No one visited Myka and Sendra after they had been given a meal, and it became obvious that they would probably spend the night in the cave with guards posted outside.
As the sun went down, they discovered why the inhabitants wore warmer clothing than the Kiri normally did. After many nights at sea, they had acclimatised to colder conditions than the tropical climes of their home, but as dusk turned to night, the cold ground penetrated their bodies and kept them awake. The guards were changed at midnight and against their best hopes, Myka and Sendra found them very vigilant. Only later did they learn that failure to keep them prisoner would have been punishable by death. By the time morning came, Myka and Sendra had been forced to huddle together to keep warm.
They awoke to grey light outside. A woman brought them food but didn’t enter the manmade cave; instead she gave it to one of the guards outside who brought it in to them. No one spoke or displayed any empathy. This was all completely alien to both of them, as on their island home they had never known hostility, and being kept prisoner was an experience beyond their ken. In fact, the whole nature of their interaction with this community was even more foreign to them than Elvene’s visitation from beyond the stars.
During the night Myka had dreamt of making love to Elvene, and when he awoke he was firstly disoriented then depressed to be reminded of where he was. It was like the dream had been his life and the awakening reality was the nightmare. But after the initial sense of emotional pain the dream had resurrected, he found it also provided him with the resolve he needed for survival and escape.
14. Abandoned
ROGER HAD MIXED FEELINGS WHEN HE FIRST LEARNED that Alfa had returned to Base without Elvene. It almost certainly meant that she was dead, yet perversely it also provided the slimmest hope that she might have survived. He couldn’t rein in his impatience to interrogate Alfa, yet at the same time he tried to suppress any optimism that arose unbidden to the surface of his thoughts.
He learned all this, of course, before Alfa had even docked. What the Corps referred to as Base was a space station: a man-made satellite orbiting a planet that had been seeded to produce life. This was genetic engineering on a huge scale, but not having the millions of years available to produce the evolution of earth, a number of isolated ecosystems were developed and then cross-populated to produce variety and competition. Modelling allowed them to predict which chaotic systems would achieve equilibrium and which ones would self-destruct, but chaos was the key rather than the exception. This was humankind playing God to survive in a post-Earth environment. The planet, around which Base orbited, was called Terra UY1216c, which was shorthand for the coordinates needed to find it. There were of course more than one Terra and they were always referred to by their navigation nodes, as that was what distinguished them, and, of course, was all you needed to know if you really wanted to find one of them.
Engineering evolution had also been applied to machines and robotic systems, which is how the marauders had developed and then become renegade machines. They were originally developed as surrogate troops or drones; their speciality being search and destroy missions. But their evolutionary programming eventually identified humans as their only technological rival and so began a technological war between the two groups as if they were rival species. Because space allowed them to exist in isolation to humans, they had never been fully eradicated, and the more determined humans were to exterminate them the more warlike and predatory they became in their own behaviour. Roger, like many people in his position, and with the perfect vision of hindsight, wondered how all those responsible had not seen it coming.
The space station itself was by no means a small satellite and in fact was bigger than a good number of asteroids. It was effectively a large city and even contained an ecosystem of its own with plants, insects and bacteria. For those who used it as home, it was seen as an island tethered by gravity to the mainland of Terra, albeit a small island. People became attached to it in the same way that previous generations had become attached to cities on their original planet, Earth.
When Alfa docked, he had to go through a thorough quarantine check before anyone could enter. Although the process was not lengthy, it didn’t improve Roger’s patience.
‘Let me know as soon as access is available,’ he ordered from his workstation.
He had not moved from his seat, yet his mind had already travelled to the Kiri planet and back again. He replayed in his head the last communications he had had with Alfa before the ship had gone landside with Elvene and so created a chasm that could not be bridged, either then or now. At the time, he thought the chasm was death itself, and he had reconciled himself to that since his return to Base. But with Alfa’s return, the uncertainty nagged at him like a recurring dream. In fact he had dreamt of Elvene’s return on more than one occasion, but this time he had to remind himself that he wasn’t dreaming, and much worse than that, Elvene was not here.
Roger made his way by airborne car to the dock and waited outside an airlock until clearance was given. With a hiss, the transparent doors gave way and Roger entered the lock. He faced Alfa’s black-nosed body which was surrounded by metal decking as if it was floating in a bath of mercury.
‘Alfa, this is Roger. I request permission to enter.’
‘I recognise you, Roger. Permission granted.’
Alfa’s door opened as a gangplank and Roger walked aboard; the gangplank closed behind him.
Roger looked around at the familiar surroundings and for a moment he thought he could even smell Elvene, but he knew it was a trick of memory rather than anything she had left in the air. Rather than sit in the pilot’s chair he sat in a visitor’s chair provided by Alfa.
‘Okay, Alfa, take me through everything that happened from when you left atmosphere with my ship until Elvene left you, and just jump through the boring bits.’
Alfa knew what was boring to humans from experience, as nothing was boring to a machine. ‘I can only assume, sir, that what is boring to you is the same as what is boring to Elvene.’
‘Yes, run with that assumption unless I interrupt you.’
‘Very well, sir.’
Roger suddenly found himself in space above the Kiri planet; he could see the space battle taking place in front of him, the two escorts and his own ship, a phalanx of marauders approaching them. He heard Elvene as a disembodied voice sitting in her pilot’s chair.
He was as surprised as Alfa obviously was when she asked him about the water ballast. But then she made her evasive manoeuvres and outsmarted her pursuers, using the ice from the ballast as a weapon.
They entered the ocean and then ensued their cat and mouse game with the marauders’ underwater sensors, which Alfa won. There was the encounter with some underwater creature that tried to eat them and he heard the fear in Elvene’s voice, but Alfa, of course, was emotionally unaffected and knew exactly what to do, as if he was eaten by underwater monsters every other day.
This was immediately followed by her consultation of the map and her choice of destination so Roger knew exactly where she disembarked. Then there was their final conversation, which Roger asked Alfa to replay, because for some reason he believed that this conversation contained the secret of her failure to return. Before Roger had joined the Corps he had been an investigator; what previous generations had referred to as a detective. It was his speciality and his talent. Like all detectives, he believed intuition and instinct was as important as sheer hard-slog analysis.
The conversation also intrigued him because Alfa didn’t challenge her when she told him to return without her. He wondered if Alfa’s attachment programming was slipping or had even failed. Attachment had been reinforced in all AI systems, generations ago, following the marauders original mutinous behaviour, and it was still a contentious point amongst experts. He found himself, against his own better judgement, feeling relieved that Alfa couldn’t read his thoughts. Ever since the seminal Clarke-Kubrick story from the 20th Century, 2001: A Space Odyss
ey, people had been paranoid about thinking aloud in front of cognisant machines.
Roger smiled to himself in recollection that Elvene was the exception in that regard. She argued that either a machine was on your side or it wasn’t and only a cretin couldn’t tell the difference. She said that humans were far more likely to betray you than a machine, and even if a machine let you down, it was invariably the result of human error. Roger would have agreed, yet he readily admitted to himself that his behaviour didn’t match his convictions.
Then, as if Alfa could indeed read his thoughts, he broke the silence. ‘What are you thinking, sir? Perhaps I can help you.’
But Roger knew it was really a cue that he had further information he thought might be pertinent. ‘Perhaps you can. Firstly, why didn’t Elvene send a quantum signal?’
There was a pause, as if Alfa was thinking. If he was human, one would assume that he was making up an excuse, but Roger knew that he was going back over his memories to find if it had been considered and rejected. Finally he answered, ‘She didn’t discuss it with me, sir.’
‘So why didn’t you send a quantum signal?’
This time Alfa didn’t hesitate. ‘We weren’t lost, sir. You knew where we were.’
‘Actually, we thought you were dead. Both of you.’ Roger silently cursed that he hadn’t sent someone to confirm their destruction, but then he remembered the battle situation and that he hadn’t been in command. Still, he struggled with Elvene’s strategy. ‘Tell me, why did Elvene leave you to fend on her own? Or didn’t she discuss that either?’
‘Correct, sir, she didn’t. But I can conjecture.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Together we couldn’t survive the marauders. She knew that we could only evade them if we were technologically invisible and silent.’
‘But you could have done that together.’
‘Unlike humans, marauders have infinite patience, eventually we would have had to break cover.’
‘But she knew that eventually she would be killed by them on her own.’
‘Perhaps. Elvene is not always logical in life and death situations.’
‘That’s quite an insight, Alfa.’
‘It’s an observation, sir.’
Roger chuckled; Alfa would note the difference. An insight was a deduction and an observation was simply his experience of Elvene.
‘But she couldn’t possibly escape. How many marauders were there?’
‘Six, sir.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘It is how many attacked us the first time. It is her value; she is worth six marauders.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘Neither did she until I told her.’
Roger raised a mental eyebrow at that comment. ‘So she left you, knowing she was going to die.’
‘Not necessarily, sir.’
‘Go on.’
‘She could convince them of her death so that they would give up the hunt. She had done that successfully before.’
‘Yes, I know. But if so, why didn’t she contact you?’
‘Perhaps in playing dead, she couldn’t contact me.’
‘Or perhaps she really was dead.’
‘Yes, that’s possible too.’
‘Which is most likely?’
‘The latter, sir, overwhelmingly.’
‘Yes, that’s what I thought you’d say.’ Roger got to his feet. He was tired and beaten and depressed.
‘Thank you for all your information, Alfa.’
‘It is my job, sir.’
At that comment, Roger felt an irrational surge of anger and frustration.
‘It was your job to keep her safe.’
Alfa’s voice, in sharp contrast, was even and flat. ‘I did that to the best of my ability, sir. It was her choice and I honoured her choice.’
They sounded like face-saving words, but Roger knew that underlying that comment was the knowledge that Alfa could have decided not to honour her choice and brought her back against her will, and risk another almost certain death. To a human, his choice of phrasing sounded like empty rhetoric, but in fact it underscored the relationship that had existed between them, and in all fairness to both of them, it was a credit to Elvene’s empathy of machine intelligence.
‘Thank you, Alfa. We will talk again.’
‘You’re welcome, sir.’
The hatch opened and Roger left feeling more depressed than when he had entered.
Myka and Sendra had spoken very little since their capture, but they were more aware than ever of their mutual dependence. Even though Sendra didn’t have the ocean navigation skills, or even the sailing skills, that Myka had, Myka could not imagine a more suitable companion. Sendra never questioned Myka’s decisions, and even in the crisis of the storm, when they were effectively lost, his support had been unshaken. In their current situation, Sendra was the best ally he could think of.
He was glad that no one from his family was here to see how he had been treated, and it would have only added further injury to witness the same treatment being dealt to them. On the other hand, he couldn’t help thinking how different things would have been if Elvene had been present, but he knew if she had, then he wouldn’t have made the journey in the first place.
Myka was completely ignorant of the enormous history of human development, and that his current experience was very mild treatment indeed, compared to what had been dealt under the epitomes of civilisations from Old Earth.
‘What do you think they will do with us?’ Sendra asked. They spoke in whispers, though within their enclosure even a whisper sounded inordinately loud.
‘I don’t know, it’s hard to believe they can keep us like this indefinitely. We just have to wait and see.’
‘But if we’ve lost our craft how can we escape?’
‘That’s a good question, Sendra, but we haven’t necessarily lost it yet.’
‘But you saw them push it out to sea.’
‘I find it hard to believe they are that stupid: to just let it go.’
‘Do you have a plan?’
‘No I don’t, not yet. We need to watch and see. This situation will change in some way that we can take advantage of.’
‘How do you know?’
Myka looked at Sendra; he knew he sounded more confident than he was, but he also knew that they didn’t know enough at this stage. He was of the impression that there must be some dynamic within this community that he could use; he just didn’t know what it was. He couldn’t explain that to Sendra, yet he had to give him some hope. ‘I promise you, Sendra that we will escape, but we have to learn more first.’
Sendra was somehow relieved that his friend could show such confidence and patience. Myka had always been something of a mystery to him, but he had always been a reliable friend, or at least until the Ocean Woman had come into their lives. Even though she had come between them quite dramatically, he knew that was partly because of jealousy, but more significantly, Myka’s very mystery had even attracted her. It was like they had been meant to find each other, and what’s more, the whole Clan believed that, including himself eventually. He wondered if it was her memory, or her influence now, that gave Myka such confidence, but he knew better than to ask.
In Elvene’s self-proclaimed territory, it snowed quite regularly now and the landscape changed its shape considerably. Elvene realised that she could easily get lost if she wasn’t careful. She had given up wearing her armour and now wore animal skins. She had learned a new skill with her laser-knife which allowed her to fuse skins together.
She made sure that every day she walked around the boundary of her imaginary territory. As she had speculated, food was becoming harder to find, but she did manage to kill a large animal, not unlike the antrops that the Kiri hunted. It had huge antlers that curled back over its head like a big horn sheep, only it was at least the size of a horse. Its feet were splayed to allow it to walk on snow and it had a thick woolly coat. She assumed that it was a
herd animal that had got lost in the snow and realised that if she hadn’t killed it something else probably would have. She buried the meat in the snow to preserve it, and removed its skin for later use. Finding roots under the snow was now almost impossible and of course there was no fruit anywhere. She expected that most animals had gone into hibernation and she wished she could do the same.
On more than one occasion she used her laser-knife to dig herself out of her cave, and clearing snow away from its entrance was now a daily chore. Despite the activities and the occasional find like the recent kill, she could feel her hope ebbing away. It was like a precious resource that she kept in a bottle; she had to use some everyday, yet always be sure that some remained for the future. At night she always lit a fire inside her cave, but fuel, like food, was becoming scarce. She found herself looking around her sparse home and acquiring a reluctant acceptance that she was going to die here.
She knew the most dangerous thing to do was to place an imaginary time limit on her rescue, because when that milestone was reached, all hope would be gone. She’d read accounts in prison camps of people doing exactly that, and consequently not surviving where others had. In her dreams, she sometimes met Roger, sometimes Myka, and on one occasion she even dreamt of Alfa returning to rescue her, but she dismissed it as a desperate person’s fantasy. If Alfa had not been contactable on her escape from the underground labyrinth, then he certainly wouldn’t be looking for her now.
Elvene saw herself staring at death in the same way a sporting competitor sometimes saw themselves staring at defeat. She knew that when that point was reached in a human competition, triumph was beyond reach. She warded off the cold with her rudimentary clothing and performed a daily routine of scavenging for food and fuel, but she couldn’t help feeling that she was delaying the inevitable. If some large predator attacked her now, she would probably be overcome and may even feel relieved in its deadly embrace. It was hard for her to imagine that she had any fight left in her body.
Elvene Page 23