“Do you think that is the Queen back there or another soldier?” Azin suddenly asked without formality. Some of the sharpness left her voice.
“I do not know, Azin,” Nina answered.
“Captain?” Nayar asked, alarmed “What is happening? Who is in the main healing chamber?”
“It is, at least, the body of a soldier we both fought beside on the Third Arm Warsphere. Her name is Talin. Hers was the body the Queen used to communicate with us. At most, it may be the Queen herself.”
Nayar was silent on the thought network.
***
True to General Breslin’s estimation, Sergeant Nichols had produced a full set of arctic combat gear for everyone and necessary supplies. In skimming the manifest, the General saw that there were even a dozen M16 rifles already prepared with cold-weather lubricant. Nichols even scored a sniper rifle.
“Damn fine work, Sergeant. We may actually get out of here a half hour early. I will meet you in the basement,” the General said. He could not decide which was more impressive; the fact that Nichols had assembled this gear in such a short time or the fact that he had somehow managed to produce a tidy and complete manifest of the materiel cross-referenced by trunk number and neatly secured with a clipboard. Somebody is getting a promotion, General Breslin thought, assuming they survived this. The General added to the clipboard the report from Colonel Balanik that was more than twenty pages long.
“Thank you, General Breslin,” Nichols said modestly, saluted and went back down the stairs to supervise the loading of gear.
To the spaceship, Arnold thought. They were preparing to fly to the South Pole in a spaceship that could apparently travel in excess of five thousand kilometers per hour within the Earth's atmosphere without turning everyone inside into tomato soup. Arnold remembered the term “rabbit hole” from his interview. He had never read “Alice in Wonderland,” but he made it a point to do so at some point. He was having trouble escaping the dreamlike quality of these events. It was those idle thoughts that kept him distracted from the strangeness of his new reality and somehow grounded in the moment.
“Inertia fields,” was Colonel Balanik’s response when Arnold had asked how such speed was possible. “The ship can build a system of localized gravity fields, then adjust them to create stable inertial pockets. It takes a lot of computing power, and the operation is very dependent on existing gravity fields, in this case, that of Earth. The good news is that Exile One had already done the math years ago. The inertia field is calibrated to earth. Once the initial calculation is complete, the ship constantly updates the variables based on sensor readings.”
“Thank you, Colonel,” Arnold said without being able to hide the irony. “I barely understood what you just said, but I certainly appreciate the information.”
“Don’t worry Lieutenant, it gets better with time,” and the Colonel gave him a light pat on the shoulder as the group made their way to the basement.
The entrance to the basement was in the kitchen. Arnold followed Colonel Balanik down the basement stairs while the General and Donna walked slowly behind Ray, who was just reaching the living room. Arnold saw that the dirt floor was shoveled and swept away to reveal a smooth and flat black surface that seemed ceramic; a single black ceramic tile. The young Corporal with her arm in a sling was doing her best with a push broom to sweep the floor. She had loosened the sling to get both hands on the broom and awkwardly held it across her body as she pushed it along.
Rachel walked over to Corporal Makon and relieved her of the broom. She held it out without looking, and another Corporal hustled over to take it from the Colonel’s hand.
“Very good, Corporal,” Rachel said.
“Am I still in the shithouse Ma’am?” Corporal Makon asked boldly.
This surprised the Colonel, who successfully hid a laugh. “Not anymore,” she said gravely. “But the bad news is that you are now in the shit storm instead. You are coming with me on a mission to Antarctica.”
Penny blinked rapidly and stammered. Did she hear that right, she thought to herself. Was the Colonel joking? The serious look on the Colonel's face let Penny know this was no joke. “Yes Ma'am, Colonel Balanik,” Penny said, then moved off to the side to wait. She struggled to understand what had just happened.
Several standard issue military trunks of gear were already stacked along the outside basement stone wall beneath an old coal chute door. Sergeant Nichols was busy directing soldiers to haul even more trunks down the stairs. Arnold counted fifteen already, and when the last crates were hauled down, there were twenty-one in total. Sergeant Nichols directed soldiers to wait in the basement. The trunks would still need to be loaded onto the spaceship which Arnold had correctly guessed was beneath their feet. Here was that underground base Arnold had speculated about a little more than week ago. And now for the authentic rabbit hole experience, he thought to his great amusement.
Ray was just reaching the basement stairs when Colonel Balanik said, “Everyone stand back.”
To Arnold’s amazement, the floor shimmered like a mirage. There was a slight vibration under his feet and dust on the floor’s surface began to bounce until it became like a miniature fog. There was the sound of shifting sand and the floor melted like candle wax downward to form a staircase.
“OK. Now, what the hell was that?” Arnold couldn’t help but exclaim. Nearby soldiers also couldn’t help themselves from snickering at the Lieutenant’s reaction.
“It is called a phase shift field,” it was Donna who answered his rhetorical question. “Advocate technology that uses energy fields to change the state of matter.”
“Oh. Sure. Of course.” was all Arnold could say. He followed Donna and Colonel Balanik down the stairs into a tunnel the color and texture of packed potting soil.
Rachel sidled up to Arnold as they walked. “There is a small complex of chambers and tunnels beneath the house that is an extension of the ship. The ship itself is about thirty meters below the field and about fifty meters from the house,” she explained. “Ray’s data revealed that the approaching ship is the same type as Exile One. It should have the same capabilities. Advocate technology tends to be static. The good news is that we probably have equal force.”
“What’s the bad news?” Arnold asked reflexively.
“The bad news is that the entire ship can be used as a weapon.”
“How powerful a weapon?”
Rachel struggled to find common terms to explain this. “I’m finding it hard to describe the scale. Thousands of times greater than modern atomic weapons. It could vaporize half a continent without much trouble at all.”
“I think I get that I don’t get it. Colonel, I have to confess that I am having trouble grasping all this. I am prepared to serve, but I feel I should tell you that I am struggling.”
Colonel Balanik took the time to pause and looked Lieutenant Triska in the eye. “And this is why I know you will do just fine. This is why we selected you. I’ve seen many Unit members go through what you are going through right now, so I don’t have to imagine how hard is for you. This Unit is very special, and you are already rising to meet its challenges. We have work to do,” and with that, she turned and led him through the tunnels.
The group of six that was the mission crew assembled on the bridge of the ship now known as Exile One. What Rachel, Donna, and Chase didn’t tell the rest was that the ship hadn’t flown for seventy years. It was buried in the farmhouse field the same year the house was built. Rachel, Donna and the first of the exiles sank the ship there in the early days of the Program. It was the early base of operations and was used to develop and adapt Advocate technology for human use.
The ship was arranged with its bridge at the domed end opposite the phase shift forge. The middle section was set up with flight couches for additional crew arranged along the hull opposite the main entry doors. Donna had already programmed the ship to form four couches for Arnold, Chase, Penny, and Andre. She and Rachel would stay on t
he bridge to pilot the craft. One of the couches was arranged for a supine position with a long armrest extending at a right angle on the right side.
“That is your flight couch,” Colonel Balanik said. “You can thank Donna for configuring your flight couch with a healing chamber for your arm.”
Penny’s eyes went wide; she said, “Ah … that’s OK Colonel … the arm feels better already.”
“Don’t worry, Corporal,” Rachel said. “It’s perfectly safe, and your arm will end up better than new. I need you fully functional for this mission, so I’m giving you an order.”
Penny swallowed hard, and Donna led her over to the couch. “I am sorry about the arm, Corporal Makon,” Donna said. “The couch will seal your arm and shoulder and fill the area with special fluid. You may feel tired while the energy fields are at work, but that is normal. The repair is should take two or three hours.”
Penny bobbed her head nervously to say “OK” as the couch phase shifted a sleeve of stone around her arm that crept up to cover her armpit and pressed against her shoulder blade. She didn’t even need to remove her uniform, but there was some pain as the couch stretched her arm out for whatever reason it decided. The arm went numb as the machine worked. Penny tried to relax as the alien machine repaired her body. She resolved herself to listen more closely to Colonel Balanik.
Several soldiers wheeled gear on board with hand trucks. Sergeant Nichols directed them to an aft cargo compartment near the phase shift forge. The center passenger compartment took up more than a third of the ship. This compartment was bounded by a thin bulkhead that defined the bridge and an aft bulkhead that marked the cargo area. There was enough space between the flight couches and cargo area for several other sizable rooms.
Donna made a final check of the passengers and cargo and helped the humans to flight couches.
***
They were just five hours from earth. It was too long for Nina to think. She wished that she were already there and hard to work. Life was much easier when she was following orders, Nina thought. But orders had stopped making sense since the Third Arm. Her world was so much different. She wondered whether the orders she was under justified destroying two of her own ships and killing the of possibly twenty of her sisters. Nina leaned back into the flight couch and closed her eyes, trying to keep her mind on the mission. All she could see instead was Talin’s scarred face. She hovered somewhere between sleep and wakefulness.
“Nina,” a familiar voice spoke softly in her mind. It couldn’t be a dream, but it could not, should not be Talin. Nina ignored it.
“Nina,” the voice spoke again. Nina looked around. Azin and Nayar were busy at work. She could hear their intermittent reports on the network. The two seemed not to hear this other voice.
“No,” Nina thought. “This can’t be you.”
“It is, Nina.”
“What are you doing here?” Nina asked.
“I survived. Because of you. The engineers found me at the drop site.” Nina said nothing. Talin continued. “Where am I? I can’t see anything. I know I am in a healing chamber.”
“You are on a Queen’s Shuttle. We are heading to Earth. Don’t you remember anything?”
“I remember being with the Queen and her Guard. She healed me, Nina.”
“You don’t remember speaking for the Queen?” Nina asked.
“I thought that was a dream,” and Talin’s voice trailed off for a moment before she said. “I remember hearing you call to me. I remember the Queen telling me to sleep. There was no pain like there is now.”
Nina opened her eyes. “I can adjust the chamber …”
“No,” Talin interrupted. “It is alright. It is not as bad as it was at first. The queen felt most of it for me.”
“The Queen is what got you hurt in the first place!” Nina shouted in her mind.
“Nina, do not be like this. I was with the Queen. In her mind. She loves us.”
Nina said nothing. Anger flared beneath the damp blanket of her numbness then dimmed again.
“Where are we going?” Talin asked after another long pause.
“Earth. I already told you. Talin, you need to heal. You should sleep,” her friend was obviously delirious.
“I know,” Talin said in a far away voice. Nina imagined for a moment she could hear Talin breathe as her old friend drifted off to sleep. The chamber must have numbed her pain and put her to sleep. Her injuries were severe. She had been healing for more than three months and was still barely alive.
***
Arnold began to notice things about the ship. To begin with, the passenger compartment was filled with bright white light, but he could see no light fixtures of any kind. There were no shadows. Also, Rachel made a voice announcement through some sort of PA system, but he could see no speakers. In fact, the walls were completely featureless.
“I am separating the ship from the tunnels and closing the doors. After that, I will start the gravity fields. You might feel some vertigo,” Colonel Balanik’s disembodied voice announced.
And with that, the massive door panels of the ship began to close. The stone tunnel shimmered and melted into itself as the door panels drew away from it. The door drew together with the sound of stone sliding on stone, and there was a hiss of air. An instant later, Arnold had the sensation of weightlessness, but there was clearly gravity here. The experience of floating made him nauseous. His hands flew up involuntarily, and his eyes fluttered as the room seemed to spin.
“Are you OK Lieutenant?” Sergeant Nichols asked. He had plenty of experience helping initiates.
This was not the time for pride. “Absolutely not,” Arnold confessed.
“OK,” Sergeant Nichols said “Don’t close your eyes. Find a spot on the wall and stare at it and breathe in and out to a four-second count. It gets a bit funky while the inertia field calibrates.”
Penny moaned in response. Her head was spinning, and she was reminded of hangovers past. The position of her flight couch had her facing the curved cabin ceiling.
“You’ve flown in this before?” Arnold asked the Sergeant while he struggled to control his breath.
“No, but I’ve trained on gravity field vehicles before.”
“On the job training,” Arnold moaned as another wave of vertigo washed over him.
“Crew: we are on ascent. We are breaking the surface of the field as we speak,” Rachel announced.
Arnold was surprised that, besides the vertigo, there was no sound, no sensation of motion. The real show was taking place in the field above. Rachel turned the forward bulkhead of the bridge into a schematic display. No visible light yet reached the ship's sensor skin, so the ship logic displayed a heatmap of the earth that encased them. Patterns of red, blue and violet slowly slid down the display as she eased down the relative gravity of the ship and it began to rise.
Lieutenant Conteh had received an order to clear a specific area of the field. They used metal detectors to find the area. No personnel were allowed within a six-meter perimeter of the launch point. Years ago, Lev had the foresight to plant large steel plates in the ground to define the ship’s footprint. Rachel remembered thinking the idea was foolish and a waste of time. She remembered her annoyance and a small argument of the type newly married couples have. She certainly saw the wisdom of that decision now and marked foresight as one more thing she loved about her husband. She tried not to think about him but suddenly found that difficult. Her heart sank as the ship rose.
A slight vibration came through the boots of soldiers standing on the perimeter. A massive bulge appeared in the field. An oval dome of green grass rose up in the moonlight, and then the earth split open. The thirty-meter long, pill-shaped ship broke through the soil and hovered above the raw pit of earth it left behind. To a person, nobody spoke. Even the wisest of wise-asses had no pithy comments. There was silence from the woods. Some stood with eyes wide and gaping mouths. Others just shook their heads and stared.
They were trained t
o see things like this, but it was still difficult for them to wrap their minds around this vision. In their world, thirty-meter-long objects simply should not hover silently above the ground, but they did. In addition to the universal amazement at the sight, every single Unit soldier present would not have traded this job for any other. Whether they articulated it or not, this ship was the reason they belonged to the Unit.
The vessel slowly rose another hundred meters and hovered perfectly still for a moment. It slowly rotated on its axis until one end pointed straight up to the sky. Inside, the passengers still perceived no motion. Outside, the ship turned perfectly black, then shimmered like a mirage as the skin bent the moonlight around itself. The ship was replaced by what looked like a wavy line on an oscilloscope screen. Then it was gone.
“OK,” Rachel announced, “We are underway,” and she brought the ship from zero to four hundred kilometers an hour in three seconds. On the ground, was a slight breeze, a hissing sound, and the ship was gone. Those soldiers prone to wisecracks felt free to make them as the soldiers dispersed.
“When will we launch?” Arnold asked, bracing himself for a jolt.
“Already have, Lieutenant,” Rachel answered. Arnold was shocked that he noticed nothing. “We are about at five thousand meters already. You might feel something when I take us to the stratosphere and get us to full speed.” Arnold was also surprised Rachel could hear him.
“Ah yes,” Arnold said with a wag of his head. “The inertia fields. Elementary of course.”
Everyone laughed, even General Breslin. Penny laughed and winced. Rachel brought the ship to a thousand kilometers an hour. When they reached the stratosphere, she set a course into the ship logic and gave instructions to proceed. The ship took a few seconds to find its bearing then reached fifty-five hundred kilometers an hour in under two seconds. The occupants felt the ship vibrate slightly and had another small sensation of vertigo.
“OK,” Rachel said “We are on the way. We should reach the Antarctic shelf in under five hours. With any luck, we will make it an hour before Nina and her crew. Feel free to leave the flight couches. Not much to see, but you’re on a spaceship so you might as well enjoy it.”
The Genetic Imerative Page 30