Reality: The Struggle for Sternessence

by Daniel A. Liut

  The internal bulkheads were already taking in the capsule’s atmosphere. The hissing of the reabsorbed air quickly ceased, and the hull opened up in two halves.

  With the capsule open, Clara jumped off into the vacuum. Abandon procedure suits, or A.P.S.s, had a limited ability to travel in space, and she was now using hers to its maximum capacity.

  The members of the raft tried to catch up with her, but they quickly realized that was not going to work.172 They soon reconvened in one of the raft halves. The other half automatically re-joined with theirs, and the raft closed. A.P.S.s were capable of performing very short-range maneuvers. Aware of that, and before starting the opening sequence, Clara had grabbed an air tank and an emergency flare gun with the intent of using them as rudimentary propulsion devices. She had hitched them onto her belt along with a C.T.C. (contact tape cartridge), which was similar to a roll of adhesive tape, but with electro-magnetic attaching properties.

  Immersed in space, Clara aimed the flare gun in the direction opposite to the Intrepid. She immediately shot the five cartridges her flare gun carried, rapidly gaining significant momentum towards the ship.

  “Come back. Don’t be a foo—”

  Clara disconnected the communication channel. Right after that, the raft’s safety system automatically resumed control and the vehicle continued its trip down to the planet.

  Releasing the valve of the extra air tank, Clara began to gain additional speed. The small propulsive mechanism of her A.P.S. helped her correct the trajectory back to the ship.

  Very rapidly, the impressive view of the Intrepid—almost a quarter of a mile in length—started taking up a wide angular scope.

  A cloud of incandescent gas erupted from the hull near the center of the ship. An ignited jet immediately followed, streaming out of the vessel with a soundless power. Clara was clear of the trajectory of the gases, but the proximity to the event made her become more aware of her relative speed. She immediately shut off the valve to the air tank, halting her accelerating rate. As she got closer to the vessel, she realized that her terminal speed was dangerously high. With the intent of reducing it, she aimed the air-tank she held under an arm towards the ship and opened its valve.

  The pressure was already low. Clara reacted quickly by reorienting the modest propulsive thrust of her space suit in a new attempt to break off her speed. It had a limited effect. When she was about to hit the hull, Clara threw the empty tank against it in a last effort to decrease her relative momentum. The tank bounced off, and right behind it, Clara bumped onto the hull at a still dangerous rate. She was only stunned by the impact. Reorienting the propulsive system of her suit, she began to move slowly over the smooth surface.

  Clara knew the ship very well, so it did not take her long to reach one of the emergency bays. She quickly found what she was looking for: a small rectangular glowing mark—one of the external digital opening terminals. She activated it and typed in the corresponding password, fearing it had been locked. But an opening immediately materialized in front of her.

  Clara slid through into a narrow chamber. The hatch above her head suddenly shut, and a hazy cold air flowing from the entire floor panel began flooding the chamber. When the ship’s internal pressure was reached, a hatch swung open. The light on top of Clara’s helmet cast shadows inside a dark corridor that lay ahead.

  What to do next? Where to start a search for anybody in a quarter-mile-long ship? Clara knew that Erina, together with Duncan, had been covering the third night watch that week. That meant she would have had a special resting period during the morning. She would start by checking her cabin.

  Clara began moving towards the hatch to an internal emergency corridor. She did not dare check how much time she had left. Fortunately, the hatch yielded at her first try. A shaft appeared, connecting to the officer’s quarters a few decks below and several sections ahead. Clara dragged herself through it as fast as she could. The gravitational system was not working anymore, and the ship retained a residual spin. The resulting centripetal acceleration was small in that area, due to the proximity to the ship’s center of gravity. But as Clara began to move faster, using the propulsion system of her A.P.S., she literally started walking on one of the bulkheads.173

  On reaching the officer’s quarters deck, some disturbing data appeared on a small infrared window on Clara’s visor: the floor was dangerously hot, a clear sign that a fire was raging on the deck below. Objects of all sizes were floating everywhere, along with debris and smoke.

  Very rapidly, the impressive view of the Intrepid―almost quarter of a mile in length―started taking up a wide, angular scope.

  Clara moved carefully down the corridor until she finally found a door with the yet unchanged inscription Ensign Erina on it. The corridor’s overhead had suffered severe deformations, which had firmly compressed the door onto the bulkheads. As Clara struggled to get the door open, an explosion, coming from somewhere inside the ship, shook it violently, causing her to slam backwards into a bulkhead.

  Taking her gun, Clara hurried back to the door and started melting an opening; she quickly realized that was going to take too much time. Taking some tape from the C.T.C. on her belt, she fixed her gun against the door and activated its self-destruction system.174 As quickly as she could, Clara now struggled to get away from the spot—not an easy endeavor in a micro-gravity environment.

  The gun exploded, thrusting Clara forward violently. She cried out with fear, remaining momentarily still, shuddering against a bulkhead. A splinter had reached her suit above her right knee, opening a rent on it. The memory of what had happened to her in Aquaelight had imprinted a mark in her psyche.

  Clara’s A.P.S. quickly took on the same atmosphere of the ship. Due to the gases released by the explosions and many fires on board, the ship’s air was difficult to breathe, but all in all, the environment was still capable of sustaining life. The corridor was filled with a cloud of smoke, and it was hard to see. She had to feel her way back to Erina’s quarters.

  By the time she had reached the spot, the air was becoming clearer. The door to Erina’s cabin was partially torn off, with one side virtually welded onto the bulkhead, and the other twisted back inside the cabin. Curled up in a back corner, a motionless human shape was discernible. Clara stepped inside at once.

  “It’s all right, Erina, it’s all right.” Clara stooped down beside her. She was in some kind of a shock. Her face had a vacant expression. “I’ll get you out of here in no time,” Clara added softly, as if talking to a child. “You’ll be fine.”

  Erina was wearing her everyday uniform. The first thing Clara had to do was to get a space suit for her. After a brief struggle with a stuck drawer, its damaged front broke off. Handle in hand, Clara hit the bulkhead behind her and bounced off towards the cabin’s overhead. Quickly checking her watch, she realized there was no time to try to get Erina to put the suit on.

  “It’s okay, I’ll get you out of here,” Clara muttered, agitated, as she hastily stuck the suit around Erina’s hips using more of her C.T.C. tape. She intended to put it on Erina once they were safely inside a raft or an escape capsule. “Everything is going to be all right now.”

  Putting one arm around Erina’s back, Clara began to move through the ship’s dark corridors. Erina was in a deep trance. Most likely, after the Intrepid had been hit, she would have heard all the abandoning instructions coming through 1-MC. Having accidentally left her communicator on the bridge, and with her comm. terminal out of order, Erina would have tried in vain to report her position and status. As time went by and everybody abandoned ship, desperation would have finally set in. The increasing bioxyn depletion would have contributed to the condition in which she was found.

  At the end of the corridor, there was an emergency escape bay. Dragging Erina along, Clara quickly reached the spot. She tried to operate the hatch to the bay manually, but it would not respond.

  Recalling the twin abandoning bay at the other end of the same corridor
, she immediately grabbed Erina and started moving on again. The corridor seemed as if it had no end. Clara began coughing and moaning miserably, and her vision began to blur. As she stopped to catch some air, another explosion rocked the ship.

  Almost instantly, Clara found herself right in front of the opposite bay, along with Erina. Immediately, she tried to open the hatch. At first, it would not respond, but with some persistence, its emergency handle loosened and the hatch opened up. An escape capsule was stowed to one side.

  Clara moved towards the pod and activated its opening system. The first thing she did was to set the landing coordinates on the navigational display. Waiting until after launch could be very risky; she could fail to do that in time, or worse, lose consciousness before doing it. Once done, she dragged Erina inside.

  There was no time for a safe by-the-rules launch, so Clara set on the jettison procedure without further consideration. The bay hatch was blasted into space, and so was the capsule. The pod’s automatic propulsion system responded immediately, not just trying to get the vehicle away from the ship, but mostly struggling to gain some altitude to avoid hitting the dangerously close upper atmospheric layers at the capsule’s ejection incidence angle. For a disturbing moment, a tenuous luminescence glowed on the pod’s hull as it scraped the silent surface of the gaseous fathoms below.

  The Intrepid was swiftly becoming another star on the horizon. Clara looked at it with a mixture of sadness and nostalgia, as the sunlight reflected on her hull slowly faded out. After a minute or so, the weak white star turned into a bright red sphere.

  The Realitarian battleship had begun her last journey, carving a furrow of fire in the higher atmospheric layers of Althea 8.175 As it slowly submerged herself into the vast oceans of the Veridiawan heavens, Clara stood salute (as it were), her sight fixed on the blazing trail. Her hair was levitating gently around her face. Above her now peaceful eyes, tears were left to float immersed in a resigned silence.

  _______________

  159 Compact technological system of a size comparable to that of a building or a small complex.

  160 Time Anti-Time explosive device.

  161 Measured from the mean planet surface.

  162 In order to maximize environmental efficiency, a relatively small percentage of the ship was pressurized, mainly in the crew operational areas.

  163 Ship’s tactical computer.

  164 A system that makes particles collapse into a so-called dimensionless state. More accurately, particle dimensions are pushed to a size smaller than what could be measured through any physical means, according to the physical models in use at that time.

  165 Missing Personnel Search team.

  166 The pod was a rather large unmanned capsule packed with instruments and other items needed for the mission still to be accomplished on the planet.

  167 Emergency Chemical Fire Extinguisher.

  168 Duncan had asked his questions while still waiting at the launching bay for all the assigned personnel to reach their raft.

  169 The hull would not allow standard communications with any terminal of any sort inside the ship. However, there was a communications interface, now out of line, that under normal circumstances would enable linking with the ship’s internal network, and through it, with any communications terminal.

  170 This implied that she would have had an extended sleeping period in the morning.

  171 A common Realitian expression used when speaking in relation to a large body, like a large vessel.

  172 Even if they could catch up with her, they might not be able to get back to the raft in time for a safe reentry.

  173 A Coriolis acceleration was induced by the rotational spin of the ship combined with the speed Clara was gathering as she moved down the shaft. This acceleration worked in a similar manner to a gravitational pull against the surface along which Clara was moving, enabling her to walk and even run along the shaft without the assistance of her A.P.S.

  174 The system allowed for different modes of self-destruction. The most violent would have caused serious damage and would have killed anybody in the vicinity. Thus Clara set her gun to a mild self-explosive mode, hoping this would release enough energy to force the door open.

  175 The ship would automatically disintegrate soon after hitting the atmosphere to minimize any damage it could cause to the planet’s surface.

  CHAPTER 15

  A Short Rest

  99.

  A new day was dawning on the warm Taicidias steppes of the north. Above the horizon, to the west, a growing red sunrise was relieving each star, one by one, from its ancient task of sprinkling beauty on the Althean sky.

  With sleepy red eyes and without much haste, two characters—rather different—were crossing the dewy fields. They had always liked taking that cross-country walk back to the village without following any particular trail.

  The calm air and the hazy horizon were heralding a warm, muggy day. But, for the time being, one of the travelers was enjoying the cool wet vegetation of the early morning, as he pondered the celestial sight he had just witnessed.

  “What a sky-light shower,” the keiro said in his distinctive sluggish cadence.

  “Yep,” Seidy agreed while riding on his friend’s back. “That sure was a good one.”

  “And that red little ball of fire falling all the way down from the sky . . .” Boldowa continued.

  “Little? It was like a sun,” Seidy remarked. “And the trail of fire it left over the clouds . . .”

  Boldowa frowned. “Why do sky-lights fall down from the sky, Seidy?”

  “Simple: sky-lights are tiny, all made out of light—that’s why they float in the sky. But when dust gets into a star, even the weight of a tiny grain can make it fall all the way down to the ground. You know, last night being so windy and dusty and all . . .”

  “Oh.” Boldowa frowned again, not understanding much of his friend’s explanation. “Seidy?”

  “Yes?”

  “I had never seen a sky-light before—that red sun we saw, that is.”

  “So?”

  “Sky-lights are beautiful.”

  “Hm,” Seidy muttered absentmindedly.

  The keiro kept on strolling for a while, his mind still wondering about the star shower. “You’re very lucky, having been born a wuol, and being so smart.”

  “You are absolutely right,” Seidy confirmed with his usual lack of modesty. His next comment was not as predictable, though. “But you are a very big strong fellow. Your hide is like copper, and your horns are like swords. You’re a pretty impressive guy too, Boldo.”

  “Oh, please, don’t call me Boldo.”

  “My name is Boldowa,” both spoke in unison.

  The landscape was slowly switching to a multicolored grassland full of flowers as the first mild rays of the local sun began to loom on the horizon.

  “You are so good, Seidy, you being my friend.”

  The comment surprised Seidy. Boldowa’s friendship had never been a particular subject of his considerations. He thought of saying something, but the few words that popped up in his mind were just not the sorts of things he was comfortable saying.

  “Hey, down there!”

  Seidy looked up. A tight formation of golloondias was flying fast towards the north. Seidy took off and approached the leader. “Hey, what’s going on?”

  “Haven’t you seen the lights in the sky?” Inury said.

  “Yeah, the falling sun, and the shower of sky-lights. Man!” Duncan’s passage through the village had left unmistakable marks on the Veridiawan vocabulary.

  “But that’s not all,” Inury commented. “A moment ago, Daihyouleeby got back from his post, and guess what? Dozens of newones have arrived with the lights.”

  Seidy frowned, amazed.

  “And that’s still not all! Guess who’s among them?”

  The wuol raised one eyebrow. “Girl-Captain Clara?”

  “Exactly, and the Boy-Dahncion, and—”

&nbs
p; “See ya later,” Seidy said, and dived down sharply. “Hey, Boldo, we gotta go back!” he yelled from the air.

  Bemused, Boldowa remarked, “But, but, we’re going back, already.”

  “No, dummy, we gotta go back to the north, to the place where the lights have fallen.”

  Boldowa’s confusion turned into apprehension. “What do you mean, Seidy? You know: ‘Tis not good to go where sky-lights fall from the sky’.”

  “Those were no sky-lights from the sky: they were sky-lights from the Realitas village. Girl-Captain Clara has come back—as she promised.”

  Boldowa’s expression was transformed, his eyes fixed on the air. Everything seemed too good for one single day. And it had barely begun.

  “Hey, what are you looking at, you, you . . . ?”

  Boldowa flashed a grin. “Hold on.”

  “Aaah!” Seidy yelled, as he flapped his wings trying to compensate for the keiro’s swift acceleration.

  A new trail sliced across the thick Taicidias grasslands as the thunder of Boldowa’s heavy gallop slowly faded to the rustle of the mild morning breeze.

  100.

  The first thing Patriarch Coelious did the day after the arrival of the Realitian forces was to add the newcomers as official new newones Veridiawa. An entire expedition was being rapidly put together to accompany the girl-Captain and her friends to the distant ruins of the south. The furthest thought from Coelious’ mind was to let it depart with outlanders176 in its ranks.

  The initiation ritual had been lengthy and ceremonious, as Veridiawan rituals went, but once it was over and all Realitians had been incorporated as newones Veridiawa, the packed Ivory Chamber was expeditiously cleared up. Veridiawans knew how to leave a place immediately when there is no more to be done. In any case, everything had happened faster than usual that day, since a great festivity was ready to take place in the village.