Living Hell Read Online Free PDF Page A

come from. No one had worked out whether we could dodge it.
    I sat there with a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach. You see, there weren’t any lifeboats on board Plexus. There were a couple of shuttle-pods, but each of them was only big enough to hold about twenty people, having been designed specifically for carrying the Plexus population, little by little, from the ship to any nearby habitable planet. They weren’t equipped to support life for very long. They weren’t big enough. Only Plexus was big enough.
    It had been decided – long ago and far away – that lifeboats would be pointless. Plexus was our only chance of long-term survival in space. That’s why we didn’t have any lifeboats, or emergency beacons, or evacuation procedures. Why bother with things like that? There was no one out there to pick us up if we abandoned ship.
    If Plexus died, we died.
    Sitting in my room, I told myself that Plexus wouldn’t die. It couldn’t die. It had a multi-layer pressure hull, designed to repel every kind of radiation known to man. It had a coating of sol-gels (heat-resistant porous films). It was constructed out of nanocomposite matter that contained atomic-force nanoprobes; they could repair faults on a subatomic level, by enabling atoms to move back into low-energy positions. On top of that, it had a photocatalytic shield. I’m not exactly sure how this shield worked, but I do know that it responded to every frequency on the electromagnetic spectrum. The higher the frequency, the greater the response, which was a massive release of ions forming a kind of reflective barrier.
    With all this at our disposal, as well as our micrometeoroid deflector and backup thermal protection system, we couldn’t be at risk. That’s what I told myself. And despite a niggling sense of unease, I truly believed it. Somewhere deep down, in my very bones, I knew that Plexus wouldn’t fail us.
    Nevertheless, I was still awake when my parents finally returned, at zero-six, for a bite of breakfast and a word with me.
    Mum took one look at my face and said, ‘You haven’t slept a wink, have you?’
    I shook my head.
    ‘Oh, Cheney. You should have called. I’d have given you something.’
    ‘You were in a Senate meeting. I couldn’t interrupt a Senate meeting.’
    ‘Yes you could. You can call me any time, you know that. Senate meeting or no Senate meeting.’
    ‘What’s going on?’ I could restrain myself no longer.
    ‘What’s happening with the wave? Is it going to hit us?’
    Dad peered at me. ‘You’ve been poking around in CAIP,’ he deduced.
    ‘Yes I have. But I don’t understand . . .’
    ‘Nobody understands.’ Dad turned to the food dispenser and jabbed at a few of the keys, frowning. (For some reason, he never quite mastered the food dispensers on Plexus.) ‘We don’t know what we’re dealing with, exactly. Not yet.’
    ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Didn’t we get anything out of the probe?’
    ‘Some early readings. That was before it passed through the wave. Since then, nothing. All we know is, this isn’t a type of cosmic emission that anyone’s ever encountered before. Oh, damn – what have I done now?’
    ‘You just cancelled your order, Dad. Let me.’
    ‘Thanks.’ He stepped aside, and I keyed in his directives for him. Poor Dad had a bit of a problem with the physical world. He called himself ‘matter-incompatible’.
    ‘It’s a bundle of contradictions, this wave,’ he continued, as his pancakes appeared. ‘On the one hand, it’s behaving rather like high-frequency radiation. On the other hand, it’s a stream of subatomic particles that aren’t quanta. Some of them aren’t even identifiable as any of the three hundred or so types known to us already, though at least two of them appear to be elementary particles. It’s very strange.’
    ‘But is it dangerous?’ That’s what I wanted to know. ‘Are we going to be all right?’
    Dad glanced at Mum. ‘Oh, I’m sure we are,’ he