The World Game

by Allen Charles

  He stood abruptly, nearly forgetting himself in the miniscule gravity effect. “Here, here,” he pointed and Janine added blue marks. “Here and one more here. OK, now let’s zoom in around these areas.”

  Janine obliged and they all looked, the search now a bit of a competition. Again, Felicity’s sharp vision pinned the tail on the donkey. “There!” She called out. The slight shadow was hard against the blue dot Janine had put down earlier. Janine pulled in on the shadow and moved the perspective. The irregular mound resolved into an artificial roof disguised as a sandy atoll with a three sixty degree all around overhang. From a little side movement the sharp shadow of a view port that had maybe a one inch exposure, stood out. Easily accommodating a rotating camera for constant surveillance.

  “Look at the ground next to the camera port.” Felicity pointed to a discolored patch of sand that now looked out of place and just a tad too regular in shape. There was nothing like it close by.

  “Access door!” said Fuller, “Janine, show us what we have on the fragment for this one please.”

  The overlay faded again and the drab fragment surface materialized. There was an inverted bubble of lava like rock where the access door had been, but where the observation port had been was a deep shadow and a glint of metal. Close in the remains of a camera or support shaft could be seen.

  “Here’s my thinking,” went Fuller. “You’re an underground facility designed for nuclear fallout and direct blast. What do you need after the war is over?”

  “A way to burrow back to surface and test it!” Shaw said excitedly. They have to have a rock borer down there or be trapped forever.”

  “And what is the first thing you would do if you were trapped inside a chunk of rock, weightless and therefore obviously flying through space, and probably blinded by external equipment being fried, boiled and blasted away?” asked Fuller.

  “Try and find a way to see outside!” answered Felicity.

  “So in all probability there is a borer working somewhere in the fragment right now!” added Shaw, “And I know exactly where it is!”

  They all turned towards him astonished.

  “When we were in the tunnel and working our way in by flashlight, I came across a hole in the wall that seemed to have no purpose. I put it down to an access panel that had blown away in the evacuation of atmosphere. When we came back into the transport just now, we all had to clean dust off our gear that we had picked up in the tunnel. I thought that was a result of our fuel bomb blast, but it’s not. It came from the rock borer blow back from the cavity in the tunnel.”

  Fuller moved to the dimage schematic of the whole fragment and looked at the tunnel as they knew it and the surface plot of the vents and observation ports. They had found three observation points in total. Where would the borer head to be most effective? “We need to take a closer look at the three observation points. If I was controlling the borer I would head for the port that had the best chance of being reactivated or least damage to the control gear where a replacement camera could be mounted.”

  Fuller gave dimage control back to Janine who zoomed in on the next mound. The first was clearly destroyed. This next was quite different. The mound shape was obvious but there was no dimple in the top. It was a clean mushroom top but there was no observation slot around that appeared in the photo overlay. They would have to go out and investigate.

  Fuller and Shaw had driven in pitons and were anchored next to the mound. They were tapping at the compacted sandy coating on the mound with particles and larger pieces being flung away by the spin. As the underlying structure was revealed it became apparent that the observation point was relatively intact and the camera view slot was soon clear. Squatting down, Fuller could see a red power light flickering in the dark interior. The camera appeared to be workable, although on closer scrutiny the lens and front end were crusted over with caked sand and the green active light was off. It was not active.

  “This damage happened before the cataclysm.” observed Fuller. “Look at the damage pattern. It doesn’t go all the way back.”

  “Look under here, sir.” Shaw pointed to a flap of metal that was angled in at forty five degrees. “I think this was a sandstorm guard that malfunctioned and left the workings exposed. It accounts for the damage pattern inside. Then the sand built up and clogged up the whole station so it was disabled and completely buried in the sand. When we were breaking away the sand cover I noticed that the compacted sand had something like spiderweb binding it. There shouldn’t have been any sand here by now. It should have drifted away or been blasted off by our fuel bomb and I think that most of it was.”

  “So what is the binding stuff?” Fuller picked off a bit of the aggregated sand and peered closely at it. “Hmm. Maybe fire retardant foam. Has to be. When the camera went off line after the sand storm they tried to clear it by blasting fire retardant from inside the post. All it did was make a mush of the sand as it soaked outwards and glued it together. The sand shell coating is what saved the obs post from the anti-matter and gave it a sacrificial layer of protection from the fuel bomb.”

  Fuller stood up against the tether and Shaw followed. “This will be the place for the borer sir.”

  “No doubt. But if Zardooz is running the show then he will be anticipating us. That he did not reply to Tom is telling. He is going to fight because he thinks he has an advantage, but he will still be cautious as his machine emerges. He has to send a repair bot with a new camera so I think he will first send an anti-personnel device to make sure the area is clear.”

  “Why don’t we just block the bore hole and stop the repair bot?”

  Fuller looked at Shaw, “Because if he is half as cunning as I believe, he has already mined the tunnel with explosives to take us out if we venture back in. We need to take action here.”

  “He is sending a bot expecting to clear sand and fire retardant goo. We could put something much harder in his way, say a cargo crate over the obs post. The bot will have to be going very slow to hold itself down to the surface so it will not be carrying more than he expects it to need. Everything else will be reaction mass. We could capture the bot, sir.”

  “Sounds like a plan, Gerald.”

  They went back to the transport and hauled out a nano fibre cargo container after emptying the contents into other receptacles. Designed to withstand being hauled about in space and protect from cosmic rays and space debris strikes, the deceptively light folding container would not be breached by the repair bot in any great hurry. Not even a laser welder would make a fast dent in it.

  Hauling the container over the mound, they tacked it down with the longest carbon fibre pitons they had been able to find, then retreated a distance away and set up an anchor station. They lay down flat to present the smallest possible target to any hostile emergence and waited. Tom and Felicity were to spell them in four hours if nothing happened. They were both armed with tether tendril guns that could be deployed on the hapless repair bot from a distance, shooting out sticky tendrils like the imaginary Spider Man comic of old, and binding the bot into a gooey cocoon. The tendrils had a curing time of around five seconds, enough to smother the bot and disable it before turning flexibly solid.

  They waited.

  CHAPTER 57

  Behind the Moon

  Sheila’s small team hauled the cocooned pair back to the shuttle where Corcoran waited slumped into a seat, exhausted, but smiling to see his friend alive and well. Once in the air lock they had been able to revert to individual youniform configuration, but the intimacy lingered through memory and buddy interaction. Martin and Sheila were inseparably part of each other, beyond the brief, biological exchange of bodily fluids. The buddies merged elements of their psyches when they joined. Where love had meant a conscious decision to commit totally to a partner, love was now the absolute knowledge of a lovers intent.

  There were now two emphatically co-joined couples in the universe who understood what love really means.

  She
ila left Martin to the team’s care and headed for the cabin to advise Bob Evans and get a report on rescue for the shuttle which was fleeing away from the moon in the precise center of the safe, fragment free region, masked by the moon. Even as she contacted Evans, she could see the fragments sparkling like a diamond halo all around. The view of the deadly baubles from the now unshaded front window was breathtaking.

  “Commander Evans, this is assistant cook Sheila Johnson reporting. Over.”

  She waited a moment but all she received was static.

  “Commander Evans? Come in please?”

  Nothing.

  A mixed sense of panic and alarm sent a feeling of nausea through her body. She changed channels and tried again.

  Nothing.

  She stopped and took a deep breath to calm her racing heart, invoking the discipline of Pirogi Cholent martial arts that had brought her this far.

  After a few minutes she opened her eyes, her body calmed and her mind focussed. She got out of the pilot’s couch and drifted to the navigator’s position where a simple slide cover revealed a roof dome for manual navigation by star sighting. Even under the circumstances, she reflected how nothing had really changed in thousands of years when technology was absent. At least the shuttle designers had the forethought to consider such an eventuality.

  Looking back to the moon, the small region she could see due to the shuttle orientation, was enough to tell her what had happened. The moon itself was being devoured by the anti-matter as it coated the surface. It was already well around the rim of the dark side facing the shuttle, and was discernible against the black shadow due to reflection of ambient starlight. But tellingly, in the middle of the black iris, was a scatter of silvery specks that formed a faded pupil to the eye. The ships of the Space City evacuation and the transports that had joined them were turning into anti-matter. There had been a fatal miscalculation.

  The gravity of the moon, mild as it was, had bent the path of fragment material in a sling shot effect. Gravity affected anti-matter in the opposite way of regular matter, but the anti-matter was a surface coating over regular matter which was present in far greater quantity. The larger masses flung around the slingshot and went off at various angles. It was the tiny, dust like particles that were bent into lunar orbit, and these had collided with the waiting fleet.

  Only the Pirogi Cholent training kept Sheila from breaking down in despair. They were lost.

  She looked out again and then it hit her. The shuttle had survived because it was running from the moon in the fragment free umbra. They were the sole survivors of the fleet, and they had to continue in the exact path they were following to avoid any particles that pursued them.

  Sheila went back to the passenger cabin where Martin was now dozing and the rest of the passengers sat waiting and chatting to each other. She signalled for silence.

  “I am afraid I have bad news.” The faces before her were impassive. “The anti-matter fragments were slingshotted around the moon by gravity and some of them struck the fleet. They are all gone, turned into anti-matter and I don’t know if anyone is alive inside the vessels. There was no answer to my call to commander Evans.

  We must assume the worst and there will be no rescue for us. We are on our own and we must conserve every resource we have while we look for some way to survive. We are the last of humanity.”

  “That’s bullshit!” The big troublemaker engineer stood up and pointed at Sheila. “We can’t survive this. There’s nowhere to go. I say that we are all gonna die right here, so let’s PARTY!”

  He pivoted around and grabbed the nearest female, clutching her and forcing a smothering kiss on her mouth, as she squirmed and struggled. His cronies saw the action and followed suit, some of the women willingly joining in, others struggling.

  Sheila was aghast and called her team over. Two of them came, the other had joined the orgy. “We have to stop this. We can survive, but not like this.”

  “Tell us how.” said one of her team.

  “Tell us, we’re with you.” Corcoran and Martin had roused themselves and joined Sheila’s group. They turned back to the passenger area where bodies floated in all directions, now mostly stripped out of youniforms and joined in animal hungry copulation where consensual, and screaming frenetic frenzy where rape was happening.

  “Get the Bio-Meters, quick!” Sheila ordered.

  They split up and sidled their way to the emergency first aid points. Each came back with a Bio-Meter in hand. “Set the Meter to manual and dial up anaesthesia.” Sheila directed. “Choose the gas setting maximum.” They all complied. Sheila pushed back to the control console and set the atmospheric control to manual, then turned off the regenerative system and set circulation to maximum. “Set youniforms to space conditions.”

  The group of five suited figures moved around the melee of sweating, thrusting bodies and held the Bio-Meter nozzles towards the rabble.

  “Go!” Shelia gave the command to release the anaesthetic gas into the mass of bodies. Guilty and innocent alike, they were all going to sleep and would wake with enormous headaches in about an hour.

  In rapid succession, the individuals succumbed to the gas and went limp, stuck in whatever position they had been in. The last to fall was the big engineer as he shook his unconscious rape victim, all the while himself weakening. Finally as the last vestiges of coherence left him, he looked around and saw Sheila and the Bio-Meter. He released his victim and flung himself towards Sheila, even as he fell fully unconscious, he drifted like a huge, pink walrus, arms outflung and his third standard deviation sized erection looking like a bulbous Americas Cup boat keel, but it too quickly went limp as the brain that controlled it switched of.

  Shelia put out a hand to stop the brute from crashing into her or the wall, as much as he deserved to do so. “Truss this one up in a seat. Put an emergency diaper on him but no youniform. I will peel his buddy off right now.”

  The group started separating the entangled mass, making note on shoulder blades the status of rapists as opposed to consensual couples. Three more of the men were treated to diapers and buddy removal, as was one woman who was known to be homosexual and butch. The condition of the clawed off youniforms and the defensive marks on the attackers confirmed each status. The victims of the four male aggressors were moved to a separate area and made comfortable after being checked over with a Bio-Meter and post coital anti pregnancy protocols applied.

  The victim of the lesbian was not in such bad shape and was also settled down in a seat.

  The team had got all the passengers back to their seats and restrained them by one arm to the seat frame. They were going to stay in place when revived. The rapists were placed in the front row, restrained at arm and ankles, naked but for the diapers.

  Shelia took one more look at her charges and then reactivated the atmospheric regeneration system. It soon cleared the gas and movement and moaning started to come from the passengers as they came up from the drug induced sleep. She checked the air monitor which had gone from red to green and told the team they could revert their youniforms to cabin status.

  There were no weapons aboard the shuttle, so Sheila spread her team around the perimeter of the cabin, each with a Bio-Meter on manual and ready on subcutaneous anaesthesia. A quick press against the skin and lights out for that person.

  Soon all the passengers were awake, but groggy from the after effects. The big engineer came to and started pulling at the restraints throwing his weight about and shaking his head in frustration. He swore and threatened Sheila, hatred burning from his eyes.

  “That’s enough from you!” Sheila exclaimed, and planted herself right in front of him, where he tried to head butt her. She grabbed his chin and kept his face just out of range and warned him, “I don’t know who you are. I don’t care right now. I was put in charge of this shuttle and I am going to do my duty for the good of all the passengers and to the best of my ability. And if that means putting a raping, foul mouthed bastard lik
e you into space wearing just a baby’s diaper, I will do it! Got me?” She stopped and stared him in the eyes. She felt his neck relax in defeat and he gave a single nod.

  “Get me out of this diaper!” he whispered.

  “I’ll think about it.” she replied. “You raped a woman. You have some justice to face.”

  Sheila got up and went to the front to talk to the passengers. “I’d like to start Ladies and Gentlemen, but there are few if any of those among you after what just happened.” There was mixed reaction, some grins and some scowling. “I want to make something very clear. We are under Martial Law until further notice. I am in sole command of this shuttle by order of the fleet commander before the fleet was destroyed. this appointment still stands and I will not hesitate to exercise my authority for the good of all aboard. So I am starting with the ruling that any further instances of rape, attempted rape or assault of any kind, will be met by summary evacuation of the guilty party into space without a youniform. There are no more chances.

  The second issue is that contrary to certain opinion,” She looked pointedly at the hulking engineer, “this shuttle can be saved and can survive for an extended time. I will explain how we do this...”

  “Peepers! Now you buzzed this lot. You can’t do that!”

  “Howley, I can do anything I damned want to do!”