The Island of Hope (3 page)

Andrei shuddered with the thought even though he knew that the lights were nothing but debris of spacecraft lit up by the bloody rise of the nebula.

There were thousands of them; in one particular spot they were agglomerating, forming an irregular sphere.

Having watched it for a while, he realized that his compartment was moving towards this new formation too. In a few weeks it was going to pass at a very close distance from the terrible spheroid.

A chill ran down his spine. What could he do to counter the laws of celestial mechanics? Sooner or later his unguided drift would result in a collision with the cemetery of battered spaceships.

He did not despair anymore. It seemed that little by little, Andrei had lost that kind of feeling. Each day of struggle changed his attitude to his trials and tribulations, but this wasn’t because he'd matured. He'd merely got used to the constant sense of danger which had gradually lost its intensity.

Despite the anxious clicking of the radiation meter and an instinctive fear of the black infinity of space, he overcame the desire to step into the abyss. His own helplessness annoyed him, but also granted some strength. His loneliness was almost palpable.

Having made a hesitant step forward, he secured the safety tether to the laser's bent mounting and cautiously made his way through the barricade of twisted armor plates.

Having slowly advanced forty feet across the mauled hull, he was sweating and exhausted. The surface glazed by an infernal temperature offered nothing he could get hold of, so Andrei constantly faced the risk of slipping off. The thin rope trailing after him didn’t offer security. The cosmic abyss made him nauseous with fear. It felt as if the magnetic soles of his boots had lost contact with the hull, space would swallow him, tether or no tether.

Finally, pulling himself up and trembling with fatigue, he crossed a mauled armor plate and saw two fire-polished hemispheres set to the left of the gun. These were tanks filled with liquid nitrogen, the sole hope of somehow correcting his drift.

The liquid gas was capable of performing the function of primitive thrusters. All he had to do was to think of some way to vector it at the right moment and in the right direction.

Andrei advanced some more and carefully examined the valves of the emergency nitrogen ejection system. They were molten too. Sparks glinted before his strained eyes. He hooked himself up to it with the tether and cast a gloomy glance at the spheroid, once again struck by the surreal sight.

He didn’t yet know that his destiny was awaiting him there.

* * *

The wreckage.

Thousands of tons of crumpled metal and molten plastic.

God help us,
someone had scribbled on the wall of a dark corridor filled with floating dead bodies.

Wrecks of space cruisers, cargo ships, repair bases and light recon modules; billions of kilowatts of power, thousands of hours of work, someone’s hopes, ambitions and fears; love and hatred, wisdom and stupidity — all of it crammed into one tomb as if into a cemetery of mankind’s hopes.

The wreckage of the Great Battle, an ominous monument to those whose bodies, which vacuum had conserved for eternity, were doomed to float endlessly in the darkness that reigned inside the spaceships they had built. What a bitter end for the creatures whose minds had been able to perceive the stars but unable to tame their own ambitions!

Most of the wreckage, subjected to the nebula’s gravity, had stuck together. Their unification was as unpredictable and unstable as uncemented masonry: the spacecraft were incessantly and chaotically moving inside an invisible sphere they couldn't escape, gravitating to each other. The silent collisions were all the more sinister since their force couldn't be estimated. Their armored hulls were deformed, their hull structures crushed and broken; now and then, the energy of these collisions fused the battered spaceships together.

It seemed that all life had left this place. Still, someone had written those words on the wall.

* * *

On three more occasions Andrei had ventured into outer space before he managed to unscrew one of the valves of the nitrogen emergency ejection system. The wreckage pile-up was approaching. At first he had the impression that his fragment would bypass them but, as his tiny planetoid was nearing the ugly sparkling sphere, it was changing its course, attracted by the heavier body.

A few stray fragments began to appear around. They floated past, grinning with hideous rupture holes, their molten sides deformed. Bent barrels of laser guns protruded out of an assault module like broken human arms.

Then a cruiser floated into view, rotating slowly. Andrei's attention was drawn to the wide open lock gate and a cloud of black dots floating around it. Because of the rotation of the massive cruiser, some of them had formed a sort of circle around the spaceship, similar to a broken string of beads.

The module started turning. The cruiser must have had gravity. Andrei peered at the monitor, deciding whether he should go and open the valve. His trajectory would lead him directly to the open airlock, the internal gates of which remained closely shut. There was a high probability of finding some atmosphere inside the ship. Wouldn't that be nice. There could be oxygen, food, a powerful transmitter, maybe some survivors even.

The next hour was one of wearisome waiting. His compartment got caught by the cruiser's gravitational field and was now carried away from the mass of wreckage following an extended elliptical route. The black gaping mouth of the airlock loomed ever closer.

Unable to stand it much longer, Andrei put on his spacesuit and got out.

His dexterity had notably increased during the last days. He was now quite accustomed to the infinite abyss, the blood-red lights and the sense of utter loneliness. He secured himself with the safety tether, switched on his magnetic boots and stood up straight on the hull.

One of the black dots was heading directly for him. Others too began approaching his little "ship" which gradually drifted almost into the very midst of the weird cloud. Andrei took a better look.

At first he could make out arms; then he saw the gleam of a pressurized helmet's visor. Finally, the scene zoomed in with all its dreadful details.

He was drifting among corpses.

Standing amidst the icy silence of the vacuum on top of his mauled spaceship fragment, he watched the approaching body, unable to avert his eyes.

He had been a commando. Their group must have attacked the cruiser: his gray commando spacesuit had been cut up by a laser ray, and some dark stains of blood had crystallized on the edges of the carbonized wound. Through the cracks in the burst visor he could see a young face and huge empty eyes distorted by agony.

'Space was too small for us,'
he thought, realizing the monstrous absurdity and corniness of that phrase. They had traveled through a tiny sector of boundless space where there still remained thousands of unexplored planets — and immediately afterward had begun killing one another, obeying some laws of economic and social development or, to be more exact, obeying their own nature and herding instinct; due to their lack of personal mentality, a small group of paranoid bastards pushed them toward each other, ordering them to kill and destroy.

Andrei could have been in that commando's place, floating in this nameless sector of space: a lump of frost-covered flesh, a cold, indifferent, dead satellite of the destroyed cruiser.

He didn't believe anything anymore. The body floated past, its outstretched arms almost touching him — followed by another one and by dozens of others here and there.

The suffering inside him was too great. He didn't feel anything anymore. He just stared at them, his eyes empty with pain, knowing he'd never be happy again. Even if he survived. A memory like that never fades, and time cannot help it.

* * *

A few lights glowed in the depth of the battle control room of the battered cruiser. All of the crew had died. The spacecraft was depressurized, practically bereft of power. But those who were now floating in the vacuum around the wreckage of their stronghold had constructed the most perfect destruction systems. Their killing machines were unequaled.

A man might have dismissed the target which appeared in the sights of the last functioning spherical radar as worthless. This still-alive lump of flesh huddling on a metallic fragment of a turret could only make you feel sorry for it. But for the cruiser's automatic systems this was the enemy. Its computer had no idea of mercy nor worth. It was programmed to continue the war.

The gun's micro switches searched for some undamaged control circuits. The exact aiming electromagnets were out of order, as were the servomotors, and that was why the vacuum gun barrel shook convulsively, struggling to aim. In the silence of space the electronic breech-block chambered the first shell, and some intermittent flashes of gun-fire illuminated for the last time the cruiser's hull. The fifth shell in the charger got stuck, but the target was already for ninety percent destroyed: the attacking battle compartment was holed, and a powerful jet of gas was gushing out of it. The reaction force pulled the compartment away from the cruiser in the direction of the spherical conglomeration of damaged spaceships.

Whether the man piloting the module was hit remained unknown to the computer, but it didn’t' care: the tiny figure at the end of the safety tether had little chance of survival.

Inside the dying spacecraft, a memory crystal logged in another victory chalked up by the cruiser
North
over an enemy ship.

3.

"H
ugh, let's clear out of here!" Nomad snapped, turning away from the external monitors.

Ernie Hugo looked in surprise at his partner. "Since when have you been afraid of the dead, Nom?"

Silently, Nomad rolled with his seat to the reserve panel and flipped some switches, then reached out for his cup of coffee.

"I swear by the Procus snake-eaters, they damaged our property, and we have the right to take our own back!" Hugo spat out. "What the hell are you afraid of?"

The coffee proved to be too hot. Having taken a gulp, Nomad burned his mouth and snorted angrily, choking. He replaced the cup and peered moodily at the 3-D survey screen where one could see, in the inky abyss of space, a gigantic swirling octopus glowing with every hue of red.

This nuclear cesspit was located exactly where the planetoid used to be. Now it was gone and so was their stash.

The planet had been annihilated, which was plainly stated by the onboard computer, thousands of metal fragments orbiting whatever was left of it.

One of the monitors kept ID'ing spaceships as they floated into the onboard video sensors' field of view.

"Ernie, you see what this means?"

Hugo made a face supposed to indicate naïve bewilderment, but Nomad wasn't interested in their habitual banter. The eyes of this space vagrant betrayed some genuine fear.

"That's a Galactic War, Hugh," he said in a low voice.

"Yeah right! Why are you panicking?" Ernie lost his temper. "What's wrong with you? Yeah, sure I can see perfectly well that this heap of scrap metal stinks of radiation to high heaven and back. So what? We have the necessary protection, decontaminating agents, remotely controlled robots! You just look at this!" he pointed a finger at a monitor identifying the contour and characteristics of yet another damaged spacecraft. "An Earth battle cruiser! Our tub is falling to pieces, the reactors are exhausted, but this..." he rolled his eyes. "In just a month we'll have ourselves one hell of a ship!" Ernie took another glance at his partner and added, without any irony this time: "You know, Nom, people only get what they deserve. If everybody worked as we do to earn their daily bread, they would have no time to exchange punches!"

Nomad shook his head but didn't reply: the onboard computer beat him to it. Their ship's transmitter kept changing frequencies automatically; and at that particular moment, it had reached the wavelength of 21 centimeters.

A voice filled the chartroom, "Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!"

Hugo keyed in some commands. The onboard radars took the object’s bearings.

"This is a spacesuit emergency transmitter," he said in disappointment.

"Find him," Nomad barked while rolling his seat toward the control panel.

"This has to be a corpse. You know these automatics."

"Hugh, I want you to find him."

"Well, as you wish. Just a moment. But after that, we'll go there and patch up that ship for our own use, okay?"

Messages flashed on the chartroom monitors,

Searching...

Coordinates of the object...

Zooming in the square...

Object detected.

An image appeared on the main 3-D monitor.

A destroyed gun turret floated through space, rotating slowly. Its armor deformed by fire, its laser mountings twisted and crumpled. Behind the remnants of the large support skids that had served at one time to put the turret forward out of the body of the cruiser to outer space, a human body in a battle spacesuit trailed in its wake. The green lights of the emergency beacons on his shoulders and pressure helmet kept flashing;

"The signal is green" Hugh exclaimed in surprise. "Should we go and check?"

Nomad nodded gloomily, turning to the panel controlling the low-powered ionic jets. He really couldn't understand why he had the feeling of an approaching disaster…

* * *

He was awoken by music.

It was hardly believable. Andrei's mind was still overtaken by traumatic memories, but through the continuous spinning of stars and frenzied flashes of vacuum guns, he was perceiving some other reality: a muffled music, quiet voices and the nauseating odor of antiseptic.

He half-opened his eyes.

Semi-darkness. The odor of disinfectant became more pungent. A dim light was penetrating a polarized wall.

Two vaguely delineated shadows were moving behind the wall.

Abrupt movement. A man's silhouette stopped dead in a strained pose. He raised a long rod that he was holding in his hand. Almost simultaneously, Andrei heard a sharp snap resembling the impact of two ivory balls, then a soft deadened strike and a high-pitched buzzer.

Andrei sat up. The piece of fabric covering him slid down. All this had to be an illusion. His mind suggested an obvious explanation: he had died and his body was drifting in the eternal cold of space, but his dying brain had woven for him this strange, illusory world. These shadows…

The floor was cool. He staggered across the room and opened the door a little.

There was a strong smell of cigarette smoke.

A bright light made him squeeze his eyes shut. When he reopened them, it became quite clear to him that he either had gone mad or had indeed died.

An ordinary billiard-table covered with green cloth was placed in the middle of an octagonal room. At the far-off end of the table, leaning on a cue, stood a speaking likeness of an old space dog from a child's dreams: gray drooping moustache, hair cut close to evenly bronzed skin, and a leather vest concealing the man's bulging muscles.

"Well, to be sure... Watch your step, man," someone chuckled behind Andrei's back.

A thousand ideas whirled through Andrei's mind.
'These men were not ghosts.

They were real!

He'd been rescued!'

He felt cold. It all made sense. Lowering his eyes and realizing he was stark naked, he burst out laughing, hoarsely and light-heartedly. Leaning against a plastic doorway, he sank to the floor, suddenly weak and shaking with sobs.

For some moments they looked at Andrei, dumbfounded. Nomad smiled slightly, then chuckled, joined by Ernie.

"You're too much, guys," he groaned, suppressing laughter, while getting a brand-new flight uniform out. "Here, take it." He held out the package to Andrei and waved his hand in the direction of the other door. "The shower's over there, at the end of the corridor. Sure you can find it?"

Andrei nodded.

"Go ahead, then. We'll strike up an acquaintance at dinner."

* * *

A running robot dexterously moved in the dark warped corridors of the dead spaceships. It was simple and functional. The electronic memory of the machine contained a sole task: to seek out an undamaged jet engine of a given configuration, dismount it and report the fact to the crew.

So far, the search had been unsuccessful. The robot wasn't interested in anything happening around, and even the only video camera attached to its spiderlike body was turned off. And that was a mistake. Its motion was noticed by something hidden inside the sinister gloom of halls and passages, in gaps between spacecraft, on landing decks crumpled by nuclear strikes; its appearance awoke some activity.

Thousands of battle machines had waited in the cold and stillness of the vacuum for their zero hour. The LEDs under the "activation" inscriptions on their control panels had been gleaming red for many months. They were ready to start fighting when the tremendous explosion of the annihilated planet liquidated both space fleets, reducing the powerful interstellar spaceships to scrap. But most battle machines had remained functional.

They had lost their commanders. Since the moment of their activation no instructions had been received from the base spacecraft' computing centers. But every robot was controlled by an autonomous program started automatically after a definite period of time.

The machines were too expensive and sophisticated for people to allow them to stay idle. A huge experience of wars had been used when programming the robots. A risk of loss of the officers or even of the whole sub-unit operating this or that battle machine had been foreseen. Then the autonomous program was run. Its functioning was based on the recognition of the "friend-foe" signal. All objects not signaling "friend" were automatically registered as targets. After that, priorities were determined, depending on the level of their activity. Finally, a standard warning and an offer to surrender were transmitted.

In case the "friend" signal was not detected after those steps, or the activity of the object didn't become nullified — a phase of active operations was actuated, and the battle machine started to fulfill its main function: the destruction of the enemy fighting equipment and men.

This phase could be suspended or interrupted in the following three cases:

After destruction of all targets.

Upon receiving an order from the command post to stop military operations.

After having spent the total of ammunition load and energy resources.

It goes without saying that those who had designed the battle machines had not foreseen such an improbable coincidence of circumstances when all command centers of the belligerents would be entirely destroyed. Thousands of activated battle machines and their quite functional autonomous programs waited for their hour to come.

Any target could serve as the first little stone to provoke an avalanche.

The running robot was that little stone.

* * *

Andrei was in a very bad mood

He had scanned the entire memory of the onboard computer but found nothing similar to the orbital fortress. Neither wreck matched the profile he'd entered in the computer's memory. Consequently, his father was alive. It was the orbital station that had the weapon on board which had destroyed the planet.

At that particular moment Andrei didn't care about the fact that an annihilation installation did exist. All that has been predicted and based on theory was sooner or later implemented. The colonists had created the new weapon and used it at the critical moment of the battle to annihilate the fleet of Earth.

Correction: hundreds of battered colonist's spacecraft then fighting in space had been sacrificed to win the Pyrrhic victory.

Thousands of desperately combating soldiers had been swept away into a nuclear vortex by the decision of a few men among whom was his father. Perhaps Andrei could find enough moral force inside himself to justify that act — if the superior officers had shared a common fate to avoid their planets being bombarded, or if they had at least sent some rescue spaceships here. Nothing of the kind: they'd struck a blow and cleared out through a wormhole saving their skins; they didn't send any spaceships here, as they were afraid of ruining their reputation.

"Dad... How could you do such a thing? How can you now breathe, live, look in mom's eyes? You remember saying to me: 'Son, it's time for you to become a man.' I did become one — what about you? You exposed me, wrote me off as a percentage of losses, while you yourself are alive. What for? How can you defend yourself now, and how will you do so once I return?"

There was only one thing Andrei wanted at the moment: to return and find out that the orbital station had evaporated in the flame of total nuclear decay without any fragment left or, at least, that his father had done what he ought to have done, going on to glory after the pointless Pyrrhic victory.

* * *

Andrei didn't know that none of that was destined to come true.

Having fulfilled its task, the running robot busily radioed that the right jet had been located , but, along its trajectory through the spheroidal agglomeration of wrecks, in the dark interior of battle decks several infrared floodlights had already lit up, and some battle machines followed the spider-like robot.

After fifty minutes by the local system timer, a group of machines of the Earth Alliance pursuing the running robot got onto the battle deck of the colonists' cruiser where dozens of weapons at the service of the Free Colonies waited for their hour to come, in a deceptive numbness.

Dante had no idea that it was the oncoming of Inferno.

* * *

Never in his life had Nomad felt his vulnerability so keenly. The jets of his spaceship had been dismounted, and for the first time in many years it was unable to start up directly after an order given by its master.

Hugo's comments on the fact that the ten hours necessary for the delivery and mounting of the new propulsion systems were not a serious delay didn't reassure Nomad much. He was afraid of this place and didn't even try to hide his fear. All around them had become impregnated with suffering and death. Thousands of corpses were floating in the dark corridors and compartments of disabled spacecraft.

Nomad rose from the control panel, casting an angry glance at the straight row of monitors. Everything was prepared for receiving the propulsion system, it only remained to wait, and that was the most painful. Three hours ago Hugo, attended by a group of robots, had disappeared into the bowels of the spheroid.