Chapter 35 Aiden
Aiden
The Maine came to life, singing its calming hum as it gently lifted off the ground.
Aiden’s stomach clenched in anticipation, then dipped down in that exciting way the moment they took off.
Within seconds they were high in the sky, the change in velocity palpable as the ship reached the thermosphere.
Another few heartbeats as the blue of the sky disappeared below them and the darkness of space surrounded them, and the Maine accelerated to cruising speed.
“Okaay, time to get everyone’s attention. We’re on,” Bea said with glee just as the monitoring alert system of Earth’s Space Security Headquarters hailed them with a warning to dock immediately at the GN’s Kalaeya Station or risk retaliation.
Bea ignored it, flying the Maine right past the massive structure and just outside of the range of its weapons’ system.
A group of shuttles with blue and red strips of lights shot out from one of the space station’s side terminals and headed straight for the Maine.
Bea maintained the ship’s speed though, flying it fast enough so the authorities couldn’t catch up, but not too quickly so they would lose visual and give up.
“George, how’s it looking?” Bea commed the Sinaloa, zooming by the first checkpoint the GN had set up on the way to the Moon.
“Everyone’s headed your way, Bea. Mars, Earth, even some ships from Jupiter. They just flew past us. The Moon is already under lockdown and the police there is mobilizing—”
“Bea! Please, be careful!” Nyle cut in, his voice high-pitched and pouty.
Aiden looked at Bea, then at the swarm of GN ships on the Maine’s radars. “I think they will try to pincer us in.”
“Agreed. I can slip them though,” she said, both to Aiden and Nyle. She pointed at the star map visualization just above the central console. “Here, by the ISS monument. This area has too many satellites. It will slow them down.”
“ETA to the debris field?” George asked.
“About thirty minutes. Is this enough time for you?”
“Yes. We’ve got visual on the cruisers. We are ten minutes out.”
“Installation won’t take more than fifteen,” Nyle jumped in, commotion audible behind him. “Gotta go now! I’ll comm you when we are ready!”
Bea blew Nyle an air kiss and clicked off.
She issued a few commands to the Maine and tapped into the comms frequencies of the nearby GN ships.
Aiden’s ears were assaulted by the voices of captains and commanders barking out orders to their crews to pursue faster and cut off the Maine, the cacophony of shouts making his head throb.
With its body designed for speed and maneuverability and the addition of the jump drive, the Maine kept an easy lead, not letting the swarm of ships get close enough so they could use their tech-disabling weapons.
The frigate’s shields could handle most of the conventional beams and lasers so Aiden wasn’t too worried about those, but if its systems got targeted by the nastier stuff and forcefully shut down, then he, Bea and Darren would be nothing but sitting ducks waiting for Marcus to capture them.
“Guys, you think Marcus is onboard one of those ships?” Bea asked, breaking the silence.
Aiden thought about it for a few moments, his eyes glued to the shrinking view of Earth and its thousands of orbiting satellites. “I don’t think so. He’s probably sitting in one of his offices and watching from there.” But then again, Marcus had been on Reikhei Station.
Bea shrugged, letting out a sigh as her shoulders slumped. “Guess it won’t make a difference if I popped some of them, then.”
“It wouldn’t. All of them are full of soldiers just following orders,” Darren said, voicing Aiden’s own thoughts.
It had crossed Aiden’s mind that they could shoot down a few, but ultimately it wasn’t going to make a difference.
It wouldn’t hurt Marcus, it wouldn’t cripple him or his power.
It also didn’t really matter anymore. Their win didn’t hinge on successfully taking Marcus down, but on an unconventional solution to an unsolvable problem.
Part of Aiden was still confused how to think of it, but as they passed the first of the Moon’s orbiting stations, excitement thrummed in his blood and made his head feel a little dizzy.
They were really doing this. They were minutes away from leaving behind this universe for a new one and humankind wasn’t even aware of it.
In a way, they were forging history—this time by themselves and their own choosing—deceiving Marcus in the same way he’d deceived the entirety of the human race.
Aiden abandoned the co-pilot’s seat and joined Darren on the bench along the left wall.
There was enough space for three or four people, so they both got comfortable, leaning their shoulders against each other and soaking up the heat their bodies exuded.
The contact took some of the edge off him, dulled it down, but then the Moon’s silvery surface came into full view, reminding him they still had to execute the most important part of their mission.
Darren seemed to reach that same realization, his posture going a little stiff as his hand came to rest on top of Aiden’s thigh in a gesture both reassuring and grounding.
“Shi—” Bea yelped and the Maine did a sharp turn to the right.
Aiden lost his balance, the sudden tilt sending him crashing into the wall across. Darren grabbed him just in time though, wrapping his hand around Aiden’s arm and pulling him back onto the seat just as two blue missiles flicked by and crashed into a chuck of debris.
“What the fuck are these signatures?” Bea shouted, pulling up on the central screen two gray ships approaching at an alarmingly quick rate.
They both fired and she cursed again, maneuvering the Maine to the left to dodge the incoming missiles. She managed, but one of them tagged the Maine’s shields, blowing up upon contact and sending a force wave that reverberated through the entire ship and shook Aiden down to his bones.
System warnings flooded the Maine, painting everything in red.
[Warning. Shields disabled. Please initiate an immediate reset.]
“Shit, shit, shit! What the fuck was that missile?! Why are my shields dead?” Bea yelled over the alerts, one hand gripping the ship’s controls while the other one scrolled through heaps of errors and warnings.
[War-r-ning. Sys-t-tem breach de-detected. Initiating emergency core shut-t down in o-one hundred seconds-s…]
“Fuck! Darren, this is not good!” Bea whipped her head back, fear contorting her features.
“We need to jump now!” she said and pressed the Maine’s controls forward.
The ship accelerated so fast, Aiden’s stomach lurched up and stayed there.
“Nyle, what the fuck is going on? What did they hit me with?”
“Bea! You nee—” Nyle’s voice rang through Aiden’s earpiece, scrambled and barely legible. “—J-drive online be—system… shut down! What—shot at you… fucking bad! We—jump… thirty seconds! You need to go—”
The screech of static cut Nyle off. Aiden winced and covered with ears, gritting his teeth as he tapped the little device off.
“Bea!” Darren yelled over the noise, which was also coming out of the ship’s speakers. “Get the drive online! We are jumping now!”
Bea muted the speakers, flicked through some more menus and switched to fully manual control of the Maine.
All the warnings and alerts stopped and the red emergency lights switched back to the normal ones.
The hum of the engine grew louder with every blur of a rock outside the viewport and Aiden could tell there was something different about it.
It still had the familiar pattern to it, the melodic rhythm, but it was slightly higher-pitched, and the ups and downs were less evenly spaced.
A barrage of blue missiles flew past the Maine as Bea did another sharp tilt, crashing into the drifting half-intact body of an old asteroid probe and blowing it up. Dust and rock particles flew everywhere.
“Okay! This is it! I’m dropping the shuttle now!
Hopefully it will be enough to trick Marcus into thinking we crashed,” Bea announced, leaving the explosion behind.
Another one followed, but Aiden didn’t even see it, the only indication it happened the activity reading on the central console. “Darreeen, it’s now or never!”
Darren’s fingers tightened around Aiden’s, and he brought their hands to his lips. “Make the jump, Bea,” he said calmly, locking his gaze on Aiden and placing a kiss on his knuckles.
“Here goes nothing!” Bea cackled just as the Maine’s AI announced the jump had been initiated.
Aiden glanced out, his timing coinciding with the Maine clearing the Moon’s debris field.
The black stillness of space engulfed the ship from all sides, and for a moment it was just that, the Maine rocking gently through that celestial darkness.
But then Aiden’s heart took its next beat and the world suddenly crumbled, folding in on itself around him first and then inside him as he felt every individual cell of his body break down into millions of tiny pieces.
The pain of it was excruciating and all-encompassing, like no pain he’d ever experienced.
It was internal and external at the same time, a contradiction of sensations coursing through and around him that he couldn’t fully comprehend.
It was like suffocating and taking a deep breath concurrently, like being cut apart and being glued together simultaneously.
It just kept going and going for what felt like forever, a hell Aiden wanted to make stop because it was too much and too torturous and a thousand times worse than any kind of death Marcus would’ve given him.
No matter how much he wished it to end though, it didn’t.
It just looped over and over again until he couldn’t tell anymore if he felt anything or he’d simply ceased to exist.
The sense of dread and finality that came with that thought started to settle in and then he felt it.
A flicker of something so familiar and dear, it filled him with joy and contentment.
It was faint at first, but then it spread and grew until it concentrated in one spot right where he imagined his heart was.
From there, it solidified and so did his body, the process as painful as the one that had torn him apart.
This time though, the warmth and the sense of belonging that came with it made it bearable.
Exciting. Profound. And when the merciless pain dissipated entirely after what felt like a second and, simultaneously, an eternity later, all that Aiden could feel was the grounding force of Darren’s touch as his hand found Aiden’s and held it.
“Darren,” Aiden whispered and opened his eyes without actually opening them as the world took shape again.
From the formless and colorless place that Aiden was in, the Maine’s cockpit emerged as if it had never disappeared, and along with it so did Bea and Darren, both of them looking just as disoriented as Aiden felt.
“I’m here,” Darren muttered, his entrancing eyes taking all of Aiden in.
Mapping him, studying him, as if to make sure it really was him.
Only when they were sure he was real, did they refocus on the rest of the world.
“Aiden, look,” Darren said and smiled, the midnight in his gaze shifting to that mesmerizing rich purple as he looked straight ahead and light from whatever was there lit up his face.
Aiden took a moment to etch that into memory and then turned around too, curious to see what had Darren’s expression shift to such wonder.
He spared Bea only a heartbeat, a second in which his brain made sure she was fine, and then a sense of fundamental awe sparked inside him as he took in what lay on the other side of the Maine’s viewport.
There, just in front of them, George’s cruisers drifted unhurriedly through space on the backdrop of two yellow dwarfs.