Her addiction wasn’t something which could be declared ‘cured,’ packed up in a box and stored away. It would always be with her, and thus with them. But the incredible resilience she’d displayed since severing her connection to the ship…well, if circumstances meant this late, waning phase of recovery was slightly easier than it might have been, dammit, she deserved the break.
It wasn’t all she deserved.
His arms were draped loosely at his waist, his left shoulder resting on the wall. He kept the casual pose while he lifted his right hand a few centimeters and wriggled his fingers in a manner that was quickly becoming second nature.
The hem of her tank drifted up to the middle of her back.
“That tickles….” Her gazed darted to him as she realized what he was doing. The corners of her mouth curled up. “Are you bored?”
“Not at all.” Provided line-of-sight to the front of her tank when she shifted toward him, he made sure it slid upward to join the rest of the material and tease her ribcage. He added the pressure of air beneath her forearms—only a little, enough to make his request clear but not so much as to force her arms upward. Let her acquiesce to the request if she was so inclined.
It seemed she was. What had been a mild stirring flared into wanton need when she raised her arms to allow him to slide her tank up and over her head from across the room. He paid no more attention to the tank, and it dropped unceremoniously to the floor beside her.
A pleased sigh escaped his lips.
“You like the view?”
He nodded slowly, unashamedly transfixed. “I really, really do.”
She shifted around farther to lean back on the table and lick her lips, sending a rush of heat through his body to flush his skin. “Anything else interesting you can do with this power of yours?”
A flick of his wrist and the top of her shorts nudged down to cling to her hipbones.
Her jaw dropped in mock indignation, and her hands moved to hold them in place. “I’m sorry, are you asking for these shorts to come off?”
“I really, really am.”
“Come take them off yourself, then.” In a flash she had bolted for the staircase and fled downstairs.
He laughed aloud, tugged his shirt off and tossed it onto the couch, and chased after her.
11
URSA MAJOR I ARX
MILKY WAY SECTOR 64
* * *
EREN RENTED A ROOM AT a cheap hostel in the bowels of the Ursa Major I Arx for the night. He needed to hole up somewhere for a few hours. Clear his head. Figure out what had just happened and what he ought to do about it.
He collapsed on the narrow bed and threw an arm over his eyes. He should already be on the way to Nephelai to meet Cosime and pick up the explosives, then he should get to lifting a ship from the Sector 23 Terminal Hub and see to taking out the Exobiology Research Lab. He had all the information he needed to complete the mission, and with the explosives and a pilfered ship he’d have all the tools.
Whatever this other madness was or was not, it could wait. It should wait.
After a couple of seconds he moved around to try to find a more comfortable position…until he accepted the futility of the endeavor on account of the bed being as cheap as the room and settled for winding his hands behind his head.
He was considering tossing the angst and instead closing his eyes for a nap when a chill passed over his skin and the dim light in the room faded to gloom.
“You need to assist them.”
He sat up and peered into the darkness, searching for the offending umbra. “Hello, Miaon. Assist who?”
A darker than black shape by the door detached itself from the wall to slink across the room; the rented unit was tiny, so it didn’t have far to travel. “The individuals you were recently in the company of.”
Eren fumbled for the bedside light panel. “How do you know who I was with? You weren’t on the ship. I would have noticed. It would have been…darker.”
The Yinhe didn’t lurk in the shadows—they were the shadows. Ghostly, solitary and secretive, they were among the stranger sentient creatures in Amaranthe. Their population was small, and no one ever saw more than one at the same time; this had led some to speculate there was in actuality only a single Yinhe. He doubted this was the case, but he had to concede it was possible; if there was only one Yinhe, Miaon was it.
Rumor had it the Directorate spent years trying to Eradicate the species, only to fail miserably when they were unable to find or keep a hold of the shadows. Target one with a weapon—any weapon—and it promptly evaporated, reappearing halfway across a galaxy. If the Yinhe had a homeworld it had never been located to be destroyed.
Eventually, the Directorate had admitted they were few in number and didn’t seem to be rising up to pose a threat to its power. It declared the Yinhe an Accepted Species and proceeded to ignore them. The Directorate denied this version of events in the strongest terms, of course, but it had all the hallmarks of truth.
Despite its insubstantiality, Miaon engineered sound wave vibrations in the air to craft a wispy, tremulous voice. “No, I was not on the Siyane—but the fact I know its moniker should appease your doubts as to my veracity. Now I am here, and I am telling you that you need to assist Mnemosyne and its companions.”
Eren groaned and collapsed back on the bed. “You’re the mutual acquaintance. You’re the one who told the Kat where I’d be. Dammit, Miaon, how could you spy on the anarchs for those cowards? Now I have to report you.”
“I am not a spy. I am a tenuous thread who hopes to one day grow into a bridge. The anarchs presume the Katasketousya to be sycophants to the Directorate. The Katasketousya presume the anarchs to be bloodthirsty terrorists. You each seek and strive toward the same goal, yet you cannot even acknowledge one another, much less work together in furtherance of this mutual goal.”
Eren opened his mouth, scathing retort at the ready. But interacting with the Kat earlier had called into question many of his beliefs and assumptions about the ethereal beings. It was one of the puzzles he’d planned to spend the next several hours contemplating.
He settled for keeping the pressure on Miaon. “Then why not simply go to Xanne or one of the other anarch supervisors and tell them what the Kats are allegedly doing?”
“They would no more believe me than the Katasketousya would believe me if I proclaimed to them the anarchs were not merely terrorists and in fact wanted nothing so much as a free peace. Trust comes from actions, not words.”
“Not ‘merely’ terrorists?”
“You alone are responsible for a striking volume of destruction, Eren asi-Idoni, as well as more than a few lives lost. And you are not the only one.”
Eren swung his legs off the bed and grabbed his jacket from the floor where he’d discarded it; the longer the Yinhe stayed, the colder the room became. “Fine, I don’t deny it. But…dammit, Miaon! I still have to report this. You know how desperately we rely on secrecy for our survival. We can’t have a spy running—or ghosting—around telling others about our plans and missions, even a well-meaning one.”
“Do as you must. It will not matter soon in any event.”
“What does that mean?” A question he was asking too often lately.
“I impart to you again: you need to assist them. If you do not, they and their allies will fail in their endeavor. They will fall, and with them so too will the anarchs fall.”
Now he stood. For all the Yinhe’s creepiness, he’d always believed Miaon to be a moral creature, by some measure or another. But now he wasn’t so certain. “Is that a threat?”
“It is a truth, one beyond my ability to alter. Nothing greater and nothing lesser. The Katasketousya have a word for this moment: ‘kairos.’ We teeter on the cusp, but the cusp of what remains to be seen.”
“Could you be any more evasive?”
“Help them, Eren, and watch the universe turn your way. Nos libertatem somnia.”
He knew when Miaon had depart
ed from the abrupt brightness flooding the room and the relative warmth returning to his skin. With a sigh he sank onto the bed again and stared at the ceiling.
He’d just gotten guilt-tripped by a bloody shadow. At this rate there was probably an Efkam out in the hall waiting to totter after him warbling ‘Shame on you!’ when he tried to leave.
Did none of them realize what these people were asking of him?
“Well, Eren, you did want a proper rebellion, one you could die for in a flamboyant blaze of glory. Repeatedly and often. Ever think maybe you ought to be more careful what you wish for?”
12
ONEIROI NEBULA
TYCHE GALAXY
LGG REGION IV
* * *
‘EXITING SUPERLUMINAL IN TEN SECONDS.’
Alex looked up from the couch in surprise. She was lying on her stomach studying some details of the intergalactic population and commercial concentration map. While she could rely on Valkyrie to store and retrieve the infinite number of tidbits of Amaranthe trivia, she did actually need to know the framework and major players in the Anaden empire, not to mention where things were situated.
She checked their location. “We’re still almost a hundred parsecs from the coordinates Mesme provided. Is something wrong?”
‘Not as such. You should both come see.’
Curiosity piqued, she climbed off the couch and met Caleb in the cockpit as the superluminal bubble dissipated.
An emission nebula stretched across the horizon of space. They were already surrounded by the first wispy coils of dust and gas, but ahead ivy green and amber nebular clouds thickened until they created the impression of a solid wall.
“How large is it, Valkyrie?”
‘It stretches for one hundred eighty-one parsecs in height and a diameter of two hundred sixty-eight parsecs on this side. I cannot yet say how deep it extends.’
“That’s…big.”
Caleb frowned as they traveled through progressively more concentrated clouds. “It reminds me of Metis.”
She rolled her eyes. “When the Kats want to hide something….”
“They encase it in an ominous, spooky nebula.”
The scene soon escalated into eerie territory. Visual sight was reduced to kilometers as they floated through a seemingly endless swath of dense ionized gases. Broad spectrum sensors fared little better, returning solely the composition of the thick nebular clouds.
‘Interesting.’
“Oh, boy.” Caleb chuckled. “What’s interesting, Valkyrie?”
‘I have not detected any evidence of recent star formation, as one would expect if this were an H II region nebula. The negative implies it is instead a planetary nebula. If so, assuming our coordinates approximate the core of the nebula, we ought to be close enough to detect the ASG star that created it.’
“And?”
‘There is a star ahead, but it has long since passed into the white dwarf stage.’
Now Alex frowned. “But if it’s been a white dwarf for a while—hell, if it’s a white dwarf at all—the nebula shouldn’t be this bright. In fact, it should be fading from sight.”
‘Yes.’
“You think the Kats are artificially maintaining the ultraviolet radiation necessary to ionize the gases, which they need to obscure what’s inside.”
‘It would be well within their capabilities.’
Shafts of luminous amber-tinged emerald light began to peek through the gloom ahead like rays of sunlight breaching thunderclouds. “Look at that.”
Caleb hugged her from behind. “For the record, if there’s a portal in here…ah, who am I kidding? If there’s a portal in here, we go through it.”
She shrugged in his arms. “It’s what we do.”
Further banter was cut short as the nebula clouds at last thinned, though they didn’t disappear entirely. Space outside the viewport took on a ghostly, haunting aura as the increasing light dispersed through the dust and gases.
A dark, decidedly non-nebular shape broke through the clouds to loom due ahead of them. “Full stop!”
They came to a halt less than fifty meters above the etched corner of an immense monolith of Reor.
“Oh. My.”
“You always did have a talent for understatement, baby.”
She grinned, but no way was she diverting her attention from the sight outside the viewport.
Beyond the one they hovered above, slab after slab after slab of Reor orbited a distant, cold white dwarf barely radiating faint white-blue light. The cumulative area of the slabs added together would easily constitute a large moon if not a small planet.
Each slab was a separate object, but they were arranged in ordered rows and columns, and precisely spaced pillars of energy pulsed between them like conductive traces on a circuit board. The collective glow of the pillars and the filaments within the slabs was enough to wash the cabin in prismatic color.
If Valkyrie will land the Siyane on the surface of one of the structures—it does not matter which one—and the two of you will come outside, I will explain.
For once, Mesme’s ‘voice’ didn’t herald the arrival of a bossy swirl of lights, and the Kat remained elsewhere. Presumably nearby, but elsewhere.
“What is this, Mesme? Why are you hiding them?”
Please, do as I’ve requested.
It wasn’t as if she didn’t want to go outside, so instead of arguing she went to get her gear, grabbing Caleb’s hand as she passed him to drag him along with her. “Guesses?”
His gaze flitted up to her without a response before returning to checking over the environment suits.
“You do have a guess. And you’re not going to tell me.”
He shrugged. “I might be wrong.”
“When have you ever been wrong?”
“Well, there was the time on…no, I was at least eighty percent right that time. Oh, but…no. Anyway, I’m sure there was a time.”
“Uh-huh.” She tossed him a mock glare but elected not to push it. They’d both know the answer soon enough. And then he could gloat in that delightfully understated way he had, as she was also fairly sure he would end up being right.
The hull rumbled as Valkyrie alighted the ship onto one of the Reor slabs. “Are we set, Valkyrie?”
‘All systems are nominal and contact is confirmed. I have extended the energy shielding to its maximum distance to provide you additional radiation protection, so you may depart whenever you’re ready.’
She checked Caleb over then he did the same for her, as always. She bounced on the balls of her feet in only slightly exaggerated excitement. “Let’s do this.”
“After you.”
Stepping onto the surface should have reminded her of doing the same on Rudan. Frozen mineral beneath her feet, odd light all around, hazy darkness surrounding it. But while the atmosphere was among the most unusual and haunting she’d ever encountered, it somehow felt welcoming rather than ominous.
The filaments ran in perfect straight lines at perfect ninety degree angles to one another, endlessly deep into the mineral of the slab. They were also active, streaming ever-shifting colors to the horizon. Eren had said they only changed color when they were encoding information, but she was beginning to wonder how much he truly knew about the substance. Standing here now, it occurred to her to wonder how much anyone truly knew about it.
She took a step forward. The material wasn’t slick, but she still tread cautiously as the mag boots were the only thing keeping her from floating away. As her left boot alit on the surface, she noticed a hum penetrate the protective gear. “Caleb, can you feel that?”
He shook his head.
She crouched down and placed her glove on the surface; the hum immediately intensified. It was similar to the sensation she’d experienced when she held Eren’s Reor slab, but what was creating it?
No answers offered themselves, so she stood once more. “Mesme, we’re here. It’s time for you to pull back the curtain.”
White-blue lights gained strength in the distance, far across the slab. What had it been doing way over there?
Mesme gathered into a semblance of a cohesive form as it approached, though it remained spread out across a far larger area than usual. Alexis, you feel a presence when you touch the Reor, yes?
“A presence? I’d characterize it more as a…power. An energy.”
This suffices. Caleb, you do not?
“No.”
Gather a small measure of diati and allow it to make contact with the surface.
He didn’t waste any time in doing so; she suspected he was as curious as she. The area outside his glove began to sparkle in crimson as he crouched down and allowed his hand to hover a few centimeters above the surface.
Abruptly he jerked. “Hey!” His hand withdrew briefly, but he quickly pressed it down again. The diati brightened and sparked.
After a bit he looked up at her, wearing a smile behind the faceplate. “It’s not fighting—neither of them are.”
They recognize one another.
She whipped around to Mesme, knowing the answer before the words formed on her lips. “The Reor is conscious. It’s alive.”
As you say.
Valkyrie?
This explanation is a logical one. I cannot construct meaningful communication out of what we’ve experienced, but I do feel like I can sense intelligence in it.
Caleb stood and allowed the diati to dissipate. “You said ‘they recognize one another.’ You’re implying the diati is as alive as the Reor, however alive that is.”
I have previously professed my belief this is the case.
“Right. So what does this mean for the Reor, and for Amaranthe? You’re hiding these slabs of Reor, much the same way you do when you’ve rescued species who are to be Eradicated. Because…the Directorate doesn’t know it’s a living entity, does it?”
As is your habit, Caleb, you are correct.
Relativity: Aurora Resonant Book One (Aurora Rhapsody 7) Page 8