A rumbling roar surged from the fleet and shook the ground. The ships glowed and then hurtled upward, blotting out the light from the moons and casting a broad shadow over Archalon.
Nova staggered forward. "No." But she was too late. Even if she found a way to defeat them, she'd never catch up to the ships.
The armada hurtled forward and gale-force blasted out behind them. It slammed into Nova and threw her backward. She landed with a hard bump.
Back inside her sandstone prison.
"What!"
Tobius' body lay beside her, surrounded by spatters of blood. The stone door blocked the way into the tunnel beyond.
Nova had followed the yellow-eyed Ancient back up into the world. Why was she back here? How!?
She scrambled over to her pistol and with shaking hands dropped it back into her holster.
Rage burned inside. She hated whoever kept laughing. She hated the voices, just at the edge of her hearing and the sights and smells she couldn't quite perceive. She hated feeling of a thousand eyes on the back of her head and that her mind was on the very edge of madness.
Most of all, she hated the damned room.
She stomped over to the door. It felt as if a vat of acid had been poured into her veins and coursed through her. Her chest tightened, burning with fury.
She reached the door, raised her fist above her head and swung it down with all her might. She would break through this door, chipping away individual specs of sand if she had to.
Her fist reached the door, and then disappeared.
She stared at the piece of empty space, her mouth gaping.
The anger drained from her body and a cold spear of icy dread went through her heart and dropped to her stomach. Her wrist ended in shimmering nothing where her hand should have been.
Her throat closed over. What the hell was happening?
She flicked her fingers back and forth, even though she couldn't see them, she could still feel them, and feel air brush past them.
She swallowed the lump in her throat and tried to think rationally. Perhaps she had slipped into the abyss of madness; it was the only way to explain what she was seeing. Tears welled at the corners of her eyes.
She imagined throwing a grappling hook and catching the very last shreds of her sanity.
She did the only logical thing; she stepped backwards.
Her hand reappeared as if she'd withdrawn it from behind a curtain. Her palm, followed by her fingers, came into view. Only it didn't look like her hand, it was dark, covered in a fine powder.
She brought her hand to her face and stared at it. Soot. She frowned and rubbed her hand on her torn jeans. The soot left streaks across her pants but her hand looked normal enough underneath.
She stared at the appendage as if it could disappear at any moment. For all she knew, it could.
She shook her head. Despite everything she'd seen, there had to be a logical explanation.
She strode to the door and swiped her left hand through the air. Nothing happened. She tried with her right hand, nothing happened.
She sighed and stomped to the far corner where she slumped down and looked between the door and her hand.
She had only one explanation; she'd been subjected to the time vortex and in response she'd gone mad. It made sense. What sort of person could see all of time and space flying by them and not go mad? It was the only natural response. So here she was, trapped in a tiny room of her memory.
"But if I were mad," Nova said to herself. "Wouldn't I know it?"
"No. That's the whole point," she replied.
She shivered. Usually she prided herself on being a rock, completely unshakable.
The Ancients had shaken her.
She closed her eyes and leaned against the wall. If she was going to survive her madness, she would need sleep, and a lot of it. She let her mind drift, floating from one daydream to another but found it difficult to relax when she was sure that her mind was lost.
She thought about everything she'd seen while in the time vortex. Entire galaxies had flown past. She could have been there forever, watching every bit of reality happening at once. But if she'd done that, she would have gone mad.
"You're already mad," she said to herself and giggled.
A noise thumped through the stone prison.
There was someone at the door.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Nova whimpered in the darkness and rocked back and forth. There were noises outside the door, but she didn't trust her ears, not with all the other noises echoing around her.
The noise got louder. It was footsteps, footsteps outside the door.
Nova's heart clenched. If an Ancient came down, then she had to do something. They'd show her the time vortex again and there would be no coming back from that. Assuming she'd made it out the first time.
The massive stone blocking the door slid sideways with a rough grinding, grating noise.
Nova's eyes locked on it and she gripped her gun with her trembling hand. Sweat made her grip slick and she had to snatch tighter to stop from dropping the weapon.
She would only get one chance. The Ancient wouldn't hesitate to kill her; it probably thought she was already dead. It was impossible to tell how long she'd been trapped with Tobius' body. Time had become meaningless after all the hallucinations.
The door opened wider and mental glinted in the blue light outside.
Nova rested her hand on her knee to steady it and stared down the barrel of her gun.
"Tobius, are you done with the human? What did she say?"
The door opened fully and an armored Ancient stepped through. It looked down at Tobius' body and then whirled to face Nova, reaching for its gun.
Nova squeezed her trigger and a blue blast of energy slammed into the red button at the creature's neck. Its helmet clicked and popped up half an inch.
She fired two more shots.
The first knocked the helmet free and revealed the hard flesh underneath. The second slammed into the creature's face and melted its flesh. The Ancient stumbled backward and fell in a heap next to Tobius, dead.
Nova's gun rattled from her shaking as she tried to put it back in its holster. It took three tries and by the last, tears of frustration welled in her eyes. On any other day she would not have put her gun away, but in her current state, she didn't trust herself not to shoot her own foot off.
She stared at the open door. It looked real enough, but she'd already escaped once from the small room. It could be another mirage, another trick of her imagination.
She used the wall behind her to get to her feet. The room spun and she fell against the wall, clutching on to stay upright.
Her thoughts flitted around her head like moths searching for a flame. Noises and colors swirled at the edge of her senses. She tried to block them out, to focus on what was in front of her, but it was hard. There was so much going on at the edge of her awareness. She was sure she saw herself a couple of times.
"That's impossible," she said, shuffling towards the open door.
Dust and sand coated the floor of the corridor, just as she remembered from when she first arrived but very different to the last time she'd walked it.
"It was just a dream," she said.
"Then if you follow the same path it won't take you outside," she replied.
She nodded. There was only one way to separate reality from imagination. If she tried to follow the same path she'd taken in the dream it would fail because it didn't exist. That would be proof enough for her.
She strode into the corridor. She remembered the path as if it was burned into her memory. She remembered hearing the voices and following the Ancient through the catacombs.
Her stomach sunk and the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. The path was just as she remembered, so familiar, and yet she'd never been here before, except in a dream.
She rounded a corner and bright sunlight spilled in from the end of the tunnel. Fresh air blew in and lifted grains of
sand off the floor, carrying them deeper into the catacombs.
Nova stumbled to a stop, her breathing ragged. This wasn't supposed to happen. She was supposed to follow the dream path and find it led nowhere, thus proving that it was a dream.
She swallowed and crept the rest of the way down the corridor, to the tunnel entrance. In the dream, she'd come out onto an armada of Ancient ships, with no sign of the Confederacy.
She peered out of the tunnel and squinted in the bright sunlight. A toppled Confederacy cruiser lay not fifty yards away. All of it, the Confederacy ships, and the bodies of the dead workers and soldiers, lay scattered across the sand while the Ancients worked on their ships and their weapons near the tunnel entrance.
"What?" Nova stayed hidden in the shadow of the tunnel. Where was the armada she'd seen earlier? All the ancients had had ships, they'd blocked out the sky. But the desert looked just as it had when she'd first been taken prisoner.
Her head ached, like a metal band being tightened around her temples, and she couldn't separate what was real and what had just been a dream. She had to get away from the tunnel, the Ancients could come in at any moment.
She massaged her left temple as she scurried out of the tunnel and took cover behind a thick tree.
The voices which had been chattering inside her head grew louder and more insistent, they beat at her eardrums like a crowd was trapped inside her skull.
She staggered deeper into the forest until the trees blocked out the sandstone pyramid.
She leaned against a thick tree and looked around. There was no one in sight.
"Cal?" she said.
"Nova! Where have you been? What is all that noise? What's going on?"
"I don't know," she whispered. A hard lump formed in her throat and she had to swallow twice before she could talk again. "I don't know what happened."
"Come back to Crusader. It's not safe for you to be out there."
"I can't," she said. "I have to see someone. They're everywhere. There has to be a way to stop it."
"Nova, you're not making any sense," Cal said. "I need to run a full diagnostic."
"No time," she said. "All the time."
"Nova!"
Her mind slipped away from her robot and floated around the trees. There was so much going on all around her. Day and night, winter and summer; it was all here. Some of the trees were covered in snow, while others were in full bloom.
She had to get away, to find something solid before she went mad. The closest thing she had was Doctor Codon, perhaps he could diagnose what was wrong with her.
She pushed away from the tree and ran through the forest. She reached the edge of the trees, some distance away from the working Ancients. She studied them as they bent over the machines but none of them had yellow eyes; that had probably been part of her dream.
She kept her head low and ran across the sandy desert to the nearest fallen ship. She paused to catch her breath and then darted between the craft, to the outer edge of the fallen fleet, to Codon's ship.
Her feet sunk into the sand but as she ran she saw shadows of people, like ghosts, floating across sand. At first she thought they were another weapon of the Ancients and dived behind a ship. The shadows moved across the desert, fading in and out of sight, but they didn't seem dangerous.
Nova kept her distance. If they weren't an Ancient weapon, then what were they? She considered stopping to ask one of them but surely talking to mirages was the way to madness.
Codon's ship towered over the others. One side of it lay wedged into the sand while the other poked up into the air. The stairs that had once led up to the main entrance lay twisted and broken in the distance and the door was too high up for Nova to reach.
She skirted around the edge, to the side that rested on the sand. Dents and scratches dulled the smooth surface but multiple doors dotted the hull. She grabbed hold of one and pulled.
It didn't move.
"Automatic doors, idiot," Nova said and slapped her palm against her forehead.
She jammed her finger down on a small, green button to the side of the door. The metal panel slid open with a smooth hiss and revealed the ship beyond.
Broken silver pipes hung from the ceiling and piles of loose equipment lay jumbled against the walls. She edged around a metal box and her boots crunched on small pieces of glass. She kept a hand on the wall of the corridor, which used to be the floor.
Fewer mirages floated about inside the ship and she managed to keep her distance. What were they? They certainly hadn't been there before the Ancients took her prisoner.
She followed the signs to the main entrance foyer and then retraced the path from there to the pilot room, where she'd last seen Codon.
"What is it, you damned machine?" he yelled, slamming his open palm down onto a row of screens.
"Codon?" Nova whispered. Her usually confident voice fled her in the face of not knowing; not knowing if this was all still a dream, not knowing what was wrong with her, not knowing what Codon would do.
"What?" he said, whirling around. "I told you to never show your face here again."
"We have to get off this planet," she said. She glanced around the room but Codon didn't look any closer to leaving Archalon than he had before.
"I know. I told you that before you stormed off in a righteous rage, remember?" he frowned hard at her. His already messy hair flew about his head in loose gray wisps.
"Yes, but I was wrong," she said. She glanced behind her; she could hear things moving. "We have to get off the planet and fly as far as we can, out of the known galaxies."
"Well that's all very well," Codon said and waved his hand at the screens. "But something's keeping us here and I've tried everything to get off."
"We have to," she whispered and looked over her shoulder.
"What's wrong with you? Stop twitching." His frown deepened.
"They've got powers. Too much power." She reached a clawed hand up to her head and grabbed a fistful of hair. She tugged at it and looked over her shoulder. What was making all that noise?
"What did they do to you? They carve out your brain or something?"
Nova shrugged. "Maybe."
She did feel crazy. There were so many sounds and lights, how could Codon stand it? But then, it didn't look like he could hear it.
"My hand disappeared."
"What?"
"My hand disappeared. One moment it was there." Nova lifted her right hand up into the air to demonstrate. "And then it was gone." She covered her right hand with her left.
Codon stared at her. "That doesn't make any sense. I'm sorry for whatever they did to you, but there's nothing I can do to help. Every second I spend listening to your delusions is another second that I'm not getting off this planet."
"It happened!" Nova said. Frustration boiled up inside her. How was she supposed to find her feet when everything kept getting thrown off kilter? How dare this Confederacy pig dismiss her.
Codon rounded on her, he took three steps so that his face took up her whole vision. "Look you crazy bitch—"
Nova's temper snapped. She pulled back her right fist and slammed it through the air.
Codon ducked to his left.
Her fist whipped past his head and disappeared.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Her mouth dropped and eyebrows shot up. She kept her arm outstretched and her fist remained out of sight.
"See?" she whispered. Her body quaked.
Codon looked at her fist. His red face drained to pale white. He blinked a few times, rubbed his eyes, then stared again.
"See?" she said, her voice more urgent.
"I do," Codon said, his voice strained.
"What is it?" she said. "What does it mean?"
"I don't know."
"There's something there," she said. She was on the verge of tears but she'd be damned if she let this Confederacy man watch her cry.
"What do you mean?"
"I can feel something. My fist is brushin
g against something."
"Well then grab it."
Her lip trembled. She forced the fingers of her missing fist to open and then close around whatever brushed the top of her hand. It felt rubbery.
She couldn't see her hand, but she could feel it just like normal.
"What happens if you move forward?" Codon said. Some of the color had returned to his face and he stared between Nova's face and her missing hand. He stepped closer and tried to peer down her arm. There was nothing there.
"I don't want to move forward," she said. "I want it to stop."
"We have to understand it," Codon said. "Try stepping forward."
"No."
Codon whipped his arm around and shoved Nova on the small of her back. She stumbled forward and the rest of her arm disappeared, all the way to her shoulder. Her hand brushed past more mysterious rubbery things followed by her forearm.
She stifled a scream and tried to step back but Codon held her in place. "Let me go!"
"Incredible," Codon said. "What's happening to your body?"
"What?" Nova looked down but everything, other than her missing arm, looked normal.
"Your whole body is coming to pieces," he whispered. "It's like your limbs have popped away and are floating inches away from their sockets."
"What?"
"Look!" Codon snatched a piece of shattered mirror from the floor and held it to her face.
Nova's eyes bulged.
Her head floated above her neck, an inch of air separating them. Her features slipped down her face as if she was melting. Her mouth drooped down on one side, and her nostril slid after it. Her right eye dropped and slithered over her cheekbone like a runny egg.
Codon's shaking arm made the mirror jerk through the air.
Nova gaped at her melting face. A missing limb was nothing compared to the horror she saw in the mirror. Her skin faded in and out of view, revealing the sinewy muscles and blood vessels underneath. She could actually see each of her ribs as they pulsed in time with her panting breath.
She threw herself backward, away from Codon and her arm reappeared, followed by her hand.
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