Belt Three

by John Ayliff

  ‘It’s no better than I deserve.’

  ‘I thought you…hated me.’

  ‘I do hate you, but I said we were partners now, and I meant it.’

  He had finished bandaging the wound in her front, but the exit wound in her back was still bleeding. He got behind her and pushed her back up into a sitting position, making her whimper through gritted teeth.

  ‘I don’t want you to die like this. Not when we’ve come so close.’ He began to spray bandage into the hole in the back of her suit, hoping it would plug the wound.

  ‘And you…need me to…fly the ship.’

  ‘That’s right. I can’t go anywhere without you.’

  She let out a long, rasping sigh. Her voice was getting fainter. Now that she was no longer holding her wounds closed, she seemed to be losing consciousness, her voice slurring into incomprehensibility. ‘I’ll get you…where you need…to go.’

  Jonas lowered her back into a lying position. According to the biological read-outs on the exterior of her suit she was stable, for the moment. He could let her rest. He had stopped the bleeding but he didn’t have any real idea of how bad the internal injuries were. If he got her back to the Remembrance then, hopefully, the medbay could take care of her.

  If he could find a way to get them back to the Remembrance.

  He went back to the emergency controls in the middle of the floor. There was the lever to move the module up and down, and other controls that looked as though they could make it switch routes, but without a map he would never be able to find the way back to the Seagull. The Aurelian didn’t seem to be able to get at them with the module stuck between exits, but as soon as they emerged they would no doubt be set upon by robots, or other menaces. Their escape from the lab had been down to blind luck. There was no way they could get off Aurelian with its computer still opposed to them.

  There was a button on the controls labelled ‘Main computer attention’. Jonas pushed it.

  ‘Aurelian, can you hear me?’

  ‘I can hear you, alien.’

  ‘We’re not aliens,’ he said.

  ‘The only human remaining is the Captain. You are aliens. You deceived me.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have lied to you,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. But we’re human. You must have used your sensors on us by now. If not, use them now.’

  There was a slight pause, and Jonas wondered what imperceptible tests the computer was running on them. ‘You are human, but clones,’ it said at last.

  He cursed under his breath. No Belt-era technology could tell a true-born from a tank-born by a remote scan.

  ‘You are alien duplicates,’ the computer said decisively. ‘You were grown to infiltrate me and steal back your artefact.’

  ‘We are clones, but we’re human,’ he said. ‘Before the Worldbreakers – the aliens – destroyed the Earth, humans managed to preserve banks of genes. They used the gene-banks to create new humans, clones, on asteroid colonies. They’ve been doing that for 300 years. The human race survived!’

  ‘You’re lying,’ the Aurelian said. ‘There are no humans but the Captain. She said she was the last.’

  Jonas swallowed. ‘The Captain was mistaken,’ he said. ‘She might have believed that she was the last human, but she was wrong. She didn’t know about the gene-banks or the asteroid colonies.’

  ‘The Captain said there were no humans except those on this ship.’

  ‘The Captain wasn’t omniscient. She relied on you to tell her what was going on outside, didn’t she? She relied on your sensors.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then look outside. What would you tell her, if she were here and she asked you what you could detect?’

  ‘I detect…no planets. Asteroid belts.’

  ‘Listen to the belts,’ Jonas said. ‘There are signals, aren’t there? Some of the rocks are transmitting signals?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Jonas could imagine the signals. Belt Three starward of them, Belt Two sunward, both flickering with busy light, the spaces inside the rings criss-crossed with rosettes of communications lasers.

  ‘Those are business transactions,’ he said. ‘Electronic goods being bought and sold. Navigational arrangements. Personal communications.’ There was a catch in his voice as he remembered the memory messages between Olzan and Emily Glass, and his own messages to Gabriel when they’d been apart, long ago. ‘Millions of people, spread across dozens of cities, talking to one another. The remnant of the human race. The Dodecs blew up our planets, but we kept going. It’s like the Captain said to Doctor Rasmussen: wherever life finds itself, it finds a way to survive.’

  Jonas ran out of words. There was silence for half a minute. He imagined the computer processing its telescope logs, making new sense of the signals it must have been recording from the Belts over the last three centuries. He hoped it was doing that, not preparing one final attack to kill them.

  ‘I can detect them,’ the Aurelian said at last.

  He almost laughed from the relief. ‘You believe we’re human?’

  ‘You are not the Captain, but you are human.’

  ‘Can you take us to a medical bay?’ he asked. ‘Keldra is badly wounded—’

  The Aurelian cut him off. ‘Why did you want the alien artefact?’

  ‘We wanted to use it as a weapon against the aliens,’ he said. There was no reason to lie about this now.

  ‘The aliens have already destroyed Earth,’ the Aurelian said. ‘It is too late to prevent it.’

  Jonas glanced at Keldra. She was unconscious, but one of her hands had curled into a fist where it lay. ‘We know,’ he said. ‘We’re going to fight them anyway.’

  The transit module began to move.

  ‘Will you take us to a medical bay?’ he asked again.

  ‘You are not authorized to be on this ship,’ the Aurelian said. ‘I will take you to a spaceplane so that you can leave.’

  ‘Keldra is dying! Surely you can take us to a medical bay first.’

  ‘The medical bays will be inoperative,’ the Aurelian said. ‘This ship is shutting down.’

  ‘No!’ he looked around in shock.

  ‘I will deliver the Sphere to your spaceplane. You must leave at once. This ship is shutting down.’

  ‘Why are you shutting down?’

  ‘There is no Earth Authority officer available to take command,’ the Aurelian said simply. ‘The Captain is dead.’

  Jonas could sense the ship shutting down around them as the transit module navigated through its tubes. The lights occasionally visible through the broken door shut off halfway through the journey, and the distant ship sound was gradually becoming fainter.

  The module took them back to the place they had first entered it: the corridor opposite the Seagull’s hangar. Jonas put his arms under Keldra’s shoulders and knees and carried her out. She moaned as she was lifted, and murmured something, hovering in and out of consciousness. Even the gravity felt a little lower than it had been when they’d arrived: the Aurelian must have cut power to the rotation systems, and the rings were slowly grinding to a halt. The lights in the orbital corridor were dark, and it stretched into blackness in both directions. The only light came from the hangar itself, a last island of light on the dying ship.

  Inside the hangar, a team of robots, suspended from rails on the ceiling, were lowering the Worldbreaker Sphere into the Seagull’s upper cargo doors. By the time Jonas had climbed the ladder with Keldra, and lowered her gently through the airlock, the Sphere was in place in the Seagull’s cargo section. The robots disappeared into the darkness of the hangar to find their rest alcoves for the last time.

  As soon as the airlock was sealed, the hangar’s floor opened and the docking cradle lowered the spaceplane out into the void. Jonas strapped Keldra into the co-pilot’s seat, while he took the pilot’s. The cradle slowed the spaceplane gently to near microgravity and then dropped it sunwards, towards where the Remembrance of Clouds still held its station.

&nb
sp; Jonas wasn’t much of a pilot, but Keldra’s home-made controls were intuitive enough, and the Aurelian had released them such that he only had to make minor course adjustments to guide the Seagull into the Remembrance’s cargo bay. The handling was heavy, the awkwardness of the improvised manoeuvring system compounded by the mass of the Sphere. As they came close to the cargo bay he noticed vacuum-suited servitors rising to meet them, adjusting cargo webbing to catch the spaceplane. Keldra was motionless beside him, eyes closed, but she was still conscious. They had just come into the signal range of her pilot implant, and she was guiding the servitors.

  He released the controls for the final approach and let the servitors catch the spaceplane. Rather than returning it to its bubble at the far end of the cargo bay, they handled it to the internal cargo airlock at the front and erected an airtight seal like the one they had used to attach the Haze’s escape capsule, while the cargo bay doors slid closed above them. The airlock inner door opened.

  Jonas undid his straps, then Keldra’s. She was stirring slightly, her limbs floating doll-like in the microgravity. He pulled her out of the seat and through the Seagull’s airlock into the Remembrance of Clouds.

  A servitor was waiting beyond the airlock, in the door of the transit module. It was dressed in faded ship overalls, not a vacuum suit. It was male, with a gaunt, scarred face and shaven head. Silently, expressionlessly, it opened its arms to take Keldra. Jonas hesitated, then gently placed her into the servitor’s hands.

  As Jonas pulled away, Keldra moved her arm to brush against him, and opened her eyes momentarily.

  ‘Don’t worry, Jonas,’ she whispered. ‘This ship…this ship won’t let me die.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Jonas hung behind the servitor as it fastened Keldra into the transit module’s acceleration straps. She floated limply, apparently unconscious, her hair wafting around her head and little pools of spittle forming at the sides of her mouth in the microgravity. The transit module began to move, accelerating much more gently than normal. He couldn’t tell whether she was directing the servitors and the module through her pilot implant, or whether she was really unconscious and they were following pre-programmed instructions.

  The module arrived in the first ring and the servitor carried Keldra to the medbay. Three more servitors were preparing the operation cubicle, and the medical robots were poised around the bed, scalpels and grippers ready. The blank-faced servitors gently but firmly blocked Jonas from coming near the cubicle. The door swung shut.

  He paced around the main medbay chamber. Every few minutes he peered through the window in the operation cubicle door, but his view of Keldra was blocked by the crowding medical robots. There was a screen displaying information on her status, but it was nothing he had the training to understand. He stared at it anyway. As long as the lines were moving, he guessed, that meant that she was alive.

  He hated himself for his concern. Keldra had killed his friends, had destroyed his livelihood, had used him as little more than one of her servitors. Not to hate her would be to betray the memory of Ayla and the others. She would be under anaesthetic by now, but she must surely have been in pain during the journey back to the Remembrance, and he tried to relish that suffering. He found he couldn’t.

  He had said he needed her to fly the ship. It was true he needed her to use the sail, but there should be enough reaction drive fuel to put the ship on a long transfer orbit to Belt Two. Her death needn’t be the end of him. He could sell the ship, hide the Worldbreaker Sphere, get a new identity in one of Belt Two’s free cities away from Solar Authority control. The prospect didn’t excite him as much as it should have. That wasn’t how it ought to go. They had come so close…

  He hadn’t come to care about her, had he? He knew that some kidnapping victims came to identify with their kidnappers. No, he decided. It was as he had told her in the Aurelian transit module: he wanted her dead, but not here, not like this. First, he wanted her to succeed. Being around her hadn’t made him stop hating her, but it had made him hate the Worldbreakers more.

  He left the medbay and headed to the bridge.

  The screen was trained on the Aurelian. The Remembrance had drifted slightly from its position sunward of the Earth ship, and was now casting only the edge of its shadow over the Aurelian’s nose. The Aurelian’s surface still shone in the reflected sunlight, but its dust-streaked rotating segments had visibly slowed since he had first seen them. The sensor readings on Jonas’s console indicated that the Aurelian’s power plant was steadily shutting down. The transponder signal had stopped.

  He sat back in his chair. Above him, Keldra’s cloud mural on the ceiling looked crude, and very close, but reassuringly real.

  An hour into Keldra’s surgery, Jonas noticed on his console that a dozen servitors had been assigned new tasks. He watched the glowing icons that marked their positions on the ship plan as they left the servitor barracks in the second ring and took a transit module down to the cargo bay.

  Eight of the servitors swarmed around the Seagull, uncoupling it from the internal cargo bay airlock and moving it towards its normal position at the back of the bay. At the same time, four servitors opened up the Seagull’s cargo doors and slowly took out something. The cargo bay’s sensors couldn’t identify what they were handling, but he knew that it was the Worldbreaker Sphere.

  He watched the procedure with interest. Keldra would have to be directing the servitors’ activity through her implant, which meant she was conscious, although the medbay readings still indicated she was in surgery.

  He had expected her to secure the Sphere in the airless microgravity cargo bay, but instead, the servitors pushed it through the cargo bay airlock and into a transit module. Very slowly, the transit module hauled its massive cargo up the spine and then out to the second ring. The four servitors emerged and made their way around the ring’s orbital corridor, moving slowly, as if carrying the Sphere between them. They went past the servitor barracks and prison cells, and into what was marked on the plan as an empty store room. A couple more servitors were moving there from a different room, perhaps carrying tools. Jonas guessed that Keldra was having the servitors install the Sphere securely.

  She was still in surgery. She must be at least partially conscious if she was directing the servitors, but Jonas didn’t know if they’d be aware of him if he went down there. It was probably best for him to wait until they were finished.

  Half an hour after the servitors finished moving the Sphere, Jonas felt a distant rumble and a change in acceleration. The bridge read-outs indicated that the manoeuvring thrusters were firing, re-orienting the ship for a course change. The reaction drive fired gently, pushing the Remembrance away from the Aurelian. Jonas watched the Earth ship recede starward. Its rotating sections were almost stationary now, and its power plant was dead.

  Once the reaction drive had put a few kilometres between the two ships, the Remembrance swung around again, and the sail unfurled, the golden plane folding delicately out from the bud like an enormous insect wing. The sail was tacking against orbit, angled diagonally against the ship’s direction of travel so that the light pressure would reduce its orbital velocity and it would spiral towards the sun.

  Jonas watched as the Aurelian dwindled to a silver point.

  Another half hour later, the ship’s course stabilized, and the servitors shuffled back to their barracks. Jonas guessed that Keldra was unconscious. What little he could understand of the medbay read-outs indicated that she was stable, but the surgery could take hours yet.

  He ate an instant meal from the kitchen, and then went back to his cabin to rest. The Remembrance’s automatic day-night cycle indicated that it was evening, but the days on the Iron Dragon, followed by the hours on the Aurelian, had disrupted his sense of time. It was only when he sat down on the bed in his darkened cabin that he realized how tired he was.

  He woke eight hours later, when the corridor lights were fading up in simulated morning.


  On the bridge, the medbay read-outs indicated that the surgery room was empty. The screen was trained starward, but he could no longer make out the dot of the Aurelian against the haze of Belt Three. He could guess where Keldra would be. He took the transit module down to the second ring.

  He didn’t realize until he reached it that he had never been in this storeroom before. Keldra had shown him the corridor during her initial tour, and this storeroom had been the one she had forbidden him to enter. After that, the door had always been locked, and none of the memories from Olzan’s implant had happened to show the inside of the room.

  Now the storeroom’s door stood open. A servitor in the corridor outside watched him as he approached, but made no effort to stop him from entering.

  The storeroom was a garden. Long soil-filled troughs stood in rows across the room, drooping with leaves. Translucent panels in the ceiling let in sunlight, day and night following one another rapidly as the ring rotated, sending shadows raking across the room. There was a splashing sound as water dripped into suspended irrigation channels. A wet, earthy smell managed to overpower the oily scents of the ship.

  This was a vegetable garden; row after row of the carrots and potatoes that Jonas had occasionally seen Keldra add to her diet of instant meals, but it looked as if she had also made an effort to make some parts of the garden ornamental. There were two long beds filled with flowers, half a dozen wildly varying colours jostling against one another with no aesthetic restraint. The way the water fell from a high pipe into a pool as it fed the irrigation channels could have been an attempt at a water feature. The ceiling in between the sun panels was painted blue and scattered with Keldra’s signature swirling clouds, and in this room she had extended the pattern to the upper part of the walls, depicting hundreds of little fluffy clouds processing away into the distance.

  In the middle of the room it looked as though the servitors had moved the trays aside and set up a simple dais made from spare floor gratings. On top of the dais, in the middle of a cage of metal supports that wrapped around it like the fingers of a grasping hand, was the Worldbreaker Sphere. Four servitors, in dishevelled overalls, were tinkering with the cage, running a fine mesh of cables in between the fingers and across the surface of the Sphere.