Bria lowered her head. Her face plate cleared, to show her mouth open, her teeth bared, as she fixed four eyes on Eydis. And, very quietly, but very distinctly, she growled.
Tarkos grabbed Eydis’s arm and pulled her away. “Pala, look,” he said in English. “On this side of the plate, you can see that her home world is on that list too. Sussurat is there, just next to Earth. If the Alliance really tried to sell us out, then they sold out Bria’s planet too.”
_____
Eydis and Tarkos stood a long time, looking at Bria, uncertain what she would do. But the Sussurat remained silent, contemplating the plates inside the cylinders. Finally, Eydis could stand the delay no longer.
“We have to take these out of here,” she said. “In case this place sinks also.”
“No,” Tarkos said. “No. Let’s burn them.”
“What?” Eydis said, incredulous. “You can’t burn history. That’s obscene.”
“You said it yourself. The Ulltrians left this here—they left this one station here, stripped of everything but these two plates—so that we would find them. They want us to take these plates back to the Alliance. So I say, burn them. Burn them to slag. Because doing the opposite of what the Ulltrians want is not a bad course of action.”
“But the truth—”
“We’ll figure out the truth after we’ve defeated the Ulltrians a second time,” Tarkos said. “The truth is important. Right. Fine. But survival comes first. When we’re safe, when the Alliance wins the war, I’ll be first in line demanding an investigation.”
Eydis turned to Bria. “Commander, you cannot allow that. Galactic law requires that antiquities and documents of historical import be preserved.”
Bria said nothing.
“We should take them back to the cruiser,” Eydis added.
“You going to tuck them under your arms?” Tarkos said. If he had any say in the matter, he was not going to let her have control of the ship’s robots. And without those, she would find it impossible to load the plates.
Eydis turned and pushed on the cylinder. It seemed a worthless gesture—Tarkos expected it to be immovable. But to everyone’s surprise it shifted slightly. Eydis walked around to the side of the cylinder that was opposite the entrance to the spoke that led to their cruiser, and she pushed on the glass, hard. It slid several meters forward, the floor underneath moving the cylinder just as it had hurried them down the long hall of the spoke.
Bria growled.
“Wait,” Tarkos said. “Wait. So this place will help you haul it out. But think. Do we want to do what they want?”
“I don’t care what they want. I want to take the plates out of here.” She shoved the cylinder again. This time, the cylinder with the plate inside slid rapidly across the floor, toward the archway, moving steadily on. The other cylinder started to move on its own, quickly pursuing the first as it shifted toward the spoke.
“Stop,” Bria commanded. “Retrieve. Maintain safety of cruiser.”
Tarkos took off after the cylinders. He couldn’t be certain which, but the cylinders accelerated away from him, or the floor was slightly shifting backwards under his feet, or both. Like in a dream when you run and your destination recedes, he could not catch up with the cylinders until both the plates had slid into the hallway of the spoke. Then they seemed no longer to hurry away. In a moment, he stood alone with them in the spoke. As soon as he passed under the archway, the floor pushed him not back but toward the cylinders. He looked over his shoulder toward Bria and Eydis—and his view went black.
A thundering clap sounded out, so loud the sound penetrated his armor, echoing the suppressed clang that his suit’s speakers let through. His helmet view flickered, adjusting to a new dimness.
It took him a moment to realize what had happened. A blast shield had slapped closed across the entrance to the hub, swinging down from above.
Tarkos stepped forward and struck it with a fist. The thick metal did not even vibrate under his blow.
“Bria?” he called. “Pala?”
Bria grunted, the radio signal clear.
“I’m here,” Eydis said. “The wall above the doorway just folded down. Are the cylinders there?”
Tarkos looked back down the hall. “They are slowly, methodically moving on their own, toward the cruiser. I’d bet they will stop just before the loading hatch. Something—an Ulltrian onboard, some AI system—wants us to take those plates home with us.”
He interfaced with the drone network and found the view inside the hub. Bria and Eydis stood off center, to his right. “Stay where you are,” he said. “I’m going to try to shoot through the door.”
He held his arm out, and extruded a barrel. He aimed the x-ray laser to the left side of the door, and fired, ramping up the beam. The alloy of the door turned red with heat, and smoked, but very little of the material ablated away. He stopped. “I’m not sure that we can cut through this door in a timely way.”
“Don’t you carry anti-matter weapons?” Eydis asked.
“I do. Bria’s suit would protect her, but yours wouldn’t. You’d get a critical dose of gamma rays.”
“I could move down one of the other spokes,” she said.
Tarkos thought about it. “You could, but to be safe you’d need to get near the end. And at that point, you might as well then just continue along the outer ring of this station, back to the cruiser. The distance would be about the same as walking back along the spoke to the center and then down this spoke.”
“Return to cruiser,” Bria instructed him. “Check plate containers for threats to ship.” Then, more softly, speaking to Eydis, Bria said, “Come.”
Tarkos watched through the drones as his commander and his lover walked toward the entrance to the spoke that ended at the empty bay. Keeping a view of them in the side of his visual field in his helmet, Tarkos started walking toward the cruiser.
“The floor is not assisting me,” he radioed. “I think someone or something wants me to get there, but not too soon. I suspect it wants to keep me from rejoining you quickly. Basically, I’m being herded.”
And then the lights went out.
CHAPTER 6
Eydis cried out once, involuntarily, when the hub went black. Almost instantly Bria set her suit aglow, making the chameleon skin shine brightly. But the light only cast a white pool around them in the large room, making Eydis feel lost in an infinite dark.
“Come,” Bria said, putting one huge hand behind Eydis’s back, the glove of her armor like a giant steel claw. The spread of Bria’s palm would have covered Eydis’s naked back, and now the armored hand nearly covered the oxygen tanks of Eydis’s suit. Bria guided her, not ungently, close to her side. She took a step forward, and waited for Eydis to match it with two steps.
They walked together toward the entrance, so tight together that their legs bumped. Bria stopped a few steps away from the entrance to the spoke. She looked up at the wall above, where the blast door would be folded if this entrance was like that of the other spoke.
“Can you see anything?” Eydis asked. She had found the lights on her own suit, twin beams flanking the helmet, and she aimed them up now at the archway. When Bria didn’t answer, she took a single step forward, to get a better look.
She had moved only a small distance, but it proved too much. Bria hurried away from her, taking the light as she went. As Eydis saw this in the corner of her eye she wondered at first, Why is the Sussurat backing away? But then she turned and saw that Bria reached for her, leaping forward, one arm fully extended.
Eydis looked to the side and the beam from her helmet showed the dark wall moving past. It disoriented her, because she stood, feet shoulders’ width apart, neither boot lifted from the floor. Only then did she realize that she slipped away; the floor under her feet whisked her from Bria, and the floor under Bria slid the huge Sussurat toward the entrance to the spoke. Bria leapt, but when she came down the floor moved even faster, hurtling her back. Eydis ran toward Bria, thinkin
g the whole time: How does it work? How does new floor form between us at such a rate? Is it a kind of liquid?
She leaned forward farther, to run as hard as she could manage in the heavy suit, the thick material chafing her legs and arms. Bria did the same, bounding against the current of the floor. But their efforts failed: Eydis ran in place, as if on a treadmill, and then the floor accelerated and conveyed her, like some kind of industrial produce, inexorably back toward the entrance to the third spoke. Bria was driven back into the hallway of the other spoke.
And then, as Eydis watched, something huge and black flashed before Bria, and the entrance to the spoke disappeared, as did the light of Bria’s suit.
The door had closed, locking Bria in the spoke and outside the hub.
Eydis stopped running. She slid smoothly backwards toward the other entrance, disappearing into the dark.
“Commander?” she called.
Bria grunted. The Sussurat still lived, at least. But on the other side of a huge, heavy door.
It had all happened in seconds. Eydis took a few more steps forward, but then gave up. The floor carried her through the entrance to the third and last spoke, and then the floor stopped moving, just as the door slammed closed centimeters before her face. She stood alone in the dark hall of the spoke. The lights from her helmet cast a dejected glow just a few meters into the darkness—a darkness where, she now had no doubt, an Ulltrian waited.
_____
“What happened?” Tarkos yelled. He heard Bria growl and Eydis shout and then both of them breathed as if running. The drone visuals were a dark muddle, and he could find neither of them in any transmitted view. “Bria? Pala? What’s happening?” He switched from Galactic to English and back, his voice frantic.
“Separated,” Bria finally answered.
“Pala? Pala?”
“I’m here,” she said. “The floor separated us. I’m in the spoke hall that goes down to the Ulltrian ship—down to where you said there’s a ship. The commander is in the other hall.”
“I’m losing drone telemetry,” Tarkos said. “Bria, are you seeing this too?”
“Diminishing,” the Sussurat growled.
“Exactly,” Tarkos answered. “I don’t think this is radio interferance. Something is destroying the drones, one by one. Wait. Look at this.”
He radioed to them an image that he had just found from one of the drones. The drone peered down the curving hall that formed the outer ring of the station, the hall that connected the end of the spoke where Bria now stood to the end of the spoke where Eydis waited. Something small and black flew out of the hall and rushed straight at the drone—a tiny stingray flapping through the air. The view exploded into gray, and then the drone stopped transmitting. “There’s another robot, collecting and destroying ours.”
They were silent a moment. Then Bria said, “Eydis, stay at location. Tarkos, launch cruiser.”
“Where to?” Tarkos asked.
“After Ulltrian ship, if it leaves. Else to end of hub, where Ulltrian ship waits.”
“But what will you do?”
“Go to Eydis.”
“I should walk,” Eydis interjected. “I don’t want to wait here.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Pala,” Tarkos radioed. “I’m starting to think it’s likely there’s an Ulltrian here.”
“Of course there’s an Ulltrian here,” Eydis said. She lifted from her hip the weapon that Tarkos had given her, a glassy black pistol that had changed shape when she first touched it, adapting to the fit her human hand. It squirmed in her grip now, adjusting to the thick suit glove. It felt solid, faintly alive, and reassuring. “But you gave me a gun. And I’m no safer here than down the hall. This way I meet up with Bria sooner.”
Bria grunted, a sound of reluctant agreement.
“Alright,” Eydis said. “I’m starting down the hall.”
_____
Bria dropped back to all fours and leapt forward, aiming to jog at a fast but not exhausting pace. But when her feet hit the floor it seemed she’d struck it as hard as if she’d fallen from a great height. She realized the floor was pushing her back violently, slowing her, if not holding her in place. She stopped and sat up. The floor slid her all the way until her back pressed against the heavy steel door to the hub.
She lowered her head and sneered. How could this work? The material must be a kind of fluid-like matter, that could flow under command, but also fill behind quickly, without seeming to break—all the while being solid to the touch when walked on. It was an interesting engineering accomplishment.
But, she realized, if it were a special material, then she might be able to change its material properties.
Bria held up both arms and extruded the x-ray lasers from the forearms of her armor. She turned down their power and then cut two crossing beams across the floor. Black lines appeared instantly, stretching away from her in twin, unevenly parallel scars. She took a step forward. The floor surged and buckled around the burns, but could not slide her backwards. As she hoped, the burns had impeded its fluidity.
“Commander,” Tarkos radioed. “The floor is moving against me. It will only let me go forward very slowly.”
“Shoot floor,” she said. “Burn.” She walked forward, deliberately, as fast as she could manage, burning criss-crossing scars in the seething deck before her path.
“That works,” Tarkos replied after a moment.
Bria walked on in silence a moment. Then she said to Tarkos, “Not FTL capable.”
“What’s that, Commander?” Tarkos asked. She could tell by his distracted tone that he concentrated now, no doubt struggling like her to burn a path as quickly as he could.
“Not FTL capable,” Bria repeated. “Not for long distance.”
Tarkos thought about it in silence. “The Ulltrian ship—the ship Pala is walking towards—it can’t leave the system. So, if there is an Ulltrian here, and it plans to make its escape, then….”
“Then there’s an FTL capable ship somewhere in orbit,” Eydis said. “Hiding above us. With its own crew.”
_____
“Something just pinged me with radar,” Eydis said. She heard Tarkos swear under his breath in reply. She realized he grew fearful for her. His breath came hard over the radio. He was running, no doubt, hurrying down the spoke to the cruiser.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “You’re worrying too much, that’s what you’re doing.” She pulled up the control menus of the suit, and after a minute adjusted her view. “I’ve got a reconstructed radar and sonar view, now. Clear as day. There’s nothing before me.”
But she knew she did not sound convincing. She stood alone in the center of the black hall. The reconstructed false light view of the path before her shone in ghostly grays and greens, a sight more ominous than clear. And, she knew, these dark vistas led, at the end of this hall, to a waiting Ulltrian ship. With, most likely, an Ulltrian crew member. Her heart began to hammer. She forced her breath to slow as much as she could manage, without getting lightheaded.
Her voice betrayed a tremor as she said, “I’m starting to feel sorry I started down this hall.” She meant it to sound light, a joke between warriors, but her voice came hushed and frightened.
“So am I,” Tarkos said. “Turn back. I’ll bring the cruiser over there, and Bria will join you soon. You can wait for us.”
“No,” she said. “There’s an Ulltrian here, Amir. And I think… I think whether I go to it or it comes to me, a meeting is taking place.”
“It’s all a set-up,” Tarkos said, switching from English to Galactic so that Bria could follow his argument. “They are controlling everything. First, fifty years ago, they let a Kirt probe see them, and they let that probe transmit its discovery. Tiklik’al’Takas gets the transmission, and takes that information to the Kirt astronomer Ki’Ki’Tilish—but the Ulltrians alter the message somehow, or maybe they even captured Tiklik and altered it somehow. In any case, they give Tiklik the wrong location
for the World Hammer. And they give Tiklik a virus.”
“Still,” Eydis said. “Why did they let Tiklik’s twin report at all, if they knew about its surveying?”
“Ready,” Bria said.
“Right,” Eydis agreed. “They were just ready. The time had come to strike. And, they were ready to leave this world. Most of them already had, probably. Maybe long ago.”
“So,” Tarkos said, “their false message moves much of the fleet to the wrong part of the galaxy, searching for the World Hammer in the wrong place.”
“And they can now make some kind of first strike,” Eydis said, “with much of the fleet out of the way.”
“One thing, though,” Tarkos said, “why not kill us when we arrived here?”
“They want us to return with those monument plates,” Eydis said.
“Not all,” Bria said.
Tarkos hissed, understanding Bria’s point. “They only need for one of us to leave with the plates. So they separated us…. And then what?”
“Samples,” Eydis said, in English. Tarkos translated for Bria. Then Eydis finished with, “They always took samples of their enemies. To study and to find out how to destroy the species as a whole. Even after they had samples, they took more. I think they were also… trophies. So, at the end of any battle, always a single Ulltrian remained behind to collect some living enemies.”
“All the more reason for you to back up,” Tarkos told her.
“No,” Eydis replied. “I spent a decade studying the Ulltrians. Everyone always backed away, gave them room, moved aside in fear. But I have a surprise for this one.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m going to take its ship.”
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