by G. H. Holmes
Well, I'm not dead yet, she thought to herself.
But thinking of death brought the nausea back. Her stomach begin began to act up again. She breathed harder, until she drew short gasps and was proud when she kept her juice down.
Suddenly she turned sleepy. A supreme tiredness came over her. Her arms and legs became heavy beyond measure; her head seemed to weigh a ton. She decided to yield and to go to sleep. Who knew? Maybe this was all just a bad dream. Maybe in a little while she'd wake up in the Space Navy's sick bay in Gemina City, tucked in, with soft pillows under her head and a nurse on call.
Tomorrow would be another day.
A black shroud came down over her mind and it went blank.
Cherry woke with a start. Where am I?
Blinking with heavy lids, she looked around and found that she still sat in that coffin-like enclosure which was the cockpit of her x-jet.
How long have I slept?
Her eyes searched for the clock in her HUD, but all it showed was a series of six zeros. She exhaled noisily. Something had happened to her systems when she was kicked out of hyperspace. She had no idea if she had slept five minutes or five hours.
The thought of time began to unnerve her.
Perhaps if she'd put her jet into low-power mode, the systems would recuperate. Charity's fingers worked her touchpad and most of the lights in her cockpit went out as she took the main systems off-line. The little fusion reactors in the four wings would replenish the batteries. After that she'd run diagnostics and then she'd do the next logical thing, whatever that would be, once its time had come.
A red triangular button stuck out of her touchpad. She eyed it for a moment.
Why haven't I thought of that before?
When she touched it, it began to blink and her craft started to broadcast an SOS signal. The thought of dying loomed large and great fears washed through her soul.
God, what's the end of this?
After what seemed an eternity to her, she powered her systems up, but found that they still would not provide her with useful data. They were still stuck beyond time and space.
Feverishly Cherry began to run diagnostics. Her fingers flew over her touchpad. She opened window after window on her main display and got deeper and deeper into the system—until suddenly the SOS button quit blinking.
It just died.
Cherry checked and double-checked and realized that while she was experimenting with her available options, she inadvertently disabled the SOS signal—and now she couldn't get it back on. She leaned back with a groan and closed her eyes.
"Great."
Now she wasn't just lost; now she was also unrecognizable for anybody who might be coming after her. Cherry looked out at the darkness in front of her face. Her mood was as black as the sky. Whatever evil thing was lurking out there, it now sneered at her.
Ben Harrow was just coming down from a skip through hyperspace when he approached the address on the vector where the crash had happened. Nobody else could have maneuvered the clumsy tug as deftly as he did. He punched buttons and digested readouts with a speed much greater than any ordinary human being. At the exact time, Ben had slowed the craft down enough that exiting the pylon road was safe to do. He left the road at the right place and entered Dark Space.
Once he was done, he marveled how Daniel von Schwarz had managed to accomplish the same maneuver all those years back, but remembered that Daniel had had an entire crew to do what he was doing by himself.
The tug slowed down and Ben became aware of the monstrous blackness around him. His heart was pierced and he felt the onset of a paralysis. Fear made his hackles to rise. Suddenly the emotional taste of his time in prison was back in his soul. The experience was just as bad as it had been seventy years ago.
Ben valiantly struggled against his incipient despair by thinking, No! This time it's different. This time everything is different.
He was not here because he'd been insolent. He was here in order to rescue somebody who was now in the same position as he'd been back then.
Ben's gaze flew across the tabletop as he took in the various readouts from its monitors and panels. The big view-screen at the front of the cockpit was black and empty.
His systems were all still up and running, just as those of Daniel von Schwarz had been when he had exited the pylon road to search after Ben.
He was not lost. Not lost!
During the hours it had taken to get here, Ben had calculated the dimensions of the sphere within which Cherry had to be floating. Surely she had engaged her distress beacon, which would make finding her a child's play. He fine-tuned his sensors to pick up even the remotest electromagnetic signal, but the tug, being the pilot ship that it was, was limited in that respect. It was not exactly a recon craft. Its ears were not the best.
Ben flew as fast as he dared and covered the biggest possible area of the range he'd calculated, but found no distress beacon. All he met was dead silence.
He sighed. Had his hurry done him in?
His heart froze when his gaze fell on the fuel gauge. The hydrogen tank feeding the reactor was less than one quarter full.
He'd forgotten to top off his bunkers! How foolish was that? Ben got mad at himself. He could hardly believe it. Had he been so blind?
Hot emotions did not always make for good decisions.
After a careful calculation, Ben allowed himself to search the projected area for a few more hours before going home. In the end he flew back to the pylon road alone, his head hung low.
Chapter 23
Harrow's mind still dwelled on Charity Jones when he walked down the wide corridor within Dante's Hall, the government seat of Terra Gemina. Barely back, he was on his way to the Planetary Security Council meeting convening in the situation room on its bottom floor. Ben walked past the arched windows and the pictures of the council members that lined the opposite wall, until he reached the tall door, which an appropriately tall guard in the blue uniform of the Space Navy opened for him.
The Council sat around a conference table with Governor Alighieri at the head. The speaker fell silent when he entered. Among those present were the elders of Terra Gemina and members of the MARDET, such as Colonel LeBlanc, its captains and their lieutenants.
Stella Halvorsen was there, too, three chairs down from Captain Anderson.
The mood was subdued and nobody smiled.
All eyes were on Ben when he walked through the door, which closed behind him. He was still wearing his Marine general's outfit, but without the hat.
Nervous, Mother Ally stood and said, "Hello Mr. Harrow. I'm so happy you're joining us. We are eagerly awaiting your report. Your troops have already told us what they know, but your report on matters will provide a different perspective, of course. What can you tell us about the situation on Kasaganaan, Sir?"
Ben arrived behind the high backed chair they'd left empty for him. He didn't even sit down. Instead, he placed his hands on its back and said, "The planet of Kasaganaan appears to be under the control of a power that knows about me and my… peculiarities."
When she saw that Ben wouldn't sit down, the governor remained on her feet, too. "I beg your pardon, Mr. Harrow. But your peculiarities are well known. They were also known to Vlad Jones before he ever left for Kasaganaan fifteen years ago."
"That's not what I mean," Ben replied, sounding polite. "I'm afraid the power over there knows things about me that go back hundreds of years to my beginnings. Only very few people have ever been familiar with those things. None are alive today—or shouldn't be."
"I'm afraid I don't understand," Mother Ally said.
Ben didn't elaborate. Instead, he said, "The entity in charge of Kasaganaan knows who I am and that I have been here for many years.
"Perhaps Vlad Jones informed it when they met.
"It expected me to go to Kasa at some point and it even set up Kasa Station as some kind of bait for me. It fully expected me to go over and reconnoiter the place. Whoever this en
tity is, it is a formidable foe." He fell silent, thinking of the engrafted module in the space station's command center electronics.
"Are we dealing with aliens?"
Mother Ally had summed up everybody's fears. The entire Council was staring at Ben, somber-faced.
"You mean people not belonging to the Human Union?"
Governor Alighieri stifled a sigh. "Yes, Sir."
Ben remembered the coding in the computers that he'd encountered. At the time he'd felt it to be human in origin. But what if it had been installed by aliens employing Union technology? He wasn't so sure anymore that they were only up against traditionals.
"I'm agnostic to that."
Ben's mind suddenly shifted into high gear. A flood of new ideas poured in, connections that he hadn't made until just now. Understanding dawned. Some things he wouldn't be able to share with his Council. How much would they understand even if he did his best to explain? Ben sighed in frustration with their limitations.
As he stood there, blank-faced, staring into space, the others wondered what was going on in his head.
When he wouldn't go on, Mother Ally asked, "What conclusions do you draw about our security here?"
Ben looked at her. "Since they tried to destroy me over in Kasa Station but didn't succeed, I wouldn't be amazed if they came over to attack us here. If the entity in charge loses its cool, that is."
Admiral von Schwarz spoke up. "By the way, Ben, we got word from Neo Babylonia and they maintain that they have nothing to do with the attack of that Delta cruiser on you the other day."
"They wouldn't know about renegades, would they?" Ben said. He sounded harsher than he meant to sound. "Maybe a bunch of renegades from Neo-Ba has set up camp on Kasaganaan, using Magogian ploys to get me to engage them. Perhaps I didn't come fast enough for their taste and so they sent their latest and most advanced craft over to take me out while I was still at my house in the forest.
"The more I think about it, the more I can see that a force will soon be upon us—and not just us but others also.
"I therefore counsel this government to step up all necessary measures and to ask for warships from the Human Union in earnest. Whoever the enemy is, it will first attack here." Ben fell silent. His gaze was on the chair in front of him.
Daniel von Schwarz sensed that there was more. Harrow was holding back. "Go on, Ben," he encouraged his friend. "Give us insight. Tell us what you're thinking."
Ben looked up. "It is thoroughly possible that a superior force has been lying low for many years all over the universe, preparing, gearing up for an assault on the Union. The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that it is so."
Ben looked into the faces of his listeners.
"The entity we're up against was able to forestall all intergalactic travel for several years and to block communications. For years mankind's best scientists could do nothing about it. And suddenly everything goes back to normal—for no particular reason?
"That's remarkable.
"And remarkably, we were not able to call and touch base with you once we were within the Kasa system. I didn't think much of it then, but I probably should have. Some entity out there has the power to seriously hamper us. Perhaps we're at its mercy even now."
"You make this sound very serious, Mr. Harrow," Mother Ally said.
Ben drilled his gray eyes into her. "This hostile entity has chosen Kasaganaan for its base, because it knew where I was; it tried to get me out of the way before it launches its attack on the Human Union."
"An attack on the Union?" Admiral von Schwarz remarked. "Are you insinuating a cosmic war?"
"I'm talking about a galactic cyclone," Ben said to him and then addressed the whole group again. "It knows, when I'm gone its major opponent is eliminated. The Union is decapitated, if you will. I understand, of course, that I am not the head of any nation within the Human Union, much less the leader of the entire federation."
The HU called itself a union, but that was mostly a vision statement. It was in fact still just a confederacy of disparate and sometimes even antagonistic nations, states and empires. The only thing they all had in common was their resemblance to traditional humans and their love for Terra Originalis.
"But it expects me to become the Union's leader," Ben went on. "It made its calculations and it figures that once I'm gone it can win."
"But you're still here…" Mother Ally said.
"We're up against something much bigger than we thought," Admiral von Schwarz said.
"Alert the troops," Ben said. "Get the warships ready in every quarter of the Human Union. Ready the bunkers for the populace on every Terra and on every colony planet. Stock them with supplies while there is still time. A major battle may be upon mankind and a hard rain may fall before we know it."
Harrow looked at the admiral. "Daniel, you spoke of a new type spaceship? Can I have a look at it?"
The admiral placed his hands flat on the table. "You mean to keep looking for Cherry?"
Ben nodded. "I came here to ask you for this prototype you had mentioned."
Von Schwarz glanced at Mother Ally. "The ship's over on Bagong Lupa."
"I don't care," Ben said.
The admiral stood. "We're going right now."
He turned towards the Council. "After listening to Mr. Harrow's report, I recommend implementation of the Schwarz plan. Let the muster begin right away. Call Terra Originalis, let them know what we've heard from Mr. Harrow. I'm sure they will listen when they hear who spoke the warning. I will be back shortly."
The admiral nodded towards the Council and left the situation room together with Ben.
Chapter 24
Over in his office, Admiral von Schwarz got on the horn with Dr. Cho, research department head of the laboratories on Bagong Lupa with Professor Guofeng, and ordered them to bring the only quantum wind-equipped spaceship in the universe over to Terra Gemina. The general and a special guest would await them up in the Gemina Space Station. Dr. Cho objected vehemently, but the admiral could not be made to yield. He wanted this ship and he wanted it now.
When they arrived at Gemina City's spaceport, military section, the place was squirming with ground crews. Word had already gone out from the Council and jets and frigates were made ready. On the far end, the giant hangar of a battle cruiser was opened and its dull-gray snout appeared.
Ben, the admiral and a small entourage boarded a pinnace that ferried them up to the space station. They traveled through the atmosphere and in due time entered Gemina's outpost on the border of the universe, where they waited for the prototype to arrive.
They didn't have to wait long. Harrow and von Schwarz stood by the vitrum wall of the concourse, staring into space, talking about the Kasa situation in low tones, when the new vessel arrived.
Like a sudden flash cutting through the night sky, it materialized before their eyes. Sparks were flying from it in every direction as if it had been lifted straight from the fires of a smithy. Soon the phenomena ceased and the ship hung in space as if it had been there the whole time.
Everybody who watched its appearance marveled. Even Harrow had a hard time acting like it was nothing.
"I like it already," he remarked and whistled through his teeth. He was looking at a sleek craft, to say the least. Its lines reminded one of a fighter jet, but it was too big to be a mere fighter—or even a fighter-bomber. Its dimensions were almost those of a frigate.
The top of the craft was covered by glowing tiles, marbled and alive like the surface of the sun, though not as bright, of course.
"What are those?" Ben asked the admiral.
Von Schwarz smiled. "That's best explained by the professors themselves. Let's go back to the pinnace."
They went to the gate.
The small craft shuttled them over to the new vessel.
"Did you see us coming?" a rather short gentleman in a lab coat said to Ben and the admiral when they entered. Ben recognized Korean features. Dr. Cho was smiling fr
om ear to ear. "Did you?"
"We didn't see a thing until you were suddenly there," Ben said and opened his eyes theatrically.
Both black-haired scientists cackled, then Ben and his entourage were formerly greeted by them, who, now that they were here, were more than eager to show off their latest brainchild.
"Quantum wind, Sir," the second scientist, Professor Guofeng, said with the voice of a connoisseur who had just tasted some wine of supreme quality. "Let us show you what all we have here, Sir."
"Much obliged," Ben replied.
For the next hour, both scientists explained the boat in remarkable detail.
The glowing tiles for instance were a peculiar kind solar panel made of cutting-edge material. The stuff was usually black, but once it was heated—by swinging by any one of the many suns in the universe—it began to glow until it got white-hot. The resulting light fed the tiles, which in turn provided energy for an arsenal of experimental weapons—independent of any power from the fusion reactors, which were present, too.
On the wall of the bridge, behind the captain's chair, stood a shower-like stall, which the scientists introduced as being the unit for individual journeys on the quantum wind. Ben had appeared in a similar unit—perhaps even the same one—on board the Gemina 1.
The scientists almost got carried away when they realized how much Ben understood of the things they were mentioning. Harrow showed interest throughout, but made sure they stuck to the important points and get didn't get lost in trivia.
When all was said, the admiral cast a stern look at the scientists and their helpers, and dropped the bomb.
"He wants it," von Schwarz said and swung his chin towards Ben. "He needs it right away."
The smiles vanished from the scientists' faces. Crestfallen, they exchanged glances.
"You serious?" Dr. Cho asked.
"Dead serious," the admiral said. "Let me explain." Von Schwarz proceeded to tell them about Charity Jones and the mishap on the pylon road. When they'd heard the whole story, the scientists got pensive.