by Hughes, Rhys
“It’s good to hear all this,” remarked Jenny.
“Now I ask myself, how to get out of this dungeon?” Gran frowned at her surroundings. There was no furniture in the cell. A window so small that even a mouse couldn’t climb through it allowed one beam of light to enter and provide minimal illumination.
“You said that you had an idea,” said Jenny.
“Yes, but that idea was to remind myself to have a better idea when I was actually locked up in the dungeon.”
“Maybe it can’t be escaped from,” sighed Jenny.
Gran shook her head. “There’s no such thing as a dungeon that can’t be escaped from, my girl! Trust me.”
Jenny said, “But I can imagine a dungeon that can’t be escaped from and I have a clear picture of it in my mind right now. Therefore I’m going to disagree with you on this point.”
Gran stroked her chin for several minutes.
Finally she declared, “Jenny, I think you’ve already given us a method of getting out of here! First I want you to carefully compare the dungeon in your mind with the dungeon we’re trapped in. Then I want you to point out any differences between them.”
“I don’t understand,” admitted Jenny.
Gran said, “This is how it works. If the dungeon in your head, which is the one that can’t be escaped from, doesn’t exactly match the dungeon we are stuck in, then the one we are in isn’t a dungeon that can’t be escaped from! Which means we can escape from it! That is called logic and it’s a useful tool to help get your own way.”
“Fine. But I still don’t really see how it helps…”
“It’s quite simple. All we need to do is locate the exact point where the dungeon that can’t be escaped from doesn’t match the one we’re in. At that point we’ll find the means of escape, because it’ll be the one part of the dungeon that can be escaped from.”
Jenny answered slowly, “Well, the dungeon in my head doesn’t have a secret unlocked trapdoor in the ceiling.”
Gran jumped to her feet. “Bravo! That’s my girl!”
She strode to the middle of the dungeon, looked up and then pointed a bony finger. “I can just see the outline,” she whispered, “There’s a secret unlocked trapdoor directly above us!”
But Jenny was suspicious. “Why would a dungeon have such a thing? It might lead to an even worse place.”
Gran said, “No, it’s almost certainly a safe way out of here. And that’s because these dungeons weren’t designed to hold prisoners. In fact they aren’t proper dungeons at all. Before Genghis Kan’t took over the galaxy, the crystal palace was a place of peace.”
Jenny accepted this. “Good point. Shall I stand on your shoulders to reach the trapdoor? It’s very high…”
They stood side by side and looked up at it.
“I think it will be better if I stand on your shoulders,” said Gran. “My shoulders aren’t as strong as they were.”
“But you once carried a drunken woolly mammoth up a hill,” objected Jenny. “That’s what you told me. Surely that took very strong shoulders to achieve? Unless the story isn’t true?”
“Of course it’s true!” huffed Gran. “And that’s precisely the reason why my shoulders aren’t as strong as they were! I sprained both of them getting that hairy beast to the summit. 12,000 years ago it happened and they still haven’t recovered. I only carried him there because he said he wanted to see the view from the top.”
“I bet there was another reason,” muttered Jenny to herself.
Jenny and Gran sneaked across the courtyard. It was night and the planet they were on had no moon, so they were inconspicuous in the darkness, but it was safer to proceed with caution.
The trapdoor had revealed a metal ladder that emerged from a hole in the middle of a large open space. They were free of the dungeon but still in danger, because the courtyard happened to be inside the palace. On all four sides the crystal buildings sparkled.
The courtyard was covered with cold flagstones of alternating colours and Jenny felt she was playing a weird kind of chess as they hurried amid the thick shadows on a diagonal course.
“Where are we going next?” Jenny wondered.
“We must get off this planet,” answered Gran, “because when Genghis Kan’t learns of our escape he’ll be sure to send out a search party to look for us; and if they catch us a second time, I don’t think they’ll be quite as lenient to us as they were before…”
Jenny shuddered, remembering the bizarre gun that the galactic tyrant had used on Boris, turning him into a skeleton before he disintegrated and briefly giving that skeleton its own separate death. Jenny had no desire to experience what Boris had endured.
“We must steal a spaceship,” announced Gran.
“I suppose so,” agreed Jenny.
They had reached one corner of the courtyard and the facets of crystal directly ahead glimmered hypnotically. It was necessary to pass through the palace to reach the other side. A risky venture. And they still had no idea where the spaceships were kept.
“Through this archway,” suggested Gran.
She scurried under it and Jenny followed her. They found themselves in a richly decorated palace corridor.
“I have a feeling this place is going to be like a maze,” said Jenny, as they turned left and hurried along, feet making barely a sound on the rich carpet. She was even more correct on this point than she thought, for the race of beings that designed buildings for the Federation loved labyrinths and never settled for simple layouts.
They turned right at the next corner, then left, then right, then left, and so on, hoping to zigzag through the palace and emerge on the grand steps near the landing pad, where presumably other spaceships might be ready for takeoff. Gran snarled and cursed.
“If only they hadn’t made us drop our weapons!”
Jenny felt sorry for her Gran. She knew how attached the old lady had been to her trusty big blunderbuss.
They turned the next corner and suddenly—
Three guards were marching towards them. They were orange and had three long legs each and were less burly than the guards that had escorted them to the dungeon; but this wasn’t a great advantage, for they appeared just as fierce and carried nets and spears.
“Run!” blared Jenny, but Gran was already scampering.
They went back the way they came.
Then they turned down a thin side-passage and bounded up a flight of spiral stairs that seemed to climb up forever. And the triple-legged guards followed behind and gained on them.
A spear whistled past Jenny’s ear, stuck in the wall and quivered. The spiral staircase was too narrow for them to cast their nets, which was very lucky. But it had to end somewhere…
From far away, echoing through unknown corridors, the furious voice of the tyrant himself could be heard, shouting in Lingua Galactica, giving orders that turned Jenny’s blood cold.
“Ldjljhi djlhli oewko!” cried a guard behind her.
Jenny responded by running faster.
“If you think I’m going to stop and give up just because you asked me to, you’ve got another think coming!”
That was her answer and it made the guard annoyed.
“Usdnl djklj wnjk xllsz!” he cried.
Jenny guessed that the guard was worried; if she and Gran managed to get away, then Genghis Kan’t would punish the guards. Life is unfair, she told herself, even to the bad guys. But she didn’t feel so sorry for him that she decided to surrender. By no means!
A mighty roar rushed up the stairs and overtook them.
It was a dreadful cacophony…
“Tdljlsk dodgp swwlekl!” chuckled the echo that belonged to Genghis Kan’t. He had apparently released his favourite pet and wanted everyone to know about it. Gran shouted down:
“I’ve reached the top! It comes out on the roof!”
Jenny increased her pace.
She burst out into the cool night air of Bellatrix Three.
The roof was pe
rfectly flat.
There was no other way down. They were trapped.
“What shall we do?” Jenny cried.
Gran pointed at a broad shiny cylinder in the middle of the roof. “We can hide behind that chimney!”
Jenny thought it was pointless to do that, for it would only delay for a few moments the inevitable tragedy of their capture and doom in the jaws and claws, if it had such things, of whatever monster Genghis Kan’t had sent to find them. But she nodded.
As they ran over to it, they realised it wasn’t a chimney after all. Gran reached it and tapped on it with her knuckles. “It’s a spaceship!” She ran her wrinkled hands over the hull.
And a hatch slid silently open. “Wdhbkih!” came a shout. The guards with the spears and nets had emerged from the spiral staircase. They were giddy and unable to throw their weapons accurately, but there was still no time for Jenny and Gran to waste.
“Get inside!” hissed Gran, and Jenny obeyed.
Gran followed and fumbled with buttons on a console. The spaceship began to vibrate. The hatch closed.
Through the porthole, Jenny watched the orange aliens poke the vessel with the points of their spears, but it was made of a tougher metal than the weapons. “Rkllsd dknlk!” the guards wailed. Their voices were very faint through the thickness of the hull.
“They said it’s the private shuttle of Genghis Kan’t himself! Can you imagine how angry he’ll be when he finds we’ve stolen it?” Jenny rubbed her palms together in malign glee.
“We haven’t managed to steal it yet, my girl!”
Something new emerged from the stairwell. Jenny squinted and then it became apparent what it was. She swallowed with difficulty. It had more than one body and numerous heads…
“Let’s take off!” she cried.
“I’m trying,” snapped Gran, her fingers pressing buttons at random. It seemed to Jenny that the monster that was bounding towards them would find ripping open the spaceship easy.
“Hurry! Hurry!” she gasped.
Gran took hold of a lever and pulled it.
The spaceship fell over. But it was cylindrical, so it began rolling. The three orange guards yelped in alarm, but they were unable to get out of its way and they were crushed flat as it rolled over them, their blood sticking to the hull and colouring it green.
“Like a gigantic rolling pin!” marvelled Jenny.
“We’re heading for the edge of the roof!” shouted Gran. This was true. The spaceship was picking up speed.
“If it goes over, the impact will kill us!” cried Jenny.
Gran sighed nostalgically and said:
“When I was your age we didn’t have impacts, because they hadn’t yet been approved for public consumption.”
“Were you ever really my age?” Jenny raised an eyebrow.
“Not really, no,” confessed Gran.
The cylinder had reached the edge of the roof. It rolled over and began falling towards the hard ground of the courtyard. Time seemed to go slow and Jenny found herself feeling odd, light headed. She gazed through the porthole and waved at the dwindling form of the monster that now stood on the edge of the roof and peered down at them with confusion on all its faces. It was a friendly wave. Why?
Gran was equally unconcerned by the extreme danger they were in. At least that’s the impression Jenny had. Maybe when you were about to die, your mind started working differently. That would explain why her Gran yawned nonchalantly before reaching out and pressing the only remaining button that hadn’t yet been pressed…
The spaceship stopped falling. It hovered an inch from the flagstones. Then it started rising again, faster and faster.
The monster on the edge of the roof grew larger again. And this time it was accompanied by its master, Genghis Kan’t himself, whose nine eyes all bulged with rage as he aimed his gun at the accelerating cylinder. The chances of him missing were very low.
But he did miss. He was so angry he couldn’t shoot straight.
“Take heed of that lesson,” said Gran.
“What lesson?” asked Jenny.
“If you allow your emotions to control you, you won’t be in a position to control anyone else,” she replied.
Jenny considered this snippet of wisdom.
“Did Machiavelli say that?”
Gran sniffed. “No, that was one of mine.”
Jenny frowned. “But it’s not entirely true, is it? I mean, Genghis Kan’t clearly lets his emotions get the better of him all the time and he already controls most of the known galaxy.”
Gran’s face went the palest Jenny had seen it and she spoke in a husky drawl. “Are you contradicting me, my dear?”
“Just making a point, Gran.”
“Don’t… make points like that… to me!”
Jenny shrugged. She couldn’t understand why her Gran had turned so unfriendly. Probably a result of the stress of the escape, she decided. She put it out of her mind and said:
“We’ve stolen his private shuttle, so he’ll be certain to send spaceships after us to get it back. What shall we do?”
Gran had recovered her composure. “Good question. We need to enter hyperspace and find an obscure planet to hide on. We need time to devise a scheme to overthrow the tyrant and replace him with you. Pass me those navigation charts please, my girl.”
“So we’re not going back to Earth?”
Gran shook her head. “Not yet. Remember that Genghis Kan’t sent an armada of vessels to conquer it, so it’ll be crawling with his warriors. No, we must find a quieter place than that.”
Jenny turned her attention from her Gran to the porthole. They had left the atmosphere of Bellatrix Three now.
“Why don’t we go to Boris’s original home?”
“You mean the star Vega?”
“Remember what he told us? That he came from a planet so gentle that the inhabitants had no weapons!”
“I think he said that was true of every race in the galaxy, but I suppose Vega’s as good a destination as any.”
“We can land there and make ourselves the rulers and then I’ll be able to order them to bring me cake!”
Gran nodded. “That’s settled then! To Vega!”
Meanwhile on Earth, a girl by the name of Maya Duesing was sitting in the garden of her house when she noticed something coming down from the sky. In fact there were lots of them.
She went into the house and returned with binoculars.
“That’s odd,” she said to herself.
She went to find her mother. Lisa was in the kitchen preparing a meal for friends she had invited to dinner.
“What’s up, honey?” she asked.
“Spaceships,” said Maya. “I think it’s a hostile fleet.”
Lisa frowned. “Really?”
She followed Maya out into the garden.
The sky was full of shapes…
“Take a closer look,” said Maya, offering her mother the binoculars. Lisa studied the shapes for a long time.
“It’s definitely an alien invasion,” she agreed.
Then she bit her lip and sighed. “Of all the days they have to come! When I’m entertaining my friends!”
“It’s very annoying, isn’t it?” said Maya.
Lisa nodded. “Certainly is.”
“Shall we ask them to go away and invade Earth on a day that’s more convenient for us?” Maya suggested.
“I don’t think they’d fall for that, honey,” said Lisa.
“Shall we fight them instead?”
Lisa sighed again. “We don’t really have any choice.” She went back into the kitchen and turned the oven off. “Well, if there’s going to be an interplanetary war, it had better be over by the end of the week! I’m not going to cancel my music concert!”
“Don’t worry, we’ll beat them before that!”
“Do you have any ideas how?” Lisa asked curiously.
Maya nodded. “There’s my school project, remember? I’m wondering if it can be used to def
eat the aliens.”
“It’s worth a try,” agreed Lisa. Outside, through the kitchen windows, the sky turned black as the spaceships got closer and bigger. That’s how many of them there were. Thousands.
Jenny and Gran hopped in hyperspace across the galaxy all the way from the constellation of Orion, where Bellatrix was located, to Lyra, home of the star Vega, which was the sun orbited by the planet where Boris had been born. Vega in fact had a retinue of nineteen planets, but all of them were dead worlds except the seventh.
It wasn’t necessary to land on every planet to learn this. There were instruments on the spaceship that enabled them to analyse the chemical composition of the various atmospheres from a distance. Planets with life always have particular kinds of atmospheres, because the life alters that atmosphere in certain detectable ways.
“If an atmosphere is full of unstable gases,” Gran explained, “then it means it has life on the surface that is creating those gases by breathing in and out. In other words, the atmosphere is kept unstable thanks to life. On dead worlds there’s no such instability.”
Jenny scratched her head. “I think I understand.”
Gran pointed through the porthole.
“That’s how I know that it’s on the seventh planet that we’ll find life. And that life must be Boris’ people…”
“Maybe we’ll get to meet his mothers and fathers,” said Jenny, “or his brothers and sisters, if any are alive.”
Gran nodded. “Yes, and bring them the bad news of his grotesque and agonising death!” she said maliciously.
Jenny was unhappy about this reaction. She had liked Boris and didn’t feel any pleasure that he was dead. Sometimes, she decided, her Gran was just a little bit too fanatical. Ah well!
She asked, “Shall we try to establish contact using the communicator? It’ll be a shock if we land unannounced.”
Gran shook her head. “The bigger the shock, the better. And for all we know, agents loyal to Genghis Kan’t might already be on the planet. If he has conquered the galaxy, as he claimed, he will certainly have stationed garrisons on every world in his empire.”