Ascent

by Thorby Rudbek

  “I think there’s a storm brewing up,” Terry explained. As if to certify his words as true, the sound of sand rasping on the side of the dome suddenly became noticeable.

  Ruth ran in from her ‘bedroom’, as she now called it. “The whole room is moving,” she gasped.

  Isaac and Terry ran over to the door of her room and looked inside. Sure enough, the structure was flexing and groaning as it shifted under the effect of the rapidly increasing wind.

  “Quick, seal it off,” Terry urged. Isaac closed the door and popped open the service panel to lock the mechanism, remembering the techniques that Latt had demonstrated a little earlier. A moment later there was a series of sounds like fire-crackers going off, followed by more groaning, then silence.

  Isaac turned to speak, then saw that Latt was already locking one of the remaining two doors. A cloud of dust puffed into the laboratory and spread out over the floor before Terry could complete the closing of the third door. As the wind rapidly gained strength, starting to batter the laboratory with increasing power, the four exchanged worried glances.

  “How long do these storms last?” Terry wondered out loud.

  “Weeks or months, I think,” Isaac replied quietly. “But I didn’t think they were much of a hazard except to visibility.”

  “They probably aren’t if you’re a satellite floating high above, taking endless pictures of the murk below,” Terry commented. “Now, if you’re down here in a tiny dome made of light-weight plastic…” He shrugged expressively, the inaccuracy of his categorization of the material being inconsequential considering the relevancy of his analysis.

  Moments later, Ruth reached out a hand to steady herself against one of the benches, as she felt the floor shift slightly beneath her feet. She looked around at the others and realized that they had felt it too.

  “We musst turn up the power on thesse Gravity Inducerss, and alsso mount ssome more,” Latt stated flatly. He ran back into the Railcar, closely followed by Isaac and Terry. They staggered back a moment later with one of the units, and Latt left Terry and Isaac to mount it in a fairly central location while he started to take up sections of the flooring and turn up the units already in place. “Go and watsch out of that obsservation port,” he urged Ruth. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to hear or feel the sship land in this sstorm.”

  Ruth nodded, ran back to the port in the Railcar and leaned against it. She discovered that visibility was highly variable; for an instant she could see nothing, then she could see the rocks about fifty yards away, then they were gone again, as if they had never existed.

  After watching for a while, the thought occurred to her that there might be another port on the other side, hidden by the boxes stacked there. That would be symmetrical. Leaving her post for a moment, she moved a couple of the crates down onto the floor; sure enough, there was another mechanism, just like the first, barely visible above the tops of the next layer of crates. With an awkward heave that threatened to injure her back, she managed to shove one of the boxes sideways enough to give her access to the controls. She opened it, leaned down across the top of the crate, and looked blankly out for a moment before she could interpret what she saw. Oh no! The trailer has blown over! Our food!

  The others worked quickly, adjusting the settings of the Gravity Inducers with a desperate haste reminiscent of the final, hopeless, senseless struggles of those about to be executed. They rapidly gained confidence through the repetitive nature of the task, although the work became increasingly difficult as, with each increase in the ability of the complex to withstand the wind, came a corresponding increase in the artificial gravity that their bodies had to endure, and the gravity field that they created was not an even, smooth one, but its gravitational manifestation was akin to miniaturised hills and valleys existing across the seemingly flat floor of the lab.

  Finally, after the last adjustments to the laser were completed, all three left the raised gravity field in the laboratory and joined Ruth by the observation windows in the Railcar. Ruth pointed out the trailer, which by then had rolled over twice more, and was only visible about once every thirty seconds.

  “If we are lucky, we’ll live to regret not bringing more food in,” Isaac commented.

  “Everyone sshould wear one of thesse from now on,” Latt urged, and he passed out breather-units and fluffy suits to each of them. “Either the sstorm or the coming battle with the Controllerss may breach our pressurized quarterss here.” Each of them hurried to slide into the suits, attach the units to them, and check them out.

  “Why don’t we need to turn up the gravity field in here?” Ruth asked when they had finished checking their equipment.

  “Thiss part is dessigned for usse in hosstile conditionss; it iss made of Hybralloy, sso it iss much sstronger than your Earth ssteel. It contains the reactor, sso it iss much heavier, and the sshape means that the wind helpss to hold it to the ground.”

  “Hmm. Aerodynamic.” Isaac muttered to himself, wondering what Hybralloy could be made of. (He had previously termed it: ‘black steel’, from the admittedly limited opportunity to analyse it that he had thus far had.) Then he pushed the thought away and concentrated on the immediate problem. “Let’s get back to our stations; I wouldn’t want to have to run with this lot on, especially if it’s necessary to enter the lab.”

  The others nodded their understanding and Terry chuckled at the thought, remembering his first, rather embarrassing encounter with gravity slopes.

  “I’ll just stay here then,” Ruth stated, as the team moved into position. The men moved back towards the entrance into the laboratory, leaving her alone with the howling noise of the wind.

  Just minutes later, she jumped, feeling her heart thump and her muscles tense as a tremendous crashing noise occurred right behind her. She turned around to see a huge dent in the curved wall just above the other port. It was shaped like a cone, three foot wide at the base, and it extended into the room a full four inches.

  Isaac came running back and stared at the damage with an expression of real fear on his face. Hmm. Is this ‘Hybralloy’ really better than steel? He was followed, moments later, by Terry and Latt.

  “The Hybralloy is sstrong, but flexible, too, sso it should not ssplit.” Latt ran a professional hand over the grossly distorted surface. “Let’ss get a patch ready, just in casse,” Latt urged loudly, using his communication system to boost the sound of his voice as he found it increasingly difficult to make himself heard above the noise of the storm.

  Quickly, Terry helped Latt detach a curved panel of the unearthly alloy from its storage attachment point on one of the strengthening girders of the Railcar, and unpack reinforcing struts from a nearby package. Terry started to weld the struts to the panel while Latt held them in place. Isaac watched from the other window until they finished the task.

  An hour passed, then two, and the storm continued to rage and beat on the laboratory and the Railcar, adding a variety of bulges to the Hybralloy walls of the Railcar. Strangely, there seemed to be no impacts of any consequence on the walls of the domed laboratory, though it sounded like it was being hit, and even seemed to ‘shudder’ from impacts from time to time. Fortunately nothing quite as large as the original projectile hit the complex again. The noise of the storm became so loud that it numbed the senses. Time seemed to stretch out to infinity, and the confines of the Railcar were the limits of reality; it comprised the totality of the universe, nothing existed beyond its walls.

  Ruth no longer caught glimpses of the trailer; she was unsure whether this was because the visibility outside had been further reduced by the increasing violence of the storm, or whether this was due to the trailer rolling even further away from them. She had tried to fix the relative positions of the major rocks and hollows outside, but even those landmarks had disappeared or been covered up by drifting sand, until the point had been reached where nothing was recognizable anymore.

  Isaac fiddled nervously with the remote control unit for th
e Gravity Inducer that they had mounted on the side of the airlock. He checked all the connections one more time, and confirmed that his arrangement of polished metal plates still gave him a good view through the window in the inner airlock door. He looked across from his spot, sheltered from the direct line of sight from the airlock, and watched as Latt tested the remote control for the laser for the third time in the past ten minutes. Their strange but highly esteemed ‘Man from Rhaal’ leaned slightly into the laboratory to see if the laser was pivoting correctly on its mount, as nothing of the ‘Red Planet’ outside was discernible on its video alignment screen. As he settled back down, he noticed Isaac watching him, and returned his gaze.

  “Thiss sstorm, it might be a help to us,” he shouted into his communicator.

  “How’s that?” Isaac called back.

  “They will come into our trap now; they might have asked me to go over and report, but now they will come here, because they know I could not go outsside in thiss.”

  “Good!” Isaac shouted with feeling. He had not been aware that this vital ingredient to the success of their plan was so uncertain, and the feeling of relief he experienced was almost cancelled out by the shock of the revelation. We might never have even been in the running, if not for this frightening storm. I think that it must be so much stronger than anything previously detected or predicted for this apparently well-studied world; I wonder what NASA’s orbiting probes are reporting?

  Terrance Stadt, multi-millionaire and industrialist, sat with his shoulder against the curved wall of the Railcar across from Ruth, and absently fingered the emergency patch he held, while he watched the changing patterns of dust out of the port beside him. He thought on the conversation that he had just overheard on his communicator and wondered what else might be changed by the unexpected development that manifested itself in the swirling clouds of sand just beyond the confines of their safe haven.

  Will the storm prevent us from observing the return of the ‘Warrnam’? Terry worried as he waited. Will the booby-trapped airlock be sufficient to kill the Controllers or at least render them incapacitated, as Isaac and Latt so optimistically suggest? Or will our desperation be so complete that we’ll find it necessary to stake our survival on the feeble infrared laser, a non-weapon of such puny power that it would probably take half a day to inflict enough damage on the mighty ‘Space Hammer’ to prevent its departure? And, even if that somehow, incredibly, succeeds, allowing us the time to take it from Harnak and his warrior-companion in ‘man-to-alien’ combat, what then?

  And if, Terry shook his head, amazed that it had come to this, the circumstances combine, as Murphy’s Law predicts they will, to force us to attempt the latter… He wondered soberly, imagining the one-sided odds of untrained human non-combatants vs. battle-toughened aliens of fearsome strength. Would any of us be left alive to tell the tale, once the battle is over?

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Life and Death are inexorable – Idahnian

  Richard turned into the driveway marked ‘Emergency Entrance’ and pulled up on the yellow cross-hatched area outside the double doors of Beddington Regional Hospital with a squeal of brakes and a smell of burnt rubber, as the disk pads on the right front wheel of the green truck locked up. The old truck ended up almost blocking the driveway, the front having slewed around until it was practically facing the automatic doors. Tutor’s directions had been flawless, as usual – the maps in his pockets had never been removed since they had left Citadel, just a day and a quarter earlier. He had driven like a man possessed for the last twenty minutes, in the hope that he would find help in time to save the life of the person that had so quickly come to mean everything to him. He looked over at Karen; she was still slumped over, the dark wet patch on her breast had spread all the way down, until it was soaking into the coverall material on her left thigh, and she was breathing rapidly and very lightly. He touched her cheek – again, there was no indication of energy transference, and he could not ‘hear’ anything at all from her, in her unconscious state. He leaned on the horn when it seemed clear to him, in his frantic state, that no one had noticed his arrival.

  Moments later a blue-smocked doctor with short blonde hair and an almost pixie-like face rushed out. She took one look into the truck and called for a stretcher.

  “What happened?” she asked Richard as two nurses ran out with the wheeled device and pulled open the truck door.

  “She was shot,” he stated briefly as he climbed out, somehow managing to remember to reach for the box on the roof. He walked shakily around the front of the vehicle and leaned on the hood while the nurses manoeuvred the stretcher into place.

  As soon as the unconscious Karen was safely on the stretcher, Doctor Wilde urged the nurses to move it quickly into the building.

  “Are you injured also?” she asked him, steadying him, as he seemed to be having trouble walking.

  “No. Just tired. In shock, I guess,” Richard admitted. “She is going to be all right, isn’t she, Doctor?” Something shiny reflected up from her smock; he glanced down and, despite the haze which seemed to be gathering all around, recognized it as a photo-identity badge, with a name printed neatly along the bottom: ‘T. Wilde, MD’. The name did not register with him, however – the label could have said ‘FBI’ or ‘police’ and he probably would not have taken it in.

  “I can’t tell at this point;” she hedged as they continued to follow Karen’s stretcher. “We’ll need to do some tests first. How did this happen?” she asked, as the nurses wheeled Karen into the first booth.

  Richard tried to think of a suitable story.

  “It… i-it was an accident,” he finally stuttered.

  Doctor Wilde bent over Karen and started her examination. “Get me the blood type, Maude,” she directed the nearest nurse crisply. The blonde, slim Maude collected the necessary syringe and attempted to push the sleeve up on Karen’s right arm.

  “What relation are you to her?”

  “I’m her best friend.”

  “I think you should wait in the waiting room,” Tracy Wilde told Richard gently but firmly.

  He shook his head slowly, his eyes now unblinking as he returned her look of firm kindness with an equally firm look of great intensity.

  “No. I have to stay with her. She’s all alone. She doesn’t have any relatives around here.”

  “I don’t have time to argue.” Tracy realized intuitively that further attempts at persuasion would be fruitless, and always avoided confrontation where possible. “Just make sure you keep out of the way, then.” She pointed to the corner of the examination area.

  Richard backed to one side, then moved down the wall a few feet, into a position where he could see the entrance to the emergency area through one of the gaps in the curtains. He wondered if the police were closing in, though the route that Tutor had found, across country, the shortest distance to the hospital, had been twisting, to say the least, and there had been no sign on any pursuit. The next stage in his living nightmare would be a SWAT team, bursting through the doors and locating the now helpless girl. He would be separated from her. Their mission would fail.

  Richard hugged the box closer, vowing he would wipe them all out, rather than be captured.

  In the meantime, Maude had given up on rolling or pushing up the sleeve, as the fabric resisted both processes, and was now cutting a long swathe into the strange fabric with her hospital scissors. The remaining material peeled back without any further difficulty, exposing the pale skin of her arm and the vein that she had to access.

  Richard glanced from the entrance to the girl on the stretcher, and leaned back against the wall, still cradling the dark grey box in his hands. They were shaking again.

  “We’ll probably have to operate as soon as the blood type is confirmed, Claire; she’s lost a lot of blood,” Tracy murmured to the other nurse as she connected up a plasma drip system. Several monitors were wheeled closer and soon the ‘peep peep’ of Karen’s heartbeat could be hea
rd as one of the devices performed soullessly in accordance with its specifications.

  Richard watched as Doctor Wilde slit open the fabric of Karen’s jumpsuit at the collar and carefully peeled the blood-soaked stuff away from her neck and chest.

  Tracy observed that the material seemed to lose its resilience as it was cut and pulled back from the damaged area, an indication (though she did not know it) that the unearthly synthetic fibre normally performed the supporting functions of a bra, thus obviating the need for such an undergarment. The pale skin exposed by this initial action was torn and bruised where the bullet had exited; blood oozed erratically in time with her heartbeat from the gaping, jagged wound located just left of the centre of Karen’s rib cage. Tracy passed the scissors to the nurse beside her and probed around the wound with the tips of her gloved fingers.

  As Claire cut away more of the fabric, Tracy continued to examine the wound closely. Tiny fragments of rib showed against the torn flesh, and she could tell that the bullet had ricocheted off the bone as it had exited, by which point almost all its energy had been spent. She raised Karen’s left shoulder slightly and checked for the location of the entrance wound. A moment later she repeated the process with the right shoulder, discovering a small puncture point just to the right of the spinal column. Although Doctor Wilde’s back was towards Richard and she was standing between him and Karen, Richard started to feel dizzy as he saw Claire throw the bloody material she had removed into the waste container and place a gauze pad over the wound.

  Tracy could see from the damage that the bullet had passed right through the body cavity, from back to front. It must have missed the heart somehow, or she wouldn’t still be alive. She looked back at Karen’s pale but beautiful face, noticed the long rope of silvery hair hanging off the edge of the stretcher, and began to hear faint echoes of familiarity from her subconscious.