James Wittenbach - Worlds Apart 09

by Gethsemane

  He remembered the parishioners singing one of the Ancient carols together.

  “Oh, Citadel of Bat’Leth

  Thy blade beside me lies

  Far above through time and space

  Our mighty starships ply

  Our world will always welcome Saviors

  As time goes by.

  Oh yes, the world will always welcome Saviors

  As time goes by.”

  And in that church at Christ Solstice Mass Time, it had suddenly occurred to him that the other people in the church weren’t just enjoying the lights, or the songs, or the smell of churchwood, but that somehow all of these things were helping them make a connection to the Allbeing. And that he, though his parents had made him attend various services over the years had never felt that connection the way these others did.

  When he looked at the candles, he only saw fire. When he heard the carols, they were just songs. When he prayed, it felt like he was standing at the edge of a canyon, straining to hear an echo that never came.

  And he had asked himself, ‘What if they are all just pretending? What if they have convinced themselves that this ritual somehow connects them to the Allbeing, when in fact, the Allbeing is off on the higher planes and could not possibly care less about them?

  “Bugger this,” Keeler said out loud. Then, turning his eyes heavenward added, “Not you, of course.”

  He pounded on the door, “I’m ready to go,” he called out. It was an understatement. He couldn’t wait to get out of that small, Holy room.

  A short time later, Keeler and Redfire were taken to a dressing room, and provided with white robes to wear ‘in preparation for your journey,’ the quartermaster, a wizened little fellow whose name-tag read “Trosper.”

  “What will happen to our clothes while we’re gone?” Redfire asked.

  “They will be kept in a storage locker for you,” Trosper replied, and he cocked his head to the rows of metal lockers behind him.

  Keeler held up the robe as though it were a dirty diaper. “I’m not wearing this.”

  “Pardon?” Trosper said.

  Keeler handed him back the folded robe. “If I’m going to go into the next world, I’m gonna go with my pants on.”

  A crooked grin came across Redfire’s face. “I agree,” he said, handing the robe back to the befuddled Trosper.

  “But you must wear the robe!” Trosper protested. “Everyone wears the robe!”

  “Oh, and if everyone shoved corn down his pants, would you do it, too?” Keeler challenged him.

  Trosper seemed confused at the unexpected reference to corn. He pointed to a sign hanging in the front of the room. ‘All Departees MUST Wear Appropriate Vestment. NO

  EXCEPTIONS!!”

  “Two exclamation marks,” Keeler said. “They must really mean it. However, I’m not going to wear this robe.”

  Trosper picked up his communication device and pressed several buttons. “Security, I have two departures here who refuse to wear their vestments.” Keeler and Redfire could not hear the other side of the conversation. “Yes, they’re the off-worlders… But the rule is No Exceptions… But the rule is No Exceptions… The rule says ‘No Exceptions… No exceptions…. I can’t make an exception…’”

  Keeler seemed amused listening into the conversation, while Redfire grew apprehensive that they would miss their scheduled departure. Trosper would not be mollified until an order was delivered to him from “Level 3,” which authorized Keeler and Redfire to be allowed into the Departure Area sans robes.

  “Why did you make such a big deal about the robes?” Redfire asked Keeler as they walked, alone, onto the flat open ground of the gateway.

  Keeler smiled. “Mainly, it was because I really do prefer wearing my own clothes, and the idea of waddling around here in a bathrobe struck me as stupid. But also, the little old guy’s response gave me insight into their culture. He almost immediately called authority figures to enforce an admittedly arbitrary rule. Authoritarian cultures inevitably make their citizens weak and stupid, subject to the whims of the complete imbeciles who staff the state bureaucracy. ‘No exceptions.’”

  They were made to wait a few more minutes to be allowed into the plaza. They walked out onto the flat, marble slabs that lined the floor of the plaza and strode toward the silvery arch that loomed over them.

  They saw a small group of people on the opposite side of the Gateway. The separation between them was deliberate.

  The doors shut at the four entrances to the Plaza. “Two minutes to Gateway Activation” said a voice. Above them loomed the gateway, a high-golden arch. Keeler felt an electric tingle that might have been the energy building in the gate’s capacitors, or might have been anticipation.

  “One minute to gate activation,” Redfire informed him.

  Keeler began to sing. “I love to go swimmin’ with bow-legged women and swim between their legs….”

  The Gateway Control Annex – When the gateway activated, A bright light enveloped Keeler and Redfire, and when it had faded, they had vanished.

  The measuring instruments Hardcandy Banks had brought with her showed a massive burst of energy as the gate activated. A lot of it was mundane… photons, electromagnetic waves, neutrinos and the like. There were also herds of hyper-neutrinos, hyper-photons, and hyper-energy waves like those found in hyperspace. But there were also bursts of particles and waves her instruments couldn’t identify. She scowled at the readings.

  “Did you get your data?” asked Blade Toto, leaning against the doorway, showing off his lean, sensual frame.

  “Neg,” she said. “Something blinded my instruments point-four-seconds into the event.

  Some of the energy that comes out of the Gateway is acting like a dampening field for our instruments.”

  “That’s too bad,” Toto said.

  “Not really,” she made a rapid series of notations on her datapad. “The energy spike that came through the Gateway would have killed all of us and vaporized this entire complex, were it not for the dampening field.”

  Toto put his hand on her waist. “Hey, you wanna see if they have anything to eat or drink around here, since we have some time to kill. I’ve got some kava back in the ship, if you want.”

  She groaned. “You wanna ‘kill some time’ huh?”

  Toto laid his hand on her shoulder. “Well, we’re here and aside from the Gateway, there ain’t much to do.”

  She gently pulled his hand away. “Maybe I can get some technical data from the Gethsemanians to put my energy into context.”

  Toto sighed. She would end up giving into him, but she always insisted on this dance first.

  Chapter 03A

  Who Knows Where? – William Randolph Keeler found himself the sole passenger on a long, wooden boat that glided silently above the silvery waters of a dark river. He turned around to see a man with a hood guiding the tiller at the back of the boat.

  Seeing Bill Keeler turn to him, the man at the back of the boat peeled back the hood from his head. He revealed himself to be a soft, middle-aged human, bald, but with a trim ring of hair above his ears; distinguished but harmless, and perhaps a little befuddled. Bill Keeler recognized him instantly.

  It was his father.

  Arthur Keeler had died of a freak brain aneurysm while participating in a naked quoits tournament in Kandor. This had happened some nineteen years previously by his own time scale, and maybe three hundred years had actually gone by as Commander Keeler had passed time in hyperspace.

  This was going to be awkward.

  Arthur Keeler, smiled and offered his hand. “Hello, Billy.” Bill Keeler took it and shook it tentatively. “Hello, Dad. Um, I wasn’t expecting this.” Arthur Keeler shrugged. “Well, no one ever does. I was kind of surprised myself, to tell you the truth.”

  There was an awkward pause.

  Bill Keeler broke the silence, “So, they keepin’ you busy?” Arthur Keeler gestured at the tiller. “You mean this? No, they just sent me her
e to escort you to the other side, make your journey less stressful and whatall.” Bill Keeler nodded, and then asked his father, “How’s mom?” Arthur Keeler shrugged again. “Same as always, except, you know, dead.” The boat shuddered and Arthur Keeler had to push on the tiller to direct it into calmer waters.

  “This darn thing is always doing that. Now, what were we talking about?”

  “You look like I always remembered you,” Keeler said. “You look like you were when I was growing up. But you were an older man when you died. Is that what happens when you die? You get to be middle-aged again?”

  “You’re only seeing me the way you want to see me,” Arthur Keeler explained. “It’s kind of complicated. You know those episodes of The Scary Zone of Unpredictable Madness that always end with some kind of crazy plot-twist, like where the protagonist doesn’t get what he wanted, but gets something similar, but very disturbing that ultimately destroys his soul?”

  “That’s pretty much every episode of The Scary Zone of Unpredictable Madness ,” said Bill Keeler.

  “This is going to be a lot like that.” With that, Arthur Keeler pulled the hood up over his head.

  A thick mist had begun rising from the river.

  “Where’s Ranking Phil?” Bill Keeler asked.

  “Flying through a tunnel of light,” Arthur Keeler said.

  “Why didn’t I get to fly through a tunnel of light?”

  “Some people get tunnels of light, some people get rivers, some get nothing at all,” the elder Keeler explained. “It’s just how it is.”

  “So, what should I expect when we reach the far shore?” Bill Keeler asked.

  Arthur Keeler heaved a sigh. “You know, if I were you, I wouldn’t have gone. But it’s too late to turn back now.”

  Bill Keeler scratched himself out of sheer unease. The boat glided through the water for several interminable seconds during which Bill Keeler could think of nothing to say.

  Arthur Keeler looked off into the foggy distance. “Billy, when we reach that far shore, you’re going to learn things you won’t be able to unlearn. The Gethsemane Gate was not built for you.

  You’re going to regret this journey in ways you can’t begin to imagine.”

  “Oh, great, now you tell me.”

  “Really, they should have put some kind of warning label on that thing,” Arthur Keeler said, referring to the Gateway.

  The boat crunched against the bottom of the river on the shallow side. The fog on the other bank was thick and heavy. “Here we are. Watch your step getting off the boat.” Bill Keeler hesitated, and turned to his father. “It was good seeing you again.”

  “Next time, maybe you can stay longer,” said Arthur Keeler. “We’ll play some checkers.”

  “I’d like that,” Bill Keeler agreed, and he shook his father’s hand.

  Bill Keeler stepped off the boat, and charged into the fog without looking back.

  Chapter 04

  Pegasus – Family Quarters of Lt. Commander Alkema – Ten Nemesis warheads exploded sequentially on the night side of the rogue planet. The first carved out a deep, bowl-shaped crater on the night-side of the planet. The next nine exploded within the crater, creating a rocket-engine effect that altered the rogue planet’s trajectory by fractions of a degree.

  Instead of hitting Gethsemane head-on, the rogue planet struck it a glancing blow. A quarter of Gethsemane’s surface was obliterated and shockwaves destroyed most of the remaining crust. Debris from the collision rained down on the planet, each piece detonating like a small nucleonic warhead.

  0.0% Survival Rate. Complete Ecosystem Destruction.

  Pegasus said.

  Lt. Cmdr David Alkema frowned and ran the simulation again, adding more warheads and altering the angle of deflection. He sat back and watched the simulation play out in the holographic display. It was still not enough to avoid the complete destruction of the planet’s surface.

  If Pegasus had arrived a few years earlier, or even a few months, they could have destroyed or deflected the rogue planet. If they had arrived at the time the Kariad did, they could have put the rogue planet safely into orbit around either the bright orange primary star or the large, iron-cored planet that occupied the next orbit in from Gethsemane. If the Kariad could build a Gateway to the Afterlife, they should have been easy for them to deflect a rogue planet.

  For that matter, of the ten other planets in the Gethsemane system (the binary companion had no planets), three were in the star’s habitable zone. Gethsemane was the third planet in the system. The fourth planet had a deadly sulfur-oxide and cyanide-rich atmosphere. The fifth, however, had a carbon-dioxide/argon atmosphere, an icy ring system, and abundant surface water (even if most of it was ice). It was not an ideal place to settle, but it was not terribly much worse than Republic had been when the first colonists arrived there. Construction of habitation domes and evacuation of Gethsemane would have been challenging, but certainly less extreme than building a metaphysical gateway. Why had the Kariad not chosen to do that instead?

  As he set up the parameters for another experimental simulation, he felt Pieta putting her pudgy arms around him. “Hey, babe,” he purred at her. “The kids are asleep, I guess?”

  “Yes, thank the Goddess,” Pieta replied. She kissed him gently on his neck. “You should spend some time with me, now.”

  Alkema scowled at his holograms. “Let me try one more simulation. Maybe if the rogue planet was in the middle of a circle of warheads at max yield, it would vaporize the debris.

  The planet would have epic meteor storms for years to come, but…” She reached across him and deactivated his interface. She was still a handsome woman.

  She whispered in his ear, “You can’t save everybody.” Alkema stroked her forearms, because she seemed to like that. And he asked her, “If you had been on Bodicea and you knew your planet was about to be destroyed, and someone told you to walk through a Gateway and you’d be in whatever your idea of the Afterlife was… would you go?”

  “My planet was destroyed, dear,” she reminded him. “I had to live in a goddess-forsaken jungle for sixteen years. If I could have missed that, by walking through some kind of gateway, I would have. Definitely.”

  “What if the alternative was living in an eco-dome on cold, barren, desolate planet?” Alkema continued.

  She put a hand over his mouth. “You know I don’t like to think about things that never happened. And why are you bothering. They left their planet. It’s over for them. Have you thought about all the planets where people didn’t have a way out? My planet? Medea?

  The Crux planet?”

  “Coriolis,” Alkema added. “Meridian, Fallon … compared to the other Pathfinders, we seemed to have hit a lot more dead worlds. It just frustrates me. We could have saved the planet if we had come here sooner. But the rogue planet is so large and it’s moving so fast… ”

  “I know what you’re going to do,” Pieta interrupted. “You’re going to obsess over this.

  You’re going to keep trying to come up with some way to save this planet, but you know, it’s a waste of time. There’s nobody left on the planet. They left. So, what’s the point?”

  “Their entire history and culture is about to be erased from the universe,” Alkema argued, but felt the weakness of his argument even as he said it.

  “No, that’s not what it is to you. To you it’s a problem. You see a problem, you need to fix it. So you obsess over it. But the people on the planet already solved their problem.

  They’re gone, and wherever they’ve gone to, I hope they’re happy. That’s all I can do.

  Now, it’s your turn to make me happy.”

  “Za, dear…” he reached up and kissed her.

  “Are you ready to make me happy now?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Good, now go down to that shop in the Amenities Nexus and get me one of those peanut butter, banana and bacon sandwiches I like. Oh, and feel free to pick yourself up something, too
.”

  Gethsemane – Port Gethsemane – Port Gethsemane, the planet’s largest city, had obviously seen better times — but what was left behind was a testament to what times they must have been.

  The remains of the city curled around a crescent-shaped bay on one of the planet’s larger landmasses. At its center, needle-thin, towering buildings pointed toward the sky in shining bronze-tinted metal and glass. Around them, more modest towers held the habitations where the city’s elite lived, and could survey their empire. These habitation complexes looked toward the sea, and the vast harbor from which the city’s wealth was drawn.

  On the inner edge of the crescent were ginormous sea-docks, stretching into the water for 2,000 and 3,000 meters in length and 500 meters across. The tips of these structures were circular platforms that were a hundred meters wider on either side than the piers themselves. Tracks ran along one side, but the equipment that had once loaded and unloaded the space-freighters of the Ancient Commonwealth was long gone. Those ships had stopped calling millennia ago.

  Some time in the last four thousand years, the harbor had become an ordinary maritime port. There were still waterships tied up alongside the piers that stuck into the harbor. They looked much like seagoing vessels on other worlds, except for the brown metallic shades of the metal they were built from. A few had sunk in the last few years and their hulks rested on the bottom near the docks. The others waited silently to rust away ¯

  which, of course, they would never get the chance to. Perhaps they might survive their planet’s destruction and drift off into the galaxy, presenting a riddle for future galactic explorers… how did these ocean-going freighters and tankers come to be adrift in the space between stars?

  Beside the largest of the ancient sea-docks, four Aves had parked: Edward, Neville, Phoenix, and Winnie II. Lt. Commander Anaconda Rook led the ‘Cultural Survey’ mission, which a few on the ship were calling ‘The Great Looting.’ She had set up a command post on the pier next to the Aves Phoenix. On a holographic table, she examined the city while her daughter, Skua, slept in a pack slung over her back.