Means of Escape (Spinward Book 1)

by Rupert Segar

  Amazingly, the blast had not killed anyone. The anti-flux mine was designed to knock ships out of hyper flight. The theory was simple. There were two small metal spheres, magnetically charged, one inside the other. Between them flowed a high level of flux which was largely self-sustaining. A small explosive charge would shred the inner sphere allowing the flux to collapse rapidly. This sudden discharge would distort the hyper realm for hundreds of kilometres in all directions. The other effects of the mine were merely incidental but useful to their design: a minor blast wave of kinetic energy could knock a hole in the side of a spacecraft; and a pulse of electromagnetic waves would disable all but the most heavily shielded electronics.

  Indiscriminately, the MPs, the military police, had rounded up everyone from the market. Most of the tourists and all the indentured workers had been taken elsewhere. Yelena, Becky and Lea, along with a dozen irate stall holders had been placed in a small cell. Yelena thought it was a good sign they had not been flown to the capital Shangri-La but did not say anything to the others. They were wary of being overheard and all three stuck to their story. They were innocent tourists caught up in a terrorist attack.

  Perhaps they should have thought of a better cover story because they appeared to be at the bottom of a very long list. One by one, the shop owners were taken for questioning and did not returned. Presumably, the merchants had been released. The three ‘innocent tourists’ were being ignored. The pod had been taken by the MPs, who arrived a few minutes after the explosion. Yelena was fairly certain the AI had been brought to the jail house.

  The evening wore on and the red rays of one of Paradise’s two suns slanted through the barred window in their cell. The other star had long since set. The last merchant had long gone. Yelena, Becky and Lea were alone in the room. Still they dared not speak freely in the full knowledge that any conversation would routinely be recorded. From Yelena’s experience of interrogating captives in the Empire, she knew that no human ear would be listening. But some basic language cypher would monitor for key words. If they started talking about the gun fight or the explosion, an alarm would ring on some security desk and their conversation would be replayed for a human ear.

  The rattle of the air conditioning unit was beginning to grate on Yelena’s nerves. The light from the setting sun dimmed and the panel lights in the ceiling came on brightly. Lea, lying full out on a bench, turned to face the wall sighing. “If they’re going to keep us here all night,” he said, “I hope they’re not going to keep the lights on. I need my beauty sleep.”

  “You said it,” quipped Becky. “Do you think we’re going to be here much longer, Yelena?”

  Yelena was about to respond when the cell door opened. An elderly overweight detective, accompanied by a young MP entered the room. Yelena saw at least one other MP outside on the corridor. The detective was distinguished by his large law officer’s badge and the word “inspector” emblazoned on his breast pocket. He turned his flabby jowls to face them and peered through little piggy eyes surrounded by puffy eyelids.

  Lea sat up and shuffled along the bench to where Becky was perched. Nicky stood up and took two steps towards the detective and MP. “When are we going to be released?” she said.

  “I am sorry to keep you, er, Mrs Moscow,” he said addressing Yelena while consulting a data pad attached to his sleeve. “You and your two friends are currently staying at the Bella Nova complex, Villa 7?”

  “Yes, we’re on holiday, from Columbus.”

  “But you’re not originally from Columbus, Mrs, erm, Moscow?”

  Yelena wondered if her disguise had been uncovered. “No, I am a political refugee from The Kargol Empire. I have been living on Columbus for a few years. Why do you ask?”

  “It is no matter,” said the detective. “I am just enlightening myself as to your military bearing and forthright manner. But there is something else I need you to explain.” Yelena had an impassive expression and kept a steady gaze as her interrogator continued. “There were four of you who registered at the resort. So where is Mr Moscow? He’s your husband, I take it.”

  “I imagine he is at the villa, worried to death, given that we have been held here incommunicado for more than eight hours.” Yelena noticed Lea had put a protective arm around Becky’s shoulders, and that she did not seem to object. Clearly, they were both uneasy at the detective’s line of questioning. Thankfully Lea is staying silent, she thought.

  The detective’s lugubrious lips slid into a smile. “I sent two MPs up to Villa 7, earlier this evening. No-one was home, Mrs Moscow.”

  “He will be out searching for us.”

  “The entire resort is under military curfew. We have been the subject of a major terrorist attack. You husband is not wandering around looking for you, Mrs Moscow.” Yelena thought it was best to say nothing as the detective continued. “Then there is the question of your port entry records.”

  “Yes?” Yelena asked genuinely puzzled.

  “They do not exist. We have no record of you, until you arrived here at the resort and checked in at the Villa. Now, how could your entry records have gone missing?”

  “How should I know,” said Yelena indignantly. “Perhaps your immigration officials are just careless. This is a tourist world, that’s why we came here.”

  “Maybe you are innocent tourists, maybe you are not,” said the detective in a friendly manner. “But until we clear up these unanswered questions, you and your two quiet friends here will be staying in this cell.”

  The detective and the MP left clanging the door behind them. Through the toughened plexglass, Yelena could see the young MP standing guard. She glanced at Lea and Becky who both looked at her imploringly. Yelena shook her head almost imperceptibly but the other two got her message: if they were not being bugged before, they certainly were now.

  The window showed it was now completely dark outside, which was a rare event on Paradise with its two suns and three moons. The air conditioning continued to rattle as the three of them sat miserably in the brightly lit cell. Becky rocked slightly while cradled in Lea’s arm. Yelena stood by the window but faced the door observing the MP guarding the room through the narrow strip of plexglass. The young officer was so uncomfortable at being stared at that he had turned away from the door to avoid her gaze. He shifted uneasily from foot to foot as he stood sentry while Yelena continued to stare at the back of his neck.

  Suddenly, the room was plunged into darkness. Yelena heard sirens and alarms going off, some nearby, some distant. The door handle rattled and Yelena could hear but not see the door being pushed open.

  “Stay where you are,” said the young MP, sounding nervous. “If you attempt to escape, I will be forced to stun you.”

  “Stand away from the outside wall, Yelena,” said a mechanical voice in her ear. “Do not concern yourself about the soldier’s threat. His gun is now inoperative. Move away from the window.”

  Yelena could hear Becky and Lea standing up and moving away from the window, towards the door. The young guard clearly heard them too. “Stay back or I will shoot,” he said his voice almost breaking.

  Decisively, Yelena strode past Becky and Lea and towards the MP using his voice as a guide. “I’m warning you I will …” he said as Yelena thrust her open palm in the general direction of his face. She caught him under the chin and snapped his head back, cracking his skull against the tiled doorframe. The MP collapsed in an unconscious sprawl on the floor. Yelena stood still, breathing evenly listening intently for any motion in the corridor outside.

  The window behind Yelena and most of the wall surrounding it exploded and a pair of bright lights poured into the room. The plastiform concrete rubble was pushed aside by a ramp that extruded into the cell. “Yelena, there are several armed officer coming toward this cell. I can disarm them but we should all leave now to avoid unnecessary violence. Please enter the shuttle.”

  Torchlight and voices were approaching as Yelena, Lea and Becky scrambled over the rubble and
into the small spacecraft which had embedded itself into the side of the building. As soon as they were inside the airlock, the vessel lurched forward, the ramp retracted and the iris door closed shut behind the trio.

  “Where is the pod?” asked the ship.

  “I don’t know,” said Yelena. “I think they brought it to the jail house. But the pod was knocked out by the blast from the flux mine.”

  “Yes,” said the mechanical voice. “The pod was transmitting the details of the attack when it went offline. Now let us see if we can reactivate the unit.” There was a slight pause before the ship continued. “Coming online now. Take a seat all and belt up. I am applying inertial compensators as we move to the other side of the jail house.”

  On a vidscreen, a picture of the jailhouse swivelled through 180 degrees and then zoomed in. Yelena and the others felt a judder as a section of the side of three story building ruptured and collapsed. Bright lights played on a group of white coated technicians on the second floor who scurried about like termites unearthed by a ravenous anteater. There was a flare of jet vapour as the pod escaped out of the ragged opening. The machine that looked like a bulky desktop computer was actually flying like a model aircraft. The panicking technicians paused for a moment to gawp at the pod as it soared into the airlock’s now open door.

  The pod swooped to a halt and settled on the floor in front of Yelena. “I am very pleased to see you again,” said the machine in front of her, “but I am concerned about Art.”

  “Concerned?” screamed Yelena, who could feel the tensions of the day beginning to release a flood of emotion. “Where is he and why did you take so long to find us?”

  Yelena realised she was addressing the pod who had until moments before been knocked inert by the blast of a flux mine. However, she was really talking to the overarching personality that she called the ship. The entity replied.

  “Yelena, I am very sorry. I was mining a meteoroid belt on the other side of the system when you were attacked at the resort market. I saw the mine explode and immediately began to travel back here. Unfortunately, my main section was in mid-transformation which prevented any use of flux hyper flight. It took me six hours to reach Paradise. Then, when I arrived, I could not find any of you. I deduced that the pod had been deactivated but I was more concerned that I could not make contact.”

  “We were being held in a jail house with a counterintelligence screen, that’s standard,” said Yelena.

  “So far, I have disabled two hundred and fifteen such screens,” said the ship. “I have infiltrated the central intelligence core in the capital city. There is no sign of Art ever being on Paradise.”

  “Wasn’t it you who remove the records?” asked Lea.

  “No, erasure just risks exposure. I merely changed some of the details to assist Art and Yelena’s new identities. Someone else wiped the records of your arrival at the main spaceport.”

  “Who?” said Becky, speaking for the first time in hours. “Why did they target Art and not us?”

  “I do not have sufficient information,” said the pod. “However, my analysis of the movement of vehicles before and after the blast leads me to think that Art was taken to a private space field on the edge of the resort.”

  “Art’s been taken off planet?” asked Yelena with a growing sense of foreboding. She then told the ship how Art had been taken by a group of at least two men. She described the dog faced goon who had leered at her and the other voice she had heard saying that Art was what was “wanted.” Yelena also described the cargo float.

  “You observations confirm my suspicions,” said the mechanical voice. “Art was taken to the space field and put on one of three postal ships.”

  “Oh no,” groaned Yelena. “It’s no secret that the postal ships are an extension of the Imperial Intelligence Service. The Empire has Art. That’s why there’s no record of us visiting Paradise; Empire agents deleted them.”

  Lea leant forward. “Where were the three postal ships going?”

  “I tracked all intersystem traffic on my approach. Of the three postal ships, two went anti-spinward towards the Kargol Empire.”

  “Where did the third ship go?” asked Yelena

  “At this distance I cannot be certain but it was heading towards the Chimera Region.”

  Chapter 20: The Secret Paths

  Two weeks after his sudden disappearance, Mojo Blanc fell back out of the grey oval. The Chief Engineer was dishevelled, famished and exhausted. He babbled about planets and doorways before collapsing. After a night in the medical bay, Mojo, rehydrated and slightly tranquilized, managed to tell his story.

  After accidentally tripping and falling into the mysterious grey oval, Mojo found himself brusquely dumped on the ground underneath another grey oval on an altogether different planet. The Chief Engineer knew it was another planet because there were two moons in the night sky. At dawn, Mojo summoned up his courage and jumped back into the grey oval, hoping he would return to Dakota. Instead, he fell onto a sand dune in the middle of a scorching desert. There was the familiar grey disc but there was also a herd of what could only be described as camels with teeth. They seemed hungry and were slavering as they gazed at him. Mojo jumped again.

  The Chief Engineer retrieved his grubby overalls as he continued his tale. Out of the bulging pockets he produced a random collection of souvenirs. As Mojo talked, he arranged these mementos on the bedside table: a handful of glittering sand; some strange trifurcating leaves; the skeletal remains of a small rodent with what looked like a miniature rhino horn; feathers from an ostrich type creature; odd looking fruit; and, some luminous pebbles.

  Mojo described his growing desperation and dismay as every jump seemed to take him to a different world. The grey ovals were doorways but he did not have a map of where they led. Then he arrived on a planet which was different.

  The Chief Engineer christened the world Eden. He had landed in the middle of what looked like an orchard. The soil seemed sparse but the trees were laden with fruit. Mojo was so hungry he was beginning to feel faint. He decided to try a small piece of fruit. It looked like an T-shaped plum and it tasted delicious. Mojo waited for a couple of hours to see if the fruit was poisonous then, feeling no ill-effects, he gorged himself on the fruit and even drank water from a fast flowing stream. The day was warm and pleasant and Mojo fell asleep in the sunshine.

  The sun had passed its zenith when Mojo awoke. Feeling replete and rested, the Chief Engineer packed his pockets with fruit and jumped into the grey disc and passed straight through landing awkwardly on the ground still on Eden. With a rising sense of panic, Mojo tried the doorway repeatedly but it refused to work.

  The sun was much lower in the sky as Mojo looked about considering how he could survive. He walked with the sun behind him seeking somewhere to shelter. No doubt the nights would be cold. Mojo had a laser cutter on his belt along with a variety of now largely useless tools. He could cut down some leafy branches and make a shelter. Then he saw Eden’s second grey oval. Strange, he thought, even in the twilight, the grey disc stood out like a beacon.

  Mojo did not hesitate; he jumped straight into the doorway and was surprised to find himself back on the planet that he had visited immediately before Eden. He jumped again. To his delight he found that he was retracing his route; the doorways were acting in reverse. He reckoned he was only four or five planets away from Dakota when he landed somewhere new.

  The shock was a physical body blow. Mojo’s mood went from jubilation to devastation. He stood in the rain on what looked like a mist covered moor. The grey oval hovered above the ground impassively. Not for the first time, the Chief Engineer wondered whether there was another, much larger, disc floating in space high above the planet. He had a vision of his brother flying his shuttle from world to world. Perhaps he had followed a parallel track to his own. Possibly Philip Blanc and his wife, Yvette, had landed on one of these worlds. With the resources on board a shuttle, they could survive for years, especially if t
hey found a planet like Eden.

  The rain dripped from Mojo’s nose but he felt elated. He truly believed his brother and his sister-in-law had survived and were, like him, exploring the doorways, only up there in space. This conviction strengthened his resolve. Mojo was determined to get back to Dakota. He jumped again and again. This time there were no repeats. Every new planet seemed different, though it was hard to be certain as Mojo stayed on each for only as long as it took to jump again. The doorways kept working and Mojo kept jumping. The worlds he passed through became a blur of images. The only constant was the unchanging grey face of the doorway on each planet. In Mojo’s imagination there was only one oval disc; and, like god it was omnipresent.

  Mojo knew he could not go on much longer. The continual leaping from world to world was beginning to exhaust him. He was like a boxer training with a skipping rope: he was becoming addicted to jumping. The fear and thrill of the unknown as he arrived on each new planet sustained his effort and kept him going. Then he jumped back to Dakota.

  +

  The prospect of unlocking the secret of the doorways and possibly finding the two missing shuttles galvanized Captain Isako. She and six more of her crew would begin mapping the doorways. The team would be led by Chief Engineer Mojo Blanc.

  Two days later, they stood in the weather dome that surrounded the oval doorway. The space was transformed. The morass of tangled cables and randomly placed equipment had gone. Military efficiency had dictated a complete refit of the area. Two neatly arranged banks of detectors stood either side of the oval continually recording. There was a ramp either side leading up to the grey lamina. Those walking on the ramp were surprised by how bouncy it felt. The Captain had ordered the ramp to be well padded. She said she did not want to bruise her backside when she returned home.