Текст книги "The Sundered"
Автор книги: Andy Mangels
Соавторы: Michael Martin
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PART 4
SURVIVAL
Chapter 12
Thursday. 5 April 2063 . 2:42 am
Zefram Cochrane found the bearded man’s story incredible. After all, he and his two companions just claimed they’d voyaged backward more than three centuries to save humankind from ravening hordes of cybernetic zombies.
On the other hand, they carried impressive tools and tech with them. Or at least it lookedimpressive.
And they said they wanted to help make the Phoenix fly.
The man who called himself La Forge was bent over the eyepiece to Cochrane’s telescope, peering into the clear night sky. He snapped shut an instrument of some sort, then straightened to face Cochrane.
“All right,” La Forge said, grinning. “Take a look.”
As if this is going to prove anything,Cochrane thought. He laughed as he approached the ’scope, a reaction no doubt fueled by the copious quantities of liquor he’d absorbed at the Crash & Burn alongside the beautiful Deena, or Deanna, or whatever the hell her name was.
“Well, well, well, what have we here?” he said as he bent his head toward the eyepiece. “Ah, I love a good peep show.”
The telescope displayed a crystal-clear image of a long, [146] sleek, graceful spacecraft, obviously the product of a culture whose technology far surpassed anything Cochrane had ever seen.
Now he felt fear. If he allowed himself to hope that this apparition was real, he knew he would be devastated beyond recovery when he finally discovered he’d been had.
Cochrane stood erect, facing the bearded man, who had identified himself only as “Commander Riker.” Like Deanna and La Forge, Riker watched him with an air of almost reverent anticipation.
“That’s a trick,” Cochrane said, before returning to the ’scope for another quick peek. The image, illusory or not, persisted. Maybe it’s real after all. Maybe their story about being from the future reallyis true.
He faced them again, still not entirely ready to let go of the armor of conservative skepticism that had sustained him through so many experimental setbacks and outright calamities. “How’d you do that?”
“It’s your telescope,” La Forge said.
Deanna finally spoke up, the effects of the alcohol she’d imbibed earlier evidently having worn off already. “That’s our ship. The Enterprise .”
Cochrane decided to allow for the possibility that their tale mightbe true. “And, uh ... Lily’s up there right now?”
“That’s right,” Deanna said, smiling.
“Can I talk to her?”
“We’ve lost contact with the Enterprise ,”said Riker. “We don’t know why yet.”
How convenient.“So ... what is it you want me todo?”
“Simple,” Riker said without hesitation, his blue eyes flashing. “Conduct your warp flight tomorrow morning, as you planned.”
Apparently, they only wanted him to do what he’d already spent years—not to mention countless lives—trying to accomplish. Had they wanted to stop him, they could have [147] done so easily. Still, their exacting requirements—and the nervous glances thrown toward Riker by Deanna and La Forge—roused his suspicions.
“Why tomorrow morning?” Cochrane wanted to know.
Riker paused thoughtfully before answering, as though he’d just made some irrevocable decision. If he really is from the future, and has to decide just how much he can afford to tell me without screwing up the timeline, then maybe he has.
“Because,” Riker said at length, “at eleven o’clock an alien ship will begin passing through this solar system.”
That was the last thing Cochrane wanted to hear. “Alien. You mean extraterrestrials. More bad guys?” The effects of the alcohol he’d consumed earlier seemed all at once to multiply. With some effort, he took a seat on a flattened tree stump. He found himself hoping that it had been either these new E.T.s or the zombie cyborgs Riker had spoken of earlier who had been responsible for the destruction of the O’Neill habitats.
Otherwise the blame has to land squarely on me and my goddamned egomaniacal warp-drive project.
“Good guys,” Deanna said. “They’re on a survey mission. They have no interest in Earth. Too primitive.”
“Oh,” Cochrane said. It made sense, given how little remained of human civilization, even though the war itself already lay a decade in the past. Hell, if I were an alien, I wouldn’t even stop off here to take a leak.
Riker approached him, a fervor in his eyes that was both frightening and exhilarating. “Doctor, tomorrow morning when they detect the warp signature from your ship and realize that humans have discovered how to travel faster than light, they decide to alter their course—and make first contact with Earth, right here.”
Cochrane considered the patch of perfectly ordinary ground that surrounded the stump on which he sat. “Here?”
“Actually, over there,” La Forge said, gesturing a short distance to his left.
[148] “It is one of the pivotal moments in human history, Doctor,” Riker continued, pacing as he spoke, moving behind Cochrane. “You get to make first contact with an alien race. And after you do, everything begins to change.”
La Forge approached more closely, looking almost worshipful. “Your theories on warp drive allow fleets of starships to be built, and mankind to start exploring the galaxy.”
“It unites humanity in a way that no one ever thought possible, when they realize they’re not alone in the universe,” said Deanna. “Poverty, disease, war—they’ll all be gone within the next fifty years.”
Riker spoke again. “But unless you make that warp flight tomorrow morning—before eleven-fifteen—none of it will happen.”
They were treating him as though he were the savior of mankind, and it was making him distinctly uncomfortable. And yet ... their story made a bizarre sort of sense. After all, if they really were saboteurs from ECON or some other faction, they could simply have killed him and ended Project Phoenix without having to resort to subterfuge. But they seemed sincere in their stated desire to see him succeed.
Cochrane’s eyes lit from face to face before he spoke again. “And you people—you’re all astronauts, on some kind of star trek.”
La Forge’s expression became grave. For the first time, Cochrane noticed the unnatural-looking blue tint of his irises. “Look, Doc, I know this is a lot for you to take in, but we’re running out of time here. We need your help.”
Zefram Cochrane turned, leaving the future-people standing behind him. He gazed heavenward, his eyes seeking the lightless Trojan point around which the destroyed space habitats had orbited, now a silent graveyard in space. The people who’d lived and worked in those colonies had died trying to make his dream of warp flight a reality.
Perhaps now he could redeem those deaths, as well as [149] those pieces of his own soul that had died along with the O’Neills. For the first time since that horrible day, he felt eager to greet the future.
“What do you say?” Riker asked.
“Why not?” Cochrane whispered to the waxing half-moon.
“I’ll tellyou why not,” Baruch said. “Because we have no idea who else might be listening in on us.”
Zafirah could hardly believe what she was hearing. Now, after more than four and a half years, Vanguard had finally achieved self-sufficiency, despite having been stranded two-hundred light-years from home.
And in defiance of the brutal reduction of its population by two-hundred and fifty-two souls when those snaggle-tusked aliens had tried to plunder the asteroid’s resources.
Zafirah had to admit that it had not been humanity’s better angels that had won the day then. Rather, it had been the suspicious natures of current Director Avram Baruch and the late engineer Kerwin McNolan—along with their hastily improvised explosive projectile weapons—that had convinced the tusk people to depart in search of easier prey.
But the raiders had never returned, and Zafirah and others—including head geneticist Claudia Hakidonmuya, the only other survivor from the initial first-contact party—reasoned that Vanguard had turned inward to lick its wounds long enough. After having lost nearly a third of the habitat’s population to the raid, after having worked so hard subsequently to survive and adapt to the harsh conditions of trackless interstellar space, it made sense finally to make restoring contact with Earth a priority. Even if the effort was destined to take centuries to come to fruition.
Surely Earth and its teeming, war-ravaged billions would still need help, even if that help took centuries to come to fruition. And the advanced technologies that sustained Vanguard in the interstellar dark could provide that help.
[150] “We’re not sending any signals toward Earth or anywhere else,” Director Baruch repeated, rising from behind the great desk he’d inherited from the slain Dr. Mizuki after Vanguard’s conservative, ultracautious majority had swept him into office. “The risk of calling attention to ourselves is simply too great. We’re still way too vulnerable out here.”
Zafirah threw up her left arm in frustration, a gesture which made her empty right sleeve flap like a banner being carried into battle. The missing limb, lost to the injuries she’d sustained during the alien raid, served as a constant reminder that a little distrust could be a very positive thing. Unless,she thought, it’s allowed to be taken to extremes.
Aloud, she said, “Using yourlogic, Avi, Earth should have been invaded a hundred years ago, when those old I Love Lucybroadcasts first started reaching the stars.”
“There’s always a first time for everything,” the morose Israeli said, shrugging. “We’ve already suffered one attack that nearly crippled us. We’d be fools to invite more of the same.” His unapologetic use of the word “cripple” prompted a phantom pain to shoot through her right sleeve.
Zafirah felt her anger at last beginning to boil over. “I’m so sorry to burden you with these radical ideas, Avi. But I thought we were supposed to be Earth’s last, best hope. After we got stuck out here, Director Mizuki made it fairly clear she considered that her life’s work.”
“And we all saw how short the rest of that life was.”
Zafirah regarded Baruch in silence. Only now did she really perceive how haggard and drawn he’d become over the past few years. His salt-and-pepper beard had gone almost white. The weight of responsibility for every human life inside this asteroid had rounded his shoulders, which reminded her of pebbles worn smooth in a riverbed.
Glowering, he gestured toward his office door. “I’ve got a lot of work to do, Zaf. And I’d appreciate it if youwould get [151] back to work dealing with the first order of business—this colony’s continued survival.”
Zafirah left the director’s office in a daze, wandering aimlessly through the stone-floored corridors of the lower levels. She felt desolate, isolated. When had mere survival become life’s sole purpose? There had to be more. A line of Robert Browning, a ghost from her undergraduate days, sprang to mind unbidden: “If a man’s reach does not exceed his grasp, then what’s a heaven for?”
After perhaps an hour, her meanderings took her coreward, to the vast cylinder of zero-gee space that ran down Vanguard’s entire long axis. Her spirits were buoyed slightly by what she saw there.
A dozen or more children were flying, wheeling gracefully on their gossamer wings. Some of them seemed to be playing a water polo-inspired game with a ball. All were extraordinarily long of limb. Most of them were born after Vanguard had been cut loose from the rest of humanity. And thanks to their gene-mods, these children and their offspring would reach maturity far faster than their ungenengineered cousins back on Earth, speeding up the propagation of subsequent generations.
As the group drew nearer to the railing where Zafirah stood, she could see that some of the very youngest ones bore the unmistakable marks of futurity. As these children—scarcely more than toddlers—tossed an oblong airbladder to and fro, Zafirah noticed that they, too, were not only long-limbed, but also had opposable thumbs on their bare feet, a genetic trait that Claudia’s labs had lately made available to Vanguard’s newest parents, along with increased genetic variability—an absolute necessity with such a small breeding population—and enhanced resistance to disease, radiation, and temperature extremes.
A generation of humanity, one that had never lived on Earth, was already becoming uniquely adapted to the [152] high-stress, variable-gravity environment of a spinning asteroid. As always, Zafirah was both chilled and exhilarated by the sight of beings capable of using all their limbs for grasping with equal facility.
She remained certain of only one thing: These children would survive and prosper out here, and would no doubt carry Claudia’s genetic improvements even further in their own progeny, regardless of the scars the rest of the human species had borne since the Eugenics Wars of the previous century. Humanity would continue out here in some form or other, whatever adaptations the random, uncaring universe forced upon them. Even if its light were to be extinguished on Earth, mankind would spread its seed across the deeps of space. Homo sapiens celestis,the children of O’Neill, would survive.
But life aboard Vanguard has to be about more than mere survival,she thought as she watched the children arc and turn in graceful flight. It also has to be about creating a future that’s worth surviving for.
Were the bedtime stories these children heard each night, and the prayers they offered to whatever gods they revered, to be filled with delighted anticipation of the unexplored wonders that the universe held in store for them? Or would they instead be reared on tales of ravening, bloodthirsty tusk-men?
The difference between truly living and merely enduring could very well come down to nothing more than that.
Chapter 13
Saturday. 9 August 2155
Sayyid al-Adnan assumed that the alarm was just another drill. After all, what were the chances of encountering a second alien raider ship during the ninety-seventh official Commemoration of the First Contact Massacre?
Of course, the reason the Dread Event should be memorialized so arbitrarily—once every approximately three-hundred-sixty-five-point-two-five twenty-four-hour intervals—made about as much sense to Sayyid as the bizarre, biped-oriented furniture some of the Oldsters still kept around in the high-grav Museum Levels.
Sayyid grasped the railings with his feet, thrusting his long prehensile tail behind him to provide a counterbalance as he swung himself down the tube—his grandfather had told him that the tube had housed an automated lifting-and-lowering device during the Age of Two-Handedness—toward the asteroid’s outermost high-grav layers.
It was unfortunate that so many of the colony’s key apparatus were still located at such uncomfortably intense grav-levels, but moving them coreward into the spinning asteroid’s null-grav regions would have required the installation of a prohibitive number of power relays. It also would [154] have run the risk of causing mass null-grav wasting among the Citizenry, as well as sealing the People off completely from the Outside, an eventuality that could prove as dangerous as welcoming into the colony more of the Tuskers who had slain the First Director and so many others.
Sayyid recalled his recent Midschool days, when he had heard an audio recording of a very old story—quite a rarity these days, considering how much of the digital library had been lost to radiation exposure during the Passage—that one of the Oldsters had described as a “skiffy.” In the tale, a tribe of People ventured from Earth and voyaged into the infinitude of space inside a vast Ship. Within a few generations, mutineers had tried unsuccessfully to seize control of the great vessel. The descendants of both the legitimate crew and the mutineers were no longer even aware that they dwelled within the giant Ship’s belly. To them, the notion that the extent of the Ship’s interior comprised the totality of the universe was merely common sense.
Fools,Sayyid thought, every time he thought of that ancient skiffy story. To be ignorant is to be vulnerable.
No, the scions of ’Neal had no desire to cut themselves off completely from the universe, whatever undiscovered terrors it held. One had to keep oneself apprised of what was out there, lest the unknown bare its tusks again and resume the lopping off of heads.
Sayyid swung himself down onto the Control Level, where the blaring of the alarm Klaxons was loudest.
“What took you so long?” Graben demanded the moment Sayyid pulled himself laboriously through the Instrument Room hatch. Sayyid hated high-grav.
Graben was older—old enough, at least, not to carry much of the genework that had made null-grav the preferred environment for the newest ’Neal generation to come of age—and Sayyid assumed that this was why he always [155] complained so much about the performance of the Youngsters in his crew. Many of these were still arriving in response to the alarm, literally right behind Sayyid’s tail.
“What’s happening?” Sayyid asked, ignoring Graben’s gruff query. Grinning, he added, “More Tuskers?”
Graben scowled. “Not Tuskers. The bogey doesn’t appear to be a ship this time.”
“What then?” Sayyid asked as he draped his long form across one of the instrument couches and donned his gloves and visor.
“You tell me, boy genius,” Graben said as the virtual display activated, immersing Sayyid in the unknown.
Thanks to the virt, Sayyid was suddenly floating outside in the void. The illusion would have been perfect save for the insistent pull of the asteroid’s spin-generated gravity, which inexorably pushed his body into the unyielding couch. But the velvet depths of trackless space and the bright stellar baubles that punctuated it made the high-grav sensation a manageable annoyance. When he turned his field of vision 180 degrees, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds—a pair of relatively small globular galaxies that lay well beyond the familiar confines of the Milky Way—stared at him like a pair of baleful eyes.
Ahead of him, perhaps pars’x away, or maybe only a few hundred klomters distant, lay a silver, shimmering ripplein space, moving in undulating, sinuous waves. Sayyid could not determine what was producing the effect, nor how it was being illuminated so far out in interstellar space.
“Whatever it is,” Sayyid said, “it seems to be moving fast.” Of course, that was relative. Although Vangarde wasn’t moving at anywhere near relativistic speeds, the Great Rock still retained a fair amount of momentum from the days of the Passage.
Sayyid recalled a story that Great-Grandmother Zafirah had shared with him when he was little. She had spoken of [156] an energetic wave or disturbance of some sort that had swept through the Earth’s solar system more than a century earlier. One of the planet’s space-based telescopes had observed the phenomenon’s unexplained superluminal passage across the plane of the ecliptic. The anomaly had apparently destroyed the Ares IV,the first manned ship bound for Mars.
As a small child, Sayyid had always wondered if the Mars ship had actually somehow survived its encounter with the unexplained on that fateful day. Might Loot Kelly’s little vessel have simply been kicked out among the stars, arriving at some impossibly far destination intact, the way the Vangarde colony had been dislocated a generation later? Because of his own life circumstances, Sayyid could never discount such possibilities out of hand.
Maybe this is another weird energy anomaly like the one that took theAres. And maybethis one is going to punt usback to Earth.
Earth. He wondered if the place could be anything like the Earth of his dreams, the Earth conjured by the many stories Greatgran Zafirah had shared with him before entropy and her old Tusker wounds had finally taken her—
“Enough dustgathering,” Graben snapped, startling Sayyid from his peaceful torpor. “I need an analysis of this thing. Could it be hiding another aggressor ship?”
Sayyid shrugged. “Can’t rule it out, Boss.” He was old enough to remember the asteroid miners who had landed several craft on the Vangarde’s skin, only to be “persuaded” to leave by a complete fusillade from the colony’s Baruch pulse cannons. Afterward, he’d sneaked into the pathology lab where one of the recovered alien corpses lay on a slab, evidently dead from exposure. He’d never forget how much like a Vangarde Oldster the thing had looked.
Except for its sickly green bodily fluids and those sinister-looking pointed ears.
Still floating in space and watching the images coming in [157] from the external telescopes, Sayyid heard Graben begin barking orders to the others. He heard the echoing clatter of the big Baruch tubes being locked and loaded again. Sayyid felt a cold sweat trickling between his shoulders, as though an enraged Tusker were breathing down his back.
Suddenly, the glistening silver band of spatial distortion greatly increased in size. Before a scream could escape Sayyid’s lips, the effect seemed to have entirely engulfed Vangarde, which lurched and shuddered, tossing him from the couch onto the cold, rigid deckplating. The universe was plunged into utter darkness.
Sayyid didn’t realize that he’d blacked out until he noticed that Graben and Keller were lifting him bodily back onto the virt couch. The lights were dim, as though whatever had struck the asteroid had also knocked out the main power circuits.
The scene reminded him eerily of Greatgran Zafirah’s story about How Vangarde Got Way Out Here.
“What happened to my virt-helmet?” Sayyid said, searching around on the floor in the semidarkness until his feet came into contact with the helmet’s curved surface. He wrapped his footthumbs around its edge and donned it using both feet while his hands and tail sought out the emergency power controls.
Almost at once, he was back Out There.
He saw right away that everything was ... different.The stars were far more densely packed now than they had been mere moments before. Neither of the Magellanic Clouds was anywhere to be seen.
Beyond the main mass of stars lay a vast, multiarmed pin-wheel of light that reminded Sayyid of the tridee maps of the Milky Way he’d made in school.
It took several days of painstaking comparative positional analysis of every known pulsar and black hole in the astronomical database before Sayyid was able to account for the [158] presence of the additional stars, the gigantic spiral galaxy that dominated the stellar backdrop, and the complete and utter disappearance of both Magellanic Clouds.
The result was both unbelievable and undeniable. In a twinkling, the anomaly had tossed Vangarde almost dead-center insidethe smaller of the two Magellanic Clouds, some 210,000 light-years from the asteroid’s previous position.
Slowly, very slowly, Sayyid allowed the truth of his discovery to sink in. Compared to the distance we just covered, those first two-hundred light-years the Oldsters crossed when they made the Passage from Earth look like a rounding error.
Gazing at. the pearlescent brilliance of the Milky Way, Sayyid began to understand that the Earth of his fantasies, the Earth of Greatgran Zafirah’s stories, hopes, and dreams, was now forever beyond the reach of the ’Neal People and their descendants. He wondered if the Tuskers had ever ventured out this far.
Or if something even worse might dwell here.
