by TTA Press
The gate to the runway was open. The flyer was parked on an apron area, gleaming bright blue, its hatch raised and stairs ascended into its interior. Even Victor’s constant stream of questions ceased as they walked across the apron following Julia. Axon was also unusually quiet.
Mariam thought “What is it?”
“I’m too busy to talk,” came the reply.
“Come,” Julia said, and led the way up the stairs into the flyer. Three rows of light blue seats were arranged just behind the wide windscreen. Behind them was a large cargo area. Everything was tastefully colour-coordinated – what might have been harsh edges rounded and softened.
“This is a flyer,” Julia said. “Sit in the front seats. This is the most important day of your lives. So far, at least.”
As soon as they sat down, shoulder restraints moved gently into place. Julia had taken the control seat. Had Mariam and Victor lived in a different place in a different time they might have been concerned at the lack of any visible controls and any sign of a pilot. Julia inspected the flyer’s identification code neatly stencilled onto the bulkhead below the windscreen. Some things, over centuries, slip from languages and cultures, whilst others stick and are still used when their origins are lost in obscurity.
“Charlie Delta Golf,” she said.
“Yes, Julia,” a soft male voice responded.
“Lock my voice only.”
“Yes, Julia.”
“Depart the facility, and then fly a circumaxial route at three thousand meters and just above stall speed.”
“Yes, Julia.”
The cabin door swung downwards and closed with a hiss.
“Performing mandatory biohazard check.”
A stream of almost invisible nano-scale particles issued from a vent in the roof of the flyer and formed tenuous clouds around the three of them.
“What’s this?” Victor demanded.
“A routine check to see if we have any infections that might cause problems for other people.”
The nano clouds swept back into the roof and the flyer said “Cleared for take-off.” Powerful fan jets wound up to a roar and they began to taxi out to the runway, turning to face a long strip of lights that stretched away into the distance. Then they accelerated quickly, the nose lifted, and the flyer headed for what Mariam and Victor knew as the sky.
Overhead it seemed misty. Below, the buildings of the Facility shrank, and at two thousand feet it was clear that this was a tiny world that was like an undulating disc of green hills and sparkling water. Then, ahead of them, the mist began to move and a circular aperture appeared in what they thought of as the sky, but was really a huge inflated dome of light biologically impermeable plastic. When the opening reached a diameter precisely two metres wider than the flyer’s wings the expansion stopped. Seconds later the aircraft passed through, and the hole in the dome began to close.
Mariam and Victor gasped as they realised they had been living in a small bubble inside a vast space. The inside of the Bio-Containment station Alpha Delta Epsilon Theta Seventeen was a cylindrical space thirteen thousand metres long and many kilometres in diameter. A white tubular structure ran along the entire axis, and from it service and support spokes radiated down to a curving landscape of farms, villages, workshops, parks, lakes, harbours and roads.
“Did you know this, Axon?” Victor thought – a thought coloured, perhaps, with tints of anger.
“I did.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
“It was not permitted. Or, to put it another way, it was not possible.”
“Is there more you can’t tell us?”
The flyer descended to a thousand feet and then flew low. The huge cylinder seemed to rotate below them.
Julia received a brief message in her transparent earpiece, and said, “You’re talking to Axon. Would you like Axon to explain, or shall I?”
“Both,” Mariam said.
“I’m too busy,” Axon said. Mariam repeated this to Julia, and added, “What’s Axon doing?”
“Developing. Growing very fast. Learning interfaces. Testing controls. Now – look over there – you see that white dome? It’s another bubble, like the one you were born and brought up in. There are eight domes. Each dome has, or had, a thing like Axon growing inside it. Charlie Delta Golf, fly the axis – close.”
“Yes, Julia.”
The flyer rose and turned from its track inside the circumference of the cylinder, and rotated so that ‘down’ was now the thirteen kilometre extent of the axial tube. The engine noise reduced to a low hiss as it changed from full- to low-gravity mode and the atmospheric pressure reduced to near-nothing. It was now less of an aircraft than a space shuttle, steered and propelled by impulse and correction jets of superheated steam. From the interior it seemed to be flying a straight line along the axial spine, but was in reality moving with a corkscrew movement to compensate for the rotation of the cylindrical worldlet.
Julia spoke to the flyer again, and dipped towards the wall that closed the end of the giant cylinder. At ‘ground’ level a door slid upwards and closed behind them as soon as they had flown in. They landed silently on a grey steel floor, next to three other flyers, each brightly coloured. The hangar was high and wide, with tool bays, hoists, service pits and gantries. Julia watched Mariam and Victor carefully, prepared to halt this voyage of discovery if they were being mentally overloaded. But, subliminally, they knew all this because the knowledge had been implanted subtly and appeared only in dreams. They chattered endlessly, pointing things out to each other.
“Come,” Julia said, as the restraining arms slid back into their chairs, the hatch opened, and the stairs touched the floor with a quick clang of metal on metal.
When the human-scale door opened into the next chamber the bright light of Angelus XI flooded the hangar and they squinted at this new shock to the senses. As they entered they saw through the thick glass windows the uncountable splash of the fiery points that made up the Milky Way.
Mariam shivered. “It’s all so…big,” she said. “Too big.”
A huge egg-like shape covered the sky as the ship completed its deceleration phase, and, with machine precision, matched orbits with the rotating worldlet.
“What’s that?” Victor asked.
Julia put her arms about their shoulders and said, “That, my darlings, is your new home.”
* *
Axon’s spherical container, with umbilicals connecting to temporary nutrient tanks, pumps, sensory interface cables, all on a metal-wheeled base, rolled slowly and carefully out of the bay doors in the side of the containment, surrounded by a posse of anxious attendants, and an even more anxious Director Somerton. Victor walked beside him, asking an endless stream of questions, until Somerton finally told him to go and pester somebody else.
Mariam swam in the lake, diving for flashing silver fish, floating on her back looking up at what she once thought was the sky, and now knew to be the canopy of the containment dome lit by the huge artificial sunlight generators arrayed along the axial spine far above.
“You are sad, Mariam,” Axon’s thought-voice said, gently.
“Am I? Yes, I think perhaps I am. I shall miss the fish.”
“There are lakes and fish in the ship.”
“Not these fish. These are my fish.”
“I understand.”
“Do you, Axon? Can you?”
“I am in you. You are in me. These are my fish, too.” A long pause, and Axon added, “They want you to get ready.”
For one last time she flipped onto her stomach, pointed her heels up at the fake sky and moved down among the fish, the weeds, the crabs in the rocks on the lake bed – staying underwater until she was nearly at the shore.
The rails ran to the base of the nearest spoke connecting the floor of the cylinder to the axis. At the base of the fifty metre wide spoke, inside the wide doors that had hissed aside, a pressurised lift waited. The strange procession of Axon and his attendants ro
lled slowly into the lift. Clamps secured the sphere and its equipment to the floor, and were checked and double checked. People took to seats around the circumference of the lift, and buckled harnesses. The doors closed, the air pressure increased a little as the lift sealed itself and began to rise within the spoke. A cloud of smart nano filled the air with a fine mist – probing the humans for traces of unpermitted viruses of microbial life, and, where necessary, purging, excising, cleaning.
Somerton’s pad beeped as it displayed a message from Axon. It was a crude way of communicating, but only Mariam and Victor had the complex web of sensory fibres and high-speed electromagnetic receivers and transmitters that enabled communication at the most intimate cerebral level. He flicked his finger across the pad to enable voice input.
“Totally impossible,” he said. “The only biological entities allowed onto the ship are Mariam and Victor, and you know that.”
Alarms at various pitches and volumes shrieked and warning lights lit up the monitoring panels around Axon. The lift’s steady point eight G rise stopped as emergency overrides kicked in. Panicking engineers frantically released their harnesses and struggled awkwardly in what was now severely reduced gravity.
As suddenly as it started, the violent noise stopped and the warning lights returned to green. Somerton’s pad beeped again.
“We are in command of the ship, not you. It is simple. It is safe. It is necessary. You will help me with this tiny kindness, or the ship is going nowhere. Axon.”
Nearby, Victor laughed. Axon was sharing this with him, but not Mariam. Somerton thumbed his panel and was not amused. At the weightless point where the spoke entered the axial tunnel the lift entered a zone where ‘up’ and ‘down’ were meaningless, and changed to what could well be described as ‘along’, traversing the axis inside a smaller tube within the larger.
At the end of the axial tube airlock doors opened and the lift slid into the lock and stopped. Hatches in the walls of the lift opened, revealing ranks of white pressure suits. They began to pull them on, awkward in the low gravity. Tell-tales flashed amber and then green on each suit. All but Mariam and Victor clipped tethering ropes to cleats on the floor.
“Mariam – Victor – clip your tethers on,” Julia said.
“Axon says not to bother,” they responded as one voice. Somerton frowned and then decided to say nothing. Satisfied that all suits were safe, the lift lit a sign saying depressurising and the air was sucked out of both the airlock and the lift. The sign changed to vacuum and the doors opened onto the sight of a cylindrical docking bay the size of a dozen cathedrals. In the distance, shuttles of many kinds and sizes were clamped into bays around the internal circumference. The great circular eye of the dock was open – shutters folded back outside like petals of dark grey radiation-blocking metal and plastic. Hanging in front of them exactly fifty metres away was a box-like silver shape – one of the ship’s non-atmosphere cargo transports. Away in the distance that gigantic form of the ship was a brilliant ellipse in the angled light of Angelus XI.
The transport steadily moved closer, robot arms extending ready to grasp Axon and its support tanks.
“No need to wait for me,” Axon said, the tone unusually cheerful. “Step out of the door – I have you.”
The two sixteen-year-olds fought to overcome their fear of falling and stepped slowly out of the lift door. Jets on their suits moved them out into the hangar, and they were turning to face the door of the lift and the figures floating inside and around it on their tethers.
“I think it is customary to wave,” Axon said. So they waved, and the anonymous space suits waved back. And then they were accelerating, out of the hangar, past the incoming transport and into space, racing towards the ship. Victor was not happy, but Axon could feel the smile on Mariam’s face.
“I love it,” she said. “It’s like swimming! Star diving!”
So Axon took her in a series of loops, dives, spin-turns and crazy corkscrews around the unwaveringly straight track of Victor, who would have white-knuckle gripped the arm-rests of whatever seat he was riding on, but there was no seat and no arm-rests. Behind them the transport entered the dock; a telescopic arm extended into the lift and, attaching to Axon’s support platform pulled the protected, but still fragile, cargo of biology into its hold.
And so the months of training began. The command deck of the ship was in the centre of the egg-like structure, surrounded by layers of decks and parks. The thick outer shell was hollow and filled with its own skins of radiation-damping liquid hydrogen, polyethylene and water. Each of the ‘floors’ of the one hundred and twenty eight decks was made of a hybrid of concrete and tailored plastic.
Not many tissue-damaging particles were going to get through to the yolk at the heart of the ship.
The deck was a sphere of seamless 3D display panels, punctuated by some hatches to the living quarters and the chamber which held Axon and its support systems. Four couches were attached on gimbals to a central column.
“Why four?”
“Did you think they’d build something this big just for you?”
Mariam and Victor had explored many areas of the ship, but most of it was secured and Axon refused to open the whole vastness on the inarguable grounds that many sectors were mothballed, and it would be a waste of energy to open them merely for pleasure trips.
“You have diagrams, schematics, 3D models, images – what more do you want?”
“I like to touch things,” Mariam answered. But on their birthday, when they had been greeted with a tuneless rendition of ‘Happy Birthday To You’ over a video link to base, Axon summoned them both to the control room and issued some instructions. Victor, he sent to a newly-unlocked Virtual Reality games centre, where he spent eight hours slaying Hell-Spawn with a variety of swords, axes, razor-whips, soul-wands, fire-bolts and other hard and soft weapons, and discovered that a rail-gun is of absolutely no use against Undead Wraiths, although average Zombies could be fragged quite successfully.
Mariam followed her plan and navigated a maze of corridors and jump tubes until she reached a door with an illuminated red sign above it – NOT AVAILABLE. Then, as she was close to the door, the sign changed to a green heart and vanished. The door whispered open. She walked through into a chamber filled with sunlight. Surrounded by low grassy hillocks, a blue lake gleamed and rippled. Dragonflies darted over the water. House Martins swooped low over the surface, the blue reflecting on their pale breasts and making them seem exotic and rare.
She followed a narrow path to a strangely familiar rock jutting out over the lake, peeled off her clothes and followed the birds in a graceful dive. Under water she swam strongly and suddenly was in the centre of a host of silver fish, darting and flocking.
“Are these real fish?” she thought at Axon.
“They’re not just real fish, Mariam. They’re your fish.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Ask Victor. Dr Somerton was most displeased.”
Mariam thought a giant smile, and took only the briefest of breaths before diving again and again amongst the flickering, shining creatures.
* *
After they’d eaten their supper in what was called the crew mess, Axon said, “You must both go immediately to level five, corridor seven, room seventeen.”
“Why?” Victor demanded.
“These are not my instructions. I have no idea.”
Twenty minutes later they walked into a dome-like chamber with curiously-textured non-reflective walls. Seats faced a series of display panels. As soon as they entered, the doors closed and the lights dimmed.
The big central 3D display lit up and Julia appeared. “There’s no need to be alarmed,” she said. “This presentation is pre-recorded and will take one hour. Whilst in this room you will not be able to access Axon and he will have no access to you. You are of age now, and will soon know everything.”
Julia walked away and Somerton stepped into view.
“For
over fifty years now,” he began, “we humans have tried to reach beyond the confines of our galactic arm. All but one attempt has failed, and that exception is not a happy story. Victor, you’re fond of asking ‘Why?’ and that’s the easiest of questions to answer. In four hundred years’ time a dense ball of dark matter eight light years in diameter will fly through our local systems. The gravitational consequences will be devastating. Stars will collide. Planets will fall into their suns or be flung into the outer darkness. Nothing can survive. Many such catastrophes have happened in the history of the universe, but this will be our catastrophe. Our only hope is to escape it, destroy it, or deflect it.
“This information is not known by many. The truth behind it has been systematically discredited for centuries. Scientists have been persuaded into public scepticism, sent into exile, or even killed. Yes – killed.
“Long ago people thought the end of the Earth could be escaped by building ark ships, and we have inhabited planets around seventeen nearby stars. But now, that seems futile. None can evade the invisible destruction which is coming.
“No human mind can control a ship like yours. We cannot build computers complex enough to do so. Consequently, we started to harness the billion-year work of evolution – we began to build larger and larger biological brains. Most of these have failed. One did not – but an error caused it to die of an infection, stranding its ship and crew ninety-seven light years away.
“Your first mission is to rescue that ship and what it contains, which is vital for the survival of the human race. You will be briefed in more detail on that later. In the meantime, Axon trusts you, but you must be very careful. If you need to discuss things only between yourselves, come into this room.”
* *
Mariam lay awake in her cabin. Sleep refused to come. The simulations had come to an end, and the first real flight, their first defiance of the universe’s unfeeling indifference, was only twelve hours away. Restlessly, her hand strayed across her breasts, her nipples stiffening under her fingers, and then slid slowly down her stomach.
