Valhalla

 

Concerned passengers lined the deck of the ferry, peering darkly over the railing into the grey metallic gloom as the agitated elements of cloud, sea and rain came together in a tangled turmoil. The storm wasn't an issue.  These ferries were big enough to cope with anything Neptune could throw at them. The trouble lay with a giant wave-powered turbine; perched like a juggernaut on top of a land docked, floating breach-rig, it had come adrift of its moorings and was threatening the approach to the harbour.  A massive gun-grey and silver swinging cradle, hanging from two arms reaching 500 feet up into the boiling leaden sky, and thrusting forty feet down below the surface of the sea, was swinging off-kilter and fit to bust.  Normally the surge and scend of the sea drove the scooped cradle landwards and upwards, turning the massive turbines anchored to a pivot three quarters of the way up the arms. The scend of the sea is slow. The cradle swings too slowly to spin the turbines fast enough, so the turbines had to be geared up to a ratio of 200 to one to generate the electricity needed for the harbour complex housing some 10 thousand sea craft, from car ferries to sea cities and two-mile-long tanker transports.  The big problem came  not in the weight of such a huge structure, which floated on hyper-inflated hammer buoys, but in the  massive force of the waves impacting on the tight gearing of the turbine. The steel from which the structure was made had to be flawless. Any hint of carbon in between the crystals of the steel could cause a fatal crack, so the entire rig had to be grown from one single steel crystal in a minuscule pipette, upwards into a super silicon mould that was strong enough to withstand the soaring temperatures of such a process. It took five years to grow such a crystal to the necessary size.

     The design was god made. No mere mortal was capable of such grand thought. And then the gods sent the blueprints of the plan down to the 19 year old Joshua Mitke in a dream one night. His fortune was made and his place in Valhalla assured. This night however, on the night of the races, as Joshua and his newfound love headed back home on the shuttle ferry between the mainland and Paradise island, the gods had also sent a force-nine gale howling up the coast, tearing loose one of the anchor chains of the rig, which now slewed dangerously left and right while the cradle continued to swing to its storm driven maximum. All shipping in the area was desperately trying to claw itself out of harms way. Nuclear engines were driven to the utmost of their power and many a prayer was being said over a multitude of steering wheels for the seven remaining anchors to hold until they had all cleared the vicinity.

All traffic was diverted to.........be continued in my third book of The Broken Moon series, 'The Dead At The Door'

The first two books are, 'The Boy At The Gate' and 'The Girl In The Cellar'.

 

LEARNING TO FLY

It was the best job in the world, getting paid to dream. Well, I don’t think we were paid, but we all lived together in a dormitory/academy kind of place and spent as much time as we could, sleeping and dreaming. Every evening at six we would phone our dreams in to headquarters.

I don’t know how I ended up here; I just know I enjoyed it very much. I did notice however, that I came here about the same time as I started flying in my dreams. The academy took a special interest in flying dreams.

The other people there were a weird mix of characters but very nice and friendly and helpful. There were men and women, old and young, neat and sloppy, stern and gay. There was a guy called Harold who was on the same team as me. He was a happy chap, a bit like the guy from Notting Hill and I think he fancied me because he was always smiling and hanging around.

Anyhoo, one day I was late in phoning my dreams through to headquarters because I had blithely slept right through the reporting time. When I awoke, Harold was very concerned that I had missed my call and bustled off to try and organize another. I wasn’t too bothered though, for I was in a very good mood as I had just had a most amazing flying-dream.

But before I tell you about that I better tell you a bit more about my dreaming. Or my dream-flying really. Most of us know what its like to fly in our dreams. Well I suppose everyone does, because I do it quite a lot. It’s become a sort of hobby of mine really. Hardly a day or night goes by that I don’t fly. I’m pretty good at it now, though thinking back, I remember how hard it was in the beginning to even get off the ground. I had to use all my will power and even then I could only rise veeerry slowly, and only a few inches into the air. And sometimes when I finally managed to get high enough, the flight was disappointingly short.

Another problem in the beginning, you might remember, is not always being able to go where you wanted to go. If I saw something I liked and wanted to take a closer look, it would take ages to turn and head in that direction. It was like swimming through treacle. If I wanted to inspect a certain cloud, or tree, or bird, I had to once again use all my willpower and concentration to get there.

Anyway. Those frustrating days are behind me now and I can pretty much fly where I want and pretty quick too. And this is where we get to the point of my story.

On this particular day, when I had overslept and missed my regular six ‘o clock phone in, I had just had the most remarkable dream of my dream-flying career. This time I dreamt that I was carrying someone, and that I was flying them fast and low around a cape headland where there were many shady trees and meadows stretching out along a curving shoreline.

The person in my arms seemed oblivious to me and was enjoying the ride immensely. He or she was very excited by the experience. The person’s head turned this way and that at every new sight they saw, a bit like a baby on it’s first outing in a buggy. There was no end of wonderful things to see.

Now. I love flying fast. I am good at that; but when this person started pointing here and there, obviously wanting to go there, I can tell you I was hard put to fulfil their wishes. When you are carrying someone, it’s like trying to turn a jumbo jet at high speed. All that stopping and turning and up and down is a very tiring business and requires a lot of effort – I just couldn’t get any momentum going. But the person was so excited about the whole thing that I didn’t have the heart to resist.

Anyway, the big surprise finally dawned on me when the person in my arms wanted to get closer to a seagull sitting in a tree. He didn’t point this time, but I picked up what he wanted – a bit like ESP. Then I realized how frustrated he or she must have been, because I had probably been missing many of their silent signals. But I can’t be blamed really; it takes a long time to tune in to a persons wants and needs.

But it was while we were approaching the seagull – when I saw how slowly I was in responding to the persons wishes – that I realized that in my first flights, there must have been someone carrying me, and trying to intuit my wishes, and that’s why things had been so slow in the beginning. But now, here I was, an experienced flyer, helping someone else learning to fly, just like someone had helped me…without my knowing it.

I remember when I woke I had a big, proud smile on my face, and when I told Harold about it, he congratulated me and rushed off to organize a special out-of-hours phone call to headquarters for me.

CROMA CRUSH

I watched the metallic being in front of me go through the hatch and transform with a click. It was called trans-worlding. An instant breakdown and reassigning of the entity into a separate amalgamate. I was not metallic so I could only go through certain portals. I couldn’t transfigure. I could transmigrate, but only if I didn’t think about it or else my mind would freak out and resist losing it’s info-structure. Anyway, I managed to go through this particular portal and hit the deck between metal and soft sand. Our little group had been fleeing from an era-end of wood and fire, and machines of all different shapes were hovering in help positions, hoovering us out of the air.

So here I was – caught under a chrome crush and pressed against the sand. This was the first time I had been mated with a metallic substance. Well, not so much mated as pushed on and moulded to. But the chrome was soft-brushed and warm, as if it had been lying in the sun. At first I thought it would kill me with its weight, but it stopped before the sensation became unpleasant. It spoke in a soft, full, friendly voice. There wasn’t much to the meeting, which soon became a problem for me because all I could do was lie still while it pressed down on top of me. Not very satisfying. I wanted to move. Explore. I loved transitioning through the weird doorways – catching myself unawares in some strange environment with brand new elemental types. It was dangerous though, and one day I knew I would go too far and forget who I was forever. But that day was still in the future. For now I liked being me.

Boxing up and flattening wide and thin as paper air, I tried to extricate myself from my croma crush, but to no avail. Pleasant as it was, I just hated being pinned down. I imagined myself dropping down a chute and parading past the other paradigms – world upon world – each one different from the next. I never knew what to expect.

I closed my eyes and set my mind to thinking about how to get out of here.