Passage
Volume Two of the Galactic Citadel Series
By
Thorby Rudbek
Copyright © 2013 Thorby Rudbek
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 9780987767417
DEDICATION
My thanks go to Madhu & Sandra, the special couple who have supported my cause recently; without their enthusiasm and encouragement, this second volume in the story of Richard and Kirrina would not be available in e-print – and neither would the first! What is really amazing is the truly international nature of this facet of the passage of ‘Passage’ from my computer to the ebook you are holding now. It is a story of old world and new… north, south, west, centre, and middle and further east. Perhaps that is fitting, for the story of Citadel is something that ‘impacts’ our entire planet, as can be verified in the third volume…
Prologue
Enid Schroder sat moodily on the end of her bed. She was in the moderately comfortable Rockland motel room that Ed Baynes’ group had arranged for her, after she had been forcibly evacuated from Redcliff the previous morning. The National Unusual Incident Team had made it clear that she was not free to leave the area, and that they would be back to ask her further questions about her nephew – the ‘terrorist’ – Richard Fletcher.
As if! She stared out the window at the rather limited and uninspiring view of the parking lot beyond the weed-infested rock garden. Several vehicles were parked unevenly across the worn wet tarmac, their varying finishes shown up clearly by the way the water beaded or pooled on the flatter panels of their exteriors. The sky was dull; the dark grey clouds drifting slowly by were loaded with rain yet to fall. In the distance, she heard another dull boom, akin to thunder. This time she was sure it was an explosion of some kind.
What are they doing to my lovely town? She watched the unexciting view idly as one particularly decrepit car burst reluctantly into raucous song and pulled out of its parking space, accompanied by the rattle of its loose and rusty muffler. After a brief flash of hesitation from the brake lights, it rolled out onto the road and pulled away.
Enid sighed, her posture slumping further even than usual. She was dressed in one of her least favourite dresses, one that she had been given by a neighbour who was unfailingly generous but invariably fashion-blind. This frustration about her very limited selection of clothing – she had grabbed just the most basic of supplies before being quite literally dragged from her home – was, from a lady with no recent history of style, a throwback to her later teenage years and the following decade, when she had still been trying to pull her husband away from his alcoholic trail. In those days she had dressed with a consideration of his response, and for a time it had seemed to work. Eventually he had become too addicted to notice her anymore, and she had gradually stopped trying. It had been many years since she had felt any real concern about how she dressed, and almost as many since she had really cared how she looked. Health problems had made this change come quicker than it would otherwise have – she had a long list of increasingly debilitating medical conditions from chronic bronchitis to multiple sclerosis, and over the years had become resigned to the increasing limitations imposed by these physical frustrations. The arrival of her nephew had briefly sparked a change to that attitude, but now those feelings seemed unrealistic in the painful light of day.
I guess I’ll just have to prepare myself for the inevitable. I’ll never see him again. She pondered on the five days that Richard Fletcher had spent in her tiny home: the friendly conversations; the youthful viewpoints; the genuine concern for her that he seemed to have. Somehow, as she had watched his enthusiastic expressions and positive perspectives portrayed, she had even felt a little younger, too. They were days that had given her hope for a brighter future, after a past filled with broken promises and shattered dreams. The fact that those old dreams were unrealistic was of course a part of the nature of such unfinished plans. However, the promises had been not merely broken, but had been crushed, and that self-indulgent decision by her husband had finally finished off her rebelliousness, and left her a shadow of her former self. Her nephew contrasted so strongly with the man she had so rashly chosen.
“It’s not that he was that unusually special, just that he was a polite, thoughtful boy.” In her solitude she spoke her thoughts out loud, a habit which had developed in the years of loneliness created by Henry’s decadence, as her pretended conversations with him had generally been one-sided due to his semi-perpetual drunken stupors. After her husband had finally died of the side-effects of his chronic alcoholism, she had continued to vocalize her thoughts, even though she no longer had an excuse for this eccentric behaviour. She reviewed in her mind the frustratingly brief newspaper articles and the more intriguing scraps of gossip she had heard, wondering again how Richard could possibly have any connection with the evacuation of Redcliff.
No, surely he couldn’t be responsible for all this, he seemed quite like his father to me, and Martin was the picture of respectability. Enid pondered on her brother, Martin Fletcher, with whom she had regularly been unfavourably compared, and about whom she had reminisced with Richard on the previous Sunday.
“Richard was different from the boys nowadays, right enough, but perhaps that was just the result of the months he had spent in a coma, and the pain of his separation from all those he loved.” She could understand this second point only too well. After her elopement, it had taken years to begin the reconstruction of her relationship with her parents, and they had died long before that process had reached anything approaching normalcy.
Aches in her legs reached a level demanding some action, so she shifted her weight slightly in an attempt to appease ‘the pain lord’, as she had come to call the newest master of her destiny. The bed creaked with the annoying high-pitched sound that she had come to loathe in the thirty or so hours since she had been deposited in the motel.
Maybe not though. Enid pondered on the newscasts, wondering how on earth her mild-mannered nephew could also be a secret agent for a foreign power. She remembered how her neighbour, Ralph Stoner, had mentioned Richard’s new friend Karen, the mystery girl at school who had turned out to be a secret agent, too, if the reports in the media were to be believed. Enid turned, ignoring the pain of her arthritis as best she could, and picked up the newspaper she had bought at the front desk the day before. The picture of Richard was a good one, but his character was known to her – and it bore no resemblance to the text beneath the photo – and she could only conclude in turn that the girl whose picture was printed alongside his was as pretty and harmless as she looked.
“Richard Fletcher and Karen Amer. ‘Fugitives from Justice!’ Why would they… how could they?” She held the front page closer to the window to improve the illumination. “It doesn’t make any sense!” The picture sank slowly and unnoticeably in her hands, and her eyes clouded over.
Her reverie was broken by the annoyingly loud bell on the telephone in her small room. She heaved herself up from the bed – with the inevitable creak – turned away from the window, took two small steps, and picked up the handset.
“Hello?” Enid listened while the receptionist explained she would connect her to the incoming call. A moment later her care-worn face brightened and her back seemed to straighten fractionally. She stared through the cheap landscape picture mounted over the small desk, absorbed in the message, seeing something, or someone, far further away than the nondescript country scenery portrayed therein. Once the call ended, she hung up the telephone and returned to the window.
She looked instinctively upwards as she contemplated the short but startling, no – stupefying – communication. Richard is safe, and he’s not some kind of international criminal. Her face softened as she watched the sky lighten and th
e clouds start to thin. He’s gone away, out there, somewhere, but he’s happier this way, and so is his young girlfriend. I should have never doubted him. He couldn’t have done what they said he did. Enid sat on the end of the bed and folded her hands in her lap as she contemplated his escape out of the dreary world from which she had once sought to run with her hero, Henry. Only he had not been all that he had seemed to the young, naïve and rebellious beauty she then was.
Ah! Young love! For a while, Enid was far from the cramped quarters that she had been allocated, in an almost vicarious daydream where she was young again, and her imaginary romantic interest was as solidly steadfast as Richard was in reality, by way of comparison with her fatally flawed Henry. Her imagined life with this ideal was exactly what she had run away from home to obtain, but of course, it was so very different from what she had ultimately achieved with her alcoholic, weak and selfish ‘liberator’, the one who had taken her away from her parents and their ‘dull existence’, or at least the steady life she had labelled ‘dull’, as she had then perceived it to be.
A few minutes later, her dreamy thoughts were interrupted as some kind of military jet flew low over the motel and into view, its engines showing a bright glow as it roared off rapidly, causing the window frame to vibrate against her elbow. She watched it streak away into the distance, leaving a thin trail of grey behind it. As it shrank and finally disappeared she spoke softly and kindly, as if her nephew could hear her easily.
“Thank you, Richard, and God-Speed.”
Chapter One
Minds in space have space in mind – Penchetan, early Arshonnan scout
The ancient Scout Craft, Citadel, continued to fall up and away from the Earth. Richard and Karen watched silently, as the full glory of the beautiful blue and white globe was revealed. Behind it the silvery splendour of the Moon drifted serenely into view.
“Are you sure you want to come with me?” Karen broke the silence finally, her mental abilities making her blindingly aware of his mixed feelings, but her feminine ones ironically causing her not to be able to resolve those same feelings clearly in her emotionally overloaded mind. “I don’t know if I will ever come back.”
“I lost everything I had on Earth, then I found you;” Richard pulled her towards him and kissed her gently. “I’m not losing you again.” He thought with a shudder of the terrible injury she had sustained during the otherwise one-sided confrontation at the police roadblock during their return to Citadel with the beryllium, and his intense feelings of desolation as he had feared her life was ebbing away. “You’ll just have to get used to having me around, I guess.”
She kissed him in return, and then leaned her head on his shoulder with a sigh of happiness. Neither of them said anything for a long time, then Karen asked quietly:
“Tutor, were my parents married, like people on Earth?”
“That information in not in the ship’s log,” her mentor responded. “But there is no doubt that they were extremely committed to each other. The Earth custom of marriage is highly variable… at least it is, the way Earth people practice it. What your parents had was much more than most ‘down there’ ever have.”
Karen looked up at Richard with her deep blue eyes.
“It was like that with you, from the moment I met you. Without you…” her words trailed off to nothing, as she realized that he understood her perfectly.
They sat together, arm in arm, watching the Earth and the Moon float gently away on a tranquil sea of stars, safe now, from the fearful fury of the would-be defenders of America.
About the time that the Earth had shrunk to the size of a pinhead, and the characteristic blue was only faintly discernible, Richard broke the companionable silence with a question directed at Karen’s first real friend. “Tutor, how long will it take us to reach Karen’s home planet… what was it called again?”
“Arshonna,” Karen supplied quickly.
“Unknown,” Tutor replied shortly. “Star Drive response is nominal according to all sensors, but I can find no indication of how this might change when we engage full power, and what influence this may have on inter-dimensional travel times, if any.”
“Can you tell us how much power we are using now?” Karen asked with a hint of irritation, unsure of the meaning of Tutor’s response and determined to discover something fundamental, as the after-effects of the adrenaline and euphoria associated with their successful escape from the authorities on Earth faded away.
“Less than a millionth of available power is currently committed to the Star Drive.”
“Wow!” exclaimed Richard as he leaned over the multitude of displays and readouts on the panel in front of his chair, trying without success to figure out if that information were shown somewhere before him. “So why are we using so little; does this mean we are going slow?” he guessed, as he continued scanning the controls. “Are you doing this just so we can enjoy the view, or…?”
“Records indicate that this power level was always maintained until the vessel reached a point more than one thousand times the diameter of the local star from the solar centre, or from any planetary body,” Tutor responded simply.
Richard and Karen contemplated this for a while. Finally, Karen decided to ask the obvious question:
“Why?”
“There is no reason recorded in the data banks, but I would infer that it is a safety feature,” Tutor began to explain. “The Star Drive works in two fundamentally different modes, although both are caused by the same equipment. In the mode we are presently using, a slight, artificially induced variation in the local gravity field allows us to continually fall in any direction we desire. In the second mode, the one which allows us to cut between the fabric of normal space, the gravity field is distorted to the point where the effect becomes more general, allowing the Scout Craft to slide right into this other set of dimensions. I surmise that this distortion effect may cause damage to anything close by, perhaps twisting it, too.” Tutor displayed some of the mathematics of this alternate series of dimensions on the smaller screens before both Richard and Karen.
“I’m sure glad you’re with us, Tutor, I don’t think I understood much of that,” Richard admitted frankly as he glanced over the display, realizing that the explanation was finished.
Karen squeezed his hand and sighed.
Richard realized, with a slight feeling of comfort at their shared ignorance, that she was also unclear as to the reality of any danger that applying the Star Drive in the vicinity of a planetary body might cause.
“So, how long will it take us to reach this safe point?” she asked, determined to get something unambiguous from her mentor.
“At present rate of acceleration, thirty seven hours, forty three minutes.” Tutor wisely left out any mention of seconds, having learned previously that such information was considered superfluous in these kinds of situations by both Richard and Karen.
“That means we have time to eat something!” Richard smiled at his own classic understatement. He got up and stepped around the high-backed chair. Karen did the same, and they smiled at each other sheepishly as they contemplated the concept of Scout Craft Seven flying onwards without any human pilot.
“Tutor,” Karen said. “Is it okay to leave the Control Centre while we are in flight?”
“Yes, I will monitor constantly. Please feel free to obtain your nourishment without worry.”
She took Richard’s outstretched hand, and together they shimmered through the simulated door at the back of the Control Centre, and reappeared in the Moss Room.
“Let’s eat my favourite!” Karen suggested eagerly. “You’ll love it!”
Richard agreed, and while they enjoyed the convenience of the Sustainable Food Supply System, they talked about what they might find when they got to Arshonna.
“I might have some relatives there, maybe an aunt or uncle; Tutor said that my parents would still be alive if they had had access to the full medic system on this Scout Craft.”
“Oh! I hope there aren’t more people like him there. They might try to boss us around. They might decide that we couldn’t get married, or whatever they call it there.”
“I get the feeling that it isn’t usually like that with Arshonnans. Not like the rulers on Earth; half the people in power back there would make Vochan seem quite reasonable!”
Karen laughed. “I guess I didn’t see that much of life on Earth; that trip to Springfield and back was more than I’d seen in all my previous fifteen-plus-a-bit years, unless you count our zipping into low earth orbit – though we really didn’t do any orbiting – and dropping down to that lovely forest in Quebec, where the jets didn’t quite find us.”
Richard looked at her closely, somehow aware of something that he perceived as rather poorly concealed in her comment by her ‘red herring’ rambling about the replacement of the Power Coupling Unit. “I guess you don’t actually know your birth date, or do you?”
Karen blushed. “Well, I did look it up... after Tutor got access to the records.”
“And?” He waited for a few moments. “Aren’t you going to let me in on the secret?”
“Sorry,” she giggled. “I wondered what it would be like to have a secret like that, like all the famous women on Earth used to.” She paused for dramatic effect. “Actually, I’m already seventeen! I have been for several weeks now.”
To Richard this made sudden and perfect sense. He waited, expectantly, for the details.
“It was August 9th,” she answered after another dramatic delay.
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