The Island of Hope Read Free Page B

phenomena.
    Fire. An acrid odor of burning insulation. Distant explosions and the shuddering hull of the gigantic space cruiser.
    The black nothing of hypersphere. The weariness of waiting for battle. And almost as the trump of doom, the salutary deliverance from uncertainty: the wailing of alarms.
    Holding their breath, they observed their fleet take up positions not far from a lifeless and nameless planetoid. A monstrous armored sphere – a star fortress of colonists – was already hanging in its orbit. Both the Admiral and Andrei's father were there now, at fleet headquarters.
    The detectors caught some disturbances in space. Something was trying to break out of the infernal Nothing, a.k.a. hypersphere, back to the three-dimensional continuum.
    Andrei didn't know that this battle would go down in history as the first experience of "puncture tactics". He would never read any manuals written for future generations, but he would also never forget the pale-blue flashes of hypertransfers suddenly sparkling directly amidst the battle formation of the Colonies Fleet.
    The first wave was formed by remotely controlled kamikaze modules. About a hundred nuclear explosions blossomed in space, reducing half their fleet to rubble, and following them, wave after wave, Earth's battle space cruisers hove into view.
     
    * * *
     
    He was coming round.
    Andrei was drenched in sweat, suffering the torments of the damned; finally he envied the dead indeed. The pain spread all over his body like a fire; the nerve endings perished first, causing inhuman tortures to his mind.
    Andrei returned to dreadful reality. But he hadn't any desire for living anymore. What for? He realized perfectly well that the turret torn from his spaceship was drifting into an abyss from which one could never return.
    He knew how to interrupt this torture, but was unable to reach for his personal firearm: the weight of the heaped-up spacesuits had pinned him to the floor. He wheezed, feeling hot liquid dripping down his cheeks. He couldn't even shoot himself!
    Once again his consciousness began to fade. He was gripped by a suffocating blackness in which a luminous spiral rotated frenziedly. It was penetrating his inflamed brain, giving him some relief; he was turning towards it, passionately desiring to escape the indecency of such a death... but at this moment (how many times had it already happened?) the bioscanners of his battle spacesuit worked.
    What's the point?
    He cursed the machine for trying to save him. All he wanted was to die, but the re-animator was able to squeeze out all of the soldiers' life up to the last drop.
    A black infinity spread from the past to the future.
    The spiral which had appeared, now disappeared.
    Then at last fell total darkness.

2.
     
    H e recovered consciousness after some seventy hours.
    Having opened his eyes, Andrei lay for a long time staring senselessly at the internal sensors of his pressurized helmet.
    "I'm still alive."
    The quivering lights of indicators were hovering at zero.
    His combat spacesuit resource was completely exhausted.
    He was surrounded by darkness and an oppressive smell . He stirred, and his stiffened body responded with a dull pain. The heap of spacesuits was displaced, and he caught sight of a strip of reddish light.
    His weakness and the nauseating odor made him suffocate. Somehow he squeezed his way through the dozens of spacesuits. Two emergency lighting lamps flooded the turret interior with a reddish light. All screens were lifeless, as well as the gun control panels; one could only read some dim lines on a stand-by monitor:
     
    Laser gun – serial number 5 – destroyed.
    Your compartment has transformed into an autonomous module.
     
    He vacantly examined those lines while unfastening blindly the locks of his spacesuit.
    The most terrible thing which could ever happen to a man had just occurred to him. During those seventy hours they could have gotten him out of the battered turret a hundred