by Rick Partlow
"What the hell?" Pete whispered, as if he were afraid to speak louder.
Rachel knew she should be watching the three Remnant rulers, but her eyes were glue to the apparition that was the Predecessor ship. It was larger than the images she'd seen of the ships that the Corporate Council had found in the Predecessor tech cache, larger than the one that had attacked the Fleet base on Inferno, from the video Kara McIntire had recorded. And this close, she could see that the surface of the ship didn't seem like the typical composite hull of any ship she'd ever seen: it seemed to shift with the light, roiling in uncertainty under her gaze. She felt as if she was looking at some ghost from the past.
"Jesus," she hissed almost unconsciously.
"That is, I hope, worth the walk," Cutter commented dryly.
The female Remnant faced the ship and began doing something that might have been singing or some sort of chant, while the males stood with arms spread and legs moving rhythmically up and down. This was their holy of holies, the embodiment of the gods that had looked like them but were so much more.
"It's...impressive," Rachel said in a subdued voice, standing next to Cutter so she wouldn't interrupt the ceremony. "But how is it supposed to find us Cal and the others?" She shrugged. "Unless you think you can fly it."
"One step at a time," Cutter said. "Right now, they want us to board."
"No fucking way!" Pete blurted, eyes going wide as he looked back and forth between Cutter, the Remnants and the ship.
"Why the hell would we do that?" Rachel asked, for once completely agreeing with Pete.
"They," Cutter indicated the three aliens with a nod of his head, "tell me that our answers will be found on the ship, but they won't board it because it would be sacrilegious or blasphemous or some such thing. If we want to find Captain Mitchell and his friends, we need to do it on that ship. And they insist that you two are the only ones they'll let aboard, since it's your family that's in jeopardy."
Rachel saw Pete staring at her. "This is fucking nuts," he said earnestly.
"I know," she admitted. "But what else are we going to do?"
"At the worst," Cutter chimed in, "it will be a waste of time." He chuckled. "I'm fairly certain that after however many millennia this thing has been sitting here..."
"Floating here," Pete corrected in a mutter that Cutter ignored.
"...there are no bug-eyed monsters waiting inside to devour you."
Rachel let her eyes travel over the length of the ship, knowing what she had to do and trying to talk herself into doing it.
"How do we get inside?" she asked, sighing in resignation.
Cutter spoke to the Remnants again and the female responded, her gestures and body language still unreadable.
"It's in the nose," Cutter told her. "That end," he amended, pointing at the flattened end of the cigar shape that was closest to them. "She said to touch the nose with your bare hand."
Rachel stared at him, sure her eyes were bugging out. Cutter shrugged. "I'm just telling you what she said."
Rachel tried to keep one eye on the Remnant trio as she hesitantly stepped closer to the Predecessor ship. Within ten meters of it, she thought she could feel something tingling inside her chest, but she wasn't sure whether it was an actual sensation or just nerves. Five meters and she was sure that she was picking up something from whatever was keeping the spacecraft levitating, perhaps something to do with its gravity drive.
What had Captain McIntire said? A black hole contained within it somehow? How the hell would they even do that, much less make it work safely for however many thousand years the ship had been there?
One meter away and the tingling had travelled up her spine to the nape of her neck. She let her carbine hang from its harness and started to pull the glove off of her right hand but then paused. Would it matter that it wasn't her natural arm? She shook her head, dismissing the thought. It was living flesh, made from her own genetic material, why would it matter?
And why did it matter so much to her?
Biting off a quiet curse, she peeled the glove away and slapped her palm against the nose of the ship. When she thought about it later, she wouldn't be able to describe what the surface felt like, or even if she'd felt anything at all. She also wouldn't remember the door opening: one second the surface was smooth and unbroken and the next there was a dark, circular gap in the hull, as if it had appeared between eye blinks. She heard Pete swear sharply behind her, but didn't respond; the opening mesmerized her. She kept expecting something horrible to leap from it and devour her, as stupid as she knew that was.
Rachel realized abruptly that she'd been standing there staring at the hole in the front of the ship for nearly a minute. She pressed her lips together firmly, grabbed the edge of the opening with her right hand and tried to pull herself inside. Then she let out a yelp as she felt herself lifted off the ground and deposited neatly inside the craft as if by magic.
Rachel stopped herself from falling forward, fighting the momentum of the motion she'd been about to make, and had just steadied herself when she heard a yelp behind her and felt Pete stumble into her back.
"Goddammit!" the younger man blurted out heatedly. "Can't anything about this place be normal?"
Rachel would have laughed at that, but she was too busy staring around her at the interior of the Predecessor ship. She didn't know what she'd imagined it would be like, but this wasn't it. The floor was spongy under her feet, and there was the same diffuse glow inside the ship that she'd noticed outside of it. But in there, it illuminated nothing. The curved hollow tube of the interior was completely empty, the bulkheads smooth and bare. She heard Pete exclaim behind her and turned to see that the door had disappeared.
"Wonderful," she hissed. She stepped past Pete and touched it with her palm; it felt as spongy as the floor, and ice cold, but there was no reaction.
Shaking her head, Rachel paced back towards the middle of the chamber---it was unpartitioned and at least twenty meters long. There was nothing. No control panel, no sensor station, no alien ghosts. Cursing under her breath, she pulled her comlink off her belt and keyed in Cutter's address.
"Cutter," she snapped. A pause. "Chang!" she shouted into it, feeling a surge of fear tinged with anger. "There's nothing in here! Get us out now!"
She waited for another breath, waiting for a reply and receiving none. She looked at Pete, feeling her lip curling into a snarl on its own accord. He pulled out his own comlink and keyed it.
"Chang!" he yelled into it. "Do you read me?"
He shook his head. "I don't think we can get a signal out of here, Rache."
Rachel felt the breath go out of her in a long sigh and she leaned back against the bulkhead, sliding down until her butt touched the floor.
"What do we do?" Pete wondered, throwing up his hands in frustration.
Rachel rubbed a hand over her eyes. She thought about the carbine, but rejected the idea immediately. A few kilojoules from a hand-held pulse laser wasn't going to burn through that hull, and God knew what sort of security systems a ship like this might have.
So what did that leave? What could they do?
"We wait," she decided. "They'll be trying to get us out."
She closed her eyes and hoped she wasn't lying to him.
Chapter Twenty
Conner:
Deke opened one eye and took a moment to determine what had woken him. Then he heard it: a crackling of dead leaves somewhere out there in the night. He turned his head and tried to look out through the curtain of animal skin that was the hut's door, but he couldn't see anything other than the faint glow of the constantly-maintained fire out in the central courtyard.
"What is it?" Kara asked from beside him, rolling over on the pallet of furs they'd shared these last two nights inside the small hut the villagers had loaned them. They had it to themselves, as Trint had been standing watch outside at night and taking standing naps during the day, while Cal had been sleeping outside...except he hadn't actuall
y been sleeping much, since he was mostly worrying about his family.
Their current privacy was the reason that neither of them was wearing a stitch of clothing. Deke reached over to where his gunbelt rested next to their pallet and silently pulled his handgun from its holster.
There's something out there, he told Kara over their neurolink. Just outside the clearing, something heavy.
Then he repeated the warning to Trint and Cal, who were presumably closer to whatever it was than he and Kara were.
I see it, Trint replied. It seems to be a large, predatory animal of some sort.
"Oh good," Deke commented, reaching for his Reflex armor. "No worries then."
It's not afraid of the fire, Caleb informed them. It's heading this way.
By the time Deke had his Reflex armor sealed, he saw that Kara was already strapping on her gunbelt. He didn't bother with his, just kept his gun in his hand and went straight for the doorway, leaving his boots behind. The dirt was damp and cold under his bare feet, but he ignored it and ran out to where he could see Caleb standing near the fire, carbine in hand. He was an island of stability, planted there like a rock of Gibraltar.
"Where is it?" Deke asked, scanning around on infrared and thermal. The stars were a frosting across the sky and he knew some of them were the debris ring around the gas giant, but he saw nothing beneath the firmament besides the still forms of the villagers inside their lodgings.
"Over there," Caleb said, pointing with the barrel of his weapon towards one of the many one-family shacks clustered around the center fire ring. "Behind that hut." He shrugged. "I think it's trying to sneak in and make a snack of the villagers inside."
"Shouldn't we wake everyone up?" Deke suggested. "Get them out of their huts?"
"No point in getting everyone worked up," Caleb told him, shaking his head. "Trint circled around that way. He should either be able to take care of it himself or make it come towards us."
"Are we trying to scare it away or kill it?" Kara asked from behind Deke. He nearly jumped...he'd been so intent on trying to find whatever was out there that he hadn't paid attention to her approach.
She had, he noticed, a very interesting tousled look to her that made him nearly forget the fact that they were stranded somewhere outside known space and being stalked by some sort of big predator. He knew this whole relationship thing should worry him more than it did, but for some reason he just felt like enjoying it while it lasted.
"I'd rather not kill it," Cal admitted, frowning. "It's just doing what comes naturally. But if we just shoo it away, it might still decide to come back and eat a few of these people."
It's heading your way, Trint's communication came over all their neurolinks.
"I'll take care of it," Cal assured them, turning back towards the hut...and setting his pulse carbine down on the dirt beside the fire.
Deke shot Kara a look and shrugged, backing up to give Cal more space.
The only reason he saw it when it came was his thermal imaging implants. It moved with a sinuous grace, low to the ground and blending tawny fur to brown earth, not giving any indication that it had to weigh in at nearly 400 kilograms and was 120 centimeters at the shoulder and almost three meters long.
"That's a fucking lion," Deke hissed.
"No," Kara corrected him clinically, seemingly unfazed. "That's a fucking saber tooth cat."
She was right, Deke realized quickly. He could see the curved canines jutting down from the cat's upper jaws now that he knew to look for them. Shit. How long had they been extinct? Ten thousand years? More? He felt an involuntary shudder.
If the animal's existence bothered Cal, he didn't show it. He waited until the cat was in the circle of light from the fire, the flicker of flame throwing haunting shadows across its intimidating bulk. Deke could hear a machine-like rumble from the beast's throat as it stalked around Cal, ignoring Deke and Kara.
"They've cloned saber-tooths in the wildlife preserves on Earth," Deke said softly to Kara, feeling as if he were trying to convince himself of something but not sure what it was.
"Yes they have," Kara agreed, not looking away from the cat. "And mastodons and a lot of other things. You think that's how this thing got here?"
"No," he admitted reluctantly. "I think the Predecessors dumped it here along with the humans after they terraformed this moon."
The smilodon made its move then, a lunge that could barely be followed by the eye of a Normal, but Cal wasn't there when the claws swiped through the space where his head had been a heartbeat before. Beyond what the Fleet techs had done to all of them, Cal was a heavy worlder on a moon with slightly less than standard gravity and he moved like a blur; his right foot slammed into the cat's ribs like a pile-driver, sending the animal flying three meters to land with a puff of raising dust from the dry soil around the fire.
The cat shook itself as it clambered painfully to its feet, a canny wariness in its eyes that hadn't been there before. Deke knew that Cal had to be pulling his blows---otherwise, the cat's ribs would have been shattered. The saber-tooth came in low this time, more cautious, then shot in for a disembowelment; and again Cal moved faster, jumping over the lunge and coming down with both feet between the animal's shoulders.
Deke could hear the air leave the cat in a distressed chuff, and it stayed where it had landed, momentarily stunned. Cal wrapped an arm around the smilodon's thick neck, lifting it off the ground in a choke hold and Deke thought he could see the distress in the cat's face. It couldn't growl, it didn't have the breath for it, and its paws waved helplessly as it thrashed in Cal's iron grip. He held it there for several seconds, until it was just about to go unconscious, then he slung the animal away from him, sending it tumbling right through the bonfire. Burning logs scattered across the dirt, leaving streaks of flame in their wake as the big animal tumbled out the other side of the fire circle in a hurricane of flailing paws.
The big cat screeched hoarsely, rolling in the dirt with smoke trailing off patches of burnt fur, and then it was dashing off into the night without another sound. Deke grinned at Cal, offering polite applause.
"That is one scared kitty," he allowed. "He won't be back anytime soon."
"What the hell are you?"
The three of them turned and saw Donald Yu and his wife standing just outside the doorway of their hut, an iron longsword held nearly forgotten in the man's right hand as he stared at Cal in disbelief. Behind them, Trint was coming back into the circle of the fire. Deke didn't know how long they'd been standing there, but apparently they'd caught at least part of the action.
"Seriously," Yu went on, shaking his head. "How the hell did you do that?"
"We," Caleb answered, indicating himself and the others with a gesture, "were...augmented physically for the last war." He snorted darkly. "I guess you missed that one, actually."
"Well, I guess there are positives to being stuck here after all," Yu said dryly, resting his sword point in the dirt and half leaning on it. He was dressed for sleep, a fur wrapped around his shoulders, and still looked groggy. His wife, on the other hand, seemed wired and wide-eyed, pulling her own sleeping furs around her shoulders protectively as her stare went between the place where the cat had run off and Caleb's suddenly intimidating bulk.
She said something haltingly in her language and Yu turned to translate.
"Xanda says to thank you for fighting off the cat. She wonders why you didn't kill it though."
Cal shrugged. "It's an animal," he told Yu, "trying to survive. I made sure it won't come back here. I didn't need to kill it." He grimaced. "I've killed a lot of people in my life, Donald. A lot of them were doing what I considered evil, trying to hurt innocent people who just happened to be in the way. But most of them didn't know about any politics or strategies, they were just following orders from the wrong people and not knowing any better. I had to kill them because they were going to kill me but God, what I would have given to be able to scare one away by kicking their ass and singeing
their fur."
Yu nodded thoughtfully and and was turning to translate the answer to his wife when Deke's head snapped around, a faint sound tickling the far edge of his enhanced hearing. He could see Cal already cocking his head toward the noise, and it was only another moment before Trint and Kara were also looking upward.
"It's a ship," Trint declared. "Our technology, not Predecessor."
"About fucking time," Kara muttered, clapping Deke on the arm. "Better go get your boots on, outlaw---our ride's here."
Then Deke could see it, coming in over the eastern horizon with a flare of exhaust lighting up the sky behind it.
"That's not a bad idea," he admitted, jogging back towards the hut and quickly pulling on his footwear as well as his gunbelt before hurrying back out into the courtyard.
By the time he made it back, the spacecraft was only a kilometer or so away and you could hear the roar of the engines without the benefit of enhanced auditory sensors. Several of the villagers were out of their houses, pointing at the incoming ship and jabbering at each other excitedly,
"I'm guiding them in to an LZ just outside the village," Kara informed him, a distracted look in her eyes letting him know she was communicating via her neurolink.
"Donald," Caleb was speaking to the marooned mineral scout, "I know you have a home here now, but if you want to go back with us, this is your best chance." He shook his head. "I don't know what's going to happen next or if we'll have another chance to come back and pick you up." He motioned towards Wu's wife. "Your family could come along, of course."
But Yu was already shaking his head. "Thanks for the offer, Mr. Mitchell, but I wouldn't remember how to live back there," he told Cal. "I'm glad your friends were able to come for you, though."
If anything, Deke thought, the man looked relieved to see them go. Maybe he didn't like the competition for the title of High-Tech Savior of the Tribe... Still, that was taking the whole "rein in hell" thing a bit far. He noticed Trint staring at Yu, and wondered whether the Tahni cyborg was marveling at the stupidity of staying here on the Planet that Time Forgot or envying the man living in a place where no one had heard of the war.