Overdrive (2 page)

Perry was
screaming.  The saber tooth was slowly dragging him back into the undergrowth.
Rupert was yelling at the top of his lungs, his rifle dropped in shock and
lying forgotten at his feet. Felix too must have also gone into shock.  He
couldn’t break his gaze away from that of the Saber tooth's. Another
disturbance in the undergrowth, this time on Felix’s other side. He turned his
head slowly and saw his uncle Manfred sighting the cat with his plasma rifle.
The saber tooth hedged one way and then the other and then finally shot back
the other way just as Manfred pulled the trigger. The resulting blast took
Perry’s head off, simultaneously separating the Saber tooth from half its face
and a leg.

The autopsy
revealed that Perry would have died from blood loss anyway. Hardly comforting
for Manfred, who surprisingly was never invited on a group hunt again.

All this went
through Felix’s mind as he stood, frozen in shock , looking at the headless
corpse slumped against the corridor of Nebula Inc. Some time passed, Felix
couldn’t be sure how long but eventually he started to take stock. Recognizing
the corpse could be difficult. Without a head and therefore an AI to direct it,
the coverall had reverted back to formless grey. The bodies build and the
slight tuft of chest hair poking over the top of the coverall suggested Luke,
one of the design engineers, but Felix couldn’t be sure.

He slowly walked
down the corridor and into the open plan work space. The office was a write
off. Smashed Plexiglas was everywhere littered amongst overturned desks and
more bodies. Felix recognized Grace and Brian lying together like sleeping
lovers, both with plasma burns covering their bodies. One of their earlier
prototypes of the Overdrive lay next to them, looking like it had been on the
receiving end of a good kicking. Stunned, Felix continued his tour, spotting
Tomas’ corpse lying face down amidst Plexiglas. Looked like Tom had done a
runner and got shot through the back. At least they all died quickly, he
thought, unlike the next body he discovered. Marie had been tortured by the
looks of things. Charred burn marks covered her body, one eye had been burned
out and her mouth was open in a frozen scream.

How do you cope
when finding the burned and broken bodies of your friends and colleagues of
five years? Felix reacted admirably, first panicking, then sitting down where
he buried his head in his hands and had a good cry. In retrospect, it probably
wasn’t the best move. Whoever had done this, could come back at any time and
would no doubt be looking for him. He sat up, wiped his eyes and attempted some
form of regrouping. His AI, disturbed at his emotional and physical readouts,
suggested he apply a sedative. He told it to stick its suggestions up its arse.
His AI contemplated this for a nanosecond, realized that it was being rebuffed
and decided to sulk.

Death. Carnage.
Gratuitous trashing of the office. Could only mean one thing. They were after
the Overdrive.

Eight hundred
years ago, a vastly overpopulated and polluted earth had finally developed the
two technologies required for successful exploration and colonization of the
galaxy – Anti gravity and a faster than light drive. Anti gravity enabled
humankind to transport the huge amount of materiel into orbit that a project of
this scope inevitably required. Conventional boosters didn’t come near to
cutting the mustard in terms of shear mass lifting power. The orbital
infrastructure alone was immense, not withstanding the amount of starships
required to realistically embark upon colonization of the stars. AG was a
technology that was hailed with almost religious fervor when it was introduced
early in the 22
^nd
century.

With no harmful
by-products and relatively cheap to produce, AG was freely accessible and
affordable. Almost overnight, Earth’s economy changed and governments were free
to devote more resources to solving the problem of traveling to the stars.
Twenty years went by before a viable solution became available. An eccentric
physicist by the name of Henry Biggles developed and tested a new method of
propulsion that enabled starships to generate powerful fields. These fields,
initially designed to protect conventional powered Sol system ships, had a
bizarre and totally unexpected side effect. Ships with modified fields could
now effectively “slip” into a new physicality or dimension, which appeared as a
grey “nospace," and travel over a period of days, weeks or months
(depending on the distance) to other star systems.

This was unanimously
voted as the most important technological breakthrough in the history of
humankind. Henry Biggles promptly retired, built himself a starship and
disappeared, never to be seen again and leaving humankind the attendant
problems inherent in the device. And there were problems. Existing within nospace
was another life form that had either discovered it before humankind or had
evolved in it. Basically ovoid, these creatures, imaginatively coined “Shiva,"
after the Hindu goddess of destruction, had numerous appendages, were vast and
seemingly very hungry. Some were over 5kms in length and after grasping a
starship in its “tentacles” would proceed to drain all the energy, not only
from the ship, but from all its human occupants. The few ships that had escaped
had reported that the Shiva would not respond to any form of conventional
communication and would seem to mindlessly home in on any form of energy
source. Once a certain route was discovered to have a Shiva guardian, (unfortunately
usually the quickest and most direct route between stars), no ship would risk
exposing itself to that danger again. So, apart from being sucked to death, the
benefits from this drive seemed to far outweigh the attendant dangers.

Before his
disappearance, Henry Biggles was adamant that the drive he invented be named
after him, which it was, but in practice no starship captain worth his or her
salt relished speaking the command “initiate the Biggles drive." For all
intents and purposes, and despite some legal proceedings, the Biggles drive
became the Slipdrive. Human colonization of the stars had begun.

Two hundred years
later, a religious group known as the Areopagite’s, harassed by various
planetary government’s for their widespread and extensive genetic manipulation
of their followers, established their own planet, Arabot, after the biblical
name for Seventh Heaven. The Areopagite’s, named after Dionysius the
Pseudo-Areopagite, a Syrian writer during the first century who wrote on the
hierarchy of angels, were convinced that humans had to establish their own
angels through genetic manipulation. And this they did. Widely successful in
their efforts, they soon attracted followers numbered in the billions, many
eager to be elevated to the status of Angel. Few were.

Angels were GE’d
to be smarter, taller, stronger, faster, live longer, and of course, to have
wings. They were reportedly pure of heart, body and mind, that is to say, they
didn’t get horribly drunk and fornicate like the rest of humanity. All angels
could create and manipulate energy fields to a certain degree. The Seraphim –
the highest order of angels in heaven, or in this case Arabot, could generate
fields capable of withstanding all but the most powerful energy weapons, and
could fire blasts of pure energy created from this shield energy matrix. All
angels of the second hierarchy or higher could also successfully navigate
through no-space – for some reason, the Shiva avoided them. In addition, all
Angels were able to survive in a vacuum which made them perfect spacefarers. All
this gave the Areopagite’s an effective monopoly on the trade routes that were
known to have Shiva guardians.

Nebula Inc had
spent the last 10 years developing a drive that could compete with the
Areopagite’s grip on dangerous trade routes, and with Felix’s input had made
leaping strides in the last 5 years. The Overdrive was the resulting product. A
drive that actually traveled above nospace, in a dimension that didn’t possess
any large, hostile and hungry predators and in half the time of the Slipdrive.
It would understandably revolutionize space travel.

Two weeks ago, the
drive had been successfully tested, completing a voyage in 3 days what would
have taken a Slipdrive powered ship up to a week. The Overdrive still had
inherent design flaws however. After returning to normal space, the drive had
overheated and fused, effectively destroying the only prototype possessed by
Nebula Inc. The last 2 weeks had been spent nailing this problem – one that
Felix and his team believed they had licked although it was yet to be tested. 

This information
had been relayed to Nebula’s executives (wherever and whoever they were) a few
days ago. Felix had no idea who really owned the company. He’d never met any of
the executives and all progress reports were coded and sent out directly from
Nebula’s central AI. Someone had obviously intercepted this information. The
only reason Felix suspected he was still alive was that he had left work early to go to the bar, ended up getting lucky with Simone and gone back to her apartment,
as opposed to his own, which no doubt would be trashed by now. Most of Nebula’s
employee’s were still completing the Beta testing on the Overdrive and hence
were working late when they got ambushed and fried.

Now the
frustrating thing for these would be technology thieves was that only the
Senior Design Engineer, being Felix, possessed the full specs for the
Overdrive. The progress reports to the executives contained basic technical
briefs and more information on what the drive did rather than how it did it.
The data stored in Felix’s AI could not be forcibly removed without corrupting
it. The reason they tortured Marie, thought Felix, was due to a misapprehension
on their behalf. They believed that by torturing one of them, another horrified
employee would volunteer the information. Sadly for them and for Marie, no
employee on site at the time possessed the information they required.

“Oh bollocks,"
he said aloud and then shut his eyes.

After pacing the
office and searching in vain for options, Felix queried Nebula Inc’s AI, found
that any recordings of last night’s murders had been wiped, and then queried it
again to see if it had any suggestions or possible options for an employee in
his situation. Nebula’s AI surprisingly responded by sending a code directly to
Felix’s AI, releasing information which hitherto he did not know existed, and
precisely for this eventuality. It provided sufficient funds, a new identity,
and a location for a rendezvous with a Nebula Inc executive. All he had to do
was get there.

Running low on
options and not willing to involve any of his friends, Felix decided to turn to
one person he knew was in a position to help him.

Using his AI, he
placed a Vidcall and a holographic representation of a bleary eyed woman
appeared under his left eyelid.

“Hi Simone.
Remember me?”

◊

“You’re fucking my
wife." It was a statement. That there was no question mark attached
indicated to whoever heard it that there was no doubt left. That little
sentence alone was enough to fill the average man with a sense of foreboding.
The fact that the man saying it held a large plasma cannon added a bit more
gravitas to the whole situation. The hand that held said plasma cannon was
shaking. The rest of the man connected to the weapon was quivering with barely
controlled rage and sweat was beading on his brow.

It was all very
disturbing for Captain Logan Alexander Pope. He knew the situation couldn’t
possibly get worse. It was hard to deny the man’s accusation when he was
sitting naked on the man’s bed. The wife in question was huddled in a corner
swaddled in bed sheets.

“Now, just calm
down Mr. Trollope and drop the gun. Its not what it looks like." It was
exactly what it looked like. He was, or had been up to a few moments ago,
fucking this man’s wife.

“Fuck you,"
said Mr. Trollope. “And fuck you too," he said, swiveling the gun in the
direction of his wife. His wife cowered some more and clutched the bed sheets
closer to her in the mistaken belief that no-one in the room had seen her naked
before. Logan used the distraction to load the firing code into the biodart
embedded in his little finger.

Before he could
aim it, Mr. Trollope turned the gun back on him. How this man had ended up with
Mrs. Trollope – Lucy - was a mystery to Logan. He had most of the features that
most people would call human except for a neck and a chin. His large nose,
looking as obvious as a pyramid in the desert, took centre point in an
otherwise unexceptional face. A medium sized beer belly completed the look,
stretching the white shirt he wore taunt against his sweating skin.

“How could you,
you fucking wanker?," he raged at Logan. “I hired you to check up on that
cheating bitch."

Logan had to admit
that bit was true. Kind of ironic really when you thought about it. Turned out
Lucy wasn’t having an affair at all until she’d met Logan. Following her
around, Logan had sat at the same restaurant as her, a few tables removed.
After exchanging looks, she’d invited him to sit at her table. Not very
professional or ethical, but she was a babe, so he’d thought, what the hell.

“What are you
talking about?," a confused Lucy stammered from the corner.

Mr. Trollope,
turned himself and the gun again to face her.

“I hired this
piece of shit," he spat, waggling the gun in the general direction of
Logan, “to see if you were cheating on me.”