by Rupert Segar
“What have you done?” he asked his hands coming up to his face in horror. “This is treason!”
Yelena, still restrained by the cables connecting her artificial abdomen to the console, turned her head to face the ex-librarian.
“It’s amazing what people will do when they see luminous caterpillars, with teeth and two metres high rearing toward them,” she said.
Lea looked down at the two guards as Art removed their goggles. “You could make them see that?”
“Look. Lea, there’s a lot we can do but right now we need to get out of this library. We’ve got a route planned but the question is: are you coming with us or not?”
“The big guy here,” said Art indicating Wang unconscious but still trembling on the floor. “He’s pretty convinced you are part of our data snatch. He has already stripped you of everything you had here. What’s left for him to take?”
“Lea Whey we are trying to find the Forbidden Planet, the real one. We know it exists because we have a friend who, well, who came from there. We need you to find his home because he says there’s a secret there that will help save the galaxy.”
“You’re mad,” said Lea. “You’re both mad!”
“Lea, it’s up to you,” said Art handing Yelena one of the pairs of goggles. “We’ve got your thesis, so that’s safe even if you stay here and face the music. But we’d rather have you.”
“But no-one has ever found a Forbidden Planet. So how can you two?”
“Not us,” said Yelena in her quiet authoritative voice. “We have a special friend with powers to do all this: the deceptions, the data snatch and complete control of the library. It … he can lead us there with your help. We have to leave now. A ship is on its way to pick us up and our destination is the Chimera region. Now, do you want to come with us or not?”
Lea looked at Yelena, an apparently pregnant woman with two thick cables protruding from her bared abdomen. Once again, he noticed how attractive she was then he centred his mind. In a brief Zen like trance, he weighed his options. The choice was obvious. Either an escape to an uncertain adventure with the possibility of a legendary discovery; or, remaining to face jail, possibly execution and, at best, lifelong obscurity exiled in a cultural backwater. Lea knew there was only one answer.
“If you are willing to harbour an ex-librarian, I would be privileged to accompany you on a voyage of discovery.”
“Great, now, let’s get going,” said Yelena grinning as the two cable claws detached from the console and snapped back into her belly. The lights went out again and wailing sirens resumed all around.
Lea was literally stumbling in the dark as the trio make their way out of the library. Several times Lea saw lines of researchers following pulsing floor lights directing them along emergency exit routes. The two data hackers seemed to have their own pre-planned route. Every few meters or so, a hand would tug him left or right while all around was chaos and confusion.
They had almost crossed the huge floor of the reading room and were nearing the security station. All around the scanners were blazing with emergency lights. Three armed guards looked out at the unlikely trio and started in their direction. Two of the scanners began making loud humming and grating noises and then exploded showering fountains of sparks over fleeing researchers. The guards turned to look at the spectacle just as Yelena and Art led Lea through a doorway and into a dark stairwell.
At the bottom of the stairwell, Yelena wrenched open a door and they emerged into bright daylight. The emergency exit led them onto a grassy knoll in the glare of the sun. Ahead of them were half a dozen heavily armed soldiers. The troops were not concerned with them or any of the people fleeing the library. Instead, they were aiming their weapons at the oval shaped spaceship landing only fifty metres away.
Becky Bhuna’s voice played in their ears. “You guys can’t resist making yourselves the centre of attention. Do you want me to deal with the troopers?”
“No need, Becky,” replied a mechanical voice. “The library can do the job for us.”
Flaps opened in the wall of the building above them and a row of neural disruptors emerged. The stubby barrels were part of the library’s anti-riot protection. They fired briefly and the soldiers aiming weapons at the ship collapsed.
Yelena led the way down the grassy bank and past the twitching troops. A few evacuees from the library looked on as the iris door to the spaceship dilated and the three entered.
The ship lifted gently, and gathering speed circled the great Quintox library, flew over the market place and shot away towards the sun.
Chapter 15: Explorer Spirit II
The Cult of Explorers’ creed was to bring knowledge and opportunity to the isolated islands of humanity left stranded throughout the galaxy by the Great Plague. Suxie Wong felt proud to have contacted more than two hundred worlds cut off from the pan-galactic culture for a millennium. Most communities were grateful to the explorers for curing the Great Plague and giving them the technological know-how to re-join the rest of humanity. Some, however, did not welcome the end of their isolation. Thankfully, Suxie thought, those who rejected what they offered were few and far between, quite literally.
Most of the worlds, Suxie, had visited were eager to have some connection with the rest of the galaxy. Interstellar travel had never been cheap but it could be profitable. Many of the re-united worlds began by trading with their near neighbours. Trade and novel technologies often led to a new prosperity on worlds which had suffered austerity during their enforced isolation. Increased economic activity led to increased trade and the beneficial cycle continued. Suxie had seen many cultures flourish within a decade of their re-integration with the wider civilisation.
Most of the worlds she had brought back into the galactic fold were content with their material gains, happy to have a few more credits on their counters. A few of the worlds, however, were more than just grateful to the Cult of Explorers; they wanted to contribute to the wider galactic culture and become explorers themselves. One such was Fair Isles.
Twenty years after her first contact with the water world, Suxie had returned en route to another sector of the galaxy. She was delighted to find Fair Isles, a scattered archipelago of islands covering only the tiniest part of the globe, had dedicated its tiny economy to building explorer ships. Three had already been launched and a fourth was about to be commissioned.
The Cult of Explorers had gripped the archipelago and its citizens were obsessed. When Suxie landed back in the waters beside the main island of Crete, she was feted by residents as a returning hero. When they discovered that Suxie was about to celebrate her hundredth birthday, a general month long festival was declared.
Amidst the melee of carnival processions and town hall dinners, Suxie was invited to address the Explorer Academy on Crete. She was particularly touched to find Thistle and Nigeal, the two young children she had known twenty years before, graduating with top honours. That evening she had her first stroke.
Suxie convalesced staying with Thistle and Nigeal at their old family home. The brother and sister were waiting to hear if they had a place on the next explorer ship. Competition for places was great and the siblings were high on the list but not quite high enough. Places were awarded on merit and although the pair had come first and second in their year at the academy, other graduates from previous years had been waiting longer. Thistle and Nigeal were top of the reserve list.
Suxie celebrated her 100th birthday being wheeled about in a bath chair. Despite being under strict orders from her own ship’s medic to take plenty of rest, Suxie still had enough energy for a few small meetings in her guest bedroom. All morning, officials and dignitaries came and went. Suxie’s first officer, Ramones was present to usher her guests in and out and to take notes. The final meeting was a short but intense conversation between Suxie and Ramones. The pair had been lovers for more than thirty years. When Ramones left he had tears in his eyes.
At lunchtime, Suxie saluted a parade on t
he main road of Minos, Crete’s main town. She had not wanted to disappoint the uniformed youngsters, so refrained from explaining that the Explorer Corps were as militaristic as a disorganised bunch of pacifists. She had to practicing saluting with Thistle before the event. In the afternoon, she officially launched the latest spaceship which was named Explorer Spirit II in her honour.
In the evening, Suxie was wheeled onto the stage at Minos town hall for a banquet thrown by Crete’s elders. She barely remembered the food which was mostly fish and spiced rice. The speeches were long but tolerable. Suxie was impressed by the enthusiasm for the explorer cause attested by speaker after speaker. This small world was determined to make a big difference in the galaxy.
Suxie was pushed to the front of the stage. She thanked all who were present profusely and told a few anecdotes: tales of explorer deeds of the decades. Then she dropped her bombshell.
“Fair Isle islanders, your dedication to the Cult of Explorers is beyond doubt. For such a small economy as yours to have launched one Explorer class ship in twenty years would be commendable, but to have built and commissioned four such vessels is outstanding. It is an effort that puts many much more affluent worlds to shame.”
Suxie looked out at the audience in the hall, mainly made up of young aspiring explorers, most of whom would never leave Fair Isle. At the front, stood Nigeal and Thistle, in their neatly pressed uniforms. They both beamed up at her.
“As you may have gathered from the few stories I have told, my crew and I are getting on a bit.” There were shouts of dissent from the well behave crowd. “Some of us have decided it is time to step down…” There were more shouts of ‘No.’ Suxie continued “We have decided to hand on the explorer quest and our vessel to you, the youth of Fair Isle!”
The hall erupted in cheering and caps were thrown in the air. Thistle and Nigeal scrambled up the stairs to join Suxie on the stage. They were spluttering their thanks when the head of the Explorer Academy called for silence.
“Explorers, order please. I know you have a lot to celebrate. Captain Wong … I know you like to be called Suxie … but Captain, you have given over command of Explorer Spirit so now we will be sending not one but two new ships, with two new crews, to bring enlightenment and contact to the rest of the galaxy. Ma’am, we salute you.”
The small crowd of uniformed young people began cheering again. Thistle and Nigeal knelt down either side of Suxie, each holding a hand. “You don’t need to thank me,” said Suxie “We had two berths free anyway and the others have only been holding off their retirement because I wanted to keep going as captain. Now, they no longer have to keep looking after me, they’ll all be quite happy to settle here. My dearest Ramones will remain on board the Explorer Spirit to help the new crew in a non-official capacity. The rest of my colleagues have all been offered teaching posts at the academy and are delighted.”
“Are you never going home to Willow?” asked Thistle, remembering a conversation with Suxie twenty years earlier.
The fact that after a life of travelling the galaxy, most explorers found the library world far too authoritarian was something that Suxie did not like to admit. However, few explorers from Willow ever returned home.
“My dear, I’m coming with you. You and Nige are to take joint command of the new Explorer Spirit II, and I’ll be there in case you need some advice.”
The two siblings cried with joy and hugged the old woman, who shed a few tears herself.
Chapter 16: The Doorways
Anton and Pierre tumbled out of the grey oval doorway still tethered together and landed in a heap on the soft grassy ground. Anton slowly exhaled. The voyageur always held his breath jumping from one world to the next. He had a dread of what might happen if he tried inhaling in the grey void. Other explorers from his tribe said travelling between gateways was instantaneous but Anton knew that was wrong. Every leap, he kept his eyes open and from the moment he was engulfed by the grey nothingness to the instant his sight was restored on the next planet he would normally count one or two heartbeats. This last jump had lasted five heartbeats, his blood pounding in his ears. The longest jump yet, he was certain, though what this signified he had little idea.
As Anton lay contemplating the mysteries of the portals, he became aware of someone else exhaling. The breath was warm and moist and he was being showered in spittle. The voyageur turned his head to find a mini-bison looking down at him.
Slowly, he reached for the knife in its scabbard on his belt. Still linked to Pierre, the voyageur leapt up and encircled the beast’s neck with the chord that tied him to his apprentice. The mini-bison tried to bolt but, bearing the weight of the voyageur and his startled novice, the creature stumbled to its knees. Anton reached under the animal’s throat and cut with his knife.
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As the sun set over the plains, Anton and his apprentice sat contentedly chewing the well cooked meat. They were happy in the knowledge that they had several kilos of bison wrapped in grass, cooking in a fire pit; twenty more kilos of meat had been salted and wrapped in the thermal bags they always carried. Two square meters of hide had been scraped and washed and was now drying stretched under rocks.
The heat of the fire pit and the pleasant distortion of his stomach made Anton feel sleepy but he knew his duty. With the first bright stars appearing in the azure sky, he began to tell his apprentice the tales of the tribe.
“Some say our ancestors came from old France, Earth,” began Anton. “Others claim they were the first to roam the Great Plains of America. Only the planetary spirits truly know which is true. We were the Métis; our parents were from the First Nation and from the Free French of Canada. The recorded fact is that our people were on their greatest portage. The tribe was on a colony ship travelling to the promised land of Lakota but we never arrived. The vessel’s computers went berserk and we were ship wrecked.”
The voyage from Old Earth to Lakota meant several jumps into the realm of hyper flight. The old colony ships from Earth could travel a distance of up to twelve light years before they had to recharge their flux capacitors. The irony of hyper flight was it could only take place in relatively flat space time, well away from planetary masses, while the energy that made hyper flight possible, flux, could only be generated in steep gravity wells, like those created by planets. The voyage to Lakota therefor took many stages.
The colony ship carrying the Métis had stopped at Saudi, an Islamic system where they had charged their capacitors while in orbit about the capital world of Mecca. As was common, many worlds on the main migration routes had orbiting ports with huge stores of flux capacitors. These were topped up by a fleet of shuttles which ferried the flux from generators on the planetary surface. For Mecca, a largely arid and infertile planet, the trade in flux was a vital part of their economy. Earth bound vessels from further out would barter raw materials and manufactured goods to recharge their capacitors. Outgoing colony ships would pay with a mixture of Earth artefacts and information. On entering orbit, outward bound ships would sell information on everything from news of economic wars and stellar cartography to the latest films and fashion designs. Uploads to the planetary datasphere could be highly profitable as even the most holy follower of Islam had a voracious appetite for knowledge of galactic goings on.
The colony ship had broken orbit from Mecca, accelerated out of the ecliptic plane and jumped into the Upper Realm before the navigator noticed something wrong. The computer had lost its positional fix on the Saudi system and told him that it could not compute the direction of their destination. As the navigator sat staring hopelessly at her console, the captain announced that she had no control over the flux field propulsion ramrods; the vessel was accelerating at an ever increasing rate. The engineer called over his comms-link, shouting that he had been forced to evacuate the engine room because of electrical discharges. Two of his crew were dead; their smouldering bodies had been abandoned in the sealed-off compartment. On the flight deck, all the computer monitors wen
t blank. The crew did not know it but the Great Plague had struck.
For the passenger, the Métis, the next eight days were frustrating and frightening. The captain gathered the crew and passengers in the ship’s largest freight hold; vessel wide communications were impossible because of the complete collapse of the AI computer. The émigrés were told that the ship was accelerating out of control. The navigator said, theoretically their dangerous velocity was so high they could be travelling not ten light years but hundreds of light years. There was no way that lifeboats could be launched because of the envelope of flux surrounding the ship. In any case, no-one would want to return to normal space at some indeterminate place in the galaxy. The odds of ever being found would be infinitesimal. So they all waited.
When, at last, the flux ran out, the ship wrenched itself back into normal space. There was an uncontrolled blast of electromagnetic radiation which shorted all the external sensors. The uneven dissipation of the field surrounding the vessel produced an angular momentum that snapped the flux ramrods out of their housings and breached the ship’s hull. Seven passengers strapped down on their crash beds died of asphyxia before the pressure seals came down.
A day later the captain once again addressed passengers and crew. The ship was wrecked. The gravity engines had been burnt out; the cause of the electrical discharges that had killed two of the crew. All the navigational and sensor instruments were dead. The environmental controls were only just working. They had no idea where they were. That was the bad news.
Captain Ewoma Isoko, a tall black woman with a naturally dignified poise, gazed at the two hundred and eighty seven people gathered in the hold. The children sat silently at the front on the floor. The adults stood behind their offspring; some perched on stacks of the cargo containers. They all looked resigned to their fate. This will not do, she said to herself. Ewoma turned to her left and saw to her relief the Métis leader Anton Mato standing defiantly. He caught her glance and understood what was needed.