The Fortress at the End of Time

by Joe M. McDermott

  “Aldo,” I said. “Please, just call me Ronaldo.”

  “No. Not while we are here, where people and algorithms and HR are listening. Not here. Not where it can be accidentally overheard. I’ve done this before. Trust me.”

  I was promised to another, of course, and I was betraying her trust. I was also lying to the admiral about the identity and origin of an object in the dark space. I was staging my system for a false alarm that would trigger my emergency message to reach the many, many ansibles and reroute them for my disbursement into the network. I needed to be ready to move fast. I needed to distract the network security officer.

  Leaving the low floors, I went to the NetSec offices next. I knocked on the door, to see if he was in.

  “Enter,” I heard.

  My entry was met with a cold, hard glare. “What do you want?” he said.

  “No salute?”

  “What do you want, sir? I’m very busy.”

  “Are our networks under attack?”

  “Always. There’s enough free-floating viral shit out there to wreck our network for a hundred years, and enough archaic code ghosting through the network . . . Man, I’m the hardest working officer on the ship and no one even notices. What do you want?”

  I closed the door behind me and sat down. “We need to discuss something that needs to stay between us. I’m preparing a mission for the admiral as soon as the ice is down and secure. General crew doesn’t know about it. I’m not supposed to tell you about it, but I think we’re going to need you in the loop. As you say, you are critical to our survival.”

  He closed his computer. “You have my undivided attention, Captain.”

  “I’m AstroNav. I’ve always been AstroNav. I got a hit on something dark and mysterious heading our way. It doesn’t look good. Admiral is going to fly out a recon. Code tech has changed a lot since she was flying. I don’t want any chances. The enemy has to have been as busy as we were.”

  “If it’s them, we don’t even know what they’ll hit us with. I don’t have the tech to set up an ansible in. You have the keys to the factory, not me.”

  “I can get you the tech in a matter of hours, but there isn’t enough time to install it without raising suspicion, nor is it safe to hand an ansible to the enemy on a scouting ship. Look, it’s probably not the enemy. But, if it is, we need to know fast, and get back fast, and I’ll spend the rest of my career pumping war supplies through the ansible, and stocking up on noble gases.”

  “Would the admiral take me along?”

  “You’re the best data guy we got. We need someone who can see the signals right away, if there are signals, and analyze the data. How up to date are you on enemy data lines?”

  “I’m rusty,” he said. “I don’t have time to upgrade, either.”

  “You’re the best we got, though, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You will be critical to our success if the scout goes down. You stay here, but I want to set up a lightspeed quickconnect. We have a bunch of them sitting in storage already, and you could install it yourself on the ship without raising a ruckus.”

  “That’s old tech. I haven’t worked with one since college.”

  “It is old because it works. We still use them for ansible negotiations, and I know the admiral uses them to send noncritical updates to HR. Lightspeed will have to be good enough. You’re busy. I can do the install for you,” I said. “I want to keep this nice and quiet. People would notice you climbing out of the hole. No one cares about me. AstroNavs who don’t get to fly are supposed to pine over their warships.”

  “You know how to set them up?”

  “I did it in college too. We can test the line before we fly. We have time for that.”

  “We aren’t ready for a war. Not out here.”

  “We don’t even know if it isn’t just a broken drone yet. It is most likely a broken drone. We just have to be ready because it is our job to take slight odds very seriously. There is no call for alarm. We will prepare. When we know, we will follow orders. There is no confirmation yet. The universe is a mysterious place. It is full of surprises, many more likely than the enemy’s return. Can I count on you to keep this between us?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. I will do the install tonight, and we can test it in the morning.”

  It is a simple plan. After the test, I would intercept the signal out with a second signal box. Upon the admiral’s approach to the object, I would cut the lightspeed signal to NetSec. I would override the AstroNav data to signal an attack with the acting admiral credentials. I would cut the line at the ansible, then, and separate us from the network in almost every way but one. Then, I would calmly step into the chamber and set the emergency signal from my tablet before anyone even realized what I was doing.

  I had almost forgotten about Sergeant Anderson. I was on my way down to the ship in dock, climbing down the ladder near the center of the station, when she called me. “Where are you, sir?”

  I had forgotten about her. “I am still on duty, Sergeant. I have a special assignment for NetSec before I can take my bucket down.”

  “We have almost fixed the pipes, today. One more juncture needs repair. We are rigging the new pipes directly out of prefabricated drone shells that have gone unused.”

  “I can’t wait,” I said. “I’m behind schedule too.”

  “I see,” she said.

  “No, don’t misunderstand. You can meet me there, if you like. Have you been aboard the warship?”

  “I am in charge of the maintenance crew. I have been there. I have checked their work. I have had my fill of the scouting vessel. I find the fascination with its fast weaponry tedious. Contact me when you finish yours, if you can keep your eyes open.”

  Only after I had offered to take her with me did I realize it was better if I didn’t. She would know what I was doing, rigging the old lightspeed quickconnects in series, to cancel each other out. She would wonder about it. I got lucky. I couldn’t pull this trick off if I relied on luck. I would have to be sneakier. I needed to conceal what I was doing in the ship. The preflight crew would notice it. I needed to create some sort of protection for my little hack.

  In the ship, I opened the control panel with the tool kit plugged into the wall. I quickly installed the little devices, both together no smaller than my palm. I pulled some wires over them to try and conceal them, but I knew that wouldn’t work. Then, I had an idea. I unplugged the true one, and used spare wire from the tool kit to rig it out and extend it. I hid the second lightspeed quickconnect as far away as the wire would go, hidden under the tool kit itself, beneath the extra wires there. It was very unlikely that anyone would bother with an old lightspeed quickconnect, as long as an officer told them to leave it alone. It was even less likely, in that scenario, that a lightspeed quickconnect would be investigated out to the wires. The maintenance crews brought their own wires, and these extras in the tool kit were intended for midflight maintenance. As long as there was smooth sailing (and there would be) no one would discover my little reroute on the lightspeed line. I had my tablet with me and put together my simple command structure and rechecked it, before flipping it on and setting up the quickconnect farther down the chain.

  The tests went fine, and everything was greenlight. No one seemed to suspect that I had a plan running under the surface of the debris that was floating out in the void between galaxies.

  I was almost free, then.

  The ice comet had to be secured in gauze and plastics, and all my best crew were down preparing their equipment for wrapping a huge comet for a controlled release of H2O. I got reports from them, and didn’t read them. I stamped them and filed them away for HR. I never heard anything back from them about my work. It’s odd, to me, that even then, HR said nothing to me. I got everything second- and thirdhand from higher-ranking officers. It created, in me, a deeper isolation when I think of it. No wonder I rebelled. They are a godhead without a body or a voice, like a false
religion. Lacking feedback from my mental structures of the world, I pushed hard against them all, to test their worth.

  Down on the first floor, with Sergeant Anderson, we were feeling the heavy, heavy weight of the full centripetal force. We had full-body gear on, and climbed through metal storage pipes and heavy equipment, ancient tractors once intended for emergency ground construction but powered by varieties of agricultural biodiesels we don’t produce here. We had exoskeletons on, and scrambled through the mess of machines and equipment, playing tag until the timer alarms went off, and we had to get up to a lower g-force or risk damage to our bones and organs. We were laughing.

  “How often do you go this low?” I said.

  “Not often. It’s hard on the body. You’ll feel it tomorrow, I promise, but it was something new, yes? A prize, here, where the imagination has no new places to spare.”

  “How can I thank you for that great prize?”

  “You might, and I am only suggesting that you might do this, but you might consider a friendly kiss.”

  “Only friendly?”

  “Well, it is really up to you if it is friendly or not. But it should not be too friendly. Too friendly would be very bad.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said. “You know, I haven’t done this very much. Even before I was cloned, I lived on a boat with my mother and father.”

  “You talk too much, Captain.”

  Her beautiful face, smooth skin as deep and vast as any expanse of night, I thought of the distance between galaxies, a century at the fastest speeds we can survive, and how these distances seemed so small compared to the space between two bodies; how far I had to lean over, gently and controlled, to place my lips upon hers.

  Oh, the mess of life I have made here, confessor. Embracing my sinful nature, I have lost Amanda, and I have even lost Sergeant Anderson. I am alone in this cell. But she kissed me. I had all of her powerful body in my arms. For a time, it was glorious. Perhaps the future will bring me another opportunity to impress Adebayo Anderson, when I am a monk and rise above the temptations of flesh and bone. I want her to respect me again, someday, more than I long for her affection.

  I was at my desk, running through my checklists on the AstroNav system, and waiting to hear back from two stations for a series of ansible transactions while the letters were running through. An alert pumped through the tablets about the foreign body entering our system. The ice had arrived, at last. All hands on deck, and we all switched over to our monitoring station to see what we could do, if anything, to help. Meteors don’t land softly unless we make it so. Much was lost in the atmosphere, but that was where it was wanted, entering the moisture and water cycle of the atmosphere. Drones would be sacrificed to level out the arrival, attempting to slow it to a gentle crawl. All hands on deck, watching for damaged drones, repairing drones, and getting a transport ship out of drydock to sacrifice it to the water, if needed. Water was everything and hope.

  I got to fly the transport, and I got to sit out and wait in the dark beside it, in case the drones couldn’t handle the weight of gravity and matter colliding. I raced to the transport, and launched into the night sky. I realized that this was going to be the very last flight I ever took, considering what I was about to do during the admiral’s voyage.

  The night sky, endless and gorgeous, scattered jewels, and a distraction to me, because I knew it would be my last time flying. I heard the chatter on the channels, where the admiral was leading the drones into the descent, assigning different AIs different jobs, and getting the station weaponry involved, using an antimatter implosion charge, for instance, to lightly thump the bottom of the ice, to hit it where it bounced and slow it down. She missed dead center, and it caused a backspin that a drone team had to redirect. It was mostly done by computer, with calculations too precise to leave in the hands of our human technicians. Sergeant Anderson had her team on standby to repair any damaged drones that flew in or were recovered by other drones. Wong’s people were coordinating our heavy matter weapons to control the descent of the ice comet, and spread out the force to prevent the creation of a powerful dust plume. The worst case scenario was the kind of impact that kicked so much dust into the atmosphere that the system’s star could not breach the fog and reach the colony. It would drive the entire human population into the station, which is ill equipped for such a population explosion, much less the many problems that would create for supply lines.

  I watched the ice meteor go down for two days, riding alongside it as it entered orbit, slowly and slower and slowest until the drones were crushed under the weight of ice, and I was sent back into the ship for the requisition of drone parts for replacements of the ones lost. I’d have to send the flight sergeant out with the supply vessel to acquire enough raw gases and raw matter to put together the necessary components with so many drones lost. Still, the gentle descent was perfect, and the ice was quickly sprayed down with a plastic coating to keep it from evaporating faster than the atmosphere could handle, to prevent any other issues. I understand that it was expected to rain with some regularity now, and there was to be an accumulation of enough water in the planetary water cycle for the beginning of meaningful ocean, with another ice meteor scheduled for the next thirteen years.

  Distracted by my knowledge of the next mission, I had difficulty focusing on the tasks at hand. What was a drone, to me, when the universe was going to be mine? What did I care for ice comets and ice meteors or descending icy worlds, when I would see Shui Mien again, in one or more of the many colony worlds. I would walk on grassy fields, and sit under a tree and look up at birds, again.

  We held a mock funeral for drones that doubled as a celebration. The admiral put pictures of all the lost drones up like lost crewmembers with paper flower arrangements and black pudding and roasted black jujube tea. It was a joke funeral, but it was well received among the men and women. I sat in the back of the room, sipping tea and imagining what coffee tasted like, once, or what the confectionary beverages of Thailand street vendors tasted like, with tea, spices, sugar, and coconut cream.

  Part of me was going to know these flavors again, and others that were new and exotic to me after nearly a decade of this miserable station. I sipped the bitter, roasted jujube tea, and I remembered. Memory, this story I tell myself of a time before this station, when I lived on Earth, and saw the ocean every morning from the deck of the boat, was feeding me the very dreams that consumed me during the execution of my greatest sin.

  After the party, an all hands meeting was scheduled to announce the scouting mission. I was asked to present my findings to the crew, as AstroNav, and I was going to have to lie my pants off, to everyone, and I wasn’t afraid. There was nothing to fear. No one cared about the rocks floating in space, or their activities.

  I put together a presentation about what I knew, pretending it was a recently discovered object in scanned space. There were actually quite a lot of free-floating debris in the black that it was easy enough to fool anyone that wasn’t closely following the trajectory of various cosmic filaments invisible to the naked eye in the huge voids between galaxies, and the structure and scope of galaxies that together form superclusters, that may even crash into each other, blowing off their gases and rocks in explosions larger than the Milky Way. AstroNavs were trained to calculate trajectories of gravimetric matter all the way back to the Big Bang, and to consider the complex calculations of gravity and the relations of different impacting objects. It was done through software, but there was an art to understanding what is presented in the software, and the training took as long as learning how to fly manned vessels in the odd conditions of free space. I had an object that was absent from prior sweeps, and then appeared. That is what it looked like, to everyone but me, because I had deleted the prior record of the artifact. I was told to bring the crew’s fear level down as much as possible. We were not warriors, just military personnel sitting out on a listening post. We did not need more fear.

  I stood before the whole c
rew, then, with cameras playing out to the monastery and colony below. I gave my little speech about the mission.

  “Probe X-13343, commissioned sixty years ago, encountered an unknown object in its sector and sent out exploratory signals. It was shorted. Let me be clear: No one in command staff here or back at the Terran sector believes for one second the enemy is returning. There is a procedure in this scenario that we must follow, and we will follow the procedure. So, this is an exploratory mission only.

  “Space, as many of you are aware, is very large and lots of things happen out there without any knowledge or input from us whatsoever. Even heavy-duty probe drones break, sometimes. There is no reason to think anything, until we can go out and look at it and see what happened to our probe. This sector is quite far away from the celestial filament. There isn’t a lot of gravity to pull off all the stuff blowing around between galactic clusters. Lots of cosmic clutter is floating around there, causing problems. Many crewmembers have had to fix probes and machines damaged from these sorts of things. This is an unknown object that matches traits we look for when we consider scouting missions, that likely coincided with a cosmic event. The scouting mission is not a war mission.

  “We will still be prepared for all possibilities. The most likely possibility is that this is something that banged into something else and flew off on a new trajectory where we didn’t see it with our probes. The admiral’s mission will be to consider the unknown object’s trajectory, appearance, and activity to either blast it out of the sky preemptively, or to ignore it. Either way, she is one of the last surviving veterans of the original conflict and uniquely qualified to judge how much time we waste with our old and outdated drones. I’m sure when she gets back, her stellar report will fill us all in on how much time we wasted scanning a wayward rock with our fully armed warship. Any questions? No? Well, orders are going out to terminals now, and those of you chosen for this giant waste of our time when the ice comet mission was a huge success will be missing some of the most exciting things happening planetside in decades: We will literally be watching some ice melt on the surface below. Terrifically exciting stuff out here. No questions, yes? Excellent. We will keep everyone informed of our results.”