The Island of Hope (9 page)

'ACTIVATION! ACTIVATION! ACTIVATION!'

The command surged through the control circuits of his photon processor. The words "he opened his eyes" would have sounded funny. He was not a man. He simply saw light.

It had been a narrow compartment cluttered with memory crystals, computer disks, paperwork and spare parts. The light was dim and red.

The emergency signal came on the internal display. His processor awoke and, in mere nanoseconds, performed a complete analysis of the situation and came to a logical conclusion.

He turned his head. The cameras mounted behind the lenses imitating his eyes registered the picture of a man kneeling beside him. He was young. His clothes were covered in blood, his hair in disarray; his eyes feverish. He was obviously under the influence of some strong anesthetic.

The man was clasping a deep lacerated wound in his side.

"Request priority command!" Andor heard, then realized that the phrase had been synthesized by his own voice module.

The man wheezed; his head shook. He stared at the android, his eyes filled with agony.

"It works," he managed, wincing. For a while the man hoarsely breathed, trying to stop his shuddering.

"A human being in agony," an impassive verdict appeared on Andor's internal display screen.

"You're my creation. I spent half my life building you. Such a shame

I won't see what you will become. Look at me," The hoarse whisper of the man was forever engraved on his memory cells. "Idiots! They've annihilated the planet," the man strained to bring his face close to the android's. "I therefore name you
Andor
. All information about the Universe, all possible and impossible data — you have it all. Base command:
survive
."

He collapsed. Red froth covered his lips.

At the time, Andor had been only ninety seconds from the moment of activation. His creator couldn't have possibly imagined all the potential of the photon processor with its speed-of-light neural exchanges. All systems were initialized in under ten seconds; in twenty more seconds he'd read and logically processed his behemoth databases. After one hundred and ten seconds, Andor had become self-aware.

He kneeled down before the dying man.

As if on cue, he opened his eyes one last time.

"Priority command:
survive
," he wheezed in a barely audible voice.

His creator's eyes closed. He died.

Andor was on his own now.

After seven hundred and twenty seconds of his conscious existence he had left the compartment to enter the insane world of the spacecraft cemetery.

* * *

A narrow corridor led the android to a dead end. Here the wall was covered in a complex pattern of broken lines. Andor raised his hand and traced some of them, forming the letters
O
and
H
. The remaining lines were a decoy.

Hissing its air compressors, part of the wall moved aside, revealing the entrance to an airlock. The internal hatch was wide open. Andor stepped in and found himself in a circular corridor with compartment doors at equal intervals. Part of the wall panel had broken off, exposing snaking clusters of cables and pipes.

Andor stopped at a door with a sign reading "PILOT ROOM". The lock's photo cell and the servo-driver were out of order, so someone had cut the lock out. He pushed the door aside and entered the room of the
LX
assault raider.

Simeon stood with his back to the entrance, his hands resting on the cannibalized control panel. A monitor glowed before him. The floor was strewn with print-outs of electric diagrams.

"What do you want?" he asked without turning to Andor.

The android perched on the edge of the navigator's seat. "I thought you might need help."

Simeon turned round and frowned at him. "When will you stop lying? You could have restored this spacecraft a long time ago! All this time you've done nothing! You let me run around the spheroid hunting rusty robots and never said a word about
this
!"

From the passionless face of the android it was impossible to tell what was going on inside his logical circuits. Still, it seemed to Simeon that he'd noticed some inner struggle.

"Do you want to rejoin people?" Andor asked.

Simeon turned pale. "Did you really think I would spend my life chasing after machines on this galactic dump?" he asked bitterly. "Then why did you upload my biorhythm data to the teaching module? I wish I hadn't learned anything!"

Andor rose and approached the vandalized console. Every year he looked more human. They considered him to be their teacher. No. Sooner or later Simeon would have acquired the necessary knowledge without the android's assistance. Andor felt torn apart as never before. He was neither a robot nor a living being. But for the presence of Yanna and Simeon, he would have lost his mind ages ago.

"The expectation of a holiday is always better than the holiday itself," he cited, brushing his plastic-coated fingers across the console's contacts. "That world you want to return to has produced killing machines and this spheroid. Besides, there's a high probability of its civilization having perished in the galactic war!"

Simeon licked his suddenly dry lips. "We..." he struggled to find the right words, "we've reached the limit of our resources here."

Andor took his time to reply. That was absurd: why would he need time to collect his thoughts! Simeon was well aware of his mind's speed.

"I couldn't force my ideas upon you," he pronounced at last. "You're right, of course, it would have been quite possible for me to rebuild everything here within these last few years. But I had no right to do that. Now I see you've grown up. All that you've done, you've done it yourself. True, I gave you the opportunity to learn and acquire some information, but that was all. You are a human being. You have your own identity. So you make your own decisions. You found this spacecraft with the aid of the Island of Hope logbooks. You've managed to get a good understanding of how it works. The hunting for battle machines has already bored you out of your mind. You are a man. And I'm only your creation."

Simeon stared at him in amazement. "I'm sorry," to life he finally said. "It's this music. I was at the end of my tether." Obeying an involuntary impulse, he put his hand on Andor's shoulder.

The robot turned round. It wasn't for the first time Simeon had the impression that he was desperate to come to life.

"Well, guys, have you discussed all your secrets?" Yanna's voice sounded behind them.

Simeon started. Yanna stood in the doorway, smiling at them. Dimples appeared on her cheeks. "By the way, I played with my doll here something like seven or eight years ago," she couldn't help laughing.

Seeing her, Simeon felt an enormous sense of relief. . "We must try," he summed up. "I don't think we have an alternative."

8.

A
furious crimson octopus sprawled its tentacles, pulsating in a drawn-out agony, spewing new protuberances into the darkness glittering with stars. A flattened sphere sped along its unstable elliptical orbit around it, trailing in its wake a thousand-mile long tail of flickering debris.

This had been their world. Their Island of Hope.

Now it was slowly moving toward the back observation screens.

Simeon tore himself away from the control panels to cast one last glance at the tiny planetoid which had been his home for t twenty long years.

They didn't know what future had in store for them. Maybe Andor sitting next to them was right and their civilization had perished, having burned itself in the furnace of a new galactic war. Then Yanna and himself might become the last hope for its resurrection. But it was also possible that things had worked out for the Earthlings and that they were heading toward blossoming new worlds.

In any case, they would never forget their Island.

They had no need for words. Simeon's hand lay on the helm. Through the glass of his pressure helmet he saw Yanna's face streaked with tears.

The spaceship hovered over the ragged steel desert. Then its stern lit up like a man-made sun, obscuring the light of the agonizing nebula; the spaceship began gathering speed, rapidly turning into a blinding dot in the sky.

They took the path to the stars.

PART THREE

FORT STELLAR

9.

"H
ey, Johnny, come have a look! What the fuck is this? What a cheek!"

The duty navigator leaned over the monitor. The scarlet dot was still at the bottom of the screen – the object which his partner had just referred to so enthusiastically was still a very long way away, almost out of their radars' range.

"Hm, I don’t know what the computer’s doing! It’s raving mad!"

John Selkirk couldn't work out what was going on, either. Having received a signal from the object, the on-board computer of their space cruiser had automatically started a search and identification procedure, and now a most absurd structure appeared on the display. This must have been the first time he'd ever seen their powerful cyber mind at a loss: the computer had failed to ID the object, plastering the screen with disorganized diagrams of all sorts of spaceships.

A navigator doesn't decide anything. Selkirk respectfully touched an intercom key. "Sir, this is the duty navigator. The radars have reported an unidentified man-made object. It's not in the database. It is armed."

"Coming."

Chains of alarm lights flashed on board the Tri-Solar Confederation cruiser. Behind the sealed gates of airlocks, launching pods opened up one by one, releasing flocks of space fighters into space. Gun turret operators hurried to slump into their seats and activate their equipment.

The object was approaching. Senior watch officer stared at the monitor in the pilot room. "Cancel the guns," he commanded. "Let's see what the multiplexers will show."

Powerful electronic telescopes began their unhurried motion, groping after the object. Finally an image of the approaching spaceship showed on the displays in the pilot room.

"Not a hypersphere one," commented the navigator, peering at the screen with genuine interest.

The huge disk-shaped body was patched in several places by cermet
5
plates welded to the hull. Antennas bristled, pointing in every possible direction; the tightly closed gun ports were barely seen behind them. The parabolic dishes didn't rotate; not one navigational light could be seen, and as for the bowl of the photon reflector mounted on telescopic supports outside the ship's bottom, it had long lost its sheen, apparently inactive for a long time.

"No response to signals. The crew are probably dead," assumed the first pilot. "Look at its drive. The photon reflectors must have been out of use for at least a hundred years!"

"Possible. A decoy?"

"A rather clumsy one, then. We can smash the ship to smithereens at the slightest hint of aggressive behavior."

The strange ship rotated slowly. An enormous shell hole, until then concealed by the photon reflector, entered the field of view of the multiplexers.

"So! Imagine the impact."

"Clause forty-six of the space service regulations. We must explore it and plant a radio beacon to mark it as property of the Confederation. All paperwork and whatever else we can find will be transmitted to Stellar's archives," senior watch officer summed up. "Send in the assault group. I'm curious to see what's there."

* * *

Sergei Snegov, commander of the assault group, liked this kind of assignment. He was a poet at heart, and the opportunity to leave the ship unaccompanied by frenzied gunfire did not occur very often.

Their small assault raider soared over its launching pad.

“Fasten your belts,” the pilot mumbled, flipping switches. He didn't even look their way. “We're off!"

The black bulk of the strange ship was growing on the 3-D monitors. Now they could see that this used to be a deadly combat spaceship of the type that had been discontinued about fifty years ago. "An LX light assault raider," Sergei identified it, "but it must have received one hell of a blow."

“Look!” Ryzhov’s voice rang with respect. “It must have battled to its death.”

The armor plates of the newcomer’s hull were fused and ripped by laser charges. Part of its hull structures had been ripped out, the laser rays slicing through them like nichrome through plastic. The ship had been cut lengthways, revealing a sectional view of its battle compartments complete with consoles, deformed operator seats and the empty eye-sockets of broken monitors. Now that they had approached the ship it became clear why the on-board computer hadn't been able to ID it. This was a strange hybrid: an
LX
with some totally unsuitable modules thrown in; it also had an archaic photon sail although the visible hyperdrive compartments seemed to be undamaged.

“Pull up by the shell-hole,” Sergei told the pilot. “We’re going in.”

Without a word, his group left their seats as one man.

The commander was the first to touch the strange ship’s hull. The motion detectors didn’t react. His pulse gun’s barrel pointed down the hole. The floodlights sliced through the pitch darkness. Sergei dove in.

“Looks like a meteorite impact,” his gloved hand brushed the fused edge, ”a laser would’ve done a nicer job.”

“There's power in the circuits!” the computer technician reported; he had already managed to hook his machine up to a cable.

They were standing in a long bending corridor that traced the internal intervals from each other.. Sergei forced one of them aside. The pilot room. The floodlight brushed across the dark screen of a telescope and stopped, discovering three seats circling the console; an unmoving figure of an android frozen in one of them.

“Nothing. There's no power here.”

They went out into the corridor. The commandos opened the compartments’ doors one after the other.

“This must be some kind of warehouse,” Gordon finally said. “There're enough supplies here for the next two hundred years!”

They kept walking along the curving corridor. Sergei had the impression that they were walking through history itself: an abandoned spaceship, the android’s figure at the control console, compartments filled up with tinned food – all that admittedly seemed eerie and mysterious.

Would they ever be able to find out what had happened to the crew?

The next door opened by itself. Sergei whipped out his gun.

"Here's the power source," Hawley said, entering the room after him.

Two lonely green lights flickered next to two hemispheres of cryogenic hypersleep capsules. Sergei cautiously stepped forward and froze, struck by the sight.

Safe under the capsules' transparent lids and floating in the mist of cryo gas inside lay a young man and a girl.

* * *

Two spacecraft, which had for some time drifted together, slowly undocked. The gap between them widened, filling with stars, while the hoses of connection tunnels were being pulled back into the gaping holes of cargo airlocks; finally they slid shut, too. One side of the cruiser was illuminated by the flashes of directional thrusters; slowly the ship began to turn. Then the cruise engines kicked in, pulling the ship away from the small dark disc which, rotating uncontrollably, continued its drift in the depths of space. It was impossible to foresee the little makeshift craft's future. Twice had it served its purpose and was now ultimately abandoned by people.

Captain Hans Frauenberg watched the little craft's flashing beacon until it disappeared amidst the many stars.

"That's life for you," he sighed philosophically, instantly forgetting the abandoned fragment of the past. He had too many pressing problems to tackle, preventing him from paying close attention to the incident.

The space cruiser
Io
continued on its combat patrolling mission of their sector of space.

The computer tech was toiling in the testing lab; he made a face as he disconnected all the probes from the android's open cranium. That proved to be too complicated a task for the onboard equipment; after five hours' worth of fruitless attempts to make the robot function he saw that his efforts were useless. "I can't make neither head nor tail of it," he said honestly to his junior partner who was apathetically tinkering with an integral breech-block of an automatic turret. "I've never seen anything like it," he slammed the robot's head in disappointment. "Here, look," Hawley was positively unable to shut up, "the ROM port looks normal, but just try to access the files! The wiring is funny, too. Nothing inside him but lasers and crystals."

"What about power?"

"Looks okay. He's got a built-in mini-reactor," Hawley unplugged the last cable. "You wait," he threatened, winding the cables, "once we're back to the base, I'll look into you more closely."

* * *

An hour later captain Frauenberg entered the medical station of the ship.

"Well, Vladimir, what's new?" he asked, stopping next to two transparent spherical capsules filled with saline solution. The young bodies of the two rescued astronauts floated inside, wound with wires and covered with sensors. "What's your verdict?"

"The girl's in a bad way, sir," the doctor on duty sighed, "but the guy might make it."

The captain frowned. "Do you think they'll both survive?"

"Difficult to say. It would be better to take them both to Stellar."

"You wish! No one's gonna relieve us from patrol duty," he scratched his chin. "But you're right there. Our equipment just won't cut it. A hundred years in suspended animation isn't something we can handle. I'll see if I can contact the base."

"I'd like you to take this, sir, and transmit it to Stellar," Vladimir handed the captain a memory crystal. "It's an encrypted recording of the young man's brain activity. He's coming round, so some memories seem to be resurfacing. In Jedian's labs they work on similar problems. Besides, this file might help us to find out whether they're moles someone's trying to plant on us."

"You're right," the captain agreed again. "To tell you the truth, I've thought about that too. Would be a good idea to find out who they are before they wake up," he put the crystal into his uniform pocket and headed for the exit. "Keep me posted," he repeated, then left.

* * *

Just before he came round, Simeon felt fear. Something scary was stirring in the black void of his slumber, an ominous shadow against the backdrop of his awakening consciousness.

He groaned.

Vladimir swung around. Dozens of sensors on the data display panel immediately reacted to the weak signal, their lights flashing, the monitor screens displaying his body activity in a series of peaking graphs.

Simeon's eyelids quivered, opening. He found himself inside a small closed space. His body was covered in a sticky warm goo. There was a pungent smell of ozone and medications. A milky mist enveloped him, revealing numerous wires and tubes that reached inside his body.

That was just what he'd been subconsciously afraid of his entire life. His awakened mind was immediately consumed by a materialized nightmare from the past: he was inside a machine! His muscles strained, his eyes widened; he bent and shuddered while trying, in vain, to escape the grip that pinned him down.

The sensors beeped anxiously. The graphs on the monitors shot up, registering an impulse of vital activity. Vladimir dropped whatever he was doing and came over to check on the boy.

Simeon didn't yet understand what he was doing: almost all of his reactions being subconscious. He stiffened in another attempt to free himself, when the bearded face of a man loomed in through the mist that filled the chamber of the machine that had captured him!

The young man's body slumped down to the rigid plastic of the life support couch; he couldn't take his eyes from the vague contours of a human figure.

Having assessed his patient's condition, Vladimir ran his hand over the computer's keyboard. A few injectors dug into Simeon's body, causing the graphs on the monitors to calm down.

Exhausted, Simeon shut his eyes, but his fading consciousness resisted, focused on one thought:
'A man. People. I'm back!'