Not to lose hope... It’s easy to say. He kept moving inside the turret; he ate and slept. After seven days, it became clear to him that he was going mad. At one time events had carried away the twenty-year-old guy he'd then been in their frenzied vortex. The war had whirled him through four years of life, then abruptly abandoned him here, amidst the dark, cold and corpses.
What before had only gleamed faintly in the depths of his mind, making him just a tad uneasy, had become quite obvious upon some reflection.
When Andrei realized he would die, he forbade himself to think of it.
He opened all the built-in storage cells, pulled out their contents and, scrutinizing that combat trash designed to allow young guys to kill and disfigure each other, worked out a new conception of his existence.
His anger subsided, bringing him some relief.
He had a standard toolkit, some spare parts for the guidance system and a few repair manuals he'd found rummaging through databases.
So as not to go mad because of the silence and solitude, he ripped out the laser gun control console and began to disassemble the system. Days went by, and he started losing his sense of time. Investigating the sophisticated equipment, Andrei tired morally but not physically.
Then he would stop and begin jumping across the cramped compartment, pushing off the walls in order to wear himself out. Sometimes these training sessions resulted in a fit of hysterical laughter: he had the impression he was an imbecile jumping and scurrying around like a monkey... but who could see him, and how could he move in another manner? At least that helped him to remain in his right mind.
In fact, he was afraid. He hated himself for that, but no sooner had he remembered the endless hours of his agony than he felt sick. He just wanted to live. He secretly dreamed of the day when he would come back despite all obstacles. He daydreamed of the moment when he'd set foot on a planet — any planet. All he wanted was to see a sky overhead and to feel firm ground underfoot.
He toiled until he was so exhausted he couldn't think. But yet he thought, dreamed — and kept working.
Ninety-two days passed.
He grew gaunt, his complexion darkly sallow. Andrei's hands were covered in burns and scratches, but now he knew the turret inside out. The radar and the transmitter functioned as before. Hence he could be sure that a rescue spaceship wouldn't miss him. It was bound to hear his signals; however, he wasn't yet aware that he'd become quite indifferent to that.
He only had to fix the antennas to finish the repairs.
To do that, he had to leave the compartment and go into outer space.
Having put on a newly fitted and recharged spacesuit, Andrei went out of the compartment into the corridor that had formerly led to Deck 10 of the space cruiser Russia. Now the corridor didn't measure more than ten feet long, ending in a hermetic bulkhead.
Having sealed the compartment hatch, Andrei turned on the air evacuation system and approached the bulkhead. For the first time in his three months' solitude, he was going to leave his shelter.
Hesitantly he took the handwheel; a moment later he was overcome with impatience. He feverishly unscrewed the spiral lock, flung the emergency hatch wide open — and stopped short.
Before him, as far as he could see, an inky abyss spilled out – the gigantic eye of the Universe gazing at him indifferently with billions of pupils. He staggered back involuntarily.
The anxious clicking of the spacesuit's radiation meter brought Andrei out of his stupor. He secured the safety tether and climbed out. Having quickly set up both antennas, he returned to the hatch and only then allowed himself a look around .
The view was both oppressing and fascinating. The shapeless fragment of the space cruiser ended in a somber and ugly gap. The surface of the turret was covered with runs of molten metal. In some places, one could see protruding armor plates broken out by the explosion. The skeleton of the laser gun towered above the scene. Its robust framework had been twisted, causing the whole structure to list. Somehow it resembled a crippled bird. The two antennas he had just set up contradicted the surrounding chaos.
While he was examining the laser, something had changed in the dark of the cosmic night. The bent supports that had seemed gray a few minutes ago were now tinged delicate pink, then quickly turned crimson.
Andrei looked up, realizing what was happening. The fragment was slowly rotating, and he had just witnessed the rise of the crimson nebula over the ridiculously close horizon of the small celestial body represented by the Russia's turret.
However, that was only a prelude. Bright lights began to flare up one after another in the dark. It looked as if someone had slashed at the black quilt of space with a knife, releasing droplets of blood.
Andrei shuddered with the thought even though he knew that the lights were nothing but debris of spacecraft lit up by the bloody rise of the nebula.
There were thousands of them; in one particular spot they were agglomerating, forming an irregular sphere.
Having watched it for a while, he realized that his compartment was moving towards this new formation too. In a few weeks it was going to pass at a very close distance from the terrible spheroid.
A chill ran down his spine. What could he do to counter the laws of celestial mechanics? Sooner or later his unguided drift would result in a collision with the cemetery of battered spaceships.
He did not despair anymore. It seemed that little by little, Andrei had lost that kind of feeling. Each day of struggle changed his attitude to his trials and tribulations, but this wasn’t because he'd matured. He'd merely got used to the constant sense of danger which had gradually lost its intensity.
Despite the anxious clicking of the radiation meter and an instinctive fear of the black infinity of space, he overcame the desire to step into the abyss. His own helplessness annoyed him, but also granted some strength. His loneliness was almost palpable.
Having made a hesitant step forward, he secured the safety tether to the laser's bent mounting and cautiously made his way through the barricade of twisted armor plates.
Having slowly advanced forty feet across the mauled hull, he was sweating and exhausted. The surface glazed by an infernal temperature offered nothing he could get hold of, so Andrei constantly faced the risk of slipping off. The thin rope trailing after him didn’t offer security. The cosmic abyss made him nauseous with fear. It felt as if the magnetic soles of his boots had lost contact with the hull, space would swallow him, tether or no tether.
Finally, pulling himself up and trembling with fatigue, he crossed a mauled armor plate and saw two fire-polished hemispheres set to the left of the gun. These were tanks filled with liquid nitrogen, the sole hope of somehow correcting his drift.
The liquid gas was capable of performing the function of primitive thrusters. All he had to do was to think of some way to vector it at the right moment and in the right direction.
Andrei advanced some more and carefully examined the valves of the emergency nitrogen ejection system. They were molten too. Sparks glinted before his strained eyes. He hooked himself up to it with the tether and cast a gloomy glance at the spheroid, once again struck by the surreal sight.
He didn’t yet know that his destiny was awaiting him there.
* * *
The wreckage.
Thousands of tons of crumpled metal and molten plastic.
God help us, someone had scribbled on the wall of a dark corridor filled with floating dead bodies.
Wrecks of space cruisers, cargo ships, repair bases and light recon modules; billions of kilowatts of power, thousands of hours of work, someone’s hopes, ambitions and fears; love and hatred, wisdom and stupidity — all of it crammed into one tomb as if into a cemetery of mankind’s hopes.
The wreckage of the Great Battle, an ominous monument to those whose bodies, which vacuum had conserved for eternity, were doomed to float endlessly in the darkness that reigned inside the spaceships they had built. What a bitter end for the creatures wh
ose minds had been able to perceive the stars but unable to tame their own ambitions!
Most of the wreckage, subjected to the nebula’s gravity, had stuck together. Their unification was as unpredictable and unstable as uncemented masonry: the spacecraft were incessantly and chaotically moving inside an invisible sphere they couldn't escape, gravitating to each other. The silent collisions were all the more sinister since their force couldn't be estimated. Their armored hulls were deformed, their hull structures crushed and broken; now and then, the energy of these collisions fused the battered spaceships together.
It seemed that all life had left this place. Still, someone had written those words on the wall.
* * *
On three more occasions Andrei had ventured into outer space before he managed to unscrew one of the valves of the nitrogen emergency ejection system. The wreckage pile-up was approaching. At first he had the impression that his fragment would bypass them but, as his tiny planetoid was nearing the ugly sparkling sphere, it was changing its course, attracted by the heavier body.
A few stray fragments began to appear around. They floated past, grinning with hideous rupture holes, their molten sides deformed. Bent barrels of laser guns protruded out of an assault module like broken human arms.
Then a cruiser floated into view, rotating slowly. Andrei's attention was drawn to the wide open lock gate and a cloud of black dots floating around it. Because of the rotation of the massive cruiser, some of them had formed a sort of circle around the spaceship, similar to a broken string of beads.
The module started turning. The cruiser must have had gravity. Andrei peered at the monitor, deciding whether he should go and open the valve. His trajectory would lead him directly to the open airlock, the internal gates of which remained closely shut. There was a high probability of finding some atmosphere inside the ship. Wouldn't that be nice. There could be oxygen, food, a powerful transmitter, maybe some survivors even.
The next hour was one of wearisome waiting. His compartment got caught by the cruiser's gravitational field and was now carried away from the mass of wreckage following an extended elliptical route. The black gaping mouth of the airlock loomed ever closer.
Unable to stand it much longer, Andrei put on his spacesuit and got out.
His dexterity had notably increased during the last days. He was now quite accustomed to the infinite abyss, the blood-red lights and the sense of utter loneliness. He secured himself with the safety tether, switched on his magnetic boots and stood up straight on the hull.
One of the black dots was heading directly for him. Others too began approaching his little "ship" which gradually drifted almost into the very midst of the weird cloud. Andrei took a better look.
At first he could make out arms; then he saw the gleam of a pressurized helmet's visor. Finally, the scene zoomed in with all its dreadful details.
He was drifting among corpses.
Standing amidst the icy silence of the vacuum on top of his mauled spaceship fragment, he watched the approaching body, unable to avert his eyes.
He had been a commando. Their group must have attacked the cruiser: his gray commando spacesuit had been cut up by a laser ray, and some dark stains of blood had crystallized on the edges of the carbonized wound. Through the cracks in the burst visor he could see a young face and huge empty eyes distorted by agony.
'Space was too small for us,' he thought, realizing the monstrous absurdity and corniness of that phrase. They had traveled through a tiny sector of boundless space where there still remained thousands of unexplored planets — and immediately afterward had begun killing one another, obeying some laws of economic and social development or, to be more exact, obeying their own nature and herding instinct; due to their lack of personal mentality, a small group of paranoid bastards pushed them toward each other, ordering them to kill and destroy.
Andrei could have been in that commando's place, floating in this nameless sector of space: a lump of frost-covered flesh, a cold, indifferent, dead satellite of the destroyed cruiser.
He didn't believe anything anymore. The body floated past, its outstretched arms almost touching him — followed by another one and by dozens of others here and there.
The suffering inside him was too great. He didn't feel anything anymore. He just stared at them, his eyes empty with pain, knowing he'd never be happy again. Even if he survived. A memory like that never fades, and time cannot help it.
* * *
A few lights glowed in the depth of the battle control room of the battered cruiser. All of the crew had died. The spacecraft was depressurized, practically bereft of power. But those who were now floating in the vacuum around the wreckage of their stronghold had constructed the most perfect destruction systems. Their killing machines were unequaled.
A man might have dismissed the target which appeared in the sights of the last functioning spherical radar as worthless. This still-alive lump of flesh huddling on a metallic fragment of a turret could only make you feel sorry for it. But for the cruiser's automatic systems this was the enemy. Its computer had no idea of mercy nor worth. It was programmed to continue the war.
The gun's micro switches searched for some undamaged control circuits. The exact aiming electromagnets were out of order, as were the servomotors, and that was why the vacuum gun barrel shook convulsively, struggling to aim. In the silence of space the electronic breech-block chambered the first shell, and some intermittent flashes of gun-fire illuminated for the last time the cruiser's hull. The fifth shell in the charger got stuck, but the target was already for ninety percent destroyed: the attacking battle compartment was holed, and a powerful jet of gas was gushing out of it. The reaction force pulled the compartment away from the cruiser in the direction of the spherical conglomeration of damaged spaceships.
Whether the man piloting the module was hit remained unknown to the computer, but it didn’t' care: the tiny figure at the end of the safety tether had little chance of survival.
Inside the dying spacecraft, a memory crystal logged in another victory chalked up by the cruiser North over an enemy ship.
3.
"Hugh, let's clear out of here!" Nomad snapped, turning away from the external monitors.
Ernie Hugo looked in surprise at his partner. "Since when have you been afraid of the dead, Nom?"
Silently, Nomad rolled with his seat to the reserve panel and flipped some switches, then reached out for his cup of coffee.
"I swear by the Procus snake-eaters, they damaged our property, and we have the right to take our own back!" Hugo spat out. "What the hell are you afraid of?"
The coffee proved to be too hot. Having taken a gulp, Nomad burned his mouth and snorted angrily, choking. He replaced the cup and peered moodily at the 3-D survey screen where one could see, in the inky abyss of space, a gigantic swirling octopus glowing with every hue of red.
This nuclear cesspit was located exactly where the planetoid used to be. Now it was gone and so was their stash.
The planet had been annihilated, which was plainly stated by the onboard computer, thousands of metal fragments orbiting whatever was left of it.
One of the monitors kept ID'ing spaceships as they floated into the onboard video sensors' field of view.
"Ernie, you see what this means?"
Hugo made a face supposed to indicate naïve bewilderment, but Nomad wasn't interested in their habitual banter. The eyes of this space vagrant betrayed some genuine fear.
"That's a Galactic War, Hugh," he said in a low voice.
"Yeah right! Why are you panicking?" Ernie lost his temper. "What's wrong with you? Yeah, sure I can see perfectly well that this heap of scrap metal stinks of radiation to high heaven and back. So what? We have the necessary protection, decontaminating agents, remotely controlled robots! You just look at this!" he pointed a finger at a monitor identifying the contour and characteristics of yet another damaged spacecraft. "An Earth battle cruiser! Our tub is falling to pieces, the reactors a
re exhausted, but this..." he rolled his eyes. "In just a month we'll have ourselves one hell of a ship!" Ernie took another glance at his partner and added, without any irony this time: "You know, Nom, people only get what they deserve. If everybody worked as we do to earn their daily bread, they would have no time to exchange punches!"
Nomad shook his head but didn't reply: the onboard computer beat him to it. Their ship's transmitter kept changing frequencies automatically; and at that particular moment, it had reached the wavelength of 21 centimeters.
A voice filled the chartroom, "Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!"
Hugo keyed in some commands. The onboard radars took the object’s bearings.
"This is a spacesuit emergency transmitter," he said in disappointment.
"Find him," Nomad barked while rolling his seat toward the control panel.
"This has to be a corpse. You know these automatics."
"Hugh, I want you to find him."
"Well, as you wish. Just a moment. But after that, we'll go there and patch up that ship for our own use, okay?"
Messages flashed on the chartroom monitors,
Searching...
Coordinates of the object...
Zooming in the square...
Object detected.
An image appeared on the main 3-D monitor.
A destroyed gun turret floated through space, rotating slowly. Its armor deformed by fire, its laser mountings twisted and crumpled. Behind the remnants of the large support skids that had served at one time to put the turret forward out of the body of the cruiser to outer space, a human body in a battle spacesuit trailed in its wake. The green lights of the emergency beacons on his shoulders and pressure helmet kept flashing;
"The signal is green" Hugh exclaimed in surprise. "Should we go and check?"
The Island of Hope Page 3
