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If you like this book, please consider buying it:
The Island of Hope by Andrei Livadny
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"I think therefore I am?"
It wasn't me who said it. I only put a question mark at the end of the phrase, tweaking its meaning.
I've got an ocean of time to be spent in thinking. Well, not an ocean. A lake, maybe. The latter isn't as imposing as the former, but sufficient enough to drown, choking on my belated comprehension of things.
That's funny. I'm sitting in a cramped sealed room on an empty ammo box writing with an ordinary pencil on ordinary sheets of paper. I've no future – having received a fatal dose of radiation, I'm not likely to last more than five or six years. But even that period seems to be too long for me if one takes into account what is lurking in the stillness of the vacuum beyond the fragile walls of my shelter. I find it funny but also sad because I've never been so calm and so bent on living as I am now. And I've never perceived with such a dreadful lucidity the essence of human nature.
I've no idea who I'm writing this for. For myself maybe, or even for you: the man who is holding my diary. There can be only two reasons for your coming here: either you're an explorer arriving here thousands of years after my death or you're intrepid. But if neither, run away. You must know that you've come to hell. A man-made version of it. The very quintessence of death, mirroring some dark nooks of the human mind.
However, if you already set foot in here, you can judge for yourself.
1.
Ragged layers of choking blue gray smoke spread over the corridors and decks of the space cruiser Russia. The flagship of the Free Colonies' fleet was dying hard, as befitted a spacecraft of her class. The turbo pumps howled trying to replace the close air but their power wasn't sufficient enough to support life on board. Red alarm lights flashed everywhere. Many compartments were blocked, consumed by the vacuum that had gushed through the punctured ship.
Gravity was unstable, dependent on the damaged generators, and that was why the commandos' advancement along the main corridor of the cruiser resembled the migration of a flock of beak toads: now the men flew up, dropped, flew up again, were flung against the walls, surrounded by smoke, shouts and shooting sprees of pulse guns in the moments when enemy assault teams loomed out of side passages. In fact, were they the enemy — or could they be some friendly teams seeking safety?
All was mixed up in that hell.
"Sergei, there's a turn a few hundred feet further on!" Andrei shouted into his helmet communicator while turning round so as to send a burst in a side passage.
"What's there?"
One could hardly hear the reply drowned by the spiteful crackling of static discharges dancing on the electromagnetic compensator section of his APG. The pulse gun bullets dashed past, howling, to the narrow transport tunnel. A second later, its entrance exploded in flames like a mortar muzzle, littering the floor of the corridor with smoking debris.
"Ordnance complex five. External blisters. If they're still undamaged."
"Let's hope so."
They advanced by leaps, back to back, firing at side passages with their APGs, steadily approaching their goal. It was still possible to disengage the cruiser from the battle since one was able to control the main systems of the ship from the conning tower, but to pass to the hypersphere, it was necessary to stop the frantic dance of the small space fighters spinning like wasps round the gigantic cruiser.
One could observe almost the same picture on board the other spaceships of the fleet. The battle had been lost, and now the destiny of dozens of planets depended on whether the rest of the armada would be able to disengage from the seething massacre. Neither the others nor our three commandos, forcing their way to the ordnance complex, doubted that immediately after their fleet had been destroyed the space cruisers of the Earth Alliance would dash to bombard the defenseless planets.
Kurt Schnell who was running behind Andrei stumbled suddenly. Andrei himself was hardly able to keep his feet by grasping a handrail at the last moment. The cruiser shuddered with a new impact.
Not again, dammit! Andrei thought desperately. Every such impact reduced their chances of escaping via hyperdrive. He was going to dash on, with a view to reaching the massive hatches of turrets looming at the turn of the tunnel, but at that moment the opposite wall turned deep cherry-colored and began to swell like an enormous bubble.
Oh, mein Gott!"
Kurt was right. It seemed like they had nothing else to do but to pray. The bubble burst, splashing about hardening drops of metal. Andrei dropped to the floor and caught hold of a bracket so as to avoid being pulled out into space.
The whirlwind didn't last more than twenty seconds — he constantly observed the spacesuit sensors until he was sure that a vacuum filled the Russia's main corridor. The airflow having run out, Andrei sprang to his feet. Immediately the enormous hole was filled by the blunt nose of an automatic landing raider. That was the worst to happen. He realized that within seconds assault robots of the Earth Alliance would burst into the corridor.
He looked around. Sergei had already arranged a telescopic tripod; Kurt's hands were shaking as he attached the barrel of a heavy emitter to it.
"Run away!" he ordered.
Andrei hesitated.
"Do it! Destroy the fighters!" Sergei shouted while pulling the trigger.
Hell's flame danced through the battered corridor and hit the raider's armor with a dazzling sheaf of fire. The first robot which appeared in the manhole was shattered.
Without further hesitation, Andrei ran forward.
If only the hatch would open, he prayed mentally when hitting the button with his palm. The armored oval weighing many tons started sluggishly and began moving aside. Such vitality of combat systems filled him with a kind of idiotic pride of the men who had constructed the cruiser. She was able to fight even when battered and disintegrated!
There was light inside the turret. Andrei sank into an operator's chair, scanning information on two main monitors. The accumulators of the six-barreled laser gun were full. Up till now, it hadn't fired at all. Having made a few switches, he ran the program of automatic defensive fire, leaving one barrel under manual control. Then he connected a thick interface cable to his pressurized helmet and glanced at the survey screen. The hatch behind him clanged shut. The compartment began to fill with air from the turret reservoir.
Now he was himself part of the gun. Two sensor laying levers emerged out of the floor. In a well-trained movement, Andrei put his relaxed fingers on the triggers.
The virtual reality.
All of a sudden, Andrei felt like twitching the interface cable so as not to see the thousands of separate points: those were the rest of seven hundred space cruisers which had constituted the Free Colonies Fleet.
The 3-D panorama of the lost battle spread before him. All data had already been processed by the laser gun's computer, and he was watching the world through its video cameras' lenses. The sight depressed his mind, but he again made himself take the levers remembering all the spite, despair and will to live felt so keenly over the last hours.
The turret activated – the computer gyroscopes were setting orientation. The drive motors began to vibrate loudly; the electron-mechanical world revived. The gun cellar escalator started transporting a string of vacuum shells to two support batteries. The turret machine-guns opened the stops of their video cameras towards the enemy fighters.
Andrei shuddered when seeing the Ready signals on the monitors of the six Pride-12 laser modules. He was excited by that power; he got stronger when sitting in the operator's chair. He also felt keen bitterness. All mixed in his soul during the few seconds of preparation.
A giant support began to move the turret smoothly into outer space. The side monitors revived one by one as new shooting sectors became available. At the same time, red signals blossomed on the multi-stage consoles. Columns of figures ran down the displays, momentarily interrupted by the brief and meaningful term TARGET.
Salvo!
His helmet's visor pulsated; Andrei settled back involuntarily. He saw fragments of armor flying away in orange clusters of explosions — floating towards him, spinning. The points faded one after the other, but new ones replaced them. In the absence of atmospheric exhausts, he realized that he was combating against automatic space-fighters with a vacuum reigning on board.
Strange phenomena are occasionally generated by a warrior's mind. After some time Andrei couldn't say with confidence whether the ordnance complex was a sequel of his will or, vice versa, his brain filled with adrenaline was nothing other than an appendage to the senseless electron-mechanical monster spouting flames.
The energy accumulators' sensors indicated half the combat capacity. He glanced at the shell counter. The gun cellars were almost empty. Incredulous, Andrei looked at the chronometer. He had been fighting almost thirty minutes
There remained only two attacking points in the visor sight.
He pressed a key on the auxiliary control panel, and liquid nitrogen started circulating through the system cooling the overheated gun reflectors.
Raising his helmet visor, Andrei shut his eyes and pressed his temples. He was shivering. Someone had spilled a few drops of molten lead inside his head. Such was the charge for the super-effective sensor-neuron connection to the turret computer. At moments when he felt that kind of horrible emptiness he hated machines, but also the men who had constructed them. However, he knew that later, once the pain was gone, he would be pulled back into the rational and cold world of the virtual reality.
That would be later. Now there was a terrible fatigue and heavy stupor within him.
Andrei made himself open his eyes and call the Russia's chart room.
Much to his astonishment, the intercom system was functioning. The face of the second captain of the watch appeared on the communication monitor.
"Ordnance complex five, Lieutenant Andrei Vorontsov," he reported tiredly, "the space sector around the jets is free from enemy assault ships."
The captain kept silent as if he saw a madman or a ghost.
Dammit, what's going on in the chart cabin if a commander is looking in such a way at an officer having carried out an order? What are they doing there? Thoughts were gathering within his mind, mixed with pain and combat post effects; at the same time, resentment was arising within him too. "Respond, captain!" he demanded furiously.
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The officer remained silent. Andrei felt himself losing self-control. The vision of the corpses of Kurt and Sergei was swimming before his eyes. They gave their lives to allow him to cut his way, and this...
The face of the captain of the watch was distorted with anger and fear. An animal fear of something inevitable.
"Too late," he forced himself to say. His voice sent shivers down Andrei's spine. "Prepare to die, son."
The communication monitor became dim. What the hell? He didn’t know what to think.
Then came the light.
It's impossible to describe it any other way. Only one word fit: light. It poured down from everywhere all at once, so that one had the impression the spaceships cast sharp black shadows on one another. As though a gigantic flashlight illumined for a moment the combat in darkness.
Instinctively, he tried to reach the control panel. The screen blazed up in white fire; there was a crackling, the recognizable smell of burning insulation. Quite unexpectedly, all around him collapsed with a great crash into an abyss to the accompaniment of sounds produced by torn metal.
The sudden overload momentarily knocked him out but the salutary swoon lasted only a few seconds. The automatics of a combat spacesuit wouldn't allow a soldier to remain unconscious in the thick of a battle, so a reanimation injection quickly brought him round. The ensued weightlessness nauseated him. But much worse was an unerring sensation that something terrible and irreparable had happened.
Andrei realized that the turret was torn away from the cruiser.
In situations like these the main thing is not to lose one's head. One by one, he turned on the telescopic survey, signal beacon and emergency transmitter.
Silence.
Desperate, he stubbornly tried to restore the intercommunication until he finally saw the futility of his attempts.
His compartment was drifting through space, rotating irregularly. The radar screen was dim and empty. No rustle in the communicator, no commands, no call for help.
He could only read on the instrument board the red alarm lines:
"Thermonuclear explosion in space. General power: 3,000,000,000 kilotons. Distance: 4,000,000 miles. Time: minus seventy seconds."
"Secondary radiation"
"Tertiary radiation"
"Skin overheated by 800 degrees"
"Protective field functions irrestorable"
"Laser gun, serial number 5, destroyed"
"Emergency life-support system activated"
"Your compartment transformed into autonomous module"
"Recommendation: maintain maximum level of personal protection during fifty hours"
"THREAT TO LIFE!"
The last line was blinking importunately.
* * *
... Each of us, before dying, should have gone mad. But we — I mean, a whole generation — millions of young guys on forty-seven colonized planets — grew up without experiencing pain or fear. Later we were called 'saplings of war'."
One could affirm that everyone who has been on the Path of Galactic War even for a short period is practically unable to believe that the world had been quite different. But I remember. I do remember mom's light-hearted laughter, pop's caressing eye. The warm water of the purple ocean of my native planet...
I remember the feeling of boundless calm and happiness experienced only by the little ones. The world was lying at my feet, so huge, astonishing and warm. It was mine.
And so it was everywhere. The planets colonized during the Great Expansion period had increased in strength, passing in four centuries from wildness and enmity to culture and civilization. Our generation was the first that hadn't had to struggle for survival. But all our dreams were trampled underfoot, mixed with ashes, frozen in a vacuum.
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.
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Books by Andrei Livadny:
The Island of Hope
Phantom Server series (complited)
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