by Joe Horan
“The Palace, quickly,” she told the driver.
Darkness had fallen and the streets of Ochira City were lit as usual by lanterns hanging from poles. They reached the Palace and Nyassa got down. Shania struggled with the steps, having to control the pain in her legs. Nyassa was in conversation with the guard on the door, and as Shania approached the guard opened the door and disappeared inside.
“The prince and princess will see us now,” said Nyassa. “It seems the Ancestor is asleep but she will be woken.”
Shania simply couldn’t manage the stairs. After a brief conversation the Palace guards fetched a carry chair to take her up. They put it down at the top and Nyassa helped her along the passage to Prince Joaquin’s apartment.
I am absolutely pathetic, thought Shania. Nyassa is in her eighties, yet it is she who is supporting me.
Inside Joaquin’s sitting room the prince and princess were waiting for her, sitting side by side in identical chairs. Next to them sat the Ancestor, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.
“This is Shania Enterada of Clan Lindus, one of our best mathematicians,” said Nyassa. “She is leading the team who are trying to determine the fate of the World. Show them your work, Shania.”
She held out the roll of papers and Joaquin took it. He opened them, glanced at them briefly and then handed them to the Ancestor.
Steph looked at the pages of dense mathematical notation in Shania’s small, neat script. At first it meant nothing, but there was a pattern to it, a pattern she knew.
“It’s quantum probability theory,” she said. “Where did you learn this?”
“I found it in the Institute’s archives.”
“I’m not an expert in quantum probability theory. What conclusions have you drawn?”
“There is a ninety-two percent chance that all life on the World will end inside a year.”
“I know,” said Steph quietly.
There was silence in the room. Shania stared at her. She knew the world was ending! How did she know? Because she was a superhuman Ancestor? No, we have learnt that there are no miraculous powers. She is just a woman and the World is governed by unchangeable mathematical laws.
“How do you know?” she blurted out.
“The monks in the Ractaz have a machine,” she said. “It measures the level of radiation in the atmosphere. It is rising rapidly and in less than a year it will reach a level where life is impossible.”
“What is this radiation?” asked Shania.
“It is a type of energy, a very dangerous type. It can destroy the body of living things.”
“When the energy wave hit the World, much of the energy went deep inside,” said Shania. “Is this what is causing it?”
“Very probably,” said Steph.
She was amazed. Without help the Ochirans had understood so much of what happened to them. This should be beyond a Grade 1 civilisation. They should be blaming it on the wrath of gods or demons, not on an energy wave propagating through space. They should be searching out witches and putting them horribly to death, not using quantum probability theory to understand what had happened to them and make predictions.
“Come, Shania, our work here is done,” said Nyassa.
Steph watched them leave.
“Can you help us?” said Prince Joaquin.
“If I can repair the communication device in the Ractaz I can send an appeal for help into space,” she said. “If my people hear it they will come.”
“The people must be prepared,” said Desiree.
“I will see to it,” said Joaquin. “You must get Steph back to the Ractaz with the things she needs.”
Steph closed her eyes for a moment. These people deserve to live. Please help me to save them.
Chapter 8
A Cry for Help
Kerri brought her breakfast in bed the following morning. Rationing was still in force, but she had managed to find her an extra bit of bread and Steph did not object.
“Kerri, what are the Five Truths?” she asked.
“The Five Truths are what we believe in,” she said:
“The World had a beginning; it will also have an end. What comes between is not written until it occurs.”
“The World is understandable by observation and reason.”
“Nothing is forever; no belief is so ancient that it cannot be changed.”
“All humans are born free and equal.”
“Fear is an enemy that can be defeated.”
“That’s what you believe?”
“Yes, my lady. They are the first thing an Ochiran child learns.”
Kerri left and Steph continued eating her breakfast. Before she had finished Desiree came in.
“How long will it take you to remove that…? What did you call it?”
“Tachyon generator.”
“Yes that. How long will it take you to remove it?”
Steph tried to bring up a picture of the pod’s schematics in her head. Access was from inside the cabin. How hard was it to get at? And the stasis unit? Were there likely to be any snags?
“Six hours,” she said, giving herself a bit of extra time just in case.
“All right, we’ll leave first thing in the morning. If it’s going to take any longer, you let me know.”
Rather than wait for Desiree to come and chase her out she was ready to start in half an hour. The faint hope of powering up the drive and flying the pod to the Ractaz disappeared as soon as she saw the buckled plating at the bottom of the hull. The pod had landed hard, and though the soft ground had absorbed some of the impact the damage to the lower hull was substantial. The main frames were distorted and the lower field coil mountings would be too far out of alignment. Even if the coils themselves weren’t damaged it would need a laser alignment frame.
She climbed in through the hatch. Of course, with the pod on its side it was going to make it more awkward. First things first; she took the blaster out of its locker and removed the power cell. If someone found it they could do a lot of harm, even by accident.
She found the tool-kit in its slot and unscrewed the access panel in the floor. There was the stasis unit, right where it was supposed to be, with its field generators bolted to it. It should be possible to remove it without taking them off. She disconnected the transmission guides, unclipped the control box and slave relays. This was going better than she thought. Just the mounting bolts now.
Whoever fitted the mounting bolts had tightened them down with a power driver on maximum settling. They would not move. She only had a hand spanner and couldn’t get any leverage in there. If I wedge another spanner across there and pull it should increase the leverage. Come on you… AAGH! Son of a bitch! The spanner slipped and her knuckles slammed into a nice sharp piece of metal. She licked off the blood, tapped down the flap of loose skin down and tried again. Come on! Come on! Come on! There it went! That’s one. Only four more to go. She was streaming with sweat and her hand was still bleeding. Lick off the blood and start on the next one. It always goes like this when you’re in a hurry.
She had the stasis unit out and was just starting on the tachyon generator when Kerri put her head warily through the hatch.
“I’ve brought you some lunch, miss,” she said.
She had found her a bit of cold meat, almost unobtainable nowadays. There was also a jug of cool, fresh water. How did Kerri know that was just what she needed?
The bolts on the tachyon generator came out easily enough. It was a tight fit through the access panel, though. You had to rotate it ninety degrees and jiggle it about a bit, and with the pod lying on its side you had to support it with your arm… Her muscles were screaming by the time it finally slipped through. She pulled out all the transfer conduits and constrictor coils. It would probably be easier to reassemble this system in its entirety than try to mesh together two different and very unequal ones. Better bring the bolts as well, just in case.
“Six hours are up,” said Desiree, putting her head through t
he door.
“Just finished,” she said, and felt as if she had won a huge victory.
Kerri had a bath ready for her when she got up to her room. She needed it. Battling with recalcitrant machinery was all part of the life of an engineer in the Atumcarian Spacefleet, but today’s fight had been particularly hard. The victory was all the sweeter, though. She luxuriated in the bath while Kerri washed her hair and told her about how the escape pod had been dragged out of the bog and to the city with the aid of large numbers of men and horses. We’d never have thought of using lots of bodies; we’d have built a machine. Different culture, different rules.
With the extra bits and pieces she had removed they had nearly fifteen kilograms of metal, polymers, connectors, transfer conduits, control boxes and bolts. It was distributed over seven horses for the ride north; it was Desiree, herself and five soldiers again. They posted it, but it took longer because they ran into bad weather; it poured with rain most of the way. The extra weight didn’t help either.
The sun shone when they got to Chale, but it was bitterly cold. The days were getting short now and it had taken them twelve days already. The winter solstice was twelve days off and Desiree turned fifteen. On the same day Joaquin turned nineteen; they were born on the same day four years apart. There was no time for a celebration; Interim Governor Sarron had showed initiative and prepared everything they needed for cold weather in the mountains. At first light the next day they started out for the Ractaz.
They struggled on through biting winds, wrapped up against the cold and with their faces covered so that only their eyes peered out. The horses had blankets on them to try and protect them. Steph suspected that they were taking a considerable risk by trying to cross the mountains at this time of year. It the weather turned really bad they could easily die. It was so cold at night that Steph couldn’t sleep. They took five horrible days to reach the Ractaz, wading through the deep snow that almost blocked the final pass and heading up the valley in a rising wind. They got in just in time. By the time darkness fell it was blowing a blizzard. If they had been six hours later they would have died.
It was cold inside the Ractaz. You couldn’t have fires in the enclosed environment of the ship. There was a cunning arrangement on the starboard side, where a wood fire provided hot air via a heat exchanger, which was then conducted though a partly open door and allowed to circulate around the ship. It provided some heat, but not much. Mostly you just had to wear lots of warm furs.
All the following day the blizzard raged. You could hear the howling of the wind inside the ship. Steph started the difficult and complex task of designing and building a working comlink system with the parts she had at hand. The main transmitter was located in a compartment near the bow. A transmitter of this power would take every tachyon the escape pod’s stasis unit could hold to send one brief message, but the Ractaz’s original stasis unit had been part-fried by a power surge and she didn’t think she could fix it. It was going to challenge both her theoretical and practical skills to the limit. She asked for an assistant for when she needed a second pair of hands and was assigned a bright fifteen-year-old girl who picked things up incredibly quickly. On any League of Planets world she could have a successful career as an engineer.
The winter solstice had come and gone. Steph was working sixteen-hour days, using a set of tools she had found in the engine room. The transmitter’s mountings had buckled in the crash and everything was out of alignment. The monks of the Ractaz had made a number of changes in their attempts to make it work and these all had to be undone. She had installed the tachyon generator and stasis unit, run a direct power tap from the power banks and managed to make and store tachyons. Now she was trying to align the collimator coils and design a control interface to an auxiliary console in the room. She still had to get the main emitters back on line. She was having to do complex field calculations on paper because there was no computer. Her assistant was starting to make useful suggestions and was even able to check her calculations.
The responsibility was awesome. She accepted now that the survival of everyone on the planet depended on her. The monks’ atmospheric sensor showed radiation levels rising inexorably. Also worrying was that the oxygen content of the atmosphere had dropped by two percent. Something bad was happening.
Another week passed. She had her interface, the emitter was on line but she couldn’t get a coherent beam. It was constant adjustments now, calculating and recalculating field solutions, entering the parameters and trying again. She was exhausted, but she struggled on.
Desiree came by from time to time to encourage her. She didn’t stay long. What Steph was doing was beyond her comprehension. She was working with things you couldn’t see, apparently had no real existence at all, manipulating the world at the most fundamental level.
Finally, in the third sevenday of the new year, she had her coherent beam, her modulating system worked, they were ready. Desiree stood next to a console. Lights glowed on it, there was a faint humming sound and a strange tension in the air.
“Speak here,” said Steph. She looked terrible. She had lost weight, there were dark circles under her eyes, she looked as if she hadn’t slept well in a very long time but she felt elated, like someone who had completed an impossible task. And she had. She had built a working comlink out of mismatched parts with calculations done on bits of paper.
“You’d better do it,” said Desiree doubtfully.
“No. It has to be you. You must speak the words.”
“Why?”
“Because with great power comes great responsibility. If we wanted we could crush you out of existence and take the World for ourselves. It would be a simple matter; we could do it in an afternoon. Therefore we have established a law that must never be broken. It is absolutely forbidden for us to have contact with a civilisation at your stage of development. I am not of this world; if I call we cannot help you. Our law forbids it. Only if someone from this world calls are we permitted to help.”
Thank the Powers of Jurress that First Contact stuff had stuck.
“What will happen?”
“What you say will be stored in the buffer until I give the send command. It will then be transmitted as a modulated spherical beam. If someone hears it, they will come.”
Spherical beam made no sense, but in the esoteric world of tachyons it did. You couldn’t visualise it; you could only describe it mathematically, but it was real, it existed, and it would carry what Desiree said outwards in all directions at many times the speed of light.
Desiree had been given a script and she stuck to it.
“This is Princess Desiree, co-ruler of the Kingdom of Ochira. Our world has been struck by a great catastrophe. It is dying. We require assistance. We call upon anyone hearing this message to come to our aid.”
Steph pressed Transmit. The message was on its way. When the stasis unit was recharged in about an hour’s time it would be sent again. It would continue to be sent until help came or until the power banks ran out.
Desiree looked at her. She understood now the power of these people that lived among their stars. Worlds were theirs to command, to take or leave as they saw fit. Ochira was very, very small by comparison.
And then Steph collapsed.
Shania’s team had got all they were going to get from their calculations; the probability of all life ending on the World within one year was 93·48% and it had not changed for the last two hundred iterations. The team was disbanded and Shania was transferred to the map-room in the palace, keeping the huge map of the kingdom up to date so Prince Joaquin could see the state it was in. She was stationed there, making continual alterations as more information came in.
Winter arrived and with it wet weather. The temperature was above normal but the rain was persistent and at times intense. Shania got sick most winters and this was no exception. The healer came and gave her medicine which was supposed to stop fluid gathering in her lungs. She spent a sevenday in bed being fed hot
soup and warm bread by the baker’s wife and another sevenday at home. When she was well enough to go back to work her body felt even weaker than usual. She forced herself to climb the stairs every day to the map-room in the Palace and sit there waiting for information to come in so she could make the corresponding alterations on the map.
Then two messengers arrived from the Ractaz. The message had been sent. A cry for help had gone out into the void and now they had to wait and see if anyone answered.
Steph had been put to bed in one of the warmest sleeping rooms in the Ractaz. The healer said she was exhausted and undernourished. He prescribed rest and extra food. Her assistant Alyssa said that the comlink would run by itself now that it was started, and anyway she could monitor it and if there was a problem she would be able to tell.
She explained that even the ancestors might not be able to save the World and in that case it might be possible to relocate the population. It had been done before; three million people had been moved when Kampoir suffered an environmental catastrophe. Accordingly as soon as there was a break in the weather Desiree sent two messengers to Ochira City to inform her brother of the situation. They left a day apart; if one didn’t get through, the other might. People had to be prepared.
A sevenday had passed. So far no one had come. Steph said they might have to wait some time so no one was worried yet.
The healer insisted that Steph should rest, so she had to stay in her room most of the time. There was a curtain for a door. Alyssa came from time to time to report on how the comlink was performing. So far it was working perfectly, sending the message every fifty-eight minutes when the stasis unit was recharged.
Desiree came as well, asking questions about the people among the stars. Steph had to be careful about what she said; she was conscious that she was talking to someone from what appeared to be a Grade 1 civilization, though she suspected that appearances might be deceptive. She described her life, what she did from day to day. She described in the most general terms the battle with the Colossus, and spoke about her hopes for the future, about how she wanted to be an engineer and advance up the ranks until one day she would be a chief engineer, with a starship’s engine room under her control.
