by Ben Bova
They made it to the stateroom’s entrance door, stopping smoothly, if abruptly, against the smooth plastic surface. She reached for the opening plate.
“Hold it,” he warned, stopping her. “Not yet.” Using his free hand, he thumbed the closet switch and felt a momentary panic as the door hesitated, then opened to reveal its contents. A red emergency light had come on inside; it was the interior light that had caused the outline to be so easily visible in the darkened room. There were four life vests inside, and Drew could see that the status plate over the left breast of each garment blinked red in unison with the light on the closet door.
“You’re right,” Vera said, following his lead. As he steadied himself with one hand on the edge of the closet, she fished out one of the bulky vests and slipped it on. The status plate changed from red to green when she pressed it closed down the front, indicating that the garment’s internal life-support unit was on automatic standby. Once it was sealed, the light continued to blink in time with the light on the door.
Good, he thought. At least the emergency systems are on-line and working.
She grabbed one of the other vests and gingerly helped him into it, then pressed the front closed with his injured arm tucked securely inside. Once it was sealed, his status indicator blinked green in unison with hers.
“Let’s get out of here.” Vera slapped the opening plate with the palm of her hand and the door slid aside to reveal a hallway that looked, at first glance, as if nothing had happened. A red warning light blinked over each stateroom door, but otherwise the overhead lighting was normal; no warning klaxon sounded.
However, any hope that the gravity failure was limited to the staterooms vanished when they carefully peeked out and saw that a series of handholds—rigid plastic loops that looked like nothing so much as pieces from a child’s ring-toss game—had emerged automatically from their recesses in the previously smooth walls on each side of the corridor. Each handhold glowed softly, with a pulse of brightness moving along the row of loops as they extended down the hallway, and Drew noted that the pulses led away from the lift. A quick glance at the panel next to the lift doors showed it to be dark and lifeless, save the ever-present blinking red light: With artificial gravity shut down, the lift system was inoperative. The pulses, designed to direct confused passengers caught out of their staterooms during an emergency, would undoubtedly lead to the nearest control station on this level.
“That way,” he said, indicating aft. “There’ll be a personnel comm terminal at the station I should be able to access.”
They moved into the corridor in the direction of the pulses, Vera towing him along with one hand while grabbing an occasional handhold with the other to keep them propelled in the right direction. There was a bend in the corridor a few meters ahead of them, and they could hear the excited voices of several people, indicating that a comm terminal was located in the next corridor.
“Brace yourself,” Vera said, deftly swinging around to stop them feet-first on the wall where the corridor changed direction. There was a moment of pain when she braked against the wall, but once again he was quietly grateful for her zero-g experience. “Are you all right?” She was breathing heavily now, he noticed, and he realized it wasn’t from the exertion of getting them both this far—she was frightened. She had responded to the emergency so automatically that she had not taken time to be afraid; but now that the adrenaline was fading, fright was beginning to well up inside her.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” he said, hooking his good arm into a loop next to hers, allowing Vera to steady herself with both hands on separate loops. He forced himself to smile. “Everything’s going to be fine. Look, we made it to the terminal.” Pushing his thoughts away from his own rising concerns, he indicated the comm just a short distance down the corridor.
There were three people there. One of them, the one actually using the terminal, he immediately recognized as Ronatti, an apprentice steward who had signed on aboard the Sylvan when they left Copenhaver. Ronatti was holding, white-knuckled, on to a handhold loop while he talked animatedly into the terminal. The other two were obviously passengers, and from their disheveled attire he assumed they had sneaked onto the deserted level for much the same purpose Vera and he had. Neither wore life vests, and both were terrified and whimpering as they clung to each other, and constantly pleaded with the steward to tell them what was happening, even though he was doing his best to ignore them.
“Ronatti! What the hell is going on?”
“Hold on,” he barked into the comm when he saw the two of them at the bend in the corridor. “Drew’s here now.” Still anchored firmly to the loop, he turned to them and called down the corridor, “Drew! This level’s sealed, but I’ve got Captain Partane right here. All gravity is off and the SIS—”
A horrendous wrenching sound exploded suddenly all around him, and he watched in terror as the entire corridor began to come apart.
A huge rent appeared in both ceiling and floor about half way between them and the terminal, and as the panels separated, the rest of the corridor actually fell away, exposing the midsection between this level and the one above.
He felt his ears pop at the same time the wall to which he clung jerked suddenly backward. Another tear appeared in the wall between the two of them as the panels pulled apart, and as he felt himself being snapped in one direction he saw that Vera, still clinging to her loops, was being tugged in the other.
“Drew!”
The tear completed itself around the circumference of the corridor, and the two sections pulled completely apart amid a jumble of jagged metal and plastic thrusting itself through what had been—only a few moments earlier—solid walls and floors. And as the corridor disintegrated around them, he felt a sudden hurricane of swirling wind and debris.
The abrupt loss of pressure sent the life vest into active mode, and a skin-shield snapped into place translucently around him. He heard a tiny voice from the wafer speaker in the lapel of the vest. “Emergency mode one enabled,” it repeated at regular intervals. There was a soft hiss from the vest fabric itself, and he felt the pain in his ears ease as the pressure returned to normal.
Dizzy and disoriented, it took him a second to recognize that he was floating free, and he stared stupidly at the detached loop that remained uselessly on his arm. The corridor was still in convulsions as he tried to locate Vera, but the grinding debris and panel sections moved against each other in strange silence now with the lack of an atmosphere to carry the sound to him. A large section of metal paneling sandwiched him against another, but the skin-shield generated by the vest held firm and kept the jagged pieces away from him until he could wriggle free again. Once clear of the mess, he called out to her, but knew she couldn’t hear him even if she was all right.
The hurricane receded and the motion of the debris that had once been luxury passenger staterooms subsided. Had he not known where he was, he would not have been able to recognize it. But the important thing was that whatever had happened was over, and he had a moment to think.
Internal pressure was gone on this level, he knew, but the fact that the life vest was only in emergency mode one indicated that the Sylvan’s hull must still be intact. He might yet find Vera, and if her life vest was functioning she should have been able to avoid injury just as he had.
“Vera!”
He picked his way gingerly through the mess using his good arm and both legs, the frictionless skin-shield allowing him to slip deftly through the weightless chunks of metal and plastic. He found only one body, that of a man he recognized as one of the new engineers. He wore a life vest, but had apparently been killed before it had activated. There was an ugly purple bruise on the man’s temple that extended up under his hairline, but other than that he appeared uninjured. Drew wondered how many others would have had time to don vests, and how effective they might have been. He made his way slowly, and once or twice he felt a shuddering in the debris or a disconcerting press of a large chunk against s
ome part of his body as the damage settled itself, but he ignored it as he tried to determine which direction her portion of the corridor had shifted.
The skin-suit suddenly cast a soft glow and he felt a rapid, sharp stinging feeling in his chest just behind the status plate of the life vest: He tilted his head in confusion at the sensation; it felt like the bite of some tiny insect that might have crawled down the front of his shirt.
“Emergency mode two enabled,” came the tiny voice from the vest, and the numbness now spreading through his body told him a stasis drug was being injected into his system. He sighed heavily as the drug began taking effect, and knew beyond doubt that the ship’s computer must have sent the signal to the vest that the hull had breached. He heard the beeping of the vest’s locator, which had also just become active. That, along with the soft glow the shield now emitted, were designed to make him easier to find by rescuers, but he paid little attention to it just now.
Everything started drifting apart, and he tried to watch the slow-motion ballet of the Sylvan breaking up around him. Somehow, although he knew the vest was maintaining his temperature, his first view of empty space made him feel colder as he dumbly watched the destruction complete itself. The pieces and chunks of the ship were spreading farther apart, and as the distance between himself and what was left of the corridor increased, he was able to see things better and recognize whole sections and subsystems of the ship.
There was an entire wall, tumbling serenely to his left. He looked closely and concentrated on something attached to it: Were those the two passengers he’d seen a few minutes earlier? Their arms still looped into the handholds, their bodies waved in a lifeless dance as the section rotated. A table, still attached to its own section of flooring, spun close. A mass of linens from some suddenly decompressed storage locker floated away from him, the sheets and blankets coming untangled from each other, giving the impression of an impossibly huge flower blossoming. He smiled stupidly at the beauty of it and waited for the stasis drug to put him to sleep.
Everywhere, there were bodies. Some had been badly mangled in the breakup, others looked deceptively uninjured. Some were in uniforms, but many more wore civilian attire. None of them wore vests.
And then, tumbling slowly a dozen meters away, another body. Vera’s body.
She was dead, the lower half of her body cut cleanly away. Her skin-shield was intact and Drew could see the blood that had pooled within after it activated, probably mere seconds too late to save her.
He turned his head away in slow motion at the sight, wishing he could turn his own vest off, and even pawed clumsily at his chest for a moment in a useless attempt to reach the status plate.
The motion set him rotating slowly, and as his body turned he saw that he was floating away from the Sylvan. Through blurred eyes he saw that the entire rear third of the ship was gone, destroyed by explosive decompression. What was left of it was dark, lifeless. There were no other skinshields to be seen.
His rotation brought him around again and he could see that the debris was spreading out rapidly. Vera’s body was gone, drifting mercifully away to become lost in the jumble of grisly flotsam. After a moment of trying to locate her body through increasingly sleepy eyes, he forgot what it was he was looking for. His eyes grew heavier still and he felt his breathing become more shallow, and he knew that he was almost in stasis.
And as his rotation brought him around to face in the direction of the Sylvan one last time, he saw the huge wasp shape of the Sarpan ship outlined hazily against the backdrop of stars. What was it called? he asked himself through a stasis-clouded mind. Hin-something. Something funny.
His last conscious thought was of the Sarpan craft as it turned deftly away from the dead ship and disappeared.
“ … and it is just as I have told you before, my friends. But this time the loss of life is overwhelming, and not only because of the high number of casualties, but because of the profound innocence of the passengers. No, please—don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean to insinuate that the many Imperial or military personnel who have died at the aliens’ hands over the years are somehow less innocent than the passengers and CTS personnel aboard the H. L. Sylvan. No one knows better than I that those in service to the Empire of the Hundred Worlds have families—husbands and wives, children and parents. I meant only that those in Imperial service know the risks inherent in service, that’s all. But those unsuspecting passengers, most of whom rode in cryosleep blissfully unaware of the danger presented to them, were attempting only to exercise one of their most basic rights—the right to travel from one human world to another.
“The sad thing is that this is already being called ‘an accident.’
“An accident.
“Of course, Imperial authorities are citing the lack of evidence that this was a hostile attack. They show records indicating the Sylvan’s Structural Integrity Shielding had displayed problems long before their rendezvous with the Sarpan ship. But think a moment: Do you know what the SIS is? Let me tell you. It is a variation on shield technology that acts as a reinforcing superstructure for large spacecraft. Just as the strength and rigidity of a shield can stop weapons fire or keep an atmosphere intact, it can also be designed to mesh with the actual structure of a spaceship, allowing construction of much larger, faster ships—with far less materials and energy cost—than ever before.
“And do you know where the technology for this type of shield utilization came from? Yes, that’s right. It came from the aliens. At best, who can say that their designs are not flawed? At worst, who can say that they have no ulterior motives? In either case, I am saddened to offer you proof once again that relying on anyone other than our human brothers and sisters has led to the death of innocents. That is what comes from dealing with the aliens.
“The same aliens your Emperor wishes to embrace as friends …”
PART TWO
A SILENT PASSING
One of the greatest pains
to human nature
is the pain of a new idea.
—Walter Bagehot
2
AWAKENINGS AND ARRIVALS
Like the H. L. Sylvan twenty years earlier, the Empire was dead.
It did not die a valiant death, going down to defeat in a decisive battle either from within or without. Likewise, no cataclysm occurred to strain the fabric of what the vast Empire of the Hundred Worlds had become. Rather, the Empire suffered the most meaningless of deaths: It had become unnecessary. It had been, for want of a better description, forgotten.
The Empire was not entirely gone, of course. The Imperial government still sanctioned research in numerous areas and still aided exploration efforts for the newest frontier Worlds whenever asked for assistance. The Imperial treasury still existed, but years of funding the project to save Earth’s Sun had depleted it severely. Not that it mattered: The rapidly expanding human civilization that had been the heart of the Empire had grown increasingly self-sufficient and needed little from the parent body.
Even the Imperial Court still remained, located on Earth’s Moon, but its purpose had long ago been relegated to only the most ceremonial of duties.
Eric, son of Javas, was now Emperor; but he no longer spent much time on the Moon. There were instances when his presence at the Court made it necessary to return to Armelin City, but a mere holographic appearance sufficed as often as not. However, on those increasingly rare occasions when he felt his actual presence mattered, he would not hesitate to travel via wormhole to even the most remote regions of the Worlds in the hope that he might reach out to a people once bound by a common thread. From time to time it seemed his words meant something to those he addressed, and sometimes he felt that maybe, just maybe, he’d managed to rekindle a spark in the imaginations of those to whom he spoke. However, as the years passed, those occasions became depressingly infrequent.
Finally, weary of the false sense of importance and formality attached to both his title and family name—and feeli
ng no small degree of shame at having been powerless to stop the rapidly changing course of history—he stayed mostly in the family home located in the Kentucky hills on Old Earth.
Old Earth, he would think bitterly whenever the phrase was uttered. There is very little “old” about it!
The Emperor was right. In the two hundred years that had passed since the wormhole method of space travel had been inadvertently discovered during a crucial test of the project to rekindle Earth’s dying Sun, the planet itself had been reborn. While the Imperial Court no longer remained the central focus of the Worlds, Earth—and the entire Sol system for that matter—had become the technologically centralized hub of an ever-expanding Imperial civilization.
The technological revitalization that had come about as a result of the Sun project—as his grandfather Nicholas and, later, his own father had predicted—was, in fact, at the very heart of the project’s success. The rush to develop new science to support the project branched almost geometrically in dozens of areas: communications, medicine, physics, construction techniques, genetics—even philosophy and religion.
Emperor Nicholas and Javas after him had been revered as the men who had begun the renaissance. Eric, too, had been praised for his efforts by a people grown increasingly out of touch with their history. His own mother, the scientist who had developed the theory that would breathe new life into the dying star that was the Sun, had been most honored. Even as she lay suspended in the cryosleep tank before him, awaiting the day for the final phase of the project that was her lifelong dream, she had become a virtual legend.
