He really needed to find a compatible woman. Although he told himself that he simply hadn’t met the right woman yet, he wondered if that was an excuse. While he would never stop grieving for Summar, the young wife he’d lost during the Endekian attack on Rystan, his marriage had been arranged … and difficult. Summar had been little more than a child bride and she’d died before they could really bond. Yet sometimes he thought that the luxury of having a full lifetime to mature would not have been enough. Summar had relied on him to make every major decision, and while he’d been hunting, she’d chosen not to flee their village with the others during the invasion. The Endekians had found her hiding in a closet and killed her. Although his village needed food from the hunt, he should have known better than to leave her alone, but he’d thought she’d become accustomed to his absences. Instead, she’d panicked, and Summar, along with the child growing in her womb, had died because he’d failed to stay home and protect them. After facing his inadequacy as a husband, Zical didn’t know if he ever again wanted the responsibility of a wife.
Many men had died during the war, so there was no shortage of Rystani women. Seven years had passed since Summar’s death. It was time to move on. But for some reason, Rystani women seemed … ordinary. Perhaps, he should make an effort to get to know some of the Terran women, who seemed bolder, more interesting. Perhaps, despite Dora’s teasing, that was why he enjoyed her company. Dora’s computer personality was more like her friend Tessa than any Rystani woman. She might irritate him, but she never bored him.
He couldn’t restrain his curiosity. “Dora, why do you want a body that’s going to age and die?”
“Computers can’t make love.”
Her response didn’t surprise him. Dora had always seemed overly interested in human sexuality. “You’re willing to give up immortality in exchange for sex?”
“Tessa says making love is different from sex.”
He didn’t need to know that. “Stars. Tessa and Kahn have a planet to run—”
“And they’re doing a very good job.”
“—so how has she time to discuss …” Climbing as they conversed, he reached for an outcropping.
“Look out.”
The rocks under his fingers crumbled into dust. Scrambling for another handhold, he scraped his hand, winced as he stopped the downward slide. After he wedged his toes into a sturdy crack, he rested to catch his breath. “You could have warned me sooner.”
“And take away your excitement? Your shot of adrenaline?” Dora laughed. “Besides, I appreciate those straining deltoids on your back.”
Zical frowned. “So why did you warn me at all?”
“According to my precise calculations, I timed the warning so you’d react to save yourself and still get your jolt of excitement.”
“I scraped my hand.”
“You’ll heal.” She laughed without one iota of sympathy.
“Dora, having a body means feeling pain.”
“I know.”
“Intellectually, you know.” Zical edged his toes along the crack, ignoring the sting of his flesh. “Pain isn’t pleasant.”
“But making love is,” she said dreamily. “Tessa says with the right man—”
“I don’t want to talk about your fantasy life,” he muttered, thoroughly exasperated that he’d allowed her to draw him into such an absurdly private conversation. He’d come up here to make a career decision, not to talk about love with a machine.
“—making love is wondrous.”
Breathing hard, Zical pulled himself into a niche where he could rest and concentrate on his surroundings. Oddly shaped, the area seemed too smooth and evenly rounded, as if manufactured. Solid rock, with red and gold striations in the layers, almost polished, but not by wind, the shallow nook could have been a portal—except there was no door.
“Dora.”
“Yes?”
“What do your sensors make of this place?”
Another computer would have asked for specifics. But Dora understood that he wouldn’t have asked the question at this particular time and place without a relevant reason.
Dora switched topics of conversation without melting one circuit. She’d been built on Scartar, a planet run by women, and could carry on thousands of conversations at once while simultaneously monitoring everything from agricultural machinery to the weather. Tessa had enlarged Dora’s capacity many times over, giving her the resources to make speedy calculations and interpret data faster than the speed of light.
“An unusual force field protects the rock. There’s a high probability that the field is being generated from inside the mountain.”
“What’s unusual about the force field?”
“The field is preventing my sensors from scanning Mount Shachauri’s interior and is composed of energy similar to shields left behind by the Perceptive Ones.”
Hair on the back of his neck prickled. “Are you certain?”
“The site is … ancient.”
“How ancient?”
“As old as the other machines left behind by the Perceptive Ones, maybe older.”
“No one would go to the trouble of hiding a doorway all the way up here unless what’s inside is valuable.”
“You’re leaping to conclusions. There could be numerous other possibilities. Another race could have created this field, one with a sinister purpose.”
“Now who’s leaping to conclusions?”
“I was pointing out alternate possibilities. You should call Tessa, have her send experts to study the force field.”
Zical ignored Dora’s suggestion. Even sentient, emotional computers tended to follow procedure. Dora could be overly cautious, especially when she couldn’t identify something outside her data banks and memory chips. Besides, further exploration would delay his having to make a decision he still wasn’t ready to make. “Maybe the force field is guarding a treasure.”
“Your logic would only make sense if the aliens held the same values as Rystani. This place could be a burial site. A religious artifact. A crashed spacecraft. A—”
“Dora, don’t tell me the possibilities. Tell me how to go inside.”
“That could be dangerous,” she warned. “We have no idea what we’ll find.”
“Dregan hell. That’s why we need to look,” he muttered sarcastically. “You think whoever built this is alive and waiting inside to shoot me?”
“It’s not likely. But—”
“Dora, if you can’t penetrate the force field, our scientists won’t be able to either.” Zical suspected that Dora knew how to open the portal but feared for his safety so was holding back. “Whoever comes up here will have to find a way in without any more information than we have right now. There’s no reason to delay.”
“Compliance.”
Oh, Dora was annoyed at him all right; but she’d never withhold information, yet whenever she slipped into computer-mode and dropped her personality into a black hole, it was a sure sign she didn’t agree with his decision. So as he waited for her marvelous brain to hum and whir and take millions of facts into account and come up with a solution, he examined the nook more carefully. He saw no buttons, levers, or knobs. No cracks to reveal any opening.
Zical ran his hands over the force field that felt smooth as bendar, the hardest man-made building material in the Federation. He didn’t note so much as a ripple, a bump, or a crack in the uniform surface.
“Put your chest against the rock,” Dora instructed, “and let the heat from your suit through.”
“Huh?”
“A variety of factors indicate either body heat or psi function will open the portal.”
Zical leaned against the portal, and using his psi, he opened a channel in his suit to allow his body heat to warm the field. Immediately, his core temperature lowered a degree and he shivered. Unable to recall the last time he’d been cold, at first, he actually enjoyed the unusual sensation. After a few minutes of losing body heat, his fingertips began to
go numb, his shivers turned to wracking shudders, and he wondered at the extremes he was willing to go to—all in the name of exploration.
“It’s n-not w-working.”
“I’m monitoring your core temperature. Hypothermia will set in within another minute.” Dora didn’t sound the least bit concerned for his welfare, reassuring him that although he might feel as though he were freezing to death, he wasn’t yet in danger.
“How much l-longer?”
“My best estimate is that you have to be willing to risk death.”
“Death?”
“Luckily for you, I’ll stop the process before the point of no return.”
“Y-you could have t-told m-me.”
“I just did.”
Zical tried to think beyond the numbness in his frozen fingers and toes. He trusted Dora implicitly to monitor his medical condition. If she said he had to go to the brink of death, he trusted her to pull him back before he died. But what was so important that the builders required a man to risk death to enter?
Damn it, he wanted to see what was inside.
The tiny part of his brain that still thought in higher functions didn’t want to back down in front of Dora. Rystani warriors were always courageous—even in the face of the unknown. Even when they shivered like a newborn baby. Even when their arms turned blue.
“Five more seconds.”
“Four.”
“Three.”
“Two.”
“One.”
The rock behind the force field dematerialized. Zical didn’t so much step forward as he staggered into a hallway of streaming multicolored lights so laser bright that he winced against the glare until his psi adjusted and turned up the heat in his suit. He took small steps for several minutes, recognizing the need to let his body’s core temperature rise. The corridor widened into an enormous cavern. Mount Shachauri had been hollowed out to house massive equipment—equipment whose most fundamental purpose he couldn’t begin to guess.
Meticulously crafted diaphanous crystals floated in a swirling array of bewitching patterns, their auras reflecting off machines larger than the skyscrapers on Zenon. A series of golden globes hung from the cavern’s peak. A map? Directions? Or decorations? Zical had no clue. The room could be some weird form of alien art. Or an armory for a weapon. A rocket launcher. Or a shrine to pay homage to ancient gods.
“Dora?”
“I’m here.” A tinny voice echoed from the computer speaker on his wrist.
“You sound strange.”
“We’re cut off from Mystique. Satellite communication is no longer viable. I can no longer contact my mainframe—”
“We’re on our own?”
“We should leave immediately.”
Zical turned around, half expecting the portal behind him to have rematerialized and trapped them. But Mystique’s azure sky shined brightly through the opening and they had a clear escape route.
“Come on, Dora. I want to look around.”
“I don’t.”
“Where’s your sense of adventure?” He’d put off a decision on his career for this long, a few more hours wouldn’t make any difference.
“Where’s your sense of self-preservation?” she countered. “If you get into trouble, I can’t even call for help.”
“Relax.” Zical stepped forward. The multicolored lights blinked and beckoned him forward to a walkway that curved into the mountain where thousands of dark screens along one wall eyed him in ominous silence. Careful not to touch anything, he tred with care along solid, smooth rock.
The chamber brightened, so bright that his suit failed to compensate and he whipped up his arm to shield his eyes. Wishing he could see past brilliant strobes of vivid purple, sunset-red, and Zenon-blue light, he squinted into the radiance. When pure golden rays beamed from the ceiling and struck, his world went black.
Chapter Two
AT THE SAME time that Dora’s central mainframe noted she was cut off from her portable unit with Zical and that he’d disappeared from her scanners, she maintained thousands of real-time conversations, coordinated satellite communications and space traffic, monitored the growth of her new body in the biological laboratory, mentored a child in basic arithmetic, collated incoming data from Mystique’s new fleet of starships, and observed and stored billions of details both insignificant and important. Noting the lack of communication with Zical and her portable unit, Dora wasn’t unduly alarmed. Whatever was blocking her sensors from penetrating Mount Shachauri had cut off contact, but she expected Zical to emerge from the cavern shortly.
Meanwhile, she enjoyed her conversation with Tessa, her Terran friend who had named Dora shortly after their first meeting. While Dora admired and respected Tessa’s opinions, she often had difficulty understanding her friend from Earth. Especially now. Tessa didn’t place a high value on beauty. In fact, on a scale from one to ten, Tessa would place comeliness at the bottom of her list. Tessa valued loyalty, honesty, friendship, intelligence, and open-mindedness above physical attractiveness. But Tessa had been born flesh and blood, and now secure in the knowledge that her Rystani husband adored her, she took her attractive features for granted.
“You haven’t asked Osari his opinion about beauty, have you?” Tessa only half-jested.
Tessa had admitted once that although the Osarian she’d befriended during a trip to Zenon, the Federation’s capital planet, was a wise and gentle soul, the blind, slime-covered, eight-tentacled Osarian took some getting used to. But if Tessa hadn’t forced herself to look beyond his ugliness and established a business relationship that had altered the economic balance of power within the Federation, Dora wouldn’t have had the credits to grow a body.
Tessa’s insistence that Dora share in the family’s wealth had given Dora the resources for research and development. These last few years she’d studied every facet of placing her personality into a human body. Such a feat had never been successfully completed, but that didn’t deter her.
Dora had brainpower and means far beyond the scope of humans. After careful consideration, she’d grown a body from stock humanoid DNA. Modifying the genes to eliminate all weaknesses that led to disease, she’d supervised her development with critical expertise garnered from medical doctors, biologists, psychologists, geneticists, and nano scientists on a hundred worlds.
Dora’s thoughts hummed through her circuits, and she replied to Tessa with no gap in their conversation. “Osari told me that since his entire race is blind, they judge beauty according to telepathic factors that reflect spirituality.”
Tessa strode from her office to the laboratory, her steps quick. She changed the subject without slowing her pace, skipping from topic to topic as friends often do. “So what’s happening right now?”
Dora understood Tessa wanted an update on her becoming human. “I’m finalizing which data and memories to transfer.”
Tessa remained silent for a moment as if thinking hard. “I hadn’t realized that you can’t take everything. But of course, the human brain couldn’t possibly hold—”
“A billionth of my capacity,” Dora spoke gloomily. “I’m keeping all my memories of our years together and my time with the family, of course.”
“Thanks.” Tessa frowned. “Dora, are you going to feel stupid with a human brain?”
“The up side is that I won’t remember how much data I’ve lost. Since humans only use ten percent of their brains, I can pack in considerably more knowledge than most people carry in their heads.”
“Is that wise?”
“Smarter is always better.”
“Not if you don’t leave enough brain capacity to learn new things.”
“I’ll leave a little room.”
“Make sure it’s enough. Learning is a valuable part of being human.”
Dora sensed Tessa was having difficulty expressing her thoughts, and a touch of frustration entered her tone. “I don’t understand.”
“One example would be your new senses. You�
��ve never tasted or touched. You’ll want to remember that kind of data as well as all your new conversations and experiences.”
“Oh, yes.” Dora sought to allay her friend’s fears. “I’ll leave lots of room to experience every facet of kissing, hugging, and lovemaking.” Tessa wiped away her frown, but Dora recognized the worry in her eyes as they entered the lab. She’d noted that Tessa tended to worry, often without valid reasons. “Relax. Being human is going to be fun.”
“Being human will be a huge change for you.”
“That’s the point.”
“Are you sure you can handle being human?” Tessa’s voice was gentle but edged with a thick thread of apprehension.
“I won’t know until I try.”
“Is the process reversible?”
“Not at the present time, but this isn’t a decision I’ve made without considerable assessment and analysis.”
“Yes, I know.”
Tessa tightened her lips, and although Dora appreciated her concern, if billions of other beings could handle being human, then she could, too. Sure, she expected a few glitches. But she’d made certain to include a capacity to adapt and cope.
Tessa strode to the tank where Dora’s new body floated in a sea of nutrients. Although it was not yet fully formed, Dora was pleased with her progress. Her height was taller than Tessa’s, but most Rystani women towered over the Terran. Dora’s organs and bone structure were completed, but she had yet to decide upon the finishing touches.
Tessa stared into the tank, again silent and oddly still, obviously containing her apprehension, but she’d support Dora’s decision—no matter what—that’s what friends did, and warmth for the connection they shared sang through Dora’s circuits.
Tessa fisted her hands on her slender hips and chewed her bottom lip. “So what’s next?”
Rystani Warrior 02 - The Dare Page 2