Conclave

by Murray, Lee

  Araxi closes the memo.

  *

  There are an awful lot of adults chaperoning the field trip, in Peach’s opinion. For a class of twenty students, two or three would do, but they have six, not including Mr Hill. Peach is sure at least two of them are regulators in disguise. With all the extra protection, some of the students are getting jumpy—as if they expect to be attacked any minute now. Do they think all the protestors suddenly stopped being ship citizens and suddenly became convicts instead?

  It’s almost a surprise that they make it to the Navigation office without incident. A tall woman with wispy brown hair steps into the hallway.

  “Hello, my name is Fern Tauranga, and I work here in Navigation. The head Navigational team is made up of…”

  As Mrs Tauranga lists the Navigation workers and their specific jobs, Peach can’t help but wonder if something else is going on in the office. It sounds as if most of the course is already in place; there shouldn’t be any problems as long as the calculations are maintained precisely. But Peach’s mother has been working extra hours for weeks. Are they doing some other kind of work in there?

  The students are asked to stay quiet while they’re in the office so they don’t disturb the operators. Peach is shuffled over to Mrs Tauranga’s computer station. Across the room, she can see her mother hunched over her keyboard, typing furiously, eyebrows furrowed. Peach has never seen her so stressed.

  The entire excursion lasts half an hour, after which Mr Hill makes a sappy speech about how thankful everyone is for the hard work Navigation does to lead us into the future. Mrs Tauranga’s smile doesn’t quite reach her eyes. She rubs a finger over her nose as she thanks them for coming and leads them hastily back to the door. As Peach passes her mother, her eyes slide across a sheet of paper on the desk. Wait a second! She turns to get a closer look, but she’s already been herded too far to see it clearly. For a moment, she thought she’d seen Araxi’s name in her mother’s hurried scrawl.

  *

  Arax-i: I know how to solve your problem.

  Time for Araxi to do what he excels at. Using all available appendages, he taps, dials, and clicks his way up the Space-line and hacks into the Raknoid mainframe. They’ll probably find him soon, so he doesn’t waste time, just looks up the programming information on the Space-line. It’s not as complicated as he expected, really. The Space-line itself is made up of hundreds of layers of programming tech, but the software to run it is already encoded into his pod. All he needs to do is find destination co-ordinates and send out a Space-line hook, which he can then use to direct himself. The plan is in place.

  Arax-i: This needs to be done quickly. I am sending a file with instructions. It will tell you what to do once you reach the Navigation computers.

  Peachtree: Why can’t you tell me what to do by chat?

  Arax-i: I need to be inside your ship for this to work. When I reach you and leave my pod, I will be unable to communicate until my technology has been re-wired into your systems. Can you find a way for me to enter?

  Peachtree: I have a friend who can help sneak you in. I’ll send Pearl to get you and find a place for you to hide. We’ll talk when everything’s settled down.

  Arax-i: Since meeting you, I have learned my talents lie in breaking and entering. I will meet you soon, Peach.

  Carefully extending his Space-line, Araxi swings his pod out towards Conclave Pacifica.

  *

  “I have to go to Navigation.”

  Pearl turns away from the controls and looks at Peach in shock.

  “What? Are you leaving me here? He’s your alien!”

  Peach knows she’ll need some time to find what Araxi needs and the Navigation Office is ten floors away. She’ll be pushing it if she doesn’t leave now.

  “Please, Pearl. We don’t have time for me to be there. I’ve told Araxi to expect you. He knows what he’s doing. Just find him a place to hook up to the power systems.” Peach takes a deep breath. “And then I’m going to need you to create a distraction.”

  “What for?”

  “I need to get the Navigation crew out of the office.”

  Pearl’s eyes dart back and forth across the maintenance docks as if looking for ideas. “What am I supposed to say?”

  “You’ll come up with something.”

  “You hope I’ll come up with something,” Pearl whispers. Peach bites her bottom lip.

  Please, Pearl, don’t let me down.

  “Okay, I’ll see you on the flipside, I guess.”

  The trip to the Navigation Office is longer than Peach remembers, but it gives her enough time to come up with a good lie. She buzzes the alert machine outside the door.

  “Yes?”

  “Maintenance has found some valuable space junk that they want to use for repairs. They need all Navigation workers at Deck Six immediately. Head Office has requested a full team attendance to test where the material has come from and if it’s safe to use.”

  There are only four people in the office, and Peach’s mother is not one of them. The last of them closes the door firmly before they rush down the hallway. When she’s sure they’ve gone, Peach uses her mother’s override code to reopen the door.

  *

  Araxi scuttles out of his pod, pulling the information drive with him. He straps the device to himself, along with his switch panel. There’s no going back out there now: the pod’s just useless metal without those parts. But it’s been a good home. Reliable.

  The speckled human staring at him must be the friend Peach promised to send. Pearl. She makes some garbled noises that Araxi assumes are a greeting. He clicks out a reply. One of her soft human hands reaches out to grab his left control arm. It trembles as she tugs him gently into a tiny, square room. On the floor there’s a panel, which Pearl unfastens. Her fingers fumble with the latch.

  “You should be able to connect to power down there. Please don’t mess anything up.”

  Peach’s friend pushes him towards it, and Araxi stops to pat her shoulder before squeezing himself inside. From under the floor, he can hear her voice and the louder, multi-human replies. The space under the floor is a tight fit, but Araxi manages to kick the cables into a hollow around him and attach his pod’s information drive to the end of an energy connector. Before he has time to second guess himself, he feeds his Raknoid Space-line a vicious self-made virus that shuts it down forever. His parent won’t be able to fix it any more than he can, although Araxi doubts anyone will try. For a second, he wonders how many Raknoids have cut off from the mainframe this way—how many of his siblings are out there still alive, drifting on their own. Did they regret doing it? Of course, there’s no point thinking about that. It certainly can’t be undone now.

  Peach has held up her end of the plan: the complete navigational logs of their flight course have been sent to his machine. Without a visual board, Araxi uses text-only commands to find the relative co-ordinates of the last time Conclave Pacifica was on the correct course. From there, he re-calculates the course path to find the location for the New Planet. Nothing too confusing.

  Except it seems he can’t hook a Space-line because the software is demanding a bio-fuel resistor. It’s a part of the Space-line that Araxi hadn’t taken into account. He turns it over slowly in his mind. As much as he’d like another solution, all he can come up with is himself—he’s the only living creature near the machine available for use. Running the Space-line through himself would require all of his energy until the ship reaches the New Planet. He won’t be able to talk to Peach. But at least he’ll know his friend is safe and on her way to her new home on the New Planet. They’ll make it there safely and he’ll meet her soon enough.

  Araxi sets the ship course to follow the Space-line automatically and then, curling around his machine, he writes himself into the program.

  *

  “Why did you want to study her anyway?”

  Before deleting everything and truly declaring the report a failure, Clay has decid
ed to run one final search for Peach and Araxi. He swivels in his chair to face Scoria.

  “Peach Endeavour saved the Conclave Pacifica. She’s the reason we made it to this planet—our ship was lost.”

  “I’ve heard that, actually,” Scoria replies. “I’ve always wondered: if your ship was off course, how did your community end up joining us here?”

  Clay shrugs “That’s the thing. Peach snuck into the Navigation Office one cycle and by the time anyone realised something was going on, we were on a direct course to the New Planet. It was as if we’d never veered off it.”

  “How’d she find it?”

  “Through a device that we call the Umbilicus. It pulled us straight here without our having to use planets’ gravitational forces to change direction. It only took us twenty-two Earth years, nothing short of a miracle. Peach never told anyone how she’d done it. Her own story’s kind of sad, though.”

  Scoria frowns. “Why’s that?”

  Clay looks out the window at the trees as they climb toward the planet’s sun.

  “She wanted to be a landscape painter. But she died a few days after the ship’s arrival in a freak accident, so she never finished a single painting.”

  “And they never figured out how she saved the ship,” Scoria surmises as she turns back to the screen. “Let’s finish up. It’s too nice a day to stay inside.”

  Clay watches the scan slowly crawl from ninety to one hundred for the last time and then opens a log of all results, determined to give the topic one more chance.

  Ba-doink.

  A message appears at the lower right corner of the screen:

  User ₪Ȣɕ₰ ѱ₪ᵹԄ¤ would like to add you as a friend. Would you like to accept?

  Contributors

  Piper Mejia, Celine Murray, Lee Murray, and Jan Goldie

  Piper Mejia is a prolific writer, but only recently had her first story, Lockdown, published in Baby Teeth: Bite-sized tales of Terror. A high school English teacher, she is co-editor of student writing collections Write Off Line 2012, 2013, Beyond This Age and Beyond This Story, and is currently working on a young adult fantasy trilogy in both novel and graphic novel formats.

  Celine Murray is 19 years old and has had her fiction published in magazines such as WriteOn, Easy Going, and Breeze, and in the horror anthology Baby Teeth: Bite-sized Tales of Terror. She has also published a solo collection of prize winning fiction entitled Seven to Seventeen.

  Lee Murray used to be a scientist, but now she writes fiction for adults and children. Lee has twice won the Sir Julius Vogel Award for science fiction and fantasy writing, most notably for Best Youth Novel for her children’s title Battle of the Birds, and her short fiction has achieved international recognition. She is the co-editor of five collected works. www.leemurray.info

  Jan Goldie. I’m a working writer, creating content for websites, print media and social media. I have a BA in English literature and a Graduate Diploma in Journalism. Interestingly, I used very few of these skills in the creation of A Mer-tale, relying instead on my over-active imagination. When I'm not slaving over the computer for my day job or imagining myself 30 metres beneath the waves, I'm writing short stories, picture books and YA fantasy novels. My most recent claims to fame are the publication of a story in the crowd-funded collection of short horror fiction Baby Teeth: Bite-sized Tales of Terror, and my YA fantasy novel Brave’s Journey being short listed for the 2014 Storylines Tom Fitzgibbon Award.