Beyond Uranus
By Stewart Bruce and Nigel Moreland
Text Copyright © 2012 Stewart Bruce
All Rights Reserved
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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To Claire, Francesca and Amelia.
This book has seen several versions released over the last two years. This is the final version.
Beyond Uranus is book 1 of a trilogy:
Beyond Uranus (2012)
The Rings of Uranus (2013)
Inside Uranus (2014)
The Androids of Thor’s Helmet (2015)
Mozart 42 (2015)
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 - Leap of faith
Chapter 2 - Preparing to Leave
Chapter 3 - New Arrival
Chapter 4 - Finding My Feet
Chapter 5 - Computer Training
Chapter 6 - Flight Training
Chapter 7 - On the Job
Chapter 8 – Exploration Station
Chapter 9 – Tuesday
Chapter 10 – Wednesday
Chapter 11 – Thursday
Chapter 12 – Friday
Chapter 13 – Saturday
Chapter 14 – Sunday
Chapter 15 – The Wrong Side of Bad Luck
Chapter 16 - Rescue
Chapter 17 - Back to the Station
The End
Chapter 1 - Leap of faith
Time was waiting to slap Roy, finally after all these years of burning the candle at both ends his name reached the top of the list. However, Time wanted to indulge itself first, with a bit of fun just to wind him up. If it had a body, instead of being a disconnected corporeal entity, its shoulders would now be merrily heaving up and down, hands wringing together in glee anticipating the approaching mirth and if Time had a mouth and a voice it would be cackling out, ‘Hubble bubble, trouble and toil’ like a witch with no sense of rhyme. However it didn’t and it wasn’t
*
Meanwhile, six billion kilometres from Earth, hidden from any form of detection, lay an alien space station, gracefully orbiting our solar system and keeping away unwanted visitors. In a secluded corridor, two dark haired men were quietly conspiring over certain matters. The bearded one said, “His father cost my father his life, so I will welcome him as he deserves, my lord Loki.”
“Don’t let him know what you know, otherwise he will be forewarned. He has a way of intuitively seeing matters and you don’t want to alert him.”
“And you promise me...”
“I promise nothing fool! Asgardians make no bargains with insignificant humans. I merely tell you what was and what is to come. How you use that is no concern of mine, other than you never mention my name or more than just your life will be forfeit.”
The bearded man turned to walk away back to his quarters, the other one gestured with his hand and disappeared.
*
Minutes later Doctor John D'Eath, the dark haired and bearded man, was sat staring at a black screen in his apartment. Every time he made contact with the other aliens, the screen seemed black and he had yet to glimpse who he had been dealing with. Apparently they lived in low-light conditions and although there are allegedly seven thousand shades of black it would take very keen sight to distinguish between them.
“Why can't we just ussse your computer?” asked a voice from the dark screen.
“My computer is a stubborn son of a bitch,” answered John. “You would never break it. I don't know why but each computer has its own personality and mine is so strong it would be useless trying to turn it into something functional. Every time I talk to you I have to put it somewhere it cannot hear me and then I get an interrogation about what I've been doing. I'm really beginning to loathe it with a passion.”
“We have our ways, but we don't care about the program, we jussst want the computer.”
“Well I have plans for my crappy computer and it involves a very heavy hammer but I'm going to get a replacement for it.”
“Ssso, what are you going to do Doctor D'Eath. We want sssome action from you.”
“I want you to be ready to meet me in a few weeks from now.”
“You will have a computer?”
“Maybe. If you come quickly when I call”
“Why? We need to know your plansss.”
“I am told that we have a new recruit coming and I have unfinished business with his family. Fifteen years ago my father lost everything because of his father and he killed himself for the shame of it all. He owed my father for a house he built and then the fool got himself killed before he paid. My father’s business collapsed and he couldn’t face the ruinous consequences. So, I have plans for that boy and he's not only going to provide me with a computer he's going to provide me with his life. An eye for an eye seems like a near-worthy recompense to me.”
“And who told you that he iss coming to the station?”
“I have my sources and they must remain my secret.”
“We don’t like our agents keeping ssecretsss.”
“This time you’ll have to put up with that.”
“Hmmm, ass long ass we get a mark four computer.”
“I know! You just make sure you are ready to pick me up when I give you the call, and come quickly!”
*
Be bebe bebedebeep, bebe bebedebeep bebe bebedebeep...
8.00 am on a Thursday morning and the last thing I wanted to hear was my alarm clock pounding in my ears. The rhythm of the beeps annoyingly fitted with 'Roy McCormack get out of bed, Roy McCormack get out of bed'. I tried to get 'Roy McCormack sleep for as long as you like' to fit but it never worked. As my brain swam throbbing through treacle, I cracked open my left eye and tried to focus on the offending banshee. An autonomous reaction swung my arm out as I tried by sheer brute force to weld the snooze button down. ‘Five more minutes please, I really need to sleep much more than live’ I thought to myself. ‘I really need to cut the lager from my diet. Tonight I will pack all the drinking in and be all clean living. And I promise I won’t stay up to the early hours of the morning playing computer games online. It was the same old lies every morning, as I promised myself that my life would be much healthier and wouldn’t involve any lager, fast food or computer games. A moment later and I was fast asleep.
Be bebe bebedebeep, bebe bebedebeep bebe bebedebeep...
8.05 am on a Thursday morning and the last thing I wanted to hear was my alarm clock pounding in my ears. I cracked open my left eye and tried to focus on the swirling form of the offending banshee. I swung my arm out and tried to weld the snooze button down. ‘I can do five more minutes, I really do need to sleep more than live’ I thought. Just like every morning I went through the timings in my head. Get up at ten past eight, a quick five minute shower, dress, have a strong cup of coffee to overpower the taste of the grunge in my mouth. Get into the car by eight thirty and arrive ready for school at eight forty for the staff meeting at eight forty-five. In my head it always worked but it rea
lity it never did, and then I was asleep again.
Be bebe bebedebeep, bebe bebedebeep bebe bebede clunk!
8.10 am on a Thursday morning and the last thing I wanted was to hear my alarm clock pounding in my ears. Opening my left eye, I tried to focus on the banshee that was shrieking so loudly. My arm swung out intending to crush the snooze button, halting before crashing onto it. “I’ve got to get up” I slurred sleepily to myself and pulled my arm back whilst the stupid, annoying noise continued. I swung my legs off the bed and with a clenched fist satisfyingly punished the kill button.
The cool water of the long since broken shower cascaded over me, shocking a semblance of life into my shivering, abused body and mind. The chore of dressing was fumblingly accomplished, to be followed by a mug of strong, hot coffee and then I was reluctantly ready to leave. As I shuffled towards the front door I caught sight of my physical deterioration in the mirror, my once dark hair was beginning to shine with grey. My tummy used to be really flat until I hit thirty but then my six-pack had bloated to nine. I wasn’t yet fat, but you could tell my diet consisted of calorific crap, vis-a-vis lager and pizza. I grabbed hold of each side of my gut and pushed my hands in toward each other so I could see what I would look like with a big beer belly, “Yuck!” I conned myself with another promise to be healthier and thirty seconds later I was in the car and, as usual, late.
On a good day I could make it to work in ten minutes. On a very good day all the traffic lights would be green. The old dodderers would be sleeping until after the rush hour and all the farmer’s tractors would be locked away in sheds. Today wasn’t a good day. The world and its dog were out, just to get in my way. Time was having such fun watching me getting ever more uptight, throwing my hands in the air and swearing at another curiously swift change of the lights against me. “You bastards! Why don’t we get as long as they do?” I irritably enquired of no one other than the light sequence. Making matters worse were the half-asleep ones at the front. “Are you here for a holiday? Look it is green, get a shift on feller.” Or, “What’re you waiting for, a written invitation?” The creepers are the worst. They try to hold the car on the clutch, usually failing. Then when the lights finally turn green they get all excited, over-react and dump the clutch, stalling the car. So we all miss a turn, “Plonker!” Though, of course, I didn’t curse loudly enough to be heard by anyone outside my car. I didn’t want to cause offence. Time was tickled. If it had a body, which it didn’t, then it would have been tickled pink!
Then the bad luck took a turn for the worse and went Lemming-like for an early morning plummet. When for some unknown reason I sensed a presence in the car and my eyes were drawn to the rear view mirror. What I saw didn’t register immediately but later I would come to realise that I’d seen myself, a second Roy sitting in the back seat alongside someone else mostly out of sight. A chill scampered up my spine, then jumped off the top of my head and bravely ran for cover. I leaned forwards and putting my other mouth close to my ear, told myself to watch for Simon’s car tonight. Then the unseen stranger said “That’s enough information, punch the TWAT now” and then they were gone, I flinched but didn’t feel a thing! Perhaps they weren’t referring to me. Then the back seat was empty again, how strange!
‘Now that’s something you don’t see every day,’ thought Time, ‘two of the same victim, together in the same place, how odd. Two stones with one bird, I feel lucky punk! You’ve made my day.’ Rhyme wasn’t the only thing that he didn’t do well. Then Time felt the familiar tug of a temporal displacement field and watched the second Roy depart along with the other person from the rear of the humans car transport thingy and he was also there as the other two arrived at when they went, in time that is. After all, Time is everywhere all the time. ‘Hmmm, father needs to know about this, he’ll want to keep an eye on all three of that pair.’ At which point, Time was satisfied with Roy’s havoc and went off to victimise someone else.
Sometimes, thought Roy, my brain can deal with really odd stuff, whereas at other times it capitulates and just blanks it out as though it never happened. Normally I could cope with seeing myself in a mirror. I don’t claim to be unusually gifted or anything, it’s just one of those shocks that life somehow prepares you for. Today was different, there I was moving independently and talking to me before I’d said anything. I’d like to say that my brain was now a seething mass of thought and reactions, possibly engaging the ‘fight or flight’ mechanisms. However, the cells that dealt with all the difficult stuff were now lying down in a darkened room, swigging bottles of ‘Milk of Amnesia’ and the only ones doing any work were those who dealt with the common-place actions like breathing, heart beating, not weeing myself and driving. Fortunately, none of those decided to get creative and we moved along in the traffic without incident.
So, I passed the minutes by praying the traffic would keep moving and calming myself by thinking about some of the classes I was going to teach. Had my dad still been around I’m sure he would have been proud of me, but becoming a teacher had happened by accident and for the last ten years I’d been in a job I no longer had any enthusiasm for. Teaching a subject I loved to kids I didn’t. What went wrong? Three years I’d spent at university doing a computer science degree and I loved it. I should have wowed the world, and at the very least ended up in a top company keeping their I.T. department running whilst earning big wages. So that by now I would have enough to retire. I blamed my college mate Tim. During the last year of my degree Tim had said to me “Why don’t you get a Post Graduate Teaching Certificate?”
“What for? I’m going to be Bill Gates’ bitch,” I flippantly replied.
“It’s a backup plan,” Tim said, “in case you don’t land one of those big jobs. It will mean you can teach instead. Whilst you’re teaching you can still apply for the big bucks but have a nice secure job with a regular income and lots of holidays.” It all sounded so logical and made such good sense. Funny how bad advice sometimes pretends to be so shrewd.
When I was a youngster I always thought teachers finished their day early and had lots of holidays. What I didn’t realise is that it was just the kids that finished early and I was still in school two hours after they had left and a lot of my evenings at home would be taken up with marking. I didn’t realise that I would spend most of my holidays writing schemes of work. I didn’t realise that my job would turn into a seven day week, working at least sixty hours, fifty weeks of the year. I didn’t realise it would suck the life out of me. That’s a lot of ‘I didn’t realise’ that I didn’t realise!
By the time my teaching career had settled down and I had the time to apply for jobs I found I wasn’t getting interviews. On phoning some of the companies I got similar answers “We were quite impressed with your application but we need to employ an I.T. specialist not a teacher. We’ve kept your details and have them on file.” A teacher! How the bloody hell did that happen?
Pulling into the car park at the Beaufield School I could see that mine was the only space that was empty, so I slotted the car into place. Yanking the hand brake on, it occurred to me that it was something of a Freudian gesture indicating that I too wasn’t going anywhere. At precisely 8.45 am, I stepped out of the car and took a long look at the crumbling edifice representing the school building, wondering if nineteen seventies architects had ever had any training. It was an unimaginatively regular cold grey, utilitarian and featureless building and definitely without soul. Thoughts of Thomas Gradgrind from Dickens ‘Hard Times’ crossed my mind, with questions over whether or not we had improved since then.
The designer thought it would be a great idea to clad the whole building with glass. Had he or she ever met any teenagers? Over the years as each, and almost every, pane of glass had been broken they were begrudgingly replaced with grey painted sheets of ply wood until the whole building had deteriorated from fresh and shiny, to a depressingly bland medley with panels of infill grey. That each year the council bought a slightly different shade
meant that batches of panels were in diverse tints, allowing the school to be dated. Like cutting a tree down and counting the rings, here you only needed to count the hotchpotch of different greys and you’d know how old the school was.
From above the reception what was supposed to be a black eagle, but looked more like a stuffed vulture, gazed hungrily on those who passed underneath. Doing so, I made my way up the main corridor towards the staffroom. I always thought the main corridor was an ironic pre-cursor to the day because it was so depressing. Painted in off-white aged to drab, it remained unheated, unattractive and lacking in any display work to inspire the pupils. With each step along the corridor, vitality was sucked from the hapless victim and only the stoutest zombies ever reached the far end.
Talking of which, “McCormack?” crackled a voice, like finger nails scraped down a blackboard. I didn’t have to look around to see who it was, as I recognised the icy blast of the Head Teacher, Mr Williams, rattling with the chill of his constant anger. And I’ll swear blind that the ambient temperature always dropped by at least two degrees in his presence. I often thought about why he was so angry and came to the conclusion that it was because the kids hated him, and parents, and the staff, and the governors, and the support staff, caretakers, dinner ladies, cleaners and probably his own family too. The kids all sniggered, when he swept past, and called him ‘Batman’ behind his back because he always wore his graduation gown. It was as though it had been surgically affixed. Here we were in the twenty first century, at a secondary school with students from the rump-end of nowhere and he wore a gown. Served him right to be called Batman and hated by everybody including, surely, his wife.
“You’re late,” he said, with a little too much triumph in his voice for my liking.
“Touché and ditto,” I replied informatively. “The meeting started three minutes ago.” Looking the man in the eyes was always an uncomfortable experience. Hidden away within their depths were glimpses of something akin to superiority, an air of overlordship. Using the teachers as his vassals helping to control the apprentice serfs indented to the school. It made me shiver.