The Kursas

by George Willson

  She looked at the spinning grid and saw she had to step in one more row. As she did, the next square lit up, and the electricity stopped coursing through it. Forward one more row, then to the left three, back one left two more to meet with her key square, She continued cautiously following the path through the red electricity until she finally reached the door. Upon doing so, the entire grid shut off, except for the first square.

  It seemed too easy. Michelle had never been adept at these sorts of puzzles, but she was proud of how she handled this one. She was concerned about what might be to come, however. She had no doubt that Blake would be trying to find his way to her, but how long would that take? And for that matter, would he even be able to get her out without her needing to solve this thing for herself.

  She stepped through the doorway which led into a long, wide room that lit up immediately. It looked a lot like a ballroom, but with a ceiling that was only about fifteen feet high. Like any large hall, there were support columns throughout and a few chairs here and there along the outer walls. She was not interested in any more chairs, but this room looked too easy.

  She took a few more steps into the chamber, and the door to the room behind her slid shut. She whipped around briefly to acknowledge this before turning back to the room before her. The floor was covered in flat, white tiles from one end to the other with no ornamentation or decoration.

  Suddenly, lights flashed from the ceiling highlighting various tiles across the floor. Michelle froze and watched helplessly, wondering what this could mean. The lights finally settled on a handful of tiles across the entire floor. She was not sure whether she was supposed to step on these tiles or avoid them. Each tile was at least eighteen inches square, so there was plenty of space for her to stand on individual ones, and easily avoid the illuminated ones.

  She stepped forward to the next tile on the floor in front of her. Nothing happened with the tiles, but the lights changed position, pointing at different tiles. She stepped forward again, and the lights once more changed. She figured there was likely a pattern to this, but she knew she would not be able to work it out before her next step.

  She stepped forward once more, and the lights changed to where one was highlighting her new position. The columns fell like trees crossing the chamber floor with their ends landing on specific tiles that opened like trap doors in the floor. Then the entire floor split down the center and dropped on hinges set into the outer edges. Michelle quickly moved to the nearest column and jumped on. In seconds, the entire floor had opened to reveal a dark chasm underneath. The columns formed a path through the room, but as before, she thought this might be too easy.

  The columns were round, so rather than risk balancing on them, she sat on her column and shimmied her way through the room to the next one. The columns were supported on a solid bit of floor which lay between them and controlled their mechanisms. As she looked into the pit below, she verified that the tiles connected into multiple sections that could raise back up, and beyond this were some unusual tracks in the rock walls.

  She climbed onto the second column and shimmied about half-way across before it sounded like some kind of lock snapped and the column freely rotated on its axis, spinning her upside down as she clung desperately to it. She knew she had to get to the next step, but with the column loosely hanging her over the chasm, it would prove to be difficult. She feared she would not be strong enough to endure it.

  A buzzer sounded in the room, and she wondered what it was going to do to her next. It buzzed steadily about once per second like a countdown, perhaps. Each buzz filled her with dread, and she was not sure how many sounded before they stopped. All she could do was blindly cling to the column.

  As soon as the buzzing stopped, the columns raised to their original upright positions and the floor raised as well. Unable to cling to the now vertical column, Michelle slid down it and landed on the ground. The lights from above flashed across the floor once more until they settled on their new tiles.

  Michelle sat for a moment where she had landed, grateful to have survived it, but not eager to relive it. The room did not appear to be rushing her with any kind of threat, so she took her time before deciding to try her luck again. Through the last part, she had managed to get about a third of the way through the room, but that meant there was a lot of ground yet to cover.

  She wondered what would happen if she just made a run for it. Four colors of lights shone from the ceiling, and she was afraid that the different colors would break into corresponding traps. The last trap took a few seconds to actually activate, and if she were to start running, she could use those few seconds to get even further, maybe even all the way out.

  She took a deep breath and sprinted across the room. She immediately broke the next light, but she kept running while paying attention to the effect. The entire room shuddered, and she almost lost her footing.

  She tried to keep running, but she realized the room was rotating. The exit remained right where it was, and the room turned like the axis was between the two doors. She lost her footing entirely and slid down the floor to land against one of the chairs that set beneath a wall whose panels opened into the chasm when the room was on its side.

  She noticed the chairs were fixed to the floor and did not move, so she felt they would remain secure as the chamber continued around. She could not simply keep running along the walls of the hall as it moved since the open paneling went from one end to the other.

  She held onto the framework of the chair, and the room proceeded to rotate fully upside down. The panels on the ceiling also opened to the chasm below as the wall panels closed. Michelle hung desperately from the chair as the room continued rotating to where the other wall was at the lowest position, and its panels opened.

  Her arms hurt as she clung to her salvation and waited for the room to complete its rotation. She prayed it would stop once it returned to level, and her prayers were answered. Once the chamber was level again, the rotation ceased, and Michelle had passed that challenge as well. The light show started again behind her in the strange ballroom, and she remained leaning against the chair that had saved her life.

  She looked at the row of seats and noticed that not only were none of them lit by any of the lights, but none of them rested on the tiles either. She moved to a sitting position and looked at the other side of the room. As with her side, the chairs appeared to be out of the active area of the floor, and she thought they might actually be the secret to getting past this room intact. It was one of those “so obvious you would miss it” sort of solutions where one would be so focused on working out the lights that they would completely miss the path on either side.

  She tucked her feet up under her off of the tile floor in front of the chair. As if afraid to alert the room to her discovery, she walked slowly on top of the seats to the end of the chamber. She checked the floor along the exit side of the room, and no lights were touching it. She jumped down from the chairs and walked toward the exit. She figured this all could have been worse, and she hoped whatever lay ahead would be just as passable for her.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Perry had gone over the cell several times since the Kursas had returned him to it, but due to the nature of the cell’s construction and its reliance on the malleable metal to give it its form, he found escape impossible. It also did not help that he was distracted by Halera’s near-dead condition when last he saw her. The Kursas leader had said that healing her would be a simple task, but when they took her away, she was a mess. What would be left of her when, or if, he ever saw her again?

  He finally sat down on the floor of the cell to see what would happen next. He could only hope that an opportunity would present itself as it often did. It was actually fairly strange how often the most hopeless of situations had been salvaged by the unlikeliest of events, usually outside of his control. Having determined that there was nothing he could do from inside the cell to allow him to escape, he was left to wait for one of these events t
o give him the hope he needed.

  With nothing to do in the cell, time passed slowly. Perry never slept, but time blurred itself together before he heard the sound of someone entering the cell block. A Kursas carried Halera followed closely by two others who were armed and apparently not afraid to shoot him should he try anything. One of them growled something at him in that indecipherable language, and based on the body language, he guessed it was to stay away from the bars. He backed himself against the wall, and the device on the head of the speaker lit up.

  The bars melted into the floor and ceiling, and the one carrying Halera knelt down and roughly rolled her into the cell area. He had barely stood back up before the bars were back in place. Perry jumped to Halera’s side. He gently touched her, and she slowly sat up and brushed her hair from her face.

  Her clothing was unchanged from earlier, so it was stained with blood, and the holes were still present. Her wounds beneath the holes in her clothing, however, had been fully healed without so much as a scar. Her breath was regular, and besides the state of her clothing, no one would believe anything had ever happened to her.

  “Are you all right?” Perry asked.

  Halera shrugged. “You didn’t tell them anything, did you?”

  “Nothing they could use, I guess,” Perry said. “What do you remember?”

  Halera’s body shook, and Perry realized she was crying. She looked up at him, and her eyes held an air of deep despair. “Everything,” she said. “All of it. Every moment. I never passed out. Something they did kept me conscious the whole time. I felt everything they did to me. When they released us, I was too weak to catch myself, and when I hit the floor, something broke. I have no idea what, but it hurt so bad. Of course, by then, everything hurt. So much pain.”

  “Where did they take you?” Perry asked.

  “They didn’t even carry me,” Halera said. “Two of them grabbed my arms and dragged me along the floor until we reached their medical area if you want to call it that. They just left me there. I couldn’t move because nothing worked at that point. I thought I was dying, but something wasn’t letting me do it. I finally turned my head to see what the room looked like, and it seemed like nothing more than a big empty room with a bright ceiling. There was a sort of pulsating hum that never stopped. Eventually, someone came in, and a table rose from the floor, formed itself around my body to force me to straighten out, and then flattened itself.

  “One of the Kursas pulled some kind of device directly over me that flashed me with blue light. He mumbled something, took hold of my arm, which I noticed had stopped hurting by that point, and right before he did it, I figured out what was going on.

  “When I had fallen, my arm had broken, and since that room is some kind of healing chamber, it had started to heal. Well, I guess it healed wrong, so he broke my arm again to reset it. I’m surprised you didn’t hear me scream. I still couldn’t really move at that point anyway, so other than my complaint, they had no trouble from me.

  “I suspect that was all they needed to physically do to me for the healing process. That Kursas decided to push me off the table to the floor before he just lowered the table. I watched him leave the room, but…”

  Halera glanced to the door and around the prison area. She lowered her voice considerably. “When he had gone, I saw what he did with the headset.” She reached into her trousers and pulled out what always appeared to be the important side of the headset. She held it close to her just barely far enough out for him to see. “I knew I couldn’t take the whole thing so I broke this piece off and hoped it would help us.”

  “We still don’t know how it works,” Perry said.

  “At this point, I’m ready to try anything,” Halera said. “I can’t do that again.”

  “What did you do with the rest of it?” Perry asked.

  “Right after he left the room, and I saw the headset, I could feel strength returning to me,” she explained. “Not much, but I wanted it to be enough. I knew I could rest later, and this would be my only chance. Since they wanted me alive, I didn’t even care if I got caught. I tried jumping to my feet, but I wasn’t done healing yet, so everything hurt, and the wounds in my shoulders started bleeding again. I didn’t care. I willed myself to my feet, stumbled to the headset and grabbed it. I crawled back to where they’d left me and thought about what to do with it. I knew I had nowhere to put it, but looking at it, I figured this one side was what controlled the metal, and everything else was just support. I used every bit of strength I had in me to break the rounded headpiece off, and I tossed it as hard as I could into a corner of the room. Then I put it down my trousers. It was the only place that I could be sure would hold it in place.”

  “It was good thinking,” Perry said, “so we need to figure it out and get moving before they find the leftover piece.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Halera said.

  “Are you ok to move?” Perry said.

  “More than ready,” she replied. Slowly and a bit unsteadily, she climbed to her feet. Once centered, she took a deep breath and pressed the headset piece against her temple. She muttered “Open, open, open” quietly to herself, but nothing happened.

  “If it works on language, we’re sunk,” Perry commented. “Neither of us speak Kursas. I was hoping it might be visualization.”

  “Picture it the way I want it to be?” Halera asked.

  “Something like that,” Perry replied.

  “I tried that before,” Halera said. “Nothing happened.”

  “Well, that was before you got caught and tortured,” Perry said. “You have an intensity you didn’t have before, and maybe you really have to see the results in your head to the point that you just know it’ll happen. You know, don’t ask it politely. Assume it already happened, and you’re just impatiently waiting to see it, and ready to condemn it for not following orders.”

  Halera chuckled. “I didn’t expect to smile so soon,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “Celebrate later,” Perry said. “Try to open the bars.”

  Halera closed her eyes, and for nearly a minute, nothing happened. Perry was about to give up hope when she opened her eyes, and the bars melted into ceiling and floor just as it had done for the Kursas. She smiled and laughed in surprise and exultation.

  “I did it!” she said. “I actually did it!”

  “Let’s see how far it gets us,” Perry said as they walked to the door of the cell block. There was no window in the door, and it did not open on its own at his approach. “If there is someone out there, they will see the door move if we try to look out. Do you remember anything from when they brought you back here?”

  “I was grateful they carried me that time,” Halera said. “I tried to keep an eye on my surroundings as we went along, but I cannot guarantee that there will be no one out there. I didn’t get much of a look.”

  “I wonder if that thing can open any other ways out of this room,” Perry pondered. “I mean, the ship is made largely of this metal stuff, so maybe the form of the entire vessel is alterable. Obviously, there are doors, so the whole place isn’t made of it, but we might get lucky.”

  “What about the outside?” Halera asked.

  “I would hesitate to break the outer skin of the ship,” Perry cautioned. “I don’t know how they work here, but a lot of ships, fictional and otherwise, have alarms for hull breaches. Theirs might be different because of how it is constructed, but I would still think an alert of some kind would sound if we tried to open a hole in the side of the ship.”

  “So we’re back to looking for another airlock?” Halera asked.

  “I don’t know,” Perry said. “Is there any way to know using that headpiece which parts of the ship are made of this malleable metal?”

  “It might have been part of that eye shield they have sometimes,” Halera suggested, “but I broke that off to steal it.”

  “I guess we’ll just have to risk it then,” Perry said. “I’m going to look out the door ver
y slowly. Maybe we can use that thing to hide in here if he comes looking. Maybe we could lock ourselves back in and confuse him. It might work once.”

  Halera nodded and stepped back against the wall where the cell was. Perry walked to the cell block door and cracked it open to look outside. A Kursas stood just outside the door and snapped at the movement. Perry ran back to stand by Halera just as the Kursas swung the door open and pointed his weapon at them. He barked something in the Kursas language.

  Halera closed her eyes as Perry stood by her. They were trapped, and there was nothing they could do. The Kursas repeated whatever he had just said and took a step closer. He held out his hand and gestured to them. Perry guessed he was asking to give up the device.

  Halera opened her eyes with a look of cold determination. Suddenly, the bars from the floor shot up and impaled the Kursas. He jerked involuntarily as the first bar held him above the ground.

  “Halera, what are you doing?” Perry asked, horrified.

  “Taking care of this,” she said flatly. Three more of the bars emerged from the floor and ceiling, turned themselves into spikes and passed into the dying Kursas. He stopped moving as his blood ran down the deadly bars.

  “You could have just trapped him,” Perry said.

  “I will not be captured again,” she said. “They are not going to torture anyone again.”

  “We need to get out of here,” Perry said.

  “We need to free my people,” she retorted. “They’ve been held here against their will and tortured just as I have. Some of the have been killed. And for what? Some piece of junk that no one can find? They all deserve to die for this.”

  “I have a friend who would say that the only person who should give out death is the one who could also give out life,” Perry said. “It is easy to end a life, but much harder to give it back. This Kursas was here on the orders of another, but we cannot know what brought him here. We don’t know his motivations or history. Would he have killed us? I don’t know. What I do know is that what you have done here cannot be undone. Their leader said their technology can heal a lot of things, but I doubt it can restore life if enough damage has been done.”