by Alex Deva
The girl had taken him through one of the curved spokes through which she'd come. He’d noticed chip gun shards everywhere, and avoided them, carefully. She’d floated ahead of him, looking like a fish in water, and he’d done his best to match her graceful moves. Then, they’d reached a stopping wall. His instincts had told him that a new secret was about to be revealed, and seeking to make it easier for the girl, he'd occupied her with some religious small talk. How often she prayed, how important it was to believe in God at times like that, how the righteous would matter at the end. He never made any direct statements, and phrased everything with the utmost attention to keep it inconsequential and neutral. He didn't even know what kind of Christian the girl was, and even if he did, it was doubtful it would've mattered. He just wanted to keep saying the right things.
Gaines was a staunch atheist, but for a treat like this, he was more than willing to become the Pope, hat and everything.
The chitchat helped. While talking, she had placed her hand on the blocking wall, and a myriad of symbols erupted from her palm, as if the wall was one giant touchscreen. She absently touched one of them, and panels opened where there was only solid wall.
She went through it and effortlessly turned on one side. That surprised Gaines, because, used as he was to low-g gymnastics, he couldn't immediately see what caused her to rotate. Then, as she stood on the wall, at ninety degrees to him, he understood.
The room had its own gravity. His SEALS had been right.
The implications were staggering. If the Eurasians had a way to generate gravity where there was none, without the benefit of mass, then that'd be the scientific discovery of the millennium. Gaines really doubted that such a momentous breakthrough could've been kept under wraps. Even compared to the atom bomb of World War II, this was far more important. And, in the twenty-fourth century, it was far more difficult to keep a secret.
It was time to consider the hypothesis that this was not a Queen ship, after all.
Still, too many things fit together. They all spoke English with European accents. One of them had a British military file -- albeit three hundred years old.
Reused identities as cover stories? Easier to come by than fresh new ones, and more confusing? Possible, if doubtful.
Time travellers? Really? But there was no gravity control in the twenty-first century. If there had been, the world would've turned out totally differently. And Gaines, even though a soldier, was also a scientist. He could not seriously entertain the idea of time travel outside of science-fiction books.
But he hadn't really believed in artificial gravity either... until that moment.
Perhaps it wasn't gravity. Maybe some exotic form of magnetism? Negative pressure?
He decided to step through the door. He began feeling the pull of gravity as soon as he approached it. He had almost forgotten how consistent gravity felt; it had been months since he'd last been on a planetary surface.
Always careful not to fall on his side, he balanced through the opening and stepped through, arriving at the same ninety-degree attitude, with the girl watching him with a smile.
"Nice, huh?" she said.
"Wow," was all he could say. Then, again, for good measure: "Wow."
He was in a round chamber, and what he had assumed was a wall, was more likely its floor. The ceiling was domed, and the circular wall was completely nondescript, except for the letters IV on the far side. He had no idea what I and V stood for.
"Turn around," said the girl.
"What? Why?"
"It's a surprise," she said with a slick smile.
He had no option but to comply. However, he took his helmet and pointed it backwards, then, with practised ease, using his forearm muscle suit sensors, he started the helmet recording camera. He'd just watch it later.
But it all took only a few seconds, and then he heard: "OK, turn back!"
He did so, and saw the girl, smiling like any gracious host would, presenting him with a bowl of clear water.
A trick? was his first thought. But to refuse would probably have ruined everything he'd built so far. So, thanking her profusely, he took the bowl and drank in what he hoped looked like big, thirsty gulps. It tasted like water, nothing else.
He thanked her again, and handed her the bowl. She just knelt and laid it on the floor.
"Wow, that was good water," he said. "Got plenty of it?"
"Yeah," she said. "As much as we need."
"That's good," he said. "I gotta tell you, Doyner, this is pretty impressive stuff you got here. Those wall symbols that you use? That... wow, I don't even know how to start."
As she frowned a little, he felt as if he'd said just a little bit too much. Easy, Steve, he thought. Don't want to look too far behind.
"You have your guns," she said. "We have this stuff."
He was quick to turn the tide.
"I'd trade a gun with this stuff, any day of the week and twice on Sunday," he said with honest enthusiasm.
"Really?" She took it seriously. "Well, maybe we could do that instead of killing each other."
He tipped his head on a side, as if giving the idea careful consideration.
"You know," he said, "that sounds like the best idea I've ever heard."
That encouraged her, just as he'd planned.
"Yeah, sure. You should talk to Mark about it. When he comes back."
"Oh, not me," he was quick to keep his distance. "But yeah, someone high above me should speak to Mark, if you say he's in charge of making the calls."
"He'll be back soon, right?"
"Yeah, sure. In fact, I've been meaning to ask you... How do you know he's not already back, knocking at the airlock as we speak?"
She smiled again. "He's not," she said. "There's nobody out there, except your ship."
"But how do you know?"
"I can feel it," she said.
XXIX.
"Say what?"
"I can feel it," she repeated.
"You... feel it."
"It's my soul," she added, seriously.
"Oh, of course."
"That's what Aram said, too. I don't understand it very well, either," she shrugged, missing his irony. "But the ship and I have this connection. I can feel what happens with it, and I can tell it what to do, or somehow it knows what to do because of how I feel about what happens to it. Or something like that."
What the hell is she talking about? Gaines wondered. Some sort of ESP? Telepathy, telekinesis?
"Can you show me?"
"Well," she said, "this isn't the command room, but I guess I can show you something."
So there's a command room.
"Sure," he said. "Show me, please."
She pointed to his left.
The room gravity felt pretty much like on Earth, and it was taking its toll. Like anyone else who had business in space for any prolonged amount of time, Gaines took care to prevent muscle atrophy, but one could only do so much. Simply standing upright had become a little painful by now. Focused, as he was, on properly keeping his balance, he hadn't noticed the new object to his left.
An amazingly detailed, three-dimensional projection, seemingly real-time, was floating in the middle of the room, right next to him. The black, toroidal ship was at the centre; just above its central core he could see his own crate, periodically firing its auto-thrusters to maintain position. Behind them, there was the pockmarked surface of the Moon.
The quality of the projection was outstanding. There were no laser artefacts, and no transparency, not even at the edges, which were cut sharply at the edge. The objects were crisp and perfectly reproduced, and invited the touch. He was completely astonished.
"Oh, my God," he involuntarily said the right thing.
"Neat, right? Now check this out."
She gently raised her arms, and her body floated one foot from the floor. Gaines felt no different, so he assumed she had only adjusted the gravity for her particular spot -- either that, or she'd made herself lig
hter than air. So this is what happened to my SEALS, he thought, bitterly.
But that wasn't what she was trying to show him. Her face focused and serious, she gently waved one hand in front of the other.
He didn't feel anything, but the three-dimensional projection told plenty.
The toroidal ship began to wiggle. That was not only in reference to the floor of the room, but to the Moon surface beneath. But, if he needed any further confirmation that it wasn't a trick, he saw his own crate immediately engaging her auto-thrusters, as it tried to keep up and maintain its parked position relative to the bigger, wobbling ship.
The girl was controlling the ship by power of thought alone.
* * *
"You had to ask," grumbled Aram.
"Transport ship two, this is the Kennedy. Come in, transport ship two."
"I don't even know where the radio is," said Mark. "Let alone how to talk back or what to say."
A new voice came up in the hidden speakers.
"Crate two, this is lieutenant Jameson. Talk to me, right now."
"Who the fuck's Jameson?" asked the Dacian.
"How should I know?"
"What's a lieutenant? Is everyone a lieutenant?"
"Crate two, this is your last warning. No games. You're on manual, headed towards the enemy. You need to explain yourselves."
"They figured out that we're not flying on autopilot," said Mark.
"Fuck their autopilot right in the arse!"
"Any useful suggestions, though?"
"Fuck are you asking me for?! Aren't you the clever soldier from the future?!"
"Aren't you the pilot in command?"
Aram muttered something Mark didn't understand, in his native proto-Romanian.
"Feeling's mutual," he muttered back.
A thin, bright beam of blinding white light suddenly appeared just on top of them.
"What's that now?"
Mark said nothing.
"I said..."
"I think it's a guiding laser. For their guns."
* * *
"That is un-fu..." he checked himself in time, and continued with a prolonged, unconvincing "...ow".
Un-fucking-believable, he finished for himself.
"How are you doing that?"
"I told you. The ship and I work together."
"Yes, but how?"
His suddenly strident tone made her look up at him sharply, as she began to see him with different eyes.
He realised he'd been pushing too far, but to hell with it, this was shattering stuff! Not the discovery of the millennium, but the whole o’ history! This was bigger than fire, bigger than the industrial revolution, bigger than the internet and the string theory! And he was damned if some young brat was gonna stand in his way!
He tried to restore his smile and restrain his enthusiasm, or mask it as awe and admiration, as he asked the big question.
"Can I try?"
"I'm afraid not," she said. "Once the ship connected with me, it won't talk to anyone else."
Bullshit, he thought.
"How did it connect to you?" he asked.
"Try to touch the wall," she answered.
Not without difficulty, he stepped towards the curved wall and placed his gloved hand on it. He didn't feel anything, and nothing happened.
"See?" she said. "But if I touch it..."
She touched the nearest wall, and dozens of symbols jumped outwards from under her palm, equal-sized black-on-yellow glyphs of no meaning to him.
"Doi likes me," she said, smugly.
"How do you know what all those things mean?"
"I don't know. But I did, right from the beginning."
"What beginning?"
"Soon as I came on the ship," she said, then realised she said too much. He saw her reaction and quickly tried a diversion.
"Must've been a cool feeling," he said. "But surely there must be a way to delegate to someone? I mean, you can't be on duty all the time? You must eat, sleep, do something else?"
"Actually, I'm always on duty, even when I sleep," she said. "Doi doesn't seem to have a problem with part of me not being available."
"What if you leave the ship?"
That stumped her for a little while, and she was silent, as he realised that she was really looking for the answer elsewhere. Sure enough, after a few seconds, she spoke again:
"The ship locks itself up, and waits for me to return."
"Come on, there must be a way to let someone else fly it! What if..."
This time, as he stopped in mid-sentence, she looked at him seriously, suddenly appearing much more mature than her age. He didn't finish.
"If I get killed?" she asked, very quietly.
He opened his mouth, then closed it. He tried to smile, but it didn't really work any longer.
"I think you've seen enough, mister Lincoln. What's that message you were talking about?"
Gaines caught on. Her sudden change of heart was the answer he was looking for. The ship needed a human in command, and if its current commander died, it would most certainly seize on to whoever was available next. Certainly that explained Doyner's swift reaction.
And it was exactly what he'd been hoping for.
He decided that there was only so far smooth talk would get him. Looking around with interest, he pulled out his data tablet, as he stepped slowly closer to the girl, then made a big show of browsing its documents.
"Erm... right. I found it," he said, coming even closer. She took a half-step back, and her own low-g area moved backwards with her.
"Okay, here it is," he said as he opened some random document. "Here's the message. It says..."
He raised his eyebrows and spoke, loudly:
"Your friends aren't coming back. You're all alone. You and your ship are now in custody of the United States Air Force, and you are to relinquish command of it to me... right now."
She turned white, and started to make a gesture, but with a swift move, he grabbed her throat. It felt thin and frail, but he squeezed it with a good solid grip, and her whiteness soon became pink, then red.
"You little fucking bitch," he said. "You freaky, stupid brat. You are going to tell the ship to listen to me, if you wanna live. Right now."
She grabbed his arm with her small hands, trying to wrestle herself away, eyes huge and suddenly filled with panic and tears.
He pulled her out of her low-g zone, and had to fight to keep her steady. Then, he put his other hand on the wall.
"Tell it to give me control. I wanna see all those symbols work for me. Or you die right here, alone, right now, and I get the ship anyway."
She croaked a little, trying to scratch his hand and pry open his fingers, but Gaines was a strong man. His face a cold mask of raw fury and hatred, he no longer faked anything.
"I know you can't speak, and I know you don't need to. Just do what I said. Do it, right now. You've already lost the war. There's no point resisting. I want this ship and you're gonna give it to me."
He glanced at his other hand on the wall; nothing changed.
Then, he looked back at her. She'd closed her eyes; her puffed, blackened lips were moving, very slowly.
She'd started her trip through the stars with a prayer; now, as she felt life draining away from her, she sought to finish it with the same prayer. She hadn't chosen to be there, she didn't know how or why things had turned out that way, but she had really tried to cope. She'd trusted one man too many, and now that would cost her her life. She desperately wanted to live, to see what the world looked like hundreds of years after her time, and most of all, she didn't want to lose her communion with Doi. The ship felt alive through her; by dying, she thought she was killing it, too.
She focused on the words of the prayer. Sed libera nos a Malo, she managed to think, and then darkness stole her.
XXX.
Εἰρωνεία.
The ancient Greeks invented the word. It came from the name Eirôn, who was devised as a comedic chara
cter in their theatre plays. The ancient Greeks knew humour, and they liked it. Their descendants enjoyed it too, as the word caught on and found itself first applied to people, and then to situations. It became a means to anthropomorphise abstract concepts, to inject an aspect of humanity into them that would agree with the general opinion on those abstract concepts.
That is how, thousands of years later, a man named Thomas Hardy employed the word in a series of poems to describe the act of God toying with the mortals, just for the hell (pun intended!) of it. Hardy's stylistic device was known as "irony of fate".
Whether there is an actual God, a collection of them, or any sort of entity functioning as Fate is not really the point. Most people believe, or have believed, at some point or another, in Cosmic irony.
What goes around, comes around, some say. Life is not without a sense of irony, said a famous film character. And when life gives you lemons... started a whole string of jokes.
It was, then, nothing short of ironic that commander Steven Gaines of the United States Space Ship Kennedy was, again, suffocating.
It was ironic because, this time, it had nothing to do with acceleration, and everything to do with two broken ribs that had punctured his right lung. Air had escaped from it into his thorax, causing him a great deal of pain and an inability to breathe properly.
The space suit he was wearing was a marvel of military technology. It collected an incredible amount of medical data -- the low blood pressure, the slow breathing, the occasional arrhythmia, and a lot of nerve transport patterns --, computed and prepared a suitable drug cocktail, and injected it into its occupant.
But the marvel that it was, it was still a military device. Its principal purpose had been set in stone for its creators: to keep space soldiers able to fight for as long as humanly and medically possible.
It didn't offer treatment. It couldn't; an operating room would've been needed anyway. But it did offer pain relief and a chemically induced will to carry on.
So, instead of the pain, Gaines only felt strong chest pressure. His suit was pumping one hundred percent pure oxygen into his helmet, but not enough of it was finding its way into his blood, whose red cells had become burdened with sticky carbon monoxide molecules. Bicarbonate, stored in his plasma on its way out of the body, could not get unloaded quickly enough. Part of his brain was already screaming for oxygen, and the other part was too busy to care.