by Colin Kapp
It was Penemue who pointed out that the station had been constructed purely as a working environment and that the possibilities of sabotage appeared to have been overlooked by its designers. The structure was divided by vacuum-proof bulkheads into five main areas, but these were segmented in planes in such a manner that a vacuum failure in the central segment, which contained the store and docking facilities, would effectively cut the station in two and deny access to the remaining half to all but men wearing vacuum suits. In the top portion of the station was located the living and recreation rooms for the staff, with the major laboratories beneath; next below came the store and docking segment; with the lower planes having other laboratories and service functions and the communications rooms associated with targeting for the Chaos Weapon.
Kasdeya’s careful count of heads over several duty cycles revealed that there were critical watch-change intervals during the rest period in which less than five men were below the central docking segment as compared to more than a hundred men who were above it. Therefore the destruction of the integrity of the vacuum seals in the docking area at a carefully chosen moment could award the escapees virtual control of nearly half the station, including the only means of external communication.
There remained the problem of containing the men trapped in the upper half, who would quickly don suits to cross the vacuum-filled sector. This difficulty was solved by Wildheit, who inconspicuously managed to sabotage every suit he could find in the emergency racks by the simple expedient of removing an airline coupling ring from each and putting the collected rings in the waste destructor. A rack of suits in the lower half of the station he left intact for their own use.
Their main problem was one of timing. Since the plan to seize half the station could only be fully effective when operated at particular parts of the duty cycle, they needed advance warning of the coming of the provost-craft or any suitable alternative vessel. There was a reasonable certainty that if they made a move too soon, those trapped in the upper levels of the station would repair or acquire sufficient suits to cross the vacuum barrier or would devise some way of communicating with the other stations, thus ruining the escape attempt.
It was not possible to obtain information on approaching vessels directly from the communications rooms without attracting attention, so the trio had to content themselves with drawing clues from the makeup of the docking teams in the periods immediately preceding the arrival of the infrequent supply vessels. By identifying the speciality of each docking crew member and noting who was called in advance to make up a particular team, it became possible to make a fair prediction of what type of cargo an approaching vessel would discharge. Thus something of the nature of the vessel itself could be deduced.
The last problem was one of arms. Of the few weapons they had detected on the station, all belonged to the guard detail, and were limited gas-projectiles which could maim or kill if fired within the station, but could not endanger the vacuum integrity of the hull. These guns were carried at all times while roving the station, but during quiet periods they were laid carelessly around the guard duty-cabin. Wildheit and Kasdeya were agreed that as long as no emergency was suspected in advance, they had a fair chance of entering the duty-cabin and seizing a couple of guns before the occupants realized their intention. Here again, timing was critical, and the optimum moment would not necessarily coincide with the watch-change of the rest period or the arrival of a suitable deep-space vessel.
They still had not resolved this timing problem when Penemue reported unusual activity around the docking area. Call signals had been put out for guards to attend the work-party when the next ship came. This was an unusual procedure that suggested that even if the arrival was not the provost-craft itself, it might still be a better escape prospect than one of the routine cargo-transfer vessels. On this basis Wildheit came to the decision to attack regardless of the less than favorable timing.
He and Kasdeya immediately went to tackle the guard. Such was the acceptance of their presence in all parts of the station that the three men in the duty-cabin actually greeted their entry with a gesture of welcome. The first two were unconscious and the third was dead before the actual intent had been recognized. Wildheit picked up a gun and charged through to the adjoining room, firing as he went. He found the room empty, however, which meant that at least three on-duty guards were somewhere on a tour of the station carrying their weapons. This was an unforeseen complication, but there was no time now to change plans. Kasdeya had already seized the remaining two guns and had leaped outside again to cover the entrance. He was ready to sprint away for the next part of the operation.
Meanwhile Penemue had donned a vacuum suit and was making his way through the stores area on the center segment to where an auxiliary space-lock was located. He had previously analyzed the mechanism of the lock and was confident that he could contrive a false signal that would make the safety interlocks think that a space-transfer tube was clamped to the outside of the lock and safety pressurized. That way the whole system could be opened.
In view of the adverse timing of the move, it was purely fortuitous that the store area was clear of men at that particular time. He swiftly stripped the covers off the control gear, cursing to find unexpected complications that caused him to make a few ill-considered alterations to his original scheme. Then he operated the master control, praying for the lock doors to swing open to the raw vacuum of the junction domain.
Nothing happened. The doors remained obstinately closed. A series of tell-tales on the signal panel, which would be repeated elsewhere in the station, lit up to indicate a whole series of faults in the lock-control mechanism. All these indicators that should have been quiescent were a dead give-away of his tampering. So it was with something approaching desperation that he used the message given by the tell-tale panels themselves to analyze and correct the fault in his logic which had led to the failure of his sabotage attempt.
Then, with the vast whistle and moan of escaping air, the doors opened. Penemue had precious little time to secure himself to prevent being hurled out into the absolute nothingness of junction space. The safety doors leading to the upper and lower segments of the station responded quickly to the pressure drop, and the clangorous sound of alarms faded swiftly as the departing air left nothing to conduct the sound. Penemue then turned toward the main lock, hoping against hope that Wildheit and Kasdeya were hurrying to join him.
The marshal and the Ra renegade, however, were not finding things going entirely their way. The misfortune of the timing had meant that many more men were in the lower segment than had been anticipated. Initially they were unaware of any crisis, and four had been shot down before the screaming alarms which told of Penemue’s success had alerted everyone to the presence of danger. Unfortunately, the missing guards had actually been on their way to the dock, and these three had comprehended the situation swiftly and came racing back to surprise Wildheit and Kasdeya in the middle of one of the great Chaos laboratory halls.
While Wildheit drew their fire from behind a large cluster of apparatus, Kasdeya desperately climbed one of the mighty cubes of a Chaos insulator and lay silently on top until the three guards ventured into view. Then he dropped all three with incredible aim and rapidity and returned to help Wildheit clear the corridor of several incautiously brave technicians who had decided to bar their way. This carnage was unpleasant, but necessary for survival. But the confrontation consumed precious time which should have been devoted to putting the communications room out of action.
Wildheit therefore decided to risk the fact that premature communication with the approaching vessel might cause later difficulties; he indicated to Kasdeya that they should don vacuum suits and make for the center section without delay. This operation was complicated by the fact that one of the technicians had a weapon of his own and kept them both pinned against an emergency rack until Kasdeya was able to drop him with a sudden spray of gunfire.
From that point on they
met no further resistance. Vacuum-suited, they arrived at a segment door only to find it had no air-lock and therefore could not be opened against a vacuum. The next position, however, did have an air-lock facility, and they were through at last into the docking segment where Penemue was anxiously awaiting their arrival.
SIXTEEN
PENEMUE had already managed to disconnect the main lighting at the power infeed, so the only illumination was now the low-level of the emergency supply. Wildheit decided that even this was brighter than what suited his plan, so with a metal rod he smashed away three more of the illuminating strips around the main space-lock entrance. By this time the tell-tales around the lock were signaling the anticipated arrival of a vessel. Nothing, however, in the call array, apart from an illuminated request for a guard detail, gave any hint of what type of vessel was closing to the station. Nor were any further clues provided as the array indicated the seeking and attachment of a space-transfer tube to the outside of the lock.
This was the most critical moment of the whole escape operation, and a great deal depended on whether or not the crew of the docked vessel had already been alerted to the crisis within the station. Wildheit decided to assume the worst, and they acted as if the lock would open to permit the egress of men both alerted and armed. In this decision he was right, because the doors opened on six armed men vacuum-suited in the yellow of the Ra provost-units, seeking instant trouble.
They found the trouble they were seeking, but not in the way that they had hoped. The provost-men searched the darkened dock area warily; but, finding no sign of the would-be escapees, they moved on toward the stores section. Their leader jacked his suit plug into a wall-communicator point and spoke to someone in the air-filled part of the station. It was at this point that what they had mistakenly assumed to be a set of vacuum suits on an emergency rack, inflated by expansion of residual air against the vacuum of the dock, suddenly came to life behind them. The gas-propelled projectiles they fired did not need to be too accurately aimed, because the suits worn by the provost-men were not armored. The vacuum soon completed any death-dealing the six bullets left unfinished.
Kasdeya jacked his suit phone into the communicator which the fallen provost leader had previously used, and he spoke rapidly. “We have the renegades, but we also have casualties. Therefore we must return instantly into the ship. Please relay this information to our control.”
He then followed over to the spot where Wildheit and Penemue had taken possession of some electron carbines dropped by the fallen men. After examination, they acquired three of these in addition to the gas guns they already possessed. Thus armed they entered the lock, leaving what they hoped was adequate time for Kasdeya’s message to be relayed to the ship outside. An entry was expected, and the lock was cycled externally to permit them to pass into the pressurized space-transfer tube. There, two more yellow-suited men were waiting, but without drawn arms. Both fell before the unexpected fire of the electron carbines as the lock door opened.
There followed a mad scramble along the springy softness of the transfer tube and into the space-lock of the provost-craft itself. Here, the impression of something amiss had already gained hold, and the inner door of the lock refused to open to the automatic switch. Penemue swore and applied himself to the emergency handwheel, struggling to override the insistence of the automatic mechanism that the door should remain closed. A blast of electron fire through the opening gap warned them that the two provost-men still in the ship were prepared to make a fight of it.
Wildheit finally found a way out of the dilemma. He surmised that the men who had remained within the ship would not be vacuum-suited. He turned and with a rapid volley of gas-propelled projectiles punctured a large portion of the space-transfer tube, thus allowing air to escape not only from the tube and the lock but also from the interior of the vessel via the partly-opened lock door. Then he helped Penemue hold the violent handwheel which the automatic system tried to turn to close the door. Meanwhile, Kasdeya, with careful positioning, was sniping around the edge of the door to prevent the occupants from taking any more decisive action.
Finally the electron fire from within died away, and the trio entered to find two vacuum-asphyxiated bodies, which they dragged into the leaking space-transfer tube before closing the lock behind them. Penemue’s first concern was to restore a breathable atmosphere in the provost-craft, and fortunately there was a sufficient supply of air to enable this to be done rapidly. While this maneuver was in progress, Wildheit and Kasdeya, still vacuum-suited, had run a quick check of their prize to ensure that no more provost-men were aboard the ship. They finally reached the flight-bridge where Kasdeya was taking a wary look at a most unfamiliar control assembly.
Penemue joined them shortly. With the air pressure being rapidly restored, he was able to assist Kasdeya in understanding the controls. The umbilical cord of the space-transfer tube was jettisoned, and the provost-craft swung to new coordinates before it blasted away from the vicinity of the space station and the Chaos Weapon itself.
Unable to assist in these operations, Wildheit waited until the atmosphere was back to normal and then removed his suit. Already the engine song was rising high as the two Ra renegades at the controls pushed the pace of escape as fast as the strong engines would allow. Shortly he was able to watch the gradually illuminating screens as Kasdeya and Penemue defined navigation channels and began to bring to life the rest of the control boards. The instruments gave him a good view of the starless junction environment and the rapidly receding Chaos Weapon.
The sight made him stop in sudden concern. Remembering the last time they had peered down the focused barrel of the weapon he had no wish to repeat the performance. Yet before their own trajectory had hardened into a course the great space assembly had been leveled and was waiting, so accurately placed that the scanners gave him a clear view straight down the concentric axis.
More than that, he could see the great filaments of unspun star-stuff twisting across the featureless firmament in prodigious loops and whirls, hurrying to be swallowed by the gigantic horn and converted into the very force from which great catastrophes were formed. Whole suns were somewhere being peeled, and their frantic energies twisted into a luminous thread that leaped ever faster into the gigantic funnel’s maw.
His unease was greatly intensified by the idea that Roamer’s hands and Roamer’s foreknowledge of Chaos probably guide the weapon’s controls. He shouted a warning to Kasdeya and Penemue, but the pair had already seen the danger for themselves and were spurring the engines of the provost-craft to even greater efforts that began to be effective about the same instant as the Chaos Weapon fired.
This time there was no doubt that the bolt from the weapon reached them. They felt a lifting sensation as it caught the ship, and their velocity received a tremendous boost that no amount of engine power could have imparted. The engine song rose to a scream as its burden was suddenly borne by other energies, which forced the rate of acceleration up to completely unprecedented levels and strained to the limit the null-G counter-force which prevented the occupants from being smashed to pulp by the conflict between inertia and their rapidly increasing velocity. Their transition through the trans-continuum barrier was nonetheless made more durable by a great wave of painful darkness which smashed the senses from their bodies and left them unconscious and inert.
Time passed.
How much time flowed was uncertain, but when he awoke, Wildheit felt drained and empty, as if his sleep had lasted many days. He found Kasdeya on his knees, attempting to stand on legs that signaled weak uncertainty. Penemue was conscious but trying to explore critically the nature of the circumstance which had withdrawn most of the energy from his limbs. Kasdeya finally reached a cabinet and distributed soft tubes which, when crushed in the mouth, exuded a liquid like an aromatic dextrose. Something in its sugary sweetness appeared to do the trick, and they all gained sufficient energy to permit them to stand.
“What the hell hap
pened?” Wildheit asked weakly.
Penemue grimaced slowly. “We hit the trans-continuum septum so fast we must have created some sort of warp in it—a bulge that took us right out beyond physics and back again.”
“Assuming we did get back again,” said Kasdeya. “Let’s try and find out where we are now.”
The screens were still illuminated, but they told no particular story. It was not until Kasdeya had played with the controls for some moments that he gave a sudden gasp of understanding and then dimmed them all from a state of classic overload. Then they saw a sight that was difficult to believe—a density of stars and galaxies so great that the view was even more incredible than the magnificent display Wildheit had seen aboard Kasdeya’s ship. Their light formed an absolutely continuous wall in every direction, and only the slight differences in distance, temperature, and color made any sort of interpretation of the scene possible. Here was the most fantastic, the most marvelous and the most dreadful backcloth in creation, and an appreciation of its scope, depth, and scale left their minds numb and amazed.
“The old universe, for sure,” Penemue said finally. “But somewhere near the core, I think. All these stars are drawing in. Soon a group will start to coalesce. That will attract more, and then the sheer pressure of gravity and starlight will force all the others to join in a cascade which will grow faster the larger the core becomes. Finally all the matter in this universe will be contained in that one single mass.”
“What happens then?” asked Wildheit.
“We don’t know. We can only speculate. Certainly it will form a singularity of matter and energy so compacted that a black hole would seem like a vacuum by comparison. A sort of a stewpot of unknown physics forming the end of Creation. One surmises and hopes that ultimately comes the Big Bang and the birth of a new universe.”
