Living Hell Read Online Free Page B

returned from the Bridge, at long last. But I was wrong.
    It was Mum, preparing to leave our cabin.
    ‘What’s going on?’ I demanded groggily. I had climbed out of bed, and crossed to the door of my room in about four shuffling steps. (It wasn’t a very big room.) ‘Where are you going?’
    ‘Oh dear.’ Mum was pulling on her shoes in the half-light. ‘I was trying to be quiet . . .’
    ‘Is somebody sick?’
    ‘No, my love, it’s nothing like that.’
    ‘What, then?’
    Mum hesitated, and that unnerved me. She wasn’t normally the sort of person to pussyfoot around.
    ‘It’s not Dad, is it?’ I asked in alarm.
    ‘No, no! Tuddor’s fine.’
    ‘Where is he? Isn’t he back yet? What time is it?’
    ‘About zero-three.’ Mum rose from her seat. She hadn’t combed her hair, I noticed. ‘Cheney, there’s a Senate meeting on. I have to go. Your father, too.’
    I caught my breath. ‘A Senate meeting? Now?
    ’ ‘I’m afraid so.’
    ‘But – but -’ A Senate meeting at three o’clock in the morning could only be an emergency Senate meeting. And the only emergency Senate meeting ever before held on Plexus had occurred during the first shift, some forty-three years previously.
    On that occasion, the ship had narrowly avoided a large meteor.
    ‘Is it a meteor?’ I gasped.
    ‘No. It’s something else.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I don’t know. Please, Cheney, I’ll tell you later. I have to go now. I’m sorry, my love, I wish I hadn’t woken you.’ She crossed the room, and kissed me on the forehead. ‘See if you can get back to sleep.’
    I couldn’t, of course. How could I? An emergency Senate meeting had to mean that something bad was about to occur. So I sat in front of my Interface Array and logged on to our Core Artificial Intelligence Program, hoping that I might be able to dig up some information.
    In those days, CAIP was pretty accessible. The personnel files were heavily protected, but almost everything else was wide open – provided that you knew your way around. I did. I had to. My Rotation Assignment at the time was with Planning and Projection, the department that took care of CAIP and the Central Processing Unit or CPU. All of us ‘Capers’ were required to have a thorough grasp of the programs that ran the ship. After two months at Planning and Projection, I had a good working knowledge of most of CAIP’s functions, thanks to my supervisor, Arkwright. Arkwright knew CAIP more intimately than anyone else ever had.
    Oddly enough, he wasn’t a big fan. Although he agreed that CAIP was extraordinarily complex, he didn’t regard it as a very ‘creative’ program. It was, he said, too stable to be really interesting. Its designers had sacrificed flexibility for stability; CAIP, he maintained, was about as exciting as a condenser coil.
    I suppose, after years of exposure to CAIP, he couldn’t be blamed for getting a little bored. I disagreed with him, though. I was still coming to terms with the sheer extent and depth of that program. As for the CPU, it was a marvel. It had a self-assembly system based on hybridised DNA, and a matrix like a neuron map. In other words, it wasn’t the least bit boring to me. Neither was CAIP. Just because a program is accessible and user-friendly doesn’t mean it’s a great big yawn.
    As accessible as CAIP was, however, I didn’t have much luck with the Navigation data that night. My problem was that I still hadn’t spent any time in Navigation. (My first Rotation Assignment had been with Sustainable Services.) So a lot of the stuff that I riffled through didn’t make much sense to me. Besides, I was tired. I wasn’t thinking too clearly.
    What I finally established was this: we were on a collision course with some kind of mysterious band of radiation. It was heading straight for us – a long, drawn-out wave of energy, hurtling through space at the speed of light. No one had worked out the exact composition of the wave, or where it might have