Approaching Omega Read online

  “Goodbye,” he said, in a little more than a whisper.

  Caroline grasped his hand and they turned and walked through the barrier, across the tarmac to the waiting shuttle.

  At the top of the ramp, he turned for one last glimpse of his family.

  They saw him, and raised their arms in a final, farewell salute.

  Thirty minutes later the shuttle took off, banked, and though Latimer peered through the viewscreen at the apron far below, he could not make out the figures of his father or sister.

  He sat back in his seat and gripped Caroline’s hand, tight.

  Two hours later, against the sable velvet of space, he saw the stark grey shape of the Dauntless.

  He looked the other way, made out the brilliant blue sphere of planet Earth, and the sight of the jewel caused him to take a deep breath. So beautiful ...

  Farewell, he thought.

  The shuttle docked, and they left their seats and entered the access umbilical.

  Technicians with com-boards awaited the maintenance crew and colonists.

  Latimer turned to Caroline. They would part here, Caroline led to hangar Five and put into cold sleep, while Latimer would make his way to the maintenance unit with Emecheta, Renfrew and Li, where he too would undergo the balm of oblivion.

  “See you ... soon, Carrie,” he said, taking her in his arms.

  “Love you,” she whispered. “See you, Ted.”

  He led his team along the corridor to the maintenance unit, where the techs waited to put them under.

  He sat on the edge of his pod, exchanging smiles with Renfrew and Li.

  He had trained for years for this moment, and now it had arrived. He lay in the pod, closed his eyes. He didn’t want to look into the jealous eyes of the tech who put him to sleep.

  Let’s get it over with, he thought.

  He felt a dozen sub-dermal capillary needles crawl across his exposed flesh, and then oblivion claimed him.

  * * * *

  One

  Latimer suffered a succession of lucid dreams before his resuscitation was complete. He was on Earth, an Earth he would never again see, and he was saying goodbye to his family. As is the way with dreams, the images were fragmented, disconnected: one minute he was hugging his frail and ageing father; the next, kissing his sister. Familiar faces morphed into faces less familiar, acquaintances from years earlier, people he had hardly known. Later he wondered if the heightened clarity of the visions had been an effect of the chemicals sluicing through his system, bringing him back to life after so many years in cold sleep.

  Then the dreams fell away, and he was hit by a piercing realisation: everyone he’d left on Earth, everyone, would be dead by now. His father, his sister and the kids ... dead for centuries. Gone and forgotten. Or almost. He realised that his recollection of them, a tiny focus of firing neurones so many light years from Earth, was the only evidence in the vastness of the universe that they had ever existed.

  He felt something cold and hard on his cheek, reached up and touched a frozen tear.

  Carrie, he thought. More than anything he wanted to see his wife again. It would be possible: once they had run though the routine checks, he would have a little time to himself. He would visit hangar Five, where she slept, and watch her dreaming.

  He might even have time to do a little jogging. After so long in cold sleep, he needed a workout. He would see what Jenny Li said.

  He opened his eyes. He was surprised at how well he felt. He had expected to be beset by aches and pains, headaches. He felt bright and alive, ready for work.

  He smiled. This is the furthest anyone has ever been from Earth, he thought. He and his team, and the sleeping colonists, were pushing the envelope of human habitation far, far out into the universe.

  He looked at the digital display beside his head, wondering how long he had been under. The figures made no sense to him. The digits flipped over crazily, years apparently passing in seconds.

  The cover of his pod was open, revealing a long chamber of white surfaces, banks of consoles and screens. He was aware of movement at the periphery of his vision, and then noise. Voices.

  He pushed himself into a sitting position. His unit had prepared a mug of high-energy concentrate. He drank the sweet, milky gloop, then looked across the control unit at Serena Renfrew. She was sitting on the edge of her pod, looking pale and tired.

  “How long have we been under?” he asked her.

  She shook her head. “My display’s down, Ted. According to Emecheta, around a thousand years.”

  “A thousand?” he said. “But ...” But, if everything had gone to plan, they shouldn’t have been awoken for another five hundred years.

  Then he heard Emecheta shouting: “Will you lazy set of bastards move yourselves! I said we got an emergency here. You didn’t hear the alarms?”

  Then Li: “What alarms?”

  Latimer wondered if he was dreaming again, a waking nightmare.

  Serena Renfrew said: “Heard nothing, Em. What gives?” She sounded sleepy, still drugged.

  In the event of an emergency, the team should have been awoken by alarms in each pod. Like Renfrew and Li, Latimer had heard nothing.

  He stood, clutching the cover of the pod for support as blood rushed to his head and his vision blurred.

  When he felt he could walk without stumbling, he crossed to where the big Nigerian hunched over his com-station. Emecheta’s over-sized fingers were playing a frantic arpeggio across the touch-pad.

  Latimer was aware of the slight hum, almost a vibration, that conducted itself through the Dauntless as it arrowed through space.

  Li joined him, diminutive in her red bodysuit. She was hardly taller than the seated figure of Emecheta. She peered at the screen, and the slits of her eyes, set flush in the sallow flesh of her Korean face, narrowed even further.

  “Bad news,” she said under her breath.

  “You don’t say?” Emecheta said, without taking his gaze from the scrolling diagnostics.

  Latimer said: “What the hell’s going on, Em?” The figures made no sense to him, an engineer.

  Serena Renfrew left her pod and slumped into a seat before her com-station.

  Emecheta pushed himself back on his swivel-chair and nodded. “Okay,” he said. “This is what happened. We’re a couple of hundred light years from Earth, give or take a few parsecs. We’d attained ninety-five percent of expected velocity. Everything was running smooth. Like a dream, my friends.”

  “And then ...?” Renfrew said, and dried up.

  “And then we ran smack bang into something,” Emecheta said. “Something big. Central AI is down. We’re running on the auxiliary system integral to this unit, and auxiliary seems to think it was a meteor storm, interstellar debris-”

  “What it was hardly matters,” Latimer said. “What’s the damage?”

  “Hard to assess,” Emecheta said. “It appears we lost half the ship, maybe two or three of the hangars, a couple of the main drives.”

  “Jesus,” Latimer whispered.

  Carrie, he thought.

  Jenny Li, beside him, was quietly weeping, trying not to let the others see her. She turned to her com-station and absorbed herself in the screen.

  Latimer wiped his brow. He was sweating. His pulse battered through him, abnormally loud. He controlled his breathing. “Okay,” he said. “Do you know which hangars are still out there?”

  Emecheta fingered the touch-pad, leaning towards the screen and peering at the scrolling columns.

  Renfrew reached out and squeezed Latimer’s hand. He smiled and nodded at her, the minimal acknowledgement all he was able to give at this moment, lest he break down.

  The Dauntless carried five hangars, each containing one thousand sleeping human beings. If two or three hangars had been lost in the impact, then the chances were that Carrie’s was one of them.

  “No way of knowing, Ted,” Emecheta said, “with Central AI down.”

  Then Renfrew, instilling
Latimer with fresh hope, said: “The screen - surely the main viewscreen’s still working?”

  With remorseless logic, Emecheta said: “The viewscreen is controlled by Central AI, Serena. Ergo, it’s down.”

  “But we don’t know that,” Renfrew went on.

  Jenny Li pushed her swivel-chair towards a bank of terminals above which, stretching to the curved ceiling, was the long oval of the shielded viewscreen. She tapped commands into a touch-pad. As they looked on, Latimer hardly daring to hope, the shield slowly withdrew from the screen.

  It was blank, black.

  Li tapped again. “I might be able to patch something through an independent surveillance cam,” she said.

  Renfrew smiled encouragingly at Latimer.

  He tried not to consider the worst case scenario: that hangar Five, and Carrie with it, had been destroyed in the impact.

  Li said: “I think I have something here.”

  As he watched, the screen flickered. He saw brief flashes of the ship’s superstructure, diminishing in perspective, set against a backdrop of sable space and distant, twinkling stars.

  I’m not going to like this one bit, Latimer thought. Seconds later the image resolved itself, and he found a swivel-chair and slumped into it.

  They stared up at the screen in silence.

  It was a demoralising scene of destruction, of mangled wreckage, sheared bulkheads and ruptured decks. The control unit in which they sat was a tiny blob on the top of the ship - corresponding to where a whale’s blow-hole would be situated - that looked back along the length of the vessel.

  The hangars had been positioned on the back of the ship, two each to left and right, and one in the middle. They had been connected by great tubular access routes, through which Latimer and his team could reach each hangar in order to effect any repairs and monitor the health of the sleeping colonists.

  Now, it was as if the hangars had suffered a direct hit in some cataclysmic battle.

  The impact had destroyed two of the five hangars, those situated on the port side of the Dauntless. Where they should have been was now no more than a ragged plain of empty deck. Of the three remaining hangars, number One was intact and still connected to the main body of the ship. Hangar Five, the hangar in which Carrie slept - Latimer saw with a heart-pounding sensation of relief - was still whole, though the access tube leading from the ship to the hangar was pulverised, inaccessible.

  Hangar Two had been disconnected from the main body of the ship in the impact: it hung in space a hundred metres above the shattered superstructure, connected to the ship by snaking hank of life-support umbilicals. It floated eerily, canted at an unnatural angle.

  So there was hope: Carrie had not perished in the impact. But what was the status of the colonists in hangars Two and Five?

  He began to say something, but Li was ahead of him. “I’m trying to find out,” she said, hunched over the touch-pad, her fingers flying.

  While she worked, Latimer took in the rest of the destruction.

  The drive unit to port no longer existed: the sponson on which it had been affixed now terminated roughly fifty meters from the flank of the ship, sheared by the impact. The starboard drive unit still functioned at the end of its sponson, though, the Hanson-Spirek coil burning brightly as it powered the devastated ship onward at just under a third the speed of light.

  “We’ve got to get out there and access hangars Five and Two-” Latimer began.

  From behind them, Emecheta said: “I don’t see that that’s an absolute necessity right now, boss.”

  Li said: “I’m trying to get a status report on the sleepers. I’m trying to patch something through on auxiliary.”

  Latimer swivelled his seat and stared at Emecheta.

  “Face it,” the Nigerian went on, looking around at them. “The chances are that the colonists are okay. Why take a risk going out there?”

  Renfrew said: “Have a heart, Em. How would you feel if there was a loved one of yours in hangar Five?”

  “But there isn’t, Serena. I made sure of that. Remember, I was against couples making the journey right back at committee stage.”

  Latimer glanced at Jenny Li. She had looked up from her touch-pad and was staring, open-mouthed with shock, at Emecheta.

  “So that’s it,” Latimer said. “You were overruled back then, and you’re still sore about it.”

  “I foresaw a time when having couples along might make for instances of divided interest.”

  Jenny Li said to Emecheta: “So that’s why you dumped me, you heartless bastard!”

  The big Nigerian shrugged. “I got out of the relationship because it wasn’t working, Jen. As simple as that.”

  “You cold bastard,” Li whispered, shaking her head.

  Looking from Latimer to Renfrew, Emecheta went on: “In any situation that might involve the safety of the team, as opposed to that of your wife, Ted, then you might be unable to make the right decision. The right decision for the mission, that is.”

  “You forget the rules laid down at committee stage, Em,” Latimer said, reasonably. “My decision is not final. We work on democratic principles.”

  “But you have the right of veto, Ted. And what about influence? Do you think Jen and Serena would go against anything our elected leader might command?”

  Li turned back to her console in disgust. Renfrew said: “Give us a little credit, Em. We’re quite capable of thinking for ourselves.”

  Latimer stepped in before the situation could escalate. “Enough, okay? This is hardly the time for in-fighting. We have a major incident on our hands here. As I see it, we need to assess the status of the sleepers in the damaged hangars. That’d be my decision even if Carrie wasn’t out there-”

  Jenny Li looked up from her com-station. “I’m getting something.”

  Latimer leaned over her shoulder and read the text scrolling down the screen. It was a list of maintenance diagnostics from hangars Two and Five. They were functioning at well within the safety limit of ninety-nine percent.

  Emecheta said: “So ... you still think it necessary to go out there, boss?”

  Ignoring the Nigerian, Latimer turned to Li. “What do you think?”

  She said: “The sleepers are doing fine, Ted.” She indicated the diagnostics. “In Five, there’s damage to the access tubes, but nothing more.”

  “What about Two?” Latimer asked, staring out to where the disconnected hangar floated against a backdrop of stars.

  “Same again. It might look bad, but it’s still connected to the power supply. The sleepers are AOK.”

  “Is there anything we could do to bring Two down to the deck, secure it there?” he asked, looking at Emecheta.

  The Nigerian shook his head. “It’d be too big a job. I say we leave it as is. Remember, there’s no friction out there. It isn’t in any danger. The power supply’s working - that’s the main thing.”

  Latimer nodded and stared through the screen, at the wreckage of the starship. On the deck, between torn shards of metal, he made out the tiny, scuttling forms of a hundred or more robot drones, trilobite-analogues and bigger, legged roboids, mindlessly obeying the dictates of their programming. These robots - perhaps a thousand units of various sizes and designs - had worked for ten centuries at routine tasks, minor maintenance and repair. They were self-servicing, taking parts from the automated manufactory in the bowels of the ship to replace those bits of themselves worn out or damaged down the years. They were overseen by Central AI and its various subsidiary routines.

  As Latimer watched them, he wondered at how their functioning had been affected by the damage to Central AI. That was Emecheta’s specialism.

  “If Central’s down, how come the roboids and drones are still functioning?”

  Emecheta nodded at his console. “I thought of that. While you were still sleeping, I patched the few lone drones into the auxiliary system and got them working again.”

  Latimer nodded. “Well done. We’ll be relying on
the drones over the next few thousand years. We can’t afford any dysfunction at this stage of the mission.”

  Li looked up from her com-station, her expression shocked.

  “What is it?” Latimer asked.

  She was shaking her head. “I’ve just checked the ship’s log. With everything going on when we awoke, it never occurred to me.”

  “Nor me,” Latimer admitted. “Go on.”

  “Well,” Li said, “according to the log, we’ve been in flight for a little over one thousand and eighty years. In that time, we’ve covered not quite two hundred light years.”