STAR TREK: The Lost Era - 2298 - The Sundered Page 8

  [75] It was as though Gaia herself were holding her breath, eagerly anticipating whatever was to come next.

  Wu touched the radio controls at her neck ring once again, tuning in the channel being shared by Zafirah and the other five particle-accelerator managers. She wanted to remember every word spoken on this historic occasion. Perhaps Zafirah had prepared a brief but profound comment, some immortal turn of phrase that would forever after be identified with Friday, 9 August 2058. One giant leap for mankind, indeed, Wu thought, ruefully aware that in many parts of the world stone axes and the bow once again represented the apex of technological progress.

  One by one, the spokespeople for each O’Neill colony checked in over the open channel, forming a bouillabaisse of accents from every corner of the Earth.

  “All systems show green on the Moss-Offenhouse colony.”

  “The NicholCorp facility is green for go.”

  “Starling habitat here. We’re looking good.”

  “Brynner asteroid is all set.”

  “Colony Roykirk here. We’re ready and standing by for a full-up warp-field test.”

  Wu heard Zafirah’s voice next, utterly serious and businesslike. “Particle flow shows green on Vanguard. Magnetic bottles are stable. Antimatter containment is positive.”

  A couple of heartbeats later another voice came over the channel. Its rough, world-weary quality, along with its noticeable lightspeed delay, told Wu that she was listening to Christopher Brynner himself. Too enfeebled by age and illness to leave Earth for the O’Neills, Brynner was the founder of Brynner Information Systems as well as the chairman emeritus of the Gerald Moss-Ralph Offenhouse Conglomerate. Despite reversals of fortune during the war, Brynner’s pockets remained deep enough to bankroll today’s experiment.

  “This is Ground Station Bozeman,” Brynner said. “I want [76] to thank and congratulate you all for the extraordinary forward stride you’re about to make on behalf of the entire human race. Now let me hand the microphone over to someone who speaks your language far better than I ever could.”

  Another voice spoke up a beat later. “Uh, hello, everybody,” it said. Wu instantly recognized the bourbon-roughened voice of the man whose warp-field theories Dr. O’Neill’s spiritual children were about to test.

  “I can’t offer you anything to top what Mr. Brynner just said,” Cochrane continued, sounding uncomfortable. “Except to tell you that if the sustained warp-field experiment ends up looking as good up there as it does on paper down here, then Project Phoenix could have a prototype warp-capable vessel ready for launch as early as next Spring.”

  Wu hoped Zafirah and the key players on the other O’Neills weren’t prone to flop-sweats.

  “So I’ll finish by wishing all of you good luck,” Cochrane said. “And godspeed.”

  Except for the hiss of her respirator, the universe went utterly quiet around Wu for several moments after Dr. Cochrane signed off. Zafirah’s much nearer-sounding voice finally broke the silence.

  “You heard the man, people. Initiate the activation sequence.”

  Reconfiguring her suit tethers so that she faced “down”—straight out into space—she reached into her toolkit to free the miniature digital Hasselblad camera from its restraining strap. The nearly full Moon now stood directly above her like a glowing sentinel, its image preternaturally crisp in the vacuum.

  She pointed the camera toward the eastern horizon, where Vanguard’s portion of the warp field would soon begin forming before it connected up with its counterparts on the Roykirk asteroid and the habitats beyond. Wu felt a slow pulsation beginning to radiate from beneath the asteroid’s skin. It quickly increased in amplitude, [77] jarring her. Surprised, she lost her grip on the camera, which launched itself into space as though shot from a rifle. Then the universe exploded around her, and she saw and heard nothing more.

  Were it not for the fading effects of the nuclear winter, this August evening on the outskirts of Bozeman, Montana, might have been pleasantly warm. Against the gradually intensifying cold, Lily Sloane drew her coat tightly about herself, her arms crawling with gooseflesh. She stood on a hill just out of sight of the dilapidated Quonset hut Cochrane had grandly dubbed “Ground Station Bozeman.”

  Lily heard Cochrane’s boots grinding against the gravel path as he approached from a nearby stand of trees. She didn’t bother looking up from the eyepiece of the tall prewar telescope that had occupied her attention for the past ten minutes.

  “Hey, Zee,” she said, still squinting through the eyepiece, Cyclops-like. The telescope was pointed at about a forty-five-degree angle upward into the night sky. “I must have bumped this damned thing. You had it pointed straight at the O’Neills. I saw a flash a while back, but now I can’t make out anything.”

  Lily was beginning to suspect that considerably more was wrong here than merely a maladjusted telescope. Straightening up from the eyepiece, she met Cochrane’s gaze.

  She thought she had already observed the full spectrum of his emotional extremes, all the way from hyperproductively manic to nearly suicidal. But she hadn’t seen him look so stricken, so blasted—so old—since just after the war had broken out.

  “What’s happened, Zee?” Lily prompted, her voice catching in her throat.

  Cochrane pulled a beat-up metal flask from his jacket pocket and took a huge quaff before replying. “The colonies aren’t up there anymore, Lily. There’s been ... an accident.”

  Lily’s heart sank. Old vids of Ares IV and Columbia and [78] Challenger inscribed arcs of fire across her memory. The realization hit her like a punch in the stomach—some five thousand of the Earth’s best and brightest were gone, probably vaporized, just like that. The flight of the Phoenix would surely be held up for years, the antimatter fuel stocks the O’Neill particle accelerators had created for the project lying unused in a rusty Titan V missile silo. The project might even be canceled altogether, now that Team Phoenix could no longer count on exotic materials or replacement parts from the orbital factories. Sure, Lily knew she could cobble together a serviceable cockpit out of scrap titanium, given enough time. But Zee couldn’t just whip up the really weird engine-related stuff—say plasma coolants, or crystallized dilithium, or unobtanium-plated warp-field frammistats—in his garage.

  Project Phoenix was effectively grounded. And a lot of good people were gone.

  Lily reached for Cochrane’s flask. Maybe we humans just don’t have the right stuff to reach for the stars, she thought, then emptied the battle-scarred container in one long, bitter swallow.

  Chapter 9

  Friday. 9 August 2058

  “What the hell just happened to us?” Zafirah said, pulling herself unsteadily to her feet in Vanguard’s darkened central control room. A confused moan was the only response she heard. Unseen broken things crunched beneath the springy soles of her sneakers.

  The emergency circuits restored the lighting a few seconds later. The place seemed to have been turned completely upside-down, then abruptly righted.

  Avram Baruch lay stunned on the floor, a heavy desk pinning him there. Kerwin McNolan, the small Irish engineer, strained against the asteroid’s spin-generated gravity to free the dour Israeli. Zafirah wasted no time helping McNolan shove the desk aside.

  “What happened?” she repeated, her eyes on a trio of shell-shocked-looking junior technicians who were returning upended pieces of equipment to their proper places. A few other technical people milled about, looking disoriented. But no one seemed grievously injured.

  McNolan was helping the disoriented Baruch to his feet. Apparently satisfied that the physicist was all right, he turned to Zafirah. “This is just an educated guess, Zaf, but I’d say [80] something must have gone very wrong with the warp-field experiment.”

  Lidia! Zafirah thought with a start. Lidia had been working outside the shell when all six O’Neills had linked to form the continuous toroidal warp field. And moments after that—

  Zafirah rushed to the communications con
sole, which displayed a green “power-on” light. “Al-Arif to Wu,” she shouted into the microphone. “Wu, do you copy? Wu, come in!”

  The only response was a wash of static.

  Zafirah bolted toward the array of consoles that monitored the asteroid’s surface, and the space beyond. Three of the half-dozen monitors there had toppled onto the decking, and now were so much scrap. Though the remaining screens didn’t look damaged, they displayed only snow.

  She noticed that Director Mizuki was already busy at one of the consoles, obviously trying to bring in a view of the outside. The darkness of deep space slowly coalesced across two of the still-functional screens, with numerous fixed stars shining invariantly in the distance. Zafirah stood beside the director before the large, flat screens, with Baruch and McNolan flanking them.

  Zafirah’s stomach suddenly became buoyant. Something wasn’t right with the image before her.

  Baruch seemed to notice the same thing. “This is as wrong as a Russian rock band. What’s happened to the Roykirk colony?”

  The nearest other O’Neill habitat was nowhere to be seen. And none of the other four hollow-asteroid colonies was visible either. If debris from any of them remained, there wasn’t sufficient light present to make any of it visible. The infinite abyss seemed to have swallowed them all whole.

  Zafirah felt sick at heart. I hope you died quickly, Lidia. Like Sabih, and little Kalil. Inshallah.

  “Gone,” McNolan said, his voice a rasp. “All of them are gone. Probably blown to hell when the warp field collapsed.”

  [81] A terrible silence descended. It was the director who broke it. “I’m not so sure the other colonies went anywhere—unless everything else did, too.”

  It was only then that Zafirah noticed that both the Earth and the Moon were also missing. And that Bellatrix and Rigel, the left shoulder and legs of Orion the Hunter, were visibly out of position relative to giant Betelgeuse, as though the constellation had been distorted by a funhouse mirror of time, distance, or perhaps both.

  The next half hour was a blur, as the survivors checked in with the director’s office and began a frantic checkout of the habitat’s status. Zafirah was surprised by how little serious damage the Vanguard facility had actually sustained, at least in terms of its physical plant. Especially considering how far the entire asteroid had evidently traveled after the torus-shaped warp field had collapsed against it.

  More than sixty-one parsecs. Approximately two hundred light-years.

  No one had believed that figure at first. It wasn’t until after Director Mizuki and Zafirah had both taken separate measurements of several of the most readily identifiable first-magnitude stars—compiling a three-dimensional model that the computers could compare with the constellations as seen from home—that the truth at last began to settle upon the 827 asteroid dwellers who had survived Vanguard’s unprecedented transit.

  They were now stranded two hundred light-years from Earth. Sol was a distant ember, lost among countless others in the infinite night.

  We’ve gone farther than anyone has ever gone before, Zafirah thought, looking back at tiny, dim Sol through one of Vanguard’s surviving optical telescopes. Trouble is, nobody back home knows about it. They must think the collapsing warp field destroyed us.

  [82] And what of the other five O’Neills? Were they, too, dispersed through the void? Or had the failed experiment blasted them all to rubble?

  There was simply no way to know.

  Zafirah felt a bizarre exhilaration, a feeling she thought might be an amalgam of wonder and dread. On one hand, seventeen of her Vanguard colleagues were either dead or missing, the dead apparently killed by the sudden inertial effects of the asteroid’s breakneck passage. On the other, the collapse of the warp-field bubble had proved one thing conclusively—that travel via subspace over interstellar distances was indeed possible.

  The director had given everyone aboard a couple of hours to consider Vanguard’s weirdly altered circumstances before summoning the senior staff to her office for an extremely tense meeting.

  She must have spent the last two hours picking everything up in here, Zafirah thought as she entered the large, immaculate chamber alongside several of her colleagues. She found herself grateful for the feeling of normalcy and order fostered by the room’s tidiness, and realized that such must have been Dr. Mizuki’s intention. Zafirah had always thought that Mizuki’s keen understanding of crew morale was one of the talents that made her so well suited to her job. Zafirah had once entertained the notion of eventually becoming director herself.

  Now she was delighted and relieved not to be the one in charge.

  The director sat behind her desk, her aged eyes sweeping the room as she displayed a smile which Zafirah found enormously reassuring. “The good news is this: We were a self-sufficient colony before the accident. And self-sufficient we will remain.”

  McNolan shook his head. “This far from a star? Our solar arrays aren’t going to get too much business way out here.”

  “That might not matter,” Zafirah said, chiming in almost [83] before she realized it. When she noticed that everyone in the room had turned to look in her direction, she nearly lost her train of thought, then swiftly recovered. “I mean I think we can generate considerable power from what’s left of our warp generators. Probably not enough to create a warp field capable of getting us back home. But the output certainly ought to make up for our lack of nearby solar power.” Her gaze lit upon Avram Baruch. “What do you think, Avi?”

  Baruch’s smile was wan and unconvincing. “Maybe. If nothing else fails. I’ve already examined the generators up close, and they’re a real mess. Three of them overloaded, and four others are melted to slag.”

  “What about the nuclear reactor?” Mizuki asked.

  “The autosafety programs kicked in during the accident and jettisoned it,” McNolan said. “They would’ve done the same to the warp generators, too, if the computers hadn’t glitched somewhere.”

  “I think we can get by with what’s left of the warp generators,” Zafirah said, trying to sound hopeful. “Antimatter containment is still positive.”

  Baruch scowled. “If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, Zaf. And even if the antimatter storage fields don’t go south, it could still be a real trick coaxing everything we need out of the remaining generators without blowing ourselves out of the sky again.”

  “Well, we can’t afford to go too easy on the throttle,” said Claudia Hakidonmuya, Vanguard’s head geneticist. “We’ll need to convert a good deal of that power into the equivalent of sunlight. That is, if we want the hydroponics units to keep feeding everybody on board.”

  The director smiled again. “As I said,” she repeated, “we are self-sufficient. Or at least we can be, if we’re very careful, and very clever.”

  “Not to mention incredibly lucky,” Baruch said.

  “We weren’t vaporized when the warp field collapsed,” [84] Zafirah said. She was beginning to tire of the Israeli’s relentless negativity. “That would seem to bode well for our continued survival.” Inshallah, she thought silently.

  “Then I’ll consider that issue settled for the moment,” the director said, her confident smile never wavering. “Now we must look beyond mere matters of survival.”

  That surprised Zafirah, even coming from Dr. Mizuki. What, other than the fate of one’s immortal soul in the next world, could take on a higher priority than the colony’s survival?

  Baruch looked suspicious, his shaggy salt-and-pepper eyebrows raised. “What do you mean?”

  “Earth is still choking on the ashes of the Third World War,” the director said, evidently unfazed by Baruch’s reaction. “We’ve just demonstrated that we can tap a power source that could pull the rest of humanity out of that morass. We can offer the world hope.”

  “We’d have to learn to stabilize the warp field,” McNolan said, “before we’d be able to offer anyone anything.”

  The direc
tor nodded. “If we’d thought that was an impossibility, we never would have undertaken the experiment in the first place.”

  “We’d also have to tell somebody on Earth about it,” McNolan countered. “And that we survived in the first place.”

  “There are two tiny things wrong with that,” said Baruch. “One, a radio signal will take two centuries just to reach Earth. And two, all the external radio dishes were sheared off during the accident.”

  Sheared off, Zafirah thought, wincing slightly. Along with Lidia.

  Mizuki rose from behind her desk, signaling that the meeting was coming to a conclusion. She appeared undaunted by the difficulties that lay ahead. “Then the sooner we get started, the better. How soon can we get one of the radio transmitters operating?”

  Monday, 2 September 2058

  [85] At first, Zafirah thought the blip on the telescope’s viewer was a comet. But as it approached in a long, leisurely ellipse, she realized that the object possessed one particular feature that she’d never seen before on a comet.

  It has running lights.

  Less than an hour later, the viewers in the main control room displayed the spindle-shaped object—now clearly a sophisticated spacecraft of nonhuman origin—making a close approach to the asteroid’s exterior, and extending mooring grapnels to secure itself to the surface.

  Holding herself even more erect than usual, Director Mizuki stood in the room’s center and addressed everyone present. “We obviously have a first contact situation here, people,” she said, smoothing a wrinkle on the front of her dark blue jumpsuit.

  The human race’s very first first contact situation, Zafirah thought, trying and failing to prevent her hands from trembling. She wasn’t certain whether fear or joy was the cause.

  All she knew was that she could see no trace of fear or hesitation in the director’s eyes.

  “Let’s go and greet them, Zafirah,” Mizuki said. Turning toward Hakidonmuya and McNolan, she added, “I’d also like Claudia and Kerwin to join the welcoming committee.”