3.
There were several overtaking opportunities in the long, narrow tunnel of the Brayle Highway, but the car’s over-cautious control systems refused to seize them.
“This is crazy,” Ewen wailed in frustration as the lumbering, overloaded freight pallet in front of them maintained an even speed.
“Hit the next rest area symbol,” Jenine ordered. “Quickly! There’s one coming up!”
“We can’t afford the time-” He broke off as Jenine reached across him and touched the appropriate control on the wide dashboard.
The car swung off the road and onto a spur that led to a toilet area and charging points. The car slotted itself into a space and the charging shoes at the front locked automatically onto a power rail.
Several other resting travellers watched curiously from the security of their vehicles as Ewen and Jenine jumped out and opened the side panel of their car that gave access to the control system.
“It’s IC750 on this model,” said Jenine, looking over Ewen’s shoulder.
Ewen traced the device and prised it out of its socket with a screwdriver. “And isn’t IC751 the speed governor?” he asked.
“Yes, it is.”
That component too was levered off the circuit board. They jumped back into the car and rejoined the highway. Within five minutes they had caught up with the freight pallet. Ewen cautiously took hold of the tiller arm and twisted. To his delight, the car swung out of the lane.
“It works!”
“Look out!” Jenine warned.
Ewen had to tuck in again to avoid an oncoming car, but as soon as it had passed, he pulled out and increased power. The car surged forward and overtook the pallet.
“Brilliant!” Ewen cried jubilantly. “Full manual control!”
They overtook several other goods vehicles in short order, in one instance shaving it so fine that the passengers in the oncoming car appeared to die of fright.
“Watch the charge levels,” Jenine warned. “You’ll burn too much power at this speed.”
The car’s selective call speaker suddenly clicked. “Pull over and stop! Pull over and stop!” The voice was that of authority.
“A police car!” Jenine hissed in alarm. “A long way back. An air-cushion job. We’ll never outrun them!”
“If you do not pull over and stop in ten seconds,” boomed the speaker, “we will open fire.”
“They’re bluffing,” said Ewen. “They won’t risk it on the highway.”
Suddenly a brilliant light flared in the tunnel. The plasma bolt struck the tunnel roof behind the speeding car and dropped a burst of white-hot globs of molten rock that splattered and danced on the road. The rear lights of another slow-moving pallet appeared ahead. Its freight platform was laden with new travelator sections that had been made at the Centre. A heavy, slow-moving load. Ewen saw his chance and squeezed past it.
“That was only a warning!” the speaker declared. “Next time we won’t miss. One…!”
“Shoot the pallet’s tyres!” Ewen yelled at Jenine. He jerked the tiller bar back and forth, causing the car to veer wildly.
“Two…!”
Jenine snatched up the PD weapon and tried to aim it. “Stop swerving, you idiot!”
Ewen straightened just as Jenine fired. She was not familiar with the weapon but she could hardly miss. The blast of energy ripped into the unmanned pallet, shredding its bulbous front tyres. It swerved violently and intercepted the next shot fired by the following police car. The vehicle struck the side of the tunnel, ripping out lights. The impact threw it across the lane so that its lacerated tyres tore into the crash barrier, causing the vehicle to rear up and overturn amid a welter of sparks and a terrible screeching of travelator sections that spilled across both lanes of the highway. Impact detectors sensed the crash and closed down the entire highway in both directions, forcing Ewen to swerve around vehicles ahead that were braking to a standstill.
He flashed Jenine a quick grin of triumph as he jockeyed the tiller. “One up to us.”
“More likely one down to us,” she retorted, badly shaken by the incident.
They arrived in Brayle thirty minutes later without further incident just as the zargon lights were brightening in the dome. It was a small town with expensive shops and broad, neat sidewalks. Even its chord-metro station entrance was embellished with statues and fountains. Ewen drove slowly along the main street with his hand resting lightly on the tiller, keeping the car dead centred in its lane and at the regulation speed as though it were driving on auto. A few traders opening up for the day’s business took no notice of the strangers.
“Next left,” said Jenine, reading a road map.
Ewen made a neat turning. The shops gave way to smart houses set in individual plots. They entered a short linking tunnel and emerged into a smaller dome that consisted of a circle of about fifty larger homes grouped around a broad but shallow water reservoir. There were no tall blocks to jeopardize privacy therefore many of the single-storey houses had rooms without roofs. There was a children’s adventure playground, and those homes bordering the reservoir had rowing boats and swimming facilities. There was even an area of smooth plastic beach treated with nonslip material. Despite the affluence, there was an air of desolation about the estate. This was not where people lived, but a place for casual visits.
Having disabled the car’s automatic control and navigation system, the only way to find Calen’s house was to stop the car, restore the missing components to their sockets, and let the car find its own way to its programmed destination. It turned into the drive of one of the more modest dwellings. Once off the road, the car permitted Ewen to take over manual control so that he could park out of sight from the road.
The ID number that Calen had given the couple opened the front door. To Jenine’s secret relief, the rooms were large. After a brief exploration of the expensively furnished rooms, they unloaded the car and fell into the first double bed that they had ever experienced.
After her ordeal scaling Senate House, Jenine was asleep in minutes, but Ewen remained wide-awake, worrying about the desperate situation they were in. It was impossible to be a fugitive in Arama. It was a miracle that they had reached Brayle unchallenged. Although they had enough ration packs to last them about ten days, it was doubtful if they would be able to remain in Brayle for much longer than that. Sooner or later someone would be certain to notice their presence unless they opted to remain prisoners in the house, and where would that get them? It was the lack of food that would defeat them in the end.
He looked at Jenine, her face now serene after the tensions of the day. He suddenly felt fiercely protective towards her, and experienced a deep bitterness that he had allowed his selfishness and blindness to drag her into this suicidal escapade.
4.
They woke at midday and took a joyful shower together, delighting in each other and their new-found freedom. They ate a carefully-rationed breakfast while watching the news. There was no mention of the previous night’s incidents; the main news story, as always, was about Arama’s latest victory against Diablo. They watched a complete cycle of stories to be certain. When the war report came around again, Ewen voiced his concern for Jenine’s welfare. She dismissed his arguments out of hand.
“Even if I got them to swallow that you’d had taken me with you as a hostage, how do I explain breaking into Tarant’s apartment?”
“You didn’t actually breakin, did you? The door was unlocked. You climbed up the outside of Senate House as part of a practical joke, after all, there have been others. He burst in on you, which is true, and you defended yourself with a table lamp, which is also true.”
Jenine stood and unfastened the gown she had found in the bedroom closet. She held it open. “And how do I explain this?”
Ewen stared at her. He saw the golden-skinned girl in his dream, emerging from the water, gleaming rivulets streaming down between her breasts, running down her thighs and soaking into the sand.
/> He drew her to him to shut out the memory of Tarlan’s blood and because he wanted to feel her close to him. They remained like that for some moments, not speaking.
“It’s too late now,” said Jenine quietly. “There can be no turning back.”
Ewen’s self-confidence had deserted him. “No turning back from what, Jenine? Where do we go from here?”
“Well,” she said, always the more practical one. “The first thing is to look at those seismographs that got us into this mess.” She fastened her gown and set the datapad on the table.
“I never had a chance to ask you if you managed to download all of them,” said Ewen.
“All except the last one,” said Jenine, shivering at the memory of Tarant bursting in on her. “This first one is Pelcan Station.”
They both watched the wipe bar sliding down the screen. The image emerging from under the bar was blank.
“Same as before,” Ewen muttered. “Exactly the same as Keltro.”
The wipe bar completed the seismograph image. They stared at it in rank disbelief. The picture was divided by an uneven but definite horizontal line that delineated rock in the lower half and nothingness in the upper half.
“Pelcan is about as far from Keltro as you can get,” said Jenine. “Some fissure.”
It took them an hour to call up all the images and print hard copies. Each one told the same story: all over Arama, at a height of about five domes, the rock, which they believed was infinite and filled the universe, came to an abrupt end.
“If it is a dome,” said Jenine slowly. “It is truly vast. The sides of it don’t even show up on the angled images taken at the extremities of Arama.”
They sat in bewildered silence for a long time. Occasionally one of them would pick up one of the prints, look at it in the hope of a new insight into the mystery, and drop it on the table.
“Perhaps,” Ewen ventured at length, “the universe is made up of layers. Maybe the rock starts again a long way up?”
“And what holds it up?”
Ewen pursed his lips and said nothing.
“There is something,” said Jenine slowly. “Do you think it’s possible that we’re not supposed to see beyond whatever it is? Could it be some sort of screening put there by the Guardian of Destiny?”
“To hide what?”
“Heaven?”
Ewen snorted. “Do you believe in heaven?”
Jenine hesitated before she uttered the fateful words. “Not now.”
“Well then.”
Jenine looked through the seismographs again one by one. None of them had been examined in detail because they had both been overwhelmed by their main message. Something caught her eye. “Ewen what do you make of that?”
She was pointing to the boundary above the chord-metro station at Albron. Just above the line where rock ended was a pattern of flecks that looked out of place.
Ewen stared at the faint traces and held the image at arm’s length. “Look’s very odd,” he agreed. “Anything like it on any of the others?”
The checked through the prints. Ewen found matching flecks along the nothingness boundary on another print that had also been captured at Albron, but at a different angle - proof that the mysterious pattern was not due to a fault in the seismoscope.
Jenine squinted at the first image, deliberately blurring her vision so that she saw the overall effect and not individual traces. “They seem to fall into a pattern of rectangles or blocks, don’t they? Like…” She lapsed into silence.
“Like buildings?”
She was relieved that Ewen had voiced her thoughts. She turned her gaze on him, her jade-green eyes large and serious. “Yes - up there. In the nothingness. Or vacuum. Or whatever it is, there are buildings. A lot of buildings.”
5.
“Supposing,” said Ewen thoughtfully, “we alter the aspect ratio of the datapad’s screen so that the horizontal component is compressed? And regenerate that image using some enhancement?” Without waiting for a reply, he reset the screen’s parameters and called up the image again.
They watched the picture that appeared in the wake of the wipe bar. This time it appeared to have been squeezed in at the sides. The distortion packed the traces more tightly together and had an elongating effect on the vertical features of Arama. It also gave greater clarity to the mysterious images above the surface. This time they appeared as definite blocks.
“Buildings,” Jenine declared. “They’re too regular to be anything else.”
“Or natural crystalline structures?” Ewen ventured.
“Those are buildings,” said Jenine firmly. “They’re as big as anything in Arama. Bigger. You don’t get crystals that size.” She bent over the screen. “And that proves they’re buildings. That can only be a tunnel.”
Ewen followed her finger. The lack of traces that suggested the presence of a tunnel leading to the buildings, if that was what they were, had been too widely dispersed on the earlier image to make their absence apparent. Now the faint trail of blank through the rock, which they had come to recognise as the mark of a tunnel, was plain to see. It was smaller than a metro tunnel. It started beneath the mysterious buildings and sloped down through the rock at a shallow angle of about ten degrees. By reprocessing the other images they were able to plot its route through the rock to the proximity of Keltro where the trace was lost in the maze of metro tunnels near the station. They checked the maps of the chord-metro system in the datapad and found no reference to the mysterious tunnel.
“There’s one place that’s often mentioned but doesn’t appear on any maps,” said Ewen. “And that’s the Revelation Centre.”
“If such a place exists,” Jenine replied. “Diablo doesn’t exist; we’re sure heaven doesn’t exist. And I’m now certain that the Revelation Centre doesn’t exist.”
“Why?” Ewen pondered.
“Why what?”
“What does it all mean, Jenine? Why all the subterfuge? What’s the point of it all? What does it achieve?”
“You might as well ask what the purpose of life is. So what do we do about this tunnel?”
“We start looking for it tomorrow,” said Ewen.
6.
Ewen waited until Jenine’s auto taxi had been gone ten minutes and called one for himself. He stepped out of the house wearing one of the close-fitting grey two-piece travel suits that they had found in the house. A citizens’ headband was draped around his neck. He carried a holdall, zipped shut to conceal the PD weapon and some tools. Not having credit meant that he had to slot money into the taxi’s meter. As the cab passed a deserted building site, he flung his medallion into the rubble. If they did transmit a location signal, as he suspected, it would might delay the search. He hoped Jenine had remembered to do likewise, and chided himself; Jenine was more sensible than him. She had been the one to suggest separate taxis to take them to the station.
At Brayle the ticket-issuing system was out of order which meant queuing at a manual booth. He did not know that all over Arama the ticket machines had been taken out of service.
“Cash?” said the ticket clerk. “Don’t you have a card?”
“I left it at home,” said Ewen easily. “A return to Keltro, please.”
The clerk accepted the coins as though he had never seen such things before and issued him with a ticket.
The incident worried Ewen. Why wasn’t a technician fixing the machines? Transport breakdowns always got priority repairs.
The clerk watched until Ewen was out of sight and made a call. Like all the ticket clerks throughout the network, he had been given specific instructions concerning passengers who paid for their tickets with cash. The youngster who had just gone through was the second cash-paying passenger within the past few minutes. When the pictures of Ewen and Jenine appeared on his screen, he confirmed that that was them.
While he was confirming their destination, Ewen and Jenine spotted each other on the platform, and entered the same passenger capsule wh
en the train slid into the station.
The same thing happened at the third station: several passengers left the capsule when the doors hissed open, but no-one boarded the train.
There were now only three other passengers in their capsule so Ewen moved to a seat near Jenine.
“Something’s wrong,” he said in a low voice while looking absently out of the window. “People getting off, but no one getting on.”
“It could be a coincidence,” Jenine replied unconvincingly.
The train hissed into the next station, the last before Keltro, and even Jenine had to admit that the total absence of passengers waiting on the platform for the train was strange. The doors opened and their last three fellow travellers disembarked. There was the unmistakable sound of power couplings being released as the train pulled away. Ewen glanced back through the rear window and saw that the train’s rear passenger capsules were remaining behind in the station.
The train did not accelerate to normal speed when it entered the tunnel. Instead the sound of couplings unhitching was repeated, and the capsules ahead veered off into a spur tunnel leaving the capsule Ewen and Jenine were travelling in to continue on alone.
“Now do you believe me! They’ll be waiting for us at the next stop!”
“I believe you,” said Jenine calmly. “The question is, what do we do?”
Ewen opened the holdall and pulled out the PD weapon. “Get down behind a seat,” he ordered. “Don’t argue!”
Jenine crouched down and watched Ewen aim the weapon at the access panel set into the passenger capsule’s floor. He turned his head away with eyes tightly shut as he fired. The blast of plasma was blinding in the confined space. He kicked the wrecked panel clear and fired twice at the linear induction motors. Jenine had risen to her feet and was thrown forward as the stricken capsule lost lift and crashed down on the rails with a nerve-shredding scream of metal on metal. The interior lights went out but Ewen was ready with a discharge tube by the time the vehicle had screeched to a standstill.
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