Jager straightened and looked around. “I’m afraid there has been an incident. You and your younger clones were killed during an uprising by the local Dianian population. Fortunately, we found an escaped clone living in Atlas and have transferred your most recent backup into her. She has a lung implant, so you will not be able to speak until we can fit you with a synthesizer. There is a change of clothes for you on the chair. We launch in twenty- five minutes. We will take you up to the Golden Hind where you will be safe while deal with the civil unrest. We hope you will be able to return to your work shortly.”
Jager delivered the news as if giving instructions to somebody changing a light bulb. Ray frowned at Jager as if trying to figure out what he was saying. She felt vague and groggy and didn’t have to play act very hard to give the impression of confusion. She worked her mouth as if trying to speak and lifted a hand to touch her throat. She signaled to Jager for a pen and paper, but he ignored her, turning instead to the guards.
” She has five minutes, make sure she is ready.”
The guard moved over to the table and held out a hand for Ray to take hold of. She sat up and attempted to adopt an expression of abject resignation. Instead she was beginning to feel energized. This could work. All she needed now was for Jager and his crew to take off towards the Golden Hind.
She considered for a second making a run for it at the shuttle port but decided that Jager would probably stay and try to recapture Astrid if he needed her that badly.
And why would Astrid run? She was supposed to be on their side. She realized that Jager was probably expecting her to be grief stricken for her sister clones, so she put her face in her hands for a while and let her shoulders shake.
Eventually, she let the guards lever her up from the bed to a stand and help her with getting herself dressed in the CDSE jump suit, all the time attempting to feign grief.
They manhandled her out the door and into a waiting transport filled with CDSE soldiers. She was last on and the vehicle began to bump along the trail heading to the shuttle port.
Ahead of them Ray could see a line of five similar vehicles making their way to the port. The last wave of troops to evacuate before they unleashed the apocalypse. Raining gas down in a hail on Atlas and the surrounds.
Ray guessed that Jager was also planning on gassing her sister clones after the explanation he had delivered thinking she was Astrid. Astrid was likely at the bottom of the lake already. Some of the troops around her were sporting injuries and looked exhausted. Ray figured they were survivors of the attack on Pham’s unit in the forest. Ray hoped he had survived.
They broke through the trees a short while later into the bright sunlight and open skies of the shuttle port. Nervously Ray looked at the sky. A clear sky could ruin everything now. If the net Nettle had moved over the shuttle-port was the counterpart of an Earth net that was still operational, then they might be able to see Earth’s distant phantom in the sky above. This would clue Jager into Ray’s deception. High wispy clouds, however, were all that Ray saw. High enough, Ray hoped, that Jager’s shuttle would not have time to decelerate and turn.
Three large shuttles stood waiting on launch pads. The smaller ones that CDSE had used for troop movements were parked off to the side. Some were sporting obvious battle damage from recent conflict. At the far shuttle Ray could see soldiers herding a line of children up the on-ramp. They were talking animatedly and jiggling excitedly.
Ray’s stomach sank. The life2 children. She had assumed that they had been taken with the rest of the Life2s. She had forgotten about the children. Of course, Jager would save them. They were worth too much. She couldn’t kill them.
Jager and his CDSE soldiers were one thing but the children were innocent. Ray tried to think. If Jager’s shuttle took off first, then the others would get some warning. Hopefully they would be able to stop and turn back in time.
Ray could see that the children were almost loaded and their CDSE guards were filing in after them. Thinking fast Ray leapt out of the transport and ran towards the children’s’ shuttle. Shouts and the sound of pounding boots smacking across the tarmac resonated from behind her. As she ran she started gesticulating wildly at the children’s’ shuttle.
She spun and looked for Jager. She saw him standing off to the side watching the pursuit. She pointed forcefully at the shuttle and indicated her head. With two hands she mimed her head exploding. The soldiers caught her a hundred feet short of the shuttle just as the on-ramp rumbled shut. Jager approached however looking almost concerned.
“Hold that shuttle,” He announced to a subordinate. The man relayed the instruction through a handheld communicator. Jager summoned a pen and paper.
“What is it?” he demanded and thrust the pen and paper at Ray. Ray snatched them and wrote.
“Juvenile clone brain. G sensitive. No more than three Gs.” She thrust the paper at Jager and looked at him imploring. He read carefully and looked at her speculatively. Eventually he shrugged.
“Relay instructions to the shuttle pilot,” he directed at the same soldier. “Soft burn. Max 3 Gs.”
“Yes Sir,” the crewman responded and relayed the instructions hurriedly, clearly keen to make it to his own shuttle. If he didn’t know exactly what was about to happen he was certainly smart enough to know he didn’t want to be around to find out.
The first shuttles take off jets whined into action, the thrusters roared, and the shuttle’s bulk lifted vertically of the ground. The fat bellied craft pirouetted gracefully, trees thrashing, and glided upwards and away from the shuttle port. The second shuttle now fully loaded mimicked the first as Ray was bundled into the final craft.
Ray strapped in and waited, willing the pilots to complete their final checks quickly. They needed to catch and overtake the first shuttle to give the children a chance. As the roaring jets lifted them clear of Diana, Ray clutched her armrest. They spun and glided out over the forest gaining elevation.
After what felt like an eternity the shuttle tilted up, tipping the passengers back into their memory gel seats. Ray looked forward along the length of the craft and could see through the small pilot’s window as the azimuth of the craft tilted up. The boost flares of the other shuttles were visible for a second through the window. One was well ahead of the other and Ray could not tell if the lower one was gaining on it or not.
The jolt of the booster firing shook the craft and Ray dug her fingers deeper into the armrest. Nothing in her life had prepared her for the crushing, overwhelming force of a hard burn in an extra-planetary shuttle. She gritted her teeth as the Gs built. The memory gel yielded to the increasing pressure as the Gs doubled, tripled and quadrupled her body weight.
A crease in her jumpsuit began to dig painfully into her back and she felt her skin stretching on her face. Still the craft accelerated. The roaring rockets hurling the shuttle bulk towards space. She had no way to know what was happening outside. Whether they had any chance of over taking the children. Whether she had given them enough time. The Gs were crushing Ray so hard now that black spots threatened to obscure her vision. She felt like she could no longer move at all. The skin on her forearms stretched against the deep indents they were making in the gel armrests.
Finally, the rockets were attenuated and the passengers all emerged from their gel seats as their bodies matched the now constant speed of the craft. Ray looked around wildly seeing only calm expressions as the CDSE soldiers and crew loosened their harnesses a little and settled in for the flight. A pilot turned to look at Jager and reported.
“Three minutes of burn at this velocity Sir and we will be clear. Twenty minutes until we maneuver for spiral orbit. One hour and five until we dock with Golden Hind Sir.”
Jager nodded in his chair looking straight ahead. Ray craned her neck to see if she could catch a glimpse of the console. She tried to see if any of the displays gave intelligible information on the relative positions of the three shuttles. Nothing that she saw helped at all.
> She considered trying to get Jager’s attention. Maybe she had been too late. From where she sat she would be lucky to get his attention in any case. Jager had his eyes closed now and appeared to be resting. Ray bit her lip and tears started to bead in the corners. There was nothing she could do but hope. Ray tried to shut the image of the children out of her mind. It couldn’t happen. Life couldn’t be that unfair.
The co-pilot turned and reported to Jager,
“Sir, lead shuttle is reporting debris. Solid but less than a cubic meter in size. She intends to punch through.”
Jager nodded vaguely.
Ray felt the hair on her neck ripple erect. Which one was the lead shuttle? She felt herself shifting forward as the pull of the planet fell behind them and the weightlessness of space began to take over. Around her she saw faces change as the effects of gravity peeled away. Cheeks lifted, and crow’s feet relaxed. Jager’s sharp implacable profile didn’t change at all. Hard skin stretched over bone. She felt a wave of nausea as her brain tried to find up and down. There were no longer any cues. Her back didn’t press into the seat any more but neither did any part of her.
The co-pilot turned again to Jager.
“Sir, we have an anomaly. We have lost voice comms with lead shuttle and there is something… odd.”
Jager’s eyes snapped open.
“What.”
“Well…my scan shows… “
“Your scan shows what pilot?”
“…My scan shows that she has lost mass sir…Quite a lot of mass.”
Jager’s teeth gritted into a rictus of rage. He turned to look directly at Ray. Unable to help herself she returned Jager’s fury with a feral grin. Realization mixed with murderous rage burned in his eyes.
“Reverse course,” Jager ordered through his teeth.
“Pardon sir?” the pilot turned to make sure Jager was serious.
“Turn this fucking tub around, full burn… And inform trail vessel.”
Ray’s elation bubbled to the surface. Trail vessel. There was a ship behind them. They had a chance. The pilot babbled into his helmet microphone and engaged the orbital jets. The slight pull of changing angular momentum shifted the passengers in their seats. Through the front screens, the distant surface of Diana rotated into view as the craft maneuvered to decelerate.
The faces around her now look bewildered or scared. Jager still stared at Ray his face blotched and red, teeth gritted so hard Ray felt she could hear them cracking.
“If we get out of this you bitch, I’m going to rip that putrid lung implant out of your chest with my bare hand and watch you suffocate.”
As the last word reached her ears the booster slammed on, this time slowing the shuttle before it plummeted into the net.
The Gs built faster and harder this time. Ray tried to relax, letting the mounting pressure push her back into the embrace of the gel seat. Around her she could see realization dawning on the faces of the other soldiers.
This was not supposed to happen. All craft knew the Net maps. Nobody went into space unless they had a clear path. Jager’s neck was pressing into his gel seat now. The Gs mounting at an increasing rate. Ray held his gaze with her own. Trying to let it all go.
Jager’s expression began to change. A flicker of panic passed over his eyes. He was still looking at Ray around the edge of his seat, his right arm folded around the chair back and his left pinned underneath him. Ray could see the pressure on his neck building. Jager tried to roll back into his seat but the massive force of their deceleration had him pinned. He could pull his right arm back against the Gs but his strength failed before he could tuck it under and use it to roll himself.
His eyes were now livid with pain and his face so distorted that his expression looked inhuman. The combination of his epic struggle and the blood rushing into his face suddenly flooded an eyeball with red as the vessels burst.
Outside the craft, the satanic inferno of the booster reached out a tongue of plasma into the void of space. The very tip of the inferno touched the edge of a net where a fold had formed, pushing a curtain of mesh hundreds of meters towards Diana’s atmosphere.
The kiss of the burner had just enough energy to evaporate the silky thread that bound a singularity within it. The singularity froze in position. No longer able to move with slow undulations of the net. An impossible immovable speck, joined across the far reaches of space to its counterpart, still suspended miles above the surface of Earth. Immovable because it wasn’t really there. As far as the universe was concerned, there was no difference between the two ends of the HERB and thus it sat in space as the flame of the booster rocket, struggling to slow the vessel, passed over it.
Somewhere over Earth a small burst of white hot plasma emanated from a net evaporating the wispy spider silk that held it in place. The ship slid further until the singularity touched the ceramic hull. Oxides of aluminum and structures for spreading heat around the surface of the ship. As far as the atoms in the hull were concerned they did not move at all. Bonds to their neighbors were left dangling as their counterparts were whisked light years away.
A slim sparkle, as thin as a thought, emanated over Earth as a thin sliver of the ship’s hull was transported. The vessel was no longer intact. A small, perfect, sub-millimeter hole reached from the cold of space into the warm interior.
Atmosphere from inside rushed to fill the vacancy, pouring through the hole into the furnace of the boost. Still the booster roared, the pilot unaware and struggling to slow the shuttle in time.
The ship slid further. More singularities were released and froze. Space time icicles fracturing the rolling gravity wells and unending plains of deep space. The ship slid through them all. Fabric and gel from the seats was teleported across the void. More holes formed in the hull.
Ray watched as the first singularity passed into the white of Jager’s eye. Vitreous erupted from the hole in his sclera, pushed by the G forced and accelerated toward the back of the aircraft. The singularity passed through the bone of his orbit and into his brain. It carved a neat hole through his cortex, severing neurons, blood vessels, and connective tissue.
Blood pumping through his brain followed the newly made track, traveling against the changing speed of the ship. It mixed with the vitreous as it erupted from Jager’s eye. A fine mist of pink in the air. Ray felt a sting in her arm as a hole appeared just above her wrist. She could barely roll her eyes down to see the small pink dot. The blood from her arms traveled back into the perfect hole in the gel seat and gleefully charged through the tiny tunnel towards the back of the craft and space.
Ray manage to look back up in time to see Jager’s last effort give out as his neck snapped under the crushing force. His head smashed against the side of the seat caught at an impossible angle. His neck stretched longer without the bone to hold it but the skin did not rip.
Blood now formed a mask in front of his face emanating from a fretwork of tiny holes. She could see the edge of the face of the soldier behind Jager now, peppered with tiny dots and the back of his chair was turning rapidly pink. A flash of white sparked in Ray’s eye followed by a black speck in her peripheral vision.
The booster sputtered once and died as the last of the fuel combusted and spat its life into the void. Too late to turn around and not enough fuel. The shuttle coasted through the net. The freed singularities gliding through steel, polymer, flesh and bone. The shock of the lost deceleration shuddered through the vessel and the fine mist of blood now matched the speed of the ship. More blood oozed from thousands of tiny wounds under the pressure of the still pumping hearts.
No longer forced by G forces, it clung to the skin or soaked into clothes and seats. The air rushed out of the cabin through millions of tiny holes and the ships fluids, lubricants coolants and water released into the cabin or out into space. The whole event passed in a few seconds, but Ray felt like she saw it all. Nobody had time to look at one another or to try and get out or even scream. They were simply impaled on fila
mentous razors in time. Shredded across light years. Their remains either freezing slowly in a lifeless hulk floating dark in the void or raining softly down over the fields and forests and cities of Earth.
The dark ship spun slowly as it inched away from Proxima Centauri. Every few hours the window of the shuttle rotated to face the sun and a beam of light illuminated the cabin. Glinting off perfect rubies, floating frozen around the cabin in countless numbers. Glassy red human statues sparkled in the light, floating in their restraints with arms suspended in front. Like a snapshot of a sunset garden party caught in the rain.
CHAPTER 36
Slowly, the population of Diana emerged from their hiding places or from the barracks they held been held prisoner in. The remnants of Pham’s unit staggered out from the forest. Tired and wounded. Many had died but many more lived.
Together, they watched one of the CDSE shuttles return and were astonished to see a column of identical pairs of children emerge. Holding hands under the care of their CDSE guard, casting frightened glances at the gawking crowds.
Jonah, Nettle and Sparks were recovered from Town Hall. Alive but critically unwell. Ray was nowhere to be found. Simply vanished like the rest of the CDSE personnel.
In the weeks that followed, the CDSE population aboard the Golden Hind and other interstellar craft contacted Town Hall. With the Life2 inhabitants on board, they had insufficient hypersleep pods to return to Earth. Fearing that Pfeffer would simply blast them into space, the Dianians permitted any who wished to remain on Diana to shuttle down through the nets under their control.
Many chose to stay. Most of the Life2s, who were technically illegal on Earth, but others also. Prudence and her engineer among them.
Months later, after Pfeffer and the CDSE ships had left. Three, identical red headed women emerged from the forest in a CDSE transport. One of the women lay in the back. Wide eyes staring at nothing. Catatonic since the overthrow of Jager and CDSE.
The other two pleaded with the Dianians to save the unborn and newly born children who were beginning to starve in the CDSE Darklands cloning center.
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