Cally studied Blake’s reaction. He’d been so confident that these were corpses, and he was evidently finding it hard to believe they could have survived.
‘No,’ Blake told her emphatically. ‘Look at this one. He can’t possibly be alive.’
Cally could sympathise. If those were dates of birth, then these people had been in the life capsules for hundreds of years. And Blake obviously thought he knew enough about this whole facility to realise how improbable that was. After all, he’d already told her that he recognised a lot of the equipment, even if it pre-dated his own experience of Federation technology. And if this sort of thing wasn’t feasible when Blake was working for the Federation, how could even older technology achieve it?
Blake edged further around the semi-circle. Cally watched him wipe the red-brown dust of centuries from the glass covers of several more cabinets. ‘All these others are the same. Eyes wide open, but sightless. No breath. No visible pulse.’
He reached across the nearest cabinet. He rapped on the glass with his knuckles. Cally smiled at the thought Blake might wake the man from his deathly slumber.
‘See? No reactions whatsoever. There’s no respiration on the other side of the glass.’ Blake bent down to examine the box more closely, his head pressed against the side panel. ‘It’s making a faint ticking sound. Some kind of machinery.’ He ran his fingers along one side of the casket, and slid them to the other edge. His fingers fumbled for a release catch.
Cally jumped up from her chair, alarmed. ‘Don’t open it!’
She was too late. Blake had located a clasp on the left-hand side of the casket. He stood up, very pleased with his discovery. The locking mechanism clicked under the pressure of his fingers.
The casket lid creaked briefly. As it opened, Cally heard the sucking sound of a vacuum breach, the sharp hiss of air. For an awful moment, it was as though the occupant of the cabinet had tried to take in one last whooping gasp of breath. And then there was a noise like a dull explosion.
A cloud of greyish, foul-smelling dust spewed from the casket, forced out beneath the half-removed lid. Blake leaped back with a startled cry, dropping the lid as he did so. It slammed back into position on the casket, wafting the disgusting cloud of grey dust across the room. It hung in the air for a while, before starting to settle slowly on all the surfaces around them.
Cally clasped her scarf to her nose and mouth, in a futile attempt to stave off the dreadful smell. At least she wouldn’t inhale any more of the cloud, whatever it was. Though she thought she could guess.
Blake coughed an apology. He wafted the remaining cloud out of his view, despite Cally’s renewed protests, and peered into the cabinet through the glass.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘that one’s certainly dead now.’
‘Oh, Blake!’ Cally slapped him on his arm, outraged by his cavalier attitude.
Blake had the decency to look slightly ashamed. ‘I’m sorry. His body just… disintegrated.’ He peered in at the occupant of an adjacent casket. When he saw Cally’s infuriated expression, he raised his hands to indicate that he had no intention of opening this one. ‘So if the others aren’t dead, what’s happened to them?’
Cally removed the scarf from her face. ‘It is a form of profound sleep.’
‘You mean stasis? Suspended animation?’
‘No,’ Cally explained. ‘This is not a cryogenic system. These men and women are on the extreme periphery of life.’ She considered what this meant. ‘Perhaps that’s what I could hear. The whispers. It could be these people, a hair’s breadth from death.’
Blake pondered this. ‘They’re like Archangels, then?’
Cally considered this. ‘No,’ she concluded. ‘This is not cybernetics. And Kodyn’s project was long after this. You said it yourself – this is much older.’
‘And that’s my point.’ Blake stared around the huge cavern disbelievingly. ‘Just look at this place. Look at the age of the equipment. If the people in those coffins…’
‘Cabinets.’
‘Yes, all right. If they’re still alive, then they must have been like that for…’
Cally nodded. ‘For hundreds of years, yes.’
Blake set one of the fallen chairs upright, and beckoned for Cally to sit down again next to him. He stroked his chin in a gesture she found both familiar and reassuring.
‘Why do you think that is, Cally?’
Cally sat a little straighter in her chair, and closed her eyes in preparation. ‘I shall try to find out.’
‘What do you mean?’
She shushed him. ‘I need to concentrate.’
‘Is this more of your intelligent guesswork?’ he asked.
His voice was already getting fainter, along with the noises of the room as the background hum slipped beyond her hearing. The stark lighting filtering through her eyelids darkened. The acrid stench from the cabinet faded from her nostrils. She could no longer feel the warmth of the thermal suit against her body. It was like she was floating… floating…
She was in the cabinet. She was… in all of them.
She knew all people. She knew each of them. She was each of them. Coleman, Stafford, Nichani, Mattro… and all the others. Faint at first, so weak, but strengthening as she reached out. And from so long ago, so very long ago.
It was a kaleidoscope of their experiences and beliefs and emotions. She saw their homes. The families they left behind. Brief glimpses into their everyday lives. Gathered around the table for a meal, laughing at some absurdity, arguing amiably over some minor information… unwilling at first to acknowledge their true purpose.
They resisted her. Did not volunteer their thoughts willingly. But she knew they were old. So very old. And over these past centuries, imprisoned in these boxes, they had only had their private thoughts and memories to accompany them on their long, lonely journey down the decades. And now, through Cally they could reach out to each other again. Once they realised that, the dam burst. The relief in knowing that they had survived the centuries together gushed out in an unstoppable torrent.
Cally feared she would be washed away by the outpouring. But she had to know. Had to listen.
Behind the joy of new contact, there was much old pain. It had been such a long time since the Federation had found them. Taken each one from their loved ones and brought them here. They did not know the pretext for their work, at first. And once they had done, it had repelled them.
That was before the Federation had set to work on them. When it broke into their psyches. It took their recollections, their beliefs, their values… and disassembled them, piece by piece, memory by memory. Until they had nothing, and were built up again from scratch. Until they accepted their new purpose.
At first, their reluctance had made them prisoners in this Federation facility. Trapped far from their home worlds, unable ever to return. They knew that the Federation had chosen them for a combination of mental agility and perseverance, so they also knew that they could outlast their prison guards. That they were stronger together than they were on their own.
That’s why the Federation placed them in the life-support capsules. Sedated them. Separated them from each other, and from the world. And as the months went by, they were no longer just prisoners in their individual caskets. Their mental fight faded as their incarceration made them prisoners in their own bodies. Fighting a battle within the trap of their own physical forms.
Ready for their true purpose.
The purpose the Federation would never reveal. The purpose these prisoners carried with them on this silent, watchful journey down the centuries. The longest war in Federation history. One that could only end one way.
Cally awoke with a jolt. She was lying on the dusty walkway, beside the silent cabinets. Blake knelt beside her to hold one of her hands and stroke her forehead.
The room returned to her in a rush. The lights and the sounds and the smells. In her thermal suit, she suddenly shivered. She realised she had been crying.
‘Welcome back,’ Blake said softly.
He helped her to sit up. She coughed a little at the dust around them. ‘They are alive, Blake. They did not die.’
‘I was worried you might.’
‘And I know what this place is.’ Cally focused on Blake’s face as she mentally returned to the present, trying to separate now from then. ‘They told me, in their own way. This place pre-dates Star One by two hundred years.’
Blake harrumphed. ‘I think we’d established that much.’
‘Listen to me, Blake.’ She fixed him with a stern look, and he fell silent again, suitably abashed. ‘This is the failsafe, in the event that Star One is ever threatened.’
‘Ah.’ She saw how worried Blake looked at this thought. ‘I can’t imagine that Star One has ever faced a bigger threat than now.’
Cally nodded. ‘When Megiddo’s strange orbit returns it to the satellite grid, the men and women linked together in their caskets take over the operation. They override Star One and… and…’
‘What, Cally? Did they tell you?’
She was close to tears again. Mourning what these people had lost two hundred years ago. Grieving for their loss yet to come. ‘This facility is a bomb.’
Blake looked around the room. ‘Which part?’ He straightened to peer across the cavern at the distant generators. ‘Over there, perhaps?’
Cally stood up next to him. ‘All of it.’
‘What? How can they launch it?’
‘No, Blake.’ She took his arm. ‘The whole of Megiddo is a bomb. When it reaches the satellite grid, the planetoid will consume itself in a massive plasma explosion. It is designed to wipe out the alien fleet.’
Blake stared at her. She hoped it was because he was taking in the enormity of what she had discerned from the sleeping operators, and not because he simply could not believe her.
‘That’s old technology,’ he said. ‘It long pre-dates the focused plasma bolts of today’s Federation weaponry. Not subtle. Not discerning.’
Cally recalled a word from the heart of the operators’ gestalt. ‘Cataclysmic.’
Blake was still considering the consequences. ‘A plasma explosion that big will wipe out everything! The alien fleet, the Federation pursuit ships, the whole flotilla of Earth ships. Not to mention the Liberator.’
Cally released his arm, and moved over to the nearest semicircle of cabinets. ‘It will kill all these poor people, too.’
Blake’s dismissive gesture waved away her comment. ‘We have bigger things to worry about.’
‘You are missing that perspective again,’ said Cally sadly. ‘They’ve been trapped here as part of Megiddo’s operating system for hundreds of years. But they are people, Blake. Not headcount.’
‘They are a weapon.’
‘They are humans,’ insisted Cally. ‘They have a right to live.’
‘They surrendered that right two hundred years ago.’
She rounded on him angrily. ‘And what would you know about them?’
Blake raised his hands to placate her. ‘All right, all right. They spoke to you, and not to me. I understand that.’ He was pacing between the caskets now, peering into them occasionally as though he might get a clue from the long-silent occupants. ‘But it’s not as though they can discuss it with us over a drink and light refreshments…’ He fell silent as a thought came to him.
‘Or perhaps we can. Can’t you reach them telepathically? Can you explain? Ask them to stop it?’
‘No.’ Cally looked mournfully through the glass of the nearest casket. It was one of the young men, Geraint Jones. Over two hundred years old, but he still looked Cally’s age. ‘No,’ she said again. ‘Over the centuries, their purpose has been indelibly etched into their minds.’
Blake was his usual brisk, decisive self again, though he spoke softly to her. ‘Well, that means we can’t save them.’
‘But it does not mean we cannot feel for them.’ Cally reached out for some of the rock dust, and scattered it over the glass so that she could no longer see the man’s face.
‘We could open all the cabinets,’ suggested Blake. ‘Destroy the operators, defuse the bomb.’ He looked at Cally pleadingly, almost apologetically.
Cally thought back to what she had detected in her contact with the gestalt. ‘The system is already under way,’ she decided. ‘Kill them, and there is no reversing it.’
Blake paced back along the semi-circle, grimacing with frustration. ‘What about an override? The Federation brainwashed them – so they must be able to issue a counter-command as well?’
Cally considered what she had learned. Even now the contact with the gestalt, the experience of being them, was fading into faint memories. What had seemed so real, so vital, so immediate only a few minutes ago was becoming history, anecdote. ‘I suppose that must be true,’ was all she could say.
‘Well, come on then!’ Blake had been galvanised into action. He stormed off across the bridge, en route to another collection of equipment. ‘Those pursuit ships are within range. And there must be a comms system in this place.’ He was already at the next island of machinery in the cavern. He brushed the dust off the paraphernalia he found, and examined it in fresh desperation. ‘If we can contact the Federation, they can defuse this bomb before it’s too late.’