Into the Light by Jane Wallace
Chapter 16

Sevin left them to finish their meal and took the steps down to the flight deck where Hauki worked alone at the navigation station. There was a starchart on the main viewer which she had angled above her lap.

’Hello sir, feeling better for the rest?’ she said as he approached. She herself looked bright and reinvigorated in the new Infinity kit.

‘Much better, thank you.’ He nodded towards the chart. ‘How are we doing?’

‘Well, it’s all a bit weird, you know? I can’t be reading this right, but the odometer says we have done over one million linials in the past twelve hours. That’s faster than the speed of light!’

‘Not possible. Let me have a look.’ He reached across her to drag the viewer closer to him and studied the numbers.

‘I see what you mean,’ he said. ‘The calc is good but that velocity is impossible. It says we’re doing normal cruising speed: celeritas plus one!’ They looked at each other – the top speed of the Coalition’s fastest craft, the supernova, touched C point 65 and only for short periods. Sevin thought back to the files he had stolen from Gharst Central Control on Gridon. The one which detailed the fission-fusion engine for the Infinity project had also mentioned the possibility of hyperluminal travel.

‘If that’s the case, no wonder Skulldur was desperate to save the ship,’ he said. ‘How long to Isvarld?’

’It’d be nine weeks in Vehement.’

’I know that. What about Infinity?’

Hauki keyed in some numbers. The results sent her eyebrows skyward. ‘It says here 30 days.’

‘Incredible.’

’Isn’t it?’ said a voice behind them. Professor Xin was standing between the middle and starboard positions on the back row. She wore the silver circlet around her forehead but had changed her Infinity uniform trousers for a beige pair, probably to differentiate herself from her passengers. She was alone, although she maintained an attitude of having a copious retinue.

‘Are we really going at lightspeed?’ Hauki asked.

‘No, faster. On the Infinity drive we can do up to C plus ten, but that, as we know, is not properly tested.’

‘How d’you do it?’ asked Sevin. ‘What’s powering this thing to make it go so fast?’

‘That is confidential.’

‘Is it a nuclear fission-fusion engine with sonic ignition?’

Her face fell. ‘It was confidential.’

‘So we can have a look?’

‘If you must.’ She turned smartly and headed for the exit.

‘Get the others,’ Sevin told Hauki, and hurried after Xin. He fell into step with her under the stairs to the mezzanine level where there were eight transparent cabinets arranged in a dogleg between the port bulwark and the wall of the outside corridor. The cabinets were upright, the dimensions sufficient to contain a large human. Sevin almost expected to see one filled with formaldehyde, a bloated specimen floating inside. What looked like an audio mixing desk faced them.

‘What is that?’ he asked, pointing at the bizarre set-up.

‘Teleport,’ she said, pacing ahead.

‘Teleport?’ he said, stopping dead. ‘Impossible! They’ve proved it can’t work!’

She stopped too. ‘That was decades ago. Now we understand what ultrasound can do at the atomic level, a whole new spectrum has opened up.’

‘You can’t be serious! Teleport only exists in the old shows on totavision. If it was real, it would revolutionise our lives – our wars. The implications are huge.’ He paused. ‘You’ve done it yourself, teleported somewhere?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Right, so this is another one of your “not fully tested” facilities?’

‘My mother was working on the packet assembly locator at the time of our escape. When the Gharst arrested her, I had to carry on the work – alone. Without being able to contact her, and, due to my own … incompetence,’ she lingered painfully over the word, ‘I have not been able to complete the project satisfactorily.’

‘All the more reason for us to rescue her then,’ said Sevin gently, recognising a frustration in her which he often experienced himself. Her mouth had formed half a smile in return when the others caught up with them.

‘Hey, what’s in there? Is it guns?’ said Marik, ignoring the eccentric cabinets to focus on the sturdy double doors which secured the room opposite. The space was completely barred off without windows. A single control panel on the right-hand wall was the access.

‘Yes,’ said Xin. She took off again, the iris of the exit flowering at her approach. They hurried after her.

’This is what I meant looked kinda like the teleport on Galactic Quest,’ Lauden said to Zendra as they passed the upright coffins.

‘More like a morgue. Or a kava recovery unit.’

‘Or a place to start the night, heh, heh.’

‘Quiet!’ said Sevin, who was bringing up the rear. ‘Listen, you might learn something.’

They fell silent as they stepped through the iris and into the corridor which ran the width of the ship, sectioning off the bridge from the rest of Level 3. Skirting the ship’s core staircase, Xin lead them through the autodoors into the refectory with its turquoise-topped tables and out of the other side where they crossed another bisecting corridor with a central spiral staircase. Finally they reached a double set of autodoors marked DANGER in both Standard and Gharst.

‘Don’t touch anything, the equipment is very sensitive,’ Xin warned them. Then they went in.

They found themselves in the dark, standing on a wire catwalk strung halfway up the hexagon ribcage of Infinity’s midships. From their eyrie, the main body of the spacecraft tapered away for a hundred metres to converge, not in the nose cone like in the bridge, but in a pulsing orb of cyan that raged behind the transparent skin of its protective casing.

‘This is our power source,’ said Xin, the whites of her eyes and teeth glistening in the jerking blue light. ‘Photons, or gamma rays, thrown off by the nuclear reactions. Think of it as ten thousand times the output of the average terran power station.’

They stared at the burning core, so different to the set-up on the Coalition ships where the reactor ovens were encased with cooling towers. Engine rooms were generally humid and noisy with the escaping steam and the thumping of antimatter kickstarting the fission process. Listening for the permadrone, Sevin realised it was a low hum, barely audible.

‘This is how we create the energy.’ Xin touched the circlet around her head and floodlights burst out of hidden niches among the girders, illuminating the cavernous expanse of the engine room. Like giant internal organs, there were four large structures mounted several metres in front of the electric sphere. Each a different primary colour, they were linked together with wide ducts in greenish silver.

‘Wowsa, there’s a whole city in there!’ said Lauden. ‘Must’ve taken a few wet weekends to put that together.’

‘It must be alien tech,’ said Zendra.

’No it’s not,’ said Marik. He pointed at a misshapen cube with white rods poking out of its top. ’That’s just a propulsion reactor like the splitters on Vehement.’

‘It’s not made of the same thing though,’ Zendra said. ‘None of us have seen material like this.’ She ran her hand along the railings. ‘What is this stuff anyway?’ she asked Xin.

‘Nanofoam. Only a hundredth of a per cent of it is solid, the rest is air.’

‘Like the old aerogel?’ asked Sevin.

‘With some modifications.’

Sevin nodded slowly, impressed. ‘So if that’s a fission reactor, what’s that? A fuser?’ He pointed to the apparatus on the port side: a bulbous flask about five metres high and full of a rose-pink liquid aerated with tiny bubbles. It was sealed at the top and bottom. Pipes from both ends ran into smaller chambers before leading back to the propulsion reactor. As he spoke, a million dots of light sparked inside the tank, dazzling like a mini-universe before fading away to leave a flat, blush wine.

‘Sonoluminescence,’ said Xin. ‘Light created by sound. Follow me down and I’ll show you.’

She headed to a two-person elevator, more of a glass capsule, which protruded from the starboard end of the catwalk. Sevin and Lauden descended first and walked around the engine room’s ground level while they waited for the others to catch up. Apart from the back wall which had doors leading into the heart of the ship, the other sides of the rectangular space were lined with thin banks of vertical operating stations. While they had been on the catwalk, the female blond morph had entered unnoticed and was checking results from a head-height monitor.

‘The real innovation is in those black boxes,’ Xin was saying as the rest of the party joined Sevin and Lauden. She indicated the slim cylinders that hung close to the fission reactor and the sparkling vat. ‘They generate the sound frequencies which catalyse both the fission and the fusion reactions.’

‘Sound? Sound of silence more like,’ quipped Marik. ‘I can’t hear anything.’

‘That’s because it’s in the ultra range, well beyond the limits of your perception.’

‘So instead of using antimatter you set off the reaction with a soundwave – a very focused, intense soundwave,’ said Sevin. ‘Once you’ve split the atoms, you hive off the energy and divert the single particles through a chamber of argon gas, like the one there,’ he pointed to a fat, yellow barrel, ‘and then into the fuser. There you blast the liquid with ultrasound until it boils, creating bubbles. When those bubbles burst, it creates enough heat to cause thermonuclear fusion of whatever you’ve got in there. What is it that you’ve got in there?’

‘Why are you asking me? You seem to know everything.’

‘Just double-checking the details,’ he grinned, enjoying her discomfort. ‘It must be something pretty unstable, haleium perhaps?’

’It is haleium,’ she said, the corners of her mouth turning down. ’You forgot to mention that once it is fused, it goes back to be split again. It’s a closed system that does not require refuelling, the process repeats itself again and again - ad infinitum.’

‘Hence its name.’

’Yes. Although the Infinity drive occurs when two reactions happen simultaneously, not one after the other.’

‘Amazing, I didn’t think it could work in practice. The teleport, does that use sonar power?’

‘Yes, the soundwave breaks the atomic bindings which hold the body together.’

’Oh my,’ said Lauden. ’Can ya stick ’em back together again?’

‘Oh Lauden,’ said Zendra, putting her hand over her eyes.

Xin scowled at him. ‘Of course, you did it when we launched off Tian. It’s much easier to travel at hyperluminal speeds in smaller pieces.’

‘That’s why everything’s nanofoam,’ said Sevin, crouching down to poke the misty flooring. ‘Less to transport.’

Lauden’s eyes widened. ‘Hey man, can some of you get left behind?’

Xin looked down. ‘We have experienced some remaindering issues.’

‘Is that what happened to your brain cell, Lau?’ said Zendra.

They all laughed, except Xin, who seemed to hear a different summons, putting a hand to her left earlobe.

‘There’s an irregularity with onboard temperature control,’ she told them. ‘Nothing serious, but I need to check life support. Roxi here will accompany you back to the bridge.’ She hurried out of the engine room through the double autodoors, leaving the lugubrious female morph to shepherd them back to the flight deck.

δ

They spent the next five days planning Operation Breakout.

The mission was to rescue Xin’s mother, Wen, without sacrificing Infinity – a tough challenge, but one they were capable of rising to, Sevin told them.

Access to the Galactic Guard’s central server had been blocked as soon as the Gharst realised Infinity had been stolen. Her databases nevertheless still held valuable pre-loaded information. There were details of arsenal locations and their inventories, fleet and ground force deployments, directories of military and civil personnel plus comprehensive maps of Gharst territories and installations, including one of the Hellenhaus itself.

Located on a high plateau encircled by mountains, the Hellenhaus was twenty kilometres from the Reinn space port, accessible by either an underground train or a rough track through the hills. Sevin studied the plan of the prison for several hours, combing through the security features of its five floors and labyrinth of towers before concluding that a direct assault was too difficult. Without inside information, they had no way of knowing where Wen was being held and it would take too long to locate her. Rather than go to the Gharst, they needed the Gharst to bring Wen to them. So they agreed to stick to Xin’s original plan of trading Infinity for her mother, with the added twist of ambushing the exchange party, securing Wen and then making off with her and the ship.

The first step was to agree the transfer. They took the matter straight to the top. Xin contacted the offices of the Gharst Derdleiter, Kenraali Sigrid, third in the Rikke hierarchy and chief of the Galactic Guard. At this distance, the message took five standard minutes to bounce between the offworld stations and arrive at Galactic Guard HQ in the capital of Lyshargen on Rheged. The Gharst reaction was rapid: within one standard hour they had approval from Sigrid herself and the contact details of the governor of the Hellenhaus with whom they could work out the deal.

Getting a comm from him took several hours longer. Bored by the delay, the others drifted away from the comms station, leaving Lauden to monitor incoming traffic. Sevin had returned to divert the sergeant with a game of myjon when the alert sounded.

‘This is it!’ said Lauden, opening the comm.

‘What does it say?’ said Sevin, standing up to read the screen over Lauden’s shoulder.

’It says “From the office of Guvernoor Geir Daas” etc, etc. It says, ah, we have the fastest transport, more convenient if we bring Infinity to Isvarld.’

‘We anticipated that,’ said Xin from behind them.

Sevin turned around. ‘And we’re already on track. This Geir Daas, ever heard of him?’

‘No, but we can search the database later.’

‘Okay,’ said Sevin. ‘Xin, you sit down here. Lauden, move aside, we better have the real thing doing the correspondence.’

They changed places. ‘Tell him we’ll meet him in orbit in twenty-five standard days,’ Sevin instructed Xin. ‘Bright side of the planet.’

They waited a while for an answer. When it arrived, it contained co-ordinates which Hauki plotted. ‘That would put us over the Reinn space port at 14:19 GST - daylight still - at our current speed,’ she said.

‘It’s Isvarld’s major transport hub,’ said Sevin. ‘Makes sense for them.’

‘And it’s not really a problem for us, it’s completely open. If they’ve got anything going on, we’ll see it before it happens.’

‘Let’s get them to bring us a half-decent ship. Tell him you and your mother will need a raefnschip at least.’

‘Alright,’ Xin said, keying in the words.

‘And tell him to come alone, no support craft, no back-up or the deal’s off. And no more than six personnel when they board us.’

‘Done.’

‘Okay, send it.’

‘Sir, wait! You know they won’t stick to that,’ said Hauki.

‘For sure, them gribs always got some scrit going on,’ said Lauden. He reclined in the unused middle desk of the back row with his hands behind his head.

‘Yes, but we know that and we can plan for it,’ said Sevin, ignoring their unease. ‘The reply will take a while, I’m going to look up Daas in the database.’

He retreated to the privacy of the captain’s cabin and immersed himself in the solid but unremarkable career of Geir Daas. Returning to the bridge later, he found Zendra and Marik had swelled the crowd around the comms desk. Zendra beckoned him forward.

’Daas says he’ll come unaccompanied but he wants to do the handover on their ship. Xin has to go across first, then they’ll board Infinity after his experts have checked it out.’

‘So they suspect an ambush. That makes our job harder, but not impossible. What do you think, Professor?’

Xin turned around from the screen. ‘It’s not optimal. It puts me in their space, an unknown quantity.’

’Which is why they don’t want to get on Infinity!’ said Marik.

’And they’d be right.’ Sevin thought for a while, his chin in his hand. ‘We’ll have to stay hidden until the advance team gives the all clear. Then, when the senior Gharst move across, we’ll attack.’ He looked at Xin. ’You’ll be alone and vulnerable, especially if it goes wrong your end before we have a chance to secure Infinity. Can you carry something they can’t detect in case you need to cut and run?’

‘I can try.’

‘Good. Then tell Daas okay. If he sees us agreeing to his terms, he’ll think he’s got the upper hand and then he’ll underestimate us.’

‘Sir!’ said Hauki.

‘Send it.’

’Really, sir, I think that’s wrong,’ Hauki said, her dark eyes anxious. ’Infinity is a Gharst vessel, they know everything about this ship, but we’ll know nothing about theirs or what’s on it. We have to get them to come to us.’

‘Too late now.’

‘But how will we…?’

‘Look around you. There’ll be something here we can use even if it’s the morphs.’

‘I hope you’re right,’ said Hauki, returning to the navdesk looking worried. She sat down to wait for Daas’ reply.

It took a while, but they knew when Xin sat bolt upright that the message had come through. Everyone moved over to the comms desk.

‘Open it then,’ said Sevin.

Xin leant over the screen to read the contents and slumped back in the chair, saying nothing.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s not what we planned.’

‘Read it out!’

‘It says – hand over the Coalition war criminals we know are also on board or Professor Wen dies.’

They looked at each other in dismay.

‘D’you think they really would kill her? It could be, you know, a bluff,’ Hauki said.

‘I don’t want to take that risk,’ said Xin.

‘How do they know we’re here?’ said Zendra, looking daggers at her. ‘Everyone at the launch site was dead before we took off and the Scorpion would have wiped out everything else!’

‘How would I know? There was surveillance at the launch site, the images were probably relayed somewhere else that survived.’

‘Let’s keep calm,’ said Sevin, holding up his hand. ‘Something you want to add?’ he asked Lauden as the sergeant cleared his throat a little too loudly.

‘No, no, nothing.’

‘Reverre’s put two and two together,’ Sevin said, sending Lauden a dismissive frown which meant he would pursue the matter later. ‘He saw me and Hauki go off in the hopper and assumed we survived, perhaps with the others. Daas doesn’t specify names or numbers. That means he doesn’t know how many we are.’ He caught Xin’s look of despairing urgency. ‘We’ll still do it.’

‘It’s such a bad idea,’ said Hauki.

‘It’s not, it’s simple. If they want us captive as part of the deal, they can have us, except we’ll be armed. Once we get on board their ship, we’ll attack and overcome them. Then we’ll have two ships.’

‘That’s insane,’ Zendra said, sending a sympathetic look to Hauki who nodded vehemently.

‘Probably.’

‘We’ll never get on board armed, they’ll search us and replace the weapons,’ said Marik.

‘Good point, Air Captain. This is where it all depends on you, Xin. You’ve got three weeks to replace an undetectable weapon we can conceal in our clothes or boots.’

Xin stood up. ‘I’ll get on with it.’

‘Zendra and Marik, you dig out everything you can replace on raefnschips, the design, performance, weapons systems, cargo capacity, how the toilets work, whatever. Hauki, get some charts of Isvarld.’

‘Yes, sir!’

‘I’m going to recce places for the morphs to hide and mount a final attack if we need it. Lauden, with me.’

‘Sir.’ The sergeant hurried after Sevin who had set off towards the bridge’s ground level exit at a brisk pace. Lauden started to speak as they passed the teleport cabinets but Sevin cut him off, indicating they should get out of earshot. They reached the galley of the refectory before Sevin deemed it safe enough to hold a conversation. He found a food processor and switched it on.

‘You were going to say something back there?’ he asked over the regular thwick of a blade slicing through air.

‘I’ve been watching the comm traffic like you said.’

‘And you found something?’

‘Well, no, not in the recent stuff, that’s as it should be. But I checked out the past correspondence.’

‘And?’

‘I found a comm, sent a few hours after we got off Tian.’

‘Sent to who?’

‘Raveneye at Herengelden HQ.’

‘No! But I thought that Reverre …’

‘Yeah, this Raveneye is one busy dude.’

‘What did it say?’

‘Not a whole lot, just the names of everyone on board.’

‘And that’s all they needed to know. Gods above. No clue as to who sent it?’

‘Nope, the trail is wiped clean.’

Sevin’s mouth set. ‘I need a word with Professor Xin. Keep this to yourself.’

‘What about … ?’ began Lauden, but Sevin was already crossing the refectory. He crashed through the swing doors into the corridor beyond and stomped down the steps to the Level 5 workshops where he knew Xin would be holed up.

The bowels of Infinity were much less prepossessing than the upper decks. Level 5 was divided into four areas by skinny gangways, lit dimly with energy savers. Sevin stood at the cross-section, feeling the clammy air permeating from the hydroponic tanks and life support functions in the areas behind him. In front, to port, was the entrance to the workshops, to starboard was sick bay. Windows lined the corridor which separated the two spaces and there were secondary access points halfway along to the bow.

Sevin tiptoed forward, hugging the wall of sick bay. Across the way, he could see Xin through the windows of the workshop. She was seated behind a central bench on a high stool. She had a magniscope wrapped around her eyes and was working with long-handled instruments like a surgeon’s tools.

The clank of footsteps on the spiral stairs sent him scurrying into sick bay where he crouched down behind a green-sheeted trolley bed. Through a sliver of window, he saw the morph Peli, a male version of the dark-haired Mimi, knock on the door opposite and go in. Then he heard Xin complaining to the morph as they hurried out of the workshop, their voices fading as they swept down the corridor and up the stairs.

Sevin crept out of sick bay and tried the autodoor of the workshop. It opened without protest and he stepped inside. Taking care not to disturb the morph parts and bins of tools which littered the floor, he made his way to the central bench where a grey overall had been hastily thrown over the work in progress. He pulled it gently. Underneath was a black cloth on which lay a string of large white beads with a silver clasp. The beads were oval in shape, almost the size of grapes, and some were open, exposing black cubes of minute circuitry wafers inside, one still attached to the maw of the tweezers. To the side sat a square jewellery case in grey leatherette, overflowing with similar necklaces.

Sevin picked up one of the strings and weighed it in his hand, trying to guess its purpose. The individual pieces were smooth and heavy like marble, too cumbersome for a telecom and not substantial enough for a weapon. Whatever they were, Xin was keeping them under cover. First the comm to Raveneye and now this: she was double-crossing them without a doubt. He had to replace a way to bring her onside. Until then, it wasn’t fair that she should have all the advantages. He pocketed the necklace and resettled the grey overall over the worktop, resolving to conduct some experiments of his own in the privacy of the captain’s cabin later on.

ε

The frosty sphere of Isvarld had been expanding in the forecam for the last twelve hours and now it filled the screen. They had arrived exactly on time, and, as the Gharst guvernoor had promised, at 14:19 GST the side of the planet they hovered over was still enjoying the six hours of light it received in an Isvarldic thirty-hour day. They were splendidly alone, except for the black dot growing out of Isvarld’s stark surface – Skirnir, the approaching raefnschip.

Sitting in the captain’s seat, Sevin laid his hand on his chest, feeling through his uniform jacket the squashy lump taped to his chest. Whatever Xin had been doing with the white beads remained her secret. Sevin had been unable to deduce their usage and had stuck them in the cavity of his boots for back-up. She had presented them with customised stun guns instead.

He had to admit it was a clever idea. Xin had stripped off the carbon fibre hardware and wrapped the sonic-beam generator in genuskin patches borrowed from the biomorph repair kit. With the non-biological element reduced to a small percentage of the whole, the Gharst scanners wouldn’t be sensitive enough to detect it. And even if they did, they wouldn’t know what it was, thought Sevin. The homemade weapon had enough power to put out an adult human for fifty seconds but it looked and felt grotesque, like a raw chicken breast.

’Five minutes till we’re in position to dock with Skirnir,’ called Marik from the pilot station.

‘They’re hailing us,’ said Lauden. ‘They’re ready to receive the boarding arm.’

‘Take us in,’ said Sevin. ‘Xin, prepare to outrig the cannula.’

‘Cannula is prepared.’

With Hauki and Zendra sitting in the woffers’ seats in the bow, the crew watched the forecam as Marik manoeuvred Infinity alongside the smaller raefnschip. Its grey hull was streaked with a rusty brown, either dirt or metal fatigue, and several of the docking lights were inactive.

’No expense spared,’ said Xin, the cacophony of Skirnir’s reverse drive forcing them to put their hands over their ears.

‘It’s an old Dragonstrike,’ said Zendra. ‘We got the specifications at least.’

’Grapple activated,’ said Xin. There was a loud clunk as Infinity’s starboard hooks latched on to the raefnschip’s port side.

‘Extend the cannula,’ said Sevin, pulling up a thermoscan of the raefnschip on his own screen. He sucked in a breath sharply as he counted more personnel than they had agreed.

‘There’s twelve warm ones on board,’ he said. ‘Can’t tell if there’s any cold.’

‘Grut-heads are trying to screw us already,’ said Marik.

‘We’re doing the same thing,’ Sevin said, patting the mound of fake flesh under his uniform.

’Cannula is connected,’ said Xin. The forecam showed a beige tube running upwards out of Infinity’s bow to the port hatch on the raefnschip’s cabin. Xin closed down the system’s desk holoscreen and picked up the pulsar at her feet. ‘We can go across.’

Sevin shut down his own station and stood up. The others joined him.

‘Morphs activated?’ he asked Xin. Three of the robots had been armed and stationed around the ship as the last point of defence. Peli would come with them as Xin’s aide and was waiting for them by the cannula entrance in the shuttle bay on Level 6.

Xin patted her silver circlet. ‘Yes.’

’Forward!’ ordered Sevin, leading the way out through the bridge’s ground floor exit to the core stairs. The others trooped behind him down to Level 6 and along the central artery to the shuttle bay wedged under the chin of the ship. Infinity was never meant to carry more than sixteen crew, judging by its escape rafts. Two eight-person shuttles filled the allowable space, their wings almost touching. The team had to squeeze past them to reach the air lock which Peli, also carrying a pulsar, opened with efficient ease as they arrived.

Inside the airlock, they waited nervously for the cannula seal to open, their faces tense in the red glow of the radiance cables which lit the way ahead. Only the morph seemed unmoved, as if it was performing an everyday maintenance check rather than a high-risk operation. Then the seal split apart and they were clambering on to the moving rungs of the travelator which they rode for the ten minutes it took to ferry them up to the raefnschip.

When they were all through and waiting in the air lock on the other side, a bloodless face materialised in the window then disappeared. A grating noise started and the air lock doors strained apart. Behind them stood three sturmgangers.

’Put the weapons in the safety mode. Then you follow me,’ said the leader in Standard. He had the three chevrons and blazing star insignia of a santi on his sleeve, the equivalent to the Coalition’s rank of sergeant. When Xin and Peli had reset the pulsars, he set off into the gloomy corridor behind, stopping after a few metres to wait for the visitors to catch up. The other sturmgangers staged themselves each side of the air lock door. Both wielded hand-held scanners.

Sevin nodded at Marik, who was closest, to leave first. He hesitated, glancing back at Sevin who urged him forward with a hard stare. Marik rallied himself and stepped out of the air lock. They watched with bated breath as the sturmgangers ran their devices over Marik’s outstretched arms, over his chest and back, and finally up and down his legs.

’Go,’ said the Gharst on the left and Marik dropped his arms to his side and sauntered forward to wait with the santi.

They didn’t bother with shoes, Sevin noted gratefully when it was his turn, thinking of the white beads stashed in his boot, and they even let Xin and Peli keep the pulsars. The little group was shepherded along the few metres of corridor into the heart of the ship. The raefnschip’s interior was scuffed and flaking and redolent of rancid fish. They stopped between two autodoors, one leading, as they knew from the plans in Infinity’s database, to the compact flight deck, the other to the saloon which took several attempts to open.

They entered a dingy, low-ceilinged cabin about twenty metres long. It had an L-shaped counter, perhaps a serving hatch, in the starboard corner near the entrance. Opposite, on the port side, was a nook of workstations in an outdated design. Tiny portholes lined the bulwarks to the rear where autodoors led to the sleeping quarters in the stern. Storage units, one with a jagged crack, clung to the back wall on both sides of the doors.

The centre of the space was dominated by a large briefing table around which the welcome party stood. There were six Gharst in total, one middle-aged man, who supported himself with an ebony cane, and five much younger women. They were all dressed in a uniform of light-blue collared shirts and black jodhpurs under black jerkins. The man was bareheaded, his blanched hair thinning towards the crown, but the women wore jaunty black berets, strangely out of place in the jaded surroundings.

‘Professor Xin Xiao-li?’ asked the man, moving stiffly away from the oval table. It sunk into the floor, creating a more open space.

‘Guvernoor Daas?’ said Xin, stepping to the side of her group so he could see her.

The man inclined his head, leaning heavily on his walking stick. He was short for a Gharst and extremely thin, his jerkin seeming to sit on a coathanger not shoulders. But there was nothing frail about his wide-set and voracious eyes.

‘These are the Coalition prisoners?’ he asked in a halting Standard.

‘Yes.’

‘There is Major Tem Sevin, Air Captain Pol Marik and Command Sergeant Major Hauki?’

‘Yes.’

‘Step forward, the three I say. ’

On a nod from Xin, they obeyed, standing in line before the Gharst party, Marik on the right, Hauki on the left and Sevin in the middle. Daas beckoned to one of his women to join him in the inspection. She hurried forward, clutching the rectangular touchpad of a DNA reader.

‘We check now you tell the truth,’ said Daas. He hobbled towards the pseudo-prisoners and stopped in front of Sevin. The assistant held out the reader. ‘Put the hand on the top,’ Daas ordered, standing so close that Sevin could taste the Gharst’s rotten breath.

The machine beeped once. Daas licked his lips. ‘Major Tem Sevin, Second Special Operations, Star Troop. A match, good, very good.’

He watched eagerly as Marik and Hauki also tested positively.

’Eksellen,’ he said, stepping back. ’Rounden dem alles,’ he cried, waving at the whole group with his cane.

‘Hey, wait a minute!’ said Xin as the guards closed in, training her pulsar on the nearest. ‘What about my mother?’

Daas looked mildly confused, then bowed his head. ’Of course. Santi, bringen oter heldensmacker.’

The santi mumbled some words as if speaking to himself and, seconds later, two more sturmgangers marched through the bow saloon doors. Between them they held a frightened Tian woman in a shapeless brown dress who resembled Xin, except with grey hair.

‘Mother!’ cried Xin, holstering her pulsar and rushing forward. Wen could not return her embrace because her wrists were bound with magnetic cuffs.

‘Xiao-li,’ she said, tears in her eyes as she raised her shackled hands to stroke her daughter’s face. Xin clasped her shoulders, ignoring the solid column of sturmganger attached to each arm, speaking in urgent Tian. Then she turned to Daas.

‘You have the ship and the war criminals, I have my mother and this raefnschip. Release her and we will go on our way.’

‘I think not,’ said Daas.

‘What?’

’We keep her – and take you!’ He clicked his fingers, twice, and the sturmgangers holding Wen pulled rackarmens from their belts.

‘You wouldn’t dare,’ said Xin, unsheathing her pulsar which she reactivated as she pointed it at the two guards.

Daas simply laughed. ’It is of no use, morka, we are too many.’

‘You will let us go, we made a deal!’

The Gharst clicked his tongue. ’A deal? There is no deal. No person makes a deal with the Gharst. We order, you obey! Sturmgangen, bringe dem til hallast!’

As the sturmgangers bore down on them, Xin dropped the pulsar. It crashed to the floor while her hands frantically pulled at her throat as if she were being strangled by an unseen cord. Then the pressure was released, her hands flew away and Sevin saw what she had been tugging. It was the necklace of white beads he had seen in her workshop. She lunged at Wen, clasping the older woman to her, and their bodies began to waver and tremble until they shook at such high frequency their very matter exploded into a mass of tiny shards that blew across the cabin and blinked out.

’Hellich lichten,’ swore Daas as his bewildered subordinates cast around for the disappeared prisoners, utterly trumped.

Sevin cursed too. The necklace was the initiator for the teleport, he should have guessed. All that rubbish about it malfunctioning - the little bitch had this planned all along. It was a simple enough strategy to set up the exchange, secure her mother and then break out, leaving Sevin to take the rap with the Gharst. Odds on they had teleported straight back to Infinity and would power out of there, probably using the Infinity drive. Sevin ground his teeth. That the Gharst would double-cross them was a given and he had suspected Xin would pull something too. But he had anticipated a full-frontal assault from her, not a backhander like this. At least they had the stun guns.

’Coalition attack!’ Sevin yelled, plunging his hand down the neck of his jacket and ripping the gun off his chest. He aimed it at the closest sturmganger and clenched the fleshy package hard. The Gharst rebounded as if he had smacked into an invisible barricade and flopped backwards to the floor, still holding his blaster across him. Sevin rushed forward to tear it from his grasp and span around, seeking the next target. Zendra and Marik were wresting blasters from the pair who had held Wen, now flat on their backs near the bow entrance to the saloon. Lauden, grisly stun-gun in hand, was pumping current again and again into the santi who finally capitulated, sinking to his knees, but not before the high-pitched whining of rackarmen fire had started up.

Sevin reacted instinctively, sending bolts of energy towards the source of the screeching. A female officer had passed out near the Coalition enclave, but Daas and the rest had raised the briefing table from the floor and were sheltering behind it, peppering the room with short bursts of charge. Hauki was leaning over the serving counter and trading shots with them. She took out one of the women but didn’t notice that the sturmganger slumped against the outside of the counter was regaining consciousness. He had obviously looked up to see brown fingers wrapped around the stock of a rackarmen above him and thought he would neutralise the threat. As he reached up to grab Hauki’s gun, Sevin took aim. The white hands plunged back into the sturmganger’s lap and the body resumed its former slouched position.

A movement at Sevin’s feet signalled his first target was coming round. He swung the blaster within a hand’s length from the sturmganger’s chest and pulled the trigger without hesitation. A bolt zinged past his arm, scorching a blackened scar into the silvery uniform which he barely noticed, consumed now with a single purpose. His rational mind lifted away as he dosed every prostrate Gharst with blaster to ensure none of them would wake up again. He gave up only when the blaster ran out.

‘Major Sevin, over here!’ Zendra was shouting from where she and Marik knelt behind the rapidly fracturing arm of cupboards which separated the workstation nook from the saloon. Sevin made a dive towards the niche as Zendra and Marik gave him cover. He rolled behind them and sat up.

’Here,’ said Zendra, passing back a spare rackarmen. Sevin took the gun, checking it was loaded, and looked around. All the sturmgangers were down plus two of the female officers, leaving Daas and three women still active. Lauden had joined Hauki behind the serving counter and together they were carving great troughs into the briefing table while Marik and Zendra kept up the pressure on the rear of the saloon. If Daas was to escape, he had to penetrate the back doors and get into the stern to the life rafts. He could then get away to Isvarld or even Infinity: there had been no engine noise from the ship and Sevin assumed the raefnschip’s cannula was still attached.

He made to get up beside Marik but a hand on his arm pulled him back. Peli was crouched down beside him, still holding the pulsar.

‘Senior operator is unavailable at this time,’ it said to him. ‘Please input instructions.’

Sevin looked from the morph’s sculpted face to the white gun clamped to its chest, wondering if it had the capacity to feel scared or alone now Xin had abandoned it.

‘Fire on the enemy,’ he said encouragingly. ‘C’mon.’ He knelt on Marik’s right side, indicating the morph should join him.

Peli had other ideas. Flabbergasted, the Coalition force watched the morph break cover and march the few metres towards the briefing table, pulsar held aloft and, as ordered, its finger never leaving the trigger. The table began to break up and the three remaining women formed a protective circle around Daas, beginning a retreat towards the stern doors. Beams from the rackarmens sliced chunks of flesh off the morph, revealing the shining black struts of the skeleton underneath, yet Peli soldiered forward, still firing the pulsar, although more erratically.

The Gharst party had reached the stern doors. They tried to open them but could not, they remained stubbornly closed, trapping the four between the wall and the resolutely advancing machine. With only one of the women’s rackarmens functional, Daas pulled his own handgun on Peli, taking off the remains of its head, and, in a second volley, everything from the left knee downwards. Peli could endure no more. Unable to walk, it hopped along for a few painful steps then keeled over several metres from Daas.

Behind the fallen morph, Tem Sevin stood like an avenging angel, blaster in his left hand, rackarmen in his right. He stared hard at Daas and the woman with the rackarmen.

‘Two left and we have five or more. It’d be a good idea to put them down,’ Sevin told them.

Daas looked at the Gharst female then bent awkwardly to place the rackarmen on the floor in front of him at arms-length. The woman did the same.

As Sevin moved to collect the guns, there was a burst of multicoloured light. A hazy picture of two people lying down was forming in the space between Daas and Sevin. The image snapped into focus: it was Xin and Wen sprawled on the ground in a heap.

‘Xiao-li, the packet locator!’ cried Wen.

‘It worked from the base station,’ said Xin, sitting up. Then she saw Daas’ white face by her shoulder and his rackarmen pointed at her head. ‘Oh my sky!’

One of the Gharst women had picked up the other gun and was threatening Wen.

‘Major Sevin,’ the governor said. ‘You want your friends to stay alive, yes? It is the good idea to put down the weapons.’

ζ

So they got a way into the Hellenhaus, although not by a route any of them would have chosen. Daas gave the order to scramble the back-up he wasn’t supposed to bring and two much newer raefnschips, each with a fresh complement of sturmgangers, were soon docking with Skirnir. Xin and Wen were hauled off to Infinity to help pilot it to the ground while Sevin and the others were made to sit cross-legged among the ruins of the briefing table and kept under guard during the slow procession to Isvarld.

Sevin wasn’t sorry to be separated from the Tians. Given half a minute in Xin’s presence he would cheerfully have thrashed her. He could see from Zendra’s stony expression that she would have no qualms about ripping both his and Xin’s throats out. Perhaps Zendra was right, they should have terminated Xin at the start and taken possession of the ship. Then they would have escaped, but to what? Sevin was thinking further ahead. He wanted Infinity with Xin on board, literally and metaphorically, and her mother too. With such a team, and such a ship, there was a beginning, a shaping of the future. If he could persuade some of the independent systems to join them, resuscitate rebel movements like the Corazon, they would have an embryonic resistance which could, with the right cultivation, grow strong enough to defeat the Gharst.

When they landed it was dark. Sevin’s timepiece read 16:34 GST but the planet had turned away from its sun a couple of hours previously. They set down at the Reinn space port, located in the lowlands of the largest plateau in the northern hemisphere. Twenty kilometres away to the elevations of the north-west was the distinctive outline of the Hellenhaus. Perched on a rocky mound in the middle of a frozen lake, it looked, at this distance, like a severed hand, the fingers of its pinnacles reaching skyward, illuminated from below by a bracelet of floodlights.

The outside temperature was double figures below freezing as Sevin and company were led out of the space terminal to the forbidding citadel of the train station. A dedicated crossing took them over a four-lane road and into the icy forecourt where transits and official limousines waited outside the main entrance. Built with bricks of the local black granite and in the Antique style, the station’s spiked turrets rose menacingly into the night sky. It was a disorienting contrast to the modern surroundings of the space terminal, all the more so because, as Sevin knew from his research, the station and underground tunnel it served had been built painstakingly by the hands of prisoners-of-war, many of whom had died in the process.

As they waited on the open part of the concrete platform, the cold began to steal through Sevin’s clothes. He rubbed his eyes and found his eyelashes had frozen. The Infinity uniform was thermadjust and keeping him warm to a point, although he began to wish for the fur stoles which the sturmgangers accompanying them wore over their jumpsuits. The guards would be quartered tonight in the cosy barracks nestled in the hillside beyond the space terminal’s upright docking arms. As for himself, who knew what was in store?

A clipped announcement in Gharst over the tannoy heralded the arrival of the train. At the end of the platform was the gaping entrance to the tunnel, through which a sleek locomotive drew a string of freight cars constructed from wooden planks. They boarded the empty cars and stood on the bare boards. Hauki put her arm through Sevin’s until the sturmganger ordered them to break apart. Sevin spent the rest of the half-hour journey contemplating the graffiti scratched into the woodwork: ‘Tell my wife I loved her’ and ‘Gods grant me a quick release’.

The platform at the Hellenhaus was blandly efficient. There were even a couple of benches to wait on - for those lucky enough to catch the train out. Two monstrous escalators trundled upwards into what seemed to be the bowels of the earth. The plasterwork ran out half-way, overwhelmed by glistening rock in layers of grey and black. There were areas where water had seeped through, leaving tracks of brown deposit like dried blood. At the top of the escalator, two flaming braziers cradled in great ironwork pillars framed the entrance to Level One, a miserable atrium of flickering yellow sconces entrenched in granite walls and flagstones slippery with ice. In its centre was a square opening where four sets of quivering metal chains winched wooden rostrums between the floors beneath and above. As they marched towards the opening, a weird howling came up from below.

‘What’s that?’ Zendra asked the nearest sturmganger.

‘Dogs. Shut up.’

They boarded the next rostrum to arrive. It hauled them up to Level Three where they were met by Hellenhaus guards wearing the same uniforms as Daas and his crew. From the conversation in Gharst, Sevin learned they were to be kept in holding cells until more permanent accommodation could be found. The sturmgangers went back to the rostrum, leaving the guards to shunt the Infinity crew out of the atrium and down a passage marked West Corridor in runes. At its end, they came into a circular gangway running to left and right with doors at regular intervals like the minutes on a clock. Sevin was thrust through one of the doors and into four square metres of windowless cell, ironically next to the Level Three emergency exit. He heard the others being incarcerated further down.

He sat on the single piece of furniture, a pull-down shelf nailed to the wall, and thought hard. He estimated his cell must be in the exterior wall of the Hellenhaus because the side facing the door was naked rock and curved. The harsh neon, and the stench from the squat in the opposite corner, was giving him a headache. With no windows and a constant, unvarying light, he wouldn’t be able to tell between night and day, especially since the guards had taken his timepiece. But they hadn’t found the necklace. That could be his way out, if he could make it work.

Xin and Wen had spent a long time teleporting a few metres: they had probably been around the universe and back. Sevin would be happy with a few centimetres if he could get outside the cell. Before he tried it, he would have to check the surveillance situation. The door, made of reconstituted limestone, had a two-way mirror in its centre for the gaoler to spy on the captive. He scoured its rough surface until he located the miniscule glass bead of camera lens. He leant his back against it, managing to get the necklace out of his boot and around his neck before an electric shock caused him to leap away.

‘Move from the door,’ instructed a Gharst voice through an amplifier set in the lintel.

Sevin scowled at the speaker and retreated to the shelf, where he sat with his arms around his knees, hugging himself against the cold. One advantage of the raw stone floor was that the door didn’t fit properly and he could hear the guards talking in the corridor outside. They must take a break at some stage, even the Gharst had bodily needs, and that would be the time to teleport out.

Sevin had to wait an hour before the guards left for the evening meal. Turning his back again to the camera in the door, he wrapped his fingers around the necklace, pulling down hard as he had seen Xin do, and prepared to teleport. Two minutes later, he was still standing in the cell and had to admit defeat.

‘The gods damn it,’ he said, unfastening the beads and examining them closely. He hadn’t noticed before but some were numbered dials, split into two halves which could be twisted to the right value. It occurred to him that he might need to switch the device on. He twirled every bead at least halfway around and tried again.

This time a tingling instantly started in the back of his neck, followed by a hot rush which spread out and down his spine as the beads began a gentle buzzing. He turned to face the door with difficulty, giddy and unbalanced, unable to replace a footing. He seemed to be floating, like someone had turned off the gravity compensator. He stretched out a hand, watching with fascinated concern as it dissolved, the skin and bone disappearing into air.

The wall stood in front of him, sternly impenetrable. He had to get through it. Mindful that the teleport might not actually move him, he gathered what little of himself remained, ran towards it and jumped.

It was like flying through smoke. His arms and legs flailed as the impetus of either the jump or the teleport propelled him through dense clouds, grey vapour whipping past him as he rocketed past. A patch of light began to grow in the distance beneath him, bigger and bigger as if he was falling towards it from a great height. Then the mist cleared and there was a sharp pain in his back as a mighty energy seemed to crush him from every angle. His hands felt a hard, cold surface; he was sitting on the ground outside the door of his cell looking into the face of a traumatised guard who dropped his rackarmen and fled.

Sevin picked up the gun, stood up and scouted the passage for more guards. None, but it wouldn’t take long. He flicked the rocker switch on the cell opposite where he had seen Lauden locked up. The slab of door groaned open on the big man who was sitting on the shelf, biting a thumbnail.

‘Major Sevin!’ he jumped up.

Sevin pressed a finger to his lips. ‘Get ready,’ he mouthed, folding himself behind the door but staying low enough to be out of range of the integrated camera. Lauden composed himself, putting on a face to greet the visitors whose drumming feet heralded their imminent arrival.

The first guard pulled up short when he saw Lauden in the cell. He hesitated at the doorway, giving the room a good once-over before striding inside to poke the nozzle of his blaster in the ribs of the prisoner. Lauden, a picture of wronged innocence, looked up at the probing eyes of the guard.

‘Why is the door open?’ said the Gharst.

‘I dunno. I was like, sleeping, and then I woke up and it was like that.’

The guard grunted, turning to look at a second guard who had appeared in the doorway.

‘Could be the toilet,’ Lauden said, ‘it was making this real strange noise before.’

The Gharst turned briefly to the squat in the far corner then, with a jerk of his blaster, gestured at his partner to investigate. Reluctantly the guard outside slung his blaster over his shoulder and came forward to peer down the stinking hole.

Neither guard saw the slight movement of the door made by a rackarmen creeping around its edge. The merest whine, more of a sigh, caught the second guard in the back. He stumbled forward, missing a step on the way so one foot sank into the toilet trough before he crashed headfirst into the back wall. As the first guard turned around to see what had happened, Lauden sprang up from the shelf, chopped the back of his neck then drove him by the shoulders into the back wall too. Sevin finished him off with a blast from the rackarmen.

‘We need to get the others out,’ he said, stripping the guard in the squat of his belt and gun.

Lauden nodded, checking the energy indicator on the handgun he’d taken from the other body. ‘How d’you get out?’

‘Teleport, like Xin did. I’ll tell you later. Come on.’

Sevin stuck his head out of the cell to recce the way ahead. He paused on the twin swing doors opposite which led to the emergency stairs where there was a picture of a stick-man running down steps and an arrow pointing up labelled ‘Spesial Polis Seksuhn 2’. Of course they would have a unit here, the Spesial Polis was the Gharst’s counter-intelligence service, notorious for their brutal methods of extracting information. His eyes moved right to his former cell, now wide open. All the other cells were locked with no clue to their contents.

‘Where d’you think they are?’ said Lauden, looking for names.

‘Hard to say. Try that way - open all of them.’

They raced clockwise through the section, releasing all the doors. Zendra and Hauki were in the next-door cells, Zendra hammering on the two-way mirror to be let out when she heard Sevin’s voice. He gave her the spare rackarmen and they went searching for Marik, drawing a blank several times before they found him eight or ten doors down, close to the junction with a passage signed North Corridor.

‘Am I glad to see you!’ Marik said, launching himself off the shelf. ‘Get me out of here.’

They regrouped outside Marik’s cell, Lauden and Zendra watching each side of the circular corridor, Sevin covering North Corridor towards the central atrium.

‘What’s that?’ said Marik, picking up the faint whirr of chain running through pulley.

‘The elevators!’ said Hauki. ‘They’re coming up.’

Sevin thought of the emergency exit, then dismissed it, assuming that a patrol would be coming that way as well in a bid to trap them between elevators and stairs.

‘We’ll have to attack the elevators,’ he said. ‘Fire on them as they come up and secure the platform. Then we can use them to get down to the train. Let’s go!’

They took off down North Corridor, trying not to skid on the flagstones, Lauden and Zendra leading, Sevin in the rear, scanning for potential threats. They reached the atrium where bright light shone upwards from the aperture at its core, accentuating the dark strings of the elevator chains, one set of which was grinding upwards.

The square shaft was surrounded by protective railings apart from four flipback gates used to access the rostrums. Sevin pulled back the nearest one and flung himself to the ground, positioning the barrel of his rackarmen over the edge and pointing down. The rostrum was coming into view, carrying a contingent of ten armed Hellenhaus guards. Sevin selected one target and fired. The man went down, as did two women, courtesy of Lauden and Zendra who had staked out the other gates.

Unable to see where the shots were coming from, the guards returned fire randomly, aiming a few opportunistic pulses upwards. The Coalition team lined up its next tranche and scored two, Lauden missing by a few centimetres, the beam sizzling out in the rock floor of Level Two below. One Gharst frantically punched at the upright post of the control panel, trying to halt the archaic technology which carried on regardless. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. By the time the rostrum reached Level Three, its occupants were dead.

‘Only ten,’ said Sevin, hustling Hauki and Marik on to the elevator. ‘There’ll be others coming a different way. C’mon Lauden, go go!’

Sevin let the gate flip shut after Zendra without boarding himself. He had other plans.

‘Sir, what are you doing?’ said Hauki.

‘Hit the button, get out of here.’

‘You ain’t coming?’ said Lauden.

‘I’m going to get Xin and Wen. There’s a sign to a Spesial Polis section on the emergency stairs. I reckon they’ll be in there.’

Zendra let out a snort of derision. ‘You’re mad, she just betrayed us!’

‘We need them.’

’We do not - I can fly Infinity and between us we can sort out any problems,’ said Marik.

‘Get out yourselves, secure the ship, that’s your priority,’ said Sevin, backing away. ‘If we make it, we make it. If we don’t, don’t wait. I’ll replace you if I need to.’

They looked at him doubtfully.

‘What are you waiting for? Go, go!’

Marik hit the lowest button and the rostrum began to sink. Sevin watched it go, his crew looking up at him, standing among the corpses, resignation written across their faces. They were capable of looking after themselves, he told himself. Then the crash of doors bursting open and shouts in Gharst told him a patrol was coming and he hurried to replace a hiding place.

η

‘So what now?’ said Marik. They were coasting downwards, four metres above Level Two where mangled shadows from the sconces played over the entombing walls. It didn’t look inviting enough to get off.

’Let’s get kitted up,’ said Hauki, conscious of the sepulchrous surroundings. She bent down to relieve the body by her feet of its blaster. ‘Any idea where we’re headed?’

‘The basement?’ said Lauden. ‘Ain’t that where the train came in?’

‘I think so, let’s make for there. Two more floors to go, but be ready to defend. Marik, Lauden, watch above. Zendra, you and me take below.’

As she spoke, the air above their heads crackled and the rostrum sagged violently in one corner as a link in its suspension chain burst open. Another bolt zinged past Marik’s hand and blew out the control panel. They looked up. A dozen guards with blasters were ranged around the aperture.

‘We’ll have to get off,’ said Zendra.

‘I can’t stop it,’ said Marik, jabbing at the burnt-out buttons. He cried out as a beam glanced past the top of his head, singeing his hair.

‘Jump,’ said Hauki. ‘Now, let’s move it!’

Clambering to the edge of the platform, Marik launched himself over, straightening into a faultless landfall two metres below. Zendra followed, recovering with the ease of gymnast. Lauden and Hauki sailed through the air and hit the ground with a bump.

‘Over here,’ said Zendra, beckoning them towards an opening in the inner wall of the atrium. They followed her inside to replace rows of lockers. Some were open with clothes inside or hanging off the handles.

‘Look, prison officer uniforms!’ said Zendra, pulling out a jerkin. ‘We’ll dress up as guards and get out that way!’

Hauki and Lauden looked askance.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘You can, but we can’t,’ said Lauden. ‘We ain’t the right colour.’

‘They’d spot us a mile off,’ said Hauki.

‘Not you, me and Marik! You stay as you are, you’re the prisoners and we’re taking you back to the cells.’

‘That’s a good one,’ said Hauki. ‘You look the part already Zendra, blond hair and all. Hurry then, get dressed!’

Marik and Zendra stripped to their undersuits and donned the uniforms.

‘This isn’t going to work, my hair is too dark,’ said Marik, tucking the offending strands under a beret.

‘We just have to try,’ said Zendra, fitting spectacles over her blue eyes.

Hesitantly they left the locker room. They skirted the elevator shaft and turning into West Corridor, hoping it would end at the emergency stairs like on Level Three. It did. They took them in double-time, stopping with the steps on the Level One landing. Marik looked through the windows of the twin swing doors into the main thoroughfare, stepping back suddenly as three guards came past. When they had gone he went through the door, holding it open.

‘Ok, clear now,’ he said, so Hauki and Lauden crept out and stood in front of Marik who jammed his blaster in the small of Lauden’s back. Zendra did the same with Hauki and they moved forward into the West Corridor, women on the left, men on the right, back towards the atrium and the escalators which would take them to the train platform.

They progressed unhindered until they got halfway up the corridor. Two guards turned into it from the other end and broke into a run towards them as soon as they saw the prisoners, shouting in Gharst.

‘Just carry on, I’ll deal with it,’ Zendra whispered.

Marik avoided looking at the guards who stopped in front of them, goggling at the prisoners. When Zendra didn’t break the pace, they started jogging alongside, calling out questions. Zendra looked steadfastly ahead, saying nothing, the ill-fitting glasses bouncing on her nose. One of the guards took issue with her lack of response and tried to slow her, tugging at her arm. She tried to shake him off but he was persistent, holding on until she berated him in fluent Gharst.

Hauki and Lauden exchanged looks, they had never heard her speak the enemy language. Whatever she said had the desired affect. The guard backed off, saying something that sounded complimentary, which his colleague echoed. Zendra pushed forward, leaving them behind.

‘What did you tell them?’ asked Marik.

‘That we’d just captured them and were taking them to Daas for questioning,’ Zendra said.

‘They swallowed it.’

‘Yes. Try and look normal, c’mon.’

They carried on, taking a right out of the West Corridor into a maelstrom of activity in the atrium. Guards swarmed, assembling into patrols which split off in different directions, some towards the emergency stairs, some mounting the elevators. A siren started, its beat short-long, short-long. Zendra and Marik pushed their little band past the jabbering, elbowing hordes, making for the burning beacons which designated the escalators to the station and their route to freedom. They moved quickly, keeping their eyes to the floor, Zendra replying brusquely to the repeated questions and Marik receiving a clap on the back almost every metre for his role in apprehending the villains.

As they stepped on to the moving metal treads, a new consignment of prisoners was being loaded on the upwards conveyor, about three hundred of them, accompanied by a squad of helmeted sturmgangers. They trudged in single file with their heads down, desperate and beaten, being made to stand on the right, one per step. Hauki caught her breath when she saw their uniforms – tattered Coalition Space Command fatigues. As the first few began to pass by, Hauki looked away, not daring to contemplate the vacant expressions of her contemporaries.

’Zendra, Zendra!’ a plaintive female voice called out. A woman with a bush of red hair was leaning over the hand-rail, waving at them from several metres below. In horror, Zendra recognised an old comrade, Chuchi, who she had last seen on Vehement the night Reverre’s goons had set on Lauden. She felt the others stiffen around her. She pulled back her shoulders and lifted her chin.

‘Zendraaaa! It’s me, Chuchi, your friend. Zendra, Zendra!’ A hand shot out as Chuchi drew level, her arm too short to bridge the divide. Zendra looked straight ahead as the two walkways ferried them apart.

‘Zendra! Zendra!’ The despairing call from behind her was cut off with a thwack.

They stood rigidly on the escalator all the way down, bearing out the curious stares of the prisoners and their captors until they marched off smartly on to the relative civility of the platform where a train was arriving. As they hurried to meet it, the train seemed to change its mind and speed up again without fully stopping. The few prison personnel waiting boarded the train anyway, dragging the doors open and leaping inside with the carriages still in motion.

‘C’mon, we can still get on,’ said Marik, seeing the others hovering at the platform edge. He reached out for a passing handle, caught it and swung himself onto the narrow running board. He yanked open the sliding door and got inside, holding it open for Hauki and Lauden to dive in.

Zendra was behind them and had to run to keep up as the train accelerated, heading for the mouth of the tunnel where the platform ended. Marik leaned out of the carriage and saw the black hole looming.

‘Jump,’ he yelled, holding on to the outside handle with one hand and extending the other. Zendra took a flying leap at him, catching him around the neck. He hauled her into the swaying safety of the carriage as it entered the tunnel.

θ

Hearing the blasters kick off in the atrium, Sevin peeled away from the concealing doorway in North Corridor and set off towards the circular corridor and Seksuhn 2.

He opened the swing doors of the emergency exit cautiously. There was a landing with the option of following the staircase down or pushing across to an enclosed walkway. Sevin padded into the walkway, figuring it was a bridge to one of the tubers that sprouted from the sides and roof of the castle. Looking through one of the mullioned windows, he saw he was making for one of the large bastions grafted on to the outside wall. He kept on, eventually reaching the arched entrance of a wooden door pitted with iron studs. He pushed it open gently and went in.

Behind the door was a large round room with white blinds over the windows and a linex floor. To his left was a metal-framed bed with a mattress covered in black plastic. Attached to the headboard of the bed were long stems of adjustable lights and there was a wheeled trolley off to the side with medical implements in a tray on top, including laser scalpels and syringes. To his right was an isolated chair.

As he looked around, he thought he could hear a remote crying, like a word being repeated. He cast around for its source, moving around until he reached a place where the sound was louder. It seemed like someone was calling his name from above. He tipped his head back and almost choked. He was looking through a glass ceiling, above which Xin and Wen were suspended, face-down and head-to-head, on two X-shaped crucifixes. Each woman had a pressure pad in her hand attached with a white lead to the other’s crucifix. Wen was writhing in pain, Xin was pale, drenched in sweat. She waved at him frantically, pointing to the steps cut into the wall of the bastion.

He took the stairs up and came out on a fretwork gallery from where he could look down on the backs of the crucifixes. They were anchored to the walls with telescopic rods, allowing them to be lowered into the current horizontal position or be drawn upright.

‘Turn it off, turn it off,’ he heard Xin crying. He looked around for the controls, assuming they must be in the black panel attached to the gallery railings in front. None of the switches or dials was labelled and he deliberated over their function, conscious that if he chose the wrong one he could increase the torment. He got lucky with a green key: the rods started pulling in, slowly raising the Xs and the bodies of the two women strapped under them.

‘Now cut the power, CUT THE POWER!’ yelled Xin as she ticked up past him. Sevin refocused on the panel. The crucifix arched backwards over the balcony and settled into its purpose-built niche. Now Xin was vertical, all the downward pressure was on the wrist cuffs from which her body sagged. She had barely the strength to hold the pressure pad.

‘I’m trying. What’s in your hand?’

‘It diverts the current - the only way to stop the pain is to inflict it on the other person,’ she panted. Then she cried out, her face stricken.

‘I’m sorry, darling, so sorry, I just can’t take any more,’ Wen called out from the other side, her voice breaking up. ‘Please, Major Sevin, stop this!’

He looked at the panel. Next to a rotary knob and a gauge, there was a red button. He jammed his finger into it and the needle on the gauge fell back to zero. Xin’s head fell forward and he heard a whispered ‘thank you’ from Wen. He walked around to the left to stand where Xin’s feet dangled twenty centimetres above the gallery floor.

‘Are you going to let us down? Or have you come to mock? I suppose you’d be within your rights,’ she said.

‘Why did you do that? Why did you run out on us? We had a plan, it would have worked, if we’d all pulled together.’

’Together, ha! Your plan was to get Infinity for yourself.’

‘I saw possibilities, I admit. But I wasn’t going to abandon you. Or turn you over to the Gharst.’

‘I didn’t know who you were! You hijacked the ship, you could have been anyone.’

‘You knew we were Coalition, you saw us in action against the first raefnschip attack. Didn’t you trust me after that, didn’t you trust the others?’

Xin grimaced, pulling up on the wrist cuffs to relieve the strain on her arm muscles. ‘Where are the others?’

’Back at the space port and boarding Infinity.’

‘They escaped?’

‘I hope so.’

‘Without you?’

‘I stayed behind.’

‘Why?’ Her eyes searched his face until the answer clicked. ‘You came to rescue us?’

‘Yes. Now do you trust me?’

She looked past him to where Wen hung like a limp flag.

’She is not strong, we must take care. Will you take us back to Infinity?’

‘Of course.’

‘Get us down then. Mother knows a way out, she’ll show us. There’s a lever for the cuffs, behind my back somewhere.’

Sevin found the toggle and released it, catching her as she slipped from the manacles. Together they helped Wen down, Xin holding her as she staggered with the unaccustomed freedom. As they hobbled towards the steps, an alarm began to wail, a short note then a long one, the pattern repeating.

‘What’s that?’ said Sevin.

‘Break-out order,’ said Wen. ‘I heard it once before when someone tried to escape. They’ll close the station, stop the trains running.’

‘Stop the trains! How are we going to get out?’ said Xin.

’There’s a track to the space port,’ said Sevin. ‘There must be some other transport, even if we walk. It’ll take a few hours, but with the right kit we’ll make it.’

‘No, we’ll die from exposure before the search parties catch us,’ said Wen. ‘There’s only one way. We’ll have to use the dogs.’

‘The dogs?’ asked Sevin.

‘The dogs. Come with me.’

ι

The Reinn space port was on high alert when they disembarked from the train. A crowd of guards was standing on the next platform, arguing and gesticulating at the tannoy speakers which were relaying a pre-recorded statement.

‘They’ve stopped the trains because of a prisoner break-out,’ said Zendra, listening. ‘The port is closing too. We’d better get out of here.’

She seized Hauki’s shoulder and marched her towards the exit. Marik and Lauden followed, attracting double-takes as they weaved through the ebbs and flows of guards and bureaucrats who were too preoccupied to ask them their business. They stopped in the station forecourt from where they could see the upright arms of the space terminal. One berth was taken, not by Infinity.

‘Where now?’ said Lauden.

‘Gods know,’ said Marik. ‘Where’s the launch pads? I saw them coming in.’

‘We need transport,’ said Zendra, staring at the row of idling limousines parked in dedicated spaces by the exit. ‘Follow me.’

With Hauki pinned on the nose of her blaster, Zendra strode over to the first limousine and tapped on its driver’s window. It scrolled down to reveal the piqued face of a young Gharst woman.

’Va?’

‘We need to requisition this limousine for prisoner transport,’ said Zendra in Gharst, one hand on the roof. ‘Turn off the engine and get out.’

‘Prisoner transport? There’s no-one moving now, the port and the trains are stopped!’

‘That’s why we have to take these new prisoners to the barracks for interrogation. We can’t get to the Hellenhaus.’

‘Oh I see.’ The window rolled up and the gull-wing door began to rise. The driver jumped out, adjusting her uniform trousers and peaked hat. ‘There you go,’ she said, ‘I left it in neutral for you.’

‘Thanks,’ said Zendra. ‘Get in the back,’ she told Marik in Gharst, even though he wouldn’t understand. She pushed Hauki and Lauden into the rear then climbed into the driving seat.

‘Good luck,’ said the chauffeur, closing the door from the outside and stepping back. Zendra slammed the autodrive into reverse, backed out of the parking spot and accelerated towards the forecourt exit. Here she had to wait her turn before taking the feeder lane into the highway on the right.

‘Anyone got any ideas where to go, say them now,’ she said.

‘Turn right, go right again!’ said Marik, ‘The launch pads are over there, kind of behind us.’

‘I can’t, there’s no road!’

‘Just drive into the airfield, there’s loads of vehicles,’ said Hauki.

‘Okay.’ Zendra took an illegal right, wrenching the limousine through the bollards which marked the hard shoulder, heading due south across the tarmac, the outlines of hangars and warehouses on their left, the first two launch pads up ahead on the right.

’There’s Infinity,’ said Marik. There were six launch pads altogether, arranged in two lines of three. Their ship occupied the furthest pitch in the back row. She too seemed imprisoned, encased in the white ribs of the pad’s superstructure. The boarding stairs were down but the starboard hatch was closed and on either side of it was an armed sturmganger.

‘Two guards,’ said Zendra. ‘Hauki, Lauden, get down. Me and Marik will get up there, try and talk our way in. You stay hidden until we give the signal.’

Zendra parked as close to the steps as she dared, exited the limousine briskly and assaulted the stairs as if her mission was of the utmost importance and required immediate attention. Marik followed, trying to emulate her confidence. It was a long way up and there were no handrails; they arrived at the top platform out of breath and, the space being so confined, uncomfortably close to the helmeted and visored sturmgangers.

‘Guvernoor Daas has ordered us to fetch the log books from this ship,’ Zendra said in Gharst.

‘Haven’t heard anything about it,’ said the sturmganger on the right, turning to his comrade. ‘You?’

‘Negative.’

‘Sorry, no entry without authorisation,’ said the first sturmganger, gripping his blaster.

‘Guvernoor Daas said it was urgent!’

‘Not without the correct authorisation,’ repeated the sturmtroooper, looking suspiciously at Marik.

Zendra sighed in frustration. ‘Come on! You know there’s been a break-out, everyone’s too busy.’

‘Get it, speccy, or you don’t come in. And take Wet Eyes with you. Hey you, what’s with the eyes? You look like a freak.’

Panic rippled across Marik’s face as he realised he was being insulted. With no idea how to respond, he looked to Zendra for help.

‘It’s lenses, he thinks it’s fashionable,’ Zendra said.

’Fashion? He looks morkan to me,’ said the sturmganger with distaste. His attention swung back to Zendra. ‘Come to think of it, so do you.’

‘Yes, a lot of people say that. I’ve got a problem with my eyes, had it since birth – double pupil, take a look.’

‘Get lost.’

‘No really, it’s weird, see for yourself.’ Zendra lowered the glasses.

He bent towards her, then stood back. ‘I can’t see anything.’

‘You’re not close enough, take another look.’