by Rexx Deane
Aryx opened his mouth to speak, but Sebastian put his hand up to stop him.
‘No, I am not brain damaged, nor suffering from oxygen deprivation. This happened inside the comet, not my head.’
‘I—’
‘You what? Don’t believe me? You would if you saw the guy! I was so distracted by it that I didn’t even get his real name. The Paper Man … It was a bit gross. I could see all the bits inside him.’ He grimaced before turning to head up the ladder.
‘Sounds wonderful. How’s that supposed to work?’ Aryx shouted, following up on the lift.
‘Stuff he eats doesn’t become invisible …’ Sebastian typed commands into the piloting console. ‘Damn, we have to wait about twenty minutes before we can take off.’
‘I could have told you that. Where we going next? Back to the station?’
Sebastian continued to type commands into the console, reading from a piece of paper he’d taken from his belt. ‘No. We have to track down an old outpost called Chopwood. He gave me a radio beacon frequency that we have to triangulate.’
‘Where’ll that get us?’
‘Achene.’
‘That’s part of a plant.’
‘It’s also the Folian homeworld.’
Aryx’s curiosity piqued. ‘Folians?’
‘Apparently, they taught him “the art of thaumaturgy”, and he thinks our perpetrator is a magic user, hence the blurred video. He also thinks the Folians may have a way of finding out what happened in the lab.’
‘I see … assuming this is all real, that is. You know, you sound almost as bad as Alvarez, talking about superstitious rubbish.’
‘I wasn’t hallucinating. I know what I saw.’
‘Okay, okay. Do you think he did it?’
‘I don’t think so, but I’m not sure. As a potential suspect, he wouldn’t have wanted to incriminate himself in front of me, would he? But he didn’t look blurry. He was half invisible.’
‘It could be a double-bluff.’
‘No. The state he was in, hiding like he does … He had a reason for revealing himself to me, and it wasn’t to get arrested.’
‘Hmm. So what else happened when you met this guy?’ He was keen to move the topic of conversation away from nonsense.
While they waited for the storm to pass, Sebastian described his journey through the tunnels leading to the cavern and The Paper Man’s tale of experimentation. ‘And I almost forgot to tell you, he heats the water for his drinks with a kettle.’
‘Sounds like my kind of person,’ Aryx said. ‘I’d look forward to meeting him sometime, for that alone.’ He clapped his hands together. ‘So, what’s the plan when we find Chopwood?’
‘We scan the system when we arrive and see if we can find Achene, simple.’ Sebastian finished typing and turned around. ‘What did you discover about our cube?’
‘You’ll be interested in this.’ Aryx wheeled to the diagnostics console. ‘You can see the cube’s emissions peak when there are lulls in those from the ship. I’d almost say it was sampling the signals.’
Sebastian stood behind him. ‘That would imply it’s a processor, but why would it be interacting with the ship? Is it interfering with the ship’s functions? I suppose the signals weren’t in any recognisable format.’
‘No, and the ship doesn’t seem to be responding to anything other than our input.’
‘There might be something on the station we can use to do a deep scan and find out how to open it. I take it there was no success with the melted lump from the lab, either?’
‘Nope. That’s just spewing out random stuff. The computer couldn’t make sense of it and neither could I – you’re the data expert.’
‘We’ll have to see if we can get some secure equipment to analyse it when we get back. Leave the computer running a heuristic analysis for the time being. You never know, it might turn up something.’
Aryx set the computer to perform a more in-depth analysis on the data from the melted lump and placed the metal cube back in its box. Feeling its weight again triggered an odd sensation in his stomach. There was something not quite right about it. ‘How old did you say this thing was?’
‘Gladrin seemed to think it was a new technology the terrorists had got hold of, or had been developing. Why?’
‘It’s just that when we looked at it with the nanocameras, something struck me as strange. Processors don’t tend to get as hot as they used to now they use quantum transfer circuits, so why would it need a heat sink? It seems a little out of date.’
‘Could it be a high-capacity multicore?’
He shook his head and wrinkled his nose. ‘It’s not just the heat sink. It’s the material it’s made from, and the use of LEDs, too.’
‘Maybe Gladrin got it wrong. Perhaps it’s older than he thought.’
‘Possibly.’ Aryx glanced up at the cockpit windows. The sun had reached its zenith and, other than a halo of steam, the surface was still. He nodded in the direction of the cockpit. ‘We’d better go.’
Sebastian jumped into the pilot’s seat. ‘I’m on it. We’ll head for the node and work out where to go from there.’
The ship lifted off without incident, and he brought up the Galactic map on the console. A cone projected outward from their current location; Sebastian had already input the frequency from the locator beacon and begun scanning for its source.
‘We’ll have to triangulate the signal,’ Sebastian said. ‘The origin must be several light years away, because the timecode’s showing a few years behind, but I’ve no idea on the exact location because there’s no comms relay. If we go to another system, we should be able take a second bearing and match the two up for a location.’
‘Better to take a total of three. You’ll get a more accurate position,’ Aryx said. He certainly didn’t want to go billions of miles out of the way to the wrong planet because of Sebastian’s laziness.
‘Good idea. I’m just glad I’m not paying for the fuel.’ Sebastian pressed a few controls on the console, storing the ship’s current location and bearing, then plotted a course for the node to exit the system and set the ship to autopilot. It was now a waiting game, and Aryx didn’t like waiting.
Aryx stared out of the window as they headed for the node. It was a shock that Sebastian had believed The Paper Man’s story about magic. Surely there were other physical explanations for his condition. What they could be however, he had no idea. Sebastian didn’t seem susceptible to suggestion, or prone to blind belief; he was far too logical for that – most of the time. Therefore, stretching credulity and assuming what The Paper Man said was true, that magic was something real and tangible, how the hell did it work? It was frustrating that Sebastian hadn’t pushed for a demonstration: what he’d seen in the comet had clearly led him to believe in it enough to start scouring the galaxy for a long-lost colony. Aryx had never encountered anything that made him question his senses like that. When you grew up on a farming museum working with machinery, crops and dirt, you tended not to dwell on irrelevant fantasy, especially in the Australian outback; instead you focused on real, solid problems, just like his father had.
‘Pass me the forty-mil spanner, will ya?’ his father had shouted from beneath the tractor.
‘Which one’s that?’ six-year-old Aryx asked.
‘The one you’re playing with.’
He dropped down from the huge wheel and crawled under the machine, dragging the enormous metal bar with him. ‘What are you doing, Dad?’
‘I’m taking the old diesel engine out. It’s gotta be replaced with a fusion unit. Cheers, laddo.’ Aaron Trevarian took the spanner, reached up into a space behind the driveshaft with his tree-trunk arms and began working on the biggest bolt Aryx had ever seen.
Aryx lay on his back next to his father, watching his arms exert their superhuman strength on the stubborn fixture. He marvelled over the twisting pipes and the patterns they made, winding their way around the chassis. ‘I want to fix things like you when I gr
ow up.’
‘You should be out playing with the other kids.’
‘The Kidgells think I’m weird because I want to be an engineer.’
The arms stopped fighting the bolt and his father looked at him. ‘You’re not weird. You’re just smart for your age, and I’m proud of you for it. I’d rather you look after the farm when I’m too old, but I can’t expect the world. You’ve got to find your own path.’
Something sharp jabbed Aryx’s back. He wriggled his hand underneath himself and pulled out an ear of wheat. ‘I don’t like plants. They’re boring.’
‘You just don’t have the patience to see them grow … If you want to be an engineer when you grow up, go for it, but you’ll find you need patience for that, too. It’s hard work.’ His father sighed. ‘Machines nowadays aren’t made for people to work on, not like these. Everything’s either thrown away or recycled. At least you’ll have good job prospects, and if you get bored, you can always come back here.’
The arms reached back into the heart of the machine and with one final wrench, pulled the bolt free. ‘That’s got it …’
After his parents died, the marines had become his family but later, when his career ended, there was no way he could go back to running the farm – he couldn’t stand to be around the place in their absence. Now, as he stared at the approaching acceleration node, gleaming in space, he smiled, and missed the warm soil under his back.
The magenta corona of the node hadn’t even appeared before an alert beeping from the console jerked Aryx out of his reverie. ‘What the hell’s that?’
Sebastian tapped away at the console. ‘Another ship, approaching from starboard. Sensors just picked it up. The node’s energy must have been masking it.’
‘We’d better wait until they’ve used the node. No telling what might happen if we used it at the same time, and I don’t think anyone’s ever done it before.’
‘A big bang, I ex—’ A loud thud reverberated through the hull. Sebastian leapt up. ‘What the hell? Are they shooting at us? Computer, open a channel!’ He pulled at the manual override stick, stopping the ship short of the node’s capture radius.
The computer bleeped, acknowledging connection to the other ship.
‘Who are you? Why are you attacking us?’ Sebastian asked.
‘This is the Independent Terran Front. You have something of ours. We want it back and we’ll take it by force if we have to.’
‘Terrorists!’ Aryx hissed, muting the comms.
‘I know,’ Sebastian whispered. ‘They must want the cube. We don’t have any ship-to-ship weapons, so I can’t risk getting into a fight, and I don’t have any practice with this,’ he said, patting the pistol on his belt. ‘What can we do …? Aha! Put the cube in the escape pod! If they come aboard, they might not find it. Put the mobipack in, too. We can’t risk them getting hold of that technology as well.’
‘I’ll put the stuff in there, but I’m not sitting this one out.’ Aryx made his way to the back of the ship, opened the hidden escape pod hatch, tossed the items inside, and closed the door. The hull echoed with another shot.
Sebastian reactivated the comms. ‘Look, we don’t have anything you could possibly want, but we have no weapons and are in no position to argue with you.’
‘We’ll be the judge of that. Prepare to be boarded.’ The comms went dead and the spray-painted terrorist ship drifted past the cockpit window from right to left as it came around to port.
‘How the hell are we going to get out of this?’ Aryx weighed up the enemy ship. It was a little bigger than the Ultima, angular and vaguely fish shaped – a stolen Antari minicruiser. The graffiti on the sides had given it a jagged white shark-grin. They could have taken it, if they had weapons.
‘I have a plan.’ Sebastian said. ‘Go to the shield room. When they get close enough to dock, set up a shield between us, then bash their ship with it. Not too hard – just enough to give them a nudge.’
‘How will that help?’
‘Look how close we are to the capture radius.’
Aryx stared at the faint glow of the tendrils in the distance and gasped. The enemy ship would be sent off into superphase in whatever direction they were travelling, and could end up in the middle of nowhere, taking them years to get back. ‘I never thought you’d be capable of something so evil.’
‘I wouldn’t, but don’t you think we both owe them a little payback?’
The terrorist ship drew alongside the Ultima Thule, its concertina docking cowl extending like a parasitic sucker towards the defenceless ship, and an aggressive voice announced over the comms, ‘Prepare to be boarded.’
Chapter 16
Aryx watched the scene on a monitor from the field generator room. When the cowl of the enemy ship was a metre away from the ship he pressed a button, triggering the projection of a thin square panel of constrained field between the cowl and the hull. With the press of another control, the panel thrust away from the Ultima.
The field rammed into the fragile cowl, which buckled and crumpled under the pressure, and shards of metal and plastic showered off into space. Compressing the cowl completely, the field hit the ship itself, and the Ultima’s generator bounced violently to starboard.
‘Seb, starboard thrusters, now!’
The engines flared into life and the little ship bravely shoulder-barged the interlopers towards the node. The pilot didn’t have time to react, and the metal shark crossed the dreaded threshold side-on, uncontrolled.
Aryx’s heart pounded as a bright stream reached out from the acceleration node and arced around the enemy. The ship became white-hot as it tumbled sideways through the crackling energy field. With a bright flash, it was torn away through space, and in the blink of an eye it was gone.
His hands shook as he made his way back to the cockpit. ‘That was a smooth move. Remind me never to get on your bad side.’
‘I hope we don’t get more of them coming after us. That trick might not work again.’
‘How did they find us?’
‘I have no idea.’ Sebastian scratched his chin. ‘Is it possible they were tracking emissions from the cube?’
‘No. They’re only weak, and they started too soon. Even if a signal had been directed through the node, they couldn’t have got here that quickly – they’d have appeared at the edge of the heliosphere and it took us an hour to get this far in.’
‘Good point, but we ought to leave the cube in the escape pod for now, just to be on the safe side. The extra layers of hull should block any signal it gives off.’
Sebastian reactivated the navigation system and the ship lurched as it realigned with the node tangent.
Three hours later, after a second node hop and signal sample, the Ultima Thule dropped into relativistic speed several thousand kilometres away from a node in a binary system.
‘Are we there yet?’
‘Nearly.’ Sebastian tapped commands into the console. ‘I just need to take the third sample … and now triangulate the position.’
The Galactic map showed three fuzzy red lines running from the bearings they had taken and converging to a point. Although fuzzy, the overlap was within thirty Astronomical Units – roughly the distance of Neptune from Earth’s sun – and within the area of intersect sat a star labelled V376 Pegasi – unexplored. Aryx zoomed the map in, expanding the system to fill the view. The system contained a gas giant labelled HD209458b, Osiris. Its green moon was the same size as Earth’s. On the other side of the system, a volcanic planet orbited uncomfortably close to the star. He tapped a few more commands into the console, trying to retrieve extra details, but with no scans of the system newer than the last fifty years in the database, further information was not forthcoming.
‘This is useless,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing about the system on the map … The moon might be green because of plant life. That could be our Chopwood, right there. Hmm … what a wonderfully appropriate name,’ he said, pointing at the label next to the moon. ‘
Tradescantia, Isis. It’s one of my favourite flowers.’
Sebastian swivelled his chair to face him and leaned back, hands behind his head. ‘Wonderful,’ he said flatly. ‘Shall we go for it, then?’
‘Did your Paper Man definitely say there was a node in the area? I don’t fancy the idea of spending years at lightspeed travelling back if there isn’t.’
‘He said he reached it in a small ship when the Folians pointed him in the right direction, so it couldn’t have been too far from Chopwood, Tradescantia, whatever. The colonists probably hadn’t detected it when they originally arrived because they weren’t looking for it. I don’t expect they would have known what it was anyway.’
‘So, we go for it and hope they point us in the right direction if we can’t find it?’
‘I’m sure it’ll be fine. Anyway, we’ve got much better technology than they would have had.’
Aryx shrugged. ‘We don’t have much choice.’
Sebastian turned to the console and selected the intersect coordinates on the navcomputer. ‘Let’s go!’
The ship skirted the twin suns of the binary system on its approach to the node. Several minutes later, it glided smoothly around the iridescent scaffold until it faced almost completely the opposite direction, and jumped.
Aryx bit his nails while the ship slid through the stars once again in superphase.
‘You look worried,’ Sebastian said.
‘I’m still hoping there’s a node there when we arrive.’
‘Have a bit of faith.’
He frowned. ‘Easy for you to say, Mr Manygods. Faith won’t get us home. Faith won’t save us from arriving back at the station long after our friends and families have died if we have to fly all the way back, or to the nearest node, at lightspeed. Besides, the onboard rations probably wouldn’t last for more than a week of acceleration time.’
Sebastian shook his head. ‘Don’t think I’m not worried. The Paper Man made his way back to our sector of the galaxy just fine, and he didn’t have the scanners to detect the nodes. We do, so I’m not concerned about that … I don’t want to find this is a dead end, and then have to try to take him back to the station under arrest.’