The Vanity of Hope

by G W Langdon

  “Of course,” Choen said, closing the book. “Read all you want. A curious mind is a good start.” He peered down his short nose. “Do you think you are here because of your strong muscles? No. You are here because of what you can achieve with your mind.”

  “But you said thinking makes you a prisoner of the mind.”

  “Thinking driven by desire is exhausting and wastes your inner energy. The mind is your greatest gift; thoughts are a veil that covers the real gem of pure awareness.”

  “I cannot give up thinking. It’s in my blood.”

  Choen’s old face sagged. “And around you go—until you shed your mortal shell. And even then, back you’ll come, to live out the same delusion. And on it goes, round and round, like a wheel rolling along an endless path.”

  “I have no idea what you mean.”

  Choen placed the Book of Light back amongst the ancient tomes and walked to a row with a solitary book. Although smaller than the Book of Light, the black book weighed heavier on Choen as he returned, holding it slightly away from his body.

  He slid the book onto the table. “Ten years after the Book of Light, Goral finished the Book of Revelations, and then passed over.”

  “It looks newer than that.”

  “Few dare to read it.”

  “Oh, it’s that kind of book.”

  Choen opened the book more slowly than its size and weight warranted.

  “Towards the end of Goral’s life, he was haunted by terrible visions of doom and damnation. His writings foretold the coming of an absolute darkness that consumed the Light of Heaven and assailed the stars in the sky.”

  “The end times. You’re talking about Armageddon.”

  “Goral sensed a malignant darkness had settled upon the heart of Tilas. Some scholars have interpreted the writings to mean the darkness consumes all realms, above and below, but…”

  “What?”

  “This was written four thousand five hundred years ago, long before the arrival of… it doesn’t add up.”

  “The arrival of what?”

  “An evil from beyond the stars came upon us.” He hesitated. “I dare not mention its name within these walls, but it vanquished all Nature. It is the reason we fled Tilas.”

  “Those hieroglyphs are on the staff,” Tom said as Choen turned the page over.

  “It’s ancient Tilasian. The way our ancestors wrote in the old tongue.”

  “What are they?” he asked, holding the staff under the light to show the colored hieroglyphs.

  “The upside-down animals signify death.”

  “But every animal is upside down.”

  Choen closed the Book of Revelations. “The end of physical life at the snaking river.” He returned the book and resealed the Archives door.

  “Who is Reuzk?” he asked, as Choen came to the table. “A soldier?”

  Choen gave an unnerving stare. “How do you know that name?”

  “When I was in the courtyard.” He stifled a small cough to clear the dry chamber air from his throat. “Why does he wear a special uniform?”

  “You can ask him that yourself. I suspect you’ll be meeting General Reuzk all too soon.”

  Chapter 9

  A flurry of Federation activity descended upon the Great Swamp. Fleets of heavy-lifting Transporters brought in a small town’s worth of equipment, supplies, and personnel to establish and seed a bio-crystal salvage rig for the uplift of StarTripper.

  The adolescent rig sent three Tylinite cables down through the sludge to the ship resting on its starboard side two hundred and thirty-seven fathoms below the frozen surface. The cables coiled like giant pythons around the hull resting on the bottom and tied into elaborate non-slip knots.

  Powered by rising daytime temperatures, the rig’s composite crystals grew up and away from the greatest pull in the center. As the rig ratcheted downwards, the self-adjusting, tensioned flex produced an immense lifting capacity, limited only by the ability of the bioGen veins to feed the crystals ongoing growth—and how much weight the weakening icecap could withstand.

  The adult rig grew to half a mile in height and covered a square mile of ice, yet the pirate ship remained stuck on the bottom of the Swamp. Vital components in the rig stressed beyond their theoretical limits and fine cracks had appeared in the thinning ice.

  The rig alternated the workload of the lift back and forth, as a fisherman might reel in a big catch; winching hard against the clinging swamp mud during the bone-chilling nights then easing back during the warming days. The rig’s growth-optimizing algorithms diverted surplus daytime chemical and solar energy stored around the wide, flat fringe to the core of the rig at night for maximum lifting capacity.

  Reuzk paced the control room, having waited one hundred and forty-five days for this moment, he was in no mood for any setbacks.

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” Captain Qualiz said. “The stress-allocating algorithms transfer the heaviest loading to the thickest areas of the icecap for an optimal spread of the lift over the widest area. As a failSafe, if the rig senses the ice might collapse, then it will let go of the ship.”

  “No, it won’t,” Reuzk said. “I’ve ordered a few changes. Either the ship comes up or the rig goes down.”

  The rig shuddered and the stress meters fell back to green.

  “We’ve got it,” Captain Qualiz hollered.

  “I want that ship on dry land. Get it up, now.”

  The longer sunlight hours and rising daytime temperature turned the sun’s energy from an indispensable ally to an implacable foe. The surface melt-water froze each night, but returned earlier the next day, pooled deeper, and lasted a fraction longer. As StarTripper rose closer to the top, the salvage operation became a race between the melting ice degrading the rig’s lifting capacity and the diminished load requirements.

  After twelve days of rising strain, the StarTripper lift passed the tipping point of no failure and the crew let out a collective cheer, unable to contain their relief and delight at completing a salvage operation that would go down in legend as one of the most difficult ever attempted.

  “Start the interrogation of the ship,” Reuzk ordered.

  Hundreds of micro-probes dropped through the hole in the ice and followed the cables to StarTripper’s mangled hull.

  Qualiz punched in commands and brought up a lightMatrix.

  “The hull’s badly crushed by the weight of the mud,” he said, analyzing the first dataStreams from the probes. “The swamp’s penetrated most places.”

  Reuzk pointed into the medical bay “What’s that?”

  The probes squirmed through the sludge to the target coordinates and up-scaled their forward lenses from ultrasound to x-rays. The outline of a bioJacket emerged and then the floor brackets that had once held a bioPod.

  “Pan right,” Reuzk said, moving closer to the bioJacket outline.

  Next to the empty bay was a connected, fully intact bioPod.

  “The moment the ship reaches the surface I want that bioPod on a medical ship, inserted into a Jacket, and transferred straight to the Base.” For longer than he cared to remember, he smiled. “And the game begins.”

  #

  Amie’s Violet-rated interrogation of StarTripper isolated the ship entirely from the rest of the Base. This guaranteed there was no chance of cross-worlds contamination from pathogens escaping—or the possibility of any outside interference. Laser beams of brilliant greens, reds, yellows, and blues swept back and forth across the hull as Gamma and X-rays scanned the ship’s contorted walls and internal structure. Swarms of nanoDroids sniffed for chemical traces of toxins as a soup of bioGen organisms ate the last remnants of the invasive swamp sludge.

  “How long before I can go in?” Reuzk asked, watching from above behind the room’s violet-tinted security windows.

  “There’s no need to,” Amie said. “I’ve almost finished compiling a replica of the ship, as it was before it sank into the swamp.”

  “I want to
get a feel for things,” he said, reassured by the glowing green tails of the nanoDroids.

  “Don’t you find it troubling that Jbir landed his ship in a place of no return and willingly gave the creature that killed his crew a bioPod he would have cherished over almost anything else? And then blows his brains out? It’s neither logical nor something I’d infer from Jbir’s history.”

  “Does the ship’s AI have anything specific about the creature that attacked the ship?”

  “Her name is Iris. She knows what I do—nothing—although she mentioned it was a mythological creature linked with the Rilla monks of Tilas. Nothing verified. I’ll make inquiries,” she added, after a short pause.

  “No. Leave the monks to me. Where are the pirates?”

  “I have detected no life-threatening pathogens. I’ll cut you in.”

  Reuzk stepped through the opening cut in the bridge door, careful not to brush the hot edges. A team of three 4i data forensic androids followed him inside and fanned out around the bridge to ingest another layer of data.

  The reinforced walls and triple-barred doorway had kept the swamp out and the bridge appeared as it was in the last moments. Jbir, preserved by the near-zero temperature at the bottom of the swamp, lay slumped in his command chair with his arm draped over the blood-splattered armrest.

  Reuzk picked the pistol off the floor, shook a Neonite slug from the clip and compared it to the exit hole in Jbir’s incomplete skull. “I bet you never saw this mess coming; and neither did I.” Jbir was a consummate pirate and trusted nobody. Somewhere, he would have kept a backup in case events turned ugly.

  He turned the Vipr’s severed head over with his foot. It was here for a reason, perhaps as protection from Rulg, or maybe there was another Orb on the ship. Made sense. This piece of junk was full to the gunnels with Federation technology that shouldn’t be here. Faint screams echoed around the bridge followed by a terrible, seething silence.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “All auditory channels negative,” Amie replied.

  He shook his head, but the silent fear grew as if the Négus had left a presence in the room—the way an animal might mark its territory as a warning to intruders.

  “Three different weapons used against a single attacker,” Amie said, interpreting the 4i dataStreams. “The pirates died from massive force injuries. No blood indicators of the attacker detected.”

  “I can see that,” he replied. Should he tell Amie about the Négus? She must have suspicions. He’d raise his concerns in the report to Lauzen about withholding key information from the greatest mind they had.

  He stepped down to the lower floor and contemplated the broken pirates around the bridge, the open half-empty weapons locker, the splayed bullet indents, and laser scorch marks across the walls. They went down fighting. He paused over Rulg’s broken body.

  “Take Rulg’s body to floor thirty-six and put it into Storage.”

  “General, I’ve found a bioCode in the engine bay. It has an Indigo security rating.”

  He left the bridge for the engine bay—two steps at a time.

  “The bioCode is locked down,” Amie informed. “I’ve sent you Jbir’s fingerprints.”

  He pulled out a mimic patch of Jbir’s fingerprints scanned off the pirate by a 4i. He pressed it against the bioCode pad and waited for Amie to run through trillions of Personal Identification algorithms based on Jbir’s geneSet.

  Five seconds later, the bioPad turned green and the mimic shield shut down. What had appeared to be a safety plate over the sub-inductor feed for the ship’s gravity drive was actually the sealed door to a vault.

  “Someone has gone to a lot of trouble,” he said, as he placed the mimic patch on the bioCode pad on the vault and Amie overlaid a second PI algorithm. The vault door popped open. The Scout-class orb was everything he could have hoped for. He checked his emotions and clicked the door closed. “Have the vault taken to counterintelligence, carefully.”

  #

  Earth rotated in the middle of his viewing room. Different shades of blue highlighted the strongest ocean currents and their depths; reds for the dominant air currents, their height above land and velocity; and yellows for high and low air pressures of the largest weather systems. Geophysical attributes—chemical composition of the atmosphere, soils, and seas scrolled down a side lightScreen.

  “The pirates were very thorough,” Reuzk said, reaching into the lightMatrix.

  “The Scout-class Orb we recovered from StarTripper is ninety-eight percent full with enough dataString storage capacity to simulate planetary reality,” Amie informed him.

  “Earth looks almost the same as Tilas, including the single moon,” he said.

  “Earth has a twenty-three-degree tilt—one degree more than Tilas, but the same gravity—1.15 times that of Heyre; perfect for life to progress to full sentience.”

  “Show me the planet at the time of the pirates—plants and animals for now.”

  The deep forests and lush jungles could’ve been Tilas—the way it was. Flocks of birds filled the skies and herds of animals roamed the plains of Africa and the unnamed continents.

  “Overlay civilization.” He moved closer to the sparse road networks across Europe and ignored Amie’s offer of magnification.

  “There are four hundred and fifty-seven million sentient humans on Earth.”

  “On the whole planet?” he said, narrowing on the cities. “Sounds like paradise. How advanced are they?”

  “Level Two. No machines.”

  “What’re the star’s coordinates?”

  Earth shrunk to a small blue dot in the SI308 sector of the Milky Way.

  “The green and red dots are Gukre and Heyre. Blue to red is nine hundred and eighty-five light years.”

  “There has to be a mistake. It would be impossible for the pirates to travel to those coordinates and return to Heyre by now.”

  “I cannot reconcile how it’s possible to travel faster than the speed of light—a scientific impossibility. However, the dataStrings in the Orb are quantum encoded. There cannot be a mistake.”

  He paced across the floor. Faster than the speed of light would enable the Federation to crush Decay. “Prove there’s no mistake.”

  “Stars live and die like everything else,” Amie said, highlighting a star. “This star is 6523 light-years from Earth—7508 from here. The star exploded in 1054, Earth time, as recorded by astronomers in China. Here is an image of the exploded star taken by the pirates two hundred and ninety-three years later in 1347. Coincidentally, this was the year the pirates arrived to map Earth. Presently, we see the star, as it was, because the light from the explosion will not reach us for another two hundred and eighty years in 9281.”

  “That date sounds familiar?”

  “It’s the next full Gania event.”

  He stopped. Arriving starlight and Gania. Omens?

  “I have matched Heyre and Earth times,” Amie said. “It took StarTripper 1236 years to get from Heyre to Earth and the pirates were on earth for one hundred and fifty-two years from 1347 to 1499. Records show they left the Base 1647 years ago. Therefore, it took the pirates two hundred and fifty years to make the return trip from Earth. Currently, the year on Earth is 1751.”

  He resigned himself to the impossible. “Show me where the pirates captured the human.”

  The lightMatrix zoomed onto England, then Hampshire, Bentley, Alice Holt Forest, and finally Shipwrights Way.

  “The pirates spent considerable time selecting their champion, Thomas Ryder,” Amie said.

  “Thomas Ryder.” A great weight lifted from him. At last, he had a name to the mysterious visitor.

  “Analysis of the science officer’s projects show the pirate Rulg devised a final contest with a genetic ‘Champion’ to see if Thomas Ryder was the strongest candidate.”

  “Include full details of the contest in the 5D orb report.”

  “Of course. Thomas Ryder’s capabilities need independent assessme
nt, although Iris did assign him an extraordinary Self-Reliance Score.”

  “How long before I can interview Rulg?”

  “There’s no need for that. I’ve scanned StarTripper’s mission logs—both Orbs, and every dataString in Iris’ memories. A physical Rulg cannot tell you anything I don’t already know.”

  “Even so, how long?”

  “Eighty days to complete the bioGenics, and another ten days to imprint the neurals as they were at his last mind-restore point.”

  “The female, Sarra Chambers, we found in the bioPod.”

  “Yes?”

  “Her and Thomas Ryder were close?”

  “According to local custom, the gold ring on her finger indicates they were to be married.”

  “Assign Indigo priority to Thomas Ryder and Sarra Chambers. Run a condensing algorithm through the Orbs, Iris, the bioPod and every connected dataString you can find. I want everything you have as soon as it’s ready.”

  “You want the lightMatrix left up?”

  “No,” he said, only to be contrary. He hated how she read him so easily. She could analyze his body language right down to his tiniest face and eye movements and simultaneously perform a trillion other tasks running the Base and Gi LaMon. “Also, I need every dataString vector connected to StarTripper, as far back as Tilas. Something tells me the pirate ship has more secrets to tell. One last matter.” He rubbed his tired face. “Any progress on how Jbir got hold of our technology?”

  “No, but it’s very fortunate for us Jbir had it. Don’t you think?”

  Reuzk opened the dataPod and slid the side wall open into the lobby. He stared upstairs to his sleeping quarters and beyond. It would be dark soon and the sky would fill with alien stars and the one constellation Heyre shared with Tilas. Even in the sanctity of his own bed under the night sky, which had been the summer custom of the Panjali mountain tribes, it was impossible to escape the reality he was far from his true home. He turned down the stairs to the next level. At least he had a constellation, which was more than the Colarians. Although, they would be used to having a new night sky.