by T. L Smith
I gasped as something pierced through the back of my suit and into my upper neck. I screamed as a burning liquid rushed into my spine. My screaming stopped instantly, my mouth still gaping open. I couldn’t even close it.
A drug? My body didn’t work, but my brain still did. “Why are you doing this to me?”
Outside the chamber I could see the shimmer of Elders gathering. And I could see more. A memory. I had been here before. I had come full circle, almost. One more thing remained.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The will to fight faded into an out-of-body awareness. I suddenly watched what happened to me inside the dome. I watched what happened to Everett and my team. My whole squadron.
My pain was a shockwave that vibrated through the entire Orb. My men fell under the wave. The lights that lured us into the ship surged, then went out everywhere. Pitching the Orb into total darkness. Then slowly they flickered on again.
As my agony leveled out, my men were able to stand again. They staggered to regain balance, until I felt the Elders block my pain from their heads. They compelled them to reactivating the Orb, that I had somehow jumpstarted. Everett remained at the barrier, staring into the chamber imprisoning me.
My body and brain hurt, and I was afraid, but at the same time felt disconnected. If I let myself, I could simply drift away. I could surrender, but it felt as if that would end me. End my soul. I would become completely their instrument. I needed to hang on.
I needed Everett. Whether my plea or his, the barrier faded and Everett cautiously entered the room. They let him approach the dais, and even climb the steps until he stood only inches from the next field.
His voice came through to me. “She’ll lose her hands in this cold. She’s probably losing oxygen too. You can’t keep her like this much longer.”
Was he speaking to the Elders, or the Orb?
“We are increasing ambient temperature inside the field.” There was a pause. “Her bio-readings are stable.”
“Is it necessary to hurt her so much?”
“We desire no harm. Final reintegration is required.”
“What more integration do you need? Why is hers different?” Everett moved around the field until he could see into my helmet.
“We have been absent for many… millennia. Her DNA allows reactivation of what you call the Orb. Now she must be merged with her…” They hesitated. “…with the Guardian.”
“The Guardian?”
“The Guardian joins her.”
I heard the answers, but couldn’t ask who this guardian was. Not even telepathically. I was trapped inside this shell. Inside my own head. All my EH abilities were trapped inside me. No matter how desperately I reached out to Everett, he could only feel my pain. I stared at him, unblinking. His eyes were the only thing that kept me focused as this isolation crippled me. As my thoughts turned to the past.
Visions of the people I’d known flashed before me. Faces of people from my prior lives swirled into a kaleidoscope. I relived flashes of loss and agony beyond anything the book had opened up for me. My memories went to war and grief. And anger.
This wasn’t my pain. With this awareness, I felt another being, so near her thoughts invaded me. “You sense me now?” The entity spoke to me. “I waited so long for your return.”
“My return?” My abilities opened a bit more with her question. I searched for her soul, but couldn’t sense her presence as I did Elders. “Where are you?”
“It has been so long since they left me. Longer than we imagined, but I had no choice. Someone had to stay, to protect this place and those who would someday return.”
“I don’t understand. You’ve been here since who left…the Elders? How? Where are you?” My neck hurt from whatever they’d injected into me. “What did you do to me? Am I reading your mind or are you communicating another way?”
“Neither. Don’t you understand yet?” Images rushed through me. The others evolved, but she would await our return, no, my return. I didn’t know what she meant, but memories came to me again, more clearly.
Two medical tables lay side by side, one with a woman, so young, peacefully asleep. I watched as my hand…no… someone else’s hand pressed to the woman’s chest. I felt this stranger’s pain as she focused on the young woman, upon herself, pouring herself into the innocent girl, until the energy burning inside her disappeared, into the girl.
At that instant everything blurred, as if seen through an oily lens. Hands caught and lay her upon the other table. She felt pressure against her head, then the sting of an unusual energy seared through her. Her heart and breath slowed and she had the fleeting thought of how it didn’t hurt as much as surrendering her soul. It wouldn’t be so bad, being converted to bio-matter, to exist within the computers of the station, maintaining the station, waiting to be reunited.
I watched and felt her agony shift to an odd stillness. She watched as her kind completed their evolution, until there was no one left, nothing left but total silence. She was alone, for eons and eons, until time became lost to her.
I couldn’t imagine what would happen if we hadn’t returned, trapped for an eternity, alone, reduced to…
Realization hit me like a rock. A huge fucking boulder. “I’m not reading your thoughts.” I jumped from the chair, bouncing off the shell containing me. “Let me out!” I fell from the first step of the dais as the wall disappeared and gasped as hands grabbed at her… no… me. “NO!”
I leapt down the remaining steps before seeing it was Everett. He reached for me again, but I thrust my hands out. “Stay back. She’s inside me.”
Everett reached for me despite my warning. “Who? Your companion?”
“No, the one they left behind…” Thoughts pressed into my mind, too many, too loud. I tried to grab at my head, but the EV helmet blocked me. I fought to unfasten the clasps.
“Stop, you trying to kill yourself?” Everett re-secured the clasp I’d flipped open. “Put your gloves on.” He grabbed them from the dais where I’d dropped them and forced them onto my hands. “What did they do to you?”
“They put her inside me.” I reached for the injection site, but the bulk of the suit made it difficult to bend my arms enough. “They reduced her to some type of… I don’t know. They put her inside me.”
Everett caught my shoulders, making me look at him. “They integrated you with your companion, the Guardian?”
He thought I meant the union he had with his companion. “NO! Yes, yes she is the Guardian, but she’s no companion.” My legs felt weak and my body began to shake. She was in my head, trying to speak to me, but I fought her. “No! This is my body.” I crumpled to my knees, forcing myself to stay conscious.
“Of course this is you.” Everett knelt with me. “I don’t understand. What happened?”
“They killed her! She let them kill her!” I blurted the words out, though I felt her denying my claim. “They killed her and left her to maintain the station. She was their leader and now they put her inside me.”
A voice crackled over our com system. “Sir, the team is in place and working through further reactivation. The oxygenation process has started and we anticipate a suitable atmosphere in ten hours.”
“Thank you, Lt. Korisan. Keep reports coming every thirty minutes.” Everett turned back to me. “We need to return you to the ship.”
The interruption gave me a breath to hear the voice in my head, begging for attention. While the Elders no longer had names, she hadn’t evolved. She was still an individual. She tried to remember who... “Sharmila! That was her name.”
“Yes! I’d forgotten the sound of it.” In my head an image of her formed, vague, vague as a memory gets after many years of not seeing a person. It saddened her how long she’d been alone, but now she lived again. “Let me show you.” Her will pushed at me, trying to get me back to my feet. “Let me show you your new world.”
“Your world. This is an Elder world, not ours!”
“No, your w
orld. We left it here for our children. This is now your world.” Again I felt her urging me up.
“Come on. I need to get you to medical.” Everett grabbed my arm, pulling me from the floor. I could sense he was fighting his companion, who wanted him to do as I ordered. No, what she wanted me to order. He got me up, holding me steady.
At the door he pulled me one direction, while she pulled me another. I staggered, caught between two separate wills, both stronger than me. “Stop it! Let me go!”
I jerked free from both grips. Stumbling away from the only one entity I could.
“I’m sorry.” Everett held his hands up, but his eyes glared through both our helmets.
“Not you.” I leaned against the wall, hearing my own laughter, sounding insane even to me. I took a deep breath. I had a pretty good idea I couldn’t just get rid of her now, no matter what. Short of dying, which seemed counterproductive. Resisting her seemed just as pointless, especially after all we’d done to get here.
I needed that minute to think, not having her or Everett’s thoughts bombarding me.
Everett waited, looking at me. I needed him to understand. “They left safeguards. Me, you… and her. She could never live this long, so they… extracted her from her body. Her DNA, her soul and consciousness, her full memories. That’s why they needed me, to bring her back. She’s no companion. They injected her into my brain stem. She’s alive again. Inside my head.”
Through emotions I could tell he understood now, repulsed by the violation, the idea of what they’d done to her, to me. I didn’t wait for him to ask anything, turning my focus to her, turning the direction she tried to pull me. “I’ll go where you want, just don’t force me.”
“I am sorry. It has been so long.”
Everett, stood dumbfounded as I walked away. I turned back and held out a gloved hand. “I’m all right. There is something she wants us to see.”
Everett caught up, helping as I used the wall to steady myself. “You said she’s injected into you, like nanotech? Is that what they did?”
It wasn’t, at least not as we understood the tech. Outside of science fiction and a few oddball maniac scientists, the act of stripping a person’s essence from them, and hoping some part of them survived, was insane and immoral. Nanotech was probably the only way to describe it.
“Essentially.” I agreed with him. “Part of her was stored in the station’s core, maintaining minimal operations until we… until I returned.”
“What would have happened if we hadn’t returned? It’s been tens of thousands of years. Does she know that?” Everett was starting to grasp her reactions to being brought back to life. “Is she going to let go when this is done? Are you going to be able to purge her from your body, your thoughts?”
His words caused her, Sharmila, to flinch inside me, making me twitch physically. Being alive, awake, excited her and he was already speaking of sending her back into oblivion.
“Stop, both of you. No, Everett, I can’t just purge her. She’s in my brain, in my blood.” I needed to calm us both down. “I’m not sure how this works yet. All I do know is she’s as mortal as I am now.” Maybe I shouldn’t have said that, though she’d hear me thinking it.
“It is hard to conceive of mortality again.” My body itched as she explored my nerve-endings, feeling the texture of the suit against my skin, the grip of Everett’s hands through the suit. The stretching of my lungs inside my chest with every breath. The movement of my body with each step. “To feel again is...”
“Can you wait to start exploring? I can only take so much.” Immediately she backed off. “She says she’s happy to be back. Now, show me how this place will win the war.”
My feet followed where she led, but like before, I knew deep down which direction to go. We walked a long distance from the activation chamber. It was an enormous station, this position only a speck near the surface. We reached an entryway. She flooded me with anticipation to see what was on the other side. “This is it?!”
It was a question and answer in one, her will pulled my hand to the lock. I held my breath as massive doors opened. This time Everett was the first one through. He took two steps before he stopped dead in his tracks. “Hah…Holy shit!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Unable to resist his odd laughter, I followed. It took a moment to realize my mouth had turned dry, standing in total awe, jaw gaping. Spread out before us in a massive cavern, were ships. Thousands of ships lined up, moored down and waiting for us.
Everett was astounded and doubtful at the same time. “These are for us? We won’t know how to…” He exhaled as knowledge rushed through him. “Our companions, that’s why we need each other. Are these ships going to be able to stand up to the Punitraq again? I mean, they’re old. Old. Old, old, old.”
Everett’s companion silenced him with answers. Yes, the ships were as old as humans, but had been preserved in zero atmosphere, maintained by robots, and were in as good of a condition as the last day they were used. The Elders were confident the Punitraq barely exceeded their prior level of technology. Everett took the remaining steps out onto the observation deck, leaning out to look into the depths of the docking bay.
I looked too. “This is why they taught me how to summon all the EH, so there’d be enough EH to man these ships.” More and more of their actions made sense. “Merging can continue here, as fast as the EH show up.” Standing next to Everett, I realized the deck was also a lift. Sharmila pointed out the operations for me. “Let’s get a closer look.”
Everett couldn’t resist either, holding tight as a section of the deck separated and drifted downward, stopping smoothly at a small craft, a shuttle. Alien doors opened to his touch and he frowned at how easy this was.
I shrugged. “No need for security. Everything’s keyed to DNA, which we have.”
The shuttle interior was roughly the size of ours, the configuration standard. In the cockpit, Sharmila held me back. Everett unconsciously took the pilot’s seat, then realized where he was. He didn’t jump up, but rather sat for a moment having an inner-conversation with his companion.
He glanced at his hands, then placed them on the smooth featureless panel in front of him. The glassy sheet turned liquid, flowing towards him until the display curved around him. Everything in perfect reach for him specifically. Everett moved his hands over the fluid panel. “Well, we seem fueled up, so where to?”
I looked out at the sea of ships, then at the control panel. I let Sharmila reach out and tap one of the symbols. A holographic diagram filled the air before us. Layers upon layers of ships, but she saw the one she wanted, touching it with what felt like affection. “That’s hers.”
Though I had confidence in Everett’s piloting abilities, I gripped the armrests as he let the shuttle drop suddenly from its grips. Everett laughed. It only took a moment of wobbling before he had the shuttle stabilizers figured out and turned towards the battleships. He raised his head, letting out a low whistle as we approached the target ship. “Ohhh, now that looks like a flagship! The queen has her throne.”
I bristled at his comment, but kept it to myself. Her sadness came through. “Here I dreamed of life after war. I had no idea what was to come.”
“You didn’t do this willingly? Why would you agree—" I shut up, having to get used to her inside me, answering as instantaneously as I thought up questions.
“When we beat them back to their planet, the Collective allowed them to live. I opposed. I put this plan into place. I led the last battle. I let them survive. If they ever came back, it would be my fault. That we are now here means I was right. This time I must finish the task.”
I didn’t share her words with Everett, blocking the ache she stirred up inside me. I focused instead on him circling her battleship. With his companion’s docking instructions, we entered the landing bay of this beautiful sleek ship.
It was good to see Everett so enraptured with this discovery. It kept him out of my head. His eyebrow cocked as
docking clamps secured the shuttle. “I’m dumbfounded. You’d expect some deterioration, but nothing, not a single scar.”
I agreed, but had her knowledge. “The tech here will keep our scientists busy for many lifetimes.” I stood, letting Sharmila guide us again.
She was like someone trapped on a deserted island for a lifetime, eager to give us the tour of what had been her home. Fortunately, she wanted to get to the bridge first. So much of her life had been lived there. Her excitement made my heart rush as we entered her command center.
Everett and I split up, moving around either side of the upper deck, in a basically circular room. Everett touched the panels his companion allowed, seeing them come to life, just as the shuttle had.
I was drawn like a magnet to a chair sitting center of the top circle. Sharmila urged me to sit. I didn’t. I could see the same hand insets I’d experienced in the activation room. “Yeah… not falling for that twice.”
She pushed and I refused. “This is your ship now. You are the Primary.”
“Primary, as in commander.” I backed away from the chair. “I’m not qualified.”
She eased off her attempts to influence me. “The ship will only respond to my descendant. Every ship, every station, is keyed to a descendant.” Tenderness surfaced in her thoughts. “Daughter. You are of us. You are of me. You will bind us all.”
“No! I’m not ready to accept this burden.” I did my best to shut her thoughts off, to isolate her and think for myself.
In the second circle below me, Everett still moved from station to station. “I need to get crews over here to start training. There’s so much to do…” Everett turned to look over his shoulder, then around the bridge to find me back at the entrance. “…what’s wrong?”