The rope. I didn’t lower it again after the climb, so I’ve no way to reach it!
In the elevator on the way down for the afternoon Hex session, buggos mutter enthusiastically about maximising points and performance and how that might impact the rumoured upcoming team selection. It’s all so trivial, so remote, as though they’re trading bubble gum cards on the other side of a thick fog. A few weeks ago I was one of them. Now I can’t fathom how I could have been so dumb. So unquestioning.
I’m in the first group of buggos to enter the Hex, and, at a breathless sprint, I’m damn sure the first to make it across the arena to the balcony, that glorious balcony where my rope is—amazingly—still hanging down.
Three things pinball through my mind as I climb. One, someone with influence is helping me in this extra-curricular adventure; he or she has lowered the rope for me. Two: that makes me unique among the other buggos, who are all still high on Hexalation. Three, I get another chance to investigate what happened inside the sanctum on the twentieth floor.
“Hey, Jim, where are you going?” It’s Rachel calling up. She parts her ivory white hair from her eyes and slowly, even sadly, ties it at the back.
“Hi Rachel. Sorry.” For everything. “I can’t tell anyone. It’s just something I have to do.”
After checking behind her for eavesdroppers, she cups her tiny hands to her mouth and whispers up, “Did you have something to do with, you know, what happened?”
I gaze blankly down at her. “What do you mean? What happened?”
“The emergency lock-down. You must have heard the alarm go off while you were up there.”
“Um, nope. Can't say I did.”
She arches an eyebrow, not really believing me. “Can I come?” she asks.
Ah, hell. At any other time I’d be hauling her up before she’d got that last syllable out. Rachel Foggerty isn’t a girl you should ever say no to. And she’s risking a lot right now. If the emperor finds out, he’ll make life tough for her. That’s one reason to turn her down—for her own protection—but if I’m being honest that’s not the real reason. I can’t have anyone mess this up for me, this AWOL time. If my dragonfly guide sees that I’m bringing other buggos with me, he might vanish.
But I can’t bring myself to say no to Rachel completely. The skimmer-boy of the oases, who used to watch her in not-so-secret fascination, who’d have given anything to hear the words I’ve just heard, would never forgive me.
“Maybe soon,” I reply. “I want to make sure it’s safe first.”
“Oh. Okay.” She sneaks me a kind of girly wave using her fingertips, so as not to attract too much unwanted attention.
I smile back, dying to communicate through it. I hold it a few beats too long and feel myself colouring. Now she smiles, knowingly, just like she used to poolside. It’s my cue to escape.
But there's no sign of the dragonfly this time. I retrace my steps from earlier, past the gunfire and the fireworks smell and another few open hatches I daren't enter. Drilling noises, hisses of compressed air, collective laughter, clangs of metal on metal: it sounds like a workshop for older recruits, but on a bigger scale than our little CDT exercises.
The dragonfly whooshes out in front of me as I reach the stairwell. I veer into the wall in shock, and have to wait till my heart stops jack-hammering.
“You need to not do that,” I tell it.
It immediately show me its butt and flies up the stairs, all the way up to the twentieth, without waiting for me to catch up. Who needs the Hex gigs when I'm spending half my day running up twenty flights? Needless to say, I'm well and truly knackered when I get there.
The dragonfly has no pity. It hovers over the sensor pad at the far end of the room, then, as soon as I've opened it with my wrist ink, races along the dark passage into the mysterious sanctum. Everything appears exactly as before: the layer of red mist high above, the vehicles and stacks of crates wreathed in shadow, the EVA spacesuits. Breathless, I follow my dragonfly guide into the centre of the vast open space.
But the nagging question is: how much of what happened last time...really happened?
The dragonfly hovers there above me, glowing its strange lilac light. Nothing happens. I glance around the sanctum, wondering if I didn't just pass out last time and some security guard found me and carried me back to my quarters, where I dreamed all the fantastical stuff.
Yet, what the heck is this dragonfly if not fantastical? It shouldn't be here but it is. And it's brought me here for a second time. Why?
A shuddery chill grips me as the sanctum begins to shrink again. But when it's formed a skin around me, that see-through, lens-like skin that distorts whatever's beyond, it isn't an unpleasant sensation. No, it's hard to describe. It makes me feel important somehow, wanted, like I've been singled out among all the other buggos and all the other recruits in the Hex for this extra-curricular field trip to...I've no idea where.
I rise into the rose-coloured mist. The same sequence of images flashes through my mind as last time. Some I recognise, some I don't. Beyond the elastic skin I can make out the walls of some giant cylindrical tunnel, but they're not very clear. The tunnel stretches up as far as the eye can see. I rise again, faster and faster. My balance wheels and I spin into a smooth and never-ending spiral of red. I fight the slippery sensation but it's no use. My line to reality is lost like a trickle of milk into the vigorous stirring of a strawberry milkshake.
This time I wake inside some sort of temple. A massive and ancient temple, its columns, arches, aqueducts and other architectural wonders covered with glittery red-brown flakes, as though a layer of rust has settled on it over the centuries. There are no signs of life. Brackish water flows over the aqueducts and falls into lagoons and artificial rivers that wind around the deserted interior of this roofless building. Glyph-like inscriptions cover each and every column from top to bottom. I can't see outside the temple. It must stretch for miles in every direction, maybe around an entire planet! It reaches thousands of feet high, almost into the thin rashes of cloud. I gasp as I look up. Above me, the rose-coloured mist is still there, forming a perfect circle. No part of the temple encroaches onto it, as though everything was built around this central point.
Is the temple some kind of monument to it? An ancient tribute to...whatever this thing is I've just passed through?
I try to move but the skin doesn't yield. It's like a strait-jacket. So I just gawp at the genius of this alien architecture, imagining the creatures that live here, or lived here once. Were they giants? The archways are huge, but then again, so were the ancient temples on Earth and the palaces on Lohengrin's homeworld, Rhea. But this isn't Rhea; that planet was only colonized a few centuries ago; this temple is a lot older than that, its stones worn over much longer periods of time.
Breathing becomes difficult again. I don't panic, but it's obvious the oxygen is getting low inside this skin. Just like last time, the dragonfly appears in the nick of time, when I'm on the verge of fainting, to whisk me up and away. As I rise, the last thing I notice before spiralling into unconsciousness is another pile of large skeletons behind a collapsed column not far from where I'd been standing.
I'm not able to identify them right away. Not until I wake.
“Finagler skeletons!” I yell out loud from my bed. Again, I don't remember how I got here or when. This time, though, there is no doubt I've just experienced something unmistakably real and absolutely incredible!
Who can I tell? Rachel? Lyssa? Lohengrin? Someone. Everyone.
Would they even believe me? Hell, would the teachers even believe me? I've found a super-awesome secret of the Hex. How can I describe it? Should I describe it? It's my secret. The dragonfly picked me. It's taking me on these amazing trips to faraway alien planets. Why should I share that with anyone else?
But it's also doing it for a reason. I'd be stupid not to want to find out what that reason is. After all, the Finagler skeletons can't have just been a coincidence, can they? Not on t
wo separate worlds. The very alien race that's trying to enslave humanity, maybe wipe us out, turns up dead at the exact spots the dragonfly takes me to?
There's a riddle behind this thing I need to solve. Pacing around my quarters with nervous excitement probably won't help, but I can't do anything else right now. I'm on the verge of an amazing discovery. Maybe the discovery. The buggos grubbing points in the Hex suddenly seems so ridiculous I actually feel sorry for them. This was what I came here for, what I gave up Sergei for. Even Thorpe-Campbell couldn't have predicted this.
The alert sounds for lunch.
Strange, that. I could swear I've just eaten it: beef stew and dumplings with sliced carrots. Apple juice. Key Lime pie.
Then I check my schedule on the digitab. Lunch was five hours ago. This is dinner. I've just skipped two whole classes!
Now I'm gonna get chewed out for sure.
Boy, when the O'see said they don't interfere with our Hex time, she wasn't kidding. Not a single staff member has pulled me to one side, visited my quarters, or even looked at me slantwise. I'm beginning to think they haven't even noticed my absences. Or if they have, their silence is as good as their permission—to keep doing what I'm doing. I don't know how I feel about that, but I'm not about to stop now. Who knows what incredible things I'll get to see next?
It's the morning after my double getaway. A night of tossing and turning has left me a little tetchy. Too many theories, too much anticipation strangled any serious attempts at sleep. As a result, my mind's now a swamp: clear and bright on the surface, a serious drag underneath. I fill up on breakfast, though, because if yesterday was any indication, this day promises to be even more eventful. Plenty of fruit, cereal, protein and fibre should do the trick.
I'm first into the Hex, first out. The old rope trick has become my personal disappearing act; no one else has ever climbed it that I'm aware of. Right on cue, the dragonfly is waiting for me at the stairwell. It seems to prefer to stay out of sight of other people, which is a-okay with me.
“Morning.”
It doesn't respond. Doesn't fly up the stairwell either. Instead, it hovers a few inches from my chest, then moves up to my throat, then back to my chest.
“Where to this time?” I ask.
It shoots off up the stairwell, so I follow. Again, there's no one to stop me, nothing to prevent me gaining access to the hidden sanctum on the twentieth floor. Only this time there's a difference. One of the crates marked ALPHA SEALED—EQUIPMENT POD USE ONLY has been opened. The dragonfly hovers inches over it, then backs off when I approach. The sanctum's so dark I have to lower the arms of my glowsuit inside the crate in order to light its contents.
It's full of breathers: state of the art oxygen masks and tank harness rigs. These are heavier than the ones I'm used to, the ones I've worn my whole life. They have multiple flow valves and filters with a wide array of settings. My guess is they're adaptable to different atmospheres, not just Martian. They'll likely use any oxygen present in the air around you, filtering it from any harmful gases. That way you're not just reliant on the O2 you bring with you. They're geared more for long-term survival.
“You want me to bring one, huh?”
It actually makes a lot of sense. I should have thought of it sooner. My first two journeys ended because I struggled to breathe inside the “skin”. So this is the dragonfly's solution—to bring more oxygen with me. More oxygen equals more time.
But how far does he want to take me? And why?
“Sucks that you can't talk.” I grab one of the breathers anyway, one that's roughly my size, and quickly work out which are the default flow and filter settings. “Take me some place amazing,” I tell him, then strap the rig and mask on as I follow him out into the centre.
Shrink-wrapped. Rising. The subliminal flicker of images. Wheeling into unconsciousness. It's a routine that feels anything but a routine. There's nothing ordinary about these journeys and there never will be. How fast we travel I might never know. How far we travel—same deal. All I know is that I wake at the other side with a dry throat, a gnawing stomach, but an overwhelming hunger and thirst for far more than food and drink. It isn't lunch I crave; it's adventure.
It doesn't disappoint.
The further I gaze, the louder I yell in triumph. Counting moons is one thing; reaching seventeen is another. But when they're bridged together by a technology so far beyond human science that your sense of logic has to make a leap into magic, then you know you're not in Kansas anymore. I'm past the edge of the map. Some place no human has been before. I don't know how I know that, given how far our deep space explorers have reached, but this just feels infinitely further. There are no constellations I recognise in the sky above or below. Not one.
I'm standing on a stone dais in the middle of about two dozen giant, horizontal spinning rings. Each concentric ring spins at a different speed and has its own unique thickness and texture. They're enormous, with no joints; it appears as though they were cut whole like this out of single blocks of stone. Incredible technology. There are gaps between the rings. Underneath is nothing but stars and empty space.
Where the rings end, a long stone walkway begins. It stretches to the next set of rings, miles away, and so on, until the sequence reaches the near orbit of a moon. Then after the moon the chain continues: islands of spinning concentric rings joined together by walkways, as far as I can see, in an arc around a giant cloud of such bright colours it reminds me of a stellar nursery, one of those distant nebulae where stars are born.
Is that what this place is? An artificial means of creating a star?
The conjoined moons appear barren. They're either icy and reflective or dusty-grey, like our own Lunar One. Strangely, the only signs of life are on the islands of spinning rings. Some are overgrown with vegetation of all shades and colours. Others sparkle with running water and fountains that somehow cling to the islands and aren't lost to the low gravity or frozen by the super-low temperature of space.
Are they protected, shielded somehow? Do they have atmospheres of their own? Does the spin of the rings create gravity, or is the whole island chain spinning faster than I can tell?
A green-and-orange fungus grows across several of the outermost rings on my island. Small creatures feed on it. They're about the size of house cats when at rest, but they're able to elongate and wrap around the girth of a ring, maybe to feed off the underside as well. A part of me wants to investigate. The rest of me thinks a look-but-don't-touch policy might be more my speed out here.
“Hey, where are you?” I search for the dragonfly, find no sign. If he's brought me here for a reason, it might be helpful if he'd share that reason before he ups and vanishes. “What is this place? Why am I here?”
Hmm. Not that I couldn't gawp at the majesty of this moon-chain for weeks and not get bored, but there's the small matter of oxygen. Not to mention food and drink. And other...bodily concerns that will become an issue if I have to wait around for too long.
Damn. I really wish I'd brought an omnicam with me! Physicists across the colonies would flip if they saw what I'm looking at right now. Add that to the mental list of things to bring with me next time: a flask of juice, a snack, Rachel Foggerty...
Yeah, if only.
That thought makes me grin—having Rachel stuck in here with me, all cosy on a round-trip tour of the galaxy—when I notice something has changed about the stone bridge beyond the farthest ring of my island. It seems awfully busy all of a sudden. Lots of movement across it, heading this way. Now, the outermost ring isn't just the broadest, it's the thickest; it slopes up for quite a distance, almost as high as the dais I'm perched on. Unfortunately, that hides my view of the nearest section of the bridge just beyond. I can't see what's approaching.
“Um, dragonfly? I've never zig-zagged before, but it might be time to, you know, move our asses!”
Where is that crazy bug? He's marooned me here like some human sacrifice on a stone altar in the middle of...
&nb
sp; No. Don't even think that. The locals are just excited they have a visitor, that's all. Maybe I can sign a few autographs, let them take a few selfies, accept an alien souvenir or two.
Or maybe not.
“Dragonfly! We've got company!”
They stream over the crest of the outer ring, hundreds of them. They might be cloaked and hooded, but I can make out the hunched shapes beneath. It's a classic Finagler disguise. It's how they appeared to us for decades—harmless vagabond traders you'd never suspect were plotting to overthrow the whole of humanity. Underneath those cloaks, their wing spines are furled, giving them a vaguely human form. But make no mistake, they're monstrous. Few civilians have seen them for what they truly are and lived to tell of it. I'd rather not be one of them.
“What are you doing? We have to go. Now!”
But my little tour guide's a no-show. Where can he be? Okay, think. He came to my rescue in the nick of time last time, because I was running out of oxygen. Gah! I've got plenty left. I'm wearing a breather. So how else can I get his attention?
Ranks of Finaglers rush down the outer ring's slope. Those creatures twining around the moss-covered rings slither out of sight, clinging to the undersides. The Finaglers seem wary of them. They move gingerly over the moss, blades protruding from their cloaks, pointed down. The first mossy ring dips a little under their combined weight. Of course, it lifts a little on the opposite side of the island. They halt, then proceed with caution.
I didn't realise the rings could spin vertically as well as horizontally? That's just crazy. But... what if one really started to spin? Like, up and over at full whack? Or two or three together. That would stop the scum in their tracks.
If only I knew what powered the rings. If only the dragonfly could get his butt down here and tell me these things. If only I hadn't got on that shuttle with Thorpe-Campbell and lost Sergei forever. What would the Minsk Machine say if he saw me now? Told you so doesn't even cut it, Trillion. So you've gotten to travel. Well, so has the fish that jumps into the bear's mouth. Hope you enjoyed the flight, doorak.
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