But first he sat the navs chair up halfway and reached his good arm up to the screen. It was a huge effort. He tapped in a command and the screen showed him Reaper ships coming round the corona of the collapsed sun. They were following a much higher, and slower, orbit than the one he had chosen. He felt relief course through him. He had some time up his sleeve.
He tried to lift himself off the chair, and fell back. The pull on him was lessening, but he must have lost a lot of blood. His good hand was covered in it, where he had smeared it around his face, trying to assess the damage to his nose.
Most of me is probably on the floor, he thought, and giggled. Then he realized he was getting light-headed. With a supreme effort he slid off the navs chair and onto his knees, then held on to consciousness grimly as everything went dark, before it cleared again.
He keyed in verbal control on the console, and then voiced a series of commands to the diagnostic program. When it showed ready he slapped the dispersal membrane against his throat. He hung on until it had finished most of its work, then let the membrane drop while he folded up, his head between his knees.
The painkillers began to work, and the moderate amount of plasma he had absorbed helped. He looked around. The small bridge of the Lucky Streak was a mess. If he wasn’t careful he would slip on the bloody floor.
“Never mind, girl,” he croaked, talking to the ship. “We’ll get you cleaned up first thing when we get back to base.”
The navs console chimed twice, bringing his attention to the proximity settings.
“Dammit, must be Reaper ships,” he muttered. The navs console confirmed that several Reaper ships were closing rapidly on his position. They were swooping down like birds of prey from the higher orbit.
The photon deflection shields were still holding up, but while he stayed on his current course, the Reaper ships could work out his position from his previous speed and trajectory.
“Time to lose this bunch of miserable slag-spawn,” he said to himself, swaying as he got to his feet. Moments later the little device the Mars miners had added to his containment chamber clicked on, and all of its systems started humming nicely.
Fedic fired his engines one more time, one second with the rods at full immersion, and headed off at a right angle to his current direction. He began to rise above the incoming Reaper ships, just before a handful of starbursts ranged along his previous trajectory. He smiled grimly. They thought they had him, but he wasn’t there now. Then the nearest Reaper ship arced great slashes of fire through the empty space where he had been.
“Too late, boys,” he muttered, making his way unsteadily to the pilot’s chair. At least he hadn’t bled all over this one.
“Wake me in a couple of hours,” he told the navigation system. When he came to he would get his arm looked at properly by the medical station, and then set a proper course for home. But right now he was going to give his body a chance to fix some of the horrendous damage he had inflicted on it.
He set the pilot’s chair back at 45 degrees, and laid his head down. He was asleep within seconds.
When Fedic came round, he would recall that he had been dreaming about the diminutive Mersa. He was going to recall that it had been rather a weird dream at that. But had he known what was happening at Thistledown Abbey, on the Mersa planet of Alamos, he would have agreed that truth is definitely stranger than fiction.
A little Mersa figure scurried from an imposing stone structure at one end of a long compound and flitted through the shadows of early evening toward the office of the abbess at the other.
The abbess had forgone her birth name, in keeping with all those who volunteered for positions of high authority in Mersa society, and the title on her door read simply Abbess Domine. It was to this door that Meeaniro now hurried. She broke into a peculiarly Mersa canter – a skip, hop and flurry of legs – and then remembered where she was. She resumed walking as fast as her slight build would allow.
The door was ajar, but Meeaniro clapped twice, to signify her presence, and waited in the head down position of supplication.
“Silly girl,” chided the abbess, who was now standing in front of her, with the door pulled to one side. “Come in before you do that.”
Meeaniro’s ears and nose turned faintly pink through the thin coating of fur. This was as near to a blush as a Mersa was able to get. For one thing the capillary structure just under the skin was quite different to that of Human construction, but mostly the fine pelt of down that covered them from head to foot hid any such coloration. At least she had not been admonished with the more formal gesture of one raised finger and the thumb and remaining fingers circled.
Appointed to head the research facility at Big Turpington because of her outstanding work on the subtleties of inter-dimensional fields, she was still new to the strange rules of this unusual place. Still, what she had to say was too important for embarrassment to hold her back for long.
“Oh, Abbess Domine,” she blurted out, as soon as she was inside the door, “we’ve captured a demon!”
Abbess Domine looked up sharply from behind her desk. She had been halfway through sitting down, but now stood frozen in an undignified crouch. There seemed little to say in response to an outburst like that, except to hope that Meeaniro’s statement was not, literally, true.
Mersa society held as its most cherished belief that each member of its society should be allowed to find their own area of expertise, and he or she should be encouraged into whatever they saw as a fit occupation.
Two of the least popular choices had been brought together in Thistledown Abbey, which was why the abbess’ job was such a difficult one. The first area of investigation, which the abbess found easier to handle, was an organized religious life. The second, which gave her many more headaches, was the area of speculative science.
Both of these had caused enough inconvenience to the usually liberal Mersa population, at times even loss of innocent life, that they were now carefully monitored. Mersa society was in general rather free-for-all and unstructured, and there were dozens of slightly different political parties in any given town, and more parties of a slightly different political slant in the next. But it was not, in any sense of the word, a place of anarchy.
Mersa society could only allow such extreme individual freedom because the whole population, with rare exceptions, was by nature unselfish. The Mersa were very much aware of the needs of those around them, and so it worked out that all parties eventually got what they wanted – after a great deal of give and take.
And all of this was only possible because levels of mental health were very high, and crime was almost unheard of. Crime, when it occurred, was considered a rather unsavory mental disturbance.
That was why positions like the abbess’ were rare. When they did exist, they required far more structure than any other position in Mersa society, and they were carefully monitored so they didn’t wear down and ultimately destroy the occupants.
The lack of a birth name was one of the ways Mersa society dealt with the situation, and regular supervision of the holders of such positions was another. Here, in Thistledown Abbey, Abbess Domine’s word had to be law, a situation Mersa in everyday society would find intolerable. This was the price that minds drawn to the supernatural, and untested scientific endeavor, had to pay if they wanted to follow their vocations.
Abbess Domine studied the little Mersa in front of her. Meeaniro was almost shaking now with excitement. The abbess sighed. This was the very thing she had been appointed as abbess to stop. Such surges of passion at the very frontiers of spiritual or scientific thought were too dangerous, too unproven, to be allowed out of the Abbey. They were too captivating to the idly curious, and eventually too damaging to weaker minds.
At least until they had been soundly investigated, with the claims of the researchers greatly reduced, and the whole thing cut down to a more manageable size.
Demons indeed!
“I suppose I had better come and have
a look,” said the abbess cautiously.
The research facilities at the far end of the compound were spartan, in keeping with the overall austerity of the Abbey, but they were adequate for the work Meeaniro was doing. Work on dimensional fields was so speculative it was largely guesswork. Meeaniro did not yet realize her investigations were very similar to the research on string theory other Mersa were doing at Prometheus, but she knew nothing about the Alliance with Prometheus as yet.
Abbess Domine could not imagine how any sort of scientist could interpret a scientific result as ‘a demon’, but stranger things had happened. When research scientists shared living space with the group of spiritual seekers who inhabited the large two-story wing on the boundary of the compound, there was always some transfer of ideas. The two groups got on well enough, and even at times worked together on different aspects of the same problem.
Meeaniro guided the abbess through the entrance hall, and then the number three lab, to the isolation chamber out the back. One of Meeaniro’s assistants was adjusting the cold fusion cells along the edge of a grided cage. Fusion at room temperatures was supposed to be impossible, according to Human and Sumerian understanding of the process – it was a good thing the Mersa didn’t know that.
Another assistant came over and took Meeaniro by the arm, guiding her silently around the cage, buzzing as it was with intense energy, until she had a clear view of the interior.
“It’s gone!” she said. Then she saw the cylinder on the floor. “No, it’s changed its shape, become . . . something metal. It has become . . . different.”
The abbess shook her head sadly. Meeaniro had not struck her as the type, but she had clearly hallucinated this whole thing.
“It was right here!” said the little Mersa agitatedly, as if she suspected the abbess did not believe her. “Filled the whole cage it did. Burning like lightning it was, and there was this sulfurous smell!”
“We have recordings to prove it,” said the assistant eagerly. “It was exactly as Meeaniro says!”
Abbess Domine wondered whether she should have them both sedated. It might be for the best . . .
CHAPTER 7
_________________
Were Meeaniro and her assistant, and possibly others in the lab, suffering from mass hallucinations? It was something Abbess Domine couldn’t help wondering. Maybe it was something in the ventilation system, some volatile chemical that had spilled in one of the other labs. She sniffed the air cautiously. It smelled all right.
“Yes, That’s right!” said Meeaniro, tugging at the sleeve of her long abbess’ cloak, “we have recordings of the demon!” Abbess Domine coughed pointedly, and Meeaniro let go of her cloak hurriedly.
“Bring the cylinder,” said the abbess, “and we’ll go and look at these recordings.”
“Ah, it may not be safe to take the cylinder out of the cage,” said the little Mersa.
“Nonsense,” said the abbess. “Look at the energy readings, it’s just a metal case now.” She turned and looked at Meeaniro condescendingly.
“Whatever was in there has gone, and we need to get a closer look at this thing, whatever it is.”
She turned to walk out the door and left toward the research center for the labs, just as the assistant powered down the grid to retrieve the cylinder.
The howl from inside the cage stopped them all in their tracks. Meeaniro and the abbess whirled to face the cage together. They stood frozen as an impossibly long arm punched straight through the grid and swung hungrily back and forth, looking for something to destroy.
It gave off an immense heat, and was a mottled black and red color, like a fire that had died down to its embers. Meeaniro shouted at her assistant to energies the grid again, but a wild backhand from the arm knocked the assistant to the floor. She didn’t get up when Meeaniro called her name a second time.
The arm withdrew, and the cage began to shift on its foundations. It shook furiously, as if something was trying to batter it apart from within. Meeaniro ran for the far wall and then stole along it to the fusion cells. Just as the cage lifted off its foundations, she reconnected the energy feed to the cage.
There was a blood-curdling scream as the cage clanged to the floor, then all was quiet. When Meeaniro gingerly approached the grid, she saw the cylinder resting in the middle of the floor, tipped on its side this time. There was the distinctive tang of something scalding and subterranean in the air.
She and the abbess stood for a long time, just watching the metal cylinder for any further signs of life. It took a long while for their hearts to return to normal. It was a group of researchers from the other end of the labs who gently shook them back to some semblance of normality.
“What happened?” asked a kindly male Mersa by the name of Gaiusino.
“Ah, that would be a demon,” said the abbess matter-of-factly. “Big demon. Big, fiery, smelly demon.”
She turned to Meeaniro. “Get more fusion cells in here and set up a triple redundancy. I don’t want the power to that grid to go off under any circumstances. Am I absolutely clear?”
Meeaniro nodded vigorously. She grabbed some of the researchers standing nearby to see it was done immediately. The abbess went for a little think about what had happened, and a long lie down.
Three days later, Abbess Domine and Meeaniro were explaining the strange events at Thistledown Abbey to the vocational council in another part of Big Turpington.
“You don’t actually know where these items came from?” asked the scientific advisor.
“Er, no,” said Meeaniro. She had been explaining that the inter-dimensional team could now sense a disturbance in the space-time continuum at considerable distances. They were not sure how far away these disturbances were, but certainly outside the Alamos star system.
“We have so far transported small items from these disturbances to our lab,” she said, “but we’re not yet able to accurately gauge the distance they have come.”
“I have seen these items,” added the abbess hastily. “They have always been innocent enough in the past, though not of any known manufacture.”
“But always of intelligent design,” responded the scientific advisor, “which begs the question as to when some such intelligence may come looking for its missing items.”
“They were nothing of consequence,” replied the abbess, holding herself more erect. She did not like the direction this line of questioning was taking.
“But they could possibly be of some danger to your researchers, and eventually Alamos,” continued her questioner.
“I hardly think that conclusion could be drawn,” said the abbess stiffly.
“And that is where we will leave the debate for the time being,” said Cantalubra firmly. The room became very quiet. When the madam chairwoman of the vocational council said a thing was so, it was so.
“However I would be interested in a more detailed description of this cylinder of yours,” she continued, turning toward Meeaniro.
“I have your reports, and photos, and engineering reports,” she said, holding up her hand as Meeaniro leafed through the pile of papers in front of her and started to look on her interface screen.
“Just give us your recollection of events, and the best description of this life form you can muster.”
“Well, it was basically a cylinder,” said Meeaniro, “with a mild swelling in the middle, as if a ball had been forced into the middle of a flexible sleeve. The cylinder passed through two discs, one at either end. The discs were of different sizes, and were pierced with holes and scored with channels to different depths.”
“This sounds like sophisticated equipment,” said Cantalubra, the madam chairwoman.
“Yes,” acknowledged Meeaniro glumly, “we have never transported such a thing before, and did not expect to this time. Everything else was of simple manufacture, and did not appear to be any sort of threat.”
“Though you have now had occasion to reconsider your opinion, I trust,” said Cantalub
ra dryly.
Meeaniro hung her head in mortification. She was well aware, now, that lives could have been lost because of the experiments at the research facility, and the responsibility was hers.
There was more to the inquiry, but in the end it was self-evident that the dimensional lab didn’t know how to send the cylinder back, and no one knew how to safely destroy it. The vocational council decided to allow more research on it, but they imposed greatly improved safety features.
Cantalubra ordered another grided cage to be built around the first one, and an airlock entrance to be put into the room. The windows would have to be removed and metal plating would now be required on all surfaces within the lab.
She also sent a detachment of the Mersa special police force with the most devastating firepower they possessed. Mersa rarely had problems with other Mersa, but police research went on like it did in all vocations, and they had some destructive weapons at their disposal.
Eventually the inquiry drew to a close.
In her private chambers Cantalubra thought for a moment, then put in a call to a communications device half a continent away in Little Worthystead. Fallostrina’s features appeared on the screen.
“I think I have something for you that will interest our mutual friends,” she said, without preamble.
Fallostrina smiled broadly. Anything the vocational chairwoman could give her to pass on to the Prometheus project was more than welcome. Fallostrina had only recently been given one of the new sub-space radios, and it was a pleasure to talk to her protege Gaiallano, the leader of the Mersa at Prometheus, on a regular basis.
Cantalubra described the meeting with Meeaniro and the abbess that had taken up most of her day. Fallostrina agreed. It was an enticing piece of information.
The vocational chairwoman was an old friend, and had a particularly keen mind. Fallostrina had trusted her enough to confide in her about Prometheus in the first days of the joint research between the two civilizations. They both hoped that the keeping of secrets would soon end, and a formal Alliance could be announced.
Invardii Box Set 2 Page 4
