“Open up, it’s me!” he yelled, his voice hoarse, at which the door was unlocked and Gail threw herself, crying, into his arms.
“I was so scared I’d never see you again,” she sniffled, her tears running down her cheeks. “There’s been rumours that the entire city guard has been wiped out. What’s happening?”
“Darling,” he said, kissing here tenderly. “We’ll talk about it more once we’ve arrived at the airbase. The Olegians can attack us at any time.”
“But I can’t leave without a change of clothes!” she wailed, as she began to fill a bag with clothes and such personal effects as women have always needed to have with them.
“We have to leave!” he shouted, exasperated, when five minutes had passed. “Soon it may be totally hopeless to get back.”
When she was finally finished, they ran headlong out of the apartment and out onto the street, now filled with a rebellious atmosphere.
“Where’s our flight? No one’s seen them return, except for one severely damaged ship,” they heard a woman ask, as they squeezed through a confused and frightened crowd that was worriedly discussing what was going on.
“I’ve heard from higher up that they’ve regrouped and joined another squadron, in preparation for a major offensive that will force the Olegians into submission,” answered a youth.
“No bloody way,” muttered an older man, whose long experience had obviously taught him not to trust everything the government claimed.
When they arrived at the main gate of the airbase, they again found themselves surrounded by a large crowd, which hadn’t been there when he’d left, noisily venting their frustration. They carefully wound their way through the mass and were almost at the gate when several people suddenly noticed his uniform.
“Look at this!” yelled a man with a long beard. “Here’s someone who can maybe tell us what’s going on!”
“I don’t know anything,” shouted Ixter, continuing to push their way through at the same time as several others tried to grab them.
The mood was becoming more hostile until the guards noticed their increasingly dangerous exposed situation and, guns raised, ordered the crowd to let them proceed.
“That’s really a fine husband you have,” said Shay to Gail when, a short while later, they had arrived at the mess. “He didn’t budge a millimetre from his decision to leave to find you, even though it would mean breaking our orders.”
“I know,” she answered. “Why do you think I married him?”
“Well, it certainly wasn’t for the same reasons I added him to my crew, in any case, but we can both agree on his qualities, certainly. Anyway, it’s going to take a long time before the Olina is repaired, which is why you, just as our friends Kark and Allur, can stay with us until we know what’s going to happen next.”
“As long as I can be together with Ixter, I can live anywhere.”
“Really! Is that really true?” he teased, “Isn’t a stable the limit?”
“No, not even that,” she answered, with a smile.
“A cave, then?” tried Caver.
“That’s enough, guys,” she said, laughing. “Don’t try to put me on the spot, because you’ll never succeed. I’d follow him to the ends of the Earth, if necessary.”
That might be just where we’ve ended up, thought Shay to himself, gloomily.
CHAPTER 5
At the break of dawn, all hell broke loose, with furious shooting between the city’s defences and attacking Olegian planes. Shay, who stood surrounded by the others, as well as Kark and Allur, who had been allowed temporary lodgings at the base, repeatedly tried, unsuccessfully, to reach the air force commander on the phone. He was close to giving up when a crackling sound announced that they had contact.
“Hello!” he pronounced, “What are our orders?”
“There’s nothing that can be down in the current situation,” the commander replied, while yet another explosion rocked the room.
“Sorry, I couldn’t hear you!” Shay shouted, trying to override the alarms.
“I said that without functioning weapons, the only sensible thing you can try to do is to fly your ship to Urduk, where it can be repaired!”
“But . . .” was all Shay managed to say before he was cut off.
“No buts, that’s an order! There’s no reason to unnecessarily sacrifice a fine ship that could be useful to us in the future.”
“It seems like the miracle has happened,” said Shay, when he had confirmed the order and signed off. “Follow me, my friends, we’re off on a little excursion to Urduk.”
Running and crouching, together with Kark and Allur, they made their way through smoke-filled corridors filled with rubbish and fallen plaster. They had just managed to leave the building when a direct hit blew out all the windows in a huge fireball. When they approached the hangars, they encountered a group of confused technicians who had been on their way to their workstations when the battle command centre was transformed into a smoking pile of wreckage and charred bodies and now had no idea what to do.
“We have room for you if you want to go with us to Urduk!” shouted Shay, “But, if so, you need to know that we’re not going to be coming back for a long time to come.”
“Don’t we have to apply for permission to come along?” a woman asked.
“On a day like this it’s going to be difficult to get any kind of permission, so you’re forced to have to take such a decision on your own, I’m afraid.”
A series of nearby blasts finally convinced two of them to put aside their reservations and join the crew, so the little group were happy to arrive at the hangar, which still remained undamaged. As soon as Shay saw that everyone had made it on board, he drew the cabin door closed and, doing away with the obligatory checklist, threw the start lever that activated the ship’s slumbering functions. Immediately, the instruments on the shiny four-dimensional control panel began glowing, and several seconds later a green control light indicated that the ship’s computer was ready to obey orders.
“Prepare for start!” Shay shouted, as his thoughts were turning somersaults.
“If you’ve only thought of flying, then that’s OK, but otherwise the ship is toothless,” he heard someone say.
“Who are you?” he asked, surprised, when he turned and saw a wiry blonde-haired woman, dressed in blue work overalls, standing in front of him.
“Flight mechanic Desia Ziffler. I was just trimming the drives when the attack began.”
“Then you had better be seated and hold on, because now we’re on our way to Urduk.”
“Urduk!” she gasped, shocked.
“Yes, it’s our only choice,” he replied.
After slowly steering out of the hangar area, across wreckage that made the entire control console shake and rattle, they finally lifted, taking off through curtains of smoke, and without being able to intervene, watched as the entire city centre beneath them flashed in a flurry of exploding bombs.
Hug, who had long understood that the end was near, had been thinking unendingly about how they could escape to safety before it was too late. His attempts to get seats on any of the military cargo ships had repeatedly failed, and private ships were impossible, because the state had requisitioned them all during the war’s initial stages. In the end, their only hope was a city guard ship that he had seen returning to the airbase, and which he’d hoped would be leaving for Urduk. After modifying his oscillator, an ingenious machine that was part of the equipment he’d had with him from Oleg, so that it could interfere with flight computers, he convinced Lidia that they should move outside the city, saying that it would be safer in case the Olegians attacked. The place he took Lidia to was chosen with care, and was near a smaller airport outside Oboe. They had camped beside the runway for a few days, when the Olegians swept by in wide attack formation.
“I love you!” said Lidia, terrified, when the bomb explosions began to be heard all around the city. “Are we going to die now?”
“Talk into so silly.”
“But obviously we are under attack, so shouldn’t the Olegian armies soon be here?”
“Trust me, we’re going to make it, my love,” he reassured her, after seeing a ship take off and come flying in their direction.
Shay had just made a wide swing east of the city and was about to select full acceleration on all drives when Esai suddenly shouted that they were losing power.
“Why’s that?” Shay asked, bewildered and staring worriedly at the several warning lights intensively blinking in a red glow on the instrument panel.
“No idea,” replied Esai.
“It seems, at least, to be a serious problem that means we immediately have to make an emergency landing,” added Desia.
“Emergency landing?” Shay asked, refusing to let the words sink in.
“Yes! To calibrate the navigation computer’s circuits in relation to the drives, which we can’t do while flying. Something must have gone wrong during the tuning.”
The warning lights kept blinking and, when the ship felt even more sluggish, Shay capitulated and ordered them to return to Oboe and descend to a small airfield next to the suburb of Sernica. When the landing strip was in view, he reduced power to fifty per cent and, after adjusting the instruments, began the approach. “Hold on!” he shouted, only seconds after hitting the ground hard, followed by several lesser bounces.
As soon as they stood still, Desia and Ixter jumped up to start removing the navigation system’s computer, but before they could get to work Esai shouted that a group of people were approaching from the other side of the field.
“How many are they?” asked Shay.
“Seven, I’d guess. What should we do?”
“Let them come along,” he said, having decided, like so many times previously, with his heart.
Once Hug saw the large ship return, he took Lidia by the hand and, after a quick march, reached its deployed stairway, at the same time as five others. When they had all come on board, Caver, disturbed by having sighted crowds of people approaching from several directions, started shouting that they didn’t have room for any more. He hit the door switch, so that it swung swiftly shut with a loud hiss. Immediately thereafter, Desia and Ixter reported that they couldn’t find anything wrong and that the steering instruments now showed that all was in order.
“That was strange,” reflected Shay, but after having glanced out the window, he instantly decided not to think about it any further.
The Olina’s stern was pushed down by the rush of power as they lifted, but the drives were now functioning perfectly, with no sign of the earlier problem, so that they quickly accelerated and gained altitude. Just when they had begun to think that the danger was behind them, the alarms sounded and three dots, indicating enemy ships, appeared on the display. Shay immediately switched the drives to maximum power and anxiously considered the precariousness of their situation. If they came within firing range of the ships, once hit by their laser beams they’d be killed instantaneously. With every passing second, though, they were further out into space, so that eventually the geider meter, with a vibrating leap, reached 12 Bylo, then, infinitely slowly, rose to 15, which indicated the critical point for entering light speed. He breathed a quiet prayer that the Olegians wouldn’t catch up to them, when they were so close to being saved, and tried to stop thinking about whether the hundredths of a second it took to be killed were something that one would manage to be aware of. When a weak buzzing tone finally indicated that they were up in light speed, and could make the leap out into galactic space, he was overwhelmingly happy that he didn’t need to think about it anymore.
“This time it was within a blink of the end,” Esai said, when they had been absorbed by the cold darkness of the cosmic night and their speed was reduced to warp speed.
“Oh, yeah, in both eyes, even,” said Shay. “I don’t want to experience that kind of a launch again for a while.”
When their course had been set to Urduk, and the readings on the autopilot checked, he asked Esai to take over and went with Caver to the cargo bay, where the passengers were sitting tightly together and talking in quiet frightened voices.
“I’m Shay Ostender,” he said, when he’d gained their attention, “And I’m captain on this ship, which is called the Olina. I hope that you’ve settled in somehow and don’t feel too uncomfortable. As some of you already know, we’re on our way to the colony on Urduk, where we’ll probably be for quite some time.”
On that news, the room became abuzz with the surprised conversations of several of the passengers.
“The voyage is expected to take seven days,” he continued, after requesting their attention, “Which means that we will be forced to ration our supplies. If everyone cooperates constructively, though, it shouldn’t be any problem.”
“What’s it like on Urduk?” asked Kark.
“I’m relatively unfamiliar with the conditions there, but from what I’ve heard it seems to be an inhospitable planet that doesn’t allow life in anything but artificial environments.”
“What’s happened to the people in Oboe?” asked a woman from the air force.
“Unfortunately, I don’t know anything more than you do.”
“When are we going to be able to return?”
“For the moment, it looks pretty bad, but everything will certainly get sorted out in time, which is why I encourage you to try not to worry.”
Then, he introduced Esai, who began by gathering information about the airbase’s personnel. These were Rhus Kakir, who had worked as maintenance supervisor, Isla Solender, as an air traffic controller, and Desia Ziffler, as a mechanic. Relieved to find out that none of them had been forced to leave children or spouse behind, he could turn his attention to the latest arrivals. In addition to Hug and Lidia, there was an older man, Grewerg Malentzer, who had been a seaman and handyman, as well as a farmer couple, Ofra and Nadine Baator, with their children Mimosa and Garlev. When the briefing was concluded, they all pitched in to search through the cargo bay for things that could make the voyage more comfortable for them, and then Shay and Esai returned to their duties.
Lidia loved every one of Hug’s atoms, every centimetre of his body, all the octaves in his voice, and every thought. When she breathed in his scent, she felt as if she was floating on a rose-coloured cloud, and when their eyes met their souls merged. Her feelings for him had been tender since they’d first met, and she’d always been attracted to him, even though their relationship was more like one of friendship than romance. She was thus extremely happy that he had changed so radically and come to love her as much as she loved him.
Hug, on the other hand, considered that he had met the absolute dream woman, and saw her as the most loving, smart and beautiful of them all. It had pained him endlessly to see her so sad and disheartened, and to not know how to help her. When he had now, against all odds, managed the trick of arranging her safety, so that they could now look forward to even more time of mutual happiness, he felt that he was in seventh heaven. At the same time as he rejoiced completely about their partial victory, he realized, though, that the threat from the Olegians was hardly over.
The Olina headed on through the infinite emptiness of space, like a glowing beacon, while those on board tried to pass the time as best they could. The children occupied themselves, as children throughout the ages have always done, with every kind of game, while the others either fell into their own thoughts, or talked constantly as a way of subduing their worry. Isla, who belonged to the first category, sat afraid and freezing in a corner, and thought that it seemed to be forever since Oboe had been attacked. She had taken the bus to work, as usual, but had only travelled half-way through the airbase’s gates when the alarm had sounded its high-pitched wailing. Only a moment later, explosions were heard everywhere, and only seconds after she and some of her colleagues had found shelter next to a hangar, they had seen the flight control centre destroyed before their eyes. Those inside, if not killed
instantaneously, were nevertheless immediately exterminated by the fireball that erupted in connection with the blast. When Isla and her colleagues had wondered, in shock and confusion, what they could do, these crewmen from a ship had suddenly popped up, miraculously, and invited them to follow along. It was now two days since they had left Loria, and the entire time she was only travelling further and further away from her parents and siblings. When she had tried to talk with the others about it, it was as if they didn’t want to listen. As long as one denies that something has happened, then one can of course avoid dealing with the sorrow, she thought. Many, surely, also convinced themselves that everything must be fine for their own dependents, even if they deep down knew that this was not the case.
Full of sorrow, her eyes full of tears, she curled herself up into the foetal position and tried to think of something more pleasant, but couldn’t manage it.
After seven days had passed, without any sign that Urduk awaited somewhere ahead, Shay began to feel concerned.
“According to the computer’s program, we should have arrived by now,” he said, when they had seated themselves for a meeting about the situation.
“Is it possible that there’s an interference field around the planet that hides their position?” asked Esai.
“Yes, unfortunately, I suspect that that might be the case,” said Desia. “There have always been rumours that ships that travel there have been equipped with a special code.”
“Dammit, then, that doesn’t sound good at all,” said Shay. “Is it possible for us to break the code?”
“Sure, that’s possible, but with the equipment we have on board I think it’s going to be hard,” replied Desia.
“So, what do we do now?” asked Esai.
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