The Rift Rider (16 page)

Awani's mouth
dropped to the floor. She stared at him wide-eyed for a time, saying nothing.
Then with upmost caution she reached out to touch him. Her fingers passed
straight through.

"Incredible,
isn't it?" Bei said.

"How is it possible?"
Awani said.

"He's a
child of the Divide," replied a booming voice.

All three of
them turned towards it. The far door lay wide open. From out of the room
stepped Brother Yojim. He had to duck his head and lean sideways to squeeze his
massive bulk through the doorframe. He wore a knee length blank sarong and
fabric slippers. The rest of him remained bare. Muscles rippled across his
stomach and his chest looked as if it had been carved out of red rock. He had a
scimitar nose, pointed ears and arched eyebrows. All that was missing was a
pair of horns, cloven hooves and a trident.

Like a flame
puffed out by a strong gust, Charlie blew back into his physical form. A cold
thrill tickled his spine. Even with his nonreligious upbringing the red alien
looked like bad news. Is this really my saviour?
Charlie asked himself.

Brother Yojim
strode towards them. Bei and Awani rose to their feet. Charlie did likewise,
stretching himself to his full height in hope of hiding his mounting
apprehension.

 
"I found him for you, Charlie,"
Awani said, moving towards the pathfinder. She met him halfway across the room,
grabbed a handful of red bicep, and led him to her friends, her face beaming
with satisfaction. "Brother Yojim, please let me introduce you to Bei
Lowaiki and Charlie Scott."

The big man
shook Bei's hand in the turen way and then stepped in front of Charlie. The robundee
pathfinder filled the room like a red shadow. Eyes like black pearls stared
down at Charlie, deep and unreadable.

"It's good
to see you again, Charlie," Brother Yojim said, his face cracking into a
half-smile, lending his demon's countenance a more human appearance.

The fear that
had clenched Charlie's heart slackened a little and he held out his hand. It
disappeared under the massive red hand sliding over it in greeting. "Thank
you," he said, his heart pounding. "I owe you my life."

"It is I
who am I debt. To your parents," Brother Yojim said, gripping his hand
tight. "And I plan to repay it."

"My
parents?" Charlie said.

"You have
your father's eyes you know," the pathfinder said.

Charlie sat
motionless, his brain threatening to short circuit at any moment.

Bei coughed,
said, "We better give you two some privacy," and motioned for Awani
to follow him out onto the balcony."

"No,"
Charlie said. "I want you to hear whatever he has to say. We're in this
together now. No more secrets."

Bei raised an
eyebrow and said, "So be it. But if we're going to talk, let's do it over
some food. I'm starving. Thirsty too." He turned to Awani. "Go and grab
a bottle of Robundee Lava from the heater." He took a look at Charlie's.
"Actually, you better make it three bottles."

By the time
Brother Yojim finished talking, they had polished off three plates of deep
fried legs (Charlie had pushed aside any imaginings of what kind of animal they
had once belonged to), four steaming bowls of spicy Gada root soup, Bei's
speciality, and two bottles of the fiery robundee alcohol. The spirit was the
colour and thickness of blood, and mixed the fiery tang of tequila with the
heady punch of an espresso.

Charlie had
eaten nothing. The red man's words had robbed him of his appetite. He had drunk
plenty though. Right now, he felt it was only the alcohol in his system keeping
him sane. In the matter of an hour, the pathfinder had turned his whole world
upside down.

Charlie eyed the
last remaining bottle, grabbed it and poured another shot.

His whole life,
Charlie had lived with the knowledge that his parents had abandoned him at the
age of one. They had taken him to Bristol’s Castle Park and walked out without
him, leaving him to whatever fate the Universe saw fit. There followed eight
years in a dilapidated Somerset children's home run by misers and filled with
modern day ragamuffins.

After that came
ten years of, sometimes kindly and oftentimes brutal, foster care, spent in
crummy market towns across the country. Finally at the age of eighteen and with
grades that surprised himself as much as his teachers, Charlie left care for
the halls of residence of Swansea university and for a better life.

Over the years,
he had spent countless nights staring up at cracked ceilings, wondering about
his parents. Why had they abandoned him? Was it pure cold-heartedness that had
made them do it, basic fecklessness or some desperate fear?

And finally he
had the answer. And it was far more complicated and meaningful and incredible
than he had ever imagined.

His father was
Doctor Heilo Krest, the very same scientist Bei had told him about on the journey
from Het City, the one turen silver who had dared to turn his back on the
Corporation. His mother, Sunna Tru, was a servant girl working in the Krest
family home.

She was only twelve
when she began her work at the house. Heilo was thirteen. It was love at first
sight.

But the purity
of the silvers was the cornerstone of Corporation rule. Their laws banned any
love affair between silver and regular turen. So they kept their love a secret.

It took Heilo
eight years to ace his way through school, university and the Corporation elite
training. In the day he studied and Sunna worked. But at night, when the rest
of the family had gone to sleep, they snuck out of their beds. The house was
large with many hidden corners for them to explore. There locked away from the
world and its laws, they shared hushed conversations that as time went on
turned into silent embraces.

When Heilo began
his work as the youngest ever head of the Corporation's intergalactic travel
research facility, he left the family home. Sunna left too. By now they could
not bare to be apart for even day. Heilo found a home for her beyond the
Corporation zone wall, close enough for him to visit in the dark of night.

Heilo spent his
days in the Corporation laboratories and his nights in Sunna's loving arms. The
first few months were bliss.

But in time the
experience of living beyond the zone wall took its toll on Sunna. She saw what
it was to live outside of the Corporation. The poverty overwhelmed her. The
daily humiliations and brutality dished out by Corporation security forces or
the Monarch gangs prowling the ghettos sickened her. She became politicalized.

Heilo saw the
change in her. It scared him. But soon he began to see the world through her
eyes and what he saw disgusted him.

His whole life,
Heilo had been sheltered from the reality of life beyond the zone walls. He
grew up believing the Corporation did good for all of turenkind. He was a
silver, one of the elite. It was his duty to take the Corporation forward, to
strengthen its control of the planet so that it could make the world a better
place. For that was the Corporation's purpose. Those that opposed the
Corporation were terrorist fiends wishing to drag the planet back into war and
misery. For the greater good, the Corporation had to wipe them out.

But Sunna made
him see this for the lie it was. She was right. Things had to change.

And then
disaster struck. Sunna grew pregnant.

Heilo cursed his
recklessness. If the authorities discovered Sunna in possession of a half
silver child, the consequences would be dire. They would link her to Heilo and
the pair of them would suffer the most terrible of fates.

The Corporation
abhorred the idea of their pure silvers mixing with regulars. They would make an
example of Heilo and Sunna, torturing them for weeks, before executing them in
the most savage way possible as the holo cameras rolled, their grisly deaths a
warning to all of the consequences of inter-racial copulation.

They had no
choice but to flee to Poklawi. Only on that distant alien planet, did they have
any hope of survival.

By then, Heilo,
sickened by the Corporation's actions and his own complicity in them, had already
begun covertly assisting the Turen resistance. He kept them informed about Corporation
plans, leaked scientific advances and supplied them with as much medical and
arms technology he could smuggle through the zone walls.

He used his
contacts to arrange their voyage to Poklawi. The Resistance knew what an
opportunity it was. They had the Corporation's most gifted scientist pleading
for their help. They made him promise that in return for their help, he would
do whatever they ask, build whatever they needed.

Heilo readily
agreed.

They assigned
him their best pathfinder, a robundee by the name of Brother Yojim. Unlike most
pathfinders, content to restrict their help to the safe shuttling of émigrés to
Poklawi, Yojim took a keen interest in the resistance. He had fought in several
resistance battles and raids, casting aside his pacifist's beliefs until the
Corporation had fallen to its knees.

Heilo, Sunna and
Yojim met three times to organise the escape plan. There could be no room for
error. The prospect of taking the Corporations brightest star, his regular
lover and their mixed race child to Poklawi thrilled the robundee. After
decades of Corporation subjugation, the couple and their child were a sign of
hope for a better future. One he hoped would inspire more turen, regular and silver
alike, to join the fight against the Corporation.

They planned to
leave Seenthee together at night, using a smuggler craft, built to evade the
Corporation's sky-space search technology. But on the day of their escape,
Heilo made an unexpected breakthrough in his research, one that had the power
to change the destiny of the turen race forever.

For years Heilo
had argued that the mythical home of the rollers, known by the robundee as the
Divide, was real. He posited that it was possible to tear a hole in the fabric
separating the Universe from the Divide, pass through it, momentarily enter the
Divide and re-emerge from it at some pre-destined point in the Universe.

He determined to
construct a machine that could tear this fabric apart. He called it the rift
engine. It required atomic power to work so he fitted it inside an atom-engine
spacecraft. His experiments with the prototype spacecraft took place inside a
hangar gifted to him by the Corporation heads. They were as keen for him to
succeed as he was. Little did they know, Heilo had vowed to steal this technology
and hand it over to the resistance.

Aware that he
would be bumped off the moment they discovered his relationship with Sunna,
Heilo kept his work a well-guarded secret, allowing his underlings only a
partial knowledge of the workings of the rift engine. Whoever knew the secrets
of the rift engine would be able to travel anywhere in the Universe in the
blink of an eye. He refused to place such power in the corrupted hands of the
Corporation.

But despite his
assertions that the theory worked and his pleas to the Universe that the rift
engine be a success, his experiments had always ended in failure. In
desperation he had built a second rift engine, attached it to a satellite and
sent it hurtling out into the Wrake Pass. He believed there had to be a reason
the rollers stayed within its stretches, never daring to leave.

It proved a
decisive move. For on that final day, just as Heilo was about to input a virus
to wipe all of his findings, his computer flashed that it had received a
message. The device had torn open a hole in the space fabric and the satellite
had disappeared through it, sending the message the instant before it crossed
over.

If the
experiment went to plan it should have remerged in Poklawi space.
Unfortunately, as the distance lay out of communicative reach, he had no means
to ascertain this for sure. He would have to see it for himself when he got
there.

 
Now he knew the rift engine worked, Heilo
had to change his plans. Instead of leaving Seenthee with Yojim he would grab
Sunna, return to the lab and take the prototype spacecraft fitted with the
original rift engine. He knew leaving the device to the Corporation hands would
be disastrous.

And so, he
contacted Brother Yojim, told him about the rift engine and arranged to meet
him on the edge of the Pass. The pathfinder would board their craft and lead
them safely through the pass.

But they never
saw Brother Yojim again. A squad of shadow fighters intercepted the pathfinder
as he made his way along the edge of the Wrake Pass. It was five heavily armed
fighter craft against one single cannoned smuggler. The robundee had to abort
the mission, fleeing into the safety of the Pass.

By the time he
got to the rendezvous coordinates, he was too late. Heilo and Sunna had
vanished.

It was only years
later that Brother Yojim learned what had happened to them.

The couple had
arrived at the rendezvous point with time to spare. There they waited, little
knowing a surveillance drone belonging to a nearby destroyer had noticed them.
The destroyer signalled back to Seenthee with a description of the ship and
they identified it as a Corporation craft stolen from their scientific research
department. The destroyer set course for the stolen ship.

Soon the ship
approached firing range of the runaways.

Out there in the
darkness with the Corporation seconds away from seizing them, Heilo did what he
had to do. He knew capture would mean a long death, brutal and public. So in a
final act of desperation he activated the rift engine.

And it worked.
They slipped through the rift, escaping the Corporation in an instant.

But this act of
escapology came at a terrible price. When constructing the rift engine and
prototype spacecraft, he had failed to account for the effect of the Divide on
conscious matter. The Divide had different laws. Heilo and Sunna exploded the
instant they passed through the rift, their life force and consciousness
becoming one with the Divide.

By all rights
the unborn Charlie should have faded into oblivion with his parents. Only by
pure luck, a school of rollers inside the Divide noticed the fluctuation in
energy levels caused by the rift. Curious, they gathered at the source of this
strange event.

The rollers
witnessed the breaking apart of the runaway craft and its passengers. They
watched as the energy and consciousness that had once formed the loving couple poured
into the Divide. With it came a flood of intensified, bodiless, enduring love.
It seeped into the creatures, charging them, threatening to overwhelm them.

At the centre of
this current flowed something new. It was growing, attracting not only the
energy dispersing around it, but also the energy that was the Divide itself. It
drew more and more inside it as it grew.

The rollers had
never seen anything of its like before. The Divide was a realm of energy and
consciousness. No conscious being reliant on form could survive it. Yet this
time, something solid had survived the crossing. It had transformed into pure
energy and its consciousness had stubbornly refused to fade away.

It grew until it
took the glowing form of a baby turen boy. This boy was Charlie.

The rollers,
stunned and brimming with excitement, gathered the child in their energy field.
They flew deep into the Divide to where the oldest and wisest of their kind
dwelled. They would surely know what to do with the child.

These ancient
beings inspected the child. They took its survival as symbol of the Divide's
great compassion and power, pledging to raise it as one of their own.

And so in the
very heart of the Divide the child grew, soaking up the energy and wisdom that
permeated throughout it. Unsure as to how to raise this alien creature, the
rollers treated it much the way they treated their own young.

Out in the Universe,
a whole year went by. But inside the Divide, much more time had passed. The
child had grown and reached preadolescence. He had learned how to communicate
with the rollers, how to listen to the endless stories pervading the whiteness,
and how to traverse it with the speed of thought. He spent his time weaving in
and out of the bright whiteness, chasing friends, singing roller songs, and
basking in the wisdom of the Divide. But what he liked most of all was staring
through the randomly occurring rifts, peeking out at the stars and worlds and
creatures that lived in the Universe.

The rollers
could not believe how at home the child had become. It was as if by crossing
into the Divide the being had changed into one of them.

But then without
warning, the boy grew sick. His energy faded to a pale shimmer and the rollers
feared the worse. They realised that this child only half belonged to them and
that without time in the physical realm he would die.

The rollers needed
a pathfinder. The robundee could receive the child in the Wrake Pass and take
it to Poklawi, raising it there. But despite the recent increase in their
communications, a pathfinder did not call. And it was beyond the power of the
rollers to reach out to them.

So the rollers
set out across the Divide, looking for a rift opening onto a world with an environment
similar enough to Seenthee's.

The fates were
kind and against all odds they found a rift. The planet was larger than
Seenthee with a smaller star, only one moon, and a lower percentage of oxygen
in the air. But it was close enough.

The rollers had
an intuition that on crossing through the rift, the child would take on physical
form adapted to the planet's environmental conditions.