Michael McCollum - The Void

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THE VOID

Michael McCollum

End of the world stories are very popular in science fiction. If only the problem was that small!

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 was not 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 28, 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 Extragalactic 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 standardized 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 suffuse 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.

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