Project U.L.F. (48 page)

“What? What did I say?”

“You just told me what you thought I wanted to hear, what everyone wants to hear. ‘Oh, it’ll be all right.’ I was hoping for more from you. I thought we knew each other well enough that you could be honest with me.”

“What do you want me to say? Do you want me to lie?”

“I don’t
want
you to say anything,” she snapped, her eyes filling with tears. “I want the truth. Are we going to get away from this place, because I really need to know?”

He hung his head. “I don’t know,” he said quietly. He looked up at her again. “But I wouldn’t be here right now if I didn’t think we had a chance.”

“I’m scared, Wyatt.”

“Hey, it’s okay to be scared. We’re all scared.”

She looked at him suspiciously, a tear running down her face. “That’s bullshit. You’re not scared of anything. Nothing bothers you. Nothing even fazes you.”

“What? You think because I don’t show fear, I’m not scared inside? Every time I go out I’m scared. Scared of where I’m going. Scared of what I’ll meet. Scared I’ll lose one of my crew. But I can’t let them see that. What good would I be to them? None of us would come back alive. “Not scared? Pah! W-w-what do you think I am? Some kind of machine?”

“I wonder sometimes.”

He looked at her, brows knitted together, clearly offended.

She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” She took a step towards him. “Hold me?” she asked and before he could protest she already had her arms around him.

Wyatt had never felt more awkward before in his life. His arms splayed out in front of him and he held his head high so as not to touch the top of hers with his chin. He struggled to look down at her and got a faint smell of her hair. There was a faint scent that marked her as female. He closed his eyes and breathed it in. She smelt so good.

He relaxed a little and brought his arms down around her, stroking her hair with a hand. He knew that she was crying silently into his chest.

He smelt her hair again, the femininity of it, and caught his breath as images of Tanya flooded his mind. It felt like he were betraying her memory. He’d never got over losing her. Kate felt him tense. “Is there…Is there someone?” she asked between sniffs.

“Huh?”

“Is there someone else? Someone who waits for you?”

“Yes. No! I mean…I mean there was once.”

“What happened?”

He fought the lump rising in his throat. His voice shaking with emotion. “Uh, she uh, she couldn’t wait any more.” He smiled sadly.

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Me too. I’m sorry too.”

They stood there for a long time after that. Neither of them saying a word, just holding each other in the darkness and listening to the occasional drop of water. Then Kate spoke again. “Why do you trap?” she asked into his chest.

He frowned above her, not really understanding the question. “Well, it’s my job. That’s what I do.”

“But you. I’d have thought you wouldn’t have done it.”

“Why?”

“Well, because you know…” she stopped, not knowing whether it was a good idea to continue, whether she might again cause offense with her insinuation. “Well, because you, of all people, know how precious freedom is.” There was a long period of silence before Wyatt answered.

“It’s a good point,” he mused. “To be honest with you, I’d never really thought about it. I know that when we cage some of these animals we strip them of their dignity. Sometimes you can just see it in their eyes, see the light dim, especially the intelligent ones.”

He laughed to himself. “You know, we humans think we’re great. Think that we’ve got this whole universe figured out nicely. That we’re top of the pecking order. But every now and then you look into a creature’s eyes and know that it despises you. You know that given a half-chance it could snuff you out without even thinking about it.

“It’s funny, y’know. We measure intellect on a scale that we devised but alien intelligence doesn’t even conform to it. It’s an altogether different intellect. You can’t name it or categorize it or put it in a box. It’s immeasurable. There are things locked up in the IZP back on Earth that in a different life, on a different world, would rule us. You can’t tell people that, it’s just something you learn from experience. The people back home…they just want something different to look at.” He sighed. “To begin with it was just a job. Now it’s my life. I don’t know any different. I can’t do anything else. Not now.”

“But you can!” Kate protested. “You can do so much more. Look, promise me if we make it back, you’ll give up all this.”

It was the same request that Tanya had made of him and it hit him like a bucket of cold water. He stood there, stunned for a while, and the silence filled the air while his mind reeled.

“What was it you did?” Kate asked.

“Huh? What?” He was still thinking of Tanya.

“What did they lock you up for?”

He grabbed her by the sleeves painfully and pushed her away from him. His eyes burnt in the darkness. “Of all the things you could ask me you want to know that? Why?” He stepped away from her. She didn’t even get the chance to reply. “You know, that’s the trouble with us, everybody focuses on the bad, nobody wants to see the good in anything any more!”

“But I know you’re a good person.”

“So what does the rest matter?” he snapped. He started to walk away from her towards the door.

“Because if I never know, I’ll only know half the person. I can’t know only half of you.”

“You don’t want to know me. Whatever would possess you to want to do that?” and with that he was gone.

Kate’s eyes filled with tears. “Because I think I love you.”

CHAPTER

“Remove hyperdrive housing locking bolt.” Kate flicked the flashlight beam off Chris’ crumpled instructions and back to the hole in the floor in which Wyatt worked and fumbled for a new tool.

It had taken them nearly two hours to locate the engine room this morning. Half an hour to find the bridge and then, when they discovered the bridge had no power and they couldn’t call up the ship’s blueprints on computer, another fifteen minutes to find the hardcopies Wyatt knew were stashed somewhere in case of just such circumstances. They had spent over an hour winding their way down through the ship, through its darkness, like specks of food passing through a great beast’s gullet. Forced on by pressure. An unseen force.

To where? The stomach, the place where energy was converted to power. Power. The engine room.

Numerous times they had stopped while Wyatt shuffled through the sheaves of oversized maps, cursing their impracticality before folding them to focus on a smaller area, like a crossword enthusiast scrutinizing the clues. Bringing the flashlight to shine on the thin paper, the faint blue lines, then shining its light on the ceiling, the walls, searching for something, looking for clues.

The darkness was oppressive, haunting them like a presence. Only the blade of light kept it at bay, fending it off like a sword.

Pressure.

Until now. A wave of relief washing over them like cool water. The discovery of the engine room easing the burden they both felt, slightly but tangibly. Even the darkness seemed to have lifted a little, backed off as if wary. Maybe their eyes had just grown accustomed to it.

“Can you shine that over here a bit?”

She did as she was asked, seeing what Wyatt indicated, a bolt sat atop a large drum, like a crown on an obese monarch; saw him apply a large wrench to it, hands, pale in the bright light, heard him grunt with effort in the darkness.

There was a bang and she heard him cry out. The wrench had gone from the small lit stage. Slipped.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he managed, she guessed, through gritted teeth.

She found his hand with the flashlight and saw the rubies of blood already forming on three of his knuckles. Then his hand was gone too, whisked away as he attempted to shake off the pain as easily as the drops of blood.

He applied the wrench again, gingerly this time, before clamping it on and locating a hammer with which to bang it around, rather than risk his knuckles again. Two firm hits and it spun easily so that he could remove it with his fingers.

He cast the nut away, not caring for it, hearing it clatter to rest in the darkness. Lost. Where it could do him no more harm. Another hurdle removed and to be forgotten. Press on.

He lifted the hatch on the drum slowly, cautiously, as if afraid of what he might find inside. Something else to hurt him. Make him bleed.

He was plunged into darkness. “Lift out hyperdrive housing,” Kate read above him before his light returned. He reached inside, bent over so his body blocked the light, hands fumbling blindly for a hold, found one, then pulled. The housing barely moved. It was heavy and he was not expecting its weight. It was going to be an effort.

“Stand back, will you? I’m going to have to lift this thing out and drop it quickly.”

“Sure.”

He heard the metal flooring clank as she retreated a few steps, then returned his attention to the hyperdrive. He took a deep breath, then heaved, holding the second breath as he struggled with the housing. Slowly, too slowly it seemed, it came. His face reddened with the exertion, his arms trembled as if afraid they might fail, but then it was out, clear of the drum and he half-threw, half dumped it onto the deck that Kate stood on next to him.

For a second the noise was deafening, a loud metallic clang which reverberated around the room like the peal of a gigantic bell, but then it was gone, escaping the confines of the chamber to scream down nearby tunnels where it was engulfed by their black maws. The silence returned. His pulse beat its loud rhythm in his temples, the muscles in his arms burned with oxygen deficit, shaking. “What now?” he squinted into the blinding light of the flashlight.

The interrogating beam left him to question the paper held in her hand. “Unscrew housing cylinder,” she dictated from above him.

“And where’s that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well doesn’t he say?”

“No.” She played the light over the black cylinder on the floor next to her. Featureless except for the handle Wyatt had used to lift it out by. “The handle,” she hinted. Wyatt looked at her speculatively, “What about it?”

“Turn it.”

Wyatt sighed and climbed out of the well he’d been working in to stand next to her, over their prize. He took the handle in one hand, tried it, nothing. Gripped it in both hands. Again, nothing. “That’s not it,” he scratched the back of his head. Kate was not so sure.

“Here,” she offered, kneeling down to grip the sides of the hyperdrive housing, “Try again. I’ll provide you with some resistance, could just be a build-up of pressure.” He shrugged, not convinced, but conceded to apply himself to the handle once more. For a second, as they both strained and groaned with the effort, Kate thought that she may have indeed been wrong, but then something gave and there was the hiss of escaping gas.

They both stopped and looked at the housing. Even in the dark they could see a ring of white around the handle, glinting, crystalline. Kate picked up the flashlight again and shone it on the housing. The white ring shrank under the beam’s stare. Tiny wisps of vapor fled away from it. She dabbed at it experimentally with a finger, leaving imprints on the black of the housing underneath. Ice. A cooling gas, liquefied under intense pressure, vaporizing on contact with warm air at normal atmospheric pressure. She was right.

She stepped away, letting Wyatt unscrew the rest. He spun the handle furiously now. Believing. Exposing more and more of the silver screw thread until it ended. He pulled and lifted a shaft of silver, gleaming metal out of the housing and then carefully laid it aside.

The housing was open now, a vertical black cylinder with a hole in its top. A hole which glowed with a faint purplish hue as if lit from within. A hole through which condensation erupted, rippling on the surface like rolling, boiling clouds before cascading away to its demise.

Wyatt peered into it but could see nothing through the white mist. “Does he say anything else?”

Kate examined the paper again. “No. Only that the hyperdrive unit is supported on struts in there.” She looked up. Wyatt was rolling up his sleeve. “What are you doing?”

“You’ll see.” He pulled a rubber glove out of his breast pocket. Wiggling his fingers into those of the glove, he stretched its wrist up his forearm and released it with a smack, like a wicked surgeon delighting in the grim operation ahead.

“But Wyatt, that’s liquid gas, it’s…”

“Cold,” he finished for her. “Bloody freezing in fact,” he added with a frown, “But as long as I’m quick I should be okay. How’s it fitted?” he added as an afterthought.

She studied Chris’ additional diagram. “Crudely. Looks almost like a bayonet kind of fitting, but it’s the electromagnets that keep it in place when the power’s on.”

Wyatt nodded. He knew. He twisted his arm, pushing it down further into the cylinder, twisted again and lifted. When his hand came up again, the hyperdrive unit was in it.

It was beautiful, a glass sphere of plasma which shone purple in the darkness. Glowing. Almost pulsating as if it were alive. The last living part of this dead ship, cut out to be transplanted into a crippled other. To give new life. To give them their lives back.

Kate could see that the sphere was encased by four silver rings, bands which protected it like ribs. One in the horizontal, one in the vertical and two diagonals. The bands met at two poles, east and west, where a single notch projected from each—the securing fittings that it had hung from only moments before.

Wyatt looked at the unit too, but he regarded it differently from Kate, saw it for what he knew it was. Phenomenal power, right there in the palms of his hands. The silver rings were not a protective cage, they were strips containing dozens of electromagnets, all synchronized so that when the first electrical spark was applied they would charge and influence the plasma and gases inside the sphere, whisk it up into a cyclone. A self-contained miniature storm complete with its own tiny fingers of lightning. White streaks that would crack and spurt their way across the globe as the radiation intensified, as the power grew in magnitude, feeding on itself, growing, unimaginable, frightening. Enough power to move this ship. Awesome power.

Kate saw the look on Wyatt’s face. Saw the awe reflected in his eyes from the purple glow and for a second she thought he looked as a mad alchemist might witnessing success. Disbelief. Realization. Knowledge. Power.

He’d struck gold.

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It had been a long night for Bobby, Chris and Par. The monster knew they were there, had been attracted by their noise, the noise of the shuttle from days ago, and had followed it to its source. To them.

It was the color of stone, equally as strong and probably as ancient. Time had not molded this creature; the environment had not forced it to adapt. It was monstrous, almost impervious to the environment like the stone it so closely resembled. Just like the rocks of a waterfall, carved and shaped minutely by the water coursing over them, this creature had changed little in hundreds of thousands of years. It did enough to exist and continue its species and that was all that mattered.

It had not attacked the shuttle again, at least not with such force, just bumped it and knocked it around in an attempt to identify it while the terrified occupants huddled silently inside.

They were quiet now. Throughout the night they had little or no sleep, terrified by the thing outside, by its attack and by its mere size. Silence. That was the key to their survival. If they made a sound it would return to inspect them more closely. For now it lumbered around the tree line, head swinging as if looking for something. Lost. Confused. Even Furball seemed to sense the danger of noise and had retreated to a dark corner of the shuttle where it had curled up and covered its eyes with its tail, finding solace in the ignorance of the dark.

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Kate stepped out into the sunlight squinting fiercely. She brought a hand up to shield her face from the glare of the suns while her eyes adjusted to the brightness. Immediately behind her Gon-Thok exited the DSM followed by Kit, and then finally Wyatt, carrying the precious hyperdrive unit in his backpack. It was 10:00 AM.

Two hours had elapsed since they had removed the hyperdrive from its housing. They had returned to the others in the MedLab and after a brief discussion, Wyatt and Kate had decided to strike out for the shuttle today. Time was a factor, yes, but there were numerous other unknown variables on this world, as they had discovered, and only God knew which ones were conspiring against them now. They weren’t being paranoid, they told themselves, but who knew what another day might bring. Better to run with the luck while it lasted then wait another twenty-four hours and discover the tide had turned against them.

They would not make the shuttle by nightfall and would have to endure some of the freezing cold that came almost the instant the second sun vanished below the horizon, but if they set a good pace, they could keep it to a minimum.

Wyatt set out in front, setting the pace he wanted them to adopt for the rest of the day, confident, at least to begin with, of the way back to the shuttle. Gon-Thok walked behind, sometimes breaking into a trot to keep up with the determined human in front. Kit followed, hands bound tightly in front of him, and Kate brought up the rear. For now she was safe at the back. Hiking across the grassy plains gave them the luxury of a view, and hence any attack from above could be spotted and assessed long before it reached them. Besides, Kate was now armed with a tazer which Wyatt had found in the DSM and given to her. It was now clenched tightly in her right hand.