Omnipotence: Book I: Odyssey

by Geoff Gaywood

  There was silence for a while. “No other ideas?” asked Arlette. No one had any.

  “OK,” said Arlette. “Let’s look at offence. What do we do when we conclude that that they are hostile?”

  “We get ourselves smartly around the other side of Ceres and hit them with the snowball,” said Genes.

  “I think that’s about right,” said Cobus, “although the window we can hit them in diminishes as our asteroid gets closer. Right now we can play games with it, but we can’t turn it around.”

  “I think we all understand that, Cobus,” said Arlette, “and obviously we need to refine its path as we get an exact fix on Dark Shadow’s location.”

  “Yes, we know that we can do that with a high degree of accuracy with the hardware we landed on the asteroid. Now it’s just three-dimensional trigonometry,” said Cobus.

  “Genes, are you up for this?” asked Arlette. “It’s going to be your hand on the controls.”

  “Right up my alley, Commander,” said Genes.

  Dark Shadow entered orbit around Ceres, visible on the horizon but not close, and at a slightly higher altitude. The two craft notionally eyed each other, in fact assessing their opposite number’s offensive capability. To the onlookers on Prometheus, Dark Shadow looked very menacing indeed. It was indeed cigar-shaped, but seemed to be bristling with spikes and towers of all descriptions. After several minutes of systematic scanning, Arlette had the light show switched on, and the external colour of Prometheus progressed slowly from blue through all the colours of the spectrum three times, finally stopping at green. There was no reaction. The process was repeated. Still no reaction. It was repeated a third time…

  There was a massive crash somewhere amidships and a huge lurching jolt. Prometheus began to turn a slow cartwheel and, with its loss of orbital speed, to dip down towards Ceres.

  Induced gravity failed, then pressurisation failed.

  “Isolate sections 3 and 4!” yelled Arlette. Air pressure stabilised but did not recover. The crew in the control centre fought to get into their restraints as loose equipment crashed around and showers of debris hit them.

  “Stabilise this tumble, Genes!” she shouted.

  “I’m trying, Christ I’m trying!”

  The external cameras began to pick up the ominous glow of ionising air as Prometheus plunged deeper into the atmosphere of Ceres.

  There was a jolt as Genes fired one of the boosters and the cartwheel seemed to slow, but then it went into reverse and the whole structure started to groan with the heat and stress that it was never designed to withstand.

  A weird screeching sound began to permeate the ship as the protective tiling on the outside overheated and began to tear off.

  “We’re going down! We’re going down!” shouted someone across the control centre.

  Arlette looked at the chaos on the control panel, clenched her fists, and in utter terror screamed:

  “GOD SAVE US!!!”

  But something in her head extracted some data from somewhere, for suddenly she shouted to Genes, “Left-hand booster, 70 per cent, 15.23.36, eighteen seconds!”

  In among the utter confusion that prevailed, Genes recognised this as an entirely coherent instruction and executed it, although neither the boosters nor any other component of the propulsion system were ever intended for use other than in deep space. Seven seconds later, the left-hand booster fired at 70 per cent of full power for eighteen seconds. Prometheus stopped tumbling and lurched sideways on to a new path, for she was now bouncing off the atmosphere rather than ploughing into it. The screeching persisted for a while and then began to subside. The navigator lifted his head and stared at his console in disbelief. “We’re going back into orbit,” he said, and tears began to roll down his cheeks.

  Arlette fought to regain her composure. She had cracked but by some miracle her intuition had come to her rescue. Intuition? Where had that data come from? Well, she had no time to dwell on that. Her ship was critically damaged and exposed to a merciless enemy. She had only one card to play.

  “Genes! Total focus on the asteroid!” she shouted.

  “We’re not yet stable!” he shot back.

  “Fuck stability! The asteroid!” she screamed.

  Genes turned his attention to the path of the asteroid that was approaching Ceres and carrying the direction control parasite that Cobus had landed on it many weeks ago.

  All the data was there. He ran the algorithm.

  “2.7 degrees. Hell, that’s tight, but still within limits!” he said to himself as he concentrated his mind on the instruction that was about to be issued.

  “Yeah!” he said and released it.

  On the strange little frozen world hurtling through space, equipment clicked and seismic events ensued. The asteroid minutely altered its course as it approached the blue globe of Ceres and began to touch the upper limits of its atmosphere. The watchers on Prometheus saw it streak past below them, tearing an orange gash in the blue and then ripping up the dark side of the planet.

  Slowly, slowly the nose of Dark Shadow appeared above the black disk of Ceres and the morning light of Omega 16 touched it for an instant.

  Arlette, her fists clenched, eyes and mouth wide open, watched as the orange streak curled upwards and ever closer to the horizon of the planet. “Yes, YES, YES!!!”

  The orange streak expanded into a savage ball of fire as it hit the massive ship, then retreated, tossing off fragments of the broken intruder in its wake.

  Dark Shadow was gone.

  30

  War Games

  Genes closed his eyes and exhaled. “Tim, sort this thing out please,” he called across to the pilot.

  Tim Cochran took control and Prometheus went through a little jig of direction and attitude corrections. A few minutes later he reported, “Prometheus is in stable orbit. Good morning, everyone!”

  Arlette reeled off instructions to her lieutenants.

  “Helen. Restore pressurisation to one bar and get me a catalogue of leak locations.”

  “Dima. Dima, are you there? Good. Are the rings OK? Good. Get me back 1G. Well, fix it.”

  “Benny. Damage report. Yes of course you’ll have to go outside. Put all your people on it.”

  “Henri. Get out there and find out what hit us. Work with Benny.”

  “Hannah. Get the paramedics to look for survivors in and around the sealed-off sections. And give me a body count.”

  “Genes. Give me a propulsion system integrity report. No, stay here and delegate.”

  Henri Bertin did not like wearing a spacesuit. He felt clumsy and vulnerable and he hated having to delegate responsibility for on-board security, even for just an hour or so. As he emerged from the airlock he felt something akin to vertigo as he anxiously sought out the anchor for his tether and clipped it in place. He clambered up the hull of the ship to where there was a huge dent in the side, some twenty metres across, just about level with the clinic inside. Gas was leaking out from a multitude of punctures and condensing into little clouds. There was no sign of an explosion, nor of burning of any kind. Just a big, round dent. Benny caught up with him and they both hung there in space, looking for evidence of some kind.

  Finally Benny said, “They’ve been playing billiards with us.”

  “Yes,” said Henri. “I don’t understand. They must have sophisticated weapons. Why would they hit us with a solid object?”

  “That’s for you to figure out,” said Benny. “I need to get back inside to repair the skin and stop the leaks.”

  When they had got back through the airlock and taken off their spacesuits, gravity had been restored, but the air pressure was being kept low to keep losses down. Benny dispatched a team to fix the leaks and went to confer with Arlette. Henri climbed into the annulus of the ship to see if there was anything inside that might throw some light on what had hit them. There was not. He went back to his office and sat thinking for a while, partially to recover from the effort of moving around in the
low-pressure atmosphere, and partially because he was looking for inspiration. Finally he got up and went to talk to Genes Clayton in the control centre.

  Genes frowned. “Weird,” he said, “but then it did the job, didn’t it?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Henri. “No one could expect this kind of ship to survive if it fell into an atmosphere. But why would they carry such a primitive weapon? It had to be a catapult of some kind.”

  “Naw,” said Genes. “I think we were hit by a space-age cannonball fired from an electromagnetic gun, and I think they probably used it because it doesn’t leave a heat trace like a rocket-powered missile. It gave them an element of surprise and it was enough. Finito.”

  It was a reasonable explanation and Henri decided to adopt it as a credible interim theory and to concentrate on the deeper implications of the attack.

  He called Cobus. “Any sign of activity in LDST 2?” he enquired.

  “Nothing,” said Cobus, and then, as an afterthought, “Shall I wake the satellite up and test it?”

  “I think that would be wise in the circumstances” said Henri, beginning to feel uneasy.

  He was not surprised when Cobus called back a few minutes later, a worried tone in his voice. “It’s not responding,” he said. “I can’t even get it to acknowledge my call.”

  “In that case I think you’d better look at the signal history in that part of the sky over the last week or so. I’m afraid you may find that there’s been quite a lot of activity.”

  “OK,” said Cobus.

  He was back again after a few minutes. “You were right. There’s another alien satellite there and it has been spewing out data in all directions.”

  “There you go,” said Henri. “It was easy enough for us to knock out their satellite and replace it with ours, so we shouldn’t be surprised that they – probably Dark Shadow – knocked out ours and replaced it with one of theirs again. Well, now that Dark Shadow is gone,” he went on, “let’s knock out theirs again and replace it with one of ours.”

  “OK, I’ll get to it,” said Cobus.

  ‘That puts a new complexion on things,’ thought Henri. ‘If we could see them just before the asteroid hit them, they could see us. That probably means that back in Andromeda they will know that we survived even though Dark Shadow did not. They will also know that the asteroid strike was no fluke. They would have been tracking it as it went behind Ceres, convinced that it would go harmlessly off into space, and then, surprise, surprise, the next time they see it, it’s coming straight for them! Hardly coincidental! Merde and merde!’

  He felt the same feeling as he had felt when summoned before the head teacher at school in Haiti after he had written something very uncomplimentary about her on the wall of the boys’ room. Were teachers really smart enough to recognise his writing? Apparently they were – he hadn’t really thought that through when he did it.

  Retribution was likely to be rather more severe than a whack on the wrist this time, though, he thought grimly. But was there already another Dark Shadow, or perhaps multiple Dark Shadows, in the Omega 16 system, or was Prometheus now alone? If they were alone, were they being watched?

  A thought occurred to him. He called Cobus again. “Can the mission,” he said.

  “Colonel?”

  “Abort the mission. I’ve changed my mind.”

  “But we’re already in countdown. It’ll…”

  “Abort the mission immediately!”

  “OK, Colonel, will do,” replied Cobus. “Should I can the replacement satellite as well?”

  “Yes,” said Henri, “at least for the time being.”

  “Can I ask why?”

  “Yes,” said Henri. “My primary concern now is to know whether there are any more alien spacecraft in the Omega 16 system. If there are, we can expect them to be in communication with or via their LDST 2 satellite. I want you to keep monitoring its communications and tell me if it is exchanging any data with another entity inside the Omega 16 system, or down LDST 2, or both. We can’t devise a strategy until we have that intel.”

  “Understood,” said Cobus, “but I can tell you now that the LDST 2 satellite is quite obviously looking for Dark Shadow,” he went on. “It’s sending out repeat messages towards us periodically, and it’s not getting a response.”

  “That’s good news,” said Henri. “Let me know immediately if there is any change.”

  “OK, but if you’re concerned that there may be other alien craft around, should I corral another asteroid from the belt?”

  “Absolutely, yes,” said Henri.

  Reparations to Prometheus went on around the clock. There was no serious structural damage but a lot of internal equipment had been destroyed. The most extensive repair work was to replace the protective tiles on the outside skin that had been lost or damaged by the impact and the subsequent burn through the upper atmosphere of Ceres. This was tedious and exhausting work because it had to be conducted in spacesuits, but for those involved there was one lasting impression: Prometheus was one tough spaceship.

  After two days the interior of the ship had returned to normal and routine resumed. Arlette called for a strategy meeting with her aides, who now regularly included Genes, Hannah and Cobus as well as Julia, Henri and Marcel.

  “Before we start,” she said, “I would like us to celebrate the fact that we incurred no fatalities in the attack, although we still have two of our medical staff in a serious condition due to oxygen deprivation. I want to commend the entire crew for their courage and bravery.” She did not mention Genes, but she looked at him as she said it.

  “Right. Let’s start with security,” she said. “Henri, should we continue on yellow alert? What threats does Prometheus face now and how do you rate them?”

  “Yellow alert should stay in place,” replied Henri. “The satellite we put in place to monitor movements in LDST 2 has been silenced, and a new alien satellite was active there prior to our first sighting of Dark Shadow. It is almost certain that all events up to the destruction of Dark Shadow are known in Andromeda, and to any other alien ship currently in the Omega 16 system.”

  “There are others?” asked Julia in horror.

  “We have no indication that there are any, but we cannot rule it out,” said Henri. “Cobus, can you please elaborate?”

  “Ja”, said Cobus. “We have been looking at the signal records of the alien satellite at LDST 2 and we found that it has been in regular contact with Dark Shadow and with a source at the other end of the wormhole. Right now it is not getting a response to its calls to Dark Shadow, and it is not communicating with anything else in the Omega 16 system. That’s encouraging, but it doesn’t mean that there aren’t any more alien ships in the system. We can find no record of communications between the satellite and Dark Shadow before it started to move either, so there could be other Dark Shadows out there, waiting for instructions.”

  “Is that the scenario we have to live with?” asked Marcel over the video link.

  “For the time being, yes,” replied Cobus, “but the risk diminishes with time if we detect no contacts between the satellite and another source in the Omega 16 system.”

  “So, Henri, are we still on a war footing?” asked Arlette.

  “Yes,” said Henri flatly. “Dark Shadow will have been tracking the incoming asteroid while in orbit around Ceres, and will have calculated that it would miss them. Even if they only had sight of it for a few seconds before it hit them, they will have assumed that the only reason that it could have changed its path would be that we had manipulated it. We have to assume that that information went back to Andromeda, and that it could only be viewed as an act of war.”

  “Well,” said Julia, “they can hardly be surprised since they tried to blow us out of the sky first.”

  “Technically that’s not correct, Julia,” said Henri. “They actually hit us with a solid projectile of some sort which was intended to knock us out of orbit. It’s a fine point, I know, but they
apparently wanted the atmosphere of Ceres to destroy us.”

  “Why would they make that distinction?”

  “Perhaps it was intended to be a legal distinction?” suggested Marcel. “If there was no missile heat-trace record, they might claim that a malfunction on Prometheus had caused it to crash into the atmosphere.”

  “Who’s going to listen to a story like that?” Julia wanted to know. “Some intergalactic court of justice?”

  “Perhaps that’s not as far-fetched as it sounds,” said Arlette thoughtfully, “but I accept Henri’s conclusions. We must be extremely vigilant of any alien communications traffic. Cobus, make sure we have an automatic alarm system to pick up any changes in the comms pattern out there.”

  “Now, before we tackle the issue of how we are going to pre-empt any further aggression from these aliens,” Arlette went on, “Marcel, how is the security situation on Ceres?”

  “Rather quiet,” he replied. “We’ve stopped shooting at LFIs when they approach us at night because we’ve learned that they do less damage when they’re not full of bullets. We did come across a shameless pair of giant scorpions mating – definitely not for the faint-hearted. Oh, and Giuliano got bitten by a crab in the kitchen. That’s about it,” he concluded.

  The others allowed themselves a chuckle.

  “Alright, let’s return to the issue of our survival,” said Arlette. “How do we respond when we detect another alien craft in the Omega 16 system?”

  “Well,” said Genes, “we could always appeal for divine intervention, like last time.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Yeah. You asked for help from the almighty and he delivered. That’s my take on it anyway.”

  “You’re not serious?”

  “Well, I’m kind of curious about that instruction you gave me,” went on Genes. “The craft was tumbling and spinning at the same time and its velocity was increasing. The temperature on the skin was rising and the air density was changing. That’s quite a tough set of parameters to input into a sophisticated mathematical model. To do that in your head and pull out an answer which had to predict the exact attitude of the ship at a particular instant when a certain amount of power from a particular booster would correct everything and push us back into orbit, well that, lady, generates more respect in me than I never had for no deity.”