After ten days Irin claimed to be fit to work, despite my protests, she suited up and went outside to repair the cracked hull. She returned after four hours, drenched in sweat and shaking with muscle exhaustion, but had finished the job.

  Our bruises were fading by the time Myra was able to run a full systems’ test. She finally pronounced herself satisfied with the ship’s condition.

  We were ready to leave and rescue Beyl and Jeklew but still didn’t know where we were going. All I could think of was Sal’s claim that she had told me, and though I racked my brains I couldn’t think of anywhere she had mentioned.

  In an effort to forget the problem and leave it to my subconscious, we talked of the alien finds again and puzzled about the destruction we had seen.

  I still wasn’t sure about the wisdom of going public, “I don’t see how it can help things,” I told Sal, during one of our arguments.

  “But the more people we have working on the problem,” he said, “the more chance of a solution.”

  “Yes, but there will be panic,” was my reply, “either we might be facing an alien threat or we may be facing two different alien threats.”

  Irin had changed her view, “I’ve been thinking. Perhaps the aliens won’t be interested in us; their quarrel may only be with the other aliens. Or maybe both races are long gone and extinct.”

  That was an interesting point; the damage pre-dated us by a long way. She carried on, warming to her theme. “Maybe the Federation has learned something from the ruins, they may have a plan, they may even have made contact with one side or the other; or even with both.”

  “But what could they do to protect us?”

  “We can’t know what the Federation has up its sleeve for defence, but maybe it’s the last piece of the puzzle. Beyl and Jeklew said that they knew where the last piece was but never told anyone.”

  “So what do we do know?”

  “When Beyl and Jeklew were caught and I escaped, the last thing she said to me was, ‘I know where we will be taken’, she didn’t tell me where, but then she said that you would know.”

  We kept coming back to me knowing the location.

  And rescuing them depended on the knowledge that I didn’t have.

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  On the morning of day sixteen, the day after we had completed all the tests on our repairs, and Myra was happy that every system was in good shape, I was waiting for Irin and Sal to appear for breakfast.

  I was looking at the box of silver discs we had found in the side cave. Holding one, turning it in my hand, I noticed a pattern that appeared to be etched on one side. It reminded me of the discs that video was stored on; although it was a different size to those we had on board. One side had a pattern that was a jumble of scratches with no logical sequence, but I had a sudden thought. I went down to the hold and looked in the lockers. The objects that we had picked up in the tunnel, the small cubes with the slot, had been bounced around when we had been damaged but appeared to be intact. I carried one back to the bridge, arriving at the same time as Sal and Irin, who both looked well-rested and fed.

  “What have you got there?” asked Sal.

  “Well, I think that this box is a player of some sort, and these things,” I held up a disc, “are data discs.”

  That got his attention; he picked up a disc from the box and turned it over, catching the light on its surface.

  “You know, in all the excitement, I completely forgot these things.” He reflected light off the disc onto the bulkhead; we could see a fine spiral pattern in the reflection. He turned the disc over and repeated the action, there was nothing.

  “It’s got data on it,” he announced. “It reflects off one side.” I passed him the grey cube; he looked at the slot and tried to push the disc into it. Having no luck, he turned the disc over and tried again. It vanished into the slot, and we could hear a whirr of gears as a mechanism started.

  A beam of light sprung from one of the blank faces, forming an image on the side of the Nav table, the nearest vertical face. The image was blurred and flickering, but clearly showed something in motion. Sal was so shocked that he dropped the cube and jumped back. As the cube hit the deck, the image vanished.

  “Well, that was different,” said Irin. She grabbed the cube from me and rattled it. “The disc is inside,” she said as she poked at the depressions on the side. “Wait, there’s a raised button here.” She pushed it and the image reappeared, shining on Sal’s face this time. She turned it until it pointed at the bulkhead.

  “It’s out of focus.” She moved the cube closer to the bulkhead and the image got smaller but stayed blurred. Irin put her fingers in the depressions and pushed them in turn, sound started to be heard and the image sharpened but was still indistinct.

  “I’ve got it!” she exclaimed. “These two control focus, and these two,” she waggled fingers as she spoke, “the volume.” She pushed the button again and the image vanished. “That must be the power switch.”

  “How do you get the disc out?” asked Sal.

  Irin felt over the cube, “There’s a button by the slot.” She pushed it and the disc came out. She smiled. “Simple, we just need to know what we’re looking at.”

  I looked in the box. “There must be hundreds of discs here, enough for the history of a civilization.”

  “Or a science book, an encyclopedia.”

  “Or it could be a spaceship repair guide or a weapons manual.” The possibilities were endless, and we were all excited by our discovery.

  And then, while my mind was diverted, I had the realization that I knew where we should be going.

  “Listen,” I said. “I know where Beyl is.”

  “How?” said Sal. “What made you remember?”

  “When I stopped trying to think, my mind just got on with it. It’s all the little clues, Vance said all the places he or his mates were stopped from surveying were near caves, we found this stuff in a cave, so the rest of the story must be in a cave as well. And there was the news disc we picked up on Nara.”

  Sal looked confused. “So what? There are hundreds of caves, that doesn’t help.”

  “Sal, where are the most famous caves in the Federation?”

  Irin chimed in, “That’s easy, Alysom caves, on Qister-Alu.”

  “Exactly,” I replied. “And Sal here said they had never heard of Mayve, which was the name Beyl used with me.”

  Sal still looked confused, so I spelt it out, “She called herself Mayve Scolas, it’s an anagram, Mayve Scolas – Alysom Caves, that’s where she is, and that’s where the final proof must be.”

  Sal just looked at me, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly.

  “Qister-Alu is a long way from here, and we’ve lost a few days with repairs,” said Irin. “And according to what I know, the caves are vast, how will we know where to look?”

  “Perhaps Beyl left another clue on here?” said Sal.

  “There was a file that she left me, I found it on leaving Mee-ling, it self-deleted, so I can’t play it to you, but it never mentioned anything that ties in with what we now know.”

  “Maybe she left another somewhere, she was good with tech,” said Sal. “Have you asked your computer if there is one?”

  “Well, I didn’t have to look last time, it just popped up, but I could try a search. Myra, list any comms files from after the landing on Callo.” I opened my wristband and Myra started scrolling the list on the panel.

  There were lots of files, customs clearances and bulletins, all the Urssa Mining traffic and many others. We would take forever to search all that. It seemed a bit pointless not to get moving and do it on the way.

  “Thank you, Myra. Store the list. New task: compute the fastest course to Qister-Alu please.”

  I never thought that the mention of the name would do something.

  “Playing a recorded file as instructed,” said Myra.

  The three-dimensional image of Beyl appeared in the middle of the bridge, she was smiling. “Well done, Dave. If you are watching this then in all probability Sal is with you and I have been captured.” Her face turned serious. “We knew that events were coming to a head and have planned for this. Now, this is very important, Dave, you’re on the right track. When you get to Qister the Nav has been set to give you co-ordinates. Please get there as quickly as you can.”

  Irin was impressed. “Quite the planner isn’t she? But there’s still nothing that anyone else could use.”

  “Well, you can’t be too careful I guess,” said Sal. “There are so many people after us now.”

  I thought of all the delays, Sal getting to find me on Villiars, getting evidence here, and then the time spent repairing Freefall. And during all this, Beyl was being held; I just hoped that she hadn’t outlived her usefulness.

  “I think we’ve wasted enough time, I just hope that we’re not too late.” With a final check on the status of the drive, we set course for Qister-Alu.

  Chapter Thirty

  Qister-Alu is a pleasure planet, pure and simple. It has huge parks with carefully controlled environments, where rich tourists can be persuaded that they are in a wild, savage land, and pay handsomely for the privilege, but it also has real wilderness for the aficionados. There are surfing beaches, White Water Rivers and all manner of extreme sports on offer. But the biggest draw is the Alysom caves, named after the semi-mythical explorer Ballantyne Alysom, a figure from the dawn of planetary exploration.

  Legend has it, and apparently Ballantyne did little to stop the legends, that he found them when his ship crashed whilst exploring the planet. He and his crew somehow rebuilt it from the wreckage and flew it to a remote mining camp half a world away. His book about the exploit has been standard bedtime reading for generations of kids on all worlds. Just how true it was, well everyone had their own idea, and really that’s half the fun of the legend.

  Since those days, centuries ago, the caves have become a lot more commercialized, and hotels have sprung up around the main entrance, where once there had been forest. The caves have hover-car tours and there are thirty-seven flavours of ice cream in most of the restaurants. For the vast majority of its visitors, it had become a wilderness in name only. New parts of the cave system were always being discovered, and it almost seemed that the whole planet was a sort of cheese, full of holes.

  We had spent the time on the way from Prairie 7 reading all the information that we could find about Qister-Alu and the caves. For the most popular leisure destination in the Federation and with the elite from the Independent worlds, there wasn’t much that wasn’t a thinly disguised advertisement or hook for travellers. Real information was scarce and contradictory.

  From what we could find, the caves extended over a large part of the Equatorial belt, and despite having been fairly well explored, about three-quarters of them were never seen by tourists. And of course, new passages were being found all the time, the local government had teams of cavers surveying on a permanent basis, but well away from the sightseeing routes.

  Looking over the historical records, you could see the perpetual promise of new tours in parts of the system that had previously been off-limits, but somehow they never seemed to be opened. Instead, you had to make do with the underground rivers, waterfalls and geological formations that Ballantyne had discovered, all those years ago and were immortalized in his book.

  Knowing what we did now, the reason for this was more obvious, but unless you had all the information in one place, you would never realize that so much was off-limits.

  Freefall arrived in orbit and was scanned, then boarded. All the stuff we had collected on our travels was well hidden, and anyway, it would be unlikely if we were not allowed in. Qister-Alu would never turn away anyone who was willing to spend; its livelihood depended on its reputation of letting just about anything go. In this respect, it flew against the controlling nature of the Federation, but it was most likely allowed to exist to keep all the fun in one place.

  Qister-Alu was the one neutral place in the galaxy where citizens of both the Federation and the Independent Worlds could legitimately mingle. The Federation liked to encourage the idea that meeting the ‘Indies’ was very risky, but to most folks’ disappointment people found that the others were really just the same.

  We told customs that we were not heading for the tourist centres, we wanted a secluded place for some survival training and this was accepted. We were cleared to land, as long as we took emergency radio and locator beacons, in case we needed rescuing.

  The authorities took the safety of everyone, even the adrenaline junkies, very seriously, and wanted to avoid any bad publicity. Also, that way they could keep tabs on everyone. As soon as we had cleared and were starting our descent, they went into the hold, where they couldn’t eavesdrop our conversations, but could still broadcast.

  We were also given a list of places where we were not allowed. As we dropped through the cloud layer, my console bleeped, telling me that another message had been activated.

  Myra, who had been carrying out the re-entry instructions announced, “I have new coordinates, Dave. Shall I alter our arrival point?”

  “Yes please, Myra,” I answered. “But wait till we’re past the resort, and clear of traffic.”

  “Will do, she answered. “Shall I play the message?”

  I called Irin and Sal to the wheelhouse to come and watch. When they were both present, I told Myra to play it.

  This time there was no 3D Beyl, just audio and a map of the planet hovering in mid-air. “Here’s where you are headed, Dave,” she said, and a red dot shone near the equator. I put my finger on it, through the holo-field and it zoomed in, features running up my arm as the picture expanded. Beside the map pictures appeared, these looked like they had been taken from orbit using infra-red, and showed a large crater in the ground, not in the side of a cliff, with a shadowy tunnel sloping gently down. Beyl’s voice continued, “This entrance is different; it’s not in the side of a cliff, and it’s blocked by gates, it looks like it has been covered with years of leaf mould and other stuff. Initially, it was thought to be just the impact crater from a meteor strike ages ago. We believe, and so do the Federation, that there may be an alien command post inside.”

  We flew over the resort attached to the caves, a huge area of hotels and crowds of people, the port was full of ships and a Mag-Lev connected it to one of the cave entrances. This one was a little small, considering the importance and size of the caves once you were in. Historically, it had been the entrance that Ballantyne had found; even though there were other grander ways in it was where the tours started.

  If what Beyl had described was another entrance to the same system, it might join up with the rest of the system somewhere.

  Myra altered to the new coordinates and we flew towards them, the scanner showing that we were not being obviously followed, but the gear the customs had issued us with was probably plotting our movements anyway. A solid carpet of green lay spread out beneath us, with the odd taller tree poking through the canopy.

  Rivers wound through the vegetation, showing rapids, large pools, and the occasional boat. The morning mist was drifting up from the treetops, and casting rainbows across the sky. There could be a city, or a whole civilization buried down there, and it would be invisible from the air.

  The Nav bleeped as we approached the spot, and the Sprite settled into a hover. Using the belly cameras, I scoured the jungle for a place to land, but there was no sight of the ground.

  Irin took in the view, “We’ll fly a spiral from here,” she decided. “That way we can find a clearing as close as possible.” She took manual control via her wristband, the holopanel hovering just in front of her.

  I looked down at the jungle, it looked like we could walk across the treetops, and I suspected it would be hard going once we were on the ground.

  “I guess we’ll just have to walk the rest; there will be no room for a car or a speeder in that jungle.”

  “Oh great,” said Sal with a sigh. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not built for walking through the jungle.”

  We slowly spiralled out from the spot, and after about twenty minutes found a landing place, on a shingle bank where a river performed a lazy loop. Irin brought us in to land. She hovered about five meters above the shingle and drifted as close to the trees as she possibly could. Seeing Irin sitting at the controls, in harmony with Freefall, brought back more memories of Myra. How many times had I seen her drift into cover like that?

  We stopped and landed, not completely hidden, but certainly as inconspicuous as possible. About twenty animals, jet black with flippers and long, tooth-filled beaks, almost like a cross between the seals and crocodiles of Old Earth were basking on the edge of the water. At the sound of our approach they lumbered into the river and swum out into the flow. We could see their heads above the water as they watched us.

  Irin was tapping on her panel as the engines closed down. “It’s about five kilometres to the site,” she said. “I’ve got the portable set up.” She lifted it out of its cradle in the console. We could now use it as a compass to guide us to the entrance – and more importantly back to Freefall.

  We assembled backpacks, survival gear, torches, water bottles, weapons and food; we had no way of knowing how long we would be out there. Or what would be in the way?

  As we walked down the ramp, Irin pointed to the animals. “Do you think there are any more like that?” I tried to remember the bit in the guidebook about the fauna.

  “The book is pretty vague, there are lots of mammals, some insects and reptiles, but no information on how dangerous a walk in the woods might be. Mind you, they wouldn’t want to be too specific and put tourists off.”

 

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