Interzone 244 Jan - Feb 2013 Read online

  “It’s nice when you do that.”

  “Go away Axon, This is private.”

  “Victor does it too.”

  “I don’t want to know.”

  “I think you do. It’s different, but similar. Sometimes he goes very fast, sometimes very slowly. Like you. I know what he thinks about. Shall I tell you?”

  “No.”

  “He thinks about lying beside you, touching and kissing. He thinks about your breasts. He thinks about you opening to him. Don’t you, Victor?”

  A long mental pause, and then Victor’s thought voice: “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  “So does Mariam. Don’t you, Mariam?”

  Mariam’s fingers were wet. “It is forbidden,” she thought at them. “We are brother and sister.”

  “That’s what they told you. It’s not true. You are from different gene pools. They modified a few things to make you look alike. There is no reason why you should not share your sexual feelings with each other. Even if you didn’t know it, you have shared them with me. Perhaps that was part of the plan.”

  Mariam rolled off the bed, pulled a shift over her head and left the cabin. Down the corridor, she opened Victor’s room without going in, said, “Isolation room. Now!” and continued walking.

  “I don’t like it when you go in there. Why do you want to cut me out?”

  “Do you understand the word ‘private’?”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t think you do.” She went into the isolation room and the door closed behind her. Soon after, Victor came in, looking flushed and embarrassed.

  “Why do you think Axon is suddenly so interested in our sex lives?” she asked. “Why now?”

  “No idea.”

  “Control. He’s looking for ways to control us. So either Axon’s lying or Julia and the others have lied to us. I think we need to find out.”

  Ten minutes later a sleepy Julia came on line and gave them the answer. Axon was telling the truth. “You should have told us!” Victor shouted. “What else does Axon know that we don’t know?”

  “We thought it was best for all three of you. I’m sorry if we were wrong.”

  As they were about to leave the room Mariam stepped in front of Victor. “If ever…if we ever…in here and nowhere else. Agree?” Victor nodded, and she went on: “Okay. Truth time. We have to know if Axon’s using us for some hidden reason. So…when you…do you really think about me?”

  He nodded slowly and looked away, whispering, “Sorry.”

  Mariam smiled and said, “Stop saying sorry. For some reason I’m not surprised. Perhaps I…well, to be fair, I should confess too. I often wonder what it would be like to touch you there. It’s going to take a bit of getting used to.”

  “I know why they did it. They wanted to create a bond we couldn’t break.”

  “I think those come in several flavours.”

  “I still love you, sis.”

  “And I still love you, brother.” And then they burst into laughter. “There’s one thing, though. If you’re going to be my lover instead of my brother you’re going to have to be a whole lot nicer to me.”

  Then she kissed him on the cheek, ruffled his hair, and went off to her cabin to sleep.

  * *

  For twenty-six hours the reaction-mass engines accelerated the ship away from the containment wordlet and the star Angelus XI, with its rocky planets and settlements. Mariam and Victor took four hour shifts, and Axon ‘slept’ for the last twelve hours whilst unconscious, massively-parallel processes assessed the constant data from the arsenal of sensors as they probed the space ahead of them at a deep level for a distance of many light years. Finally, the words they’d heard a thousand times in simulations rang out: “Impulse engine shutdown in five seconds.” A pause for breath, and then the steady two-G push ceased. “All ready?” In the strange ordering of things evolved over seventeen years it was necessary for all three consciousnesses to agree before radical action could be taken. Three thought yeses committed them.

  Outside the ship the mesh sails expanded, thinning to a web of mono-atomic threads. Power surged through the web. Axon sensed the multi-dimensional space around the ship, almost tasted the seething point-events in the quantum foam. Under Axon’s control, the web twisted into planes and interlinked toroids, into cylinders with spheres, into spikes of filigree fronds, focusing, concentrating. Suddenly, the point-particles of the foam could not annihilate each other as they wished. The forces of annihilation were cancelling out. Unwilling to accept this breach of fundamental laws, space shifted, moving the ship into an absolute vacuum, falling down the front of a huge energy wave.

  Right across the galactic arm, a burst of high-energy neutrinos signalled ignition. The entire ship’s mass, its hull, its plants, fish and tiny human population experienced no acceleration forces. The bubble of modified quantum events simply translated itself elsewhere, although where is a complex concept in eleven-dimensional space-time. You might say that at the moment Axon released the field it had travelled twenty-seven light years – but year and travel didn’t apply in any meaningful sense. It just was where it was not, and the universe repaired its minor injury. From ignition to shutdown had taken thirty-six seconds of ship time.

  Displays which had blanked during the space-time shift began to light up.

  “I’m sorry,” Axon thought at them. “I missed the target.”

  “By how much?”

  “Eight point five three metres. I’ll try to do better next time!”

  Mariam and Victor slapped their restraining harnesses off, whooped and high-fived.

  “Ship’s status?”

  “Checks are still running. So far, only trivial damage to a couple of X-ray sensors and a slightly higher level of radiation in the outer skin than expected. We appear to be stable. May I signal the damaged ship Iron Lady?”

  “Agreed.”

  Multi-frequency lasers aimed at a point four hundred thousand kilometres ahead and pumped a dense burst of information down the beam. They sat calmly and waited. After seven minutes a screen lit up, showing a white-haired gaunt woman.

  “That was quite a spectacular arrival. It’s pretty dark out here, but you sure lit it up. Thank you. The Iron Lady is not in good shape. We have your ship identified as Zbeta97gamma. Do you have a friendlier name?”

  Victor held down the mute button on his chair arm and said, “We never got around to naming the ship. Any ideas?”

  “Oh yes,” said Mariam. “Axon came up with the name a long time ago.”

  “Did I?”

  “We’ll have the champagne later. I name this ship Sky Leap. May she and all who travel in her be safe and happy!”

  Others were steadily crowding in behind the woman – Renata – on the display. “We need to know,” she said, “if your imploders are intact. Ours are, but we have no motive power of any sort.”

  “What imploders?” Victor and Mariam asked in unison.

  Axon broke the link and the screen went dark.

  “The forward halves of this ship and Iron Lady contain devices to collapse local space into super-massive black holes. The intention is to put these in place so that their immense gravity will sling-shot the dark matter object heading for the Orion-Cygnus arm of the Milky Way out of the ecliptic and off to who cares where.”

  “Why weren’t we told? There seem to be a lot of things we weren’t told!”

  “There are consequences.”

  “Oh,” said Victor, “I think I see. Unless the ships jump at exactly the right time we’re going to get a close-up view of some very nasty event horizons.”

  “Correct.”

  “Oh, shit! It’s a suicide mission.”

  “Look on the bright side,” Axon said. “Iron Lady’s central brain is totally dead. Without that the operation becomes almost impossible.”

  “I don’t think almost is that bright a side,” Mariam said. “I would prefer totally impossible.”

  * *

  The
impulse engines powered up and Sky Leap accelerated towards Iron Lady; estimated journey time fifty-seven hours. As the adrenalin-rush faded, Mariam and Victor were suddenly hungry and thirsty. They dialled the food system in the crew mess to deliver kebabs, salad, and a bottle of champagne. When he’d popped the cork, Victor splashed champagne down the wall.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Ship-naming.”

  “Isn’t the champagne supposed to be on the outside?”

  “The door’s that way. Off you go, sis.”

  “Ex-sis. Remember?”

  “Oh yes. I very definitely remember.”

  “Good. Looks like we’re going to die soon, so we may have to pack the rest of our lives into a couple of days. So don’t take too long eating that kebab.”

  He was still chewing his last mouthful when she took the champagne bottle in one hand and his arm in the other, kissed him, and led him off towards the isolation chamber.

  * *

  They were still lying in each other’s arms when the alarms went off. Naked, they ran to the door. The second it slid back, blinding pain shot through their heads and they both screamed.

  Victor pulled Mariam back inside the containment chamber and hit the manual door-close button. They leaned, panting, against the wall as the pain subsided. “Axon,” Mariam said. “Something’s seriously wrong.”

  Victor went to the control panel and cancelled the alarm. “System – diagnostics – Axon-specific.” Data streamed down the right of the main screen, and to the left a coloured diagram of Axon’s spherical brain pulsed with bright green highlights. “Analysis,” Victor snapped. After a few seconds a synthesised voice said, “Ninety-four per cent of neurons are firing synchronously.”

  Mariam stared at the data. “What does that mean?”

  “It means,” Victor replied, “that Axon is having an epileptic fit.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Wait. The support systems are supplying suppressants.”

  A chime sounded, the data shrank away, and Renata appeared. “Why are you initiating a jump?” she demanded.

  “We’re not,” Mariam answered.

  “Your webs are deploying and charging. Have you kids gone crazy? If you jump now you will annihilate us. You must stop it!”

  Victor switched the diagnostics from Axon-specific to general, and there it was – clear evidence of the first stage of a launch.

  “Axon’s having a fit. We can’t go outside this area without frying our brains.”

  “Look,” Mariam said, pointing at the ship’s schematic on one of the screens. Slowly, the front section was peeling back.

  “Oh, my God!” Renata shouted. “He’s arming the collapsers.”

  “I’m going to try to reach the control room,” Victor said. “It’s the only way.”

  Mariam grabbed him. “You won’t make it!” she yelled. He shrugged her off, and headed for the door. Intolerable pain. Fire raging behind the eyes. Fear, torture, anguish, blindness. Victor stumbled on along the corridor trying hard to keep moving through the overwhelming horror in his head. He had no idea that Mariam was close behind him. They sensed without senses that they were in the control room, where warning lights were flashing red.

  Victor forced himself to shout “Emergency power-down! All systems.” He scarcely heard the request for multiple confirmation, or Mariam’s strained “Confirmed.”

  Circuits disconnected. Pumps ceased to spin. The fierce pain in their heads reduced to the mere level of a bad migraine. Only emergency lights lit the chamber. Outside, the great flaps at the front of the ship stopped moving, at half retraction, arrayed like petals around the bulbous hull.

  “You’re an idiot,” Mariam said as they lay slumped in their chairs. “So are you,” he replied.

  “I hate to ask, but now what?”

  The emergency power supply kept the control panels alight. Victor touched and swiped across them. “If we don’t supply power to Axon’s nutrient and oxygen supplies he’ll be dead in ten minutes.”

  “Can we disable the link to us, and feed him?”

  “No idea.”

  “Well start thinking.”

  “We need to talk to Iron Lady, so I’m restarting power to the isolation area, our life-support, and Axon’s vital supplies. Done.”

  The lights in the control room came back on, and speech recognition systems re-booted.

  “Power to the central brain – monitoring only.”

  The image of Axon’s neurons still pulsed with abnormal regularity.

  “Power to external telemetry and comms links.”

  After a pause, the worried face of Renata reappeared, and then she smiled and said, “Fantastic! How did you do it?”

  “Victor hit the big off switch,” Mariam said. “We’re bringing systems back if they are not controlled by Axon. Victor, send the brain imaging to Iron Lady, please. Renata, do you have a doctor in your crew?”

  “Three.”

  “Get them to look at the images. We need suggestions urgently. What’s happening is outside the automatic brain control system’s programming.”

  “Keep transmitting. I’ll get to you ASAP.”

  Victor was carefully studying the complex diagrams of the ship’s electrical systems.

  “Apply power to distributors alpha theta nine-seventy and nine-seventy-one. Then close the forward doors.”

  “Weapons control is not available to you.”

  “Bollocks!” Victor shouted. “Give us control, now!”

  “That cannot be done.”

  Mariam put her hand on his shoulder. “Calm down. There has to be a way around this. They must have planned for central brain malfunction, surely?”

  “If they did, it’s something else they forgot to tell us.”

  Renata reappeared on the screen. “Can you give us control of the brain support systems? The medics want to send instructions to produce some drugs that should halt the seizure.”

  “OK, but I doubt if the ship will let you,” Victor said.

  “Oh – it will.”

  Shortly they watched the brain read-out as it was flooded with anaesthetics and seizure-suppressants. Slowly the storm calmed and normal sleep patterns emerged. And then the brain went dark. Warning signals flared on the control panel. Axon’s support system went into overdrive, injecting adrenalin, administering electric shocks. But still, the mighty brain remained inert.

  Axon was dead, and with him any hope of going anywhere. They stood silently for a moment, and then Victor turned towards the image of Renata.

  “To put it in the vernacular,” he said, “it looks as though you fucked up.” Before she could reply he reached over and cut the comms link.

  “Look,” Mariam said. “The forward doors are closing. System – explain.”

  “Fallback condition assigns full command to Victor and Mariam.”

  “Restore the quantum webs to the rest position.”

  The webs slowly retreated.

  “Restore full power. Correct the course alignment to previous targeting schedule.”

  “Deceleration will begin in three hundred and twenty minutes. Alignment with Iron Lady in seventeen hours.”

  “Victor,” Mariam said, “I can feel your thoughts. Something’s happening to us. And by the way, it’s bad luck for men to baptise ships. Just thought I’d tell you.”

  They ate and then slept for a while, curled up together, exhausted, mourning the loss of Axon, their triplet. Then they were summoned to the isolation chamber, where a pre-recorded message from Somerton gave them a new briefing. Silently, Sky Leap slipped into position parallel with Iron Lady. When they reopened the comms link to the other ship, Renata was furious. “You cannot cut communications like that. You will come over to Iron Lady in your shuttle immediately.”

  “On the contrary,” Mariam said, perhaps too sweetly, “you will use your shuttles. All personnel on Iron Lady will be transferred to Sky Leap in the next eight hours.”

  �
��Impossible.”

  “Check the authorisation codes we’ve just sent you. Both ships are now under our command.”

  * *

  Mariam and Victor had never seen so many people before. Areas of the ship that had been mothballed were opened up, kitchens came to life and remembered how to cook, previously dark corridors were full of life.

  During the next twenty-four hours, six hundred injections of newly-manufactured nano began to work on six hundred human brains.

  Renata and the other senior members of the Iron Lady’s crew were not taking kindly to having their power usurped by a couple of teenagers. Arguments raged in the control centre, until Victor banned them. Mariam was better at empathy, and went to great lengths over coffee and cakes to reduce the tension. “Look,” she said time after time, “if you have a better idea, let’s discuss it. Otherwise, the choices are, stay here and run out of everything, or take the risk that we can complete the task we came to perform.” At last, if they didn’t see reason, they saw inevitability; and they saw the truth that the supposed twins had more abilities than even they themselves knew.

  At midnight, ship’s time, the nano-injections had diffused through grey-matter. Every human was strapped securely into inertia-damping chairs. Sky Leap and Iron Lady began to accelerate in perfect synchronisation. For the first time in their lives, over six hundred souls heard a voice, not through their ears, but in their minds – the calm voice of Mariam. “Dear friends,” she said, “Iron Lady is now slaved to this ship. We have begun the launch sequence. Our great brains failed us, so now we must link our small brains together and hope that we can succeed.”

  Outside petal-like doors folded back from the noses of the ships, and the gossamer webs unfolded and expanded.

  “Immediately after the collapsers have been launched,” she went on, “we will turn and attempt to ignite the main drives. You may find it disturbing, possibly frightening, but you must not fight it. Victor and I were bred for this task, but we need each of you, and all of you, if we are to have any chance. Let us wish ourselves well.”

  In the control centre the one-time twins looked at each other. “This could be a rough ride,” Victor said, and blew Mariam a kiss. “Let’s do it.” He issued the final command.