by S. H. Jucha
“What happened?” Harbour asked Jessie. He signed for a separate comm channel and Harbour complied.
“The dome swept the gas out, and the Colony members rapidly revived,” Jessie replied, “and reinforcements flooded up from below deck. It was a fight to get free from the onslaught. Jaktook and I were trapped at the console, and the team came to our rescue. I don’t know exactly what happened to Dillon. I’d kicked a gray, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw him fly across the deck, about three meters in the air.”
“Should we go back for him?” Harbour asked.
“His helmet looked like it was turned around,” Jessie replied. “I think a red-black broke his neck. Even if Dillon wasn’t dead, which I highly doubt, the Colony has him now.”
Harbour shuddered. She hated that she hoped Dillon was dead. She didn’t want to think about him in the clutches of these insidious sentients.
“I’m all right,” Tracy said, pushing away from Aurelia. She didn’t want to admit that the young empath’s ministrations had done a great deal to lessen her pain. The emotion that ruled her was white hot anger, a lot of it. She stalked toward the console to get free of her team. Standing next to Kractik, she said to Devon, “If you ever want to give someone else a turn with that weapon, you let me know. I’d be happy to take it off your hands.”
Devon nodded without replying. He’d seen angry family members before. Shortly after losing a loved one through a tragic accident or murder, they looked for justice, if not vengeance, and they didn’t care how it was obtained.
“What now?” Jessie asked Harbour.
In response, Harbour called, “Mangoth, I need you.”
“Yes, Envoy,” Mangoth said, hurrying to gain Harbour’s side.
“The Tsargit tasked you with providing evidence of the Colony’s operation here,” Harbour said to Mangoth. “We’re on the deck, and our adversaries are trapped below … and so are the tunnel and the newly constructed dome. How do we collect your proof?”
When Mangoth hesitated, Jaktook piped up. “The console, Envoy, will provide us with proof of the Colony’s presence and activities. A download to our cubes will identity the alpha dome as an unidentified location to the Tsargit.”
“Take care of it,” Harbour ordered.
Jaktook ran to the console and chatted with Kractik. The console operator doffed her pack and dug out four cubes. She searched through the console’s records, working backward to find the moment the Colony first arrived. Kractik pointed out the image’s date to Jaktook and spoke of the most recent recording date. The difference surprised Jaktook, but there wasn’t time to dwell on it, and he requested Kractik hurry.
Kractik programmed an activities download from the console. She set her first cube in position and tapped the menu item. When the console signaled the cube was full, she replaced it. The records required three cubes before the download was complete.
“Envoy, Mangoth,” Jaktook called. When the two individuals reached the console, Jaktook handed the cubes to Mangoth. “Delegate Mangoth, I present you with the proof the Tsargit requested of the Colony’s incursion into this dome.”
“Your efforts are appreciated, Advisor Jaktook,” Mangoth replied in formal tones. “The Tsargit will be made aware of the Jatouche and Pyrean’s efforts to assist me.”
“Envoy, look here,” Jaktook requested. He made a brief request to Kractik, who queried the console.
An image popped up above the panel, and Harbour asked, “What should I be noting?”
“Wait,” Jaktook managed to say before the image changed.
Harbour watched a series of recordings from the dome’s overhead point of view. A consistent theme became evident. “The Colony is flowing out of this dome through gate one,” Harbour said.
“So it appears, Envoy,” Kractik replied.
Mangoth studied the image of the Colony sentients frozen in the panel’s projection. Gate one held a load of crates, and Colony sentients were draped over them.
“The Tsargit won’t be pleased,” Mangoth said, with a deep sigh. “They’ve set the guidelines for alliance members for millennia, and they’ve failed to consider the ramifications of ignoring rogue sentients who don’t wish to abide by their restrictions.”
“Did the Colony travel through gate two?” Harbour asked.
“Not at any time, Envoy,” Kractik replied. “I queried the console for that very thing.”
Harbour wanted to ask Kractik if she was sure, but she considered that it would be an absurd question. Instead, she said, “Looks like we’ll be taking gate two,” Harbour announced to the teams. “Mangoth has what we came here to get. Now, we have to find a way home.”
“My team will go first,” Jessie said to Harbour. “You’ll need Devon to hold the ramp.”
Harbour agreed with Jessie’s suggestion, and team two mounted platform two. They readied their weapons, and Jessie cued Kractik, who sent them on their way.
“Everyone but Kractik and Devon mount the platform,” Harbour called out, and her team hurried to obey. When they were ready, Harbour said, “Short delay, Kractik. Then the two of you run.”
Kractik set the gate’s activation. When she initiated the program, she yelled, “Now, Devon,” then the two of them raced each other to get to the gate first. It was a tie — Devon’s legs were longer, but Kractik had the shorter distance to travel. Within a count of three after gaining the platform, the gate activated.
-27-
Beta Dome
“Welcome to beta dome,” Nelson quipped, when the gate’s light faded on team two.
The explorers arrived with weapons drawn only to face an empty deck. Through the blue glow of the dome, they could see the night sky.
“No crates, no debris,” Bryan remarked. “No sign of occupation.”
“Clear the platform,” Jessie ordered.
The team jumped down and waited anxiously for their fellow explorers. When Harbour’s team arrived, they immediately cleared the platform, and Mangoth spread a net over it.
“The wedge is closed,” Jaktook noted. “That’s a good indication that this dome has been vacant since the Messinants left it.”
“Nonetheless, we should check below,” Mangoth offered.
“Agreed,” Jessie added.
The team had rehearsed these movements before. Jaktook and Kractik occupied the console. Devon took up a forward position directly facing the ramp. Tracy was on his flank. She wore an evil grin. The rest of the team members were arrayed beside and behind them.
Kractik initiated the console, which appeared to have been dormant. She activated the needed panel, touched off the wedge, and called out, “Opening.”
After a half hour of investigating every room on the second level, the team finally admitted that beta dome was safe. No one was here but them, and they were probably the first sentients to set foot in the dome after the Messinants.
The company retired to one of the larger dorm rooms. They stripped off their gear and suits, used the facilities, and sat desultorily eating their paste.
Jessie finished his plate and pushed it forward. A mild burp escaped his mouth, and he apologized.
“So the action is not appreciated by humans?” Mangoth asked Jessie.
“No, but it happens to all of us,” Jessie replied.
“Unfortunate,” Mangoth said. “It’s expected in my culture.”
There was subdued chuckling from several of the team members.
“I see that we have two choices,” Jessie said. “We can either fight our way through the alpha and Colony domes to reach Rissness, or we can search for an alternate route home.”
Kractik gently cleared her throat. “I’m sorry to disagree with you, Advisor,” she said. “We’ve only one choice. Before we retired I checked the status of this dome’s four gates. We journeyed from alpha dome to arrive at beta gate one. That gate is now offline.”
“The Colony is probably using my net to block the gate,” Mangoth growled.
“
Undoubtedly, Delegate,” Kractik replied. Turning to Harbour, she said, “The other three gates are active and unobstructed.”
“That this dome has four gates bodes well for the possibility of our success, Envoy,” Jaktook added.
“As I was saying, we have a clear choice before us,” Jessie quipped, amending his earlier remark in disgust.
“Too bad,” Tracy said harshly. “I would have voted for taking the direct route home.”
No one replied to Tracy’s comment. It was clear that, at this moment, she didn’t care if she survived the journey through the alpha and Colony domes or not. She wanted revenge.
Devon was instructed that the beam weapon had a means to lockout unauthorized users. He hadn’t thought to employ it, but he made a mental note to do so before he left the dorm room again.
“Expectations must be properly set, Jaktook,” Mangoth said soberly.
Jaktook tipped his head in acknowledgment of the delegate’s statement. He gazed at Harbour and Jessie. Then he said, “That beta dome has four gates and is unoccupied indicates that potentially there is a complex web of gates beyond our three choices. Consider that beta gate one leads to alpha gate three, which leads to the Colony gate one, which leads to Rissness, which connects to the alliance.”
“To be more specific,” Kractik added, “we’ll start with three choices, which will lead us to other domes with more choices.”
“And until we reach an alliance member, these domes will be undocumented, and we’ll have no way of knowing which gate to take,” Bryan reasoned.
“We’ll have to explore them one at a time and track them,” Olivia noted.
“That will be critical,” Jaktook agreed.
Pete held up a finger for attention, “Do we have a method of doing that?” he asked.
“I can query each console, Pete,” Kractik replied. “That will give us a precise locator for our position.”
“How?” Bryan asked.
“Every dome has a unique identifier, which is contained in the console,” Jaktook explained.
“Then we can map our journeys, if we have an application to record it,” Olivia said.
Kractik flashed her teeth. “After my first visit to Triton, I desired to be a dome investigator for the Tsargit one day. At the time, it was a lofty thought, far above my standing. However, I chose to prepare myself for the role, in case an opportunity was afforded me. One of the tools of the investigator is an application that maps the domes. Journeyers use a simpler version to navigate through the alliance domes. However, my app is more robust. It allows me to add new domes, name them, detail their gates, and display the linked gates.”
“Excellent,” Olivia said joyously, clasping the Jatouche on the shoulder.
“If we are able to return to the alliance, the Tsargit will hear of your cleverness and foresight, Kractik,” Mangoth said.
This time, Kractik flashed her teeth so wide it resembled a snarl.
“I’ve a question,” Aurelia said. “We can map our progress. That’s great. But what I want to know is how do we protect ourselves during our journey through each gate?”
“Good point,” Pete agreed, looking at Jaktook.
“The cubes,” Jaktook said. “We record visuals of us and send the cube ahead. That will announce us.”
“There are some holes in that thinking,” Pete replied. “Say the receivers have recently discovered the dome but can’t operate the console. They’re surprised by the appearance of a cube. Their response is to let the cube sit on the platform forever, waiting for it to do something.”
“Or sentients have discovered the console, are learning to operate it, and are able to view the cube,” Bryan suggested, “but they’re an aggressive species, and we walk into an assault.”
“Or there’s no one there,” Olivia added, “and the cube sits there as in Pete’s scenario.”
“I retract my suggestion,” Jaktook said in a desultorily fashion.
There was quiet, while the team mulled over a means of effectively communicating with whoever might be on the other end of a gate pair. Jessie regarded Aurelia, and said, “I think the answer to your question is that we can’t. We’ll have to take our chances.”
“But we’ll arrive with our weapons displayed. We have to,” Harbour objected.
“Who’s to say they’re weapons if we don’t portray them as such?” Mangoth asked.
“True,” Harbour agreed, seeing his point. “They could be the tools of explorers. In which case, we have to take care to keep them at our sides and not point them at dome inhabitants.”
* * * *
Sleep came quickly for most of the team. Nerves and muscles were heavily stressed, resulting in mental and physical exhaustion.
Harbour and Aurelia bracketed Tracy’s pallet. The girl had pushed off their ministrations several times. But, as she slumbered, her dreams haunted her, and she whimpered in her sleep.
The two empaths turned on their sides to face Tracy and lent her emotional support for hours before they too succumbed.
In the morning, by the explorers’ chronometers, they assembled on the deck, fed and rested.
“Do we use logic or chance?” Jessie asked, gazing at the three gate choices.
“Mangoth and Jaktook said that this might be a long process,” Olivia reminded Jessie. “I vote for logic. We came in on gate one. We should start with gate two and map our way along the journey.”
“I concur,” Kractik piped up.
Harbour chose to take up Olivia’s suggestion. “Kractik, set the console to activate gate two.”
The company departed in two teams. The next dome was mercifully anticlimactic. It was unoccupied. Kractik addressed the console for its ID, mapped the gates, and the teams, who had arrived on gate three, left on gate one.
And so it went for days and days. The teams jumped from dome to dome, recording their passage and mapping the gates. Following their chronometers, whether the sky was bright or dark, they rested at the end of a ten-hour period.
After the third day of travel, Mangoth remarked, “I find it hard to comprehend the number of unoccupied domes.”
“Agreed,” Jaktook replied. “I wish I’d carried my scope. I want to examine the nearby planets to look for burgeoning civilizations.”
“There is the possibility,” Bryan offered, “that we’re journeying through some of the newest domes constructed by the Messinants. Their experiments, which were designed to uplift the species on these planets, might not have matured yet.”
“That’s a possibility, Bryan,” Jaktook offered.
“It also means that alpha domes’ gate one and two represent open territories for the Colony,” Devon said. “Maybe that’s why they’re expanding in gate one’s direction.”
“That’s a salient point, Devon,” Jessie acknowledged. “It would indicate that the Colony members explored the routes from alpha gate one in depth, realized the opportunity, and developed a plan to usurp those worlds.”
“And that means the Colony intends to invade the planets and wipe out any developing cultures,” Harbour said.
“That makes our return to the alliance all that more imperative,” Mangoth said. “The Tsargit must be warned of the Colony’s intentions.”
After journeying through a gate on the eleventh day, Harbour’s team arrived in a dome with a single platform. The deck was crowded with individuals studying the console and the glyphs on the deck. The flash of the platform had frozen them in a tableau.
“Send us back, Kractik,” Harbour whispered. “Everyone else stay still.”
Kractik eased off the platform and wound her way past several green-skinned, round-bodied sentients. Their huge, bulging eyes stared at her. At the console, she had to point to it to get an individual to step aside. She accessed the controls for their gate, brought up the menu, chose the delay mode, and set the time. All the while, one of the sentients studied her every movement.
When Kractik finished, she made her way back to the
platform, threading through the staring throng. She gained the platform, and then the team was gone. They carried latent images of a stunned young race, which had just had an eye-opening demonstration of the dome’s purpose.
Kractik was overjoyed to share the news with Jaktook that after all their travels they’d finally encountered a new race who’d achieved space travel. “And I suppose I advanced their understanding of the dome’s operation by half an annual,” Kractik remarked.
“The bad news is that if this race begins exploring the domes, the first species they encounter might be the Colony,” Jessie said. His pronouncement put a damper on the explorers’ excitement.
The first time the team returned to beta dome, the sight of Mangoth’s net lying across gate one told them immediately where they’d arrived. There was a brief bit of laughter about the irony that they had returned to the starting point after twenty-one cycles of travel.
They rested and ate in a familiar dorm room before starting out again. The routine repeated, and the teams lapsed into a daze, traveling through empty dome after empty dome.
Their second return to the beta dome produced no laughter. Instead, feelings of despair rolled off everyone, which Harbour and Aurelia sensed. They’d been journeying for thirty-eight days and were emotionally exhausted by the lack of progress.
With few words among them, they trooped down the ramp to the second level and the prior occupied room. After cleanup and food, they lay on their pallets, a despondent group of individuals. Even Harbour and Empath couldn’t muster sufficient sympathy to alleviate the mental suffering of their team members.
Jessie’s imagination produced an image of the team as a pack of vermin running through a maze of pipes aboard a huge station. Lacking knowledge, the creatures were never aware of the greater structure in which they roamed. Instead, they were doomed to traverse familiar paths until their lives ran out. He hardly recognized that he complained out loud, “One dome looks like another. If I was a Messinant, how would I know where I was without querying a console and carrying a map? For a highly advanced race, that seems a tedious method.”
