“Tornado, Sir?” Dinwoodie began, a thought forming in his mind that he dared not give voice to.
“Your new positing is with the Tornado Conversion Squadron at Dunryan. Report to Squadron Leader Eastgate at seventeen hundred hours. Now, kindly remove yourself from my base, as quickly as you can, Flight Lieutenant, and don’t come back,” Boreland said with polite finality.
“Yes, sir, thank you, sir,” Dinwoodie, still shaking, saluted stiffly which was, once again, not acknowledged by the C.O.
Boreland pointedly returned to his paperwork, dismissing him with silent contempt.
Outside the door, Dinwoodie had almost collapsed with relief and excitement. He had achieved what he had set out to do. He had been posted to a Conversion Squadron. There he would be trained on one of the new types of fighter the Air Force was gradually bringing into service to replace the old Phantoms. His father had been right, he mused, it‘s always the squeaky wheels that get the oil. Now, he was on his way to his dream posting. With a spring in his step and a smile on his face, he set off to tell Tommy the news, say his goodbyes and pack up his kit.
Then, he could head off for his new home, and new adventures.
Chapter 16
When the final bell rang, Billy rushed out with his classmates into the playground to make his way to the bus stop and the sanctuary of home. In the great scrimmage of running, fleeing figures, Billy spotted the object of his affections, Julie Martin. In the distance he saw her talking to three nervous looking girls. It was Julie Martin all right, the face of the most perfect angel and black hair, long and beautiful.
This was his chance, Billy thought. I have to speak to her, he resolved, despite the warning from Reilly. Billy summoned up all of his meagre courage and walked over to the object of his infatuation. Trembling like a leaf on the branch on a windy day, he did his best to speak to Julie Martin. As he approached her, he felt the tension in his body build up mixed with the feeling of utter euphoria and joy at simply being near her. His face felt like it was on fire. The blood banged in his ears like a bass drum on parade day and he had the most awful premonition of being sick right in front of her. He had managed to stammer a few garbled incoherent words that made sense neither to him nor to her. Hearing the nervous garbled nonsense from behind her, the radiant smile on her face had melted to a thunderous look of outrage and anger.
She did not need to turn around to face him, knowing exactly who it would be. There was only one boy who would have the temerity to even dare to speak to her in the playground. The other girls giggled nervously glad for the distraction as the enraged Julie spun around to face Billy. Then with the speed of a cobra she struck. Bringing her knee up, swiftly, she made harsh savage contact between Billy’s legs. For a brief moment Billy felt as if his groin had caught fire. Then, he toppled over like a felled tree in the forest. Clutching himself, he had the feeling that someone was trying to pull his intestines out through his mouth. With tears streaming down his face in an agony of pain, Julie had spoken quietly to him.
“Look, you fat ginger weirdo, if I wanted to talk to you, I would ask you to speak to me,” she hissed venomously to the prone gasping figure, “In the future, you stay away from me and you keep your mouth shut. Remember that life’s a bitch, and I am one,” she snapped, and turned away leaving Billy to his personal agony.
The three girls who had witnessed the scene made sympathetic noises and scampered away glad to be free of Julie Martin’s presence.
For long minutes Billy lay on the hard tarmac of the playground, clutching himself in a world of unfair pain, shame and humiliation. He’d only wanted to talk to her, he thought to himself. Slowly and gradually, with his abdomen raw from the trauma of the assault, he stood up tentatively. He lurched over to the sandstone wall of the school building and drew deep breaths to try to relieve the pain and the horrible sickly feeling. Then, he began to weep. For the pain, the shame, the humiliation and the rejection, he wept. His father had been right; women were nothing but trouble.
As he sat down on the stone steps of the school building he began to feel a different emotion. Billy Caudwell began to feel angry, and with that anger he began to make his way home.
At first he stumbled and lurched along the wall, around the corner of the building. Then, as his ravaged abdominal muscles began to loosen again, he started to walk. Across the playground, stiffly, he hobbled. As the muscles loosened further with the activity, the tears had started to flow. When he reached the black painted iron fence he was able to trot, lost in his own personal world of discomfort and rage. Then, he began to run. Out of the school gates, he trotted painfully, down the busy street, paying no heed to the traffic on the busiest road in town, or the people walking past.
He may have run into a man in an olive coloured overcoat, he couldn’t remember. His world was one of shame, rejection and anger. He ran on, trying to outrun his anguish. His legs pumping beneath him, the hard pavement passing swiftly under his feet, the tears stung savagely in his eyes. He had run until he could run no more. The concrete slabs and tarmac had become the softer grass of his local playing field, cut into a patch of hilly waste ground. This was where he came to think, this was his escape from the troubles of the world. On top of a hillock, in a scrape in the ground that a family of rabbits had vacated years before, he sat and watched the world go by.
He could see the squat, brooding high rise monstrosities, looking for the world like large, white prisons full of hen-hutch flats and people with no hope. Not so long ago he had been living in one of them. They were somewhere he would rather not go back to. He had known only fear in those flats. Drunken voices raised in arguments outside of his bedroom window, violence, breaking glass and the constant blare of police sirens. To him they were the closest thing he could imagine to the Pit of Hell.
On the opposite side of the disused railway line, which had once supplied a thriving factory complex on the outskirts of town, was a play park. Cut into the foot of the shallow ridge, the swings and roundabouts rarely saw any human attention during the hours of daylight. Most of the park’s activity went on after dark. Surrounded on three sides by bushes and shrubbery, the secrets of the little park were shielded from the eyes of the more refined community members. Those were the rich people who lived on the well-to-do estate up on the hill.
There he sat, staring into the distance as the white fluffy clouds hung in the warm blue sky, and the hot humid day crawled on to its inevitable conclusion of a warm, humid evening.
He knew that the world was unfair – he just wished it wasn’t so unfair to him!
Chapter 17
Unknown to Billy Caudwell, some one hundred and fifty Earth kilometres beyond the planet’s atmosphere, a small ship hung undetected in the deep blackness of space. This craft was of no Earthly design, piloted by a being that had never seen the beautiful blue planet that stretched out before her until a few days ago. Like most of the passenger transport vessels she had flown, the internal décor was very sparse and minimalist. All of the vital command systems were located on the waist-high desk on the central pillar in the front of the control room. Behind the pillar were two chairs, one of which doubled as a bed. In fact, it was a portable medical facility, called a Med-Bed, which dispensed the vital treatment that kept the pilot alive and functioning in this mission.
This was the only furniture in the control room. The Control Column stood out like a small island in an otherwise, sterile grey ocean. The pilot knew that she was dying. That did not matter to her. She had no fear of death. She had been in the military since passing into adulthood. Her entire family had been in the military for almost a thousand generations, and a swift death in battle had been deemed the highest honour she could achieve. Now, she was the last of her species, and on the final mission.
As she sat behind the Control Column, she let her mind drift back the few days that had passed since she had been given her mission.
“Do you know why I have called you here, Tega?” the huddled
figure of Teg Maggor rasped, as it sat at the small work desk, huddled into his favourite robe.
The disease had physically reduced Maggor, who, insisting on wearing the Splendid Leader’s formal Robe of Office, now looked like a child in a stolen adult’s garment. His pale yellow skin now sported the angry green welts that told her he had only a few brief days left to live.
“No, Council Leader,” the ramrod straight officer had responded.
Realising that she was staring, which was very disrespectful, she quickly snapped to attention. Her eyes stared blankly out of the large office window onto an empty sky. The last time she had been in this office, the sky had been full of commuter transports, and the lights from a million offices and advertising signs had challenged the double moons of Garmauria and the stars for their brilliance.
“You have been chosen for a vitally important mission, Tega,” the voice of Teg Maggor brought her back to the reality of the situation with a heavy bump.
“Yes, Council Leader, a great honour, Council Leader,” she had intoned the words expected of her.
“Don’t be so impudent, Samarasa,” the Council Leader had snapped as he stood to reach over his desk to pick up a data folio, and stumbled.
Samarasa had instinctively stepped forward to assist him.
“I said stand at attention, Tega,” the Council Leader barked weakly, as he recovered his seat, gasping heavily at the exertion.
“Yes, Council Leader,” she had snapped her heels together, and returned to her position.
“You have been chosen, Tega, because you are one of the few officers still alive that I would trust with such a mission,” Maggor had rasped.
Not wishing to incur his further wrath, Samarasa had remained rooted to the spot and said nothing.
“The scientists tell me that it is all over for us,” he reported, “this virus that the rebels have infected us all with, mutates far too quickly for them to find any cure. The stasis experiments were all a failure and the genetic manipulation track has hit a brick wall.”
For a moment he paused to draw breath as if the weight of what he reported was wearing him out.
“The virus has now found a way of attaching itself to our D.N.A., so there will be no future generations of Garmaurians,” he continued to the silent Samarasa as he sounded the death knell of the species, “the remaining scientific colonies and military outposts have been evacuated and abandoned, and the Grand Council has handed effective control of what remains of the population to the military.”
For a moment, Tega Digima Samarasa stood in stunned silence. This really was the end for the Garmaurian species. It hit her like a hammer blow to her midriff; all the avenues of exploration to find a cure for the virus had failed.
“Garmauria is to be stealthed and quarantined to ensure that, when the last of us dies, there will be no chance of destructive materials or forces escaping from the planet. The great Battle Fleets, built during the civil war, have been secreted in a huge nebula, ready and waiting for the successors of Garmauria to utilise these ships in the future,” Maggor concluded the first part of his report.
“Successors, Council Leader?” Samarasa asked nervously, her mind whirling in confusion.
“Yes, Tega, the future is what I wish to discuss with you,” Maggor began, “The Grand Council has decided in its final session that the legacy of Garmauria, all of our knowledge and technology should be locked away forever. Our Trion Technology is to be hidden away.”
“But, what of our allies?” Samarasa questioned anxiously.
“Really, Tega, would you trust them?” Maggor challenged feebly, “the Bardomil, the Ganthorans, the Regelians, would you give them unrestricted access to Trion technology, they would be butchering each other, and everyone else they came into contact with, in moments.”
“I suppose you are correct, again, Council Leader,” Samaras conceded, “but what if they try to develop Trion Technology for themselves,” She began a horrible thought crossing her mind.
“Then, in all likelihood, they’ll destroy themselves and the entire universe with it,” Maggor rasped bleakly, “we were very lucky that we didn’t destroy everything in our own initial Trion experiments. There’s no guarantee that another species will be as lucky.”
“And, the Grand Council decided….?” Samarasa began to grasp the magnitude of the situation and to voice her concerns.
“The Grand Council decided that the Universe would have to fend for itself, and take its chances,” Maggor completed her sentence.
“But…?” Samarasa began to argue once more.
“Yes, the decision was, and is, entirely unacceptable. So, we are going to do something about it,” Maggor rasped, the old fire that Samarasa knew well starting to burn in his eyes once more.
Again, her mind dizzying from the implications of what she had been told, Samarasa fell silent.
“What I am suggesting, Tega is totally radical and, by Grand Council standards, totally unethical and positively illegal. But, as I am the sole survivor of the Grand Council, no one is going to object,” Maggor smiled weakly at his own particular humour.
Samarasa, still questioning the legality of it all, waited for Maggor’s bombshell to fall.
“I do not propose involving an entire species, but one individual,” he began, “from a planet or species not involved in our civil war, one neutral individual, with the right skills,” Maggor argued.
“They could then rally all of the allies and mould them into an effective alliance to pick up and carry on the work of Garmauria,” Maggor announced almost triumphantly.
“Where would we find this individual?” Samarasa had asked, “The chances of finding someone with the right skills, knowledge, background, training, experience and attitudes outside of Garmauria are, nil!” she argued.
Smiling softly, Maggor, like a magician, produced from the deep folds of his robe a data sphere. He then set it gently and deliberately upon the desk like a challenge to the young officer before him.
“This is the cutting edge of Garmaurian Mind Technology Tega Samarasa!” he rasped, “It contains the Mind Profile of my oldest childhood friend, the late Teg Portan; our First Admiral.”
“Mind Technology!? A Mind Profile!?” she spluttered, “We outlawed the development of Mind Technology almost two generations ago!!”
“I know,” Maggor replied softly with defiance, “but since the Council was unable to produce a solution, I did what leaders do,” he paused, “I produced my own solution.”
Astonished, Tega Samarasa stood and stared in abject horror at the transparent sphere on his desk. She could not equate the brave, noble, honourable Teg Maggor with the creature who had just perpetrated potentially one of the worst offences in Garmaurian history. The mind was near sacred to Garmaurian culture. The mind and thoughts were the very essence of the free individual, and any attempt to harness, control or interfere with that process was equal to mass murder under Garmaurian law. If Teg Maggor had stood up, carved open her chest, ripped out her heart and burned it in front of her she could not have felt more betrayed.
“Why?!” she stammered aloud, her mind racing as to what she should do next.
“You, of all people, can surely understand why I did this?” he asked pleadingly, almost begging for acceptance from a mind that recoiled in horror from the very concept of what he had done.
She looked blankly at him, hoping that this really was a bad dream from which she would soon awaken.
“You are so like your father,” Maggor sighed, “he would be feeling exactly what you are feeling now; confused, hurt, angry, betrayed, frightened. And, he would probably have shouted and stomped his outrage quite a bit as well. But, he would also have recognised his duty, Sama,” he soothed.
“We got it wrong” he said definitely, after a pause, and she saw some of his old strength and fire return. “We tried to control and manipulate all those other species and prevent them from acquiring Trion technology; that was our mistake. We should h
ave embraced those other cultures and shared our knowledge with them. We should have bound them into an alliance with us and given them a lifestyle that would have made it impossible for them to break away from that alliance,” he announced and paused to allow Samarasa to comprehend what he had just said.
Shocked and stunned, Samarasa said nothing.
“Instead we left them at each other’s throats, with the universe vulnerable to anyone who could work out Trionic theory and develop the weapons, or destroy it all if their research went wrong. But, it’s not too late Sama; we can still start to put things right.”
He passed his hand over the scanner plate on his desk and spoke the code word for his personal display screen. The three-dimensional image of a small blue planet appeared slowly above the screen. Samarasa had never seen this planet before. It was a Nezadir planet. She marvelled at the sight of clear skies, white clouds and blue green oceans set out before her. She had seen service in the Nezadir galaxy during the civil war, yet she had never seen this particular planet.
‘This, Sama, is a planet in the short arm of the Nezadir galaxy that the natives call Earth”, Maggor began “The dominant species call themselves humans,” the screen showed a revolving graphic of one naked human male and one naked human female figure.
“Some forty-thousand generations ago, an early Garmaurian expedition visited this planet and experimented with the primitive ancestors of these humans,” Maggor continued, “through careful genetic manipulation, certain characteristics in these humans were enhanced to promote their development as potential labourers and servants for a Garmaurian colony. The colonial idea was abandoned when it was discovered that the planet’s environment was inherently unstable, and prone to periods of extreme cold. Consequently, it was decided that Earth should become a dump planet for the genetic experiments that went wrong on our other colonies. So, if you look at some of the animal life on this planet, you will see primitive examples of some of the most advanced species we have created. However, in our experiments with the primitive humans we discovered that the species had a great deal of potential.”
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