The landing pad officer walked up to Vorlar, saluted him and said, ‘Vice Admiral Block, we have ordered the crew to disembark, but they have not complied. Requesting permission to board.’
‘Proceed, Lieutenant,’ Vorlar commanded.
The soldiers rushed past Jill. They clustered around the side entrance in an arrow formation with assault rifles pointing forward. The first one attached a probe on the door. He pressed a few buttons on it and took a step back as the heavy door started inching upwards.
The solders moved in.
Jill sat waiting. She hoped the mechanic would refrain from fighting, for his own sake. A big man or a small man, the soldiers would make mash out of him regardless.
It was frustrating to just sit there. There was nothing she could do but watch. She had lost everything. Her life had been with the navy; she had no friends to speak of. She had even lost the control over her body. Will I be confined to this chair for the rest of my life?
She could not envision a positive outcome. Compared with the potential options of lifetime imprisonment as a cripple or being hooked up to a system to minimise her footprint in an eternal torment, she hoped for a quick death, or even a chance of playing it out in the front lines. But those things were as unlikely to happen as any Dresnean shedding a tear.
Her vision went blurry with tears, and she felt drops slide down her cheek and fall down on her shirt. The idea of her and Tristram ever being together was stupid and childish. It was so unrealistic, so improbable, and so precious.
More tears fell.
Vorlar pushed a handkerchief against her face. ‘Poor baby, don’t you cry. I’m sure they’ll be gentle with the big man.’ He sprung up. ‘Ah! Here he comes!’
The robots carried the big man down. His eyes were closed, like he was sleeping. There was an ugly cut on his brow. Behind him the robots carried another man, an officer in navy uniform. An orange cat, the one Jill had sent to Tredd, ran down the platform past the soldiers.
The lieutenant ran up to Vorlar, saluted, and stood to attention. ‘We have captured the mechanic, and can confirm his identity. He shot one of ours before he was tranquillised.’
Vorlar smirked. ‘Take him to a cell. I will talk with him later.’
The lieutenant saluted and ran back to his unit to give orders. The men and the robots formed a line and marched back inside through the automatic door. The cat snuck in with them. As a resident of this ship, she knew where to go and nobody paid attention. To Jill, the cat only served to remind her that her efforts had been in vain.
Jill was left sitting there with Vorlar and a few soldiers. With a blank gaze she stared at the cold ship. Vorlar had taken everything from her, except perhaps one thing: her feelings for Tristram.
JILL WOKE up to the sound of someone shouting.
She remembered dozing off while waiting for the trip down to Eura on a planetary assault craft. She opened her eyes and saw a big man slam onto the floor in front of her.
It was the mechanic, Berossus Dengo. He raised himself up as the door swished shut. He glanced at Jill, then threw himself at the only door of the small windowless room, banged it hard, and shouted in a foreign language.
‘It’s made of chrystallium,’ Jill said. ‘There is no way for you to break it.’
Berossus stopped banging. ‘You blasting bastards!’ he shouted at the door. He stared at it, his neck stiff and veins throbbing. He turned to Jill, eyed her and her chair and scratched his head. ‘Who are you?’
‘A friend of Tredd’s. Jill.’
‘Jill… Ah, yes.’ His face lit up. ‘You helped us escape. You are his childhood sweetheart.’
‘Uh-uh,’ Jill said, feeling awkward. While it was nice to know Tristram had spoken well of her, she didn’t want to know it all.
‘I’m Berossus,’ he said, and reached out his hand. He eyed her with a dumbfounded expression, and after a moment, pulled his hand away. ‘Can’t you… Are you…?’
‘You mean paralysed from the neck down? I’m not – or I wasn’t. The doc injected me with something today.’
‘That’s terrible.’ He thrust his hands deep in his pockets, hunching his shoulders.
Jill was done crying, but she still clenched her jaws thinking about it. The likelihood of her ever walking again was as low as winning the jackpot of the Tera-Tera Lottery. As if she would ever even make it out alive. She was so close to crumbling, the only thing keeping her together was the navy training she’d had for handling extreme physical and mental stress. Her guiding star, the place she drew herself back to when she started drifting to thoughts of death, was Tristram. Whatever the circumstances, she was going to see Tredd again, even if just for a moment. It had become her sole aim. Nothing else mattered as long as she could see Tristram one last time.
Berossus sat on the bench opposite her, looking down at his hands. His wrists had fresh bruises from the restraints he had been in. ‘You know,’ he said still looking down, ‘I’m sorry about all of this.’
‘I think it’s me who should be sorry,’ Jill said. After all, capturing Aino for the Dawn Alliance had been her mission.
Berossus shook his head. ‘No. I brought the doctor along. It was too easy. Now, I look back and see it was not I who went to her. She came to me. She was a perfect match: she specialised in neurology, she was at the site, and she was ready to go. She wanted to do it for research; she even had all the right credentials. Berossus was fooled again. So stupid, so stupid…’
Jill cringed. It was too easy for the special forces undercover operatives to arrange something like this. She herself had used them in more elaborate schemes to make unsuspecting people provide information or services without them ever knowing it had happened – including emptying a whole planet of its indigenous people to make way for a military base. She regretted having played a part in it, but it was done. ‘It’s not your fault. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been someone else.’
The room trembled momentarily as the landing craft took off, but settled as the inertial dampeners took effect.
Raising his head, Berossus gasped. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Somewhere down in Eura. I’m actually from—’
The big man stood up and started pacing around the small room. ‘We’re going terrestrial? Oh my… Oh my,’ he mumbled to himself. Then he began to shout. ‘I must go back, take me back!’
‘Calm down,’ Jill said, frowning. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘I can’t go down to a planet,’ he said, pacing nervously.
Jill raised her eyebrows. ‘Surely it’s not—’
‘No, you don’t understand!’ Berossus freaked out, jumping right in front of her. She tried to pull away, but could only move her head back by perhaps two centimetres. The large bearded face filled her field of vision. He put his large hands on her shoulders, gave her a serious stare, and said, ‘You’re in grave danger.’
Jill was taken aback, and wondered why he had suddenly become so theatrical. ‘Yes, I am well aware of that,’ she said in an openly sarcastic tone.
Berossus pulled away. He leaned against the door as if he was going to force it open. ‘No, you don’t understand. If we go down to the planet, I will…’ He sat down on the bench and rested his head in his hands. He let out a long sigh, then raised his eyes to look at Jill. ‘I’ve only been down once, a long time ago, but I know it will happen again. I can already feel it.’
Now she became curious. ‘What will happen?’
Berossus hunched down and shook his head. ‘I’m so sorry… I lived my whole childhood on a space station – born and raised in IIS258 – and by my eighteenth year I had never been to a planet. My mother knew better than to let me go down – she said it was not good for our kind to live down on planets. She always made me feel like we were something special, unlike the others.’
Is this guy going to tell me his life story? Jill wondered if it would be helpful, but settled on nodding and letting the big man continue.
‘As
a teen I wanted to visit Ophelia-X, but my mother was against it. I even threatened to run away from home, but she kept her head, and I never had the guts to follow through. Still, it didn’t stop the curiosity from building up within me, and just before my eighteenth birthday I had my chance. I escaped the station and hitched a ride with a friend down to the beautiful O-X. I remember this same tingle on my skin then, even though it was almost twenty years ago. Thought it was from excitement…’
‘Doesn’t sound too bad.’ Jill had had her share of tingles too.
‘No, but that was only the start.’ Berossus grabbed the edge of the bench and pushed himself to sit upright. ‘We landed down at one of the beach ports and entered a swanky bar on the shore. The drinks were cold, the star, Halcyon, burned hot, and the girls even more so—’
Jill raised an eyebrow.
‘Anyway, the next thing I remember was waking up in a cell naked and cold, loose bands around my body, neck, arms and legs,’ he said, and showed with his hands where he had been tied, highlighting the bruises he had just received on his wrists. There was no need for restraints now. A simple rounded chrystallium capsule, a navy special, was practically inescapable from the inside. They could detonate an ion blast in the middle of the room and the bench, the walls, the door, and even the embedded lighting would remain unaffected.
‘Why, what had happened?’
‘My friend Anser, the girls we were with, and two of the bar staff…’ Berossus paused and closed his eyes. ‘Everyone was shredded to pieces… dead… and dozens of other people injured and millions worth of property destroyed. They said I had turned into a furious raging monster, and taken more than twenty shots from the police tranquilliser gun before I went down.’
‘Let me get this straight,’ Jill said, feeling her face tense as she tried to understand what Berossus had just said. ‘What exactly do you mean?’
Berossus shook his head. ‘I had lost myself… My memories were gone, but I saw the surveillance video: a huge, hairy, screaming red monster wreaking havoc in the bar. They said it was me.’
Jill nodded. Perhaps someone spiked his drink… and he really is the size of a monster.
‘The police examined me for hours, perhaps days. They did a test, then threw me back in the cell, then they did another test – cell, test, cell, test, and so forth – so I lost track of time. Then the tests ended, and I was left by myself, alone in the cold, empty cell.’ Berossus crossed his arms, hunching.
‘Did they find anything?’ Jill asked, wanting to understand if there was any biological explanation for him changing. She had read about an instance of a Baar man turning green and suffering from hallucinations after an exposure to strong Dresnean adaptogens. This could have been similar.
‘No, absolutely nothing,’ he said, and shook his head. Then he opened his arms and leaned forward, his palms on his knees. ‘That’s the thing: my numbers were normal for an Andron.’
That ruled out drugs – or most of them. ‘What do you think caused it?’
Berossus looked down and took a deep breath. ‘I know it sounds silly, but I know there’s something in me, something that’s not visible – like a curse – in every cell of mine.’ He looked about his arms and chest and sighed.
‘Perhaps it was a reaction to something in the air?’ Jill tried.
‘Perhaps.’ Berossus shrugged and looked away.
Jill got the message. He believed it was magic, there was no way around it. ‘How did you get out then?’ If what he had said about the massacre were true, it would have been a long sentence.
‘My mother picked me up and took me home.’
‘Really?’ Jill was perplexed. ‘How’s that possible?’
The big man scratched his beard. ‘To be honest, I never thought about it that way. She’s my mother. She has always been there for me.’
‘Didn’t you just say you killed people and destroyed property? Surely your mother couldn’t reverse that.’
‘I don’t know. We didn’t really talk about it, but I know she knew I had turned into a monster. She knows.’
‘Interesting,’ Jill said. She figured that instead of turning into a monster, he had gotten drunk, done something foolish, and been arrested by the local police. Then he had, in his own mind, built a story of a cursed monster to cover his shame. ‘Are you sure you… turned into something?’
Berossus leaned her forehead on his palm. ‘You don’t believe me.’
Jill shrugged, but nothing happened. She could not move her shoulders, nor anything else. She was just a talking head. ‘To be honest, I find it quite challenging.’
‘Believe it or not…’ Berossus stood up, and walked to the door, eyeing its chrystallium frame. Then he turned to Jill with a solemn expression. ‘Just make sure that when we reach the planet, you do whatever it takes to get away from me.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
HENNING DAL’S office occupied the space just below the highest point of the tower, and offered an expansive view over the Garden and past the walls, over the green countryside of Eura. Green pastures stretched as far as the eye could see, with a few blue lakes scattered here and there. It was pure, undisturbed nature – the nearest city was over five hundred kilometres away. Inside, the office felt comfortable in an instant, perhaps due to it expansive use of wood panelling, supporting pillars like trees, and unpainted wooden furniture between a plethora of plants and, most remarkably, a floor apparently of real green grass. Tredd poked his finger into it, and found moist soil.
Henning himself looked like he did on the video, perhaps slightly less polished; he had coarse grey stubble and prickly hair, and his skin was less tan. Contrary to most people Tredd had seen in the community so far, he wore a warm grey suit with a distinct silver emblem in the shape of a fan on his chest. He walked across the room barefoot, carrying himself bolt upright with a sombre look of contemplation. When Tredd entered, Henning stopped and turned. The stern expression vanished from his face, he stared at them, eyes wide open and mouth gaping, and said, ‘Aino… is it really you?’
‘Father!’ Aino ran to him.
Henning lowered himself to embrace her. ‘I’m overjoyed to have you back. I had lost all hope… But then on this holy Sunday afternoon, you come back to me. It’s a miracle.’
‘I’m so happy to be home,’ Aino said, and rested her head on her father’s chest.
Henning glanced up at Tredd and Evie, then back at Aino. ‘Let me take a look at you. It is really you… and you have grown! I want to hear everything.’
Aino nodded and beamed in her father’s embrace.
Henning looked up at Tredd and Evie. ‘Who do I have to thank for returning my girl to me?’
‘I’m Tredd Bounty.’
‘Evie Yeoh.’
Henning stood up; he was taller than Tredd. ‘I see that you are also a son of Eura.’
‘That’s right, I’m from Initia.’ Tredd found himself answering too quickly, and wondered where Henning had gotten the information – perhaps they had enough of an access to the Dawn Network to look up anyone’s profiles.
Henning smiled. ‘You surely are; I can see it in your eyes. Thank you for bringing Aino back. Please, do sit down; I want to hear the whole story.’ He moved across the room to a set of comfortable blue chairs. Aino darted behind him.
Adessa touched Tredd’s hand as a gesture to follow them. ‘We will make snacks available, and if you require anything, just let me know.’
Tredd nodded, and with Evie followed Henning and Aino to the lounge chairs. Henning sat on the couch with Aino by his side. She kneeled on a pillow. Tredd sat on a low chair and let out a long breath. He couldn’t remember when he had sat on anything as comfortable.
Looking around, Tredd saw Henning eying Aino, Tredd, and Evie. It was as if everyone wanted to ask something, but they were not sure to start. Henning broke the silence, ‘So, tell me, how did you find my little girl?’
While Tredd hesitated – he didn’t know where to begin �
�� Aino took over and said, ‘He was so fast Tommy didn’t have a chance! Then she got shot! Dad, can you imagine? She was shot!’
Aino was eager to tell the story, and Tredd let her. Henning listened intently, asking a few clarifying questions to which Tredd and Evie sometimes chipped in. Two ladies in white brought in small dishes such as smoked fish, dried meat, glazed vegetables, flatbread, butter, and berries with honey. While the ladies laid out the dishes on a low table between them, Henning explained that everything on the table was grown and produced within the community using ancient sustainable methods.
Tredd felt relaxed as he sunk his teeth into real food and chatted by the fireplace, but it was not long until the topic of Aino’s powers entered the discussion. Aino said, ‘Tommy wanted me to make stars crash into each other. I didn’t want to, and I didn’t know how, but he made me…’ Her voice trailed off and she looked down, frowning.
Henning pulled his chin back. ‘I think you’re inventing this…’
‘No,’ she said shaking her head. ‘I’m sorry, Daddy, but it’s true.’
‘It is.’ Tredd swallowed a piece of spicy dried meat and met Henning’s eyes. ‘She made Yedda and Moola crash – I assume you have heard about it.’
Henning looked at him with a solemn expression and set his small plate on the table. ‘You can’t be serious!’
Aino shrugged, hands crossed.
‘Why don’t you show him?’ Evie said, waggling her eyebrows and leaning towards Aino with a piece of bread in her hand.
She looked away and down at the floor. ‘I’m a bit tired from the last time—’
Henning laid his hand on her shoulder. ‘It’s all right.’
Aino pinched her nose and closed her eyes for a moment. She raised her head and brushed her white hair back. ‘No, I’ll try…’
She blinked, drew a sharp breath, and gently touched her thumbs to index fingers. She froze on the spot, and stared at the dishes on the table. If she was going demonstrate her skill with food, Tredd knew she didn’t need to strain, as it was going to be easy for her. She was so good.
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