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  Alexander shook his head. It was ridiculous that space exploration and extraterrestrial colonization had been fueled by the threat of self-extinction, but at the same time, it made a sick kind of sense. The human race had always been its own worst enemy.

  There came a sharp intake of air, followed by a young woman’s voice: “Captain de Leon!”

  Alexander turned to see a woman come skidding to a stop in front of him, blocking his view. She stood at attention and saluted. The single silver bar she wore marked her as a lieutenant junior grade, while the glowing white stripe below it indicated she was a member of the bridge crew of a starship. A junior lieutenant made bridge crew? Alexander wondered, looking her up and down carefully. The woman was not ugly by any means, and not all natural-borns were, but something about the lieutenant set him off. Her eyes were a rare shade of blue; her hair looked like liquid gold, not one strand out of place; her complexion was too perfect, and her bosom—Alexander stopped his analysis there.

  It was rare to find a gener in the navy—or in any other branch of the service, for that matter—but not impossible; he’d met a few of them warming seats in OCS. They had their own government incentives, financial ones to match the cost of what the navy offered to natural-borns. Maybe this lieutenant had been born a gener child, but then her family had run out of money and she’d signed up to save someone else. A baby, perhaps…?

  No, he decided. Northerners had implants to prevent pregnancy, and giving birth to degenerates was illegal in the Northern States. She must have had other reasons for joining the service.

  “Something on your mind, Lieutenant?” Alexander asked, frowning up at her.

  “Sir, Junior Lieutenant McAdams, reporting for duty, sir!”

  Alexander’s frown deepened. “You’re assigned to the W.A.S. Lincoln?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “I know my entire crew from White Deck to Blue, and I don’t recognize you.”

  “I’m a recent transfer, sir. I have my orders if you’d like to see them.”

  “Please.”

  The young woman held out her arm. Her sleeve rode up, revealing her comm band. She used her other hand to activate the holo display and then navigated by touching holographic buttons and making gestures. Once she found the right document, she made a circle in the air with her finger, and the display rotated to face him. He scanned her orders. Everything checked out. McAdams was to replace Lieutenant Ramirez as the Lincoln’s chief engineer.

  Alexander’s eyebrows floated up as he read that. “You’re a junior lieutenant. According to fleet regulations, a ship’s chief engineer must be at least a full lieutenant.”

  “Admiral Flores waived the requirement for me, sir.”

  “And what happened to Lieutenant Ramirez?”

  McAdams gave him a dumb look.

  “My previous chief. He was supposed to be aboard this climber. Where is he?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Never mind. I assume you’ve been through the training for this mission and that you’ve been adequately briefed?”

  “Yes, sir. I was one of the reserves.”

  “And you’ve served on a Hunter-class destroyer before?”

  McAdams shook her head. “Not on active duty, sir, but the reserves were all trained on one, and I’ve been studying the operational manuals.”

  Alexander grunted. “It’ll have to do, I suppose. Carry on, Lieutenant. I’ll see you on deck.”

  “Aye-aye, sir.” McAdams saluted once more and went on her way.

  Alexander went back to watching the view from the climber. Earth could now be seen curving away below him, the upper edge of the atmosphere glowing a bright blue against the black of space. The sun peered over the horizon at him, dazzling his eyes and making him see spots when he looked away. Then his stomach grumbled, reminding him that he hadn’t eaten breakfast yet. He unbuckled and rose stiff-legged from his chair.

  It was time to get to the mess hall, and while he was at it, to check the Lincoln’s roster. His crew was like family; he hoped he hadn’t lost anyone else. Ramirez had left the mission without so much as a goodbye. Maybe he’d thought it would be too painful to see them off, but that still left the question of why he wasn’t on the mission. Assignments weren’t optional, so it had to be something serious. Alexander hoped it wasn’t because Ramirez had gone AWOL, but if he had, maybe he could escape a court-martial for a while by hiding out in the South.

  Suerte hermano, Alexander thought, and while he was at it—Good luck to the rest of us, too.

  *

  As it happened Ramirez wasn’t the only one who’d left the mission. Almost a third of Alexander’s crew had been detached from the W.A.S. Lincoln with little or no notice, and the reserves had been called up instead.

  Now Alexander’s heart was sore for more reasons than he could count. He didn’t understand it. Why hadn’t he been told? Why had no one come to say goodbye? He resolved to ask Admiral Flores about the changes to his crew.

  No sooner did Alexander arrive on Orbital One than he received orders via his communicator to report to Admiral Flores in the auxiliary briefing room on Deck Nine. He walked there, once again enjoying the effects of gravity.

  The station’s gravity was artificially generated by its rotation around the Earth and its location above GEO (Geostationary Earth Orbit), such that “down” was actually facing outer space and “up” was facing Earth.

  Alexander reached the auxiliary briefing room, and a pair of petty officers guarding the entrance scanned him with wands before he reached the doors. Neither of them moved to open the doors for him. Instead, one of them turned aside and said, “Call Admiral Flores.” His earpiece recognized the command, activated his communicator, and placed the call. When the call went through, the petty officer announced to the admiral that Captain de Leon was waiting outside the briefing room for her.

  Moments later, the doors swished open to reveal Admiral Flores herself. Her white admiral’s uniform contrasted sharply with her ebony skin. Alexander stood at attention and saluted. Flores returned the salute.

  “At ease, Captain,” she said, stepping aside so he could enter the room.

  Once inside, the admiral shut the doors with a gesture and locked them with another. From there she turned and strode down the aisle to the speaker’s podium. Alexander followed, and noted with a growing frown that they were the only ones in the room.

  “I must be early,” he said.

  “Actually, you’re late,” Flores replied.

  That gave him pause. “Where are the others, then?” They reached the speaker’s podium, and the admiral stepped up while he sat down in the front row.

  “What others?” Flores asked, turning back to face him.

  “I’m not sure I understand, ma’am…” Alexander replied slowly. “How many people know about this mission?”

  “Five hundred, give or take.”

  Alexander’s eyes widened. “Then why am I the only one being briefed?”

  “They already know everything they need to. They’re with mission control on Lewis Station.”

  “Lewis Station? I’ve never heard of it.”

  Admiral Flores’ cheeks dimpled with rare amusement. “Nor should you have. Operation Alice is highly classified. If you were to breach operational security, even accidentally, you would be looking at a dishonorable discharge and a firing squad. In order to spare everyone that unpleasantness, we’ve told you as little as possible up till now.”

  Alexander’s pulse began jumping in his temples. “I see.”

  “No, you don’t, but you will.”

  Flores walked up to the far wall and began making gestures. A series of holo displays glowed to life, showing star maps and flight plans.

  Flores pointed to the first hologram, a flight plan, and began to explain: the Lincoln was to detach from Orbital One and fly straight to Venus, where it would get a gravity assist and fly on toward the Alliance colony on Titan.

  But Tita
n wasn’t their real destination. The Lincoln was to fly to a set range of a hundred million klicks from Venus, where no Confederate eyes were likely to be watching, and then they would deviate from their course and head for coordinates another fifty-seven million klicks away from Earth.

  Flores gestured to another hologram. This one showed deep space, and it was marked with two icons. One of them was labeled Lewis Station, and the other was labeled the Looking Glass. That rang a bell. Alexander was beginning to recognize the nomenclature.

  Flores appeared to notice his distraction. “Something on your mind, Captain?”

  “The Looking Glass—what is that?” The icon on the map looked like a perfectly clear marble floating in space, distorting the star field behind its spherical shape. He couldn’t even guess at what it might represent. “The names are all vaguely familiar—Alice, Wonderland, The Looking Glass.”

  “Operation Alice was named after a pair of books by Lewis Caroll, hence Lewis Station. The names are all metaphors for what Operation Alice is about. For example, in one of the books a girl named Alice travels through a mirror or Looking Glass to another world.”

  “So the Looking Glass is…” Alexander felt his heart begin to pound as wild ideas flew through his head. “Some kind of gateway?”

  Admiral Flores pointed to the map, and the hologram zoomed in.

  “The Looking Glass is a Lorentzian wormhole, otherwise known as a Schwarzschild wormhole or an Einstein–Rosen bridge,” she said, pointing to it on the map. “In layman’s terms, it’s a traversable tunnel from one point in spacetime to another.”

  Alexander grinned wildly and leaned suddenly forward in his chair. “We managed to create one? Where does it go?”

  “We’re not entirely sure where it goes. We keep losing contact with our probes soon after they arrive in the Wonderland System. From what little data we’ve managed to receive, our best guess is that the wormhole leads to another galaxy entirely. And as for how it got there… We didn’t create it. We found it.”

  “You mean the wormhole is naturally occurring?”

  “We don’t know if it is or isn’t naturally occurring. What we do know is that it’s occupying a stable orbit around our sun, at a mean distance of two hundred eighty-nine million klicks. That puts it relatively close to Earth, depending on what time of year you choose to travel. Right now it’s actually at its most proximal point, at just over a hundred million klicks away, but we’re taking a circuitous route via Venus so that we don’t attract any unwanted Confederate attention.”

  Alexander frowned. “If the wormhole is just a hundred million klicks from Earth, surely the Confederates have already spotted it.”

  Flores shrugged. “Wormholes are surprisingly hard to detect. They’d have to know exactly where to look. Let’s hope they don’t, but if they have spotted something, it’s squarely in our territory, and we have Lewis Station to prove it. We can even claim that we built the wormhole. That might just scare the socialism out of them and put an end to this stupid war once and for all.”

  “Or scare them enough to attack us before we develop any more of a technological edge.”

  “Let’s hope not. Meanwhile…” Flores turned back to her holo displays and gestured for a new screen to appear. It was a map of a solar system. “This is the Wonderland System. It has a G-type star, or yellow dwarf, the same as us. There are ten planets in all.” Flores pointed to one in particular and zoomed in on it. “The third one from the sun appears to have all the same characteristics as Earth. That’s Wonderland herself. From our current data we suspect the planet has a lot more surface water than ours, but otherwise it could be a perfect sister planet for Earth, right down to its mass, which will produce a tolerable one point one times Earth’s gravity.”

  Alexander was shocked. After a long, silent moment, he said, “People have been dreaming about this for centuries, ever since we put the first man in space. What’s the catch?”

  “There’s more than one, actually,” the admiral replied. “The overriding concern—which has been repeatedly put forward by Dr. Thales, the head of our astrophysics department on Lewis Station—is that there’s no way this wormhole could be a natural phenomenon. If he’s right, then we might be looking at a first contact situation on the other end. But we have to ask ourselves: if the wormhole was created, then the race that created it must have intended to use it to get to our solar system. So where are they, and why haven’t we met them yet? It would appear that they built the gateway just for us, which doesn’t seem likely. To be safe, we are sending an Alliance diplomat aboard the Lincoln as the President’s official representative should you meet intelligent alien life.”

  Alexander nodded. He couldn’t help but agree: first contact was unlikely. That so-called first contact specialist was going to be a lot of dead weight—besides how could anyone be a specialist in first contact if first contact had never been made before?

  “So what’s the other catch?” he asked.

  “The probes. None of them ever made it back. The popular theory is that the wormhole is only open on our side. By traveling through it we force it open in Wonderland for a few minutes, and then the Wonderland side collapses to an infinitesimal width, making a return trip and ongoing transmissions impossible.”

  Alexander paled and he gaped at the admiral. “That’s the popular theory? Then why are we sending a manned mission?”

  “The probe data is inconclusive, and even though the Collapsing Gateway Theory is the most popular one, the other theories are still valid—spacetime distortion, equipment failure, radiation damage, alien interference, etc. A Hunter-class destroyer is much larger than any probe, so it is infinitely better equipped to run the necessary scans of the area and help us narrow down the list of possibilities. In case you’re wondering, we have sent probes with live animal subjects and confirmed that they made it to the Wonderland System alive and well.”

  Alexander blew out a breath. “But they still didn’t make it back. You’re basically telling me that this is a one-way trip.”

  “Not at all, Captain. We should be able to force the wormhole open for you by sending another probe. You’ll have some time to investigate Wonderland before then, but that is one of your mission objectives, regardless. Rest assured, we aren’t planning to abandon the Lincoln, Captain.”

  “You said the wormhole stays open for just a few minutes. That’s an incredibly tight window, even if you can force it open for us with another probe—and that doesn’t explain why you didn’t try this method to rescue one of the probes.”

  “As I said, a ship like the Lincoln is better equipped. The same goes for her crew versus the limited intelligence of a probe. We’ve set your clocks to coincide with pre-planned launch times for future missions. As soon as you arrive in Wonderland, the Lincoln will send us her nav and sensor data from the trip, and we’ll use that to make adjustments on our end. We’ve factored in time dilation and checked the math a thousand times. It is a tight window, but you’ll have a chance, Captain, and if you don’t make it the first time, we’ll keep sending probes until you do. The nav data from each failed attempt will be used to make adjustments on both our ends. Through an iterative process of trial and error, we will get you home.”

  Alexander frowned. “How long will it take us to get to Wonderland?”

  “Around seventy days.”

  “So ten weeks. That’s twenty weeks there and back. Plus the time spent waiting for a rescue…”

  The admiral nodded. “Correct, although, you won’t notice the time passing until you arrive. Traversing the wormhole calls for you and your crew to spend the entire trip in a medically-induced coma.”

  Alexander blinked. “What? Why?”

  “The wormhole is roughly point oh seven light years from end to end. You’ll spend the first eighteen days accelerating at a constant ten Gs until you’ve reached half the speed of light. After cruising for just over a month you’ll spend the same amount of time decelerating.”

/>   “Ten Gs for eighteen days? We’ll be dead long before we get up to speed, Admiral.”

  She just smiled and shook her head. “You’ll be spending the duration of the trip in G-tanks, and to answer your first question, putting you in a coma isn’t strictly necessary, but mission planners decided that it would be better for your mental health. Ten weeks is a long time to spend floating in a fish bowl with nothing to do but sleep and listen to your heart beat.”

  Alexander’s brow furrowed. “So why not wake us and bring us out of the tanks once we’ve reached cruising speed? We could spend that month preparing for our mission in Wonderland, and stretch our legs while we’re at it.”