The Island of Hope (12 page)

Actually, the
Io
had already done its job. It had transmitted a signal to Stellar, so all that was left for the kamikaze ship to do was to embrace its fate. It had long been doomed, and everyone on board knew it. Only an incredible coincidence could save the ship now.

The android lay his other hand on the battle console keyboard.

He was the wrench in the works of fate.

For a few minutes, nobody spoke in the cramped cabin of the space fighter. Sergei kept sweating over the console, trying to join the thick cables of energy interfaces directly. The automatics protested and flashed error messages, but he paid attention neither to them nor to the cascades of sparks shooting up from smashed instrument panels.

At last the main monitor came to life and showed the surroundings of the agonizing cruiser. The radar lit up with an even blue light.

Three disc-shaped vehicles were coming up on the
Io
under the cover of four fighters with obtuse noses. There were no other ships within the radar's range.

Sergei breathed a sigh of relief. "They're gone," he stated. "This is just an assault group!"

"Right, but our assault modules are destroyed!" Spyte grumbled.

The scanners lit up with the first digits and message lines.

The Io
shuddered as if an unknown giant had played a drum roll on its hull.

The few surviving crew members were shaken. The turret tower that had been smashed to bits by a direct hit of a laser beam jumped back to life.

“That can’t be right!” Frauenberg began to type, but the computer refused to obey the commands.

Judging by the personnel distribution scheme, there was nobody inside the turret; at any rate, nobody alive!

The covering fighters entered the zone of defensive fire at full speed. Four orange bubbles blossomed in space, surrounded by cascades of debris flying in all directions. The side monitors displayed a surreal view: the dark turret tower, punctured in the center, suddenly turned round, as if operated by the devil himself; the batteries of vacuum guns arranged along its perimeter moved their barrels and shuddered, shelling the enemy assault raider.

Space exploded. The dazzling flash disabled the monitors. When they came back on, the
Io
was surrounded by a cloud of debris. Two surviving assault raiders were trying to weave their way through it.

The furious staccato of twenty guns did not remit as they went through ammo at a frightening speed.

The lone turret kept spewing out fire in a desperate feat of valor — desperate at least in the eyes of the people who’d already accepted their death as inevitable. Vacuum turrets rotated with inhuman accuracy, seeking out surviving machines among the wreckage and tearing them apart.

The fight didn't last more than two minutes. The people on board hadn’t yet recovered from their amazement; the bulkheads still shuddered, the empty corridors of the
Io
still echoing with the recoil of the guns when the second assault raider was also annihilated. However, the third one had time to bank and lunged onto the turret under the cover of the debris.

A volley of its photon emitters smashed the
Io
’s last hope, leaving a ragged hole in its place. Now the cruiser was at the enemy’s mercy.

"End of the line," Spyte smirked. He slammed down the visor of his pressure helmet and squeezed through the narrow manhole of the shooting bay.

The transparent dome of the assault module turned about its axis; six barrels of the vacuum turret emerged from the open gun hatches.

"Sergei, ground her!" he barked into the intercom. "I swear by Procus' snake-eaters, there are no people inside those ships, and you know what these computers are like. I bet all you want they’ll all head for the launch site!”

The assault raider’s outline in the monitors kept growing as it headed for the gateways of the launching deck.

Sergei hit a key, anchoring the ship to the launching pad.

"Done! I'm going out."

He didn’t finish. The gateway thundered open. The air around them whizzed, escaping through shell-holes, tearing down the equipment of the launch pad and carrying it away.

Sergei froze. the armor of the cruiser, cherry-colored from the heat, began to swell under the pressure of the powerful assault ship. Finally it succumbed to the pressure and burst, scattering soft white-hot fragments over the floor. The black disk of the assault raider slid onto the launch pad.

A long narrow hatch in its side cracked open.

* * *

Simeon hadn’t seen the furious combat between the raiders and the turret tower.

He’d hacked the electronic locks of a hangar and reprogrammed one of the heavy rovers, then hidden by the gateway.

He knew he’d only have one attempt to battle his way through the
Io
.

The open hatch of the enemy raider glistened as a ramp slid out. The first ominous shadow loomed out of it.

Battle machines had considerably evolved over the last hundred years. The heavy armored monsters of the Island of Hope looked like fossil relics in comparison with these streamlined new generation of assassins. Their base model resembled a spider. Its drop-shaped body was about three feet long; its bulbous foremost part was equipped with ten manipulators as thick as a human arm. Cables and the hoses of servo-drivers wound around them like muscles. A jet engine and an anti-grav generator made them swift and extremely dangerous. The landing raider carried around thirty such machines. They rose into the air and hovered in a chain across the launching deck, awaiting the signal. Their radar blades rotated, the dull eyes of their video cameras scrutinizing the hall. Their leg-like supports were pulled up to the belly, vibrating slightly. The petals of their diaphragms pulsated rhythmically, concealing unknown quantities of weapons.

The turret tower of assault module #7 sprang to life.

The six barrels of the vacuum gun fired a frenzied volley.

The squall of shells swept away the robots together with part of the ship’s plating, exposing the tangled mess of reinforced steel. Spent shells clattered to the floor, accompanied by Spyte’s generous cussing.

"Sergei, go away, now!" he yelled, squeezing the trigger. The gun spat out a new portion of fire and metal. The enemy raider reached out its deadly ray and stopped Spyte’s battle mid-word, slicing through the turret tower, the gunner and the gun.

"Go," Spyte wheezed, staring in amazement at the lower part of his body which had suddenly separated from the upper. He struggled to say something, but the arriving vacuum relieved him from his agony.

A lone figure in a battle spacesuit rolled down the assault module’s gangway and hid behind its supports, in the mess of cables and service towers.

This was it, Sergei realized. He‘d always known he’d come to a bad end.

He double-checked the bolts of two pulse guns tied up together with some wire, attached the clips and began climbing the module’s hull toward the mangled turret tower.

The right part of Spyte's body was still clutching the trigger with its crooked fingers. His left part complete with his head and part of the gun had disappeared.

He switched his jetpack's engine to idle. The
Ignition
sign glowed on the convex transparent interface inside his visor.

The black bodies of four battle machines now formed a semicircle, closing in on the module. Sergei braced himself. He knew he couldn’t change anything. He was living his last seconds.

He reached forward, clinging to the cracked armored glass of the tower. The panorama of the destroyed launching site was slowly moving in his sights. Finally he set the cross-hairs on the obsidian armor of the leading robot. He squeezed the trigger, enjoying the sight of his rounds dancing on the machine's frame, tearing off manipulators and crushing the interior of the robot.

Their return fire cut through the assault module’s supports. It shook under the impact and listed back, knocking down the launching bars and refueling towers.

Sergei had time to jump aside and now, lost in the tangle of piping and steelwork, completely lost his bearings.

A bar struck him in the chest, pinning him to the floor. His vision blurred. Before losing consciousness he saw the ominous shadow of the battle machine reaching toward his helmet.

* * *

A battle robot swept along the
Io
’s main tunnel. Its multi-joint legs were extended along its body, its two automatic guns incessantly firing, peppering the large corridor with shells.

The hermetic door of the pilot's room was broken.

Captain Frauenberg raised his heavy emitter. Two missiles hit him, the impact throwing him back onto the control console.

He died instantly. The robot stopped and extended his manipulators. His scanners inspected the pilot room. The ship's central processor was dead. The clasps that used to hold the navigation crystal in place were empty.

The robot floated toward the control panel. It pushed the human body aside and plugged its manipulator into the navigation terminal slots.

A panorama of neighboring space appeared on the robot's internal display.

Five bright points were approaching the
Io
, coming to its rescue.

Those were enemy ships, the robot understood. They had just emerged from hypersphere and were coming toward the battered cruiser in combat braking mode.

The info was urgently transferred to the mothership.

A second later the raider's central processor sent the battle machine the command to self-destruct.

A bright blue flash blossomed out in the
Io
's pilot room.

* * *

Soon the first assault group charged onto the
Io
's launch deck.

Commandos poured in, forcing their entry through launching silos, throwing themselves to the floor, rolling aside in well-practiced movements and freezing, awaiting a command.

"Attack!"

The line started advancing in short runs.

The lieutenant was the first to stumble against the battle machine's frame. "Jesus," he whispered, looking around, unable to hide his amazement.

The commandos stopped. They’d expected to see everything but not what they actually saw.

The launch pad was scattered with the remains of battle machines. A destroyed planetary tank stood motionless by the wall. A heap of metal towered nearby in which one could hardly recognize the hull of an assault module.

"
What the fuck has happened here?" one of the commandos said, thrusting his finger into a neat hole in the body of a robot. The hollow-charge shell had punched its electronic interior precisely in the center. Nearby, listing on its three crooked legs, stood another automatic soldier. Its video cameras had been shot through!

"Looks like a snipers' platoon practiced some pretty sharp shooting here," a corporal with a gray moustache grumbled. He pushed another robot with the toe of his boot to turn it round. Someone's good shot burned an opening in the exact place where all the servo-driver cables met.

"By the volcanoes of Pluto! Can you imagine any snipers here?!" the lieutenant objected. He was as struck as the others by the view. "This is a kamikaze spaceship! The whole crew don't even make up a platoon!"

The commandos moved on, taking in their surroundings. They were used to running the risk of death, but when you were looking at these skillfully destroyed machines, you had doubts whether a man could do that.

"My God, I wouldn’t like to have been here half an hour ago!." the lieutenant shrank. "Okay, guys, we're going to comb the ship."

* * *

"
Io
, I’m
Genesis
, do you read me? I repeat, everyone who is on board, if you are alive, stay where you are, we are sending rescue groups your way. Hold on, we’re coming."

Exhausted, Simeon sank to the floor of the medical compartment, watching Andor trying to hack the life support chamber.

Yanna was alive.

"We are coming!" an unfamiliar voice sounded in the communicator of his pressure helmet. "The enemy raider has self-destructed. Hey guys, no need to hide anymore."

Those were people. The people of whom he had dreamed in the gloomy insides of the spheroid.

A tear rolled down his cheek.

12.

T
he blue sun was rising above the low horizon, making its way through swirling clouds, while the red sun was going down and the yellow one was at its zenith; so, there were three shadows at the same time – a short shadow and two long ones. The shadows were cast by intensely sparkling groves spread over a boundless plain.

This was a blessed country of eternal summer and wonderfully warm days when three suns shone in the sky, replacing one another; Only twice a month did the three suns' radiance fade, turning the sky gray. On such rare nights Stellar loomed into the sky: an enormous yellow disc shimmering with metal, glowing with the bright spots of cities under their force shield domes and blotted by the ominous shadows of orbital defense stations, the steel guarantors of the planet's safety.

The planet Rory was the home of the famous Mirror trees, a blessed and bountiful place. Still, its mountains could be as fatal to an inexperienced wayfarer as a venomous frog’s bite.

A world where spacecraft were not allowed to land; where super megalopolises didn’t poison the air with their dump sites. Not a single towering skyscraper challenged the planet’s mountain tops.

All those facts were explained by the presence of the Mirror trees – the planet’s true inhabitants, which had appeared here long before man left his caves and entered space.

Simeon had a very special kind of love for the place. All his childhood dreams evoked by his father's stories had become real here, materialized in boundless landscapes of velvety-green plains and sparkling mountaintops.

He turned round. Jedian and Yanna were playing a game similar to lawn tennis, chatting nonstop.

"Aren't you two tired?" he asked, approaching the tennis court.

Yanna’s laughter chimed in the air. She wiped her face with a towel. "I love it. I need a cold drink though."

"Let's go. We deserve a couple of cocktails!" Jedian agreed, looking at her with admiration. He apparently liked the mission the Commander had charged him with.

They headed for the coolness of the canopy of their posh one-storied villa and slumped into wicker chairs.

"There’ll be a reception in Fort Stellar tomorrow night in honor of the Commander's grandson," Jedian announced. "Your Granddad will make you his legal successor."

"Which means?"

"The command of Fort Stellar runs in the family. Actually the planet and its satellite are Vorontsov's private property. For one hundred years he managed to appropriate almost everything here. But the title isn't the main thing. He has billions in galactic banks, and a neat little income from his exclusive Mirror tree trade. You're now the sole direct heir," he concluded.

"Does that mean that my arrival changed his plans for you?" Simeon asked.

Jedian turned pale. "That’s not a nice thing to ask!"

"Sorry," Simeon rose. "I haven't yet mastered the art of small talk. I say what I think."

A shady alley led him to a terrace. Defense reflectors towered in an open area nearby. Simeon walked past the watchtowers manned by robots and entered the house. Unthinkingly, he headed for the library.

Andor was still sitting in a soft chair. The android's hand was plugged into an electronic module. He was reading.

Simeon took a seat next to him.

The android gave him a studying look, then shook his head. "You’re not happy," he said, impassionate.

Simeon shook his head.

Andor pulled his fingers out of the plug. "The probability theory says that you have won one chance in a billion."

"Why didn’t you go with us?"

"Your second cousin hates me. Who am I? — a tin that walks about his villa and pretends to be a thinking being. To him, this is a personal offence. As far as he is concerned, creatures like myself should be scrapped."

Simeon’s vision blurred. He couldn’t say whether he was happy or not. The wildlife around him seemed simple and beautiful while the locals had proven to be alien and incomprehensible. “Tell me more about the planet,” he asked.

Andor gave a thoughtful nod. “You’ve come to love this world.”

“Yes, I have,” Simeon’s voice rang with challenge. What was wrong with him? It was as if he had to lose all that was dear to him again. He sensed it but was powerless in the face of these new developments.

Amidst the library, a 3-D image of the planet unfolded in mid-air.

“This world is unique. The planet’s axis isn’t inclined and therefore, it has no seasons. The three suns of the system flood the planet with their energy scorching the equator while the poles forever remain icebound. It’s difficult to imagine worse conditions for organic life to originate and evolve. Nevertheless it did appear, and it happened in the narrow zone separating the two deserts, on the border of light and gloom, squeezed between intolerable heat and bitter frost.“

Andor clicked his fingers. Two strip, one each along the northern and southern hemispheres, encircled the planet.

Andor knew how to tell a good story. For a while, Simeon forgot all the problems that bothered him.

“So, the first organisms began to evolve and very quickly populated the available habitat. Animal life quickly came to a halt – there was just not enough space and food to go around. On the other hand, the planet’s flora survived, being slower and less demanding.”

He paused and flipped a few switches on the library control console. Simeon sat back, relaxing. ‘
If you shut your eyes, you can mentally get back to those days.
’

“You sure you pressed the right button?” Simeon asked.

Andor’s hand froze in mid-air.

“I saw nothing: neither glaciers nor deserts,” Simeon explained. “Or did people turn the planet’s axis?”

“No. People have got nothing to do with it. Sometimes nature - or to be more precise, evolution - disregards the laws of celestial mechanics. Vegetative forms occupied the narrow habitat and began to perish when attempting to exceed the limits of the favorable climatic zone. For millions of years they struggled against heat, perished, produced sickly descendants, mutated. Then, at last, the intricate paths of evolution brought forth the first Mirror tree. If we make an analogy, we can compare that event with the advent of the first mammals on Earth. In both cases the new class became dominant and predetermined the further development of the biosphere.”

The history of the Mirror tree appeared before Simeon: from the first squat creepers with deformed stalks and tenacious roots to contemporary two-hundred-foot giants. There were about a hundred transient forms, and all plants had a recognizable thin layer of silvery substance covering their trunks and leaves, as if they’d been dipped into liquid mercury.

“According to research, it has taken Mirror trees a billion years to conquer the torrid zone and finally meet by the equator. Their advance gradually changed the planet’s climate. “

The outlines of a relief world map appeared in the middle of the library.

"As you can see, the equatorial zone of the planet is almost entirely covered with mountains. It receives about seventy percent of all energy. The Mirror trees, conquering new vital space, gradually crept along mountainsides, their long leaves reflecting the light of the three suns, diffusing it. Thus the energy balance established by the laws of celestial mechanics was broken. Today we observe the result of a process that has been going on for about three billion years. The new energy equilibrium took a very long time to set in. The main mass of Mirror trees is presently concentrated in the equatorial zone. They receive radiation from the three stars and reflect it to the horizon. There a part of the radiation is diffused over the plain, transforming the formerly temperate zone into subtropics while the other part is reemitted farther to the poles by new Mirror tree forests. The ice caps of both hemispheres melted a million years ago, and the polar zones are now occupied by non-mirror vegetative forms that had in former times struggled for survival in the sub-arctic zones."

Andor switched off the holographic projector.

"Is that it?" Simeon cast an inquiring glance at him. Andor felt somewhat uneasy under that steadfast gaze.

"You've forgotten something," Simeon rose and went to the bar. "For example, these huge reflectors around the villa," he outlined an envisioned perimeter with his hand holding a glass. "By the way, they're operated by a special computer system. You've also forgotten to explain why there isn't a single building exceeding two story height here. I'd like to know as well why they build cities on Stellar which is deprived of atmosphere and where they have to resort to using force shield domes.

Andor shrugged. In people's presence he assumed human body language. "That's another story."

"Tell me."

"Why? You're asking the right questions, so you must have already come to the right conclusions."

"I’m sorry, Andor. I'm only trying to understand. But you've been sitting here for three days running. I know perfectly well that your processor is capable of analyzing the entire histories of Rory and Stellar in that time."

"Very well," the android was about to smile, but changed his mind: mastering the expressions of his plastic face had proven to be a real challenge to him, so he could not bring himself to experiment, considering Simeon's state.

The young man put the empty glass on the table and walked over to the window. "The arrival of humans was a catastrophe for this world," he said without turning.

"I shouldn’t jump to conclusions. You asked for information. The planet Rory was discovered by a reconnaissance ship of the Tripartite Alliance. As is known, it consisted of about fifteen planets, and, consequently, there was no centralized power here initially. To define the colonization of this world, I'd employ the expression
gold rush
. It's not difficult to imagine the demand for the Mirror tree's timber on the galactic market. Two years later the Tripartite Alliance collapsed. All those who could afford a ticket for an interstellar flight and a trade license dashed here. At that time the planet was ruled by spontaneously formed local authorities. About a quarter of the Mirror trees were cut down in twenty years. New settlements grew on clearings without any system. In 2630 the Free Colonies brought about a fundamental change in the course of the war, assumed the tactics of active defense and began strengthening their space bases. Military fleets of diverse alliances and groups of planets dominated in different sectors. With a view to curb the chaos and control the military presence in those regions of space, the Free Colonies started creating a so-called
Sphere of Strategic Interests
. In fact, that was a network of strongholds and forts that literally encircled a particular area in space with the Free Colonies' planets at its center.

"Commander Vladimir Vorontsov arrived here in 2633, leading ten cargo ships and five battle cruisers. His mission was to conduct negotiations with Rory's government, but an unexpected disaster disrupted their plans. The unsystematic felling of Mirror trees has disturbed the fragile energy balance that they had introduced. Now the remaining trees couldn’t reflect all of the triple-solar energy. In this situation they developed another unique ability: an adult tree could work as a battery, absorbing any surplus energy. However the rate of deforestation by far outpaced the trees’ adaptivity. The time came when even these live batteries couldn’t absorb all the surplus energy anymore."

Andor looked out the window. The reflectors’ shining fins rotated slowly. A shady park lay around, washed clean by the rain. Still, Andor’s story offered a dramatically different picture.

"The few survivors said that that the tops of the trees sparked because of all the power they’d accumulated. Bolts of lightning struck out from their branches, and the sky flickered with Saint Elmo's lights. Then the whole planet suddenly turned suddenly into a gigantic discharger as the trees began to release the power. The high-voltage sky showered cities with fireballs, burning everything around. Only the planet’s original life forms managed to survive as they were adapted to these levels of electricity.

"The Rory colony ceased to exist. Vorontsov’s spacecraft which had special energy protection, managed to only pick up about three hundred survivors. The deforestation stopped. The planet made the colonists pay a terrible price but was unable to bring back its lost balance."

Andor switched off the holographic projector and sat down.

"So electric storms didn't cease?" Simeon asked, deep in his thoughts.

Andor shook his head. "At present any tree felling is carried out very cautiously," he explained. "Mirror trees are planted in vast dedicated areas under the scientific monitoring of Stellar's specialists, but the electric storms haven't ceased – they've only become less frequent. It's practically impossible to forecast an electric discharge, that's why the local buildings never exceed a two story height. Reflectors safeguard every construction; only specially designed shuttle spaceships can approach the planet’s surface."

Simeon rose and walked up to the window, thinking. The constant mental pressure only added to his exhaustion after staying in the cryogenic chamber, reanimation and the fight on board the
Io
.

"You're not responsible for what's done by an entire civilization," he finally offered.