3201
The Procul Station
It began with a very low hum.
The room which the hum filled
was tiny, a glorified cupboard. Even in zero-g, where every wall was a
workspace, the room was small. The ceiling was punctured by a perfectly
circular window, from which the minute glow of one distant star signified the
station was facing towards Sol. A single figure floated from wall to wall,
adjusting machinery, and making rapid calculations on her forearm mounted
tablet. Sweat dripped from her forehead and floated off towards the centre of
the room.
Pushing off, the woman glided
from one corner to its opposite a few metres away. Her rate of movement was
steadily increasing. More buttons were pressed. More wires plugged or unplugged.
Dials and screens tapped to make sure they were working. Numbers flew from a
hundred screens, through the brain of the young scientist, out through her
fingers and onto the tablet. More calculations were made. She darted to another
wall, then another. Eyes never leaving the numbers, fingers never leaving the
tablet.
Her bead of sweat that had
migrated from her brow hung emotionless in the centre of the room. It saw her
expressions of confusion, fear and excitement all pass by in instants. It saw
her thinly muscled arms, weak from lack of specialised zero-g exercise, grasp
tiny handholds as she pulled herself up to one final machine by the window on
the ceiling. Fingers danced across a keyboard to the beat of an allegro tune.
One final number was shown on an ancient screen, coated with dust and oil. The number
was fifty seven digits long, but only the first mattered. It was above zero.
The scientist relaxed. Her
thin arms let go of the handholds, and she drifted slowly down from the window
towards the door. Her lone bead of sweat found a home in her hair, where it
nestled among the short brown curls. Her face was one of serenity. A calm she
hadn’t felt for nearly a decade. But one she would not last. A toothy grin
exploded on her face.
Corkscrewing, she pushed the
door to the laboratory open. The dark corridor it led into wasn’t much larger,
but it would take her where she needed to go. Like a worm she wriggled around
and between the various operating machinery protruding from the three walls of
the triangular prismic corridor. As she moved, fans begun to purr, lights begun
to flicker, and alarms to sing. Computers which hadn’t stirred for hundreds of
years were waking up, groaning and roaring into life. As she pulled herself
from handrail to handrails, she passed alert after alert, in every language the
modern solar system knew, and a few it had forgotten. It was as if she herself
was causing the excitement, like it was her arrival which was causing the
hubbub.
As she emerged from the
corridor into the command room, she felt like an angel. The corridor was alive,
like a cityscape of a thousand lights and sounds. The space echoed with her
laugher now. She was happier than she had ever been in all her life. Happier
then when her mother returned alive from the hospital. Happier than when she
was accepted into the university. Happier even than when she was commissioned
to the Procul Station all those years ago.
Rising from the tunnel like a
prophet, she saw the rest of the crew of the station waiting for her. The
grizzled captain from Triton, his normally haggard face aglow with the joy of a
new grandfather. The two sisters from Mars, their dark faces both beaming out
the wide bridge window. The three maintenance staff, who she rarely saw outside
of their quarters had made an appearance, and the two which had been lovers for
the past few months were mid embrace. All six turned at her appearance, and she
almost didn’t need to say anything. Behind the silhouettes of her crewmates,
through the window, and over the scattered communications equipment jutting
from the rear of the station she saw it.
The wormhole.
The induced portal. The
subject of a million research papers. A million documentaries. A million
cinemas. The subject of paintings, novels, poems. Of songs, of hopes, of
dreams. Of her life.
The wormhole, which was sealed
shut nearly a thousand years ago, had opened. It looked exactly how she
expected it too, a two dimensional disk, through which an unparalleled
blackness was visible. The ring of the disk seemed to melt the space around it,
as tart pink and turquois fibres flowed and retracted into the nearby space. It
was beautiful, and she could stare at it for days. But she couldn’t.
“Well? Miri?” The captain’s
twanged voice cut through the scientist’s stupor. Hearing her name, she blinked
and turned to him but couldn’t answer. “It’s the wormhole isn’t it?” He asked,
cocking his head in that way he did when he wanted something.
All eyes were on her. She
removed her forearm tablet, and pushed towards the captain to hand it to him
but stopped. She let go of the tablet, and it drifted towards the floor. She
was laughing again, and felt tears flow down her face. Her friends were
suddenly upon her, hugging each other like children and laughing with her.
Their voices ebbed and flowed from joy, to excitement, to elation. She felt
like a little girl again, when her mother would hold her tight and sing her the
songs of Procul, their new home across the stars.
She managed to push aside one
of the Martian sisters, and met the captains eye. He remained by the console,
his finger hovering over the button which would activate the beacon. She held
his gaze for a few happy seconds then shouted as loud as she could over the
uproar of the crew.
“Yes! Yes the portal is open!
The way is open!” She threw back her head and laughed, sending her tears flying
towards the ceiling. “Procul is open! We’re saved! We’re all saved!”
The captain wiped away what
few tears adorned his bearded face, and he pressed the button. As he stomped
towards his crew, roaring with laugher and calling for brandy and crackers, the
computer begun calculating. An aerial almost thrice the length of the station
from tip to tail, extended itself from the laboratory with the small circular
window. Cylinders emerged from cylinders, lengthening and stretching outwards
into the void, pointed back towards the home star. As it grew, the great lance
begun to vibrate and quiver with energy.
As Miri and her friends supped
and dined happily, listening to upmarket Martian pop music from centuries ago,
the beacon activated. The surge of electricity was immense, it dimmed the
lights on the station and caused their music to cut out, swallowing almost all
the reserve power of the stations reactor. But it couldn’t damped the crew’s
spirits. Their raucous laugher would have been heard from a listener even
outside the stations walls, if not for the perfect vacuum. But instead they
would hear the low hum of the beacon, broadcasting for the entire solar system
to hear. It was a message in Old English, the language of the archaic rulers of
Earth, the openers of the original wormhole all those centuries ago. Before the
wars. Before the secession.
The message proclaimed
brazenly that the wormhole was open, that Procul was within the grasp of man
yet again! The message was eloquent, polite and inviting. From a warmer and softer
time. It spoke of mutual benefits, of cooperation and alliances. Free of modern
applications of propaganda and advertising. But the Solystem was different now.
It was a savage and divided place. None of the old bitter enemies would suffer
to see their opponents make it to the wormhole, and even the most weathered
alliances would be tested.
Written by me, more shall follow.
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