Approaching Omega Read online

  Latimer nodded. The figures were an abstraction he had no real hope of understanding. They had travelled farther than any human before them - they were pushing the limits of exploration in a way that, twenty-five years earlier, before the development of the Hanson-Spirek coil, no-one would have thought possible.

  Such a fragile cargo of life in the infinite depths of space.

  Guessing where this was leading, Latimer said: “Two hundred light years - so, how many planetary systems did we investigate?”

  Li glanced at Renfrew, then said: “Twenty.”

  “Twenty?” he echoed. What had Omega forecast? That the chances were they would discover a habitable planet - or at least a planet that might prove adaptable - within ten attempts?

  “And not one of them matched Omega’s wide criteria for a liveable planet,” Li went on. “Not one. Nothing.” She gestured to the screen. “It’s all there, planet after barren, hostile planet. Twenty worlds matched the criteria insofar as distance from primary, but all failed when it came to biosphere make-up and atmosphere content. There wasn’t even one world back there we could terraform with any hope of success.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Latimer said. The parameters that the Omega Corporation had set for terraforming had been pretty elastic. With the cold sleep facility, the colonists could wait out something in the order of twenty thousand years, while a planet was remade, before systems degradation kicked in.

  Into the following silence, Emecheta said: “So where does that leave us?”

  “I’ve made a few calculations,” Li said, “extrapolating from the data gathered so far. I don’t know ... I can’t be sure ... I’d really like Central to back me up on this, but Central’s down, so...”

  “Jenny,” Latimer said, exasperated.

  “Well, I calculated that going by the data gathered so far, then it might be another thirty thousand years before we find a suitable Earth-like, or even terraformable, planet.”

  In the sudden silence, Latimer could hear the ticking of his heart, the slight movement of Renfrew’s chair as she rocked back and forth, and Emecheta’s heavy breathing.

  He nodded. “Okay, thanks for that, Jenny.” He sat down and looked around at his team. “Does anyone have any comments?”

  Emecheta merely stared down at his big hands. Renfrew just shook her head, appalled. Li could not meet his gaze.

  “Jenny?” he asked.

  “Well, I just wondered ... I thought maybe we might consider the possibility of turning back.”

  The words seemed to freeze the very air of the chamber.

  After perhaps five seconds, Emecheta laughed. “Turn back to what, girl? Get real. Earth’s probably blown itself to hell and back!”

  Latimer said: “We can’t turn back, even if we knew Earth was AOK.” He paused, gathering his thoughts. “So you think we won’t come across a habitable planet for thirty thousand years, based on data gathered so far. But that doesn’t rule out the chance that we might - just might - come across something within the next twenty thousand years before degradation sets in. We’ve got to keep on.”

  Li looked forlorn. “But how long do we go on before we decide that enough’s enough? What if we haven’t come across a suitable planet in that time? The cold sleep system will be so degraded it’ll be useless, with no hope of repair. What then?”

  “We’ll have found a suitable planet by that time, Jenny. You studied Omega’s predictions. We all agreed with them back then.”

  “Predictions,” the Korean countered. “What we’re faced with now are hard facts. Evidence.”

  Latimer took a deep breath. “So okay, we turn back. We return to Earth - if it’s still there - in what? Far longer than the thousand years it took us to get this far, now that we’re travelling on one drive. Can you imagine that?” He looked around at his team. “Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Earth’s survived. We won’t be going back to the place we knew. Society, human beings, will have changed out of all recognition. So much will have happened in the time we’ve been away - we’ll have no hope of understanding or fitting in. We’ll be freaks.”

  He stopped, aware of the eyes on him.

  “And remember, we’d be consigning not only the four of us to a world we no longer recognised or belonged to,” - he indicated the viewscreen, the hangars containing the three thousand sleepers - “we’d be playing with the destiny of everyone else, too. Think about that.”

  In the long, silent seconds that ensued, they thought about it.

  We can’t vote to go back, he thought. It would be more than just defeat, it would be the end of a dream.

  “So ... what do you think? Who’s for pressing on?”

  Help came from an unexpected source. Emecheta raised a big hand. “I’m with the boss. I say we keep on. We can’t turn back now. We signed up to do a job, and like Ted says, even if Earth survived, what kind of Earth would we be returning to? We’d be like Neanderthals among Homo Sapiens.”

  Latimer looked across at Emecheta and nodded his thanks. He turned to Renfrew. “You?”

  He could see the uncertainty in her eyes. Finally she gave in and nodded. “As I see it, we’re caught between two evils,” Renfrew said. “I don’t like the picture Jenny paints - I don’t like the idea of just going on and on and on without hope - but what would we be going back to, if anything? So, yes, let’s keep on.”

  “I think you know how I feel on the issue,” Latimer said. “So we press on. Okay, Jenny?”

  She gave her head a minimal nod. “It was only a suggestion, Ted. I ... I’d like to go back. I’m sure Earth has pulled through. But I guess I’m out-voted on this one.”

  She turned her seat and regarded the screen.

  Renfrew said: “Hey ... Did you check for incoming, Jenny? What about that message from Earth?”

  Even before Jenny Li replied, Latimer knew the answer.

  The Korean shook her head. “If Earth did broadcast, and we did pick it up, it was lost with the damage to Central.”

  The news was yet another disappointment. How wonderful it would have been to have heard from the Omega Corporation, told that all was bright and rosy on a rejuvenated planet Earth. But, thinking about it, perhaps it was just as well the message had been lost. If the news from Earth had been unremittingly bleak ...

  For the next hour they prepared themselves for another stretch of cold sleep. Emecheta set the program to wake them after a thousand years, and they returned to their pods. Li and Renfrew lay down and pulled the covers shut over themselves, and in seconds the alpha-numerics were sequencing along the flanks of their pods, denoting successful immersion.

  Latimer was about to settle into his own pod when he looked across the unit at Emecheta. “Hey, I appreciate your help back there. We’re doing the right thing.”

  “Sure, boss,” Emecheta said. And with that, he lay down and drew the cover over himself.

  Latimer smiled to himself and stretched out in his pod. He felt the tickle of a dozen hypodermic capillaries worming under his skin, and seconds later he was sinking as if under the most sublime anaesthetic.

  His last waking thought was that Carrie was alive and well, and he entered cold sleep with a vision of her beauty playing in his mind’s eye.

  * * * *

  Two

  It seemed to Latimer that he came awake almost immediately and rose slowly through a sea of dreams. He saw a twisted, phantasmagoric image of the starship, wrecked beyond salvation, and a thousand floating bodies.

  The cover above him lifted suddenly. It was Renfrew, staring down at him.

  “We got a problem, Ted.”

  “No suitable colony planets?” he said, half awake.

  “No - but that’s not the problem.”

  He sat up and swung himself from the pod, but too fast. His vision swam as he stood. He felt dizzy, nauseous. Renfrew passed him a beaker of high-energy concentrate. He gagged half of it down, then pushed himself over to where Emecheta and Li were hunched over their co
m-stations.

  “What’s happening?”

  They were too intent on the screens to explain. He turned to Renfrew. “How long have we been out?”

  “A thousand years, like we programmed.”

  “So we weren’t pulled out by the emergency alarm?”

  She shook her head. “As soon as I woke, I checked things at my com-station. Central’s as dead as before - and something’s happened to the auxiliary back-up. It’s down. We’ve got no link to the hangars.”

  Emecheta turned to him. “I don’t understand this, Ted. Everything was AOK when we went under. This shouldn’t have happened.”

  Li looked up from her station. “No link to the log, either, Ted. We’re completely cut off.”

  “Okay, so what about the ship? Are we still maintaining speed and course?”

  Emecheta shrugged. “No way of knowing.”

  “Visually?” Latimer suggested. “Can we open the viewscreen?”

  Li shook her head. “I tried. Nothing.”

  Latimer paced to the end of the unit and back. The Dauntless was still moving. The constant, thrumming vibration conducted itself through the superstructure of the starship and entered his bones, just as it had done a thousand years earlier.

  “Perhaps it’s a link problem,” Renfrew said. “Central’s still functioning, but we’ve been cut off.”

  Emecheta considered that. “No way. What about the override circuit? We should be able to get through on some link if Central was still up and running.”

  Latimer was aware that all eyes were on him. “Our first priority is the sleepers,” he said. “First we make sure the systems in the hangars are working. Then we drop to the core and see if we can work out what gives with Central.”

  The others nodded.

  “Em and Serena, check hangar One. Jenny, we’ll see if we can get through to hangar Five.”

  They took the dropshaft to the main lateral corridor, a featureless grey tunnel with all the aesthetics of a storm-drain. They stepped from the plate and crossed to the entry hatch.

  Latimer tapped the access code into the control unit and stood back.

  Nothing happened.

  Renfrew glanced at him. “You hit the right code?” she asked.

  He tapped it again. “Five - zero - two - five. Open sesame.”

  The hatch remained shut.

  Emecheta pushed past him. “Let me try.” He tapped the code and waited, with no result. “Christ!” He removed the cover of the control unit, pulled tools from his belt-pack, and began tinkering. “Overriding the command signal,” he said. “This should do the trick.”

  “In your dreams,” Renfrew commented, when the hatch remained closed.

  “If we can’t get to the hangars ...” Li began, voicing what Latimer was thinking.

  “And the AI systems are down,” he finished.

  Carrie ... he thought. From one nightmare scenario to another.

  “Okay,” he said. “Serena, go get the cutting tools from stores.”

  “I’ll help you,” Li said.

  Emecheta looked at him. “So,” he said, when the women had taken the upshaft. “What the hell gives?”

  “Beats me. Omega never prepared us for this kind of emergency.” He paused, then said: “What about the roboids? They service the sleepers, right? You slaved them to auxiliary, and auxiliary is down.”

  Emecheta nodded. “Right.”

  A feeling very much like despair opened up inside Latimer. The sleep pods could function for a thousand years or so, just so long as nothing went wrong. In the event of some mechanical dysfunction, in theory there were always drones on hand to fix things.

  But with Central and auxiliary down, and the drones leaderless ...

  “Christ knows how many sleepers we might have lost, boss,” Emecheta murmured.

  Renfrew and Li returned, hauling a big cutter and a tool box.

  Li primed the laser-cutter, the bulky device incongruous when wielded by an operator as diminutive as the Korean. She stood with it lodged on her hip and applied the working end of the cutter to the hatch.

  It burned, sending up a plume of acrid smoke.

  She worked with painstaking care, slicing a vertical line through the metal. When she reached the floor, Emecheta took over. He cut a line at right-angles to the vertical slice, then downwards to create a small door-shape.

  Five minutes later he killed the cutter, placed it on the floor and kicked at the crude door-shape with his right boot. The section of metal fell away and landed on the corridor beyond with a loud, ringing clang.

  He stood back, grinning. “After you,” he said, indicating the aperture.

  Latimer ducked and made to ease himself through.

  The laser vector almost decapitated him. He felt the heat of it as it passed over his shoulder, was aware of an instant of blinding white light, then felt hands on his legs, hauling him back. A second vector lanced through the opening, missing him by centimetres.

  He lay on the floor next to Emecheta, who had evidently saved his life. Renfrew was backed up against the bulkhead, knuckles to her mouth, staring at him.

  Li was already unfastening her medi-kit and fishing out some kind of salve. She applied it to his neck, even before Latimer realised he’d been burned.

  Then she hit him with a hypo-ject. “Pain-killer,” she explained. “Christ, you were lucky, Ted.”

  He stood and moved away from the opening in the hatch, staring at the laser burn on the far wall. “What the hell was that?” he said.

  “How about this?” Em said. “A rogue drone. One of those factory critters. One of Central’s slaves has gone berserk.”

  Latimer stared at him. “They can do that?”

  The Nigerian shrugged. “Any other suggestions?”

  Li said: “What about the sleepers, Ted?” in a small, frightened voice.

  Latimer’s belly contracted, and he nearly vomited the concentrate he’d forced down on awakening.

  Carrie ...

  “We should arm ourselves,” he said. “There’s no telling if it’ll try to come through.”

  Emecheta nodded and picked up the cutter from the floor. He moved to the hatch and positioned himself next to the aperture, the cutter poised to slice anything that might venture through.

  “Jenny,” Latimer said, “break out four lasers from stores. Serena, go with her. Bring back one of those remote surveillance cams and a monitor, okay?”

  The two women ran to the upshaft and disappeared.

  “Another thing they never trained us to cope with,” Emecheta grinned.

  “I’m an engineer, Em, not a damned soldier. I volunteered for the mission to build a new world out there, not fight rogue drones.”

  “Know why I volunteered?”

  Latimer smiled. “To drive me nuts?”

  “Apart from that,” Emecheta said. He glanced at the hatch, then back to Latimer. “The challenge. Adventure. I thought, who knows what we’ll find out there? One thing I was sure about, though. We could beat it. Ingenuity, logic. We can beat anything if we just think it through, okay?”

  “Hope you’re right, Em,” Latimer said, and thought again of Carrie.

  The dropshaft purred, lowering the women back down. They carried two laser pistols apiece. Li had the surveillance cam and monitor in a backpack.

  The cam was a tiny flyer, about the size of a dragonfly. Latimer set the monitor on the deck well away from the hatch and readied the cam. It lifted, bobbed. He experimented with the controls, finally managed to patch a picture through to the monitor. The image was grainy, showing an unstable image of the corridor as the cam rose and fell.

  Emecheta lay aside the cutter and joined the others behind the monitor. He took up a pistol, directing it at the hatch, while Latimer manoeuvred the dragonfly cam. It hovered towards the hatch and disappeared through the cut-away section.

  All eyes were on the monitor.

  The corridor was in darkness until the passing of the cam tripped a
sequence of dim wall lights. Even then, the image was indistinct. Latimer made out the ribbed walls and grey floor of the corridor, broken by frequent static, some dysfunction of the telemetry phasing the image from colour to granular black and white.

  Latimer estimated that the cam had travelled about five metres when he made out a squat, four-legged shape in the centre of the screen.