THE CAMBRIDGE ANNEX: THE TRILOGY Read online

  With her cheery good luck still in his ears, Ricky followed her instructions. The corridor was wide and bright, better decorated than many of the hotels he’d visited. The lift too, was large and comfortable, taking him speedily to the first floor and the large lobby leading into the auditorium.

  There was a drinks table to one side, and others were already making their way into the auditorium, expressions mirroring their awe.

  Ricky took a plastic cup of apple juice and followed the others through a set of double doors, to find himself in a huge space, easily able to sit three hundred. He found a seat and settled down to wait, his eyes constantly surveying the large room. It wasn’t that it was any different from any of the other auditoriums that he had been in, of which there were many. It was that he couldn’t believe that such a large and normal looking room could exist 500 kilometres up in space.

  “Hello again,” said a voice, and he smiled, recognising Joyce.

  “Labelled and tagged, eh?” he asked with a smile.

  She nodded, rolled her shoulders with a look of unease, and slid in beside him. There were quite a few in the hall now, some choosing to chat, others doing as Ricky had, sitting on their own to gaze about them in awe.

  “I can hardly believe I’m really in space, you know?” she asked.

  He did, and finished nodding as the lights began to descend. The large screen flickered and showed space again, the edge of the ARC’s hull on the very edge of the image.

  “You are in space,” said a deep male voice. “You are living in the most hostile environment known to man. Nothing lives here,” they were told. “Fail to take the right precautions, and you won’t either.”

  “Wow! That get’s it said!” Joyce whispered.

  +++++++++++++

  Michael strode into the Rolle College Business Annex of the Cambridge Airport to smile at the large black man seated on one of the comfortable chairs, tea and biscuits sitting half drunk and eaten on the small table in front of him.

  “My apologies, I’m late,” Michael admitted apologetically while holding out his hand.

  Samuel Jenkins rose to take the hand. “That’s alright. It is nice and peaceful here, and your receptionist was very kind in making sure I had refreshment,” he explained, smiling his thanks towards the young woman at the front desk.

  “Well, if you’re ready?” Michael asked.

  “I am,” Samuel told him calmly, picking up a small rucksack of belongings.

  “The Swami was very complimentary about your experience. It’s good of you to consider giving up your studies to come and work for us,” Michael said as he led the way into the new glass lift on the outside of the building which lowered them smoothly to where the Range Rover waited.

  “My studies were about finished,” Samuel explained, putting his bag in the back of the car before getting into the front and doing up his seatbelt.

  “But you’re not a Guru?” Michael asked, a little perplexed by the subtleties of the Hindu administrative structure.

  “Guru means Teacher, but the meaning behind the word is a little different. It’s more than teacher. Teaching is not the sum of it all,” Samuel explained, the fleeting expressions on his face showing Michael that he knew he wasn’t doing a particularly good job of explaining the nuances behind the role and title. “Not all who study necessarily find themselves able or willing to take on the title.”

  Michael then steered the conversation away from the man’s faith and encouraged him to talk about his previous life as he drove around the perimeter road to stop at the southern boundary, and smoothly converted the controls. As the last indicator turned to green, Michael lifted the vehicle from the asphalt, and glanced towards Samuel.

  Samuel watched with interest, exuding a calmness Michael had not experienced with anyone before him.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked of the African-American as they rose above the layer of cloud, leaving it beneath them like a blanket of cotton wool.

  “How wonderful Brahman is,” Samuel answered while still looking outside.

  “That’s one of the Hindu gods,” Michael asked.

  Samuel frowned. “I would not have used the term God. It is the power behind everything, the essence of all, the spirit behind everything that is,” he explained. “There are then deities through which different elements of Brahman are expressed.”

  Michael nodded. He could see the logic in that.

  The sky grew darker as they rose above 85 kilometres, while outside, they had lovely views of the earth curving gently round, bright below them, darkness above them. They passed the 100 kilometre mark without comment and Michael turned on the telemetry to point them towards the ARC.

  “That was something I shall always treasure. Thank you,” Samuel murmured.

  “I hope you will have many opportunities to experience it again,” Michael told him. “I certainly have yet to get used to it,” he admitted.

  They chased the ARC eastward over Europe and Asia, catching up with it on the dark side of the earth, the dense lights of cities defining the coastlines for the eye to follow. The ARC, still sailing ahead of them, showed her navigation lights, additional lights ensuring the opening rear doors were clearly visible.

  “That is one big craft,” Samuel murmured.

  Michael grinned with pride and concentrated on bringing the Range Rover onto the floor of the docking bay and letting it roll into the nearest empty garage.

  “We’ve got a team of people ready to meet with you, to begin showing you the ship’s systems and the people responsible for each of them,” Michael explained while he waited patiently for the doors to close, and air flood into the small garage.

  “I should explain,” he added. “We’ve not made any changes to the Chapel, so it’s still pretty much orthodox Church of England.”

  “That’s fine,” Samuel shrugged. “Hindus tend to pray on their own, usually before just a small altar, a picture of a deity, a flower, a candle. I certainly don’t need the symbols of other forms of worship removed, and nor do other faiths consider Hindu practises a profanity,” he explained, his smile softening his statement.

  September 9th.

  “Frankie. We have an emergency,” Frank heard in his ear. He was in the driving seat of a SUV heading out to a middle earth orbit to collect a defunct satellite that had already been sold for ten million US Dollars. He pressed the red button on his screen to stop their movement and Maddy, sipping her tea beside him, stopped to look enquiringly up at him.

  “What is it Gary?” he asked, putting their conversation on the speaker.

  “The ISS has an internal breakdown,” Gary told him. “We’re trying to get more information, but no one is responding. But the line between them and Houston Space Flight Centre is full of technical details about the restoration of power to their air scrubbers.”

  Maddy was already working on her screen, swiping through the index of known and recorded location of orbiting objects, selecting the ISS to have its location appear. She held a finger to it, causing it to appear on Frankie’s screen.

  “We’re on our way there,” Frankie told the ARC, selecting the highest speed he could, but requesting they stop 500 metres short of it, just in case large parts of the station had come adrift. The last thing Frankie wanted was to ram into anything.

  The SUV shot backwards, curving around the earth as it held its orbit until, nearing the ISS, it could drop closer, stopping at the defined distance.

  For the two Travellers inside the SUV, it was the first time they had seen the International Space Station with any degree of detail. Far from being the single craft their experience of the ARC led them to expect of a Space Station, the ISS was a series of dissimilar cylinders whose narrowing ends had been fastened together in a long series. Then, sitting across the final third, a long boom had been constructed to support large sheets of solar panels. Unlike the ARC, the ISS could have fitted on a football field.

  Using their cameras and screens, Maddy and
Frankie looked for something amiss and shook their heads.

  “Looks fine on the outside,” Maddy told the ARC, knowing she was far from being an expert on the subject.

  “We’ve been intercepting bits of conversation between them and the Houston Space Flight Centre,” Gary explained. “They have issues with their air scrubbers. Electrics by the sound of it.”

  “What do they need? Equipment?” Frank asked.

  “Not sure. They’re not responding to our offers of assistance. All we can do for the moment is listen in and keep offering our help.”

  The screens in the SUV showed one of the modules of the ISS breaking soundlessly open, metal tearing apart producing a hole some 20 centimetres in diameter through which small object were being forcefully ejected into space. The force began to turn the ISS and the boom holding the massive sheets of solar panels began to bend.

  “I think we’re too late,” Frankie murmured, he and Maddy watching the silent explosion of air from the hole in the side of the ISS.

  “You getting this?” Frankie asked, aghast. Maddy brought more cameras into use. “One of the sections of the ISS has just been punctured, exploding outwards,” he explained, needing to say something.

  The fracture grew as the ISS continued to turn. Then, suddenly, the broken hole lengthened and, like a thin drink can being pulled, twisted in two directions, the fracture tore right across it, breaking it into two.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Maddy gasped, reaching for her helmet as she saw a limp body tumble out and into space.

  “You getting this?” Frankie repeated as the unmoving body floated away from the station, a station that was rapidly becoming two pieces, each moving on a different axis, their rotation threatening to bring them disastrously together again.

  “Jesus! Who’s the astronaut?” Gary cried. “I think that’s the Tranquillity Node 3 breaking up,” he went on to say, his voice sounding stunned.

  Frankie quickly slid his own helmet on and the two waited impatiently for the start-up sequence to finish before they could expel the air from the SUV, and step out to retrieve the body. While they waited, the rupture of the ISS continued, the long boom holding the solar panels breaking off-centre, then folding slowly inwards, moving to collide with itself in a terrible but inevitable slow motion.

  “We’re recovering a body,” Frankie told the ARC. “Do the others want evacuation?”

  He tapped his finger on the steering wheel, waiting for a reply while watching Maddy use the small hand-held directional controller to move swiftly and easily towards the tumbling body of the ISS astronaut. All she needed was a red cape and streaming golden hair and she’d pass for Supergirl, he thought.

  “Come on,” he murmured to himself, watching the now two separate parts of the ISS begin a slow tumbling motion, the dissimilar rotation narrowly missing each other, but promising to collide on the next turn, or the one after that.

  “We’re getting different instructions from different bases,” Gary explained into his ear. “Europe has called and asked for our help, Russia has called and warned us not to assist, and Houston can’t make up their mind and request we wait.”

  “I hope they see what we see,” Frankie told him as the camera faithfully recorded the clashing of two sets of fuel-cell panels. The distortion caused the remaining modules attached to the remains of the boom to begin tumbling on a second plane. “Is Oliver there?” Frankie asked.

  “I am,” Oliver murmured, clearly moved by what he was seeing. “We’re recording all of this, don’t worry Frank.”

  Maddy had returned with the lifeless body of the astronaut and was using strips of Velcro to fasten the body to the floor of the rear of the vehicle, the track of tears on her face gleaming in the reflected light of her heads-up display.

  “Russia continues to tell us that assistance is not needed,” Gary was saying, even as the broken fuel-cell panels came fully adrift, and turning on their own mass, swung across one of the other ISS modules, scarring its outer wall and causing it to turn in yet another direction.

  “That’s it; I’ve had enough. Fuck ‘em; I’m going in. Tell the remaining crew to get into the docking module. It’s probably the only module I can get to without those fucking fuel-cell booms hitting me!” Frankie called.

  “Don’t take any risks Frankie,” Gary told him.

  Frank’s fingers worked on the screens to give him the displays he wanted, and then he took up the steering wheel to begin moving the SUV slowly forward and down, under the tumbling remains of the station to then twist round, presenting their skids to the portion of the ISS that still held life.

  For the very first time, the sensations from his series of scalp tattoos seemed to be working. Whether it because he wasn’t concentrating on them, or because of the amount of time he’d spent with them, he wasn’t sure, but he could now sense the SUV surrounding him and, beyond that, the various pieces of the International Space Station moving over and around him.

  “Maddy?” he called.

  “I’m capturing the module,” she answered, and that was enough for him to identify her among the movement of things upon his scalp.

  With a strap in her hand she was swinging around the module they wanted, and then feeding the strap into a winch on the other side of the SUV to begin moving the two of them together. Meanwhile, Frankie had swung out of the SUV, and reaching into the tool box behind the cab, dug an electric chainsaw out of the tool cabinet. Armed with it, he jumped to the truss just behind the group of modules they wanted so that he could begin to cut through it.

  It still posed a danger though, so Frankie retrieved the spray gun from the SUV and used it to spray the truss with enough HYPORT to make sure it would fly towards earth fast enough to burn up on entry.

  “I can see them through the observation port. One is moving, although injured I think. The other is still,” Maddy told him, a note of urgency in her tone.

  “That will have to do then,” Frankie said. “Gary? Make sure the dock is empty and gravity-free for us. We’re going to bring the remains of the ISS into the ARC’s docking bay. Quickest way to get them out of there,” he explained, launching himself from the remains of the ISS towards the tool box in the back of the SUV.

  Maddy was already in the driver’s seat when he got to the cab, setting up their app for a return to the ARC while he returned to the cabin and closed the door. She tapped the app as soon as he was in. For once he was glad they didn’t have to worry about inertia.

  “Did you feel it?” he asked.

  “Did I!” she gasped. “I knew where every little piece of it was, and its size too!” she cried excitedly.

  Frankie nodded, relieved another wild idea had worked. He lifted his hand to rub at his scalp and laughed as he knocked his facemask. He had got so used to it he hadn’t noticed that he hadn’t removed it yet.

  +++++++++++++

  “Do we know the status of the crew?” Glen was asking, seated in his office in the White House, his face looking bleak.

  Michael’s image was on the screen, shaking his head. “We’ll have them out of their module in a few minutes, and then we’ll know more. We have a full and very competent medical team here, and we’ve sent for another team, one from the British Armed Forces with experience of Turkey and Afghanistan. But you’re welcome to request your own people attend,” he offered.

  “That might be a good idea. We’ll ask NASA to provide someone,” Glen agreed.

  The call finished, Glen turned his chair to look towards his certificate, issued by the ARC to prove that Glen Schroder had, having ascended beyond 100 kilometres of earth, achieved the distinction of becoming an Astronaut. The A3 frame had taken the place of the one of him shaking hands with the then newly elected President of the United States, now relegated to the side wall, no longer visible from the doorway of his small office. He hoped his trust in the ARC had not been misplaced.

  +++++++++++++

  “You have violated our national space,” Mr Evzen Hlavka told
Michael Bennett with a sombre face. “Your interference has caused the total destruction of the International Space Station and quite possibly the death of one of our cosmonauts. Do not compound your criminal acts by keeping the crew in custody. Release them immediately!”

  “Mr Hlavka. The crew are being extracted from the wreckage of the ISS, which had begun to disintegrate before we intervened. To suggest we caused the death of anyone is extremely insensitive, given the situation,” Michael suggested.

  “You talk of insensitivity? You have kidnapped the crew of the ISS. We demand you return them to earth immediately!”

  “They will be examined medically here first, and will only be returned to earth once we are satisfied that they are fit enough to do so. You are invited to have your own doctor examine them here, on the ARC.”

  “You will allow us on the ARC?” the Russian asked, his anger suddenly muted as he saw the advantage of Michael’s proposal.

  “A doctor,” Michael stressed. “We will check, Mr Hlavka,” he warned.

  +++++++++++++

  Gravity was disarmed in the ARC’s docking bay to allow the SUV, with its load held beneath it, to hang in the large area. With the doors closed, air was blown in, water content producing a shower of small ice crystals in the low pressure until there was enough pressure to stop it from doing so.

  Samuel Jenkins was in the passage adjoining the docking area with the medical personnel, many of them post-grads in fields allied to medicine. He spoke to them softly, urging them to breathe deeply and relax while they waited in nervous anticipation for the pressure to build before they were able to open the doors and rush in, some with wheeled trolleys, one carrying a defibrillator.

  Michael, watching from his suite, made a note to have them spend more time in weightless training, shaking his head when he recalled that they had scarcely been there a whole day. Meanwhile, Mickey and Lenny, out on a garbage run of their own, ditched the defunct satellite they had captured and dived for earth and the UK barracks where the field hospital team were hastily preparing medical supplies.