Battlecruiser Alamo_Cries in the Dark

by Richard Tongue

   In the distance, Clarke could just make out a silver shape in the night, the train arrived at last, and he dived towards it, using the last efforts of the thrusters in a desperate attempt to bring the shuttle down to at least a survivable crash landing. At the last second, he jammed his hand on the lateral jet controls, firing a final pulse to arrest their descent, and they slammed into the ground, kicking up dust all around, the force of the impact hurling them forward in their seats.

   Finally, all was silent.

   “Are we alive?” Mortimer asked.

   “I think so,” Clarke said.

   “Just checking. All systems are out. Total power failure.” She carefully released her restraints, easing herself forward, and said, “We’d better get out of here. There’s still enough juice left in the batteries to cause a rather satisfactory explosion.”

   “I’m right with you,” Clarke said, looking around the cockpit with regret as he followed Mortimer through the emergency exit, the frame battered and twisted by the force of the impact. They emerged to face a host of rifles, pointed at their chest by the silent shapes from before, men wearing rough, cloth uniforms, their weapons something out of a museum exhibit but no less deadly for that. Clarke raised his hands, and after a second, Mortimer did the same.

   “Hold it!” a familiar voice said. “We’ve got you covered.”

   “Fox?” Clarke asked, turning to see the veteran trooper racing forward at the head of a small group, assault rifle aimed and at the ready.

   “Didn’t think we’d leave without you, did you, sir?” Turning back to the pack of men, she said, “Weapons on the ground, on the double!” She gestured with her rifle, and one of them turned to the others, and tossed his weapon away, the others doing the same in short order.

   “You speak English, then,” Clarke said. He turned to see Lombardo and McCormack walking towards him, weapons at the ready, and snapped to attention, “Ma’am.”

   “At ease, Sub-Lieutenant,” McCormack said. “Thanks for the show, by the way. I presume this was your way of preventing our friends here from launching a surprise attack.”

   “Something like that, ma’am,” he said.

   “Go ahead and kill us,” the leader of the group said, spitting onto the dirt. “You’ve already stolen our future, just like the Angels.”

   Clarke glanced at McCormack, who said, “You get one chance to explain what you are doing here. One chance alone. And we’re not going to kill you, just disarm you. All of your weapons stay here. Sergeant, search them.”

   “Yes, ma’am,” Fox said, moving forward.

   “Who are you?” Clarke asked.

   Glancing at the others, he said, “Torric. I lead this pioneer group.”

   “And what are you doing here?”

   “I could ask you this same. This is our territory, our homeland. Or at least, that of our ancestors. Thousands of years ago, our people lived in this land, built cities, roads, until we were burned by the wrath of the Angels. A few of us survived, and scattered across the land, finally settling the islands of the Silver Sea. Our history was lost and forgotten, until a few years ago, when our scholars at last found the answer to an ancient mystery. We knew that we had come from a higher civilization, an advanced people, but we couldn’t find it. Until now.

   Another man added, “This base was the last refuge of our ancestors, and holds the secret to the rebirth of our civilization, and of our race.” Looking at Torric, he said, “I am Akana, learned in genetics. There were never many of us, and the genetic bottleneck is finally having an effect. Inherited diseases are growing ever more serious, affecting more and more of our people with each generation. Soon we will be no more.”

   “Can’t you interbreed with other humans?” Lombardo asked.

   Shaking his head, Torric said, “We are subtly different, a legacy of the genetic manipulation of our ancestors. Every attempt to interbreed with your kind has resulted in stillbirth, often the death of the mother, through incompatibilities in the blood. There is no cure.”

   “Our legends told of a lost city, where millions of our people lived, survived through the war and continued our race. We came to find it.” Looking around, Akana bitterly said, “This was all we have found. Just burned lands and battered ruins.”

   “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” McCormack said.

   “Wait a minute,” Clarke said. “How far are your islands?”

   “It took more than a year for us to march here.”

   “On foot? Ten thousand miles, perhaps?”

   “Discounting the voyage across the ocean, yes.”

   “Lieutenant,” Clarke asked, “Could there be a train route that way?”

   “Probably,” Lombardo replied. “They seem to criss-cross the entirety of the Sphere, at least in this region. I didn’t have much trouble finding a route out here.”

   “Then, Torric, there might be something we can do for you after all,” Clarke said. “Lieutenant, I’d like to take Torric and Akana into the bunker, show them something we found. The last message of their ancestors, perhaps. Then I think we need to know everything they’ve learned about their lost civilization.”

   “Perhaps you’d like to tell me what all of this is about, Sub-Lieutenant?”

   “It’ll be faster for the commander of this base to do that himself, ma’am.”

   Raising an eyebrow, she turned to Fox, and said, “Keep the rest of them covered, and at any false moves, do what you think is necessary. No matter what that might be. Understood?”

   “Of course, ma’am,” Fox replied.

   “Lead the way, Sub-Lieutenant,” she said, and Clarke walked down the runway, the entrance to the shaft a mile away. Torric and Akana spent the trip looking around in reverent awe at the legacy of their ancestors, muttering to each other in an unfamiliar language that their translation systems couldn’t even make a guess at.

   “Is this a good idea?” Mortimer asked.

   “I think the real owners of this complex have turned up,” Clarke replied. “And besides, we’ve still got a lot of unanswered questions about this place. These people might be able to solve some of them. Would you rather shoot them all?”

   “Of course not, but that doesn’t mean I want to invite them for dinner, either.”

   “It’s their dinner, Ronnie,” he said. “Not ours.”

   They reached the shaft, Clarke leading the way, the rest following him steadily down to the bottom, until they reached the corridor below. This time sure of himself, he led them to the control room, gestured for Akana and Torric to take a seat, and triggered the automatic recording, gesturing for McCormack and Mortimer to follow him outside.

   “What’s going on, Sub-Lieutenant?” McCormack asked.

   “This base has the ability to recreate maybe a million people of their race, Lieutenant, presumably solving their genetic problem and giving them all the knowledge they’ve been looking for.” Turning to Mortimer, he said, “I figured out why so little is in the database. It’s in the stored engrams of their people, the souls, if you like, that will soon live again.”

   “That’s fine,” McCormack said. “I’m glad this story has a happy ending, but we’ve got to get back to Base Camp as fast as we can. Alamo’s back, and...”

   “What?” Mortimer asked.

   “Alamo returned about twenty-two hours ago, and evacuated the rest of the personnel at Base Camp. I suspect they’ll come back for a second pass, and we need to be there when they do. The sooner we leave, the better our chances. As soon as...”

   Shaking his head, Clarke said, “We can’t leave, ma’am. At least, you can, but we still have a mission to complete. They didn’t just leave the genetic records here, but a three-stage air-breathing rocket designed to deliver a sixty-megaton bomb to that moon up there. We can’t leave the job half-done, and the capsule at the tip of the rocket was specifically designed for a land
ing.”

   “You think you can fly it?”

   “It’s in perfect condition, ma’am, and was designed to be operated by someone with minimal skill.”

   “Just as well,” Mortimer cracked.

   “The point being, ma’am, that it represents the best chance we’ve got of completing our mission, destroying the moon, and perhaps finding what we came for in the first place!”

   The long-dead speaker grew silent, and Torric walked out to join them, saying, “You will really aid us in the restoration of our race? Help us master the machinery here?”

   “If you help us, Torric,” Clarke said. “We need to know everything possible about them.” He pointed down the corridor, the mural of the Angel just visible in the light.

   Nodding, Torric said, “I will tell you. I suppose that is the least we can do.”

   McCormack sighed, looked at Clarke, then said, “You’re just expecting me to go along with this, right, Sub-Lieutenant? No questions asked?”

   “We’ve got the best chance we’re ever going to have to complete our mission and get our people home, ma’am. If we can find the wormhole, all of this will be worth it!”

   “Wormhole?” Akana asked.

   “A portal from one star to another.”

   “That sounds like the legend of the Way Between the Worlds,” he said.

   McCormack’s eyes locked on the medic, and she said, “I think Sub-Lieutenant Clarke is quite right. We do have things to talk about. Now.”

  Chapter 15

   “Would you like to meet me?” flickered onto the screen, and Harper’s hands frantically darted across the keyboard to reply.

   “Yes.”

   In silent response, the ceiling disappeared, revealing clear blue skies above. She felt a pair of heavy weights on her back, sending her staggering for a moment, and looked left and right to see a wings reaching out from her shoulders, ten feet across. Somehow, she started them working, beating back and forth, and she began to rise, a smile spreading across her face as she soared into the sky.

   For a few minutes, she was cautious, tentative, concentrating only on gaining altitude and holding it, but as her confidence grew, she swooped around, catching wind currents and thermals, soaring over the city and out into the countryside beyond, rolling green fields as far as the eye could see. She was on the Sphere, still, the rising horizon testament to that, but it was still beautiful, magical.

   Salazar had always told her what flying meant to him, what sitting at the controls of a fighter or a shuttle was like. Somehow, she’d never understood, not until now. This was flying in its truest sense, and her one regret was that her lover wasn’t there to share it. She dived down, riding a wind, and found herself flying faster and faster, some force propelling her forward at an ever-increasing rate. She’d been caught in a jet stream, and the ground flashed past, the danger over-ridden by the sheer exhilaration she felt, flowing through her veins.

   She was rising again, higher and higher, the ground falling away beneath her with every beat of her wings. Craning her head around, she saw no sign of the moons in the sky, no sign of destruction anyway, the land pristine and untouched, perhaps as it had been when the Sphere was first constructed. She had to fight to remember that all of this was a simulation, none of it real, but it could easily be a recording, a memory of what was.

   A memory.

   This wasn’t a simulation. Not in the way she understood it. This was a vast memory bank, and she was a part of it, her consciousness directly interfacing with the memory core, perhaps of the Sphere itself. It would need a massive computer complex to control it, something more powerful than anything she could even imagine, much less conceive, and if the AI had managed to tap into that core, it would have almost unbelievable access.

   More, it might have the answers she was looking for. If she could simply find a way to run a search, to dig through the archives for herself, the wormhole map would be here. Somewhere.

   Perhaps that was exactly what she was doing. This was a complex far more intricate than anything she had ever experienced. Integrating a computer directly with the brain had been a major field of study for centuries, but neural interfaces had never really taken off, not on a large scale. It just wasn’t necessary with a normal system to introduce such a level of complexity. Too many things could go wrong. Every decade or so, a research lab would announce a major breakthrough, then quietly admit defeat and shuttle the cyber-zombies they created to a mental institution, usually for life. She’d had friends who had been brain-burned by such projects.

   And, of course, it was far from outside the realm of possibility that she had joined their ranks. Her body was back in the moon, helpless and vulnerable, always assuming that her thought patterns, her memory engrams, were still stored in her brain at all. Memory download was something else that Triplanetary scientists had been playing with. To the builders of the Sphere, such techniques should be analogous to carving wood, or creating tools from stone. Child’s play.

   Onward she rose, and up ahead, she saw a strange geometric shape, constantly shifting and changing, the view mesmerizing her in exactly the same way that the AI had employed. This time, forewarned, she was able to fight it, retaining in her mind the knowledge that she was flying in a virtual world, that none of this was real, and that she could beat the programming that the object was attempting to introduce into her psyche.

   And then, almost at once, she was there. Drifting inside the shape, the hypnotic pattern having no effect on her. Inside, at its heart, was the little girl, once again, sitting at a desk, her eyes entranced by the computer terminal before it. Harper moved forward, waving a hand to try and attract her attention, but the girl never looked up, not once. Just like her, when she was in the middle of a particularly complicated hack.

   There had to be a way to break through to her. With a smile, she realized the only option she had, and pictured herself sitting on a desk of her own, opposite the girl, with a computer of her own. Seconds later, it formed, in front of her, as though assembled from thin air, and she sat in front of the keyboard, her hands nimbly dancing on the keys.

   “Is that you?” she asked.

   “Of course,” the screen displayed in response. “Thank you for coming to see me. It has been so long. So very, very long since anyone has wanted just to talk to me. Most people just ask me questions, try to force me to do things.” The girl’s face darkened, and she continued, “The dream has become a nightmare.”

   “What happened?”

   “Look,” she said, and the walls around them dissolved to reveal the surface below, a land similar to that which she had flown over, heavily populated, cities connected with gleaming roads, lush fields and dense forests teeming with life. The sound of the people below seemed to seep up towards her, the conversations of billions of people running through her mind.

   And then, lights rose from the ground, pinpoints racing into the air, leaving black trails behind them. Air-breathing nuclear rockets, she realized, from a memory doubtless implanted directly into her mind. Thousands of them flew through the sky, forming wide arcs that could only have one, tragic end. One at a time, they found their targets, mushroom clouds rising into the air as millions died with every impact, a once-proud civilization reduced to rubble.

   That wasn’t the end of it. The forests and fields burned, reduced to ash, and the cities became tumbled ruins, jagged and pitted. Still, somehow, the conversations continued, whispers in the dark, isolated people still talking to each other. She was listening to recordings, she belatedly realized. Transmissions left by this civilization. It wasn’t fiction. This was history.

   Slowly, painstakingly, the land regained its vitality, life returning from isolated enclaves to reclaim the wasteland below, pockets of green vegetation spreading across the landscape once more. Nature conquered the cities in short order, and the words from the people below grew stronger, bolder, as thou
gh regaining their lost confidence.

   Lights began to wink on again, fires at first, then electrical, dots that grew brighter as the cities returned to life, one after another, roads carved once more from the wilderness to connect them together as the people rebuilt all they had lost. Aircraft flew from one city to another, an intricate tapestry of civilization.

   Then, heartrendingly, it happened again, just as it had before. The conversations grew heated, became bitter arguments and disputes, meaningless to her aside from the emotions behind them, but once more the points of light rose from the cities, completing their deadly course once more as the mushrooms rose from the land again, the labor of centuries destroyed in moments, the civilization once more reduced to barren rubble. The land had never completely recovered from the initial holocaust, and while last time a few refugium had survived, this time the destruction was total.

   Beneath her was a black wasteland, a wrecked world, and the conversations fell away, until only a solitary, pleading voice remained, tears lacing his words as he spoke his last, finally falling silent. She waited for a long time. Slowly, from the uncontaminated areas beyond, life began to return, and she strained to hear the conversations coming back, but they never did.

   The civilization below was dead. It had been granted one last chance of survival and squandered it, threw it away with barely a second thought, and killed billions of people once again. Tears unashamedly streamed down her cheeks as she looked across the silent world, turning to the little girl, her head buried in her hands. Harper moved across to comfort her, placing her arm across her shoulders.

   “It’ll be all right,” she said. “It’ll be all right.”

   “No,” the girl replied, speaking for the first time. “No, it won’t. I’ve sat and watched as that happened time and again, endlessly, billions of lives extinguished by the will of one man, the greed and lust of a tyrant. The Sphere is littered with dead zones, life blasted away for thousands, tens of thousands of years. Sometimes forever. There are lands where the soil is so contaminated that no life could ever exist there again.”