by Yunker, Todd
The xenobiologists were very scrupulous about the programming of the environments, including day/night periods. The days began with the lightening of the force field from one end of the garden. As this gradient crossed the garden, a prism structure moved behind, redirecting the star’s light to provide a world-like dawn. As the star’s position moved higher, the lid became the device managing the star’s light to the inhabitants of the garden. A secondary prism structure on the far end of the garden developed into the sunset, bringing upon the garden a close to the day as the lid reproduced the star’s light.
The night sky of each planet was fastidiously copied and made provisions for annual change of orbital positions and the planetary seasons. Binary and trinary star systems made the night sky short. But it was interesting to watch the realism brought here by the environmental engineers.
The programing of the seasons was also taken into account through the field-density programing of the lid and the amounts of infrared radiation passing through it. The lessening of the infrared provided the cooling and the cold seasons. The lid could be programmed to magnify the infrared radiation, creating desert-like conditions.
The environmental engineers had created bands of temperatures, giving the flat surface of the gardens the climates of a spherical planet with polar and tundra, boreal forest, mountain, temperate forest, Mediterranean, desert, dry grassland, tropical grassland, and tropical forest.
The trickier part of any planetary replication was the thermohaline circulation, giving the oceans the churn or conveyor belt action to maintain the biological processes needed to renew the water system. The environmental engineers not only had to recreate the planet’s natural system but had to apply it to an artificial system five orders of magnitude larger than the original.
Weather programming was developed in conjunction with the topographical engineers. They worked to provide the surface-feature placement for the weather dynamics needed to give the ecosphere the dynamics for environmental growth and development.
The Emperor wanted a garden where he could go and visit a large number of his most precious territorial possessions and colonies. Each garden had been built exactly in every way like the planet it represented. The Emperor would not have to lose so much time crisscrossing the galaxy to visit his favorite worlds. He would need only to come here to visit 1058 different worlds. The Quest approached the garden wall. This wall was different from the others they had crossed.
Electra was at the engineering station. She tapped Alec on the shoulder and pointed out the top edge of the wall, “The garden is coming apart at the seams.”
The Quest had to climb steeply to vault over the mismatched pieces of the wall. One garden abutted the other, but, here, instead of the wall tops being flush with each other, one garden wall was askew and rose three kilometers above the other.
“You could say that.”
Electra put her hand on his shoulder, “Seriously, the structure of the hanging gardens is unstable.”
Alec replied, “I see misalignment here. You are telling me that this is a recent occurrence? What provisions did the builders provide?”
The Quest flew through a slot between two structures on a garden wall’s edge and into the next garden.
“Alec, I do not understand it, but the prophecy foretold of someone, like you, coming to save the gardens,” reminded Electra.
Alec questioned her. “What does that mean? I’m not this seeker you’re looking for, but I will do what I can.”
Electra stated, “How do you know this wasn’t foretold long ago?”
“Electra, this place is overwhelming. I cannot even wrap my head around the fact it actually exists, and yet it does. Now you are telling me that it is falling apart and that I will be able to fix it. I don’t know what to say.”
She left the command deck. Dancer turned to Alec. “Hope is a special part of your race’s makeup.”
Alec turned over the controls to Dancer. Alec said as he turned out of the command deck, “Back in a minute.” He looked for Electra in the galley, checking the kitchen — nothing. Alec arrived outside Electra’s compartment. He leaned against the door frame and raised his hand to knock but hesitated. Then he rapped the door softly.
Alec asked, “Can we talk?”
The door opened, revealing Electra standing in the middle of the room. She did not make eye contact, and then she hung her head. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Electra said, “Yes?” Her head rose, and she looked directly back at him.
Alec reached slowly down for her hand. He took it with his and squeezed it. “I’m not the hero of your prophecy. There will be no godlike powers, no superhuman strength, but I will do what I can to stop this. I am that guy.”
She stepped closer to him, wrapping her arms around his back and putting her head down on his chest. They embraced tightly. She looked up and revealed to him a broad, beautiful smile unlike any he had witnessed before. She drew up her right hand and combed back his hair with her fingers. Electra said softly, “I know you will.” Electra leaned against him for comfort.
The copilot’s seat reverberated as Dancer tried some small, random maneuvers to make targeting harder. Another explosion off the port side shook the Quest up, but no real damage was taken by the ship. Dancer scanned the sensors and tried to get a fix on where the shots had come from.
Dancer toggled the ship-wide intercom system, “Alec! I could use your magic up here.”
The Quest shook with the force of another blast, this time off the starboard side. Alec entered the command deck and landed in his pilot seat. He strapped in. “I just can’t let you drive without getting into trouble, now can I?”
The ship had evaded the Skiptracer’s weapons fire, but this brought the ship closer for easier targeting of the Quest.
Electra entered the command deck with the maintenance screen. The screen showed in great detail their position, the position of the Skiptracers, and the position of the Koty battleship. It was slowly heading their way.
Alec looked at the screen. He understood what it was showing them. Alec said, “Oops.” He yanked back on the control, pulling the Quest into a tight inside roll, coming in behind the Skiptracer ship.
He brought the nose of the ship within weapons range of their tormenters. “Fire!”
Electra fired the charged weapons. The blasts hit the Skiptracer’s shields.
Dancer took a reading. “No effect.”
Alec shook his head. He looked over at Dancer. “Let’s lose them!”
The two ships were flying in extraordinarily close proximity as they jockeyed for position. Alec and Dancer tried to get the crew of the Skiptracer ship to forget trading weapons blasts and to compete on purely flying skills. The speed of the ships grew increasingly reckless. The garden wall quickly approached as the two ships bumped and fought for the lead. The top of the garden wall was filled, as far as the eye could see, with shiny objects. The closer they came to the wall top, the easier it was to discern that what they were seeing was energy production on a scale never seen before. The solar panels were pointing in a static, upward direction. The solar fields were outside the gardens they supported, so they were not affected by the planetary sky reproductions inside the gardens. Their precious power production was one of the main reasons to produce a structure like this. Free and plentiful power generation available continuously.
The Quest banked hard port and bumped the Skiptracer’s ship into an unrecoverable dive into the garden wall top. The crash was spectacular. A cloud of solar-panel destruction flew up in front of the Skiptracer’s ship as it impacted with the surface like fine powder in front of a snowplow just after the sky had dropped 45 centimeters of fresh white stuff. The ship clipped something very solid unseen under the canopy of solar panels and flipped end over end, cartwheeling to a stop 500 meters later against a translucent cone-like structure rising 100 kilometers from the wall’s top edge. The cone resonated with more than just the kinetic energy it absorbed as
the ship rang it.
The garden wall top was 1000 kilometers across, with a great seam that bisected the wall for the entire length between the two gardens. The seam allowed for structural flexibility. The gardens were not connected by material means. The builders knew that a solid sphere would not be stable for extended periods around a star, so they had built a self-aligning maintenance system to release-align-reattach that made corrections and removed any chance of stresses building up and destroying the sphere.
The wall tops of the gardens were not flush with each other, and, even as the Quest passed over it, there was movement as one garden shifted even higher than the other.
The Quest’s course took it over the top of the wall into the next garden. The new garden was substantially different from anything they had seen. There wasn’t a lid covering it, and, instead of a biosphere, they found only an enduringly flat surface far below. The Quest dropped down into the empty space.
Alec, Electra, and Dancer watched the readings on their screen.
Electra looked out the ports. She pointed at motionless objects. “This is why my world is in danger.”
The Quest’s altitude decreased, and the screens filled with machines on a gargantuan scale.
Electra put her hand on the back of Alec’s chair and pointed to a building in the distance. “That is the central Maintenance Citadel for all of the gardens. It is no longer functional and has left the machines without direction. Scheduled maintenance has not occurred in eight thousand cycles, and the gardens are ready to come apart at the seams.”
The Quest reduced its altitude and speed even lower as they got closer to the Citadel.
“How often did they awaken?” asked Alec.
“Every 200 cycles,” replied Electra.
Dancer checked his screens. Dancer keyed in a command. “It was automated?”
Electra responded, “Yes. It was those who left us during the exodus that caused this.”
Alec looked inquisitively. “How?”
Electra’s expression became flat. “They took with them pieces of the dedication plaque that ran the Emperor’s Hanging Gardens. They warned us not to follow them.” She turned Alec enough to look into his face. “What they did not know was that the dedication plaque was the primary regulator for the maintenance system. When they removed the section they did, they damaged the sphere-integrity system, a critical system.”
Alec considered her statement. “We’re going to need all three pieces to make the fix.”
The Quest stopped its descent into the garden at an altitude of 8000 meters. They flew down a wide corridor of the biggest tool shed Alec had ever seen. They zipped through the space, level with the top of an elaborate storage system. Rows upon rows of storage systems stretched out into the distance. The number was easily in the tens of millions. The purpose of the tower formation of its structure was to add more storage per kilometer of surface space. Each storage system was an open-faced tower, a little wider at 350 meters and a height of 6150 meters and deeper than what it contained. The storage system held six maintenance robots standing at a kilometer in height one above the other in nearly perfect alignment to the robot above and the robot in the next storage system over. The robots were built for heavy construction and repair work on an order hard to fathom. The robots showed no sign of recent activity, nor did they react to the passage of the Quest. The Quest continued toward the Maintenance Citadel.
Then it happened. They could see out the ports that the storage units had changed to match the new configuration of robots they held. The robot population was hard to estimate without a census, but the job they held in maintaining a structure of this size would be challenging without a support staff to do the big jobs, and everything here was, well, big.
The Quest emerged from the corridor into a vast open space or buffer zone about the Citadel. It was easy to see that, as the robots came from storage, they would form maintenance teams out here before being transported to their assigned duties.
The Maintenance Citadel erupted from the flat plain and rose more than five kilometers. The architecture of the fortress was surrounded with full circular quad-bastions to protect the gardens from self-destruction. The Quest flew in a wide path to circle the structure.
Dancer keyed in commands. Dancer turned to Alec. “Now what? We need a plan to get the last piece.”
Alec smiled with anticipation. “First we take Electra home. Then we will have to beard the Koty lion in his den.”
They flew over the Citadel toward the garden wall in the same direction they had been flying.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The Koty battleship Illia hung in space as it orbited the star outside the asteroid field. The ship’s squadrons rotated patrols, on alert for any hostile actions that came from the inhabitants of the sphere. The ship kept in close to the debris field to disguise their location. A squadron of fighters left the battleship and cruised at maximum alert to their assigned patrols. The squadron they were to relieve waited until they had arrived and made the coded, short-range “friend” transmission. The fighters that had finished their patrol headed back to the battleship.
The entire exchange was monitored and recorded by systems located at every intersection of the hexagons around the sphere. The video and data analysis were being made available for the artificial intelligence known as the Groundskeeper.
The Groundskeeper, at one time, had led an army of biologics and mechs — “custodians,” as they were known — in keeping up the gardens for the Emperor. It was an honor to keep these gardens pristine for the Emperor, and, when his heirs took over, they, too, came here to visit. They praised the Groundskeeper for the work done and made their own additions to the gardens. They upgraded the mechs, provided additional resources, and increased system replacement computing and storage capacity to that of a galactic library level. This was a very special tribute to the work the Groundskeeper had done and would continue to do for millennia more. The visits of the royal family grew more sporadic over time until communication with the Emperor’s representatives no longer came. The Groundskeeper kept moving forward with its duties.
Then the event came — an act of malicious mischief by inhabitants of one of the gardens. They could not have understood what they had done, but the results were a loss of higher-care functions.
The Groundskeeper found it ever so hard to maintain its concentration. As a matter of note, keeping mental focus had been a problem for a long time. The simplest functions were difficult as the Groundskeeper found that the highest orders of thought were sporadic or just missing. It was reduced to that of power and thermo management. The structural force and alignment maintenance routine had not been completed in millennia, and the grounds showed the problem to have become critical. Other timely maintenance functions were set aside to focus on power and thermo; they, too, waited for system repair. The structure was failing, and unless repairs were made, the gardens would come apart, and all life here would end.
The Illia’s crew continued in their duties, blissfully unaware of the intelligence considering them. Wolfgang Gray stood close to the monitor with an overhead view from above the Maintenance Citadel. A second screen had a representation of the structure with a path marking where they had picked up the Quest and its direction toward one of the structure’s ribs.
Gray sneered, “Got you, Shackleton.”
The Quest crossed the wall between translucent, cone-like structures 100 kilometers from the wall’s edge. The ship dove into the hexagon, the ocean large and teaming with life. The Quest reduced speed.
*
Captain K’Dhoplon and Wolfgang Gray waited for the crew member Araimeer to pick himself up from the floor.
Captain K’Dhoplon demanded, “Report!”
“Sir, sensor contact re-established,” Araimeer stuttered.
Captain K’Dhoplon scoffed down at the crewmen, “Dismissed.”
Gray said, “Captain — if I might make a suggestion?”
“What?” replied Captain K’Dhoplon.
Gray paused and then said, “It is clear this find of ours is, well, quite beyond what you had in mind. I would recommend you remove any possible leaks. You know loose orifices destroy ships.”
Captain K’Dhoplon burst out laughing and quit just as suddenly. “The Koty claim ownership of this technological wonder. We will exercise our rights and destroy any settlements found on our station.” He looked to his helmsman. “Plot a course that brings us in behind the human’s ship. I want patrols in defensive posture close to the ship. No telling what we will find.”
The battleship Illia slowed her progress around the star and made way for the exterior wall of the sphere. The squadrons of fighters kept pace and position with the great ship. It was not unlike watching a large, ponderous fish swimming in a tank, with a small school of fish tagging along. The battleship made course and speed corrections and the fighters matched nearly all of them. As the battleship neared the exterior wall of the sphere, it reoriented itself so that it now had the wall under its keel and the Quest far ahead and out of sight.
The Illia crossed the garden’s vast darkened lid producing a night for the inhabitants below it. The garden wall came at them quickly and forced them to gain altitude and vault the wall’s top, with the squadrons of defensive fighters keeping up. The Illia continued on its course at a higher altitude, eliminating the need to make the adjustment again. They passed over four more gardens before reaching the wall top showing damage. The battleship slowed its progress to a stop to view the destruction — it was, evidently, the result of a ship crashing into the wall. The fighters swarmed the area, vigilant for any perceived danger.
Following the path of destruction, they came across the crash site of the Skiptracer ship. The ship was askew, lying on its top against a volume of debris that had built up as it slid through the sea of solar panels, stopping only when it smacked up alongside the cone.
The two crew members of the downed ship were in spacesuits outside on the garden wall top, surveying the ship’s damage. Even from a distance, it was clear that quite a bit of repair was going to be needed. Gino and Worrell tried to flag down the Koty ships for assistance. But, even if Gino and Worrell were working for the Koty representative Wolfgang Gray, it was not the way of the Koty to offer assistance to anyone needing help. When the Koty ships moved forward and away from them, the crew of the downed ship realized that the Koty had no use for alien races.