Apocalypse 05
“Doctor to the bridge!” AJ yelled into the ship's intercom, and then paused before adding, “I also need all crew to the bridge.”
Raines was first up the stairs, followed by Vee and Dr. Wood. “Make way for the doctor,” AJ said.
As the two stepped to the side, Wood strode forward with his medical bag. “What happened,” he asked as he knelt down to Jane. “Did she fall? Did she strike her head on anything?”
“No,” Jessie said. “She just sort of passed out.”
Wood pulled out his medical scanner and ran it over her head, then down her body. “I don’t see anything wrong.”
“Are you sure that thing even works?” Raines asked. “This ship and everything inside it was recreated by the machines. Maybe your scanner is faulty.”
Wood turned and aimed the scanner at Raines. “It says you’re seventy-three-year-old male with a thirty-five-year-old stem-grown heart.” He looked up at the man. “Is it working?” Raines sheepishly nodded. Wood turned back to Jane. “You do your job, engineer, and I’ll do mine.”
“Is she going to be okay?” Jessie asked.
Wood continued his scan and didn’t answer. As he tweaked a few of the settings, he suddenly stopped. “That’s odd,” he said then reached into his bag and pulled out a small device that looked like it had been built of spare parts.
“What’s that doctor?” AJ asked. Wood lowered the device to Jane’s forearm and slid it across the skin. A large simple dial spiked to the right, and Wood bolted straight up. “What’s wrong?”
Wood's eyes were wide. “That’s not possible,” he said, then looked at Raines. “I think you’re correct in that these devices can’t be trusted.”
“What’s going on, Doctor?” AJ said. “What is that device?”
He held it up to her. “This is the Beta tester I put together a few months back when we were on our way out here, remember? I used it to test Jane for Beta markers.”
“And you found none,” Jessie reminded him. “In fact, I think you said she was less Beta than anyone you had ever tested. Almost pure Alpha Human”
Wood turned the dial of the scanner towards her. “Well, now it says the exact opposite. In fact, if these readings were to be trusted, I would have to conclude that she is the pure Beta everyone has been looking for.”
“How is that possible?” AJ asked.
“Because I altered my blood the last time,” Jane said from the floor. Everyone backed up as she stood up. Everyone except Dr. Wood.
“How did you do that?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she admitted, “but I think it’s a way to allow me to fit in with you. When you tested me before, I wanted to be an Alpha, and so my blood responded. Now, I want to show you who I really am, so I let the Beta marker show.”
“So, you were actually born inside that sphere,” he said, a strange gleam in his eyes. “You are the one.”
“Apparently,” she said.
“She is not,” Jessie yelled as she placed her body between Jane and the doctor.
“It’s okay,” Jane said, pulling her aside to face Wood and the others. “I’m sorry I deceived you all. I didn’t know myself until just recently. The Hall of Records...it showed me the truth.”
“Then it lied to you,” Vee said, stepping up beside Jessie to help block her from the doctor. “You’re not the pure Beta, you can’t be.”
“What’s going on?” Jake asked from the stairwell.
“You missed all the...” AJ started to say but then lost her ability to speak when she saw Jake’s dead girlfriend standing right behind him.
“Oh, my!” Raines exclaimed.
“Captain,” Vee said. “What have you done?”
Jake looked at them, and then back at Stacy. “I...I haven’t done anything. This is Stacy Coal. The woman that I thought died a year ago.” He turned back to face the room. “Stacy, this is my crew.”
“Nice to meet all of you,” she said, “and I have to say, I never thought I’d set foot on my bridge again. It’s good to be home.”
“Home?” AJ asked, then walked towards her captain. “Jake, you know she isn’t...you know she’s a...”
Jake put his arm around Stacy and pulled her close. “It’s not what you think. She was taken here. From the Rift. When she fell in, an isopod rescued her and brought her here.”
“Rescued her?” AJ asked, shaking her head. “Captain, she’s not real. Any more than your father. Any more than Ash.”
“Hey!” Ash said.
She turned to him. “Tell him, Ash. Tell the captain that she’s like you.”
Ash walked forward to stand beside AJ. “Hello again,” he said to Stacy.
“Hello,” she replied. “It’s nice to see you again.”
“You know her?” AJ asked.
“She was here when I first woke up,” he replied, then looked at Jake and AJ. “She never mentioned her name, and I never guessed she was Jake’s ex-girlfriend.”
“But is she real?”
“She seems real enough to me.”
“You can’t tell?” AJ asked.
“It’s not like we have a secret handshake or something.” He looked back at Stacy. “Are you real?”
She smiled and replied. “As real as you.”
“That doesn’t help,” AJ said.
“You need to listen to me,” Jane said, interrupting the conversation. “None of this matters. They are coming back and we have to figure out a way to stop them.”
Jake walked past AJ and Ash to face Jane. “What are you saying, Jane?”
“I’m trying to tell you that they are on their way right now. They’ll be at Civica’s borders in a couple of days. We have to stop them.”
“We’ve already talked about this, Jane. There isn’t anything we can do about the isopods.”
“I’m not talking about the isopods,” she yelled. “The people who created me, the ones who supposedly tried to kill off humanity hundreds of years ago. The Betas of your legends are alive, and they are real, and they are coming back to Civica.”
“What do you mean, they created you?” Raines quickly filled him in on what Jane had just told them. When he finished, Jake looked at her. “This isn’t true, is it, Jane? This is one of your games, right?”
Jane looked at him, then past him to Stacy. “I’m not the one playing games with you, Jake.”
“How do you know about the Beta army?” Jessie interrupted. “How do you know they are coming?”
“The Hall of records showed me a map, a map of our world. The Betas were far away, on the other side of the ocean, they probably would never have found us. The sphere you found, my sphere, sent a signal to them. Told them where you are. Now they are on their way and they will reach Civica in less than 48 hours.”
“Two days? That’s just about when the hunter-isopods will arrive,” Vee said.
AJ looked at Jake. “That can’t be a coincidence.”
“No, it can’t,” Jake agreed, still looking at Jane oddly.
“What does that mean?” Jessie asked.
Jake looked at her, then back at Jane. “I think it means they are working together. The isopods will be attacking Civica at the same time the Betas are returning.”
Jane could only stare at the deck plating beneath her feet. “What it means is that in less than two days, we are going to witness the end of the human race.”
“What do we do, Captain?” Jessie asked. All eyes turned towards him. Even AJ, who knew better than anyone that he was, at best, a captain-in-the-making, looked expectantly at him. He turned back to face Stacy and wished that her father could have been standing there beside her. Someone to ask advice of, or at least, bounce his crazy ideas off before telling his crew. But he was alone. Alone with his fears and alone with his responsibilities as captain.
“I know you don’t need my father’s advice,” Stacy said, as if she had just read his mind, “but I think if he was here right now, he would tell
you to follow your gut, because, as he used to say, ‘when you have nothing else to guide you, trust your instincts.’”
“Trust my instincts?” he repeated. “Alright, I’ll admit that my instincts up until now were telling me to stay put and try to make a home for ourselves in the torus. We left Civica for that exact reason, didn’t we?” He looked at Stacy and felt his heart skip a beat. “And a part of me still thinks that’s what we should do. Stay here and make a home for ourselves.” When he looked back at AJ, his thoughts quickly changed. “However, the torus, as nice as it is, is still a prison if we are held here against our will. I also think it’s safe to say that none of us could ever be happy living here, knowing that we just let the rest of humanity die without trying to help. So, I think it’s time to do something about it. It’s time for us to leave this place.”
His crew's eyes widened almost in unison. “And now,” AJ said, “I assume you’re going to tell us all exactly how you plan to escape.”
“No,” Jake said. “But I’m confident that we can figure that out together. As a team. As a crew.”
“And if we do get out, what then?”
Jake looked at Ash. “You said they replaced our batteries with some sort of super capacitors that could allow us to run full-speed for over a year, is that right?”
Ash nodded his head and then smiled. “I see where you’re going with this. You want to go bubbly.”
“That’s right,” Jake said. “If we can find a way out of here, we might be able to use the supercavitation drive to take us all the way back to Civica.”
Ash was already back at his navigation console running the numbers. “At fifty KPH nominal speed, and let’s say a maximum of five thousand kilometers back to Civica...”
“Why five thousand?” Vee asked. “We estimated only four thousand when we came out here.”
“Right,” Ash said, “but we didn’t find this place, remember? Then the isopods took us the rest of the way. I’m making an assumption that it was less than another thousand to reach here.”
She nodded. “So five thousand it is. That would make it a one hundred hour trip.”
Raines stepped up. “If the thrusters can take it, I might be able to push them a bit and shave off ten percent.”
“Even at ninety hours, that’s nearly four days,” AJ said. “The isopods and, if Jane is correct, the Betas will be at Civica in two. The battle will be long over by the time we get there.”
“We don’t have to make it all the way there to be helpful,” Jake said. “All we have to do is to get close enough to send a long-range transmission, alerting the Colonial Guard to what’s coming.”
AJ looked at Jessie. “How close would we need to be to send a focused acoustic pulse?”
She shook her head. “Well, no one’s ever sent one farther than two thousand kilometers, since that’s the diameter of the colony, so I would have to go with that. Maybe twenty-five maximum.”
“That’s halfway back,” Jake said.
“Our Rubicon point,” Jessie reminded them.
“And it will take us two days to reach it,” AJ added. “Right about the time everything hits Civica. That’s cutting it pretty close.”
“And that’s on top of however long it takes us to find a way out of here,” Raines said, then looked at Jake. “If you think we are all going to just put our heads together and figure that out, then we had better get started because right now I haven’t a clue.”
“I have a clue,” Jane said, now standing near the chart table. She turned and activated the table, then began entering commands into the input pad.
“What are you up to, Jane?” AJ asked.
She continued what she was doing without speaking.
“Jane,” Jake said, a little more loudly.
“Easier to show you than...there...finished.” She taped a final entry and a map appeared above the table. In the middle, Jake saw their torus. He was about to ask what she was trying to show them, when a series of blue lines appeared beneath the torus, snaking outwards like the rungs of a crooked wheel.
“What is that?” Vee asked.
“Our way out, I think,” she replied.
“What are those lines,” Jessie asked.
“Tubes,” Raines said. “Those look just like drawings I’ve seen of underground transportation tubes. It’s how people used to cover large distances quickly before the Fall.”
“How do they work?” Vee asked.
He shook his head. “I only saw drawings because no descriptions remain.” He enlarged the image to center on one of the tubes. “However, we can make some inferences. I would assume they are hollow cylinders filled with fast-moving water.”
“So we jump into one of these tubes,” Ash said, “and go where?”
Jane changed the image to center on the torus again, and then followed one of the tubes until a collection of dots came into view. The tube passed right beneath it.”
“Is that Civica?” Jake asked Jane.
She nodded. “I’m not sure the Hall of Records intended for me to see this, and it was only displayed for a second or two, but my memory is pretty good, and I’m sure one of the lines went right through Civica.”
“If there really is some sort of transportation tube passing under Civica, I still don’t see how that would help us,” AJ said. “We’ve all lived there our wholes lives, and I don’t recall seeing, or hearing of, a transport station inside the colony. Have you?”
“If they’re not too deep underground,” Jessie said, “say, under a kilometer, I can modify the acoustic Wave chambers to resonate vertically instead of horizontally.” They all stared at her, waiting for an explanation. “That way I could send a signal up through the ground.”
“How fast do you think these tubes would be?” Jake asked Raines. “In other words, is it worth our effort to pursue this?”
“No way to know for sure, but I doubt our ancestors would have built this form of transportation if it wasn’t considerably faster than conventional travel.”
Jake looked back at the table. “Can you give us any more detail, Jane?” When she didn’t answer, he looked over and saw her curled up in the navigation chair. “Jane?”
“You don’t even care, do you?”
He walked over to her. “Care about what?”
She looked up at him, a profound sadness in her face. “You don’t care that I’m a Beta.”
He shook his head. “According to my mother, so am I.” he Waved his hand at the others in the bridge. “So is nearly everyone here, I think.”
She looked at them, then at Jake. “But I’m the pure Beta; the one everyone in Civica is afraid of. Your civil war started because of my arrival. I’m the true Novum in your sailors’ stories.”
He looked down at her and realized that none of it mattered. She was still the same girl he had found in the forest, admittedly a lot smarter than he first thought, but she was still just Jane. “I don’t care about any of that,” he said, finally putting into words what he was thinking and feeling.
She looked down at her bare feet. “It has to matter to you. I’m not the person you thought I was.”
He knelt down to her. “Do you remember anything from that world?” he asked quietly. “Anything from before I met you?” She shook her head, still avoiding his gaze. “When I first met you, you helped me realize we can move away from the bad parts of our pasts. If we focus on the present, focus on the future, we can move forward.” He placed his hand on her knee. “You can move forward too, Jane. We need you. If we want to help the people of Civica, we all need your help.”
“That was a really nice speech, Jake,” Stacy said from right behind him. When he stood up, she reached out her hand to Jane. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced,” she said. When Jane awkwardly reached out to shake her hand, Stacy quickly pulled away and wrapped both arms around Jake. “I’m Stacy, Jake’s fiancée.”
AJ cleared her throat. “Can we get back to business here?” When Jake looked
at her, he noticed an expression on her he hadn’t seen before. Was she angry with him?
“You’re right,” he said, letting the matter drop. “We have a possible way to get back to Civica, maybe even beat the isopods there. Now let’s see if we can find the door to it.”
They made a quick plan to circle the lake, or miniature ocean, and look for possible exits. To keep the machines from guessing what they were up to, Jessie suggested using her acoustics gear in passive mode to monitor the echo returns from the thrusters. This way she could build up a map of the outer walls without using active sonar.
As they proceeded, AJ stepped up to stand beside Jake. She stood there silently watching her crew work, but when Stacy asked Jake if he wanted to head down to get some coffee, she asked Vee to go down with her and bring everyone a cup. When they were gone, she turned to him and whispered, “Why is that woman on my bridge?”
“That woman has a name,” he replied, “and this used to be her bridge.”
“If she’s real. But, if she isn’t, how can we trust her?”
Jake pointed to his navigator. “You trust Ash, don’t you?”
“That’s different.”
“Finished,” Jessie said as she transferred her data to the chart table. In the middle, a rough-hewn bowl appeared with a dozen or so red circles along the bottom. “Those appear to be water inlets and outlets,” she said. “They’re smooth metal so they stood out from the solid rock outer wall.”
“How are we going to figure out if any of them might lead us to the transport tubes,” Vee asked.
Jake walked over to stand next to AJ. “Jane’s tubes should be below us, and I assume the vents to the ocean would head upwards,” he said. “We just have to figure out if any of these head down.”
“Doesn’t matter,” AJ said. “If we don’t find a path to the transport tubes, then we just go with our original plan to escape to the ocean and then race back to Civica with the supercavitation drive.”
He looked at her. “I like that you always have a Plan-B.”
“What about a Plan-C?” Stacy asked from the stairs. “I’m of course referring to the plan for what we do when your isopod friends figure out what you are doing and decide to end all of our lives.”
Novum Chronicles: A Dystopian Undersea Saga Page 39