They had worked for hours trying to operate the energy weapon. No matter what they tried, the alien artifact remained an inert, lifeless cylinder of metal. Along the haft were a score of dials and gauges, but no manipulation of these controls had any effect. They reluctantly drew the simple conclusion that the weapon had no power — it was uncharged — and it was useless to them. After running in fear, it had seemed as though they would at last have some way of defending themselves. It was not to be. The staff lay on the ground beside Karic, who was lost in the strange, distracted mood that had infected him since their arrival on Cru. God knows where his mind is. Yet they still needed him, and his brilliance. Needed his leadership.
Andrai caught her eye and gave her a warm smile, his unshaven cheeks now bristling with the beginnings of a ginger-blond beard. He looks cuter than ever. Her heart flipped and she returned the smile. Andrai had told her about Janzen’s cunning deception — deleting the video log Andrai had recorded before they left the lander to rescue Karic, then substituting his own. All done to throw her off her game and get them at each other’s throats. Janzen, the fucking snake. She felt ashamed now at having judged Andrai so quickly. That was her — always shooting from the hip — and most of the bastards out there deserved what they got. But not Andrai. He really was different. Her heart was only now opening up to that strange possibility, that he was someone she really could trust. And where her heart led, her body followed …
She felt her cheeks flush hot and looked away. This was not the time or place for romance, but she could not deny the new desire for intimacy with Andrai that was building inside her. Mara knew he was interested — and always had been — but he had always been the overlooked nice guy waiting in the wings while she obsessed over the alpha males. That too, she had begun to question. Life on the industrial space platforms had been harsh. Gangs. Rapes. Violence. A packed mass of humanity left to fend for themselves in a cage of metal bulkheads where only production quotas mattered. She had carried a knife from the age of nine — and used it too. You had to be strong. It was the soft, the weak, they were the victims waiting to happen. Even then she had sought out the pack leaders. She had let them use her, abuse her, as long as they could protect her. When she went Earth-side to study for her undergrad degree in astronomy, she had thought she was free. But now she could see she was just following the same old pattern. Her knife had been replaced by a viper’s tongue, and she had gone after the same men — influential professors, Janzen himself, then Karic. Men with power. Narcissists obsessed with themselves and their own self-serving visions. As though she needed their strength to be safe. Well, she didn’t.
She was no longer that scared girl walking home through the dank, greasy access tunnels of the Davis Industries Platform. She was the astronomer of the first Terran starship. Mara had proven herself again and again, with nothing more than guts and talent. She would be her own strength now, and she wanted a man who was there for her. A man she could trust.
Mara sidled closer to Andrai and hesitantly touched his hand. The contact set her heart racing. His hand enfolded hers gently, blissfully warm against her cold skin. She looked across at Karic, but he had not even noticed. The new commander was looking into the shadowed world around them, lost in his own thoughts.
***
Karic’s thoughts swirled around him like a pack of startled birds with no place to land, crying out in vain for the island-rookery that had just slipped below the surface of the ocean below them. He knew he had to lead his crew. To find some way out of danger, and off Cru, yet there seemed to be no way out. They were trapped here, and the best they could hope for was to buy themselves time before death found them. Losing the lander had been a bitter, bitter blow.
The body of Utar lay on the raised bier. The two unnamed Imbirri beside him were also encased in dark shells. Finding the strangely transformed bodies of Utar and his acolytes had fuelled Karic’s hope. He had felt certain the answer to their survival was right here, along with the prone form of the Deepwatch. But he was out of answers. They had already used up all the meager rations of food and water from the pod, and he had no plan.
Karic turned to see Andrai and Mara sitting close together, hands touching. A jagged blade of jealously twisted inside him. He suppressed it. He knew it was only to be expected that they would turn to each other for comfort. Even so, seeing them together sharpened his sense of isolation. With an iron control, he forced himself to be objective.
Andrai’s face was drawn, his shoulders slumped with fatigue. The pod lights reflected in miniature in his light gray eyes. Mara sat pensively, dark eyes fixed on Karic’s as though expecting censure, and he knew the highly-strung woman was close to exhaustion herself — and ready to snap.
There were more important things to consider than the strange love triangle that had developed here. Having escaped death at the hands of the Imbirri, they now faced the question of survival. That was what they needed to focus on. Maybe together, they could do just that.
Karic cleared his throat. “Utar must have led us here for a reason.”
Andrai gave a mocking smile. “Yeah, boss. To give him a good Christian burial.”
Mara shifted. A curl of dark hair had escaped her braids, and lay against her pale cheek like a bruise. “We don’t know, and we can’t even guess. Maybe he still plans to destroy us.”
Karic looked at Mara critically, wondering if she really believed that or was just opposing him out of reflex.
Andrai’s eyes brightened. “What about the stasis fields in the cavern? Maybe we can use them to stay alive down here until a rescue probe can arrive from Earth.”
Karic shook his head. “Preserving machinery is one thing. The complexity required to preserve living tissue is another.”
The stasis fields they used on Starburst were specially configured not only for living tissue, but for living human tissue. Using the alien fields would not work, and it would be dangerous to try. The process was a function of cellular biology on an atomic level. But as he looked at their hopeful expressions, he could not bear to tell them. “Perhaps one could be modified. I’ll look into it.”
“We have to do something!” Mara glared at him. “We have no food, no water, only enough fuel for a short trip, and no foreseeable way of ever reaching Earth again. And the Imbirri are still hunting us. We are going to die, Karic! Here on this miserable, unchanging world.”
Karic could see that Mara was on the verge of emotional collapse — they all were. This was a critical time. He was the commander of the mission and had to give them a focus if they were to carry on. Even if they were to die in this strange world, old and alone, forgotten by a world lightyears away, they would have to live with purpose. They needed to sustain their spirit. For that, they needed a hope, however faint, that they may one day feel the familiar embrace of Earth again.
Andrai leaned into Mara, as though for support. She touched his thigh in unconscious rapport. The intimacy tore at Karic.
“We have to find out what can be salvaged from the wreck of the lander. The energy screen was intact, remember? With that, we need not fear the Imbirri, or that weapon. Maybe one of the fuel tanks escaped the explosion un-ruptured.”
Andrai stirred, his expression wistful. Hopeful. “Is there a chance?”
Mara frowned as she considered the question. “The lander was destroyed. We heard the explosions and saw the wreckage. How could there be anything more than frigging scraps left?”
Karic swallowed, forcing himself to smile in encouragement. He did not believe that anything could have survived the destruction of the lander — the maelstrom that had shaken the forest thicket had been too complete — yet he needed to make his two crew believe him. They had to be distracted from their dangerous lethargy.
“We don’t know for sure,” reasoned Karic. “None of us were observing the explosions carefully; it was minutes before we could even look at the landing site and assess the damage. The screen was still intact. Perhaps other v
aluable sections of machinery were thrown clear. The initial explosion would have been massive enough to throw part of the main section kilometers from the landing site. The sound of the concussions could have masked anything.”
To Karic the words sounded contrived, yet he could see he was convincing them. Andrai sat straighter.
“How should we start?” asked Mara. She let go of Andrai’s hand and got to her feet. Andrai raised himself from the ground with a perfect economy of effort and stood beside her quietly. Always ready to follow.
Karic summoned all the confidence he could muster. “Try to connect with the lander’s computers — it’s a long shot, but it could be worth it. Then try to set up a link with the Starburst; if the atmospheric conditions are right, we may be able to use the ship’s radar array to map the distribution of the wreckage. It’s time we reestablished contact with the ship to check the onboard systems anyway.
“I will scout around the perimeter of the clearing for a water source and collect samples for testing. I’ll also look around for other structures or anything left by Utar.”
Mara and Andrai set off for the pod with a renewed sense of determination. As he watched them go, he felt something break inside him. The terrible responsibility of command, and the new intimacy building between Mara and Andrai, both created a gulf in him. A distance from human contact.
Karic walked into the darkness with a small flashlight. Tiny creatures fled across his path. He knew the learned response of flight indicated a predator stalked these small creatures, yet he felt no fear. After a time, the clearing was lost from sight behind him and the light of the tiny torch seemed feeble against the blackness.
On impulse, he climbed to the top of a sheer outcrop, the rock as smooth as glass under his fingers. Finding a perch, he sat down and leaned back against the unyielding surface. He switched off the torch and waited for his eyes to adjust.
They had set the pod down in a broad valley, sunk into permanent twilight. The world around him was alien to his senses, but he pushed this aside and tried to think. After he had touched the mind of Utar, he had felt so sure they would escape this planet. Now that hope seemed a delusion.
The initial excitement of finding the alien structure had been replaced by a dull resignation. The cavern had proved to be nothing more than a storage area — the cryptic devices inaccessible inside their stasis fields. The enigmatic culture that had fashioned those works of high technology had vanished from Cru, or perhaps had regressed to the point of primitivism, the tribal Imbirri their last remnant. Either way, there seemed no help for the last remaining crew of the Starburst.
He had been so confident. So sure space could hold nothing but glory and wonder.
Against his will, Karic relived his wife’s death. The loss. Then the guilt. Watching the purple of the darkened sky, Karic wished he could cry, but tears were beyond him. Instead, he felt a heavy knot in his chest that would not ease.
His feelings of guilt were amplified by the physical desire and love he felt for Mara. His initial affection for her had grown quickly into love. He had been a fool to risk that. But he had been so concerned with failure, so worried about the future. He had feared the reaction of ExploreCorp if he refused the publicity tour with Evelle. Feared that he would be taken off the crew and then lose his only chance to explore space. Now he had lost Mara, Evelle was dead, and he himself was struggling to survive. But for the first time he was starting to get angry with Mara. He had made the wrong call, but she had never once tried to forgive him.
He shifted his weight, trying to find a more comfortable position. Sitting within the alien darkness, Karic’s mind slowly cleared. For a long moment he thought of nothing — felt nothing. Then a single thought leapt into this mind. The future cannot be controlled. So simple. And yet now he understood this in a way he never had before. Man only has power over the present, he realized. He can be true to his beliefs, and strive to make the best decisions, but no more than that. He had made mistakes, but Mara had also made her choices. She had chosen pride over forgiveness. Would she ever forgive him? There was no way he could know. For now, he had to focus on their survival.
An old memory filled his mind. Like all the days leading to his departure from Earth, his schedule had been ridiculously full. He was up at four in the morning to make the flight to L1, the long drive to the spaceport making the day even longer. They needed him in the spacedock to oversee the early tests of the Shipcom. Problems with integration of the complex network of the AI’s submodules. The more scientists and engineers tried to duplicate true consciousness, the more complex and inexplicable it appeared. Neither sheer processing power, nor increased memory, nor quantum computing, had solved the conundrum.
He was on transit to the spaceport when he got the call.
“Call for you, Karic,” said his driver from the front.
Karic sighed, absorbed as usual in some problem on his portable computer. “Divert it to message bank.”
His driver pulled the limousine over to the curb.
“Hey Lenny, what are you doing? We’ll miss the flight.”
With the car stationary, his driver turned to face him over the thick leather of the driver’s seat. “It’s an emergency. I think you should take this one.”
Karic groaned. He had at least two weeks’ worth of messages to catch up on. He just did not have time. The Starburst was launching in less than a month.
He took the call.
“Karic, is that you?” It was his grandmother, Rosa, her face pale and drawn over the link. “Lein is dying, Karic. He is asking for you.”
“How could this happen so fast! Why hasn’t someone been in touch with me?” He was furious that this could come at him out of nowhere.
There was a moment of silence on the line. “We have been trying to reach you. For weeks, Karic.” Her voice was rough from grief and tears.
“Should I turn the car around, Karic?” asked Lenny.
He nodded dumbly.
Later, at Lein’s side, Karic found the old astronaut focused as always. He was filled with questions about Starburst and the progress of the fitting out.
“You’re finally doing what I could only dream of, Karic,” said Lein, taking a small sip of water through a straw and reaching to set the cup on the shelf beside his bed. His hand shook with the effort. Karic was horrified to see how weak Lein was. He helped his grandfather set down the cup.
Lein sat back with a sigh and looked at Karic with a penetrating intelligence that belied his extreme weakness. “You will do it, Karic. And bring them home again.”
They shared a moment then, both dreaming of space. It was only when his grandmother reentered the room, and Karic snapped back to reality, that he realized both he and Lein had been lost in fugue.
Rosa helped Lein sit up straighter on the bed, fussing with his pillows.
Lein began to tremble then, his eyes squeezed shut as he fought against a sudden pain.
“What is it?” asked Karic.
“It’s the medication. The same dosage is having less and less of an effect,” said Rosa in a low voice.
“What can I do?”
Lein was whimpering in pain. To see his strong-willed, brilliant grandfather like this ripped the core out of him, leaving him sad and overwhelmed.
Rosa looked at Karic blankly. To someone else, it might seem she was emotionless, but he knew her too well. She was trying to hold herself together. To be strong for Lein. “You better leave. You can come back and see him later, at dinner time.”
There was no dinner time. Not for Lein. He died two hours later, attended only by his wife and two medical staff.
Karic was on a satellite hook-up at the time — in the hospital waiting room — trying to deal with the Shipcom issues across the crackling link, fretting with every time-lag delay. It was during one of those frustrating spaces in transmission that he drifted back into the fugue again, fatigue creeping up to overwhelm his tired mind. For a long moment, it seemed he was
back in the room with Lein, sitting quietly by his grandfather’s side.
“Never forget. You are not going alone. You are part of humanity, Karic. Don’t forget it. Don’t forget,” said Lein.
“I wish you were coming with me, Grandpa,” said Karic, his voice sounding oddly young in his mind.
Lein smiled. “Oh, but I am, Karic. I am.”
The satellite link had buzzed static in his ear, snapping him out of the fugue. “Karic, are you there?” It was Andrai on the line from the spacedock at L1.
“I’ll call you back!”
A sudden intuition gripped Karic and he rushed to Lein’s bed to find the sheet across his grandfather’s face. Rosa had collapsed forward onto the bed, at last giving vent to months of sadness and grief.
His driver, Lenny, had appeared at the door.
“Take the limo back to Boston, Lenny,” said Karic. The man smiled sadly and left.
Karic silently took a seat by Rosa’s side.
Even back then, his grandfather was able to see the forces in Karic’s life better than he could.
Above Karic, the sky of the darkened valley remained unchanged. The sun did not rise, and there was no promise of morning. Cru was silent. Inexplicable. Hunger gnawed at him, and his head and arm throbbed with pain. He had no time for either. He had to focus on survival.
He stood up atop the outcrop, fighting a brief wave of dizziness, and contemplated the climb down. He could not afford a broken leg. Not here.
Karic had communicated with Utar telepathically. But even before this, he had known the Deepwatch. It had been his eyes that had hovered in the void, watching them through time. There had been other images since he arrived here — dreams of golden beings — what did they mean? He would get no answers from Utar now.
He switched on the torch to aid his descent. Beneath him, the surface of the rock appeared dark and smooth, unmarred by vegetation. A flash from within the depths of the hill startled Karic. Instinctively, he shone the torch toward the source. Images of the small lamp stretched to infinity beneath him, held suspended within a transparent matrix. Karic shone the torch around him at the substance of the hill, suddenly transfixed. He was standing on one of the crystal light-towers. Unlike the others, this small, jagged outcrop had grown dark centuries ago, leaving the valley in night.
The Tau Ceti Diversion Page 22