We were done with three legs of the hunt; the final stretch was before us. As soon as I stepped into the cave, I felt the familiar presence the Theos left behind. After being visited by the shadow man a few times, my senses were now picking up the Theos essence. I wondered if the others felt it too, but judging by the blank looks on their faces, they didn't. Was I their fabled True? Would I discover them and be able to assist in saving the universe from this mystical Unwinding we knew next to nothing about?
“Over there,” Mary said, pointing to a corner where a cocoon-shaped stone sat carved into the rock wall. A divot was cut into the front center of the stone, the perfect indent to place the palm-sized oval seed into.
Without any further delay, I set it into the cocoon rock and waited for the show. Black mist emerged as expected from the stone; their theatrics were getting a little old. Mary still held a look of awe and interest, while Slate just wore a deep frown. I think he was sick of it all, like I was.
The mist took the form of the shadow man after a brief pause as the Theos symbol.
“You have completed your task,” the familiar voice said once again. This time, I decided to not bother arguing with a program and waited for it to speak again. “Welcome to your fourth challenge. Put on the suits before proceeding.”
“What suits?” Mary asked, looking around the empty, musty cave. There were no hiding spots visible to our eyes.
A rectangular stone drawer opened out of the wall beneath the carved cocoon. Inside were three suits.
“How do they know how many of us there were going to be?” Slate asked, talking to us, not the Theos shadow. He was the one who answered anyway.
“There are three because you are three. If you were one, there would be one.”
Apparently, none of us were up to the task of questioning that logic, so we instead grabbed the folded EVAs and pulled them out. They were thin: thinner than the ones we’d started the trek with. Masks, much like what we’d used underwater, were on top of each suit, but these would cover the whole head in the clear, malleable substance.
“Where are we going this time? Space?” I chuckled and didn’t get an answer.
“Connect the three. Land below. The Final will be upon you.”
“What three?” I asked, hoping to glean any additional information.
We didn’t get any. The mist faded, swirling this time into a vortex an armspan wide. Beyond was blackness with pinpricks of light. Stars, maybe.
“No time like the present,” Slate said, grabbing one of the suits from the pile before us. It was too big, but it fitted to him by itself, another technology that made knowing your size a thing of the past. Mary began to step into one as well, and I joined them, feeling the legs cinch up before I had the clasps closed.
“Make sure your earpiece and mic are in first,” I said, plugging mine into my left ear. Slate fumbled with his, getting it in before he threw the last piece of his suit on: the mask.
It conformed to his face; a layer of a thin clear plastic substance molded itself to fit his head. There were still no signs of oxygen tanks, but I trusted their technology. It worked underwater; I knew these would function in the vacuum of space. The Theos wouldn’t bring us this far only to let us die.
Mary finished getting her suit on, and the three of us stood at the gaping hole in the room. Mary’s bow was slung over her shoulder, and Slate and I had the pulse rifles on our backs. Slate held the pack with our few remaining objects. My Relocator still sat in my new EVA pocket.
“What do you think he meant by ‘Find the three. Land below’?” Mary asked while staring into the opening in space. It felt out of place in a cave, like we were in a dream.
“Same old cryptic Theos. Who knows?” I answered.
“Do we just go? This one feels different,” Slate said, his right hand stretching forward toward the vortex before us.
He was right. The other seeds had each acted in some dramatic way. The massive steel tree on Atrron, Aquleen’s healing, and now, comparatively, an anticlimactic rift in space.
“It does feel different. The sooner we go, the sooner we go back home.” I stepped forward first. I could feel a tugging on my body as I stood a few feet shy of the opening. I turned, giving Mary a quick smile, and lifted a leg, walking into the vortex. It was time for our fourth challenge.
Nineteen
They were gone, nowhere to be seen.
“Mary? Slate?” My earpiece returned silence. Where did it send them? They’d been right behind me.
Where was I, for that matter? I’d been so worried about the other two not being there, I’d been blind to my surroundings. I was inside a room. The walls were cold and metallic: silver with a blue line running around the room at waist height. I floated, lightly, two feet from the ground. I was either on a planet without gravity or I was in space.
“Mary?” I asked again, and I swore I heard the slightest feedback before it went silent again. I was torn between investigating where I was and staying put, hoping the others would arrive soon. I decided to wait five more minutes and explored the room in the meantime. It was empty, at least twenty feet high and thirty feet wide and long. I waved my arms, moving slightly until I could touch the roof. I ran a gloved hand along the metal and pushed off, down toward the side of the space, to where a door sat nestled into the wall.
When no one arrived, and I was sure there was nothing to be found in the cold room, I searched for the door access. A tablet came to life as I tapped it, and with the touch of a button, the door slid open. I tried to tell myself it was a good guess, considering the text was in an unknown language, but since there’d only been two options, I couldn’t give myself too much credit.
Feeling stupid for not thinking of it sooner, I pulled my pulse rifle from my back and held it firmly. The feel of the ridges pressing against my palm calmed me. It made me feel better about being alone on a creepy empty ship, or station, or wherever I’d found myself.
The door made more noise than I expected, sounding like a rushing train on a warm summer morning: the kind that would run behind our home on Sundays before the sun rose, startling the roosters into a cockadoodling frenzy far before their real alarm clock went off.
I pulled myself through the doorway, noticing that the lines of blue continued to run along the walls and down the narrow hallway. I scanned ahead, seeing what appeared to be a window halfway down. I didn’t see any doors, which meant less chance of an ambush. I’d just have to watch the end of the hall, not behind me where a room stood empty.
Feeling better, I used my left hand to push off the side of the wall, and my right foot to steady me on the other. The hallway was only four feet wide, and this allowed me to bounce down the corridor without hitting the ground or the ceiling.
The window was coming up on my right, and I stopped pushing off, letting myself float slowly toward the viewport. It had a lip of a ledge, and I used my fingers to grab at it, stopping completely. The view was overwhelming. Gigantic rocks hung in the distance, while pieces of large space vessels were scattered between them. We were in orbit of a world that looked like nothing but blue-green water from this vantage point. A hazy yellow star hung way back, like a tennis ball about to be served, giving bright light over the whole image. It was beautiful.
I appeared to be in a long corridor, one likely used in a space station in orbit above a planet. A planet with nothing but water. A world like this would be highly valuable. I thought about my bargain with the Bhlat and wondered if I’d be able to find this world’s coordinates after it was all done. Water would solve their issues for decades to come, maybe forever.
It would have to go through the Gatekeepers first. We’d have to ensure there was no intelligent life, and that was a sticking point for many of us. To Mary, all life was important. To CR-3 from PPSD1, a world of half-synthetic androids, the term meant a very different thing.
Where were Mary and Slate? I wanted to share this moment with Mary by my side. Determined to get moving and
find them, I cast myself off again, floating faster down the way until I found the door at the other end.
I used the tablet beside the door and was greeted with another loud slide of a long-unused metal slab. I found myself on the left side of a huge room, small ships lining the floor in straight lines that would please even the most severe OCD sufferer.
I pushed over to one of the ships and was surprised by the small size of it. They were made to be personal vessels – that much was clear – but for whom? They were pointed at the front, like leaned-over elongated pyramids. I moved to the back of the ship, seeing inset thrusters there, larger than my head. Four of them sat on the base, one on each corner.
The ships were black, and I could picture the whole fleet out there in space, hiding in the dark backdrop beyond. There were row upon row of them, and with a quick count, I estimated there were two hundred in the room. It was impressive.
I wanted to know what happened. Were they wiped out by a runaway asteroid? Wouldn’t it have hit the planet too? Or maybe massive chunks of rock did hit the world below, sending it into a cataclysmic state, which in turn caused it to be overrun with oceans. Mary always knew more about that kind of thing, and I couldn’t wait to pick her brain about it.
What had the Theos said? Connect the three. If I had to guess, which apparently I did, that meant we each needed to get something. They’d separated us so we could each get something, bring them together, and take them to the world we were currently orbiting. Land below.
That had to be it! It comforted me to know they were likely somewhere similar to me, contemplating the same problem at that moment. Mary was probably already solving it, and Slate was, without a doubt, seeing if he could fit into one of those ships. If he could, it would be a funny sight.
It became a challenge now, a race amongst friends. I would find my piece of…whatever I was supposed to find and be there waiting for the other two.
With newfound energy, I searched the huge hangar. First, I headed for the left front corner, where the walls met at a ninety-degree angle. I walked the perimeter, hoping to see anything out of the ordinary. Unfortunately, it was all out of the ordinary.
The room was well lit: an energy source still powered the orbiting station. If I had to guess, it was solar-powered, since the star in the distance was giving a lot of rays toward the floating debris around the station inside.
My slow methodical paces took me to the far corner of the room now, and I turned, heading toward another large doorway on this end of the hangar. Initially, I thought this must be where the ships exited, but with a crane of my neck, I looked upward, seeing large lines in the ceiling. It would slide or split open, allowing the pyramid ships to rise and depart.
This door would lead somewhere else on the station. Before I opened it, I wanted to scan the rest of this room. I passed the doorway, letting it be, and continued my circle of the room. A computer screen sat integrated into the wall as I walked along, and I stopped, turning to it.
With a tap of my finger, it came to life. Strange lettering cascaded onto the screen with some flourish. With the program running, I tried to make some sense of it. I had nothing with me to translate it, but like many alien programs I’d seen, they used small icons beside some of the options.
An image that could only be one of the pyramid ships was on the bottom left, with lettering beside it. I tapped it, and the room shook lightly with a constant vibration.
“Dean, stop being careless,” I chided myself out loud.
A loud noise started from above, and I looked up to see the large ceiling panels slide apart, like massive pocket doors. The darkness of space hung above, and I spotted a flicker of blue energy between the roof and space. At least there was something preventing me and all the contents of this station from being sucked into space.
I tapped it closed and waited with more than a little anxiety as the doors sealed. The last thing I wanted to do was trust the forcefield of a busted-up alien station. Not wanting to activate anything else, like a self-destruct, I left the comp screen alone and moved back toward the doorway I hadn’t explored yet.
With a tap, I had access to the next room, which was much smaller than the one I was coming from. It looked like an office, with four work stations; three doors lined the edges of the area. I set to looking at the desks. Their screens showed various programs, but the one with a 3D map caught my interest. On it, I could see the planet we were orbiting and the two moons around it, as well as a large space station. The same yellow star was further out, with two other planets nearer than this one in various stages of their elliptical orbit. One appeared to be nearing its perihelion and looked closer than I’d want to be to a star.
Most days, I could close my eyes and my memory of floating near Earth’s sun, trying to save the suicidal vessels full of humans, would flash in my mind. It wasn’t a moment I liked to dwell on, but there it came, flooding back to me like it was happening. I felt the heat of the sun and the tug of the tethered rope. I closed my eyes tightly, and when I opened them, the moment had passed. All I saw was the map once again.
Three things interested me. One, that there were no asteroid chunks on this map. That meant it was being looked at before the damage was done. Two, the planet showed lines and texture, unlike the waterlogged world we currently had nearby. There was no sign of a space station on this map, which I found intriguing as well.
I sat down at the hard metal bench. Whoever had designed the workspaces was more about function than comfort. There were a few options on the two-foot-wide screen that was built into the desk space. Eventually, after a little trial and error, the map system started loading an updated version. First, lines appeared, dancing across the screen as the sensors identified the objects nearby.
Within a few minutes, the lines were filling in with realistic images, even though some of the color appeared wrong to me. The rocks had been lighter gray when I saw them out the window in the corridor twenty minutes earlier, but these were dark.
I was shocked to see both moons were gone. I’d assumed they were being blocked by the limited view I’d had. That explained more. Something came and destroyed their moons; chunks inevitably would have rained down on the planet below, and a combination of tsunami and tides being altered ended up in a water world.
“Who did this to you?” I asked no one in particular. Was this another sick game by the Theos, or did they set it up to look like the scene I’d just played out in my head? Was any of this real? Either way, I still had the same objective. Finish the task and get home. That was all I wanted. I wanted to be in my house on New Spero, with Maggie licking my face as morning broke. Mary and I had talked about a family, and when this was over, I was going to broach the subject. She’d been so distracted, exploring worlds as a Gatekeeper over the past year, that I wasn’t sure she’d mentioned having kids more than once. We’d both been distracted, and now with the Theos conundrum, we were digging ourselves deeper into the universe. The deeper we dug, the harder it would be to get out of the hole.
I zoomed on the map, finding the station I was inside. It looked to be one of the smaller chunks, still intact. Slate and Mary could be in any of the others, maybe even together. Maybe the initial Theos plan had been to send us to three corners of the same station, but now that they were busted up, things had changed.
Connect the three. What did it mean? Connect what? I looked over the map more, zooming in and out of the station debris. Then it made sense. Amongst the waste, three sections of the station were very similar. From an aesthetic point of view, the station would have many parts that made it symmetrical, but I’d originally assumed it was a circle. The design was the most functional for the sake of gravity and for long-term sustainability in space.
The Theos would have no need of that. They were so far advanced, they could choose any shape they wanted. In this case, they chose the symbol for their homeworld. Now that I saw the three pieces, I couldn’t unsee them. Stacked together, they would form the symbo
l, with three horizontal lines connected in the middle. I was in either the top piece or the bottom, depending on perspective. The other two were close by, and that was where I’d find Mary and Slate.
The question became: how could we connect the three?
Twenty
With the objective clear in my head, it was time to figure out how to accomplish their challenge. We had three sections of the station; presumably each of us were currently on one of them. Looking at the map, I mentally assigned Mary to the section nearest me, and Slate to the middle piece on the other side of some large hunks of moon.
I needed to get in contact with them. I checked the other workstations and was sure there was a communication link between the sections, but I couldn’t figure out how to use them.
“Mary. Slate. Come in.” Static. “If you can hear me, I think I know what we have to do. We’re each inside a section of a space station. We need to connect them. The end result is a station in the shape of the Theos symbol.” There was no reply. I’d have to find another way to get the message through.
I tried the left door first. As expected, it was nothing more than a small room with more computer screens. I already knew the layout of the portion of the station I was in because of the 3D map I’d seen. The hangar was the middle piece of the symbol, with the corridors making up the symmetrical length. It was like a squat letter T. I headed for the hallway door and found a corridor much like the one on the opposite end of the hangar.
I floated through it, pushing myself along the walls as I had before, and made good time down the long stretch. I paused midway as the window approached, this one aiming in the reverse direction of the first. I got a much different view from there, the planet and star no longer in my sight lines. Now I saw the other pieces of the station, and I squinted, looking for a window on one of them.
The closer of the two would act as the middle, and I did see a tiny square window much like the one I was peering out of. Was that someone moving past it? I silently hoped it was Mary. The thought that I might have just seen her float by the viewport filled me with a needed burst of adrenaline.
The Survivors Box Set Page 78