Living Hell (4 page)

I sat there with a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach. You see, there weren’t any lifeboats on board Plexus. There were a couple of shuttle-pods, but each of them was only big enough to hold about twenty people, having been designed specifically for carrying the Plexus population, little by little, from the ship to any nearby habitable planet. They weren’t equipped to support life for very long. They weren’t big enough. Only Plexus was big enough.

It had been decided – long ago and far away – that lifeboats would be pointless. Plexus was our only chance of long-term survival in space. That’s why we didn’t have any lifeboats, or emergency beacons, or evacuation procedures. Why bother with things like that? There was no one out there to pick us up if we abandoned ship.

If Plexus died, we died.

Sitting in my room, I told myself that Plexus wouldn’t die. It couldn’t die. It had a multi-layer pressure hull, designed to repel every kind of radiation known to man. It had a coating of sol-gels (heat-resistant porous films). It was constructed out of nanocomposite matter that contained atomic-force nanoprobes; they could repair faults on a subatomic level, by enabling atoms to move back into low-energy positions. On top of that, it had a photocatalytic shield. I’m not exactly sure how this shield worked, but I do know that it responded to every frequency on the electromagnetic spectrum. The higher the frequency, the greater the response, which was a massive release of ions forming a kind of reflective barrier.

With all this at our disposal, as well as our micrometeoroid deflector and backup thermal protection system, we couldn’t be at risk. That’s what I told myself. And despite a niggling sense of unease, I truly believed it. Somewhere deep down, in my very bones, I knew that Plexus wouldn’t fail us.

Nevertheless, I was still awake when my parents finally returned, at zero-six, for a bite of breakfast and a word with me.

Mum took one look at my face and said, ‘You haven’t slept a wink, have you?’

I shook my head.

‘Oh, Cheney. You should have called. I’d have given you something.’

‘You were in a Senate meeting. I couldn’t interrupt a Senate meeting.’

‘Yes you could. You can call me any time, you know that. Senate meeting or no Senate meeting.’

‘What’s going on?’ I could restrain myself no longer.

‘What’s happening with the wave? Is it going to hit us?’

Dad peered at me. ‘You’ve been poking around in CAIP,’ he deduced.

‘Yes I have. But I don’t understand . . .’

‘Nobody understands.’ Dad turned to the food dispenser and jabbed at a few of the keys, frowning. (For some reason, he never quite mastered the food dispensers on Plexus.) ‘We don’t know what we’re dealing with, exactly. Not yet.’

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Didn’t we get
anything
out of the probe?’

‘Some early readings. That was before it passed through the wave. Since then, nothing. All we know is, this isn’t a type of cosmic emission that anyone’s ever encountered before. Oh, damn – what have I done now?’

‘You just cancelled your order, Dad. Let me.’

‘Thanks.’ He stepped aside, and I keyed in his directives for him. Poor Dad had a bit of a problem with the physical world. He called himself ‘matter-incompatible’.

‘It’s a bundle of contradictions, this wave,’ he continued, as his pancakes appeared. ‘On the one hand, it’s behaving rather like high-frequency radiation. On the other hand, it’s a stream of subatomic particles that aren’t quanta. Some of them aren’t even identifiable as any of the three hundred or so types known to us already, though at least two of them appear to be elementary particles. It’s very strange.’

‘But is it dangerous?’ That’s what
I
wanted to know. ‘Are we going to be all right?’

Dad glanced at Mum. ‘Oh, I’m sure we are,’ he said, in that booming voice which always sounded so confident. ‘For all we know, the probe’s just fine. The wave might be ahead of its signal, that’s all.’

‘Anyway, your father’s working on an alternative course,’ Mum added. ‘We might be able to outrun it. So to speak.’

‘But we’ll have to hurry.’ Dad began to stuff down a pancake, using his fingers. ‘Seems to be subject to random surge variations . . . which makes it hard to plot, of course.’

‘We’re on yellow alert,’ Mum interrupted. ‘That’s the important thing.’

‘Yellow alert?’ I was dazed. ‘What does that mean?’

‘Oh, Cheney.’ Mum sounded disappointed. We were all supposed to know our alert drills off by heart. I tried to concentrate.

‘He hasn’t slept,’ Dad mumbled, through a mouthful of pancake. ‘Maybe you should give him something to calm him down.’

‘I’m fine. Really.’ I’d remembered, by then. Yellow alert.

Of course. ‘Pressure suits and scheduled stations. Stand by to brace,’ I recited.

‘Correct,’ said Dad.

‘But I don’t
have
a scheduled station,’ I pointed out. Capers had no specific site allocations – they could work out of their cabins, if they wanted to – and anyway, I was supposed to be sticking with Arkwright. ‘Where’s Ark-wright going to be?’

‘On the Bridge,’ Dad replied. ‘I’ll take you.’

He and Mum exchanged another glance. Then Mum hustled me into my pressure suit, which was a transparent, plasma-film thing with a built-in thermionic cooler system and an emergency oxygen supply pump. Happily, I didn’t have to seal the hood. Not for a yellow alert. Even the glove assemblies were optional.

Dad needed a lot of help getting into his.

‘It’s sticking to me,’ he complained.

‘It is not,’ Mum retorted. ‘It just feels like that.’

‘It’s too small for me, Comet, I swear.’

‘Nonsense.’

They ended up in fits of nervous giggles because he totally screwed up the boot assembly attachment. My father could break
anything
, given half a chance. He was brilliant, but he was clumsy – always knocking over cups and running into bulkheads. He had outsized feet, and a huge voice, and one of those big, loose-jointed bodies that are terribly uncoordinated, no matter how much training they’re put through.

He was also a good bit older than Mum, so that can’t have helped his agility rating. His long, wispy curls were quite grey, by then; his face was pouchy and his movements were slow. But that was all right, he used to say. My mother had enough energy for both of them.

I suppose I took after Mum, in the looks department. I wasn’t especially big or especially loud. Nor was I especially clumsy. I had her pale eyes and skin, and my hair, though thicker, was a similar brown to hers. But when it came to energy levels, I was much more like Dad.

The two of us working together couldn’t accomplish half as much as Mum could. Not unless the work involved particle physics or something.

‘How long have we got?’ I asked them. ‘I mean – when are we supposed to be hitting this thing?’

‘If we hit it at all,’ Mum corrected, and Dad said, ‘We’ve got a few hours yet. When we’re finished our calculations, we’ll know the exact time.’ He accepted a spare glucose bar from Mum, and tucked it into his pocket. ‘My guess is, about eleven-hundred.’

‘Have you eaten, Cheney?’

‘Yes,’ I replied – although I knew that, in my mother’s opinion, one dry biscuit from the bottom of a drawer wasn’t a proper meal. The trouble was, I didn’t feel hungry. ‘When do we go onto red alert, then?’

‘When the time is right,’ said Dad. Mum squeezed my arm.

‘I’ll be along, Cheney,’ she murmured. ‘Everything’s been arranged. My emergency station is on the Bridge, with you and Tuddor. There’s no need to worry.’

No need to worry. That’s what all the Shifters were told. And it’s what we believed. What was the point of panicking? It wouldn’t do any good. Besides, our world had always been so stable. We could hardly comprehend anything else, especially when our parents remained reassuringly calm. Mum was calm. Dad was calm. (Slightly distracted, but calm.) Out in the tube, there weren’t any disturbances. A few people were walking around in their pressure suits, and even they were perfectly calm – though perhaps a little preoccupied. Everything else seemed normal.

When the next OTV arrived at our junction, I saw that Sloan was inside. He, too, was calm. In fact he appeared more concerned about his ‘little guys’ than he was about anything else. As we sat there, behind Dad and one of the Tekkies from Technical Fault Protection, Sloan muttered something to me about the effects of high-frequency radiation on various bacteria colonies that hadn’t been developed ‘with intensive exposure in mind’.

‘Anything much over seven hundred and fifty terahertz and they’re sizzled,’ he said. ‘Of course, they’re nowhere near the hull, but still . . .’

‘Aren’t you more worried about us?’ I asked him quietly. And he shrugged.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not really.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because Firminus isn’t.’ Sloan crossed his legs, leaning back in his seat. ‘Firminus doesn’t think we’re going to be too badly affected. This ship is built like a fort.’

‘All the same, it might be hard. Just getting through the next few hours, I mean.’

Sloan smiled. He fixed me with an odd look – lazy but intent. Then he leaned over.

‘You won’t feel a thing,’ he murmured.

‘What?’

‘MedLab has it all under control.’ As I stared at him in total confusion, he went on to explain. ‘Any red alert means that they adulterate the air supply. Automatically.
Before
you seal your pressure suit. Procedure M34a.’

‘Huh?’

‘It means that no one’s going to panic. Won’t be able to. We’ll all be under a form of sedation.’ Watching me, Sloan added, ‘It’s the logical thing to do. We’ll be put down, too, if it gets to the point of hull disintegration. Did you know? There’s some kind of painless neurotoxin release in our ID band -’

‘There is not!’ I pulled away in horror. Dad turned around.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

‘Sloan says -’

‘It’s all right,’ Sloan interrupted. ‘I was teasing. Sorry.

It’s neither the time nor the place.’

For a moment, Dad studied him. Then he studied me. Then he grunted, and returned to his conversation with the Tekkie.

‘We’re not supposed to know about M34a,’ Sloan whispered, putting his mouth to my ear. ‘It’s part of the security protocol. Very hush-hush.’

‘Then why do
you
know?’ I demanded softly.

‘Because my mother spilled the beans.’ Sloan smiled again. ‘She has such a big mouth.’

I was shocked. It seemed to me that Sadira had been pretty irresponsible. My mother was the
head
of MedLab, and she’d never told
me
about Procedure M34a. I was about to say something when we arrived at Navigation, and I had to get out. Dad got out too. But not before addressing a few words to Sloan.

‘If there’s a red alert,’ said Dad, ‘you come straight back here.’

Sloan nodded carelessly.

‘I mean it,’ Dad insisted. ‘Your mother will be here, and so will Firminus.’

‘He told me.’

‘It was all worked out a long time ago, Sloan,’ my father added. He sounded very serious all of a sudden. His voice rumbled in his chest, deep and strong. ‘The day you were born, in fact. There’s only one place for you during a red alert. Is that clear?’

Another nod from Sloan – not so careless, this time. The hatch shut. Then the OTV slid away, leaving Dad and me standing on the platform.

We arrived on the Bridge just after zero-seven-forty.

CHAPTER
FOUR

When I was very small, I didn’t understand why the Bridge was called ‘the Bridge’. I knew about bridges – there was one at the Depot, connecting two gangways – and the large, white compartment on A deck didn’t resemble one at all. Only later, after studying Earth history for a while, did I begin to understand. A bridge was originally a narrow, elevated platform from which the captain of a sailing ship issued orders and surveyed the horizon. Even when this platform became an enclosed room, and the captain’s orders were transmitted rather than shouted, the word ‘bridge’ still remained.

On board Plexus, we didn’t have a captain. Nor did we have any windows to look out of. (With artificial gravity in place, windows weren’t really an option.) But we did have a Navigation department, and that department was centred around the Bridge.

The Bridge was a highly specialised location. It contained an outstanding Interface Array, which included special functions available nowhere else. The Mimexis Chamber was also attached to the Bridge. Like the Depot and the pump stations, the Bridge was one of the few places on Plexus rated ‘First Level’. This meant that the door wouldn’t open automatically for every person who approached it. Your DNA signature had to be cleared by a scanner if you wanted to get in. Either that, or you had to be
with
someone who had First Level clearance.

My father had First Level clearance. That’s why I was admitted. Upon entering the Bridge compartment that fateful morning, I saw that it was bursting at the seams. Every chair was filled. There must have been two dozen people there, including myself and Dad. Arkwright was there, poring over a screen. So were Merrit and Firminus.

Merrit lifted her hand to me.

‘Hello, Cheney!’ said Haido, who was one of the Navvies, like Dad. A round-faced woman with crisp grey curls worn close to her head, Haido doted on all the Shifters. Even at such a tense time, she seemed happy to see me. ‘Have you come to help your dad today?’ she asked, flashing her dimples.

‘Uh – no.’ I gestured at Arkwright. ‘I’m with him.’

‘Oh. Yes, of course. You’re in Planning and Projection now, aren’t you? Lucky old boiler, she doesn’t deserve it.’

Haido was referring to the Central Processing Unit. She was the only person I ever knew who talked about the CPU as if it were a person – a little old lady, to be precise.

‘Granny’s got indigestion this morning,’ Haido would say.

Or, ‘That mean old bag ate up my selection criteria!’

She was nice, though, was Haido. Very nice and very smart.

‘Off you go, then,’ she said. ‘Better not keep Arky waiting. We’re a bit busy today.’

As if I didn’t know! Firminus, in particular, was a wreck, all hollow cheeks and red-rimmed eyes. He was hovering over one of the other Navvies, his gaze fixed on a cascade of twinkling numbers. Beside him, Arkwright was playing CAIP like a musical instrument, his long, bony fingers moving smoothly from pad to pad, node to node. I had to tap him twice on the shoulder before he noticed me.