BACKGROUND INFORMATION: Narwin is pleasant enough world. Its lone continent boasts a predominately temperate climate, is blessed with plentiful rainfall and benefits from a long growing season. Over time, a diverse flora and fauna has evolved here. The first settlers from Earth, lead by Michael Narwin, arrived around three hundred years ago.
After a recent devastating interplanetary war between Tor-Ganistan and the nearby Sor-Ganistan had resulted in the total destruction of Sor-Ganistan's entire ecosystem and Tor-Ganistan's sole source of grain, the first division of Tor-Ganistan's victorious, military machine arrived on Narwin and quickly overcame the weak resistance offered by the settlers. Inside of a month, Narwin's administration had become an extension of Tor-Ganistan's. Naturally, there were protests against the new government, but these were suppressed quickly and brutally. Protesters were arrested, imprisoned and executed. This policy succeeded in stopping the protest marches, but not, of course, resistance to the harsh regime, which simply went underground and began using terror tactics. Bombs would be left in places frequented by off-duty soldiers, as well as attacks on guard posts and lone patrol vehicles. There were reprisals, of course, but the violence continued spasmodically.
By the end of the first six months of the occupation, with dissidents being arrested almost daily, the warehouses that had been commandeered to provide prison facilities were full to overflowing. Securing these unsuitable sites against attempts to free the inmates was also proving to be extremely difficult, and diverted a significant number of troops from their principle task - capturing even more dissidents. For these reasons, the Tor-Ganistan administration opted to take advantage of the fact that the ice covered polar caps were separated from the single continent by three thousand miles to the north, and two thousand, three hundred miles to the south. Two large prisons were constructed - one on the northern permanent ice pack, called, Kanja, and one on the southern one, known as Darmanja. Both were designed to ultimately accommodate upwards of fourteen thousand prisoners each.
Since escape from either facility involved crossing more than a thousand miles of sub-zero wilderness, battered by two hundred mile an hour blizzards, and crisscrossed by deep ravines, security was also less of a problem. In fact, being ejected through the main gate and into the freezing, arctic night, dressed only in lightweight prison fatigues, became a regularly employed means of punishment.
Let us now introduce our three principle characters. They are :-
Arbelo, Suda: male, 28, 6'0", 185lbs, blue eyes, black hair.
Duchas, Kan: male, 32, 5'10", 195lbs, brown eyes, brown hair.
Karass, Julia: female, 26, 5'8", 128lbs, blue eyes, black hair.
All three were arrested on the same day, found guilty of terrorism at the same mass trial, and transferred on the same transport to 'Kanja', where they were scheduled to be executed within ninety days of their arrival.
Although the long-term well-being of the inmates was hardly an important issue - after all, six hundred or more of them were due to be executed well before the spring thaw - a four hour exercise and free association period was instituted four times a week to give the prison staff ample time to complete a thorough search of every cell in each of the sixteen cell blocks. It was during several of these exercise periods that our three intrepid prisoners planned their extraordinary escape. What follows is Julia Karass' story, in her own words. Enjoy!
"Suda, Kan and me were picked up outside Frazi's bar around three in the morning. We'd only really hooked up that night, though we'd seen each other there a few times. As the place emptied, we kind of gravitated to the same end of the bar and got talking. We'll, the drink blurred 'make-believe' and 'reality' and pretty soon we were finalizing our master plan for the downfall of the entire Tor-Ganistan regime. Eventually, though Frazi offered us a place to sleep it off, we decided to risk the walk home. It was to be 'our little protest'. Inside three minutes, we were stopped by a passing patrol. The patrol leader said we'd broken curfew - which I guess we had - so would we pretty please climb in the back of the truck so he could give us a lift home? Actually, he didn't. We were each prodded in the small of the back with the business ends of fully charged lances (energy weapons) until we reached their transport, and then encouraged to climb inside by crude threats, lots of swearing and name calling - from both sides, I might add - and even more prodding in the back with those damn lances.
It took twenty minutes to get to the holding center, and a couple more to realize we weren't ever going home again. The list of charges read out by the booking clerk included, 'resisting arrest' and 'assaulting the person of a representative of the Tor-Ganistan Occupation Force'. There were a few other, minor ones, of course, but these two on their own were enough. 'Resisting' was worth ten years. The 'Assault' had earned us the death penalty. Three days later, after the duty magistrate had recorded a 'guilty' verdict on all the charges listed against each of our names - even though we hadn't left the holding cells - we were all three put on a transport headed for 'Kanja'...
Thirty of us were inducted into Kanja polite society, that day - twenty-six males and four females. Warden Commandant, Jank Cannute, had a policy of not placing females with males - not because he was bothered about rape or anything, but because he didn't believe in offering even the smallest opportunity for prisoners to enjoy themselves. Unfortunately, our ever-watchful warden had never heard of 'girls who like girls' and put me in with Janasra, a very large, very strong and highly motivated girl, who just couldn't take 'No' for an answer. I spent a long week, constantly watching her from the safety of one corner of our 'ten by twelve'. Well, of course, nature had to have its way eventually and I fell asleep. I woke with a start to find Janasra standing over me with... Well, you surely must know what she had attached to her anatomy... Anyway, to cut the story short, I was so tired and strung out I just burst out laughing. That really tweaked Janasra's tail. She came at me, screaming her head off, with her huge arms flailing. I was moved to another cell immediately after that. Cannute must have figured Janasra had enjoyed herself way too much while she was beating me up.
Suda and Kan were lucky! They got to share a cell together.
After we'd been there ten days, we were ushered outside into the bitter cold for our first period of 'free association'. It was right then that Kan suggested we break out. Although I had bruised ribs, courtesy of Janasra, I managed to laugh - but only briefly. Suda, though, looked thoughtful. Thanks to the lottery of Kanja's prison cell allocation system, the two men had been given the opportunity to get to know each other - while stone cold sober, this time. Now they were outside their cell, and away from the intrusive, and obvious, surveillance equipment, they were free to discuss - albeit in a whisper - what they'd been individually thinking about since they first arrived at Kanja. It was obvious to me they'd become good friends. A couple of hours later, as the guards were ordering us back inside, we all agreed to start the slow, but probably hopeless, process of planning our escape. It wasn't brain surgery we were planning. All we had to do was break out and march across eighty miles of freezing wilderness to the supply base. What we would do when we finally got there - if we got there - we hadn't figured out, quite yet. But that didn't matter. At least we had the first glimmerings of hope in our hearts; and that can warm a person, through and through, even when it's sixty below!
* * * *
With our 'free association' periods happening roughly every other day, it was sure to be a slow process getting our plan together. Sometimes, it was just too cold to walk outside, or there was a blizzard blowing, and we'd all have to sit in the huge communal eating hall, with guards making sure we didn't talk to one another. We lost seven periods that way.
How did we plan? Well, the way it went was, I'd get given a couple of details to find out, from the men, and would then have to wait maybe a couple of days or longer before I could report back. It was tough keeping that small flame of hope alive, sometimes. I'm sure I don't need to remind you, the reader, that we now had just seventy days left - less, if we accidentally allowed other prisoners, or even the guards, to find out what we were hatching. There were no constraints on Cannute as far as when he might decide to terminate our 'pointless' existence. Ninety days was only an administrative guideline, is all. There was no chance of a pardon. There was no appeal process. Cause any trouble at all and he'd waste you, right there and then. Believe me, that was real pressure! Our life-clocks were ticking very loudly in our ears, and awfully fast.
Inside a of month, we'd figured out enough of our plan to be able to agree we were 'going' in one week's time. Anyone whose done anything at all risky will appreciate just how nervous you can get waiting for that last week to pass before the 'great day'. By the time we got to the night before, I was a complete wreck. My cell mate, Tusca, asked me at least a dozen times whether I was sick or something. All I could do was keep saying I was feeling a bit stir crazy, what with the bad storm that had been raging the last forty hours. As soon as I'd said that, I started wondering whether we'd be able to put our plan into action after all. If bad weather meant we were holed up in the eating hall, again, we'd have to scratch, and there'd be no way to set up another date until the next association period. That was two days away. Needless to say, I didn't sleep at all.
In time, the day dawned, the wake-up bell rang for a full minute - like it always did - and Tusca and me walked to the latrine where we emptied our waste receptacles. Today was washday we were told - it happened once a week or so - so we were given soap and joined the long queue for the shower stalls. I guess this might sound a little curious to some people - that we should be allowed to wash sometimes. I mean, what's the point of it? We were going to be dead soon. Well, the fact was, we had nothing to lose, so we protested about everything, as often and as violently as we could. Cannute could shoot us or give a little. At first, he shot. Our friends outside got to hear about the first mass killings in Kanja through a bunch of drunken guards boasting about it in a bar when they were on leave. From that point on, ' whacking' a couple of guards every now and then became pretty much routine. The ' whacking' reached a kind of stalemate, eventually, and Cannute was forced to make a few concessions because it was giving the Tor-Ganistan administrators a serious staffing problem. Very quickly, they resorted to appointing guards on a non-voluntary basis and cancelled all leave. That really upset the guards, of course - both the new ones who didn't want to be there, and the ones who'd volunteered but couldn't go on leave, anymore - so things got pretty rough, once more. Cannute didn't withdraw our washing facilities, though, for some reason. Maybe he didn't like the smell or something? As for the food, it had always been lousy.
After showering, we dried ourselves on toweling rags, dressed in our dirty clothes, and trudged off to breakfast. This was always a thick, gray-colored porridge, but today there was nothing. The large pots, which normally filled the far end of the hall with clouds of steam, were cold and empty. Upwards of fifty guards were lined around three walls as we were ushered in. This didn't seem right. I felt the short hairs on the nape of my neck stiffen. I quickly scanned the assembled prisoners, searching for Suda and Kan. They were together, but not together. Close to one another, but not talking - not even risking eye contact.
I cautiously started to move towards them, hoping no one would notice. I was about twenty yards from them when Cannute appeared behind us and made his way towards the pots. Without pre-amble, he told us we were not going to be fed today, because the transports that were bringing in fresh supplies had been sabotaged by terrorists. All would be well, tomorrow, however, because more transports were on their way. With that, he dismissed us with the news that free association today would last six hours instead of four. We knew the transports had not been destroyed, off course. Who would blow up ships carrying much needed food supplies to their starving friends and relatives? Everyone who had lived in Haracoor, our biggest city, before their arrest, knew that numbers of supply ships left daily, apparently heading for Kanja and Darmanja. Now they were on the 'inside', they also knew they didn't arrive at their posted destinations that frequently. It was a real mystery!
Once we were outside, Suda and Kan found me, and the three of us strolled around the exercise yard, taking care to keep pace with a larger group ahead of us. Suda told me we were going as soon as the morgue truck arrived. This was the part of the plan I really wasn't looking forward to, but it was the only way past the guardhouse and the heavy, double doors.
Each circuit took us by the entrance to the morgue. It was where the detainees who'd been ' terminated' were held before being taken outside the prison for disposal. As we reached the entrance, we took a quick look around and ducked inside. As we'd hoped, the morgue was empty, except for three rows of black, plastic body bags placed on the floor. Without a word, Suda walked quickly between two of the rows, like he was checking something. Suddenly, he stopped, turned, and beckoned me over. I knew what was inside that bag was going to smell bad. I just had no idea it would smell quite that bad. The skin on the limbs was patterned like marble. This one had been dead a few days.
Kan already had another bag unzipped by the time I'd dragged the body I'd removed over to him. We placed the bodies head to toe and resealed the bag. I now had an empty bag to myself. It took another ten minutes before the men had theirs. It was a close call. I was just struggling to zip my bag shut the last few inches as the disposal crew walked into the room, laughing at a joke one of them had just cracked - probably to do with their grizzly work.
Two members of the disposal crew were really close to where I lay, now. So close I could hear them grunting as they lifted the bodies onto carts and then wheeled them outside to the transport. I was scarcely breathing. I heard one guy swearing loudly as a body bag tore, depositing its contents on the floor. It was one of those we'd repacked with a second body. He let rip with a long stream of obscenities, and wound up accusing Cannute of being so tight - because he obviously had bodies packed two to a bag to save money - that his ass would likely squeak as he walked. Suddenly, my head and feet were yanked upwards, while my rear end still dragged on the floor. I felt myself being swung from side to side as they negotiated the doorway. One heave and I was lying on top of the pile. Suda had made sure we were at the far end of the room, so we'd be among the last to be thrown on the transport, because our plan required that we be able to climb out of our bags while it was in motion. We'd watched the transport arrive week after week, so we knew there was no rear door. What we didn't know is where it went after it left the prison. For all we knew, it went in completely the opposite direction to the supply depot, adding more miles to our journey. We had no compass and intended to use dead reckoning. The extra distance would seriously increase the margin for error, and, because we had no food, make our ' little adventure' a lot more dangerous... Maybe even fatal?
* * * *
We'd been bouncing up and down inside the back of that transport for about ten minutes, when Suda unzipped his bag and clambered over the pile of bodies to mine. A cold blast of air hit my face as he unzipped it and helped me sit up. Another bag, towards the rear, was wriggling around. One end raised itself up to a sitting position, a finger appeared and started the zipper moving. Kan's grinning face appeared a few seconds later. We met in the center and clasped hands. WE'D DONE IT!!! WE WERE REALLY FREE!!! There was little chance we'd be missed until after free association was over, and only then if my cell mate, Tusca, asked a guard or something; and, anyway, she'd most likely assume it had been my turn for the extermination team and say nothing. With so much empty, frozen space outside, the guards seldom did a head count. Who in their right mind would try to make a run for it? There was nothing out there.
The transport ground on for another twenty minutes before slowing down to a walking pace and finally stopping. On Suda's signal we dropped off the rear and crouched down, waiting for the driver and his helper to come to the back and start unloading. But they didn't. Instead, we heard the rattling of a wire mesh gate as it was flung wide open and then rebounded against the fence, followed by the driver's door slamming and the engine restarting. We only just managed to clamber back on board as the transport lurched forward.
After another minute or so, we stopped again. This time we could hear the two men talking as they walked to the rear. We were out of the transport in an instant. Suda was to take one of them, and Kan was to deal with the other one. I was supposed to watch and lend a hand to whichever one of them needed it most. As it happened, they both seemed to need help. Suda's adversary was at least thirty pounds heavier and four inches taller than he was. Kan and his opponent were even more mis-matched. I went to Kan's assistance and between the two of us, we managed to render him unconscious. Then the two of us pulled the driver off of Suda - who was close to being choked to death - and dealt with him, too. We'd won, but we were not cheering. We were way too cold and exhausted for that!
The two men bound the driver and helper hand and foot, hefted them into the rear of the transporter, and joined me in the cab. Suda took the controls, turned the transporter around and headed out through the open gate. We'd seen no other bodies while we were there, and we had no desire to look for them, either. I suppose they were underground somewhere - maybe in an ice cave or something. Anyway, as we accelerated away from the compound, I mentioned to Suda that we should think about doing the right thing for all those poor devils riding in the back with us. Suda bit his lip. He always did that when he was thinking. Kan chipped in with the idea that maybe we could dump them in a crevasse if we came across one on the way to the supply depot. I told him I wasn't sure about that as a plan, because it seemed a bit... well, cold and impersonal. "What if they weren't 'believers'?" he asked me. "It wouldn't matter then."
Well, I couldn't answer him, could I? So we just agreed we'd go with his idea. Assuming we found a crevasse, that is. Suda, who hadn't said anything up until then, said a crevasse wouldn't be a good thing. We might not be able to cross it, he said, and that would add a lot of time to our journey. And then we might not have enough fuel reserve to make it all the way around it. No, he said, a crevasse would not be a good thing. We'd better just leave them in the back and deal with them when we got to the depot. With all this debate and uncertainty going on, it was hardly surprising our initial euphoria at having escaped quickly evaporated away to almost nothing.
We sat in silence as the transporter rumbled on for mile after mile. Every now and then, the whole thing shook violently as we hit a stretch of 'washboard'. Even at a slow crawl, it felt like every nut, bolt, rivet and weld was coming undone - including all of my internal organs. We hit another really bad section after a further two hours. It was so badly ridged, we all had double vision and the plastic cover on the instrument panel cracked. I guess Suda had hit it too hard. He let go the throttle and we slowed enough to at least see where we were going, and hopefully stop the windshield from popping. We were barely moving, now. It was taking far longer that we'd planned. Ain't that always the way with plans, though?
Ever since we'd left the burial site, I'd been checking behind, occasionally, to see if we were being followed. There was little chance, but, heck, I was nervous. Who wouldn't be? Anyway, while I was looking - immediately after we hit the last ' washboard' section - I spotted a couple of black, sausage-like objects lying on the ice. It was a good half-minute or so before I figured out we'd been pitching so violently over the bumps that we must have been dropping bodies off the back. I told Suda right away. He cussed and, without throttling back, threw the transport into a tight turn to the left. We were still ' washboarding' at that point and we almost rolled over. I was so angry I punched his arm. He stood on the brakes, turned and slapped me. I slapped him back. He slapped me back, only harder. I slapped him harder still. We weren't really hurting each other - just burning off all the tension inside us. Eventually, we both stopped swinging and started laughing. Suda drove slowly, so Kan and I could walk ahead and get the bodies back on board as he went past.
After twenty minutes or so, we'd cleared the rough section and were heading towards the supply base, at a fairly reasonable pace, and our mood was a whole lot better. We even sang for a while, until our voices got hoarse. We wouldn't have been quite so happy if we'd realized that although the guards probably wouldn't have noticed we'd escaped, yet, they would definitely know the mortuary detail hadn't returned to the prison. After all, the two men were their own kind - soldiers. How long they would give them before declaring them overdue and sending out a search team to look for them was something we couldn't know of course, and hadn't considered, either. And, perish the thought, if they'd noticed we'd escaped, realized that the mortuary detail hadn't returned, put two and two together and come up with four, then figured we were probably in the mortuary transport, heading in the only direction that made any sense, we'd have likely been a little more concerned than we were. Suda's right hand might have pushed that throttle lever a little further forward, and we might have thought seriously about changing our route for one just a little less predictable. But we didn't! We just pressed on, hoping it was all going to work out right, and savoring the incredible feeling of freedom in this endless, pristine, eye-blinding, frozen landscape.
Two hours later, the ice, ahead and slightly to the right of us, erupted in a bright orange fireball. There was a second explosion to the left. They'd found us and obviously weren't interested in talking with us or taking prisoners.
Suda flung the transport to the right, then the left, trying to throw their targeting systems off. It worked for a while, but then the un-manned surveillance craft's remote operator figured out there was a pattern to Suda's desperate attempt at evasion and dropped a bomb right about where the right-hand track was going to be unless Suda changed his tactics. He didn't and the track was blown clean away. We were still mobile, but badly crippled. The next one, we knew, would be dropped on the cab. We bailed and rolled clear, just as the front of the transport was engulfed in flame. Instinct made us lay still. The small craft hovered, then began to circle slowly. It was scanning the area, making sure we were dead, I guess. In fact, it dropped almost to the ground, hovering just a few feet above my head. It was all I could do not to try and get away from the freezing cold downdraft of it's hover fans. I could imagine the operator, back at the prison, moving control sticks and pressing buttons, sending the craft this way and that. Checking this way. Checking that way. Checking for bodies. Checking for movement. Eventually, the craft moved upwards, hovered for a few seconds, as if taking one last precautionary look, and then headed back to the prison. How about that for efficiency? Cannute's guards had tracked us, found us, wasted us, and all from the warm comfort of their control room. Ain't technology great?
* * * *
When the sound of the surveillance craft had faded away, we got to our feet and took a look around the transport. The whole front end was a twisted tangle of metal, right back to the mid-section. Underneath, the turbine power plant looked to have survived intact, along with the armored fuel tanks, both rear tracks, and most of the flat-bed. But we weren't technicians or mechanics so no way would we be able to salvage anything. Virtually all of the body bags in the rear half of the load area were in one piece, but both of the soldiers had been killed by the blast and subsequent fireball. The heat had also melted the body bags to the front of the load area. The plastic material had flowed over the bodies inside them, making them look like a tangled pile of polished, black statues. The ones underneath the pile were just one coagulated mess! The stench of burnt plastic and flesh was overpowering.
"Well, that's a fine state of affairs," Kan screamed. "We're screwed, now! Totally screwed!"
Suda moved towards him to calm him down, but Kan pushed him away, still screaming we were screwed. Suda tried again to calm him down, but again Kan pushed him away - with such force this time that Suda fell to the ground. Suda got to his feet, looking pretty angry, and whacked Kan in the mouth. Kan reacted the only way he could and hit him back. They grappled and fell to the ground, scratching, biting, kicking and gouging. I tried to break them up, but got a punch in the cheek for my trouble. I'm a quick study, so I just sat down on the left-hand caterpillar track and watched them going at it until, eventually, they got too tired to fight. They lay there, breathing hard, for several minutes, before struggling to their feet and squaring off to each other - like they were going to start, again. I took the opportunity to remind them that we were miles from our destination, and that we'd better get moving if we (a), wanted to get something to eat, and (b), didn't want to freeze to death. I didn't trouble to mention it, but there was also a '(c)', of course. The surveillance craft had done a great job of stopping us, but the guards might well want to recover their colleagues, even if they suspected they were dead. They could be on the way, right now, in a heavily armed convoy.
The men agreed it would get them nowhere to carry on, and besides, they could always, "finish it off later", so they spent time searching the bodies of the two guards for anything that might prove useful. We already had their weapons, but Kan recovered four spare ammo packs, three water bottles - deformed by the fire by still in tact - and six slightly singed packets of high energy field rations. Things looked pretty good at that point. Yes, we'd be on foot, but we were armed, and had enough food to last us, at least for a day or so. We lacked shelter, of course, but if it all went well and a blizzard didn't hit us, we wouldn't need it.
As we walked, Suda did his best to figure out how far we had to travel. According to his calculations, we'd been moving at an average of about eight or nine miles an hour for something like eleven hours. He did not smile when I pointed out the fact that eight times eleven equals eighty-eight, and that was eight more miles that we were supposed to be having to travel in the first place. He said something must be wrong, and I said, yes, his stupid calculations. Then Kan chimed in with the suggestion that we hadn't been driving in the right direction, anyway, so we were probably miles away. I expected the fighting, which had only been put on the back burner for a while, to break out again, but both men managed to hold their tempers and tried instead to reason it out.
After another half an hour's walking, there was still no sign of the depot. Suddenly, we heard a distant rumble. Several ground attack vehicles were racing across the ice pack at break neck speed - bearing in mind the depth of the ruts in the ' washboards'. As we stood, transfixed, one veered sharply to the right, flipped, rolled and caught fire. The others immediately reduced speed but still headed for our position. Now on foot, with only personal weapons to hand, I was thinking we were soon going to be a very small footnote in the pages of Narwin history, when the ground behind us seemed to open up and a voice called out to us, "Come inside. Quick!" Without thinking, we did just that.
As our eyes adjusted to the low light level in the vast cave, we could see our benefactor was obviously human. "What in the name of all that's wise, sensible and prudent are the three of you doing here?" he asked. "Just look at you. Why, it's obvious to anyone with eyes in their head that you're all straight from the big city."
'Why lie?' I thought to myself, 'we weren't criminals' - except in the eyes of the occupation force - so I told him the truth about us, and why were traveling without proper equipment or adequate provisions. He nodded thoughtfully. There was great sadness in his voice as he told us about the co-workers and friends he had lost to the terrifying weapons of Tor-Ganistan's construction team, when they asked them politely why they were busy blowing up a large piece of the permanent ice pack [ So they could put in the foundations for Kanja prison - Ed].
I asked him what they'd been doing out here when the Tor-Ganistan construction crew arrived? He told me they were a scientific expedition, plotting the temporary ice pack's seasonal cycle of freezing and melting, as well as measuring the thickness of the permanent polar ice pack. I asked his name, and he said it was, Benjamin Cusir. "You live out here?" I asked.
"Yes," he replied.
"Why are you still here," I asked, "if everyone else is dead?"
"Finishing the work we started," he replied, humbly. "In honor of their memory."
I had to admit, it was a noble enough sentiment, if a misplaced one; but, hey, it was his life and his decision. I then asked him how he managed to exist here? What did he have to eat, or was he still working through the expedition's original food supply?
He said he'd grown tired of eating the food they'd brought with them, so he told us all about the wild animals that existed in this frozen wilderness, how he caught them, prepared them, cooked them... Everything, in fact! It was amazing! He'd obviously been alone a long while, because he didn't stop talking the whole time we were eating. When we said we were tired and needed some sleep, he still didn't want us to leave him. In fact, he followed us to the far side of the cave, where others, long dead, had laid out the bedding we were about to use. I fell asleep, wondering if the crews of those ground attack vehicles were going to get any sleep. I fervently hoped not. In fact, I remember thinking, "I hope they all die in agony, screaming for their mothers.
Considering the situation we found ourselves in, we slept pretty good that night, and woke refreshed and confident we'd reach our goal. When I asked Cusir if he knew about the supply depot, he said he knew where it was and how to get to it, but had no idea what was inside. I told him we didn't either. That brought a smile to his heavily creased face. I asked if we could leave anything with him? A weapon, maybe? Ammunition clip? He said, 'No', and offered to give us some extra food from the store. There were two other things he gave us: a tent and a stove. After showing me how to light the stove - because I was a girl, I suppose, and most likely to be doing the cooking - he re-packed it and slipped it into a small backpack, along with some strips of dried meat and another water bottle. Suda and Kan busied themselves with checking the weapons and packing their newly acquired backpacks.
Cusir looked sad as we started to make our way upwards through a narrow fissure and onto the ice outside. We'd tried to persuade him to come with us, but he insisted he still had a great deal of research to do, and that it ' wouldn't be right not to finish what he and his colleagues had begun', all those years ago.
The ground attack vehicles had long gone, but we moved away from the cave quickly, anyway, just in case they had gone on further and were going to be heading back the way they came. From what Cusir had told us, the supply depot was less than four miles away. We saw the tall radio mast emerging from the mist after just two hours. In another half an hour, we were standing in front of a heavy metal door. Suda tried pressing the pressure pad, but nothing happened, so Kan shot it clean out and kicked the door open, grinning broadly. When I pointed out that there was no way we could now conceal the fact that we'd been here, Kan shrugged and grinned again.
We climbed up six steps and Suda pushed open another metal door - unlocked this time - and we found ourselves in a large room, filled from floor to ceiling with black cabinets, jam packed with key pads, scrolling and static information displays, big and small boxes with multi-colored lights and a semi-circular desk, complete with four swivel chairs. Behind the desk, a flat screen, at least ten feet long by five high, was projecting a schematic of Narwin's planetary surface, and loads of what appeared to be trajectory plots - each a different color. About half seemed to start from Haracoor, our largest city. Strangely, they didn't touch any other point on Narwin. They seemed to be heading for an orbit around the planet, or beyond.
"It's un-manned," Suda suggested.
"And fully automatic," I added, as the screen updated and displayed a brand new trajectory plot, colored green, which had emerged from the black spot on the map that was Haracoor. "I wonder what this is telling us?" Neither of the men answered. To be fair, I didn't expect them to. As I watched, the screen updated every few seconds or so, and the green line grew in length until it suddenly disappeared off the screen. It was headed in the same direction as all the others. One of the plots - a blue one - slowly faded. I could only assume that, whatever it was had finished its task and didn't need to be displayed anymore?
When you don't understand what you're looking at, you soon get bored, so I was just about to walk away when I noticed another plot start out from Haracoor. I half registered the fact that it was ' purple' - purple happens to be my favorite color - and that it wasn't heading in the same direction as the other plots. In fact, it was on a course roughly at ninety degrees to the others, heading for the northern pole. It seemed to creep along very slowly at first, taking nearly half an hour to grow to about a foot in length. Then it accelerated, until the screen couldn't refresh fast enough and the line lengthened in spurts. Twenty minutes later, it was nearly at the pole. Whatever this line represented was awfully close to where we were. Suddenly the whole building started to vibrate, as if something huge was passing overhead. As I stood there, my eyes transfixed on that purple line, the plot stopped. Slowly, it began to fade. It had reached its destination. I started jumping up and down. I knew what this screen was telling me. "These plots are transports, guys," I yelled.
Suda ran over to me and asked, "How do you know?"
"Look," I replied, pointing at the scarcely visible purple line. "See? It started in Haracoor, just flew overhead and has now landed at Kanja."
"And the rest of them?" he asked, looking doubtful. "Where are they going?"
"Off-world, somewhere," I suggested. "Maybe orbit?"
"Why?" he asked. "Why stack them in orbit? Doesn't make sense."
"It does if they're not staying there," Kan said.
"What do you mean?" Suda demanded, gruffly.. There was still a lot of anger between the two men. The question of who was the better hadn't been determined yet.
"What I mean is, they're food transports aren't they?" he said.
"We don't know that," Suda said.
Kan explained. "Julia just saw a plot displayed from Haracoor to Kanja, right?" Suda looked dumb. "We just heard it fly over.... Yes?" Suda still wouldn't co-operate. "The whole building just shook. Right?" Suda nodded. "And we know the transport heading for Kanja is carrying food, because Cannute said one was due in today." Suda nodded. "So these plots are all transports, one of which landed at Kanja a few minutes ago, and the rest of which are headed for space..." His voice tailed off. He'd obviously reached the end of his deductive reasoning.
"Why would food transports be heading for space?" I asked. "Where could they go?" I smiled. "I know, they're hauling garbage. Tor-Ganistan is cleaning house." Suda started laughing. Kan joined in. "Why not?" I protested.
"Yeah, right," Kan said, laughing even louder. "I mean, like they give a damn about what happens here. All they're interested in is sucking us dry. I've never seen people eat like they do. I swear their troops are at least fifty pounds heavier than they were when they first arrived.
"We're missing something, here," Suda said.
"Wow," I said, "that's a switch!"
He rounded on me, looking pretty angry. "What does that mean?"
"You weren't interested a minute ago," I replied, standing as tall as I could, which was still four inches less than him. "Now, all of a sudden, it's ' Detective Suda rides out'."
He glared at me for a full second, before the beginnings of a smile made his eyes crease. "You're okay," he said, squeezing my shoulder gently and making me blush a little. "But you're also wrong. They're not hauling garbage, they're hauling grain." He looked at both of us in turn, like he was getting us ready to receive some incredible truth. "Tor-Ganistan must be starving. That's why they're here."
"You think so?" I asked, a little breathlessly. He was a good looking guy, I decided. My mind drifted off to a place I'd been only once before in my life.
"I know so," he replied.
"What?" I asked dreamily.
"Julia," Kan cried, "wake up and get with the program."
"What program?" I asked.
"Suda," Kan said, "I hate to admit it, but you're the man."
"What the heck are you talking about, Kan?" Suda snarled, suspecting Kan might be mocking him.
"She's...." He stopped, looked at both of us and then added, "Forget it."
"So what do we do now?" I asked, having finally returned to reality.
"Well," Suda said, "this place must be pretty important to the whole process or it wouldn't be here. Maybe it some kind of flight control center?"
"You mean the ships can't fly there on their own?" Kan asked.
"Maybe our ships' navigational systems can't interface with theirs," Suda said, "and this place handles it... You know, like a kind of gateway?"
"So," I said, "you mean, if we blew this place up, we'd screw their little game?"
"Most likely," Suda replied. "Leastwise for a while. Until they brought in another one."
"Yeah," I said, "But that would take a while."
"A week. Maybe?" Suda said.
"Come on," I protested. "A complicated facility like this? It would take at least a month or more - even if they worked overtime."
"Look around you, Julia," Suda said. "This is a prefabricated unit. They just brought one of their self-contained command and control centers - designed for missile fire control and tracking most likely - and lowered it onto the ground right here. It was probably up and running in less than a week."
"So why blow it up?" I asked.
Suda smiled, mysteriously. I hated that, and the self-satisfied grin he sometimes had - but he was a good looking guy, so I let it go. "Did I say blow it up?" he asked.
"Well, no," I admitted. "But you didn't say we shouldn't, either."
"We could work on it to cause the transports to miss Tor-Ganistan," Kan suggested. "Or crash into it, perhaps?"
"I dunno," Suda said.
"You don't know?" I groaned. This was awful! Here I was, just beginning to look up to this man, and now he let's me down with a great big thump.
"Not 'don't know'," he replied. "Just being cautious."
"Cautious is good," I said enthusiastically. I hate to admit it, but I can be such an awful hypocrite, sometimes. But, in my defense, he was/is a great looking guy!
"Let's check this place for food," Kan suggested.
"Good idea," Suda said.
The purple line was back on the display, this time starting at Kanja. But it wasn't moving. I called the information out to Suda. He called back to watch it. So I did. I also figured that because the same color had been assigned to the ship on its return journey, that the command and control system could identify each ship in some way as it took off, or got ready to take off. Suda's suggestion that this place was acting as a gateway made less and less sense. If this equipment could interact with Narwin technology, then surely the same equipment on Tor-Ganistan would be able to. I got no further than that, though, because right about then, a very large, yellow lamp, at the bottom-center of the screen, started to flash on and off. I've no idea why I thought what I did - proximity alarm - but I did. I screamed as loud as I could, "We've got company!"
The men came at the run. "This way, Julia," Suda yelled, pointing in the direction he'd just come from. "You too, Kan."
We followed him as quick as we could, down a circular flight of stairs that carried us down to below ground level. Way below, in fact. This 'sucker' was set deep, perhaps thirty feet or more. On reflection though, it needed to be. Storms up here routinely hit well over a hundred miles an hour. A thing this big had to be pretty well nailed down to stay put, especially with that large transmitter mast on top.
As we settled down to wait out our unwelcome visitors behind piles of spares boxes and cables, we heard a metallic thud - presumably the main door opening - followed by several loud voices and clumping boots as a squad of Tor-Ganistan's finest made themselves to home.
Suda handed me a water bottle. It was badly distorted. It had come from one of the two soldiers. I held it towards the ceiling - like I was toasting them - and silently wished them both an eternity in purgatory.
* * * *
It was more than an hour before the troopers had searched the upper floors of the installation to the satisfaction of their officer. Left to their own devices, they would probably never have started, but he drove them on with curses and thwacks from his chrome feruled stick.
Pretty soon, we knew, they'd be coming down those stairs. If they searched even considerably less diligently than they had before, they'd fall over us. Suda pointed to the very rear of the storage area, and we made our way there as quietly as we could. Even so, Kan nudged a box with his hip. It scraped across the metal floor for a few inches, making the most incredible racket. We all held our breath and waited, but no one came, leastwise any faster than they were already coming.
"Over there!" the officer snapped, directing his men. "And don't just rely on your eyes."
' Don't rely on your eyes? ', I was thinking.
One of them came so close to where I was crouching that I could hear something softly clicking. I found out much later that it was a thermal imaging device. The clicking sound was being made by the sensor as it swept from side to side. How he didn't pick me up, I do not know. I can only assume there was something inside the box I was crouching behind that screened my body heat from the sensor. Anyway, the clicking sound faded and we heard the troopers make their way back up top. A short while later, we heard the inner door close and the place was quiet again.
We left our hiding places and gathered in the middle of the floor. Suda and Kan looked as relieved as I was feeling. Kan said, "Phew!"
"Echo that," I said.
"Let's get back upstairs," Suda said, "and decide what we're going to do."
Back in the control room once more, I ran my eyes over the display, trying to see if there were any new tracks. If there were, I couldn't see them; but then I hadn't tried to memorize all the colored lines, before, just the green one heading for space, the purple one, tracking for Kanja, and the blue one that had slowly faded. I did count them, though. There were six flights outbound from Haracoor. Every one, I knew, now, was laden with food supplies. "We've gotta stop them," I told Suda.
He reached for my arm and grasped it gently. "We will stop them," he said.
I don't know why, but I believed in him, more than I'd ever believed in anything. Even so, I needed something more concrete than simple faith in him. "But how?" I asked.
"Watch," he said, leaning across the desk and pressing a button. It was so small it had almost been lost amongst the clutter of control and readout panels, but Suda had seen it; seen it and understood.
Nothing happened, at first. Then the screen cleared and three rows of numbers were displayed. They meant nothing to me, but Kan nodded knowingly as Suda starting tapping keys. The numbers changed a row at a time. As the last number changed, Suda looked at me and grinned.
"What did you do?" I asked him.
"Oh, nothing," he replied, feigning innocence.
"He changed the default destination co-ordinates," Kan said.
"To what?" I asked.
"Watch," Suda said.
A new plot was starting out from Haracoor. It tracked slowly across the screen, heading north, like previously. 'What the heck has he done?' I was thinking. He noticed my look. "Wait," he said.
I waited.
Minutes later, the plot suddenly swung right. It was heading to Kanja, now. I scowled. They'd soon know something had happened when all these transports started landing outside the prison. I said so, but he just kept on grinning. "Patience," he said.
I waited almost another half an hour before the place shook like it had before. The transport was passing directly overhead. The sound quickly faded, the screen updated, and the track continued to move across the map, until it finally stopped twenty minutes later. But it wasn't like before. The plot faded almost immediately. The transport wasn't heading for orbit and Tor-Ganistan. It was still on Narwin. "Where is it?" I asked. "New Samoa?"
"Where else?" he asked.
"Why land them there?" I asked. "I mean, they'll soon know the ships aren't going where they're supposed to."
"Sure they will," he said, "in week or more."
"Sooner than that," I said. "The pilots will tell them."
"Oh, no they won't," he said.
"Why not?" I demanded. His absolute certainty was getting to me. I thought he was being arrogant. I thought he had to have missed something. I was wrong. I was missing something; but I didn't know what it was until he told me. The ships, he said, weren't manned, they were being flown by remote control until they'd cleared orbit and were en-route. When they reached Tor-Ganistan, another control center likely brought them down to land. He said, the command and control center we were in was just that: a remote control center. No self-respecting citizen of Narwin would have piloted one of those ships without an armed guard to make sure they took it all the way to Tor-Ganistan.
Somehow, I couldn't imagine one of our 'own' would collaborate with the enemy. Chances are, a few might have - for money. They wouldn't have lasted long, though! One trip at most. Anyway, automated systems were a better solution for a hard pressed and seriously outnumbered force of occupation. It was simple, effective and, more importantly, trustworthy and dependable. By changing the destination, like Suda said, it would be a week or so - the flight time from Narwin to Tor-Ganistan - before the garrison would be told the ships had failed to arrive. He said, we now had to work out what we were going to do with that time. I told him it would take us that and more to get home. He laughed and said we'd be back there today. He didn't wait for me to ask how. He showed me.
Forty minutes later, the transport, which had flown over us hours ago and was now returning empty from Kanja to Haracoor, was parked a little over two hundred yards away from us. "Better get moving," he said. "We've only got ten minutes to get over there and get on board."
"Couldn't you have cut us a little more slack?" I asked him.
"These ships may be on ' automatic'," he said, "but that doesn't mean they might not be under occasional surveillance. An extra ten minutes on the flight time is about all we dare risk." He patted my rear end, playfully. "Now move!"
An hour later we touched down in Haracoor. As the engines fell silent, the ship was ringed with troops - presumably to prevent sabotage - and the refueling booms swung out, automatically connecting their nozzles with the ship's fuel valves and beginning the process of topping off the tanks. We made our way to the cargo hold and waited for the main doors to open. Our plan involved blending in with the cargo loaders, who we assumed - and fervently hoped - would be civilian Narwin, rather than Tor-Ganistan troopers. Fortunately, we were right. Three men entered the hold, well before the doors had fully opened and began releasing the long, tie-down straps and untangling the heavy webbing, used to stop individual boxes from moving around during the flight. It was hard work at the best of times.
Suda was the first to slip out from his place of concealment. The man nearest him gave him a searching look and returned without comment to his task. Suda beckoned to me. I dropped down from the crawl space, quickly followed by Kan. The three of us stepped over the tangled webbing, squeezed past two troopers - who barely registered us, even though we looked pretty unkempt - and headed for a set of steps that were hanging from the lowermost edge of one of the main doors to within a foot of the ground. One by one, we descended. Now came the hard part.
"Where are you going?" one of the troopers forming the circle around the ship yelled.
"We need some replacement tie-down ratchets," Kan improvised.
The trooper waved his weapon in a hurry-up motion. "Make it quick!"
"Right away, Sir," Kan said, and broke into a jog.
"Why did you say that?" Suda asked. "Now he'll be expecting us to come back."
"I will be," Kan replied. "You won't."
"I don't follow you," Suda said.
Kan said nothing more until we reached the nearest building. It also happened to be the largest. In fact, it was large enough to accommodate the largest ship in the entire fleet. To the rear, as Kan knew, were the parts stores, with everything from tie-down ratchets to entire propulsion systems - ' state of the art' ones. You know, with gleaming Hoochar Manifolds and Cadmium plated Colwell Model 20 Pre-Mixers. In the far corner was a wooden crate. It had to be about six feet square. A stenciled label said, ' Product of Caribou III'. Underneath, was the single word, ' Starcross ', and the code number, '78-112-0606'.
" Wow, a six-oh-six! " I cried.
"A what?" Suda asked, frowning.
"A Starcross triple stage fuel pump, model six-oh-six," I enthused. "It's a classic. There's more than a whole year's salary in that one box."
"How do you know?" he asked.
"That's my job," I replied.
"You stack boxes?" he asked.
"No," I replied, "I fix engines."
"Well, you live and learn," he said. Did I see him move a little away from me? Jeez, a mechanic in the family, he was likely thinking. Maybe it wasn't his style? Did he sense my fear? I don't know if he did or not, but he did slip his arm around my waist and squeeze. I was thinking maybe he had an old, worn out ground vehicle that needed a tune-up? He kissed my cheek. Stupid girl! What if he did? I'd fix it and he'd buy me dinner. I kissed him right back.
Kan collected six new tie-down ratchets and re-joined us. "Julia," he said, "you're licensed to taxi aren't you?"
"Sure," I replied. "Why?"
He ignored my question and posed one of his own, "So you're familiar with the controls?"
"Sure," I repeated. "But why?"
"I'm going back on board that ship," he replied.
"And do what?" Suda asked.
"Can you tell me how to unhook the auto-pilot and fly it manually?" Kan asked.
"Probably," I said. "In fact, yes."
"Why, Kan," Suda asked.
He didn't reply, but I'd worked it out for myself. Leastwise, I thought I had. There were only about six thousand Tor-Ganistan troops on Narwin, and yet their superior firepower had enslaved a population of more than one hundred and eighty thousand. Most of the occupation force was right here, at Haracoor Spaceport. It gave them easy access to our shipping fleet and gave us absolutely no cover to sneak up on them. When the spaceport was built, we had flattened more than two hundred square miles of forest. It was totally covered in concrete, flat as an ironing board, from horizon to horizon, and pretty soon it was no longer going to exist!
* * * *
I didn't know what to say to Kan. I didn't know what to say to Suda. I knew from experience - not here, but at Grüber Spaceport, on Procyon II, where I'd previously worked - that a fully fueled Setra Class transport, hitting the ground at just three hundred miles an hour meant death for everyone within a radius of a mile or more: troopers, spaceport workers, travelers passing through... Us! It was a courageous plan, for sure. Courageous, but suicidal!
Suda must have finally figured it out. He looked at Kan, like he was saying goodbye or something. "What do you need?" he asked.
"You're not going to try to stop me?" Kan asked.
"Of course not," Suda replied.
Well, I have to say that Kan looked just a little upset, for a very brief moment. It was almost like he thought, as his friend - albeit for a few months, only - that, maybe, Suda should have made a token attempt to convince him not to go through with it. "Well, good," he said, at length.
"So," Suda said, "what do you need us to do?"
"Help get every Narwin off the spaceport," Kan replied. "Or, at least, more than a couple of miles away."
"That'll be difficult, without letting the troopers in on it," Suda said.
"I know. But we have to try." He laughed. It was a strangled, wimp of a laugh. I knew he was really scared. Jeez, what am I saying? I was scared, and I wasn't the one who was going to be pile driving myself head first into the ground! "I don't want any dead Narwin on my conscience," he added.
"We'll figure something out," Suda assured him.
"A walkout," I said.
"A what?" Suda demanded.
"A strike. We haven't had one in months." I grinned, broadly. "In fact, we haven't had one since the 'Tor-Ganistan' arrived."
"Military occupation is one way of settling labor disputes, I suppose," Suda said, grinning too.
"You think the spaceport management organized the occupation to deny us our legitimate right to withdraw our labor," I asked, pretending to be shocked.
"Of course not," Suda replied. He thought for a moment, then asked, "Anyway, how can you be certain they won't start shooting you all the moment someone cries, ' Okay, everybody out '?"
"I don't. But it wouldn't make sense to take out the only work force they have."
"Maybe?" he conceded. "Are you sure you'd like to gamble your life on that fact, though?"
I didn't answer. I turned my attention to Kan, instead. "There's another way."
"To do what?" he asked.
"To crash that ship without you being in it," I replied.
"I don't mind dying," he said, "if it means getting rid of those bastards."
"But you don't want to die?" I persisted.
"No, I don't," he admitted.
"Fine," I said, turning away and walking towards the office. I picked up the phone. "Is Jaki there?" I asked the person who picked up. They said I should hang on. I smiled encouragingly at Kan as I waited. There was a click and I heard Jaki's gravelly voice ask me what the hell I wanted. "Jaki," I said, "I'm really sorry you're working nights and that I got you out of your nice, comfortable bunk, but there's a freakin' war on, in case you hadn't noticed, and I really need a sixty-two-dash-forty-eight-dash-nineteen over here in building fourteen... And I mean, like I want it yesterday."
"You want a drone self-destruct logic unit?" he asked, doubtfully.
"Would I have asked you if I didn't?" I growled.
"No," he replied, "I guess not. You want remote or autonomous?"
"Auto," I replied. "Two sequential event decision logic."
"Anything else?"
"Yeah," I replied, "a timer unit. Thirty seconds."
"Four wire feed?"
"Sure," I said.
"Okay. That's one, seventy-eight-dash-fourteen-dash-thirty-tee. Is that it?"
"That's it," I confirmed.
"On their way," he said, hanging up without any of the usual pleasantries. Not that he was a pleasant individual - far from it - but he was one hell of a warehouseman, and he knew his stock code numbers.
The ' sixty-two' unit and the timer arrived inside ten minutes. The logic unit was fairly small, and had ten electrical feeds. It was a simple installation job on a drone, but whether I could get it to interface with the remote control hardware the Tor-Ganistan techs had jammed into the transport's flight control systems, I couldn't say. And if I could, whether I would then be able to re-activate the original flight director systems and cause the auto-pilot to crash the ship, was anyone's guess. Oh, by the way, ' two sequential event decision logic' simply means the unit would activate when one event occurred, then activate again when a second event occurred. For example, the drone's self-destruct mechanism could be armed when it dropped too low, or strayed too far from its original flight path, or perhaps the engine failed, meaning it might crash on a populated area. Then, after waiting a few seconds, to permit an override signal to be transmitted, it would then make its second decision (have a few seconds passed without a signal?) and activate the self-destruct. I was going to initially trip it on altitude. As soon as the transport had reached eighty thousand feet, the unit would, in theory, trip and short out the Tor-Ganistan control unit. The ship would then be out of control. The second event circuit would then be used to put the ship's actual auto-pilot back in the loop, after ten seconds had passed. I was going to preset the auto-pilot to crash the ship right on top of Tor-Ganistan's biggest battleship. And, no, Narwin transports don't have a sense of self-preservation. It would fly in any direction I wanted, when I wanted. The only weakness in my plan, apart from the pretty obvious technical difficulties I had to overcome, was that I had no idea whether the Tor-Ganistan engineers had put in their own hardware for firing the self-destruct, just in case some other Narwin came up with the same suicidal plan that Kan had. I could deactivate ours. In fact I had too, else the damn thing wouldn't hit the ground in one piece. I had to hope they couldn't blow it up, and ruin our ' master plan'. Talking of master plans, I had one more call to make. James Bacon was our union rep. He was the most argumentative individual you could ever wish not to meet, but right now he was our white knight. He was going to have to get every Narwin working on the spaceport into the underground storage area and keep them there until the deed was done.
The three of us strolled across to the transport like we hadn't a care in the world. The trooper who'd challenged us glared at us - like we'd taken too long, maybe? - but waved us through after Kan held a ratchet in front of his face and grinned. I felt that trooper's eyes boring through my back. They must hate us almost as much as we hate them.
"How long will you need?" Suda asked.
"I'll know if I can do it inside ten minutes," I replied. "If I can, it'll take roughly an hour."
"Good," he said. "That'll give Bacon time to organize his strike."
"What if I can't do it?" I asked. He didn't need that. I didn't need it. Starting out thinking you're likely to fail is not positive thinking, I guess, but I couldn't help it. I wasn't rated on navigation systems, just general ' electrics' and simple flight control systems - oh, and engines, of course. I hadn't exactly told them the truth. I know my motive for letting them think I could succeed was good - I was trying to save Kan from having to kill himself - but that didn't mean I was right. Suda and me were close to getting together, if we lived through the next couple of hours. It can't be right to not be honest with the guy you're going to be sleeping with soon, can it? Suda gave me a smile. He knew. I knew he knew. I started to tell him. "Ssssh," he said. "It'll be okay."
I tried as hard as I could not to, but I blinked tears.
"Kan," he said, as we entered the flight deck, "give us a minute?"
"Sure," Kan said stiffly. Whether he felt uncomfortable because of the intimacy between Suda and me, or he was just plain scared I'd fail, I don't know, but he slipped outside the door without a word.
I just let Suda hold me for a full minute. Then I pulled free and opened my tool roll. "Kan?" Suda called.
"Yeah," Kan answered, still outside the room.
"Julia's just starting. Can you keep an eye on the guards?" He pointed to the monitor as Kan entered the room. "We need to know if they have any idea she's tampering with their equipment."
"What if they start moving in?" Kan asked.
"Hit the cargo door ' Close'."
"Yeah, and we'll end up trapped inside," Kan quipped. "How long before they open this thing up like a can and fry us all?"
"Dammit, Kan," Suda cussed. "An hour ago, you were planning to kill yourself in this ship, and you were happy about it."
"Not happy, exactly," Kan interjected.
"Ready and willing, then," Suda offered. Kan nodded. "Surely," Suda went on, "if you actually have to go through with it, after all, you can't possibly have any objection to having us keep you company while you do it, can you."
Kan looked overwhelmed. "I suppose not," he mumbled.
I looked at the large, red, green and silver colored box, crudely nailed to the flight control desk and sucked air through my teeth. I wasn't as good a job as I'd feared, but it looked like it might be doing more than just operating the flight control systems. I went to the locker behind the left-hand pilot chair and removed the maintenance handbook. I use the term, book. It was, of course, a flat display screen with a built in keypad that you plugged into the maintenance jack. Inside a minute, I had the full logic diagram in front of me and I was checking what each of the twenty-seven wires the engineers had almost torn out of the original harness and fed into their own hardware connected to. I found the four I needed to kill the Tor-Ganistan unit inside twenty minutes. After I'd dealt with that, I would then go on to install the timer that would count down ten seconds, and then re-connect the auto-pilot and turn the ship south. At full power on the engines, I calculated the ship would be traveling at close to a mile a second - more if I had time to work out how to fire the boosters, too - when it hit the ground. The rest, as they say, would be history. There would be a very large hole in the ground, and the hard working members of the construction union, who were affiliated to Bacon's own, would suddenly inherit some serious, and very long term, job security.
"That's it," I said, stretching the kink out of my spine.
"Sure?" Suda asked, massaging the small of my back.
"I said so, didn't I?" I snapped.
"Yes," he said, softly, making me feel guilty as hell. He bent and packed my tool roll. "Is this everything?"
"Yes," I said.
"Neat job," he said, rubbing away a fingerprint I'd left on their cover panel. He turned to Kan. "Anything?"
"Nothing," Kan said. "The heavy stuff's already on board. They're starting to load crates, now."
"Fine," Suda said, "let's get out of here."
"One more check," I said, turning back to the desk. I tried to make it quick, because I knew that this was not a large ship as ships went, and the loading operation would only take a few more minutes, but I couldn't stop going through it over and over again. I simply couldn't turn my back on it and walk away. In the end, Suda took my arm and pulled me through the door. "It'll work, or it won't," he said. "Time to get out of here."
"Okay," I said. "I..."
"Ssssh," he whispered.
How we made it out of that ship and through the cordon of troopers, I don't know. It was like I was sleepwalking. I could hear Suda telling the trooper that we were done, and the trooper grunting something back. I was aware of my legs moving, but I had no idea where I was walking to. Suddenly, Suda stopped and said, "Now we wait."
"What?" I asked.
"We wait," he repeated.
I guess I regained my senses at that point. When I looked around, there had to be several hundred people there, obviously confused, but safe in the underground bunker, which had been constructed, ironically enough, for such a contingency as was about to happen - a crash-landing. "We're on strike?" I asked.
"Training," a nearby worker replied.
"Bacon pulled a real stroke and told the Tor-Ganistan commander that, with his permission or not, we were going to have a fire drill," Suda told me, beaming, "and this happens to be the assembly point."
"What?" I said.
"He did look a little confused," Bacon said.
There was a heavy rumbling noise, somewhere behind me. "It's taking off," Suda said.
"How long?" Kan asked.
I checked my watch. I'd gone over it so many times in my mind that I had the answer down pat. "Two minutes, twelve seconds."
"That long?" Kan persisted.
"Climb to eighty thousand," I began,"... about one-minute-forty."
"That long?" Kan asked.
"Fifteen miles, straight up, hauling two thousand, five hundred tons. How fast could you do it?"
"Then?" he pressed, ignoring my sarcasm.
"The remote unit is cut out the loop," I said, "but the engines are at full thrust until the auto-pilot cuts in, so it's still climbing."
"They won't shut down when their remote control is disconnected?" he asked.
"No. Of course not."
"But I thought their remote control would operate the engines, too," he protested.
"It does. But it's not connected to the ship's systems anymore, is it?"
"So the throttles won't close down when the controller fails?"
"I hooked it up that way." Kan looked lost, so I added, "I used a couple of the spare feeds on the logic unit I installed to control the power to the fuel feeders."
"And you throttle back when the auto-pilot cuts in so you can turn the ship?"
"Kind of."
"So," Suda said, "we have thirty-two seconds left on the clock. Yes?"
I nodded. "We've climbed maybe another ten thousand, by now." My eyes were closed. I could see it happening, like I was on that flight deck. "At eighty thousand feet, the logic unit was going to disconnect the remote control unit and hold the fuel feeder circuits closed, killing the engines. One second later, the timer would reset and count down ten seconds. The logic unit would initiate 'Decision Two" when the timer hit zero, and the auto-pilot would be back in the loop." Three seconds later, I knew, it was going to have to attempt a full power engine restart, since shutting down the feeders would have flamed them out. Technically, I knew I should have used just five percent throttle for this procedure, but, to be totally honest, I plain forgot to ask Jaki for a one-seventy-seven-dash-ninety-one-dash-forty-eight-slash-three - to handle the throttle setting. Anyway, if the engines restarted, fine. If not... Kaboom! We'd be in for a short spell of metallic rainfall.
"So, we're down to, what, twenty-two seconds?" Suda asked, snapping me out of my reverie.
"Nearer nineteen," I said. He looked confused. "Free fall," I explained. "We're almost sixteen miles up, by now. We're gonna fall for a few seconds, to around ninety thousand, before I figure the engines will have restarted."
"It's only going to take nineteen seconds to drop fifteen miles?" Bacon asked, looking nervously around him. "Are you sure this facility is deep enough?"
"It is if the ship crashes where it's suppose to," I said, confidently.
"That is such a comfort," Bacon said. "I can't tell you."
"Well," Suda said, "we'll know in...." He checked his watch. "Fifty-eight seconds."
I was mentally counting down, had passed ' zero' and was at ' plus three', when a bang as loud as the one that accompanied the birth of the universe as we know it shook the ground. A second bang, and another quake, followed a second later, and I just couldn't remain on my feet any longer. In fact, we all fell down and were forced to lay there as the second shock wave rushed past, covering our bodies in a layer of fine dust.
It was like a scene from your worst nightmare. The sun was obscured by black, choking clouds that reached several thousand feet into the atmosphere. Most of the ships parked within two miles of the impact crater were damaged beyond repair. Highly volatile fuel had poured from ruptured tanks in a few more, and then ignited. The flames were now so intense that the ships were bending and deforming as we watched, like figures made from chocolate stood close to an open fire. Everything had gone. In fact, that wasn't quite true. It was still there, in a hole a hundred and fifty feet deep and half a mile across, but it had been reduced to its constituent molecules. Fires were burning everywhere, out to a distance of a mile or more from the impact site. The concrete beneath many of the wrecked and still burning ships was badly cracked and soot blackened. The stench of burned and unburned fuel was carried on the gentle breeze to our nostrils, making us feel ill. We three covered our noses with rags and tried to make our way through the carnage to the impact crater. We couldn't help ourselves. This was what we'd planned and dreamed about, and we wanted to see it all: every dead body, every bent and twisted ship, every weapon that had ever been fired at us, or used as a club to break our ribs. We needed to see it down there, in that deep, deep hole, but we couldn't reach it.
Our eyes were painful and streaming tears. We couldn't breath.
"Let's get out of here," Suda yelled above the creaking and groaning of ships in their death throes. "We can come back tomorrow," he said, as he closed the door of a blockhouse behind us. It was nearly a mile from the impact and had survived mostly intact, though a few of the windows had shattered. The showers weren't working, but there was enough water in the tank to fill the washbasins in the men's toilet - the women's restroom had disappeared under a large section of one of the transports that had been closest to the point of impact. It must have weighed upwards of ten tons, yet it had been blown more than a mile.
The evaporating tension left us feeling drained. We couldn't face that long walk out of here, so we made ourselves as comfortable as we could. We were asleep in minutes.
We slept for almost twelve hours. The sun was shining, again, as we walked outside and made our way to the crater. Most of the fires had died down by now. Firefighters were out in force, damping down the few that still had fuel to burn. There was no other activity that we could see. People were still too shaken to think of starting the clean up operation. For now they could only stare at the apocalyptic devastation and feel happy to have survived!
There was nothing to see in the crater, just a slowly solidifying pool of metal, mixed with massive pieces of concrete. It was still radiating a considerable amount of heat, making the other side of the crater shimmer like a desert mirage.
Our anger had instantly evaporated at the sight that had greeted us that morning. Apart from a couple of dozen troopers who were on checkpoints at the five entrances to the spaceport, and around a hundred guarding the grain warehouses a short distance from the spaceport - and who were almost all taken prisoner shortly after the impact - every Tor-Ganistan had vanished in an instant. Completely. Utterly. There wasn't even a single tooth or a sliver of bone for any of their kin to bury. When the construction team filled in the hole, there would be nothing left to see, but we'd never forget they were there, a hundred feet down. We had hated them with every fiber of our being, and had sought to destroy them. And we had succeeded. They were tyrannical and cruel. They had likely ravaged their own world, and were busy vandalizing ours. We had eradicated them, like a pestilent species of insect, but only by becoming them. We had left Earth and it's nearest colonies to get away from war, but, unknown to us, war was already out here, waiting for us. Naïveté - pure and simple. I guess we'd finally lost our innocence!
Before the day was over, four transports, filled to overflowing with volunteers, armed to the teeth with captured weapons, set off for the two prisons. A fleet of empty ones followed a hour behind. We heard that Cannute and Fark, his opposite number at Darmanja, were killed by the volunteers when they arrived. Nearly six hundred brave citizens, many of whom had been prisoners, were killed during the rescue. We never found out what happened to the prison staff. They were killed and left there, out on the ice, I suppose.
Suda and me knew we would spend the rest of our lives together. We knew we'd laugh a lot, cry some, have a few kids, watch them grow and have kids of their own. But we knew something else, too. We knew we'd never, ever, forget how good it had felt to free, again!
How long we had before Tor-Ganistan would send more ships to find out what had happened, we couldn't know. It took us nearly a month to find out why no ships had come from our neighbor, 'Equinox', this past year, to find out why our grain shipments had dried up. The fact was, Tor-Ganistan had knocked out our ComSAT and had also paid them a visit. Much of their infrastructure was a pile of rubble. Their space fleet, such as it was, had been commandeered and put into service shipping our grain to Tor-Ganistan.
We were going to have to get used to living like an inmate on death row: never knowing when the guards would arrive at the cell door to take the order for our last meal. But good did come from the threat hanging over us. It brought us together, like never before. It made us appreciate each other. It made us appreciate every day.
Perhaps we wouldn't survive the next invasion? Perhaps, we would, and be enslaved like before? Either way, right now, life was good!
