Trixie & Me

by Peter Cawdron

  Berry handed her a pack of six acetylene cylinders, each no larger than her forearm, and she realized they contained something intended for consumption. Their identical brass-threaded heads indicated that they were interchangeable. Looking at the threads, Trixie could see how they would screw into something and immediately grabbed the portable welder, checking to see if they would fit into a similar brass fitting she'd observed on that device.

  “Clever girl,” Berry said, watching her.

  Trixie smiled, twisting the handle on the side of one of the cylinder heads. A viscous liquid bubbled up out of the neck of the cylinder, only it wasn't water. It was so cold it seemed to burn. Frost formed on the outside of the cylinder. Vapor and bubbles started seething as the liquid ran down the side of the metal cylinder, dripping on the floor.

  “Oh, no. Turn that off,” Berry said, to which Trixie responded immediately, turning the handle back the other way.

  “You've got no sense of caution, have you?” Berry mused aloud. “Smell that? That crisp, clean smell? That's dangerous, Trix. This stuff is heavier than air, so it pools low to the ground, at the lowest point. And if there's a spark. BANG!”

  Berry clapped his hands in time with the word bang, and Trixie jumped in surprise, getting the message.

  “Watch,” he said. Grabbing the welding kit he screwed in a smaller, blue cylinder, fitting it up inside the grip of the torch. “This is the pilot fuel. It's good for about an hour. Next you need a regulator.”

  Berry screwed a small brass fitting into the bottom of the welding kit before attaching the cylinder Trixie had been holding.

  “This regulates the flow of gas, controlling the rate at which the acetylene comes out of suspension.”

  Trixie memorized every motion. Berry held the torch so she could see what he was doing.

  “The trigger controls the flow of gas. This is the safety stop. Cylinder pressure shows up here. Green is good. Red means it's time to change cylinders. This button, on the side, fires the pilot light.”

  Berry flicked the red button and a blue haze appeared at the tip of the torch. The sound of gas flowing excited Trixie. She could see how all the mechanical parts worked together to control something that seemed inherently uncontrollable and dangerous. Berry pointed the torch upwards, holding it out so she could watch as he squeezed the trigger. A burst of bright yellow flame shot out a foot above them, with black soot forming rapidly in the air as smoke.

  “Oxygen rich. Makes for quite a show.”

  “I like it,” Trixie said. Berry smiled, cutting the pilot flame and switching off the flow from the cylinder. Trixie's eyes were glued to his every move.

  “OK, let's see what else we have to work with,” Berry said, putting down the welding torch.

  Trixie put the spare cylinders carefully next to the welder and waited eagerly as Berry continued rummaging through the Swift's cargo hatches, each one built to maximize any available space in the bulkhead.

  Berry pulled out a pneumatic rivet gun for repairing hull breaches and handed it to her along with some smaller green cylinders full of compressed air. Trixie looked carefully at the gun, noting how Berry held it by the grip, closely examining the trigger. It was similar to the welding torch. Even though it was smaller, it was bulky in her petite hands, being designed for use through the thick gloves of a spacesuit. She could see how the mechanics of it would work, with a belt-fed row of rivets passing up through the handle into an open breech. She couldn't imagine what it was used for, but she could picture how each of these rivets was intended to pass out through the barrel. Berry handed her a few more prepackaged strips of rivets.

  “There's not much to work with,” he said. “But it's all I have. The Swift wasn't intended as a military vessel. There's no armament as such, to avoid any provocation, and certainly no anti-personnel weapons, but we've got to do something.

  “Anderson knows the first contact protocols. He'll have taken the Rift deep, powering her down to hide her electromagnetic signature. She'll be running on silent. That old dog is probably sitting in the outer debris field around that nebula, blending in with all the junk. I know I would. And if he doesn't hear anything from us, if we fail to arrive at the rendezvous, he'll assume the worst and expect hostilities. But what can we do? We're damned if we stay, damned if we leave.”

  Trixie looked content with her new toys, turning over one of the cylinders in her hand. Berry was talking to himself. “We can't flee, but we have to warn the Rift .”

  Berry scratched the stubble on his chin, thinking aloud.

  “We could fry our fusion cells. Remove the safety. It'll take them about a day to overheat. But when they go bang, it should have a yield of about twelve kilotons. It won't make too much of a dent in this thing, though. From what I could tell during the capture, it's the size of a small moon. And I suspect our newfound friends have already anticipated this as a possibility, as that would explain why they're sealing the tunnels and thickening the hull below us, but an explosion would give the Rift something to work with. Our guys will spot the detonation, they'll recognize the radioactive signature, and they'll pick up on these monsters long before they're flushed out of hiding.”

  Trixie was smiling, but she hadn't understood what Berry was saying. Words were becoming clearer, taking on meaning, but he spoke so fast it was difficult for her to string the concepts together in her understanding.

  “Boom, Trix. We'll make a big boom.”

  Trixie understood boom. The onomatopoeic nature of the word resonated with her. She could instinctively hear the meaning in the sound. As the word left his lips, Berry gestured outward with his hands, starting with them in a tight ball and flinging his fingers outward, mimicking an explosion. Trixie liked boom. She smiled. Somehow she understood the violent term being pressed upon her, and it didn't frighten her. She felt excited at the thought of taking the initiative.

  “Oh, Trix. I am so sorry. Your brief light will be too quickly snuffed out. Yours is an intelligence that will never bloom.”

  He kissed her lips softly. She liked the way his lips lingered for a moment, one that, for her, could have stretched on into eternity. The bell hanging from her bracelet rang softly around them. Berry smiled. The delicate, high-pitched ring had been there all along, tinkling as she'd handled each tool, but it was only now he noticed. For her, it meant life, and he seemed to understand that. Trixie had no idea he was setting in motion her death.

  2:02 Rift Valley

  Anderson was worried. His coffee had cooled, untouched. Cream settled on the surface. He looked out at the star field wondering what lay out there, who was looking back? With his eyes, he knew he'd never see anything other than the dazzling cluster of stars lighting up the eternal night, but the act of physically looking seemed somehow important.

  Wisps of interstellar molecular clouds spun off to one side a mere two light years away. They stretched out for over forty light years, dwarfing the stars within the cluster. Gravitational forces were at work, forming a cosmic ballet played out over millions of years, as the cloud was drawn into the cluster and dissipated by its harsh electromagnetic winds. A newborn star on the edge of the dark cloud of hydrogen pushed back the bounds of the swirling gas. Ordinarily, Anderson would have been in awe of such a sight, but the thought of a hostile alien race hidden within the cluster around them worried him.

  The darkness on the bridge of the Rift Valley was vaguely familiar. Although he'd never been in the habit of coming up here in the quiet of the evening, he knew others in his lineage had. He remembered those nights as clearly as if they had been his own memories. Having memories of a bygone age, of incidents he'd never witnessed, of events he'd never seen was a little unnerving, but that was the nature of clones. It wasn't supposed to be unsettling, but with the passage of time in his own life, Anderson felt it becoming harder and harder to distinguish his own recollections from those of his predecessors.

  Not every memory stuck, it was mostly the technical thoughts, a coll
ection of facts and figures, theories and concepts, which Anderson found handy. But those memories associated with strong emotions also tended to hang around, clouding his mind like ghosts. And now it was his turn on the bridge at night. It seemed they all ended up here at some point, for one reason or another, as though it were the rite of passage for his clonal series.

  Anderson leaned on the edge of a protoplastic bench that automatically morphed into a usable surface, its artificial intelligence withdrawing the normal array of controls and holographic projectors, leaving it as a blank desktop. The section he leaned against softened subtly, providing him with a bit of padding while automatically calculating the optimum density so as to reduce the load on his skeletal structure and provide him with some comfort.

  He reached back with his hand, propping himself up as he gazed out of the clear dome surrounding the bridge. The bench stiffened that area of the tabletop, adjusting its angle so it provided an appropriate amount of support.

  For this particular Anderson, it was the loss of five good men that had drawn him to the quiet of the main bridge at night. Engineering had the helm, operating from deep inside the maintenance bay at the rear of the craft, doing little more than watching as the Rift glided through the heavens. The Intelligence Group was monitoring the cluster from the science deck, leaving the bridge empty.

  He'd sent those five men to their deaths. Not purposefully, but the effect was the same. And as they departed, they all seemed to know what was about to unfold. Their uneasiness was almost precognitive. The goodbyes were personal, heartfelt, as they recognized this was not another training drill.

  As commander, Anderson wasn't supposed to care. They were doing their duty. This is why they were here—to explore on behalf of mankind, and if need be, to die to protect the human race. Their very presence this deep within the galaxy was a sacrifice, one chosen for them by others. It was a choice they never dared question. What was one more sacrifice? They would all die anyway, sooner or later, and when they died they'd be replaced like a burnt-out light bulb. They knew they were expendable, and they accepted that, they were ordered to accept that, they were clones. Any tears that were shed were a waste. It was like crying over a broken toy. At least, that's the way it was supposed to be, but after a thousand years of isolation, separated from natural-born humans, that distinction had faded. Their emotions had grown like their memories, becoming stronger with each generation that passed. For Anderson, unspoken tension seemed to hang in the air around the crew, like humidity in the tropics waiting for the dark clouds overhead to break into a storm.

  Five good men.

  Dr. Phillips might be able to pull the same models off the assembly line, but she couldn't replace them. She might have scans of their memories, their personalities and interests, but it was an illusion. With the same bodies and the same experiences, their replacements might seem familiar, but they weren't the same. They were strangers as far as Anderson was concerned. You couldn't replace experience, not real experience, not experience that had been earned through blood, sweat and tears in that particular lifetime.

  Perhaps his feeling of defiance was personal, he wasn't sure. One day, though, he knew it would be his youthful facsimile standing here in the cool of the evening, a doppelgänger, in every respect identical to him, in every respect except one, it wouldn't be him. He liked that, thinking of his successor as ‘it,’ depersonalizing and distancing the awful truth.

  Do clones have souls? Does anyone?

  And what was he? What was this personal detachment from the atoms and molecules that made up his arms, his legs, his torso? What was this intimate sense of presence and perspective that defined his life?

  He was here. He was self-aware, and that meant alive. But as for the five? There was no heaven for clones.

  The stars were content, the heavens were at peace, and yet, though they seemed settled, the appearance was deceiving. To him, the stars looked fixed, radiating with vibrant light, full of warmth in the bitter cold, they were beacons in the darkness. The reality, though, was that stars were seething cauldrons of superheated plasma, violent and explosive, flaring up in hellish outbursts, raging with fiery storms. Their benign appearance was a lie perpetuated only by distance. The harmony and order they portrayed hid the truth, that they would crush, burn and consume anything that drifted too close. The stars, it seemed, were as much a contradiction as life itself.

  Anderson ran his fingers over his temples and through his hair.

  The Serengeti , the Savannah and the Rift Valley were mankind's furthermost ventures into space, reaching far beyond the colonized zones. The Serengeti had gone north, above the galactic plane in search of intelligent life in other galaxies and the Savannah had been commissioned to explore the outer reaches of the Milky Way, charting the star-forming regions of the galaxy.

  The Rift Valley had been given the core. She had been named after the cradle of humanity, that narrow tract of land in Africa where Homo Sapiens had first stepped out of the jungles and begun their journey to civilization. The Rift Valley was headed for the bulbous heart of the galaxy, the densely packed star fields that surrounded the center of the Milky Way. The Serengeti had the Hail Mary pass, being told to run long and deep, while the Savannah and the Rift Valley were barely over the celestial scrimmage line.

  The Rift had been tracking the faint electromagnetic output of a potential source of extraterrestrial intelligence for over three hundred years. Buried deep within a star cluster some seven hundred light years from Earth, were three targets. The Rift had established that the point of origin for these radio waves was not stellar. They emanated from the proto-disc of a forming star, and from the outer planetary region of two other nearby star systems, one of which was a binary star group. Gravitational tides within the cluster tended to distort distant locations, but by circumnavigating a small portion of the cluster, the Rift had managed to lock down the coordinates to within half an astronomical unit, or half the distance from Earth to the sun.

  Following first contact protocols, the Rift had been cautious, masking its approach by using line-of-sight stars and neutron stars, both before and aft of the craft to mask its engine bloom when maneuvering, and then coasting rather than powering into the cluster. The Rift navigated the gravity wells surrounding these stars like an eagle uses thermals, gliding between interstellar Lagrange points, taking the optimal path rather than the shortest path and, in the process, covering its tracks.

  If Anderson had been navigating a mountain range on Earth, the equivalent would have been to stick to the ridge lines, moving from peak to peak and avoiding the valleys. Valleys weren't so bad to enter, but they were difficult to climb out of, and so the easiest course for the Rift was to follow the gravitationally neutral points between stars.

  Three hundred years of playing cat and mouse across four generations was coming to an end. Anderson had launched scouts to conduct close surveillance and, potentially, make first contact. But, three months on, five scout ships had been lost, assumed destroyed. Four of them had reported nothing unusual. Their sensor arrays transmitting nothing out of the ordinary right up to the point static dominated the radio waves.

  The fifth had detected something artificial at a distance of two astronomical units. The only reason this scout had spotted the unidentified object was because the pilot, a middle-aged man named James Berry, had been astute enough to look more broadly at the target system. When his array told him there was nothing unusual, he wanted to know what was considered usual and had idled away his time taking long-range photographs of asteroids, planets and planetoids as his craft plowed slowly through the far reaches of the system.

  In a series of shots taken of an outer gas giant, resplendent in its swirling patterns of emerald green, Berry caught a glimpse of something black occulting the background stars. A dark shadow passed in front of a portion of the planet like an irregular-shaped moon, and then out across the stars beyond, blocking them briefly from view. Nothing appeared on any
of his sensors. His passive radar and thermal imaging suggested it was a low-density asteroid with a poor radar profile. Although the asteroid was large, there were none of the normal echoes associated with a nickel-iron core, ice, carbon or compressed rock, suggesting it was little more than regolith, a loose collection of dust and pebbles bound together by their mutual gravitational pull.

  Berry had been surprised by the phenomenal rate with which the object moved outward through the planetary system. It was moving too fast to be considered as having a natural motion, as it should have been flung apart before reaching what was an interstellar escape velocity. And its direction was wrong. It was being ejected from the system.

  Berry calculated that their paths would close to within a hundred thousand miles within a week. With complete autonomy and results streaming back to the Rift, Berry expressed his concern and made the call to withdraw and observe from a distance of ten astronomical units. Anderson agreed.

  When Berry changed his drift, firing his engines and actively pulling out of the gravity well surrounding the star, the alien craft realized it had been spotted and gave chase. It too changed course, arcing away toward the heliosphere as it raced to overtake the scout craft.

  Berry changed course again, realizing he'd be overrun within a matter of days. He tried to drive deeper toward the heliopause, the region of space where the solar winds from the energetic young star were halted by the turbulent, interstellar electromagnetic winds within the star cluster. He said he was hoping to hide his scout craft in the noise of the bow shock thrown up into space by this star as it orbited within the cluster.