Authors: J. D. McCartney
The Empty Warrior (4 page)
“Very good, Chief,” Mult said. “
Endurant
, start a countdown at sub-light plus twenty seconds.” The ship acknowledged and he waited, continuing to nervously squeeze the skin beneath the whiskers of his unshaven chin. When the ship finally spoke he was yet again startled.
“Commencing countdown. Twenty, nineteen, eighteen,…” As the ship droned on with the count, Mult reached for his sensor goggles and placed them over his eyes. He adjusted the fit until they sat comfortably over the bridge of his nose and then removed his hands. As he did so the two straps on either side of the device found each other behind his head and tightened to hold it snugly against his face. He sat in the darkness provided by the thick eyepieces, waiting for them to activate, as the countdown proceeded.
When the ship dropped below the speed of light the sensors suddenly came to life, but did not reveal the sight that Mult had expected. There was no giant sphere of Akadea looming before him, no mass of factories, no thousands of ships. Instead only an area of utter darkness lay directly before the bow, a darkness so deep and complete it could mean only one thing.
Klaxons were ringing in his ears even as the thought flashed across his brain; while in the background the steady intonation of
Endurant’s
warning repeated itself over and over. “Emergency proximity alert, gravity well at three fifty six by five degrees. Emergency proximity alert…” He waited, paralyzed, for
Endurant
to take evasive action before it abruptly hit him that he had taken control from the ship.
He lifted the goggles slightly with his left hand and peered out from under them for long enough to find the intercom mute with his right, silencing the cacophony of voices that sounded in his ear. “Everyone off the com,” he ordered. “Now! I want silence on board. Endurant, enough of the warning! I can see it. Jarad?” For a moment there was no reply. “Jarad?” he repeated.
“Here sir.” Mustacka’s reply was tense, with fear dripping audibly from both syllables.
“Uncouple us,” Mult commanded. “We’ll never get out of this pulling the barges.” He did not need Hyra’s navigational displays or even a report from her to know that they were already much too close to the monster that confronted them. Escape, even without the barge train, was going to be a dicey proposition. Nevertheless, somewhere deep in the back of his mind an inane thought crystallized. He felt certain that if he survived, the company was going to be very upset with him for losing the payload, and for a split second he actually felt guilty about it. He pushed the thought aside and, without waiting for Mustacka to respond, turned his attention to the Navcom station. “Hyra, we’re losing the barges,” he said. “As soon as we’re free, move us out of the way, and take the best course to starboard that will get us around this thing while putting the least amount of stress on the ship. Copy?”
“Yes sir! Copy that.” Her response was by the book, but the relief it conveyed was unmistakable. Apparently she wholeheartedly concurred with his decision to abandon the barges to their fate within the singularity.
Behind him, Mult could both hear and feel the heavy metallic scrapes and muffled clangs as the connections to the barges were severed. He glanced over his left shoulder, and through the goggles he could see them being pulled past the ship toward their destruction.
Endurant
veered away, her engines pushing her nose to starboard. Around him, the ship began to groan as the gravitational stresses of fighting against the black hole’s immense pull built on her hull.
“Hyra, where are we?” he demanded, his mind unable to process the most likely conclusion.
Her voice came back almost whimpering. “This is the right spot, Captain. This is where Akadea is supposed to be. I think it’s gone.” Gone? It took a moment for the word to sink into Mult’s consciousness. Gone? His wife, his family, along with billions and billions of other people; simply gone? It couldn’t be. There had to be some mistake.
“Hyra,” he said, forcing himself to speak calmly, “Akadea can’t be gone. Check again.”
“I’ve checked and rechecked, sir, several times. The stars are where they’re supposed to be, and we are where we’re supposed to be. It’s Akadea that’s not here. Ask
Endurant
.” Mult swallowed hard, then did as the Navcom officer suggested.
“
Endurant
,” he asked. “Where is Akadea?”
The ship replied softly in its feminine voice which was, despite the enormity of the situation, as inflectionless and devoid of emotion as it had ever been. “Akadea is no longer at its mapped coordinates.”
“I don’t want to know where it’s not; I want to know where it is, you witless bucket of bolts!” Mult was too upset now to worry about any repercussions from insulting the ship. He was on the verge of losing control.
Endurant,
of course, took no offense. “Insufficient data exists for definitive conclusion,” the ship replied sweetly. “However, the most likely hypothesis is that Akadea is no longer at any spatial point of reference. It appears to have been swallowed by the gravity well before us.”
Mult slumped in his chair. It was unthinkable, very nearly the entire human race killed. Dead. Gone. “How can that be?” he murmured, unaware that he had spoken aloud.
Nevertheless
Endurant
heard and answered. “Insufficient data exists for definitive conclusion. However, the most likely hypothesis is that the star that burned at the center of Akadea has collapsed, and pulled the surrounding spheres into itself, and that has somehow vastly accelerated the process of creating a black hole. Insufficient data exists for definitive conclusion as to the cause of said collapse or the processes involved in the formation of the black hole. No further hypothesis available at this time.”
The words left Mult speechless and stupefied, unable even to curse the ship and its sterile, impassive assessment of the cataclysm. The magnitude of the catastrophe had reduced him to numbness. Around him the ululation of metal strained beyond its limits ratcheted ever higher as
Endurant
struggled against the gargantuan forces that clawed at her, but all Mult could do was tear the goggles from his face and sit staring into the controls before him.
It was Hyra’s frantic voice in his ear that finally penetrated his horror induced catatonia. “Captain, we’re not going to make it! Every bit of thrust I have is pushing us to starboard, but we’re still not hitting the angle we need. We’re going to be pulled in.” The sheer need implicit in her pleading report brought Mult back to himself. He was the captain; he had to do something.
“Chief,” he yelled into his com unit, “we need more power. All the power you’ve got or we’re all dead. Do you copy?”
There was a pause before Tock answered. When he did, his voice was nearly drowned out by the screaming metallic agony of
Endurant
, the hull seeming to wrench and grind with even greater ferocity deep in the ship than it did on the bridge. “I copy, Captain,” he screamed over the din. “But the engines are all firewalled now. There’s nothing left.”
Mult considered their options and immediately realized there was only one. “Engage the star drive,” he said softly, as dread, heavy as an anvil, fell into his awareness.
“I didn’t get that, sir,” shouted the Engineer. “Did you say engage the star drive?”
“Yes!” Mult ordered, this time much more forcefully. “Engage the star drive now.”
“That’ll tear us to pieces, sir,” Tock protested. “We’re not that far from minimum activation velocity, but against this gravity it’s still suicide; there’s no way she’ll take the strain. The drive assembly will separate from the ship and take half the hull with it.”
“I know that,” Mult shouted with resignation. “But if we don’t do something right now we’re all going to be a whole lot smaller. It’s the only chance we’ve got. Now light that drive! And hope whoever built the old girl did it well enough that she comes out of this in one piece.”
Mult retrieved his goggles and resettled them over his eyes. He only had time for one glance at the black hole before he felt the surge of power shudder through the ship. For an instant the bow moved several degrees farther to starboard, pulling away from the horror that sought to devour them. But abruptly a visceral, excruciating scream of tearing metal emanated from below, ending what little hope Mult had entertained of escape. He knew they were finished even before the remnants of the drives shot from beneath his perch, cartwheeling away amidst a cloud of debris and then, bereft of a power source, being pulled back toward the singularity.
“Chief?” Mult whispered into his com, expecting no reply and getting none. “Gunter?” As he spoke, the fatally wounded
Endurant
heeled over to port, and started to fall almost directly into the blackness that had once been Akadea. As the ship hurtled over the event horizon, Mult’s last living perception was a vision of his wife and children standing before him, their arms opened wide as if in welcome.
38,224 B.C.
Despite the hood of rough homespun the old man had draped over his head to shield both his scalp and the back of his rawboned neck, and the robes he wore to protect the rest of his body; the relentless African sun still burned hotly enough in the afternoon sky to plague him as he bent to his fruitless task. Droplets of perspiration formed in the crooks of his legs and rolled down his calves, while sweat from his armpits wetted his flanks. Beads of the fluid gathered in the graying hair over his sternum and pectorals, matting the curly bristles to his chest. His garments clung to his skin wherever they touched his body.
He would have preferred to work indoors, but there was nothing beneath a roof with light bright enough for him to discern the details of his work. Even the relative comfort of a shade tree was denied him by his failing eyesight. He raised the next circuit board and held it up in the sunlight, three quarters of a spindly arm’s length from his face, just far enough away for him to focus on its intricacies. At that distance he propped it against a block he had set atop the wooden table before him and connected it to a portable power supply.
He then retrieved his battered circuit tester, and took one of its electrodes in each hand, reaching out unsteadily to touch the thread thin needles to the tiny contacts on the board, attempting to determine if it was usable, reparable, or beyond hope. With each touch his back stiffened and his head rose, moving his squinting eyes just far enough away from the tester for him to be able to read the results displayed across its tiny screen. Finally one touch of his electrodes brought forth a muttered obscenity as well, as its results were not to the old man’s liking.
He worked through most of the afternoon, patiently disassembling the guts of the robot, testing each component as well as he was able with such a basic instrument, and then reassembling the unit with those parts he could find no fault in along with others cannibalized from units long since retired. Nothing worked. With each incarnation the automaton simply lay in the dust, immobile and unresponsive. At last he disgustedly tossed the most recent board he had tested to the table top and leaned back in his rickety chair.
It’s no use
, he thought.
They’re all going to fail sooner or later.
Without spare parts there was nothing he could do to prevent it.
Already there were too few Grangers to plant, mind, and harvest the fields, and too few Sentinels to protect them. No Sentinels remained to guard the village. With each passing year there were fewer of each, and each season the earth yielded up its abundance in a more miserly fashion. It had reached the point where most of the colonists worked only in the pursuit of sustenance, accomplishing nothing save mere survival. Indeed, not only was the colony not prospering, it was falling into disrepair. The solar collectors, like the robot corps, were slowly failing, and there was no way to repair them or manufacture replacements. As the power dwindled, the lives of the colonists became progressively more primitive.
The loss of the robots and the power grid were not crucial; the settlement could survive bereft of both. But the old man was hardly so certain their small band could deal with the other problems they faced. The most pressing of these was the utter savagery of the unfinished world upon which they lived; the planet was simply not ready to be colonized.
Sol Three’s atmosphere had been perfectly apt for human habitation for uncounted centuries before the colonists’ arrival, and the bio-diversity of the globe had been planned to the last detail. After centuries of work, the planet should have been well on its way to becoming a literal paradise. But the plans that had been so carefully laid had never come to ultimate fruition. While the great apes and mankind’s more distant genetic ancestors had been established here long ago and had survived well enough, many other life forms that should have been sent to Earth had never been introduced at all. And by the same token, many native species that had been marked for alteration or eradication had ultimately never been dealt with.
There was danger everywhere one turned, and the perils increased by leaps and bounds as the technology designed to protect the colonists slowly failed. There were poisons in the plants, insects that carried disease, reptiles and arachnids with deadly venom in their fangs, and predators galore, many of them large enough and strong enough to easily kill and carry off even the hardiest male among the colonists. Even the microbes in the air and water here could be deadly now that the medical supplies had been exhausted. And there was nary a magma vent constructed anywhere on the planet. If the myriad other dangers did not destroy the colony, it seemed certain that some mammoth eruption ultimately would. Either that or a cosmic collision, as there was no functioning asteroid protection. The condition of the planet was more akin to an automated mining colony than something fit for human habitation.