Means of Escape (Spinward Book 1)

by Rupert Segar

  The archaeologists’ greatest puzzle was dubbed the Ziggurat of Centuri, a sprawling building up to three kilometres high without an entrance. When the exo-historians finally broke into the Ziggurat they found a giant interconnected honeycomb. Each cell contained fine sand, presumed by some to be the remains of alien bodies, although no DNA or anything which might be described as alien genetic material could be retrieved. If there had been any pictures or hieroglyphs within the supposed giant mausoleum they had long flaked off the walls or ceilings and mixed with the fine grained sand on the floors.

  The discovery of long departed alien cultures was repeated around the galaxy’s spiral arms. The extinct cultures were all of different ages. Many had not developed interstellar space travel. Others, although technologically advanced to a point where interstellar travel was possible had chosen, it seemed, not leave their own solar systems. In all the worlds discovered to have extinct cultures, the exo-historians were left poor pickings. The cosmic scale of time was just too vast. Machines and monuments, libraries and tombs crumbled to dust over ages. Old Earth archaeologists could happily look back mere tens of thousands of years to retrieve the DNA of prehistoric plants. Terran historians recovered entire languages from the walls of tombs and the odd trilingual stone. The exo-historians, however, had to deal with the passages of time dealt out in tens of millions of years. The dusts of eons had cheated them out of the wisdom of ages.

  In all of humankind’s recorded travels, no living alien culture had been encountered. There were always rumours of flying saucers or other mysterious craft, some alleged to be piloted by legendry little green men. There was also the cultural myth of the forbidden planet: a mysterious world lost in the depths of space; or one that once found could not be left. People in every sector of every spiral arm knew these stories but there had never been any evidence to bear them out.

  The Fermi Paradox was resolved. The fact of intelligent life elsewhere was a proven certainty but the chance of any of them visiting Earth in the recent past, or any time soon, was remote.

  Chapter 5: Spinward

  Yelena Kolowski lay on her bunk in the cabin. She had been crying quietly, now she was reassessing her situation. On her home world, Crandos, women largely repressed their emotions; it was the men who were expressive and prone to tears or laughter. Yelena’s emotions, however, had finally overpowered her. The indiscriminate killing of her colleagues and the attempt on her life had initially left her feeling numb. Her instinct for survival had allowed her to act without feeling. Now, lying in the darkened cabin the ship had created for her, she had time to reflect on the devastating blow dealt to her.

  Yelena’s home planet, Crandos, was one of the original five worlds of the Empire. The planet had a military tradition that stretched back continuously to before the Great Plague. Crandos had been part of the old Junta, the regime that stretched a quarter of the way around the galactic disc. When the post-plague revolutions swept through the thousands of planets making up the Junta’s domain, Crandos was one of only five worlds where the ruling military elite managed to keep control. In the years after the Great Plague, when the planet was isolated and all the AI computers stopped working, social reform followed of necessity. There was a degree of liberalisation: elements of the free economics professed by the enemy, the Federation, were allowed to develop; most citizens were allowed to vote for a parliament which had an advisory role; and, the courts and the judiciary were given some limited independence to protect an even more limited set of rights for civilian citizens. The military elite kept ultimate power to itself. The generals and now land-bound admirals made concessions to their tax-paying citizens but kept their hands on of most of the world’s wealth.

  For more than a millennium, the military elite ruled supreme. A reformed economy provided even more wealth for their vast military forces. Members of the elite syphoned off money for themselves. The tax paying citizens also received a large share of the economic benefits of limited free trade. The people were mostly happy. In every generation, dissidents would appear but they were not tolerated. They would be harshly treated by the authorities: sentenced to hard labour or simply made to disappear.

  The Second Great Expansion changed little on conservative Crandos. Re-opening the door to interstellar space travel brought the dormant Crandos navy back to life. The rush to rebuild a fleet caused an economic boom. Wealth that had been stockpiled in low interest government bonds was released to re-arm the world’s forces. The construction and arms industries made fortunes for their shareholders and largely ex-military directors. There was a new age of affluence as luxury items from other planets we sought, bought and traded. The tiny middle class grew and became comfortable under the regime.

  The Crandos military elite first heard the news of the old Junta’s complete collapse from the Cult of Explorers, missionaries whose arrival on the planet marked their re-unification with the rest of the galaxy. Among the admirals and generals, there was a great distrust of the selfless missionaries who brought their “Good News” to isolated planets. The elite were downcast to hear that on other world the people had deposed their governments. The military leaders sent out their own scout craft to confirm the extent of the galactic revolution. Much to their disappointment, after two generations of surveillance, they found only four other worlds where the old regime had survived the millennium of isolation. They were all reasonably near, by hyper-light standards. Neptune, the furthest world from Crandos was only a ten day trip, a mere 312 light years away. Trade and cultural exchange grew into a mutual protection pact. Interstellar war was too costly to be common, but it was not unknown for defenceless planets to be raided by well-armed pirates. Crandos, New Mars, Colossus, Sparta and Neptune all came to the ‘assistance’ of nearby worlds. Inevitably, those weaker planets were put under the ‘protection’ of their more powerful neighbours.

  Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the five military powers began to merge. Enlargement or conquest was a cultural imperative in their combative cultures, but they all knew fighting among themselves would put their own regimes at risk. However, stagnation was not an option. The five separate kingdoms were growing planet by planet and were beginning to rub up against each other. Increasing tensions actually forced each military elite or ruling party to cooperate more closely with the others in order to avert disastrous armed conflict. Finally, after decades of diplomacy, the warring worlds joined together. At a conference held aboard the giant Ulysses spacecraft carrier, the five sets of leaders decided to unite in one all-powerful Empire. A decade later, the Empire had one clear leader, an Emperor.

  Yelena had grown up in a politically conservative family. Her elderly mother and father always voted for the Administration, the party which completely supported the Emperor. In fact, the Administration leadership was made up exclusively of retired generals and admirals. Yelena had willingly enlisted at 16 years of age, a year ahead of compulsory conscription. The enlisted route gave her the chance to extend her education in engineering and allowed her to become an officer within two years. By the age of 20, Yelena was a fully-fledged lieutenant engineer.

  Yelena’s father died a few days after her twentieth birthday. She had celebrated her birthday on the space station in orbit above Crandos. As a privilege, she had been allowed a five minute, vid-screen call home. Yelena was pleased to have been able to speak to her father just before he died. One hundred and thirty one was a good age.

  Most of her time was spent in near space or attending military college on Crandos. Yelena was able to visit her mother fairly regularly. She had become frail and forgetful after her husband’s death. Yelena was a week out on a trip to Flora, one of the most recent planets to come under the protection of the Empire, when she received a text-vid informing her of her mother’s death. There was no question of returning home to Terra Nova for the funeral. The vastness of space and physics of hyper flight were unbending and remorseless.

  Yelena was on a tour of the occupied zone, newly conquer
ed planets like Terra Nova, on the edge of the Empire. The first planet she was deployed to was Flora, a world full of degenerate pacifists ruled by armed pirates for centuries. Yelena believed the Empire’s forces were liberators, freeing the people from an oppressive regime. However, her naïve convictions were shaken when she had to police anti-tax demonstrations. She and the other troops opened fire with stun rifles as flower waving protestors marched towards them. Yelena had almost questioned her superior’s orders when she discovered three dead children among the stunned protestors. A stunner worked by overloading the body’s nervous system, causing intense pain and eventual unconsciousness. The shots designed to incapacitate adults had killed the children.

  On the next planet, Aribia, an arid ocean free world only recently taken into protection, Yelena witnessed the imposition of what was called imperial justice. A small garrison of troopers had been poisoned in their barracks in one of the desert regions of the planet. A group of Aribians had dumped highly toxic plant extracts containing odourless cyanide into a reservoir built to store rainwater for the soldiers. The terrorists were traced back to the village of Tarat, three kilometres away. The poisoners did not come from the village but had mounted their attack from the settlement. None of the villagers in Tarat, it seemed, had even been aware of the terrorist’s plan. Nevertheless imperial justice was swift. Within hours, a bloom of vargas exploded a hundred feet above Tarat. The gas drifted down to the ground with lethal effect.

  As the lead engineer in her unit, it was Yelena’s job to supervise the loading of the cylinders of vargas. Up until then, the use of the deadly chemical was a theoretical tactic. As the two sets of five shiny metal cylinders slide into the apertures on wings of the attack craft, Yelena knew scientific theory was becoming fearful fact.

  Following the attack on Tarat village, she was put in charge of the decontamination team on the ground. The task for Yelena’s team was simple: she had to locate the ten spent cylinders and make sure they were safe. Deadly vargas decomposed within minutes of release. Yelena had to make sure all the vargas had evaporated and to retrieve the metal cylinders that originally held the gas in solid form. Moving from cylinder to cylinder, Yelena passed scores of dead villagers. At one site, where a cylinder had crashed through the roof of what looked like a school dormitory, Yelena had to clamber over children’s bodies piled up behind a locked door. The blue tinge of their skin and terrified expressions haunted her nightmares for months.

  Yelena and the rest of the small team of engineers did not talk about the attack. There was a quiet horror that such retribution had been necessary. The troopers on the ground, on the other hand, were jubilant. For weeks and months after, the soldiers would be found in bars and clubs celebrating the attack on Tarat with toasts to the dead.

  Secretly, Yelena questioned many of the decisions made by the officers above her; she questioned the need to invade planetary systems and she was appalled by the harsh rules of the occupation. However, Yelena never dared speak about her doubts and her revulsion, even to her closest friends. Speaking out against the policies of Empire was a capital offence. Not reporting seditious speech was also punishable by death.

  Two years later, Yelena was a chief engineer. She had a cabin of her own, the majority of her salary was accumulating in a government bond account, and she had found respect and friendship among her colleagues. Yelena had learnt to put her treasonous thoughts aside. She was incredibly loyal to her fellow engineers, her navy and her world. She felt an emotional fealty to the Empire which had brought strength, stability and prosperity. Yelena knew her place in a very ordered and efficient regime. She was mostly happy. Until, that was, the Empire ordered her execution.

  As she lay on her bed in an alien cabin, another sob wracked her body. Most of her friends among her shipmates on board the Fist of God were dead. What is more, it was her fault: she had selected them to be part of the team working on the mystery craft. They had been slaughtered by the Empire. They were killed in the same way the Empire had slaughtered the innocent villagers of Tarat. Her near execution had been part of that plan as well. She knew that. The trooper may as well have succeeded, she said to herself. The Imperial Navy wasn’t perfect, she thought, but it was my family, my home and my life. Now, it is over and there’s no way back.

  +

  Colonel Garth paced the floor of the captain’s cabin on board the flagship destroyer, Dreadnought. Despite his ordinary rank, the Emperor’s enforcer was in charge of a powerful fleet made up of ten destroyers and twenty five cruisers. Reviewing the orders for the fleet, Garth smiled as he reminded himself of the superstitious addiction to the revered number five which afflicted the navy. He had succumbed himself and had assigned two groups of five cruisers to pursue the alien craft. Colonel Garth told himself that he was only doing so because the captains of the cruisers would feel uncomfortable, even less confident, if they were not part of a group of five.

  The tiny alien craft had headed spinward out of the Terra Nova system. The tiny tell-tale signs of hyper-flight had been picked up by Imperial warships all over the system. Now, two hours after the escape, some the sensor information from nearby parts of the fleet had arrived on the flagship, by slow, radio wave transmission. Within the solar system, light speed busting hyper-flight was tricky at best and impossible near large planetary masses. But not impossible for that little alien toy ship, Colonel Garth thought, reminding himself of why the artefact was now so important.

  The Empire’s defences were based upon the early detection of threat. Any enemy spaceship or fleet could not jump into normal space from hyper-flight any less than 10 million kilometres from planetary masses. In the case of any such attack, the Imperial fleet stationed in every Empire controlled system would have hours to intercept and destroy the interlopers.

  The mystery ship had, it seemed, the ability to break the laws of hyper-flight and could emerge right next to a planet. As such it had the potential to be a deadly weapon. And, now, according to the traces, it was heading towards the Empire’s biggest enemy, the Alliance. Colonel Garth asked himself how he had missed the critical importance of the little mystery ship.

  Previously, the tiny craft had been regarded as a curiosity, if only because in the whole history of spacefaring, no-one had ever built a one-man hyper-flight ship. The amount of flux energy needed to jump a ship into the Upper realm varied proportionately with the surface area of the craft. The economics said the bigger, the better. The Colonel recalled a lecture at Alpha College, the elite military school. It was like a mouse and an elephant falling off a very high overhanging cliff, said the uniformed lecturer. The elephant would accelerate downwards to meet a bloody end, its massive weight overcoming air resistance. The mouse created only a very small amount of air resistance but this would counteract its tiny weight, so the small creature survived the fall. The Colonel was not sure he fully understood the metaphor but the meaning was clear: small ships made no sense in the Upper Realm of hyper flight.

  The alien ship, if it was alien, was clearly built for hyper flight. You could tell from the range of instruments on the control console. Not that it was easy to decipher their function at first. Much of the panel was covered in buttons and light switches that were labelled with squiggles and strange symbols. That all changed after the first test flight.

  All hyper flight ships have to have sensor webs for the pilots to fly by. The alien craft was no exception. The engineers detected clusters of resonators and scanners in the head rest. There were many more than in conventional navy ships but this craft was far from conventional.

  At Proteus Spaceport, a small corps of engineers and technicians had attempted to understand how the ship worked. There were no examination panels for them to open. In fact, as Lieutenant Yelena Kolowski, the chief engineer had first discovered, there was not a single screw or riveted seam in the entire vessel. It was as if the ship had been moulded or grown rather than assembled. They did find some sockets in the rear of the spaceship. In one they
detected a residual current in the other there was a scent of flux, the energy needed to jump into the Upper realm to make hyper flight possible.

  The technicians made plugs to fit the sockets. The first attempt to re-power the ship almost ended in disaster. The technicians must have reversed the polarity for the moment one socket was connected huge arcs of energy leapt from ship to battery store. Lieutenant Kolowski pulled the plug to stop the short circuit. An hour later, a chastened technician finished the charging process. The strange little craft had enough power to run its systems and a small amount of flux energy, enough for a short hop within Nova Terra’s solar system.

  The giant freighter, Vim, lifted the little alien craft out of the solar plane until it was 10 million kilometres away from the planet. The one-man space ship was jettisoned from the one of the freighter’s many holds.

  The navy pilot, Captain John Bull was an experienced if unimaginative type. Later he recalled how strapped into the seat in front of the control console, he felt powerless. The technicians had strapped his head to the headrest along with an array of sensors and recorders. He felt a tingle in the rear of his skull and suddenly he saw through the sensorium the volume of space immediately surrounding the tiny ship. He remembered the pictured offered to him was much more detailed and vivid than any sensorium he had ever experienced. He outstretched his hands and the joystick controls sprang into his palms. A black and white image of the solar system sprang into his mind’s eye. He looked towards his intended destination, a spot in the void of space above the northern axis of the solar system about 20 million kilometres away. A marker, like a chess pawn appeared on the map. He gripped and twisted the joystick that the engineers said would trigger the jump. He felt the usual disorientation that accompanied the transition to the Upper Realm of hyper flight, and then he blacked out.