Such was the genesis of this world in the depths of space; its brief history was a tragedy of constant soundless catastrophes, explosions and collisions. After several years, the world finally became somewhat stable: wrecks of cruisers agglomerated to form a dense sphere, collisions and explosions almost stopped, and the newly brought to light planetoid started its elliptic run around the curling nuclear sink, dragging a long tail of fragments of smaller size.
Simeon was not going to linger by the rupture hole once he was sure there was no danger ahead. The wild pictures of rampant steel landscapes spreading out before his eyes didn't make any impression on the lad — he found some familiar reference points and moved on cautiously. Simeon didn't know the origination of the nebula and metallic sphere, and he didn't care for it.
There was something eerie and unreal in the small figure which was hastily making his way across the destroyed decks of the irrevocably ruined spacecraft: in the eternal silence, gloom and cold of the space night, consumed with hunger and anxiety, he was moving on too confidently and skillfully. Warped bulkheads, narrow vertical trunks, dark halls with immobilized mechanisms inside — that was his world, the world of cold metal in which he lived.
He was twelve that day, and he felt his solitude and impotence still sharper than in the last several days. His thin-grown face behind the transparent plastic of the helmet was clearly marked with the traces of endured suffering.
Simeon took a few steps and stopped, grasping with his left hand at a beam hanging down from the corridor ceiling. In his right hand, he was squeezing anMG-90 plasma emitter , with its safety-catch released. The lad felt a danger hidden before him, but couldn't locate it. Simeon's eyes filled with tears: to become accustomed to the idea of being quite alone was a frightening thing...
For some seconds he intently peered into the dark depths of a hall extending ahead. He was a few hundred feet away from home. This path was perfectly familiar to him, and all around seemed to be calm, but the first rule he learned in his life read as follows: "Never trust calmness and a vacuum." It had become an unconscious habit with him. Quite mechanically, he picked up a warped piece of pipe and flung it forward.
The infinity of the hemispherical hall was suddenly lighted by surges of light-blue lightning; the piece of pipe splattered drops of molten metal and evaporated.
The next few seconds would be decisive.
His flexible figure rushed to take cover under a dilapidated console. His fingers automatically pulled the trigger, and a plasma discharge shattered several cubic inches of metal in the place where the surges of lightning had come from.
Falling on the floor, he rolled to dive into a vertical trunk just at the moment when a new series of flashes annihilated the console that had served him as a shelter only seconds before.
Having flown a dozen feet, Simeon slowed down his fall, and just at the right moment: the vertical tunnel ended quite unexpectedly, and he found himself dangling from a bracket that he was by some sort of miracle able to seize . The dim light cone of his lantern snatched out of the gloom a fragment of cargo hold. There remained some ten feet to fly over, and the boy unclenched his fingers without any hesitation.
This hall was familiar to him. Confidently turning into a passage between empty racks, he squeezed his way sideways into a cargo lift trunk. At this moment there was nothing in his soul except for a hatred that superseded all other feelings. The bright splashes of energy discharges, the soundlessly scattering splinters of the console, the suddenness of the attack — all that reminded him of his loss. He still saw mentally a similar picture engraved on his memory: darkness torn by shots, the grotesque outlines of a battle robot, and his father's figure shielding him and burning in a plasma vortex. He didn't know how much time had passed since his death. His memory only retained a part of the eternity full of the pain of irreparable loss, loneliness and grief.
Probably having reached the limit of moral exhaustion — his instincts receded, and now to live or to die was all the same to him. Perhaps, this robot was just the one that had killed his father!
Clinging with his hand and legs to the brackets, he clambered through the trunk up to the deck where he had been attacked a minute ago. He was choking with hatred and tears. Flexible like a cat, decisive and fast like death itself, unhappy while being unaware of the complete extent of his unhappiness — the twelve-year-old lad glided along a wall, and gloom, the host of these halls, closed in on him.
The lantern on his helmet had been switched off, and he was able to distinguish ahead a dim, reddish spot. That was the glow of heated metal. The spot was slowly moving away, crossing the hall diagonally. Simeon shivered. 'So, I hit it!' he thought, leaning against the wall and raising the MG.
A series of light-blue suns cut open the darkness. A wall of silent flame shot up in front of him. Simeon instinctively screwed up his eyes not to lose his sight, and that was why he didn't see the retaliatory salvos rush at him from out of the gloom. A part of the wall was transformed into fountains of hot splashes.
He remained intact, but was totally blinded and lost the power of movement for some seconds. All of a sudden, three floodlights filled the depths of the hall, cutting the viscous darkness with oblique columns of light, and a MONSTER set out against Simeon.
The incandescent walls and the floodlights now illumined the scene well enough for him to see the adversary that he had just tried to knock out with his manual weapon.
A ten-foot high square platform was gliding easily just above the deck without touching it at all. Formerly there had been four sloping plasmatron turrets placed on it — now there remained only three, and one of them, half cut off by a burst, was emitting a crimson glow.
On the whole, the construction looked rather shabby: half of its shutters and hatches were broken off, a slide was protruding out of the launching silo, askew on its end a rocket blocked the mechanism, the plates of radar antennas were misshapen. The machine's armor, pierced and molten in some places, had lost its original luster long ago, but three machine-guns peering out of their sockets were in good working order: helped by a sole undamaged video camera, they were stubbornly and purposefully seeking out their target. Horrified, Simeon suddenly realized that it was getting really tough, as he was being attacked by an Automatic Planetary Scout which, although shabby, still remained one of the biggest and dangerous robots.
He crawled aside, continuing to observe the giant.
Color rings were floating before his eyes, but he was already able to discern some objects around. To the right of him, there was a lift trunk, to the left – the glowing wall, the robot – ahead of him, behind him – a short tunnel leading to a small sealed shack, where his father and himself had lived over the last several years. Remembering his father, the boy was again overwhelmed with a burning hatred for all mechanical creatures. He shouldered his weapon, but at the same moment, lowered it. It was impossible to destroy the scout with one shot, and he wouldn't have time to get off another one, as the robot's electronic reaction was equivalent to a death sentence.
Only one reasonable solution remained: to run away, to try to slip away from the machine in the depths of the spaceships and to lead it away from the shack as far as possible.
The vortex of thoughts that flashed through the boy's mind resulted in one action: he half-rose and, taking an acrobatic jump, dived into the cargo lift trunk. A double explosion blazed behind, but Simeon was already safely dropping through a broad dark tunnel, and the robot had missed its target. Having rolled head over heels onto the lower deck, he started running. A belated fear drove him farther and farther, along narrow corridors and across huge, dark halls until he completely lost sense of time and distance.
At last he stopped, breathing heavily and, grasping at a wall so as not to fall, rested his helmet visor against a bulkhead. No vibration was felt, and he calmed down a bit. His excitement subsided, he was ready to drop; he gave an involuntary sob and almost collapsed on the floor. Taking a glance at the
oxygen pressure sensor he understood that he had to go on by all means and felt worse yet. He would be suffocated if he didn't get home.
Such things had already happened; it had occurred to his father and himself to return from sorties literally on last gulps of oxygen, but now he was all alone and hadn't the slightest idea of the right direction.
It remained the sole path for him to take – the one to the surface of the spheroid, as it was only there that he would be able to get his bearings.
Exhausted and depressed, he reached the upper layer of ships and cautiously looked out of a hatch. All around, the chaos of a metallic plain stretched for many miles.
The crimson nebula still curled above the close horizon, coloring the ships' armor with opalescent spots. The indifferent stars interlacing fanciful patterns of constellations coldly gazed at the steel sphere from the abyss of space. Simeon got out of the hatch and looked round once again. The unfamiliar outlines of disabled spacecraft produced a discouraging impression on him. He realized his having completely lost the way.
The lad sat down on the ledge of the hatch, leaning against the covering, lowering his arms helplessly.
Simeon didn't know the exact names of feelings.
He had struggled all his life. At first it was a struggle against loneliness and boredom, against the walls of the small room and the locked hatch. But boredom finally came to an end, the hatch opened, and his dad appeared on the doorstep without fail. He brought some food, the smell of sweat emitting from his pressure suit, a tired smile and a lot of words. Father talked very much to him, telling him a number of zingy stories about quite unimaginable places.
At the beginning Simeon believed that Dad traveled to those places when he was out, but later, when he grew up and started getting outside too, he understood that his father's stories were nothing more than fiction: during their wanderings on the spheroid he never saw a huge room filled with oxygen on the floor of which water called "river" would flow.
In return, he mastered other arts. When he wasn't yet five, Simeon knew the true price of a gulp of air and of a bit of food. He learned to walk in the gloom of halls, shoot at everything moving, find out stores, open doors using electronic pass-keys and an emitter. Very often it seemed to him that his father and himself were playing a simple game with elementary rules: shoot first, manage to find a store, quickly react to the gleam of a robot's armor.
His life was simple and clear. He didn't feel any deprivation, and he didn't understand that he was desperately struggling for survival doing his utmost. He simply couldn't imagine any other existence; as for his father's tales about other worlds – they didn't find any confirmation in the gloomy labyrinths of the ships' cemetery.
Simeon lowered his head in such a manner that his helmet's visor now rested on his bent elbows. Loneliness and hopelessness overflowed his soul, coming to his throat as a hot, suffocating lump. There was no need to continue struggling, all had come to an abrupt end the moment when he'd tried to make Dad talk, looking with horror through the melted glass of his helmet as his face turned white.
"Sonny," another memory emerged from the depths of his memory, touching him deeply again, "remember this: one mustn't give up in this place. Each second is a struggle." He suddenly remembered that he had laughed at those words while Dad grew gloomy and his eyes dampened. "What a pity, sonny, that it seems normal to you." he whispered and turned away, sorrowful, which remained incomprehensible to Simeon. "I was unable to arrange a better destiny for you."
The crimson nebula almost sank below the horizon, and this part of the spheroid began immersing fast into the inky dark of the cosmic night. The cold stars' patterns became still more distinct. Human's passions were unknown to them. They remained impassive when observing the explosions and destruction of powerful spacecraft squadrons, and they were also indifferent now, when the enfeebled and exhausted lad at last got up and slowly plodded along the hacked surface of the steel planetoid lost in the depths of space, created by a wild madness of his ancestors whom he had never known. as he had never known their war.
The light column of the manometer indicating the pressure level in the sole oxygen bottle was inexorably descending to zero. He was now going at random, without making attempts to seek out some familiar reference points. The ambient landscape was uniform and was formed of an infinite conglomeration of various superstructures of ancient interstellar spaceships. Occasionally he crossed spots of bare, darkened armor or a real thicket of antennas among which were hidden concave bowls of radars and the sloping cupolas of control rooms.
Noticing that one of them was punctured, Simeon glanced into it through the shell-hole. His lantern's ray lit up some control panels, a partially broken a fissured survey screen and a row of seats. The last one in the row was occupied by a dead astronaut, turning to Simeon half-way. The corpse hadn't decayed due to the vacuum conditions.
A stroke of luck? He squeezed through the shell-hole and bent over the figure hanging from the seat. Alas, both oxygen bottles were empty. The pressure helmet had cracked after an impact against the console, the reservoirs had gotten crumpled, and all oxygen volatilized many years before, at the moment of catastrophe. Simeon sighed and turned back. No sooner had a hope gleamed than it was dashed. The sight of a dead man didn’t provoke any emotion in him: all spaceships forming the spheroid were filled with bodies floating far and wide. Before the death of Simeon's father the corpses had not presented for the lad any association with such notion as life, they had simply been part of the interior.
He left the control room and stopped for a while, examining wearily and indifferently an impulse rifle he'd picked up near a seat. The charge counter was fixed at mark 5. It was a good weapon, but too heavy and bulky for a boy of twelve. Simeon turned, with the intention of putting down his find, and at that moment a salvo of three vacuum machine-guns came sideways at him, a miraculous escape, having been protected by a ledge of superstructure immediately gone up in the squall of fire. Simeon recoiled under the protection of a cupola, having had time to notice the ugly outlines of a Planetary Scout.
He shouted. Angrily, hoarsely, not like a child at all. Any woman might have gone mad if she had looked through the transparent visor of his helmet – such inhuman torment could be read on the distorted features of the lad.
Awoken fury multiplied by a skill trained to reflex level produced their effect: the barrel of the heavy pulse gun traced a short half-circle and started energetically, spitting out five hollow charges – the whole magazine at the robot.
The plasma generators' turrets were smashed to smithereens, the platform swayed, the splinters of its destroyed armor flew in all directions, falling amidst a fragile forest of antennas and crushing under itself the location system of an ancient spaceship. Two machine-guns choked, only the third continued with mechanical regularity to spew bullet after bullet into the inflexible armor of a control room.
"Be sugared!" The lad swore through clenched teeth, picking up his MG.
The rest of the Scout sank into a silent light-blue flash. Simeon turned round and walked away. The momentary combat had made him concentrate, and his depression receded. He had to fight! The glance he took at the oxygen pressure indicator forced him to quicken his pace: the air mixture reserve would suffice for a couple of hours, and within this time limit he had to find a full reservoir. He came up to the nearest hatch, looked once more at the icy grapes of stars and got downwards with desperate determination.
An unpleasant surprise awaited him inside this ship. The store rooms he found proved to be empty. Obviously, someone had visited them long before his arrival – all useful items had been thoroughly cleaned out, and only trash remained that could be of no use to anybody. The sole thing he discovered was a burst tin of canned food unable to sustain the internal air pressure in the vacuum. The remainders of its contents were spread on its sides, so he put them in his pocket.
The empty store rooms filled his soul with anxiety.
He knew t
hat robots never looted cargo holds, they were only interested in generators and such. True, Dad had constantly repeated that there must be other survivors somewhere around, but Simeon remained indifferent to the hypothesis. He simply didn't understand his father's aspirations. Firstly, they felt comfortable enough being alone together, secondly, the child didn't believe in the existence of "other people". However, Dad had never given up the idea – sometimes, overflowing with sad and strange excitement, he'd set out in search of something or somebody, but always returned empty-handed.
By the end of the second hour of his search, he had examined three spaceships and gotten into a fourth. A bit later, the lad penetrated a huge hall, absolutely empty at first sight. Then he felt the first symptoms of suffocation. He realized that the end was nearing, and the despair he had for such a long time kept in the depths of his consciousness, finally broke through. Simeon stopped, panic-stricken, took a breath, being afraid that it could be his last . Multicolored points flashed before his eyes. He staggered, but didn't fall. 'Something's abnormal in here,' he thought, a gleam of hope arising. He was examining the empty space around, but taking a step forward was beyond his possibility. After the first spasm of suffocation, horror fettered his arms and legs; Simeon remained motionless, paralyzed by the thought that he would choke. His whole body was trembling tremendously, he was eager for life, and his lungs desperately demanded air!
He passed his rough tongue over his parched lips. He only saw through the convex glass of helmet an inimical and viscous darkness with just a few lighter spots here and there.
Perhaps he was dominated by illusion? Simeon breathed out, then carefully breathed in. The next portion of air mixture was compliantly delivered by his oxygen set's mouthpiece, though the red indicator had already lit up.
He took an uncertain step towards the spots and noticed at the same instant that the whole room maintained some traces of a cruel fight: the farthest wall and part of the floor were covered with vestiges of frozen burns, the gray spots proved to be the battered bodies of battle machines.
The Island of Hope Page 5
