by Joe Horan
Steph Campbell was dead. She knew she was dead because no one could have survived that. She was the drive specialist in damage control team twenty-two in the Balastar’s number three drive tube. They had been fighting a Colossus machine out beyond the edge of human space. She knew the enemy had blown up spectacularly, the Balastar was caught by the blast front and number three tube was ripped off. The ship might or might not have survived; what was beyond doubt was that she could not. In basic training they had been warned never to launch a shuttle or an escape pod while the ship was at lightspeed, no matter how desperate the situation. Metal might withstand the stress of crossing the drive field boundary; flesh and bone definitely could not.
Steph was a Tanuist, and Tanuist teachings on what happened after death were confusing and contradictory. She was twenty years old and had not given a great deal of thought to the afterlife, even when the Balastar was sent on a dangerous mission beyond the boundary of human space, trying to find the source of the huge, part organic machines that were attacking the human worlds. They found the source all right; it was the Arrachanoids, the only non-humanoid intelligent species know to have existed in the galaxy. A thousand years ago they tried to exterminate humanity, but they lost the war and were believed extinct – until now.
The fundamentalist sect her parents belonged to seemed to believe that unless you were very good (i.e. unless you subscribed to the particular brand of Tanuism preached by their Holymen) you would be tortured eternally in one of a variety of different hells. This had always seemed preposterous to Steph and she left it as soon as she could. (She later heard that her parents’ Holyman had denounced her as a heretic and promised her the hottest spot in the Hell of Eternal Fire, the worst of the numerous hells the sect taught.) The more mainstream group she joined taught that death was the end. Well, the fact that she was dead and yet still conscious proved that was wrong too. She could hope for the paradise that some of the liberal sects believed in, except that the fact that she was in considerable pain suggested that she was probably in hell. Nothing for it but to open her eyes and look…
A gently curving sheet of metal greeted her eyes. At first she couldn’t process what she was seeing, but after a few seconds she realised she was still where she had been, in the Balastar’s number three tube between the outer plating and the core casing about thirty feet from the forward annular confinement generator, except that the metal was twisted out of shape and seemed to finish in a jagged edge beyond which was the black of space. She was still wearing her heat resistant environmental suit and was breathing. Not dead, then. But how…?
She reviewed what had happened to her. Steph was the drive specialist and third ranking member of damage control team twenty-two, who were stationed at the forward end of number three tube. A lot of damage control duty consisted of waiting, but they had been kept busy during the battle because the power supply to the annular confinement generator had been cut early on and it was their job to fix it. They rigged a temporary bypass and as soon as that was up Steph checked the alignment while the others set about restoring the primary link. They had just finished when the end came; the Colossus decided to blow itself up and the ship swung into an emergency turn as she tried to escape. The vibration was incredible and she could feel the tube flexing on the end of its already damaged support strut. No sooner were they round when the blast front hit them.
She knew as soon as the tube started to twist sideways that she was going to die. The heads-up display in her helmet automatically flagged up the progressive failure of the main structural members in the support strut. She heard he annular confinement generator engage in continuous mode as the energy in the core was vented into space, heard Sublieutenant Daran the team leader muttering the ancient words to commend his lifeforce to the Powers of Jurress, then the tube broke off, spun away and hit the drive field boundary. She was lifted up, slammed into the ceiling, then down onto the floor. Her body seemed to be pulled all ways at once. She closed her eyes and waited for death and whatever followed, probably eternal oblivion. She heard the sound of metal rending, felt the break-up shock as the tube disintegrated, then it finished and she was lying flat on her back; and still alive. How had that happened?
She had joined the spacefleet on a whim. She had passed the general intelligence tests, the physical evaluation and psychological assessment, but without any relevant qualifications she had to start off as an enlistee. Her aptitude tests had shown a talent for engineering, and it was this that got her trained in drive technology and assigned to damage control in one of the tubes. The Balastar’s first officer had recently recommended her for training as a proper engineering officer, and she was supposed to take the initial examination as soon as they reached a main base. She had been studying hard, and part of her studies had included the esoteric subject of spacetime distortion fields. This gave her some idea of how she had managed to survive. The drive units were in the main hull, but there was a static field associated with the core contained in the external tubes and this would be collapsing as the core vented its energy into space. There must have been some sort of interaction between the two fields, creating a local spacetime eddy at the moment the tube penetrated the drive field boundary. Caught in this eddy, she had somehow survived. Had the others…?
She sat up carefully, checking her movement. Her body was badly bruised, but as far as she could tell nothing was broken. The forward fifty feet of the tube had sheered off but appeared otherwise more or less intact. The stars drifted slowly across the opening; it was tumbling gently. About ten feet away was a silver environmental suit with a sublieutenant’s patch on the sleeve, which told her it was Sub-lieutenant Daran, but the way it was wrapped round a girder told her she really didn’t want to know what was inside. There was no sign of the other two members of her team; probably they had been sucked out with the air when the hull split open.
She brought up the suit’s diagnostic readout. It was still airtight, but she had forty-eight minutes of life support left. Put another way, unless she could find another source of air she had forty-eight minutes to live.
The gravity was off, so she pushed off and drifted across to Sublieutenant Daran. She forced herself to turn the environmental suit over; it felt as if it was filled with jelly. The life support pack on the back was smashed open and the valve broken off the oxygen cylinder. All the air was gone.
The one remaining hope was the escape pod. It was located on the outer surface of the tube, close to where the break had occurred. It might still be there, and it might still be serviceable. It was supposed to take twelve people, so if it was intact and still had life support it should keep her alive for a considerable period. It seemed like a long shot, but it was all she had. She pushed herself round the tight, curving space between the shell plating and the core.
The pod was still there, hanging on right on the edge of the break. The mountings had sheared off and it was connected to the ship only by the umbilicals. There were some nasty-looking dings in the side and the communications array was gone.
She launched herself across the gap and managed to land next to the hatch. She spun the manual locking wheel, pulled it open and climbed in. The interior was in darkness except for the glow of the main power switch. She hit this and the lights came on. A scattering of red lights also appeared across the control panels; damage indicators. She closed and locked the hatch, then secured herself in front of the controls and tried to work out what was broken and what was still working.
The drive showed green; so did the scanners. Communications were out – she remembered the missing communications array – as were the fluid recycling plant and transponder. Environmental showed amber. She pressurised the capsule up to about one tenth atmospheric pressure, then waited. After ten minutes it was clear that pressure was remaining constant, which meant that the pressure hull was intact and the seals were holding. She brought the capsule up to full atmospheric pressure, then turned off the suit’s life support and removed the hel
met.
What to do now? Without the comlink or the transponder the pod was a small scanner target, but even if the drive was down the auxiliary power banks would give an energy signature that would be detectable from a considerable distance – if anyone was looking. There was no reason why they should be; it would be assumed that everyone in number three tube died at the drive field boundary. If she separated the pod from the tube fragment she would be able to use the scanners, but it would be a smaller scanner target. On the other hand, even if the Balastar had survived she would be badly damaged; the crew would have their work cut out just getting home. There were probably hundreds of pieces of wreckage drifting in space and it would be the energy signature from the power banks that would distinguish the pod from the drifting pieces of metal.
The decision made, she released the umbilicals and blew the release bolts. The pod drifted free and the remains of the mountings spun away. Now she could check out that amber light on environmental. It wasn’t good news. The recirculation system was working but the scrubbers were not. The power tap was out, not something that could be fixed from inside the cabin. Without them air quality would gradually deteriorate; she probably had about ten days before it became toxic. She had that long to find somewhere with a breathable atmosphere.
She scanned for position and velocity. Position was almost impossible to establish; out beyond the edge of human-controlled space there were no charts and the only navigational information was what had been gathered by the Balastar’s scanners and downloaded automatically to the escape pod’s computer. Velocity was easier; it was simply a matter of measuring the Doppler shifts of nearby stars. It meant using the tachyon beam scanners; when an object came out of lightspeed in free RS effect the speed usually stabilised at about 0·8c, which meant relativistic effects would make an electromagnetic scan unworkable. She had a limited supply of tachyons in stasis. The pod had a small tachyon generator, but it ran off the same power tap that supplied the scrubbers and the power banks couldn’t sustain the output to operate it. There were three power taps, but no way to cross-circuit between them. (Who thought up that stupid arrangement? Not someone whose life had ever depended on it she was sure.)
A few minutes of work with the scanners confirmed that her speed in the local frame of reference was 0·63c and she was travelling at about fifty-five degrees to the Balastar’s last recorded course vector, however the ship had been manoeuvring violently in the minutes before the tube broke off and the computer might not have been updated. Her studies had told her that when an object broke up as it came out of lightspeed there could be a wide distribution in velocity spread. There was one class M star within ten days’ travel time. The odds were against it having a habitable planet, but as there was nothing else on scan, she set a course. She checked out the drive; after an event like that, she wasn’t going to take a green light at face value. The pod had a fairly sophisticated V drive with a core along the centreline, co-axial converters above and below the cabin and drive coils at the extremity. Everything seemed to be working so she powered up the drive coils and got under way. It was rated for a maximum of five LUs., but she was a drive specialist and she ought to be able to squeeze a bit more speed out of it.
Chapter 2
City under Siege
On a planet known to its inhabitants as the World a brother and sister, a prince and princess, sat side by side in the great hall of Ochira City.
“This was thrown over the wall by the main gate at first light,” said the guard.
He held a brown canvass sack with dark stains on it. Prince Joaquin gazed at it apprehensively. Beside him, Princess Desiree let out the sort of expletive a girl her age shouldn’t know.
“Open it,” she said.
Cautiously the guard undid the fastenings. He looked inside. His face went white.
“Show me,” said Princess Desiree.
Gingerly he lifted out the contents. It was a severed head. Princess Desiree let out another expletive. Prince Joaquin just felt numb with horror. It was the head of their father, King Astur III. That explained why there had been no communication from him.
He had left two se’enights ago with the army, determined to turn King Shalmazar’s army back at the Yabok River. He left his teenage son and daughter in charge of the city, promising he would be back as soon as he could. Prince Joaquin was eighteen, wise beyond his years. It was said that he could understand the advanced mathematics the cartographers employed to plot the path of the World as it circled the sun and understood the techniques they were using to measure the distance to the stars. He was, however, no warrior, so when the king realised his daughter was a tomboy he had her trained in the Warrior Way. Princess Desiree was only fourteen, but big for her age and with her long blonde hair and the sword she habitually wore she looked the part of a warrior princess.
And now the king was dead, and if he had perished so undoubtedly had the army. There was nothing to stop the Kaun invaders advancing into Ochira, looting and raping and killing as they came.
“So, what now?” said Desiree, looking at her brother.
Just then the main gate horn blew, and again, and a third time. Danger at the main gate! Then the other horns blew, in the south and the north and the west. Danger all around. Prince Joaquin knew in his heart that could mean only one thing. He waited for the messengers to arrive with the news that the Kaun Army encircled the city. They were under siege by eighty thousand battle-hardened troops, and all they had were three thousand veterans the king left behind when he marched out.
Then another messenger arrived.
“Horsemen approaching the main gate under a flag of truce,” he said.
“Let them in,” said Desiree. “Bring them before us here.”
They had a few minutes to prepare. Prince Joaquin put on his best tunic while Princess Desiree wore her breastplate of gleaming steel and arranged her hair to tumble down her back in a tangled blonde waterfall. They sat side by side upon the dais, waiting to hear what their fate would be.
Half a dozen warriors were shown into the hall. They wore the dark red colours of Kaun. The Ochiran guards accompanying them were all veterans; they had the forethought to take the emissaries’ weapons to forestall an assassination attempt upon the prince and princess.
“Hear the words of the great King Shalmazar,” proclaimed the leader. “Your king is dead. Your army has been slaughtered. Your lands and your city are mine. If you open the gates to me your men and boys will die by the sword, but your women and girls will be spared to become my slaves. If you do not, then every breathing thing in this city will die. How say you?”
Desiree rose to her feet and shook out her warrior’s hair.
“Cut off their heads,” she said. “Pitch them over the wall.”
“Desiree, perhaps we should consider…” Joaquin began.
She turned to him, eyes blazing with anger that her brother should actually be considering this demand.
“If you agree to this outrage, Joaquin, I swear by the honour of the Ancestors that I will kill you myself. Do not the Five Truths say: All humans are born free and equal? The women of Ochira will never be slaves. We were born free and we will die free.”
“They will give us no quarter,” said Joaquin.
“Nor shall we give them any,” responded Desiree. “I shall make an appeal. We have many weapons in the armoury. Every man and woman in the city who is capable of lifting a sword must step forward. We will train them as quickly as we can.”
“Women can’t fight,” said Prince Joaquin, aghast.
“Who do you think you are talking to? Our Law says: The man is the same as the woman, the prince is the same as the carpenter, the princess is the same as the day labourer. If those words are not meaningless then a woman can do anything a man can do. We will not prevail by abandoning the Five Truths and the Law we have built upon them.”
Shania Enterada didn’t realise anything was wrong until she arrived for work at the Institute of Cartograph
y and found the doors locked. It was midday; she had worked late last night and they told her not to come in until the afternoon. She stood in the street wondering what to do and only then did she notice that there were very few people about. The streets of Ochira City should have been crowded at this time, but there were only two people in sight and they were hurrying along with their heads down as if they needed to get somewhere fast. She turned back to the doors and knocked as hard as she could without hurting her hand; the skin was soft and delicate, the result of holding nothing heavier than a pen and a slide rule all day. There was no answer.
“Shania! What are you doing here?”
She turned to see Alysa Sheedy bearing down on her. Alysa was one of the field cartographers who went out and took the actual measurements that Shania and her colleagues in the Institute processed and turned into maps. She wasn’t big but she was tough, used to roughing it for weeks on end in the field. Her last assignment had been in the Western Wilderness, trying to map the far extremity of the Mountains of Amorn. There had been six of them in the party and they had an exciting time of it, having several encounters with mountain apes and lions. Alysa was a skilled archer and a reasonable swordswoman; you needed to be proficient with weapons for an assignment like that.
Shania was small and frail. Her knees were constantly swollen and if she stood for too long she had to control the pain. In a society where women were considered the equals of men, she felt she was something of a let-down to her sex. She had done well to make it out of childhood; when she was born the healers thought she wouldn’t survive a year. A hundred years ago she would have been left in the woods for the Jalyx cats, but these were more enlightened times and her parents nursed her through illness after illness until she eventually got to adulthood. Too weak to do any sort of manual work, the clan would have taken care of her, but she would always be Poor Little Shania and she wanted more from life than that.
