M. R. Parsons

Elixa looked at her hands: small, nail-bitten, and stained with remnants of the sugary pastry she ate for breakfast. Between her sticky fingers, she held a composite bracket of the erector-set she played with. Nimbly, she placed it between the tiny propeller and the body of the vehicle before tightening the plastic connector strap. She leaned in, eyes inches from the drone which fit in the palm of her hand. Finding what she needed, she plucked the end of a wire from the drone’s body and ran it to the propeller hubs, wrapping the excess around the bracket-strut she had just placed.

Sitting back on her heels, Elixa looked at her toy. Boys and girls raced around her, playing tag or playing with dolls imported from Sol. They had long since learned to leave her to herself—she never played with them. Instead, she spent her time building the devices from the manual of the erector-set she’d been given for her fifth birthday. She was finally nearing the final project: a solar-powered mining claw. Just a tiny one though, meant for digging the dirt of the colony moon she lived on: Ximacent, Orbiting Proxima Centauri B. It didn’t have near enough reach or power to collect the helium-3 deposits her father mined, miles below her feet.

No longer able to contain herself, she snatched up the wireless controller. Giddy with excitement, she flipped the power switch to ‘ON.’ The controller flashed green, and the eight drone propellers cycled on and off as they ran the calibration sequence she’d programmed. Finally, the drone too, flashed green.

She pressed the altitude-control lever forward and the drone shot upward. She circled a joystick controlling the angle of the propellers and it buzzed across the room, moving in jerks like a hummingbird above the heads of a dozen staring children.

See what I can do, she thought, before the drone smashed into a wall and plopped to the floor. The children cheered at the carnage, but she didn’t care. I did it. I made that.

Elixa rushed to a far corner of the room where the older kids sat playing a virtual game. “Gab’iel! ‘Ebbeca! Did you see!?”

Her sister, Rebecca, shushed her, then seeing her dismay, wrapped her in her arms. Rebecca leaned down and, black hair smelling of cherry blossoms, made a tunnel between their faces. “Shh. Gabe’s in the miner’s seat.”

Elixa’s face parted through Rebecca’s hair as she looked at her brother. He sat in a wide chair, designed to imitate the seat of a helium-3 drill. He looked around beneath a goggled helmet, cut-off from her world, as his fingers raced about the air in haptic gloves, working at the controls of a virtual drill. The other boys watched, some cheering, some calling insults born of the fear they would lose.

“He’ll win. He always does,” Rebecca whispered.

Cries of victory and defeat trumpeted as Gabriel passed up the highest scorer. Despite her age, pride warmed Elixa’s heart. My brother’s the best.

Her delight was short-lived as a greasy man burst through the entry of the daycare. He leaned over, hands on thighs, breathless from exertion. He looked up with a jerk to the stare of dozens of young children and near-adults. His eyes burned with berserk anger, making Elixa dart behind her sister.

“What are you doing? You can’t—” the matron of the daycare shouted as he lurched towards Elixa’s group.

“The SHELTER!” he screamed, eyes shiny with emotion.

Not anger, Elixa thought. Fear.

“You’re from—” the matron began to ask.

“The SHELTER!”

The matron’s throat bobbed as she gulped with understanding. “Come along children. Shelter drill.” She began directing them to a cramped room, barely large enough to contain one of the fossil fuel cars from old Earth.

Bright white lights lit their excited faces as the children filtered in from the dramatic start of the shelter drill. The older kids began murmuring amongst themselves. Elixa stood on her tiptoes as she tried to listen in but gave up when Rebecca grabbed onto her in a tight hug. Instead, she looked around the room, trying to identify the carbon composites reinforcing the thick epoxy walls as bodies pressed in around her.

As the last child took a spot near the door, the matron squeezed into the room. She pointed to a space on the floor and motioned for the man to join her. He quickly shook his head and began to close the door. “Wait,” the matron said.

He paused. “I got kids in another daycare a few blocks away. I got to get to them. You’ve a commplant?”

The matron nodded.

“Spread the word.” He began to close the door again.

“Wait. How long do we have?”

He sighed and shifted his weight to the door. Not to close it like some child-infested bank vault, but to bear his weariness. “I don’t know. I was halfway down the lift when the ‘splosions started. Never thought a hangover’d save my life—don’t know if anyone’s gonna make it back.” He slammed the door, causing the lights to flicker as the shelter switched to emergency power.

Whispering conversations continued around Elixa as she watched the matron: finger pressed into her neck at the back of her ear, head bowed, speaking quietly. The telltale sign of commplant communication.

As the minutes dragged on, the room grew stuffy, air turning to a musky-smelling soup. Elixa wiped a sheen of sweat from her brow, leaving a streak of syrup above her eyes. “Hello? Hello!?” she heard the matron say as she noticed the conversations between the other children had died.

Elixa’s toes and feet began to tingle as if she’d sat on them too long. Then she distinguished the sensation—vibrating. Like when taking the lift to the surface. only stronger. Almost numbing. Are we moving?

A crescendoing hum accompanied the feeling, quickly growing into a roar. It reminded Elixa of the train horns she’d heard in the films of old Earth. We are moving!

“What’s that sound!?” a boy asked from beneath a mop of bright red hair, panic clear in his voice.

The matron’s gaze wandered about the room, studying the walls and ceiling. “Children get—”

The lights cut out as the room shuddered violently, ripping Elixa from her sister’s arms.

###

Elixa smashed her forehead into the bar of the bunk above. Then she fell out of bed gasping for the air she was sure had been replaced by smoke and dust. The roaring continued, sending her scrambling across the smooth metal floor. As her lungs filled with cold, stale, recycled air, she looked around, remembering she was no longer the five-year-old girl of her nightmares.

She pressed into the back of her ear, silencing the wake-up alarm inducted into her skull from the commplant. I’m not on Ximacent, she reminded herself as she rubbed the growing welt on her head. I’m on Mothership. And that was nearly a quarter of a century ago. Going to the upright locker beside her bunk, she touched a faded picture of her parents on their wedding day.

Pulling open the locker, she grabbed a clean jumpsuit from a shelf and pulled it over the tanktop and athletic shorts her shipmate referred to as ‘ranger panties.’ When Cedric first referred to them that way, she’d wanted to be offended, but when he bestowed her nickname, she decided it wasn’t that bad after all.

“Ranger, come in,” Cedric’s voice said. A warbling alarm could be heard in the background.

Elixa pressed a finger to her neck. “What’s wrong?”

“Bessy’s out again.”

“Again?”

“Does the day end in ‘Y’?”

“You stay at the controls. I’ll do a hard restart.”

“Range, ‘fore you go down there. It’s not just Bessy… we’re getting some strange magnetic readings.”

“It’s probably the next activity cycle starting up. I’ll stop by the bridge on my way.”

Elixa donned a pair of sturdy work boots and slapped a button, opening the door to the bunkroom with a whoosh. She breathed in the scent of metal and ozone permeating the corridor. Like so many before her, she’d first hated the smell. How it was everywhere. How it infected her clothes. Her sheets. Skin.

Now it was the smell of home.

As she walked the short distance to the bridge, she felt the weight of Mothership pressing down on her. The corridor, lined with pipes and valves, pressed in, making her duck her head, despite knowing there was no cause for concern. Even though it was the size of a small city and meant to house ten times the number of people it currently did, the living quarters were cramped.

Her boots echoed off the metal grate that curved perpetually upwards, disappearing a hundred meters in front of her. It had taken her a while to get used to the false gravity of the centrifugal ring. But now it was natural; during her last leave to the moon, Ximacent, it’d taken her several days to get used to the strong gravity and flat ground.

Reaching the bridge, the door glided open with a puff of air, blowing her dark hair back. Mothership’s only other occupant sat at the control booth, not even looking up as she entered. “What’s wrong?”

“Good call giving the others leave a week early,” Cedric said. “Solar activity’s spiking.”

She looked at the line graph displayed on a screen: jagged peaks followed by narrow valleys. The latest spike, continuing to grow, shifted the scale of the chart ever upward. “The solar activity cycle change is a few weeks early,” she noted, then shrugged. “With a 14-year cycle, that’s well within the margin of error. Thruster’s ready?”

“Another half-hour and the software patch’ll be done. Then we bring the other four computers back online.”

Elixa walked to a window taking up a whole wall of the bridge. In the distance WeeGee, the space station colony and wormhole generator, glowed in space like the pictures of Earth’s moon. It eclipsed a dark spot in space: a hole in space-time connecting Proxima Centauri to Sol. Somewhere in that hole were her brother and sister, traveling on a freighter meant to deliver helium-3 to one of the outposts orbiting Jupiter’s moon, Europa. A line of kilometer-long ships flashed weakly against the brilliance of WeeGee, looking like gnats swarming the halo of an angel.

Pressing her hand to the glass, she felt the familiar hum of the powerful energy laser hundreds of meters above her head. The invisible beam shot off from Mothership—100,000 kilometers away to WeeGee, where it powered the massive generators that sustained the wormhole.

For a moment, she took in the sheer size of where she was. It felt like how her brother described his first time seeing the last grasslands of Earth. ‘Waves of green, so vast you think it goes on forever. It’s like home.’ The irony that all his time was spent on a ship in the depths of space had not been lost on Elixa. Yet, across the night, the ten-thousand solar collectors of the Dyson Swarm harvested Proxima Centauri’s energy, and Elixa was where she belonged.

She broke away from the window. “Alright, I’m going to restart ol’ Bessy before things start getting steamy.”

“Range… are you sure? I mean you’re cute and all… but I thought you had standards,” Cedric said.

“I could send you.” She gave his head a firm shove as she walked by before striding through the door, middle fingers held behind her back.

“It’s all you, boss,” he called after her.

Elixa climbed into the seat of a narrow electric cart and ran her fingers across a touchpad mounted in front. Moments later she was zooming down the narrow tunnels webbing Mothership as the cart navigated the turns to her destination. Even at max speed, it was twenty minutes before she reached Bessy at the oldest end of Mothership.

Getting out of the cart, she stood for a moment studying Bessy’s control board. She both loved and hated the radiator panel that maintained the excess heat dissipation of Mothership. On the one hand, it kept them cool and was old tech—easy to fix. On the other hand, its age meant that it was prone to errors: part due to wear and tear, part due to the layers of software patches built up over decades—slowly making it incompatible with the newer systems.

It had long been scheduled for a complete rehaul, and someday it would be replaced. Elixa layed a hand on the board. She hoped she wouldn’t be there when that day finally came.

When all else fails… Elixa lifted a plastic cover and flipped a switch down, where the worn word ‘OFF’ was barely visible, turn it off and on.

Cedric’s garbled voice crackled in her skull. “—ixa com—n. Range—in.”

“What is it now?”

“Eli—can—hear me?”

“Barely. Interference.”

“We recei—transmission.”

A transmission? What was so weird about that? They must have received a thousand communications from WeeGee and the swarm’s control stations each day.

“Sit tight; I’ll be there soon.” She flipped the switch back to ‘ON.’ “And get those computers back online. I want those thrusters operational to get us out of this magneto—”

Her words caught in her throat as a sudden change in inertia slammed her sideways into a steam pipe. The insulation worn away, it scalded her arm with a sizzle. “Gah!” she pulled away from the pipe, fighting the acceleration force. “I didn’t say to activate the thrusters!”

“—ange, hurry!” Panic was evident in Cedric’s voice.

Elixa rushed into the cart and set her destination before overriding the safe speed restriction. As she sped back to the bridge, she looked at her arm. Part of the skin had sloughed away and raw blisters were already growing at the edges of the burn. She painfully picked out bits of nylon, melted into her wound from her jumpsuit. Then pulled a small medical kit from below the touchpad and searched through it until she found antibiotic ointment and gauze.

Carefully, she tried to apply the sticky medicine to her injury, having to restart as a hairpin turn caused her to smear ointment on the seat as she gripped it for support. Finally, after several attempts, she succeeded, then wrapped her arm in gauze.

The cart came to a stop with a sudden jerk, forcing her forward out of her seat. That has to be a record, she thought as she gained her feet and ran onto the bridge.

“There you are!” Cedric yelled as she entered the control room, panting. “Shit, Range. What happened to your arm?”

“Why—the fuck—would you start the thrusters without giving me a warning!?”

“Wasn’t me, Range. System took emergency measures.”

Only then did she notice the claxons blaring an emergency warning and felt the tug of acceleration. “Thrusters are still going?”

“Yeah boss. System’s reporting imminent failure and is taking action to prevent it.”

“What’s the cause?”

“Can’t say for certain but—”

“Can you bring them to a force stop?”

“You know there’s no override for this type of failure.”

Why the hell not!? her brain screamed. Of all the idiotic things for the engineers who designed the swarm to do: trusting a computer over a human in the face of total destruction was the stupidest.

“Listen Range; we got this str—”

“The other control stations—are they reporting any failures?” She began to run through scenarios that might cause the system to take emergency control.

“No, they—”

“We need to—”

“Range, listen to me!”

The scenarios stopped. “You think this has to do with the transmission you mentioned?”

“I’m not sure but… yeah.”

“What type? Who sent it?”

“Multimedia. There’s no sender. It’s like it appeared out of thin-space.”

“Bring it up.”

Cedric pulled a multimedia program onto the screen over the graph of solar activity. He waited for the message to load then hit ‘PLAY’.

A reverberating screech that Elixa associated with sound feedback filled the air. Meanwhile, a bright yellow wave filled the screens, synchronized oscillations with peaks and dips in the screeching. Binary filled a text box on the edge of the screen, racing down as the ones and zeroes filled in.

“Enough!” Elixa said through clenched teeth. “Enough!”

Cedric stopped the transmission. “It goes on like that… I ran an analysis. There’s a fractal pattern embedded in the message. But none of our programs can understand it. It’s not human-made.”

Elixa focused on Cedric’s last word. “What are you saying?”

“Alien malware.”

“That’s ridic—”

“The Dyson Swarm has been here for the better part of a century. Think about how many stars are within 30 or 40 light-years of here. It wouldn’t even take a space-faring civilization to detect us and send a computer virus. We had the tech to do so when the furthest we’d ever gone was to the moon.”

“Let’s say you’re right. What do they want?”

“Maybe they’re just looking to see if we react; to confirm we’re intelligent and not a collection of asteroids or space dust. Or… maybe they’re trying to cripple our connection to Sol before invading. Who could say?”

“This sounds—”

“I know. I admit you’re right; the idea is crazy.” Cedric looked up at her, eyes hard and steady. “But the thrusters activated after we received the transmission. And it doesn’t appear to be of human origin.”

“Fine, start a system security scan—”

“Already started.”

“In the meantime, we need to look for other sources of the failure. We HAVE to get control of the thrusters before we’re out of range of the other control stations.”

“Actually, that won’t be an issue…”

“Why not?”

“Well… we’re on a collision course with WeeGee.”

Elixa rushed to the window. The bright spot of the wormhole generator, usually the size of a quarter, was now at least twice that. “How long?”

“We’ll be within WeeGee’s gravity well within two hours.”

“Then boom,” Elixa whispered. “WeeGee knows our situation?”

“They’ve halted traffic into the wormhole and have started evacuations,” Cedric confirmed. “But…”

“But the population on WeeGee is nearly that of Ximacent. Even with all the freighters in proximity. They’ll never evacuate the millions on WeeGee.”

“What’s the closest control station to Mothership Beta? They can bring her online, so we can do a hard restart.”

“Beta’s at least a three-hour shuttle ride… but that’d be Rocco’s station. Get on the horn. Get him there. If we have to power down, we’ll need another mothership online as quickly as possible.”

“But if we go offline without Beta—”

“Don’t you think I know that!? Find out why those thrusters are firing!”

Cedric audibly gulped and began clacking away at the console behind Elixa. She stared at the dark outline of the wormhole behind WeeGee. Among tens of thousands of souls, her brother and sister traveled somewhere in that bridge to Sol: an eleven-hour journey connecting solar systems four light-years distant.

Elixa touched the glass. It was ice under her fingers. Leaning on it, she cradled her burn against the surface. The cold brought only minor relief.

None of those people would be aware of the threat looming around them. Of the upcoming collapse of the wormhole.

Gabriel. Rebecca.

###

“Oh, good! You’re awake, sleepyhead,” Rebecca cheered from where she stood in front of the two-burner stove of their cramped kitchen. She turned to face Elixa, holding a wooden spoon against her chin and staring at the dingy ceiling as if deep in thought. “Wasn’t there something special about today?”

Elixa rolled her eyes and mumbled, “It’s my birthday.”

“That’s right! How old now? Eleven?”

“Twelve,” Elixa grumbled as she took a seat at the bar-height counter that served as their small apartment’s dining table. Sniffing the air, she breathed in scents of frying meat, oregano, and garlic, perking her up. “Wait, what are you making?”

“You don’t know? You’re always talk about it—about how good mom’s recipe was. I think I’m getting close, but something’s missing.”

“Smoked paprika. Mom always put in a dash of smoked paprika.”

Rebecca frowned, dismayed. “I’m sorry, Lixa. I just wanted to do something nice.”

Elixa walked around the counter and wrapped her arms around Rebecca. “It’s okay, Becca. It smells delicious. But…”

“But how can we afford spaghetti?” Rebecca shrugged. “Gabe and I wanted to do something special for your birthday. Rice and beans are fine for any other day but this one.”

“You and Gabe have been going without lunch again, haven’t you?”

Rebecca turned back to a boiling pot of water. “So what? Gabe and I are done growing. You still are. And from the looks of it, you’ll be taller than either of us… Besides, a few weeks of missed meals are going to be worth this one. Now go get our brother.”

Elixa went to her brother’s door and peeked through the open crack. The flickering glow of a holocall was there. Gabriel stood with his back to the door, curly black hair falling nearly to his shoulders. The 3D apparition of their family’s caseworker stood before him.

“What do you mean ‘only one of us’?” Gabriel asked the apparition with an angry whisper.

“Look, I know it’s not what you were expecting,” said the even-toned hologram.

“Not what I was expecting!? You said we’d all have the opportunity to go to the university on WeeGee.”

“And you all still do. But the funds from the payout after the accident are drying up. I can only allocate enough for one of you to attend.”

Gabriel leaned back, arms crossed against his chest. “That’s not what you promised us.”

“My hands are tied… There is, ah, one other item we need to discuss.”

“What, you’re cutting our rations again?”

“No, ah, not that… Look, you’re almost eighteen.”

“So what?”

“So your sisters are fifteen and elev—”

“Twelve.”

“Right, twelve. Whether you decide to take the funds and go to university or not, you’ll be out of the care of The Colonies.”

“And?”

“And your apartment was built to house four. We made an exception for the three of you, but we need the space. I have a refugee family that needs it.”

“What will happen to my sisters?”

“If you can’t afford an apartment and take guardianship over them, we’ll place them where we have openings. It’s not likely there will be two openings at the same residence.”

“You’re splitting us up.”

Elixa gasped, making Gabriel turn and lock eyes with her. She rushed to the bedroom she shared with Rebecca, tears streaming down her face. Collapsing face down on her bed, she sobbed into her pillow.

Ten minutes later, there was a knock at the door. Gabriel and Rebecca entered. Rebecca sat beside Elixa, rubbing her back while Gabriel took a seat on the bed across from them.

“I’m not going to the university,” Gabriel said, sharing a knowing look with Rebecca. “Neither is Becca.”

“But you were already accepted!” Elixa protested.

“I never saw myself as an engineer anyway.” He shrugged. “But you, Elixa, were born to be one.”

“And I just want to cook,” Rebecca said. “I’ll learn more working than I ever will in the Culinary College.”

Elixa sniffed. “What about our home?”

“They just finished building a new freighter,” Gabriel said. “They need workers.” He looked around the tiny dirt-stained room. “Pay is good. We’ll move somewhere nicer.”

“And we’ll be together?”

Gabriel reached across the gap and grasped her hand. “Always.”

But that was a lie.

Freighter workers spent months deployed, and Gabriel was no exception. Over the next three years, Elixa saw her brother only a few months. After that, Rebecca took a line cook position on the same freighter, leaving Elixa to channel her loneliness into her studies. Graduating secondary school two years early, she entered the Engineering College of the University of WeeGee at sixteen and graduated top of her class four years later.

###

“Bessy’s out again,” Cedric said as a bead of sweat rolled down his neck to collect at the growing wet patch on his back.

Elixa sat at the console beside him, fanning herself with a datapad. Her wounded arm throbbed. “You think?”

They’d spent the last hour and a half brainstorming scenarios that would cause the computer to sense an imminent failure and sustain thruster activation for so long. But there were no external threats. It had to be the computer system, and with seven redundant computers keeping each other in check, there was only one conceivable cause—a virus.

“Where are we at on the security sweep?”

“Ninety-eight percent. Two minutes.”

Elixa stared at the screen before her, monitoring chatter between WeeGee and the freighters running the evacuation effort. “They’re getting nervous.”

“You would be too if you were less than twenty minutes away from death and only two incompetent engineers could prevent disaster… oh, wait.”

“Only one of us is incompet—”

“Sweep’s done!”

“It found something?”

“…No—nothing.”

“Fuckkk!” Elixa sighed, feeling her insides collapse with despair. Of course, why would the security system pick up an alien virus?

“I’ll head down to the Solar Generator room.”

“No. Mothership is my responsibility. I’m going.”

“Better hurry. Fifteen minutes. Takes at least five to get there.”

Elixa ran out of the room and into the cart. She paused for a moment before entering the destination. Was she ready to do this? Was she ready to condemn all those in the wormhole to death? No, I can’t think that. I’m saving millions more… including myself.

Five minutes later, she stood in a room larger than any single freighter hanger on WeeGee. A room so large a dedicated dehumidifier the size of a shuttle ship was necessary to prevent clouds from forming at the ceiling. In front of her sat the solar generator, taking up half the room itself, amassing the energy from ten thousand collectors to power Mothership and the energy laser. And WeeGee.

Taking a deep breath, she approached the control panel mounted on a pedestal before the generator. The small screen, no larger than a datapad, controlled the whole system.

Elixa’s fingers flew across the screen, scrolling through menus and entering codes. At last, she was given the option: ‘POWER DOWN?’

She pressed a finger to her ear. “Cedric. Are we ready?”

“Wh—Range? Are you—?”

Elixa sighed; Goddamn solar activity. But that was the least of her worries. Wasn’t it?

She selected ‘PROCEED.’

‘ARE YOU SURE?’

She took a deep breath. Tens of thousands dead. Gabe. Becca. The screen flickered—another sign of the increased solar noise—radiation flipping bits in the pixels that made up the display.

Wait.

She ran back to the cart, leaving the question unanswered.

###

“Range? What the fuck!?” Cedric screamed as she stormed onto the bridge.

“We have three minutes. Pull up the chart showing solar activity.”

“Shit, we’re about to die!”

“Pull up the goddamn chart!”

“I hope you know what you’re doing—there’s no time to get down to the generator.”

“There!” She pointed to a spike on the graph. It reached the top limit before forming a plateau, then quickly falling. “It’s off the chart. Tell me when we received that message?”

Cedric consulted a screen. “Right at the peak… I don’t get it. How did we receive a multimedia message from a star? And how is it making the thrusters fire?”

“It isn’t. The message was just another symptom of the same problem—multiple event effect.”

“You mean single—”

“No.” Elixa shoved Cedric out of the seat and began rapidly searching through the computer. “Single event effects wouldn’t affect our system. That’s what we have seven redundant computers for. If radiation flips a bit of binary in one computer; it’s compared against the six others and found to be false, then repaired.”

“But we only had three computers online when the thrusters began firing.”

“Exactly. We must have been hit with a coronal mass ejection. So much radiation there was some overlap in the changes of two of the computers.”

“So the two overruled the third? But why wouldn’t the thrusters stop when we brought the other four—”

“There!” Elixa exclaimed.

Cedric leaned in next to her. “The solar positioning system?”

“It thinks we’re on the surface of the star.” Elixa typed in three numbers, overriding the location understood by the computer. Immediately the acceleration tug of the thrusters stopped, then reversed as Mothership rushed to correct its position. “The four remaining computers don’t come online simultaneously after a patch. Otherwise, they’d overrule the update.”

Cedric grabbed her shoulders and shook her joyously. “Brilliant! I could kiss you!”

“It’s why they pay me the big bucks… and please don’t.”

Cedric gave her a wink as the screen buzzed with an incoming video call from WeeGee. Normally they were too far away for the lag time to make video call worth it. But not now.

Elixa answered the call. “Yes, director.”

A haggard-looking man with red eyes and a crumpled collared shirt said, “I could kiss you.”

“There’s a lot of that going around. Sorry about the scare.”

“Scare. That’s an understatement if I’ve ever heard one. I have a lot to see to here. I just wanted to say—thank you, you saved our asses. You saved everyone’s ass.”

“Just doing my job.” Elixa cringed at the cliché as it left her mouth.

“Yes, well, we’ll need a full engineering report on what caused the problem, how you fixed it, and how to prevent it in the future.”

“Understood.”

“Oh, and have telecom patch you through to The Trunchbull.”

“My brother and sister’s freighter? They’re scheduled to be in the wormhole right now.”

“Traffic was particularly bad today. Again, you have my personal thanks… If you ever need anything…”

Elixa nodded and the screen went black. A minute later, she was connecting to The Trunchbull. Her brother and sister’s relieved faces greeted her, followed by the cheers of a hundred refugees crammed into the space behind them.

“Gabe. Becca. I think it’s time we use some of that leave we’ve accrued.”

I hope you enjoyed this story, as it was the first story I ever had published. If you would like to read similar stories involving massive man-made machinery and structures, please consider purchasing Titanic Terastructures by JayHenge Publishing. You can buy it on Amazon here.

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