Trans-Temporter by Christopher M Robinson - HTML preview

Chapter 5

Valu

Tanvi’s little sister prefers not to live in her big sister’s shadow nor to be defined by who her parents are. She’s a rebel which is what I find so appealing about her, and doesn’t play by the rules.

She is extraordinarily clever but treated school with disdain and couldn’t wait to escape the clutches of academia a couple of years ago instead of going on to university like her elder sister, despite having achieved extraordinary marks in all her exams which she’d taken a year early. It’s almost like she knows everything by some kind of intuition, in fact some of her teachers at the secondary school were convinced she must be cheating in some way, but she wasn’t.

Tanvi and Chris find her annoying and Ava doesn’t usually mix with us when she’s around but she does seem to like me, perhaps because I used to play games of ‘teacher and pupil’ with her, which may have been the first suggestions to me that I should become a teacher. She would play the attention-seeking, annoying class member whom I would have to deal with by finding more demanding tasks for her to do. It seemed she enjoyed being set difficult tasks as a punishment. I suspect it’s how she behaved with her real teachers too but they didn’t have the time nor patience to handle her.

Although just three years younger than me, she was soon outstripping what I had already learned and actually helped me with my learning when I started university. In discussing concepts that I was trying to get my head around, she would quip, “Simps,” and reveal a solution I hadn’t seen. “Simps” became something of a nickname I had for her. She told me it was a better name than Valu which people kept pronouncing wrong.

“It’s ‘Va-loo’,” she told them, putting the stress on the second syllable, “not ‘Val-you’. It’s a Sanskrit name meaning worth as in importance. I’m not a cut-price supermarket bargain.” However, most

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people just called her ‘Val’ which she endured, “But it’s not short for Valerie,” she would emphasise.

She had inherited her mother’s good looks, with a few Indian features providing a gorgeous glow to the tone of her skin. Couple that with an athletic physique and her youth and you can see why so many men couldn’t take their eyes off her even though she was only a teen, but she had no interest in using make-up or dressing to attract men. She is the epitome of a tomboy, preferring an active life of climbing trees and playing football to reading a book.

She would often take herself off alone, walking or cycling for hours on end by herself usually getting as far away from civilisation as she could reasonably achieve on this small island of ours.

I caught her one day skinny dipping in the lake behind SSS offices when she was about fourteen of fifteen. She knew I’d seen her and made a show of flaunting her body but I immediately withdrew and ran a mile; when she did see me next she just brushed it off. “I’ve nothing to be ashamed of,” she said. I told her she would get in trouble if the wrong sort of man were to see her.

“I can take care of myself,” she replied and I think she probably would be the equal of most would-be attackers.

Because she had been top of the class in all her subjects, the school had advanced her a year and she had started sixth form a year before other children.

At sixteen, she hitch-hiked to Scotland in the school summer holidays half way through her sixth form course taking just a Swiss Army Knife as her only ‘luxury’ apart from her mobile phone. Saanvi and Noah couldn’t stop her. She did post some clips on social media bivouacking having constructed shelters from fallen branches and bracken. She’d collected rainwater and water from streams which she filtered using a filtration system she’d fashioned from an old plastic drink bottle she’d found discarded, along with layers of clean sand collected from a pristine beach, over layers of gravel and larger pebbles.

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She managed to make a fire by gathering sticks, shaving kindling, adding old dry leaves and making a spark by striking her penknife against a stone. She had picked berries and knew which plants were edible but had learned to fish with a spear she fashioned from a long, straight stick, standing for hours to catch one which she’d gut with her knife and cook over the fire, by snaring it on a stick. She even fashioned a crude clay pot from silt she fashioned with her hands and baked in the embers of a fire overnight. It was sufficient to use as a cooking utensil.

However, she had had a scary moment when hitch-hiking. A lorry driver had helped her by giving her a lift and even bought her a meal when he pulled in at a cheap drivers’ stop, but then he indicated he was intending to park up there for the night and sleep in his cramped quarters above the cab. That was when he ‘invited’ her to join him, supposedly offering her a place for the night rather than abandoning her in the wilds of Northumberland. That was when she had to demonstrate just how savvy she was and gave him the slip using the age old trick of escaping through the cafe’s toilet window. A waitress going off shift saw her and let her hide in her car until she finished and gave her a bed for the night.

When she arrived back home after nearly four weeks away, her parents were all over her but she hated them fussing. “I survived,” she said and after a medical check-up at her mother’s insistence, she was found to be in the best of health.

She would often find me to spend time with, “to get away from my over-protective parents,” she’d say.

She enjoyed playing through my collection of antique and vintage recordings. I had taken a particular interest in music from a century ago and the revival in interest of music from the 1970’s and 80’s. They had been so gifted musically it seemed to me, with tunes you could sing along to.

We also got into big trouble when my Dad caught us playing games with a Temporter. We had devised lots of games using it when we shouldn’t have, from hide and seek to pelmanism. One of us would shut

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the other in a temporter and set it for a short time, usually about 5 minutes, during which we may hide or change the space around the box a bit. When the seeker emerged, they had to find the other or describe the changes that had occurred etcetera. Although we got a stern ticking off from my Dad and were forbidden to go near the device again, it did prepare me for what was to come later.

Valu was just seventeen when she left school to take a gap year doing voluntary work oversees as her mother had done, albeit a couple of years older than her, but she eschewed any help in signing up with MSF or any other charity that could use her, insisting she would go her own way, finding work as required and going where she felt led. She packed a rucksack with the bare essentials and started off hitch-hiking through Europe, staying in hostels or homesteads in exchange for work, any sort of work: fruit picking, managing animals or whatever she could find, preferring an outdoor life. Saanvi and Noah hoped she would soon tire and miss the comforts of home to return and follow an academic path in university or college of some sort to prepare her for a ‘proper role’ in society.

She sent texts frequently and posts on social media for the first couple of months and then, somewhere in Eastern Europe, she suddenly went quiet. Despite frequent texts there was no response. Attempted phone calls were met with, “This number is currently unavailable.”

Everyone was concerned and her grandfather, Bodhi, had the international crime agencies looking out for her to no avail.

Then out of the blue, SSS received a communication from Valu’s device. (SSS had been receiving some anonymous texts to send the plans for a temporter but, they had been considered hoaxes.)

“We have your girl. If you want to see her again, give us a temporter.” Geo co-ordinates were attached A precise location had been provided with geo co-ordinates and time. “We will collect it from the pod,” suggesting

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that we could just put a temporter in a pod and send it via the Channel Pipeway.

Checking the co-ordinates provided revealed the Northern France terminal of the Cross-channel Pipeway, in a disused quarry near Marquise.

As proof they had her, they’d permitted her to add to the text.

“Don’t worry. They’re after a temporter, including all its control gubbins. They say it’s for a good cause. It’s simps to just send them one, isn’t it? Love Clodagh.”

She never signed off ‘Love’ anyone, “and why the name Clodagh?” everyone asked, but I knew that she had sent me a workable plan of action.

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