Strider's Galaxy

by John Grant

  Then it felt things begin to . . .

  . . . slide.

  One moment the Main Computer had been in complete charge of the Santa Maria.

  One moment it had been in control.

  One moment it had been relishing the trivia of keeping the mission on course.

  Now it was as though every subroutine were being swollen . . . sideways.

  The pain was excruciating. Trying desperately to keep its mind tethered, the Main Computer shut down every subroutine—every nerve-ending—that wasn't currently necessary. It flicked off its observation of the chess game, of Holmberg sweatily sleeping, of three people rutting most interestingly in the grasslands up by the daylight-simulator, of the present status of the navigational systems.

  It pulled itself back from everything that it could.

  The shields stayed up. That was a prime imperative. The Main Computer had learnt that. The recycling systems—particularly that for the reclamation of oxygen—remained at full power. The screens on the command deck remained as fully operational as the Main Computer could keep them.

  It recoiled from the agony of keeping the daylight-simulator alive. The light died.

  The Main Computer shut down all the things that it could. Still the anguish continued. It screamed throughout every channel of its software, hoping for some form of release.

  Pinocchio was trying to link with it. The bot was feeling some of the same pain. The attempted link was like the touch of a red-hot wire.

  The Main Computer screamed again, rejecting the link.

  It screamed one final time, then died.

  #

  Free fall.

  Strider identified her situation at once as she woke from a restless sleep. As she twitched reactively on waking she began to float up from her bunk towards the ceiling of her cabin. She was in complete darkness: the daylight-simulator must have failed. She had the sickening sensation that she was falling, and that the ground was a very long way away.

  "A nightmare," she said out loud, but she knew that she was awake.

  She touched the ceiling gently with outspread fingertips, and this was enough to push her back down towards her darkened bunk—if she'd had a forcefield bed there would have been at least a little light to guide her, but she'd opted for just a straightforward bunk.

  She'd stashed a torch somewhere down there, two years ago, but had assumed she'd never have to use it.

  She missed the bed and landed on her uniform. Careening around the room, she tugged on her jumpsuit—boots and the rest could wait until later. Bile rose in her throat, but she swallowed it back. She discovered her belt when her holstered lazgun hit her on the side of the head.

  The torch had been—yes, she had it. She twisted its barrel, and a faint red light came on. The chips were nearly dead. She'd told herself as they'd left Ganymede that she should follow the regulations and recharge them every month, but like everyone else she'd concluded, after a while, that such a primitive piece of equipment as a torch was unnecessary: the daylight-simulator was supposed to be permanent, wasn't it?

  She shone the torch's glimmer around, and it was reflected from the nearest window. If she could reach the window, and then hand herself along the cabin's wall . . .

  She found the door on the second attempt, and plucked it open to find herself in a larger darkness. Umbel alone knew what that darkness might contain—except for distant yells and shrieks. The nearest cabin to hers was a hundred meters away, but in the blackness she couldn't guess the direction.

  "Are you sure this isn't just a nightmare, Leonie?" she said out loud.

  She swivelled the torch about, hoping to be able to orient herself, but its faint beam barely penetrated the dark. She couldn't even find her own cabin any longer.

  Then Strider saw another light, bright yellow, coming towards her. She tucked herself into a ball, hoping that she wasn't drifting too far away from the surface. As the light approached it separated itself out into two lights.

  Pinocchio's eyes.

  "Grab my hand," shouted the bot as it came near her.

  "I can't see your hand!"

  Something touched her hip, and she seized it. It was Pinocchio's hand. She clutched it.

  "Swim," said the bot.

  "Which way?

  "Down."

  "Which way is down?"

  "I'll guide you."

  The atmosphere in the hold was just dense enough that, if they floundered against it, they could move themselves around. The twin beams from Pinocchio's eyes caught the roof of Strider's cabin, and they struggled towards it.

  "What the fuck's going on?" said Strider as they huddled on the roof.

  "I think the Main Computer's gone down," said Pinocchio. He sounded breathless, but she knew that was just a figment of her imagination. "The drive must have cut out as well, because the g has disappeared."

  "We're dead, then," said Strider.

  "Maybe."

  "Can you orient us towards the command deck?"

  "Yes. That's why I needed to find the roof. Hold on to my belt." The bright beams of his eyes swept her face as she obeyed, then whipped away again to probe the darkness between the jutting fields.

  "I see the locks now," said Pinocchio. "I'm going to jump this. Keep a tight hold, and don't thrash around."

  He tensed his legs, and then leapt. Strider tried to imagine herself as a sleek fish, motionless in the water. The tug on her arm was barely perceptible, but she had the feeling that she was moving through the gloom at great speed.

  "We will be impacting at the airlock in about fifteen seconds," said Pinocchio a little later. "Grapple your way up my body and let me take you in my arms."

  At a time like this? she wanted to say. Instead she just clawed herself up Pinocchio's clothing until her head was level with his.

  In fact, it was only one arm that he put around her. In the glare from his eyes she could see that his other arm was outstretched ahead of them.

  "This may be a bit of a rough landing," said the bot.

  A moment later they hit the lock door. Most of the worst of the impact was shielded from Strider by Pinocchio, who twisted himself about as they hit. He had his free hand wrapped around the edge of the emergency manual wheel in the airlock door's front.

  "Hold me by the belt again." he said. Once more there was the impression that he was gasping. She did as he told her, then felt him use the wheel to swivel them both round until her feet touched the floor.

  "I can't believe Leander and Nelson would have pressurized off the deck," said Strider nervously. As a last desperate measure, the command deck could be sealed off from the rest of the ship. Her voice sounded too loud. The screams of the other personnel, back in the cabins or among the fields, sounded a mercifully long way away—as if the distance made her have to worry about them less.

  "Neither can I," said Pinocchio.

  He touched the OPEN ME control just to the right of the door, and it slid easily open.

  There was a shimmer of light ahead of them.

  The bot hauled Strider in through the door, and they bounced uncomfortably against the inner door. Through its plastite windows they could see lights dancing.

  Leander opened it. Her face was in darkness, but over her shoulder Strider could see that every screen on the command deck was going mad—except for the two at the main control desk, the two that supplied a direct communication line between the operational command crew and the Main Computer.

  They were showing a flat green.

  "What's going on?" said Strider immediately, as she and Pinocchio, with Leander in train, swam towards the control desk. Nelson's huge form was crouching there. He was tapping the keyboard in front of him, despairingly trying to coax some response out of the Main Computer.

  "We don't know," he said, not turning. "We're trying to find out. Every sensor aboard this ship has gone haywire."

  Strider seized the back of his chair, and hung on.

  "Give me an update," she said.r />
  "I only wish we could," said Leander. "Look at the clock."

  Nearly all of the sensor screens on the deck were showing wild swirls of color. Some had gone dead. The noise was almost deafening as static expressed itself through the screens' audio channels. But there was one screen that held a steady image.

  It was the clock.

  2531//08//1603 it said, giving the year and the month and the hour and the minute.

  But what fascinated Strider was the seconds counter.

  The full reading of the clock's screen was 2531//08//1603//31:08.

  The counter stayed like that.

  31:08.

  #

  The starfields were gone from the command deck's forward viewing window. There was nothing but blackness.

  "Time can't just have stopped," said Strider, hauling herself down so that she squatted precariously beside Nelson.

  "The Main Computer couldn't just have stopped," he growled, manipulating his keyboard, "what with all its fail-safes. But it has."

  "Where the hell are we?"

  "To ten decimal places and expressing myself in Galactic Coordinates," said Nelson, "I haven't got a fucking clue."

  "See if you can hone that estimate down a bit."

  Pinocchio was moving around behind her. She glanced back at him. The multiple hues of the ranks of screens around the deck made his features look as if they were in some frenzy of motion, but she could tell that the bot's face was fixed.

  "What are you doing?"

  "I'm hooking myself up to the Main Computer. What's left of it."

  Ignoring a shout of protest from Leander, Pinocchio reached his fingers in around the edges of one of the screens and then, his feet braced against the wall, yanked it free of its moorings. The screen went dead. There was a firework display of electrical sparking from the hole in the wall where it had been.

  "Stop!" yelled Strider.

  Pinocchio looked at her.

  "Whatever killed the Main Computer . . ." She let the sentence hang.

  "Can't kill me," said Pinocchio firmly. "Well," he added, "I don't think so. I'm hooking myself in only so far that I can try to diagnose what went wrong. The interface should be too shallow for me to pick up anything damaging."

  A wiry extension sprang from roughly where Pinocchio's navel would have been. In the flickering light it looked like the limb of some iridescent insect. Strider watched, fascinated, as it plunged itself into the circuitry where the screen had been. There was a flash of bright green, as if someone had just discovered, right at the end of the party, one last firework that everyone else had overlooked.

  Strider shook her head to clear her eyes.

  "You're going to kill yourself!" she shouted at the bot.

  He wasn't listening to her. Instead he was concentrating his full attention on the linkage he had made with the Main Computer. His body jerked a few times, and then he shoved himself away from the wall. There was another little display of sparks, but much more muted this time. The link snaked back into Pinocchio's midriff.

  "You were a trifle inaccurate in your estimate of our location, Umbel Nelson," said Pinocchio in a voice that was almost repellently calm. "The truth of the matter is that we're nowhere at all. We seem to have fallen entirely out of the Universe."

  #

  With Pinocchio's help, Strider managed to activate the emergency intercom system that ran throughout the hull's interior. It was one of the few devices that didn't require the Main Computer's intervention—even the throat-mikes were out. The SSIA had half-heartedly built into the Santa Maria the principle that there should be, in times of dire need, the ability to fall back on progressively more primitive technologies. Now Strider wished they'd applied the principle more thoroughly.

  "There is absolutely nothing to worry about," she repeated over and over again, trying to seem nonchalant. "Everything is under control. If you are still in your cabin, please stay there. If you are away from your cabin, please try to find something to which you can secure yourself. Please do not panic. Stay as close to the floorspace nearest you as possible in case g is reintroduced unexpectedly. Lighting will be reinstated as soon as possible. The Santa Maria has sustained no physical damage."

  It's just that it's been stricken brain-dead, she thought each time she came to that final line. But how the hell can I tell them that?

  When she felt she'd repeated her message often enough, she turned back to the command deck. "Are there any signs of life at all in the Main Computer?"

  "Nothing," said Leander, who had resumed her seat alongside Nelson.

  "It's dead," said Pinocchio. "I told you so."

  "Lots of people have died and then been brought back to life again," said Strider tightly. "Keep trying."

  "Computers aren't the same as people," said Pinocchio.

  She rounded on him, a peculiarly clumsy manoeuvre in the circumstances.

  "I'm beginning to think you're right. Try to get that damn' machine up and running again. Otherwise we're all dead."

  "Except me," said Pinocchio. "All I will be able to do is shut myself down. Temporarily."

  It took a few seconds for the implications to hit Strider as she peered over Leander's shoulder, trying to will the blank screen to come back to life.

  Then she turned to the bot. "If the systems fail entirely," she said softly. "I'll use my lazgun on you. OK?"

  "That would be most kind," said Pinocchio.

  2

  Elliptical

  The nightmare dragged on: it was difficult to tell how long it was lasting, since every clock on the command deck—including all their wristwatches, Pinocchio's internal time sensor and the chronometric software in Nelson's thighputer—had stopped. Strider hadn't paid full attention to Pinocchio's comment that "We seem to have fallen entirely out of the Universe" because it had appeared to make no sense at the time. Now it was beginning to feel like the only possible answer.

  But of course she couldn't tell her personnel that. As far as they were concerned, this was to be treated as a temporary interruption to the usual service. She recorded a loop-chip, so that every now and then her seemingly unperturbed voice boomed out through the hull, remarking that there had been, you know, this little slip-up, but no one was to panic or anything.

  Then Strider began to feel physical sensations.

  A glance at Leander and Nelson was enough to tell her that they were feeling the same.

  This was something that couldn't be hidden from the personnel.

  At first it was the feeling of being stretched, somehow, from head to foot. She flipped herself around, but it didn't make any difference. The tugging—irritating rather than painful—still seemed to run along the length of her body.

  She wondered if she might throw up. The blood was rushing to her head and her feet. The general effect was vertiginous, and vastly disorienting.

  "Do you all feel this?" she said hoarsely, knowing the question was unnecessary.

  "Feel what?" said Pinocchio, who was still trying to figure out a safe way to hook himself into at least enough of the Main Computer's subroutines to restore lighting and atmospheric replenishment.

  Strider explained as quickly as she could. The nausea made it difficult for her to speak. It would be disastrous if any of the three humans on the deck actually did vomit. Vomiting in free fall was one of the most antisocial acts of all. Strider did her best not to think of what was happening back in the hull. Her looped voice boomed out again. Some reassurance that must be giving right now, she thought sourly.

  Worse followed.

  Initially Strider thought that someone had pinched her thigh, but immediately she realized this was ridiculous. Then there came another pinch, this time on her cheek—not a hard one, but disconcerting.

  "What in hell is this?" she yelled.

  Again Pinocchio looked baffled. It was clear that, whatever was causing these effects, they were psychological rather than physical.

  The odd little intimate pinching came
more and more frequently.

  "I don't like this at all," said Leander. She shoved herself away from her screen and drifted across the deck, swatting the air around her, as if trying to fight off a sex-pest. As a result she performed a complicated three-dimensional dance.

  "Stop it!" said Strider. "You're just making things worse for yourself."

  "Couldn't get much bloody worse," muttered Nelson.

  "Done it," said Pinocchio. The entirety of his upper chest was open to view. A mass of wiring ran from him to the interface he had uncovered in the wall. Strider boggled. She had never realized the full complexity of the hardware that resided inside her friend and lover.

  "Done what?"

  "I have reinstituted air replenishment. We had seven point three seven days before the atmosphere would have degraded to such an extent that it would have been unable to sustain human breathing." The bot was spreadeagling himself against the bulkhead, as if to get closer to the interface. Strider was reminded of biological specimens back in her childhood: a frog pinned out on a board. "I will now try to restore lighting throughout the craft. This is a very difficult task for a computer as small as my own. I will therefore shut down my other functions."

  He turned and gave Strider a smile, and then his face went into immobility and the lights in his eyes faded. It looked exactly as if he had just died.

  Several seconds passed, and then the overhead lighting on the deck flickered uneasily into life.

  Strider shook her head angrily, as if to shake away tears. Pinocchio couldn't have killed himself: he knew what his primary imperative was on this mission. But it felt to her as if he had. If they ever escaped this craziness, she would find out if her instincts were right or wrong.

  "Are you getting anything out of the instrumentation now?" she said to Nelson.

  "Not a thing," said the big man. He winced as an invisible pair of fingers pinched him yet again. "We should be getting something, thanks to our friend here." He nodded towards the bot. "He's imported enough of the Main Computer's systems that he should be able at least to perform some kind of triangulation exercise to try to estimate where the shit we are, but"—he gestured towards the view-window overhead—"there's nothing to triangulate against, is there?"