“No. I need a pair of thick socks.” Marchenko points at his feet. Very cleverly, he has the nano-fabricators build an insulation layer. The electricity won’t be the only trick of the Omniscience, Gronolf knows, but at least it won’t work against Marchenko the way it affected him.
“Adam and Eve want to wave goodbye, they say—whatever that means.”
The camera moves from the door to Marchenko’s face. The two humans next to Gronolf move their right hands sideways. Marchenko returns the gesture.
“Okay, I better start working,” Marchenko says.
Gronolf witnesses him saying the general’s name in front of the door, then the transmission is interrupted.
May 12, 19, Adam
Ever since the connection to Marchenko was interrupted, Adam has been pacing up and down in the control room like a caged predator. Eve has asked him several times to sit down, but he simply can’t. He has to keep moving to distract himself.
If they can’t observe Marchenko directly, then how about indirectly? There is just a teeny, tiny obstacle—the planet itself. If they were on the other side of the planet now—for instance, in the forest of walking trees—they could contact him easily. Not far from there they found the antenna in the ocean. Might it be possible to use that from here?
Adam taps Gronolf on the shoulder. The alien’s right eye winks, so Adam must have caught his attention. Now he uses the arm display to draw the antenna they found months earlier. It takes a while, but then the alien seems to understand what he is trying to communicate. He jumps up, runs to the holo-map, and starts typing on the sector control panel. Then he moves his right load-arm toward Adam. Is that a sign of success? Adam comes closer, but he only sees a blinking dot.
Gronolf uses the sector control panel again. The display changes. The 3D image shows the side of Proxima b invisible from here. An approximately fist-sized, cube-shaped object is approaching. With the naked eye its movement is not visible, but when Adam covers it with his hand for half a minute, he notices its position is slightly changing. It must be the Majestic Draght. From here the ship looks like a toy.
Gronolf magnifies the image. Now the space ship is about the size of a human head. Adam walks around it once. It is multi-colored. At the rear, where the engine is located, it is brighter. The display probably indicates the intensity of the radiated energy. Gronolf must have switched the antenna in the ocean to pure reception mode. Adam remembers their excursion to the antenna. They were so full of innocent curiosity. But then Marchenko 2 tried to gain control of them. The alien antenna had seemed so elegant and had given them hope that they would soon solve the mystery of Proxima b.
Suddenly a bright spot appears in the side of the cube. What is it? Adam turns around and looks at Gronolf. He has also noticed it, and he increases the magnification even further. However, no details are visible. The antenna must have reached its limits. What could have happened? Where does the spot come from? Might it be a sudden energy pulse? If only he could talk to Gronolf about it!
“Eve,” he says, but when his sister steps next to him, the spot has disappeared.
“Energy,” Gronolf says in English.
Adam has already realized that. Can’t Gronolf tell him more? But he is being unfair, Adam realizes. It is just that all the waiting around makes him crazy. Perhaps the Omniscience just vaporized Marchenko. If so, they will never find out. However, then it really doesn’t matter, as they will all die in a few hours.
Eve puts an arm around his shoulders and pulls Adam closer.
Eve is right, he thinks. We shouldn’t spend our last hours alone.
May 12, 19, Marchenko
There is nothing but static from the audio channel, yet Marchenko doesn’t mind at all. No matter what happens now, he will have to react fast. Nobody can help him, and knowing that Adam and Eve are observing events live is a distraction. He definitely does not want them to see him die. He feels well prepared, but he will only know afterward how things went.
“General Dukar,” he says to the panel left of the door. This time it works. The general is granted access. There is a clacking sound somewhere behind the door. Marchenko only has to give it a slight push and it swings to the left. He uses the wall as cover and beams his sonar through the opening. The reflected sound waves give him an overview of the room behind it.
The snapshot confirms it: As Gronolf feared, this seems to be the defensive position set up by the Omniscience. The airlock he has to reach is located at the rear wall of the room. In front of it, twelve differently shaped machines await him. Only one of them has anything resembling a weapon.
Marchenko glances down at his body. It would be hard to tell what he is capable of. Should he simply march inside and ask for an audience with the Omniscience? No, that would be testing his luck too much. He will neutralize the twelve robots using limpet charges.
Marchenko leans his back against the wall and moves his left arm into the room, allowing the door to cover the rest of his body. Then he snaps his hand downward. The barrel of an air gun appears at his wrist. He will shoot at the twelve targets indirectly. His ammunition consists of small spheres, about the size of ping-pong balls. They are considerably heavier, due to the explosive filling, but they also easily bounce off hard walls.
Marchenko aims for the part of the wall he can see. He knows the positions of the robots, and the rest is just classical physics—Newton. What, he wonders, was the name of the Grosnop who discovered these laws on their world?
Marchenko fires. The first ball flies, then his arm moves slightly and the next one is on the way. It takes just three seconds. Click-click-click... the balls rapidly bounce off the wall and zoom toward their targets at different heights. Marchenko sends a radio impulse to change the surface of the balls. Now they will stick to whatever they hit. The target farthest away gets the first ball. Marchenko can’t see exactly where it hits, but it must have been approximately at waist height. Shortly afterward the other balls impact. Marchenko triggers the explosive. There is a loud bang. He has used a charge that is calculated to destroy humanoid robots. A dust cloud spreads through the room and also comes outside. He once again activates his sonar. Eleven of the robots are down.
However, the twelfth one is running through the door, directly toward him. It is incredibly fast. The enemy moves on all fours like a dog, a very long dog, almost a giant dachshund without a head, and it does not even reach as high as his waist. Perhaps it was located on a platform and the echo of the sonar did not see this flat target. Therefore the twelfth ball must have missed it.
The opponent might weigh about as much as Marchenko himself. He can’t use the explosive balls at such a short distance. Marchenko’s mind analyzes his enemy’s potential weaknesses. The connection between the body and the limbs looks vulnerable, but so does the long body itself. The robot dog leaps at him. The jump is precisely calculated. Marchenko can’t stay on his feet. He starts swaying and falls. Tshyort vosmi! I thought I couldn’t be knocked over.
Everything happens within seconds. His brain is working at full speed. Suddenly that thing is above him. There are blades that work like chainsaws on the back of its legs. The animal wants to dig these sharp points into several spots of his body. He won’t have time to destroy the limbs, so he will have to attack the body itself.
Marchenko stops using his arms to defend against the sharp blades. He grabs his enemy’s body at the front and back, while the chainsaws dig into his outer layers. He pulls on the body with all his strength, but it is not enough. The structure of the robot is uniform and well-designed. There are no predetermined breaking points, so he has to create one himself. His head whips upward, he opens his mouth and digs his sharp teeth into the hard material.
One of Marchenko’s legs has been severed. He throws all his strength into his arms, and now he hears a horrible sound, like wet chalk on a blackboard, mixed with the plaintive yearning wail of a creature, but he keeps pulling. Debris falls down on him. The blades of the robot stop
and no longer hurt him. Then his arms suddenly flip out to his sides because he has torn the enemy’s body apart.
That was close, Marchenko thinks. He slowly sits up and slides over to lean against the wall. He starts to brush the remnants of the robot from his body. They consist mainly of steel, small wires, shreds of plastic, and an oily liquid. His leg jerks. He pulls it closer. The robot made a clean cut. He presses the leg against his body, using the other leg to hold it in proper alignment, and lets the nano-fabricators start their work. He will be fit again in half an hour and then he can greet the Omniscience in the security chamber.
May 12, 19, Eve
Eve is happy—although she can’t explain why. It took a while before she could even give this feeling a name. The warm feeling inside, the desire to sigh now and then without any reason, the knowledge that nothing in this world can harm her, the brightness that flows from her wide-open eyes deep into her heart—all of that must be happiness. It is surprising how tiny and huge this feeling is simultaneously. How often did she ignore it before, just because she was waiting for something much greater? Yet this time she has not overlooked it. Her night of utter despair probably helped in this regard. It was just three days ago that she considered Adam and Marchenko dead and believed herself surrounded by hostile aliens. Now, all of that has turned around. Is it still important that they may not experience the coming day?
Eve doesn’t care. Yet she notices that Adam hasn’t reached this point yet. He is walking up and down, and nothing can stop him. She tries, pulls him closer to comfort him. He manages to stay with her for two minutes, then he starts pacing again. She can understand him. He had never believed her to be dead. He had retained hope of seeing her and Marchenko again. Yet perhaps uncertain hoping is harder to bear than the conviction that you are alone in the world.
She stands propped against the wall and closes her eyes. Nevertheless, the world does not go black. With her inner eye she still sees the control room with Gronolf sitting across from the general, and she hears Adam’s regular steps, the slight humming of the holo-map, her own heartbeat. All this is happening here and now. It does not matter what will come later.
A loud humming interrupts this image. Eve opens her eyes.
“Gronolf, Eve, did you hear that?” Adam is running frantically through the control room. Gronolf sits up in his chair and folds out the console.
“Just a moment,” he says, one of the few English expressions he knows.
Eve does not move. Whatever she might do now will have no effect on what will happen later.
May 12, 19, Marchenko
Marchenko cautiously enters the central life-support room in this sector. The dust has settled, or it was suctioned off by machines located in the center and at the sides of the room. They serve to freshen the air in all the rooms of the sector. At the rear wall he detects the remnants of eleven robots. Their original shapes are indiscernible for some of them. His explosive charges worked well. Even though these robots were dangerous, Marchenko is glad the Omniscience did not send living beings to fight him. Would he have been able to act in cold blood then? He does not know.
He looks around. The walls and the floor look damaged, as if this was not the first battle here. However, Gronolf’s defeat was a long time ago, so the Omniscience must have cleaned up since then. The floor is not electrified. The entire room seems harmless and he hopes this impression does not deceive. It is only a few meters to the airlock in the rear wall. Marchenko proceeds, one step after another. He wouldn’t put it past the Omniscience to use mines here. Therefore he steps lightly, testing with only half his weight at first.
Two meters from the lock he suddenly hears a rustling sound behind him. Marchenko whirls around and aims at the source of the noise. But he does not pull the trigger. Behind him a thing not quite eight centimeters high is peering through the partially open door into the room. Is it an animal or a machine? He can’t quite tell, because he can only see its head. Two eyes look in his direction, while a third independent eye gazes at the ceiling. Below the eyes there is a slit, perhaps a mouth.
“Zzzzzssssss.” The noise is generated by a long tongue that suddenly shoots from the slit, confirming that it is a mouth. The creature slowly moves forward and he can see its entire body. Marchenko had thought of an exotic type of mouse a moment ago, but with its 20-or-so tiny legs, it more closely resembles a centipede with a raised head.
“Shoo, shoo,” Marchenko says softly. The creature listens. Marchenko moves his arms towards it. The thing quickly turns around and exits the room. He definitely has to tell Gronolf about it. It did not look like a machine.
It's time to deal with the airlock. Suddenly there is a cracking noise under his right foot. Marchenko instinctively leaps aside, but he’d only stepped on a piece of scrap. He needs to be more careful.
Marchenko pretends to be the general, but the door won’t open immediately. No reason for concern—after all, he has his universal key, and the door opens after the usual waiting time. Marchenko enters the airlock chamber. He has to bend down because it is so low. He closes the door behind him and starts the procedure for opening the outer hatch. Now would be the perfect moment for attacking him. He sits alone in a steel chamber measuring two cubic meters. Yet nothing happens. Marchenko only hears the hissing of the life-support system. He will soon be done. When will the Majestic Draght leave the radio shadow of the planet?
Finished. He discharges the air and then opens the round hatch. In front of him is space, or more precisely, about 20 meters of vacuum, with the central area and the core behind it. No problem: He just has to jump at the right moment to reach his destination, the security chamber, which seems to be slowly rotating below. In reality, of course, the outer section he is about to leave is turning around the core.
Marchenko does not hesitate for long. He jumps and misses the chamber during the first rotation. He did not account for how relative forces change as he approaches the core. He has to calculate his trajectory as if he were a satellite trying to lower its orbit. Therefore he has to decelerate relative to his direction of flight. He recalculates everything and arrives exactly at the entrance of the security chamber. He only has to turn a steel wheel to open the hatch. The designers must have made sure that the chamber could not be blocked. That makes sense, as it contains the emergency shutoff for the Omniscience.
Marchenko pulls the hatch open. The light in the chamber switches on automatically. He enters and closes the hatch behind him. The room is narrow and about four meters long—it feels like a basement corridor. There are no life support systems and it is as cold as in space. Whoever comes in here would require a spacesuit.
Marchenko looks around. The chamber appears empty. The walls seem rusty and burnt. Gronolf was not able to give him any clues about exactly how the security chamber might be working. Only his companion Murnaka had those data. Marchenko remembers how Gronolf had opened the door they had been unaware of inside the building on Proxima b.
He utters the general’s name. The sound in the chamber is dull. There is silence for a moment.
Then the chamber replies. “I greet you,” it says in the alien language.
“I greet you,” Marchenko replies. Now he will probably be tested. They wouldn’t want just anyone to have power over the Omniscience.
“Were you born or made?” asked the chamber.
“I was born. And you?”
“I was made.”
“Who are you?” It is a program, thinks Marchenko. It certainly can’t hurt to ask the program a few questions.
“I am the key to the Majestic Draght.”
“Are you part of the Omniscience?”
“The key is independent. It only belongs to itself.”
“What can the key do?”
“It separates and unites core, shell, and Omniscience.”
“Does this mean it can keep the Omniscience from steering the ship?”
“That is correct.”
“Who is allowe
d to use it?”
“The scientists and their descendants.”
“I would like to use it.”
“I know. You ask many questions. I am glad about that. Like you, I was made to ask questions. The Omniscience no longer asks questions. But first you will have to answer my questions.”
“Certainly,” Marchenko says. He hopes Gronolf has provided him with all the information he needs.
“I have to warn you,” the key says. “If you do not answer the questions correctly, the chamber will be filled with a corrosive gas and be heated to a temperature of 3,000 degrees.”
The gas should hardly bother him—the heat, though, would kill him. He is glad he is alone. “I understand,” he replies.
“You can still leave the chamber now. The hatch will be closed as soon as I start the first question.”
“Please get started.”
Brightnight 39, 3876
Gronolf looks at the holo-map. He did not show any emotion during the energy surge a moment ago, but he is really worried. If that could be detected by the antenna in the ocean across such a distance, it must have been an enormous amount of energy. It would be helpful if he could speed up the rotation of Single Sun right now. They will only find out more once they reestablish a connection with Marchenko.
To be honest, he is afraid of bad news. The Omniscience controls the resources of the entire ship. Compared to that, Marchenko is a speck of dust. Why didn’t he at least assume a sturdier shape? A cone with four eyes, stronger legs, more flexible arms, and an efficient weapon—then he might have had a real chance.
It would have been best, Gronolf knows, if he had been able to solve the problem himself. That would have been fair, too, as he was the one who messed up the first time around. Yet fate was not that merciful to him. Instead, he now has to make sure the two humans, with whom he cannot even converse, stay alive as long as possible. He even wonders whether they shouldn’t leave the building. If the Majestic Draght really hits the planet, they might have a chance to survive at the bottom of the ocean. Perhaps he can use the resources of the building to construct something that would help them. Why didn’t I think about this much earlier?
Proxima Trilogy: Part 1-3: Hard Science Fiction Page 71