Passage

by Thorby Rudbek

  Kirrina seemed to want to move even quicker once they were back in the passage, and Richard had to urge her to slow down, as he lost his footing and tumbled in slow motion to the floor. “Let’s take it easy.”

  She did not reply.

  A few more yards showed the roof had buckled upwards under some cataclysmic force, and more importantly, the powerful beams of light from their helmets showed that the floor was flooded with lava, which rose gradually until the surface of the shiny, bubble-filled rock touched the distorted roof, some forty yards ahead. The dust seemed not to have reached this spot, perhaps because there had been no movement of air at the dead end, so long ago when this tragedy had occurred. Neither of them spoke this time, but both turned to investigate the passage in the opposite direction.

  “Looks like the lava almost broke through from below here, too,” Richard commented as they progressed past their entry point and moved over another bulge in the floor and down the dark corridor. As they did so, the surface underfoot again became coated with dust. “It’s amazing anything was left at all.”

  Kirrina’s hand suddenly squeezed his, and he swung his head slightly so as to add his illumination to the ghastly form that she had just seen in the distance. They found their reaction had lifted them from the surface again, but once they drifted back down it took only moments to move to the still recognisable, though badly deformed shape stretched out on the ancient tiles.

  Richard crouched down. It was the body of a woman, and she was remarkably well preserved, as if the loss of the atmosphere on which she had depended for her survival had occurred very slowly. She was dressed in what looked like an updated version of the jump-suit which Richard had worn so often since he had teamed up with Kirrina, and he could see that it was a dark red colour, as only the upper surfaces were covered by the dust. The cause of her apparent deformity was a tall piece of equipment that had pinned her across the legs when it had become detached from its recess on the wall and fallen on her. One of her arms was stretched out in front, and the other was by her side. A dull black laser pistol about the size of a miniature hand-gun was lying where it had slipped from her hand, and the equipment bore the scars caused by its use as she had tried to cut herself free.

  “What happened to her?” Kirrina asked, almost dreamily, picking up the tiny weapon and turning it over to tip off the dust. She pointed it at the heavy equipment that had pinioned the hapless, would-be escapee, and depressed the firing trigger. A faint beam issued forth and started to create new but rather inconsequential scars in the heavy-duty framework. “It’s almost drained.”

  Richard studied the scene a moment more before responding with his conclusions. “She was hurrying along this passageway when the equipment fell, trapping her. She took the laser from its holster.” Here he tentatively touched the synthetic material of the receptacle at her waist. “And tried to cut her way out, but something made her stretch out in front once more. Then she must have passed out.” He looked at her eyes under the dust-coated lashes; they were bloodshot due to the loss of air pressure but still clear enough to determine that she had died staring diagonally across the floor towards the opposite wall.

  “I think it must have been fumes,” Kirrina ventured, suddenly sounding more alive as she took a very personal interest in the woman’s failed struggle for survival. “The vapours from molten rock or whatever must have overcome her.” She leaned in closer and noted the direction of the dead woman’s gaze. “What did she see that was so important?”

  Both of them turned and illuminated the section of wall in question. Something small and round reflected the light back at them, despite the ever-present dust. Richard, being closer, stepped towards it and picked it up.

  Kirrina looked at the object in his hand as he dusted it off. “It’s a memory disk, like the kind I used to transfer data from the Outpost computer to our new ship. They can hold an incredible amount of information.”

  Richard carefully slipped the disk into a compartment on the front of his suit and sealed it up. “From the way she died, reaching for it, I’d guess it must have been very important to her.” He turned and looked past the dead woman and the fallen equipment. “Perhaps she came from some kind of record or data room. There might be more disks in there.”

  “Richard.” Kirrina’s hand pulled him backwards as he started to move on. “Let’s go back to the ship; I don’t want to be down here any longer.”

  He looked down the long corridor, wondering what else he might find, then at the small laser pistol Kirrina was unconsciously turning over and over in her other hand. He crouched down by the fallen Arshonnan, momentarily contemplating the holster, but reluctant to disturb her – lying in state.

  “Richard.” Her voice was louder this time. “I can’t stay here.”

  He looked into her eyes and saw the wildness lurking there. “Okay, let’s go back.” He stood slowly, looking one last time at the slightly mummified appearance of the bearer of the memory disk. He kept hold of Kirrina’s hand until they reached the area where they had dropped through the hole in the ceiling high above, then brought his head towards hers until the helmets met with a slight click. “I’ll jump up and pull myself through the hole, then I’ll wedge my feet under the edge and catch you when you come up. Don’t worry if you jump too hard, I’ll stop you.”

  Kirrina nodded within the helmet, and watched as he sprung lightly up and grabbed the edge of the ceiling to stop his upward flight. A moment later she followed him, and they scrambled carefully to their feet and turned towards Seagull.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Arshonna, the lovely, the welcoming… truly like being home again – Winseuw

  As they were retracing their steps, leaving the woman in timeless solitude, Richard had worked hard but unsuccessfully to stop himself from thinking that the Aircar would be gone, and it was not until he had confirmed its presence and glanced up and seen the blotted-out section of stars still directly overhead that he started to breathe easily again. He understood that his fear was rather illogical, but still – and even though he was almost entirely certain that his third crew member was as loyal as anyone could be – he could not put aside the thought that this Narlav was, until just a few weeks earlier, his mortal enemy, one that almost killed him with his bare, double-thumbed hands.

  They walked slowly to the Aircar, and Richard opened the door, suddenly catching Kirrina’s compulsion to depart with all possible speed. He urged her to enter first, then stepped in himself, collapsing into its induced-gravity interior, feeling like his suit was made of lead as the contrast caught him by surprise.

  Kirrina had already powered-up and, as soon as the door was closed, she flew them up to their ship, which was now also her only known home, waiting motionless above. They passed through the dull walls with scarcely a shimmer.

  Less than a minute had passed since Richard had stepped into Seagull, and already they were climbing out into the clean, new interior of the Patrol Craft’s hangar. They only stopped to remove their gloves and helmets before shimmering into the Control Centre with their find.

  “Let’s see what we got,” Richard said a bit breathlessly as he sat down and took the disk from its compartment in the front of his vacuum suit and held it up. “We found this just in front of the body of a human trapped under falling wreckage,” he informed Paranak, deciding with a flash of cross-cultural understanding that the gender of the person was probably irrelevant in this instance, and might even be a distraction for the Narlav, diverting him from the importance of the disk.

  Kirrina took it and inserted it in a reader. “There’s not much on it,” she announced, after checking the input data. “It won’t take more than a couple of seconds to scan it all into our ship’s computer.”

  Richard sat back, pulling his arms out of his suit as he waited for the device to complete its task.

  “Just two entries,” she announced grimly. “Put the long range and short range scanners on alarm,” she ordered Parana
k, forgetting in her highly charged state that she had relinquished any authority she might have had over the Narlav to Richard, as Ship’s Captain. “I don’t want any ships to arrive without our knowing, while we view this.”

  Paranak caught the edge of something worse than desperation in her voice and went through the motions of doing what he had already done before they had descended to investigate the last fragment of Arshonna, satisfied that the repetition would do no harm to him, and that it might somehow help his blood-sister in her anguish.

  A moment later, the view of that last fragment was replaced with a larger-than-life image of a haggard-looking man, dressed in brown coveralls, seated at a control console in a room clothed within a garment of dim red light, laced together with white strands of smoke. His face was drawn, and dark hollows under his grey eyes showed his fatigue clearly. He coughed, and as he did so the sound track cut in, revealing the sounds of alarms going off in the distance, and a high-pitched whine that filled the air with a sense of impending doom.

  Fighting his cough, he managed at last to get a decent breath despite the smoke drifting throughout the interior. “This is Obervawn reporting from the Dolen temporary command post. I have to–” He was forced to stop, as another series of coughs racked his body.

  The left arm of the man who identified himself simply as ‘Obervawn’ hung limply at his side, and a dried stain of what looked like blood was visible down the length of his torn sleeve. He struggled to contain the outburst, and as he did so, Richard turned to glance at Kirrina, his question obvious by his expression, even without mental contact. What’s this ‘Frozen’ temporary command post? He translated the name from Arshonnan with unconscious ease.

  “I don’t know about the command post,” she responded aloud, for Paranak’s benefit. “But I did look up some background information on Arshonna while we were on Outpost Twenty-Seven. Dolen is the name given to the fourth planet in this system.” She paused the play-back mechanism to allow herself time to complete her response. “It got called that because it is so far from the system star, and temperatures there usually stay below minus forty centigrade; it was mined for useful minerals, and had a small staff of equipment maintenance workers and technicians who stayed on a rotation basis, and even a small colony of researchers and their families, people who liked the adventure of living on a different world.” Kirrina put her hand on the pause control again. “Lots just came on rotation and stayed a week or two until another crew took their place,” she explained emotionlessly while the man remained frozen on screen in his attempt to gasp for breath. She must have released the ‘hold’ feature, as the recording restarted as she continued to explain: “I think maybe–”

  She cut off her response as Obervawn wiped the sheen of moisture from his forehead and continued at last: “Vershonnan[5] with ships vastly superior to ours, and in countless numbers, have attacked our home planet and this mining facility. I believe, from reports received from the few defending ships still operating in the system, that Outposts One, Two and Four were attacked virtually simultaneously. The ships there must have dropped back as soon as the attacks began. There has been insufficient time for the Scout ships assigned to any of the other, more distant Outposts to reach here, and of course the same thing applies to the colonies, since the attack began only four hours ago. I–” He broke into another fit of coughing, then hammered a fist on the table in frustration.

  “I understand that this may indeed explain the disappearance of Scout Craft Two, Seven, Eight and Twelve last year; I just hope that some of the other Scout Craft, or perhaps even some of the newer Patrol Craft, will get back here in time to tip the balance of the battle. The main mining facility here on Dolen was destroyed by a redirected asteroid two hours ago. We felt the shock waves even here, although the impact was half way around the planet. No one there could have survived the blast effects.

  “I declared myself in charge, though this doesn’t mean much in practice, as the Vershonnan have done four close passes and lasered most of our equipment to junk. I have tried to organise an emergency hospital in the lower levels, but none of the medic equipment will function now our primary power source has been damaged, so all we can do is simple first aid and primitive operations, which seem more like butchery than surgery. If we are lucky, we will hang on until the defenders around Arshonna push the Vershonnan back. Then, eventually, they will send a rescue ship to find us.”

  He glanced to the left, and his expression suddenly became bleak. “Forget that, the Vershonnan scum must have traced our transmissions. They have directed another asteroid towards this location; they obviously don’t believe in mercy. I will continue as long as–”

  The screen went instantly blank, but before any of them could comment, another view formed before their eyes. This time they found themselves looking at a Control Centre somewhat larger than theirs, perhaps the kind that would have been found in Patrol Craft One, had it been completed by the technicians of Outpost Twenty-Seven before their hasty retreat. A dark-haired girl, apparently in her early twenties, dressed in some kind of blue uniform complete with stars on each shoulder, sat in the right hand of the three seats. The central seat was empty, and the left hand seat was occupied by a body, similarly dressed in blue, slumped over onto the controls and instruments.

  “This is Pilot Stuona of Patrol Craft Four. I just received a transmission from Dolen which indicates that there may be no one left alive on that frozen planet,” she said grimly. “We have better news; we have just destroyed a Vershonnan ship!

  “We returned from Outpost Two just an hour or so ago, after having witnessed the destruction of all the other Patrol and Scout Craft there; our ship was down to the last Shell when we decided to abandon the defence, and seven of our crew had been killed by stray force effects and backlash, leaving only our chief engineer and two analysts-turned-gunners to effect repairs. Captain Marda was also killed in our skirmishes over Outpost Two, leaving me in charge, with Pilot Orantil badly wounded. The Outpost was glowing with countless volcanic eruptions the last time we saw it; no one could have survived, once the Shell generator went down.” She leaned hard over as she grappled with the Navigation Sphere in front of her.

  “I think Orantil may be dead now; I can’t leave the controls to find out, but when we computed our return, we decided to come out very close to Arshonna, to ensure that we would be safely behind our own ships’ defensive perimeter.” She laughed bitterly, brushing her long, dark brown hair back and revealing a diagonal gash on her forehead that obviously had not been treated in any way since she had received it. “There was no defensive perimeter; we came out just four hundred yards from a Vershonnan arrow-head shaped attacker! Fortunately we did still have all our Negatruction weapons operable, so we hit the ship with everything we had; its Shells went down, and it was history.

  “We were hit in the process by the peripheral effects of one passing green bolt, however, and that was when Orantil was hurt the second time. Since then I have concentrated on keeping our ship in one piece so I could pass on this report. I believe that our tactics have been entirely wrong; if we had taken the battle back to the accursed Vershonnan and fought them close-up, I believe we would not have lost Outpost Two. I do not know, but I think the defensive tactics we were taught for such theoretical situations may also have cost us the other Outposts our leaders had decided we could defend. This fighting of wars is something we knew nothing about, until yesterday.”

  She struggled, as the Patrol Craft seemed to shudder, fighting to keep the ship under control. The lights dimmed, to be replaced after a moment of darkness by dim red ones. “That was close! I’m going to do a micro-jump to lose them; I want to have time to complete my report before–” She cut herself off abruptly, concentrating on the calculations until the move was completed. “You may think I am crazy to do this when we are so close to Arshonna, but when I show you what they have done to our beautiful home, you will understand that nothing matters anymore.”

&nb
sp; The scene dissolved to reveal a planet shrouded in black clouds, glimmers of ugly red showing through from beneath. Stuona’s voice carried on, a savage frankness now in evidence: “Short range scanners show that the planet has been hit by so many redirected asteroids that the crust is cracked clear through to the core. My instruments indicate the core is subject to violent instabilities, and my guess is that no one left down there can survive for more than a few more hours. Zoonth[6] has been pushed into a decaying orbit, somehow – when it hits our once-lovely home it will tear it apart for sure, especially when you consider that there are several hundred Eliminator reactors still operating around the planet, maintaining Shell fields and thus the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arshonnans, perhaps long enough for some of them to escape. When the planet’s disintegration advances a bit more, those Eliminators will be swamped from below, and the power released will completely vaporise large parts of our home.” Her voice sounded even more agonised as she thought about the collision of planetary mantle and core energy with the equally energetic power of transformation of matter into energy that occurred so routinely and safely in those marvellous reactors… and with that, she faced what she now knew to be inevitable – the total destruction of Arshonna.

  “Scout Craft Seventeen signalled us some time ago, or it may have been a message to the planet below… anyway, it seems that they have decided to fall back to Frontier Post Nine. There are no significant asteroids in that system, the planet has no moon, and so these attacks would not work there. Even more importantly, perhaps the Vershonnan will not be able to discover us there, since that Frontier Post was only set up a couple of years ago.”

  The tortured planet vanished from the viewscreen to be replaced with the Control Centre view, revealing the lanky pilot still working hard to maintain control in the red gloom of the emergency lights. Stuona pushed back her tangled hair once more as she heard a voice reporting from another part of the ship. “It seems we will not be able to join you there.” Stuona’s face became a study in bleakness. “Our Star Drive has just dropped to ninety percent capacity and another of the Vershonnan ships is heading towards us, followed by several others.”