Ahead, barely visible in the darkness, was Jonah, who seemed to move through the shaft effortlessly, as if he had been born there. He made it look so easy. Had he the choice again, Jos would have chosen an alternative route. This might be safer and faster but if he hit his head one more time, he would scream some choice obscenities. There was only one thing that Jos knew for certain: these shafts had not been designed for crawling through.
On his left, Jos passed a metal grille, and he slowed as he crawled past it, taking care that whoever was in the room below would not notice his presence. He needn’t have worried. As he glanced through the mesh, he saw that the occupants of the room were engaged in some sort of heated business discussion. An old man suddenly dropped his papers and fled from the room.
Despite his decision to follow Jonah, Jos wanted some tangible proof. He trusted Jonah enough to think that he believed what he had said, but that was not enough. Jos needed support for the theory. That something was afoot on the ship was obvious, the momentary loss of power, the failings of off-ship communications, these things were unlikely coincidences. But a conspiracy required more than one person, and Jos wanted some hard evidence that the ship itself was endangered. If they could get to the engine room, he could investigate what caused the power loss, that might be enough to prove that it was sabotage, if indeed it was.
Ahead of him Jonah stopped suddenly, and Jos narrowly avoided bumping into him in the darkness.
“Why have we stopped?” he whispered.
“Shh!”
Jonah shuffled forward and pointed to the grille on their right. Jos looked and saw that they were above one of the many corridors in the ship. It looked the same as all the others, white strip-lights across the ceiling, blue tiled carpets on the floor. With all the passengers restricted to their rooms, the whole ship seemed lifeless. Then two security guards came round the corner, cloaks billowing behind them. They were talking to each other so quietly that Jos could barely make out the words.
“…to next?”
“One floor… standard sweep”
“How could they have lost him?”
“Seems to be something of an escape artist.”
“With two guards outside his room?”
“Might have gone into the shafts. We should be in there!”
The guard pointed directly at Jos. He froze, hardly daring to breathe. Beneath the black visor it was difficult to tell but surely they could see him! Seconds became long hours, each pounding heartbeat echoed forever.
“Not our patrol,” shrugged the other one, “Fourteen is on it.”
“Good. Hope they catch the bastards.”
“It’s only a matter of time.”
They moved out of hearing and Jos allowed himself to breathe.
“We have to get out of these shafts!” he hissed to Jonah.
Jonah nodded. “We’re nearly there.”
“Nearly where?”
“A place we can stop and plan.”
Without waiting for a response, Jonah sped off down the tunnel. Feeling certain that his hands were beginning to blister, Jos followed him.
They had not gone much farther when he heard a noise from behind him. A noise which, unless he was very much mistaken, was the sound of someone too big trying to silently squeeze down a ventilation shaft.
“They’re coming,” he hissed urgently.
“I know,” came the whispered response, and Jonah upped his pace.
They crawled forwards a few more metres, Jos struggling to keep up, feeling sure that their pursuer must be gaining on them. The shaft divided in two and Jonah took the left-hand fork. Whoever was behind them was close now but could he see them in the darkness? Jos hoped not.
Then Jonah stopped suddenly. What the hell was he doing? Jos prodded Jonah, hoping to make him move further down the tunnel. Jonah remained motionless. The sounds were coming ever closer. This was it then. There was no chance that they would not be caught.
He could hear the sound of heavy breathing - he must have just reached the fork. Jos could picture him looking one way, then the other. They were dead in the water - they must have been seen by now. Cold sweat ran off Jos’ forehead in torrents, trickling down his eyebrows and into his eyes. He couldn’t breathe.
And then the man moved off in the other direction. Jos even thought he could hear him cursing under his breath. Once he had passed entirely out of earshot, Jos allowed himself to speak.
“That was too close.”
“Back up,” whispered Jonah.
Jos did, and soon passed the fork in the vents once more, followed shortly by Jonah.
“Why didn’t he see us? We couldn’t have been more than a couple of metres away. I don’t understand it.”
“Have faith, Josiah Smith,” Jonah replied, with a smirk that Jos could hear if not see. “They will not catch us.”
“I wish I had your confidence.”
“Follow me. We’re nearly there now.”
With that, Jonah moved off down the other fork. Jos followed once more, shaking his head in vague disbelief.
* * *
After a few more minutes of crawling through impossible gaps and tight squeezes the tunnel unexpectedly ended and opened out into dim light. Jonah dove forward into empty air. Half-expecting Jonah to have smashed his head on the floor, Jos pulled himself forward to see where we had gone. He found himself face-to-face with a grinning Jonah, somehow suspended in mid-air.
“What is this place?” he asked.
“This, my friend, is what I like to call the Zero-Site,” and with that, Jonah exhaled, causing him to spin around slowly. “This is where the ship’s gravity does not quite reach. Why don’t you join me?”
Jonah stopped spinning and propelled himself away from the tunnel in which Jos still crouched nervously. He hated weightlessness, it made him feel ill and the earlier loss of gravity did nothing to ease his worry. Down ought to stay down, he thought. He took a deep breath and crawled into the air, feeling gravity lose its grip on him at the precise moment that the floor ceased to be anything but another wall and his stomach threatened to spill its contents. He fought down the nauseous feelings. The only thing worse than having to be in zero gravity would be having to swim through last night’s dinner.
Jonah was still watching him, seemingly bemused at his floundering. He moved through the air effortlessly. This seemed to be his natural element, floating free and unfettered by such mundane things as the law of gravity. Feeling clumsy and awkward, Jos wished he could move as Jonah did.
He looked around at this Zero-Site. It was cube-shaped, with tunnels leading off in all six directions - to use such words as up or down seemed rather inappropriate. Each wall was just short of four metres, and along each ran a dozen or more cables, each differently coloured. Some sort of keypad was floating near one of the walls (was it opposite where they had entered?), attached to a device that Jos did not recognise, hooked up to one of the many cables running along the walls.
“So, what do we do now?” Jonah asked.
Jos blinked twice. “Funny, I was just about to ask you the same question.”
“Jos, you have followed me for long enough. Now you must lead.”
Jos paused, and found to his surprise that he was not afraid.
“First,” he began, “we should make sure that we are safe.”
“There is no place safer,” Jonah replied.
“How can you be so sure? We know Security are searching the shafts, they could come through here any moment.”
“You must have faith in me, I’m afraid, Jos. I shall answer your questions, though I suspect not entirely to your satisfaction. Security will not come here. Nor will anyone else. This place does not exist. It does not appear on any map, schematic or blueprint. The computer itself does not know this place exists.”
“But you used this place to hack into the computer mainframe. That’s what this equipment is for, right? How do you know that they didn’t track you?”
“You are correct but I was extremely careful. My presence in the system went unnoticed.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“I simply am. There is no more time for doubts. We are safe here, what is our next move?”
Jos swallowed his remaining doubts, though there was, as always, so much that Jonah was evidently not telling him. “I need to see some evidence that the situation is as you described it. I’m a scientist, I can’t just rely on faith.”
“Certainly,” said Josiah, floating gently around the room, “I expected nothing less. And you shall certainly find your proof.”
“If I can use your machine there, I might be able to find out what really caused the loss of power and disrupted the communications. May I?”
“Please do,” Jonah replied, pushing the keypad towards Jos.
“Let’s see what this toy can do.”
Jos was almost smiling with relish. He realised that, despite himself, he was enjoying this. Though every muscle and bone in his body seemed to hurt, he was somehow more alive than he had been for a long time. It was as if he was waking up from a long sleep.
Jos activated the keypad, switching it to display, projecting the screen into the air. Jonah glided easily beside him. It had been a long time since Jos had attempted something like this - hacking into secure files, breaking security locks. It was strange to think that he had once been so young and reckless. Had it really been him at all? He took hold of the keyboard, almost eager to see if he still had the knack.
‘PLEASE ENTER USERNAME & PASSWORD’, the screen demanded.
Jos looked at Jonah.
“Well, here’s the one I’ve been using,” Jonah said, and reached over to press a series of keys in quick succession.
‘INVALID USERNAME OR PASSWORD’, the screen proclaimed.
“What?” said Jonah, his brow furrowed, looking quite confused. He typed it in again.
‘INVALID USERNAME OR PASSWORD’.
“How can that be?” Jonah asked, more to himself than to Jos.
“It seems they knew rather more than you thought. They’ve locked you out of the system. I don’t think I even want to know where you got your code in the first place. I guess I’ll have to try my own. Though I suppose they might have locked that as well.”
Jonah smiled devilishly. “With all the confusion at the moment, I wouldn’t bet on it.”
Jos tried it.
‘PASSWORD ACCEPTED, UPDATING PREFERENCES’.
“It worked!” Jos exclaimed. “Now, to business.”
Slowly at first, but with increasing speed, Jos began to access the parts of the system that were out of bounds to passengers - digging further and further down into the recesses of the electronic mind.
He found something that looked promising - Security Transmissions. After a minute or two, he managed to open it - crackling voices filled the air of the Zero-Site. With several people speaking all at once, Jos could only make our a few words at a time.
“…sign of them…”
“…Fourteen, what is your status?”
“…totally empty. Can’t find…”
“Very professional, not a trace…”
“…have been them, might not have been.”
“I do not believe in coincidence.”
That was the unmistakable voice of Major Cassandra. All the other signals suddenly died as her steely voice filled the air.
“They are out there somewhere, loose on my ship. If we do not find them soon, they might destroy us. They have brought down our communications - we are on our own - and I need results. We keep looking until we have them under lock and key.”
“Yes, sir,” came the response from two-dozen or more voices. Then the reports started flooding in again. Jos had heard enough, and switched it off.
“Keep digging, you’ll find what you’re looking for,” said Jonah reassuringly.
Jos continued hacking and searching though most of the files were unhelpful and uninteresting. Then he found something that showed more promise - it was the communications log, detailing its status at regular intervals. Eagerly, Jos broke into the file. Too eagerly. The green light at the bottom of the display began to flash red.
“You’ve unleashed a tracer programme!” whispered Jonah urgently. “This machine will give them a good chase but you only have a few minutes to get out the system before they find us.”
“I’ll make it,” Jos replied, with a confidence he was surprised to feel.
Sorting through the file was easy but irritatingly time-consuming. Jos could feel his pulse rise as the time ticked away.
“Look at this!” he shouted in exultation.
“What?”
“Here, at 5:56 am, all power was lost. You see? There’s a gap in the read-out. Then, two minutes later, communications came back online and automatically ran a repair programme. Here.” He gestured at the display.
“Hurry, we don’t have long.”
“I’m nearly there. At 6:02, the repair programme tripped a mine, deeply embedded within the programming.” Jos’ eyes widened with astonishment. “The whole system got chewed up and spat out again.”
“You have under a minute!”
“I’m getting out. I need to download this.”
Seconds ticked by with agonising speed. The red light began to flash furiously but the download was almost finished.
“Twenty-eight seconds!”
‘DOWNLOAD COMPLETE’.
“I’m getting out.”
“There’s not enough time.”
“I can make it.”
The red light burned crimson, flashing so quickly it was almost continuous.
“They have you!”
Jos could see that Jonah was right - he could not make it in time.
Then suddenly everything went black.
“What? What just happened?” asked Jos confused. “Did they catch us?”
Jonah laughed out loud, and spun around several times. “No they didn’t, they didn’t catch us. Just before the tracer caught us, they disabled your access codes.” He laughed again. “It seems that the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing.”
Jos laughed too, elated and drained. Jonah bounced around the room, chuckling to himself, pushing off from all six walls. His coat flapped behind twisting like a living thing, while his red hair seemed aflame. Then his expression changed to one of utter seriousness. He stopped bouncing and swam over to Jos.
“Now what do you think of my story?”
“Well, whoever planted the mine was certainly clever. It was hidden deep in the programming, lying dormant until triggered by the system running a high level repair. To make sure that the mine was tripped, someone, possibly the same someone, had to cut off power to all systems, knowing that when it came back on, the repair programme would run the scan that set off the mine.” Jos’ mind was working quickly now, burning through possibilities.
“Clever but who are the likely suspects?”
“I’m not sure. What really frightens me is not the loss of power but the mine. It was hidden so deep within the programme, made to look completely innocent until the right sequence of events triggered it into action. Something like that would need seriously high-level access to the computer. It may even have been built into the system from the beginning. It sounds like you were right. This feels like an inside job.”
“And why would they want communications off-line?” asked Jonah, and Jos wasn’t sure if he already knew the answer.
“Because the first thing you would do when attacking someone, is to make sure that they cannot call for help…” The implications of this was truly chilling.
“Do you believe yet?”
“Yes,” answered Jos, “something is deeply wrong here.”
“So, if you were a terrorist planning to destroy a ship, and you had disabled the communications, what would be your next move?”
“I would need to take control of the ship itself.” He thought for a moment. “Perhaps we can kill two birds with one stone.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“The obvious target, it seems to me, would be the engine room, and while we are there we can investigate the loss of power that started the whole process.”
“Excellent plan,” said Jonah excitedly, “the engine room is this way.”
“Hold on a moment. You said I have to trust you, to have faith. Well, give me a reason to.”
“What do you mean?” Jonah asked, seeming somewhat puzzled.
“I believe that this ship is in danger but I need more than that. Who are you, Jonah?”
Jonah’s eyes widened for a moment. His lips trembled. For a moment, Jos thought he was going to start shouting. Then he seemed to visibly deflate. A pained look came over his eyes.
“I suppose you need to know,” he said, his voice close to a whisper. “Very well, Jos, I shall tell you what happened, without the bias and lies of the authorities. But let me tell the story from the beginning to the end without interruptions. When I am finished, I shall try to answer your questions. I’m sure you will have many.”
“I usually do,” Jos muttered.
Jonah smiled weakly, closed his eyes, and began.
“My home town, which is to say the place where I lived, not the place I was born, was a quiet sort of place. It seemed to exist in its own bubble of reality, barely aware of the world beyond. It seemed as though nothing would ever change. This, of course, is false - time is change, and all things end in time.
“A man came to our town. Where he came from we dared not ask, and I never did discover. He brought with him his wife, his two children, and all sorts of strange men that served him. They moved into an abandoned house, almost beyond the town’s limits, and renovated it beyond recognition. This man’s real name was Kuranes but no one called him that. Everyone called him the Archangel. A sense of irony, perhaps.
“The first thing we noticed was strange men on the streets. Dressed in black suits and black shirts, dark glasses. Smoking long cigarettes. Not doing much - simply hanging around - but an aura of fear began to grow around them. If we saw them, we crossed the street, or went back the way we came. But for all that, they didn’t actually do anything. Merely making their presence felt. Despite their inaction, or maybe because of it, a palpable change had come over the town. We no longer felt safe in our homes.
“I don’t quite understand how it happened, but within a few years he was in charge of everything. The police were in his direct employ, the shopkeepers paid for protection, or else suffered unpleasant ‘accidents’.
“In what order did these things occur? How could he gain control so quickly? It is so hard to recall the exact sequence of events. It was all so long ago - a lifetime, several lifetimes - and all the separate moments have twisted themselves into a ball. Disentangling the threads is now impossible.
“At the beginning it was done with words - hints and threats. Nothing was done but everything was implied. At some point, it changed. A shopkeeper did not meet his payments. His store was broken into, the windows smashed, graffiti daubed across the walls. The police did nothing. According to rumour, a police car had been patrolling the area at the time. They could not have heard nothing. Then friends and family, people we had known for years, began to appear with ugly bruises, fresh wounds. No one asked where they had got them from - we did not need to ask.
“We didn’t have much money! We weren’t rich. Why did they come to us?”
Jonah lapsed into silence, and Jos wondered if he would continue. A few moments later, Jonah took a deep breath and spoke again, his voice soft and terrible.
“He was the first but he brought associates. People were ‘encouraged’ to leave their homes and move away. Ancient buildings were replaced with skyscrapers as modern as they were grotesque. The streets were no longer safe - not at night, and then, finally, not by day. Our home was no longer ours.
“Yet we survived, despite it all. Bravely accepting all that fate handed to us, stubbornly believing that this could not last forever. I too did nothing, and learnt the perils of inaction. I thought that I could act later, that things would change. I did not fully realise then, that not making a decision is choosing to do nothing.
“My wife, Ruchamah, ran the town bookshop. It wasn’t much, and it didn’t make a lot of money, but books were her passion. When the demands came we paid swiftly. What else could we have done? But we did not have much and the demands grew ever larger. I think we missed a payment, perhaps we missed two. I can’t remember now.
“One day, I went with Ruchamah to the bookshop. We found it burning. Ghastly orange flames licked each scrap of paper, and leapt high into the air. She ran into the shop, not wanting to believe her own eyes. He sobs rang through the air, through the smouldering ash that fell from the sky like snow. I can hear her now, after all these years. She ran out, sobbing, a small flame had caught the corner of her dress. I called to her but she could not hear me. She ran and ran, heading straight across the road, oblivious to danger. I ran after her. I called her name, I screamed her name, but she either did not or would not hear me…”
Jonah paused, lost for words.
“She never saw it coming… it hit her… she turned and screamed… the ambulance, not looking where it was going… she just ran out.”
Jonah closed his eyes tightly for a moment, and when he opened them they were red with tears.
“But you do not know the worst thing, that chilled me to my very bones. The sound of childish laughter. His children were there. They had come to watch the fire. They had come to watch and they laughed. They laughed…
“I could hesitate no longer. If only I had acted sooner… One night, I broke into his house, it was not so difficult. I broke into his house and killed every single person I could find. I do not deny it. None were innocent, they were all bound up with the same evil. I killed them with mercy, and burned the house as a symbol and a warning - an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. I would no longer stand by and let injustice happen. The fire was an offering, a sacrifice to a new life.”
Jonah became more controlled, more determined as he spoke, eyes shining with fresh resolve.
“That is the truth of the matter, as much as any human being can possess the truth. So, Josiah, do you have any questions?”
It was a story that hurt to hear, obviously and painfully true. What could he say?
“Plenty,” Jos said, “but they can wait. We should get down to the engine room. Time is of the essence.”
“Yes,” replied Jonah, “yes it is.”
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