Omnipotence: Book I: Odyssey

by Geoff Gaywood

  “OK,” said Marcel. “Anything else?”

  Julia and Chang sat quietly considering the implications. They both looked up at each other at the same instant and frowned. The meeting broke up.

  14

  Into the Wormhole

  Hannah Cohen and Freddy Jones found themselves sharing a lift as they returned to their stations, both of them staring rather intensely at the floor. Freddy looked up and gave her a thin smile. “Are you scared?” he asked. “I am.”

  “Yes, I am,” she admitted with a sigh. “I thought about it when I was asked to do the mission, but then the challenge and excitement of working in alien conditions sort of carried me over the dam wall. Now this seems like a moment of truth and I really don’t know if human beings can survive this transition. I feel a bit out of it with all these gung-ho scientist and engineer types, and I miss my partner, his calmness and his wisdom.” She gave him a long, sad look.

  “Come up and have a coffee,” said Freddy. “Let’s chat.”

  They went into Freddy’s office and sat in big, soft chairs that almost swallowed them up. They talked about their childhoods – his in Wales, hers in Israel – so different in their environment, but so similar in being the only children of devoted parents. She listened to his stories of boyhood adventures and magical moments, told in an irresistible Welsh lilt, and her smile grew broader and broader. She talked of Hanukkah lights, of bearded uncles who told her fantastic stories, of her riotous military service and the pain of leaving home to study abroad. It was cathartic and just what they both needed. Finally they talked about the mission.

  “We are soldiers, Hannah; we are here to do our duty for mankind. We chose to accept and no one tried to hide the risks,” said Freddy, not with total conviction.

  “Yes, I know, and I wouldn’t change it. I see the anxiety in the eyes of my staff and I put on my most assured look of confidence and authority. I can convince myself when I’m doing my job. It’s not so easy when I’m alone.”

  “Yes, that’s just leadership 1A. We will go down fighting if we have to, we are well trained to. I don’t think about it much. I try to put my anxiety in the context that it is a natural consequence of breaking new ground. We must expect the unexpected, and it is the unexpected that requires the presence of us intelligent human beings. All very logical, but I need a hug sometimes.”

  They both laughed, got up and embraced. “Thanks, Freddy,” said Hannah and she turned to go.

  “What do you think of Commander Piccard?” He seemed to want to prolong their conversation.

  Hannah turned and looked at him, her head on one side. “I think she has been well chosen for her role. She’s analytical, courageous, even ruthless, and she believes in herself and in mankind. At the beginning I didn’t think she had the weight for the job, but now I see her exercising her authority with much more conviction. I would stand and fight with her if needs be. How do you see her?”

  Freddy blew out his cheeks. “Sometimes I think she needs a good cry, or perhaps a good fuck. I would like to think that she has the depth to engage with real people, not just professional robots, but I haven’t seen it.”

  Hannah laughed. “I think you are being too cruel. It’s her first command. She’s naturally concerned about maintaining distance. You are totally at home with your people in your farmyard, just as I am comfortable with my medical staff. She has a large crew, many of whom have vital skills she could not possibly have. She can’t be a mother to them as well!”

  “Yeah, maybe I need a mother,” said Freddy with a grin.

  “Count me out!” said Hannah, still smiling, and left.

  With the transmission time now at four and a half hours each way, Hannah’s communications with Jafar had become reports rather than conversations and a lot of natural intimacy was lost. This time the news that Hannah was about to deliver was so serious that she was glad to not have to face Jafar’s immediate response.

  “Well, Jafar my darling,” she began, “I have pretty momentous news for you. Firstly, Helmut Schindler, our chief biochemist, has been murdered in a fashion very similar to Kazarov, the Russian pilot, only he has been stabbed through the heart from behind. Colonel Bertin had found a discarded micro-syringe and Schindler was analysing its contents when he was murdered. He’s under tremendous pressure and keeps grilling me about what it could have contained, but it’s disappeared so I have no idea. Also a soldier, one of our more senior men, has gone missing while supposedly guarding Schindler.

  “I had a good chat with Freddy Jones, who runs the farmyard. He thinks the Commander is overwrought and needs a good fuck – how like a man! I think she needs a friend and perhaps it should be me. I’m looking for the right opportunity to get closer to her. I like her. She’s incredibly courageous and she uses her authority very sparingly and effectively, and completely without arrogance. She’s furious that there’s another security crisis now, at what turns out to be a very delicate stage of our mission. Everyone in the command team is very tense, but she refuses to be distracted. She says it’s Bertin’s problem, and her mission will continue as planned.

  “That, my darling, I can now tell you, is to traverse to a solar system which houses a habitable planet by means of an artificially induced wormhole.”

  Hannah paused, as if taking in the enormity of what she had just said for the first time.

  “Although it has remained a strictly guarded secret until now, this has already been done safely by an unmanned vehicle. We will of course be the first humans to do it, but the scientists on board are telling us that we won’t feel a thing.”

  Hannah allowed a grin to spread across her face.

  “I’m terribly excited about it, Jafar, and I think everybody on board feels that we are just so lucky to have been chosen for this mission.” Then, with a look of real concern on her face, “I do hope you understand that this had to be kept a secret, Jafar, and you won’t hear about it in the news until we come out the other side. Just wish me luck and think of me going faster and further than anyone has ever gone before. I love you!”

  When Jafar received this message some five hours later he just stared at the ebullient image on the screen before him and felt a lump in his throat. “Good luck, little Hannah-le,” he whispered. Then he delivered a loving and supportive response, which, he mused, would reach her perhaps some days later, or perhaps not …

  He stopped the machine and weighed his next words carefully.

  “The news here is not so positive,” he began. “There has been a missile attack on a meeting in San Francisco called to address the failure of the Hong Kong climate control conference. The Chinese President, the Japanese Prime Minister and twenty other senior politicians were killed, together with more than fifty leading scientists. Apparently the missile was launched off-shore, probably from a submarine, and no one knows who did it or why. According to our man on the spot, there was widespread looting of the damaged buildings and the police just shot the looters on the spot. It was absolute chaos. Global stock markets have crashed, the press is blaming everybody from aliens to religious extremists, and there have been riots against the establishment around the world.”

  The message was paused there, then continued a day later.

  “I’m in Dhaka now. The city is completely under water and 85 per cent of the country is flooded. The floating corpses of people and animals are everywhere. No one knows the death toll. A man came up to me and pushed two little children into my arms and then ran away. I took them back to the hotel to feed them but they wouldn’t let me take them inside and I had to give the doorman a huge bribe to let me in the back door with them.”

  At this point two dark, scared little faces appeared on the screen behind Jafar.

  “I’ve tried to find one of the relief agencies to take them but they are completely overwhelmed by the scale of this flood, even though it happens almost every year. I’ll never be allowed to take them back to Beirut – the city is overrun with refugees already – so
I’m going to stay here until I get this sorted out. The agency is no help, of course.” He sighed.

  “However,” he brightened up, “your cousin Hepsibah’s daughter Sally has given birth to healthy triplets in Berlin, so you’ll have an attentive audience for your stories of the fantastic when you get back. I love you very much.”

  His face on the screen looked immensely tired and sad as he signed off.

  * * *

  “This is Prometheus command. Booster rocket firing will commence in thirty minutes. All crew are to secure their stations and execute lock-down procedures. Electronic sign-off must be completed by 10.20 hours.”

  Click.

  Arun Dar stepped out of the body dryer, inspected his long, slender body, and slipped into his pilot’s uniform. The son of a general in the Pakistani army, Arun had always assumed that his place would be in the front rank of anything he chose to do. He had played both football and tennis at international level while cruising through his degree in astrophysics, and had cultivated the studied humility of an accomplished sports star. He truly worshipped his patrician mother and treated the girls who flocked after him with the greatest politeness and respect. Despite this immaculately polished exterior, Arun was a ruthless competitor, and, once provoked beyond a certain point, quite wild.

  On the flight deck Arun slipped into his ergo-couch, and grinned at his co-pilot, Sanam Ghorashian. She looked across at him and maintained a totally neutral expression. She thought him impossibly handsome, naturally elegant, quietly competent and somehow devoid of the typical bravado bullshit that she so much hated in male pilots. This was the first time that they would fly operationally together, and she wasn’t at all sorry that Kazarov was gone. They went through their checklist procedure almost at a whisper. Finally Sanam announced, “Ready to commence booster ignition.”

  There was thirty seconds’ silence. “Commence booster ignition sequence,” commanded the Flight Director. A low rumble could be heard from the back of the ship as it jerked forward, pinning them into their couches. Sanam was all business, checking the attitude and trajectory of the ship, its acceleration rate and velocity, engine performance and fuel burn constantly, looking for any signs of anomaly from the programmed flight performance. She retained total concentration for her 120-minute stint at the controls, then turned to her co-pilot. “It’s all yours, Arun, and she’s right on the button.”

  “Copy that, Sanam.”

  She turned and watched him, his long fingers moving across the controls as though he was playing a musical instrument. She watched his eyes as they searched the data screens, absorbing, calculating, confirming, with never the hint of a frown of concentration touching his smooth brow. She looked at his silky, coffee-coloured skin, his glossy black hair and his delicate, sculptured chin and she thought, ‘This is a man I would like to be close to.’

  Arun could see that her face was turned towards him in his peripheral vision, and it sharpened all his sensibilities. A flicker of a smile passed his lips and he moved his head as he went about his task in the slightly self-conscious way people do when they know they are being watched. There was some sort of pheromone interaction going on; he could feel it.

  As Prometheus reached the mouth of the wormhole she was dead centre and travelling at 3,200 km/second. The boosters were shut off and the blackness of the universe outside became tinged with blue. Arun turned towards Sanam and gave her a winning smile. “Now, my beauty,” he said, addressing no one in particular, “let us see what the Gods have hidden from us.” Sanam narrowed her eyes and briefly cast him as a God in her mind. ‘You won’t be hiding anything from me,’ she thought.

  * * *

  Shinji Yamamoto had called his entire team of fifteen IT engineers together in one meeting. Once they had settled he wasted no time in getting to the point. “Our video monitoring system is being hacked and manipulated in real time. We are going to clean up the system and upgrade the encryption. Billy and Ahmed will do the re-programming but I want each of you to carry out visual inspections of the video installations to check for tampering and bugging. Here is a list of the sectors each of you is to inspect.” He leaned forward and elaborately pressed the ‘send’ command on his phone. “I want to be notified the moment any anomalies are found.”

  “Are there going to be any changes to the automated data review processes?” Shelley Matthews wanted to know.

  “The rules have not changed, Shelley. Data confidentiality can only be overridden in an emergency which threatens the integrity of the mission.”

  “Uh-uh,” said Shelley. “Bertin is getting access. Please clarify.”

  “Colonel Bertin is the sole individual on the ship who has the authority to decide if there is a threat to the mission. He is not accountable to me…”

  “No, I bet he isn’t. I just wanna know whether our rights to privacy are being abused.”

  “Don’t be absurd, Shelley.” Yamamoto was getting irritated. “Everyone’s privacy is protected until such time as they have been shown to have broken the ISEA code of practice.”

  “Oooh, what are you getting up to, Shelley, that would surprise us? Naughty, naughty.”

  “Shut up, Ben!” Shelley was getting flushed. “Here we are, the vanguard of humanity, and we’re subject to the same old ‘Big Brother needs to know’ bullshit.”

  “If there is any abuse of privacy, I’ll be the first one to tell you about it and punitive steps will be taken to correct it. For the time being, however, the ship’s command has every right to have reliable information on who is doing what and where in the operational sphere and it’s our job to deliver it.” Yamamoto lifted both hands to signal the end of the discussion.

  Five minutes later he was on the phone to Henri Bertin. “Yes, we had one very vocal opponent in Shelley Matthews, but she’s always argumentative on privacy issues. She doesn’t fit the behaviour profile you gave me. Three of the others did.” He provided the names and sectors to which they had been assigned.

  “Thanks, Shinji,” said Henri. “Let’s put them on the close watch list.”

  * * *

  Henri selected two of his security detail to assist him in carrying out a systematic search of the annulus of the ship. They began with the farmyard sector at the nose, burning through the inner skin of the ship and installing access doors at strategic locations. It was tough and unpleasant work. The thick insulation on the other side of the inner shell responded to the heat of the blowtorches by producing pungent fumes. It was very cold inside the annulus and insulated protective clothing was required to search the area, which was unlit, included a lot of infrastructural machinery, and had not been designed to allow easy movement. By the end of the first day of work Henri was more convinced than ever that the annulus of the ship provided almost unlimited opportunities for hiding places for a group of insurgents. It would not have been difficult to construct quarters in there which could be secured and linked up to the ship’s utilities.

  ‘How many are there,’ he wondered, ‘and how much do they know about the workings of the ship?’ He badly needed some reliable intelligence, or just a lucky break. But the hacking of the IT monitoring system was a sophisticated operation which had to have had insider help. He shuddered when he thought how vulnerable the crew was against a ruthless internal enemy.

  * * *

  By the third day since entering the wormhole, the tail of the ship had adopted a suffused red glow, while the nose seemed to be bathed with soft violet. Prometheus had broken all known records for the velocity of a man-made object. The crew went about their business with a slightly crazed air reminiscent of The Flying Dutchman. While the physicist’s predictions were borne out that they would feel no discomfort despite their phenomenal velocity and escalating rate of acceleration, the crew were constantly eyeing the diagram of the ship’s progress towards the point of inflection on their monitors, as though they did not truly believe that they could bypass such an extreme cosmological anomaly without catastrophic conseque
nces.

  However, Prometheus continued on its course with serene stability. There was no detectable buffeting and no damage to the outer skin reported by the monitoring devices. One hour prior to passing the point of inflection, Sanam and Arun yielded the piloting controls to their team-mates – Deputy Commander Conradi, who had stepped in to replace Major Kazarov, and Tim Cochran, an American who was, to Sanam, the epitome of the ‘bullshit bravado air-ace type’.

  “Arun, come and watch the inflection point fly-by with me,” said Sanam as they stepped out of their ergo-couches.

  “Ah, Sanam, if I do that I shall miss it, because I shall be unable to take my eyes off you.” He seemed to have adopted a Bollywood accent for this line, leaving an air of oriental ambiguity.

  “Well, Arun, you’ll just have to make a special effort in the interests of science, won’t you?” and she took his hand quite firmly and led him out of the control centre. Their conversation on the way up to the crew quarter’s level was animated and loaded with innuendo. He, playing the wide-eyed innocent, she the boss, having everything her way, as usual. As she closed the door of her room behind him he stood there for a long minute, genuinely amazed by its lavish and exotic furnishings. Sanam stood behind him and felt her heart pounding. ‘Play it cool’ she said to herself.

  * * *

  At the other end of the ship, the two members of the Induced Gravity team who were on duty were settled back in their ergo-couches, when a well-known, friendly face entered. “Hi there! Have you come to share the fly-by with us? What’s the matter?!”

  There were two muffled cracks, then silence. The visitor moved quietly, crossing the induced gravity control room with a canvas bag, and entered the plant room. He was in there for barely ten minutes, then passed back by the two staring bodies in their ergo-couches, and left.