The Bridge

by Simon Winstanley

  “You could always start another,” said Megan.

  “Maybe…” Marcus nodded.

  Nathan turned his attention back to the screen.

  “OK,” he said, “Let’s slow it up. What’s this over here?”

  Dixon adjusted the drone and moved the camera in closer. The image filling the screen was similar to a sight they’d seen at various locations during their previous years of travel; a small, packing-crate community, arranged around a centralised shelter. Some people were washing in the surf, and others moved between the water and small campfires.

  He turned away from the screen to face the crew.

  “Let’s see if we can help.”

  DARK

  Raven stared at the tablet that was secured to the cockpit console; her mind a livid swirl of dark grief and anger as she tried to come to terms with what Marcus had discovered. Looking back at her from the tablet’s simulation of a London flat, Marcus gently shook his head.

  “I’m sorry,” his voice sounded far away.

  Raven looked over at Lana and Ivan, floating next to her in the cockpit. They were equally dumbstruck.

  All these years, she’d thought that her mother had given up on her; chosen to end her own life. In fact, Ebony had made the ultimate sacrifice to make sure that Dwight would never be able to find her defenceless baby.

  Ebony had ensured that her child would be free of the hardships and prejudice that she herself had endured.

  As far as everyone was concerned, a mother and baby had died that day. Ebony and Emily Smith had perished; their shared Biomag ID had been proof enough. By burning the aviary biome event from the public record, Lana and Ivan had allowed a new life to rise from the ashes.

  Raven couldn’t blame Fai, Lana or Ivan for not knowing the truth about Dwight’s murderous action. By every definition available to Fai, he’d been invisible. It had taken the fusion of an advanced artificial intelligence and a father’s deep loss to uncover the facts.

  “Does he -” Raven cleared her throat, “Does Dwight know who I am?”

  On the small screen, Marcus shook his head, “I don’t know but, just before I got shut down, I saw a large credit transfer from Luóxuán Biotech to the Kavanagh family’s account.”

  “Compensation?” Ivan frowned, “For the Helix Station incident?”

  Marcus shook his head again, “The credit was made the day before.”

  Raven heard Lana muttering a string of Russian words, none of them pleasant.

  “I think the Helix thing was a con,” said Marcus, “Something to sell you on Dwight’s loyalty.”

  “Then…” Raven suddenly realised the subtext.

  “Yeah,” Marcus nodded, “Kohlner knew.”

  Abel suddenly turned and stared at a flashing light.

  “Damn it!” he said, “Navcom error.”

  “Checking,” Ivan swung himself away and brought up a diagnostic window on another screen. His expression drained, “It’s not the navigation computer.”

  “Ivan,” Abel pointed at the indicator, “I’m looking at -”

  “No!” he cut in, “It’s the main communication array that feeds into it.”

  “Toolkit!” Lana immediately launched herself away to the opposite side of the cockpit.

  As she arrived at a large rectangular panel, she turned to catch the small toolkit that Abel had sent spinning to her. Pulling out a screwdriver, she began releasing the four captive screws that held the panel in place.

  “Abel, reset the Navcom,” Ivan called out.

  “Already done, no effect.”

  Raven heard the panel detach and turned to see a cloud of sparkling debris coming out of the wall. Lana hesitated only a moment before plunging her hand into it.

  “Mama!” Raven pushed herself towards her.

  “Help me!” Lana shouted.

  Raven saw what Lana had grabbed hold of.

  Amid the expanding debris, glued to the circuit boards, was something that had no place being there: a dense collection of plastic gears and metal parts. The whirring clockwork mechanism was busy drilling a metallic shaft through the circuits.

  Raven grabbed the block.

  “Twist it!” she called out, then moved her hands.

  In zero gravity her lack of weight simply twisted her whole body in the opposite direction.

  Thinking quickly, Raven reoriented herself to crouch on the wall, wedged her knee into the recess, and tried again. This time the mechanism began to shift. With another burst of effort, the glue around the outside gave way and the collection of parts came away from the circuits.

  “What the hell is that?” Abel shouted.

  Raven looked at the assembly of parts. Surrounding a large spiral spring at its centre, spinning cams and clockwork gears were driving a thin drill bit. Specks of ruined circuit board clung to the metal as it continued to turn.

  An abrasive alarm cut through the air.

  “Pressure warning!” Ivan yelled.

  “Shit!” Abel twisted his seat to face the console, “We’re venting oh-two.”

  Raven could see the diagram on Abel’s screen clearly from where she was; a simple bar chart showed oxygen reserves were falling.

  “Where’s the breach?” Lana launched herself back to the main console.

  “Damn it!” Abel smacked the console, “There’s two of ’em. An oh-two tank, and one in the hull.”

  “Where?” Ivan looked around them.

  “Can’t tell,” Abel muted the alarm, “but it’s why we’re losing pressure.”

  The cockpit became quiet. Raven looked between her parents. They were both silently calculating. Beyond them, through the dark forward window, she saw Eri come into view.

  “So what do we do?” she said.

  “Priority one,” said Lana, “seal the breach.”

  “No,” Abel looked through the forward window, “Our Field ratio’s at twenty-four hundred to one, we’ll reach Eri in about twenty seconds. We have to get the Navcom back or there won’t be enough time to adjust trajectory.”

  To Raven the solution seemed clear.

  “We deactivate the Field. Give us more thinking time.”

  Lana gave a nod and moved back to her console.

  “Wait!” Ivan called out, “The breach is slowing.”

  “So?” said Abel.

  “It’s slowing down because the Field around the ship is stopping the oh-two from escaping.”

  Raven instantly pictured the bubble around the Bergstrom filling up with air. If they dropped the Field, the resulting vacuum of space would make things worse.

  “How about a live adjustment of the Field?” said Lana, “Drop to a temporal ratio of one-to-one, without deactivating first.”

  “Do it,” Abel flicked on the intercom, “OK, everybody, standby for severe disorientation, we’re making a Field change.”

  Spotting that the others were putting their harnesses back on, Raven returned to her seat and did the same.

  “Raven,” Marcus spoke from the tablet, “Let me see that thing. Hold it up to the camera and turn it around for me.”

  “What are you looking for?” she slowly rotated the whole clockwork mechanism for him.

  “Clues,” he said.

  “Field step-down,” said Lana, “in three… two… one…”

  Lana pushed the button.

  Raven immediately felt a rapid pulsing wave of nausea and her vision blurred; as though she was seeing densely-packed visual echoes of the moments before and after the button press. Then suddenly everything returned to normal.

  “One-to-one,” Lana groaned and rubbed at her eyes, “Oxygen?”

  “Stabilised,” Ivan looked out through the window, “Contained.”

  “Give me a sec,” Abel read various displays, “We’re back in normal time, but all the readings have moved on. OK, looks like we’re less than an hour from Eri… I guess that’s better than twenty seconds.”

  “Raven,” said Marcus from within the tablet.
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  She turned to see that he was holding a clockwork mechanism.

  “I couldn’t see all the parts,” he explained, “but I copied the ones you showed me and extrapolated the rest.”

  “Wow,” she marvelled at his speed, “I only showed you a few seconds ago.”

  Marcus now looked confused, “It’s been hours.”

  Raven looked over at the others.

  “I’m guessing it’s the Field step-down,” said Abel, “Non-linear time messes with our biological senses, but machines just sit through it.”

  “I thought there was something wrong with my program,” said Marcus, “You froze. Like what happened back at your office.”

  Raven faced him, “I’m sorry.”

  “I’ll make this quick,” he held up his version of the mechanism, “The components in it are used in everything from automatic doors to exo-limbs. Someone assembled this thing from standard Luóxuán stock parts.”

  Raven’s blood ran cold.

  “It’s driven by clockwork. Probably started running before you even left. Fai didn’t know there was a threat ’cos it had no visible power source or electronics in it. I reckon you’ll find more of these bloody things near the oh-two tanks.”

  “Abel,” said Lana, “if we can fix the breach, could we just go into orbit and wait for the Eridanus to return?”

  “It’ll take them seven years to complete the solar orbit.”

  “So can’t we just increase our Field ratio again?” said Raven, “wait it out for seven days?”

  Ivan was shaking his head.

  “We can’t get back the oh-two that’s outside the ship. With our current reserves, we’d run out after two days.”

  For moment, the only sound was the cockpit’s background hum.

  “We don’t have a choice” said Abel, “We have to try reaching the surface.”

  “But the comm array’s dead,” said Ivan looking at the open panel, “Even if we make it to the surface, we couldn’t contact the Eridanus. They wouldn’t know where to start looking for us.”

  Raven felt a cold, creeping realisation.

  “Son of a …” she cradled her head in her hands. Like pieces of clockwork slowly assembling themselves into a terrible machine, she could see it all, “That’s what all of this is about.”

  She felt Lana’s comforting hand on her shoulder, “What is it?”

  “Kohlner,” she said, “This is what he wanted. The Bergstrom disappears without trace. People never get proof that Eri is habitable. Nobody leaves the Eridanus.”

  “Why is that what Kohlner wants?” said Abel.

  Lana answered for her.

  “He hated Chen’s welfare program. After the loss of Raven, he’ll bravely step up to take control of the company. People will have to pay for every breath they take.”

  Another quiet moment filled the precious air.

  “Raven,” said Marcus.

  “Yes,” she looked up.

  “I said I’d have to be quick,” he said, “I think I ran the tablet’s processors too hard.”

  “What?”

  “I’m gonna lose power soon.”

  She suddenly noticed that his environment was no longer his London flat, it had returned to being a plain black box. When she checked the tablet’s exterior, she could find no visible connection ports.

  “Abel,” she quickly glanced around the cockpit, “where can I charge this?”

  “I…” he hesitated then looked at the tablet, “I think Fai’s tech is too new. I’m really sorry… I don’t think the Bergstrom’s got anything that’ll connect.”

  “But,” Raven looked back at Marcus on the screen.

  He was nodding to himself, “It’s alright.”

  She shook her head, “There must be a way to charge -”

  “Hey,” he shrugged, “it’s all just a simulation, right? When the juice runs out, I’ll just close my eyes… Sleep mode.”

  “I swear,” Raven sat up straight, “We’ll get out of this mess, and then they’ll pay for what they did.”

  “Thanks,” he smiled, “They got my daughter, but -”

  The screen went dark.

  OPPORTUNITY

  Trudy turned to face the camera.

  “Though whether the Bergstrom will succeed is, of course, anyone’s guess.”

  For a moment, she continued to stare into the lens of her recube. If she needed to add creative wipes and transitions, she’d have the footage to do it. Breaking her self-imposed freeze-frame, she reached out and stopped the recording.

  As she put the recube in her pocket, she saw Raven Meznic’s bodyguard approaching her.

  “Miss Brightman?” he seemed ill at ease.

  “Yes,” she smiled.

  “Do you have a moment?” he kept glancing over his shoulder.

  Recalling his earlier behaviour at Helix Station, she spotted an opportunity to get an alternative viewpoint piece.

  “Sure,” she began reaching into her pocket for her recube.

  “Er,” he lowered his voice, “I was hoping I might speak with you off the record.”

  She knew that, for most people, off-the-record conversations typically ended up as fully recorded statements.

  “Of course,” she said, “Go ahead.”

  After checking that they wouldn’t be overheard by the crowds at New Houston, he took a hesitant step closer.

  “Not here.”

  “Sorry,” she said, “First you’ll have to give me a rough idea of what it’s about.”

  “It’s about the…” he seemed to search for the right words, “upper management at Luóxuán.”

  “Devon Kohlner?” she kept her voice low.

  “I didn’t say that,” he glanced around, “but I can’t hide what I know anymore.”

  “Go on,” she said.

  “For my own safety, I can’t,” he looked slightly nervous, “But if someone else were to investigate it, they could stop him.”

  It seemed he’d made a slip, she could only think of one upper management ‘him’.

  “OK,” she said, “Where do you want to meet?”

  SPACE, TIME & GRAVITY

  Using every adult aboard, the process of checking the Bergstrom took only minutes. From stem to stern, every possible access panel had been removed and replaced.

  A duplicate of the clockwork device had been found intersecting one of the oxygen tanks in the central section. After a quick-setting plastic had been sprayed over the area, its ability to cause further damage had been halted.

  Like everyone else, Raven knew that the mechanism responsible for the external hull breach hadn’t been found. But as Abel had pointed out, the Bergstrom was a large ship; finding a needle-thin hole in its surface area would be impossible from inside the craft.

  Navigating between handholds, Raven slowly made her way through the circular central section that curved around the ship’s Field generator. Most of the seats were still occupied, but the zero-gravity environment was filled with people busily pushing themselves through the air as they made preparations.

  At Abel’s request, personal belongings were being secured to the hull’s interior with straps. If a breach should make its way through to the inside shell, the hope was to slow it with layers of material. Everything from medical kits to cuddly toys were being stuck into place. She saw that the use of the latter items was doing little to reassure the children aboard.

  Leaving the noise of the main compartment, she joined Lana, Ivan and Abel in the cockpit.

  “Ideally we would have entered orbit first,” Abel was tapping at a diagram, “then transitioned to a descent phase. But I don’t think we’ve got that luxury.”

  Ivan gave a loud exhale.

  “You still think it’s too high a risk to manoeuvre to a shallower approach?”

  “Our angle’s steep but at least Eri’s gravity has caught us,” Abel glanced at the screen, “Given our condition, I don’t want to drop the Field just to tweak the trajectory. Once we’re
through the atmosphere we can shut it down, and switch to full flight mode.”

  Lana pointed at the line representing their current trajectory.

  “Very steep,” she said, “Our descent will be purely ballistic.”

  Abel nodded, “Until we deactivate the Field, we’ll have no external control of direction.”

  “But?” said Raven.

  He pointed to a schematic of the Bergstrom.

  “Inside the Field, I should be able to eyeball it and use thrusters to keep us the right way up,” he glanced over at the countdown clock on the console, “We’re sort of out of options here.”

  Lana nodded her consent and turned to Ivan.

  “We should make sure everyone’s secure,” she said, “Entry’s going to be rough.”

  “You take the port side,” Ivan replied, “I’ll take starboard.”

  Without hesitation, they both turned and launched themselves into the main compartment.

  “What about me?” Raven frowned.

  “We’re under two minutes away,” said Abel, “I’d buckle in now, if I were you. I could use an extra pair of eyes running pre-flight.”

  Raven pulled herself into her chair and began putting on her harness. She found her eye drawn to Marcus’ inert tablet; the one place on the console that wasn’t alive with data.

  “Ready?” Abel called out.

  “OK,” she said, “What do you want me to do?”

  “One section over, two up,” he used the tablet as an origin, “Starboard thruster pressure level, you see it?”

  “Yes,” she saw the bar chart.

  “I’m gonna cycle the external valve assembly,” he said, “The pressure’s gonna rise. When it goes above two Pascals, push the purge button. D’you see it?”

  “Got it,” she poised her finger.

  “Here we go then,” he flicked at several physical switches, “Cycling starb-”

  A blunt explosion shook the ship. Above the immediate cacophony of alarms, she heard a hiss and saw that the main passenger section door had automatically slid shut.

  Abel was frantically trying to bring the situation under control, stabbing at various buttons before resorting to the intercom.