James Wittenbach - Worlds Apart 09

by Gethsemane

  The humans are trying to repair their mighty ship. The damage it has taken has been extreme. I, myself, have been generously providing my services to the crew in restoring damaged systems.

  Pegasus – Commander Keeler’s Quarters: Keeler sat in his couch, wearing a blue bathrobe with a design of yellow and gray geometric shapes linked by black lines in a sort of circuit-board pattern. The slippers on his feet were made of bunnybeast fur. The drink in his hand was hot buttered rum.

  He stared at the case that had been built into his wall, but was now smashed and broken, like the dozens of archaeological tchotchkes that had been displayed on it but now lay in pieces across his tasteful cream-colored carpet.

  The ceiling over one of his chambers had collapsed entirely. The bulkhead near his sleeping quarters had collapsed. Fortunately, however, his liquor cabinet had come through unscathed and that Keeler regarded as proof of a beneficent Allbeing.

  Someone knocked at his door. “Come,” he bade to them without getting up.

  The door no longer opened automatically, David Alkema had to push it aside. “Good morning, Commander Keeler, how are you feeling?”

  “I am very disappointed,” Keeler answered. “It looks like you kids threw a wild party while I was gone. And you could have just as easily thrown it while I was here.”

  “I don’t know if you remember,” Alkema said, sitting down across from him on the opposite couch, placing a datapad on the low drinks table between them. “Two days ago, as we were returning from Gethsemane, Pegasus was attacked by… something we are still trying to analyze.”

  “The last few days are something of a blur,” Keeler admitted. “I have a clear memory of walking through the Gateway. Then, there’s a lot of fuzzy stuff about … damn…”

  “What?”

  The Commander groaned in frustration. “Every time I think I’m just about to remember, it gets away from me. Anyway, I wake up here, my cat’s hungry, I give him some tuna fish.”

  Alkema activated the Display Mode of the datapad. A holographic model of Pegasus, 1/4,200 scale, projected above it. Most of the rear sections were colored red for severe battle damage.

  Alkema explained it. “We took multiple direct hits to the UnderDecks, the port wingblade, and the Secondary Command Tower. We lost 34% of our water supply. 32% of our food supply. 30% of our general stores. We lost 33% of our production capacity from the artifactories. Power nodes have been disabled in over a third of the ship.” Alkema nearly got emotional on the next point. “Primary Command Center… The Main Bridge was completely destroyed. That entire deck was torn to pieces. The Bridge Crew barely made it out alive.”

  Keeler shook his head, near disbelief. “Krishna. Was any one killed?”

  “No one on the Main Bridge, they got out in time.” Alkema rotated the model. “Another direct hit took out one of our gravity engines, the portside aft one. It’s beyond repair. The starboard gravity engine is severely damaged. We may be able to salvage it, but we’re still assessing. In the meantime, we have only two working engines. And with the other damage to the ship…” He shook his head.

  Alkema then brought up a secondary chart that described damage to tactical systems.

  “We lost over a third of our Accipiters in the attack, and our supply of hammerheads is severely depleted. A number of our phalanx guns were destroyed, and others were badly damaged.”

  Keeler asked. “What about people?”

  This was the grimmest news of all. “46 confirmed dead, and another 96 unaccounted for. There are parts of the ship we can’t get to, and won’t be able to for a while. All casualties were among our personnel, we didn’t lose any of the Gethsemanian children.” Keeler looked puzzled. “What Gethsemanian children?” Alkema took a deep breath: “After you went through the Gateway, we discovered that the children of Gethsemane could not pass through it. They were going to be left behind to die when the planet exploded. We undertook to rescue them.”

  “Oh, Good Lord…” Keeler realized he was going to need another, much more potent drink to cope with this.

  Alkema gave him the details. “We rescued 8,111 children under sixteen and 200 adults from the planet’s surface. We have space to accommodate all of them in the ship’s habitation complex. Most of the children are above the age of ten.” Keeler was stunned by this information. “What you’re saying is these children now outnumber our legacy crew by more than two to one.”

  Alkema: “Not all of them are children, but, za, there are now at least 11,600 people on Pegasus.”

  Keeler was mortified. “How can we possibly take care of that many people with the damage we’ve suffered?”

  Fortunately, they are moving most of the new young humans to the Tertiary Habitation Decks them. The quarters that were emptied out when half the crew left on Lex Keeler will house the rest, most of them with families that have agreed to adopt them. We had to shut down the Holographic Sky Generators to save power, so there is nothing projected on the domes over the inhabitation areas, just black starry space. Since those areas have not been used until now, they’re rather plain.

  They used to be entirely dark and empty. There goes the neighborhood, I guess the expression is.

  Other members of the crew are also moving to the Tertiary Habitation Decks so they can help the newcomers adjust themselves to this ship, which adds to the general disarray that has become the defining characteristic of life on board Pegasus since the destruction of Gethsemane.

  Pegasus – Tertiary Habitation Area, Deck 11: “If you don’t like the color of the walls, you can adjust them with this control panel,” Taurus Rook demonstrated by changing the walls in the room for white to dark blue with white trim.

  “They were okay before,” Soarboar said in his soft, shy voice. “It’s good.” It was a standard residential pod, a central living and dining area with an alcove to one side for food preparation. A short corridor at the back led to sleeping areas and the hygiene pod, which Johnny Rook had demonstrated to the polite amazement of Soarboar and his wife.

  This pod contained only the bare minimum of furnishings it had been equipped with at the time of Pegasus’s launch: a dining table, a couch and a chair. There were additional blankets and clothes in the storage cupboards, along with a months supply of food and the utensils for preparing and eating it.

  “When the artifactories are operational again, we can supply you with more furnishings,” Taurus Rook said apologetically, resetting the walls to standard white.

  “This is good, thank you,” Soarboar assured her. “It’s real nice. Maybe I can help fix your… your artrafactries… I’m good at fixing things.”

  “We will be happy to train you. Maybe you can join the ship’s Technical Core once you learn our technology,” Taurus Rook told him.

  Anaconda Taurus Rook was now tasked with provisioning, quartering, educating, and integrating eight thousand new Gethsemanians into Pegasus’s crew. She along with Johnny Rook, Skua, and Shorpy would be moving into family-sized residential quarters in the Tertiary Inhabitation Area, along with the Gethsemanian refugees.

  During the attack, the crew wasn’t sure if one of the Aves had made it off the planet and survived the explosion. As it turns out, they did and I lost 10 bucks. There should be some interesting and awkward conversation once they learn TyroCommander Change wanted to leave them to die.

  Phoenix: Trajan Lear and his ship had been adrift in space for more than 22 hours. Aeric Tuck had fallen asleep in the second seat and slept for so long, over six hours, that Trajan Lear had to check to make sure he was all right.

  Down on the main deck, the last of the children alternated between hyperactivity, panic, and restlessness, so a few hours earlier Trajan Lear had briefly reduced the life support systems oxygen content to put them to sleep. It had been quieter since then.

  Trajan Lear had allowed himself a brief nap, had tried to reinitialize the navigation system on three separate occasions, and had moved his ship closer to the molten ball of rock th
at once had been the planet Gethsemane, thinking it might be easier for Pegasus to find them there.

  After 22.3 hours adrift, his proximity alarm alerted him to the presence of another ship.

  Trajan Lear read the transponder code and activated the ship-to-ship COM Link. “I knew it would be you.”

  The Aves Prudence flew into view over his canopy. “What’s your status, Phoenix?”

  “Propulsion and flight controls are able, but our navigational sensor array and related systems were severely damaged when the planet exploded,” Trajan Lear reported.

  “Can you follow me back to Pegasus or do you need a tow?” Matthew Driver asked.

  “Cables are standing by.”

  “If you remain in visual range, we can follow you back to Pegasus,” Aeric Tuck began stirring in the seat next to Trajan Lear. “How far are we from Pegasus anyway?”

  “About 16.7 million kilometers,” Matthew Driver answered.

  Trajan Lear replied. “Did you say 16.7 million kilometers?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Were you guys planning on leaving us out here or something?” Matthew Driver responded. “We had a tactical situation on the ship. In the course of which, we moved several million kilometers farther away from the planet.” Trajan Lear didn’t ask for details, he was too busy calculating how long it would take them to get back.

  Matthew Driver read his mind. “I’m signaling Pegasus to come about and rendezvous with us. It should shorten the trip to … three-point-seven hours. Activating formation beacon.”

  A bright flashing light appeared on the underside of Prudence. Trajan Lear instructed his ship to lock onto it.

  The two Aves moved together, precisely matching acceleration curvatures to stay in visual range. Driver filled Alkema in one the attack Pegasus had suffered through, which Trajan Lear did not believe in at first. The notion of monster demons from another dimension was just too ridiculous.

  Within an hour, they were passing through the outer edges of Gethsemane’s debris field.

  Trajan Lear saw close up the gob of molten ore that had been a living planet. He knew enough about geophysics to know it would take thousands of years for the crust to cool and resolidify, and that for thousands more years, the surface would be bombarded by rocks as the planet’s gravity pulled its pieces back from orbit.

  And nothing made by humankind would survive, he thought. Compared to the mass of a planet, all the things a human civilization might make over the course of millennia would be like a sliver of finger nail to a human body, or maybe an eyelash. And most of that would have been annihilated in the initial collision of worlds.

  So, it was a minor miracle when he saw the watership.

  He detected an object in space and zoomed his visual sensors on it. Under intense magnification, he spotted the hulk of an old ore freighter, one that had been parked at the pier in Port Gethsemane.

  The watership was drifting through space, neither spinning nor tumbling, but simply drifting forward, prow first. Under exteme magnification, he could even pick out the name painted in Gethsemanian lettering on its rear, “Iron Voyager.” Trajan Lear could not help but smile as the only relic of Gethsemane’s civilization plied its way through the Cosmos. Perhaps, some future civilization would find it and puzzle over it. Or, it might drift through Cosmos until the last red dwarf stars cooled and faded and the universe died.

  “Godspeed, Iron Voyager. Godspeed,” Trajan Lear whispered.

  A couple of hours after that, they rendezvoused with Pegasus, and Trajan Lear realized that, if anything, Matthew Driver had been soft-peddling the battle.

  The rear of the great pathfinder ship – once the most beautiful space vessel ever assembled by human hands – was a ruined landscape of twisted and jagged metal. A hole a hundred meters across had been blasted through the port wingblade. The edges of both port and starboard wingblades, once as smooth and as sharp as knives, were gouged and broken. There were even pockets of fire burning in some of the UnderDecks.

  They were all thinking the same thing, but it was Trajan Lear who verbalized. “By the Allbeing, what happened to our ship?”

  When you’re living on a spaceship, and your spaceship nearly gets destroyed by an evil monster from another dimension, one of the things you want to find out is what the thing was that attacked you. So you can avoid running into one in the future. (My advice would be to avoid trying to cheat death by opening portals into unknown dimensions, but I probably would not follow my own advice. I don’t really want to die.) Unfortunately, our encounter did not leave us with many clues.

  Pegasus – Artifact Laboratory (Deck 53): Many of Pegasus’s laboratory sections had been damaged in the attack. The Primary High-Energy Experiments Lab had no power and its Orgatron was inoperable. The Microbiology Laboratory had been breached and destroyed entirely. A flood of contaminated water from a burst conduit had destroyed the Space Physiology Laboratory. And an oven had exploded inside the Experimental Food Laboratory, splattering little bits of cake everywhere.

  The Artifact Laboratory had fared a little better. Some of the colonial artifacts and equipment were damaged, but it was intact enough to receive the antiquities and small everyday devices recovered in the final days of Gethsemane.

  But what called the most attention was a small curved oblong piece of metal, made of an ancient alloy, measuring twenty-four centimeters by twenty-two centimeters by one-point-five centimeters thick. It had been recovered from the Rogue Planet.

  There were two circles at the top followed by words. Lingotron had worked up a translation of the ancient message as best as it could.

  Consequently of in AFTER CHRIST our resistance of the star in the foot of the month of the July peoples 1969 they with security to arrive at the beginning for all persons existence of for inside

  “What does it mean?” Alkema asked the small group of archaeologists gathered in the laboratory. Aside from images of blasted and twisted metal support parts, it was the only thing they had salvaged from the Rogue planet.

  Specialist Merch tried to explain. “It’s a very old Earth dialect, a precursor to one of the languages of the Commonwealth. Espanol, maybe, or Anglish. We think the number 1969

  might refer to a date, the old Solar Year 1969. Which would mean this predates the Commonwealth by four hundred years.”

  Another scientist spoke up. “There were once pretty extensive facilities there. There’s not much left now, but there could have inhabitations, laboratories, hangars…”

  “That place was bombed hard,” Merch added. “Maybe during one of the Crusades.”

  “When you’re finished studying the object, hand it over to Commander Keeler,” Alkema said. “I think he would enjoy having it.”

  Alkema left the Artifact Laboratory, he paid a visit to the Special High Energy Studies Laboratory, where he encountered Hardcandy Banks and Blade Toto, both of whom, he was relieved to find, were completely dressed.

  “I know it’s soon to ask,” he told Banks. “But General Kitaen and I agree we need a full report on that thing that attacked us. And we need it before Commander Keeler puts it in the ‘let’s never discuss it again’ folder. Any personnel or other resources you need to complete the report will be at your disposal. Just let me know what you need, and how long it will take to complete the report.”

  Hardcandy Banks gave a low whistle. “I can do the report myself, and I have everything I need… except data. All of our sensor records of it are gone.”

  “Destroyed in the battle?” Alkema asked. “We should be able to pull recovered files from …”

  “Neg, there are continuous sensor records from Pegasus and Zilla. There just aren’t any readings,” Banks indicated the two displays, one for each ship. “No visual records of the ship being hit by those … Demon things. No records of unusual energy signatures in the Gateway. As far as the sensor logs are concerned, our ship was nearly destroyed by nothing.”

  Alkema was completely baffled. “How is
that possible?” Hardcandy Banks assumed her “hot but thoughtful” posture. “How is it possible to walk through a Gateway and get a foretaste of the Afterlife? Look, I know I am a scientist.

  But when I try to analyze this, all I get back to is that the Gethsemanians… with help from the Kariad… were messing around in areas they should have left alone.” This did not satisfy Alkema. “I don’t accept that. We saw those things. We saw them on our sensors. I saw one face-to-face. How can our sensors say they didn’t exist when we saw them?”

  Blade Toto explained it better. “She’s saying those things weren’t real. Our sensors couldn’t record them because they weren’t real. Something let them be for real, for a little while. But once they stopped being real, our universe forgot they were ever here.” Seeing Alkema’s befuddled expression, Hardcandy Banks explained. “That’s how I explained it to him before you came in.”

  “Are you saying we’ll never even know what that thing was?” Alkema asked.

  “Probably not,” Banks broke the news to him.

  Alkema took this in, and was surprised to find himself saying, “Maybe we aren’t supposed to know what it is, but I’d still like the best report we can do. I’ll try to record whatever I can remember from the sensor readings in Zilla. We’ll study the damage for residual clues.”

  There was one other thing. “Did you ever figure out how the Gateway itself worked, and where the Commander and all those other people went.” Hardcandy Banks transferred her final report to his datapad, but gave him a verbal summary. “I am almost positive the Gateway opened up a portal to somewhere, using a mechanism similar to the mechanism Pegasus uses to pass through hyperspace, which carried an interesting implication. To wit: If we duplicated the exact output and energy signature of the Gateway with our own engines, we could take the entire ship through to wherever the others went.”

  Alkema contemplated the implications of this for a second. “OK,” he decided on the spot. “Let’s never do that. In fact, when we write this mission report, let’s write it in a way so that nobody will ever try to do that.”