Authors: William Bowden
Robert found the Afrika’s autopilot instructions left by Ril and Ramani, and overrode them to make a departure of their own choosing. They would leave soon enough, but he could not help wondering what had become of their hosts. They were, to some extent after all, human. But the Emerald City was as inert as ever. Nothing in the frequency spectrum, nothing through the main telescope, and now they had waited long enough.
Yet the Veil remained.
Without any means of communicating with Earth they would have to make their own way home. With most of their reaction mass used to get them to Mars quickly, the return journey would be a long one.
Neither of them minded in the least.
* * *
The Afrika’s ship-wide projection system has Lucy on the flight deck, seated at the pilot’s station before the panoramic view of Mars, Robert at the commander’s station next to hers.
“Sure you can light this thing?” he quips.
“I am confident,” she says, haughtily.
Lucy brings up her own systems display—a ribbon of telemetry curving in an arc projected before her. A few light taps is all it takes.
“Plasma injection sequence commencing,” she announces. “Three, two, one.”
A deep groan from within the bowels of the ship reverberates up the corridor, signaling—
“Ignition. Full thrust—”
A great weight crushes against Robert, pinning him to his seat, the flight deck shaking violently all about him. All is not as it should be and such is the force bearing down he has to strain to turn his gaze to Lucy.
Her projection fragments, the deep alarm on her face barely discernable, the color sucked out of her image until it finally disintegrates.
The mains power trips offline.
Robert all but passes out before reality abruptly snaps back, shoving him forward into his seat restraints, klaxons sounding loudly as the systems wind back up.
Zero gee.
Lucy’s projection reassembles itself in the pilot’s seat, the klaxons immediately silenced.
“What the hell happened?”
“I do not know,” says Lucy, busy at her projected console. “The drive has shut down, but reports no damage. Checking systems ship-wide.”
The inky black through the panoramic viewport suggests to Robert that the Afrika has nonetheless moved far enough to see only space. Stars would not be apparent from within the lit flight deck, but Mars will still be nearby. Just a matter of checking the navigation computer—
“My God. Where’s Mars?”
The gray glow to one side of the view heralds the answer, the blur of some crater pocked world sliding past.
“Lucy…where the hell are we?”
“Looking for a visual fix through the main telescope…we are still local.”
“Local?
That’s fifty light years across
.”
“I’m going as fast as the telescope’s mechanism will allow—
oh!
Robert,
look!
”
Lucy points at the far edge of the view port, the gray crescent of the world below coming into view, an eclipsed blue world rising above its horizon.
The Earth and the Moon.
* * *
Celestial observation was enough to establish the local time, showing the translation of the Afrika from Mars to the Moon to have been faster than the speed of light, with no evidence as to how that was achieved other than some odd data from just before mains power was interrupted.
Robert wondered whether Veil engineers had conjured them through the higher dimensions in such a manner as to render the actual distance covered much shorter than that of real space, and so preserving Einstein’s integrity.
Lucy preferred to stick to the facts at hand and given the current time, and their lunar transit, determined them to be on a classic trans-Earth injection trajectory that will bring them into a perfect low-Earth parking orbit within seventy-two hours, and without any need to fire the Afrika’s main engines.
But even though rounding the far side of the Moon has given them clear line of sight, they might as well still be at Mars when it came to communications.
“Nothing?” Robert asks.
“I’ve rechecked the systems. We are not receiving anything, and probably not sending either.”
“Great. Just
great
. They zap us halfway across the solar system, but no bugger knows we’re here.”
“They will do within seventy-two hours.”
“Ril and Ramani still yanking our chain.”
“I can’t help thinking it wasn’t them…”
“What makes you say that—?”
A chime sounds, its source not immediately apparent, but enough for Robert to seek it out. Something about its innocent nature grabs him. Not of the flight deck.
Something else—
The chime sounds again, drawing his attention to the flight navigator’s console, a stick-like device plugged into one of its universal ports lighting up with a gentle glow. Robert hauls himself over with a look of utter disbelief, the glow unfurling into a holographic air screen displaying the service provider’s logo.
“My phone.”
The logo clears to show his home page.
Good afternoon, Robert. You have 156 messages.
Robert catches himself being annoyed at the number of messages—
supposed to be a private account
. A snort of laughter snaps him out of it.
He’d plugged the phone in two weeks ago to download data for private reading and forgot about it. Now here it was showing an active connection via the Afrika to the com-sat network. Could Ril and Ramani have missed it?
No—he’s being allowed…
The messages prove to be a series of pings from mission control about the time the communications blackout started, but which had stopped shortly after. So now it was the moment of truth. But who to call? All the numbers Robert needs he keeps in his head. He taps out one on the air screen.
The call is placed and a moment later answered by a desperately tired and haggard face.
“Debs! How’s life on Earth?”
“
Bob!!
” Landelle all but jumps out of her desk chair with a start, but Robert remains in a jocular mode.
“You are not going to
believe
—”
“
Stop!
Listen to me!” Landelle blurts out.
Chief Justice Garr comes into view behind Landelle, equally haggard, equally shocked. Others quickly gather round—Tobias Montroy and a pale Senator Blake among them. Robert’s jocular demeanor melts away. He can see how tired they all look, like they haven’t slept for days. And they are in the Afrika’s Nevada mission control.
What are they doing there?
“We have been shown
everything
, Bob. From when they cut communications two weeks ago right up until you fired the main drive—then
nothing
.” Landelle is visibly shaking. She has to take a gulp of air. “Where the hell are you?”
“Just emerging from the far side of the moon. We’ve no comms other than this phone, but you should be able to track us visually—”
“I want them
found!
” Garr barks to someone out of sight.
Lucy’s avatar leans in front of Robert’s phone.
“What do you mean…shown everything?” she asks of Landelle, her appearance eliciting a silent gasp from all with a line of sight to Landelle’s air screen.
“
Lucy!
” Landelle gulps out. “Oh
my!
”
Some unseen distraction turns the heads of a few behind Landelle.
“It’s starting again!” Montroy calls out.
* * *
Landelle follows Montroy’s gaze to the mission control big board—one of the telemetry screens shows her at her desk, some invisible camera watching her.
On the other side of the world that same image appears on a huge projection floating in mid-air, the million-plus occupying Tiananmen Square before it now rising to their feet with a collective intake of breath, quickly followed by a hush.
“Jesus,” Landelle’s image says, Chinese subtitles at the bottom, her words echoing all about.
She knows the world is now watching
her
, and there is nothing she can do about it.
“It started right after we lost all telemetry from the Afrika. Media channels were hijacked in every country and giant projections appeared in the larger public places. In every city, every town, every village across the globe, people have had access to a twenty-four hour feed.”
At first people had no idea as to what they were seeing. Many were already glued to the media channels because of the enormous revelations of the previous forty-eight hours—a vast structure on Mars, the Afrika already many months en-route, its sole occupants perhaps the two most notorious individuals of recent times…and the truth about the Messiah virus. Any notion of a hoax had been quickly and comprehensively dispensed with, creating the mother of all culture shocks. And then there they were—Robert and Lucy playing a game of Go for all the world to see.
At first governments tried to suppress it, but the projections could not be hidden nor the media channels blocked. Tensions had already been very high, with panic rife and rioting in many the world’s major cities, and attempts at intervention threatened to take things to a tipping point.
In Tiananmen Square, amidst violent demonstrations, scaffolding had been erected to cover the projection there, but it had simply moved forward into view again. Elsewhere across the globe people were prevented from accessing such public places, but then a projection would pop up somewhere else.
World authorities quickly capitulated.
Not all media channels had been taken over, and the global network remained open, allowing for a tsunami of discussion and analysis as the world tried to make sense of what it was being shown. Then, when the Afrika neared Mars, the world stopped and just simply watched, the panic and rioting vanishing as quickly as it had started. Most stayed at home, but many were drawn to the sprawling tented cities springing up around the public projections—Red Square and the Lincoln Memorial being among the largest after Tiananmen.
It was the appearance of the corporeal Lucy that took everyone by surprise, the machine that took a life now made manifest as an innocent, a beautiful young woman naïve to the dangers about her—something a world full of hate found difficult to reconcile.
With Robert it was a similar story, the man blamed for the worst horror the century had seen was not the monster they had been promised, yet he remained the only symbol for all that had happened a decade before.
Most had supported their respective executions.
But somehow two negatives seemed to cancel each other out, the relationship between Lucy and Robert forged onboard the Afrika now captivating the world, tempering the shock of the dome itself, the wonders within it, and the enigmatic Ril and Ramani. It proved to be a rollercoaster ride of emotion for many, the anger and distrust directed at these two individuals pitted against their plight becoming a reflection of humanity itself.
Lucy’s evening at the Pavilion, and what followed, was the first swing at the mirror, her tears at the picnic the blow that shattered it. The leap from the Cantor Satori tower had sounded a collective wail of anguish, and her death an outpouring of grief. All swept away by the bitter sweet of her resurrection as a machine once more.
“They made us watch,” Landelle says. “They made us watch it all. To see how we would react. The empathy test.”
“
Sharanjit—”
“She’s alright, Bob. It was just a dream for her.”
Earth is a glowing slice of blue cutting across the panoramic view, the rest a blackness. Lucy and Robert are back on the flight deck for the final moments of the Afrika’s journey. For whatever reason, Robert’s phone remains the only communication link, but the bandwidth is more than sufficient for a wide range of telemetry and both Robert and mission control had busied themselves patching everything through it.
The central console shows the face of Chief Mission Controller Tobias Montroy. Next to it is the Veil feed, with what Robert finds to be a somewhat disconcerting view of them both from within the flight deck.
“Orbital insertion confirmed. Right on the money. Welcome home, Lucy.”
“Thank you, Toby.”
Lucy clears her own console projection, turning to Robert.
“What do you suppose is to become of us?” she asks. “Chief Justice Garr has been most reticent about answering our questions.”
The world is reverting to type—paranoia and secrecy. Quite why is beyond Robert, the Veil having demonstrated that they—
it—
really can see
everything
. But then he reminds himself that it is the people the authorities wish to keep in the dark, and thus far the Veil have not
shown
everything. Those in power still have a means to retain it.
Toby’s face is joined by another next to it.
“Afrika. This is Pegasus.”
The screen shows Toor in the copilot’s seat on the flight deck of the Pegasus space plane, Dr. Panchen next to her as pilot.
“Hello again, Commander Toor,” says Lucy. “Hello again, Dr. Panchen.”
“
Sharanjit—
a sight for sore eyes.”
“We will reach you in eighty minutes,” Toor says, a cold and forthright demeanor. “Sorry to arrive unannounced, but we are still playing catchup.” But even the ice queen has a heart, and she cannot suppress the emotion within her. “Good to see you too.”
Dr. Bebbington shoves his face forward between the two women.
“
Hey, Luce! How y’doing?
”
“Just fine, Dr. Bebbington. I have kept the Afrika in good order.”
“Good girl! We’re glad to have you back.
Hey! You’re one hot babe!
”
“Put her down, Bebsie,” Panchen says, “She’s too much woman for you.”
Lucy looks sharply to Robert for guidance on the remark. All he can do is shrug his shoulders with a weak grin as Panchen laughs out loud, leaving Bebbington looking somewhat sheepish.
Even Toor has a discernable smile, Robert noting the raising of eyebrows at Panchen, betraying an exchange between two women that no man could ever hope to discern, some message having passed between them.
A slew of alerts on the central console has Lucy bringing up her own display.
“One moment. One moment…Dr. Panchen—”
“I see it, Lucy.”
“We do too—” says Toby.
“See what?” demands Robert.
Mission control and the Pegasus feeds cut off, the screens blanking.
* * *
The Veil feed is still up on mission control’s big board, but Landelle has cut the direct links with the Afrika. Their conversations with the Pegasus are now private, as is a back channel via Robert’s phone earpiece and Lucy’s diagnostic stream.
Let the people see, so that they do not see.
But it’s a risk. Any hint that something’s not right—
“The Afrika’s reactor is executing a series of commands,” Lucy says over the back channel, her lips silent in the Veil feed. “It’s preparing for ignition.”
“The fusion drive is going to fire?” Landelle says.
Montroy is making his own analysis from the systems data.
“It’s just the main reactor,” he says. “The fusion drive is offline.”
Landelle doesn’t see it, but Panchen shares a worried gaze with Chief Justice Garr, a set of wide eyes boring down from the big board.
“Lucy, can you shut it down?”
“I cannot, Special Agent Landelle. The reactor’s systems have been locked using reverse quantum encryption—”
“
What—who?
” But the
what
and
who
are not the priority. “Can you break the codes?”
“Not in the time remaining. And nothing else will be able to.”
“
The time remaining—?
”
“The reactor preheats the propellant to a plasma prior to injection into the Star Light drive,” Lucy explains. “But without a burn sequence there will be no flow. The core will overheat and eventually melt down, forming a critical mass in zero gee that will then undergo spontaneous fission.”
“How long?”
“I calculate approximately forty-five minutes. There are many variables.”
“Dr. Panchen—how is this even possible? The fail safes—”
“It’s a self-destruct sequence,” Panchen says, her voice laced with guilt.
It’s a statement that needs no further explanation, given the circumstances. Landelle can guess the rest. Only a few would have known—Blake, insisting upon it in exchange for his complicity, Panchen to set it up, and Chief Justice Garr, upon whom Landelle’s gaze now rests.
“Tell me this wasn’t you,” Landelle says, rounding on her.
But Garr is at the tail end of her own thought process, the anger welling up inside her concealed by a heavily managed demeanor that is now cracking under the strain.
“Where is Senator Blake?” she hisses.
“Backup mission control is online,” Montroy calls out.
Garr exits in haste, collaring Montroy and two armed MPs.
“Can the Pegasus get there in time?” Landelle asks of Panchen.
“Possibly. At maximum burn.”
The grave faces all about are the real answer to that question.
“Bob,” Landelle says. “You need to get off the Afrika.”
* * *
Robert pulls himself along the main corridor, Lucy’s avatar projection appearing next to him.
“Where are you going?”
He ignores her.
“Bebsie, can you hear me?”
“Right here, Bob.”
“Going to need your assistance.”
Bebbington is in the Pegasus’s passenger cabin, the prep for a possible Afrika rendezvous hastily completed over the past few days. Before him is a view of the Afrika’s main corridor, with Robert arriving at the hatch to Lucy’s room.
“Bebsie!” Panchen calls back from the flight deck. “Strap yourself in!”
“
Crap
,” he mutters in a panicky struggle with his harness.
Forward, on the flight deck, Panchen is completing the setup for maximum burn. They need to push the Pegasus to its limits, and in that regard she outranks Commander Toor.
“Okay, everybody. Hold on tight.”
The Pegasus lights up.
Robert hauls himself into Lucy’s room in a single motion, floating to a hand hold on her cradle.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“The cradle has six anchors attached to grips,” Bebbington says over Robert’s earpiece. “Three at the bottom, three at the top. Each has a quick release clamp.”
Robert sees, setting about releasing each one. Lucy sees as well.
“You do not have time for this!” she wails. But Robert pays her no attention, leaving her to look on distraught.
The MBI unit is hooked up to the Afrika via a number of thick cables, each ending in a rubbery pad slapped onto its surface—there are no physical connections to Lucy.
“Don’t worry about the cables,” Bebbington says. “The induction pads will detach. Just give it a really good shove.”
Robert braces himself against the bulk head behind the MBI unit, and kicks out at its short edge with both feet, launching it toward the hatch, each induction pad peeling off with a
pop
.
The diamond composite mono-bloc bashes against the upper lip of the opening, but Robert is on it, grabbing hold of the suction grips still attached to it. Still, its mass is sufficient for Robert to struggle with the momentum, having to wrestle the slab out into the main corridor.
* * *
Upon arrival the MPs expedite their entrance into backup mission control by simply kicking the doors in, Garr and Montroy right behind them. There is only one occupant, a figure at a control desk with his back to them, and upon whom two weapons are drawn.
“You will cease and desist!”
Senator Blake slowly places his hands to the back of his head, keeping his placid gaze forward. A seething Garr gestures for Blake to be hauled out of the way, and Montroy to inspect the console. Blake does not give them the satisfaction, choosing instead to stand for himself and step aside.
Montroy is quick to examine Blake’s handiwork. A shake of his head at Garr confirms there is nothing to be done.
“Bring him,” Garr says to the MPs. “I want him close.”
* * *
Landelle watches as Robert transits the MBI unit down the corridor in an unceremonious fashion—a series of kicks that has it bashing its way toward the garage. A distraught Lucy darts about to keep herself in his line of sight.
“There is no time for this! Leave me here.”
“There is time, Lucy,” says Landelle. “Let him do what needs to be done.”
“This does
not
need to be done.”
Garr is at Landelle’s side, with Blake being sat down nearby under the encouragement of the two MPs.
“He
must
get her out of there,” Garr says. “She is everything now. We cannot afford to lose her.”
The two of them look at the Veil feed. It’s showing everything, but not the why—Robert has snatched what moments he can to communicate via the back channel, out of earshot and keeping his comments vague. But it isn’t enough. The constant monitoring of the media and social feeds indicates that while they have dodged details of the self-destruct protocol getting out, there is a growing suspicion that something is seriously wrong. It looks like Robert and Lucy are going to use a lander to disembark from the Afrika, the speculation rife as to the haste, with Lucy’s distressed state serving only to fan the flames further.
“The Veil are letting us get away with it,” Landelle says. “They could easily expose truth.”
“If the world knew of what Blake has done…we’d be back to where we were two weeks ago. Or worse. They probably don’t want that any more than us.”
“Then why don’t they help?”
“Why indeed…” muses Garr. “But that is not the question. The
question
is how did Blake do it? He has the access, and the ability, but not the specifics needed to initiate the self-destruct protocol.” Garr fishes a phone out her pocket, presenting it to Landelle. “He was speaking to someone all the while—identity withheld. I’ll bet they guided him through the procedure.”
“But we’re in lock down…someone here?”
“Somebody…somewhere. Pretending to be from here…perhaps?”
“The Veil? Why would they do that?”
“What if Mars was not the test?” Garr says to her squarely. “What if this is the test?”
Landelle is left momentarily speechless, Garr taking a moment to observe the penny dropping.
“Shouldn’t we tell them?” Landelle asks of her.
“I’m just speculating, Deborah. Let’s not confuse an already difficult situation.”
Having deposited the minimum amount of information sufficient for Landelle to act, should she need to, Garr nips the resulting concern in the bud.
“Speaking of lock downs,” she quips, “The White House is becoming extremely agitated. If I don’t tell them something soon they’re likely to turn the perimeter troops on us. So if you’ll excuse me, Joseph and I have a plan to placate them.”
“What’s the plan?”
“Blatant lies.”
With Garr’s departure, Landelle returns her gaze to the Veil feed.
“Bob! Not the Mombasa—it was wrecked. Use the Nairobi—”
* * *
Robert has managed to get Lucy’s MBI unit into the garage, but is now struggling with its momentum again as he manhandles it into the Mombasa—
“Yeah, it was wrecked, Debs. But rebuilt using technology a thousand years beyond our own. I know which of the two I’m going to trust.”
“Right. That’s…uh…a good point.”
Cargo clamps secure Lucy’s unit in the rear cabin, a connection with the Mombasa being established by means of its own local network. Job done, Robert pulls himself forward onto the flight deck. Lucy is waiting for him, arms tightly folded,
“I am very cross with you,” she says with an angry pout.
“Okay, baby. You be cross with me. Now be a good girl and get us the
hell
out of
here
.”
The access ramp rises, Lucy sits, pout undiminished as she brings up her own flight console projection.