The Stark Divide

by J. Scott Coatsworth

  He was with her now. “I know you’re there.” She felt his presence, even though she couldn’t see him, not directly. “It’s amazing, isn’t it?”

  She felt his assent, though he didn’t say a word. She had come to accept his presence. Sometimes she would glimpse him in the distance, striding through the forest in her virtual world.

  She thought she knew what he was. Her conscience. She even thought she knew who he was.

  She turned back to the day’s schedule. Daphne, her next meal, was coming in, but before her arrival, two others of interest would be coming to Forever on the Hammond.

  She would be arriving soon. The director had told her so the last time he’d been here.

  Lex frowned. She wasn’t sure yet, what she would say to the woman who had nearly cost her her life.

  A reckoning was overdue. She’d waited a long time for this.

  AARON STOOD on the bridge of the Hammond, the ship named after his father and his own family name—one of the first of the new, larger Axion-class ships, which were part mechanical and part biological.

  Ahead, the new worldlet looked more like a bumpy log than anything else. It grew slowly on the large, curved monitor that wrapped around the front of the viewing deck, which provided a spectacular view of their approach.

  Officially, it was called “Ariadne” after the asteroid that had been cannibalized to create it, but everyone on the ship called it “Forever,” the impromptu nickname its creator had given it.

  He wore his white AmSplor uniform proudly, emblazoned with its white-on-blue galaxy patch. At just seventeen years old, he was one of the youngest cadets to graduate from the academy, and he’d left his brother, Jayson, and his mother behind on Earth to take this post.

  His father’s death and subsequent heroic legend had drawn him out here to see this place for himself. This new world Jackson Hammond had given up his life to help create.

  The ship called the Hammond was much larger than the old Mission-class ships his father had flown on. Dr. Anastasia Anatov and her father had pioneered the biotech that led to the seed and now the worldlet before him, and had later been adapted to build this new class of living ships. The Axion-class required much less in the way of mechanical interfaces than the old Mission-class. They’d also been bred to be resistant to the Anatov Fungus, as the pathogen that had brought down his father’s ship, the Dressler, had come to be called.

  Captain Tanner came up beside him, putting his hand on Aaron’s shoulder. “She’s really something, isn’t she?”

  Aaron nodded. The new world was shaped like a long tube, 26.3 kilometers around and about 169 kilometers long to date, or so his briefing had told him. Her dark outer skin was threaded through with wild crisscrossing lines of shining gold—a bioluminescent effect that had been bred into the original seed’s code. She spun to create an artificial gravity via centrifugal force.

  As Aaron watched, a pulse of light ran from one end of the seed to the other, and the crackled lines grew suddenly brighter. “What was that?” he asked, aware his mouth had fallen open.

  The captain laughed. “That was daybreak. You’ll see it from inside soon enough.”

  Off to the side of Forever, a small blip of light was slowly expanding. Transfer Station—his initial destination out here. It was a huge wheel that spun around a central hub, with five narrow spokes connecting them.

  Transfer coordinated all the supply shipments coming in to Forever, including the personnel who had been recruited to work inside the new world.

  Aaron was one of those people.

  COLIN MCAVERY, director of the Forever Project, sat at his desk in his small office in Transfer Station—the operation he ran out here in the middle of nowhere. His office was spotless, a point of personal pride.

  It had been ten years since he’d last seen the blue skies of Earth. Since Transfer had been brought online, he hadn’t found the time to get away. Of course, it might have had something to do with the fact that he didn’t trust anyone else to do this job the way he would.

  Things had gotten more rough-and-tumble down on Earth of late too.

  At Colin’s insistence, Transfer had been built the old-fashioned way, with no organic parts other than the station-mind. The void and the new world outside the station were enough to deal with, and he had no intention of going through the nearly fatal experience that had plagued him with the Dressler. Even if they insisted it had been fixed in the new Axion models. Never again.

  That trip, one of his last as a ship’s captain, had been on his mind a lot lately. Not surprising, given the two VIP passengers who were coming in on the Hammond today.

  He was grayer at the temples now than he had been back then, but he worked hard to keep himself in shape at forty, walking ten miles every day around the runway that encircled the wheel of the station. Unlike his old ship, Transfer boasted a centrifugal gravity that was three-quarters Earth Normal.

  His morning walk took him past the public sections of the station, with their accommodations, bar, and restaurants; through the station’s biosphere gardens that supplied much of her fresh oxygen and supplemental food via fruit trees, vegetables, and algae that the processors used as a base for much of their foodstuffs; and past the private quarters of the station crew.

  He tapped his loop. “Anything new today?” he asked Ronan, the station-mind.

  “Negative, Captain. The Hammond is due to arrive in fifteen minutes.”

  “On screen.” The approaching ship was a small dot against the background of stars. “Magnify.” The speck expanded to fill the screen, a larger version of the Dressler, fatter, with only three arms instead of five. She looked more like a puffer fish than a starfish.

  Her larger sails meant the collection of more interstellar dust, which translated into faster top speeds. She could make the round trip between Frontier Station near Earth to Transfer in two days, half the time it had taken the older ships.

  “Thanks, Ronan.”

  “You’re welcome, sir.”

  Damn thing sounds almost snarky. He tapped off the loop. The ship couldn’t read his private thoughts, but he didn’t like the idea of leaving it on all the time. Who wanted to chance getting their brain hacked?

  Colin stood, stretching his sore muscles. He’d spent too much time in his chair today.

  He splashed some water across his face and ran his hand through his dirty-blond hair, staring at himself in the mirror.

  He felt old. At forty, he wasn’t even halfway through his useful life, and one of the youngest people to ever hold a station director’s post for AmSplor, but he’d had no idea of the bureaucratic and logistical nightmares he’d be inheriting when he took on this job after the Dressler incident.

  The approaching Hammond brought its own nest of challenges.

  On the plus side, Trip would get to spend a few days in port this time.

  Colin grinned in anticipation. They had a lot of catching up to do. He was used to sleeping alone, but he missed Trip’s warm body, and his wit.

  But the other two….

  Ghosts of the Dressler, indeed.

  He left his office, determined to be there to meet the Hammond and her cargo when the ship arrived.

  A TURBULENT mix of emotions washed over Ana as the Hammond made its final approach to Transfer Station. She’d spent most of the forty-eight-hour journey in her cabin, avoiding the ship’s other passengers.

  Not that most people would recognize her. The scandal that had ended her career and sent her to prison for almost a decade had largely faded from the public consciousness, and she bore little resemblance to the Venus Vixen, as the press had taken to calling her, that she’d been at the time. Prison had aged her prematurely, and she’d shaved off her beautiful black hair, which had begun tending toward a washed-out gray, as a form of personal penance.

  She stood now in one of the ship’s view ports, watching the station and the seedling grow slowly larger. Not that seedling suited it any longer.

&nb
sp; On the one hand, she felt a great swell of pride seeing this new world slowly taking shape—a world she, more than anyone else, had helped to create. She had kept up with the news from the North Fargo Detention Center where she had been housed, but seeing it up close was something altogether different.

  Colin had done well with her. She could see that already.

  On the other hand, she still felt the deep sting of bitterness that this project had been taken out of her hands, even if it had been her own fault. It was only through the grace of the director that she was here again at all, though, so she supposed she ought to be grateful.

  She touched the silver cross on a chain under her shirt. Jackson haunted her still.

  She pulled her shawl around her thin shoulders more tightly, feeling suddenly cold.

  Someone else entered the room, coming to stand next to her. “Quite a view, isn’t it?” His voice was young and somehow familiar.

  “It really is.” It was maybe a fifth of its final size, and already it was awe-inspiring.

  “Thirty minutes to arrival at Transfer Station,” the ship-mind said.

  “Ever been out here before?” the young man asked.

  “A long time ago.” Ana turned to look at him.

  The blood drained from her face. It was as if she were face-to-face with the long-dead Jackson Hammond.

  She stumbled in fright, and he caught her, powerful young arms supporting her while she found her balance.

  This one was too young to be Jackson. One of his sons, then.

  She recovered her composure. Their eyes met.

  “Hey, do I know you?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so.” She squeezed his arm. “I’m sorry. I don’t feel well, but thank you for catching me. I have to go.”

  As she fled the room, she could feel his eyes boring into her back.

  AARON WATCHED the doctor run away, his own emotions in turmoil. She looked older than he’d expected. He had memorized every shot of her face from the tridimensionals and the Net that he could find. He’d known she would be on the ship with him. Indeed, it was one of the reasons he’d chosen this flight—but until now she’d kept herself hidden away in her cabin.

  He had dipped into the ship’s files, seeking out her passenger record using the gift bequeathed to him by his father. There’d been little there of interest beyond her name and age and the items she had declared when she boarded, among them a silver cross. Strange. He hadn’t thought she was religious.

  He’d needed to see her, this woman who had been there when his father died. Needed to look her in the eyes and make her account for what had happened.

  She wasn’t the formidable force of nature he’d expected. This woman was frail, haunted, just a husk of the person she’d once been.

  He’d been sure she would give him what he so desperately needed—a sense of closure. An answer to the questions that had plagued him for a decade.

  Now he wondered if he’d been wrong.

  THE HAMMOND had come to rest next to Transfer Station, both constructs floating above Forever in orbit around the sun. Earth was visible as a slender crescent in the distance, before a flurry of stars.

  The ship’s shuttle could carry a dozen at a time from the Hammond over to the station. Ana had gotten there early to choose a seat at the back, where she could watch the other arriving passengers.

  Hammond’s son arrived just before departure, carrying a soft-sided duffel bag that he stuffed unceremoniously beneath the seat in the row ahead of her. He winked at her before sitting down.

  The resemblance to his father was uncanny—the same red hair, the same freckled face, the same impudence, though it had been toned down by age in Jackson, the boy’s father.

  At last the shuttle lifted off the Hammond’s deck and slipped into the ship’s air lock. The air cycled out, and the outer doors opened to reveal the stars. Soon they were floating free between ship and station.

  Transfer was a huge gray wheel surrounded by brilliant, steady white lights, its five spokes leading down into the central hub, their current destination. The station was festooned with instrumentation and mechanical outcroppings—antennas, collectors, dish-shaped sensors, and escape pods.

  Ana noted that there were no visible organic components. A rueful laugh escaped her lips. There wouldn’t be on any ship of Colin’s, would there. Not after the Dressler.

  As they approached the hub, she could make out the worldlet on the other side. So strange to think the Dressler ship-mind was in there now.

  She stared at the back of the Hammond boy’s head, wondering what he must be thinking. He looked no older than twenty. Maybe younger.

  She had known so much when she had been young like him, before her father had been killed by religious extremists and her neat, ordered world had come crashing down.

  It seemed like she knew less and less with each passing year.

  Did he know who she was?

  If so, did he hate her? Did he expect to get something from her?

  She had an uneasy feeling that she would soon find out.

  Chapter Two: Transfer Station

  LEX WANDERED through her domain. Her world wrapped up and around her like a frozen wave, and in it she saw it as it would come to be, bustling with people, filled with cities like sparkling gems along its length.

  A living gateway to another world.

  She’d consumed Ariadne, and the second asteroid, Daphne, was being maneuvered into place—fodder for her strong roots to break up as she continued to build the next phase of Forever.

  In her mind’s eye, she sat on a ledge on the black, barren slopes of the Dragon’s Reach, staring down at the empty plains below. They were covered with trees, a huge forest that sheltered the people and creatures of her world.

  Perhaps she would create a sea next. An ocean where she could sink her toes into the sand and listen to the waves.

  If Daphne carried enough water, there was no reason not to.

  She’d come a long way, from ship-mind to mistress of her own world. There was so much more she wanted to build.

  AARON WATCHED the station grow outside his window, a great half circle visible through the small plasform window. It was a testament to mankind’s technical prowess, one of the largest things ever built in space, though Frontier back in Earth orbit was larger still.

  His father had taught him to respect the mechanical arts.

  As a child, he had always been in awe of Jackson Hammond.

  His mother, Glory, had been dead-set against Aaron joining AmSplor—afraid, he guessed, that he would meet the same fate as his father. He’d come home one day the previous week to find her with her head down on their kitchen table, wearing one of her favorite floral print dresses, sobbing quietly.

  Time had not been kind to Gloria Hammond. After her husband died, she had shut herself away from the world for almost a year, gaining a lot of weight and losing most of her friends.

  “What’s wrong, Mamma?” he’d asked, taking a seat next to her at the old, worn kitchen table. The ruddy light of sunset filtered in through the window, painting the room in a rosy glow. Summer was fading into fall, but it was still hot outside.

  “Isn’t it enough that I lost your father up there?” She looked up and took his hands in hers. “Don’t go, mijo.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom, but I have to. I need to find out what happened to him.”

  She’d searched his eyes long and hard. “I don’t know how you can do this to your poor mother,” she said at last and turned away without a word. She had refused to speak of it again until the day he left.

  At Fargo Port, she clutched him to her chest fiercely and whispered in his ear, “You come back to me, mijo. You come back, you hear?”

  “Yes, Mamma,” he’d promised.

  He wasn’t sure he ever wanted to go back, promises notwithstanding, but he’d find some answers to send her in his stead.

  COLIN LEFT his office, exiting onto the runway, the c
oncourse that encircled the entire station. He passed the closed doors of the station’s other crewmembers and walked through the station’s biosphere, a warm, humid artificial breeze brushing past his cheeks.

  At last he arrived at one of the five spoke elevators, set in the middle of a wide room that extended out to the edges of the rim. “Hub, please,” he told the station-mind, and a shimmering wall of protective force slid up around him as the circle of floor on which he stood began to rise toward the opening above. In seconds he’d left the station proper and was being lifted up along one of the five transparent spokes that connected the rim to the hub.

  The clear walls of the spokes had been his idea. They gave newcomers an unobstructed view of the rest of Transfer Station and the worldlet of Forever, and created an unavoidable impact on first-timers.

  He reached the hub, the central docking facility for the station. The elevator rose out of the floor into the large open space. It was shaped like a wide, shallow barrel about a hundred meters across, with several separate landing facilities and decks, all set at strange angles to one another above each of the spokes.

  The centrifugal force that created the station’s gravity was almost nil here, so work was done receiving and rerouting cargo at all different orientations. Even now a shuttle was loading up to transfer supplies from Earth to the station and to Forever—supplementary foods, construction materials, and specialized plants sent up from the AmSplor labs in Sacramento.

  Colin was wearing his dress whites as befitted the occasion, welcoming his new guests and AmSplor workers to Transfer Station.

  A clang reverberated through the hub as the outer air lock doors closed behind the passenger shuttle from the Hammond. Compressors pumped air into the lock, equalizing the pressure, and the huge metal doors slid apart to let the shuttle in. It looked like a squat metal turtle, three rows of passenger seats under the “shell” behind the pilot’s cabin. Aerodynamics was not a concern in space.