Dawn Four volume 1 - Pursuit

This is taken from the introduction of Pursuit, the first book in a story I've been writing on and off (mostly on) for the best part of ten years. 
Though it has no header, the title of the introduction is "Observations".

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Roots and stones broke up the ground, and Jon Sinclair had to tread carefully. His mind was not on the job, though. He went over, again, that question he had been asking himself for the best part of an hour already: why? Why was he stuck in this crazy situation? And Rachel, too? One of them lost was bad enough, but both children?
 
Their hopes of being found dwindling?

He stamped his foot. He mustn’t think like that. His sister was relying on him.
 
‘Doesn’t look very good, does it Jon?’ she remarked softly, drawing close. The dappled sunlight made her blonde hair shine and the tips, still red from her last adventure with the dye, sparkled, but her normally bright blue eyes looked hollow. She crossed the few paces to Jon’s side and pressed into his reassuring hug. Rachel glanced up at his tufty brown hair. He would normally have had a crap joke for her, but there was nothing. He just shrugged.

It scared her.

‘You sure the boat is somewhere along here?’

They pressed on. Jon had no answer. He had no idea. Maybe their little tour ship was moored in this direction, though he doubted it. Trying and hoping for the best was better than nothing though, wasn’t it?

But the truth, like the silence, was deafening; they were lost and alone, and had been for three hours. They had no food and no water.

Rachel was still waiting for her answer. She wished he would say something, even if it was pompous. Anything to end the silence. The sun was starting to sink.

‘What do you think we should do?’ she asked.

‘Do?’ he echoed. She shivered. ‘What can we do? Except wait.’ He pulled her closer to his side.

The ground came to a precipice; they must have been walking up hill for a while because a steep gully lay before them, about thirty feet deep. Like every inch of the island, the hollow was thick with trees, but they had a good view through the trunks to the sparkling waters of Lake Winnepeg beyond.

But it wasn’t the water, nor the deep orange sunset that drew the eyes of Jon and Rachel Sinclair, for nestled in the darkest part of the thicket, hard against the earth cliff, stood a building. Had the sun been any further in the west they would never have seen it, but the splash of red on metal stood out like a flare.

Though, in the second or so it took to see all this, neither of them noticed the ground falling out from beneath them. Rachel slipped out of Jon’s grasp, the world turned upside down, air rushed past his face and he thought no more.


                                                                    * * * *

Her head was spinning. She didn’t know is she was still falling. Lying on her back, with little showers of earth falling all around her, she tried to roll onto all fours and stand.

‘Ouch!’

A sharp pain shot through her chest and she remained on her haunches.

‘Rache! Are you alright?’

She felt her brother’s hands under her arms, lifting her up, and she gasped as the pain roared again through her side like an electric shock.

‘I’ve been better,’ she muttered.

‘Anything broken?’

She gasped. ‘Mmm. Probably…’

He helped her away from the mound of fallen earth. The wind was up and the sun had long gone. He didn’t like to think how long they had lain there unconscious. He spat.

‘Are you alright?’ Rachel asked, her turn for concern.

‘Just blood,’ he explained, feeling his gums with one finger. He thought part of his front tooth was missing. Just ahead they head waves breaking on the shore, the peaks shining in the moonlight.

‘Where’s the boat?’ she asked. The shoreline was deserted. Jon stared left and right, eyes straining for any sign of a ship, but they were completely alone. He shivered.

‘Let’s find some shelter,’ he muttered, and a memory came back to him. ‘Hey, wasn’t there a building back there? I think I saw something.’

‘Yeah,’ she agreed, and he helped her to turn. Jon’s jeans felt sticky and damp; he was sure he was bleeding somewhere. ‘It was over that way, I think,’ though in truth it was too dark to be sure, especially once they shuffled back under the canopy.

They found the building by walking straight into it. Rachel put her hands out to the solid metal wall for support. By the fragment of moonlight trickling through the trees, they could tell the thing was old. In fact, the building looked like it had been underground for a very long time; the skin was faded like the pattern on old crockery unearthed from a compost heap.

‘There’s an opening round here,’ Jon said, and Rachel shuffled around the exterior until she bumped into him. She could barely see what he was showing her. ‘It’s a window, I think. He was stooped low, leaning to peer through the gap.

‘It looks dangerous,’ she said, though she had little idea – it was just too dark.

He stood and put his hands gently on her shoulders. ‘I don’t think we have much of a choice, Rache,’ he intoned kindly.

She relented. ‘Okay…’

He crouched, slipped out of his jacket with difficulty, and spread it over the sill of the broken window. Then he crawled through the gap and she heard him land inside. ‘Are you okay?’

‘It’s a bit of a drop and floor’s covered in broken glass,’ he called back. ‘Keep your hands on my jacket and I’ll catch you.’ He heard her gasp with pain and he approached the gap, reaching through. ‘Take my hands, Rache.’ She inched forward slowly and he lifted her through and down onto the floor, but her weight shifted suddenly on landing and Rachel yelped.

He steadied, stepped back, and lifted her out of the hole her modest weight had just exposed in the floor.

‘Blood hell, Rache. Are you okay?’

‘I’m no worse,’ she shot back testily. ‘If that’s what you mean.’ Then, ‘Sorry.’

‘No worries,’ he said, smiling, but it was too dark for her to see. ‘I’d be more worried if you weren’t sarky.’

Though light was coming from somewhere and they turned to see a very soft blue glow behind a sheet of glass at one end of the corridor they were now stood in. As they watched, the light grew brighter and the glass sheet, now revealed as a door, slid apart. A glass-walled lift stood waiting, expectantly.

Rachel looked back down the corridor, but it curved out of sight. Jon stepped towards the lift.

‘Are you sure it’s safe?’

‘No other way to find out,’ he replied. ‘We might be able to find a radio or something.’

‘I guess…’ she accepted, and walked into the lift after him. Jon pressed his face to the glass, looking down. The glow from the lift let him see that the shaft went down quite a way. Then the doors slid shut and the cab began a rapid ascent.

Jon and Rachel lurched into each other, but the journey was brief; the cab halted before a second set of glass doors. Before them was one of the oddest rooms either Jon or Rachel had ever seen. It was circular, stepped down in tiers towards the middle, and ringed by alcoves packed with banks of monitors. Their soft glow projected a pleasant haze. Bulkheads divided the outer wall at regular intervals, accentuating the shape with soft shadows, and two chairs sat ready in each space. A pair of cone-shaped mechanisms shared the middle of the room, one rising, the other hanging, though not quite meeting. The place looked as though the crew of the Enterprise had just walked off set.

A wall of warm air greeted them when the doors dinged open, rushing through their hair as two atmospheres merged.

‘Wow,’ Rachel breathed.

They stepped hesitantly into the room, half expecting it to wink out of existence, but it remained reassuringly there. They walked along the top level, computer screens fading up as they approached, stacks of code dashing up the displays. Wanting it all to be real, but not trusting until he could feel and recognise what the chamber was built from, Jon pressed his fingers into the leather seats, glad that they dimpled in the way he expected. The desks were plastic, robust, curved, and painted a very light grey. The terminals had no keyboards or mice, but the chairs looked comfy, so he sat Rachel down and checked her injuries.

Jon imagined he looked as bad as his sister. Bruises and cuts marked her face and her clothes were torn and caked with dirt. Her left hand was pressed into her ribs.

‘Your leg’s bleeding,’ she said, and he looked down to see the dark stain on his thigh.

‘I’ll be okay,’ he said, but she persisted.

‘I should bind it up. Let me –’ but a screen beside them flickered, the flying code replaced by a logo or a tower about which the name “Kairosille Observatory” was etched and, beneath, “Touch to Begin”.

Every screen in the room followed suit.

‘Going to do what it says?’ she asked, shifting uncomfortably in her chair. She reached behind her. ‘Maybe we can call for help?’

‘What’s that you’ve got there?’ he asked, seeing the object in her hands.

‘Just a book. I was practically sitting on it. Well?’

‘What’s it about?’

Staring at him in bemusement, she shook her head and flipped the heavy book open on the desk. She scanned a page that was chock full of words and diagrams, but understood none of it. ‘No idea,’ she replied at once, turning another chunk of pages in one, and she was about to close it when something caught her eye and she pulled the book closer.

‘What is it?’

‘Someone’s highlighted the top of this page. Sequence sixteen. Underlined in red.’ Jon stared at her, then turned sharply back to the screen, convinced he had seen something move there, but the logo remained static. ‘What did you see?’ Rachel asked. She wondered if she had seen it, too.

He bit his lip. ‘Dunno…’ He must have imagined it.

‘So, you going to press it, or shall I?’ and she leant forward, one hand still pressed on her ribs.

‘Yeah, sure…’ and he stretched out a finger to the glowing icon, but paused, glancing around for something – he didn’t know what – then turned back and touched to begin.

They both relaxed, fully expecting nothing to happen, but the chamber throbbed noisily into life. Jon stagger to his feet, knocking the chair back down the steps. Bright lights flared from every beam and the floor hummed with a powerful energy; a creature, long in slumber, was waking.

‘What the hell?’ Rachel demanded, having to shout over the cacophony erupting all around them.

‘I don’t know!’ he called back, glancing instinctively at the door which was, too his horror, closing. The lift shot down and out of sight before they were even half way to it. ‘Shit!’

Hands grasping for the seam, they tried to pry the door open, but it remained immovable. Panic swelled in his chest as he willed the cab to return; there wasn’t a recall button that she could see. Rachel banged her fists uselessly against the glass.

They were trapped in contraption whose revolutions were beginning. Then, the voice spoke.

Rachel whirled about, but the room was still empty but for themselves. A female voice addressed the chamber, running through a list of half-heard and even less-understood announcements.

‘Commencing first stage shutdown and separation; rerouting power to atmospheric pre-preparation subsystems; signal core isolation complete; main power to transmission emitters; confining all control inputs to this location,’ and more besides that they did not catch.

‘What is it, Jon? What the hell’s going on?!’ Rachel’s voice rose shrilly; he grabbed her hand, trying to steady her.

‘Rache, please. Rachel!’

But as suddenly as it had started, the noise and light ceased, plunging them into total darkness. Rachel screamed, and her shriek from out of that nothingness chilled her brother’s blood.

Then, the core mechanism – the opposing cones – began to extend towards each other, pulsing with a hypnotic blue light. The floor they were stood on turned translucent and amplified the light until it was painful to look at. They clutched each other as the cone tips neared, closed their eyes. White light flared through their eyelids and the fell like cut grass.


The light faded and the voice resumed. ‘Initiating matter confinement; full power to transmission emitters; initiating link; buffering; transferring.’

The last sensation Jon felt was a tingle at the top of his spine that spread to every fibre of his being. The room hummed and the blue glow flared, then subsided. Jon, Rachel, and their belongings has vanished.

‘Temporal incursion complete; purging buffer; relinquishing atmospheric pre-prepartion subsystems; disengaging matter transmission protocols; rerouting controls to default locations; returning to standby mode.’

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That's about one third of the intro. I'm not very good at short chapters...