by Isaac Hooke
When she had cleared the ship, she activated her air brakes to slow herself, and jetted sideways and downward to rejoin her companions, using her overhead map to guide her. She glanced over her shoulder at the starship.
The underside of the triangular vessel was red hot, with sections already molten. The starship hadn’t been designed for atmospheric reentry. It was pockmarked with blast holes—the ship had been shot down.
“Rhea?” Will asked.
She blinked, his voice bringing her back to the present moment. She felt a moment of anger at his interruption, but then realized he probably wasn’t responsible for ending the flashback. It was just a coincidence on his part.
She ignored him and continued forward with renewed purpose.
Jairlin immediately started walking again, in order to keep his team ahead of her.
Crystalline structures began to take shape in the walls. Stacked one atop the other, they protruded in octagonal rods, their tips flats.
“Emeralds,” Jairlin said.
“We’re in the old mines,” Horatio said. “These crystals would have formed after the impact, a consequence of the extreme temperature and pressure. I’m beginning to wonder if the entire Emerald Highlands were created by the crash.” The robot glanced at Rhea. “If that’s the case, it was probably a starship after all.”
The party continued forward, until the tunnel walls opened ahead.
“We’ve reached a chamber of some kind,” Jairlin announced. “Give us a moment to clear it.”
Rhea switched to his viewpoint. He indeed stood in a chamber. Well, a cavern really. Emeralds jutted out intermittently from the walls and floor. At the center lurked a black, cube-like structure whose top and bottom were encased in the rock of floor and ceiling. It was about the size of three standard Rust Town cargo containers, in terms of breadth.
Beyond the cube, she could see corridors branching off. The Black Hands would have fled down some, or all, of those tunnels. But she already knew she was going no further into the cave system: the cube was undoubtedly the ‘gift’ Veil had referred to.
“It’s clear,” Jairlin said.
She dismissed his viewpoint and entered with the others. They fanned out in front of the cube, and slowly approached.
Horatio was the first to reach it, and he rested a metal hand on its surface.
“It’s made of a strange alloy I’ve never seen before,” Horatio said. “I’m not completely sure how it was formed, but it would’ve had to have been virtually indestructible to survive the crash.”
“Well, it’s obviously a black box,” Miles said. “Get it? You know, the flight recorder.”
Everyone ignored him, lost in their own thoughts.
Rhea neared the object. As she got closer, she realized it wasn’t encased in the rock after all: there was a trench dug all along the outer edges, both on the floor and ceiling, as if someone had tried to remove the cube from the surrounding rock. They’d managed to excavate the rock, yes, but apparently the cube had been too dense to move.
“It’s emitting gravity waves,” Horatio said.
“What are you saying?” Miles asked.
“I believe the device is still powered,” Horatio replied. “And it’s emitting these waves to artificially increase its weight.”
“So that no one could relocate it?” Miles pressed.
“I don’t know,” Horatio admitted.
Rhea ran a hand across the black surface. There were minute scratches, often flowing outward, as if evidence of blast marks. It seemed obvious that Veil, and whatever Earth governments knew about the crash site, had tried to cut into the cube but failed. All they’d been able to do was scratch it.
Not far from her, Will fired his plasma pistol at the cube. Those around him stepped back nervously as a red circle formed over the impact zone. The circle quickly faded, and the material displayed no hint of any impact.
Will’s brows knit together; he raised a tentative palm and rested it on the surface. He pulled the hand away as if expecting the cube to feel extremely hot, but evidently it was not because he pressed his palm onto the exterior once again a moment later.
“Remarkable,” he said. “It’s already dispersed the heat. That should be impossible, given our present-day science.”
“A lot of the tech the Ganymedeans had was supposedly impossible,” Horatio commented.
Rhea was reading a weak signal.
“Are you guys getting that?” she asked.
“Getting what?” Horatio replied.
“There’s a signal…” she said.
“No,” Horatio said. “We read nothing.”
“It’s possible her comm system is malfunctioning,” Jairlin suggested. “She did take quite a battering back there.”
“It’s more likely her Ganymedean mind-machine interface is picking up something human tech can’t,” Horatio said. “How do you think she’s able to activate the Ban’Shar when no one else can? It’s the subtle differences in her interface. If this object is Ganymedean, it’s entirely likely she’s the only one who can communicate with it.”
Now she understood why her head would have raised a fortune on the auction block.
A hologram appeared before Rhea: a woman, dressed in a pristine white robe. Though her hood was raised, long black hair flowed out from beneath the rim of that hood.
“Welcome, Mistress,” the woman said. “You have returned.”
“I’ve been here before?” Rhea asked. If that was true, then it must have been before Veil and her Black Hands had taken up residence. Or perhaps the woman was referring to a time before the ship had crashed.
“I have prepared your quarters,” the woman replied. Rhea noted that she had not answered the question.
“Who are you talking to?” Will asked.
A panel slid open in the cube, forming an entrance. It was dark inside.
She glanced at Will whose mouth had dropped.
“This was part of my ship,” Rhea said.
“If this was your ship, then you were part of the invasion force that came to Earth,” Miles said.
“She didn’t participate in the Great Calming,” Will told him. “You know she didn’t.”
Miles nodded. “You’re probably right.” But still, his features had darkened.
Maybe she had directly participated in the Great Calming. Or maybe she hadn’t. Either way, for some reason the possibility that she might have been involved didn’t bother her anymore. Perhaps it was because she knew she wasn’t that person anymore. The Rhea who lived today would never wipe out half a planet. Never.
Or perhaps it was merely because she was curious about what resided inside this cube.
She returned her attention to the hologram.
“Who am I?” she asked.
“You instructed me not to directly answer questions from anyone ever again, even you,” the woman said. “As such, while I can let you inside, I can do no more. I denied entry to the others who came, just as you ordered.”
That would make some sense. If Khrusos had captured Ganymedeans, he would have tried to use them to open this cube. Yet if Rhea was his slave at some point, she would have opened it for him, as she did just now. Unless Khrusos didn’t know, which seemed unlikely.
She approached the opening, and when she took a step inside, a glow lamp lit up overhead, illuminating a black corridor.
Will started to follow her.
She looked at him and raised a hand. “I have to do this alone.”
He seemed about to contest her, so she added: “I’ll share my video feed with you. If anything happens to me, you can rush inside.”
He opened his mouth once more, but then reluctantly nodded and stepped back. She shared her feed and watched her view count increase to match the number of members in the party.
She entered, and the hologram vanished. Once beyond the threshold, she took a few tentative steps, then glanced over her shoulder. The entrance remained open. She could see Will and t
he others watching anxiously beyond, their headlamps creating bright cones of light that cut through the darkness.
She turned around and continued forward. Her feet echoed off the hard floor, sounding muted in the tight confines. The arched ceiling smoothly joined the walls on either side, and was just the right height for her, with about a handspan to spare above her head. White dots the size of pinpricks shone in the round surface, forming archways of light that added to the overall glow.
She reached an L intersection and slowly rounded the bend. She was ready to deploy her Ban’Shar…
But no one waited to ambush her. Instead, the corridor opened into a room roughly the size of a cargo container. The corners where the floor and ceiling met the walls were rounded, forming a seamless surface as if the entire room had been cast from a mold.
The room was empty save for a lone pedestal in the center.
Rhea approached it.
The top portion of the pedestal ended at waist height, terminating in a flat, elliptical surface that sloped forty-five degrees toward her body. There was a handprint cut into that surface, with a thumb placement on either side—it could support either the right or left hand. Without pausing to think, she rested her intact hand onto the imprint. Her palm and fingers were slightly smaller than the stamp, so for a moment she thought nothing was going to happen.
But then nozzles opened along the left and right sides, and thousands of black dots poured out. Insects. Crawling up the surface of the pedestal. Toward her hand.
Rhea didn’t move.
The insects flowed onto her fingers and skittered up her arm. She felt them all, their tiny, sharp feet seeming like small razors against the metal of her flesh. They ignored the Ban’Shar, swirling around it.
The insects crept up her shoulder, then began to spread across the remainder of her body.
That was when the agony began. Those tiny razors dug into the raw elements composing her armor. Thousands of them gnawing at the same time, firing off the pain sensors embedded in the metal.
It was so intense that she was forced to shut off the pain, lest she scream. She held her hand firmly in place on the pedestal, somehow knowing that once the process had begun, it would be fatal to interrupt.
The insects continued to disseminate across her body, though none of them touched the artificial skin that began above her upper chest. No… they crawled underneath it, concentrating on the metal portions hidden below. Devouring. Transforming.
She zoomed in on a section of her body. They weren’t insects of course, but nano machines. Spiderish, with eight legs, and mandibles that could rip away pieces of metal. On the abdomen, precisely where the spinnerets of a real spider would be, resided an array of lasers and extruders, used for cutting, soldering, and 3D printing. She wasn’t sure what their power source was. The physics behind them were impossible, at least by Earth standards.
The machines devoured her armor, and at the same time printed copies of themselves. These copies went on to do the same, so that they were reproducing exponentially.
The machines were no longer crawling onto her from the pedestal, so she released it. As the servomotors in her knees failed, she collapsed.
She tilted her head to gaze down upon her ravaged body. Her arms, legs and torso caved as she watched.
Veil’s final revenge. It was all a trick.
Her network connection cut out, severing her from the others. She knew it wouldn’t be long before her mind-machine interface failed entirely, and then, her brain.
But incredibly, new arms and legs began to take shape beneath the remains of her old limbs. She realized that while the nano machines were using the metal of her body to create more of themselves, most of these new machines went on to integrate themselves with her frame, forming new circuitry, servomotors, and armor. On a macro scale, they were remaking her.
Her chest slowly puffed out as well, and then in moments, it was done. The nano machines slipped inside tiny vents within her armor, vanishing from view, and then the vents themselves sealed, leaving behind a smooth, skin-like metal in its place.
Her arms and legs were bigger, and sleeker than before, polished to a mirrorlike sheen. Not only that, her severed hand had been restored.
She touched her upper body. She felt the soft, artificial skin of her head and shoulders, which apparently had survived the transformation unaltered. The Ban’Shar around her left hand had also survived the transformation.
Will stood at the entrance to the room. The others were crowded in behind him, with concern written all over their faces.
“Are you all right?” Will asked.
In answer, she slowly clambered to her feet. She griped the pedestal for support.
Will seemed reluctant to come inside to offer her a hand, she noted. She didn’t blame him, after what had just happened.
When she was fully standing, she released the pedestal and turned toward him. The nano machines activated in a ring pattern around her neck. They swarmed out, with those in the lead melted by those just behind, their raw elements smelted and separated to create a glass composite. This process continued, with more and more of the machines swarming upward, so that they 3D-printed a translucent dome around her head. At the very top the machines formed a metal box, completing the seal. The remaining nano machines vanished within that box, and oxygen flowed into the dome.
She took several deep breathes, and then the process reversed as the dome began breaking down. In seconds it had vanished, and the nano machines returned into the vents around her neck.
“How are you doing that?” Will transmitted.
She lifted her arm, and it changed shape as the nano machines forged a long blade. She noted that her forearm thinned noticeably—the materials for that blade had been taken directly from her armor.
“I don’t know,” she told Will. “It’s almost… instinctual. It’s like the nano machines inside me are just another organ inside my body. One that’s completely under my control. I’m creating these things by flexing this organ… as I would flex a finger or toe.”
“Muscle memory,” Will said.
She nodded, and the blade retracted, restoring her hand. Her forearm returned to its previous thickness.
“Give me access to your feed,” she said. “I want to look at myself.”
Will did so.
She observed herself from his viewpoint. The artificial skin of her head and shoulders indeed remained intact, so that part of her looked identical to before. But the rest of her… she looked exactly like the other Ganymedeans she had seen in her memories, those who had leaped from the hull of the starship as it burned up during atmospheric reentry. Lustrous, lithe, and highly deadly.
“Your body looks almost like it’s made of mercury,” Brinks commented.
“Mercury is liquid at room temperature,” Rhea said.
“That’s what I mean,” Brinks said. “It’s so shiny… almost like liquid metal.”
“Just like the Ganymedeans,” Miles commented softly.
Rhea continued to admire herself. “I thought at first Veil had betrayed me. But she wasn’t lying. This is indeed a gift.”
“You’ve been upgraded,” Will agreed.
She nodded, smiling grimly. “I’m finally ready.”
“For what?” Will asked.
She could see her eyes glinting malevolently on the video feed. “I’m ready to face Khrusos.”
BOOK 4: Rhea, Will and Horatio return to fight another day in Warden 4, available on Amazon at https://readerlinks.com/l/1054312
Or discover how Will and Horatio first met in the prequel novella, Salvage, available for free here: https://bookhip.com/WBMXLC
About the Author
USA Today bestselling author Isaac Hooke holds a degree in engineering physics, though his more unusual inventions remain fictive at this time. He is an avid hiker, cyclist, and photographer who sometimes resides in Edmonton, Alberta.
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Copyright © 2020 by Isaac Hooke
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