by S. K. Holder
Brett gave a solemn head shake. ‘Then we’ll make you part of the fleet young Citizen.’ He slammed his hand down on Connor’s shoulder, making him flinch. ‘I’ll introduce you to the few sorry cadets we’ve left on board, my son included.’
Brett led him along the hollow arteries of the ship that reverberated with haunting sounds and clanging metal.
Connor gaped at two passing droids with clunky arms and legs, walking shoulder to shoulder. A part of him still wanted to believe than none of this was real. That it was all part of a game. The prospect of being dumped back on alien territory filled him with dread. He scanned the connecting corridors in search of a way out. For one brief moment, he thought about faking a collapse. Brett couldn’t send him onto the battlefield if he was unconscious.
He met three cadets in the ship’s training quarters. He recognised Brett’s son at once. The boy was in his mid-teens and had the same bulk in his upper body as his father. He had a bloated face and copper-coloured eyes. The boy aimed a laser gun at a moving hologram target as it darted back and forth. His jaw was clenched and he had formed a fist with his free hand. Connor worked out that the gun couldn’t have been real because when he shot at the moving target, it evaporated and a new one appeared. The wall behind the hologram target remained undamaged.
A boy of about eleven sat on a bench watching Brett’s son. Tears ran down his cheeks. When he caught sight of Brett, he used his sleeve to wipe his tears away, earning a look of reproach from the commander.
‘This here is my son, Erard,’ said Brett. Erard’s eyes slid briefly from the target to acknowledge Connor with a nod. ‘And this here is Rivilsa. We just call her Riv.’ Erard ignored the younger boy and pointed through the moving hologram into another section of the ship, where a girl of about seventeen spun a curved blade through the air. It landed in a soft pillar fixed to the wall. Both sides of her head were shaven and covered with a labyrinth of red and black tattoos. She had a thick plait running from the front of hair down to the middle of her back. Connor watched her tug out the quivering blade. She threw it again, splitting the top of the pillar in two. His mouth dropped open in awe of her skill. She caught him gawping and returned an angry frown.
He knew he didn’t possess the stealth or skill to use a blade. Whether he intended to fight aliens or not, he wanted to be armed. His gift was not enough. ‘Can I have a laser gun?’ he asked. He guessed what the answer would be before he had said the words.
‘Unequivocally no,’ said Brett. ‘We don’t issue them to under sixteens.’ He clasped his hands behind his back his eyes darting between his son and Riv as if trying to weigh up who showed the most promise. ‘I’ll give you all a quick pep talk before you leave.’
Locked in a trance, the only words Connor heard in Brett’s pep talk were, ‘You better be faster than them…keep moving.’
Brett gave each of them a pack filled with supplies and a communication, ‘transcom’, device, in the form of an earpiece so they could communicate with him from the ground. Connor blindly slipped the pack on, his heart thumping in his ears. Brett tightened the straps around his shoulders and clipped the transcom onto Connor’s ear.
They left the training quarters. Wobbly with fear, Connor could barely walk. The corridors loomed before him like hexagonal-shaped spider webs. He felt trapped like a fly. No one was coming for him. Not ever. He snapped out of his trance.
He noticed that Riv wore energy armour. The chest plate was capable of emitting shockwaves strong enough to blast a hole through a wall. Connor had had one in Narrigh and wished he had it now. Erard also wore a protective chest plate made from toughened fabric. He had one of the discs he had seen hanging from the ceiling of the armoury and a laser gun in his belt. Connor opened his mouth to complain, but Brett cut him off by bundling him towards the carrier’s locked hangar.
The hangar door flew open and the air rushed through. ‘I-I don’t ha-have any weapons,’ he spluttered.
‘You have a throwing net in your pack and your wits,’ Brett shouted above the carrier’s rumbling drone.
Connor looked down. The ground moved rapidly beneath him.
‘Out you go,’ shouted the commander. He shoved Connor hard in the back. He fell from the carrier with a shriek, his arms and legs flailing. His chest tightened in fear. The ground was coming up fast.
‘You should have chosen a better hiding place,’ said the Authoritative Voice.
TWENTY-FOUR
Skelos waded through the slick rainbow coated terrain. On some patches of ground, he hardly had to walk at all, he slid, holding up his arms to keep his balance. And he discovered, there were lots of ways to avoid walking, if your feet were sore and your boots were shedding leather. He swung himself between rocks and leaped where leaping would permit.
Vastra walked for the most part. Skelos thought that the Citizen rather enjoyed walking. We’re not of the same breed, he decided. Not learning about the Second Status Citizen’s past, placed him at a disadvantage. The man had an air of nobility about him that many Citizens lacked. He had not had the chance to examine Vastra’s Compulog as he could never be certain he was alone while Vastra had use of an Invisibility Potion.
After several hours of trekking, they came to a passage hewn from rock. They inched their way along the tight passage, swarming with lizards and scattered with rock fragments. Skelos caught his foot twice, almost losing what was left of his boots. Vastra slipped once but quickly recovered by using the ridges in the rock to pull himself up. Skelos enjoyed watching Vastra falter. It made him feel less physically inferior.
Vastra stumbled to a halt at a cleft in the rock no longer than his arm. ‘This is it,’ he said.
Skelos used a hunk of stone to the clean lizard entrails from his splintered boots. ‘This is what?’ he asked. The site looked like a ripe lair for a beast; other than that it held no prominence.
Vastra slithered through the opening. ‘You’ll see soon enough.’
Skelos’s scrawny frame permitted him to slip through the gap after Vastra. If he had not lost a third of his body weight, Vastra would have had to blast the rocks apart to accommodate him.
‘It is − as I remember,’ said Vastra.
‘You’ve been here before?’ He watched Vastra survey his surroundings as if he had stumbled upon a palace of precious metal and not another slick-walled, stony cavity, teeming with lizards. ‘Exactly how long have you served in Narrigh?’ Long enough to go insane?
‘I came to Narrigh as a child.’
Skelos masked his astonishment with a scratch of his beard. It did not bode well that a child had been exiled from Odisiris because it meant Vastra did not travel to Narrigh alone. He would have a family or guardians; other Citizens out there looking for him. If Vastra was only a child at the time of his exile, it was highly unlikely that he was to blame for his family’s expulsion from Odisiris. What if there was no exile story and his family had moved to Narrigh voluntarily, much like his former friend, Osaphar Kulane?
‘You’ve no family back in Narrigh?’ he asked. He could count on one hand the Narrigh Citizens he knew by name: the one standing before him and Osaphar. When you spent most of your time in an underground laboratory, you had no time to socialise.
‘I did but they left.’
They must hate him as I do. ‘How awful. And what is the name of your House?’
‘House of Ostin.’
Skelos had heard of House Ostin. They were an old and extremely wealthy House. A few of their numbers served on the Presidential Elite, some two hundred years ago. What crime did the family commit he wondered and why had they left him behind?
Vastra placed his hand on an insignificant patch on the wall.
A grating noise sounded at his feet and a round solid rim appeared in the ground. It turned like a grinding wheel, dispersing rock dust into the space around them.
Skelos shielded his eyes and hoisted up his robes as the wheel rose and the terrible screeching sound pummelled his eardrums.
Once the noise faded and the dust had settled, he uncovered his face and let his robes hang loose. The ground had dredged up a steel compartment, fourteen feet high and ten feet wide, by Skelos’s estimate. The compartment door opened, displaying a table surrounded by metal stools. He saw nothing inside that looked as if it could transport them anywhere. He was beginning to think the compartment had been built for the sole purpose of dining when Vastra entered it and slammed his hand down on the table to uncover a control panel.
Skelos gave a low whistle. ‘This will teleport us out, no? Ingenious. I should have known there was another way out of Narrigh.’ It all came together. Undren Village was a gateway to the other worlds. The compartment was the portal: the vessel that would take them there. ‘Who’s controlling it?’ He wondered why the cylinder had been left unguarded. Could it be that Vastra had been reemployed in Shardner’s service and was simply escorting him to a new prison? Was this a trap? He didn’t know how well Vastra knew Osaphar. As he stared around the capsule he became bogged down with fear and doubt. Ever since he had embarked on this underground quest he had felt his determination waning, his confidence diminishing. The opportune moment was there for the taking. The promise of a new world.
‘The promise of the unknown,’ said a little voice inside his head.
He made his face taut and stood tall, determined to hide his disquietude from his buoyant companion. ‘How long has it been since you have seen this place?’
‘About fifteen years.’
Skelos guessed Vastra’s age to be something in the early thirties, possibly younger. He would have had to have been a boy when he first laid eyes on the compartment.
‘You mean this contraption hasn’t been used in fifteen years? Do you even know what it is?’
‘I don’t know if it has been used since I last I saw it.’
Skelos leaned against the door and peered in. The heat from inside smothered his skin. Sweat trickled down his face and down his back. As long as the machine was technologically wired, he could activate it. It had been a while since he had used his Technopath skills. He was cautious about putting them to use on an object of which he had no working understanding.
He entered the cylinder and tried to bring it to life with the power of his mind. Vastra’s presence put him off. I might have to close my eyes for this one.
He went over to the control panel. The mechanism was ancient by Odisirian standards. The touchscreen had the most basic controls: a biometric hand reader, numeric and alphabetical keys. He stretched one hand over the panel to see if he still had ‘the touch’. Vastra batted his hand away with such force that he dropped onto one of the stools, his mouth hanging open in shock and indignation. It appeared that Vastra had lost his Citizen manners and the courtesies that went with the higher Status echelons, since he had been dumped in Narrigh.
‘You forget you’re a Citizen,’ Skelos remarked in disdain. ‘We’ve left Narrigh behind. You’ve no authority over me.’
‘I think I do, since you have no idea how this contraption − as you call it − works. It is better that you leave it to me. Take a seat old man.’
Skelos stopped himself from retaliating with a cutting response. There were no more than ten years between them. He suspected Vastra thought him weak and thus deserving of his insults. He resolved to endure them for the duration of their journey. He was no fool; Vastra was armed, but they would soon part company.
‘I watched from over there,’ said Vastra gesturing to a nook in the wall outside of the compartment. ‘No one saw me.’
‘And who did you see?’
‘A figure in a hooded robe.’
‘A hooded robe. Do you recall its colour?’
‘What does it matter as to the colour,’ snapped Vastra. ‘This isn’t a sorcerer’s toy. The machine was created with science not magic.’ He placed his hand on the biometric panel. The compartment door slid shut.
Skelos thought about the man from whom he had stolen the Avu’lore: the magical artefact which had the power to control minds. He had worn a hooded white robe and had also touched a portion of a cave wall in order to conceal the artefact. Could this be another one of the hooded-man’s treasures?
The compartment grew warm. Skelos would have liked to shed his robes, but was ashamed to show the withered fleshy skin underneath. The Traceless One within him had altered his physical form by aging him prematurely. His body had still not regenerated from the damage it had inflicted. The temperature didn’t appear to bother Vastra. He had no sheen on his face and no sweat patches on his clothes.
‘Now all we have to do is figure out how to get it to take us to Pyridian,’ said Vastra, hitting one of the keys on the control panel.
Skelos shot from the stool snapping his back straight. ‘Curse you and your Pyridian. It’s not the epicentre of the galaxy. I cannot thrive there.’ I cannot conquer. ‘This is going to be a very short trip indeed if you plan to take me to that infernal planet. I shall derive another plan.’
‘You should have done all your planning while you were in the laboratory, churning out those faulty Wings for the Shardner or when you were lying in your stone bed chamber.’ Vastra swept his hand over the panel. ‘Do you suggest we go separately? You understand the risks are doubled. One of us may not make it.’
‘Or both of us may not make it, assuming we ever get anywhere. Tell me, what else do you remember from your time here?’
‘I remember seeing a map, not in the form you gave me, but in the form of a hologram above this table. I saw the coordinates. The person I saw manipulated the hologram and the keys on this control panel. You see that window.’ Vastra pointed to a window that had opened up in the compartment. ‘I spied on them through there when the door had closed. I had to stand on a rock to see in.’
‘He didn’t see you?’
‘No, and I sense what you are going to say. The figure in the hooded robe was not a Citizen. He had the hands of a man and they were unmarked. He was not as stealthy as I am now, and once the cylinder door had closed, I made little effort to conceal myself. I was awestruck. Fleeing was far from my mind by that point. I watched a light ignite the compartment from the inside, and then it vanished from my sight.’
‘The compartment?’
‘No the rocks. Of course the compartment.’
Skelos bit his tongue against Vastra’s sarcasm. ‘So you had no idea the machine would still be here. You took a gamble.’
‘Logic told me it would be here. Though it may not be the same one, or I may have been mistaken.’ He showed his apprehension for the first time. ‘It looked as if it vanished. It gave off a blinding light, which compromised my vision for a short while.’
‘And you have no idea how it works?’
‘You’re the scientist. You tell me.’
Skelos placed his hands over the control pad. He had nearly forgotten his true profession. In Narrigh he was a different kind of scientist – a hapless one. He knew neuroscience; ancient machines were not his specialty. And his skills as a Technopath were surely being tested with this contraption. He lacked mental energy. The Traceless One was still pulling on his mental cords; still addling his brain. He had no plans to mention this to Vastra. He was more likely to slice him in two with his sword than contend himself with soul-less entities.
Skelos means of testing the machine were rudimentary. He managed to ignite the panel without touching it. It produced a hologram grid which held markings similar to the canvas map of The Other Worlds. Except it had no named landmarks.
A synthesised controller spoke as if from the compartment walls. ‘Please enter your location.’
Vastra gave him a probing gaze. ‘How did you manage that? Nothing happened when I did it. You didn’t even touch it.’
Skelos recognised his error. He should have touched the panel with his fingers, not leave them hovering over it like a sorcerer about to invoke a spell. ‘These old machines take a while to warm up. It’s your touch that started it n
ot mine.’
He could tell by the way Vastra regarded him that he had aroused his suspicion. He’ll be gouging out my eyes with my Worral Stone if I’m not careful.
Vastra keyed in the coordinates written on the canvas map: 87, 23, and 16. The digits appeared on the grid for a short while before vanishing.
Two flashing lights appeared in the ceiling: one blue, one white. On Odisiris a flashing blue light meant stop, a white one meant you were free to go.
‘Welcome to the Teleportation Capsule. Press four to activate the quantum accelerator,’ said the controller.
Vastra hit the responding key, triggering one of the grid points.
As the dot flashed, Vastra prepared to hit another key without the controller’s prompt. ‘We want to go to Pyridian,’ he said, hoping the controller responded to vocal commands.
Skelos was less optimistic. It didn’t prevent him slapping Vastra’s hand away from the keys. He would rather the machine didn’t work than end up in a place he considered less desirable than Narrigh. ‘You can’t just blurt out destinations or hit the keys at random. The contraption may be temperamental.’
‘The coordinates of this capsule are pre-set for Earth. Affirm or override coordinates,’ said the controller.
Skelos and Vastra shared a wary look. Skelos had come across the word in some of the literature he had read in Narrigh. It was used to describe soil and ground. If the word was to be taken literally, it was hardly a desirable destination because it would teleport them above ground and he knew they had not left Narrigh.
‘I don’t know the coordinates for Pyridian,’ said Vastra. He played with the hologram, snapping the grid apart and pushing it back together. The dot failed to stop flashing.
Skelos’s body sagged with relief now that Pyridian was no longer an option for them. ‘Earth must be a planet, or a land outside our galaxy. There is no harm venturing there, at least we’ll be out of Narrigh, and as you said, we know the risks.’
