Approaching Omega

by Eric Brown

  The air lock door slid open; lights winked on within. They jumped into the lock and the door closed behind them. Half a minute later, the inner door cycled open and Latimer floated through. He was aware that beside him, despite her optimism, Renfrew had levelled her laser. He found the control panel and activated the halogens, and seconds later the chamber was flooded with light.

  He found himself weeping with relief. There were no hostile cyborgs or roboids to greet them, no scene of wholesale butchery. The hangar was as it should be: row after row of cold sleep pods, their covers shut, their running lights sequencing normally.

  They powered up and jetted over the gallery. Latimer directed himself down between the first rows of pods and floated towards the nearest. He looked through the crystal cover and felt tears coursing down his cheeks.

  A young Asian woman lay fast asleep, her face serene. He bobbed along to the next pod, this one occupied by a European in his thirties.

  He heard Renfrew’s small voice in his helmet: “They’re okay, Ted. Christ, they’re okay. Every one of them!”

  He turned. She was floating beside a com console set into the bulkhead at the end of the row. Latimer jetted over to her and examined the scrolling diagnostics.

  “One hundred percent survival rate as of now,” she reported, a catch in her voice. “Absolutely no problems at all ...”

  If only this had been Carrie’s hangar, Latimer found himself thinking.

  He said: “Access the files. Let’s see what specialisms we have here.”

  With a clumsy, gloved finger, Renfrew tapped the touch-pad.

  The manifest flashed up. She entered a command to find a com-expert among the sleeping colonists.

  A second later the message appeared: None Found.

  Renfrew laughed. “Christ, Ted ...” She was scrolling down the list of a thousand names. “We’ve got agriculturists and biologists and zoologists ... all the soft sciences, but not one damned computer specialist.”

  He felt his elation quickly turn to something very much like despair. “So ... what now?”

  A beat, then Renfrew said: “Let’s get back to the command unit. We’ll try to assess the extent of the damage, see what we can rig up ...”

  A cold weight lodged in his chest, Latimer nodded and followed Renfrew towards the air-lock. They cycled themselves through, attached the safety cables, and powered themselves back towards the distant, tiny light of the emergency exit high on the side of the command unit.

  They had come so far, Latimer told himself, overcome such extreme odds, that they would not be defeated now. They would manage somehow to find a habitable, Earth-like world.

  He wondered if he was deluding himself. It would be a tragedy if, after everything they had experienced in the past few days, they were to spend the rest of their lives wallowing at sub-lightspeed between the stars. He could not bring himself to accept the enormity of the idea.

  They reached the emergency exit and cycled themselves through, into the welcome familiarity of the command unit.

  Latimer broke the seal on his helmet, pulled it off and dropped his laser.

  Beside him, something about Renfrew’s body language alerted him. She had stopped, stiffened, and was staring across the unit towards the com-stations.

  He followed her gaze.

  Someone was sitting before the consoles, facing them.

  It was Jenny Li.

  * * * *

  Thirteen

  Latimer’s first thought was that it was a mistake to have cast aside his laser - the second, that Jenny Li, or whatever she had become, was not armed.

  She sat in the swivel-chair, in her EVA suit, having removed the helmet. She looked tiny within the bulky suit, even smaller somehow because of her shaven skull.

  She smiled across at them. “Don’t be afraid Serena, Ted,” she said. “It’s okay. I won’t harm you.”

  Renfrew stared at her. “How ... how the hell did you survive?”

  Jenny Li shrugged the massive shoulders of her EVA suit. “I was the only augmented human in the theatre when you depressurised the ship. All the others had been sent to capture you. When I realised what you’d done, I suited up and made my way back here.”

  Renfrew shook her head. “I mean ... earlier. I thought ... Emecheta was supposed to have ...”

  Then Latimer knew why Jenny Li was still alive: Emecheta had shot her, but the AI surgeons had repaired her, brought her back to life: it was not, after all, that much of a miracle, considering what they had done to the other sleepers.

  Her high laughter filled the unit. She said: “Oh, Em couldn’t bring himself to end my suffering, Serena.”

  Renfrew said: “Emecheta didn’t...?”

  “I saw him return,” Jenny Li said. “I was conscious all the time, you know. All the time they were cutting me. I couldn’t feel a thing - but I knew exactly what they were doing to me. Anyway, I saw you up there. At first I hoped you’d be able to do something, rescue me. But I knew that was impossible. Then Em came back, and I knew why. I saw him aim the pistol, and I willed him to kill me ... but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.”

  Latimer considered the big Nigerian, then, his cold rationality ... So he had had a fallible, human side, after all. He wondered if that was why Emecheta had sacrificed himself in the end, because he knew that his inability to kill Jenny Li had compromised their mission to destroy Central?

  “Me and Em,” Jenny went on, “we were close, once. Then Em just turned off, concentrated wholly on the mission, ignored me.” She smiled. “But in the end, his humanity won out - he couldn’t kill me.”

  Latimer shook his head. “None of us could. We ... we wanted to - for your sake as well as ours. We didn’t want you telling the AIs what we’d planned.”

  Jenny Li smiled. “Oh, how I cursed Em when he didn’t pull the trigger! But then, a minute later, I realised how fortunate I was that he hadn’t. The AIs gave me something wonderful, you know.”

  Renfrew said: “They turned you into a machine!”

  But Li was shaking her head. “They turned me into something that retained my humanity, but also gave me something much more.”

  Latimer thought of Carrie, and did not want to hear what Jenny Li was telling him.

  She went on: “I was still me, still human, but I had access to such knowledge, such a wealth of understanding.”

  “And now?” Renfrew asked.

  “The same,” Li said. “Oh, because Central is destroyed, the cache of knowledge available is reduced. But, in here,” and she raised a small hand to the input jacks at the base of her skull, “in here, I have a much greater understanding ... of everything.”

  Latimer said: “We had to destroy Central, Jenny-”

  She smiled, interrupting him. “No, Ted. You thought you had to destroy Central. Based on the knowledge available to you, by your own criteria, you had to do as you did. But your knowledge was partial; you acted on ignorance.”

  “We wanted to survive,” Latimer said, “as we were.”

  “But you didn’t even know what it was, truly, we wanted to change you into.”

  Renfrew stepped forward. She found a swivel-chair and slumped into it. “Central,” she said, holding her head. She looked up, at Jenny Li. “Central was undamaged when we reached it.”

  The diminutive Korean smiled.

  Latimer said: “I don’t understand.”

  Renfrew turned to him. “Don’t you see? Central was undamaged. We assumed, all along, that it was damage to Central that had sent it crazy, made it turn against us.” She faced Jenny Li and said in a whisper: “But it was planned all along, wasn’t it?”

  Jenny Li shook her head. “Not at all. Just as the human crew was given directives, so was Central. Its directive was to survive at all costs, and to ensure the survival of the colonists. It deemed that, in the interests of the mission, a union should take place.”

  “So when the ship hit the cometary storm-” Renfrew began.

  “There was
no storm,” the Korean said.

  Latimer said: “The Hansen-Spirek coils ... The Earth First activist was right.”

  “The probes,” Renfrew said. “My God, the Omega Corporation knew they were sending us out with defective drives.”

  Jenny Li said: “They knew there was a sixty percent chance that the coils would malfunction - but the Corporation had already invested so much, and Earth was so near crisis point, that they deemed it necessary to go ahead with the mission.” She paused, then went on. “In the event, they were correct. We had to leave Earth, whatever the potential risk.”

  Latimer said: “What do you mean?” He had an awful feeling that he knew very well what she meant.

  She sighed. “Central received two communiqués from Earth, one twenty years after we set off, the second after thirty years. We couldn’t access them up here, of course.”

  Renfrew said: “And? What did Earth say?”

  “The first message,” Li said, “reported a war on Earth between Europe and Oceana, biological plagues, mass slaughter. It was estimated that some two billion human beings perished in the war and its aftermath.”

  “Christ,” Latimer said, finding a seat and slumping into it. And he thought he had experienced the ultimate horror aboard the Dauntless.

  He thought of his sister, her kids. What chance that they had survived? Then he realised that this was all ancient history, now.

  Renfrew said: “And the communiqué after thirty years?”

  The Korean shook her shaven head. “It was little more than a farewell message, put together by a few surviving scientists. The war had continued, turning nuclear. Earth was moving into a self-induced ice age; they forecast that all life on Earth would be extinct within twenty-five years.”

  The enormity of the concept, allied to the idea that all this had happened hundreds of years ago, turned the tragedy into something abstract. It would be a long while before he fully understood what Jenny Li had told him.

  Renfrew sat up: “So ... we’re the survivors, Jenny. You and me and Ted and the thousand colonists. We’re all that remain ...”

  Latimer said: “What now? Is there any hope of finding a suitable planet?”

  He saw something then in Jenny Li’s eyes - perhaps the desire to tell him that, if they had spared Central, then the chances would have been excellent. He wondered what it was that had stopped Jenny reminding him of what they had done in destroying Central - the machine part of her, or the human?

  She said: “While you were across at hangar Two, I patched together a rough com system. With what I have up here,” - she touched her head - “and the unit’s auxiliary system I’ve repaired, we have a matrix that should be able to detect a habitable planet. Of course, we’ll be moving at well below maximum speed, so it might take that much longer. But the computers servicing the cold sleep system are working AOK, so we should last the journey.”

  A silence opened up between them. At last Latimer said: “And you’re on our side, Jenny?”

  She smiled. “Whatever I might have become, Ted, I’m still human. I want to survive, with my species. Of course I’m on your side.”

  Later, they prepared themselves for another period of cold sleep. Jenny Li told them that she had instructed the com-system to wake them in fifteen hundred years, for maintenance checks, or before that if they should happen upon a suitable, Earth-like planet.

  As Latimer stretched out and gave himself to the crawling sub-dermal capillaries, his last thought was whether it was wise to have trusted her.

  * * * *

  He woke slowly. His first thought was of Carrie, and of what had happened to her. Then he remembered the thousand surviving colonists, and finding Jenny Li in the command unit ...

  He peered at the digital display above his head. Jenny had set the chronometers to zero before they slept - and now his read 800.

  Which meant they had emerged before the fifteen hundred years scheduled for a maintenance check.

  Which, he reasoned, could mean only they had come across a planet.

  Either that, or there was another emergency.

  He sat up. Renfrew emerged from her pod opposite Latimer. She smiled at him. “Was all that a dream, Ted?”

  “A nightmare, Serena. But it happened.” He pointed across the unit, to where an augmented Jenny Li sat at her com-station. “There’s the proof.”

  Across the chamber, Li swivelled in her chair.

  “What’s happening?” Latimer asked. He stood, unsteadily, and crossed the unit to his own com-station. Renfrew followed him.

  “What were you expecting?” Li asked, smiling. “Another Hansen-Spirek blow-out?”

  “After what happened last time,” Renfrew said, “I’m ready for anything.”

  Jenny Li tipped back her head and laughed, and the gesture was so human that Latimer could almost ignore the sight of the ugly cranial augmentation that adhered to the base of her skull. “Are you ready even,” she said, “for a virgin, Earth-type world, ninety-eight percent Earth-norm gravity, breathable oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, no indigenous sentient lifeforms ...? In other words, the perfect colony world.”

  Something like elation swelled in Latimer’s chest. “You’re joking, right?”

  “No joke,” Jenny Li said, swivelling in her seat and hitting the touch-pad. “Alkaid VII, as yet unnamed.”

  Above her, the viewscreen flared with a panoramic view of a mountainous valley falling away to a plain of blue-green grass and strange, attenuated trees.

  “I sent a few probes down as soon as I came round. It looks like paradise, Ted.”

  She tapped the touch-pad, and the scene on the viewscreen changed. Now they stared at a coastal landscape, a scimitar beach backed by rolling blue-green hills. Latimer made out lumbering, pachydermal beasts, snuffling through the red sands.

  “I repaired the com-system linking the unit with hangar Two,” Li went on. “The sleepers are all doing fine.”

  “What about the shuttles?” Latimer asked, aware that if they had been destroyed in the accident, then there would be no way of reaching the surface of the new world.

  “I’ve checked. Three of the six were destroyed when the coil exploded. But the three others are in good working order. I’ve put the Dauntless into a low orbit. We can start waking the colonists, getting them down to the shuttle hangar.”

  When she stopped talking, a silence developed. Suddenly Latimer laughed, and instinctively reached out and pulled Renfrew and Li towards him.

  * * * *

  Coda

  He was awoken early by a gorgeous orange sunrise in the west. He slipped out of bed, dressed and left the dome.

  He stood in the warm morning light, stretching and inhaling the heavy scent of the flowering shrubs that grew in the garden surrounding the dome.

  Down in the valley, another day was beginning: domes were being constructed, roads laid, fields tilled.

  A year since landfall, the colonisation of Arcadia was progressing according to schedule. The society would have been better equipped, and balanced, if the four thousand sleepers had not perished aboard the Dauntless, but the one thousand and three surviving colonists would provide a sufficiently varied gene pool in order for a viable colony to prosper.

  And Arcadia had proved a welcoming world, with few vicious predators - animal or viral - to worry the colonists. They had settled a clement equatorial region, with hot summers and mild winters, and set up farms, a few outlying villages and this, Latimer’s hometown, Landfall City, home to some six hundred souls, and rising.

  Latimer worked as an engineer in Landfall, supervising the slow expansion. At nights, he sat at his com-screen and slowly wrote out the story of what had happened aboard the Dauntless.

  Sometimes, when daunted by the prospect of accurately setting it all down, when the emotions brought about by the memories became too much, he would leave the dome and stroll up the hillside, sit on the blue-green grass and stare up at the star-packed sky.

  Sol was a
tiny speck of light high in the northern sky, but it was hard to associate the star with the cradle of humankind. The first children were being born on Arcadia, and soon they would learn all about the troubled history of planet Earth.

  That had been something Latimer had worried over during the long months of establishing the colony: how to shape a society that would not fall into the traps that had brought life on Earth to its knees.

  It was a conundrum beyond his limited knowledge: the future, he knew, was unknowable; he could but trust in the goodness of the individuals around him to perpetuate a fair and equable society, based on equality and tolerance.