The Bridge

by Simon Winstanley

  Nathan didn’t react in alarm, “What bearing?”

  “Multiple bearings,” there was a moment’s hesitation, “We’re at the centre.”

  This time, Marcus saw him frown.

  “Sonar, on screen,” Nathan turned to face the main display.

  The sonar screen showed its usual set of concentric circles, but nothing else was visible. Nathan’s frown suddenly disappeared.

  “Zoom out,” he said, “maximum range.”

  The screen updated. Sitting just inside the limits of the screen was a speckled sonar trace that formed a faint circle.

  Marcus stared, unable to process it.

  He’d heard Tristan relate the stories and talk about the symbol, but it had done nothing to prepare him for seeing it in person.

  “Rachel?” Nathan had picked up a separate phone handset, “Tell me that the deflector launcher is clear… Is it loaded?… OK, transfer launch control… Understood.”

  He hung up and turned to Dixon, “Do you have it?”

  “Transfer confirmed, charge at ninety percent.”

  “Good. Vaz, all stop. Prep the starboard and port webs.”

  “Answering all stop,” Vasily replied and a low vibration transferred through the hull.

  Marcus felt the sub sway as it began to bring itself to a halt. As the sway stabilised, he felt his attention return to the present moment.

  “Nathan, what can I do?”

  “I’m recording all this,” Nathan glanced around the room, “But, if it doesn’t work, we’re going to need everyone’s personal account. Watch everything. Try to retain as much detail as you can. It may be important.”

  In times gone by, Marcus would have reached for his small inhaler to help him process things a little faster. He now realised that over the years he’d become too comfortable with his surroundings; he’d stopped carrying the inhaler with him. Now, he only had himself to rely on.

  “The radius?” Marcus pointed to the sonar.

  “Makes the one around the Iseult look like a practice run,” said Nathan, “Ten, possibly eleven-fold bigger.”

  “But the Britannia’s a bigger ship,”

  “Yeah, but not ten times bigger,” Nathan shook his head, “The volume to radius ratio is -”

  “Reading all stop!” Vasily called out, “Detection webs at standby.”

  “Deploy,” Nathan answered immediately.

  Marcus turned to look through the narrow forward window and saw torpedo-like trails racing away from the sub in all compass directions dragging wire filaments in their wake. Occasionally the light shimmered over the unfurling spider’s web of radial segments and spoke-like wires.

  “Temperature warning!” Dixon yelled out, “Negative two thirty-two.”

  “Already?” Nathan turned and sprinted to another console, “It’s happening much faster than before.”

  “Detection web in place!” Vasily called out, “Recording!”

  “Dixon, I need that missile!”

  “Ninety-five percent charged!” he shouted back.

  “Vaz?”

  “Local Gee just dipped,” Vasily quickly reported, “Reading RMS of nine point one. Electromagnetic dispersion… whoa… non-linear!”

  Marcus knew enough to guess that average local gravity was fluctuating. Radio waves and light were no longer travelling at constant velocity as they passed through the detection web.

  Rachel dashed into the room and began accessing her screen, “Did it work?”

  “Dixon, give me the good news,” Nathan called out.

  “Ninety-seven percent!”

  Rachel appeared horrified, “It didn’t launch?!”

  He saw Nathan’s eyes darting back and forth.

  “It’ll have to do,” he said, “Dixon, kick it!”

  Marcus felt a rumble under his feet followed by a shudder that passed through the hull.

  “Missile away!” Dixon confirmed.

  “Come on, come on…” Nathan stared at his screen.

  Marcus felt another rumble.

  “Negative two forty-one!”

  “Gee just got bounced to six point four and back.”

  Marcus had no idea if he’d remember even half of the figures he’d been hearing. He faced the window again to try taking in what visual details he could. For a fraction of a second he thought he saw the water get brighter. A ripple seemed to pass over or through the filament web, colouring the water slightly redder, but the effect disappeared immediately.

  “Getting missile telemetry!” Rachel reported.

  “Got you,” Vasily shot back, “Web pairing complete.”

  “On screen!” Nathan shouted.

  Marcus looked over at the main display.

  The missile launch system, designed twenty years ago to destroy rogue lunar fragments, had been put to a more scientific use. As the missile’s onboard sensors and measuring equipment recorded its journey, it rapidly climbed high above the ocean. Marcus watched as it began turning to angle its camera back toward the location of its launch.

  “Negative two fifty-four!” Dixon called out, “It’s -”

  The room fell silent as they all saw the camera feed.

  On the surface of the sea, directly above their position, was a transparent hemisphere; its presence only detectable because of the effect it was having on its contents.

  As if constrained within a thin soap bubble, tendrils of fractured lightning were folding themselves into the thrashing waves that lapped at the hemisphere’s boundary. Iridescent patterns of light rippled over the bubble’s surface, making the water inside appear translucent and insubstantial.

  Marcus felt a strong pulling sensation, as though every cell in his body was trying to twist. The sensation he’d felt briefly aboard the Iseult hadn’t been anything like this.

  He looked out through the forward window.

  Tristan had told him about an icy sphere that had unfolded around the Sea-Bass during the last moments before its transfer. Either it wasn’t happening to the Britannia, or the size of the anomaly was so large that it couldn’t been seen through the intervening seawater.

  “Telemetry loss,” Rachel’s voice sounded far away.

  The shimmering of the detection web, and the motion of the minor air bubbles in the water, suddenly slowed.

  “EM standing wave!” Vasily was saying, “No wavefront progression or local Gee!”

  The corners of his vision began to darken and he knew he was about to lose consciousness. He forced himself to take in every last detail before the inevitable moment came.

  “Zero K boundary!” Nathan’s voice was becoming indistinct.

  To Marcus, the view appeared to become as immobile as a still image; as though a single moment in time had been forever frozen in place.

  The eternity passed in an instant.

  He awoke feeling every bump in the deck’s cold metal plating. Crouching at his side, Nathan patted his shoulder.

  “He’s alright,” he called to the others.

  He risked raising his head and saw that more people had begun entering the room. They were busily exchanging reports, but there was no sense of panic.

  “Are we OK?” he looked around the deck.

  “Just getting reports now,” Nathan glanced at the others, “but structurally we’re intact. Amazingly.”

  Marcus rubbed at his head, “How long was I out?”

  “Maybe a few seconds,” he said, “Do you remember anything?”

  “A fair bit,” he tapped the side of his head.

  “Good man,” Nathan stood and looked over at the forward window.

  From his low perspective, Marcus could see that the view was now pitch black, “Wasn’t there sunlight when we left?”

  “Yeah,” Nathan nodded, “It might be a while before we can work out where we are.”

  “Is navigation down?”

  Nathan shook his head and pointed at the dark forward window.

  “There’s no Sun,” he shrugged, “So I thin
k we might be on the opposite side of the world. It might take the mapper an hour or so to deduce our location.”

  Marcus thought he could see the problem. The Britannia used a topology mapping program to determine its position. By comparing scans of the seabed immediately below the sub to those that were made before Siva, the sub’s location could be reverse-engineered. Until they could find a scan that matched the seabed underneath them, their position would remain unknown.

  Considering the scale of the oceans, Marcus now found himself overwhelmed by one thought: their tiny capsule, containing a genetic cross-section of the human race, was lost.

  “Think I must be getting tired,” he laid his head back down on the deck.

  Nathan nudged him with his foot.

  “Well you can’t just lie there,” he said, “You’re making my deck look messy.”

  Despite Nathan’s attempt to cajole him into action, he knew he needed another minute to gather his thoughts before going anywhere.

  “As usual,” Marcus shook his head, “the whole world goes and changes again.”

  “Yeah,” said Nathan, “but what’s that phrase you used to tell my dad?”

  “Adapt or die,” he sighed.

  “Clearly you’re no good at the second thing,” Nathan held out his hand, “so let’s go with option one.”

  Whatever they had yet to face, he thought, the decision to get off the floor was simply the first step. Every decision after that would just be a process; little by little he’d learn to adapt again to whatever life was about to throw at him. It was something that he’d always done. He just had to choose to do it one more time.

  Grabbing Nathan’s hand, Marcus pulled himself to his feet.

  “OK,” he said, “Option one.”

  .[>>>>]

  HUMAN NATURE

  Ebony looked out across the landscape.

  The distant buildings, lakes and fields curved smoothly upward to meet overhead beyond the rod-like sun that ran through the cylinder’s rotational axis.

  During the day, the beam of light that ran from one end of her world to the other would blaze brightly. But now, at close of day, all that could be seen was its grey silhouette; a dark line that cut across the myriad pinpricks of light that covered the interior of the Eridanus. Each light was a beacon; a symbol that celebrated the saving of one human life. In some places, Ebony could see clusters of lights; constellations of lives who’d escaped the troubles of the slowly dying Earth.

  In the August of 2173, riding a succession of directed nuclear detonations, their cylindrical lunar-rock vessel had begun a generation-spanning journey to the stars.

  The saved had left everything behind.

  Everything except human nature.

  It didn’t matter how many light years the Eridanus would cover; fear of change would always be the primitive mental stowaway that fuelled prejudice and violence.

  She wiped the blood from her cut lip and checked around her.

  The southern aviary biome was only a few minutes away now. All she had to do was remain unseen. Ducking through a tree line, she left the main streets and allowed her eyes to adapt to the slightly dimmer light.

  Adjusting the heavy sling that lay across her chest, she took shallow breaths so that her ribs wouldn’t complain. Undoubtedly, her injuries were severe enough to slow her down, but she still had one advantage over her pursuer: in all likelihood, he probably had no genetic assist.

  Closing her eyes briefly, an image of her mother climbing some sort of spherical space popped into her mind. Taking courage from the thought, Ebony cradled the sling and set off again, being careful to remain low as she moved on.

  Her mother had been among the first to exhibit signs of a low-level genetic augmentation; an uncanny spatial awareness and the physique to utilise it. Ebony had inherited a similar ability, but the genetic roll of the dice had given her more obvious physical deformities.

  The bony protrusions from her shoulder blades hadn’t bothered her as a child; the supportive crew of the Sea-Bass had always seemed incapable of seeing her deformity. The years that had followed had been less kind to her.

  Although the community they’d discovered at the equator had generally been welcoming of the new arrivals, there had still been pockets of ignorance. Children, and some ill-educated teens, had taken to calling her ‘Bony’. Eventually, Ebony had responded by dressing to expose the affected area; almost inviting physical conflict rather than suffering in silence. Thanks to her physical adeptness, conflicts were typically short-lived; she would vault and climb anything in her vicinity to make an escape, or she would use her opponent’s uncoordinated arm-swings to manoeuvre them into the dirt. Either way, she always tried to make sure that any humiliation was theirs not hers.

  Something she hadn’t appreciated at the time was that humiliation is the often fuel of vengeance.

  On her eighteenth birthday, three men had ganged up and forced themselves upon her. Though the men had been banished, she’d been left pregnant. In a world struggling to repopulate, all new life was protected by law and she’d carried the baby to term.

  Ebony reached the aviary biome and took a moment to listen. In the dim light and quiet seclusion of the surrounding bushes, she peered into her sling. Apparently undisturbed by the swinging motion on the way here, her baby was still asleep.

  Although her daughter had come to the Eridanus with her, she’d have no memory of the hibernation ship that had brought them. In the Field-equipped vessel, they’d slept through the best part of forty years in just six days. Those who could afford it had dreamt through that time in a personally tailored mental landscape, but she’d taken the cheaper oblivion option. The dreamless sleep was the most peace she’d ever known.

  She had hoped that when she became part of the Eridanus community, it would give them both a fresh start. But because a large number of people had travelled here with that same mindset, some of the underlying social problems had simply migrated to a new environment.

  She gently rocked her baby back and forth as she checked her surroundings. Despite the head start, Ebony knew that the man would catch up soon. This time there would be nowhere to run, and no possibility of besting him again physically. What lay ahead would be the hardest thing she’d ever do, but hopefully it might save her daughter’s life.

  She checked over her shoulder then, keeping a firm hold of her child, she moved inside the biome.

  As expected, the aviary was dark and empty. This late in the night, the birds had fallen silent in their habitats. The only sound now was the mild hum of the biome’s air conditioning.

  She let her eyes adjust to the dim glow.

  Throughout the space were small red lights; indicators that the interlinked Biomag network was in operation, protecting the lifeforms within the aviary. Although people had to wear individual Biomags to anchor themselves to the Eridanus’ temporal Field, it was impractical to do the same for birds. In this controllable space, they were free to move and fly as they had on Earth.

  “Hello Ebony,” Fai’s voice called to her from a nearby information panel.

  The voice startled her and for a second she wondered how Fai had recognised her. She looked down and remembered that, of course, the Biomag she was wearing contained an ID chip.

  “Hello Fai,” she began loosening her baby sling.

  “This facility is staffed between eight a.m. and seven p.m., I have no record of an extracurricular visit under your name. Please can you clarify the nature of your visit?”

  Ebony knew she’d have to be careful how she replied. Fai, being the vessel-wide artificial intelligence, would process information quickly and efficiently. Neither of which she needed.

  “I thought my Biomag was failing,” she lied, “The aviary was the nearest safe space.”

  “A sensible precaution. Would you like me to conduct a diagnostic scan of your Biomag?”

  She unclipped the sling, “I need you to answer a question first.”

  “Pl
ease proceed.”

  “My baby doesn’t have her own Biomag,” she looked down at the unit that they shared, “Without a Biomag, will the aviary’s network protect her?”

  There was a slight pause while, presumably, calculations were being made.

  “I detect two heat signatures,” Fai spoke, “based on predictions of heat to mass ratios, your baby will remain protected. The nearest Biomag node is two point three metres to your left.”

  Ebony could see the red indicator light and moved swiftly towards it.

  “Fai, can you record a message?” she knelt down next to the light, and gently removed the sling from around her daughter.

  “Yes. Who is the recipient?”

  “Lana Yakovna.”

  “You are not listed in her group of permitted contacts.”

  “I know,” she lowered her blanket-wrapped child to the ground, “but after tonight, I think she’ll want to hear it. Can you hold the message until the right time?”

  “Please specify the term ‘right time’.”

  Ebony kissed her daughter’s forehead.

  “In the event of my death.”

  “My diagnostic confirms that your Biomag is fully functional. You are in no danger.”

  “I told you not to scan it!”

  “You asked me to answer a question before scanning,” Fai corrected her, “Is the nature of your death related to a condition beyond the control of the Biomag?”

  Fai’s less than empathetic response was in fact a perfect description of the problem, but admitting it would automatically summon medical assistance to her location.

  “I don’t have time to play twenty questions!” Ebony removed her jacket and began stuffing it into the now empty sling, “I just need you to record the message now!”

  “Recording,” the calm voice replied.

  Ebony looked around the aviary. It was the perfect place for a genuinely fresh start. To be truly free though, there would have to be no ties to her former life. That included the name of her baby.

  Her eyes settled on a sign that labelled one of the enclosures.

  The name was as dark as her own.

  •