Sa'lok

by Elin Wyn

  I wanted to argue, but a soft comfortable mattress, the warmth of a comfortable quilt, and the arms of a strong man around me—that recipe was enough to knock me out until the alarm clock rang, the pink glow of a rising sun filtering through the curtains of Sa'lok’s cramped bedroom.

  And then there’d been the summons to report to General Rouhr, and everything else had been a rush.

  That had been hours ago, but I could still feel the warmth of Sa'lok’s naked chest under the palms of my hands, that pleasant feeling lingering on my fingertips. God, what I wouldn’t give to be back under the covers with him right now.

  “Anything else, Teisha?” the general asked, drumming his fingers against the edge of his desk. He was looking straight at me, his eyebrows arched in a curious expression. I had already finished my report, but instead of sitting back down, I had allowed my mind to wander and simply stood in front of the general’s desk like an idiot.

  Smiling, I shook my head and looked around the packed office. Despite how busy everyone was, the general had insisted that all the strike team leaders be present during our retelling of events. I knew most of them from my stint as a pilot during the Xathi war, but I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen every single one of them crammed inside a room. Clearly, the general was prioritizing this situation over anything else.

  There were others, too. The women in the room I recognized as Maki and Alessa, the archeologist in charge of the original dig site and the engineer tasked with digging them up, and Leena, a renowned geneticist that had been part of the war effort.

  I’d looked around for Mariella, but oddly, she wasn’t there.

  As for the rest of the aliens, a mix of Skotan and K’ver soldiers, I had only seen in passing, and couldn’t put names to their faces.

  “First things first,” the general said as I took my seat. Leaning back, he looked around the room and focused on Sa'lok, who was sitting right beside me. “As you’ve told us, the Puppet Master has destroyed the only vial you had with a cure. That particular serum is gone, but do you think you can reengineer it?”

  “I should be able to,” Sa'lok admitted. “I wasn’t exactly following protocol and noting everything down, as we were in a hurry to get things done, but do I remember the formula I used. A few tweaks here and there, and I should be able to produce another working batch. The formula might need some adjustments, though, at least when it comes to enzymatic activity, but I—”

  “That’s good,” the general said, raising the palm of his hand, cutting Sa'lok short. Even though Leena seemed to be on the edge of her seat, drinking up every single one of Sa'lok’s words, the general didn’t seem that interested in the scientific details. His mind was set on the big picture. “What about the Puppet Master? I know we have nothing but guesswork right now, but you were there when it happened. Do you think the Puppet Master has succumbed to the Gorgos?”

  There was a moment of silence, one that seemed to weigh on everyone’s shoulders. Sa'lok leaned forward and lowered his voice, and the team leaders standing behind him seemed to be holding their breath.

  “I don’t know,” Sa'lok shook his head. “We saw the anti-alien faction force a foaming Gorgo onto the Puppet Master, but I believe he tried to resist it. In any case, I don’t think that was the first Gorgo they’d tried to infect him with. Judging by the fact he tried to destroy the serum, back when Teisha and I were still in the lab, I’d say they had already tried doing it before.”

  “You think it would take more than just one Gorgo to infect him?”

  “It’s likely.” Nodding, Sa'lok cleared his throat before continuing. “The Puppet Master is very different from a human being, and he’s far more powerful than anyone or anything else. The Gorgo will have a hard time subduing him. The fact that he’s not reaching out leads me to believe he has been infected, yes, but his immune system—for lack of a better term—is probably trying to fight it off.”

  There was a pause, then Sa’lok leaned back in his seat. “But if we don’t do something, and do it soon...then I believe the Puppet Master will be done for.” Even though no one said a word, it was obvious the exact same question burned in everyone’s minds—we had to do something, no doubt about it, but what?

  Alessa was the first one to speak.

  “Maybe I could redirect my team from the dig site,” she started. “We could head into the Puppet Master’s lair and try to dig through. You said there was a cave-in on the main chamber, but if his core is still there—”

  “Don’t bother with it,” Vrehx stepped forward, his lips pursed tightly. “My team has already been there. There’s no sign of the Puppet Master anywhere. More likely than not, the core has gone underground. If we try to dig through, we might end up—”

  “Causing more damage, yeah,” Alessa sighed. “Message received.”

  The back-and-forth between the crowd assembled inside the general’s office continued for the better part of an hour, but a clear path of action remained outside our reach.

  The Gorgos had played their pieces perfectly by enlisting those xenophobic bastards to their cause, and now our backs were against the wall.

  Our strongest ally had been removed from the chessboard, and we had no idea what the enemy was planning.

  As a pilot, that immediately made me think of someone flying blind after his main engine had blown up. Not a good scenario.

  "Let's focus on the anti-alien factions for a moment," Sa'lok said, raising his voice just so he could make himself heard. By now, everyone was talking at the same time, frustration getting the best of the room. "We have a lot of their members under surveillance. Maybe we can bring some of them in for questioning and—"

  He was silenced by the sound of the office door swinging back on its hinges and hitting the wall as someone burst into the room.

  We all turned around to see who the newcomer was, some of the Skotans automatically reaching for their rifles, but they immediately relaxed.

  Mariella stood in the doorway, her disheveled hair framing her frantic expression.

  "I'm sorry I was late and to barge in like this," she started, her breathing ragged. She had been running, it seemed. "But I have news."

  "Let us hear it then," the general said evenly. He didn't seem annoyed that our meeting had been interrupted. If anything, he seemed relieved. No wonder—the more we argued about what we should be doing, the more confused everyone got.

  "Late last night I got word that more ruins were found near Glymna. A merchant crew had engine trouble and ended up making an emergency landing in unmarked territory.” She grinned. “I suspect they may not be entirely on the up and up, but that’s someone else’s problem.” She pulled back her hair, started braiding it as she spoke. “Going over the maps with Fen, it seems that, though the ruins were easy to access from the ground, they were surrounded by geological formations that prevented the Urai satellites from picking them up earlier. And, the best part is, there's writing everywhere."

  "More writing?" Maki sighed. For an archeologist, she didn't seem too excited about the new findings. "We already have so much writing to sift through. The Aeryx writing system is complex and—"

  "I'm gonna stop you right there," Mariella interrupted her, and there was a glint in her eyes. "I'm not talking about the Aeryx. I'm talking about the Gorgos."

  "Hang on,” Maki said. "What are you talking about?"

  Taking a deep breath, Mariella straightened her back and ran her tongue over her lips. "The writing we found is different," she replied, her tone now more controlled than before. "Very, very different. Fen believes it belongs to the Gorgos.” She looked around the room with wide eyes. “We came across their writing system."

  Now that got the room's interest.

  Sa'lok

  Not surprisingly, the meeting broke into chaos, everyone talking at once.

  Mariella left just ahead of Maki and Teisha, and I brought up the rear, closing the office door as I left.

  “Are you absolutely sure we
’re talking about the Gorgos?” Maki asked, upping her pace so that she was walking beside Mariella. “According to what I’ve seen, the Aeryx system has a lot of thematic variations. The script seems to change whenever the theme changes. It’s highly possible you’ve come across one of those variations.”

  “I’m not the one who’s saying these runes don’t belong to the Aeryx,” Mariella said, glancing at Maki as a smile spread across her face. “Fen and her team are the ones who are convinced. And I don’t really think of her as a gambling kind of person.”

  “The Urai said that?” Maki repeated, and it was obvious that Mariella had finally managed to convince the archeologist of the finding’s relevance.

  She started walking faster now, as if she couldn’t wait to dive into all the new material that had been uncovered.

  “Here we are,” Mariella announced, swiping the card that hung from her neck across a small panel. The sealed door in front of us hissed for a couple of seconds, and then it swung back lazily.

  The labs were similar to what we had used in Glymna, but the rooms were cramped and stuffy. Mariella didn’t seem bothered by that. She took a sharp turn left and stepped inside the largest room on the floor, the walls made of thick floor-to-ceiling glass panels.

  At the center of the room was a large circular table, hundreds of pictures strewn across its surface.

  Without waiting for Mariella’s say-so, Teisha made a beeline straight toward the table. Placing the palm of both her hands on the edge of it, she leaned forward and scanned all the documents in front of her with one quick glance.

  “This is impressive,” she muttered, her eyes wide with excitement. Standing beside her, I looked down at the table to see pictures of runes etched on ancient walls.

  Their lines were sharp and angular, and there was a kind of roughness to the script.

  I wouldn’t exactly call what I was seeing an impressive thing, but what did I know?

  I wasn’t the archeologist or the linguist.

  “Even if it is the Gorgos’ writing, though, where is it going to get us?” Maki asked.

  Just like me, she didn’t seem particularly impressed by Mariella’s finding.

  “If we manage to translate this,” Mariella replied, tapping one of the pictures in front of her with two fingers, “then we might have a shot at deciphering the Gorgoxians’ inner workings. All that we have so far are second-hand accounts of who they are and what they want, and ravings from some of the possessed. Nothing from the original species.”

  “They’re assholes who wants us dead,” Maki shrugged. “Isn’t that enough?” When the two other women didn’t reply, clearly not impressed with her sense of humor, she merely shrugged.

  “This is where we found all this,” Mariella continued, pushing a couple of pictures toward the center of the table. One was an aerial shot of the jungle that encircled Glymna and, even though it didn’t pop out right away, a closer look revealed some kind of structure hiding beneath the green canopy.

  The other picture had been taken from the ground and it revealed the structure’s main entrance, thick stone pillars with runes etched all around them, and narrow stairs that seemed to dive straight into the ground.

  “This looks similar to the temple Amira and Dax discovered a couple of months ago,” Maki mused, narrowing her eyes as she analyzed the pictures. “There are some architectural differences, but the similarities are too obvious to ignore.”

  “Agreed,” I pitched in.

  Even though I hadn’t been part of the investigation into all those ruins and temples, I had read all the reports and seen the pictures. Just like Maki had pointed out, the similarities were there.

  “So, the Urai have already started analyzing the bulk of what we have,” Mariella continued.

  She was more interested in the runes themselves than any architectural analysis. “They’ve analyzed and transcribed snippets of what we’ve found, and they’re pretty confident that the writing system we’re seeing here has nothing to do with the one we found before.”

  “And have they managed to translate any of this?” I asked, waving my hand at all the pictures. The way Mariella’s lips turned downward told me the answer before she even opened her mouth.

  “Not exactly,” she admitted. “They’ve been trying to translate it with some old references they have, but all the sources they’re working from are second-hand material, coming from all over the universe. According to what they’ve told us, it’s difficult to piece together a coherent picture of the language.”

  “That isn’t exactly helpful,” I said, suddenly feeling deflated.

  Mariella had been so excited about this that, for a moment, I’d actually thought we were making progress. As it turned out, we just had another piece of the puzzle, one we had no idea where to place. The way I saw it, we were just spinning our wheels.

  “Sorry to bother you,” I heard someone say right behind us, and I turned around to see Leena standing in the lab’s doorway. She gave our little group a smile, and then focused her attention on me. “The meeting with the general has already ended. He told me to come see you, Sa'lok.”

  “Is it about the serum?”

  “Yeah,” she nodded, and I returned her smile.

  Happy to have something other than mysterious runes and enigmas to focus on, I left the three women to puzzle over the Gorgos’ script and led Leena toward the corner of the room, where a whiteboard had been set up against the wall.

  Even though most scientists preferred working with holoscreens, I liked having something more tangible to work on.

  “Given that there’s a lot of things happening at the same time, the general asked me to start working on the serum.” She sounded slightly apologetic, as if she was afraid of my reaction. She was probably thinking I wouldn’t like to have someone taking the serum research away from me. I didn’t really care.

  Leena was one of the smartest people around, and I knew for a certainty that she’d improve on my work. “He says you’ll probably have your hands full in the coming weeks, so—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I told her. “I’ll ask the Glymna lab to send you all my documents. In the meantime, I’ll give you a quick rundown of the formula I used. We only tested it once, and it was on someone that hadn’t been infected, but it seemed to produce the desired results.”

  I omitted the part where Teisha had been the test subject. I had never worked closely with Leena, but something told me she wouldn’t have approved of that.

  “Alright, go for it.”

  “You’ll basically have to produce a hormonal cocktail,” I started to explain as I scribbled my formula on the whiteboard. “The key is to stimulate the brain in a way that’ll elicit someone’s happiest memories. That should be enough to break through the hold the Gorgo has on the mind.” My marker moved fast over the board, but Leela seemed to be capturing all the information just as fast as I explained it.

  “What about this?” she chimed in, grabbing the marker from my hands and scribbling a couple of notes beside my formula. “Accelerated protein breakdown might help, no?”

  “You’re right,” I nodded, scratching my chin as I saw how her notes fit in with the rest of my formula. Just like I thought, Leena was the right person to be working on the serum.

  “Perfect,” she beamed, using her datapad to capture the information on the whiteboard. “Just send the documents from the Glymna lab whenever you can. I’m going to get started on this.”

  With that, she turned around and moved into the adjacent room, snapping her fingers at the lab assistant sitting there. He jumped from his chair and stood at attention while Leena barked her orders.

  She was a petite woman, but when it came to her work, she was as ferocious as they come.

  Stretching my back, I ambled back to where Teisha and the other women were. They were still hunched over all the pictures and translation documents, but they didn’t seem to have reached any kind of consensus yet.

  I wasn�
��t surprised. If the Urai were stumped, did we really think we'd be able to translate any of this in a few hours?

  Not really interested in the runes, I sat beside Teisha and reached for the aerial pictures of the temples. It was amazing to think that all those structures had remained untouched for millennia.

  “Hang on,” I muttered, shuffling the pictures of the three different dig sites in my hands. Narrowing my eyes, I spread them across the table in front of me, then glanced at the document in Maki’s hands.

  It was a list of all the runes that had been used in this hypothetical Gorgo script, an impenetrable alphabet of sorts. Jumping to my feet, I grabbed the document from Maki’s hands and laid it above the pictures of the dig sites. “Can you see it?” I asked the three of them, frantically looking around.

  “See what?” Leaning over the pictures, Mariella pursed her lips. “What are you talking about, Sa'lok? I don’t see anything.”

  “I see it,” Teisha cried out, and she, too, jumped up from her seat. Pointing at one of the runes, she tapped it a couple of times and then pointed at one of the dig sites. “Seen from above, this temple is exactly like this rune.”

  “That might be a coincidence,” Maki muttered, but her eyes were already trying to find a match for the remaining dig sites. “Or maybe not,” she continued, her words brimming with excitement. “These two runes here, they match the other dig sites.”

  “Finally,” I grinned, “we’re getting somewhere.”

  Teisha

  I couldn’t get any sleep.

  It was three in the morning and my brain was still working at high speed, weird runes and strange characters parading behind my closed eyelids in an endless procession.

  I hadn’t been hopeful about the translation efforts to start with, but it hadn’t taken long before I became obsessed with cracking the code.

  Back when I had been studying linguistics, I always achieved high marks, not because of all the studying I did, but because of the single-minded way I pursued things.