Chapter 1
‘Abandon ship! Abandon ship! Hull breach imminent! Life-support failure in thirty seconds!’ Blared the sled’s computer. Mervyn looked out at the featureless expanse of deep-space. He ran through all the other emergency options -- ejection into space remained the only hope of survival.
‘Twenty seconds to life-support failure!’
He felt remarkably calm, ‘This is it, Loren. Are you ready?’
‘Affirmative, all other courses of action are negative. We’ve gotta go.’ Tiny droplets condensed onto the equipment poisonous gases escaping into the sled’s cockpit. Mervyn’s heart began to pound. He checked the integrity of his spacesuit and sealed his helmet.
‘May-Day message sent. Emergency beacons activated,’ Loren said as she completed her checklist.
‘Let’s go then.’
‘Ten seconds to life-support failure!’
Mervyn lifted the cover off a fluorescent button, marked ‘Eject’, then hesitated. Free floating in deep-space with nothing more than a spacesuit for protection meant almost certain death. He asked himself whether it might not be better to remain in the sled and succumb to the gas? He tried to calculate the odds, but his brain ceased up. He should have paid more attention in mathematics. Loren would know how to do it; now though, was not the time to ask her. More gas hissed into the cockpit. A slim chance is still better than none at all however the numbers added up.
‘Life-support failure imminent!’ He gently touched the eject button. Suddenly, everything happened at once: Mervyn’s seat hugged him in a vice like grip, the canopy above his head split open, and he shot upwards. The force of the acceleration rammed him even further into his seat. Below him the sled fell away. He was alone in the darkness of space.
Everything abruptly turned white.
The intensity of the brightness hurt Mervyn’s eyes, and a gentle voice sounded in his ear, ‘Simulation over. Emergency evacuation procedure complete.’
Mervyn found himself dangling from a crane. Below him, the rest of his class crowded on to a gallery -- he could see De Monsero pointing two fingers at him like a blaster and taking pretend pot-shots. The simulator squatted on the floor with pieces of canopy swinging around him on wires. The escape had felt real.
‘Well-done, a perfect escape.’ Cage said. ‘As everyone has now passed their emergency simulations, even Maurice, we can move on to real sleds and plan a real race.’ Cage had worked them hard for weeks, perfecting every variation of the emergency procedure. In his excitement, Mervyn could almost forgive the ignominy of dangling from a crane in front of his peers. ‘Remember, though,’ Cage said, repeating his mantra, ‘always stay with your craft unless it is going to kill you.’
For the rest of the week, the class worked on data collected from field trips, moulding it into a flight plan for their first race. In mathematics, they learned how to calculate their position inside a globulus cloud. In science, they learned how gravity tides and magnetic fields react in star clusters. There were more science lessons that usual that week. Even physical recreation continued the theme, with circuit training for flight fitness and stretching exercises to relieve aching legs on the long flight. In communications, they wrote out specimen flight plans for one other.
Prep was abandoned for the week. Calculating trajectories and completing flight plans dominated everyone’s mind. The Misfits, spent many hours in the simulators testing their plans. They checked ever trajectory for safety, speed, and fuel consumption, then flew the race again from the start. Eventually they declared themselves satisfied and handed in the perfect flight plan. Then they waited.
The night before the race, Mervyn tossed and turned. He tried to sleep, but all he could think about was the flight plan. When he did eventually doze off he dreamt the Naga of Pershwin was pursuing him in a sled yelling, ‘Die, Runt, die.’ Then the Naga’s warship appeared and blasted him with its main guns and he spun out of control into the fiery furnace of a young blue star. He woke with a start. He knew it was useless trying to get back to sleep. Why was sleep always so elusive when he needed it most? He hauled himself out of bed, pulled on his dressing gown, and wandered into the common room looking for something to distract him. There was nothing there, and opening his biolink would only set his head buzzing, so he wandered out into the corridor.
The stardome was in darkness, lit only by the glitter of a thousand distant stars. Mervyn climbed the mound and sat down, searching for NCZ2398. It would be one of the closer blue stars. He could ask the computer to pinpoint it for him, but tonight he felt like finding it himself.
A noise startled him out of his revelry. The door opened and footsteps enter the room. Who could possibly be out at this time of night? Instinctively, he slithered back over the ridge so he could hide in the shadows. Another set of echoing footfalls joined the first. They mounted the hill. Soon Mervyn could just make out two forms standing on the summit. The light was not good enough to make out their features. Then one of them turned side on and weak starlight lit their profile: Rufus De Monsero. From the walk Mervyn guessed other was Hidraba. Curiosity made Mervyn lie flat in shadows, watching and listening.
De Monsero spoke first, ‘Is it done?’
‘It’s done,’ Hidraba said. ‘I’ve sorted the rods -- no one will suspect anything. I still don’t understand why I had to switch the extinguishers though.’
Whatever they were talking about it was clear they were up to no good and Mervyn wanted to hear more.
‘What did you do with the old ones?’ De Monsero asked in a quiet silky voice.
‘Put them back in the store.’
‘Good.’
Both of the silhouettes gazed up at the stars. Mervyn held his breath in the silence, in case they discovered him.
‘How’s the race going to go tomorrow?’ De Monsero asked.
Pains shot up Mervyn’s right leg, he was not in a comfortable position. To make matters worse he was slowly sliding down the steep slope of the mound. He dared not shift into a move comfortable position in case they heard him.
‘It’ll be a synch,’ Hidraba said. ‘Jenny from the Comets is good, but as long as she’s paired with that buffoon Maurice she’ll be no threat to us. The only competition we need worry about are the Misfits. Aurora and Bright are gifted pilots and withholding the syndicate answers has made them into a tight team – not exactly what we intended.’
Mervyn listened intently, distracted only by the cramp in his leg. He tried to change his grip, but only succeeded in slipped a bit further down the mound. Now he was clinging to a steeper part of the slope.
‘Well we don’t need to worry about the Misfits tomorrow, they’re....’
Mervyn finally lost his grip and slid down the mound, his fingers squealed horribly on the shiny floor as he went.
‘What’s that noise, Rufus?’
‘There’s someone down there. Get after them! Quick, don’t let them get away, they heard what we said.’
Feet pounded down the slope above him, but Mervyn had no intention of hanging around. He jumped to his feet and hobbled as fast as his cramped leg would allow him towards the door. Behind him De Monsero and Hidraba blundering around in the dark.
‘It came from down here.’
‘I can’t see anything, turn the lights on.’
‘No, no! The crew will see the lights from the flight deck. We don’t want them coming to investigate. Stand still and listen.’
Mervyn stopped, gritting his teeth against the pain in his leg. He stretched his leg out and the pain eased a bit. He breathed as shallowly as he could. Then he started to tiptoe towards the door on bare feet. As he neared the door it tagged his biolink for instructions.
‘The door! Someone’s tagged the door. This way!’
Mervyn fled as two pairs of booted feet charged toward him. The door opened and he leaped through into the darkened corridor. It would not stay dark for long though, his pur
suers would have no fears switching on these lights.
On impulse Mervyn doubled back to the door. He ripped open the emergency panel, grabbed the manual over-ride, and twisted it to the lock position. Two solid thumps on the other side provided his reward. That would keep them occupied for a while. By the time De Monsero and Hidraba managed to crank the doors open by hand he would be long gone. With any luck, the crew would come to investigate and catch the pair red-handed. Mervyn, meanwhile, returned to the apartment, and tried to work out how the Raiders planned to sabotage tomorrow’s race.