Chloe broke the silence. ‘What? What does that mean?’
Her voice was like a prod to Orshio’s mind, reminding him just how urgent the situation was if they were right. Every second would matter now.
‘We have to get to the Igodo now!’ He bolted for the office door as he spoke. ‘Whoever is stealing our ship could be trying to turn it into a relativistic kinetic kill vehicle... the kind that can crack a planet open like a walnut!’
Chloe ran steadily, through the corridor beyond to the octagonal office area, doing her best to keep up with Lien-Ådel who was breathlessly explaining it to her as they ran toward the docking elevators.
‘Before the Adadevoh drive was invented, all rockets were momentum machines. Mass out in one direction at high velocity, the rocket moves in the opposite direction.’ She shouted as the sounds of chaos got louder. Ahead of them Orshio sprinted ahead with fierce determination.
‘The Adadevoh drive doesn’t do that. It’s a reactionless drive that uses vacuum energy directly from space. That’s why it can go so fast without having to lug a ton of fuel behind it. But the problem is, if you don’t limit it and put controls on how much vacuum energy it uses, the maximum speed it reaches and how close it can approach planetary bodies, then it can easily be turned into a relativistic kinetic kill vehicle of unimaginable power.’
They reached the tall, imposing doorway. Lien-Ådel stopped talking, catching her breath. She could feel her heart pounding in her throat.
Chloe went ahead, and the door opened once she was close enough for it to identify her genetic signature. Orshio nodded and then accelerated again and Lien-Ådel continued as they ran down the energy shielded stairs.
‘In a ship like the Igodo, with a glitch that could potentially allow access to the planetary approach limits, some suicidal lunatic could accelerate the ship to half the speed of light and deliberately crash it into a planet. At that speed, even for a ship as small as Igodo, the kinetic energy will be in the gigatons. At least 500. We are talking several thousand nuclear warheads worth of concentrated impact force in a single blow.’
Chloe would have gasped if she wasn’t panting so hard already.
The trio entered the main Ceres station tunnel and froze. Ahead of them, the lights lining all the elevators leading up to Ceres’s docking ports were blinking wildly. One of the elevators was burning; an unbelievably tall tower of fire reaching all the way from underground Ceres to the exosphere like an ancient cosmic snake. At the bottom area where the fire raged most fierce, a large group of emergency responders wearing hermetic mechsuits were attempting to control the blaze by shutting off the oxygen and power supply lines, braving the heat and the smoke.
‘Chai!’ Orshio exclaimed. ‘Looks worse than I thought.’
‘Look for the man that drugged you in Officer Mukisa’s office. If he’s going for your ship, he must be here somewhere.’
‘What if we’re too late and they already have the Igodo?’ Lien-Ådel asked in a whisper.
Around them, people flowed. Most were running away, toward the main tunnel, bumping into those that stood still watching the inferno and the chaos and the commotion. There was one anomalous movement, though. One man at the bottom of one of the elevators, pacing nervously. Chloe was the first to spot him. She noticed that the elevator he was in front of wasn’t blinking like the others, its lights were steady, which meant it was in override, not emergency mode. She looked up, and just barely made out a figure standing in the transparent ascending shaft.
‘There!’ she shouted. ‘There’s someone in that elevator.’
She broke into a run.
Orshio and Lien-Ådel glanced up to see the elevator ascending.
Orshio turned to Lien-Ådel, ‘You need to find the ansible office on this station and establish communications with the Igodo so that I can reach you once I get on board. If we are right, then we will only have a few minutes or even seconds. Please, go!’
Lien-Ådel nodded her understanding and sprinted back the way they’d come. Orshio followed Chloe. The man at the base of the elevator saw them approaching and pulled out an electric stun-stick, stance at the ready.
‘You keep going!’ Chloe called out. ‘Get to your ship before they take off. I’ll handle this.’
They’d attracted attention now and the spectators were torn between the roar of the fire and the fight they could see was coming.
Chloe dived for the man’s feet as she reached him and they both fell to the ground before he could even bring down his raised stick. She moved in a blur, wrestling and wrapping her body around the man powerfully, like a snake, trying to lock his limbs against his torso. Orshio jumped over their writhing mass and into the elevator, tapping at the panel to enter the code they’d been given when they docked earlier. The door sealed, and he began to rise.
Ascending, he looked up, silently watching first the fragments of ship, cables, fire, lights, and panelling go by, and then, as he entered Ceres’s exosphere, turning his gaze to the distant sun and the cluster of nearby asteroids. The burning elevator remained visible, from high above, a spectre of destruction, of death. An augury of what was to come?
Near the end of the ascent, as it routed his car along the cable tethered to their ship, he came to a sudden stop. As he watched, only a few feet ahead of him, he saw the Igodo’s nuclear reaction control system vents fire and the tethering cable start to detach.
‘Shit!’ he shouted. They are initiating launch sequence. They’re going to escape.
The lights along the flanks of the Igodo went bright blue. The engines were on. In a few seconds the Igodo would begin to move, exiting Ceres’s primary gravity well and after that, if what he suspected were true, go into drift-flux aimed at a major Transhuman Federation outpost like Mars station. But, without the tethering cable’s elevator access he had been effectively separated from the ship. Soon the airlock would close too and that would be the end. Just a few feet of space between him and the ship and there was nothing he could do. There was no way to get on the Igodo.
Unless...
With his arm powered to maximum and his enhanced melanin protecting his skin, he might just be able to make it.
Taking a deep breath and calming himself he rehearsed the steps in his mind.
One. Two. Three.
One. Two. Three.
One. Two. Three.
There was little-to-no margin of error.
He thought the instructions directly to his bioplasmium arm.
One.
Exhaling slowly so oxygen wouldn’t expand and rupture his lung tissue, he braced himself on one end of the elevator, facing the Igodo’s airlock.
Two.
He launched himself forward, shoulder first. The transparent elevator wall shattered explosively. Oxygen rushed out and cold seized him as momentum kept him drifting towards the airlock. The airlock door began to close, slowly like a sleepy eyelid. He watched it in horror. The darkness on every side of the ship reminded him of what would happen if he didn’t make it. Every nightmare he’d ever had of dying in space since he’d become a pilot pounded against his chest. He willed himself to go faster but he couldn’t. He closed his eyes. It was out of his hands now. He only opened his eyes again when he felt his shoulder hit the side of the Igodo.
Three.
Reaching out before he could bounce away, he stuck his right arm into the airlock and grabbed onto the edge. The low vibration of the ship set his teeth clattering. He yanked hard, and pulled himself into the ship, hitting the row of spare extravehicular mobility suits and maintenance supplies just as the airlock door finally fell into place and the ship’s pre-exit procedure was completed.
The vents opened, and oxygen flooded back into his lungs. He breathed in gasps, wedged in between two E.V.M. suits. He lay there for a moment, as blood pulsed in his head and a ringing sounded in his ears. Then the increased vibration of the ship reminded him what was happening, and he pushed himself to the main access door. It opened immediat
ely as it scanned his genetic signature.
He drifted through the ship quickly heading for the control room.
When he entered, there was someone seated in the engineer’s module. The crewcut hair gave the thief’s identity away.
‘Stop!’ Orshio called, flexing his arm.
The man turned, his face as calm as a cliff. He held a small black cube with a matrix of pulsing light symbols around it just like the one that had been in the office when he awakened. Orshio surmised it was the writing device, while the companion left behind in the office had been the reader.
‘Well, this is unexpected,’ he remarked. ‘I knew the drugs wouldn’t last long in the bodies of genetically modified spacecrew like you two, but how did you escape the progmat restraints?’
‘The same way I’m going to crush your windpipe if you dare touch my ship’s interface.’ Orshio gestured toward the middle of control deck. ‘Get away from the control module and move here! I know what you’re up to and it ends now.’
The man cocked his head to the side and smiled. ‘You think you can stop us, mongrel?’
The viewscreen of the Igodo exploded into the colourful array of data that indicated an incoming transmission. It went unanswered.
‘Shut up and move away from the controls!’ Orshio shouted. ‘And if you so much as try to issue a command to override the planetary approach limits, I will choke you to death. The world has moved beyond you and your kind. You can’t change the march of progress with acts of terror.’
‘No.’ The man said. ‘I know I won’t change anything. You and your Transhuman Federation of borderless gene editors and race mixers will continue to take over this system. Technology and economics are on your side, we know that. We’ve known that ever since your Botswana, Singapore, and Norway units started sharing their gene editing technologies and got your Canada unit to start collaborating with the Nigeria unit to develop their Adadevoh drive. You will never turn back from what you think is success. We know. We see clearly.’
Orshio stared at the ranting man in front of him, confused. ‘Then what are you doing? Why?’
‘To hurt you,’ the man replied angrily. Behind him, space flowed steadily by and the incoming transmission light signals seemed to become more turbulent as the distance between them and Ceres station increased. ‘You think you are better than us but you’re not even human anymore. You call us stupid and backward and racist and evil simply because we want to maintain our natural bodies, our way of life, our group identities and our culture. You insist that we agree to your freedom and justice laws before we join your Federation but what kind of community would we have if everyone from everywhere could go wherever they wanted without screening? What kind of society can we have where everyone does whatever they like with their bodies, their minds? How would we find social cohesion? How would we define ourselves? No! You made us choose between our borders, our culture, our beliefs, and your progress. You forced us to take a stand and we have paid for it dearly, but this is it. This is what the wrath of real humanity feels like.’
Orshio laughed derisively. ‘You can’t be serious. Everyone in the Federation maintains their culture if they want to, it’s just an individual choice now, just look at me for my ancestor’s sake. No, what you wanted was to be dominant in some space, to treat others who’d had their genes edited or their bodies adapted as being less than you, to refuse them the right to live next to you and be themselves, not assimilated. What you wanted was the right to discriminate. Our progress made you uncomfortable and now you’re trying to destroy Mars because we didn’t let your isolationist and regressionist Confederacy join our Transhuman Federation and get access to our technologies? That’s absurd and stupid and petty.’
The man growled. ‘I didn’t say anything about Mars.’
Orshio shivered.
If not Mars, then...
Earth?
Surely, they wouldn’t dare...
Then man inhaled deeply and added, ‘It doesn’t matter, I don’t expect you to understand and besides, you are already too late.’
With those words, the man finally rose from the module and launched himself at Orshio. Around them, the lights on the ship dimmed as the tachyon field auto-navigation system engaged. Through the view screen and behind the man rapidly approaching him, Orshio saw an elliptic hole suddenly appear in the darkness, its edges rimmed with light and bleeding into the fabric of space like an injury to a star. The man must have already overridden the controls and set them on automatic. They were going into drift-flux.
The man crashed into Orshio. He held onto him and turned sharply, swinging the attacker to the other side of the room, before punching him square on the jaw. The man’s eyes rolled back in his head. Roaring, Orshio bounced off the control deck floor and drove his entire body forward toward the wall, trapping the man’s head between his bioplasmium shoulder and the wall panel. There was a sharp crack. The man stopped moving.
Orshio kicked him in the chest, using the momentum to push himself toward his seat in the pilot module. His eyes were locked on to the hole in front of him. It narrowed to a point. Just as he settled into the chair, the Igodo went into drift-flux.
The stars and asteroids and superstructures that had seemed like they were slowly moving by started to rotate. The black, silent fabric of space seemed to curve into a ball and he was at the centre of it, plummeting toward the surface of teeming, rotating stars. No matter how many times he entered it, Orshio’s mind always felt confused by it. Space didn’t make sense in drift-flux.
There was no time, he had to act quickly.
He swiped furiously at the blinking viewscreen of the Igodo to accept the incoming transmission.
Lien-Ådel’s face appeared, with Chloe’s and several others he didn’t recognise, standing behind her.
‘Orshio! Orshio! We just detected a vacuum energy singularity developing. Its drift-flux! If you are on board, you need to stop him. Stop him now!’
Orshio grunted. Too late.
He swiped away the message and pulled up the Igodo’s projected path, to see that it was aimed for Earth. It would crash into humanity’s home planet at 0.7c, functional lightspeed. Enough to trigger an extinction level event. Defensive weapons would be useless against a relativistic kill vehicle going that fast. Even near-orbit impact would have catastrophic consequences. With every passing moment things became more and more dangerous. Time dilation was starting to kick in and he’d be experiencing shorter time than everyone else was. He needed to get a message out. Fast.
He swiped at the controls and fired off a message of his own.
‘Lien-Ådel! I’m in flux. Contact Earth station and tell them the Igodo was set on a kill path but I have retaken the ship and will attempt to correct. I repeat, I have retaken the ship and will correct!’
The silence returned and Orshio’s mind raced as he swiped through the ship’s basecode trying to recall what he’d been taught about Adedevoh-class driveship programming. Everything was confusing. But he needed to do something. There were so many loops and subroutines and he couldn’t tell the functional elements from the damaged relay. His genetic signature allowed him access even the deepest layer of core programming, but he had no idea what to do to re-establish the maximum speed and planetary approach limits. The blood pulsed in his ears as the ship hurtled toward the Earth to smite it like the hand of some petty god. He desperately wished Lien-Ådel was beside him. Screwing with ship code was her thing. Piloting was his thing.
Piloting is his thing.
He swiped away the source code, pulled up the projected flightpath and began to recalculate. He frowned in focus, his eyes narrowed, and his tribal marking compressed.
He began to swipe, adjusting the hundreds of lines that marked out all class-2 orbital and transport bodies in motion in the sub-belt solar system. The beating of his heart was thunder. He could not reinstall the limits or change the ships hardcoded path, the man had damaged the flight path adjustment console. He’
d been locked out. And even if he dropped out of drift-flux now, the ship was already going fast enough to cause major damage, he needed to slow it down. If he could combine a series of unscheduled decouplings with a rapid correction using the reaction control system, he just might ensure the Igodo didn’t crash into the Earth or anything else with enough force to kill billions. And if he was lucky, he wouldn’t get himself killed either.
He finished his calculations and paused. He closed his eyes and prayed to his ancestors, ‘ŋ́má alekwu,’ then swiped the calculations in without giving himself time to overthink it.
The first decoupling kicked in. The ship groaned with a whine like a dying beast, shuddering as its Adadevoh Drive broke connection to the zero-point field of fluctuating energy distribution in space. The ship slowed, and curve of reality flattened out into the familiar again. But before Orshio could even see how close to Earth he was, the ships thrusters fired as pre-programmed and set it rotating. It spun round on its axis like a mad Frisbee at an angular momentum it was never designed to handle. And then for one deathly moment the elliptic hole of bleeding light reappeared. With a forceful crunch, the ship recoupled, going back into drift-flux with its drive facing the opposite direction, as Orshio tried to brake by putting the Igodo in reverse. The delta V induced a sudden and spectacular curvature of reality. He saw light. He squinted and saw light glaring out from behind a hole in the ball of reality. His head spun. His heart raged against his ribcage. His vision began to blur at the edges.
The second decoupling kicked in and the ship groaned again, the Adadevoh Drive breaking its connection to the zero-point for the second and final time.
The manoeuvre had driven the Igodo’s engines far beyond design capacity and the force of the second decoupling mid-spin had wrecked the drive.
Orshio was thrown out of his seat and even his genetic gravcines couldn’t stop him from finally losing his hold on consciousness.
AfroSFv3 Page 13