The Rift Rider (15 page)

When Bei finally
switched off the device, shaking his head, disbelievingly, night had fallen and
the lights of Jajag city hovered in the distance like a swarm of fireflies.
"It'll be a massacre," he said, almost inaudibly.

"What's
wrong?" Charlie asked.

"This
Doctor Sree has developed a new kind of engine, one that uses energy form the Divide
to massively increase their speeds. They tried some out on their shadow
fighters and it worked. Now this Sree plans to build a larger, faster engine
and install it inside a destroyer. They'll be able to reach Poklawi in two
months.

"Ko showed
up yesterday so we know they've been back a day or two at least. The
Corporation board will have already begun preparing for an invasion."

"An
invasion with just one destroyer?"

Bei snorted.
"A single destroyer has enough artillery to wipe out all of the robundee
planetary defences and still have enough firepower left to flatten every city.
The moment it reaches Poklawi space, it's game over for the robundee and turen
living there. "

"What about
the resistance? Won't they fight?"

"To the
death," Bei said with both pride and sadness in his voice. "But only
small ships have ever passed through the Wrake Pass. And the robundee don't
have the technology or resources to build their own craft. Against a destroyer
and its shadow fighters, the resistance pilots will have no chance in a space
battle."

The despair in
Bei's eyes made Charlie turn away.

"It'll be
genocide," Bei said, his voice tight. "They'll burn them alive in a
blaze of energy bursts. And those they don't kill, they'll enslave. I mean why
bother importing a workforce when you already have a planet full of men, women
and children unable to refuse your orders? That's how they'll see it. And
without a safe haven to flee to, the resistance will die too, and with it all
hope of a world free from those Corporation bastards." He stopped talking
and stared out of the window.

"There must
be a way to stop them," Charlie said. "The destroyer hasn't left
Seenthee space yet, has it?"

Bei
straightened, gathered himself and said, "Not yet. The data says it'll
take them a week or so to build the engine and prep the destroyer. The
Corporation have an orbital off Moon Two. That's where they'll be making the
modifications."

"Then we still
have time."

Bei stroked his
chin. "Sabotage and abduction our only options. If we find a way inside
the prototype destroyer, grab this scientist and destroy his engine, we'll stop
them. But that's a hell of an if."

"I think I
know who can do it."

Bei raised an
eyebrow.

In a flash of
green, Charlie changed form. Hovering inside the van, basking its interior in
his green flow, he raised his hands, and said, his voice now thick and powerful
and godlike, "Me."

 
"I thought your plan was to find
this Yojim and get home. Why would you risk you life to help us? We're not your
people."

"When I had
no hope, you helped me. Without that help, I'd be in a hundred chopped up
pieces right now, with this Doctor Sree prodding my dissected bollocks. And
this Corporation needs to be stopped. With this new power, I can't stand by and
let them destroy a race of people. "

"But how
will you get on board the destroyer?"

"You've
seen what I can do. I dropped through a marble floor. Energy bursts went
through me. There's got to be more things I can do. Brother Yojim will know. When
we meet him, we can come up with a plan."

The blue man
frowned. "I don't know, Charlie."

Charlie smiled.
"The last I heard you were the most famous smuggler on Seenthee. Or was I
wrong?"

Bei's face went
serious. He ran his hands through his hair, raised his chain and said,
"You heard right. Now let's see what this heap can do. We've got a lot of
work to do."

Once they
entered Jajag city, Bei took over the driving again. They had been driving for
a while when Charlie decided to lower the window and a take in the scent of the
city.

He instantly
regretted it. The stench of raw sewage and decaying waste flooded into the van.
He covered his mouth and nose, fighting the urge to wretch. Bei slid the window
closed again, sparing Charlie the indignity of puking over his pyjama robes.

"The outer
half of the city hasn't had a working waste disposal system in two
generations," Bei said. "It's the same story in every major city. The
Corporation keeps their zones in pristine working order, and lets the rest go
to shit."

Shit's putting
it lightly, Charlie thought as he studied the squalid world outside his window.
The city was so far down on its heels it was barely above ground. Row after row
of windowless, apartment blocks lined the streets, sparsely lit by ancient
petrol generators, oozing oil onto the broken pavements. Every once and while a
once majestic building, now flaking and crumbling, or a half-built shopping
mall, long since abandoned, interrupted the wall of derelict blocks, giving
Charlie a glimpse of what the city had looked like in happier days.

Inside these
wrecked buildings, lived the poor and the desperate. They made their homes out of
whatever fabric, or material they could find in the cities seemingly limitless
supply of rubbish. The trash collected in bus-sized piles within which
mud-caked youths fought with monstrous looking vermin for scraps. He doubted
even Dickens could have imagined such wretched creatures as these and wondered
how they survived when winter came.

Right now,
however, Seenthee's most southern city was in the midst of summer. The heat was
stifling and the air sticky. But inside the van, Charlie sat in cool comfort. He
felt the now familiar knock of guilt at his door.

"Why
doesn't the Corporation do anything about this?" he asked.

"How do you
think they recruit people? They make it so bad that people would sell their
parents for the chance to get out of this dump and into the luxury of the
walled off Corporation zones."

"People
work for the Corporation even though they know its them that's ruining the place?
That's crazy."

"The
recruiters come to the schools and select the most ruthlessly ambitious out of the
high performers. Those sons of bitches, still in their early teens but already
sick of life in the gutter, will do whatever it takes. And once the Corporation
has recruited them, their only way out is in a body bag. They don't take too
kindly to resignations."

"What about
everyone else?"

"The rest
scratch out a living working for Corporation subsidiaries, doing all the
backbreaking, soul-destroying jobs they want nothing to do with. But a proud
few refuse to accept this as their lot. In their case, they have two choices, a
life of crime or the resistance. Either way, if caught, they face execution,
imprisonment or a short, miserable life working the mines. But better the
chance of freedom than the certainty of slavery."

"What made
you stop smuggling and join the resistance?"

Bei's eyes
emptied, as if viewing a memory behind them. "That's a story for another
day."

Charlie watched
the turen outside as they prowled the dark streets. "Why haven't I seen
any silver-skinned turen?"

Bei took his
mitts off the control pads, cracked his knuckles said, "The Corporation
breeds those silver bastards behind their walls." He gripped hold of the
pads again, harder this time.

"Like
clones?"

Bei shrugged.
"Clones, robots, aliens, who knows? That's the most closely guarded secret
on Seenthee. I doubt no more than a handful of the very top silvers know the
truth. You see only silvers can run the Corporation."

"Has it
always been like that?"

"The
Corporation and silvers are two sides of the same coin. But it was the
Corporation that came first. You see it actually began life as a simple arms
manufacturer. But it got so rich and powerful during the eighty-year war it
expanded, seizing monopolistic control of every market on the planet. That's
when the first silvers started to appear. They appeared out of nowhere, taking
every position at the top of the Corporation.

"Nobody
mentioned it at first. It had been common to genetically change skin colour for
over a century, so most people assumed it was some fanatical approach to
business management.

"And then
when Seenthee looked set to destroy itself, the Corporation stepped in, and, using
its massive wealth, political ties and superior weaponry, seized control of the
planet. At that point, everyone was just glad the war had ended. They didn't
give a shit what colour skin their saviours had."

"Some
saviours," Charlie said, glancing through the van's windows.

"Yeah. It
didn't take them long to show their true colours, so to speak. In all that time
only one silver has ever gone against the Corporation, a science genius called
Krest. He was young too, no older than you."

"Why?"

When Bei
answered, his voice held in it a quiet awe. "For the same reason we all do
stupid things. For love." The blue man shook his head. "He fell for a
regular turen. And they screwed him for it. The Corporation anti-terror squad
spent weeks torturing his silver arse before they finally killed him. His lover
too."

Charlie thought
back to the hours he had spent in the torture room. Never again, he told
himself.

"You know
it's funny," Bei said. "Sree repeatedly refers to a scientist called
Krest in his writing. Maybe it's the same one. If he's old enough, it's possible
Sree could have worked with him before he turned traitor. I mean it makes
sense. This Krest was hailed as an innovator. This new technology could well be
based on the ideas he left behind."
 

Later, Bei
slowed the van, thus ending their journey the planet, one that had taken them
from the frosty plains of the North to the sultry nights of the South. They
came to a hovering stop beneath a monstrous fifty-storey block. All but the
bottom three floors lay in darkness. The building loomed above them like a
giant sentinel of the night.

Thieves, time
and weather had stripped bare the lower floors of the building. All of the
interior walls had collapsed and only the giant concrete support beams
remained. Between them the Jajag city poor had erected makeshift shelters,
forming a raggedy, zigzagging village.

"Home sweet
home" Bei said.

He drove the van
slowly inside, manoeuvring between the clusters of tents, their occupants
stirring from the unexpected purr of a hovercraft. Halfway inside, they parked,
bringing the van to a stop beside a large, surprisingly well-tended tent. As
they pulled up a thin man stepped out and sniffed the air suspiciously. Bei
wound down the window and shouted a friendly greeting at the man. The man
responded with a large toothless smile.

Charlie stepped
out of the van, covering his nose against the smell. Above him a rusted pole
supported a swaying lamp, its greasy wire connecting to a generator bolted to
the floor. It flickered on and off, threatening to die out at any moment.
"I imagined something much grander," he said.

Bei smiled, shut
the van door, and went over to the tent man, giving him an elaborate alien
handshake. The tent man looked happy to see Bei and even happier to pocket the
money the blue man slipped him after the handshake. "Any trouble?"
Bei asked him.

The man shook
his head and grunted in the negative.

"Good,"
Bei said, walking to the back of the hover van. He opened it, pulled out a box
and placed it on the floor next to the tent. Four grubby, childish faces now peeked
between its flaps. Bei did not bother going back to lock the van. "Keep
your eyes open. There might be trouble coming."

The tent father
nodded, his face serious.

A few metres
away, stood a rickety lift. From the looks of it, nobody had used it in decades.
Bei walked over to it, and reached inside a hole to the left of it. Curious,
Charlie peered over the blue man's shoulder. Deep within the hole gleamed a
palm-sized square. It was the same blue as the rocket ride's activation slab. Bei
placed his hand against it. A few seconds later, the lift door slid open with
an unexpected smoothness.

Charlie followed
Bei into the lift. The control panel fitted to the lift wall surprised him with
its complexity. He had expected rinky-dink levers but this panel looked better
suited to a spaceship control deck. Bei ran his fingers across it in a
well-practised manner and the lift hurled upwards. The acceleration gave
Charlie a fierce jolt. Bei, standing with arms folded across his chest,
chuckled to himself.

Charlie had
scarcely regained his balance when the lift came to a shuddering stop. He lost
his footing and tumbled. Only Bei's outstretched arm stopped him from
clattering to the floor.

The lift door
opened straight onto an apartment of epic proportions.

"Welcome to
the penthouse suite," the blue man said.

They stepped out
of the lift, and the room's lighting automatically grew stronger. The lift door
closed behind them as if it had been waiting for them to leave. Charlie scanned
the carpeted floor for a doormat. His bare feet were coated with dust and
grime.

"Don't
worry," Bei said collapsing on a crescent moon sofa in the centre of the
room. "The carpet's self cleaning." He kicked off his boots, placed
his feet on the table and rested his head against the cushions stacked up
behind him. "Come on, take a seat."

Charlie padded
across the carpet, the soft pile slipping deliciously between his toes, and
joined Bei on the sofa. A sigh of pleasure escaped from his lips as the cushions
pushed against his back and bottom. After twenty hours sat in the van, the sofa
felt like heaven.

From his vantage
point in the middle of the room, Charlie took a good look around the apartment.
The furniture was an eclectic mix of wood, animal bone, metal and leather.
Paintings hung on every wall, and sculptures, figurines, busts, exotic carvings
and other arty knick-knacks littered the room. Bei looked far from the arty
type, yet even with his barbaric lack of appreciation for art, Charlie could
tell the smuggler knew his art. The man had more surprises up his sleeve than a
kleptomaniac magician.

In one corner,
several bean bag sized cushions lay in a circle below a bug like chunk of metal
embedded in the ceiling. Charlie recognised it immediately. He had seen plenty
of these holographic game projectors in the harem and during his short stay
grown competent in the planet's fighting games

Shutters covered
the whole side of one wall.
Bei
reached into the sofa and the blinds slid open, revealing a
glass edged
balcony. Water pipes, plants and metallic furniture lay dotted around it,
seemingly floating mid-air.

 
Beyond it lay Jajag city.

In the distance, a grey wall, larger even
than Lady Ori's, enclosed the central area of city. On top of the wall, rays of
light from passing searchlights illuminated rows of cannons pointing downwards
onto the city.

 
“Behold the Corporation wall,” Bei said.

“It’s massive.”
 

“And there's one in every major city."

“Has the resistance ever got through it?”

“Long ago one team did. Here in Jajag. It caused
quite a stir. They killed a handful of silvers and spent the next two years
having their testicles and nipples singed and their nails and teeth removed.
That kind of put off other resistance fighters. Suicide's one thing, two years
of agony is another.”

“They've given up then?” asked Charlie.

“They’re just biding their time for a better
chance of success. I guess that's where you come in."

Beyond the
gaming pit, a door creaked open a fraction. Charlie looked over. A thin band of
light spilled from the room, but nobody stepped out. Before Charlie could ask
Bei who was inside, Awani burst out of a door on the opposite side of the room.

"You're
back," she screamed, running and diving on top of Charlie. "I heard
the Corporation found you," she said between the kisses she was planting
on Charlie's forehead and cheeks. "I thought they'd got you."

Charlie,
overwhelmed by the pink girl's attention, sat and silently let the kisses rain
down on him, too stunned to speak. His heart raced. He had hoped for a friendly
reunion, but had never dreamed of such a display of affection.

"What about
me?" Bei said, disgruntled. "I was in danger too, you know."

Awani slid off
Charlie and crawled over to the blue man, giving him a hug. "I'm glad you
made it too, old man."

"Didn't I
tell you the kid would do okay?" Bei said, once Awani had settled down and
taken a seat next to Charlie.

She laid her
hand on Charlie's thigh and clenched, as if holding him down to prevent him
from running off into danger once more. "I'm just glad he got out in one
piece."

As she spoke
Charlie stole a glance at her attire. Dressed in tights shorts and a top that
started low and finished high, she looked incredible. She noticed his staring,
and shot him a smile that sent lightening bolts through his chest, stomach and
crotch.

Be said,
"One piece? Awani you should have seen him. He was incredible." He
turned his amber eyes onto Charlie, and said, "Go on show her."

Charlie, always
partial to a little showboating, was happy to oblige. He had a deep conviction
that if he played his cards right tonight she would be his. With the speed of
thought, he changed form.