“What are you going to do with us?” Ayia asked.
“As I said, our elders will want to speak to you,” she said, smiling back at her.
“What she is asking is, are going to harm us?” Gheno said bluntly.
“Why would I do that?” Ulisike asked.
It was a simple question, yet fully loaded as well. “We don’t know who you are. We are a bit afraid as this is all very new to us,” Kale said. “Are you human?”
“We are people, yes,” she replied. Kale grimaced a bit as he knew the words had different meanings.
“Yes, but are you human? Are you people like us?” he asked.
“We are people like you. We are your brothers and sisters,” she said, pointing around the bridge, or the eye as they called it.
“Where did you come from?” Ayia asked.
“We are from Gadoni,” she said.
“Is that your planet? Your city?” Ayia asked again.
“It is our Gadoni,” she said. There was just a hint of frustration where the meanings of the words were lost. “There is only Gadoni. Our home.”
“Ok. Why were you coming for us?” Kale asked.
“All of the threads converged on your box,” Ulisike said.
“Box?” Kale asked.
“Your ship,” she replied.
Gheno laughed. “Box,” he repeated.
Kale nodded his head. “I'm afraid I just don’t understand. Threads?”
Ulisike stood up and Kale reflectively stepped back a bit. She was still donned in her wooden armor and still an imposing, if not still alien, figure. She pointed up and one of the larger spheres began lowering down towards them. It stopped just over them and Ulisike reached out and touched one of them. An image formed and Gheno instantly recognized it as a star map, although it was unlike any he recognized. They were not any constellations he knew.
“The entire existence is woven by threads. They course through every being, and every rock and every essence. All existence is held together by these threads. The eye cannot see them, but some of us can feel them. I have this gift. So I ride this Vahe through the existence and sometimes, we come across a convergence of these threads, a knot.”
Kale sat back, having not understood anything she had said. He was about to ask what she had said, but realized he didn’t even know what to ask. Thankfully for him, Gheno came to the rescue.
“Quantum strings?” he asked, jumping up and almost hitting his head on the sphere. “These threads, they connect everything. You can’t see them, but you can feel them, because they vibrate, from one end to the other. And you can pull them, or better yet, pull yourself along them?”
Ulisike looked at the boy in amazement. “You do understand,” she said with a smile.
Gheno turned and attempted to explain what was going on to Kale but the Captain had difficulty understanding anything. Ayia understood a bit and Karai nodded her own understanding. Once again, Kale felt left out.
“Wait, quantum strings are one dimensional. How can a human being feel them?” Gheno asked of Ulisike.
Karai stood up and started talking about some other ideas she had about string theory and quantum manipulation and Kale squeezed his eyes shut. They were stuck on board an alien space craft, which was run by humans, and they were all arguing scientific matters he didn’t understand. To top it off, Cruxe was sitting just ten feet from him and he couldn’t hurt him.
“Will you let us go?” Kale asked, interrupting them.
“Will you not speak to our elders?” She asked.
“Who are these elders?” Kale countered.
“They guide us. Our leaders. They said that if we ever found our brothers, and they survived meeting us, that they would want to speak to them.”
“And these elders are on Gadoni,” Kale implied.
She nodded. “And after we speak to them, we may leave if we wish?” he asked.
Everyone turned to wait for her answer.
“Yes,” she said. “But you may wish for your ship to heal first.”
Gheno laughed again.
***
Kale and Ayia followed two men towards the rooms they were being provided. They were, assumedly, flying back to where these people came from, although they couldn’t understand just how long that would take. There were many things lost in the translation when the two groups attempted to communicate. These new people weren’t very forthcoming either, despite their friendly demeanor. Gheno had attempted to understand how their translating gel, as he called it, worked. But other than their brief explanation of the quantum threads, which Gheno of course, understood, they simply wouldn’t talk about much else until they met with the elders.
They said it would take two 'trails' to reach their home and no one could explain how long that would take.
"How long did you know about Cruxe?" Kale whispered to Ayia. He looked down and saw the back of the man, in between him and some other guards.
"About him?" Ayia began, "listen, Kale. I’m sorry. I really didn’t know it was him."
"That what was him?"
Ayia told him everything. She explained the secret messages and how they had all come true. She had come to trust this secret messenger, even though it was foolish. She then confessed that it felt even more foolish not to think she could have trusted Kale with the information.
"But I never knew it was Cruxe," she said. "How could I know?"
Kale looked her in the eyes and then picked up his pace to catch up to Cruxe. The boy looked back, startled as the Captain reached him.
"Why should I trust you?" Kale asked.
"I really don’t care if you trust me or not. It’s only her trust that I’m hoping for," Cruxe said, motioning back to Ayia.
Kale looked back and made eye contact with Ayia. As he did, she met his gaze and looked away.
"Why?" Kale asked.
"I couldn’t let them hurt her,” he said.
"What do they want with her?" Kale asked.
"It's not her. It's all of you. What they think you have," Cruxe said.
He told Kale about the video footage of Deespa on Oxaoca and how the Crusaders had managed to put it together with the other two people they saw in the footage: Kale and Ayia. They were putting together a plan to try to kidnap Deespa, but caught in the middle of a civil war as she was, they settled for the easier plan. The Crusaders wanted to get them both and get from them all of their knowledge of Deespa. It was part of this overall mission to find their god somewhere outside of humanity.
"And you’re not a part of them?" Kale asked.
Cruxe explained how after the failed attack on Devil's Den, he had nowhere else to go. He had only ever wanted to try to explain himself to Ayia and found himself embroiled in a far more complex situation. He went through their initiation and said all the right things, all to remain on the inside. He knew that he would find Ayia through them. When he found out that they were starting to track her, he started sending her the secret messages. He did that until he could put himself into a position to find her himself. That he did at the Gemini system, only to get himself captured by these people.
"Let me make this clear though, Captain," Cruxe said. "Whatever else that was out there, THAT is exactly what the church is looking for. They are fanatically insane and if they find out about those spheres or these, I don’t know, whatever wood-type people these men here are, they will stop at nothing to get at them."
"They’re more than happy to. Whatever those spheres were, they made easy work of their ship," Kale said.
"No, you don’t understand. This group, this church, they have been looking for their god for too long now. If they find whatever those things are, they will try as best as they can to submit to them, to worship them. I don’t know what was going on in your ship, but on that cruiser, the spheres were trying to hack it, take control of it."
Kale remembered Sentinel's battles.
"And?"
"If those spheres are truly alien, they weren’t comin
g in peace. And even if they are not, well, you don’t seem to understand. You have seen just a very small fraction of the church's complete power. They have men and ships in every government, every corporation, hell, on every rogue planet around. Nearly each one of those fanatical believers is willing to give his life, or more, to find their god. Who knows what they would do if they actually found it."
"Or chose to find one," Kale added.
Cruxe nodded.
"You tried to kill us," Kale said after walking with him a bit longer. They stopped in front of a small doorway, where the men were showing Cruxe his room.
"I’d kill anyone for her," Cruxe replied.
"At the end of this all, you will be dead," Kale said, and walked away, following his two guides.
One of the men pointed at the room and Cruxe turned to walk in just as Ayia walked past. She stopped in front of him and tried to smile. She caught herself remembering being locked up in a small space station on a frontier system and lost the urge to smile. Instead she turned away and kept walking. Dejected, Cruxe walked into his room. The door sealed up behind him.
***
Kale could feel the electricity moving through his body. His mind remembered the pain, although now he couldn’t feel it. He tried opening his eyes, but he couldn’t make out the figures in front of him. There were a lot of people. Most we did not know, but in the crowd, he saw the tormentor. Standing behind him was Oganno. Kale tried scanning the crowd, but again found that his eyes simply wouldn’t open. He looked down and saw that his feet had large red spikes through them. Again, he remembered the pain, but couldn’t feel it now.
Somebody was talking, reading something out loud. Kale kept trying to focus on all the individuals but couldn’t see anything. The crowd was spinning around him and he was becoming light headed. As the spinning slowed down, he was able to see his mother in the crowd. Her face was dirty. Or was it bloody? His mother had been dead for a long time.
Kale looked down as he heard crying and saw a child looking up at him, pleading. Then he felt the pain.
***
Kale sat up suddenly in his bed. It was more like a hammock than the usual flat beds he was used to, but very comfortable. He didn’t wake up screaming, but he was covered in sweat. He remembered the dream clearly. It was unlike any he had ever had before. He looked around and saw Gheno, Karai and Ayia, each in their hammocks. They had insisted on putting everyone in a room together. Thankfully, they had left Cruxe in his own room.
Waking up that way had nearly thrown him out of the hammock and Kale put his feet on the ground to stabilize himself. There was a dim glow in the room. It had been barely noticeable before, but it seemed to be growing in intensity. Despite that, it seemed to be confined to his little corner.
He got out of the hammock carefully, so as not to make too much noise. His three crew-mates were still deeply asleep. The light seemed to glow towards the door. He removed his sweat soaked shirt and put another rough shirt on. It was something his hosts had left for them. It was like leather, strong and smooth, but surprisingly soft and supple. It was brown in color, like nearly everything on the ship, and came down past his thighs, similar to a tunic. He slipped on his boots and was about to get his ear bud when he decided against it. Sentinel had remained a secret so far, and who knows what kind of technology they might have that could spy on him.
As he walked up to the doorway, it appeared to vanish as it opened. It did not make a sound. Kale took one last look back out to his crew-mates, then stepped out into the hallway. He looked both ways. He wasn’t quite sure, but he turned right from his room and began walking. As far as he knew, they were prisoners and his just being out there walking was enough to get him killed. He just had to rely on their initial friendly disposition. As he walked down the hallway, the dim glow of light seemed to follow him. The ship was eerily silent. He had been on some military ships before, ships that had been designed for efficiency. Many of those ships prided themselves on being run silently, but even on those, there was always the sound of machinery, somewhere. Here, though, there was next to nothing, certainly nothing that seemed artificial. Instead, Kale reminded himself, it felt as if he was walking through a forest at night. About all he could hear was the sound of air moving by. He touched the sides of the hallways. He was expecting something rough and cold, but instead it felt leathery and definitely warm. It had all the appearances of bark on a tree, but its touch was clearly soft. He pushed in with his hand and when he pulled away, the mark of his hand remained visible for a few seconds.
He continued walking for ten or so minutes. He came across multiple rooms, all with the same kind of door as his had been, but none opened as he walked past. He did come across a larger room with a far larger door, and when he peered inside, he saw three men and a woman. They were all dressed in normal clothing and certainly looked far more human than they had before in their wooden leather armor. When he stepped into the room, almost inadvertently, the younger of the men stood up instantly and said something to him. Kale didn’t understand him.
An older man, with graying hair, sitting next to him, reached up and put his hand on the younger man’s arm and said something to him. The younger man gave Kale a stern look, but then sat back down. The older man motioned Kale over. He hesitated for a moment, but walked over to them. The older man showed him to a chair at the round table they were sitting at.
They had cups and plates on the table. The plates were empty, but had the remains of whatever it was they had eaten. The older man took one of the cups and filled it with a dark liquid from a pitcher in the middle of the table. He held it out to Kale and said what sounded like ‘okte’. Kale took the cup and looked into it. Satisfying himself that he saw nothing swimming in it, he took a drink. The liquid had a hint of citrus flavor, but just barely. It was cold and quite refreshing. He wondered if it would have any other effect on his body than just refreshing it. It then dawned on him that drinking might have been a bad idea considering the ship was a host to some biological agent that had nearly killed them.
Kale sat down and drank the rest.
He returned the cup to the older man and said thank you. The man smiled back, maybe not understanding the words, but perhaps the meaning behind the words. The third man and the woman were seated close to each other, and were holding hands. Kale was continually surprised by the ship. They had been captured by soldiers on a ship that had attacked and destroyed another ship, and yet within it there was a different atmosphere once the armor came off. He half expected kids to come out of the rooms and start playing.
He couldn’t communicate with them, so he sat there and listened to their strange language. The younger man still had a scowl, but the older man and the couple continued talking, at times nodding towards Kale. He continued mostly to stare into his cup and listen to the foreign nature of the language when he caught a glance from the woman out of the corner of his eye. She was pointing towards the exit. Kale looked up and saw that the glow of light he had followed was back at the hallway. He had stopped following it when he came into the room. He hadn’t remembered it when he came into the room, but there it was. It was still impossible to pinpoint where it was coming from in the walls, but it was. The woman said ‘ontedsu’ and kept pointing at the doorway or the light. The old man nodded and the younger angrier man tried shooing him away. Kale figured he had worn his welcome and got up. He set the cup down, thanked them in his own Anglian, and walked out.
When he reached the door, he turned one more time, and found the four had returned back to whatever discussion he had interrupted. The room was still dimly lit, and he felt he was going to wake up at any moment. The hallway got dark and he began walking down the hallway again to chase the light. He continued walking, only coming across another man who came walking in the opposite direction. He was also dressed plainly. He either didn’t seem to care this completely foreign man was walking down the hallways of his ship unescorted, or, Kale was in fact being escorted, by the light.
The light came to a stop outside a large circular doorway. A very thin film covered the door, similar in nature to the doorways to their rooms. In this case, the door was either much thinner, or the light inside was much brighter. He reached out and touched the door, expecting it to open, but it didn’t. The light he had followed vanished and he was left outside of the room. When he touched the door, he could feel his hand stretch through. The light inside of the room dimmed suddenly, and Kale was left standing in the dark.
It took a moment for his eyes to adjust, but then he noticed the light he had been following. The door had opened silently; he hadn’t noticed that with the lights growing dark. He stepped forward into the room and nearly fell down. The room was a sphere and it lowered down as he entered the room. He stumbled forward, catching himself and focusing on the small ball of light down at the bottom of the sphere. It was nearly seventy feet away, and he could tell that someone was sitting under the light. He walked slowly towards the light and began to make out the form of Ulisike, sitting there in the middle. As he approached her, he noticed her sitting with her knees folded under her. It was only when he got within ten feet of her, did he realize that the dress she was wearing was surprisingly thin. He instantly saw the shape of her body, and was then completely convinced that she, and the whole crew of this alien ship, were human. He quickly turned away.
Ever since he had managed to escape from Urt and the slavery machine of the Dominion, Kale had kept himself away from any kind of romantic encounters with women. He had worked with many and certainly had business dealings with women all the time, but he tried his hardest to keep that strictly business. Having Ayia on board his ship the past four years had been difficult. He had routinely told himself that she was too young for him. That and the darkness that crept up on him from time to time helped him keep things normal. It never helped that Ayia had hinted that it could be different.
The Lost Tribe (Sentinel Series Book 2) Page 17