Tachyon Tunnel 4

he deck of Tranquility was in complete chaos, but the sound did not come from alarms. Instead, it was a silence so absolute it seemed to suck the oxygen from the bridge. Where Pronimos had filled the forward screens with oceans of shimmering cobalt and continents etched in gold city-light, there was now only a dark world, devoid of life. The image of destruction was one that would be burned into every survivor’s memory.

Shelby Coats Durant stood and walked to the control panel near to where Alex stood. Her eyes were red from crying, and her breath was too rapid. “Emily, isolate the southern continent. Magnify sector Gamma-Nine.” Her voice fractured. “That’s where the schools...” She choked. “Where my children are.”

The screen obeyed. There was no southern continent anymore. Just blackened soil. No water, no air, and no life.

“My kids were in Gamma-Nine,” Shelby repeated. “Abby had her flight trial today. Tyler was supposed to …”

Her hands trembled against the console. She shifted through data, pulling up evacuation logs, emergency tunnel access records, and orbital shuttle manifests. None of it mattered. The network had gone dark 2.7 seconds after atmospheric ignition.

“Shelby…” Alex said softly, his heart aching as if it had been stabbed.

“No.” Shelby’s voice sharpened. “No, they can’t be gone…” Then she crumpled to the floor.

Emotions rippled across the bridge like a physical force with fear, rage, and grief. It threatened to unmake them as surely as the DPK beam had unmade Pronimos.

Heat burned behind Alex’s eyes as the animal urge to hit something reared up. To hit someone, but the Daklin had been eliminated, and all that remained was a dead planet and exterminated dreams.

Those billions of dreams had been erased in a single, unthinkable act of calculated annihilation.

Standing in front of the forward viewport, Alex watched the darkened sphere of fractured rock. Its atmosphere stripped away, a thin halo of debris glowing like funeral embers. “Emily… how many people got off Pronimos before the DPK destroyed the planet?” His voice was steady, but hollow.

There was a pause, not mechanical. Measured.

“I am compiling confirmed escape telemetry,” Emily replied. Her eyes shimmered faintly as she processed incoming signals across multiple spectrums. “One thousand seven hundred thirty-one ships achieved successful departure vectors and are still within two million kilometers of our present position.”

Alex swallowed. “How many souls escaped?”

“I cannot give you an accurate number, but based on registered manifests, average occupancy per transport class, and encrypted civilian flight logs… approximately twenty thousand individuals escaped.”

Twenty thousand.

Out of billions.

Emily’s number hung in the air like a verdict.

“Twenty thousand,” Alex repeated softly. “From a world.”

Emily’s voice lowered, exhibiting her human side. “Statistically, that is 0.0008 percent of the planetary population.”

“Don’t,” Alex raised his hand. “Let’s stop calculating.”

“You are right, Alex. I apologize,” she said.

On the main display, debris from the destroyed DPKs drifted in widening spirals. Megan had annihilated them with surgical fury, but they had unleashed their lethal destruction before she had arrived.

Alex exhaled. “Connect with every one of those seventeen hundred thirty-one ships. I want vector projections, fuel states, structural damage assessments, everything. Let’s make the best of what remains here.”

“I am already doing so,” Emily replied. Then her eyes dimmed. “There is an additional data irregularity.”

Alex turned. “Define irregularity.”

“As the DPK energy beams made atmospheric contact with Pronimos, there was a brief discontinuity in sensor readings.”

“I’m not following you, Emily.”

“For 3.4 nanoseconds, the planetary mass signature dropped below detectable thresholds. Pronimos seems to have… disappeared.”

The word hung there.

Shelby looked up. “Disappeared?”

“Emily.” Alex’s jaw tightened. “That has to be an anomaly. I mean three-point-four nanoseconds… that’s 0.0000000034 seconds, which is practically zero.”

Emily paused, processing. “The interval is extraordinarily brief. Three-point-four nanoseconds is less than the time required for a single photonic oscillation at visible wavelengths. Given the scale of the energy discharge, gravitational lensing, and magnetospheric collapse, it is most likely a sensor artifact.”

“Most likely?” Alex pressed.

“Yes,” Emily said. “The duration is so small that it falls within theoretical error margins for multi-spectrum interference under extreme plasma conditions. It is statistically insignificant.”

“So, give me your best conclusion.” Alex pressed.

“It is likely an anomaly, but I can show a replay in the event. You and Megan can double-check to see if it resulted from a sensor glitch or the physics of the Daklin energy beam.

Alex stared in horror at the data replay forming on the holographic display. The energy from the DPKs converged at the moment of atmospheric ignition.

And there it was. A microscopic gap. A flicker. A couple of frames with nothing, followed by catastrophic annihilation.

“Run it again,” he whispered. “Show gravitational data on the same timeframe.”

Emily replayed the sequence this time showing gravitational readings. The planet flared white, sensor saturation spiking, and for an infinitesimal instant, the gravitational mass signature dipped.

Then the world burned.

Shelby pushed herself to her feet. “You’re saying that for a blink… it wasn’t there?”

“I am saying,” Emily corrected, “that our instruments briefly recorded an absence. I believe we have a sensor problem.”

Megan’s voice cut in over plink, sharper now. “Can someone explain the physics here in understandable terms?”

“In high-energy relativistic events, unusual readings are not uncommon,” Emily replied. “However, I cannot fully explain the data, and we don’t have any other data streams of DPK destroying planets.”

Alex folded his arms, gaze fixed on the projection. “Three-point-four nanoseconds, which is nothing in human terms, and yet…” He rubbed his chin, thinking about the data. “Flag it so we can look at it again later.”

“Copy that, Alex,” Emily replied.

He nodded once, then forced himself back to the present. “Status of the escape fleet?”

“All 1,731 vessels are transmitting at varying power levels,” Emily said. “Approximately eighteen percent have sustained hull damage from shockwave propagation. Damage was sustained on two hundred twelve transports. Several ships are operating without full navigational arrays.”

“Get them organized,” Alex said. “Use an encrypted comm channel to assign rendezvous coordinates.” He punched in coordinates. “There is one place in the galaxy that still seems safe.”

“Yes, Alex.”

On the viewport, the ruins of Pronimos rotated slowly, a dead stone cooling in a vacuum.

Shelby stepped beside him. “They didn’t just kill a planet,” she said. “They killed an idea.”

Alex’s eyes never left the control panel. “No,” he said. “They tried to.” He gestured toward the tactical display, where 1,731 blinking signals were scattered like fragile embers.

“Twenty thousand people,” he continued. “Scientists. Engineers. Families. Builders.” He turned to the bridge. “Right now, it’s not extinction. That’s a seed.”

“A seed?” Megan’s voice steadied. “For what?”

Alex straightened. “The Daklin think they erased us,” he said. “They probably think the resistance was obliterated today.” He studied the data and looked back at the holo-image of Megan. “Let’s prove them wrong.”

“You are such a fuckin’ optimist, Durant.” Megan shook her head.

“Optimist?” Alex turned to the holo image of Megan, clenching his fists. “I lost children today, and the Daklin erased one of the greatest testaments to the best of humanity. I’m not feeling optimistic. My blood is boiling I’m so angry. Every part of my emotional energy wants to tunnel into the past and destroy the Daklin before they ever start.”

Shelby put her hand on Alex’s shoulder but said nothing.

The alert tone did not wail. It pulsed, cold, measured, and relentless.

“Can we get a fuckin break?” Megan blurted.

Alex turned toward the forward display as the deep-space sensor grid painted the arrivals in hard crimson light. Three signatures. Daklin cruisers. Then six. Then twelve. All within a blink of an eye.

They emerged from folded space like predators surfacing through black water with angular hulls and bristling directed-energy arrays, hunting for any ship or part of the population that escaped the planet’s destruction.

For a moment, Alex said nothing. “They came to finish the job.”

The tactical overlays expanded. The cruisers were not forming a defensive posture. They spread into a wide dispersal net, a well-tested, perfect geometry for regional annihilation. Their energy cores were already climbing toward firing threshold.

“I know it won’t change anything, but let’s kill these feckless assholes,” Megan said.

A surge of anger rose in his blood. It was hot, immediate, and volcanic. “They’re the second wave, here to make sure nothing remains.”

The Daklin had exterminated hundreds, maybe thousands, of civilizations before. Mars. Venus. Entire systems were reduced to ash to preserve imperial control. And now they had uncovered the gemstone of humanity here in Pronimos.

His hand hovered over the Singularity’s weapons authorization grid.

“We can take two of them before they know what hit them,” Megan said in a tone that was not bravado. Assessment.

“Yes,” Alex agreed. He ran the numbers in microseconds. “We could. Let’s quickly assess. If we fire first, the Daklin will execute a saturation strike.”

“Likely true,” Emily confirmed.

Alex exhaled. “They want us angry,” he said. “They want us to be reactive. We must take control of the situation.”

Megan looked at his image on the holo-screen. “What are you thinking, Alex?”

“I’m thinking that we leave and live to fight another day.”

The weapons arrays on the cruisers brightened. The geometry tightened. They were calculating firing solutions across the entire grid.

“Time to impact?” Megan asked.

“Forty-six seconds before first discharge.” Sun Tsu answered.

“There’s not enough to evacuate conventionally.”

“No,” Emily said. “But I’ve already developed a plan for all of these refugees to disappear.” She plinked the plan to Alex.

“That’s perfect,” Alex pivoted to Emily. “Transmit this signal to all tunnel-capable vessels. All Pronimos traffic, this is Alex Durant. Execute Protocol Horizon immediately.”

Emily pushed a quantum-encrypted burst across the network.

“Alex,” Megan suggested, “you said they came to erase everything, so won’t they know what’s happening and track us?”

The first Daklin cruiser fired, and a beam of energy lanced across space, vaporizing an empty grid coordinate where a transport had been a millisecond earlier, but the Pronimos ship was already gone.

“No, Megan. Each ship will slip into the tunnel for a fraction of a second before it would have been destroyed. The Daklin will think they have succeeded.”

One by one, the 1,731 Pronimos ships slipped into a narrow tachyon corridor that was thin, precise, and pre-calculated by Emily’s core. The escape tunnel was imperceptible against the black vacuum and then sealed behind them without a trace.

The Daklin beams struck nothing, though they believed they were accomplishing their mission.

“This is good.” Megan chuckled. “You’re a fuckin’ genius, Durant!”

Alex watched the last civilian signature blink into transit.

Anger still burned in him. He wanted to attack. He wanted to punish. But he had learned that war was not won through emotional satisfaction. It was won through asymmetry, and on that front, the Daklin held the advantage.

The Daklin cruisers widened their sensor sweeps and fired again in a final cleanup operation. It was indiscriminate now. Scorched arcs of energy carved through empty space.

Nothing remained except Singularity and Tranquility. The Daklin formation tightened as they focused on Alex and Megan.

Megan’s voice came through the com. “So,” she said calmly, “now can we hit them?”

Alex had taken a path that was not reckless, or enraged, but strategic. “They came to destroy,” he said. A faint smile touched his face. “They just failed.”

The Singularity’s tachyon core began to hum.

“Next time,” Alex said, “we choose the battlefield, and it will not be where the Daklin expect.”

“Where did you send those ships, Alex?” Megan asked.

“Mars,” Alex said as Tranquility slipped into the tachyon tunnel.