Horses
By Tony Lavoie
"Uh...Captain?"
Quiet amid the noisy bustle of the bridge, the voice had a quavering hesitation to it, which is the only reason it was able to gain the captain's attention at all. Captain Morris turned toward the comm station.
"What is it, Halstead?" he asked, approaching.
As always, he was momentarily overwhelmed by the vast, curving array of monitors, keyboards, and buttons that was the comm center. Seated in the center of this sweeping arc was Halstead, a young recruit barely old enough to be holding his Corporal's rank. The young man's gaze ping-ponged from Morris to the bank of monitors before him, as if he couldn't decide which needed his attention more. Morris was a little afraid that the kid's head might spring off.
"I'm...uh...picking up something on the scan, Captain. I think. The readings seem to indicate a large vessel."
Alarms went off in Morris' head.
"A capital ship? Out here?" he asked. "Ours or theirs? What class?"
This far out between the planets, any traffic was either a Federation ship, which was not a threat, or an Alliance vessel, which was. If it was an Alliance ship, he just wasn't ready to deal with it. They'd just come from the liberation of Europa, where his hand-picked crew had pulled off nothing short of a miracle. Morris fully acknowledged the fact that God had been with them during that campaign. Their inferior numbers could have done nothing without Him. Plus, there was the undeniable fact that not a single member of his crew had been killed--no small miracle in itself. But now they were tired, their weapons capacitors drained, and their supplies low. They needed to get back to Mars before they could take on another capital ship from the hateful Alliance.
"Dunno, sir," Halstead said. "There's no carrier signal. No ID broadcast. It's weird, sir...." He trailed off.
"'Weird', Corporal?" Morris prodded. "Could you try to stow the technical jargon a little and tell me what we're dealing with?"
"Sorry, sir," Halstead cringed slightly from the Captain's quiet rebuff. "But I just don't know yet. The signal map is vague. Its signature seems to indicate a single ship, but it covers too much area. Spread out, like."
Morris tried to fight down his impatience.
"Okay," he said, "Let's start there. The size of the scan signature will give us a clue as to what class of vessel we're dealing with. How big is the signal map?"
Halstead swallowed.
"It...covers a volume of approximately twenty million cubic kilometers, sir," he said.
Morris heard himself gasp.
"Twenty million..."
"But it's not right, sir," Halstead went on. "The signal volume is that size, but it's strength is geometric degrees smaller. No stronger than a couple of cruisers, I'd guess."
Morris pulled himself together.
"That means either our guest is putting out a bigger signal than he ought to be, or is spreading it out." His words snapped something in his mind. "Or we've got more than one guest," he said. "Any chance they're overlapping their signals to make themselves appear bigger?"
"No, sir," Halstead replied immediately. "Signal overlap like that leaves artifacts in the scan map. I'm not seeing anything but a clean signal."
"So only one ship?" Morris queried. "A ship that size? Impossible! Can we get a visual on the screen yet?"
Halstead shook his head.
"No, sir," he said. "But nav comp's best guess is that our course and theirs--its--well, we're converging in any case, sir. Estimated visuals in under an hour."
"We can't pin it down any tighter than that?" Morris asked.
"No, sir. With a map that vague--"
"Okay, okay," Morris interrupted. "So we don't know when we'll have visuals, and we don't know what kind of ship or ships we're going to see when we do. In short, we don't know anything, is that what you're telling me?"
"I...uh...I do have one idea, Captain," Halstead ventured.
"Well? Out with it, man!"
"This kind of signal mapping fits the signature style of a group of multiple individual-sized vessels, sir," Halstead explained. "But while the individual signatures can be added together to get the overall map, the sum can't be greater than the whole. So even a capital ship's worth of smaller ships, like horses for instance, never add up to the signature of a single capital ship. But the volume of this map is just too big to be horses."
Morris was mildly surprised at Halstead's knowledge of the archaic term "horses". That nickname for the early one-man fighter ships had come and gone a generation before Halstead had been born.
"Hypothetical question," Morris said, leaning over and studying the scopes. "Assuming your theory is correct, how many horses would it take to generate a signature map that big?"
"Rough guess, sir?" Halstead asked. "Approximately two hundred million, assuming current A-X class starfighter designs."
Two hundred million--! Morris blew out a breath.
"That can't be right," he said. "You'd never be able to keep the comm channels focused throughout a web like that, never mind the Q-lock trajectories. You'd need two or three capital comm ships just to have the computing power to follow one ship-to-ship conversation in a web that size. But any capital-sized ship would be broadcasting its own--"
A thought occurred to him.
"Any chance they've got the capital ships buried at the heart of the web? Using the smaller ship's signal maps to hide themselves?"
"No sir," Halstead answered immediately. "There would be a concentrated area of the map showing up on the scan."
"So we're pretty sure there's no capital ship out there," Morris said.
“No,” Halstead said. “I don't think there's even one capital ship.”
“And we can't be talking about starfighters in those numbers, right?”
“It seems pretty unlikely, sir.”
“Then something else is causing the reading,” Morris said. “Some inter-spatial interference. Cosmic rays. A previously-unidentified type of Quantum wave, perhaps.”
“No, Captain Morris. They are indeed star craft.”
The voice startled Morris. Halstead actually jumped in his seat. It had a deep, rich, almost musical quality, that voice, but the most striking thing about it was that it could be clearly heard throughout the bridge despite the tangled noise of equipment and conversations.
Morris turned to see a man standing in the center of his command bridge. He was clothed in a simple, unadorned white flight suit of an unfamiliar cut. It bore no resemblance to any uniforms he knew, either Federation or Alliance. The man himself was pleasant to look at, a friendly, non-aggressive smile lighting his eyes.
"Who the devil are you?" Morris asked, "And how in Heaven's name did you get on my ship?"
The man's smile widened.
"Well, to answer the first, I can say with certainty that I am not he," he said, "but you are utterly correct about the second part."
Morris looked at him quizzically. Despite the pounding of his heart caused by the sudden and unexpected arrival of this stranger on his bridge, Morris felt an odd lessening of his tension, as if the man was broadcasting calm.
"My name is Michael," the stranger said, "and those ships out there are under my command."
"Bound for what target?" Morris asked, his mind unaccountably bypassing the more immediate questions he had in favor of this one.
"We are bound for Earth, Eugene," Michael said, startling the captain even further by his use of Morris' Christian name.
"Much has happened on Earth while you were out here defending the colonies," Michael explained. "The Evil One has cemented his control of the planet in the last few years, and currently sits upon the throne that was reserved for him for this period. But his time is now at an end. We are in the later stages of his banishment, as was announced millenia ago. The time of new beginnings is at hand. You would do well, Eugene, to bring your men and women home to Earth."
Morris suddenly relaxed completely. He knew now who this Michael was, knew what his task was, and in the instant of these realizations he knew without a doubt that he wanted more than anything else to be on Earth when Michael's task was complete.
Michael must have sensed this, because he smiled and said, "Yes, Eugene. It is time. Do not fear, for you will make it back before the Time, but do not delay. The Time is come!"
He vanished. No white light, no fanfare, just simply winked out of existence.
Morris smiled, took a deep breath, and blew it out. Turning to a wide-eyed and confused Halstead, he said, "Well, you heard him. Get on the comm and tell the crew we're going home. To Earth."
"But..." Halstead stammered, "but...who was...what about the Alliance?"
"The Alliance is finished," Morris said. "Earth is being wiped clean of evil even as we speak. As for who that was, and who our guests out there are," he waved toward the main viewports, where a very light haze of two hundred million distant but rapidly approaching starfighters could now be seen, "I suggest that after you relay our orders you pull up the book of Revelations and refresh yourself on its content."
Halstead continued to stare.
"Well?" Morris prodded, "Get on the horn. Let 'em know the good news, and then tell Nav to plot us a course for home. We're going to follow the Archangel Michael and his two hundred million horsemen to Earth." He watched as, against the huge panorama of stars and space, the vast web of small star craft began melting into individual forms, passing them in a fast-moving wave.
Moments after the final ships moved in front of them, a small lurch was felt across the bridge as the ship suddenly began accelerating, following the moon-sized web of horses. Morris' grin widened.
"We're going to be there to welcome Jesus home," he said.
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Tony Lavoie writes speculative fiction, therefore he exists. It is possible that the converse of this is also true, but it has yet to be proven to his satisfaction. His short story Moon Dust is currently making an appearance at MindFlights.com, and his on-line serial novel, The Ballad of Scabbard Pete: On the Seas of Hell is available for a limited time as a free eBook at http://papergizmo.com.
When he is not writing about spaceships, balls of rock, or pirates, he can often be found slumming around at http://ChristianWriters.com. Oh, and he designs model rockets out of paper.
For more information check out his website at: http://scabbardpete.wordpress.com.
