The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [105]
“If all that’s so,” Adam Zimmerman observed, “it’s surely not impossible that alien starships fitted with exotic drives might have been ducking in and out of the system for centuries.”
Niamh Horne didn’t believe that for a minute — but she couldn’t prove the negative. “There’ve always been stories and sightings,” she conceded, politely, “and anomalous traces on all kinds of recording devices. We dismiss them all as travelers’ tales, hallucinations and mechanical glitches…but everyone who’s spent much time in space has heard the rumors.” For a minute she sounded as if she were halfway to talking herself into it, but then she shook her head.
If we really had been a team, of course, I’d have told them what Christine had told me: that we were aboard the so-called Lost Ark, Charity. Charity was one of four giant spaceships that had been put together as a desperation measure when the Crash was at its worst and it seemed that the ecocatastrophe might make the Earth’s surface uninhabitable. All four had become effectively redundant before attempting to hitch a ride in the “blizzard” — a cluster of cometary fragments that had crossed the Earth’s orbit for the second time shortly before I was born — but their makers had invested everything they had in their obsession, so they went ahead anyhow. Only three of the vessels had been successfully integrated into the cometary masses, though, because Charity had been so badly damaged in the process that it had been written off. The colonists aboard that Ark had been transferred to the others.
By the time I was old enough to take notice the Arks were well on the way to being forgotten, but one of them — Hope — had come crashing back into the news seven hundred years later after it had made a landfall on a life-bearing planet: Ararat, also known as Tyre. I’d worked out that if what Alice had told me about herself was true, she must have been a passenger on one of the Arks. I had hesitated over believing that, because I wasn’t at all sure that an Ark lost in the 2100s could still be lost in 3263, presumably having made at least one more pass through the inner system in the meantime — but Niamh Horne had just told me that it could. If so, then it was not inconceivable that some of the prospective colonists had remained aboard rather than transferring to the other Arks. Even if that were not the case, the lost Ark might be an obvious target for other Ark dwellers returning to the system after a very long absence, if they wanted to establish themselves quietly and unobtrusively in a home-away-from-home. Even if everyone in the system had lost track of its orbit, that orbit would still be recorded in the Ark dwellers’ data banks.
Unfortunately, it still left the difficult questions conspicuously unanswered. Why should Ark dwellers of any sort want to hijack a Titanian spaceship? Why, if they did, would they choose to do it while it was playing temporary host to Adam Zimmerman, Michael Lowenthal, and Niamh Horne, to name but three?
If Alice had returned to the solar system from elsewhere — Ararat being the likeliest contender — then she must presumably have the use of a spaceship that was far more advanced than Charity, which could easily have stayed in the Outer System rather