Ascent

by Thorby Rudbek

  “I have filled the fuel storage compartment completely,” Tutor announced, almost immediately. “I suggest we go somewhere uninhabited, so that you two can fix the fault in the Star Drive.”

  Richard nodded to Karen.

  “Okay,” she agreed.

  “Any preference for location?” Tutor asked.

  “Er, not really. Just make it… empty, but still habitable, you know?” Richard asked hastily.

  “Will comply.” Citadel fell upwards once more. This time, the planet seemed to rotate downwards as they rose into the stratosphere. A moment later, and the descent began; the movement northwards continued. The ground rushed towards them once more. On this occasion, like the one so many centuries before when this scenario first occurred, there were only the incurious trees and animals present to witness the spectacular, soundless, surreal arrival of Citadel on planet Earth.

  A squirrel watched as Richard and Karen shimmered out of the black bulk that had arrived so silently in the clearing and seemed to have sunk partly into the ground. It ran away as Richard stepped on a dry twig, and the ‘crack’ that sounded broke the afternoon peace of the Quebec forest.

  “Nam burd hoon,” Richard muttered as he approached the rear end of Citadel and stepped around to the location of the access point, as described by Tutor.

  The curved wall above his head seemed to glisten as he approached it, and when he reached out hesitantly, trying to figure out how to lever himself up, he found that this time there was an improvement – he felt strangely light. His fingers slipped into the smooth, slotted depressions and he pulled himself up, almost effortlessly. He stepped into the slots as soon as he had pulled himself high enough to do so, moved up until the curve was away from him, indicating he was nearing the upper surfaces of Citadel, parts that had previously been hidden by local stone, shaped as castle battlements. He reached out to the right, feeling for three round holes, which Tutor assured him would be easily within his reach.

  “Ah!” he muttered, as he found the locations with surprising rapidity. The area around his hand started to shimmer, and Richard flexed his fingertips to get a good grip, then pulled back slowly. A ridged cylindrical object, coloured like burnished brass, slid out of the wall as if it were being propelled by a hydraulic ram. It was exactly like the object on the floor of the Moss Room, the device that had baffled two generations of Karen’s family for over five hundred years. When just over a foot was visible, it came loose from the wall and swung down towards the ground. Richard tried to hold on to it, but it slipped off his fingers like a greasy ten-pin bowling ball, and dropped into the leafy undergrowth. Drat. I forgot how heavy the spare was.

  Karen stepped forward and reached into the bushes. “Tutor, I can’t find it,” she admitted a moment later.

  “Stand back, please,” the familiar voice warned.

  Karen backed up and bumped into Richard as he dropped the last couple of feet back to the ground, and stepped forward to help.

  “Sorry.” They both said, as Karen turned to look at Richard. She jumped, as the sound of crackling came from the undergrowth behind her. Tutor was burning it away to expose the point of impact.

  “Finished?” Karen questioned rhetorically as she stepped forward once the sound ceased, and looked down into the hole. “Why, it’s nearly a foot under; let’s just leave it there, it’s broken, anyway.”

  “This would not be an advisable option to choose. Military experts will search this area, after we have left, hoping to figure out why we came here. They would find it,” Tutor warned.

  “But, how could they ever figure out what this does, even if they had it for years to analyze?” Richard sounded doubtful.

  “If the Arshonnans could design it, I can compute no logical reason why Earth scientists, who are obviously from the same species, would not be able to deduce its purpose, eventually.”

  “I guess we’d better take it with us, then,” Richard stepped forward, and bent down.

  “Wait. I will vaporize the soil around it, so you can remove it. Please stand back and cover your eyes; I will not be able to limit the scatter and perform this operation with the optimum speed.” Tutor waited for them to comply, then lasered a three inch wide, cylindrical channel around the fallen component, effectively exposing it to Richard’s reach, once more.

  “Neat.” Richard bent down, arched his back cautiously, and heaved the cylinder out of the still smoking hole, well-satisfied with the ease with which he could now perform this task. The action struck a chord in his memory, and he stopped, suddenly annoyed. “The grey box, we left it under the ‘copter’!”

  “We could go back and get it…” Karen began. She looked at him, uncertainly.

  “Military aircraft are approaching;” Tutor interjected. “The first will arrive in two minutes, seventeen seconds. Suggest you complete the repairs first, then discuss the other matter within the security of Citadel, afterwards.”

  “He’s right.” Richard nodded to Karen. He staggered over the uneven ground, back into Citadel, bent down and lowered the old unit into the raised, cup-like area which appeared before him; heaved the other cylinder off the elevated surface which now surrounded it on the mossy floor, and returned to the repair site with the spare cylinder which had lain unnoticed and unappreciated in the Moss Room for so long, tucked against his side.

  “Do you think you could manage to pass it up to me, when I have climbed back up?” He looked at Karen, voicing his request reluctantly. “It’s really heavy.”

  “Let me try.”

  Richard placed the brassy cylinder in her arms.

  Karen gritted her teeth. “Better get up there,” she said shortly, “I think I can hear–”

  Karen’s observation was cut short by the deafening roar of after-burners, as a jet blasted past at minimum altitude, a few hundred yards to the south of their partially hidden position.

  Richard climbed up the strange steps once more, and then reached down for the unit. As Karen brought it within inches of Citadel, the anti-gravity effect came into play, and she was easily able to raise it enough for him to catch hold of it. Richard hauled it up beside him, and tilted it until the end was perpendicular to Citadel’s surface, then breathed a sigh of relief, as it seemed to slide in of its own accord. He pulled his hand back and watched the surface shimmer back into place.

  “How’s that, Tutor?”

  “Diagnostics check proceeding.”

  Richard looked up nervously. He was about to urge Tutor to hurry, when Karen’s mentor announced that the repair had been successful.

  “Get back inside!” he shouted, as he climbed back down. “Everything’s fixed.”

  Karen ran to the entrance and fizzed inside. Moments later, they were both in the Control Centre, well protected, and effectively out of the range of the aircraft buzzing futilely around outside.

  “Take us up as soon as you can do so, without endangering that ‘plane,” Karen urged.

  “There are six out there, and many more approaching,” Tutor corrected her as Citadel fell upwards once more. “But I am complying at this moment.”

  They both dropped heavily into their chairs, and smiled their relief to each other. The forest shrank rapidly, until the trees merged into a green blur. Within moments, the horizon became visible, then drew nearer as the curvature of the Earth became apparent once more.

  “Now,” Richard started, once he had caught his breath. “Can we go and get the remote we left at the crash site?”

  “That will no longer be necessary,” Tutor informed them, sounding almost smug, “I activated the laser, and started a fire in the wreckage. The device will be destroyed in the flames.”

  “Are you sure?” Karen asked.

  “It has already ceased to function,” Tutor confirmed. “There was quite a lot of fuel still on board.”

  “Well, I guess that’s it, then.” Richard sounded slightly disappointed not to be required to collect the grey box; a part of him had relished the effect that t
heir reappearance over Redcliff would produce.

  Citadel continued to fall away from the Earth. Richard and Karen watched silently, as the full glory of the beautiful blue and white globe was revealed. Behind it, the silvery splendour of the moon drifted serenely into view.

  “Are you sure you want to come with me?” Karen broke the silence finally, aware of his mixed feelings, but not able to resolve them clearly in her emotionally overloaded mind. “I don’t know if I will ever come back.”

  “I lost everything I had on Earth, then I found you;” Richard pulled her towards him and kissed her gently. “I’m not losing you again.” He thought with a shudder of the terrible injury she had sustained at the police roadblock, and his feelings as he had realised her life was ebbing away. “You’ll just have to get used to having me around, I guess.”

  She kissed him in return, and then leaned her head on his shoulder with a sigh of happiness. Neither of them said anything for a long time, then Karen asked quietly:

  “Tutor, were my parents married, like people on Earth?”

  “That information in not in the ship’s log,” her mentor responded. “But there is no doubt that they were extremely committed to each other. The Earth custom of marriage is highly variable… at least it is, the way Earth people practice it. What your parents had was much more than most ‘down there’ ever have.”

  Karen looked up at Richard with her deep blue eyes.

  “It was like that with you, from the moment I met you. Without you…” her words trailed off to nothing, as she realized that he understood her perfectly.

  They sat together, arm in arm, watching the Earth and the Moon float gently away on a tranquil sea of stars, safe now, from the fearful fury of the would-be defenders of America.

  Chapter Forty-One

  The treasonous are always silenced – Shoonan saying

  “How does it feel now?” Tracy bent down and gently brushed Brad’s dark brown hair back with her hand, noticing the grey intermingled, wishing she had been able to do more than she had for him, since the black bulk of Citadel had disappeared so abruptly.

  “Hurts like the blazes, not like Karen made it feel, until those army medics came and messed with it.” Hawk grinned up at her from the stretcher he was laid out on, and shifted his leg tentatively in its field dressing and splint. He pushed himself up on his elbows, and looked around.

  “She has quite a gift there…” Doctor Wilde imagined how wonderful it would be, to be able to ease suffering as she had seen this slight but formidable girl do. And now she is safe at last – I hope. She joined her boyfriend in observing the final, resultant phase of her truly wild decision to help ‘two young enemies of the State’.

  Soldiers were still scrambling around, spraying fire retardant on the smouldering ruins of Brad’s trusty old Bell 206B, just beyond the shelled house. Down the slight slope of the hill, more soldiers were measuring the depression where Citadel had smashed into the ground, after leapfrogging the approaching tanks, and others were removing ammunition from locations near burned-out anti-aircraft guns.

  Just this side of the point where Citadel had landed, engineers were examining the mangled remains of the main battle tank which had been so effectively and ostentatiously destroyed by Citadel’s lasers, under Richard’s directions, and a little further down, Judy Brisson was studying the neat, almost surgical hole drilled through the armour and engine of another, otherwise undamaged Abrams. This was the one that Tutor had put out of commission in such a contrasting manner, one without any trace of showmanship, as it had been about to put a second shell into the ground precisely where Richard and Karen had been standing, and this while the incredible black spaceship was still in flight, mid-way through its short but devastatingly effective rescue hop.

  “Quite the mess here…” Brad looked up at the afternoon sky and saw only the white, wispy remnants of the cloud cover that had made their incoming flight so dangerous, as though the explosions had blown the rest away, too. “I guess they’re going back to wherever she came from.” A tingle ran through his body as he recalled Citadel’s stunning departure. Faster than anything we’ve ever imagined, with not a hint of engine noise, just the faint sound of rushing air to convince us it’s not an optical illusion.

  Tracy thought back over the past twelve hours, remembering how she felt when she had realized that she had the two ‘enemy agents’ before her, and how she felt when she had discovered that Karen, or more correctly, her parents, were not from Earth.

  “I’m glad I met them. Proud to have helped them. Even though it cost you your livelihood.”

  “Don’t worry about that… at least we’re both together, and more-or-less whole! We both avoided a government-sponsored early retirement plan! That’s the most amazing part of it – you just did the most dangerous thing you’ve ever done…” Hawk reached up and took her hand in his, and Tracy responded by kneeling beside him, undeterred by the mud. She glanced down at her blue smock and grimaced, as she realised it was covered in mud, and had a series of small holes, bordered with brown, burned across the front, through which were revealed little disks of white undergarment or pink flesh.

  “I told you these hospital outfits didn’t look good on me,’ she said with a wry smile.

  Hawk reached over with his other hand and brushed a half-dried drop of mud from her neck.

  “You look wonderful!” Brad winked as she shivered at this tender touch.

  They turned their heads to the sound of approaching boots squelching through the mud.

  “Mr. Hawk. Doctor Wilde.” Ed Baynes crouched down beside Brad awkwardly. “Medics look after you all right?” He sounded incredibly tired.

  “Yes, Major,” Brad nodded. “Can you tell us what has happened since Citadel took off?”

  “Why not? You already know the most important points,” Baynes said, after a slight hesitation. “They went straight up about sixty miles, then dropped back down to Springfield, where they collected more beryllium. Then they went up again, coming down far to the north of here, in the wilds of Quebec, Canada. A few minutes later, they went back up once more. The last I heard, they were several hundred thousand miles out and moving steadily faster away.”

  “So, they really have gone,” Tracy remarked quietly.

  Ed looked across at her, almost catching her disappointment, despite the careful control she had exercised over her voice.

  “I hope so. They made the biggest mess in history when they were here,” he commented sourly. “And that brings me to the reason why I wanted to see you both. Officially, the explanation for this mess is still the same one as was announced to the media, just two days ago. Hence, your arrival here doesn’t make any sense, in that context. Knowing the abilities of the girl called Karen Amer, I must conclude that you were coerced into transporting Richard and Karen here. I have decided,” Baynes continued, without giving them time to venture a differing opinion. “…To keep the entire sequence of events under a security classification so high that anyone talking about it won’t get beyond the third phrase, before he or she is locked up for life, and has his or her identity deleted from the records of this country. For all intents and purposes, such a person would simply… cease to exist. I hope you understand what this means to you both?” He raised his eyebrows questioningly.

  Brad and Tracy were both silent, wondering where this one-sided, dictatorial discussion could lead.

  “Of course, even if I didn’t do this, your most likely future, if you decided to ‘go public’, would be as cult heroes to the UFO fanatics.” This, coming as it did from Ed’s own lips, seemed close to self-betrayal. He sighed as he stood up, his knees already stiffening in the damp air.

  “Oh, one last thing. There’s a fully equipped Bell 206 Longranger in for a scheduled overhaul and minor repairs at a military airbase in Florida; plans are that the work will be completed in the next few days. Half an hour ago, I authorized a complete refurbishing of the interior, in addition to the required mechani
cal work in progress. When it’s ready, it will be flown to Westwood airfield. It is being registered to a Mr. Bradley Hawk as we speak, and should still be sitting there, waiting for you, when your leg is finally recovered.”

  Tracy found Brad was squeezing her hand painfully tightly, and perhaps for that reason, as well as others, her eyes started to water.

  “Mr. Hawk’s living expenses to that point will also be covered,” Ed continued, pleased with the reaction his comments were evoking. “The National Unusual Incident Team always pays its debts.” He turned as if to go, then continued philosophically: “I like to think that eventually life will carry on as if this whole incident had never occurred.” Baynes shook Brad and Tracy by the hand. “An air ambulance will take you both back to Westwood in about half an hour.” He gave them each one of his cards, his glance suddenly very penetrating. “Call me if you decide there’s anything else you remembered that you’d like to tell me.” He walked away, without a backward glance.

  “He really thinks he’s ‘something’!” Doctor Wilde shook her head in wonder as she watched the chief of the NUIT continue to recede from view.

  “He’s both more and less than he seems…”

  “He might think he’s the President, but that doesn’t mean he can fix your leg.” Tracy grinned at her boyfriend’s perceptiveness. “You’d be fine if I hadn’t called.”

  “I broke the other one years ago; now I’ll have a matched pair. You really are good for me! If you hadn’t brought me into this adventure, then I’d still have my trusty flying steed, and I wouldn’t have got injured. If I hadn’t got injured, he might not have replaced my copter.” Brad looked up at Tracy and smiled a broad, schoolboy smile. “And as soon as my leg is better, I guess I’ll be back in business.”