Blue Remembered Hills (ch14)

[igenlode]

I'm not even going to bother posting ch13 over in the Blake's 7 section, since this chapter is entirely B7-centric and is unlikely to attract much interest in the POTO section -- I may as well upload this one briefly, then move them both over at once.

At any rate, in chapter 14 we finally find out just what did happen to the Liberator, and why Blake and Gan are currently stranded on Newparis. When writing this story, I'd originally intended to insert the 'Liberator-chapter' in its chronological place, e.g. immediately after Blake and Gan are set down on the planet. But I came to the conclusion that it would be much more effective to do it retrospectively so that the reader would have no more idea of what had happened to the ship than Blake did -- the result of which is that most of this chapter, as usual, consists of what is effectively flashback :-p

Yet another (unavoidable) point of view switch, which means a chance to explore yet another character's opinions and motivations...

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Chapter 14: Adrift in Space

‘WISDOM MUST BE GATHERED. IT CANNOT BE GIVEN,’ Zen had assured them once, evading the answers Avon demanded.

Well, they’d learnt that now all right, Jenna Stannis thought bitterly. And most of the wisdom she’d gathered over the past endless hours was wisdom of a variety she could well have done without. Right now she’d have given half the contents of Avon’s famous treasure room — still stored up in useless splendour deep within the ship, just as he had discovered it — to hear Zen’s electronic philosophising again. To hear anything at all from Zen.

She pulled her surface parka more closely around her in the chilly darkness of the flight deck, staring at screens and banks of dead instrumentation. She’d clipped a small glow-light to the front of her tunic; the greenish glimmer of her own face gazed back out at her in multiple reflections, distorted by upward shadows and haggard from the constantly running treadmill of her thoughts.

Without the ship’s computer, the Liberator was all but crippled. Jenna didn’t know Avon well enough to pretend to say whether he’d spent the last dozen hours repining over the choice he’d made — and to do the man justice, he’d been working harder since than any of them — but for all her cynical self-reliant shell, she bitterly regretted her own part in it.

It had been irresistible, at the start. Avon, the self-vaunted computer expert, confronted with an artificial intelligence he refused to acknowledge as such: a machine with a personality that logic told him could not exist, yet which chose to defy a direct command for deeper reasons of its own. Jenna, who’d experienced that intelligence more intimately than the others — who’d shared her mind, for an infinity that had lasted only a few seconds, with the ship, and from whose thoughts the very name Liberator had been drawn — had never for a moment doubted Zen’s self-awareness. The computer had always been a ‘him’, not an ‘it’, to her, and however frustrating — and yes, potentially dangerous — Zen’s refusal back then to give information on the teleport system had been, the spectacle of Avon outmastered by a machine had been a pleasure her sharp tongue could not have passed up.

“I don’t think he likes you, somehow.”

She still didn’t know which part of that quip had cut the deepest: the undeniable truth of the observation, or the ‘he’ with which she’d qualified a mere computer.

“I think I may have to reprogram this machine,” Avon had retorted, a barely-veiled threat that all but acknowledged Zen’s awareness; one that was just asking for her own riposte.

“That still won’t make you likeable...”

And it hadn’t, of course. She wasn’t sure she’d ever met anybody less likeable on a day to day basis, the late unlamented Sub-Commander Raiker of the London included; she could take care of herself where the Raikers of this world were concerned. Avon, on the other hand, had an unerring instinct for going straight for one’s own weaknesses as leverage, and only Blake seemed able to shake it off. But then Blake had been new-born from the Federation’s rape of his mind and past — he was still an innocent in so many ways.

By her standards and Avon’s, that was. She belonged in Avon’s world and not Blake’s, she knew that well enough. The world where the strong and the quick and the able took their chances and won, as she had done for so long, and the others — the herded earthbound masses within the Domes, dosed into tranquillity — were fodder for their masters.

Blake’s dream of uprising and equality had never been hers. But some dreams and some men were worth having. Where Blake was concerned, she would take either to get the other, she thought now, in a moment of pitiless self-honesty; and Avon — curse him — saw that all too clearly.

So she and Avon, as usual, hadn’t precisely been in the most charitable mood towards each other when the Liberator had pulled out of Newparis orbit under Zen’s automated guidance. They had headed in a gracefully random ellipse towards the inner cloud of the system, where an Earth-sized planet had broken up millions of solar cycles ago and left behind a spinning ring of debris gradually eroded by the streaming particles of its star. It wasn’t entirely an ideal environment in which to experiment with manual control of the great ship’s functions, but it would shield them admirably from the long-range scan of any incoming Federation traffic; and beyond the cloud lay a couple of tiny rockball planets in close orbit that would serve admirably as a testbed for any manœuvres Jenna cared to try.

She hadn’t been planning to be stranded here for hours, helpless beneath the sleeting radiation that might blind any detectors casually turned in their direction but which was steadily eroding even the Liberator’s energy banks. If there was one thing Jenna Stannis hated more than being trapped planet-side with no way into space, it was to be out in space without control, just one more piece of rotating debris adrift around a star. She had the ship; she’d had the helm in her hands. But when Zen had gone offline, he’d taken every functional system in the ship down with him, from shield regeneration to life-support; eventually, if they lasted that long without bloodshed, she, Vila and Avon would be orbiting corpses in an airless coffin.

But frankly that was the least of her immediate worries. Keeping an overtaxed Avon from assaulting Vila on his attempts to be helpful — and restraining her own hands from the pair of them — ranked far higher.

It had all been Avon’s fault, of course. Except... she knew full well that if it hadn’t been for her own needling, the man would never have gone so far as he had.

~o~

Everything had seemed so promising in the beginning. She’d taken control of the ship, tentatively at first, and then with increasing confidence as the interlinked helm functions became more and more apparent. Vila and Avon had proved a more adept flight deck team then she could ever have imagined, both of them caught up by the technical challenge to deft fingers and a mutual if very varied intelligence; the little Delta-grade had after all, she realised, been as much a problem-solver in his own larcenous vocation as Avon had, and his lively wits had been fully engaged by the question of what went where and to what effect.

The three of them couldn’t hope to operate the ship in full battle configuration, of course. Avon had traced the combat functions and agreed — somewhat to Vila’s disappointment; Jenna had never suspected him of a hankering for missiles and explosions, and was rather amused — that they should concentrate on establishing basic ship handling for the moment. They’d got the three main consoles up and running, and Jenna had sent the Liberator gliding out of concealment and in towards the nearer of the two dwarf planetoids, with an idea of matching velocity.

The other two had worked together in an unexpected fierce silence of concentration, waiting for once without question for her commands as Jenna tried to coordinate the three of them into the necessary moves. If it hadn’t been the best-drilled of operations, it hadn’t been any too bad for a first attempt; and Zen’s intervention had been a matter of mere precaution, and over-zealous programming.

“ATTENTION. GRAVITATIONAL INFLUENCE EXCEEDS SAFE PARAMETERS. PLANETARY BODY LOCATED ON PORT LATERAL INTERSECTION COURSE. DIRECTIVE REQUIRED ON MANUAL OVERRIDE.”

“Directive required”—? Jenna’s hands tightened for a moment on the twin control yokes in confusion; tightened further a moment later, as the import of the computer’s toneless announcement sank in. So Zen wanted her to reconfirm those overrides, did he? And suppose he thought the ship was in serious danger — would he just take over then, without a pause to ask if she really knew what she was doing? And what would happen to the crew then? What exactly had happened to the Liberator’s original crew?

She tried urgently to correct their course, found the navigational data locked in wrong by a factor of ten digits, and swore under her breath. “Fix it, will you, Avon?”

She got only a glare in response — Avon had obviously spotted the mistake even before she had, and was working furiously to correct the settings — but it was too late. The ship’s orbit was becoming dangerously unstable, and it didn’t take a computer to detect that their current trajectory was going to take them far too close to the second planet. However small it was, it was still made up of a mass of rock and metals many times their own size and with a far greater density. She really didn’t want to head nearer to it than at present.

“ATTENTION,” Zen said again, with an intonation that sounded far too much like that of a final warning, and she jerked out a frustrated exclamation. They couldn’t risk it.

“All right — all right. Full automatics. Zen, correct course and take us back into the debris field.”

The ship steadied and began to move of her own accord as Jenna released the controls, and she sank back in her seat, nursing simmering anger at Zen, at herself, and at Avon in particular.

Avon, as usual, made no attempt to conceal his own annoyance. His mouth was pinched with reaction.

“If you’d taken the trouble to check a moment, you might have noticed that I had those figures fixed within a sizeable margin of error before you decided to abort the entire procedure — never mind that if Vila had paid proper attention to that detector array he claims to be operating, I wouldn’t have been fed distorted data in the first place... I thought the idea was to practise operation under real-life conditions? How much do you suppose we’re going to learn if we just switch to automatics every time something doesn’t go according to plan? We weren’t within a thousand spacials of actual danger from that overgrown asteroid.”

“I know that,” Jenna said sharply, watching the growing mass of space-dust begin to coalesce on her display as they slipped back into the main plane of the ring. “But have you asked yourself what might happen if Zen took it into his head that our incompetence was an actual danger to the ship?”

“Zen cannot possibly take anything ‘into his head’. ” That particular air of condescension, from Avon, only ever emerged between gritted teeth. “Zen is a machine — a computer with no independent volition. It has no feelings to be hurt, and no patience to lose. It operates according to its programming.”

“Except we’ve got no idea who programmed it,” Vila pointed out. “Now why do I not find that reassuring?”

His background protests against Avon’s accusation of shoddy scan data had gone ignored by both the Alpha-grades on the flight deck; Jenna had long since shaken off the tentative alliance they’d shared in the weeks she’d spent in the holding cell back on Earth, when Vila had been the only convict with wits enough to guard her back and weak enough for her to trust him there. But this latest sally dropped into an unpleasant silence, and echoed in the moments that followed.

“In that case, perhaps Avon would like to investigate,” Jenna said at last, directing the iciest of smiles down from the helm in his direction. “I’m sure the rest of us would appreciate the reassurance. And since he’s been talking about doing it since we arrived, I imagine he’s already worked out precisely how he is going to proceed.”

She hadn’t intended for one moment that he should actually make the attempt. She’d meant it as nothing more than another needle-thrust in the constant, unacknowledged war of wits between them: he might be the number two man in the Federated worlds where computers were concerned — or in his own estimation the number one, who’d been let down by an inconvenient human factor — but where the Liberator was concerned Avon could be no more an expert on her alien architecture than she was.

She hadn’t reckoned on the man’s absolute refusal to back off... or his driving need to prove himself right. Or perhaps, to do him justice, on that burning desire for knowledge — Avon’s beloved ‘data’ — which bore as much resemblance to her own sharp survival-based curiosity as a star-probe did to a passive sensor array.

He’d taken her instantly at her word, with a flash of teeth that was less smile than snarl, and had the fronts off half a dozen cabinets on the flight deck before she could retract what she’d said. He’d looked utterly confident... and none of them had dreamed, despite all their assorted professional paranoia, that the Liberator’s main computer systems would conceal a shut-down failsafe that reacted to tampering by switching itself completely offline. Zen’s last owners had really, really not wanted him reprogrammed.

Jenna supposed she ought to be grateful they hadn’t left any more mind-bending devices in there like the one that had nearly killed both Avon and herself on the flight deck that first day. As it was, the shut-down surge had knocked Avon, up to his elbows in circuitry at the time, halfway across the room.

“It’s got to be removed.” Avon, still shaky later in the sickbay, had been adamant. “Sooner or later we’re going to need access to that machine for some reason or other, and when we do, I’m not going to have time to waste tiptoeing round this kind of block. You don’t want a ship with an autocratic auto-pilot, Jenna — well, I’m not handling a computer where you can’t examine its parameters. If we’re going to have security on Zen — and I can think of a few alterations in that respect right now — then it’s going to be security under our control.”

Which meant, effectively, under Avon’s control. Even now, after watching him drive himself without mercy over the intervening hours in the effort to restore Zen’s functions, Jenna found herself more than a little ambivalent about that idea. But after the stunning success of her last attempt at intervention, she’d kept her mouth shut.

She didn’t know what she was going to tell Blake, when they got him back. If they got him back... because while the Liberator was busy circling the sun like an inert tube of herculaneum, while she and Vila took turns to hold the torch for Avon here on the darkened, steadily chilling flight deck, Roj Blake was stranded down there on the planet, running unknown dangers of a completely different kind.

And however safe he was — and she had no reason to suppose he was safe at all — he wouldn’t be human if it hadn’t occurred to him by now, once or twice, to wonder if she hadn’t planned to leave him all along; if all her fine words hadn’t just been a cloak for the lure of that fortune in treasure they had on board. If she were in Blake’s place right now, it would have been the first thing she thought of when the ship failed to come back... but then she had the disadvantage of being all too intimately acquainted with a certain Jenna Stannis.

Because she had been tempted, over Cygnus Alpha. She’d all but left him there, and yielded to the worser part of herself: to Avon’s whispering. It was one of the reasons she found Avon hard to take. And she would never be sure, until she asked — and she knew now she never would — whether Blake had known and understood that temptation, then or afterwards.

He’d trusted her again with the ship, cheerfully and without hesitation. But then that was a gift he had: a charm to awaken loyalties in the cynical and the jaded. He could be dead or dying down there in the belief that she had betrayed him...

A yelp and clatter from the far side of the flight deck, as the pool of light there flickered and ebbed; Vila scrambled to retrieve the dropped torch for the third time in the last hour, and the beam rocked wildly around consoles and cabinets, glancing over the dark void in the floor where Avon had the main ducts exposed and the discarded panels stacked in piles where subsidiary circuits had been traced back. Unexpected silence from Avon; Jenna allowed herself a moment of concern. If he was too tired even to take it out on Vila, he was dangerously close to total collapse — and he was the only hope they had.

She got stiffly to her feet, aware again of the ragged edge of her own exhaustion. Zen’s circuits ran through room after room deeper within the ship, and she’d spent hours concentrating on delicate, fiddly tasks she didn’t understand, with the lash of Avon’s expert scorn to let her know when she’d slipped up in some vital respect. They were all of them running with energy banks close to zero.

“Get some rest, Vila. I’ll take over on the torch again.” She took the heavy tube out of his hands and directed it down under the floor again towards Avon, who was waiting in grim patience to be able to resume work. Propped in a cramped position on his elbows, he had a dusty smear down one side of his face, and nose and chin were drawn sharp with weariness.

“I know some more stories, if you need any help keeping awake.” Being tired only made Vila babble worse. “There’s one you’ll like: it’s about a couple of smugglers who pick up a signal from an abandoned space station—”

“Shut up, Vila — and get some sleep, if you can.” At least it would keep him quiet.

She crouched down, watching Avon’s hands, deft with probe and grips. A muscle in his cheek was trembling slightly, in a spasmodic, unconscious twitch. They couldn’t go on like this. It was absurd.

“Avon...” She waited for him to look up. He didn’t, of course.

Jenna choked back her own frustration, working hard on sounding reasonable. Rational. Appealing to self-interest.

“Avon, never mind about bypassing the block. We can do that later — some other time, in a safe orbit with a space-tether out. It’s too late for reprogramming now. Let’s just get the whole thing sealed up. Get the systems back online.”

“In approximately ten minutes we should have power back on the flight deck.” Avon spared her a brief upward glance at last. “Auxiliary systems only — it will take longer to get the main computer up. Life support is already on throughout the ship, along with the medical and escape-rocket circuits. Reprogramming Zen’s automatics will, as you so astutely observe, have to wait.”

He swallowed a yawn, and his mouth tightened under her scrutiny. Jenna managed to suppress an answering yawn of her own.

“So how soon can we get back to the planet?” she said, keeping her voice carefully level.

“In a few minutes we should be able to monitor Federation communications in this star system.” Avon had already turned his attention back to his work. One hand extended out of sight, deep into the ducting, and a jerk of his head indicated that Jenna should angle the beam of the light accordingly. She crouched low on her heels, aiming the torch as steadily as she could, and after a moment he deigned to explain further.

“If Blake has been captured or recognised down there on Newparis, the news will be buzzing between every Federation detachment in range. Space Command will be notified. Escort ships will be sent. It’s one event you won’t be able to miss hearing.” He shifted position a little, with a harsh intake of breath as the unseen hand made a swift adjustment.

“If we don’t hear any reports, personally I intend to assume that our two gallant Ghost-hunters are lying safely low on the planetary surface, as instructed, and that the rest of us can afford to leave the ship on automatics and take a few hours’ sleep.” As if to punctuate this point, a soft but unmistakable snore drifted across the deck from Vila’s direction; the hint of a smile curled Avon’s lips in response. “Charging in for an unnecessary rescue is a sacrifice I for one don’t feel prepared to make.”

The very thought of sleep pulled treacherously at Jenna’s eyelids, and she fought back another yawn. Avon was, as usual, right: even operating the teleport correctly would be a challenge for any of them just now, and it would be stupid to risk Blake’s safety like that unless it was a real emergency down there. “All right — but the first thing we do is check.”

“Naturally. After all, the Liberator will be their number one target once they’ve caught Blake; in fact, I imagine they’re probably considerably more interested in the ship than in him.”

If Blake had anything to do with it, that was soon going to change, Jenna thought, remembering some of his plans. But she had to concede the point. Right now, the continued freedom of Roj Blake was little more than an embarrassment to the Federation; the Liberator, on the other hand, was a prize they’d give a great deal to get their hands on.