Author: Andrei Livadny
Date: 2015-11-16 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction
Description: A science fiction novella. An intergalactic war has scorched dozens of planets and destroyed millions of lives, leaving in its wake dead carcasses of drifting spacecraft where desperate battles used to unfold. These are perilous places unfit for habitation... or are they?

The Island of Hope

a novella
by Andrei Livadny

Magic Dome Books

The Island of Hope

Copyright © Andrei Livadny 2015

Cover Art © Vladimir Manyukhin 2015

Translator © Vasily Repin 2015

Editors: Suzanne Mallette, Jade Rose

Published by Magic Dome Books, 2015

All Rights Reserved

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is entirely a work of fiction. Any correlation with real people or events is coincidental.

Also by Andrei Livadny:

Edge of Reality (Phantom Server Book #1)

The Outlaw (Phantom Server Book #2)

Table of contents:

Prologue

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Epilogue

About the Author

The Island Of Hope

Prologue

The sky came crashing down around him, its song angry and deafening.

The two-year-old boy would never hear it again, but it forever remained imprinted in his subconscious: engines roaring, ashes hissing, rocks crumbling overhead.

Dark shadows were chasing after him, unyielding as Fate itself.

He was running on his feeble feet, crying at the top of his voice and trying to escape the roaring terror falling from the sky.

What could be more awful than such helplessness?

Huddled between two boulders, he was still crying, and the earth was shaking under the weight of interstellar spaceships landing. Then, in a sudden and deafening silence, roared the spiteful staccato of machine-gun fire; after that, all was quiet, and for good.

Exhausted, he stopped crying. He simply couldn't cry anymore; only his body trembled occasionally. The world had changed.

Nobody came to take him into their arms, to give him some warmth, food or comfort. He was too little, his mind too immature. Therefore he couldn’t perceive all the horror around him.

He sat huddled. The boulders exhaled cold. The small body was gradually overtaken by the cold and, finally, it stopped quivering.

A blue grass blade swaying in a breeze, the sound of heavy footsteps, the rattle of metal — these were what he remembered. There was also within him a sense of great offence at the warm world which had suddenly become cold and strange.

He didn't hear the spaceships wail and scream, soaring to the sky.

He didn't perceive the silence that wrapped smoking ruins in a heavy shroud.

Slowly and unconsciously he was leaving that world, freezing between the two boulders, and the swaying blue grass blade, burnt and broken, was a kind of lullaby for him.

That happened in the year of Galaxy Calendar 2607.

Humankind was aiming for the stars.

* * *

Heavy jackboots with grooved soles were crunching on the hash of broken glass. The barrel of a pulse gun was looking into the darkness of ruined corridors, scrutinizing the devastated offices with its single black eye.

"Bastards," the word escaped someone's lips, heavy like spittle.

Nomad sat down wearily on a plastic windowsill.

The colony was dead. Its inhabitants, slaughtered. The mines had become desolate.

The wind howled through the openings of broken windows. All of a sudden, Nomad was seized with a bitter helplessness though he didn't personally know anyone of those who had perished here.

He lit a cigarette while he gloomily examined the frames of burnt mechanisms that one could see through one of the office building’s windows.

Nomad had been watching the flame of galactic war arise for some years already. The old wanderer incessantly moved from one stellar system to another. He saw the Second Expansion Wave splash out of the boundaries of the solar system and break against the colonies ring.

For four hundred years the colonists of the First Dash, left by Earth to the mercy of fate, had been fighting for survival on uninhabited far-off planets.

So, finally they'd heard from their legendary Alma Mater. The new "settlers" were a rather diverse contingent scooped up from the bottom of fetid sewers of super megalopolises: the ancient homeland of Humankind held to the worst traditions of the past. But now millions of these superfluous people were united by military discipline and cast into space with a practical and far-reaching purpose. Earth having spent all internal resources was in need of more space for colonization.

The second wave of mankind's space invasion kept to the beaten tracks: the vector lines of space anomalies hadn't changed, after all, so at the end of their journey the new colonists inevitably came across one of the surviving old colonies.

Nomad threw away the stub and smiled wryly, remembering that not so long ago, the authorities of some planets used to qualify Ernie and himself as criminals. 'Not only they are dealing in all kinds of junk but also avoiding taxes! Thank you very much!' Surfing the galaxy in his own spacecraft pieced together from some junk, that’s all he’d been doing. He'd never actually killed anyone.

He looked around himself again.

What was the crime committed by these people? Certainly, they didn't want to accept new colonists from Earth. However, there were thousands of unpopulated planets in the Galaxy. Did Earth really need this planetoid and its little mine begotten in sweat and blood?

The answer was obvious to Nomad. The war. Earth was overpopulated again. The solar system looked like an empty worm-eaten nut. They wouldn't colonize unexplored planets any longer. They wanted to live comfortably now.

He spat and rose from the windowsill. Time to clear out before the spacecraft of the Second Wave arrived and began tackling the forsaken mines.

Going outside, he narrowed his eyes from the bright light. Ernie Hugo, his partner, was standing by two granite boulders, apparently bewildered.

"Nom? Come here!" he called.

Nomad approached, looking around mechanically. His strong hands were squeezing the warm rifle butt. He gave no credence to the quiet, to the idle wisps of smoke and the bodies lying about.

The universe was seething with madness.

Ernie struggled to breathe. "Look!" he wheezed.

Nomad took a step towards the boulders and saw the small huddled body of a child between them

Shocked, he stared at it for a few seconds, then bent over and put the rifle aside. He touched the child's cheek with his trembling fingers. It slightly shivered under his palm. He shrank back as though burned.

"Is he alive?" Ernie asked, squatting down.

Nomad nodded, picking up the frozen little body.

"But what... what are we going to do with him? He's practically a baby!"

Nomad didn't reply.

Some minutes later, he was already making his way to the spaceship, awkwardly clasping to his chest the frozen and helpless lump of flesh feverishly thinking of something on board that could be turned into a comfortable enough bed.

He understood nothing in the impending madness.

Tears were streaming down the old smuggler's cheeks.

PART ONE

BROKEN FRAGMENTS

"I think therefore I am?"

It wasn't me who said it. I only put a question mark at the end of the phrase, tweaking its meaning.

I've got an ocean of time to be spent in thinking. Well, not an ocean. A lake, maybe. The latter isn't as imposing as the former, but sufficient enough to drown, choking on my belated comprehension of things.

That's funny. I'm sitting in a cramped sealed room on an empty ammo box writing with an ordinary pencil on ordinary sheets of paper. I've no future – having received a fatal dose of radiation, I'm not likely to last more than five or six years. But even that period seems to be too long for me if one takes into account what is lurking in the stillness of the vacuum beyond the fragile walls of my shelter. I find it funny but also sad because I've never been so calm and so bent on living as I am now. And I've never perceived with such a dreadful lucidity the essence of human nature.

I've no idea who I'm writing this for. For myself maybe, or even for you: the man who is holding my diary. There can be only two reasons for your coming here: either you're an explorer arriving here thousands of years after my death or you're intrepid. But if neither, run away. You must know that you've come to hell. A man-made version of it. The very quintessence of death, mirroring some dark nooks of the human mind.

However, if you already set foot in here, you can judge for yourself.

1.

Ragged layers of choking blue gray smoke spread over the corridors and decks of the space cruiser Russia. The flagship of the Free Colonies' fleet was dying hard, as befitted a spacecraft of her class. The turbo pumps howled trying to replace the close air but their power wasn't sufficient enough to support life on board. Red alarm lights flashed everywhere. Many compartments were blocked, consumed by the vacuum that had gushed through the punctured ship.

Gravity was unstable, dependent on the damaged generators, and that was why the commandos' advancement along the main corridor of the cruiser resembled the migration of a flock of beak toads: now the men flew up, dropped, flew up again, were flung against the walls, surrounded by smoke, shouts and shooting sprees of pulse guns in the moments when enemy assault teams loomed out of side passages. In fact, were they the enemy — or could they be some friendly teams seeking safety?

All was mixed up in that hell.

"Sergei, there's a turn a few hundred feet further on!" Andrei shouted into his helmet communicator while turning round so as to send a burst in a side passage.

"What's there?"

One could hardly hear the reply drowned by the spiteful crackling of static discharges dancing on the electromagnetic compensator section of his APG. The pulse gun bullets dashed past, howling, to the narrow transport tunnel. A second later, its entrance exploded in flames like a mortar muzzle, littering the floor of the corridor with smoking debris.

"Ordnance complex five. External blisters. If they're still undamaged."

"Let's hope so."

They advanced by leaps, back to back, firing at side passages with their APGs, steadily approaching their goal. It was still possible to disengage the cruiser from the battle since one was able to control the main systems of the ship from the conning tower, but to pass to the hypersphere, it was necessary to stop the frantic dance of the small space fighters spinning like wasps round the gigantic cruiser.

One could observe almost the same picture on board the other spaceships of the fleet. The battle had been lost, and now the destiny of dozens of planets depended on whether the rest of the armada would be able to disengage from the seething massacre. Neither the others nor our three commandos, forcing their way to the ordnance complex, doubted that immediately after their fleet had been destroyed the space cruisers of the Earth Alliance would dash to bombard the defenseless planets.

Kurt Schnell who was running behind Andrei stumbled suddenly. Andrei himself was hardly able to keep his feet by grasping a handrail at the last moment. The cruiser shuddered with a new impact.

Not again, dammit! Andrei thought desperately. Every such impact reduced their chances of escaping via hyperdrive. He was going to dash on, with a view to reaching the massive hatches of turrets looming at the turn of the tunnel, but at that moment the opposite wall turned deep cherry-colored and began to swell like an enormous bubble.

Oh, mein Gott!"

Kurt was right. It seemed like they had nothing else to do but to pray. The bubble burst, splashing about hardening drops of metal. Andrei dropped to the floor and caught hold of a bracket so as to avoid being pulled out into space.

The whirlwind didn't last more than twenty seconds — he constantly observed the spacesuit sensors until he was sure that a vacuum filled the Russia's main corridor. The airflow having run out, Andrei sprang to his feet. Immediately the enormous hole was filled by the blunt nose of an automatic landing raider. That was the worst to happen. He realized that within seconds assault robots of the Earth Alliance would burst into the corridor.

He looked around. Sergei had already arranged a telescopic tripod; Kurt's hands were shaking as he attached the barrel of a heavy emitter to it.

"Run away!" he ordered.

Andrei hesitated.

"Do it! Destroy the fighters!" Sergei shouted while pulling the trigger.

Hell's flame danced through the battered corridor and hit the raider's armor with a dazzling sheaf of fire. The first robot which appeared in the manhole was shattered.

Without further hesitation, Andrei ran forward.

If only the hatch would open, he prayed mentally when hitting the button with his palm. The armored oval weighing many tons started sluggishly and began moving aside. Such vitality of combat systems filled him with a kind of idiotic pride of the men who had constructed the cruiser. She was able to fight even when battered and disintegrated!

There was light inside the turret. Andrei sank into an operator's chair, scanning information on two main monitors. The accumulators of the six-barreled laser gun were full. Up till now, it hadn't fired at all. Having made a few switches, he ran the program of automatic defensive fire, leaving one barrel under manual control. Then he connected a thick interface cable to his pressurized helmet and glanced at the survey screen. The hatch behind him clanged shut. The compartment began to fill with air from the turret reservoir.

Now he was himself part of the gun. Two sensor laying levers emerged out of the floor. In a well-trained movement, Andrei put his relaxed fingers on the triggers.

The virtual reality.

All of a sudden, Andrei felt like twitching the interface cable so as not to see the thousands of separate points: those were the rest of seven hundred space cruisers which had constituted the Free Colonies Fleet.

The 3-D panorama of the lost battle spread before him. All data had already been processed by the laser gun's computer, and he was watching the world through its video cameras' lenses. The sight depressed his mind, but he again made himself take the levers remembering all the spite, despair and will to live felt so keenly over the last hours.

The turret activated – the computer gyroscopes were setting orientation. The drive motors began to vibrate loudly; the electron-mechanical world revived. The gun cellar escalator started transporting a string of vacuum shells to two support batteries. The turret machine-guns opened the stops of their video cameras towards the enemy fighters.

Andrei shuddered when seeing the Ready signals on the monitors of the six Pride-12 laser modules. He was excited by that power; he got stronger when sitting in the operator's chair. He also felt keen bitterness. All mixed in his soul during the few seconds of preparation.

A giant support began to move the turret smoothly into outer space. The side monitors revived one by one as new shooting sectors became available. At the same time, red signals blossomed on the multi-stage consoles. Columns of figures ran down the displays, momentarily interrupted by the brief and meaningful term TARGET.

Salvo!

His helmet's visor pulsated; Andrei settled back involuntarily. He saw fragments of armor flying away in orange clusters of explosions — floating towards him, spinning. The points faded one after the other, but new ones replaced them. In the absence of atmospheric exhausts, he realized that he was combating against automatic space-fighters with a vacuum reigning on board.

Strange phenomena are occasionally generated by a warrior's mind. After some time Andrei couldn't say with confidence whether the ordnance complex was a sequel of his will or, vice versa, his brain filled with adrenaline was nothing other than an appendage to the senseless electron-mechanical monster spouting flames.

The energy accumulators' sensors indicated half the combat capacity. He glanced at the shell counter. The gun cellars were almost empty. Incredulous, Andrei looked at the chronometer. He had been fighting almost thirty minutes

There remained only two attacking points in the visor sight.

He pressed a key on the auxiliary control panel, and liquid nitrogen started circulating through the system cooling the overheated gun reflectors.

Raising his helmet visor, Andrei shut his eyes and pressed his temples. He was shivering. Someone had spilled a few drops of molten lead inside his head. Such was the charge for the super-effective sensor-neuron connection to the turret computer. At moments when he felt that kind of horrible emptiness he hated machines, but also the men who had constructed them. However, he knew that later, once the pain was gone, he would be pulled back into the rational and cold world of the virtual reality.

That would be later. Now there was a terrible fatigue and heavy stupor within him.

Andrei made himself open his eyes and call the Russia's chart room.

Much to his astonishment, the intercom system was functioning. The face of the second captain of the watch appeared on the communication monitor.

"Ordnance complex five, Lieutenant Andrei Vorontsov," he reported tiredly, "the space sector around the jets is free from enemy assault ships."

The captain kept silent as if he saw a madman or a ghost.

Dammit, what's going on in the chart cabin if a commander is looking in such a way at an officer having carried out an order? What are they doing there? Thoughts were gathering within his mind, mixed with pain and combat post effects; at the same time, resentment was arising within him too. "Respond, captain!" he demanded furiously.

The officer remained silent. Andrei felt himself losing self-control. The vision of the corpses of Kurt and Sergei was swimming before his eyes. They gave their lives to allow him to cut his way, and this...

The face of the captain of the watch was distorted with anger and fear. An animal fear of something inevitable.

"Too late," he forced himself to say. His voice sent shivers down Andrei's spine. "Prepare to die, son."

The communication monitor became dim. What the hell? He didn’t know what to think.

Then came the light.

It's impossible to describe it any other way. Only one word fit: light. It poured down from everywhere all at once, so that one had the impression the spaceships cast sharp black shadows on one another. As though a gigantic flashlight illumined for a moment the combat in darkness.

Instinctively, he tried to reach the control panel. The screen blazed up in white fire; there was a crackling, the recognizable smell of burning insulation. Quite unexpectedly, all around him collapsed with a great crash into an abyss to the accompaniment of sounds produced by torn metal.

The sudden overload momentarily knocked him out but the salutary swoon lasted only a few seconds. The automatics of a combat spacesuit wouldn't allow a soldier to remain unconscious in the thick of a battle, so a reanimation injection quickly brought him round. The ensued weightlessness nauseated him. But much worse was an unerring sensation that something terrible and irreparable had happened.

Andrei realized that the turret was torn away from the cruiser.

In situations like these the main thing is not to lose one's head. One by one, he turned on the telescopic survey, signal beacon and emergency transmitter.

Silence.

Desperate, he stubbornly tried to restore the intercommunication until he finally saw the futility of his attempts.

His compartment was drifting through space, rotating irregularly. The radar screen was dim and empty. No rustle in the communicator, no commands, no call for help.

He could only read on the instrument board the red alarm lines:

"Thermonuclear explosion in space. General power: 3,000,000,000 kilotons. Distance: 4,000,000 miles. Time: minus seventy seconds."

"Secondary radiation"

"Tertiary radiation"

"Skin overheated by 800 degrees"

"Protective field functions irrestorable"

"Laser gun, serial number 5, destroyed"

"Emergency life-support system activated"

"Your compartment transformed into autonomous module"

"Recommendation: maintain maximum level of personal protection during fifty hours"

"THREAT TO LIFE!"

The last line was blinking importunately.

* * *

... Each of us, before dying, should have gone mad. But we — I mean, a whole generation — millions of young guys on forty-seven colonized planets — grew up without experiencing pain or fear. Later we were called 'saplings of war'."

One could affirm that everyone who has been on the Path of Galactic War even for a short period is practically unable to believe that the world had been quite different. But I remember. I do remember mom's light-hearted laughter, pop's caressing eye. The warm water of the purple ocean of my native planet...

I remember the feeling of boundless calm and happiness experienced only by the little ones. The world was lying at my feet, so huge, astonishing and warm. It was mine.

And so it was everywhere. The planets colonized during the Great Expansion period had increased in strength, passing in four centuries from wildness and enmity to culture and civilization. Our generation was the first that hadn't had to struggle for survival. But all our dreams were trampled underfoot, mixed with ashes, frozen in a vacuum.

I'm neither a prosecutor nor a pacifist. I'm a professional soldier, an assassin legalized by the state, pulled by force of circumstance out of the vicious circle of death and thrown away into a great icy nothing to die slowly, thinking.

* * *

Two hours ago he was young and full of strength, now he was dying, slowly and terribly. His parched lips were whispering something, but the sounds couldn't be heard from behind the thick glass of the pressurized helmet.

The internal communication monitors were spangled with chaotically scintillating points. The stacked control panels had lost their kaleidoscope of colors, the screens dimmed. The panels and sensors' illumination was fading. They were dying together with the man.

Only a few minutes had passed since the emergency monitor gave the last message. In the heat of the moment he hadn't paid attention to the value of the general explosion power — in any case, he would have judged it unreal: the total combat power of the two fleets couldn't have produced such an explosion. Yet it soon became evident the figures were true: suddenly he felt his joints being wrenched by a dull ache.

There is nothing worse than being aware of the inevitable. Andrei was panic-stricken, his eye feverishly scanning the instrument boards. Three billions of kilotons.

He felt sick. His joints didn't ache anymore: they were burning, as was his whole body.

Andrei understood that the instruments were not lying and his compartment was traveling through a blustering hell of accelerated particles that were piercing him every second, destroying his body's cells. Even his battle spacesuit was unable to stop this flow of hard radiation, and the radiation dose he was taking was quickly approaching a fatal level.

Horror pressed his throat with its icy gnarled fingers. Andrei flung the doors of an in-built storage cell open. In the interior of one of them he could see the even gleam of a series of high-protection combat spacesuits. He stretched out his hand. A sharp pain pierced his thorax as he was seized by a fit of suffocation .

Once again, injections reanimated him and returned him to reality.

He had never been a coward. In fact, he was only properly scared now. It's so terrible and disgusting to die.

He collected the rest of his strength and tugged the heap of spacesuits towards himself. Their gray protection skins enveloped him, softening the merciless flow of invisible radiation; instinctively, he tried to bury himself in the very midst of the shapeless pile.

A few minutes later hope turned to despair.

Andrei was unable to move anymore — quite unexpectedly, he'd transformed into a helpless mannequin, an onlooker observing his own agony. Non-existence was rushing up to him by suffocating black lapses interwoven with minutes when his mind became more lucid even though immersed in delirium. They say, a dying man recollects his life... Nothing of the kind. He was still going through his last awful combat.

He hurt. He hurt so much. His joints were wrung out, his body burned by an unmerciful fire. He wheezed, feeling some disgusting foam on his lips and... an injection. His mind burst in bloody fireworks and gradually faded, as if he were falling into the gentle embrace of a vacuum.

* * *

He existed… But at the same time he didn't.

A lacerated mind creates strange phenomena.

Fire. An acrid odor of burning insulation. Distant explosions and the shuddering hull of the gigantic space cruiser.

The black nothing of hypersphere. The weariness of waiting for battle. And almost as the trump of doom, the salutary deliverance from uncertainty: the wailing of alarms.

Holding their breath, they observed their fleet take up positions not far from a lifeless and nameless planetoid. A monstrous armored sphere – a star fortress of colonists – was already hanging in its orbit. Both the Admiral and Andrei's father were there now, at fleet headquarters.

The detectors caught some disturbances in space. Something was trying to break out of the infernal Nothing, a.k.a. hypersphere, back to the three-dimensional continuum.

Andrei didn't know that this battle would go down in history as the first experience of "puncture tactics". He would never read any manuals written for future generations, but he would also never forget the pale-blue flashes of hypertransfers suddenly sparkling directly amidst the battle formation of the Colonies Fleet.

The first wave was formed by remotely controlled kamikaze modules. About a hundred nuclear explosions blossomed in space, reducing half their fleet to rubble, and following them, wave after wave, Earth's battle space cruisers hove into view.

* * *

He was coming round.

Andrei was drenched in sweat, suffering the torments of the damned; finally he envied the dead indeed. The pain spread all over his body like a fire; the nerve endings perished first, causing inhuman tortures to his mind.

Andrei returned to dreadful reality. But he hadn't any desire for living anymore. What for? He realized perfectly well that the turret torn from his spaceship was drifting into an abyss from which one could never return.

He knew how to interrupt this torture, but was unable to reach for his personal firearm: the weight of the heaped-up spacesuits had pinned him to the floor. He wheezed, feeling hot liquid dripping down his cheeks. He couldn't even shoot himself!

Once again his consciousness began to fade. He was gripped by a suffocating blackness in which a luminous spiral rotated frenziedly. It was penetrating his inflamed brain, giving him some relief; he was turning towards it, passionately desiring to escape the indecency of such a death... but at this moment (how many times had it already happened?) the bioscanners of his battle spacesuit worked.

What's the point?

He cursed the machine for trying to save him. All he wanted was to die, but the re-animator was able to squeeze out all of the soldiers' life up to the last drop.

A black infinity spread from the past to the future.

The spiral which had appeared, now disappeared.

Then at last fell total darkness.

2.

He recovered consciousness after some seventy hours.

Having opened his eyes, Andrei lay for a long time staring senselessly at the internal sensors of his pressurized helmet.

"I'm still alive."

The quivering lights of indicators were hovering at zero.

His combat spacesuit resource was completely exhausted.

He was surrounded by darkness and an oppressive smell. He stirred, and his stiffened body responded with a dull pain. The heap of spacesuits was displaced, and he caught sight of a strip of reddish light.

His weakness and the nauseating odor made him suffocate. Somehow he squeezed his way through the dozens of spacesuits. Two emergency lighting lamps flooded the turret interior with a reddish light. All screens were lifeless, as well as the gun control panels; one could only read some dim lines on a stand-by monitor:

Laser gun – serial number 5 – destroyed.

Your compartment has transformed into an autonomous module.

He vacantly examined those lines while unfastening blindly the locks of his spacesuit.

The most terrible thing which could ever happen to a man had just occurred to him. During those seventy hours they could have gotten him out of the battered turret a hundred times. This could only mean that he had been included into the number of fatalities and forgotten.

Andrei was so feeble that he couldn't even fall into despair. Finally he succeeded in undoing the spacesuit locks. Gasping, he peeled off the hermetic shell together with the overalls and underwear.

Tears welled up in his eyes. At the moment he hated Fortune for giving him a chance.

To survive and have only death in prospect – that could seem funny if it wasn't so dreadful and obvious.

His skin was burnt as if he'd been lying in a scorching sun. If he didn't get out of there in a few hours, the radiation sickness would become irreversible. He needed urgent qualified help.

The thought spurred Andrei on. He scrambled into the operator's chair.

He opened the survival kit and gave himself two injections: a painkiller and a stimulator.

Gradually, the pain abated. Andrei forced his battle spacesuit into the utilizer and, having put on some clean overalls, returned to the computer terminal. The system had frozen. The image on the screen didn't move. The dim light of the emergency lamps pointed at either deficient batteries or to a break in the power circuit.

Counting on the backup software, he reached for the reset button. If nothing has burnt inside the electronic circuits, the system will execute all necessary troubleshooting and memory testing itself. But what if something had indeed burnt out?

Andrei's hand froze over the control panel. It was sheer Russian roulette. He was going to shut down the programs that were still running with a view to activate the frozen modules, but what if the system wouldn't restart?

The lights twinkled for a second when his finger pressed the Reset button.

The turret computer was functioning.

In the corner of the central monitor, memory test figures began flashing.

Power failure

Please wait

He tried to make himself comfortable in the chair. Inside the stacked control panels and behind the plastic wall panels something was buzzing and snapping: the system's central processor was using the emergency reserve of its built-in batteries trying to find some undamaged circuits.

The lights began twinkling again. Then, all of a sudden, the ceiling lamps lit up.

With a soft click, the air regenerator came on. A convulsive wave of lights ran along the instrument panels.

The turret was springing back to life.

Instinctively Andrei moved forward, ignoring the system info, when one of the survey screen sectors began filling with stars.

An enormous blood-red octopus spread over space, eclipsing stars with its luminescence.

Space coordinates of the object match those of planetoid Y-047

The computer message left no room for doubt. The swirling spiral nebula was the remains of the lifeless planet and the colonists' station that had orbited it at the beginning of the battle.

Both had been destroyed!

Not split asunder by rocket strikes, not broken by gravitational guns — just destroyed.

Andrei couldn't believe his eyes. Still, the facts spoke for themselves. The dazzling light reappeared before his eyes just as he realized the meaning of that flash.

The planet had been annihilated.

In full prostration, he returned to the sole undamaged survey screen.

The nebula glistened. He could clearly see the waves of scarlet luminescence running down its tentacles. And on the background of this symbol of universal apocalypse, multiple brilliant dots were moving.

Thousands of them.

He understood there were no winners here.

In front of him was floating the cemetery of both fleets.

* * *

He had to survive. The thought completely consumed him.

He looked at the 3D monitor screen, dissolving in the abyss around him. The eerie sensation of abandonment and solitude captured him, and it wasn't an ordinary agoraphobic fit: he'd simply stopped viewing himself as a cog in a huge war machine: it was dead, scattered around in thousands of metal fragments and hundreds of corpses. The civilization had abandoned him and didn't care one bit about him.

He was all by himself, surrounded by billions of miles of cold and emptiness.

Andrei didn't want to believe it. He couldn't accept the hopelessness of his situation, admitting thereby the inevitability of another agony. Having once passed through the horror of a slow and wholly experienced death, he hated the very idea of facing it again.

'They absolutely have to come back here. For sure they'll return. I'll only have to wait till they come back!'

Only much later would Andrei learn that he had stubbornly refused to view his situation objectively. He was too stunned, scared and wound up by the sharp change in his life, by the sheer fact of being abandoned in the midst of the boundless abyss. With the obstinacy of a drowning man, he clutched at a glimmer of hope… unable to comprehend that the tragedy of that battle, of that fleet would forever remain his own personal little drama. As for the Galactic War, it had already rolled away, following its own bloody course.

* * *

Each compartment of a battle space cruiser contained emergency rations of food, water and air. The situation in which Andrei found himself – being all alone in a drifting fragment of a spacecraft – was as old as the hills. The history of the conquest of outer space abounds with such incidents having similar beginnings but different outcomes.

Technically, the problem of survival after a crash had been solved long ago, maybe two hundred years before; nevertheless, only few had managed to escape. That wasn't a matter of technology, but one of the human mind. Now Andrei regretted his going to sleep at lectures on space psychology.

Only seven days had passed since the moment when he'd come round amidst the dim radiance of emergency lights, but the period was sufficient enough for Andrei to taste all the delights of living in absolute solitude.

Dammit! When you're twenty it's impossible to be serious about such tiresome disciplines as survival psychology and prepare for a complete isolation at the very beginning of life!

There was one thing engraved in his memory though. As the 'I-want-you-to-focus' (the moniker they'd given to the space psychology instructor) used to say, 'The two main causes of mental disorders suffered in an enclosed space are loss of hope and physical inactivity. They're the cause of death in ninety percent of all cases.'

Gradually, anger overcame him. Andrei knew perfectly well that he wasn't a hero. To fall in battle, in front of his comrades and commanders, or to peg out from anguish, solitude and incurable radiation sickness — these turned out to be quite different things.

Not to lose hope... It’s easy to say. He kept moving inside the turret; he ate and slept. After seven days, it became clear to him that he was going mad. At one time events had carried away the twenty-year-old guy he'd then been in their frenzied vortex. The war had whirled him through four years of life, then abruptly abandoned him here, amidst the dark, cold and corpses.

What before had only gleamed faintly in the depths of his mind, making him just a tad uneasy, had become quite obvious upon some reflection.

When Andrei realized he would die, he forbade himself to think of it.

He opened all the built-in storage cells, pulled out their contents and, scrutinizing that combat trash designed to allow young guys to kill and disfigure each other, worked out a new conception of his existence.

His anger subsided, bringing him some relief.

He had a standard toolkit, some spare parts for the guidance system and a few repair manuals he'd found rummaging through databases.

So as not to go mad because of the silence and solitude, he ripped out the laser gun control console and began to disassemble the system. Days went by, and he started losing his sense of time. Investigating the sophisticated equipment, Andrei tired morally but not physically.

Then he would stop and begin jumping across the cramped compartment, pushing off the walls in order to wear himself out. Sometimes these training sessions resulted in a fit of hysterical laughter: he had the impression he was an imbecile jumping and scurrying around like a monkey... but who could see him, and how could he move in another manner? At least that helped him to remain in his right mind.

In fact, he was afraid. He hated himself for that, but no sooner had he remembered the endless hours of his agony than he felt sick. He just wanted to live. He secretly dreamed of the day when he would come back despite all obstacles. He daydreamed of the moment when he'd set foot on a planet — any planet. All he wanted was to see a sky overhead and to feel firm ground underfoot.

He toiled until he was so exhausted he couldn't think. But yet he thought, dreamed — and kept working.

Ninety-two days passed.

He grew gaunt, his complexion darkly sallow. Andrei's hands were covered in burns and scratches, but now he knew the turret inside out. The radar and the transmitter functioned as before. Hence he could be sure that a rescue spaceship wouldn't miss him. It was bound to hear his signals; however, he wasn't yet aware that he'd become quite indifferent to that.

He only had to fix the antennas to finish the repairs.

To do that, he had to leave the compartment and go into outer space.

Having put on a newly fitted and recharged spacesuit, Andrei went out of the compartment into the corridor that had formerly led to Deck 10 of the space cruiser Russia. Now the corridor didn't measure more than ten feet long, ending in a hermetic bulkhead.

Having sealed the compartment hatch, Andrei turned on the air evacuation system and approached the bulkhead. For the first time in his three months' solitude, he was going to leave his shelter.

Hesitantly he took the handwheel; a moment later he was overcome with impatience. He feverishly unscrewed the spiral lock, flung the emergency hatch wide open — and stopped short.

Before him, as far as he could see, an inky abyss spilled out – the gigantic eye of the Universe gazing at him indifferently with billions of pupils. He staggered back involuntarily.

The anxious clicking of the spacesuit's radiation meter brought Andrei out of his stupor. He secured the safety tether and climbed out. Having quickly set up both antennas, he returned to the hatch and only then allowed himself a look around .

The view was both oppressing and fascinating. The shapeless fragment of the space cruiser ended in a somber and ugly gap. The surface of the turret was covered with runs of molten metal. In some places, one could see protruding armor plates broken out by the explosion. The skeleton of the laser gun towered above the scene. Its robust framework had been twisted, causing the whole structure to list. Somehow it resembled a crippled bird. The two antennas he had just set up contradicted the surrounding chaos.

While he was examining the laser, something had changed in the dark of the cosmic night. The bent supports that had seemed gray a few minutes ago were now tinged delicate pink, then quickly turned crimson.

Andrei looked up, realizing what was happening. The fragment was slowly rotating, and he had just witnessed the rise of the crimson nebula over the ridiculously close horizon of the small celestial body represented by the Russia's turret.

However, that was only a prelude. Bright lights began to flare up one after another in the dark. It looked as if someone had slashed at the black quilt of space with a knife, releasing droplets of blood.

Andrei shuddered with the thought even though he knew that the lights were nothing but debris of spacecraft lit up by the bloody rise of the nebula.

There were thousands of them; in one particular spot they were agglomerating, forming an irregular sphere.

Having watched it for a while, he realized that his compartment was moving towards this new formation too. In a few weeks it was going to pass at a very close distance from the terrible spheroid.

A chill ran down his spine. What could he do to counter the laws of celestial mechanics? Sooner or later his unguided drift would result in a collision with the cemetery of battered spaceships.

He did not despair anymore. It seemed that little by little, Andrei had lost that kind of feeling. Each day of struggle changed his attitude to his trials and tribulations, but this wasn’t because he'd matured. He'd merely got used to the constant sense of danger which had gradually lost its intensity.

Despite the anxious clicking of the radiation meter and an instinctive fear of the black infinity of space, he overcame the desire to step into the abyss. His own helplessness annoyed him, but also granted some strength. His loneliness was almost palpable.

Having made a hesitant step forward, he secured the safety tether to the laser's bent mounting and cautiously made his way through the barricade of twisted armor plates.

Having slowly advanced forty feet across the mauled hull, he was sweating and exhausted. The surface glazed by an infernal temperature offered nothing he could get hold of, so Andrei constantly faced the risk of slipping off. The thin rope trailing after him didn’t offer security. The cosmic abyss made him nauseous with fear. It felt as if the magnetic soles of his boots had lost contact with the hull, space would swallow him, tether or no tether.

Finally, pulling himself up and trembling with fatigue, he crossed a mauled armor plate and saw two fire-polished hemispheres set to the left of the gun. These were tanks filled with liquid nitrogen, the sole hope of somehow correcting his drift.

The liquid gas was capable of performing the function of primitive thrusters. All he had to do was to think of some way to vector it at the right moment and in the right direction.

Andrei advanced some more and carefully examined the valves of the emergency nitrogen ejection system. They were molten too. Sparks glinted before his strained eyes. He hooked himself up to it with the tether and cast a gloomy glance at the spheroid, once again struck by the surreal sight.

He didn’t yet know that his destiny was awaiting him there.

* * *

The wreckage.

Thousands of tons of crumpled metal and molten plastic.

God help us, someone had scribbled on the wall of a dark corridor filled with floating dead bodies.

Wrecks of space cruisers, cargo ships, repair bases and light recon modules; billions of kilowatts of power, thousands of hours of work, someone’s hopes, ambitions and fears; love and hatred, wisdom and stupidity — all of it crammed into one tomb as if into a cemetery of mankind’s hopes.

The wreckage of the Great Battle, an ominous monument to those whose bodies, which vacuum had conserved for eternity, were doomed to float endlessly in the darkness that reigned inside the spaceships they had built. What a bitter end for the creatures whose minds had been able to perceive the stars but unable to tame their own ambitions!

Most of the wreckage, subjected to the nebula’s gravity, had stuck together. Their unification was as unpredictable and unstable as uncemented masonry: the spacecraft were incessantly and chaotically moving inside an invisible sphere they couldn't escape, gravitating to each other. The silent collisions were all the more sinister since their force couldn't be estimated. Their armored hulls were deformed, their hull structures crushed and broken; now and then, the energy of these collisions fused the battered spaceships together.

It seemed that all life had left this place. Still, someone had written those words on the wall.

* * *

On three more occasions Andrei had ventured into outer space before he managed to unscrew one of the valves of the nitrogen emergency ejection system. The wreckage pile-up was approaching. At first he had the impression that his fragment would bypass them but, as his tiny planetoid was nearing the ugly sparkling sphere, it was changing its course, attracted by the heavier body.

A few stray fragments began to appear around. They floated past, grinning with hideous rupture holes, their molten sides deformed. Bent barrels of laser guns protruded out of an assault module like broken human arms.

Then a cruiser floated into view, rotating slowly. Andrei's attention was drawn to the wide open lock gate and a cloud of black dots floating around it. Because of the rotation of the massive cruiser, some of them had formed a sort of circle around the spaceship, similar to a broken string of beads.

The module started turning. The cruiser must have had gravity. Andrei peered at the monitor, deciding whether he should go and open the valve. His trajectory would lead him directly to the open airlock, the internal gates of which remained closely shut. There was a high probability of finding some atmosphere inside the ship. Wouldn't that be nice. There could be oxygen, food, a powerful transmitter, maybe some survivors even.

The next hour was one of wearisome waiting. His compartment got caught by the cruiser's gravitational field and was now carried away from the mass of wreckage following an extended elliptical route. The black gaping mouth of the airlock loomed ever closer.

Unable to stand it much longer, Andrei put on his spacesuit and got out.

His dexterity had notably increased during the last days. He was now quite accustomed to the infinite abyss, the blood-red lights and the sense of utter loneliness. He secured himself with the safety tether, switched on his magnetic boots and stood up straight on the hull.

One of the black dots was heading directly for him. Others too began approaching his little "ship" which gradually drifted almost into the very midst of the weird cloud. Andrei took a better look.

At first he could make out arms; then he saw the gleam of a pressurized helmet's visor. Finally, the scene zoomed in with all its dreadful details.

He was drifting among corpses.

Standing amidst the icy silence of the vacuum on top of his mauled spaceship fragment, he watched the approaching body, unable to avert his eyes.

He had been a commando. Their group must have attacked the cruiser: his gray commando spacesuit had been cut up by a laser ray, and some dark stains of blood had crystallized on the edges of the carbonized wound. Through the cracks in the burst visor he could see a young face and huge empty eyes distorted by agony.

'Space was too small for us,' he thought, realizing the monstrous absurdity and corniness of that phrase. They had traveled through a tiny sector of boundless space where there still remained thousands of unexplored planets — and immediately afterward had begun killing one another, obeying some laws of economic and social development or, to be more exact, obeying their own nature and herding instinct; due to their lack of personal mentality, a small group of paranoid bastards pushed them toward each other, ordering them to kill and destroy.

Andrei could have been in that commando's place, floating in this nameless sector of space: a lump of frost-covered flesh, a cold, indifferent, dead satellite of the destroyed cruiser.

He didn't believe anything anymore. The body floated past, its outstretched arms almost touching him — followed by another one and by dozens of others here and there.

The suffering inside him was too great. He didn't feel anything anymore. He just stared at them, his eyes empty with pain, knowing he'd never be happy again. Even if he survived. A memory like that never fades, and time cannot help it.

* * *

A few lights glowed in the depth of the battle control room of the battered cruiser. All of the crew had died. The spacecraft was depressurized, practically bereft of power. But those who were now floating in the vacuum around the wreckage of their stronghold had constructed the most perfect destruction systems. Their killing machines were unequaled.

A man might have dismissed the target which appeared in the sights of the last functioning spherical radar as worthless. This still-alive lump of flesh huddling on a metallic fragment of a turret could only make you feel sorry for it. But for the cruiser's automatic systems this was the enemy. Its computer had no idea of mercy nor worth. It was programmed to continue the war.

The gun's micro switches searched for some undamaged control circuits. The exact aiming electromagnets were out of order, as were the servomotors, and that was why the vacuum gun barrel shook convulsively, struggling to aim. In the silence of space the electronic breech-block chambered the first shell, and some intermittent flashes of gun-fire illuminated for the last time the cruiser's hull. The fifth shell in the charger got stuck, but the target was already for ninety percent destroyed: the attacking battle compartment was holed, and a powerful jet of gas was gushing out of it. The reaction force pulled the compartment away from the cruiser in the direction of the spherical conglomeration of damaged spaceships.

Whether the man piloting the module was hit remained unknown to the computer, but it didn’t' care: the tiny figure at the end of the safety tether had little chance of survival.

Inside the dying spacecraft, a memory crystal logged in another victory chalked up by the cruiser North over an enemy ship.

3.

"Hugh, let's clear out of here!" Nomad snapped, turning away from the external monitors.

Ernie Hugo looked in surprise at his partner. "Since when have you been afraid of the dead, Nom?"

Silently, Nomad rolled with his seat to the reserve panel and flipped some switches, then reached out for his cup of coffee.

"I swear by the Procus snake-eaters, they damaged our property, and we have the right to take our own back!" Hugo spat out. "What the hell are you afraid of?"

The coffee proved to be too hot. Having taken a gulp, Nomad burned his mouth and snorted angrily, choking. He replaced the cup and peered moodily at the 3-D survey screen where one could see, in the inky abyss of space, a gigantic swirling octopus glowing with every hue of red.

This nuclear cesspit was located exactly where the planetoid used to be. Now it was gone and so was their stash.

The planet had been annihilated, which was plainly stated by the onboard computer, thousands of metal fragments orbiting whatever was left of it.

One of the monitors kept ID'ing spaceships as they floated into the onboard video sensors' field of view.

"Ernie, you see what this means?"

Hugo made a face supposed to indicate naïve bewilderment, but Nomad wasn't interested in their habitual banter. The eyes of this space vagrant betrayed some genuine fear.

"That's a Galactic War, Hugh," he said in a low voice.

"Yeah right! Why are you panicking?" Ernie lost his temper. "What's wrong with you? Yeah, sure I can see perfectly well that this heap of scrap metal stinks of radiation to high heaven and back. So what? We have the necessary protection, decontaminating agents, remotely controlled robots! You just look at this!" he pointed a finger at a monitor identifying the contour and characteristics of yet another damaged spacecraft. "An Earth battle cruiser! Our tub is falling to pieces, the reactors are exhausted, but this..." he rolled his eyes. "In just a month we'll have ourselves one hell of a ship!" Ernie took another glance at his partner and added, without any irony this time: "You know, Nom, people only get what they deserve. If everybody worked as we do to earn their daily bread, they would have no time to exchange punches!"

Nomad shook his head but didn't reply: the onboard computer beat him to it. Their ship's transmitter kept changing frequencies automatically; and at that particular moment, it had reached the wavelength of 21 centimeters.

A voice filled the chartroom, "Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!"

Hugo keyed in some commands. The onboard radars took the object’s bearings.

"This is a spacesuit emergency transmitter," he said in disappointment.

"Find him," Nomad barked while rolling his seat toward the control panel.

"This has to be a corpse. You know these automatics."

"Hugh, I want you to find him."

"Well, as you wish. Just a moment. But after that, we'll go there and patch up that ship for our own use, okay?"

Messages flashed on the chartroom monitors,

Searching...

Coordinates of the object...

Zooming in the square...

Object detected.

An image appeared on the main 3-D monitor.

A destroyed gun turret floated through space, rotating slowly. Its armor deformed by fire, its laser mountings twisted and crumpled. Behind the remnants of the large support skids that had served at one time to put the turret forward out of the body of the cruiser to outer space, a human body in a battle spacesuit trailed in its wake. The green lights of the emergency beacons on his shoulders and pressure helmet kept flashing;

"The signal is green" Hugh exclaimed in surprise. "Should we go and check?"

Nomad nodded gloomily, turning to the panel controlling the low-powered ionic jets. He really couldn't understand why he had the feeling of an approaching disaster…

* * *

He was awoken by music.

It was hardly believable. Andrei's mind was still overtaken by traumatic memories, but through the continuous spinning of stars and frenzied flashes of vacuum guns, he was perceiving some other reality: a muffled music, quiet voices and the nauseating odor of antiseptic.

He half-opened his eyes.

Semi-darkness. The odor of disinfectant became more pungent. A dim light was penetrating a polarized wall.

Two vaguely delineated shadows were moving behind the wall.

Abrupt movement. A man's silhouette stopped dead in a strained pose. He raised a long rod that he was holding in his hand. Almost simultaneously, Andrei heard a sharp snap resembling the impact of two ivory balls, then a soft deadened strike and a high-pitched buzzer.

Andrei sat up. The piece of fabric covering him slid down. All this had to be an illusion. His mind suggested an obvious explanation: he had died and his body was drifting in the eternal cold of space, but his dying brain had woven for him this strange, illusory world. These shadows…

The floor was cool. He staggered across the room and opened the door a little.

There was a strong smell of cigarette smoke.

A bright light made him squeeze his eyes shut. When he reopened them, it became quite clear to him that he either had gone mad or had indeed died.

An ordinary billiard-table covered with green cloth was placed in the middle of an octagonal room. At the far-off end of the table, leaning on a cue, stood a speaking likeness of an old space dog from a child's dreams: gray drooping moustache, hair cut close to evenly bronzed skin, and a leather vest concealing the man's bulging muscles.

"Well, to be sure... Watch your step, man," someone chuckled behind Andrei's back.

A thousand ideas whirled through Andrei's mind. 'These men were not ghosts.

They were real!

He'd been rescued!'

He felt cold. It all made sense. Lowering his eyes and realizing he was stark naked, he burst out laughing, hoarsely and light-heartedly. Leaning against a plastic doorway, he sank to the floor, suddenly weak and shaking with sobs.

For some moments they looked at Andrei, dumbfounded. Nomad smiled slightly, then chuckled, joined by Ernie.

"You're too much, guys," he groaned, suppressing laughter, while getting a brand-new flight uniform out. "Here, take it." He held out the package to Andrei and waved his hand in the direction of the other door. "The shower's over there, at the end of the corridor. Sure you can find it?"

Andrei nodded.

"Go ahead, then. We'll strike up an acquaintance at dinner."

* * *

A running robot dexterously moved in the dark warped corridors of the dead spaceships. It was simple and functional. The electronic memory of the machine contained a sole task: to seek out an undamaged jet engine of a given configuration, dismount it and report the fact to the crew.

So far, the search had been unsuccessful. The robot wasn't interested in anything happening around, and even the only video camera attached to its spiderlike body was turned off. And that was a mistake. Its motion was noticed by something hidden inside the sinister gloom of halls and passages, in gaps between spacecraft, on landing decks crumpled by nuclear strikes; its appearance awoke some activity.

Thousands of battle machines had waited in the cold and stillness of the vacuum for their zero hour. The LEDs under the "activation" inscriptions on their control panels had been gleaming red for many months. They were ready to start fighting when the tremendous explosion of the annihilated planet liquidated both space fleets, reducing the powerful interstellar spaceships to scrap. But most battle machines had remained functional.

They had lost their commanders. Since the moment of their activation no instructions had been received from the base spacecraft' computing centers. But every robot was controlled by an autonomous program started automatically after a definite period of time.

The machines were too expensive and sophisticated for people to allow them to stay idle. A huge experience of wars had been used when programming the robots. A risk of loss of the officers or even of the whole sub-unit operating this or that battle machine had been foreseen. Then the autonomous program was run. Its functioning was based on the recognition of the "friend-foe" signal. All objects not signaling "friend" were automatically registered as targets. After that, priorities were determined, depending on the level of their activity. Finally, a standard warning and an offer to surrender were transmitted.

In case the "friend" signal was not detected after those steps, or the activity of the object didn't become nullified — a phase of active operations was actuated, and the battle machine started to fulfill its main function: the destruction of the enemy fighting equipment and men.

This phase could be suspended or interrupted in the following three cases:

After destruction of all targets.

Upon receiving an order from the command post to stop military operations.

After having spent the total of ammunition load and energy resources.

It goes without saying that those who had designed the battle machines had not foreseen such an improbable coincidence of circumstances when all command centers of the belligerents would be entirely destroyed. Thousands of activated battle machines and their quite functional autonomous programs waited for their hour to come.

Any target could serve as the first little stone to provoke an avalanche.

The running robot was that little stone.

* * *

Andrei was in a very bad mood

He had scanned the entire memory of the onboard computer but found nothing similar to the orbital fortress. Neither wreck matched the profile he'd entered in the computer's memory. Consequently, his father was alive. It was the orbital station that had the weapon on board which had destroyed the planet.

At that particular moment Andrei didn't care about the fact that an annihilation installation did exist. All that has been predicted and based on theory was sooner or later implemented. The colonists had created the new weapon and used it at the critical moment of the battle to annihilate the fleet of Earth.

Correction: hundreds of battered colonist's spacecraft then fighting in space had been sacrificed to win the Pyrrhic victory.

Thousands of desperately combating soldiers had been swept away into a nuclear vortex by the decision of a few men among whom was his father. Perhaps Andrei could find enough moral force inside himself to justify that act — if the superior officers had shared a common fate to avoid their planets being bombarded, or if they had at least sent some rescue spaceships here. Nothing of the kind: they'd struck a blow and cleared out through a wormhole saving their skins; they didn't send any spaceships here, as they were afraid of ruining their reputation.

"Dad... How could you do such a thing? How can you now breathe, live, look in mom's eyes? You remember saying to me: 'Son, it's time for you to become a man.' I did become one — what about you? You exposed me, wrote me off as a percentage of losses, while you yourself are alive. What for? How can you defend yourself now, and how will you do so once I return?"

There was only one thing Andrei wanted at the moment: to return and find out that the orbital station had evaporated in the flame of total nuclear decay without any fragment left or, at least, that his father had done what he ought to have done, going on to glory after the pointless Pyrrhic victory.

* * *

Andrei didn't know that none of that was destined to come true.

Having fulfilled its task, the running robot busily radioed that the right jet had been located , but, along its trajectory through the spheroidal agglomeration of wrecks, in the dark interior of battle decks several infrared floodlights had already lit up, and some battle machines followed the spider-like robot.

After fifty minutes by the local system timer, a group of machines of the Earth Alliance pursuing the running robot got onto the battle deck of the colonists' cruiser where dozens of weapons at the service of the Free Colonies waited for their hour to come, in a deceptive numbness.

Dante had no idea that it was the oncoming of Inferno.

* * *

Never in his life had Nomad felt his vulnerability so keenly. The jets of his spaceship had been dismounted, and for the first time in many years it was unable to start up directly after an order given by its master.

Hugo's comments on the fact that the ten hours necessary for the delivery and mounting of the new propulsion systems were not a serious delay didn't reassure Nomad much. He was afraid of this place and didn't even try to hide his fear. All around them had become impregnated with suffering and death. Thousands of corpses were floating in the dark corridors and compartments of disabled spacecraft.

Nomad rose from the control panel, casting an angry glance at the straight row of monitors. Everything was prepared for receiving the propulsion system, it only remained to wait, and that was the most painful. Three hours ago Hugo, attended by a group of robots, had disappeared into the bowels of the spheroid.

Annoyed, he lit a cigarette and went out into the central saloon.

Andrei was in an agony of suspense, sitting by the transparent shell of a reanimation chamber that Hugo had arranged for the two-year-old baby. The boy was sleeping with his arms stretched out in a funny way, and his snuffle made the plain and functional space of the compartment more cozy.

Nomad stood still in the doorway. Andrei's hunched figure was sharply dissonant to the kid's placid features, as if there were an invisible partition between them.

He sighed and went to the bar.

"Want a drink?"

Hearing no answer, he filled two glasses and offered one to Andrei.

He took it, indifferently looking down.

"What are you thinking about, soldier?" Nomad asked, trying to dispel the oppressive silence; at the same moment, he regretted his having been ironic. Such a furious madness flared in the young guy's eyes that a cold shiver ran down his spine.

"None of us will survive," Andrei managed.

He was eager to live, but he knew better than anyone that the flame of war had spread over the sliver of space explored by men. Neither he nor anybody else could stop the frenzied dance of death. The avalanche of galactic war would sweep away mankind, sparing only a few men like himself, aged prematurely, seared by battles and perceiving too late the crux of the matter.

"I've never wanted to live so badly," he breathed out.

Nomad was going to object, but stopped short. He realized that he didn't have the right words.

"Stay with us," he said at last. "I understand, you wouldn't like to go to your death again."

Andrei raised his head. "Thanks," bitterness sounded in the word. He drank his glass in one draught and, lighting a cigarette, leaned back in his seat so that the smoke couldn't reach the cradle.

"We're too selfish," he said suddenly, as though expanding on the idea. "We're like a plague. And only having got into a mess, we begin to struggle, comprehending some ancient values discovered thousands of years before us."

Quite unexpectedly, Nomad became angry. "You, philosopher, here you are going a bit too far. Don't forget that you defended your planets. And if you don't believe me, have a look at this baby here. I saw his parents. They had been shot at close range. Pacifism is only good to a certain degree, you know."

Their spaceship shuddered with an impact.

The intensive care chamber gave a lurch. Nomad was knocked down, his curses drowned out by the cry of the awakened child. The deck underfoot was vibrating.

"Spacesuits!" he commanded, jumping to his feet. There was no need to repeat the command. Andrei was the right man for such a situation. The spaceship shuddered again. A siren howled.

When he ran back into the chamber fetching three maximum protection spacesuits, Nomad was out. The baby kept wailing in his cradle. Andrei snatched the cylinder of a personal first aid kit and gave the child an injection of soporific, then began to suit up. While he was busy with the clasps, the child convulsively sobbed one last time and quieted down, sinking to the bottom of the intensive care capsule.

Andrei carefully picked up the little body and put it into another spacesuit. Turning on the self-feeding oxygen, a thermocouple and a pressure transducer, he made sure that everything was functioning properly and only then sealed the suit shut. The spacesuit became slightly inflated. A pale blue indicator blinked on the forearm, signaling the suit's proper functioning.

All over the ship, alarm sirens were now howling.

"Nomad, what's going on around you?" Andrei asked, turning on his communicator.

"Can't understand. There're some flashing lights reflected from the armor of the neighboring ships. Hugo doesn't respond. The radar shows six objects approaching. Shit! They have readings of planetary tanks!"

Andrei began shaking uncontrollably.

Closing the visor of his pressure helmet, he attached the spacesuit with the baby to the chest of his own, taped up its empty sleeves and rushed out of the room.

He was halfway to the chartroom when the ship shuddered again.

Andrei dropped to his back so as not to hurt the child. He felt rather than heard the wailing of the escaping air. The opposite wall began to recede, the floor coming apart at the seams. A lonely star twinkled in the gap.

The old tub of the freelance dealers was cut into two by a laser ray.

Weightlessness came. The artificial gravitation generators had conked out. Repelling himself from the floor, he flew the last several feet and squeezed himself into the half-open door of the chart room.

Nomad's body was floating in a vacuum, surrounded by a halo of scarlet drops. Some impulse rifles had fallen out of the stack and were circling him slowly.

Fury, powerlessness and incomprehension overwhelmed him. His muscles acted on their own accord. He seized a rifle drifting past, floated back into the corridor and started gliding along the wall in the direction of the airlock.

Nomad died of an instant decompression. His lungs had simply burst.

Andrei dove into blackness and turned on his transmitter. "Hugo, where are you?"

"Ah, dammit..." his words could hardly be heard because of interference. "I’m here, by the ship. We are being attacked by battle machines!"

"Get away!" he shouted into the communicator, instantly realizing what was happening. "Keep under cover and don't move. Switch off all suit systems except oxygen supply and heating! The child's with me, I'll find you!"

Silence.

Then something wheezed in the communicator, and a heart-rending cry burst upon his ears.

He emerged from the airlock into the gloom illuminated by flashes of lasers. A combat in the void of a vacuum was in full swing. Six battle machines were fighting to the death, slashing one another with laser rays, and amid this chaos, one could see a broken jet floating and a decapitated body quite close to it.

Andrei was by himself again.

He rushed to the nearest rupture hole and disappeared within the interior of the battered spaceship. Turning round in a narrow deformed corridor, he brushed a bulkhead and felt the helpless lump stir inside the other spacesuit.

There were two of them.

And they were doomed.

PART TWO

THE SPHEROID

4.

Gloom reigned in front of him.

Simeon rose on his elbows and looked around from the top of a heap of crumpled girders. The pale beam of his lantern snatched from the darkness gray armor plates of a listed deck of a spaceship. The boy glanced over them, noticing that some debris of facing plastic remained here and there, a few propulsion systems disabled by an explosion, then riveted his eyes on a piece of starry abyss which was clearly seen through an ugly rupture hole in the side.

During some minutes' observation no shadow obscured the stars, and he decided that it was possible to move onward.

Abandoning his shelter, Simeon covered in a graceful jump the several feet to the rupture hole, perched at its edge and cautiously looked out.

He became blind for some seconds: the reddish light of a nebula pulsing in the gloom of space was reflected from a metallic plain becoming just bearable for his eyes. He strained, trying to become invisible against the gray background of the armor — at such moments the boy was always helpless because of the jammed light filters of his old pressure helmet. To repair them had proved to be beyond his powers.

Finally Simeon's eyes became adapted to the bright scintillation, and he started recognizing familiar outlines.

It was a sinister, pitiful and, at the same time, bewitching sight. The huge spheroid on the surface of which he was moving shone in the red light of the nebula like a multi-faceted crystal made of hundreds of disabled spacecraft. Simeon didn't understand that, in fact, it was an agglomeration of trash brought together by the force of gravity. The rupture holes in the ship hulls made you imagine they were gnashing their teeth, exposing the frameworks of mutilated mechanisms or a fragile web of broken antennas.

Eternal monument to man's madness.

Very long ago two space fleets had engaged in a frenzied battle here, and the annihilated planet still dying as a curling, bloody nebula, had been a silent witness and one of many victims of that barbarous and insane combat.

Father told him that there had been no winners in that battle, but Simeon couldn't grasp the sense of the words.

Time passed, and the separate debris of spacecraft, obeying the law of gravity, began to agglomerate. The ones that possessed a great kinetic energy left the destroyed planetoid's system forever or became distant satellites of the blood-red nebula, but the greater part of battered spacecraft eventually formed a ball of irregular shape measuring about one hundred miles in diameter.

Such was the genesis of this world in the depths of space; its brief history was a tragedy of constant soundless catastrophes, explosions and collisions. After several years, the world finally became somewhat stable: wrecks of cruisers agglomerated to form a dense sphere, collisions and explosions almost stopped, and the newly brought to light planetoid started its elliptic run around the curling nuclear sink, dragging a long tail of fragments of smaller size.

Simeon was not going to linger by the rupture hole once he was sure there was no danger ahead. The wild pictures of rampant steel landscapes spreading out before his eyes didn't make any impression on the lad — he found some familiar reference points and moved on cautiously. Simeon didn't know the origination of the nebula and metallic sphere, and he didn't care for it.

There was something eerie and unreal in the small figure which was hastily making his way across the destroyed decks of the irrevocably ruined spacecraft: in the eternal silence, gloom and cold of the space night, consumed with hunger and anxiety, he was moving on too confidently and skillfully. Warped bulkheads, narrow vertical trunks, dark halls with immobilized mechanisms inside — that was his world, the world of cold metal in which he lived.

He was twelve that day, and he felt his solitude and impotence still sharper than in the last several days. His thin-grown face behind the transparent plastic of the helmet was clearly marked with the traces of endured suffering.

Simeon took a few steps and stopped, grasping with his left hand at a beam hanging down from the corridor ceiling. In his right hand, he was squeezing anMG-90 plasma emitter , with its safety-catch released. The lad felt a danger hidden before him, but couldn't locate it. Simeon's eyes filled with tears: to become accustomed to the idea of being quite alone was a frightening thing...

For some seconds he intently peered into the dark depths of a hall extending ahead. He was a few hundred feet away from home. This path was perfectly familiar to him, and all around seemed to be calm, but the first rule he learned in his life read as follows: "Never trust calmness and a vacuum." It had become an unconscious habit with him. Quite mechanically, he picked up a warped piece of pipe and flung it forward.

The infinity of the hemispherical hall was suddenly lighted by surges of light-blue lightning; the piece of pipe splattered drops of molten metal and evaporated.

The next few seconds would be decisive.

His flexible figure rushed to take cover under a dilapidated console. His fingers automatically pulled the trigger, and a plasma discharge shattered several cubic inches of metal in the place where the surges of lightning had come from.

Falling on the floor, he rolled to dive into a vertical trunk just at the moment when a new series of flashes annihilated the console that had served him as a shelter only seconds before.

Having flown a dozen feet, Simeon slowed down his fall, and just at the right moment: the vertical tunnel ended quite unexpectedly, and he found himself dangling from a bracket that he was by some sort of miracle able to seize . The dim light cone of his lantern snatched out of the gloom a fragment of cargo hold. There remained some ten feet to fly over, and the boy unclenched his fingers without any hesitation.

This hall was familiar to him. Confidently turning into a passage between empty racks, he squeezed his way sideways into a cargo lift trunk. At this moment there was nothing in his soul except for a hatred that superseded all other feelings. The bright splashes of energy discharges, the soundlessly scattering splinters of the console, the suddenness of the attack — all that reminded him of his loss. He still saw mentally a similar picture engraved on his memory: darkness torn by shots, the grotesque outlines of a battle robot, and his father's figure shielding him and burning in a plasma vortex. He didn't know how much time had passed since his death. His memory only retained a part of the eternity full of the pain of irreparable loss, loneliness and grief.

Probably having reached the limit of moral exhaustion — his instincts receded, and now to live or to die was all the same to him. Perhaps, this robot was just the one that had killed his father!

Clinging with his hand and legs to the brackets, he clambered through the trunk up to the deck where he had been attacked a minute ago. He was choking with hatred and tears. Flexible like a cat, decisive and fast like death itself, unhappy while being unaware of the complete extent of his unhappiness — the twelve-year-old lad glided along a wall, and gloom, the host of these halls, closed in on him.

The lantern on his helmet had been switched off, and he was able to distinguish ahead a dim, reddish spot. That was the glow of heated metal. The spot was slowly moving away, crossing the hall diagonally. Simeon shivered. 'So, I hit it!' he thought, leaning against the wall and raising the MG.

A series of light-blue suns cut open the darkness. A wall of silent flame shot up in front of him. Simeon instinctively screwed up his eyes not to lose his sight, and that was why he didn't see the retaliatory salvos rush at him from out of the gloom. A part of the wall was transformed into fountains of hot splashes.

He remained intact, but was totally blinded and lost the power of movement for some seconds. All of a sudden, three floodlights filled the depths of the hall, cutting the viscous darkness with oblique columns of light, and a MONSTER set out against Simeon.

The incandescent walls and the floodlights now illumined the scene well enough for him to see the adversary that he had just tried to knock out with his manual weapon.

A ten-foot high square platform was gliding easily just above the deck without touching it at all. Formerly there had been four sloping plasmatron turrets placed on it — now there remained only three, and one of them, half cut off by a burst, was emitting a crimson glow.

On the whole, the construction looked rather shabby: half of its shutters and hatches were broken off, a slide was protruding out of the launching silo, askew on its end a rocket blocked the mechanism, the plates of radar antennas were misshapen. The machine's armor, pierced and molten in some places, had lost its original luster long ago, but three machine-guns peering out of their sockets were in good working order: helped by a sole undamaged video camera, they were stubbornly and purposefully seeking out their target. Horrified, Simeon suddenly realized that it was getting really tough, as he was being attacked by an Automatic Planetary Scout which, although shabby, still remained one of the biggest and dangerous robots.

He crawled aside, continuing to observe the giant.

Color rings were floating before his eyes, but he was already able to discern some objects around. To the right of him, there was a lift trunk, to the left – the glowing wall, the robot – ahead of him, behind him – a short tunnel leading to a small sealed shack, where his father and himself had lived over the last several years. Remembering his father, the boy was again overwhelmed with a burning hatred for all mechanical creatures. He shouldered his weapon, but at the same moment, lowered it. It was impossible to destroy the scout with one shot, and he wouldn't have time to get off another one, as the robot's electronic reaction was equivalent to a death sentence.

Only one reasonable solution remained: to run away, to try to slip away from the machine in the depths of the spaceships and to lead it away from the shack as far as possible.

The vortex of thoughts that flashed through the boy's mind resulted in one action: he half-rose and, taking an acrobatic jump, dived into the cargo lift trunk. A double explosion blazed behind, but Simeon was already safely dropping through a broad dark tunnel, and the robot had missed its target. Having rolled head over heels onto the lower deck, he started running. A belated fear drove him farther and farther, along narrow corridors and across huge, dark halls until he completely lost sense of time and distance.

At last he stopped, breathing heavily and, grasping at a wall so as not to fall, rested his helmet visor against a bulkhead. No vibration was felt, and he calmed down a bit. His excitement subsided, he was ready to drop; he gave an involuntary sob and almost collapsed on the floor. Taking a glance at the oxygen pressure sensor he understood that he had to go on by all means and felt worse yet. He would be suffocated if he didn't get home.

Such things had already happened; it had occurred to his father and himself to return from sorties literally on last gulps of oxygen, but now he was all alone and hadn't the slightest idea of the right direction.

It remained the sole path for him to take – the one to the surface of the spheroid, as it was only there that he would be able to get his bearings.

Exhausted and depressed, he reached the upper layer of ships and cautiously looked out of a hatch. All around, the chaos of a metallic plain stretched for many miles.

The crimson nebula still curled above the close horizon, coloring the ships' armor with opalescent spots. The indifferent stars interlacing fanciful patterns of constellations coldly gazed at the steel sphere from the abyss of space. Simeon got out of the hatch and looked round once again. The unfamiliar outlines of disabled spacecraft produced a discouraging impression on him. He realized his having completely lost the way.

The lad sat down on the ledge of the hatch, leaning against the covering, lowering his arms helplessly.

Simeon didn't know the exact names of feelings.

He had struggled all his life. At first it was a struggle against loneliness and boredom, against the walls of the small room and the locked hatch. But boredom finally came to an end, the hatch opened, and his dad appeared on the doorstep without fail. He brought some food, the smell of sweat emitting from his pressure suit, a tired smile and a lot of words. Father talked very much to him, telling him a number of zingy stories about quite unimaginable places.

At the beginning Simeon believed that Dad traveled to those places when he was out, but later, when he grew up and started getting outside too, he understood that his father's stories were nothing more than fiction: during their wanderings on the spheroid he never saw a huge room filled with oxygen on the floor of which water called "river" would flow.

In return, he mastered other arts. When he wasn't yet five, Simeon knew the true price of a gulp of air and of a bit of food. He learned to walk in the gloom of halls, shoot at everything moving, find out stores, open doors using electronic pass-keys and an emitter. Very often it seemed to him that his father and himself were playing a simple game with elementary rules: shoot first, manage to find a store, quickly react to the gleam of a robot's armor.

His life was simple and clear. He didn't feel any deprivation, and he didn't understand that he was desperately struggling for survival doing his utmost. He simply couldn't imagine any other existence; as for his father's tales about other worlds – they didn't find any confirmation in the gloomy labyrinths of the ships' cemetery.

Simeon lowered his head in such a manner that his helmet's visor now rested on his bent elbows. Loneliness and hopelessness overflowed his soul, coming to his throat as a hot, suffocating lump. There was no need to continue struggling, all had come to an abrupt end the moment when he'd tried to make Dad talk, looking with horror through the melted glass of his helmet as his face turned white.

"Sonny," another memory emerged from the depths of his memory, touching him deeply again, "remember this: one mustn't give up in this place. Each second is a struggle." He suddenly remembered that he had laughed at those words while Dad grew gloomy and his eyes dampened. "What a pity, sonny, that it seems normal to you." he whispered and turned away, sorrowful, which remained incomprehensible to Simeon. "I was unable to arrange a better destiny for you."

The crimson nebula almost sank below the horizon, and this part of the spheroid began immersing fast into the inky dark of the cosmic night. The cold stars' patterns became still more distinct. Human's passions were unknown to them. They remained impassive when observing the explosions and destruction of powerful spacecraft squadrons, and they were also indifferent now, when the enfeebled and exhausted lad at last got up and slowly plodded along the hacked surface of the steel planetoid lost in the depths of space, created by a wild madness of his ancestors whom he had never known. as he had never known their war.

The light column of the manometer indicating the pressure level in the sole oxygen bottle was inexorably descending to zero. He was now going at random, without making attempts to seek out some familiar reference points. The ambient landscape was uniform and was formed of an infinite conglomeration of various superstructures of ancient interstellar spaceships. Occasionally he crossed spots of bare, darkened armor or a real thicket of antennas among which were hidden concave bowls of radars and the sloping cupolas of control rooms.

Noticing that one of them was punctured, Simeon glanced into it through the shell-hole. His lantern's ray lit up some control panels, a partially broken a fissured survey screen and a row of seats. The last one in the row was occupied by a dead astronaut, turning to Simeon half-way. The corpse hadn't decayed due to the vacuum conditions.

A stroke of luck? He squeezed through the shell-hole and bent over the figure hanging from the seat. Alas, both oxygen bottles were empty. The pressure helmet had cracked after an impact against the console, the reservoirs had gotten crumpled, and all oxygen volatilized many years before, at the moment of catastrophe. Simeon sighed and turned back. No sooner had a hope gleamed than it was dashed. The sight of a dead man didn’t provoke any emotion in him: all spaceships forming the spheroid were filled with bodies floating far and wide. Before the death of Simeon's father the corpses had not presented for the lad any association with such notion as life, they had simply been part of the interior.

He left the control room and stopped for a while, examining wearily and indifferently an impulse rifle he'd picked up near a seat. The charge counter was fixed at mark 5. It was a good weapon, but too heavy and bulky for a boy of twelve. Simeon turned, with the intention of putting down his find, and at that moment a salvo of three vacuum machine-guns came sideways at him, a miraculous escape, having been protected by a ledge of superstructure immediately gone up in the squall of fire. Simeon recoiled under the protection of a cupola, having had time to notice the ugly outlines of a Planetary Scout.

He shouted. Angrily, hoarsely, not like a child at all. Any woman might have gone mad if she had looked through the transparent visor of his helmet – such inhuman torment could be read on the distorted features of the lad.

Awoken fury multiplied by a skill trained to reflex level produced their effect: the barrel of the heavy pulse gun traced a short half-circle and started energetically, spitting out five hollow charges – the whole magazine at the robot.

The plasma generators' turrets were smashed to smithereens, the platform swayed, the splinters of its destroyed armor flew in all directions, falling amidst a fragile forest of antennas and crushing under itself the location system of an ancient spaceship. Two machine-guns choked, only the third continued with mechanical regularity to spew bullet after bullet into the inflexible armor of a control room.

"Be sugared!" The lad swore through clenched teeth, picking up his MG.

The rest of the Scout sank into a silent light-blue flash. Simeon turned round and walked away. The momentary combat had made him concentrate, and his depression receded. He had to fight! The glance he took at the oxygen pressure indicator forced him to quicken his pace: the air mixture reserve would suffice for a couple of hours, and within this time limit he had to find a full reservoir. He came up to the nearest hatch, looked once more at the icy grapes of stars and got downwards with desperate determination.

An unpleasant surprise awaited him inside this ship. The store rooms he found proved to be empty. Obviously, someone had visited them long before his arrival – all useful items had been thoroughly cleaned out, and only trash remained that could be of no use to anybody. The sole thing he discovered was a burst tin of canned food unable to sustain the internal air pressure in the vacuum. The remainders of its contents were spread on its sides, so he put them in his pocket.

The empty store rooms filled his soul with anxiety.

He knew that robots never looted cargo holds, they were only interested in generators and such. True, Dad had constantly repeated that there must be other survivors somewhere around, but Simeon remained indifferent to the hypothesis. He simply didn't understand his father's aspirations. Firstly, they felt comfortable enough being alone together, secondly, the child didn't believe in the existence of "other people". However, Dad had never given up the idea – sometimes, overflowing with sad and strange excitement, he'd set out in search of something or somebody, but always returned empty-handed.

By the end of the second hour of his search, he had examined three spaceships and gotten into a fourth. A bit later, the lad penetrated a huge hall, absolutely empty at first sight. Then he felt the first symptoms of suffocation. He realized that the end was nearing, and the despair he had for such a long time kept in the depths of his consciousness, finally broke through. Simeon stopped, panic-stricken, took a breath, being afraid that it could be his last . Multicolored points flashed before his eyes. He staggered, but didn't fall. 'Something's abnormal in here,' he thought, a gleam of hope arising. He was examining the empty space around, but taking a step forward was beyond his possibility. After the first spasm of suffocation, horror fettered his arms and legs; Simeon remained motionless, paralyzed by the thought that he would choke. His whole body was trembling tremendously, he was eager for life, and his lungs desperately demanded air!

He passed his rough tongue over his parched lips. He only saw through the convex glass of helmet an inimical and viscous darkness with just a few lighter spots here and there.

Perhaps he was dominated by illusion? Simeon breathed out, then carefully breathed in. The next portion of air mixture was compliantly delivered by his oxygen set's mouthpiece, though the red indicator had already lit up.

He took an uncertain step towards the spots and noticed at the same instant that the whole room maintained some traces of a cruel fight: the farthest wall and part of the floor were covered with vestiges of frozen burns, the gray spots proved to be the battered bodies of battle machines.

Simeon had no idea of what the discovery would mean to him until he, by chance, set eyes on a pale spot of light. He looked closely at it, and all of a sudden it became clear to his dulled brain that he had been staring for several seconds at a wall where, near a half-opened hatch, dimly shone a rough luminous inscription:

END OF PRESSURIZED PREMISES

Pressurized premises! Simeon knew well what it was supposed to mean, and now it was for him like a miracle. Convulsively inhaling, he broke into a run.

There was no air beyond the hatch – only an airlock raked with fire with a robot body smashed to bits and two totally burnt corpses inside. Simeon couldn't believe his hopes had been dashed. Clearing the obstacle, he rushed on, losing control of his actions. Having run through a long enfilade of dilapidated halls bearing multiple traces of a violent fight between people and machines, he unexpectedly found himself at the dead end of the corridor.

5.

Vivifying air, thick and fresh, was pouring into his chest torn by a sharp spasmodic pain.

Simeon opened his eyes. The airlock was full of respiratory mixture, the internal hatch wide open, a fragment of corridor brightly lit could be seen through it. The last thing kept by his memory was a feeling of surprise when the dead end transformed itself into an open hatch. He also remembered a suffocation spasm and how his fingers were tearing at the helmet locks at the very instant when the external hatch returned to its normal position.

For some time he had simply lain on the floor, enjoying the taste of the air, sweetish because of the abundance of oxygen. Strength was gradually returning to him, accompanied by anxiety which grew intolerable a minute later. After a few sobs, he made himself get up and, picking up his weapon, stepped into the dazzling radiance of the corridor.

The passage proved to be short, a dozen feet at most. Its walls and arching ceiling were glowing softly. At the opposite end, he saw another open hatch. Simeon stole toward it and, weak with nervousness, looked into the next room.

His worst conjectures came true. He recoiled from the hatch, but was left with no other way. The oxygen bottle was empty, and he had to replace it to go out of here. Bracing himself, Simeon peered out of the hatch again.

From the place where he was now standing, he could see the rest of the corridor dividing a huge room in two halves; its walls had become transparent, allowing him to clearly see machines behind them. They were functioning. Complex surges of light flashed across electronic units; a couple of screens gleamed, mechanical devices were busy executing a predetermined series of operations with monotonous regularity.

Clutching the MG's handle in his white-knuckled fingers, Simeon stepped into the hatch and stopped, immobilized by some mystical horror. A few steps more, and he found himself face to face with a great number of machines which had been for him a synonym of the word death ever since he'd been born.

He barely stopped himself from shooting – to disturb this monster would have been crazy – and rushed forward, dashing along the corridor until he reached the next room.

It was quiet and flooded with light. Air was pouring in from some invisible sources. Hot with excitement, Simeon welcomed its cool flow. Along the walls of the rectangular hall there were tall racks stacked high with rows of books and disks of memory crystals. A strange machine with several screens towered in the middle; two seats were placed nearby. Simeon stole past the inactive machine and froze in the doorway of yet another hall, feeling that he was on the brink of a nervous breakdown. It was for the first time in his life that he found himself in such an eerie and mysterious place.

The room differed dramatically from the two previous ones. Never before had he seen such an ordered collection of all kinds of things: a table, some soft chairs, a long couch, tall bookcases with transparent doors – all these didn't seem to be out of place here. On the contrary, they made the room look warm and cozy. But that was only a fleeting feeling which disappeared, crushed by his survival instincts; Simeon was still in a state of feverish excitement, and his mind was nothing else but a continuation of the weapon he was squeezing in his hand.

While he was examining the perimeter of the walls and the strange images in dark frames hanging on them, he sensed a motion in the middle of the room.

He swiftly turned round, simultaneously stepping back and raising his MG, but his finger froze on the trigger.

A strange being, woven of light, smile and — and fright, stood by the low couch. At a glance, Simeon knew that he was looking at a human being.

The discovery shocked him deep inside. Completely stunned, he studied the small figure, blond curly hair dropping to its shoulders and frightened blue eyes. A thin nose with trembling nostrils and a mouth flashing a helpless smile made the face even more perfect. The creature was staring into the black eye of the barrel, as frozen as he was himself.

"Who are you?" the voice- husky with emotion broke the thick silence.

"I'm Simeon," he answered equally hoarsely after a pause, feeling unsure of his answer.

Neither of them had recovered from the shock yet, and they were only able to stand and look each other; Simeon watchful, the creature frightened and amazed.

"My name is Yanna." She took an uncertain step towards Simeon and, all of a sudden, stretched out her little hand with pale trembling fingers.

His heart clenched. He knew this gesture very well, as that's how he used to greet his father. To accept it would have meant to completely rely upon a person, to become unarmed and helpless. But this was a human standing in front of him! Yanna's face was neither malicious nor menacing. Being of his height, she had an open and friendly manner, offering her hand.

Slowly he lowered the gun. He pulled off his glove and cautiously touched her hand. Yanna flinched, then squeezed his palm.

The chaos of steel labyrinths shrank back. There was another human being in this world, and Simeon felt her hand's warmth.

Yanna remained still. Then she looked up. She must have noticed the change in him as she asked, "What's the matter? Why are you crying?"

If he could answer the question. Simeon was only a boy of twelve deprived of his father and lost among the ruins of ancient spaceships. He had to break down some time or other, and now it had happened. His legs gave; he collapsed in a heap on the floor. Tears, hot and bitter, streamed down his cheeks. Frightened, Yanna released his hand; he was sobbing, realizing how much time he had spent without sleep, without a meal, realizing the importance of this human warmth that he'd believed he'd lost forever.

Tears were hot on his face but he wasn't ashamed of them; on the contrary, he felt an incredible relief, believing wholeheartedly in Yanna's existence.

A warm palm softly touched his cheek. Simeon opened his eyes, and she pulled back her hand, unsure whether to ask him another question. Something in her appearance put Simeon on his guard. "Why don’t you have a weapon?" he blurted out.

"A weapon?" Yanna repeated. A surprised smile flitted across her face. "What would I want with it? Don't you know that women don't carry arms?"

Simeon thought he'd heard it wrong. "A woman?" his eyes lit up with joy. "So, you are my Mom, then?"

Yanna froze. She must have finally worked out the meaning of his words as she shook her head and said, "No, I cannot be your Mother. I am a woman. A girl, rather, but you must be older than I am. How old are you?"

"Twelve," he replied mechanically, unable to resist disappointment. Father had always said that his mother was a woman. He looked up at her, "Are there any other women apart from Mom?"

"I don't know." Yanna answered, puzzled. The idea of parenthood was devoid of any meaning for her. Simeon's arrival had bewildered the ten-year-old girl who had long ago come to the conclusion that people existed only in books and on memory crystals, even though Andor didn't agree with her and told her stories about forty-seven worlds colonized by men.

"Have you ever seen people?" she blurted out.

A pained expression crossed the boy's gaunt face. "I used to have a father," he said in a low voice.

Yanna felt a pang of pity. She'd hurt him, though no one had taught the girl to recognize such things. Overcoming timidity, she sat down beside him.

"Are you hungry?" she asked the first question that crossed her mind.

"Eh?" Simeon hadn't yet recovered from the shock and didn't catch what she said while thinking of his father.

"Are you... hungry?" Yanna repeated, unsure.

Seeing her so timid, Simeon put his hand into his pocket. He took out the burst tin of canned food – his sole nutrition reserve for the moment – and held it out to Yanna. "Take this."

The girl cautiously took the deformed tin, its sides still caked with some dark substance. She turned it round in her hands, sniffed it and pulled a face, unable to hide her surprise. "You really eat that?"

She seemed stunned, ready to burst into tears or to burst out laughing.

Simeon glanced at her gloomily and nodded. He found absolutely nothing amusing or strange therein. She attempted to smile. "Come with me, I'll make something for you."

He didn't object. The hunger pangs had already subsided; the cramps in his stomach weren't so bad anymore. Still, the mention of food made him feel weak.

Yanna took him by the hand and guided him to the exit. Simeon's whole being focused on the warm and slightly damp palm of the girl. He had never thought that it felt so good to sense life.

A short corridor led them to a landing with five closed hatches in its walls. An air generator rustled overhead, releasing a cool, life-bearing jet of oxygen.

The room they entered was the smallest of all, but still far more spacious than his shack. It could comfortably seat, say, five persons.

Simeon sat down in a cozy armchair by an oval table and looked round with curiosity. Apart from the familiar shape of a nuclear thermostat, he noticed a number of other devices which remained alien to him.

In a few practiced motions, Simeon unzipped his sealed light suit and stepped out of it, leaving it in a heap on the floor. He watched the girl manipulate a shiny machine. Two cylinders were connected by means of a set of hoses to a power generator and a transparent sphere on the base of which he read:

INLET CHAMBER OF FOOD PRODUCTS SYNTHESIZER

OPERATE ONLY WHEN SHELL CLOSED!

Finally the machine's bowels began to murmur. Simeon watched anxiously as lights flashed on the control console, but Yanna paid no attention to them. She was busy pressing buttons, putting out plates, cutting something, all the while furtively glancing at him until he felt dizzy with the abundance of all kinds of food and the unusual odors floating in the room.

Yanna sat down to table and took a fork. She barely touched her food while Simeon was helping himself. She couldn't take her eyes off his gaunt face. He was taller and evidently stronger than herself. His skin had a strange bronze hue. Yanna didn't know this was common space tan.

“Where are you from?” she couldn't help asking.

Simeon’s hand stopped in mid-air. Where are you from, she'd said. He realized he couldn't answer her question.

Yanna brushed off a strand of blond hair and said, “You came in through the main airlock. But I don’t know what’s behind it. I’ve never left this place.”

Simeon nearly dropped his fork.

“You know... I cannot.” Yanna struggled to find the right words. “I’m glad you’ve come.”

Tears flowed down her cheeks, but she was smiling at the same time.

...

Those who are happy never notice time go by. Neither he nor she could name what was going on in their souls. Time had stopped. They enjoyed the very possibility of seeing and speaking to each other which was already a source of incredible joy for both after the loneliness they had experienced, even though the girl hadn’t known one hundredth of the hardships that comprised his life. They would speak, sometimes struggling to understand each other, as though they were two beings from different worlds.

Any other time Simeon would have given it some thought, but now he felt as if the stern world of the steel sphere was distancing, rapidly becoming unreal.

Yanna rose from the table and began removing the plates when the hatch rustled open behind the boy's back.

He felt electrocuted. Simeon jumped to his feet, swinging round, and froze. An icy horror filled his heart.

A robot stood in the doorway.

It resembled a man so much it sent shivers down your spine, but the boy could not be fooled by the likeness – this was a machine.

He reached for his gun but his fingers closed around thin air. He'd left his weapon in the room where he'd seen Yanna first. Thousands of thoughts flashed through his mind and disappeared, soaked up by his brain, leaving only one,

'They got me. The weapon! I left it behind. So stupid. This is death. I must kill. KILL!'

"Morning, Andor!" Yanna's voice cut through his thoughts. She continued to remove dishes.

"Morning, Yanna," the robot answered in a low pleasant voice. His lips fashioned of metal and plastic moved in unison with his words. He turned to the boy. "Morning, sir! May I ask your na-"

Simeon lunged onto him.

He vaulted, his feet kicking the lifeless face. The machine tumbled to the floor. He punched the steel breast with such force that he his knuckles exploded with pain. His other hand closed around whatever passed for the robot's throat, trying to strangle him.

"Run!" he shouted desperately, hoping that Yanna would understand his plan and escape while he was pinning the robot to the floor.

The girl didn't move. The momentary fright in her face gave way to surprise.

"What are you doing?" she demanded. "Release Andor, now!"

The lying robot struggled a few times as if checking the strength of his opponent, then jumped to his feet.

Simeon was thrown into a corner, but so gently and accurately that he wasn't hurt. Horrified, he squeezed his eyes shut, shrinking into the wall. He was ready to die.

Instead of a gunshot, he heard the same voice rumbling over his head. "Sir, may I inquire about the reason for your discontent?"

Simeon forced his eyes open. The robot was kneeling beside him.

"I hope you didn't hurt yourself?" he asked.

Simeon heard a sob behind as Yanna couldn't take the strain.

Simeon was staring at the android kneeling beside him. He couldn't believe it. The Universe had collapsed. He had just struck a robot, but the latter hadn't killed him in return! This was too illogical — beyond his comprehension. Himself, he'd learnt to walk and to shoot at the same time.

"Simeon!" Yanna's voice broke, her breathing uneven. "Andor won't hurt you. Trust me." She walked over to the android and took him by the hand. "Look, he isn't scary. Andor is my teacher. He used to feed me when I was a baby. He told me about people."

That was apparently too much for her. Yanna burst into tears.

Simeon would have loved to believe her, but he couldn't help feeling the way he did. A robot was a robot. Standing next to one scared the hell out of him. Simeon glanced over the robot's chromium-plated body but saw no sign of a weapon. It looked like Yanna was telling the truth. The thought puzzled him. An unarmed robot! This glaring contradiction with all his life experience confused him. It was so absurd that he almost burst out laughing.

"I can't harm a human," the flat voice broke the silence, "even if you ordered me to do so, Sir."

Andor rose and demonstratively stepped aside.

Simeon felt he was going mad. He didn't lose sight of the android for a second. He was shaking. There was hell in his heart.

"What is sir?" he asked, scrambling back to his feet, just to say something.

"It's a polite form of addressing human males," Andor quietly explained. "A woman is addressed lady."

Simeon felt sorry for himself. Why had this creature had to come and stand between them? "I'm off," he said coldly, picking up his suit.

Yanna startled as if he'd struck her. "But why?" she demanded. "You don't believe me, do you?"

"I don't know," he turned round and went out.

Having returned to the central room, he picked up his MG and squeezed its cold plastic hard.

Yanna walked in.

"I'm short of oxygen," Simeon said gloomily, avoiding looking at the android that lurked in the doorway. It was obvious Yanna liked this machine for some reason, and now, holding a weapon, he was afraid of upsetting her even more by shooting the robot down.

"Come here," Yanna called in a low voice.

There were four other doors leading out of the airlock, and the girl opened one of them. Simon saw tall racks piled with sealed containers. Simeon followed her and froze, rooted to the floor.

Talk about Aladdin's cave.

Fascinated, he stared at the neat stacks of spacesuits, sorted by size. A unified model, used by Earth commandos. Until now he had only heard his father speak about it.

"Are they in working order?" he asked, his voice trembling.

Yanna raised a surprised eyebrow. She couldn’t understand his emotion: the girl hadn’t had to struggle for survival, she had never choked to near death because of lack of oxygen, had never turned blind because of jammed light filters; she hadn't had to patch a spacesuit nor been frozen to near death because of a failed thermostat.

“Sure. Everything's in good working order here,” she answered. Yanna had never entered the storeroom before, it was Andor's job, but she trusted him. She glanced at Simeon and added, “You can take all you need.”

He couldn't resist the temptation. Then again, what temptation? His spacesuit was bursting at the seams. At the time, Father and himself had spent ages looking for the right size but never found it. How many times had Andrei dreamed of a spacesuit equipped with a converter for his son! Simeon didn’t know about it, but he remembered his dad explaining to him patiently time and time again, the principle of the converter's work as he described the equipment.

Now Simeon reached for it with confidence. The surprisingly light and strong spacesuit felt as if he'd known it for ages, up to the smallest wire and tiniest indicator. Father kept helping him, even after his death.

Yanna looked at him, uncomprehending as he froze, lifeless, his heart overtaken by memories that took him far away from the storeroom.

At last he started, getting rid of a vision, and turned to her. His expression was pained.

“Why?” she asked, faltering. “Why are you going?”

Simeon sighed and began to pull on the spacesuit. He clicked the weapon belt on, fastened the MG to it and moved his shoulders. Not sensing the usual weight of an oxygen cylinder felt weird. He put his finger on the converter’s button. His lungs filled with the air mix that the device made from pills stacked up in its holders. A stack the size of his hand was sufficient for a day’s breathing.

Right until now Simeon hadn’t traveled further than a couple miles from home, except for emergencies. One oxygen cylinder that he could use with his light spacesuit only lasted him seven hours. And now he could take on the world!

“Thanks,” his heart was breaking.

Yanna burst out crying again. “Why?” she repeated obstinately, sobbing.

He couldn't explain. He himself didn’t understand what it was that made him do it. He couldn't define it, let alone explain it to Yanna. He simply knew that he had to leave the place inhabited by a machine. At a certain point, he very nearly stayed, but then his heart filled with such icy cold that he almost screamed.

A twelve years’ life in a vacuum, amid the constant combat between cybernetic systems. Some of the adults who'd lived their entire lives on their peaceful little planets had lost their sanity witnessing it. He'd grown up here. He was a part of this nasty, impossible world, and no sooner had he begun to perceive the most elementary notions of the world than he got the cruel rules of the game. Now he would like to break them, but he couldn’t. To consider the situation from a normal point of view and understand it, to believe Yanna he would have had to grow mad. And to forget his dad.

Then he sighed as if he had found a way out, grasped another spacesuit and held it out to the girl.

She got shy, but quickly controlled herself.

Yanna’s trembling fingers at once got tangled in locks and fasteners. Simeon helped her, carefully checked the function of life support systems and shut her helmet himself.

“Let’s go,” he said through the communicator, taking her by the hand.

Yanna nodded, unable to utter a word. Maybe, for the first time in her life she was properly frightened.

Andor appeared in the door opening. He silently watched the preparations while Simeon was loading the pack with holders containing oxygen tablets and with charged compact generating sets.

“Good-bye, sir,” the android uttered calmly when they moved towards the airlock. “Yanna, will you return?”

“Sure, Andor.” She replied, though being in that moment quite unaware of any further development of events.

They passed the airlock.

In fact, Yanna had never left her protected apartments. Simeon saw the girl’s face turning pale and growing a sallow hue once they stepped into the gloom and walked through an enfilade of ruined halls.

Yanna’s breath became intermittent and accelerated. She was shivering, Simeon felt it even through the thick material of pressurized gloves.

The flashlights of their helmets sliced through the darkness, revealing more chilling details of a combat between men and machines that had unfolded here in former times.

Finally they saw the airlock next to which Simeon, almost suffocating, had noticed the glowing sign that had saved his life. The same sign was repeated on the inner side, but here the characters glowed red, as if dooming anyone who dared exit to certain death.

END OF PRESSURIZED PREMISES

Simeon was aware that he was probably being cruel, but he didn’t see any other way of revealing his feelings to her, of making her understand the true meaning of the phrase about the impossibility of the truce between man and machine.

He led the girl into a vestibule. The light of their two flashlights illuminated the eerie contents of the cramped cabin.

“There,” Simeon said hoarsely when she suppressed a shriek at the sight of two charred corpses. “That's what happened to my father," he managed, suppressing his hatred. “They tried to do the same to me hundreds of times!”

* * *

The way home proved to be long.

For the first time in his life, he was not in a hurry to return. This was unbelievable: only a few hours ago he'd been suffocating, but now there was plenty of oxygen. He could do what he wanted. By simply touching a button inside the pressure helmet with the tongue he could drink some water or get a food pill.

Nevertheless Simeon was moody.

Only yesterday a similar spacesuit would have been his dream come true.

Then why wasn’t he happy now?

Hundreds of questions ripped his mind apart. The world around him was imperceptibly changing; existence as he knew it was slowly but inevitably collapsing.

Father’s tales about human beings had turned to reality.

'Where did Yanna come from? Who are the people that died when defending her shelter? What is Andor and, generally speaking, how is it possible that there’s a robot not trying to kill me? Perhaps it’s faulty?'

Slowly Simeon scrambled through the sinister interiors of the gutted spaceships that used to belong to his ancestors, trying for the first time to comprehend the eerie world of mechanical wreckage.

The corridor arched.

He turned a corner and found himself in front of a mangled doorway.

A massive hatch had been torn off its hinges by the old explosion and now hung overhead, stuck in the wall just under the ceiling. A wide crack gaped alongside it. Its edges were blocked with debris, half-sucked in by depressurization: deformed seats, crumpled paperwork, crushed memory crystals, some rags and fragments of devices and weapons.

Approaching the door, he caught sight of a human torso. Still clad in a tattered uniform, it was pinned to the hole with the rest of the debris. No spacesuit. The man's glazed-over eyes were distorted with agony.

Simeon shrank back. His father’s body must have been floating somewhere in the vacuum, looking exactly as this one.

The feeling shattered him. All the corpses filling the spheroid had at one time been living men.

* * *

He was deeply shaken by his epiphany.

The boy’s mind was still unable to grasp the full horror of reality, but the understanding that had just dawned upon him was sufficient enough to plunge him into shock.

He aimlessly trudged along tangled passages for a long time, mechanically hopping from one shell-hole into another. The clear and familiar world of the steel labyrinth had unexpectedly changed, as if the mask of the ordinary had been torn off it. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? Simeon was aware of something new, horrid and incomprehensible, intruding into his life, making it yet less comfortable, yet more complicated and lonely, as if he hadn’t so many other troubles.

He would grow up first, and only then would he realize: just in those days, after his father’s death, his meeting Yanna and Andor, his intellect really began to produce new ideas, although the process was rather distressing. The facts and notions that Andrei had sought to transfer to Simeon, became clearer and yet clearer to him, and these separate bits of other people’s experience that he inherited, would eventually help him to fit together a fragile and awful mosaic of the reality surrounding him.

* * *

For the next three days, he was busy. He'd finally found his way home and caught some sleep in his cramped room. Then he ventured out to the nearest stores to fill up on water and food, but the usual excitement of ++++a challenge had gone.

Not quite understanding what was happening to him, he got angry.

Several times he'd abandon whatever he was doing and climb out onto the surface of the spheroid. He'd sit there for hours, gazing at the crimson nebula and the rampant contours of battleships amid the distant stars.

Simeon was overwhelmed with melancholy as he knew that there was life not very far from his shelter. And even the existence of Andor didn’t bother him as much as before.

'I'll kill him,' Simeon thought. So, he chose the simplest solution for the robot problem.

Finally, by the end of the third day, he couldn't stand it any longer. He headed back to see the girl.

6.

"Oh, Simeon! Simeon! I'm so happy you're back!" Yanna rushed out to meet him and threw her arms round his neck, the shock of her silky hair covering the boy's helmet like golden tinsel.

He was taken aback for a second, but Yanna's sincere joy broke the fragile ice. Simeon raised his visor. The hatch behind his back hissed shut.

The girl's eyes sparkled. "Andor and I were so worried," she admitted.

The boy tensed up. His right hand lay on his gun. "Where is he?"

Yanna followed his gesture. Her gaze betrayed fear. "Don't know. He went out. He didn't say when he'd be back."

Simeon's fingers released the handle of the weapon. It was of little consequence. The android wouldn't catch him unawares again. As far as Simeon was concerned, he was as good as dead. He didn't want to think of the robot now – Yanna's joy filled him with the exciting and unfamiliar sensation of happiness. It was a new, pleasant and strange feeling, even better than the taste of oxygen or an accurate shot.

"Will you go again?" Yanna asked with badly concealed anxiety.

"No," Simeon shook his head. "I've come to stay."

He removed his helmet and followed Yanna to the community room. On a table next to a wide open bookcase lay a book open in the middle, next to a glass filled with pink liquid.

Yanna sat down on the couch. "I was worried," she admitted as she watched Simeon remove his spacesuit. "Andor said you'd be back, but I didn't believe him."

Simeon frowned. The idea of the robot was quickly becoming as obsessive as a toothache.

They kept silent for some seconds, unable to control the feelings overwhelming them both and not knowing what to say. Both were too grown up for their age. Their daily problems would have broken any child of ten or twelve. But subconsciously they remained children. Their world was simple to the point of absurdity, bot at the same time excruciatingly complex.

They knew no grown-up tricks: they didn't know how to lie or deceive, their consciousness was free from all the complexes and conventions developed by our millennia-old civilization.

They could only say what they felt, which made their hearts sensitive like live wires. Their lives had been shattered; their world was collapsing while fusing their two hearts together: the unity of two experiences and two identities.

Yanna watched Simeon fold his spacesuit. He'd intruded into her life amid all the ideas and reveries she'd borrowed from films and books. He had destroyed her world, showed her the vacuum and the gloom reigning behind the walls of her dwelling — so fragile and accident prone.

Terrified, she was on the brink of tears. She didn't remember how she'd got home that day; the silence and emptiness surrounding her after Simeon's departure had stupefied her.

He too had experienced something similar. Simeon wouldn't say why he was attracted to this place. Now the tense silence was hurting them both.

They were too pure, too naïve — too wise. But also cruel: two little living beings lost in the boundless dark of the Universe amidst the cold and deadly chaos of metal drifting through a vacuum.

Simeon gave a faint smile. All of a sudden his face lit up. He was about to say something but Yanna, noticing the change, couldn't restrain herself any more. Joy, relief, an incomprehensible bitterness and a tenderness strange in a ten-year-old girl – all these flooded over her as she ran up to Simeon, flung her arms round his neck and clung to him, shaking with sobs.

Somewhat scared, he moved back and looked in her face.

A tearful Yanna gave him a happy smile.

* * *

Yanna woke up early in the morning before the artificial daylight ceiling fixtures had lit up, replacing the dim night lighting in the compartments. She stayed in bed for a while, half-believing what had happened the day before.

Then she felt anxious. Andor had been absent for two days. It had happened before that her instructor left the protected modules for a long time, but Yanna, not knowing what dangers lay behind the main airlock, had never been really anxious for him. Or rather, she knew it theoretically, but to hear of something and to see it with one's own eyes are two different things.

She sighed and got up. She took a peek into the adjacent room and stood for a while in complete darkness, listening to Simeon's broken breathing. Then she went to the galley and began making breakfast. For the first time in her life, Yanna had no idea what the coming day had in store for her. What if Simeon would make her suit up again and step out of the main airlock? The thought was awful. The contents of hundreds of books she had read kept intruding upon her mind. What once had sounded like fiction or looked like a collection of stage props was now turning into reality. There were other people besides her. There were huge spheres called planets out there. She wasn't unique, nor was her room the center of the Universe.

Immediately she thought of Andor. Where was he? She couldn't help worrying about her old mentor.

And her parents? Simeon had told her that he'd had a father who'd been killed by a battle machine. Then, where were her own father and mother?

But what if...

Yanna's legs gave way under her as she realized clearly: Simeon's father had been killed by a robot. What if her parents, too... Whose carbonized corpses were those in the battered airlock?

So gradually, the war mentality began to creep into her mind.

After breakfast Yanna dragged Simeon off to the library. He followed her reluctantly. They hadn't heard from Andor yet, but quite a few other machines aroused his suspicion, including an odd motionless apparatus with two opal-black screens placed in the library.

Yanna laughed sincerely, not understanding how one could be afraid of a universal library processor.

The two children like two halves of one large mind. Simeon's part contained all the hands-on survival experience in the inhuman conditions of the spheroid. His mind stored only the knowledge he could have obtained during everyday struggle. Yanna, on the contrary, knew lots of things; she was literally crammed with all sorts of information, but she was unable to apply it and would for certain have perished had she had to venture outside.

Yanna approached the computer in the middle of the room. Its indicator lights kept flashing cheerfully, but the two monitors in front of the seats remained black. Warily Simeon walked around the machine, keeping his hand on the handle of his weapon just in case.

Yanna opened the central panel and produced a thin plastic headband hooked up to the machine with wires.

"Put it on," she said, "and sit down."

Simeon tensed up. "Why?".

Yanna smiled; dimples appeared on her cheeks. "Don't be afraid. I want to show you people. This headband helps me learn."

After a second's hesitation Simeon obeyed. He didn't want to disappoint Yanna. Besides, he kept his right hand closed around his MG, so it wouldn't be a good idea for the machine to suddenly spring to life and point a weapon at them.

"Close your eyes," the girl sank into the opposite seat. Yanna was unaware that she was performing a revolution in his life – how could she have known the wonderful potential of the ordinary processor so familiar to her?

Simeon put on the headband and lowered his eyelids. He felt a weak prickle in his temples.

He didn't see the opposite monitor light up, streaming with incomprehensible messages. Yanna had never seen anything like that, either.

POTENTIAL INTELLIGENCE TEST: 170 POINTS

REAL KNOWLEDGE TEST: 28.1 POINTS

PERSONALITY TESTED. ANTISTRESS INDEX: 127 UNITS

AUTOMATIC TRAINING PROGRAM ACTIVATED

Simeon felt something pierce his arm. He tensed up, about to spring back to his feet, then succumbed to a pleasant weakness overtaking him. A

A soft female voice echoed in his mind,

"Relax. Don't open your eyes. Now you will hear a brief course on the history of the Galaxy. The information will be transmitted directly into your brain."

Later Simeon could barely remember what happened next. He seemed to have lost all will of his own.

Yanna wasn't surprised seeing him sunk into a trance. Admittedly she was disappointed he couldn't talk to her for some time. The girl had experienced similar phenomena more than once and didn't consider a direct neurosensory contact with a machine to be something supernatural or dangerous.

The primary course lasted four days. Simeon ate and slept without in fact realizing what he was doing and then returned to his seat, which was actually a very complex diagnostics and life support machine.

The sophisticated automatics of its teaching module could not make him a genius. Having determined his brain's potential, the machine's processor simply uploaded to it a certain amount of general education information. The teaching module didn't pursue any concrete aim; its actions were akin to the behavior of a wave rolling onto a desolate beach where, half-buried in sand, lay an empty bottle. The wave would fill it with brine and recede, totally indifferent to the change in its contents or in the bottle itself.

Yanna quietly entered the library.

Simeon slumped in his seat in front of the computer terminal, his white-knuckled fingers clutching the armrests.

She cautiously went round the machine.

Simeon was asleep. His hair was tousled; his head drooped to one side. Yanna's heart sank. She remembered at once what he'd told her about machines; overcome with fright, she looked at the chrome-plated teaching module with its gleaming polished plastic panels.

What if... what if the machine had harmed Simeon? Fear touched her chest with its cold sharp-clawed fingers. Yanna was not devoid of imagination. While listening to Simeon's accounts she'd had the impression that she watching a movie.

She looked around her, desperate. What if something had actually happened to Simeon? Andor had been out for more than a week. She'd be left here all alone...

The terrible, gloomy, dangerous world opened up before her as an icy abyss swarming with the ominous shadows of battle machines.

Simeon emitted a weak sigh. His eyelids began to tremble.

He opened his eyes.

Yanna was sitting on the armrest of his seat, white as a sheet. Her lips quivered.

"What happened?" she asked with genuine anxiety.

Slowly Simeon came round.

"I have a headache," he pressed his hands to his temples where the electrodes had sunk into them. The indicator lights on the teaching module control panel kept flashing happily at each other. He stared at their patterns. For the first time in his life, he wasn't afraid of them. He was trying to remember and bring back the sensation of real time.

Two children and machines.

Some of them had tried to kill them. Others helped them survive. Yet others didn't do anything at all. But they all controlled their lives. That was one thing Simeon knew. But why? He was shocked by the revelation that all machines as well as the steel spheroid itself had been created by people; directed by their will and actions.

He wouldn't be able to explain what it was that he felt. The understanding had come, making him quite grown-up, making his soul and mind ten years older, but all that was still deep in his subconscious. In fact, the whole process had resulted in resentment, confusion and anger. Now he began to grasp the significance of the ships' cemetery, seeing clearly that it was a place resulted from cruelty and madness. This place had never been intended for living. Yanna and himself were machines' slaves. Every breath, every second of their life could be granted or taken away by these inanimate devices.

"No," he whispered.

Yanna turned to him in surprise.

Simeon had finally emerged from his slumber. He refused to believe that his father had been one of those who initially doomed him to this kind of life. And he also understood that he wasn't a machines' slave. He was their master. He belonged to the race of creators.

Simeon couldn't yet explain it, the ideas still growing within him to become his personal experience. His anxiety culminated in a bitter sensation of injustice, of humbleness; then, by a sort of chain reaction, that sensation aroused more feelings, more malicious, cold and practical.

"Let's go and have dinner," Yanna said, fingering his tangled hair.

Simeon leaned back, placing his head on the headrest and almost sinking in the huge cushioned seat.

"Don't want to. Maybe later?"

Yanna nodded, looking asquint at Simeon. It was as if she saw this thoughtful expression on his face for the first time. She was neither hurt nor surprised, knowing by experience how difficult it might be to return to reality after getting an injection of the antistress drug used by the life-support automatics. She had also many times recovered her senses sitting in the same armchair and feeling her head bursting with new information. But she was unaware of this difference between them: Simeon's mind, geared toward survival, had already linked all the new data about the Universe and people with the spheroid and drawn some obvious conclusions that had never entered her head.

"Okay then," she sighed and slipped out of the library as quietly as she had entered. Instinctively she knew he wanted to be left alone.

Simeon hardly noticed her leave.

He got up and approached the shelves stacked with long rows of books. Despite the headache and the feeling of his spiritual bankruptcy, he needed to get some information himself, without the machine's aid. He glanced over the books' spines, but none of them caught his eye. Then he noticed a thick stack of plastic paper taped together.

"LOGBOOK," he read. "ISLAND OF HOPE COLONY. Started on 10.07.2607 Galaxy Calendar."

He returned to the table and, his heart sinking, turned the first page. His inner voice suggested that this was what he'd been subconsciously looking for on the bookshelves.

He scanned the printed lines,

"10th July 2607. There are thirty-two of us. Twenty-nine men and three women, the remainder of the crews of fifteen hundred spaceships engaged in the battle."

Simeon buried himself in reading.

It seemed to him that he was seeing them – irreconcilable enemies capable not only of meeting inside the spheroid shaken by explosions, but also of shaking hands.

Glancing over the even print, he grasped the sheer terror of their despair, all their hardships and hopes, as this was the kind of life he himself knew.

They had welded together several surviving spacecraft, connected them by airlocks and sealed them. Then they had given a name to their little world amidst the raging hell of collisions. They called it The Island of Hope.

As he was reading, he couldn't help visualizing them living within these walls, as if those people had come back from the past and stood in his mind's eye like a row of ghosts.

They had not despaired.

Page after page, he followed their struggle and conflicts, their friendship, love and hatred. The people lost in the middle of Great Nothing had gradually become aware of the monstrosity of the war. They saw the light.

"19th December 2607. Finally we located a repairable spacecraft and towed it off to the base. It's an LX light raider. We'll have to repair and rebuild most of the onboard equipment, restore all external communications, the radar system and so on. We are up to our eyeballs in work. The spheroid continues to shudder, but not as badly as before. We hardly ever move away from the base, and even this spacecraft has been found nearby. Sergei has already warned everybody about the activate battle robots he's come across during his sorties. Good job he's a cyber wiz! He managed to disarm them, otherwise we would have had it! It gives you the creeps just to think of all those battle machines waiting for their hour to come.

"We have to get out of here, the sooner the better. This place is not just terrifying, it's the testimony of our insanity, exposing it in front of the rest of the Universe.

Still, they had perished. They would never know who or what had been the first pebble that had started the avalanche. Three months later, when the repair works were in full swing, the spheroid was shaken by the first explosions of a new war between machines. The people began to act frantically, speeding up the repairs and building some defenses around the colony. But by then, the skirmishes between machines had already spread over the whole spheroid, and separate groups of robots kept breaking through their defenses sowing destruction and death.

That was a cruel and unequal battle. Simeon could hardly imagine those days when machines were teeming everywhere. As far as he could remember, they were few and far between: the robots' frenzy of mutual destruction had peaked around the time when the final tragedy of the Island of Hope took place.

The people inhabiting the tiny world wanted desperately to live, but they had all perished, one after another. They'd believed they could escape, so they continued fighting until there remained only two of them. They were Yanna's parents whose carbonized bodies he saw in the airlock near a destroyed battle machine.

Simeon turned the last page. He was crushed. Only now did he completely realize where Yanna had come from — and who he himself was. His father had gone through a yet harder tragedy than the Island of Hope's fate. Because he had been alone.

And Mother?

Simeon shook his head sorrowfully as if answering his own thoughts. He knew nothing about her.

Turning in the chair, he wanted to get up when he caught sight of a figure frozen in the library's doorway. Andor.

Simeon reacted without thinking: a knee-jerk reaction refined by years of practice. He whipped out his MG, pointing it upwards.

The android didn't move. He stood in the doorway, looking eerily like a man yet his steel parts glowed like the most dangerous of machines.

"Hi, Andor," Simeon said, lowering his weapon.

"Good afternoon, sir!" Andor stepped into the library. "I am glad you're back."

Simeon couldn't shoot and he knew it.

Andor sat in the opposite chair. Simeon studied his shimmering armor, his almost human face and the logo on his chest indicating a self-developing cybernetic system. He didn't know what to think. What was this creature? A friend? An enemy? Or... a slave?

"Why did you leave?" Simeon asked him.

"I knew you would kill me," Andor answered without hesitation.

Simeon's hand reached for the gun. "How sure are you that I won't kill you now?"

Andor shook his head. "I'm not. But I know that you have changed. Before, you were guided by your instincts. Now you possess enough information to make an unbiased decision."

"I was guided by my experience!" the boy interrupted him. "And you — you contradict it."

He was dead tired. Making small talk with a robot was the last thing on his agenda.

He frowned at the android. It was clear that this machine was different. It didn't really contradict his experience, it was more like an exception to the rule. He couldn't think straight; he'd had very little experience in logical thinking. After all, these were his first steps in mastering the most perfect instrument for survival in the Universe: a mind armed with knowledge.

"I radically differ from all other machines," Andor said, breaking the lingering pause in the conversation. Was he reading his thoughts? "You have nothing to fear from me," he added. "I've already told you I can't hurt a human."

Simeon grinned, "D'you mean the three laws of robotics or something?" he asked, suddenly remembering them from the mine of useless information the teaching module had crammed him with.

Andor understood his sarcasm. "The laws of robotics were created a long time ago, and they worked as long as people stuck to them. But in building their battle machines, they had to ignore them. I don't abide by them, anyway. Laws are nothing compared to the AI psychology."

"Are you an AI?!"

Andor stared at the boy with his unblinking bulging eyes. He looked as if he desperately wanted his face of steel and plastic to be capable of expressing emotions. "I am an experimental model," he confirmed. "My creators failed to go through with the experiment. They were killed in a battle. I was created as a self-developing system intended for independent reconnaissance of very distant stars and planets. I was to develop by constantly updating my knowledge and making independent decisions – and that was all. Probably those who created me did not suppose that in the course of time I would become capable of emotions."

Simeon shook his head in disbelief. "Unbelievable," he whispered to himself as if he was thinking aloud.

"From the point of view of known technology – yes, you could say so. An electronic copy of a human neuron is a complex device several cubic inches in size. Now imagine the size of billions of neurons forming a real biological brain. But I operate on a different principle. Inside me, they used the revolutionary technology of a photon data transmitter. Now, I am afraid, this technology is buried with me here forever," he meaningfully knocked on his chrome-plated skull.

"Do you get upset?" Simeon asked on a hunch.

"Of course I do. But my emotions differ from the human ones quite a bit. They are colder, more rational. I'm a machine, after all."

Silence hung in the air. This new information was too sudden.

"But you educated Yanna! What's rational in that? Why did you do so?"

"What do you mean, why? Did you love your father?"

"Of course I did!"

"And who do you think my parents are?"

Simeon was at a loss. The question didn't seem to make sense.

"People," Andor answered curtly.

Simeon dug his fingers deep into the armrests. Stars alone knew how hard it was for him to grasp all this. New information, new problems. And he'd have to learn to solve them!

Suddenly he realized that this was what he wanted to do. His life took on a new meaning. He wasn't a little boy anymore, chased by metallic monsters and hiding from them in dark passages.

Now he was a Man.

The android rose. "I got the impression Yanna expects you to join her for dinner," he stated. "Once you're finished, I would like you to familiarize yourself with the colony’s defense system."

"Fine," Simeon rose and looked at Andor. "Will you join us?"

The android nodded his consent. It seemed to the boy that a faint semblance of a smile touched the robot's steel lips.

7.

A battle robot was scrambling to safety.

Its worn units and rickety body were about to disintegrate, but some software equivalent of the self-preservation instinct was now running within this very expensive machine, driving it farther and farther away in its fruitless attempts to shake off the enemy.

Corridors, halls, compartments, shafts, shell-holes, heaps of trash, human bodies and crumbling skeletons of machines – they all flashed before the sole undamaged video camera of the battle machine that had once been so menacing .

Suddenly its radar located a target. Fountains of sparks showered the deck as the robot braked. His gun turret turned, but the scarlet dot had already disappeared from its radar.

The machine's computer instantly recalculated the target's route. The turret of the vacuum gun moved once again and fired, shelling the bulkhead behind which the man was hiding.

It was a sight begging to be depicted by a mechanorealist's brush. The ugly robot towered in the center of the crumbling reactor room, its search radar warily moving its antenna. The grotesque pose of the battle machine somehow suggested frustration. Had the monster been capable of experiencing fear, he'd be trembling as its processor couldn't really tell whether the enemy was still here. This was the fourth time the machine had encountered this particular enemy, but every time its target somehow escaped, mocking the computer's logic based on always taking the shortest route.

The robot didn't know it was dealing with Man.

The gutted wall emitted a reddish glow, illuminating the room.

Yanna licked her dry lips. Simeon made a warning gesture and stepped forward. He was holding the pulse gun pointing it down, as if not afraid of the bulk of the planetary battle machine towering over him.

Vacuum does not transmit sound, but it seemed to Yanna that she heard the hoarse wail of servomotors when the robot's gun turret began its deadly turn. The mechanical monster had been designed to beat human reaction times, but to Simeon, machine time was no enigma. His brain and his muscles had their own millisecond countdown; he could clearly see the convulsive movements of the mechanical limbs as if in slow motion.

The two black eyes of the vacuum turret had no chance. Simeon's pulse gun beat them to it, his rounds piercing the armor somewhere around the main drive. The robot shuddered, striking up fountains of sparks with its caterpillar tracks; the follow-up shot sent it into a spin. The machine's central processor registered a destructive vibration when something heavy struck its body twice near the motor; the external sensors were disconnected, unable to bear the impact. Now the only way the computer could perceive the world around it was via a video camera, its lens pointed to the part of its own armor coursing with power surges.

Two shadows appeared on the molten remains of the crimson wall. They approached.

"It's disintegrated," a radio frequency reported.

Yanna smiled.

Simeon turned, picked up the empty magazine, reloaded and peered into the robot's smashed electronic interior. Its crackling innards were aglow with green sparks and surged with electric charges being rerouted to new control circuits pulsing with green indicator lights.

The machine's processor was restoring the system, trying to duplicate the lost functions.

Yanna followed his stare and took a step towards the power unit of the machine. Simeon softly pushed her hand aside.

"What's up? It's trying to rebuild its control circuits!"

"Let it be," Simeon pointed at the smashed engine, the ripped tracks and the mangled fragments of the gun turret. "It won't kill anymore."

Yanna imagined the battle machine sentenced to spend an eternity in the silent gloom of the destroyed room, trying to grasp the meaning of it all. Some of Simeon's decisions were admittedly rather strange.

He turned round. Yanna's pale face, lighted by the surges of green lightning, betrayed bewilderment, her eyes feverish. She'd liked the pursuit, but she couldn't relate to the weird feeling Simeon experienced every time he had to kill a machine. True, he didn't enjoy hunting as much anymore – he had shown to them all and to himself who was the master of the spheroid.

"Let's go home," he suggested, having lost all interest in the agonizing remains of the machine, "Andor's waiting."

“Wait,” Yanna tugged at his sleeve. “What are you saying, I don’t understand-”

Simeon shrugged. “They can't control us anymore.”

Yanna pressed her helmet against his visor, trying to look into his eyes. “So that's what this risk is all about?”

He grinned. Did life qualify as a risk?

The infrared eye of the battle machine glowed maliciously in the darkness behind them. Simeon knew what would happen later on. The robot's processor would persevere in its fruitless attempts to restore control of the broken servomotors until its energy had run low. Then the ominous light of the infrared scanner would fade and ultimately, go out.

That was his revenge, if it was possible to apply human feelings to a machine.

"Let's go," he repeated, taking Yanna by the hand.

A narrow utility corridor took them to a shaft that reached the very surface of the spheroid. The exit was safe – it was concealed by a dilapidated control room riddled with shell-holes that offered a view of a steel desert stretching out for dozens of miles.

Simeon helped Yanna to climb inside the control room and froze, scrutinizing the close horizon. She sat down, also peering into the distance. They'd done it many times before. The control room was their favorite place in this part of the steel planetoid. Yanna had got used to the magical colors of the metallic island, but she constantly discovered something new, as if she was gradually, step by step, discovering the stern beauty of crimson colors and their many hues.

The blurred outline of a spiral nebula rose above the ragged horizon. Clusters of starlight froze overhead in the bottomless coal-black sky; a few blood-red dots were sliding past: the spheroid's satellites.

The ragged steel desert underfoot sloped towards the close horizon; here and there, frameworks of hull structures or whole bodies of destroyed spaceships towered over the Abyss.

This was their world. Their Island of Hope. Five years ago they'd met inside its heart inhabited by mechanical death. It was a miracle – two children who'd survived and matured, transforming into a young man and woman. Two saplings of life, seared by nuclear folly, sealed within their pressurized premises, had then made their way to the surface, defying the law of probability.

They were utterly happy but also sad.

Simeon and Yanna loved each other stronger than a brother and sister, more passionately than any amount of young lovers could – they were two parts of a single whole, shuddering at the thought of the time when they had lived separately.

The inspection finished, they left the control room and went to the spheroid's surface. The safe tunnel leading to their dwelling was within ten minutes' walking distance.

Habitually Simeon scrutinized each detail, the slightest motion or change in the familiar landscape, but the process was practically subconscious and didn't prevent him from thinking. Lately he had often felt some dissatisfaction. The more he read, the narrower the steel sphere of the Island of Hope seemed to him. Here, there were no other colors except for the crimson radiance of the nebula, there was no spaciousness except the immense abyss of the cosmos. He tried to imagine other planets — living planets with millions of people inhabiting them, but his imagination was like a caged bird thrashing against the bars – it returned time and time again to the poor reality of the steel labyrinth.

He was unaware of his own maturity and of the fact that his future worried him. For a few years already, survival had ceased to be a pressing matter. More and more often he turned his thoughts to the stars, especially as he knew perfectly well: the spacecraft forming the spheroid had used to travel through space.

* * *

How nice it was to be back home!

Simeon stepped out of the airlock, removed his helmet and froze.

Something was wrong.

His mind didn't yet have the time to work out the reason for this vague anxiety when his hand closed around his MG; he stepped forward, shielding Yanna with his body, and listened.

The air hissed as it was pumped under pressure down the sealant of the internal hatch; a tired valve in a regenerator's pump moaned rhythmically, begging for a replacement; control panels beeped. But now a new note added to this familiar white noise: a sound completely alien to these premises, a deep and hollow hum coming from the library.

Yanna dug her fingers into Simeon's shoulder. She heard it too: a deep, menacing drone full of dormant energy.

"What's that?" she whispered.

"Don’t know," Simeon shook his head, taking a step forward into the transparent tunnel leading to the life-support automatics. By association, he remembered the day he'd first come here, stealthily advancing along this same corridor exactly as he was now.

The noise grew. Now it sounded like an overloaded generator about to explode; the growing tension lingered in the air, almost tangible.

A strong clear note added to the deep drone.

The sound vibrated in the air, echoing from the walls and changing its pitch until it finally transformed into a precise and harmonious rhythm. Simeon unclenched his fingers. His MG slid down its holster. Faulty generators weren't capable of synthesizing music. He took the last step towards the library's door. The pulsing melody was pouring into his mind; it was gentle and velvety like the cosmic gloom filled with icy stars, intense and unrestrained like the bubble of thermonuclear reaction; it was calling him, disturbing and questioning — the perpetual motion of a human mind.

Andor stood at the center of the library.

The melody that had at first frightened and then fascinated Simeon, was streaming out of the concealed intercom loudspeakers. The bulkheads vibrated with the rhythm.

Silently Simeon shook the android's hand stretched out to greet him. He looked into the robot's eyes. His quizzical stare was filled with silent reproach. Andor was too unpredictable and tended to rely too much on the young intellects of his human masters.

"This is the Cosmic Symphony," the android explained quietly. "It was composed many centuries ago on the planet Earth, the historical cradle of mankind. I've found it in a record library on one of the cruisers."

"Andor, you're a gem!" Yanna exclaimed. Her fear was gone, her eyes glistening with pleasure.

Music was everywhere. It was pouring from one compartment to the next, following the two young people and the android.

Was Andor aware of the psychological effect of certain sorts of music?

They sat down at the table, but Simeon suddenly felt that he could neither talk nor eat. For some reason there was a hot, suffocating lump in his throat. He put aside his fork and raised his eyes, unable to express his agony. Tormented by doubts, dissatisfied and haunted by new unknown desires, he could finally name his frustration. The subconscious fear of the unknown had died in his heart, replaced by the anticipation of a new loss and something else, yet unidentified, that this Cosmic Symphony had stirred in his heart.

Probably Andor hadn't meant anything of the kind when he'd discovered this memory crystal amidst the debris and carbonized bodies, its discs containing the last surviving music file. He hadn't expected this reaction from Simeon when he decided to play the file in the library.

Simeon felt the melody stir bitter feelings in his heart, similar to the foreboding of inevitable loss.

A nostalgia for the stars he'd never known.

The unrestrained celebration of human nature, a subconscious craving for enigmas that had made the first cave-dwellers throw back their heads and peer into the bottomless abyss of the Universe.

And a painful, annoying question: who are they, the people who permitted mechanical creatures to torment their children?

The reality of the Island of Hope burst again, this time due to the questions put forward by the mind of a grown-up man.

Without a word, he rose from the table and left the compartment almost at a run.

It had happened so fast that Yanna was taken aback. She jumped to her feet to follow him, but Andor softly prevented her from doing so. "I know where he's gone. Give me a few minutes," the android said.

* * *

A machine's mind is not without its ghosts. Especially if the said machine is a rational creature and the formation of its intellect took place in extreme conditions when all criteria of what's real, wrongful or correct had become a mere convention depending on the agendas involved.

In this respect, Simeon and Andor were very much alike. Both had been born and grown up here, among the dead. It was probably for that reason that they understood each other without a word.

The android had forever remembered the first spark of his consciousness.

'ACTIVATION! ACTIVATION! ACTIVATION!'

The command surged through the control circuits of his photon processor. The words "he opened his eyes" would have sounded funny. He was not a man. He simply saw light.

It had been a narrow compartment cluttered with memory crystals, computer disks, paperwork and spare parts. The light was dim and red.

The emergency signal came on the internal display. His processor awoke and, in mere nanoseconds, performed a complete analysis of the situation and came to a logical conclusion.

He turned his head. The cameras mounted behind the lenses imitating his eyes registered the picture of a man kneeling beside him. He was young. His clothes were covered in blood, his hair in disarray; his eyes feverish. He was obviously under the influence of some strong anesthetic.

The man was clasping a deep lacerated wound in his side.

"Request priority command!" Andor heard, then realized that the phrase had been synthesized by his own voice module.

The man wheezed; his head shook. He stared at the android, his eyes filled with agony.

"It works," he managed, wincing. For a while the man hoarsely breathed, trying to stop his shuddering.

"A human being in agony," an impassive verdict appeared on Andor's internal display screen.

"You're my creation. I spent half my life building you. Such a shame

I won't see what you will become. Look at me," The hoarse whisper of the man was forever engraved on his memory cells. "Idiots! They've annihilated the planet," the man strained to bring his face close to the android's. "I therefore name you Andor. All information about the Universe, all possible and impossible data — you have it all. Base command: survive."

He collapsed. Red froth covered his lips.

At the time, Andor had been only ninety seconds from the moment of activation. His creator couldn't have possibly imagined all the potential of the photon processor with its speed-of-light neural exchanges. All systems were initialized in under ten seconds; in twenty more seconds he'd read and logically processed his behemoth databases. After one hundred and ten seconds, Andor had become self-aware.

He kneeled down before the dying man.

As if on cue, he opened his eyes one last time.

"Priority command: survive," he wheezed in a barely audible voice.

His creator's eyes closed. He died.

Andor was on his own now.

After seven hundred and twenty seconds of his conscious existence he had left the compartment to enter the insane world of the spacecraft cemetery.

* * *

A narrow corridor led the android to a dead end. Here the wall was covered in a complex pattern of broken lines. Andor raised his hand and traced some of them, forming the letters O and H. The remaining lines were a decoy.

Hissing its air compressors, part of the wall moved aside, revealing the entrance to an airlock. The internal hatch was wide open. Andor stepped in and found himself in a circular corridor with compartment doors at equal intervals. Part of the wall panel had broken off, exposing snaking clusters of cables and pipes.

Andor stopped at a door with a sign reading "PILOT ROOM". The lock's photo cell and the servo-driver were out of order, so someone had cut the lock out. He pushed the door aside and entered the room of the LX assault raider.

Simeon stood with his back to the entrance, his hands resting on the cannibalized control panel. A monitor glowed before him. The floor was strewn with print-outs of electric diagrams.

"What do you want?" he asked without turning to Andor.

The android perched on the edge of the navigator's seat. "I thought you might need help."

Simeon turned round and frowned at him. "When will you stop lying? You could have restored this spacecraft a long time ago! All this time you've done nothing! You let me run around the spheroid hunting rusty robots and never said a word about this!"

From the passionless face of the android it was impossible to tell what was going on inside his logical circuits. Still, it seemed to Simeon that he'd noticed some inner struggle.

"Do you want to rejoin people?" Andor asked.

Simeon turned pale. "Did you really think I would spend my life chasing after machines on this galactic dump?" he asked bitterly. "Then why did you upload my biorhythm data to the teaching module? I wish I hadn't learned anything!"

Andor rose and approached the vandalized console. Every year he looked more human. They considered him to be their teacher. No. Sooner or later Simeon would have acquired the necessary knowledge without the android's assistance. Andor felt torn apart as never before. He was neither a robot nor a living being. But for the presence of Yanna and Simeon, he would have lost his mind ages ago.

"The expectation of a holiday is always better than the holiday itself," he cited, brushing his plastic-coated fingers across the console's contacts. "That world you want to return to has produced killing machines and this spheroid. Besides, there's a high probability of its civilization having perished in the galactic war!"

Simeon licked his suddenly dry lips. "We..." he struggled to find the right words, "we've reached the limit of our resources here."

Andor took his time to reply. That was absurd: why would he need time to collect his thoughts! Simeon was well aware of his mind's speed.

"I couldn't force my ideas upon you," he pronounced at last. "You're right, of course, it would have been quite possible for me to rebuild everything here within these last few years. But I had no right to do that. Now I see you've grown up. All that you've done, you've done it yourself. True, I gave you the opportunity to learn and acquire some information, but that was all. You are a human being. You have your own identity. So you make your own decisions. You found this spacecraft with the aid of the Island of Hope logbooks. You've managed to get a good understanding of how it works. The hunting for battle machines has already bored you out of your mind. You are a man. And I'm only your creation."

Simeon stared at him in amazement. "I'm sorry," to life he finally said. "It's this music. I was at the end of my tether." Obeying an involuntary impulse, he put his hand on Andor's shoulder.

The robot turned round. It wasn't for the first time Simeon had the impression that he was desperate to come to life.

"Well, guys, have you discussed all your secrets?" Yanna's voice sounded behind them.

Simeon started. Yanna stood in the doorway, smiling at them. Dimples appeared on her cheeks. "By the way, I played with my doll here something like seven or eight years ago," she couldn't help laughing.

Seeing her, Simeon felt an enormous sense of relief. . "We must try," he summed up. "I don't think we have an alternative."

8.

A furious crimson octopus sprawled its tentacles, pulsating in a drawn-out agony, spewing new protuberances into the darkness glittering with stars. A flattened sphere sped along its unstable elliptical orbit around it, trailing in its wake a thousand-mile long tail of flickering debris.

This had been their world. Their Island of Hope.

Now it was slowly moving toward the back observation screens.

Simeon tore himself away from the control panels to cast one last glance at the tiny planetoid which had been his home for t twenty long years.

They didn't know what future had in store for them. Maybe Andor sitting next to them was right and their civilization had perished, having burned itself in the furnace of a new galactic war. Then Yanna and himself might become the last hope for its resurrection. But it was also possible that things had worked out for the Earthlings and that they were heading toward blossoming new worlds.

In any case, they would never forget their Island.

They had no need for words. Simeon's hand lay on the helm. Through the glass of his pressure helmet he saw Yanna's face streaked with tears.

The spaceship hovered over the ragged steel desert. Then its stern lit up like a man-made sun, obscuring the light of the agonizing nebula; the spaceship began gathering speed, rapidly turning into a blinding dot in the sky.

They took the path to the stars.

PART THREE

FORT STELLAR

9.

"Hey, Johnny, come have a look! What the fuck is this? What a cheek!"

The duty navigator leaned over the monitor. The scarlet dot was still at the bottom of the screen – the object which his partner had just referred to so enthusiastically was still a very long way away, almost out of their radars' range.

"Hm, I don’t know what the computer’s doing! It’s raving mad!"

John Selkirk couldn't work out what was going on, either. Having received a signal from the object, the on-board computer of their space cruiser had automatically started a search and identification procedure, and now a most absurd structure appeared on the display. This must have been the first time he'd ever seen their powerful cyber mind at a loss: the computer had failed to ID the object, plastering the screen with disorganized diagrams of all sorts of spaceships.

A navigator doesn't decide anything. Selkirk respectfully touched an intercom key. "Sir, this is the duty navigator. The radars have reported an unidentified man-made object. It's not in the database. It is armed."

"Coming."

Chains of alarm lights flashed on board the Tri-Solar Confederation cruiser. Behind the sealed gates of airlocks, launching pods opened up one by one, releasing flocks of space fighters into space. Gun turret operators hurried to slump into their seats and activate their equipment.

The object was approaching. Senior watch officer stared at the monitor in the pilot room. "Cancel the guns," he commanded. "Let's see what the multiplexers will show."

Powerful electronic telescopes began their unhurried motion, groping after the object. Finally an image of the approaching spaceship showed on the displays in the pilot room.

"Not a hypersphere one," commented the navigator, peering at the screen with genuine interest.

The huge disk-shaped body was patched in several places by cermet5 plates welded to the hull. Antennas bristled, pointing in every possible direction; the tightly closed gun ports were barely seen behind them. The parabolic dishes didn't rotate; not one navigational light could be seen, and as for the bowl of the photon reflector mounted on telescopic supports outside the ship's bottom, it had long lost its sheen, apparently inactive for a long time.

"No response to signals. The crew are probably dead," assumed the first pilot. "Look at its drive. The photon reflectors must have been out of use for at least a hundred years!"

"Possible. A decoy?"

"A rather clumsy one, then. We can smash the ship to smithereens at the slightest hint of aggressive behavior."

The strange ship rotated slowly. An enormous shell hole, until then concealed by the photon reflector, entered the field of view of the multiplexers.

"So! Imagine the impact."

"Clause forty-six of the space service regulations. We must explore it and plant a radio beacon to mark it as property of the Confederation. All paperwork and whatever else we can find will be transmitted to Stellar's archives," senior watch officer summed up. "Send in the assault group. I'm curious to see what's there."

* * *

Sergei Snegov, commander of the assault group, liked this kind of assignment. He was a poet at heart, and the opportunity to leave the ship unaccompanied by frenzied gunfire did not occur very often.

Their small assault raider soared over its launching pad.

“Fasten your belts,” the pilot mumbled, flipping switches. He didn't even look their way. “We're off!"

The black bulk of the strange ship was growing on the 3-D monitors. Now they could see that this used to be a deadly combat spaceship of the type that had been discontinued about fifty years ago. "An LX light assault raider," Sergei identified it, "but it must have received one hell of a blow."

“Look!” Ryzhov’s voice rang with respect. “It must have battled to its death.”

The armor plates of the newcomer’s hull were fused and ripped by laser charges. Part of its hull structures had been ripped out, the laser rays slicing through them like nichrome through plastic. The ship had been cut lengthways, revealing a sectional view of its battle compartments complete with consoles, deformed operator seats and the empty eye-sockets of broken monitors. Now that they had approached the ship it became clear why the on-board computer hadn't been able to ID it. This was a strange hybrid: an LX with some totally unsuitable modules thrown in; it also had an archaic photon sail although the visible hyperdrive compartments seemed to be undamaged.

“Pull up by the shell-hole,” Sergei told the pilot. “We’re going in.”

Without a word, his group left their seats as one man.

The commander was the first to touch the strange ship’s hull. The motion detectors didn’t react. His pulse gun’s barrel pointed down the hole. The floodlights sliced through the pitch darkness. Sergei dove in.

“Looks like a meteorite impact,” his gloved hand brushed the fused edge, ”a laser would’ve done a nicer job.”

“There's power in the circuits!” the computer technician reported; he had already managed to hook his machine up to a cable.

They were standing in a long bending corridor that traced the internal intervals from each other.. Sergei forced one of them aside. The pilot room. The floodlight brushed across the dark screen of a telescope and stopped, discovering three seats circling the console; an unmoving figure of an android frozen in one of them.

“Nothing. There's no power here.”

They went out into the corridor. The commandos opened the compartments’ doors one after the other.

“This must be some kind of warehouse,” Gordon finally said. “There're enough supplies here for the next two hundred years!”

They kept walking along the curving corridor. Sergei had the impression that they were walking through history itself: an abandoned spaceship, the android’s figure at the control console, compartments filled up with tinned food – all that admittedly seemed eerie and mysterious.

Would they ever be able to find out what had happened to the crew?

The next door opened by itself. Sergei whipped out his gun.

"Here's the power source," Hawley said, entering the room after him.

Two lonely green lights flickered next to two hemispheres of cryogenic hypersleep capsules. Sergei cautiously stepped forward and froze, struck by the sight.

Safe under the capsules' transparent lids and floating in the mist of cryo gas inside lay a young man and a girl.

* * *

Two spacecraft, which had for some time drifted together, slowly undocked. The gap between them widened, filling with stars, while the hoses of connection tunnels were being pulled back into the gaping holes of cargo airlocks; finally they slid shut, too. One side of the cruiser was illuminated by the flashes of directional thrusters; slowly the ship began to turn. Then the cruise engines kicked in, pulling the ship away from the small dark disc which, rotating uncontrollably, continued its drift in the depths of space. It was impossible to foresee the little makeshift craft's future. Twice had it served its purpose and was now ultimately abandoned by people.

Captain Hans Frauenberg watched the little craft's flashing beacon until it disappeared amidst the many stars.

"That's life for you," he sighed philosophically, instantly forgetting the abandoned fragment of the past. He had too many pressing problems to tackle, preventing him from paying close attention to the incident.

The space cruiser Io continued on its combat patrolling mission of their sector of space.

The computer tech was toiling in the testing lab; he made a face as he disconnected all the probes from the android's open cranium. That proved to be too complicated a task for the onboard equipment; after five hours' worth of fruitless attempts to make the robot function he saw that his efforts were useless. "I can't make neither head nor tail of it," he said honestly to his junior partner who was apathetically tinkering with an integral breech-block of an automatic turret. "I've never seen anything like it," he slammed the robot's head in disappointment. "Here, look," Hawley was positively unable to shut up, "the ROM port looks normal, but just try to access the files! The wiring is funny, too. Nothing inside him but lasers and crystals."

"What about power?"

"Looks okay. He's got a built-in mini-reactor," Hawley unplugged the last cable. "You wait," he threatened, winding the cables, "once we're back to the base, I'll look into you more closely."

* * *

An hour later captain Frauenberg entered the medical station of the ship.

"Well, Vladimir, what's new?" he asked, stopping next to two transparent spherical capsules filled with saline solution. The young bodies of the two rescued astronauts floated inside, wound with wires and covered with sensors. "What's your verdict?"

"The girl's in a bad way, sir," the doctor on duty sighed, "but the guy might make it."

The captain frowned. "Do you think they'll both survive?"

"Difficult to say. It would be better to take them both to Stellar."

"You wish! No one's gonna relieve us from patrol duty," he scratched his chin. "But you're right there. Our equipment just won't cut it. A hundred years in suspended animation isn't something we can handle. I'll see if I can contact the base."

"I'd like you to take this, sir, and transmit it to Stellar," Vladimir handed the captain a memory crystal. "It's an encrypted recording of the young man's brain activity. He's coming round, so some memories seem to be resurfacing. In Jedian's labs they work on similar problems. Besides, this file might help us to find out whether they're moles someone's trying to plant on us."

"You're right," the captain agreed again. "To tell you the truth, I've thought about that too. Would be a good idea to find out who they are before they wake up," he put the crystal into his uniform pocket and headed for the exit. "Keep me posted," he repeated, then left.

* * *

Just before he came round, Simeon felt fear. Something scary was stirring in the black void of his slumber, an ominous shadow against the backdrop of his awakening consciousness.

He groaned.

Vladimir swung around. Dozens of sensors on the data display panel immediately reacted to the weak signal, their lights flashing, the monitor screens displaying his body activity in a series of peaking graphs.

Simeon's eyelids quivered, opening. He found himself inside a small closed space. His body was covered in a sticky warm goo. There was a pungent smell of ozone and medications. A milky mist enveloped him, revealing numerous wires and tubes that reached inside his body.

That was just what he'd been subconsciously afraid of his entire life. His awakened mind was immediately consumed by a materialized nightmare from the past: he was inside a machine! His muscles strained, his eyes widened; he bent and shuddered while trying, in vain, to escape the grip that pinned him down.

The sensors beeped anxiously. The graphs on the monitors shot up, registering an impulse of vital activity. Vladimir dropped whatever he was doing and came over to check on the boy.

Simeon didn't yet understand what he was doing: almost all of his reactions being subconscious. He stiffened in another attempt to free himself, when the bearded face of a man loomed in through the mist that filled the chamber of the machine that had captured him!

The young man's body slumped down to the rigid plastic of the life support couch; he couldn't take his eyes from the vague contours of a human figure.

Having assessed his patient's condition, Vladimir ran his hand over the computer's keyboard. A few injectors dug into Simeon's body, causing the graphs on the monitors to calm down.

Exhausted, Simeon shut his eyes, but his fading consciousness resisted, focused on one thought: 'A man. People. I'm back!'

10.

"The mind boggles," Jedian Lange turned off the monitor and sprang back to his feet. Psychoanalysis and neurosurgery were his calling, but today, for the first time in his life, he regretted not having become a clerk or a mechanic.

"I need an audience with the Commander!" he demanded into the intercom. "ASAP. It's about his family."

Somewhere in the depths of Stellar's cybernetic brain lurked the microprocessor of the admiral's private secretary. Ten to fifteen seconds later — a considerable amount of time for a machine — the loudspeaker resounded with a melodious female voice, "Your appointment is for eleven thirty."

Jedian cast a glance at the timer. Eleven twenty five. The old man still appreciated his grandnephew. He replaced the memory crystal in his desk drawer, peeled off his lab coat and hurried out of the private office down the labyrinth of underground communications of the Confederation Fleet HQ.

Admiral Vorontsov was waiting for him in his office. He was one hundred sixty-one years old, and only his private doctors knew whether there still remained any of his own organs inside his body. Most likely, most of them had already been replaced with cloned ones. The founder of Fort Stellar, the creator of the Tri-Solar Confederation's military doctrine was sitting in a rigid diagnostic chair.

"Jed, my boy, what's up?"

Jedian lowered his head in respectful greeting, "Sir."

"Stop that. Nobody can hear us. Help yourself to some booze. I can see you're nervous."

"And for a very good reason, grandfather." Jedian gulped and offered the old man a 3-D photo of a computer image. "Is this face familiar to you?"

No man living in the habitable part of the Universe had ever seen or could even imagine something like that: the lips of the fabled admiral notorious for his disregard for human emotion suddenly trembled. Tears welled up his eyes.

"Andrei."

"Grandfather, are you sure?"

"Where is he?! Is he alive?!" the admiral shouted, but immediately pulled himself together. "It can't be. You must have found his body or an archived pic. That's cruel," he reproached him.

"Not at all. This photo is a computer model of the memories of a young man they found a week ago in a cryogenic chamber of a battered spaceship dating from the First Galactic war. He was born and grew up on the spaceships' cemetery located where the battle unfolded — during which Andrei Vorontsov was supposed to have died. The young man's memory is dominated by this image. This is his father's face!"

"Can you expand upon it?" the admiral asked. "I want you to tell me everything you've found out, every little detail. But first answer this question: what happened to Andrei?"

Jedian braced himself. "Your son - my uncle is dead."

He disliked his grandfather for his cruel uncompromising attitude and was rather afraid of his angry outbursts. "He died eight years previous to his son's departure from the cemetery in a spacecraft built with all sorts of wrecks and debris. They failed to repair the hyperdrive, so they used photon thrust instead. The cruise control was set to the Galaxy's center."

"How did my son die?"

Jedian turned pale under his grandfather's icy stare that revealed the whole measure of his grief. He was a good psychologist and could see perfectly well the possible consequences of his answer.

"Andrei was shot by a robot," he uttered. "Judging by the memories scanned from my cousin's cortex, that was a PLENET class battle machine which was part of standard equipment of the Free Colonies' Fleet."

The admiral gritted his teeth. He could still remember everything as if it had happened yesterday; his memories nested in him, exhausting him, leaving behind only emptiness and suffering.

He had sent Andrei to his death.

* * *

"Sir, we've made it!" Alexander Vorontsov, the senior officer on the flag cruiser of the Colonies' Fleet, had slid the door closed behind him and glanced at the Commander's hunched back.

Their spaceship was maneuvering. The stars on the survey screen were performing a frenzied dance that only navigators can appreciate.

The commander turned round and gloomily looked at the officer. "What's there to be happy about?"

'The old fool!' Alexander thought in desperation, inconspicuously unclasping his holster. "Admiral, I've lost my son in this fight, but you seem to have lost your mind," he snapped. "Our duty is to fight on!"

The old admiral shuddered. He was crushed. The monstrosity of the battle and the mind-boggling number of casualties were beyond his comprehension. He had seen the explosion which had consumed millions of people – the horror of these figures was absolutely unimaginable – and he didn't want to see it through. He didn't want to lead more lunatics to bomb more planets in order to consolidate their sudden strategic success.

"There're people left there," he said slowly, "and also some machines. Our duty is to go back and rescue at least some of them. Not to engage in a new bloodbath."

"There's nobody left! Who do you expect to rescue from the area where even metal has evaporated?" the officer managed, trying not to scream. "All spacecraft whose force fields did hold have already re-established contact, and as for any functioning robots that might have survived the inferno, honestly, I don't give a fuck! I'm awaiting your orders!"

"You must be mad!"

"At least I'm not a coward and I'm not going to die!" Alexander raised his pulse handgun. "My son has given his life for the cause, and I'll avenge him! We're going to crush Earth now, while it's not too late, while they haven't received reinforcements!"

The Commander turned away from him, staring at the screens.

Alexander couldn't shoot a man in the back. "You're arrested," he had said icily. "I'm taking over command."

* * *

That had been so long ago. The first steps in his difficult rise to the rank of Commander. Actually, at that time he'd wholeheartedly believed in what he was doing.

Jedian stared in bewilderment at the Commander's lifeless face.

"Leave me," the Commander demanded, resurfacing from his reminiscing. "No, wait! Where's the young man at the moment?"

"His name is Simeon. He's on board the patrol cruiser Io blockading the most probable direction of the-"

Vorontsov turned pale. What was that? Fate, maybe? Or the belated retribution for having betrayed his own son?

"I see," he interrupted Jedian. "I want you to contact the base and tell their senior officer that I want Io to be withdrawn. Let them replace it by any other ship, at his own discretion."

He remained silent for a while, as if he had lost all of his energy in those minutes. Suddenly Jedian realized how old the man sitting in front of him really was.

The Commander's face spasmed. "He must survive. I don't care if it's impossible!" the admiral's voice filled with authority. "By all means! You understand?"

Jedian nodded.

He lingered in the doorway. For so many years he'd been afraid of the man, prostrating before his rank and power. Now he just wanted to see this passionless face spasming again.

"The crystal containing the boy's memories is on the table," he said nonchalantly. "I suggest you check it, grandfather."

The door slid shut, leaving the Commander alone with his own memories and the lonely file on the table that kept drawing his stare. He feared this crystal disc more than death itself.

He knew that its contents were far worse than death for him.

11.

The crew of the patrol cruiser Io was not very numerous and had plenty of work to be done, which was why it was only Vladimir Yusupov, the onboard doctor, who was monitoring Simeon's awakening.

Simeon lay covered with a sheet, watching inconspicuously this strange man in white coveralls pacing the module and taking readings of all the numerous instruments.

Vladimir finished the check and returned to the table with a portable computer on it. As usual, he looked at his patients before sitting down. The girl's waxen body kept rotating slowly in the jets of saline solution, but the boy was lying with his eyes open, glaring at Vladimir's belt.

"At last!" Vladimir rearranged the holster with his trusty Viper. "I thought you'd sleep until we reached Stellar."

Simeon tried to say something, but could only heave a deep sigh.

"Easy, man, easy," Vladimir took a wad of cotton and moistened Simeon's dry lips. "Take it easy. Drink this," he placed a round amber-colored piece of candy into his mouth. The candy exploded, filling his mouth and throat with a pleasant sensation, cool and tickly.

The boy's lips trembled. He tried to speak; finally he gasped, "Yanna."

Vladimir pressed the intercom key and moved his chair closer. "So, let's start from the beginning. I understood your question. Try to relax. Everything's OK."

Simeon leaned back on his pillow and lowered his eyelids. He was so weak that he struggled not to faint.

"Are you listening?" Vladimir said.

A barely noticeable nod served as an answer.

"So, you're among friends. Quite by chance, we came across your spaceship drifting through space and sent an assault group to check it. There must have been an accident — or you might have collided with a meteorite – we never worked it out. The fact is that the ship was disabled, there was a huge shell-hole in its side, all power units were exhausted except for the two stand-by ones which fed the cryogenic compartment from whence we extracted your companion and yourself. There was nobody else in the ship except a non-functional android, model unknown.

At these words Simeon tensed up.

"Don't worry, he's here on board, but it looks like our technician has given upon him," Vladimir smiled.

Simeon nodded, then half-shut his eyes again. "How's Yanna?" he wheezed; the question was hardly audible.

Vladimir took his time. "You see, the cryogenic process is very complex. The capsules you were in are outdated which is why our onboard reanimation equipment is practically incompatible with them. Therefore we should exercise caution. You've come round because your body is stronger. In short, the girl is alive, we're supporting the proper functioning of all organs of her body, but I'm afraid the total awakening is not something we can do tomorrow."

Simeon re-opened his eyes again and squinted over his shoulder; he caught sight of the transparent sphere containing Yanna's body.

"What's your name?" Vladimir hurried to ask, trying to divert his attention.

"Simeon."

"OK, I'm Vladimir," he squeezed Simeon's shoulder in a friendly manner. "Don't worry, she'll make it," he said, sounding more optimistic than he should. "You'll see. Just give me some time, and I'll sort it all out."

Simeon's head dropped onto the pillow. "I'll be waiting," he whispered, his lips dry with dehydration.

Exhausted by the conversation, he soon drifted off into a deep sleep.

Vladimir rolled his chair away. "Have you heard, sir?" he asked.

"Yes, I have," the captain's reply came through the intercom. "He speaks International English with an old-fashioned Russian accent. As far as I know, there are no such worlds left in our sector."

"Right. But he's slept for the best part of a hundred years."

"Most likely, he comes from some other location. In any case, I don't think it's an attempt to plant a mole on us. Their ship was built out of damaged modules of battle spacecraft from that period. Apparently, these two have had it hard."

"They have sir. Any news from Stellar?"

"It's too early for news, Vladimir. We'll reach the patrol point in five hours, and only then we can have a communication session with them. Let's hope they've deciphered the file you made."

* * *

For the next five days captain Hans Frauenberg thought about the rescued astronauts only occasionally: Io had reached the assigned zone measuring eight cubic light years, and began patrolling. This sector was considered as one of the most dangerous in case of a sudden break-through of enemy ships, and the task of the cruiser was to promptly locate the point where the hostile spacecraft would come out of hyperspace and contain them until the main forces of the Fleet arrived. Io was a kamikaze spaceship.

That was the tenth year of the Second Galactic war — the Free Colonies, having conquered Earth, were dividing the spheres of Galactic influence.

* * *

He was alive.

Simeon was lying under a thin sheet, enjoying the coolness of a fresh bed.

No doubt, the spacecraft was only a fraction of the world where he longed to go, but a really great one! All the sensations were new. You had merely to open your eyes – and you saw the soft radiance of the ceiling panels. The floor exuded warmth. The rustle of air regenerators didn't let up for a second. The ship was in good working order, not a wreck, but part of a larger world which traveled through space obeying people's will; it wasn't helplessly drifting with the elements.

He turned round. Yanna's motionless body was still wound with the tubes of the life support system. Vladimir was sitting at the table busy with some paperwork.

The sight of the helpless girl awoke his dormant anxiety. If only Andor was with them! But in spite of all his efforts, Simeon could not remember under which circumstances Yanna and himself had been placed into cryogenic chambers and why the android had had to switch his power over to them.

Vladimir finished writing. "Aha, you've woken up!" he said joyfully. "Excellent."

Simeon forced a smile and sat up. Weakness had almost disappeared, but he felt giddy as before.

"Think you can get up?"

Simeon slowly placed his feet on the floor. Could he trust his feelings? His atrophied muscles were hardly able to bear the weight of his body. Simeon staggered, then made a few steps. It was as if history repeated itself: once again he was learning to walk in the gloom of their cramped compartment. In a moment, the door would open and the father would come in.

The young man's hands lay on the cold plastic of the life support capsule. He leaned against it, his face at the same level as Yanna's. Vladimir carefully took him by the arm.

"She’s stable," he answered his unasked question. "We're waiting for some info from Stellar. We must get her there."

"You mean your planet?" Simeon asked, stepping toward a chair.

"Sort of," the doctor answered vaguely while reaching into a closet for a flight uniform kit. "The captain wants to talk to you; besides, our computer technician is looking forward to the moment when you're able to walk," Vladimir cast a testing glance at Simeon as if about to ask something. Still, he stopped just in time, remembering the captain's interdiction. Hans Frauenberg had promised to personally deal with anyone who’d utter a word about Io's patrolling in front of Simeon. Vladimir kept his fingers crossed. If only they were in luck, like last time. He really didn't want to think of all the consequences of a potential breakthrough in this sector.

"So, where would you like to go first, to see the captain or the tech’s laboratory?" he asked once Simeon had dressed. His experience suggested to him that it would be better to take the guy as far as possible from the motionless body of his young companion.

"I want to see Andor."

Vladimir raised his eyebrows, uncomprehending.

"I mean, the android," Simeon corrected himself. "His name is Andor."

"OK, then, Hawley will be glad to see you," Vladimir said, locking the door of the medical compartment. That Simeon had no idea of the on-board subordination didn't astonish him at all. 'In fact, the captain can wait, why not?' he thought, not without some pleasure, while they headed for a between-deck lift well.

Io was about a mile in diameter and almost twice as long. The internal space of the ship was divided into ten self-sufficient decks.

Simeon walked along the corridors, taking in the odors and sounds of the living breathing ship and couldn't believe that he was here, among people, and that all around him wasn't a figment of his imagination. It was real.

* * *

Deck 2 of the spacecraft housed the launch pads.

They stepped onto a narrow balcony that traced the internal perimeter of a huge hall. Simeon involuntarily stopped to examine the launching pads on which ten, small hawk-nosed assault module their armor glowing, hunched like birds of prey with their wings folded but ready to launch at any second. The hatch of one of them was open. A bright spot of light fell onto the dark coating of the launch pad.

Vladimir touched his shoulder. "Sorry, I'm a bit pressed for time."

Simeon nodded, forcing his eyes away from the majestic panorama of the launch site, and followed the doctor into a side corridor.

There was nobody in the technical laboratory.

"Hawley!" Vladimir called. "Where the hell are you?"

Silence. Puzzled, he looked round.

All of a sudden Simeon brushed him aside and walked into the laboratory. He kneeled before a bulky capsule inside which lay a strapped-down android.

Vladimir realized that he had made a mistake. The sight of the immobile robot made the boy suffer just as much as the sight of Yanna.

'Why?' Simeon kept asking himself, unable to find an answer. 'What happened to our ship and to us?' his fingers slid off the transparent plastic of the capsule.

"You stay here while I go look for him in the workshops," the voice of the on-board doctor interrupted his thoughts. "Just don’t touch anything, OK?"

Simeon nodded.

Now his attention was focused on Andor. The transport capsule was equipped with a complex set of instruments. A number of cables and energy interfaces were reaching from numerous connectors to the robot's head. Two monitors displaying a chaos of sparkling dots confirmed a total inefficiency of the testing and control systems. Andor was dead.

Simeon’s hand lay onto the built-in keyboard unit.

Enter activation code.

At one time Andor had made him memorize the access code and showed him how to reset his systems. Simeon noticed his fingers tremble and willed himself to stay calm. He couldn’t afford to make an error and run the wrong sequence.

Something clicked inside the capsule’s inner works. The information carrier drive rustled to life.

The access program worked. The data entry port was enabled.

The chaotic dance of dots on the right monitor was replaced by a short message,

No charge detected. External power source required.

It wasn't yet Andor, but one of his emergency programs. Simeon looked around him. He was alone but he wasn’t going to wait. He disconnected some equipment and plugged in the capsule’s power cable.

The message on the monitor instantly changed.

Please wait. Main accumulator is being charged. Built-in power sources will be switched on in 618 seconds.

Simeon perched himself on the edge of the capsule, imagining how Andor would emerge from his oblivion, recovering consciousness and memory byte by byte.

The intercom panel blinked with an incoming call. Awaking from his reverie, Simeon startled and looked round. Nobody.

He pressed the connection button.

"Hey, Hawley, what the fuck?" a built-in loudspeaker growled with the captain's voice. "We've got a problem. Code Alpha twelve! Go quickly to the launch deck, Sergei and Spyte are there fixing module #7. You've got a second!"

The loudspeaker clicked and disconnected.

Simeon couldn’t make head nor tail of Frauenberg's tirade, but the order was quite clear. He glanced at the monitor. Three hundred seconds left till activation.

He could make it. Simeon hurried out onto the balcony of the launch deck. The hatch of one of the modules was still open. Simeon vaulted over the low railing and covered the fifteen-foot drop in one leap.

Voices came from the wide open hatch. Simeon walked over to the gangway and froze. He had no intention of eavesdropping, but a few random words rooted him to the spot.

"Bullshit! Can’t the Captain understand we’re cannon fodder!"

"Then why the fuck are you here?" another voice asked.

Simeon didn't know the speaker. He didn't know anybody of the crew except Vladimir. So, he remained immobile by the gangway, quite unaware of the fact that this last question had been asked by Sergei, commander of the assault group who had brought Yanna and himself on board the Io.

"I need to earn a few bucks and leg it. I’ve had this war up to here."

"Shut up, then."

"You don’t care, do you? You’re gonna croak anyway, today or in a month; but this is my last sortie!"

"Put a sock in it, will ya? Otherwise I’ll make sure you’re not going back to Stellar,” Sergei's voice rang with threat.

"All right, all right. Don’t get your knickers in a twist. You’re all psychos here. Actually, what did they send you here for? They say you used to be an officer on the Fifth Orbital Station. Is it true you used to be one of those who protect Stellar?"

"Sort of," Sergei answered gloomily. He paused and added, "This is something I don’t understand: what’s the point dying for money? You think it’s normal?"

"And what did you want me to do?" the other man spat out. "As a volunteer, I at least had a choice! You know, all my life I've been scared they’d send me to space infantry," he suddenly admitted.

"Okay, you smartass. Enough," Sergei said good-naturedly. "Back to work now."

They returned to their positions, judging by the resumed clanking of metal and clicking of spanners.

Simeon didn't move, shattered by what he’d just heard. This was a heavy blow indeed.

The world was at war again.

* * *

Thunderstruck, captain Frauenberg stared at the murky sphere of the radar. Five dots. A small enemy squadron. A nearby wormhole had just disgorged Io’s death sentence. Because to engage in combat with five cruisers would be certain death, but it didn’t look as if they had an alternative. Better to be killed in action than to rejoin Fort Stellar's penal battalions.

A few seconds didn’t change anything now. The attack was too sudden and too powerful.

Alarms wailed. The general warning system sprang to life. Its pleasant female voice echoed in hundreds of intercom loud speakers,

"Battle alert!"

"Take action stations."

"Five heavy enemy cruisers at a thousand miles in combat mode."

"Shit! You fucking-"

Simeon didn't understand the last word.

"This was supposed to be my last sortie!" the voice repeated hysterically, accompanied by the clanging of the readied pulse gun.

A powerful figure appeared in the module’s hatch. "And what are you doing here?" Spyte bellowed, noticing Simeon. "Haven't you heard what that bitch just said? We're toast! Time to leg it!"

He didn’t have the time to say all he wanted to. A tremendous blow hit the spacecraft.

The Io shuddered.

Somewhere monitors exploded; the lights went out, replaced by the ominous red glow of emergency lamps under the ceiling; then the power supply was restored, and the deafened people saw the smoldering wiring fill corridors with thick smoke.

Simeon rushed back to the balcony, but Io's main computer had already switched to combat mode. All hatches were simultaneously shut all over the ship.

* * *

Hans Frauenberg was perfectly aware that they had no chance of survival and that resistance could only prolong the agony.

The five heavy cruisers on the screens in the pilot room zoomed into view: the incorporeal dots transforming themselves into armored behemoths aglow with navigating lights.

"Come on, John, quit fucking around!" the captain snapped, slumping into his seat at the fire control console.

John Selkirk who was trying to bring the Io out of her uncontrollable spin didn't need reminding. Beyond all expectation, he managed to manipulate directional thrusters to vector the cruiser into a firing position.

The captain’s hands fluttered over the controls. The engines roared, operating the main calibers. Monitors flashed frantic successions of numbers.

Frauenberg pressed the Fire key.

The first volley breached the leader’s shields, sending cascades of debris into space. The raging beams of laser guns slashed at the giant until one of them hit the reactor unit.

The hyperdrive exploded in an impressive display, but even this successful hit couldn’t change anything for the Io. A simultaneous salvo of the four wingmen swept off her laser batteries, leaving fire-polished shell holes where the gun ports had been mounted.

The sirens wailed more urgently. The soft female voice sounded like a mockery while the crew was choking on the smoke filling the battered cruiser.

"Depressurization of modules five, seven, twenty and forty-seven. All unimpaired compartments are sealed. Losses of heavy armament – ninety percent. The main propulsion system is damaged and will be ejected. All equipment to switch to emergency mode."

Only two minutes had passed since the enemy squadron had been located by Io's radars.

Angry blue lights flashed along the perimeter of the launch deck. There was some activity around the launch pads of nine of the assault modules. The pads shuddered and began to rise, lifting the ships up to their respective launching silos.

Spyte rammed the sealed hatch with his shoulder. "You fucking piece of shit!” he screamed, kicking the thick steel. Having vented, he trudged back to the open hatch of the repaired ship.

Simeon still stood by the gangway. He felt as if he’d had the wind knocked out of him. For the first time in many years he was desperate.

Still weak after reanimation, he now stood in the bowels of a strange spacecraft whose computer had separated him from both Yanna and Andor. He was unarmed and defeated.

"We're locked!" Spyte growled, walking past. The automatics has sealed the deck!"

He reeked of death.

The module’s hatch began to slide shut.

* * *

The re-activation only took a split second. It seemed to Andor that he’d only just sunk into oblivion on board their makeshift spacecraft. But the reading of the nuclear timer sobered up his machine brain. Ninety-three years had elapsed since he’d fed all his power to the batteries of the two cryogenic capsules.

In the few seconds that his memory was being tested and systems reset, his external scanners registered the reddish light of emergency lamps and the familiar vibrations of bulkheads.

Andor stood up, shattering the plastic capsule to smithereens and frightening the computer technician to near death.

"Shit!" Hawley recoiled.

He could not take his eyes off the gleaming figure of the android who had arisen from the transport capsule. The technician’s hand fumbled blindly about workbenches until it closed around the butt of a pulse gun.

In a smooth unperceivable motion, the android grabbed his wrist. "Sir, I would appreciate any information about two young people who were on board my spaceship," he said. "Please."

Hawley’s eyes bulged with pain. The gun banged down to the floor. "Medical module!" he croaked mechanically.

"Thank you, sir!" the android picked up the weapon, nodded to the speechless Hawley and left the lab.

* * *

The inside of the module was quiet and brightly lit.

"Damn it! Will this monitor function or what?" Sergei exclaimed, tinkering with some damaged wiring. The control panel sparked; the commando swore, shaking his hand in the air; the monitors finally sprang to life, displaying the view of the launch deck.

The nine fighters had already risen toward the airlocks which began to open slowly.

"The cover modules are taking off," a voice said in the intercom when the last ship cleared the exit. "The enemy has started a mass attack using small spacecraft."

Clenching his teeth, Simeon was suiting up.

Yanna and Andor had stayed behind deep within the agonizing cruiser’s guts.

Spyte stared at him nonsensically, high on adrenalin, fingering the butt of his pulse gun. He sensed the approaching death which spread a strange paralyzing chill down in his stomach. He would have liked to scream, to drop to his knees, to do anything only to avoid the unavoidable. 'Oh, my God,' he thought in despair, seeing in his mind’s eye the enemy spacecraft rushing toward the Io, 'why did it happen? What have I done to deserve it? I don't want to die!' A strained wheeze escaped his throat.

Simeon turned to him. Spyte saw his drawn, gaunt face. The boy didn't say a word, but having met his eye, Spyte shrank back. This wasn’t the face of a twenty-year-old.

At that moment Simeon was overwhelmed by a bitter unaccountable fury. The world that he had not yet had time to know was already collapsing, crashing down about his ears, and that was really cruel.

"Don’t forget that the world you’re so impatient to join has created the killing robots and this spheroid," Andor’s words echoed in his feverish mind. He’d never thought it would be so hard to part with illusions and face the truth. Pointless. Too late. It hurt too much.

Sergei glanced up from the control panel at the crestfallen Simeon.

Nobody said a word. Silence hung in the cabin, interrupted by the beeping of controls.

"Listen," Spyte said hoarsely, knowing they had but minutes left to live, "just go. This isn’t your war." He placed his finger on the monitor, pointing at a large gateway at the end of the space port. "There's a hangar with planetary vehicles there," he hurried to explain, "the robots won't search the ship, they'll rip out the navigational crystal and leave."

Simeon peered into Spyte's eyes. He wouldn’t be able to explain what he felt at that moment. It was as if a stray ray of the sun had touched him, illuminating for a second his most secret dream; his heart sinking with joy, he tried to get a better look at his reverie, but the ray expired, leaving him in the dark which closed around him, comfortable like old clothes.

Spyte felt a spasm distort his face. "Don’t you understand! You should survive!" he shouted, losing control, and stepped back toward the turret. "Just go! We'll cover you!"

Simeon took a step. His mind was collapsing onto itself. He had to save Yanna. This world had given him nothing but another pointless war unleashed by man. Then why did he experience this strange bitter warmth? Who were they to him, these two men, frozen in anticipation of impending death, but still prepared to help him escape?

"I'll be back, " he said unexpectedly for himself.

* * *

Andor looked around. A vacuum reigned in the corridor sealed with hermetic bulkheads, leaving open the entrance to a turret tower. Andor forced the unyielding hatch open and squeezed his way through.

The spherical room made of transparent armor alloy was pitch dark, but the android didn’t need light in order to see. A shell-hole gaped in the tower’s convex wall; the gunner's seat was empty. Control consoles were dead.

Andor switched over to scanning mode and soon found the source of the problem. A laser beam had sliced through the cupola , damaging the main power cable.

Having restored power, Andor eased his body into the seat. Now he had all he needed. The gun's radar revealed the panorama of bitter combat between nine assault modules and enemy fighters. The android’s plug-like fingers began to protract. He thrust his hand into a socket on the console, taking over the gun's processor.

It took him ten seconds to crack the Io's central processor and another fifteen seconds to hack its main programs.

Judging by the displayed scheme, Yanna was in the medical module, two decks above. Her life was, at the moment, out of danger. The module was protected by other compartments and had its own power supply.

Simeon's position was much worse. His signal was located at the launching deck and was mixed with two unidentified ones.

Andor switched his attention to the neighboring space.

Three assault raiders were approaching the Io under the cover of fighters. The cruisers fired one more volley then turned their sterns to the dying spaceship.

The Io didn't interest them anymore. It was the assault groups’ turn.

The assault modules covering the Io had been destroyed.

The four enemy cruisers began to withdraw. They fired their hypersphere drives and disappeared from the screens. It took the android's photon processor ten seconds to analyze the situation. The raiders’ paths led toward the launching deck. More scanning revealed that they had ninety attack robots of unknown design on board. There were no people.

Actually, the Io had already done its job. It had transmitted a signal to Stellar, so all that was left for the kamikaze ship to do was to embrace its fate. It had long been doomed, and everyone on board knew it. Only an incredible coincidence could save the ship now.

The android lay his other hand on the battle console keyboard.

He was the wrench in the works of fate.

For a few minutes, nobody spoke in the cramped cabin of the space fighter. Sergei kept sweating over the console, trying to join the thick cables of energy interfaces directly. The automatics protested and flashed error messages, but he paid attention neither to them nor to the cascades of sparks shooting up from smashed instrument panels.

At last the main monitor came to life and showed the surroundings of the agonizing cruiser. The radar lit up with an even blue light.

Three disc-shaped vehicles were coming up on the Io under the cover of four fighters with obtuse noses. There were no other ships within the radar's range.

Sergei breathed a sigh of relief. "They're gone," he stated. "This is just an assault group!"

"Right, but our assault modules are destroyed!" Spyte grumbled.

The scanners lit up with the first digits and message lines.

The Io shuddered as if an unknown giant had played a drum roll on its hull.

The few surviving crew members were shaken. The turret tower that had been smashed to bits by a direct hit of a laser beam jumped back to life.

“That can’t be right!” Frauenberg began to type, but the computer refused to obey the commands.

Judging by the personnel distribution scheme, there was nobody inside the turret; at any rate, nobody alive!

The covering fighters entered the zone of defensive fire at full speed. Four orange bubbles blossomed in space, surrounded by cascades of debris flying in all directions. The side monitors displayed a surreal view: the dark turret tower, punctured in the center, suddenly turned round, as if operated by the devil himself; the batteries of vacuum guns arranged along its perimeter moved their barrels and shuddered, shelling the enemy assault raider.

Space exploded. The dazzling flash disabled the monitors. When they came back on, the Io was surrounded by a cloud of debris. Two surviving assault raiders were trying to weave their way through it.

The furious staccato of twenty guns did not remit as they went through ammo at a frightening speed.

The lone turret kept spewing out fire in a desperate feat of valor — desperate at least in the eyes of the people who’d already accepted their death as inevitable. Vacuum turrets rotated with inhuman accuracy, seeking out surviving machines among the wreckage and tearing them apart.

The fight didn't last more than two minutes. The people on board hadn’t yet recovered from their amazement; the bulkheads still shuddered, the empty corridors of the Io still echoing with the recoil of the guns when the second assault raider was also annihilated. However, the third one had time to bank and lunged onto the turret under the cover of the debris.

A volley of its photon emitters smashed the Io’s last hope, leaving a ragged hole in its place. Now the cruiser was at the enemy’s mercy.

"End of the line," Spyte smirked. He slammed down the visor of his pressure helmet and squeezed through the narrow manhole of the shooting bay.

The transparent dome of the assault module turned about its axis; six barrels of the vacuum turret emerged from the open gun hatches.

"Sergei, ground her!" he barked into the intercom. "I swear by Procus' snake-eaters, there are no people inside those ships, and you know what these computers are like. I bet all you want they’ll all head for the launch site!”

The assault raider’s outline in the monitors kept growing as it headed for the gateways of the launching deck.

Sergei hit a key, anchoring the ship to the launching pad.

"Done! I'm going out."

He didn’t finish. The gateway thundered open. The air around them whizzed, escaping through shell-holes, tearing down the equipment of the launch pad and carrying it away.

Sergei froze. the armor of the cruiser, cherry-colored from the heat, began to swell under the pressure of the powerful assault ship. Finally it succumbed to the pressure and burst, scattering soft white-hot fragments over the floor. The black disk of the assault raider slid onto the launch pad.

A long narrow hatch in its side cracked open.

* * *

Simeon hadn’t seen the furious combat between the raiders and the turret tower.

He’d hacked the electronic locks of a hangar and reprogrammed one of the heavy rovers, then hidden by the gateway.

He knew he’d only have one attempt to battle his way through the Io.

The open hatch of the enemy raider glistened as a ramp slid out. The first ominous shadow loomed out of it.

Battle machines had considerably evolved over the last hundred years. The heavy armored monsters of the Island of Hope looked like fossil relics in comparison with these streamlined new generation of assassins. Their base model resembled a spider. Its drop-shaped body was about three feet long; its bulbous foremost part was equipped with ten manipulators as thick as a human arm. Cables and the hoses of servo-drivers wound around them like muscles. A jet engine and an anti-grav generator made them swift and extremely dangerous. The landing raider carried around thirty such machines. They rose into the air and hovered in a chain across the launching deck, awaiting the signal. Their radar blades rotated, the dull eyes of their video cameras scrutinizing the hall. Their leg-like supports were pulled up to the belly, vibrating slightly. The petals of their diaphragms pulsated rhythmically, concealing unknown quantities of weapons.

The turret tower of assault module #7 sprang to life.

The six barrels of the vacuum gun fired a frenzied volley.

The squall of shells swept away the robots together with part of the ship’s plating, exposing the tangled mess of reinforced steel. Spent shells clattered to the floor, accompanied by Spyte’s generous cussing.

"Sergei, go away, now!" he yelled, squeezing the trigger. The gun spat out a new portion of fire and metal. The enemy raider reached out its deadly ray and stopped Spyte’s battle mid-word, slicing through the turret tower, the gunner and the gun.

"Go," Spyte wheezed, staring in amazement at the lower part of his body which had suddenly separated from the upper. He struggled to say something, but the arriving vacuum relieved him from his agony.

A lone figure in a battle spacesuit rolled down the assault module’s gangway and hid behind its supports, in the mess of cables and service towers.

This was it, Sergei realized. He‘d always known he’d come to a bad end.

He double-checked the bolts of two pulse guns tied up together with some wire, attached the clips and began climbing the module’s hull toward the mangled turret tower.

The right part of Spyte's body was still clutching the trigger with its crooked fingers. His left part complete with his head and part of the gun had disappeared.

He switched his jetpack's engine to idle. The Ignition sign glowed on the convex transparent interface inside his visor.

The black bodies of four battle machines now formed a semicircle, closing in on the module. Sergei braced himself. He knew he couldn’t change anything. He was living his last seconds.

He reached forward, clinging to the cracked armored glass of the tower. The panorama of the destroyed launching site was slowly moving in his sights. Finally he set the cross-hairs on the obsidian armor of the leading robot. He squeezed the trigger, enjoying the sight of his rounds dancing on the machine's frame, tearing off manipulators and crushing the interior of the robot.

Their return fire cut through the assault module’s supports. It shook under the impact and listed back, knocking down the launching bars and refueling towers.

Sergei had time to jump aside and now, lost in the tangle of piping and steelwork, completely lost his bearings.

A bar struck him in the chest, pinning him to the floor. His vision blurred. Before losing consciousness he saw the ominous shadow of the battle machine reaching toward his helmet.

* * *

A battle robot swept along the Io’s main tunnel. Its multi-joint legs were extended along its body, its two automatic guns incessantly firing, peppering the large corridor with shells.

The hermetic door of the pilot's room was broken.

Captain Frauenberg raised his heavy emitter. Two missiles hit him, the impact throwing him back onto the control console.

He died instantly. The robot stopped and extended his manipulators. His scanners inspected the pilot room. The ship's central processor was dead. The clasps that used to hold the navigation crystal in place were empty.

The robot floated toward the control panel. It pushed the human body aside and plugged its manipulator into the navigation terminal slots.

A panorama of neighboring space appeared on the robot's internal display.

Five bright points were approaching the Io, coming to its rescue.

Those were enemy ships, the robot understood. They had just emerged from hypersphere and were coming toward the battered cruiser in combat braking mode.

The info was urgently transferred to the mothership.

A second later the raider's central processor sent the battle machine the command to self-destruct.

A bright blue flash blossomed out in the Io's pilot room.

* * *

Soon the first assault group charged onto the Io's launch deck.

Commandos poured in, forcing their entry through launching silos, throwing themselves to the floor, rolling aside in well-practiced movements and freezing, awaiting a command.

"Attack!"

The line started advancing in short runs.

The lieutenant was the first to stumble against the battle machine's frame. "Jesus," he whispered, looking around, unable to hide his amazement.

The commandos stopped. They’d expected to see everything but not what they actually saw.

The launch pad was scattered with the remains of battle machines. A destroyed planetary tank stood motionless by the wall. A heap of metal towered nearby in which one could hardly recognize the hull of an assault module.

" What the fuck has happened here?" one of the commandos said, thrusting his finger into a neat hole in the body of a robot. The hollow-charge shell had punched its electronic interior precisely in the center. Nearby, listing on its three crooked legs, stood another automatic soldier. Its video cameras had been shot through!

"Looks like a snipers' platoon practiced some pretty sharp shooting here," a corporal with a gray moustache grumbled. He pushed another robot with the toe of his boot to turn it round. Someone's good shot burned an opening in the exact place where all the servo-driver cables met.

"By the volcanoes of Pluto! Can you imagine any snipers here?!" the lieutenant objected. He was as struck as the others by the view. "This is a kamikaze spaceship! The whole crew don't even make up a platoon!"

The commandos moved on, taking in their surroundings. They were used to running the risk of death, but when you were looking at these skillfully destroyed machines, you had doubts whether a man could do that.

"My God, I wouldn’t like to have been here half an hour ago!." the lieutenant shrank. "Okay, guys, we're going to comb the ship."

* * *

"Io, I’m Genesis, do you read me? I repeat, everyone who is on board, if you are alive, stay where you are, we are sending rescue groups your way. Hold on, we’re coming."

Exhausted, Simeon sank to the floor of the medical compartment, watching Andor trying to hack the life support chamber.

Yanna was alive.

"We are coming!" an unfamiliar voice sounded in the communicator of his pressure helmet. "The enemy raider has self-destructed. Hey guys, no need to hide anymore."

Those were people. The people of whom he had dreamed in the gloomy insides of the spheroid.

A tear rolled down his cheek.

12.

The blue sun was rising above the low horizon, making its way through swirling clouds, while the red sun was going down and the yellow one was at its zenith; so, there were three shadows at the same time – a short shadow and two long ones. The shadows were cast by intensely sparkling groves spread over a boundless plain.

This was a blessed country of eternal summer and wonderfully warm days when three suns shone in the sky, replacing one another; Only twice a month did the three suns' radiance fade, turning the sky gray. On such rare nights Stellar loomed into the sky: an enormous yellow disc shimmering with metal, glowing with the bright spots of cities under their force shield domes and blotted by the ominous shadows of orbital defense stations, the steel guarantors of the planet's safety.

The planet Rory was the home of the famous Mirror trees, a blessed and bountiful place. Still, its mountains could be as fatal to an inexperienced wayfarer as a venomous frog’s bite.

A world where spacecraft were not allowed to land; where super megalopolises didn’t poison the air with their dump sites. Not a single towering skyscraper challenged the planet’s mountain tops.

All those facts were explained by the presence of the Mirror trees – the planet’s true inhabitants, which had appeared here long before man left his caves and entered space.

Simeon had a very special kind of love for the place. All his childhood dreams evoked by his father's stories had become real here, materialized in boundless landscapes of velvety-green plains and sparkling mountaintops.

He turned round. Jedian and Yanna were playing a game similar to lawn tennis, chatting nonstop.

"Aren't you two tired?" he asked, approaching the tennis court.

Yanna’s laughter chimed in the air. She wiped her face with a towel. "I love it. I need a cold drink though."

"Let's go. We deserve a couple of cocktails!" Jedian agreed, looking at her with admiration. He apparently liked the mission the Commander had charged him with.

They headed for the coolness of the canopy of their posh one-storied villa and slumped into wicker chairs.

"There’ll be a reception in Fort Stellar tomorrow night in honor of the Commander's grandson," Jedian announced. "Your Granddad will make you his legal successor."

"Which means?"

"The command of Fort Stellar runs in the family. Actually the planet and its satellite are Vorontsov's private property. For one hundred years he managed to appropriate almost everything here. But the title isn't the main thing. He has billions in galactic banks, and a neat little income from his exclusive Mirror tree trade. You're now the sole direct heir," he concluded.

"Does that mean that my arrival changed his plans for you?" Simeon asked.

Jedian turned pale. "That’s not a nice thing to ask!"

"Sorry," Simeon rose. "I haven't yet mastered the art of small talk. I say what I think."

A shady alley led him to a terrace. Defense reflectors towered in an open area nearby. Simeon walked past the watchtowers manned by robots and entered the house. Unthinkingly, he headed for the library.

Andor was still sitting in a soft chair. The android's hand was plugged into an electronic module. He was reading.

Simeon took a seat next to him.

The android gave him a studying look, then shook his head. "You’re not happy," he said, impassionate.

Simeon shook his head.

Andor pulled his fingers out of the plug. "The probability theory says that you have won one chance in a billion."

"Why didn’t you go with us?"

"Your second cousin hates me. Who am I? — a tin that walks about his villa and pretends to be a thinking being. To him, this is a personal offence. As far as he is concerned, creatures like myself should be scrapped."

Simeon’s vision blurred. He couldn’t say whether he was happy or not. The wildlife around him seemed simple and beautiful while the locals had proven to be alien and incomprehensible. “Tell me more about the planet,” he asked.

Andor gave a thoughtful nod. “You’ve come to love this world.”

“Yes, I have,” Simeon’s voice rang with challenge. What was wrong with him? It was as if he had to lose all that was dear to him again. He sensed it but was powerless in the face of these new developments.

Amidst the library, a 3-D image of the planet unfolded in mid-air.

“This world is unique. The planet’s axis isn’t inclined and therefore, it has no seasons. The three suns of the system flood the planet with their energy scorching the equator while the poles forever remain icebound. It’s difficult to imagine worse conditions for organic life to originate and evolve. Nevertheless it did appear, and it happened in the narrow zone separating the two deserts, on the border of light and gloom, squeezed between intolerable heat and bitter frost.“

Andor clicked his fingers. Two strip, one each along the northern and southern hemispheres, encircled the planet.

Andor knew how to tell a good story. For a while, Simeon forgot all the problems that bothered him.

“So, the first organisms began to evolve and very quickly populated the available habitat. Animal life quickly came to a halt – there was just not enough space and food to go around. On the other hand, the planet’s flora survived, being slower and less demanding.”

He paused and flipped a few switches on the library control console. Simeon sat back, relaxing. ‘If you shut your eyes, you can mentally get back to those days.’

“You sure you pressed the right button?” Simeon asked.

Andor’s hand froze in mid-air.

“I saw nothing: neither glaciers nor deserts,” Simeon explained. “Or did people turn the planet’s axis?”

“No. People have got nothing to do with it. Sometimes nature - or to be more precise, evolution - disregards the laws of celestial mechanics. Vegetative forms occupied the narrow habitat and began to perish when attempting to exceed the limits of the favorable climatic zone. For millions of years they struggled against heat, perished, produced sickly descendants, mutated. Then, at last, the intricate paths of evolution brought forth the first Mirror tree. If we make an analogy, we can compare that event with the advent of the first mammals on Earth. In both cases the new class became dominant and predetermined the further development of the biosphere.”

The history of the Mirror tree appeared before Simeon: from the first squat creepers with deformed stalks and tenacious roots to contemporary two-hundred-foot giants. There were about a hundred transient forms, and all plants had a recognizable thin layer of silvery substance covering their trunks and leaves, as if they’d been dipped into liquid mercury.

“According to research, it has taken Mirror trees a billion years to conquer the torrid zone and finally meet by the equator. Their advance gradually changed the planet’s climate. “

The outlines of a relief world map appeared in the middle of the library.

"As you can see, the equatorial zone of the planet is almost entirely covered with mountains. It receives about seventy percent of all energy. The Mirror trees, conquering new vital space, gradually crept along mountainsides, their long leaves reflecting the light of the three suns, diffusing it. Thus the energy balance established by the laws of celestial mechanics was broken. Today we observe the result of a process that has been going on for about three billion years. The new energy equilibrium took a very long time to set in. The main mass of Mirror trees is presently concentrated in the equatorial zone. They receive radiation from the three stars and reflect it to the horizon. There a part of the radiation is diffused over the plain, transforming the formerly temperate zone into subtropics while the other part is reemitted farther to the poles by new Mirror tree forests. The ice caps of both hemispheres melted a million years ago, and the polar zones are now occupied by non-mirror vegetative forms that had in former times struggled for survival in the sub-arctic zones."

Andor switched off the holographic projector.

"Is that it?" Simeon cast an inquiring glance at him. Andor felt somewhat uneasy under that steadfast gaze.

"You've forgotten something," Simeon rose and went to the bar. "For example, these huge reflectors around the villa," he outlined an envisioned perimeter with his hand holding a glass. "By the way, they're operated by a special computer system. You've also forgotten to explain why there isn't a single building exceeding two story height here. I'd like to know as well why they build cities on Stellar which is deprived of atmosphere and where they have to resort to using force shield domes.

Andor shrugged. In people's presence he assumed human body language. "That's another story."

"Tell me."

"Why? You're asking the right questions, so you must have already come to the right conclusions."

"I’m sorry, Andor. I'm only trying to understand. But you've been sitting here for three days running. I know perfectly well that your processor is capable of analyzing the entire histories of Rory and Stellar in that time."

"Very well," the android was about to smile, but changed his mind: mastering the expressions of his plastic face had proven to be a real challenge to him, so he could not bring himself to experiment, considering Simeon's state.

The young man put the empty glass on the table and walked over to the window. "The arrival of humans was a catastrophe for this world," he said without turning.

"I shouldn’t jump to conclusions. You asked for information. The planet Rory was discovered by a reconnaissance ship of the Tripartite Alliance. As is known, it consisted of about fifteen planets, and, consequently, there was no centralized power here initially. To define the colonization of this world, I'd employ the expression gold rush. It's not difficult to imagine the demand for the Mirror tree's timber on the galactic market. Two years later the Tripartite Alliance collapsed. All those who could afford a ticket for an interstellar flight and a trade license dashed here. At that time the planet was ruled by spontaneously formed local authorities. About a quarter of the Mirror trees were cut down in twenty years. New settlements grew on clearings without any system. In 2630 the Free Colonies brought about a fundamental change in the course of the war, assumed the tactics of active defense and began strengthening their space bases. Military fleets of diverse alliances and groups of planets dominated in different sectors. With a view to curb the chaos and control the military presence in those regions of space, the Free Colonies started creating a so-called Sphere of Strategic Interests. In fact, that was a network of strongholds and forts that literally encircled a particular area in space with the Free Colonies' planets at its center.

"Commander Vladimir Vorontsov arrived here in 2633, leading ten cargo ships and five battle cruisers. His mission was to conduct negotiations with Rory's government, but an unexpected disaster disrupted their plans. The unsystematic felling of Mirror trees has disturbed the fragile energy balance that they had introduced. Now the remaining trees couldn’t reflect all of the triple-solar energy. In this situation they developed another unique ability: an adult tree could work as a battery, absorbing any surplus energy. However the rate of deforestation by far outpaced the trees’ adaptivity. The time came when even these live batteries couldn’t absorb all the surplus energy anymore."

Andor looked out the window. The reflectors’ shining fins rotated slowly. A shady park lay around, washed clean by the rain. Still, Andor’s story offered a dramatically different picture.

"The few survivors said that that the tops of the trees sparked because of all the power they’d accumulated. Bolts of lightning struck out from their branches, and the sky flickered with Saint Elmo's lights. Then the whole planet suddenly turned suddenly into a gigantic discharger as the trees began to release the power. The high-voltage sky showered cities with fireballs, burning everything around. Only the planet’s original life forms managed to survive as they were adapted to these levels of electricity.

"The Rory colony ceased to exist. Vorontsov’s spacecraft which had special energy protection, managed to only pick up about three hundred survivors. The deforestation stopped. The planet made the colonists pay a terrible price but was unable to bring back its lost balance."

Andor switched off the holographic projector and sat down.

"So electric storms didn't cease?" Simeon asked, deep in his thoughts.

Andor shook his head. "At present any tree felling is carried out very cautiously," he explained. "Mirror trees are planted in vast dedicated areas under the scientific monitoring of Stellar's specialists, but the electric storms haven't ceased – they've only become less frequent. It's practically impossible to forecast an electric discharge, that's why the local buildings never exceed a two story height. Reflectors safeguard every construction; only specially designed shuttle spaceships can approach the planet’s surface."

Simeon rose and walked up to the window, thinking. The constant mental pressure only added to his exhaustion after staying in the cryogenic chamber, reanimation and the fight on board the Io.

"You're not responsible for what's done by an entire civilization," he finally offered.

"I'm not. But at least I can analyze what's going on," Simeon replied. "Rory is merely an episode in the galactic expansion of mankind."

"It can't be helped."

"I'm only analyzing... for the time being," Simeon repeated.

"You're too moody. I don't like it. I've warned both Yanna and yourself that you might find it difficult to live in society."

"Don't worry, Andor," Simeon sighed. "I don't intend to judge mankind. I’m just trying to work out certain people's motives. Besides, Yanna isn't in a bad mood at all," he failed to conceal a bitter note. "Thanks for helping me. This evening Yanna, Jedian and I are flying to Stellar. Will you come with us?"

"I'm afraid I can't. Firstly, as far as I know an android isn't on the guest list. Secondly, didn't you ask me to prepare a brief review of Galactic wars? May I ask you why you need it?"

"You may. But I don't know yet. Only vague ideas here," Simeon clapped himself on the forehead. "Above all, please don’t forget to copy the star charts of all the battles, okay?"

"No problem. That'll be done by your return."

Yanna's laughter rang clear from the terrace.

"Well, it's time," Simeon slapped Andor on the shoulder and hurried to the door. "See you."

The android nodded. Just as Simeon, he aspired to work out people's motives. He had already achieved some results in that field. Now as he watched his student go away, Andor realized that he was experiencing an odd discomfort somewhere in the circuits of his state-of-the-art photon brain. 'I wonder if this is what people call pain?' he thought. 'Or is it anxiety?'

Jedian appeared in the corridor connecting the dining room to the library. Andor shrank into the shadows to avoid him. He pulled the library control console closer, contacted the data storage and sent the query, "Space battle operations. Full review since 2600."

13.

'We had left the Spheroid hopeful.

The uncertainty we'd faced filled me with some semblance of delight. I anticipated the novelty that awaited us in the worlds populated by mankind. Now I understand: it would have probably been better for both Simeon and Yanna had the civilization burned to ashes in the furnace of the two Galactic wars; then their desperate dream of returning to people would have forever remained unchallenged.

For the first time since my activation, my processor identifies the feeling I experience as fear. My identity becomes divided, and this division grows into an abyss. On one side there's the cold logic of my software, on the other, my life experience. I'm human and a machine at the same time. I'm so uncomfortable in my cermet-made body which keeps hindering my progress.

I'm waiting. Fear is gnawing at my memory cards, interfering with their normal work. Two persons whom I love are now gone, and it's possible they might come back somewhat changed. My own fate does not worry me: my photon processor is still unsurpassed. No machine can compete with me. My fear is for those two; but my hands are tied. At present I begin to realize why entities endowed with feelings inevitably create religions. I would so much like to pray to any god for Simeon and Yanna not to lose their identities. My logical perception of the world goes far beyond the visible future of the civilization, and I can see clearly that tomorrow belongs to them. To interfere in the course of history is a fallacy of arrogance. I'm unable to change the world: it isn't ready for changes and doesn't desire them. But who can do it if not Simeon and Yanna and others like them? Who can prevent mankind from its arrogant plunge into an abyss, from its continuous courting of some extremely dangerous and ruthless forces? And who will pick up the fragments of humanity after the Apocalypse?

I swear that I'll never influence their decisions. They're people. I've been and will remain their faithful friend. I'm nothing without them. Just an excellent machine that has no equal. like there's no match for Simeon and Yanna. I represent the next generation of machines; they, the next generation of people.

Oh gods, if you do exist, give them the strength to keep their souls intact.'

* * *

A clumsy orbital shuttle cocooned with three layers of reflective armor was cautiously making its way through Rory’s atmosphere. It was going on autopilot but Jedian Lange, just in case, had taken his seat at the control panel in the tiny pilot’s cabin.

A real hell reigned in his heart.

He cursed himself for that moment of weakness. For one brief second had he yielded to compassion, shattering his own future. He should have destroyed that wretched crystal disc with Simeon’s deciphered memories straight away.

The thought made him uncomfortable. Jedian felt he was falling apart. It was as if an abyss, the existence of which he couldn't possibly suspect, had opened up in his heart. The thought of the lost inheritance was driving him crazy.

To top it all, Simeon walked in. “Yanna's asleep,” he explained and took a vacant seat to one side from the pilot’s. “How long are we going to creep like this?” he asked, watching two fireballs trying unsuccessfully to catch up with the shuttle, bobbing about in the its engines' wake.

“Twenty minutes,” Jedian managed.

The ship entered a massive layer of clouds impregnated with water which stretched for many miles, covering the monitors with gray mist.

“You’d better go to the passengers’ cabin,” Jedian advised gloomily. “There’s a thunder front before us. It's going to be bumpy.”

“Can't we go any faster?” Simeon seemed to have ignored Jedian’s last words.

Jedian mentally counted to ten. “Too much electricity here. You don’t want one hundred fireballs to tail us, do you?”

“They're not fast enough,” Simeon objected. “According to calculations, we can go faster without weakening the force shields' protective properties.”

“How d’you know?”

Simeon smiled. “Arithmetic.”

“You're good at mental calculations, then?”

Simeon shrugged, watching the leaden cloud castles whirl to his right, discharging bolts of lightning that hit the gray haze. The claps of thunder rocked the shuttle quite perceptibly.

Jedian struggled to keep his cool. Just think that only two weeks ago he could have decided this brat's fate! Who did he think he was? Had he destroyed his memory crystal there and then, the Io would have disappeared in the depths of space as it should, a worthless piece of scrap metal!

But now it was too late, he thought glaring at Simeon's back. If that demented idiot Vorontsov made him his heir, Jedian couldn't stop him. Should he maybe strangle the kid now?

Momentarily Jedian indulged in the idea, only to recover the next minute at the thought of all possible consequences. If he as much as touched a hair of Simeon's head, the admiral would skin him alive. For him, this kid was a ghost of his irredeemable past. The old fool had decided to strike a deal with his own conscience.

Wait a sec, he stopped himself. Did Simeon actually know who had sentenced his adoptive father to a certain death, abandoning him on that ship's fragment? And how sure were they that Simeon was indeed Andrei's son?

Jedian shuddered with the thought. He turned his head. Simeon perched himself on the edge of the control panel, watching their progress across the sky. Jedian's thoughts resumed their course. Actually, Simeon's mother was absent from his memories. Were there really any women among the survivors?

Yeah, right. Even if he was who he was pretending to be, it was well worth planting a few doubts in grandfather's mind. Of course! It was Jedian's duty to make sure the two confronted each other. Knowing the Admiral's character, the outcome could be impressive.

Jedian felt he was on the right path. Asking for the boy's DNA test might not be a bad idea, either.

Simeon looked as if he was trying to second-guess him. "I've interfered in your life," he said without turning round, "but if you think that I want Vorontsov's money, you're wrong."

Jedian clutched the armrests of his seat. He was too much!

Simeon turned to him. "We simply wanted to get back, don't you understand?" his voice rang with bitterness. "It was all the same to us where to, we just wanted to see people."

"You were lucky to reach Rory's system," Jedian croaked, unable to restrain himself anymore. "That's the only reason you're still alive! Any idea what could have happened to you had you arrived at any other planet? You would have starved to death! Your stinking robot would have been scrapped, and as for Yanna, she would have never regained consciousness because you'd have been unable to pay for her treatment! Who do you think you are?" Jedian stood up in his seat. "Look around you. The world is crawling with bums like yourself! Why should anyone help you? Why should they feel sorry for you? There are thousands of starving children on any planet, dying without help from anyone!"

Simeon's face turned gray. "I need neither your world nor your money," he repeated. "You're all raving mad if you can watch your children starve and die. You'll exterminate yourselves."

"Then why are you going to Stellar?" Jedian shouted.

"That's none of your business. I need to see Vorontsov."

"Aha, so you admit you recognize the power of money. Without it, you're nothing. Do you know that it was Admiral Vorontsov who left his own son — your father! — there to die? Think I'm imagining it? Go check the archives, it's all there! He abandoned his son on a ship's fragment in exchange for a nice little career for himself ! In exchange for his money!"

"Stop it!" Simeon shouted. "I know it."

Jedian opened his eyes wide and sank back in his seat, totally confused. "Do you?" he asked.

Simeon was deadly pale. "I read my father's diaries," he answered. "Don't you worry: I know perfectly well what I've come back to."

He headed for the exit, but lingered in the doorway. "Just don't get Yanna into this mess," he said. "Keep yourself in check, at least until we reach Stellar. This is my sole request." The door closed.

Furious, Jedian punched the instrument board. "I'm going to show everyone what you're like," he hissed through his clenched teeth.

The gray haze of the monitors was replaced by a violet-black abyss with Stellar sparkling amid it.

The shuttle had entered outer space.

* * *

Time hung heavy on Jedian's hands. Finally the shuttle was docked with the personal spacecraft of the Admiral. Its little crew attended to Simeon and his companion.

Without paying attention to anybody, Jedian passed straight to his cabin equipped in the same way as was the laboratory on Stellar.

Jedian had firmly decided to fight to the end.

While the automatic system was establishing a connection with Stellar, he took out a duplicate of the crystal disc and inserted it into the disc drive of an on-board computer.

Simeon's memories had not been deciphered in their entirety.

Jedian was surprised at himself. He had always been so balanced, had calculated his moves so well while keeping his eyes on the prize. Not this time. The sudden crash of his hopes had unsettled him.

He had to pace himself, Jedian kept repeating.

His hand lay onto the keyboard. He lingered with sending a landing request to Stellar. Instead, he ordered a coffee and was deep in the analysis of Simeon's memories that the on-board computer was reading out for him from the crystal disc.

He was working as he never had before. Like a wolf sensing a prey nearby, he was going deeper and yet deeper into the surreal world of mental images, aiming to reach the very first, still semiconscious imprints. It wasn't easy. Even the perfect processors of the twenty-eighth century often proved powerless when faced with the mysteries of a human brain. The crystal disc now contained a few pieces of very special software designed in Stellar's secret laboratories. They were mainly intended for mnemonic interrogations.

It had been the pinnacle of his work. Jedian Lange's very own creation.

Ten years ago on Vorontsov's orders all battle spacesuits of the Confederation's Fleet had been equipped with special scanners. They recorded the electric pulses of the astronaut's cortex. Every day thousands of disks with these records arrived on Stellar, destined for Jedian's laboratories. Gradually, he'd created a unique database. The analysis of some entries allowed the identification of certain impulses as feelings or visual images.

His ten years' worth of hard work was now represented by the graphs running across the screen. They crossed to form a complex pattern; the computer was analyzing it while drawing an initially vague image that was gradually becoming more and more precise. The images on the screen were coming to life.

Now and then the images were accompanied by a running text line that represented the astronaut's thoughts. Normally, Jedian stopped the process and moved on to the next image whenever he realized that the memory had something to do with the gloom and chaos of the cemetery of spacecraft.

He was searching for something else.

And he did find it. Forty minutes later he leaned back in his chair, pale and exhausted, clutching the armrests with his trembling fingers. Got it. Just what he'd been looking for.

Simeon hadn't been born at the ships' cemetery.

He sat huddled. The boulders exuded cold. The boy's tiny body gradually succumbed to exposure. Finally, it stopped quivering. A blue grass blade quivering in the breeze, the sound of heavy footsteps, the rattle of metal — these were the things he remembered. Inside him, resentment grew toward the warm world which had suddenly become cold and strange.

It was the earliest of Simeon's memories, and it explicitly proved that he'd been born on a planet. To top it all, the weird purple-hued grass could possibly indicate his home!

Jedian pulled himself together. He switched on a text encoder and started typing the first lines of a report to the Admiral. There was a feverish and almost insane gleam in his eyes.

* * *

The officer on duty took Simeon and Yanna to the visitors' cabin.

They found themselves in a spherical room, the walls and ceiling of which represented huge screens offering a full telescopic view. They could control the picture, zooming parts of it in and out and changing the viewing angle. The soft seats and folding couches by the little carved tables were screwed to the floor and stuffed with sensitive electronics; no sound penetrated the cabin, and only the movement of stars on the screen and the rare flashes of directional thrusters betrayed the ship's movement.

Yanna sat down in a chair and glanced sideways at Simeon who leaned over the computer's terminal. In the last few hours he hadn't said a word. She couldn't understand why he'd changed so much. Having awoken in the life support center on Rory, she'd found herself surrounded by the stuff of their dreams — the dreams that had always dwelt in their hearts. Then, why was Simeon so gloomy? Certainly she knew about the combat on board the Io, but all's well that ends well. Hadn't he had to fight battle machines day in, day out when they'd lived on the Island?

His sudden alienation made her feel uneasy. Nothing and nobody could separate them, but Simeon, how could she put it... he looked old.

Unable to conceal her feelings for much longer, she walked over to Simeon and wrapped her arms around him. "You okay?" she whispered.

Simeon covered her hand with his. "Our true happiness was in its anticipation," he admitted.

Yanna looked into his eyes. In the whole Universe they were the only two people to speak that way. "You know something."

Simeon's blue eyes concealed a grayish hue. 'Like blue steel,' Yanna thought. Neither he nor she realized that their relationship had already grown out of its youth.

"I've seen death."

That sounded like a verdict. The words hurt her like a whip lashing a delicate skin. Yanna started. "But we did come back," she tried to object.

"So what?"

The question stunned her. 'So what, really?'

Then she asked: "Perhaps we've come to the wrong place?"

Simeon shook his head. He had pondered a lot over their problems during those last days. The dreams once fostered by their childish minds had been crushed and discarded. He couldn't find the words to explain it to Yanna, just as he'd been unable to do so at their first meeting in the bowels of the spheroid; a deadly chill had been clenching his heart since the moment when the Io was attacked. His dreams had been trampled, sliced by lasers just like Spyte had been, torn apart like Frauenberg and killed by vacuum like Vladimir. People knew not what they did. And the most terrible thing was that they, in a way, enjoyed the process!

Yanna looked in his eyes again. "Please don't," she whispered in despair.

He gently took her by the shoulders and turned her toward the sectors of the screen that displayed the airless surface of Stellar drifting past.

Their spacecraft followed a high-altitude orbit, and the main city of the planet lay before their eyes.

The super-megalopolis could impress the most experienced traveler. It was located on the bottom of a crater that was one hundred miles in diameter and was protected by a spherical force shield. The city glowed its many colored lights, encircled by a mountain range topped with the menacing batteries of space defense systems. In fact, it was the mountain range itself, riddled with caves and tunnels, that had initially been called Fort Stellar. For decades it had remained an ordinary military base, conveniently located in close proximity to Rory. The city on the crater's bottom had appeared much later.

They were flying over a boundless, airless plain studded with the gray squares of strategic launching sites. Some of them were empty; others were occupied by pressurized repair rigs while yet others sheltered squadrons of spaceships ready to take off.

That was the heart of the military machine of the Tri-Solar Confederation. Tens, even hundreds of miles of gray armor, heaps of metal and plastic, billions of galactic credits, hundreds of thousands of human lives – all this in the name of the so-called Safety Doctrine.

As Simeon watched the unfolding panorama, his hopes dwindled. Rory's velvet plains which they had left far below and tens of other planets were but the hostages of this gloomy gray monster stretching over half the Universe. The Safety Doctrine: an unfeeling mechanical guardian of human life whose creators had long been reduced to an army of ants swarming inside it.

He glanced at Yanna. She stared at the screens, as silent as himself. Color had drained from her face, replaced by a deathly pallor.

Her lips moved. A nervous chill clenched her chest. The ten days that she had spent at Jedian's villa after leaving the life support center now seemed like a distant rose-colored dream. The scales began to fall from her eyes.

She tried to restrain her uneven breathing. Before Simon could say anything, she already found the right definition of the panorama unfolding below. That was their Island, the difference being that this one was in good working order, brimming with deadly mechanics and operated by soulless machines. As for people, they apparently didn't realize that the automatic world they had created would only bring destruction, death and suffering to the tens of worlds that existed so far.

The door behind them hissed open. Jedian walked into the cabin.

Simeon turned to him. "When are we going to land?" he asked.

"Soon," Jedian opened the bar's glass doors, produced a glass and pulled a chair toward himself. "You'd better take a seat," he suggested.

Simeon gave him a long look. "Bad news?"

Hatred flooded Jedian. Why was the boy so calm? "No. But I'd like to ask you a question before we land."

Yanna sat down opposite him. Simeon leaned back in his seat. He was ready for bad news and he wasn't mistaken.

Jedian took a sip from his glass. "Soon we'll be on Stellar. Your grandfather will certainly demand a full report on my researches into your memories. I think I've discovered something interesting," he grinned. "Tell me, did your father mention any planet with a blue grass in his diaries?"

Yanna looked at Jedian, then at Simeon.

"I don't think so," Simeon answered. "I can't see your point."

"Shame," Jedian rose. "You two think about it, anyway," he said, stepping out. "While you still have time."

The door closed.

* * *

Simeon slumped into his seat and sat still, clasping his head with his hands.

"Simeon, dear, what's the matter with you?" Yanna approached him. "Say something!"

"The grass," his voice rang with pain. "You see, I do remember."

"Remember what?"

Simeon squeezed his eyes so tight that he saw iridescent circles float before him. His brain was about to explode.

Finally, he heaved a sigh. "No, I can’t remember," he looked about in despair, as if seeking support from the large shimmering row of screens.

"Leave it. You're hurting yourself."

Simeon nodded.

"What can we do?" Yanna took him by the hand — their old habit. "I have this feeling like I'm drifting away through space and can’t come back," she admitted.

Stellar's surface filled the screens, rushing past in every detail. The ship approached the planet's artificial surface. Landing sites were followed by squat gun towers which, in their turn, gave place to the rectangular buildings of some automatic factory rising into the black sky. The planet was clad in gray armor with only the distraction of the spaceship's clearance lights. The glittering dome of the force shield over the super megalopolis towered in front of them, gradually growing in size.

"Would you like to stay and live here?" Simeon's voice sounded dull.

Yanna took her time answering. She watched the gray monolith of the planet, remembering Rory's warm plains; in her mind's eye, the creepy vines of the mirror trees whose soft leaves she'd kissed only yesterday reveling in the touch of organic life, were now reaching out through space, climbing the turrets of space defense towers: a surreal collage entitled hopelessness.

"Why?" she asked by way of reply.

Simeon chuckled bitterly. "We've left the spheroid searching for happiness. I used to think that the Island was the most unnatural place in the Universe, created by injustice and madness. That was what my father used to tell me. But the Island was our home, you see?"

A flame licked the screens as the craft began to land. Two rows of blinding blue lights flashed ahead, indicating a gap in the city's force dome.

Simeon turned to her, tenderness and fury in his eyes. He wasn't going to sacrifice their lives to this monster. He wasn't afraid of machines — nor of people.

"The Island was controlled by a set of rules. We were used to sticking to the rules and thought it would never change," he touched her cheek. "We were children then — and we wanted to remain just that."

He smiled. "We used to see everything in black and white. On one side there was light, on the other darkness.

"No," Yanna grabbed his hand. "What's the point in blaming people? We've been dreaming about meeting them, remember! It might not be as bad as you think!"

The ship shuddered, entering an enormous hangar. It seemed to Simeon that history was repeating itself. Once he'd made her put on a spacesuit to show her the sinister reality of the spheroid. He wished things were as easy now.

Simeon was different from everybody else. For him, Jedian's words had become a mere confirmation of his own bitter conclusions. No amount of naive hopes or Utopian dreams could shield him from reality. The battle machines of the Spheroid that had educated him knew no such subtleties.

For him, the last thirty days had become a lifetime.

He couldn't master the art of understatements and half-feelings, of sucking up to the rich and the powerful. To try to adapt to this crowd of faceless, weary creatures was to Simeon equivalent to death. He was too used to being honest, straightforward and open.

"We just can't live here," he said, "and it's better we admit it now than hide behind our useless dreams."

Yanna sensed he was right, but still it was difficult for her to admit it. Accepting the reality as Simeon had described it would be the end. She realized the whole tragedy of their situation.

"Does that mean we've failed?" she asked, sick at heart.

Simeon clenched his teeth. "There are two ways," he said, "but eventually it is a moral death for both of us. All our values will go out the window. We'll be obliged to adapt to this civilization," he said sarcastically.

Yanna's face fell. She couldn't believe he was saying that. "There are other planets!"

"You’re wrong. We don't belong here," Simeon snapped.

"Are you suggesting we should change the world?"

Simeon stared at her. "Change the world?" he repeated. "What for?"

"To make it better!"

Simeon shook his head. "One hundred and seventy planets. Two Galactic wars," he mused. "The civilization is in the throes of labor. So many generations lost. You and I, we believed in an ideal world which doesn't exist! And never will. Nobody cares about us. For them, we're just casualties."

He knew he sounded tough but there was no other way.

They remained silent for a while.

"You're right," a tear rolled down her cheek. "Can't anyone help us at all?"

It seemed to her that the ground was giving way under her. In fact, it was their ship docking.

They arrived on Stellar.

14.

In the cool calm of the library on Jedian's villa, the computer pinged with incoming mail.

Andor turned his head. A letter for him.

A cable snaked from the android's cranium, connecting him to the library processor. He looked at the monitor, scanning the coded message.

A semblance of a smile touched his lips.

One of the security guards glanced through the window and recoiled. His boss had a nasty habit of collecting all sorts of weird junk. First some mutants from a deserted orbital station and now this robot sitting there with a cable in his head pulling faces at me!"

The guard shrugged and went on patrolling. An hour later, walking past on his next round, he looked into the window again.

The android had disappeared.

He entered the library and carefully examined all the corners, but the robot had, so to say, evaporated. The cables were neatly stacked up in a niche, the processor was switched off, and only one light was on on the satellite communications panel, indicating a sent facsimile message.

The guard checked the code and whistled. The information had been transferred directly to Admiral Vorontsov.

He waited some more, cussed under his breath and walked away. After all, Jedian hadn't left him any instructions regarding the robot. In any case, he couldn't leave the premises, and that was all that mattered.

On the runway, a drone shuttle was clearing the scanner arch, about to take off. A green light came on, meaning the cargo had been properly declared. Nothing illegal on board.

The shuttle accelerated and took off, gaining altitude.

From the cramped control cabin, Andor watched as the guard's figure by the edge of the runway was getting smaller. The electronic declaration form had listed him as an extra unit of the navigation control system.

The android's fingers sank into the shuttle's connectors, causing its computer to change course. Navigational data disappeared from the monitor, replaced by a new message,

Strictly confidential.

An image of a gigantic battle spacecraft appeared on the screen.

A long-range battle cruiser GENESIS, the prompt read. Please enter the access code.

Once again, a barely perceptible smile touched Andor's lips.

* * *

The balcony of the banquet hall overlooked Fort Stellar. Simeon leaned against the marble railing, playing with his empty champagne glass.

The carved doors behind him clicked open.

"Admiral?"

Vorontsov wore the black uniform of the space fleet over his exosuit. As he approached, his dirk dagger knocked on the marble with a hollow sound. "Not happy, are you?"

Simeon shrugged.

"You are difficult to please," the Admiral said. "When you left that wretched spaceship dump, all you wanted was to meet people. Here you are. So what's the problem?"

Simeon gave him a long look. A fine web of wrinkles ran from the Admiral's eyes to his temples. Father used to love the man. What a strange, surreal coincidence.

"There is no problem," he answered.

Vorontsov didn't lower his eyes, brimming with carefully concealed fury. He was the one giving orders. He would have it no other way.

"Don't lie to me! I can see that you're smart, but your head is screwed on the wrong way! I can't understand your cynical fatalism. This reception is in your honor, and you're wandering about the halls with an air of moody independence. Just looking at you gives me the creeps. D'you think you're some angel of the Apocalypse or something?"

A smile touched Simeon's lips. "Bellum omnium contra omnes," he quoted, looking into the grandfather's eyes. Vorontsov raised an inquiring eyebrow.

"A war of all against all," Simeon translated. "I studied Latin on that dump, as you say, which was my home. Looking at the corpses floating in a vacuum, I kept thinking about all the survivors. I was imagining their throes of conscience. How's that for naive!"

"You weren't the first to think so," the admiral chuckled. "The reality, my boy, can be a bitch, but you can't hide from it behind illusions. This is a cruel world. We need to get real. Man is basically an animal still struggling with his instincts."

"I'm not an animal," Simeon cut him short. "I'm a man, sorry. Yes, I've grown up amid death and cold. I'm well aware that I might have been a beggar had I landed on another planet. I might have worn rags instead," he pulled at the lapel of his tail coat, "but at least I'd be human!"

The old admiral sullenly stared into space. "I can do a lot for you," he said after a long pause. "Just don't you preach to me, okay?" the old man snapped. "This is my world," he waved his hand at the cliffs where the laser batteries towered. "Perhaps in a million years mankind might stop tearing each other apart, but to do that, you'd have to take a new generation and raise them a couple thousand parsecs away from Stellar!"

Simeon started. "Makes sense."

Vorontsov felt his mechanical heart pound against his exosuit. Fury, regret, late repentance – he didn't know what to think anymore. 'Nerves are playing up,' he thought. 'Why should I care, really?' Now he clearly saw that he desperately wished only one thing: to forget.

"I'll do everything I can for you," he repeated monotonously. "Just don't think you can change the world. You can't. It's very steady on its legs."

"I need a spaceship," Simeon blurted.

The admiral could not hide his surprise. "What does that mean? What for?"

"Do you really care?" Simeon asked wearily. "What's the point piling up lies? You've always known what you wanted, so why are you trying to deceive yourself? You don't need any ghosts. The initial bout of compassion is gone. Now all that everybody wants is for us to turn out to be a bad dream — so that they can get on with their lives!"

"How dare you say that!" Vorontsov wheezed. His white-knuckled fingers clenched the marble railing. He looked about to pass out.

Simeon turned towards Fort Stellar. "Admiral, this is your world. I don't intend to contest it. To each his own. My place isn't here. I wouldn't want an inch of this surface."

Vorontsov was afraid to let go of the railing. The distant lights swirled before his eyes. His temples throbbed. During the last hundred years — at least — no one had ever dared speak to him with such merciless clarity. Until now, he'd been the one to pronounce verdicts and decide people's fates. 'This brat offers me a deal?'

Still, he had no arguments to offer against the truth. Simeon wasn't trying to blackmail him, He'd simply expressed the admiral's most secret feelings.

"Fine," he answered, collecting himself. "That's your right. What kind of ship do you want?"

"Genesis."

"You can't! It's in a dry dock. We've made a decision to remove it from operation."

"But it's space-worthy!"

"There is no crew," the admiral explained. "They are disbanded. To operate a ship like this you need thirty men at least."

"Doesn't matter. We'll manage, Yanna and myself."

Vorontsov grinned. 'So this is the way he wants it to be. What a cheek!' He had the impression he was gaining his ground, the slight disappointment replaced by the anticipation of a moral victory.

"Well, let him try and fail. Then he'll come — no, he'll crawl back to me.''

The admiral knew that neither two nor ten people were capable of flying Genesis.

He produced a communicator. "Alpha four, I need a flyer. Tell Terminal 8 to unblock Genesis and provide a launch corridor-" he turned to Simeon questioningly.

"In an hour," Simeon suggested.

"In an hour." Vorontsov repeated. A smirk played on his lips. He put the communicator away and slapped Simeon on the shoulder. "The flyer is coming. It'll take you two on board Genesis. And in a couple of hours you-" he didn't finish the sentence, turned about abruptly on his heels and added,

"Enjoy your flight... grandson."

15.

The tiny flyer whizzed over Stellar's steely surface. It had left the city and the mountain tops far behind and was now approaching the neat grid of countless launching sites.

Simeon couldn't wait. Finally the little craft slowed down and dove toward the squat terminal building. The four segments of a round hatch parted, letting the flyer in. The airlock began filling with air. Finally the internal hatch clanged open. The flyer's hood went up.

Yanna and Simeon jumped out of the cab onto the concrete.

"Have you entered the return code?" Simeon asked.

Yanna nodded and took him by the hand.

They stepped into a corridor that opened up before them.

Simeon felt her body tremble.

The hangar was submerged in near darkness. Clusters of powerful lamps overhead struggled to disperse the gloom. Blue and red lights flashed along the perimeter of the launch pad.

Genesis lay on her belly. Two miles of perfect black armor that didn't reflect light: even the close flashes of signal lights disappeared in the depths of her armor plates.

Simeon stepped forward. The ship's dormant power was giving them the shivers.

Servomotors howled. The frontal part of the ship just under the control room came down, forming a ramp. A light glowed inside, inviting them to enter.

Without saying a word, they entered the elevator. A slight jolt; then the cabin rushed upwards. A panel on the wall flashed with the deck numbers.

15. The elevator hissed to a halt.

"Authorization confirmed," a voice said overhead. "Welcome to control room."

The elevator door opened.

Simeon and Yanna stood in the heart of Genesis.

A hemispherical hall was packed with control panels, screens, computer consoles and other electronics. Simeon counted fifteen main posts and five auxiliary ones. All seats were empty; the instrument boards in front of them flashed their lights, inviting crew members to take their places.

"But how on earth are we going to-?" Yanna stopped mid-word.

Simeon suppressed a knowing smile.

One of the seats by the central console swung around.

"Easy!" Andor said. His head was unscrewed open. Dozens of cables snaked from it, disappearing inside the console. His one hand was plugged into a connector, the fingers of the other lay on the keyboard. "Welcome aboard!"

Yanna giggled. "You should see yourself!"

Andor shrugged: the only gesture he could manage.

Simeon sank into the seat next to him. "Did it work?"

"It did indeed. I've set the ship's processor to speech mode. We've had a heart-to-heart, so now I'm her interpreter. Temporarily, of course," he added.

Simeon nodded. "Yanna, your seat is the sixth to the right of mine," he commanded. "The navigation console. You have forty seconds."

"Okay," she took the seat and studied the terminal. "What's the course?"

"We're leaving Stellar using the ion thruster. The course... whatever. Find a bright star and steer toward it. Hyperdrive safety range: three AUs."

"Andor?"

"System testing completed. Auto pilot on."

"Fine." Yanna's fingers lay on the keyboard.

* * *

Less than ten minutes remained of the hour Simeon had asked Vorontsov for. The hangar's dome shook, falling apart into ten segments. Genesis' belly glowed crimson.

"Lift-off," Andor said.

"Six feet! Fifteen!" Yanna's voice rang with excitement.

"Forty-five!"

A black silhouette rose above the gray surface of Stellar, surrounded with crimson flames: a powerful space beast shaking the planet as it forced its way out, growling.

"A hundred and twenty feet. We're entering the range of the space defense batteries."

"The engines are synchronized. Space defense systems show no activity."

Simeon's finger lingered over a key. "Have you sent the fax?" he asked Andor.

"I have."

"Then we've seen enough of this place."

The stern of Genesis flashed, flooding Stellar with a dazzling blue light.

A second later it blended with the abyss, becoming just another tiny star in the sky.

* * *

As Jedian headed for the Admiral's quarters, he was in an excellent mood. He'd managed to locate the planet where Simeon had been born. It was a modest planetoid in the God-forsaken system Epsilon-32, once known for its uranium mines. At the beginning of the first Galactic war an assault squad of the Earth Alliance had destroyed the mines, but fortunately the archived copies of their computer files had survived. They contained the colonists' DNA codes. Looking Simeon's parents up wouldn't be so difficult after all.

There was light in the Admiral's rooms. Jedian crossed the reception and stopped in the doorway of Vorontsov's private office.

Nobody in sight. That was weird. Fifteen minutes ago he'd spoken to his grandfather and told him he was coming.

Jedian pushed the door open and froze.

Admiral Vorontsov sat at his desk. A few loose pages lay in front of him — a fax, judging by the handwritten message.

But that wasn't what Jedian noticed first. The admiral's head was cocked unnaturally to one side as if he'd fallen asleep in an awkward pose. But was it possible to sleep with open eyes?

Jedian was panic-stricken. Stealthily, as if afraid of scaring Vorontsov, he approached his desk. The life support system next to it was flashing emergency lights. One look at it was enough to realize that the admiral had just had a fit.

Jedian's legs gave under him. He grasped at the desk, very nearly sweeping the pages off it. Jedian glanced over the lines. The handwriting was somewhat similar to his.

'We all had to go mad before we died,' he read a random line. His blood ran cold as he realized what these pages were.

'But I remember. I still remember Mom's carefree laughter and the kind eyes of my Dad. The warm purple ocean of my native planet. I remember the feeling of boundless peace and happiness that only children have. The world was lying at my feet, so huge, astonishing and warm. It was mine. But all our dreams were trampled underfoot, mixed with ashes; frozen in a vacuum.'

'No wonder the old man had a fit,' Jedian thought, unable to take his eyes away from the handwritten lines.

'I'm neither a prosecutor nor a pacifist. I'm a professional soldier, an assassin legalized by the state, pulled by the force of circumstances out of the vicious circle of death and thrown away into a great icy nothing to die slowly, thinking.'

That was Andrei Vorontsov's diary.

Automatically Jedian's hand reached for the cables that snaked from the life support system to the admiral's chair. His fingers trembled as he pulled the wires out. Vorontsov's head jerked. The peaking graphs on monitor screens flattened.

Jedian stole a furtive look around and plugged the cables back in.

Life had come full circle.

EPILOGUE

A gargantuan structure drifted through deep space far from the busy galactic thoroughfares. Starborne Citadel.

Twenty planets had joined forces building it. When the conflict between Earth and the Colonies had broken out a hundred years ago, the colonists had no hope of winning the impending war. So they built Citadel that could serve them as a refuge in case their native planets were occupied.

The first Galactic war had plunged the inhabited areas of space into chaos. After the first crushing defeats, the Free Colonies' Alliance had disbanded under the strikes of the squadrons of the Earth Alliance.

Those were dark times for our civilization. Lawlessness and crime reigned in space. Hundreds of battles broke out, multiple planet alliances were created and then broken, piracy ruled, while entire planetary systems fell into decay.

Citadel's crew had no illusions about the future. There were some reasonable men among its senior officers, and after the first defeats suffered by the colonies, when the chaos was only just setting in, they steered their behemoth station toward an uninhabited and unexplored part of the Universe.

These were courageous people who launched themselves into the unknown, hoping to escape the insanity and find a new planet for their priceless cargo.

The crew had a vast experience in deep space settlement. They fashioned their station after the old colonists' transports, putting the whole experience of the happy colonies of the past to good use.

Citadel had disappeared without a trace. A few space crews claimed they'd seen it, but little by little it had become a legend. The governments of some planets occasionally tried to find the vagabond station, but without success.

The puzzle had a simple but tragic answer, and the place to look for it was in the archives of the now-destroyed Earth Alliance.

* * *

The pilot room of Genesis was unlit.

A thirty-foot frontal monitor created the impression of a window facing an abyss.

Holding her breath, Yanna watched an impossible object zooming in on the 3-D display.

From a distance it looked like a planetoid encircled with several dark, ominous rings. But the closer they approached, the more chilling details came into view.

In the center of the surreal structure lay the twenty-five-mile long sphere of Citadel. The dark rings proved to be masses of misshapen spaceships: forty miles of metal debris circling the station.

"This is the Fifth fleet of the Earth Alliance, conspicuous by its disappearance," Andor said, pointing at the spine-chilling circle of the dead spacecraft.

"They tried to capture Citadel, didn't they?" Yanna asked, starting the ships' scanners. The floodlights of Genesis were not powerful enough to illuminate the entire grotesque structure, so it was only their computer's processor that could create a precise image of the object.

Andor scrutinized the appearing images. "The admiral of the Fifth fleet was not only ambitious, but also greedy. He knew that the Supreme Command would disapprove of his raid, but… victors can't be judged. The taking of the legendary Starborne Citadel could have become his hour of glory, not to mention the station's cost and the uniqueness of its onboard equipment. So, having received the information about its location, he decided to act at his own risk."

The scanning process completed, replacing the vague outline on the screen with a clear image.

"We should call Simeon!" Yanna exhaled. She'd seen her fair share of similar images while living on the Island, and now her imagination was reliving the past events. "That's just what we've been looking for for the last five years!"

Andor nodded and pressed the intercom key. "Simeon, we've come across an interesting object. You might want to have a look."

"Roger that. The raider is almost ready."

Yanna lay her hands on the keyboard. "Commence scanning," she entered the command.

The image of Citadel, captured by the on-board computer's memory, filled the screens.

"You see the basic model of an interstellar station," the computer's voice could be heard. "It's thirty-two miles long and twenty-eight miles wide. Its hull is made of a cermet alloy. The station has three internal launch pads, one hundred and twenty control desks, systems of both space defense and planetary attack. One thousand two hundred staff. There are five cryogenic rooms, a gene bank, some incubators for reproduction and a set of exploration equipment of an unknown type. There is no information as to the status of the cryogenic rooms."

The door rustled open behind Yanna. She pressed the pause key. The computer's voice stopped.

Simeon came over to her. "Everything okay?"

Yanna took him by the hand. "Have a look. I think I'll never get used to this."

Citadel loomed close. Tremendous shell-holes gaped in its hull, the broken hull structures buried under the wreckage they'd collected on the way. Not a light, not a single sign of life — nothing but an expanse of motionless, crumpled metal.

An area encircled in red appeared on the screen. Genesis was approaching its edge.

"This is the safety zone," Andor explained. We can't be sure whether the station is as dead as it seems to be. The colonists fought to the last man. They destroyed the whole fleet," he pointed at the rings of debris orbiting Citadel. "So there's a high probability of encountering battle machines here, just like on the Island. Not to even mention the defense systems of Citadel itself."

"I see," Simeon came up to the screen, as if it could help him see something the others didn't. "Yanna, you're staying here. Ensure that Genesis is ready for any emergencies. You never know, we might have to beat a hasty retreat. Andor and I will try to enter the station."

"Why? What do you expect to find there?"

Simeon shrugged. "It's too early to speak about it. There's nothing worse than disappointment," he touched her cheek with his lips. "We already know how it feels, don’t we?"

* * *

An assault module stole toward Citadel.

"Two miles," Andor said, watching the radar screen in front of him. "No activity."

Simeon had taken the gunner's position, peering at the spaceships' fragments floating below.

The ring was not as homogeneous as it had seemed from a distance: the lumps of metal, only vaguely resembling manmade objects, drifted slowly but chaotically like gigantic molecules.

For the last five years they had seen the same everywhere, like a dreadful recurrent dream: Genesis had visited dozens of similar cemeteries. They hadn't found life on any of them.

"One mile. Looks like the defense systems are down."

Andor activated the directional thrusters and steered the ship toward a huge shell-hole in its hull.

Simeon sealed the visor of his pressure helmet and rose.

The shell-hole was approaching, like a black gaping mouth of a mythical monster.

"Five hundred feet."

A dull thump of a touch-down, then vacuum torches kicked in, sending cascades of sparks around as they welded their ship to Citadel.

"Yanna, can you hear us?"

"Roger. The picture is stable. Good luck!"

Simeon opened the hatch.

Starborne Citadel took up all the visible space, stretching into infinity.

Simeon slowly moved along, clutching at the docking supports. Finally he reached the edge of the shell-hole. Andor followed him.

They forced their way past some heaped armor plates and found themselves in a spacious corridor leading deep inside the Station.

Their two flashlights sliced through the dark.

A battle had once raged here. Probably all those who'd survived the destruction of the space fleet had attempted to storm Citadel. Simeon walked along the corridor, looking into the compartments through the doorways smashed by explosions, but all he saw was some destroyed equipment, blown-up consoles, and the walls raked by lasers.

"We really should find the transport hub," he said." "Otherwise we'll be walking down these corridors till the end of time."

Andor nodded. He switched to scanning mode and quickly located the entrance to the station's transport system. "All circuits are dead," he said, pointing at the tunnel they needed.

Simeon stepped in, finding himself inside a large pipe. The wall's plastic lining had burst, exposing bundles of wiring. This was where the transport hub's electromagnets used to be. He pushed away from a wall, and again, trying to gain some speed and move faster.

Behind him, Andor repeated his actions. He continued to scan the area, transmitting the image to Simeon's tablet.

"Nine hundred feet a minute. I think that's enough."

Decks loomed in the dark and dashed past them. There was no electrical activity, only the gloom and the battered metal.

Finally the signs of destruction around them disappeared.

"They put up a long fight," Andor commented. "The colonists must have tried to defend the heart of the station to the last man."

Simeon didn't answer. He was sick and tired of all this madness. He knew of course that constant exploration of all those war wrecks could drive them insane. At any rate, it could result in a one-sided and incorrect attitude to the civilization. 'We must remember that people created lots of good and beautiful things, too,' Simeon never stopped telling himself.

'Circumstance determines identity.' The ancient postulate never left him alone, forcing him to ponder over it again and again. All human beings had the right to live, but would you really call that a life? Billions of children were born into wars, their souls perverted by propaganda, a low social status and many other unfavorable circumstances. Very few were able to survive them and develop normally.

"You're approaching a power source!" Yanna's voice interrupted his reflection. "Deck 75."

"Roger that," Simeon slowed down, using his pack's jets.

Andor kept going until he stopped at a closed deck hatch. "I'm going in first," he said.

A minute later they entered the circular corridor of Deck 75.

There was no destruction at all here. The walls were lined with white plastic that reflected their flashlights' beams.

"Cryogenic Room 1," Simeon read the inscription on a massive armored gateway.

Andor was trying to force the lock.

"The power source is located farther," Yanna suggested. "Connect yourself to any socket on the deck, and I'll be able to give you more info."

Andor found the distribution board, removed the facing panel and switched himself into the circuit.

"Let's see... It's nine hundred feet to the right along the corridor. Just a moment," Yanna paused. "Got it. According to the scheme, it's in Cryogenic Room 3."

Simeon hurried along the corridor almost at a run.

The indicator on the door to the Cryogenic Room 3 airlock flashed green: the first speck of light in the dead darkness of Citadel.

Without saying a word, Andor leaned over the code lock.

With a shudder, the heavy door slid aside.

Simeon hurried into the airlock chamber.

He counted seconds as the awoken compressors filled the chamber with air. Finally, the internal hatch began to open, then stopped halfway. Its gears screeched to a halt.

Simeon forced himself through the resulting opening. He found himself in the control room.

Several control panels lined a transparent wall, their strings of green lights filling him with joy and confusion.

A desk stood to one side of the room. The body of a man in a decayed onboard suit lay in a seat nearby. Long strands of gray hair framed his mummified face, its features withered and distorted. This was a very old man who had died a natural death.

A sheet of paper lay on the desk in front of him.

"I entrust them to you," Simeon read the inscription on the fragile yellowed piece of paper. His heart missed a bit.

"What's that supposed to mean?" he heard Yanna's voice in the earphones.

Simeon pushed the transparent door aside and walked into the cryogenic room. The place was so ancient it was spooky. The step that he had just taken was the most important in their life.

The level rows of cryogenic capsules lined the never-ending walls. Each was lit up from the inside. There were hundreds of them, and in every one lay a child.

For the first time Andor's voice rang with amazement, "Did you know anything about it?"

Simeon nodded, unable to take his eyes off the concentric circles of pale blue light. "These are the children of the colonists. To save them from the horrors of the war, their parents sent them aboard Starborne Citadel. Now you know why the crew fought to the last."

The android approached the nearest chamber and peered through the transparent lid. A blond girl about five years old lay there enveloped in a shroud of hibernation gas.

Simeon remembered what Admiral Vorontsov's had said back on Stellar, so far away from Citadel: "You'd have to take a new generation and raise them a couple thousand parsecs away from Stellar!"

A faint smile touched his lips. Some scary stories might still have a happy ending.

Here lay those who were destined to become the world's future.

THE END

About the Author

Andrei Livadny is a popular Russian science fiction author. Born on May 27 1969 in the city of Pskov, he was an avid reader from an early age. But it was the Russian translation of Robert A. Heinlein's The Orphans of the Sky that decided his choice of future occupation. The story has become a pivotal moment in the boy's life, leaving a lasting impression on him.

Andrei wrote his first book at the age of eight. Since then, he's never stopped working on new books. His passion for science fiction has gradually become his career.

In 1998, Andrei debuted in Russia's leading publishing house EKSMO with his novella The Island of Hope. Since then, he has penned over 90 books that have enjoyed a total of 153 editions.

Andrei has created several unique worlds, each unlike the previous. He wrote A History of Our Galaxy with humanity itself as a protagonist. This sixty-book series creates a history of our future civilization and its contacts with alien races, forming a convincing and logical picture of humanity's development for two millennia from now.

Besides hard science fiction, Andrei Livadny also works in cyberpunk genres which allow him to focus on human relationships and raise questions about artificial intelligence and identity uploading, describing cyberspace as humanity's future environment.

The English translation of A History of Our Galaxy will be available shortly. Check the author's Russian-language site for updates.

Table of Contents

- Prologue

- PART ONE BROKEN FRAGMENTS

- 1.

- 2.

- 3.

- PART TWO THE SPHEROID

- 4.

- 5.

- 6.

- 7.

- 8.

- PART THREE FORT STELLAR

- 9.

- 10.

- 11.

- 12.

- 13.

- 14.

- 15.

- EPILOGUE