Penumbra (2 page)

He turned the tug and backed towards the delivery bay. Ten Lee directed the operation of unloading the containers, each one disappearing into the terminal to be loaded on to a cargo vessel. One hour later she gave the thumbs up and Bennett eased the tug from the terminal.

As they moved away, he asked Ten Lee about her name.

A brief sigh was the extent of her protest. ‘It doesn’t
mean
anything, Joshua. My mother wasn’t very imaginative - she ran out of names for her children after the first five, so the rest were called Six, Seven, Eight, Nine ... I was her tenth.’

Josh peered at Ten Lee in the gloom of the cabin, but her expression was serious as she stared at the passing station.

‘My mother was religious, so I got Joshua,’ he offered. ‘Christian fundamentalist.’ She had died when Bennett was seventeen, three years after the death of her daughter. She had never recovered from the shock of losing Ella.

‘My mother,’ Ten Lee responded, surprising him, ‘worked all her life to overthrow the government of Rocastle’s World. She was a writer. She wrote political pamphlets exhorting revolution. When the change came, she taught Buddhism. I trained at the Bhao Khet Space Academy and piloted sub-orbital freighters for ten years before coming to Earth.’

‘Ten years?’ He shook his head. ‘How old are you now?’

‘Thirty-two.’

‘Hell, I had you down as twenty.’

‘If that’s meant as a compliment, save it for the girls on the station.’

Bennett lifted his hands in a gesture of helpless innocence.

‘Age is an irrelevance,’ Ten Lee went on matter-of-factly. ‘What is important is experience, and how one interprets and uses that experience in this incarnation.’

‘In
this
incarnation?’ Bennett said.

She stretched out her stick-thin arms and yawned. ‘This is my final incarnation in the physical. Upon my death I attain the void. This life is merely a means to prepare myself for that state.’

Bennett fell silent for a time. To change the subject he said: ‘Why did you come to Earth?’

‘I needed new experience. My Rimpoche - my teacher - suggested that my fate was elsewhere. I should follow an outward path. Outward even beyond Earth.’

Bennett nodded. He had met many colonists in his years on the station, most conforming to character types and belief systems prevalent on Earth. Occasionally he came across humans so strange that they seemed almost alien in their idiosyncrasies.

The Viper banked around the curve of the orbitals on automatic. Bennett closed his eyes and contemplated the end of the shift and his three-day leave.

He would visit his father in hospital in Mojave Town, more a courtesy call to salve his conscience than a genuine display of sympathy or concern. Every leave he made the short journey to the private clinic that had been his father’s home now for the past year. He was not so much ill as merely old. He was over a hundred, and it seemed that everything was failing at once. Expensive and expert medical care kept his vital organs ticking over, but the quality of his life was diminishing fast. He spent most of his time hooked up to some mindless virtual reality entertainment, and seemed to resent his son’s intrusion. Bennett never looked forward to their futile, stilted dialogue. They had nothing in common other than a mutual experience of resentment.

His father had waited until his retirement before starting a family - an afterthought to his major concern of amassing wealth. Even then, he had spent much of his time immersed in business matters, regarding his son and daughter as a distraction from the more serious matter of accumulating saleable assets. The laughable irony was that his father had lost most of his savings with the collapse of a string of dubious financial investments months before his final hospitalisation. Now the old bastard was fading fast after a life of futility, and the hell of it was that Bennett could not help but feel guilty for his lack of concern.

After visiting his father he would call on Julia, and try to assess the current state of their relationship.

He opened his eyes as the Viper altered course. They dropped from the plane of the orbitals, the radiant white light of the Earth, spinning hugely to starboard, filling the tug with unaccustomed illumination. The Burgess manufactory was situated below the orbital chain, an ugly silver rectangle producing the catering supplies for the interstellar liners. Five minutes later they docked and began the loading process.

Bennett watched Ten Lee as she stared at the read-outs on her helmet screen. She was washed in the stark light of Earth, and he was made aware again of her diminutive size and frailty. Involuntarily, he recalled the image of his sister, her thin body wasted by the lymphatic cancer that finally killed her.

The pick-up was through in twenty minutes. They collected ten containers and moved slowly away from the manufactory. They climbed past the orbitals and Redwood Station, and headed ‘up’ towards the phase point. Bennett stretched, savouring the thought that soon he would be in his berth on the station, showering before taking the ferry to Earth.

‘Joshua . . .’ Ten Lee said.

At the same time, Control spoke in his headset. ‘Bennett. What the hell’s happening out there?’

‘Joshua,’ Ten said again. She was sitting up on her couch, frantically running fingers across a touch-pad on her lap, staring intently into the screen of her visor.

‘What is it?’ Bennett said, a sick feeling in his stomach.

‘I don’t understand this,’ Ten Lee said. ‘The Viper has reverted to the original program.’

Control’s shout almost deafened Bennett. ‘Jesus Christ, man! Watch out for that bastard liner!’

He stared through the viewscreen, the improbability of what was happening slowing his reaction time. He felt a stab of disbelief - this was surely impossible.

A starship was moving slowly through space towards phase point, and the tug’s flight-path was taking it on a collision course. Bennett grabbed the controls and yelled at Ten Lee to abort the pre-program. She was already cutting the link. Thanks to her quick work, no sooner had Bennett gained manual override than he felt the tug respond.

The liner swelled before them. Bennett watched a knot of passengers gathered by a viewscreen, gaping out like fish in an aquarium. Their collective reaction mirrored his own sense of panic: they fell to the floor or fled as the tug hurtled towards them.

Bennett cried out and pushed on the controls, sending the Viper into a steep dive. The liner seemed to bob up and out of view, and for a split second Bennett almost allowed himself a sigh of relief. Then he saw before him, and impossible to avoid, a forest of antennae and guidance probes bristling from the underbelly of the starship.

They scythed through them, a series of sickening thumps conducted through the cabin. The tug yawed wildly, spinning out of control and hurtling towards the swollen cargo blister on the rear underbelly of the liner. For all their speed, the silver blister seemed to approach in slow motion, expanding before the Viper like a blown bubble. Bennett dragged on the controls, less from intent than sheer blind hope, and miraculously the liner vanished.

He was about to congratulate himself when something hit the Viper. One second they were drifting in the welcome void of space, and the next they were swatted by a terrifying and powerful force.

Bennett swore and stared through the viewscreen above his head, hardly able to believe what he was seeing.

The starship had phased out, washing the Viper in the molten backblast of its ion-engines. The temperature in the cabin was climbing alarmingly and Bennett felt his skin beginning to burn. The tug swirled out of control like a leaf in a hurricane, the jets incinerating the vessel’s paintwork and melting the viewscreen.

‘Get the suits, Ten!’ Bennett screamed, expecting the viewscreen to crack and the tug to depressurise at any second - and then the alarm sounded, an ugly, pulsing double note that almost deafened Bennett. The tug was floating, becalmed. The viewscreen held, a blurred mess of scorched plasti-glass.

The alarm dinned in his head and Bennett fought to control his breathing. He fumbled at the controls, trying to kill the noise.

Ten was scrambling around in the confines of the tug, attempting to find the suits.

Control was yelling: ‘What the hell were you doing, both of you?’

‘The Viper rejected the rewritten flight-path!’ Bennett yelled back.

The alarm cut off, to be replaced by the Viper’s calm, synthesised voice: ‘Cabin depressurisation. Advise immediate evacuation.’

Bennett felt his pulse quicken. ‘Ten! Those suits!’

‘You were slow, Bennett!’ Control went on. ‘You should have seen the liner long before you did, taken evasive action.’

‘We were on an original flight-path, okayed by you! I wasn’t exactly expecting company!’

‘That’s not the point—’

‘And fuck you!’ Bennett shouted. He turned to Ten Lee. ‘Where the hell are those suits?’

She was floating, twisted, behind the seats. She stared at him with a calm expression which, in the circumstances, he found maddening. She indicated the empty suit storage unit. ‘They aren’t here.’

‘Jesus Christ . . .’ Bennett said.

‘Repeat: cabin depressurisation. Advise immediate evacuation.’

Ten Lee resumed her seat and regarded the monitor. ‘We have seven minutes before the tug breaks up, Bennett.’

His visor screen flared. He blinked and made out the hunched head and shoulders of Matheson, the flight manager.

‘Hope you both enjoyed that little roller-coaster ride. I want a full report and systems analysis in my terminal in six hours, got that?’

‘It was a program error,’ Bennett began. ‘And what the hell are you doing to get us out?’

‘I’m not bothered what the hell you
think
it was, Bennett. I need to find out what went wrong out there.’

‘Hey - and who equipped this fucking pile of junk?’ he began, but Matheson had cut the connection.

Ten, professional to the last, was reporting a list of damages back to Control. Bennett stared at her. She seemed calm, composed. Her voice was even, her expression neutral.

He closed his eyes and concentrated on not spilling the contents of his stomach.

‘Major functions damage,’ Ten Lee said. ‘The tug is inoperable. Control’s sending out a salvage ship.’

Bennett stared at her. ‘Christ, Ten, we’ve got five minutes to live and you don’t even bat an eyelid.’

She shrugged, regarding the screen of her visor.

‘Okay, I know. You don’t fear death, right? You’re past all such fear . . . Well, just between you and me, I’ve yet to learn that lesson and I’m shit scared.’

He was aware of the tremor in his voice and shut up.

‘Repeat: advise immediate evacuation.’

‘How long before that damned tug gets here?’ he said.

Ten Lee glanced at him and smiled, something mocking in the regard of her slanting eyes. ‘Calm down, Joshua. Panic can benefit no one.’ She raised a small hand and pointed. ‘Look, the salvage ship is here.’

Bennett stared through the damaged viewscreen and made out the hulking silver blur of the salvage vessel as it slowly approached.

His visor flared and Matheson stared out at him. ‘Bennett, Theneka,’ he said, something ominous in his tone. ‘This is just to tell you that you’re both suspended for ten days until we get to the bottom of this. Out.’

Ten Lee raised a hand, forestalling Bennett’s protest. ‘We have nothing to worry about. It was a systems error, after all. Calm down.’