by G J Ogden
Hallam’s mouth was dry and he took another sip of water, managing to swallow it that time, without spraying it back out on the table. “The only damage I’ve seen is what your renegade fighters have done,” he said. He was still eager to hear more of Dr. Rand’s story, but at the same time, he hadn’t forgotten that her band of outlaws had almost killed him twice in the last few days alone.
“The damage is not something you can see, at least not yet,” Dr. Rand answered, her tone becoming darker and more intense again. “The Shelby Drive I built was based on the original bridge drive system in the alien probe. But the probe was damaged and so I had to improvise. The probe also used materials and manufacturing processes that I simply could not replicate. In short, Mr. Knight, my drive was a hatchet job.”
Hallam laughed at the absurdity of what Dr. Rand had just said. “Come on, Doc. There are hundreds of your drives powering ships that travel along the bridges every day. I’ve flown in tankers for years, and those drives always purr like kittens.”
“I didn’t say the drives don’t work,” Dr. Rand answered, again a little peevishly. “A coal-fired power station 'works', and so do old internal-combustion engines. The problem, as with those archaic technologies, is the damage the Shelby Drives are doing.”
Hallam frowned. “I didn’t have you down as an eco-warrior,” he said, responding to Dr. Rand’s petulant tone with matching crabbiness. “Is that what this is all about? Reducing ‘Randenite emissions’?” Hallam laughed at his own joke, but the scientist was less than impressed.
“Since I’m obviously struggling to put this into words that you can take seriously, allow me to explain in a more visual manner,” said Dr. Rand while plucking a palm computer out of one of her many pockets. She activated the device and a holo-projection appeared a few meters to the left of their table. “This is a map of the bridge worlds and the interlinking bridges.”
Hallam nodded; it was a rudimentary map he’d seen a million times before, as it was used for basic route planning. He’d memorized the network of bridges long ago, though, so he'd had no cause to look at it recently.
Dr. Rand tapped the screen of her palm computer, and the bridges all changed color. Some were a light green, others were yellow going into orange, and some appeared to be turning red. This was something new to Hallam, and the colors meant nothing to him. However, the more he looked at the projection, the more he realized that the darker oranges and reds seemed to correspond to the more frequently-traveled routes.
“I’m guessing this shows average traffic flow, right?” mused Hallam. “The routes to some of the newer outer bridge planets tend to be busiest, because of all the resource mining.” Then he saw that the route to the leisure planet, Feronia, was also a dark orange, and he snorted a laugh. “And I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that traffic to the ‘Vegas Strip that never ends’ is so high either.”
“This isn’t showing traffic flow, though there is a direct correlation,” said Dr. Rand, tapping on the palm computer again and zooming in on the bridge from the Centrum to Minerva. “This illustrates how close the bridges are to collapsing. And when they do, the repercussions will be catastrophic.”
Hallam felt another tingle rush down his spine, “Catastrophic how?” he asked, slightly wary of what the answer was going to be. Dr. Rand’s expression had become grave, as if she’d just been given a terminal diagnosis.
“When these bridges collapse – and it is a case of when, not if – they will create ruptures in space that are millions of miles long,” Dr. Rand replied, delivering the words with a cold clinicality. “The ruptures will alter the physics of the surrounding space, creating distortions in the gravitational field of any system of planets connected to the bridge. Planetary orbits will become unpredictable. The mass of an object will no longer have a constant relationship to its gravitational field. At best, the distortions will adjust the orbital paths of stellar bodies. At worst, planets will be thrown into their own suns, or cast out into the Darkspace, or simply torn apart from the new stresses.”
Dr. Rand tapped the palm computer again, and Hallam watched as the holo-image appeared to simulate the collapse of the bridge between the Centrum and Minerva. Almost instantly, the orbits of the planets started to shift in ways that made no sense. One planet was consumed by the Minervan sun, while two more collided, like giant pool balls, smashing each other into billions of pieces. It was terrifying to watch, but at the same time, Hallam couldn’t tear his eyes away from the display.
“And you’re saying this is all because of your Shelby Drive?” Hallam asked, feeling embarrassed that he’d acted like such an ass with Dr. Rand up to that point.
The scientist nodded. “Unless I can stop ships travelling along the bridges, they will eventually all collapse. And when they do, the system of bridge worlds will be destroyed. And so will Earth.” She switched off the holo with a single tap of her finger and sat back again. “It is only a matter of time.”
Hallam blew out a long, dispirited breath and pressed his hands behind his head. As bombshells went, Dr. Rand had dropped a thermonuclear-sized whopper, and he had no idea how to process or make sense of this new information. He still had a dozen other questions, but one in particular had jostled its way to the front of his addled brain.
“So why the hell doesn’t anyone know about this?” Hallam asked, still hugging the back of his neck. “Why haven’t you gone public?”
“That’s the first thing I tried,” replied Dr. Rand as she slipped the palm computer back into her pocket. “I went to Doyle and the Consortium, but they merely dismissed the evidence as theoretical.” Then she shrugged and added, “Though the real reason was that shutting down bridge travel would ruin them. Their entire business now revolves around Randenite and the ability to traverse the bridges. They don’t care about anything else.”
This made perfect sense to Hallam. He’d experienced the Consortium’s utter disregard for anything other than their own interests first hand.
“And as for going public, Doyle controls the media. It didn’t matter how I approached them, I was debunked as a hoax, an impersonator, or a prankster.” Rand then smiled and shrugged. “There are rumors, of course; if you search the darker corners of the BridgeNet, there are about a hundred conspiracy theories about what happened to me and the origins of Randenite. If you piece together parts from a dozen different theories, you actually get to the truth. But only the tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists believe it. It’s no different from the theories about the moon landings, or JFK or Area 69. I’m just another myth.”
Hallam smiled. “Looks like this time the conspiracy theorists actually got it right, though.”
“For all the good it has done,” Dr. Rand replied. “The truth is, the only way to really reach the mass public is for me to get direct access to the BridgeNet broadcast network, but I’m sure you know who controls that too?”
Hallam sighed. “Yeah, I think I can figure it out.”
“I’ve tried hacking into the BridgeNet, but it’s too well locked down, and even now I haven’t found any way to circumvent their safeguards. As a result, any attempt by me to expose the truth is blocked or automatically erased by the Consortium’s expansive cyber defense network. And if I decided to show my face publicly, on any bridge world, I would have been swiftly captured and made to disappear, if you take my meaning,” Rand went on. Hallam didn’t need the scientist to elaborate; he knew precisely what she meant and didn’t doubt that she was accurate either. “So I was left with only one option. To stop bridge travel, I had to destroy everything to do with my research. And if it wasn’t for the Centrum, it would have worked. But there’s no way to penetrate that fortress, at least not until now.”
Hallam stood up, feeling the need to move. If he’d sat down for any longer, the build-up of nervous energy might have caused him to rupture, like one of the bridges.
“You can’t get to the Centrum, so that’s why you have the Darkspace Renegades target Randenite tankers
instead?” Hallam asked. The whole picture was starting to make sense now.
“I’m not proud of it, but I’m afraid it’s a numbers game,” Dr. Rand replied. “There are still over a hundred tankers left in service and around five hundred bridge runners in total. Five hundred souls weighed against tens of billions, Mr. Knight. It’s an ugly calculation, but it’s the only one that solves the problem.”
“Some of those people are my friends,” Hallam hit back, disliking the way Dr. Rand had distilled people’s lives into a simple numbers game. “Damn it, Doc, one of the lives you’re casually dismissing is mine.”
Dr. Rand now also stood and moved to face Hallam. She seemed suddenly eager, as if desperate to reveal a dirty little secret.
“So now that you know, what if you could do something about it?” Dr. Rand asked, locking her sharp, intelligent eyes onto Hallam’s. “If you could help to destroy the Centrum, stop the bridges from collapsing, and prevent the need to attack any more tankers, would you step up?”
“Of course I would!” answered Hallam in an instant. The speed with which he’d essentially agreed to help the band of renegades surprised even himself, and it was a second or two before he could collect his thoughts enough to continue. “But what can I do that you haven’t already tried? I’m just a bridge runner.”
“You’re much more than that, Mr. Knight,” said Shelby with the most enthusiasm he’d seen from her since they had met. “And I don’t just mean because of your thus-far utterly wasted potential.”
Hallam snorted; it was one thing to be self-deprecating, but quite another to have someone you only just met lay down some hard home truths.
“Some combination of your exposure to Randenite radiation on the tanker and my highly experimental treatments, have caused your cell biology to become resistant,” Dr. Rand continued, either unaware of or indifferent to Hallam’s bruised ego. “In essence, through a true freak of chance, you have become the first radioresistant human being in existence.”
Hallam frowned. “That’s great, I think, but it helps you how exactly?”
Dr. Rand now looked even more ardent. “Because it means you may be the only person alive who can get me the one thing I need to destroy the Centrum, once and for all.”
“I’ll probably regret asking, but what’s that?” Hallam replied, feeling his pulse quicken again, through a mix of nerves and anticipation.
Dr. Rand continued to hold Hallam’s eyes with a fervent intensity before finally answering, “I need you to find and steal the original alien probe I discovered all those years ago and bring it to me.”
13
The roar of the transport’s thrusters firing let Hallam know that they were about to touch down. His destination was the principal Consortium headquarters campus on Vesta; his home for the five years he’d been a bridge runner. While he waited for the transport to arrive on stand, Hallam continued to roll the communicator disc back and forth over his knuckles, as if he were entertaining a small child with a clever coin trick. There was nobody in the seat next to him; the exercise simply helped Hallam to think. His mind had been unable to stop racing with thoughts of the secrets he’d learned, and the choices he still needed to make.
The disc was another one of Dr. Rand’s genius inventions, though like the Shelby Drive, it had been adapted from tech salvaged from the alien probe. It was a secure, two-way communications device that propagated electromagnetic signals through bridge space. As such, its range and rate of transmission was simply astonishing, allowing Dr. Rand to call him from millions of miles away, as easily as if she were on the same planet. Dr. Rand had given him the disc before they’d parted ways on the Darkspace Renegade hideout as a means to contact him once he’d had a chance to consider her proposal. A proposal that would inevitably lead him down the path to becoming a rebel; a Darkspace Renegade.
Hallam and Dr. Rand had talked some more before the scientist had agreed to send him back into civilization, and this had allowed Hallam to obtain answers to a few more of his lingering questions. In particular, Dr. Rand had explained how Hallam’s novel radioresistant biology put him in a unique position. It meant that Hallam was the only person alive who could safely remove a key component she needed from the radioactive alien probe without requiring a full-blown hazard suit to even get near it. Dr. Rand hadn’t gone as far as revealing why she needed the probe, despite Hallam pushing for more answers. And she’d either ducked or responded cagily to a number of his other questions too, including how many Darkspace Renegade hideouts there were, exactly how large her rebel band was, and whether the mythical thirteenth bridge planet she supposedly died trying to find actually existed or not.
Hallam hadn’t taken these rebuttals personally, though. He was as much of an unknown to Dr. Rand as the Dr. Rand was to Hallam. Neither had earned the other’s full confidence yet, although if Hallam was honest, the scientist had placed significantly more trust in him than Hallam had afforded her. The mere revelation of her identity and her desire to recover the probe were significant pieces of information that he was sure the Consortium would find of great interest. Hallam didn’t know why he had merited her blind faith, but in a strange way, it made him feel good to know that someone of Shelby Rand’s caliber considered him worthy. It had been the first time he’d felt valued and significant since the disgrace of being kicked out of the CSF.
On the flipside, even if he had revealed his recent experiences to the Consortium, he doubted anyone would have believed him anyway. As Dr. Rand had pointed out, there were already far wilder stories about her survival and current whereabouts circulating on the BridgeNet. One tinfoil-hat theory even had “proof” that Dr. Rand had mutated into a four-armed human/alien hybrid, and was living in the catacombs of Carmentis, preparing to raise a mutant army to enslave the human race.
Despite everything Dr. Rand had said, though, Hallam hadn’t been ready to become a full-blown renegade quite yet. He needed time to think about everything the scientist had told him and work out what he wanted to do. Back in the hideout, Hallam’s “I need time…” line had simply been a way to stall Dr. Rand so that he could return to civilization and some sense of normality. He wasn’t a rebel and he certainly didn’t want to court trouble with the Consortium. Furthermore, even though he’d been genuinely persuaded that the ticking time-bomb of bridge travel had to be dealt with, Hallam lacked Dr. Rand’s conviction that he could be a part of the solution.
What a difference forty-eight hours had made, Hallam thought to himself as he flipped the communicator disc back and forth over his fingers. The trip back to Vesta had afforded him ample time to ponder his options, as well as his life choices, many of which Hallam knew had been poor. And the more he thought about what Dr. Rand had said, the more he felt a compulsion to do something about it. The scientist’s offhand comment about his “utterly wasted potential” had a large part to do with this, Hallam knew. Her comment had cut deeply and stuck in his mind, like an infuriatingly-catchy pop song. Perhaps it had been Dr. Rand’s intention to give him a kick up the ass and stop him feeling sorry for himself. Lord knows he needed one.
The transport touched down and the pressure door opened, filling the stale cabin with the warm, fragrant air of Vesta’s largest southern continent. Like everything that the Consortium’s Chairman and CEO, Damien Doyle, purchased, his HQ’s location on Vesta was the height of luxury, and in the most opulent location imaginable.
Hallam stepped off the transport and walked down the narrow metal staircase, sucking in long, deep breaths. He’d breathed nothing but recycled air for the past week, and the taste and smell of real air was a welcome tonic. Then he spotted a man and a woman waiting off to the side of the arrival door, and sighed. From the style and cut of their suits, and the rigid, mannequin-esque way in which they stood, he knew at once that they were Consortium investigators. Hallam had been debriefed by similar suited members of the Consortium Investigation Branch several times before, after other instances where his tanker had suffere
d damage during a Darkspace Renegade attack. However, he’d never before been faced with having to explain the loss of an entire tanker, and its precious cargo, and so expected this interview to be far more hostile.
“Hallam Knight?” said the woman, who Hallam could see from the three silver bars on her lapel was the lead investigator. It gave her a rank equivalent to Chief Inspector in a civilian police force; not that the Consortium Investigation Branch ever referred to ranks. They didn’t even use their real names, preferring code names instead. Hallam had always considered this to be trite and even a little silly, but he still couldn’t help feeling a nervous twinge in his gut as the woman spoke his name.
“Yeah, that’s me.” Hallam replied, trying to act casual. He had no reason to suspect the investigators would know that he’d spent time on a Darkspace Renegade hideout, but the presence of such a high-ranking investigator was making him anxious. He could feel a bead of sweat slowly rolling down his temple from his brow, and from the flick of the female investigator’s eyes, he knew she’d seen it too.
“I am Fletcher and this is my associate, Chan,” the woman said in a tone that was neither sociable nor impolite. “If you’d like to follow us, Mr. Knight; we have a few questions regarding the loss of Tanker Romeo Sierra One Three, and also, where you have been.”
14
The investigator who’d called herself “Fletcher” led Hallam through the main terminal building, and into a pre-prepared interview room. The first time that Hallam had been de-briefed by the investigation branch, he’d wondered why they had rooms set up so close to the transport stands. It had been Dakota who had given him the answer – “so you don’t have time to think up a story or invent a convenient lie…” she had told him with an accompanying eyebrow waggle. This comment had never been more pertinent, Hallam realized.