The Light-Field (40 page)

‘Amie had a visit from Khalid,' Taren explained.

‘He found the ship,' Yasper concluded. ‘Shit!'

‘I know … but no point wasting energy on regret,' Taren said warning him to stay civil and focused. ‘Let's just get the bastard back in a cell where he belongs.'

‘So we are going to Dead Man Downs?' Yasper asked.

‘As soon as we find Zeven and Lucian,' Taren stated and, with one last look at the beautiful piece of their soul source, she made a move to do just that.

Once the team was gathered, Zeven was as keen to get on Khalid's trail and find Kalayna, as Yasper was to find Telmo. Lucian was not overly thrilled to be going back to Dead Man Downs. He remembered their last visit there and, in that time line, it wasn't very pleasant.

‘We kicked arse.' Zeven wasn't worried; it was his destiny to destroy Khalid and the sooner the better in his opinion.

In a circle formation, they clutched the wrist of those alongside them, and Taren and Zeven focused on delivering them to Dead Man Downs.

 

Those who'd been to the ancient crash site before were rather stunned to find themselves standing on the open canyon floor. Bones, rubble and the shattered remains of the minor ships that had gone down with the fleet surrounded them.

Swithin was horrified by his predicament, as all he had to do was touch the dead and they would return to life — one false move and they'd be facing an army of skeletons!

‘Ah …' Taren figured his predicament. She looked around the killing field for a clear piece of earth, but there were bones scattered for as far as the eye could see. ‘Not good.'

‘You think?' Swithin panicked and nearly overbalanced, but Zeven and Yasper, who stood either side of him, held him firm in his stance.

‘I got this.' Yasper levitated up, grabbing Swithin's other arm as well, and lifted him over the mass grave.

‘Don't drop me for fuck's sake!' Swithin clearly preferred being zapped to being levitated.

‘I won't, if you will stop wriggling.' Yasper strained, and then dropped Swithin as soon as they reached the edge of the debris.

‘Shit!' Swithin hollered, until he'd landed safely on his haunches and was relieved to find nothing but earth beneath him. ‘Thanks … I think.' He brushed himself off and stood, as Yasper returned to the others.

‘What happened to the mother ship?' Zeven expected to find it where they had left it in the last time line.

‘Khalid took it,' Taren suggested. ‘And left the bones of the ghost crew behind.'

‘You might be right about the ship,' Lucian granted. ‘But these bones do not belong to the crew of the
Insurrecto
, as they are all female.'

‘What?' Taren was shocked to hear this. ‘How did the bodies of so many women end up here?'

The look on Lucian's face expressed the trepidation he felt, viewing the ghosts. ‘There are young girls and babies too.' He was utterly appalled by his vision, and had to turn and walk away from it. ‘They were all sacrificed to the demons here.'

‘Where are the demons now?' Zeven wondered; he knew they existed as he'd fought with them before.

‘Gone.' Lucian turned back to convey what the ghosts were telling him. ‘Khalid took his ghostly crew and left all the souls of their victims here in limbo.' He truly felt their torment. ‘What am I to say to them?'

‘Hey!' Swithin yelled, but they couldn't make out the rest of what he was saying. He was pointing to something.

‘Wait on, Swithin, I'm in the middle of something,' Taren yelled back and returned her focus to Lucian.

Swithin had found a metal canister that was locked closed, and he wondered what was inside. When he unlocked the canister, all he saw was grey powder. ‘What is this?' Having been a smuggler, he knew all sorts of things were hidden within grainy substances, so he held his hand
underneath the ash as it poured out, and only one little trinket remained in his hand. The piece felt as cold as ice and immediately made him feel rather ill, so he placed it back into he empty canister. ‘Ripped off,' he decided. When he stood up, he noted all the ash had not settled, but was rising up before him to form the shadow of a large man. ‘Oh shit.'

‘I do not have enough spiritual knowledge to know how their curse might be lifted,' Taren advised Lucian and their unseen company. ‘But I know someone who is very knowledgeable, and as soon as I find him, we shall do all within our power to free them —'

‘Who is the spiritual know-it-all you speak of?' Yasper wondered, as there was no one within their ranks that fitted that profile.

‘It's your brother, Yas,' she advised to his great shock, ahead of looking back to Lucian.

‘These women will not be left and forgotten,' Taren vowed. ‘We will do all within our power to set their souls free.'

At last, Lucian smiled and nodded in approval; it seemed his ghosts were content with that answer.

‘My brother doesn't really look or sound like a spirit-master type?' Yasper was concerned by Taren's promises to the dead, having watched Telmo on air yesterday.

‘He doesn't know he has this Power yet,' Taren explained, her thoughts elsewhere, but they made her smile.

‘What is so amusing?' Zeven wondered.

‘Khalid thinks he has the jump on us because, as far as he knows, we've never seen the interior of his mother ship —' Taren shared her joy.

‘— but,
we have
.' Zeven's spirits lifted considerably too.

‘But won't he have his ghost crew shielding his vessel, just as they shield him?' Yasper theorised. ‘If the Juju stops him from finding us then —'

‘No, no, no.' Taren could see his reasoning and disagreed. ‘Light can penetrate darkness. Aurora has given me an idea of how we might get around Khalid's dark defence system.'

‘Something's happening.' Lucian observed what his team mates could not. ‘All the spirits are fleeing to hide.' Lucian looked in the opposite direction to see what had them spooked. He saw his brother running toward them, carefully dodging bones to outrun a huge shadow form, which had risen out of nowhere and was pursuing him.

‘Me coming was
such
a bad idea!' Swithin sprinted past with the container still in his hand.

‘What did you do?' Lucian had never seen a spectre that was so filled with darkness before.

‘I just opened this!' He waved it about, and Taren willed the object to her. Upon seeing her power, the spook took off into the sky and was gone before she could will him back into confinement.

‘Something tells me things just got worse.'

‘If we don't know enough to free the souls trapped here, we certainly don't know enough to deal with that one.' Yasper agreed.

‘Then we had better get to Telmo before it does,' Taren advised, suggesting they return to AMIE to regroup.

‘Best idea I've heard all day.' Swithin tiptoed in to join them. ‘I'm real sorry about that.'

‘It may not be an entirely bad thing,' Lucian commented. ‘The spirits here say that was Chironjivi, Khalid's father, who was trapped in Khalid's body during their time in prison.'

‘So, Khalid was probably the one who entrapped the spirit of the last prince of Phemoria,' Zeven theorised and then grinned. ‘Boy oh boy, is Khalid in trouble.'

‘And so is any other living thing in his vicinity.' Taren gripped Lucian and Swithin, and Zeven grabbed Yasper, and they all returned to the conference room next to the captain's office.

 

The reality of being a hostage on this vessel was a nightmare for Kalayna. She didn't feel safe sleeping or showering — even going to the toilet freaked her out, as she felt the eyes of all the dead and deprived
men of the crew constantly upon her. When she was in Telmo's company it was not so intense. However, if they showed intimacy toward one another, she would immediately get the intense chills that she'd only begun feeling since being brought on board the
Insurrecto
.

Obviously none of the ghosts were technically capable enough to follow the work she hadn't been doing for Khalid, or they would have reported her covert activities by now.

Only hours after he had tortured information out of them, Khalid had visited Kalayna and Telmo again and handed them their first assignment. He wanted them to build and install a huge photon-camera on his ship. Kalayna had thought this an odd request, as he was hardly going to spot any psychics out in space! Telmo asked why Khalid, with his PK, needed them to build the camera. Why could he not just whip one out of thin air? Khalid did not like being questioned about his skills, but for the sake of getting on with it, he explained that if such a camera had already been in existence, no problem. But because the camera needed to be redesigned to suit his purpose, he could not just ‘whip one up'. Kalayna, however, did not ask questions, as his request gave them full run of the ship — bar the bridge and control deck. Khalid figured they couldn't hide anywhere on board that his ghosts could not find them, and the best thing about the commission was that it gave them an excuse to tinker.

In what little sleep Kalayna had managed to secure, she'd dreamt her way around the circuitry of a psychic neutraliser band — a device she'd never even seen! Admittedly, before she'd drifted off to sleep, she'd desired to know how to construct one of the Maladaanian devices, so she could take out their captor. It was stunning that her request for information had been met so swiftly. As she now understood how the neutraliser worked, she conceived of how the technology could be transformed into a handheld weapon — and that was very exciting!

So whilst Telmo got started on the photon-camera for Khalid, she pretended to be making components — all the while constructing her weapon right under her captor's nose. It had only taken a couple of
days to construct the handheld device, but the scary thing was there was no way of testing it.

‘How are you doing?' Telmo was keeping a constant check on her progress.

‘Just the outer casing screws to drill and fit and I'm done.' She briefly looked up from her work to flash him an encouraging smile. ‘How are you doing?'

‘Not so good.' He gave a heavy sigh.

‘You stuck on something?' Kalayna offered to help.

‘No, it's all pretty straightforward, seeing as we have a copy of the original
MSS designed
blueprints.' He was rather concerned to be working off stolen government documents. ‘No, what is annoying me, is that the design for this weapon was inspired by a breakthrough scientific invention by the very great Dr Taren Lennox. Which basically means the MSS ripped off her brilliant work and put it to the worse use possible.' He shook his head in disgust.

‘What do you think Khalid wants with it?' Kalayna queried in an attempt to defuse his anger.

‘Whatever it is, you can guarantee it's
not
good. Ah!' Telmo threw his tools down, suddenly.

‘What's wrong?' Kalayna put her screwdriver down and actually looked at Telmo. A grey haze appeared to hang about him, but perhaps her eyes were strained from the intricate work she'd been doing under light?

‘I've got some grit in my eye.' Telmo moved quickly to the door to go the bathroom down the hall and wash the offending particle out. The strange grey haze followed him out of the room.

Kalayna shrugged off the sighting — she'd seen and felt loads of strange things since she'd been brought on board. She was learning very quickly that the more fearful she was, the more she attracted the spooks' attention and the worse the episodes were. If she ignored the ghostly creeps and didn't react to their attempts to frighten her by moving things or blowing her hair about, they tended to get bored and go away.

When Telmo returned to the lab, he just stopped inside the doors and stared at her for the longest time, his smile slowly broadening. The grey haze was no longer pursuing him, but he looked to be covered in soot.

‘Telmo?' Kalayna quizzed his odd behaviour with an uncomfortable grin.

‘A woman,' he said, his voice as harsh as sandpaper, as he stumbled toward her like he'd only just learnt how to walk.

‘Are you drunk?' She stood and backed away, her untested weapon in one hand and a small screwdriver in the other.

‘I will be,' he said ominously, ‘on the blood of your dead body.'

Not the Telmo I know and love,
she thought, trying to suppress her fear and prevent herself squealing. She darted away and put a work bench between them. ‘Stay back.' She aimed the flattened cigar-shaped object in her hand at her pursuer.

‘What are you going to do … throw it at me?' he sneered.

‘Telmo knows what this is capable of.' She questioned his ignorance.

‘I'm not Telmo,' he admitted with a broad grin.

‘No, you're not.' She fired her weapon, and as the magnetic pulse struck Telmo's body the soot was shocked right off of him. The grey mist reformed quickly into a large face, which snarled at Kalayna, but when she threatened to fire at it again, it fled the room.

‘What the?' Telmo was left quivering in the wake of the episode and Kalayna rushed to catch him up and steady him on his feet. He looked to her whereupon his confusion turned to hope. ‘It works.'

‘Well, it does something they don't like too much,' Kalayna agreed, feeling empowered to have a weapon to use against her invisible assailants.

Telmo looked to the large-scale photon-camera he'd been working on. ‘Speaking of not being liked too much, Khalid is going to be back to check up on us soon, and just in case your weapon doesn't do what we think it does —'

‘— better get cracking on his commission,' Kalayna agreed. Now that she'd completed her task, she could give Telmo a hand.

 

In the conference room, those involved with this particular mission had gathered to brainstorm penetrating Khalid's ship. Swithin had bowed out of the pursuit for the moment, fearing he'd create another demon to battle, but was on call if needed. Zeven and Yasper, who, having seen a kindred spirit in each other, were fast becoming firm friends, and were as eager as ever to take off and complete the mission. Lucian and Taren felt that a little more caution and planning was required in this instance.