At this most exciting moment, the action was replaced by a television presenter. Her name, ‘Suniva Atrox’, briefly floated in front of her. She was pointing at a graphic showing a multiple choice question. The possible answers were ‘Yes’, ‘No’, and ‘Random’.
The TV audience were being asked to vote on whether Suran should be given a chance of being saved. The presenter, who could hardly contain her enthusiasm, said, ‘Should Khonen be shown any more detail on his display? Vote now.’
A message flashed across the screen, ‘This show is a repeat, your vote will not count.’
With some relief I saw the audience overwhelmingly voted ‘Yes’, and the thrilled presenter continued with their patter, ‘Okay then. We can now return you to a close up view of Suran leaving the dome behind. This is what happened next.’
Amazingly the dome wall was made from a super viscous membrane. This was clearly yet another intelligent material with self-healing properties. Only a small amount of air escaped from the dome.
Once more, I found myself looking through Khonen’s eyes. He was curious to see a number of spherical bubbles, made from the membrane material, speeding away from the dome to gently fall back down onto the Lunar surface, under the Moon’s low gravity.
Bubbles like that had never been seen before and he zoomed into each one to study them further. He was startled to find one of them contained a girl, curled up with her head between her knees. She had brown tightly tied back hair and a pink uniform.
Khonen voiced the words, ‘Yes, it is Suran,’ although there was no-one else in his cabin. He hit a button to tell his workmates, ‘Did you see that? There’s a girl out there. I’m going after her.’
I could feel my heart leaping out, with his, for her. I somehow knew he was thinking, ‘Is she alive?’ The air trapped in the bubble would only last a few minutes.
Without any hesitation, Khonen took over full manual control of his vehicle, pushing two long levers forward, one in each hand. Breaking ranks from the other construction machines, he raced his digger over to the bubble with Suran inside it. He took the chance there would be just enough umbilical supply flex to reach her. In one smooth action, he scooped up the bubble, containing Suran, in the jaws of the digger and raced onwards. The flex snapped, whipped and flailed around, spraying electrical sparks, oxygen and cooling fluid in all directions. But the heavy construction vehicle had built up sufficient momentum to carry itself on a little further. He just managed to steer the digger up a small incline of dusty screed, causing it to fly a short distance, and then to plunge into and straight through, the transparent wall of the dome.
My point of view now changed to the scene inside the dome. I began to think I might be watching a dramatisation, because it seemed too remarkable that cameras had been placed in the best possible position to see this action.
In the blink of an eye, the dome wall healed itself behind the digger as it rumbled on, to fall down a couple of metres into rich soil, eventually coming to an abrupt halt, upon colliding with a stout tree.
Khonen flung open his cabin door. He jumped out and ran around to the jaws of the digger. He could see a dazed looking Suran through the shiny bubble membrane.
With the air pressure now equalised around it the bubble popped, its job done. Suran focussed her gaze on Khonen, and their eyes met. It was love at first sight.
Then out of the blue came an all channels news flash.
On what used to be the Earth facing side of Cerrina, or spaceship Moon, on the smooth plains of the Sea of Serenity, the High-Elite had made their new home. And that was the exact spot the last transport ship from Earth, the very one we had seen being launched only hours before, had crashed into the surface with a mighty explosion. Clearly there would be no survivors. The hundreds of Elite and humans on board the transport craft would have been killed outright. Most, if not all, of the High-Elite in their Serenity base would have been annihilated. As the flames died down you could see a huge crater several miles across. The whole Moon was shaking, and debris would be showering down over every part of the lunar globe for several hours to come.
*
My terrifying vision of Endimian 389, crashing into the Moon, was rudely interrupted by yet another bang on the door, much louder than before. It had the force of a small controlled explosion. The whole door suddenly crazed and then shattered into thousands of safely rounded glassy beads, that shot everywhere, right across the apartment.
Chapter 22 – The Recycling Room
The explosion had both dazed and deafened me and a lot was about to happen in a short space of time. I couldn’t think straight and had to go with the flow.
Ellie burst into the room with the tracker device, that Tom had used to find me once before, tightly gripped in her hand. She took hold of my arm and pulled me off the bed, onto my feet.
I just had time to notice the carpet fibres frantically swaying back and forth, like the fronds of a sea anemone caught in a turbulent ocean current, sweeping away the debris - from the explosion - somewhere out of sight. In less than a second, the beginnings of a new door had started forming, growing from around the edge of the frame.
Dragging me through the rapidly closing hole in the door, and out onto the balcony, Ellie demanded, ‘Come with me now, before the mob get here. They almost certainly heard that door shattering.’
It was happening again. Twice, in as many days, I had been asked to follow someone instantly and without question. There was really no time to think, and allowing Ellie to take me with her was, in hindsight, not one of my best decisions.
‘What about Tukarra?’ I shouted.
Ellie shrieked right back at me, ‘Leave her. She has orders to kill you. I’ll explain later.’
I guess that was true, although Tukarra showed no signs of carrying her orders out, and I wondered how Ellie knew about them anyway.
‘We need to hide in there,’ Ellie said, pointing at what looked like a cupboard, just a few doors down from where we were standing.
As we ran towards the cupboard, I quickly glanced over the balcony and saw that all the Scavengers were having a party. They were revelling in the central lake, in the middle of the artificial oasis. They were drinking the water, splashing each other, picking and eating fruits from the surrounding trees and generally enjoying being cool for once. They hadn’t noticed us. Nevertheless, when we arrived at the cupboard doors, Ellie flung them open and bundled me into the laundry chute, they were concealing, before jumping in herself.
*
I found myself slipping and sliding down a twisting turning tube at an alarming rate and mainly in the dark. The ride only lasted a few seconds, but it seemed much longer than that. Eventually, I dropped out of the end of the tube, to make a soft landing on a small pile of disposable clothes and bed sheets. I quickly jumped to one side to make way for Ellie, who I could already hear was about to emerge out from the same tube right after me.
This new room, we were now standing in, was pretty much empty apart from a large rectangular bath of egg-yellow slimy liquid, let into the white tiled flooring. Ten or so blue coloured tube endings extended a short way down from the ceiling. Some of the tubes, like the one we had just slipped down, had a pile of clothing under them.
Looking around, I noticed one particular heap of khaki coloured objects that seemed entirely out of place in this minimalist room. Closer inspection, of the heap, revealed that Ellie had built up a stockpile of explosives, including several sticks of dynamite, most of which were stuffed into a haversack.
‘Where are we?’ I asked.
‘It says, “Recycling Room”, on the door outside,’ Ellie replied. ‘Where the heck have you been? I’ve had more than enough time to put this lot together,’ she said pointing at the heap of explosives. ‘You left me for dead and I’ve I had to track you down again.’
‘Well, yes. I did think you were dead. I was with Tukarra. That was her apartment. I shouldn’t have left her,’ I admitted, feeling wracked with gui
lt.
Ellie went on, ‘Don’t you worry about that floozy. Our driver said every one of the Elite has been sent a message over the Ether commanding them all to kill you on sight. Anyway, now we are alone, I have a surprise for you.’
She pulled out a hand-gun, pointed it at me and said, ‘Surprise! I want to kill you before the Elite get their hands on you.’
Over the next few minutes, it slowly became clear to me that Ellie believed her whole life had been ruined by my family.
My jaw dropped as she told me her story. It was her boyfriend, Kalim Doman, who had tried to kill my father in that car crash on our Graduation Day. Of course he hadn’t succeeded and ended up killing himself and my mother in the process.
Ellie hadn’t known Kalim for very long, but she had fallen intensely, emphatically, in love with him. His death was a bitter blow, turning even more sour when she had discovered he was a member of an unusual social networking group. It was a group with extremist views, and was surprisingly contributed to, if not actually set up by, her own father, Vitcha Kesinko. Ellie came across some well thumbed pieces of paper, in Kalim’s spare clothes, that listed a number of websites and passwords. With that information she was able to steal his online identity. She had pretended to be him for a while, to find out more about him. It was then she started to understand the cause he was fighting for and began to believe in it herself.
With a gun pointed squarely at my chest, aimed by a woman on the edge, who was trained how to use it, all I could do at this point was listen to her rantings.
Apparently, Kalim had admired Vitcha’s work and offered to make his latest adversary, my father, Aleq Goreman, ‘disappear’. This revelation came as quite a shock to me. I had never thought of Ellie’s father and my father as being ‘adversaries’. My father always told me they were the best of friends. Ellie had kept very quiet about all this and had not told the police, or anyone else about Kalim’s offer.
A few weeks later, Vitcha was involved in the horrific accident that saw him barbecued by rocket exhaust gasses. Apparently, this had taken place during one of the launches I had taken my friends, including Ellie, to watch. That was something else she would never forgive me for.
During the week of special leave that she took off from the Academy, she came across a suicide note. The note revealed that her father had taken his own life, because the work of my father had become a higher priority to the military. This had resulted in the cancellation of the whole fleet of spaceships that were to be named after him.
She had even been to see my father to read the note to him. Apparently, they met in a reception room just outside Bunker 7. She said that during her visit, she was so distraught and exhausted she had fainted. When she came to, my father had gone, and a nurse was attending to her.
That’s when she first started hearing those voices in her head: amongst them the voice of her father telling her to take revenge on me. His voice was still with her, even as she spoke, goading her to pull the trigger of the gun she was pointing at me; but despite the intense pressure she was feeling to commit murder, she was in no hurry to end my life. She had more to say. At least someone would hear her story, even if they were not going to live for very much longer.
It was then she admitted setting up most of the ‘accidents’, my team had encountered, during our training at the Boot Camp. The extremist group, she was then part of herself, had been planning to take down the Ether as a protest against the mass migration programme; and she had an idea to make use of that fact. In particular, she hatched a clever plan to cause the robotic artillery to fire shells at me on our last day at the camp. She had negotiated a slight change in the group’s timing for the protest, and planted that homing beacon in my jacket pocket. Unfortunately for Ellie, she didn’t know I had swapped jackets with Gerland on the day.
Now, a billion years later, when we could well be the very last true humans on Earth, she still harboured her grudge and was going to kill me.
Tears of sadness and rage flowed down her cheeks.
‘Killing you might stop the voices,’ she screamed. ‘And there’s nobody here to prevent me from doing so, or even to find out about it.’
I began to wonder whether she was simply mad or whether she had something implanted in her brain, receiving messages or commands from the Ether, like the Elite.
At that moment, a pair of feet, then legs, all clad in white, appeared out from the laundry chute behind us, catching Ellie by surprise. In the blink of an eye, Tukarra found a firm footing, gained her full height, and flung herself onto Ellie.
They struggled. Ellie fired her gun. The bullet grazed Tukarra’s arm and ricocheted off a smoke sensor, causing the whole room to be sprayed with water for a while.
I tried to grab the gun off Ellie, just as Tukarra elbowed her in the stomach. Winded, Ellie stepped backwards over the rim of the recycling pool and tumbled into it, gun and all. I was looking into her eyes as she fell away from me.
The yellow goo behaved strangely, rather like uncooked custard. The force of the impact caused it to solidify temporarily, and just for a moment Ellie floated there, adhered to its surface. A look of horror spread across her face as she could feel there was something alive in the pool with her, moving around her. Tukarra and I, knelt on the floor and tried to reach over the edge of the tank, to get hold of Ellie, to pull on her arms and legs, but she was stuck fast. Then hundreds of grotesque, slimy, pale yellow tentacles emerged from the liquid and pulled her deep into the pool. The more she struggled, the thicker the liquid became and the tighter the tentacles gripped her. The syrupy goo closed in around her body, then her face, then her mouth and her nose. A second more went by and she disappeared altogether. Just a few bubbles remained on the surface of the pool for a while.
As we stood up, I gently put my arm round Tukarra.
‘Thank you for saving my life,’ I said. ‘But why did you, when you have been told to kill me?’
She replied, ‘I can make up my own mind you know. I don’t have to obey the command. You fought the Scavengers to protect me back in the tunnels. I owed you one.’
She attempted to hold back a flow of blood from her injury with the palm of her hand. Blood continued to ooze between her fingers. I pressed my hand on top of hers.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘My suit will soon start working to stop the bleeding, and repair itself at the same time.’
‘How did you find me here?’ I asked.
She said, ‘I came out of the shower when I heard the explosion, noticed the broken door, and saw you were missing. I remembered you were probably still wearing the televisualisation star, I gave to you, on your forehead. So I established a connection with it. Through that, I was able to see what you were seeing, and also listen in on what Ellie was telling you. I overheard her entire convoluted, crazy story; and so I knew she was about to kill you.’
*
Without warning, the door to the recycling room was kicked open. Stood in the doorway was an Elite man who I could only assume was the driver of Ellie’s Hippo. I suppose he could have managed to untie himself? or perhaps Ellie had let him go?
He was holding a basic hand-gun, similar to the one Ellie had brought with her. It didn’t take him long to recognise me, from my picture published on the Ether no doubt, and without even saying a word, he took aim and fired.
Tukarra must have anticipated what was going to happen. She pushed me out of the way, and for the second time, in the space of a few minutes, she took the bullet to save me. This time the bullet punched a serious hole in her chest.
Luckily for me, the driver was not familiar with the ancient gun and didn’t instantly know how to fire a another shot. He hesitated before pulling the trigger a second time, and in that brief pause, a crossbow bolt burst through his forehead, and pinged off the ceiling.
*
The driver dropped to his knees, then fell face down onto the tiled floor, very definitely dead. A river of bright red blood flowed away from his hea
d along the wet tiles and ran into the yellow recycling tank.
In the corridor outside stood Woynek, the chief Scavenger, reloading his favourite compact cross-bow. He had noticed and then followed the white haired, white suited, Elite driver to see where he was going.
Woynek had stealthily managed to catch up with and actually stand behind the driver, cross-bow at the ready, when the driver had kicked the recycling room door open. He had noticed the driver holding a gun in his hand and, once the door had swung open, that I was going to be in its sights. As I had suspected, Woynek had developed an interest in me and instinctively shot the fatal crossbow bolt clean through the back of the driver’s head, at close range. Unfortunately, his intervention was just too late to prevent the driver’s first bullet from hitting Tukarra.
Woynek looked down at the driver’s body on the floor and smiled. On behalf of all Scavengers he was pleased there was one less Elite in the world. And whilst I was still trying to come to terms with all the events that were unfolding, he now aimed his crossbow at Tukarra.
I held my hand out, and stood between them. I pleaded with Woynek, ‘Please no. Can’t you see she’s hurt. She is no threat to you. She’s just saved my life. Twice!’
He lowered his weapon.
Tukarra was hurt pretty badly. She was in a lot of pain. Woynek and I helped her to sit on the floor and supported her back.
Through gritted teeth she implored Woynek to take me back to Bunker 7 along with the stash of explosives Ellie had put together.
No sooner had Woynek agreed to do that, than she tried to stand up. It was going to be an enormous effort for her, but she insisted she was going to stand. I helped her onto her feet. She put her arms around me and kissed me.
Then before I realised what was happening, she quite deliberately let go of me to fall gracefully, as if in slow motion, backwards into the recycling pool.
‘No,’ I cried, as I reached out to her.
Escaping the Sun Page 15
