Beyond the Starport Adventure (Bullet Book 1)

by Richard Fairbairn

  “I tried to count the dust,” she admitted, “I didn’t mean to. I think… I think I’m afraid. I think I do it when I’m afraid. I… I think I’m trying to…” she paused a long time, thinking. She didn’t know what to say next. She didn’t know the word. “I think I am trying not to be” she finished.

  Counting the dust particles had been costly. She’d forgotten details of the incident with captain Zinn’s shuttle. They might have been important details. She made a new rule in her mind. She made a rule not to count dust or snow or raindrops or stars again. She looked at the tiny beast. It looked at her. Jann Linn called them Rootorrs. He’d told her that they were vermin. They infiltrated the cave when given the chance and they tried to eat his food stores and steal his water. Their tiny droppings showed where they‘d been. They moved very quickly. She couldn’t see them move unless she slowed down time enough to watch them. Now much slowing down. Just enough to see. Slowing time down was something she‘d made rules about too.. It could hurt if she overdid it - in different ways. The Rootorr was cleaning its whiskers. Its tiny black eyes looked at Cass’s body and her hands. She wondered why the creature didn’t look at or into her eyes like Jann Linn did.

  She touched her hands to her face. It wasn’t as pretty as it had been, but her eyes were still where they were supposed to be, even if one of them was no longer sending any information back to her. The Rootorr continued to clean itself. It wasn’t particularly interested in Cass and even her movement and speaking had done little to frighten him.

  “I don’t think I’ll count things anymore,” Cass said quietly, “I forget too many things. I don’t like forgetting things.”

  The Rootorr sniffed the air. Its little nose twitched. It had sensed something, she realised. Then, faster than she could see, it was gone. She hadn’t travelled far. Walking was difficult. It seemed that she had to stop and rest every few metres. Her power system was damaged. She didn’t know how badly. The diagnostic tools she normally used weren’t working. That frightened her too. She’d been walking for three hours, but five hours had passed since the city had been destroyed. Dawn had come, but the sky was dark with the dust thrown into the atmosphere. Father would be making breakfast. She imagined he’d be angry with her for disobeying his instructions.

  The ship did not have a name. It had never occurred to the elderly scientist that he should name his creation. For most of his ownership the ship hadn’t looked anything like a spaceship. It had started out as a decaying metal antique left abandoned and neglected at the bottom of the mountain. His Enrilean masters had not explained where the ship had come from, but for some reason they’d dragged it up the side of the mountain when they’d dragged him to the mountain the first time.

  “I’m having trouble getting off the ground,” Oss Linn said emotionlessly, “I’m sorry, but I don’t think there’s going to be enough power.”

  The hull moaned to punctuate Oss. Jann Linn touched a switch. The old reactor worked harder. The ship groaned and lurched.

  “The reactor’s overloading,” Oss said, “I don’t think I can keep it stable for long. I‘m sorry, but I don’t think I can get us into the air.”

  “Thank you, Oss,” Jann Linn whispered, “Just try for a little longer. Your sister is out there somewhere. She’ll be frightened and confused. Do you understand? “

  “I’m sorry but I don’t understand,” the ship’s computer said flatly, “The reactor’s working at ninety percent now. I’m reading abnormal energy fluctuations. I wouldn’t recommend that we proceed. The readings are dangerous.”

  He could see the energy gauge for himself. The ship’s reactor was working too hard for its age. Oss’s lack of emotion did not distract Jann Linn from the importance of her words. The hull screamed. There was a sound of tearing metal. Something on the left ventral side of the ship was coming away, being torn away and destroyed by the mountain that had fused itself to the ship.

  “Reactor is failing,” Oss stated, “Power output is ninety five percent. Cooling system is overloading.”

  Suddenly the tearing and groaning of metal ended. Jann was pushed back into his seat. His back pained momentarily but he barely noticed it in his euphoria at getting the ship off the ground.

  “We’re in the air,” Oss said dutifully, “The engines need calibration, but I’m able to control the ship.”

  Jann Linn’s knuckles were white. He was gripping the single centre seat so hard that pieces of the mouldy armrests were coming away under his fingernails. And two of his fingernails had come away from his fingers. The ship swayed in the air ten metres above the ground. The sun was rising and the early dawn lit up the three deep gouges on the port side of the ship. The ship’s nose, pointed slightly downward, turned carefully towards the burning remnants of the city below.

  “You know what we’re looking for,” Jann Linn’s throat rumbled dryly, “Just do your best, Oss. I have every faith in you.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand what faith is,” Oss said.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’ll try to explain it later - or you can ask Cass when we find her,” Jann Linn looked at the viewer in the control panel in front of his old chair. It was a newer display - something he’d scavenged for himself from scraps that Zinn’s men had brought. The screen was clear and crisp. He could see the enhanced outline of the mountain below, the edges dancing in an orange glow. This was the work of Oss deciding where the ground began and the sky ended. Oss; the predecessor to the magnificent Cass Linn.

  “My daughter,” he whispered, “My child.”

  Oss heard him speaking. She knew that he was referring to Cass Linn and not herself. It did not concern her.

  The ship weighed twenty tonnes. The antigravity engine held it easily above the ground, but the sandstorm was buffeting it and pushing it one way and then the other. Oss was making fine adjustments to the engine system to compensate for the forces on the mountainside. The old ship was reasonably under control, Jann thought.

  “How are you feeling about thee engine management?” Jann asked, “Do you think you can pilot the ship?”

  “I think I can,” Oss said.

  “Okay, take us down towards the city. Nice and slow. I don’t want to miss her. She’s down there somewhere, if she survived.”

  The ship looked like a large lump of orange brown rock floating in the air. The sand storm made the ship almost invisible. Without Jann’s enhanced view screen the mountainside would have been too. Oss was tidying up the image, removing dust and debris and showing the rocks below. She had other ways of seeing her surroundings.

  Oss had once had a body like Cass Linn‘s. She had neither liked or disliked it. Now, being a part of the ship, was simply a different state of being. She neither liked or disliked being the ship computer, nor did she prefer one state of being to the other. They were just different. She didn’t think like Cass Linn, she never would. Her mind was not as sophisticated as her sister’s mind. And that, too, did not bother her.

  She took no joy from piloting the ship. It was something she’d imagined and practiced in her mind tens of thousands of times. The actual reality of it was very different, but the practicing had helped her prepare for what she now found herself doing.

  Cass Linn was not hearing or replying to any of the signals Oss was transmitting. Oss decided this was either because Cass was damaged or destroyed. The ship’s ageing sensors probed the ground for Cass’s energy and for the metallic components of her body. There was debris from the city even this far up the mountain. The ship started down the mountain slowly, keeping low above the ground.

  Jann closed his eyes. He was tired, exhausted. He’d worked on the ship for five solid hours. He hadn’t eaten anything in all that time and there wasn’t anything on the ship to eat. His stomach growled for a full three seconds and he patted it with his hand.

  “Sorry,” he said quietly. Then he laughed out loud when he realised that he’d been speaking to his own stomach.

  The ship had mov
ed ten metres down the mountain. Five minutes had passed. Oss was confident that she could control the main engine and the poorly aligned stabilisers. She took the ship further down the mountainside.

  There were other chunks of debris. None of it bore any resemblance to her sister so Oss ignored it. Jann’s eyes were still closed and his breathing was slow and shallow. He’d fallen asleep. The ship moved over some pieces of metal that looked strange to Oss. She made a note of it. It wasn’t important enough to wake Jann over, according to her programming.

  Oss was on her own. She did not care. She’d been alone many times before. Even if she hadn’t experienced loneliness it would not have troubled her. Oss was blessed and cursed with a disposition such that nothing impressed or distressed her. She was void of curiosity. Her sensors had returned something that Jann would have been interested in, had she told him. But she was not looking for debris from alien spacecraft. She was looking for her sister, or what remained of her sister. Few other things would distract her from what she had been told to do.

  The ship was one third of the way down the mountain and about fifteen metres off the ground. The reactor was overheating already. Oss was watching it carefully. It would shut down in two or three hours. Jann needed to make adjustments that she couldn’t. She didn’t think the reactor would explode. It would probably shut down before it got too hot. If not, she’d land the ship and shut it down.

  Jann snored softly. The sensors passed over something that had once been alive. She examined it carefully for a second or two. There were no signs of life, though the body was warm. There was another, equally dead, person near the first. And much more of the strange debris. Finally, small fragments of the devastated city were revealing themselves. Oss looked carefully at the odds and ends that had been blasted up the mountain. She recognised some of the artefacts, but not others. She filed them away to think about later.

  Matt Silverman was dreaming. He’d been able to tell the difference between dreams and reality longer than he could remember. And he could change his dreams if they got too frightening – though they rarely did. His dreams had habitually been very boring. Once, as a child, he’d dreamt of buildings, machines and other normally inanimate objects that had come to life and chased him through his home town. He’d been unable to wake from that dream, but he somehow hadn‘t been afraid. The dream had fascinated him just as it had fascinated his classmates and the bewildered teacher when he‘d feverishly recited the entire episode as soon as the class door had closed. The class of 8 year olds had gone wild, caught up in the fever of the passion in which Silverman had told his tale. Miss Allison had managed to calm the class by asking Matt and each of his thirty six classmates to write a short story about their favourite dream. He’d had more attention at school in that one day than he’d ever had in his two years of school. He’d enjoyed the new found popularity, even though it did not last long.

  The dream he was now experiencing was very much like that one, childhood dream. But the glass faces were in this dream. He’d been seeing them since his father had died. In the first year or so the glass faces would make an appearance almost every time he succumbed to sleep. Emotionless, stolid expressions turning inexorably to face him. Somehow, the thought of looking into the sightless glass eyes terrified Matt. It was a rare occasion in his dreams when a glass face managed to turn completely round to look at him. He would use his dream warping talent to turn them into light bulbs or make them disappear altogether. The glass faces had only ever stared at him a few times before in his dreams. They’d turn on that stump, as if on a turntable, with a slow and ominous inevitability. When the sad, staring, sightless glass eyes met his own he would be filled with an incredible and inconsolable grief like a hole in his stomach. And then, instants later, the calm and serene generic faces would turn into something hideous and terrifying. He never knew what, exactly. His dreams never went that far, even if he lost control of the glass faces. He’d wake himself up as soon as the glass eyes met his own.

  He was alone. He was getting used to being alone more and more, so dreaming a lonely dream wasn’t a surprise. It was a hot day. The sun was warm on his face. Too warm. He tried to put a cloud in front of the sun but the sun kept getting hotter. At first he thought that he was standing on a beach, but he quickly realised that he was standing crouched on a hard rocky slope. It was like the side of a mountain or a large hill. The air around him was fast moving, dry and hot. It swirled dustily around his face. He had his sunglasses on and they were protecting him from the dust and debris. The glass face in this dream had a body, which was unusual. A long body with a thin waist and narrow shoulders. The face was different. It wasn’t the same as the other glass faces in his nightmares and that relieved him. This face did not look like a person’s at all. It was such an alien face that his normal acute apprehension of the transparent countenance was not present. He had his hands cupped around his eyes, blocking out the sunlight, as he stared quizzically at the approaching creature. It was difficult to look directly at the glass figure as the bright sunlight reflected from every harsh angle of its limbs, torso and face. The glass figure moved nimbly over and around the harsh desert rock and within a few seconds was standing next to Matt Silverman.

  “You’re on fire,” the glass figure said, “You’re burning up. You have to get up,” Its voice was strangely calm and serene, considering what it had just said.

  The glass faces in his dreams had never spoken before. They had never had bodies either, Silverman considered, and somehow both these differences made these glass faces nowhere near as terrifying as the ones he habitually avoided and manipulated in his dreams.

  “I’m on fire?” he replied, staring at the glinting, transparent face.

  “You have to get up. We have to get out of here,” the large alien oval eyes looked into Silverman’s without blinking and without seeing. The voice sounded strangely familiar. “Come on, son.”

  The dream ended abruptly. Jim Quinn’s concerned, gaunt and blood soaked face smiled oddly at Matt. Silverman had it in his mind to say two things to the white haired man. They came out as one blurted sound.

  “Wh…ello…”

  Matt’s senses came back to him in a rush. He was lying on his right side on something hard and painful. Above him there was a grey orange sky and billowing clouds of dust. The sun was bright. Larger than the sun of home. He felt the heat on his face as he squinted his eyes against its light.

  Silverman sat upright sharply, checking to see which part of his body was on fire. He twisted his arms round one way and patted down flames that were not there.

  “What is it, ants?” Quinn asked.

  Silverman coughed up dust, “You… you said I was on fire.”

  Quinn smiled lopsidedly. His eyes were cold and hard. “No, son, you must have dreamt that. I’ve been trying to wake you up for the past fifteen minutes. You took a bit of a shunt, I think, when the shuttle crashed. It was quite a dramatic landing, or crash if you‘d like to put it that way. Well, I‘d suppose there isn‘t another more honest way of looking at it. We crashed.”

  Silverman found Quinn’s face with his dry, sore fingers. He was feeling Quinn’s thin lipped smile. Quinn’s forehead wrinkled both quizzically and disapprovingly, but he didn’t pull away from Matt’s hand. Matt removed it himself, slowly.

  “I suppose you could say I crashed us, technically speaking, but the truth is that there really wasn’t any piloting involved. We came hurtling out of the wormhole at breakneck speed. I’d think we were close to the speed of light for a few milliseconds, thrashing quite perilously close to the big sun you see up there. That’s how we ended up in this star system, according to Heyward’s rules of time and space. The mass of a star creates a weakness in normal space, you see son. A lot of people don‘t know that the ether gates almost move in and out of normal space at points. It’s a little bit like join the dots, if you‘ll think of each star as a dots. Mind you, there would be some interesting folds in the paper.”
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br />   “Where are we?” Silverman interrupted, “What happened to the shuttle? Where is everyone?”

  He tried to stand and moved too quickly, falling back onto his side and jarring his elbow hard. For a moment he feared that his ankle was broken, but it seemed to twist and turn without too much pain. He scrambled onto his haunches beside Quinn, who was kneeling on the ground.

  “Your face is covered in blood,” Silverman observed, “Are you injured?”

  Quinn touched the fingers of both hands to his face, touching his chin and then his cheeks.

  “I don’t think so,” he answered, “I was wondering why my face felt… stiff. Poor…” he concentrated for a moment, “You know, I don’t remember her name.”

  “Alice,” said Silverman, remembering. “It’s her blood, I’m afraid. I… shall not share with you any more than that. It was… terrible business.”

  He produced a small silver flask that Silverman rightly guessed contained some kind of liquor. He handed it to Matt. Matt almost refused, but then he took the flask and unscrewed the silver cap. The flask was shiny and well looked after. There was an inscription. Silverman wondered whether he should read or ignore the inscription.

  THE BEST GRANDAD IN THE WORLD - LOVE SAMUEL

  Silverman weighed the flask briefly before filling his mouth and then swallowing hard. He preferred Southern Comfort to Scotch Whiskey, but the warmth spreading from the top of his stomach outwards and down was more than welcome. He handed the flask back to Quinn. Quinn took the slightest of sips, then screwed the top back on. He glanced at the inscription momentarily before replacing the flask on the inside of his jacket.

  Silverman looked around. There was a mist, a fog. The mountain or hillside was shrouded in it. Visibility was about seventy metres or less. There were particles in the fog. Large black and grey flakes.

  “It’s smoke,” Quinn said, “I don’t know from where.”