The Island of Hope Read Free Page A

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