by Richard Dee
As we passed the last gas giant and got ready to go trans-light, we heard that all movements were halted. All ships were being recalled and told to land. All comms except emergency transmissions were forbidden. Griff turned the receiver off and punched the buttons that accelerated us away.
“Perhaps someone would like to tell me what’s going on?” Ria said as the ship went trans-light with the familiar jolt in the stomach. “We’re racing off somewhere, apparently there are aliens involved as well, now we can’t land anywhere if we want to take off again.”
“You see, Ria,” I said, “it’s not all about Rixon. Even he couldn’t do all this.” She gave me a look; it suggested that she wasn’t so sure.
Griff acted as though he hadn’t heard any of that. “I’ve had a thought,” he said. “We didn’t check the stores and water before we took off.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
We had three days to Felton, fortunately there were enough meal packs and the water tanks were full.
Griff set up a calling sequence for Melva and for Rixon, we needed to get hold of both of them before they landed somewhere and got stuck. The best plan would be to get together on a neutral place, like Qister-Alu or Kendye. There were enough of them around. We would be able to land secure in the knowledge that we could take off again.
We got hold of Melva, she sounded pleased to hear from me. “What am I supposed to do with this stuff?” she said. “I have to deliver it to Felton, now I can’t raise my contact. The word is, if I arrive and land I’ll be stuck there.”
“Simple,” said Griff, “you come to a neutral planet and don’t worry about it. Nobody’s going anywhere, your buyer won’t expect you to deliver if it means you getting stuck, unable to work. You can land it and store it there. As soon as the restriction is lifted, you reload it and deliver. When did you last speak to your agent on Felton?”
“Not since I told him I had loaded and was on the way, that transhipping idea is no good. It’s a time-sensitive cargo. If he doesn’t get it soon, it’s worthless. And the deal we had, unless I deliver, I won’t get paid. The comms are down, Felton is unavailable, all I get is a message saying head to the nearest Federation planet and remain there.”
“Whatever you do, stay off the ground. I’ll call you when I’ve decided where to meet; it’ll be a neutral planet somewhere.”
“OK,” she said. “And things were going so well. Which way are you flying?”
“We’re heading for Felton, that’s where I thought you would be coming from.”
There was a moment’s silence and I thought I’d lost the connection. “Sorry,” she said, when she came back, “I was talking to Mum, checking the map. I can meet you at Kendye.”
It seemed a little out of the way. It had been close to her outward route but once she had the extra job, nowhere near Caraca, or the way back from Felton to New Devon. What was she up to?
“Why there?” I asked.
“I’ll call you when I’m inbound, save me a landing spot,” she said. The call ended.
“Will she be OK?” I asked Griff. “What’s she up to?”
“She’s not stupid, and Myra won’t let her do anything crazy, like land on Felton and try to take off again. As for Kendye, why not?”
“Well for a start, once she got the extra cargo, it’s nowhere near her route anymore.” I didn’t mention the Sister or Rixon’s instructions. Instead, we just altered our course for Kendye.
Irin grinned. “Can’t she have a little fun? Perhaps there isn’t really another cargo. Maybe she wanted to get away for a while. She’s old enough to have secrets, maybe there’s a boy.”
I laughed, but inside I wasn’t so sure, that was my little girl, a boy had no right to… I stopped myself as I saw the look on Irin’s face.
We heard nothing from Rixon, despite our calls. He must have been back in the IW and unwilling to give his position away.
“It’s about time for explanations, Griff,” I suggested. “Met said you’d tell us all about it.”
Ria’s eyes widened. “I knew it,” she said. “I knew you had more to do with this than you were letting on. All those meetings with people who looked a bit shady, you’d never tell me their names. It’s time for you to come clean about it all.” She had been quiet up to now, I assumed that Griff had explained it all to her in the privacy of their cabin.
Griff shrugged. “It’s no big deal, I’m not hiding anything, I’m just a messenger. The best thing would be for us to see the disc that Met left us, get up to speed on what everyone else in the Federation knows about the Khayan.”
I broke the seal on the packet and a whole load of trans-papers fell out, together with a disc in its protective sleeve. The papers contained a transcription of the contents, in press release format. I started to read, it was all very compelling but in a sensational, light on the facts sort of way, like you’d read in a cheap magazine. Lots of maybe, could and might and few real pieces of information. It was a disappointment. If this was all they had; it hardly seemed worth all the hype and disruption. The Federation could deny all this easily. There had to be more.
Irin was reading over my shoulder. “This is rubbish,” she said. “The only good thing about it is that we don’t get a mention by name.”
Griff took one and read it. He shook his head. “Waste of time,” he agreed. “Bait to get people watching. Very clever, it tells you nothing, but in a sensational way. Let’s see the disc; perhaps they saved all the good stuff for that.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
The disc was presented in the form of a documentary, it started off with the story of the first discoveries of tunnels and the grey boxes. There were still images of places like the doors we had seen on Prairie and blurred images of the boxes. They had the appearance of pictures taken in secret. If the Truth Movement had been visiting quarantine worlds to gather information, then they had been operating in a dangerous place, we had nearly lost Freefall to a missile. Then the narrative moved on to the Federation’s establishment of the quarantine worlds, with interviews from the displaced, and those who had stayed behind. There had been a lot of research done, and a few tales of the retribution handed out to investigators who had been caught.
Without mentioning our names, the story moved on to the finds on Qister-Alu, which we had been part of. The quality of the video here was so much better and I recognised Miro and the caves. The question was, who of us had been recording?
“This is better stuff,” muttered Griff. Ria was engrossed, she had forgotten her anger and watched without comment.
The events I remembered so well unfolded, the machines came to life and spoke to us, we heard every word, saw Miro’s reaction. The recording continued right up to the point where the ceiling started to collapse. At that point, the scene changed to a room, with a man facing the camera.
“Good day,” he said. “I’m a representative of the group that have been cataloguing all these finds, against the wishes of the Federation.”
“Is that Paoul?” asked Ria.
“No,” I said. “I don’t know him, but from a security point of view, it makes sense not to appear in person.”
The man was still talking. “It may come as a shock to you, to find that other species, aliens if you like, exist, or it may be that you always suspected. The truth is, even so, we may be alone, the Khayan are an old race and we have found no evidence that they are still around. What we have found is that they may have been instrumental in our creation, which is where the reason for official secrecy probably comes in.”
“The Federation would want to suppress that,” said Griff, pausing the playback. “After all the division and hatred that we had with the Blessed, and the civil war, it would make them seem right, their teachings almost respectable.”
“Exactly,” said Irin, who had been lost in thought up to now. “And if people can see that the Blessed weren’t so far wrong, it undermines the Federation.”
“Which explains why the IW are back
ing the release of all this,” I said. The IW was the rump of the religious government of the Blessed, and the tale of the Khayan aligned with what they had preached, about a benign creator, one who had gone away and would return.
“Play the rest,” Ria said, Griff pressed the button.
The man continued. “After the events on Qister-Alu, when the Khayan’s device was activated and learnt our language, there was a surprise. Boxes that we had already found, readers that had worked but we couldn’t understand, found on Callo and elsewhere, suddenly played all the discs in our language. It made the work so much faster. The trouble is, we don’t have a complete set of discs, there are gaps and we must try to get back to the quarantine worlds to find them. But what we have learned so far, from our incomplete records, is incredible.”
“Perhaps now we’ll actually be told something important,” said Ria.
“Shhh,” replied Griff. “I want to hear this.”
“The Khayan were an old race,” said the man. “According to the information we had deciphered from their records, they seem to have arrived not long after the first planets became habitable. There’s no information about where they came from. In fact, it might have been that they were the builders of the universe. There’s nothing about how they developed or where their technology came about, it could be propaganda, or they could just be responsible for it all.
“They roamed all over and seeded, their word, a lot of planets. They tended the races they created, there’s a whole lot of stuff about the techniques of manipulating DNA. It looks like they were benevolent, seeking to create a galaxy full of peace.”
“Then why aren’t they still here?” asked Ria. “Why is there only one race of sentient life, us?”
“The box mentioned a race called the Destroyers,” I replied, just as the man on the screen said the same thing.
“We know that a race that they referred to as the Destroyers appeared and disrupted the Khayan’s efforts,” the man continued. “We’re still working on deciphering that part of the story but it seems as if they were created by the Khayan by mistake, the records suggest some sort of error, a mix-up with what they were doing. That, or they got arrogant and careless. The race they had created were warlike and were able to rise up against their creators. It’s all on the discs, at least the bits we know. It seems that they fought for many years; until there was only our planet of origin left untouched. The Khayan kept its location secret from the Destroyers and the fight moved away from this part of the galaxy. It looks like we were kept safe, as the only remnant of the Khayan’s legacy.”
This was a lot to take in, we could only imagine the reaction that it must be receiving on all the planets where it was being shown. Irin and Ria both tried to talk at once. Griff shouted, “Hang on a minute,” and paused the playback again.
“What I don’t understand,” said Ria, “is how the machine on Qister learnt our language?”
“It must have been some sort of advanced AI,” said Irin. “It communicated with all the machines that we had on Freefall.”
“It has to be some sort of quantum control system,” said Griff, “you know, the electron switch theory. Once the one on Qister had learned our language, all of them knew it.”
“Isn’t it strange that a machine had never been turned on before?”
“We talked about it at the time. Paoul thought that the machine somehow sensed the deaths of all the wildlife. Don’t forget, they had created it all, or at least allowed the conditions for it to exist. If it could sense our presence, perhaps it could sense the destruction of its creation.”
With that sobering thought, we watched the rest of the film, there were only a few minutes left.
“Our efforts continue to gather all the information left for us,” said the man. “What we don’t know, is where the Khayan went, how long ago this all happened and what the final outcome of the war was. All we can do is keep searching for discs and hope that we get more of the story, once the Federation has admitted that what we’re saying is true.”
That made sense; it had been a sobering event, to see the results of our expedition and nearly the cause of our deaths, explained so well.
“Does that mean we’re going back to Prairie?” asked Irin. I wasn’t sure if she was joking, but I hoped she was.
“There’s a lot that they didn’t say, a lot of the film of the Khayan from the discs, I’m surprised that it wasn’t shown.”
“What was on it?” asked Ria. “Were they like us?”
I tried to remember the images I had seen on the way to Callo, when we had managed to work out how to use the discs. “We never saw them, but there were some buildings and ships. It was hard to say, the designs all seemed to be based around the grey box. If they made us, then they could have been any shape.”
“There’s little we can do about it now,” said Griff. “It will play out way above our heads and once the dust settles, we will have to deal with the aftermath. All we can do is get everyone back together and carry on with sorting out our lives.”
He was right. I needed my ship to get Irin to wherever her mother was being held. We should meet up on one of the neutral worlds, free from Federation or IW interference. She had suggested Kendye. When we got hold of Rixon, we would find out what it had to do with the Sister. I just had to hope that she would arrive. And that Malkin could get me a message through the Federation blackout.
I did get a call from Rixon, he had crossed back from the IW and picked up my message. I told him we were heading for Kendye and he told me to organise a landing space for his ship and the Sister, which proved that something was going on. In case our traffic was being monitored; I didn’t want to find out what he had planned. He said he would tell me when he arrived.
We talked a bit more about the Khayan, whether the Federation would be able to keep it all under wraps. It seemed unlikely; there were just too many people, on too many worlds to silence. Which didn’t mean that they wouldn’t try, based on their past paranoia. We had no way of communicating with any planet except the Independent Worlds, and we would be on Kendye tomorrow.
When we dropped out of light-speed and arrived above Kendye, the orbital anchorage annulus was crowded, to say the least. It seemed like every independent trader had decided to do what I had told Melva to do. Before we sorted out a landing point, I asked arrivals control for the location of Freefall. “She hasn’t arrived yet,” I was told. When I said that I wanted a large bay, one that would take all four ships together, I found another problem.
“Space is at a premium,” I was told, “it’ll cost you.” He mentioned a figure that was eye-wateringly large.
“Typical neutrals,” muttered Griff, “always ready to make a few extra credits from adversity.”
“Can we not stay in orbit?” asked Ria. “And just transfer or video chat when everyone else turns up.”
“We might have Melva’s cargo to shift and store,” I said, “and it’ll be insecure, video chatting.”
We booked a bay. It wouldn’t be ready for a couple of days, so we sat and waited. I put in an order for food and water, ready for when we landed.
On the third day, Rixon arrived in orbit, in the ship he had borrowed from Griff. He was tight-lipped over the radio, all he would say was ‘I’ll tell you when we get on the ground’.
We finally got landing clearance and headed down together. Our space was plenty big enough; we set down at the extremes leaving room for Freefall and Sister between us when they turned up.
“Where're the others?” was the first thing he said when he came on board.
This was starting to sound suspicious. “Should they have been here by now then?” I asked him. “Have you seen Melva?”
“No,” he answered but I could tell that he was hiding something.
“Are you sure?”
“Well, she asked me not to say.”
“Were you on Caraca?”
“No,” he said. “I was still in the IW then.”
&n
bsp; “So when?” This was silly, if she’d wanted help, she should have called me.
“I helped her with her cargo for Felton.”
Bells went off in my head. “Was it legal? Tell me you’ve not got her involved in anything dodgy.” I had visions of illegal take-offs, chases, missiles.
He looked at me, all innocence. “Of course not, I was just helping her, she wanted to do it without asking you, show you she could be independent. What was I to do? Of course I helped her.”
“With the Sister?” He nodded.
“Have you turned into Griff?” he asked. “You seem able to find out as much as him. I guess that he’s here somewhere, he wouldn’t miss this.”
“Don’t change the subject; what did you help her with?”
“Melva called me up, about a week ago, she had a problem. She takes her trade very seriously you know,” he said. “You should be proud of her.”
“What’s she done, and why does it involve the Sister?”
“Like I said, she had this problem. Felton was locked down, she couldn’t deliver.”
“We know, we spoke.”
“She said, but she didn’t want to do what you suggested. Said it wouldn’t do her reputation any good. She’s feisty, just like her mother was.”
“Hang on, she hasn’t got a reputation, she’s a rookie.”
He smiled. “That’s right, and it’s what I said. I told her you were correct, it was the sensible thing to do. She said she knew all that. She wanted to acquire a reputation, and she knew how to do it.”
“What did she do?” Somehow, I knew that I wasn’t going to like the answer I got.
“Clever really, she got me to call the Sister, the two of them arranged a meet, on a deserted moon. They trans-shipped the cargo, Sister delivered it. Sister’s a registered neutral ship, the Feds can’t hold her on the ground.”