Authors: Allen Charles
CHAPTER 63
On board the transport.
Shaw had been analyzing the layout of the complex that the repair bot memory module had yielded. Fuller was looking at it from a military strategic angle. Shaw was using it to evaluate and compare the mass calculations for the fragment. Something still did not stack up in the math. Furthermore, Shaw had checked the rotational period of the fragment and found a further anomaly. The spin was ever so slightly slowing; not enough to be of any concern for at least the next fifty years, but it was slowing.
He did some further calculations which came close to verifying his hypothesis and then called a council meeting. The group assembled within minutes, Fuller also ready to present his plan of attack.
Fuller started, “Okay Councillor Shaw, you called the meeting so please start.”
Shaw moved to the front of the group and activated a larger dimage of the fragment and the now fully revealed complex. “I have discovered some information that is both of concern and also of a very positive nature.” He brought up some equations under the dimage.
“Because we need to know the mass of the fragment as accurately as possible for our future journey, I used the complex schematic to evaluate how much mass has been removed to form all the rooms and corridors and it is substantial. The mass removed still does not account for the estimated mass calculation that I did earlier based upon our rotational adjustments that were fairly accurate.
What this means is that there is a great deal more fragment mass missing or the material of the fragment is very light and spongy and we know first hand that this is not the case.” He paused and drew a series of swirls and lines behind the complex representation at the back side of the fragment.
“The only conclusion I could draw from this is that there are more cavities, be they natural caves or excavations, that are not shown in the complex schematic or anywhere else in the bot memory for that matter. Therefore we may have a very different scenario for Councillor Fuller to consider from the military standpoint.” There was a buzz among the councillors at this revelation. Shaw held up his hand for silence. “There is one more thing.”
He drew in a solid area in the new lines and colored it blue. “The fragment spin is slowing down very minutely, at eight decimal places in the measurements. It is a definite pattern that fortunately will not affect us for decades, but the slowing force means something is causing this braking effect. My conclusion is one possibility. There must be a significant, coherent body of fluid somewhere inside the fragment and based on the rotational behavior it is towards the center.
I am trying to calculate the volume of liquid, and I am assuming fresh water would be logical for the complex reservoir, based on the braking effect of the fluid’s coefficient of friction. It is a very difficult estimation without further data but that is not important right now. What is important to us is that there is a LOT of water in there and that means drinking, bathing, washing which are all recycled and when we need it, lost reaction mass.”
Shaw sat down and Fuller took over. “Based on these new findings we clearly have to take the fragment, with or without Zardooz cooperating. Councillor Shaw’s conclusions are sound and that means that Zardooz may have other exits from the complex if there is a cave or extended unmapped section that has been exposed by the fragmentation. We must examine the fragment surface scans once again now that we know we are looking for openings or signs of internal structure.
I am greatly concerned that Zardooz may be able to poke his head up from somewhere else and see that our lift off was a hoax. I do not believe he will blow up the fragment, but he may try to do damage to us and our transport. I am sure he has weapons in that complex.”
“But he wouldn’t have a space suit!” interjected Felicity.
There was silence for a moment as the group digested these ideas, then Shaw answered, “There is a large body of water in there, most likely with piping, valves and all sorts of other equipment that might need maintenance. There is a good chance that there is diving equipment of some type for that purpose, and we know that diving suits are not that far removed from space suits.”
“I believe,” continued Fuller, “that we must consider lifting the transport off and parking it nearby until this is resolved. If Zardooz does do something stupid we do not need to go down with him, and we certainly don’t need to make it easy for him to attack us.
This is a fluid situation and may change instantly. We must be ready to react until we know that Zardooz is either contained or... dead.”
“I will get ready to lift off.” said Janine. “I think we should use explosive shears to cut the tether lines so we are all aboard. You can approach the fragment from the spin axis to get back on later. In fact I intend to park the transport in line with the axis. It makes us a difficult target for anyone not on the axis and we present our smallest profile to any threat.”
“Tom, Gerald, Felicity. Take two shear charges each and fix them to the tethers at one end each. We may need the cables again later. Janine will detonate remotely when you are all back aboard.”
The group dispersed to do their tasks.
“We are ready to go. Is everyone strapped in?” Janine asked across comms. “This is a tricky manoeuvre and probably a bit gut churning, but it will not last too long. Here we go!”
She hit the switch that blew the tether charges and immediately the transport began to slide against the direction of spin and drift away from the fragment, upside down as it was. Janine applied full thrusters to take it up so that the fragment edge would not swat the transport like a fly. They had some tangential motion already and the shove popped them over the fragment edge with room to spare. Now they were a space ship again and Janine manipulated the jets to bring the transport along side the fragment as she had explained.
Completely without artificial gravity or coriolis forces, the cadets took freedom in not having to be constantly strapped in while the council assembled to work out the next step in taking over the fragment from the Iranians.
CHAPTER 64
Inside the Complex.
Arjmand watched the monitors carefully, constantly glancing back at the self destruct button. He had a crazy urge to touch it, to flirt with danger and feel death through the tips of his fingers. He didn’t want to do it, just feel it a little.
He worked his way out of his seat and across to the self destruct panel. He stood holding himself in place as he stared at the doomsday button, the path to Allah and seventy two virgins.
As he daydreamed about the seventy two, the dead view screen from the surface node that Zardooz has attempted to recover suddenly flickered with snow and lines. A grainy image flashed on for an instant showing the American transport shooting jets and attempting to land. It drifted away and then the screen went blank again. Ejecta from the tether shear explosion had hit the node camera, that as damaged as it was, came on again for that instant as a broken contact connected from the impact and then broke apart again from another strike. But it was enough to excite Arjmand.
“Zardooz! Are you there!”
“Yes, what is it?” came back the tinny reply. Zardooz was in the dive suit and on the move.
“The Americans just landed. I saw it on the outside node camera.”
“Impossible. That camera is dead!”
“No! I saw it. Just for a moment, it came on and then died again. I saw their ship landing.”
“Fine. They will be there for me to destroy them. Do nothing Arjmand!”
“But you told me to hit the red button if they came back!”
“Do you really want to kill yourself Arjmand?” screamed Zardooz. “Are you so stupid? There are no virgins and there is no glory. It is all nonsense!”
Arjmand was stunned by the outburst from Zardooz. He believed in the Prophet and the seventy two virgins. Zardooz was an heretic. He could die along with them all and not get his bevy of virgins.
“I am pushing the button!”
“Don’t be a fool. Think about a religion that rewards you through your penis. That is a physical sensation only for the living. What are any virgins doing in the next world? Not waiting for you. And when the seventy are no longer virgins, what do you do then? Little boys?”
“You are disgusting Zardooz! I am pressing the button!”
Arjmand plunged his hand down on the red button.
“Yes! Yes! He did it!” Howley was so excited. “Charonelle! Did you see that! He actually pressed the self destruct! I pulled all the explosive charges as my interference clause allowed. He did it! He did it!”
“Howley! Calm down! We see it. Now all the interferences are balanced so could we please not have any more? Do I have your agreement? Peepers? Howley?”
“You have mine,” pontificated Peepers, “I never wanted interference in the first place. Spoils the au natural appearance of the acts.”
“OK!” grudgingly agreed Howley.
“I was impressed that Zardooz came out openly and admitted that the seventy two virgin bit was hard to swallow. I can’t quite understand how anyone could possibly believe such nonsense, but that Zardooz did put it succinctly.”
“It didn’t help though.” Said Charonelle. “Arjmand still tried to blow them up.”
There was no reaction from the audience. None of them had disembodied from this edition and so had no association with this method of Deity worship.
“I am not denying the Deity in all this. We have the Deity Clause. It is just hugely entertaining to see how these acts over five thousand or so years have twisted the Deity concept and lost sight of what the Deity is all about.”
“Please Peepers, this is not an evangelical broadcast,” Scolded Charonelle, “This is entertainment at its best and I think these last acts have done so brilliantly. I would put Arjmand and Zardooz up with the other favorites now.”
“You’ve got to be joking. This has been the most boring segment of the show since the board lit up! I wouldn’t give these two the time of day!” said Peepers in disgust. “This more along the lines of Howley’s comedy acts with this virgin nonsense. Good grief! The women we lifted into stasis from Arjmand’s orgy were far from virgins and he seemed to enjoy himself there. What is this fascination and fixation on virgins when they treat their women like possessions, like cattle? No these are not winner material.”
“All right folks out there. You have heard Peepers opinion. I still hold that these two have something to offer and a chance to win. We will let the acts themselves decide. Let’s get back and look at the Fuller team. What are they up to?”
CHAPTER 65
Aboard the transport, now floating free.
Janine had aligned the ship perfectly once she had matched velocity with the fragment. It faced one of the barely visible Dinkshif drives that was counter rotating on the fragment so that it appeared to be travelling along with them as the fragment spun. The fragment loomed around them, blocking the sunlight so they were hidden in the deep shadow that obscured the drive. All the more difficult for anyone on the fragment to see them. Meaning Zardooz.
They would use the Dinkshif drive as a stable work platform to launch their assault on the complex.
Four of the team had carefully surveyed the surface scan of the far side, which had not taken the brunt of the fuel bomb blast that removed the anti-matter. The blast on this side had effectively been parallel to the surface as it curved around, following the charged surface and sweeping away the silver anti-matter layer. The intense heat of the blast had fused the surface into a dimpled, shiny glazing that the shear forces and heat had polished up nicely, completely the opposite of the head on blast effect on the front side. The team had identified deeply colored, shallow concave regions of varying shape. They determined that these were “glass” bubbles covering over the exposed cave system that Shaw had predicted. They did find one anomaly.
One of the dimples, a fairly large one, had a perfectly round, black hole in the middle. An opening into the cave system and maybe access to the complex. The bubble had begun to burst as the blast effect dissipated and the skin of fused rock hardened with the hole formed by surface tension. It was going to be a race to see if Zardooz would find this hole or if he would attempt to smash his way out somewhere else.
Fuller, the President and Shaw were in full jet packs and each carried a two thousand meter spool of mono filament to use for backtracking, just like the story of the Minotaur and the maze. The mono filament graphite carbon was also conductive and would be the antenna for comms link inside the fragment. Fuller carried an extra tether cable spool for their surface track.
The trio jetted off the transport and headed for the Dinkshif drive platform. Fuller carried a pack loaded with their remaining rock climbing gear as he would lead once they started their crawl across the back surface towards the hole. They had considered testing the fused glass bubbles of closer outlets to see if they could gain entry, but because there was definitely a mass of water somewhere inside the fragment, they did not want to accidentally pull the plug and lose it all. The hole they had found was obviously not connected to the fluid reservoir and Shaw had no success in calculating the position of the main water mass due to the approximations involved.
They started out on their trek, Fuller placing a piton every arm’s length and moving along at a snail crawl. Shaw followed him, holding on to the cable and passing equipment as needed, and Tom followed at the back, pulling up nine out of every ten pitons and handing them forward to Shaw. It was slow going, but they had calculated to have a few pitons left on reaching the hole and a permanent path back to the stable platform.
They were passing the first of the glassy bubbles and Fuller moved as close as he could to still drive in a piton without damaging the surface. The bubble was mostly clean and smooth, with tiny pock marks beginning to show from meteorite erosion. It was obvious that in a relatively short time the glass would be sandblasted into opacity and probably shatter. Right now, Fuller was able to stretch over the glass edge and shine a flashlight through it. The beam was swallowed by the intense blackness and nothing could be seen.
“Let’s move on.” said Fuller, “There is nothing obvious here.”
They continued their crawl for another forty minutes, stopping only once more as they closed on the hole to peer into another bubble close to their goal. Still nothing.
The glassy surface before them presented a small problem. The edge of the hole was a good five meters away. They had to either smash through the glass where they were or crawl across to the hole. Fuller pulled a small laser torch out of his pack and began to warm an area of the bubble, moving inwards in decreasing spirals until the center glowed cherry red. He took a piton and pressed it into the elastic glass, then opened the barbed flange at its tip, inside the molten glass.
The area cooled quickly in the zero of space and was soon just warm and hard again. He repeated the process three more times until he reached the rim of the hole, which was polished and smooth. There were no hand holds to grip, so he used the torch to soften the edge of the rim and pushed a piton right through, twisting and sliding it to form a glass handle, and then again two feet away.
Once the grips had cooled, he was able to drape his torso over the edge of the hole and shine a beam inside. The molten glass was purely a surface effect as he could see grainy rock and crystalline reflections within. The bubble had formed over a large chamber in what appeared to be a natural cave system. He could see two black openings that were conduits in the cave system. There were no excavations marks in the walls and stalagmites and tites indicated what had once been up and down. Some of these mineral spears looked menacingly sharp in the bright light.
Fuller pulled back and warned the others about the sharp spikes, then they went to work to fix cables between the hole edge and the cave base next to each opening, after which he designated Tom and Gerald to attach their guide spools to one opening and explore that way, while he did the other.
The comms antennae were transmitting back to the transport where Janine and Felicity were watching as the computer used dead reckoning to plot their movements and thus the cave layout as they explored. From their transmitted description of each area, Janine drew in the features. At the same time, she reported their relative positions back to them via a small schematic image of the fragment.
Fuller’s tunnel ran parallel to the surface for some time then turned in towards the fragment center while Tom and Gerald found a fork and split up. Moving inside was relatively easy using the spin forces as artificial gravity. The only problem arose when the tunnel was perpendicular to the spin. Then they had to use the ancient technique of tacking into the wind, taking a small angled push off one wall to reach the opposite wall. The greater the angle, the more distance covered. “Six points to the wind!” Thought Fuller as he brought his leisure time sailing boat skills into play.
“Hit a dead end here!” reported Shaw.
“Me too.” the President joined in.
“All right, turn around and head back. My tunnel is still going, so wait for me to report back.”
“Hold on a minute!” exclaimed Shaw. “I am taking a close look at the end of the tunnel and it is not natural. It appears to be rough concrete which is why it looked like the cave at first glance. It is also covered with a thin layer of ice in places.
I do believe we have found our reservoir. They must have dammed up the cave system and allowed rainfall to fill it with water, but there must still be a significant single body of water further in, like a huge chamber, otherwise there would be no braking effect.”
“What do you see, Tom?” asked Fuller.
“Same thing. Damp concrete barrier. I’m assuming that when there was gravity, the water may not have reached the concrete barrier. Now it is in free fall and it will find its way through every crack or porous area, assisted by the spin.”
“Okay, both of you head back my way. There’s nothing you can do other than capture some images of what you see. My tunnel seems to be heading around the edge of the fragment, or better yet, around something and heading towards the complex. I am guessing it follows the outer limits of the reservoir system. Catch up with me guys.”
The trio carried on for a while, the two catching up slowly with Fuller, when suddenly he called out, “Bingo! This tunnel becomes an excavated conduit. I just hit reinforced concrete walls and I do believe I see light fittings. I’ll wait for you here.” He sat down against the light pseudo gravity and waited. Soon he saw reflected light flickering from the walls. It was a little disorienting as it came from all around. In fact it was getting stronger, but not from the direction he expected.
He pulled himself as close to the cavern wall as possible, trying to blend in and warned the others not to come any further. It was certainly Zardooz coming his way.
The apparition that caromed into sight looked like a skinnier version of the Michelin Man as it bounced from wall to wall. What was not funny was the black pistol this clown figure was holding. It stopped its motion and looked at a note taped to its wrist. Zardooz had not seen Fuller - yet.
Zardooz raised his hand and pointed the pistol towards Fuller and pulled the trigger. The shot sent up a spark inches from Fuller’s head as it ricocheted its way down the cave. There was an “Ow!” from Shaw as the slowing projectile nicked his shoulder. “What was that?” he called out.
“Zardooz took a shot at me, but I don’t know how he could have seen me.” answered Fuller. “He didn’t compensate for the recoil and now he’s flying backwards and out of control.” Fuller watched as Zardooz struggled to regain equilibrium. After a few minutes he struggled back to his last position and once again referred to the paper on his wrist. He started working his way towards Fuller but stopped short and extracted another paper from his belt pouch, which he stuck onto the cave wall. He was careful to check that the wall was excavated bedrock and not concrete, but all Fuller saw was the bulls eye target hanging on the wall.
“You guys need to get out of here quickly. Zardooz is doing target practice. He never saw me so I will stay put. I don’t have time to get out of the way. Go now! Move”
The pair, now together, responded and started back. They were trying for a sharp bend in the tunnel that would afford them reasonable protection from the bullets.
They hadn’t quite made it when Zardooz started firing, slow, deliberately aimed shots. The slugs vanished down the curved tunnel in a series of sparks, narrowly missing Tom and Gerald until, “Uhh! I’m hit!” gasped Tom.
They were almost at the bend so Shaw struggled to drag Tom to safety, the sparking bullets coming steadily. They all hit the end wall that the cave presented because of the bend and rebounded into energy sapping ricochets, finally slowing enough for the gravity well to drag them to the rock face where they came to rest. Except for the one that had hit the President and broken his rib. The youniform had done its job, preventing penetration, but it could not stop the impact, just as Shaw would have a decent bruise on his shoulder.
The buddies went to work on both wounded men and started accelerated healing, applying pain suppression to Tom’s ribs and soothing Gerald’s shoulder.
Even as Gerald looked back, another spark flashed at the end wall as a bullet struck, but this time it rebounded almost perfectly. With few ricochets, the slug travelled back the way it had come and plowed into Zardooz, puncturing his diving suit and sending him tumbling about as his pressurized air blasted out. He was slapping his hands about looking for the hole but couldn’t find it as he gasped for the last vestiges of atmosphere. Then he blacked out.
Fuller moved quickly to the prone form. He had seen that against all odds, Zardooz had shot himself. He didn’t think twice about saving him. It had to be attempted.
Zardooz was out and close to death. Fuller found an emergency youniform patch and applied it to the obvious bullet hole in the dive suit. There was no blood so it was likely the bullet had buried itself in the tough suit as there was no exit hole. Once patched, Fuller took what was clearly an extra oxygen bottle and attached it after removing the exhausted one. The suit began to inflate ad bring oxygen to Zardooz’s starved brain. Fuller thought about taking Zardooz captive but decided they did not need the difficulty involved in guarding him. Instead he took all the weapons and ammunition Zardooz had strapped to himself.
Finally Fuller looked at the paper on Zardooz’s wrist and carefully removed it and folded it into his belt pack. Zardooz was coming to, his eyes just visible behind the diving face plate fluttering into consciousness. Fuller wrapped Zardooz with his own cable to disable him, and pressed his youniform faceplate to the diving plate.
“Zardooz! Can you hear me?” Inside the helmet Fuller could see the sudden confusion and fear in Zardooz’s eyes as he fully awoke, his head splitting with pain from the oxygen deprivation.