The Pouakai

by David Sperry

  I had a purpose, and a mission. I felt energized.

  When I’d finished my meal, I took a few deep breaths, and tried stretching. With the gravity so low, I ended up just bouncing across the floor.

  During my inspection of the main floor, as well as looking for those recessed handles, I’d been looking for anything I could use as a tool. Mostly, I’d been searching for the spears the Kakamaku had thrown at us when they’d stormed out of this vessel, but there weren’t any visible in these rooms. They must have come from elsewhere in the vessel. That meant I was limited to what I had in my survival pack: one energy bar, half a pouch of water, a flashlight, knife, compass, mirror, radio, silvered survival blanket, a couple of rags, and the .45.

  Could the computer kill me? It said it couldn’t, but all it would take would be to open the main door, and the vacuum of space would kill me in seconds. I had to disable it as quickly as possible.

  I stood at the bottom of the ladder, and took several deep breaths. I felt calm, but couldn’t stop my heart from beating a rapid tattoo. Up the ladder I went, into the processing center, with the straps on the backpack cinched tight. The only thing in my hands was the flashlight, a foot-long black aluminum cylinder. If my theory was correct, it would take a lot of leverage to get one of those recessed handles open.

  After a deep breath, I jumped up to the top of the big box with the recessed handle. Only two feet of space remained between the top of the box and the ceiling, so I lay on my stomach, with my legs hanging over the side of the box. I grabbed the recessed handle, and pulled. It didn’t move, just as I’d expected. I placed the flashlight under the handle and yanked up, using it as a lever. The handle moved up about an inch before the flashlight slipped out. I put the flashlight back under the bar to get another pull on the handle.

  “NO!” shouted the computer.

  With a fierce jerk, I slammed into the ceiling, and then back onto the box, the vessel’s acceleration changing direction and strength. I hung on to the handle with a death grip. The flashlight fell out of my hand, and flew across the room. The world twirled, and I lay on the ceiling again, as the vessel’s thrust changed. Then just as quickly, I smashed back onto the top of the box, my legs pulling me down the side as the G-force increased. I still had a grip on the handle, but couldn’t get any leverage. The force changed again, lessening momentarily, and I pulled myself up to the top of the box, wedging myself between the ceiling and the box with my knees. I grabbed the handle with both hands, and pulled harder than I’d ever pulled in my life. The handle moved slowly but smoothly upward, to the vertical position.

  A bang echoed through the vessel.

  I floated in midair next to the box. Pushing off from the ceiling, I held on to the handle. The box twisted in the air with me, its connection to the floor severed.

  “You still with me?” I panted. No reply.

  Weightless, I was stuck in the middle of the room, holding on to the handle at the top of the computer, which rotated slowly along with me. Gently pushing off toward the floor, I grabbed the top of the nearest box as I drifted past.

  “Hello?” I said. No response. I’d done it right. Before I could celebrate though, I had to do the rest of the job. I needed the flashlight again, so I pushed myself across the room, and found it partially hidden from sight between a box and the wall. I took it to the remaining box that had a handle, wedged the flashlight under the handle, and pulled. It took a lot of effort for me to move it, but then, I wasn’t a Kakamaku, was I?

  The flashlight bent, but didn’t fold. Eventually I worked the handle up, and as it reached the ninety-degree point, it stopped. Instead of detaching from the floor however, an image shimmered into view above the box. A ghostly gray, three-dimensional image came into focus, but I couldn’t figure out what it meant. A tiny flat circle sat in the center, with an elongated triangle above it, pointing up. The image didn’t seem to be really there. I passed my hand through it, and felt nothing. The image didn’t waver; it was a hologram projected above the box.

  I looked around the outside of the box for any controls, but there was nothing. As I moved my hand upward along the right side of the image however, it changed. It seemed to contract, and tiny balls appeared, like ghostly gray pebbles floating alongside the circle and triangle. The circle and triangle shrank too. I moved my hand down along the same side of the image, and it expanded, the pebbles moving out of view. I did that several times, and it always reacted the same way. I moved my left hand up the other side of the image, and the floor rose up to meet me. I felt heavy, and a huge thump sounded from behind me. The computer slammed down onto several other boxes, coming to rest at an angle, lying on its side.

  The image had changed a little, with the triangle longer than it had been before. So I took my left hand, and passed it downward along the left side of the image. The weight went away, and the triangle went back to its original size. We were back in freefall.

  I smiled, and let out a long breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. I had guessed correctly.

  “What do you plan to do now?” came a tinny voice from behind me. I turned, startled, at the sound.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “What do you plan to do now?” it repeated. The computer’s voice came from the box I’d detached from the floor, a very different tone from the booming, omnipresent sound it had been before. This voice was quieter, and weaker.

  The spot on the floor where the computer had been standing was a raised square, with hundreds of smaller raised squares on top of that. They were all burnished silver metal. Whether they were connectors for the computer, or a hold-down system, I didn’t know. I was sure of one thing though; when I’d disconnected the box, the computer had instantly lost control of the vessel.

  “My plan,” I replied, “is to go home.”

  9

  The computer didn’t speak again, either by itself, or in answer to my questions. I turned my attention back to the image that shimmered over the smaller box. I moved my right hand up, and the image shrank as the gray pebbles appeared. I moved my hand some more, and one larger pebble appeared. The pebbles were all in the same plane, but the circle and triangle were not. They remained in the center of the image. What the hell was I looking at?

  There was something familiar about the image—Josh and Kelly’s homework from years ago. What was it? Then with a flash, I recognized it—our solar system. The big pebble had to be the sun, and the others were the planets. How many times had I repeated the list with the kids? Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and so on. Earth was the third planet out from the sun. All I had to do was aim the vessel at it, and we’d be on our way.

  How could I steer this beast? I waved a hand at the front and back of the image, but nothing happened. Only the two sides seemed to have an effect.

  I looked around the box for anything else that might be different. It stood four feet high, and two feet square. The image was a cube, two feet on a side, projected on top of the box. There weren’t any buttons or switches on the box, except for the big handle that had turned it on.

  It was difficult holding my position while weightless, so I increased the acceleration back to about what we’d had before. I gently dropped to the floor. That was enough to hold me in place while I figured this thing out.

  This display had to be part of the computer’s plan to have one of the Kakamaku fly this thing out into space. It would never reach the home world though. Instead, the poor volunteer, and this vessel, would simply drift through the cosmos once it had died.

  So how did the controls work? It had to be something simple, as the creature destined to use this control box wouldn’t have been technologically adept. I sat back, and examined the box and image. As I sat there, a wave of fatigue washed over me. I shook my head. This was no time to think about sleeping. I took a deep breath, and stood up. Carbon Dioxide. I’d been breathing this air for three days. I must have raised the CO2 level by now, and could feel the effects. I had to get this crate ba
ck home, the sooner the better.

  Focus. I had to stay focused, and get back quickly. Without buttons or levers, control of this vessel had to be through the image. I waved my hands again on all four sides, with predictable results. Nothing. Then I put both hands along the sides, and moved them up and down together. Nothing. I needed to steer this vessel, to make it turn in the direction I wanted it to go. If the vessel had a steering wheel, it would be a lot simpler. Instead, all I had was this ghostly image. I put both hands along the sides, and made like a steering wheel, moving one up, and the other down.

  The triangle and circle rotated while the pebbles remained still. I felt the tug of gravity shifting, like the vessel was tilting. It must have been rotating to match what I’d set into the image. The movement stopped, and the circle and triangle rotated back to the upward position in the image, the pebbles following along with them. I cracked a huge smile.

  “Take that, you pile of bolts,” I said to the computer.

  Moving my hands in opposite directions rotated the circle, which had to be the vessel. The triangle was our vector, the direction through space we were traveling.

  I was a pilot. I had this.

  Unless I turned the vessel, the triangle pointed straight up. All I had to do was figure out which of those small pebbles was Earth, turn the vessel until that pebble lay directly above the triangle, and start moving. Easy as pie. I had the image set the way I wanted in minutes, and started toward home.

  I used a stronger thrust than the computer had set getting out here, since I had to get back before the carbon dioxide got to me. If it had taken three days to get out here, I didn’t want to take more than two days to get home. I’d be dehydrated, tired, and loopy from the CO2, but I’d make it. Thinking otherwise wasn’t an option.

  I reached for the oatmeal raisin bar in the backpack, and then stopped. It still didn’t appeal to me. Memories of my favorite grill in Honolulu, and their double bacon cheeseburger, came to mind. I could wait a little longer.

  10

  I felt heavy because of the acceleration, so at some point, I had to put on the brakes. About a day after I took over, the distance to Earth had been cut in half. The main thrust only worked in one direction for me, so I’d have to turn the vessel around to slow it down.

  I did that, and as I ramped up the acceleration, the triangle pointed away from Earth. A flat gray square also appeared in the image, between the ship and the Earth. It moved according to how much thrust I applied; closer to the vessel if I thrust more, closer to Earth – or past it – if I reduced the thrust. It was a trend marker that probably showed the spot in space where our velocity relative to a nearby object would be zero. Perfect. I set the thrust so that square was just above the surface of the Earth.

  The computer lay on the ground, stubbornly silent. Was a situation like this even part of its programming? The computer’s box lay where it fell in the processing center, on top of several smaller boxes. I walked over to it, and knocked on the side.

  “Anybody home in there?” No answer.

  I rubbed my eyes. The CO2 had to be affecting me, if I was stupid enough to be annoying the computer. I’d been up for longer than I could remember, watching the image as the distance to Earth slowly shrank. I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer, and lay down for a short nap.

  I awoke with a start, not remembering where I was. I felt groggy, and my head throbbed. The CO2 levels were probably increasing. That much I did remember. Trying to clear the cobwebs from my mind, I stood up and looked at the image. I cranked down the scale. We were almost at the gray square. It had been nearly fourteen hours since I’d closed my eyes. One thought penetrated the fog; I couldn’t risk falling asleep again.

  Lowering the thrust to almost nothing, my velocity relative to home was near zero. I hung about one Earth diameter above the surface.

  I zoomed in further, and recognized the outlines of continents, islands, and oceans on the image of Earth. I hovered above northern Europe. That image was my way home.

  “What are your plans now?” the computer asked, startling me.

  “I’m going home, as I said before.”

  “How will you do that without having more missiles fired at you?”

  Son of a bitch. The CO2 had dulled my thinking. How would anyone know it was me, and not the aliens coming back for round two?

  I had no working radios, no communications devices of any kind. If I just appeared over Honolulu, they’d blast me to dust, just as they had tried to do back on Tikopia.

  “Your efforts, although unexpected, will be ultimately futile,” the computer said. “You will be destroyed, the technology of this vessel lost to your people.”

  I glared at the box, ready to argue. Then I remembered how I had made it to this point.

  “Your problem is,” I said, “you underestimated us. You had all these contingencies programmed into you, but the ability to think outside the box, so to speak, wasn’t built into you, was it?”

  “I do not understand.”

  “Of course you don’t. That is why you failed. You were one ship, with one computer controlling it. You spent all this time and energy to get to Earth, and are far more technologically advanced than us. Your mistake though, was a lack of redundancy. All along, you showed me that you had great plans, but if a link in your chain failed, your mission did too.

  “You assumed there wouldn’t be intelligent life on Earth. When there was, you created the Pouakai to remove it, but they didn’t finish the job. Your creations could only survive where the sunlight was bright enough to supply the energy they required. You didn’t have a plan in place for what to do with us up in the colder, darker parts of the planet. Up there, we had time to analyze your attacks and study the Pouakai. You were a single vessel, trying to take over an entire civilized planet. If it had been us trying to colonize your world, we would have retreated even before attempting to do what you did. If we really wanted to continue, we would have come back with multiple vessels, and the ability to adapt to all conditions that might be present on the planet. That’s the difference between our species.”

  “This does not explain how you have progressed as far as you have, or how you will complete your stated desire to go home.”

  “No, you wouldn’t see it. Do you understand the concept of ego?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’ll understand why your mission failed. You were created to run it, and the designers of this vessel were so confident in their design, that they only needed one of you. You had no backup.

  “I realized that if I could disconnect you, as the Children were supposed to, I might be able to control the vessel.”

  “I did not tell you how to disconnect me.”

  “You said the Children would still be technologically naïve when they set you up as their oracle, and sent one of their own to the stars. The process for them to do that had to be obvious, and simple. When I found the handle on the main door, and the ones on you and the controller, it all made sense. It was the ego of your creators, also programmed into you, that eventually caused your downfall. You wouldn’t let yourself believe that I could think through a problem like this, and come up with a solution.”

  “A failure of imagination. If I could feel sorrow for my creators, I would.”

  I remembered the sight of Jennifer, lying gutted on our living room floor, and any remorse I felt evaporated.

  “So now all I have to do is get home,” I said. The computer didn’t respond.

  “Hello? Are you there?” Nothing. Maybe it was sulking after the inferior species had prevailed over it.

  My problem still remained though: how to get home.

  An insistent beeping sounded from the image. I jumped over to it, and had to grab on to the box to slow myself in the miniscule gravity. A gray dot had appeared off to one side, between the vessel and the Earth in the image. It moved quickly toward me too. Shit. I’d probably already been spotted by radar, and they had fired a missile at me. W
hat could I do?

  A spot on the box appeared below the image, illuminated from within. It blinked in time with the beeping. I touched the light. The familiar hum of the beam weapon mast came from the ceiling, just above me. A snap echoed inside the vessel, and the dot in the image disappeared.

  Oh crap. Now they would be sure I was an alien invader. I had to find a way to get down to the ground, while letting them know who I was.

  11

  To survive, I had to tell the world it was me, not the aliens, controlling the vessel. Either that, or I would have to outrun whatever they threw at me. If I dove down quickly and landed somewhere remote, could I pop the door open and make a run for it? After seeing what they tried on Tikopia, I doubted I’d make it. They’d probably lob another nuke or ten at me, and I couldn’t see myself outrunning several megatons of nuclear fury.

  I had to convince them it was me before I left the vessel. This spaceship was even more important than my survival; the technology we desperately needed.

  The only action I could take would be with the vessel itself. Wherever I landed however, they’d be gunning for me. That couldn’t be my strategy. After all my work to get here: hopping from island to island, sneaking aboard this vessel, searching for an answer; it couldn’t end this way. I was so close to getting home with the prize. Landing alone couldn’t be my strategy.

  I held on to the box, wondering what the hell I could do. Everything that had led up to this point circled through my mind; a collage of ocean, islands, Pouakai, and Kakamaku. The image stuck with me: island hopping. It was what my great-grandfather had done in World War Two, as a young infantryman in the Army. He’d moved from island to island across the Pacific, pursuing the enemy toward their homeland.

  In that instant, my course became clear. I didn’t have to go to just one place, but could choose multiple locations. If I retraced my steps backwards across the Pacific, from Tikopia to Anuta, Nanumea, Palmyra, and finally Honolulu, then Colin or someone in the Navy might understand that as an attempt to communicate with them.