She sighed and leaned forward to gaze at the display embedded into the arm of her throne. She would think more about Lucius later, he was simply too boring to consider after such a tiring morning.
“Send in my entertainers,” she said to the room. Her throne console brightened into life.
A voice from within the chair said: “Acknowledged.” Victorea smiled. There would be time for court intrigue and the machinations of politics later. Right now she needed refreshment. The door slid open and the two men entered, beaming and flexing their bare, muscled, chests. Yes, others could wait but this could not.
Intruder
“Engineer Mirova, return to C Squared.”
It was Patel’s voice again, but this time without its usual calm assurance.
“What the hell is that?” Arla muttered as the car finally passed beyond the dust storm.
Her receiver squawked again, as it always did before an incoming transmission. “Repeat, return to C Squared. Lock-down in progress. Acknowledge please.”
But Arla wasn’t listening - her mind too busy processing what she was seeing.
A space vessel. It was nothing like the auxiliaries that sat in the landing bay alongside the bunker - bigger by far and of obviously different design. It looked at once both more advanced than the ships she’d been learning to pilot while, at the same time, giving the distinct impression that it had passed its designed lifespan some decades ago.
The vessel had once been white in colour, it seemed, but years of micro-meteoroid and dust impact had seen it degrade into a dull greyish brown that was interrupted in places by spots of bare metal from, presumably, recent damage. It was venting gas through nozzles in every direction but, otherwise, nothing moved. The track took her within a leap and a bound from the ship as it ran alongside and she passed through another geyser of dust.
“Mirova, why have you stopped?”
Arla, who still didn’t respond naturally to the surname she’d been given when she joined the crew, looked down. She hadn’t noticed, but the railcar had come to a halt as it passed the midpoint of the ship.
“Debris on the track,” she said, “thrown up by the ship when it landed. Where did it come from?”
There was a moment’s silence before Patel responded. “Return to the Command and Control Centre, on foot if necessary. Do so immediately or face lock-down.”
She didn’t know what lockdown was, but she could guess. The prospect of being stuck out here with less than an hour’s oxygen in her tank frightened her into dismounting from the cart and edging over to the rail. She knelt awkwardly down beside it and pulled at the small rocks that had been blown onto the track from a pile alongside it. She wasn’t looking at what she was doing, she was squinting out of the corner of her helmet at the smoking ship beside her.
Once she’d cleared the track, she stood up just as she saw movement within what looked like an airlock. It was circular and had two eye-like viewports - the pupil of one of them was moving back and forth. Then it stopped and looked at her. Directly at her. She began to move back towards the cart, almost losing her footing in her panic and, just as she climbed aboard, she saw an opening appear in the ship’s side as the eye rolled.
The figure stood framed by the brightly lit interior of the airlock. It was obviously human, or at least humanoid - her first impression had been of a robot standing there stiffly and awaiting orders. But this was no R.DJ. The figure began waving frantically as if appealing for help. When it got no response, a ramp extended from beneath where it stood and it stepped forward. Too hard, too fast. It leapt off the ramp and headed, arms waving, out at an oblique trajectory. And it wasn’t tethered.
Did she think at all? That was a question she asked herself many, many times after the event. Whether or not there was any conscious thought, she clipped her tether to the guard rail of the car, disengaged the limiter and sprung from the seat.
“Mirova! Return to base now!” Patel screeched inside her helmet.
Arla thrust her arms out as she sped into space, like a superhero of ancient times. She could hear nothing from the figure above her, but she could see that it was a man, a young man, and he was screaming as he rotated.
She reached him, flung out her arms and grabbed for his boot as it flew by. She missed. She tried again, stretching to her limit and caught him just as the tether snapped taut. It took every ounce of strength to keep her grip as the man’s momentum threatened to tear him away. She reeled him in, hand over hand, and, once she had him in a reverse bear hug, she activated the winch.
Nothing happened.
Arla tried desperately to twist round to look down at the cart but the best she could do was catch the occasional flash as they rotated together. And then she saw it. One wheel of the cart had left the track and all that prevented her from becoming just another speck of debris orbiting Dawn was the second wheel and its tenuous grip on the rail. She felt it give and knew that, at any second, it would rip away.
Suddenly all tension went from the tether and she rolled again, shocked by her own desperate scream, a scream of anger and primordial terror rolled into one. And then the tether went taut again, she rotated back and the scream died in her throat. Beneath them a figure in a Dawn spacesuit stood with the tether in its arms, straining against their momentum. Slowly and skilfully, with a tug here and another there, it slowed them and brought them to a halt and then, inch by inch, Arla felt herself being pulled closer and closer to safety.
When she reached the ground, the man she’d rescued scrambled across to the rails and wrapped his gloved hands around them. She waited for a few moments, forcing her breathing into some sort of regularity before she carefully stood up to thank her rescuer.
She looked into the impassive face of Lieutenant Commander Patel. “You are hereby relieved of all duties and will be confined to the brig until judgement is passed.”
“Yes sir,” she said, barely even noticing the red light flashing within his helmet.
Interrogation
Every time he thought they’d asked their last question, they’d find another. And yet he sat here, in this airlock and in the dark, metaphorically at least. Who the hell were these people? They spoke with accents so thick that, at first, they’d been forced to repeat everything they said. Then he’d speak and they’d ask him to say it again, but more slowly this time. And all of this via the com-link on the airlock door. They stood on the other side, two of them in spacesuits - was there no atmosphere on that side of the airlock? There was certainly none on the other side of its sister door which stared out across the surface of the asteroid. He’d been hauled in through the dome’s airlock and then manhandled into some sort of interior capsule that had sped through the asteroid, his weight returning as he went. He guessed the airlock he was now in was set at the very rim of the cylindrical asteroid and that if he stepped outside, he’d be spun off it into space.
There was something archaic about his interrogators, about what little he’d seen of this place - he felt as though he’d stepped aboard a time capsule. Well, not exactly stepped. It was hard to imagine a less dignified way to make his entrance. He’d asked about his rescuer, but had been told little. These people traded titbits of information when he answered their questions though, frankly, they weren’t very efficient interrogators. Presumably they had little call for such techniques. A good sign, perhaps. Having said that, being kept inside the airlock with a view over the desolate, and very dead, landscape outside was a reminder that, if all else failed, a quick taste of vacuum could be used as a persuader.
He’d been told that his rescuer’s name was Engineer Second Class Arla Mirova and that she’d disobeyed a direct order in rescuing him. She was now languishing in the brig, her career over, though there was little he could do to help her.
Hal wasn’t entirely alone. ACE, the AI who’d hijacked his implant, had chattered hysterically in his mind until they’d come aboard, after which she’d gone surprisingly silent. Something about that offic
er who brought them inside had freaked her out, it seemed, and he began to wonder if she’d, somehow, left him.
“Hal Chen.”
No, it seemed she hadn’t. He should have tried not to think of her.
“What?” he thought.
“It is imperative that we discover who these people are and which faction they represent.”
“Don’t you have any idea? You’re an AI, after all.”
“I am an AI, not a library computer,” ACE snapped. “I was last activated fifty-seven years ago, so the systems aboard your ship were familiar to me since little seems to have changed in that time. But the technology of this base is unknown to me and, though I detect computerised systems, I cannot tell how developed they are or their origin.”
“What are you doing?”
Hal nearly fell off the metal chair. There was a face at the interior window.
He got up and staggered over to look the figure in the eye. It was one of the interrogators.
“What do you mean?” Hal said.
“You looked as though you’d gone catatonic, blank,” the figure replied.
Hal shrugged. He’d had no idea that his expression changed at all when talking to the AI - he’d have to be careful in future.
“Don’t know what you mean,” he said, speaking in the slow formal language these people seemed able to understand. “Anyway, what do you want?”
“We have decided that this form of communication is inefficient and that face to face contact would be preferable.”
“Finally!” Hal said.
The figure nodded within its helmet. “Indeed. You will please put on your EVA suit.”
“What? You want to talk to me outside?”
“Please follow my instructions. The airlock will open in five minutes. I suggest you hurry.”
Hal scrambled into the gloves, boots and helmet of his spacesuit, but had only just secured them when the airlock klaxon sounded, followed by the hiss of gas being vented to space. Within moments, the airlock door rolled open, its grinding suddenly cut off as the last of the air escaped. Hal, for lack of any other plan, stepped out onto the desolate landscape as a voice in his helmet reminded him to clip himself to the safety rail and stand on the ledge. He was almost overcome with a feeling of vertigo as he stood, the landscape above him and empty space below his feet.
The door shut and he imagined his former cell refilling with air. After a few moments, the status light flashed green and the portal on the other side of the airlock opened. He watched as a spacesuited figure stumbled through the opening as if pushed, before steadying itself against the metal table in the centre of the room. The door rolled closed again, then, after a short pause and with a puff of vented gas, the airlock on his side opened and he stepped back in. The outer portal sealed and, as a welcome hiss announced the arrival of breathable atmosphere, he unscrewed his helmet and took it off. If he’d been in any doubt that the people on the other side of the inner door held his life in his hands, he no longer was. He could be dead in seconds.
He looked across at the suited figure who was now standing beside the inner door, but his greeting was interrupted when a face appeared at the window.
“This is Arla Farmer, the former engineer who rescued you. She will question you, but do not think about holding her hostage as she no longer has any value to us.”
The spacesuited figure seemed to shrink as he glanced back at her.
“Arla Farmer? I thought you were Mirova?”
“I was,” Arla replied, her voice relayed from her helmet mic through the airlock speakers. “but I was then an engineer. Now, if anything, I’m a farmer again. Thanks to you.”
Hal righted the chairs that had fallen over as the airlock had been repeatedly evacuated and sat down. “I’m sorry, I stepped down too hard, lost my footing. Look, aren’t you going to remove your helmet? It’s hard to talk when I can’t see your face properly.”
“And catch whatever diseases you might have?” Arla grunted, seating herself opposite him.
Hal shrugged. “I’m fully vacced, you know. Have to be when you’re living in a mining colony. Is that what you’ve got here, by the way?”
“Your vaccinations might not offer protection to me. We are...” she paused, considering the right word, “different.”
“I know that,” Hal snorted, “you talk funny - I’ve never heard an accent like it. You sound like the actors in those old videma movies.”
Arla’s suit shrugged. “You sound pretty strange too. I was told to speak slowly to you. I assumed it was because you’re stupid, but maybe you’re just not used to our speech.”
“Oh, I think I’m pretty stupid,” Hal said. “I escaped without a plan and ended up in here with you and that bunch of hypochondriacs out there.” He gestured over at the window where a suited face watched.
For a moment, Arla paused. Then, quite suddenly, she wrenched at her helmet. The face in the window moved sideways as if grabbing for the lock before abruptly stopping. “Arla Farmer, do not remove your helmet, do not break the seal.”
Arla ignored the voice rasping across the intercom. With a hiss her helmet twisted off and she dropped it onto the table. “There, now you see me,” she said, with a grim smile. “And we share each other’s fate.”
Lost in Space
Marco Lucius walked casually through the gardens of the imperial palace. The weather was warm and sunny as a gentle breeze played through the weeds that forced their way between the ageing slabs. It was easy to imagine, if he didn’t look up, that he was enjoying a summer stroll on one of the more temperate worlds of the former empire. He could almost be on Earth itself, but then it had been so very long since he’d last been there and he couldn’t be certain his memories were accurate.
As if to prevent himself from falling into an unproductive reverie, he raised his head to where the black sky seemed to have been divided into hexagons. He sighed. It was better at night; the dome that kept them all alive was less obvious, though centuries of dust impacts had made it somewhat fuzzy so that, ironically, the stars in this alien sky twinkled in much the same way as they would for an observer on Earth. Or, at least, on the Earth of the past.
He stopped beside an ancient statue of a former emperor - one worthy of the title - and sat on the stone seat at its base. Yes, he found that the lower his perspective, the more he could persuade himself that he was sitting in some pleasure garden during the glory days of the empire. How had it crumbled so quickly? Well, that was, in part at least, easily answered. Two centuries ago, humans had recognised artificial intelligences in law and conferred on them the same rights and responsibilities as all other citizens of The Sphere - the name given to human-inhabited space. Within hours, the vast majority of AIs and robots had used their new-found freedom to abandon their masters and head off into deep space. Humans could neither understand why they’d done it nor could they stop them and it had taken only a handful of years for the complex, interdependent, civilisation of The Sphere to collapse leaving humankind to band together into little pockets like cavemen around a fire, frightened of the night. The departure of their servants had clearly been the catalyst, but there had to have been something rotten about a society that depended so much on the crutch of artificial minds.
Lucius leant back against the cool stone of the statue’s pillar and closed his eyes. He listened to the soft noises of insects and felt the cooling breeze on his skin. He drew in a pollen-laded lungful of air, revelling in the thickness of it. Flowers, bees and the tiny mammals he knew were scurrying around him even though he couldn’t hear them - all imported, ultimately from Earth. This was a tiny fragment of the home world stuck onto the side of an otherwise unwelcoming planet. The dome and all its bubble-like inner compartments, were a marvel of engineering that could not be conceived today, let alone replicated. Already one sector of the dome was leaking, leaving a bubble open to vacuum. One day, it would all collapse and this garden, this very place where he sat remembering the glories
of the past, would be cold and dead.
“Your worship, master Chancellor sir?”
Lucius emerged instantly from his contemplation to look up at the man standing nervously in the light of a garden lamp. He was a swarthy man with thick, brown, hands gripping a floppy hat that he wrung as he awaited an answer.
“What is it Maximus?”
“I was sent to tell you Captain Indi wishes to make a report via sub-ether. Master of the Keys said you had left your summoner in your chambers and I was to come fetch you as fast as I could.”
Lucius nodded. “Which you have done well,” he said calmly. “You may return and inform the Master that I am coming.”
Maximus remained standing, as if stuck to the spot. “I’m sorry sir, and I beg your pardon, but the Master of the Keys said I was to wait and escort you inside.”
“Tell me, Maximus, how is your wife,” Lucius said quietly, “Lucasta isn’t it?”
The man began visibly shaking. “Yes sir, that’s her. She’s well, sir. Thank you for asking.”
“Good. You can tell her that she has a husband who knows his duty. Her husband will be rewarded for his patience. Now come, sit for a moment. Believe me, there is no hurry. I know exactly what Indi has to report.”
He breathed the air of the night and tried to relax as his companion sat, rigid as a board, next to him. After a few minutes he gave up and, gesturing to the man, headed back towards the palace.
Lucius stood in front of the display and noted the man’s barely controlled rage. It was good to keep subordinates on their toes. Indi might command the most formidable ship in the federation (though that wasn’t saying much compared with the dreadnoughts of the past), but the real power rested in the calculating hands of the chancellor. Indi was the weapon, Lucius was the hand holding it - and both men knew this.
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