by J Battle
‘Close the chamber. It should switch on automatically.’
‘No I’ll wait for you, to be sure you’re safe.’
‘Do it now, just to make sure it works. If it doesn’t, we’ll have to think of something else.’
‘Are you sure you’ll be alright?’
‘The quicker you shut up and close the chamber, the quicker I can make myself safe.’
‘Okay. I guess I’ll see you when we’re rescued. Love you. ’
‘And you,’ breathed Max, as he heard the lid of the chamber closing. He held his breath for a moment, then he felt the faint vibration of the chamber working.
He leant his head back against the chamber and let the tears flow.
After what seemed an age, they dried and he lay on his back, trying to find a more comfortable position under the four G pressure.
‘That’s three hundred kilo I weigh now,’ he muttered to himself.
The pain in his knee was indescribable. He almost laughed to himself as he remembered to trigger his nanos. The relief was almost instantaneous.
The pressure on his chest was growing second by second. He was finding it hard to breathe. The nanos might help with the pain but they couldn’t breathe for him.
He guessed he must be at eight or nine G when he started to fall in and out of consciousness.
Very soon after that he blacked out completely.
The drive was at ten G when the figure climbed the stairs, his movements effortless and smooth. He entered the room and bent over the unconscious man.
Straightening, he checked the chamber. Through the cloudy surface he could see the woman. Sure that it was in operation, he took a further moment to examine the other chamber; it also seemed to be fine.
He walked back to the man and picked him up gently in his dull black hands.
Chapter 22
It would have been easy to step back into darkness when the lights of the lunar rover appeared on the near horizon, but Number Five didn’t move. He merely waited as the small vehicle glided towards him. When it was near, he raised one hand in greeting and the craft settled on its over-sized wheels on the dusty rock before him.
He could see that there were two passengers through the thick windscreen; one too many for his purposes. As he walked up to the rover, he disabled the communication antennas with a quick laser pulse, to ensure privacy.
The first person to exit the craft through its airlock was surplus to requirements, so he tossed him over his shoulder into the dark side, taking care to jerk him in such a way that his neck would be sure to be broken. Then he bent slightly and stepped into the airlock.
**********
Debois was feeling slightly nauseous.
He shouldn’t have been; his nanos were designed to protect him from the effects of the flicker. He’d been fine during the mini-flick that had carried him out to his rendezvous with Jack. But that had lasted only a fraction of a second; before his body knew that something was happening, it was already over.
He knew this flicker wouldn’t last much longer but, somehow his body understood the difference, and it was protesting.
He closed his eyes as soon as it began; he didn’t like the way the forward bulkhead was charging towards him. And light really shouldn’t be that colour, that grainy, that soupy. Even the ceiling was misbehaving; it was much closer than it should have been.
Then it was over and Debois was able to unfasten his straps and sit up, the slimy mess on his left shoulder beginning to dribble down to his chest.
‘Are we there yet?’ He asked as he dabbed at his shoulder with his handkerchief.
Jack brought up the display on the forward bulkhead.
At first it was difficult to be sure what he was looking at, then the screen zoomed and he spotted the small rocky disc at its centre.
‘It looks a long way off. Shouldn’t we be chasing it?’
‘We don’t have to; it’s coming towards us. At close to one point six million kilometres per minute.’
‘What are we going to do? You can’t just wait for it to hit us.’
‘We’re going to accelerate until our speed matches the habitat.’
‘Can we even go that fast?’
‘Of course we can, it will just take us a couple of days of one hundred G acceleration.’
‘But what about me? I can’t take that level of G.’
‘That’s a shame. You’ll have to ride it out in the stasis chamber the ship has just made for you, won’t you?’
‘Oh, I love a joker,’ laughed Debois as he slipped off the couch and walked to the narrow oval chamber next to the rear bulkhead .
Two days later the ship’s speed was close to that of the habitat. As it rushed on at 10% of the speed of light, the habitat drew closer and closer behind it.
At last, with featherlike touch, the ship landed on the northern pole of the ex-asteroid.
When he was released from the stasis chamber, Debois was almost giddy with excitement.
‘I’ve never been on a habitat,’ he enthused as he slipped from the chamber’s confines. ‘The views are supposed to be astounding.’
‘I wouldn’t expect too much,’ said Jack, as he closed the chamber.
‘You’re just an old grump,’ Debois muttered as he straightened his clothes.
‘I could do with fresh clothes and some blusher. And my hair must be such a mess. I don’t like meeting new people when I don’t look my best. ’
‘I wouldn’t worry about that.’
Debois looked at Jack, then took a step closer.
‘Are you saying that I still look good, even in these circumstances?’
‘No, I’m saying you’re not going to meet anyone. And please step back.’
‘What do you mean? You’re taking me with you aren’t you? You can’t leave me behind. I’m Earth’s witness. I have…’
‘Calm down. You’re coming with me. It’s just that there will be no one to meet. The habitat is uninhabited.’
‘But…what happened to them? There must have been thousands of them; tens of thousands. You didn’t…’
‘I didn’t do anything to them. They …..missed their ride.’
Debois folded his arms over his stomach.
‘An explanation would be nice.’
‘Well, you might say I hijacked it. The habitat was built over a thousand years ago and I hid a replicant there; it seemed a good idea at the time. Then the programme was mothballed and Number Seven was left alone, which was fine.
‘When the new plan was put in place to make the habitat a self-propelling spaceship, I saw it as a good opportunity to place my replicant outside the realm of human interference. I wanted the habitat, but not the people. He would be safe in the habitat, flying at high speed away from known occupied space. With people aboard, there was always the risk of meddling. I mean, what else would they have had to do?’
‘You didn’t kill them all?’
‘There was no need. I arranged the shifts to allow a twenty-four hour window where no-one was aboard the habitat. I used that time to override the programming of the engines and ramped up the drive as quickly as physically possible to forty G, and kept it at that rate for about three months. Then the fuel ran out. By that time the speed was close to 10% of light speed. That was nearly one hundred and fifty years ago.’
‘If all the fuel has run out, how is it going to stop?’
‘Stopping wasn’t really a consideration.’
Debois frowned.
‘So it just goes on, forever?’
‘In case you didn’t get the email; that was the whole point of the replicants.’
‘But you’re prepared to stop them now? Despite all you’ve done to create, distribute and perpetuate them?’
‘If it’s the only way you’ll let me come back to Earth.’
‘In that case, shall we start?’
The ship had landed in the centre of the habitat’s north pole, over the docking station.
Within a c
ouple of minutes they had cycled through the airlocks and were inside the habitat.
As they were at the centre of the north pole, gravity was virtually non-existent. Debois had to cling to the hand holds conveniently placed along the walls, ceiling and floor of the narrow corridor they found themselves in. Jack walked in a perfectly normal manner.
They came out onto an open landing, giving them a clear view along the length of the habitat.
Debois had seen many 2Ds and 3Ds of other habitats and they were always amazing. The designers seemed to be compelled to outdo each other in the complexity and beauty of their creations.
Not so much this one.
‘What have you done!’ He whispered; not expecting Jack to answer.
‘The design protocols didn’t meet my requirements. It wasn’t meant to accelerate the way I needed it to.’
He leant over the rail next to Debois.
‘It was quite pleasant though, originally. Those narrow grey strips of bedrock, they were a mixture of green growing stuff and brown fallow land. There were lots of trees and you can just make out where the lake would have been. There were no animals yet, they were due to be brought in a little later. I was pleased about that. I didn’t want to hurt any animals.’
They looked across the length of the blighted land that was below, around and above them.
More than three quarters of the length was just rock, grey and dirty; banded by the concentric rings of the low restraining walls. They were designed to hold the soil and the biomass in place when the habitat’s spin was stopped and the one G drive was in operation.
They were no help against the forty G assault that had been placed upon the habitat.
At the southern end they could see where the habitat’s living blanket had gone, forced and compacted against the southern wall; a broad green ring that dipped into a shallow hollow at the centre.
‘How do we get down there?’
‘There are lifts that will take us down to ground level. Or you could just fly. Your suit is equipped with little wings that will help you control your flight along the centre of the habitat, and you also have low velocity jets fitted. But watch out for the sun; you don’t want to get too close.’
Debois looked towards the sun, only one hundred metres above their heads, then down at the brown grey, unappealing ground.
‘You know, I don’t think I’ll bother,’ he said.
Chapter 23
‘So where is he? Can you remember where you put him?’ Debois had relented at the last moment, realising that he didn’t want to be left alone.
‘Of course I remember. The shell of the habitat is nearly 100 metres thick. There is a small chamber near the southern pole, dug into the bedrock.’
They were in the lift; descending the 1.5 kilometres to ground level. As they moved away from the centre of the habitat, their weight began to increase. Debois was happy that he was no longer in danger of bouncing around the lift.
‘Whilst we have nothing better to do, why don’t you tell me about the Primes? I know about them of course, but I’ve never really understood them. It’s not my field after all.’
‘TPI technology uses the springiness of the Prime boundaries to drive us to where we want to be. We don’t enter the Prime itself, not completely anyway. As you know, there are 17 Primes tightly wrapped and intermingled with each other, and up to 37 sub-Primes intertwined with them. I say up to 37 because the number is never static and can drop to much lower figures for reasons that are still something of a mystery. And in the centre of all these different realities is the Absence, where nothing can exist. Where even the strongest protective fields would be useless.’
‘Thanks for all that, but what is a Prime?’
‘It’s not an alternate reality, as some people suggest. They are completely separate realities, with different physical laws, where causality can be radically different, where the basic laws of our Prime do not apply. These are seriously strange places, and I’ve spent a lot of time travelling through them, not just to move about our Prime, but to explore and try to understand them.’
‘And how successful would you say you were?’
‘Well, I know how to survive in them, but that’s as far as it goes.’
When they left the lift, they walked out on to a narrow path that led between the strips of dirty bedrock towards the south.
Debois wrinkled his nose.
‘Smells a bit,‘ he said, taking a step to one side to avoid one of the many puddles dotted over the path’s surface.
‘Where’s all this water from? Has it been raining?’
Before Jack could answer, there was a whirring sound and jets of water shot high into the air from sprinkler set at regular spaces in the visible bedrock.
‘There’s your answer,’ said Jack, striding along, oblivious to the puddles he was splashing through.
Debois nodded as he looked around, mildly surprised that the irrigation system was still working after all this time. Then he scurried along to catch up with Jack.
He knew that Jack could have flown down the length of the habitat in seconds, but for some reason he was prepared to take this slower route.
‘What is your plan when we get there?’
‘What do you mean?’ responded Jack, his attention on their destination.
‘Do you have a way to disable the replicant? To destroy it? I can’t imagine it will be easy.’
‘You’re correct. I’m sure you would find it very difficult; if at all possible.’
‘But you can, can’t you?’
Jack stopped and turned him, and shook his head. Then he continued.
Debois sighed. ‘What are you planning to do then?’ He called after him as he raced to catch up.
‘It’s quite simple Debois. I’m not going to disable or destroy him, I’m not going to try to harm him in any way. He’s going to come with us.’
‘That isn’t what was agreed!’
‘I didn’t agree to anything. Any agreement made was with my AI and even you suggested that it wasn’t necessarily a permanent situation. Consider it expired.’
‘But what do you hope to achieve? They won’t let you return to Earth, you must know that’
‘I know nothing of the sort. They want me to remove the threat the replicants pose to the known universe and this is how I’m going to do it.’
Debois stopped in his tracks.
‘This is ridiculous! I can’t allow it!’
With machine speed Jack’s hands gripped him by the shoulders, lifting him two metres into the air.
‘Don’t test me, man,’ he hissed. ‘You won’t live to see the result.’
Debois patted his hands helplessly against Jack’s unyielding arms.
‘OK. OK. This is getting out of hand. Just put me down and we can talk about it.’
‘There is nothing further to say.’
With surprising gentleness, Jack lowered him to the ground.
Then he marched off at a pace Debois wasn’t going to even try to match.
He shuddered as he watched him storm along the path. He didn’t like him when he was angry.
When he did catch up with him, he was standing still, close to the edge of the green mound of earth and vegetation that ringed the south pole.
At his feet was a rectangle in the rock, 3 metres by 2.
The door opened without a sound, held by two black hinges.
Without waiting for an invitation, a creature stepped up and out. Its dull black skin seemed to evade the light. In very much the same way as Jack’s did. There were surely differences between the two, but on cursory inspection, they seemed identical.
‘This is Number Seven,’ said Jack, simply.
‘Aren’t you going to introduce me?’ asked Debois, trying not to pout.
‘He already knows who you are. We’ve been in communication since we entered the habitat.’
‘Oh. I see. Good to know.’
Number Seven ignored Debois and turned toward
s the south pole. For a moment he appeared to study it, then he strode across the rough rock.
‘What’s he up?’ asked Debois.
‘It seems he has a…project.’
‘A project? Shouldn’t we be going now? We should be catching up with Number Two, before it’s too late.’
‘Don’t worry yourself. There’s no rush.’
‘No rush! It’s eating…’ Debois stopped himself; he hadn’t liked Jack’s previous reaction to that statement.
They watched Number Seven in silence. He seemed to be studying a particular section of the hill before him.
‘You don’t have a shovel on you do you? I think he’s going to need one.’
Debois ignored the question.
In a flurry of scooping arms, Number Seven began to dig, throwing great chunks of earth over his shoulders; his absolute silence slightly disturbing to Debois.
He stepped back a little, not wanting his boring, quite out of fashion space suit made even dirtier.
Within only a few seconds Number Seven was out of sight deep into the hill. All they could see were sods of grass- bound earth flying out of the tunnel he had dug.
Then the earth stopped and the crashing began.
‘Time for us to follow him, I think,’ said Jack, his actions matching his words.
Debois skipped after him, anxious not to miss the excitement.
At the end of the tunnel were the remains of a noncrete wall. Debois wasn’t sure if the state of the wall was due to the 40 G pressure, or simply Number Seven’s hands.
Behind the wall was a chamber which they could see was still in drive configuration. The reception desk was several metres above their heads and the stairway they could see would have required the skills of an acrobat.
Number Seven didn’t make use of the stairs; he simply floated towards what had been the ceiling and ripped his way through.
Debois was quite surprised when Jack slipped his hands under his armpits and lifted him into the air to follow Number Seven.
They found themselves standing on the wall of a long room, with two grimy looking stasis chambers just above their heads.