Solstice Fall

I: Starship Earth

 

The Solstice and Nightfall have been travelling through space at near-lightspeed for eighteen and a half years. They move in tandem with the ghosts of another future—Starship Earth, they were called. Their two timelines coiled together as tightly as threads in a rope, more interconnected than was thought to be possible. Just a day ago, the two ships had surpassed the Angel’s Line: a colossal belt of asteroids arcing around the orbit of the star system NH558J3, long thought to be the limit of human interstellar travel. Unbeknownst to those on either timeline, more than one battle of darkness would take place that day.

 

II: Solstice 

 

“Our fuel is being expended much faster than the mathematicians had calculated.” Colonel Warren’s eyes are unfocused, his blank stare fixed on the curving white walls of the meeting room, as if he couldn’t make himself look anyone in the face. “Something about the chemicals surrounding the Angel’s Line. It’s a high possibility we won’t have enough to return.”

Silence follows, a tense, palpable hum in the air. 

“Burns?” the Captain turns towards the communications officer, who had been sluggishly rubbing his dark-circled eyes for the past two hours. At the Captain’s summons, he jerks up.

“Despite the faster-than-expected advancement into the Intelligence Age, the Earth doesn’t have the technology to reach this far. We’ve been trying all possible links for the past week.” A beat passes. “No contact.”

The Captain’s eyes darken. Warren is unmoving. No contact with the Earth. The simple idea, so seemingly small upon utterance, is nearly unimaginable in the true scale of our situation. We have really passed the point of no return. What had been a guiding tether to our motherland, and in extension the tether of our sanity over the past two decades, had severed, leaving us as lost as that warning tale about a child thrown into the merciless wild prowling with starved, bloodthirsty creatures, once used to keep rebellious adolescents in line. It’s disconcerting, the knowledge that we are now that child: completely and utterly alone in the vast depths of previously unexplored space with no way home. 

This was a suicide mission; we were fools to think otherwise.

No.

A moment of vertigo seizes me, scattering my swirling thoughts and my reality along with it. Unintentionally, I grip the edge of the table. Someone utters a word, maybe my name, but I tune it out as a thought slowly grows in my head. It’s a terrifying idea, raising too many questions about my morality, but what other choice do we have? Contact is cut; nobody else would know, with eighteen light-years of separation between us. A blind eye is turned, whether they like it or not. I exhale an unsteady breath and release the table. The concerned-looking pilot who had been hovering over me backs off, but I take no note of him. I will not die here. I refuse to die here, with nothing but the blinking star-spangled belt of the Angel’s Line as witness.

“We can get more fuel.”

“Oh?” the Captain regards me with an air of challenge.

“We have interstellar missiles,” I say first, watching for a reaction to the underlying implications of that statement. They give me none. Good. Calmly, more calm than I should be, I lean forwards. “We can eliminate Nightfall.”

 

III: Nightfall

 

It’s starting to make sense why the word lunacy was derived from lunar. We are all going crazy, aren’t we? More paranoid, more disconnected. And now this, the final straw: we’ve lost contact with Earth. Oddly enough, it doesn’t seem to really bother me in any particular way. I think I’d subconsciously accepted the possibility of this fate the second I’d stepped aboard this ship. Besides, it’s not a bad place to die, here in the caressing arms of the Angel’s Line, knowing your spirit would soon be returning to the cemetery of stardust—the place of its birth in its purest form.

I cast my mind to those on the Solstice, our last remaining tie with the world we’d now said farewell to for good. I push my face up against a small porthole in the rear of the Nightfall, into the never-ending darkness where Solstice drifts, seemingly motionless against the intense black backdrop of eternal space. How fascinating, the fact that it was moving at near lightspeed, that we were moving at near lightspeed, but our eyes view it as completely still. So close, and yet so far. Honestly, the people there might as well be as distant as those on the Earth we’d left behind.

“You little—”

A crash resounds from somewhere in the corridor beyond the perch I’m at. More incoherent shouts follow, and I quickly slip out the rounded doorway to investigate.

“Lieutenant? What are you doing?”

The words become clearer as I near the commotion. I recognise the voice as that of the Commander. Rounding the last corner, I’m woefully unprepared for what I find, and nearly trip at the sight. It’s Lieutenant Anderson, gripping one of the mathematicians in a headlock with his fist in the guy’s mouth, face twisted with murderous intent. 

“This rat sabotaged us—he purposely calculated the fuel for a one-way journey, and now all of us are gonna die without ever setting foot back on Earth!”

“What?” I say out loud. Nobody pays me any attention. After all, in their eyes, I’m nothing but the too-young apprentice of their most valued scientist, little more than an extra weight and an extra mouth to feed.

“Hold on,” the Commander says. Everyone quietens at the authority in her voice. “How would you know? What do you have to prove it?”

“Prove it?” he laughs bitterly, wrenching his hand out of the mathematician’s mouth and yanking his head back by a fistful of hair. “He admitted it himself. Ask him.”

The person’s face is vaguely familiar; I’d seen him around, always with his head down and muttering strings of numbers to himself as if he were mad. The accusation came as a shock—I thought he would be too crazy to do something like this.

“Dawson?” the Commander prompts. Her posture is perfectly straight, her face a mask of serenity, but the air around her is charged. 

Dawson smiles humorlessly up at her from his twisted position. “He’s right. I did.”

Her mouth opened again, the pleasant mask splintering, but before she could make herself heard, an ear-splitting blaring from the intercom drowned out her next words, followed by the artificial voice of Nightfall’s built-in AI. 

“WARNING: MISSILE DETECTED. CALCULATING PROJECTED TRAJECTORY. ESTIMATED IMPACT TIME: TWENTY SECONDS. PLEASE FOLLOW NECESSARY SAFETY PROCEDURES.”

The Commander takes charge immediately, ignoring Dawson in the face of more urgent problems. She throws out rapid-fire instructions, but I can do nothing but stand rooted to the spot. Time slows—or does it speed up? I can’t tell. My sense of reality is warped, distorted, and in the back of my mind, only a few vague thoughts surface. It’s from the Solstice, isn’t it? And to think I yearned for their company just minutes ago. Why do I feel so betrayed? It’s only natural human nature. Of course they want to survive, to go home. Why am I sympathising with them? Maybe I’m crazier than I thought. Must’ve been the sitting around alone all day. Should’ve talked to more people.

Briefly, the Commander’s voice breaks through the fog in my head. 

“Fire ours back! If they want our fuel so badly, at least teach them they can’t get it without sacrifice.”

“ESTIMATED IMPACT TIME: FIVE SECONDS.”

 

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

 

Then nothingness.

 

Ten seconds later, the Solstice falls.