Keystone

Alex didn’t find sleep quickly. He spent hours staring at the ceiling, only able to turn his eye far enough to see the clock on the wall. When he did, the dream came almost immediately.

He pushed himself up out the the cockpit of the simulator, blinking in the bright lights of the sim bay. He had a stupid sort of grin on his face, an enthusiasm that permeated the whole of his being. “If that’s what the next generation of Waverider drives is going... I can’t wait to get my hands on the real thing.”

There was a little hiccup in his dream here. Something interjected a curious sense of superiority, maybe smug satisfaction. There was a word for it, he just couldn’t remember.

“I think everybody is interested in that right now, Pilot Sorenson.” Ed was his trainer in the Scoutship program, an old pro who’d been out in the black a dozen times. Ed had never called him Pilot Sorenson.

“Are they going to have these ready for my ship?” He was eager to know when he would finally get his assignment. He had spent two years getting ready for this assignment, even spent six months at Navy boot camp for zero-g training. They should have put him on one by now. Three others had left while he’d been stuck doing more training... but if the trade off was the new engines, he’d be happy with that.

“As a matter of fact, they will. Your charge will be ready in just about two months.” Ed looked... Alex wasn’t sure. Sad, tense, hopeful and worried, all at the same time, boiling just below the surface. There was more happening than he was letting on.

Another hitch, a flicker of an emotion that wasn’t his, this time pleased at his insight.

“That’s great! Is it new? Will I get to name it?” First pilot always got to name a new ship. He felt like a kid in a candy store at the prospect, his mind running over all of the potential names he could assign it before Ed cut him off.

“No, it’s already named.”

“I guess that makes sense.” It wasn’t unusual for ships with the first run of new technology to already be named, particularly when it came to engines. “What’s it called?”

“Kshalvo. Bridge builder.”

“I don’t recognize that language.”

“It’s Tslao. Your engineer is going to be a Lan, a Shipmaster.”

“Tslao? They’re putting me on a ship with a fucking dog?” His voice practically cracked, starting to make a scene in the quiet hum of the sim bay. He didn’t have any particular problems with the Tslao. That didn’t mean he wanted to have to deal with one of them, let alone get stuck with one in a Scoutship.

“Watch your mouth.” Ed’s face twisted with anger and his voice dropped an octave, eyes gleaming with a hard edge as he leaned in to Alex. “Come to my office. You need to see something.”

Alex hadn’t thought he’d said anything particularly bad. Nothing he didn’t hear a dozen times a week out of the other pilots, but given the way that people moved out of Ed’s way, he had fucked up pretty impressively. Goodbye future opportunities. Ed slapped the control panel, closing the door behind Alex and dropped himself into his desk chair without saying a word. Alex sat silently with the hope that he might be able to salvage his career.

Ed just stared at his monitor and dug around for something. When he found it, he swiveled the screen around to Alex. Just a video, time lapse, of a blue and green planet spinning slowly. The original timestamps were in a flowing script he assumed to be Tsla, modern English numerals below it. It ticked forward three minutes every second, must have been taken from a geosynchronous satellite as the landmass below never changed.

He missed it at first. A black speck a few hundred kilometers from the western coast. It expanded, a ragged spot and then a gray-black smear spreading across the atmosphere. The playback sped up, each tick an hour forward. The continent dipped into night and then came back around to day, the streak had widened by about double. Alex’s blood ran cold as he watched it envelop most of the planet, finally understanding what he was looking at. “Was that a volcano?”

There was a hitch again, longer this time. Sorrow so bad it hurt.

“Sort of. Ejected more than nine thousand cubic kilometers of debris into the air. The Volcanic Explosivity Index was extended to ten just for it.” Ed had calmed significantly, his normally cool demeanor sliding back into place. The old pilot continued, “That was six years ago, they came to us for help a year later. Scientists figure it’ll take about a decade for the ash to come down and who knows how long to fix up the biosphere. In the meantime, most cities have functioning shielding, but they’re still trying to offload the remaining one and a half billion refugees on planet.”

Alex nodded, unable to look away. He understood the limitations of atmospheric craft and ash was one of the worst things to fly through. There were ways around the that, but even small craft would require hundreds of modifications to survive it. Maybe some atmosphere capable warships with fully sealed systems... but good luck landing those in a city. “It’s dead, isn’t it?”

“Basically. We’ve been helping with the offload, giving shelter where possible without making a scene,” he gave Alex a pointed look. “Getting their shipbuilding capability back up has been a nightmare, I’m told. A lot of their manufacturing was done on the ground on their homeworld.”

Even if they weren’t building new ships, they would still have to maintain the old ones. Alex didn’t know the numbers of what the Tslao fleet looked like, but if the main source of parts was gone, it would be dwindling by the day. “Guessing there’s not a lot of interoperable parts.”

“A lot of things are similar enough,” Ed shrugged. “They love quickweld and we’ve got the Lamarr refit dock in orbit, so they can replicate specific parts on site, at least.”

“Good. How are they doing?” The last few minutes had changed his perspective significantly.

“Everything they’ve got is crammed full of refugees, they’re constantly short of food, medical supplies and everything else. So, about as shitty as you’d expect.” Ed swiveled his monitor around again and leaned back in his chair. “That is why we embarked upon this little project. The Kshlavo uses a Scoutship frame that was nearing completion with Tslao engines refit into it.

“Yeah, I get-”

Alex would have sat up bolt upright, startled from sleep by the door to the medical bay opening, but he was still pinned to the mediboard. His eye swiveled down to find Carbon returning, cleaned up and dressed in a plain jumpsuit. She sort of looked at him, eyes dull and sick as she scanned the room and then proceeded to the medical dispenser.

Carbon switched it into Tsla and started dialing things in, each press on the screen slow and methodical. She shifted as she tapped out a few doses and Alex recognized the Tslao symbol for on the screen. “How much radiation did you take?”