Star Binder

by Robert Appleton

  Lohengrin and I sit beside Sergei, watching the sky, imagining...anywhere but here. This inescapable canyon. I’m too tired to keep my eyes open but too anxious to close them. The river’s roar seems to channel the tumult of a galaxy. We don’t say much. It’s all said by the waiting anyway.

  Bip—bip—bip—

  The sun has already set for the third time since our lifeboat’s landing when, out of a restless starlit sky, a craft approaches. It’s too small for us to make out at first, but it appears to be alone.

  Now, this could be help on the way, or it could be the other thing. The three of us decide to race for the cave and watch from our hiding place.

  The nimble craft circles the canyon a few times, then lands on our bank of the river. A man wearing a trench coat hurries out, wielding a flashlight. He heads our way. A woman follows him, carrying blankets.

  It suddenly occurs to me our hiding place isn’t much of a hiding place after all. Our glowsuits have given away our position in the dark. Luckily, this time, it doesn’t matter. Thorpe-Campbell and O’see Hendron find us. They each apologize once, and once only, for what they freely admit is the biggest screw-up in the history of the Hex.

  For my money they can say that again.

  It’s a little surreal, being under supervision again. For one thing, I don’t feel like a student any more. Where we’ve been, what we’ve accomplished, the impossible choices we’ve faced: the past few days have been our graduation. And a grim one. We’ve nothing more to prove.

  The flight back to the facility lasts about twenty minutes, way quicker than our flight out. We give the O’see a thorough account of our ordeal. That aggressive spy-catcher gaze of hers spurs us on to be brutally honest about who did what and why, who took command, who came up with the best ideas and when, how we felt at certain key points in the journey. She records it all on her omnipod, saying little apart from the odd nudging question.

  When we finish, she shakes our hands one by one and tells us, “It’s a long time since I’ve said it, but you’ve no idea how proud I am of you right now. The Selection Committee has just assigned you to Priority Pod Training. Not just Pod Training, which would be impressive enough for buggos, but PriPod! You won’t know how big a deal that is until you get to leave Mars, which will be tomorrow. But I can tell you it’s the first time ever that a complete pod has been selected from a crop of first-years. The combination of the three of you—together with Van Buren and Foggerty—has the Committee tremendously excited. So, boys, from here on out everything’s going to change. Get a good rest tonight. Tomorrow there are no more secrets. Tomorrow...we leave everything behind.”

  Part Three

  The Star Binder

  CHAPTER 20

  Hex-Y-Z

  Walking alone around the empty arena is the closest I’ve ever come to believing in ghosts. It’s not what’s here; it’s what isn’t here. Years, maybe decades of buggo hustle and bustle, laughing, cajoling, the shouts of encouragement, the screams of frustration, the mutters of jealousy, the rise and fall of tyrants and rebels, and, of course, the craziest collection of gigs ever assembled in one place, pushing and pulling the laws and physics every which way: it’s all gone now. Maybe it will never happen again. Like a fairground after hours, there’s something in this place that lingers, a charged air, echoes of the boys and girls who’ve come in childhood and gone on to see the galaxy. They all have one thing in common with us. They’ve experienced the Hexalation.

  I slept well in my quarters, a good ten hours without interruption. No dragonfly wake-up calls. If this is my last day on Mars, I’m going to soak it all in—every last moment. I was over-tired last night, so I couldn’t really appreciate Thorpe-Campbell’s flying skills as much as I should have. The guy flew manually into an icy trench near the Chasma Boreale, down a few hundred feet, and then negotiated an oval-shaped tunnel—slowly, because the roof was unstable—before landing on a flop-port inside an ice cave. It turned out to be another entrance into the Hex. He said there were four other similar ways in but two collapsed under the Finagler bombing raid. The ice tunnel I entered through on my first day, that’s been smashed to pieces as well. This whole place is a couple of shimmies away from being a tomb.

  “Don’t even think about climbing that rope!” Lys springs into the arena. I haven’t seen her since that first night in the canyon. “Jim, don’t move. Stay completely still.” She races across at full sprint and tries lifting me into a hug and spinning me on the run. It all goes south and we wind up spitting sand and laughing on our backs like idiots.

  “How’ve you been, Lys?”

  “I’ve been better. But not better than I am right now! Look!” She points across to the elevator doors, to the glowsuited buggos streaming in. “I never thought we’d all be together again.”

  By ‘all’, she means our team—the five of us. Sarazzin and his team are here as well, but they keep their distance. And nothing in their demeanours suggests they’re as glad to be a team again as we are. Lys runs back to Lohengrin and Sergei, jumps on them both at the same time. They carry her between them, horizontally, like she’s the Queen of Sheba. She milks the moment by giving a haughty, superior look and telling them she’ll have their heads if they even think about dropping her.

  Meanwhile, I stride out to meet Rachel, who’s never looked prettier or more guarded. Her eyes are full, but they won’t weep. She won’t let them. Like me, she doesn’t want to show her feelings in public, so it’s a tentative hug at first. Cautious and sweet. There’s so much I want to know about her, who she really is, how she became a warrior gal capable of killing the nastiest aliens who ever lived. But I don't know how much she wants to tell me, or even if she's allowed to tell me anything. That kind of combat training is the stuff of legend throughout the colonies. We've all heard the stories of elite juvenile units conditioned to be killers from a young age, but no one I've spoken to has ever actually met one or seen one in action. Until now.

  There's a point where tentative melts away into something else entirely, and to be honest I’m not aware of it until it’s already happened. It’s a bit like warming up quickly when you’ve been out in the freezing cold. You get the rush of heat, and also the tingles. For all I know we’re glowing like supernovae right now. My heart's beating so loudly it seems to echo through my whole body.

  I feel a drip of something warm and wet on the back of my neck. A tear? Then I hear her whisper, “I'm sorry I didn't tell you, Jim. Don't be afraid of me. Promise you won't be afraid of me.”

  “It'll take more that to scare me away,” I lie. The truth is I am a little wary of her, and I hate myself for it. She's the perfect girl in every way. She'd never have turned killer if it hadn't been to protect us. But she did turn killer, and because of that I don't know her like I thought I did. Don't know what she's really capable of. We're no longer just fellow buggos who like each other. She's more than me. So much more. I can't get my head around that idea—that she could kill us all in the blink of an eye if she really wanted to.

  “Those insurgents outside the hotel in Cydonia Heights,” I remind her. “You killed them?”

  She pulls away. “I had no choice.”

  “No, no. I didn't mean it like that. I'm just trying to make sense of...you know, why you—”

  “I swore an oath never to use my training unless it's life or death,” she explains. “In the Hex, we were never in that kind of danger. And O'see Hendron warned me not to retaliate. She knew I wouldn't be able to stop myself once the training kicked in. She'd have thrown me out right away if I'd lifted a finger to protect you all. I think she was a Phi cadet herself. She knows all about my training.”

  “Yeah, I think so too. But she really does scare me. Seriously, those eyes freak me out!”

  “Oh, me too,” she says. “But just so you know, those Sheikers outside the hotel, they spotted you, their weapons were drawn. I couldn't let them take you, so I had to do something.” She sniffles. “I'm just glad you didn't s
ee it.”

  “I know. And I never got to thank you for that, for doing what you did.” I kiss her cheek. “See? Does it look like I'm scared of you? Besides, it's kinda cool having a Phi chick watching out for us.”

  “You mean that?”

  “Are you kidding? We'll be legends. When the older recruits find out what we've done, they'll build statues, I swear.”

  “Uh, yeah.” She playfully rolls her eyes. “Hey, let's sit together on the flight.”

  “But I don’t know where we’re going.”

  Yeah, genius. That, right there, is why it’s taken us so long to get so close and why I’m destined to blow it a trillion different ways, no matter how many times she tries.

  “Sure, yeah, we need to sit next to each other,” I recover, but even that has a whiff of desperation.

  She at least agrees to hold my hand as we rejoin our friends. But the first thing she does when we’re all together is hold Lohengrin’s hand as well, as if to tell me, You’re running out of time, Jim. You know I like you, but I’m not going to wait forever. And at the end of the day, he is a freaking prince.

  So yeah, there’s that.

  “No hard feelings, Trillion.”

  Spinning to face the new speaker almost gives me whiplash. It’s not completely unexpected, I guess, after what we achieved together in the canyon, but still, this is the emperor of the Hex, come to ask our forgiveness. His former peons.

  “You did good out there,” I reply.

  “So did you.” Sarazzin's glance touches each of us in turn. No one reacts.

  “No hard feelings,” I tell him.

  He manages a few subtle nods and then walks, not struts, back to his own team. While it’s not exactly the Interstellar Nuclear Disarmament Accord, it’s something. We’ll never be friends but at least we’re no longer enemies.

  On that note, Thorpe-Campbell and his superior, O’see Hendron, enter through the balcony door. They’re dressed for a run. She’s wearing black yoga pants and a plain grey hoodie. The untucked hem of her T-shirt is visible. He’s gone even more old school, for him: blue running shorts and T-shirt, just like he used to sport in his RAM-running days, when he held the record for most consecutive wins of the annual orbital race. A really big deal back then. The sport doesn’t exist anymore because it disrupted the air traffic too much. Whole planets used to grind to a halt to watch the races, bet on them, and generally bunk off work.

  I’ve seen the VRI movies, and I’ve personally tried a comparison simulator, for fun, in which you attempt to keep up with the “average” RAM-running speed from a century ago, and I can tell you those people were almost superhuman. The fittest men and women who ever lived. Thorpe-Campbell, though he’s well past his prime now, was once a sporting god. The most famous name in his field, and one of the richest men on Earth. That he’s even alive is a miracle, but to see him in his famous retro running outfit is more than a little surreal. He’s also kinda taken me under his wing. Me, Jim Trillion, a nobody from nowhere. It suddenly hits me—just how tiny I am compared to all this.

  “Okay, guys, here’s the thing...” O’see Hendron’s exotic accent pronounces it ‘theeng’, which is awesome at full volume. “We’re graduating you early. We’ve no choice. As you’ve no doubt already heard, the joint Sheiker-Finagler invasion has struck a crippling blow to our Core defences. We don’t know how they got in so close without being detected, but they’ve always been one step ahead of us technologically. The simple fact is they’re not going to stop. They want what we have—everything we’ve strived to build and discover—and they’re probably going to get it. Our biggest mistake was spreading ourselves too thin. Too many worlds in too many systems, with not enough military support.

  “They’ve picked us apart for decades now, taking bites, giving us the run-around across the outer colonies. The last major offensive, beginning with their attack on Altimere, nearly brought us to our knees. This new one has, and the sad truth is that we may not be able to pick ourselves up again. Another hit like we just took and the Core defences will crumble. It’s inevitable. They know our weaknesses now. There’s already been talk of surrender. Submitting to outright Finagler—alien—rule, under the regional governance of those bastard Sheikers. We’d effectively be Sheiker colonies, lawless, corrupt, pretty much the interstellar Sodom and Gomorrah, just like their colonies used to be out past the 100z border. While in the meantime, the Finaglers would take whatever resources they want, whenever they want, from wherever they want.”

  She spits down onto the sand. “So we can hate, and we can fight, and we can die doing both, but is that really the right thing to do?” She leans forward onto the railing, scanning our faces. “I know exactly what you’re all thinking. Trust me, I’ve had to live with it for most of my career. That instinct to fight back. That hope that a military genius will step forward with a way to wipe them out. Or a tech genius will invent some kind of doomsday weapon to keep us safe. But it hasn’t happened. ISPA scoured the colonies for young prodigies and put them through its intensive Phi training. I was one of them. So was Foggerty.” She nods to Rachel, who looks at her own feet. “We worked hard, like you, and became the best we could hope to be. But it wasn’t good enough. We haven’t found the next Alexander the Great or the next Oppenheimer.” She sighs.

  “This is all there is. We saw it coming a long time ago. We hoped things might turn out differently, but hope is not a military word. It’s not action. It’s the space between actions, a reflection of your true intention. Hope is what you’re left with after you’ve done everything you can possibly do to make a thing happen. Well, we’ve done everything we can possibly do, guys. But it’s not enough. Our actions haven’t saved us. As painful as it is to say, and to hear, we have to face facts. We’ve lost the war.

  “This—”

  She motions to Thorpe-Campbell, who presses a function on his omnipod. A grinding, squealing, carking noise overhead makes us all look up. The entire Hex ceiling splits, draws apart like the jaws of a massive iron mouth. It reveals a dark hexagonal shaft that reaches...just reaches...into a vague, roofless space where the hub ceiling used to be.

  “This is our hope,” she announces.

  I shiver with deja vu. It’s difficult to describe because the hub shaft is poorly lit. Just a uniform pale, beige glow illuminating each level. It looks like a beehive more than ever. Yet, where the roof of the facility ought to be, there’s nothing. But not nothing nothing. Imagine looking up at the night sky from the bottom of a well, only there are no stars, no moonlight. Your eyes can’t see anything through that tiny hole. But you know there’s something up there. There’s just a sense of openness. Vastness. You’re confined and you want out, and your mind reaches. It reaches in every direction all at once, and it reaches farther than you can imagine, because that sense of openness has no shape. No limits. It’s not bound by anything. The darkest, emptiest places are not frightening; they’re just waiting to be explored. To be fulfilled. When Thorpe-Campbell first mentioned leaving Mars, back in the desert that day with Sergei, the idea unlocked a door to a room deep inside me, a room with no walls and no ceiling, just winking stars. It was a yearning. I could never fulfil it, I felt. It was too deep and too big, that yearning. There was an eternity in there.

  Well, there’s an eternity up here, too, beyond where the roof of the hub should be, in the heart of the Hex. I recall the rose-coloured glow high above me in the sanctum, and the sudden shrinking of the walls of reality until the sanctum was a lens-like skin all around me. The rise into the mist. The series of images flashing through my mind. The wheeling sensation. And the incredible and frightening experiences that followed.

  If this is hope, it is an awe-inspiring thing. But what does it all mean?

  The O’see whispers something into Thorpe-Campbell’s ear, then pretends to throttle him. They both grin. It’s an oddly comforting thing to see, just before the big, heavy reveal of...whatever we’re supposed to be looking at.

 
“Straight up—that’s our way out of here,” he tells us, jabbing a finger skyward. “I’m not one for speeches, and despite what some people say—” He nudges Hendron with his elbow, “—my grandstanding days are over. So here it is, flat-out. You’re standing directly under the most significant discovery ever made. It’s called the Star Binder, and it’s our ticket to the farthest reaches of the universe.”

  He pauses a few moments to let that sink in. It doesn’t, not really. I've been inside it, but I don't know the first thing about it.

  “Okay, so I lied about the grandstanding. What can I say? I was born this way.”

  The O’see rolls her eyes.

  “It’s a transit system, guys,” he says. “The biggest one ever built. We’ve no idea who built it or when, but we have figured out how to travel through it. Over a century ago, I made the first strides in a new kind of exploration. Notice I said strides, not steps. That’s because the Star Binder doesn’t do small. It wasn’t designed for local travel. Its limbs bind entire galaxies. Its largest branches might even encompass clusters of galaxies.

  “The farthest I travelled was approximately two-and-a-half million light-years, to the Andromeda Galaxy. When I returned home a couple of years later, almost a century had passed on Mars. And before you start quoting Einstein at me, hold that thought. Here’s the thing: you really can’t travel faster than the speed of light, and you can’t escape the effects of Special Relativity, so long as you’re moving through space-time. Einstein was right about that. So what the Star Binder does is jump its passengers in and out of space-time. Kind of like leap-frogging ahead over time and distance. The faster you travel, the further ahead it jumps you. The actual physics behind it is somewhere on the level of multiverse math, which is way out of my league, so you'll have to forgive my crude explanations.