Waypoint Five Read online

Waypoint Five

  by Ben Lees

  Copyright Ben Lees, 2015

  08/12/214 (Adjusted Calendar)

  You're not supposed to dream in frozen suspension. Certainly not a dream of a small child with your ship's engineer's eyes. The image flickered for an instant behind Mana's closed eyelids as the transparent cover of her tank spat open, simultaneously draining the freezing suspension fluid into a reservoir underneath her, the whirr of the pump motors more felt than heard through her fluid-filled ears. For the moment there was nothing else but cold.

  Shivering violently, just beyond the edge of her control, she pulled her knees up and forced herself weakly into a sitting position. Freezing fluids ran along her dark ponytail and down her bare back, setting off another wave of shivers as she coughed and spat more of the damn stuff out of her mouth. It took her almost a full minute to get a single word out.

  "Quinn?"

  No response. No sounds of movement from the tank next to hers.

  "Quinn?"

  Carefully blinking her eyes clear Mana looked over to the cylindrical tank - the twin of hers - to her right. It was still sealed; its timer, which was independent of the ship's chronometers in case of a failure, clearly wasn't synchronised exactly to hers. Lucky, she thought. It wasn't desirable to wake alone in case of problems but her tank had apparently gone through the cycle successfully and she would be in a position to help Quinn when he was woken. She felt grateful as well that he wouldn't get another look at her before she was dressed.

  She hauled herself out of the tank, summoning all her strength to lift her leg over and lower herself to the floor. The lower than standard gravity would probably save her from a fracture if she slipped but she breathed easier when she got both feet on the ground. She grabbed a silvery padded robe from a nearby hanger and pulled it around her. Immediately the inside lining began heating up to a preset temperature. It felt wonderful.

  Mana lowered herself onto the chair that obligingly slid from the wall behind her and looked at the floor for a few minutes, concentrating on getting warm as the lights slowly began to come on, alerted by her movements. It was when her shivering stopped and she was beginning to feel her toes again that she spotted that the lid on Quinn's tank. It was sitting closed but the seals were still open.

  She raised her head. "Quinn?"

  Rising more quickly than was advisable against the fading dizziness, Mana looked into the tank. It was empty.

  "Quinn?"

  She looked round, first left, then right. She was alone in the main cabin. No sounds of movement from anywhere else. The lights in the corridor beyond were off so nothing was moving there. This wasn’t right.

  The main screens on the console had already glowed back to life and it was with a feeling of her stomach being jettisoned that Mana looked over and saw the "Message Waiting" indicator flashing on one of them.

  "Quinn..."

  Mana made five unsteady steps to the screen and sat down. She took a breath and tapped the "Play" indicator. There was a blank pause and then an image of Quinn seated in his customary console chair. Mana glanced briefly to her right where it sat empty.

  "Morning, Manny," Quinn's image said. "Hope you slept well. Sorry I wasn't here when you woke up but I suppose you'd probably have been expecting that."

  Mana attempted a "huh" but only coughed up a little residual fluid from her lungs.

  "One of the good things about being the engineer is that you can always lie about how bad things are to give yourself more time to fix them, like you didn't know. I just did the opposite of that to you, I'm afraid, Manny. The damage to the generator was just a bit worse than I told you. I know you hate it when I'm too technical, you being a mere co-pilot and all, but instead of having just enough power to get us both to Terraquintus and run the ramscoop at optimal we just had too little to keep both tanks running. One of us had to go and one of us had to... well, had to go.

  "You should be approaching orbiting distance in a few hours or at most a few days by now. There shouldn't be anything you need me for. Just park Penny and get yourself to the surface. I'd recommend capsule two when you abandon ship from the look of the wear on one but it's up to you obviously - so make sure you take two. Hopefully nothing's impacted us too badly in the flight."

  He paused, unusual for Quinn in full flow, and glanced over in the direction of the tank where Mana must have been lying while he made his recording.

  "Our cargo seems to have settled down for the moment," he continued. "The only readout I've picked up in the last hour says it's created waypoint number five. Damned if I know what that means but maybe you'll find out. Hope you find Terraquintus okay, darling. I'm taking the skiff and heading for Cinque Port. It should just be in range from here and I don't fancy heading back for Pentad Reach with the radiation this high and the Drifts around."

  He paused again before continuing: "That's about it, Manny. Just the parting of the ways now, though for you I'm long gone. Look after yourself, darling... I love you. Always did."

  The screen went briefly blank before the image was replaced by the default set of readings. Mana sat still for a time, head down, wishing she could just go blank too.

  18/12/214 (Adjusted Calendar)

  "How are you feeling this morning?" asked May, settling herself into the chair opposite.

  "All right," Mana replied. "Got the headache again but not as bad."

  "Did they give you anything for it?"

  "Yes. It's fine now. You said you'd try and find out Penny's status for me?"

  May nodded. "That I did. I spoke to someone from the Fleet and he tells me it's still in a stable orbit. Months before any corrections need to be made. Looks like you did better than you thought."

  "That's good."

  "Interesting name for a ship. I don't think I've come across the name Penelope Weaving before. Is she someone well known where you're from?"

  "She's well known in physics circles I was told by my engineer. There's a plaque on the ship with her bio. She had some radical theories on causality, apparently."

  "Causality? What's that? Physics isn't my field."

  "Search me."

  May smiled and picked up her notes. Mana glanced towards the windows which looked out over a collection of unevenly spaced rounded pinkish buildings on the western edge of Anansi City. Pink was apparently the colour of the local concrete. It made an oddly satisfying complement to the rusty desert stretching out to the red mountains rising above a line of heat haze on the horizon, stark and jagged against Terraquintus' dark blue nitrogen-rich sky. She had no idea how far away they were. Mana had stood on five different planets in her life now; she had never got used to how the apparent distance of the horizon on the other four differed from her birth world.

  Gravity was different here too; Mana was walking with an unaccustomed spring in her step which contrasted sharply with her general mood. Breathing was harder, though, with the lower oxygen level. As with every other planet she had visited Mana was still amazed how the natives always seemed to adapt to the differences.

  May, her counsellor, sitting in the chair opposite, was the most immediate example. She was tall and slim like most of the Terraquintans Mana had seen: the product of a few generations of a low-weight environment - Mana found herself much shorter than the average seemed to be here. Her blonde hair was tied tightly back in keeping with the long tight grey skirt, jacket and blouse she was wearing today. For her part Mana was sitting uneasily in a concrete-pink dress enthusiastically presented to her by a young female hospital orderly when she had been finally allowed out of bed. Mana had not worn a dress for more years than she liked to think. The orderly had looked genuinely surprised when Mana had asked about the possibility of being supplied with a pair of trousers: the Terraquintans appeared to maintain civilian dress conventions that distinctly separated male and female in a way that Mana found archaic, but she supposed that was up to them. The future belonged - in large part, anyway - to the Terraquintans, it seemed.

  Like a couple of Mana's hospital doctors, May wore glasses which appeared not to have proper lenses, just plain clear ones which Mana surmised was some sort of fashion thing – or maybe they housed a recording device. They had met a few times before in the hospital where she had been treated. Mana had been heavily drugged with something she had never heard of and had found herself talking a lot, almost rambling. She wondered what May had made of her then: mad spacewoman probably. If so, she might be right.

  "I've become a lot more in demand over the last couple of days," May said, looking up again.

  Mana wasn't quite sure how to respond. May seemed to be the type to throw in non-sequiturs to get her patients talking.

  "Lucky you?" she settled on with an involuntary grin at May's telic expression.

  "It's thanks to you, though. I've had both the main news distributors wanting comments from me and a number of professional colleagues I haven't seen for ages contacting me. All because I'm one of the first ones to speak to our new arrival from the heavens."

  "You don't get many visitors here, do you?"

  "No, it's been almost fifty-five years since we had visitors from another world."

  "That's one of the benefits of being so remote."

  "Benefits?"

  "Well almost everyone else has been having some real trouble with visitors in the last thirty years or so. Well, thirty-four years now maybe."

  "You're talking about the Drifts?"

  "Yes.
"

  "Tell me a bit more about them," May said. "Before what you could tell us - about the fighting - we basically only knew that they existed."

  "Oh, they exist. They declared war on us when they attacked the colonies on Epsilon Beacon and wiped them out."

  "What happened? Some kind of dispute? You're going to have to explain from the beginning, I'm afraid. We don't even have a proper idea of what a Drift looks like here."

  Mana paused, thinking how to begin explaining so basic and practically fundamental a fact of her existence.

  "I've only ever seen a dead one," she said. "They're about two metres tall, something close to an octopus with an exoskeleton - you know what an octopus is?"

  "I've seen pictures."

  "Well something close to that but no real eyes or face as we'd understand it, just a set of raised areas around the skull region they use to smell and hear. They might use a kind of echo location as well with high pitched sound, something beyond human hearing, you know? Apparently they can give off some kind of sensation of fear and unease when you get near them and that might be the side effect.

  "They attacked Epsilon Beacon without warning after trading with them very occasionally for decades. There's a kind of language that the Epsilonians developed to communicate by analogue radio signals and by arm gestures but apparently the Drifts simply stopped responding one time when they arrived with a fleet and opened fire. Since then we've been at war."

  "Your whole life then?"

  "Almost. I was an infant when Epsilon Beacon happened."

  "And you don't know what sparked it?"

  "Not for sure. No one does. There are theories the Drifts didn't appreciate how many humans there were at first. They might have thought we were pretty much confined to Epsilon Beacon and not spread out further. They may see us as a threat and just attacked us as a kind of pre-emptive strike. The Beacon only had a few tens of thousands of colonists and it had been their policy not to pass on any firm information about the location of any other colonies, just in case."

  "Good policy it seems."

  "Yes. If you're worrying now you can probably rest easier. It's very unlikely they know about Terraquintus. That's why I'm here, really."

  "But you mentioned other colonies have been destroyed?"

  "Yes. They found Phi Rampart where there were several million people living. It seems it was after they found it that they destroyed Epsilon Beacon before moving back to attack Phi Rampart in force.

  "The Ramparters had some warning it was coming when a couple of ships made it to them from the Beacon but they almost went under in the first attack. The human race hadn't fought a proper battle in space before. They had to improvise warships and weapons and basically use anything they could. Fighting went on for two years before the Drifts finally took the planet and moved on."

  "And Earth is gone now too?"

  "I don't know. The last I heard there'd been no communication for years. Same with Mars. They're too remote from the other colonies to hear from much anyway."

  "Okay," said May after a pause. "You'll need to give a fuller account to the government people who want to talk to you later. Right now you and I just need to talk."

  "About what?"

  "About you. Your state of mind."

  "Psychological debriefing, you mean?"

  "Not a term I'm familiar with. The powers that be just want to be sure you're mentally fit before they let you back up to your ship. They need to know you’re in the right shape to help the recovery crew up there."

  "Seems reasonable. They'll be keen to examine the payload. I suppose they want me along because I know the ship."

  "That's my impression."

  "Okay," said Mana after a pause. "Where do we start?"

  "How about the last battle you were in? Pentad Reach." May looked at the pad clipped to the arm of her chair. "Your ship was a kind of heavy weapons carrier?"

  "Yes. Penny's a Starfish class transporter. We were carrying a gauss cannon designed to cripple enemy warships. The Drifts had found Pentad Reach and finally attacked with a massive armada, the biggest anyone had seen. We were hit early on and the captain and one of the gunners were killed. That left me, Quinn the engineer and Fyfe the other gunner to make a run for it. Our weapon was gone and we had damage to one engine so we couldn't really do much more there to help."

  "You headed away from the planet?"

  "Yes. We weren't able to get much sense from Command but they were ordering a retreat so I decided we needed to get some distance between us and the battle. There's a really big gas giant with a few dozen moons in Pentad Reach's system. I thought we could find somewhere to hide there and carry out what repairs we could."

  "And then you encountered the other ship?"

  "Yes."

  "Tell me about that."

  19/09/209 (Adjusted Calendar)

  "Under one hundred and fifty thousand kilometres now," said Fyfe.

  "Show me."

  Fyfe tapped at his screen and a blurry image of a metallic object, dark grey against the empty space behind it appeared on Mana's screen.

  "Is that the best magnification you can get?"

  "Afraid so."

  Mana studied the outline for a moment. It was a rough cone shape with what might have been engines fixed around the circumference of the base. Way too small for an interstellar craft.

  "Doesn't look familiar. You seen anything like that before? A section of something else? A weapon that could have been jettisoned?"

  Fyfe shook his head. "No. Nothing I recognise."

  Quinn appeared in the main cabin through the hatch leading to the engine section. He looked tired round the eyes but otherwise unaffected by recent events. Mana suspected he was taking his de facto (and surprisingly annoying) role as crew clown as a need to be upbeat for the sake of his surviving comrades. Mana mildly resented that she appreciated his efforts.

  "Recognise what?" Quinn asked.

  "Fyfe's got us an image of the transmission source," Mana said. "Get over here and see if you recognise it."

  Quinn squatted down, his hand on the back of Mana's chair slightly too close for comfort.

  "No," he said after a moment. "Don't even think it's a section of any ship I've seen."

  "And we're still getting the transmissions?" Mana asked.

  "On the hour," replied Fyfe. "Last one twelve minutes ago."

  "And it's definitely a distress call?" said Quinn.

  "Looks like it. We're getting more interference now with the sunspot activity increasing but the pattern looks like one."

  "Sunspots increasing? When did that happen?" asked Quinn.

  "Fifteen hours ago. While you were asleep" said Mana. "Sorry, I should have informed you before you went back down to the engines."

  Mentally Mana was kicking herself. She should have informed Quinn in case any of the engine instrumentation or shielding was likely to be affected. He took advantage to get in a quick dig.

  "It's okay, Manny. You have other things on your mind."

  Don't call me that, she thought. With an effort she ignored the comment and changed the subject.

  "Do we have a new engine status update yet?"

  "Auxiliary is fine but I don't think we'll need it. One is okay and I've replaced the damper on Two. We should be able to get it close to optimal with a long acceleration."

  "Good work. Thanks."

  "No excuse not to investigate that call, then," said Quinn.

  Trust Quinn to voice the exact the thought that had been bothering Mana.

  "That's got to be the next decision. We're still getting no reply?"

  "Nothing," said Fyfe.

  "Okay," said Mana. "Either no one is left to respond or they are unable to respond. We'll have to assume there may still be someone to assist. How fast can we get there?"

  "About twenty-seven hours," said Quinn

  "Okay. We can get there. Now, should we go - this isn't a distress call that's officially recognised."

  "That's not a reason to leave some poor soul out there," said Quinn. "It could be someone from one of the remote colonies. Almost certainly is, looking at that ship. They might not even know about the war -"

  "Agreed," said Mana, cutting him off. "But I need to consider the safety of this ship first. The sunspots increasing has basically cut off any communication with the fleet, even if there is anyone left to give us orders. It's lucky we picked up the transmission as it is. We have to consider any and all possible dangers. If a Drift vessel shows up to answer the transmission we'll have to make a run for it with virtually no weapons and engines we may not be able to rely on if we push them too much."