Farthest Reef (3 page)
Authors: Karl Kofoed
Tags: #Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Science Fiction, #space
The
Enceladus
shuddered and the cabin lights flickered for a moment. Alex knew from experience that the creaking bulkheads meant that the ship was breaking free of Jupiter’s mighty gravitational grip. They were doing it the hard way, a direct full power insertion into a trajectory that would take them to Mars. Usually they used gravity to slingshot ships to their destinations, to save fuel and minimize stress on the ship’s superstructure. A power launch meant they were in a hurry.
The cabin lights never came back to their full brightness. Alex looked out the window. “Must be using the null-gee,” he muttered as he floated to a wall panel and removed a geebrew from the food locker. He lingered for a moment examining the gourmet food packets. “First class all the way,” he said, opening a faux-turkey sandwich. It begin began to heat up as he removed its wrapping. Soon it was too hot to hold, so he let it float free in the air, cocooned in a small cloud of steam. “Cold sandies are jus’ s good,” he grumbled. He gave the sandwich a tap, sending it spinning toward the seat by the window, then uncapped the squeezer of geebrew and pushed his body in the same direction. He arrived at the seat and got comfortable just in time to snatch the free falling sandwich. Weightlessness didn’t bother Alex. He’d spent enough time in free-fall to get used to it. And a steady diet of geebrew kept bone loss and tissue degradation to a minimum.
There was a knock at the door. “Open!” he said, loud enough to be heard above the thrumming of the ship’s engines.
Mel, the passenger he’d met earlier, gingerly opened the door and peered inside. He grinned when he saw Alex. “Ah … I was going to ask you to join me for lunch. But I guess …”
Alex grinned. “Just in time,” he said, tossing the sandwich into a trash receptacle. “This faux-turkey is as faux as it gets. They must have something better aboard the ship.”
“Going to the canteen,” said Mel. “Hate to eat alone. Join me?”
“Sure,” Alex capped his brew bottle and pushed himself toward the door. “No sense wasting the brew,” he said, stuffing the squeeze into his togs.
“Without the null-gee we’d be stuck in our seats. Full burn the whole way,” said Mel, admiring Alex’s agility. “I heard there’s a group of Marilyns aboard.”
“Monroe clones? Pleasure series, right?”
Mel smiled and winked. “Always a treat.”
“You forget I’m married to a Sensor.”
“Yep. A sainted Mary series. Lucky you. Not at all, Mr Rose. No harm in a little fun, though. Right?”
“I’m more interested in food, thanks.”
Alex and Mel floated through the hatch and clipped onto a yellow cable. “How did you know it was the yellow one?” asked Alex as they were carried down the corridor.
“Passenger cables are always yellow,” said Mel. “Easy to see, drunk.”
They sat in a gee-booth watching a holo-show hovering above the central bar as they talked. Mel was a former Construction Battalion chief who had the same affection for Ganny life as Alex. “Strange for an ice world to be s’ warm,” he reflected. “Now there’s the war for the Atlantic. Crappers. I like it quiet. CB’s were always there first, puttin’ out fires or taking hits trying to build something. The way the corpies ran it made me hate ’em all.” But Mel did more joke telling than angry reminiscing. Sadly, he had more tales to tell than the bar had people to listen, and Alex thought it was unfortunate since each one seemed to contain a message worth relating.
Alex noted with pleasure Mel’s comment about the Gannys. That alone told him that the man had his priorities straight. He enjoyed the conversation, and with complimentary geebrews frequently offered them, he decided the trip might not prove to be so bad after all.
The highlight of the evening came at its end. On their way back to their respective staterooms, he and Mel were navigating a tight corridor when they chanced to squeeze past all six of the Marilyns, one giggling body at a time, each one an uncanny resurrection of that female icon of twentieth century American cinema. Alex never quite caught what Mel said to them as they rubbed slowly past him, but they giggled and seemed glad for the experience. So was Mel; the smile didn’t leave his face for quite a while.
Soon thereafter everyone went to sleep. After talking to Mary one last time, Alex took the capsule that had been included in his complimentary flightpack. The commercial lines mandated sleep stasis for long flights because it saved air and other consumables. For the purpose they supplied a relaxant to make the ride a pleasant one.
“Synthopium,” he muttered to himself. “A pleasant ride, all right.”
He popped the pill into his mouth and washed it down with his stale geebrew, then he strapped himself into his bunk. As he hoped, he dreamed of Mary.
Chapter 2
1
Through the window the
Goddard
was a featureless fat white needle, hanging above the red globe that was by now a familiar sight to Alex. Mars was having dust storms, but he couldn’t pride himself on noticing. It had been mentioned in the Martian weather broadcast he’d heard over coffee. He wondered if the subtle contrasts of peach and sand would have stood out so clearly to him if he hadn’t been tipped off they were there. He was still blurry and shaking from cold-sleep. The geebrew wasn’t all that conducive to stasis, either, and he had awakened with the worst headache of his life. To his relief, it was gone by the time he got a message from Stubbs. Professors Stubbs and Baltadonis, Tony Sciarra, and a team of other experts were already aboard the
Goddard
, the first Earthcorp service class gee-pulse starship. They were waiting for him, the message said, and the ship was already rigged for the first jump. And there was a personal attachment to the message.
The self- erasing recording was of a voice he didn’t recognize, and it proved to be mostly about Mary. The recording explained in blunt terms that Earthcorp possessed full records of all activities leading up to Alex’s discovery of the reef and reminded Alex that he had been exempted from prosecution for stealing an Earthcorp vessel and abducting a member in active service to Earthcorp, as a gesture of appreciation and as a reward for his service to mankind.
The cabin was cool, but Alex broke out in a sweat when Mary was mentioned. Earthcorp flatly claimed her by right of birth. Theirs, they said, was a universal parentage claim to all clones that could ordinarily be revoked only at death. Mary was a hero, so for political reasons she’d been given freedom to choose a life of her own, but circumstances now demanded her services as a Sensor. Her recent modifications had been done specifically for the coming mission. These new bio-mechanical implants were now hundreds of times more powerful than before and upgraded her to the newly created classification of Remote Sensor.
When it was over, the message erased itself. Almost simultaneously there was a knock at the door. “Shuttle, Mister Rose,” said an unfamiliar voice.
Alex was overwhelmed with a mix of shock and anger, but the truth the message contained seemed so obvious now that he mentally kicked himself. Everything began to add up. They’d brought him to Mars, out of range of Mary, to tell him that rather than being free of her Sensor duties, she was still a slave and might always be one. Of that, Earthcorp was confident. After all, they had a prison sentence to slap on Alex if he refused to cooperate. He and Mary weren’t being invited to be part of a great mission. They were being drafted, and blackmailed for insurance. The worst of it was that nothing he could do could change any of this. Refusal was out of the question. He took a deep breath and got his gear together.
He was on the red cable in half an hour. The men who escorted him to the
Goddard
were Corporate Marines, Earthcorp’s Praetorian Guard. Alex guessed they were clones, like Mary, but that tempered his resentment for them only slightly.
Alex had a chance to wave goodbye to Mel, something he feared he might never do. Mel threw him a geebrew; it tumbled through the air and Alex caught it snappily. “You’ll need it where you’re goin’, I guess,” said Mel with a wink.
“’fraid so.” Alex saluted Mel and pocketed the beer in his flightsuit. As he left he thought of Mel and the Marilyns; their arching eyebrows, pouty lips, and platinum hair, like holograms from an ancient film as they had rubbed past him, one by one, in the cramped corridor. In retrospect they were like omens, clonic replicas, dolls for the pleasure of …? Who, he wondered, was the Corpie god of creation?
Mary clicked into his mind like a light going on. She was smiling, blowing him a kiss. Alex smiled. “Dingers,” said Alex. “You knew all along, didn’t you?” The corporate guards, each weighing over two hundred pounds, looked blankly at him.
By the time the shuttle left the hold of the
Enceladus
and headed toward the
Goddard
, ten klicks away, Alex had experienced two epiphanies, one intellectual and the other emotional. Perhaps he had no choice, but perhaps it didn’t really matter. Earthcorp respected him as a discoverer and therefore an asset. That meant he had some control of the situation. And now, thanks to Mary and her newly augmented abilities, he knew that she was already a step ahead of them. She had touched him, all the way from Ganymede. For a fleeting moment she had been there with him, so real that he could almost smell her. He wondered why she had bothered with the holo-phone, but he realized that would be telling. She had revealed a special secret, just to him and just for him. She had felt his pain.
2
Mary’s touch had cheered Alex up immensely. Far from being upset by the message packet Stubbs had sent, he was ‘cool’s salt ice’, as the Gannys put it. He conversed freely with the two guards, hoping to give a general impression of a cooperative attitude. Questions about their mission went unanswered, but when he asked about the
Goddard
, they seemed more inclined to talk. A guard, the one that looked Asian, moved closer to Alex and pointed to the long pearl colored ship that loomed ahead of them, filling the sky. “She’s goin’ to the stars. My guess is, you are too.”
The perfect contours of the white surfaced vessel were deceptive. Its featureless perfection fooled the eye and Alex found that he couldn’t estimate their distance from it. Then a seam formed in the hull and an enormous round-cornered rectangular panel jutted outward and slid to the side as if riding on tracks. Inside was another set of huge doors decorated with brightly flashing red lights. At the top and bottom, fixed at either end to the hull, were giant rails supporting the outer doors. The hull itself seemed to be made of thick white plating that sandwiched thousands of white rods fused into a single mass.
The inner doors, flat sheets of smooth gray metal, opened in the middle and slid to either side, revealing a shuttle bay. Several shuttles of various types were already nested in gantries, but most of the bays were empty. Alex noticed that one of them was lit and open to receive them.
Their tiny shuttle rotated as it moved into the docking bay and came to a hard stop with a clang as anchoring mechanisms snapped into place. Once the outer doors closed, a rushing sound could be heard as the shuttle bay pressurized. When
Goddard
control told them it was clear, the shuttle’s hatch opened and the guards told Alex to gather up his gear and leave.
Outside the airlock hung several straps with hand-sized loops connected to an overhead cable. The cable hauled them and their gear smoothly to an exit, where they detached and floated weightlessly through the door. “This is a shortcut to the meeting room,” said one of the guards. “Get ready for gravity at the end.”
Behind the exit was a small room that housed the terminus of a large white tube that hung from the ceiling with two handrails extending from it to the floor. One of the guards told Alex to step forward and grab the rails. When he did so he was pulled upward, slowly at first, then more quickly. After less than a minute of sliding through a slippery white tubeway, he found himself deposited on a thin platform before a door. Somewhere along the way the tube had connected to an area with gravity, but it happened too quickly to analyze. When the two guards arrived at the platform, the door opened and they all stepped into a small circular room. Alex was surprised to see Professors Baltadonis and Stubbs waiting there to greet him.
“Welcome to the trip of a lifetime, Alex,” said Professor Stubbs. “Of a hundred lifetimes! Once again, you’ll be first!” Both men wore white coveralls, like everyone else Alex had seen since he entered the ship. Stubbs seemed shorter and a bit older than Alex remembered, but his handshake was strong and steady, and the years since Alex had seen him on Earth hadn’t diminished his look of steely determination.
Unlike the elder Professor, Professor John Baltadonis seemed unchanged from the last time Alex had seen him. “Real good to see you, Alex.” He offered a hand and a warm smile. “It’s been …”
“Good to see you, too, Johnny,” Alex said cordially.
“Are you ready, Alex?” asked Stubbs. “Shall we start your tour?”
“Ready, Professor.” Alex wasn’t sure what he was ready for, but at the moment, with two guards escorting him, he felt he had little choice but to cooperate.
“Call me Harry, will you, Alex? All my friends do.”
“I take it that it’s Commander Stubbs, now. No?”
“At the moment, Alex. But we’re old friends.”
“Right, Harry,” offered Alex. He watched as the lift closed under him, a thick rubbery white membrane. Surveying the walls, he noticed they were made of the same material. “What is this ship made of?” he asked, poking his finger into it.
“Drygel,” answered Johnny. “A polyceramic aerogel. Don’t worry, the rest of the place isn’t as wobbly. The interior is rock solid.” The Professor looked at the accompanying officers. “We’ve got a shakedown crew of three hundred and six … now seven, counting you.” He smiled and handed Alex a pair of white coveralls like the ones he and Stubbs were wearing. “Put this on.”
It took only a few seconds for Alex to get into the slippery material. After he had snapped the last fastener he noticed a small red lever attached to a packet near his throat. He pulled the thing, thinking it to be some kind of fastener, and there was a loud pop as a hood blossomed from the suit’s thick collar and sealed around his head like a helmet. At the same time the suit pressurized and Alex felt his legs and arms stiffening.
He stared at Johnny in disbelief. “Hello?”
“That wasn’t what we had in mind at all, Alex,” said Stubbs, trying to keep a straight face.
“Now what?” Alex’s voice boomed in his own ears as he shouted through his sealed suit.
“Just push the red buttons on either side of the neck plate.” Johnny spoke loud enough for Alex to hear inside the helmet. “Both at the same time. Might take a few tries.”
Alex did it on the first try, and the hood snapped back into place while the rest of the suit deflated.
A small machine on his chest began making a whirring sound. Johnny said it was recharging with air. “It might be doing that for a while. It’s just a compressor. Try not to let it bother you. The suits are designed to maintain themselves.”
Though the thick collar of the suit felt odd, Alex was relatively unencumbered by the garment. It fitted over his existing togs with disturbing ease. Johnny explained that the suits were for protection during the gee-pulse.
“This isn’t at all like the
Houston
,” said Alex.
“The
Houston
was a prototype to test the gee-pulse drive,” offered Stubbs. “Nothing like the
Goddard
, though. This monster took years to build. The power train went in last. A hundred tandem power plants. She has a double polycer hull.” Stubbs grinned broadly. “But best of all is the biocylinder. Artificial gravity, a floating jungle. A lake. What else, Johnny?”
“The hanging jungle was my idea, Alex,” said Johnny proudly. ”The design, at least!”
“Plants to make the air?” Alex guessed. “A terraformer stunt.”
“Yes, but for the beauty too, lad,” argued Johnny.
A crewman came over and whispered something to Johnny, and the Professor reached down and adjusted a controller on the belt. Alex noticed that it seemed to be assisting him as he walked.
“Why the aid, Johnny?” asked Alex. “I hadn’t heard …”
“Terraforming expeditions are fun, Alex, but only for the young,” Johnny said ruefully. “These bones are poor all-terrain vehicles.” He laughed and rubbed his left thigh. His hand slid on the slippery fabric and he might have fallen if something in his suit hadn’t prevented it. “I’m almost healed,” he said, looking happy to have his dignity spared further damage. “I healed in weightlessness. Now I need adjustment before these bones take on ol’ man gravity. Either way, I’m good to go.”
“To go where, exactly?” asked Alex, following behind Stubbs.
“For that talk, Alex, we go to the biocylinder. Master control.” Stubbs pointed to a green hatchway. “You came in the back door, you might say.” On the door before them modest black letters spelled the words “Master Control”.
3
Alex gauged the gravity to be the same as Mars, presumably because most people aboard were accustomed to it. Not Alex. After the long weightless flight, and years in Lunar-level gravity, he could already feel it taking its toll on his muscles and joints. He stiffened his body against the pull and took a deep breath. The air inside the ship smelled sweet, almost floral, but it struck his senses as alien and artificial.
“On the whole I’ll take my ship,” he mumbled as the door slid open.
Suddenly the sky was full of trees. The sun was shining. Birds were singing.
“I expected a helm,” said Alex.
They walked to a stairway that spiraled up to an upper deck. There workmen were installing two doors that led to what looked like a gigantic park, yet when they stepped outside the park was not only around them but above them. High above the verdant parklands birds were flying near the weightless center of the biocylinder, where a massive glowing tube lit the place like a long tubular sun. Squinting up and examining details on the far side, he guessed the cylinder to be almost a kilometer across. “This thing is …” he said.
“About three quarters of a kilometer across, Alex,” announced Stubbs proudly. “I can bike to work when it’s not raining.”
“Raining?”
“
Goddard’s
built for a long haul, Alex.” Stubbs pointed to what looked like a large domed silver hut nestled on the green lawn amid growing trees, most of which seemed dotted with fruit of one kind or another. “Those rain towers are already working.”
Following a wide path paved with a soft black material and edged by freshly blooming wildflowers, they reached the circular building. A door opened when they approached it, revealing a large room manned by a dozen or so officers.