Fear the Survivors (35 page)

Chapter 31
: Drop Zone – Part Two

Captain Samuel Harkness
felt ebullient. Adrenalin seemed to outweigh blood in his veins as he stared, wide-eyed, at the console in front of him. His pilots and crew were wired into the ship already, cables flowing from the back of their necks into the many ports that dotted the crew module’s interior. The ship’s technicians were studying its systems from within, enjoying access and real-time data exchange they could only have dreamed of in the past. Minds darted like cats around the ship as the final countdown approached, but Samuel Harkness, captain of New Moon One, the first ship of its kind, took a moment to review the instruments by eye, a tribute, perhaps, to the captains of old, as they completed a visual inspection prior to departing on a great voyage.

He paged through screens of data in front of him, and felt a combination of pride and awe at the scale of the ship that had been entrusted to him. But as he stared at the screens, he also felt a pang of need for the true access his spinal port gave him. Looking at this two-dimensional screen, these figures presented in tables and charts, numbers that needed so much interpretation and visualization. It seemed so primitive to him now. With his desire to give the ship an old-fashioned walk-through sated, Captain Samuel Harkness plucked his port cable from the mount on his chair, flipped back the protective cover that sheltered the gel-like connection point, and reached back to check his own port in the back of his neck.

He shivered a little, as he always did before plugging in, then shook his head slightly and smiled at his foolishness. He had done this a thousand times during the construction and testing of the ship. He took a moment to tuck his legs under their straps in the soft, cradle-like captain’s chair he sat in, and checked the straps across his torso. He then brought the cable’s tip up to the back of his neck, feeling the gelports reach out to each other as they sensed each other’s presence.

He waited while the system synced with the spinal interface buried in his neck.

Three, two,

Falling. The ship sunk backward and exploded outward at once, his view distorting and moving out of focus even as his mind told him he was seeing everything more clearly than before. Everything suddenly went blue with a blink. Icewall.

Captain Harkness felt his identity being validated as his preset limits and time checks came online; his anchors to the real world. He checked them as they scrolled across his brain and then, authority confirmed, he moved on, not by action but by will, simply stepping through the blue wall that enveloped him, popping it as he did so, and entering the vacuum.

His universe expanded outwards exponentially, no walls, he felt the vacuum of space on his skin as the ship became him, his arms and ears and eyes, his fingers and toes. He felt it. Flexing his muscles delicately, he felt his systems respond. He sensed the other crew as they embodied their respective systems, and by thinking of them he brought them to him, their minds providing him with system status in magnificent color and glory, the smell of green light pervading him as he absorbed the ship’s readiness in his bones.

In the nearby space station, Birgit hung suspended in a cradle of her own, her link also active, her body limp as she connected with the system. She linked with Captain Samuel as he joined her, and greeted him in the strange communing that was seeing someone’s personality in cyberspace. Over the course of several generations on Mobilius, the Agents’ ancestors had created complex graphic interfaces to ease their populations’ acceptance of the concept of direct interface with a computer, but this was no public system, no game, this was pure, and the primal rush of power it gave you was not for the faint of heart.

After careful consideration, checking and rechecking, the captain told her it was time. At the captain’s request, she turned her attention to the eight great engines that made up the bulk of the ship’s mass. She was here to guide the final preparatory step the ship would make before it left Earth forever. She was here to switch on the preposterously powerful engines that would propel New Moon One farther and faster than any man-made ship had ever dreamed of going. She prepared herself. Once ignited, the engines would drum with an energy it was not possible to contain. It would need to be spent, and spent it would be. This was the last chance to stop it. They had cycled the engines in testing. Teasing them with the promise of ignition, but they had not let them reach critical mass. Each one of these mighty beasts was capable of generating enough power to supply Mexico City with electricity indefinitely. They were potent enough to move two million tons of asteroid, to tame it, and drive it into orbit.

They were specifically designed to run at two different capacities, the first being only a tenth of the power they would use once they were leashed to the asteroid they intended to bring home. Any more, and they would crush the ship’s crew to pulp in an instant with the sheer force of acceleration. As it was, the crew was strapped into cradles in their various compartments. Muscle relaxants already pumped through their veins, oxygen rich blood supplementing their own via tubes passing to and from veins in their arms. Their breathing was slowing, their bodies preparing for the coming surge. It would only be for a few minutes at first. Enough to start them on their journey before the accelosphere engaged and they vanished into Earth’s gravity well, for the first powerful leap toward their goal. But that was all to come. First was ignition.

Steeling herself, Birgit turned her mind to the engines. As she did so, the rest of the crew faded, replaced by the cold hearts of the eight massive generators. Her thoughts went coursing through their systems like fingers, feeling them, bracing them. They were cold now. Hollow. Shells of potential. She started by engaging the fuel systems. They worked only on demand. Giving only when their contents were wanted, and even then withholding their full potential.

They responded begrudgingly, their safeguards querying her request in a hesitant loop that would help harness the roar of the engines once started. Next she needed pressure. Massive pressure. Wave generators began to warp the space inside the cores, forcing inward, pushing the vacuum, focusing nothingness into an intense magnetic and gravitic pressure centering on the engines’ very hearts.

A spine like needle reached from one side of the engines’ cores into their centers. It could retract as needed, coming close to, but never touching, that center of force at the heart of the engine. Through it, a tiny amount of liquid oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen coursed, harvested over the past weeks from the upper atmosphere by the Climbers as they rose toward Terminus. It was the engine’s fuel, and it would be injected into the fusion core. As it ejected from the end of the needle, it was caught instantaneously by the wave field, and became hyper-weighted, swarming into a ball of ever-greater pressure as it gathered to critical mass.

This was the most delicate phase. Birgit managed it delicately, with literally her whole being focused on the process. Too much, and the reaction would surge out from the fields and overwhelm them. It would still be contained, at least theoretically. Sensors would control the supply of fuel and the ship would survive. But the engine wouldn’t, and the whole project would be set back precious weeks as another generator was fabricated and sent up. Too little, and the pressure would overwhelm the core and smite the reaction. Not deadly in and of itself, but beyond a point, she would not be able to stop the other engines powering up, and the ship would be torn apart as seven of eight engines fired and sent the ship off in a warping spin that would certainly kill everyone aboard.

She felt them coming close. She felt it like fire on her skin, a growing warmth that she could feel, not as pain, for none of her sensors were so crude as to send such blunt signals as pain, but as pure, hot information, telling her every source and magnitude, instantly analyzed, its meaning and implications forecasted and presented directly to her cerebral cortex as knowledge. As the energy mounted, so did the feeling of power in her veins as ever more potent signals thrummed through her synapses. It was building to a surging crescendo, balanced, perfectly in tune. Supply and demand singing in harmony as the reactors went energy positive and started to fire. The feeling pounded through her, and even as her mind swam in perfect clarity with all the information coursing through her, the sense of it all drove her to something close to orgasm, sweat breaking out on her brow, her face and neck flushing as she lay, cradled in the Terminus station, some two miles from where her mind was sparking eight new suns to life at the center of New Moon One’s engines.

Captain Harkness felt some echo of the life in his engines from the ship’s systems, and sensed as the eight massive engines cycled and notified him of their readiness. He felt as Birgit disengaged from each in turn, and handed them off to their various techs, turning each into separate entities so they could be managed by their respective onboard teams.

As they came online, the captain flexed them and tensed his machine body, feeling it respond. It was almost time. Checklists filled as feelings of strength in his mind, his health was the ship’s tested newness, his breathing its fuel and life support systems, his eyes the far reaching sensors and onboard cameras that covered the hull, inside and out. A presence met him, stepping into his world from outside and greeting him. It was Birgit, linking in one last time from Terminus station, head of the ‘ground’ crew that had helped build and prepare New Moon One. Her checks had completed as his had: her team’s minds scouring the ship like dockhands were satisfied and signing off: and so they were ready.

The countdown began as planned. The computers sought his approval and got it, a second surging feeling came as Birgit gave her approval and she was gone, a single message left in her wake. He would read it later.

Birgit retracted her view as the ship came to life, the countdown running toward zero, and she engaged with Terminus’s external cameras and sensor suite to view the launch. Joining numerous others using the station’s eyes and ears, she watched as the spherical ship began to glow. It was just outside Terminus’s own orbit, sitting above it, and it would need to clear her range before beginning its descent. The eight cigar-shaped engines came to life in unison as the counter reached zero. Only mildly at first, Captain Harkness feeling his way before ramping up their power. Eight blue streaks began to resolve behind the ship. Tiny atomic particles accelerated to near light speed and catapulted from the ship to give their momentum to it. Such tiny masses, but fired with such monumental power that they began to drive the mighty ship forward, pulling ahead of Terminus’s orbit and starting to accelerate around Earth’s equator.

His confidence building, the captain surged the power upward smoothly toward his operational maximum, the eight blue lines from his engines forming into sharp white blades, hot as supernovae. Inside the ship, twenty-three bodies were pressed into their gravity cradles as the ship thrusted forward. Pulling away at a rate of nine gravities, the ship was a hundred miles from Terminus in under a minute, travelling at a relative thousand miles an hour already.

Varying the output from each of his engines ever so slightly, the captain began to curve the ship downward. He arced them smoothly toward the huge globe beneath them, even as the ship continued to gather speed, gravity adding to their flight now as they began their mad plummet into Earth’s gravity well. The accelosphere engineers began their preparations. It would come up fast now, and they would only have a brief window for the coming translation.

From SpacePort One, Neal and a host of dignitaries and staff watched the ship turn earthward, and the tension began to mount. Silence was broken only by the regular report of the mission commander updating on speed and altitude, and the occasional heavy sigh as someone remembered to breath.

The ship entered the atmosphere not on a ballistic trajectory, as it was not
coasting
downward, instead it was punching through the air like a cosmic cannonball, the wild blue flare of its engines overshadowed now by the fireball of our atmosphere wasting itself on the ship’s meter thick shielding. But even that thick shield could not stand too much more, for unlike previous spacecraft, or entering meteorites, New Moon One was not slowing, it was getting faster still, and the pressure and fire would only build until they rivaled the fire in the stellar cores of its eight engines.

The moment came. They knew it would. They could see the timer ticking slowly to zero. But despite this, no one was quite prepared for it. With an intense suddenness, the fireball imploded, a shock wave resounding outward across the upper atmosphere as the source of that massive turbulence and heat vanished, quite literally into thin air. A vortex of smoke warped the upper atmosphere like an inhaled cloud.

And then there was silence.

They knew that somewhere the ship’s engines were still firing. They knew that the ship was, in fact, still coursing toward the earth, and even now beginning its ultrasonic flight straight through it. But for everyone in the control room, and in the many powerful offices monitoring the event, New Moon One had simply vanished.

A new counter showed now, and the screen was already switching to a new view as the effects of New Moon’s abrupt departure wafted ethereally on the wind. Now the view went to a camera mounted on a StratoJet on the other side of the planet. The jet was circling high above the central Pacific Ocean, about three hundred miles north of the Marquesas archipelago, its pilot, Major Jack Toranssen, already in position for the next big step. He was waiting and transmitting a signal via humanity’s growing subspace tweeter network to audiences in SpacePort One, Terminus, the Research Group in their bunker in Japan, and a select few heads of state around the globe.