“On my way, Mother.”
“Please,” she had said. How thoughtful of her designers to allow for the inclusion of a politeness protocol, employed even when speaking to a synthetic. Walter had no need of the spoken courtesy, but he appreciated it nonetheless.
Compared to the size of the Covenant itself, the bridge could almost be called intimate. It was, Walter mused, exactly the right size to accommodate a crew and all necessary instruments and functions. While the ship’s builders could easily have made the area larger, they hadn’t been the types to waste space. No waste space in space, he told himself, not for the first time and certainly not for the last. He was quite able to appreciate his own sense of humor, even if at the moment there was no one to share it with.
Settling into his station, he ran through the pre-checks required prior to grid deployment. Telltales and readouts responded punctually.
Nodding to himself, Walter replied aloud.
“Deploying collectors now.”
As his was the only voice to be heard on the Covenant, he missed no opportunity to employ it. Not that it would go rusty—another joke—from disuse, but his voice had been designed to sound pleasant, and when the situation demanded it, he enjoyed listening to himself.
Though the collectors had the look of vast sails, they were not. The size of a small city, they expanded with extraordinary speed, reaching their full extension in a matter of minutes. With only the stars—and Walter—to witness their beauty, they gleamed in the interstellar night, gathering energy of which ancient man had been long ignorant.
While the names of such energies were simple, their physics were not. It had taken mankind thousands of years just to discover their existence, but only hundreds to learn how to utilize them. Their diffuseness forced the collectors to focus them and concentrate them. Only then were they made useful to the Covenant’s engines and able to power her internal systems. Walter thought of them as the ship’s invisible strength.
He waited for a while on the bridge, monitoring the steady accumulation, until he was assured the operation was proceeding normally. Only then did he move on to check on one of his favorite parts of the vessel. The part that was green. The part that was Earth.
Hydroponics Section was filled with vegetation, most carried for its nutrient value and eventual planting, some for purposes of experimentation, other sorts simply to supply memories of home. For their psychological value to the colonists. Ornamental plants and trees shared space with cucumbers and quinoa. He strode among them, whistling aimlessly as he checked flows of nutrients and water, analyzing the lighting to make certain it was just the right wavelength to maintain healthy growth. His hands gently caressed stems, leaves, trunks, flowers, bark, as he whistled.
“That’s a fallacy, you know.” Mother, always present, always watching.
He didn’t look up. “What?”
“That music facilitates plant health and growth.”
“Why, do you think I was whistling to the plants?”
“Very droll. Though I don’t know I would call the sounds you were making ‘music.’ I suppose you—”
She stopped abruptly.
Walter was instantly alert. Mother never did anything abruptly. He voiced a prompt into the continuing silence.
“Mother?”
“Walter. We… may have a problem.”
Many things had been programmed into Mother. Knowledge. Technical skill. Allgegenvartig understanding. And understatement. Walter waited.
“An atypical energy burst has been detected,” she continued, “consisting of heavy particulate matter. Analyzing composition.”
“Where?”
“Sector 106. Very close. Source was masked, hence the unusual—no, extreme proximity prior to discovery. Undetectable earlier due to unique concatenation of spatial and gravitational distortion in the vicinity. Apologies. Initial analysis was insufficient to gauge intensity, as well as proximity. Reappraisal suggests possibility the event could be substantial. Unable at this time to predict risk.”
“Likelihood of intersect?” Walter stood motionless, listening intently.
“Very high. Now detecting extreme proximity. Calculating for precision.”
Without waiting for further details he abandoned Hydroponics and raced toward the bridge, giving orders as he ran.
“Mother, retract the collectors and channel all reserve and backup power to ship shielding. Initiate emergency crew revival.”
“Underway. Recalculation indicates extreme proximity achieved. Intersection in nine, eight, seven…”
The particle wave itself was not visible, but its effects were unmistakable as the shockwave slammed into the ship. Strong enough to knock the preternaturally stable Walter off his feet, it swept past the shielding and wreaked havoc on the giant vessel.
Even as the collection sheets continued to retract, some of those caught unfurled began to shred. Expansive as they were, the sprawling energy collectors could not withdraw fast enough to escape the consequences. Fashioned of incredibly thin material, they weren’t designed to withstand an assault by such an intense storm of energized particles, however infinitesimally small each one might be on an individual basis.
It was all Walter could do just to stabilize himself. He could do nothing for the ship itself. He could only hope that Mother could deal with the particle onslaught.
As for himself, he could understand helplessness, he could feel it.
He did not like it.
III
It went away in an instant, like a delicate flower caught in the wind of a thunderstorm. The room in the unnamed city, the log cabin, the bed, the coffee, the husband—all vanished in a flash, as if none had ever been.
Daniels found herself jerked awake, fully alert and being thrown from side to side within the hypersleep pod. As awareness dawned a fresh jolt sent her flying upward to slam against the clear, curved lid. When she dropped back down, her nose was bloody from the impact. Her first thought was that she might have suffered a concussion. Dazed, her training took over in the absence of coherent thought.
The fingers of her right hand, still half numb from the after-effects of hypersleep, machine-gunned the pod’s internal keypad. Dream-visions of warmth, taste, and love were replaced by the cool white rigidity of the sleep bay, its hard surfaces and intense illumination visible through the canopy. Woozy from months spent in hypersleep, as well as from the abrupt awakening, she struggled to make sense of her surroundings. Of reality.
Some of the other pods were already open. A couple were empty, but the majority still held their occupants. Like her, her colleagues were struggling for mental and physical equilibrium. Unlike her, several were suffering from some of the stronger side effects of hasty revivification. Much cursing accompanied a wide assortment of puking, sweating, and shaking.
Ideally, emergency revival from hypersleep wasn’t supposed to produce those kinds of consequences. But then, she told herself, emergency revival wasn’t supposed to happen, period.
Lights flashed around her and from several wall-mounted panels, sparks erupting in satanic electronic celebration. There was also smoke. Smoke in a spaceship was a bad sign indeed. At the moment, the scrubbers in the circulation system were barely keeping up with it. Alarms assailed her ears.
It wasn’t how she was supposed to arise from hypersleep. There should have been coffee. There should have been food. To make matters worse, the fragmenting wreck of the wonderful soothing dream continued to linger in her mind until…