“Everyone,” I said, using my booming voice to quiet them all down at the same time. “The ship flying escort is a friend of mine from before your time. He came to warn me of attempted sabotage of our mission, and we engaged the ships shortly after. Both hostile ships are destroyed, our ships are completely safe, and my friend is going to fly escort for us to ensure everything stays that way.”

Shoshanna pushed off the wall and floated toward me, her arms open and eyes wet with tears. I happily dropped my armor and caught her, then stabilized us both and looked to the crew for questions.

“Well, shit,” the captain slurred. “Who were they?”

“Yeah, and what do you mean sabotage?” another voice in the floating crowd called.

The documentary team was silent, staring and recording the entire encounter. I frowned.

“Just that, they intended to harm our mission capabilities, and damage our ships,” I carefully answered.

“Damage?” someone shouted. “You mean destroy!”

“Which is why I dealt with the ships,” I yelled authoritatively. “There was no way I was going to risk either ship, either crew. I protected this fleet, which is my exact job. There are activist factions who disagree with Save the Cubes mission, and apparently are serious enough to do something about it. But they wont be back. Our fleet is safe, and our mission continues on as planned.”

The crew was silent while I spoke, but as soon as I finished someone shouted, “Hazard pay!”

“Yes,” I sighed. “Yes that will be taken into account when your end-of-mission bonuses are paid out,” I replied. “Of course it will, that was never in doubt. Check your contracts for hazard pay details, the affiliate will obviously honor their contracts. Now if you all don’t mind, this has been hard on everyone. Most of all our CEO.”

As I finished addressing the crew, a sharp notification buzzed in my mind, followed by a calm, businesslike voice that could best be described as oily.

Crew gone unruly, mutinous whispers at every turn, any Captain may wonder about the dangers set to befall them . . .

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Images of calm, smiling crews flashed through my mind, all accompanied by financial advisors who confidently reassured them of their benefits. The voiceover was soothing, yet firm:

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With the crew meeting complete, I floated down the hall past the camera man. He turned to follow me as I moved, carrying Shoshanna in my arms. Her head was tucked in against my chest and she was crying softly.

Once we escaped to her cabin, things got better. She still sniffled and wrung her hands, but she calmed significantly.

“I’m sorry Shanna,” I whispered, when she leaned into me for a hug. “It may have been unwise for me to join your affiliate in such a public manner. I still have enemies. This is something I should have seen coming.”

“What even happened?” she whispered back, clutching at my jumpsuit with one curled fist.

I took a breath and shook my head. There was no way around it.

“A cult of delves that wants to hurt me targeted your ships. But a very old friend arrived first to warn us, and we destroyed both ships together. Everything is fine. He’s going to stay and protect us until we find Cube, even if it takes a few more FTL jumps,” I explained.

“But that could be weeks still!” Shoshanna exclaimed.

“It will be fine, my friend is well-equipped. Plus, I can respond again if needed,” I told her.

She nodded against my chest, but then pulled away to look up into my eyes. “Wait, does that mean you just killed people? Like you killed the delves on those ships?”

“No,” I told her. “I disabled their ship, then went on board to talk to them once they were no longer a threat. They killed themselves, suicide pills. It was fast, looked painless.”

“But your friend was shooting that other ship, we all saw it,” she whined.

I nodded slowly. “Yes, my friend killed the crew of the other ship,” I admitted. “I’m sorry.”

“And they were going to kill us,” Shoshanna asked, in a small voice. “To hurt you?”

“Yes,” I answered.

My girlfriend took a long, shaking breath and nodded, looking at her own hands. “Well, I’m glad you stopped them then.”

“It wasn’t a close thing, you were never really in danger, thanks to my friend’s warning,” I answered.

Her eyelids raised a bit. “That’s comforting, I suppose. But this cult, they know my affiliate now. They know me now. Won’t they try again?”

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

“They’re not that big, and I doubt they’ll send another ship now that we’re ready for them,” I said. “We have plenty of time to get security in place for you and your affiliate.”

Shoshanna’s eyes widened again and stayed that way. “I’ll get started on that right away.”

I sighed and looked away. “I’m sorry,” I whispered again.

The next day when I left the ship for my dinner with Justin Lee, the crew was silent and separate. None of them raised much complaint after they saw the generous hazard pay stipulations, and Justin’s ship kept its distance to avoid reminding them of the encounter. But none of them were exactly happy either. Especially since we had to cut com access out of security concerns.

Unfortunately, those hazard pay sections in the crew’s contract were generous. Part of that had been the Silken Sands standards and practices, which provided rough guidelines for contracts operating under its umbrella. We had been lax with them because the mission was expected to go smoothly and be quite boring. That was my fault for underestimating the cult.

I ended up having to tell Shoshanna the new fundraiser morties would have to go to cover the crews additional pay, and we would figure out something else for resupply if it became needed. That helped her calm down, and she immediately began pressing at her device to get Molly on the phone. Out in deep space as we were, the options for that were limited, and I saw MortMobile’s face briefly in her device.

He stared at me in the instant before he turned into a tunnel of gray fog and connected the women. Shoshanna immediately began crying as she blubbered everything that had been happening out to her friend. I left to let her vent, after reminding her to swear Molly to secrecy.

On my way out of the ship, I heard MortMobile in my head, far weaker than before. “Who are you?” he whispered, before our connection was cut. I felt his absence in my mind as clearly as his presence.

Justin’s ship was a few thousand kilometers to our rear, but the journey over to his ship took almost no time at all. I simply pushed the suit into a short range gravity haul and then started rotating with his ship, looking for the open airlock.

Once I was aboard, I was led to the captain’s quarters. The cabin was still cramped, tucked away into the sharp edges of the outer hull, but it was nicer than I had expected. The room was roughly octagonal and furnished to be comfortable. Justin’s bed was covered up by a thick purple curtain on one end, with his bathroom area behind another at the opposite. A small dinner table had been placed in the center of the cramped space and draped with a purple silk tablecloth.

The other cabins were mere cots in the walls of the ship, small compartments covered by sleep-webbing, magnetized screens, and family photos. Comparatively, the private space was a luxury. It reminded me of the delf culture I had fought against a century before. Their soldiers were forced to live spartan lives, even while serving in wartime, on an attack craft.

Justin opened his arms to greet me as I entered his cabin. “Tyson, welcome, welcome. I am pleased to share a meal and more wine with you.”

True to his word, two bottles of wine were open on the table, and our oversized glasses were already filled partway. I smiled and sat where he gestured, across from him on the small table. It reminded me of a folding card table, the kind we used to set up at the campground to check guests in when the office computer went down. Only Justin’s table was made of ebony hardwood.

A silvery metal candelabra held two modest candles, already melting. Beside it sat a small cornucopia filled with flower petals and dried herbs. A pleasant, spiced smell wafted up from the centerpiece, but was quickly overwhelmed by our meals once they arrived.

The artificial gravity on his ship allowed for proper cooking, and one of the craft’s weapon bays had been remodeled into a small kitchen. Instead of the easily stored zero-g rations the ship would have had before its remodel, a full meal service was available to its crew.

I lamented the availability of such a luxury for my own crew, it would have gone a long way toward helping morale.

Our food was brought in on tin platters, with shining covers. Justin thanked the server as the delf carefully lifted our covers to fill the room’s ceiling with steam.

In front of me was a large, baked fish in a thin, gray sauce. There was a side consisting of an unfamiliar citrus fruit and an orange mashed root vegetable. It all smelled delicious, but I hesitated when I saw the fish.

“Wasn’t this sapient?” I asked.

Justin nodded quickly. “Indeed. Fish, sadly, do not typically fare well under BuyMort. Those that are included are often hunted to extinction and represent a fleeting delicacy. Of course, there are those who protest the eating of lesser sapient animals, but a trout is a trout to most.”

I looked closer at my fish. It was trout, a sizable rainbow trout from Earth.

“Where did you get them?” I asked, a chill running down my spine.

“Apocalypse Earth,” he replied casually. “The last of my supply, I wanted to share something special with you.”

I took a deep breath and looked at my host. “What is Apocalypse Earth?” Even as I asked, I knew the answer.

“The next Earth in line, after yours. It was included in the BuyMort system roughly thirty years ago. The inclusion was short-lived, as you can probably glean from the name. Most don’t even remember it anymore. No more Earths will ever be added, thanks to how poorly that one performed. Hardly even a thousand humans were added to BuyMort, of course. Hard to win placement on the top ten with that kind of start,” he remarked.

I stared at him while he spoke and thought. I imagined the world that had entered BuyMort after my own. With that name, it wasn’t hard to recognize the theme. The history my people experienced in another universe, years later. BuyMort found your world faster each time, and before my world had come an Earth at roughly the start of the industrial revolution. That one hadn’t survived the Church wars either.

Sensing my focus on the destruction, BuyMort flicked an ad into my mind, and all at once I was immersed in the ad space.

Before me orbited Earth, and as I tore through space and atmosphere, I saw that it was one like the Earth I had come from, but devastated by apocalyptic conditions.

In the place of sprawling cities, dusty wreckage and gaping craters remained. The side screens in my periphery popped up with scenes of daily life for the remaining residents. They were either hunkering in deeply-buried bunkers eating canned food, or struggling to survive around a fresh water source on the planet’s desert surface. Not many looked healthy, and none of them were young.

Where my Earth had been a fragile blue marble, this Earth was a wasteland. I stared down at it as my perspective slid by at sky-level.

Then, stopping in the sky directly over a familiar little campground in Arizona, the ad showed me waves of red dunes blowing across my former home, now desolate and scrubbed from the face of the planet by endless sandstorms.

One of the dunes shifted and revealed part of a human skeleton beneath the sand.

Seconds later, the camera pulled back and showed me a still-frame of a pockmarked continent. The entire landmass of the planet was covered in atomic strike locations visible from space.

Large letters tumbling past me, freezing into place as I watched.

'EXPERIENCE THE DESOLATION OF APOCALYPSE EARTH!' they enthused in bold, flashy text, the excitement in their message loudly proclaimed against the landscape of the dead planet.

The documentary ad continued, bombarding me with more scenes of devastation across this alternate Earth. Cities crumbled under the weight of time, war, and the elements. The skeletons of skyscrapers bent and eventually collapsed, and vegetation rapidly withered in the scalding heat and nuclear fallout.

EXPERIENCE THE HOMEWORLD OF BUYMORT’S NEWEST HUMAN POPULATION AS IF YOU WERE REALLY THERE.

The screen on the right showcased the "best moments" of the apocalypse—highlight reels of ever-expanding wars, panicked crowds around water ration facilities, and the relentless march of extinction, with animal and insect names falling off the screen like coins from a slot machine.

People entered specialized shelters in remote locations, leaving the rest of the population to tear itself apart and succumb to the collapse in a variety of ways, one more devastating than the next until that final blossom of mushroom clouds.

BREATHTAKING RESULTS!

The final image was a scorched Earth, heavily pitted and scarred by nuclear weapons. There was still life, but it was rare. Those who still remained, barely subsisted. When BuyMort arrived, the majority of people still alive dove into Storage like it was a resort vacation. A small few in large bunkers quickly became influential citizens in the BuyMort system.

A final barrage of words rolled past.

DON’T JUST WATCH HISTORY—LIVE IT!

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Only Nu-Earth and Neolithic Earth had managed to flourish in the post-Church environment, no other Earths remained attached to the BuyMort system.

In a terribly linear sense, I was given a snapshot of my planet’s history through the multiverse. Something I felt repulsed by and compelled to improve. My planet still lived, even thrived under Axle’s self-centered rule. I could protect that world from what had been about to befall it, before BuyMort’s introduction.

When BuyMort arrived, my world fell apart in hours. But that was because our society had been weakened and ready to collapse. We had built everything around a single, deeply flawed tool, while blinding ourselves to those flaws. Once our systems had rotted from corruption and neglect, a stiff breeze could have knocked us all over. And with the increase in storm potency, that had been happening more every year.

Whatever path my people had been on, I’d been given the chance to see where it led even without BuyMort. Full civilizational collapse. Apocalypse Earth.