by Rob May
It had been a terrible week. Dravid and Talem had taken the weapon deep into balak territory, into uncharted regions of the jungle, and struck at their very heart. Talem’s creation had proved more effective than he had ever imagined or intended, spiralling out of control, unable to be stopped until it had run its course. Talem had suffered the news that almost a million balaks had died at the hands of the fearsome weapon that he had created.
And afterwards, the balaks had continued to come to Perazim. But this time it was not to fight, but to surrender to their attackers. Tragically, Perazim troops had shot down thousands more before they had realised. Talem had watched the carnage from atop the city walls in anguish.
The so-called king of the balaks had swiftly been taken into the Arch Predicant’s custody. There had been rumours spreading around the city that the leader of the grey-green-skinned savages had some special power or secret. Talem was about to discover what it was.
He stood with Dravid before the Arch Predicant and his guest. They all regarded each other in silence for a time. Then the Arch Predicant finally spoke:
‘For thousands of years we thought the balaks were wild creatures of the jungle, primitive animals serving only to remind us how far our own race has progressed. Only now that we have murdered half of their population is it revealed how wrong our assumptions were.’
The Arch Predicant looked across at the balak who sat before him. The king wore animal skins and fragments of plate armour, but also a metal crown. Talem wondered who had fashioned the crown and the armour. He had seen a balak wearing a catron’s ribcage as armour once, but never anything manufactured.
Then the king of the balaks spoke.
‘All we ever wanted was to live in peace, away from those who we considered to be our enemy …’
Talem gasped and visibly slumped. The balaks could speak! He felt numb with guilt and confusion, and could hardly hear the rest of the king’s words.
‘But crazy hot-headed warriors on both sides have brought this disaster upon us. I have come to your city now to seek … atonement.’
The Arch Predicant let the king’s words sink in for a while. Behind his mask, his expression was unreadable. ‘I have spoken to Zaal,’ he declared eventually. ‘He desires peace between us. We will take the balaks under our protection. No harm will come to them from this day forth, and on the day of Zaal’s choosing, we will all face judgement together.’
The Arch Predicant stood, signalling the end of business, as if dealing with the fallout from catastrophes was all in a day’s work for him. Clearly, Talem and Dravid were not expected to speak. Talem felt his fear subside a little.
The king of the balaks, however, would not be moved.
‘We do not want protection,’ he said, his voice taking on a cruel tone. ‘We want justice. I too have spoken to Zaal—’
‘What?!’ Even the Arch Predicant was momentarily shaken.
‘It seems we bow down to the same god. Zaal appeared to us in the jungle three thousand years ago. He instructed my ancestors to carry out his will. The will of Zaal is in my blood! I come here now to deliver his demands. Yes, he demands peace, but that peace comes at a price.’
Even Dravid seemed to pale beneath his stiff resolve. There was only one possible reason why he and Talem had been summoned here. The method of payment to the god was well known.
‘Zaal has not demanded blood sacrifice in Perazim for over a thousand years,’ the Arch Predicant said.
The king of the balaks rose and faced the Arch Predicant. Both men were powerfully built. Talem wondered if they would fight to settle this.
‘He demands it now,’ the king growled, looking down at Talem and Dravid.
The Arch Predicant stood silent again, letting his authority quietly reassert itself.
‘Zaal tests both our wills, it seems,’ he said, clearly laying the ground for a compromise. ‘I will not give up both my men to appease him, when the fault lies with only one of them.’
The Arch Predicant pointed at Talem. The king of the balaks shrugged and nodded his assent. Dravid moved behind Talem and secured his hands behind his back before he could do anything stupid.
‘I’m sorry, my friend,’ he said.
Talem was incensed. ‘The prototype wasn’t ready!’ he shouted at the Arch Predicant. ‘It was impossible to control. I warned you all!’
Lightning flashed overhead, but was drawn away from the city by the tall power masts that rose from the walls. The Arch Predicant was impassive, his mask expressionless. But the balak king laughed: a nasty gurgling sound.
The Dungeons in the Tower of the Moons were a kilometre below ground. There were thousands and thousands of cells, and although few were occupied, the effect was to make you feel small and alone. Talem had been there for a week, but it had felt like a month. There was no day and no night in the dim cell. Time played cruel games with his mind.
There were no guards, no scheduled meals: nothing that could mark the passage of time or make you feel that you were of interest or worth to anyone. Only Dravid’s visits broke the awful monotony. Talem never knew when they would be, or which one would be the last.
He heard the footsteps now, loud and echoing in the metal corridors. Dravid appeared before the floor-to-ceiling laser bars moments later. He seemed calm and collected. He always did.
‘I led a team to search your lab and home today, Talem,’ he said. ‘We took away everything and destroyed most of it. Your apartment has already been given to another man. Actually, it’s the same scientist who has also taken over your position at the university.’
Talem just shrugged. ‘There was nothing anyone could use there. My work is useless without me.’
‘There’s just the prototype left, the one we used against the balaks. I’ve kept it.’ Dravid took the cylinder from his jacket and held it up in his gloved hand: a baton of shining metal.
Some emotion and colour returned to Talem’s face. He came close to the bars. ‘Dravid, you must destroy that too! It’s too dangerous to let anyone else work on it. It’s unpredictable, uncontrollable … it could kill more people. There’s no place for it in the world.’
Dravid only smiled. ‘I thought I’d keep it safe for you,’ he said. ‘You can work on it again, when you return.’
Talem had no idea what his friend was talking about. ‘I don’t think there’s any coming back from where I’m going,’ he said, ‘no matter what the Book of Zaal says.’
Dravid stepped closer, until the two men were face-to-face. Then he whispered something into Talem’s ear.
‘Dravid—’ Talem began.
Dravid kept whispering, outlining his plan in detail. When he had finished, Talem was speechless. He was stunned that his friend would risk everything on this plan. Talem, of course, had nothing to lose.
‘Thank you,’ he said eventually.
‘I’d better get going and arrange everything then,’ Dravid said. ‘We’ll see each other again, my friend, but it may not be for a while.’
They gripped each others’ arms through the laser bars. ‘I’d like to say goodbye to Paran too then,’ Talem said.
‘I thought you might,’ his friend said. ‘She’s already on her way.’
Dravid had left. Paran had been and gone. Talem spent the next few hours in a state of nervous anticipation. He ate one final meal, pressing a button on the wall to order a tasteless food block from the dispenser. Then he sat on the hard bed and waited.
After an interminable length of time, there was a soft click and the bars of the cell powered down and vanished. Talem immediately jumped up and ran down the corridor. The window of opportunity that Dravid had engineered was tiny. Talem took two left turns, then a right, then entered a lift. He hit the button marked zero.
The lift ascended. Talem’s heart was pounding. When the movement stopped and the door opened, he quickly stepped out and made another series of turns through some empty corridors. Then he came out in a large hall, the prison entrance lobby.
It was deserted. Amazingly, he was going to walk out of here unchallenged. Dravid had said that one of his old squadmates—whose life he had saved at least once—was now one of the prison wardens who was, if not happy, then at least obliged to help out.
Talem eventually joined a public thoroughfare that passed under the Tower of The Moons. It was easy to lose himself among the crowds. The escape was not over yet though. Across the city was an unlocked and unguarded stardock, where an unregistered decommissioned military starship was waiting for him. He would flee across the galaxy, where nobody could follow. Dravid would spin some wild story about how Talem had planned his escape long before he was ever imprisoned. Talem’s ingenuity was well-known and nobody would ever be able to refute the lie, even if they dared challenge Dravid’s credibility.
Was Dravid playing straight with Talem? Was Talem walking into an elaborate trap? No, Talem trusted his friend completely. Dravid made no secret of his desire that Talem should turn his research towards military ends, and it seemed that he wasn’t going to let the Arch Predicant, a savage king, and a bloodthirsty god get in the way of his ambition.
In fact, the only person who had ever stood in Dravid’s way was Talem himself. And even now, with his life completely in his friend’s hands, Talem wasn’t intending on leaving the planet without making one vital change to Dravid’s plan.
A change that would destroy their friendship forever.
The starship was long and menacing, with one giant fin on the back. It was called Discord: a fighting craft, although it had been stripped of weaponry. It looked fast though. It needed to be: word had probably already gotten out about Talem’s escape. The city had powerful ground-to-air defences, but Dravid had assured him that they would struggle to target a small speedy ship that was leaving the planet suddenly; they were designed to focus on threats approaching the city with plenty of warning.
Talem walked up the open ramp and passed through the airlock. There was a narrow corridor that ran the length of the ship, with a bulkhead door separating the engines from the cockpit. Talem sat in the pilot’s chair and took a few moments to gather his thoughts.
He had time; there were many stardocks around the city, and even if anyone did decide to investigate this hangar right now then he could take off within seconds. He turned to the ship’s controls and started to explore the computer systems, looking for any signals that could be used to track him. Dravid has assured him that there were none; and it seemed that he had been telling the truth.
Although the ship was not armed, it was fully fuelled and was also equipped with a stasis bay that he could use to sleep away a long journey. There were many planets out there that could support life, and countless more just waiting to be discovered. Talem felt the thrill of starting out on an adventure.
But still he delayed. There was just one last thing …
Talem waited and watched. The stardock was large, and was privately-owned by Dravid. There were all manner of ships docked here: ex-military mainly, but also some classic and sporty civilian models. There were rows of silver saucer-shaped craft that Talem didn’t recognise, but then his knowledge of spacecraft was limited.
He spotted movement. A figure was walking slowly across the stardock floor towards Discord. Talem waited until he was sure of the newcomer’s identity, then went back to open the ramp. He waited, almost nonchalantly leaning against the ramp strut as the woman approached. She stopped at the foot of the ramp.
‘Here it is,’ she said, handing Talem the metal cylinder. Dravid would be furious that Talem was taking this with him.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘And the answer to my other question?’
With one hand on her pregnant belly, and the other unconsciously touching the silverite band at her throat, Paran looked up at her husband’s best friend and steeled herself for her answer.
‘Yes,’ she said, stepping onto the ramp and into Talem’s arms.
Less than a minute later, Discord shot out of the stardock and rocketed away from the city and out over the jungle. When the lights of Perazim were left far behind, it started its climb to the stars.
Once they were out of Corroza’s atmosphere, Talem engaged the superluminal drive, and Discord shot across the galaxy. Talem almost immediately pulled the lever back, killing the engine and letting the ship drift in space. Out of the cockpit window, nothing was visible but stars.
‘Where are we?’ Paran asked.
‘Who knows?’ Talem laughed. ‘Safe,’ he added, slumping back into the pilot’s seat and taking a breath. ‘We’re safe.’
Paran smiled at him. Their joy was a mixture of adrenaline and relief. They had left everything behind but they still had each other.
Talem glanced at the starmap. ‘Okay, we’re somewhere in the Orion-Cygnus Arm,’ he said. ‘I just made a random jump to get us away from Corroza. We can float around here for a while, enjoy the view, and just … rest.’
Paran went to explore the rest of the ship, while Talem idly perused the starmap. Millions of planets had been visited or at least scanned in the five hundred years since the zelfs had begun to explore the galaxy. Somewhere out there was their new home.
Paran came back into the cockpit. ‘The medical bay is nicely equipped,’ she said, touching her swollen belly. ‘Of course, they say that Zaal disowns babies born in space.’
Talem snorted his derision ‘At least we won’t be obliged to go through with the naming ritual. It would have been all I could do to keep from turning the knife on the predicant.’ They both laughed.
‘Anyway,’ he said, indicating a planet on the starmap, ‘here’s a possibility. It’s mostly water, but there is some land that isn’t either inhospitable ice or desert. The oxygen content of the air is just about high enough, and their sun is burning away strongly, so energy won’t be a problem.’
‘Any intelligent life?’ Paran asked.
‘Last time we checked they were still hitting each other with swords, but the population is vast and spread out all over the planet. They’re technologically advancing much faster than we ever did. They call their planet … Mud.’
‘Mud?’
‘Mud, Earth, Dirt … something like that. The name’s probably got lost in translation. But they look a bit like us—or at least nothing a bit of cosmetic surgery wouldn’t fix—and they have a similar yearly cycle. Their days are only twenty-four hours’ long though.’
‘Well it all sounds just perfect, Darling,’ Paran said, and Talem could tell that she was only half-joking. The lure of a normal, happy life was starting to take hold on both of them.
The cockpit shook slightly as another ship fell into position on their starboard side. It was twice as big as Discord, heavily armoured and heavily armed. The ship was black, and wider than it was long: built to bear as many weapons on its enemy as possible, rather than for speed. Paran looked at Talem in alarm. ‘Who knows we’re here?’
‘No one,’ Talem said. ‘I checked the ship and the prototype for any kind of tracking device. Any implants that we might have can’t be traced across this kind of distance, and the superluminal drive leaves no engine signature—’
The other ship swung round in front of Discord. It was so close that when the armour plating slid up, they could see through the cockpit window. There was one person sitting alone at the controls.
‘Dravid!’ Talem exclaimed. Paran subconsciously touched the wedding band at her neck, and Talem instantly knew where the hidden tracking device was.
They could see Dravid’s lips move as his voice was transmitted into their cockpit: ‘You betrayed me. Both of you.’
‘You bugged my wedding band?!’ Paran accused him.
Dravid stood and leaned forward over his console, as if to close the distance between them. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘So that I could watch over you and protect you! Not because I had any idea you might run away with him. I always trusted you, Paran. I was never suspicious. All those times you were with him I never suspected anything—perhaps I shou
ld have done—but I didn’t. I just needed to know where you were in case you were ever in any trouble …’
He slumped back in his chair. ‘Even now I wanted to believe that you had been kidnapped,’ he sighed. ‘But I see now that I can’t hide from the truth any longer.’
Now Talem stood. ‘Dravid, you have to let us go. Everyone should be free to choose their own path.’
Dravid scowled. ‘You wouldn’t be free at all if it wasn’t for me. I gave you the chance to get away from here, so that one day you could come back and continue your research. I was going to set up a secret lab for you, a fortified base. We could have been strong together, powerful!’
‘I don’t want to be powerful, Dravid,’ Talem replied. ‘And if I do come back it will be when I have something better to offer than a genocidal weapon!’
All the time they were talking, Talem was thinking of how they could escape. They needed to disable Dravid’s ship so that he couldn’t follow, but they had no weapons. Or they had to lose the tracking device that had been permanently cast around Paran’s neck.
He had a sudden impulsive plan. Without giving away his intentions by signalling to Paran, he put Discord in a roll that took it down and underneath Dravid’s ship. Because of the artificial gravity, it looked as though Dravid had shot up and out of sight.
Talem hit the button that released the escape pod, and saw the quick bright white flash of an explosion in space as the pod smashed into Dravid’s boosters. He hoped that it would be enough to cover their escape, and once again he engaged the superluminal drive that in seconds would accelerate them away up to a speed of over two light-years an hour.
In those few seconds, Dravid managed to react by firing a blast from his ship’s macrolaser cannon. Discord shuddered, not just from the sudden speed, but also from the hit that breached the cockpit and sent Paran sprawling to the floor in a shower of sparks and wreckage.
Discord floated in space. Talem stood at the port observation deck and stared into infinity. Had Dravid been planning to fire at them, or had Talem provoked him? He’d never know; he could never go home again now.
