Authors: Allen Charles
CHAPTER 69
Approaching the fragment.
“We will dock at the closest axial platform that you can see straight ahead, Martin.” Janine instructed the shuttle pilot. “Once I dock the transport, I want you to dock along side us, parallel. Our first task is to check off all personnel and profile skills, then to check inventory. We are all well rested,” she paused and grinned at Fuller, who reached out and brushed her breast intimately, “so there is no reason to delay these tasks.”
“Understood.” Martin replied.
The docking process was quick and while Janine’s instructions were being carried out, Fuller and Shaw jetted over to the tunnel, matching rotation once again and entering. They were able to raise Zardooz immediately and told him they were coming to test the air lock integrity. Zardooz illuminated the inner corridor and waited.
The pressure gauge on the makeshift partition was at the same reading as when they had departed. It looked good.
“Zardooz, we have a good pressure seal here. The next stage is entry if you agree.”
“I agree Col. Fuller. But let us not waste the entry effort. What can we achieve by this entry?”
“We wish to survey the access to the main water supply and examine the pipe system. You have no water left in reserve...”
Zardooz interrupted, “So I noticed.”
“...and we have a plan to restore regular water supply and stabilize the psuedo gravity. We want to begin by sitting with you and explaining our future plans. You and Arjmand are part of these plans whether you like it or not. I would prefer to have your willing cooperation.”
“Could you bring a little vodka to this meeting?”
Fuller looked at Shaw with a huge grin at Zardooz’s request. “I’ll see what I can do. I thought the prophet said your lot are not allowed alcohol.”
“Medicinal purposes Col. Fuller. Strictly medicinal.”
Fuller switched to private comms and told Shaw to jet back and pick up a bottle from the Airforce One supplies that had been shipped aboard. While Shaw did this he ran the gas sniffer around the seals once more to be sure, then just waited for Shaw to return.
Zardooz was getting impatient. “What is taking so long Col. Fuller?”
“We are double checking the seals. We have time and no need to take any risks. We will do everything with the maximum safety of all personnel foremost, and that includes you two if you are with us.”
“Well thank you. I trust that our earlier differences will be put aside sir. We are most prepared to forgive your country for what it has done to us.”
“Zardooz, I suggest you don’t go there. Do not go there ever again. You are in no position to be assuming any high ground, moral or otherwise. We are under martial law and I tell you that any such talk from this point onwards will bring unpleasant consequences for you and Arjmand. Make sure he knows to shut up as well!” Fuller dropped all pretense at diplomacy with his last words and pushed his message through harshly. “We are on our own now, just you and me Zardooz. So you get one warning. Step out of line just once, and I will happily lose your genetic contribution to the new human regeneration into the vacuum of space. Your prophet will be mightily pissed at that. Got it?”
“Now now Col. Fuller, no need to become belligerent with me. I wish to live. We will cooperate to the best of our ability.” Zardooz was trying hard to control his anger. He almost sounded friendly.
At that moment Shaw returned with a bottle clutched in his gloved hand. The contents were almost solid courtesy the chill of space. Zardooz would have very icy vodka.
“We are coming in Zardooz. Are you ready to release the lock?”
“Yes. Your repair to the circuit is holding. We are showing green to go.”
“Okay. Evacuate the lock.”
Zardooz activated the pump that sucked most of the carbon dioxide test gas back into the general atmosphere. It would be scrubbed out in the normal cycling course. The temporary entry light on the outside went green so Fuller pushed in the small, makeshift port. There was no puff of escaping gas. The system had worked well. He and Shaw climbed through the round hole and pushed the door shut, dogging it into place. The whole structure had been cut away from the secondary hull access point of the transport where it would not be missed. A patch plate had replaced it and access was available from the forward section of the hull. Just inconvenient if it was needed.
“Zardooz, pressurize the lock please.” commanded Fuller.
They saw a tiny puff of vapor as moisture in the first air into the tiny lock froze on contact with the extreme cold. In moments the whole lock had fogged up but there was enough visibility to see the inner access door which was still scorched and streaked on the outside from the anti-matter and subsequent fuel bomb blast, as deep as it was inside the tunnel. Fortunately it was superficial damage. The seals had held, although Fuller and his team had to replace fused wiring when they installed the temporary lock.
The door swung open into the corridor of the complex. They could see the bloody smears where Arjmand had come to grief earlier. Shaw pointed to the marks and Fuller nodded that he had seen them. They knew that someone had been injured here.
“We are in Zardooz. Closing the air lock door now.” Fuller pushed the door closed and the dogs latched into place. The pressure was left in the temporary lock ready for departure.
“Come straight down the corridor Col. Fuller. You have two more equal pressure locks to pass through.”
“Where is Arjmand?” asked Fuller.
“Still asleep. I sedated him after I knocked him out. I hope you have something as you mentioned earlier.”
“Yes I do. We are approaching the last door.”
“I will come to meet you.”
The three sat in the complex control room strapped into chairs. Arjmand was still curled in a foetal position in the corner couch, and would stay that way for some time. Fuller had administered an injection of Medalizam that would set Arjmand’s memory back a few steps if it worked as advertised. A doctor aboard Sheila’s shuttle had worked out the dose and frequency of administration to take Arjmand back to the days before he became the president of the Iranian Empire. It was going to be an interesting experiment.
Zardooz carefully picked up the bottle of vodka from the makeshift restraint and examined the label. The contents were now oily thick as the temperature increased. He pursed his lips and nodded his head in appreciation. “The real thing. Stoli. You treat yourself well Col. Fuller.”
“This is a gift from the President of the United States Mr Zardooz.” Fuller had decided to become formal and see where it all led. “Our President trusts that you will make a medicinal toast to our future friendship and cooperation.”
“By all means! Here, let me load some drinking bottles with a little for each of us. We have to find solutions to these new conditions for everything, even drinking.”
Zardooz had three empty bottles ready, their caps unscrewed. He carefully unwrapped the neck of the vodka bottle and broke the seal, surreptitiously inspecting it for any tiny holes or signs of interference, but Fuller noticed. He oriented the bottle so the psuedo gravity kept the precious liquid away from the mouth and placed a plastic drink container tight against the glass vodka bottle, then sealed it with a strip of adhesive tape, also cut beforehand.
“You seem to be well prepared for this Mr Zardooz.”
“Yes Col. Fuller,” Zardooz relied, noting the change of attitude, “I was certain you would follow through with your agreement to find a bottle. If you can move this fragment then a bottle of vodka should be child’s play to you.”
Fuller laughed, “It may be easier to move the fragment than find a bottle in the future. Don’t get the wrong idea in your head. Oh, just do one for me. My companion is yet of drinking age.”
Shaw caught himself before he reacted with an objection, realizing that Fuller still did not trust Zardooz and wanted Shaw to watch his back in case the bottles had been tampered with.
Zardooz shrugged and handed Fuller a bottle with a generous amount of vodka. He lifted his own bottle in a toast and called out, “Le chayim!” and took a good swig. Fuller waited and did not react, actually surprised that Zardooz had used the national toast expression of his most bitter enemy.
“Colonel, you do not drink? Aha! You still do not trust me. A wise man. Here, give me your bottle.” Zardooz reached out and took Fuller’s bottle, then holding it away from his lips, squirted a stream of vodka into his open mouth. He wiped the stray drops away with his sleeve and gave a sigh of appreciation and handed the bottle back. “See Colonel, no poison!”
Fuller took the bottle and looked at the top, then back at Zardooz. A fast acting topical poison could still be on the drinking cap, so he unscrewed the cap and carefully put it in his belt pouch, then squirted a bolus of vodka into his own mouth without touching the bottle. Zardooz gave a faint smile and said, “You will find nothing on that cap Colonel. I have no bad intentions towards you. It would not be worth my life.”
“Mr Zardooz, there is a creature that I recall changed its color instantly to save itself. A chameleon lizard. It was still the same lizard underneath the color. Think about it. Now let’s get down to business and I will explain what we are planning.”
CHAPTER 70
“It is a difficult docking sequence Martin, but I have done it once with the fragment tumbling, not just spinning. Gerald Shaw has calculated the two rim positions for the transport and the shuttle. We will dock one at a time to avoid collision. Once in place and tethered, we will apply gradually increasing thrust against the spin of the fragment until we reduce the spin to relative zero. Unfortunately, the downside of this plan is the loss of a large amount of reaction mass, namely our water supply, and the catch to the scheme is that we cannot get more water until we stop the spin. We have to use everything we have available and this is truly do or die. When the spin has been stopped, we will apply the Dinkshif Drives to build linear acceleration that will create a pseudo gravity in the correct orientation to put the main body of water back into the reservoir where it can be accessed by the pump system.”
“Janine, why can’t we use the Dinkshif Drives to take off the spin?”
“The Dinkshif theory states that a trail of ionized gold is the exhaust of the system. We have no idea of the properties of this gold or what it would do to the fragment or us. If you look at the spin mechanics you will see that we would collect exhaust residue from the de-spin on the facing edge of the fragment as we travel into the exhaust material off the leading edge. We cannot take that risk. Your group detected the relationship between the gold residue and the anti-matter.”
“I understand. You know, I always wondered why the metal gold was considered so valuable. You couldn’t eat it at the end of the day. It had to be an artifice of the human mind that gave anything value, but now I see that this gold residue comes from a reactive drive, it makes a bizarre sense to see that there is something special, almost unworldly, about gold.”
“Hey Martin! That’s what alchemy was all about. Creating gold from base metals. Just when we get it all figured out, wham! There’s no one left to appreciate it. OK you ready to dock? Your tether team on stand by?”
“All ready Janine. Here we go!”
Martin took the shuttle into an inverted trajectory over the thin rim of the fragment, a zone about fifty yards wide with a sharp edge where the fracture from the Earth’s crust had occurred. He made it look too easy as the shuttle eased down on its back and then he held it in place with the thrusters as his tether team boiled out of the ship and took their positions. With guidance from Janine’s prior experience, they got the cables set and the ship secured. There was about a five degree angle from the perpendicular to the fragment that was taken care of by the gimballed main drive.
Then it was Janine’s turn and she did it like an old hand. The space crews were the best of the best that Earth ever had to offer. Tom, the President watched with pride the perfect execution of the plan, then felt a huge mood of depression as he realized yet again that there was nothing to be proud about. He went back to thinking about Zardooz after hearing Fuller’s report of the encounter.
The bottle cap had tested almost clean. There was just an infinitesimal trace of something so obscure that it took the Bio-Meter three hundred and fifty three milliseconds to identify it, instead of the usual three to five. The substance was a very rare snake venom, native to Iran but believed extinct on Earth for some two thousand years. That it was even in the data base was astounding, an apparently beneficial adjunct of the Iraq-Iran wars of the past century where no holds were barred by either side. The Iraquis had identified this threat and put aside a sample. US Desert Storm forces has captured all the documentation and samples which over the ensuing years had been tested and cataloged for its esoteric and maybe medical, value.
There were just a few molecules present on the cap. Just enough to kill. Just enough to blame on a snake living somewhere in the complex near a water source.
Tom was thinking furiously whether to space Zardooz and Arjmand or try to live with them like the two poisonous snakes they were.
In the cabin, Janine was coordinating the thrust build up with Martin under instruction from Gerald Shaw. He was manipulating the dimage at an incredible speed, running what if calculation scenarios to narrow down the effects of unknown factors. On Martin’s shuttle, Sheila was following the math as fast as Shaw could manipulate the equations. Already genius level, Shaw was moving to another strata of human intelligence never before seen. The other councillors watched in amazement and admiration as the teenager took physics and mechanics to new heights. Felicity watched with a glow of possessive pride as the solution took shape. She too was understanding math that she had never been trained into. She could not innovate like Shaw, but she could follow.
Sheila watched Gerald’s dimages flash past and added her own interpretation, seeing one place that he had missed a variable, simply because he had no idea it was there in her ship. She corrected and a fleeting “thanks” scrolled by.
The main engine thrust gradually came up, the tethers taking the strain and applying the anti-spin force to the fragment. The cable anchors were the weakest link in the plan so there were people in pairs watching each anchor outside the ships. The fours had to be sacrificed for the moment.
They had some redundancy in the tethers in case of breakage and the observation teams were set back out of the danger zone if a break occurred. Or so they thought.
Inside Janine’s transport there was a sharp noise, like a firecracker, transmitted through the hull as a cable anchor pulled free without warning. Outside, the two cadets watching the cable never knew what hit them as it sliced them in half like a grass trimmer. The ship did not move but the gory remains of the pair drifted and spiraled outwards as the others watched, horrified. The two lower bodies were left tied down where they had been watching. The loose tether had finally whipped around and passed through the thruster blast which cut it and it flew off into space.
The remains stayed put. Nothing vanished. The gore was splattered everywhere it could stick. The buddies were dead too.
“Everyone hold position!” commanded Janine. “We go on! There is only one shot at this. Hold position and keep right down low. We will mourn later. Now we have a job to do people.”
Outside, two of the cadets in sight of the grizzly scene were being violently ill, but their youniforms and buddies took care of the upchuck before it could do any damage. After a few minutes they all settled down, spirits dampened and without enthusiasm.
Nickle watched the board. There were more red dots again, those brains that had not been strong enough for the electric shock treatment. More mush for the recycling system. He looked at the judges’ monitors. Uh oh! Howley wasn’t back on line yet. He could hear moaning from Peepers.
“Oooh! My head hurts! What happened? Where am I? Oh my back is killing me? Why is everything dark?”
“Peepers? It’s Nickle. Your old friend.”
“Nickle? Nickle who? Nicklodeon? Ha ha!”
“Aahhg! What hit me? Peepers? Howley? Are you guys OK?”
“Who are you?”
“Charonelle, Peepers don’t remember nothing and Howley hasn’t come back on line. I’m afraid he may be brain mush.”
“Ohh! Nickle! What happened?”
“I had to do a system wide shock. Too many brains was going into one way euphoric addiction mode. They would never have come out of it and the instruction book said I had to do a system wide shock before everybrain got caught up in it.”
“Gracious me! What about the audience?”
“We seems to have lost quite a few of ‘em as red dots. Lot more than last time. Doesn’t matter though. Theys all went out smiling.”
“Nickle, the game must go on! What of our erstwhile performers?”
“Well, while you lot were all in happyland they had a little accident and a couple of the cadets got kinda messed up.”
“Did you catch them and put them is stasis?”
“Naw. I was too busy sorting out you lot and the main board. Likes I says, they got messed up as in little pieces. They was too dead before I could do nothing.”
“Those poor dears. I guess there is no point in crying over spilled blood now. Oh well.” Charonelle was reflectively silent for a moment then, “Can we do anything for Peepers. He seems to think he has a body once again. The shock jolted his memory back over twenty five thousand years. Is this permanent or will his memory come back?”
“Ah don’t know Miss Charonelle. The hand book say that the amnesia be temporary and memory come back gradually, starting at earliest regression, so I guess Peepers has twenty five thousand years of memories to live through. Could take a little while.”
“Oh my! Is there any sign of Howley?”
“Well that’s an interesting question. I been watching his monitor light and I thought we lost him to red, but he keeps swinging through a range of colors, mostly in blue and purples and there ain’t nuttin in the book about that, so I’m guessing he’s getting brain screwed big time and loving it. The jolt didn’t seem to affect him at all.” Nickle stopped talking as Howley’s light changed from the odd color to a steady green.
“You guys been talking about me?” came Howley’s cheeky voice.
“Oh Howley!” gushed Charonelle, “We were so worried about you! What happened?”
“Char, if I had a face I’d be smiling to split. I just had the best brain-sex mind-gasm blast in the universe with a lady brain friend. We let go to the euphoria stream just right and then Nickle gave us a tickle,” Howley giggled at his own rhyme, “Nickle tickle huh? Well that little helper kicked us both off together in a shared mind-gasm like never before. It made the long gone love tackle orgasms look puny by comparison. Whew! I’m still coming down from it.”
“Oh,” said Charonelle with a touch of dismay in her voice, “I just blacked out and poor Peepers has lost his memory. He still thinks he has a body.”
“That was probably the last time he had an orgasm, when he had a body. Makes sense he would regress there. He always struck me as being anal retentive.”
“Well just us two now as judges and Nickle told me we actually lost two finalists to death, which has never happened before.”
“That is sad. And what’s worse, from what I can see not one of the audience saw the death episode. What waste of actors. Can we do anything with the body parts in stasis?”
Nickle cut in, “We can’t touch them any more. They know something is fishy and have even set up watches round the clock to stop the stasis collection. Peepers messed up big time when he snatched the fleet people. These performers are really clever, better than any before. We can’t afford any more mistakes.”
“OK Nickle, no more snatching unless it is totally concealed.” said Charonelle.
“So audience!” announced Howley, “Who is still with us and what are the odds now? Let’s hear some betting people. That IS what this is all about!”
The network began a subdued hum. “Hey! Cometfart! You still cerebrating?”
“Wotchit Moonballs! If I had just one leg I’d hop over to your galaxy and boot you in the balls. How much you want on Sheila and Martin. I kinda fancy them...”