The Captured

by Kyte, Adrian

  ‘You can?’ She wondered how he could simply be available for her call, as if she had some kind of special privilege.

  ‘Please wait. Patching you through.’

  ‘Yes, what is it?’ came the gruff and inevitably irascible voice of her commander.

  ‘It’s Zoraina,’ she said, realizing he must already know that. ‘I want to know if my ship has been repaired.’

  A silence for a while. Maybe an impertinent request. Then: ‘Well, the technical crew recovered the vessel. Elusiver technology has certain self-repair capability. The upshot is, Zoraina, it is likely to be space worthy but because it isn’t B’tari it’s not listed on our official inventory.’

  ‘So it’s available and I can take it?’

  ‘Don’t think I haven’t already considered such a request---’

  ‘Can I take it?’

  ‘Yes you have a right to it, but---’

  ‘It may be too late, I know. The drone will escort me there now, won’t you?’ It looked at her motionless for a few seconds, doubtless processing the validity of her request.

  ‘That is acceptable,’ it finally said, and scuttled along the corridor at a fast walking pace.

  * * *

  92

  A bright light, he had to turn away from. Birds tweeting that meant nothing for the first few seconds. Just a cacophony. Movement above him, as they flew away. Reacting to him.

  Why, he thought, what am I to them?

  Me? Who? That didn’t matter much for now. He felt uncomfortable all of a sudden. The ground was hard but not rocky. Grass, bracken beneath his head. He sat up. A small animal with a bushy tail ran off to climb a tree.

  ‘Hello. How did I get here?’ someone said.

  He looked in the direction of the man’s voice. He also seemed to be in the same predicament. The man stood, noticed him.

  ‘Torbin. This is quite remarkable.’

  Yes, that was right. It was his name. But he didn’t recognize the man, yet there was something oddly familiar about him.

  ‘Do I know you?’ Torbin asked.

  ‘You probably don’t remember me. I’m Roidon Chanley, and it seems I saved your life.’

  ‘Where is this?’

  ‘More to the point, when is this?’

  ‘The day, the month, I don’t know,’ Torbin admitted. ‘But I think the year is twenty-two seventy eight.’

  The man nodded. ‘Yes your life does go back a long way, for a human, and you look noticeably younger.’

  ‘Do I really?’ Something quite odd about this man, he thought.

  ‘You should be glad, all things considered.’ He then raised his head to peer at the mostly blue sky. A smile formed, the beginnings of a nod. ‘It may be we were granted special dispensation. Or: the field array affected us differently being so close to the device.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  He looked thoughtful. ‘Yes, curious that I do remember. Maybe it does truly have sentience and it ensured I remembered. Trust those Elusivers to create something worthy of their power.’

  ‘I really need to get home now,’ Torbin insisted.

  ‘And where would that be?’

  Torbin felt annoyed that he didn’t have an answer; it was as if Roidon was trying to catch him out and prove a point. He thought to say: That’s not your business to know. But he really didn’t remember, absurdly it seemed. A sudden hollow feeling, a gap where... Home: it was just a basic requirement. Home must have the answer.

  Roidon nodded once more, it was becoming an irritating gesture. ‘So you don’t remember, do you?’ This time, though, a more earnest tone in his voice.

  ‘What’s happening. Why are we here?’ Torbin found himself saying.

  ‘I’m not clear on that. We need to make a move though, find some clue.’ He began walking, waved for Torbin to follow.

  The woods led to a clearing and then a road. An dull silver oval shaped object farther along. Roidon started running towards it. Torbin this time felt instinctively that he should follow and keep pace.

  The object had become a vehicle of some sort, or maybe more than mere terrestrial transport with its protruding nacelles like giant exhausts. Roidon was moving his hands over its rounded and pointed shell as if performing some mystic ritual. There seemed to be no obvious hatch. But then a top section slid away.

  Roidon looked back at Torbin. ‘I suggest you get in,’ he said.

  The interior seemed deceptively spacious: two broad and comfortable seats. Roidon was studying a fixed instrument panel. ‘Mnn. Does look like twenty-third century tech,’ he murmured, nodding again. ‘Okay. Computer: take us up.’

  A heads-up display suddenly appeared, then a synth voice. ‘Please specify.’

  ‘Five thousand metres.’

  ‘Acknowledged.’

  As it ascended, the base of the craft became transparent; a slightly unnerving feeling. There were mountains in the distance. Before them he noticed a cluster of buildings.’

  ‘Looks like a town to me,’ Roidon observed, as the craft maintained its fixed altitude. ‘Computer. Where is this?’

  ‘Vancouver, Canada.’

  ‘Thought as much.’ Roidon then looked over at Torbin. ‘Well, that looks like our best bet. What do you think?’

  ‘It’s not home.’ Still that basic need.

  ‘Home, my friend, is a nebulous concept right now. Maybe you will find links to your past, or make a new life for yourself.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about me. I always find my way.’

  * * *

  93

  In normal space now, the stars had a beauty about them she had never fully appreciated before. Here in space through the half-dome transparency of the Elusiver ship, it felt like each one was uniquely special. All those points of light with their potential for life; their associated planet systems, many that never had long enough or the serendipity. One, ninety-four light years away the ship identified and tagged by its atmospheric signature. It was perfect for life to develop and advance. And what if it had? There was a good chance the Kintra had never reached that far out, but the temporal eradication wave would. There seemed little chance that beings even as advanced as Earth (pre-invasion) would have detected the wave. Only B’tari tech could detect the subtle changes – the gravametric distortions, and consequent regression of a star by whatever fraction of its lifetime – until of course it was too late, when nearby planets showed the more obvious signs of reverting back millions of years. When it got to the stage you could see the effect on planets.

  Well, without any kind of hyperspace capability – forget it! Make your peace. But it was likely to be sudden, a superluminal tsunami.

  So what could she do?

  Zoraina was one of the first to leave Earth, in a starship as good as the best B’tari craft. Not that she felt good about having this advantage. But it was hers to claim. Except that being able to get a safe distance (if only temporarily) only made her feel a sense of responsibility. Could she visit any of those worlds; warn its inhabitants; transmit every bit of technical knowledge held in the ship’s database? In this quadrant they had no more than weeks to prepare (if the rate of eradicated beacons were anything to go by). Maybe possible. There was always a possibility. But there were so many worlds, out here – eleven thousand light years from her homeworld – not yet identified. Trying to save the ones nearer the wave might be a waste of time. The outer worlds?

  Zoraina told the ship jump to the nearest tagged system. It took her there in only a few minutes. There were signs of life: heat, light, EM emissions, but no orbiting communications technology. Like Earth mid-twentieth century, she thought.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, before continuing: ‘Ship. Take me to the next world farther away from the wave.’

  The next world was slightly more advanced, had basic communications satellites.

  ‘Ship. Transmit warning message followed by all technical data to any capable comm orb
ital.’ It complied; in less than two minutes this world would have schematics for every ship or device invented by the B’tari. Of course, it was such a wealth of information any civilization at the level of early twenty-first century Earth would struggle to distill anything relevant to finding a way of escape. Certainly with such little time. In any case, given that her own species had failed, it seemed a forlorn hope.

  Still, she went on to the next farther out and more advanced world.

  Eventually, at somewhere near the edge of the Milky Way galaxy, she was faced with a choice. The Large Magellanic Cloud seemed the safest prospect. But even if she could find enough matter to recharge the engines, even if she stayed mostly in hyperspace, it could mean weeks confined in this small vessel.

  So she headed back towards the wave.

  The ship, for all its complexity and knowledge of spacial phenomena, could not identify the wave beyond an unidentified distortion in space. At least it saw better than she could. She told it to enhance the effects, magnify the nearest planets in the immediate path. Now represented as a translucent cerise tide washing over a world not so dissimilar to Earth. That world was the one the ship had identified as having complex life; those beings lives wiped away in an instant, before they even knew what had hit them, and it would be as if they had never existed. Yet from this distance, a few light years away, all she could see was a subtle shift of the continents. She drew some comfort from knowing it had all happened in a fraction of a second; there were certainly many worse ways to die. Even if she stayed here the wave would take her in less than an hour.

  But Zoraina had come to a decision. ‘Take me towards the wave.’

  She expected the ship to put up some objection, but it said nothing; it simply complied. Perhaps it realized now there was nowhere, realistically, to run. Maybe she could evade the inevitable for weeks or even months, hoping for some intervention from a higher power, be they a god or some undiscovered superior beings. Yet if this Elusiver-tech ship could not detect them then whoever was advanced enough to escape the wave must have already done so.

  The ship now overlaid the approaching wave in turquoise. It reminded her of a gentle incoming tide. Zoraina relaxed into her seat feeling a sense of serenity she could never have expected.

  ‘Estimate: forty seconds,’ the ship told her.

  One more thing to do, that would use up remaining resources.

  ‘Send out superluminal data package. Target all local galaxies.

  ‘Complying.’

  ‘Goodbye ship.’

  ‘Goodbye Zoria...’

  The end.

  Read the prequel: Time Over

  Time Over (Amazon.com) or Amazon.co.uk