Martyn Vaughan - The Cave of Shadows

‘We all know the way now?’ Jon asked, looking at each of the survivors in turn.

They all nodded.

‘Then we’ll be on our way. But first, an experiment.’

To the others’ surprise, Jon crossed to a nearby information screen and activated it.

The unblinking man appeared.

‘We want to surrender,’ Jon said in a broken voice, ‘we’ve suffered enough. We want assurances we’ll be well treated.’

As he had more than half expected the unblinking man’s visage disappeared and was replaced by another face.

The flint-like features of an implacable, dark, heavy-boned man.

Korok.

‘I am disappointed. Very disappointed,’ came that granite voice, ‘Disappointed in your weakness and also that you know so little of the Protectorate. It is not those who surrender who obtain our mercy but those who fight to the glorious end.

‘Think on that before you surrender.’

The screen went dead.

‘Why did you do that?’ gasped Jarm, ‘You’ve just made him angry!’

Jon turned. ‘I could have taunted him. Threatened him. But this way he thinks we’re beaten. It might give us an edge, who knows?’

‘We’ll certainly need that,’ Jorl muttered, ‘as all we’ve got is our fists.’

‘No,’ Jon said, ‘we’ve got more than that. We’ve got our brains as well. Come on.’

And with that, they left the Education Room.

The corridors stretched before them, cold, grey, metallic, slowly curving. Each section looked exactly the same as the previous one. To minds on the edge of abject despair it appeared that their search would never end, could never end.

Jon became aware that his Shana was trying to speak to him. He had put Shana36 ahead of him and Shana12 beside him; so worried was he that he might fail to distinguish them. He turned. ‘Yes?’

Shana placed her hand on his shoulder, trying to slow his furious march but he did not allow that. They must get to the Control Room!

Shana spoke, breathing heavily as she matched his furious pace. ‘The High Official Generation Room – I know what it is.’

‘And’

‘I didn’t have the knowledge before the Educator but now I do. Jon, it’s exactly the literal meaning of the words. Korok, Maroun and the rest of them – they’re going to come out of it!’

‘Nonsense. All we saw were tanks with organic chemicals in them. If they were going to travel on this ship in physical form why wouldn’t they be in the pods?’

‘Jon, we look human but we’re not. We have the bodily shape but our proteins are not natural ones. We were designed to survive a journey of this length – and even then some of us didn’t survive, Shev told me. Ordinary humans are not robust enough. They had to find another way.’

‘So why not travel as a simpler structure – a collection of zygotes.’

‘Anything of great biological complexity would be at risk of degradation in the high energy environment between the stars. But those tanks contain everything that a human body is constructed from, but in the simplest, most radiation-proof form, just the basic molecules, protected by metres of lead shielding. A sophisticated nanotechnology could construct a human body from those compounds once the environment was safe.’

‘A body. But only a body. It would know nothing.’

Jon was not looking at Shana otherwise he would have seen her exasperated expression.

‘Jon – think! If the consciousness, the memories, the identity can be extracted from a biological brain, digitised and uploaded then the process can be reversed – a digitised mind can be downloaded into a biological brain!’

Jon stopped his mad dash as the full import of her words struck him. The others, suddenly aware that their progress had halted, turned around in puzzlement.

She looked him full in the eye, blue-grey almost on the same level as brown.

‘Jon, it would be like they had taken one step on Earth and the next on an alien world. And if they could do it once, they could do it again and again. Jon, this gang of horrors could live as long as the universe!’

Jon stood stock still, staring at Shana; the others gathered around him, anxious to discover what new problem was now facing them. He detailed Shana’s revelation to them.

‘We must destroy them,’ he said slowly, ‘even at the cost of our own lives.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Jorl said, ‘I’m here to save my life – not throw it away on a theory.’

Jon stared at the cold grey floor, held motionless by indecision. Then he straightened.

‘The systems must be programmed to begin regeneration when the ship arrives – at wherever it’s going. So we have until then. If we can’t control the ship, then they will never come out of those tanks. If we can, then we turn our attention to them after we have made the ship safe.’

The others, even Jorl, nodded in acceptance.

And their journey was resumed.

They noticed that the corridor was becoming wider and the quality of the light was changing, becoming harder, bluer. Arachnoids scurried away from them in all directions.

And then they were there. A great door sensed their approach and slid obediently open.

They came out on a balcony below which stretched banks of humming, buzzing machinery; softly glowing viewer screens; shining, gleaming surfaces everywhere. Here was the home of the arachnoids, for during five hundred long years they had kept the brain of the Fatal Scimitar working as well as their programming and dexterity had allowed. The system had been designed as perfectly as human ingenuity could have made it; no possible problem had been unforeseen, uncatered for.

But it had not been enough: the insidious fingers of entropy and a random high-energy event had brought all that brilliant planning to catastrophic failure.

They descended to the main level; slowly, moving like stunned barbarians entering a splendid cathedral of the High Renaissance. They rapidly pooled the knowledge that the Educator had given to them and then Jon approached the largest of the viewer screens, a screen which was wider than the entire astonished group and twice Jon’s height.

Instantly it sprang into life. And the image it showed was strangely familiar.

It was of a perfectly black background, but not totally black for it was dusted with little lights; little hard, unblinking lights, some noticeably brighter than the others.

Shana grasped his arm. ‘Jon – it’s my dream. And you saw it too – remember!’

‘Yes,’ he said, wonderingly, ‘when I tried the Hill version of the Educator. I saw this. But now I know what it is.’

‘And it is…’ Jarm enquired.

For an answer, Shev strode up to the display and, acting on a hunch, held her palm against the screen and flicked it to the right.

The lights in the viewer display suddenly shifted to the right; some disappeared, some came into view.

But something else came into view – a small, painfully bright disc of harsh radiance.

Jon studied the words and numbers that had suddenly flashed across the bottom of the screen.

‘G8 main sequence,’ he said, apparently to himself. He turned to the others: ‘Our destination!’

The others burst into a clamour of excitement, slapping each other on the back and with broad smiles almost splitting their faces. His Shana made as if to kiss him.

But he ignored her and bent down to get a closer look at the numbers and mathematical symbols which were being displayed in a repeating sequence at the bottom of the huge screen. His strong fingers flew back and forth over its lambent surface and he spent quite some time there, staring with slowly narrowing eyes at what they revealed.

Finally he stood upright and turned to look at the group. Jorl took in his expression and snapped: ‘Alright – let’s have it!’