Chapter Five
As Human beings, we are often not proficient at considering the consequences of our actions. Rather, we plunge forward carelessly, taking the path of least resistance. Short-term pleasure. But for the sake of our children and grandchildren we need to look farther ahead than the stubby tips of our noses.
—Noah Watanabe, Eco-Didactics
With his ears attuned to every noise, Noah heard footsteps. Boots, but he could not recognize the stride, the one foot scuffing. Maybe it was another doctor coming to examine his condition. He hated them for probing him every few hours, taking cell and blood samples, hooking him up to machines.
For three days Noah Watanabe and Anton Glavine had been incarcerated at Max One, believed to be the highest-security prison on Canopa. They were in individual cells on separate floors, preventing the men from communicating with one another. The facility, like the notorious Gaol of Brimrock that had been destroyed with Timian One, fronted a broad canal, and had been built around the same time, during the reign of Lorenzo’s father.
To Noah it seemed ancient, with green-and-black grime and mold on the stones, and lingering, unpleasant odors. Max One had an ugly reputation during the decades it had been operating, with stories of tortured and murdered prisoners. His father, Prince Saito, had always said they were only unsubstantiated rumors, but looking around his own cell and walking the rock-lined corridors whenever he was escorted by guards, Noah sensed that bad things had taken place here, and might be occurring at that very moment.
On the third night he heard voices down the corridor, the authoritative tones of guards and the whimpering pleas of a prisoner, followed by an ugly sounding thump. Then footsteps again, and the dragging of a heavy object, probably a body. The noises receded, leaving Noah with his own troubled thoughts.
The fortress-like building echoed with emptiness. The muscular, red-haired man climbed on top of a chair and looked out a high window at the canal. Through the soft orange glow of electronic containment bars he saw the lights of the Doge’s military encampment on the opposite shore, casting reflections across the water. Even at this late hour soldiers moved around over there, tending to their various tasks.
Any fears Noah had were diminished by the fact that he now seemed impervious to physical harm. In one of his most optimistic projections, he only had to wait, and eventually he would discover a way to gain his freedom. His enemies could not kill him. Or, he didn’t think they could. Certainly, every method had not yet been attempted. Not even close. He shuddered at the thought of what the Doge’s torturers might do to him, the unspeakable suffering they might inflict on him as they performed cruel tests to see how much he could endure. He might be immortal, but apparently that did not come with invulnerability to physical suffering. He remembered only too well the intense, searing pain of the puissant blast to his chest when his own sister shot him.
Through it all, Noah at least had an avenue of escape into the paranormal realm, and he hoped to perfect that ability enough to endure even the most terrible atrocities that his torturers might visit upon him. Noah was able to break away mentally for a few moments at a time, and sometimes longer, to take what he called “timetrance” excursions into the web. But the ability was erratic and unpredictable.
On an earlier excursion into Timeweb, Noah had been able to remote-pilot podships, one at a time. But when he attempted to do the same thing from the prison cell, his power proved unreliable. Like the tendrils of a plant, his mind would reach out into the cosmos, questing, trying to secure itself to a podship. Sometimes he could do it, though for only a few moments before the living vessel jerked away and fled into space. On other occasions he could not even touch one of the vessels. Such attempts disappointed him, because he thought he’d been making progress at unraveling the mysteries of the alternate dimension. But like a playful lover, Timeweb seemed to withdraw and elude him whenever it felt like it, dancing away and then returning, always enticing him, while remaining out of reach.
If only he could remotely control the podships on a regular basis, even one of them at a time, he might find a way of going after the Mutati torpedo weapons. But previous visions had shown him that there were hundreds of the super-bombs in space, surrounding the Merchant Prince Alliance. Noah would need to make a concerted, methodical effort, and he didn’t have anywhere near the capability necessary to accomplish that yet. He also realized that even if he found a way of destroying the super-weapons it wouldn’t solve the underlying problem—the ability of the Mutatis to create more of the devices. He couldn’t just treat the symptom of the disease. It went much deeper than that.
Despite Noah’s frustrations, his ephemeral sojourns into the mysterious realm gave him something he could look forward to. Curiously, some of the paranormal occurrences, even if they lasted for only a few seconds, seemed to take much longer, like complex dreams that were experienced in an instant. But it was not always that way, judging by his own wristchron, which his jailers had allowed him to keep. Sometimes it was exactly the opposite, as longer trips seemed to pass in an instant, and an hour became five seconds. It was as if Timeweb, the teasing lover, was not allowing him to figure out patterns, not permitting him to exploit it.
Noah steeled himself as he heard the footsteps getting closer, and he vowed to outlive this prison, all of its wardens, and all of its doges. He would find a way to survive and live a full, rewarding life, a contributing life. Life. Such an unpredictable force, even in his own case, with his cellular system enhanced.
What did his tormenters want of him this time? Had they thought of some new experiment to conduct, yet another painful intrusion? He took a deep, shuddering breath. They weren’t giving him enough time to sleep, but he had already noticed a diminishing need for rest, beginning right after Eshaz connected him to Timeweb and gave him the miraculous cure.
Now a new guard appeared on the other side of the containment field, with his features fogged slightly by a glitch in the electronic barrier. He fiddled with the black field-control box on his waist, cursing the trouble he was having with it.
Finally the energy field fizzled and popped, then went down entirely in a crackle and flash of orange.
Noah sprang into the corridor and tackled the guard before he could grab a weapon, slamming him to the floor. Noah was powerfully built, and had been doing daily exercises in his cell, trying to stay as active and as strong as possible. The guard was no match for him. With one punch to the jaw, Noah knocked him unconscious.
Just as he was removing the guard’s uniform, however, he heard a noise and reached for the man’s gun. Before he could unholster it, a bolt of yellow light knocked the weapon away.
Doge Lorenzo emerged from a side passageway, with half a dozen Red Beret soldiers. One of them fired a stun dart at Noah, hitting him in the shoulder and dropping him hard to the stone floor.
“We’ve been observing you,” Lorenzo said. “Taking bets on what you would do. I won, of course.”
***