Spheres of Influence

by Bob Mauldin

  Departure was less eventful than arrival, though tears and hugs were shared all around again. Lucy called Galway just before leaving the house to inform him of her return to New Mexico. “I’ll meet you there and see to the guard detail around your ship,” he said.

  Lucy’s goodbyes were just as heartrending as she’d known they would be. She experienced fear and concern for her mother and father, and worry about Bruce’s plans, although she was pretty certain she’d be seeing him soon. Regret at leaving her friends behind made her say, “You know, you guys are welcome to join up. We wouldn’t get to see a lot of each other but more than if you don’t. Bruce won’t be far behind me. He’s almost twenty, and the folks can’t hold him back if he wants to go. You three could make a trip of driving down to New Mexico together.”

  With the last tear shed and the last hug given and received, Lucy turned to the smoked-glass doors that led onto the tarmac where her ship waited, but a tug at her sleeve turned her back. “Here’s your bag,” Bruce said, handing over the black nylon satchel. “And you did promise me a look inside your cockpit, Luce. Mind if I walk out with you?”

  Expecting the request, Lucy nodded and pushed the door open. She eyed Carmen and Amy, but they both shook their heads. The cool morning air made her glad she’d worn her long-sleeved uniform, but the weight of the laser on her hip was unaccountably bothersome. “Sure, let’s go.” Stepping out into the bright morning light, she looked around and saw several vehicles with that “cop” look to them, and at least half a dozen silhouettes of men either atop nearby buildings or in the shadows not far from the Mamba. To one side, a motorized ladder stood waiting, its engine idling and a driver at the controls.

  Reaching into the pouch on her belt, Lucy pulled out the key and pointed it at the ship. Seconds after she pressed the recessed button, the shimmering field around the Mamba vanished and she waved the ladder driver to move up to the craft. She touched another button and the cockpit opened as if on its own as the stairway came to a stop mere inches from the skin of the ship. Climbing up first, Lucy stood to one side so Bruce could look inside.

  “Can I . .?” he asked, gesturing at the seat.

  “Sure,” Lucy said indulgently. “Just don’t touch anything. You could deactivate the magnetic containment field and blow up half of the airport.”

  “Yeah, right,” Bruce muttered as he slid into the cockpit. “What am I looking at?” he asked, hands conspicuously on his legs.

  “Far right panel is environmental controls. Next to the left is the armament status board. Center front are the actual flight controls. Radar is a holographic display projected on the inside of the cockpit window. Next to the left is the engine status board, and on your far left is the comm panel. We simplified some of the controls so they act almost like computer games with joystick controls, but it’s not really set up for atmospheric flight. These engines make it much more suited to what it was designed for—a space fighter.”

  Bruce looked around at the controls and the helmet sitting atop the panel. “If I’ve got a choice,” he said, “I’d like to learn to fly one of these, but Mom...”

  Lucy put her hand on her brother’s shoulder. “Brucie, Mom’s all right with it. Trust me. We talked last night, and she’s not real happy, but she knows, deep down, that you’re about to leave the nest. She also knows that whatever you do in life has risks to it. She’s okay with this if you go in with your eyes open. And if you do show up in New Mexico, I’ll make sure your eyes are opened before you get accepted. Now, just about everybody who signs up wants the glamour of being a Mamba pilot, so sooner or later we examine them all, but I do have some pull,” she said, smiling up at him, “and I’ll get you bumped up the list. After that, you’re on your own. If you wash out of pilot training, I’ll find something else for you to do if you decide to stay with us.”

  Bruce looked at the controls for a moment longer, then climbed gingerly out of the fighter to stand beside his sister. “You said, ‘if you decide to stay with us.’ Do you think of things as ‘us’ and ‘them’ now, Luce?”

  Lucy stood on top of the stairway and thought for several seconds. She looked around the airport and, in her mind’s eye, beyond, to her one-time home and her past. Bruce leaned down and picked up her helmet, turning it over in his hands. “Yeah, I think I do, Bubba,” she said taking the helmet and letting it dangle at her side. “At least for now. The world needs to grow up some before we can turn everything over to it, I think. Simon had the right idea about getting the food processors out first and free. End the hunger and then people have time to grow, as individuals and as groups. As long as you have to worry about your next meal, you can’t think much beyond that. Now, they can. All we have to do now is fight man’s basic greedy behavior. In the long run, I think that will be the hardest battle of all. If we can win that one, then the ‘us’ and ‘them’ can go away.”

  She smiled ruefully at her brother. “The last thing you needed was a speech from your big sister as she’s about to leave. Sorry ‘bout that. Look, I gotta get the show on the road. When you get ready, call the number in your top desk drawer and get your butt down to New Mexico.” She punched him on the shoulder, then hugged him, hard. “Now go. Love you, Bubba. Tell Mom and Pop to come visit. It’s about time they took a vacation anyway, isn’t it? Oh, and by the way, under the right circumstances, you could blow up half of this airport, no joke.” She watched the look of amazement cross his face as she waved the ladder driver back and stepped into the cockpit of the Mamba. As the platform moved slowly back away from the black ship, Bruce carefully walked down the steps, and when it stopped, he stepped off.

  Lucy slid the actuator into its slot and the systems came alive, one by one. She pulled the helmet down over her ears and lowered the canopy before she thumbed the comm panel. “Cincinnati Control, Terran Alliance One requests permission to take off. Destination, New Mexico.”

  “Terran Alliance One, Cincinnati Control,” a strange voice answered. “We advise caution. There is severe weather between here and New Mexico.”

  “Not a problem, Control. I can fly above anything out there. And what I choose not to fly over can’t hurt this ship.”

  “Terran Alliance One, what are your takeoff parameters?”

  “Just tell me when I have clear airspace and my takeoff parameter will be straight up, Control. I can be out of your airspace in a matter of seconds.”

  “I doubt that, but it will be interesting to watch, Alliance One. Wait for clearance.”

  While Lucy waited for Control to clear the airspace above her, she brought each system on-line and double checked it. The antigravs whined into life and the sleek ship lifted off the ground. She slid the craft out over the taxiway where she floated about thirty feet off the ground.

  Since she was still waiting for word from the control tower, she called Diana in New Mexico. “I’ll put you through to your office, ma’am,” the tech on duty said.

  Almost instantly, the circuit connected, and Diana’s voice came through her speakers. “It’s good to hear your voice, Lucy. Did your trip go well?”

  “As well as can be expected, I guess. How are things on base?”

  “Running like clockwork, really, thanks to Abernathy and his people. But we do have a situation that needs your immediate attention. Dan Baylor just brought us a packet by way of the McCaffrey. It’s marked urgent.”

  The tower chose that moment to give Lucy permission to launch, so she said, “Hold on, Diana.” Switching frequencies, she said, “Cincinnati Control, this is Terran Alliance One. You said you doubted my ability to be gone in seconds? Well, watch this.”

  “All eyes are on you, Alliance One. You are cleared for takeoff. Good luck and have a safe flight.”

  She poured more power to the generators and the ship rose another fifty feet. Tilting its nose toward the sky, she pulled the joystick back hard toward her and the ship almost literally vanished from sight. Keeping her speed down below the so
und barrier, she still went from zero to almost six hundred miles per hour in under half a second, vanishing from the radar screens of anyone who had an interest in her departure.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Somewhere deep inside the proto-organic gel that was the brain of the Galileo, a metaphorical switch was thrown, and Consciousness began to return to Kitty Hawke. That gel was most intimately connected to the occupant of the chamber in the medical bay through the sensors embedded in the pedestals under the table. It recognized a crewman in distress, and when its sensors confirmed that the crewman had a chance of survival, it began procedures that had been set down in its primal conditioning—first, insulate the body and then induce the body to repair itself.

  Wiped of all its secondary programming by the virus that had killed the original crew, its primary programming remained intact. Ship functions were unimpaired, as were medical functions and logic circuits, all of which took up a tiny fraction of the organic mass and had been shielded by layer after layer of protection. Now that its new occupants had removed the last trace of the virus, it searched the remainder of itself and found appallingly little about the bodies of its new owners. Following hints, it learned of a larger database concerning the human body on the planet below. It tied itself into Earth’s satellite system while all was in chaos and downloaded everything it could find on the human body.

  It began comparing what it “read” with what it sensed of the body in the regeneration chamber. When it got to the cellular level, the computer came as close to a feeling of joy as it was possible for it to get. Comparing the genetic coding in the database with material taken from the chamber, the computer began testing each of the billions of combinations it was possible to twist the human code into. It had long been known to science that reputable cases of spontaneous regeneration of an organ or even a limb existed, but the process had never been isolated. Until now.

  Time, it has been said, heals all wounds, and the greater the wounds, both physical and mental, the greater the time needed to heal. Time was all that was necessary for the computer to repair the genetic damage, and Kitty’s body was induced to grow nerve cells, skin cells, bone, and blood cells in the insular gel surrounding it in the chamber. But Time was going to have a harder job ahead when it came to healing the tortured psyche in the computer’s care. Each time the computer’s “attention” wandered even a bit in its quest to find a solution, the mind it was trying to heal fought to the surface, and each time that mind showed itself unready to return. Each time, the computer flooded the body with narcotics manufactured in its central core to calm the mind and ease the pain.

  Some ten months had passed since Kitty had received her wounds at Camp David, and under the watchful care of the computer, six of those months were all that were needed to bring the body back. Electrical stimulation of the muscles helped keep them in tone, blood was flushed of waste and toxins, and nutrients were added to keep the body alive, but the mind was beyond the scope of the immense computer. Hidden behind the barriers constructed to hold the now non-existent viral attacker at bay, the computer, realigned to serve its human element, had adopted a wait-and-see policy toward the occupant of its regeneration chamber for four additional months.

  The first clue that the “Kitty situation” had changed came at shift change when Lt. (jg) Heather Crawford walked into the sick bay carrying a stack of study material, preparing to take over the monotonous shift of watching the never-changing container holding the body of Kitty Hawke. Following procedure established months before, she checked the numerous dials and gauges attached to the outside of the semi-transparent material housing the body of one of the Founders of the Alliance.

  “Temperature’s up on the chamber, Colin. Did you get it documented?”

  Performing a classic double take, Lt. Colin Hampstead said, “Everything was normal when I came on. What is it now?”

  “Up six degrees from normal,” Lt Crawford noted. “Procedure says to notify the captain immediately.”

  “Don’t quote regs at me, Lieutenant,” Lt. Hampstead said. “Everything was normal when I came on. I’ve got it logged.”

  “Well, I’ve got the shift now, and I’m notifying Captain Morgan immediately,” Lt. Crawford said. She pulled her comm unit from her belt and pressed a button. “Lt Crawford to the captain,” she said. “Please contact me in sick bay immediately.”

  The voice that came back was not the captain’s. “This is the Exec. What’s the problem, Lieutenant?”

  “Sir,” she replied, “I just took over duty in the sick bay and found the chamber up six degrees. It’s risen another degree since then, and other vitals are up as well. Heartbeat is up, respiration is up, and alpha waves are up, and I don’t know what to do other than notify the captain as ordered.”

  “Good job, Lieutenant. I’ll notify the captain and the doctor immediately. Make sure you have everything documented. Someone’s going to want that information later. Exec out.”

  Ten minutes later, Mustafa Morgan, Captain of the Galileo, strode briskly into the sick bay, belying the fact that it was the middle of his off shift. “Status, Lieutenant,” he ordered as he entered the room.

  “Sir,” the nervous lieutenant said, “temperature is up to ninety-six degrees. It’s stayed constant at eighty-six since the beginning, and now this!”

  Dr. Jeffers entered the sick bay looking as if he’d been sleeping in his clothes, which to all intents and purposes, he had. He went straight to the chamber that was holding Kitty’s body and began studying the dials and readouts. “A full ten degrees up,” he noted. “Respiration is up from eight breaths per minute to fourteen, and her alpha waves show normal sleep patterns. Has Simon been notified?”

  The young lieutenant, unused to so much brass around, found a corner to make herself inconspicuous in as she listened attentively to every word. Recruited right after the Camp David affair, she’d never known Kitty and was understandably curious about the individual she’d heard so much about and been keeping watch over for the last few months.

  Simon, who’d been summoned by Mustafa as soon as heard the news, entered the room at that moment. For the first three weeks after his rescue, Simon had spent every waking moment in the sick bay, convinced that his presence would get through to her and cause her to awaken. Even the list of injuries didn’t deter him from his belief that his presence would have a positive effect on the woman with whom he’d shared the last seventeen years. Finally, Dr. Jeffers had convinced him that for his own benefit he should find something to occupy his time rather than sitting around pining and accomplishing nothing. “There are plenty of people out there who would benefit from your expertise,” he said to Simon. “When there’s a change, you’ll be notified, I promise you.”

  Wandering around the Galileo as it went about its task of building the fourth base, Simon spent considerable time feeling sorry for himself and Kitty, not really knowing who needed his sorrow the most. But he eventually began to take an interest in the engineering problems involved in building the more massive Taurus. Throwing himself into the project allowed him to hold his grief at bay, although it was always just under the surface and erupted at the most inopportune moments. All aboard came to recognize when his moods were most volatile and left him alone or just agreed with him and went ahead and did things the way the supervisors ordered, ignoring any suggestions he gave in times of stress.

  Now, notified as promised, he stood, shifting from foot to foot as the doctor moved from one sensor to another, making notes. Finished with that process, he turned to the two captains and announced, “It looks like something has decided it’s time to wake her up. I don’t have any more control over the process than you do, so I know just how helpless you both feel, Simon in particular.” An idea occurred to him. He turned to the junior duty officer and said, “Lt. Crawford, right?” At her affirmative nod, he ordered, “Go to the captain’s quarters and bring back a set of clothes. It doesn’t matter what as long as it covers
her warmly.” Dismissing her from his thoughts, he went back to his instruments. “Ninety-seven now, and respiration is up to fifteen per minute. I’d have to guess that something is about to happen, gentlemen.”

  As if in response to his words, the chamber began to clear a bit, showing the naked form of Kitty Hawke floating in a suspension that was suffused with glittering particulate matter of some indeterminate material. The young Lieutenant made haste to get out of the room on the errand she’d been set, leaving the three men alone with the slowly changing chamber.

  Mustafa, a bit nonplussed by seeing Kitty nude, asked, “Should I be somewhere else, Simon? I don’t see how I can be any help here.”

  Simon answered from a distant place. “I’m sure you’ve seen naked women before, Stafa, and I don’t think Kitty is going to be worried about it. I’d rather have you here if we need you. Let’s just make sure that no other sightseers get in, shall we?”

  Taking the suggestion as an order, Mustafa commed his security chief and ordered a full security detail to the sick bay to guard against that occurrence.

  The cloudiness continued to dissipate from the container and the three men could clearly see the hoses and other contraptions attached at various points to Kitty’s body. “Well, there won’t be any bedsores to contend with,” Dr. Jeffers said as he noted that Kitty’s body was supported about four inches off the table by the sparkling substance that surrounded her body.

  One by one, the various fastenings attached to her body began to separate themselves and retract into receptacles in the tabletop, leaving only a demi-mask over her nose and mouth and another covering her eyes. By this time, the three men could see the definite rise and fall of her chest, indicating that she was breathing more or less on her own. After an indeterminate time, the level of the fluid in the container began to recede, showing a marked line along the sides of the clear cover. Finally, Kitty’s body rested firmly on the tabletop, and the rest of the fluid was sucked out of the chamber. At this point, the connection over her nose and mouth detached itself, followed by the one covering her eyes, both tubes sliding into a hole in the flat bottom of the chamber.