Future Days Anthology, page 27
part #1 of The Days Series
“I see,” I said, when he’d finally run out of technobabble. “Why didn’t you take this to your fellow boffins?”
Joe hummed and hawed a little, but finally admitted that they didn’t believe him. They were so wedded to the concept of high technology solving everything that they were reluctant to admit that technology itself could be the problem. A handful of scientists believed that the energy flux was the problem, but they also thought it could be contained. Joe wasn’t anything like so sanguine. He figured that the flux simply couldn’t be deflected away from critical equipment.
“I need you to help test the theory,” he said. “Please.”
I frowned. “Can you get a Man-eater onto my ship?”
“Yes,” Joe said simply.
I thought about it for a long moment. On one hand, like most spacers, I wanted a working FTL drive. There were hundreds of habitable planets within a thousand light years of Sol, all tantalizingly out of reach, and Joe’s explanation of the problem sounded valid. I could easily believe that the boffins hadn’t thought about more primitive ways to solve their problems. But, at the same time, if we were caught before we managed to activate the drive...it wasn’t a pleasant thought. I’d probably wind up being marched to an airlock and unceremoniously tossed into space, or condemned to spend the rest of my life on Earth.
And yet, I asked myself, how long will I be allowed to remain free and independent anyway?
That, too, wasn’t a pleasant thought. I was growing uneasily aware that my time might be running out. I was in my late forties, no longer the young woman who’d endured high-g travel with a smile on her face, and I had very little hope of sinking gracefully into retirement. Lead Pipe wasn’t worth much these days. I might be able to sell her to an asteroid prospector, if the banks let me. I doubted they’d even bother to repossess the worthless ship.
“Very well,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
I won’t bore you with the details of how we managed to transfer a Man-eater from Selene Base to Lead Pipe. Suffice it to say that most people on deep-space research bases are remarkably trusting. Joe – probably with the help of someone who remained nameless – managed to shuffle loading orders around until no one, save for us, was truly aware of what was going where. The Man-eater was transported to my ship by a pair of naval crewmen who were under the impression that I was taking a piece of outdated equipment home. The only real difficulty lay in connecting the Man-eater to Lead Pipe’s fission plant.
I’d expected a rocket, somehow. The Man-eater looked more like a small collection of translucent pipes centered on a simple box. Joe explained that the Man-eater wasn’t a rocket, in the sense that it provided boost for a ship; it simply projected a field around the ship. I checked and rechecked the programming, then led him up to my command room. His face fell the moment he saw it.
“Just strap yourself in,” I ordered, as I checked the systems one by one. “We’ll be leaving in a few minutes.”
Joe looked pale. “How do you plan to get us out of here?”
“I intend to declare an emergency,” I said. It was the sort of question he should have asked me earlier. “Watch.”
It felt awfully weird having someone watching me as I powered up the ship. I normally worked on my own, to the point I rarely bothered to wear clothes. It wasn’t as though I needed them when I was living and working in zero-g. But this time...I ran through the final checks, then hit the emergency button. Selene Base’s staff couldn’t be allowed time to think.
“Emergency,” I snapped. “Coolant leak. I say again, fission coolant leak!”
I triggered the emergency disconnect protocol at the same time, disengaging Lead Pipe from the airlock and boosting her into open space. A coolant leak wasn’t dangerous in itself, but it was often a harbinger of worse problems. My fission plant might be on the verge of a meltdown. Hopefully, whoever was on duty in the command center would act first and think later. My fission plant wasn’t supposed to be online now.
“Report status,” a voice ordered. “What’s happening?”
“Fission emergency,” I said, trying to sound panicked. I’d been taught to react coolly and calmly to emergencies, but a hint of panic should help convince them to let us go. “I say again, fission emergency.”
I looked at Joe. “I’m bringing the Man-eater online now,” I said. “Are you ready?”
“Yeah,” Joe said. “I’m ready.”
The radio crackled. “Power down your drives and eject your fission core,” it snapped. “This is a priority-one order.”
Joe coughed. “They know.”
“Perhaps,” I said. The distance between us and the station was widening rapidly. I didn’t think they’d do anything violent as long as they felt the situation was under control. It wasn’t as if I could outrun either of the cruisers orbiting the base. “Hang on.”
I checked the display, gritting my teeth. We weren’t far enough from the station to trigger the Man-eater, not yet. But the cruisers were powering up. I didn’t know if they were coming to help us or if they knew we’d stolen a Man-eater, it didn’t matter. My failure to eject the fission core into space wasn’t a good sign.
A new voice echoed through the radio. “Power down, now!”
“We’re ready,” Joe said.
I braced myself, resting my finger against the control. “Go.”
Space twisted around us. My stomach lurched as an invisible force slammed into it. For a horrific moment, I knew we were dead; then the sensation was gone. I looked up and peered through the porthole. The stars were gone, replaced by a faint glow that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. I stared, unable to take my eyes off it. We were looking at the universe from the other side of the light barrier. It was...
Tears prickled at the corner of my eyes. It was wonderful.
“It’s working,” I said. “It’s working!”
“The flux will come in ten seconds, when the drive powers down,” Joe said. He sounded almost inhumanly calm. “Five...four...”
I gritted my teeth just as the universe twisted again. Lead Pipe shook so violently that I was half-convinced we’d dropped out of FTL within a planetary atmosphere. Joe had assured me that we wouldn’t be traveling very far, but he could have been wrong. The lights dimmed a second later, followed by two of my consoles. I sucked in a breath as red lights flared up on the display. The ship had taken a lot of damage, the computers struggling to figure out precisely what was damaged. I had a feeling we’d lost the damage-monitoring system as well as everything else.
“We made it,” Joe said. He waved a hand at me, never taking his eyes off his palmtop. “We’re heroes!”
“If we can get back,” I said. I was too busy checking the systems to pay attention to him. Lead Pipe had barely been moving, by interplanetary standards, when we’d triggered the drive, but now she was gliding through space at a surprisingly respectable speed. The Man-eater must have given us a boost as we dropped out of FTL. “Do you know where we are?”
Joe said nothing. I sighed and brought up the position-monitoring system. It was useless. The automatics were shot. I swallowed a curse, then set out to take the observations manually. It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t something I’d had to do outside basic certification, but I eventually figured out that we were nearly two light-years from Sol. I looked at the timer, then back at my results. Just how fast had we been traveling?
“Probably many times the speed of light,” Joe said when I asked, which was probably the least useful answer anyone had ever given me. “Let me calibrate the drive before we try to go back.”
I left him to his calculations and went to work, assessing the damage to my ship. Joe had been right, I realized numbly. A great deal of advanced technology had simply been fried by the energy flux. The life support system was on its last legs. I was silently grateful I’d invested in grass carpets that kept the air clean without needing mechanical support. The radios, the computers...we’d lost too many of them. I promised myself that, next time, I’d make sure that everything that might be vulnerable was shut down before we activated the drive. But the drive system and fission core remained unharmed.
A chime echoed through the hull. Ice ran down my spine. It was an emergency signal, a priority emergency signal. I hadn’t heard anything like it since the day Hollister Asteroid had suffered a massive air leak and all ships in the area had been summoned to help. I hoped, as I scrambled back to the command room, that it was just a glitch. We were so far from Earth that I was sure we were alone. Given the number of frankly absurd answers the computers had given me in the last hour or so, I was quite confident it was a glitch.
I was wrong. An emergency signal was pinging up on the main display, bleeping remorselessly. I sat down, strapping myself into the chair, then ran a trace. The source of the signal was a large cruiser, only a few thousand kilometers from us.
It – she – was HMS Magellan.
Joe looked up at me. “What are we going to do?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. Magellan was pumping out an emergency signal, but that was all she was doing. Her hull wasn’t radiating any energy signatures at all. No drives, no radio signals; I didn’t like the look of it. “We could take a look.”
“We have to get back and report,” Joe said.
I shook my head. “We have a higher duty. You don’t ignore a call for help.”
Joe looked mutinous, but nodded reluctantly. I understood precisely how he felt. What we’d found was proof that the Man-eater could be made to work without destroying the ship, if we managed to report home. But I was a spacer and I knew, without a doubt, that all distress signals had to be answered. It might be me next time.
“Keep getting the drive ready to go,” I ordered as I slowly braked the ship to a halt, relative to Magellan. “I’ll take a look over there.”
I donned my spacesuit after checking it thoroughly, and launched myself into space. I’d known groundhogs who hated flying in space, but I loved it. It was so peaceful. The sensation stayed with me until I reached Magellan and landed on the hull. I’d hoped that someone would see me coming, but as I wrestled open the mechanical airlock, I realized she was a dead ship. I glided into the interior and stopped dead.
It wasn’t the first time I’d seen death, but there was something truly horrific about the disaster that had struck Magellan. Everything was fried, from life support systems to spacesuits. I’d thought there should be enough air in the hulk to keep them alive for a few days, certainly long enough for us to find them, but evidently not. The bodies drifting in front of me looked to have died gasping for air.
Sick, I thought.
It took me nearly two hours to search the ship from top to bottom. No one was left alive, as far as I could tell. The bridge was devastated: consoles had exploded, something I hadn’t seen outside bad movies and worse TV shows. Joe had been right, I realized again, as I found the captain’s body. The energy flux had devastated the entire ship. I found a copy of a paper logbook – someone, fortunately, had had the presence of mind to write a final record before his death – and transferred it to my pocket, then headed back to Lead Pipe. There was nothing left on Magellan worth recovering.
They’ll have to come back for the bodies, I thought. I briefly considered trying to transfer them to my ship, but I didn’t think I had the time. And then they can try looking for the other missing ships.
“I’ve checked the calculations,” Joe said when I returned to the command room. “We should be able to get back to Earth.”
“Please,” I said sincerely. I didn’t want to go straight back to Selene Base. We were probably already on the ‘shoot-on-sight’ list. “Let’s go home.”
I turned the ship around, then checked the calculations myself before activating the Man-eater. The universe shook again, just for a few seconds, then spat us out far too close to Earth for comfort. I let out a sigh of relief, even though we were plunging towards humanity’s home world. The orbital defense network would blow us out of space if there was even a small chance we’d hit the planet.
“I’ve sent the signal,” Joe said. “Everyone knows what we’ve done.”
“Yeah,” I said as I managed to guide us onto a relatively stable orbit. “Now it’s time to face the music.”
And that, more or less, was that.
You’ve probably heard the rest of the story already. Selene Base decided to retroactively approve everything we’d done, probably because it would be embarrassing to admit that we’d stolen the Man-eater. Joe Buckley went down in history as the drive’s inventor, not entirely fairly; he spent the rest of his life trying to explain that it was a team effort. And me?
Well, I took the reward money and purchased a bigger ship, one large enough to carry hundreds of people, but primitive enough to survive the Man-eater. The skies are open.
...Shall we go exploring?
###
About Christopher G. Nuttall
CHRISTOPHER NUTTALL WAS BORN IN Edinburgh, studied in Manchester and lived in Malaysia, all the while reading every science-fiction and fantasy book he could. Now, he lives in Edinburgh with his wife and two sons, making a living as an indie author
Connect with Christopher here: www.castrumpress.com/christopher-nuttall.
Castrum
JCH Rigby
“Prepare for landing,” says the machine voice. He shivers violently. It’s always the same; dreamtime makes him cold to the bones. He’ll be trembling and shaking for ages. Moments after waking, Sergeant Joel Edwards already has it bad.
The machine speaks again. “Five minutes until touchdown. No hostile forces within the area. This is not a hot site.”
The craft rattles and shakes in turbulent air. Lander’s got the trembles too, he thinks.
The troopers are stirring in their seats. People are wriggling about, tugging at clothing, yawning and grumbling. As usual, Stepanychev is listening to music, judging by his tapping fingers and the look on his face. Popov will be praying. Farther down the cabin, somebody swears.
Edwards’ vision blurs and displays icons. The data shows outside air temperature and pressure. He blinks them away, and yawns.
Wait a minute. He looks around the cabin. This isn’t the normal kind of lander. He doesn’t recognize the seating layout. The panels opposite him are neat and clean – military vehicles are usually a bit scruffier than this. Must be brand new.
Forget it. It’s not important. There’s a mission coming up.
Odd, though. By now, he should be receiving orders. But the cabin speakers have fallen silent again, the radio net’s quiet, and his datalink isn’t showing any alerts.
He twists to look for a window, a screen, or anything else that will let him see outside. Nothing. Forward in the cabin, the bulkhead is solid. There’s no access door to the crew deck.
This is weird. The lander won’t be autonomous, will it?
“Landing in one minute,” says the voice. But we don’t know where we are, or what we’re supposed to do! This is crap.
The team need to know something. “Listen in, everyone. As soon as we land, get out of the vehicle and into whatever cover you can find. As far as I can tell, we can breathe the air. Take only your personal kit. Leave the heavy stuff onboard. Weapons tight unless you’re fired upon. I’ll assess the situation and give snap orders after that.”
“Give us a break. Lander said this isn’t a hot site!” He recognizes the voice, and she’s moaning as usual.
Edwards doesn’t have time for this. “Wind your neck in, Anwar. I don’t care what the machine says, there’s less than a minute till touchdown, and we’ve got no orders from Command. We get out of the vehicle, and we secure our position while I find out what the hell’s going on.”
It strikes him that he hasn’t noticed who else is on the mission; just Anwar, Popov, and Stepanychev. Edwards feels uneasy. He has a worrying sensation that once he sees the rest of the section, he won’t know them. But how could that be?
Better get ready to land, then. He tugs at the seat’s crash straps. He’s trembling less, but he’s still woolly-headed.
“Landing now,” says the machine. Engines roar; the craft tilts; his stomach lurches.
Here we go, then.
✽✽✽
He doesn’t know why he doesn’t know the others. He hardly remembers himself. Who is he? Edwards knows he can lead combat operations against any enemy, can handle any weapon, can operate countless vehicles. He can summon up data directly into his mind and superimpose it onto his visual field. His skin will shift its color to match the surroundings, without any conscious effort. He can speed up his reflexes or slow his awareness down to a crawl. He can lie motionless for months, and then react in milliseconds.
He knows that he is Joel Edwards, sergeant, enhanced special forces trooper and section commander. But the rest is inaccessible. Who his friends are, what he likes and dislikes, where he was born; all of this is a mystery.
He knows that humans who lack enhancements are called slows, and he knows that the word cyborg is a deadly insult.
But he has no recollection of anything before waking up in the lander.
✽✽✽
Where the hell is this? Joel Edwards stares at open grassland, turns around. A few hundred meters away, woods encircle them. The troopers are spreading out around the lander, weapons up into the aim, looking outwards for threats.
Nobody and nothing. No reception committee: no local forces, no briefing officer from Command. There’s no sign of anyone, military or civilian, and not much of anything else to give him a clue.
Wait. Gravity gives him a clue; it’s Earth-normal, but that’s not much help. Humans settle anywhere they find comfortable, so they could be on Earth, Parnassus, Harmony, Rheparion...
“Anyone know where we are?” He uses the radio battle net to talk to this group of comrade-strangers. No one answers. But there’s a cloudy sky and a proper horizon, so they’re on a planet and not a habitat. Somewhere on one of maybe twenty planets? Practically solved it already.
