The Rift Rider (14 page)

Charlie sprung
to his feet and as he did, the glow vanished, his body returning to its
physical state in the blink of an eye. He wasted no time pondering the strange
changes happening to his body. The metal club lay at his feet. He picked it up
and, drawing on the hundreds of hours spent inside his school's cricket nets,
swung it in a perfect arc, bringing its stubby end against the base of the
guard's skull with a delightful crunch.

"Six,"
he called out, grinning with a mixture of relief and vengeance.

Square Head's
massive, goldfish eyes rolled backwards into his head, and his great bulk
crumpled.

Charlie jogged
over to the other guards, ignoring the aches in his foot and fist. The guards
were still out cold. Then he hurried up the corridor and into Lady Ori's court.

He had to stop
himself from yelping with joy when he found the court deserted. Fifty metres
away, through the glass doors, lay the palace garden and at its centre the lift
down to his rocket ride and freedom.

He ran across
the empty room, pumping his legs and arms. He was halfway towards the glass
door when he heard voices coming from a side corridor. A giant painting of a
mountain range hung to his right, its canvas reaching all the way to the floor.
He changed direction and dived behind it.

From the voices
and footsteps on the marble, he guessed a group of three or four had entered
the room. The persistent growling, soft but menacing enough, told him one of
them was Lady Ori, accompanied by her pets as always.

Then Charlie
remembered. The meat. Every part of him tensed. The desert stalkers were bound
to sniff his pocketful of choice cuts. He slid his hand down his side and reached
inside his robe pocket. He relaxed. It was empty. He had finished off the stash
he kept there.

 
"We know you have him here, Lady
Ori. Hand him over to us immediately." The picture blocked his view, but
Charlie knew the voice. It was one he would never forget.

Only a thin
sheet of canvas separated him from Executive Ko. He pushed back against the
wall. Each breath he took was a hurricane wind in his ears. He felt as exposed
as a Twickenham streaker.

"You have
no right to take what I have paid good money for." Lady Ori made no
attempt to hide the annoyance in her voice.

"The
Corporation has the right to do whatever it wishes," Ko replied.
"This is a matter of planet security. If you refuse to cooperate, I have
permission to exercise maximum force." Charlie heard the clicking of the
woman's shuddering jaw and shivered at the memory of it.

"You have three
soldiers," Lady Ori said, snorting. "I have an army of mercenaries at
my beck and call."

"So call
them," Ko said with a sneer in her voice. "Let's see what
happens."

For a long
moment, neither woman spoke. Bebel and Ius scratched their claws against the
floor, pining at their mistress to give them the order to attack these
intruders. Charlie hoped she would. That would provide the perfect distraction.

In the end it was
a palace guard that broke the silence. "The new boy's escaped,
Ma'am."

"Lock down
the building," Lady Ori.

Charlie had to
move now. Any moment Lady Ori would activate his bracelets. He shot a glance
around the edge of the curtain. Lady Ori, Executive Ko, three fringes and the
guard who had dropped him in it, stood about twenty metres away. They had their
backs to him. Charlie made for the glass exit, shuffling crab-like along the
wall, using the hanging paintings for cover.

Ius and Debel
sensed the movement and barked. They claws scraped the floor as they raced
towards him.

"Shit,
shit, shit," Charlie muttered. He flung the curtain away and sprinted
towards the glass doors. He slammed into them. But the palace staff had locked
them for the night. He bounced backwards, rattling the glass.

The desert
stalkers were at his feet, yelping with pleasure. They still took him for a
friend.

Beyond them, led
by Ko, the aliens jogged towards him, rifles raised. Lady Ori followed behind.
She looked more disappointed than angry. The control bracelet glittered on her
wrist.

Charlie clenched
his right hand and released the hidden blade. He slammed his first into the
door. The glass shattered into a hundred jagged pieces. Charlie dived away,
covering his face with his hands, the blade instantly slotting back into his
skin. A waterfall of shards landed at his feet, just missing his toes.

He got up. A
carpet of glass lay between him and the elevator. He looked at his bare feet. Fuck
it, he thought.

But before he
could race across it, a fierce pain rolled up and down his arms. He dropped to
his knees, screaming. It felt as if someone was rubbing burning barbed wire
back and forth across his forearms.

Lady Ori stood
over him, shaking her head. Then she reached for the bracelet and Charlie's
pain ended. "Take him. I've no need for ungrateful little boys, no matter
how beautiful." Then she stormed away trailing her two pets and the palace
guard.

A fringed
soldier pulled Charlie to his feet and pinned his arms behind him. The other
two stood with their rifles aimed at his belly.

Executive Ko
stepped up to him. "We meet again Charlie Scott."

Charlie looked
up into the blank, expressionless eyes and said, fighting to keep the fear out
of his voice, "What are you going to do with me?"

"Anything I
like."

"Why don't
you just kill me, and get it over with?"

"I would very
much like to do that," Ko said. "However, I have my orders to bring
you in alive."
 

Charlie fell
silent, but inwardly his soul cheered. They needed him alive. He would have
nothing to lose by making another run for it.

Ko must have
seen the glint in his eye. The instant he twisted, and pushed the fringe
holding him away, she gave the order. "Aim for his legs." The two
other fringes lowered their rifles and fired as one.

Something inside
Charlie clicked. In that fraction of a second, everything became clear. That
night's dream of floating with rollers, and his glowing green form came back to
him in high definition clarity.

 
He knew, at some deep level, beyond
conscious thought, that the dream was a key, unlocking a power long trapped
inside him. This power enabled him to change from one from to another, from his
familiar physical form to one that went beyond concepts of form and solidity.
His subconscious had already accepted the changes, triggering the changes that
had helped him escape. All that was left was for him to take conscious control
of his new ability.

He seized
control and in a flash his vision brightened, expanding to encompass the whole
360 degrees around him. The shards of broken glass, littering the floor around
him reflected his appearance back up at him. He was a shining green silhouette,
a man-shaped collection of sparkling stars, twirling and streaming inside a sky
of green.

Without turning,
he saw the gun barrels twitch and their energy bursts blast harmlessly through
him.

The fringes stared
at him, open-mouthed and wide-eyed. Ko studied with calm eyes, working out a
way to handle this unexpected development.

He looked at
them and then, with an effortless change of focus, into them. He could see
everything that made them, every proton, neutron, electron cloud and all the
nothingness in between. Another shift in focus, and the whole room around them
fell apart, breaking down to the same basic level of existence.

Charlie turned
his attention inwards, running his all-encompassing sight onto every part of
him. He noticed the bracelets, immediately. They had changed alongside him,
shifting to a form that was pure energy, but they remained distinct. He
concentrated, and then as simply as calculating two plus two, released them.
They dropped through him towards the floor, returning mid-air their metal form.
They clattered onto the floor.

 
Ko looked down at the bracelets and then
up at Charlie.

When Charlie
spoke his voice resonated with untold power. "Goodbye Executive."

The look of
angry impotence on her face was priceless. Charlie soaked it in. And then, with
the nonchalance of a pro surfer dropping in on a ten-foot storm wave, he slipped
through the marble beneath him. He landed barefoot and physical on the basement
floor, five metres from his rocket ride.

The thrill of
this new power surged through him. He had no idea where it had surfaced from
and what it meant. But deep within him, with an instinctive certainty, he knew
that a door had opened, and more changes, more abilities would come through it.
He needed to talk to Brother Yojim. That much was clear. But first, he had to
get the hell out of this palace.

The rocket ride
was exactly where Charlie had left it, parked snuggly between the two armoured
vehicles. It was frosty cold in the basement. Charlie wrapped his arms around
him and headed over to the ride. His foot throbbed with pain, the change in
state having had no healing effect on it. A detail well worth remembering, he
reflected.

Charlie climbed
onto the sleek rocket, placed his palm on the activation slab, and brought it
purring to life. The familiar vibration underneath him felt good. He leaned
forward, grabbed the handlebars and raced out of the basement.

A squadron of
guards were waiting for him in front of the palace gates, Executive Ko and her
fringes at their centre. They fired low hoping to take out his ride and keep
him alive.

He swerved to
avoid the energy bursts. The shots slammed into the palace wall a metre to his
right, sending fragments of rock and dust into the air. Charlie, keeping his
body pinned against the ride, took a course parallel to the gates, hoping to
draw them away. When he saw his plan had worked, he brought the ride around in
an arc and aiming for the palace gates, its guard reduced to two soldiers,
accelerated. He would smash right through them.

"Don't do
it," Bei shouted in his ear. "They're solid metal."

Charlie pulled
the ride hard to the left, whizzing past the metal bars. "You took you're
sweet time," he said, racing along the side of the wall.

Charlie glanced
behind him. The guards had reorganised themselves. They were pursuing him on
armoured hover bikes. Executive Ko sat on the back seat of the lead bike,
shouting out commands.

Charlie weaved
through the garden pathways, using the ride's greater speed and manoeuvrability
to outfox his pursuers. "What should I do?"

"Look up
.
"

Charlie ducked
under a branch and looked upwards. Bei was racing across the top of the wall on
his rocket ride, following Charlie from above. Energy bursts plowed into the
wall beneath the blue man. "I see you."

"Good. Now
flick the switch under the rocket's belly and use the energy surge to ride up
the wall."

"No way.
I'll end up in the outer atmosphere."

"Not if you
jump first.
"

"That's
insane."

"I'll catch
you. I promise. Now do it. I'm getting my arse shot off up here."

Bei was right.
The palace guards had a far better sight of Bei than Charlie. He was not going
to last much longer up there.

Charlie reached
a clear patch of garden, a wide lawn stretching smoothly outwards like a
bowling green. It left him terribly exposed, but nevertheless he slowed his
ride, leaned forwards and ran his fingers along the machine's underbelly. He
found the square patch, slid it to one side and flicked the switch hidden
inside. With his hand back on the handlebar, he pulled hard on the accelerator.
The ride shot forward like a turbo charged bat from hell.

"Yank it
all the way back," Bei's voice screamed in his ear. "Now."

Charlie did and
shot upwards towards the top of the wall. In less than a second he had cleared
it, and was rocketing into the sky.

"
Jump."

Charlie let go of the handlebars, dropped
his hands onto the engine and pushed. The ride shot away from him. He fell back
towards the wall now fifty metres below him. He thought about switching form so
he could float safely back to the ground. But then an arm wrapped around him
and plucked him out of the sky.

"Got you," Bei said, swinging
Charlie roughly onto the back of his ride.

Charlie grabbed
onto him, and they thundered downwards, into a rising hail of energy bursts. The
air around them was filled with energy bursts but no shots hit them.

By the time Bei
brought the ride to a horizontal trajectory, racing a safe two feet above the
ground, they had cleared the series of walls and a quarter of the city.

"How did
you do that?" Charlie asked.

"I was going
to ask the same question."

He saw me,
Charlie thought. He had no idea how to answer the blue man, so he said nothing
and shrugged.

They completed
the final minutes of their journey across the city in silence. Bei took them
down a crumbling street on the outskirts of the city. At the end of it, an
ancient looking hover van lay abandoned next to a steaming pile of rubbish.

 
Bei raised a hand towards the van and
squeezed the remote control device inside it. The van's rear doors slid open.
The blue man slowed the rocket and brought them into the van. The doors closed
behind them and the van's internal lights flashed into life. The van looked a
lot smarter on the inside than the outside.

"Here's our
getaway hover," Bei said, climbing off the ride.

Charlie nodded,
impressed.

An hour later
they were racing across the desert. They were taking the long route to Jajag
city in a hope of throwing Executive Ko off their scent. It seemed to be
working. Nobody had followed them.

A lot of that
was down to the van. For despite its raggedy appearance, it was equipped with
the latest cloaking technology. Only a visual would pick them up, and with the
van's rusted brown outer shell blurring seamlessly in with the surroundings,
their odds of escape looked good.

"So,"
Bei said, settling into the driver's seat, relaxed and smiling now that Charlie
had handed the data over, every megabyte of it unencrypted, "are you going
to tell me about that little light show you put on back there or not?"

Charlie coughed.
At times like this he pined for the polite indirectness of his people back in
England. "How did you see it?"

"I was up
on the walls, waiting. You took so long I was contemplating whether to come down
and save you. But when I saw you change into a green lamp and disappear through
the floor like a ghost, I figured you had it covered."

"How long
were you up there?"

"I followed
Ko to the palace. I pulled out a couple of upward thrusters and a cloaking blanket
from Tills bag of treats. I got up there without being noticed, no mean feat.
Anyway, quit dodging the question. What happened to you back there? Is that
normal for your kind? If it is, that would've been useful to know before I
risked my arse getting up that wall."

"I doubt
it's normal for any kind," Charlie said. He paused, and stared out of the
side window, eyes fixed on the desert rushing by. When he spoke it was as
though he was using speech to arrange his thoughts.
 
"Last night I dreamt of rollers. I
existed amongst them in a place unlike any other, a place beyond words, a place
without rules or limits. Somehow I knew I'd been there before, long ago and
that I belonged there. In the dream I looked and felt just like the rollers. I
was made of green energy and something else too, some form that exits beyond
this Universe, something powerful, immortal.

"And when I
woke up and the next thing I knew different parts of me were changing into this
green form. But it wasn't until the courtyard, when Ko tried to take me down,
that I understood I could control the change."

Charlie turned
and looked at Bei. "And you saw it yourself. The energy bursts passed
right through me"

Bei exhaled.
"That's some crazy shit."

"It doesn't
get any crazier." Charlie held up his hand. One moment it was an ordinary
hand, pink and knobbly and strange looking in its normality, and the next it
was an impossible hand, holding a galaxy's worth of stars within its green
grip.

Charlie saw
Bei's mouth drop. "Go on," he said. "Try and touch it."

Bei took a hand
off the steering wheel and prodded the shining limb with an outstretched index
finger. It went straight through, all the way to the knuckle. "Incredible,"
he said, pulling his finger out of the light.

"The roller
we met told me to come home to the Divide. That must be the place I saw in my
dream. But what has that got to do with me?" He blew out some air and
shook his head. "I just don't get it."

"Well,"
Bei said, "whatever the reason it proved damn useful. You can't deny that.
What I would give for a little indestructability."

Indestructible,
Charlie thought. Is that what I am?

"Don't look
so glum, kid. Awani made contact with Brother Yojim. They're waiting for us in
Jajag city. You'll get your answers soon."

Charlie pictured
the demonic. The thought of sitting down and talking with the erd giant filled
him with dread and excitement in equal measures. His mind raced with questions.
For a long while he sat in silence, imagining his conversation with the red
alien, guessing at the pathfinder's answers to the questions he had.

Finally, he gave
up the imaginary questioning and asked Bei a real one. "How did Ko find
me? You said Lady Ori was untouchable."

Bei paused to
think about it, and then said, "Ko must have activated a mole in Lady
Ori's staff. And to play a card like that they would've needed a very good
reason indeed."

Charlie knew
what the reason was. "They found out the truth about me. That's why they
want me so badly"

Bei laughed.
"Well if they didn't know you were an alien then, they sure do now."

Charlie laughed
too. Despite everything, he felt good. Sitting beside this blue-skinned man
racing across the desert towards an unknown alien city and uncertain future, he
smiled, filled with an unreasonably optimistic sense of adventure.

When Charlie
showed his damaged foot to Bei, the alien pointed out that he had broken three
of his metatarsals. He chucked Charlie the bag of medicine that Tills had
packed for them, and told him to root around for a small wooden box of robundee
healing jelly. Once he found it, Charlie applied a scoop of the pink goo to his
aching foot. It worked with the usual alien speedy effectiveness. The smashed
bones healed in minutes.

"Robundee
medicine," Bei said, knowingly. "Best there is."

Charlie leaned back
in his seat and let out a deep sigh. His closed his eyes and soon fell into a
well-earned, dream-filled sleep.

When he opened
his eyes next, they had cleared the desert and were hovering through verdant
valleys. They flew alongside a river as thick and powerful as the River Severn.
Charlie wondered if this river also received a tidal bore like the Severn did,
a river wave that drew surfers from around the world to the Gloucestershire
countryside, including one Charlie Scott.

Bei looked
knackered. In the spirit of fairness Charlie volunteered to do some of the
driving. Besides, after the rocket ride Charlie fancied trying out some less
death defying forms of alien transport.

The van may have
appeared like an alien twin of Charlie's VW from the outside, but on the inside
it was a whole other story. Instead of a gear stick, clutch, accelerator and
brake pedal, every control had been installed into two steering handles resembling
PlayStation control pads.

Once Charlie got
used to the pads, he found the van handled incredibly well. Whether rushing up
a rising mountain face or taking an unexpected bend in the valley, the van
responded to Charlie's commands with a lightness and speed that belied its
bulkiness.

For the rest of
the journey Charlie and Bei took it in turns to drive. While Bei drove, Charlie
slept, daydreamed, or admired the landscapes they passed through. Deserts,
mountains, plains and beaches, it seemed Seenthee had it all. Towards the end
of the journey they cruised along a wide stretch of coastline.

Charlie gaped in
awe at lines of waves pummelling the black sand beaches. Much of it was closed
out, impossible to surf. But now and then, the waves would catch on some
underwater reef or rock ledge and jack up, forming perfect walls of glass that held
up for hundreds of meters.

Charlie drooled
at the sight of these perfect waves completely free of the crowds that cursed the
epic waves of Hawaii, Bali and Sri Lanka. He yearned to dive into the ocean and
feel its cool touch against his skin. Longingly, he thought of his surfboard,
wondering whether it had made the journey with him or had washed up onto the
Gower shore to be claimed by a lucky passer-by.

With the waves
on display, Charlie once more explained the art of surfing to Bei.The blue
man's fascination seemed genuine, so Charlie promised to show him one day. The
thought of surfing these empty waves thrilled him. However when the alien
revealed what beasts lurked beneath the surface of Seenthee's ocean, Charlie
came to regret the promise he had made.

During the times
Charlie was in control of the van, Bei worked his way through the unencrypted
data. He had uploaded it onto a device built into the van's dashboard. The data
ran in vertical and horizontal lines across it, making Charlie dizzy whenever
he looked at it.

It turned out a
single scientist, one Doctor Sree, had written it all. The scientist allowed no
others access to his data. He alone would be taking credit for any success. But
it also meant if the Turen Resistance abducted him, the Corporation would be
unable to use any of his work.

Doctor Sree reported
his findings in a staggering level of detail. So it took Bei a long time to get
through the scientist's discoveries, conclusions, and recommendations.

Charlie had to
spend the last ten hours driving, so that Bei could finish in time. From the
look on his face as he read, Charlie knew it was bad news and resisted
complaining about his tired eyes and sore backside.