The Shadow and Night

by Chris Walley

  The cabin lights flickered and then dimmed for a moment. Merral glimpsed flashing yellow and red lights on the panels of the consoles. He could see the captain, bracing herself against the desk and hurling orders. The entire ship was quivering angrily now, and he had a terrifying vision of the long structure vibrating like a twig in a storm. Suddenly something broke free above him and crashed down in a pile of fragments in front of him.

  The vibration continued. He slowly and painfully turned his head to see Vero, his face distorted by the acceleration, with his eyes closed, his hands clenched on the seat edges, and his mouth moving.

  Merral began to pray intensely, aware of the smell of smoke, the shuddering of the whole ship, and the almost deafening compound noises of the different sirens and alarms. Nearby a side panel tore loose with a bang and vomited out wiring.

  On the screen image, thrashing from side to side, there was an image of the pulsing blue slab. But now the beating was faster and faster, every pulse brighter, every gap between the pulses shorter.

  “It’s going!” came a yell. The Gateman, thought Merral dully, feeling, in some strange confused way, that the catastrophe focused on this one figure.

  The screen flashed a dazzling brilliant white that cast shadows around the cabin. Above the vibrating, roaring groans of the ship, Merral heard a single united awed gasp and knew that his own mouth was open and that he had contributed to it. Blue lines slowly returned to the screen as the whiteness faded. Now, though, they were less frantic, more leisurely, and their pulse seemed to be weakening. For a fraction of a second, a wild hope seized Merral, only to vanish as he saw that underneath them there was no Gate.

  Awestruck, unable to comprehend what had happened, Merral stared as first one, then another, then many sharp-edged gray fragments raced outward through the waning blueness. He could hear an inconsolable gasping sobbing from somewhere in the cabin.

  “The Gate has exploded,” intoned Vero, his voice clogged with emotion and barely recognizable.

  Numbed, Merral stared ahead to the consoles, aware of action and orders as, despite the appalling vision, the ship raced onward. Barely audible over the cacophony of sirens and ship noise, Merral could hear the captain’s distorted announcement: “All crew! The front of the debris cloud will reach us in approximately one minute. Prepare for possible damage to hull and engines. God be with us all.”

  Merral closed his eyes and waited, trying to close out the brutal bombardment of sound and vibration. The Gate has gone. The thought rang in his mind again and again but he could barely make sense of it. It was a simple, factual statement, but he felt vaguely that the news of his own death would have been less shocking. Be with us all, Lord.

  Something struck the ship.

  There was an awesome, tearing hammer blow that broke through all the noise of the vibration like a thunderclap in a rainstorm. In a wild, explosive flurry of fragments, something burst up through the floor, ripped through the cabin, and struck the roof.

  And kept going.

  Most of the lights went out. A deafening screaming whistle began and a gust of air sucked across Merral. Through half-closed eyes, he could see, caught in the rays of light from the few remaining sources of illumination, debris being whipped up roofward in a whirlwind. Above him, at the apex of the spiral of dust and fragments snaking up through the weird twilight, Merral could see a hole. He was aware of a new screaming in the cabin, the screaming of men or women in extreme pain.

  There was a popping sound in his ears, and he realized that through the gap in the roof he could see points of light.

  Stars.

  In his mind, Merral heard Perena’s voice, eons ago and worlds away: “But vacuum kills quicker than either air or water.” The sounds were dying away now.

  So this is it, Merral told himself in the encroaching quietness of the vacuum. How very strange to face death twice in a few days. And, even as the idea came to him, Merral noted his ability to think irrelevant thoughts.

  Then, beginning to gasp for breath, he began to make a final prayer. As he did he was aware that above him something was being extruded into the cavity from every side. The vision of stars died away as the hole seemed to shrink to nothing. Sound came back, and with it the noise.

  But he could breathe.

  Lights flickered back on, and the wallscreen image slowly came to life. But the image it displayed was now a schematic plan of the Heinrich Schütz, and two words in brilliant red, Pressure Crisis, hung on top of it. Of the twenty or so sections, six were a flashing red and the rest were either a pale or dark blue. As Merral watched, one by one the flashing red blocks were replaced by shades of blue until, within minutes, all were dark blue.

  The words Pressure Restored flashed across the top. From somewhere came a cry of praise.

  Still absorbed in appalled reflection on what had happened to the Gate, Merral was only peripherally aware of how, over the next few minutes, the acceleration died away, the created gravity came back on, one by one the sirens and alarms stopped, and the screaming died away into a dull, sobbing whimper.

  Numbed, Merral undid his straps, uncertain of why he did so, and got to his feet, shaking fragments off him. There was debris all around: bits of wall, thermoplastic sheet, portions of tile, shards of metal. In the roof, an ugly brown resinous mass bulged downward, showing where the hole had been plugged.

  Merral turned to look at Vero, who was sitting up, his head between his hands, his face a picture of blank desolation. He was shaking. Slowly, as if in a dream, he patted Vero on the shoulder. Then, picking his way between debris fragments, Merral walked toward the three consoles on the bridge. At a gaping head-sized hole in the floor he paused and looked down, only to see that it had been blocked between decks by the same automatic sealant system that had closed the breach in the roof.

  Disjointed fragments of sound seemed to drift into his mind from the frantic talking going on around him. A particular phrase seemed to be repeated and rang out again and again like a chorus. Somehow, though, its meaning failed to register with him.

  He walked on. Gateman Mikhael Lessis was sitting down with his back to the guardrail, with someone bending over him, administering medicine to a bared upper arm. Merral glimpsed an expression of total vacuity on his face and a meaningless twitching of the lips. I hope he gets better quickly and gets back to work. In that instant, the appalling revelation struck him that there was no hurry at all for a Gateman to recover.

  Staggering forward, almost overwhelmed by the thought, he came to the bridge area, now crowded with people. Merral glimpsed the captain slumping over her console with her hands to her head, her hair loose and hanging over a shoulder. As if sensing his approach, Captain Bennett turned her face up toward him, revealing tear-filled eyes.

  “How is it?” Merral asked, and the words seemed to sound in his ears as if they had come through a wad of cloth.

  She just shook her head. A man behind her with a single flash on his dusty uniform answered in slow, numbed words. “Five dead, twelve seriously wounded. Thirty with minor injuries. A lot of damage to the engines . . . but, God willing, we’ll make it back to Gate Station.”

  Captain Bennett looked up at Merral with moist and appalled eyes.

  “Sorry,” she said, her voice almost a sob. “I have a son on Marant.” It came to him that there was an odd exactness to her words, as if she were speaking in a foreign language. She swallowed and spoke again, but this time she said just two words: “Fifty years.”

  Fifty years.

  With a stunning blow of horror, Merral realized that this was the phrase he had heard repeated—the words that had been on everyone’s lips. Forty light-years from Bannermene at the maximum of eighty percent light speed. Was there ever a more simple, rigid, or cruel equation? Suddenly, as if a dam had burst, Merral realized the import of the loss of the Gate, and he reached out for the edge of the console to support him.

  Fifty years, at a minimum, before there was any physical contact of
any sort with the rest of the Assembly. Fifty years for a Made World to survive on its own with no external advice, no brought-in equipment, no emergency resources. Nothing out, nothing in, only long decades of silence. In forty years’ time they would get the first message—already nearly half a lifetime old, doubtless with condolences, a promise of prayerful support, and probably a tentative timescale of sending a new Gate. But nothing until then.

  He was aware of the Helm Officer speaking into his console and turning to Captain Bennett. “Gate Station, Captain. They are okay—just. They want to know where we are going to dock: main or engineering segments?”

  The captain looked at Merral, her face bearing an infinite weariness, and then she turned back to her navigator.

  “Main,” she answered, and her faint voice sounded as if were from a continent away. “Engineering can wait. We aren’t going anywhere for a long time.” She put her head in her hands. “Not for half a century.”

  20

  On the evening of the following day, Merral cautiously made his way down to the observation bay in the crew section of the Gate Station. There he floated, his hand only a few centimeters away from a grab rail, and looked down on the browns, greens, and blues of Farholme as the night spread slowly over the Mazurbine Ocean toward Menaya. In the last dozen hours, he had found that there was something soothing about being here and watching his world. The magnificence of the view both distracted and comforted him, and whenever the enormity of what had happened threatened to overwhelm him, he calmed himself by forcing his mind to identify all the places he knew on the globe below.

  The passengers who needed urgent medical treatment had been ferried back to Isterrane as priority, and Merral and Vero had been allocated berths with the crew of the Heinrich Schütz. In the last few hours, the Shih Li-Chen had returned to the Gate Station to bring back the remaining passengers and crew.

  To his surprise, Merral had found that the delay had not been a problem. In part, it was because he had been in too much turmoil to think about it, but also because he was vaguely aware that it was probably as easy to come to terms with the new situation in the seclusion of the Gate Station as anywhere on Farholme.

  As Merral stared down over the planet, his mind kept coming back to the events that had overtaken him and his world during the last few days. The loss of the Gate was so catastrophic that he had had to struggle not to let it push the other matters out of his mind. He wondered whether his ancient ancestors, so used to wars, rampant evil, and catastrophes, had handled such things better. Did they just shrug their shoulders, pick themselves up, and get on with life? If so, he envied them that, at least.

  He forced himself to stare out of the glass again. From this vantage point Merral could see almost all of Menaya, apart from the extreme western Tablelands and the most northerly parts of the ice cap. South of Menaya, he noticed a swirling cluster of storm clouds gathering over Hassanet’s Sea, their shadows black on the silver-tinged sapphire waters. It would, he decided, be wet and windy in Isterrane by dawn. Along the eastern coastlands, evening was falling, and inland he could make out the green swathe of the Great Northern Forest, and at its very eastern end, the tiny dirty blue smudge of Ynysmere Lake. North of the forest, the Northern Wastes stretched in lifeless shades of gray and brown almost across the entire continent, passing ultimately, on the edge of his vision, into the gleaming featureless white of the polar ice fields.

  As he hung suspended there, Merral realized that even gazing at this tranquil scene gave him no ultimate escape from his problems. Normally—especially when faced with things to think about—he would have looked forward to walking out into the wilds and being alone among the forests and lakes that he could see so clearly, but so distantly, below. Only now, the wilds were no longer the invigorating and innocent spaces they had been; they had become in his mind—and perhaps in reality—haunted and shadowed places. With this somber thought, his eye was drawn inevitably to where the low-angle light was etching in black the vast broken circle of the Lannar Crater and the Rim Ranges.

  There was a noise to his right, and a slight, slim form dressed in dark blue slipped down through the far opening of the observation bay. With a fluid motion, the figure glided smoothly toward him, almost like a diver cutting through water, extended delicate fingers, caught a strut, and with a practiced ease, swung to a stop an arm’s length away.

  “Perena!” cried Merral, lunging forward to hug her. He missed and, arms flailing, started spinning.

  Retaining her fingertip hold on the strut, Perena stretched out a hand, caught him, and pulled him over so that he could reach the handrail. Then she wrapped an arm around him and hugged him. They hung there staring at each other.

  “It’s gone,” he heard himself whisper, and he realized he sounded like a child. “The Gate’s gone.”

  Perena lifted her gaze upward through the gold-tinted glass to where the hexagon would have been. “Yes,” she replied, and there was strain in her voice. Then she added, quietly but defiantly, “Nevertheless, the King still reigns.”

  “Amen!” Merral answered, but felt it was an effort to say it.

  Perena gave him a smile, at once determined, weary, and sympathetic. “I’m glad you agree. But it’s a hard thing to say.”

  Funny, he thought, she looks older now. But then perhaps we all do.

  “What are you doing here?” Merral asked, realizing how pleased he was to see her. “I thought you were getting your ship fixed?”

  “I came up as extra crew on the Shih Li-Chen just now. They have a general survey craft here, the Eliza N’geno, they want bringing down, and I’m assigned as co-pilot.”

  She sighed and glanced down at Farholme. “A new ruling, as of this morning. All ships are to have co-pilots. Ship safety is now a priority. We can’t afford to lose a single vessel from now on.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve been a bit too absorbed to take in much of the news from elsewhere. What’s it like down there?”

  She shook her head. “Hard to summarize. It’s taking time for it to sink in. No real lasting panic, of course. Resignation, acceptance, grief: especially where families have been broken up. The day after tomorrow has been declared a solemn day of petition and fasting.”

  “That I had heard. But what do they know?”

  She stared out of the window again at the planet below. “Only that there was a Gate malfunction on an unprecedented scale. There is no hint of intruders, or of it being deliberate—I think that is the word. To those that know of it, my warning is being put down to a premonition. I have a reputation, it seems.” She smiled a shy, secretive smile. “Apparently, out of the whole of Space Affairs, I seem to be the one person that everyone feels a visionary warning might have been granted to. I don’t know whether to be personally flattered or collectively ashamed.”

  “And was it a vision? We owe you a lot.”

  For a second she continued gazing out of the window. “No,” she said in quiet way as she turned back to Merral, revealing a curious, thoughtful expression. “Not in a conventional sense. Something very strange happened. But I will tell you of it when Vero is with us. And how is he?”

  Merral detected a deep concern in her voice and he chose his words carefully in answering. “It’s been bad for everybody. But for Vero it’s been an especial blow. He’s said little since it happened and I’ve left him on his own. He’s been in the chapel a lot.” Merral remembered how he had last seen Vero, a brooding and disconsolate figure floating in the corner of the chamber the station congregation used for worship.

  “Poor Vero,” Perena said, with a sigh of sympathy. “I’ve sent a request for him to come and meet us here. Incidentally, the provisional statistics are that ten thousand Farholmers are trapped out of the system and just over a thousand people are trapped in. Both cases are awful.”

  “I can imagine. The only family member I have lost contact with is a great-uncle on Mamaria, and I’ve never met him. I’ve been asking myself, how would I take being tol
d that I would be an old man before I had any sort of communication with my family? And Vero’s father is elderly and frail.”

  Perena bowed her head as if in resignation. “It’s tough. And how are you handling it? How’s the ankle?”

  “The ankle is fine, especially when I’m weightless. As for the rest, I’m trying to digest it. Bit by bit. I’m spending time in here. I find staring at Farholme consoling in some way. As if having a perspective on the planet gives me a similar perspective on my problems.”

  “Yes.” She gave him a determined smile. “But they’re our problems. We are together in this.”

  “Thanks. That is one of the things that makes it bearable. How’s Anya?”

  “Numbed and quiet. Which is an unusual state for her. She has lost—no, that sounds like they are dead—but you know what I mean—colleagues and friends. We all have.”

  She paused. “Of course, in a way it’s worse for us four. Everybody else thinks it was some appalling, unexpected accident. We know—or we strongly suspect—that it wasn’t that.”

  Merral felt himself clench the handrail. “No!” he answered, and he was surprised at the bitterness in his voice. “It was an attack! It was a deliberate, malevolent destruction of the Gate! Perena, when I think of it, it reminds me of the attack on Spotback. Multiplied a millionfold!”

  “Yes,” she said in barely audible tones, “and we must act. Look, I’ve also been sent up here to bring you both back personally. Anya’s arranged a private meeting between Representative Anwar Corradon and us tomorrow. But I’d like to talk to you and Vero first.”

  She cocked her head sideways and listened. “Sounds like him.”

  There was a clunking noise from along the corridor. A pair of flailing legs descended out of the roof hatch, a groan, and a moment later, the rest of Vero awkwardly followed.