“Definitely not,” Paranak responded once his hacking laugh subsided enough for him to talk. “But then I know you are a male! You are indeed a great warrior, my friend.” He reached out to slap her on the head again, but caught himself in time. “Even if you are a little fragile.”
Kirrina wisely decided to drop the subject until a more suitable occasion. I could show him, but as he is not familiar with human anatomy, and his unclothed body ‘bares’ no resemblance to the human form… She shuddered as she briefly considered exposing herself to the monstrous creature she now thought of, incredibly, uncertainly, but with ever-growing confidence, as her friend.
“So, what will you do, now that you are convinced you have fully recovered?” she asked hesitantly, after a short period of contemplation.
“Pain is good for a warrior.”
Kirrina understood from this that his wounds were in fact far from healed. She was about to suggest rest, but the knowledge he had imparted to her in the recent mutual sharing of their minds was sufficient to convince her that he would take any such advice as an insult.
“I must help you,” Paranak said simply. “I know, somehow, that your Patan[3], your ship is badly damaged.” His face looked more wrinkled than ever, indicating his confusion at the new experience of having Kirrina’s, or anyone’s, thoughts and memories in his mind. He stood up suddenly, startling her again by the way his legs unfolded. “If we do not hurry, my brothers will return, and there will be a battle. I must not fight my brothers, but I must protect you, therefore we must leave before they return.” He stepped outside, moving his short legs rapidly, with Kirrina keeping up easily beside him.
“Good, you remembered about Seagull,” she congratulated him, as he intuitively recognised and headed for the Aircar. “If you allow yourself, you will find much which may help you understand me,” she continued, hoping that her femininity would surface from the undoubted mess that his subconscious now was. She climbed inside the Aircar and waited while the bulky alien joined her. She glanced over as he sat down beside her; his legs stuck straight out awkwardly, touching the instrument panel.
“This ship is not built very well,” he observed as he found himself pushed back against the headrest.
Kirrina smiled. “Why don’t you put your feet up on the ledge here?” she suggested, avoiding any comment on his anatomy. She waited while he tried this, and, seeing that he was at last almost comfortable, started out for the maintenance centre. Being back with her beloved Seagull made her feel more confident, almost relaxed. Relaxed enough so that she said what was uppermost in her mind without hesitation. “Paranak, why do your people hate mine so much?”
“Humans, or Shaatak, as the Narlavs call your kind, have always been our sworn enemies.”
Kirrina recognised the word as a name for a small, fast-moving animal from Narlav history, which would try to eat anything that moved. Something like a rat… I don’t think it’s much of a compliment!
“But surely there must have been a time when neither race was aware of the other’s existence?”
Paranak folded and refolded his arms in a fluid and repetitive manner that Kirrina recognised as an indication of uncertainty, roughly equivalent to the human shrug.
“I have heard it said that the Chiefs of each tribe keep a record which goes back many centuries; perhaps this knowledge is contained in one of these records. I only know that Shaatak have been used for slaves on all the Narlav worlds for a very great length of time. Many warriors would have to work in the fields before getting an opportunity to fight in the wars, if it were not for the slaves.”
The Aircar landed neatly in the entrance and both occupants got out. Kirrina walked towards the main control console, but turned her head – instantly regretting the movement as it brought a searing pain from the damaged muscles. She turned her whole body instead, hoping to hear more from the strangely frank Narlav, as the memories she had gained from him so recently were coloured with a mass of emotions too violent for her to sift through – for the present, at least.
“This is a very great base, where are all the other people?” Paranak inquired as he turned from side to side and examined the huge facility.
“They left over five hundred years ago,” Kirrina responded simply. “The records don’t say exactly why.”
The Narlav looked at the wreckage of Scout Craft Seven as it sat on its dollies in the centre of the vast hangar. All along the side were a neat row of small tripods, like miniature overhead high voltage towers. “This place, where is it?” He admitted the extent of his ignorance reluctantly, like a novice at Monopoly putting the last of his money into houses for the most expensive street while looking to see if any of the other players were amused.
“We are inside the protective Shell Field of the base called Outpost Twenty Seven. It was in this star system that your Pakak attacked our defenceless craft without warning.”
Paranak turned from his methodical scanning of the black hulk and looked at her with the wrinkled eye-gap that she was now growing used to.
“Defenceless! Ha! How is it that your ship reduced ours to atom-fragments then? A great ploy from your warrior mind, no doubt.”
“No, we really were defenceless.” Kirrina insisted with total sincerity. “Almost all the ship’s systems had failed. The craft you see before you has undergone little maintenance in the past five hundred-plus years; we were trying to fix the Star Drive when we felt the ship jump from the explosion.”
“There were two explosive devices. But how did you respond, if your Drive was down?”
“I managed to get the Drive back on line, just seconds after the explosion, whichever one it was, and Richard got lucky with the Negatruction beam. Then he punctured your boarding craft with the laser, because the Drive had failed again.”
“Yes, I saw that,” Paranak correlated her narration with his recollection of the events. “None of the others had their breathers on. Shaatak-karvak! I knew I was right!”
Kirrina smiled. Rat-fodder, that’s what he thinks of his companions. We are so lucky the others weren’t as smart, or maybe, is it just cautious? …as he is!
“So, what were you and your crew doing in this system?” she asked a little hesitantly, as she could see he would not return to the subject without more prompting.
“Ha!”
Kirrina ducked to avoid his hearty head slap, her neck pain pulsing strongly again as she unintentionally changed the inclination of her head.
“It was not my crew.” Paranak tried to hide his amazement at the human ability to fold the body over while remaining standing. “I was lowest of all. The ship chiefs, the officers, as you would call them, all thought I was weak, because I studied many things. It is not the way of the warrior, but I needed to know. I had a compulsion about it. They ignored my prowess in the fights. They did not consider that I had never been injured” – (he did not consider the many flesh wounds he had received as ‘real injuries’) – “not after my first practice fight. Now I know that I was right! A warrior is stronger with knowledge of many things. That is why I still live.”
“But what was your Chief doing?” she asked exasperatedly.
Paranak turned and stared at her, and Kirrina wondered if she had gone too far, and he would finish her off, now he knew she was alone on the planet.
“We always look for Shaatak ships, whatever system we patrol. We knew this system had an impregnable base, and had assumed a large force manned it. We knew that they were too scared to leave…” Here a piercing whistle made Kirrina jump – and she knew, more than just recalled, that this was the Narlav expression of amazement. “It has been some years, but some of the crew your Richard disposed of so well remembered a fight with a Patan – a Scout Craft – like yours, before I was even born. They said that one Narlav gunner stood between them and its capture. He blew the Scout Craft to oblivion when his fellow warriors had knocked the Shell Fields down and were about to crack first the Structural Protection Field and then the
hull with fusion bombs, just as we did to enter your ship. I think he hated humans too much, enough to defy a direct order. His superiors must have thought so; they could not tolerate his unauthorised action. He was executed immediately.
“This system is visited regularly,” he continued, obviously unconcerned at the elimination of such an undisciplined warrior. “Because of the large supply of Batnokkan here from which we refuel all our Pakak and Warrnam every year or two. No wonder that no one ever tried to stop us taking it!” He walked up and touched the black surface of Citadel with his double-thumbed hands. “That is why we must leave, before my Pakak is missed, and another is sent here. If that happens, you will be trapped here forever; I cannot help you if it means fighting against my own people.
“This is very strange,” he changed the subject abruptly as he walked around to the front end of Citadel and examined the crater-like hole in Scout Craft Seven’s forward sphere. “The interior has vanished. How can that be?”
“Your ships are not built like this?” Kirrina asked in amazement.
“No, how could we build something that is only there sometimes?” The Narlav looked puzzled, but more than that, he looked intensely interested in receiving the answer to his own question.
Kirrina opened her mouth to give him the solution, then decided it would be too difficult to explain. “If you would help me activate some of this equipment I have been setting up, I think I might be able to show you how.”
Paranak swivelled energetically from side to side in agreement, and he watched as she aligned the focus coils for the miniature ‘high voltage tower’ device nearest the front end of Citadel so that it would present its unique energy field towards the damaged sphere, enveloping it completely as required. As she moved on to the next, he startled her by approaching the one at the far end and deftly tuning it as if he now knew what to do.
Kirrina finished the adjustments to her second device and started on the third as he completed his first. Abruptly, she stopped and checked the unit he had tuned warily.
Paranak stood motionless for a good minute, then he seemed to boil over without warning:
“What! Is my work to be suspected by a mere Shaatak?”
Kirrina stepped backwards in shock as the Narlav’s gnarled hands reached out towards her.
“Not at all!” she squeaked with her tortured voicebox. “It is merely standard practice among humans to double-check everything, as a safety precaution. Please check mine,” she added hastily, as a form of compliment, for she had discovered to her amazement that his manipulations were correct in every detail.
Paranak halted his advance in confusion, as evidenced by the interlocking and disentangling of his double-elbowed arms.
“This is an insult, yet it might save lives, if an error had been made.” He stared at Kirrina with his expressionless eyes for several minutes before continuing. “I will do this for you.” He walked over to the devices she had aligned. “For how can an insult be an insult, when it is exchanged for another identical to it, to allow the warriors a better chance to fight and beat their enemies in the future?”
Kirrina did not respond, assuming the rather long-winded question to be rhetorical, but just watched in relieved silence as he checked her work. Once he had swivelled to indicate all was correct, she let him tune the third device, and checked it afterwards. Next, she led him around to the other side and they tuned the devices there, also, each checking the work of the other. Once both were satisfied with the fine-tuning, she leaned over the device by Citadel’s rear Sphere and activated it.
Paranak did the same with the two nearest him as she tuned the one at the other end, and they hurried back around the end of Citadel to activate the devices that they had tuned there earlier. Then they wandered around, each casting their eyes over the controls of the four units on each side one final time to confirm that all the strange contraptions were working within the normal range of specifications and without difficulties.
“The computer said it would take a few minutes for the effect to stabilise,” Kirrina said, as she watched the crater with anticipation.
“Ahh!” Paranak murmured as the black substance shimmered, then seemed to blow away like mist in a sudden wind, revealing the interior of the Control Centre once more. “This is fantastic!”
Kirrina shuddered. “I used to think so, until I started contemplating what it would be like to be stuck inside, when the five power backups failed.”
“We must examine the equipment in here,” Paranak said without any sign of trepidation connected with the concept of entombment. “Perhaps we will be able to deduce conclusions from the state of the components which were once used to assemble them.”
“Help me with this ramp, then,” Karen pointed at a wheeled access device over by the wall. “And you can find out for yourself.” She shook her head in amazement at his abilities and curiosity, convinced now that his ‘help’ would not just be a convenient way for her to keep him under surveillance, but would also be a means to accelerate the completion of the work far in advance of her most optimistic projections.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Gravitational effects are imperceptible from within the field – Ibernal
Leroy stamped his boots dry (or at least drier), hung up his coat and followed the others through the open doorway from the foyer. He saw that the Man from Rhaal, as he liked to refer to him in his own thoughts, was standing on a stool, leaning over a white, pyramid-shaped object located in the centre of the otherwise empty, and very spacious room.
The size of the room had been chosen more for the high ceiling than the square footage. That almost two story high ceiling, together with the walls and windows - all were covered with egg-carton-like insulation, and the floor was covered in springy rubber mats, nailed down to maintain a safe walking surface. Judy was staying back out of the immediate area of interest. That much hasn’t changed since she’s been down here with the ‘unique one’.
“Thiss is not any real practical version, but… ” Latt shrugged and removed the opaque plastic sheeting from the bulky object on the laboratory bench. He stood back to allow the others to take a closer look. “Sorry about the wiring; I never had to work on thiss level before, so it is a jumbled mess.” His voice sounded very flat due to the studio-standard soundproofing.
Quite the classic understatement, Ed Baynes thought as the strange contraption appeared from beneath the protective cover.
“This is just one Gravity Inducer?” Isaac overlooked the tangled mass of multi-coloured, plastic-coated cables that snaked through and around the device, and he studied the huge stacks of integrated circuit boards, electromagnets and associated components which could be seen down the many minute gaps between the outer hardware.
“There are some very complex harmonics and inter-related field effects which must be generated.” Latt explained. “For a while I thought it would be impossible to create a working copy using your technology, as the entire unit needs to function within a sspherical volume less than three feet in diameter, but I found a way to stack the boards between some of the larger components, and that brought the farthest projections to within sseventeen inches of the centre.”
“Over an inch to spare, huh?” Leroy commented to himself as he leaned closer to the bench, enjoying the resilience of the sound-deadening floor coating under his aching foot.
Judy leaned beside him, having made her way around to him in time to overhear his murmurings. “Not really,” she responded at a similar volume. “The ‘three feet’ Latt mentioned is just a round number; we are actually within a tenth of an inch in some places.”
Leroy noticed that she seemed more comfortable near him than he remembered. Maybe she missed me! He also noted that she had traded in her sweater for a light blue sweatshirt that matched her new jeans perfectly. He decided she had either opted for the change because she was trying to improve her image, or because of a newly discovered allergy to wool. He managed to resist making any comment, ch
oosing instead to wait to see if there would be any further developments, or revelations, in the course of the afternoon.
Ed walked around the bench to examine the fantastic device from all angles. “I’m glad we haven’t invited any ‘brass’ to this,” he began, smiling and chuckling as he noticed the nylon rods poking out from various angles, and the unique, fine fibres stretched between the end of the rods. “General Spiner equates appearance directly to credibility; I think he would take one look and cancel all funding!”
“Sir, this is just proof of concept,” Judy reminded him hastily, walking over towards him, prepared to argue the point further.
“I know, Brisson, you don’t have to worry about my opinion here, I’m committed to this. If this fails, I’ll be out.”
Judy blushed, embarrassed by the unplanned revelation of her new lack of confidence in her boss. She did not, however, duck her head as she would previously have done.
“Judy has been instrumental in the completion of thiss initial version,” Latt explained, patting her on the back as he did so. “It was not our intention to create such a ‘bird’s nest’, as I think you would call it, but the activation of this kind of device produces local and highly variable distortions in the gravity field. These non-conductive braces and tension-maintainers prevent the components from shifting from their original possitions and creating local overloads in the circuit.”
Isaac nodded, his understanding of the theory sufficiently developed to allow him to see the problem clearly.
Leroy sat down at the end of the bench and studied the contraption with an expression of almost child-like anticipation. “Eric mentioned a British private he met when he was out in the Gulf, this guy built a ‘still’ out of broken plumbing. He was going to make some kind of brew. Eric asked him what it was, and he said it was based on the drawings of someone called Heath Robinson, and that it would make either a celebration drink, or napalm, or possibly both!” He shook his head. “From what Eric said, it must have been like this. He got transferred just after that, so he never saw if it really worked. I’d say you are following in the same tradition, Judy.”
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