Michael McCollum - The Void

Illustration by George H. Krauter

Captain-First-Rank Tessa Hallowell stood before the mirror and cast a critical eye over the black and silver uniform that hugged her svelte form. It wasn’t vanity that caused her to switch the mirror camera from viewpoint to viewpoint, but rather a desire to make the proper initial impression on her newly acquired prisoners. The war council had entrusted her with one of the most important missions of the impending attack and she was determined not to fail them in the slightest detail.

Having assured herself that her uniform was spotless and wrinkle free, she turned her attention to the body within. The face was pretty enough, she supposed, with high cheekbones and a mouth that fell too easily into a pout. Her eyes were her best feature, emerald green and expressive, but as hard as diamond when she wanted them to be. The blonde hair was cut short in order not to interfere with the helmet seal of her space armor. The body was muscular, without being manly; properly curved, but without the excess flesh that some men found attractive. There were many planets in the Galaxy where Tessa Hallowell would be considered beautiful—and, of course, an equal number where her large-framed blondeness was little more than a curiosity.

She smiled as she scanned the mirror one last time. At twenty-eight, she was the youngest captain in the fleet and only one of two women commanding starcruisers. It had taken a great deal of effort and not a little political maneuvering to achieve her current status and everything she had worked for was about to culminate in triumph.

Finished with her inspection, she called out, “Yeoman!”

“Yes, Captain?” came the immediate reply from the overhead speaker.”

“Have my gig made ready. I’ll go over to the observatory now.”

“Aye aye, ma’am.”

She picked up the anachronistic helmet that the Hegemonic Navy had adopted for its official headgear and strapped it on. Moments later she was striding purposefully around the main circumferential corridor of the busy star cruiser, acknowledging salutes from the crewmen she passed. The salutes were as crisp and perfect as any to be seen at the Galactic Guard’s academy on New Rome, an indication that her pride was shared by those who served her. Two corridors later and a quick fall down a dropshaft brought her to one of the bays where they kept the auxiliary craft.

The gig launched into the great blackness less than two minutes later. As they cleared the cruiser, Tessa glanced up and suppressed a sharp intake of breath as the Galaxy came into view. From her current position some ten thousand light-years above the plane of the Galaxy’s equator, the Milky Way was a vast river of subdued fire frozen against the utter blackness of space. The great pinwheel was so close that it seemed three-dimensional, yet sufficiently distant that its foreshortened spiral form was easily discerned. Next to the Galaxy’s glory, the other patches of light in the ebon sky dimmed to near invisibility.

The Hegemonic Fleet starcruiser Warwind had been six thousand hours in transit to reach her objective located high above the galactic spiral. For two-thirds of a standard year they had slipped upward from where humanity’s million-plus stars floated among a hundred billion unexplored brethren, climbing nearly to the halo of ancient blue suns that englobed the flattened disk and bulging central mass of the Galaxy.

Warwind’s objective was the Extra-galactic Tachyon Observatory, the largest and most costly observing tool ever created by human beings. For a starship to approach the Universe’s premier tachyon instrument by stealth required careful piloting and not a little luck. For eight long months, Warwind ’s crew had monitored the superlight communications bands, searching for any hint that the observatory had noticed the tachyons that streamed continuously out of their ship’s engines as it climbed ever higher above the Galaxy. For all of that time, Tessa Hallowell had lived with the tension brought about by fear of discovery, tension made worse by the knowledge that it would only take but a single warning to alert New Rome and ensure the destruction of the Hegemonic fleet.

Nor was lack of an alarm necessarily evidence that they had not been spotted. Even in these non-military times, a great deal of comm traffic was in code—whether originated by computers, diplomats, or merely commercial concerns eager to keep their monied secrets. Also, the warning could have been disguised, either as an innocuous message or by being buried in the astronomical data the observatory transmitted back to the Galaxy round the clock. A single nanosecond pulse was all that was needed to send the Galactic Guard streaming away from their bases and toward the worlds of the Hegemony.

After eight months of worry, action had come as an anticlimax. Warwind had closed to within a hundred thousand kilometers of the great observatory before launching her strike boats. Her marines had grounded on the hull without incident and then proceeded to break in at a dozen different places. They had been met, not by armed defenders, but rather by a staff more bewildered than resisting. The sheep had submitted meekly as soon as they found armored wolves in their midst.

With surprise total and her victory complete, Captain Hallowell had sent the coded words so ancient that few knew the language that had originated them. “Tora, Tora, Tora!” had whisked toward Hegemonic Headquarters on a beam of modulated tachyons, to be instantly responded to with, “Make your preparations, but hold for orders. H-hour is imminent!”

Suddenly, a tiny sphere appeared in the great blackness before them. With the Galaxy at her back, it seemed lost in an empty ebon sea. It expanded quickly and turned into a large habitat globe, almost mundane in its ordinariness. There were literally tens of millions of these islands of hospitality scattered throughout human space. Most orbited yellow suns that emulated (to a greater or lesser degree) the warm glow of Father Sol, others bathed in the ruddy rays of great stars the color of old coals, or flashed with the actinic blue-white of nature’s supergiants, or orbited close to many of the Universe’s countless midget suns. Still others floated where every star was a dimensionless pinpoint and only the most sensitive instruments could detect the pull of distant gravity. The standarized habitat modules were used wherever men and women found themselves enveloped by vacuum. Out here there was nothing to reflect off the white hull save the diffused glow emanating from the Milky Way. Even so, the contrast with the black backdrop and its myriad faint smudges of light made it seem as though the habitat globe was illuminated by some internal fire.

The habitat was only the most visible portion of the observatory. Dispersed across a billion kilometers of surrounding space were the sensors that collectively made up the tachyon “array.” Invisible though the sensors were, they were the reason Tessa’s ship had been dispatched to this distant outpost. Here, high above the galactic swirl, conditions were nearly perfect for “seeing” the superlight particles created in the nuclear fires that burned at the heart of every star. Out here where space was virtually flat, where cosmic gas and dust were nearly nonexistent, tachyon astronomers could watch the Universe in real time, unfettered by the snail-like crawl that is light speed.

Nor were they limited to observing natural phenomena. The engines of starships burned bright with waste tachyons, spewing them radically outward in every direction in the moment of their creation. Like their sublight cousins, the neutrinos, tachyons were virtually unaffected by passage through the normal matter. Thus, starships appeared as tiny moving stars to the great instrument at the edge of the Galaxy. It was the tachyon telescope’s ability to track ships that had caused the Hegemony’s high command to dispatch Warwind to this most distant of all humanity’s installations, and which had been the reason for so many of Tessa Hallowell’s sleepless nights during the approach.