Approaching Omega (9 page)

He lowered his faceplate and sealed his helmet. In seconds he was breathing canned air in eerie silence.

They stepped through the hatch, back into the corridor, and Renfrew stood foursquare before the sliding door and ordered Latimer to close the hatch. "Then hold on tight, Ted!"

She had it all planned, he thought. He hit the control panel.

Behind them, along the corridor, he heard the sound of running feet. He swung round and fired, and the first phalanx of cyborgs came up against his shots. They fell, screaming.

Behind them, others appeared.

"Serena!" Latimer yelled.

The sliding door closed on the muzzle of her laser, and she fired.

In the nacelle, the viewscreen shattered. Latimer heard nothing, but felt the force of the displaced air as it tore past him, smacking Renfrew against the partially closed hatch.

Along the corridor, cyborgs fell to their knees, gagging. He watched, at once appalled and fascinated, as their flesh turned blue, exploded.

Seconds later, the pressure equalised, Latimer and Renfrew hurried along the corridor, dodging corpses, and stopped before the triangular hatch to the core.

Renfrew blasted the control unit and the hatch jerked open. Whatever had been alive and breathing in there, Latimer knew, was no longer.

Ahead, beyond a grotesque tableau of asphyxiated cyborgs, piled alongside those that Emecheta had killed, was the hexagonal hub of Central AI.

Beyond it was the halved pieces of Em's EVA suit. He had been so close, Latimer thought.

Smiling to himself, filled with a bitter sense of satisfaction mingling with the pain, Latimer raised his laser.

Beside him, Renfrew did the same.

For  a second, the screen set into the console above the banked terminal pulsed with a pattern of Mandelbrot fractals, and Latimer wondered if Central was about to plead for its life.

He signalled to Renfrew. Together they burned the AI, and stopped only when Central was a blackened, smouldering pile of slag.

Twelve

They made their way back up though the shattered nose-section of the ship, passing dead cyborgs and malfunctioning machine intelligences on the way. They depressurised the sealed sections of the ship as they went, by the simple expedient of blasting open hatches and doors with their lasers. They were cautious, lest rogue cyborgs had had time to locate EVA suits and save themselves.

They came across little resistance, one trilobite drone stuck in a cycle of endlessly firing off its laser pistol, and a cyborg which was dead, but slaved to an exoskeleton programmed to fire its laser at selected targets: in this case, EVA suits. Renfrew accounted for the trilobite, but Latimer almost walked into the slaved cyborg before raising his laser and slicing it to pieces.

They came to the impact breach torn through the ship, and powered themselves circumspectly through the vacuum. It would be tragic, Latimer thought, to come this far only to slip up through complacency.

They made the other side and rode an upchute to the command unit.

Latimer cracked his helmet and held Renfrew as she wept.

~

They sat at their com-stations and regarded the scene through the viewscreen.

Hangar Two hung against a backdrop of stars, drifting.

"That's our only hope, Serena," he said. "If the AIs didn't get to them..."

She turned to him. "And the mission? How do we get the ship back on course, without Central? How do we find a suitable colony world? I'm no com-expert, Ted."

He smiled at her. "Think about it. There's bound to be com-experts in hangar Two—"

"If," Renfrew said, "they're still alive."

He stared out at the drifting hangar. "I know they are," he said. He was convinced. There were a thousand colonists out there, totally oblivious to the horror that had ensued while they slept.

The alternative, that they were dead, or that the AIs had got to them, was unthinkable.

The two of them, alone on a crippled starship...

He stood up, affixed his helmet. "Okay, let's go take a look, shall we?"

They pressurised their suits and cycled themselves through the airlock.
Déjà-vu
, Latimer thought as he attached the safety cable and activated his powerpack. It seemed such a long time ago since he had last passed this way with Emecheta.

They exchanged a glance and kicked off, floating high above the wreckage of the superstructure. Minutes later they approached the great ugly bulk of the disconnected hangar. Latimer reached out and grabbed a hank of cable, and seconds later Renfrew joined him. They hung side by side, like swimmers enjoying a break at the side of the pool.

Latimer examined the twisted power supply and air leads. He opened up radio communications with Renfrew. "They seem intact and undamaged, Serena. Let's hope the sleepers weren't too shook up in the blast."

"They'll be fine, Ted," she murmured.

Hand over hand, Latimer hauled himself along the length of the cable towards the big bull's eye on the door of the emergency exit. They floated side by side, Latimer hesitating before keying in the code that would open the air-lock.

They had brought their lasers along, just in case. With his free hand he unclipped it.

"We won't be needing it, Ted," Renfrew reassured him.

"Hope you're right..." he said. He unclipped the safety cable from his suit and attached it to the lug beside the entrance,  then punched in the code.

The air lock door slid open; lights winked on within. They jumped into the lock and the door closed behind them. Half a minute later, the inner door cycled open and Latimer floated through. He was aware that beside him, despite her optimism, Renfrew had levelled her laser. He found the control panel and activated the halogens, and seconds later the chamber was flooded with light.

He found himself weeping with relief. There were no hostile cyborgs or roboids to greet them, no scene of wholesale butchery. The hangar was as it should be: row after row of cold sleep pods, their covers shut, their running lights sequencing normally.

They powered up and jetted over the gallery. Latimer directed himself down between the first rows of pods and floated towards the nearest. He looked through the crystal cover and felt tears coursing down his cheeks.

A young Asian woman lay fast asleep, her face serene. He bobbed along to the next pod, this one occupied by a European in his thirties.

He heard Renfrew's small voice in his helmet: "They're okay, Ted. Christ, they're okay. Every one of them!"

He turned. She was floating beside a com console set into the bulkhead at the end of the row. Latimer jetted over to her and examined the scrolling diagnostics.

"One hundred percent survival rate as of now," she reported, a catch in her voice. "Absolutely no problems at all..."

If only this had been Carrie's hangar, Latimer found himself thinking.

He said: "Access the files. Let's see what specialisms we have here."

With a clumsy, gloved finger, Renfrew tapped the touch-pad.

The manifest flashed up. She entered a command to find a com-expert among the sleeping colonists.

A second later the message appeared: None Found.

Renfrew laughed. "Christ, Ted..." She was scrolling down the list of a thousand names. "We've got agriculturists and biologists and zoologists... all the soft sciences, but not one damned computer specialist."

He felt his elation quickly turn to something very much like despair. "So... what now?"

A beat, then Renfrew said: "Let's get back to the command unit. We'll try to assess the extent of the damage, see what we can rig up..."

A cold weight lodged in his chest, Latimer nodded and followed Renfrew towards the air-lock. They cycled themselves through, attached the safety cables, and powered themselves back towards the distant, tiny light of the emergency exit high on the side of the command unit.

They had come so far, Latimer told himself, overcome such extreme odds, that they would not be defeated now. They would manage somehow to find a habitable, Earth-like world.

He wondered if he was deluding himself. It would be a tragedy if, after everything they had experienced in the past few days, they were to spend the rest of their lives wallowing at sub-lightspeed between the stars. Perhaps he could not bring himself to accept the enormity of the idea.

They reached the emergency exit and cycled themselves through, into the welcome familiarity of the command unit.

Latimer broke the seal on his helmet, pulled it off and cast aside his laser.

Beside him, something about Renfrew's body language alerted him. She had stopped, stiffened, and was staring across the unit towards the com-stations.

He followed her gaze.

Someone was sitting before the consoles, facing them.

It was Jenny Li.

Thirteen

Latimer's first thought was that it was a mistake to have cast aside his laser — the second, that Jenny Li, or whatever she had become, was not armed.

She sat in the swivel-chair, in her EVA suit, having removed the helmet. She looked tiny within the bulky suit, even smaller somehow because of her shaven skull.

She smiled across at them. "Don't be afraid Serena, Ted," she said. "It's okay. I won't harm you."

Renfrew stared at her. "How... how the hell did you survive?"

Jenny Li shrugged the massive shoulders of her EVA suit. "I was the only augmented human in the theatre when you depressurised the ship. All the others had been sent to capture you. When I realised what you'd done, I suited up and made my way back here."

Renfrew shook her head. "I mean... earlier. I thought... Emecheta was supposed to have..."

Then Latimer knew why Jenny Li was still alive: Emecheta had shot her, but the AI surgeons had repaired her, brought her back to life: it would not, after all, have been that much of a miracle, considering what they had done to the other sleepers.

Her high, child's laughter filled the unit. She said: "Oh, Em couldn't bring himself to end my suffering, Serena."

  Renfrew said: "Emecheta didn't...?"

"I saw him return," Jenny Li said. "I was conscious all the time, you know. All the time they were cutting me. I couldn't feel a thing — but I knew exactly what they were doing to me. Anyway, I saw you up there. At first I hoped you'd be able to do something, rescue me. But I knew that was impossible. Then Em came back, and I knew why. I saw him aim the pistol, and I willed him to kill me... but he couldn't bring himself to do it."

Latimer considered the big Nigerian, then, his cold rationality... So he had had a fallible, human side, after all. He wondered if that was why Emecheta had sacrificed himself in the end, because he knew that his inability to kill Jenny Li had compromised their mission to destroy Central?

"Me and Em," Jenny went on, "we were close, once. Then Em just turned off, concentrated wholly on the mission, ignored me." She smiled. "But in the end his humanity won out — he couldn't kill me."

Latimer shook his head. "None of us could. We... we wanted to — for your sake as well as ours. We didn't want you telling the AIs what we'd planned."

Jenny Li smiled. "Oh, how I cursed Em when he didn't pull the trigger! But then, a minute later, I realised how fortunate I was that he hadn't. the AIs gave me something wonderful, you know."

Renfrew said: "They turned you into a machine!"

But Li was shaking her head. "They turned me into something that still retained her humanity, but had gained something much more."

Latimer thought of Carrie, and knew that he did not want to hear what Jenny Li was telling him.

She went on: "I was still me, still human, but I had access to such knowledge, such a wealth of understanding."

"And now?" Renfrew asked.

"The same," Li said. "Oh, because Central is destroyed, the cache of knowledge available is reduced. But, in here," and she raised a small hand to the input jacks at the base of her skull, "in here I have a much greater understanding... of everything."

Latimer said: "We had to destroy Central, Jenny—"

She smiled, interrupting him. "No, Ted. You
thought
you had to destroy Central. Based on the knowledge available to you, by your own criteria, you had to do as you did. But your knowledge was partial; you acted on ignorance."

"We wanted to survive," Latimer said, "as we were."

"But you didn't even know what it was, truly, we wanted to change you into."

Renfrew stepped forward. She found a swivel-chair and slumped into it. "Central," she said, holding her head. She looked up, at Jenny Li. "Central was undamaged when we reached it."

The diminutive Korean smiled.

Latimer said: "I don't understand."

Renfrew turned to him. "Don't you see? Central was undamaged. We assumed, all along, that it was damage to Central that had sent it crazy, made it turn against us." She faced Jenny Li and said in a whisper: "But it was planned all along, wasn't it?"

Jenny Li shook her head. "Not at all. Just as the human crew was given directives, so was Central. It's directive was to survive at all costs, and to ensure the survival of the colonists. It deemed that, in the interests of the mission, a union should take place."

"So when the ship hit the cometary storm—" Renfrew began.

"There was no storm," the Korean said.

Latimer said: "The Hansen-Spirek coils...  The Earth first activist was right."

"The probes," Renfrew said. "My God, the Omega Corporation knew they were sending us out with defective drives."

Jenny Li said: "They knew there was a sixty percent chance that the coils would malfunction — but the Corporation had already invested so much, and Earth was nearing crisis point, that they deemed it necessary to go ahead with the mission." She paused, then went on. "In the event, they were correct. We
had
to leave Earth, whatever the potential risk."

Latimer said: "What do you mean?" He had an awful feeling that he knew very well what she meant.

She sighed. "Central received two communiqués from Earth in the thirty years of the mission, one twenty years after we set off, the second after thirty years. We couldn't access them up here, of course."

Renfrew said: "And? What did Earth say?"

"The first message," Li said, "reported a war on Earth between Europe and Oceana, biological plagues, mass slaughter. It was estimated that some two billion human beings perished in the war and its aftermath."

"Christ," Latimer said, finding a seat and slumping into it. And he thought he had experienced the ultimate horror aboard the
Dauntless
.

He thought of his sister, her kids. What chance that they had survived. Then he realised that this was all ancient history, now.

Renfrew said: "And the communiqué after thirty years?"

The diminutive Korean shook her shaven head. "It was little more than a farewell message, put together by a few surviving scientists. The war had continued, turning nuclear. Earth was moving into a self-induced ice age; they forecast that all life on Earth would be extinct within twenty-five years."

The enormity of the concept, allied to the idea that all this had happened hundreds of years ago, turned the tragedy into something abstract. It would be a long while before he fully understood what Jenny Li had told him.

Renfrew sat up: "So... we're the survivors, Jenny. You and me and Ted and the thousand colonists. We're all that remain..."

Latimer said: "What now? Is there any hope of finding a suitable planet?"

He saw something then in Jenny Li's eyes — perhaps the desire to tell him that, if they had spared Central, then the chances would have been excellent. He wondered what it was that had stopped Jenny reminding him of what they had done in destroying Central — the machine part of her, or the human?

She said: "While you were across at hangar Two, I patched together a rough com— system. With what I have up here—" she touched her head "-and the unit's auxiliary system I've repaired, we have a matrix that should be able to detect a habitable planet. Of course, we'll be moving at well below maximum speed, so it might take that much longer. But the computers servicing the cold sleep system are working AOK, so we should last the journey."

A silence opened up between them. At last Latimer said: "And you're on our side, Jenny?"

She smiled. "Whatever I might have become, Ted, I'm still human. I want to survive, with my species. Of course I'm on your side."

Later, they prepared themselves for another period of cold sleep. Jenny Li told them that she had instructed the com-system to wake them in fifteen hundred years, for maintenance checks, or before that if  they should happen upon a suitable, Earth-like planet.

As Latimer stretched out and gave himself to the crawling sub-dermal capillaries, his last thought was whether it was wise to have trusted her.

~

He woke slowly. His first thought was of Carrie, and what had happened to her. Then he remembered the thousand surviving colonists, and finding Jenny Li in the command unit…

He peered at the digital display above his head. Jenny had set the chronometers to zero before they slept — and now his read 800.

Which meant they had emerged before the fifteen hundred years scheduled for a maintenance check.

Which, he reasoned, could only mean they had come across a planet.

Either that, or there was another emergency.

He sat up. Renfrew emerged from her pod opposite Latimer. She smiled at him. "Was all that a dream, Ted?"

"A nightmare, Serena. But it happened." He pointed across the unit, to where an augmented Jenny Li sat at her com-station. "There's the proof."

Across the chamber, Li swivelled in her chair.

"What's happening?" Latimer asked. He stood, unsteadily, and crossed the unit to his own com-station. Renfrew followed him.

"What were you expecting?" Li asked, smiling. "Another Hansen-Spirek blow-out?"

"After what happened last time," Renfrew said, "I'm ready for anything."

Jenny Li tipped back her head and laughed, and the gesture was so human that Latimer could almost ignore the sight of the ugly cranial augmentation that adhered to the base of her skull. "Are you ready even," she said, "for a virgin Earth-type world, ninety-eight percent Earth-norm gravity, breathable oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, no indigenous sentient lifeforms...? In other words, the perfect colony world."

Something like elation swelled in Latimer's chest. "You're joking, right?"

"No joke," Jenny Li said, swivelling in her seat and hitting the touch-pad. "Alkaid VII, as yet unnamed."

Above her, the viewscreen flared with a panoramic view of  a mountainous valley falling away to a plain of blue-green grass and strange, attenuated trees.

"I sent a few probes down as soon as I came round. It looks like paradise, Ted."

She tapped the touch-pad and the scene on the viewscreen changed. Now they stared at a coastal landscape, a scimitar beach backed by rolling blue-green hills. Latimer made out lumbering, pachydermal beasts, snuffling through the red sands.

"I repaired the com-system linking the unit with hangar Two," Li went on. "The sleepers are all doing fine."

"What about the shuttles?" Latimer asked, aware that if they had been destroyed in the accident, then there would be no way of reaching the surface of the new world.

"I've checked. Three of the six were destroyed when the coil exploded. But the three others are in good working order. I've put the
Dauntless
into a low orbit. We can start waking the colonists, getting them down to the shuttle hangar."

When she stopped talking, a silence developed. Suddenly Latimer laughed, and instinctively reached out and pulled Renfrew and Li towards him.