‘What happened?’ asked Denise.
‘I think it worked,’ said Dr. Richter.
‘But... it can’t have,’ she said with a worried tone.
‘Are you sure?’ asked Eradani disbelievingly.
‘Well, it looks like it,’ Dr. Richter replied, indicating the view out of the window.
It was true - the Earth had suddenly shrunk to a tiny pinpoint of light, and the moon was no longer visible. The Sun was still there, but was diminishing gently with each passing moment.
‘So, you’re saying we’ve just accelerated instantaneously to the speed of light?’ asked Eradani, still disbelievingly.
‘Yep,’ said Dr. Richter.
‘So why aren’t we all squished flat in the back of the seats?’
‘Well, I think the situation is that we didn’t really accelerate to the speed of light, we accelerated to minus four and a half miles per hour, so we felt that force acting upon us rather than the larger one that you may have expected. It’s all a bit complicated, really. Professor Hughes released a further updated version of Cofomaristics a few days ago. Combines the Consistency Theory of Cofomaristics with quantum mechanics and details the precise Newtonian effects of Cofome operations.’
‘Really?’ said Eradani, not knowing anything about this.
‘Oh, yes. Didn’t I tell you? He called it his General Theory of Cofome Dynamics. It’s all explained in there. Extremely advanced stuff, includes lots of higher physics and thirteen-dimensional universes and stuff. Don’t worry, you wouldn’t have understood any of it. To be honest, much of it was beyond even me, and I’m supposed to be an expert.’
‘Sounds great,’ said the Captain, unbuckling himself from his seat. ‘Well, I’ve set the autopilot, so that’s me all done. I’m off to the lounge for a rest.’ He prised himself off his chair and ripped himself along the bridge floor.
‘I think we may as well go with him,’ said Dr. Richter. ‘We can’t do anything else up here.’ The others agreed, and they tore themselves off their seats and Levcroed their way down to the lounge. Denise hung back slightly and looked quite pale in the face; Eradani wondered if everything was alright with her.
After a bit of relaxation, during which they got very bored, they indulged in a game of space marbles, a game that the Captain had invented. It required just one marble each, the aim being to throw your marble into the air and not hit anyone else’s marble. Because of the zero gravity conditions (true zero gravity now, or at least extremely negligible gravity due to their now great distance from any planets or the Sun) the marbles bounced around the room continually. There was exactly no skill involved in the game, as you just chucked your marble in any old direction and watched it, hoping it didn’t collide with any of the others. And when there was a collision, a complex and generally incomprehensible set of regulations were deployed to determine who should be eliminated from the game.
Denise didn’t seem hugely interested in this game and eventually wandered off. Eradani had been out almost instantly after her marble collided with Denise’s, but the Captain and Dr. Richter were thoroughly absorbed in the contest, watching their marbles spinning slowly around the room with almost fervent concentration. Eradani sat on the settee and wondered whether this was symbolic of anything.
<=> <=> <=>
Denise eased herself into her station and swung the computer around. It ran a highly bespoke operating system with a minimalistic user interface. The UI was, in predictable fashion, mostly green in shade and it had enormous jumbo icons to help with interstellar finger wobble. Denise liked the fact that it came with a natty screensaver which featured a cartoon-like realisation of the Garden Wall flying down a multicoloured swirling wormhole that was faintly reminiscent of Doctor Who. There was a tremendous lot of software installed on the system, and the ever-curious Denise wanted to find out exactly what it all did and maybe, just maybe, find out how this ridiculous great cabbage of a spaceship had actually managed to accelerate to the speed of light.
She swiped the screen and delved into the first level of directories. Nothing there. Mostly just system software. She started to make her way further into the tree-like substructure of folders. There were a lot of small programs and files that served no purpose other than to let the operating system get on with operating, although there was the odd piece of software that controlled a primary shipboard function, such as activating a warning siren or even killing all the engines (and this did tempt her briefly).
She was half expecting to come across a directory filled with games, but sadly there wasn’t one. The software engineers could at least have left them a few pieces of recreational software to play around with, couldn’t they? Miserable bunch.
She did come across one or two promising sounding files, but they didn’t seem to do anything when she clicked on them. Frustrated, she moved on to something else.
The supplies database turned out to be a gem of a find. Denise didn’t really know what supplies a pioneering interplanetary expedition would require and after close inspection she decided that neither did mission control. The database was very badly organised so she spent some time cleaning it up and constructing some useful queries that she could return to later. Once complete she made a mental list of some of the more curious aspects of the inventory. For instance, while there was some food on board, it hardly seemed enough for a journey of this magnitude. Admittedly they would be spending a large proportion of their time in suspended animation but even so; ten loaves of bread, twenty cans of beans with mini sausages, two hundred packs of assorted crisps and fifty bags of funsize chocolate bars did not add up to a whole lot of nutritional meals. And as for the drinks; well, she certainly appreciated the fine scotch and real ales and selection of red and white wines from exclusive vineyards in northern Italy, but she would have felt happier with a touch more than 20 litres of drinking water. And some of the other entries were even more erratic. Under what circumstance would they need to use a wheelbarrow? Or four quadbikes? Or a tent? Very odd. Glancing over her shoulder to check nobody was in the room she made copious notes in her little black notebook.
When she’d extracted as much information from the system as she could she elected to go back down and join the others. She began to close down the system, but halted impulsively with her finger half an inch from the screen.
She could have sworn she heard a sharp intake of breath behind her.
Curiosity outweighing fear, she looked around the room.
Nobody there.
She must have been hearing things. She carried on with exiting the supplies database, but froze when she heard something else.
No doubt about it this time. There was definitely a very low, almost inaudible droning.
She could feel herself tensing up as adrenalin started to flow throughout her body. The droning noise somehow didn’t seem right, didn’t seem real. It was almost detached from reality; floating in the ether. And the breath - where had that originated? She was convinced she’d heard it, absolutely convin...
There it was again. Another breath. As clear as the 20 litres of water. She slowly turned round, although she didn’t know if she’d rather see something or not.
There was nothing.
She turned back to the computer and listened carefully. The droning continued, a lone tsunami in a sea of tranquility. It showed no inclination towards going away.
She couldn’t explain the noises. They were there, but they couldn’t be. Something had to be making them - something not of the Garden Wall.
Something alien perhaps?
Time seemed to slow. Her pulse was thumping relentlessly against the underside of her skin and her breathing became snatchy and erratic. They were heading into the darkest reaches of the unknown. Nobody had ever gone this far, this quickly. Could anybody know for certain there was nothing out here? That there were no unexplained forces, no shapeless malevolent entities waiting to engulf them? Mankind had been alone for so long, been so imprisoned by the fragile atmosphere of its mother planet, and now suddenly had made the great leap into the dark and infinite territory beyond. Perhaps, just perhaps, this territory had already been claimed...
Another breath, this time over to her left. Denise felt her body go stiff with terror. She didn’t dare make any noise, so shouting for the others was out of the question. She didn’t dare move. Not a muscle. She even fought against the urge to blink. Never, not since she was a child lying awake at night convinced something was opening the bedroom door, had she felt fear like this. She couldn’t cope with it.
Another breath. And another. One to the left, one to the right. Could she be imagining this? It wasn’t impossible. Space sickness could affect the best, and Denise was, well, probably not one of them.
Still the droning noise continued.
Then the voice started.
At first it was nothing more than a faint whisper, but it was recognisably a voice.
The volume increased slowly and steadily, echoing horribly around the stark walls of the bridge.
‘Indelphi awaits,’ she heard it say. ‘Indelphi awaits.’
Deep space outside the ship; strange, floating, bodiless chanting inside.
This was a cold, creeping terror.
‘Indelphi awaits,’ chanted the voice. The whisper became a chant. The tempo and volume increased steadily. A chorus of other voices joined.
‘Indelphi awaits,’ they said.
Denise gripped her seat, her face white and her hands pale. This was wrong. It was all wrong.
‘Indelphi awaits, Indelphi awaits, Indelphi awaits.’
The droning, thus far a constant, increased suddenly in pitch and volume, morphing into a deafening roar of white noise. The chanting voices became a wailing, otherworldly shriek: urgent, menacing. The shriek became a scream, the words pouring across the room like the Severn Bore racing up the Bristol Channel.
‘Indelphi awaits, Indelphi awaits, Indelphi awaits...’
Denise screamed. ‘Stop it!’ she cried. ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it!’ She started to sob as the voices became just a blur of syllables in amongst a throbbing soundscape.
She didn’t notice the Captain and the others running onto the bridge, alarmed at all the noise. She didn’t notice the look of realisation cross Dr. Richter’s face. She didn’t notice the electric guitar begin to pluck a complicated rhythm over the rapidly fading voices.
She noticed when the sounds stopped, however.
Looking up, she saw Dr. Richter closing down the music program she’d inadvertantly opened.
‘What is it?’ she asked, rubbing her eyes dry.
‘It’s okay,’ he reassured her. ‘It’s just music.’ He ran his hand gently through her hair under the pretence of comforting her.
‘Music? I thought some aliens had boarded the ship!’
‘No, no,’ said a sympathetic Dr. Richter. ‘It was just some progressive rock music I loaded into the system before we left. A band from the seventies called A Darker Shade Of Red. They tend to have a big build-up to their songs. I’m sorry, I never thought it would frighten anybody.’
Denise suddenly became very ashamed. ‘Oh, no, I wasn’t frightened, I was just surprised,’ she made out to him. ‘Really, I wasn’t scared.’ She blew her nose on a handkerchief Dr. Richter was offering to her and then collapsed with relief like a star with no glow.
As they left the room, the Captain chanced upon her notebook, lying by the computer terminal where she’d left it. He leafed through it quickly, smirked to himself, then pocketed the notebook and left with the others.