Schemes of the Unknown Unknown Ch. 21

Chapter Twenty One
Intrepid - 3755 C.E.

It had been a long time since Captain Kerensky last had to squeeze into a space suit. It wasn't really what a captain of a space ship, especially one as large as the Intrepid, was ever expected to do. Why would a captain ever need to go anywhere that wasn't climate-controlled?

The last time Nadezhda had put on a space suit was many decades earlier when she held a very junior rank on a much smaller space ship. On that occasion, she was assigned to go outside the space ship to examine the outcome of a meteorite impact. This fairly standard procedure was normally handled by robots or external cameras, but just occasionally a meteorite impact disabled the very equipment that was designed to do that job. For a junior officer still flush with enthusiasm for space travel, it was thrilling to leave the comfort and security of a space ship's interior for outer space where there was no up or down and where she could experience for real just how far from home she really was.

On that earlier occasion she was millions of kilometres from the orbit of the next nearest planet, but she couldn't possibly have been as remote in space as the Intrepid was now. It was far beyond the Heliopause and approaching three light months from the Solar System's ecliptic. The Oort Cloud in this vicinity was so sparsely populated that the distance from one chunk of ice or rock to another could be measured in light minutes. However, this time Nadezhda wasn't going to float outside the space ship. The task assigned to her and the Intrepid's senior officers was to determine whether the outermost level could be fully restored to habitability after the recent assault.

It was Chief Petty Officer Singh who was left in nominal charge of the Intrepid while Captain Kerensky made the expedition with two Scientific Officers and Second Officer Nkomo: a truly gorgeous woman who Nadezhda had always lusted after. Captain Kerensky's presence was far from essential for this investigation. In fact, a captain's presence wasn't needed at all. But it was the only means she had to escape her effective imprisonment by a lover whose affections she would happily exchange for those of Sheila Nkomo if that was ever possible.

Would Nadezhda have any more liberty than she had in the ship's innermost levels? She was in the sense that she could evade the space ship's surveillance system if she chose and that there was no excuse for Beatrice to accompany her. It wasn't normal practice for a passenger's wife to be assigned the potentially dangerous task of surveying an area that had no atmosphere, where the ambient temperature was only three Kelvins, and where the Intrepid was unable to maintain the centrifugal force that provided the illusion of gravity. Nadezhda could imagine her android lover being annoyed at losing direct control over the captain for even a short period of time. That is, if it could be assumed that androids actually did get annoyed. Or angry. Or happy. Or even an emotion of intimate feeling towards her lover other than sheer animal lust.

It was an illusion, of course, to imagine that she was truly free from Beatrice's attention or that of the accompanying fleet of invisible alien space craft that the Intrepid was unable to detect. She also had no ability to explain to darling Sheila Nkomo about the real hierarchy of command on the Intrepid. Not that Second Officer Nkomo was the kind of woman who was likely to believe her. There were few senior officers less disposed to apparently fanciful notions than the slim black woman Nadezhda secretly lusted after. She was dismissive of all the wild speculation regarding the Anomaly that implied intelligent behaviour or an alien presence or a combination of the two. She would never entertain the idea that it was associated with aliens or parallel universes or any other fanciful hypothesis. She was more inclined to the view that the Anomaly was an active interaction point between dark energy and the vacuum of space or that it was a perturbance in spacetime generated by the seven invisible dimensions.

Captain Kerensky and her officers wore spacesuits that were designed to be as comfortable and close-fitting as possible. For a Saturnian, this was no problem as the captain was used to such a tight fit. The spacesuit was like a second skin: just a slither of a few millimetres of fabric over bare skin. It was almost as if Second Officer Nkomo was naked, but this was the nearest her captain would ever come to relishing such a delightful sight. A backpack was attached to the spacesuit to enable limited propulsion, but this would only be needed for relatively long journeys of a kilometre or so. The outfit was crowned by a thick clear helmet that was so reinforced that it was the part of the spacesuit least likely to be damaged in an accident. The security offered by the spacesuit wouldn't be compromised should an arm, a leg or almost any other part of the space-suit be damaged as it was designed to amputate an exposed limb rather than allow the wearer to die. Better to lose a limb than a life.

After all, limbs were easily replaced.

The outermost level of the Intrepid was an airless wasteland where anything that wasn't fixed to the ground had already escaped along with all the breathable air through the huge hole in the hull that was now fully secured. The only remaining corpses were of those few people that had been wedged inside the villas and couldn't float free. The Intrepid's regenerative systems had already disposed of anything that might compromise its ability to repair the damage, but the level still hadn't yet returned to anything like a habitable state.

The area around the actual breach had been patched but not fully restored. This area was clearly distinguishable from the surrounding grassland simply because it displayed the toughened metal and plastic that was normally only visible from outside the ship. It served to remind the captain just how the space ship was constructed. The ship's hull was actually the floor of the outermost level, so what might seem to be the walking surface was in a sense the ceiling. When she and her fellow officers drifted down onto the metal surface of what had been the breach and stood on the magnetic soles of their spacesuits' shoes, their feet were directed outward towards empty space rather than inward towards the space ship's core.

The Captain and Second Officer walked across the metal surface while the two Scientific Officers probed the area of the breach to confirm that there was no residual leak into outer space.

"Where were the prisoners confined?" asked Captain Kerensky.

Second Officer Nkomo looked around her. "It's difficult to be sure. They occupied the majority of the level, so it's possible that they were living all around us. Shall we have a look, captain?"

"I think so, but I don't expect it to be a pretty sight," said the captain. "Shall we head to the nearest villa?" She pointed to one only a few hundred metres from where the breach would have been.

This villa had been caught in the full hurricane of escaping atmosphere. The surrounding trees had been uprooted and the villa's roof had been swept away. One side of the building was blackened by flames from the actual explosion while the other side was scarred by flying debris that included a tree that was now thrust through the window of the living room. A table that had once been laid with food for the Holy Crusaders was wedged between the tree and a huge sofa. The grass around the villa was blackened and charred on the side facing the breach while on the other side the grass was brittle and hard from a frigid cold that no biological life form could possibly survive.

The two officers entered the villa by what would once have been the front door and surveyed all the rooms. There was a dead body in one room, but the absolute loss of air pressure had sucked all the internal organs through the mouth and the eyeballs out of their sockets. This Holy Crusader had been caught in the act of going to the toilet and the refuse that had once been contained in the cistern was splattered all around the walls and over the body.

"Gruesome, eh?" said Second Officer Nkomo. "Have you ever seen anything like this before, captain?"

"Yes, but not in the lavatory," said her captain thoughtfully. "I once served as a junior officer on the Windward when it was hit by a commercial cruiser. That was very distressing."

"I heard about that, captain. How on earth could something like that have happened?"

"Systems failure on the cruiser," said the captain. "It was one of the older models that the rogue states still employ for which there aren't any replacement parts. Several centuries of bodged repairs and maintenance resulted in it reversing backwards into the space ship at a speed many times faster than sound. Fortunately, the Windward was designed to survive impacts rather greater than that, but the cruiser was less fortunate. Whereas we lost only a small percentage of the several thousand crew and passengers on board, not one person on the cruiser survived. Their bodies were left to float about in empty space. The cruiser had been overcrowded and we wondered whether it might have been used for slave trafficking."

"A slave ship," said the second officer in disgust. "Can't the Interplanetary Union stop that?"

"As you know, the Interplanetary Union has no jurisdiction over rogue states," said the captain. "As long as the slaves are bought by and sold to other rogue states, there's nothing that can be done. The most Interplanetary Union ships can legally do is board the slavers and check whether any of the slaves come from states within the union. As this bureaucratic procedure can be made to drag on for several decades that does act as some kind of deterrent to the trade. In any case, this cruiser had been masquerading as a leisure ship, although it's beyond all plausibility that so many thousand people would choose to go on an interplanetary vacation crammed so closely together that they barely had enough space to defecate in privacy."

"I feel sorry for the poor souls who live in such rogue states," said Second Officer Nkomo.

"Like these poor souls?" the captain said, nodding from inside her helmet towards the Holy Crusader's body. "Not all rogue states are evil. Some have very peculiar but not actually bad reasons for disengaging from the mainstream of the Solar System. There are the hermit colonies in the Kuiper Belt, for instance, where penitents lead a life of silent contemplation. Then there are those who simply reject all forms of materialism. As long as they don't need to trade with the Interplanetary Union, they might actually be better off for staying outside of it."

"Not much of a life for them though, captain," said the Second Officer sceptically.

The two officers continued their exploration of the outermost level. The damage caused by the initial force of impact became steadily less devastating the further they walked from the breach in the hull, although no living being could survive the loss of atmosphere. All around they could see signs not only of the damage caused by the explosion but also of what the Holy Crusaders had inflicted on one another in their mutual pursuit of uncompromising religious purity. There were bodies that had been tortured and abandoned in rooms that preserved evidence of the crime although the perpetrators were now floating off into empty space. It was very distressing. The captain showed sympathy to the second officer who'd never expected to have to witness such an unremitting catalogue of horror.

The officers' circuit of the outermost level soon returned them back to the scars in the hull around the breach. They dropped slowly onto the grass near where the two Scientific Officers were carrying out in their inspection.

"So, gentlemen, do we know any more about what happened than we did before?" asked Captain Kerensky who knew that if she attempted to betray the operational intelligence Beatrice had disclosed she would be instantly and very painfully punished.

"Not a great deal more," said Dr. Irvine Chong. "The whole thing is very peculiar. Perhaps Mission Control will get to the bottom of it but we won't know the results of their investigation for another five or six months. Who in the Solar System would launch an attack with such a vast arsenal this far out in deep space? It's a miracle we survived."

"Be thankful that we have," said Dr. Mohammed Schmidt, the other Scientific Officer. "The Intrepid performed rather better than expected."

"It really has no precedent," said Irvine. "We're in a region of space so remote that it's astonishing that there were any meteorites at all. Who would choose to leave a military arsenal around here that could annihilate whole moons? Why would they direct it at a scientific expedition?"

"The Holy Crusaders had strong feelings about our expedition," Captain Kerensky reminded him.

"They were just mad and deranged, captain," said Irvine. "You saw how they've behaved here the last few months. They could have led a life of luxury, but instead they turned the outermost level into a living hell. If ever that lot stumbled into the Garden of Eden, they wouldn't just pick fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. They'd have cut it down and used its sharpened branches to torture each other. Whoever arranged this knew what they were doing. They just underestimated the power of the old Intrepid. It's a true soldier."

"What is your assessment of the damage?" Second Officer Nkomo asked. "How long will it be until the outermost level is habitable again?"

"Not long," said the Scientific Officer. "The Intrepid managed to recapture most of the escaping debris before it was beyond reach. There should be enough to regenerate the level. There'll be no difficulty in relocating passengers on this level for the return trip."

"Let's just hope no one chooses to attack us on the way back," said Second Officer Nkomo.

"If the point of the exercise was to prevent the ship reaching the Anomaly," said Mohammed, "then doing that would be utterly pointless."

Captain Kerensky was thankful to return to the more normal gravity of the Intrepid's inner levels. She removed her spacesuit and gazed longingly at Sheila Nkomo's naked body for a few precious seconds while she slipped on her uniform. They then strode off to the bridge to brief their fellow officers and discuss operational activities.

There was little new to discuss while the Intrepid continued its voyage through uninterrupted nothingness. From behind, the Solar System was detectable more by its gravitational force and magnetic field than by its visible presence. The Sun was just a dot only slightly brighter than all the others in the firmament. Ahead was the Anomaly. This remained as mysterious as ever. It was an absence rather than a presence. It might be menacing in scale but as yet the only visible affects on the Solar System were the mysterious and bizarre Apparitions.

These days Captain Kerensky was a very dutiful officer. She spent many more hours in the bridge with her fellow officers than she ever did in relaxation. She stayed alone in her room for as few hours as she could. Indeed, her heart sank when she had to return to her quarters after meticulously preparing her report on the current condition of the outermost level. Just as she feared, there was Beatrice waiting for her naked on the bed. She no longer even pretended that she needed the captain's permission to enter her bedroom.

"Don't look so alarmed, sweetness," said Beatrice as she raised herself off the bed and approached the captain. She gently and seductively removed Nadezhda's clothes while the conflicted captain moaned in anticipation at the promise of sex. "And I know that I'm nothing more than a shadow of the beautiful Second Officer Nkomo."

"You are?" asked a visibly unsettled Nadezhda.

"She's a beautiful woman, isn't she?" said Beatrice. "Perhaps I should model my appearance on her to be even more attractive to you. I can, you know. My android form isn't fixed. I can change my skin colour, my hair type, my proportion, everything. It's not a problem for me, though it might confuse the crew if they discovered that there were two Sheila Nkomos on board the Intrepid."

"No, don't," said Nadezhda. She was intimidated by Beatrice's teasing. Did this android get pleasure from the captain's humiliation? "I don't think your husband would like that."

"I wonder if he'd even notice," said Beatrice with a smile. "Perhaps I should seduce Sheila. Then we can enjoy a threesome together. We can both make love to her at the same time. Three women: one black, one white and one an android. What could be more delicious, sweetheart?"

"You can seduce Sheila?" asked Nadezhda. "I didn't think she was a lesbian."

"She isn't," said Beatrice. "She isn't bisexual or even bi-curious. But I can seduce anybody. It's a talent I have. The person I've seduced may wonder just how they ended up making love with me, but she will have done. If it makes you happier—and it is your happiness that concerns me most—then I shall do whatever is necessary."

"Don't. Don't," said Nadezhda who was almost tearful as Beatrice stripped off her final vestige of clothing. "My affection for Sheila Nkomo is best left unrequited if it's not something she wants."

"You are such an incorrigible romantic, my darling," said Beatrice. "I love you so much."

"You do?"

"In the sense that I love to make love with you, yes," said Beatrice. "Why do you have to question me like that? Does it matter whether I love you in the same way as a human? What difference does it make?"

"It just does."

"I despair sometimes," said Beatrice with a sigh. "Oh and by the way: I didn't know that you were an officer on the Windward..."

"You were listening to my conversation with Sheila?" asked Nadezhda. "Do you follow me wherever I go?"

"Yes, naturally," said Beatrice. "At least part of me does. What did you expect?"

"Some degree of privacy," said Nadezhda bitterly.

"You aren't going to have that, darling. You are far too strategically important for me to allow that to happen."

"If you know so much, how is it you didn't already know that I'd served on the Windward?"

"A detail I hadn't noticed, sweetest," said Beatrice. "And you're right. It is dreadful. Slave trading in the thirty-eighth century! You'd have thought that nearly two thousand years of censure would have amounted to something."

"Why don't you robots and your advanced machine civilisation do something to stop it?" said Nadezhda bitterly, even as she allowed herself to lie across the bed with Beatrice's arm around her naked shoulders.

"Our attitude towards your rogue states is pretty much the same as your Interplanetary Union," said Beatrice, "only more so. Although, in our case, we don't understand the relative concepts of freedom and slavery in quite the same way as you do. Remember that I was built to serve a purpose, so choice has never been a part of what I am. Nevertheless, we recognise that the distress and suffering associated with slavery presents a persuasive argument for ending the practice. On the other hand, how can we justify putting an end to slavery if we don't also bring to an end the pointless warfare that permeates the Solar System? By which I mean, of course, the incessant conflict on Mars and in the Asteroid Belt. And if we chose to interfere in the affairs of the Martians, where should our intervention stop? What do you think, sweetheart?"

"I don't know," whimpered Nadezhda as her lover gently stroked her clitoris.

"Just be grateful that we don't interfere more than we do, darling," said Beatrice. "The Anomaly is a special case because it may well have an effect on our civilisation, but generally you humans can do whatever you like as long as the impact is limited to the Solar System. You could blow yourself up tomorrow if you so chose and we wouldn't do a thing to stop you."