Tinman

by Simon Fairhead

  “Immediate.”

  CHAPTER 9

  If you ever have the opportunity to venture into space, don’t go. If you are a fighter pilot or a submariner, you will find familiar conditions, but much, much worse. The places between the stars are not meant for living organisms, and their fragile reliance on heat and light and water, all within very precise, immutable boundaries.

  Art Parrish tried to scream, to wake himself from a nightmare. He found he was not asleep, and the nightmare was real. He would have felt sick, but his stomach was stored, along with the rest of his organs, his body, on the deck below, in refrigerated stasis. Unit 114-Kamakura.

  He found, by ‘blinking’ that he could see. He seemed to be around six feet from the ground. He appeared to be looking at bio-readouts on a screen. Involuntarily, the view changed and wheeled around to look at a trajectory chart. The mental nausea returned. A voice entered his head.

  “Art, you’re awake.”

  He didn’t know who it was.

  “The disorientation is normal. I have patched you through my optical sensors. Would you like a self-operated cart?”

  He was desperate for some sort of physical control, but he did not know how to answer. Where was his voice to come from?

  “Patching you through now. You should see a set-up screen.”

  He did indeed. He had been heard. Now he was in familiar territory. The green type on the plain black screen was his own design. Stage one of physical integration. Now, how to type the programming code? Ah, there was the first line. Oh, there was the second. Amazing. He was coding as fast as he could think. A rectangle appeared on the right side of the screen, showing the edge of a charging station and a calibration chart. Optics were up and running. He zoomed into the centre of the chart, the largest of the five finely marked concentric circles, and focussed his eyes, the composite video signal from the lens. Then he zoomed all the way out to the wide end of the zoom. Focal length of 14mm. A semi fish-eye lens. Now he could see both sides of the charging station, the chart, and the edges of several other carts docked along side him, all curiously barrel-distorted on the edge of his vision. Focus was out. He typed in an adjustment to the back-focus, re-focused on the chart, and zoomed in again. Clear focus all the way through his zoom range.

  He typed some more. A blast of engine noise frightened him. A rectangle with a leaping noise bar appeared, mostly amber darting into red. He shifted some on-screen sliders, brought the volume levels down, down beyond the amber into a green area. Better. He slipped it down a little more. The engine noises became faint background ambience. He trimmed the bass, boosted the treble. Quiet but clear. Much better. Very calming, in fact. Audio system online.

  He took a moment to rest. His memories were returning. He had no eyes to weep, but weep he did, at what he had seen, and guilt lay upon him like a sweat-soaked blanket.

  He had seen men and women reduced to screaming monkeys as the realisation of the approaching disaster became tangible. In the early days after the news was first broadcast, the people of Imo took comfort from the announcement that evacuation ships were on their way, unaware they would not arrive in time, equally unaware no such ships had been launched. A very brave executive at Vimo, Imo’s only news channel, had made the decision not to tell the population they were doomed. Instead, she continued to broadcast footage of plucky Imonites stock-piling food and packing belongings, ready for the impending exodus. Her name was Vara Brabin, and for Art Parrish, she was a hero.

  Kate disagreed. “She lied! She lied to everyone, so they did nothing, and when it was too late, they panicked and killed each other in a wave of suicides and murders and all that other stuff no one should have to experience!”

  At its cold, logical core, the decision was one of damage limitation, of offering a few more months of relative normality, of the cosy illusion of war-time spirit, where neighbours help each other out, and the nation comes together to fight a common foe.

  Vara Brabin kept up the façade right until the end. As a journalist, she even anchored some of the final programmes, keeping positive news to the fore, knowing, months in advance, that everyone on Imo without access to Kyko Halliday’s vessel would die.

  And she was on board. Halliday had seen to that. Inadvertently, she had protected his shuttlecraft from danger on the launch pad, and this was her reward.

  When the supernova blast-wave hit the planet, at Imo adjusted time 2:55pm on a rainy Monday afternoon, Ms Kjanvik had been engaged in a fruitless round of chasing invoices from late payers. No one had been answering their phones, and around six minutes to three, some stones smashed the window, and black smoke started to snake in from under the reception room door. She was getting static from most of the head-feeds, and the rest were abandoned open channels. All she seemed to be getting was screaming and crying and prayers. The military was still online. Following Halliday's instructions, she filed a fake flight plan for his shuttlecraft, indicating engine problems on the 101-90. She informed the military, and Imo air traffic control that the shuttle was on route to the Columbus. Then smoke got in her lungs and she began to cough and she knew her bag was full and she needed to empty it right -

  Launch day would haunt Art and all those aboard Kyko Halliday’s ship forever. None of them witnessed it as it happened, they were already disembodied brains in stasis tanks, but the security feeds from the launch pad cameras were transmitted to his vessel, along with digital media from Dawkins and Six, who loaded the shuttle.

  CAM GATE 1 was a tiny face-recognition camera positioned inside the security guard’s cabin, focussed on the inquiries window. The low-rez image showed the window frame and a section of junction, with white markings on the road. A man with a rucksack came up to the window, and banged on the glass.

  “Hello? Hello?”

  There was another voice from off camera, just a pair of legs appearing in the top corner of the frame. “I can’t see anyone.”

  The man, who wore a suit, but who sported wild hair and a week’s worth of stubble, cupped his hands to his face and peered into the booth.

  “The computers are on. I can see lights.”

  A woman came to the window. She was dressed in a business suit, and trailed a seven-year-old child, dressed quite formally, in her hand. “Knock on the window. Maybe they’re having a tea-break. You could have shaved, Pioter.”

  The man, Pioter, hammered on the window. No one came, because there was no one at the gate. The launch pad was locked down and abandoned. The staff had been murdered barely an hour earlier by Halliday employees.

  CAM GATE 1 implacably continued to record the events of the launch day as they unfolded.

  “Let’s try round the other side, I can see a shuttle being prepped now.”

  The woman looked from the gate to the cabin, and frowned. “Be quick, Pioter, we don’t want to miss it.”

  Pioter ducked out of the shot for a second or so, and then a big, six wheel construction lorry, laden with thirty or so terrified people, careered into view, spewing smoke and dust, and mowed down Pioter’s wife and child, the high metal gate and the security guard’s cabin. CAM GATE 1 twisted from its mount in the final seconds and recorded the lorry, amidst the collapsing masonry, speeding across the tarmac. Crushed body parts pirouetted away from the bloodied wheel arches as it lurched and swerved towards the launch pad. There was a scream of anguish from Pioter, and a split second of him scrambling over the twisted skeleton of the bars of the gate before the camera died.

  SEC. CAM 5 was on the underside of the air traffic control tower. It faced the gate and covered the area from CAM GATE 1 to the base of the launch pad. Thankfully, it recorded no sound.

  This was a high resolution image from a broadcast quality camera. Normally, it would have operated simultaneously with SEC. CAM 5a to provide a 3D image for spaceport security to archive. But SEC. CAM 5a had broken weeks ago, and Halliday Unisphere maintenance operative BOB4, who was responsible for spaceport camera repairs, had hidden himself in the bl
ast-bay of a launching shuttlecraft, the Mayflower. He was incinerated. Suicide?

  The Mayflower launched successfully, and docked half a day later with the Columbus in high Imo orbit. This was another fast craft, owned by the manufacturer of the Krupp mass converters. They, too, had the Farringdon-Kaarlsonn star-drive, and 52 D-12 converters. What they did not have was a viable escape plan. Nothing is known of the fate of the Columbus, save the initial trajectory co-ordinates, and this was a direct route to the Luhrmann Breach, at nine-tenths light-speed. Physics dictates, on speed alone, they would have made it, with two weeks to spare, but they had minimal shielding and standard cabin arrangements. The untested acceleration alone may have crushed everyone on board to death in the first few weeks. And they would have skimmed the leading edge of the blast-wave as they entered the Breach. Enormously powerful waves of x-ray and gamma radiation would have flooded all but the most heavily shielded areas of the ship, killing all organic matter on board.

  Perhaps some survived. But we will never know…

  The construction lorry, laden with evacuees, came to a sudden halt at the base of the launch platform under the emotionless gaze of SEC. CAM 5. A trail of blood, like a skid-mark, soiled the pale tarmac all the way from the gate. Pioter staggered along behind. He had lost one of his shoes, but had not noticed. Dawkins and Six could be seen leaving the field of view as more people, running frantically, most carrying luggage, swarmed over the broken gates towards the last spacecraft to leave Imo.

  Art remembered the awful, blue light most of all. E-416 was a stupendous blue-white ball of plasma in the sky now. Imo knew no darkness. At night, the diaphanous shell of the shock-wave appeared like a hovering web, held motionless only by distance. Only astronomical telescopes, trained on the periphery of the explosion could see the truth of it; the speed of it: a racing, boiling, burning sphere of white-hot gases, consuming space itself at near the speed of light.

  People began scaling the launch platform. The service lift had been disabled by Dawkins after he and Six were on board, so they broke down the security gate to the stairs. Many more began clambering up the scaffolding of the launch-pad superstructure. Still with their incongruous burdens of suitcases and hand luggage, their lap-tops and packed lunches. Men. Women. Children. Pets.

  Primary ignition began. Those who had not begun to climb fell back momentarily as the ignition motors sent sparks out to meet the flood of liquid hydrogen spewing from the fuel tanks. Then, astonishingly, horrifically, they surged forward again. More people could be seen thronging through the gates behind them, all caught in the blue-white glare of E-416 as it tore across space to meet them.

  Secondary ignition. The sparks ignited the liquid hydrogen. TECH. CAM 2 captured the moment of ignition, situated on a gantry 250 metres from the launch pad. The silhouettes of climbing people obscured the view for a moment. The rocket nozzles flexed and shifted with the sudden surge of fire. The silhouettes sprang and danced and fell like flies burned in a lamp. Then tertiary ignition began, and everything burned to white.

  SEC. CAM 5 recorded the carnage as tertiary ignition turned the launch pad into a furnace. The blast wave sent hundreds of people scattering lifelessly across the tarmac, blasted half to ash. The construction lorry crashed over and exploded, its tyres on fire. Twenty or thirty people, not caught in the initial blast, staggered across the camera view on fire, horribly maimed, falling, dying, dead. Pioter, further away, fell to his knees as his hair and clothes caught fire.

  AFT HULL CAM. 101-90-S recorded the same scene from high on the shuttlecraft’s flank, above the orange belly of one of the four re-useable fuel tanks. It pointed directly down, a wide angle lens, and caught a 180 degree view of the black smoke and white fire that spat and roared out of the launch thrusters. Like insects caught in a forest fire, the hundreds of tiny black dots below, desperate human beings, spun and slewed away from the mighty force of the erupting engines, extremities withering, bending, vapourising like the fragile antennae of ants under a magnifying glass pointed at the sun. Then, a judder. The superstructure of the shuttle visibly flexed as it tore itself from the disengaging launch tower. Umbilicals popped and spun in the air, spewing gases as they writhed and fell away from the hull, and then the image blacked and returned, digital squares of interference making holes in the picture, as vibrations ran the length of the shuttle. The view slowly expanded as the craft cleared the launch tower. The blood-trail of Pioter’s wife and daughter was still visible, burned black into the tarmac as the security gate came into view. And still more people were coming. The road beyond was swamped with figures, all looking skyward. The fields and open spaces on both sides were littered with abandoned vehicles. One can only imagine their thoughts at this moment. There would be the educated and informed, crying in terror as their last hope of escape lumbered into the air on its column of smoke and flame, the noise of the engines crackling in their ears; there, too, would be the optimists, dismayed at missing this flight, but convinced, like Pioter had been, that there would be other launches soon – surely the government on Imo wouldn’t just let them die? And then there was the majority – aware life on Imo would become untenable in a few month’s time, but re-assured by Vimo that Earth ships were on their way to evacuate them.

  They were all already dead, and, thankfully, the supernova that wiped the Mioumu system off the face of the universe left no information regarding the terrors those eight hundred million souls endured in their final months of existence. One hopes they found peace with their God.

  CHAPTER 10

  Earth.

  Poor, dear, infected Earth. Men, naturally, were to blame. Too damn many of them. One cannot expect to go forth and multiply indefinitely. So it was no dramatic asteroid strike, no devastating world war (although there were always plenty of local conflicts to go round). No, it was the rather mundane but no less calamitous accretion of many small, poorly addressed problems that did it for Gaia. The salination of water tables; deforestation to make way for arable land that was hopelessly infertile; food chains fatally compromised by microscopic plastic waste particles; global temperature rises from increased industrialisation. And of course the people, the thronging, consuming, fucking and fighting people, all after a slice of the farm.

  It is a wonder any escaped the home world at all. There was an almost wilful disregard to the notion of an exodus. They didn’t want to give up their home comforts, or something. But for every refrigerator there is a power station, for every power station there is a mine, clawing out the innards of the Earth to feed it, on and on.

  In 2237, the Luhrmann Breach was discovered. It lay invisible only 85 million miles from the edge of the Kuiper belt, an eight month flight from Earth. It was a wormhole; a stable, ancient phenomena that by chance had formed in a peaceful corner of the galaxy away from the gravitational disturbances of giant stars. Like a needle pulling a thread to draw two halves of a garment together, the wormhole pinched together two folds of space, joining two voids that cosmologists later positioned more than seventeen billion light years apart, part of an entirely unknown and unseen galaxy. They called the galaxy G-17-B, galaxy seventeen billion. To Earthmen, never slow to bastardise names to more easily fit their tongue, it became known as Geseven.

  In 2250, Yan Froytzer became the first man to go through. He has statues all over the place now, and inspired a small but determined religious cult in his day, but he was little more than a monkey, trained by the military, and thought of as expendable. They actually fired him, like a human cannonball, from His Majesty’s Reconnaissance ship the HMS Stephen Hawkins, in his tiny probe vessel, at the wormhole. The probe wasn’t even made for the job; it was a sun-watcher, designed for scientists to get a close look at our star. It was heavily heat shielded, but an otherwise unremarkable ship. The exercise was very much like small boys throwing stones off a motorway bridge, just to see what would happen. Yan got through, of course, and returned within the hour, shrugging off the pats on the back, but eagerly consuming a
can of beer brought to him by the captain. Yan was a grunt, a pilot grunt, and beyond explaining the performance of the spacecraft and a physical, perceptual shift he called the ‘twist’, he offered no great revelations about the space beyond. So they sent more people.

  Millions of words have since been written about the ‘twist’, about what it is, but still no-one really knows. It is a similar sensation to being a passenger on a plane, just after take off as it banks round to find its course. If you look down the aisle, your eyes and centrifugal force tell you you are horizontal. If you look out of the window, there is the ground, with its houses and carparks, where the horizon should be, and you realise you are in fact vertical. The head-rolling nausea of that experience is part of the twist. The other one is the sensation you may have late at night, watching television, or as a passenger on a dull car journey, where you begin to doze off, and then catch yourself, as your head starts to loll. So that was the twist, mild nausea from gravitational perception, and the sensation of nodding off. Better than being torn atom from atom.

  `CHAPTER 11

  Art, Dawkins and Six made their rounds of the three decks that comprised 101-90, their rubber caterpillar tracks squeaking on the plastuminium flooring like basketball players sneakers. Their combined weight was enormous, and the deck plates vibrated as they passed.

  Art stayed at the back, tentatively following the others, occasionally scraping against walls and pipes, a newborn in an alien body. He had his binocular headcams, his fore and aft track cams, a fantastic infra-red/night vision device and a part optical, part digital telescopic sight he could zoom in to pick out distant objects in glorious detail. None of them could convincingly tell him exactly where he was. He was seeing a multitude of screens that overlapped and blended as his brain sourced the information from the various feeds to ascertain his position, but it was like trying to park a caravan using a joystick. He bumped and trundled his way along, following Six’s rear lights.