘pop’ it.”
Tark hugged her, wincing as he drew her into his injured leg.
“You should go back. Finish your Ph. D. Surely you have the data you need for your thesis now.”
“How will you ever manage without me?”
Tark feigned outrage that she’d even suggest such a thing, but then she felt his shoulders tighten. “We do make a great team, and you didn’t need a degree to save all these people. To save me. Think about what you could do if you took this back to the academy.”
“You did alright yourself. You didn’t freeze up. You sealed your suit, the ship… I didn’t save you, you saved yourself.”
“I’ve got to go back to the Navy. I’ll report what happened out here. I’ll volunteer to go out there and help. There must be more of these objects…”
“You’ll need my data. And I still don’t have a working theory explaining the cataclysmic structural collapse. Maybe if we spaced the timing out, slowing the onset of the wave crests–“
Tark’s laugh cut her off. “You’re doing it again. If there’s anyone out there who can solve this better than you, I’d like to meet them.”
Catherine turned back to the nav computer and set the coordinates for Star’s End.
“We’re going home.”
_______________
A. Reid Johnson has been writing science fiction since he was a child. He normally focuses on space opera and first contact stories but the creation process is non-linear. He can usually be found teaching college chemistry. His stories have appeared in Radon Journal and OnSpec, and this story is his first non-flash publication. You can find him online at areidjohnson.com.