Chapter 39: Running and Hiding
The nursery was, in reality, just an expansion of the educational system. It was conceived as a replacement for dysfunctional family units. At first, it was a volunteer system and billed as prestigious. You could send your child to a nursery, but this had to be done before the child’s first birthday. Children would be raised in the nursery and all decisions about their direction in life would be made by the state. At first, parents could see and visit their children, as long as there were no lasting emotional repercussions. It soon became obvious that most parents would rather live their lives without the burden of child rearing. Those persons to whom having and raising children was critical to their happiness could choose to work in the nursery.
Jayne dreamed. She was six years old again. She was in the nursery. She was hiding from the matron. She had saved some of her morning meal and was nibbling a small piece of breakfast bar. Someone was calling her name. The voice was soft and warm at first but it soon became loud and sharp. The matron was calling for her. She became still hoping to remain undiscovered but the matron drew closer. Suddenly a large hand reached to where she was hiding and grabbed her by the collar. Jayne startled awake.
She did not remember where she was. Her legs were cramping. Suddenly it all rushed back and she jumped to her feet and looked furtively around. She was still all alone. It was morning in the biome but she was still in the shadow of the rocks that formed the small canyon. The light was racing in on the western floor as the sun rose in the east. She was thirsty and walked to the floater. There would be water in the survival pouch and maybe some food of sorts. She drank water from a flexible container and chewed on a sweetened bar of nuts and dried fruit. She stopped chewing at the sound of a floater. It was still distant. She had not sensed any danger from the intruding floater but was cautious all the same. She peeked furtively out from behind the large boulders and watched a small scout floater nosing its way toward the canyon opening. It was a drone and floated only a few cm from the ground. Jayne grabbed a large rock from the pile at the base of the boulder. She waited as the scout floater gradually neared the opening.
As it passed through, Jayne raised the rock and smashed it to the ground. She could see one of the scout cameras begin to rotate upwards to capture the visage of its assailant. She raised the rock again and smashed the camera to mush. She continued smashing until there were no parts intact. Even the small power source was smoking.
“They have found me,” thought Jayne. “They will be coming soon.” With a flood of adrenalin she pushed the mind bubble up and over her entire being. The possibilities percolated out of the moment and the moments to follow. None were useful. All the possibilities were equal; equally neutral and without potential. The field of time that she spread out before her was flat. The potential of any of the barely detectable possibilities was the same at every point. Nothing reared its head, except the uglies. This was Jayne’s word for those possibilities that could and would result in death. She chose to ignore these.
Jayne was about to collapse the bubble and move somewhere else and try again when she noticed the anomaly. It was a potential of a possibility and very noticeable once you detected it. Like a pit in the field of possibilities that went so deep you could not detect the bottom. Jayne looked. She could see nothing. There was no reason for its existence. It was simply a pit of nothingness.
Jayne snapped back and decided just to wait. Here was a situation that she could not see into and control. There was nothing she could do but wait. Waiting would provide something new so she waited.
During the passing hours, Jayne thought about her life as an adult. She had joined the fixers less than a year earlier. Before that, she was just a regular kid in the nursery. She did what all kids did. Jayne reflected on her own thoughts. Maybe she did not do what every other kid did. Maybe she had just thought that she was normal, when in fact, she wasn’t. Normal, that is. But she had done exactly what was expected of her. She studied her schoolwork and she played with the other kids. What else was there to do in the nursery? As far back as she could remember, she had spent all her time learning. Even when she played she had really been learning. She had learned games like GravBall. Everything she did was easy; was a matter of course, as if it had all been planned. One day, she decided to be a TechElecMech fixer so she wrote the test and passed. She was reflecting on what had given her the idea; what had inspired her to want to do what she did and how she became good at those things? Nothing was really clear as to the reason why she was who she was. A lot of the memories of when she was really young were not at all clear. She had no memory of her mother, not even a picture. All she had was the music box and what others told her. She had nothing of her own to remember about her mother. She had been told that her father was just a donor. ‘Justadonor’. She remembered a time in the playground GravBall tube.
“Hey, you are pretty good. Who is your father?” asked the big kid. “Did he teach you how to play GravBall? What is his name?”
“Justadonor,” she had replied automatically.
The big kid replied, “Justin Doner, never heard of him. He ever play in the pros?”
For the first time, Jayne listened to what she had said and realized that the words were not a name at all. Her father was just a sperm donor. At the time, she had flushed at her stupidity.
“Naw,” she responded, as she ran off. As an afterthought, she called back to the boy, “He was a great teacher, though.”
She giggled at the absurdity of it all. She was thirteen and she could not picture her mother, and her father was an unknown donor. She was Jayne Esther Wu and she was lucky and that is all that counted, except for getting out this situation alive.
There was no place to run. There was no place to hide. She sat on one of the flat rocks facing the opening between the boulders and waited. She had no time to get a weapon. She instinctively reached into the fixer pouch at her waist. She removed some twine, a small blade used for cutting insulation and some insulation patches. A few minutes later she had constructed her weapon of choice. She now had a functional sling. She spent some time practicing with some small stones. She gathered some evenly shaped ones and put them into her pouch. She wasn’t sure how effective the sling would be, but it might come in handy. Her thoughts were interrupted by a distant hiss of floaters. “They are coming,” she thought.
The sound of one floater became louder than the others. Suddenly it stopped, just outside the barrier of rocks in front of the canyon. On impulse, Jayne reached down and picked up a rock as big as her hand. She tossed it from hand to hand. “It is better than my little sling,” she thought, as she weighed it in her right hand and reached for another with her left. Just like one of the mini grav balls she had learned to play with when she was smaller. The heft was about right. She stood and waited.
A helmeted head peeked between the boulders that made the entrance to the canyon. Jayne tossed the rock and it shattered against the rock face right where the helmeted head had been, before it ducked out of sight.
“Hey, Wu! Lay off. It’s me!”
She heard the voice of Joseph Kane from behind the boulders.
“Joseph?” she queried.
“Yeah. It’s me,” he said, as he walked into the area and pulled his helmet off his head. “A bunch of security guys from Earth arrived and took over. They seem to know all about the secret tunnels and the explosions and the murders. They didn’t ask us who we were. They just ordered us to get floaters and to find the dangerous fugitive that’s been hiding out in Biome 7.”
“Dangerous fugitive!” Jayne said surprised.
“Yeah. And by that near miss with the rock, I’d say they are not too far off,” he said. He looked at the mark from the rock she had thrown, on the boulder beside him. “I said I would check out the area by the canyon because I knew it well. They let me and so here I am.” They both looked skyward as the sound of other floaters became louder and then faded. “What is the plan, oh dang
erous fugitive?”
“We should get out of here and get off this rock and hide somewhere else,” said Jayne.
“I know this is none of my business. I am great at following orders without really knowing the whys and the wherefores but, if you don’t mind me asking, what did you do to piss so many people off that they want you dead?” Joseph asked, as he led the way to the canyon opening.
“They don’t want me dead, but they will kill you to get to me,” she said. “As to what I did to deserve this, your guess is as good as mine. I suspect that they want me to…” she stopped and then continued, “experiment on. I think I am an experiment that ran away from them and now they want it back. Do you have a VID?”
Joseph reached into his pouch.
“Give it to me!” she ordered. She had had the presence of mind to carry a few of the entangled encryption tabs with her at all times. She slipped one into the side panel of the VID. “Now we wait for Poppy.”
“Who?” he asked.
“Greenway. He is our only hope of getting out of this,” she said and she absentmindedly kicked at the pieces of the smashed floater drone at her feet. Suddenly they heard the growl of a flier in the biome. That was totally against all protocols. Fliers could compromise biome integrity and yet security was using one to search for her. It flew overhead. They both pressed themselves into the boulders but it was too late. The flier sensors had spotted them. As the flier roar faded the whooshing sound of floaters swelled.
Jayne looked at Joseph’s VID in her hand. There was no response from Poppy. She peeked out from the boulders and saw three floaters land. The passengers were riding double. Six security personnel landed and fanned out in front of the opening to the canyon. They were armed.
Jayne felt the bubble form. It had been involuntary. The high stress of the impending danger took control. She tried to push it down; to control the formation, but it was too late. The bubble locked out the flow of time from Jayne’s consciousness. Everything slowed and the spikes of possibilities popped in and out of the stream. Most were uglies. These were people and she did not want to kill them. She scrambled from one possibility to the next in the hope she could find one that would work. A tiny and incredibly unlikely event zoomed to focus. She had all of the time in the world to analyze and caress it. Finally satisfied, she nudged it into being and pushed it forward. That was not enough. The probability of it occurring naturally was still infinitesimally small. She pushed harder. The last push did something she had never experienced before. She realized exactly what she was trying to do. She was not just focusing on the result. She wanted to move the boulders together. That was what she wanted to do. The result would be to give them more time; more time for Poppy to rescue them.
Instead of focusing on ‘getting more time’, she focused on blocking the space between the boulders. Suddenly, a myriad of new possibilities appeared, as if conjured out of the ether. Some of the less likely ones, like an asteroid quake bringing them together, were dismissed. She settled on using the rocks to block the entrance. She popped out of her mind bubble and looked at Joseph and pointed at the circle of flat rocks in the middle of the area. “How many of those rocks can you get over here to the opening?” she asked.
“In this gravity, I can run with them,” he said assuredly.
“I want to block this opening,” she said.
“They,” he gestured at the opening and the security men moving toward the opening between the boulders, “will simply blast them away.”
“I know, but it will take them some time and I plan to confuse them a little so it takes even longer,” she said, as she glanced at the now entangled and beeping VID in her hand. “Greenway’s initiated a connection.”
The VID beeped again. Joseph ran and carried large boulders to the opening.
Poppy’s face appeared.
Jayne spoke. “We are in trouble, Poppy. Can you get us out of here?” She saw his stern face.
He spoke. “You have to stall. My crew is 10 minutes out. And five from your location, once inside the biome. Can you hold them off?”
“I am going to try,” she said. “Hurry!”
Jayne picked up the stone she tossed at the wall and lobbed it over the rocks as far as she could. She heard it hit something on the other side and quickly glanced out. All six security personnel glanced in the direction of the noise and did not see her. Two of them moved to check it out. The other four were still moving towards the open passage between the boulders. The passage entered on an angle so you could not see directly in or out. It was narrow at its base and would allow only one person at a time to walk through. Jayne had seen this as an advantage in that she could probably stop them from entering. Joseph dropped the first rock in place and now both he and Jayne were running back and forth carrying rocks to fill the gap. The rocks were fairly large and soon the space between the boulders was filled up to Jayne’s shoulders. She had just dropped the last load when they heard voices from the other side.
“She has tried to block the opening,” a female voice spoke.
“Set a charge and blast it away,” said a commanding male voice.
“The girl must not be hurt in any way. You saw how adamant she was about that. I’m not blasting anything. You want to take that risk, you go ahead. I suggest that we just climb over the rocks,” a third voice said.
“OK, but since it was your suggestion, you go first,” the first male voice ordered.
“No problem,” the woman responded.
There was a rattle of boots climbing up the pile of rocks. “Take care. These rocks are very loosely placed. We could have pulled them out of the way.”
“Just because we cannot hurt her does not mean that she cannot hurt us. You heard the rumors about pulverized bodies. Well, I heard that this little girl was responsible for that,” said another voice.
The woman on the rocks took out her weapon and cocked it. “She is just a kid, a smart kid, but still a kid. I’ll use my stinger if I have to,” she said with assurance.
Jayne winced. She looked at Joseph and whispered, “Greenway will be here soon. He will get us out of this. We just have to hold them off a little longer.”
They both backed away from the opening and moved to the side with their backs to the boulders. Joseph picked up a throwing rock and then another. Jayne loaded her makeshift sling. She swung it gently in her hand and bit her lip as she waited. A sense of impending danger swelled inside her. There was no bubble, only a strong sense that something was about to happen. Something bad. There was no focus, just a pressure that filled her with dread. Jayne looked furtively around. She could hear the security woman about to step into view. The swell of danger was almost incapacitating. Jayne saw the woman’s head poke out from the opening in the rock and then disappear. The security woman’s head was at least two and half metres from the ground, standing on the pile of rocks that Joseph and Jayne had moved to fill the space. Jayne and Joseph both stepped away from the boulder. Joseph raised his hand ready to throw a rock. Jayne started to twirl the sling faster. The woman poked her head out again. Then all hell broke loose.
There was a sudden suction of air from behind them. The stones flew. Joseph’s rock went high and slightly wide. The woman ducked but some rock splinters splashed into her face. Her support hand, holding onto the rock wall, released. The woman slipped and she would have caught her balance, except that Jayne’s sling was true. The stone hit the woman on her cheek just below her eye. Blood spurted and she slipped and fell. Her weapon fired as she hit the ground. Joseph collapsed in heap. Jayne watched him fall and screamed his name.
Behind him, she could see an opening at the base of the sheer wall that supported the dome, with stairs leading down to the underworld of the asteroid. The air was filled with dust from the change in pressure and out of the dust came at least a dozen soldiers dressed in pressure armor, carrying weapons. They fanned out around Jayne, who was now kneeling beside Joseph. Jayne reached down and touched his neck. She could not
find a pulse. Beneath his jawbone she saw a neat red dot that could have been painted under his chin. The needle hole. She saw the blood spread out in a red bloom around his head. She lifted his head in the hope she could stop the bleeding but when she looked, there was only more blood. He had fallen on a sharp shard of rock. It had pierced the base of his skull. She swept the sharp rock aside with her hand and set his head gently down. His eyes were closed and his mouth was frozen in the smile that had crept over his face when he saw the woman fall. His last thought must have been, “I got her!”
At least that is what Jayne chose to believe. Joseph was dead. He died trying to save her.
The tears welled up in her eyes. “You bastards!” she hissed.
Jayne looked up. Her sense of danger was now going critical. This was not Poppy’s rescue team. This was THEM and they would pay. The bubble started to form in her head but, before she could find and push a possibility of escape into being, she felt a sting on her neck. The bubble shattered into nothingness and Jayne fell unconscious on top of Joseph.