At one point Jorl stood up. ‘I’m going to that Regeneration Room you told me about. The shielding is heavier there. I’m not going to stay here and be cooked alive! If you’ve got any sense you’ll come with me,’ with the last comment being directed to the team other than Jon.
The latter stood up and barred his way. ‘You’re going nowhere. We need everyone here, manning the controls. We can’t allow anyone to become a passenger.’
Jorl stared at him. ‘We? You mean “you”, don’t you? Actually, I don’t remember anyone voting for you in the election. In truth, I don’t even remember the election!’
Jon did not move. He stood stock-still on the rocking, shuddering floor of the Control Room.
‘Jorl if I have to knock you out I will. But that means we’ll lose your abilities at the controls. So I’d rather not do it. Don’t make me do it.’
The two men remained staring at each other for some time with the others having turned in their seats to watch the outcome. Finally, Jorl gave a short nod and slowly went back to his machine.
The star had now filled the entirety of the viewscreen which had automatically stepped the blinding glare down by many orders of magnitude. Still it blazed like a sea of molten steel, so close now that only the edge of one sunspot was visible.
The creaking and groaning of the ship’s fabric had blurred together into one continuous roar.
The heat intensified.
And so it was that the entire group had collapsed into unconsciousness as the ship rounded the turning point of the dreadful hyperbola and began its retreat from the thwarted star.
Gradually Jon became aware of his surroundings. His first sensation was of a terrible, oppressive heat that lay over him in a suffocating blanket; then he was aware that the deck below him was shaking and jerking as if in the jaws of a tremendous beast and finally he could hear an all-pervasive roar. A sound, he eventually realised, of great engines performing at the very peak of their tolerances.
He rolled over and slowly pushed himself up so he was resting on his palms and knees. He looked around and saw his companions lying in various positions on the metal floor; some on their backs, some on their fronts, some in a foetal position. To his great relief, he could just make out through the hurricane of noise that they were starting to make sounds of awakening. And slowly, one by one, they did.
For some time they said nothing; did nothing, just showing simple relief for having survived the close encounter with the system’s star; having survived the turning of the deadly hyperbola.
Hour by hour the temperature dropped.
Hour by hour the throats of the braking rockets blazed white-hot as they fought the implacable equation of momentum.
Hour by hour the thunder of the mighty task of those tortured engines rolled through the ship.
Finally Jon said after studying the diagnostics on his viewscreen: ‘We can’t maintain this expenditure of energy. We’ll have no fuel for manoeuvring among the giant planets. We’ll have to cut the thrust.’
He studied the scrolling numbers on the screen while the others waited; waited to hear what existential issue now awaited them. They stood there like wraiths or spectres, still clad in peeling anti-radiation paint, which in several places did not cover weeping blisters.
‘There’s been a significant change in our trajectory. The curve we’re following is now at least parabolic, possibly even elliptical,’ Jon finally announced.
Shana12’s face lit up. ‘An ellipse! That’s a closed curve. It means we’ll come back to this system!’
Jon gave her a grave glance. ‘I said it might be an ellipse. And even under the most optimistic assumptions it would take us out to about a parsec at apastron. I’ll leave you to calculate how long it would take us to get back.’
The little sparks of joy flickered out immediately and their usual expressions of stolid acceptance returned.
Jon stood silent for a moment, staring at his companions, wondering at their reserves of strength and silently cursing the authors of all this suffering – the now incredibly distant Protectorate. But no! – he checked himself: The Protectorate was not distant; it was with them in an invisible form. Somewhere in the Artificial Intelligence that ran this vessel, at the centre of its intangible web, lurked another intelligence – Korok. They could never relax, never declare victory while that threat remained. In any electron flow Korok could be there; hiding in the voltages, secreting himself in the amperages. He had not moved against them, Jon knew, because all they had done had been to preserve the Fatal Scimitar and thus the Protectorate’s original plan.
But should they do anything to prevent that plan…
Jon knew that there could be no safety until Korok was finally confronted.
And destroyed.
Nine
The main drive had been shut off leaving the starship to sweep through space in unpowered freefall and the consequent silence felt strange, eerie, as if something had gone terribly amiss. Ears used to a solid wall of thunderous sound found it hard to adjust to the relative quiet.
Only relative quiet, of course. The fabric of the ship had suffered greatly in the close passage and it was still groaning as the stresses and strains gradually worked their way out. Many bulkheads had failed and the travellers could see on their viewers that the entire vessel was swarming with over-worked arachnoids desperately trying to close tears and rips in the structure while being showered by fountains of sparks.
It was odd to be safe from imminent danger and actually to find themselves with very little to do. To conserve energy, the ship was now on a Hohmann transfer orbit out to the realm of the giant planets of the alien system; the course had been set and the ship’s control systems were perfectly adequate to maintain that course.
But Jon had something to show them. He called them over to the huge wall viewer and pointed to a dim star-like spark in the blackness. He placed a finger on it and the spark vanished temporarily.
‘That is the destination that the Protectorate set half a millennium ago. That is the terrestrial planet that we are meant to land on and subjugate.’
‘Subjugate?’ Jarm enquired, ‘Are there any signs of a civilisation on that body?’
‘None whatsoever,’ Jon replied, ‘The Protectorate may have been guilty of a little wishful thinking. But that was only the first plan: if the planet was found to be uninhabited then it was our job to engineer it so a second Protectorate could be established on it. Which would in time fight the first.’
‘How sweet,’ Shana36 commented, ‘so some of the tubes in the Regeneration Room must be intended for female resurrections. I doubt if we would be allowed to breed once our use was over.’
‘Of course. The resurrection process can be run any number of times with slight alterations each time to avoid inbreeding. And of course, there would be far more females than males.’
‘Probably the only males would be the High Officials themselves,’ Jorl grinned, ‘Boy, will they be busy!’
‘Yes,’ Jon replied, thinking it was time he let up on Jorl somewhat, ‘but someone will have to do it!’
The group broke up then but Jon took Shev aside and they went off together and started working on some project on the Command Computer.
They worked together for many hours. Shana12 observed them for afar with gradually narrowing eyes. She had enquired once as to whether she could help and Shev had simply replied with a brusque “No.” Shana had on one occasion almost shared her disquiet with Shana36 but at the last moment, she had thought that maybe that was a confidence too far to share with her double.