No Direction Home

by James Baddock

  Shit… It was his embedded comm speaking, for Christ’s sake – the network that only UNSEC personnel could access. And it was his own voice he could hear… What the hell?

  ‘I’m speaking to you from the good ship Atlantis, which is the name of the starship that has almost caught up with you. Like you, I’m a clone of the original Chris Vinter, the second successful outcome of the same project that produced you, but, by the time I came along, it had been taken over by EarthCorp. I’m your alter ego, I’m afraid. Now I’ll give you a few moments to digest all that before I continue.’

  Vinter found himself in front of the mirror, staring intently at it, only dimly aware of the significance of the reaction. Another Vinter… Shit. Unless he really was going round the bend, after all, some unpredictable side effect of the cloning process that had him hearing voices in his head… For a moment, he wondered if the Livvy Vinter were trying to resume control again, but then recalled the content of the message; the other Vinter was aboard Stalker.

  Terrific. That’s all we bloody need – another one of me.

  But it made sense, unfortunately – if they could do it once, they could do it again. And again… How many of me are there, for fuck’s sake? And how the hell was this other one talking to him through the most heavily protected comms system on Terra Nova?

  ‘To answer the question I know you’d ask if you could – yes, I’ve hacked into your comms systems and I’m speaking to you through it. Nobody else can hear us – it’s routed exclusively to you as sole recipient. Now, if you want to reply, you need to accept a burst message I’m going to send in a few seconds – your nano systems should be able to handle it and convert it into a format you can feed into your comp. Obviously, you’re going to be concerned that it’s simply a virus that will cripple your system, one way or another, but then you’re going to realise that if I’ve hacked into your comms sufficiently well to talk to you at all, then I’m already in a position to release a virus anyway by using the protocol – right? So… I’m sending the message now.’

  It was as if there was a brief explosion of white noise in his head, then, somehow, he knew exactly what instructions to type into his comp. He hesitated for a moment – he’s right; if he has got a virus ready to run, then he’d have implanted it by now – then typed in the sequence he had been given.

  ‘OK,’ he subvocalised. ‘I hear you, Chris.’

  There was a delay of about ten seconds before the voice in his head said, ‘That was quick. Are you on your own?’

  OK, so the time lag was about right for Stalker’s present distance; maybe he wasn’t going round the bend after all… Vinter waited a couple of seconds to see if there was anything else, then said ‘Yeah. You bloody well woke me up though. I take it you’re alone as well?’ He went over to the drinks dispenser and dialled a coffee; with a ten second delay for the message to reach the other ship and for a reply to come back, he might as well wake himself up during the gaps.

  ‘Yeah – although you’ll have to take my word for it. This is just between the two of us – we’ll just have to live with the time lag, I suppose.’

  ‘Yeah, I think I can cope with that. OK, What did you want to talk about that you don’t want our bosses to hear?’ Again, he waited for the response, but when it came, it took him by surprise.

  ‘Is that really what you want to talk about?’

  Vinter pursed his lips ruefully. ‘You know the answer to that, don’t you?’

  ‘I suspect the main problem we’re both having is that we already know what the other one’s going to say, isn’t it? What you really want to know is whether there are any differences between us, and if so, what are they? Right?’

  ‘Right. OK… which one do you remember – Anji or Livvy?’ He took a sip from his cup and grimaced; now that he had the Anji memories, the shipboard coffee seemed to taste even worse…

  ‘Livvy. I don’t know any Anji – or Angela. Well, there was a girl at school called… OK, so you’ve got two sets of memories, is that it?’

  ‘Right.’ Bloody hell – he’s quick. But then we both are…

  ‘And, at a guess, the Anji set is the original.’

  ‘I think it is, yes. They gave you the simpler version.’

  ‘Figures. They’ve given me just about enough to keep me sane – I’m only a fucking cyborg, after all, so who cares what effect it has on me?’ There was a pause, but before Vinter could reply, the other voice said, ‘You know your trigger phrase, don’t you.’ It was a statement, not a question.

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Shit… so you’re under your own control?’

  Vinter nodded, a split second before he realised the futility of the gesture. ‘The original trigger’s been disabled.’

  ‘So you’re not under New Dawn control?’

  ‘Not as far as I can tell.’

  ‘That’s something, anyway.’

  Vinter hesitated for a few seconds, then said quietly, ‘In held ‘twas in I.’

  This time, there was a longer delay than before. ‘That was the nonsense phrase used to release you?’

  ‘Yes. Did it have any effect on you?’

  ‘Nope. I certainly still don’t know what my trigger phrase is.’

  ‘Procol Harum? Pink Floyd?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue what you’re talking about. Looks like it doesn’t work for me.’

  ‘It was a bit of a long shot, to be honest.’

  ‘Thanks for trying… So you’re more like the real Vinter than I am, by the look of it.’

  ‘Who knows? I haven’t been given all his memories, after all – I know that. Does it bother you?’

  ‘What, that you’re more like the template than me? I suppose it does, in a purely intellectual sense, but not in any visceral way. The way I look at it is this – I’m lucky to be here at all and so are you, because the failure rate in the programme that produced us was catastrophic. We’re not exactly easy to create, apparently – it’s the augmentations that are the problem. You were Number One Eighty Seven, I was Two Ninety Three and we’re the only two successful augmented clones out of nearly four hundred attempts. The process needs a little working on, put it that way.’

  ‘Bloody hell… I never knew. What happened to the others? Never mind – I can guess.’

  ‘Most of them didn’t last beyond the embryo stage. Those that did mostly had genetic defects that would have led to mutations or the kind of disabilities that the researchers didn’t want, bearing in mind that the whole project was funded by the military, so they were only interested in super-warriors – us, in other words. Some had inadequate or non-existent immune systems, so they would have died of the common cold if they were ever exposed to it… and so on. There were simply too many things that could go wrong that normally would have been dealt with by Mother Nature, but not by Genetic Engineering. The last one in the sequence apparently did survive to maturity, but the minute he was awoken, he went berserk and killed everyone in the med lab. They had to take him out with automatic weapons and he still killed three armed soldiers… They cancelled the project after that.’

  ‘I’m not surprised… So there were nearly four hundred of us who were simply disposed of?’ Bastards…

  ‘Incinerated, apparently. But yes, round about that.’

  ‘There’s nothing at all about any of this in our data bank.’

  ‘Now why doesn’t that surprise me? Not many people did know about it, actually. It wasn’t exactly something that anyone on Earth was interested in making public, so I doubt that even the orginal Vinter ever found out, either. Once it was cancelled, the UN took the decision to bury the whole project, you know, destroy the equipment and the files, but before they could do a proper job, EarthCorp moved in and captured the facility. I was still in the tank then, put on indefinite hold, and so EarthCorp had me to work on right from the start. They found the Livvy memories that New Dawn had succeeded in giving to you in the databanks and adapted them to suit EarthCorp. So, as far as
I’m concerned it was EarthCorp who sponsored me through University and then recruited me into their military wing.’

  ‘Why didn’t they simply use one of their own people? That would save having to rewrite any memories – again.’

  ‘Like I said, we’re difficult to create. They tried, but enough of the equipment had been destroyed to make it impossible without re-developing the entire technology, which, I gather, you have on board your ship. By the time we had to launch from Earth, they still hadn’t managed to grow a viable second clone, so they were stuck with me.’

  ‘And none of that bothers you? That you’ve been brainwashed and given a set of memories that are utter bullshit?’

  ‘It bothers me, but what the hell am I supposed to do about it? Whether I have the original memories or not doesn’t seem particularly important to me in comparison to simply being here, to be honest, given what happened to the other three hundred and ninety four Vinters who never made it. I am what I am, same as you, and there’s not much point in wishing things were different. Neither of us is the original Vinter and we never will be. More to the point, everything that’s been put into our heads is false anyway, because – well, you know why.’

  ‘Because it never actually happened – not to us, anyway.’

  ‘Exactly. There is one thing that I resent, I suppose.’

  ‘That I have both sets of memories and you don’t.’

  ‘Exactly. You know me better than I know you. Could put me at a disadvantage.’ Now, his voice sounded shrewder, more calculating. Vinter knew why; they both knew that were almost certainly going to have to fight each other at some point and that only one would survive – assuming either of them did…

  ‘OK. This is where we get to the matter at hand, is it?’

  ‘We’ll have to do it some time.’

  ‘OK. You’ve initiated all this, so presumably you’ve got something to say.’

  ‘Right. I think we both know that we’re all in a dead end scenario. Our original mission was to catch up with you, destroy you with nukes and then head on to Delta Pavonis to claim it for ourselves, but it didn’t exactly work out as planned. I don’t suppose I need to tell you that we had an argument with a larger than usual piece of cosmic debris about thirty years ago that cost us nearly a third of our deuterium mass, which means that we can’t slow down enough at PlanetFall. The bottom line is that we need your cryochambers, and Shadrin will be going all out to make that happen.’

  ‘Shadrin?’

  ‘He Who Must Be Obeyed. Our commanding officer. Colonel Yevgeny Ilyich Shadrin. He led the assault on Mumbai.’

  ‘Bloody hell… Not exactly an idiot, in other words. And pretty ruthless to boot.’

  ‘Indeed. He had no qualms whatsoever about nuking Terra Nova and everyone aboard, but now, of course, he can’t do that, so he’ll try and capture you instead. However, it’s going to be complicated by the fact that we can’t afford to use all our firepower, because we daren’t risk damaging Terra Nova, so all the nukes, railguns, missiles, lasers, armour plating to deal with kinetic missiles and so on that we’ve got are going to count for bugger all. Our firepower will give us some advantage when it comes to the crunch, but any attack is going to involve heavy casualties on both sides. Interrupt me, by the way, if I’m stating the bleeding obvious too much – I suspect you already know all this.

  ‘However, what you won’t know for certain is exactly how bad the propellant mass problem is. It’s bad enough. Like I said, we won’t be able to decelerate enough at Delta Pavonis to achieve any kind of orbit, not unless we ditch a substantial amount of mass along the way, which will include about half the cryochambers – along with their deep frozen colonists. So the reasoning is, why do that when we can grab yours and transfer all our colonists across? Why ditch half of our colonists when they’ll all survive if we can take over Terra Nova? OK, so it’ll mean spacing all of yours, but so what? You’re the enemy, after all.

  ‘The thing is that, if we combine our deuterium masses, we could probably get a significant proportion of the colonists, both lots that is, to Delta Pavonis. It’d need some pretty nifty engineering work, not to mention recalculating orbital vectors, using light sails or something similar, maybe taking longer over decelerating and doing it at a lower rate or using both ships in reverse slingshot manoeuvres to slow down, but we could come up with a solution that would bring in the largest number of survivors. How many, I don’t know, because I’m not an expert in orbital or celestial mechanics, not that good, anyway, but we could at least have a stab at it. I’ll pause here, because you might have spotted something I’ve missed.’

  ‘Unlikely. So Shadrin won’t go for a combined solution because he want to have all his colonists survive rather than simply some, right? But you’re talking about the greatest good for the greatest number.’

  ‘Exactly. But there’s no way I can get Shadrin to go for this and, believe me, I’ve tried. He couldn’t care less about your colonists, to be honest.’

  ‘Ferreira’s the same. You’re the enemy, so you don’t deserve any consideration at all as far as he’s concerned.’

  ‘Even though we’re probably all that’s left of Mankind? Did you realise that?’

  ‘Yeah – we received the broadcast. Fucking Armageddon.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘What we don’t know is what happened to bring it about. The last we heard before that, things were getting worse. You and New Dawn were both building starships and rattling sabres at each other.’

  ‘OK. Things got a lot worse. The cover stories about Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti being the destinations were a load of bullshit. Both starships were intended for Delta Pavonis all along, simply because it had the most Earth-like planet. Both sides simply intended to kick out the UN once they got there, even if they couldn’t manage to intercept and destroy you on the way. We managed to get going first and, once EarthCorp realised what New Dawn were up to, they destroyed New Dawn’s ship while it was still in orbit. Things went downhill fast after that. New Dawn hit London with a chemical attack, we did the same thing to Tokyo, then they nuked New York, we nuked Beijing and so it went on. It’s like both sides had a fucking death wish all along.’

  ‘Jesus… The stupid bastards…’

  ‘Exactly. They threw it all away – everything. And all because both sides thought their way was right. Or they didn’t want to give up the power they held, more like.’

  ‘How bad was it?’

  ‘Pretty much total annihilation. There might be a few survivors in more remote areas or in underground bunkers, but the radiation will get them in a few years, because neither side bothered about using clean nukes – assuming any nuke can be called clean, that is… If any do manage to make it through somehow, they’ll have been blasted back to the Stone Age.’

  ‘There’s nothing left at all? Not even the Tycho Base?’

  ‘They only had supplies for six months, although they lasted for nearly a year in the end. Or some of them did… You don’t want to hear the last message they sent, believe me. So it’s Delta Pavonis or bust for both of us now, with the added consideration that whoever gets there will be on their own. If there are any survivors left on Earth, they won’t be sending out any starships for several thousand years yet, if ever. We are all there is, which makes getting as many of us to PlanetFall as possible even more vital.’

  ‘And how.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘So it looks as if we’re going to make the same mistakes here as happened back on Earth. Even when it’s in our own best interests to co-operate, we’re going to fight it out – for what? Terra Nova is big enough for both of us, for Christ’s sake. We could set up separate colonies on opposite sides of the planet if it came to it.’

  ‘Yes, but do they want to exist together, even if the other side are half a planet away? In any case, can you see either side trusting the other enough even to start negotiating?’

  ‘They might do, I suppose… but I’m not holding my breath on that o
ne.’ He paused, then said, ‘You know, it would be very easy to become arrogant about how much brighter we are than them, wouldn’t it, when they behave like that?’

  ‘It would indeed. Even talking about “them” isn’t a good sign, really, is it?’

  ‘No, it isn’t…’ Vinter rubbed his face tiredly. ‘OK, let’s think this through. Basically, the problem is the fact that both ships are under military control at the moment. Presumably, you’ve got political leaders on board in the cryochambers? Any chance of reviving them and getting them around a table if I can do the same thing here?’

  ‘Not on my own, no. I’ve suggested that to Shadrin as well, but he insists there’s no need – there’s nothing to discuss, because he has his orders. They were to destroy Terra Nova and everyone on board anyway, so he’s simply modifying them to enable our sleepers to survive. The real reason, of course, is that he doesn’t want any interference from above. As far as he’s concerned, we’re at war, and that’s all there is to it.’

  ‘Ferreira feels the same way. That’s the crux of the matter, though, isn’t it? They’re both sides of the same coin. If we could take the military element out of the equation, we might be able to get somewhere.’

  ‘There’s really only one time where that could happen, isn’t there?’

  ‘In battle. Maximum casualties on both sides.’

  ‘And how do we do that, when we’re going to have to fight each other? What we want to happen is going to count for fuck all.’ There was a pause and Vinter was about to speak, but then the voice continued, ‘Just for the record, when it does happen – us having to fight each other, that is – it’s nothing personal. If it were up to me, I’d tell them to go fuck themselves, but – well, once we’re in Augmented Mode, we won’t have any choice in the matter, will we?’

  ‘Yeah, I know – I’ve been there.’ Six dead UN troopers…

  There was silence that stretched out for considerably longer than the signal delay, before Vinter Two said, ‘Actually, maybe the situation will resolve itself anyway. Assuming we go ahead with the attack, there are bound to be heavy casualties. Maybe there won’t be enough troops left on either side to be in control afterwards. It would all depend on how many UN people you’ve got available.’