The Hatch

Prologue

Prologue

Feathers—slick, black, twitchy then still. Eyes—unmoving, piercing, with a stare as sharp as its beak. The crow…

Not the symbol she wants to see, though it is the one in her mind and horribly she knows it does not symbolise magic, or mystery, or change of life; it speaks to her of death.

We’re not going to survive this.

Amelia Tate breathes in and rubs her lips together. She is on a spaceship, minutes away from making a jump through a Hatch.

The crow’s eyes turn red, its feathers transform into tattoos. Mandon! Of course! He wants the weapon and will kill them for it. His security forces are waiting for them on the other side of the jump.

Damn. Why hadn’t she seen all this before? Is it too late?

Urgency breaks her connection. She has to stop her crew from making the jump. Eyes open, she slaps her cheeks, trying to fling off her meditative state.

Secured tight in her seat like the rest of her small crew, she takes in the view out the front display screen and observes their rapid approach to the massive, cylindrical Hatch; rotating, charging, waiting…

The central computer announces, ‘Two minutes to Hatch entry.’

Their ship shakes. Peering to the right she observes androids busy at the ship’s controls and knows instinctively they are taking the ship to him, to Mandon. They are with him. They will take them through the Hatch, transcending time and space, to deliver them into his hands. Programmed by the World Council, the droids were always going to betray them at this moment. If they were human, she perhaps would have telepathically picked up on their plans much sooner.

At least, her foresight has granted them this last-minute warning. The immediate future is always easiest to see.

She swipes at a sensor near her waist and the seat’s locking mechanism releases, lifting the frame. Her crew members look to her and she swiftly lifts a finger to her lips, begging them with her eyes and the gesture to remain silent.

Squatting, she reaches beneath her seat and slides out two Apexa guns.

‘What?’ Shanen lets slip. She casts a scathing look at her first officer, but the androids have been alerted. They turn.

‘Tate. Return to your seat. Hatch entry is in ninety seconds…’

She fires a white, hot stream at the android that spoke. Its fabricated skin melts away, leaving a metallic chrome mould of its face and neck beneath its now lopsided helmet. She fires a second stream at it, burning out its central control system. The other two make a grab for their weapons affixed to their waist belts.

‘Don’t,’ she screams at them, waving both guns with trembling hands. She is outnumbered.

‘Captain! What are you doing?’ Shanen yells. ‘The Hatch…’

The ship is vibrating so violently, Amelia can hardly hold her stance. Sweat has the guns sliding in her hands. She grips tighter.

‘Mandon’s turned against us. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it,’ she cries desperately. ‘We go through the Hatch, we’re all dead.’

One of the androids tilts its head. ‘Coordinates for the jump are set.’ It smiles. ‘One minute to Hatch entry.’

‘Is she telling the truth?’ Shanen asks of the grinning, bald android. ‘Mandon will kill us?’ Her first officer can’t take this in. In the past, her prophecies have proven accurate, but he had put those outcomes down to lucky guesswork or coincidences. He has always been more in line with the doubters when it came to the psychic arts. In this case, the World Council is the sponsor of their mission. He can’t imagine why they would turn on them. They’ve succeeded in bringing back the weapon. It doesn’t make any sense. Needing more evidence, he wastes precious seconds in seeking it.

‘Will Mandon kill us?’ Shanen yells at the android.

Compelled to answer a direct question, it replies, ‘Yes.’

Amelia shoots at the android and watches its face melt away. The last remaining android fires its gun. Knowing which way to leap, she throws her body clear of its stream, while Veenan, the ship’s engineer and the youngest member of their crew, has already freed himself of his restraints and wrenched out a weapon. He returns fire.

Within seconds, all three androids are destroyed, left smouldering in their seats.

Amelia hurries to the controls.

‘What are we going to do?’ Shanen asks, gripping the back of his seat to hold steady against the ship’s shuddering. ‘Choose another human settlement?’

‘They are all run by World Council security.’

‘Go back to Nattalia?’

‘They’ll hand us over. They only let us leave because they knew the androids were delivering us directly to Mandon.’

‘Thirty seconds to entry.’

‘I know of another Hatch,’ Amelia says. ‘Not man-made, near no human settlement.’

‘What?’

She looks to the others and takes in their shocked expressions. ‘It’s a long way out,’ she tells them.

‘How far?’ Veenan queries.

‘Far.’

Shanen’s head is shaking. ‘Not man-made?’

‘Whatever made it, are they friendly?’ Veenan asks.

‘Yes.’

Amelia looks to the controls and speaks into the computer. ‘Jedder, set the coordinates for Parsec Zeta, three-one-two-zero, dash, five-five-six-three-nine.’

Shanen’s eyes are bulging. ‘What! Why that… that would have to be billions of light years away! Are you sure?’

‘Yes. I’ve seen the red Hatch.’

‘Seen it? As in one of your dreams?’ Shanen has never openly derided her prophetic abilities before, but this is different. He can’t let that nonsense cast them into the far reaches of space, well beyond the map of human knowledge. Based on what? Some notion of a red gateway that can’t possibly exist.

The Jedder computer informs them, ‘Coordinates set. Ten, nine, eight…’

Amelia hasn’t got time to argue with doubters. She had known he was sceptical; had always sensed it. Fortunately, she is the captain and it’s her call that counts. ‘Get back to your seat,’ she shouts at the young engineer while clambering back to her own. Veenan slams his body in and their restraints lock against their chests as the brutal shaking begins.

Shanen, seeing it’s too late to alter course, looks as though he’s staring death in the face. Amelia closes her eyes against his fear and bites down on a mouthguard, hanging from a cord before her. It’s not her first time through a Hatch, but this jump will definitely be the biggest and the riskiest.

There are several long seconds of remorseless shaking, then it’s over.

They are through.

All is calm and quiet.

Amelia’s heart pumps hard, feeding her trepidation. She is coated in sweat. What has she done? Where has she sent them? If only she had had more time to think. But there was nowhere else to go. Mandon had them. He had had years to prepare for their capture and they had only two minutes to plan their escape. Two minutes and they are now forty-five billion light years away from their home planet of Earth. Oh, what have I done? she thinks.

‘Look,’ Shanen calls. ‘It’s flashing.’

Amelia opens her eyes and sees a blinking three-dimensional blip on the hologram receptor. Her crew are out of their seats and at the controls.

Shanen points. ‘We’ve picked up a Hatch. It’s pinging a signal at us. We just have to lock on.’

Amelia takes a shaky breath, hardly able to believe it herself.

‘You were right,’ the youthful Veenan says, letting loose with a laugh of relief.

‘There’s really a Hatch?’

‘You had doubt?’ Zantha, their onboard medic, throws her a critical sidelong glance. ‘You brought us this far out on a hunch?’

‘Wait. We have a problem,’ their heavily bearded pilot, Rogan, butts in. He is manically swiping at screens. ‘I don’t understand. No.’

‘What is it?’ Amelia asks, swiping her seat’s release.

‘We’ve got major disturbances in this sector; gravitational anomalies, a pull. We’re being drawn in.’

‘Into what?’

Amelia and her crew look out the viewing screen. They see an expansive black field, like a giant has swiped out a large scoop of stars. The chilling darkness spreads across most of their view. They all feel it; a humming, but not the low humming of the Hatch. This is different, visceral, more intense and all pervading, like it's playing in their bones.

‘What’s that?’ Veenan asks. ‘Some kind of black hole?’

‘Not a black hole,’ Rogan says. ‘But I don’t know what it is. Look at the readings. Never seen anything like it. It’s indicating the space-time continuum is extremely unstable.’

Amelia scans their instruments. ‘Doesn’t make any sense.’ She feels the first twinges of alarm. ‘Pull away. Just move it. Engage primary drive. Get us out of here. Punch it, Rogan. Punch it. Now!’

The thrusters fire up. There’s the familiar low frequency resonance as the huge primary drive engages and ramps up to full power. Even though the anti-gravity buffers are working overtime to stop them from feeling the massive G-forces, Amelia and her crew are tossed off their feet and sent tumbling around the cabin. They are left scrabbling for a hold.

‘We’re not going anywhere,’ Rogan says. ‘If anything, we’re slipping back.’

‘Engage secondary drive.’

Rogan glances at Amelia. ‘Captain, you know that’s dangerous with the primary going.’

‘Do it.’

The control panel starts to fuse and there is the unmistakable smell of electrical burnout. Rogan follows her command and scrambles to hit the right combination. The ship shudders.

‘It’s working. We’re making headway.’

Amelia nods, well pleased, but aware they are still a long way from safety. After a minute, inevitably, the secondary drive gives out, but it has bought them their escape. They are removed from the influence of the mysterious void.

‘Bring primary drive down to nominal levels,’ Amelia orders. ‘Keep us going positive.’

They hear the drive power down to a less frantic burn.

Amelia looks to their pilot. ‘What’s the status? How did we fare?’

Rogan won’t answer. He strokes at his beard while assessing the instruments.

Amelia sees a slight tremble in his hand. ‘What is it? Tell me.’

He can’t meet her eyes. ‘It’s fried. We’ve suffered critical damage to our operational controls. The circuitry’s been fused on a lot of our sub-systems. Can’t tell you in detail yet, but it’s bad. Put it this way, we’re not up to any kind of Hatch jump.’

There is a long silence as this shocking realisation sets in. Without a Hatch jump or any human settlement for billions of light years…

‘You mean we’re stuck out here?’ Veenan pipes up, suddenly sounding much younger than his twenty-one years.

‘Can it be fixed?’ Shanen asks.

Rogan doesn’t want to give false hope, but he doesn’t want to be the one writing their funeral notices either. ‘Like I said, it’s bad. I don’t know, I have to do a full assessment. On the face of it, I don’t think so.’

‘What are we going to do?’ Veenan appeals to his captain.

Amelia absorbs the situation and, given the tension around her, struggles to find her usual calm. She is reeling from a full appreciation of the devastating consequences of their mission failure, not to mention the personal consequences of never going home, never seeing her children or husband again. She shakes her head. They have no spare parts for repairs, no capacity for communication, no way of signalling for help… Signalling! There is one way. She can communicate telepathically. She thinks of her eldest son, Jem.

‘I will get a message to my son,’ she tells her distressed crew. ‘Tell him where we are, our status, and that we have the weapon. I’ll advise him to inform the head of EASA, Treesa Breenswick. She alone can be trusted and will know what to do. Our mission can’t and won’t end here.’

The crew members fidget, shuffle, avert their eyes; they are not convinced. They know she can communicate through other planes, but they doubt she can make meaningful and detailed communications with her son on Earth, forty-five billion light years away. They wonder at the speed of thought, not appreciating the concept that there is no space or time on the other side.

‘How old is your son?’ Shanen asks.

Amelia tries not to hesitate, though she knows her answer will not do anything to allay fears. ‘He’s fourteen.’

‘You’re trusting our planet-saving mission and our lives to telepathic communications with a young adolescent across an unfathomable distance?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t think—’

‘You have an alternative plan, Officer? Any of you? If you do, let’s hear it. We sure could do with another solution. Anything?’

‘You shouldn’t have brought us…’ Shanen starts, taking an accusatory tone.

‘But I did,’ Amelia says. ‘If I hadn’t, we’d all be dead right now. Mandon’s security forces would have taken the weapon and believe me, with what we know, we would not have been allowed to just walk away.’ She sees that they get this. ‘It was a risk, but we’re alive, we’ve taken no injuries, we still have the weapon, and we’ve still got time.’

‘But we’ve mashed our ship!’ Shanen cries. ‘We’re on the edge of whatever that void is. Who knows what’s out there? Do you? Do you really know everything? I mean, what’s a Hatch doing out here and what built it and why?’

‘Check your stress, Officer, and know your place.’ Her words are as sharp as a slap.

With clenched jaw, he murmurs through tight lips, ‘Apologies, Captain. Of course, we are safe in your hands.’

His sarcasm bites at her but she chooses not to react. ‘I will contact my son and help will come. We can survive a long time in hibernation.’

‘What if you can’t contact him?’ Veenan puts in. ‘Your son?’

‘Then I’ll try to contact someone else or something.’

‘Something?’

‘That’s right.’

She sees their faces. They are drawing on shock as a numbing agent to help ward off debilitating fear. She expects at least one question, but none come.

‘This rescue may take some time. I support going into hibernation,’ their medic states.

They are uneasy. Hibernation will render them vulnerable. They would rather stay conscious and hug their weapons.

‘We will do what we have to when we have to,’ she says, her voice husky with strain. ‘Now excuse me. I’ve got a call to make.’

She leaves the cabin in search of a quiet space, determined to meditate for as long as it takes to reach Jem.