Outlander 05 - Parallax Red

by James Axler

  The troll pointed down and said, "D." At least D was the letter formed by his lips.

  Kane pushed the button, the doors slid shut and, with the barest of lurches, the elevator began its descent. He announced, "Next stop, Trollville."

  Grant scowled at him. "It better not be."

  The elevator eased to a slow stop. Kane fisted his Sin Eater, whispering, "Triple red."

  The doors slid open on a very deep dark. They gazed at utter stillness. Kane heard Brigid's and Grant's tense respiration. Nothing moved in the gloom, but out of the comer of his eye, he glimpsed the troll casually squatting down and lowering his head.

  Out of nowhere, out of the darkness, a harp began to sing, notes rippling in tuneless melody. Kane's memory jerked back to Ireland, to Newgrange and the deadly harp played by Aifa.

  With his head encased in the helmet, he should not have been able to hear much of anything external, let alone a sound as subtle as a harp's.

  "I hear music," Brigid blurted in dismay.

  Kane whirled toward her, feeling a trip-hammer vibration shivering up and down his body. The harp sang louder, throbbing through his bones. He felt it sweep over him in a wave.

  The troll's face was screwed up tight, eyes closed, but he was receiving only a feeble backwash of the harping. Grant cursed thickly, like a man drifting off to unwelcome sleep or fighting the effects of a somatic drug.

  Kane swung his Sin Eater toward the troll, crouching in a corner like a gargoyle. His finger crooked around the trigger. Then he fell on his face and lay there, struggling to move but only twitching. He was dimly aware of Brigid sagging to the floor, her knees buckling, collapsing half on top of him.

  The harp trilled louder, achieving a jumbled cacophony of notes. Their vibrating echoes trailed off into a silence as deep and impenetrable as death.

  Chapter15

  Brigid remembered nothing that had happened since the harp song insinuated itself into her brain, overwhelming her senses. She fought very hard to ward off the clutching fingers of unconsciousness.

  She was still fighting when she found herself waking up prone on a flat surface. The air was thin and bitingly cold on her exposed cheeks. She realized with a start that she no longer wore her helmet.

  Snapping her eyes open, Brigid saw blank walls of blue surrounding her. She struggled up to her elbows on the raised disk beneath her body. It was of an opaque, plasticlike substance about four feet in diameter. From beneath it, she heard the faintest susurrus of electronic hums.

  She slowly pushed herself to a sitting position, squinting around at her surroundings. The blue room had eight walls, enclosing her and the disk in a featureless octagon. She was alone, but she didn't pay attention to the sense of dread the thoughts of Kane and Grant evoked. Without much surprise, she saw her blaster, web belt and equipment case were missing.

  Breath rasping in her throat, Brigid climbed to her feet, her lips feeling dry and chapped. She noticed she felt heavier than she had upon arriving at the station. Wherever she was, the gravity was close to that on Earth. She moved to the edge of the disk and looked down. It was elevated a foot above the floor, and she made a motion to step down.

  A sudden flash of blue lightning filled her eyes, and for an instant, she glimpsed skeins of electrical current dancing along the metal zippers of her sleeves. She whirled around and slammed back on the disk. She felt no pain, no sensation of shock, only an invisible hand swatting her away from the disk's edge.

  She lay for a moment on her side, dragging air into her lungs. She tried to curse, but couldn't find the breath for it.

  "Our visitor appears conscious," said a man's voice.

  Brigid heard the words in a monotone, with faint fuzzy crackles of static following each s . She sat up again, but this time stayed put, hands on her knees. She guessed that some sort of electromagnetic screen surrounded the disk.

  "Identify yourself," the voice demanded. Though it had an electronic timbre, the voice was well modulated, with a sonorous tenor quality.

  "Where am I?" Brigid asked. "Am I on the station? Where are my friends?"

  "You will answer my inquiries first. What is your name?"

  Seeing no reason to lie, she said, "Baptiste."

  "Baptiste, that's it? No other name?"

  "Brigid. Satisfied?"

  "By no means. You arrived here via the gateway. From where?"

  Repressing a smile, Brigid replied, "Where else? Earth."

  The unseen transmitter offered a deep sigh, heavy with annoyance. "Where else indeed. From where on Earth? I was not able to trace the matter-stream carrier wave to its point of origin. Was it a failure on the part of my instruments or a deliberate deception?"

  "Your choice."

  There was a long pause in the questioning. Presently the voice stated, "I've just been informed that your companions have revived. They are unharmed, but a bit uncomfortable. What is the nature of your visit here?"

  "A recce," she answered.

  "Recce?" The word was repeated, the pronunciation uncertain. "Explain."

  "It's slang, derived from reconnaissance.'"

  "Oh." A chuckle floated into the room. "Local vernacular. Lingo. Patois. I'm hip."

  "What?"

  "Pardon my ignorance, Miss Brigid. I we have been separated from the mainstream of common humanity for a very long time. We hope to change that."

  Getting to her feet again, but maintaining a discreet distance from the edge of the disk, Brigid winced as her lungs burned with the effort of breathing. A slow throb began pounding in her temples.

  The voice instantly became solicitous. "I apologize for your discomfort, but we only recently restored marginal power to this section of the station. We're still working out the bugs in the environmental systems. They've been neglected for many years."

  It took a moment for the statement to penetrate Bri-gid's oxygen-deprived reasoning centers. "You only recently restored the power? You mean you don't live here?"

  "A small group of us does at present. This is not our home, only a way stop, a staging area."

  Brigid gazed around the room, trying to locate the comm unit from which the voice emanated. "A staging area for what?"

  The reply was so long in coming, Brigid almost repeated the question. Then the voice spoke a single word, the tone of it touched with a bitter resolve. "Exodus."

  Brigid started to respond, but her throat muscles constricted. She coughed, shoulders shaking, diaphragm contracting. Her chest ached fiercely.

  Through amoebalike floaters swimming over her eyes, she saw a dark line form a rectangle in the facing blue wall. The line expanded and became a door. The figure that walked through it was so startling, Brigid feared her air-starved brain was supplying hallucinations.

  He was small but so perfectly proportioned her sense of perspective was confused for a moment. He was a three-foot-tall godling of a man. Unlike the trolls, his legs weren't stumpy or his arms too long or his forehead too low.

  If he had been three feet taller, a hundred or more pounds heavier, he would have been the most beautiful male Brigid had ever seen. Thick, dark blond hair was swept back from a high forehead and tied in a ponytail at the nape of his neck. Under level brows, big eyes of the clearest, cleanest blue, like the high sky on a cloudless summer's day, regarded her sympathetically. Beneath his finely chiseled nose, a wide, beautifully shaped mouth stretched in an engaging grin, displaying white, even teeth.

  He wore a perfectly tailored, fawn-colored bodysuit. A silk foulard of blue swirled at its open collar. A gold stickpin gleamed within its folds. The cuffs of the legs had stirrups that slipped between the arch and heel of polished, black patent leather boots. In his right hand, he carried a miniature black walking stick, with a hammered silver knob and ferrule.

  He should have looked ridiculous but he didn't, and Brigid wasn't sure why. Perhaps the confidence, the self-assurance he exuded as he walked across the room had something to do with it. Her eyes fixed on the small metal cy
linder in his left hand, with the transparent respiration mask attached to it.

  The man stopped at the outside rim of the disk and made a short stamping motion with one foot. Brigid heard a click, then an immediate cessation of the electronic hum beneath her.

  The little man handed her up the cylinder and mask. "Put that over your nose and mouth, turn the valve and breathe normally."

  She did as he instructed, inhaling the cool stream of oxygen into her straining lungs. Within moments, the fiery pressure in her chest abated and the pounding in her temples ebbed away.

  The little man watched her curiously, a friendly smile playing over his lips. Brigid considered using the air tank as a club, but decided that such an action could not only bring about unpleasant repercussions, but it would also be exceptionally bad manners. She noticed his foot hadn't strayed far from the control he had manipulated to turn off the disk's electromagnetic screen. Presumably he could reactivate it quickly if he thought the circumstances warranted it.

  Brigid removed the mask long enough to say, "Thank you."

  The little man nodded. "My pleasure. I'll keep the sterilizing field down if you promise to govern yourself as a guest, not as an invader."

  "I promise. Sterilizing field, you say?"

  "Originally this device was designed to sterilize nonterrestrial materials, kill possible alien bacteria and microbes, that sort of thing. I simply altered the voltage capacitors and voila, I had a small holding cell, with no bars or doors."

  She smiled wryly. "Am I your first prisoner?"

  He shook his head, returning her smile. "Lamentably no. I've had to place a few of my own people in it when they became..." His eyebrows knit as he searched for an appropriate word. "Overeager is the best way I can describe it."

  Brigid took another deep breath, removed the mask and asked, "Who are you? Who are your people?"

  The man pressed a narrow, long-fingered hand over his heart and bowed slightly. "My apologies for my breach in manners. I should have introduced myself at once. The name I have taken is Sindri."

  "Sindri?"

  The little man lifted his cane and rapidly traced letters in the air, as if he were writing them on an invisible chalkboard. "S-I-N-D-R-I. It's spelled the way it's pronounced. Does it mean something to you?"

  Brigid flipped through the index file of her eidetic memory. "Only in the classical sense. In Norse mythology, Sindri was the weapon smith of the gods, corresponding roughly to Hephaestus in the Greek pantheon. Sindri fashioned Odin's armring, Frey's golden boar and Thor's hammer, Mjolnir. He was a"

  She bit off the final word, not wanting to utter it.

  Sindri smiled mildly. "A troll, Miss Brigid. My namesake was a troll, but an extraordinarily gifted one. As am I."

  He extended his left hand toward her. Tentatively she took it and stepped down off the disk. The crown of his head barely topped her hip.

  "As for my people," he said, "I suppose they meet, perhaps even exceed the standard definition of trolls."

  Brigid did not respond, pretending to inhale deeply in the respiration mask.

  "However," he continued, "it would be far more accurate to call them Martians."

  Grant and Kane awoke more or less simultaneously and both felt like they were falling, plummeting a hundred feet, a thousand feet, ten thousand, a mile

  They kicked and flailed frantically, tumbling through the darkness. Their stomachs lurched; their heads swam. Kane opened his mouth to cry out, but he realized he felt no rush of wind buffeting his speeding body. The air was calm, but very cold. His sinus membranes felt dried out, and the tender tissues of his throat burned. His chest and head ached.

  Grant coughed and muttered something. Kane's eyes adjusted to the dim, vinegar-colored light. He stiffened, went rigid with shock.

  He and Grant were suspended, floating in the gloom, the lack of gravity providing the illusion of falling when they returned to consciousness. They bobbed gently in an ovular cell with no apparent door or windows. Kane felt as much as heard a steady whine, so high in pitch it was nearly beyond his range of hearing.

  Grant's cough turned into a strangulated spasm, and he floated over Kane's head, knees bent double and drawn up to his midriff. Kane reached out, caught an ankle and drew him close. He held him until Grant got his coughing under control.

  They still wore their environmental suits, and judg-ing by how cold the air felt on his face, Kane figured he and Grant would have succumbed to hypothermia without them. He didn't see their helmets, blasters, web belts or Brigid anywhere. He felt a flash of fear, but he tried to ignore it.

  Both of them snapped at air, desperately trying to drag the thin oxygen into their lungs.

  Kane forced himself to speak, though his words issued from his lips in a wheeze. "Where do you figure we are?"

  "Lakesh said the central axis might have no gravity at all," Grant managed to half gasp. "I figure that's where we've been stuck."

  Kane closed his eyes. He felt thirsty and sleepy. "Why didn't they chill us?"

  Grant shrugged, and the motion sent him drifting toward the ceiling or the floor. Neither one of them had any idea which was which, no sense of up or down. "What did they use on us? I heard something like harp music."

  Kane remembered the op to Ireland and how he had fled the agony-inducing music strummed by Aifa. Bap-tiste had theorized that the instrument utilized sound waves in certain frequencies and harmonies that could have deleterious or benign effects on matter. Still, it made no sense that monkey-pawed trolls were mincing around the enormous space station playing the same kind of deadly harps.

  Grant braced his hands against a curving wall, truculently knitting his brow. "Don't feel like talking?"

  "Not much, I don't."

  Grant inhaled harshly. "If there's a way out of this place, we've got to find it and soon. For all we know, we're in Parallax Red's trash hatch, left here to die or to be jettisoned into space."

  It wasn't a comforting possibility. Kane stretched out his arms and legs. He floated at the midway point in the chamber, where the curvature of the walls was the deepest. Peering around the darkness, he felt ineffectual, indecisive.

  "I don't think that's the plan," he said at length. "I think they put us in storage to give them time to figure out what to do with us."

  Without warning, the ovular room seemed to split open in sections. Bright light dazzled their eyes, and they glimpsed a tumble of shapes, silhouetted black against the white. The cell seemed suddenly filled with a foul smell.

  Kane pressed his back against the wall, squinting against the sudden glare. The light actually wasn't all that bright, and his eyes swiftly adjusted to it. Seven trolls floated around them, six men and one woman. Like the males, the female was a squat creature with pushed-in, bulldog features. She wore a threadbare olive smock that left most of her stumpy, thickly thewed legs bare.

  Gripped between her unshod feet was an object that resembled a lopsided wedge made of a glassy, iridescent gold. The leading edge was strangely elongated, like the neck of a glass bottle that had been heated and stretched out.

  Kane looked at it closely, noting how the device vaguely resembled a small harp, but with a set of double-banked strings. The opposable toes of the woman hovered menacingly over them.

  Two of the men grasped a length of heavy rope in their feet, tie bars knotted to it at regular intervals. The

  I

  rope dangled upward into a star-shaped aperture. The troll Brigid had christened "Frog-boy" paddled close to Kane. He scowled ferociously and pointed at the rope. "Climb."

  His voice was a squeak, like that of a small child or an adult who had been sucking on a helium-filled balloon. Despite the situation, Grant and Kane couldn't help but exchange smirks.

  The woman's foot-thumb stroked the harp strings. Something rippled out of the bottleneck, a force that shocked both of them. For a sliver of an instant, both had the impression of being stung by a hundred waspsnot the tiny, predark variety, but t
he big, black mutie brutes with six-inch wingspans. The flaming agony seemed to erupt from the nerve roots outward.

  The pain vanished immediately, before either one of them could draw enough breath to gasp.

  Frog-boy said again, "Climb."

  Neither Kane nor Grant smirked this time. The demonstration of the harp's capabilities proved that a rebellious attitude would earn only agony, if not death. Other than the devices, the two men weren't accustomed to zero gravity and they feared the rarefied air would cause them to faint if they expended much energy in a struggle.

  Kane grasped a tie bar and began to climb, though he felt more like a worm wriggling up a string. A troll preceded him, and two placed themselves behind him, between him and Grant. The other three men followed Grant, the female bobbing alongside them, swimming easily through the null gravity.

  The rope extended through the opening and into a completely round chamber, featureless except for white-glowing light tubes bracketed to the walls.

  Kane's headache worsened once he climbed out of the ovular cell, and he clung to a tie bar, wheezing and panting, his legs drifting upward. Frog-boy floated past him, his foot slapping him lazily across the cheek.

  "Let's go," he piped. "Keep it up."

  Relaxing his grip, Kane rose upward. In the domed ceiling, Frog-boy clung to a wheel lock by his feet, turning it expertly. His coarse black hair puffed around his head like clot of rancid seaweed stirred by ocean currents.

  Grant bobbed up beside Kane, jostling him with a shoulder, sending him into a slow somersault. Kane started to swear, realized he didn't have the breath to waste and tried to straighten himself out. A pair of trolls grabbed him by the shoulders, turned him upright and gently pushed him back toward the hatch.

  Frog-boy opened it and kicked himself through the opening. Kane followed a moment later, finding himself staring at the stinking, dirty, callused soles of Frog-boy's feet. They were anchored on a staple-shaped rung bolted to the inside of a long, straight tube, barely wide enough to admit Kane's shoulders. Looking up the shaft past the troll, he was reminded of an unbelievably long blaster barrel.