by Chris Walley
Perena launched herself toward him, smoothly curling into a tight ball and then unrolling with a final neat twist. She came to a stop with her feet against a wall strut and stretched herself out so that she lay horizontally across the corridor.
A sickly grimace appeared on Vero’s drawn, weary, and unshaven face. “Perena Lewitz, the Queen of the Zero G Circus,” he said in a subdued voice.
Then he smiled solemnly. “But it is very good to see you. However, bearing in mind my delicate stomach, could you please go the right way up? I would feel better about hugging you.”
Perena walked down the side of the wall, stood vertical, and then reached out slender arms and hugged him. Nervously, Vero clasped his arms about her and held her tight.
“Well, Vero,” she sighed as they separated, “I could wish you were safe home. Yet it’s good to see you too. Very good. And I’m glad you are in one piece. The King does indeed reign.”
“Yes,” he answered in a hesitant tone, staring at the observation window and Farholme beyond it. “To deny that would be a greater disaster than the loss of the Gate.” But Merral felt there was more determination than enthusiasm in his voice.
Then, with his legs hanging out untidily behind him, Vero hauled himself slowly along the guide rail until he was alongside Merral. As Perena made a precise glide to join them, Merral gripped his friend’s arm.
“Are you feeling better?” Merral asked, heartened at Vero’s appearance.
“Yes, I suppose so. It’s been a bad twenty-four hours though. Extremely bad. The only way I have kept going is by trying to work out what’s happening.”
Vero drifted slowly forward and then peered dubiously through the glass at the stars, his gaze moving along the Milky Way until it found the location of Ancient Earth. Then he stopped and sighed deeply. “I am telling myself that I mustn’t do that. Home is now down there.” He gestured to the world below.
Merral felt a pang of sympathy for his friend. “We may be able to do something,” he muttered.
“No.” There was a sad and dogmatic shake of his head. “Don’t encourage any false hopes. I have heard the commentators. And I checked it out myself. There is no chance of you—I mean us—making a new Gate.”
Perena gestured down at Farholme. “We have the plans in the Library.”
“No, Merral, Perena,” he answered. “They are there to satisfy curiosity alone. Shielded Gates—Gates of any sort—are just too big. I hadn’t realized a full Shielded Gate is nearly two million tons in mass. There’s one factory that makes them—in the Solar asteroid belt. Even then it takes ten years to fabricate just one. A world of thirty million people can’t do it. We can’t even make an unshielded one.”
“No,” Merral admitted, “I suppose not.”
“So you see, I’d better make the most of it. Become a Farholmer.” He scrutinized the world below. “Hi, home,” he murmured in an unconvinced tone. “Will you have me?” he asked Merral.
“Of course.” Merral patted his arm. “Anyway, we are citizens of the Assembly, not of planets. But for your insistence yesterday we would have lost everybody on the ship. We owe you a lot.”
“We still lost five, or whatever the toll will finally be.”
“I know, but it could have been much worse. And I had given up. You didn’t. Why?”
Vero rubbed his face with his mobile fingers. “I had a terrible thought, a presentiment, that what I had done with the diary it might be possible to do with the Gate. Get into the circuitry and rearrange it. Turn the power against itself. I tried to push the idea to one side, but the phrase came back to me: ‘Don’t rule anything out.’ As the Assembly we have never really built in safeguards against . . . sabotage.” He shook his head as if the word stung. “We sentinels should have insisted that it was always a possibility.” He stared silently outward. “I derive no pleasure at all from being right.”
Merral turned to Perena. “You realize that we weren’t sure it was you?”
“But Merral believed it was,” Vero interjected, “and persuaded me it was genuine. And I just didn’t want to give up. I guess I was really hoping that—by playing for time—you would get through again.” Then he frowned and bit his lip. “But I wish we could have saved the Gate.”
Merral stared out of the glass and thought hard. “Yes. But it seemed so impossible.” He peered up to where, at the edge of the window, the three remaining Gate beacons hung equidistant from a smudge of dust that obscured the stars. “I still barely believe it. You heard poor Gateman Lessis. ‘They never fail.’ We never believed they could. And by forcing us to look at the visual images, you saved the ship.”
“I suppose so . . . ,” Vero said dully, as if distracted by the vision of the world below. He stared down, his eyes squinting as he peered toward the planet’s surface.
Merral knew what he was looking at. “I know,” he added, following his gaze to the edges of the Lannar Crater, now half flooded with black night. “My eyes keeping looking there too.”
Vero nodded and turned to Perena. “Farholme will manage?”
For a moment, she didn’t answer but merely tapped delicate fingers thoughtfully against the glass. “The short-term prognosis—that is, over months—is fairly good. But the big issue is the long term. There are a number of teams being set up to study the implications. There are so many unknowns, but the provisional word is that—if the Most High wills—Farholme may well survive fifty-plus years of isolation.”
“Merely ‘may well’?”
“Assembly caution,” she answered with forced humor, and Merral realized that there were aspects to the Gate loss that she was still trying to come to terms with.
“Will you keep flying?” Vero asked her.
“To a lesser extent. We need to work out how much we can actually afford to do. Space flight is a major area—maybe the major area—where the worlds rely on the Gate system to supply spare parts. We have some supplies, but we can’t make fuselages or ion engines here, let alone gravity-modifying engines or Gates. Fortunately, Assembly engineering has always gone for having long times between servicing. Of course, we don’t need in-system shuttle flights or a Gate Station now. And we can recycle bits of the Schütz. It all may help.”
“I see.” Vero looked at Merral and then back at Perena. “We need to talk. I have some ideas; I think they are outrageous, but this situation is so extraordinary that it needs some explanation.”
Perena gave a slight nod of affirmation. “If we have to see Anwar Corradon tomorrow, we need to decide what we are to say. And I would like to think that we have not just questions but also answers.”
“Exactly,” Vero said. “So first, the warning, Perena. Can you explain about it?”
Perena gazed back at him. “Explain? No, but I can tell you what happened. That was a strange matter. Very strange.” Her eyes seemed to focus on something invisible that was a long way away, and Merral sensed again the depths that there were to her. Vero leaned forward unsteadily, his weary face showing an intense curiosity.
“Very well,” she said softly. “After I left you I decided to stay over rather than go back into town, so I just grabbed some things off the ship and took a berth at the pilot’s center. Yesterday—was it really only yesterday?—I decided to look at the Nesta before going over to the morning service. So I went over to the Engineering and Maintenance Complex and checked in. When I looked at the status screen at the entrance, I saw that there were a couple of people around the main offices but no one in Bay One. I’m certain of that because I’d asked that no work be started without me being there, and I remember feeling reassured that this was the case. Anyway, it was the Lord’s Day. So I walked down to the entrance to Bay One, glanced at its status screen, and saw again that no one was there and that the bay was at normal temperature, pressure, and radiation. In E and M Complexes you always do that. Just in case. You don’t want to walk into vacuum.”
She paused, as if mentally thinking through her account. “So I went t
hrough the airlocks, put the lights on, and wandered up to the port lifting surface.” She gave a tiny smile as if thinking of a private joke. “I suppose I wanted to reassure myself that the holes were really there.”
She paused and closed her eyes as if uncertain about what to say next. “They were. I was staring at them when I saw, under the fuselage, that there was someone on the other side of the ship.”
Merral heard a sharp intake of breath from Vero. Perena continued. “From where I was standing I could really only see a pair of legs, and the way the light was, it was impossible to make out anything about them. It was as if someone else had come in and was looking at the other lifting surface. I was, as you can imagine, pretty puzzled. After all, I had asked that no work be begun before I had okayed it and it was the Lord’s Day. And I had not heard the door open. So I walked over and peered round the nose.”
She hesitated. “There was someone there. He was standing up and looking at the underside almost as I had been doing. Now, whether it was a trick of the lighting or something else . . . I have to say I can’t give any sort of real description.” Now her words came slowly, in a labored way. “I had the impression of a tall, dark figure. Almost a silhouette. A man, I would say. Yes, definitely.”
She paused, and Merral was oddly aware that beyond the tense silence he could hear the faint hiss of the ventilation system. “He was—or he seemed—oddly dressed. As if he wore something like a loose, long black coat and seemed to have a hat of some sort. But it was hard to make out. He always seemed on the edge of my vision. And I am fairly certain that he cast no shadow; there is a lot of lighting in Bay One. He was just peering at the underside of the wing as if he was curious. No, more than that; as if he disapproved of what he saw.”
Vero opened his mouth to speak, closed it, and gestured for Perena to ignore him.
“I suppose,” she said, as if speaking to herself, “I knew that there was something wrong. Well, not wrong, weird. I think I shivered.” She gave a little swallow. “Then he turned toward me and spoke. And it’s hard to describe his voice, but his way of speaking was incredibly striking. As if the words were just pressed out of the air. . . .”
She fell silent, staring at the planet far below and Merral could see her reflection in the curved, coated glass.
“What did he say?” Vero asked, as gently as if he were talking to a child.
“He said this: ‘Captain Lewitz, night is falling. The war begins.’ But I can’t give any sense of the sheer weight of the words.”
She paused again and moved her head so that she was looking carefully at Merral and Vero, as if weighing them. “ ‘Night is falling. The war begins.’ ”
Vero asked, “Do you understand what he meant at all?”
She looked at him blankly. “Not then.” Then she looked to where the Gate had been. “But I do now. Or think I do.”
Perena turned back to Vero and Merral saw there were shadows under her eyes. “I wish I could describe the voice. It was human in its words, but not in its sound. It was emotionless; I felt there was no flesh and blood, no lungs and larynx involved, but that it was not—most definitely not—a machine voice.” She shook her head. “If it was a vision, it was a remarkably concrete one. Anyway, so I said, ‘Who are you?’ ” Then she paused and sharply corrected herself. “No. I said, ‘Who are you, sir?’ because there was such an authority in the voice. Then he answered me. ‘I too am a captain, and I too serve.’ He paused, as if to let the words sink in, then he said, ‘I have been sent by our Lord the King as an envoy to you. I am to warn you that the enemy is seeking to regain his authority over your worlds. His power extends to Farholme Gate. Even now he seeks to seize your friends.’ ”
Merral felt himself reach for the grab rails. He glimpsed Vero gulping and, for a moment, wondered if he was going to vomit.
Perena swallowed and when she spoke again there was a great emotion in her voice. “I was nearly sick with fear, but I said, somehow, ‘Can I stop it?’ There was another silence and then he just said, ‘You may be able to stop the ship entering Farholme Gate.’ Then he seemed to start to walk away toward the rear of the Nesta. There he turned briefly to me. ‘And remember, Perena, whatever happens, the King reigns. And stand firm.’ Then he was gone.”
“Gone?” Vero’s voice shook and Merral was aware of his hands twitching.
She raised her eyebrows. “He just wasn’t there. In the chamber. Did he move or did he vanish? I don’t know.”
She turned and leaned her head back against the glass and looked at them, her face pale and intense. “For a moment I froze. Then I started shaking and I had to lean back against an undercarriage leg to brace myself. I prayed. Then I realized that you were going through the Gate in just over an hour. So I raced up to the complex offices and asked if anybody else had been in Bay One. They looked at me as if I was deranged. ‘Of course not,’ they said. I ran to the Gate Control office. I must have been a sight for them to see. I told them to stop the Schütz. Turn it back, whatever. Then the fun began.” She sighed, rubbing her chin gently. “They were very kind, they all knew me, but they said, ‘Why?’ Of course, I was in a mess, because all I could say was that I had met someone or had a vision of some sort. So they looked at each other and checked and rechecked all the Gate signals while they got me a chair.” She wrinkled her face up in a rueful smile.
“Visions, I now realize, do not appear in the manuals. Nor do angels. Anyway, the Chief of Operations—a nice man—said, well, they had Standard Operating Procedures and, of course, there was nothing they could do. There was no basis to order any diversion. So I thanked him and walked out. Of course, I couldn’t get you on the diary. Then I remembered something, so I walked through to Communications and sat down at the desk where they had the backup systems. There was no one about there so I sent the message that you got. I saw how it was cut off after a minute, so I just went outside and sat on a step and prayed. Half an hour later, I heard this extraordinary commotion from the Gate Control Office. I ran in. . . .” She took a deep breath. “You cannot imagine the atmosphere there. But eventually we realized the ship was safe, if damaged. As you know, a number of Gate fragments perforated it, but you were going so fast by then that their relative speed was pretty low.”
She looked at them with an oddly respectful look. “I trust both of you have given thanks for great mercies. Despite our ships’ excellent self-sealing abilities, most space travelers who see the stars with naked eyes find that it is the last thing they do see in this life.”
Vero bowed. “I think that neither of us will overlook that.”
For some moments, nobody said anything, and in the silence Merral heard the clatter of equipment echoing from one of the station’s corridors. Finally Vero, his weary face marked by a bemused expression, spoke. “Extraordinary, quite extraordinary.” He looked at Merral. “Are you reminded of something in Perena’s account?”
“Jorgio’s dream, of course. Of the testing of the Assembly; to watch, stand firm, and to hope.”
“Yes,” said Vero. “But Perena, I keep thinking about this appearance—this apparition. I do not have the words. What was it?”
She closed her eyes for a moment before opening them. “I wondered if it was a hallucination. I was tired and stressed. But there was a curiously solid quality to the appearance. As if it had come from somewhere else. And there were other things; I felt a moral aspect to the envoy. I felt under judgment in some way. It was—” she stared at her fingers and Merral wondered if she was blushing— “a not entirely welcome feeling.”
“Was it an angel?” Vero asked. “In the Scriptures, an envoy and an angel would be the same word.”
Perena shook her head. “I would not wish to claim—or deny—that he was an angel.”
“That angels guard the Assembly,” Vero said slowly, “is an ancient statement of faith. That, in this age of the world, they do not appear to human beings, is a statement based on equally ancient experience.”
“
In this age of the world?” Perena said in a sharp voice. “But if I understand Jorgio’s vision—and mine—then this age of the world may be ending.”
Vero stared out into space for a moment. “Perena,” he said, and his tone was troubled, “I stand corrected.” Then he turned to her. “Thank you twice over. Your encounter not only saved our lives; it has added another significant piece to the puzzle.”
She shook her head. “There are two more things I must tell you. First, yesterday evening I did a check on the Argo. The ship that in 2098 went into Below-Space with a living crew and returned with a dying one.”
Vero bent closer as if to hear better, swayed, overcompensated, and began to spin. Perena grabbed his arm and steadied him.
“Take it easy. No sudden movements. Anyway, very little of the Argo’s voyage was made public. The crew names, dates of injection into Below-Space, and recovery; that sort of thing. There are some comments on the properties of Below-Space, and they provide our only real eyewitness knowledge of what happens there. The comments were that, as the remote probes had suggested, some wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation travel through Below-Space. At the upper levels you could make out stars and planets in shades of gray, but as you went deeper, it became opaque quickly. But with depth they reported a progressive and remarkable degree of mental disorientation with hallucinations and eventually delirium. Which, sadly, proved irreversible.”
“Is that it? That tells us little.” Vero looked disappointed.
“No, the oddity is this: That is all that was reported of the mission of the Argo.”
“But there must have been a full report published.”
“No. I checked. The full report on the voyage of the Argo is one of the few documents never put into the public domain in the entire history of the Assembly.”
“Really? Why?”
“Ah. I then ran a search on rumors and fables of early Assembly space flight. There was one record to do with the Argo; simply an early post-Rebellion rumor that it had encountered ‘Powers.’ ”