TO INFINITY
(and maybe that’s far enough)
By
Darren Humphries
Photography credit: D Sharon Pruitt
Also Available on Kindle
The Great Rock N Roll Doomsday Tour
The Sword In the Tree
New York City Legend
An Orc Not Like Others
The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D.-The Curious Case
Of The Kidnapped Chemist
Stormwreck
Table Of Contents
Prologue
The Not So Great Escape
The Man Who Would Be Warden
Fertiliser God Of Dunes
In Space No-one Can Hear You Sing Showtunes
The Ship Who Lied
Telepathy Or Not Telepathy, That Is The Question
It’s My Party And I’ll Dive If I Want To
Close Encounters Of The Halreptor Kind
Family Reunion
Presidential Address
PROLOGUE
It is a dark time for the Galactic Republic
Fusion reactor fuel rod prices have gone sky high and people can’t afford to switch their lights on.
Even more importantly, the mysterious Halreptors are ravaging the edges of known space, destroying outposts, hijacking freighters, stealing every copy of Galactic Heat magazine and leaving nobody alive to tell the tale. Emboldened by their successes, their last attack was deep inside Republican borders.
The Space Corps, relegated by centuries of peace and decadence to little more than glorified traffic wardens, cannot cope. The Senate is either in bed or disarray.
The Galaxy is in desperate need of a leader, a hero…
THE NOT SO GREAT ESCAPE
Srindar Djem was the pride of the Galactic Republican Penal System. It was justifiably proud of its 0% parolee re-offending rate. This was due, in full, to the fact that once you went to Srindar Djem you never came back. Rehabilitation was not high on the agenda. In fact, it wasn’t on the agenda at all because there was no agenda. The prison authorities knew full well that half of the people who got sent to Srindar Djem were the kind of people who would have stolen any agenda available and traded it as toilet paper in seconds whilst still managing to be in full view of at least a dozen witnesses a mile away at the time of the crime. The other half would have stolen the agenda and just stood there saying “what are you going to do about it, eh?” whilst holding something large and destructive behind their back.
As a result, not a lot of meetings were held there.
Another thing that Srindar Djem was proud of was its pigs. Djemese pigs were sought after the whole galaxy over for their admittedly tough, but flavoursome, meat. Their hide, also tough, was used in making some of the best walking boots in all the spiral arms. Their powdered tusks could be made into the most potent aphrodisiac (also the most expensive, Djemese pig tusks being tough to powder). Their hair could be twisted into rope that would never break, their eyeballs possessed homeopathic properties and their bones were sold for pit-props.
The only part of a Djemese pig that nobody could find a use for was its personality. Djemese pigs were mean and, since they were five feet high and possessed tusks that could (in the non-powdered form, at least) spear a man through his chest, not that many people wanted anything to do with a live one. Which was fine by the pigs.
Being a Djemese pig herder meant two things; firstly that you were a career criminal to be on the planet at all and secondly that you were stupid enough to really piss off the authorities after you got there. Being a live Djemese pig herder meant that you hadn’t at least pissed off the Djemese pigs.
The only thing that Djemese pigs hated more than their herders were other Djemese pigs. As well as being homicidal they were also utterly porcinocidal. As a result, each pig was housed in its own individual compound constructed of steel-reinforced concrete that even the most advanced ground assault munitions would have had trouble breaking through. These compounds, naturally, became incredibly filthy over time, especially as the pigs used their bowels as a way of communicating their unhappiness at being held in a bare concrete enclosure that even their heads couldn’t crack. Periodically, therefore, the compounds were sluiced out by those inmates that were considered the lowest of the low. Nobody volunteered for sluicing duty and even having both arms broken by the Clammer Gang was considered preferable.
Kaymer Haynes thought differently.
That was part of his problem. Firstly, he had thought differently from his fellow man about the rights of payment and ownership. Then he had thought differently about whether the Galactic Cyber Bank’s security protocols were there for any other reason than to present a challenge. The Sultan of Capra IV had certainly not shared his view about the sanctity of the Capresi harem moon and his views upon the proper way to test drive a Quasar 11 driveship had been at odds with those of the dealer. Unfortunately, his thoughts on the Space-Corps-Police-evading capabilities of the Quasar 11 had proved to be different from both those of the Space Corps and the manufacturers of the ship. The judge believed that he had been lenient in his choice of sentence, considering that he was a major stockholder of the Galactic Cyber Bank and a close personal friend of the Sultan of Capra IV. Haynes had thought differently, of course, and was not about to accept it.
Which brought him to the dung detail.
It had been absurdly easy to get onto the sluicing crew. The real difficulty had been in managing it without letting anyone realise that it was what he actually wanted. That would have instantly seen him put under close surveillance or placed directly into the asylum. He was watched, of course, at the beginning as all prisoners on a new duty were watched. That meant that he had been sluicing out the pig enclosures for almost a month before he felt the time was right.
He had to wait until the very end of the duty before he could put his plan into action. By that time, the accumulated grime was beginning to eat through the heavy disposable coveralls that he wore and the mask that protected his eyes and throat from ammoniac attack was no longer keeping back the worst of the smell. Sweat was pooling in his boots (thicker than the coveralls, but equally disposable. After all who would possibly want to wear them after this?) and every inch of his skin itched like crazy at the mere thought of coming into contact with what he was currently scraping into the central gully that flowed down into the transport tanks. There were some patches that not even the superheated steam jets could soften into liquid. That itch had been with him since the very first day on the job and he wondered now if it would ever truly leave him.
This escape plan, crazy as the idea of escape from Srindar Djem was, could have been attempted at any time since he was put on the duty, but first he had to serve enough time on the crew to be accepted and for the watchers to relax their guard. He also had to be absolutely sure of his timing. He was only going to get one shot at this and if it didn’t work then he would be stuck mucking out these pigs for the rest of his life, and he intended to live a very long time. The timing was for today, he was sure of it. At least as long as nobody else changed the timetable, of course.
The klaxon for the end of the shift sounded over the complex and the pigs started to batter at the steel doors of their holding pens, keen to be back out at the task of soiling their enclosures. This was a purely pavlovian response because that was the only kind of response the pigs had sufficient brains for. The main doors to the enclosures ground open just far enough to let a human slip through.
This was the moment, the instant when the plan either stood a chance or fell at the very first step.
Checking that the cameras were not pointing directly at him, Haynes slipped over the edge into the concrete gully. The sludge there was up to his knees and existed in a state somew
here between liquid and solid. He waded down the channel until the walls on either side were tall enough for him to crouch behind and mask him from the eyes of the camera. He did crouch down and reached inside his coveralls, careful not to touch any bare skin with the soiled surface of his gloves, and pulled out a tightly rolled bundle. He quickly shook open another set of coveralls and tossed them up onto the concrete floor of the pen. When the pig was released back into the open, it would dash straight to the clothes and rip them into shreds that would be identifiable for what they had been, but which would leave nothing to be examined thoroughly. That would hopefully keep the guards from looking for an escaped convict, thinking instead that he was a dead convict.
He waded further on, bent double to avoid detection, the waste level rising up his thighs. Behind him, the giant doors ground shut. There was no going back now. A Djemese pig would think nothing of plunging through its own waste to get a bite of live human. He had to hurry now. It was taking him longer to progress than he had estimated, not least because the viscous sludge seemed to be actively resisting his movement.
He reached the grate at the end of the channel just as the chains of the inner gate started to clank. This was the first critical point. Grabbing one of the bars, he pulled on it hard. Nothing happened. He grunted with the effort, switching his grip and direction of pull, but the bar remained resolutely in place. Behind him, he could hear the pig, snuffling and snarling, its trotters scrabbling frantically as it tried to get through the opening gap. It could certainly smell his presence, though how it managed that through the stench that shrivelled Haynes’ own nose hairs, he couldn’t even begin to guess. In frustration and, he had to admit in a flash of uncomfortable honesty, panic he kicked the bottom to the bar.
It sprang to one side.
He didn’t take time to smile grimly because he could almost feel the warmth of the pig’s breath on his neck. Blessing the corrosive properties of Djemese pig droppings, he pushed the bar to one side and hauled himself through the gap presented, just as the pig launched itself across the compound in a whirl of porcine death. It fell upon the discarded coveralls with a fury.
Haynes found himself in a tunnel that was just large enough for him to stand upright in. The concrete gave way to some metal plating further on. It was clearly impregnated with some strong chemicals to protect it against the corrosive properties of the liquid that it channelled. It chilled him to think what would have been the result if the same chemicals had been used on the metal of the grille. Turning away from the light, he waded further on through the turgid mess. The tunnel started to angle down and close in around him. That made walking difficult. It also brought his face closer to the surface of the noxious stuff he was wading through. The stink, now concentrated in a small area, was beginning to burn through the lining of his lungs.
Suddenly, the floor of the pipe disappeared from beneath his feet. There had been no warning, no rushing sound like a waterfall, but this wasn’t water and it flowed glutinously over the lip rather than rushed. Fortunately, the turgid nature of the waste slowed down his descent, as did the narrowing of the pipe. It narrowed too far too quickly and abruptly his slide came to a jerky halt as his shoulders refused to follow his chest any further. The waste following him started to pool around his jammed torso. This wasn’t how he had imagined his life coming to an end, wedged immovably in a pipe and drowned in pig faeces.
As the noxious material built up around him, though, it provided both a lubricant and increased pressure. Enough, at last, to fire him like a stun gas grenade out of the pipe into the waste pool below. It was all that he could do to prevent being submerged.
That horror was yet to come.
He surveyed the tank he had landed in and realised that he had reached his first goal. This was one of the transport tanks he had seen being loaded onto the freighter shuttles and shipped off-world into the cargo holds of the giant interstellar jumpships. Somewhere beyond the room, machinery of enormous size thumped and clanked into life and the tank began to move. This meant the it was time for the next stage of the plan and that meant the reed.
Reeds were another thing, other than convicts and pigs, that were common on Srindar Djem. A whole industry dedicated to manufacturing complex and beautiful-sounding reed organs would have been possible had the population not been more interested in the possibilities of their use as deadly accurate blowpipes. The first (and, as it happens, last) mass breakout attempt from Srindar Djem was armed with blowpipes and darts dipped in moonglow flower poison. It was only thwarted when the escapees realised that they had forgotten to check whether any of their number could fly a shuttle. Since then, all shuttle operations were completely automated from within blowpipe-proof cockpits and any human guards or operators present wore body armour that could stop something significantly more powerful than a breath-propelled dart.
Prisoners on work duties were routinely searched for long, hollow tubes. The one that Haynes carried, though, was broken into several small sections that could be secreted about his person and slotted back together for a not quite airtight (but definitely pig effluent-tight) seal. He quickly assembled the reed pipe and, as the tank slid out into the open to be loaded onto the (fully-automated) shuttle, put his lips around one end and sank below the surface scum, hoping that his eyelids wouldn’t melt.
Now that he was submerged, his other senses took over the story. He felt the turgid ebb and flow of the almost-fluid around him as the tank was moved along a conveyor into the facility where it was prepared for transport. Dimly, through the muck (and how was he ever going to get that out of his ears?) he heard the change in the quality of the sound as the tank slid inside the building.
There, it ground to a halt.
There was a distorted gurgling that suggested something had entered into the tank with him. He had not considered that security could be so tight that they would search the pig waste before shipping it. There couldn’t be many people who were mad enough to try and hide in a tank Djemese pig effluent.
There was a sudden hissing, crackling sound and he found himself abruptly immobilised to such an extent that he couldn’t even shiver.
He wanted to shiver, though, because he was also suddenly very cold.
He realised what had happened immediately, and even considered that perhaps he should have anticipated it. The tanks were certain to be secure and stable during the interstellar section of the journey because the freight ships plying the space lanes were the size of small moons and only became unstable when struck by multiple nuclear warheads. Such warheads were, admittedly, easy to come by in ones and twos, generally for slum clearance, but any more than that usually brought the wrong kind of interest in the buyer (not from the police, you understand, but from people wanting to steal them in order to sell them on the black market for slum clearance). The lift off and descent to the destination planet, however, were entirely different propositions in terms of stability. Atmospheric buffeting could sometimes be severe and Djemese pig waste was not something you wanted slopping around your decks. The solution, apparently, was to freeze-dry the cargo for the journey. Unfortunately, this consignment had been freeze-dried with him inside.
He had been breathing in at the moment of the freezing, so he slowly exhaled through the reed and attempted to breathe in again. The material of his coveralls was frozen to the now-solid pig effluent, but his chest was able to move slightly beneath it to allow shallow breaths.
Haynes had spent some time in the Monasteries of Tantra IV as a youth. He had gone there because he heard that the monks employed the most exotic women in the whole galaxy to test the abilities of the acolytes to control their bodies and desires. Those that successfully resisted the wiles of these women went on to study higher and more complex forms of spiritual meditation. Haynes had been thrown out for not having the slightest intention of resisting, but in his brief stay he had learned to control a few other bodily functions. Breathing was one of the first disciplines that the brothers taught
their young apprentices.
“You cannot meditate properly until you can breathe the way you choose,” his old teacher had advised him many times, usually accompanying the statement with a sharp blow to the head from his wooden prayer mat to emphasise the point. Other favourite sayings had been “Awareness is the key to life” (a kick to the shins), “Reality is only as real as you let it be” (jabbed in the side with a sharp stick), “The body is a temple with strict tenancy agreements” (slapped in the face with a wet fish) and “Never practice these skills on the Abbott’s teenage daughter” (head shoved down a toilet for long enough to test anyone’s breath control).
Haynes certainly didn’t miss that old monk.
The low bass rumbling and jarring of the shuttle lift-off gave way to a violent thudding as the tank was thrown into its cradle inside the great freighter’s hold in orbit. There would be nothing more to be felt now until the tank was taken back out again.
Settling himself (metaphorically, of course, since he was completely encased), Haynes slowed his breathing and heartbeat, relaxing as far as he was able. Calm engulfed him in its easy, warm and familiar grip and he slipped slowly into a trance, secure in the knowledge that he had pulled off the impossible and escaped from Srindar Djem. It was almost a shame that nobody else would know it.
THE MAN WHO WOULD BE WARDEN
“This is quite impossible!” the Warden declared hotly. “I don’t believe it.”
“Belief is not required.” The other man shrugged, dismissing his concerns. “These are facts.”
“But you are suggesting...”
“I am suggesting nothing,” the other man interrupted, but with factual calm.
The Warden tried to study him, but it was difficult from 100 light years away. Just because the Warden was the man responsible for every aspect of the running of the penal colony of Srindar Djem didn’t mean that he was ever going to venture anywhere near the place. He had never stepped foot on the face of the planet, having accepted the job from a ship in orbit. Holographic transmission technology made his personal presence unnecessary anyway. Two people from opposite ends of the Republic could appear to be in the same room, though this could be embarrassing if the time differential was miscalculated and they both appeared to be in the same shower.
To Infinity Page 1