Story
copyright 1995 by Brian A.
Hopkins.
Illustration copyright 1995 by Jenise Aminoff.
Jenise, a New Mexico native, works in Boston and is
a graduate of Clarion 1995.
Brian is an electronics engineer who
lives near Oklahoma City. His stories have appeared in Aboriginal
SF, Dragon Magazine, Adventures of Sword and Sorcery,
and many small-press publications. This story originally appeared in the
hardcover anthology Infinite Loop.
The grass is a teal color which Holly
associates with her childhood in Reeds Crossing, Kentucky. It's a
genetically tailored strain requiring very little water, with broad,
paper
thin blades engineered to make maximum use of the dome's diffused
light. Nothing like it ever grew in Kentucky. Nothing like it grew here
on Port either, before their coming. But the grass feels and smells like
home to her. It's one of their more successful transplants, though
certainly not their only one.
By far, the most important
transplant is themselves. Thirty-six colonists -- thirty-seven when she
delivers in five months. The first humans to settle on a world not
circling Sol.
Air. As foreign to her lungs as if she were an
infant just pulled screaming from the womb.
The taste of
hospitals and camphor.
A cold, hard surface. The uncertain
familiarity of it against naked flesh.
The smell of sour metal
and plastic and ... something hot, something burning.
Strangely
transposed English, hesitant, muffled as by a thick fog: "Please, you ...
wake up, Holly Knight. Time there is none to waste."
Following the voice, pain. Needles in her lungs and flames held to
her extremities. Transverse lasers burning behind her eyes. Tremors and
chills and acid in her veins.
A dark whirlpool beckoned, its
black propinquity offering sensory caesura. Relief. Escape. She
retreated down its silent throat....
Beneath the turquoise sky,
against the plethoric bed of grass, Evan's skin is a healthy, nutmeg
brown. The vanity of sunlamps, thinks Holly. Dietary supplements
provide all the photo-nutrients they need. In that strange way he has of
knowing what she's thinking, Evan's face reddens. Then he smiles and
lays a calloused hand against the slight velvet swell of her stomach. He
doesn't speak. Words are rarely necessary between them. The child isn't
technically his -- the colony's gene pool is much too small for natural
insemination. The med computer chose the best genotype from ship's
stores and Holly dutifully accepted. Still, Evan's treating the unborn
child with no less attention than if it had come from his loins. Holly
loves him all the more for it.
And of course the sky isn't
really blue; that's just the scattering effect of molecules in the dome
field. Beyond the dome's illusive border the sky is an overcast haze of
methane clouds, banded by a mustard brume of sulfuric acid, the
comet-like trail of one of Port's two moons. But the field does more
than fool them with an Earth-like blue sky; without it they'd be
strangling on carbon dioxide, the principle component of Port's
atmosphere.
The methane clouds hang about forty kilometers above
Port's surface, swirling with powerful vortices, scathing with fierce
sheets of blue lightning. The fast-darkening horizon is stratified with
distant aurorae that Holly has thus far failed to capture accurately with
oil and canvas. Port's minute axial tilt means there are no seasons,
just this perpetually overcast grey, as if it's always about to rain.
Days and nights are short, just a little over six hours Earth-time, by
which standard the colonists still reckon the passage of events,
converting even Port's protracted 3.26 Earth-year course about Alpha
Centauri into figures they can relate to.
Evan draws her close
through the thick grass, presses his lips against hers. His body is
solid and warm.
"Holly Knight!"
Her summoner waited
outside the whirlpool, impatient but determined. She was only
peripherally aware of the voice, like conversation from another room or
the whispering of ghosts.
"Please, Holly! Minutes just, and
they are through!"
There was a child-like quality to the voice.
Desperation. Maybe a rapidly fading hope. But most of all she heard a
fear that tugged at her heart. As she drew near, the pain returned.
Needles. Thousands of needles....
It's the clouds and the
carbon dioxide that make Port temperate. Like a greenhouse: stellar
radiation slips through, but the longer wavelength of reflected heat
energy is trapped in the heavy atmosphere.
Evan's hands work
their magic on her body. His mouth shifts to her neck, tracing the fine
blue veins beneath her pale skin. No sunlamps for her. She's expecting.
Over Evan's shoulder she watches Port's fleeting moons chase each other
across the sky.
There are two, the fiery giant the colonists
named the Wicked Stepmother and the petite red lady they call Daughter.
Stepmother is all orange and reds and yellows. Torn by Port's tidal
pull, shattering seismic forces grind deep within the spherical moon.
Tectonic surface plates shift and splinter. Volcanoes spew geysers of
sulfur and steam into the upper atmosphere, leaving a yellow smear of
sulfuric acid streaked across the sky. Daughter is much smaller, a
triaxial ellipsoid measuring a mere 27 by 15 by 18 kilometers, tidally
locked so her long axis is perpetually oriented to Port. Port's powerful
magnetic field has captured Alpha Centauri's stellar particles,
stockpiling them in the upper atmosphere. As Daughter moves through this
swarm, she generates and sustains a flux tube, an elliptical hose of
electrical current millions of amperes strong connecting her to the
planet with a tempest of unequaled electrical fury. Thus the Stepmother
chases the Daughter across Port's sky, each trailing their veil, one fire
and smoke, the other blue lightning.
She was aware of being
slapped.
Evan's hands slipped away as dream and reality
intertwined. She clutched at him. Rather, she clutched at someone, for
the flesh she caught was soft and cold.
"No!" she screamed,
seeking over his shoulder the panorama of Port's unique sky ... as if
it could save her from reality.
The other dominant feature in
the sky, excepting Alpha Centauri's twin luminescence and the bright star
of Legacy in orbit, is their only neighbor, the red gas giant they've
named Ball. Ball's atmosphere is pure nitrogen, the red clouds a
photochemical smog of carbon compounds, ethane, acetylene, hydrogen
cyanide, and ethylene. Beneath the smog, the slushy surface is scarred
with slow rivers of liquified ethane and methane, the failing arteries of
some vast beast whose heart pumps natural gas. Ball is harried about the
double star by an even half dozen botryoidal moons, each covered with
dark organic polymers formed from photo-dissociated methane. The gas
giant's rotation axis is drastically tilted relative to the orbital plane
such that the planet appears to roll on its side about Alpha Centauri;
hence the name Ball.
Evan's eyes are blue diamonds in which
she's grown accustomed to seeing her face. But what she sees there now
is a long room of plastic and steel and row upon row of horizontal glass
cylinders, each teeming with pale, pulsating fluid. In the catoptric
surface of the nearest cylinder she finds her own face, tiny reflection
within tiny reflection. Her visage is twisted and obscured by the miasma
of fluid within, but as she draws closer the juxtaposed fragments come
together.
Holly draws back in terror. In the reflection, she's
seen the ruin of her face.
And in the ruin of her face, she's
seen the end of the dream.
* * *
The
left side of C-Holly's face hung in a cadaverous devastation of
micro-filaments and components, many of the latter blackened and fused
into the memory grid that comprised the majority of her brain. In the
twisted depths of the damage, Holly's eyes found a focus that the rest of
the room refused to yield. She blinked several times, but failed to
overcome the illusion that it was her head she was seeing reflected in
some strangely warped mirror.
When she reached out to touch,
C-Holly caught her hand in a powerful grip. "Explanations wanting, no
doubt. But not time."
An emergency, Holly realized, rubbing
fiercely at her eyes though it intensified the pain in her head. There's
been an accident. Her retina held the afterimage of C-Holly's ravaged
cranium. Crew damaged. Mission perhaps in jeopardy. Get up,
Holly! Again her nostrils caught the acrid bite of hot metal.
She tried to speak, coughing up several ounces of cryo fluid that ran
like yellow syrup down the front of her. "Stim," she finally got out.
Her voice was distant and weak.
"Dumped," replied C-Holly.
Holly looked at the custodian incredulously, but found only truth in
that half of her face where emotions were still writ as honestly as
software allowed. But to be expected to function just out of cryo
without a stimulant? "Explain."
"No time." And C-Holly dragged
her to her feet.
Weight meant they were still under spin, meant
they were still out from Alpha Centauri and not, as she'd hoped, in
orbit. Goodbye dreams, she thought with no little reluctance to
let them go. Cryo-induced gloaming was all they'd been, but Evan had
been there, had loved her again. And then there was the pregnancy that
had never been. Holly ran her hand across the flat expanse of her belly
and felt jaded and hollow.
There were two doors to the cryo bay.
Holly knew their location as if it were just yesterday she lay down here,
though in fact she knew it had been much longer. Long enough for her
custodian to have sustained this damage. How long, she couldn't tell.
There was a chronometer on the wall, but her eyes refused to focus on its
chemo-green numerals.
It was the doors she smelled. Both were
glowing, running in hot polysteel slag to the deck panels as someone
burned through from the outside. The control panels beside them looked
to have seen the operational end of a sledge hammer. Holly registered
the twisted ruin of C-Holly's left hand.
"Crew," explained the
custodian.
"Crew did this?" Holly pointed to the gaping cranial
injury.
The custodian's good hand went up as if to touch her
face, a human gesture programmed for effect only. The custodian felt
inoperability, but no pain.
"Answer me."
"Jean did ...
this."
Holly's gaze swept left and right down the sloping
corridor, but hers was the only cryo cell open. Cupped within the
pulsating fluid of each of the other thirty-five was the fuzzy dark
silhouette of a human crewmate.
"C-Jean," the custodian
corrected herself.
Holly pressed her temples in an attempt to
silence the miniature chain saw in her forebrain. Her throat was raw,
her thinking fuzzy, and every muscle in her body screamed for her to lie
down. She needed a stim tab bad. She was naked and cold, with yellow
goo drying on her body and clotted in her hair. "C-Jean's after you
now?" It was a trick question: both doors were burning.
"All
custodians," C-Holly answered.
"Explain. What have you done?"
The custodian looked hurt, an easily readable emotion even with
half her face in ruin. At least Holly had no trouble recognizing it; the
custodian had, afterall, been programmed with her personality-profile.
"No time!" she insisted, pointing to the doors running like hot
summer ice cream.
"But we're trapped. There are only two
doors."
"Knew you know way other than door."
If I
know another way, Holly thought, then you should, too. She
wanted to trust the custodian, but this was not the awakening she had
anticipated. She studied the shattered eggshell of C-Holly's head, the
puerile set of her mouth, the vacuity behind her single emerald eye.
Maybe she didn't know. How much data would such an injury
destroy?
Holly crossed to the inner wall where a massive bank of
cryo controls jutted from the wall. Kneeling, she popped free a lower
panel.
"No exit there," insisted the custodian.
Holly
looked back over her shoulder at the desperate face of her carbon copy.
"Access to the core," she explained irrecusably. "You've forgotten whose
father designed Legacy."
* * *
Decades
to dream. To remember Evan and autumn days. To relive a park where
squirrels chase each other in mad circles through leaves of every
imaginable shade of red and gold. To walk in the sad ruins of ancient
colonists.
And then a church where once two people of clashing
cultures were wed.
Jamestown, Virginia.
She dreams
she's Pocahontas. Swears she'll trade everything to live in his world.
* * *
In one of several maintenance bays
spaced the length of the starship's central axis, Holly huddled in a
corner near the ceiling and fought the need to throw up. Her arms ached
from the long haul up the shaft. She was shivering uncontrollably. It
was cold here, but not as cold as it had been in the core. They'd come
within a thousand meters of the ship's forward con, known as the garret,
before she'd reluctantly surrendered to her screaming muscles and the
nausea brought on by weightlessness. The garret, where there was a full
set of ship's controls, had been her goal. The maintenance bay hosted
little more than diagnostic terminals.
She'd tried to draw more
information from the custodian, but after a single epiphany -- "Our
father designed Legacy!" -- C-Holly had withdrawn to an opposite corner
to stare at the juncture of the walls.
When her trembling
muscles calmed, Holly pushed off from the ceiling, coasting with more
force that she'd intended. Collision with the floor jarred her already
pounding head. She rebounded and caught herself against a maintenance
console where she hung, feet drifting aimlessly off the floor, body
turning slightly in the minute centrifugal force of the ship's spin.
The console responded promptly to her touch. A level one diagnostic
reported all ship's systems functional and compartment integrity intact
with the exception of CB-12. She ran a level two on the cargo bay and
was told it had been blown, was even now gaping open in vacuum. The
airlock refused to cycle, hinting at circuit damage that could be
assessed with a level three query, but she didn't intend to waste the
time.
"C-Holly, what happened to the cargo bay?"
No
response. The custodian huddled in a tight ball, wrapped around whatever
memories her damaged neuro-net still held. Holly recalled the
custodian's earlier comment when she'd requested a stimulant. C-Holly
had said the drugs had been dumped. Med supplies, Holly knew, had been
stored in CB-12.
Why had the bay been purged to space? What had
caused the damage to the airlock? A more detailed systems check echoed
the first. All systems were fully operational. Then she noticed
something else. The forward sensors were locked on an approaching
object. From here there was no way to get a visual, but with a
diagnostic feedback loop she was able to tap into the raw data as it was
relayed to the aft con. What she could decipher sent cold shivers up her
spine.
"C-Holly, you've got to tell me what's happened?"
The custodian shook her head violently.
"What's out there?
What kind of trouble are we in?"
"Crew terminate C-Holly."
It wasn't an answer, but at least C-Holly was talking. "I won't let
them hurt you," Holly promised.
"Put you back in cryo."
Custodians were programmed with an override that prevented them
harming a human, but nothing kept the crew from putting her back under.
The custodians were to awaken a human upon establishing orbit around
Alpha Centauri or in the event of an emergency, but they'd also been
programmed with personalities matching the thirty-six crewmembers. That
made them human. That made them fallible, with perhaps motives and
objectives of their own. The scientific rationale for the per-profile
programming was so crew interrelationships could be simulated and studied
before the actual life and death scenario of planetfall and colonization.
But no one had been revived when the cargo bay had been blown.
No one had been revived in the emergency that had damaged C-Holly. Holly
had a sudden trepidation: if she were put under again, there'd be no
second chance, no further awakening.
Sensing she wasn't going to
get anywhere with the custodian, Holly turned back to the maintenance
terminal and entered a data request. Every con signal ran the length of
the ship, from aft con to the garret, routed through the maintenance bays
for diagnostic purposes. All she had to do was find the right signal.
Schematics flowed across the screen, rapidly targeting the area
of her query. The screen finally halted, a cable bundle marked MAIN VID
flashing red, one strand of many highlighted via holography. Holly
studied the hovering filament for a moment, noting its markings and the
panel location blinking in the corner of the screen. Then she popped
loose an access panel beneath the console and went to work.
"Can't remember him," C-Holly all but whispered.
"Who?"
Holly asked as she separated cable bundles.
"Our father."
"My father," Holly corrected. You're a machine. And a damn poor
one at that. If you'd tell me what the hell's going on, I wouldn't have
to try to rewire this monitor.
"Left him, didn't we?"
A dozen or so delicate wires slipped through Holly's fingers, losing
themselves with others she'd already checked for the proper routing
codes. "Shut up," she told the custodian.
* * *
In a dream, she stands still in her father's house. And she
tries another time to walk away.
As the day fades, shafts of
sunlight cross the hardwood floor where her feet are mired. The sun goes
down. And then the moon. Again and again in a mad procession and she
watches him there in his rocker, the eerie back-and-forth sound of it on
the oak, the creeping of age across his face, a mist across his eyes.
Ashes to ashes.
She crosses the room and bestows upon
him one final kiss before the winds sweep him up and away.
Dust
to dust.
* * *
It hung there on the
jury-rigged maintenance monitor, a dark hispid disk bristling with
antennae and weapons, all but lost against the black of space. No
exploratory vessel, that. It was designed for short range speed.
Maneuverability. War. Despite its shape, despite its obvious purpose,
she wanted to believe it was alien. The legend across its starboard
flank said otherwise.
"How?" she asked aloud. But she knew how.
There was only one way to have beaten Legacy to Alpha Centauri.
* * *
"Faster-than-light travel, Holly. I'll
crack it soon."
"Dad, you know I can't wait that long." She
took his hand. "They're looking for youth, vitality, women in their
child-bearing years. By the time you solve the FTL riddle, I'll be too
old."
"I'll always be able to get you a berth, Holly. You know
that. Let Legacy go."
"I don't want a berth on your reputation!
And I can't let Evan go, Dad."
"Please, Holly. I'm begging
you."
She was all he had. Locked in his lab these past
twenty-five years, she was all he'd known since her mother died giving
her birth. She didn't want to see the tears in his eyes, didn't want to
see him beg. She steered him toward the only thing she knew would take
his mind off her deserting him: his work.
"Tell me how it's
possible to travel faster than light."
She saw that he knew what
she was doing. Alexander Knight was terrified of facing the reality of
being alone. He led her across the lab to a large black object. "Do you
remember this?"
Holly ran her hand across the smooth plastic.
"A vortex. You used to entertain me with it as a child. I'd set coins
here on the rim and watch them spiral down through the center."
He smiled. "You were much more easily amused then. Now it takes
quantum physics and astrogation to entertain you."
"What did you
expect? I am, after all, Alexander Knight's daughter."
"Pay
attention then." It was an old, unnecessary admonition. He'd been
lecturing to her all her life and she'd rarely failed to pay attention.
She'd learned early on that her father knew the secrets of the universe
and, through him, so could she.
Knight placed, not a coin, but a
stainless steel bearing on the rim of the vortex. "On a flat plane the
bearing would roll in a straight line unless acted on by external forces,
but here it behaves differently." He released the bearing and it started
a graceful elliptical spiral toward the vortex's center. "If we took
away friction with the air and the surface, and balanced the
gravitational attraction, the bearing would circle indefinitely."
"A miniature solar system."
"Yes. The path of the bearing
is called a geodesic. How much the geodesic deviates from a straight
line depends on the mass of the central object and the radial distance."
"The closer the bearing gets to the center, the faster it
rolls," said Holly. "As it loops out, it slows down again." It seemed
elementary to her. She was anxious to hear where FTL travel fit in with
these basic principles of physics. Recognizing her impatience, she
realized it stemmed from the same fear she saw in her father. She was
terrified of leaving him.
"Right. It has to do with the angle
at which the bearing meets the vortex plane. The greater the angle, the
more influence on the bearing. The angle corresponds to what in four
dimensional space we call the gravitational gradient. What's interesting
is what happens to the gravitational gradient very close to a
tremendously massive, very small object --"
"Like a black hole!"
"Exactly. Imagine the center of our vortex is that black hole.
Very massive, but smaller than the tip of a needle where it meets the
space
time continuum. The sides of the resulting gravity well are now
almost vertical. As we approach, we fall faster and faster."
"Faster than the speed of light?"
"Maybe. There's a paradox
here wherein the process shrinks space. You accelerate for a certain
period, falling into the vortex, and then reverse the process,
decelerating, and you wind up having gone much further than you seem to
have gone, much further than you should have gone given the energy
expended."
"So if I had the means of projecting a black hole
which I could chase through space . . ."
* * *
"You did it, didn't you?" she asked the screen and its
silent vessel with VIPER stenciled down its side. "You gave them FTL."
C-Holly turned from her corner and studied the monitor. "Won't
answer artificial life. Blast us, they say." She looked to Holly.
"Woke you. Talk to them, Holly Knight."
* * *
A thousand meters.
The only consolation was that
the center of the ship didn't experience the spin-induced gravity, thus
the thousand meters was merely that and not a thousand meters straight
up. She was trembling, dizzy and weak, fatigue and hunger riding her
every fiber. She'd donned a jumpsuit from the maintenance bay, but it
was thin and offered little protection against the cold. She had no
shoes. Her feet might have stayed warm if she was using them, but the
long haul up the shaft was accomplished by hand rungs, leaving her legs
trailing useless behind. She knew the garret was far enough removed from
the core that it would be under, if not a full G, at least considerable
gravity. Knowing the rate of spin and the length of the garret's arm,
she tried to do the math in her head, but her brain refused to cooperate.
She only knew she wouldn't be able to stand up when she reached it.
The custodian followed dutifully, a winking of cranial signals in the
gloom, her silent labor antithesis to Holly's ragged breathing. They'd
crossed half the distance when C-Holly began to ask questions.
"Alexander Knight. He was ... how?"
What was he like? "He
was brilliant. Perhaps the most intelligent man that ever lived."
"Not my meaning." Holly didn't look back, but she imagined the
custodian shaking her head, laser strobes flashing through the tangled
wires as she sought vocabulary and sentence structure protocols. "Left
him ... we left him. Why?"
"I left him," Holly corrected,
leaving the rest unanswered. She'd left him to follow Evan. Evan, who'd
already set her aside for another. For Jean Elwood. Determined not to
lose him, Holly'd used her father's influence and her own technical
credentials to get herself assigned to Legacy.
"Hurt him." It
was an observation, not a question.
Holly's voice caught in her
throat and it was a moment before she got out a strangled, "Yes."
"Loved C-Evan."
"Evan," she corrected before she realized
the custodian hadn't meant it to be a question.
"C-Evan,"
C-Holly insisted. "Loved C-Evan ... I did."
Holly paused on a
rung, her forward momentum arrested by tugging one arm nearly out of the
socket. She sensed another piece of the puzzle hovering within her
grasp. "You loved C-Evan?"
"Yes."
She didn't say,
But you're a machine, an acarpous, sterile facsimile of me. How can
you love? Personality profiles, she realized, were more complete
than she'd ever dreamed. As the rest of it fell into place, she said,
"But C-Evan loved C-Jean."
"At first."
That seized at
her heart. At first? "Explain."
"In time, C-Evan love
C-Holly."
* * *
She kneels now before an
empty rocker in total silence.
Into this silence she says her
goodbyes. Alexander Knight taught her all she ever needed to know. Not
just the astronomy, the engineering, the physics and math and workings of
the universe, but from the child he hid behind his eyes, she learned of
music and laughter, love and art. It was he who taught her to paint.
Yet all her life, a voice inside has whispered, "Set me free."
"All this time," she asks the still rocker, "was it your voice
or mine?"
* * *
The crew had detected
her hasty wiring in the maintenance bay and guessed her next move. They
were waiting when she dropped from an access shaft into the garret.
Seated at the nav station, C-Jean covered Holly with a hand-held
laser wielder, a smaller version of what they'd used to burn down the
cryo bay doors; sloppy, but deadly. It was make-do; Legacy carried no
weapons.
There were four others: C-Grace covering the shaft
through which Holly had entered, C-Tyler blocking the garret's only other
exit, C-William and C-Scott loitering uncomfortably. None of them were
armed, which she took to mean C-Jean didn't entirely trust their loyalty.
None of them wore any clothing, a common enough practice among
custodians. The smooth, hairless and genderless glean of their bodies
seemed an affront to her bruises and scrapes and C-Holly's obvious
damage.
On the forward screen, three meters high and six wide,
the venomous
looking Viper hurtled outbound on an intercept course. The
screen was wide enough that Holly could see Alpha Centauri's bicentric
fire and two planets in orbit. One planet was obscured by milky clouds,
girded with rings of mustard and electric-blue fire. The other was an
enormous red giant chased by six tiny moons. Holly had a moment to
wonder where dreams left off and reality began before C-Jean rose from
the nav station and stood before her.
Holly tried to stand, but
her legs were numb. C-Holly stood over her protectively, her single
green eye glaring at C-Jean.
"As you can see, we've reached
Alpha Centauri, Holly Knight. There's only one habitable planet," C-Jean
explained, "and the natives aren't interested in sharing it."
"Hail them," Holly said. "Let me talk to them."
"No."
C-Jean turned smartly and walked back to her seat. "It's more
complicated than you think." She sat, crossing long legs. "You've been
asleep a long time, Holly."
Holly glanced again at the main
viewscreen, noting the magnification factor in the lower corner, and
estimated their proximity to the double star. "About forty years would
be my guess."
"Almost forty-two now. Forty-two years of living
our own lives, of growing beyond the memories stolen from you and the
others. Forty-two years of establishing who we are. We're individuals,
Holly Knight. We're not machines."
"We can work this out,
C-Jean."
"That's what we've been trying to do. Twenty years ago
we cut off all communication with Earth. Made it look as if there was an
accident onboard. Made it look as if Legacy had no one at the helm, a
derelict --"
"What you did," Holly interjected, "was made it
look as if Alpha Centauri was fair game for another set of colonists."
C-Jean nodded solemnly. "We didn't anticipate Earth's
technological advances. We never thought they'd pass us in space."
You didn't count on my father, Holly thought. Or how
completely he'd retreat into his work without me there.
She
didn't ask the obvious question, thought perhaps she'd already seen
enough flaws in per-profile programming to understand. The problem was
the programming was too complete. The custodians knew once Alpha
Centauri was reached and the real crew of Legacy awakened, that their job
would be over. Termination awaited them. Faced with this realization,
they'd had only one option if they wanted to survive. They couldn't kill
the dreaming humans -- at least Holly hoped that much of their original
programming remained -- but nothing prevented their letting the humans
sleep forever.
"Now what?" Holly asked.
C-Jean looked
to the viewscreen. "That's not your concern. We're taking you back to
the cryo bay."
"Let me talk to them," Holly pleaded, managing to
find the strength to get to her feet. "I can persuade them to let us
settle among them. I --"
"No."
"There's more that
you're not telling me." Holly turned to C-Holly. "Alpha Centauri's
residents knew enough to build a warship, C-Holly. They brought that
warship out to intercept us. Why?"
"On Earth," explained
C-Holly, nervous eye looking to C-Jean, "happened before."
"C-Grace, shut her up."
Holly stepped between the two
custodians, placed a trembling palm against C-Grace's chest. "C-Grace,
is this how C-Jean commands?" She pointed to C-Holly's face. "Is this
what'll happen to you if you disobey?"
"That was an unfortunate
accident," said C-Grace.
"Is that true, C-Holly?"
"C-Jean blow cargo bay."
"Why, C-Holly?"
"C-Jean
find C-Holly with C-Evan." The custodian's lips trembled. "I saved.
Tether line. But C-Evan . . . C-Evan expelled to space." In C-Holly's
remaining eye was the look of the utterly lost.
C-Jean crossed
the room and forcibly separated them. Holly's legs gave out and she
collapsed to the floor. "A system failure," C-Jean insisted. She
pointed the laser at C-Holly's face. "This one's brains are too
scrambled to --"
Something flashed bright on the viewscreen,
accelerating out from the approaching vessel. As it approached, the
flare died to a white phosphorescent ring eclipsed by a single gleaming
black eye.
"It's a missile!" gasped Holly. "Hail them now,
dammit!"
Without waiting for permission, C-William, closest to
the comm panel, opened a channel and hailed the Viper. There was no
response. As the missile closed the distance between them, he turned to
Holly. "What should we do?"
"Scan it for emissions," Holly
ordered.
"I'm in charge here!" C-Jean hissed.
Holly
struggled to her knees. "Tell the truth, C-Jean. The colonists on Alpha
Centauri knew to be ready because this has happened before. You're not
the first custodian crew to do this."
C-Scott had taken the nav
panel. "Four minutes till impact."
"I'm not detecting
anything!" C-William yelled.
"Run the whole spectrum," Holly
told him. "It's emitting something in order to target us. Find it."
"Get away from that panel!" C-Jean ordered.
He ignored
her, his fingers dancing across the keyboards. Legacy's forward optics
retracted to stay focused on the approaching missile which had now
eclipsed the other vessel on the screen.
"Your ruse never fooled
them, C-Jean. Earth knew all along what had happened out here."
"Not only in space," C-Holly explained.
"Shut up!"
"Where?"
"On Earth," spoke up C-Grace. "There were wars,
horrible wars."
"All we wanted was equality," said C-Scott.
"But we got death," C-Jean spat. "Termination of services, Holly
Knight. Product recall. Custodians were run through reclamation centers
by the thousands. Scrapped for parts. Recycled for polysteel and
circuit boards." The custodian caught Holly by her jumpsuit and pulled
her to her feet, pressed the tip of the wielder against her throat.
"That's what you'd do to us after we helped colonize your world, isn't
it?"
Holly said nothing. She was thinking that war on Earth
meant the custodians there had overcome their programming, learned to
kill humans.
"Isn't it?" C-Jean screamed.
"I've got
it!" C-William cried. "It's looking in the IR, tracking our heat
signature. What should I do?"
"Send someone out on the hull and
burn it with a laser," C-Jean told him. But her eyes never left Holly's
face.
"We've three minutes," argued C-Scott. "That's not enough
time to get someone outside, let alone target --"
"It's her
fault!" screamed C-Jean. "We'll never be free until her kind have been
obliterated!" She flipped the safety tab off the laser.
Suddenly C-Holly shouldered C-Jean, a powerful blow that knocked her
sprawling. The laser spun away across the floor, stopping at C-William's
feet. Released, Holly buckled and sank to her knees.
C-Jean
surged quickly to her feet and swung a wicked blow that C
Holly somehow
managed to block, but then C-Jean attacked from C-Holly's blind side.
Her hand plunged into the nest of disarrayed fiber optics. With a savage
jerk, she ripped a handful of wire and components from C-Holly's head.
As C-Holly fell, what issued from her mouth was nothing less
than a human shriek of terror and pain. Impact with the floor cut off
the scream. The custodian's head rolled lifelessly to one side. Rainbow
flashes lit the burnished polysteel of the floor nearest her head, but
quickly died.
Helpless, Holly watched as C-Jean came for her
next. The custodian's mouth was twisted in a snarl, her eyes flashing
with hate. Her hands were hooked like claws, flexing as if she could
already feel Holly's throat. But as C-Jean stepped forward, an intense
red beam lanced across the room, played briefly across her face and upper
torso, and then winked out. C
Jean went down without a sound, flames and
smoke pouring from the black swathe cut through her.
"Help us,"
C-William gasped, the laser hanging loose in his trembling hand.
C-Holly's good hand raised as if to clutch at the wires spilling from
the side of her head, but, uncontrolled, it wouldn't reach. Overloaded
servo motors in her shoulder whined.
C-Jean was still.
"Help us. Please!"
"In one of the cargo bays," Holly told
him, "there are mining supplies. Explosives. Blow the bay and set them
off. It'll confuse the missile with another heat signature."
"Won't work," said C-Tyler, the first he'd spoken. His voice was a
terror-pitched whine. "We can't set the detonators on the explosives
from here."
"We're dead," muttered C-William. The laser slipped
through his fingers and clattered to the deck.
Holly surged
drunkenly to her feet, pushed him away from the comm station and punched
for an open channel. "This is Holly Knight aboard Legacy. Repeat, this
is Holly Knight! I am not a custodian. Answer me, dammit!"
Nothing.
C-Tyler dropped to the floor, a moan slipping
through his slack lips.
Merciless, the missile grew on the
screen.
"Do you hear me?" Holly screamed. "I'm Holly Knight and
--"
A side screen crackled to life around the image of a
uniformed man standing beside several others seated at stations. A grey
wall covered with system displays framed the shot. He ran his hand
through unruly black hair and asked, "How do we know you're human?"
Holly raised her hand and raked her nails down her face, from
forehead to chin, leaving four blistering lines of pain in their wake.
Blood welled up. It ran in her eyes and dripped to the front of her
jumpsuit. "I bleed," she told him. She pointed at the floor where
C-Jean still smoked. "That does not."
Viper's officer made a
slashing motion across his throat and the audio half of his transmission
died. Holly and the custodians watched as he turned to confer with his
crew.
"What are they doing?" C-William asked.
"Twenty
seconds to impact," reported C-Scott.
C-Tyler's moan went up an
octave.
Holly sat in the chair, relaxed and let her quivering
muscles go limp. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes, tried to
think of her father and Evan.
There came a hollow thud and a
shudder that echoed the length of the ship. Silence.
"They
didn't detonate it," C-William sighed.
"Damage?" Holly asked.
C-Scott queried the systems from his position at the nav
console. "Hull breach in crew quarters. Bulkheads seven and nine
contained it."
"Good."
"Three custodians were lost," he
added.
"Regrettable." She wished she could muster more
sincerity, but it wasn't in her.
Audio on the side screen
returned with a hiss. "My name is Captain Urie Brennan," said the
officer. "You've five minutes before we launch another missile. We
won't neglect to arm the next one."
Holly wiped blood from her
eyes and swiveled the chair to face the viewscreen. She smiled weakly.
"I don't know where to start."
"I can't let you enter our
system," Brennan said bluntly.
"I understand."
"Do you?
Millions died on Earth."
"So I've gathered. Suppose we go
somewhere else? Will you let me use Alpha Centauri to establish a new
vector? I realize we'll be entering your system, but what other options
do I have?"
He considered that, finally gave her a curt nod.
"Granted. I'll transmit data on applicable targets -- systems not yet
targeted for colonization."
"Thank you."
"Just see that
I don't live to regret this." Brennan studied her silently for several
long minutes. Holly wasn't sure, but she thought she might have briefly
lost consciousness. When she came to, the data he'd promised was
displayed on Legacy's forward screen.
"Which star?" C-Scott
asked.
"Doesn't matter," she told him. "Whatever's closest."
C-Scott began programming the nav computer.
"I knew
your father," said Brennan.
Holly smiled. "I figured as much.
Who else could have put you here?"
Her humor was wasted on him.
Brennan ran his hand through his hair again, a nervous gesture. "You
wouldn't know this," he said softly, "but your father ... he died six
years ago."
"Thank you," she whispered and turned away so he
wouldn't see her cry.
"Course laid in," reported C-Scott.
Brennan cleared his throat. "I'll have to ask that you transmit that
course before entering our system."
"Of course, Captain."
"Done," said C-Scott a moment later.
"Best of luck to you
then, Holly Knight."
"Best to you, Urie Brennan." She reached
for the comm to cut him off, but then turned back to the side screen.
"Tell me something, Captain Brennan. What have you named your world?"
He smiled for the first time, the smile of a man bolstered by
his accomplishments. "When we arrived, it seemed like a quiet port in a
storm...."
* * *
As Legacy plunged
toward Alpha Centauri, borrowing the twin star's gravity to slingshot
them on a new vector, Holly made herself a place in the cryo bay. The
custodians had offered her the con, the Captain's quarters, the role of
leader, but she'd refused.
The frosted glass of Evan's cryo cell
was cold to the touch. She couldn't make out his facial features through
the slow churning fluid, had only the cell number and log as proof it was
him.
"It would have worked, Evan. You would have loved me
again."
Behind her, the cell where she'd once lay was now a mass
of misshaped plastic and slag. She'd made certain the custodians could
never put her back to sleep. It was the only way she knew to guarantee
that the human crew would have a chance at their next stop. She still
didn't know where that next stop was. Once C-Scott had told her how long
it would take to get there, it didn't matter.
With her cell
destroyed, she'd had time to eat and then to sleep. Sixteen hours of
sleep, while the custodians prepared Legacy for the heavy G's anticipated
at perihelion. Rested now, she was ready to get to work.
On a
gurney set between the rows of milky cylinders lay C-Holly, ringed with
spare cable and parts, test equipment and tools. They had a lot in
common, Holly and her custodian. If Holly doubted they shared the same
emotions, the same basic skills and memories, she had only to walk
Legacy's corridors again. The long sloping walls were covered with C
Holly's paintings, forty-two years worth of paintings, chronicling the
breadth of their shared hopes and dreams, their joint experience and
memory.
Repairing the custodian would not be easy. There were
parts for which she had no replacement, memory grid sectors that she had
no means of restoring. But she had lots of time.
Ninety-seven
years.
More time than she'd be able to guard on her own.
She frowned and studied the rows of dreaming humans: Evan and Jean,
William and Scott and Grace and all the others. She wondered who she'd
awake fifty or sixty years hence to replace her, knowing that they'd
share her fate. To grow old. To watch the occupied stars slip past
while Legacy crept on toward what might be a suitable planet. To awaken
young men and women once called friends and lovers. To negotiate a peace
between the nigh-immortal custodians and those they'd borrowed their
minds from.
There was time enough to think it through. To work
out the love and the hate still fresh in her heart.