by Exurb1a
No thank you. I will be going out in the standard fashion.
In any case, I wasn't afraid of the tunnel and willed myself and my suit up through it.
It wound about a long while, narrowing. I thought light and a lamp activated on the suit's helmet. The walls were flecked with brownish residue. It didn't take me so long to find the source.
Body parts were floating silently ahead, half an arm, a leg, skull sections, all of them rotating slowly or knocking into the walls and rebounding.
The crew had known what was happening, tried to escape.
Finally in the distance there was a blue light. Nearer then, it wasn't a light at all, but a field of some kind, shaped roughly like a door. I have heard stories of empire ships doing away with solid airlocks entirely and using only particle nets to contain the atmosphere within. I put a leg through the field and yes, this was one of those contraptions.
I found myself in a great cavern, an imperfect sphere, and dotted up the walls were hundreds, thousands, of longsleep chambers, men and women clearly visible inside. Thank god then, they would survive the catastrophe.
On closer inspection of a few of the chambers, this was not to be. The critical signs were all flat, heart rate, respiration, temperature; everyone gone deadwards. Some of the eyes were half open as though the sleepers were awaking. Now they'd be always a little groggy.
Against one wall was a great stone tablet, perhaps seventy feet high and engraved in laser calligraphy:
Onto the stars with virtuous sleep we'll pour,
Here in our beds, waiting for some new dawn far distant
where then we'll lay our claims and till the soil,
We endeavour to make the void our own
and blaze a trail so cleanly and precise
that even a blind man
might find his way
to heaven.
I couldn't bear to stay in that chamber and pushed on through another corridor to what must have been the resuscitation centre. Small field bubbles had popped up in the room, oxygen pockets for emergencies, all long depleted now I suppose.
Perfectly still at the far end was a man cradling a little girl. Their eyes were closed and in the little girl's hand was a teddy bear.
Another corridor, another chamber, and I came to what must have been the bridge.
A middle-aged woman sat placidly in the command chair, eyes half open, palms on the armrests, no panic about her.
Had I a sophisticated enough device I suppose it might be possible to take some clever reading of her brain and extract that last, dying thought. By her expression I fancied she didn't go screaming or bargaining into the abyss, but only sat and waited, calmly noting that the oxygen was getting thin and the room rather cold.
In the next few days a message would be thrown across the void by some great empire machine with the news. Somewhere, on Aerth or New Pleven or Al’Hazaad perhaps, a family would calmly open the message packet and learn that their daughter or lover or mother had gone deathwards, alone and in the orbit of an alien TZ star.
I choose to believe that souls know their way home, wherever they start their long journey from.
More than that, she looked a little like my wife, Henrietta — that same impassivity about the face.
Was Henrietta dead for sure? I wondered.
Yes, certainly. She hated longsleep and vowed never to travel beyond Aerth anyway.
I had left on an argument. There was no chance to apologise now.
On the bridge, dust-images like the one Dimitrova had used were hanging in the air, though enormous and coloured. They displayed all sorts of esoteric symbols, thrust trajectories, mechanical statuses, crew statuses.
I was only interested in the last one and pulled a dust-image towards me and went searching through the manifest. Everyone was registered as “inactive”. It was possible they weren't wearing their monitors, but this was doubtful.
No, one life signature was present — Ivan Tellinger, Lab 9 Phi, Mid-deck.
I brought the dust-image with me for help with navigation and willed the suit out of the bridge and down a winding staircase of sorts.
A direct comm request came in from Dimitrova: “Where are you?”
“Stuck,” I said. “I'll be back soon.”
“You need help? We've got the airlock open.”
“No, I'm fine. I'll come find you.”
Out of curiosity I said to the dust-image, “Can you talk?”
“Of course.”
“Guide the way to Ivan Tellinger then, please.”
It took lead position and I followed loyally.
“What happened to the ship?” I said.
“Relativistic high impact.”
“With what?”
“Not known.”
More bodies all about, teenagers, old folk, all struck rigid in poses that suggested terrible panic. We passed labs and observatories, kitchens and libraries, and a number of rooms containing machinery and apparatus I could barely guess at, much less describe.
What would the empire look like in another hundred years, I wondered. It seemed alien to me already. Soon it would be totally unknowable to all those who lived within it, the technology so advanced and wonderful that humans would just have to give up on trying to understand any of what they'd made.
The dust-image and I arrived at what must have been a bulkhead at some point, but now was cleanly dissected, and beyond the bulkhead was void, sealed off by an emergency field. We entered a room containing chemistry apparatus, chairs, and half a floating corpse. The torso had been sliced in half just below the belly, though the upper half was mostly intact—a man in his forties perhaps.
The dust-image was motionless.
“Where is Ivan Tellinger?” I said.
“This is Ivan Tellinger.”
I took a quick survey of the room but there was nothing of interest and so I went to leave. At the threshold of the door however I saw the corpse's eyes flicker open, growing wide and staring.
This wasn't so awful; I have been present in morgues when cadavers sit up or burp thanks to rigor mortis.
But no, the corpse raised a hand towards me, the fingers desperate and outstretched.
Hot nausea set in.
“Is there an oxygen field emitter in this room?” I said to the dust-image.
“Yes.”
“Please activate it.”
A blue shimmer appeared in a corner, large enough, and I dragged the man into it, checked the air levels. I told the suit to remove my helmet and with a great hiss it did so.
Immediately the man grabbed both of my ears, pulled me close, his mouth opening and closing, noiseless. The eyes were so bloodshot it was almost impossible to find the pupils.
“I need to get you to safety,” I said. “Are there suits stored somewhere?”
He rasped, something very close to a death rattle.
“Where are the void suits?” I said to the dust-image.
“In the excursion module.”
“Where's that?”
“Separated from the main bulk four hours and sixteen minutes previous. It is now seven thousand kilometres distant from your position.”
“Can oxygen fields be made mobile, then?”
“No.”
The man rasped again, frowned as though about to cry.
There was nothing else to say so I said it. “How are you alive? How are you breathing?”
I noticed his chest didn't rise or fall. I put my hand close to his nose and there was no air flow.
There are plenty of rumours of experimental hollowships. Given the duration of their journeys, it is not unthinkable that empire high-ups might subject the crews to genetic or technological experiments. Perhaps one of those experiments was holding my ears now.
I removed his hands. They were frozen.
We stared at each other a while.
Is there something to write with in this suit? I thought.
A small flap opened on my chest. I poked a
bout inside and found a stick of chalk and placed it in the man's hand.
“How are you alive?” I said.
The man gasped and flailed, then wrote in almost illegible scrawl on the floor: DON'T KNOW.
“What happened to the Vasily?”
DON'T KNOW.
“Are you in pain?”
YES.
He fixed me with his terrified eyes again. Gently as I could, I turned him up a little to get a better look at the bifurcation site under his torso. No guts were spilling out. The bottom of his stomach had been sealed, cauterised perhaps, and silver remnants remained, reminiscent somewhat of liquid mercury.
A comm message from Dimitrova came then. “Where the hell are you?”
“I think you need to see this,” I said.
Back on Ertia we were transported to a hospital in Shienae, the capital city. The other doctors and medical folk disappeared off to interview rooms, accompanied by empire officials. Dimitrova took me instead to the emergency room where the strange Ivan Tellinger was being worked on by surgical staff. They took his vitals and examined the bottom of his torso as I had. He watched all of this silently, only opening and closing his mouth as though trying desperately to get oxygen.
Dimitrova leant over and said, “He was talking, right?”
“Writing.”
Overhearing this perhaps, Tellinger pulled himself up violently and stared straight at us, at me, and extended a hand.
“Did he tell you anything about the accident?”
“Nothing. What caused it?”
“You've done enough here. Good work finding him. There's a flyer waiting near the mortuary. It'll take you back to your hospital.”
There was a long silence and we watched a surgeon inserting some kind of device into Tellinger's chest.
“Please tell me what happened up there, what caused the accident,” I said.
“We know very little at this point.”
“The dust-image said something struck the ship.”
“Debris possibly, yes.”
A stupid and insulting lie and Dimitrova knew it. Void debris was a long-dead myth. No one jettisoned rubbish anymore. And besides, if they did, why would it be orbiting a TZ star?
I thought of the folk in those longsleep chambers, the dead half-gazes, the postures all slack and crooked.
“There's more I haven't told you,” I lied.
“What?”
“Tellinger said things, about the accident.”
She turned on me with unveiled malice, the kind they breed into empire officials to make the rest of us small and compliant.
“What did he say?”
“I'm not at liberty to repeat it without further details about the accident.”
She put a firm hand on my arm and led me into the room where the surgical instruments were kept and closed the door. Then she came close, intimately close so that I could smell her breath, and said: “Vested in me is the authority to have you executed at a moment's notice. I could do it myself, by whatever method is most easily available.” She picked up a scalpel. “This should work fine.”
I nodded and was a little surprised to find no fear poked its head up in me.
“What did Tellinger say on the Vasily?” she said.
“I want to know what caused the accident.”
She thrust the scalpel forward and stopped perhaps a few milimetres from my throat.
“If you slice me open, you'll never know what he said, I’m afraid.”
“We have machines back on Aerth for that sort of thing. Don't think memories require a living participant to volunteer them.”
I followed the medical literature close enough to know this was highly unlikely. Of all the great problems of neuroscience in the galaxy, memory was still sitting at the centre, largely untouched.
“All right,” I said.
We were quiet for a while. Then she sighed and put down the scalpel and leant against a wall. I didn't feel any joy from the victory.
She pulled up a small dust-image, scrolled through tables of data. “Are you aware you have a great, great, niece? On Aerth that is, descended from your sister.”
I shook my head.
“Well you do. Isn’t time dilation wonderful? And if what I'm about to tell you manages to get out, and I can prove it was you who spilled the beans, I will take young—” she glanced again at the dust-image, “Eda Hamebe into empire custody and ensure that her final days are utterly miserable. Do you understand?”
“I do.” It seemed strange to me that Dimitrova didn't just use this as a threat to get the information she wanted and avoid telling me a damn thing. Then again, in my limited experience, empire folk are ruthless, but far from evil. Perhaps preservation of high order just necessitates low mercy.
She sighed again then said, “Several centuries ago a science voidship detected some kind of object exiting the orbit of a TZ star at about seventy percent C.”
“C?”
She rolled her eyes. “The speed of light. They were unable to catch up with the object, but managed to scan it from a distance. It was not made of any known empire material and we have no idea how it survived its close proximity to the TZ star without evaporation. About sixty years later, around Orb Flain this time, another object was detected by an astronomy satellite exiting Flain's TZ star. The composition appeared exactly the same as the first artifact. The satellite had much better sensors this time around and relayed that the object was perfectly spherical and changed course by around ninety degrees without pausing, possibly with a little Higgs trick, we don't know. What we do know is that neither of these artifacts are Aerth or empire-built. Even the Marquis' black laboratories have confirmed this.”
“Extraterr?” I murmured.
Dimitrova shrugged. “We don't know. There are other possibilities.”
Like what? I was going to say, but she continued: “A third artifact was the cause of the Vasily incident, exiting the Ertia TZ star at seventy percent C again, the same speed, and judging by satellite scans from Ertia, the same composition as the other two. On this occasion though it happened to pass straight through the Vasily, and straight through Mr. Ivan Tellinger here. The object only measured perhaps a few feet in diameter, but travelling at that speed it may as well have been a plasma shell. The Vasily didn't stand a chance.”
“That's quite a coincidence,” I said after a while.
“What?”
“The Vasily being right there at the right time.”
Dimitrova shrugged.
“Say, I don't suppose the empire noticed any contributing factors to these artifacts exiting the TZ stars? A ship or satellite getting too close for example?”
Dimitrova said nothing and adjusted her toga.
“My god…”
“It's not like that,” she said very quietly. “No one was to know it'd cut the ship in half. If you breathe a word of this—”
“That's why hollowships use TZ stars in the first place, isn't it? I always wondered what the point was. You were hoping for another exit event. You've been endangering thousands, maybe millions of lives just to satisfy some stupid curiosity.”
“I don't give those kinds of orders.”
We both stared at each other a while, then Dimitrova turned to Tellinger out beyond the glass partition.
“What will happen to him?” I said.
“If he lives he'll be transported to Aerth. If he doesn't live, same applies.”
“The silver residue on him, that's from the artifact isn't it? It chopped straight through.”
“Likely, yes.”
The surgeons were finishing up now, placing their instruments back on the tables.
“What if we're all contaminated?”
“Acceptable risk.” She collapsed the dust-image and straightened her toga. “Now, what did Tellinger say?”
“Nothing. Just that he was in pain.”
She turned on me, her nostrils flared. “What?”
“Oh go on then, I'm ol
d enough to take whatever it is. You all think you're so smart, but you're just the same as us plebs. Dangle a carrot in your face and you break all the rules.”
I could tell her mind was on the scalpel again. Instead though she stormed out of the emergency room.
I have told you that I worked for a time on Orb Dannika. There is a history to the orb not often made public. A tale to illustrate my case then:
Dannika was a young human culture, having settled the orb some five hundred years previously; a mere eight generations of humanity.
During my time on Orb Dannika it came to light amid construction work on some other continent that there were remains in the soil, human remains, far predating the original settlement. These skeletons totalled in the thousands. 'Early pioneers or something' was not going to cut the mustard.
Soon after the discovery, a number of empire voidships arrived on the planet and sealed off the construction site. They confiscated the remains and declared that all was normal and everyone should just go back to work.
How little they knew Orb Dannika.
It wasn't just a mining planet, but an orb home to some of the galaxy's finest archaeologists. And they were having none of it. Since many a couple consisted of one archaeologist and one miner, ties were strong between the professions.
Digging is digging, whatever the sought prize.
Dannika is, unfortunately for the empire, also home to the largest deposits of delphium—that strange matter used for powering starships.
Since the miners and the archaeologists knew this, you can imagine what happened next.
A planet-wide strike began. No delphium was extracted.
The empire threatened and cajoled, sent crisis teams, sent threats. Nothing.
What, demanded Orb Dannika, were those skeletons doing here?
In the way these things often go, it was neither the strikers nor the striked-against who folded. Rather, a budding journalist on some minor orb chanced across an ancient newsfeed article regarding colonisation of a world not called Dannika, but in Dannika's exact coordinates, not five hundred years ago, but eight hundred.
Curioser and curioser.