The Fourth World Read online

  Nizhoni didn’t answer, and just smiled.

  “Actually, it’s nice doing this without her looking over my shoulder.”

  Their ships rose above the city, humming quietly as they spun around. They followed the beacon upwards towards the roof where a small gate opened in the dome and they flew through it.

  This took them to a smooth sided, dark tunnel. Nizhoni was taking the lead, and had found the controls to start a spotlight that shone upwards into the darkness.

  They finally exited the tunnel back into open-air. It was dark outside in the real world.

  “Interesting,” said Zack. “They have opposite day from night inside the base”

  “It makes sense,” said Nizhoni. “I assume they fly missions outside the base all the time, and it is easier if it is our daylight, but nighttime in the real world outside.”

  “And it makes us harder to spot,” said Zack, “when we come out of the Earth like this.”

  Nizhoni punched in the coordinates that Trichallik had supplied.

  “Let’s go” she said.

  Their rally point was in a long valley that ran north to south in the deep Nevada desert.

  “The Pintwater range,” Zack read out. “Never heard of it.”

  To the south-west they could see the lights of the highway.

  “That’s the I-95,” said Zack “leading from Las Vegas up to Death Valley. I went there once, when I was a kid”. In opening comms with Nizhoni, a window appeared on his heads-up display with her face in it.

  “You still are a kid,” said Nizhoni, smiling.

  He laughed. “And so are you, but, we don’t feel like kids here, do we?”

  She nodded agreement.

  “I’m from Fresno,” said Zack. “Just across those mountains. I could fly this sucker home if I wanted.”

  “And do you want to?”

  “No,” said Zack, “definitely not.”

  *

  From working with her through the afternoon, it soon became obvious to Fintan that Ayako was smart. He enjoyed watching her, and learning that real intelligence didn’t just come from book learning, but in how you approach a problem and solve it.

  “I’m lost,” he admitted. “I thought I was good, but, you’re way ahead of me.”

  She smiled. “Not really. You know how these things go, I’ll get only so far, and get stuck, then you’ll take over until you get stuck and so on until we have the saucer fixed.”

  He looked at the array of circuit boards and partially assembled panels in the cockpit.

  “I wish I had your confidence.”

  *

  To Nizhoni, Zack had always been a clown. She wondered what Ayako saw in him, and silently agreed with the implicit decision that Ayako had to keep her distance from him. Of course they never spoke about it, but it was easy for her to know what was going on in her roommate’s mind.

  Zack was bottom in so many classes, but despite this, he was becoming quite popular. In this competitive environment, it was always good to have someone around that was worse than you, when you were worried about so many that were better than you.

  But out here, in the real world, she realized that Zack was his own person. He may not be good at the book work, but he outshone her quickly in the field. Even with flying, he struggled in the classroom, but he was already outpacing her in the exercises that Trichallik had given them.

  “Now I know why we use flying saucers,” said Zack. “Think about it, the typical airplane is arrow-shaped for maximum aerodynamics in the direction it flies.”

  He paused for a minute, and his ship spun on an axis and zipped in a new direction.

  “So to move in a new direction you have to turn so your new direction is forward. If your ship is circular, it’s equally aerodynamic no matter which direction it flies in, right?”

  She nodded. It made sense. And it helped her understand why Zack was flying much better than her, in fact, much better than anyone. They all flew like they were still in space, thinking in terms of trajectory, gravity wells and fuel. In atmosphere it was a different story, and they flew their saucers like airplanes, with an imaginary nose always at the front. Zack was flying rings around her.

  She gained a new admiration for him. Perhaps he wasn’t such a clown after all.

  *

  Dinner at the first year’s table in Red Squadron was a lively affair that night. Instead of the students huddling in their own little groups, they were all together and all chatting jovially.

  Everyone was talking about their project, complaining about how hard it was, and trashing Mister Singh for giving it to them.

  Fintan had barely even heard Raj talking before, but now he was chattering like a monkey, and just as funny. He partnered with Heather, who, if there was an opposite to Raj, it was she. Her tall, fair-skinned, blonde looks contrasted his short, dark-skinned and thick black hair.

  But opposites always attracted, and the two got on like a house on fire.

  Zack shook his head and muttered under his breath “Even Raj can get a girl.”

  “I might be blonde,” said Heather “but I’m not deaf.”

  Zack gulped and everybody laughed.

  Fintan noticed that Zack and Nizhoni weren’t talking much about their project. But whenever he would begin to ask them, the conversation would shift in another direction.

  Later that night, he lay in his bed, looking at the ceiling. It had been a good day, and he and Zack were swapping stories about their classmates and laughing themselves to tears.

  As they quietened down after lights-out, Fintan had a strange feeling in his chest. He thought about Zack and Ayako and Nizhoni and everything that had been going on. It gave him a light-headed feeling that just felt like it was tugging him upwards, and that he could fly.

  I guess this is what they call happiness he thought before falling into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  Chapter 16: The Chase

  How goes the construction?

  Fast, but not fast enough.

  It’s not like you to be so concerned.

  The expression I like to use is ‘Hedging my bets’ or ‘Not having all my eggs in the same basket’

  Trichallik contacted Zack and Nizhoni by means of their heads-up displays. Her alien head looked strange on their screens.

  “Congratulations,” she said. “You learn quickly. Here is your next assignment.”

  She downloaded some data to their ships and vanished. Zack played it over his intercom. It was a signal, full of electronic noise.

  “She has a great taste in music, doesn’t she?”

  “It’s an encrypted signal.”

  “Then I guess we have to decrypt it.”

  Nizhoni pulled the signal into her on-board computer and ran some decryption algorithms on it. Nothing.

  “It wouldn’t be that easy,” said Zack. “I think we have to do it by the seat of our pants.”

  “How?”

  “Just watch papa go to work,” he answered. She heard him cracking his knuckles.

  *

  Fintan looked at the ship. They’d been working on it for nearly two days and it still looked like a pile of junk.

  “I don’t think this is going to work.” he said

  “Sure it is,” said Ayako. “Look, they just asked us to fly it, not take it into space, right?”

  She pointed out the makeshift sealant around the engine compartment. “The engine insulation was in pieces, so we could take the sealers off the ship’s hull panels and patch the ship up with them.”

  “The engine wasn’t in bad shape, but doing that cut it off from the control room,” said Fintan.

  “So we drill a hole through the insulation here and that allows us to run the control cables.”

  “But that breaks the insulation.”

  “It does, but if we double insulate here, it protects the pilot from any excess radiation.”

  “So we strip the control cables from the main console, and extend them back t
owards your little contraption-”

  “Exactly.”

  “So, it might look like garbage, but it’s almost done.”

  “I don’t think there are any marks given for tidiness,” she said.

  “The question is, will you be able to fly it?”

  “Me? Why not you?”

  She batted her eyelids. “Because I’m a lady, and you’re a big strong man.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Besides,” she said “you’re a much better pilot.”

  *

  “There’s a pattern” said Zack. “Right there.”

  He had drawn a spectrogram of the signal on their heads-up display. They were still hovering over the Mojave Desert. He drew some circles at some points.

  “Look what happens when I split out the signal into different frequencies.”

  “There’s a correlation.”

  “Right. It’s encrypted, but, it’s a 1:1 encryption, meaning the letter A will always be encoded to the same value, as will B or C.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Because when I break it down into discrete values, there are only 26, but they are spread out across different frequency spectrums. So instead of hiding with a complex cipher, they are hiding with a few simple ciphers.”

  “So we’re back to square one,” she said.

  “Not necessarily,” said Zack. “Computers are good at doing simple chores quickly, and doing many of them over time. I just have to program the computer with all these patterns, and get it to go through each to figure out the likelihood about which signal being which letter.”

  “But you don’t have a frame of reference,” said Nizhoni. “Any letter could be any value.”

  “I don’t have an absolute frame of reference,” said Zack. “But I do have a relative one. There are 26 letters, so it is likely English. It’s a long message, so we know the 26 letters probably meet the rough distribution of letters that any text will have.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “For example, the letter ‘E’ is the most common letter used in the alphabet, so the odds are the most common signal we’re seeing matches to the letter ‘E’ and so on.”

  “That’s brilliant.”

  “Hey sweetcakes, I’m not just a handsome face you know.”

  “You’re not even a handsome face mister, now get to work.”

  “Roger Roger Ma’am.”

  After a few moments Zack was still deep in concentration. Nizhoni wasn’t happy with his facial expression.

  “Is there a problem?” she said

  “It’s taking a little longer than I thought. I’m taking some of the other systems off-line to increase computing capacity.”

  “That’s not a good idea,” she said.

  “It’s ok,” said Zack. “Main propulsion is still online, so I’m not going to fall from the sky.”

  “So what did you take off-line.”

  “Err…” he paused. “Everything else?”

  “That’s not a good idea.”

  “What could go wrong?”

  Zack’s headseat crackled. “Attention unidentified flying craft, you are in a restricted military airspace. Respond.” The voice was firm and hostile.

  “That wasn’t you was it?”

  “Not unless I suddenly became a man.”

  “We are authorized to use deadly force unless you land immediately,” said the voice. “This is not an exercise, this is not a drill. Respond.”

  “Uh oh,” said Zack. “I have two bogies on my heads-up. Closing fast. They’re the US air force.”

  “We can easily outrun them,” said Nizhoni.

  “Not easily,” said Zack. “My systems are off-line, remember?”

  “But you said propulsion was online,” she said.

  “It is, but navigation and everything else is off-line. I can hover but not much else.”

  “ETA to contact is thirty seconds,” said Nizhoni. “Can you get it online before then?”

  “Negative.”

  Something beeped on Zack’s display. “Oh that’s not good.”

  “Radar lock,” said Nizhoni “They have me too”

  “Does that mean what I think it means?”

  “If you mean radar guided missiles to blow us out of the sky, then yes.”

  “Oh crap.”

  “Stay here,” said Nizhoni. “I’m going to engage them.”

  With that Nizhoni’s craft left Zack and headed towards the two aircraft.

  “As if I could do anything else,” he said, under his breath.

  From his display he could see Nizhoni darting towards the two craft. They split up to avoid a collision, and one turned to follow her, while the other continued its intercept course at Zack. She immediately reversed course to follow it, overtaking it and ‘buzzing’ it, forcing it to break off.

  “Unidentified craft, this is your last warning. Your actions are considered hostile, and we will use deadly force without further warning.”

  Deadly force thought Zack. Deadly force indeed, I could blow you from the sky, but you are my people, you are American, I will serve you, but I will never hurt you.

  The computer beeped at him, his decrypt programming had stopped running, and the rest of his systems were coming online. It was a message but he had no time to read it. There was something else too. His proximity sensors had picked up something, buried in the desert beneath them.

  His shop had extra sensors that he didn’t expect it to have. They were doing a deep scan on the buried whatever-it-was. He’d only need a few more seconds for them to finish. Nizhoni was doing an admirable job of keeping the air force planes occupied, so he decided to wait.

  Those few seconds seemed to last an eternity. Finally, they beeped and the lights went green. Their scan was complete. “Nizhoni,” he said. “Go straight up. These planes are likely F-15’s which have a ceiling of about 65,000 feet. All we have to do is get above that, and we’ll be free of them.”

  He saw her nodding, and then her ship disengaged from the plane that had been closing down on Zack. Like him, she changed her course and shot straight up. Both planes tried to follow, but then fell back.

  “You don’t know how many UFO stories I read where the USAF traced unknown craft which escaped by shooting upwards into space,” said Zack. “I never thought I’d be in one of them.”

  *

  “It doesn’t look pretty, but I think it’ll work” said Fintan, looking at their hastily reassembled craft. “We still have a couple of days to go before we have to hand in the project. Are you sure we want to do a test flight today.”

  “We have to,” she said. “If it works, we still need to do refinement, and if it doesn’t, well, we’ll have to start over.”

  “Hmm,” said Fintan. “Ok, let’s give it a shot. You should go back to the station and stay in touch via bracelet comms. Don’t want you to be too close in case anything goes wrong.”

  She nodded, and reluctantly withdrew.

  Fintan climbed into the cockpit and took his place at the somewhat familiar controls. Around him the control room looked like a computer workshop with circuit boards and cables everywhere.

  Ayako’s voice came through his headset “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” said Fintan. “Here goes nothing.”

  He activated the switch to start the engines. “You see anything?”

  “Yes,” said Ayako. “The ship has started to levitate; you’re about six feet above the ground.”

  “Good,” said Fintan.

  “Oh,” said Ayako “it’s starting to spin too. This looks good!”

  “Ok, let’s take it slow,” said Fintan. “I’m going to increase the spin.”

  “Ok,” said Ayako. “Nice and smooth.”

  But then something went wrong. “Fintan, stop the engines!” she screamed. The spin had become erratic, and the ship began to wobble like a buckled wheel. It caught on the ground, and under the force of the spin flipped ove
r, hit the ground and rolled several times before coming to a stop, upside down.

  “Fintan?” said Ayako. “Can you hear me? Are you ok?”

  “Yes,” he squeaked.

  “What happened, are you hurt?”

  “I’m ok,” he squeaked again. “I got a bit bumped about, but I’m ok.”

  “Why are you speaking in such a squeaky voice?”

  “You just don’t know boys do you?”

  A hatch opened at the bottom of the ship, which was now pointing skyward. Fintan climbed out holding his groin.

  *

  “It’s a long message,” said Zack “and we’re almost out of time. I’ll download it to your terminal, we’ll head back to the barn, and we’ll discuss tomorrow.”

  “Ok,” she said. “The Barn?”

  “I feel like a pilot now, and that’s what pilots call home base.”

  “Zack,” said Nizhoni. “You’re twelve.”

  “And I’m flying a superfast flying saucer above the Mojave desert, dogfighting with the USAF. Your point?”

  “Actually I was dogfighting them.”

  “Hmm. Good point, let’s head back to the city and we’ll discuss tomorrow.”

  “Roger Roger,” she said, mocking his earlier tone.

  *

  It was night and the two boys were in their beds, staring at the ceiling.

  “How’s your project going?” said Fintan.

  “I wish I could tell you” said Zack. “But I can’t for so many reasons, one of which is we haven’t done anything resembling a science project yet.”

  “Ten bucks says Nizhoni is telling Ayako what you guys are up to,” said Fintan, joking. “It’s ok. I understand that Trichallik wants you to keep it a secret.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Zack, “how did you know Trichallik gave us the project?”

  “Because Ayako told me,” said Fintan. Zack could hear Fintan’s bed shaking slightly. Fintan was laughing at him.

  “I’m going to kill that girl,” said Zack. “If she’ll ever let me close.”

  Chapter 17: Riddles

  He is smart and he is good too. His heart is so innocent, yet there is steel buried deep.

  I know, but I am beginning to care for him, part of me wants to let him stay innocent.

  It’s too late for him to stop, and if we do it’s likely too late for the rest of us.

  Are things that bad?

  I don’t know, and whenever I try to find out, all I get are riddles.

  “The library?” said Nizhoni. “Is that where you want to discuss this?”

  “Yes,” said Zack, “I think we’ll need some of its resources.”

  “I read the decoded message,” said Nizhoni “and it didn’t make sense. It looked like a random stream of letters.”