He continued, “Give us a little time. I had no idea this place belonged to someone. I’ll get my people out of here.”
So he didn’t want a confrontation either. Good. Clearly, the Empire’s presence worried him. She opened her mouth, but Vilhauser spoke first.
“I’d rather you show me how to get into that room,” he said.
She resisted the urge to throttle Vilhauser. She kept her gaze on the stranger, knowing she was at a disadvantage. He could see her expressions—and probably her annoyance at Vilhauser—and she couldn’t see anything about him or his people.
“We need to check out your people,” she said. She didn’t want to be surprised again. She wasn’t even sure about their weapons.
“Why?” the stranger asked. “We all know this base is empty.”
She wasn’t talking about the emptiness of the base. She was more concerned with the fact that these ten people seemed to have no concern—indeed, no understanding—of the danger they were in from the Room itself.
Or maybe they weren’t in danger. Maybe they had no idea what the Room did to most people in the Empire.
Maybe they truly were strangers.
She wasn’t sure how to express that, without giving too much away. So she said, “Your people seem to have no trouble in this base. Plus, we didn’t see you entering this part of space.”
He straightened. Just a bit, but enough for her to notice. She might not have noticed, though, if she had been watching his expression. She was looking for anything that might give her a clue about him, and his posture was about all she had. Everyone around him had remained still.
She needed her soldiers to behave like his people. Hell, she needed the idiot scientists to behave like his people as well.
The stranger did seem surprised that she hadn’t seen his ship, but she wasn’t sure what that surprise was. Had they cloaked and he was astonished they had done so? Or had they slipped in through an opening in the information shield?
“I’m not sure why you would have expected to see me,” he said.
Damn. He was playing the same game she was: Be coy, don’t give too much away.
So she decided to give him more information, information he would know if he had somehow come through the shield.
“We’ve posted most of this region, informing ships to turn away. We also state that anyone who gets through will be considered trespassers and might get shot on sight.”
“Apparently, your postings aren’t as numerous as you thought,” the stranger said. “And it sounds like they make idle threats, since we never saw a ship of yours on our trip here.”
That statement matched what her people had experienced. But she wasn’t going to say so.
“You might not have seen us,” she said, “but we should have seen you. We had an information shield in place.”
“An information shield,” the stranger said as if he hadn’t heard that term before. “You believe that we would have passed through that on our way here?”
“I know you would have,” she said. “There’s no other way here. You would have had to go through our sensors.”
“And you don’t think there are gaps in your sensors,” he said.
“There aren’t,” she said firmly, even though she wasn’t certain.
“And yet we’re here,” he said. Was that sarcasm? What was it about her that provoked sarcasm today.
“You could’ve cloaked,” Vilhauser said in that same excited voice. She knew where his statements were leading. He was going to ask the damn stranger if he had stealth tech, and she needed to stop it now.
“No cloak is good enough to mask against our sensors,” she said loudly, and she was glad she did, because Vilhauser had actually added the words “stealth tech” before he realized he had said too much.
“Doctor,” Dryden said to Vilhauser through the comm, “please let the Commander handle this.”
She was both grateful and irritated at Dryden for speaking up. She needed to concentrate on the strangers, but she was having trouble. She was not a diplomat, and this situation was beyond anything she had done before.
She said to the stranger, “You came in a small ship, one that cannot have traveled through deep space.”
“So,” the stranger said, with amusement in his voice, “now you know the capabilities of my ship. Have you flown one like it?”
“I know, based on the size and the power configuration, that it couldn’t have traveled here on its own. That’s a short-range vessel. If I had to guess, I would say it’s a troop transport.”
That tiny movement again, the one he probably didn’t even know that he did. It was a tell of some kind. She had identified the ship’s function. But if it were a short-range vessel designed for carrying troops, then where was the mother ship?
“Until you people showed up,” the stranger said, “I had no reason to bring a troop here.”
“So what are you doing here?” Vilhauser managed to ask before Elissa could speak up.
The stranger said, “We’re exploring. None of us had been here before.”
“And somehow you got into the secret room,” Vilhauser said.
“It didn’t look secret,” the stranger replied. “In fact, I’m not even sure what you’re referring to as the secret room. We’ve found some doors that were harder to open than others, but we didn’t find any hidden spaces at all.”
Vilhauser tried to shake off Dryden, but Dryden pulled him back. Not even Dryden could stop this idiot from taking over the encounter. “The secret room is the door inside—”
“What’s the point of your exploration?” Elissa asked over him, hoping the stranger didn’t take this little internal conflict as a sign of weakness.
The stranger turned toward her. He seemed to have some sort of reaction to Vilhauser, but she couldn’t’ tell what it was. Contempt? Mockery? Amusement? Relief that this little Empire team was horribly inept?
The stranger said, “The point of our exploration is what’s always the point of exploration. Information, mostly. But I have to admit, there’s just a bit of an adrenalin high going into a new place, particularly one that’s been deserted for this long.”
Someone who came to the Room because it existed? That definitely marked this little group as not from the sector.
“Did you expect to find something here?” she asked.
Vilhauser wasn’t moving now. Apparently this interested him too.
“Of course not,” the stranger said. “This place has been abandoned for a long time. Abandoned places get scavenged. I figured there would be little here, except of exploratory or informational value.”
He kept repeating the word “information.” She found that curious. “What are you trying to find out?”
“Your guides and warnings seem to give this place mythic powers,” the stranger said. “We wanted to see that.”
Your guides. Not the Empire’s guides. Not the guides all over the sector. Your guides. As if he weren’t from here.
There was more to this transport’s arrival on the Room of Lost Souls. These people weren’t afraid of the Room’s deadly history; they knew how to open complicated doors; and they could turn the gravity on in the entire station, something the scientists had been completely unable to do.
This was more than a sight-seeing trip, and she was a bit insulted that the man speaking to her thought he could fool her this way.
Maybe she should stop dancing with him. Maybe she should be even more direct.
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
He actually turned toward her, which made her realize he hadn’t been looking at her full on before. He paused for a moment. Had her statement startled him? Was he trying to decide whether or not to be honest with her?
Then he said, “You don’t believe that we were interested in a place called on all maps the Room of Lost Souls? Who could avoid such a place?”
“Anyone with an instinct for self-preservation,” she said.
T
he soldiers behind her shifted. Dryden said softly, in their comm, “Commander….” as if warning her.
But she ignored him.
The stranger tilted his head again. “You keep threatening that something bad will happen. Are you going to kill us for visiting here?”
She guessed they were both putting everything on the table now. He wanted to know if they would attack. She had threatened him before. She could threaten him again.
She was about to when that damn Vilhauser meddled yet again.
“No, no, of course not,” he said. Then he turned toward her, grabbing her arm. She wanted to shake him off, but he had a determined look. He wouldn’t give up, unless she dragged him out of here—which she was going to do if he didn’t fucking settle down.
“For god’s sake, Commander,” Vilhauser said, and he still was using his speaker, probably because he figured the broadcast would allow the strangers to side with him. “We need to talk to these people. There are at least thirty of them and they all have the marker.”
She wanted to hit him. Just knock his bubble helmet loose and see how he reacted. She clenched a fist against her side, the side that the stranger couldn’t see.
“You,” she said to Vilhauser, “are here on my sufferance. One more word, and I’ll send your people back to the ship.”
She kept that on speaker too. It was already clear to the stranger that she had problems in her ranks. She was going to let him know that the problems weren’t with her soldiers, but with the idiot scientists.
Vilhauser’s determined look became something more sinister.
“Actually,” he said, “you’re here because of me, and you have no right to order me around.”
Son of a bitch. Didn’t he know what he was doing? He was hurting all of them. He was hurting the entire empire.
Then someone chuckled. She turned toward the sound. It had come from the strangers.
“Fun as this all is,” the man said, “it has nothing to do with me or my people. We had no idea we were trespassing, so we’ll leave. Just give us thirty minutes and we’ll be out of your way.”
Finally, progress. She was about to agree when the Room—moved. There was no other word for it. It felt like a ship with the power down, drifting in space. It made Elissa dizzy for a moment, and off-kilter.
Vilhauser pin-wheeled his arms to keep his balance, nearly hitting one of the other scientists. The strangers spread their legs farther to catch their balance, as if they’d done this before.
“We lost two,” Dryden said softly into the comm.
Elissa glanced behind her, saw that Maichle and Kuether had fled through the door they were supposed to be guarding.
So much for any pretense of professionalism. Now the strangers knew just how deeply terrified her people were.
13
ELISSA’S FINGERS WERE SEIZING UP. She could barely move them.
She had crawled under the console that contained the environmental controls. It had taken force, but she had managed to open the interior. She couldn’t see clearly, so she was going by feel.
But her gloves were getting in the way. She could feel the shapes of things, but not what they actually were.
She had to take the gloves off.
She hesitated for just a moment. The gloves protected her skin. Eventually, though, that wouldn’t matter.
Or maybe not so eventually. She took a deep breath of icy air, and then pulled her gloves off. She reached into the guts of the console and found the controls. She touched them, and her fingertips burned.
She brought her hands back, shocked, and it took a moment for her brain to process what she felt.
Ice. She had felt ice. Ice at very very cold temperatures burned the skin.
She glanced at the locker door, wondered how her people were doing. They were probably warmer than she was.
Wait, no probably about it. They were.
And they knew by now that she wasn’t going to join them any time soon.
She took another deep breath, feeling the chill move all the way down her lungs, and reached back inside the panel. By will alone, she would make this all work. And the first thing she was going to will was that the burning sensation wouldn’t bother her.
Then she was going to find a way to turn on the environmental systems, if it was the last thing she ever did.
14
“WHAT THE HELL?” Vilhauser said when he caught his balance. The Room’s movement seemed to startle him as much as it had startled everyone else. “That’s new. You’re doing something, aren’t you?”
He directed that last at the strangers.
“What am I doing?” The stranger responded in a slightly aggrieved tone. “I’m talking to you. This place has been moving like that ever since we arrived. We thought it was normal.”
Elissa did not believe that at all. She’d seen the strangers respond. Her people had been terrified by the movement. It had stunned her and made Vilhauser act even more unprofessionally.
But the strangers just adjusted their bodies and their balance, as if they’d done it a million times before.
“It’s not normal.” Vilhauser said, with as much anger in his tone as Elissa had ever heard. He shook off Dryden, and to her surprise, came toward her, not heading for the stranger.
“Commander,” Vilhauser said. “These people are clearly doing something in that room. Something important. You know this place has been changing size over the years. I’ll wager that what we’re feeling is something they did. Maybe they’ve been manipulating the Room all along.”
Vilhauser had a point. But then, the change might be something as simple as the gravity. None of her people had been on the Room with the gravity on. Maybe the old equipment caused that slipping movement. Maybe it was normal, here.
Then Calthorpe from the Discovery said into the comm, “Commander? The transport has cloaked. I can still track it by its energy signature, but they’ve made it invisible to 98% of our sensors. They’re up to something.”
She felt a surge of anger run through her. She’d had enough of games.
“I think we’re done talking,” she said to the stranger.
His soldiers formed a tight circle around him as they pulled their laser rifles. The rifles aimed directly at her.
Her heart pounded. She didn’t even have to order her soldiers to raise their weapons. They did it so fast that she was surprised no one fired accidentally.
Vilhauser, the coward, cringed, and his scientists huddled together.
“I don’t think we’re going anywhere,” the stranger said. “I’ve told you our plans. I was very clear. We need thirty minutes to leave this place.”
“Your transport is cloaked,” she said.
“Standard procedure,” he said. “We do that as we power up and prepare to leave. That way no one tracks us because they don’t know our origin point. Don’t you people do the same thing?”
It was her turn to chuckle. No one cloaked without a reason. It used too much energy.
“I don’t like what’s happening here,” she said. “You’re coming with us and we will remove the rest of your people from the Room.”
“I don’t think so.” His voice dripped with contempt. “We’ve offered to cooperate. You should take us up on that.”
Her eyebrows went up, and she tilted her head just a little. “Is that a threat?”
He shrugged. She knew that shrug was deliberate. He was pretending to be calm, but they both knew that if one of them made another mistake, someone would die.
“You can take it however you want,” the stranger said. “I think of it as friendly advice. Two of your soldiers have already left the area. It’s clear that your crew lacks discipline. I watched you for a long time before you even noticed me, and my people have been watching you longer than I have. You can’t get most of your crew out of this entry. Apparently they’re afraid of this Room of Lost Souls, as you call it, and that fear trumps whatever discipline you have.”
Her
cheeks warmed. He was right; her soldiers had behaved terribly. Vilhauser had been worse, and she’d probably been the worst of all. For all of that fighting she had done to get her own command, she hadn’t been ready for it after all. She had made mistake after mistake, which had led them here.
“Now,” the stranger said, “you could let us leave of our own accord, or you could try to force us to go with you. I don’t recommend the second.”
She studied them. Those environmental suits were either tissue thin or they were made of something she didn’t understand.
These people weren’t afraid of the Room. They knew how to use its systems, which had been too difficult for good old technician Vilhauser and all of the people who had been here before them.
Did she gamble with her people and possibly lose? Or did she trust the stranger to leave the Room without her help?
Was it worth going to battle over a place that so terrified her people they fled at the first opportunity?
Apparently Vilhauser took her silence for a lack of nerve. He touched her arm. She wanted to slap him.
“Let me go with them,” he said through his stupid speaker. “I want to see how they got into that secret room. It’ll be cooperation, and I can make sure they leave.”
Like he had any ability to make them do anything.
Still, it was a way to put this entire fiasco on him. He had stepped into this first contact and destroyed any attempt she had made to do it right. Vilhauser also claimed he was in charge of this mission.
Since it was already so screwed up, she saw no reason not to let him win this battle. Let him go with the strangers. If he died, if something happened to the Room, well, then, it would all be on him.
She hadn’t taken her gaze off the stranger. “Leave the room open,” she said to him.
“Which room?”
As if he didn’t know.
“All of them,” she said.
“Fine,” he said as Vilhauser said, “No!”
She looked at him, trying not to scream at him.
The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas Page 43