by Andy and Shadar
His guards thought they were exiling a political prisoner. One too well connected to be executed but knowing a bit too much to be allowed quiet retirement.
Boris, the head guard, thought it impossible for their prisoner to escape. The special device they had been given made him safe to transport, they were told.
The device restricted his cognitive abilities and denied him access to the other dimensional energies his people used, that other races of man considered magic, but he was still more than the two of them could handle. He had been an agent for the Atlantean government for 30 years.
Jason had worked for the Ministries of Justice and of Defense and for the last 10 years as head Provocateur for a High Councillor. He had great experience in defeating the indefatigable, harming the invulnerable, and tracking the untraceable.
Councillor Inger used him for such tasks because he was good at the impossible. Commendation was impossible for he was a nonperson, a ghost, deniable and expendable.
Reprimands were equally impossible. Failure was death. The safety of his planet, its people, and its culture, was more important than his life.
Now he was here, at the Prisoner Transport Facility inside the Ministry of Justice. He had become aware of the callous and ruthless way the High Council viewed the citizens of New Atlantis. He had questioned orders and the policy behind the orders and the integrity of the men who made the policy. He had done this publicly, he who was supposedly to be unheard and invisible had made himself seen and heard by all. He hoped the people had heard but it was out of his hands now.
The other Councillors had covered it up. The Head Councillor had been personally involved in whitewashing the story he leaked to the press. So he had taken things a step further. He had tossed his boss into the disintegration chamber and did his best to expose the corruption at the highest levels to the planet at large. He hoped it was enough but he had done all he could. Now he was no longer an agent for anyone except himself.
They were worried about how an exceution would look so he was officially "retiring" to a world that was pre-industrial and so far from any wormhole that no trading ships would find it for millennia, if at all. The Diaboli knew of it because it had been seeded by the Elders long ago; and the Elders had told the Atlanteans because unlike them the people of planet Velvet had gladly agreed to be cannon fodder for those so-called gods.
They were often used as an example of the benefits of following the leadership of the High Council rather than the Elders. Now the New Atlantean government was using them as an exile planet because of their low population, tech level, and isolation. The High Council, justly worried about the resourcefulness of their few renegades, had even put satellites around the planet to fatally scramble any attempt to quantum tunnel, or gate, from its surface without equipment such as his escorts wore to provide the right electronic codes.
Few could use that method of traveling to other planets without technological aids like the one he was being walked towards. However it was possible, if only for the most powerful and mathematically inclined among them. So the High Council considered it impossible for him to escape once he was there. The device restricting his cognitive abilities would be inoperative in transit. Boris didn't think there would be enough time during transit for the prisoner to free himself from two guards and escape but this was why he made certain he was one of Jason's guards.
The trip through the quantum tunnel was very disorienting and both guards loosened their grip involuntarily as their minds tried to make sense of their surroundings. That was all Jason needed. He broke free of the guards and they continued on without him to Velvet. Of course this left him adrift in an extra-dimensional realm but he was one of those who had the power, skill, and training to traverse the folded dimensions by mind alone and he changed his destination to Kelsor 7.
On Kelsor 7 it was like old times again. Thanks to the advanced state of Diaboli medicine and his own abilities he looked only in the mid-twenties despite being fifty-something and he had always looked nondescript. He blended in with almost any crowd. He infiltrated, set up a cover identity and went up into orbit with a repair crew.
They had lost a man on the last job, upgrading the cyber-weapons mounts on one of the Quaker warships. He was the replacement. They were a freelance outfit that boasted it could refit any ship as good as new.
The wreck they were working on hadn't even made it into dock but had needed a rescue boat to take the crew off. It floated alone at the farthest end of the repair facility as if the other ships worried about catching something --or more likely it was considered bad luck and nobody wanted it too near them.
The crew labored over all parts of the ship and Jason labored along with them learning as he went and filing the data away for further use. After they finished the ship was indeed good as new. They celebrated the completion of a long assignment and coming bonus with a party on their last day aboard.
Jason took over the mind of the shift boss, Vanessa Ciardi. One slow dance was enough to make her his with the ease of long practice. She had already been planning to recommend a commendation for him, she considered him a good worker and would have announced it to everyone after dinner. He sighed, unhappy at the work he must do now -- but this was not the way to be invisible, so he smoothly moved her to decide that someone else would be the recipient.
He had a plan and put it into action. After a long night of dancing, eating and drinking homemade liquor, everyone drifted off to sleep -- everyone but him. He set up his cut-off to disable computer control as soon as everyone else left. The crew went left on schedule the next morning and the records showed the ship was empty but ready to be occupied as soon as it was inspected.
Port control was shocked to see an empty ship moving and they wasted precious time checking the docking clamps and trying to reach the onboard computer. At the right time he manually fired the engines and they realized there was a person or persons onboard. The officials told each other that he must be crazy for nobody could pilot such a ship without computer control. There was too much data for any normal human mind to make sense of it. The Diaboli, however, are from an early age accustomed to dealing with masses of data that would overwhelm most normal minds.
Jason felt confident in his ability to guide the ship alone. He knew exactly where he was going to try to lose himself. Of course the idea was simply to get so lost nobody could find him not get killed and he might even if he made it safely through the "unnavigable" wormhole but he thought it worth the risk.
It had already been known to him from his work in Diaboli Intelligence that there was a P1 who had refused her Rites and instead had gone to Kelsor 7 and become a scientist there instead of a Protector. She was also known to have ridden on some wormhole scouting expeditions. This was one reason he had come to the planet as part of his escape.
He hoped to scan her mind and find habitable planets for which there were no starmaps.
Boss Ciardi had heard rumors about Alisa Liddell's last expedition. There was something scandalous about it, or something scary -- Boss Ciardi didn?t know which -- and there was nothing about it any public database. But it had apparently put Alisa herself off traveling for a while; she was now on leave from the Survey Service. Jason caught up with her at the Dirac Hole, a bar catering to physicists, where she was talking shop with several colleagues.
He scanned her mind lightly from across the room. There he found what must have been troubling her: a planet called Rostran. It was overrun with Primes -- that was upsetting enough. But there'd also a been woman who was half-Galen, and had managed to make the Primes of Rostran think she was a Goddess. On top of that, they even had a Tset'Lar and a Saray'en.
There had been a power struggle on Rostran, supremis against supremis. It had nearly led to a civil war that could have destroyed the planet. Still in Alisa's mind the goddess who had played a central role wasn't just on a power trip -- she was trying to do good. Only, it hadn't been good enough, and she'd been -- replaced? But not by anyone from Rostran --rather by her sister from? another world he'd never heard of -- one known only to Alisa herself among those of the Survey Service mission to Rostran.
There were other memories -- tangled relationships among Alisa, her captain, one of her colleagues, and the Rostrans. Her unexpected enhancement, which had enabled her to save the mission during its encounter at Cygnias 275 with rips in space and -- the Old Galactics? He didn?t want to go there; instead he focused on what she knew of a planet named Sanctuary. Chances were that nobody else on New Atlantis had ever heard of it. And it was habitable and inhabited by normal humans, although the only people she knew from there were Aayla and Klara. Who were definitely NOT normal humans if her memories were to be believed.
If it wasn't on a standard starmap, it was pretty far afield and hopefully safe from his colleagues. He'd had other ideas but none were good enough. He needed a place where he didn't have to spend his whole life undercover. That was one reason he was doing this. To find a place that let him live an honest life. Where his actions were known and he did not need to hide what he was. The planet was possibly a place where all sorts were welcome and definitely out of the way. If it went bad he would go from there.
Thoughts and worries done he guided the ship through the necessary transits.
If he made it, the planet called Sanctuary would be the perfect hiding place, and he could make it. He also knew that he was unlikely to be found out unless he chose to reveal himself. He planned to announce himself as soon as possible. He was sure how he'd be recieved though. Those who could not master the mental and "sorcerous" abilities he would need had not been allowed to breed by order of the Elders and by the time they no longer revered the Elders as gods they were no longer normal humans.
The physical differences were so slight that none but the Vendorians, the race of master builders, had ever created a scanner that could detect them. Other races would need the most exhaustive of DNA analyses to ever see the difference. The Atlanteans were among the strongest clans of Diaboli and Jason had been selected for ability then trained. No, he was sure of his abilities; the rest was up to the stolen ship.
The ship had never been designed to be controlled by one person -- and no matter what modifications he made it showed. The wear was much greater than he had anticipated, especially at the uncharted wormhole, and it was barely holding together during that last transit.
By the time he made it through that last wormhole, he knew that the ship would likely never dive another -- but with luck it wouldn't need to. He aimed for the M class planet and tried to baby the ship along. He managed to enter the atmosphere before the engines died completely, then strapped in securely and, being too much of an atheist to pray, spent what might be his last minutes chanting his invulnerability spell out loud and continuously. He was hoping repetition might help reinforce it.