The Final Dawn

by T W M Ashford

  He turned around and abruptly found Everett Reeves on the other side of his helmet. The man looked agitated. The bags under his eyes gave Jack the impression he hadn't slept since their last meeting.

  "Jack! You're ready. Good. Everything fit okay?"

  "Erm, yes. I think so. Look, Mr. Reeves…"

  "Call me Everett." He put an arm around Jack's shoulders and guided him back towards the machine. "Come on, let's get you—"

  Jack stopped sharp.

  "What is this thing?" He wrung his gloved hands together. "Can you at least tell me what I've gone and signed myself up for?"

  Everett's face fell in utter bafflement. Then he broke into nervous laughter. A couple of scientists glanced up again.

  "Oh, of course! You have no idea, do you?"

  Jack shook his head. The helmet made it harder than it should have been. Everett got off to a couple of false starts trying to explain, then resignedly led Jack to a nearby desk. He snatched up a piece of paper.

  "Here's where Earth is, yes?" Holding it landscape, Everett drew a dot on one end of the paper. "And this is where the nearest habitable star system is." He drew a second dot close to the opposite end. "Even at half the speed of light, to get from here to there would take a dozen lifetimes."

  "So you're putting people into stasis?"

  "What? No! The survival rate amongst cryochamber test subjects is still woefully unsatisfactory, and besides – we don't have the power to sustain a ship for that long a journey, let alone one filled with three hundred thousand frozen coffins."

  Jack furrowed his brow.

  "But if the Arks don't have the power to travel those sorts of distances, then how…"

  "How can we make the trip at all?" Everett grinned. "By taking a shortcut. Watch."

  He folded the paper in half, then pierced the tip of his pencil through both of the dots he'd drawn.

  "We punch a hole through spacetime. With the right coordinates and calculations, the trip should be almost instantaneous."

  Jack felt as if he'd been dunked in ice water. His whole body turned numb.

  "A wormhole." The words spilled out flat and monotone. "You're talking about using a wormhole."

  "Not using one, Jack. Making one. We've done it before." Everett pointed at the machine. "This is one half of a pair. The other sits in a secondary lab about a mile or so down the runway."

  Everett waited for Jack to put the pieces together himself. He sighed and gave up.

  "We're going to send you from one chamber to the other," he explained.

  Jack blinked at Everett as if he hadn't heard a word he'd said. Then he started frantically pulling at his helmet.

  "Nope, definitely not." Try as he might, he couldn't twist it off. He started tugging at his gloves instead. "I'm out."

  "What? What do you mean, you're out?"

  "I thought you needed somebody to undergo the conditions of interstellar acceleration, or something. You know, pilot things. If I'd known you were going to bloody teleport me about, I never would have volunteered."

  "Not teleporting." Everett grabbed Jack by the shoulders and lowered his voice. "Bending spacetime. There's a difference. Don't do this to me, Jack. I took a chance on you. If you leave now, they'll shut down the project for sure."

  "They?"

  "Look up there."

  Jack squinted past the glare of the bulbs. A large window stuck out from the far wall, sort of like the box at a baseball game. Half a dozen old men in black suits looked down at them from their seats. Each appeared deeply unimpressed by the delay. Standing by their side was Captain Blatch. She didn't look particularly happy about it either.

  "Do you really think I'm going to let anything go wrong while they're watching? Come on, Jack. If we don't do this, nobody's getting off this planet."

  Jack looked around the lab. All the scientists were watching him from their computer stations, waiting to begin.

  "I don't know…"

  "Yes you do. You want tickets for you and your wife?" Everett gave a subtle nod in the direction of the men in suits. "This is the only way to get them. They'll do anything to honour a hero. Trust me."

  Jack chewed his bottom lip. His skin felt like it was burning. All he wanted to do was run away, and yet…

  "Okay. Answer me one question. What happened to the other pilots?"

  Everett was taken aback. He looked almost angry in his confusion. Then his expression softened again.

  "Oh, them. They're fine. A little shaken up, as one would expect, but fine. The test is perfectly safe, Jack. It's just a case of scaling up, from a mouse to a person to an intergalactic supercarrier. Hell, I'd do it myself if they'd let me." He dropped his voice to a whisper again. "If you leave and they pull my budget, I'll probably have to."

  Jack closed his eyes, sighed, and nodded.

  "All right. Let's get this over with."

  Everett clapped his hands together with glee.

  "Okay, we're good to go! Everybody to their positions!"

  As Everett guided Jack back towards the machine, the rest of the scientists hurried from computer to computer. Two men in hazmat suits rolled out a couple of large, metal barrels and plugged them into panels at the machine's base. The door of the dome had been opened for him, and a wheeled set of stairs positioned in front of it.

  All he felt like doing was throwing up, but Jack didn't permit himself to hesitate. He climbed the stairs and stepped inside the chamber.

  It was empty, save for a single leather pilot's chair in the centre. Unlike a cockpit there were no dials or dashboards of any kind. The hexagonal panels on the curved wall mirrored those on the outside of the dome, though these were plagued with dozens of bulbous Tesla coils. Transparent pipes ran along the chamber floor.

  He sat in the chair. It seemed expected of him. Everett followed him inside and took the opportunity to conduct one final inspection of the chamber.

  "How will you know if something goes wrong?" asked Jack. "Is there a way I can get hold of anyone?"

  "The suit will be feeding us your vitals the whole time, and we'll be keeping an eye on you through this camera," Everett pointed at a tiny black speck on the panel directly in front of Jack, then slapped him on the arm. "Don't worry, Jack. You're perfectly safe. Just, erm, try not to wriggle about too much."

  Jack let out a nervous laugh. Everett shot his colleagues a thumbs up.

  "We'll shut the chamber door, and then you'll have a minute or so before we start her up," said Everett, hovering in the doorway. "Good luck."

  The metal door swung shut with a cold clang. Through its tiny slit of a window, Jack could see assistants pulling the stairs away.

  He faced the wall of the chamber in front of him and tried to control his breathing. Everything was going to be fine. They wouldn't be running the experiment if they didn't expect it to succeed, right? All he had to do was sit still and try not to pass out.

  He reached into the compartment on the chest of his suit and pulled out the piece of paper. Unfolding it was a delicate process, especially given the gloves he was wearing.

  It was a photograph of him and Amber. They'd taken it during a trip along Oregon's coastline not long after he'd left the academy, a couple of years before the first solar flare had hit. The way the sunset mist crept over the sea-swept cliffs behind them was beautiful. They both looked so young. They both looked so happy.

  He smiled to himself, then carefully folded it up and stuffed it away again.

  Remember who you're doing this for.

  A few seconds later, a green light went on above his head. He looked up as far as his helmet would allow.

  "Here we go," he said, clenching his fists.

  He glanced through the small window and saw Everett shouting something to his colleague. Nothing bad, Jack hoped. Then Everett pressed a button on his console and the whole noisy mechanism jolted into life.

  The chamber started to hum – Jack could feel the vibrations through the seat of his chair. Slowly, as
if brought to life by an emergency generator during a power cut, the coils all around the dome began to glow.

  Jack gripped the arms of his seat. It was tempting to shut his eyes and wait the test out, but he forced himself to watch. They wanted to know what he saw as he shot from one lab to another, and he intended to tell them.

  He jumped as a bolt of blue electricity crackled from one node to another. Perfectly normal, he was sure. He glanced out the slit of a window again. Everett didn't seem to be panicking, at least.

  As the static charges increased in regularity, Jack discovered a growing pressure on his chest. He'd wondered why the chair hadn't come with seatbelts. Now he had his answer. Against the forces this experiment would apply, he wouldn't need them.

  The humming noise grew louder. An electric hiss rose in volume alongside it. Jack tried to look at the scientists through the window again, but the bolts of lightning had grown so frequent that they almost appeared to form an electric cage around him.

  "Guys?" The words croaked out in a wheeze. "Is this supposed to happen?"

  He didn't know if anyone could hear him, but nobody answered.

  Now it felt as if a large man had sat on his chest. It was getting hard to breathe. Even raising his arm from the side of his chair was an ordeal. The inside of the chamber was growing more bleak and monochrome as his vision started to grey-out… not that it had been all that colourful to begin with.

  Jack couldn't hear much besides the chamber's mechanical humming sound. He certainly couldn't make out the voices of anybody outside in the hall. And yet he could hear the sudden gurgle of liquid behind him as clearly as if he were lying under the pipes of his kitchen sink. He tried to look around but the pressure was too great.

  He needn't have bothered. Whatever liquid being pumped into the machine now flowed through the pipes that ran along the chamber's floor. It was as sluggish and black as tar.

  He tried to call out again, but this time only a pained groan escaped his lips. The man who'd been sitting on his chest had got up and allowed a bull elephant to take his place.

  And still the machine grew in power.

  The periphery of his vision was darkening now. All he could see were the blurry flashes of blue electricity in front of him and the horrid blackness inside the pipes by his feet.

  How were they doing this? Had he ever gone this fast in any of his centrifuge tests? He knew that pretty soon he would lose his sense of sight entirely, and pass out after that. If they didn't stop the experiment at that point, he would die.

  He didn't want to die. He just wanted to go back home to Amber, even if it meant losing his job. Even if it meant dooming them both to a life on a dying planet.

  Something rattled loose from the chamber wall and ricocheted off Jack's shoulder. Jack stared wide-eyed, suddenly alert again. He could have sworn it had been a rivet or a bolt of some kind. But that was impossible. That would mean the machine was tearing itself apart.

  Another bolt came loose and hit his helmet, scratching the visor. This time Jack had no doubt as to what it was… for the most part because it remained motionless in front of him, floating as if in zero G.

  Then it shot past him into the back of the chamber. That was when all hell started to break loose.

  Rivet after rivet tore through the dome, punching holes through the metal panels all around him. Jack winced but the pressure kept him locked in place. A couple pieces of shrapnel bounced off his suit. It stung, but they didn't rip the fabric. One of the pipes shook itself loose, spraying the thick, black fluid over his boots. It looked toxic.

  The door rattled and its window smashed. Luckily for Jack, the glass burst outwards. Then the whole door flew off its hinges with a terrible screech. Jack expected to see something on the other side – even if only a nauseating blur – but there was nothing outside the chamber except white-hot nothingness.

  The threads of Jack's chair began to split.

  "Why won't…" he whimpered, blinking a tear free. "Stop…"

  A metal panel in front of him started to wrench itself away from the chamber wall, buckling as easily as one might turn the corner of a page. Behind it were all manner of complicated wires and tubes, most of which were broken and sparking. Jack hoped the liquid at his feet wasn't flammable. Horrifying images of the Apollo 1 fire rose in his mind.

  The panel lurched further free. Its jagged edge looked like the serrated teeth of a chainsaw. One of the tubes behind it flew out and exploded against the side wall.

  And still the pressure grew greater…

  And greater…

  And…

  The world turned mute, and Jack was thrown forwards.

  After a while, when it became apparent he hadn't been cleaved in two, Jack opened his eyes.

  The chamber was gone. The entire machine was gone. So was the laboratory, and the scientists, and the viewing box full of men in suits.

  In their place was… nothing.

  Well, that wasn't strictly true. As his tunnel-vision retreated and the pain in his chest subsided, the darkness before Jack grew less absolute and more… beautiful. It was as if somebody had taken a black sheet and pricked a hundred thousand tiny holes in it, and through those holes shone beads of brilliant light, some much greater than others. And all around them bloomed great clouds of dust in deep pastels – blues and reds and greens – a tapestry wrapped around him, yet infinitely out of reach.

  The laboratory was gone, and in its place was everything.

  "No, no, no," muttered Jack, as reality kicked in. His heart rate skyrocketed and his breathing, already laboured from the experiment, became sharp and erratic. "This cannot be happening, this can not be happening…"

  Wide eyed, he looked everywhere his bulky helmet would allow. He saw nothing except more empty space. He tried to turn around, but his arms and legs flailed through a vacuum. There was nothing to hold on to. All he could do was float, adrift.

  Earth was nowhere to be seen.

  He started to hyperventilate. His visor fogged up. No Earth, no Moon. No satellites or space stations. He was getting pains in his chest. Panic attack? Heart attack? He tried to remember the constellations his father had taught him as a child. Maybe he could get his bearings that way.

  No luck there either.

  It was getting harder and harder to breathe. Of course. No oxygen, save for what was trapped in his suit. In a few minutes only carbon dioxide would be left. He was going to suffocate, alone.

  Once more, his vision grew dark at the edges. His temples throbbed and his lungs ached. The stars blurred and ran into one another. He tried to scream, but nothing came out.

  As he lost consciousness, his thoughts were of Amber.

  Moments later, a huge shadow passed overhead. It lingered above him, blotting out the nebulas beyond.

  Something reached out.

  4

  The Automata

  Jack woke up on his back, gasping for air. He clawed at his helmet only to discover that it wasn't there anymore.

  Wherever he was, there was oxygen.

  His breathing steadied, as did his heartbeat. He was alive, he guessed. His body felt like it had gone a few rounds against a grizzly bear, but he was alive.

  How was that even possible?

  For the first time since gaining consciousness, he paid proper attention to the ceiling above him. It looked like the bulkhead of an ancient submarine. Sheets of copper metal had been welded to iron girders and punched together with rivets the size of Jack's fist. It was a clumsy job. There were spots of what looked like rust.

  He shivered. Even in the suit, he was freezing. A cold mist floated up from his mouth each time he exhaled.

  Something bulky and metallic leaned over him.

  "Hey, guys?" it said. "Get over here. He's awake."

  Jack screamed and scampered across the floor on his backside until he hit a wall. His eyes were wide and his legs trembled. He held out his hands in self-defence.

  Half a dozen figures watche
d him from across what looked like a cargo bay. A couple of them were approaching, cautiously, as if he were a wild cat that had escaped its cage. They were humanoid in general appearance, and in the way that they moved, but…

  …but they were anything but human.

  They walked with gears that ground together and pistons that pumped up and down. Their metal feet clanged heavily against the floor. Some of them had mechanical hands that resembled those of a human, complete with flexing fingers and thumb. Some had mere clamps and claws. Their bodies were as industrial as the ship, though some looked better maintained than others. They studied him with eyes made of lenses and LEDs.

  Jack waved his hands back and forth.

  "Keep away from me!" he shouted. "I'm warning you!"

  One of the robots came closer than the others. It shook a sad, elongated head, which was attached to a thin torso by a trio of long metal rods.

  "See? He's just like all the rest of them," it said. "I told you we should have left him out there."

  "Don't be ridiculous," said the one that had first leaned over him. He was smaller than the others – three feet tall, perhaps – and stockier, with a head that protruded from his otherwise box-shaped torso like a VHS cassette tape. "We're not animals. Besides, it’s Ministry protocol."

  A third joined them. This one was about Jack's height and had a faceplate that actually resembled a face – albeit one forged in a foundry, not a womb. A tight bunch of cables flowed out from the rear of her head like snakes and re-entered at the small of her back. She looked more advanced than the rest of her companions.

  "He's not dangerous," she said, the apertures of her eyes contracting as she squinted at him. "He's just scared."

  The short one tilted his head.

  "We found you floating about outside.” He pronounced each word as if Jack were a child. "We aren't going to hurt you."

  Jack studied them, his mouth agape. He didn't lower his arms.

  "What the hell are you?" he asked.

  The grumpy one laughed and shook its head again. It was the most human-looking one who answered.