Interzone 244 Jan - Feb 2013 (16 page)

“
Agreed.”

Multi-frequency lasers aimed at a point four
hundred thousand kilometres ahead and pumped a dense burst of
information down the beam. They sat calmly and waited. After seven
minutes a screen lit up, showing a white-haired gaunt woman.

“
That was quite a
spectacular arrival. It’s pretty dark out here, but you sure lit it
up. Thank you. The Iron Lady is not in good shape. We have your
ship identified as Zbeta97gamma. Do you have a friendlier
name?”

Victor held down the mute button on his
chair arm and said, “We never got around to naming the ship. Any
ideas?”

“
Oh yes,” said Mariam.
“Axon came up with the name a long time ago.”

“
Did I?”

“
We’ll have the champagne
later. I name this ship Sky Leap. May she and all who travel in her
be safe and happy!”

Others were steadily crowding in behind the
woman – Renata – on the display. “We need to know,” she said, “if
your imploders are intact. Ours are, but we have no motive power of
any sort.”

“
What imploders?” Victor
and Mariam asked in unison.

Axon broke the link and the screen went
dark.

“
The forward halves of this
ship and Iron Lady contain devices to collapse local space into
super-massive black holes. The intention is to put these in place
so that their immense gravity will sling-shot the dark matter
object heading for the Orion-Cygnus arm of the Milky Way out of the
ecliptic and off to who cares where.”

“
Why weren’t we told? There
seem to be a lot of things we weren’t told!”

“
There are
consequences.”

“
Oh,” said Victor, “I think
I see. Unless the ships jump at exactly the right time we’re going
to get a close-up view of some very nasty event
horizons.”

“
Correct.”

“
Oh, shit! It’s a suicide
mission.”

“
Look on the bright side,”
Axon said. “Iron Lady’s central brain is totally dead. Without that
the operation becomes almost impossible.”

“
I don’t think almost is
that bright a side,” Mariam said. “I would prefer totally
impossible.”

* *

The impulse engines
powered up and
Sky Leap accelerated towards Iron Lady; estimated journey time
fifty-seven hours. As the adrenalin-rush faded, Mariam and Victor
were suddenly hungry and thirsty. They dialled the food system in
the crew mess to deliver kebabs, salad, and a bottle of champagne.
When he’d popped the cork, Victor splashed champagne down the
wall.

“
What are you
doing?”

“
Ship-naming.”

“
Isn’t the champagne
supposed to be on the outside?”

“
The door’s that way. Off
you go, sis.”

“
Ex-sis.
Remember?”

“
Oh yes. I very definitely
remember.”

“
Good. Looks like we’re
going to die soon, so we may have to pack the rest of our lives
into a couple of days. So don’t take too long eating that
kebab.”

He was still chewing his last mouthful when
she took the champagne bottle in one hand and his arm in the other,
kissed him, and led him off towards the isolation chamber.

* *

They were still
lying in each other’s
arms when the alarms went off. Naked, they ran to the door. The
second it slid back, blinding pain shot through their heads and
they both screamed.

Victor pulled Mariam back inside the
containment chamber and hit the manual door-close button. They
leaned, panting, against the wall as the pain subsided. “Axon,”
Mariam said. “Something’s seriously wrong.”

Victor went to the control panel and
cancelled the alarm. “System – diagnostics – Axon-specific.” Data
streamed down the right of the main screen, and to the left a
coloured diagram of Axon’s spherical brain pulsed with bright green
highlights. “Analysis,” Victor snapped. After a few seconds a
synthesised voice said, “Ninety-four per cent of neurons are firing
synchronously.”

Mariam stared at the data. “What does that
mean?”

“
It means,” Victor replied,
“that Axon is having an epileptic fit.”

“
What can we
do?”

“
Wait. The support systems
are supplying suppressants.”

A chime sounded, the data shrank away, and
Renata appeared. “Why are you initiating a jump?” she demanded.

“
We’re not,” Mariam
answered.

“
Your webs are deploying
and charging. Have you kids gone crazy? If you jump now you will
annihilate us. You must stop it!”

Victor switched the diagnostics from
Axon-specific to general, and there it was – clear evidence of the
first stage of a launch.

“
Axon’s having a fit. We
can’t go outside this area without frying our brains.”

“
Look,” Mariam said,
pointing at the ship’s schematic on one of the screens. Slowly, the
front section was peeling back.

“
Oh, my God!” Renata
shouted. “He’s arming the collapsers.”

“
I’m going to try to reach
the control room,” Victor said. “It’s the only way.”

Mariam grabbed him. “You won’t make it!” she
yelled. He shrugged her off, and headed for the door. Intolerable
pain. Fire raging behind the eyes. Fear, torture, anguish,
blindness. Victor stumbled on along the corridor trying hard to
keep moving through the overwhelming horror in his head. He had no
idea that Mariam was close behind him. They sensed without senses
that they were in the control room, where warning lights were
flashing red.

Victor forced himself to shout “Emergency
power-down! All systems.” He scarcely heard the request for
multiple confirmation, or Mariam’s strained “Confirmed.”

Circuits disconnected. Pumps ceased to spin.
The fierce pain in their heads reduced to the mere level of a bad
migraine. Only emergency lights lit the chamber. Outside, the great
flaps at the front of the ship stopped moving, at half retraction,
arrayed like petals around the bulbous hull.

“
You’re an idiot,” Mariam
said as they lay slumped in their chairs. “So are you,” he
replied.

“
I hate to ask, but now
what?”

The emergency power supply kept the control
panels alight. Victor touched and swiped across them. “If we don’t
supply power to Axon’s nutrient and oxygen supplies he’ll be dead
in ten minutes.”

“
Can we disable the link to
us, and feed him?”

“
No idea.”

“
Well start
thinking.”

“
We need to talk to Iron
Lady, so I’m restarting power to the isolation area, our
life-support, and Axon’s vital supplies. Done.”

The lights in the control room came back on,
and speech recognition systems re-booted.

“
Power to the central brain
– monitoring only.”

The image of Axon’s neurons still pulsed
with abnormal regularity.

“
Power to external
telemetry and comms links.”

After a pause, the worried face of Renata
reappeared, and then she smiled and said, “Fantastic! How did you
do it?”

“
Victor hit the big off
switch,” Mariam said. “We’re bringing systems back if they are not
controlled by Axon. Victor, send the brain imaging to Iron Lady,
please. Renata, do you have a doctor in your crew?”

“
Three.”

“
Get them to look at the
images. We need suggestions urgently. What’s happening is outside
the automatic brain control system’s programming.”

“
Keep transmitting. I’ll
get to you ASAP.”

Victor was carefully studying the complex
diagrams of the ship’s electrical systems.

“
Apply power to
distributors alpha theta nine-seventy and nine-seventy-one. Then
close the forward doors.”

“
Weapons control is not
available to you.”

“
Bollocks!” Victor shouted.
“Give us control, now!”

“
That cannot be
done.”

Mariam put her hand on his shoulder. “Calm
down. There has to be a way around this. They must have planned for
central brain malfunction, surely?”

“
If they did, it’s
something else they forgot to tell us.”

Renata reappeared on the screen. “Can you
give us control of the brain support systems? The medics want to
send instructions to produce some drugs that should halt the
seizure.”

“
OK, but I doubt if the
ship will let you,” Victor said.

“
Oh – it will.”

Shortly they watched the brain read-out as
it was flooded with anaesthetics and seizure-suppressants. Slowly
the storm calmed and normal sleep patterns emerged. And then the
brain went dark. Warning signals flared on the control panel.
Axon’s support system went into overdrive, injecting adrenalin,
administering electric shocks. But still, the mighty brain remained
inert.

Axon was dead, and with him any hope of
going anywhere. They stood silently for a moment, and then Victor
turned towards the image of Renata.

“
To put it in the
vernacular,” he said, “it looks as though you fucked up.” Before
she could reply he reached over and cut the comms link.

“
Look,” Mariam said. “The
forward doors are closing. System – explain.”

“
Fallback condition assigns
full command to Victor and Mariam.”

“
Restore the quantum webs
to the rest position.”

The webs slowly retreated.

“
Restore full power.
Correct the course alignment to previous targeting
schedule.”

“
Deceleration will begin in
three hundred and twenty minutes. Alignment with Iron Lady in
seventeen hours.”

“
Victor,” Mariam said, “I
can feel your thoughts. Something’s happening to us. And by the
way, it’s bad luck for men to baptise ships. Just thought I’d tell
you.”

They ate and then slept for a while, curled
up together, exhausted, mourning the loss of Axon, their triplet.
Then they were summoned to the isolation chamber, where a
pre-recorded message from Somerton gave them a new briefing.
Silently, Sky Leap slipped into position parallel with Iron Lady.
When they reopened the comms link to the other ship, Renata was
furious. “You cannot cut communications like that. You will come
over to Iron Lady in your shuttle immediately.”

“
On the contrary,” Mariam
said, perhaps too sweetly, “you will use your shuttles. All
personnel on Iron Lady will be transferred to Sky Leap in the next
eight hours.”

“
Impossible.”

“
Check the authorisation
codes we’ve just sent you. Both ships are now under our
command.”

* *

Mariam and Victor
had never seen so
many people before. Areas of the ship that had been mothballed were
opened up, kitchens came to life and remembered how to cook,
previously dark corridors were full of life.

During the next twenty-four hours, six
hundred injections of newly-manufactured nano began to work on six
hundred human brains.

Renata and the other senior members of the
Iron Lady’s crew were not taking kindly to having their power
usurped by a couple of teenagers. Arguments raged in the control
centre, until Victor banned them. Mariam was better at empathy, and
went to great lengths over coffee and cakes to reduce the tension.
“Look,” she said time after time, “if you have a better idea, let’s
discuss it. Otherwise, the choices are, stay here and run out of
everything, or take the risk that we can complete the task we came
to perform.” At last, if they didn’t see reason, they saw
inevitability; and they saw the truth that the supposed twins had
more abilities than even they themselves knew.

At midnight, ship’s time, the
nano-injections had diffused through grey-matter. Every human was
strapped securely into inertia-damping chairs. Sky Leap and Iron
Lady began to accelerate in perfect synchronisation. For the first
time in their lives, over six hundred souls heard a voice, not
through their ears, but in their minds – the calm voice of Mariam.
“Dear friends,” she said, “Iron Lady is now slaved to this ship. We
have begun the launch sequence. Our great brains failed us, so now
we must link our small brains together and hope that we can
succeed.”

Outside petal-like doors folded back from
the noses of the ships, and the gossamer webs unfolded and
expanded.

“
Immediately after the
collapsers have been launched,” she went on, “we will turn and
attempt to ignite the main drives. You may find it disturbing,
possibly frightening, but you must not fight it. Victor and I were
bred for this task, but we need each of you, and all of you, if we
are to have any chance. Let us wish ourselves well.”

In the control centre the one-time twins
looked at each other. “This could be a rough ride,” Victor said,
and blew Mariam a kiss. “Let’s do it.” He issued the final
command.

Missiles streamed from the nose of the
ships. The impulse drives cut, and the bay doors were closing even
as the great vessels changed course, turning away from the missile
tracks. And then Victor and Mariam locked their brains with all the
other brains and began the impossible calculus which could subject
the quantum foam to their bidding. Strange fire crackled through
the webs. Slowly, much too slowly, flickering erratically, the
ships began their leap into the void.