Lacuna: Demons of the Void Read online

  James’s hand motored along to his pinkie and crashed into the side. The hand overturned, pitched upwards, and dramatically sank. “At least we shouted over the megaphone that we’d rammed them. Actually ramming them would be a bit tasteless.”

  Liao blinked. “Wouldn’t that violate…”

  “…all kinds of rules?” James finished, nodding. “Pretty much every ‘good conduct’ rule in the book. The administrators of the war games disallowed our kill and ‘refloated’ the Bush, but in the minds of the crew and I, we sank a 100,000 tonne aircraft carrier for the cost of a 1,500 tonne patrol boat. That’s a huge net gain for our forces.”

  “But you all died,” Liao pointed out, “And it’s not a move you’d use in real life...”

  The car arrived at their destination, a single story building near Sydney’s centre. It was a nondescript sandstone building. It had no distinguishing features apart from its generic, completely normal appearance which, Liao guessed, was probably deliberate.

  “Correct,” James answered, giving an impish grin. “But isn’t real life just another game, with a different set of rules?”

  The two disembarked, continuing their conversation as they made their way up to the building’s glass doors.

  “Ramming your ship into the enemy’s ship doesn’t sound like a sound interpretation of the rules to me.”

  Grégoire waved a key fob in front of a sensor and the two panes of glass opened. A cool, air-conditioned breeze washed over Liao’s face.

  “Not if you look at it like that,” he answered, shrugging. “As far as I was concerned, the rules of the game we were playing said, ‘Ramming always works.’ I took an inexpensive ship and rammed a much more expensive ship, sinking the pair of them. That’s a net gain for us. That’s a victory.”

  The two walked inside the structure. Immediately, the atmosphere changed. The inside of the building was a stark contrast to its exterior. This seemed like the inside of a dormitory for a tech college. Technical graphs, diagrams and posters adorned almost every inch of every wall, proudly displaying the technical aspects of devices Liao didn’t even recognise. The floor was covered in a thick, plush, blue carpet.

  “Hey, so you’re the visitors, huh?” came a feminine, nasally voice, thick with an Australian accent. A short, freckled, weedy, twenty-something Caucasian woman with bushy red hair and large, awkward looking glasses leaned casually against a wall in a stance that Liao could only describe as a desperate attempt to look like one of the cool kids in a high school.

  “That’s right. I’m Lieutenant Melissa Liao from the People’s Republic,” Liao offered, extending her hand. “And this is Captain James Grégoire, Belgian Naval Component, EU.”

  The redhead’s bravado almost instantly evaporated and she seemed to hesitate a moment before taking Liao’s white-gloved hand, giving it an awkward shake. She didn’t look her in the eye. She then shook James’ hand and gestured to a room further inside the building.

  “I’m Summer Rowe. I’m lead engineer here. You’re here to see Chekhov’s Armoury, right?”

  James threw Melissa a confused look. “Sorry, what?”

  Rowe gave a nasally snort, pushing up her glasses with her ring finger. “That’s just what we call the toy box – uhh, I mean, all this stuff. It's a literary term... it's, uh- it's kinda the idea that when you introduce something early on, it’s irrelevant at the time, but later becomes really important... and this stuff is going to be really important in a few years.”

  “...oh,” was all Liao could say to that.

  Summer turned and began to walk further into the twisting maze of tunnels which resembled, for all intents and purposes, a rabbit warren or the maze in some medieval wizard’s dungeon. Behind her back, the two military personnel exchanged a subtle, questioning, ‘What the hell?’ glance.

  “他妈的书呆子...”

  “Be nice,” Grégoire implored in a mutter.

  Summer glanced over her shoulder. “Huh?”

  “Nothing,” Liao chirped, giving her best smile. Her heels tapped on the polished linoleum with every step as she squinted slightly in the dimly lit corridor.

  Rowe shrugged it away, fidgeting with something in front of her. Click. Click. Click. Liao saw that it was a ball point pen and the woman was clicking the top button on and off. Every repetition seemed to increase Liao’s blood pressure.

  “We don’t get many other girls in here,” Rowe admitted sheepishly as the group passed a giant trash can overflowing with soft drink cans, pizza boxes, plastic takeaway containers, and computer printouts smeared with grease.

  “That’s probably because you work in a lightless, filthy hovel,” Liao snipped sarcastically, her tone a little more acidic than she really intended.

  Summer winced, looking away from the Chinese woman.

  Melissa gave her an apologetic smile. “Sorry, it was a long flight.”

  As they walked, Liao could feel eyes on her as they passed endless laboratories, some filled with modern looking computers. About half of them were in use by neck-bearded scientists (and, despite Rowe’s comment, the occasional woman) typically typing at a blistering pace in black and white terminals.

  Click. Click. Click.

  Rowe absently waved her hand as she passed several doors, her other hand abusing the pen’s clicker.

  “What do we have here? Uhh... okay. This is an advanced, high radiation resilient tungsten-aluminium-whatever alloy... that’s the pet project of the materials guys. I don’t know what it’s called, something Greek or Latin, but we nicknamed it ‘indestructium’. Radiation resistant, really really strong, lightweight... apparently they think it’s the bees knees, but eh. So you can build a cool tank with it. Who cares. I hate those arrogant assholes.”

  Click. Click. Click.

  Summer paused before an unmarked door, mercifully slipping the pen into her hip pocket. The woman seemed a lot more relaxed now that they were further inside, away from the last vestiges of the sun’s presumably harmful rays. “Let’s start at the least impressive item and work our way up, shall we?”

  Liao shrugged, idly wondering if the woman was a little nuts. “Sure, why not. We have to see it all eventually.”

  The redhead opened the door. Inside, a donut-shaped chrome-steel device rested on a heavy wooden table. It was a fairly plain metal composition that didn’t at all hint as to its functionality. It had a layer of thick, shiny, silver paint on it that made it look like a piece of scrap that they’d dragged out of a junkyard, smoothed, and then tossed up on the table.

  “We call it the Reactionless Drive,” she proclaimed, gesturing over the very simple looking device with a hand, her tone conveying a weight that the others simply didn’t feel.

  “Looks like some kind of tacky prop from a 60’s sci-fi show,” Melissa observed, chuckling. “What’s it do?”

  Summer looked very offended.

  “Only, you know, violate Newtonian physics,” she retorted, pushing up her glasses with her ring finger yet again, a gesture Liao found almost as annoying as her voice. “This baby generates gravity waves. Observe!”

  Rowe pressed the giant, fist-sized red button on the wooden desk. And exactly nothing happened.

  Liao watched curiously as she took the plastic pen out of her pocket, holding it near the giant donut. The tip wobbled, and then the whole pen was jerked out of her hand towards the featureless metal – hitting it with a *clank*.

  “Impressive, but isn’t that just magnetism?” Liao observed dryly.

  “That pen’s plastic,” Rowe retorted, turning off the device with another thump of the button. The pen clattered to the table. “But, yeah – the Reactionless Drive can attract or repel objects made of any material, or even propel itself like an engine. Flying cars, here we come!”

  James nodded, giving Liao a grin. “Impressive.”

  Rowe’s smirk was a mile wide.

  “Yeah, I’m really looking forward to Jane Sixpack-Soccermum flying over my house all fucked up on
Ritalin, typing on her cell phone with one hand, chugging scotch with the other between bouts of screaming at the kids in the back seat...”

  Summer laughed. “...but, seriously, you haven’t seen anything yet.”

  She led them to a different room. This room was essentially a giant corridor, stretching out beyond the single light above them. Two black metal rails at hip height followed the corridor into the gloom.

  “Lieutenant Liao, Captain Grégoire, this... is the magnetic accelerator.”

  Melissa felt a twitch building in her eye. Just like her father, this annoying woman was fond of dramatic pauses for effect.

  “What’s it do?” Liao asked, folding her arms in front of her.

  Rowe grinned a proud grin. “Take any three-to-four kilogram ferrous projectile, place it in this thing, and watch as it gets shot up to about... oh, three kilometres a second. Faster, with more juice behind it and more rail length...”

  Liao was actually genuinely impressed. “Cool.”

  Rowe snorted derisively. “Cool? It’s damn near fucking godlike! Can you imagine trains built on this technology? You could get from Perth to Brisbane in, like, half an hour... allowing time for the train to accelerate or decelerate so the fleshy bodies on board don’t get smushed. Freight trains could go even fucking faster than THAT!”

  She became more and more animated the more she talked, her breathing picked up. Liao absently worried if she was going to have a heart attack.

  “Anyway, seriously, this thing is already obsolete,” she said, suddenly relaxing and flashing a knowing smirk. “At least, the last room in this little tour is going to make even the idea of trains laughable...”

  She lead them out, bouncing like a child showing her parents her prize for making the best potato battery in school.

  The last room was right at the middle of the single-level building... if Liao’s sense of direction was to be believed in this maze. Rowe dramatically pushed open the heavy double doors, throwing her hands high above her head.

  “The Spacial Coordinate Remapper. It is here, ladies and gentlemen, that we have become gods. It here that we make physics our bitch.”

  A large, perfectly spherical object, about a meter in diameter and made entirely out of some kind of metal neither James nor Melissa recognised, stood on four struts in the middle of the room. This, much like the devices in the previous two rooms, was incredibly underwhelming, but the two naval officers had figured out that, generally speaking, the less impressive the appearance the more impressive the functionality.

  Summer’s words were a bold proclamation, Liao thought, but held back an amused chuckle. “Right,” she said instead, “So what does this little toy do, hmm?”

  Rowe snorted, pushing up her glasses. “It teleports itself and anything around it to another location.”

  Liao blinked.

  James shook his head. “What, like Star Trek? ‘Beam me up, Scotty’?”

  “No, not quite. Essentially, it transports itself and attached mass – up to about 200,000 tonnes, give or take – from point A to point B directly, without any journey in-between... unlike in Star Trek, where the transporters de-materialise the transportee and move the matter stream to the transporter pad. Instead this thing just jumps itself from place to place. No de-materialising. Just ‘pop!’

  “...so it’s more like Nightcrawler, from X-Men. Incidentally, “Beam me up!” is a frequently misquoted line. Kirk never actually said that phrase during the whole show, nor did anyone else. It’s kinda like... ‘Luke, I am your father’... that’s wrong too. Vader actually said, ‘No, I am your father!’”

  The woman looked smug, which was the stroke that completed the unflattering picture of her Liao was painting in her mind.

  Melissa pursed her lips thoughtfully. “So... this ‘jump drive’... Where can it go? What’s its effective range?”

  Summer grinned triumphantly. “As far as we can tell, unlimited. At least, that’s what our theoretical physicists tell us. We can’t get it to work within a planet’s gravity field; even very minute interference throws it off... so it hasn’t been tested.”

  Liao frowned. “So we can’t use it anywhere there’s even a tiny bit of gravity? Doesn’t that limit its application somewhat?”

  Rowe smirked. “You might think so, but no. You see, gravity operates on the inverse square law so you’d think you’d have to be ages away from any sizable body to make it work, but... there are these things called Lagrangian points, points in space where there’s practically no gravity at all... I mean damn next to nothing.”

  Summer casually chewed on the end of her pen as she spoke, muffling her words ever so slightly, causing the others to have to focus on what she was saying to hear her.

  “They’re found where the gravitational forces of two strong, nearby bodies cancel each other out – between the Earth and the Moon, for example, or between the Sun and the Earth. So while we can’t use it to send a postcard to Canada, we could send one to a Lagrangian point near Pandora, where the Avatar people are, or to ice-planet Hoth. You know, whatever.”

  James spoke up. “How do you even know it works?”

  Rowe shrugged. “We don’t, but the math surrounding it is totally rock solid. Rock solid...” Then, in a soft mutter, “...pretty much.”

  There was this awkward moment of silence where nobody knew quite what to say.

  “So, um. That... concludes the great tour, you guys! Uhh- Lieutenant, Captain, did you two want to head to the lunch room for a bite to eat?”

  “Actually we have our own lunch planned,” James answered. “Sorry.” Liao silently nodded in agreement.

  Summer looked dejected, but perked right back up. “Ah... that’s fine. I’ll walk you back to the front entrance. Then I have paperwork to do, so... work, work.”

  They began to walk back the way they’d come, and Summer pulled out her pen again... until Liao shot her a look that said it was probably better if she didn’t.

  Instead, she pocketed it and turned to James. “So, you liked what you saw of the technology?”

  The man nodded, his smile growing. “Yes. I see a lot of potential here, a lot of new technologies that the EU will be happy to trade for. It’s all in aid of our space program, you see, so...”

  Summer gave a squeal. “Oh, wow. My shit’s going to get shot into space? That’s so cool!”

  “Heh, well, if it does... I’ll make sure that they send back plenty of pictures.”

  Liao tuned out the conversation, instead stopping by the water cooler and plucking up one of the plastic cups.

  “What a complete fucking waste of time,” she muttered to nobody, despondently watching the small container fill with cool, bubbling water, patiently waiting as the water level gradually rose.

  Suddenly an incredibly bright flash, like a camera only a foot away from your eye, exploded from further down the corridor. It faded quickly, replaced by a low glow as though coming from the headlights of a car. Looking up – and immediately forced to squint – Liao could barely see the shadowy outlines of Summer and James, stopped in the middle of the corridor, both as alarmed and curious as she. The cup, forgotten, began to overflow as Melissa raised a hand to shield her eyes, trying to peer past the intense light.

  Then the roaring started. It was like a foghorn, low and loud, the vibrations so strong she could feel them in her gut. The whole building began to shake, posters and pictures thrown from the walls. The light intensified. It was so bright that she was forced to cup her hands over her eyes.

  With a rumble a support beam dislodged from the ceiling and caught her on the back of her head, sending her sprawling to the ground with a pained grunt. The water cooler collapsed and broke with a crack-splash, dousing Liao’s face and upper torso in freezing water. Panicked, Melissa struggled to stand but the roof above her gave way, concrete and steel crashing down all around her, pinning her face down on the carpet-covered floor.

  White-hot pain exploded from her legs. Her agonized screa
ming was drowned out by the noise, the fog horn, that was so loud her ears could hear nothing else.

  Abruptly, the sound ceased. The debris shifted and settled, and for a moment, there was absolutely no sound at all except her own pained gasping for breath and the gentle trickle of water from the remains of the broken water cooler onto the carpet.

  Then, mercifully, unconsciousness took the pain away.

  Chapter II

  “The Pillars of the Earth”

  *****

  Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre

  People’s Republic of China

  Earth

  Eight years after the attacks

  “Congratulations on your new promotion, Commander Liao. She’s a fine ship.”

  Field promotions could be bittersweet. In most cases, they represented recognition of skill or capabilities beyond your current rank, deserving of reward. However, in this case her promotion represented simple survival; it represented merely being alive after a catastrophe.

  This, in Liao’s mind, was not an action worthy of advancement and adoration – but the choice had not been hers to make.

  So much had changed since the attacks. If Liao hadn’t been in Sydney at the time, the attack on Beijing would have claimed her too. An unusually high number of naval officers had been attending their yearly mandatory classes in the capitol at the time of the attack and had subsequently died. Due to her mission in Sydney, Liao was given an exception to the training, which had ultimately saved her life.

  Sydney had been attacked too, but the heavily reinforced building they were in had saved her. No such luck for the shoddily constructed barracks the Navy called a training depot. Everyone in that building had been crushed... it had taken the rescue authorities a month to even dig the bodies out.

  So now after the attacks, all over fleet, every ship, every submarine, every terrestrial base was screaming for experienced officers. They had all requested her – but they had all been denied, because General Yang offered her a command she couldn’t turn down.