Geoff and Chen continued their tour through a dozen or so other sections divided by bulkheads, set obliquely to the centre-line of the ship. Their accommodation was housed amidships. It replicated many of the facilities of the Khitan Caves. Geoff suspected some of it was the actual furniture, bathroom fittings and hard-copy books they’d used previously. The galley was equipped with a nanowave cooker and an omniprinter interface, similar to the food dispenser they’d had in the caves. But he was more interested in a cupboard in the storeroom. It was full of harpoons and a spear gun. Did it mean they’d be able to sail in open water?
Once again, there were six sets of everything. The Thiosh could not have known in advance how many delegates would find their way to the whale-bot, or if it would be needed at all. He was convinced Mettravar had attended the conference in good faith, hoping to negotiate a non-aggression pact. But then he’d given them the means to escape if everything went wrong. The fact the whale-bot could accommodate six people showed Thiosh couldn’t see into the future. It was a relief to know their paranormal ability had limits. They were superhuman, but they weren’t gods.
Chen pointed to a silver cylinder in a compartment near the stern. ‘Fusion reactor. It generate electricity. Very advanced. My biometer register low-level background – like cosmic rays on Earth. But you see pistons? They are like old beam engine. Cranks and levers work tail up and down.’
‘Actually, I think it’s rather clever,’ said Geoff. ‘The mechanical linkage controls the stroke and speed of the fluke. It’s not your usual digital system. It does make us seesaw up and down, though.’
Geoff and Chen returned to the wardroom, where Maura was looking at pictures resembling lithographs fixed to the walls. Her cheeks were still stained with tears and Geoff didn’t want to bombard her with questions. At least, not yet. He gave Chen a ‘wait’ signal with his hand and they both pretended to study the line drawings of ocean-going robots. There were portraits of former Saazats too, but they all looked the same.
‘How are you feeling?’ Geoff asked Maura eventually. He decided not to mention his own queasiness.
‘I’m better now,’ said Maura. ‘But I know now OPDEO will never cohabit with Thiosh. We wanted to persuade them but they weren’t having any of it. Another minute on the quayside and they would have arrested us again. It’s the third time Thiosh have rescued us. First from the seabed, then the prison, and now we’re on the run again.’
‘What happened to Mettravar? Did you pick up anything, telepathically?’
‘A rebel group hit OPDEO’s computers and it caused his feckin’ fish tank to collapse.’
‘Oh, so other Thiosh killed Mettravar, did they?’
Maura stopped stretching and turned to face Geoff, one hand on her hip. ‘Mettravar never wanted any aggression. He told them not to retaliate.’
‘D’you think the rebels wanted Mettravar out of the way?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps they didn’t foresee the consequences of their cyberattack.’
‘What happened to the rest of the group, after we split up?’
‘All I know is they’re safe and they’re in space somewhere. They escaped in an OPDEO ship. Leona has shared her thoughts with me, but she doesn’t know where they’re going or what they’ll do.’
‘What about the loyal Thiosh?’ Now Geoff had begun, he decided to blurt out all his worries. ‘OPDEO has shown itself to be ruthless, right? We can assume it’ll try to wipe out all possible opposition. Flannery and his crew know Thiosh are living in the Cronus Rift. They could nuke the whole area!’
‘They’d be crazy to do that. The tectonic plates under the ice are unstable. A nuclear explosion would cause volcanic eruptions. They’d damage the ice cap and wreck the environment.’
‘Well, alright. But they also have an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons. They’ll find some other way to destroy the Thiosh.’
‘Perhaps we find new home for them,’ said Chen, entering the conversation. ‘Somewhere under ice where they live safe.’
‘It’d win them time if they found a hideout, but OPDEO would track them down eventually,’ said Geoff.
‘Maybe they build ships and travel to other planet? Kai can look for ocean somewhere, maybe on Saturn moon?’
‘It’s a feckin’ shame OPDEO can’t show some respect for a unique life form, the bastards!’ said Maura.
‘Ah, you’re beginning to sound more like yourself,’ said Geoff and, amused by his irony, he began to feel better too.
Geoff took Maura up to the bridge and she began studying the charts on the viz-box screen. She waited for the autopilot to switch off, and then set a new course. She aimed for the edge of a tectonic plate in the seabed where she expected to find more hydrothermal vents. The whale-bot was no speedboat, but its fluke drove it through the sea with natural grace. After a while, Geoff hardly noticed the craft’s rocking motion. He felt he could relax and take stock for the first time since the trauma of the conference.
But his reverie was interrupted as the craft shuddered and tilted towards the bows.
‘Why are we going down, Maura?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. I’d set the fins to keep us level. Has a crab-bot come again?’
Geoff flicked on the front floodlights and peered at his viz-box screen. ‘I think we’ve rammed something. Hang on, I’m zooming out. Ah, there’s a huge lump attached to the bows. I’ve got it now. Oh my God! Look, it’s got tentacles.’
‘Jaysis, it looks like a squid. It’s feckin’ enormous. We’re sinking fast. I’m filling the buoyancy tanks with air.’
Chen must have heard the urgency in his companions’ voices because he joined them on the bridge. ‘Can we go backwards?’ he asked. ‘Pull up again?’
‘Sorry, no reverse gear,’ said Maura. She pressed the buttons on her viz-box screen and reconfigured the slide controls. ‘I’ve shut off the power, filled the tanks with air . . . but it’s not working.’
‘You feel that pulse?’ said Geoff. ‘The squid’s squirting us downwards. It wants us on the seabed.’
‘What?’ said Maura. ‘It probably drags fish down deep so the pressure kills them. It’s trying to do the same to us.’ As if to underline Maura’s analysis, the hull emitted a sound similar to a human groan as stress built up in its structure.
Geoff closed his eyes and thought intently. He managed to wrench off one the squid’s tentacles using TK-force, but he had to let go to work on another. He couldn’t pull them all off at the same time. He gave the squid’s body a hard jab, but it absorbed the blow like a lump of jelly. He wondered about its vital organs, but he didn’t know where they were. Squids on Earth have three hearts. How many hearts has an alien squid?
His train of thought was interrupted by a wailing alarm. ‘There’s a leak,’ Maura cried. ‘We’ll break up if we go too deep!’
Geoff was at a loss. The situation’s out of control. Running away has solved nothing. But what choice did we have?
Fugitives in Space
‘Give me time, let me meditate,’ said Leona, and Kai watched her as she crossed her long slim legs and floated weightlessly in the lotus position. She straightened her body. ‘We’re armed with a gigawatt laser, aren’t we?’ she said, her words jolting Kai back into the reality of Huang’s predicament.
‘Yes, why do you ask?’
‘I have a strong feeling we should use it to drill into the asteroid’s interior.’
Kai ran his fingers over the stubble on his head. ‘It is not logical. Drilling into the crust is not going to lift Huang off the surface.’
She looked him full in the face. ‘Trust me. I don’t know how it’ll work. Perhaps it’ll be like surgery.’
They had failed to find a conventional solution. He knew her proposal was irrational, but he decided to try it anyway. ‘Where do you want me to aim?’
‘Into that crater,’ she said, pointing to a circular ridge about five kilometres from the shuttle. ‘A few seconds at half power sho
uld be enough, I think.’
Kai sequenced the weapons array and focused the laser onto the centre of the shallow depression. He ran up the generator, set the power level and hit the fire button. A brilliant shaft of electric blue light spiked into the crater. Plumes of incandescent matter erupted from the surface.
He shut down the laser, but fluid still jetted out from the penetration point, the colour visibly changing from dark brown to white in the weak sunlight. He ran a spectrograph on the spray and smiled. ‘It is steam,’ he said, and they watched a shining pool of water creep towards the rim of the crater as the vapour condensed.
Huang’s excited voice broke through the static from the intercom. ‘Hey, Kai, I felt a change – I tried the thruster and I lifted off!’
Within minutes the shuttle was locked onto Aquila’s docking port. Once Huang had climbed out of his suit, Kai checked him with the medi-scan. ‘You will be fine,’ he told him. ‘Drink a litre of rehydration solution over the next hour or two.’
‘Physically I am okay, but I do not understand,’ said Huang. ‘You hit the ground with the laser and I became free. Please explain. Was that cause and effect?’
‘Yes, I believe it was. The crater is now a bowl of soup made of water and protein molecules,’ said Kai.
‘It’s what the asteroid wanted,’ said Leona.
Huang choked as he gulped from his drinks bottle. ‘How can a dead rock want anything?’ he asked.
‘You have to understand – the rock wasn’t dead,’ said Leona. ‘All life wants to reproduce itself. We helped it, and it helped us.’
‘There are more forms of life in the universe than we could ever imagine,’ said Kai. ‘Now, we must move on.’
To make their escape from Europa, Kai and his companions had been happy to steal any ship. But the Aquila had not been designed for stealth; its polished titanium skin shone brightly even in weak sunlight. Kai was certain that the Europan colony regularly scanned the dark sky for impending meteor strikes. The blink comparator they used to identify non-stellar objects gave OPDEO the means to locate the ship; once they were found, patrolling Hesperian destroyers would close quickly within distraydar range.
But the odds had improved for Kai and his companions. Thanks to the catalytic material they’d collected from the ‘living asteroid’, the Aquila now had a fully operational fusion ramjet. It could travel beyond the edge of the Solar System. Furthermore, the eruption from the asteroid’s surface had coated much of the Aquila’s casing with a thin layer of dark brown material, making it far less conspicuous. Instead of OPDEO looking for a bright needle in a haystack, it would now be searching for a cowpat in a muddy field.
For the first time since they’d escaped from OPDEO’s ambush in the Unidome, Kai felt he could relax. The Aquila was a large, well-equipped ship; while Huang worked out in the gym, practising his martial art skills against holographic opponents, Kai spent more time with Leona. Although her background was very different from Kai’s, they had much in common. She had learnt the traditions of the Maasai at a young age and understood the sanctity of life, both present and past. Her family preserved their ancestors’ artefacts as repositories of their spirit, in harmony with their environment: the sky, the lakes, the mountains. All creation, either animate or inanimate, was imbued with a life force, a component of the universal consciousness encountered by Kai through meditation. But his attraction to Leona was more than spiritual.
Although Kai no longer practised telepathy with Leona, they’d developed an instinctive understanding of each other’s desires. Even on a large ship, the fact two men and a woman were living in close proximity was certain to cause emotional tension. For that reason, Kai and Leona had not yet consummated the intimacy they felt for each other. But Kai knew voluntary restraint would not last forever.
As their craft neared the main asteroid belt, Kai considered their options. He was sure they’d managed to escape detection so far, but he judged the best way to throw off their pursuers would be to hide for a while. ‘How far away are we from another asteroid?’ he asked Leona. She swung her braided hair over her shoulder and accessed the astronavigation program.
‘On this course, we could rendezvous with 31 Euphrosyne in two days.’
‘Euphrosyne. One of the five most massive asteroids. What else do we know about it?’
‘Roughly two hundred and sixty kilometres in diameter with an irregular shape,’ she said, reading data from her screen. ‘It’s another of the dark bodies that’s never been properly surveyed.’
‘What is its inclination?’
‘It’s not known exactly but it’s been estimated at twenty-five degrees. Is it important?’
‘That depends on its orbital position. But at a latitude of greater than sixty-five degrees, the polar regions would stay in darkness for nearly three years. It could be a good place for us to lie low for a while.’
While they approached the planetoid, Kai carried out a distraydar scan and chose an area within a small, deep crater as a suitable landing site. To find them, an OPDEO destroyer would have to pass almost directly overhead. He was relieved to be able to rest knowing they were safe, and he needed time to decide what to do next.
They had enough supplies to last them for a long flight; they could travel to Mars, or even Earth, provided they weren’t intercepted. Kai could return to Khitan territory and tell of OPDEO’s intention to launch a pre-emptive attack on their Empire. But the Khitans already knew that was likely. He could break the news about the existence of Thiosh, and OPDEO’s hostility towards them, but what could the Empire do to change anything? The way ahead was not clear. He decided to occupy himself with routine activities, at least for the time being.
‘We had better set up a sentry post,’ he said. ‘I shall take the shuttle and install equipment on the rim of the crater. It will give us early warning if OPDEO come near. Huang, you are in charge until I get back.’
Kai circled the crater and chose a flattened peak where he could land. Once on the surface, he scanned for biochemical or electromagnetic hazards. There was a lot of background radio noise sounding like wind in a forest. But there was something else about it; he suspected there were patterns in the sound. He tried to get a fix on its source, but the signal was omnidirectional. It didn’t seem like a natural phenomenon, but what did ‘natural’ mean on Euphrosyne? He contacted the Aquila to say he’d be carrying out tests, and they should ignore his radio transmissions until he gave the all clear.
Huang locked onto Kai’s frequency and prepared to wait. He turned to face Leona. ‘What is he doing now? He never tells me anything.’
‘Sorry, I don’t know,’ she said, looking up briefly as she carried out a routine instrument check.
‘Why don’t you know? You can read his thoughts, can you not?’
‘No, not really. He’s not clear in his thinking at the moment.’
‘But you are very close to him. I know how he looks at you. What are his plans? How long have we got to spend in this hole?’
She stopped logging the instrument data and turned to face Huang. ‘Actually, I don’t think Kai knows himself. You should realise he’s had two mentors in his life. One was an abbot in a monastery and the other was the leader of the Thiosh. Each gave him a sense of purpose, but now they’re both dead.’
Huang gripped the support straps opposite her. ‘We are hiding like bamboo rats. What will we do here? It is dark, it is barren, we can only see the sky above us. It is a prison.’
‘If it’s any consolation, I don’t feel comfortable here either. But it was Kai’s choice, and we must accept it,’ she said.
Huang leant close. ‘When I was stuck on the Trojan asteroid, you told him to fire the laser into a crater. How did you know that would free the shuttle?’
She let her com-pad stylus float gently towards the floor deck. ‘When we left the Trojan asteroid, we’d made it possible for new life to evolve. Beyond that I can’t tell you.’
‘There are many thin
gs you are unwilling to explain. You know how to defeat the OPDEO security codes. You have their encryption programs in your com-pad. Breckenridge thought you were a spy. Was he right? Yes or no?’
Huang and Leona glared at each other, each determined not to break eye contact.
‘You’re wrong, Huang. Breckenridge didn’t think I was a spy. He threatened me with interrogation to try to make me spy for him.’
‘You have not answered my question!’
‘If I was a spy for the Khitan Empire you should be glad.’
‘I am not a thinker like you and Kai. I am a warrior. I fight for my friends.’ Huang was shouting now. ‘I would give my life for them, and they would die for me. Without loyalty, there is no honour!’
‘There are loyalties that transcend frontiers, Huang. And if you’re suggesting . . .’
Kai’s voice cut in over the radio, his signal punctuated by crackling interference. ‘I am Kai - - - - carbon biochemistry – what do you use? - - - - Have you always been this way? - - - - But where is your hardware? - - - - You exist in space, independent of material? - - - - Are there many like you?’ - - - - You want me to help you? - - - - When the time is right.’
Out of the Frying Pan
Geoff had a sudden thought. ‘Maura, Chen – go to the wardroom and sit on the table. Don’t touch anything metallic.’
He went to the stores, grabbed one of the harpoons he’d seen earlier, and headed for the engine room. Much of the high voltage cabling had no insulation.
I don’t suppose the maintenance robots worry about health and safety. Lucky for them – and maybe lucky for me.
The Hesperian Dilemma Page 9
