Henry sank from a world of color and sensations into roiling black depths, settling somewhere in between. On one side was animation, activity, thought, feeling. On the other was the agentless inaction of unalive matter. He was not dead, of course—not even close—but to describe him as alive would do poor justice to life. He floated; thoughtless, feelingless, practically inanimate as his body conducted its vital functions at a much slower rate.
Time had no power within the dreamless depths. When the first stirrings of consciousness reemerged it was as a scattering of vague, distant sensations, like pinpoints of light appearing in darkness. Feelings of warmth and comfort, growing stronger, then a faint recognition of awareness.
Memories returned in confusing flashes; people, places, desires. None of it made sense on its own. He attached himself to them one at a time, arranging and rearranging them until they resembled something that felt correct. A narrative, one that was frightening but also exciting in equal measure.
That’s who I am.
The warmth and comfort slowly began to disappear, replaced by a feeling of cold wetness and a sudden terror that threatened to drown him. Then air touched his skin, and soon afterwards the sensation of the mask being lifted from his face.
“Forger!”
The sound of his name spirited him back to consciousness. Henry’s eyes opened, and a bright, painful light instantly overwhelmed his senses. He blinked hard many times, scowling as the light slowly lost intensity and the room around him came into focus.
Zhu stood by his creche, half-dressed and with his hair somewhat wet, holding the oxygen mask.
“Are you okay?”
“...Feel like crap.”
“Does anything hurt?”
“...Uh…nah.”
“Then unplug and get up. We need you.”
There were strange noises sounding in the room that were hard for Henry to make sense of, something that could have resembled scurrying feet and raised voices. He carefully freed himself from the tubes—an awkward bit of business—then lifted himself up into a seated position, rubbing his face in a pointless attempt to ease the worst feeling of sleep inertia he’d ever experienced. When he finally looked up, he saw a group of people in various states of dress gathered around one of the open creches across from him.
A naked, red-bearded man lay perfectly still inside the creche, his eyes closed as though he were asleep. Some of the people around him held fingers to his neck and wrists, others prodded his arms and chest. A blonde woman—Kaya, Henry soon remembered—began to rub her knuckles fiercely against the man’s torso, just below the ribs. Above the chaos, a mingled, urgent chatter filled the room; people speaking to one another in desperate tones as they worked, some directly to the unresponsive man.
Finally, realization dawned on Henry’s sleep-addled mind.
That’s the captain. Something’s wrong.
One of the people who’d been holding onto Studebaker’s wrists, an older, light skinned woman with brown hair, suddenly placed her hands against his chest and began to perform CPR.
“Kaya, get the crash cart!!!” she roared above the chaos.
Kaya immediately rushed out of the room, disappearing into the hallway.
Within the haze of having just woken up, the full weight of what Henry was witnessing did not fully register. Zhu reached out to help him out of the creche. As he gained his feet, dripping wet and trying to cover himself, Henry looked up and saw that Zhu had a deeply troubled look on his face.
“Get dried off and dressed as quickly as you can,” he said, handing over a towel. “Then report to the bridge. Send the initial communications handshake to Sol. And order the ship to general quarters. I want an immediate status report from all decks.”
Henry gave him a reluctant nod while wrapping himself in the towel, feeling intensely uncomfortable to be taking orders under the given circumstances.
Zhu shot a worried glance over at the scene that was transpiring nearby, and when he spoke again it was in a low voice.
“...Don’t speak a word about this to anyone!”
“Alright.”
“Hurry!”
With that, Zhu walked over to join the swarm surrounding Studebaker. Henry dried himself off at his best possible speed and got dressed just as quickly, then jogged out of the room.
He felt absolutely terrible as he forced himself to hurry down the hallway towards the bridge, but somehow he managed to keep going.
Feels like the morning after shore leave, he thought grimly. Then: What happened to the captain? She said hibernation was safe, didn’t she? I do feel like shit, but I don’t think I’m about to drop dead….
It was then that the full realization of what he’d witnessed finally occurred to him. Studebaker’s total lack of response to everything being done to him.
Is he actually dead?
His head shook fiercely as if to clear the thought away, then he urged himself to greater speed. He’d been awake for less than five minutes and somehow things had already gone wrong.
----------------------------------------
The halls were completely empty as Henry ran towards the bridge, causing him to feel an intense sense of dislocation, as though he were running down a hallway in a strange dream. As he ran, it dawned on him that the ship was now eighty years older than it had been when he’d fallen asleep, though it certainly didn’t look it.
And so am I, actually.
He pushed the thought aside for later.
Finally his destination came into sight. He slowed to a walk, wiping sweat off his brow. A set of double doors simply labeled: “Bridge”, lay directly ahead of him, and they slid open the moment he entered range.
The bridge was cloaked in pitch black darkness when Henry stepped inside, and the ceiling lamps began to flicker on automatically. Light gradually filled the room as he looked around for the ship's status board, and after spotting it on a wall off to his left he trotted towards it.
Just like every other bridge Henry had ever been on, the status board contained a cross section of the entire ship, containing hundreds of small lights representing the current status of corresponding rooms. The board was ruled by a mostly automated system that delivered information depending on various statistics, such as temperature, cabin pressure, hull integrity and status of personnel among a variety of others. At the moment the vast majority of the lights were green, meaning no problems had been reported as of yet. Only a few lights were blinking yellow, including in one of the rooms fairly close to the bridge. Henry stared at it, thinking, until he realized that the room in question was the one containing the bridge’s hibernation creches. The one he’d just awoken in.
I guess the system is picking up the captain’s health issue. Is something similar happening in these other rooms, too?
Shaking his head, he turned away from the board and scanned the now fully-lit bridge. Whoever had designed it had not been very creative—it was virtually identical to the others Henry had been on. The captain’s long desk station was dotted by computer terminals and was situated just a few steps away from the door to the hallway, sitting in a slightly elevated position above the crew pit.
In the pit sat ten more stations, generously spaced out to give proper room to maneuver around them. Each station contained at least one inactive terminal and seats for the crewmembers meant to operate them. Beyond the stations, the wall ahead was shaped like the top half of a pentagon, with three large oblong window screens situated on each wall. The armored external shutters for the windows were currently down—their standard position for travel and for combat—and beyond was vacuum.
The communications station sat against the wall in the far right corner, the attached expandable privacy booth making it the only station immediately distinguishable from the rest. Before Henry could get to work, though, he had an announcement to make.
A black, cordless telephone sat upon the captain’s desk, one that was connected to every loudspeaker in the ship. Henry approached it and lifted it to his ear. A dull tone sounded for several long seconds, then stopped, the indication that it was ready to transmit.
Henry heard his own voice booming in the hallway closeby as he spoke.
“This is the bridge. Action stations, action stations. Deck chiefs submit status reports ASAP. Repeat: Action stations, action stations.”
He set the phone back in its receiver and immediately marched towards the communications station, hastily taking a seat at the booth before hitting the terminal’s start-up button. There would be no reason to extend the booth until he was ready to begin the encryption process.
As the terminal flickered to life, Henry heard someone enter the room behind him. He spun his chair around to find a thin dark skinned young man with short, curly hair, wearing the civil service uniform, headed in the direction of one of the stations on the opposite end of the room. He stopped in place when he noticed Henry’s attention on him, giving a good look at the three silver starbursts on the right side of his uniform’s collar, along with a gray-blue pin representing Europa opposite.
He seemed somewhat flustered. “Hi, uh…”
“Yo.”
“Hey. Is it just us so far?”
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“Yeah, I’m Henry, FTL comms.”
“I’m Art, astrometrics.”
Art approached for a handshake, and Henry stood up for it.
“Short for Arthur?”
“Artemis. Are you the bridge duty officer?”
“For right now, I guess. Until the cap—”
Henry stopped himself short, and blinked several times before continuing. “...Until someone else comes along.”
Art raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.
“Just do your thing for now,” said Henry. “Get us eyes on both planets.”
“Will do.”
Nerd type, Henry concluded as Art moved off towards his station. Before he could return to his terminal two more people, a young man and a young woman, walked onto the bridge, both wearing the same gray-black naval fatigues Henry was wearing.
They immediately approached Henry upon setting eyes on him. The young man was light skinned, and his close cropped hair was black. He had a technical sergeant’s rank pip on his chest and his name tape read: “Sevchenko”. He was fairly good looking, though a bit heavy set.
The young woman was also light skinned and wore her brown hair in a short bob. She was thin, tall, had fairly androgynous looks and wore a staff sergeant’s rank pip. Her name tape read: “Becker”. There was a sour look on her face, as if she already disapproved of what was going on.
They both came to a stop just a few feet away from the communication station.
“Hey, sir,” Sevchenko smiled. “How’d you sleep?”
“Great,” Henry replied flatly. “You two my commo geeks?”
Sevchenko nodded, still smiling. Becker’s nod was barely perceptible.
“Cool. First thing’s first, we need to check all the lines running from the terminal. Make sure nothing’s screwed up in the last eighty years.”
Sevchenko’s face fell. “Uh…all of them? Sir?”
“That’ll take us all day,” Becker complained. “There’s miles of wiring, and the bundle ends down at the other end of the ship.”
Henry was unmoved. “You’d better get a move on, then. I’ll diagnose the terminal and the wiring here on the bridge while you two are doing that.”
The scowl on Becker’s face deepend slightly, but Sevchenko simply shrugged.
“You got it, sir,” he said.
“Good. Let me get your numbers before you run off.”
They quickly traded contact information, and at Becker’s blunt suggestion they began a group chat. With that done, Henry sent them off to do his bidding. They left the bridge side by side, talking with one another in low voices too quietly to be heard.
Before anyone else could interrupt, Henry turned back to the terminal and quickly hit the button on the touchscreen to extend the privacy booth. The thin metal grating which stood in the air above the terminal began to move. It extended itself out and then down, concealing the terminal and Henry’s upper half from sight.
Finally, he thought with a sigh.
The terminal had warmed up while he’d been distracted. The system was designed to display a simple status pip on the home screen, which at the moment indicated that the terminal and the rest of the communication system was currently in operational condition. The status pip also indicated that the FTL antenna had deployed itself automatically after the ship had reached its destination as intended, and Henry inputted the command to align it with Sol.
Well, at least we’ll be able to tell them about our problems. Therapy sessions, at a distance of seventy light years.
As the terminal worked, Henry craned his neck over to peer at its side, sliding his fingers back and forth against the metal until he felt what he was looking for—a small depression, one just large enough to fit the tip of a finger into. After a bit of searching he found it, then held his thumb against it.
A small compartment on the terminal’s opposite side suddenly popped open, containing a single sheet of paper covered in a glossy plastic coating. Henry carefully extracted the paper and brought it under the terminal’s glow.
The entire process for sending and receiving messages with the FTL array was absurdly complicated, and for good reason. To transmit, the antenna fired off a series of photons at faster than light speeds, meant to be received by a waiting photovoltaic antenna at its destination and subsequently assembled by its corresponding terminal. After assembly the terminal would then decrypt the message, which itself utilized a unique coding language developed and used only for FTL communications, explicitly to make it as difficult as possible to compromise. The result being that the only way to eavesdrop on their communications would be to physically position a third antenna in between the sending and receiving antennas, one capable of capturing the photons. Even then, decrypting the message would theoretically be impossible without access to the language cipher stored within the terminals.
For the last eight centuries, the SAIs had always managed to gain complete access to human communications no matter the amount of effort put into encrypting them. Their technology was so advanced, and they were simply so good at problem solving, that no reliable method of safeguarding communications had ever been developed that could deter them for long. Their ability to consistently monitor human chatter was one of the many things that made them such deadly foes. Compromised communications had been one of the driving factors behind humanity’s failures at Earth, both during the Exodus and during the massive invasion eight centuries later. It was because of the SAIs that the FTL array was designed as it was—the most advanced method of transmitting secure information ever conceived. Being able to communicate relatively quickly with a distant solar system dozens of light-years away was almost seen as an afterthought.
It’s too bad we haven’t figured out how to speed up anything bigger than a photon to FTL speeds.
The paper in Henry’s hands contained a single string of information—thirty-five utterly bizarre symbols, a foreign language that had never, and would never, be spoken aloud. But once fed into the terminal, then encrypted and transmitted, the antenna back in Sol would receive a simple one-line message confirming the Vanuatu had arrived intact, and that at the very least one person who understood how to operate the FTL comms system had survived the journey.
Henry opened the encryption application on the terminal and began to input the characters from the sheet, taking his time to ensure he made no mistakes. Once it was done he entered the message into the encryption queue, then set it to be sent off the moment the antenna finished aligning with Sol.
Alright. Now we’ll see if the system is actually working. On to the next disaster.
He locked the terminal, then hit the button to collapse the booth, and its metal walls quietly retracted to their original position. There was more activity on the bridge, now—a dozen more people had shown up since Henry had extended the booth. A low murmur filled the room.
After taking a moment to stretch, Henry took a look around. A small group of men and women, all dressed in the civil service uniform, had gathered around Art’s terminal on the opposite side of the room. With a sigh, Henry got to his feet and made his way over to them.
Art looked up as Henry approached, though the others looking over his shoulder remained focused on his terminal.
“Something strange is happening,” he said.
“What is?”
“Look.”
Art’s terminal displayed what looked to be a video feed of a vibrantly blue planet, with wisps of white spread haphazardly across its surface. The planet also had what seemed to be a polar ice cap, similar to the one on Mars.
“The hell is that? Is this a camera feed?” Henry asked.
“Yes, this is one of the forward external cameras. Here.”
Art hit a button, and the feed switched to a new angle. It seemed to be showing a different blue planet, one that appeared to be nearly identical to the first, though this one had a different arrangement of white wisps stretched across it and was clearly much farther away.
“This is on the opposite side of the ship.”
Henry frowned. “...Is this some sort of camera glitch? Why are they both blue?”
“I really have no idea.”
One of the people standing closeby, a woman with light brown skin, striking good looks and straight black hair tied back in a bun, then spoke up.
“This can’t be right. We should be seeing a Mars-like moon orbiting a carbon planet. It makes no sense that we’d appear above two ocean worlds.”
She suddenly had everyone’s attention.
“Ocean?!” Henry asked, dumbstruck. “You’re saying all that blue is water?”
“Well, yes! Look. Those clouds are obviously water vapor, and if I had to take a guess they’re probably being shaped that way by strong wind. The polar ice cap seems larger than we expected, but that could be accounted for by the sheer amount of water present.”
Henry and the rest were stunned into silence. He glanced at the symbols on her collar—three silver planets arranged in a triangle, with the black-white pin representing Callisto opposite.
“How can you be sure about that?” asked Art. “Couldn’t they be gas giants? Neptune is blue.”
“I’m an astrophysicist,” she said. “And no, they couldn’t. Both planets are too small to be gas giants.”
Before Henry had a chance to digest this, the door to the hallway opened. Zhu marched inside in a hurry, accompanied by a burly light skinned man with a mean glint in his eye, wearing marine fatigues. His uniform displayed a major’s rank pip, and his name tape read: “Ioane”.
Zhu and Ioane made a beeline for the phone on the captain’s desk, and Henry hurried over to intercept them.
“Status?” Zhu immediately asked.
“The handshake is set to be sent once the antenna is aligned.”
“Fine. Major Ioane, this is Captain Forger, our FTLTO.”
Ioane gave Henry a piercing stare before extending his hand.
“How are ya.”
“Good, sir,” Henry replied hastily as they shook, then turned back to Zhu. “Sir, there’s something else you need to know.”
Zhu’s fingers clasped around the phone’s handle. “What?”
“There’s something wrong with the planet. Or, uh…planets. They aren’t what they’re supposed to be.”
“What’re you saying?” Ioane asked, squinting.
“Astrophysics thinks we’re above two ocean worlds.”
“What?!”
Zhu shook his head with disbelief and lifted the phone to his ear. “One problem at a time.”
After a few seconds passed his voice began to blare in the hallway.
“Crew of the Vanuatu, this is Admiral Zhu. Stop whatever you’re doing and listen. It is with deep sadness that I must inform you that several crew members have passed away as a result of our long hibernation. We are working to figure out how they perished, but as of right now we have no reason to believe anyone is in danger. Unfortunately, Captain Studebaker was among those who perished.”
Zhu had the complete, silent attention of everyone on the bridge. He paused for a moment to gauge the room before continuing.
“As of this moment, I am assuming command of the Vanuatu. Deck chiefs, take a headcount immediately. That is all.”
With that, he hung up the phone and turned to Henry.
“Alright,” he said with a hint of weariness. “Show us.”
Henry led them to Art’s terminal, and the crowd cleared away. Zhu and Ioane both leaned forward over Art’s shoulders to stare closely at the video feed.
“This’s some Congress fuckery, no doubt,” Ioane said, chagrined.
Zhu leaned back up, scowling. “Is the helmswoman here yet? Where are you? Get the shutters open right now.”
A young light skinned woman with long and straight black hair sat at the forward station closest to the windows. She gave Zhu a quick nod, then immediately turned to her computer terminal and rapidly hit several buttons. The armored shutters on all three windows slowly began to retract upwards.
In the right window, a distant blue-white planet was slowly revealed, sitting against a backdrop of twinkling stars. In the center window, the retracting shutters revealed nothing except for a dense field of stars, glowing white, red, and occasionally even blue. And as the shutters on the left retracted another blue-white planet, much closer and shining brightly under the sunlight, filled the entire window.
Everyone on the bridge began to gravitate towards the left window, and a dead silence filled the room as they all stared down at the planet below. Henry gawked at a massive storm forming in the upper atmosphere, wondering at the length of its two giant white arms.
“Fuckery, indeed,” said Zhu.