Scott awoke to darkness and a cold shiver. The temperature in the facility had dropped, and the only light came from a dim emergency lighting strip running along the ceiling. “Cyrus, you awake?” Scott glanced over and could just make out a mound in the bunk opposite. It stirred. “Cyrus, something’s wrong with the power.”
“Eh?” the mound replied.
Scott sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bunk. “How long have we been asleep?”
Cyrus grumbled as he checked his internal clock. “Crap… almost ten hours.” He slowly moved himself off the bunk.
Ten hours. How is that possible? thought Scott. “Maybe they drugged us?”
“Or maybe they lowered the oxygen levels. That and the fact that we were pretty exhausted anyway.”
Scott put a finger to his lips to signal to Cyrus to keep quiet.
“What?” whispered Cyrus. “I don’t hear anything.”
“That’s the point,” said Scott. “Neither do I. It’s very quiet out there.” He gave Cyrus a look. “I think we need to investigate, find out what’s going on.”
They opened the door and moved into a short corridor. It was dimly lit, but not by emergency lighting. This meant that there was still power in the facility, something that came as a relief to Scott. The section they were in was below ground, like most of the research station. They moved quietly down the corridor to a stairwell at the far end. They could hear nothing but the sounds of their own footsteps. They exited the stairs into the ground level area where they had first met Dogg and his crew. It had been stripped clean.
“Shit. They’re gone,” said Scott.
Cyrus stood mute as he surveyed the barren space. “How…?”
“Hello?” Scott shouted. But there was no reply save for a faint echo. He looked over at Cyrus as the realization of their situation began to sink in. “They’ve cleared out, taken everything with them, and stranded us here.”
Cyrus took a second or two to respond. “But how? I didn’t see a shuttle outside.”
“They were obviously picked up by someone.”
“Well, that’s great. Just great. I thought we were home and dry.” Cyrus gave an exasperated sigh.
“We’d better figure out what we’ve got here in terms of life support.” Scott glanced around the space. “Let’s find where the operations room is. Come on.”
Both Scott and Cyrus had been in a great many research stations over the years, and they all had a similar layout. It was a design honed by both practicality and necessity in equal measure. Above ground was a domed structure used primarily for goods and vehicle storage. It was not a space you wanted to spend a lot of time in unless it came with heavy radiation shielding or its own magnetosphere. The latter was a recent technological advancement which required a considerable power source to function.
The biggest threat to life in space was cosmic radiation, a constant background noise of heavy isotopes traveling at almost the speed of light. Exposure caused damage to cellular life, and prolonged exposure led to certain death. That was why everything needed high-density physical shielding. But there was another way, the same way that the Earth protected all life on the planet. It was one of the vital ingredients needed for life to exist on the surface: Earth’s magnetic field. Elegantly simple in many ways, but to emulate on a small scale required a massive electrical power supply. Fortunately, with the advent of LENR technology, this was no longer such an issue. The problem for Scott and Cyrus, however, was that they were small, easily transportable, and worth a considerable amount of money. Which was why Dogg and his crew had stripped the research station of its power supply, and it was now operating only on an emergency backup.
“We’d better get down below,” said Scott. “I suspect they’ve also stolen the station’s LENR.” He glanced up at the roof of the dome. “That’s why we’re on backup power, and we’ve got no magnetosphere. We’re going to get fried if we stay up here.”
“Bastards. They’ve left us here to die.”
“Come on. We’re not dead yet.” They moved back into the stairwell and down to the lower levels.
Scott knew that being bombarded with cosmic radiation was the least of their worries. With only an emergency power supply, the research station would eventually run out of power. When that happened, they would be dead. It was only a matter of time—although how much, they wouldn’t know until they located the operations room and interrogated the control systems.
It didn’t take long to find it: a circular room whose walls were clad in monitors and control systems. In the center sat a low holo-table. Scott left Cyrus to establish just how much power—and hence, time—they had left. He continued his search of the lower levels to find what food had been left, if any. He also had a vain hope that they may have left them a functioning EVA suit, and if they could find some hydrogen, there might be a slim chance they could get the shuttle operational, enough to maybe get one of them to Dantu and initiate a rescue of whoever chose to stay behind. Then it struck him: Aria.
Scott stopped dead in his tracks as the realization sank in. They had taken Aria. He was certain of it. The very thing that he had promised Aria would not happen had just happened. The QI had fallen into the wrong hands. Scott had to steady himself against the corridor wall. Slowly he sank down to sit on the floor, and placed his head in his hands. He had blown it. Not only that, he had probably just hastened the extinction of the entire human race.
12
The Perception
Miranda pulled herself out of the swimming pool and moved over to the recliner where she had left her towel. She gave her face and hair a quick dry and sat down just as one of the ship’s droids arrived with a margarita, presenting it to her with the flourish of a seasoned waiter. She picked up her drink, took a sip, and gazed out at the universe beyond the long viewing window running the full length of the pool. Miranda allowed herself a long, satisfied sigh, and had to admit she could get to like this way of life. It sure beat traveling in a beat-up old spacecraft any day.
The ship her stepfather had provided for her transport back to Earth was luxurious beyond anything Miranda could ever have imagined. It was as big as the Hermes, with a rotating torus providing a comfortable one-gee environment, but that was about where the similarities ended. This was state of the art, designed to be the ultimate in space travel. Every area, every object, and every surface were soft and smooth and lush. The illumination was low and diffuse and seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Even the air had a vague botanical scent, which shifted subtly as she moved around the ship’s interior. The effect on Miranda, when she first came on board, was like stepping into a dream.
It was also autonomous; Miranda was the only human on board. There was no crew and no one at the helm, so to speak, save for the ship’s AI, Max. As a consequence, there was no bridge, no operations room, no command center. For a flight officer like Miranda, this was a little disconcerting. With no human command center, how would you know what the ship was doing, where you were in space, or how the fast you were traveling?
The AI assured her that all would be fine, that she should simply relax and enjoy the trip. It then proceeded to introduce her to a remote droid that would be her personal servant for the duration of the journey. Anything she wanted, she could just ask and it would be arranged.
The first few days out from Europa, Miranda indulged herself in the luxurious surroundings and investigated the layout of the luxury craft. Not only did it not have a bridge, there was no communal canteen, no labs, no workshops, none of the areas she had grown to expect after years of living and working on scientific vessels. However, it did have a swimming pool.
It was Max that had suggested she utilize the pool, and informed her that it would be heated to suit her requirements. Miranda didn’t quite believe it until she finally saw it. That was a few days into the journey, after Max informed her that the initial burn was complete and she could now use the pool. She’d half-expected to se
e something a little bigger than a jacuzzi, but this was thirty meters long and ten wide. Miranda wasn’t sure how the ship balanced the weight of all that water—not that she cared. It was also sandwiched between two tropical gardens which gently curved to follow the contours of the torus’s outward rim.
And so Miranda spent the initial days of her journey home indulging in the guilty pleasure of pampered luxury. She’d had no idea how wealthy the VanHeilding family was. From what her mother had told her, she had known they were rich, but this was a different level of wealth. This was on a scale she hadn’t even thought possible.
How much had all this cost? Simply to return a family member—not even a blood relative, at that—to Earth. Part of her viewed it all as obscene, wasteful opulence. But part of her was enjoying it; that part of her was hypnotized and lulled by this freedom from all the System’s trials and tribulations, safely cocooned in the soft plushness of it all. It made her feel important. To have all this to herself, for her own pleasure and enjoyment, made part of her sink into a parallel universe where the grubbiness of the real world was left far, far behind.
But reality found a way back into her mind. It came to her as thoughts of Scott, and what she had left behind. Would she ever see him again? Did she even want to? Had she been a fool to get involved with him like she had? It was clear that her departure had affected him more than it did her. Yet part of her wished he were here to share this experience, and maybe that was what life was all about. What use was anything if you had no one to share the joy and the sorrow?
As the thoughts of what she was leaving behind tugged at her, she also speculated about what awaited her on Earth. What was she heading into? She knew nothing of this family her mother had married into, other than that they were one of the wealthiest on Earth. She had no attachment; in fact, she despised them. Nor did she really have much attachment to her own mother, a woman whose ability to scheme and manipulate was legend. Miranda had taken the first opportunity to get as far as possible from her sphere of influence. That was why she had joined the military, but even there her mother’s power had pulled strings and feather beds for her. So, when Miranda was finally discharged, she’d started to think that heading out into deep space might put her beyond her mother’s reach. As it turned out, her mother had lost interest in her at that stage, as she had begun swimming in the political and social minefield that constituted her relationship with Frederick VanHeilding. It was, on the surface, a relationship that Miranda was happy with, although not because of any concern for her mother’s emotional well-being after Miranda’s biological father died. More because it stopped her mother from meddling in Miranda’s life.
In short, there was no love lost between them, so why was this new family going to all this expense to bring her back? To say her goodbyes? Somehow, Miranda didn’t quite buy it. Yet with all this self-examination, she began to feel that maybe she wasn’t all that different from her mother. There was an allure to this lifestyle, a sense of being above the messy, dirty strata of common life. She could feel it calling to her, pulling at her sense of self-worth, telling her she was special, that she deserved this. But where would that lead? Would it lead to a place where relationships became simply about how much someone could do for her? She shuddered; maybe she wasn’t so different from her mother after all. She had felt it in her before: that sense of control over others, the ability to manipulate, to bend people to her will for her own benefit. She pictured Scott’s face when she’d told him she was leaving. He was devastated, more so because the poor fool thought she was pregnant. She laughed. It was a kind of reflex she couldn’t help. Yet she found no joy in it, only… loneliness. The realization struck her like a tsunami. It washed over her and obliterated all pretensions she had of living this life of luxury. In truth, she had never felt more alone, and as the ship carved its way through the solar system, it brought her farther and farther away from what she knew now to be what she really wanted in life: true friendship.
She sighed, looked through the pool’s viewing window at the vast panoply of stars, and ordered the droid to bring her another margarita.
***
By the seventh the day out from Europa, Miranda could add boredom to her increasing sense of loneliness. So she asked Max if there was anything on the ship to stimulate the mind. It suggested the library. But this was not a library in the traditional sense: there were no books, as such. Instead there were tastefully appointed holo-tables interspersed with low, comfortable seating, and an odd collection of antiques harkening back to a previous century. Like the rest of the ship, it was sumptuous and expensively kitted out. Miranda realized that this area was the closest thing on the ship to a command center. At least here she could get some data on their current position in the solar system. She had one of the holo-tables display a schematic of the System with the path of her ship, Perception, and its current location mapped out. She also had the Hermes tracked, although she wasn’t sure if this was live data or simply the AI’s best guess at its location. Relatively speaking, the Hermes wasn’t far behind, having left Europa’s orbit only a day after her ship. However, its track diverted from hers, since she was bound for Earth and they were headed to Mars via a stop-off at Ceres. She left this running in the background as she started to investigate what the ship had in its database on the VanHeilding family. She wasn’t doing this out of some filial curiosity—it was more a case of know thy enemy.
As the days passed, Miranda found herself falling into a routine that involved exercise in the ship’s gym, a spell in the pool, and many hours in the library. And so she began to build up a picture, not just of the VanHeildings, but of their relationship to the six other mega-corporations generally known as the Seven.
They had, between them, carved out a virtual monopoly over most major industries on Earth, even though it was claimed they were responsible for the calamity that was the Rim War. But far from losing power and influence, they had only gotten stronger. How this came to be was the subject of much speculation. Various theories had been postulated, but the one that seemed to carry the most credence was that they had simply become too big to stop. Part of this was to do with the power of AI to shape and manipulate people and markets, and part of it was the new phenomenon of longevity. The families that controlled these vast corporations were simply living much longer, giving them more time to consolidate their grip on the levers of power. Before the advances in genetic engineering that enabled this “miracle,” leaders would naturally die and hand the reins of power to new blood. This handing over of power had always been the way it was, but not any longer. These two advances in technology had combined to create a whole new stratum of wealth and power—which Miranda, whether she like it or not, was now a part of.
But what surprised her the most was that, until now, she’d known so little about all this. Perhaps she’d simply had no need, busy as she was dealing with the demands of being a flight officer on a deep space science vessel, not to mention her involvement with Scott. Each time she thought of him or the others, she would cast a glance at the 3D projection of the Hermes’ current path through the System. It was a way, perhaps, of reassuring herself that they were still out there, and that she hadn’t completely lost touch.
It was on one such occasion when Miranda glanced over at the projection that she noticed the Hermes was no longer being tracked. Her own ship was there, its path scribed through the System, but there was none for the Hermes.
“Max, can you display the path of the Hermes for me again? It seems to have been switched off.”
“The Hermes no longer exists.” Its reply was coldly matter-of-fact.
Miranda froze. Had it been a human giving her that response, she would have taken it as a joke. But AI weren’t known for their humor. “What do you mean?”
“It has ceased to exist as a functioning spaceship.”
Miranda’s concern began to mount. “How is that possible?”
“It suffered a catastrophic disassembly approxi
mately twelve hours and forty-six minutes ago, while rendezvousing with a shuttle from Dantu on Ceres.”
Miranda jumped up and stared at the 3D projection, as if the act might help her make sense of what she’d just been told. She thought of Scott and her friends, and had to steady herself on the edge of the holo-table as the reality hit her. “Why didn’t you inform me before now? My friends are on that ship.”
“Please forgive my insensitivity. My purpose is to see to your comfort during the journey to Earth, so I did not want to distress you.”
“For f…,” but she didn’t finish the sentence. She knew from experience there was little point in getting angry with an AI. “Show me its last location, and give me a general broadcast feed so I can see the news on this incident.”
A red dot appeared within the projection, showing the last known location of the Hermes. At the same time, her own data screen populated with broadcast feeds direct from Dantu on Ceres.
Miranda sat down again and scanned through the feeds. As she read, she began to get a picture of what had happened. The shuttle bringing Chancellor Bezzio of Ceres had been hijacked en route, and then used as cover to board the Hermes. A number of people had been taken hostage, supposedly for ransom. Miranda was relieved to see that Dr. Stephanie Rayman was one of them. This meant that she, at least, was still alive. But two of Goodchild’s entourage died in the shoot-out, and Commander Scott McNabb and Chief Engineer Cyrus Sanato were presumed dead after the ship exploded.
Miranda’s heart sank. Scott and Cyrus dead?
The Belt: The Complete Trilogy Page 26
