by E. R. Torre
Seeing him fall back in his chair, Saint Vulcan reached out. Her right hand pressed against Desjardin’s chest. Her touch was hot and, incredibly, her hand glowed with an inner light.
“No,” Saint Vulcan said. “We aren’t done yet.”
8
The young David Desjardins clicked the recorder off. He walked to one of the ship’s elevators.
“Destination?” a voice inquired.
His last memories as an old man, of confronting Saint Vulcan back on Onia, were so very fresh. It was as if they happened only a couple of hours before. On Onia he was near the end of his life. When he awoke in the stasis chambers of this ship, he was a man of no more than thirty years.
How could that be? And how could she –Saint Vulcan– remain so young? Despite these new memories, he was still missing much. What happened between his collapse and now? Did his older self survive the heart attack?
Try as he might, David Desjardins could not recall anything more of his last encounter with Saint Vulcan. All he knew was that he tried his best to rid the universe of her. His efforts were useless and he was here, where she wanted him to be.
But…
Why did she want him here?
Where was this ship going? What mission could interest Saint Vulcan so much that she would risk emerging from her hiding place?
“Why me?” he said.
You’re the only one who agreed with my course of action. The only one who understood this had to be done. If I hadn’t taken over your ship, you would have initiated the bombings yourself.
David Desjardins felt light headed. He staggered back and leaned against the elevator wall.
She was right.
“The Gods damn us all,” he whispered. “You were right.”
David Desjardins slid to the floor and covered his face with his hands. In his mind he pictured his beloved wife. Had he been able to communicate with Holly one last time while over Pomos, he would have told her he loved her.
And then?
“And then I would have begged you to forgive me,” he said. “To forgive me for what had to be done.”
He cried and banged his hand on the floor, a new born in an adult’s body. He cried until he could cry no more.
“Destination?” the elevator’s computer repeated.
David Desjardins wiped the tears from his face.
Please forgive me. Please…
“Bridge,” he said.
A loud hum was heard and Desjardins felt the tug of gravity. In less than three minutes he was over fifty miles from where he began. The elevator slowed before stopping. The doors opened, revealing a large room replete with monitors and view screens. The largest of these view screens displayed a star field.
Desjardins walked into the room and made his way to the Captain’s chair. There was no one else in the bridge nor, he suspected, the ship itself. He was its sole occupant.
Desjardins sat down and activated his recorder.
“I’m in a space ship,” he said. “Larger than anything I’ve ever seen. Larger than anything I’ve ever known was possible.”
He eyed the various screens.
“Which raises several questions,” he said. “While I remember things that happened up to shortly before my arrival, I suspect memories following that moment are purposely being kept from me. There has to be a reason for this, one I can’t see at the moment. This craft could easily house an army of soldiers yet I am utterly alone. I won’t starve. Food synthesizers are spread throughout the ship. I won’t freeze, I won’t burn. So far every door I’ve found opens and nothing is locked. Everything is available yet when I ask the computer what our destination is, I get no answer. When I request astrological charts they are not provided. And when I ask why I’m here, the computer tells me I don’t have the necessary clearance.”
The lights around him dimmed.
“I’m even provided a sense of time. Evening is coming, and the lights turn low.”
He shook his head.
“I’m so damn frustrated. Whatever information I seek is buried either in my head or within the computer’s memory banks. It all goes back to Saint Vulcan. Why did you do it? Why did you send me out here alone?”
The lights dimmed some more.
David Desjardins put away the recorder. He prepared for bed.
9
When he awoke, Desjardins felt as if he was back home on Onia, the elderly man patiently waiting for his life to come to a silent and lonely end.
Being young again… such a beautiful dream.
The light around him was bright and growing brighter.
Artificial light.
It took a while for him to realize he was lying beside the Captain’s chair of the mysterious and enormous vessel he found himself in a couple of days –is that how long it’s been?– before. He stared forward, at the ship’s view screen.
So very far away in the distance was a bright yellow star.
My destination?
“Looks like it, even if the computer won’t tell me.”
Desjardins rubbed his face and reached for his recorder. He stopped and laughed.
“What else is there to say?”
The star lay many billions of miles away.
By the time this ship gets there, I may no longer be alive.
Desjardins’ laugh died.
No longer alive… or a very old man.
“Again.”
In his later years on Onia, he shed most human contact. His family was gone and he made no friends. He never re-married. He didn’t dare consider doing so.
He became a solitary introvert.
Still, he made casual contact with those around him. It might not have amounted to much more than polite greetings, but they were contacts nonetheless. Trapped in this vessel, how would he stand years being alone with no one to talk to?
He suppressed a chill.
During the early days of space exploration and before the Displacer networks were active, the incredible time required to journey between solar systems proved daunting to explorers. Research and common sense suggested large groups of astronauts stood a better chance of success on long trips. The earliest attempts at exploration were therefore done with groups of people rigorously screened and trained for their sometimes decade long journeys. In spite of enormous levels of preparation, claustrophobia and psychotic reactions were not uncommon.
Traveling alone was considered a torture not unlike being kept in solitary confinement.
For the first time since his arrival here, David Desjardins felt the full weight of his loneliness and the accompanying despair. For several long minutes, he hoped and prayed the dark feelings would pass. They persisted.
Stubbornly.
I need to move.
Desjardins tried. He tried again.
He didn’t. In the darkness that swirled inside his mind, he thought he would never move again. He would remain here as the passing seconds turned into minutes, then the minutes turned into hours and the hours days. He’d rot away here, decomposing in this bridge until there was nothing left of him.
What’s the use? You’re going to waste your entire second life trapped here, in this Godsdamned…
“Fuck you, Saint Vulcan,” he shouted.
His words echoed through the bridge.
Not loud enough.
“FUCK YOU!”
He was on his feet, pacing the bridge and yelling those words over and over again. Yelling until his throat was raw. Yelling until his body hurt. When he was out of energy, he fell onto the Captain’s chair.
He wept.
Afterwards, he was back on his feet. He stepped out of the bridge and lost himself in ship’s endless corridors. He wandered for hours, until he was sweaty and his energy spent.
Desjardins slept in one of the rooms he passed, huddled against the wall and on the hard metal floor. He dreamed of his wife and of Onia. He dreamed of Pomos and the horrors inflicted upon her.
He dreamed of Saint Vulcan.
In the morning, David Desjardins felt better. He left the room he slept in and continued his journey through the ship. As he walked, his thoughts felt clearer and his emotions more in check. What he felt the day before was alien to him.
Must have been a reaction to the drugs pumped into me during stasis. They’re finally wearing off.
It was easier for him to focus on exploring the ship. Desjardins wondered how long it would take him to reach every compartment within. How many mess halls and laboratories and med bays and—
He abruptly stopped walking.
How many landing bays are there?
Desjardins’ face lit up.
There had to be landing bays –several of them!– on a ship this size. If there were, might there not be shuttles or transport craft parked within?
If there’s only one, that’s all I need.
With a shuttle he could escape this vessel. He could return home.
Desjardins was walking again. Fast.
Yes, you’re far away from home, but if there’s a transport craft, a ship this size might be towing its own Displacer unit as well. Returning home might not be such an impossibility after all.
The thoughts kept his spirits up for the rest of the day.
That night he found and slept in another empty room. It had its own food station and a working bathroom. Desjardins cleaned and showered before eating and laying down to sleep on the hard floor. As he was drifting away, he thought he heard noises. He sat up and listened.
He heard nothing more.
It’s too early to be going mad, he thought.
The next day Desjardins felt even more clear-headed.
Memories of his past returned with great clarity. He remembered breaking his arm as a child and of the intense pain it caused him. He remembered his first day in school, of his first crush. He remembered the day he graduated. He remembered the pain from that accident that took his parents.
He remembered meeting Holly in the academy. She was seated in the row in front of his. Her blond hair—
Enough.
—her smile. Her—
ENOUGH!
He fell against the corridor wall. His body shuddered.
Keep it together.
He breathed slowly.
That’s it.
The emotions passed.
Move on. Move on.
Later that day he found a large fitting room. He changed into fresh clothes.
He continued his search.
“There has to be a reason I’m here,” he said out loud.
It made no sense for Saint Vulcan to manufacture such a monstrously large vessel and send it to a distant solar system with him its sole occupant.
There most certainly had to be a reason he was here, but what could that be?
David Desjardins spent many hours thinking about that.
He hoped his continued exploration would offer some clues. Perhaps there were other people here after all. Perhaps he had to find them and together they’d figure out what Saint Vulcan was up to.
A day passed. Another.
There was absolutely no evidence of any other occupants, hidden or otherwise, within the ship.
Desjardins’ frustration grew.
He explored countless levels. The places he visited blurred in his mind. One room was just like the other, one corridor led into the next. After a while the places he visited felt the same. Even worse, he lost track of time.
How long has it been? Days? Weeks?
A month?
He no longer knew.
One day, while eating, Desjardins looked out of one of the innumerable windows in the massive starship. In the distance he saw the tail of a comet. It glowed like a starburst before fading away.
He wished he could accompany it on her journey.
I have to keep a journal.
“Didn’t I do that already?”
He searched his pockets.
“Where is it?” he said.
He no longer carried the recorder. He tried to remember where he left it. He couldn’t.
You left it behind somewhere. Then you forgot all about it.
“Idiot.”
Without a recorder, he’d have to write information down.
“By the Gods,” he said. “Write things down.”
He swore.
“Make a map! How in Hades are you going to figure out where the landing bay is without a map?”
It took you this long to figure that out?
“You’re not as smart as you think you are,” Desjardins said.
He laughed.
He kept laughing.
Desjardins stared out the window.
The comet was long gone. He looked down and tried to get a view of the ship’s sides. It proved difficult. The ship was either oval or spherical and all the windows looking out –at least those he found so far– offered few glimpses of the vessel’s sides.
The one thing that remained a constant was her enormous size.
Despite this, his most recent searches yielded results. He lucked upon some boxes and, within them, paper and a couple of pencils. The papers were most blank. Some were standard, unfilled requisition forms. All were yellow with age and the box and room they were in was dusty.
Desjardins spent the day mapping the territory around him. He did the same the next day and the one after that. By the end of the week he had a clearer idea of the ship’s size. It was far, far larger than anything he had ever seen. Larger even than Epsillon Mega-Cities.
Could this be… an ark?
The thought bordered on blasphemous.
The first ark came to orbit around New Eden and from there the first seeds of the holy Phaecian Empire were born. The people of the second ark settled Zethus and so began our own Epsillon Empire. The third ark was lost.
The original two arks were stripped, their parts used to build the first Empire cities.
“Is… is this the third ark?” Desjardins whispered.
Had Saint Vulcan found it? Was Desjardins on board it?
“Can’t be,” he realized.
This ship lacked basic amenities. Rooms that were clearly meant for habitation had no furniture. Bathrooms lacked fixtures or running water. It was as if the ship was launched from her berth in mid-creation, unfinished or perhaps rushed into service. What amenities were here could take care of Desjardins or a smaller group of people, but not one third of all humanity.
If it isn’t an ark, then what is it? When was she commissioned and created?
It was hard to imagine a ship this size could be made by Saint Vulcan in complete secrecy, especially after the events at Pomos. Following the ravaging of that planet, all of her remaining laboratories and research stations were seized by rival companies eager to claim –and steal– her knowledge. Some of them, like Octi Corporation, rose from the ashes of mediocrity to become true powers.
So eager were the companies to lay claim on everything Saint Vulcan left behind that they conducted extensive searches for any remaining intellectual properties in all corners of the Epsillon Empire.
How could the existence of a starship this large slip through their fingers?
“It couldn’t,” Desjardins said.
He continued walking.
David Desjardins passed several doors, barely bothering to look into the empty rooms beyond. Somewhere along the line, he realized he had walked a very long distance that particular day.
Desjardins looked back. He spotted the dark gray frame that surrounded the elevator doors. It was at least a mile, maybe more, away. Desjardins didn’t feel tired. Not at all. Before arriving on this spacecraft, before turning young, he felt the icy bite of arthritis. He enjoyed his walks on Onia but was limited in the distances he could travel.
In the past weeks he walked on a daily basis several times those distances and didn’t feel winded at all.
A smile worked its way onto his face. The corridor continued for perhaps another mile before eventually curving away.
“Why the hell not?” he said.
Desjardins stretched and cautiously ran in place. Years had passed since his last run. It took him a bit to remember the mechanics.
Desjardins stopped. The smile on his face broadened.
“Why the hell not?” he repeated.
He was off.
Desjardins ran as fast as he could for as long as he could.
His movements were awkward at first, but with each step long dormant instincts took over and his movements grew smoother. When he was a cadet, he ran some of the quickest laps in his class. When he graduated, he continued exercising. He loved to run but as he aged, that ability slipped away. It did so slowly and quietly until one day he could no longer do it at all.
The smile on his face was dazzling. He let out a laugh and stopped. Between deep breaths he continued laughing, delighted at what he accomplished. He looked down the corridor, back toward where he came, and couldn’t see the elevator doors’ frame.
How far did I go? He wondered. And then: What the hell difference does it make?
He wiped sweat from his face. The joy of the moment passed, leaving behind silence. He looked forward. He saw movement from the corner of his eye and the smile on his face was abruptly gone.
He turned. Slowly.
Standing some twenty feet from him was a woman. Her features were spectral, her skin translucent. He could see through her, as if she was a ghost.
Which in many ways she was.
“It’s good to see you happy.”
Desjardins approached the apparition.
“I was wondering when you’d show up,” Desjardins said.
The spectral woman offered Desjardins a small bow.
“It was best to give you time to acclimate.”
“Are you on this ship, Saint Vulcan?”
“No. What you see before you is an augmented holographic representation. I’m sorry, Captain Desjardins, but I could not join you on this journey.”