The Halreptor ship rose up behind the burning freighter. It was no longer cloaked in its green aura as it was no longer moving at speed, but the red light of the lasers reflected evilly off the hull. As he watched in growing horror, Dennis saw the last section of the cargo bay sliced open and its contents spill out into the darkness. The lasers flickered off and were replaced by a yellow maw opening up in the lower half of the enormous bow. The alien vessel swept low over the now-gutted Republican freighter and began to swallow up the spilled cargo.
The pod rocked violently as the first cargo block caught it a glancing blow. Crump struggled back to he feet only to be bowled over by another. He managed a glance through the now rotating porthole and saw the space all around him filled with slowly-spinning walls of white. As the Halreptor vessel wheeled around onto a course heading directly towards him, he realised his tactical error. The aliens wanted the cargo, not the freighter. They had released it from the cargo bay and were scooping it straight out of the vacuum.
And he was right in the middle of it.
As the big mouth of alien craft swept him and everything around him into the interior of the craft, he glimpsed the freighter firing up its engines and limping to safety.
THE SHIP WHO LIED
“Now that,” Haynes declared with a depth of feeling, “is truly a thing of beauty.”
It was, too.
The ship had lines, curves, shapes and angles that were so sharp they could cut just by being looked at. It was so slick that not even a gaze could stick to it. On the cool scale it made absolute zero look like the Bahamas in a heat wave.
“How did it get here?”
Here was a cave barely narrow enough to span the wingtips, though that was still wide enough to be a very large cave. Hochnar had nothing that was grandiose enough to be termed a forest. There weren’t enough real trees on the whole planet to make a half-decent copse. What there was, was scrub. Scrub was a species of hardy low bush. That it survived at all on Hochnar gave a whole new meaning to the word hardy, but it managed to flourish in some places that were sheltered from the worst ravages of the weather and some moisture managed to cling to the thin dust. The entrance to the cave had been hidden behind a large, dense growth of particularly thorny scrub that had been carefully cultivated to grow both in front of and above the entrance, which had thus been invisible until they stumbled through into its mouth. Inside the mouth there had been a tidy stack of prepared torches that were quickly lit to provide illumination.
“Uncle Silas always insisted that these were prepared,” Keely told them nostalgically.
Simeon merely snorted.
The cave had sloped gently downwards for about fifty metres and then there it had been.
“It belonged to Uncle Silas,” she said.
“Your Uncle Silas must have been a very interesting man,” Haynes said, still admiring the ship, even though it could only be half seen in the light cast by the torches.
“No,” Simeon muttered, “just mad.”
“Have you any idea what this is?” Haynes ignored the young man and continued his breathless wonder.
“A spaceship,” Simeon pointed out the obvious. “A broken spacehip.
“Oh no,” Haynes contradicted him. “Calling this a spaceship is like calling the Ultramark Firevixen a car or the Smithson Dolphin IV a boat...” he broke off when he saw their blank expressions. “Venus de Milo a sculpture?” he offered, going a bit less technological, “Mona Lisa a painting?”
There was no better response.
“OK, how about it’s like calling Mountain yak rose garden manure a common dung.”
Finally, they nodded, understanding what he meant.
I have got to get off this planet, he told himself and looked again at the ship that just might do it.
“This is,” and his voice fell into the hushed tones reserved for churches and hospital wards at the mere thought of saying the words, “a Space Spirit VI deep space scoutship.”
There was a moment of silence as they all absorbed the import of that.
“So?” Simeon asked with a shrug of his shoulders.
Haynes restrained the urge to throttle him, but it was a close run thing.
“Is that good then?” Keely asked.
Haynes edged forward and laid one hand hesitantly on the ship’s hull. He could feel the pressure of the metal’s presence against his hand, but there was no other sensation. There was no temperature nor any sense of roughness. He pressed one finger against the surface and it simply slid away, gliding off the ship.
“Oh Keely,” he told her more in a sigh than speaking, “this is one of the most advanced ships ever built by the Star Fleet. The pinnacle of spatial transport design. These were meant to be the ships that would take us beyond the galactic rim.”
“It’s still a piece of junk that won’t fly,” Simeon muttered.
“What did Uncle Silas use it for?” Haynes wondered.
“He didn’t,” Keely revealed. “We found it accidentally when we were children and he let us use it as a slide.”
“A slide?” Haynes was scandalised. “You used a Space Spirit IV deep space scoutship as a slide?”
“Low friction surface,” Simeon pointed out. “Makes for a fabulous slide.”
Haynes walked around the beached ship, his eyes drinking in every facet of a sight that he had never thought to see.
“What happened?” Bentham asked from the edge of the lit area. He had entered the cave only unwillingly and now stood as close to the way out as he could and still see anything.
“How do you mean?” Haynes barely registered the question through his raging spaceshipophilia.
“You said that these ships were meant to take us beyond the rim. That means they didn’t. What happened?” Bentham clarified, looking terrified that he had dared to question his prophet, though Haynes had noticed a lessening of his sycophancy since the speech in the barn. News of those words had flown through Hochnarian society with a speed almost faster than the communication cables that carried it. When people came to discuss it everyone else already seemed to know about it. Debate was raging and, in some areas, fires were raging with it.
“A slight design flaw in the AI control system,” Haynes dismissed with a shrug. “Only ten were built before it was detected and all of them were disassembled, or so I thought. So everybody thought.”
“Design flaw,” Simeon was interested despite his determination not to be. “What was that?”
“They joined together and decided to take over the universe.”
“What?!” Keely and Simeon exclaimed together, their reaction similar enough to betray their heritage.
Bentham took one long look at the ship and slowly backed out of the cave.
“Artificial intelligence can be a tricky thing,” Haynes explained, dismissing the matter. He examined what appeared to be a hatchway in the side of the hull. “Now, how do we get in here?”
“You don’t,” Simeon told him flatly. “Uncle Silas sealed it and never showed us how to unseal it. Towards the end. I don’t think he knew how to do it himself.”
“I once found him down here on his own with a hundred of these torches, pounding on the door, begging for her to let him back in,” Keely said sadly. “He was crying.”
“He did that a lot towards the end,” Simeon agreed and for once his voice was not tinged with a sneer.
“Why so many torches?” Haynes wondered. He was intrigued by Uncle Silas, but the homely, heart-warming family recollections could wait. He had problems to solve first. A solidly shut hatchway for example.
“He said that he was trying to make her see the light,” Keely said.
“He often spoke nonsense at the end,” Simeon added.
“Oh no,” Haynes immediately started to examine the hull of the ship much more closely. He found what he was looking for almost straight away. “Uncle Silas may have been an old fool, but he was also a genius and certainly not mad. Come on, we have got work to d
o.”
“Where are we going?” Keely asked as Haynes surged past her, newly energised.
“Where we always seem to go at times like this,” he told her, waving at both of them to follow him. “Back to the beginning.”
The Leader of the Republican Council was not a man who was easily perturbed. He had to deal with the whims of hundreds of feckless senators from all over the galaxy for one thing, each with their own agendas, personalities and petty rivalries getting in the way of whatever he and the President were trying to achieve. He often wondered if the whole bunch of them had been elected as part of some elaborate conspiracy against his sanity. He always wondered how he got anything done at all.
The honest truth, though, was that he didn’t really get that much done anyway. There wasn’t really that much to do. Most of the hard work (The Treaty For The Equality Of Sentient Beings, Universal (or Galactic at least) Suffrage, Free Trade, the right to free speech or telepathy or sign language) had been sorted out in the long history of his predecessors in the office. He was now left mainly settling squabbles between Senators about who saw which mineral-rich planet first and who insulted whose concubine over breakfast in the Senate’s dining hall. There were times when turning over the dirt on his allotment asteroid was a seriously inviting prospect.
This was pretty much one of those times.
It was fair to say that the man opposite him perturbed him. It was not a feeling he approved of, at least for himself. It was a meeting that he would rather not have taken, but there are some things that not even a Leader of the Republican Council could avoid.
“I am not quite sure that I understand the request,” the Leader sat back into his obscenely expensive armchair and regarded the other man over steepled fingers.
“I require the use of a deep-space frigate and would like to borrow one,” the other man repeated his request word for word right down to the total lack of inflection.
“A frigate?”
“A deep space frigate,” the visitor confirmed, stressing the designation.
“For what purpose?”
“Mr Leader,” the visitor had been precise in his use of the title. So precise that the Leader wondered if it wasn’t being used as an insult somehow, “You know that I do not divulge information of that type . There are certainly a few operations I have carried out for this Office that I am sure you would want to be covered by my discretion.”
“Of course, but...”
“Allow me to save us both a little time,” the visitor spoke softly, but there was no denying the command in his voice. “I am in need of a forward base of operations for a few days and a deep space frigate would serve my purposes. You have such ships at your disposal. This is an operation for another individual, but it is one that will also benefit the smooth running of the Republic. There would be no repercussions that could be harmful to you in my inevitable success.”
“A few days,” the Leader repeated, his mind still struggling to grasp the scale of what the man was asking. This was not a laser lawn cutter he was asking to ‘borrow’.
“No more than that,” the visitor replied.
“What could possibly make you think that I could just hand over a deep space frigate to you even if I wanted to?”
“In view of our long relationship...”
“You want it as a favour?” the Leader asked, stunned.
“I had hoped that would be enough,” the visitor admitted, “but was prepared for the chance that it might not be.” He threw a small envelope onto the desktop.
The Leader reached out and took the envelope with some trepidation. The mail system was fully electronic now and nobody used paper envelopes for anything other than very bad news. He opened it and shook out the data crystal. With hands that shook just a little, he slipped the crystal disc into the reader and called up the screen.
“I took the liberty of disabling the sound,” the visitor spoke calmly. “I did not think that you would want those sounds to be overheard.”
The Leader’s hands were shaking from outrage now, “How did you get hold of this?”
“Mr Leader,” the visitor spoke as one would to an angry child, calmly, soothingly, “I do things for a great many important people and along the way I find things out that have nothing to do with the job at hand, but which I keep for myself in case it might come in useful at some time. Such as now.”
“You don’t think that I would let you out of here alive with this do you?” the Leader stormed, all sense of personal danger gone. The man opposite him was very dangerous, and the Leader knew just how dangerous, but it didn’t matter.
“And we both know that you’ve given that order before, don’t we?” the stranger said coldly.
The Leader stopped as if he had been slapped in the face and had his head deluged with cold water all at the same time. It was true, this man knew things about what went on in the halls of power, some of the less palatable (not to mention legally questionable and even beyond questionable) things that went on. Like all Republican Leaders, he had given orders that were best left secret, not only for himself, but also for the office and the Republic itself. He had been offered a choice, but it wasn’t really much of one.
“Is this the only copy?” the Leader asked, stopping the recording. The crystal disc slid smoothly out onto the tabletop.
“Don’t be foolish,” the visitor replied equably, “but you can be assured that all copies will be destroyed as soon as I am safely out of the building with what I have requested.”
And, strangely enough, the Leader was reassured. He knew enough of this man to know that, killer though he was, his word was indeed his bond. If he said he could do something, he could do it and if he promised something, then that thing came to pass.
“All right,” he surrendered gracefully at last, “but I need to know that this decision will not come back to haunt me.”
“Your ghosts are your own and I do not speak for them,” the other man rose lithely to his feet, “but my task will not embarrass you.”
With a respectful nod, which of course added insult to injury, the visitor turned and left, leaving his back unguarded had the Leader possessed the courage to draw a weapon and use it.
They both knew that was not his way.
The Leader picked up the crystal disc and let it slip through his fingers to shatter on the marble floor.
Back to the beginning meant the dung container from Srindar Djem. Haynes’ newly regrown nasal hairs practically shrivelled up at the mere thought of returning to the receptacle, but he needed it once again for his escape. He stood, along with Simeon and Keely who appeared to have become his constant companions, in the centre of the structure, looking at the few forlorn plasteel girders left standing, all that remained of the giant receptacle.
“It’s all gone,” Keely continued to display an incredible talent for saying what everyone could clearly see.
Hochnar was as poor in minerals as it appeared to be in everything else and the container represented a significant source of material. Not only that, but it was manufactured and worked to a quality far beyond that which could be achieved in any of the planet’s blacksmithies. It was no surprise, therefore, that the larger and more useful pieces had been recycled. It was actually surprising that anything at all was left.
“There’s not enough here to make a pulley or lever or anything big enough to pull the ship out,” Simeon assessed. “Most of this was buckled in the drop. That’s why it hasn’t been taken yet.”
Haynes swivelled around on one heel of his hand-sewn boots, taking in the whole of the distant, bleak horizon. It was easy to see why this had been the designated drop zone. Nobody was going to worry about effects on the natural beauty of the place.
“No,” he said, slowly and thoughtfully, “I think that there is just enough for our purposes.”
“But it’s all junk!” Simeon declared, kicking one of the girders. It leaned over slowly enough to seem to defy gravity and then toppled to the gro
und. “You try to use any of this to pull or push that ship and it will twist out of shape, or just plain break.”
“You see,” Haynes said in a slightly dreamy tone, still surveying the horizon, “the thing is that most people never look at what’s beneath their own feet.”
Both Simeon and Keely involuntarily looked down at the dirt they were stood on. Haynes lifted up one foot. Where his heel had pivoted around, the dust was swept away to reveal a small patch of plasteel. He smiled hugely and the two younger people couldn’t help joining in.
It was impossible to keep the thing a whole secret. The moving of a large chunk of plasteel, especially a large flat chunk, involved certain resources such as specialised lifting gear and transport vehicles. On a planet such as Hochnar, the local availability of such equipment could be counted on the fingers of one finger. A certain amount of resource reallocation therefore had to take place and the person whose equipment was suddenly de-allocated complained to somebody else in a bar (there is nowhere so poor that they cannot afford to set up alcohol fermenting businesses). The bar companion got curious and mentioned it to the local farmers’ cooperative. They mentioned it to their wives and by morning the whole community knew what was happening.
A large crowd gathered to watch the lifting of the plasteel (newly shorn of the last of the attached girders which disappeared shortly thereafter). Many brought sandwiches. On a world as entertainment-deprived as Hochnar, the inhabitants learned quickly how to exploit every new opportunity to enjoy themselves to its utmost. The lifting of the plasteel became the loading of the plasteel as the afternoon wore on. By this point, the local schools had given up the fight and their students were running around, playing and generally getting in the way of the workmen. The workers bore it all good naturedly, merely pointing out to the children just how thin the red smear on the ground would be if a piece of plasteel this big fell on them.
Afternoon wore on into evening and the loading of the plasteel finally became the transporting of the plasteel, but the crowds did not disperse. Lighting torches that they had brought along already prepared, the onlookers spread out in twin lines behind the heavy transporter and walked in its tracks, singing songs until long into the night.
To Infinity Page 4