Exiles of Colsec

by Douglas Hill

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

A raw hatred of ColSec burned in Cord. Hatred for the huge, world-dominating organization which had callously bundled Cord and a group of drop-out kids into a defective spacecraft and launched them out to live or die on a wild planet. Luckily, cord and one of his new companions were able to crash-land their shuttle. But then the fight for survival was on - and some of the dangers they were to face had travelled there with them...

Release date: June 30, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

The broad chamber, with walls and low ceiling of blank, colourless metal, lay in shadow and silence. Only the muted glow from a computer screen, set into one wall of the area, interrupted the darkness. But nothing interrupted the stillness.

It was the empty, gloomy stillness of a long-forgotten tomb. And it was made all the more tomb-like by the twelve containers fastened solidly to the metal floor in the centre of the area.

In shape they were like caskets, or large coffins, made of sturdy condensed plastic. But inside, they were softly padded – the padding moulded to the individual shapes of the twelve bodies that lay within. Youthful human bodies, as silent and still as everything else in the area, eyes closed, with no sign of heartbeat or breathing.

But in the sides of the containers, behind the padding, were complex devices that worked to nourish, to preserve and support life. Through the padding a host of needles reached out to thrust deeply beneath the skin of the bodies. Other parts of the skin were covered with the electrodes of monitors and scanners. And so the bodies were healthy and alive.

Now and then a group of muscles might ripple and flex uncannily, but the movement was caused by a gentle shock from an electrode, to maintain muscle tone and fitness. The minds within the bodies felt no movement. The minds were in a sleep that went beyond sleep, a coma of life in suspension.

Yet within the deepest reaches of those minds, the dreams lived.

Stormy, chaotic dreams, most of them, of grim and ruined landscapes, of misery and hardship – but also of laughter and crashing music and wild, high-speed excitement. In two of the young minds, the dreams centred on a sprawling urban area of crumbling buildings and filthy, broken streets, an area that armed and armoured Civil Defenders entered only in hover-tanks. It was a place populated by human refuse – the thugs and the druggies, the twisted and the insane, the hopeless and the defeated. It was a place called Limbo.

But among the outcasts of that place roamed other groups – packs of young people, wearing strange garb, finding their excitement in acts of petty crime and violence. The free Streeters of Limbo, homeless but not helpless, defiantly rejecting the grey, dull, ordered world around them.

In another casket, a similar dream – of wild, violent, strangely decorated youths turning their backs on the regulated ordinary world. But this was a dream of chill and gloom and damp, in endless underground passages, called the Bunkers – rat-warrens beneath the ruins of a once-magnificent capital city. There the youths made their free lawless domain, where even the most coldly determined squads of Civil Defenders could not pursue them.

But in a different casket, a different dream. Images tinged with melancholy beauty – of an unending sweep of dusty plain, of high hot summer skies, of the eye-searing winter sun on fresh snowfields. And mingled with these images, the memory of isolation, of bone-twisting cold, of the clench of hunger.

Oddly, in among the images that lived in that one dreamer, there came fragmented glimpses of other scenes. Wild pursuits through crumbling city streets, noisy charges through dark twisting tunnels. Scenes filled with the shadowy forms of young people, weirdly dressed, with strange distorted faces …

Then again, another mind in another casket had its own individual dream. This one recalled a land of storm-clouded skies and lancing rain, of steep brush-covered mountain slopes and wide lakes of black and pitiless water. But to the dreamer it was a land of beauty and delight, made into a place of joy by the presence of a red-bearded giant wearing skins and furs and cloth with a colourful criss-cross pattern. The beloved uncle, who had raised the young dreamer in that wild land and taught him all its ways.

The dream recalled the breathless stalking of vast herds of red deer; the warmth of a small stone hut and a dancing fire that kept the icy wind at bay; occasional nights among other wild folk in skins and furs, the graceful leaping dances, the soul-saddening music, the drinking and tale-telling and competitive tests of strength. And the young dreamer relived his own part in those tests, when he was grown to a stocky bulk of solid muscle, and set a gleam of pride in the uncle’s eyes.

But then the dream shifted, from happiness to horror. The fall that had injured the uncle – and the young dreamer slinging the huge groaning body over his powerful shoulders and walking forty kilometres to the nearest civilized place of streets and houses, to seek help. Help that was refused, because the young one had none of the necessary stuff called money.

Then the death of the beloved uncle, in raging agony, and the red fury that bloomed within the young man, amid grief and loss and thunderous hate. That fury had set out to smash the clinic that had turned the dying uncle away – and it had needed half a dozen club-wielding Civil Defenders to subdue it.

The dream then remembered days of drugged mindlessness in a cage, the cloudy awareness of a five-minute trial, and the judgement. Transportation, for life, to the prison colony of Antarctica, as befell all young offenders against the civil order.

So that dream came to its end, as it had many times before. But before it might begin again, as it also had continuously done, like an endless loop of video tape, something wholly unusual stopped it.

Along among all the sleepers in the twelve caskets, in that dim, metal-walled chamber, that dreamer awoke.

His body was filled with a vibrating throb of pain, and his mind was filled with nothingness. Empty-eyed, he watched needles and electrodes slide back into the padded sides of the casket. Empty-eyed, he stared down at his body – the slightly freckled skin, the solidity of mounded muscle – and did not recognize it. Slowly he closed his eyes, as if seeking to return to the dream.

But his eyes jerked open again as another needle probed out from the padding, into his skin. The injection seemed to flow through his every cell, in a wave of cool soothingness. The pain receded – and with it went the clouds in his mind.

He remembered. He was Cord MaKiy, sixteen years old, and a Highlander. One of the wanderers of a harsh and beautiful land too bleak and poor and remote to interest the rulers of the rest of the world. And, he remembered, he was no longer in that land.

He clamped his eyes shut again, but tears seeped through his eyelids as the memories relentlessly formed. The beloved uncle was dead, the Highlands lost to him forever. And he, Cord MaKiy, was a criminal, condemned forever to the Antarctic prison.

But then his jaw tightened, and muscles leaped and bunched in his arms as he clenched his fists. If he was awake, he thought, they must be arriving. And he would not arrive tear-stained and whimpering like a child.

He opened his eyes once more, and felt a jolt of surprise. The top of the casket had raised itself, on silent hinges. He saw a blank dimness above him, a slightly curved ceiling of colourless metal. Slowly he sat up, shivering slightly in the thin, cool air. He was not aware that, until some moments before, there had been neither air nor warmth in that metal-walled chamber.

At his feet he saw a bundle of muddy-brown clothing – strange to him, though commonplace in the ordinary world. Plain tunic and trousers, sturdy boots. Automatically he pulled on the clothes, ran fingers through his tangle of auburn hair, then clambered from the casket. He realized that his body was moving normally, yet somehow he felt slow and weary, and wondered for a moment how long he had been unconscious in the casket.

And why, he asked himself, should they send us this way, to Antarctica? It can’t be that far …

But he knew he was not familiar with many of the ways of the civilized world. So he let the question go, trying to ignore the twist of unease within him.

He stared around blankly at the other eleven caskets, closed and silent. Then his eye was caught by a sudden brightness across the area. Sharply defined golden letters had appeared on the screen of the computer.

He moved towards it. He had learned something of reading and writing from his uncle, but even so he read the letters slowly, with puzzlement.

THIS IS A GUIDANCE AND DATA STORAGE COMPUTER SHUTTLE-FORM 181-QX9 VOICE PROJECTIVE AND VOICE ACTIVATED SPEAK ALOUD TO BEGIN COMMUNICATION

Cord understood only a little of it, but grasped the idea that he should say something.

‘Uh … what do I say?’ He felt a little foolish, and his voice croaked from lack of use. But it did not seem to matter.

‘Thank you for activating me.’ The computer’s voice was soft and human, but totally without emotion. ‘I am known as GUIDE. I am here to provide information and to answer your questions.’

Cord blinked, unable to think for a moment. ‘Good,’ he said at last. ‘You can … you can tell me if we’ve got to Antarctica, now.’

‘Antarctica is on Earth,’ the soft voice of GUIDE told him. ‘You are not on Earth.’

For all their quiet tone, the words struck Cord like hammers. His legs felt weak, his flesh cold, his mind reeling. It wasn’t true, he thought numbly. How could it be true? It was a lie – a joke – maybe a form of mind-bending torture, a cruel invention of the Civil Defenders …

But the computer was going on, doing its duty, providing information.

‘You and the others are inside an orbital shuttle, which is being carried by a space freighter, en route to a Colonization Section base in the Procyon planets. The shuttle will be automatically released when the freighter passes near a planet named Klydor, after a flight of four months. We are now approaching Klydor, and have left translight and reentered normal space. After release, the shuttle is programmed to land on Klydor, where you and the others will seek to establish a new human colony.’

Even in his daze, Cord understood much of that. Some kind of spaceship, carried by another spaceship, to be dropped off on some planet …

Disbelieving horror brought the sudden sourness of nausea into his mouth. It couldn’t be … The frozen wastes of Antarctica would have been bad enough – but another planet? Earth some unimaginable, unbridgeable distance away, lost to him forever, as he was flung unconscious across space, to some unknown alien world … Flung by ColSe. . .