Sanctuary Falling (50 page)

Annette grabbed a stylus from a counter and began editing the hologram, erasing the straight pie-slice lines, jumbling them up making them jagged mountains more reminiscent of nature. Annette was deep in reworking the edges of the caverns when Mikey, Scope and Net rumbled in from lunch.
 
Each took up their standard places.
 
Annette finished her touch ups and Net joined her in the hologram.

“Chief Jr., that’s just what it needed,” Net began.

“Thanks, I hope it won’t mess up the program you’ve set for the excavators,” Annette replied.

“No, I can integrate the new footprints with a couple of points and a click or two,” Net jabbed at her pop-pad, “There we go. Not so hard, now that we’ve got the right programs involved.”

Annette smiled and wandered over to check on what Mike, the mathematician was up to. His fingers were furiously tapping away at the keyboard and his eyes were glued to the screen. Manically he turned to face Annette, “Chief Jr. We have a problem! A very big problem!”

“Mikey don’t tell me we have problems we are just about ready to start construction!” Annette pleaded.

“Oh, no it has nothing to do with that! Sanctuary is in severe risk of being crushed!” Mike blurted, everyone else in the room rushed to see what he was talking about. Mike pounded the execute key, “I’ve done the calculations twice. You have to tell Angela, clearly someone is trying to destroy Sanctuary. What’s worse is that according to my calculations it’ll work. “

Annette smiled weakly, he’d finally stumbled upon the pressing concern bothering Annette for months, “I think she already knows, and that it’s why she asked us to design Refuge. “

Scope nervously looked at the display, “Why wouldn’t she just tell us that then?”

Annette frowned, thinking hard, “She probably didn’t want us to stress out over it. She needed us to get the job done and she probably worried we’d crack under the pressure.
A

Mike swung his seat around to face them, “We won’t, but Sanctuary sure as hell will! I can’t believe she didn’t trust us to get the job done.”

“She does,” Angela said stepping into the workroom, I just wanted to spare you. I didn’t want you left sleepless thinking the fate of all of us rested on your work. By the way how goes it?” Everyone looked sheepish, especially Mike.

Net was quick to respond, “We’ve selected the planetoid, thanks to the help of an army of surveyors. The cavern designs are complete, and I’ve already programmed the excavators.”

Mike groaned, still appearing to be upset by the lack of information, “And I finished the calculations for the bubble generator. Basically everything rests on whether or not the design for the generator was valid and whether or not Sinclair’s team was capable of executing the design.”
  

A noncommittal smile crossed Angela’s face, “Not a problem, they tested it. It works. So, it’s going well? You can have it done how soon?”

Annette took charge waving off Net’s incipient response, “We can have it done by the deadline, if we excavate, terra-form, and landscape it before en-bubbling it.”

“But Mike hasn’t finished the stress calculations to determine the structural specifications necessary to withstand the stresses of en-bubbling. He ran the Sanctuary calculations instead. I guess he’d rather wait until after en-bubbling to do the construction,” Scope weighed in. Annette smiled as Mike glared at her for not letting them know Angela was lurking in wait.

Annette glanced at Angela and saw a flicker of worry cross the older woman’s face, “There probably isn’t time for that, not if we try to replicate the temporal differential of Sanctuary. “

Mike stiffened, clearly coming to the realization he had proven the need for a deadline. “I was taking a break, messing around with the stress equations before I got started.”
 
Defensively he turned back to his terminal and typed frantically.

Annette watched Net glance around nervously before asking, “So, is the deadline when Sanctuary’s set to implode?”

Annette watched Angela’s face while the older woman clearly weighed the possible answers, “It’s slightly sooner than the earliest possible time. We may have more time if our factors can manage to stop enough of the dark teams. “

“So, maybe we can extend the deadline indefinitely?” Scope blurted hopefully.

Angela quickly shook her head no, “Our people are good, but I’m not optimistic. The dark has too many windows of opportunity, too many possible patterns to trigger the implosion. We can’t tell which pattern they’re going after until they’re halfway through it. It doesn’t give us much time to stop them from completing it.
 
We’ve already cut it close twice, and one of those times was sheer luck.”

Annette grimaced, “The quake.”

Angela looked at Annette approvingly, “Yeah. Look, I’ve got to get back to other. . . things. I’m glad things are going so well. Please, don’t spread the word about the threat, I was hoping to wait until after the new place is ready.”

“We’re calling it Refuge,” Annette supplied.

“Really, Refuge? Sounds good, let me know when you’ve got life support started in it so I can check it out,” Angela said making a quick retreat.

Annette took a seat by Mike’s terminal and spoke softly, “She’s worried.”

“And she probably hasn’t looked at the numbers. I’ve seen them and I’m twice as worried,” Mike said while he typed. Then he stopped and looked at Annette, “How are you doing?”

Annette froze at the personal question, since the sluggoids she’d been hesitant to open up to even her trusted friends. “I’m doing as well as can be expected, given the quake, the slugs and the pressure of developing a new home-world from scratch.” She tried to smile but it came out as a grimace instead.

A piercing whistle announced Carl’s arrival. Annette swiveled in her chair to face the door. He came trotting in the room with a pizza box. “Annette, you will eat!” Carl announced with a smile which dissolved the moment he saw the other people in the room, “What? Did someone die?”

“No, Carl,” Net said softly, “We just found out that Sanctuary is going to be destroyed, we’re working under a definite
>
dead’-line.”

“Whoa! Are you serious?” Carl asked almost dropping his pizza.

“Got it from the Chief’s mouth. Oh and by the way we aren’t supposed to be spreading the word around about it,” Mike said with a wry dead-panned grin.

Carl tossed the pizza box onto a counter top, “Then I guess we should get started with the building, shouldn’t we?”

- - - - - - - - - -

Angela pressed her back to the wall of her paint-room. It wasn’t wet yet. She’d come directly from the design room. Annette’s team had hit a raw nerve by figuring out the peril they were all in, and attacking her with it. Angela focused her mind on the stack of paint cans and began randomly opening the lids. When she found a grey matching the fear churning in her gut Angela raced to it and began flinging it around the room with her mind, like a mini tornado. Since the attempted takeover by Kavir, when Annette had broken through the paint on the painted over door, Angela had painted it shut again, after permanently disabling the door mechanism. The only way into or out of the room now was teleportation.

Angela emptied the paint can and tossed it into the pile of empty ones. She would need more paint soon, a lot more before things drove her to another breakdown. The Kavir incident had shaken her to immobility until Annette showed her a path of action. Now all of Angela’s hopes rested on the girl being able to create a new Sanctuary.
 
Refuge, it was a good name, and it fit. Everyone moving into it would be a refugee, fleeing the destruction of their home.

How was Angela going to break the news to the people? “I’m sorry folks we all have to move or be killed in the universe’s largest trash compactor. No problem since it’s no longer secure against threats from outside,” Angela covered her mouth realizing she’d said that out loud. Perhaps she didn’t need to worry about a future breakdown, considering that she was currently going through one.
 
Angela slapped herself to dry up the panic bubbling in her stomach.
 
She wanted Daniel’s arms around her, but still was terrified of her husband because of Kavir.

Thinking of Kavir reminded Angela of Yllera, who was still missing after two years. Max alternated between harassing Angela and moaning his grief at her. Angela couldn’t take much more, especially since his connection to Yllera was their only real hope of finding the girl.

Angela grunted at herself, when had she started calling the women around her girls? Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Angela was old enough to be their grandmother, or perhaps it was because she had moved into an addle-brained state of semi-senility. She shook her head just to see if her brains would make a rattling sound.

Time to splatter more paint, Angela selected a nice bright pink and began by sticking her hands in it, then she began putting pink hand prints everywhere, she even levitated herself up to the ceiling to put some up there. After the pink can went empty, Angela began laying violet footprints on the ceiling. She brought her feet down to the floor and smiled at the track she had made, going nowhere.
 
That was where she hoped her career would go, nowhere.

- - - - - - - - - -

Chapter 17

Bouncing Off

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The increasing number of dimensions being destroyed by the dark had bad consequences for Annette. Annette frowned at what her pop-pad was telling her, dozens of factors had lodged nasty complaints over Sanctuary abandoning dimensions that were about to be destroyed by the dark. The field factors were incredulous that the worlds where they were stationed would be destroyed without the least bit of an attempt to save some of the people living in them. Most of the people howled their complaints at a level well above Annette’s tolerances and Annette had switched her pad to mute as she reviewed them. Despite the aural pain the
 
complaints caused, Annette couldn’t help but agree, and that was why she chose to hunt down Angela and make a case for evacuation, in person.

Annette had consulted with Prima and Central computer on where the best place to pin down Angela would be, and both had come up with the same answer, Annette strolled down the familiar corridor to the Angela’s paint room.
 
She tried the door, but it didn’t even acknowledge her presence.

“Prima, what’s up with the door,” Annette asked.

“It has been manually disabled,” Prima replied.

How like Angela to seal herself off from the people around her, after all the woman walked around with an assumed mask of authority. Annette suddenly realized how much of an intrusion it must have been,
 
her stumbling over this room, during the Kavir incident. Annette knocked on the door firmly.

“Who’s there?” Came Angela’s muffled voice.

“It’s Annette and I need to talk to you, should I come in?”

“No,” Angela quickly shouted back, “I’ll be out!” There was the sound of empty paint cans jangling together then a spotlessly clean Angela appeared next to Annette. “So,” Angela cleared her throat, “What is this about?”

“Factors are loudly complaining about our abandonment of doomed dimensions. They want to know why they aren’t trying to save as many people as possible. To be honest I’d like to know the same,” Annette blurted.

Angela stood, face blank, mouth opening and silently closing like a scared goldfish.

Annette tried again, “I mean they may already be collapsing from crunch bombs but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t evacuate people, so at least something of those worlds would survive!”

“We don’t have the room,” Angela finally answered firmly.

“There’s plenty of room in Refuge,” Annette replied, “I could even go and set up direct portals to Refuge.”