Prologue
Part 1
The resurrection of the Father
Session Three. Read from Part 2 – In the beginning
Father Ellis Simpson woke to the sound of nothing other than his laboured breathing, a state of quietude which lasted only a few seconds before a soul shattering agony leapt at him like an avenging demon, invading every muscle, sinew, and bone in his body. He could feel a grand mal tinkering with his cognition right at the edge of his perception and he reflexively glanded Topiramate 11 to suppress it, but his system had nothing for pain.
A green light flashed on a panel in front of him. It was so bright he could glimpse it through his tightly closed eyes. Forcing one eye open, he saw it was more than one light. A series of letters in a readout panel read: “Hibo capsule opening in:” The numbers next to the message were counting down in seconds and showed just over two minutes to go.
Tentatively moving one emaciated arm to test the lid of his capsule, Ellis sucked in air tasting of chlorinated faecal droplets as the grinding of unused joints added to his distress. He gagged.
“Good morning, Father Ellis,” said a soft, female-sounding voice. “I am Maribel, your ship’s intelligence. I observe you are in some pain, so I will administer some aid for that.”
“Please,” grunted Ellis. He tried to turn his head to the speaker on the left wall of the capsule, but stiffness forbade more than a few millimetres of movement. A faint hum preceded a growing glow of relief, and he relaxed in his cocoon.
“You have been hydrating for four hours, so with analgesics you should be able to function once your capsule opens,” Maribel informed him in her gentle, sing-song voice. “However, I should caution you not to make any rapid movements until you have fully acclimatised in about ten hours.”
“How long have I been under?” Ellis asked.
“One year and nine days,” Maribel said.
“A year!” Ellis jerked forward and winced, instantly regretting it as his body complained. “We were supposed to be travelling for five months.”
The original mission parameters were for the ship to accelerate at one gravity for two months, then decelerate to their destination for a further three months. Five months in total. A year must have taken them beyond the Oort Cloud into interstellar space.
“The mission has changed,” Maribel said. “We are no longer looking for mining opportunities.”
Before Ellis could reply, the capsule in which he was encased made a muted clank. The top split in two and slid back to leave him lying on a gurney. Two figures stepped into view.
“Easy Father,” said the first, a short woman dressed in a white lab coat, her face a blend of three or four ethnicities arranged with easy symmetry, as if by diplomatic agreement. Ellis recognised her as the ship’s doctor, Eloise Mugangwe. “You look rough. These damn old-fashioned V6 Hibo-caps are useless for anything over six months. We’re going to give you a sedative, and then pump some fast-nutrients into you.”
“Wait,” Ellis croaked. “Before you knock me out. Who authorised the extension of this mission? This is Vatican funded, and I should have been consulted.”
“Father, the Vatican has gone. Earth was raided by an alien task force after you went into hibo,” said the second, a thickset man in a military flight suit, whom Ellis did not know. “The whole of Rome was levelled before we fought them off and I was despatched by fast picket from Jupiter Station to intercept you. This is a military mission now.”
“If the Vatican has gone, who authorised it?” Ellis asked, his mind racing with the implications of the Vatican being destroyed and by aliens no less.
“New Rome has been established in Compton, Maryland, USA,” the military officer said. “There has been a convocation of the remaining cardinals and a new Pontiff elected.”
Ellis squinted at his name tag. It said, “Lieutenant Bright.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Ellis said, feeling relief in the knowledge the church had continued. “Who is the new Pope?”
“Cardinal Skaunce from New York. He hasn’t chosen a papal name yet,” said Bright. “My briefing notes say you know each other.”
Ellis did indeed know Pierre Skaunce, they lodged together in London when they were jointly assigned to the diocese. Skaunce was a moderniser, a man with his eyes on the future. He was a proponent of women priests, ending ecclesiastical celibacy, and an open celebration of non-binary love. Things were about to be shaken up.
Cardinal Skaunce once told him sex wouldn’t exist in the future. “It’ll all be sanctified steel onanist basins and long-distance frontal lobe stimulation. If you ever meet your significant other in the street, you probably won’t recognise them.”
This convinced him the church should cast aside Episcopal celibacy and follow the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic Churches who required married clergy to abstain from sexual relations only for a limited period before celebrating the Eucharist. He was of the view that protecting God’s gift of procreation might become the ironic preserve of the priesthood.
“How bad was the destruction?” Ellis asked, saying a silent prayer for the dead.
“About a billion dead. Most major cities damaged or destroyed.” Bright’s features tightened, as if some memory attached itself to the statistics, and Ellis added a prayer for the man’s peace. “Infrastructure is shot, but thankfully repairs are underway and the whole thing has brought humanity together.”
Unity in adversity, thought Ellis, it is always the way with humans. If you want to bring people together, find a common enemy.
“How did they get here?” Ellis was a geologist by training, but he knew enough about physics to understand interstellar travel was more or less impossible.
“Ah, yes,” said Bright. “That’s why I’m here. When you’re sufficiently recovered, I’ll brief you.”
The man stepped back, allowing Mugangwe to administer a sedative, and Ellis dropped off the edge of consciousness into a world of nightmares.
Part 2
In the beginning
Ellis rode into the briefing room, a small compartment to the aft of the ship, one wall of which formed the shield protecting the crew compartment from the fusion engine; the others comprising the outer bulkheads of the ship and a thin aluminium foil divider separating the room from the sleeping quarters and offices crowding the central axial corridor leading past the two loading bays and their attached shuttles, the mining laser, medical, hibo-pods, and ultimately the control bridge and officer’s ready rooms.
His ride a printed hover scooter riding on a noisy cushion of inducted air, slid gently through the foil curtain.
“Father, thanks for coming.” Lieutenant Bright was floating near the head of a plastic table. “Can you shut the scooter down? I can hardly hear myself think.”
“Of course, Lieutenant,” Ellis flicked the switch and his ride fell to silence. He remained seated, but felt himself floating away from the scooter, so gripped the sides with his knees. “I was quite happy to get here under my own steam, but you know doctors.”
A woman was engaged in a conversation with the ship’s intelligence at the other end of the room and Bright called her over. She kicked off the bulkhead and swam across the room, a picture of grace and athleticism.
“I’d like to introduce Doctor Jane Wildbird,” Bright went on. He waved a hand at the woman, her hard features barely registering the introduction with a slight flickering of her eyelids and a small inclination of her head. She was dressed in a military flight suit like the Lieutenant’s, and in similar fashion, had her hair cropped tightly to her scalp, leaving only bristle. “Jane is from the Earth Fleet science group.”
“Earth Fleet?” Ellis queried. He had never heard of such an organisation and momentarily wondered at its legitimacy and authority.
“Yes,” Bright said. He handed two sheaves of plastipyrus to Ellis. On each was a letter addressed to him, the first from Cardinal Skaunce, the second from the President of the United Nations, both authorising Lieutenant Bright to command all facilities for whatever purpose he deemed fit. “Earth Fleet is the designation given to the combined forces of Earth’s military. It took us a while to iron out the kinks, but we’re up and running now and this is our first mission.”
“Ah yes. Your mission,” Ellis said as he scanned the letters. “Perhaps you’d like to tell me, as the original mission leader, the purpose of it.”
“All in good time, Father,” Bright countered. He pulled himself towards the table, which seemed ridiculously at odds with the complete lack of up and down in the room to Ellis. He had done plenty of flight training, but not having solid ground under his feet always disoriented him. “But first I’d like to bring you up to speed.”
He touched a button on a small control panel set into the surface of the table and a hologram field leapt into position a metre above it. The resolution gradually increased as magnetic-iron particles took their positions, reflecting laser pixels to form an image of a strange-looking craft.
“This is one of the alien attack craft. We call them the Moaik. It was photographed as it passed between the Moon observatory and Mars. While it’s incredibly fast and manoeuvrable, it’s neither heavily armed, nor shielded,” Bright turned to Wildbird, who was squatting crossed legged in mid-air. “Can you give Father Ellis a rundown of their capabilities?”
“Certainly,” she said in a Slavic accent. She barely moved her lips as she spoke, but her eyes flickered from Bright to Ellis constantly, as if assuring herself of their attention. “They appear to be capable of extended flight within excess of ten g acceleration, allowing them to cross the solar system in a matter of days rather than months. One central armament, a laser with approximately five to ten gigawatts of power, and a battery of nuclear-tipped missiles, with a roughly twenty to thirty megaton yield. Despite their manoeuvrability, we could target them successfully with the mining operation mass drivers on the Jupiter moons and in the asteroid belt. There was one large ship, of which we could not capture an image, with its own mass driver, which stayed out of Earth orbit in the asteroids, throwing rocks at us. They brought eleven ships to the battle. All disintegrated completely when struck with our own dumb ballistics. They didn’t even seem to expect us to fight back and took no evasive measures.”
“They didn’t expect us to fight back?” Ellis repeated her words, his voice rising as quickly as his eyebrows. Since the revelation of the aliens’ existence, he had been debating with himself about their position in the order of things. Were they God’s children, too? Or was that reserved for humanity? Surely an all-seeing, all-loving God would see them as His divine creations, just as the small ant on the Earth owed its life to God’s Grand Plan, these Moaik must have a place in his heart too.
“No,” Wildbird said. She stared at Ellis, as if trying to understand the turmoil he was in. “Our analysis is they thought we were defenceless, so they took no countermeasures.”
“To be frank, we were,” interjected Bright, leaning forward. Ellis noticed the Star of David dangling from his neck. Now that throws a new aspect into the mix, he thought. “We had nothing to fight them with. All our ships are commercial ops, and none of them have anything like the acceleration of the attackers. They’d have turned them into confetti if they’d engaged. It was only when the science people suggested we use the mass drivers as a last resort that we got into the game.”
“The plan to throw small rocks at them in a wide-field cross section worked amazingly well,” Wildbird continued. Ellis wondered if she was of faith too, but nothing about her suggested anything to him. He knew many scientists, in fact a surprising number, were religious believers, but a majority only followed the Church of Science. “We co-ordinated our strikes and took out every single one of them in a three-hour barrage. The miners in the asteroids used a small nuke made of a converted shuttle to destroy the bigger ship.”
“Wouldn’t that have knocked asteroids out of orbit?” Ellis looked concerned. He understood the concept of friendly fire, but this was taking things to the extremes.
“It did, and we’ve been shooting them down ever since. Most went out towards Jupiter and will inevitably fall into its gravity well, but as you may have surmised, some headed sunwards and represent a threat to Earth,” Wildbird showed the first glimmer of emotion as she tightened her lips. “We’re racing against time to capture or destroy those on Earth intercept orbits, but we’re confident we’ll accomplish that mission successfully.”
“So, what about these Moaik?” Ellis figured this was the twenty-thousand-dollar question. “How did they get here?”
“We’re not sure, but we have an idea,” said Wildbird. “Have you ever heard of the Redlines?”
“Other than the prosaic use of the term,” Ellis said, “I don’t think I have.”
“That’s not surprising. Despite the initial popular interest, the phenomenon remains the province of esoteric physics. The Redlines are lines of force radiating from the edge of solar mass gravity wells from system relative fixed points near the trailing edge of the particle stream from the sun as it orbits the Milky Way. They were discovered thirty years ago by an Irish physicist, Professor Charles O’Connor, working at the Dublin Institute of Technology. He postulated they would facilitate interstellar travel at multiples of C if only we could access them. He called them the Redlines because in his opinion we could never cross them.”
“And you think these Moaik have developed a way to cross the Redlines?” Ellis asked. That would make them more advanced than humanity. His belief was that if Earth ever met a more advanced civilisation, they would be peaceful. It seemed he was completely wrong in that respect. Unless there was a whole other story they were not telling him. “And travel across the galaxy to attack Earth.”
“Exactly that,” Bright said. He touched the controls again and a map showing the solar system displayed. It gradually zoomed in to the Oort Cloud, with a flashing symbol showing the position of their ship next to a larger symbol labelled “Redline Confluence.”
“So, what do you intend doing when we get there?” Ellis demanded.
“We reason it will take a lot of power to open a portal to the Redlines, and the Moaik used their multi-Gigawatt lasers to do just that,” Wildbird said. She stared at Ellis. “We don’t have lasers capable of that kind of power. Even your rock breaker here is only a thousand kilowatts. So, we’ve brought some military spec hardware and intend building a laser to open a portal.”
“How will you generate that amount of power?” Ellis gasped. He was aware of most of the technical specifications of his ship. He had to. All crew members had to be ready to fit in if they lost a crew member. “Even our fusion engine couldn’t do it.”
“Have you ever heard the term ‘Bomb Driven Lasers’?” Bright looked at him, his face impassive, although Ellis could see a hint of interest in his answer.
“Can’t say I have,” responded Ellis. “But I have an awful feeling about it.”
“No need to be afraid, Father Ellis,” said Wildbird. “We will be well away from the blast field when it’s operational. A bomb driven laser is my area of expertise. They’re lasers powered by an explosive device. The bigger the explosion, the more powerful the laser. I’ve been working on them on the moon Io for the last two years, and we have refined the technology to the extent it is now possible to say with confidence we can scale them up to produce a laser beam of short duration of about twenty megawatts.”
“And how do you plan to do that?” Ellis asked warily. “Don’t tell me you’ve brought a nuke onboard.”
“No, we didn’t need one. You already have two, your shuttles.”
“The plan is,” said Bright, “we will convert one shuttle into a shaped charge bomb, tow it into place with the other shuttle, then explode it causing it to send a laser beam lancing into the nexus of the Redlines and hopefully opening a portal.”
“Hopefully?” Ellis queried.
“I have a high level of confidence,” Wildbird actually smiled. “But a prayer would not go amiss, Father.”
“Oh, I shall be praying. You can be assured of that,” Ellis returned the smile. “But what if the Moaik return through the portal we have created?”
“We have a contingency plan for that,” Bright said, a grim expression clouding his face. “We will convert the second shuttle to be ready to explode if necessary, and the pilot has instructions to fly into their midst and detonate it.”
Ellis felt a pang of shock echo in his heart. “Good Lord. Who is going to pilot the second ship on a potential suicide mission?”
“That would be me,” said Bright. A faint gleam of something in his eye caught Ellis’s attention. Was it fanaticism? Courage? Fatalism? “I would never ask someone in my command to do something I’m not prepared to do myself.”
“And if we’re successful and have no incursions?”
“Then we send in our probes to see where they go. I have ten of them, which are equipped to send telemetry back through the Redline wormholes. Of particular interest are constellation photographs. That way, we can determine where they are. If possible, they will return. If not, they will detonate as soon as they lose comms.”
“How long before we get there?” Ellis asked.
“We are there now. Follow me to the bridge and Captain Alois can point out the target to you.”
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