Starport:
Zeta Prime
By
S. A. Jackson
( c ) copyright by Sheila Jackson, August 2014
Cover art by Jenny Dixon, August 2014
ISBN 978-1-60394-636-0
Smashwords Edition
New Concepts Publishing
Lake Park, GA 31636
www.newconceptspublishing.com
This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.
Chapter One
Jillian raced down to the steel fence circling the perimeter of the gateway. The call on her communication device from her second-in-command had been an urgent ‘code yellow’. This meant military presence–which indicated to her that there may be a threat on site.
Her second-in-command was waiting for her by the entrance gate. She lifted her arm to shield her eyes from the glare of the headlights on the military land pod. There were three approaching the construction site and their arrival had caused intrigue amongst the workers, many stopping their duties and craning their necks to look.
“Mikey. Open the gate so we can check I.D.,” she instructed the dark-skinned man beside her and then lifted the communication device to her mouth.
“All security, military incoming. Stay focused on the back perimeters.” She raised her head to see several of the gateway builders still staring from the large mound in the center of the area.
“And can someone locate the foreman and tell him to get his men back to work.”
Mikey used a magnetic fob to unlock and swing open the gate as Jillian walked forward to greet the two soldiers who emerged from the first pod.
“I.D. please, gentlemen,” she requested. They wore the standard red and green uniform of all soldiers–the colors made for the best camouflage against the colors of most foliage on planet Zeta Prime–but she liked to be thorough. As the head of security for the site, she made sure that she knew every single person who entered the gateway side of the fence. The men complied and flashed her identification cards with serious expressions.
“What’s your business here,” she asked the taller of the two–a shaven-headed man with a square jaw who she had noted was named Tom?
“We’re looking for a Miss Jillian Tierney.”
“You’ve found her.” She gestured to herself and made to extend her arm in a handshake, but as she reached forward Tom grabbed it and twisted it behind her back, pulling her other arm in the same way.
As the shorter of the two soldiers clipped handcuffs tightly to her wrist, she yelped in pain at the overstretch in her shoulders. Mikey dashed over and placed hands on the short guy.
“Hey. Hey. What do you think you’re doing,” he demanded, trying to stop him securing the cuffs?”
“Sir. Please step away.” Tom lifted a gun in warning and Mikey lifted his palms in surrender, feeling hopeless for his boss but admiring the way her face remained emotionless. Seeing her shake her head at him he backed away slightly, knowing that she wanted him to keep out of trouble.
“Miss Tierney. We are arresting you for conspiring with rebel supremists in a plot to sabotage this gateway.” Tom had placed his gun back in the holster and proceeded to rip Jillian’s stun gun, magnetic fob and communication handset from her solid silver belt.
“What?” Jillian’s expression finally reflected disbelief at the ludicrous allegation. “That’s utterly ridiculous. I’m head of security here. My whole life on this planet has been about protecting this gateway. There has been some mistake. Let me go and we can get to the bottom of this.” She struggled against her cuffs.
“We’ve been given orders to arrest and take you in, Ma’am.” Tom motioned to his colleague, who then placed his hand on Jillian’s back and marched her towards the third land pod.
She twisted her around, glimpsing a growing crowd underneath the silhouette of the starport, their work abandoned in favor of watching this dramatic scene.
Mikey watched, too, frustrated at being unable to stop this madness and resolving to help Jillian as soon as he got more information. He attempted a comforting smile in her direction, trying to signify to her that he would resolve things from his end and wanting to calm the growing concern he caught flash across her face.
Unbeknownst to any of the humans, someone else was also watching with interest. Hidden up high in the branches of a tree, sat Faron–one of the cat-like people native to Zeta Prime. His eyes glowed an iridescent yellow in the dusk as he looked upon the events unfolding before him. The human female he had followed for some time now appeared to have been captured by soldiers of her own kind.
Faron had observed the invaders before. When they had first landed and built their colonies, he and his tribe had spent years gathering all the information they could, from a distance. They wanted to learn their ways, their strange language–and he needed to learn if they were going to be a threat to his people.
He had noticed this female on one such tracking mission. It had been her eyes that drew her to him. This race all had extremely strange, small eyes, but he had never seen such a color before. Hers were stormy grey, the same hue as the most beautiful of Zeta Prime’s five moons. He’d marveled at her spiraled hair, how it bounced and was the shade of night.
Witnessing her capture, he growled with displeasure. From what he had seen of this race, they were greedy and seemed to take whatever they wished–without thought to the consequences of their actions. As he noticed a large troupe of them stamp out of an unfamiliar vessel and into the place the female spent most of her time, he assumed they were taking her area too now, and decided perhaps it was time to stop observing at a distance.
Blinking against the bright lights inside the pod, Jillian stifled a moan as she was slammed into the side of the vehicle, the sensor on the cuffs activating the safe-hold feature–strong titanium bars on the wall fixing onto her handcuffs, securing her to the ship. She was on a prison pod. The stark grey interior housed only sporadically spaced bars in a circle, one of which she was now attached to. The blue sensor on the bottom of each bar flashed, ready and waiting for more handcuffs–more prisoners.
There was a vague shudder as the pod lifted from the ground and began its journey. Jillian was now completely alone and utterly bewildered. She shuffled her feet in an attempt to ease the pressure in her shoulders. Her thick boots were covered with a film of red dust from the site, but the black leather trousers and thick, long-sleeved top remained clean–their anti-stun coating repelling the brightly colored dirt of planet Zeta Prime.
Knowing it was futile to fight or shout in the unmanned ship, Jillian waited patiently in her awkward position until she felt the descent to land. As the hatch opened, the bars released her cuffs and two soldiers held her arms, escorting her into a dingy bunker in a clearing of Zeta Prime’s peculiar red forest.
Jillian shook her head as she walked, trying to make sense of all that had happened. Arguing with the soldiers wasn’t going to help, so she stepped inside without a fight.
She was shunted forward inside what could only be described as a cage. A small box covered with thinly spaced metal strips on all four sides and the ceiling contained a narrow bed, toilet and sink. She was astounded at the archaic prison facility–inside the dimly lit bunker she could see long rows of cages like hers, scuffed concrete forming a grid of paths between them. She saw that the locks on the cell doors were much higher tech than the old fashioned cells, and similar to the magnetic locks they used on the site she had just been removed from. One of her escorting soldiers pressed his fob to the keypad–she was officially imprisoned.
“Excuse
me.” She asked him as he tucked his keys back into his pocket.
“When is someone coming to explain this to me? When do I give my statement?” She had to fight to keep her voice steady. Being locked up like a zoo animal had made the seriousness of the situation more apparent, and concern had started to grow.
“Someone will be with you shortly.” The soldier replied flatly, providing her with zero reassurance that that would actually be the case.
Jillian paced the floor, mind racing. She had been arrested for assisting supremists to sabotage the gateway. The very idea of it was so ridiculous it was almost funny. Her job was to keep those extremist protesters away from the site, and she had done so successfully for a long time now. Heck, the build was almost finished and there’d been no trouble at all–thanks to her. She inhaled, feeling some confidence build. She would be able to clear up this misunderstanding and prove her innocence, for sure. That’s all it was after all, some silly misunderstanding.
A loud explosion interrupted her thoughts. The ground underneath shook and rumbled, and Jillian had to spread her feet to maintain her balance. Shouts echoed around the bunker as the atmosphere charged with panic. For the first time, she noticed other prisoners–their hands clutching onto the cold metal bars of the cells, the lurid orange lights above illuminating wildly panicked faces.
“What was that?” One prisoner yelled to the guards, some of whom were huddled talking in urgent tones into communication devices, some running out of a wide door at the front whilst a couple of them sped up and down the aisles–pulling on the doors of the occupied cages, checking that the locks had held after the vibrations from the explosion.
“Was that a bomb?” A large man on Jillian’s left spoke.
“Did something blow up? What’s blown up? Are we under attack?” The first prisoner continued. At his questions, all hell broke loose. There were probably only twelve of them locked up, but it sounded like ten times that as everyone started screaming for answers and speculating on the event. Jillian heard one person she couldn’t see start to sob–great, huge wracking gasps of fearful tears.
In her peripheral vision, she noticed the prisoner in the box next to her waving maniacally. He was a short, tubby man in his forties and looked more like a pompous school teacher than a criminal, she thought. Jillian squinted to try and see him better, pressing herself as close as she could to the edge of her sealed cage.
He joined the fingers and thumbs of both hands together to make a circle then, raising his eyebrows as if to make sure she were ready, he splayed his fingers and moved his hands apart, signifying the ruin of the circle.
“Gone.” He whispered, waiting for her reaction with a gleeful smile.
For some reason, an icy trepidation started growing in the pit of Jillian’s stomach. Logic began creeping into her consciousness, no matter how hard she tried to fend it off. The prisoner’s crude actions and shouted assumptions from other prisoners had done nothing but confirm her initial fears. There was only one thing in the near vicinity that would require a bomb big enough to cause an explosion of that magnitude. There was only one thing that would cause such a shake to the ground as it collapsed… the star portal.
She chewed on her bottom lip as she analyzed what this may mean. The military clearly thought she was already a part of some rebel group working to destroy the gateway. If it had now been blown up …. Jillian sank onto the hard bed as she exhaled. It would be bad news for her. Regardless of the ludicrous accusations that had already been made, she had clearly failed in her job somewhere if a rebel organization had planned an obstruction of that size without her picking up on it. And as the bomb had gone off so soon after she had left the area, it would look like it had been brought in while she was still on duty.
The conclusion was that she had either missed something crucial on her rounds, which she very much doubted–she knew for a fact that she was good at her job, nothing ever got past her–or, the bomb had been planted as soon as she’d left. Which left her with the theory that this had to have been an inside job, and if that was so, then somebody had set her up to take the fall for it.
Chapter Two
It seemed to take hours for the chaos to die down, although Jillian’s heart rate did not seem to slow as the time passed. Some of the prisoners had taken to quiet reflection after receiving no information from the guards, who seemed shell-shocked and hectic in the continuation of their duties inside the bunker.
Jillian joined the majority of them by sitting on her bed and trying to piece what little knowledge she had together. She was heartbroken at the thought that they were now completely cut off from Earth and empathized with the crying from the other cell. The excitement of the near completion of the gateway had brought so much joy as people anticipated seeing family and loved ones after decades apart. Although she had no one left there herself, Jillian had felt her own thrill at being able to visit in a matter of seconds–Earth was, after all, her home planet. She also felt a strange sense of loss. The colony on Zeta Prime was now completely isolated–a rescue ship would be at least twenty years away. For now and for a long time, they were alone.
* * * *
Mikey could have cried as he regarded the conditions of the prison, he couldn’t believe such a burst of life like Jillian was locked up in such a dank, soul-less place. After hearing the reasons for her arrest, he had done a little cautious snooping and had started to suspect a plot from the inside. He didn’t believe it was anyone from their security firm–they worked together far too closely and Jillian was sharp, she would have definitely picked up on unusual behavior.
He was inclined to think there was a terrorist cell inside the military, but knew well enough to keep his suspicions to himself before he had any proof. In the meantime, he knew he had to help his boss.
Thankful for his training, he accosted a guard protecting the outside force field perimeter. The bomb from earlier meant that he was too busy on his handset, distracted, which made sneaking up from behind easier than he’d anticipated. He had stunned the man to the floor and with heart-stopping speed, had dragged him just inside the cover of forest to don his clothes and procure the most important item–the key fob.
A fine sheen of sweat across his forehead, he’d used the fob to drop the field and tried to look confident as he made long strides into the bunker. If he were caught now, he and Jillian would run the risk of both spending a lifetime incarcerated.
Keeping his head down, he located Jillian’s cell quickly and made his way over, mouth dry with fear.
“Mikey.” She breathed in relief at seeing her old friend and colleague approach her. He stood rigidly and only gave the slightest of smiles in greeting.
“There isn’t much time.” He darted his eyes in the direction of the guards. “They think you were working with the supremists to destroy the gateway. It’s gone.” He finished sadly.
Jillian opened her mouth to protest her innocence but Mikey raised his palm to stop her.
“I know you weren’t involved, I know, but there’s no way of proving that to the others now. The way it stands, you’re gonna be charged with this.” He leant very close and lowered his voice further.
“You have to get out of here.” He clutched her hand affectionately. Jillian tried to hide her shock as she felt a small metal fob pressed into her palm.
“It is a master. It’ll unlock your cell. Also, there’s a force field around the perimeter–I saw two key pads to lower it–one north and one south of this bunker. Use the fob and wait until the field drops. Choose your moment Jillian, and good luck.”
She stared at him, absorbing the sincerity in his brown eyes–the pity. She had worked with Mikey for over a year and trusted him with her life. She knew he was putting himself at great risk allowing her to escape, and amongst the tornado of disbelief whipping inside her, she also felt a warm ball of gratitude at his loyalty.
Placing her palm on his cheek, she bid him a silent goodbye. He tilted his head onto her warm han
d, conveying his sadness at the situation, then turned and left her alone once more.
Jillian sat on the edge of her bed and tried not to think too hard about what was happening and why. Right now, she needed to focus on the most pressing task at hand–escaping an unfair prison sentence for a crime she did not commit. She watched the guards carefully, one of them would always do a round every couple of minutes or so but they were mostly aghast at the news of the destruction of the star gate, and conveniently had their focus elsewhere.
The prisoner to the left of her was in his bed, covered with a grey scratchy blanket. Despite them being curled in a fetal position to sleep, she could tell this person was mighty from the outline of the sleeping mass. Not that it mattered. Sleeping people were not going to be a threat to her plan. The row of cells directly opposite her all seemed to be empty, and she decided that path was probably the best route out.
School teacher man was looking at her with interest. He had seen the tall, dark guard whispering and had been curious. The guard’s stance had been too furtive–guilty almost. He had positioned himself so he could get the best view possible of the exchange, but frustratingly, he hadn’t been able to make out the conversation. Remaining there, he wondered what was so special about this new female that entitled her to private conversations with the staff.
Jillian noticed him gawping, and gave him a look so sharp he hung his head in guilt at being caught. She would have to wait for this one to sleep, he had an air of untrustworthiness, and instinct told her that he would be likely to alert the guards should she be bold enough to simply walk out under his gaze.
She lay on her side and shut her eyelids tight to feign sleep, in the hope that he would do the same. There would be no hope of the blissful ignorance of slumber for her, but she concentrated on the rush of air filling and then empting from her lungs in an effort to stop her thoughts racing. Knowing that she would have to make her move soon, whilst the guards were still pre-occupied, she prized open her eyes just a crack. The tubby man was still watching her and she ground her teeth in annoyance. Keeping the rise and fall of her chest steady and slow, so as to appear deep asleep, she kept a lookout on him. Waiting.
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