STOWAWAY TO THE STARS

The ship drifted down through the water. Larry breathed out deeply and flexed his left hand, stiff from gripping the stick for so long. He looked across at Karen, who stared in wide-eyed horror at the seawater outside.

“I’m sorry I startled you, Karen. I had to make a change of plan when I found we were headed for the wrong spaceport, and I didn’t get a chance to explain. We will be travelling underwater for a while.”

“But this is a spaceship.” She waved her arms frantically. “How can you go under water in a spaceship?”

“Under water, outer space. They are much the same. The hull is easily strong enough to withstand the pressure. We have air, and unlike Earth spaceships that are rocket-powered, there are no external components to flood with our gravity-wave drive. The big gamble is whether the Ziloni are able to detect us under water.”

“What do you mean? They could detect us thousands of kilometers out in space. Surely you’re not relying on them being unable to find us underwater?”

“That is exactly what I’m hoping. I don’t think the gravity-wave sensors will work under water, because air attenuates the signal substantially, so water should suppress it altogether. We will find out before long.”

“And what happens if you’re wrong?”

Larry shrugged. “I warned you it was dangerous.”

Karen opened her mouth for a moment, then closed her eyes and put her head in her hands.

After a few seconds she looked up again and breathed out slowly. “So, do we shut all the lights off and hold our breath?”

“No, I want to put as much distance as possible between us and where we went into the water. It will be swarming with flyers up there pretty soon, and they are likely to start bombing. But we have to go slowly at first or the turbulence might show up on the surface.” A shiver ran down his back, though it wasn’t cold. If they saw the slightest sign of his presence it didn’t bear thinking about.

He eased forward on his control stick, and the water streamed past the canopy. He angled downward until the light started fading, at which point he leveled off as well as he could.

“All this instrumentation, and I have no idea how deep we are.” He muttered as much to himself as to Karen. “All I can do is judge my depth from how much light there is.”

“How do you know what direction to go in?”

“I don’t care for the moment, all I want to do is get away from where we went in.”

“What about submarines? And won’t they be able to find us with sonar, or whatever you use instead?”

“I dare say they might have submarines, but I doubt there are any close by. Not many people use sea travel any more, the few boats around are for pleasure use. As for sonar, they will have the capability somewhere, but intra-planetary wars are more or less a thing of the past. I don’t expect there are any warships equipped with sonar that they can deploy right away.”

Karen snorted. “I can’t believe it. They have all this fantastic technology, but they can’t lay their hands on simple Earth technology like sonar.”

“It’s not so unbelievable if you think about it. To give you an analogy, suppose your army suddenly needed bows and arrows. They could obtain them eventually, no problem. But they are not standard equipment so it would take a while. By then we shall be gone, I hope.”

For the next five minutes he watched the viewscreen closely. Any traces he saw would be bad news. If he could see the flyers that must be converging on him by now, they would be able to see him.

The screen stayed empty, but a sudden heavy thud interrupted the peace of their journey. Almost at once came another, much louder, and the ship shook slightly.

“Larry, please tell me that Zilon has fish that make booming noises.” Karen’s voice had a brittle edge. She took one look at his face and gave a groan. “Oh God, they’re depth charges, aren’t they?”

“I doubt it.” He corrected her without thinking. “I expect they are using bombs with delayed action fuses, which will amount to much the same thing.”

More explosions followed, with increasing frequency. Some were loud, others were quieter. Every now and again a really loud one rocked the ship. They were using so many. It would only take one close by to open up the ship like a sardine can.

A sequence of explosions started to increase steadily in volume. It sounded as if they were being pursued, and Larry decided to change course.

Boom! The loudest explosion yet caused the ship to lurch violently. “That was close.” Karen’s voice was shaky. She reached across the aisle and gripped Larry’s hand. He tensed and held his breath – where would the next one land?

The next explosion was just about the same intensity, and the ship rocked again. Karen squeezed more tightly, her nails digging into his palms. Neither of them spoke, but he breathed more easily when the next one seemed to be further away.

Soon a pattern emerged. The booms faded, then got louder, then faded again. But the close ones came much less often, and Karen’s grip eased. Slowly, the thuds faded to a background noise, and she abruptly pulled her hand away.

Larry gave her an encouraging smile. “I think we have eluded them. I saw no traces on the viewscreen, and it’s pretty clear they were not able to see us either.”

“What happens next?”

“I will give it another ten minutes, which should see us well clear. After that we can put on a bit more speed.”

“Where are we going?”

“Unfortunately the liner was not headed for the spaceport I had expected. I had hoped we would be headed for Zirtar, which is their capital city, but instead they were going to Zadeg, which is on the wrong continent. We shall have to crawl all the way across this ocean.”

“Crawl? You said we were going to pick up speed. How long will that take?”

“A long while, unfortunately. It’s about three thousand kilometers – I will check the maps in a minute. I don’t know exactly how fast we can go under water. I knew it was possible because one of the other guys in the IEP had to think fast and go underwater to evade the locals during an exploration. It turned out they had more advanced technology than he thought. But he never mentioned how fast he could go.”

Larry stopped and pulled at his ear for a moment. “This ship is not very efficient hydrodynamically, so my guess is that it will only travel smoothly at between twenty and thirty kilometers an hour. That will take forever, so I shall have to use the power of the ship’s motor to ram it through the water much faster. It will cause a mass of turbulence, which is why I dare not do it yet, while there could still be flyers in the vicinity. I’m hoping we might make between eighty and a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour. If I’m right, it should take us between twenty and forty hours to get there.”

“Oh, I see. We’re talking days, not hours, then. That gives them lots of time to track us down, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so. Fortunately, oceans are big, and they have no idea where we are going. The sheer size of our hiding place will be an advantage.”

It was time to think about making a move. “Let us hope we are far enough away from any search now that we can risk making some turbulence. It’s time to work out our course and get a move on.”

Larry got out one of the maps he’d brought from Hideaway and laid it out on the top of the instrument panel. “This is Zadeg, where the liner was headed. I think we must have ditched about here, more or less due west of Zadeg, about thirty kilometers off the coast. This is the base we are aiming for.” It helped to talk his plans over with Karen to clarify them in his own mind. He drew the track they needed to take across the ocean and compared it to the graduations on the map. “That is a heading of four point nine radians. We should be able to make landfall in this small river estuary. It’s isolated and heavily wooded, so we won’t be seen.

“Our first problem is navigation. Spaceships use radio beams to home in on spaceports, which is not much use to us here. We shall have to go back to mankind’s first navigational tool, a magnetic compass.”

“Are you telling me your spaceship’s equipped with a compass? I’d have thought that would be about as much use in a spaceship as turn indicators.”

Larry grinned. He’d just dumped this girl underwater after a hair-raising descent behind the spaceliner, and she still had enough spirit to give him snappy answers.

“No, but I have one in my equipment. That is another benefit of being an IEP ship. We have compasses, because they are occasionally needed for navigation on primitive planets.”

Karen looked at him. “I hope you know what you’re doing. It all sounds a bit far-fetched to me, that you can cross an ocean with nothing but a compass and find a river estuary on the other side.”

Larry put out his hand and squeezed her arm. “Trust me.”

“Well I hope you’re not going to ask me to map read,” she said.

Larry laughed. “Not this trip, Karen.”

He eased the thrust control forward, building up speed, and they set off on their long journey under the ocean. The ship’s motor could provide five million pounds of thrust. It turned out that he needed to use most of that sheer brute force to bludgeon the ship through the water. At the high speed they were travelling, the viscosity of the water made it almost like a solid. It occurred to him that such a long journey at high power might use up all his fuel, but a quick calculation satisfied him that it would use less than a quarter of the contents of his fuel capsule.

The highest speed he could reach turned out to be about a hundred and thirty kilometers an hour. Above that, cavitation in the water spread so far forward over the canopy that it became impossible to see where they were going. That speed would give them at least twenty five hours travelling.

Larry kept the ship as deep as he could while still having enough light to see by. He could imagine the turbulent maelstrom being created in the ship’s wake. Even travelling at this depth, he would be leaving a trail on the surface easy enough for the Ziloni to spot, if someone was looking in the right direction. Their only hope was that it would be, quite literally, a spit in the ocean, and the Ziloni would have no idea where he was going.

****

Karen found it a strange journey, surging through the murky water. The light from above filtered down to give a greenish tint to the view. The turbulence they were creating produced an opaque white churning mass of bubbles across the rearward part of the canopy. The leading edge of the bubbles danced around in front of their eyes, leaving just enough clear canopy to see forward. Not that there was much to see, other than odd pieces of flotsam that flashed past too quickly to guess at what they were.

Suddenly the view ahead turned dark. The next moment she was flung forward. She just managed to catch hold of the edge of the instrument panel to avoid crashing into the canopy. Had they run into something?

“Are you all right?” Larry looked at her anxiously.

She nodded. “What happened? Is the ship all right?”

“Yes. I’m sorry. I had to slam us into reverse to avoid hitting whatever that is ahead, and I didn’t have time to warn you. I will switch the gravity compensator back on in case it happens again. There is no danger provided we keep a good look out, because with the power of our motor we can stop within a few meters.”

He eased the ship slowly forward. The darkness transformed into rocks and weeds of the sea bed, rising steeply from the depths.

Larry said, “It looks like the shallows of an island, or maybe a reef. I’m not going up to find out. We shall have to work our way round it.”

They skirted round the side of the rise. It took ten minutes before it petered out and they were able to resume course. After that they both kept a sharp lookout for more obstructions. Occasionally they heard a bang as a fish or a piece of debris bumped into the hull. The first one startled Karen, but Larry reminded her that the hull was heavily reinforced to withstand small meteor impacts. The only thing likely to cause damage was running into rocks.

Once they were settled into a routine, Larry said, “To pass the time, I think it would be useful if you improve your command of Universal. The language translator will have given you a good vocabulary, but it does not fully cover grammatical differences, so you need to practice speaking. Why don’t you tell me all about yourself in Universal? Do you have any hobbies or play any sports?”

Karen collected her thoughts and tried to think in the strange new language that was in her head.

“Well I enjoy aerobics and keeping fit and I have always played a lot of sports, including tennis, hockey and baseball for local teams.”

“I didn’t know women played baseball too.”

“Women play everything that men play,” she retorted.

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry. Tell me more about you. Boyfriends?”

“Some, but no one special at the moment. I was always busy, and though I have been out with several guys, it never worked out.”

“So what do you do for a job?”

Karen explained that she had fancied an active career in the armed forces, but in the end had not wanted to leave home, and she had drifted into office administration. She now worked for a Sports Foundation.

Larry moved on with more questions, about her parents, her home town, and her experiences growing up.

As they chatted, Karen frequently stumbled over the Universal words. There were many interruptions as Larry explained the right way to say something, or there was no word that had the exact meaning that Karen wanted. All the time they took it in turns to keep their eyes on the green water streaming past the canopy at a hundred and thirty kilometers an hour, watching for any obstructions.

When she finished telling Larry about her background, he said, “Maybe you’d like to tell me what happened to your sister, if it’s not too painful.”

Slowly and hesitantly she explained all the details of Rachel’s death, and how she had vowed to track down Rachel’s boyfriend, the man she believed was involved in the tragedy.

“That was why I started spending my weekends disguised as Rachel, going to places where I thought they had been together. I wanted to try and surprise him by seeing Rachel come back to haunt him. Instead I managed to surprise you, and end up in this mess!”

“I’m really sorry that you got dragged into this.”

Karen gave a weak laugh. “It was scarcely your fault. You did not ask me to stow away. Mom and Dad have warned me about doing things without thinking, and this time I played a real blinder. But I am grateful you sent that message to your friend. At least now, whatever happens, they will find out what happened to me eventually.”

“If we do get through this, I meant what I said. I’ll help you track down the man you were looking for.”

For a little while they were both quiet. Larry stared intently through the canopy and juggled with his speed control, making the churning bubbles creep forward and back over their view.

Karen thoughts turned back to her parents. She always saw them at least once a week, so when she didn’t turn up they were certain to be alarmed. That is, if they weren’t contacted by her boss before that when she didn’t turn up for work.

Even then they wouldn’t realize just how much trouble she was in now. She had a suicidal break-in to a Ziloni military base to look forward to – that was if she even survived this underwater trip. The Ziloni were desperately searching for them up above. Would they spot the tell-tale signs of their turbulent passage? If so, what would be the first sign? Probably more bombs, this time aimed directly at them. Would it be quick, or would they be drowned by the water rushing in?

She felt suddenly overwhelmed by her situation, combined with reliving the memory of what had happened to Rachel. She squeezed her eyes shut as if it would help to blank out the memories. Oh come on Karen, stop feeling sorry for yourself. At least you’re still here and you’ve survived the first stage.

She ought to break the silence. “What about you?” she asked. “Tell me what life is like on other planets. Where do you live, for example?”

“I grew up in the city of Greti, which is the largest city on Central.”

“Central? Is that a planet? It sounds like an odd name for a planet.”

“That’s because it was uninhabited before the Galactic Union decided to make it their main administrative centre. Rather than single out an existing planet, which would have caused resentment from all the others, they decided it would be more diplomatic to start from scratch.”

He went on to describe life on Central. His father was a minor government official in the administration. His family had expected him to follow suit, just as his good friend Ket did. However, he had always been fascinated with space travel, and as soon as he could, he joined the Interstellar Exploration Program. The one drawback of the job was that he spent weeks, if not months, on each exploration, and never had a settled home life.

Karen threw back at him the same question he’d asked earlier. “How did your girlfriends like that?”

“Not very much at all. I’ve had plenty of girl friends – being a space explorer, even in the Union, is a glamorous job. But none of those relationships ever survived an exploration trip. I suppose I realized my lifestyle wasn’t cut out for a steady girlfriend, so I never looked for a long term relationship. Whereas Ket took a shine to my younger sister, and now they are very happy together.”

Another obstruction loomed out of the green sea, but this time Larry was ready for it, and the gravity compensator stopped them getting thrown about. It showed up clearly as a small peak in the seabed, not even a proper island. But beyond it were many more. They spent half an hour weaving through shallow water until they were clear and able to speed up.

As soon as they were under way again, Karen had more questions for Larry. She was getting into the swing of speaking in Universal, and listening to the way he spoke the words and expressed things. When at last they had exhausted the details of each other’s background, she had other things she’d been wondering about.

“You remember I told you I had read a magazine article that said you could not travel faster than the speed of light? It also said that if you did, it generated paradoxes or time travel or something?”

“Wow, that was quite a technical article.”

“Oh, I did not read all the technical stuff. I just . . .” she broke off, seeing his broad grin. “Oh, you are teasing me, aren’t you?”

“No – well, maybe a little bit. I’m sorry. The fact is, to achieve time travel you need stations that are far apart, travelling at near-light speeds, and you have to travel between them faster than light.”

“Hmm, that sounds pretty complicated.”

“Yes, you have to work hard to achieve time travel. If you want to understand how it causes time travel you have to make coordinate transformations in space-time for the two stations.”

Karen’s eyes widened. “But you really can do it?” Who cared whether it meant making coordinate transformations?

“No, I’m afraid not. It requires true faster than light travel to break causality and –”

“I’m sorry,” interrupted Karen. “What has casualty got to do with it?”

“I beg your pardon, breaking causality – not casualty – means reversing cause and effect. In other words, time travel. Hyperspace travel is not faster than light travel. It’s travelling in higher dimensions, which include time. In effect, if you try and do that trick of travelling at near-light speeds, you travel forward through time as well when you make a hyperspace jump. Nature is pretty good at stopping the things that break fundamental laws of physics, like perpetual motion machines and time travel.”

That almost made sense, though she still didn’t understand how you got time travel if you could go faster than light. She stared out of the canopy for a few moments. The sea was clearer now. The surface was visible far above them, while below the bottom appeared from time to time, covered in weed and rocks.

“How do you know so much about science, when you are an interstellar explorer?” she asked curiously.

“It’s an essential part of the job. We have a lot of training. Self-defense, weapons training, how to cover up our presence and keep a low profile, and where to look to get information on the state of science and technology. That’s where our knowledge of science theory comes in.”

Larry was easy to talk to and the time passed quickly. The conversation ranged over all sorts of topics. She was getting to know him well, but there was one subject that they never seemed to touch on. Eventually she could contain her curiosity no longer.

“Larry, how did you come to be a fugitive from the Ziloni?”

His face clouded and he turned away. For a moment she thought she had over-stepped the mark.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I did not mean to pry. It just –”

“No, it’s not your fault. I ought to explain.”

He glanced at her for a moment, before returning his gaze to the water rushing past. He took a deep breath and began.

“It all started during a standard IEP visit that I was making to Trajia. Their state of development would have corresponded to, let me see, maybe the beginning of the twentieth century on Earth. Because Trajia was a world that had an enlightened attitude to women, I took a new woman agent with me to supervise her on her first full mission.”

Once he had started, the whole story of his exploits and Annek’s death came tumbling out.