The two of them looked at each other, sharing a knowing glance they were probably sure I had not seen before they looked back to me. It confirmed my suspicions there was more to what was being said here, but I had no idea what.
“What,” I began, vitriol dripping from my tone, “you going to kill the little Comm girl? With all the death that has already happened, and you’d add murder on top of it? Probably easy to hide. A distress call isn’t that hard to send out, just hit this button here. But if you want that message to get anywhere then it’s going to need a lot more boosting and rerouting.”
“Huria, what the hell are you doing?” Dixes asked, using my full name. Her voice had grown even and hostile.
“Why don’t you guys tell me!?” I was super aware of where my pistol was. I had no doubt they could out-shoot me, but for some reason my mind kept going back to its location on the console. “It’s pretty obvious. ‘Bray’ the ‘miner’, and ‘Dix’ the ‘guard’ if those are even your real names or jobs. Dix, you seemed believable enough, excluding these weapons which I knew for a fact were not approved…or listed… on the colony manifests. These shields are high tech military equipment, and all three of our weapons are not standard colony protective weapons. The only thing I could find anything about was the Plaz-Shot, which is a special ops assault weapon. Oh, and your nearly professional fighting skills. ‘Lowly colony guard.’ Yeah, right. I bet Classed Soldier.”
They took a step towards me. “Back off. Shoot me or take another step and I wipe all the codes out. There would be no way anyone hears the distress call.” They stood there, surprised at my outburst. I saw in their faces the act they had dropped. Somewhere they knew something very secretive here, and did not want to let ‘little Ria’ know.
I was scared and wanted to back down from the two of them, but I also felt this strange strength inside me that sprung from a feeling. A certainty that felt they knew some sort of deeper reality whereas I was positive I knew more than they could ever know. Even though I could not physically explain or understand what I felt, I bravely pressed on.
“And Bray, if I had to guess, I’d say a Solarian agent. Based on your intelligence of this situation, I’d say maybe even an agent from Terra herself. They say Terrans have the best AGEd past, looking at your ‘fitness’ I could see it.” His lips gripped in a grim straight line; I knew I was extremely close to the mark. Was he going to charge and kill me?
I stopped for a moment and continued. “Look, I trust both of you with my life, and given this situation, we have to. But tell me what is going on.”
We sat in a tense silence for a while. Somewhere a few levels above us I heard the scraping of the alien claws on the metal walkways.
“I do have to say given what has happened, it was fortunate a Communications Officer remained.” Bray’s voice was different; that fact struck me deeply. Though I wasn’t sure of what exactly the feeling did to me, except add another layer of dark reality to the scary situation. “Admittedly the scenario grew much direr than either of us would have expected.”
I stood straight, looking directly at him. I tried to stay tough, but I didn’t know how long I could keep it up. I did indeed feel this rage keeping me going, but I also felt a deep fear trying to get me to back down - fear trying to get me to shut up, tow the line, and hopefully stay alive.
He continued, “Both of us are indeed from Terra.” Being the home of our race it was an honor to be from there; not many were. Often the people from there were of the finest engineering. “Other than that I am not going to disclose much more. It is true that we both carry importance beyond just our simple professed jobs.
“We have had a lot of recent…events…throughout a specific section of Solarian space. The correlation to this certain event as well as the appearance of creatures is extremely high. I was sent here to investigate whether this area would likewise show the same …awaking. Needless to say, it is obvious it has.”
“ Tsh. ‘Awakened’. What a peaceful euphemism,” I somewhat spat back at him. “But you seem really knowledgeable about weapons. Tough too. What is the reason behind that?”
“Would such a valuable asset to Terra like myself be easily compromised?” He smiled slyly. I probably would have hated the arrogance if I didn’t know how smart and tough he actually was. “Dixes here is the true fighter though.” She nodded softly, and her ‘grin’ looked very cold.
“Did you guys even know each other?” I asked. “Did you guys really love each other?”
“Of course,” Dix said. “We have been together for a long time. Our relationship was strictly professional for a while, but after enough missions of only having one person to trust, things change.”
I turned back to the console and pulled up a map of the local star area. “We are fairly near the center of our galaxy, which is actually the direct cause of a lot of anomalous behavior our colony experienced, barring the aliens obviously. Where were these others systems that you were talking about?”
Bray scoffed, and walked up to me. “You are smart, it should be obvious. They were all near ’gates’ of sorts. Are you familiar with ‘dimensional lattice theory’?”
I shook my head no.
He lifted his hand, “Understand I can’t go into details, but there seems to be a higher structure to the universe’s physical presence. It is though there are either openings or less dense areas that higher dimensional phenomena occurs more readily at. These anomalous creatures, as far as we know, are unrelated with any of the anomalies like the power outages you might be referring to. These certain situations all occur near Center, perhaps not by just chance. It is thought that perhaps center of galaxies are ‘gates’ where the lattice is more open.”
I was under no doubt he was telling me very secretive stuff. “If I may be so foolish as to state, the ‘certain situation’ is the appearance of that blue energy, right? So you found something like this at every inner system?”
“All of them. If there was a planet capable, or once capable, of supporting life then we almost always found something on at least one planet in the system. The Aelisha are the ones mostly investigating this, we simply are helping.”
“Almost?” Did I sound like a kid asking so many questions?
Dix laughed a bit. “Don’t you get it? This was one of the planets that had yet to produce any evidence. We had to know if there was indeed something to this phenomenon. The only way to test this was to accelerate the exploration…perhaps exploitation… of this planet.”
I took a step back. My thoughts were racing. It was such a dark idea, crafty, but would indeed produce the desired result. “So this colony was founded. Founded to see if this would result. Founded to see if that blue stuff existed here, and if the monsters were in tow. Founded to die.” I was partly disgusted, but a deeper part of me appreciated the utility of the decision. Coldly practical.
Bray shook his head. “It’s not always so bad. Remember, in low quantities this substance seems to be revitalizing. Vital to an extent beyond anything we have ever found. It puts anything else to shame: nutrients, supplements…it is comparable to the highest level of AGEing, and gene therapy.”
“What do you mean by that last part?”
“That people exposed to levels of this substance show such drastic improvements that it literally becomes impossible to tell the difference between them and a product of high caliber genetic engineering. Well, other than their hair if they choose not to repeatedly dye it.”
I was looking at the map, thinking about the strange implications to what this meant. I caught the reflection of my face. An upper part of my hair had indeed begun to turn white. Pretty strange how fast it happens. Bray said it was changed all the way down to the root. Why did even the already-grown hair turn white? This agent that was supposedly so vitalizing in low quantities seemed to me only a strange age-accelerating substance that left its telltale mark. Honestly I did feel a lot more intelligent and perhaps energized. But was it only a placebo from hearing wh
at it supposedly did?
“But you said there were always these humanoid monsters or whatever that was around this stuff, so how do they know the benefit if everyone dies?”
“If you can get away from the area you will live. Their existence does indeed contribute to the certainty of the theory of them occurring together. It has been theorized that these life forms feed on whatever it is this is.”
I shivered a bit. “They feel evil.”
“Strange you would say that. I would have to drop the scientific mind to say so, but I do agree. If I may be so bold, they feel a like a desecration to creation.”
My mind went to a darker reality that might present itself if I survive this. “So what is going to happen to me after this? I am going to get killed? Wiped out to preserve this perverse secret that the Federation knows but no one else does?”
“Depends. Do you know anything about what happened?” Bray had a weird tone in his voice, and then I realized what he was implying.
I responded, “Nothing that no one else wouldn’t know, especially if they went through the same thing. Just rumors.”
The two of them laughed. “Exactly. Try to keep it that way.”
“So I should be thanking you for not putting me up for whitewash?”
Dix shook her head. “You do not give the Federation enough credit. We are not in the business of liquidating civilians.” She stopped, and her next part was, in my mind, in bad taste. “Too often.” She laughed a bit, “I do caution you to not say too much on your inevitable debriefing, but in true honesty there is not much you can say that anyone would pay much attention to. ‘That a colony was wiped out by a hostile life form’? Happens all the time. ‘Found a weird substance’? Happens a lot too. The true value of what is going in here is a small view into a truer part of reality, and unless you already possessed a lot of the framework, these insights would seem foolish and useless.”
‘Framework on the true view of reality…’ I repeated in my mind.
They have no idea, Ria. What they perceive is only a small part of the grand scheme.
What the…? Who was that?
I guess it made an ironic sort of sense, that there were indeed colonies dying all the time, no one really cared at all. There would only be a small collection of people somewhere that thought they were onto something that would connect the small dots.
I went back to inputting some additional data packets and synching with some local transmission networks to ensure our rescue would come soon. I stopped before I hit the final submit button. It would be the final last vestige of power I would have over these two if their friendship towards me was nothing but a farce. I hit the button. Well here’s to the best outcome.
“You know, the real question is who you are, Ria.” I felt my insides rotate around themselves, nauseous over the implication. Had I just sealed my fate? I regretted hitting that button. I was going to get killed to preserve what was going on here. I realized how dumb I was to think they’d let me live.
“Dix was trained to handle battles far worse than this, and my training was sufficient to pull me through here. The average civilian?” He lifted his hand as he was wont to do, encompassing the whole colony. He laughed. “Not enough, probably not even close. For how long we have endured, anyone without special training’s survivability should have dropped to about zero. But you are not even wounded. It never even seemed close that you might die.”
“ ‘Little Comm girl’. Yeah, right,” Dix said, imitating what I had said about her earlier. “I had thought for sure you might have been exposed to this substance prior, so I watched your hair carefully. You seemed too stupid honestly to have been a fighter. But no, your hair is still turning. That left one other reason for your survival: you are a highly trained agent yourself. We were the ones played all along by your act.”
I felt tears coming to my eyes rapidly. An emotion (sadness?) began flooding me.
“I had a lot of my doubts of your surviving initially,” Bray charged. “But it was little things that kept adding up that did not make sense. You always had this calm aura about you when things were at their worst in fights, your understanding of cover and battle tactics. When we were in battle it was like having a trained assassin under my command.”
His hurtful slander continued, “Maybe it was all just from watching holos, some people actually do learn vicariously to extreme degrees, but then it was things like watching you with that armor, which actually is fairly complicated to ensure its correct fit; or your ability with the flechette pistol which really made me question.”
With each charge he leveled at me, I felt my eyes water harder. Something seemed so hopeless, but I didn’t know what it was. “You are almost as good in battle as Dix, and it’s clear you do actually possess technical knowledge as you are an undoubtedly qualified as a Comm Officer. Additionally you seem a bit too interested in both our technology and this blue essence. Your curiosity struck me as far beyond typical. Wouldn’t the typical civilian be more concerned about, ‘Oh help me please! How do we get out of here!? Oh I’ll do whatever it takes to get out alive!’ Not you though, you kept a calm head through everything, questioning every vital aspect to whatever end you are going for. You leveled the charge of ‘agent’ at me, but honestly it sticks to you far better. Just who are you, ‘Ria’? What are you?”
Dix ran over to me, grabbing my chest armor and pulling me upwards. “You had better start explaining. I have no problem killing you.”
“I…I don’t know…” I dropped to my knees, and started crying.
***
I was looking at the same being again. Solarian. Was he always a Solarian? I was not sure. I didn’t think so. But there was no doubt it was the same person. It was the same energy, that’s how we really knew each other.
Raist, Dax, Fria, all names he had had (or will have). Time was much more fluid and meaningless; as something that would occur no different than what had occurred. All names he had possessed throughout different lives. It didn’t matter what his name was in a single blip of time. A name was a mortal thing; we knew each other on a deeper level, one that did not require a label to garner the other’s attention.
I knew these facts to be true, but I did not know their implications. Somehow I was convinced I knew this man throughout different lives with different names. In another time or situation I would have thought I was losing my sanity. In a way maybe this survival situation near the center of the galaxy was indeed the type that would cast ruin to even a stable mental landscape. Yet that was not the case. I had begun to see…to know things in a way I never would have in normal circumstances.
It all had to do with what that blue essence was, what I was, and of course how everything was connected. Not ‘everything’ in my own personal, pointless life; no…‘everything’ in a much grander term. ‘Axls’ was the name of the life essence, but again, a name was so useless. It meant nothing to me in any form where a name might matter.
This vision did not seem to be focused on a specific episode of this man so much as a rapid summation of a life’s events. Random scenes flashed: battles, victories, joys and sorrows. A scene flashed where a friend of his with pink hair was dying as she was stabbed to a tree, him struggling onwards with a wounded girl on his shoulders. Now I saw a different battle in a different life of a city getting blown apart by missiles as he ran from cover to cover. More importantly was the conclusion of his life and my own insights in how everything was interconnected.
Was he alive? Was he dead? It seemed like it was in the latter form that I actually preferred him. How could that even be? Yet it seemed like it was so much easier to communicate.
My thoughts were growing unclear in that I could not focus on a specific sight or communication, but then one thing grew out of the cloud. It was no longer me watching him, but the roles had been completely reversed. Was this energy I had watched over… now watching over me?
‘Ria’. It is not normally recommended, but recall your true nat
ure. Now is not your time, your Fate Line must be preserved. You are in a very tumultuous mental position; allow me to temporarily assist you. Embrace your truth and allow me to fully synch with you. As in death…
With a single admission from the being I was talking to everything snapped into place. An unbreakable confidence flooded through me, never to be shaken.
“As in life,” I stated, supremely confident. Always.
My (eyes?) opened…I remembered what I was. I knew what I was. I was not seeing with human eyes…
***
…but the eyes of time.
“Back the fuck away from me before I break that finger off… ‘Dix’.” I slapped her hand away, my face painted with a dark smirk as I looked down at her from where I was now standing. In my mind I was aware of my true nature, and of the other entity that has selflessly guarded me for my life. Together we would not be stopped.
She looked back surprised at me. I could sense she earnestly thought about dashing in and attacking. High fake right with a low left knife stab to my stomach. Then she would spin around my right side and slit my throat.
Ha, she could try it. Only one in a few thousand possibilities ended that way, and most would require my inaction. I dashed in and held my palm against her hand that had went for her hidden knife.
“You’d be too slow if you tried.” I lifted the tip of my lips just barely, part in desire and joy, my face practically touching hers. “You would have possessed a higher percentage of successes if you had simply punched me.” I moved my face a bit closer to her ear, touching her cheek with mine, whispering in it so that only she would hear. “Drop the knife.” I rubbed her leg sensually; the base dimension was so alluring in every way. “Trust me, you would not stand a chance.”
The physical body was such a sensual experience! I felt such joy just being in it. Strangely lust was a very powerful feeling; to me it felt among the strongest. Did they not understand what gifts they had? Love was such a special thing, and in such a physical entity enhanced by so many degrees.
AilAid (VayneLine) Page 4