‘How’s that even possible?’ Tredd asked. The Dawn Network held everything.
Eddie leaned forward, and with a soft voice, said, ‘Well, the Dawn Net might appear laser-proof, but if you look closer, you’ll see it’s full of holes… Weird stuff happens all the time. However, with Jill, I think something has been going on.’
‘What do you mean, going on?’ Tredd noticed he was whispering.
Eddie shrugged. ‘Perhaps another hacker.’
PART III
‘Before a natural collision, stars engage in a chaotic gravitational dance around each other. Moola and Yedda had no time to dance, as they crashed head-on. On collision, in one tiny moment, the smaller Yedda entered inside Moola and both exploded in a bright supernova. Both stars’ remaining planets were the first to burn up in the resultant shockwave. Loss of human life was negligible with the main settlement, Five Ways space station, evacuated well ahead of time. Dorama Corporation, the owner of Five Ways space station, is at risk to suffer losses exceeding 500 billion teradollars and is set to take the Ins-Corp to court over what they refer to as ‘an unnatural occurrence’. The full scale of destruction is yet to unfold, as the shockwave travels through space, shaking stars and burning planets…’
– Brock Roome, Newscast 1, Initia
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
DEEP WITHIN AN UNKNOWN PLANET, Tredd fell into a time-lapse.
He cursed his lack of judgement. Tommy had called his bluff. Tredd would never have shot the girl, knowing so little about her, and Tommy had seen right through him.
Tommy stood hunched, frozen in time, gripping his rifle, a Cromaron HT-12: a relic, recently known for its role in the Jura rebel insurgence. He stared at Evie with gleaming, mad eyes, droplets of sweat clinging to his skin. As opposed to Eddie, time had worked against Tommy. Bald, chubby and sweaty, he was only a shadow of the strong youth Tredd had once known.
Evie had been hit below her shoulder by a burst of Tommy’s rifle; her expression was stunned, her body just about to hit the floor. It was a queer sight, but nothing Tredd hadn’t seen before.
It would have been easy to dismiss Tommy’s babble of Shades as the talk of a madman, but one of the things he said bothered Tredd. Tommy said he could see veils belonging to those he called evolved beings. Though this was also easy to dismiss, he had explicitly referred to Tredd as being one. Did he know about the time-lapse? With this one reference, in Tredd’s mind, Tommy’s talk about the Shade goddesses got an uncanny dose of credibility. It was as unbelievable as the stars crashing, but that had happened too.
Tredd drew the Light Burst from its holster on his belt, and set it to tranquilliser mode. He pointed the gun at the side of Tommy’s neck and pulled the trigger – just like he had done with Daler, but this time there were no guards, just a girl. For a moment he wondered if he should stun her as well, but decided against it. He wanted to talk to her.
He let go of the time-lapse early and felt only slightly nauseous.
The gun dropped from Tommy’s hands, and in an instant his limp body fell to the ground.
Evie fell on her back, and lay there unconscious.
Aino screamed, the sound like breaking windows.
‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ Tredd said in a soothing voice – or at least as soothing as he could manage. He glanced at Tommy. ‘He’s only stunned.’
She cried.
Tredd let her. Then he put his callused hand on her tiny shoulder. ‘Please stay put. I have to look after my friend, OK?’
Aino nodded, sniffing, tears running down her cheeks.
Tredd ran to Evie. She had a blackened wound below her right shoulder, and she was bleeding from the back of her head. She had hit her head badly and was unconscious. Tredd tried to reach Eddie for help, but he was out of range – they had gone too far and too deep into the planet.
He heard a crack behind him, and glanced over his shoulder. The girl was gone, running back into the darkness from where she had come.
Blast, he thought. ‘I’ll be back for you,’ he said to Evie, and darted after the girl.
He ran through the mist to the darkness, into a dim corridor, and came to a crossing. Surrounded by moist air and darkness, he turned on the torch on his pistol. The walls of strange rock glared dark green in the light of his torch, and seemed to move as he walked along. As he stopped, the walls also stopped moving. Or was it just an illusion?
Tredd heard a low hiss and an occasional water droplet hitting puddles on the ground. Then he heard a yelp from the corridor to his left.
He turned, and saw a dead end. Or not quite, as the corridor ended with a locked door that the girl was trying to pull open. The metal handle clanked as she let it go and turned around. She dropped down and buried her face in her hands, sobbing. White against a background of dark rock, she glowed in the light of his torch.
Tredd had no real experience with children – if she even was one. He turned the light of his gun to the side, and with voice as neutral as possible said, ‘Hey…’
Warily, she raised her head. Tears from her big eyes ran down her round cheeks, and over a small birthmark on the left side of her pointy nose. ‘Please don’t kill me,’ she said, weeping.
If she really was the device he was looking for, this was going to be difficult. If she would bring about the destruction, he would have to kill her. Sacrifice one to save billions. It shouldn’t be too hard for a soldier, but he couldn’t go barging in and whacking the life out of her just like that. Of course, she didn’t look like much, but Tredd had learnt the hard way never to judge anything by its appearance. And this gloomy set-up, deep inside an unknown planet, was giving him the creeps.
Tredd bent down towards her. ‘Can you make the stars crash?’
She sobbed, and then lifted her eyes to look at Tredd, who tried to put on a fake smile in order to appear friendly. Then she nodded.
‘How do you do it?’
She stared down at her hands, twirling her index fingers over one another. She said, with a quiet voice, ‘I don’t know.’
Tredd wanted to know how it all worked, but did not seem to be able to get anything out of her. He wanted to figure out what to do with the girl, and if it was safe to take her with him. He had to get back to Evie and Eddie. ‘What is this place?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, her eyes filled with tears. ‘I don’t know what this place is. He took me away. He said he was taking me home, but it’s not… Please take me back home.’
So, Tommy had kidnapped Aino from her home planet. That was why she had no ID in the Dawn Network, she was travelling in the dark. ‘Where is your home?’
She scratched a nail and looked up. ‘Avalon.’
It was unknown to Tredd – like most places people called their home – but surely he would find it on the ship’s computers. Wherever it was, it was going to be a long trip. He could not promise to take her home though. FIST wanted her, and so did the Dawn Alliance, Tommy’s employer, and perhaps others… Tredd wanted to understand it all and then figure out what to do with her, but first they had to get out of the murky cave.
‘Come with me now,’ Tredd said, and extended his arm.
She grabbed it with her frail little hand and got up. Together they started walking through the dark back to the elevator. It wasn’t long, but Tredd paced quickly as he was worried about Evie. Aino had no trouble keeping up.
When they reached the light by the elevator, Evie was sitting on the floor, holding the back of her head. Eddie was by her side.
‘I tranquillised him,’ Tredd said when he saw Eddie staring at Tommy. ‘We should take him with us.’
Eddie stood up, looking ponderous, and walked around Tommy.
Leaving him stranded here would be a fitting payback, Tredd thought. Bringing him along, however, I could make him talk about the past and about Aino. Though he could be trouble—
‘I’ll tie him up,’ Eddie said, holding a bunch of what looked like composite cable ties. With Tredd’s
nod, Eddie knelt down to tie Tommy’s hands.
Evie cleared her throat. ‘I’m OK, been better, thanks for asking.’ She clenched her jaw and bowed her head. ‘That was one hell of a bang-and-tumble, but I’ll live.’
Her shirt had a hole on the shoulder, its edges charred black like the skin beneath it. The wound did not bleed – the veins had burned closed – but it was deep and needed medical attention.
‘Glad to see you’re all right. We must take you to Bells to glue that up,’ Tredd said as he squatted beside her. ‘Can you walk?’
Evie grimaced, pushed herself onto her feet, and rose up. ‘I think I can, whoa—’ She curled down, holding her head.
Tredd took a hold of her arm. ‘You OK?’
‘I just felt a bit dizzy getting up so quickly.’ She turned around and pointed at the back of her head. ‘How does it look?’
Tredd moved her hair aside. Blood stained his hands. ‘There’s a nasty wound, and a bump, but I don’t think anything’s broken.’
‘Good. But it sure hurts,’ Evie said with a sigh. She brushed the dirt off her clothes.
Eddie stood up beside Tommy, whose wrists and ankles he had just secured with cargo fasteners. ‘I didn’t find anything on his ship. Perhaps we should search the premises.’
‘I’ll spare you the trouble,’ Tredd said as he ambled towards Tommy. ‘The device… is she.’
‘The girl?’ Eddie looked at Tredd and Aino in turns.
‘Her name is Aino. She says she was taken from her family and brought here by Tommy. Apparently he wanted to do a service to a goddess or something—’
‘Nenetl,’ Evie said, limping beside them, ‘so that she could end this universe, and start a new one without all the baggage – like a reboot.’
‘Oh,’ Eddie said, looking like he had realised something. ‘You must remember the story… You don’t?’
Tredd shook his head. He had never been an avid reader of history, fiction even less.
‘Shades are the mythical overseers of the universe in a story ages old. Once they were a group of wise gods, but a fight broke their unity and the fate of the universe was left to humans. If I remember correctly, Nenetl wanted to start everything anew – do your reboot – but failed and was thrown into exile.’
Evie was nodding in agreement as Eddie spoke. ‘Perhaps the story didn’t end there.’
‘That would fit the description a bit too well,’ Tredd said. He didn’t like the way this was headed. He didn’t like it at all. FIST had told him about a device that could move stars, and eventually bring them all together in a big crunch to end this universe and a Big Bang to start a new one. Sounded just like this Nenetl.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Tredd said. ‘We need to sort this stuff out.’ He took hold of Tommy by the shoulders while Eddie grabbed his ankles, and together they started to drag him back to the elevator.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
EVIE LAY down on her side. On a metal shelf in front of her rested a set of medical equipment with bending pipes and metallic ends connected to boxes with a screen. She had no idea what most of the items in the infirmary did.
Night had already fallen on the strange planet as they walked back to the landing craft, Tredd and Eddie hauling Tommy. To Evie, the ride back through the dark, facing the unconscious, tied-down body of a man who had just shot her, felt much longer than the way down. But she had no choice: Tredd had wanted Aino to travel separately from Tommy, so had taken her up in the two-seater that Tommy had left down on the planet.
Bells had already done her magic on the back of Evie’s head, cleaning up the wound, gluing it up, and medicating her so that unless she thought about what happened, Evie would not even know she had hurt her head. Now Bells was tending the wound on her shoulder.
Evie had explained where they had been to Bells, how she had gotten shot, and about Tommy and the girl. Tommy’s motives for taking the girl to the bunker in this remote solar system remained a mystery. She hoped once Tredd and Eddie had had their chance to talk with him she would know too, but while she wanted to understand, she had no intention of joining them. The repulsive man had tried to kill her.
‘You were lucky to catch it on your shoulder,’ Bells said as she ran a whirring medical tool over the charred wound. ‘Just a bit to the left and you would have been gone.’
Evie still felt shaken because of the fact. Never before had she been shot at in real life. The man had really tried to kill her, aiming right at her chest. In the instant he pulled the trigger, Evie had ducked down. It was terrifying how close it had been. If there were parallel universes, in most of them she would be dead.
‘I know. Thanks for doing this. I don’t know what I would have done without you.’ She meant what she said – she had been lucky. Evie would have followed the guys down to the planet, just as she did, regardless of whether they had a doctor on board or not.
‘Poor girl, that Aino,’ Bells said as the tool whirred. ‘It must have been awful being snatched by that lunatic.’
‘You think he’s crazy?’
‘By the sounds of what you told me, yes, no doubt. I’m not sure if I want to talk to him to find out… but I would like to talk to the girl. If what she does is true, it could be the next step in human evolution.’
Evie nodded just as much as she could with her head on the pillow. She had been expecting a device, the nature of which was already too difficult to understand, but the fact that it was a young girl really blew her mind. How can she move stars? She’s so small. ‘What does that mean?’
Bells stopped the medical tool, replaced it on the rack and picked up a smaller one, like a pen. ‘We have harnessed the ultimate physical particles, the energy of stars, technology, biology – everything but one, the spiritual power of the human mind.’
‘Spiritual power?’
Bells bent down close to her shoulder, the device emitting blue light. ‘I believe that the mind wields the ultimate power in the universe. The ancients knew how tap into it, but it has since been forgotten. I am sure someone will find it again, and take it to the next level. Perhaps someone has already done it.’
Interesting thought. ‘It’s like the programmers of Momentum 6 – their minds are the ultimate power in the virtual universe. They are like gods, and because of that, they live little outside their domain. You think Aino is such a person?’
‘She is special,’ Bells said. The blue light disappeared and she stood up. She took one more look at Evie’s shoulder and replaced the device on the rack. ‘All done, miss. You need to take it easy for a while.’
‘Thanks, Bells, I surely will.’
Evie sat up, feeling pretty good considering the circumstances. She had received an artificial-skin graft just below her right shoulder, above her breast. There was a barely visible line, and a slightly different tone to the colour, but otherwise it was like her own skin. In a few weeks nobody would notice. She tried pulling on her top, but while not too painful, it was difficult to bend her arm. Bells pulled it down with a smile.
While Bells stayed to organise her research, Evie left the infirmary and wandered back to the galley. Berossus and Aino sat by the table, chatting, Berossus trying to amuse her by making a face out of his fingers. Aino seemed relaxed when Evie entered the room.
‘Hey, Evie,’ Berossus said. Then, as he saw her, ‘Wow! Dude, your skin’s perfect again.’
‘Thanks, but you’re still a bag of meat.’
Everyone chuckled, and even Aino put on a hesitant smile.
‘How are you doing, Aino?’ Evie asked.
She looked up and hesitated. ‘OK.’
‘Would you like something to eat? I’m ravenous.’ Evie picked up a plate and stepped up to the foodalator. She yearned for traditional Jindalar samosa, and asked the machine for the closest thing.
‘Yes, I could have some shrocks, please,’ Berossus said, his hand up in the air.
‘I asked Aino. You’re always eating anyway, and shrocks, is that supposed
to be food?’
‘Fried balls of lamb fat,’ Berossus said nodding and licking his lips, ‘and with red-hot chilli sauce they’re finger-licking good, even the ones from the foodalator.’
The foodalator made a beeping noise and Evie opened the hatch. A few brown nuggets had appeared on the plate. Even though they looked unlike the samosas back home, the familiar scent of a Jindalar home rose up to Evie’s nostrils. She had wanted to get away from it all, but now for some reason she needed something homely. She picked up the plate and said, ‘Aino, want to try one?’
‘Thank you,’ Aino said, nodding.
Evie took another plate from the cupboard and set one of the nuggets in front of Aino. She sat beside her to eat.
Aino examined the imitation of a samosa in front of her, and touched it with the tip of her index finger.
‘It shouldn’t be too hot,’ Evie said.
Aino grabbed the nugget with two hands and brought it up to her mouth, first taking a smell, and then a bite. ‘Mmm…’
Evie took a bite out of hers too. It felt harder than she expected, and there was no hard crust or soft filling. Perhaps she had been away for too long, because even a cheap imitation made her feel the tastes of home, the tastes of childhood. She had to take a deep breath, just thinking about it.
Waving a bottle of chilli sauce, Berossus cut in, ‘What happened to my shrocks?’
‘You’re big man, you can pick up your own fat balls,’ Evie said, purposely teasing the big man, who grunted and stood up. She turned to Aino. ‘Like it?’
She nodded. ‘I like it a lot, it’s a similar taste to what we used to have at home.’
‘It is?’ Evie asked in surprise.
‘Uh-huh. My dad always has me tasting dishes from across the five races. Most of them are, well…’ She covered her nose, squinted her eyes hard shut, and showed the lip of her tongue for a moment. ‘I try to forget those ones, but those Jindalar samosas were so yummy, I could live on them alone for days. To be honest, sometimes I did.’
Evie chuckled. ‘You miss home.’
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