Fear the Survivors

by Stephen Moss

  She felt them coming close. She felt it like fire on her skin, a growing warmth that she could feel, not as pain, for none of her sensors were so crude as to send such blunt signals as pain, but as pure, hot information, telling her every source and magnitude, instantly analyzed, its meaning and implications forecasted and presented directly to her cerebral cortex as knowledge. As the energy mounted, so did the feeling of power in her veins as ever more potent signals thrummed through her synapses. It was building to a surging crescendo, balanced, perfectly in tune. Supply and demand singing in harmony as the reactors went energy positive and started to fire. The feeling pounded through her, and even as her mind swam in perfect clarity with all the information coursing through her, the sense of it all drove her to something close to orgasm, sweat breaking out on her brow, her face and neck flushing as she lay, cradled in the Terminus station, some two miles from where her mind was sparking eight new suns to life at the center of New Moon One’s engines.

  Captain Harkness felt some echo of the life in his engines from the ship’s systems, and sensed as the eight massive engines cycled and notified him of their readiness. He felt as Birgit disengaged from each in turn, and handed them off to their various techs, turning each into separate entities so they could be managed by their respective onboard teams.

  As they came online, the captain flexed them and tensed his machine body, feeling it respond. It was almost time. Checklists filled as feelings of strength in his mind, his health was the ship’s tested newness, his breathing its fuel and life support systems, his eyes the far reaching sensors and onboard cameras that covered the hull, inside and out. A presence met him, stepping into his world from outside and greeting him. It was Birgit, linking in one last time from Terminus station, head of the ‘ground’ crew that had helped build and prepare New Moon One. Her checks had completed as his had: her team’s minds scouring the ship like dockhands were satisfied and signing off: and so they were ready.

  The countdown began as planned. The computers sought his approval and got it, a second surging feeling came as Birgit gave her approval and she was gone, a single message left in her wake. He would read it later.

  Birgit retracted her view as the ship came to life, the countdown running toward zero, and she engaged with Terminus’s external cameras and sensor suite to view the launch. Joining numerous others using the station’s eyes and ears, she watched as the spherical ship began to glow. It was just outside Terminus’s own orbit, sitting above it, and it would need to clear her range before beginning its descent. The eight cigar-shaped engines came to life in unison as the counter reached zero. Only mildly at first, Captain Harkness feeling his way before ramping up their power. Eight blue streaks began to resolve behind the ship. Tiny atomic particles accelerated to near light speed and catapulted from the ship to give their momentum to it. Such tiny masses, but fired with such monumental power that they began to drive the mighty ship forward, pulling ahead of Terminus’s orbit and starting to accelerate around Earth’s equator.

  His confidence building, the captain surged the power upward smoothly toward his operational maximum, the eight blue lines from his engines forming into sharp white blades, hot as supernovae. Inside the ship, twenty-three bodies were pressed into their gravity cradles as the ship thrusted forward. Pulling away at a rate of nine gravities, the ship was a hundred miles from Terminus in under a minute, travelling at a relative thousand miles an hour already.

  Varying the output from each of his engines ever so slightly, the captain began to curve the ship downward. He arced them smoothly toward the huge globe beneath them, even as the ship continued to gather speed, gravity adding to their flight now as they began their mad plummet into Earth’s gravity well. The accelosphere engineers began their preparations. It would come up fast now, and they would only have a brief window for the coming translation.

  From SpacePort One, Neal and a host of dignitaries and staff watched the ship turn earthward, and the tension began to mount. Silence was broken only by the regular report of the mission commander updating on speed and altitude, and the occasional heavy sigh as someone remembered to breath.

  The ship entered the atmosphere not on a ballistic trajectory, as it was not coasting downward, instead it was punching through the air like a cosmic cannonball, the wild blue flare of its engines overshadowed now by the fireball of our atmosphere wasting itself on the ship’s meter thick shielding. But even that thick shield could not stand too much more, for unlike previous spacecraft, or entering meteorites, New Moon One was not slowing, it was getting faster still, and the pressure and fire would only build until they rivaled the fire in the stellar cores of its eight engines.

  The moment came. They knew it would. They could see the timer ticking slowly to zero. But despite this, no one was quite prepared for it. With an intense suddenness, the fireball imploded, a shock wave resounding outward across the upper atmosphere as the source of that massive turbulence and heat vanished, quite literally into thin air. A vortex of smoke warped the upper atmosphere like an inhaled cloud.

  And then there was silence.

  They knew that somewhere the ship’s engines were still firing. They knew that the ship was, in fact, still coursing toward the earth, and even now beginning its ultrasonic flight straight through it. But for everyone in the control room, and in the many powerful offices monitoring the event, New Moon One had simply vanished.

  A new counter showed now, and the screen was already switching to a new view as the effects of New Moon’s abrupt departure wafted ethereally on the wind. Now the view went to a camera mounted on a StratoJet on the other side of the planet. The jet was circling high above the central Pacific Ocean, about three hundred miles north of the Marquesas archipelago, its pilot, Major Jack Toranssen, already in position for the next big step. He was waiting and transmitting a signal via humanity’s growing subspace tweeter network to audiences in SpacePort One, Terminus, the Research Group in their bunker in Japan, and a select few heads of state around the globe.

  - - -

  Complete blackness surrounded Captain Harkness and his team. Weightless and isolated, they watched their internal clocks and hoped their calculations were correct. They could have no way of knowing their location. They had no instruments capable of penetrating the void outside, for they were enveloped in a sphere that placed them outside the normal universe. They were passing through the seemingly dense core of the planet like sound through water, unencumbered, unnoticed, their presence muted but still vital, waiting to reenter the universe when they were safely clear of Earth’s fiery core. For now they were as ghosts. Ephemeral. Awaiting translation back into reality even as they harvested Earth’s massive gravitational well to slingshot them right through itself.

  Samuel listened to his systems. Even his subspace communications were silent, operating as they did in a different dimension again from the one he now found himself in, lost in the many layers of reality.

  With nothing else to do, they counted down.

  - - -

  Fourteen minutes after New Moon One had vanished from space, the majority of the most important and powerful people on Earth had returned from whatever task they had busied themselves with, and were once again routed to their various screens, mute and transfixed as the counter went to single digits.

  Jack circled the anticipated spot, his StratoJet flying at over sixty thousand feet and his cameras pointing higher still into the purple blackness of the exosphere. Countless models and experiments had led them to this precise time and place on the far side of the planet.

  The time came. Whether clear of Earth or not, this is when New Moon One would disengage its accelosphere. Acute cameras on Jack’s plane showed a lucky few hundred spectators the spot as it happened. Space seemed to warp and then explode outward as seven hundred tons of fusion-fired madness was reintroduced to the universe. A thunderclap was heard across a quarter of the planet as the shockwave buffeted the earth, but New Moon One was not waiting to s
ee the aftereffects of its rebirth. Catapulted outward at over seventy thousand miles per hour, Captain Harkness and his crew shot out away from Earth. Fired out like a cosmic cannonball, using Earth’s entire mass for gunpowder.

  They surged out from Earth, and aboard, Captain Harkness felt their course resolve now, not theory but certainty, a future they were now hurtling toward at ever increasing speed. Powering in a wide arc, they would now dip into the sun’s vastly more powerful embrace. They would not penetrate that massive orb as they had the Earth. Such extreme catapults as stars were reserved for achieving interstellar speeds. But New Moon One would veer inside Earth’s orbital path, so they could cut the corner on the orbit that would take us a full year, and in doing so they would catch up with their quarry from behind.

  And so the ship surged outward, like a blue missile spat from the planet’s very soul. Still accelerating, it soon outpaced the telescopes tracking it, until Birgit and her colleagues could only see the angelic blue flare of its engines.

  The crew, jubilant at their monumental achievement, settled in for the longest journey any human had ever undertaken, either in terms of time or distance, and Captain Harkness remembered the message left for him by Birgit as they departed. Opening it, he heard her voice in his mind. ‘God speed, Captain. You fly on the wings of the combined accomplishments of two races. A hundred light-years have been crossed to bring you the technology that powers your magnificent ship, and she is, without doubt, the most amazing thing humanity has ever built. Take her and enjoy her, Samuel. Take her out. And when you come back, bring Earth a New Moon.’

  Chapter 32: Landing Party

  Though Nick and Malcolm had never gotten more than a few feet above sea level during their crossing of the Caspian Sea, their landing in Azerbaijan was proving far rougher than that of Hektor and his team, a thousand miles to the north.

  The Turkmen fishermen they had co-opted had been both surly and dangerous looking, and the two men had been unable to get any real rest during the eight hours it had taken them to get across the inland sea. Combine this with the roughness of the crossing, and the lingering stench of rotting fish guts that pervaded every part of the ship, and you had the recipe for a most unforgiving voyage.

  Once in sight of land, the trip had only gone from uncomfortable to trepidatious.

  The coast of Azerbaijan appeared in the distance like a murky, smog-covered line, topping a choppy, dirty seascape. Ships of all sizes plied to and from the port city of Baku, which was Azerbaijan’s largest port, largest city, and capital. In the distance, they could see the occasional custom’s boat plying back and forth amongst the late morning shipping, looking for Iranian smugglers, local sturgeon poachers who hadn’t paid their dues, and any sign of whatever had so recently and effectively subjugated the Stannic Bloc across the sea to the east.

  They didn’t have the manpower to stop very many of the hundreds of fishing vessels moving in the harbor, but the Turkmen markings on Nick and Malcolm’s boat were a sure invite to investigate further, and Nick was becoming restless.

  “We need to get on to one of those local fishing boats,” said Nick in an aside to Malcolm.

  “How?” asked Malcolm. They were sitting on upturned plastic containers amidships, stained from the thousands of fish carcasses that had passed through them. Nick was facing the open door of the wheelhouse they sat next to, the captain at the wheel, clearly very aware of Nick’s presence. Malcolm sat with his back to Nick, facing aft, to where the ship’s three crewmen sat sullenly. Both the British men had their guns drawn.

  “We pull alongside one and commandeer it; get them to take us ashore, and then tie them up and make our way to a payphone or the embassy,” responded Nick.

  “What about these guys?” said Malcolm, waving his gun at the Turkmeni, “Won’t they go to the local authorities once we get off the ship?”

  “Only if they want to spend the next few nights, or possibly longer, in jail answering questions about what they were doing in Azerbaijani waters in the first place. No, once we’ve pointed our guns elsewhere they’ll turn around and get the hell out of here.”

  “Assuming they don’t run us down in the meantime,” said Malcolm warily.

  Nick seemed to ponder this a while, nodding thoughtfully as he did so. Seeming to come to a conclusion, he stood and stepped to the side of the wheelhouse, scanning the horizon.

  - - -

  Rizvan Asadov had been fishing for forty years. Not constantly, though it felt that way some days. Poaching of the prized sturgeon had always been a problem, but in recent years it had gone from nuisance to epidemic, as the poachers had started becoming brazen in the face of the increasing willingness of local officials to turn a blind eye.

  Now they even used dynamite or homemade explosives in glass bottles, dropped into shallow waters, to obliterate everything below. After siphoning off the sturgeon they prized, they left a swathe of destruction in their wake, and they were fast destroying whole ecosystems.

  Rizvan, today out with his brother-in-law Gulshan for purely recreational purposes, was increasingly frustrated with the lack of fish to catch. This was ironic, as Mr. Asadov was, in fact, one of the very parasites who had taken bribes to look the other way in his days working for the Environmental Ministry. He had reconciled his actions as him being part of a greater whole, and by saying that the poaching hadn’t been as bad when he was doing it as it was now. Such is the mindset of the institutionally corrupt.

  For his part, Gulshan, Rizvan’s sister’s rather dimwitted husband, was happily humming in the back of the boat, immune to the futility of their venture. But it was Gulshan, not Rizvan, who spotted the old fishing trawler motoring their way. He stared for a while, wondering why the ship was coming so close. But as the ship continued to come on, Gulshan eventually expressed his confusion.

  “ahhmm, Rizvan?” he said in a puzzled tone. Rizvan only grunted in response, his eyes on his line as it bobbed in the water. This is far too deep, we will catch nothing here, thought Rizvan. But the shallows that had been so fruitful in his youth were all but barren now.

  “ahhhmmm, Rizvan?” said Gulshan again, more loudly now.

  “What, Gulshan?” said Rizvan impatiently, still not looking up, even as the sound of an old diesel engine impugned on his sullenness.

  Gulshan went to speak again, but went silent, the sight of the dirty but clearly very pale man on the side of the boat coming alongside them throwing him off completely. Eventually, the noise of the approaching boat broke through Rizvan’s sullen mood, and he looked up, his expression quickly turning indignant at the sight of the fishermen, then angry at the sight of the Turkmen writing on the side of the rickety ship.

  His mood changed once more when the Western-looking man leaning over the rails of the boat revealed a small but expensive-looking gun, and pointed it down at the two surprised-looking Azerbaijanis.

  - - -

  The transfer was tense, all parties on the verge of violence from start to finish. Nick had taken Malcolm’s point about the disgruntled captain of the larger Turkmen fishing boat, and the chance that he might try to run them down once they were aboard the smaller vessel. Though that was unlikely now that they were in sight of the shore, the chance that they still had a shotgun or some other weapon below decks that they might produce once Nick and Malcolm were in the smaller fishing boat was an eminent possibility. So they had ordered the Turkmen captain down into the smaller fishing boat first, followed by Malcolm, with a promise that the fishermen could pick up their captain once they were clear.

  The result was a decidedly cramped and very hostile little fishing Dhow, motoring away from an even angrier Turkmen crew in the dusky afternoon air. The Turkmen captain was mumbling unpleasantries at the two Englishmen, while the two Azerbaijanis sat in mute silence. Malcolm couldn’t help but feel guilty for taking the Turkmen so far from home. But in the light of what he and Nick were facing, the scale of the Turkmen’s plight was appropriately diminished.

>   Once they were a quarter of the way toward the shore, and closer still to the discombobulated fleet coming to and from the busy port, Nick indicated with his gun for Rizvan to slow down. Once they were lulling once more on the swell, he gestured for the captain to get into the water. The man hesitated. Partly concerned about being shot in the back, partly concerned about being left there, and partly resisting the urge to believe it all might actually end peacefully.

  But peaceful it was. Once the captain was in the water, Nick waved for the Turkmen boat to approach, and then ordered Rizvan to get going for the shore, waving his gun liberally to emphasize the point.

  “Keep an eye on the Turkmen boat,” Nick said to Malcolm. “After all this, I wouldn’t want his crew to leave him there and make off with his livelihood.”

  Malcolm looked mildly alarmed at this thought, and glanced back at the Turkmen vessel, and its captain flailing in the water, as they came to pick him up. But the crew seemed to get their captain inboard with little trouble, and the two boats parted. The Turkmen were full of reasons to hate the Englishmen, but their desire was superseded by a baser survival instinct. Turning briskly, they headed back out to sea.

  In the end, Nick and Malcolm’s landing in Azerbaijan was as bumpy as it could have been. They motored along the shore for some way looking for a relatively deserted spot, passing under the long, low bridge to Gum Island off the coast of Baku, and the stilt caviar factories that branched off it. The bridge creaked with foot traffic and puttering carts, ferrying their precious cargo ashore, the rusting antiquity of them juxtaposed against the value of their cargo.

  Nick shivered as the cool sea breeze washed through him. They were grimy. Tenseness had become their everything, and they were exhausted on a primal level, functioning now on adrenalin alone. As they finally motored toward the brown sand beach, Nick and Gulshan leapt from the boat, the water like an icy baptism around Nick’s feet and calves, bracing and reviving him. They were close now, so close to safety. Malcolm looked at Nick. The man was a husk, but somehow he was still awake, and his eyes still brimmed with violence and an inherent threat.