Shackleton's Folly (The Lost Wonder Book 1)

by Yunker, Todd

  Commander Astraeus brought up the rear with his burden and second in command. They headed down the flights of stairs at best speed. The two Atlantean Security Force carriers awaited them at the bottom of the stairs; everyone but the pilots left their stations and came up the steps to help the wounded.

  Dancer carried heavier equipment over his back and managed to keep his three wounded moving toward the Quest. His minions flew and ran ahead, entering the Quest as fast as their little tracks, wheels, and propellers could take them.

  Alec assessed the situation quickly as the crews from the Atlantean Security Force carriers came toward them. “Get to your ships! We will take these wounded with us.” Alec and his group headed directly to the Quest, which was still on the landing pad. The airlock opened to their approach as they reached the ship.

  Dancer and his charges arrived and entered the Quest first, as they were the most mobile of the group. Dancer took them into the galley and made them as comfortable as he could before he pulled out a medkit from a nearby storage locker.

  The woman and Electra were at the airlock when the woman collapsed. “Dancer, I need you!” called Electra into the ship. Dancer appeared with such speed it was almost instantaneous. He gently lifted the woman, who sagged in his arms and took her into the Quest, with Electra following him. Alec was the last to step into the airlock, closing it tight. He walked down the passageway and was almost to the Medical Bay when the ground pitched underfoot and knocked everyone standing to the floor. Alec fell to his knees as he almost dropped Gray from his shoulders.

  Dancer came from the galley and said, “When there seems to be no way out, get on your knees and pray for Shackleton.”

  Electra rushed forward and pushed Dancer aside as she took hold of his arm to steady him. She looked hesitantly from Dancer and his strange remark to Alec. Alec mustered up his strength; he stood up straight and lifted Wolfgang again, high on his shoulders.

  Electra came close, took his hand, and held it tightly, “Are we going to make it?”

  Alec looked back into her big, beautiful eyes and said, “I am making this up as we go, Electra. I know what we need to do, and that’s getting off this garden.” He lit up with a big smile. “Come on — let’s get out of here.” Alec had gotten to the Medical Bay when a shriek came from the wounded woman Dancer was within a nearby stateroom. Dancer took a medscanner to her as Alec entered the Medical Bay and laid Wolfgang out on the bed. The scanners went to work immediately, and, just as quickly, alerts lit up with a myriad problems and systems that were failing. Some of the organ failures were beyond the capacity of the medical system.

  “Not looking so good, am I?” asked Wolfgang.

  Dancer rushed in. “The woman is bleeding out internally from a puncture to her abdomen.”

  “Is she young and pretty?” asked Wolfgang wistfully.

  Dancer considered the question and the man asking it before he responded solemnly, “Very pretty — and I would say she was young.” Dancer caught Alec’s eye. Alec slightly shook his head.

  Wolfgang Gray said, “Bring her in here. She can make better use of this than I.”

  Alec put his hand on Wolfgang’s shoulder. “Is this what you want?”

  “What a stupid thing to ask. Yes, get the girl in here. You have some place I can rest and wait my turn?”

  “We have a nice cabin just a short distance from here,” replied Alec.

  “Well, what are you waiting for? You have a ship to pilot, right?” said Wolfgang, his voice labored.

  Alec nodded to Electra and Dancer and then left. Electra gave him a shoulder to hold onto and helped Wolfgang sit up and put his feet on the floor. Dancer had gone to retrieve the young woman. Wolfgang had managed to stand and passed through the doorway just as Dancer was carrying the young woman into the Medical Bay. Dancer laid her out gently on the medbed as Wolfgang watched. Dancer started the system. Wolfgang turned to Electra. “I want you to do something for me.”

  *

  Alec sat in the pilot’s seat to key in commands, quickly going through an abbreviated checklist for takeoff. He flipped an intercom switch. “Brace yourselves — this might be a rough ride.” He leaned over and rubbed the panel on the wall. “Dad, let’s take her back to her people.”

  *

  The battleship Illia made its way back to the debris field between shell and star. The fighters on patrol were kept close for quicker recall and recovery. Asteroids in the field were no longer in a stable orbital disk as they had been. The disruption of the outer shell had loosened its hold on them. The Illia had to readjust its course to allow for the rocks’ unpredictability. Cracks in the shell were easily discernible as bands of energy pulsed along gaps. The energy bonding the joints flickered and gave way. Gaps widened as titanic pieces of the outer shell came apart. The gardens had nothing to keep them together, and, like the seed head of a dandelion in a soft wind, they came apart in an expanding cloud of glistening jewels. The outward expansion of the gardens had been slowed by the interaction of the pieces. The garden’s trajectory was nearly linear — it was as if the sphere were enlarging in a calculated manner.

  Captain K’Dhoplon sat in his command chair and watched the gardens come apart at the seams on the Illia’s main screen. The One would forgive him. It would have been a tribute to her magnificence to have the station whole, but their mighty ship was of such insignificant size in comparison to the station, the battleship could have stopped nothing. He would have to settle for an offering to the One — technology recovery from the isolated components rather than the station as a complete living space under the dominion of the Koty. The One usually had a great understanding of such matters.

  Captain K’Dhoplon inquired, “What is the status of the individual environments?”

  “Sir, readings are indeterminate. The individual pieces have come apart, but they all have force field enclosures keeping their environments intact.” He continued, “The isolated artificial-gravity systems within each garden would make survival for the inhabitants possible,” came the reply from the science officer.

  The Illia experienced a collision with one of the many asteroids in the disk. The helmsman cried out, “Sir, the debris field is becoming unstable. Recommend repositioning the Illia.”

  Captain K’Dhoplon grimaced. “Make it so, but do not let that happen again.” He watched as the helmsman took the Illia out of the plane of the asteroid field.

  The Illia’s engines fired up and took the ship to a new position above and outside the edge of the asteroid field from the star. Captain K’Dhoplon and the bridge crew continued their duties. He reminded his helmsman, “Keep your distance. We’ll be safe here as the pieces are ejected from the sphere.”

  The communications officer said, “Captain, the Saleen would like to rendezvous with us as soon as possible.”

  “Tell them to meet us here as quickly as they can make it,” replied Captain K’Dhoplon.

  *

  The command deck was empty but for Alec as the Quest rose from the Maintenance Citadel. The Quest quickly gained the altitude it needed to put the garden behind it. Dancer came in and took his copilot’s chair. He brought out the maintenance screen. It displayed the gardens expanding, the 1070 pieces no longer connected with each other. They could visually see out the huge gaps in the external shell, but it was all relative.

  Alec flipped the Quest over and put on the sub-light to near full power, taking the ship across the open gulf now growing fast between the gardens. The Quest dashed across more than 250,000 kilometers of open space where there once had been none. Dancer managed the sensors and found the Koty battleship Illia parked near the asteroid field and a second Koty battleship outside the sphere making toward the interior through the gaps opening up between the gardens. Optically, to any normal life form, the gaps looked empty but Dancer could see beyond the visible spectrum. The walls of the gardens were alive with inconceivable energies. “Alec, make it faster. We have to get inside a garden now. There’s
something happening within the garden walls!”

  *

  Electra used her field-medic training to make Wolfgang as comfortable as possible. The internal damage from the energy weapons was extensive. The only reason he was still alive was because of the self-cauterizing nature of the energy blast.

  “You are really from Atlantis?” asked Wolfgang.

  “Asked and answered. Yes, my people are descendants of the original Atlanteans,” she replied.

  Wolfgang held up a datapad with the picture of the girl in the medbed. He zoomed in the magnification and touched her face on the datapad with his fingertips. “Is the girl going to make it?” he asked. He winced as he tried to make himself comfortable.

  “The medbed stopped her internal bleeding and has her stabilized.”

  “Good.” He grimaced as he reached out and took Electra’s hand. “‘Shackleton’s folly’ is no more. You are living proof of that. I wish I could have seen it with my own eyes.” He closed his eyes and squeezed her hand as a wave of painful awareness passed over him.

  “You know I can get you something for the pain.”

  “Yes, if you would. It will be over for me very soon.” A seizure washed over him. Electra held him down to keep him from falling to the floor.

  “I want to speak to Alec,” came the contorted voice from Wolfgang.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  It was first just a single, small light on the very first storage rack near the bottom of the first giant robot. Its systems quickly cycled up to a point where the robot awakened, receiving orders. The giant stepped forward out of the rack, turned, and went to its designated position for maintenance grouping. As it left the storage rack, the robot above it lowered into the position the first robot had held. Awake, it received its orders and stepped forward to proceed to the grouping. This process of awakening, programming, and marching onto the marshalling field to take their designated position spread like a network virus across hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of giant robots.

  The marshalling field packed quickly. Then the first maintenance teams stepped onto large ovals embedded in the ground. The ovals lit up, and the robots lifted off the ground and headed skyward to their assignment out in the sphere. The oval launching the groupings of robots together into space quickly became a stream, as robots marched forward in an orderly fashion, raising up into the sky in what looked like a school of fish flowing up out of the garden and into space, and breaking up their streaming to locations throughout the gardens.

  A rumbling rolled ahead of a dark cloud in the distance. A second marshaling field had started. The cloud was made up of row after row of the gigantic maintenance robots that had also left the maintenance center. Soon, other launching points were busily launching their robotic groups.

  *

  Alec had the Quest over the Atlantean garden and flew low inside the force field. “Alec, he is asking for you,” came the soft voice behind them. Alec saw in Electra’s face the seriousness of the situation.

  Alec said to Dancer, “Find a nice spot outside the city and set her down.”

  Dancer replied, “Understood.”

  Alec left the command deck and rushed to the stateroom where Wolfgang had been left.

  *

  The Quest came down softly on a grassy hillside overlooking the city of Atlantis. The airlock opened, revealing Wolfgang and Alec. Alec supported Wolfgang as they left the ship. They walked at Wolfgang’s pace to a large rock jutting from the ground. Alec helped Wolfgang to the ground with his back to the stone. He had an unobstructed view of the city, its waterways, and the straight blue channel of water pointing the way to the ocean. He saw the gleaming statue of Poseidon atop the temple in between the modern skyscrapers that surrounded the park even at this distance.

  Wolfgang ran his hands through the grass beside him and pulled a clump from the ground. The dirt-encrusted root system teemed with life from Earth. He put it to his nose and took a deep breath. His senses filled with the organics within the dirt and the sweetness of the grass. “I made it home.” He took another long, deep lungful and slowly exhaled out both his breath and the last of his life energy. Wolfgang was gone.

  Electra came from the ship with the walking-wounded Atlantean Security Force members they had transported. Alec had made his way to an outcropping that overlooked the valley below with Atlantis. The force field overhead no longer had the directed starlight to produce the sun’s passage across the sky; it had stopped its projection. It was the first time since the garden’s construction the inhabitants could see not only the star as it truly appeared but the asteroid disk around it and the other gardens as great jeweled hexagons adrift in the heavens. The hexagons were loose on their axis and ever so slowly spinning. Their garden was rotating away from the star.

  Electra walked up silently, stopping close to him as they both held their breath and watched the sky, waiting to see what happened next.

  “A beautiful sky for the end,” she reflected.

  “Yes, a wondrous sky,” came Alec’s quick reply. He took her in his arms and pulled her close. “I found everything I was looking for. You, for one.” He gently kissed her, and she responded, warming to his touch. “I wish we had more time,” he said.

  “I love you,” she said, her voice a whisper.

  Dancer exited the airlock with the maintenance screen in hand. He looked for Alec and saw that he would be interrupting them, but, hey — it was the end of the world, right? “Alec, I have to show you something.” He walked over to the pair, who begrudgingly released their hold on one another. Dancer held up the screen for Alec and Electra. The screen went blank immediately.

  “Why, how interesting. A blank screen?” said Alec, deadpan.

  Dancer looked at the screen again, “Come on — you were showing me something you wanted me to see.”

  “Talking to screens now, are we?”

  Electra had spent such a short time with the pair and could not pin down the exact nature of the relationship, but family or brothers came to mind. She considered the banter she had with members of her family clan.

  Dancer scanned for damage to the screen and found none. “It should be on, so the Groundskeeper has quit displaying information on it for some reason.”

  “Maybe it’s busy elsewhere,” retorted Alec. He took the maintenance screen from Dancer. As he did so, the world went dark. Not the dark of just night but the power system of the garden went out as did the power of every other garden in the sphere. The garden’s new orientation was now outward from the star, the inside of the dark nebula their only light source.

  “Okay,” said Dancer. “That was different.”

  Alec tried to key in commands, and a cursor winked on in the upper left corner. Alec held it so both Electra and Dancer could view the screen, “I think I got it.” A flash of characters crossed the maintenance screen. A real-time representation of the sphere’s interior came to life, with the asteroid field disk around the star highlighted; the view zoomed in, and a very tiny point lit up. Then the view zoomed in again on the Illia.

  Alec was about to say something ironic but checked himself. “The Koty are not in a safe place to weather this one out.”

  Dancer replied, “We don’t have much time. Once the force field fails, the gardens’ atmosphere will start to bleed out to space. Life here will not last long after it happens.” Dancer looked up at the heavens. Dancer walked back toward the bow of the Quest. “The force field is failing.”

  Electra looked at Alec imploringly, their closeness reassuring to the other.

  Alec spoke. “It should have worked. We did what it asked.” He keyed in commands, and a system schematic popped up. It was the only light they could see in the garden.

  Electra reached out and found his shoulder. She ran her hand across to his other shoulder, took it, and pulled him close to her. Alec was lost in thought; he studied her face. Electra asked, “Can I help?”

  “Of course,” came the answer. Alec reviewed t
he screen and pointed to the blip. “The Koty’s ship.”

  The screen showed the breakup of the gardens from different vantage points from the interior of the sphere. The views that most interested Alec were the ones tracking the Koty battleship Illia close into the asteroid field and the ones from the exterior of the gardens showing the gardens in various orientations to the star they once enclosed. The perspectives of the vantage points gave Alec a rough idea of where the cameras were stationed. The dwarf planets the Empire had employed to sweep the debris from the exterior of the gardens were also being used to monitor the shell’s exterior. The shots filling the screen showed the breakup of the gardens and the huge gaps that had developed between the individual rotating pieces.

  Alec watched closely as the vantage point returned to the interior of the gardens, focusing on the battleship Illia. The screen then focused on the disk of asteroids that were not supposed to be there. Alec smacked his forehead with the flat of his hand, “I am such an idiot. The Groundskeeper has been telling us that the Koty are in danger where they are. That disk of floating rock is about to get cleaned up, and so will the Koty, if we are lucky.”

  Dancer had heard some of what Alec had said. “They’re too big for us to fight one-on-one,” reminded Dancer.

  “How about some reverse psychology? If I try and fail, so be it,” came Alec’s response.

  “Where are we going?” asked Electra as Alec took her hand and pulled her along as he headed back to the Quest.

  “I have to warn them of the danger remaining in the asteroid field,” he said as they entered the Quest.

  “Don’t we want them in danger?” asked Electra.

  “Absolutely,” answered Alec.

  The Quest’s engines fired up immediately. Electra looked out the port at Wolfgang, motionless in the darkness. “Are we just going to leave him here?”