Heavenward
Two unknown radar contacts emerged before the surveillance of the United Systems. War captains and their wingmen were dispatched to combat such minor engagements, dogfights for which Captain Cullen was conditioned to execute with adroit precision.
On a nearby blue giant system, two trespassers had flown near a local colony beyond reasonable comfort, and it was Captain Cullen and his two wingmen’s duty to show the intruders no mercy.
“I’m getting tone on bandit-two. He’s mine,” spoke a wingman.
One of the war jets pursued a pirate in a dogfight; they were dark triangular vessels, crude as the cosmic dark and humankind’s finest anchors of war; they were arrowheads chiseled from unearthly stone, hounding scrapped enemy spacecraft in barbaric hunger. Three jets and two pirates tangoed in the darkness, sparks gamboling upon the ecliptic of the blue sun.
“Copy that, Ironhead. I’m going to get tally on bandit-one.” Captain Cullen disengaged from bandit-two and maneuvered his war jet through the vacuum of the solar system.
The pirates traversed with vague intentions beyond trespassing for illegal operation, likely the transport of undocumented cargo, which meant more than the welfare of allied solar systems. Captain Cullen, of the lightweight war jet Night Executioner, and his wingmen were amongst the few who were sent for their unfailing skill to eliminate minor targets.
“Cullen, bandit-one’s still on my ass. I can’t shake ‘em!” Cullen’s second wingman, Weasel, called into his earpiece.
Bandit-one fired a missile into space, engaging their target.
“Smoke in the air, Weasel! Smoke in the air!” Yelled Cullen.
Weasel jerked his jet upwards, redirecting his craft into the vacuum above. The missile steered swiftly and maintained on the wingman, leading the pirate.
“Defending!” Weasel deployed flares, steering rightward, enveloping Cullen’s view in a dazzling array of defensive fireworks. The missile caught a flare and perished upon nothing.
“Weasel, maintain your maneuvers and keep him off your six. I’m engaging bandit-one.” Cullen swooped from behind and engaged the pirate closely.
“Scratch one. I’m re-engaging.” Ironhead buzzed into their ears.
“Copy that, Ironhead, I got visual on my six. Weasel, I’m engaging, seven-o-clock. On my command, bank right. I’m going to get tone.”
“I got visual. Copy!” Weasel maintained a hard bank left, maneuvering out of the pirate’s scope. Captain Cullen awaited the opportunity to center the bandit in his sights.
The pirate piloted a scavenged ship, a typical combat spacecraft manipulated and developed from stolen technology. They weaved and churned through the obtuse vacuum, retaliating against the war jet’s defenses with similar armament, never gaining an advantage over the indefinite skills of the captains.
Savages such as the pirates would not have access to a neuro-network with their craft, direct connections from their brains to the heart of their vessels: synchronization with brain stimulus and their vessel’s arms. Instead, pirates were primitive, manning spacecraft with volatile, instinctive muscle memory, training their brain’s response to their immediate surroundings. Beneath the captains’ headgear were links to the nape of their necks, and within their brains was a war jet, breathing at the expansion of the captains’ lungs.
Cullen felt the clicks of his joystick, the handle stirring in his palms. His blood pulsed into the war jet’s veins, veering with the ether of his core. The vessel was his body, his arm—the bandit was already dead when the Night Executioner became.
“Three, two, one… bank!”
Weasel cut right on a dime, nearly vanishing from Cullen’s view. The bandit, slower to maneuver, steered its spacecraft toward the wingman, emerging into Cullen’s barrel.
“I got bandit-one dead ahead. I’m getting tone!” Cullen steered the Night Executioner and centered the pirate in his sights.
“Nail him!” Weasel pushed his throttle.
“Good tone! Firing!”
An anti-satellite missile launched from the Night Executioner’s wings, accelerating toward the pirate. Cullen watched the projectile soar into the spacecraft’s rear and obliterate.
“That a hit! Bandit-2 down!” Cullen maintained forward and lifted his ship, passing above the drifting hostile that fragmented into the weightless void of space, adrift and forgotten into an eternity of floating dust. His wingmen changed course and steered behind the captain.
“Good shot, Cullen,” Weasel said.
“We got any more bogeys?” Ironhead chattered into Cullen’s ears.
“No joy. Good work, gentlemen. Reporting back to Station.”
Station was fifty light years away. That was where home was, where Cullen’s wife and two children would be waiting. After four months of enduring the cosmos, training the best captains, and engaging in minor combat, he would see himself at home on that blue marble Earth.
“Radar contact! We got more bogeys on the map!” Ironhead shouted.
Cullen shook himself from reverie and jolted his eyes to the spanning display on his control module. “What the hell is that?”
“You’re asking me? It’s a fucking swarm!”
“What the…”
“That doesn’t look friendly. Whatever that is, we’re outnumbered,” Weasel heaved.
A mass of radar contacts emerged onto their maps like a hive-minded entity several thousand miles ahead of them, rapidly moving in a formation roughly a quarter mile in diameter.
“I still got no visual,” Cullen panicked, flitting his eyes from the map to the immediate void before him.
The three captains faced their jets towards the approaching hive, seeing nothing but blue glints that conjured from the darkness, an amorphous cloud spawning from the vacuum itself. It was a swarm of pirates from an unknown location, committing a final act of retaliation.
“Tally! There’s like a hundred of them, twelve o’clock high!” Weasel shouted as all three captains watched the unwavering swarm appear.
“What the fuck…” Ironhead drifted.
Cullen’s wife would raise the corners of her lips once she met him at the doorstep, the scent of his home adrift as he dropped his belongings then and there. A light bar suspended over the kitchen would outline her shape, and a hanging halogen lamp would murmur static throughout the threshold.
“We need to get the fuck out of here. There’s no time to call reinforcements. Cullen, send Station the coordinates,” Weasel panted through his headset.
And his children would follow behind her, rambling about whatever their dog might have done half an hour before he arrived, seeing by his wife’s expression if they were true. Into their jubilance would he give in, kneeling before his kin and the mantel of his heart.
“We have to do something.”
“Cullen! Do you copy?”
There was no other way.
“Fall back. Retreat to Station now. Initiate jumps, and let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Copy!” The wingmen replied in unison.
The three captains maneuvered their ships away from the approaching swarm, pushing the throttle.
Small rounds began brushing past their jets. There was little time.
“Fire warp throttles,” Cullen commanded.
“Copy!” The wingmen followed.
Cullen engaged the warp throttles. A low hum rippled through the cabin walls and the vacuum; space around them distorted gradually as though the fabric of spacetime itself were melting, searing the matter about them. The wingmen followed as they pushed away from the ensuing swarm, entering a boiling veil of nonentity.
“Initiate jump sequences. Enter coordinates to Station.” Cullen toggled the switches on his control board to initiate twelve jumps back to Station.
“Set!” His wingmen replied.
The hostiles attempted to engage with aimless rounds.
“They’re trying to engage, Cullen!” Weasel shouted.
“Keep pushing! They cannot enter our field.” Their jets soared away as spacetime bent around them. The swarm pursued, yet overtaking the war jets was impossible. They slowly vanished into a blackening universe as space drew further behind them.
Spacetime bent into their coordinates. The captains were ready to launch.
“Warp is complete. Jump ready!” Cullen shouted.
“Jump ready!”
Cullen gripped the control stick, shuddering in anticipation before the jets lurched them through consecutive wormholes.
“Three!” Cullen watched the swarm fade behind him, distorting with the matter around him.
“Two!” The wingmen drifted beside him, a triad of sails piercing into the darkness, blazing trails of thunder from their thrusters.
“One!”
Cullen saw a flank emerge from his left, unveiling from a transparent camouflage. Ambush.
*
A boy was delivered near midnight. He was just over eight pounds and surprisingly full of hair. He wailed loudly into the delivery room before immediately being placed upon his mother’s chest, shutting his eyes tightly beneath the beaming whiteness of the room. A universe starting anew, materializing from the fog of sightlessness. They knew he was going to be healthy; the doctors said so. As his mother beamed a crooked smile through her fatigue, the boy’s father lowered himself beside the two, speechless beneath his trembling lips. His slender arms reached toward the child, but a pervading anxiousness hesitated his grasp. It was still unbelievable that this was his offspring; it made him afraid to reach just yet, to hold this vessel of life that wailed to his mother. Nine months had mentally prepared the father for this instance, yet he was clueless before the zenith of his life. His life and blood, pulsing through the baby’s body, being held first by this woman he endlessly loved.
It was a family, huddled around a fire of love, conceived for the very first time.
*
Cullen screamed.
The pirates had as much time to evolve as did the United Systems. To think camouflage was accessible to the pirates of the outskirts was lunacy, yet it was lunacy that emerged from the ambush. The merciless pirate fired rounds into the Night Executioner’s tail, creating system malfunctions throughout the ship. The field sizzled about his craft, and space wrapped around him. The timer was already out. He veered his craft downward and began jumping into nowhere.
Contact had managed to puncture through a spot in the Night Executioner’s underbelly, disrupting the ship’s central computer module; all systematic AI and manned computations abruptly disconnected from the ship, upon which Cullen’s jump depended. The link at the base of his neck burned, and he twitched at its accord, concealing a yelp beneath the panic. The Night Executioner was taking over, and Cullen could only grasp the joystick.
“Shit!” He smashed his jump sequence initiator, receiving no response. Space nearly vaporized around him in an imperceptible blur of celestial dreams. He attempted to disengage the warp throttles and was left with no response.
“Station, this is Cullen. Do you read me?” He was jumping beyond the designated sequence. Twelve had already prolonged into thirty-five.
“Ironhead? Weasel? Do you copy?” They had likely already reached Station.
“SOS!” Cullen cranked a lever overhead and triggered the response that nobody would hear. ‘SOS’ beeped in morse code throughout the cabin, filling the expanding void of his internal turmoil.
He growled and writhed. The neuro-connection shuddered and pulsed spasmodically, bereaving his senses and consciousness—his brain was becoming the ship, his hands and feet curling with extreme tension. All protocols for which he trained were futile procedures; nothing understood his commands, the buttons he smashed, and the Night Executioner fulfilled a destiny of sailing for eternity.
The ship was attempting to override his mind. Cullen anguished and flexed his limbs as though electrified, mentally combating the ship’s command for as long as he could—which he could only resist for so long. He tugged at the chord, but it would not give. With every pull, he felt as though his skull were to tear with it, his hands eventually growing static. Losing the strength to clasp the chord tight enough, they fell to his sides.
The number of jumps passed the hundreds, each increment growing shorter and shorter. Every jump accelerated his ship faster than the seemingly instant velocity at which it already traveled.
Bound for the edge of the universe, Cullen was left accelerating toward light speed.
*
Every clear night, the boy’s father would saunter around the perimeter of their house. The lantern wall fixtures would be off to invite all of the midnight languor, sifting through the gossamer air, before settling on the lawn.
“Son, come outside,” he would beckon through the front door.
“Why?” The boy would complain, gripping the tablet that spewed colors and noises of silly mobile games.
His father would wander out the front door, leaving the boy without a response as to why, and insinuating he came along anyway. Finally, the boy would rise from the sofa and wander outside in pajamas. Many shoes would be littered across the carpet before the front door, and into any immediate flip-flops would he slip, exiting into the night.
And supple drafts would wander about his soft, pale face, swaying in the summery midnight as he walked into the front lawn. It would be deep in July when the nighttime air was pacific, picking up tufts of his brown hair. His dad would be standing in the middle of the lawn, a small plot of sprinkled grass where arborvitae hedges were extruded by moonlight.
The boy was seven, so the father knelt and embraced him with one arm. The boy could only think of the game away from which he had stepped as the tablet hummed tunes inside the living room.
“Look at the moon! Can you believe how bright a blue moon gets?” The boy’s father began.
He gazed up. “Yep.”
“Look at the dark spots on the moon.”
He studied the body floating in the sky, a remote node radiating like fluorescent milk.
“People say you can see a rabbit. Can you see it? Look, it looks like it’s jumping away.”
The boy watched intently, imagining the shape of a rabbit.
“Can you see it?”
“I think so.” The boy stood in his father’s arms. He was a middle-aged man with narrow features, bearing a vague and elongated face that shuddered with the vibrating textures of the night. His once full head of hair was clean-shaven and reflected the moonlight, a curious hairstyle about which the boy could only wonder.
All conceptions of the video game inside receded into the darkness. The boy allowed the weight of the night sky to press upon his marble eyes, the pallor on his cool cheeks. It was truly mesmerizing to try and understand the void beyond those stars, the gaps between the vague and the apparent, all of which appeared so undisturbed above their heads.
It was beautiful. Quiet and distant.
“Those dark spots on the moon are called maria.”
The child wondered if he knew anyone named Maria. “Why are they dark?”
“From volcanic activity. A long time ago when the moon used to be very hot. All young planets and moons used to be very hot. Like lava.” The father stood, placing a frigid hand on the child’s back. “Long time ago, people thought they were oceans, so they named those spots ‘maria,’ which means ocean in Latin. Now we know that they are just gray fields of rock left over from millions of years ago, and there’s no such thing as oceans on the moon.”
“Then why don’t they just call it ‘gray spots’ instead of ‘maria?’”
“I couldn’t tell you, son.”
It never quite occurred to the child that he internally admired the skies, these inexplicit depths that hummed as breezes in the night, opening the mystified eyes of the observers below. As such, it was a blessing that his father had taken college astronomy, took an interest in nature’s serenity and the night sky, and wished to bestow his son the charm of unknowing. The fantasies of unreachable stars, which the boy would admire for many years to come.
It would come to a moment of silent observation before they returned inside—two bodies, outlined by moonshine, surrendering their minds to the infinite night.
“Time is memory, my son,” the boy’s father uttered out of the blue, taking one final sweep of the skies with his flitting eyes. He looked toward him.
“Our past is just a collection of memories. A time that only exists from our ability to remember. Doesn’t time feel so short when we experience exciting moments? Fun moments? And they drag on for so long when you’re doing something boring like waiting for food. Remember when we had to wait thirty minutes for those mushroom burgers? It probably feels like it never happened.”
The boy paused.
“Life is just us people seeking memories to make. Otherwise, time means nothing, doesn’t it? What good is our future if it isn’t to be memorable? The past doesn’t seem to exist, but our memories remind us it does. And the future to come… they’re just memories we haven’t made yet.”
And the boy gazed toward his father, not fully grasping his digression.
But he listened anyway, trying to understand his words.
*
A mouth of darkness enveloped the universe behind Cullen as he escaped light. The cosmos ahead of him abstracted into cold, distorting hues.
Space was no longer a plane. It bent around him, and he accelerated through the entrance of every jump initiated by the microsecond. They must not have considered such a travesty in the trials of the Night Executioner. A hundred and forty-seven thousand miles per second trembled within his control module, his jumps exceeding any acceptable quantity. Delusion coursed about the field, trickling into the cabin, and pulling vision out of his eyes.
The velocity of his ship pressed against the tissue of space, and the warp field generator gorged the matter of time into its voracious throat. The neuro-connection could do nothing but leech all sense of judgment; Cullen’s hands held the captain’s chair in distrait terror, unable to remember the faces of loved ones and retaining consciousness through labored breaths. The void of the ship’s mind approached his horizon, likewise the oblivion of a universe without light.
The cosmos narrowed into a shrinking tunnel at the focal point of Cullen’s eyes; cold, iridescent blue light beyond the Night Executioner’s nose curved into the depths below, and images of past light warped into his peripherals. A turquoise hue washed over the cockpit, transitioning into a blue ocean that flooded the vessel.
“God, please, no!” Cullen hit the control module with his dreary fists, sweat condensing around his headgear. He was losing minutes that dilated into decades behind him. Steaks of the passing cosmos fogged into a construing nightmare of ultramarine waters as photons drew away, farther as the Night Executioner inched toward light speed.
Control was slipping into the ship’s command.
He was unable to do anything but watch the ship accelerate.
One hundred and eighty thousand miles per second.
Cullen fingered the chord on his neck, and his hands could not fully close; numbness pricked his entire upper body.
With his open palms, he slowly removed his headgear in heat exhaustion. His hyperventilation enhanced without the pressure of his helmet, and he observed the uncanny stillness of the Night Executioner’s cabin. His face contorted beneath the accelerating chaos outside, slouching in a sob of defeat.
All SOS protocols blared in the ship, sending signals to people who had already perished decades ago. At this rate of acceleration, his family was already dead. His grandchildren embracing grandchildren of their own—all life as he had known dilating into a red purgatory of frozen dreams.
“God, Please! Stop the ship!” The ship was ready to take him. His memories were nearly depleted; his throbbing heart was but the rhythm of a whistling husk.
He held his eyes shut, his captain’s chair, and waited for the universe to encumber the vengeful vessel.
It was fate. To experience unliving before death and perish without a fragment of him to be found in the observable universe. To cherish memories and visualize the faces of those he loved was not even possible—the universe would not allow him. Blackness emerged from his peripherals. The universe contracted and strangled his heart. Light became a blue ring at the end of time.
One hundred and eighty-seven miles per second. Crossing light speed, Cullen began failing to exist.
*
I was in scrubs, my hair netted. The operating theater was a white orchestra of fever: a space of blinding lights and unforeseeable prospects. Adrenaline and paradoxical emotions drained my face pale with the room under which my wife lay, twisted with labor. But I held her hand, and the pallor around her fingers squeezed mine. Nine months of reconciliation had brought me to the frontier of my transcendence. The zenith of my life was minutes away, and I absently stood at its gates.
Lifted, I was drifting across space with the sterile air pervading the hospital. I was elated with fear. Expectant with unpreparedness. Words of comfort barely slipped my tongue, helpless with how little I could ease her pain. Helpless before fatherhood.
Until I watched life be delivered in the theater, life itself had never quite occurred. As our daughter was placed into her mother’s arms for the first time, we welcomed a new life into this Earth. Into this vacillating universe. Lowering myself beside her mother, my emotions could only express tears for the woman who delivered this child. Our child. Our blood, flesh, and bone nestled in her arms, finally crying aloud after nine months of unconsciousness. The gates had opened, and I finally crossed.
And as the sun peaked over the horizon, my wife asleep in our room, I tightly wrapped and held my own offspring in my arms. This warm and pink body, eyes shut in rest and knowing nothing yet of the man holding her in his arms.
I could only plunge within my thoughts. Images of you began traveling at light speed, pictures of your gleaming eyes, guidance, and duty to raise this man who had now entered your shoes. The urge to protect this infant surged through my arms, no longer an imagination or a story told by others. A story I had lived under you—which was now my own.
The restless, unending work of parenthood now challenged my life, this task for which I was forever unprepared, but its journey awaited. The gift of transcendence pitied the return of my own innocence, but I sat still. My painted smile answered it all.
New life was nestled in my arms, my baby girl. And I would vow her service until my death, as you had done for me.
I will forever be amazed at your work. At how well you had handled fatherhood, despite the anxiety that must have coursed throughout your body. Forever will my deepest sorrow be that you could not see me grow. To see your grandchild be delivered into this Earth.
I see your worry-stricken face every night. Betrayed by time, that you will miss my graduation as captain and father—as a man raised by you. To fill that eternal void in your heart and mine, which expands as your memories grow farther away. Maybe you can hear my words, which is the least that I can give:
*
Cullen could hear his breath travel across the cabin, reverberating off the walls.
Yet the walls were cubical. Tall as a room, colored an off-white and painted blue on the lower half. The hues stretched and blurred, illusive as though written by the subconscious. A white silhouette was lying before him, formed by subtleties of the mind as if someone were asleep.
Yet what was in his arms was unmistakably a child.
Cullen began gasping for air, the world continuing to abstract as his fever raged. Scalding heat inundated his body, perspiring throughout his suit, yet he was in casual attire, wearing a warm sweater, and cradling a child.
His first baby girl who was then just hours old.
Cullen’s face twisted and wrought tears of confused panic when he understood where he was—breathing, animating this body that was years in his past, at the moment he was doomed for the edge of the universe.
And for an instance, he felt a soft warmth envelop his entire body. A momentary cushion held his neck as though he were lying in the crook of someone’s elbow, his entire body cradled. He tried to scream, but a mere wail floated above him.
Lost in unreason, he fell further back in his seat, lamenting at the return of these images; his arms loosened, and his eyes rolled into the back of his head, deconstructing emotions into darkness.
The seat in which he sat morphed beneath his elbows, formed under his palms, and a blinding whiteness returned to the cabin.
Cullen gasped deeply in awakening, tunneling back into the fated vessel where perception decayed. Into hyperspace, where he existed for all and no time. The searing suit returned upon his skin.
The Night Executioner fell totally silent; the static torment of his neuro-connection ceased to inundate any seizure. Cullen felt the nape of his neck soften, his body releasing into a state of unmoving. The war jet was unresponsive, yet he was still awake.
‘SOS’ continued to beep, yet its alarm traveled into a moment Cullen could not describe. The sound began dwindling, ceasing to exist, as he realized, toward nonexistence. At this rate, he had what he observed to be minutes before reality became everything and nothing, becoming the omniscient fate toward which he was accelerating.
Cullen attempted to comprehend what he had just experienced: it was a memory he had cherished for all eternity—bearing his firstborn daughter for the very first time—followed by an embrace that he recognized, a feeling he had associated with his earliest memory. Images that had returned as the Night Executioner’s toxin subdued.
Moments into which he had entered physically—he was encountering extradimensional movement for the final minutes of his life.
This was his final frontier. To place within his heart what the universe would not allow.
How had he done it just then?
Everything flowed in slow motion, and Cullen’s time itself was coming to an end.
He shut his eyes one last time, inhaling an elongated gasp of air.
His eyes rolled to the back of his head, his body succumbing to time and perishing memories. Into darkness he entered, attempting to visualize the moment he wished to relive. The warmth of his firstborn was briefly in his arms again, yet he continued.
There was only so much he could ascertain. Lost in hyperspace, his minutes of dimensional existence were becoming seconds.
He continued into the recesses of his mind, aimlessly returning into the darkness for the final seconds of his life.
*
Cullen held his eyes steady, observing the hazy surface on which he stood, a soft bed of grass that ebbed into uniform darkness. Gazing above him, a tall figure stood under the moonlight with a hand on Cullen’s back.
The man looked down, beaming into Cullen’s eyes. Momentarily, the clarity of his gaze punctured his soft skin, the sharpness of his visage taking him aback.
Cullen could only return a hard stare beneath a midnight sky.
“What is it, son?” The man uttered pleasantly. He chuckled, “Did I confuse you about time?”
Hot tears seared the underside of Cullen’s eyes, feeling them surface as he gazed absently. He faltered into a hysterical wail, wrapping his arms around his father.
The man released Cullen’s grasp and knelt before him. “My, my, son, what is it? Why are you crying?”
Grief erupted through his howling lips and pouring eyes.
“What is it, son?”
Cullen kept crying. “I don’t want to go!”
“Go where, son? We’re not going anywhere.” His father grabbed him firmly, pressing his protruding shoulders into Cullen’s cheeks.
The boy’s narrow and watery eyes faced the night sky. Far in the horizon, a milky whiteness started bleeding into the night.
A large hand pressed his back in a downward motion, embraced in comforting arms about which he could have only dreamed. “We’re not going anywhere, son. Why are you crying?”
“Please! Don’t leave!” Cullen clawed at his father’s shirt, his arms tensing with the little strength they had.
“I’ll be right here until your very last day, son. I didn’t mean to scare you about time. We have forever to live, don’t we? Don’t cry! Your life hasn’t even started yet!” His father’s voice was pleasant and firm.
The whiteness approached the entire sky, bleaching the night and the stars, before leaking into the landscape.
Cullen’s wailing stifled into hiccups. He finally fought through his jabbing breaths, perching an utterance upon his lips and lapsing into his father’s shoulders.
“Thank you,” he pressed through his sobs. “For my life and yours.”
For a moment his father was silent. Slowly, he released the boy to look him in his eyes, a deep abstraction and forlorn creasing his brow; melancholy poured into the ravine of his heartache, where its waters wept for the pain of his son. His lips inconsolably quivered, taken aback at how a seven-year-old boy could utter such words.
Whiteness approached the grass that brushed their legs.
A tear formed upon his father’s eye before releasing across his cheek. He raised a gentle hand and held his son’s face, studying the innocence of his eyes. “It has been the greatest gift of my life to be your father. Even when I’m gone, you will find all the success and happiness in the world. Thank you… for my life and yours.”
The light of everything and nothing ran up the little boy’s legs.
“I’m so proud of you, Cullen…”
Captain Cullen shut his eyes and buried his face into his father’s chest.
THE END