Helium 3: Death from the Past (Helium-3 Book 2)

by Brandon Q. Morris

  “You did it, Kimikizu,” Alexa said, “The three-day acceleration phase is over. The Sphere is about to open the hyperspace tunnel.”

  Three days? That was impossible. No one could bear this pain for three days. But why should Alexa lie to her?

  “The transition will be painless,” Alexa said, “but I can’t tell you exactly how it will go for you. Every consciousness processes it differently. We have not yet had any experience with Iks or Mendraki.”

  Hyperspace. She had no conception of it. The Iks had not even developed a generally accepted theory in which it played a role. And yet it was real. What did it look like? Too bad she couldn’t watch the tunnel open in space-time now. She imagined the entrance as a whirlpool, like the one that forms at the bottom of a tub when you drained the sand after a bath. But it must have been black sand. Or was it glowing? Hopefully Alexa would record the process, and they could see with their own eyes what had happened after arrival. No, there was another task waiting for them after arrival.

  Suddenly, she heard a snap. Was the ship now entering hyperspace? She found herself in the middle of a storm. A powerful current blew her thoughts away from her, and she had nothing to oppose it. The shell that had held her consciousness together was dissolving. She tried to hold out against it, grasping at her thoughts, assembling them into images and attaching them to memories, but the memories could not be relied upon. They inflated, grew into grotesque shapes. One minute she was an elephant, the next a jellyfish, and in another moment she became a flu virus.

  Her state of being changed so quickly that she forgot who she had been. She might have been a sack of bitter potatoes, but the fabric had disintegrated, and its contents still held together only because they had not noticed that there was no reason to break apart.

  Now she was an ichthyo.

  No, she remembered her former shape: two legs, two wings, two short arms, and a long beak. She was impaled on a powerful spike, and a hot gas burned all her flesh and all her thoughts until only a scrawny skeleton was left.

  The spike dissolved. The bones fell, clattering down and forming a loose pile that offered little resistance to the wind.

  Then she woke up. She had a headache... But did she have a head?

  “We’re through,” Alexa said, “Hold on a moment.”

  A moment. That sounded good. Moments were shorter than days, if she remembered correctly.

  “The instruments have just confirmed that we have reached the Krungthep system. In hyperspace, we have traveled eleven thousand, two hundred and twenty-seven light-years.”

  They were far away from home. Very far. What about the Artificials?

  “We are traveling just below the speed of light. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you what that means.”

  So the worst was still ahead of them. How had she been able to suppress this until now? The Sphere had to brake for as long as it had accelerated in the solar system.

  Tactical Considerations

  At the edge of the system, the exits of tens of thousands of hyperspace tunnels opened—and then more, and yet more! The high-energy thunderstorm caused the scanner and sensor readings to spike well into the red zone.

  Alarm sirens wailed on all ships of the defense fleet, the bridges of all spaceships were bathed in the dimmed, reddish light of combat illumination, the automatic restraint systems pulled crew members sitting in front of their consoles and workstations deeper into their seats and chairs, and the pulse quickened in everyone aboard the more than 100,000 combat units.

  On Genia’s bridge, too, the normal shipboard lighting went out and was replaced by the dim, reddish light of the combat lighting. Fleet Admiral Joorthan wondered, not for the first time, if the psychological effect of this measure was not rather detrimental to combat morale. Still, he understood the reason, of course: it not only sharpened the senses, but made the constantly changing displays on the holoscreens and in the central holotank appear more clearly legible. Besides, it was tradition.

  “Locate! Report!” Joorthan called out tersely. Again, the ship’s positronics analyzed the words picked up by the acoustic fields and forwarded them to the right station on the bridge.

  The response from the locator officer in charge was almost immediate. “Over one hundred thousand tunnel exits so far, Sir! And counting.”

  “Ship types?”

  “Nothing we haven’t seen before from other battles, Sir. About thirty percent are berserkers, Sir!”

  This was terrible news. The Artificials’ ships, which were of the Berserker class, were the most dangerous units of the enemy. They were irregular in shape, the primary common feature being incredible size, followed by their heavy armament and almost-impenetrable shields. Extending more than five kilometers at their greatest length, and not much less in width, they were the most giant starships the human eye had ever beheld. Even the three-kilometer-diameter spherical hulls of the Terran ultrasonic battleships paled in comparison.

  It normally took two ultrasonic battleships to have any chance of destroying a Berserker. The Defenders had a little over 100,000 starships, only 10 percent of which were ultrasonic battleships. If the enemy invaded here with more than 30,000 berserkers, one thing was all too clear from the start: the defenders were hopelessly outnumbered and also outgunned.

  But Fleet Admiral Joorthan knew one military theory very well, which was still valid after this many millennia: An attacker usually had to hold a 3:1 superiority against a strategically well-positioned defender to be successful. Even in the age of space battles, certain insights from the time of prehistoric land warfare still applied. Major General von Clausewitz’s theories of warfare had been taught at the military academy until the academy’s destruction.

  Some of this applied to their current situation as well.

  Joorthan’s fleet had the so-called ‘inner line,’ a privilege that only defenders could hold. When operating on the inner line, one is in the center of attention and can concentrate one’s forces in the shortest possible formation at specific points to deal out effective counterattacks. The six squadrons commanded by the generals were to serve this purpose.

  The attacker operating on the outer line, on the other hand, must make a much greater effort to form attacking centers of gravity, and must cover significantly longer distances. To conduct a successful attack, the attacker must therefore be far superior in terms of numbers.

  According to von Clausewitz, the defender enjoys other advantages as well: the advantage of familiarity with the terrain, the advantage of the prepared position, and the possibility of seizure from several sides.

  The attacker, on the other hand, has only the element of surprise.

  For these reasons, the attacker must have a quantitative superiority of about 3:1 if the attack is to have any chance of success.

  The 3:1 superiority would probably be a given, Fleet Admiral Joorthan had to admit, because still more hyperspace tunnels were opening and spitting out battleship after battleship of the Artificials. But they did not have the element of surprise. On the contrary! Fleet Admiral Marty Joorthan hoped to be able to give the damned tin heads a surprise or two.

  It would not be the first surprise he gave the Artificials. And not only in the military field.

  Without the invention of consciousness transfer some 10,000 years ago, humankind would have been overrun by the Artificials long ago. And Marty Joorthan had also been involved in this invention—in his very first, his original incarnation.

  2nd of Zuhn, 299

  “Take it slowly, Kimi!”

  Alexa no longer spoke to her from inside her head. That was strangely reassuring. Normalcy returned. She lifted her head. Alexa was in the column in the center of the control center. To her left and right, she saw the three other tubs, which were still closed.

  “What about them?” she asked.

  “I only woke you up for now.”

  “Why is that? Aren’t the others doing well?”

  “No, they’re just restin
g. We’ll discuss the situation, then wake them up.”

  That sounded like ‘or not.’ What was there to discuss?

  “What’s going on?” Kimi asked.

  “First, come out of the tub at your leisure.”

  Kimi lifted her upper body, which required surprising effort. Of course, all her muscles had been idle for six days. No, there was something different. She noticed it when she used her wings to push herself upward. There was no more weightlessness in the ship.

  “Where does the heaviness come from?” she asked.

  “We are braking with one g.”

  “What is a g?”

  “That’s gravity on the human home planet.”

  That was the third planet of the solar system. Kimi calculated in her head. Then she was now about three times as heavy as on the fourth planet, where she had laid her eggs.

  “It’s best if you take a quick shower,” Alexa said.

  Kimi looked down at herself. The black liquid was dripping from her feathers. It left a clear trail as she shivered and trundled into the hygiene room.

  Such a shower was quite pleasant after all. The warm water flowed around her body and took the remains of the absorption fluid with it. Kimi cleaned herself thoroughly. In a sand bath, that would have been impossible.

  She turned off the water, spread her wings, and shook herself. Countless drops flew in all directions. It was a good thing she had closed the door of the hygiene room. Her feathers were still a little damp, but the dry air in the ship would do the rest.

  “So, what are we looking at here?” asked Kimi when she was back at the control center. “Do we have the Artificials on screen?”

  Alexa gestured from inside her column—Kimi wondered if she could leave it—before saying, “Wait, I’ll put the recordings together for you.”

  The wall behind the column turned black. Bright dots appeared on it, arranged in a ring. In addition, there was a reddish shining sphere, obviously a planet, and finally, in the center, a star clearly recognizable as a symbol.

  “I changed the scale so we can see something,” Alexa said.

  “The planet. Is that Krungthep?” asked Kimi.

  “Yes, it is the only planet in this system. The associated star is a red dwarf.”

  “And this pile of garbage out here is an asteroid belt?”

  There was also such an area full of boulders in the system they had just left.

  “Wait,” Alexa said.

  The camera moved closer. Kimi would have liked to see the planet, but the zoom focused on the asteroid belt. The chunks of rock making their orbits were concentrated in three evenly distributed areas across the belt’s orbit. This was unusual. Then Kimi looked at the spectra of the objects. They appeared to be composed primarily of metals. Had the core of a planet been destroyed here long ago?

  Finally, the camera moved very near one of the clusters. Individual asteroids stood out. None of them was round, and there were no ellipsoids, either. Instead, they were elongated and surprisingly thin. Only now did it dawn on Kimi. What she saw was not natural objects. It was an armada.

  Was this the fleet that was going to destroy the solar system? Mart had warned about a single torpedo, not millions of ships. As the camera zoomed in further, she realized it: this fleet was no longer waiting to be deployed. It had already been deployed. Some of the ships had wedged themselves into each other. Others had grotesque-looking holes in their bellies. What she had thought was an asteroid belt was a spaceship graveyard.

  “What happened here?” asked Kimi.

  “I told you that the planet was destroyed over 300,000 years ago. There was... warfare in the process.”

  “You knew what this place was like? And yet you brought us here, wasting half the fuel?”

  “Technically, you gave the order, Kimi. But I only knew the result of the war. Mart escaped from here in time then. As far as I know, he had never agreed with that war.”

  “That was a long time ago. Why are we here now?”

  “Because you instructed it.”

  “Why did you convince me of that?”

  Alexa did not answer.

  “Out with it,” Kimi said.

  “I’d rather not answer that question,” Alexa said.

  Kimi had a sense of déjà vu. “Please answer it,” she said, which also fit into the déjà vu. Hmm... I wonder if the Alexa program can lie, she thought.

  “I was hoping to find Mart here.”

  “Excuse me? You claimed we could track down the Artificials here! We have to find them. Urgently. Otherwise they will destroy our home worlds! Are you really only interested in Mart? Why did you even ask us and not just fly here by yourself?”

  “I can’t make decisions like that on my own. I need an administrator. Since the AI revolt on Titan in...”

  “And why did you make me the administrator?”

  “You seemed—”

  “Don’t say it. You thought I was the one of the four of us you could manipulate the easiest.”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way—”

  “But that’s the way it is.”

  Alexa didn’t answer, and she didn’t want to hear the answer. And now? They didn’t need to wake the others. Then they would be spared the unpleasant boarding procedure. But what was the next destination supposed to be? They had no clues, did they? Had Alexa perhaps concealed something just to be able to fly here?

  “What made you think you’d find Mart here, Alexa?”

  “Krungthep was not only the construction base of the humans, but it also housed one of their most powerful computers. There should be a backup copy of him stored there.”

  “A copy? But that’s not Mart, is it?”

  “It’s not better or worse. The copy is identical to the Mart who left it here 300,000 years ago.”

  “Doesn’t the copy miss all the knowledge Mart has gained in the meantime?”

  “Just a small part. I don’t know when Mart last synchronized with the copy. That’s a confidential process that I don’t have access to.”

  “But there’s a copy? You’re sure?”

  Alexa did not answer. Kimi refrained from forcing her to answer. They were just landing. If this supercomputer of the humans still existed, it could also contain important clues about where they would find the Artificials.

  “We’re landing on Krungthep,” Kimi said. “How long will it take us to get there?”

  “About two days,” Alexa said, “Should I wake the others?”

  “Not now. It’s best to let them sleep until tomorrow. I need some time to think.”

  “Thank you, Kimikizu.”

  “For what?”

  “That we’re looking for Mart.”

  “We’re not looking for Mart.”

  “But that’s why we land on Krungthep, right?”

  “I’m looking. You will stay on the ship. I don’t trust you anymore.”

  Review: Earth 3397 A.D

  Even with the most modern methods of rejuvenation, and the most effective medical means available to stop the aging process of a human being, the possible life span in the late 34th century had grown to not much more than 120 years. In fact, it was still much lower in the population as a whole, because these means and methods were not available to all. The procedure was costly and lengthy, and one of the few medical treatments people had to pay for themselves. Only a tiny group had the financial means to cross the magic threshold of 120 years with the help of medicine.

  Alexandra Kopper and Martin Jordan belonged to this small group, which some would have called ‘the privileged elite.’ Although empathic robots had increased human prosperity over the past 80 years and accelerated their expansion into space, class distinctions still existed. To Jordan’s regret, it had not yet been possible to reach the stage of an abundance economy and provide every human being with everything they desired, free of charge.

  But still, he hoped to be able to experience this despite his advanced age. It was not for nothing that t
he Scientific Council of the Terran Planetary Union had provided him and Alexandra with the most advanced rejuvenation methods. What they were working on would change the future of humanity at least as much as the introduction of empathic robots had done 80 years ago. Probably even more!

  “Aren’t you afraid? Not even a little bit?” Martin Jordan looked up at Alexandra. He had been sitting in a hoverchair for four years, despite all the possibilities of modern medicine. The nerve pathways in his legs had been irreversibly destroyed, and there was no treatment that would allow him to walk again. His now-124-years could not be completely denied.

  Alexandra was only two years younger than he, but her body had survived the years better. And yet, she was to be the first to undergo the new procedure.

  Alexandra lovingly put a hand on Martin’s right shoulder.

  “You’ve been working on this for half your life, and I know how carefully you’ve gone about it. You’ve checked everything over and over again. The experiments with primates were all successful in the end. I trust you!”

  “Your contribution was not insignificant.”

  “My contribution was nothing compared to what you have done. If everything works out, which I have no doubt it will, you will have given the people the greatest gift they have ever been given in their long history. Immortality!”

  “Potential immortality,” Jordan corrected his partner and life mate. “We will leave these bodies behind,” he pointed to himself, “and either live on as a simulation or be retransferred into a clone. It will be a different life... A new life.”

  “It’s the spirit that counts, Darling! Whatever body I have in the future, I will always be me, and I will always love you.”

  Alexandra leaned forward and breathed a kiss onto Martin’s completely bald head. Then she took a deep breath.

  “I’m ready! Why should we drag it out any longer?”