Finding Sanctuary

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Chapter One

He was the impossible man.
His name was Jason. His escorts thought he was just a political exile, too well connected to be executed but too far out of favor to be allowed quiet retirement.
They were wrong.
They thought he could never get away from them, that the machine they had been given made him safe to transport.
Again they were incorrect.
The machine prevented him from using any mental powers true, and it kept him from accessing the other dimensional energies in the manner that other races called magic or sorcery but he was still more than the two of them could handle. He had been an agent for the Atlantean government for 30 years.

He had worked for the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Defense and for the last 10 years for a High Councillor. He had great experience in defeating unbeatable security, harming the invulnerable, and tracking the untraceable.
He was good at the impossible. He could never be publicly commended for he was an unperson, a ghost, deniable and expendable. He had been OK with that. He was never reprimanded. Any failure would have been met with death on his return home. That had been OK too. He had been responsible for the safety of his planet and its people and culture, that was more important than his life.
It was also why he was here, at the Prisoner Transport Facility deep inside the Ministry of Justice. He had seen finally, the true heart of the person he worked for. He had questioned orders and the policy behind the orders and the integrity of the man 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 for their colleague; even the Chairman of the Council of Thirteen had done nothing -- so he had taken things into his own hands. He had sent his former boss into the disintegration chamber and exposed the corruption to the planet at large. He hoped it was enough but he had done all he could for his world and now he had to do what he could for himself. He was no longer an agent for anyone except himself.

They were sending him to a world that was pre-industrial and so far from any wormhole that nobody 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 used as an example of the benefits of following the leadership of the High Council rather than the Elders. Now the New Atlantean government used 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 prevent any inhabitant from quantum tunneling from its surface without equipment such as his escorts wore to provide the right electronic keys.
Few could use that method of traveling to other planets without technological aids like the two escorts had; but it was possible, if only for the most powerful and mathematically inclined, so it was ruled out. It was impossible for him to escape but he did it anyway.

During the trip through folded dimensions their grip loosened, after all this was the home stretch so they relaxed. It was all he needed to free himself. Of course this left him adrift between dimensions but he was one of those who had the power, skill, and training to traverse the folded dimensions on his own and he changed his destination to Kelsor 7 instead of Velvet.
On Kelsor 7 it was as if he had never been stabbed in the back by his own people, as if he was a loyal servant 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 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 and the had an unofficial party on board to celebrate the completion of a long assignment and the bonus they would get.

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 that the empty ship was moving while empty 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 this was a person or persons onboard.

The officials told each other that he must be crazy for nobody could pilot a ship without computer control anymore. There was too much data for any normal human mind to make much 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 not only knew how to guide the ship, he knew where he was going. That was the other part of his plan. The idea was simply to get so lost nobody could find him not get killed -- as he might even if he made it safely through the \"unnavigable\" wormhole.
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 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.

His shift boss on the work crew 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 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.

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 wanted, no 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 be himself. 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 disliked having to go undercover again but he could if necessary. 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 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.