Brian Ball - Singularity Station

Buchanan knew he would return to the Altair Star in that moment. It was a confirmation of Maran’s prescience. Maran had ordered the impossible. And the machines accepted the order.

“Very good, sir,” came the metal-edged voice.

They watched as the marvelous, haunting time-tunnel began to take shape. Bathed in a coruscating white-gold sea of strange, eddying forces, the ships appeared on the screen. Liz Deffant sighed. She forgot the burly figure at the console. All the experiences of the bitter hours drifted from her memory. She saw what Al Buchanan had seen, and she entered into his knowledge, shared his wonder and grief, understood his compulsive obsession as never before. The eerie resting-place of so many ships was dreamily peaceful, utterly beyond anything she had thought to see. Al was right. It was alien but beckoning, terrifying but compelling. The mystery lay before her in its bizarre majesty. A freak scanning showed the whole length of the Altair Star. Washed by ripples of white-gold translucence, it gleamed like some magnificent, somber tomb.

“We shouldn’t disturb it,” breathed Liz. “No, Al!”

“Please, Liz,” said Buchanan.

Maran brought the scanners close to the ship. He knew ships. “The bridge has gone. But that doesn’t mean she’s a wreck.”

“It was blasted clear. Against my orders.”

“Yes,” said Maran. “It was under robotic direction?”

“Infragalactic policy. I tried to take over.”

Buchanan thought of the frenzied, despairing, harsh orders, the gouging shocks as his engineers ripped out decision-making systems.

“And?”

“I took too long to make the decision to take over.”

Maran frowned. “Power potential when you blasted clear?”

“About eight percent.”

“Low.”

“The robots let the screens down.”

“Yes,” said Maran.

“Leave the ship alone, Al! Please!” Liz said, turning to Maran.

“I’m sorry, Miss Deffant,” Maran said.

Buchanan waited, bile in his mouth. The years of searing anguish, interrupted by Liz Deffant’s tenderness, had led to this moment.

“Well?” he asked.

“We go, Buchanan.”

“All of us?”

“Not Miss Deffant.”

“Stay here,” said Buchanan to Liz.

“We both have our reasons for going,” Maran said to her. “Buchanan’s you know. You may or may not have guessed mine. But you know this, Miss Deffant,” and his great eyes were luminously intent. “You know that Maran must not fail!”

Liz shrank back, afraid for Al Buchanan, convulsively afraid that Maran might work some shocking legerdemain aboard the ghost-ship.

“Project a Quasi-warp,” ordered Maran.

The robotic controller still hedged. “Where to, sir?”

“To the Altair Star!”

“We’ll take deep-space armor,” Buchanan added.

“Why?” asked Maran.

“Life-support. Aboard the Altair Star. Its systems should have run out.” He said in a low voice: “I hope they have.”

“I must state, for the purposes of record that the station commander is grossly exceeding the instructions of the Board,” the Grade One robot announced.

Buchanan followed Maran to the hold.

Liz Deffant watched the ghostly fleet, picking out here a bulbous ion-fission hulk that had not roared across the dimensions for half a millenium; there an elegant scout that had drifted into the tunnel not more than sixty or seventy years before. She could hardly bare to look at the huge, infragalactic liner that had been Al Buchanan’s command.

The eerie journey brought a proximity desired by neither man, yet each derived a measure of comfort from the knowledge that another human being was in the cramped cabin. Pinpoints of white-gold iridescence spangled the interior. Its tiny engines groaned as shields were forced inward by the blossoming Quasi-warp. Coiling shards of black light began to build up as the glittering tunnel formed around the raft. The Singularity’s fields jerked and pushed, and the raft spun crazily as it left the station. Buchanan gave no thought to Maran. Half-forgotten scenes tumbled with appalling clarity through his mind: a child’s toy; the stunned face of a dignified old man; Preston’s refusal to believe that the machines would condemn them, his shout of protest…. The last moments of the Altair Star haunted him afresh. He could see the lost faces, the dawning horror, the slow realization that the final moment had come.

“Proceed,” ordered Maran.

The Quasi-warp, created by the station’s puking engines, reached out to the misty edges of the strange graveyard of ships.

Buchanan saw Maran’s big-boned, overfleshed face through the visor. There was a grotesque magnificence in his bulk. His eyes burned with a deep, profound, and tormented vision. Buchanan knew that he should be considering his own future actions: he should be working on some way of thwarting Maran’s escape plans. But he could not. Liz was safe. Whatever happened to Maran and himself aboard the Altair Star —and he was more sure than ever that he would reach the ship—she would be cared for.

The robots would safeguard her person. If he and Maran failed to return, they would decide that the station and its records should be preserved; and Liz with it. Perhaps Maran knew that only if Liz’s safety was assured would he willingly accompany him to the riven, time-lost ship. Buchanan firmly put down any speculation about what Maran wanted him for; it was enough that he was returning to his command. He would find the answer to the question that had tortured him for so many years, that had sustained him through the long interview with the Board, that had kept him intent and purposeful during the descents into the depths of the Singularity. Time enough to wonder about Maran when he had put to rest the ghosts of the Altair Star.

“Maran,” he said urgently. “I want to be the first to step into my ship.” He was pleading, but he did not care. “It was my command.”

“Agreed,” said Maran.

The Quasi-warp built into a thrusting, glowing spear that sliced through the unguessable forces. It merged with the strange architecture of the Singularity and allowed the life-raft to pass into the deeper regions. A small screen pulsed irregularly. Buchanan’s mind spun as the screen picked out the fantastic time-locked graveyard.

“There!” he called.

They had reached the impossible temporal discontinuity. And the images of the ancient ships filled the screen—blurred, almost unrecognizable as the deep-space vessels to the untrained eye, but immediately identifiable to Buchanan. And Maran, it seemed.

“I see, Buchanan.”

Maran fed in commands. The raft hung, shot through with the white-gold, stunning radiance and the eerie black light. Every cell in Buchanan’s body seemed invested with the Singularity’s weird effects. Yet he saw the ship.

“The Altair Star!”

The impossible warp drilled through and into the time-tunnel. Coruscating, whirling forces eddied around the raft as it glided along its sheath of translucence toward the Altair Star. Buchanan clung to the obsessive fixation that had worried and ripped at his mind for so long: why had the robots allowed so many to sink away into the glittering tunnel?

Then even that thought was gone as a sudden eddy of grotesque forces beat the Quasi-warp. Maran struggled to hold the raft, but the Singularity’s weird forces would not be denied. The little craft was hurled about with a blind, brutal frenzy of strange powers. And the two men pitched about the tiny cabin helplessly.

Buchanan’s mind reeled. He struggled for sanity, for breath, for memory. Then, there was peace. Calmness came like an explosion.