Shackleton's Folly (The Lost Wonder Book 1) (33 page)

The fact that a Koty Union battleship was here meant that this place would soon be a very popular place if they had been able to make a report. Wars would break out quickly among the sentient spacefaring races. Who would want your noisy neighbor with whom you had disagreements once in a while to acquire technology that could obliterate you on a whim? A galactic war would sweep across space. Billions of beings would die for the power-hungry few. No, this place needed to stay secret. It had for a very long time, and it needed to remain so.

Alec said flatly, “He’s here, and so is the third piece of the inscription.”

Dancer evaluated the situation as he manipulated the video file and analyzed the data. The arrival of the Koty was all but certain after he and Alec had discovered the tracking unit on the hull. Dancer had removed the device and deactivated it. Once the Koty found the Gardens, they would look for them whether or not they could still track them.

The main screen showed the battleship
Illia
entering the sphere from the buoy’s point of view. Data, including the number of ships, configurations, and support was delivered on a sidebar as the video ran. The fighter support was noticeably remaining in tight formation to the battleship.

Dancer keyed in commands, and the main screen displayed the relationship between the battleship
Illia
, the Skiptracer’s ship, and the
Quest
. Dancer had made the port they entered as the prime meridian on the world map. The
Quest
had traveled 123° East around the interior of the shell. The Skiptracer ship was in the asteroid belt at 100° West, and the
Illia
was making a slow march West and had traveled to only about 3° from the port. The
Quest
flew at as low an altitude as possible and still clear the garden tops. The Koty battleship was furthest away, while they made good time toward their destination.

Dancer checked his sensors. He had been unable to detect any active sensor sweeps from the Koty ships, but it would only be a matter of time. “Are we going to be able to slip into Electra’s Garden without them seeing us?”

Alec turned to look at Electra and said assuredly, “You can count on it.”

The
Quest
’s silhouette sped across the cloud tops far below as the distance between the ship and the garden wall shrank. The force field “lid” on the garden top slowly shuttered, creating night below. Time in the gardens was regulated the same as the home world represented. Days and nights were meticulously recreated for the biosphere, including plants, animals, and insect life.

The xenobiologists were very scrupulous about the programming of the environments, including day/night periods. The days began with the lightening of the force field from one end of the garden. As this gradient crossed the garden, a prism structure moved behind, redirecting the star’s light to provide a world-like dawn. As the star’s position moved higher, the lid became the device managing the star’s light to the inhabitants of the garden. A secondary prism structure on the far end of the garden developed into the sunset, bringing upon the garden a close to the day as the lid reproduced the star’s light.

The night sky of each planet was fastidiously copied and made provisions for annual change of orbital positions and the planetary seasons. Binary and trinary star systems made the night sky short. But it was interesting to watch the realism brought here by the environmental engineers.

The programing of the seasons was also taken into account through the field-density programing of the lid and the amounts of infrared radiation passing through it. The lessening of the infrared provided the cooling and the cold seasons. The lid could be programmed to magnify the infrared radiation, creating desert-like conditions.

The environmental engineers had created bands of temperatures, giving the flat surface of the gardens the climates of a spherical planet with polar and tundra, boreal forest, mountain, temperate forest, Mediterranean, desert, dry grassland, tropical grassland, and tropical forest.

The trickier part of any planetary replication was the thermohaline circulation, giving the oceans the churn or conveyor belt action to maintain the biological processes needed to renew the water system. The environmental engineers not only had to recreate the planet’s natural system but had to apply it to an artificial system five orders of magnitude larger than the original.

Weather programming was developed in conjunction with the topographical engineers. They worked to provide the surface-feature placement for the weather dynamics needed to give the ecosphere the dynamics for environmental growth and development.

The Emperor wanted a garden where he could go and visit a large number of his most precious territorial possessions and colonies. Each garden had been built exactly in every way like the planet it represented. The Emperor would not have to lose so much time crisscrossing the galaxy to visit his favorite worlds. He would need only to come here to visit 1058 different worlds. The
Quest
approached the garden wall. This wall was different from the others they had crossed.

Electra was at the engineering station. She tapped Alec on the shoulder and pointed out the top edge of the wall, “The garden is coming apart at the seams.”

The
Quest
had to climb steeply to vault over the mismatched pieces of the wall. One garden abutted the other, but, here, instead of the wall tops being flush with each other, one garden wall was askew and rose three kilometers above the other.

“You could say that.”

Electra put her hand on his shoulder, “Seriously, the structure of the hanging gardens is unstable.”

Alec replied, “I see misalignment here. You are telling me that this is a recent occurrence? What provisions did the builders provide?”

The
Quest
flew through a slot between two structures on a garden wall’s edge and into the next garden.

“Alec, I do not understand it, but the prophecy foretold of someone, like you, coming to save the gardens,” reminded Electra.

Alec questioned her. “What does that mean? I’m not this seeker you’re looking for, but I will do what I can.”

Electra stated, “How do you know this wasn’t foretold long ago?”

“Electra, this place is overwhelming. I cannot even wrap my head around the fact it actually exists, and yet it does. Now you are telling me that it is falling apart and that I will be able to fix it. I don’t know what to say.”

She left the command deck. Dancer turned to Alec. “Hope is a special part of your race’s makeup.”

Alec turned over the controls to Dancer. Alec said as he turned out of the command deck, “Back in a minute.” He looked for Electra in the galley, checking the kitchen — nothing. Alec arrived outside Electra’s compartment. He leaned against the door frame and raised his hand to knock but hesitated. Then he rapped the door softly.

Alec asked, “Can we talk?”

The door opened, revealing Electra standing in the middle of the room. She did not make eye contact, and then she hung her head. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Electra said, “Yes?” Her head rose, and she looked directly back at him.

Alec reached slowly down for her hand. He took it with his and squeezed it. “I’m not the hero of your prophecy. There will be no godlike powers, no superhuman strength, but I will do what I can to stop this. I am that guy.”

She stepped closer to him, wrapping her arms around his back and putting her head down on his chest. They embraced tightly. She looked up and revealed to him a broad, beautiful smile unlike any he had witnessed before. She drew up her right hand and combed back his hair with her fingers. Electra said softly, “I know you will.” Electra leaned against him for comfort.

The copilot’s seat reverberated as Dancer tried some small, random maneuvers to make targeting harder. Another explosion off the port side shook the
Quest
up, but no real damage was taken by the ship. Dancer scanned the sensors and tried to get a fix on where the shots had come from.

Dancer toggled the ship-wide intercom system, “Alec! I could use your magic up here.”

The
Quest
shook with the force of another blast, this time off the starboard side. Alec entered the command deck and landed in his pilot seat. He strapped in. “I just can’t let you drive without getting into trouble, now can I?”

The ship had evaded the Skiptracer’s weapons fire, but this brought the ship closer for easier targeting of the
Quest
.

Electra entered the command deck with the maintenance screen. The screen showed in great detail their position, the position of the Skiptracers, and the position of the Koty battleship. It was slowly heading their way.

Alec looked at the screen. He understood what it was showing them. Alec said, “Oops.” He yanked back on the control, pulling the
Quest
into a tight inside roll, coming in behind the Skiptracer ship.

He brought the nose of the ship within weapons range of their tormenters. “Fire!”

Electra fired the charged weapons. The blasts hit the Skiptracer’s shields.

Dancer took a reading. “No effect.”

Alec shook his head. He looked over at Dancer. “Let’s lose them!”

The two ships were flying in extraordinarily close proximity as they jockeyed for position. Alec and Dancer tried to get the crew of the Skiptracer ship to forget trading weapons blasts and to compete on purely flying skills. The speed of the ships grew increasingly reckless. The garden wall quickly approached as the two ships bumped and fought for the lead. The top of the garden wall was filled, as far as the eye could see, with shiny objects. The closer they came to the wall top, the easier it was to discern that what they were seeing was energy production on a scale never seen before. The solar panels were pointing in a static, upward direction. The solar fields were outside the gardens they supported, so they were not affected by the planetary sky reproductions inside the gardens. Their precious power production was one of the main reasons to produce a structure like this. Free and plentiful power generation available continuously.

The
Quest
banked hard port and bumped the Skiptracer’s ship into an unrecoverable dive into the garden wall top. The crash was spectacular. A cloud of solar-panel destruction flew up in front of the Skiptracer’s ship as it impacted with the surface like fine powder in front of a snowplow just after the sky had dropped 45 centimeters of fresh white stuff. The ship clipped something very solid unseen under the canopy of solar panels and flipped end over end, cartwheeling to a stop 500 meters later against a translucent cone-like structure rising 100 kilometers from the wall’s top edge. The cone resonated with more than just the kinetic energy it absorbed as the ship rang it.

The garden wall top was 1000 kilometers across, with a great seam that bisected the wall for the entire length between the two gardens. The seam allowed for structural flexibility. The gardens were not connected by material means. The builders knew that a solid sphere would not be stable for extended periods around a star, so they had built a self-aligning maintenance system to release-align-reattach that made corrections and removed any chance of stresses building up and destroying the sphere.

The wall tops of the gardens were not flush with each other, and, even as the
Quest
passed over it, there was movement as one garden shifted even higher than the other.

The
Quest
’s course took it over the top of the wall into the next garden. The new garden was substantially different from anything they had seen. There wasn’t a lid covering it, and, instead of a biosphere, they found only an enduringly flat surface far below. The
Quest
dropped down into the empty space.

Alec, Electra, and Dancer watched the readings on their screen.

Electra looked out the ports. She pointed at motionless objects. “This is why my world is in danger.”

The
Quest
’s altitude decreased, and the screens filled with machines on a gargantuan scale.

Electra put her hand on the back of Alec’s chair and pointed to a building in the distance. “That is the central Maintenance Citadel for all of the gardens. It is no longer functional and has left the machines without direction. Scheduled maintenance has not occurred in eight thousand cycles, and the gardens are ready to come apart at the seams.”

The
Quest
reduced its altitude and speed even lower as they got closer to the Citadel.

“How often did they awaken?” asked Alec.

“Every 200 cycles,” replied Electra.

Dancer checked his screens. Dancer keyed in a command. “It was automated?”

Electra responded, “Yes. It was those who left us during the exodus that caused this.”

Alec looked inquisitively. “How?”

Electra’s expression became flat. “They took with them pieces of the dedication plaque that ran the Emperor’s Hanging Gardens. They warned us not to follow them.” She turned Alec enough to look into his face. “What they did not know was that the dedication plaque was the primary regulator for the maintenance system. When they removed the section they did, they damaged the sphere-integrity system, a critical system.”

Alec considered her statement. “We’re going to need all three pieces to make the fix.”

The
Quest
stopped its descent into the garden at an altitude of 8000 meters. They flew down a wide corridor of the biggest tool shed Alec had ever seen. They zipped through the space, level with the top of an elaborate storage system. Rows upon rows of storage systems stretched out into the distance. The number was easily in the tens of millions. The purpose of the tower formation of its structure was to add more storage per kilometer of surface space. Each storage system was an open-faced tower, a little wider at 350 meters and a height of 6150 meters and deeper than what it contained. The storage system held six maintenance robots standing at a kilometer in height one above the other in nearly perfect alignment to the robot above and the robot in the next storage system over. The robots were built for heavy construction and repair work on an order hard to fathom. The robots showed no sign of recent activity, nor did they react to the passage of the
Quest
. The
Quest
continued toward the Maintenance Citadel.