by PN Burrows
‘Level three is for crimes such as burglary, vehicle theft and tax evasion. Each instance will earn the criminal half a bar, a public lashing and time in a penal system, similar to the one that Urser is at now.’
‘A bar being part of the triangle tattoo you mentioned earlier?’
‘Exactly, the triptych. Gaining a full bar also loses you the right to reproduce.’ After an enquiring look for further questions he continued. ‘Level four is for more serious crime: the supply of narcotics, aggravated assault and brandishing a weapon at any member of police, pyro brigade etcetera. This will get you a full bar and time in the PeCo, sorry penal colony. All penal systems tend to be located on the less desirable planets. Ones with a heavier gravity are preferable as it tires the inmates out quicker. Level five in the criminal system is for things like treason, premeditated murder and using a weapon against any member of the police or other forces. You only have three choices, you either choose a humane death, solitary life imprisonment on a terraforming planet or a life term in the Shock Troopers which has an average life expectancy of thirteen years. That’s about it. Pretty simple – after several millennia of civilisation, the answer to nearly everything is to keep it cheap and simple.’
Continuing on in silence, Sam once again mulled over the large volumes of unbelievable information he was being presented with. Amongst his thoughts, he realised he could feel the vibration of machinery through the floor. Looking ahead he could see the opening of another tunnel becoming visible around the curvature. As they continued to descend what Sam could only imagine as a large lazy downward spiral, the promised conveyor system became visible and began to run parallel with the road.
‘There’s no echo. We should have heard the reverberations from the entrance.’
‘It’s the paint,’ answered Reb. ‘It’s been formulated for noisy environments so it absorbs most of the sound.’
A long stream of barrels trundled along a raised platform emerging from a side tunnel. Sam was aghast at the quantity. Each one contained toxic waste of some kind, any one of which could leak into the water table, polluting the area for miles around.
Sam felt his patience wear thin. ‘Are you immune to the toxicity if one of those leaks?’ he asked vehemently.
‘No, I’m flesh and blood, same as you Sam. You saw the protective suits, so you know we are not immune. But they won’t ever leak, rust or break. The spraying process you witnessed is a molecular compound that bonds with the metal to form an impregnable outer coating. Protecting the environment is part of our ethos and way of life. Besides, our history shows a plethora of civilisations that withered away due to them destroying their home planet. You’re teetering on the edge now. Without our clandestine intervention you’d have passed the point of no return decades ago.’ Reb stopped to look Sam in the eyes. ‘Did you know that in the Pacific Ocean there is an area called the Pacific trash vortex? A patch of debris and plastic flotsam larger than the state of Texas. Not only is the marine life being entangled and killed by it but the plastic breaks down, saturating the area for miles around with toxic polymers that are ingested, endangering every species in that area. So don’t pull the environmental card on me. You are the monsters here, you all turn a blind eye and pretend it has nothing to do with you and someone else will fix it. Your industries don’t care and your governments kotow down to them, begging bowls in hand. Your planet is only focused on profit and power.’ Anger and frustration tempered Reb’s voice, portraying a hard side of Reb that Sam hadn’t previously seen.
‘But you’re obviously storing them below ground, even with your coating you are only delaying the inevitable.’
‘Are we? Would you like to put a wager on it? After everything you have been told you are still thinking two dimensionally.’
‘First off, do you realise you sound like an extra from Star Trek? I honestly thought you were going to mention M Class planets earlier and now the Spock, Khan quote. Do you really want me to take you seriously?’
Reb laughed. ‘Ah, we do love your TV, but I am more of a fan of Firefly myself, it’s a bit more true to life. Even in space the low-tech simple answer is often the most effective and thus more commonly used.’ Still chuckling to himself, he continued, ‘I certainly wouldn’t want a door that shushed me every time it opened and closed.’
‘Funny,’ a dejected Sam replied. ‘If we are going down, you are either storing them or dropping them down a very deep shaft. It’s not warm enough for there to be a lava pit down there and we would have smelt the sulphur.’
‘Well firstly, it’d be a magma pit as we are below ground and lava is above. It is what spills out of a volcano. Secondly, no, we are not doing either of those things. You will have to wait a few minutes. The answer is just around the corner.’
They were walking alongside the conveyor now; the tunnel had widened to accommodate the extra machinery. Further along, Sam could see rows of large stacked cubes. They were polished bright, reflecting the light from overhead. Sam cast a questioning glance at Reb.
‘Would it make sense if I said they are a by-product of the process? To be precise they are two-metre tall cubes of solid steel or eight cubic metres of steel weighing over sixty two thousand kilograms each. Does that help?’ The sarcastic tone failed to mask Reb’s amusement at Sam’s quandary.
Sam touched one of the cubes as he walked by. The sides were perfectly smooth and he couldn’t see the top as it was above his head height. The edges and corners were rounded, giving the cubes the look of gigantic dice.
A subdued glow was faintly visible from the end of the conveyor. Sam calculated it to be a quarter of a mile away. He didn’t bother to figure out how many barrels were passing him on the conveyor. A steady stream of them, spaced six feet apart, were travelling lengthways, slightly faster than the pace they were walking at. They disappeared ahead, near the glow. Sam could not make out what was happening, it all seemed to be occurring in shadows, which didn’t make sense as it was also glowing.
He picked up his pace a bit, subconsciously eager to solve the mystery. ‘Do I need to wear a suit or anything?’ he enquired.
‘No, but do not and I stress DO NOT touch anything. In fact, put your hands in your pockets when you get there,’ Reb replied cryptically.
He could feel heat, it was definitely getting warmer as he drew nearer to the glow. The air had the feel of a smithy he had once visited. It had a perceptible ferrous taste. He could partially see the end wall of the tunnel thirty or forty feet behind the glow, but something large and dark was obscuring the view.
The conveyor ended suddenly with a short downward section. The barrels seemed to enter a dark cave. Bastards, he thought, they are dumping the drums, after all that bullshit and holier-than-thou crap he had been fed. The bright glow prevented him from seeing into the new cave or tunnel entrance. It seemed to be a set of ultra-bright strip lights. In his haste, Sam had gotten ahead of Reb at this point, he looked back with anger in his eyes.
‘You go ahead, I’ll catch you up. For your own safety, please do not go up the gantry steps or go into the red zone.’
Sam didn’t realise it but he had broken out into a small jog as he strained to see clearly what was happening. What seemed to be a tunnel entrance from further back must be the opening of a large 20 foot diameter pipe, whose opening was facing directly at him as the opening was floating in the centre of the tunnel.
He could see the barrels rise to the top of the conveyor’s apex and then descend, lost in the illumination from the bright strip lights. At thirty feet, his assumptions fell apart. He could see that the glowing strip lights were in fact a constant stream of bright luminescent liquid flowing into a grill in the floor. ‘None of this makes sense,’ he muttered to himself. ‘If the liquid was the toxic waste, what’s the pipe for?’ He looked back at Reb. ‘I don’t understand, you’re just dumping it all into the ground, but what’s the pipe for?’
‘Look closer, Sam, you not allowing yourself to see the truth.’
Sam paused at the railings which separated the danger zone from the walkway with the aid of red markings on the floor, defining a twenty-foot radius from the illicit dumping area. The whole area was brightly lit. The liquid wasn’t luminescent. It was white hot. He could feel the heat searing his skin even from this distance. The pipe was blacker than night. It was void of any reflection from the incandescent liquid that was pouring down. The barrels moved along the conveyor and they should have fallen into the centre of the dark yearning chasm and rolled away. Instead they seemed to hit a solid barrier. Where the metal met the beginning of the opening it instantly became molten liquid, running down across an invisible surface and into the grate in the floor.
Sam walked around the railing to try and see the process from the side. He didn’t hear Reb as he eventually ambled alongside him. There was no pipe, there was no nothing. From his vantage point at the side, the barrels stopped their descent from the conveyor in mid-air. The metal simply melted as if it were merely chocolate touching a white hot skillet. It ran down and back towards the direction of the conveyor. A river of molten metal floated in the air as if it were on top of an invisible thin sheet of glass that was set at a at a thirty-five degree angle. Sam walked further round to see if he could make sense of what he was seeing. All he could see was blackness, a huge disc of blackness.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘My ancient ancestors with their primitive minds called it “Dia Kuklos” because they could go through the circle. This is the cause of distortion here in Minera. This is what we guard, keep secret and safe. This is our primary duty.’
‘So is this a black hole? Shouldn’t all of our solar system be sucked into it?’
‘No, you’re not seeing what is in front of you, Sam. Come back to the front and watch.’ Sam and Reb walked back along the railing to view the barrels land on the Dia Kuklos.
‘Think back to the balloon model we discussed. If two distortions happened to touch each other, they’d perforate the fabric of space and link together. You can literally step through one side to the other. Your scientists theorise about this and commonly call them wormholes. There’s no tunnel connecting them. Both openings occupy the same space at the same time. They have many names in different cultures throughout the universe such as spatial apertures or perforations, portals, Quantum eyelets, interstices.’
He looked at Sam, beaming. ‘Cool, eh? So we are using this cosmic abnormality to dump your toxic waste. Just not where you thought. The metal can’t get through the surface tension. The reaction is so volatile that it melts upon contact. We use this to allow the waste to escape and flow through, whilst collecting the metal for recycling.’
‘So you’re saying I could step through to wherever you are dumping this stuff?’
‘Well, you could step through, Sam, but you wouldn’t last very long. The other side is in a fixed position near a star you call Canopus. Over the course of a year or so, the waste is gently drawn in by its gravitational pull and destroyed. The aperture itself is black because neither side opens facing the star. If you could pop your head through and look to the right…’ Reb shrugged and put his hand on Sam’s shoulder. ‘I was hoping to have thought of something witty to say by now, but, there you go. What else can I do to prove to you we are the good guys?’ He handed Sam the small stone from his pocket. ‘Go ahead and toss it in, watch it float away. Do it from the other side to get a better view.’
Sam walked to the rear side of the aperture and gently, with an underarm throw, tossed the stone through the portal. It physically slowed as it passed through what Reb had called the surface tension. It carried on into the darkness with its left-hand side clearly visible as it was being illuminated by the unseen sun.
‘Why are you guarding these, why the secrecy?’
‘Why? Well, that’s a long story, but I’ll keep it brief. My race evolved on planet Minera long before the Overseer arrived. As our population spread over the planet legend says they found a portal and called it “Dia Kuklos”. It happened in the midst of the harshest winter in history. My primitive ancestors found a window to a sunny world, it saved thousands of lives. They sought refuge through it and others harvested food and brought it back. Over the centuries, we eventually learnt how to detect the distortions in the fabric of space and found thirty more on our planet. Because of the nature of their original creation, these portals were always located within spatial distortions like Minera, making them difficult to find unless you know what to look for. Not all distortions contained a portal and many, being like this one, open into empty space, or hundreds of feet above ground. As our technology evolved and resources dwindled, we abused these portals to other worlds to carry out raids and wage war.’
‘We discovered one portal close to a black hole. The conflicting forces waged between the portal and the event horizon of the black hole made it jittery. The other end wasn’t permanently fixed. It sporadically lashed across the universe, momentarily fixing on other portals. We learnt how to manipulate it with gravitational and spatial distorting fields. We could lock onto other portals within its original range. It is, to this date, the only one we know of with this ability. History says we were ruthless, relentless and barbaric. To the unwary, we came out of nowhere. Whole armies massed secretly in the distorted areas, unseen by the local population. It was an era of terror that we waged secretly over the universe and a shame we still carry. The Overseer stopped this. Somehow he changed the surface tension on all of the portals. Nothing but light passed through; they became useless windows. In one fell swoop he had isolated us. We had no long distance space travel technology as we had never needed to develop it. Our planet was over populated and resources strained. He gave us an ultimatum, either we sign up and with our knowledge locate these portals throughout the universe and guard them from further abuse or he would cause our extinction.’
‘The elders in their vanity would not bow down to an unknown enemy and millions died as ruthless factions fought amongst each other for the dwindling resources. After 225 years of planet-bound war, they realised no children had been born. We had been sterilised. The last generation to be born were now in charge and the war machine had fizzled out long ago. The remaining populace had reverted to a simpler way of life. The preservation of life and the recovery of our planet became almost a religion. It was a hybrid of high technology and ecological, environmentally friendly living. On the eve of 250 years, the Overseer spoke again. The message was clear: police the portals for him or die out. The rest is history, as they say, they capitulated and we have served him ever since. The Overseer returned to us the ability to reproduce and the use of the portals, though he has never allowed any metal to pass though since.’
‘Well, that’s not what I expected. I don’t know what to say.’
‘There is nothing to say, but you can see a similarity between our chequered history and how your civilisation’s developing. It took a long time for our planet to recover from our greed and negligence.’ Reb ushered Sam back around with his arms. ‘We try to keep the portals secret to make our life easier. There are only a few races out there that are partially aware of them. For some they are a thing of myth and legend, magic gateways to other worlds, but nothing more.’
Sam subconsciously switched the case to his left arm as he walked back around.
‘The process,’ swinging his arm at the conveyor, ‘should end in a few minutes, then we have a few people to see.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Reb’s head flew up as something caught his attention. He quickly moved himself in front of Sam, hugging and pushing his head down at the same time. The crack of assault rifles reverberated across the cavernous tunnel, regardless of the sound dampening paint. Sam felt the impact of seven or eight bullets as they struck Reb in the back. The shudder of the impact passed through to him as Sam took on th
e full weight of his body.
Other bullets impacted all around him, causing shards of concrete splinters to fly all around. He grabbed what was left of Reb, and using his body as a shield, moved behind one of the huge steel blocks that were scattered around. ‘Shit!’ he expelled, as he tried to lower Reb to the ground with some reverence. He had, after all, sacrificed his life for Sam.
‘Oh God, that hurt. Bob, what the hell’s going on? Who are they and where did they come from?’ Reb shouted to no one in particular.
‘What the fu–’ He was cut short as Reb waved his arm for silence and stuck his finger in his ear.
Kneeling down, Reb popped his head around the corner of the block and just as quickly drew his weapon, firing off a short burst with a surreal, silent ‘pfft’ as the muzzle flashed brightly. ‘Should slow them down for a second.’
Sam looked at Reb’s back. The long overcoat that he always wore and trousers were pockmarked with bright, shiny metal bullets. Each one held what appeared to be a gel that had solidified upon impact. Without thinking, Sam brushed a bullet off the coat and watched as the area reset to a flexible fabric.
‘What do you mean there is no one else here, I can bloody well see them.’ He indicated to Sam to take up a position on the other side of the block. Drawing his Glock he did so.
Peering around, he saw three huge brutes taking cover from Reb’s fire. In the distance he could make out a group of others rushing around the curve of the tunnel. ‘There’s more on the way, at least another eight,’ he shouted to Reb.
‘Bob, we need backup now! What, we haven’t got ten minutes. How did they get through? What do you mean there are only sheep in the tunnels, do they fucking look like sheep to you? I don’t care what the computer says. Get me some backup, now!’
Upon seeing their comrades closing the half a mile gap, two of which must have been an advanced scouting party, leapt out with bravado, firing their carbines on full auto as they dashed to the next steel block. Both Reb and Sam took this opportunity to fire into the face of an inaccurate but just as deadly fusillade. Both running assailants took the explosive small arms fire to their chests. Sam was silently impressed at the reduced recoil and improved accuracy of his cloned weapon. He was less impressed at the supposedly improved munitions. ‘I thought you said these were explosive rounds,’ he angrily shouted towards Reb.