Sulu shook his head and let out a heavy sigh. Some people just don’t know when to quit.
“Phaser Array One and Two are targeted and ready,” [140] Akaar said, looking at Sulu expectantly. “We have detected functional weaponry near the vessel’s core. But if we destroy those weapons, a great many Neyel may find themselves floating home without a vessel around them.”
Sulu turned back toward Rand. “Send one more hai—”
Lojur interrupted. “Captain, the Neyel are firing at us again. Looks like a missile of some kind.”
Sulu turned back toward the viewscreen and in less time than it took him to blink, saw a bright streak headed directly at Excelsior.
“Coordinates are locked in,” Beauvois said.
“I’m all set here.” Docksey looked over at him. “So, how’s the new boy doing? You thought of a name yet?”
Beauvois shook his head. “No, we’re still mulling names over. How are the wedding preparations go—”
Docksey saw a bright light shining through the windows of the phaser bay, illuminating Beauvois and herself and all the others present so brilliantly that they seemed to be ashen bas-reliefs set into a gray stone wall.
The shield in front of the hull sparkled and cracked for a heartbeat, and then the hull itself blew inward as the Neyel missile suddenly expended its destructive energies.
No longer able to breathe, her lungs afire, Docksey surmised that the oxygen in the bay was igniting along with the Neyel incendiary device. But she could still see the gaping rent in the bulkhead, beyond which lay darkness and toward which the remaining air was blowing with gale intensity. She sensed dimly that her body was in motion, a straw in a hurricane.
Docksey tumbled in the endless dark for a cold eternity, her tears sublimating in the vacuum, along with her blood. Knowing she was dying, she thought of Lojur, and wished her intended happiness and peace. And she wondered if the emergency forcefields had clicked on in time to save [141] Beauvois, so that he might have an opportunity to see his newborn son.
Then the eternal night enfolded her.
“Shields are now at forty percent and holding, Captain,” Lojur said, still blinking from the brilliant explosion that had blanked out the main viewer.
“The forward sections of Deck Five were badly hit,” an ensign at the aft tactical station called out. “We lost some personnel along with the phaser power.”
No more, Sulu thought, gripping the sides of his chair nearly hard enough to snap something off. “Fire all weapons,” he said, his voice a low rumble.
Moments later, -the surface of the Neyel ship was dotted with explosions. A gout of flame and debris shot out into space from a hull breach near the vessel’s midsection.
Then the Neyel ship went completely dark and silent.
PART 4
SURVIVAL
Chapter 12
Thursday. 5 April 2063. 2:42 am
Zefram Cochrane found the bearded man’s story incredible. After all, he and his two companions just claimed they’d voyaged backward more than three centuries to save humankind from ravening hordes of cybernetic zombies.
On the other hand, they carried impressive tools and tech with them. Or at least it looked impressive.
And they said they wanted to help make the Phoenix fly.
The man who called himself La Forge was bent over the eyepiece to Cochrane’s telescope, peering into the clear night sky. He snapped shut an instrument of some sort, then straightened to face Cochrane.
“All right,” La Forge said, grinning. “Take a look.”
As if this is going to prove anything, Cochrane thought. He laughed as he approached the ’scope, a reaction no doubt fueled by the copious quantities of liquor he’d absorbed at the Crash & Burn alongside the beautiful Deena, or Deanna, or whatever the hell her name was.
“Well, well, well, what have we here?” he said as he bent his head toward the eyepiece. “Ah, I love a good peep show.”
The telescope displayed a crystal-clear image of a long, [146] sleek, graceful spacecraft, obviously the product of a culture whose technology far surpassed anything Cochrane had ever seen.
Now he felt fear. If he allowed himself to hope that this apparition was real, he knew he would be devastated beyond recovery when he finally discovered he’d been had.
Cochrane stood erect, facing the bearded man, who had identified himself only as “Commander Riker.” Like Deanna and La Forge, Riker watched him with an air of almost reverent anticipation.
“That’s a trick,” Cochrane said, before returning to the ’scope for another quick peek. The image, illusory or not, persisted. Maybe it’s real after all. Maybe their story about being from the future really is true.
He faced them again, still not entirely ready to let go of the armor of conservative skepticism that had sustained him through so many experimental setbacks and outright calamities. “How’d you do that?”
“It’s your telescope,” La Forge said.
Deanna finally spoke up, the effects of the alcohol she’d imbibed earlier evidently having worn off already. “That’s our ship. The Enterprise.”
Cochrane decided to allow for the possibility that their tale might be true. “And, uh ... Lily’s up there right now?”
“That’s right,” Deanna said, smiling.
“Can I talk to her?”
“We’ve lost contact with the Enterprise,” said Riker. “We don’t know why yet.”
How convenient. “So ... what is it you want me to do?”
“Simple,” Riker said without hesitation, his blue eyes flashing. “Conduct your warp flight tomorrow morning, as you planned.”
Apparently, they only wanted him to do what he’d already spent years—not to mention countless lives—trying to accomplish. Had they wanted to stop him, they could have [147] done so easily. Still, their exacting requirements—and the nervous glances thrown toward Riker by Deanna and La Forge—roused his suspicions.
“Why tomorrow morning?” Cochrane wanted to know.
Riker paused thoughtfully before answering, as though he’d just made some irrevocable decision. If he really is from the future, and has to decide just how much he can afford to tell me without screwing up the timeline, then maybe he has.
“Because,” Riker said at length, “at eleven o’clock an alien ship will begin passing through this solar system.”
That was the last thing Cochrane wanted to hear. “Alien. You mean extraterrestrials. More bad guys?” The effects of the alcohol he’d consumed earlier seemed all at once to multiply. With some effort, he took a seat on a flattened tree stump. He found himself hoping that it had been either these new E.T.s or the zombie cyborgs Riker had spoken of earlier who had been responsible for the destruction of the O’Neill habitats.
Otherwise the blame has to land squarely on me and my goddamned egomaniacal warp-drive project.
“Good guys,” Deanna said. “They’re on a survey mission. They have no interest in Earth. Too primitive.”
“Oh,” Cochrane said. It made sense, given how little remained of human civilization, even though the war itself already lay a decade in the past. Hell, if I were an alien, I wouldn’t even stop off here to take a leak.
Riker approached him, a fervor in his eyes that was both frightening and exhilarating. “Doctor, tomorrow morning when they detect the warp signature from your ship and realize that humans have discovered how to travel faster than light, they decide to alter their course—and make first contact with Earth, right here.”
Cochrane considered the patch of perfectly ordinary ground that surrounded the stump on which he sat. “Here?”
“Actually, over there,” La Forge said, gesturing a short distance to his left.
[148] “It is one of the pivotal moments in human history, Doctor,” Riker continued, pacing as he spoke, moving behind Cochrane. “You get to make first contact with an alien race. And after you do, everything begins to change.”
La Forge approached more c
losely, looking almost worshipful. “Your theories on warp drive allow fleets of starships to be built, and mankind to start exploring the galaxy.”
“It unites humanity in a way that no one ever thought possible, when they realize they’re not alone in the universe,” said Deanna. “Poverty, disease, war—they’ll all be gone within the next fifty years.”
Riker spoke again. “But unless you make that warp flight tomorrow morning—before eleven-fifteen—none of it will happen.”
They were treating him as though he were the savior of mankind, and it was making him distinctly uncomfortable. And yet ... their story made a bizarre sort of sense. After all, if they really were saboteurs from ECON or some other faction, they could simply have killed him and ended Project Phoenix without having to resort to subterfuge. But they seemed sincere in their stated desire to see him succeed.
Cochrane’s eyes lit from face to face before he spoke again. “And you people—you’re all astronauts, on some kind of star trek.”
La Forge’s expression became grave. For the first time, Cochrane noticed the unnatural-looking blue tint of his irises. “Look, Doc, I know this is a lot for you to take in, but we’re running out of time here. We need your help.”
Zefram Cochrane turned, leaving the future-people standing behind him. He gazed heavenward, his eyes seeking the lightless Trojan point around which the destroyed space habitats had orbited, now a silent graveyard in space. The people who’d lived and worked in those colonies had died trying to make his dream of warp flight a reality.
Perhaps now he could redeem those deaths, as well as [149] those pieces of his own soul that had died along with the O’Neills. For the first time since that horrible day, he felt eager to greet the future.
“What do you say?” Riker asked.
“Why not?” Cochrane whispered to the waxing half-moon.
“I’ll tell you why not,” Baruch said. “Because we have no idea who else might be listening in on us.”
Zafirah could hardly believe what she was hearing. Now, after more than four and a half years, Vanguard had finally achieved self-sufficiency, despite having been stranded two-hundred light-years from home.
And in defiance of the brutal reduction of its population by two-hundred and fifty-two souls when those snaggle-tusked aliens had tried to plunder the asteroid’s resources.
Zafirah had to admit that it had not been humanity’s better angels that had won the day then. Rather, it had been the suspicious natures of current Director Avram Baruch and the late engineer Kerwin McNolan—along with their hastily improvised explosive projectile weapons—that had convinced the tusk people to depart in search of easier prey.
But the raiders had never returned, and Zafirah and others—including head geneticist Claudia Hakidonmuya, the only other survivor from the initial first-contact party—reasoned that Vanguard had turned inward to lick its wounds long enough. After having lost nearly a third of the habitat’s population to the raid, after having worked so hard subsequently to survive and adapt to the harsh conditions of trackless interstellar space, it made sense finally to make restoring contact with Earth a priority. Even if the effort was destined to take centuries to come to fruition.
Surely Earth and its teeming, war-ravaged billions would still need help, even if that help took centuries to come to fruition. And the advanced technologies that sustained Vanguard in the interstellar dark could provide that help.
[150] “We’re not sending any signals toward Earth or anywhere else,” Director Baruch repeated, rising from behind the great desk he’d inherited from the slain Dr. Mizuki after Vanguard’s conservative, ultracautious majority had swept him into office. “The risk of calling attention to ourselves is simply too great. We’re still way too vulnerable out here.”
Zafirah threw up her left arm in frustration, a gesture which made her empty right sleeve flap like a banner being carried into battle. The missing limb, lost to the injuries she’d sustained during the alien raid, served as a constant reminder that a little distrust could be a very positive thing. Unless, she thought, it’s allowed to be taken to extremes.
Aloud, she said, “Using your logic, Avi, Earth should have been invaded a hundred years ago, when those old I Love Lucy broadcasts first started reaching the stars.”
“There’s always a first time for everything,” the morose Israeli said, shrugging. “We’ve already suffered one attack that nearly crippled us. We’d be fools to invite more of the same.” His unapologetic use of the word “cripple” prompted a phantom pain to shoot through her right sleeve.
Zafirah felt her anger at last beginning to boil over. “I’m so sorry to burden you with these radical ideas, Avi. But I thought we were supposed to be Earth’s last, best hope. After we got stuck out here, Director Mizuki made it fairly clear she considered that her life’s work.”
“And we all saw how short the rest of that life was.”
Zafirah regarded Baruch in silence. Only now did she really perceive how haggard and drawn he’d become over the past few years. His salt-and-pepper beard had gone almost white. The weight of responsibility for every human life inside this asteroid had rounded his shoulders, which reminded her of pebbles worn smooth in a riverbed.
Glowering, he gestured toward his office door. “I’ve got a lot of work to do, Zaf. And I’d appreciate it if you would get [151] back to work dealing with the first order of business—this colony’s continued survival.”
Zafirah left the director’s office in a daze, wandering aimlessly through the stone-floored corridors of the lower levels. She felt desolate, isolated. When had mere survival become life’s sole purpose? There had to be more. A line of Robert Browning, a ghost from her undergraduate days, sprang to mind unbidden: “If a man’s reach does not exceed his grasp, then what’s a heaven for?”
After perhaps an hour, her meanderings took her coreward, to the vast cylinder of zero-gee space that ran down Vanguard’s entire long axis. Her spirits were buoyed slightly by what she saw there.
A dozen or more children were flying, wheeling gracefully on their gossamer wings. Some of them seemed to be playing a water polo-inspired game with a ball. All were extraordinarily long of limb. Most of them were born after Vanguard had been cut loose from the rest of humanity. And thanks to their gene-mods, these children and their offspring would reach maturity far faster than their ungenengineered cousins back on Earth, speeding up the propagation of subsequent generations.
As the group drew nearer to the railing where Zafirah stood, she could see that some of the very youngest ones bore the unmistakable marks of futurity. As these children—scarcely more than toddlers—tossed an oblong airbladder to and fro, Zafirah noticed that they, too, were not only long-limbed, but also had opposable thumbs on their bare feet, a genetic trait that Claudia’s labs had lately made available to Vanguard’s newest parents, along with increased genetic variability—an absolute necessity with such a small breeding population—and enhanced resistance to disease, radiation, and temperature extremes.
A generation of humanity, one that had never lived on Earth, was already becoming uniquely adapted to the [152] high-stress, variable-gravity environment of a spinning asteroid. As always, Zafirah was both chilled and exhilarated by the sight of beings capable of using all their limbs for grasping with equal facility.
She remained certain of only one thing: These children would survive and prosper out here, and would no doubt carry Claudia’s genetic improvements even further in their own progeny, regardless of the scars the rest of the human species had borne since the Eugenics Wars of the previous century. Humanity would continue out here in some form or other, whatever adaptations the random, uncaring universe forced upon them. Even if its light were to be extinguished on Earth, mankind would spread its seed across the deeps of space. Homo sapiens celestis, the children of O’Neill, would survive.
But life aboard Vanguard has to be about more than mere survival, she thought as she watched the children arc a
nd turn in graceful flight. It also has to be about creating a future that’s worth surviving for.
Were the bedtime stories these children heard each night, and the prayers they offered to whatever gods they revered, to be filled with delighted anticipation of the unexplored wonders that the universe held in store for them? Or would they instead be reared on tales of ravening, bloodthirsty tusk-men?
The difference between truly living and merely enduring could very well come down to nothing more than that.
Chapter 13
Saturday. 9 August 2155
Sayyid al-Adnan assumed that the alarm was just another drill. After all, what were the chances of encountering a second alien raider ship during the ninety-seventh official Commemoration of the First Contact Massacre?
Of course, the reason the Dread Event should be memorialized so arbitrarily—once every approximately three-hundred-sixty-five-point-two-five twenty-four-hour intervals—made about as much sense to Sayyid as the bizarre, biped-oriented furniture some of the Oldsters still kept around in the high-grav Museum Levels.
Sayyid grasped the railings with his feet, thrusting his long prehensile tail behind him to provide a counterbalance as he swung himself down the tube—his grandfather had told him that the tube had housed an automated lifting-and-lowering device during the Age of Two-Handedness—toward the asteroid’s outermost high-grav layers.
It was unfortunate that so many of the colony’s key apparatus were still located at such uncomfortably intense grav-levels, but moving them coreward into the spinning asteroid’s null-grav regions would have required the installation of a prohibitive number of power relays. It also would [154] have run the risk of causing mass null-grav wasting among the Citizenry, as well as sealing the People off completely from the Outside, an eventuality that could prove as dangerous as welcoming into the colony more of the Tuskers who had slain the First Director and so many others.
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