by Chris Ward
This, however, was on a whole other level. The ship appeared built out of carbon, the walls, floors and ceilings ebony-black, sucking up the lights that were always too dim for him to see clearly. And the dimensions were distorted. Doors were thinner, ceilings higher, steps taller and narrower. After a few minutes of traversing corridors and climbing staircases his head began to pound, and he took to keeping his eyes closed, letting the Evattlan guard directly at his back control his direction with sharp prods of its claws.
And then there were the transportation tubes. They came to an elevator set into the wall. It looked like a regular elevator for carrying regularly sized people, but beside it was a thin door which when opened by one of the Shadowmen revealed a narrow tube whistling with gusting wind. The Shadowman stepped into it, and before the door was even closed he was gone, sucked upwards, vanishing like a puff of smoke. Caladan stared in horror, only for the creature to reappear a minute later, arriving as a blur which solidified and then stepped out of the tube without concern. The Shadowman looked at the others, said something, then they nodded together and one pressed the elevator control.
As the Evattlan guards, Caladan, and three Shadowmen entered the elevator, the others waited back by the tube. He wondered what it would feel like to step into one of those tubes, whether it would be wide enough to accommodate him or whether he would get stuck a short distance along like an obstruction in a trash disposal.
He didn’t have much time to think about it as the elevator rose quickly, coming to a stop a moment later. The doors opened and he found himself facing what he could only guess was a welcoming party. In the centre stood a Shadowman in a form of regal dress, a cloak that could have been satin pinned around his shoulders by a broach fitted with a large black diamond. Above each slitted eye was a silver emblem which resembled some kind of bird.
He opened his mouth and emitted a whispery sound which made Caladan’s bladder loosen. He got control of himself just in time as the Shadowman leaned forward, one spindly arm reaching out for cold fingers to caress his bald scalp with the tenderness one might stroke a pet, all the while continuing to whisper in that fear-inducing way. Caladan, gritting his teeth to hide his revulsion, tried to meet his gaze. The sound was far different to the chirps and hoots of those in the landing party which now stood silently around him, their heads bowed, and Caladan guessed he was being treated to some kind of formal introduction.
‘Viceroy and Commanding Flight Commodore Kal Al’Tinth of Shadowhaven would like to welcome you to our ship, General Bertram Georgetown Grogood, honored leader of the Trillian Space Fleet 14th Combat Division, stationed around Dynis Moon, in orbit of Cable, second planet of Trill System in the Estron Quadrant. It is his pleasure and that of his esteemed and valued crew to have you onboard.’
Caladan looked for the speaker and noticed a stocky communications droid was standing behind the Shadowman, translating the Viceroy’s words. He stared at it because even a dull grey box with twinkling lights for eyes was preferable to look at than the spindly nightmares towering around him. He tried to think of something witty or defiant to say, but nothing would come, so he just grunted and nodded.
The Shadowman spoke again. This time Caladan was unable to prevent a little dribble sneaking out. He squeezed his legs together to try to hide it, but the nearest Shadowman lifted his head and made a loud sniffing sound.
‘Viceroy Al’Tinth would like to remind you that your full cooperation is required and expected, or you will be tortured slowly and inexorably towards a death that will become a fixation of your every waking moment, a period of suffering that can be made to last for as long as is necessary to extract the information required from your pathetically small, insignificant brain. Do you have any questions?’
Caladan gave a dumb shake of his head.
‘Then without further ado, you will be shown to your quarters.’
The Viceroy and his party departed, although the droid fell into step with Caladan’s guards as they led him though the ship. At one point they passed a view-screen which showed a representative view of their ship and the surrounding fleet. A flashing dot seemed to indicate their location within the closest ship, and Caladan realised the lander which had taken them from the surface had at some point docked with a gigantic mothership, which a scale gave as nine Earth-miles long. As he craned his head to watch, a box in the corner designed for the benefit of passengers zoomed in on one of the ships and began talking through its weaponry. While the language was unknown, one of three scrolling across the bottom was the common intergalactic language. Caladan caught a few words before a prod in his back sent him hurrying to keep up with the others.
They led him through several corridors and chambers, at one point climbing into a small train carriage which zoomed them through the internal workings of the ship. Corridors, hangars, and control rooms passed in a blur, then they were stepping out into a section that felt colder and gloomier, leaving Caladan in no doubt where they were heading.
‘Droid,’ he hissed at the grey box rolling along beside him on caterpillar treads. ‘They sent you to translate for me, didn’t they?’
‘It is my command,’ the droid said, the voice frustratingly loud, making a couple of the Shadowmen ahead glance back. ‘However, certain requests will be ignored or filtered.’
‘Where are we heading?’
‘To your quarters.’
‘This is the prisoner section of the ship, isn’t it?’
‘I am not permitted to say.’
Caladan sighed. ‘Will I be tortured?’
‘I am not permitted to say.’
‘I’d like to begin negotiations for my freedom as soon as possible. You know, I’m extremely important to the Trill System government, or whatever’s left of it. They’d pay a lot of money for me. Am I going to be ransomed?’
‘I am not permitted to say.’
Caladan gave up, falling into step again with his guards, grimacing as they entered a part of the ship that resembled a cave. The walls had begun to glisten with oozing moisture which made Caladan’s boots tacky. The Shadowmen in his welcome party began to coo and titter as though entering some kind of theme park.
Around the corner they paused by a slimy, rock-like door. One member of the party pressed a control and it slid open, the silence broken by hideous wailing from down a dim corridor stretching away into the distance. It came from multiple places at once, and Caladan felt his knees begin to tremble.
‘What’s that?’ he asked the droid. ‘Are you permitted to say?’
‘We have entered the guest quarters,’ the droid said.
‘The guests? It sounds like they’re being tortured.’
The droid said nothing, and Caladan realised he needed to address it with a direct question.
‘Are they being tortured?’ he asked.
‘No,’ the droid said.
‘Then why all the screaming? I’ve never heard anything like it.’
The grey box sitting on top of the larger grey box, which Caladan guessed counted as the droid’s head, turned towards him with a creak of poor maintenance. Its eye lights twinkled in a way which in other circumstances might have made Caladan smile for how much it reminded him of Harlan5.
‘They’re having nightmares,’ the droid said.
25
Beth
Teer Flint had returned to the flight deck, and stood with Beth and Paul as they peered out of the view-screens at the entanglement outside.
‘What do you make of it?’ Beth asked.
‘They look like cables,’ Teer Flint said. ‘Perhaps when the orbiter was damaged, the casing broke open and spewed out its guts.’
‘If we spacewalk outside we can blow them off,’ Paul said. ‘We just need to deal with the close ones manually, then let the ship’s guns take care of the rest.’
Teer Flint shook his head. ‘I’d be very careful about shooting anything in here,’ he said. ‘You said this thing was built by the ancient Trill? Do you really think those cabl
es will be the kind of cables that you’re used to? You could set off a chain reaction that might blow the entire orbiter.’
‘You’re the mechanic, then. What do you suggest?’
Teer Flint shook his head. ‘I fix up broken starships, not hyper-advanced tech built by aliens that vanished hundreds of millennia ago.’
Beth patted him on the shoulder, catching a sideways scowl from Paul. ‘But let’s say this was just a starship, and you had to do some work on it, what would you do first?’
‘Easy. Make it safe. Before you start playing around, you have to cut the power.’
Beth turned to Harlan5, still standing in his maintenance terminal at the back of the flight deck. ‘Harlan, is there any way you can scan this orbiter and identify a power source?’
‘The Matilda has already done so. There appears to be a central power core, but I would advise against going anywhere near it.’
‘Why?’
‘Because its surface temperature is ten thousand degrees Celsius.’
‘Is that hot?’ Paul asked.
‘About five times hotter than the lava that turned me into a walking junkyard.’
Paul smirked. ‘So nearly as hot as me.’
Beth rolled her eyes and Teer Flint gave a little chuckle. Harlan5 appeared to be the only one oblivious to Paul’s misguided charm as he continued, ‘It’s contained within a protective casing and is powered in itself by solar energy from Trill Star. Due to the damaged wing, its power is lower than it might have been, but it’s still phenomenal.’
‘Some kind of nuclear reactor?’
‘Neither my programming nor the ship’s computer can say for sure, but I would guess that it’s far more advanced than that. Most likely neutron-fission.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a form of tech long outlawed in the Estron Quadrant. Tiny amounts of material produce energy millions of times as powerful as a simple nuclear reaction. Enough to wipe out Dynis Moon and everything within a million miles of it in the blink of a nostalgic eye.’
‘Quit being poetic, robot,’ Paul said, although Beth caught the hint of a smile before Paul looked back at the dashboard.
‘Do you think it might have an off-switch, or some kind of pause button?’
Harlan5 shook his head as far as its melted casing would allow it to go. ‘The greatest minds in the galaxy have failed to harness the power of ancient Trillian tech. While your confidence in my abilities is flattering, it is somewhat misplaced.’
‘That’s a no, then,’ Paul said.
‘A flat, slap-in-the-face no,’ Harlan5 said.
‘We should go and take a look anyway,’ Teer Flint said. ‘I’ll go. Not many mechanics get to look at something like this close up. And in any case, I should have died twice over in the last few Earth-weeks. I’m starting to feel immortal.’
‘Perhaps you’re a descendant of the ancient Trill,’ Beth said with a smile.
‘They must have been some ugly mothers,’ Paul said, flashing Teer Flint a grin which made the lizard-like off-worlder cackle with laughter. ‘They vanished as soon as some bright spark invented the mirror.’
‘How do you suggest we get there?’ Beth said. ‘The orbiter is massive. It’s too far for a spacewalk.’
‘It’s possible to use the Matilda’s shuttle,’ Harlan5 said.
‘We have one? I know there are a couple of escape pods, but they’re one-way.’
‘It’s that lump of metal stuck like a turd to the Matilda’s butt,’ Paul said. ‘Caladan told me he used it to hide illegal contraband. It’s never worked, he said. We should have left it behind on Cable.’
Harlan5 shook his head. ‘Teer repaired it on Docrem2. It’s fully operational.’
Teer Flint couldn’t resist a smug grin. ‘The only thing wrong with it was the docking mechanism,’ he said. ‘It barely needed more than a little work with a spanner. I had a maintenance droid fix it up. A thirty-minute job. You clowns have no idea what an incredible ship you have here. It’s the best of its class and you’ve treated it like some Lumbar X transportation barge. You’ve been running it at a fraction of its potential.’
Glancing at the box on the dashboard with its bouncing head inside, Harlan5 turned to Paul. ‘General Grogood agrees. At least, that’s the gist of the message.’
‘Blame Caladan,’ Paul said, giving the box a glare.
Beth lifted an eyebrow. ‘Haven’t you assumed command in his absence? Shouldn’t you take responsibility for the ship?’
‘Just tell us what we have to do, robot.’
‘The core is roughly a hundred Earth-miles from here. I can chart you a course for the shuttle which will get you to the core and back. My programming’s advice would be to touch nothing unless you’re certain you know what it is. Otherwise, you could blow all of us to kingdom come.’
Paul looked at Teer Flint. ‘Can you fix robots?’ he said.
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘The first place we stop after we escape this hellhole, we’re getting the robot fixed,’ Paul said. ‘And his memory upgraded.’
‘We can leave Harlan in command of the ship,’ Beth said.
Harlan5 shook his head. ‘The shuttle is only large enough for two passengers,’ he said. ‘It’s a short-distance research vessel, not a passenger transport.’
‘Teer and me will go,’ Paul said quickly, as Beth raised her hand to volunteer. ‘We’ll need a mechanic’s skills and someone will have to be in command.’
Beth glanced at Harlan5. ‘Much as we’ll miss you on the flight deck, I think that’s a good decision.’ She turned to Teer Flint. ‘Don’t let him touch anything that looks dangerous.’
‘I won’t. We’ll check it out, see what the deal is, then come right back.’
Harlan5 instructed the ship’s computer to prepare the shuttle for launching. Together, they headed down into the holds, where the refugees were doing their best to make themselves comfortable. A group of the more senior among them wanted to know what was going on, but Paul, doing his best captain’s impression, explained that the situation was under control. Beth could tell he didn’t believe it, but if there was one thing Paul was good at, it was talking up a situation.
The shuttle was accessed through an airlock in one of the hangars. Teer Flint, after checking its systems on a terminal by the entrance, climbed straight in, but Paul lingered near to Beth, as though wanting a dramatic goodbye.
‘Be careful,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll be perfectly safe right here. No one knows we’re here, do they? All we have to do is sit for a while, wait for that fleet to move on, and then get ourselves free. Easy, right?’
Paul’s bottom lip trembled. ‘In case we don’t make it back, I just wanted to say….’
Beth could hardly bear the suspense. She knew what was coming, but hoped Paul would lose the nerve to say it before embarrassing himself and her in front of Harlan5.
‘I … I … I … put you in charge, until my return. And if I don’t … assume command. Get these bedraggled wretches to safety.’
Beth grimaced, then snapped a salute. ‘I’ll do my best, Captain.’
Paul glanced at her one more time, nodded at Harlan5, then climbed into the airlock. The door zipped shut behind them. On a view-screen, Beth watched the shuttle detach from its docking port, drift powerlessly away from the entangled ship, small enough to get through the cables that enmeshed them. For a few seconds she felt a knot in her gut wondering if the thrusters would actually work, then they roared into life and the shuttle vanished. The view-screen camera moved to follow it, but in a couple of seconds the thruster flare was gone.
Beth looked up at Harlan5. ‘Just us now,’ she said.
The robot tilted its head. ‘There are a couple of minor issues I felt best to hold back until the change of command was passed along,’ he said. ‘Would you like to hear them now or when we return to the flight deck?’
Beth frowned. ‘Um … now?’
Harlan5 nodded.
‘One is of a personal nature, and concerns General Grogood. His life support system is beginning to fail. He may not survive until Little Buck and Mr. Flint return unless he is moved to another system.’
‘Do we have one onboard?’
Harlan5’s face cocked a little: a half nod. ‘There is a possibility,’ he said.
‘And the other thing?’
‘Unfortunately, we are not as hidden as we had hoped. It appears the ship’s power outage wasn’t timed quite right, and the computers of our enemy calculated our likely course of action. As we speak, Shadowman ships are assembling around the orbiter in order to capture or destroy us upon our departure.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘We have received several transmissions ordering us to give up and surrender. My programming believes that they don’t know exactly where we are, and are unwilling to enter the orbiter to search for us. However, it is quite within their ability to either starve us out or simply fire on the orbiter. Both of which are not great prospects for our survival. Especially not with the refugees onboard. Our resources are declining with every hour that passes.’
‘You have been receiving transmissions?’
‘Directed at any ship that might be within the orbiter, yes. Another has arrived while we were talking.’
‘What does it say?’
‘It appears they are impatient. We are required to surrender, or they will fire on the orbiter, and destroy us along with it.’
Beth grimaced. ‘How long do we have?’
‘One Earth-day.’
26
Paul
‘I’m not trying to be cruel here, but I’m pretty sure she really doesn’t like you. Not in … that way.’
Paul scowled at Teer Flint, squeezed into the co-pilot’s seat beside him. ‘And what would your race know about it?’
Teer Flint rolled his eyes. ‘Nothing about that mess you humans call love. In my race, the female usually eats the male after copulation.’
Paul glanced round. ‘Is that so?’