Passage

by Thorby Rudbek

  “PARANAK!” she screamed. “PARANAK!”

  Kirrina stood, fists clenched at her sides, as the now totally deserted hangar sent her words back at her, mockingly. She sank down in her anguish, lost and alone.

  Betrayed.

  Somehow, he had finished the repairs and left her, alone, without hope, in a solitary, desolate Outpost on a desiccated planet where life could continue, dream-like in its quality, purposeless in its monotony, until loneliness drove her to despair and–

  Kirrina jumped up from her position, slumped against the rejected equipment. He couldn’t have finished the repairs; the Star Drive hadn’t even been checked out of the spare supply storage yesterday. He must have moved the ship, using the other Aircar, just as I did! She ran over to the maintenance terminal. A moment later she had discovered that the spare Drive was still in storage. She walked over to the spot where her home had stood and looked at the hangar floor carefully. Sure enough, there was a trail of sorts, muddled by the tracks left previously by Paranak and herself as they walked across the dusty floor with new pieces of equipment and tools. She walked towards the exit and found the trail made by the massive rollers was still visible. In fact, it was clearer now that it had continued outside of their usual working area, and she could see that it led out onto the landing pad, until it reached a point where the dust no longer clung to the tough grey surface, and thus the direction of his clandestine move became unclear.

  “I must think,” she reminded herself aloud, and she took several deep breaths and tried to clear her mind of the potent emotions that had clouded it. “Why would Paranak bother to accelerate Richard’s recovery, if he intended to leave us here? Where could he have wanted to take Citadel, if he still planned to restore it to operating condition? Why didn’t he take the replacement Drive?” She walked slowly back into the hangar and across the bare floor towards Woodpecker, the questions still hanging like ripe apples in the leafy tree of her mind.

  “Patrol Craft One!” She exclaimed as the facts finally fell into place, and she jumped into the tiny Aircar with excitement, and still a fair degree of trepidation. Could he have somehow fixed that experimental craft with the parts of Scout Craft Seven that now work? What about being my blood-brother? As Kirrina flew a little less desperately to the once dangerously secure storage location of the bigger and theoretically better Patrol Craft One, the logical portion of her mind told her that he could not hope to achieve such a daunting workload in one night. Her imagination, however, in combination with her emotions, kept her still wondering if his alien mind had really accepted her existence as his blood-sister, despite her totally strange, hideous and unfamiliar appearance, and her incomprehensible mannerisms and outlook on life, or if he had just been biding his time for an opportunity to desert her.

  She landed Woodpecker near the jagged hole she had cut in the entrance near where Richard had almost been sliced in two, and walked cautiously past Ed Baynes’ gun where it lay, still welded to the floor, and on, to the small opening. The Patrol Craft was still inside, but it looked totally different. Kirrina stopped, still bent over from ducking through the hole, as she tried to determine what had happened to the craft. It clicked as she finally blinked, and she shivered as the realisation hit her. It’s black now, almost a negative of the original, like Scout Craft Seven was, and still is, as far as I know. She straightened up and walked down to the subtly pointed end and stopped as she looked down the other side. There, she saw Paranak sitting on the floor by the terminal, busily punching keys. His back was toward her.

  Kirrina hesitated for a moment, then walked boldly up to him. “And just what do you think you are doing?” she asked, one eyebrow arched and her lips forming a long, narrow, and almost white line across her face.

  Paranak’s legs moved, and his body twisted remarkably rapidly until he had turned towards her. “We must leave before thirty more of this planet’s days have passed,” he said expressionlessly. “Or the next patrol from Craklav will find us here.”

  “So you think that gives you the right to play with my fiancé’s–” she stopped, corrected her terminology to something more familiar, more comfortable to Paranak. “My blood-brother Richard’s life? You might have killed him!”

  “It was a risk, but the canister appeared to be functioning correctly when I left it last night,” Paranak responded calmly.

  “You could have consulted me before you did this; what gives you the right to play with his life?” She repeated grimly.

  “I knew you would never have agreed to this, yet it had to be done, or he would surely die, as would we.”

  “And you thought you could just walk in and steal away my spaceship without talking to me. How could you?”

  Paranak seemed to expand upwards with his self-importance. “It was difficult to do this alone,” he acknowledged. “I did not realise you would recognise my efforts!”

  “Ha!” Kirrina spat out the exclamation with explosive force. “I should be impressed, should I? So I find Citadel gone, no explanation, then I decide you must have found this craft and come here–”

  “I knew you would realise where I had taken it,” Paranak interrupted her, almost smugly, still misunderstanding her reactions.

  “And now you have decided to experiment on this, this… monstrosity? How can we ever escape with this? There’s no way to control it. I–” Kirrina leaned over him, her fists clenched and her eyes blazing. “I should finish you for this, I should do something–” She stopped and collapsed to the floor beside him, sobbing uncontrollably.

  Paranak stared at her for several seconds before tentatively reaching out with his tough grey hand and touching her wet face. Her emotions flowed into his mind faintly, and the Narlav warrior struggled to understand the confusing pattern formed by her wild thoughts. After a short period of uncertainty, he spoke up once again. “If we do not escape in time, we will all die. As for what I am doing, why don’t you stop that strange and disturbing manifestation of your race’s over-developed emotions and look around you?”

  Kirrina sat up suddenly and glared at him, then swung her arm at him harder than ever before. “Ouch!” she murmured as her hand throbbed after its vigorous impact with the rock-like surface of his head.

  “Ah! You do see my plan!” he exclaimed, taking her frustrated blow as a gesture of approval.

  “What?” Kirrina found that her emotional and physical outburst had almost magically cleared her mind. She wiped her tears away and turned to examine the close-fitting hangar more carefully. Along the walls, mounted on small tripods like miniature overhead high voltage towers, there was a long row of Virtual Interior Compartment activators, and the low hum emanating from them indicated to her that they were focused on the ship and also that they were functioning as they should. “Where is Scout Craft Seven?”

  “The other side of that wall, in the main hangar,” Paranak explained. “I have yet to discover how to open this storage cell.”

  “What happened to the Patrol Craft, why did it turn black?”

  “It’s the effect of the VIC activators; now the structure has been transformed it will stay in this mode for several hours, due to an energy hysteresis effect, even if the eight back-ups fail, even if the activators are switched off,” he replied. “According to the computer records, this is the improved, Mark II version, developed some twelve years after the original material; that’s why it was a different colour before it was activated. As I need so much less sleep than you do, I have spent many hours studying the records here. I was just about to go inside and check out the Star Drive. Why don’t you come too?”

  Not true! You don’t need to take a sleep session until a whole Earth day has passed, but when you do you’re out for twice as long as a human would be… Kirrina sighed as the last vestige of her emotional outburst faded away with this thought. “But won’t the Drive be subject to the incapacitating effects of the shutdown, like all the equipment in Citadel was?”

  “Except the VIC defining mod
ules – remember they still worked in Citadel. And no, I don’t think so. I think everything that was installed when the ship was being prepared all those hundreds of years ago will be fine. That’s another of the improvements in the Mark II version.” He sounded almost like a salesman, promoting the obvious improvements of the latest, new and improved-tasting version of a food product in a television commercial.

  Paranak walked purposefully over to the curved black surface of Patrol Craft One and stopped in confusion, his hands on the hard material. He twisted around and looked at Kirrina with his characteristic wrinkled eye-space. “Where is the entrance?”

  “Let me check the terminal.” Kirrina walked back to the terminal and scanned through the information Paranak had called up. She accessed the index and found the information with the ease of familiarity, her returning self-confidence buoyed by the knowledge that she still understood some things better than her alien blood-brother did. Kirrina returned to the huge ship and stopped next to Paranak. “It’s just a matter of thinking of your required destination. The access network does the rest.”

  Paranak pushed at the unyielding surface for a moment. “Perhaps it cannot sense my thoughts,” he said finally.

  Kirrina nodded. She took his hand and stepped forward, holding her breath as she concentrated on the Star Drive. The familiar sparkling effect started just before her other, out-stretched hand touched the Craft, and a moment later they found themselves standing in a long, narrow chamber similar to the one in the older Citadel. Kirrina stepped up to the controls and scanned them quickly. “This Drive is in storage mode. Systems are…” she looked for indications of grade briefly. “Average to good! That’s great!” she exclaimed. “I’ll activate the maintenance program.”

  Paranak stood beside her, silently observing as she went to work. His eyes missed nothing as she moved rapidly along the control panel, repeating the same process for each module. He resisted the urge to slap her on the side of the head as he saw that she had restored the dormant Drive to its optimum state in less than a minute.

  “I think we can proceed with start-up now,” she said excitedly as she turned to him.

  Paranak’s body swivelled from side to side in agreement, and Kirrina powered up the Star Drive. They both watched with eager anticipation as the long-inactive system rapidly warmed up, settling into a stand-by mode that made the chamber vibrate subtly with a sense of raw power.

  Kirrina studied the available energy read-outs intently. “This Drive is almost exactly the same size as the one in Citadel, but it generates nearly ninety times the power!”

  “That is why I knew we must use this Siph[4],” Paranak said quietly. “I want to be sure we can resist the attack of a Pakak long enough for us to make our escape into Grey Space.”

  Kirrina nodded, sobered by his preparation and forethought, as she had discussed nothing beyond the mere existence of this Craft with him. “But how do we use this? There are no navigation or command-type modules available to equip the Control Centre of this Craft with.”

  “There is a way to connect Patrol Craft One to the other, older Scout Craft Seven which brought us here. Once we get the dividing wall down, we can build a ramp and move your Citadel into place, aligned with the front end of this ship. Then we remove the useless old Drive and start the joining process.”

  Kirrina looked at him with amazement. “You’ve really figured this all out, haven’t you?”

  “We must work very, very fast,” he continued, ignoring her compliment (which Kirrina later remarked to herself, with considerable amusement, was an extremely rare event). “Or we will not be completed before the next patrol arrives here.”

  Kirrina led him back out into the huge storage room, and went over to the terminal. “I’ll find a way to sensitise the access network to your thought patterns,” she predicted. “Then – oh, here’s the barrier control.”

  Dust swirled around as the end wall beyond the Patrol Craft slid sideways, exposing the immense, dark cavern of the hangar to the bright lights of the storage area for the first time in hundreds of years. There, looking small and vulnerable, lay the partly repaired Scout Craft, surrounded by the Virtual Interior Compartment activators that Paranak had mounted to a framework attached to the dollies. Beside it, looking bright and cheerful in its yellow and black stripes, lay Seagull.

  “While you’re doing that, I’ll bring the Melder up from the lower level,” Paranak announced as he walked off.

  “Okay,” Kirrina said absently, then she turned and watched as the incredible alien marched off on his short, ‘backwards’ legs. He really is doing what he thinks is best for me. And perhaps he was right about Richard; I couldn’t have made a decision to risk his life based on Paranak’s assurance that his ‘colleagues’ would be here before Richard had been restored to health.

  She turned back to the terminal and started work on the access network, confident that she would be able to discover its secrets and modify it to accept her blood-brother’s unique (or typically Narlav) brain-waves, without any real difficulty.

  Chapter Thirty

  Match-maker… no wood required!

  The somber, substantial stones stood silently on the bleak, unpopulated plain; the wicked wind cut through Judy Brisson and created a muffled roar in her ears as soon as she got out of the car.

  Judy looked around, turning her head so that her hair was blown clear of her face and hastily stuffing both hands into the wool-lined pockets of her suede jacket.

  “We have the whole place to ourselves.” She pulled a pair of woollen gloves out of one pocket, closed the car door, walked around to the passenger side of the car and watched as Latt emerged cautiously.

  “I didn’t think I could ever feel so cold,” he said, as the wind cut through his windbreaker in turn and made him feel like he had forgotten to put on the heavy sweater that Ruth had given him.

  “Don’t forget your gloves,” Judy chided.

  Latt grinned as he took her advice.

  “You ssound like Ruth when she is reminding Isaac of something he wants to forget.”

  Judy took Latt’s gloved hand in hers without commenting on the comparison, and they walked through the deserted parking area and into the ticket office.

  After buying two tickets, Judy and Latt crossed the road and walked towards the huge circle. The ancient rocks seemed to grow bigger as they approached.

  “This is very, very old,” Latt began, as he studied the nearest fallen upright where it lay half-buried in the grass. “I jusst know it.”

  Judy nodded her agreement and tried to use Latt as a windbreak as she considered his first impression.

  “Yes. I think it has been here more than three thousand years – perhaps much more. Probably most of that time it has been deserted, like it is now. I wish we could have come in the summer.”

  “I’m glad we didn’t wait!” Latt hugged her closer.

  She smiled, and kissed him agreeably.

  “Perhaps we wouldn’t get the same feeling then,” he speculated. “If there were lots of other people here.”

  “True. There is something about the solitude. My people went to America over two hundred years ago. I know because I had a great aunt who went crazy about genealogy. She looked up all our ancestors. When I got a copy of the ‘family tree’, I went and saw some of the early settlements that those early arrivals built. Some of them have a real rustic feel, sort of ‘well-aged’. But there is nothing in the States like this.”

  “There is a feeling of incredible age; something about this place that I have never come across anywhere else,” Latt continued. “I can’t explain it, but I know that my people were not living in the caves on our barren hillside as long ago as the people who built this musst have lived here.”

  They walked around the silent stones and drank in the atmosphere of the place, all the while trying not to shiver. They stopped at one point near the circle, finding a location where they could keep their backs to the wind and face the stones. T
he sun found a tiny break in the seemingly continuous cloud cover, and a wan light illuminated the scene, bringing added colour to the grass and the weathered rocks, and throwing long shadows across the ring.

  As the sun faded back into the clouds, Latt asked the obvious question.

  “What is it for?”

  “It was probably used to determine the seasons, but I think it was used much more for their religion,” Judy explained.

  “What’s that?”

  Judy looked at his face to make sure she had not mistaken the question.

  “I’ll explain on the way back to London; Terry gave instructions that we were to eat at a restaurant he particularly liked, in Soho – that’s a district of London – and our reservation is for seven tonight.”

  As they headed back to their hired car, a stinging rain started to whip across the ground, seemingly never touching it, but somehow managing to chill them even further. They walked a little faster, and drove off as the stones started to darken with the impact of that hard, horizontal precipitation.

  ***

  Judy was still trying to explain as they came out of the tube station and started to walk along the narrow and crowded street towards Soho.

  “I guess anywhere in the world you can find a religion. It’s about people who believe something that you can’t prove with scientific experiments. Usually it has something to do with saving everybody. Usually there’s someone special who will do the saving.”

  “It doesn’t ssound like you are one of the believers,” Latt said quietly.

  Judy did not answer immediately.

  “No. I was once, when I was just a kid, but I guess I couldn’t believe in a God who could let my stepfather’s friend do the things he did to me.” She leaned towards him and spoke quite softly as they walked along, making it difficult for Latt to catch all the words. “I suppose I should be grateful my mother came home before he did everything he wanted to, but that was just because of a mistake in a schedule.”