Текст книги "The Sundered"

“What the hell just happened to us?” Zafirah said, pulling herself unsteadily to her feet in Vanguard’s darkened central control room. A confused moan was the only response she heard. Unseen broken things crunched beneath the springy soles of her sneakers.

The emergency circuits restored the lighting a few seconds later. The place seemed to have been turned completely upside-down, then abruptly righted.

Avram Baruch lay stunned on the floor, a heavy desk pinning him there. Kerwin McNolan, the small Irish engineer, strained against the asteroid’s spin-generated gravity to free the dour Israeli. Zafirah wasted no time helping McNolan shove the desk aside.

“What happened?” she repeated, her eyes on a trio of shell-shocked-looking junior technicians who were returning upended pieces of equipment to their proper places. A few other technical people milled about, looking disoriented. But no one seemed grievously injured.

McNolan was helping the disoriented Baruch to his feet. Apparently satisfied that the physicist was all right, he turned to Zafirah. “This is just an educated guess, Zaf, but I’d say [80] something must have gone very wrong with the warp-field experiment.”

Lidia!Zafirah thought with a start. Lidia had been working outside the shell when all six O’Neills had linked to form the continuous toroidal warp field. And moments after that—

Zafirah rushed to the communications console, which displayed a green “power-on” light. “Al-Arif to Wu,” she shouted into the microphone. “Wu, do you copy? Wu, come in!”

The only response was a wash of static.

Zafirah bolted toward the array of consoles that monitored the asteroid’s surface, and the space beyond. Three of the half-dozen monitors there had toppled onto the decking, and now were so much scrap. Though the remaining screens didn’t look damaged, they displayed only snow.

She noticed that Director Mizuki was already busy at one of the consoles, obviously trying to bring in a view of the outside. The darkness of deep space slowly coalesced across two of the still-functional screens, with numerous fixed stars shining invariantly in the distance. Zafirah stood beside the director before the large, flat screens, with Baruch and McNolan flanking them.

Zafirah’s stomach suddenly became buoyant. Something wasn’t right with the image before her.

Baruch seemed to notice the same thing. “This is as wrong as a Russian rock band. What’s happened to the Roykirk colony?”

The nearest other O’Neill habitat was nowhere to be seen. And none of the other four hollow-asteroid colonies was visible either. If debris from any of them remained, there wasn’t sufficient light present to make any of it visible. The infinite abyss seemed to have swallowed them all whole.

Zafirah felt sick at heart. I hope you died quickly, Lidia. Like Sabih, and little Kalil.Inshallah.

“Gone,” McNolan said, his voice a rasp. “All of them are gone. Probably blown to hell when the warp field collapsed.”

[81] A terrible silence descended. It was the director who broke it. “I’m not so sure the other colonies went anywhere—unless everything else did, too.”

It was only then that Zafirah noticed that both the Earth and the Moon were also missing. And that Bellatrix and Rigel, the left shoulder and legs of Orion the Hunter, were visibly out of position relative to giant Betelgeuse, as though the constellation had been distorted by a funhouse mirror of time, distance, or perhaps both.

The next half hour was a blur, as the survivors checked in with the director’s office and began a frantic checkout of the habitat’s status. Zafirah was surprised by how little serious damage the Vanguard facility had actually sustained, at least in terms of its physical plant. Especially considering how far the entire asteroid had evidently traveled after the torus-shaped warp field had collapsed against it.

More than sixty-one parsecs. Approximately two hundred light-years.

No one had believed that figure at first. It wasn’t until after Director Mizuki and Zafirah had both taken separate measurements of several of the most readily identifiable first-magnitude stars—compiling a three-dimensional model that the computers could compare with the constellations as seen from home—that the truth at last began to settle upon the 827 asteroid dwellers who had survived Vanguard’s unprecedented transit.

They were now stranded two hundred light-years from Earth. Sol was a distant ember, lost among countless others in the infinite night.

We’ve gone farther than anyone has ever gone before,Zafirah thought, looking back at tiny, dim Sol through one of Vanguard’s surviving optical telescopes. Trouble is, nobody back home knows about it. They must think the collapsing warp field destroyed us.

[82] And what of the other five O’Neills? Were they, too, dispersed through the void? Or had the failed experiment blasted them all to rubble?

There was simply no way to know.

Zafirah felt a bizarre exhilaration, a feeling she thought might be an amalgam of wonder and dread. On one hand, seventeen of her Vanguard colleagues were either dead or missing, the dead apparently killed by the sudden inertial effects of the asteroid’s breakneck passage. On the other, the collapse of the warp-field bubble had proved one thing conclusively—that travel via subspace over interstellar distances was indeed possible.

The director had given everyone aboard a couple of hours to consider Vanguard’s weirdly altered circumstances before summoning the senior staff to her office for an extremely tense meeting.

She must have spent the last two hours picking everything up in here,Zafirah thought as she entered the large, immaculate chamber alongside several of her colleagues. She found herself grateful for the feeling of normalcy and order fostered by the room’s tidiness, and realized that such must have been Dr. Mizuki’s intention. Zafirahhad always thought that Mizuki’s keen understanding of crew morale was one of the talents that made her so well suited to her job. Zafirah had once entertained the notion of eventually becoming director herself.

Now she was delighted and relieved not to be the one in charge.

The director sat behind her desk, her aged eyes sweeping the room as she displayed a smile which Zafirah found enormously reassuring. “The good news is this: We were a self-sufficient colony before the accident. And self-sufficient we will remain.”

McNolan shook his head. “This far from a star? Our solar arrays aren’t going to get too much business way out here.”

“That might not matter,” Zafirah said, chiming in almost [83] before she realized it. When she noticed that everyone in the room had turned to look in her direction, she nearly lost her train of thought, then swiftly recovered. “I mean I think we can generate considerable power from what’s left of our warp generators. Probably not enough to create a warp field capable of getting us back home. But the output certainly ought to make up for our lack of nearby solar power.” Her gaze lit upon Avram Baruch. “What do you think, Avi?”

Baruch’s smile was wan and unconvincing. “Maybe. If nothing else fails. I’ve already examined the generators up close, and they’re a real mess. Three of them overloaded, and four others are melted to slag.”

“What about the nuclear reactor?” Mizuki asked.

“The autosafety programs kicked in during the accident and jettisoned it,” McNolan said. “They would’ve done the same to the warp generators, too, if the computers hadn’t glitched somewhere.”

“I think we can get by with what’s left of the warp generators,” Zafirah said, trying to sound hopeful. “Antimatter containment is still positive.”

Baruch scowled. “If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, Zaf. And even if the antimatter storage fields don’t go south, it could still be a real trick coaxing everything we need out of the remaining generators without blowing ourselves out of the sky again.”

“Well, we can’t afford to go too easy on the throttle,” said Claudia Hakidonmuya, Vanguard’s head geneticist. “We’ll need to convert a good deal of that power into the equivalent of sunlight. That is, if we want the hydroponics units to keep feeding everybody on board.”

The director smiled again. “As I said,” she repeated, “we are self-sufficient. Or at least we canbe, if we’re very careful, and very clever.”

“Not to mention incredibly lucky,” Baruch said.

“We weren’t vaporized when the warp field collapsed,” [84] Zafirah said. She was beginning to tire of the Israeli’s relentless negativity. “That would seem to bode well for our continued survival.” Inshallah, she thought silently.

“Then I’ll consider that issue settled for the moment,” the director said, her confident smile never wavering. “Now we must look beyond mere matters of survival.”

That surprised Zafirah, even coming from Dr. Mizuki. What, other than the fate of one’s immortal soul in the next world, could take on a higher priority than the colony’s survival?

Baruch looked suspicious, his shaggy salt-and-pepper eyebrows raised. “What do you mean?”

“Earth is still choking on the ashes of the Third World War,” the director said, evidently unfazed by Baruch’s reaction. “We’ve just demonstrated that we can tap a power source that could pull the rest of humanity out of that morass. We can offer the world hope.”

“We’d have to learn to stabilize the warp field,” McNolan said, “before we’d be able to offer anyone anything.”

The director nodded. “If we’d thought that was an impossibility, we never would have undertaken the experiment in the first place.”

“We’d also have to tell somebody on Earth about it,” McNolan countered. “And that we survived in the first place.”

“There are two tiny things wrong with that,” said Baruch. “One, a radio signal will take two centuries just to reach Earth. And two, all the external radio dishes were sheared off during the accident.”

Sheared off,Zafirah thought, wincing slightly. Along with Lidia.

Mizuki rose from behind her desk, signaling that the meeting was coming to a conclusion. She appeared undaunted by the difficulties that lay ahead. “Then the sooner we get started, the better. How soon can we get one of the radio transmitters operating?”

Monday, 2 September 2058

[85] At first, Zafirah thought the blip on the telescope’s viewer was a comet. But as it approached in a long, leisurely ellipse, she realized that the object possessed one particular feature that she’d never seen before on a comet.

It has running lights.

Less than an hour later, the viewers in the main control room displayed the spindle-shaped object—now clearly a sophisticated spacecraft of nonhuman origin—making a close approach to the asteroid’s exterior, and extending mooring grapnels to secure itself to the surface.

Holding herself even more erect than usual, Director Mizuki stood in the room’s center and addressed everyone present. “We obviously have a first contact situation here, people,” she said, smoothing a wrinkle on the front of her dark blue jumpsuit.

The human race’s veryfirst first contact situation,Zafirah thought, trying and failing to prevent her hands from trembling. She wasn’t certain whether fear or joy was the cause.

All she knew was that she could see no trace of fear or hesitation in the director’s eyes.

“Let’s go and greet them, Zafirah,” Mizuki said. Turning toward Hakidonmuya and McNolan, she added, “I’d also like Claudia and Kerwin to join the welcoming committee.”

The Hopi geneticist crossed to the director immediately. Zafirah, feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of the moment, walked over to Mizuki a few seconds later.

But hard-eyed McNolan, seated at a console beside the apprehensive-looking Baruch, didn’t move.

Mizuki frowned. “You have objections?”

Baruch spoke up when McNolan hesitated. “In a word ... yes.”

“Fear is what plunged mankind back into the Stone [86] Age,” the director said, extending her arms as if to embrace the entire universe. “We ought not repeat that mistake out here.”

McNolan finally broke his silence. “Why haven’t they hailed us?”

“They may have been sending us friendship messages for the past hour,” Mizuki pointed out, referring to the balky high-gain antennas which remained in disrepair. During the past several weeks, simple survival had taken precedence over trying to send messages that Earth couldn’t possibly receive for a score of decades. “We have no way of being sure.”

“That’s precisely my point,” McNolan said. “Their intentions are a mystery.”

“Any civilization capable of traversing interstellar space has to be peaceful by definition,” said the director, adopting the didactic classroom-lecturer tone she preferred over confrontation.

“Assuming that they think in a way we can even understand,” Baruch said, casting a glance toward Zafirah. “Remember, most human cultures have always had a hell of a time understanding how otherhuman cultures think. Never mind aliens.”

Baruch’s glance reminded Zafirah of frightened young Israeli soldiers with quivering trigger fingers. And her own desperate, demoralized cousins who had for decades counterattacked indiscriminately by strapping bombs to their bodies. Justifiable fear had motivated both sides. Those recollections made her wonder whether Baruch and McNolan might not be equally justified in their wariness.

“And that’s what’s kept our species trapped on Earth for so long,” Hakidonmuya told Baruch. She gestured toward the image of the just-landed alien vessel. “Less enlightened beings are almost certain to destroy themselves before they figure out how to handle the energy sources interstellar travel requires.”

[87] The director walked toward the door, followed by Hakidonmuya. Zafirah fell into step behind the geneticist.

“Are you coming, Kerwin?” Mizuki said, pausing in the open hatchway.

McNolan rose slowly. “All right. But at least let me take a few simple precautions.”

“Precautions?”

“We need to have some weapons handy. Just in case our visitors turn out notto be friendly.”

“Whatweapons?” Zafirah asked. Vanguard wasn’t exactly a military installation, after all.

“Some of the rock-boring and digging equipment will do in a pinch,” McNolan said. “And a few of the construction beamjacks even have target pistols. It’ll only take a few minutes to get them ready.”

Zafirah got the distinct impression that this was because McNolan had already made a few surreptitious calls; he’d probably gotten started the moment the alien ship had been identified as an alien ship.

The director’s mouth became a grim slash. “Absolutely not.”

McNolan approached her. “Director, a smile and a few kilos of mining explosives will always get you a lot farther than just the smile.”

He was notsmiling, however. His eyes remained hard, his resolve clearly immovable.

“Amen,” said Baruch.

After a seeming eternity, the director averted her gaze from Baruch. She looked about the room to measure the opinions of everyone present. The dozen people in the room seemed split down the middle on the issue.

Then Mizuki trained her probing gaze squarely on Zafirah. “And where do youstand, Zaf?”

Zafirah swallowed hard. Visions of rock-hurling teens and suicide bombers flashed across her mind’s eye. She knew in [88] her heart that distrust was not a productive path to follow. But as she tried to tame her own mounting fear, she found it nearly irresistible. Allah forgive me. Did you not create these alien visitors as well as us?

“I think Kerwin and Avi have a point,” she said finally. “Maybe we should consider keeping some armed people behind the welcoming party. Discreetly.”

“ ‘Trust, but with verification,’ ” Baruch said, no doubt quoting some ancient Cold Warrior from the previous century.

Norman Arce, the construction foreman, was studying the image of the alien ship displayed on the monitor. Bright lights flashed intermittently between the vessel’s hull and the asteroid’s nickel-iron-marbled surface. “Better make a decision soon. They’re cutting a doorway.”

Dr. Mizuki sighed, then nodded her grudging consent to McNolan’s proposal. As she followed Claudia and the director into the corridor, Zafirah felt relief that pragmatic realpolitikwas evidently as important to the director’s job as was raw idealism.

But her fear remained, to her enormous shame.

The alien boarding party consisted of four creatures whose robust-looking sidearms and long, sheathed knives were immediately apparent. Zafirah’s heart pounded; she hoped that the visitors’ open display of weaponry signaled mere caution rather than naked aggression.

Zafirah stood beside Mizuki, Hakidonmuya, and McNolan on the rough metal surface of Vanguard’s lowest, highest-gravity level. The members of the welcoming committee were empty-handed, with the exception of McNolan, who carried a small, unobtrusive radio transceiver that he’d left patched into the main control center.

All of their eyes were trained on the aliens who strode purposefully toward them. The hole through which the visitors had gained ingress was visible some twenty meters [89] behind them. The lack of so much as a breeze indicated that they had done Vanguard’s residents the courtesy of installing an airlock of some kind on their way in.

They’re not monsters,Zafirah told herself silently and repeatedly. Just like the Israeli soldiers, they were merely the products of a different culture.

As well as, obviously, a different biology. Although the quartet of creatures provided living proof that the general humaniform template was not unique—each of the newcomers possessed two arms, two legs, and a head that harbored something roughly analogous to a face—they were clearly like nothing human beings had ever before encountered. They were all large, broad across the shoulders, and perhaps two-and-a-half meters in height. Their hair was shaggy and black, and hung past their bulky shoulders in untidy mullets that were adorned with bushy topknots and uneven, dreadlocklike braids. Their garments were motley and loose-fitting, predominantly blousy shirts, baggy jackets, and pantaloonlike leg coverings that brought to mind the pirates of the Barbary Coast, or her own people’s legends of djinn.

But it was the aliens’ faces that Zafirah found to be their most arresting feature. Their skin was dusky, their eyes obscured by multiple folds of wrinkled flesh. Nose and mouth converged in a single, snoutlike projection, bordered by a sharp chaos of sharp tusks and fangs.

They’re not monsters,inshallah.

When only a handful of meters lay between the two groups of sentients, the visitors came to a halt.

The being at the front of the group raised a single meaty hand. “Be’huh laku fraken Nausicaa,”it said, its voice deep and booming. Zafirah wondered if it was identifying itself, or its species, or its intentions.

We’ll find a way to speak to them,Zafirah told herself. These creatures have had to contend with the same laws of[90] physics we do just to get so far out into space. We have at least that much in common already.

The lead alien tipped its head, apparently expecting a response. Zafirah recalled the sixteenth-century Spanish explorers who had read proclamations to the indigenous people of the Americas, then slaughtered them when they failed to make a satisfactory reply.

But they’re not humans,Zafirah thought, hoping that the director’s instincts would win out over McNolan’s. They won’t necessarily behave the way we humans have always behaved.

Director Mizuki spread her hands in a gesture of peace. She stepped forward, and away from the rest of the group, closing the distance between herself and the alien leader to a gap of about a meter.

Zafirah suddenly realized she was holding her breath.

“I am Kuniko Mizuki,” the director said. “I am in charge of this facility. It is my honor to welcome you to the Vanguard colony.”

The director bowed respectfully.

The alien before her bellowed, “Kak Nausicaa!”In a blur of motion, it unsheathed a long, evil-looking serrated blade.

Almost too quickly to see, the blade rose, then swept across the back of the director’s still-bowed head.

A scream escaped from Zafirah before she could find the will to squelch it.

“No!” Hakidonmuya shouted.

McNolan cursed, then barked a single terse order into his handheld transceiver unit.

The director’s head fell from her body, landing on the rough-hewn rock-and-metal floor with a sickening wet crunch. Frozen across her broad features was an expression of pure, unadulterated surprise.