When Luck Runs Out

by Terry Mixon

  “You can do this,” Kelsey assured her. “Let’s go.”

  Together, the two of them found an unused compartment where they could switch clothing. Kelsey sure hoped that Julia could carry off the role, because if Jared figured this out before the pinnaces launched, she was utterly screwed.

  Talbot was more relieved than he could say when Elise was able to open up the small chamber that he’d arrived in. He couldn’t see anything there, but she assured him there was a rune. She demonstrated it by closing the chamber, then having him touch the bare rock to open it back up.

  “I can’t believe that,” he grumbled. “How can you see it but I can’t?”

  “That’s… complicated,” she said. “I’m not really sure that any of us understands why, but it has something to do with me being pregnant.”

  He blinked in surprise. “Pregnant?”

  She nodded and smiled a bit wryly. “It turns out the EMP damaged my contraceptive implant. It didn’t fail right away, and something about me being pregnant made the chamber with the map give me extra authority. We’re not really sure what that is or why it’s working here, but it is.”

  “I suspect you’re not going to like the answer,” Carl said. “The fact that it’s working outside of the chamber almost certainly means that it’s made some change to you personally. Maybe an electronic implant of some kind or something that we can’t even understand. Once we get back to Invincible, I’m going to have to take you to my lab and see what we can find.”

  “An implant?” she asked, her voice suddenly strained. “I was just standing there. Nothing broke my skin. How could there be an implant?”

  “This comes back to the whole ‘alien technology is so advanced that it seems like magic’ scenario,” Carl said. “I mean, I suppose that we might still be in an area that allows you to wield that kind of control, but we won’t really know until we get you to the ship. Don’t panic. I don’t think you’re in any danger.”

  “But you don’t know for sure? Perfect. Jared is going to be just thrilled.”

  Elise threw her hands up in frustration and froze. “The alien interface just disappeared!”

  “Make that gesture again,” Carl said.

  She did so and seemed to deflate. “It’s back.”

  “This is a good thing,” her young friend said. “Being able to dismiss the interface is better than having it on all the time.”

  “I don’t want to mute it! I want it out of me!”

  “The sun is coming up,” Olivia said, probably trying to distract her friend.

  All of them turned and saw the sun peeking over the horizon behind the city. It was a reassuring yellowish color that wouldn’t have been out of place on Avalon. With the appearance of oncoming dawn, the stars began vanishing from the sky.

  Talbot knew that soon enough, it would be like any other planet’s typical day, although he wouldn’t be surprised if the galactic disk was still visible. It was so large and bright that it might be there all the time.

  The four of them stood there and watched as the sun rose beyond the horizon and were a little surprised when a second sun began rising behind the first. It was almost identical in color to the first and seemed to be about the same size.

  “Is that normal?” Olivia asked. “I thought most binary star systems had one sun that was significantly larger than the other. Those looked to be virtually identical.”

  “It’s not exactly the most common stellar arrangement,” Carl said. “That said, it’s not unheard of either. This world must be a little farther away from those suns than most worlds. Otherwise, it would be blazing hot.”

  Talbot shielded his eyes with his hand and kicked in every single filter that he could in his ocular implants. There was something in between the suns. It was almost as if there were strands of material going between them.

  “So, is it a bad thing when a binary star system has matter being transferred from one sun to the other?”

  “Send me a vid feed of what you’re seeing,” Carl said.

  His young friend observed it for a minute and then shook his head. “That’s not natural. Those stars are too far apart to be exchanging matter. There has to be something in between them—something too small for us to see—that’s drawing matter from each of them. It might be some kind of alien artifact drawing power. Or doing something we can’t even begin to imagine. Just one more mystery we’ll never have the opportunity to explore.

  “In any case, I don’t believe we’re in danger.”

  “Uh-huh,” Talbot said, not bothering to hide his skepticism. “I suggest that we take our robotic friend back to the planet with the obelisk and figure out how we’re going to get out of that chamber.”

  “No argument from me,” Elise said. “The robot is fairly sizable, but it’ll fit into the small transport chamber. Only one of us is going to be able to go in with it, though. The rune above the door there is going to be the rune you’ll need to use. I’ll send everyone the picture.”

  Talbot examined the rune that she sent to him. “I’ve got it. Why don’t I go with the robot to make sure that everything works as expected? It’s my job to take risks.”

  None of them objected, so he went into the chamber first and located the rune. Elise turned the robot off, and they pushed, pulled, and shoved until it was inside with him.

  “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” he muttered as he pressed the rune in question.

  The bright white light came back and vanished, and then he was once more in a small chamber just off the map chamber, and other people were calling out to him through the now-open door.

  “Grab the other end of this thing, and help me get it out,” he said. “Everybody else is fine, and they’ll be back here in just a couple of minutes.”

  Five minutes later, he’d gone back and gotten everyone. One problem solved. Now they just had to figure out how to use Elise’s new controls to get them the hell out from under the obelisk.

  16

  Elise was glad to be back in the larger cavern but still wasn’t certain how they’d get out of it. The strange, ghostly controls were still just as obtuse as they’d been before. She could summon or dismiss them now, but none of the runes made any sense to any of them.

  Yes, she’d figured out how to turn the map on and off, almost by accident. She could zoom in and see some of the details but really had no overall control, because she was ignorant of what any of the other runes did.

  It was like learning a new language by being dropped into the middle of a culture where they refused to help you in any way.

  She wasn’t quite sure how she’d figured out the zoom function. Doing it by accident seemed unlikely. Maybe the menu was context sensitive. Since they’d been looking at the map, maybe what she was doing was limited to affecting only the map.

  That begged the question of what else was possible. The only way she was going to find out was by doing things. Things that might go very wrong.

  Still, it wasn’t as if she had a choice. Nothing Carl did affected anything in the room. He couldn’t activate the map, and he couldn’t get them out. It was as if once she was selected as the operator, there was no way to release control back to him. At least no way that she knew of.

  He was still trying to get the exit to respond to them, so she walked over to the central area that the map was controlled from and, rather than touching any of the controls around her, tried to will the map into existence by thought alone.

  Unsurprisingly, nothing happened.

  The last time she’d brought the map up, only she could see it. There was probably a way to make it publicly viewable, but she didn’t have the knowledge to do that. That only annoyed her all over again.

  Worse, if they couldn’t get out of the chamber, they’d run out of water shortly. Well, unless, of course, they went back to the alien planet and tapped into the water supply that Talbot had found. And the food he’d eaten, though she thought that was incredibly rash of him. What kind of moron ate
million-year-old food?

  Hungry Marine Raiders, or so it seemed.

  Well, if they had nothing else to eat or drink, she’d do it too.

  Elise took a slow, deep breath and brought the controls to visibility. Once again, the spirals of light went down from her head and around her body and stopped at her waist. Above and below them were glowing runes that she knew meant something.

  Looking back at what she’d done before, she saw which rune she had touched to turn the map on and did so. Once again, the blazing glory of the Milky Way appeared above her.

  No one else even glanced up, so she knew that it was only visible to her.

  How was that possible? Carl had been standing right beside her and couldn’t see anything. What would make the map visible only to her?

  Unfortunately, his suggestion that she had some type of alien implant inside her made all too much sense. If there was an alien device feeding her information, there was no reason that anyone else should be able to see it. In fact, there was every reason that they shouldn’t.

  But if there was an alien device feeding her information, shouldn’t it be making an attempt to at least modify its behavior for her? Why did she have to figure out what all of the strange alien runes meant when it should be modeling its behavior on her? Why weren’t all these displays in Standard?

  Elise eyed the rune that turned the map on and off. Was using it a binary choice, or did manipulating it in different ways also modify what it did?

  Her experimentation revealed that passing her hand through it at various angles only turned the view on and off. No one else gave any sign that they saw the map above them.

  If the damn thing hadn’t been immaterial, she’d have tried manipulating it in other ways.

  Maybe that didn’t matter.

  She reached out as if she were going to grab the rune between her thumb and index finger. Once she was pretending to hold it, she twisted her wrist, and the rune flipped over. The change also switched its color from blue to lime green.

  This had an immediate effect on everyone around her, as the entire room looked up and gasped when the map must’ve appeared above them. She’d found a way to turn it on for everyone else.

  “What did you do?” Carl asked as he hurried up.

  “I tried twisting the rune around. It changed color from blue to green when I did that, and now everyone can see the map. I think that means I took it from private to public.”

  “Try doing other manipulations with the runes and see what you can do.”

  It didn’t take too much experimentation to figure out how to make the map rotate along multiple axes as well as zoom in and zoom out. She had to put her hands out like she was grabbing the spiral of light and rotating around her body to get at the runes to her rear.

  It was annoying. Why couldn’t she do any searching?

  She brought up the image of the rune that led to the world they’d visited and reached out with her index finger and drew it into the air. To her shock, her finger left a blue mark in the air as if she were writing on nothing. When she completed the rune, the map rotated and zoomed to a specific system, maybe halfway toward the galactic core from the Terran Empire but on the far side of the Milky Way.

  She had absolutely no way of knowing if that was really the place they’d just visited, but it did have two stars in close proximity to one another. Between them was a small flashing light. Would that be the alien facility Carl had guessed might exist?

  Elise touched one of the stars. Well, it was way up in the chamber, but she acted as if she were touching it. The star shifted to the left, and her view was filled with a scrolling column of runes. She suspected that meant it was telling her about the star that she’d designated.

  “Can you see that?” she asked.

  Carl nodded. “It looks like you’ve tapped into a database of some kind, and it’s giving you information on the star. Or perhaps the system itself. See if you can tap the planet that we suspect was the one we visited. That is what you selected, right?”

  “I think so.”

  She tapped the glowing spark between the stars, and the same kind of column started scrolling. Too bad she had no frame of reference to know what any of that meant.

  “How do I know which planet we were on?” she asked.

  The map of the system had the two stars and eleven major worlds. Around those worlds were innumerable moons.

  Carl pointed at the one that was fifth in orbit. “Start with that one. I think it’s probably about the right distance out to be in the habitable zone considering the solar output from both stars.”

  Elise reached out and touched the image of the world that Carl indicated. Like the star and the alien facility, it began scrolling runes next to it that she had no way to interpret. There was a small flashing light on the surface of the planet that looked exactly like the one between the stars.

  Curious what that was, Elise tried to expand the planet further without much expectation of success. She was surprised to see that she could zoom in past any of the other locations that she’d tried so far. In fact, as she grew closer to the blinking light, she realized she must be looking down at the city that they’d seen when they’d visited the world.

  It didn’t look like a real-time display. In fact, it didn’t look like it was even a photograph. This was obviously computer generated. Everything had just enough off about it that she could tell that it wasn’t depicting reality.

  “Interesting,” Carl said. “My guess is that the database has information about the city’s layout and size. Those buildings don’t look like they’re really there, so they must be computer generated. Can you get any information from the city?”

  She tried to zoom in closer, but the display stopped expanding when she had a decent view of the city as a whole. She tried tapping individual buildings, but all her efforts did was select the city itself and scroll data about it.

  “It looks like I can see what’s going on with the city at some point in the past,” she said. “It won’t let me dig down to find out what’s going on with any specific building. Let’s see if I can find the little chamber that we transported into.”

  It turned out that the flashing light that had drawn her to the planet wasn’t the city. It was the chamber off to the side. More interesting to her was the fact that in this computer image, there wasn’t just that little chamber. That entire hill seemed to be honeycombed with some type of installation.

  The only reason that she could tell it was there were faint hollows under the ground that hinted at a facility without giving any details. Also, the entrances were clearly marked. If they’d gone around the small area they’d come out at, they’d have spotted a larger door that apparently led into the facility itself.

  She supposed that was reassuring, because the idea of being able to use such a small chamber to travel that unbelievable distance would have been mind-boggling. At least now she knew that there was a large facility generating an enormous amount of power backing it up.

  “Why can I see all the details about this facility but not the one between the stars?” she asked. “It only showed the glowing dot.”

  “Maybe it’s not accessible to the aliens,” Carl said with a shrug. “Just one more unanswered question.”

  “I wonder why so many of the runes we’ve seen aren’t active anymore. Do you think that’s because of how old they are? Have this civilization and its creations been around for so long that the majority of them have finally failed, and we just got lucky to find a functional one?”

  “There’s no telling,” Carl said. “I’m more curious as to why someone felt the need to move all the dinosaurs here and then make a reservation world for them. Obviously, the aliens wanted to keep the critters genetically stable. That explains why they have specialized nanites that don’t allow for genetic drift.

  “Yet the presence of humans—beings that shared the same genetic home world—caught the attention of this facility and made it signal us. It cert
ainly seems as if the aliens wanted us to find all this, but I don’t understand why. This place is nowhere near Terra. How could they know that we’d get here?”

  Elise frowned as she thought about that and decided to see if she could gather any more information about this system. She brought up the image in her implants of the rune that had brought them back to this world and drew it in front of her. That caused the map to shift and show them a new star system.

  Again, it looked relatively normal. She knew which world they were on and was able to tap it and see another blinking dot that, when they zoomed in, revealed the obelisk and hints of a larger facility beneath it.

  She zoomed back out and examined the system as a whole. There was the multiflip point, but was there anything else?

  Her eyes narrowed when she finally spotted it. One of those ultra-far flip points was sitting out beyond any reasonable range that they’d have explored. Those things could travel a tremendous distance, so there was no telling where it ended up.

  Or was there?

  She reached out and tapped the flip point with the tip of her finger, and the map shrank back down to the point where she could see that the line led to another system. She had no way of judging distance, and the system she was looking at on the other end didn’t look familiar.

  It was a trinary star system with two suns in a close orbit and another sitting off at a distance. There were some small worlds in the system, but nothing looked like it would be habitable or even really all that useful.

  There was only a single regular flip point in the system. No multiflip points and no far flip points.

  Just out of curiosity, she tapped the regular flip point and saw that it went to the next-nearest star. A tap on that system brought understanding, as it was a system that she recognized instantly.

  She pointed at the map almost accusingly. “That’s Terra. There’s an ultra-far flip point in Alpha Centauri that leads here.”

  Carl nodded. “Go back to Alpha Centauri. I want to take a closer look at the planets in that system. Was it just a hop along the way to get here, or did the aliens have some kind of facility there? I guess it makes sense now why they’d put the dinosaurs here rather than Alpha Centauri. There aren’t any habitable worlds there.”