‘You have to understand: as far as I was aware, everyone and everything I had ever known, with the exception of Vitcha, had been destroyed, a long time ago and so I agreed to help him in exchange for a ride to the stars.’
‘When I saw your face, on display walls everywhere I looked, I was totally blown away by the incalculable odds that we could both still be alive, and living at the same moment in time, all these years into our future. By putting your picture on screens all over the ship, Vitcha was flaunting his prize. He was making your demise into a live horror show, no doubt to cause me the maximum amount of grief. And although I realised it might be a trap, I just had to mount a rescue, to see you in person one last time and, well, here we are.’
‘I guess Vitcha has told you how he hates me for keeping my transporter system a secret from him, even though he must have known it was my professional duty to maintain total secrecy on such an important project. And after all these years, he still does not think he has punished me enough. That is why he wants to kill you as painfully and as publicly as possible.’
‘And we are not going to let that happen, if we can help it,’ piped up the second robot using a similar, tinny sounding, voice.
The Captain extended a seamlessly jointed arm around the shoulder of his companion. It seemed strange to me these expressionless robots could demonstrate any kind of affection for each other. It was a gesture that brought home the fact these were real people trapped inside their artificial bodies.
He went on to explain, ‘Miraculously, Ellie was recently brought here: you know, Vitcha’s daughter. She too was allowed to keep her free will.’
I turned to look at the other poker-faced robot.
‘Ellie?’ I enquired, stunned yet again by the sudden turn of events.
The other robot replied, ‘My father intervened when I fell into the recycling tank, back on Earth, in Vidora. He commanded the nanites in that thick yellow liquid to record the inner workings of my brain and recreate my mind in this artificial body. He wanted me to see for myself and understand the empire he has built up. He wanted me to idolise him.’
‘But seeking my honest opinion, he lost any chance of controlling my mind. Like your father Aleq, my central processor has been built without the hooks my father needs to intercept and modify our thoughts.’
‘As a result, the voices inside my head have stopped, and I can think clearly for myself once again.’
The idea that my father and Ellie had been turned into such basic robots seemed abhorrent to me, even if Vitcha was not attempting to twist their minds to his way of thinking.
I had to ask the obvious question, ‘After millions of years of development, why do you have to suffer having such basic grey appearance and such crude synthetic voices?’
Ellie explained, ‘My father deliberately kept the specification of all the androids as simple as he could, and he also kept them partly under his remote control, to prevent them getting ideas above their station. He was frightened that intelligent robots might one day evolve into artificial lifeforms in their own right, become the dominant species, and perhaps even challenge his own position as supreme ruler over humans everywhere.’
The Captain added, ‘So you see, the only exceptions we know of are Ellie, myself and possibly Kleb. For us three, Vitcha arranged to preserve our reconstituted minds fully intact, as far as we know that is.’
Tukarra looked directly into Ellie’s emotionless eyes and made an apology, ‘Ellie, I am so sorry I was responsible for causing your death back in the recycling room, even if it did turn out to be only your body that actually died.’
Ellie responded with no sign of hesitation, ‘You needn’t be sorry. I was out to kill Rhett. You were in my way, and I would have killed you too. It felt like I desperately needed to murder my friends, and was being forced to witness myself trying to fulfil that need,’ she replied.
I am sure I heard Ellie sigh with relief before she went on to say, ‘At long last I have been freed from such awful thoughts.’
*
‘What happened to the hologram?’ I asked.
‘I turned it off,’ replied the Captain.
I stared at him for a moment or two whilst I tried to understand the crazy mixed up emotions I was feeling.
‘This is so weird,’ I exclaimed. ‘It’s going to take some time for me to call you, a robot, my “father.”’
‘I can understand that,’ he said, with a just a hint of sadness in his mechanical voice. ‘But that’s time we haven’t got. We must get back to the Paricianne. Just call me Aleq, if that helps.’
‘The Paricianne?’ I quizzed, with a puzzled look on my face. ‘I thought that was the Starship Kesinko we came from!’
Aleq hummed a little, then said, ‘Well, yes we did. The truth is we came from both. Vitcha’s original starship is actually inside the much larger cruiser known as the Paricianne. This liberty boat, and also the one we came to rescue you in, came from the starship. As you might have noticed, they were no longer intended to be used in earnest. They both made quite a mess when we were launched straight out through the hull of the cruiser.’
I said, ‘I guess the bigger ship, the cruiser, is named after your mother Ellie?’ ‘Yes,’ she confidently replied. ‘There’s no doubt about it; and she was named after an Incan deity.’
Tukarra chipped in, ‘That would be Paricia. The legend goes he sent floods to kill every human who did not respect him.’
Ellie spat out the following words with venom on her synthetic tongue, ‘Well, I don’t know about floods, but my father has certainly proved himself capable of killing every man, woman and child when he wants to. He’s done it before, and I am quite sure he could do it again.’
Aleq changed the subject.
‘Let us focus on the task in hand,’ he said with both authority and some urgency in his voice. ‘We only have a limited supply of liquid rocket fuel on-board, and so we must set course for the Paricianne before we drift too far away from her.’
With that, Aleq floated over to the front row of seats, strapped himself down, and took control of the helm. Ellie sat next to him, helping out with navigation and engineering, and together they began their pre-burn checks and calculations.
A few touches, on the bow and stern thrusters, saw the view through the window change to one perfectly framing the Paricianne. In the background, there was no mistaking the dwarf planet Pluto and its relatively large, tidally locked, moon Charon. All three of these objects were gracefully receding further into the distance; as we looked on, fascinated by this strangely beautiful scene.
The enormous cruiser was gently turning, as though roasting on a spit, and I could not help but notice that the two wounds in the hull of the ship, our liberty boats had left behind us, had completely disappeared. Those severed roots and arteries must have divided and grown across the gaps, an outer layer of smart skin healing over the scars.
Aleq locked in the course and duration for the burn, then watched a numerical readout counting down to zero on his workstation.
His hand hovered over a large red button and he was just about to punch it, to ignite the main rocket motor, when the pin sharp view of the Paricianne suddenly became blurred, as though it was in some kind of heat haze.
Almost at the same time, our whole vessel felt like it had been picked up by an invisible giant hand, then thrown to one side. Aleq struggled with the controls to regain a stable orientation.
When he eventually managed to point the craft back, in the direction of the Paricianne, the star cruiser looked considerably smaller than it had done before, and was receding faster than ever.
‘Vitcha has fired up the Paricianne’s Dark Matter Engines and several days early. I am afraid he has left us behind.’
Tukarra asked, ‘Can’t we outrun that big lumbering cruiser?’
Ellie answered on behalf of Aleq, ‘It is true that, at least for a few minutes, we can accelerate a lot more than the Paricianne. However, the Paricianne has bee
n equipped with a nuclear fusion power plant, and she can keep up her rate of acceleration for a thousand years or more. She has already exceeded our top speed; so we are now effectively on our own, cast adrift six billion kilometres from the next nearest habitable environment!’
*
Thinking out loud once again, I came out with what was might have been a rather naive suggestion, ‘What we need is a Dark Matter Engine of our own. Then we could catch up with the Paricianne.’
At that Aleq flung his arms in the air, which looked a really ungainly thing for a robot to do.
‘And I have an idea where we might find one,’ he said.
A few flicks of the ancient controls later, and Aleq had positioned our cabin to face Hydra - the second largest moon of Pluto (only about 100km in diameter). A telescopic view of Hydra appeared on the back of the seat in front of me, and also in front of Tukarra. Then Aleq touched a few more controls, and the image zoomed in to pick out something, on the rough surface, twinkling in the sunlight.
‘That,’ he said in as much of a triumphant voice as a robot could ever achieve, ‘is a Dark Matter Engine. It is a Tug boat that one of my passengers, Carilesha, told me about. She had just flown it onto the surface of Hydra, and fitted it into position, when she was recalled to Earth.
With the Paricianne ready to set sail on its maiden voyage, Vitcha had no more need for precious minerals - even if his Elite might have found some use for them.’
I asked, ‘Surely you are not thinking of flying a whole moon after the Paricianne, are you?’
‘No, no, no,’ Aleq replied. ‘We are going to fly that Tug.’
Once the plan had been hatched, everything went smoothly for a while. We landed on Hydra, right on the top of the Tug itself.
This so called Tug boat, looked more like an oil refinery than a spaceship. It seemed to be fabricated from a chaotic mess of metal pipes, compressed into a rough cube shape, some half a kilometre across.
A purpose-built landing platform had been constructed on the top surface of the cube, making it a fairly simple matter for our tiny liberty boat to avoid the sprawling pipework and to gently touch down, in the extremely low gravity.
The feet of the shuttle were automatically caught and clamped into position, although our airlock doors turned out not to be compatible with those of the pressurised walkway that extended towards us from the loading bay. This was going to be a major issue because the porthole glass of our inner airlock door had been smashed by Kleb.
Fortunately, Aleq knew of a solution to the problem. After we released our safety belts, he walked down to the back of the cabin, to the wall Tukarra and I had been pinned against when we were launched from the starship, and pulled on a handle. A large, upright, rectangular panel slowly glided out from the wall revealing two pairs of spacesuits, complete with all necessary accessories.
I almost choked.
‘They were there all the time, while we were dying in here!’
‘Yes. Well. How could you have known?’ Aleq said sensitively.
Always on the lookout for weapons and explosives, Ellie looked at me and said, ‘This liberty boat was built in the same era, and by the same military, as those Hippos. You know, those heavily armoured mine-proof vehicles. Wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, I guess it must have been,’ I replied.
She turned to look at Aleq.
‘Well then, they had a gun cupboard built into them, a small armoury in fact. There wouldn’t happen to be such a thing in here would there?’ she asked.
With some reluctance my father replied, ‘Yes, there is.’
And he pulled on another handle causing a much smaller, unmarked, storage bay to slide out in front of him. It was just big enough to hold four hand-guns, along with matching utility belts and holsters.
‘I suppose it might be a good idea for us to wear these,’ he said. ‘I have no idea what we might encounter on that Tug.’
Tukarra and I, declined to wear the gun belts. Not only would they be unusable, and not to mention darn right uncomfortable worn inside a spacesuit, we didn’t want to risk them going off and puncturing the material.
Aleq and Ellie had no need for spacesuits of course - they could withstand a full vacuum for several minutes before too much hydraulic fluid had either boiled away, or else had frozen solid in the outside temperatures that were close to absolute zero.
Once Tukarra and I were suited up, it was only a short bound or two across the dusty platform to reach the nearest of the loading bay entrances on the Tug itself.
The view from the loading bay was spectacular, and so I stood still for a moment to survey the curved horizon, which rapidly fell away from our position.
‘Tukarra, have you seen those jagged mountains in the distance?’ I asked.
Her reply crackled slightly over the radio in my helmet, ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Are my eyes deceiving me or are they made of that purple crystal?’
Aleq, who had also tuned into our communications link, confirmed our thoughts for us.
‘It seems more than ninety percent of this moon is made up of pure Astracite,’ he said.
I managed to put into words what all four of us were thinking, ‘No wonder the High Elite wanted this moon brought back to Earth, and no wonder Vitcha wanted it left here! It would have given the Elite far too much power. They could have used it to build a new Ether, one without Vitcha in the loop. They would have been able to control their own destiny.’
*
We had no problem finding our way from the loading bay to the flight deck of the Tug. The route was well signposted. I was somewhat relieved to find we had no need for the guns Aleq and Ellie were wearing. The Tug, like the rest of Hydra, was completely deserted.
The bridge turned out to be quite small, similar in size and layout to our liberty boat in fact.; whereas the Tug’s computer system was rather more sophisticated and able to accept spoken commands.
I don’t know if it was something to do with the hat he was wearing, but the computer somehow knew Aleq carried the rank of Captain. So when my robot father sat down in the Captain’s chair, the computer announced it had put the whole Tug entirely at his disposal.
With his first two commands, Aleq prudently acquired full local control and complete isolation from the Ether cloud.
Then, once we were all safely belted into our seats, Aleq asked the computer to bring the Tug’s older style, fission based, nuclear reactor up to full power.
A satisfying hum filled the cabin, and I began to feel confident we would achieve our mission to get back aboard the Paricianne.
It was an equally simple matter for Aleq to request the detonation of the explosive bolts, that held the Tug down to the little moon’s bedrock. It was just as easy to bring the massive Dark Matter Engine online, and then to pilot the whole rather ugly, odd shaped, vessel - looking rather top heavy with our liberty boat stacked on top of it - to catch up with the Paricianne.
*
Once the course had been set and the Dark Matter Engine had been successfully engaged, there was time to pose more questions.
I said, ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, but apart from being turned into robots, why in particular did you Aleq, Vitcha’s Captain, and you Ellie, Vitcha’s daughter, suddenly decide to turn against him?’
Ellie spoke up first, ‘As soon as I had been freed to think for myself once again, I realised that my father’s meddling had caused the death of my boyfriend, Kalim. And now, I also have to accept the possibility that Kalim might not have been in love with me anyway; rather he might have been one of my father’s pawns, like Kleb, trying to assassinate you Rhett: just to get at Aleq.’
There was a short pause while we all tried to imagine how Ellie felt, but we did not have to wait long for the silence to be broken.
‘More to the point,’ my father said. ‘At the same time I discovered Ellie, trying to hide amongst the robotic crew members, I had just realised a number of my passengers had disappeared. Together, El
lie and I started to look for them and also signs of the technology that brought us aboard. We looked for tanks of goo and tentacles, and we found them everywhere!’
Then Ellie picked up where my father had left off.
‘All the Elite passengers and human crew have always known they are to be frozen in a deep cryogenic sleep for the rest of the voyage, and in every bedroom there is a stasis pod originally intended for that very purpose. But what the passengers and crew don’t know is that underneath each pod, there is a recycling facility. We believe this whole ship is literally going to consume them over a long period of time, simply in order to keep Vitcha alive. Imagine surviving on a packet of frozen peas by eating them one pea at a time, if you will.’
Aleq spoke up again, ‘So you see he only needs the Elite and humans on this ship as food from now on. I also know he has reproduced Archive 239 somewhere on-board, and he believes he can always recreate the Elite once we have reached New Earth. By which time, he will have probably made further “improvements” to their genetic make up that will remove their ability to question his authority altogether.’
*
As we edged closer to the star cruiser, we encountered a significant amount of turbulence. Whilst Aleq kept a close eye on the holographic displays in front of him, Ellie tried to explain what was happening.
‘I remember my father telling me about spinning coils of Dark Matter being created in the wake of his engines,’ she recalled. ‘I can see from these displays there are four such vortices ahead of us.’
Still transfixed on the shimmering displays being presented to him, Aleq said, ‘Spot on Ellie. Your father taught you well.’
We continued to out accelerate the Paricianne, and soon we had passed her magnificent, but currently redundant, heat shield. A moment later we were running parallel to her long, forward pointing, organic looking, stem of passenger decks.
Now Aleq was faced with the problem of maintaining a safe distance, from the hull of the cruiser. There was an invisible Venturi effect, pulling the two Dark Matter Engines together.
Escaping the Sun Page 23