City Without Suns (22 page)

Chapter 47

39 Days Remaining…

The importance of the situation weighed heavy on Breccan’s conscience.  He had been away from the bridge for six days and although not summoned, he was curious how the preparations were coming along.  Plus, the incomplete holographic model of Gamma stuck in his memory, and he wanted to see what the new imagery looked like.  He decided to approach the bridge and enter, not knowing if he would be welcomed.  He had resigned the key after all, and whether they needed him or not, Ace had assumed the primary role as pilot.

As expected, Breccan’s former station was occupied.  The two other human apprentice pilots were present, standing on the platform surrounding the holographic model of the destination.  They turned to acknowledge Breccan, making brief eye contact but turning away when he greeted them. The recent Keyholder strolled to the middle of the spherical space under weight of the main engine acceleration.  The bridge was as he left it, still illuminated by the secondary images of the surrounding stars revealing the destination planet on the walls as still no more than a spec of light.  The magnified hologram was the better view, but it was incomplete, even at the late stage during their approach. 

Breccan asked, “Why is the imagery incomplete?”  One of the other auxiliary pilots shrugged his shoulders while the other ignored him completely trying to hide the discomfort at the presence of their former superior.

“Keyholder Breccan, where have you been?” A voice came over the surrounding sound generators, a phenomenon that could be triggered by only a Keeper.  Ultima, the chief Keeper Pilot, approached up the wall from the bottom of the sphere. The Keeper slid itself up the surface and grabbed a platform with several of its legs spiraling around some of the crossbeams.  It pulled itself up to the top and mobilized its body across the platform to the hologram, where it stopped in an unthreatening manner.

Breccan responded, “Not feeling well, Master Pilot.”

For a few moments, Ultima returned the reply with nothing except silence, as its uniform color did not translate into an audible reply.  After long silence, words came again from the speakers, uniquely present on the bridge to ease communication, but present in few other places on Neptune.

“You have passed on the key prematurely, young pilot.”

Thinking quickly on his feet for an appropriate reply that would not be disloyal, Breccan answered, “I knew Ace would be an adequate substitute while I was unable to attend.  I will take the key again, if you wish.”

“Do you want it back?”

“No, I can still help during our remaining time.  Who holds the key is no longer important.”

Had anyone else said those words for Ace to hear, the idea would have provoked ire, but Ace’s feelings toward Breccan could still be described as a fearful respect, even though he was now the Keyholder.  None of them, including the Pilots, were accustomed to the new arrangement, and Breccan’s reply left the relative rank and status among them more ambiguous than it had ever been.

“Very well, pilot Breccan,” the voice punctuated the short conversation with the Keeper, but the questions were not finished.

The previously unresponsive youth Orr wore a frown.  He stifled the volume of his voice and asked with a whisper, “Have you really been sick?”

Breccan was annoyed at the question and did not honor it with an answer, trusting it had gone unnoticed by the deaf Pilots and the bridge translators.  He just shook his head as Orr looked away unable to hold the gaze of his superior.

The attention shifted again to the distorted vision of a planet in front of them.  The shape of the holographic sphere had finally been formed from the data collected by the telescopes, but one side of it was nearly transparent as if that part of the planet were made of vapor.  The ghostly side of the planet defied any explanation, as if the celestial body was a cosmic piece of fruit from which a giant bite had been taken.

The star they always assumed to be nearby was actually distant, no brighter than the others that speckled the spherical display.  It had grown no larger in the window than it was when Breccan last studied it, several days before the last time he was in the bridge when he turned the key.

“Gamma is literally in the middle of nowhere,” Breccan murmured.  He realized what the pilots present already knew.  Even the Keepers seemed to have a somber mood as they slogged around the bridge without their normal brisk movements and energy.  All of the telemetry they had from the ancient beacon suggesting favorable temperatures and atmosphere were contradictory to what they were observing.  There was no nearby star to provide energy consistent with the light and heat coming from the celestial mass, and the paradox left Breccan marveling whether Gamma was an asteroid or a small star.  Either way, the planetary home he had hoped for seemed nonexistent, but there was no choice.  They had invested everything in that destination.  The fuel spilling into the void would soon be spent.  Gamma, for better or worse, would be next stopping point, the only one Breccan and the others would ever see.

The hologram rotated in front of them.  The oceans were evident under the clouds, which glowed from underneath suggesting an unseen energy source.  Breccan looked at the model and then met Ace’s eyes.  Helpless, Breccan hung his head, looked downward, and walked slowly out of the bridge.

When he had just entered the adjoining corridor leading back to the human living area, he heard a call back from the bridge.  Orr was standing at the open door.

“Where are you going? You’re worthless!” Orr started to say more, but was unable to complete his thoughts, apparently distraught that he had to stay on the bridge.

“Step right here and say that again,” Breccan replied while pointing to a spot on the ground in front of him.  The location in front of him was out of view from any Keeper on the bridge. 

Orr looked down at the place on the floor as if it was a different world.  The place where he was situated in that moment was safe, but the world that beckoned him was dangerous.  He wanted to take the three steps into the different world, for without doing that, everything he was trying to say was null and void.  He wanted his words to be heeded.  He paused and turned around back into the bridge, ultimately unwilling to call the bluff and risk being physically punished by Breccan.

Breccan walked away frustrated.  It was not that last encounter that bothered him, although he was irritated at the disrespect shown by the youth he had helped teach.  His torment was much larger.  He had always wanted desperately to lead them to success, which had been defined in their lifetimes by the arrival at Gamma.  His role in that process was now defunct.  Almost daily, his rage made him want to hurt someone, one of the people he wanted nothing more than to help.  Every time it happened, he was more humiliated than proud, and he knew he was more feared than loved.  Somehow, nothing but anger was ever evident.  He knew it and sensed he had a problem, but he did not know how to recover the persona he had been raised to project.

Chapter 48

36 Days Remaining…

Breccan accompanied his sister Nova to look for the children she had not seen in several days.  He certainly did not want her wandering off alone like she tended to do sometimes.  It was no longer safe.  The people were more boisterous than normal, while the Keepers had stopped monitoring.  Approaching the tier-three section of the ship, they heard commotion.  Nova slipped her fingers along Breccan’s palm and took hold of his hand.  The firm grip asserted by her comparatively smaller hand caught his attention, and he latched onto it in return to show that her hand was welcome in his.  More than that.  He held secret attraction for his foster sister but considered it improper to let anyone know, especially her.

“Isn’t that room big enough to hold all ninety-eight humans?”  Nova asked, referring to the testing chamber ahead.

Breccan did not answer the question, for he knew the number was really ninety-seven if Rose was not counted, and the count maintained by the Keepers decremented without explanation sometimes anyway.

“Odd, there is no testing scheduled with the pending landing,” Breccan noted as he peered around the door’s edge.  Although the noise level suggested there was a large crowd, there were only six full-grown men in the room with seven children.  The children were running on treadmill stations in front of immersive displays showing planetary habitats from Old Earth. 

“Faster!” yelled Andre, a tier-three clone who worked as a cleaner and was refusing to do that work anymore since it was not being enforced.  He was the ring leader for the event underway, in which he gathered all the youngsters ages six through eight, some of whom had already been qualified as tier-two.

Breccan reflected on the practice of testing, normally supervised by Keepers to categorize the humans.  They had a vested interest in the members of the human species, whom they needed to help guide the ship.  They needed them to breed, they needed them to perform services for other humans, they needed work to be done around the ship, and unbeknownst to the people, Breccan suspected an occasional individual was kidnapped to provide food for the few remaining meat-eating dodecapi.  He had heard Ultima utter through the bridge translator one time in the past, ‘was the human harvested?’  The question was not directed to one of the pilots, and he always wondered the purpose of the strange question that seemed to be picked up accidently by the automatic translating device.

To ensure the Keepers’ goals for the humans were met as efficiently as possible, the children were grouped at about age six.  With such little time remaining in the planned voyage, the practice had stopped.  Yet there they were, witnessing what looked like a physical testing in progress.

Breccan, initially confused at the sight, had an idea what was happening as he saw the events unfold.  Left to their own devices, some of the tier-three clones appeared to have instituted a new test.  Feeling slighted by their plight, they considered the imposition of hardship on some of the children who were coming of age a form of entertainment.  The first of the children fell from exhaustion, and the men jeered at his misfortune.

“Tier-THREE!  Welcome to my world you miserable little lowlife,” proclaimed Andre.  Two men approached and began to urinate on the boy, leaving him to clean the puddle as his first assignment to inaugurate him among the servant class.

Breccan released Nova’s hand and stepped through the door, not saying a word.  He glared at Andre, the strong yet inept tier-three as he approached.  The five others stepped away from the children at the sight of Breccan.  Andre held his ground but began stuttering while seeking justification.

“Testing.  We had to do the testing…” spoke Andre as he tried to defend his actions.  It was clear to him and everyone in the room that Breccan was holding him accountable. 

Breccan remained quiet, as the children ran to the edge of the room where Nova stood by the door.

“Please, it was just for the testing,” repeated Andre as he held out his arm toward Breccan, who was advancing upon him in an extremely slow stroll.

“Yes, of course,” grumbled Breccan with his teeth clenched.  “Now your test will begin.”

In the space that remained in between Breccan and Andre, about three steps, Breccan accelerated into a run.  He lowered the top of his head to meet the bottom of Andre’s chin.  Andre was rendered unconscious from the blow and hit the ground on his back with Breccan on top.

A moment later, Breccan heard the sound of heavy and rapid footsteps approaching.  He turned to see two Keepers moving swiftly across the floor behind him.  The unusual rapid scurry of the twelve-legged creatures was an odd combination of graceful and clumsy.  They propelled themselves quickly and were upon him before he could stand.  Breccan and Andre were quickly wrapped up in long, sprawling arms.  A Keeper had never accosted Breccan before.  The tier-one markings on his hand should have been enough.  His status had never been in question before.  He realized as he was being carried out of the room that perhaps his markings were not seen.  Maybe enforcement that had been interrupted for days had been resumed when a potential fight was detected.  Maybe his markings had gone unnoticed, but he was given no chance to protest.

“No!” yelled Nova.  She followed her brother, who saw her but could not yell back with his mouth covered by one of the Keeper’s limbs.  She pursued them around the main corridor and was barely able to keep up.  They proceeded around the ship, under the bridge, and into prohibited sections she had never seen, but she refused to give up.

…

They came to a place that looked like a shower room.  It was almost featureless except for the drain in the floor and the faucets protruding from the walls, but there was an additional object on the wall.  The room had been equipped with a translator, the rare device that bridged the gap between Keeper and human communication. 

Andre and Breccan were tossed onto the floor.  Andre, smothered by one of his carrier’s arms, had not reawakened and lay unconscious on the hard surface.  Breccan pushed himself backwards into a corner as far away as possible, and to his dismay, he was followed by Nova, who ran to his side. 

They looked at the Keepers flashing a display of changing colors in their skin.  Seemingly unknown to them, the translator deciphered their private communication.  Breccan heard the resulting audible words come out of the translator but did not respond to the discomforting conversion of the Keeper light signals.

Idiot, those two are tier-one.  This one is a tier-three.

It does not matter anymore.  The humans have no useful purpose in our short remainder of a voyage.

I recognize that one.  He is a pilot.

The necessary pilots are already in the bridge.

Eliminate the tier-three.

Before the communication was complete, one of the Keepers had picked up Andre by both wrists and both ankles.  The tier-three clone struggled but was still not fully awake.  He was not given time to understand.  A fifth arm from the dodecapus wrapped itself under Andre’s chin.  The man could not inhale, as his face was slowly turning blue with his eyes opened wide in horror.  A sixth arm encircled the abdomen, a seventh and eight wrapped around each leg, and a ninth and tenth grabbed each arm.  They all constricted.  Breccan did not know how to react.  A valiant person would have jumped forward to aid the fellow citizen despite the earlier offense, but eleventh and twelfth arms waved in front of him to impede any advance.

The arm around Andre’s midsection released and the others pinned him flat against the floor and stretched him. The arm around the neck unwound.  He gasped for air a couple of times.  Before he could regain his wind, the Keeper pounded down across the stretched stomach and shocked the air back out of his victim.  The crippling blow was used merely to establish a target, for the next moment, the same arm came crashing down with unspeakable force and met the floor underneath.  Andre was severed in two.  Still alive, he could not speak and could not breath.  His eyes looked only at the ceiling.  It was the last thing he would see. 

Breccan did not hesitate.  He grabbed Nova’s hand and sprinted past the Keepers through the only doorway. They ran through the halls into a dark abyss.  They continued into darker sections of the ship, not wanting to turn back the other way lest their accosters could capture them again. After a few seconds Breccan slowed as the surroundings grew more and more absent of light.  Instead of him leading the way with his sister in tow, Nova took the lead to guide them through the dark labyrinth.

…

The ship was only about two kilometers in circumference, Breccan thought, but he had never traversed its entire span.  He instinctively wanted to get back to their quarters, where Keepers had always protected Nova.  Maybe he should have tried to speak to the murderous ones that pulled them away, but after watching what happened he could not stay.  He did not know whom to trust, especially when he no longer wore the key.  Would he need to hide?  No, surely not. While these thoughts were racing through his head, they reached a dead end in the corridor.

Nova could see a ramp to the side, which given no other choice, they approached.  It led them downward to lower levels of the ship, making Breccan uneasy as he had hoped the main corridor would continue all the way around back to their section.  The ramp spiraled in the darkness for what seemed like a distance great enough to reach the center slice, where Breccan knew the gravity stones were housed, the dividing line between the upper and lower hemispheres.  The other hemisphere contained an ocean, swarming with dodecapi according to legend, on the other side of which there was another area of the ship unlikely to ever be seen by people. 

The ramp ended at an obstruction made of metal, cold to the touch.  Breccan felt it in the pitch-black surroundings. 

“It’s a door,” observed Nova, who could see what her brother was feeling.

“Okay, but what’s on the other side?” Breccan asked.

He gripped the wheel and twisted with all his might.  The device rotated slowly and gradually loosened until the door cracked open.  They stepped cautiously through the portal into an area that contained some soft light emitted from glowing tracks in the walls, and Breccan could see once again.  If they could just travel long enough in the same direction, he reasoned, they should reach the section of the ship considered home.

They entered a spacious area where there was a lake of water, where they stood on a bed of sand alongside the reservoir.  Breccan cupped his hand and scooped some of the water up to his mouth.  It was a fresh water store, filtered from the salty ocean beneath it and fed through the gravity stone layer that separated the ship hemispheres.  The area was rectangular, probably the largest open space they had ever seen on Neptune.  It was much larger than the bridge, and the surface area of the water was greater than the floor space of the library.  A bulkhead that dropped off steeply into the water outlined the thin strip of sand aligning the lake. 

As Breccan and Nova made their way across the sandy floor, something moved in the periphery of Breccan’s vision.  He checked the water’s surface but nothing was there.  He looked all through the area about fifty meters to the side where they entered but still there was nothing. He was sure he saw
something
move.  He looked up to the ceiling about forty feet over his head into darkness.  He could not make out the features at the top of the room.  There must be some kind of scaffolding in a water reservoir area, he thought.

Then he wondered why thoughts of scaffolding at the ceiling would enter his mind since he had never been in that place.  He knew nothing about water processing and maintenance on Neptune and didn’t even know where he was on the ship.  There was a faint ringing in his ears that suddenly became noticeable and grew in volume until it was loud.  It became so piercing that it brought Breccan to his knees holding his hands over his ears, but he could not shield the noise.  It was as if it was originating inside his head.  Nova’s concerned touch on his shoulder did nothing to comfort him from the shrill noise.

He saw it again, a shadow over the sand.  It was gone as soon as it appeared.  He clenched his teeth to endure the deafening whistle.  The noise increased in pitch until he could no longer hear it.  He looked over the sand at something flying.  It was too fast for him to discern its identity, perhaps an insect in the ship, and he was fascinated to think there was a different Earth species onboard. 

“What’s wrong?” Nova implored as she dropped to her knees at Breccan’s side.  She had a hand on his back and another trying to pull her brother’s face to hers so she could see his expression.

“I’m fine.  You didn’t hear that?”

“Hear what?” Nova asked.

Breccan wanted to ignore the noise inside his head.  Although he could not help but worry something was wrong with him, he temporarily dismissed the anomaly, stood up, and they continued to the other side of the giant mid-ship cavity and into another dark hall.  The light from behind them slowly lost its luster as they walked the slow curve.

In the darkness, the high-pitched whistle started again, drowning the faint sound of their footsteps.  The screeching and shouting inside Breccan’s head did not seem to affect Nova.  Intermittent phrases entered his mind as if being spoken.  He closed his eyes while his sister pulled him through the black passageway.  The fleeting thoughts he heard were fragmented and incomplete.