Chapter 1

Two months after the Five Minute War, Captain Yeung was chewing meditatively on his last ration bar and considering the options. Nitrogen would be the least painful way to end it all – a peaceful, dreamless sleep. There was also his service weapon, a simple and compact kinetic weapon that used chemical propellant to send slugs through human bodies. That, at least, had a certain long and storied tradition about it. There was also the somewhat more outre and daring method of dropping out of an airlock and letting the thermal wash of his ship, the Hope of Common Humanity, wash over his body.

The news casts from the Earth orbitals were clear – the mass die offs and the firestorms were continuing unabated. The Martian front of the United Near East Coalition was claiming that they had managed to scrape together a functional, long term biosphere ... but Captain Yeung’s father had been an ecologist and imparted to his young son that the possibility of recreating Earth’s biosphere on Mars was fast approaching nill, based on current progressions and the tensions separating the UNEC and the NEB – the New Eurasian Bloc.

The fault lines of humanity, drawn in economics and blood, had been tense when he had been young. Captain Yeung had bought into the idea that one could help keep those lines safe by signing up with the Coalition Navy – but in the end, the only thing it had bought him was two, three months of extra time away from the extinction the rest of the human race circled around.

The bridge of the Hope was somber. Astrogation officer Williams was suspended in her microgravity harness and writing another letter back home – the eastern coast of the Americas had been mostly spared from the effect of the triple kinetic salvo in the Pacific Ocean, but the fallout from the atomics and the knock on ripples of the war plagues and the bolides were both working to rip her extended family apart. She wasn’t even sure if they were still alive. Still, she wrote.

But at least she was working on something real. Yeung swung his gaze to his tactical command officer, Hurly. Hurly had the facial appearance and build of a rather cheerful marshmallow suspended too long over a fire, his dark cheeks surrounded by vitiligo and his hair sheered short and curly. He was chewing his knuckles and, again, looking at what he called The Blip.

Captain Yeung put aside the thoughts of suicide. He unstrapped himself and gently pushed himself from his seat to the console that Hurly was strapped into. Softly, he spoke. “Hurly, what have you got?”

“I know you think I’m crazy, Captain,” Hurly said, his Hindi only lightly accented. “But I am convinced.”

“Aliens,” Captain Yeung said, frowning.

“No, not aliens, something!” Hurly said, turning in his seat. He pointed. “Okay, look at the fleet dispo chart we have – here’s us, here’s every BAN bastard out there.” The screen flickered with red and blue dots, indicating the array of siloships, laser destroyers, kinetic drone carriers, cutters, patrol ships, and logistics drones that had been the solar system before the Five Minute War. He tapped a few buttons. “Okay ... watch...” He tapped a few more buttons – and things ticked forward, bit by bit by bit. Captain Yeung found himself watching.

And softly, he whispered. “I’ll be gods damned,” he said.

“See!” Hurly said. “The maneuvering burn that the BAN-2 fleet made that got our silo ship to launch? It was made in response to this.” He thrust his finger at a blaze of energy at the edge of the solar system. “I think they mistook it as an atomic attack in the outer system and reacted.” He turned his head back. “And I’ve been collecting data over the past two months.”

“From whom?” Yeung asked.

“From our survivors, a few Bloc captains that have their coms open,” Hurly said, his voice growing excited. “The triangulation data is clear. The Blip is fifty kilometers wide.”

Yeung’s jaw dropped. But he had seen something he was sure that Hurly had seen as well. Their course and the hypothetical line that the Blip had been making – the trajectory it had made in the few pings that everyone had gotten before the billions of corpses had distracted everyone.

The math was obvious.

He turned to Williams.

“Williams,” he said. “Set a course for these coordinates. Five G burn.”

“We won’t be able to get back to E-” She hesitated. “To Mars. Not without getting remassed.”

“Do it.”

Williams was silent. But discipline held. She swept her letter off of her console, then started to program in the information. Yeung kicked off the floor, floating to the chair. He strapped himself in, then tapped on the communication systems of the Hope. “All hands, this is Captain Yeung. Brace for high G maneuvers. Estimated burn time...” He glanced at the quick flash of Williams’ hands. “Four minutes.”

The chisel shaped, mushroomed head of the Hope swung herself slowly around as their cold gas thrusters spurted and fluttered. The elegant laser frigate, designed to provide anti-drone and anti-fighter support for any fleet she was attached to brought herself to a new bearing – one not entirely in line with her destination. Changing orbits was more complex than simply sticking your nose in the right direction and burning hard. But burn hard she did, the fusion drive that served as her power system and her propulsion in equal measures cutting a brilliant line of heat and radiation through space. Other ships watched, from their lonely distance.

But no one launched a missile or even sent a query. There was no point, not while the vast farmlands of Earth burned, and the United Nations were calculating the dead by the methane their rotting corpses were creating in the atmosphere. The whole solar system was numb – and for Captain Yeung, it had all narrowed down to this moment, this singular burn.

And five days later, with another equally powerful burn depleting their fuel, and their stomachs growling with hunger, their water rations feeling like lead weights in their bellies, the bridge crtew of the Hope gaped at the screens of their bridge ... and at the Blip. Searchlights beamed from the forward turrets of the Hope, jerry rigged up for no one had ever once imagined that they would need to shine this much plain and simple light and swivel it around. Because despite the radar being aimed directly at the immense wall of black material, the Blip remained elusive on every scanner they had, save for purely visual. It drank radar reflections, it swallowed thermal emissions, it seemed invisible to everything save the brilliant white light that swept along the vast, almost rocklike hull.

But...

It was a hull.

The Blip was a starship. But it was also a floating field of debris. The rocky chunk that the Hope was aiming its lights at was surrounded by an expanding field of dark, cold debris. Long coiling whips of metal and fabric, shimmering tubes of blue-white glass, things that radiated enough hard gamma that they were probably being picked up by whatever survived in CENTCOM back on Luna. The debris were spreading around the rocky central hull, which itself, looked to be a tiny fraction of the fifty kilometers that they had detected two months ago. Yeung thought that, maybe, he should have been curious about all the vital scientific data humanity had missed while their telescopes had been aimed at one another and not here.

Instead?

“Think they have food?” Hurly whispered.

The rock that their ship floated before bisected. A thin blue line spread and opened, bit by bit by bit, until the Hope was hovering before a huge, empty space. There was a hemisphere of metal that looked, for all the world, like a landing platform. Their ship had never been designed to land – but the invitation was clear. Yeung nodded and spoke. “Anyone who doesn’t want to come can stay aboard the ship ... but ... at the moment, we have no protocols, no regulations. Our navy is a pile of scrap, our commanders are either atomic cinders or hiding in bunkers on Mars and Earth. I am going to take a shuttle here ... and I am going to see what we can find.”

Hurly and Williams both nodded. The security officer, Chang, flashed a huge grin. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world, Cap.”

In the end, the entire thirty six human crew of the Hope Of A Common Humanity boarded the three shuttles – one was normally robotic and used purely to transport freight, and was able to carry sixteen crew by dint of them reprogramming its flight speeds and safety tolerances while wearing vac-suits. But they all came into the alien ship and landed upon the shelf of metal. The rock closed behind them, sealing the shuttle into the immense hemispherical chamber, locking them in with the pale blue glow that suffused it.

Captain Yeung, for his part, half expected there to be gravity. But, no, it seemed that some things remained constant. The only gravitational force that existed came from mass, acceleration, or could be faked by rotation. He felt faintly comforted by it.

Williams and Hurly were more focused on everything the shuttle’s suite of sensors could give them. “The outside atmosphere ... captain!” Hurly sounded dizzy with excitement. “It’s nitrogen-O2, it’s breathable. Fuck! It’s more breathable than Earth!”