The Great Escape Chapter 1 Part 1 of 3

The Great Escape
Chapter 1 Part 1 of 3

The freezing night rain came two hours after sunset in the Southern Mountains when it was already dark, and the Herders at the sheep station were in their huts, snuggling in bed to keep warm. The rain lasted half the night. Only the hardy sheep stayed outside.

At midnight, with hailstones thudding on the roof and the wind rattling the shutters, two tiny figures crept silently out of a hut, careful not to wake the sleeping women. They carried big leather backpacks and wore wide-brimmed leather hats. They ventured fearlessly into the freezing downpour and headed up the mountain.

Rain ran down the gullies. The fugitives - two adolescent girls, one petite and skinny, one taller and athletic - trudged through the streams, walking on gravel riverbeds in thin leather sandals despite their freezing feet, leaving no footprints. When the mountain streams were too narrow, they tramped over the soggy grass, avoiding the muddy sheep tracks that would record their passing.

The volcanic mountains were old and dormant, and their peaks weathered into ashy mounds that regularly crumbled down the slopes. The girls picked their way up the hill, staying on the east side to escape the wind, but there was no escaping the freezing rain that fell in torrents.

There was a sheltered cove about five miles from the sheep station. Here, they stopped to rest, unraveling one of their leather backpacks. It opened as the groundsheet of a tent. They sheltered beneath the sheet, cuddling to stay warm.

The younger girl shivered, her teeth chattered, and her hands and feet were like ice blocks. But she never complained or asked to turn back. The older girl held her closely, rubbing the younger girl's hands until she could feel them again.

Eventually, the rain stopped, and the wind died, but the cold mist penetrated their bones.

After a few hours' rest, well before dawn, the older girl gently woke her friend and whispered that it was time to go. They squatted together behind a large boulder to relieve themselves, then hefted up their packs and began the climb over the ridge onto the south side of the mountains, trying to put as many miles as they could between them and the Herder Tribe.

It was easier walking along the rims of the volcanoes, heading westward on the southern slopes. When the sun came up, it began to dry them out and burn off the clinging mist. Then, the girls could see the size of their ambition. Row upon row of brown and white volcanic peaks stretched in a line before them, leading to a grey and misty horizon under a clear blue sky.

Undaunted, they trekked on.

Their swag bags held flatbreads, round cheeses, and long strips of dry salted beef. The older girl took a hunting knife from its holster on her thigh and cut strips of meat for their breakfast. They chewed as they walked. The bladders they carried over their shoulders contained milk. When they drank the bladders dry, they filled them with cold, clear water from the small streams that dripped through mossy overhangs beside the ridge.

They walked all day, stopping only when exhaustion forced them to until the low sun in their eyes signaled that it was time to seek shelter for the night.

There was a granite cave, a fissure in the mountainside with a roof of compacted gravel and pumice. It was dry and warm inside. Despite their exhaustion, the girls were fascinated by the colored rocks in the walls, glistening with beams reflected from the orange sun. A purple seam ran across the floor and up one wall.

Too tired to talk, they stared at the dancing reflections until it was time to squeeze into the tent, to hold each other and sleep.

After two days of trekking on the mountain ridge, the fugitives reached the cliffs, where the rocky walls tumbled drunkenly into the sea. They stayed in a hole in the cliffs, sheltered from the freezing night rain. The following day, they started northward along the beach, hidden from view by the gradually diminishing cliffs.

Before them was a vast golden beach, stretching out for more miles than even their sharp eyes could see.

Behind them were the Southern Mountains, brown-sided and snow-capped. To the left was the ocean, immeasurably vast. To the right was a wide and well-watered prairie, hot and lush, where the Herders and their cattle roamed. Beyond the prairie was a thick forest, grey and green in the hazy distance, with great snowy mountains on the horizon behind.

With wide-brimmed hats to protect them from the scorching sun, water bladders filled from sweet mountain streams, and strips of good dried beef between their teeth, the girls set out northward filled with courage and hope.

The physics textbook said hyperspace was how grave space and grave time were looped together with quantum interactions. Luckily for those who traveled vast distances through the galaxy using hyperspace jumps, it was possible to use a hyperdrive motor without understanding complex physics.

The spaceship pilot plots the starting coordinates and what he hopes will be the finishing coordinates on a navigation system. The piloting computer calculates the parameters for the jump. When he engages the hyperdrive motor, usually by pressing a big red button on the piloting console, the ship enters hyperspace, emerging a few seconds later billions of miles away.

Someone who understood the mechanics of hyperspace travel but not the underlying science was a planetary prospector called Ezra Goldrick.

Planetary prospectors were adventurers who courted danger by jumping hundreds of light-years through hyperspace to discover exciting and valuable new solar systems. Driven by courage and commercial ambition, they sought asteroids and moons for their mineral content. However, the real prize was an Earth-sized planet capable of being terraformed to support human life.

With governments on Earth eager to transport excess populations to pristine new worlds (and the populations themselves keen to emigrate), settler companies were making huge profits and offering substantial bounties to prospectors who discovered Earth-like planets.

Aged forty, Ezra had been a successful prospector for fifteen years in a profession where success was measured more by survival than by the number of bounties claimed. In Earth year 2,554, he sought his fortune with a risky venture. He had a destination in mind: a previously discovered planet, now lost, that was so much like Earth that his bounty would make him rich for life.

Ezra researched his destination in the libraries of the Anglosphere. He plotted his course on the available star maps. He studied the records of earlier voyagers. He borrowed money from investors, including his parents and friends. He fitted his spaceship out for a long and dangerous journey with a year's supply of rations and a reconditioned hyperspace engine.

He put in a bounty claim to a settler company, Outworld Ventures, but did not bother to tell the Prospectors' Guild where he was going. They would not find a volunteer to rescue him if he got in trouble. Instead, like all prospectors, who live more in fear of claim-jumpers than of jumping through hyperspace into the middle of a star, Ezra kept his destination a secret even from his closest family.

It was in the cause of maintaining this secrecy that Ezra visited his sister at Trinity College, Cambridge, on an overcast winter's day just before he left Earth. The damp appearance of the ancient colleges, their dingy shadows concealing the bright learning going on behind the stone walls, always made a grey day in Cambridge seem even duller to Ezra, who walked down Trinity Street with his jacket collar raised to wait outside the grand entrance of the college for Danielle. She taught an advanced astrophysics class on a Wednesday morning and soon skipped up to greet him, bringing human sunshine to mend the deficiencies of the weather.

At six feet tall, Ezra was average height for an Englishman in the mid-twenty-sixth century. He was athletic with mid-brown hair, dark blue eyes, an ordinary face, and a strong, clean-shaven chin. His bright and sunny sister was twelve years younger and three inches shorter, an inch above average for the Anglosphere. Where Ezra was average-looking, Danielle was beautiful, with large dark-blue eyes the same shade as his, a high forehead, a broad smile, a small, determined chin, and wavy platinum-blonde hair the product of a salon to replace the straight, mousy-brown hair that she felt did not reflect the joy of her disposition.

Danielle took Ezra's arm and pulled him to a Market Hill Cafe.

The market stalls were covered with striped awnings. Danielle looked out the window at the browsing students with woolen scarves and shoppers with warm coats while Ezra fetched their coffees.

When he sat down, she had a demand for him.

"Where is it? Where's my letter?"

"What letter?"

"Come on, big Bro. Hand it over."

"I didn't bring it with me."

"Liar!"

"All right."

Ezra took a white, sealed envelope from inside his jacket. It had Danielle's name and the date, and he handed it over.

"Don't open it for a month," he said.

"I know the drill."

She held the letter to the light, trying to see the writing through the envelope.

They had a ritual. Before a prospective trip, Ezra wrote his destination on a letter and forbade his sister from opening it until he was well on his way.

Danielle pretended to be disappointed that she could not see the destination. She tried to peek under the flap, but it was adequately glued down. She pouted in frustration, but she was only teasing.

"If you won't say where you're going, at least tell me you're following known pathways," she said. "Are you using tethered beacons?"

Danielle, the astrophysical engineer, wanted to know that Ezra would be safe. Hyperspace pathways were her specialty. She built them for a living and taught them once a week to a select group of undergraduates.

There were two modes of hyperspace travel. There were 'free' jumps taken by spaceships using their hyperdrive motors to enter hyperspace in one place and emerge seconds later somewhere else in the galaxy.

There was also 'tethered' hyperspace travel, which used hyperspace beacons at both ends of a fixed pathway.

Any spaceship could enter one beacon and emerge from the linked beacon in a precisely known location.

Tethered hyperspace pathways were almost entirely safe. Free hyperspace jumps were risky. What made them dangerous, causing travelers to emerge close to stars or even (for a sad but mercifully painless moment) actually inside a star, were what Danielle called 'anomalies.' A hyperspace pathway was extremely sensitive to magnetic flux, x-ray stars, black holes, clouds of charged particles, and other quantum interactions, which would redirect the traveler toward the nearest gravitating object, sometimes with disastrous consequences.

"My first jump is on a tethered pathway near Capella Space Station," Ezra said. "From then on, I make free jumps along pathways others have traveled before."

This was a slightly disingenuous statement for reasons Ezra kept to himself, but Danielle took it at face value and was relieved.

"All right," she said. "I'll let you go, so long as you promise to return safely."

"I promise."

"I love you, Bro."

"I love you, Sis."

With his preliminaries completed and his sister mollified Ezra returned to London to hand over the keys to his apartment to the agent who would rent it out for a year. With his belongings in storage, he took a last suitcase on an intercontinental ballista flight to Perth, Australia, to say goodbye to his parents, Mariotta and Nathan.

A day later, after a warm and fond farewell, Ezra boarded a stratoliner to the Commonwealth Space Elevator in Equatorial Africa, which lifted him and his small luggage to a shuttlecraft in low-Earth orbit. It transported him to his spaceship, moored at an engineering station 3,000 miles up.

Ezra spent three weeks in space testing his hyperspace engine by making a series of careful jumps on the 43-light-year journey to the Capella Space Station.

Ezra was pleased with his ship when he emerged from hyperspace after his last test jump. The engine had pushed him through hyperspace without incident a dozen times. He always emerged safely, at or close to his intended location. The navigation system was equally successful, pin-pointing his starting position before a hyperspace jump and quickly confirming his location at emergence.

Internal mechanisms were all working well. The bulkhead airlocks are appropriately sealed. So long as Ezra wore his flight suit, which had magnetic strips along its arms, shoulders, and legs (or if he was in regular clothes when he wore a magstripe waistband and overshoes), then the magnetic artificial gravitation pulled him firmly toward the floor of the ship. Life support gave good readings. The ionizing air scrubbers gasped and hummed, as all such units did, even in the most expensive pleasure cruisers. They removed carbon dioxide efficiently, maintaining a good level of oxygen.

Feeling confident, Ezra proceeded to Capella Space Station under the power of his ship's ion drive.

From 50,000 miles away, the space station was a dot among millions of luminous dots sprinkled heavily on the black curtain of space. It orbited one light-year from the four stars that made up Capella's solar system, two hot and bright yellow stars, and two dull red dwarf stars. Dozens of hyperspace beacons shared the space station's orbit.

The beacons were silver-grey rings hundreds of meters in diameter. Their centers were filled by amorphous purple lenses known as 'plumes.' The lenses flickered and glowed with charged particles as golden lights ran around the inside rims of the beacons.

The beacons and the space station were powered by white gamma streams that crisscrossed space around the two brighter yellow stars. Beamed from a legion of solar collectors near the star, the gamma streams were split up by transmitting stations and redirected to receiving dishes on the beacons and the space station.

With 1,000 miles to go, Ezra reversed his ship and used the ion drive to decelerate. Three hours closer and only 100 miles from the space station, he steered by maneuvering rockets for the last ten minutes of his journey, slowing to match the space station's orbital velocity, following a guided path to a dock.

Capella Space Station looked like a giant gyroscope. It had a spindle six miles long and a great wheel with four thick spokes twelve miles in diameter.

It rotated about 600 times a day to create an Earth-normal artificial gravitation for those on the inside surface of the great wheel's rim.

Huge radio dishes grew like mushrooms on the spindle. Radio antennas and masts bristled like hedgehog spines. The bottom of the spindle widened in two places to make a lower Military Dock and an upper Freight Dock. Giant vessels attached themselves nose-first to the space station like suckerfish.

Smaller vessels parked halfway into the docks.

Above the wheel were two more docks: one for passenger ships, the other for smaller private vessels.

Canceling his maneuvering rockets, Ezra let his ship be guided into a berth on the private vessel dock by magnetic tracking beams. His forward docking system latched to the bulkhead with a firm clunk. A green light showed the mating was airtight and secure. It was safe to open the sealed hatch and enter the passenger dock.

Ezra kept on his flight suit to use the magnetic artificial gravity in the zero-gravity dock as he visited stores to order food, water, and fuel supplies.

He paid with a credit stick that he charged on Earth with ten Galactic Pounds. This was more than the average monthly wage and would leave plenty for an enjoyable last night on the station.

Ezra ran final tests on his ship's electronic equipment, the nation's system, and life support. All the self-checks passed. Taking every precaution, he powered the batteries of his emergency escape pods and checked the medical kits slotted into drawers in the pods' bases.

After finishing his preparations, Ezra took a shower. Hot, damp air puffed at him in the sealed cubicle, and he wiped it down with ultra-absorbent sponges.

Dressed in regular clothes, he planned to make his last night in civilization one to remember.

It was evening by Galactic Standard Time. Ezra donned the complimentary magstripe waistband and overshoes in the zero-gravity passenger dock to follow the embarkation route to the customs and hygiene registers. He presented his identity card and health stamp. His breath, saliva, and blood samples were quickly analyzed, and a healthy verdict was given. Two minutes later, Ezra passed through the entry gates to take a lift down to the center of the spindle. Here, he returned the overshoes and waistband. He turned at a right angle to float into another lift, which went down one of the spokes of the great wheel.

In the plate-glass elevator, he maneuvered feet-first to join the other passengers in the cubicle. From experience, he tucked his arm around the handrail to hold on tightly. The lift shot off toward the rim of the great wheel, picking up both angular momentum and artificial gravity to unbalance the passengers and create a queasy feeling for anyone unprepared for it.

Most of the station's population lived and worked on the rim, divided into four causeways. The West Causeway had posh shops and good hotels. The North Causeway had the homes of the permanent residents, a school, a hospital, and a park with a zoo. The South Causeway had food halls and workshops for artisans. The East Causeway had rowdy bars, casinos, pawnbrokers, and brothels.

There were 10,000 permanent residents: mechanics, shopkeepers, bankers, teachers, cooks, hydroponics farmers, gardeners, and Entertainers, that is, prostitutes, who were legal, licensed, and guaranteed to be drug —and disease-free.

There was also a transient population of space riggers, miners, freighter crew, military personnel on leave, and Prospectors, who all visited Capella for supplies, to look for work, to feel some gravitation albeit artificial underfoot, or to gamble, drink, shop, trade, and spend time with a friendly Entertainer.

Added to this diverse humanity were thousands of settlers a year from Earth, who came to Capella to embark on giant hyperspace transports to distant planets. Capella Space Station was a gateway to the dozen planets of the Outworld League.

The lift slowly decelerated. It disgorged Ezra onto an unusually quiet East Causeway.

He took the moving walkway twelve blocks clockwise to The Goat and Chariot pub, where the prettiest Entertainers hung out waiting for customers.

He was seeking his favorite: a woman called Hestia. Ezra saw that his quarry was absent when he got to the pub. The bar was deserted, except for the slow barman and a petite young Asian woman in a short pink skirt and a yellow crop top. She was thin, with a round face, dark-brown eyes, and long, straight black hair below her shoulders. A fringe suited her pretty face, which had attractive small dimples.


To be continued