The admiral had seen many breaches, but he was still excited. Breaches were compelling. The anomalies were frightening and unquantifiable in a world where all else had become safe and routine.
For days, the HMASS Polybius had loomed in the emptiness at a considerable distance, watching the Herald radiation shimmer in senseless fractals that built up like a slow and anticipatory drumroll.
The radiation levels hit Chandra, and like clockwork the Polybius’ Prime AI issued her Cassandra. All displays dipped to red, blaring a dire advisory that the mission should be immediately terminated, and they should escape the sector with all possible haste.
The crew ignored the AI’s warning. A few of the junior officers allowed grins to spoil their military bearing. There were so few opportunities to feel superior to an AI, each needed to be savored.
Every breach, the ship’s AI would warn them to flee, and every breach they would ignore her. It was satisfying, like rolling a stripe of electrical tape over an insistently blinking CHECK ENGINE light.
The Smarts were still trying to invent an AI that wasn’t terrified of Herald radiation, so far to no avail. Every sentient machine melted into a simpering coward the moment it detected even a single erg of the unknown force. Right now, the entire anomaly was no more than the output of an industrial microwave cooker, but that was changing rapidly.
The admiral watched the Herald fractals blooming on the display and wondered for the hundredth time what they meant. He stroked his beard, which was steel gray, trimmed within a millimeter of milspec.
It was a very human thing, trying to assign meaning to any phenomena that seemed ordered. The AIs claimed the fractals were arbitrary, but machines simply could not be trusted where breaches were concerned.
At the moment, the ship’s AI insisted the radiation field that had been a few piddling kilowatts an hour ago was now a screaming megamaser outputting roughly the same energy as Canis Majoris. Her reading was obviously wrong. Such an emission would have instantly incinerated the Polybius and anything else in this sector.
What AIs hated most about Herald radiation was that a sensor hadn’t been found that could directly detect it. Measurements were all made via inference from anomalies in other sensor readings, and something was absolutely wrong with the model.
Nothing made an AI crankier than something she couldn’t see and couldn’t understand. The Smarts had claimed they were on the verge of a breakthrough with their unified theory of Herald radiation for decades.
The breach had begun. A status tone played on the bridge speakers. There was a technical initialism for the sound, but it was unwieldy. Everyone simply called it The Pitch. The Pitch was a slowly sweeping audio tracker that gave them a constant indicator of the estimated herald radiation frequency.
The oscillation had been endlessly analyzed. Sometimes it was a perfect logarithmic curve. Sometimes it seemed almost random. Only one thing was certain. When the tone hit twenty-two gigahertz, something would happen.
As always, the admiral felt a momentary camaraderie with all the captains who had observed a breach. A great many of them had died for the privilege and, soon, he might be among them. Even the most stringent breach protocols had proved inadequate, time and time again. The events were predictably unpredictable.
The admiral ignored the new wave of alarms and cast his vision to the breach. He had to order the AI to keep her eyes on the anomaly as she attempted to divert all cameras.
The AI delivered an unusual second request to terminate the mission, and the admiral could see why at once. All the measurements were just meaningless lines howling off the top of their scales, it was going to be a big one.
For an instant, the admiral felt a vestigial urge to pray, but it found only the numb scar where religiosity had been amputated from his mind as a condition of assuming command. If he was about to be obliterated, it would be without illusions.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
The breach expanded, and the entire bridge gasped as the largest whale any of them had ever seen materialized. The black alien hulk silently emerged from the invisible radiation field, trailing the distinctive tendrils of distortion the Smarts theorized were tears in spacetime.
Whales came in a wild assortment of shapes and sizes. The Navy had a designation for each. From the zeppelin shape and lack of any exterior lighting, this whale was a Hindi Class, most likely the largest ever recorded.
It was so large that its hull brushed against the boundaries of the breach, a novel phenomenon. The breach pulsated, trying to expand to let the whale pass through.
This whale was in trouble. The hulk’s forward motion ground to a halt, and there was a ring of dazzling white light at the breach’s edge. The admiral was aware of a ripple through his officers, each going through the same phantom prayer he had, each feeling the missing piece of themselves.
This was abnormal. In most breaches, a whale appeared, lingered in space, and then dove back into the void, vanishing without a trace. In situations where whales were prevented from diving, they tended to explode with approximately the same energy as a type Ia supernova. The similarity had vexed astronomers to no end since so many of their measurements were based on the Chandrasekhar Limit.
The Smarts thought this might mean the whales were somehow using captured white dwarfs as their power supplies. As usual, they were only speculating. No one had ever laid eyes on a whale’s powerplant and lived to report back.
The officers on the bridge were aware that no one had ever recorded a whale failing to breach. That didn’t mean it had never happened, just that it had likely killed everything for ten parsecs. The HMASS Polybius was currently stationed at the distance Breach Protocol dictated, ten light minutes.
They were all going to die.
The AI sent her third plea for retreat. The admiral had never seen an AI issue three Cassandras.
“Oh, hiss off, you coward,” the admiral ordered the AI. Every eye on the bridge was suddenly on him. He hadn’t meant to vocalize that command. The admiral realized those might be his last words, and he gazed at the breach, trying to think of something inspiring to say.
“Looks like a turd pinching off halfway and getting sucked back in,” the captain of Marines opined. No one laughed, and the COM obviously didn’t care if they did. His description was undeniably apt.
The admiral exhaled pointedly, making it abundantly clear he didn’t approve of the outburst. It was no secret he would have preferred someone more polished as his second in command, but the COM had more combat experience than the rest of the bridge combined. Some of the junior officers had none at all. They had been handpicked by the admiral for other considerations.
Together, the officers watched the great space-sphincter contract, and they waited to die. With silent, incredible violence, the breach tore the whale in half, and then vanished.
There was no supernova. The officers didn’t die. They gripped at their chests, assuring themselves they hadn’t been vaporized. They uttered thanks to nobody and furtively glanced around, checking to see if anyone had hissed themselves.
“It’s huge!” a lieutenant who didn’t know any better exclaimed. “Is that the biggest whale ever recorded?”
“Bigger,” the admiral said, deadpan.
Protocol dictated he was not allowed to grin, and they were not allowed to groan and roll their eyes. But he grinned anyway. They had survived the largest breach ever recorded. If they got out of this alive, they would be legends.
The admiral gazed at the half-eaten whale. The bite mark was still glowing white-hot. Even broken in two, it was almost twenty kilometers long.
There was a blip in the lights, and they received a notification the ship’s AI had gone insane and been rolled back to the default firmware. The admiral sighed, silently cursing the Smarts.
“Orders, Admiral?” the witless lieutenant asked. The admiral bit back a severe reprimand and ignored the idiot. Fear made men forget their places. He shot a look at the man’s CO, who gave a pained nod in return.
The officer who should have asked for orders was the Captain of Marines. But the COM gazed at the immense whale on the display, his expression inscrutable. The admiral glared at the ugly mess of scars on the back of the Marine’s neck, waiting for scopaesthesia to kick in. The COM only scratched idly at his ancient burns, still peering at the monster.
“Captain?” the admiral said, slightly too loud.
“Sir?” the COM asked, turning back to the admiral.
For a split second, the admiral could see the undisguised persiflage in the captain’s face. It was immediately replaced by military bearing so total the admiral doubted he’d even seen that hint of a grin. But it was surely there. The COM likely thought the admiral was a buffoon. He probably wanted a commander who wasn’t so…theatrical.
The admiral flashed a toothy smile and doubled down.
“Captain of Marines,” the admiral commanded, puffing up his chest and raising his voice as if he were addressing the whole crew. “Send in the T.A.R.D.S!”