The Ascension Collection

  *

  She had taken off from the east docks. The vessel looked as though it was made of glass and its transparency offered an incredible view. She could see the entirety of the station from here. Ascension’s skin was mile after mile of sculptured mythology. Here Pegasus was flying off into the sunset. There Achilles was shooting an arrow. Her eyes took in the collection pool for the Blue Clarity generators. Another marvel of the Promethean Layer. Infinite energy for the price of nothing. She watched the light of those pools wash across her instrument panel.

  She would make it look like an accident. They would call it a tragic loss. The founder of the Equinox project killed because of a faulty manifold. She wondered if she even had the balls to do it.

  All those people. All those people drinking the milk, and not realising what had happened to the cow. How had it come to this? To treat people as cattle. Was the future a farm?

  She wondered what would happen to all the people she had left behind in the United World. Would her husband remarry? Would her mother open that school she had always dreamed of? She certainly wasn’t getting any grandchildren. Or would they all perish in the hell-fire that the Alliance was about to release upon them?

  She sat back in her seat. It was almost time. She sat there in her execution dress, a dainty satin number. Her hands rolled across the fabric, testing its softness. She should probably have worn something a little warmer. This was not an event to undertake in the cold.

  Her finger pushed the sleek screen and a red warning symbol began to flash. She began to smile as she thought about what she had created. Perfection itself. She had created perfection. In a small way she wished that she could have lived long enough to see it. But enough of that. She had made her own bed and now she had to lie in it.

  Still she smiled. She smiled when the repulse systems misfired and a core breach began. She smiled as the screens warned her of an impending chain reaction. She smiled as the vessel began to shake. She stood up gracefully and glided over to the glass to look at her beloved station.

  She was still smiling when the core exploded. She had always known she’d die smiling.

   

   

  Shadows in a Mirror

  He was late. It was an occurrence that rarely happened to him. Throughout his life people had always thought of him as dependable. It was surreal to think that he would be late for something he had looked forward to for months. A real pain in the ass.

  The transfer flight to the spaceport would leave in a few minutes. He hated the lack of frequent flights. Back on Earth if he had missed one shuttle, there would have been five others departing in the same direction within minutes of each other. Here, on this backwater colony, there were only ten flights a day and they were all fully booked. It was enough to drive you insane. Tahena was a planet from which there was no escape.

  The rain lashed down on his back. It rained all the time here, and in the spirit of this unusually disorganised day he had forgotten to wear his membrane. That would have kept him warm and dry. It annoyed him all the more because he knew damn well what the weather was like. It was so unlike him to forget something like that. The back of his head remembered the statistical information that the planet was renowned for its ninety percent rainfall coverage.

   There should have been a taxi, but that had been cancelled because of the high winds in the atmosphere. On Tahena there were no roads. They would have been clogged up all year round by the mud the rain brought in. The ever-changing atmosphere also usually prevented flights. Most people would have taken the underground trains, but there had been a bomb scare and today they were closed. He wondered who on earth would have bothered to bomb this little colony.

  There were other people running frantically near him. Each of them was desperate to get out of these conditions. He wondered why each of them had bothered coming here. Perhaps for them it had been the allure of a new frontier. The desire to go and conquer a place that had been previously untouched by human kind. There were even animals that exclusively hunted mammals the size of humans here. He had forgotten their name the moment that he had heard it.

  There! There it was. He could see the curved wave-like architecture of the terminal. He would be there in all but a matter of minutes. He wasn’t really a religious man, but that terminal seemed as close to a divine work as anything he had seen before. This was his moment of salvation.

  The doors parted their ways to let him in. Warmth. The feeling almost overwhelmed him. He was sure that he had never felt better. Composing himself he strode towards the access cylinders, little glass security precautions. The doors facing you opened. You stepped inside. It sealed you in and scanned you for explosives. The other doors opened and you went on your way. Simple.

  He stepped inside. A blue hologram of the terminal’s AI appeared in front of him. ‘Good morning citizen,’ she said. ‘I am now about to close the outer doors. Please stand clear.’

  He nodded. He wasn’t about to ruin his return journey now. It would not be long until he was at the spaceport and then he would be on his way back to Earth.

  ‘Salem Handarn, greetings. Would you like to hear this in a language other than Western Standard.’ He grimaced. Whenever a machine heard his name they immediately thought he couldn’t speak the language. In fact he knew it better than most of the United World’s citizens. Few of them even realised that it had originated in England, and although it had a few modifications, it was actually called English.

  ‘No thank you,’ he replied instead of complaining.

  ‘Very well. We have detected no offensive article on your person. Do you have anything that is not on your person but may be present on the flight?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Please proceed to your shuttle. Your shuttle is at gate seventeen-B. Have a pleasant flight.’

  The outer doors opened and he moved with a little more speed than he should have done to get to the shuttle. He was that desperate to get out of there.

  The shuttle’s on Tahena always reminded him of something that a science fiction movie might have dreamt up a hundred years ago. It was ovoid in shape and entirely transparent. The design hadn’t changed in years. Indeed why should it have? They served their purpose and were not required to do anything else other than that. It seemed pointless to improve something that served such a simple purpose.

  The shuttle was already as full as it was going to get. But he squeezed himself in anyway and resigned himself to stand with the majority of his body parts poking other people. How intimate. There really was no better way to fly. The shuttle doors closed. The whole system was automated and so there was no speech from the captain. There probably wasn’t any reason for one. The flight would take ten minutes at the most.

  The ovoid staggered smoothly away from the gate. There was no noise, reaction thrusters had gone the way of the dodo long before he had been born. Still, he sort of missed the familiar sound they would play as an action hero took off in pursuit of some evil maniac. Car chases were never the same after that.

  The shuttle burst forwards and began to ark into the air. ‘Ow!’ shouted a voice from behind him. He turned to see an attractive looking woman rubbing her eye. He must have banged into her with his ass as the shuttle accelerated.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he replied. ‘Really I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘Ah!’ she continued to rub her eye. They were climbing away from the planet now, the sky was almost black and he could see the purple and emerald planet behind them. There was a lightning storm over Cormeay City.

  ‘Here let me see,’ he said as he turned to face her. In the process of the shuffle he managed to elbow her in the face. That was just bad luck.

  ‘For the love of—‘

  ‘I am so very sorry.’ If his face reddened any further people might begin to mistake him for a tomato.

  ‘Say, how about you stop helping me until after we have landed?’ She smiled despite her obvious pain. She was working her slender jaw to try an
d move the pain out of it, with her other hand holding her eye.

  The shuttle was preparing to dock with the space-port. It was in orbit just above the planet. The space-ports had been designed years ago, back when FTL flight was a difficult thing. They were set far enough away from the planet that the event-horizon from the drive systems would not damage the atmosphere, but close enough to make sure that a shuttle could easily make it back to the planet in the event of an emergency. Neither of those things were an essential requirement anymore but people had a way of clinging on to tradition.

  They docked without a sound. A membrane began to extend itself around the vessel. Once the cocoon was in place it expanded as air was forced into it to equalise the pressure. Salem gathered his things together quickly as the shuttle doors opened. He quickly ran out into the space-port.

  He was just about to leave the arrivals section when someone tapped him on the shoulder. He was pretty sure that he did not know anyone in Tahena but he put on his best smile anyway as he turned. His smile dropped as he saw who it was.

  ‘Think you might owe me a bit of an apology.’ It was her. She was smiling. A bruise was beginning to form on her cheek.

  ‘Seriously, I am really sorry,’ he began.

  ‘Don’t worry about it. You’d be surprised how much that happens to me in those things. Guess I just blend into the background.’ She smiled again. He saw something in her shining eyes that drew him in. He really wished he hadn’t hit her. ‘I guess I’ll see you around.’ She turned to leave, but then faced him again smiling. ‘Next time you feel like boxing another citizen, you’ll know who to find.’ Now she started moving away.

  ‘Wait,’ he shouted after her. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘It’s Kalen.’ She was still moving away from him.

  ‘Where are you going to Kalen?’

  ‘Why Earth of course, isn’t everybody?’ She did not face him but she had stopped walking away. Salem ran up to her.

  ‘I’m alone. No, not alone like that. I mean in the world. Damn it all. In the station, on Tahena, I mean. It would be nice, wonderful even, if you could keep me company on the journey. I hate being away from Earth, everyone is so...different.’ He was very aware that he had just made a complete fool out of himself.

  ‘You’re a strange thing aren’t you?’ she smiled again, that warm rapturous smile. His heart broke. He was certain that he had lost his chance to get to know her. He really had wanted to get to know her. Then she put her hand on his shoulder and said, ‘it would be an honour to keep you company.’

  He could have jumped for joy at that moment, but held off only because he didn’t want her to think he was any weirder. Instead he simply said, ‘thank you, thank you so much. It is so very kind of you.’ But she wasn’t listening to him. Instead she had already begun to walk towards the departures section of the port. He chased after her, scarcely aware that he was bumping into people as he did so.