Blake's 7 - 04 - Afterlife

by Tony Attwood

  'We seemed to be haunted by people trying for faster food production, ' said Vila. Koreli looked up curiously. 'On Skat the original settlers were trying to develop better crop yields before they found the black hole. The Ghammarans said they used space travel only to secure food supplies they needed from a few underdeveloped planets, and now this place. I can tell you that no one in their right mind would grow a single pack of food concentrate down there. '

  'Vila, you're a genius. '

  'I know, I keep telling everyone, but no one ever believes me. ' Despite his quick retort Vila wondered what on earth he had said. One thing was certain, he wouldn't spoil the spell by asking. Koreli was quiet; Vila looked at her intently, but she just smiled and said nothing. Up on the screens the first, and probably only, man made planet was gradually getting larger.

  As orbit was established Avon made a reappearance on the control deck. 'What have you built down there, ' asked Vila at once, 'an escape capsule?'

  Avon ignored the jibe. 'Koreli, I want you to take the ship in and land at the grid references fed into Blake. When we land I shall unload the items that I have in the hold and you will be free to take off again. '

  'This is insane, ' Vila told him. 'You are re-running exactly what happened with Liberator. The only difference is that this time we don't have a ship that is falling apart at the seams. ' Vila looked around nervously. 'At least, not yet. '

  'So you will be able to take off again. '

  'But what keeps bringing you back here? And what keeps you insisting that you always do it alone?'

  'Does it matter?' asked Avon. He had the air of a man too tired to bother with debate.'Yes it does. Last time we had to drag you out of the mess you created by deciding to go wandering about on that iceball down there. 3

  'Did you say ice?' Korell asked.

  'Well not exactly ice, but it was windy and cold, ' Vila acknowledged.

  'There's no ice down there now. No wind and no cold. The planet is hot - in some places very hot. Its orbit must have changed dramatically... '

  'What does that matter?' said Vila frantically. He turned back to Avon. 'If you had told us what was going on we might well have been able to save you without losing Cally. '

  'So you should have left me and done what I told you. Then Cally would still be alive. '

  Vila was struck by a sudden thought. 'You're not going back because you think Cally is alive? We didn't find the body, but she couldn't still be there... Not after all this time. '

  'If I find the grave I'll lay a wreath from you. '

  'Were you close to Cally?' asked Korell.

  Avon spoke rapidly. 'Cally was a good fighter, intelligent and moderately unemotional. Those are qualities that can be admired. In as much as I admired such qualities I was close to her. But what I am going to do has nothing to do with Cally's death. She is dead Vila, and reminding me of the fact is a waste of everyone's time. Now will you put us down on the planet Korell, or do I have to do it myself?'

  'I think the safety of the ship, if nothing else, demands that I do it, ' she replied, and the descent began.

  Even Vila had to admit the planet had changed dramatically since he was last there. According to Avon they had landed close to the spot where they teleported on their last mission. The cold biting wind was gone and there was no sign of any of the creatures they had met before. The foliage had also disappeared. Instead they now found themselves on a sandy soil. In the distance there was water - a huge lake, possibly even a sea. The sun shone down warm but, at least at this latitude not unbearably hot. The ground retained the

  uneven quality Vila had found before, but even that seemed to have modified and evened out.

  Avon took care of his own unloading. The equipment that Vila had last seen sprinkled around the hold was now packed into two crates. Whether it was still in parts or now unified into one working machine couldn't be seen. Vila once more tried to persuade Avon to explain, but met with no success.

  As Avon continued preparing for his departure Vila walked disconsolately back to the control room. Finding himself alone, he asked the computer for an analysis of the situation.

  'Avon is unloading silicon-based equipment onto the planet's surface, ' said Blake.

  'I know that, you useless pile of junk, ' Vila retorted. 'What I want to know is, why is he doing it? What is his plan?'

  'I cannot answer that question owing to the disconnection of certain functional levels of my operating system, ' said Blake.

  Vila was stunned. He had been under the impression that the ship's computer was now restored to normal, with the single exception of viewing facilities to the hold. Vila ran through the ship, out of the airlock and onto the planet's surface, and immediately confronted Avon with his discovery.

  'The ship's computers will operate perfectly adequately for the purposes of controlling the ship, ' replied Avon stiffly.

  Vila turned to Korell standing close by. 'Is he still sticking to the plan to go off into the sunset and leave us?' he asked.

  'There has been slight progress, ' Korell replied. 'I have agreed to stay with the ship on the ground for five hours. Avon will come back within that time. If he doesn't we can do whatever we please. '

  'Five hours, ' said Avon and with that he marched away from the Revenge in the direction of the water, pulling the two crates behind him on an improvised sledge.

  'Good luck, ' shouted Vila, and then in a lower voice, 'whatever it is you're up to. ''Do you know what he's doing?' asked Vila.

  'Not exactly. But whatever has been driving that man for the past few years is here, or around here, or connected with here, or reached from here or... '

  'Thank you, ' said Vila, 'but if it's that vague I'd rather not know. '

  Koreli laughed. She wanted to explain, if for no other reason than to hear out her own theories. 'It's not so bad, Vila. Whatever it is that has been pushing Avon has a connection with this planet. Now it may not be that Terminal is the answer, but if it isn't it must be a means to the answer. Just think about all the inexplicable things about this planet. Its shape, its origins, its location, its change of climate. All that means something to Avon. '

  'It doesn't mean much to me. '

  'No, but it will do soon. '

  'You really think Avon will come back?'

  'It doesn't matter. I made the ship's water supply radioactive two days ago. We can follow him on the scanner. '

  Vila was appalled. 'Radio-active? You'll cripple us. ' Suddenly Vila felt weak. He sat down heavily.

  'Relax, ' Koreli told him. 'There's enough to give a trace, no more. It's like putting fluoride in the water to keep your teeth healthy. '

  Vila looked unconvinced but kept quiet. He wondered why he'd developed toothache. Koreli put the screens on. The landscape as mapped from the air during their descent was put on the screen. A bright red pulse showed Avon walking.

  After ten minutes the pulse stopped. 'What's he hanging around for?' asked Vila.

  'Probably nothing, ' Koreli told him. 'He could be going underground. Look, the pulse is getting slightly weaker. Did you go underground before?'

  'What civilisation there was was underground. Servalan had her HQ there. We saw a few buildings in the distance but they looked run down - probably smashed up by the Links. I tell you something else. There were major volcanic

  eruptions going on at the time we left. Servalan had set charges all over the place, and as the underground tunnels began to collapse with the explosions everything else began to break up too. '

  'I doubt if they were really volcanic, ' said Koreli. 'There's nothing at the centre of the planet that could cause that sort of activity. ' She looked back at the screen. 'Avon's definitely underground. Are you sure the tunnels were all blown in?'

  'We didn't hang around long enough to find out, ' Vila said. 'There were so many explosions it wasn't safe waiting. Even Orac got dented. '

  The flashing dot on the screen was now progressing, but very slowly indeed. Vi
la remembered the scene underground as the explosions had started off the collapse. He shuddered and tried to find something to take his mind off the situation. 'Avon thinks you are a spy of Servalan, ' he said. It seemed a fair way of opening up a new conversation.

  'He's thought that since I first found him. In a sense he's right -1 am. '

  Vila fell off his chair. Koreli laughed. 'Servalan recruited me to keep an eye on Avon a year ago. It took me months to find him. By the time I had there had been the shoot-out at Cauda Prime and Avon was locked in a cell. I must have arrived just after everyone else left. '

  'I didn't see you. '

  'I'm very discreet. '

  'So you don't know what happened there any more than Avon does?'

  'No. '

  'But it is only Avon that Servalan wants. She must know that Avon is the one with the brains. She won't want to worry about me. You could just drop me off on some little backwater planet somewhere and tell Servalan that I ran away. She'd believe that. Or tell her... 'Vila stopped because Koreli was still laughing at him. 'Servalan recruited me but I'm not working for her. My job was to follow Avon and eventually find a way of reporting back on what he is up to. But once I've done that my life won't be worth a credit. She'll have me eliminated in case I've picked up some of the knowledge that Avon has tucked away in his head about computers, teleports, plasma shields and everything else he seems to know about. '

  'That's a relief, ' said Vila. 'If I can believe it. '

  'Vila, you can leave any time any place you like. You can walk out now, or wait for the next planet, or the one after that, or the one after that. But I hope you won't. I rather like you, and you are a very good thief. ' And she blew Vila a kiss before returning to the screen. Vila collapsed back in his chair certain (at least for the moment) that never again could he leave Korell's side.

  Avon, on the other hand, was starting to have doubts about the viability of ever returning to anyone's side. He had planned to make his way through the entry hatch that he had used on his last visit to Terminal, into the underground tunnels, and then work a route around the blocked passageways using the by-pass tunnels that would have been built to carry emergency air supplies from the surface, and to act as emergency escape routes. But these too now appeared to have been blocked in the explosions that wrecked much of the underground complex. Just as he was thinking he would have to make another overground trek to find the next entry point he located a small air duct, just large enough for him to crawl down. The grille had already been knocked out, but the iron ladder was still firmly attached to the wall. Carefully he made his way down into the pitch darkness. After ten minutes' descent he found himself standing on a pile of rubble but with no obvious way out of the duct. For a moment Avon considered the possibility that so much debris had come down the duct that he was still many feet above the bottom of the shaft. But his boots kicked the unmistakable form of the grille blown out from the top of the shaft. That would obviously have been the first thing to go down. If there had been rubble it would have come after the grille, and the grille should then be buried. Avon was clearly on the bottom.

  He picked out a tiny nuclear torch from his pocket and shone it around the circular base of the shaft. Half way round he found the join he was looking for. At the first push nothing gave, at the second, with a severe creak, it moved back.

  Avon walked out into a wide passageway apparently undamaged by Servalan's destructiveness. As far as he could judge he was probably several levels below the location the woman had chosen for her HQ, in what must at one time have been a recreation area for senior scientists. It was beginning to seem that his deductions had been right. Servalan had only been interested in Terminal as a suitable out-of-the-way location for trapping Avon and getting hold of Liberator. She had probably never even instructed her troops to search at these lower levels.

  Carefully, unwilling to believe his own deductions that there was nothing to fear down here, Avon made his way through the tunnels, his torch picking out the accumulated rubbish plus the odd skeleton, representing decades of neglect.

  His first priority was the establishment that this was, indeed, the lowest level. He checked a door. The main circuits were of course dead and it refused to slide open to his touch. But then the emergency fusion battery backups took up the request and the door slid back. Avon peered into a small store room, moved back into the main corridor and continued his cautious probing through the pitch darkness, penetrated only by the photon beam from his hand-held light pack.

  On Revenge, Vila was dozing in his chair in the main control room. To his right Korell continued to watch the screen closely. Neither occupant of the ship was in any way prepared for the explosion that shook the whole ship and threw both of them to the floor.

  'Take off, ' screamed Vila. 'Avon's triggered some moreexplosions. The whole place will fall apart any second now. '

  'We can't leave Avon, ' Koreli shouted back.

  'Yes we can, ' replied Vila, still shouting as loud as possible, despite the fact that the initial sounds of the explosion appeared to have died away. He lowered his voice a little. 'We can go into orbit and then come back when it's safe. Avon's bound to have a communicator. He can call us if he wants. '

  'He's still moving, ' said Koreli. 'Not very much though - as if he is in a confined space. ' And then she stopped speaking, for it was now clearly possible to hear a low rumbling which appeared to come from the very ground itself.

  'Take the ship up, ' pleaded Vila, but still Koreli would not agree, although she did set the controls in readiness for a rapid blast-off just in case the ground underneath them gave way. At the same time she put all the ship's scanners on different screens. One of them immediately caught her eye. She cried to Vila and pointed at it. For a moment he didn't realise what he was looking at. Then he saw. The sun in the sky was getting smaller. But that was impossible. The ship was still on the ground.

  'It's a super nova, ' he called. And then in a calm voice, 'Of all the ways to end. Our deaths will be seen in the skies of a million planets. '

  'Very poetic Vila, ' said Koreli, 'but also very untrue. I didn't know you read poetry. '

  'My mother did, ' said Vila. 'But what is it if it's not the first stage in a star explosion?'

  'The first stage in a take-off. The whole planet is on the move. That rumbling must have been the engines. And Avon has found a way of starting them up. '

  'You mean Avon is driving his own planet?'

  'So it would seem. Look at the screens now. '

  Outside it was growing dark as the star that had previously given light and warmth to the surface of the planet receded and became just another blue-white dot in the sky. Within minutes a deep permafrost covered the ground.

  Koreli shone a powerful light towards the sea, and saw the deep blues and sparkling whites of half formed waves now frozen, never to make the shore.

  'It was the only explanation, ' Koreli told Vila. 'A pointed planet in the wrong place. Evolution speeded up a millionfold. Terminal had been moved and the power to move it is inside the planet itself. '

  'So now Avon has a planet instead of a spaceship. What are we going to do? And don't say that we should go and find him. It's freezing out there. '

  'Since the planet is flying through space, and the only thing we could do if we took off would also be to fly through space, I guess we just sit and wait and see what he does next. Besides, ' she added, tapping out commands onto the template in front of her position that linked to Blake, 'I'm not sure we can do much else. The navigation controls are locked on a route that takes us out of this sector altogether. We can either fly out or wait. We can't go into orbit, nor can we follow the same course as Terminal at a safe distance behind. '

  Koreli considered the implications of this development and frowned. Since she had first met Avon on Gauda Prime she had found more and more that her predictions about Avon were becoming less and less reliable. She knew beyond doubt that in the early days Avon had tho
ught a lot about her, and as Vila had reminded her, he had guessed her connections with Servalan. Yet he had made no move to remove her from the ship. With a moment's sudden inspiration she checked the food stores. Avon had removed a considerable amount of concentrate - not enough to cause a problem to herself and Vila but still a considerable amount of food. It looked as if he were planning on a long stay on Terminal.She thought again. If Avon seriously thought Koreli was with Servalan he would know that she could signal Servalan with Avon's whereabouts at any time. What was his planning? Did he now think Koreli was not working for Servalan? Or did he think she would hold off until she had more information to give? Or was the planet armed in such a way as to make any attempt to get him impossible? That would seem unlikely - Servalan had blown up whole planets before, and the artifical environment would seem unlikely to stop her repeating the procedure.

  As she pondered further, Korell's mind turned to even more remote regions. The talk of the myth of MIND. Could the hard-headed Avon really be taken in by a myth as she had suggested? It seemed utterly unlikely, and she had hoped her baiting of him would have given clearer insights into Avon's motives; but it hadn't happened. He had led everyone on a totally reckless journey to Terminal once before. Could that be explained entirely by his already having at that time a clear knowledge of what was to be found on Terminal? She began to list the unsolved problems that had gathered around Avon like bees around honey, writing them directly onto the computer screen in front of her position. Each problem she turned into an isolated dataline, and as the lines began to fill up the screen she considered the links between them. She gave space to the troop disappearances on Gauda Prime and to the curious existence of KAT, a computer with powers far beyond what should be necessary for kinesthetic analysis and transmission. She linked that with KAT's apparent existence without tarriel cells. Why, she contemplated, should anyone want to build a non-tarriel computer anyway, even if it were possible? Separately she noted the reoccurence of the topic of rural environments, and linked that with Avon's absorption with MIND.