The Rift Rider

by Mark Oliver

"It's coming to life. But most of the crew and soldiers still look half asleep. They're not taking much notice of the alarms."

  Bei nodded. "I doubt they expected anyone to make it this far. Still, the Executive back there called for reinforcements. So it's only a matter of time before the bay's swarming with soldiers."

  "Then let's get moving," Awani said. "You two play prisoner. I'll follow from behind."

  The spacecraft's rear had the appearance of butterfly's backside. Two triangular wings arched upwards, sliding down into the ship's centre where another pair of front wings angled forwards. Between the rear wings, a drawbridge protruded like a stumpy tail.

  With the alien drug pumping inside of him, Charlie walked up the bridge as calmly as if he were walking to the shops to buy a Cornetto and a packet of Monster Munch. Whatever this drug was, Charlie hoped its effects would last forever. He had not felt this fearless since he had drunk ten bottles of Diamond White cider and gone for a post-pub surf.

  Once inside, Bei pressed the beeper in his hand, and the rear doors slid shut. He ran his eyes over the interior and smiled. He turned to Charlie, and said, "Welcome to my ship. The Bane flyer. The finest smuggler this side of the Wrake Pass."

  "Your ship?" Charlie said.

  "Our ship," Awani corrected, climbing into a metallic sphere that took up half of the section they were in. She took her place in the centre of writhing mess of wires and tubes that interlaced the sphere.

  Bei reached inside, placed a hand on her shoulder and looked into her eyes. "Happy hunting."

  Awani returned his stare. "Good luck."

  Bei laughed. "This is Bei Lowaiki you're talking to. I don't need luck."

  She rolled her eyes, and placed her hand against a dull blue slab in the centre of the controls. The sphere hummed to life. It spun on its axis, leaving Charlie looking at his own reflection in the curved metal wall.

  He turned to Bei, and asked, "Where do I sit?"

  Bei slapped him hard on the back. "Kid, you're with me in the cockpit, on front guns. So I hope you're just as good with your left hand as your right."

  The cockpit was about half the size of Charlie's van and just as disorganised. "Did the Corporation do this?" Charlie said, taking the seat beside Bei's.

  Bei shot him a look, and said, "What do you mean? It's always like this."

  Charlie said, "Oh," and strapped himself in. It was no mean task with one arm lying limp in a sling. But in the end he managed it.

  Bei cracked his knuckles above the rows of buttons and levers that covered the control desk. Like two tropical spiders, his blue hands danced across them, bringing the ship to life.

  The space between the control desk and cockpit ceiling was filled with a curving blank screen. Bei placed his hand against it. It flickered for a second and then divided into dozens of separate screens.

  Together they gave Bei a three hundred and sixty degree view of the ship's surroundings, the front view filling the most central screen. Along the screen's edges, maps, tracking systems and figures Charlie could not understand danced across two columns of data screens.

  Charlie scanned the central screens to see what was happening outside.

  The docking bay stretched for hundreds of metres in every direction. It was filled with spacecraft. Some were as small and plain as a Nissan Sunny, others as large and luxurious as a billionaire’s yacht. All around them, aliens in grey fatigues or soldier's uniform busied themselves loading cargo, typing on black slabs and scooting around on small carts that hovered a half a metre above the ground.

  Bei flicked a switch and Awani's sphere emerged, blister like, on the left side of the ship between its rear and front wing. The panelling around it rotated one hundred and eighty degrees, bringing outside the weaponry that had lay hidden inside. Charlie counted four long barrels and two short stubby ones. The weaponry gave the blister the appearance of a metallic crab.

  Bei interrupted Charlie's observations, by waving a blue hand over the controls in front of him, pointing out the small cube screen and phallic gun grip. "Right," he said. "That square there is your targeting system. To shoot, press the end of the stick. Long soft squeezes will fire a stream of energy soaked bullets. Short, hard squeezes will launch energy grenades. But use these sparingly. Last I checked we just had a couple of dozen left. Understand?"

  Charlie nodded.

  "Great," Bei said. "Here we go." He pulled back hard on the largest of the four levers emerging from under the control desk. The engines roared into life, lifting the Bane flyer shakily off the docking bay floor.

  A deep hum massaged Charlie's bottom. He watched the screens. The air around the ship shimmered in the heat of the engines. Every head in the bay had turned in their direction. The igniting engines sent nearby soldiers and engineers scattering to a safe distance.

  A couple of soldiers, however, stayed behind. They went for their rifles. As they did, Awani's sphere rotated towards them. With six monstrous guns facing them, the soldiers lowered their rifles and fled for cover.

  Bei tugged on a second lever and the Bane flyer surged forward. It flew rear up, its nose hovering barely a foot above the ships it passed over. Charlie judged their speed at around twenty miles an hour.

  They had cleared half of the docking when energy bursts, great streams of violet and green, started ploughing into the ships rear.

  "They're shooting at us," Charlie said.

  Bei shot him a bemused look and said, "Stay cool. It's just rifle fire. The rear's been reinforced and the rest of the ship's designed to take cannon fire."

  Even so, Bei picked up the speed. The ship rushed forward. Ahead of them glowed one of the bay's two exit tunnels, its lamprey mouth entrance lined with rows of flashing lights.

  "Almost there," Bei said through gritted teeth.

  Charlie held his breath. Five more seconds and they would be out of there.

  "Shit," Bei screamed, as doors slid out of the docking bay wall, sealing the tunnel shut. He slammed on the ship's front thrusters. The ship halted, its backend lifting up at a ninety-degree angle as if it were bike whose speeding rider had foolishly gripped the front breaks.

  Charlie shot forward, his restraints cutting into his bare chest and wounded arm.

  Bei brought the ship back down, and shouted, "Awani," into the control desk's microphone.

  "One step ahead of you," came Awani's voice. A stream of energy bursts swiftly followed her call. They tore past the ship and into the tunnel doors.

  The exploding rounds shook the ship violently, bouncing Charlie in his seat. But after ten seconds of shooting, the tunnel remained sealed.

  "Kid," Bei said. "It looks like Awani needs your help."

  "Bursts or grenade?"

  "Grenade."

  Charlie wrapped his left hand around the gun stick and gave a short, hard squeeze. A fist-sized sparking star shot out of the ship's nose and ploughed into the wall, exploding in a burst of blinding white light. The shock wave flung the Bane flyer backwards and only Bei's white-knuckled wrestling with the control levers kept the ship from slamming into the docking bay floor.

  When the light faded, torn metal lay strewn all over the floor and a hole gaped in the bay wall.

  "Good shooting, kid," Bei said, and with a thrust of the levers, propelled the ship through the hole.

  They accelerated up the tunnel, Bei no longer concerned about keeping his speed down. The tunnel lights flashed by in a blur of blue and green, until finally Charlie saw the black oval marking the end of the tunnel. Charlie gripped the control desk in front of him. The Bane flyer shot out of the tunnel like a butterfly bullet bursting out of its metal cocoon and into an ocean of darkness.

  Chapter 9

  The destroyer's fired its cannons at the fleeing ship. But somehow Bei swung and shimmied the Bane Flyer between the energy streams. It was the finest display of elusive running Charlie had seen since watching Jason Robinson shimmy his way through the Australian defence for the British and Irish Lions in 2001
.

  "How long can you keep this up?" Charlie asked, after Bei pulled off a twisting loop that left the destroyer shooting at ghosts.

  "Long enough," he said, running one hand across the control desk and manipulating the levers with the other. "We're almost at the Wrake Pass. They'll leave us alone then."

  Bei was right. The moment they crossed into the Pass the destroyer stopped its fire.

  "Why did they stop?" Charlie said.

  "They're happy to let the Wrake Pass finish us off for them," Awani said, coming into the cockpit and taking a seat behind them. "Isn't that right?"

  "Safest place for us," Bei said.

  "Safe!" Awani shook her head.

  "It's too late to complain now. Besides, escaping into the Pass was always the plan, wasn't it?"

  Charlie remembered Executive Ko telling him that they caught him aboard a ship heading towards Wrake Pass. "What so dangerous about the Wrake Pass?"

  Awani leant forward in her seat. "Take a look at the navigation screens."

  Charlie looked at the data screens running down the sides of the cockpit display. They were completely blank.

  "Ships go in and don't come out," she said. "Ever. Not unless they've got a robundee pathfinder guiding the way." She theatrically looked around the cockpit. "And I don't see one here. And they'd be pretty hard to miss, being seven feet tall and red and all."

  "You're wrong," Bei said. "The original turen immigrants made their way through the Pass. That's how they found Poklawi and the robundee in the first place."

  "Last I heard, only two ships out of the thirty made it."

  "Hey," Bei said. "Quit your moaning. You agreed to take this mission, same as me."

  Awani crossed her arms and huffed.

  "All we need to do is float here a while," Bei said. "Then, when the destroyer has travelled far enough so that we're beyond the range of its tracking devices, we can fly out again. Simple."

  But nothing, Charlie soon learned, was ever simple here. Just as they were settling into the wait, Charlie's arm exploded in pain. He opened his mouth and let out a scream of epic proportions.

  "My . . . arm." He forced the words out between screams. "The . . . drug . . . worn . . . off."

  He shut his eyes, enveloped in a pain that eclipsed all senses and all thoughts. It made a prisoner out of him, sealing him off from the outside world. All thoughts, fears and hopes vanished in its embrace.

  Whether a minute, or an hour later, Charlie could not tell, but the pain gradually grew weaker. Charlie unclenched his teeth, withdrew his fingernails from his palms and opened his eyes.

  He was strapped to a table. Awani and Bei stared down at him, looks of concern written across their colourful features.

  "We had to restrain you," Awani said. "You were screaming and flailing about like a crazy person."

  "I'm sorry," Charlie said.

  "Don't be," Bei said. "You got shot saving us."

  "We gave you what painkillers we had left," Awani said. "But they're a lot weaker than the Theran water."

  "Where am I?" Charlie asked, looking around the room.

  "Under the weapons room," Bei said. "In the rec pit."

  "Look, Karlee" Awani said. It was the first time she had said his name, and despite mincing it, it pleased him. He thought she would go on calling him Passenger forever.

  "I need to operate on you, right now," she said.

  Charlie looked down at the hole in his arm, then back at Awani. "Okay."

  "I've got to get back to the cockpit, " Bei said, placing a hand on Charlie's shoulder. "Who knows what might run into us out here?" He climbed up the short ladder leading out of the rec pit. He lifted a hatch in the ceiling, paused, stared down at them and said, "Good luck," before climbing out. Charlie was not sure if Bei meant it for Awani or for him.

  Awani reached down, picked up a dark oblong object from beneath the table, and placed it on Charlie's chest. It looked like an old leather rugby ball with a hole carved in its middle. It radiated warmth.

  Awani tapped out a short sequence onto its surface, and it stirred into life. Once activated, the object emitted a pleasant hum and began vibrating softly.

  Charlie raised his head and looked down his nose. The whole top half of the oval flickered with information. He tried to read it. He made out the words, cut, arm, insert and roam, before a wave of nausea rocked him and he had to put his head down.

  "Don't worry," Awani said. "I've used the medbot plenty of times."

  "I trust you," Charlie said, realising as soon as he said it that he meant it.

  "Good," she said. "Now, I suggest you keep your head down as the next bit's going to be messy."

  Charlie rested his head against the table. Directly above him, a flat, metal handle protruded from the rec pit ceiling. In it Charlie could see a twisted, blurred reflection of himself, Awani and the medbot. It'll have to do, thought Charlie. Despite being a touch squeamish, he wanted to see exactly what this medical rugby ball was going to do to him.

  Charlie felt a tremble on his chest, and then from out of the medbot four moist tentacles emerged. They began crawling along Charlie's body.

  Like a centipede, each had dozens of pairs of tiny legs. They tickled Charlie as they moved towards the hole in his arm. They took positions at four opposite ends of the wound. Once positioned, the tentacles shivered, and sprouted clawed grippers. They snapped their new appendages in the air, as if communicating in some crab language. And then they plunged into Charlie's wound.

  He screamed, and fought against his restraints. But he had been secured tightly. Awani laid a cool palm across his brow. "Calm down Karlee. The pain will fade. I promise."

  Charlie looked up into her beautiful pink face. Her eyes sparkled at him.

  He tried to smile, but a fresh stab of pain twisted it into a grimace.

  The tentacles writhed about inside his arm, tearing, tugging and pulling at him. He looked past Awani and up at the reflection. His arm looked alive. Blood and slime flowed from his wound, spreading across the table and soaking into his wetsuit bottoms.

  Awani stroked his head. "The tentacles are releasing an anaesthetic. It'll just hurt for a few more moments."

  The pain subsided. Soon Charlie's arm was as numb as it had been after the Theran water. The tentacles, Awani had informed him, released a strong anaesthetic as they worked. It flowed up from his arm, bringing a warm tranquillity to other parts of his body.

  He yawned. His eyelids felt like manhole covers. But he fought the urge to close them. He wanted to see what was happening to his arm.

  Awani stared into his eyes, and smiled. "Don't fight it. You can't win."

  She's so lovely, Charlie thought. He closed his eyes and fell asleep.

  "What do you mean he escaped?" Doctor's Sree's voice, shrill and wild, echoed around the laboratory.

  Executive Ko stepped forward, her hand raised, ready to slap the scientist. Her jaw shuddered as it always did before an attack. "How dare you raise your voice to Chief Lade, you little - "

  "Executive, please," the Chief Technology Officer said. The authority in his voice brought the silver woman's hand down. But she continued to glare at the scientist, her green eyes smouldering.

  Chief Lade turned to the scientist. His mouth smiled but not his eyes. Despite his many years, the man's silver skin had kept its bright complexion, and his hair remained glossy brown. He stood with a back as straight as a ruler.

  Doctor Sree wondered what secret experiments the Chief Lade had had his team carry out to keep him so fresh.

  "Remember your place, Doctor Sree," the chief said. "Your usefulness has granted you certain privileges, but that doesn’t include the permission to insult superiors."

  By superiors you mean silvers, the Doctor Sree thought. To Lade, speaking with as much difference as he could muster, he said, "I'm sorry, Sir. It's only the prisoner's escape came as most unpleasant surprise. I'm afraid it represents a huge missed opportunity for all of us."

&nb
sp; Chief Lade locked his predator's eyes on to the scientist. "Why exactly did you call us down here? I assumed it was something to do with the rift engine project."

  The scientist motioned for the two silvers to follow him to a display hanging at the far end of his lab. In a calm, professional voice he said, "Before his interrogation, the prisoner was subjected to a brief medical inspection to determine whether he carried any viruses that could spread to the crew, the usual blood and tissue samples. The results showed him to be a disease free turen male, approximately twenty years of age."

  Chief Lade looked at him blankly. Executive Ko shook her head, and said, "You're wasting our time doctor."

  "However," the scientist went on, "after I saw the prisoner, I felt the need to conduct some of my own tests. His outlandish story, together with his peculiar blend of silver and regular features, piqued my curiosity. There was something not quite right about him. And it seemed I was right. Through DNA analysis of the samples I discovered his genetic make-up to be subtly different to our own. He looks like us and talks like us but he is not one of us."

  The scientist paused and fixed the Chief in his stare, satisfied that he had discovered something his silver overlords had overlooked.

  "Sir, his story was no cover story. It was the truth. He really did come here from another world. He had the secrets to intergalactic travel locked inside him. And we had him." Doctor Sree exhaled. "And now we've lost him."

  Chapter 10

  The beagle stopped in front of a large oak door and barked three times. The great slab of wood creaked open and the dog padded through, his short tail swinging. Charlie followed.

  The door slammed closed behind him, locking them both inside a large, softly lit study. Bookshelves covered the room from floor to ceiling. Charlie inhaled and the scent of a thousand books filled his nostrils, each with its own distinct flavour. He smelt mosquito repellent, boiled mushrooms, the hoppy smell of Indian Pale Ale and even Lynx Jade, his choice deodorant as a spotty teenager.

  The dog barked once more and took a seat behind a large desk, cut from the same tree as the door. It scratched an ear, and raised its snout towards the seat opposite it.