Survive

by Vera Nazarian

  Claudia, Li Jie, and Brie move quickly in the front of our group, ranging slightly ahead. Yana and Darius walk at my side, and we exchange occasional comments. I learn that Yana is a Czech from Prague and is a mixed martial arts expert. Darius is a pro athlete swimmer, runner and lifeguard from Australia.

  Soon, the captain drops back to walk with our central group and quickly explains to me the unusual pegasei situation we’re about to walk into.

  “Part of the reason the local authorities were unable to accurately locate the pegasei is because of some kind of impenetrable quantum force field which encloses their holding pens,” Captain Siduaz says. “The Communicator sent here earlier was unable to reach out to them because of that quantum field. She and her PRT walked around the pens for hours, looking for some kind of breach, or field weakness, or loophole—forgive my terminology, I don’t know how your communication with them works. She called for assistance, and a second Communicator was sent, with his own PRT. Still no results. And then the locals found out, word got around we were breaking into their old ‘sacred pegasei grounds.’ They massed, got their militias, notified the ruling crime syndicate, started pushing back, and the teams had to abandon the mission due to the elevated threat level.”

  “Very interesting.” I frown. “Why doesn’t the Hetmet do something about it? About the local resistance, I mean?”

  The captain shakes his head with irony. “The Hetmet is too afraid of pushing the crime syndicate boss who owns most of the land in this area, and considers the pegasei facility ‘owner’ under his ‘protection.’ Khenneb is small, underpopulated, and the Hetmet’s power is precarious. Besides, this pegasei situation is rather unique, and he realizes the need for a high-level expert—such as yourself.”

  An expert, me? I want to laugh in my mind. On the other hand, why am I laughing? I’ve positioned myself as such and have to maintain this authority if we want to succeed in freeing the pegasei.

  We arrive at the mountain cave entrance that leads to a subterranean network of tunnels and storage warehouses. The entrance is a narrow doorway cut into the mountain, hidden by overgrown shrubbery. It shows signs of being recently used, and the PRT troops get out machetes to clear out the rest of the brush, allowing us to enter easily. Then they send hovering drone probes and mini orb lights ahead of us inside, to better light our way, and to prevent surprise attacks. There’s no sign of any hostiles, but everyone is vigilant.

  Inside, the tunnel is ridiculously narrow, forcing us to walk in pairs or single file for at least ten minutes in near darkness, with only the mini-orbs and occasional wall sconces in the rock illuminating our way. It’s dank and smells like mold and sulfur.

  I glance behind me and see Brie Walton’s tense face illuminated by hovering orb lights . . . and just for a moment I get a flashback to the Games, when Brie and I were temporarily walled in inside the pyramid and I found out she is claustrophobic.

  I wonder if she regrets signing up for this mission, I think.

  On the other hand, Blayne is moving along with great skill, effortlessly maneuvering through the tunnel on his narrow board.

  “Almost there,” the captain tells us, as we continue to carefully advance forward.

  I nod. . . . And then I tell myself, it’s time.

  I clear my mind and sing the now familiar frequency to open the floodgates of communication. If the pegasei are anywhere near, I am about to hear them.

  The stream of sensory data rushes through my forehead, and at once I hear the spiraling call in my mind. It comes from the vicinity, a corkscrew of meta-sound, a profound melody forming a double helix. . . .

  Freedom! Freedom! Help us! Please, free us, human! They fill my mind in a sudden chorus of urgent voices.

  I’m coming! I mind-speak in reply. I am here! Show me where you are!

  At once I get a carousel of images, poorly lit, huge, cavernous expanse of black and slate-grey rock walls, greenish, chalk-pale portions of the bedrock, strange striated layers. . . .

  Hungry, hungry, always hungry! Not enough light! the voices cry.

  And right in that moment we emerge from the tunnel into the same open cavern space that I’ve just seen in my mind.

  A surreal, impossible sight greets us.

  The cavern is precisely as I’ve seen it, and yet—the pegasei never showed me the bottom of this expanse. The entire floor of the cavern is a softly roiling mist-ocean of very faint golden light vapor. Scattered throughout this bizarre golden mist are the so-called “holding pens”—spheres of gold light mounted on slim metal posts elevated about a meter from the ground. Each sphere is twice the size of a basketball, and it’s pulsing with moving colors of pegasei plasma. . . . orange, yellow, blue, violet, turquoise, pink. . . .

  There are at least twenty of these spheres, maybe thirty. Definitely more than I expected.

  “What the hell—” one of the shìrén behind me whispers—I think it’s Darius.

  The PRT unit troops who’ve arrived ahead of us stand waiting for the captain and the next set of orders. Everyone has stopped at the entrance, and no one is sure how to proceed. Do we walk into that swirling gold mist?

  Help us! We long for freedom! So much hunger. . . .

  More and more people arrive, and now I see the captain approaching me as I stand next to Tuar and Yana and Claudia at the edge of the floor that begins to turn to mist.

  “What exactly is this stuff?” Tuar asks the captain, pointing to the mist on the floor. “Is it toxic?”

  “It’s safe, according to the previous two PRTs and Communicators who were here,” the captain retorts, then quickly looks on his wrist comm to check a flashing incoming message. “We are being told to expedite. The hostiles are approaching and will be here in less than an hour.”

  “Okay. . . .” I take a step forward into the mist.

  But then I hear Blayne’s voice. “Hold on. Let me take a quick look.”

  In that moment Blayne sings a quick, precise sequence and soars forward, inclining the board flat so that now he’s lying on his stomach. He flies low, a few inches over the mist and starts making rapid hover passes around the perimeter, circling the cavern, then venturing out to the middle. I see him reach down with one hand and sweep it through the golden vapor, then rise somewhat and approach one of the thirty containment orbs roiling with pegasei essence.

  “Be careful, please!” I call out to him, and my solitary voice echoes throughout the cavern.

  Solitary . . . that is, if I don’t count the relentless plaintive cries of the quantum beings ringing inside my mind. . . .

  Let us go! Please set us free!

  “All right, so far,” Blayne calls out to me, as he remains suspended before one of the containment spheres. “The vapor stuff feels like nothing. Going to touch this ball thing now—”

  Blayne moves his hand slowly, and places one finger on the sphere . . . and immediately exclaims, “Whoa!”

  “What’s happening?” I ask.

  “Look!” Blayne exclaims, turning his head to stare in our general direction. “Can you see it? My finger! Oh, man, look!”

  I narrow my eyes, but in this poorly lit chamber I can’t be sure of what I’m seeing at this distance. So, I think, to hell with it, and just walk into the golden mist and march up to Blayne. I can hear Tuar and the others follow, immediately behind me.

  As I get close, I begin to see what he’s doing.

  And my jaw drops.

  Blayne has inserted his finger inside the sphere up to his joint, but the tip of his same finger is sticking out at an odd angle of approximately fifteen degrees in the opposite direction—as though it’s been cut off, displaced about an inch, and is now coming out from inside the sphere.

  Where have I seen this before?

  Oh my God. . . . It’s that impossible matter refraction phenomenon.

  We observed it when SPC probes were sent into the huge alien spheres that comprise the golden light grid around Helios.

  “Blayne, ar
e you okay?” I exclaim worriedly, as I arrive at his side.

  Blayne nods in astonishment, continuing to hold his finger inside the sphere. And then he slowly pulls it out. As he does so, the refracted tip of his finger nearby recedes back into the sphere, and disappears. Blayne flexes his reclaimed finger, frowning.

  “Everything seems fine,” he says, staring at his hand. “I felt nothing. That was incredibly bizarre.”

  “Let me try,” I say, and stick my entire hand into the sphere, up to my wrist.

  My fingers disappear inside and then appear—equally displaced, refracted at an angle—from the opposite direction. I wiggle them, and see them wiggle back at me, coming at me from the other direction.

  As this is happening, I can see the rest of the PRT unit troops begin to spread out around the cavern and start touching the spheres, passing fingers through them in sweeping motions, blowing at them—and feeling their own breath blowing back in their face at an angle.

  Everything they attempt to insert gets “refracted”—hands, firearms, machetes.

  Except for this one weird material effect, the containment spheres are intangible, physically unreachable, locked away indeed in some other dimension.

  And the pegasei are locked away inside them.

  With this new development, our situation just got even more complicated. I stand in puzzlement, looking at the containment spheres spread out around the cavern, and listen to the clamor of pegasei inside my mind, calling out to me.

  I really should contact Aeson, I think. I need to let him know about the same dimensional phenomenon I’ve discovered here. It’s relevant to our bigger problem and maybe it could help us?

  But right now, we’re running out of time. I need to figure out how to get those pegasei out of their prisons and then we all need to get out of here in a hurry, before armed hostiles arrive.

  But how to do it?

  Maybe I should ask the pegasei.

  And I do.

  I mind-speak my question at them, showing them the entirety of my confusion, perplexed bafflement, and uncertainty as far as how to proceed.

  At the same time, I call Arion.

  Chapter 89

  Arion responds to me instantaneously, as always. One moment he is elsewhere. And the next, his plasma-cloud essence enters the present reality with a tiny pop of displaced air, and then expands in a radiant cloud for three meters around me.

  I am here, Gwen Lark who is Kassiopei, his familiar calm voice speaks inside my mind.

  Arion’s arrival is accompanied by a flare of light, like a small firework going off, and everyone turns in our direction. At once the cave becomes a little brighter in our vicinity.

  “Whoa! Did you do that?” someone asks.

  “So—did you just figure out a way of breaking them out of those containment fields?” Brie Walton steps closer, staring curiously at the newly arrived quantum being.

  But I raise my hand up for quiet, because I’m communicating with the pegasus.

  “Arion!” I mind-speak anxiously. “Do you know what this is? Your people are stuck inside this strange force field, or barrier, and I don’t know what to do! I’ve never worked with anything like it.”

  Help us, please! We have been here for so long! Forever! Forever! The other pegasei continue their desperate, plaintive cries.

  “Do you know what type of containment you are in?” I ask the clamoring voices.

  A continuation of their lament seems to be the only direct answer.

  Starving, weak, need more light, help us!

  They are so agitated that they do not appear to pay attention to my question, seemingly unable to focus long enough to answer.

  There is a short pause, as I sense that Arion at least is about to speak. . . . He is choosing carefully from the infinity of images inside him to formulate his reply.

  Freedom! Please release us!

  “Arion?” I repeat. “What kind of containment field is it?”

  It is—not, he replies at last.

  “What do you mean?”

  Not a containment field. Not a barrier. It is a threshold doorway.

  “What? A threshold doorway? What does that mean?”

  Help us!

  “I am trying to help you, okay? Please shush for a moment! I mean, I’m sorry . . . let me just work this out,” I think-say in frustration and a twinge of despair. And then I redirect my thought speech back at Arion.

  “Please explain,” I say, trying to make my thoughts as calm as possible. “What is this thing—this threshold doorway?”

  There is another pause, with only the general telepathic din, for lack of a better word, coming from all the imprisoned pegasei. But at least it’s somewhat more subdued.

  They are really confused, Arion says unexpectedly. They have been here so long that they cannot remember how to reply to complex questions. They are entangled improperly between multiple dimensions. . . . In addition, their self-membranes have deteriorated so much that they have difficulty separating themselves from others . . . and from everything else.

  “Okay, not sure I understand,” I say. “Where are they exactly?”

  In the doorway. . . . They are inside the doorway, trapped between here and there.

  I sigh. “Still don’t know what that means, but what can I do?”

  “Imperial Lady Gwen?” Captain Siduaz interrupts our telepathic conversation. “Any progress?”

  I raise my hand again for silence and shake my head negatively.

  “Remember, we’re short on time,” the captain reminds me again, before stepping back to give me room.

  “Arion, what—”

  These pegasei here are trapped inside a threshold, Arion says slowly. It is very difficult to describe upper-dimensional concepts using the terminology of a lower dimensional reality such as this.

  Imagine that dimensions are like rooms, he continues. There is a wall of ice between two rooms. You are frozen inside the wall of ice. Normally, the ice would be liquid water cascading down and you could easily pass through it. But now it is frozen, and you are stuck inside it.

  “Oh wow,” I say. “That’s horrible.”

  It is.

  “How did it happen? How did this threshold freeze?”

  Time.

  “You mean, a long time?”

  A very long time, Arion’s voice rings sadly. More than nine thousand of your years. Soon after the time of your Landing.

  I suck in my breath—so that Tuar, standing and watching me, focuses on me worriedly.

  “What caused it? How? What happened here? If not containment spheres, what are those round things?”

  You caused it—your human species who came to this planet and brought my species with you by force. Here in these ancient caves of the place you now call Khenneb, your ancestors tried to make another dimensional rift—just like the one they made on Earth, and using the same destructive methods.

  “Oh my God!” I exclaim out loud, so that the PRT unit troops walking around nearby freeze and stare at me.

  The careless humans started forming the dimensional breach. Then they forced a number of pegasei inside to keep it open, Arion continues. Only it didn’t work. The fabric of space-time reacted in a way they did not expect and the breach collapsed and ‘healed’ itself, sealing the pegasei in the process, stuck between dimensions.

  “They couldn’t just get away?”

  Normally, my species can pass easily through that space-time fabric but, as I explained, metaphoric water had now become metaphoric ice. The spheres are nothing more than hardened space-time bubbles, membranes isolating foreign matter—the unfortunate pegasei. And the more time passed, the more impenetrable the membranes became.

  I nod slowly. “So then, this whole area is basically dimensional scar tissue!”

  Yes, a valid analogy.

  “Crap. . . .” Once again, I speak out-loud.

  “That bad?” Blayne asks.

  My frown is sufficient answer.

&nb
sp; There is a long pause.

  And then I say, “Arion, ice is frozen water. It can be melted again. Is it possible to melt space-time?”

  Anything is possible, he replies. But I don’t know how. This is something that I have never encountered before, even though my entity existence has been longer than you can humanly imagine.

  “Great,” I mind-speak, projecting all my bitterness, and shake my head.

  I am sorry. I wish I could help but this is an unknown for me. I will continue to ponder this genuine puzzle, and I will speak with the rest of my kind to search for answers. . . .

  “We are getting notification of incoming,” Captain Siduaz says. “Only twenty-five daydreams before they arrive at the cave entrance. We are leaving in ten, regardless of mission completion.”

  “Oh, no,” I say. “But we can’t!”

  But the captain shakes his head. “I must insist, Imperial Lady. So please proceed with what you are doing, and expedite.” And then he turns to dispatch some of the PRT unit troops to retreat back the way we came from and guard additional points along the tunnel and entrance.

  I want to metaphorically wring my hands with anxiety. Instead I start moving around the cavern, looking around, with a frown of effort pulling at my forehead. Periodically I stop and focus with desperate intensity on the glowing, pegasei-filled spheres, pausing to run my fingers through them and see the matter refraction happen again and again.

  My guards and the shìrén pilots watch me, following not too closely so as not to interfere with my arcane “process,” whatever they think it might be. Arion floats nearby in plasma shape, and the tumbling thought images I get from him have turned incomprehensible, while the telepathic din has resumed as the pegasei sense that something urgent and important is happening.

  “I don’t know,” I mind-speak. “I just don’t know. . . .”

  Then I resort to my usual standby—I use my Voice.

  Placing my hand inside the nearest ghostly orb, I sing a keying command in a ringing voice of power, directing my focus at the sphere—that intangible, corrupted membrane-bubble between dimensions. Stupid thing. . . . Like a dimensional pustule. . . .