Black Desert

by Peter Francis

  “Never send a boy to do a man’s job,” said the Captain.

  “See you two finally made up,” said Ogden to Ramirez and Gowan.

  “I sacrificed myself to be with her,” said Ramirez.

  “Yes, Eric, you threw yourself into a room filled with cough medicine.”

  “I am so embarrassed,” said Gowan, sealing her suit.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” said Ogden. “The Captain quite admired your sporran.”

  “My what?”

  “Inside joke.”

  “We both thought we were dying, you know.”

  “Let’s just be grateful you weren’t. Now if I can just get that image of Ramirez out of my head everything will be fine.”

  They packed the sarin in the additional safety container and left the not so secure room and found themselves gathering in the corridor. Footsteps clacked down the staircase and Stiers, not anxious to add to their numbers, headed in the opposite direction until Ramirez stopped him. “No good, Captain. There’s a solid steel door that way which we would have to cut through.”

  “We’re all in uniform. Let’s bluff it,” said Stiers. “You do the talking, Ogden. You sound English.”

  “My accent may be right but I’m not certain my wits are up to the job,” Ogden confessed. “Put on your safety masks.”

  One guard walked lazily to the bottom step and halted in panic as he saw them. He had an assault rifle slung over his shoulder which he unleashed with a slowness that belied any training he may have been given. He poited the business end at the masked quartet. “Stop,” he said.

  “We’re not going anywhere, old chap,” said Ogden. “But I would put your mask on if I were you.”

  “What? I don’t have a mask,” the guard stuttered.

  “We’re from Hazmat,” said Ogden. “There has been a spillage and we’re cleaning up. If you don’t have a mask, I suggest you wait at the top of the stairs till we establish how toxic this substance is.”

  “Yes,” he said and put his hand over his mouth, allowing the rifle to hang by its sling while he searched for a handkerchief to cover his mouth and nostrils. He turned back and raced up the stairs.

  “Lucky the phones are out,” said Stiers and they all followed him.

  He was waiting along the corridor on the next floor as they appeared. Ogden said, “It seems to have been a simple cold remedy. No harm done.”

  “What’s in the container?” asked the suspicious guard. “And why wasn’t I notified?”

  “The container has specialist chemicals and testing devices,” said Ogden. “We were already on the premises when the spillage occurred. I expect the phones are out along with the power. You should have been told this by your shift supervisor.”

  “Communications are down. I’d better escort you around,” said the guard.

  “You had better not,” insisted Ogden. “In fact you can ensure we have nobody else in this building as you evacuate it. We’ll give you the all-clear as soon as we are able.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m afraid so, old chap. We can’t risk anything getting out. In fact, keep an eye of the main front doors to ensure nobody enters or leaves.”

  The man hesitated then nodded and took off running. The crew made their way to the roof and back into their craft, Gowan and Ramirez lugging the container. As they made preparations for departure, Stiers said, “You two young people aren’t going to be making out on every mission, are you?”

  “No,” said Gowan. “And please don’t mention it again.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  They took off using the reverse parabola to take them back to the desert while it was still very dark. Dawn was breaking as they rose from the roof of Porton and they headed upward as quickly as they were able. Stiers had programmed a course for home when Gowan announced, “Ferry sinking off the coast of China.”

  “What?” said Stiers.

  “Sensors have picked up a sinking ferry. It mostly contains schoolchildren – about two hundred of them. I can give you exact figures.”

  “How close are they to shore?”

  “Five miles.”

  “Can’t they swim it?” asked Ramirez.

  “We should not get involved,” said Ogden.

  “Sure we won’t,” said the Captain. “Two hundred kids, eh?”

  “Two hundred and seven plus adults.”

  “They have rescue boats – lifeboats right?” asked Ramirez.

  “Yes, but the ship is sinking too fast to launch them.”

  Ogden checked his holos. “Gowan is correct,” he said. “The ferry has been holed badly. It appears to have struck an underwater obstruction.”

  “I take it we won’t save it,” said Gowan.

  “Damn right we won’t,” said Stiers.

  “Perhaps we could go back in time another eighty years and save the Titanic,” grumbled Ramirez.

  “How long have they got?” asked the Captain.

  “I’d say less than fifteen minutes. Boats are on the way but nothing will arrive in time to save them,” said Gowan.

  “We’re agreed it’s not our business, right?” said Stiers.

  “Yes,” said Gowan.

  “Right,” said Ogden.

  “No way,” said Ramirez.

  “And these kids are mostly Chinese, are they?” asked the Captain.

  “China, Hong Kong, a few others, I expect,” said Gowan. “Do you want a breakdown?”

  “No. How long would it take to get there?”

  “About two minutes,” said Ogden, “arriving in the evening. Not that we’re going, are we?”

  “Damn right we’re not,” said Stiers.

  “So we’re all agreed on going straight home,” said Gowan.

  “In our time, those children are all dead,” said Ramirez. “Saving them is pointless, right?”

  “Eric makes sense,” said Gowan. “They’ll be dead to us anyway if we make it to our time.”

  “I agree,” said Ogden. “We can’t afford to be seen and we certainly must not intervene. We may change things.”

  “Something my old mother used to say was ‘Never underestimate God’,” said the Captain.

  “I have managed to restore the cloaking device,” said Ramirez.

  “Who darn well asked you to do that?” pressed the Captain.

  “Nobody, Boss. I was just passing time – in case…”

  “In case I decided to go against all our better judgements and head over towards China to save those kids?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You’ll make a Captain one day,” Ogden said to Ramirez. He looked at Stiers. “What do you say?”

  “I say we go take a look,” said Stiers. “Keep chameleon cells active and cloak us.”

  “But we’re not going to do anything, are we?” asked Gowan.

  “Unless we can save them,” said the Captain. “Maybe we won’t be able to save our planet but if we can extend a few lives, we should do it.”

  “It’s what your mother would want,” said Ogden and could not resist a grin. “I think I’ll like her if I ever meet her.”

  “I expect you will,” said Stiers.

  They laid in a course to take them to the stricken ferry while Ramirez researched the library. The journey was completed mostly in darkness and they ended it hovering two miles above the vessel which was obviously well down at the nose and in danger of overturning.

  “It’s 4,000 tons,” said Ramirez. “There is no chance we can lift it from the water. I doubt we can even raise the nose.”

  “Bow,” said Ogden.

  “Bow? What for?”

  “The front end is called the bow, not the nose,” Ogden explained.

  “Pedant,” muttered Ramirez.

  “Can we switch four of the shield stabilisers to use as extra lifting power?” asked the Captain.

  “It will take a couple of minutes but we still won’t have the power to lift that ship. It’s just too heavy.”
/>   “I’m not trying to lift it. I’m trying to stabilise it in the water.”

  “We can do that – and tow it,” said Ramirez.

  “We won’t be adequately cloaked,” said Ogden. “The cloaking device provides us with a kind of mental skirt around the Challenger. We’ll be above them and the beams radiate sideways not down. They will be able, as it were, to see up our skirt.”

  “They won’t see much,” said Stiers.

  “There is a lot of panic on board the ferry,” said Gowan. “Children are screaming in terror.”

  “I’m descending to the optimum level – 200 feet above the ferry,” said the Captain.

  “Give me half a minute, boss, and I’ll have the extra lifting power for you,” said Ramirez.

  He was ready by the time they settled above the sinking vessel and Ogden sent down eight anti-grav beams to lock onto the ship below. Very slowly they managed to pull the heavy nose up a few feet and Stiers set a course for the closest harbour and pier. Afraid to lose the tenuous connection, he went slowly, keeping the speed down to fewer than a hundred knots. This created a huge bow wake which spread out from the ship on the ocean and raised it even more, lightening the load. Stiers took the ferry pierside and kept the beams active until most of the children were on land.

  “We’re losing our grip,” warned Ramirez. “Too much water coming in.”

  “More power,” said the Captain.

  They pressed on until the load was at breaking point. Almost all the children and passengers were safely on land and the ferry wouldn’t sink for another twenty minutes. The beams split away one by one as the load became too heavy and the Challenger was unable to bear the weight. They released all their connections with the bows of the ship below and headed for home. Below them anxious faces looked up at the mysterious lights and wondered at their saviours as the last of the passengers were helped to safety.

  “Do you think anybody noticed that?” asked Stiers and even Ogden didn’t know whether or not he was joking.

  “No more than a few hundred people at most,” said Ramirez.

  “Plus the quayside TV cameras and crews – and the reporters,” said Gowan.

  “And all those people on other ships who rocked like crazy when the ferry zoomed by at about ten times its maximum speed,” said Ogden.

  “Job done,” said the Captain. “We’ll be barely a blip in history. Let’s get back home. There’ll be no more trips for us once we’re sealed inside the dome.”

  “The safest place,” sighed Ogden. “We make too big a splash out here in the real world.”

  “Have we changed history – changed things for the future – our future?” asked Gowan.

  “I leave the big things for God to sort out,” said the Captain and within a few minutes they were sliding back into the familiar territory of their hangar. As the ship settled and the portal formed, Lillishenger moved inside to check on their trip.

  “Did you get it?” she asked desperately.

  “We have the Sarin,” said Ogden and pointed to the container.

  “Anything unusual happen?”

  Ogden had an image of Gowan holding the rising member of Ramirez. “Not so you would notice,” he said.

  “And you didn’t have to kill anybody?”

  “No.”

  “So everything went smoothly?”

  “There was an incident in the storage labatory,” admitted Ogden then saw Gowan’s eyebrows raise in shock. “We dropped a jar of some cough remedy.” Gowan’s eyebrows found landfall again.

  “Thank the Lord there was nothing serious,” said the Professor. “You’d probably welcome some supper.”

  “I would,” said Ogden.

  “Nobody was expecting you to say no,” said Ramirez. He caught Lillishenger’s scowl as it glanced off his cheek. “Anyway, I expect we could all do with a sit down and something to eat.”

  Jenny gave him a look that said ‘My hero’ and was surprised when he grabbed the left arm of Gowan and pulled her close. She was even more surprised when Gowan turned her head and smiled at him instead of knocking him on his ass.

  Lillishenger said, “I’ll study the Sarin container while you guys eat.”

  As she went aboard the others made their way across to the house and into the kitchen area where Sarah and Dunfield welcomed them despite their brief absence. They sat down to coffee and toast and little else. Ramirez could not understand why he felt so tired and he noticed Gowan’s eyelids were drooping also. He wondered if the cold remedy had been concentrated enough to cause drowsiness. He seemed to zoom in and out of the conversation around him. Gowan was definitely having trouble as here eyes closed and opened again suddenly.

  “I think Junette and I inhaled something that is making us drowsy,” he said.

  “Go to bed,” said Stiers.

  “What – together?”

  “Not together,” said the Captain. “What is the matter with you. Both of you get to your own beds but go into the ship first and have the Prof check you both over.”

  “Yes,” said Ramirez and he and Gowan left.

  “Smooth trip?” asked Dunfield.

  “Yes,” said the Captain.

  “No problems?”

  “Hardly any at all.”

  “That’s good,” said Dunfield. “I expect the crap will hit the fan when they find out it’s missing.”

  “Not the British,” said Ogden. “They’ll just pretend nothing ever happened. They won’t admit losing the Sarin.”

  “So everything will be quiet then?” said Dunfield.

  Stiers thought about the rescue of the distressed ferry as it was whizzed back to harbour in full sight of hundreds of eyewitnesses. “I expect you’re correct,” he said.

  And he was right. There was no mention of the miracle as news sources in China were closed down while the authorities investigated. The whole rescue story sank as deeply as the ferry did after the rescue. The team pressed on with work on the dome, completing the structure in fast time. Jenny returned home and back to her studies, paid for by their fund which had been added to Dunfield’s payout. The Professor spent her time examining the Sarin without opening it and creating gelatine capsules to hold the evil stuff. There was a way of extracting it from the container using hypodermic syringes. She prepared gels which could be injected with sarin and automatically seal themselves until split open. Ramirez developed an airgun whose barrel would fit outside the craft and align exactly with one of the disrupter weapons. The striking range where the two weapons coincided on target could be adjusted from six to sixty meters and he developed a magazine system that would automatically feed up to six of the gel capsules.

  Gowan and Ogden with the help of Stiers and Dunfield completed the dome with the occasional input from Lillishenger. She and Dunfield were protective about Dunfield’s design and their fussiness led to the Captain seriously considering giving both of them a slap from time to time. However, he was more pleased by the way Ramirez and Gowan worked together and spent more time in the company of each other. As Captain, he was sad to see his ship enclosed within the time capsule for a plan he was never sure would actually work. He was putting faith in minds greater than his own.

  “When I was a lad,” he told Dunfield one day, “my great-grandfather, who was still alive then, took me to a bar. It was an old place unchanged over the decades, dark inside with comfortable browns and dark green windows through which little light filtered. There was brasswork and an old, scarred mirror behind the bar. The seats were hard wood and uncomfortable and the atmosphere made visible by the smoke from pipes and cigarettes. It was a scene from a long lost world; an echo of what life used to be like before stress and strain became out watchwords. But it was so comfortable and relaxing with no hint of time passing. It was a magic place, all of which are now lost. The future, son, is not all electronic wizardry and wonder. Now we talk to everybody and they all know us; but we never meet – it’s just images and voices through a speaker. You and Sarah shoul
d have a family because that is now the only reality.”

  Dunfield said, “We are planning to do the whole thing right – marriage then making children.”

  “You should make it soon. Sarah is a rare find.”

  “Maybe if you’re around we’ll invite you.”

  “Just to the marriage part,” said the Captain.

  “Oh yeah – right.”

  “We’ll be going as soon as we complete the final tests. Our first hop will be a very short one so we can try the system and calibrate the chronometers for accurate time travel.”

  “How long?”

  “How long what?”

  “How long will you be gone for?”

  “I honestly don’t know. We’ll run the test up to full speed then come down again at once and investigate our systems. Without accurate chronometers we can only approximate. I would say a week to a month your time.”

  “And when do you intend to leave?”

  “As soon as the Professor has the Sarin safely sealed in gel capsules and the gun has been perfected. Say less than a week.”

  “I suppose you’re anxious to get back to your own time.”

  Stiers stroked his chin and pondered that one. “No – but it’s our duty,” he said. “Not just to Earth but for my family and Fleet colleagues. The sad thing that it would be fair to say we’re all feeling is the loss of you and all this lovely Earth. Once we go there will be no way back and no certain knowledge we will ever arrive. That will be greatly thanks to the efforts of you and Sarah and Jenny and all your heirs.”

  “But you must go.”

  “I don’t know,” said Stiers. “What lies in the future is decades after your own death, Hugh, if you forgive me for saying so. It is not your world and you are not responsible.”

  “We’re all time travellers, Captain. And if we are fortunate we will be able to hand the reins over to our offspring. Time is what both connects and disconnects us.”

  “You’re a wise man.”