Charger the Soldier (5 page)

They decided to aim for Alpha Centauri. After
all, they had nowhere else to go.

But their flying city was destined never to
reach Alpha Centauri. One day a new planet, the tenth planet of
Earth's solar system, appeared in the distance, a black orb
invisible against the backdrop of inky black space, but whose
presence was detected by the Nines and their instruments. Visha
decided that it would be good to use this passing body as a
gravitational slingshot, speeding up their journey.

Many generations of their people had lived
and died during the long flight, so perhaps impatience fueled the
Nine's decision, but attracting the black planet was the worst
decision they could have made. They were able to grab the rogue
planet with the gravity drive, but could not escape the planet's
own mighty grasp. As a result, Mahoud crashed so hard into this
planet that it penetrated the thin surface crust and buried itself
inside the planet's hollow black belly, acting as a plug for the
break. There, fortunately, it continued to generate gravity,
stabilizing the planet.

The Mahoud continent was domed and the dome
held, though many people were killed by the impact. Only two of the
outer towers survived and, luckily, these two towers kept the
vacuum of space from rushing into the hollow world and killing
everyone. Many of the Nine of Nines had died, though the group into
which Visha had been blended suffered only two deaths.

Visha knew that human nature would cause most
people to instinctively look for someone to blame for the great
misfortune. As leader of his Nine, it fell to him to calm the fear
and panic which the survivors faced and to give everything a
positive spin. With care and logic, he formulated duties for the
unhurt individuals to perform, helping those with the lightest
injuries to tend to those needing immediate care. He directed
others to begin stabilizing the remaining two towers. The undamaged
robots were immediately ordered to put out fires to prevent the
wasteful consumption of needed oxygen. The water they had carried
with them in travel was checked and rationed.

Visha was thus the guiding force behind the
success of the survivors. The two perished members of his Nine were
surgically replaced with survivors from one of the other groups of
Nine. At full capacity again, the Nine started planning, not just
to survive, but to make out of their mistake a brilliant success.
Like a man possessed, Visha drove the other eight minds at a
frenzied pace, for he knew that death would soon claim him. He was,
after all, nearly five hundred years old. Thus, he organized,
delegated and responded with such vigor that, within a month of the
crash, most things had been stabilized.

It started with a complete redesign of the
Mahoud robots and the building of the first generation of Taskers.
These Taskers were more efficient, smarter, faster, stronger, and
more durable than the previous robots. Able to survive the hostile
nature of space, they could gather resources the city needed to
build on its successes.

The redesign did not proceed without a
mysterious tragedy, however. Pitar, one of the scientists working
on the new robots, begged audience with the Nine of Nines. "Great
ones," Pitar said, "May I speak? Something very strange happened
while my staff and I were taking our last sleep period."

"Tell me," Visha said, summoning energy to
deal with yet another problem.

"First, we were wakened by an explosion. Not
inside the dome, of course."

"Of course not." The Nine would have known if
that had been the case. "But it must have been inside the planet.
Perhaps an earthquake?"

Pitar shook his head, then remembered the
Nines would be looking at the ceiling, not at him. "We don't think
so, great ones. It was sudden and must have been very loud, for we
could hear it even inside the sleeping quarters."

"Is that all?" Visha asked.

"No, great one. We heard nothing else and, as
you have said, we thought it might be a quake, and so we went back
to sleep. But, when we went to the lab to return to work, we found
Arun murdered."

"Murdered!" Visha could not suppress his
shock. Mahouds did not kill one another. "Are you sure it was
murder?"

"Yes, great one. His neck was broken and
there was fear on his face. But it was not one of us. Someone
strange had been inside the lab. Someone very large, for a chair
had been broken, as if crushed from the top of the seat. Things
were tumbled about."

"Was anything missing?" Visha asked.

"No, although the plans for the new Taskers
were out of order and there were dirty fingerprints on the corner
of one sheet. Very large fingerprints."

"What about the prototype?"

"It didn't appear to have been touched, great
one. We could find nothing changed in any way. It is working just
as well as it did before this happened."

Visha closed his eyes. If an alien being was
in the planet, where had it come from? Or had it always been there?
Or perhaps someone disliked Arun so much that the stress of the
deaths and this new home had caused him to break his conditioning
and actually commit murder. If such a man existed, his friends were
covering up for him. As for the explosion, Earth suffered quakes,
so why not this planet? "Thank you for reporting this, Pitar. The
Nine will consult on the matter."

Pitar exited the Nine of Nine's large room
and Visha consulted with himself. He felt quite sure that the
hollow planet contained no life forms other than his own people and
that it would be impossible for anyone to come in from outside. No
one could survive in outer space. Which meant that Arun's death had
been caused by another Mahoud. This was tragic and worthy of
universal tears, but what would it avail to discover him? Any true
Mahoud would suffer worse pain than death simply for knowing he had
broken the first law. If another death occurred, as he suspected it
might, he would know that the culprit had taken his own life.

Yes, he would consult with his eight
companions. That is, when they were not consulting on a great many
more crucial matters.

One of these matters was the fact that this
new Earth had turned out to be a rogue planet wandering far outside
old Earth's solar system. The Nine of Nines eventually worked out,
to their amazement, that every five hundred years, it actually did
orbit Earth's sun, but then veered off out of the system and into
deep space, where it orbited a giant red sun once before returning
to Earth's solar system. Its path looked rather like the figure
eight, though the two loops were a long distance apart.

The Nine did not give up hope of someday
returning to Earth. Therefore, they chose to name the black planet
Alcazaba, meaning fortress, a place that would protect them until
such time as they might leave. Soon after that decision was made,
within a year of the crash, Visha perished, but the legacy of
building he started raced onward undiminished.

Because Alcazaba was pure carbon, a
relatively soft element, the survivors were able to further hollow
it out, and create an atmosphere of oxygen, and from that, water.
It was possible to walk anywhere inside the hollow world since
gravity worked from the outer shell. Because the planet was so
large, looking at the horizon was the same as looking at the
horizon on Earth. And, because they had so much digging, burrowing,
and constructing to do, the Mahouds developed wonderful machines to
do the work.

They soon constructed a space port inside the
planet, using the path taken by the city-state, to serve as an
entrance for spaceships. The first small ships they built were
piloted by Taskers and sent out into the cosmos to gather materials
they needed. The Taskers found asteroids rich in ice, and that,
along with the carbon of Alcazaba, gave Mahoud the minerals it
needed to build beautiful structures, just as it had when the
continent was attached to Earth.

The Mahouds themselves chose not to continue
exploring space. With a sadly depleted population, they needed
everyone, old and young, to contribute to the building of their new
life and their new home. After such a very long time of drifting
through space, the idea of 'home' had become a cherished ideal.

The original Mahoud island remained domed,
with artificial light to illuminate it and an entrance hidden
behind a waterfall, which kept out the dust and debris arising from
construction in the rest of the planet. Visha had decided that an
artificial sun resembling the sun in Earth's system was needed for
the growth of plants and expansion of living areas into the rest of
the hollow planet. This construct would not shine into the city
dome because almost none of the planet's carbon interior around the
dome had been dug away.

The creation of the artificial sun was an
immense achievement, the brainchild of Visha. He would be forever
revered as the one who brought light to the blackness of Alcazaba.
Though Visha did not live to see its construction, the entire
process was thought out and executed from his design. So brilliant
was his plan that no alterations were ever needed, though the
construction went on for several years. Hundreds of Tasker robots
walked their way on the inner curvature of the world to a point
directly vertical from the city's central square. There they built
the factory that created the internal sun; they used controlled
radioactive particles contained in carbon-rich structures to emit
energy which was then used to propagate high-intensity sound
waves.

These sound waves were in turn used to excite
rare subatomic particles to the point that they would spontaneously
generate light in a specially created gigantic geodesic carbon
dome. With the first intense sparks of light, the Taskers building
the project were instantly vaporized but the shadows had been
finally chased away. This sun provided light without any
gravitational effects, and so the balance of the city-state of
Mahoud was maintained.

In time, the entire interior of this rogue
black world became a garden of immense beauty, vastly different
from the world the Mahouds had once lived on. Small towns were
built. Great fields of plants and exotic animals were created,
adapted to the ways of the planet. Life was good.

As individuals in the Nines died, the Mahouds
did not replace them. Every Mahoud, under the influence of peace
and plenty, had become as intelligent and wise as the elders had
been of old. However, statues to the elders, especially to Visha
for his sacrifice, were built and honored for all days.

>>>

Thousands of years later, a descendant of
Visha's family, Endellan, spent her mornings strolling the stone
walkways that encircled the shrine to Visha and the survivors,
happily enjoying the peace and beauty. She was always accompanied
by Morrie, her small tan and white terrier. Few Mahouds now spent
time in the gardens she loved to maintain. The place was sacred and
regarded as too important for tourists from outside the city to
plague. The still body of water shimmering and reflecting the sun's
light gave the place a magical ambience, casting away shadows and
inviting the eyes to gaze reverently upon the statues dotting the
grounds. In the center of the grounds rose one statue above all
others. That was Visha, the one who had guided and ensured the
survival of all Mahoud.

Endellan knew that after the great city-state
of Mahoud had traveled the void and crashed into this black hollow
world, there were very few survivors. It made her sad to read how
very dark things were in those first few days. Cries of pain filled
the air, and little could be done to help the dying. The gravity
drive had remained intact, so the survivors at least had the
ability to move about naturally save for the great damage. Most
survivors simply lay where they fell for several hours, if not
days, before reacting to the situation.

As a direct descendant of Visha's family,
Endellan was more than just an ordinary groundskeeper. Many
mornings found her picking up the smallest bits of litter, and
pulling the tiniest weeds. This day, as morning gave way to
afternoon, Endellan chose a new place to eat her lunch. Sitting in
a rocky spot that allowed her feet to rest in the warm water, she
stared out over the calm blue waters at the temple, which had been
built on an island in the center of a deep lake. The island was
connected to the shoreline by a long bridge. She laughed as small
fish swam up and tried to nibble on her toes, and threw bits of
food into the water for them as well as bigger bites to Morrie.

As she sat, she felt the ground under her
lurch once. The dog whined. Then nothing. Odd, she thought, she
must have imagined it. Mahoud never experienced earthquakes now,
though apparently it had in the past. She went back to feeding the
tiny, sparkling fish, then spent the rest of the day placing small
statuettes in new locations, replanting flowers and generally
fussing over the little things.

The following day she decided to again return
to the rocky spot to eat her lunch, but the rocks she'd sat on the
day before were under water. What could cause the waters to rise?
This went on for some time and, little by little, the water began
to rise up over the grounds she so treasured. Endellan spoke to the
city staff and inspectors came to look at it, but all were quite
perplexed.

Alcazaba had so far provided a solid
foundation for the city and no one ever thought that the lands
could sink, but this was what was happening. Magnetic forces deep
beneath their feet were at play, causing the waters to rise and
cover the island temple. Those forces arose from the city's gravity
drive, pieces of old Earth's fragmented core held together to
create a stable surface for Mahoud. This threat to the stability of
the world was only fully realized when, one morning, the temple
complex finally submerged overnight, swallowed into the large blue
body of water, never to be seen again.