The captain kept silent as if he saw a madman or a ghost.
Dammit, what's going on in the chart cabin if a commander is looking in such a way at an officer having carried out an order? What are they doing there? Thoughts were gathering within his mind, mixed with pain and combat post effects; at the same time, resentment was arising within him too. "Respond, captain!" he demanded furiously.
The officer remained silent. Andrei felt himself losing self-control. The vision of the corpses of Kurt and Sergei was swimming before his eyes. They gave their lives to allow him to cut his way, and this...
The face of the captain of the watch was distorted with anger and fear. An animal fear of something inevitable.
"Too late," he forced himself to say. His voice sent shivers down Andrei's spine. "Prepare to die, son."
The communication monitor became dim. What the hell? He didn’t know what to think.
Then came the light.
It's impossible to describe it any other way. Only one word fit: light. It poured down from everywhere all at once, so that one had the impression the spaceships cast sharp black shadows on one another. As though a gigantic flashlight illumined for a moment the combat in darkness.
Instinctively, he tried to reach the control panel. The screen blazed up in white fire; there was a crackling, the recognizable smell of burning insulation. Quite unexpectedly, all around him collapsed with a great crash into an abyss to the accompaniment of sounds produced by torn metal.
The sudden overload momentarily knocked him out but the salutary swoon lasted only a few seconds. The automatics of a combat spacesuit wouldn't allow a soldier to remain unconscious in the thick of a battle, so a reanimation injection quickly brought him round. The ensued weightlessness nauseated him. But much worse was an unerring sensation that something terrible and irreparable had happened.
Andrei realized that the turret was torn away from the cruiser.
In situations like these the main thing is not to lose one's head. One by one, he turned on the telescopic survey, signal beacon and emergency transmitter.
Silence.
Desperate, he stubbornly tried to restore the intercommunication until he finally saw the futility of his attempts.
His compartment was drifting through space, rotating irregularly. The radar screen was dim and empty. No rustle in the communicator, no commands, no call for help.
He could only read on the instrument board the red alarm lines:
"Thermonuclear explosion in space. General power: 3,000,000,000 kilotons. Distance: 4,000,000 miles. Time: minus seventy seconds."
"Secondary radiation"
"Tertiary radiation"
"Skin overheated by 800 degrees"
"Protective field functions irrestorable"
"Laser gun, serial number 5, destroyed"
"Emergency life-support system activated"
"Your compartment transformed into autonomous module"
"Recommendation: maintain maximum level of personal protection during fifty hours"
"THREAT TO LIFE!"
The last line was blinking importunately.
* * *
... Each of us, before dying, should have gone mad. But we — I mean, a whole generation — millions of young guys on forty-seven colonized planets — grew up without experiencing pain or fear. Later we were called 'saplings of war'."
One could affirm that everyone who has been on the Path of Galactic War even for a short period is practically unable to believe that the world had been quite different. But I remember. I do remember mom's light-hearted laughter, pop's caressing eye. The warm water of the purple ocean of my native planet...
I remember the feeling of boundless calm and happiness experienced only by the little ones. The world was lying at my feet, so huge, astonishing and warm. It was mine.
And so it was everywhere. The planets colonized during the Great Expansion period had increased in strength, passing in four centuries from wildness and enmity to culture and civilization. Our generation was the first that hadn't had to struggle for survival. But all our dreams were trampled underfoot, mixed with ashes, frozen in a vacuum.
I'm neither a prosecutor nor a pacifist. I'm a professional soldier, an assassin legalized by the state, pulled by force of circumstance out of the vicious circle of death and thrown away into a great icy nothing to die slowly, thinking.
* * *
Two hours ago he was young and full of strength, now he was dying, slowly and terribly. His parched lips were whispering something, but the sounds couldn't be heard from behind the thick glass of the pressurized helmet.
The internal communication monitors were spangled with chaotically scintillating points. The stacked control panels had lost their kaleidoscope of colors, the screens dimmed. The panels and sensors' illumination was fading. They were dying together with the man.
Only a few minutes had passed since the emergency monitor gave the last message. In the heat of the moment he hadn't paid attention to the value of the general explosion power — in any case, he would have judged it unreal: the total combat power of the two fleets couldn't have produced such an explosion. Yet it soon became evident the figures were true: suddenly he felt his joints being wrenched by a dull ache.
There is nothing worse than being aware of the inevitable. Andrei was panic-stricken, his eye feverishly scanning the instrument boards. Three billions of kilotons.
He felt sick. His joints didn't ache anymore: they were burning, as was his whole body.
Andrei understood that the instruments were not lying and his compartment was traveling through a blustering hell of accelerated particles that were piercing him every second, destroying his body's cells. Even his battle spacesuit was unable to stop this flow of hard radiation, and the radiation dose he was taking was quickly approaching a fatal level.
Horror pressed his throat with its icy gnarled fingers. Andrei flung the doors of an in-built storage cell open. In the interior of one of them he could see the even gleam of a series of high-protection combat spacesuits. He stretched out his hand. A sharp pain pierced his thorax as he was seized by a fit of suffocation .
Once again, injections reanimated him and returned him to reality.
He had never been a coward. In fact, he was only properly scared now. It's so terrible and disgusting to die.
He collected the rest of his strength and tugged the heap of spacesuits towards himself. Their gray protection skins enveloped him, softening the merciless flow of invisible radiation; instinctively, he tried to bury himself in the very midst of the shapeless pile.
A few minutes later hope turned to despair.
Andrei was unable to move anymore — quite unexpectedly, he'd transformed into a helpless mannequin, an onlooker observing his own agony. Non-existence was rushing up to him by suffocating black lapses interwoven with minutes when his mind became more lucid even though immersed in delirium. They say, a dying man recollects his life... Nothing of the kind. He was still going through his last awful combat.
He hurt. He hurt so much. His joints were wrung out, his body burned by an unmerciful fire. He wheezed, feeling some disgusting foam on his lips and... an injection. His mind burst in bloody fireworks and gradually faded, as if he were falling into the gentle embrace of a vacuum.
* * *
He existed… But at the same time he didn't.
A lacerated mind creates strange phenomena.
Fire. An acrid odor of burning insulation. Distant explosions and the shuddering hull of the gigantic space cruiser.
The black nothing of hypersphere. The weariness of waiting for battle. And almost as the trump of doom, the salutary deliverance from uncertainty: the wailing of alarms.
Holding their breath, they observed their fleet take up positions not far from a lifeless and nameless planetoid. A monstrous armored sphere – a star fortress of colonists – was already hanging in its orbit. Both the Admiral and Andrei's father were there now, at fleet headquarters.
> The detectors caught some disturbances in space. Something was trying to break out of the infernal Nothing, a.k.a. hypersphere, back to the three-dimensional continuum.
Andrei didn't know that this battle would go down in history as the first experience of "puncture tactics". He would never read any manuals written for future generations, but he would also never forget the pale-blue flashes of hypertransfers suddenly sparkling directly amidst the battle formation of the Colonies Fleet.
The first wave was formed by remotely controlled kamikaze modules. About a hundred nuclear explosions blossomed in space, reducing half their fleet to rubble, and following them, wave after wave, Earth's battle space cruisers hove into view.
* * *
He was coming round.
Andrei was drenched in sweat, suffering the torments of the damned; finally he envied the dead indeed. The pain spread all over his body like a fire; the nerve endings perished first, causing inhuman tortures to his mind.
Andrei returned to dreadful reality. But he hadn't any desire for living anymore. What for? He realized perfectly well that the turret torn from his spaceship was drifting into an abyss from which one could never return.
He knew how to interrupt this torture, but was unable to reach for his personal firearm: the weight of the heaped-up spacesuits had pinned him to the floor. He wheezed, feeling hot liquid dripping down his cheeks. He couldn't even shoot himself!
Once again his consciousness began to fade. He was gripped by a suffocating blackness in which a luminous spiral rotated frenziedly. It was penetrating his inflamed brain, giving him some relief; he was turning towards it, passionately desiring to escape the indecency of such a death... but at this moment (how many times had it already happened?) the bioscanners of his battle spacesuit worked.
What's the point?
He cursed the machine for trying to save him. All he wanted was to die, but the re-animator was able to squeeze out all of the soldiers' life up to the last drop.
A black infinity spread from the past to the future.
The spiral which had appeared, now disappeared.
Then at last fell total darkness.
2.
He recovered consciousness after some seventy hours.
Having opened his eyes, Andrei lay for a long time staring senselessly at the internal sensors of his pressurized helmet.
"I'm still alive."
The quivering lights of indicators were hovering at zero.
His combat spacesuit resource was completely exhausted.
He was surrounded by darkness and an oppressive smell. He stirred, and his stiffened body responded with a dull pain. The heap of spacesuits was displaced, and he caught sight of a strip of reddish light.
His weakness and the nauseating odor made him suffocate. Somehow he squeezed his way through the dozens of spacesuits. Two emergency lighting lamps flooded the turret interior with a reddish light. All screens were lifeless, as well as the gun control panels; one could only read some dim lines on a stand-by monitor:
Laser gun – serial number 5 – destroyed.
Your compartment has transformed into an autonomous module.
He vacantly examined those lines while unfastening blindly the locks of his spacesuit.
The most terrible thing which could ever happen to a man had just occurred to him. During those seventy hours they could have gotten him out of the battered turret a hundred times. This could only mean that he had been included into the number of fatalities and forgotten.
Andrei was so feeble that he couldn't even fall into despair. Finally he succeeded in undoing the spacesuit locks. Gasping, he peeled off the hermetic shell together with the overalls and underwear.
Tears welled up in his eyes. At the moment he hated Fortune for giving him a chance.
To survive and have only death in prospect – that could seem funny if it wasn't so dreadful and obvious.
His skin was burnt as if he'd been lying in a scorching sun. If he didn't get out of there in a few hours, the radiation sickness would become irreversible. He needed urgent qualified help.
The thought spurred Andrei on. He scrambled into the operator's chair.
He opened the survival kit and gave himself two injections: a painkiller and a stimulator.
Gradually, the pain abated. Andrei forced his battle spacesuit into the utilizer and, having put on some clean overalls, returned to the computer terminal. The system had frozen. The image on the screen didn't move. The dim light of the emergency lamps pointed at either deficient batteries or to a break in the power circuit.
Counting on the backup software, he reached for the reset button. If nothing has burnt inside the electronic circuits, the system will execute all necessary troubleshooting and memory testing itself. But what if something had indeed burnt out?
Andrei's hand froze over the control panel. It was sheer Russian roulette. He was going to shut down the programs that were still running with a view to activate the frozen modules, but what if the system wouldn't restart?
The lights twinkled for a second when his finger pressed the Reset button.
The turret computer was functioning.
In the corner of the central monitor, memory test figures began flashing.
Power failure
Please wait
He tried to make himself comfortable in the chair. Inside the stacked control panels and behind the plastic wall panels something was buzzing and snapping: the system's central processor was using the emergency reserve of its built-in batteries trying to find some undamaged circuits.
The lights began twinkling again. Then, all of a sudden, the ceiling lamps lit up.
With a soft click, the air regenerator came on. A convulsive wave of lights ran along the instrument panels.
The turret was springing back to life.
Instinctively Andrei moved forward, ignoring the system info, when one of the survey screen sectors began filling with stars.
An enormous blood-red octopus spread over space, eclipsing stars with its luminescence.
Space coordinates of the object match those of planetoid Y-047
The computer message left no room for doubt. The swirling spiral nebula was the remains of the lifeless planet and the colonists' station that had orbited it at the beginning of the battle.
Both had been destroyed!
Not split asunder by rocket strikes, not broken by gravitational guns — just destroyed.
Andrei couldn't believe his eyes. Still, the facts spoke for themselves. The dazzling light reappeared before his eyes just as he realized the meaning of that flash.
The planet had been annihilated.
In full prostration, he returned to the sole undamaged survey screen.
The nebula glistened. He could clearly see the waves of scarlet luminescence running down its tentacles. And on the background of this symbol of universal apocalypse, multiple brilliant dots were moving.
Thousands of them.
He understood there were no winners here.
In front of him was floating the cemetery of both fleets.
* * *
He had to survive. The thought completely consumed him.
He looked at the 3D monitor screen, dissolving in the abyss around him. The eerie sensation of abandonment and solitude captured him, and it wasn't an ordinary agoraphobic fit: he'd simply stopped viewing himself as a cog in a huge war machine: it was dead, scattered around in thousands of metal fragments and hundreds of corpses. The civilization had abandoned him and didn't care one bit about him.
He was all by himself, surrounded by billions of miles of cold and emptiness.
Andrei didn't want to believe it. He couldn't accept the hopelessness of his situation, admitting thereby the inevitability of another agony. Having once passed through the horror of a slow and wholly experienced death, he hated the very idea of facing it again.
'They absolutely have to come back here. For sure they'll return. I'll only have to wait till they come back
!'
Only much later would Andrei learn that he had stubbornly refused to view his situation objectively. He was too stunned, scared and wound up by the sharp change in his life, by the sheer fact of being abandoned in the midst of the boundless abyss. With the obstinacy of a drowning man, he clutched at a glimmer of hope… unable to comprehend that the tragedy of that battle, of that fleet would forever remain his own personal little drama. As for the Galactic War, it had already rolled away, following its own bloody course.
* * *
Each compartment of a battle space cruiser contained emergency rations of food, water and air. The situation in which Andrei found himself – being all alone in a drifting fragment of a spacecraft – was as old as the hills. The history of the conquest of outer space abounds with such incidents having similar beginnings but different outcomes.
Technically, the problem of survival after a crash had been solved long ago, maybe two hundred years before; nevertheless, only few had managed to escape. That wasn't a matter of technology, but one of the human mind. Now Andrei regretted his going to sleep at lectures on space psychology.
Only seven days had passed since the moment when he'd come round amidst the dim radiance of emergency lights, but the period was sufficient enough for Andrei to taste all the delights of living in absolute solitude.
Dammit! When you're twenty it's impossible to be serious about such tiresome disciplines as survival psychology and prepare for a complete isolation at the very beginning of life!
There was one thing engraved in his memory though. As the 'I-want-you-to-focus' (the moniker they'd given to the space psychology instructor) used to say, 'The two main causes of mental disorders suffered in an enclosed space are loss of hope and physical inactivity. They're the cause of death in ninety percent of all cases.'
Gradually, anger overcame him. Andrei knew perfectly well that he wasn't a hero. To fall in battle, in front of his comrades and commanders, or to peg out from anguish, solitude and incurable radiation sickness — these turned out to be quite different things.
The Island of Hope Page 2
