The Island of Hope (4 page)

Annoyed, he lit a cigarette and went out into the central saloon.

Andrei was in an agony of suspense, sitting by the transparent shell of a reanimation chamber that Hugo had arranged for the two-year-old baby. The boy was sleeping with his arms stretched out in a funny way, and his snuffle made the plain and functional space of the compartment more cozy.

Nomad stood still in the doorway. Andrei's hunched figure was sharply dissonant to the kid's placid features, as if there were an invisible partition between them.

He sighed and went to the bar.

"Want a drink?"

Hearing no answer, he filled two glasses and offered one to Andrei.

He took it, indifferently looking down.

"What are you thinking about, soldier?" Nomad asked, trying to dispel the oppressive silence; at the same moment, he regretted his having been ironic. Such a furious madness flared in the young guy's eyes that a cold shiver ran down his spine.

"None of us will survive," Andrei managed.

He was eager to live, but he knew better than anyone that the flame of war had spread over the sliver of space explored by men. Neither he nor anybody else could stop the frenzied dance of death. The avalanche of galactic war would sweep away mankind, sparing only a few men like himself, aged prematurely, seared by battles and perceiving too late the crux of the matter.

"I've never wanted to live so badly," he breathed out.

Nomad was going to object, but stopped short. He realized that he didn't have the right words.

"Stay with us," he said at last. "I understand, you wouldn't like to go to your death again."

Andrei raised his head. "Thanks," bitterness sounded in the word. He drank his glass in one draught and, lighting a cigarette, leaned back in his seat so that the smoke couldn't reach the cradle.

"We're too selfish," he said suddenly, as though expanding on the idea. "We're like a plague. And only having got into a mess, we begin to struggle, comprehending some ancient values discovered thousands of years before us."

Quite unexpectedly, Nomad became angry. "You, philosopher, here you are going a bit too far. Don't forget that you defended your planets. And if you don't believe me, have a look at this baby here. I saw his parents. They had been shot at close range. Pacifism is only good to a certain degree, you know."

Their spaceship shuddered with an impact.

The intensive care chamber gave a lurch. Nomad was knocked down, his curses drowned out by the cry of the awakened
child. The deck underfoot was vibrating.

"Spacesuits!" he commanded, jumping to his feet. There was no need to repeat the command. Andrei was the right man for such a situation. The spaceship shuddered again. A siren howled.

When he ran back into the chamber fetching three maximum protection spacesuits, Nomad was out. The baby kept wailing in his cradle. Andrei snatched the cylinder of a personal first aid kit and gave the child an injection of soporific, then began to suit up. While he was busy with the clasps, the child convulsively sobbed one last time and quieted
down, sinking to the bottom of the intensive care capsule.

Andrei carefully picked up the little body and put it into another spacesuit. Turning on the self-feeding oxygen, a thermocouple and a pressure transducer, he made sure that everything was functioning properly and only then sealed the suit shut. The spacesuit became slightly inflated. A pale blue indicator blinked on the forearm, signaling the suit's proper functioning.

All over the ship, alarm sirens were now howling.

"Nomad, what's going on around you?" Andrei asked, turning on his communicator.

"Can't understand. There're some flashing lights reflected from the armor of the neighboring ships. Hugo doesn't respond. The radar shows six objects approaching. Shit! They have readings of planetary tanks!"

Andrei began shaking uncontrollably.

Closing the visor of his pressure helmet, he attached the spacesuit with the baby to the chest of his own, taped up its empty sleeves and rushed out of the room.

He was halfway to the chartroom when the ship shuddered again.

Andrei dropped to his back so as not to hurt the child. He felt rather than heard the wailing of the escaping air. The opposite wall began to recede, the floor coming apart at the seams. A lonely star twinkled in the gap.

The old tub of the freelance dealers was cut into two by a laser ray.

Weightlessness came. The artificial gravitation generators had conked out. Repelling himself from the floor, he flew the last several feet and squeezed himself into the half-open door of the chart room.

Nomad's body was floating in a vacuum, surrounded by a halo of scarlet drops. Some impulse rifles had fallen out of the stack and were circling him slowly.

Fury, powerlessness and incomprehension overwhelmed him. His muscles acted on their own accord. He seized a rifle drifting past, floated back into the corridor and started gliding along the wall in the direction of the airlock.

Nomad died of an instant decompression. His lungs had simply burst.

Andrei dove into blackness and turned on his transmitter. "Hugo, where are you?"

"Ah, dammit..." his words could hardly be heard because of interference. "I’m here, by the ship. We are being attacked by battle machines!"

"Get away!" he shouted into the communicator, instantly realizing what was happening. "Keep under cover and don't move. Switch off all suit systems except oxygen supply and heating! The child's with me, I'll find you!"

Silence.

Then something wheezed in the communicator, and a heart-rending cry burst upon his ears.

He emerged from the airlock into the gloom illuminated by flashes of lasers. A combat in the void of a vacuum was in full swing. Six battle machines were fighting to the death, slashing one another with laser rays, and amid this chaos, one could see a broken jet floating and a decapitated body quite close to it.

Andrei was by himself again.

He rushed to the nearest rupture hole and disappeared within the interior of the battered spaceship. Turning round in a narrow deformed corridor, he brushed a bulkhead and felt the helpless lump stir inside the other spacesuit.

There were two of them.

And they were doomed.

PART TWO

THE SPHEROID

4.

G
loom reigned in front of him.

Simeon rose on his elbows and looked around from the top of a heap of crumpled girders. The pale beam of his lantern snatched from the darkness gray armor plates of a listed deck of a spaceship. The boy glanced over them, noticing that some debris of facing plastic remained here and there, a few propulsion systems disabled by an explosion, then riveted his eyes on a piece of starry abyss which was clearly seen through an ugly rupture hole in the side.

During some minutes' observation no shadow obscured the stars, and he decided that it was possible to move onward.

Abandoning his shelter, Simeon covered in a graceful jump the several feet to the rupture hole, perched at its edge and cautiously looked out.

He became blind for some seconds: the reddish light of a nebula pulsing in the gloom of space was reflected from a metallic plain becoming just bearable for his eyes. He strained, trying to become invisible against the gray background of the armor — at such moments the boy was always helpless because of the jammed light filters of his old pressure helmet. To repair them had proved to be beyond his powers.

Finally Simeon's eyes became adapted to the bright scintillation, and he started recognizing familiar outlines.

It was a sinister, pitiful and, at the same time, bewitching sight. The huge spheroid on the surface of which he was moving shone in the red light of the nebula like a multi-faceted crystal made of hundreds of disabled spacecraft. Simeon didn't understand that, in fact, it was an agglomeration of trash brought together by the force of gravity. The rupture holes in the ship hulls made you imagine they were gnashing their teeth, exposing the frameworks of mutilated mechanisms or a fragile web of broken antennas.

Eternal monument to man's madness.

Very long ago two space fleets had engaged in a frenzied battle here, and the annihilated planet still dying as a curling, bloody nebula, had been a silent witness and one of many victims of that barbarous and insane combat.

Father told him that there had been no winners in that battle, but Simeon couldn't grasp the sense of the words.

Time passed, and the separate debris of spacecraft, obeying the law of gravity, began to agglomerate. The ones that possessed a great kinetic energy left the destroyed planetoid's system forever or became distant satellites of the blood-red nebula, but the greater part of battered spacecraft eventually formed a ball of irregular shape measuring about one hundred miles in diameter.

Such was the genesis of this world in the depths of space; its brief history was a tragedy of constant soundless catastrophes, explosions and collisions. After several years, the world finally became somewhat stable: wrecks of cruisers agglomerated to form a dense sphere, collisions and explosions almost stopped, and the newly brought to light planetoid started its elliptic run around the curling nuclear sink, dragging a long tail of fragments of smaller size.

Simeon was not going to linger by the rupture hole once he was sure there was no danger ahead. The wild pictures of rampant steel landscapes spreading out before his eyes didn't make any impression on the lad — he found some familiar reference points and moved on cautiously. Simeon didn't know the origination of the nebula and metallic sphere, and he didn't care for it.

There was something eerie and unreal in the small figure which was hastily making his way across the destroyed decks of the irrevocably ruined spacecraft: in the eternal silence, gloom and cold of the space night, consumed with hunger and anxiety, he was moving on too confidently and skillfully. Warped bulkheads, narrow vertical trunks, dark halls with immobilized mechanisms inside — that was his world, the world of cold metal in which he lived.

He was twelve that day, and he felt his solitude and impotence still sharper than in the last several days. His thin-grown face behind the transparent plastic of the helmet was clearly marked with the traces of endured suffering.

Simeon took a few steps and stopped, grasping with his left hand at a beam hanging down from the corridor ceiling. In his right hand, he was squeezing anMG-90 plasma emitter , with its safety-catch released. The lad felt a danger hidden before him, but couldn't locate it. Simeon's eyes filled with tears: to become accustomed to the idea of being quite alone was a frightening thing...

For some seconds he intently peered into the dark depths of a hall extending ahead. He was a few hundred feet away from home. This path was perfectly familiar to him, and all around seemed to be calm, but the first rule he learned in his life read as follows: "Never trust calmness and a vacuum." It had become an unconscious habit with him. Quite mechanically, he picked up a warped piece of pipe and flung it forward.

The infinity of the hemispherical hall was suddenly lighted by surges of light-blue lightning; the piece of pipe splattered drops of molten metal and evaporated.

The next few seconds would be decisive.

His flexible figure rushed to take cover under a dilapidated console. His fingers automatically pulled the trigger, and a plasma discharge shattered several cubic inches of metal in the place where the surges of lightning had come from.

Falling on the floor, he rolled to dive into a vertical trunk just at the moment when a new series of flashes annihilated the console that had served him as a shelter only seconds before.

Having flown a dozen feet, Simeon slowed down his fall, and just at the right moment: the vertical tunnel ended quite unexpectedly, and he found himself dangling from a bracket that he was by some sort of miracle able to seize . The dim light cone of his lantern snatched out of the gloom a fragment of cargo hold. There remained some ten feet to fly over, and the boy unclenched his fingers without any hesitation.

This hall was familiar to him. Confidently turning into a passage between empty racks, he squeezed his way sideways into a cargo lift trunk. At this moment there was nothing in his soul except for a hatred that superseded all other feelings. The bright splashes of energy discharges, the soundlessly scattering splinters of the console, the suddenness of the attack — all that reminded him of his loss. He still saw mentally a similar picture engraved on his memory: darkness torn by shots, the grotesque outlines of a battle robot, and his father's figure shielding him and burning in a plasma vortex. He didn't know how much time had passed since his death. His memory only retained a part of the eternity full of the pain of irreparable loss, loneliness and grief.

Probably having reached the limit of moral exhaustion — his instincts receded, and now to live or to die was all the same to him. Perhaps, this robot was just the one that had killed his father!

Clinging with his hand and legs to the brackets, he clambered through the trunk up to the deck where he had been attacked a minute ago. He was choking with hatred and tears. Flexible like a cat, decisive and fast like death itself, unhappy while being unaware of the complete extent of his unhappiness — the twelve-year-old lad glided along a wall, and gloom, the host of these halls, closed in on him.

The lantern on his helmet had been switched off, and he was able to distinguish ahead a dim, reddish spot. That was the glow of heated metal. The spot was slowly moving away, crossing the hall diagonally. Simeon shivered. 'So, I hit it!' he thought, leaning against the wall and raising the
MG
.

A series of light-blue suns cut open the darkness. A wall of silent flame shot up in front of him. Simeon instinctively screwed up his eyes not to lose his sight, and that was why he didn't see the retaliatory salvos rush at him from out of the gloom. A part of the wall was transformed into fountains of hot splashes.

He remained intact, but was totally blinded and lost the power of movement for some seconds. All of a sudden, three floodlights filled the depths of the hall, cutting the viscous darkness with oblique columns of light, and a MONSTER set out against Simeon.

The incandescent walls and the floodlights now illumined the scene well enough for him to see the adversary that he had just tried to knock out with his manual weapon.

A ten-foot high square platform was gliding easily just above the deck without touching it at all. Formerly there had been four sloping plasmatron turrets placed on it — now there remained only three, and one of them, half cut off by a burst, was emitting a crimson glow.

On the whole, the construction looked rather shabby: half of its shutters and hatches were broken off, a slide was protruding out of the launching silo, askew on its end a rocket blocked the mechanism, the plates of radar antennas were misshapen. The machine's armor, pierced and molten in some places, had lost its original luster long ago, but three machine-guns peering out of their sockets were in good working order: helped by a sole undamaged video camera, they were stubbornly and purposefully seeking out their target. Horrified, Simeon suddenly realized that it was getting really tough, as he was being attacked by an Automatic Planetary Scout which, although shabby, still remained one of the biggest and dangerous robots.

He crawled aside, continuing to observe the giant.

Color rings were floating before his eyes, but he was already able to discern some objects around. To the right of him, there was a lift trunk, to the left – the glowing wall, the robot – ahead of him, behind him – a short tunnel leading to a small sealed shack, where his father and himself had lived over the last several years. Remembering his father, the boy was again overwhelmed with a burning hatred for all mechanical creatures. He shouldered his weapon, but at the same moment, lowered it. It was impossible to destroy the scout with one shot, and he wouldn't have time to get off another one, as the robot's electronic reaction was equivalent to a death sentence.

Only one reasonable solution remained: to run away, to try to slip away from the machine in the depths of the spaceships and to lead it away from the shack as far as possible.

The vortex of thoughts that flashed through the boy's mind resulted in one action: he half-rose and, taking an acrobatic jump, dived into the cargo lift trunk. A double explosion blazed behind, but Simeon was already safely dropping through a broad dark tunnel, and the robot had missed its target. Having rolled head over heels onto the lower deck, he started running. A belated fear drove him farther and farther, along narrow corridors and across huge, dark halls until he completely lost sense of time and distance.

At last he stopped, breathing heavily and, grasping at a wall so as not to fall, rested his helmet visor against a bulkhead. No vibration was felt, and he calmed down a bit. His excitement subsided, he was ready to drop; he gave an involuntary sob and almost collapsed on the floor. Taking a glance at the oxygen pressure sensor he understood that he had to go on by all means and felt worse yet. He would be suffocated if he didn't get home.

Such things had already happened; it had occurred to his father and himself to return from sorties literally on last gulps of oxygen, but now he was all alone and hadn't the slightest idea of the right direction.

It remained the sole path for him to take – the one to the surface of the spheroid, as it was only there that he would be able to get his bearings.

Exhausted and depressed, he reached the upper layer of ships and cautiously looked out of a hatch. All around, the chaos of a metallic plain stretched for many miles.

The crimson nebula still curled above the close horizon, coloring the ships' armor with opalescent spots. The indifferent stars interlacing fanciful patterns of constellations coldly gazed at the steel sphere from the abyss of space. Simeon got out of the hatch and looked round once again. The unfamiliar outlines of disabled spacecraft produced a discouraging impression on him. He realized his having completely lost the way.

The lad sat down on the ledge of the hatch, leaning against the covering, lowering his arms helplessly.

Simeon didn't know the exact names of feelings.

He had struggled all his life. At first it was a struggle against loneliness and boredom, against the walls of the small room and the locked hatch. But boredom finally came to an end, the hatch opened, and his dad appeared on the doorstep without fail. He brought some food, the smell of sweat emitting from his pressure suit, a tired smile and a lot of words. Father talked very much to him, telling him a number of zingy stories about quite unimaginable places.

At the beginning Simeon believed that Dad traveled to those places when he was out, but later, when he grew up and started getting outside too, he understood that his father's stories were nothing more than
fiction: during their wanderings on the spheroid he never saw a huge room filled with oxygen on the floor of which water called "river" would flow.

In return, he mastered other arts. When he wasn't yet five, Simeon knew the true price of a gulp of air and of a bit of food. He learned to walk in the gloom of halls, shoot at everything moving, find out stores, open doors using electronic pass-keys and an emitter. Very often it seemed to him that his father and himself were playing a simple game with elementary rules: shoot first, manage to find a store, quickly react to the gleam of a robot's armor.