8FOLD: Pulse War Special # 2, "Weavers Dawn"

[Amabel Holland]

  We know going in, it will be hell.
  Just getting there, will be hell.
  Once we get there, if we get there: hell.
  Then we throw a Hail Mary.
  If it works, all that hell was worth it.
  If it doesn't, then it wasn't.
  Either way, none of us are coming back.
  Hell is what we signed up for.
  It ain't a forlorn hope.
  It's the voyage of the damned.

     - LCpl Robert Quinn
     Personal log (final entry)

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                 WEAVERS DAWN
              BY AMABEL HOLLAND

Quinn is the first to go blind.

   This is a shock. Everyone assumed it'd be Bacon; Bacon was the
first to have problems, and his eyesight seemed to be deteriorating
faster than everyone else's. As the microgravity caused the fluids in
his head to shift, and increased the pressure in his eyeballs, the
sharp edges in the distance lost definition, becoming blurry and
muddy. With time, it became blurrier and muddier, his
rapidly-developing myopia exacerbated by choroidal folds.

   Bacon described it as the world growing smaller. Yesterday, only
the few inches in front of his face were in focus. This distressed him
to no end. Before the mission, he had been a painter.

   "Professionally?" scoffed Quinn.

   "No," said Bacon. "Just something I enjoyed. Something I'll never
enjoy again."

   "You'll never enjoy it again anyway," said Quinn. "That's the mission."

   "I know," said Bacon, irritated. "I know there's no logic to it.
But I still feel the loss acutely."

   Quinn made a wet flatulent noise with his mouth. "Boo hoo," he said
dismissively. "I'm glad my eyes are going. That means I won't have to
look at your ugly mug much longer."

   And now it's gone; Quinn is blind. The consensus is that it
couldn't have happened to a nicer fella. Everyone irritates everyone
aboard the Forlorn Hope -- it's a consequence of packing twenty people
into two thousand square feet for seventy-four days of sleep
deprivation and brain damage -- but nobody irritates everybody else
the way Quinn does.

   "I feel like I should get a prize or something!" Quinn says,
half-joking. "Maybe the captain can break out the sherry?"

   Coop thinks for a moment, then agrees. While the crew is squeezing
liquid salt and pepper into their dinners, Coop personally apportions
the sherry for each of them, giving Quinn a double portion and
forgoing one herself. Davidson decides to decline his as well, and
Quinn greedily downs a third cup.

   Coop looks out across the room, noting stoically that most of the
faces are indistinct. Globs of color bleeding into other globs. One of
the globs sounds like Quinn, and is bartering with Lazy Mike for half
a glass more. Wilson comes into focus beside her, and asks Coop if
this will become a ritual, repeated every time one of them goes blind.
"Not enough sherry for that," says Coop. "Especially if Quinn's
invited."

()

The alien engine that propels the Forlorn Hope through space also
allows it to jump through "gates": fissures in the fabric of
space-time. A distance that would take several lifetimes to cross is
traversed in a day, and so it is estimated that the ship will travel
from Earth to Deep Space in only two months.

   But the gates that make this voyage feasible are also the problem.
Passing through them exacerbates the effects of microgravity on human
bodies, and accelerates their decline. This could be countered by the
use of a gravity generator. They have one of those, too, another gift
from Earth's alien allies on Kyklokos. Using it would double the
duration of the journey. Earth might not have that much time left, but
that's not why they're not using it.

   In a way, theirs is an escort mission. Their charge is to escort
the gravity generator to Weavers Dawn, and then turn the thing on. And
between now and then, Coop just has to get them through it. Just has
to hold them together while they go through the wringer.

   The ship's trajectory was set after they left Earth's orbit, using
information pieced together by Regina White's network of
extraterrestrial informants and Ben Keller's "book club". Every few
hours the thing needs to be checked and occasionally adjusted to keep
them on track. There are power cells that need to be changed, systems
that need to be maintained. But generally speaking, there isn't really
enough for a half-dozen people to do each day, let alone a crew of
twenty. As Quinn joked early in the voyage, they've brought spares for
their spares, so that if and when they get to Weavers Dawn, there'll
be at least one person left to push the big red button.

   Quinn's been a problem right from the start. He's fond of sardonic
asides that only he seems to be fond of. If Coop's job is to prevent
the demoralization of her crew, Quinn makes it a central feature of
his running commentary. She used to joke to herself that Quinn was
assigned to the Forlorn Hope so that the Earth didn't have to deal
with him. Then she heard Quinn say the same thing about himself, and
the joke stopped being funny.

   Some crew members are more vulnerable and depressed than others,
and through a mixture of cabin reassignments and work shifts Coop has
had some limited success keeping Quinn and his demoralizing influence
away from them. The loss of his eyesight means that he's effectively
confined to quarters, which removes one headache.

   It replaces it with another, though. Sudden total blindness in
microgravity makes it hard for Quinn to do anything for himself, and
his acerbic personality makes it hard for anyone else to want to help
him. His cabin-mates manage to be conspicuously absent when he needs
help finding and climbing into his tethered sleeping bag, or finding
his way to the mess, or using the suction toilet. So Coop puts him to
bed, and brings him his meals, and assists him in the bathroom:
putting his feet in the straps and braces about his thighs, ensuring
the paper goes into the air-tight bags when he's done ("I'm not wiping
for you, Quinn"), sealing the waste bag in the toilet and jamming it
down into the disposal unit.

   When he urinates, she holds the relief tube two inches away from
him. Any farther and the tube won't do its job; any closer, and the
suction would mutilate his genitals. After one of his smart remarks at
lunch-time, she warns him not to push her: "Remember who holds the
tube."

   He doesn't necessarily become more pleasant after that (he doesn't
have a pleasant atom in his body) but he's too embarrassed to cause
much trouble. And his cabin mates, for the most part, feel ashamed
enough that the captain is doing all this that after a couple days
they take over.

()

After Quinn goes blind, he starts showing up in her nightmares. His
eyes are covered in shadow, becoming black and empty voids. If only
Coop could get close enough, she could see his eyes, but the closer
she gets the more inscrutable the void becomes. At the edges of the
eyeless void his skin is cracked and bloody.

   Finally she thinks she sees something in the shadows where his left
eye should be. A white dot. Or maybe yellow? Like a squirt of pus, but
flitting about in the darkness. Moving.

   Suddenly it jumps out of his eye and into hers, burrowing and
thrashing and slicing.

   Nightmares have become common to the point where it's more unusual
not to have them. Sleep is hard enough to come by without that
complication; there's a joke going around the crew that goes like
this:

   "How did you sleep?"

   "Oh, I slept like a log. Three whole hours."

   "Oh, so you slept in." And so on. There's no real sense of time in
space. Darkness and light blast through the windows at seemingly
random times, severely disrupting the body's circadian rhythm.
Stuffing yourself in a bag and floating on a tether doesn't
necessarily help matters. To top it off, a space station is noisy the
same way a house is noisy. It creaks and complains. Only here there's
the added delight of wondering if that noise means you'll soon be
sucked into the cold and merciless vacuum of space.

   Coop made an effort early on to enforce the sleep schedule that had
been drawn up back on Earth. But it wasn't long before allowances had
to be made. If the body can't sleep during its assigned shift, it
can't be forced, and within a few weeks there was no longer any
semblance of a schedule. People go to bed now at odd hours, and
there's no consistent rhythm to it; the span of time between naps for
a given crewmember varies wildly.

()

The funny thing is, Wilson is well-rested when it happens.

   He begins with alternating bursts of panic and apologies, but Coop
cuts him off. "Just tell me what happened."

   "Six hours ago, I went to check our heading. I did the calculations
and made a slight adjustment based on that to keep us on course." He
hands her the tablet.

   "We are not on course. You never left it unattended?"

   "It's not sabotage, captain. It's," he winces, "it's me. I must've
gotten it wrong. I swear to God, I checked the numbers. Checked them
twice before I punched it in, checked it again before I confirmed. I
was just wrong three times in a row."

   "Lucky that we caught it now," says Coop mildly. "A few more hours
and we'd have gone off-road." Meaning that the ship would have strayed
so far from the nearest space-time gate that it would take decades
instead of hours to get back on course. "Thank you for catching it."

   "Don't thank me," says Wilson. "I screwed it up in the first place."

   "I'm the captain, I will thank whoever I please, is that understood?"

   "Yes, ma'am."

   "I appreciate you owning up to it."

   Coop decides almost immediately that Wilson, like Quinn, will need
to be relieved of active duty. Now's not the time to tell him that,
though; there's still a crisis to avert, and he's still in a state of
shock and panic over what he's almost done. Given that he was wide
awake when it happened, Coop figures that it's not sleep deprivation,
but rather their old friend microgravity again. Shifts in intracranial
cephalad fluids change the shape of the brain. Some parts reduce in
volume while others get larger, greatly impairing memory and
cognition.

   None of this is a surprise. Not only did the mission anticipate
this (again, that's why their spares have spares) but the medical
staff who helped plan the mission gave Coop a way to measure her
crew's inevitable decline. Each person aboard the Forlorn Hope has a
daily series of timed puzzles to complete: pattern recognition,
problem solving, et cetera. As their cognition deteriorates and sleep
deprivation takes its toll, naturally the puzzles will take longer to
complete, and once they push past a certain average range, the system
will flunk them.

   "That way," one of the doctors had told her, "you'll know to remove
them before it gets to the point where they can jeopardize the
mission."

   The problem of course is that it's been weeks since any of them
passed. According to the system, all of them, including Coop, are
unfit for duty; all of them are a threat to the ship and its safety.

()

Catherine Cooper wakes up in her bed in Arizona, and just outside her
husband is on the patio, grilling sausages on a hot August day. She
knows it's a dream.

   She knows it's a dream because this is the house she grew up in,
not the home she bought with Hans. She knows it's a dream because it's
August and Earth instead of March and Deep Space.

   She knows it's a dream because Hans is still alive.

   Before she can slide out of bed, she's on the patio and asking him
what day it is. The twenty-fifth of August, twenty-fourteen. The day
the Pulse attacks the Earth.

   "But you're already dead," she argues with him. "You died the year
before." And because she says it, it becomes true again: she's alone.

   Their son runs up from the backyard and shoots her with a squirt
gun. But of course they never had a son, and she knows that; he has no
face.

   Someone wakes her by knocking on the cabin door. "Sorry, Captain,
but you're needed in the mess."

   She nods them away, floats out of her sleeping bag, and gets
dressed. When she enters the mess, the entire crew is there, even
Quinn. "Surprise!" they squeal in unison, presenting her with a
tortilla smeared with chocolate frosting.

   "What is this?"

   "Happy birthday, Captain."

   It's not that she forgot her own birthday. She knew it was coming
up this Friday. It's that she thought today was Tuesday.

   Coop thanks them and takes a grateful bite of what passes for a
cake in space (can't have crumbs floating around). "Thanks," she says.

   "How is it?"

   "Oh, it's terrible, but I love it." Laughter. Everyone is more
relaxed than they've been in a long time.

   "How old are you, Captain?" says Quinn with a wide smirk.

   "Day older than yesterday, day younger than tomorrow."

()

In her dream, the crew floats around her with big kitchen knives. That
doesn't scare her; she knows they will never hurt her.

   But they will hurt themselves, and suddenly, rhythmically, they're
stabbing themselves over and over again. Coop tries to stop them. For
some intense dream-reason she can't grab their hands, can't wrestle
the knives away from them. The only way she can save them is to take
the blows herself, throwing her arms across their chests, catching the
blade in her palm, her breasts, offering up her thighs and belly,
opening up her neck.

   When she wakes, the back of her hand is burning, the mancer's mark
pulsing blue light.

()

Their final jump takes them to Weavers Dawn. A hush falls over the
crew, and it is only broken by Quinn asking if Bacon can describe it.
But by now Bacon is practically blind too; it's all shadows and dim
gauzy light.

   "A hundred different colors," says Wilson. "Some I never seen
before. Streams of light, like strings. Tessellating, and every time
you look at it, you see something different. Different colors,
different shapes, different... different sounds."

   "Different sounds?" says Quinn.

   "I don't know how else to explain it," says Wilson. "I look at it,
and I can see sounds. Music. Words. Ideas. Like looking at the face of
God."

   "Glad I'm blind, then," lies Quinn. "Anyone have any idea what this
is? Scientifically?"

   "It's a mystery even to the Pulse," says Coop. "Those who have
tried to study it have gone mad."

   "Maybe don't stare God in his face," Quinn suggests.

   Wilson bristles but lets it go. "Do we know who the weavers are? Is
this where they started, the dawn of the weavers? Or does it belong to
them, the weavers' dawn?"

   "Neither of those," says Coop. "The grammar's a little funky, but
it basically functions as a declarative. Like I might say, 'Wilson,
move'. They're saying, 'Weavers: dawn'. Dawn is the thing the weavers
are supposed to do. But who they are, what that means, where it even
came from, no one knows."

   "I'm just glad we made it here," says Bacon. "We've done it! It was
impossible, but we did it."

   "Yes," says Coop. "Now comes the hard part."

()

Jump gates only work in one direction; by occupying a blocking
position that prevents egress to the next gate, the Forlorn Hope
effectively cuts the Pulse's empire in two. Naturally the Pulse can't
allow that, and it won't be long before the first enemy ships attempt
to dislodge them.

   The Kyklokan jump engine that got them here is highly combustible,
and so the first thing Coop does after weighing magnetic anchor is
jettison it, sending it spiraling through the jump gate. Somehow, this
more than anything crystallizes the understanding that none of them
are going back.

   They commemorate the occasion with two glasses each of sherry, and
they hold a sort of wake for each other. Eulogies are a combination of
facts and fiction, the facts being made of the little accidental
scraps of biography each of them has revealed over the course of the
journey, the fiction filling the gaps and somehow ringing more true.
Amid peals of jagged, exhausted laughter they toast Quinn's many
imaginary ex-wives and bastard children, Wilson's six years at clown
college ("somehow, he never did graduate"), Bacon's intense and tragic
allergy to water (a running gag that's been with them for most of the
journey, and no one quite remembers how it started).

   Then they get to the captain, and there are neither facts nor
fictions. She's told them precious little about her life on Earth, and
there are no jokes about her, only a kind of solemn reverence. She
raises her glass to herself.

   "I was Captain of the Forlorn Hope," she says. "Together, we
crossed the stars. What else do I need?"

()

In the distance, a Pulse ship appears, a thousand feet long. Coop
recognizes the shape from her briefings. Like the Hope, it has a jump
engine, and like the Hope's, its engine is highly combustible. That
makes it too dangerous to take into battle. Instead, it serves as a
carrier for eighteen smaller combat crafts equipped with less-volatile
non-jump engines. These swarm out of the carrier now, slowly floating
toward the Forlorn Hope, each of them about half its size.

   "They've only sent one squadron. They think that'll do the trick."
Coop frowns; that's not nearly enough. They can't turn on the gravity
generator until they've attracted the attention of a more significant
chunk of the enemy fleet. Six carriers, at least.

   Ten of the eighteen fighters hang back in reserve. That's smart,
and more-or-less what Coop expected. The other eight are in a very
loose formation, with plenty of room to maneuver. This means that Bell
and Mason, manning the front guns, will need to aim very carefully.

   "I'd prefer it if they were all clumped together," Bell calls out.

   "I'll be sure to pass that along," says Coop.

   To a casual observer, it would look like all eight are making a
beeline for the bow. But Coop can see that three of the ships are
veering slightly starboard, and she can see it because she's looking
for it. Before the Forlorn Hope left Earth, military intelligence had
ensured that fifth columnists on Earth had "stolen" its blueprint to
pass on to the Pulse, exposing a supposed crucial weak point on the
starboard flank.

   The five head-on fighters open fire, streaks of white light zipping
through the empty, silent, frictionless void of space. Some shots miss
the Hope completely, others bouncing off its shielding. None of these
are intended to be kill shots. They're meant to distract from the
three ships that are swooping toward the flank.

   "They're taking the bait," says Coop, and on cue the four starboard
guns light them up.

   "Three down!" says Alcorn. "Fifteen to go!"

   "Make that fourteen!" says Bell. She's managed to take out one of
the five. The other four fall back into the reserve.

   "Shields?" inquires Coop.

   "Ninety-four percent, holding," replies Hardy.

()

It is forty minutes before the enemy launches a second assault,
committing another six of its remaining fighters.

   "They're gonna hit us in waves," intuits Coop. "They're gonna try
to wear us down."

   "Luckily we got a full night's sleep!" bellows Quinn, to riotous laughter.

   "Everyone strap in," says Coop, slipping a tether about her own left wrist.

   The enemy's fire is more focused, now. These shots aren't meant to
draw attention, but to wear down the shields. An intense volume of
fire zeroes in on a single point.

   "Eighty percent," calls out Hardy. The ship rocks violently; only
the magnetic anchors prevent it from careening into space, and only
the tethers prevent the weightless crew from bouncing about like
pinballs.

   "Make that seventy-five," says Hardy mournfully.

   Bell manages to pick off one of the fighters, and the exploding
debris strikes another. The remaining four split off, two circling
each flank, while the second wave comes up the front.

   The fighters at the flanks are very cautious now: they know their
intel about the starboard side was incorrect. Maybe they even suspect
that they were fed bad info on purpose. Coop doesn't know what's going
on in their heads. (Coop doesn't really care; easier to kill them if
you don't think of them as having faces.)

   Luckily, while the Pulse was gathering intel on the Earth, the
Earth was doing the same. Coop knows what these fighters can do. In
addition to the low-level rapid-fire blasts they've been peppering the
shields with ("sixty percent, Captain"), they're equipped with more
powerful disruptor guns. These need a moment to charge up, just like
the Hope's beloved cannon "Sol Invictus", during which time the ships
can't be firing anything else.

   Coop guesses that that's why those ships on the flanks aren't
firing. Instead, they're concentrating on giving a wide berth to those
powerful starboard and port guns, trying to stay in range while
avoiding getting hit. Once the other two waves have worn down the
shields ("forty-four!"), the guys on the flanks are going to hit them
with the disrupters from both sides at the same time.

   "Take out those ships!" she barks to the crew on the flanks.

   "We're trying," promises Alcorn.

   "That's not good enough," snaps Coop. On the way here, she needed
to make allowances for the frailties of the flesh, for the fact that
all their bodies and brains were falling apart. That was the kind of
leader they needed to get them through their collective suffering, to
get them to this moment. But now that they're here, and the fate of
the world hinges on these people doing the impossible. And so now, she
must demand it of them.

   "Thirty percent!" says Hardy. "Switching to back-up shields. It's
going to go fast, Captain!"

   "I'll be ready," says Coop. Her mancer's mark begins to glow.

   "Got one!" says Alcorn.

   "Got two!" brags Bell. "Ooh, three!"

   The remnants of the second wave fall back as the final wave moves forward.

   "Nineteen!" The ship rocks again. "Fourteen! Twelve. Six."

   "Here we go," says Coop.

   "Shield's broke, Captain!"

   But even their spares have spares. Coop's hand glows blue and hot,
and the Hope glows blue and hot, just as the disrupter blasts hit the
flanks: two at port, one at starboard.

   They melt gently into the blue shell that surrounds the ship. It
sways only slightly, almost imperceptibly. Viewed from the outside, it
would appear that the disrupters have no effect at all. Like the Hope
doesn't even feel it.

   But Coop does. The pain surges through her, indescribable,
overwhelming, almost ecstatic: the worst pain she's ever had. It's
unbearable; she bears it.

   "You okay, Captain?" solicits Bell.

   "Not in the slightest," grimaces Coop between heaving breaths.
"Keep firing. Hardy, get Sol Invictus ready."

   "Aiming for the carrier?" says Hardy.

   "Aim, but miss," says Coop. If they take out the carrier, it'll be
up to the remaining fighters to get word to the Pulse. Since they
don't have jump engines, that will take months, and they don't have
months. Besides, they don't intended to let any of the fighters
survive.

   Using their disrupters drained a significant amount of their power,
and leaves those fighters at the flanks vulnerable while they recover.
They don't get the chance; Alcorn's team makes quick work of them.

   The remainder of the enemy fires wildly at the bow (each shot is
like a long needle pushing its way through Coop's skin) swooping in
and out of range. Despite this, Bell and Mason each manage to down
another fighter.

   This leaves only three fighters. But Coop only sees two of them,
both rapidly falling back toward the carrier. Where's the third?

   "Kill it kill it kill it!" screeches Alcorn as the last fighter
flings itself into the Hope. Coop feels it plowing into her belly,
cracking her ribs as it wrenches her back.

   The enemy ship collapses like sea foam. The only evidence it
existed at all is the long, deep crack on the starboard. Coop grits
her teeth and clenches her fists, holding the ship together.

   "Captain!" says Hardy.

   "I'm fine," Coop mutters. "Is she ready?"

   "At your command," says Hardy.

   "Fire the solar cannon."

   Sol Invictus belches forth a column of cosmic sunlight. From within
the ship, they feels its intense heat. Even with their eyes closed,
they can see the white light. Only Bacon, who is very nearly as blind
as Quinn, keeps his eyes open; the last thing he'll see is the
brilliant white beam that stretches across the silent void.

   After the beam is gone, traces of it will remain - its light will
not fully fade for another century. It will be a popular theme in the
art of the cosmic diaspora, that defiant bolt of light.

   The carrier takes the hint, and speeds off with its two remaining
ships. Equipping the Hope with one of Earth's only three solar cannons
was a calculated risk. It's an expensive piece of equipment that would
be better suited for the defense of the Earth, like the two that arm
its orbital defense stations. But it's a surprise for the Pulse that
wasn't on the stolen schematics, and it's one that is likely to draw a
measure of serious attention.

   "Let them come," Coop whispers to herself.

()

The crack at the starboard side is a problem: the second that Coop
lowers her mystical shield, the crack will split the ship in two, and
they will all be dead.

   They're not scared of dying. That's what they signed up for, after
all. The moment they turn on the weaponized gravity generator, their
mass will become infinite and they will each collapse in on
themselves.

   "It's a messy way to go," says Quinn. "I don't like it."

   "Better than getting sucked into space," says Alcorn.

   "How is it better?" says Quinn.

   "Less painful," says Alcorn.

   "Getting crushed down to a dot, that's less painful than suffocating?"

   "You go out into space without a suit, and the air in your lungs
will rupture almost immediately," says Alcorn. "The water in your body
will vaporize because there's no atmospheric pressure; your tongue and
your eyes will boil. That all happens in ten or fifteen seconds,
before you lose consciousness. The other way, it's over in a second.
You'd hardly feel it."

   "We know that for sure?" says Quinn. "They've done studies as to
how long it takes for you to stop feeling it when your body has
infinite mass?"

   "Well," says Alcorn. "They've done the math."

   "Now, that'd be a terrible way to go."

   "What's that?"

   "Having to solve quadratic equations." As usual, no one laughs
harder than Quinn at his own joke.

()

The skirmish with the enemy woke everyone up, gave them a massive
surge of adrenaline, made them hyper-alert. But in the aftermath,
they're somehow more exhausted than they were before, more unfocused.
More dangerous.

   "Get some shut-eye if you can," Coop tells them. "It'll be two days
before the carrier gets word to their masters, and probably about four
days before they come back with more friends. So you can have a few
hours."

   Coop doesn't join them. If she breaks her concentration, she will
break the shield and the ship. She has to stay awake until the thing
is finished.

   Being cognizant of this, Bell and Alcorn volunteer to keep watch
with her, to stop her from falling asleep. Bell lasts longer than
Alcorn does, but within a couple hours even she is dozing off.

   Coop watches the two fuzzy blobs sleep with a warm and indulgent
smile. They had fought off the enemy and survived; let them sleep. She
had asked the impossible and they had done it. Now it was time for her
to do the impossible for them.

()

On the second day, Coop starts to feel the violent crack running along
her own starboard side, insistent and inevitable. That's now all she
feels: in her fingers, she feels the gentle pulse of the Hope's
life-support systems. With the blood in her veins, she feels the
coolant in the ship's veins. In her belly, the tingling core of Sol
Invictus, still hot from firing.

   Then there's something else, something she isn't quite sure is
real. It could just be the sleep deprivation and exhaustion playing
tricks on an already addled brain, but sometimes, for brief moments,
she thinks she can feel the crew itself. The whole ship, and everyone
on it, all contained within her, all rendered as palpable and physical
sensations, as pains and pleasures. The whole Earth, and everyone on
it. The whole universe.

   She's finding it harder and harder to hold onto time, not just in
the sense of how much time has passed, but also what things happened
in which order, not just now, but her life in general: she remembers
graduating from the academy before her prom, and she knows that isn't
right, that it can't be right, but there it is. She can't seem to hold
onto a single thought, to see a sentence from its beginning to its
end.

   But if she gets lost frequently, it's never for too long: the crack
in the ship always jolts her back with a sharp ripple of pain, always
focuses her on the task at hand. When it does, she's often surprised
by who is standing in front of her, who she was talking to, what she
was saying to them. Sometimes, they're not the members of her crew at
all, but people she used to know on Earth.

   Bell is taking her temperature now. She tells Coop the number, but
Coop forgets it almost immediately.

   "I have a fever?" Coop asks.

   Bell looks pained. "Yes, Captain. You. You've had a fever for days
now. It doesn't seem like it wants to break."

   "I'll be fine," says Coop. Even she knows it's a lie. "My clothes
are different?"

   "You had an accident, Coop," says Bell gently. "We couldn't really
salvage it."


   "But whose clothes are these?"
   "Quinn's."

   "Quinn's running around naked?" says Coop. She laughs uproariously.

   "No. He died. The other day."

   "Oh," says Coop. She's about to say that she liked Quinn, but she
knows that's not true. But she will miss him.

   She stares at Bell's face, and feels Bell's thoughts as a sharp
pain in her lungs. "This isn't the first time you've told me."

   "No, it's not."

   "Probably won't be the last," says Coop.

   Suddenly Bell is holding her and sobbing.

   "As you were," Coop says, a little coldly.

   "Captain," says Bell as she withdraws. "Maybe it's time? Time to
push the big red button?"

   "They're not here yet."

   "I know," says Bell. "But you can't go on like this. And maybe.
Maybe it'll be alright?"

   "No," says Coop. "If we push the button too early, it's not a trap, is it?

   "Of course, Captain," says Quinn with uncharacteristic gentleness.
"If that's the way it'll have to be, then that's the way it will."

   "Where's Bell? I was talking to Bell."

   "She died, Captain," says Quinn. "Two days ago."

()

"Do you have any regrets, Captain?"

   It's a voice, in the dark. Everything's dark now; Coop's eyes
finally failed yesterday, or maybe the day before, or maybe tomorrow.
She doesn't recognize the voice.

   She answers its question, but doesn't remember the answer.

()

Ten carriers arrive on the seventh day.

   Coop can see them. She's blind, but she can see the ten carriers,
and she can see the bolt of white they burned across the black and
empty heavens, and she can see the red-blue glory of Weavers Dawn.

   She can hear them. There is no sound in space, but she can hear
each carrier's squadrons scrambling, nearly two hundred fighters ready
to kill and to die.

   She can feel the bursts of violent light crashing against her blue
shell, burning her skin, twisting her intestines, shattering her
bones.

   "Now," she whispers, and someone hears her, and pushes the button.

()

Coop collapses in on herself: her body becomes infinite, her mind
becomes infinite, time becomes infinite. Right now, at this moment, on
the twenty-eighth of May, she is going down with her ship, but at the
same time, it is also the second of January, and she is being briefed
on her mission.

   The briefing isn't how she remembered it: bits and pieces of it are
moving around. Probably that's because her brain has been crushed by
her skull. She is incapable of thought and sensation, and yet, she
thinks and she feels.

   "You've turned the gravity generator into a weapon?"

   "More like a portal," says a man without a face as the first
dreadnaught appears on the starboard side of the Hope's collapsing
wreckage.

   Coop doesn't have eyes to see it, but she recognizes the emblem of
Earth-44. On the port side, there are two dreadnaughts from Earth-26.
Then, one from Earth-9.

   "How many?" she asks.

   "The treaty of the United Earths has ninety signatories," comes a
voice from Weavers Dawn. "Some are only providing troops, resources.
Most aren't any more advanced than we are, but some have already
conquered star systems in their own universes."

   "How many?" she asks again.

   "Sixty dreadnaughts," says her dead husband.

   "And three hundred single-man fighters," says the son they never had.

   "The Pulse have thirty-six active carriers," the spymaster Regina
White is telling her. "Maybe half of those should be tied down by our
allies from Kyklokos by the time you get to Weavers Dawn. If you can
draw enough of the remainder to your location, then the United Fleet
can overwhelm them. Not only are we cutting their empire in two, but
we're wiping out a big chunk of their space navy."

   Only one of the enemy carriers will escape, and less than a third
of the enemy fighters. Coop knows that a week after her death, two
planets that had previously refused Earth's pleas for help will join
its uneasy alliance with Kyklokos. The queen-sons of the Eighth Hive,
left behind in the Pulse's initial invasion of Earth, will secretly
leave Beijing, and then the Earth, so that their leader Rurik can
instigate a rebellion; that rebellion will spread. The fleet of the
United Earths will hold Weavers Dawn until they are betrayed by
accident, by someone named Claire Belden, whom Catherine Cooper met
once in passing but doesn't recognize.

   Coop doesn't have a body, but she feels the explosions miles in the
distance, as the carriers burst into shrapnel, and the fighters panic
and run -- those that aren't crushed by gravity bombs or ignited by
laser cannons. The victory of the Earths is not without a cost: they
lose twenty of their own fighters, and Earth-6 loses its dreadnaught.

   And among the dead, of course, there is the crew of the Forlorn
Hope  of which not a trace remains, save that fading bolt of light.

COPYRIGHT 2023 AMABEL HOLLAND