Shackleton's Folly (The Lost Wonder Book 1) (43 page)

Alec said to Dancer, “Find a nice spot outside the city and set her down.”

Dancer replied, “Understood.”

Alec left the command deck and rushed to the stateroom where Wolfgang had been left.

*

The
Quest
came down softly on a grassy hillside overlooking the city of Atlantis. The airlock opened, revealing Wolfgang and Alec. Alec supported Wolfgang as they left the ship. They walked at Wolfgang’s pace to a large rock jutting from the ground. Alec helped Wolfgang to the ground with his back to the stone. He had an unobstructed view of the city, its waterways, and the straight blue channel of water pointing the way to the ocean. He saw the gleaming statue of Poseidon atop the temple in between the modern skyscrapers that surrounded the park even at this distance.

Wolfgang ran his hands through the grass beside him and pulled a clump from the ground. The dirt-encrusted root system teemed with life from Earth. He put it to his nose and took a deep breath. His senses filled with the organics within the dirt and the sweetness of the grass. “I made it home.” He took another long, deep lungful and slowly exhaled out both his breath and the last of his life energy. Wolfgang was gone.

Electra came from the ship with the walking-wounded Atlantean Security Force members they had transported. Alec had made his way to an outcropping that overlooked the valley below with Atlantis. The force field overhead no longer had the directed starlight to produce the sun’s passage across the sky; it had stopped its projection. It was the first time since the garden’s construction the inhabitants could see not only the star as it truly appeared but the asteroid disk around it and the other gardens as great jeweled hexagons adrift in the heavens. The hexagons were loose on their axis and ever so slowly spinning. Their garden was rotating away from the star.

Electra walked up silently, stopping close to him as they both held their breath and watched the sky, waiting to see what happened next.

“A beautiful sky for the end,” she reflected.

“Yes, a wondrous sky,” came Alec’s quick reply. He took her in his arms and pulled her close. “I found everything I was looking for. You, for one.” He gently kissed her, and she responded, warming to his touch. “I wish we had more time,” he said.

“I love you,” she said, her voice a whisper.

Dancer exited the airlock with the maintenance screen in hand. He looked for Alec and saw that he would be interrupting them, but, hey — it was the end of the world, right? “Alec, I have to show you something.” He walked over to the pair, who begrudgingly released their hold on one another. Dancer held up the screen for Alec and Electra. The screen went blank immediately.

“Why, how interesting. A blank screen?” said Alec, deadpan.

Dancer looked at the screen again, “Come on — you were showing me something you wanted me to see.”

“Talking to screens now, are we?”

Electra had spent such a short time with the pair and could not pin down the exact nature of the relationship, but family or brothers came to mind. She considered the banter she had with members of her family clan.

Dancer scanned for damage to the screen and found none. “It should be on, so the Groundskeeper has quit displaying information on it for some reason.”

“Maybe it’s busy elsewhere,” retorted Alec. He took the maintenance screen from Dancer. As he did so, the world went dark. Not the dark of just night but the power system of the garden went out as did the power of every other garden in the sphere. The garden’s new orientation was now outward from the star, the inside of the dark nebula their only light source.

“Okay,” said Dancer. “That was different.”

Alec tried to key in commands, and a cursor winked on in the upper left corner. Alec held it so both Electra and Dancer could view the screen, “I think I got it.” A flash of characters crossed the maintenance screen. A real-time representation of the sphere’s interior came to life, with the asteroid field disk around the star highlighted; the view zoomed in, and a very tiny point lit up. Then the view zoomed in again on the
Illia
.

Alec was about to say something ironic but checked himself. “The Koty are not in a safe place to weather this one out.”

Dancer replied, “We don’t have much time. Once the force field fails, the gardens’ atmosphere will start to bleed out to space. Life here will not last long after it happens.” Dancer looked up at the heavens. Dancer walked back toward the bow of the
Quest
. “The force field is failing.”

Electra looked at Alec imploringly, their closeness reassuring to the other.

Alec spoke. “It should have worked. We did what it asked.” He keyed in commands, and a system schematic popped up. It was the only light they could see in the garden.

Electra reached out and found his shoulder. She ran her hand across to his other shoulder, took it, and pulled him close to her. Alec was lost in thought; he studied her face. Electra asked, “Can I help?”

“Of course,” came the answer. Alec reviewed the screen and pointed to the blip. “The Koty’s ship.”

The screen showed the breakup of the gardens from different vantage points from the interior of the sphere. The views that most interested Alec were the ones tracking the Koty battleship
Illia
close into the asteroid field and the ones from the exterior of the gardens showing the gardens in various orientations to the star they once enclosed. The perspectives of the vantage points gave Alec a rough idea of where the cameras were stationed. The dwarf planets the Empire had employed to sweep the debris from the exterior of the gardens were also being used to monitor the shell’s exterior. The shots filling the screen showed the breakup of the gardens and the huge gaps that had developed between the individual rotating pieces.

Alec watched closely as the vantage point returned to the interior of the gardens, focusing on the battleship
Illia
. The screen then focused on the disk of asteroids that were not supposed to be there. Alec smacked his forehead with the flat of his hand, “I am such an idiot. The Groundskeeper has been telling us that the Koty are in danger where they are. That disk of floating rock is about to get cleaned up, and so will the Koty, if we are lucky.”

Dancer had heard some of what Alec had said. “They’re too big for us to fight one-on-one,” reminded Dancer.

“How about some reverse psychology? If I try and fail, so be it,” came Alec’s response.

“Where are we going?” asked Electra as Alec took her hand and pulled her along as he headed back to the
Quest
.

“I have to warn them of the danger remaining in the asteroid field,” he said as they entered the
Quest
.

“Don’t we want them in danger?” asked Electra.

“Absolutely,” answered Alec.

The
Quest
’s engines fired up immediately. Electra looked out the port at Wolfgang, motionless in the darkness. “Are we just going to leave him here?”

“We will be back to retrieve him and the wounded,” said Alec.

The
Quest
leapt from the ground, departing the hillside in darkness. Its engines first lit up the area and then faded as the distance became greater still. The
Quest
made short work of the trip to the asteroid field.

Electra looked out the portal and saw titanic bands of energy flowing through and around the individual gardens. The red energy sparked across the highlighted gaps in the sphere. All of the gardens were receding from the star at the garden’s core. The black organic cloud, made up of giant robots, ebbed and flowed, seeming to touch down on the points of every garden wall.

Dancer said with some surprise, “Will you look at that!”

The
Quest
flew above the disk of the asteroid field. The ship’s exterior gleamed brightly in the star’s yellow light. The
Illia
lay about 40° ahead of them around the asteroid belt. Maintenance robots flew through the belt, grabbing individual asteroids and herding them toward the star. Once they had the rock on a trajectory with enough momentum to burn up in the star’s fiery surface, they released the asteroid and came back for another. The procedure was the same for all the material smaller than the robots. The bigger pieces required a larger, more direct, response.

The
Quest
’s command deck was again full. Alec and Dancer were at their stations. Electra was seated at the engineer’s station. Alec checked his sensors. The asteroids were of all sizes and shapes. They had been attracted over the millennia by the pull of gravity — first to the garden and then down the gravity well formed by the pentagons and the artificial gravity systems surrounding them, as they had witnessed earlier. Now they were being recycled in the nearby star to one day become a part of another star system.

Alec took the
Quest
down through the disk that made up the field and came out the other side. Once they were clear of the asteroids, Dancer’s attention went back to the maintenance screen. It showed the Koty battleship on the move. The
Illia
maneuvered itself closer to the asteroids.

Alec took the
Quest
on a course that kept significant amounts of rock between them and the
Illia
. Alec pointed out the maneuver’s significance. “They’re hiding.” Alec switched the communication system on, setting it to a civilian frequency the Koty were known to use. Alec said, “Captain K’Dhoplon, it’s no longer safe for you here.” Alec listened.

Dancer used the maintenance screen to give him the perspective he needed. “They are just sitting there,” remarked Dancer.

“Of course, they are — they think they are safe where they are. The gardens are moving outward.”

Electra stood behind Alec, looking at the monitor and out the port. A giant robot grabbed the quarter-kilometer rock they were behind and jetted out of there. They were out in the open, and three kilometers away was the
Illia
’s stern.

Captain K’Dhoplon appeared on the communication channel, and his voice crackled from the speaker. “If you won’t die on the ground, so be it. You will die here in space. Fire!”

A huge volley of energy blasts struck the
Quest
’s shields with enough energy to bring them into the visual spectrum. The source was not just one gun but from eight points among the aft decks of the battleship.

Alec blasted the
Quest
out of there and kept as many of the asteroids as he could between him and the
Illia
. The battleship fired her engines to take up the hunt for the
Quest
.

Dancer checked. “Shields down to 35 percent.” He got up and took the engineer’s seat. Electra had made way for him and taken the copilot’s chair to get out of Dancer’s way.

Alec saw the concern in Electra’s face. “I had to try to distract them. The longer they stayed, the greater the chance they would get caught up in the cleanup.”

“I know,” she replied.

The
Quest
put on speed to outrun the
Illia
. Engines fired beyond the threshold of safety as the
Quest
started putting some distance between itself and the Koty, but now they were out in front of their massive forward guns. The
Illia
’s main guns trained themselves on their quarry, fired, and grazed the
Quest
. They did strike an asteroid next to the
Quest
’s shields. The exploding iron core of the asteroid became shrapnel that caused the
Quest
’s shields to fail. The explosion showered the hull with a coating of iron oxide and larger pieces. Control surfaces were damaged, and a chunk of asteroid stuck out of the aft engine compartment.

The
Quest
set course for Atlantis. The
Illia
seemed to hesitate leaving the safety of the asteroid belt, but its Captain felt the escape of the humans too great an offense not to stop. The
Illia
throttled up her primary engines to full power as it followed the
Quest
through the asteroid field.

Alec checked his flight controls and then looked back at Dancer and shook his head. Alec turned to Electra. “Nothing left we can do but get out of here.”

Electra reached over, put her hand on top of his, and held it, giving it a squeeze. Electra was filled with emotion. “When the power goes out in the gardens, all life support will end.” She stated clearly, “My family won’t leave; they will suffer the same fate as our people. Please take me home; then you can leave.”

Alec stared into the bulkhead marked by years of wear. He touched the spot and closed his eyes. Alec turned to Electra and said with conviction, “I am not leaving you behind.” He paused. “You’re stuck with me. I can think of no better place to be than with you and your family.”

Electra smiled softly; a tear welled up and ran down her cheek.

Alec gently wiped the tear from her face. “Now that’s settled. The flight controls might be a problem, but we will get her down safely.”

*

Captain K’Dhoplon surveyed his bridge. “Discontinue firing, and don’t stray too far from these rocks. The energy discharge will consume the ship if we are hit directly.”

His weapons officer nodded.

“Have the
Saleen
rendezvous with us immediately. We will catch and find the human soon enough after our forces have regrouped.” Captain K’Dhoplon cursed, “We will strip this place bare and conquer the galaxy.”

*

The
Saleen
selected a course its latest commander found as a pathway through the newly formed gaps in the exterior shell. They had taken readings and found a cycle to the red energy’s peak periods. The course lay in wait and timed it just right. The battleship
Saleen
made it across the gap between the gardens and made best speed to the
Illia
. The two ships closed and fell into formation.

*

The sphere’s expansion had slowed to a stop. The gardens were adrift; many had returned to their original orientation. Each of the hexagon garden walls had the same fields of energy collectors as they had found, and, in amongst the collectors, rose the same large energy rods that had been at the port. The rod devices extended to the same height as before — six kilometers.