by Alex Deva
“Can’t tell yet,“ answered the little girl.
Tiessler’s lips made a line so thin it wasn’t visible under his moustache, but he didn’t say anything.
Ileana/Keai said something to Doina, something that wasn’t carried on the audio channels of the transmission. The girl gave a quick nod, then focused forward. Unmoving, she adjusted something, and after a few seconds, her face lit up:
“They’re separate. They’re separate! I have Mark’s and Zi’s equipment stationary, and the alien with the man digging away. Ten metres… Twenty now.“
Yes, thought Aram. Yes. So far, so good. Just a little more death, Mark. Come on, mate, you can take it.
The speed of the digging was unbelievable. The tunnel was already well beyond Vichy, just north of Limoges, hundreds of kilometres from Geneva. They had agreed on ten kilometres, as the absolute minimum distance between the Square and the abandoned cylinders. That left them with over a quarter of an hour to wait. If Mark and Zi were already brain dead, fifteen minutes would see them well beyond any hope of recovery, for human medicine. And that was assuming that the Square hadn’t made sure of it.
They wouldn’t dare, hoped the Dacian. He tried to think about something else. There was no point in stressing now. There was nothing to be done but wait. Thinking about all the ways in which it could end badly wouldn’t help anybody.
He let his thoughts wander aimlessly. He thought about his friends, long gone now, about his uncle, about his parents, even about his sheep. He thought about the day he’d left, about the Roman fort up on the hill, about the clear weather, about the endless ribbon, about the two soldiers, what were their names? Naevius and, the other one? The new, scrawny, nervous fellow who had pulled out his gladius? Right: Cornelius. What an idiot.
And then, weirdly enough, his thoughts jumped directly to Ileana Toma, although she was definitely no idiot.
“One kilometre,“ said Doina.
Damn, that was gonna be one long wait. But he was good at waiting. Waiting to spring on some unsuspecting plundering nomad; waiting for his sheep to graze; waiting for the next bunch of plundering nomads. Waiting led to frustration; frustration led to mistakes.
So, he decided not to wait.
“I’m going back,“ he announced, in Lawry’s direction.
A few heads turned towards him, surprised, but the only mouth that opened belonged to the American.
“Right now? You sure you’re up to the trip?“
“As soon as you can take me. I’m ready.“
She turned towards Tiessler’s screen. “Sir?“
“Next lift-off is in six hours,“ said the German. “But there’s a full complement on board. All the coming ten… no, eleven Pinion launches are full. Somebody would have to give you their place.“
“You promised you’d take me back,“ began Aram.
“Yes, but not at six hours’ notice.“
“I don’t…“
“Stop, Mr. Aram. Never mind. I’m taking care of it.“
“Two kilometres,“ said Doina. “Yes, Aram. I’d like you back here with me.“
Tiessler sighed. “And there’s no backing out now, then. I’ll tell Dahlberg to organise an airlift.“
“Thanks,“ said the Dacian.
He felt much better now. His job, his role, was together with Doina and Mark. According to his initial plan, he would be returning anyway, to pick up Effo and its miracle cannon, but now, if Mark was to be transported directly to the starship, he might as well be there as soon as possible.
“You can give Zi my place in the Pinion on the trip back,“ he told Tiessler. The German lowered the corners of his mouth in an unhumorous smile, and made a nodding gesture that meant I can figure out my shuttle roster just fine, thank you, mr two-thousand-year-old. Aram shrugged. He’d only wanted to be positive. He said nothing more after that.
It was only after Doina announced the sixth kilometre that the doors to the laboratory opened, and four Rooks entered. One of them, Aram noticed, was the one who knew Russian. Ready to leave, he stood up and looked around. He waved in the general direction of everybody, and said:
“Thank you. I don’t know exactly what you were doing, but I’m pretty sure that if you stopped, we’d all be dead. So thanks.“
He turned towards Lawry.
“I’ll keep you posted on the way,“ she said.
“Do that,“ he answered, as he left the room.
XXXII.
The black ovoid floated in orbit about Western Europe, tumbling on all axes but remaining geostationary. Unknown forces, produced by unknown engines inside its hull, and fuelled by unknown energies, worked to keep it that way. It flew a good fifty kilometres above the outer atmosphere. The void was imperfect, not quite as empty as interstellar space, but still impacts with air molecules were manageable.
There were other spacecraft nearby. A mere four thousand kilometres to the south-east, and not much lower, there was a Eurasian cruiser, its many surfaces reflecting everything but the really long waves. Some satellites flew nearby, a little faster or a lot faster. Some of the satellites were military; they were all scanning the space around them, looking everywhere at once.
But nothing and nobody noticed the black ovoid. It was not reflecting anything that the humans were flooding its area with. Not that it couldn’t, of course; had it received the necessary command from the starship on the other side of the blue planet, it might have turned itself into a Christmas tree — more or less figuratively. But attention was unnecessary; more, attention was best avoided. So it flew, unseen, unheard and undetected, tumbling fast, but always maintaining a perfectly straight line between itself, the starship on the other side, and a specific point just under the surface of the planet.
Finally, the command came. The black ovoid spun up its internal field generator, which quickly settled into a high-energy state, as powerful as a hundred nuclear explosions, yet contained in one of its foci. Even as it was still tumbling on all axes, a round disc opened on its surface, changing its place so that it would always stay pointed towards Earth. Through it, the black ovoid shot its carrier beam.
A yellow ribbon-like ray, wide as a man with arms outstretched and flat like a sword, appeared in the atmosphere below, as the carrier beam excited free particles and forced them to emit glowing photons. It quickly found the surface, and went through it, unperturbed, until it found a long tunnel carved underneath. There, in the tunnel, the carrier beam found many things. It found abandoned equipment, and most importantly, it painted in gold two large cylinders which were laying end-to-end on the floor of the tunnel. Having satisfied itself that its target was correctly identified, it began modulating the carrier beam with the powerful energies it had stored, far above in orbit.
The new beam had a gravitational quality in its triple nature. At first, it changed the energy that it was still imparting to photons in the atmosphere; they, in turn, changed wavelength and the light they made changed, turning orange, and then red. Then, as the beam’s gravity wave component amplified, fewer and fewer photons were produced; and after a critical energy level, they became instead absorbed inside the beam. The result was that the colour darkened, becoming blood red, then brown, finally settling on pitch black.
Then, in an insanely powerful burst of modulation, the ovoid ejected all of its stored energy into the beam, which flashed blacker than black — and then vanished.
With it vanished the equipment in the underground tunnel; and after a few seconds, the black orbiting ovoid began to break apart, slowly but definitively, into its constituent atoms, lazily dissipating the resulting energy in levels still too small to be detected by the military satellites in the neighbourhood. Its mission was complete.
* * *
Doina gently manoeuvred the starship so that its open airlock swallowed the floating cylinders and the equipment around them; then, the iris closed and the airlock’s atmosphere was replaced.
“They’re hanging at zero g,“ she announced.<
br />
Tiessler said nothing. He had had his best technicians pointing every human device that could see in any way, shape or form, towards the coordinates where the emitter on the other side of the planet was supposed to be, towards the two points on the ground where the imaginary line between Doi and the emitter intersected planet Earth, and towards Doi itself, hoping to see something — anything — that they might analyse later. He had even sent observers on the ground in France, with excellent night detection equipment. His team had barely made it through the turmoil, and had nothing to show for it.
They saw the carrier beam, undulating through the atmosphere, and gently touching the grass on an empty French field, in the neighbourhood of a deserted farm. The bright yellow beam had been filmed from ground and from space in as many details as twenty-four century cameras could produce. In the dark night below, it had shone brighter than the Sun rays that lit the Eighters’ Places of Light, but nobody was there to see it except for Tiessler’s team. He tried to imagine how people would have reacted to it, and found himself grateful that the Square had not abandoned the bodies of Mark and Zi underneath a city.
“Are they alright?“ he heard Souček’s voice.
“They’re both in cardiorespiratory arrest,“ answered Toma/Keai.
It had been over twenty-nine minutes. Not yet a half hour, but long enough for any human to be pronounced well dead.
“I hope you don’t need the equipment back, sir,“ said the alien — his captain, his promising Romanian cadet that he himself had hired a few years earlier. Why was she still calling him “sir“?
“No,“ he said, offering nothing more.
He had no idea what was happening inside the starship’s airlock, and it was driving him mad. He had no idea how that wide, impossible beam functioned, how it had magically made the cylinders vanish in the tunnel and made them appear in orbit. He felt dangerously obsolete, inadequate, unprepared. How the hell can I protect this planet if we’re so far behind everybody else and nobody wants to share anything? he wondered for the hundredth time.
The fact was that, even if he could somehow see inside the airlock, it wouldn’t have made much sense to him. Tiessler was no doctor, but he knew that bringing people back from the dead would somehow entail at least two or three… hundred things that he (or anybody on Earth) would be unable to understand.
Another minute passed. He watched the video feed from Doi. It showed the little girl and the taller alien looking ahead, abstractedly. They did not talk to each other, and they barely moved at all. Were they working together? Was the Builder showing the ropes to the girl, like a surgeon to his team of fresh residents? After this, would that little girl know how to fix dead people? Of course she would, he thought. And of course she wouldn’t share.
Time passed, and nobody said anything. A discreet ping came from Tiessler’s tab; it was a call from Dahlberg. He muted the conference channel and answered the call.
The Norwegian was wearing a military helmet, which looked incongruous over her business suit. It took Tiessler a second to realise that she was inside an armoured transport of some kind.
“Did it work?“ she asked. Her voice had that metallic quality that audio filters give when they try hard to eliminate loud ambient noise.
“They’re on board the starship,“ he said, giving a slight nod.
Dahlberg shook her head. “Damn. What science.“ And then: “Will they recover?“
“They’ve been dead for half an hour,“ said Tiessler, “and still are, for all I know. But the… Builder is hopeful.“
Dahlberg gave a small, discreet leer. There would be ample time to discuss alien infiltrations in Eurasian military… later. If they would still be relevant.
“Problems?“ asked the German.
She scrunched her face under her oversized helmet. “You don’t want to know,“ she said. “It’s not a matter of being overwhelmed. It’s not even a matter of winning or losing, because we’ve already lost. It’s coming down to losing everything as slowly as possible.“
Tiessler bit his upper lip and said nothing. After a while, he asked: “Are you losing many people?“
“You mean civilians or my people?“ She didn’t wait for the German to clarify. “We’ve got waves of suicides, and the occasional religious mass-murder. We’re trying to focus on the big stuff, and not think too much about everything else.“
Tiessler was silent, and Dahlberg didn’t continue, either. The noise suppression system mistook the silence as a job too well done, and lowered the filter limit. An almost white noise filled Tiessler’s headset. For a brief moment, he listened to it intently, trying to find in it some distant voice, instructing him how to fix everything.
Then, Dahlberg’s voice came back.
“Go check on them, and let me know,“ she said, and briskly hung up.
The white noise vanished.
XXXIII.
Aram floated expectantly in front of the starship airlock, trying not to look too ridiculous doing nothing. He felt like he was running out of patience. For the whole trip to space, hastily arranged so he could return as quickly as possible, he had had nothing to do. Zero. Not even the friendly major Petrov had come along; he had been rotated out and would not return to space for a while.
The Dacian had insisted to suit up and leave the Pinion, and he was now hovering above Doi, a tiny prick above the massive torus, his dark green suit barely recognisable over the deep, deep black of the starship.
Come on, he thought. Let me in, Doi. I know you know I’m here.
The Pinion pilot waited at about fifty metres, not really knowing what to do. Her orders had been to deliver the Dacian safely all the way to the starship — surely that meant making sure that he had safely gone inside? She decided to hang around until either the airlock opened (which she had never seen, and was really keen to glimpse) or until her fuel gauges indicated the point of no return, because her other orders were to see all there was to see.
Aram flirted with the idea of floating to the other side of the central airlock, through the spokes of the starship, and see if he could get Effo to let him in. But then he remembered that Effo didn’t have an airlock, and opening its cockpit into space might perhaps damage something. Just when he was about to be amazed at himself for even thinking about something as scientifically advanced as that, he remembered that he had neither the training, nor the basic knowledge of navigating the complex trajectories required to change his position, in a twenty-fourth century space suit.
So he tried to resign himself to waiting a little more.
* * *
Doina felt the inside of the airlock, in the same way that she felt everything that happened with the starship. But beyond all that, she felt the massive presence of the Builder, the woman — if there was really a woman inside that body — whom she had allowed near her. There had always been something that had made Doina feel guarded about captain Toma; something she couldn’t really define, and now she understood why. That the original builder of the starship would be in the same room as her would never have gone through her head.
But then, perhaps it should have. How had Ileana Toma gained her trust (guarded as it was)? Had something else been at play? Something more than gentle, well-chosen words of encouragement and “an army of child psychologists“? Was there a subtle influence, the tiniest amount of pressure, that came from the starship itself, or perhaps from the disguised Builder directly? Would that even be possible? Had she unknowingly lowered her guard?
Of course, there had not been anything to make her regret it… yet. The Builder had done nothing but helped. And, with Mark and Zi safely in the airlock — technically dead, she shuddered — she had kept her promises.
She? He? It?
— Stick with “she,“ she heard Toma’s voice. It’ll be less confusing.
She quickly glanced to her side. The other’s lips had not moved.
— You… can read my thoughts?
— Doi can. She passes on what
she thinks I should know, answered the Builder.
Of course, thought Doina.
Once more, she allowed the enormous, calming starship to fill her new mind, and focused on the airlock. She understood what was going on there, even if she would never be able to explain it to somebody else. On some level, knowing that the Builder was also in control made her feel a little more at ease. She sort of felt, instinctively, how to guide Doi, not that the starship needed much guidance, into fixing Mark and Zi. She hadn’t known before that it could be done; fixing dead people had always been reserved to God.
To Doina, many things had been reserved to God, until she became one with Doi.
She had no idea; but then the Builder opened a secret box, and suddenly she knew. Of course, she wondered how many other secret boxes there were; many more, to be sure.
More than a little twelve-year-old might be expected to handle?
— No, came the answer. You’ll be fine.
She sighed, mentally.
— How much long… she started, and then she heard it.
A thump.
She knew what it was, but didn’t comprehend it at first. She began to frown, and then she heard another thump.
And another; and another.
They came from two human hearts.
* * *
“They’re alive,“ came Doina’s voice through Tiessler’s tab. He gave a minute nod, and said: “Good.“
He watched the feed sent from the Pinion that had delivered the Dacian, and which was still floating, stationary relative to the starship’s black airlock. He zoomed in, all the way to small details, and then panned the zoomed image across Aram’s shoulder. The angle was good; he zoomed a little more and could see the suit’s biometry numbers, as they appeared on a small screen at the back of the life pack, for a potential rescuer to see. He checked the suit’s atmosphere; it was good for another forty-four minutes. He ran over the other numbers: carbon dioxide levels, average body temperature, breathing rate, heart rate, blood pressure. He read them all and interpreted them in his head, remembering what the limits were, looking for the trends, anything to pass the time.