"I'm ready, I think. But wait a minute. Isn't Elliadaren radioactive?"
"Yes, but the suit will shield you."
"Right, okay."
Even as she wondered if she could trust this alien entity that claimed to be her guide, an energy shell engulfed her, then dispersed. Her boots sank into a thin layer of bitter, greyish snow, and she tottered, struggling to keep her footing on a slippery surface. Legs braced, she regained her balance and look around. A dull, almost uniformly grey landscape stretched away to distant hills and a jagged jumble that could have been the ruins of a city. The sun was a dim glow beyond a dull blanket of clouds that almost blocked it out. A bitter wind tugged at her, and her breath fogged the inside of her visor. The sensor feed in her brain informed her that the air outside was well below freezing, and a heating circuit activated, sending warmth down her spine.
"Okay, I'm here. What am I supposed to see?"
"Turn around."
With great care, she shuffled around, and gasped. The visor fogged, and she tried to wipe it, cursing when she realised that the mist was on the inside. She waited, breathing slowly, for the fog to clear. The patches of mist shrank, and she tried to make sense of the view.
Giant spires of crystal thrust up from the grey snow, towering kilometres into the air. The crystal glinted with a medley of colours, mostly soft blue, mauve and pink with glimmers of yellow and green. The crystal was, for the most part, clear, and the colours came from refracted light. The faceted columns were broken, their tapering tips lying smashed beneath the snow. The jagged, oddly-shaped mountain from which the spires sprouted had to contain something the size of a moon hidden under several feet of snow, and she shivered as she stared at it.
"What is it?"
"A ship of sorts. It was a sentient crystalline beast capable of using the transfer Net far more efficiently than any man-made ship."
"What's it doing here?"
"Its master forced it to partially enter the planet's atmosphere, and it was employed in his work when nuclear fire razed the planet. It is the only instance in which one such has been… killed."
"Why are you showing it to me?"
"I will explain that in due time. I will return you to your ship."
"Wait a minute!" Rayne cried. "Can't I have a closer look?"
"There is nothing more to see. The creature has been dead for fifty years. It is frozen solid, and there is no portal through which you could enter."
"Still, I want a closer look." She plodded towards the mountain, the stiff, heavy suit and slippery ice underfoot making progress difficult.
After sinking waist deep into drifts twice, she reached the edge of one of the broken spires and touched the frigid crystal. Aware that its razor edges could rip her suit, she moved around it and slogged towards the mountain. It rose high above her in a vaguely dome-like curve, its under parts either flattened or forced into the ground by the force of its impact or its sheer weight. Certainly something so massive and constructed largely of crystal had to be extremely heavy. Whatever shape it had had when alive was hard to determine now. Decades of atrophy had caused it to sink and buckle, and summer thaws had allowed parts to rot. Something told her it had been much larger when it had been alive, and even now, it was so huge that to view it in its entirety was impossible unless she could hover a couple of kilometres in the air.
Radiating lines of buried crystal columns hinted at a vast array of wing-like structures whose purpose she could only guess at. The columns stretched away into the distance, swallowed by snow and mist, but she estimated that they must be hundreds of kilometres long. She climbed up the steeply sloping snow banked against the sides of the mountain, her legs aching by the time she reached an area where it appeared to be thinner.
After resting for a while, she scraped the snow away, hoping to dig through to the skin of this amazing space beast. The snow covering it was a metre deep, and she was sweating by the time her glove scraped crystal. Her suit link warned her that the humidity within it was becoming dangerous, and it vented clouds of steam. Cursing it, she knelt to peer into the hole, where crystal glinted in the grey depths. As her guide had said, there was little to see, and finding a way in would take months and a great deal of machinery. She sat back with a sigh, her visor fogging.
"Okay, you win. Take me back."
The transfer Net deposited her in the scout ship, and, with the help of another energy sphere, she stripped off the suit, eager to quit its sauna-like confines. Free of it, she revelled in the sweet cool air and towelled the moisture from her face. As her damp clothes dried, she sat on the couch and stared at the grey planet on the main screen.
"What happened to Elliadaren?"
"It was the first, and only planet in this galaxy to be attacked by an Envoy."
She sighed. The voice seemed clearer now. Evidently the guide ship had found a more suitable waveform to transmit on. "What's an Envoy?"
"That is a long and complicated narrative."
"I'm all ears." She rose and fetched a cool drink from the refreshment dispenser, then settled back on the couch.
"You are tired. You should sleep."
Rayne yawned and put the glass down before it slipped from her fingers. The black abyss of sleep dragged her into its dark embrace, and she fought against it with every iota of her will.
"Is it safe?" she mumbled.
"I will guard you."
Her eyes slammed shut, and she sank into darkness. She floated in space, stars glinting in the distance. Within its utter, frigid silence she was at peace, watching the tiny specks of light with god-like knowing. The trailing arm of a spiral galaxy embraced her in a tenuous clasp of tiny suns. It was her galaxy, she realised, and she could even pin-point the brittle glimmer of the yellow star that was Earth's, insignificant against the backdrop of a million greater suns. She could almost reach out and touch it with a celestial hand of pure thought. Utterly peaceful, perfectly still, the endless universe filled her spirit with an all-encompassing glory, a masterful creation that moved to the ageless harmony of a silent song of invisible waves and speeding light.
A wave trembled and shattered on an imperceptible barrier that cut through the void. A portal tore into a dimension of golden light, and a sparkling stranger birthed itself into the universe. Golden energies crawled over and through it, dispersing. A crystal ship sailed into the darkness, gathered the light of a billion stars and harnessed it.
The ship radiated shafts of lambent energy. Light shattered in its facets and danced like shining water along vast butterfly wings of delicate filigree. Never had she seen anything so utterly indescribable, for there were no words to define its awesome power and grace. Its wings seemed to harness solar winds, and she turned to follow its trajectory.
It sailed towards a blue and white globe orbiting a yellow dwarf star. Her heart ached, but the oddly-shaped landmasses and two moons told her that this was not Earth. Time seemed to speed up, and within moments it reached the planet’s atmosphere and the tips of several immense spines entered it, fire sprouting from their edges. The ship dwarfed the moons, its wings almost spanning the gap between them and the planet.
Her view shrank until the world’s sunlit surface replaced the universe. She looked down on forests and oceans, white beaches and rolling grasslands. Networks of simple dwellings patterned the emerald green around tall cities, and ships sailed the blue depths between floating communities. The crystal ship descended until its wings almost touched the ground, and the strange envoy fascinated the populace.
The space creature reached out to the people of Elliadaren and touched them with a powerful telepathic message that at first brought intense joy. Then the crystal light darkened, and she sensed the malice of those who dwelt within this intelligent, harmless creature and controlled it. Their malevolence used the ship's vast power to turn joy into the thing those who commanded it sought, and fed off. Pain. Millions of people cried out in agony and fell to their knees, bowed under the cruel force of a
telepathic suffering too vast to be denied, and the beings within the ship revelled in their torment and drank it in. The pain flooded through Rayne, filling every part of her being with anguish that made her long for death.
Rayne sat up with a gasp, a choked cry echoing in her ears. Her eyes swept over dull walls and winking consoles as the terror drained away. She waited until her hammering heart slowed, then went to the dispenser and poured another drink, casting a dark glance over her shoulder at the main screen with its view of the grey world.
"Are you still there? You'd better be."
"Of course."
She sank back onto the couch with a sigh, sipping the drink. "Do you have a name?"
"Not really. My creators imbued me with several of their personalities combined, so I can lay claim to no one name. However, if you wish an appellation with which to refer to me, you may call me Endrix."
"What does that mean?"
"Nothing, it is a name my masters used to use."
"And just exactly who are your masters?" She held up a hand. "No, forget that for now. What I meant to ask was, what happened to Elliadaren? The dream didn't explain everything. Where did the Envoy come from?"
"I do not know for certain, but I suspect another universe, since I have never encountered anything else like it in this one."
Rayne refused to be side-tracked by that statement's insinuation that Endrix had explored the entire universe. Sticking to the subject, she asked, "And these creatures who lived inside the Envoy? What were they?"
"No, you misunderstand. The crystalline creature was not the Envoy, the being it carried was."
"Ah. There was just one on board?"
"No. From what I could learn of their society during the ship's flight here, they are a form of hive creature, but ruled by a male. There were about fifteen thousand creatures on the Crystal Ship, and the dominant male was the Envoy. I will not detail their reproductive cycle -"
"Please don't," she muttered.
"But their society was primitive and cannibalistic. What they did to each other, however, pales into insignificance when compared to the atrocities they have visited upon other intelligent beings, in particular the crystal ships. From studying this one's metabolism, I deduced that the ships usually live in a gaseous nebula, where they feed on gas and sunlight.
"They are incapable of landing on a planet, although they can hover, as you saw. But their structure is too massive and delicate – if you will forgive the contradiction – to withstand gravity. They are deep space creatures, and utterly harmless unless harnessed by an Envoy. What you experienced while asleep was not a dream, but a segment of my memory broadcast into your brain. You woke yourself before the end, however."
"It was painful," she said, setting aside her empty glass and returning to the dispenser for a sandwich.
"Unfortunately, I cannot delete sensations from my memories."
She turned in surprise. "You felt that pain?"
"I experienced the same sensations as the populace, yes, but my brain does not perceive pain as you do."
"So, just tell me what happened next, but I think I know." She perched on the edge of the couch and nibbled the sandwich. "A ship called Night Hawk arrived in orbit, and when he saw what was going on, he dropped a nuclear arsenal – which I have no idea how he had – then left when the Atlanteans arrived."
"Not exactly. Elliadaren suffered for seventeen days before that ship arrived, and all the others that were orbiting it crashed on the surface."
"Why?"
"The pain drove them insane. They either lost control of their ships or deliberately crashed them to escape the suffering. Ultimately, they would have died of dehydration or shock, anyway. Elliadaren was not a busy planet. Ships came here rarely. Only a few commercial traders a year. Night Hawk did not go into orbit. If he had, he would have succumbed too, but even at the distance where he stopped, the pain must have been bad. He watched the planet for two days, and I understood his anguish, for he was Antian."
"How do you know all this?" Rayne waved the sandwich. "Did you read his mind?"
"Yes. He was a smuggler, carrying a cargo of nuclear warheads when he decided to return to his home world, since he was passing close by. He had not intended to stay, but when he saw what was happening, he eventually did the only thing he could, and used the Net to transfer his cargo to the surface, where he triggered it. Then he waited for over a month until the planet's light speed distress signal was answered."
"Why?"
"Perhaps to see who came, or maybe to mourn his people. I did not pry into his thoughts after he set off the bombs."
She finished the sandwich and rose to fetch another. "So the Antians didn't possess Net technology?"
"No. They preferred culture and religion. They had no wish to leave their world."
"The pilot of Night Hawk, did you learn his true name?"
"I did not pry deeply into his mind. He was able to shield his thoughts quite well, but I sensed a great deal of suffering there, not only because of his world's fate. Now he calls himself the Shrike, as you know."
She frowned. "Have you been prying into my mind as well?"
"A little."
"Why didn't you do something to help them?"
"I could not. I have no weapons."
"Presumably this all has something to do with the prophecy?" Rayne asked.
"Yes. Unless you stop it, an Envoy will destroy Atlan."
"Now how the hell do you know that?" she demanded. "And what am I supposed to do about it?"
"My masters gave the prophecy to the Atlanteans. My masters travelled between the universes, and encountered the Envoys."
"And who gave it to the Draycons?"
"No one. They learnt of the prophecy and knew that if Atlan fell, they would be able to take over, so they made up a prophecy of their own. They are deluding themselves, however, for the Envoys have no interest in them, and will destroy them too."
Rayne put down the half-eaten sandwich and rubbed her face, trying to assimilate all this astounding information. Fatigue made her eyelids droop, and her brain laboured to absorb everything. "Okay, so what am I supposed to do about this Envoy?"
"I am not certain, but my masters claimed that one such as you could stop it."
"By warning the Atlanteans?"
"No. I, or my masters, could have done that. The Atlanteans will be helpless to prevent the next crystal ship from entering their atmosphere. Their weapons will be useless against it in space, and once in the atmosphere, anything powerful enough to destroy the ship will also wipe out the population, just like on Elliadaren."
"So what's so special about me?" she asked, almost dreading the answer.
"I do not know," Endrix replied.
"Well, that's a first. All right, tell me about your masters. Do I get to meet them?"
"No. That is a long and even more complicated tale. If you wish to hear it, I recommend we travel to my masters' world. I do not believe you should attempt that now, in this ship, however. I will return you to the Cerebilus Moons, then you can return to Atlan. But I must urge you to do something to arm yourself for your coming conflict with the Envoy."
"What?"
"Seek out the Shrike and befriend him. Only he can provide you with a ship that will be able to take you where you need to go and help you in your battle with the Envoy."
Rayne sat bolt upright, her fatigue banished. "Are you nuts? He's a damned slaver! A murderer! An outlaw! He'll never help me, and he's…"
"He has already helped you, and he will again, if you are pleasant to him."
"Pleasant…" She scowled. "I never want to see him again."
"That is not true. He did not murder his people. He saved them from untold suffering. He has killed many men, it is true, but they deserved to die. As for the rest, I recommend you ask him about it. His answers, if he is truthful, may surprise you."
"Why would he help me, anyway?"
"Look at the planet on your screen," End
rix replied, and she gazed at the dull grey world. "That is his world, destroyed by an Envoy. If for no other reason, he will do it for vengeance."
"Couldn't you help me? Talk to him?"
"No. In this instance you do not require my aid, nor would he welcome my interference."
She sighed, slumping. "Okay, answer this question, if you can. Why the hell are these sadistic, cannibalistic monsters called Envoys?"
"Since we have never communicated with them, we have no idea what they call themselves. My masters named them Envoys because, even in their own universe, they come from deep space, where few ever venture. They fall upon a planet broadcasting peace and love, just as an emissary would, and only when they have gained access do they show their true natures."
"More like a Trojan Horse," she said.
"The Trojan Horse of your history was a gift from a warring king, which turned out to be a trick. This is not an accurate description of their actions. They come as envoys, but they consume their hosts."
"Parasites."
"In a sense."
A short silence fell as she pondered this last bit of information, and, after a few minutes, Endrix said, "I think it is time to return you to the Cerebilus Moons, and for you to return to Atlan. Your next priority should be to seek out the Shrike. The time of the Envoy's coming draws near."
She stifled a yawn, clamping a hand over her mouth. "I have to sleep, I'm pooped."
"Pooped?"
"Tired."
"Would it help if I returned you to Atlan? My appearance may cause some consternation."
She waved a hand. "Don't worry about that. I'd be most grateful. I have absolutely no wish to be hooked up to that damned neural net ever again."
"Very well."
The crawling golden fire engulfed the screen in a solid curtain, and when it faded, Atlan's pearly orb hung there.
Chapter Fifteen
"Are you nuts?"
Rawn placed his hands on his hips and scowled at his sister, who sat on one of the comfy sofas in her lounge. The shade shields on the vast windows that overlooked the wild garden were withdrawn, allowing the warm rays of a glorious sunset to stream into the airy room with its pale decor and crimson carpets. Tallyn sat on a plush white faux leather chair on the other side of a low crystal-topped coffee table, frowning at her. She shrugged, and Tallyn leant forward.
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