Blue Shift Protocol, page 26
DISABLING THE PROXIMITY sensors, long-range radar, remote overrides, and the navigation backup terminal in Ops took a few minutes. He dumped a handful of fuses and circuit board jumpers on the console before making final preparations.
Goodhope leered. His smile had grown wild. He jerked at the ties holding him. Cackled. Kicked until Trenton secured his feet. Spat. And finally, he sank into himself and sobbed.
“This is going to be uncomfortable, Mr. Goodhope. For that, I’m sorry.”
Trenton strapped in. With the safeties off, navigation needed an ass in the seat. A five-hour flight, he estimated. He worked the maneuvering sticks and the Dragonfly responded to his every touch. The HUD laid out an incomplete grid, but the magnification imaging gave him the data he needed. It was dead reckoning from here.
The engines burned hard. The seat cushioned him at first, but the raw forces at odds in his body replaced comfort with pain.
Goodhope gasped, gagged, and passed out.
Distant sparks of illuminated mining platforms, tethered stations, and Nexus herself danced and grew. Pod Traffic streaked about the inky rocks. The mass driver was one of dozens of lights, but he couldn’t decide which it was. Didn’t matter.
With Nexus gone, without her resources and support, the automated systems would cease providing fuel and propellant. Anyone serving the Wall would have bigger problems.
The depth and breadth of the catastrophe streaking towards the station remained unclear even to Trenton. One thing was certain. Nexus wouldn’t be rebuilt in a day. Or even a year. By then, Ganymede, Carpo, Highpoint, and the other communities might piece together what had happened.
Meridian would do its best to obfuscate. Did they have their own colonies of super fungus growing in their farms in the asteroid belt? Why hadn’t any of their scientists noticed the Wall had its own agenda? A bottomless hunger and it wasn’t willing to wait any longer for mass drivers or polite trade to spread its corruption.
With its hooks in Nexus, it could have gone to the stars, yet it had returned.
An impatient child.
One hour, three minutes, twenty seconds until impact.
The calculations on the burn continued to update. His joints cried out. Muscles twitched. Breathing took effort. On screen, Nexus and its rings grew. A clockwork contraption against the backdrop of chaos and order of the stars.
He laughed. “You want pretty, Administrator? Take a gander at Jupiter. But to see potential, grit, and too-dumb-to-quit, seeing Nexus after a three-month mission...well, there’s nothing like it.”
Darkness seeped into his mind like a tide. Just a little more time, baby, and it won’t matter. No reverse burn possible. No maneuvers would stop the Dragonfly in time. Nexus had no defenses. He let go of the controls and sank all the way back into the flight chair.
Smelled mint tea and gingersnaps. The whiff of another scent even more intimate. Lilac-infused bath oil and the hint of sweat.
Nikki.
“I just want to come home,” he said.
As she drew him in for a last embrace, he welcomed the roiling gloom.
He breathed her name once more and wanted nothing else in this life but to be reunited with her for as long as it all would last.
Epilogue
Providence reverse burned as it dropped towards the ruined station. The stubby trawler shook hard as it passed through the debris field.
The captain’s fingers drummed on the armrest. “Cut burners. Update approach vectors.”
Gum snapped in the pilot’s mouth. “Already laid out. We have a dozen directions we can go if things get hairy.”
“Pick the best two, Brother Dobbins. Let’s get a fresh map on screen. Penny?”
Penny’s fingers swiped the control panel. An image popped up for the Providence crew to see. She gaped and ran a hand over her buzzed scalp.
They all sat transfixed.
Nexus Station. A twisting, tumbling monstrosity in the center of a cloud of swirling shrapnel. And not far beyond, the captured pair of asteroids, along with more wreckage.
The captain typed busily and logged their arrival. The radio chirped and sent the update back to Carpo. Every moment over the past twelve hours had been dutifully recorded and relayed home. In case anything happened.
“Okay, we’ve got a mission. Remember your assignments and we do it by the numbers. Let’s have a blessing.”
As the captain prayed, Penny rubbed her bracelet. A gold wire with polished plastic charms Samantha had made for her after Penny’s graduation. Seeing the station stirred bad feelings. With the news of the mission, Penny had volunteered. Samantha had begged her not to go.
“Guide our hands. Protect our hearts. In the Son’s name, amen.”
Penny muttered her affirmation. Touched a finger to her neck where a second piece of jewelry hung beneath her pressure suit. A token on a chain, it bore a laser-etched image of Jacko. His face, smiling, as she best remembered it. Her hand returned to the monitor and she dismissed the memories as best she could.
Thinking of him too long would bring her to tears.
“Distance to the closest major debris field remains at 180 klicks, captain,” Penny said.
“Anything gets closer than a hundred, sound off. If anything powers up, hit the alarm.”
“Copy that.”
She pulled up the coms screen. No active shortwave chatter. Nexus still had a series of live beacons repeating their signals into the night. They would do so for another century until the batteries failed. But no one was talking.
Thurgood, their science officer, said, “No readings. No off-gassing or reactor signatures. Station’s dead.”
It confirmed their week-long observations during their approach. Nexus was a tomb.
They were the first manned mission from the Jupiter communities to arrive. Likely, there’d be others coming soon. The discussion of what to do with such a significant asset like Nexus Station continued to be argued. Carpo, for all its oddities as an independent colony, had been fast to take a vote.
“The wise see the danger and take refuge,” Carpo’s colony leader had pronounced after the results were read. They’d send a ship and confirm what Ganymede’s probes had told them. A threat-assessment mission, and they’d bring along one of the two survivors who was now a fully fledged assistant navigator.
Their pact called themselves The Jupiter Independence Fleet. But Providence flew alone.
Visuals continued to update, a jerky video zooming in on the rings of the station. Ring One appeared intact and Ring Two had minor damage. The station’s spine and other rings hung as twisted appendages.
The Providence’s probes were now active, sending penetrating radar and sonar while sweeping the station with thermal scans. Radiation levels read high, within standard ranges.
Penny mapped the movement of the debris field. It had spread since the disaster. Her computer marked every scrap and fragment.
The ship’s AI listed multiple Nexus systems still under power. Pockets of environment lived on within the ruins. Same with both rocks and two of the auxiliary stations.
“Can you imagine living in the wreckage for five years?” Thurgood asked.
No one on the bridge answered. They had exhausted the topic during their voyage.
Penny chewed her lip. Jenny and Dez had died there, their bodies no doubt decayed alongside so many of the Gardeners. The thought they or Jacko living on in the memory of a wall of fungus was too horrible to contemplate. Anyone still living within was a mindless drone. Also, a murderer. The icy rage inside her refused to believe there was anyone left who deserved to be saved.
While Carpo agreed with her neighbors about what to do, their solution besides their survey mission remained a guarded secret. The pact remained shaky enough, with ideological and cultural differences gumming up the pragmatic necessities of surviving post-Nexus.
Ganymede wanted to pick apart uninhabited sections of the station.
Cardinal and Terminus both wished to sample the bio-contaminant. Better to fight should more of the colony vessels return.
And what of Pallas, Meridian’s headquarters? She stood in revolt, a divided population. Her Frontier Independence and Virtue movement was currently in charge and wanted a say in what happened to Nexus. The F.I.V. took over from the Reunification Commonwealth, which had overthrown the Islamic Peace and Science Collective.
Beneath it all, Meridian existed but had gone dormant. A chilling analogy, according to Thurgood.
After five shifts of scanning, listening, and recording, the captain said. “The Lord forgives what necessity demands.”
The weapons officer and Thurgood headed for the loading bay.
Ignacio, their coms and EVA specialist, said, “For the record, we haven’t sent a message.”
“That’s my prerogative,” the captain said. “Nexus knew we were coming six months ago. They sent no response.”
“Understood, Brother. But in case someone fixed an antenna during that time, I’d sleep a lot better knowing we checked again.”
The captain pivoted in her chair to face Penny. “Thoughts?”
“Talking’s always good,” Penny said. “Except in case we don’t want them to know our ship’s position and heading. They have no active radar. If they repaired a radio and kept quiet, what else might be waiting that could complicate our mission?”
“Go on.”
“We voted on what to do.”
“It’s got to be all dead, right, Sister?”
Was the captain testing her? Searching for a remnant of the illness echoing in her mind?
She answered calmly, “I saw the modeling from the Science Department. I’d follow the assumption that it’s anything but dead.”
The Captain got busy typing their latest update.
Ignacio whispered to Penny, “Such a waste. It would take us two hundred years to gather just the materials to make a place that big. Why not let it stew for a while longer? Anything alive will be dead after a decade. That would make sense, right?”
“And during that time, what if Mars decides it wants a piece of what’s here? Or Pallas’ new government? Or Luna, for that matter? They all wanted us to hold off on coming here. Probably guessed what we were going to do.”
“You survived. Seems harsh to assume no one else did.”
“Then we’ll answer for it, come the Judgement.”
It was the right answer to shut Ignacio up. He focused on his work. She’d have replied just as harshly if they had been alone. Ignacio’s mother sat on Carpo’s ruling council. Penny was certain the ship kept transcripts of everything, including crew chatter on the bridge.
The captain had plenty to track on his screens. Not only Providence and the probe data, but each crew member had a subdermal chip monitoring temperature, heart rate, and dopamine and serotonin levels.
If the Black Wall exerted any influence on the crew, the captain had contingencies.
They ran their shift without incident. No communication came from Nexus. The station and the rocks launched nothing. Quiet was good.
The captain leaned back. “Payload is secure. We’re prepared to launch. All hands to your seats. We’re leaving.”
The departed bridge crew returned to their stations and secured themselves.
“Does anyone have anything they’d like to say?” the captain asked.
Penny considered a half-dozen memorized prayers from the manual. Nothing felt right. For her family, she had cried her tears. Stale rote would taste bitter.
“The Lord rewards those who act swiftly,” Thurgood said, and it was good enough.
The missiles dropped from the cargo hold. Providence evacuated the area, moving off five hundred kilometers before the rocket motors fired. They carved blue trails towards Nexus and the two rocks.
The merging flashes were spectacular but all too brief. Next, a stunning darkness, as if the station had never existed. The debris field would scatter, along with a hefty cloud of radiation. A tiny ripple in an endless ocean, with no communities close enough to be threatened.
Carpo would broadcast a service for the dead. The ship’s crew would tie in, listen respectfully, say their amens, and they’d finish the mission by returning home.
Would she ever fit in? With all her time at Carpo, it still felt like the first days with the Gardeners. Formal politeness. Hints of distrust. A fondness for a hungry stranger based on cold principle.
She still had Samantha. The girl was young enough that she had made fast friends with the youths in her primary class. In another few months, she’d be moved out of Penny and her shared apartment and over to the girls’ dorm, which meant Penny would either need to take on a roommate or choose someone to marry.
She hadn’t given it much thought. This mission had been a last hurdle. She had half-expected a whisper, a headache, or a fresh round of illness to strike the crew. None of that had happened.
Everyone knew Carpo wouldn’t last on her own. Which meant there would be opportunities for a trained astrogator on Ganymede or one of the other communities. And Carpo would, despite its clingy culture, let her go.
They were her people for the time being, at least as much as Professor Eames had been.
She thought of Trenton Keller and wished there had been another way. He’d set a model for her to copy. A giving of self.
It’s what she would do for Samantha, Penny promised. And when Samantha no longer needed her, she’d find others who she could fight for, protect, or even love.
“What are you smiling about?” the captain asked.
“We made it,” she said.
“So you did. Praise Him and get us home.”
Author’s Note
Blue Shift Protocol is my first stand-alone novel in almost ten years.
Under my previous pen name, I wrote a soft post-apocalyptic story that I fully intended to follow up with more installments since it left a major plot thread open for development. Other stories got in the way.
Here, the timeline, the corporations, and the events of a scrapped colony mission are shared with my Old Chrome series, along with my Dawn Moriti series. These deal with events on Earth, while Blue Shift Protocol addresses a major development that shatters the lives of those trying to scrap by in Jupiter’s orbit.
The other two series lean towards crime and science fiction mystery rather than survival.
Will I explore what happens to Penny and how things will develop post-Meridian? I don’t know. I love to hear from you, my readers, about which stories and characters interest you.
You can touch base with me at IOAdler.com.
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Copyright © 2025 I.O. Adler
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Published by Lucas Ross Publishing.
Author website: ioadler.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to similarly named places or to persons living or deceased is unintentional.
