We had plenty of air thanks to the transport’s industrial-sized oxygen rebreather. That same unit combined enough Hs and Os to provide water for two platoons. Our food supply, on the other hand, had thinned to just about nothing.
I really did not care about survival. After months of hearing people “praise the Lord” and plow the corn, I’d decided that I would rather die in space than live on Little Man. I did, however, want to reach my own personal promised land. Even if I did not get to return to Earth, I wanted to see that broadcast station.
Amazingly, I got my wish.
The broadcast station was the last vestige of a recently defunct transportation system that once served as a superhighway across the Milky Way. Even flying at the speed of light, and no Unified Authority ships could attain that speed, it would take you one hundred thousand years to cross the Milky Way. Most of the 180 planets populated by humans were five hundred to one thousand light-years apart.
The key to getting from one planet to another was broadcasting, a technology that translated spaceships and communications into data that could be transferred instantaneously from one location to another. Some ships, mostly scientific vessels, had onboard broadcast engines that enabled their pilots to plug coordinates into a computer and “broadcast” to any location. The vast majority of space travel, however, was routed through the Broadcast Network, a system of satellites called “broadcast stations.” Broadcast stations had separate discs for sending and receiving ships.
Freeman proposed a plan to try and convert a standard short-range military transport into a self-broadcaster by installing a broadcast engine. He wanted to commandeer the broadcast engine from the sending disc of the nearest broadcast satellite and attach it to the electrical system in our transport. It was a crazy idea, kind of like tying a rocket engine to an atmosphere-bound jet and flying it into space.
Assuming we could adapt the industrial-sized broadcast engine from the station to work on our ship, we could send ourselves to Earth or Mars or some other place in the heart of the Republic. Now that we had coaxed our transport two hundred thousand times farther than it was designed to fly, all we had left to do was to pull a serviceable broadcast engine out of that station, adapt it to fit on our ship, and splice it into our electrical supply.
The Broadcast Network was set up in a linear fashion. Each sending disc only sent ships to the next broadcast station down the line. The various stations did not need or have computers because their sending discs formed a dedicated conduit sending ships to a few select locations. No computers were necessary; all of the calculations were premade.
That did not bode well for Freeman and me, as it meant we would have no way of aiming ourselves once we got the broadcast engine up and working, if we got the engine up and working. We might simply send ourselves into oblivion and never materialize again.
Dropping our speed to a mere crawl, Freeman approached the broadcast station. From the front or the back, the satellite looked immense. Both the sending disc and the receiving disc were a full mile in diameter. They were made of mirrored glass. When active, broadcast discs emitted streams of hyper-accelerated electrons that shone so brightly that a quick glimpse at them would leave you blind. The power was off now. This was the first time I had ever actually seen the front of a broadcast disc up close.
“Damn, Freeman, you actually got us here,” I said.
Ray did not respond.
We went to go change into our space gear so that we could begin removing the engine from the station, and ran into a problem. Ray, the one of us with the mechanical expertise, did not fit in the atmospheric suits that came with the transport. The suits were made for general-issue military clones, men who stood just under six feet tall. Ray stood over seven feet tall and weighed approximately three hundred and fifty pounds. His torso was the basic shape and size of a wheelbarrow tipped on its nose. With his huge biceps and forearms, Freeman could not fit his arms in the sleeves. Even if he could have, his arms must have been ten inches too long to fit. His tree-trunk legs and great wide ass did not fit in the pants.
The suit did not fit me so well, either, but I managed. I stood six-foot-three, about four inches too tall. I forced my long arms into the sleeves and scrunched my back, then fastened the helmet over my head. Once I was dressed, Ray returned to the cockpit and vented the oxygen out of the kettle. With the air gone and the gravity off, he opened the six-inch-thick metal doors at the rear of the kettle. As the doors parted, an endless ocean of lights and blackness stared back at me.
Throughout my walk to the broadcast station, Freeman and I would have uninterrupted communications through the interLink—a proprietary small-area communications system developed for military use. I had a video recorder built into the visor of my helmet. From the atmosphere-enclosed comfort of the cockpit, Freeman could monitor the images captured by that recorder and guide my every move.
I hooked my tether line to a socket near the rear door of the transport and kicked off into space. Ahead of me, the dormant sending disc had the slight concave curvature of a dinner plate. If it were a dinner plate, I was smaller than the smallest fly. Its reflective glass surface seemed to stretch on forever. I drifted toward it until I was close enough to tap my finger against its surface.
My atmospheric suit was white, with lights placed on the shoulders, helmet, torso, and legs for visibility. I saw my reflection in the mirrored glass of the disc with the fabric of space as my backdrop. I reached out and touched my reflection, then used the jetpack on my suit to propel myself along its face. When I reached the top, I looked back down to where I had come from. The disc was three inches thick and a full mile in diameter. From a distance it would look sharper than a razor blade.
Ships did not actually enter sending discs. When they approached, the sending disc coated them with accelerated electrons and broadcasted them instantaneously to the next station in the Network. That was how man conquered known space, by creating a transportation and communications highway that enabled him to travel tens of thousands of light-years in an instant.
“You ever done this before?” Freeman asked. Freeman’s voice was so low that it sounded more like a rumble than a voice over the speaker in my helmet.
“Have I ever done what, free-walked in space or salvaged parts from a broadcast disc?”
“Free-walked?” Freeman asked. He knew I had never salvaged parts from a broadcast disc.
“Yeah,” I said. Growing up in an orphanage—that was the term Unified Authority politicians used for the farms in which they raised military clones—we used to spend one week each year in a “summer space camp.” Instead of riding horses and swimming in a lake, we did spacewalks and sham battles.
“You ever been behind the scenes on a broadcast station?” Freeman asked.
“No,” I said.
I controlled the jetpack in the back of my suit using optic commands on a menu built into my helmet. This left my hands free for holding objects, using tools, and praying. Thoughts about floating forever in space ran through my head. I saw myself curled up in my suit and floating like a specimen in a jar of formaldehyde, but that was not a realistic concern. Nothing short of a laser shot would break my tether; and even if something did, I could control my flight using the jetpack.
Looking down the back of the glass, I saw the spindle that connected the sending and receiving discs like an axle between two wheels. All of the generator and broadcast equipment would be housed in that spindle. From up here, a half mile away, the hall connecting the two discs looked as narrow as a sewing needle.
“That’s where you need to go,” Freeman said.
“I know that,” I said.
What I would have given if I could have restarted the entire Broadcast Network from this disc. Not long ago, fleets of mile-wide naval ships traveled across the galaxy using the Broadcast Network. Then came the war. Enemies of the Unified Authority Republic took control of a self-broadcasting fleet and shut down the entire galaxy with a single sh
ot. They destroyed the broadcast station near Mars, cutting the juice that powered the entire Broadcast Network. There would be no restarting the Network without rebuilding the Mars Station.
The Unified Authority still had the biggest and most powerful ships, but they were not self-broadcasting ships. Without the Broadcast Network, fleets that were ten thousand light-years from Earth would need more than ten thousand years to travel back. Without the Broadcast Network handling transmissions, messages sent from Earth to those ships would take ten thousand years to arrive as well.
Even though they were dormant, the size of the discs made me nervous. I floated down the gap between them slowly. As I descended, I saw that the discs were one hundred feet apart. From a distance, they seemed to butt right up against each other. Dropping between them, I felt like a diver entering a massive crevice. I dropped a good thousand feet and stopped. When I glanced in the direction I had come from, it seemed like the gap between the two discs had narrowed.
As I glided toward the spindle connecting the two discs, I wondered if the tether line would reach. Just for it to reach from the top of the discs to the spindle it would need to be a half mile long. It wasn’t. I was about halfway down the side of the disc when a message flashed on the visor of my helmet: “CAUTION. TETHER LIMIT REACHED.”
“YOU HAVE REACHED THE END OF YOUR TETHER” would have been more accurate. Floating in space, with everything happening in slow motion and the obsidian depths wrapped around me like a blanket, things sometimes seemed the opposite of what they were. Emptiness felt smothering. Floating in a vacuum reminded me of swimming underwater.
With trepidation, I detached my tether line and watched it reel away. Had there been a loop or a stem on the back of the disc, I would have tied it on. The back of the disc was as smooth as the front.
“You there?” I asked Freeman.
“Yes,” he said.
Nervous about floating untethered, I had hoped for more pleasantries. Hearing his voice, I realized he would not chat with me.
The backs of the discs were black but not reflective. Looking into the backs of the discs reminded me of staring into a shadow. Looking out the gap between them, I saw stars. I stared at the stars for a moment, then turned my attention back to the discs. It was like having a black cloth draped across my helmet. Taking a deep breath, I continued on to the spindle.
I had not appreciated the size of the tube that connected the two sides of this broadcast station when I viewed it from the edge of the sending disc, a half of a mile away. From up there, it looked short and narrow. Now that I had floated down beside it, I realized it was the size of my boot-camp barracks—two stories tall and a hundred feet long.
It only took me a moment to figure out how to enter the broadcast station. The batteries inside this station might not have had the teravolts needed to keep the discs operating, but they did have enough electricity to power the lights marking the door.
I approached. The door was sealed, of course.
“We’re specked,” I said.
“Speck” was the Marines’ swear word of choice. During my time in the Corps, I used the word “speck” only slightly less than I used the words “I,” “and,” and “the.” Technically, “speck” was a noun. It referred to sperm. Most military men found other creative uses for the word. If you did not like someone, you told him to “get specked.” If you thought a brother Marine was in trouble, you might say that he was “specked.” Almost every serviceman used the word “speck” in one form or another, but Marines seemed particularly adept at it. On a daily basis, I heard speck used to describe bad chow, stupid officers, and a bad case of the runs. You might say that we Marines were specking geniuses at coming up with new uses for that word.
“Think I should blast my way in?” I asked.
Back on the transport, Freeman saw everything I saw on his monitor. “See the red circle?” Freeman asked. Beside the door was a six-inch red circle. “That’s the security panel. Press down on it.”
I traveled over to the circle and pressed three fingers against it. The circle rolled over, and a laser no broader than a spaghetti noodle shot into my helmet to perform a retinal scan. I started to pull away.
“What’s the problem?” Freeman asked.
“It won’t recognize me,” I said. “It will arm the security system.”
“Most of the techs who fix these stations are clones,” Freeman said.
“They’re a newer model,” I said.
“You think they updated the eyes?” Freeman asked.
I pressed the panel a second time and waited as the laser scanned my left eye. The door to the station opened.
“That was easy,” I said. I did not need to worry about Freeman saying he told me so, that would have been too many syllables wasted.
Once inside the station, I found the master control panel. I found the switches for sealing the door and starting the gravity generator. I did not bother turning on the oxygen. Though the station did have an environmental system, I preferred my suit. I turned on the lights. “Are you getting this?” I asked.
Ray did not answer. I suppose he would have said something if he was not getting a picture.
The inside of the station looked like a warehouse. Equipment of every shape and size lined the walls. There were lockers and storage compartments. There were oxygen tanks, laser torches, jetpacks, racks of environmental suits, boxes of tools, and a credit-operated vending machine filled with snacks for the maintenance workers who would repair this station when and if it broke down. We had just about run out of food on the transport. Seeing that machine with its candy bars and potato chips nearly brought tears to my eyes.
The moment I found the broadcast engine, my luck turned sour. The engine was fifteen feet tall. It was built into the wall of the station. Because of its size and mass, there would be no way to disassemble it and carry it out piece by piece as we had planned. “We’re specked,” I said. “It’s too big.”
Freeman did not respond.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“Cut through the wall,” Freeman said.
“What about the station?” I asked.
“What about the station?” Freeman asked.
“Won’t that destroy the broadcast station?” I asked.
“You see anyone who is going to complain?” Freeman asked.
I went back to the entrance, selected a laser torch, and returned. I once owned a self-broadcasting ship, a commuter craft called a Johnston Starliner. The broadcast engine on that ship looked like a crate filled with mortar shells. It had eighteen brass cylinders, each about three feet tall. The broadcast engine for the discs had the same basic design—eighteen brass cylinders shaped like bullets. In this case, each cylinder was fifteen feet tall and so specking wide that I could only reach two-thirds of the way around them.
With Freeman looking over my shoulder, I cut every cable and wire that connected the engine to the broadcast station. Before climbing under the cylinders to cut the outer shell of the satellite, I returned to the atmospheric controls and purged any remaining oxygen from inside the station. If there was any oxygen in the station when I cut through the fuselage, it could cause havoc the moment I cut a hole in the wall.
Next, I turned off the gravity. Back on Earth, those eighteen brass cylinders would weigh several tons each. With the gravity off, their weight meant nothing, but their mass still posed a problem. Moving them from the station to the transport would not be easy.
With Freeman directing me, I cut through the outer wall of the station. Once the incision was done, I braced myself against a rail and kicked one of the cylinders. The entire engine, outer wall and all, dropped out of the station as a unit.
I would have needed a crane to move the broadcast engine back on Earth. Out here in space, I conveyed it using a cargo rig—a couple of synchronized jetpacks that I attached to the outermost cylinders using canvas cords. I stood on top of the broadcast engine holding the reins in my hands and ro
de it like a Roman riding a war chariot.
Up to that point things had gone pretty well. After this it all went to shit.
CHAPTER
TWO
I rode the engine between the discs and out to the transport. The ride went smoothly. The problems did not start until I reached the kettle.
The broadcast engine was still attached to the portion of the wall that I cut out of the station. Before I could fit the engine into the transport, I would need to cut the engine free. With the small section of outer wall attached, the engine would not fit up the ramp of the kettle.
“It’s too wide to fit through the hatch,” I said as I used the cargo rig’s reverse thrusters to put on the brakes.
“Cut the outer wall away,” Freeman said.
We did not have torches on the transport, and I had left the torch I used to extract the engine back in the broadcast station. I had to fly back to retrieve it. The trip took twenty minutes. Then, with Freeman inspecting my every move to make sure I did not damage the cylinders, I used the laser torch to cut the brackets that attached the broadcast engine to the outer wall.
I did not damage the cylinders, nor did I cut any hidden cables, but something still went wrong. We should have seen it coming. With the brackets cut away, there was nothing holding the cylinders together. It was like placing a dozen eggs on a table, then peeling away the carton holding them. With the wall and brackets gone, the only thing binding those giant cylinders together was the canvas straps from my cargo rig.
As Newton observed, “An object at rest will remain at rest until acted upon by the force of a cargo rig.” Too distracted to notice that without that section of wall binding the bases of the cylinders, the canvas strap would no longer hold the various components of the broadcast engine together, I started up the cargo rig. The cylinders slipped out of the rig and floated in eighteen different directions. It looked like slow-motion footage of bowling pins struck by a ball.
The Clone Alliance Page 2
