Battle Cruiser (15 page)

-21-

Before we reached the detention center, the lieutenant we’d captured passed out. His leg hung limply at an impossible angle. I felt responsible for his condition as I’d been the one who had ordered the hatch to be closed on him.

Pushing that thought away, I reminded myself that Singh had started this showdown, not me. I was only trying to keep my crew alive, which was my duty as an officer of the Guard.

“Open the cell door for me,” Zye said, and Yamada quickly complied.

Zye placed the dying marine on a bed that was far too big for him. He wasn’t a small man, but he looked like a child in her arms as she placed him on the featureless bunk.

“We have to strip off his suit and let the chamber do its work.”

“How fast does this cell function?” Yamada asked. “If we take off the suit, he’ll bleed out.”

“You’re right…not fast enough.” Zye reached for a strap that circled her waist. There were several that hung from various cinch spots on her spacesuit. It was the first time I’d really taken the opportunity to examine her equipment.

“That’s not a smart suit, is it?” I asked.

“No. Betas don’t have such things,” Zye said, tying the strap around the lieutenant’s leg to form a tourniquet. “Now we can take his suit off. The medical bot won’t operate if blocked by thick clothing.”

I recalled that Zye had been naked in the cell, I now understood why. We stripped off Morris’s suit and stepped out of the chamber. The exposed wound was grotesque. Really, his leg had been severed. It was hanging by skin and tendons alone.

As soon as we closed up the cell, it began to whir and hum. “The bot is going to work,” Zye said, peering through the porthole. “He might live. We’ll see.”

“We did what we could,” I said. “Is it all right to leave him in there?”

Zye nodded. “If he survives his injury, he’ll be kept alive for years. The cell is merciless in this regard.”

I glanced at her sharply as her tone had a hint of bitterness in it. Had she attempted suicide in her cell? I wouldn’t have been surprised. Trapped for years in an automated cell, without companionship or hope of rescue…it was a wonder, as I thought about it, that Zye was sane at all. Perhaps her resilience was a feature of her genetic design, and by inference, part of the personality of all Betas.

We moved back to the life support section. The crew there was glad to see us return alive.

“Any new developments?” I asked them.

My hydraulic engineering mate showed me that something had changed: more of the ship had come awake in our absence.

“Hmm,” I said, studying the ship’s diagram. “It’s following some kind of script.”

“The ship is programmed to add vital systems one at a time when the generators are running again,” Zye explained.

Eyeing her thoughtfully, I asked her a question: “What were your duties aboard
Defiant
before you were arrested?”

“Maintenance,” she said vaguely. “I kept things running. That’s why I know how many of the subsystems operate.”

“I see. It would seem to be in our best interest, then, to get more power flowing around the vessel. Given sufficient feed, can the ship repair itself?”

“We have no nanites,” Zye said. “No smart metals that fold themselves back into shape. We never developed that technology. But we do have robotic repair units. If you can get power to the lower aft deck, you’ll find the units running all over the ship, rebuilding her.”

Rumbold perked up. “That should give Singh’s men something to chew on!”

“Right,” I said. “Yamada, stay here with an assistant to man life support and watch the screens for infiltration. We don’t know how long we have before Captain Singh decides to visit us again. The rest of us will head for the power-coupling deck.”

It took nearly an hour to reach the center of the power-coupling deck. In a damaged spacecraft, the going can be treacherous. Cold vacuum alone is deadly enough, but jagged twists of metal, poisonous corrosives and radioactive substances are frequent elements in any large ship’s construction. We had to wind our way past these hazards and into the damaged region carefully, like a party of cave spelunkers.

When we’d reached the power couplings themselves, we found them remarkably intact. It was the massive cables that were severed, rather than the critical switching equipment that routed the power.

Rumbold and his team proved themselves to be instrumental over the following hour of hard labor. With Zye’s help, they shunted and reconnected the massive cables, repairing them. I was relegated to the role of an observer, and spent most of my time tapping on various control screens.

I learned that the ship’s interface, although strange, wasn’t unfathomable. With Zye’s help, I managed to breach many security elements and access the data core.

Fascinated, I paged through the information I found there. The ship had been commissioned two decades earlier, if my understanding of their dating system was accurate. She was one of several identical massive vessels. Her class was indeed referred to as a battle cruiser, meaning she was an independent capital ship capable of performing missions in remote star systems without supporting vessels.

As I paged through star charts and saw various colonies mapped there, I became increasingly excited. My heart pounded in my temples. This ship was a treasure trove of critical information. Earth had been asleep for so long…

How could this have happened to us, I wondered? How could we have been so blind? We’d assumed that because our own pathways to other star systems had vanished, that the pathways between other star systems had also been destroyed. Even more foolish, we’d believed new pathways could not be found. But why?

On the surface of it, when confronted with the physical evidence, I was dumbfounded at the shortsighted nature of Earth’s rulers. How could we have assumed so much, so wrongly, for so long?

Then, unbidden, darker thoughts came to my mind. Perhaps we
weren’t
so stupid after all. Perhaps at some level, government officials knew the truth, or at least they suspected it. How could they not have done so?

All my life, I’d believed the common wisdom of my fellows. I’d been certain that the colonies were cut off from us, and we from them. We weren’t even sure whether or not they still existed. Every teacher in every school, from kindergarten to graduate school, had professed this knowledge to me as indisputable fact. Anyone who disagreed was labeled “ignorant.”

But it wasn’t so. We
weren’t
alone. And our isolation was due to our own disinterest. There were surviving colonies, many of them. As I continued tapping at links, looking at new worlds, I realized that there were actually more colonies than I’d ever been told of. This fact led me back to Zye with fresh questions.

“Zye,” I said, “how many colonies are there in space?”

“Human colonies? About a hundred that we know of.”

My eyes narrowed. “Do I take it from that statement that some of these colonies are not human?”

“That’s right. There are worlds where humans share the planet with native life-forms. Creatures that weren’t transplanted from Earth long ago. In addition, along the distant frontier where new colonies are still being founded, alien intelligences have been encountered from time to time.”

My blood chilled in my veins. “Aliens,” I said. “Real aliens, not microbes and odd scrubby plants?”

“That’s right. But we Betas don’t know much about them. We only have contact with a few local human colonies, all of which are hostile to us. We’ve never met with a real alien that I know of.”

“But…if you know the pathways,” I asked, “why don’t you trade? There used to be a thriving trade system.”

“There is some trade,” she said, “but it’s nothing like the old days. Remember that before the Cataclysm, all the pathways between the stars were first discovered between Earth and the colony systems, one at a time. Earth was the hub, the center of commerce. You had to travel to Earth before you could get anywhere else. The colonies didn’t have direct, independent trade routes. Because of this weakness, a dark age began when we were cut off.”

“It was similar on Earth but possibly worse. We weren’t just cut off from you, our homeworld was wounded as well. Most of our technology was wiped out during the span of a single hour due to the massive solar flare. In the years that followed, we endured starvation, wars… The fact that the old pathways between our star system and the colonies had been erased wasn’t our worst trouble.”

“I see,” Zye said thoughtfully. “What you describe is close to what was generally assumed. We didn’t know if you still lived or not. Therefore, we had to fend for ourselves. We had trouble just feeding our population at first, and when equipment from Earth broke down we often lacked the skills to repair it. We had to build new industries from scratch, replacing infrastructure that had previously existed only on Earth. Most of our population died out within the first decade. Correspondingly, the Betas decided to rebuild our race with survival in mind. We cloned a new generation of Betas, designed to survive hardship.”

“You said before you were made up of females—why only females?”

“The original plan involved superior female lifespans and the ability to reproduce. We wanted to be able to quickly expand our population naturally without cloning.”

“Reproduce without cloning?” I asked. “By meeting up with others…an outside group with males?”

“We have a few males,” she said matter-of-factly. “They’re in storage in case we need them. But you’re the first male I’ve ever seen with my own eyes.”

The more I learned of the Betas, the more disturbing I found them to be. Also, I was becoming curious as to the behavior of Zye herself. Perhaps the psychology of the situation between myself and this amazing woman was more complex than I’d imagined at first. If I was the only male she’d ever encountered, and I was also the first human face she’d seen when we’d rescued her from her cell—these facts could explain a lot. When taken together, the emotional impact of making my acquaintance might explain her apparent devotion to me.

“Thank you for being so open,” I said, “we’ll talk more later.”

“I’m yours to command.”

She walked away and continued helping Rumbold’s men shunt massive cables around.

I looked after her. She’d said these last words as if they were part of a ritual. Perhaps that’s how one Beta addressed another who was their leader. I found that to be an interesting concept, then I relegated the idea to the back of my mind.

Once the power-couplings were functional again, we had decisions to make.

“What part of the ship do we want to make operational first?” I asked.

“Weapons systems, sir,” Rumbold told me. “What choice do we have?”

I frowned at him. “Are you suggesting we should blow
Altair
out of the sky? Wouldn’t that be confirming Singh’s lies about us?”

Rumbold shrugged. “I guess you could activate
Defiant’s
drive. That way, we could at least fly her. Not an easy choice, I admit.”

“Communications,” I announced. “That makes the most sense to me. If we activate the drive, we might be able to fly, but we’d be flying blind. No sensors. Possibly, no helm control either. The drive is too interdependent, likewise the weapons systems.”

“Communications then?” Zye asked.

“Do it.”

Zye directed the repair crew, all of whom were sweating in their suits, to help her connect the final coupling. The collars touched, then the meshed splines locked into place. With a confident hand, she reached out and threw the massive breaker.

The lines hummed under our feet. Everyone shifted uncomfortably, aware of the unknown voltages that now coursed close to our bodies. It was one thing to work on a ship you understood, it was quite another to toy with systems on a vessel that was for all intents and purposes alien, and many times the size of our largest ships. If not for Zye’s help, I doubt we could have done it at all.

Lights flickered, dimmed, then came back up to full power. The ship adjusted to our altered pathways, funneling juice to unknown destinations. After a few tense seconds, during which we all glanced at one another with wide eyes, we began to smile.

All of us, that was, except for Zye herself. Her confidence in her own technical skills was absolute. She stepped away from the rest of the group, and went to work on another damaged region.

After we were sure we weren’t all going to blow up or be burnt to ash by our jury-rigged repairs, we followed her.

“There’s a problem,” she said, examining various readouts. “The generators are already at their peak output. That shouldn’t be—but it is. I can only surmise that we’ve lost several generators, and that we must head down to the power deck to get more of them operational before activating more systems.”

“All right, but do we have communications?” I asked Zye.

“Of course.”

“How do I use them?”

“Operate any station. Access the data core as I’ve shown you. Link into battle command and transmit whatever you want.”

“Battle command?” I asked. “Are you talking about a Beta communications network?”