Broken Wing: A million deaths were not enough for Cassandra!

by Konig, Artor

  As the last instances passed, it became apparent that the two could not see each other; for the two signals came closer and closer together without the tangible pyrotechnic display that would indicate a fire-fight, until there was only one. That signal went serenely on its way; towards Earth. Carefully it crept around the back of speeding Jupiter; behind it a tiny sun flashed for a short while on the screen.

  As Number Three hurtled down through the void, her jets pushing her forward mightily, I scanned the signals carefully to see if I could identify the craft that had survived the encounter. There was no way that I could, not at the distance I was at, even if the signals had not drawn back in distortion as I for the second time approached light speed. I knew very well that Wren Number One could have turned on her tail and trotted back to have a look at Jupiter; maybe even the Doctor could have decided to return home and tell me all about it; I could not tell from where I was if he had not done so, or if he had in fact not made it through the encounter. Even if the craft on the monitor did carry on towards Earth, that didn’t mean it was the enemy or that it wasn’t. The only way I could find out for sure was by getting within clear targeting range and having a look at the craft.

  Resolute now, I pushed the throttle forward, feeling once again the fuzzy, aching pressure as the airspeed indicator once more crossed the ninety-eight percent of C point of no return. I reversed the throttle as before but kept the stick level. I watched as the needles crept up again, well into the danger area for both the drive and jets, the heat of transition mounting. The moulded surface of the windscreens seemed to be liquid, the blaring reactor alarm carrying no significance. I focussed my eyes on the orb of Jupiter, little more than a bright star before me.

  The stars glazed, their colours mounting swiftly into the fiery brightness, the diamond blue that seared even as it wasn’t really seen. With a fierce, gusting fury, they streamed towards me, pouring their liquid fire over my soul as everything coalesced into a single torch of pain. The streams of fire abruptly seemed to freeze as the huge golden orb leaped through the void to stand beside me, its majesty poignant as it filled the whole sky to my left and above me. Even as I fixed my perceptions onto it through the haze of blue fire and pain, it leaped away again, but more slowly, more majestically than before.

  I pulled the stick back, skimming the Wren just above the surface of Ganymede, pitted and ugly for all the legends thought otherwise. Around the surface of that huge moon I sped, my eyes on the war-system even as the reactor alarm muted itself. But this time the inertialess drive alarm wouldn’t quiet itself, shrilling its coded alarm warning of a fusion of parts or damage to its core. I cut down the power to the drive as far as I could but there was no way I could turn it off; not at eighty percent of C with the retro-thrust at its maximum.

  The war system alarm went off, its tone telling of absolute proximity, its lasers arming and focussing even as I looked up.

  The ship was monstrous, huge, miles long and longer, lumbering through the void less than four hundred miles away. It was damaged, flaming patches of destruction distorting the nose cone and its upper surfaces. I allowed a single instant for the Wren to record its appearance before I threw every last erg of might she had to spare right into the heart of that huge ship’s reactor. Then the Wren sped on, still hugging the surface of Ganymede, swiftly passing into her shadow as the frantic ship of war exploded behind me. I used the cone of Ganymede’s shadow to travel down as pillars of fire and destruction exploded into ever higher palls of flame. With her speed reduced to forty percent of C, I took her out of the fireball range, pointing her nose up at the empty void.

  With the sky clear for as far as the sensors could perceive, Jupiter and his moons and little stars fading behind me, I shut down every thrust system before finally shutting down the hard worn inertialess drive. There was hardly a transition; the craft was free-falling on its momentum, its acceleration at zero. I attached myself to an extension hose just in case there was a leak in the cabin that nobody had told me about; and then opened up the hatch giving me access to the reactor. The inertialess drive, clinging to the platinum case of the reactor just above it, managed to look sorry for itself even though it was just another lump of the lead-grey metal.

  I poked around thoughtfully, noticing that the casing and the wires leading to it were hot; red hot in places. One of the heavy feed cables looked as if it might be damaged, but I couldn’t be sure if this was so until the whole setup had cooled down to the point where I could touch it.

  It took me four hours to repair the inertialess drive. For all I had nearly convinced myself that I didn’t know a thing about complicated nuclear gizmos it turned out to be a relatively straightforward bit of machinery rather like a magnetron only different. I took the mechanism carefully from its housing, unbolting the whole setup once it had stopped glowing. My suit was, of course, heat insulated; so I could have started straight away; but I didn’t want to burn the upholstery with floating bits of furious ember.

  The live lead from the reactor to the drive was nearly burnt through; overload I supposed. But since the cables were rated at nearly a hundred gigawatts, some ten million amperes at ten kilovolts, I found it a bit puzzling. The only explanation I could come up with was that the waves that it generated somehow went into a standing, coherent beam at ninety-eight percent C, and the point at which the reactor had started complaining and the point at which the craft had continued inevitably to beyond light-speed whatever I had done to stop it.

  That standing wave, the inertialess laser as I thought of it, caused the craft to ride before it through the light barrier, drawing as it did so an overload from the poor old reactor. The moment the energy was cut off, probably by the actual light-barrier rupture, the inertialess laser stopped and the resultant inertia dragged the craft back through the light barrier into real space where the speed dropped massively before the inertialess drive could re-establish its field. It occurred to me that if the inertialess drive hadn’t kicked back in, the retro-thrust, working against the formidable momentum of the craft, would have destroyed the whole vehicle, me included.

  Within the inertialess drive I could see little actually wrong; everything seemed to be in place and there were no obviously damaged parts, even when I compared them to the spares. The two spheres of highly-conductive but radiation-opaque metal, probably containing some frightful radioactive component, the dull black plates of who-knew-what spaced evenly between the spheres; eight of them, the whole happy puzzle stuck into an insulated casing, connected to the outside world by copper conductors almost five inches thick. In those there were some signs of wear; they had obviously decided that they could bear the huge load that had passed through them a whole lot better when they were in their liquid phase.

  They were the only parts that I replaced; I was in two minds about trying anything else. When I had finally replaced this in its platinum cover and shovelled the whole mess back on to its anchorage on the reactor, I was rather tired and out of it. But I took the time to work out where I was and set the most convenient course back to the inner void. Knowing that I had at least eight hours journey at the speed I was making, I set the alarm to waken me after setting the autopilot for home.

  It began about then; just when I was beginning to drift off to sleep; that unpleasant feeling of being cut off and unutterably alone. I became aware of the emptiness between me and home, the vast expanses of void beyond the hull of the craft. The fear came after that; then the sorrow. I hadn’t looked for any remains of Wren Number One because I had a feeling that there wouldn’t be any. The Doctor was in no position to see the joke; undoubtedly; but I had told him so. I, who could see the point, found it poignant and very bitter. But my whole perspective was different, my appreciation of personal things faded behind an awareness of the majesty of that which I had passed through not once but twice.

  There hung before me the burning memory of those fierce streaks of light, the dullness of the void bleached to that azure splendour b
efore those fierce arcs of majestic power. It was gloom and majesty before the unyielding light in a combine that knew not of such small things as I. The memory had a spice of fear within it; and though the option to pass that gate once again to make my way swiftly home lay before me; that gate opened by my skill combined with that of a dead man; I would not demean that awesome portal but respect its solemn glory.

  I tried, for the first time since I knew I would not see him again, to recall the face of the Doctor; but only that look of anger and shock came back to me. His face in my memory was twisted, the twisting as much his care as mine. I shut my eyes, not to sleep but to rest, to find some strength from my wrung out body that I may at least land the craft when her futile labours were at length over.

  She seemed to know that the one who had created her was dead; and she grieved as a child would for her father, slow to respond and silent. She let me rest, I let her seek some measure of peace though she was a war machine and peace was not her way. It occurred to me that there was more wrong with her than just the inertialess drive which I had fixed. Going through the light barrier had done something to me, I wasn’t sure what. But it was sensible to assume that something had been done to her as well, if only on a physical level.

  With those thoughts close to the surface of my mind I drifted off into an uneasy slumber. My dreams were full of fire and speed but through all this always came that blue light and it gave me comfort; it showed me something of peace, something I was not able to understand, only to feel and know.

  She chirped petulantly in my ear, insisting that I wake up now, at once, this instant. I, on the other hand, didn’t want to wake up, not now or ever. I was tired and I wanted to sleep, forever if possible. However she had the definite upper hand because to reach the controls I would have to wake up. Number Three had been taught not to respond to vocal commands if she was of the opinion that the person giving them was asleep. She made it perfectly clear that she was going to wake me up until such time as I turned off the alarm manually, thus convincing her that I was in fact awake. With an enormous sigh I sat up a little; as much as my straps would allow me to. At once I keyed the jets back into phase, through all four stages into the retro-thrust. The speed dropped rapidly; even so I overshot Earth by several million miles before she was down to a sensible speed.

  I turned her around, struggling to concentrate, struggling to compensate for her somewhat sluggish and erratic flight. I knew then that there was something wrong, seriously wrong, somewhere. It took me a long time to drag her into a high parking orbit over the terrestrial terminator, high over the South Pole. When that was at length done I went through every operation she possessed, testing everything, using the external cameras and internal to examine every bit of her that I could get into focus. Both of the rotors were damaged; not seriously but enough to impair her flight in atmosphere and make her unwieldy. Her anti-torque rotor seemed to have been left behind somewhere; as were two of the vanes on her tail. Her inertialess drive was jumpy; obviously there was a flaw in it that I hadn’t picked up. The four drive stages seemed to be all right; but it would take a lot to make anything wrong with them.

  But the photonic relay that was the core of her control system seemed to be unresponsive or flawed, probably cracked somewhere along the pickup disc connected to the joystick. She was not in a good way at all; and I was seriously worried about whether I would be able to get her home in one piece. Also I was worried about where I should take her; which home? My long neglected home? The old airfield? Or the Crag?

  I don’t know why I set her course to the Crag; now I begin to regret that I did so. But I realise now that I was afraid. There was nobody who I could trust with this craft or this deadly technology. And at the Crag there are the facilities to repair the craft.

  She made her re-entry without too much of a problem; as well she made the flight to the Crag, shrouded again in night and under the bewitching light of the moon. So often my eyes were drawn to that silver globe, the essence of its strange light so close, so similar to the hazy fire of colour that had dazzled me before. The sight of the moon gave me no peace. But slowing the craft up, unwracking the damaged rotors and opening one of the rocket ports to replace the anti torque rotor; that’s where that nightmare began. For once under rotor power alone, the Wren was quite obviously in a lot of pain and it was extremely difficult to keep her straight and level. I kept her at the hover for all of fifteen minutes before I had worked up enough confidence in my command of her cranky controls to dare the passage into the Nest.

  Four times she nearly hurtled out of control, her wide blades missing the rough walls by shaven inches, her belly scraping the passage once before I could bring her down on her own little spot. I shut down her systems, cracked open the door and wept slept.

  Sorrow gave way to fatigue, exhaustion gave way to hunger and for that my dreams had no answer. I crawled from the craft into lower control with the flight discs, logging in Number Three with a full record of the flight and her damages. The system thought about my report while it closed Number One’s file at the point on the record that mentioned the Doctor’s probable fate.

  Finally I turned from the system to attend to my most pressing need; a cup of tea. It gave me a diagnosis of Number Three’s problems and a list of things I should do to cure her and a list of parts that ought to be replaced. I digested this information in silence, seeing quite clearly that I had a lot of work to do before this problem was cleared up. The system also rather dryly informed me that during the ‘superluminal transition’ the craft covered a distance of one point eight light-months in a time unit so much meaninglessly smaller than a nanosecond that I couldn’t quite grasp it; but it was apparently the time required for the inertialess standing wave to pass from the reactor and drive core to beyond the periphery of the craft’s hull.

  This had been accomplished twice with more-or-less the same results each time. I brooded over this for some time, also over the matter of repairs. At length I fed myself from the nearly untouched stores on Number Three, stripping everything out of her, piling all the food and other stores by the wall out of the way.

  After that was done I found myself a remote control with which I could operate the pulley. It took me more than eight hours to isolate the damaged parts and remove them, the hub and rotors taking up most of that time. But I had been through the process of stripping the craft down a number of times before; and I dragged one of the consoles from lower control out beside the Wren to keep us company. It took me eight days, however, to get the Wren put back together again, the largest segment of that time devoted to getting the two new rotors down those hellish stairs.

  There were days when the knowledge that I still had that task before me caused me seriously to consider not getting up at all. Fifty steps a day was as much as I could expect of myself with that pair of rotor blades, moving the pulley down then easing the rotors on their chain down, curve after curve, tread after tread. It was largely because of my stubbornness that the task was so hard, that I refused to take the wide blades down one at a time.

  It was my stubbornness as well that made sure that I didn’t stop each day until I was in no position to get myself moving again. On more than one occasion I found myself asleep on the stairs beneath the two massive rotor blades, stiff and iced over in the cold. But once that was done it was quite easy to get the blades onto a dolly and trundle them over to the craft. It was in the evening of the eighth day that I found myself faced with the one task that for some obscure reason even now I cannot do, or at least I cannot make myself do. To this day the Wren’s inertialess drive lies on her back couch, stripped down and waiting for those new plates to be put into place. It is a five minute job; but one for which I haven’t the heart. Without it she would fly; the system assures me that as she stands she is flight-worthy bar that one item.

  But I cannot do it; not even now, while I stand whiling away the hours of each long day, feeling the horror of that time gradually die down, as the sc
ars replace those bloody wounds in my mind. The gold spider ring seems a bit tighter and more inhibitory as I think these thoughts, wondering if maybe I should have another go at walking down those long and terrible stairs. Or maybe I should make some more biscuits, though that dietary habit of mine is beginning to have ill effects. I look up at the lights which still burn from the fifth and sixth floor of the roundhouse, even though I haven’t set foot in the upper control since I returned with the Wren so badly mauled. The sight of that huge space cruiser, torn and savaged by the fury of the Doctor’s pyre, that or by his vain effort to destroy the craft, that still comes back, as does the mocking word; the last word I heard him speak.

  Fiddlesticks.

  It grieves me still that such a word, such a contemptuous dismissal of an earnest warning, can send such a heaving quake of horror through me. How can a word that is meaningless and by its very nature implies meaninglessness, inspire fear? How can the name of an oracle millennia dead still cast her shadow on the present? Could I have done more, said more or acted differently and thus cast the black wave back at less than the cost I have paid? This balcony so far has yielded up no answer. Byrtle has tried; but the matter is beyond his limited vocabulary. I’m almost sure he knows the answer; at times his compassion is frightening, his knowing old face filled with that terrible pity.

  Or maybe the answer lies out there where the Doctor found his unique grave, his pyre of power and splendour far finer than the best my ancestors had ever managed. That his remains, be they minute and without form, yet hurtle beyond any known ken into the infinite void at such a pace may bring rest to his soul; but I somehow think not, for it was I, not he, who finally passed the highest test of them all. I passed through the wall of flame that keeps the mortals from the work of Gods; I who passed by the feet of my greatest Master twice and yet live and think. By this honour I have learnt some humility but it has taught me great fear as well; it is that, I think, which stays my hand when I finally face myself and ask whether or not I will finish this task.