With some assistance from the on-board computer, he managed to compensate for the suction between the two vessels, and then precisely match the Paricianne’s acceleration, and heading. There was no attempt by the massive cruiser to try and dodge us, and so we had a little time to weigh up what we had to do next.
Perhaps, it should not have come as such a surprise, but we quickly found that the whole cruiser was rotating at quite a lick below us. This meant there was no manoeuvre, our muscle-bound Tug boat could do, which would keep us in a stationary orbit, relative to Paricianne’s cylindrical hull.
As we watched the cabin windows of the cruiser fly by beneath us, I could see alarmed passengers and crew looking out at us. They were stood at rakish angles, leaning backwards into their cabins, their feet seemed to be anchored on the heat-shield side, or more precisely the stern edge, of each window. That’s when I knew for sure, at least the passengers had always assumed they would be put into deep frozen sleep well before the Paricianne’s Dark Matter Engine was started up.
For our mission to succeed, the only way forward was to make use of our one other asset, the one that we had parked so neatly on top of the Tug. Therefore, a new plan was hatched requiring us to get back in the liberty boat and then launch it at full throttle, like firing a shell from a cannon, directly into the hull of the Paricianne.
Whilst Tukarra and I suited up once again, Aleq had an in-depth discussion with the Tug’s computer, telling it how to hold the course he had set for us: as we gradually approached the Paricianne.
Curiously, Ellie seemed to be more interested in the contents of a store cupboard, from which she had extracted a large haversack that she slung onto her back.
When everyone was ready, we set off to the loading bay, out through the airlock and clambered back into the tiny landing craft. We readied ourselves for one last burn of the liquid fuel rocket motor; to do what we had to do, or die trying. There would be no second chances. Apart from the possibility of a horrible crash, that burn would most likely consume the very last drop of processed, high octane, fossil fuel we had.
Aleq counted out a sequence of numbers in his head - he was waiting for one of the empty looking bedrooms to pass by us. As he counted, I could see the gap between our Tug and the cruiser was becoming narrower by the second.
He tapped Ellie on the shoulder, and there was a loud roar, as she brought the rocket motors up to maximum thrust.
Then, after about the twentieth revolution of the Paricianne’s hull, Aleq shouted, ‘Now!’
Ellie released the clamps attaching us to the Tug.
Our heads and limbs were suddenly pressed hard back into our cushioned seat rests and the scene through the windscreen seemed to become a web of streaks, as we plunged the remaining few tens of metres, straight in through the large eye shaped window that Aleq had been watching out for.
Chapter 30 – The Lesser of Two Evils?
Our arrival, onto the luxury cruiser, was hardly what you would call an elegant one. The windscreen of our four seat liberty boat shattered as we burst in through the bedroom window, and ripped right through the back wall, before finally shuddering to an abrupt halt.
Even though we had prepared ourselves for a crash, the sudden deceleration wrenched our arms and legs straight out in front of us, and our necks were stretched to breaking point when we were swiped sideways by the rotation of the Paricianne’s hull. Tukarra and I were really thankful for the extra padding our spacesuits had afforded us. Without those suits, there was little doubt that our seatbelts would have broken our ribs.
As soon as the flying glass had settled, it felt as though we were lying on our backs ready to launch once again. But the view through the broken window was not of sky or stars; or even obscured by blood red living tissue, as before. The crumpled nose of the craft seemed to have lodged itself firmly into what appeared to be a busy hotel corridor.
The main body of our small boat was now snugly jammed between the side walls of the bedroom, preventing any significant rush of atmosphere from venting to the vacuum outside. Furthermore, we had seen for ourselves how the Paricianne had the capability to swiftly grow a new outer skin over any hull breach. It therefore seemed okay for Tukarra and me to remove our helmets and, although feeling battered and bruised, we still managed a whoop and a cheer.
‘What a ride that was!’ I exclaimed, offering a gloved hand to Tukarra, who slapped it with hers. She must have remembered first Tom and then Lynne giving me high fives back on Earth.
Aleq and Ellie dusted themselves off, whilst Tukarra and I removed our cumbersome spacesuits. As we did so, all four of us reaffirmed our determination to carry out the next stage of our plan: to find Vitcha Kesinko and either kill him or at least disconnect him from the Ether.
‘Before we leave this cabin,’ Aleq announced, ‘I have something of critical importance to show you. Please quickly climb down to the teleport tubes and I’ll explain.’
Trying to ignore the wailing of alarms and cries of panicking passengers wafting through the broken windscreen, we helped each other to clamber down around the seats towards the rear of the cabin, just as Aleq had asked us to.
The four of us stood together in a group with our feet planted firmly on the back wall, the four transport tubes arranged in a circle around us.
Aleq started his explanation saying, ‘Vitcha is in control of everything on the Paricianne: every android crew member, every door, every plant if he wants to be. He exercises that control through the Ether and also by way of an army of nanites: microscopic robots that course through the veins and capillaries of the ship. Because of this, even the trees and flowers can move and grow in real time, to attack us. So we need something to level the playing field. We need an army of our own.’
Aleq was looking directly at me now as he proclaimed, ‘And you my boy have brought one with you.’
I shot a puzzled glance first at Tukarra, and then at Ellie, before it finally dawned on me; this probably had something to do with Vitcha’s hologram saying that I had to die.
‘More precisely, you have brought the specification for an army with you,’ he clarified. ‘If you would be so good as to get into one of these empty tubes for me, I can download the data.’
I saw no reason not to trust my father at this point and I happily obliged. He pressed a series of buttons on the side of the tube, and a small holographic display popped up in front of him. It showed a slowly rotating three dimensional image of my body, in every detail.
As I might have expected, the precise area where my tracer chip had been injected between two of my ribs was highlighted. A few more button pushes later and masses of technical information started scrolling vertically to one side of the revolving diagram. The stream of information ended with a simple virtual push button floating over the image. The legend on the button read, ‘Commit’.
My father extended a slender robotic forefinger into the button and said, ‘It is done.’
‘What exactly have you done?’ I asked.
‘You remember I had serious misgivings about the technologies I was developing back in the 26th Century?’ he said rhetorically. ‘Well I implanted in you the means to destroy it all. You were my insurance policy to be called upon should any of my inventions ever be used against us as weapons of mass destruction. What I didn’t know at the time was that Vitcha would become the number one enemy of all humankind.’
In order to reign in my disbelief, I had to reflect on what my father had just told me, ‘So you are telling me that I have been carrying the specification for an army around with me for a billion years and you have just unleashed it?’
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I hid the description for a single spore of a genetically modified mycelium fungus within your tracer chip and hoped that one day you would come and find me. I hadn’t anticipated it would take so long for us to get back together though.’
My jaw dropped as I briefly contemplated the odds of such a long-shot paying off.
‘A
nyway, that single spore is now fully reconstituted in here,’ he said, pointing at the one unused transport tube. ‘It is sitting on top of the only remaining cylinder of Astracite.’
He proudly announced, ‘I genetically modified this fungus to seek out and destroy Astracite. Just now, it is having a feeding frenzy.’
As he spoke, rapidly increasing numbers of delicate frost like fingers began spreading downwards throughout the purple crystal, until the whole of the glass tube looked like it was full of pure-white candy floss.
He then suggested that Tukarra and I should rest our hands on the tube. It was hot to the touch.
‘As the mass of fungus expands, it heats up. It won’t be long before it breaks out of there,’ he said.
‘Is it harmful to us?’ Tukarra asked, beginning to look a little worried.
Aleq replied, ‘It’s not harmful to humans, except perhaps for the smart materials you are wearing. So I would not let it touch your clothes if I were you. It certainly wouldn’t do androids like Ellie and myself any good either. Therefore, now would be a good time for us to run I think.’
*
The seemingly impossible psychic connection with our doppelgängers on Cerrina (that Tukarra and I had become aware of when we first arrived on the starship) was apparently still present. And despite the rapidly increasing distance between us, we found ourselves exchanging thoughts with our remote partners instantaneously. This was almost as though we were using Astracite based communications. I could only assume our powers were derived from us being exact copies of each other - the kind of phenomenon reported by identical twins.
Anyway, it appeared our Cerrina partners, apart from worrying about being crushed by Eric, had a little more time on their hands to think about things than we did.
Cerrina Rhett contemplated unleashing his own army.
‘I must have identical data implanted in my tracer chip,’ he thought. ‘Perhaps, I could do the same thing here if only I could break free of Eric.’ But then he dismissed the idea just as quickly, when he realised Cerrina could not exist without Astracite. Astracite was everywhere, and most notably would be present in the smart materials used in the vitally important dome over his head.
Cerrina Tukarra wondered, ‘If it’s not harmful to humans then what about the Elite? They have an Ether interface built into their brain, like I used to have. That has a speck of Astracite in it.’
Tukarra and I briefly considered discussing our concerns on the Paricianne, but we still didn’t know whether our dual identities were a gift or a curse, and we certainly had no wish to reveal our condition to Aleq and Ellie for fear they would think we had gone mad.
That said, it had now become crystal clear, to both of our twin incarnations, that Aleq was probably just as deranged and dangerous as Vitcha.
*
‘Where can we run to?’ interjected Ellie.
The answer Aleq gave us was not as clear cut as we would have liked.
He said, ‘The fungus will poison the flesh, blood and sap of the Paricianne, but the antique Starship Kesinko lodged within her is largely made of metal and will not be as easily infected. We need to get to the bridge of the Kesinko as quickly as possible. I am hoping we can fly her out of here before the Paricianne disintegrates around us.’
My heart skipped a beat, as the glass holding back the fluffy white fungus began to craze.
Tukarra spat out the question, ‘What about the passengers? What about the Elite?’
Aleq replied, ‘Collateral Damage. Casualties of war.’
‘They are going to die anyway,’ he said.
‘Remember, they are to be Vitcha’s frozen food supply,’ confirmed Ellie.
Tukarra frowned asking, ‘Can’t we evacuate them?’
Aleq replied, ‘It is true the Paricianne does have a large number of single seater landing craft stowed under the hood. However, firstly they have been mothballed - to help preserve them for a long voyage, and secondly we are nowhere near anything suitable for them to land on out here. Thousands of refugees could not survive more than a few hours in the cold void, and it would take those tiny little craft decades to limp back to Earth or Cerrina.’
‘Your army?’ I asked. ‘What if Vitcha manages to synthesise a fungicide?’
‘It’s possible I suppose,’ Aleq admitted. ‘But my team back on Earth couldn’t find one. As far as I know, it only stops growing when all the Astracite in reach of it is consumed.’
At that moment the glass cylinder shattered, and we didn’t need any more encouragement to get a move on.
We had to climb upwards, back over the seats, and out through the broken windscreen, into the brightly lit corridor beyond. A fleeting look over my shoulder was enough to reveal a growing carpet of hungry white threads smothering everything behind us, and beginning to reach over the headrests of the rear seats.
Tukarra caught hold of my arm and pulled me out into the light. Our dramatic arrival had cleared the corridor of horrified passengers. It really was just like an ordinary, now empty, hotel corridor with bedrooms, staircases, and lift doors leading from it, stretching a long way into the distance.
Despite this familiar scene, it was quite difficult to work out which way was up. The blunt, and now battered, nose of our liberty boat had ground to a halt, after punching its way through the floor beside us. Most disconcerting though: all four of us were stood leaning to one side, and our sense of balance was telling us the corridor stretched steeply downhill in one direction and uphill in the other.
There were flashing red messages scrolling along the walls, and emergency announcements ringing through the air around us saying, ‘This is not a drill. All passengers and human crew go to your cabins and get into your stasis pods. Life support will be turned off in fifteen minutes. That is, just fifteen minutes from now.’
But the passengers and human crew were the least of our worries. Down the length of the corridor, dozens of androids were opening cabin doors, coming out into the corridor and turning to face us from both sides. There were so many robots they would easily overpower us.
Luckily, fate was on our side. The sophisticated computer system, on the Tug, had discovered it was not actually sophisticated enough to maintain a steady course. Without the guidance of a human captain, it was finding it hard to cope with the swirling Dark Matter pressure waves surrounding the Paricianne.
The half kilometre cube of Tug had lost ground. It had fallen behind, and clipped the Paricianne’s heat shield. There was a sudden jolt, and all the robots down our corridor fell over, many sliding a long way downhill towards the stern of the cruiser.
‘Run,’ my father shouted. ‘That way!’ he said, pointing downwards.
The relatively basic programming of the android crew had literally been their downfall. Ellie and my father had no trouble regaining their composure and running with us. We jumped over and onto the fallen robots as though they were stepping stones.
The few seconds, it took us to reach the end of that first corridor, seemed to pass in slow motion. Although having to take extreme care with each footfall, Tukarra and I could not resist the occasional glance behind us. By the time we reached the end of the passageway, we could no longer make out the shattered cockpit of our liberty boat. It had been swamped by a seething web of fungal threads. The androids furthest from us were shaking and twitching, unable to raise themselves off the floor. They were being overwhelmed, by masses of deadly white fibres: fibres that were ruthlessly seeking out the Astracite in the robots’ artificial skin and neural networks.
Most disturbing of all were those thickening threads of fungus that had found their way underneath bedroom doors. Like Tukarra, I knew they would be hunting down the Elite passengers as they were settling into their cryogenic sleep - desperately trying to obey the ship’s emergency announcements. But it no longer mattered whether we agreed with what my father had done. He had woken a monster and all we could do about it was run.
Aleq told us he would be taking u
s through the core of the ship, through the central atrium, and we should not use any lifts, or moving walkways, in case Vitcha took control of them.
As we might have expected, from a rebellious ex-Captain, Aleq knew his ship inside out and was soon directing us through stairwells, kitchens, and service corridors until we emerged into a vast open space, now tilted at a rakish angle like everything else.
Both Tukarra and I were amazed at the scale of the atrium, and to see its lush tropical beauty. There were colourful gardens to be seen in every direction, even above our heads.
Regrettably, due to the constant acceleration, provided by the Dark Matter Engines, there had been an avalanche of trees, soil, and water, towards the stern end of the cavernous space.
Our run had been reduced to little more than a swift walk, by then. We frequently had to make short detours across the tousled flower beds, in order to avoid the stare of video cameras, and to bypass any moving pavements. It was on one such detour, I became aware there was motion all around us. Wherever any soil remained in the gardens, and sometimes under our feet, fine green tendrils had suddenly started growing at an alarming rate.
‘Look at this!’ I shouted, staring at the ground.
Just then something else caught Tukarra’s attention.
‘Are those flower pods!’ she shrieked, pointing between trees off to one side of us.
I don’t think Aleq and Ellie knew why we were so alarmed by the sight of a few green shoots and a couple of over-sized buds, but Tukarra and I could feel our other-selves judder at the very thought of them. Our unseen partners knew only too well why we should be concerned.
Tukarra called out for Aleq and Ellie’s sake, ‘Don’t let the plants touch you, and don’t even think about taking a closer look at those large green leaves with pink inside. They bite!’
At that moment, my father held out an arm and stopped us in our tracks. He wanted to indicate something straight ahead, despite the ground still appearing to dip down and away from us.
Escaping the Sun Page 24
