The Third Craft

by James Harris

  There were four defensible positions: the ground-level entranceway, the spaceship, the missile ready room, and the missile launching room. He ruled out the entranceway because it would involve immediate confrontation, probably all five of them at once. Hiding in the spaceship would also afford no advantage, because the ship would inform Stell of his presence. Stell could lock Grayer inside the craft remotely and turn off the life support system. He would be trapped, and death would be inevitable.

  Grayer chose to hide in the missile launch room because it gave him visual access to some of the activity in the silo. A few monitors still functioned well enough to give him the position of the crew without revealing his own position.

  He climbed the stairs to the launch room and decided to make himself comfortable and wait for them to arrive. He took a few minutes to familiarize himself with the control panels. He paced the bunker-like room and memorized each nook and cranny. Only two monitors were operational. He discovered a computer system that was still intact. It controlled the life support, lighting, pneumatics, and secondary mechanical systems. The room was littered with sliced electrical cables and telephone cables that jutted from the floor and walls like chopped vines growing from concrete. There was a metallic-green army swivel chair. It smelled oily and dusty. Grayer eased into it and waited.

  At 1600 hours, there was a sudden commotion at the entranceway. Grayer jumped from the chair and raced to the heavy iron door. He peered outside. He spotted three people clanking down the circular steel staircase like snakes winding down a tree, their shoes ringing on the steel steps. Grayer eased the door open to get a better look, hoping to spot Stell. If he could surprise him and get the drop on the group, he might have a chance. At that instant, a red light caught his eye. He threw his head back, and a bullet exploded into the concrete where his skull had been an instant before. Ping! Ping! Ping! Three more rounds crashed into the doorframe.

  Grayer retreated inside the room, leaving the door open an inch. His heart was beating rapidly. They had him nailed down. But how? How could they have known he was here? It appeared that the element of surprise was theirs, not his. He was trapped.

  He was kicking himself for not choosing the entranceway. He could have engaged them right away. He would have at least had an exit. Now he was trapped underground with no chance of escape until the helicopter returned in three hours. Stell and his men had all the advantages. Maybe he should have taken the Secretary’s advice and brought Special Ops as backup.

  Would have, could have, should have. Deal with the here and now, he thought.

  The shooting stopped as quickly as it had begun. Grayer was tempted to peek outside the door. He knew that would be fatal. He nudged the door shut with his hip and approached the console. He activated both monitors. His mouth dropped open in surprise as Wixon’s smiling face filled the one monitor.

  Wixon waved and smiled a cruel smile. He lifted up his hand and pointed to a contraption the size of a basketball with wires wrapped in and about it. He jabbed his finger toward the device. He mouthed the word “boom.” Then he disappeared from view as he descended toward the bottom of the silo.

  Grayer observed him again minutes later. He was on the stairs about twenty feet below the launch room, about to enter the missile ready room with some device in his arms.

  Moments later, Grayer watched Stell on the monitor as he emerged from the missile ready room. The tiny figure looked up and waved, confident that Grayer was watching. He must have already planted the bomb, because his hands were empty. The figure disappeared into the bottom of the silo. The other crewmembers had disappeared from sight. Grayer could do nothing but wait and try to figure out what Stell was up to.

  He got his answer quickly. The center console lit up by itself. The warning horn started to bleat. Grayer reached out to the console and toggled the ON/OFF switch to deactivate it. It didn’t respond. He tried both of the other switches. They, too, were dead. It dawned on Grayer that Stell had taken control of the console remotely. The orange lights turned green, and the giant floor began to rise.

  The door to the launch room clanked as the locking pins fell into place, sealing him inside. He rushed to the door and shoved against it. It didn’t budge. He was now entombed in this tiny room.

  He watched the monitor helplessly as the floor continued to rise. It halted twenty feet below ground, more than fifty feet above the missile launch room. The silo was open to the sky. There was a spurt of flame from beneath the spaceship, then another and another. Their energy consolidated into one brilliant burst, and the ship catapulted from the floor upward and disappeared off the monitor screen.

  In a flash, they were gone. He was alone.

  Grayer groaned. There was a bomb twenty feet below him: nuclear, no doubt. The device would blow up and the explosion would be contained within the silo. It could not escape to the outside and dissipate its energy. The concussion from the explosion would disintegrate the rotting concrete and bury him alive – if he wasn’t already fried to a crisp. Any nuclear radiation would be contained underground. No one would be any the wiser.

  He checked his wristwatch. It was 1650 hours. He had a chilling recollection. When he had last tested the system, it auto-started the “all clear” about two hours later. Then the floor had descended again. That must be it, he thought. That’s the trigger. The floor descends, it trips some triggering device, and then the bomb detonates. The helicopter would arrive at precisely 1900, ten minutes after he was buried.

  Grayer had two hours to find a way out. Two hours to live.

  CHAPTER47

  Grayer figured that Stell wanted him to sweat out the last moments of his life, not knowing when the bomb would explode. Now he knew that his adopted brother was capable of murder. That saddened him more than anything. To think that Stell hated him so much that he would kill him. Grayer felt truly alone. There was a numbness that heralded his acute despondency. Grayer knew Stell had always wanted to be in control of something all his life. When they lived together, it was Kor’s father who ruled. When Stell fled to the Abishot, it was the queen mother who ruled. Stell was always second banana. Maybe he wanted to be important here on this planet and not have to worry about Kor’s interference. It was apparent that Stell saw no other way except to murder him.

  Grayer felt anger and frustration and yet it was his sense of loss that caused him the most anxiety. He was hurt beyond words that his childhood friend, his best and only friend, had turned on him and wanted him dead. Grayer’s sense of loneliness and loss was acutely debilitating.

  Disheartened, he paced the room. He attempted to force the door using a psychokinetic push. No response from the monstrous hunk of metal but a rattle and a groan.

  He leaned back against the gunmetal console and slowly scanned the room, searching for a clue to escape. Time was running out, but he managed his panic reflex well. He knew he had to be calm, or he would most certainly perish in this tomb. And it was every bit as much of a tomb as the ones the ancient Egyptians had built for their dead. Although the silo was not a pyramid, there were similarities. It was a coffin befitting a prince.

  Grayer had always admired the ancient design of the pyramids. He often wondered if another space culture had enlightened the early humans as to the techniques of architecture, stress, mathematics, and engineering in order to facilitate the structure. If so, had those aliens left? Or had they integrated into human society, as he and Stell had? Who knew?

  His mind began to picture the structure of the pyramids. He could envision the engineering diagrams depicting the royal burial chambers, the secret shafts, and the … the ventilation systems. There were positive and negative ventilation flows, he knew, in every engineered ventilation system. Fresh air was introduced, and stale air had to be pumped out, for the air to flow efficiently. That was it! Stale air meant return ducts. The fresh-air ducts were too small to crawl through, but what about the return-air ducts? Where were the return ducts?

  He searched the base of
the walls for ducts. There were none. He searched the floors for ducts. Nothing. Impossible! He even searched the ceiling for any evidence of ducts. Again there were none. Grayer got down on his hands and knees, looking for grid holes in the twelve-by-twelve green floor tiles. All he found were old drill holes once used for anchoring equipment. Still nothing. The floor and walls were solid concrete.

  He slumped, cross-legged on the floor. He must have overlooked something, but what? God, the room wasn’t that big. It was only threedimensional, and he had searched all three surfaces: wall, ceiling, and floor. This already desperate situation had now become utterly hopeless.

  He sat quietly and reflected. This seemed a good time to surrender to the inevitable and make preparations for death, he thought. He knew what had to be done. He knew that death would free him. His body might spend eternity buried in the silo, but his Being wouldn’t. It would drift through the collapsed rubble into the free air above and tether to someone else or merge (layer) with another Being. Grayer began to make mental preparations. He focused on a mind mantra and began drifting into a meditative state of altered consciousness until he became un-conscious. Death would be painless and his passing would be a footnote.

  But Grayer was both Frank and Kor. It was the Kor side of him that had resigned himself to death without apprehension. Everything, everyone dies. Some go sooner than others. Relative to the enormity of the cosmos, a few years, a few dozen years, a hundred years are incalculably tiny. Kor, as a highly evolved human, was cognizant of the true nature of death and life, and had no fear of dying. He understood the necessity of death in the ongoing song of life’s endless cycle. Birth was a song of joy and celebration. Death was a song of joy and celebration. Mankind did not create the song of the universe. But it is our future destiny to reveal and revel in its ultimate truth. For Kor, death was the surrender from the living flesh to the Being. Existing as a Being, un-human and formless, wasn’t a bad place to be. It was and is the place we have always been since the beginning. For the less-evolved Frank Grayer, death was not something he embraced without a fight. Not yet, he thought. His life must go on. He must beat this thing.

  Frank Grayer’s fighting spirit jarred the Kor element out of its complacency. Grayer snapped out of his trance to resume his search for an escape route. There must be a way out of this. He fought back tears of frustration as he thought of his boys. He wasn’t going to disappear on them. He wasn’t going to disappoint or hurt them. He had to live for their sake.

  He stared at the ceiling. Think!

  The minutes passed slowly and silently. He ended up gazing at one of two dead four-foot fluorescent fixtures fastened to the ceiling.

  Did you look behind the fixture?

  He leaped up, grabbed the end of the corroded fixture with both hands, and hung on. The light groaned and ripped partway out of the ceiling. Two four-foot light bulbs fell and exploded on the tiled floor. Grayer covered his eyes against the flying glass. Then he examined where the fixture had hung. Staring back at him was a blank solidconcrete ceiling with some wires dangling from one-inch embedded conduit.

  His palms were cut from the sharp fixture edges. There was one more light, one last chance. Grayer hesitated. It was such a long shot that a ventilation return would be behind a light fixture that he chuckled at his thinking. But it was his last and only shot. He repeated the same procedure. This time the entire fixture ripped from the ceiling and dangled from a single black wire. He looked up slowly, afraid of the final disappointment.

  There was no disappointment.

  Hidden behind the fixture was a return-air duct. Its outer edges had been puttied over with concrete to make it appear narrower. After bashing the concrete edging, it fell away and revealed a hole large enough for a man to crawl through. But crawl where? Down or up? Away from the bomb or closer to it? Away from one death trap and into another? There was only one way to tell. Grayer leaped up onto a console table, placed a chair on the table, and began to wriggle his way upward into the hidden shaft.

  “Why are we stopping?” one of the crew asked.

  Thirteen miles away from the silo, the ship hovered almost noiselessly above a cliff edge of a craggy canyon wall. The pilot allowed it to flutter gently to the ground mere feet from the edge of the precipice. The nose of the craft was pointing back at the silent silo. Stell engaged the forward-view monitor.

  “I want to make sure he’s finished for good,” Stell murmured as he watched the screen.

  “How long must we wait?” one of them asked.

  “Just under two hours,” Stell said. “Relax. Enjoy yourself. Take a stroll outside.” He gestured outside the craft toward the dead drop over the side of the cliff. “We confirm the kill, OK?”

  The crewmembers remained obediently silent as they all stared at the screen. They shuffled uneasily at their leader’s strange behavior. A sense of retraction came over them, as if Stell would take it all back if he could rewind time.

  A morose feeling had come over Stell. Like a child that feels bad, sad, and scared after it has done something it knew it shouldn’t. Was it remorse? Was his resolve wavering? The truth was that Stell harbored serious doubts about his decision to entrap Kor and eliminate him. Kor had always been like a brother to him, despite his treachery and deceit. Indeed, Kor’s family had spared his life. The motives may have been suspect, but the act was genuine. Was it possible, Stell wondered, that Kor had had no idea about his father’s treachery? Was Kor just as much an innocent victim as he, Stell, was?

  On the other hand, Kor, the arrogant Prince of Narok, was ultimately accountable for the acts of the House of Narok. His family’s actions could not be forgiven. Enemies for generations could never be friends, let alone brothers. They weren’t brothers. They were false brothers contrived by the evil king of Narok.

  Stell gazed thoughtfully at the desert, part of him secretly hoping that Grayer would escape. That he wouldn’t be all alone on this planet. But he knew that was impossible. His brother’s fate was sealed. The explosion would be triggered when the platform descended back down into the silo. The force of the trapped energy would collapse the decayed walls of the silo, and the structure would crumble from within, burying him alive.

  Stell glanced down at his hands. He couldn’t believe it. They were shaking. He clasped them firmly behind his back. Steady on, this is the price of leadership and control of this planet. Don’t expose any weakness,

  What if I’m wrong? he thought. Get a grip! The king betrayed me, Kor betrayed me, and now I’m alone on this planet. I alone have to build a new future for our people.

  Stell resolved that, with Kor gone, he would turn his attention to the population of the Earth colony. It would be his kingdom to rule. Before he discovered that Kor was alive, Stell had dreamed up a devious plan to take over this new planet and reinstate the House of Abishot to its former glory. It was time to initiate the first phase of his plan. He turned toward the forward monitor.

  “Alpha II.”

  “Commander?” the computer voice answered.

  “There is an instructional file that I want you to transmit to the second-to-last beacon we left in space before we encountered our problem with this planet.”

  “File name?”

  “Wake Amonda.”

  “Found.”

  “Good. Attach this planet’s navigational coordinates to the file. That is, Earth’s position relative to the beacon. The program contains specific instructions to the cruiser labeled Gamma III.”

  “Instructions?”

  “Correct. The program instructs Gamma III to depart from its programmed trajectory and follow the coordinates that you will give it. The coordinates are for this planet. The instruction is that we have landed on our desired destination.”

  “If this is the target destination, we have been programmed to inform the entire fleet.”

  “Obey these new instructions, is that clear?”

  “Understood. Coordinates attached. On your command, this file w
ill be transmitted to the beacon using frequency ten to the ten through GB.”

  Stell nodded. “Send the program file.”

  “Sent. Auto receipt enabled. The beacon will receive the message in two years standard time, and an auto confirmation will be received in approximately four years.”

  “Next, I want you to disable transmissions from the beacon nearest to Earth using our UHF radiation beam. I want it to become inert and unable to guide cruisers.”

  “Without the guide beacon, the cruisers will revert to preprogrammed coordinates, commander.”

  “Correct.”

  “Those coordinates are outside Earth’s solar system. The cruisers will miss Earth.”

  “Yes, they will. Except for Gamma III, which has our coordinates and will head directly to Earth.”

  “Understood. Transmitting to beacon using frequency ten to the twenty-six through GB.”

  “That is all.”

  It would take two years for the transmission to reach the second nearest beacon. The beacon’s computer would store the file and the coordinate attachment and wait for the cruiser Gamma III to arrive and download the information.

  CHAPTER48

  Grayer felt as if he was in lousy physical shape: he now regretted that he didn’t exercise much. He started sweating as soon as he began to worm his way up the cold concrete return airshaft. It was no place for anyone with claustrophobia. It was only about two feet wide and there was no light. It felt like an invisible coffin. Grayer inched his way farther and farther upward. The concrete was ripping at his clothing and skin. His own breath came bouncing back at him with each exhalation.