Worlds Apart 02 Edenworld

by James Wittenbach

  “This should never have been a civilian mission,” Bellisarius went on. “We should have stuck to the original plan. 1,000 highly trained military personnel on a lean ship. That was the right way to do this... Odyssey Project.”

  Constantine saw a shadow approaching them. “Bellisarius… look.” He swiftly activated his body shield and weapons pack.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Bellisarius assured him, raising one hand, palm down, signalling his lieutenant to relax.

  The figure continued moving forward from the darkness, moving more fluidly than a human would. When he got close, Constantine saw that he had no face, but a mirrored orb for a head. His hands and arms were constructed of the same material, and the rest of him was hidden beneath a Centurion’s cassock.

  “An and/oroid,” Constantine said in astonishment.

  “Salutations, Centurion 10010010,” Bellisarius.

  The and/oroid made a rapid series of hand gestures in the air. Although Constantine was fluent in the secret sign language of the Centurion order and even conversant in the sign language used by and/oroids to interact with humans, he found nothing familiar in the movements this individual was making.

  “Forgive my associate, he is ignorant,” Bellisarius said to the and/oroid. The and/oroid made another gesture.

  “Now, there’s no excuse to name-calling. We have a job to do.”

  “I’ve never heard of an and/oroid Centurion before,” Constantine offered by way of explanation, as they stepped together into the gloom.

  “Oh, they’ve been around for a while. How long have you served the Order, Centurion 10010010?”

  The centurion held up two fingers on one hand and made a pair of circles with the other one.

  “Two hundred years?” Bellisarius commented. “I never would have guessed a day more then 150. You seem as shiny as a new power conduit.” He leaned in to Constantine. “They don’t normally like working with wet-bags. It would not hurt to flatter him.”

  Pegasus – The UnderDecks

  When John Hunter returned to his chamber, Trajan was collapsed in a heap in one corner. Salty rings of red encircled his eyes. His hand, where it emerged from the restraining cuff was also red and raw. Veins were bulging against the smooth skin of that hand. “You shouldn’t try to pull away from the pillar. You could injure yourself.”

  The boy came around slowly, and in a way that made Hunter suspect he had only pretended to be sleeping. “Let me go,” Trajan begged. “I won’t tell anyone.”

  “I believe you would tell,” John Hunter said, a little softer and gentler than he had been before. “But that’s not the reason I will keep you here. I’m not a monster, but I have to weigh your temporary discomfort against my … freedom. You will have to take this on faith, but the less you know, the better it will be for you, as time goes by. They will want to block your memory of this, when you go back.”

  “I want to go, now.”

  “If our mother agrees to my small request, you will be on your way shortly, and this will all seem like a bad dream.”

  Trajan’s lower lip quivered like he was about to argue the point, then gave it up in futility. With his free hand, he made an attempt at wiping the tearstains from his eyes. “Since my Passage is over, why don’t you give me some food?”

  Hunter shook his head. “Not yet. The purpose of the Passage is to enable you to find your soul. I respect your religion and I will not stand in the way of that. If at the end of three days, I have still not received your ransom, then I shall see if I can find some food for you. Food isn’t as easy to come by down here as it is up there.”

  Hunter sighed, and sat down on a box just outside Trajan’s reach. “Besides which, your Passage may not be over. You and I may share many meals together, in the days and months to come.”

  “Why are you doing this to me?” Trajan shrieked. His voice cracked at the end of it. Whether this was the onset of puberty, or whether he had been screaming and rendered himself hoarse and broken, John Hunter could not be sure.

  “Motive and opportunity. I was the motive, you were the opportunity.”

  Trajan drew himself into a ball against the wall, buried his head in his arms. “Why can’t you just answer one fetid direct question with one fetid direct answer?”

  “I don’t think your mother would approve of your language. All right, let me tell you. I don’t want to have to live down here any longer. I need a way out, and you are it.”

  “It’s because of my mom, isn’t it?”

  “Your mother is the greater part of my problem. Executive Commander Lear is obsessed with rules and order, and has very little common sense. Those of us who are down here might as well be put to work for the good of the ship. Some of us would make fine additions to the crew, most of us would at least give more than we would take. The worst you can say about most of us is that we are too unlucky, or too eccentric. Neither of which ought to be a crime. Neither of which should warrant being put into stasis and sent back to the home worlds for criminal prosecution. Captain Keeler, on the other hand, is a very sensible man. I am sure a few minutes with him would be enough to persuade him into accepting our participation on this mission.”

  Trajan was confused. “What do you mean by us? Who are these people you keep talking about?”

  A smile parted Hunter’s mouth, he seemed almost ready to laugh. “That’s right. How could you possibly have known. How few of you on the Topside know about us, how very few? You go through your lives, completely unaware there are stowaways on this ship… a few, only, but more than you would think.”

  “What’s a stowaway?”

  “Someone who hides on board a ship in order to obtain free passage.” He paused, thought about something for a moment, then went on. “There are people who wanted to be on this ship more then anything. A few of them are dangerous, the Isolationists. You owe Vesta a prayer of gratitude that it was me and not they who found you first. Their demands would have been impossible… and they never would have returned you. Most of us, though, are rather decent.”

  “You hid yourself on this ship… before we launched?” Trajan looked incredulous.

  “Almost two years before. When I came on board… oh, the cargo decks were empty, most of the crew areas were unfinished. All the primary systems were in place, but the inhabitation decks were almost as stark as these Underdecks.”

  “How did you get on board?”

  “A bribe here, a theft there, I learned a few tricks in the process.” He paused, as though the conversation was beginning to take him places he did not want to go. “That story is not nearly as interesting as the story of my journey to the Republic out-system to meet this great ship, and eventually conceal myself on board her.”

  Trajan leaned resignedly against the wall at his back. He had the uncomfortable feeling he was going to hear the man’s life story. Like any other boy on the cusp of thirteen, his interests did not extend to the autobiographies of didactically-inclined adults. Hunter began with relish. “To get from the Extraction Zones of the outer Sapphire System to the Odyssey shipyards, I bribed the captain of a refinery ship to take me on board as a Cryo-Hibernation technician.”

  “So, you came from Sapphire.”

  “I did, but that does not mean I was born on Sapphire. A refinery ship carries eighty million tons of gas and ore. They have to use star-sails, because Gravity Engines would interfere with the refining process of the chemicals. The magnetic fields generated by ion-drive engines would make the chemicals unstable. As a result, refining ships move very slowly, and it takes them eight or nine months to travel between our two systems. They process the gas and ore en route. The ships are entirely automated, so the crew goes into Hibernation after we clear the Oort cloud and are revived before we reach the other system to save on resources. However, Guild Regulations require at least three humans remain awake in transit, to run the machinery in the event of an emergency or a massive system failure. Another beast shit Guild job. They know if the shi
p failed bad enough that the and/oroids couldn’t handle it, there sure as hell wouldn’t be anything we could do about it, but it keeps the Guild employment rolls up, and so the dues keep pouring in.

  “It’s the third worst job in the Guild. You’re practically alone. You have to patrol one end of the ship to the other three times every seven-hour-shift. You pass by the gas refineries, and they stink of ammonia and acid, the ore refineries bang away like an army of giant hammers, the air gets charged with static electromagnetism that makes your hair stand on end. The smell of oxidized metal and ozone permeates the ship.

  “And it’s lonely, and it’s dark. Just imagine the creepiest, coldest, scariest place you’ve ever been. Someplace that would make you cry if you had to stay there for even a second longer. Then, imagine being stuck there for nine months. That was my life on the good ship Madison Gilmore. ”

  “You said there were three of you.”

  “Oh, indeed, I had company, if you want to call it that. The other techs had been in the Guild for years. They were hardcore Guilders. They couldn’t empty water from a boot if the instructions were on the heel, but they knew how to invoke every manner of grievance procedure to avoid having to do what little actual work was required on the ship.

  “Furthermore, they knew each other from a long time back, and I was the outsider, not that I cared. The older one was named Ozzie Aziz. He had a metal jaw, and metal teeth on the lower part. Something about the Guild, a physical disfigurement is like a badge of honor. If they lose a limb, they don’t grow new limbs or get realistic cyber-organic body components, they get prosthetics, the more mechanical and artificial they look the better.

  “Haphaestus Hathaway had no visible disfigurement. He was taller than Aziz, but just as fat, and he wore a beard.

  “Like yours.”

  “Many Guilders reactivate the dormant hair follicles of the face.”

  “It’s repulsive.”

  “Indeed, but it helps keep the face protected in the event of explosive decompression.”

  “So why did you do it?”

  John Hunter paused. “For reasons I would not expect you to understand.”

  “Sixty-seven Sapphirean standard days into the transit, the proximity sensors malfunctioned. Some glitch in the system caused them to sound a proximity warning at random intervals, once every few days for about twenty seconds, as though another ship had intruded on our space. We tried to shut them down, but the Guild Health and Safety Computer refused to let us over-ride. I got used to the alarms after a while, but they made Aziz and Hathaway nervous. Every time they went off, they spat on the deck and crossed themselves.”

  “They spat on the deck and what?”

  Hunter demonstrated the gesture. “A prayer gesture from one of the ancient faiths, although these men were not so much religious as superstitious. I paid it little mind, myself. I did my duty-shift every twenty-one hours, then repaired to my quarters. I had my readers to keep me company. Aziz once asked me if I had any coitus simulation programs. When I told him I did not, he expressed surprise and disappointment. Offered me access to any one of his. He had hundreds, and had used every one to the point of tedium.”

  He was surprised to see a faint blush come to Trajan’s cheeks. Of course, to any good, clean-minded boy from one of the primary families of Republic, coitus simulators were not a decent topic of conversation. “I explained to him that I was more interested in lore,” Hunter continued quickly. “The Mining Guilders are a superstitious lot, and over the centuries, have produced a surprisingly rich body of literature, one overlooked by most academics. I had read tales of shipwrecks, pirates, debaucheries, down-and-out men and women with nothing to lose desperately grasping at whatever wayward strand of hope passed their way. The Guild is made up primarily of misfit and misbegotten souls who never found their place in our worlds, and their literature reflects that condition, and a view of the universe as hostile to the most basic human aspirations ... comfort and hope. Guild society offends the sensibilities of most of the good people of Sapphire and Republic. What I read of it offended me, too, but each offense was like an exquisite sting to my sensibilities. I relished it.”

  Trajan was looking bored again, and Hunter realized he had gone off-narrative. “When I told him what I was reading, Aziz asked me, ’Do you like ghost stories, then?’ I told him I did. When he relieved me on the next ship, he gave me a book. Not a reader, an actual hidebound and glued set of papers. It must have been centuries old. It was musty, and the print had faded in places, but it was a story I had not found in any of my other readings. I would later learn there was a prohibition among Guilders of even speaking the name of the ship it concerned.

  “The Loran Deene was a colonial transport. She arrived in the Sapphire system, so the legend goes, in Pentember in the local year A.S. 4351. She cruised slowly by the system’s outer markers without a word. The alarms were raised, and a detachment of patrol ships was dispatched to escort her in. The patrol ships scanned her. They saw her running lights were on, and that all her systems were functioning perfectly, but there were no life signs on board.”

  He paused and let the thought sink in.

  “She made orbit over Hyperion, but the outpost couldn’t raise contact with her. They scanned her, and saw that all her lifepods and shuttlecraft were intact and at their stations. They dispatched a boarding party. Two women and five men. They broke in through an air-lock, and reported that the ship was icy cold, and silent.

  “The boarding crew made their way to the bridge, they passed a mess hall with food still sitting on the plates, half-eaten, but still fresh, as though it had been placed out just that morning, but the ship had been followed for nearly three weeks at that point.”

  Trajan interrupted. “Well, if the ship were cold, as they said, it would have kept the food fresh. In ancient times, they used to preserve food by keeping it cold?”

  “They said the coffee and tea in the mugs were still lukewarm, despite the cold temperature of the ship,” John Hunter stated testily. “Two of their party were sent to the cargo holds to check on the colonists. They were surprised to find that each of the stasis chambers was empty. Not a trace of any colonist was found, although their personal possessions were still on-board, and the manifest indicated each chamber had been occupied when the ship had departed from Turning Point colony. Again, I remind you, all the lifepods were in place, all the shuttlecraft were on-board.

  “They continued on to the bridge. They didn’t encounter a single person. The bridge was empty, too, and also looked like it had been abandoned only an hour before. Most curiously of all, the controls were all set to manual.”

  Trajan rolled his eyes.

  “I didn’t believe the story either,” said John Hunter. “I could imagine a colony transport coming into the system on auto-pilot, with a dead crew and a load of dead colonists owing to a malfunction of the cryo-hibernation units. I could imagine the story being gilded over the course of a few centuries, merging with other stories, evolving into something more horrible. It would have been easy to slip in a small detail about the controls being set to manual. For the sake of a good story, I think we ought to accept that as given.

  “As you can imagine, there was some debate on the Hyperion Outpost as to whether to bring the boarding crew back. There was a quarantine protocol. If some disease had wiped out the ship and its crew, or if there had been some sort of alien contamination, it had to be contained, but the boarding crew was terrified. They demanded immediate evacuation.

  “Eventually, it was decided to evacuate the boarding crew and remove them to an isolated facility on Hyperion, away from the main outpost. They were told to wait onboard until it had been evacuted and sealed. As they waited for the clearance to evacuate, they diligently reviewed the ship’s logs, looking for indications of a systems failure, an alien attack, or perhaps an evacuation to a planet or another ship.

  “As they worked, one-by-one, members of the boarding party began to disappea
r. First it was one of the technicians, stepped off the bridge to use the lavatory and never returned. They sent another technician to look for him, and he never returned. Then, there was some kind of malfunction, and the lead engineer went to investigate, and he never returned. They split into two search parties of two people each, searched the ship with communication lines open, agreeing to meet back at the bridge. The communicators failed, and so they made their way back to the bridge. The second party arrived to find the ship’s Chief Warrant Officer, a woman, alone on the bridge, and unable to explain what had happened to her search partner.

  “So then, there were three left, the two women and one of the men, they noticed that four of the stasis units had been re-activated. Immediately, two of them went down to the cargo hold, leaving only one woman, the warrant officer, on the bridge. When they reached the cargo hold, they discovered the four missing men had been placed into stasis chambers. They tried to bring them out of stasis, but the controls had been locked out.

  “By this time, the boarding party was near panic. The two who had gone below went to their shuttlecraft, and prepared to over-ride the controls. The woman on the bridge refused to go, ordered them to stay on board, but they would not listen to her. They over-rode the controls, and broke the shuttle free from the docking lock.

  “However, the shuttle soon began flying erratically. There was no communication from those on-board. The shuttle would not respond to commands from the Hyperion outpost, and soon disappeared to the dark side of the moon where it crashed, leaving a crater and wreckage that can be seen to this day.”

  Trajan snorted. There were probably dozens of shuttle crash sites on the major moons of the Sapphire system. It proved nothing.

  “The last of the boarding party was the Chief Warrant Officer. As the shuttle was on its final plunge to the surface, communication with the Loran Deene was lost. Some hours later, the ship’s thrusters fired and it broke from orbit over Hyperion, on a course perpendicular to the orbital plane of the Sapphire system. Just as the ship passed out of communication range, the survivor sent her last transmission. It was cut by static and distortion, and she seemed nearly insane, gabbling semi-coherently about a radiation surge, failures in the stasis units, malfunctions in the ship’s BrainCore, the ship reprogramming its and/oroid emergency crew to ensure the ship completed its mission. The last they saw her, in the last transmission from the ship, she was sitting in the captain’s chair, as the Loran Deene pulled away from the station, her eyes wide and crazed in terror.”