Roy C. Dudley

Galactic Gambit Prologue 1

   Star Wolf, XP-35-U5-Y, poked her blunt snout purposely into the asteroid belt. Soon, her sensors encountered images of huge chunks of ice and rock hurtling past. She slowed and dodged nimbly, her electronic sensors buzzing inaudibly. The computer banks digested the constant stream of data from the sensors, data on distance, size and the relative speed of the asteroids. Relays clicked open, others closed.

   Star Wolf slowed to a crawl as she worried her way through the aimlessly whirling mass. After each evasive maneuver, she returned remorselessly to a predetermined course, the exact course she had used on her departure.

   Star Wolf, circa 2050 A.D., experimental space ship number thirty-five returned home from Universe number five, Planet Y--or so her numerals would indicate. The travel tape fed orders to the computer banks controlling the space drive, was overridden by the urgency of the messages relayed by the sensors, backtracked and reissued the orders until a pause in the sensor activity allowed the orders to the drive to slip past. Then, inexorably, the tape advanced.

   Deep in the bowels of the ship, in the exact gravitational center, a polished metal sphere hung suspended, a sphere housing all the accoutrements of human comfort. The sphere was long unused, almost pristine in its sanitary cleanliness. This sphere was divided into three floors. The central floor was the living quarters, the bottom segment for use as storage, the upper segment, the control room. No human hands had touched these controls in tens of years.

   Near the wall in the center segment, and enclosed in sealed, glassine containers, rigidly clamped to the deck, lay three humans. Supported by beds that enfolded their length, the humans lay suspended and cushioned inside the containers. Numerous wires and tubing led to each of the containers, a veritable web of them. These were for the sensing devices monitoring the human's condition, and for the transmittal of life-giving heat, oxygen and the nutrients required by the humans upon waking. The humans lay frozen and motionless in the near death of suspended animation; the life which knows no awareness.

   Long rods braced this central sphere, rods that led to the shell of the ship itself, the sphere entirely independent of the struts and internal bracing holding the ship together. Around the sphere swirled a brutal cold only slightly less than that of space itself. Faint scars impinged upon the polished surface of the sphere, scratches marking where minute particles of dust had glanced from the unyielding surface after penetrating the outer and inner shell of the space craft. The struts and braces had been holed repeatedly by these tiny particles, but not the rods holding the sphere.

   Space dust and debris had battered the inner and outer shell of the ship on numerous occasions. A messy aggregation of sealant marked each of these scars on the hull.

   The supports for the central sphere were of the same hard metal and high polish as the spheres, and showed no signs of damage. Two larger such rods extended in parallel lines to smaller spheres located in the ship's bow and stern.

   In the forward sphere were computers, memory banks, sensors and the ship's controlling mechanisms. Through these two rods ran myriad wires and piping--the vitals of the ship. These rods offered scant room for human passage between the two spheres, and such travel had not occurred for decades. As with the rods, so with the computers and other equipment; each was duplicated and interconnected so the failure of one would not interfere with the ship's operation. All units were self-healing to a reasonable extent, and only extensive damage would totally disable any one of them.

   Through the hurtling mass of swirling asteroids something utterly alien progressed with practiced ease. This creature possessed a barely discernable substance, yet it sustained a life; not as man would describe life, but it existed. Ulna was not a native of the asteroid belt, had been a resident for an infinity of lonely years. In ages past, she had arrived with a companion, another mental force bereft of physical being. Those had been the happy times. Now she was alone.

   She was all intelligence and energy--cold, reasoning intelligence, almost illimitable energy. She progressed by a series of mental progressions--teleportion. In this particular asteroid belt lay the sustenance necessary to her existence. She was trapped. Capable of projecting her insubstantial body by teleportion, she could not do the same for her food. She must remain throughout eternity in this belt, alone and lonely. She patrolled the belt endlessly, around and back again.

   Ulna all but collided with the space craft and paused, baffled by this strange apparition. Sheer curiosity led her to conduct a minute examination of this asteroid which shifted directions so erratically. She quickly discovered the atomic key to the ship's construction and passed inside, absorbed by the ship, a gray mist of swirling luminescence with a bright light as a central core. Curious as a child, she probed the inner recesses of the computers, the sensors, all the ship's mechanism. She traced circuits in milliseconds, was puzzled momentarily by the atomic drive and finally entered the chamber of the humans.

   She probed the glassine case of the smaller one, a young boy. After a moment, she entered, flowing through the glass, an insubstantial mist. She touched the mind of the boy, sensed a surface awareness and picked up his feeling of intense cold, the loneliness and the longing of the boy.

   For the first time, she evinced some excitement. The mists swirled faster and became brighter, her presence more evident. She sensed a strange bond of some intangible thread binding the boy to the others, his creators. This alien thread was love she discovered, a strange fabric unknown to her. She ran ghostly fingers along the nerve networks of the boy, and through his brain, stirring ancient memories, ancestral horrors and recent regrets. She recoiled from the unfamiliar emotions, appalled, yet fascinated by this unawareness, this state of not being, and by an intelligence, however alien.

   She beamed strong telepathic commands and received answers weakly, very slow answers, but she had plenty of time. She had an eon of time, nothing but time; and she had been alone so very long. She opened the lock of the space ship and loaded food aboard, enough for an eon of existence.

   She rejected the thoughts of the boy's creators as too alien, too mundane, and settled herself to a strange vigil with the boy. She was fascinated by this not-life, and by glimpses of another world foreign to hers. She sensed some delicate balance which held this entity in its grasp, and probed more cautiously, but teaching too in her impatience to learn.

   Two centuries passed. Star Wolf had escaped the asteroid belt and held steadily to her programmed course. A modern Earth ship emerged from a space-time warp and almost immediately launched itself on another leap to a far distant planet. But its scanner had picked up Star Wolf on her lumbering course and alarms rang. A neatly printed probability course emerged from the computer, plotted exactly to the tenth decimal place.

Copyright © June, 1998
By: Roy C. Dudley