A Check for a Billion

by Vasily Mahanenko

  “We will lose the brainworm.”

  “Or acquire something that no one has ever seen before. I will record everything on video. Look, I can’t explain my hunch, Lex, but we need to go in there. Otherwise we will regret it for the rest of our lives!”

  “Uh-huh. We’ll regret everything, including the prize check we’ll lose forever!”

  What a day! Why does everyone keep trying to put me on the spot and forcing me to make decision after decision? First it was between the prize check and the brainworm, now it’s between escape and certain death. Perhaps my first choice was wrong; I’ll admit that I acted slightly recklessly. I liked the title of Devil’s Advocate a little too much and I wanted to see the quest chain to its end. But what Eunice was proposing now was entirely beyond logic. ‘I can’t explain my hunch, but…’ What an argument!

  “Brainiac, do as I ordered,” I decided. Eunice sniffed indignantly, but I had more important business to deal with. The flying fortress fired again, forcing my ship to strain and move away from the line of fire. The orbship completed the maneuver and pulled away from the black hole.

  “Captain, we do not have enough time!”

  Even without this warning, it was clear that my plan would end in failure. Instead of darting away like a bullet, leaving the flying fortress behind, the orbship crawled away from the black hole at a snail’s pace, fighting for every new percentage of thrust. We had only fifteen seconds between the main cannon salvos, and during this time we were able to reach an orbit that gave us thirty percent of thrust to maneuver. Everything else went to fighting the monstrous gravity. Shrapnel from the torpedoes exploding ahead of us, began to pepper our hull — if I could represent the orbits around the black hole in terms of our available thrust, then the torpedoes were exploding where we would have forty percent. The Zatrathi did not spare the deadly missiles, sending them at us one after another. At the speed we had, it was almost impossible to slip away from them.

  “Brainiac, hang on. Let’s wait for the next shot!”

  “Roger. Taking evasive maneuvers. Captain, we have thirty minutes of fuel left. My initial calculation was incorrect, we have wasted too much elo. I propose we self-destruct.”

  Three clumps of plasma zoomed past us. The further we moved from the black hole, the more accurately the Zatrathi fire got. Even if we could slip through the blizzard of torpedoes, our lives wouldn’t get any easier.

  “That flying fortress is lying in wait for us.” Eunice pointed to the vessel straight above us. It had moved in an arc closer to our potential point of escape, but hadn’t used its main cannon yet. The bastard was waiting for a clear shot. What kind of advanced AI had the corporation assigned to these Zatrathi? It was almost impossible to use the same trick on them twice.

  I stared at my screens without seeing a way out. Anywhere I looked, the possibility of escaping seemed closed to us. The enemy did not conserve their resources, seemingly deciding to deal with the annoying pirate once and for all. And they still had their regular beam cannons in reserve, since we were still out of range of those. As soon as we got closer, we’d have to deal with a wall of plasma.

  My reflections on the meaning of life were unceremoniously cut short. The orbship jerked sharply, shuddered, all our screens went out, and we began whirling in a frenzied dance. To make matters worse, the ship’s inertial dampeners shut off too, allowing us to experience firsthand what astronauts encounter during their training. The armor suits fought valiantly to maintain our health, but it was a losing battle.

  An eternity of three infinite seconds passed before Warlock came back to life.

  “We’ve been hit, Captain!” screamed Captain Obvious. “Our hull has been breached! Orbship functionality has been reduced by seventy percent! Our shields our down! We are running on backup systems! I strongly recommend you begin self-destruct procedures! Ten seconds until the next shot!”

  I glanced at Eunice. My wife turned away, demonstrating that she had already said her piece and all further decisions were to be made by me alone. And I alone would be responsible for them.

  “What’s up with the brainworm?”

  “I placed it in the medcapsule where it will be easier for it to deal with the inertia. Cap’n, we have five seconds! Remember that being hit by Zatrathi fire could disrupt our planetary binding in addition to killing us!”

  God damn it all! What was that Eunice had said about her hunch?

  “Turn her around, Brainiac! Head for the black hole. Full thrust! Do it now!”

  “Copy. Heading for the black hole at full thrust, Captain.” The orbship burst forward, away from the cluster of incoming torpedoes. A flash erupted behind us as a clump of plasma flew into the place we had just been and powerlessly licked the void. I would never have thought that the computer’s AI could be so emotional. The typically snide voice had now given way to humility and an acceptance of the hard facts before us. We began to shake and the closer we flew to the event horizon, the stronger the shaking became. Brainiac tried to say something, but it did not work out very well:

  “So long…thanks…all the…Captain…farewell…”

  With a sinking heart, I watched the utterly black disc fill our screens. Gradually, they began to go out. The orbship’s electronics could not cope with the chaos of physical laws reigning around us. The extinguished screens began to drift away from me and they were followed by my own legs stretching to infinity. The shaking ceased and gave way to a transformation. Warlock, my crew, my wife and me turned into a thin string, winding around the black hole like a thread around a spool. Something blinked and the surrounding space turned into a completely black nothingness.

  Only a few lines of system text before my eyes kept me from losing my mind. I clung to them as a drowning man at a straw, reading and repeating them again and again:

  You have crossed the event horizon of a black hole.

  Access check: Success.

  Loading data…

  Chapter Fourteen

  I snapped my spare powercells into place, reviving my armor suit. The ventilation turned on, blowing a fresh breeze across my face. I felt some relief, despite the utter darkness around us. With a movement of my eyes, I activated the space scanner and waited for a three-dimensional projection of Warlock’s bridge deck to appear.

  A bit of good news — my ship was still there, instead of some fading line across a broken screen. I could make out the pilot’s chair and some items. I looked down — my legs also looked the way they were supposed to. But the best news of all were the normal pressure and atmosphere readings on board.

  As for the bad news — that would be the engineer’s head hanging limp right out of the wall. Her mouth was frozen open in a sleepy yawn with her long tongue dangling out of it to the floor like a fire hose. Next to it, Eunice was slumped motionless in her chair.

  I turned on the searchlight, dispersing the darkness, and the captain’s cabin acquired some new, not at all joyful colors. The screens remained out. Brainiac didn’t say anything. But the most horrible thing was that all three of the engineer’s eyes were open and staring at me. The snake neither blinked nor moved — she just hung out of the wall and stared. The blank look on her face gave me the chills.

  “Are we alive?” Eunice’s voice, echoing through the orbship, snapped me out of my hypnotic trance. Only now it occurred to me that I couldn’t hear the customary stamping of the rhino, nor some rudiment that the gunner was typically tapping out somewhere down below. My wife got up from her chair, grunting like an old woman, and stretched her sore muscles. Naturally, I couldn’t actually hear the cracking of her joints in the game, but my vivid imagination supplied the illusory sounds as I watched her stretch. Some unconscious part of my brain compelled me to repeat her actions, and I realized why Eunice had grunted. If it weren’t for the armor suit, I would not even have been able to stand up. My body had grown stiff and cold.

  “We survived, but not everyone did,” I pointed my spotlight at the broken snake. Eun
ice approached her, looking into the snake’s wide-open eyes.

  “Can you move?”

  There was no reply.

  “You can’t. Okay. Can you move your pupils? Excellent! Up and down means yes. Right and left means no. Okay?”

  A pause, after which the engineer’s pupils jumped up and immediately dropped.

  “Is there a way to recover you?”

  ‘Yes.’

  “Do you need energy?”

  ‘No.’

  “What do you need?”

  The snake rolled her eyes in response.

  “Oh, hang on…Do I have to do something to you?”

  ‘No.’

  “No?!” Eunice echoed.

  ‘No.’

  “Is it something with the ship?”

  ‘Yes.’

  The conversation with the engineer was long, tedious and somewhat reminiscent of a cavewoman interrogating an alien about the principle behind spaceflight. We simply didn’t know what to ask or even what words to use. Any way you spin it, Eunice and I weren’t engineers. You know it’s bad when you never knew anything and forgot even that much.

  After a countless number of maddening ‘No’s,’ we were about to give up, when the perfect solution popped into my head. ‘Yes’ and ‘no’: zero and one. What is that if not binary code, damn it?! All that we had to do was make up an alphabet and teach it to the snake!

  “I saw you have a diamond. Give it to me, please,” I turned to Eunice, taking a spare armor suit from my inventory. Its flat, smooth breastplate was perfect for my purposes.

  “Why?” asked my weary wife, handing over the diamond. Instead of answering, I began to scratch the common alphabet on the surface, complementing it with a variant of Morse code. Once upon a time, back in my first days in Galactogon, knowing this code had helped me a lot. Now was a good time to resort to it once more. I dragged the suit over to the snake.

  “Do you understand what is written here?”

  ‘Yes.’

  “Take a pause of five seconds between each letter. Tell us what to do.”

  Things got more fun after that, though no more productive. The snake began by telling me what she thought about all this.

  ‘Werent you told to activate the self destruct many question marks.’

  “Uh-huh,” I replied, appreciating how the engineer had solved my omission of any punctuation marks in my ad hoc code.

  ‘Why didnt you listen question mark exclamation mark.’

  “If this is all you’re going to talk about then I think we had better wrap up this séance. Many exclamation marks!”

  In response, the snake rolled her eyes furiously. However, she continued in a more constructive fashion, periodically reminding me that ‘We should have self destructed exclamation mark.’

  “Got it!” Eunice unscrewed a panel and pulled out the backup control unit. Without Brainiac, the orbship could no longer open holes in its hull at will. In order to access the engineering deck, we first had to make a door. The options were to cut our way through with a plasma cutter or use the backup terminal. The engineer preferred the second option.

  The next and indeed the last step of the plan was to start the reactor. It wasn’t enough to merely swap out the elo. The inner core has been extinguished and we had to start the system manually. That was not easy. We had to get the starter running in order to trigger the chain reaction. We tried running in circles, pushing the starter lever both individually and together, but we just couldn’t build up enough speed. I don’t know how much longer we would have kept running like this until I remembered that I could use my thrusters to spin in place. Taking off, I hovered horizontally, grabbed the lever and began to accelerate as fast as I could. My head began spinning after a couple of passes, but shutting my eyes, I continued to increase the speed.

  “Greetings, Captain!” The sound of Brainiac’s voice was so welcome that I momentarily lost my concentration and released the lever from my hands. Physics is a terrible thing, especially that part of it that is responsible for centripetal acceleration. I shot off like a cannonball tearing through everything in my trajectory. A thought flashed through my head that I was a goner, but the ship computer reacted in time. A hole appeared in the hull and I shot straight out into space. Or rather, what I had imagined would be space.

  The place I now found myself in, however, was more reminiscent of a soufflé than ordinary deep dark space. The only difference being that generally soufflé is opaque, whereas the ‘soufflé’ around me now was transparent enough that I could see a little ways ahead of me.

  The viscous medium slowed me down and allowed me to remain near the orbship. I tried to move. It turned out to be hard, the ‘soufflé’ resisted, but I insisted. Turning on my thrusters, I made my way back to my ship at a turtle’s pace. As soon as I reached the hull, the engineer’s hands popped out and pulled me aboard.

  “Were you planning on going far, Cap’n? What’s the rush? Let’s have some tea before you go! Why so English and so brusque?” grumbled the snake, looking me over from head to toe. “We kept yelling and yelling, but you didn’t say anything. What was that?”

  Her tone was full of nothing but concern, as if she had forgotten all about her recent paralysis.

  “I don’t know. You saw yourself what it looks like out there. I guess signals can’t pass through it because I couldn’t hear you.”

  “Clearly this is an enigma,” came the pensive reply. “Come quickly.”

  “Is there any news?”

  “You bet! Hurry — you have to see this for yourself!”

  The milky infinity turned out to be indeed infinite, yet with a quite definite center in the form of a luminous cube. A countless number of ships had gathered around it. There were scouts, fighters, cruisers, and even a couple Zatrathi ships of the typical virion design and the size of destroyers. All of the ships seemed lifeless. They did not move, they had no power, and they did not attempt to contact us. We were all like flies stuck in the web of some abstract spider.

  “Brainiac, can we move?” I asked the most pressing question of the moment.

  “Analyzing systems now.” Brainiac’s voice sounded steely and mechanical, as if his personality AI had been turned off. “The answer is yes. However, speed will be minimal. The elo reserves are running out. More than half has been spent on reactivating vital systems. There is enough elo to reach the indicated destroyer. There is a probability of replenishing elo. The alternative is self-destruction.”

  “We always have time to blow ourselves up. Head for the destroyer. Have you determined what the white substance around us is?”

  There was a long pause. I even began to think that I would not get an answer, but the computer was simply systematizing its data.

  “The surrounding atmosphere consists of high density helium, an inert gas. No other substances were detected in the samples. The cause of the viscosity is not determined. Helium does not have this characteristic. The space scanner does not work in this environment. Signals are likewise blocked.”

  The orbship jerked, forcing Eunice and me to wobble.

  “To save energy, all non-essential systems have been deactivated,” Brainiac explained.

  “Well done,” I praised him for his initiative. We didn’t need inertial dampeners to fly. Now I was sure that Brainiac had deactivated his own personality AI in order to save some system resources.

  “What is the status of the marine and the gunner?”

  “They are in anabiosis. Estimated time of arrival to the destroyer is ten minutes. I am disabling the screens.”

  Brainiac was very serious about economizing any available power. Every piece of elo that could be used by the reactor had been counted and carefully moved to the right place. I took stock of my own elo reserves — it was a good thing Eunice had replenished them before leaving. Offering the ship a few extra powercells, I could not avoid the snake’s tight hug. The engineer was moved. We could not offer much, of course, but it was still enough f
or ten minutes’ flight.

  However, the friction from the helium atmosphere grew with each passing meter. We were crawling, not flying. Once a couple of minutes were left until we docked with the destroyer, Eunice got up and ran full check of her armor suit. I got up to do the same.

  “No, I’ll go there alone.”

  “Oh sure. I’ll just sit here while you go scout out a strange ship with who knows who on board,” I said ironically, checking over my armor. How could I possibly accept her proposal? “I’m curious myself. Plus, you’re not good at flying these things. Have you forgetten?”

  “But I am well-versed in ships. This is not an offer, Lex. You are the captain, we can’t risk you. Especially now. If something happens, you have to give the order to self-destruct. We’ll see each other on Blood Island. Brainiac, can you fly us as close as possible to the airlock?”