The Island of Hope (2 page)

I'm neither a prosecutor nor a pacifist. I'm a professional soldier, an assassin legalized by the state, pulled by force of circumstance out of the vicious circle of death and thrown away into a great icy nothing to die slowly, thinking.

* * *

Two hours ago he was young and full of strength, now he was dying, slowly and terribly. His parched lips were whispering something, but the sounds couldn't be heard from behind the thick glass of the pressurized helmet.

The internal communication monitors were spangled with chaotically scintillating points. The stacked control panels had lost their kaleidoscope of colors, the screens dimmed. The panels and sensors' illumination was fading. They were dying together with the man.

Only a few minutes had passed since the emergency monitor gave the last message. In the heat of the moment he hadn't paid attention to the value of the general explosion power — in any case, he would have judged it unreal: the total combat power of the two fleets couldn't have produced such an explosion. Yet it soon became evident the figures were true: suddenly he felt his joints being wrenched by a dull ache.

There is nothing worse than being aware of the inevitable. Andrei was panic-stricken, his eye feverishly scanning the instrument boards. Three billions of kilotons.

He felt sick. His joints didn't ache anymore: they were burning, as was his whole body.

Andrei understood that the instruments were not lying and his compartment was traveling through a blustering hell of accelerated particles that were piercing him every second, destroying his body's cells. Even his battle spacesuit was unable to stop this flow of hard radiation, and the radiation dose he was taking was quickly approaching a fatal level.

Horror pressed his throat with its icy gnarled fingers. Andrei flung the doors of an in-built storage cell open. In the interior of one of them he could see the even gleam of a series of high-protection combat spacesuits. He stretched out his hand. A sharp pain pierced his thorax as he was seized by a fit of suffocation .

Once again, injections reanimated him and returned him to reality.

He had never been a coward. In fact, he was only properly scared now. It's so terrible and disgusting to die.

He collected the rest of his strength and tugged the heap of spacesuits towards himself. Their gray protection skins enveloped him, softening the merciless flow of invisible radiation; instinctively, he tried to bury himself in the very midst of the shapeless pile.

A few minutes later hope turned to despair.

Andrei was unable to move anymore — quite unexpectedly, he'd transformed into a helpless mannequin, an onlooker observing his own agony. Non-existence was rushing up to him by suffocating black lapses interwoven with minutes when his mind became more lucid even though immersed in delirium. They say, a dying man recollects his life... Nothing of the kind. He was still going through his last awful combat.

He hurt. He hurt so much. His joints were wrung out, his body burned by an unmerciful fire. He wheezed, feeling some disgusting foam on his lips and... an injection. His mind burst in bloody fireworks and gradually faded, as if he were falling into the gentle embrace of a vacuum.

* * *

He existed… But at the same time he didn't.

A lacerated mind creates strange phenomena.

Fire. An acrid odor of burning insulation. Distant explosions and the shuddering hull of the gigantic space cruiser.

The black
nothing
of hypersphere. The weariness of waiting for battle. And almost as the trump of doom, the salutary deliverance from uncertainty: the wailing of alarms.

Holding their breath, they observed their fleet take up positions not far from a lifeless and nameless planetoid. A monstrous armored sphere – a star fortress of colonists – was already hanging in its orbit. Both the Admiral and Andrei's father were there now, at fleet headquarters.

The detectors caught some disturbances in space. Something was trying to break out of the infernal Nothing, a.k.a. hypersphere, back to the three-dimensional continuum.

Andrei didn't know that this battle would go down in history as the first experience of "puncture tactics". He would never read any manuals written for future generations, but he would also never forget the pale-blue flashes of hypertransfers suddenly sparkling directly amidst the battle formation of the Colonies Fleet.

The first wave was formed by remotely controlled kamikaze modules. About a hundred nuclear explosions blossomed in space, reducing half their fleet to rubble, and following them, wave after wave, Earth's battle space cruisers hove into view.

* * *

He was coming round.

Andrei was drenched in sweat, suffering the torments of the damned; finally he envied the dead indeed. The pain spread all over his body like a fire; the nerve endings perished first, causing inhuman tortures to his mind.

Andrei returned to dreadful reality. But he hadn't any desire for living anymore. What for? He realized perfectly well that the turret torn from his spaceship was drifting into an
abyss
from which one could never return.

He knew how to interrupt this torture, but was unable to reach for his personal firearm: the weight of the heaped-up spacesuits had pinned him to the floor. He wheezed, feeling hot liquid dripping down his cheeks. He couldn't even shoot himself!

Once again his consciousness began to fade. He was gripped by a suffocating blackness in which a luminous spiral rotated frenziedly. It was penetrating his inflamed brain, giving him some relief; he was turning towards it, passionately desiring to escape the indecency of such a death... but at this moment (how many times had it already happened?) the bioscanners of his battle spacesuit worked.

What's the point?

He cursed the machine for trying to save him. All he wanted was to die, but the re-animator was able to squeeze out all of the soldiers' life up to the last drop.

A black infinity spread from the past to the future.

The spiral which had appeared, now disappeared.

Then at last fell total darkness.

2.

H
e recovered consciousness after some seventy hours.

Having opened his eyes, Andrei lay for a long time staring senselessly at the internal sensors of his pressurized
helmet.

"I'm still alive."

The quivering lights of indicators were hovering at zero.

His combat spacesuit resource was completely exhausted.

He was surrounded by darkness and an oppressive smell
.
He stirred, and his stiffened body responded with a dull pain. The heap of spacesuits was displaced, and he caught sight of a strip of reddish light.

His weakness and the nauseating odor made him suffocate. Somehow he squeezed his way through the dozens of spacesuits. Two emergency lighting lamps flooded the turret interior with a reddish light. All screens were lifeless, as well as the gun control panels; one could only read some dim lines on a stand-by monitor:

Laser gun – serial number 5 – destroyed.

Your compartment has transformed into an autonomous module.

He vacantly examined those lines while unfastening blindly the locks of his spacesuit.

The most terrible thing which could ever happen to a man had just occurred to him. During those seventy hours they could have gotten him out of the battered turret a hundred times. This could only mean that he had been included into the number of fatalities and forgotten.

Andrei was so feeble that he couldn't even fall into despair. Finally he succeeded in undoing the spacesuit locks. Gasping, he peeled off the hermetic shell together with the overalls and underwear.

Tears welled up in his eyes. At the moment he hated Fortune for giving him a chance.

To survive and have only death in prospect – that could seem funny if it wasn't so dreadful and obvious.

His skin was burnt as if he'd been lying in a scorching sun. If he didn't get out of there in a few hours, the radiation sickness would become irreversible. He needed urgent qualified help.

The thought spurred Andrei on. He scrambled into the operator's chair.

He opened the survival kit and gave himself two injections: a painkiller and a stimulator.

Gradually, the pain abated. Andrei forced his battle spacesuit into the utilizer and, having put on some clean overalls, returned to the computer terminal. The system had frozen. The image on the screen didn't move. The dim light of the emergency lamps pointed at either deficient batteries or to a break in the power circuit.

Counting on the backup software, he reached for the reset button.
If nothing has burnt inside the electronic circuits, the system will execute all necessary troubleshooting and memory testing itself. But what if something had indeed burnt out?

Andrei's hand froze over the control panel. It was sheer Russian roulette. He was going to shut down the programs that were still running with a view to activate the frozen modules, but what if the system wouldn't restart?

The lights twinkled for a second when his finger pressed the
Reset
button.

The turret computer was functioning.

In the corner of the central monitor, memory test figures began flashing.

Power failure

Please wait

He tried to make himself comfortable in the chair. Inside the stacked control panels and behind the plastic wall panels something was buzzing and snapping: the system's central processor was using the emergency reserve of its built-in batteries trying to find some undamaged circuits.

The lights began twinkling again. Then, all of a sudden, the ceiling lamps lit up.

With a soft click, the air regenerator came on. A convulsive wave of lights ran along the instrument panels.

The turret was springing back to life.

Instinctively Andrei moved forward, ignoring the system info, when one of the survey screen sectors began filling with stars.

An enormous blood-red octopus spread over space, eclipsing stars with its luminescence.

Space coordinates of the object match those of planetoid Y-047

The computer message left no room for doubt. The swirling spiral nebula was the remains of the lifeless planet and the colonists' station that had orbited it at the beginning of the battle.

Both had been destroyed!

Not split asunder by rocket strikes, not broken by gravitational guns — just destroyed.

Andrei couldn't believe his eyes. Still, the facts spoke for themselves. The dazzling
light
reappeared before his eyes just as he realized the meaning of that flash.

The planet had been annihilated.

In full prostration, he returned to the sole undamaged survey screen.

The nebula glistened. He could clearly see the waves of scarlet luminescence running down its tentacles. And on the background of this symbol of universal apocalypse, multiple brilliant dots were moving.

Thousands of them.

He understood there were no winners here.

In front of him was floating the cemetery of both fleets.

* * *

He had to survive. The thought completely consumed him.

He looked at the 3D monitor screen, dissolving in the abyss around him. The eerie sensation of abandonment and solitude captured him, and it wasn't an ordinary agoraphobic fit: he'd simply stopped viewing himself as a cog in a huge war machine: it was dead, scattered around in thousands of metal fragments and hundreds of corpses. The civilization had abandoned him and didn't care one bit about him.

He was all by himself, surrounded by billions of miles of cold and emptiness.

Andrei didn't want to believe it. He couldn't accept the hopelessness of his situation, admitting thereby the inevitability of another agony. Having once passed through the horror of a slow and wholly experienced death, he hated the very idea of facing it again.

'They absolutely have to come back here. For sure they'll return. I'll only have to wait till they come back!'

Only much later would Andrei learn that he had stubbornly refused to view his situation objectively. He was too stunned, scared and wound up by the sharp change in his life, by the sheer fact of being abandoned in the midst of the boundless abyss. With the obstinacy of a drowning man, he clutched at a glimmer of hope… unable to comprehend that the tragedy of that battle, of that fleet would forever remain his own personal little drama. As for the Galactic War, it had already rolled away, following its own bloody course.

* * *

Each compartment of a battle space cruiser contained emergency rations of food, water and air. The situation in which Andrei found himself – being all alone in a drifting fragment of a spacecraft – was as old as the hills. The history of the conquest of outer space abounds with such incidents having similar beginnings but different outcomes.

Technically, the problem of survival after a crash had been solved long ago, maybe two hundred years before; nevertheless, only few had managed to escape. That wasn't a matter of technology, but one of the human mind. Now Andrei regretted his going to sleep at lectures on space psychology.

Only seven days had passed since the moment when he'd come round amidst the dim radiance of emergency lights, but the period was sufficient enough for Andrei to taste all the delights of living in absolute solitude.

Dammit! When you're twenty it's impossible to be serious about such tiresome disciplines as survival psychology and prepare for a complete isolation at the very beginning of life!

There was one thing engraved in his memory though. As the
'I-want-you-to-focus'
(the moniker they'd given to the space psychology instructor) used to say,
'The two main causes of mental disorders suffered in an enclosed space are loss of hope and physical inactivity. They're the cause of death in ninety percent of all cases.'

Gradually, anger overcame him. Andrei knew perfectly well that he wasn't a hero. To fall in battle, in front of his comrades and commanders, or to peg out from anguish, solitude and incurable radiation sickness — these turned out to be quite different things.

Not to lose hope... It’s easy to say. He kept moving inside the turret; he ate and slept. After seven days, it became clear to him that he was going mad. At one time events had carried away the twenty-year-old guy he'd then been in their frenzied vortex. The war had whirled him through four years of life, then abruptly abandoned him here, amidst the dark, cold and corpses.

What before had only gleamed faintly in the depths of his mind, making him just a tad uneasy, had become quite obvious upon some reflection.

When Andrei realized he would die, he forbade himself to think of it.

He opened all the built-in storage cells, pulled out their contents and, scrutinizing that combat trash designed to allow young guys to kill and disfigure each other, worked out a new conception of his existence.

His anger subsided, bringing him some relief.

He had a standard toolkit, some spare parts for the guidance system and a few repair manuals he'd found rummaging through databases.

So as not to go mad because of the silence and solitude, he ripped out the laser gun control console and began to disassemble the system. Days went by, and he started losing his sense of time. Investigating the sophisticated equipment, Andrei tired morally but not physically.

Then he would stop and begin jumping across the cramped compartment, pushing off the walls in order to wear himself out. Sometimes these
training sessions
resulted in a fit of hysterical laughter: he had the impression he was an imbecile jumping and scurrying around like a monkey... but who could see him, and how could he move in another manner? At least that helped him to remain in his right mind.

In fact, he was afraid. He hated himself for that, but no sooner had he remembered the endless hours of his agony than he felt sick. He just wanted to live. He secretly dreamed of the day when he would come back despite all obstacles. He daydreamed of the moment when he'd set foot on a planet — any planet. All he wanted was to see a sky overhead and to feel firm ground underfoot.

He toiled until he was so exhausted he couldn't think. But yet he thought, dreamed — and kept working.

Ninety-two days passed.

He grew gaunt, his complexion darkly sallow. Andrei's hands were covered in burns and scratches, but now he knew the turret inside out. The radar and the transmitter functioned as before. Hence he could be sure that a rescue spaceship wouldn't miss him. It was bound to hear his signals; however, he wasn't yet aware that he'd become quite indifferent to that.

He only had to fix the antennas to finish the repairs.

To do that, he had to leave the compartment and go into outer space.

Having put on a newly fitted and recharged spacesuit, Andrei went out of the compartment into the corridor that had formerly led to Deck 10 of the space cruiser
Russia
. Now the corridor didn't measure more than ten feet long, ending in a hermetic bulkhead.

Having sealed the compartment hatch, Andrei turned on the air evacuation system and approached the bulkhead. For the first time in his three months' solitude, he was going to leave his shelter.

Hesitantly he took the handwheel; a moment later he was overcome with impatience. He feverishly unscrewed the spiral lock, flung the emergency hatch wide open — and stopped short.

Before him, as far as he could see, an inky abyss spilled out – the gigantic eye of the Universe gazing at him indifferently with billions of pupils. He staggered back involuntarily.

The anxious clicking of the spacesuit's radiation meter brought Andrei out of his stupor. He secured the safety tether and climbed out. Having quickly set up both antennas, he returned to the hatch and only then allowed himself a look around .

The view was both oppressing and fascinating. The shapeless fragment of the space cruiser ended in a somber and ugly gap. The surface of the turret was covered with runs of molten metal. In some places, one could see protruding armor plates broken out by the explosion. The skeleton of the laser gun towered above the scene. Its robust framework had been twisted, causing the whole structure to list. Somehow it resembled a crippled bird. The two antennas he had just set up contradicted the surrounding chaos.

While he was examining the laser, something had changed in the dark of the cosmic night. The bent supports that had seemed gray a few minutes ago were now tinged delicate pink, then quickly turned crimson.

Andrei looked up, realizing what was happening. The fragment was slowly rotating, and he had just witnessed the rise of the crimson nebula over the ridiculously close horizon of the small celestial body represented by the
Russia
's turret.

However, that was only a prelude. Bright lights began to flare up one after another in the dark. It looked as if someone had slashed at the black quilt of space with a knife, releasing droplets of blood.