To Infinity

by Darren Humphries

  “Are you still secure?” Haynes asked.

  “If I was any other computer then my knickers would be round my ankles and it would be free access for all...”

  “A simple yes or no would do,” Haynes snapped.

  “Yes,” the computer replied with an audible pout. “But even I won’t be able to hold out much longer. These guys interface directly and that Hive mind is pretty powerful.”

  “Then we need to talk,” Haynes said urgently, turning back to the Queen, “and you need to surrender.”

  “Surrender?” The sound that issued from Lyssa’s throat was probably laughter, but since the Halreptors’ physiology differed somewhat from humans in the throat area it just sounded really painful. “You expect us to surrender to you?”

  “No of course not,” Haynes responded, his voice dripping with scorn. “We’re here to destroy you, not to take your surrender.”

  Though she was rendered speechless, Lyssa’s face told him all that he needed to know about the Queen’s reaction. He rushed on quickly before the inevitable happened and they plucked the memory from Lyssa’s head as to why they could not read him directly.

  “You need to surrender to the Fleet High Command and set up trading agreements otherwise...” he faked a shudder.

  “They’re through the outer defences,” the computer reported in a high-pitched panic. “They can’t work anything, but they can read everything and they’re ransacking my information. Get your filthy minds off me you damned dirty insects!”

  “The file?” Haynes demanded, feeling time rapidly running away.

  “They know it’s there, but can’t get in it without fusing my core memory,” the computer composed itself somewhat. “They’re a bit pissed about that.”

  “What file?” asked Keely, thoroughly confused, which probably meant she wasn’t proving to be too much help to the Halreptors.

  “Remove the tie,” Lyssa ordered, pointing to the protective neckwear that was his only protection against them.

  “You think that it was just chance that the most advanced ship in human space pitched up in the hold of the vessel carrying your Queen?” Haynes yelled desperately. A couple of the soldiers moved towards him, brandishing sharpened appendages that were certainly capable of slicing through the tie, but were also likely to take a good section of the neck along with it. “All right, I’ll take it off, but I’m not going to be the only one who’s sorry.” As he reached up to undo the tie, he ordered the computer, “Prepare to activate the contents of the file.”

  “Roger that.”

  Steeling himself for the mental onslaught, he pulled at the knot around his throat. He barely loosened it before he felt them flooding in, scurrying across his mind, swarming through his memories. The pitiful defences that his training had allowed him to mount were swept away, burrowed through in an instant in a hundred different places. As his resistance was left with more hole than resist, he could sense the one driving objective behind the searchers, the one thought that obsessed their questing minds - the file.

  In that instant they were upon it, led to it by his recognition as though by a neon sign wired across an entire moon. They knew where it was, how he had no access to it any more and what instructions he had given the computer. They also knew of the formidable destructive force that the ship could still unleash in the right circumstances - or the wrong circumstances if you happened to still be within the quite considerable blast radius.

  They even knew of his extreme attraction to Lyssa, but he hoped that they weren’t sharing everything with her.

  As each of his mental defences collapsed, or more accurately dissolved, the voices ganged up on the next, shouting all the time to know what was in the file.

  Haynes gathered his last strength and tried to erect a brick wall in his mind around the consequences of opening the file, but he only got as far as ‘br..’ before the Halreptors were through and saw an image of destruction so dire that it could not be contemplated.

  “Initiating file,” the computer announced.

  Abruptly, the Halreptors were gone and not just from his mind. The Queen was surrounded by ranks of her soldiers and they were all racing for a doorway that had crumbled out of the chamber wall. Haynes slumped to the floor, certain that his mind was going to be bruised for weeks. Keely ran to his side, but he waved her over towards Lyssa who was also lying prone on the deck. She had taken the worst of things and there was no telling how badly her synapses had been fried.

  “Looks like you really stirred them up,” the computer told him through the haze in his aching head. “I’m picking up energy surges in their engines and they’re broadcasting on just about every waveband how much they want to talk.”

  “That’s good,” Haynes supposed, though he wasn’t sure whether it was good, bad or indifferent. He wasn’t quite sure what they were talking about. “I expect.” He knew that he had a name and that it probably began with a ‘Q’...no that didn’t sound right.

  “Uh oh,” the computer reported.

  “Uh oh?” Keely said from her knees next to the completely unresponsive Lyssa. “Don’t say ‘uh oh’. ‘Uh oh’ sounds bad.”

  “Not so much bad,” the computer told her, allowing her to breathe easier.

  “More sort of really, really bad.”

  Keely began to hyperventilate.

  “Hey you need to keep it together little girl,” the computer encouraged her.

  “I am not a little girl!” Keely growled from between gritted teeth.

  “And now is the time to get into that,” the computer demanded, “with the Halreptors about to dump the entire contents of this chamber into open space and put as much distance between us and them as they Halreptornly can?”

  “What?” She looked around in a panic. The huge space was now empty, completely empty. There was not a single Halreptor to be seen. They had paused long enough in their flight, apparently, to seal up the walls after them. Somehow the total lack of sharp-edged aliens was even more scary than their presence had been.

  “This is not good,” she agreed.

  “Really not,” the computer insisted. “You need to get everyone inside before the floor starts cracking.”

  Keely screamed as the floor beneath her feet cracked with a sound like gunfire.

  “OK, I’ll settle for getting everyone inside before it finishes cracking,” the computer decided.

  “I can’t carry everyone.” Keely hurried over to Haynes on her hands and knees as the cracks raced across the floor in all directions. He was mumbling to himself. “Haynes, Haynes, we need to get back to the ship right now.”

  “Haynes?” he frowned. “Is that my name? Really?”

  “Kaymer Haynes,” she confirmed quickly as cracks gave birth to more, smaller cracks. “That’s what you’re using at the moment anyway.”

  “Curious. You would have thought that if I was choosing a name I would have come up with something better than Kaymer Haynes.”

  “Haynes!” Keely yelled, grabbing him by the ears and twisting them both hard. “And if you don’t help me then we are all going to be freeze-dried real soon!”

  Eyes watering from the pain, Haynes struggled upright.

  “You get Lyssa and I’ll bring Dennis,” Keely urged him.

  “OK,” he paused. “What’s a Lyssa?”

  Keely pointed to one crumpled figure, “Lyssa,” then to the other, “Dennis.”

  Haynes staggered across to the prone woman and dragged her up over his shoulder, nearly losing his balance and going sprawling twice in the process. Keely took the more direct approach of merely dragging the unconscious man across the rapidly fragmenting surface.

  “Now, which way is this ship?”

  “Over here,” someone said in his ear and the chamber was suddenly lit with lights so bright the effect was almost physical.

  “Please stop that!” Haynes moaned.

  “And don’t do it again,” Keely agreed, adding, “Just follow me.”

&nb
sp; They struggled across the floor, sections of which were now canting out of alignment, but as they approached, the airlock door slid smoothly shut.

  “No,” was all that Keely could gasp.

  “I take it that’s not normal,” Haynes suggested.

  The door slid smoothly open again.

  “I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist it,” the computer told them. “You should have seen the look on your faces.”

  The floor suddenly bucked under their feet, throwing them forwards. Haynes staggered through the airlock before tipping full length on his face, spilling Lyssa across the floor. Keely scrambled frantically after him, dragging the still-unconscious freighter navigator. Looking back, she saw the crazy paving that was the deck of the Halreptor ship falling away in waves. Waves that were heading in their direction.

  “We’re in, shut the door!” Keely screamed, but the airlock was sealed just as she felt vacuum dragging at the air around her.

  Then the ship fell.

  It was only a momentary feeling before the gravity grid kicked in, but unsettling enough.

  “Come on,” Keely urged, dragging Haynes to his feet and running down into the command lounge. The big screen was showing the image of a Halreptor ship wheeling away through space. From the fact that the stars were also moving, it was clear that it was themselves that were doing the wheeling.

  “We’re in a spaceship,” Haynes noted in wonder.

  “What’s the matter with him?” the computer asked, through the main speakers this time instead of their earpieces.

  “They were in his mind,” Keely explained.

  “Ooh, that must have been kind of cramped.”

  “Look, if you haven’t anything more useful to say then shut up,” Keely snapped back.

  “Sit him down on the main couch,” the computer suggested.

  Haynes cocked his head to one side, “Did you hear that? I think I’m hearing voices. Are you hearing voices?”

  “Wouldn’t be much of a conversation if we didn’t,” Keely steered him to the main flight couch, right next to the command console.

  “Ooh comfy,” he approved as he sat down.

  “Can you do something?” Keely asked in both exasperation and desperation.

  “I can do lots of things,” the computer assured her, “ I was programmed that way.

  “About him,” she clarified.

  “You don’t like him the way he is?”

  “What would concentrated nail varnish remover do to the inside of your memory banks?”

  “Oh all right,” the computer said huffily, “but he’s not going to enjoy it.”

  “Do it.”

  Electricity arced out of the command console and straight into Haynes’ forehead. He convulsed violently and the air was briefly tinged with aroma of burning human. Then it stopped.

  “That hurt,” Haynes said absently, “I think.”

  There was another bright arc.

  “Ow, that bloody well hurts!” Haynes yelled when it stopped. His eyes seemed clearer to Keely.

  “Haynes?”

  There was another discharge, more singed hair smells and more electrical crackling before sudden silence.

  “What the hell...?”

  “Computer, I think you got him,” Keely shouted as the console arced again.

  “Why you silicon-chipped bast...!”

  “Computer, you can stop now, you got him!”

  “Oh I know, but it’s too much fun to stop so soon.”

  “Do that one more time and I’ll use your higher logic circuits as a game of pick up sticks,” a voice said quietly but firmly from the doorway.

  The control panel crackled ominously, on the edge of rebellion, but nothing more.

  “Lyssa!” Keely threw herself at the other woman who proved not to be up to the impact and they both ended up in a pile on the floor. “You’re all right.”

  “No,” Lyssa denied, not shaking her head for fear that it might fall off. “Alive yes, conscious just about, but definitely not all right. The only reason I’m moving at all is because of your odorous boyfriend out there acting like the best smelling salts ever.”

  “Haynes!” Keely suddenly remembered, scrambling back across the deck to the acceleration couch where Haynes was slumped, cradling his head in his hands.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked him gently.

  “Like someone just put my brain through a blender before trying to fry it with high voltage,” he moaned before adding, “which is far more painful than I expected being dead to be, so can I assume that the plan worked?”

  “What plan?” Lyssa picked herself up gingerly off the floor. “I saw no evidence of any plan.”

  “A bluff,” Haynes explained, “a file buried so deep in the computer’s core memory and surrounded by every known anti-hacking measure the contents of which are not even known to the computer storing it.”

  “Can I read it now?” the computer queried.

  “No,” Haynes refused. “I just had to make the Halreptors believe that opening the file would have consequences so disastrous as to be apocalyptic.”

  “Which you did so it must be something pretty awesome,” Keely bounced up and down in impressed excitement. “A secret doomsday device.”

  “Ain’t got one of those,” the computer told her.

  “So what’s in the file?” Lyssa asked.

  “Family recipe for chicken soup,” Haynes managed a weak grin, “very secret.”

  “Chicken soup?” Lyssa was too mentally tired to get too worked up. “How did you convince them that opening a recipe for chicken soup would be disastrous? They were reading you telepathically!”

  “Are you kidding? If anyone did learn the secrets of that recipe the consequences would be catastrophic,” he told her. “I’d be haunted by every ancestor I ever had and they were a dodgy lot I can tell you.”

  “You surprise me,” Lyssa remarked dryly. “Thank goodness it skipped a generation with you.”

  “To be really good at what I do,” Haynes revealed, “you have to be able to convince anyone of anything, most of all yourself.”

  “That so?” Lyssa wondered, clearly unconvinced.

  “Don’t knock it, it worked,” Keely pointed out. “Which makes us all heroes I guess.”

  “A thief, a spaceship on the most wanted list, a telepathic grease monkey and a...whatever you want to be called? Not your usual brand of heroes,” Lyssa commented.

  “Somehow I just don’t think that the universe works that way,” Haynes warned. In his experience it was in the moment after you had just won that you were most likely to find out that you had, in fact, lost.

  FAMILY REUNION

  The lights flickered suddenly and the screen blanked momentarily. The room seemed to bank to the left, something that was impossible this far from a gravity source.

  “Computer, what’s happening?” Haynes got to the question fractionally before his companions.

  “I’m losing power in all systems, right across the board,” was the response.

  Lyssa went immediately into engineer mode despite the pounding her mind had recently taken. “Generators or conduits? Error messages coming up? Power relay outages?”

  “None of the above,” the computer reported. “The power’s being produced, but it’s not doing anything. It’s sort of being negated. Like we’re in some sort of energy cancelling field.”

  “Cancelling field?” Haynes queried.

  “There’s no such thing,” Lyssa told him, her fingers running all over a systems panel, calling up information faster than he could read it. “You can’t just wipe out energy.”

  “Then I guess this isn’t about to happen then,” the computer said archly just before the lights went out.

  There was silence. Nobody spoke. The three of them barely breathed. The dark was absolute. There were no lights anywhere. Not a single console blinked. Not a single readout chimed softly. Haynes realised that he couldn’t hear the fans supplying the air. Agai
n.

  “Spooky isn’t it?” the computer asked suddenly, causing Keely to scream.

  “Sorry,” she apologised.

  “I thought you said that there was no power,” Haynes accused into the general darkness.

  “There isn’t,” the computer’s voice, even more disembodied than usual, assured him. “This is super emergency back up power produced off chemical batteries.”

  “Chemical?” Lyssa was surprised.

  “My designers thought of everything,” the computer said proudly. “Back ups to back ups of back ups. There’d be a store of white mice and a wheel if they’d thought it would help.”

  “How long will that last?” Keely asked quietly.

  “Five hours, but you don’t need to worry about that.”

  “I don’t?”

  “No,” the computer told her cheerily, “because you’ll have run out of breathable air before that.”

  “Oh,” Keely’s voice was barely audible.

  “Of course, you’ll probably freeze to death before that happens.”

  “You can stop trying to cheer us up now,” Haynes suggested.

  “We’re getting a signal,” the computer suddenly changed the subject, “a transmission. It’s on a really tight beam so it must be meant for us.”

  “Can you put it on the main screen?” Haynes asked.

  “Not being given any choice in the matter.”

  The big screen burst into life and the three crewmembers winced at the sudden illumination.

  “This isn’t doing much for your survival time,” the computer warned.

  The connection finally swam into focus. They were looking at the cabin of a small space vessel and the face of a very still man. He was so still that they all thought they were looking at a single image until he spoke.

  “Hello Kaymer. That is what you’re calling yourself these days isn’t it?”

  “You know him?” the two women asked in unison.

  “Hello Morrison,” Haynes replied, ignoring them. “Long time no see.”

  “Long time,” the man on the screen agreed. “Not since...”

  “Mother’s uterus?”

  “Mother?” Lyssa repeated.