Meanwhile, she looked for a cube small enough that she’d have a prayer of lifting it. Finding one, she bent at the knees and hoisted it onto her hip. It was lighter than she expected, but still a solid ten kilos, and her various injuries were now bad enough that breathing was a constant source of agony. She was about to pull a sticky mine off her belt and attach it when suddenly Tim was there, trying to grab the cube from her.
The creature threw its head back and roared again, turning to find its prey. Again, it charged.
Eva struggled with Tim for a few moments before he finally released the cube, but it was too late; the creature was almost on top of them. She threw the cube and pulled Tim toward the trench, not stopping to be sure the creature swallowed.
The rumbling ground told her it hadn’t taken the bait.
Eva immediately dropped backward to the ground, wincing at the impact to Tim and herself, then locked her arms tightly around him as she flipped on her gravboots. They slid toward the trench together, more slowly than if she’d been alone but still faster than they could have run. Together they fell into the pit, landing painfully in a pile at the bottom.
“This is nice,” Eva said between shallow breaths, even though he couldn’t hear her. “We could live in this hole. Maybe start a commune. Give tours to bored rich people.” Surely the creature would wander off eventually.
Or it would start dribbling inky bits of itself all over the place. She imagined getting hollowed out like a blown egg. Not good.
Eva gestured frantically at Tim to hold his position, then turned on her gravboots again, this time to walk up the far wall. She was almost to the top when the creature leaned in to snap at her, falling just short, then backing up and leaping over the gap to the side with the door.
Well, shit.
She crouched and cut power to her boots, somersaulting in midair and turning them back on. As quickly as she could, she clambered over the edge of the trench. It dogged her as she ran, bounding almost parallel but on a slight diagonal that brought it closer to the pit. She pulled a sticky mine off her belt, reaching one of the small cubes and slapping it to the side.
The creature leaped back to her side of the cavern.
With just enough time to think “Hail Mary, full of grace,” she tossed the cube at the monster and ran for the trench.
The thing reared on its hind legs again, maw widening—unhinging like a snake’s—and snapped up the energy cube with the mine.
Eva wasn’t going to make it to safety, but this was their only chance to kill it. She triggered the detonator as she leaped the last few meters.
Sorry, Vakar, she thought. Hope you get my remains home, if there’s anything left.
The creature exploded in a flash that expanded to the other cubes in the room, causing a chain reaction as they all released their stored energy. It was kind of beautiful, actually, like drowning in light, the waves of white heat bursting into miniature supernovas that flowed around her like—wait, around her?
Eva closed her eyes, but the damage was already done; she was blind again, this time from staring at a bunch of close-up explosions. Stupid. But why wasn’t she dead?
She groped around, feeling a floor below her, curved rather than flat. Holy Mary, mother of God, she was in an isosphere.
A laugh fountained up inside her and spilled out, and she pumped her fist in the air and whooped for joy. For a moment, she wondered if Vakar had somehow found her, but she immediately realized how foolish that was.
“Tim?” she asked. “I can’t see anything. Tell me you didn’t bubble me and then get crushed by rubble or something.”
She waited. No response. Shit, if she was stuck in an isosphere, this would be a very short-lived victory party. And she still couldn’t see, either.
Come on, Tim, wake up, she thought. Then she smacked herself in the head.
“Aw, fuck me to tears, my sound was off again,” she said, and turned it back on. “You okay, Tim?”
Still no response. Then, the low, rasping quennian equivalent of a laugh, sounding like it was coming from the bottom of a well.
“Yes,” the Wraith said. “I am injured, but not gravely, and I am alive.”
“Good. Great.” She paused, feeling suddenly awkward. “Thanks for, you know, saving my ass.”
“You have my thanks as well. Our posteriors were mutually saved.”
The isosphere vanished, and she dropped a couple of centimeters to the ground, stumbling into Tim. She immediately stepped away, clutching her aching chest.
“Sorry.” She coughed, and if she weren’t already blind she would have seen stars from the agony. “So. Let’s get back to finding your people. And my person. Former crew person.”
“My sensors indicate the missing persons should be behind that door on the far side of the cavern.”
Eva grinned. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
She sent one last ping to Vakar, and her smile faded when he still didn’t respond. Well, she’d find out what had happened to him soon enough.
Everything smelled like ozone and burning. The explosion had apparently blown out a wall and part of the ceiling, sending rocks sliding down to form a rough ramp they were able to climb without incident. Eva’s vision was still a big black splotch, but colors were starting to slowly fade in at the edges. Once again, she had to let Tim lead her. Still annoying.
They reached the door, she assumed, because he stopped and released her hand. It took him a minute to get it open, but they at least had the luxury of not being chased to give him the time he needed. Soon enough, it made a grinding sound and her suit registered a gust of cooler air rushing out in front of her.
“Anybody home?” she called out.
“Citizens, are you safe?” Tim added. “I have been sent to recover you.”
Smells flooded out, which Eva’s translators registered as relief. “Bless us, they sent a Wraith,” someone said. “We are here. I am First Scientist Orana Pulean. Lumus is injured, but the rest of us are merely fatigued.”
“Do not forget Seiana,” someone else said.
“I had not forgotten her, Volucia,” Orana said coldly, smell tinged with anger and sorrow. “Her . . . remains are back on the ship.”
That must have been the quennian in the tank. Eva felt a twinge of sadness for their loss, but she had more immediate concerns.
“Where is Vakar?” she asked.
A pregnant pause gave birth to a litter of uncomfortable silences. She felt the shape of a question in the air, punctuated by the scent of confusion.
“Who?” said the one called Volucia.
“Vakar. Vakar Tremonis san Jaigodaris. He’s an engineer, he—” She stopped. A feeling crept up Eva’s spine, tingling at the base of her skull, as the smell of confusion strengthened.
Tim had never said Vakar was one of the missing crew, had he? He’d just let her think that. He needed help to get to them, because he wasn’t sure what he’d find. And he had trusted her, a perfect stranger, a human with a story that even she thought sounded ridiculous.
Eva ignored her protesting ribs and reached for the armored shape of Tim’s shoulder. She had to reach up, of course, because he was taller than her.
She balled her other hand into a fist and punched him hard in the gut.
“You sneaky, stupid, lying little stinkbug!” she shouted, shaking her injured knuckles.
“Eva—”
“It is you! Me cago en ti! You didn’t answer any of my pings! You let me think . . . You . . .” She sat down hard on the floor, staring into the fading gray that still obscured her vision, every ache in every injury vying for her attention even as all she wanted to do was scream in frustration.
Vakar crouched down next to her. “I could not have done this alone,” he said. “I was going to. I was coming back from scouting the area, attempting to convince myself to disobey orders, and there was your ship. Except it was not La Sirena Negra. And you and Pink came bouncing out of Ingenuity like you had not been g
one for a year. I chose to be prudent.”
“You put a gun to my head.”
“I did not know why you came, after all this time, in a strange ship, just as this Fridge-connected situation had become problematic. It was highly suspicious, though Pink being with you gave me pause. And when you said you needed me to get your ship back, I was concerned that if I revealed myself, you would attempt to convince me to leave immediately.”
“Stop being so, ugh!” She pounded the ground with her fists. “You could have asked me to help.”
“Would you have helped?”
“Probably. Maybe.” She genuinely wasn’t sure. With all her injuries, maybe not. She might have tried to convince him to leave instead, like he said. “Whatever. Let’s get out of here. You can finish baffling me with your bullshit later.”
“Yes, please,” said one of the quennians, smelling relieved. Eva realized the air was thick with embarrassment, disdain and curiosity. She still couldn’t smell Vakar, though, in his stupid suit.
“We cannot leave without the Proarkhe artifact,” said Orana. “If it fell into the wrong hands, the results could be disastrous.”
“Removing it could pose a challenge,” Vakar said. “The room beyond has been substantially damaged, but the cave-in created a hole we might be able to use to climb out.”
“Unless it is as large as the doorway, the artifact is unlikely to fit.”
“I can see that. It is . . . quite large.”
“I can’t see it,” Eva muttered. No one seemed to care.
They went back and forth about it for a few minutes, and Eva didn’t bother trying to help. This wasn’t how she had expected the rescue to go. Despite everything, she’d built up some ridiculous notion of busting in and saving the day.
In a way, that had happened, but she wasn’t the hero; she was a tool.
Vakar had lied to her. He’d let her fill in the blanks all by herself. He’d manipulated her. Maybe it was her own fault for trusting a stranger in the first place, except he wasn’t a stranger. And no, it wasn’t her fault, because she wasn’t the one who made the choice; he was.
You’ve lied to him, too, she thought. Yeah, and that was just as wrong as this. He’d forgiven her, but could she forgive him?
Also, he was a Wraith? Or was that a lie, too? What the hell had happened in the last year?
She tuned back in to the conversation when Vakar said, “You and I will get the other door open while the rest of your team prepares it for transport. I will scout ahead for the—” Her translator stuttered, then supplied “hungry darkscreamers.”
“What about me?” Eva asked.
“Are you still blind?”
She squinted, trying to blink away the gray clouding her vision. “Yeah,” she finally said, and the word tasted bitter as a banana peel.
“Then stay here for now. You can bring up the rear once we start moving.”
The quennians called instructions to each other, setting up an antigrav harness system to move the artifact. They smelled excited now, eager. Eva considered shutting off her scent receptors but decided that would be childish.
Instead, she got up and groped her way back to the door, which wasn’t far, edging around the corner to lean her back against the outside wall. It wasn’t as if she could even see whatever magical wonders lay inside the precious room.
The sound landscape was different in the cavern, with more ticking echoes of shifting rocks, and the voices of the people in the room drifting out, along with Vakar and the lead scientist working to get the other door open. They succeeded, and soon enough the artifact was being towed into the cavern amid much grumbling and terse accusations of insufficient care. There was something else, though. A hum, far away, and a low bass note thrumming just beyond the edge of her hearing. Sounded almost like . . .
“Ship incoming,” she shouted.
“Is it yours?” Vakar asked.
“You wanna wait to find out?”
“Get the artifact out of here as quickly as you can,” he said. From their dismayed smells, Eva assumed that was going to be easier said than done.
The approaching ship’s engines grew louder and louder, until finally Vakar grabbed her hand and tugged her forward. They climbed over rubble from the cave-in, which formed a bridge over the trench. He guided her in a strange arc, presumably to avoid the artifact, then bolted diagonally to the door.
“Wait inside,” he said, leaving her with a hand against a wall. She was starting to be able to make out more shapes within the grayness, splotches of color and outlines of things, and movement. Peering out through the doorway, she saw something coming toward her, but it looked too huge to believe.
And then the explosions started.
The ship had arrived and was firing on them, which answered the question of whether it was El Cucullo. The ground shook as each boom caused tremors to spread like ripples in a pond.
“Get through the door!” Vakar shouted.
“But the artifact!” someone replied.
“They can take it now or take it from your corpse,” he said coldly. “It is your choice.”
No one else argued. Flickers of movement came through a spot in the ceiling that was brighter than the rest of the cavern—a hole, she assumed, made bigger by whatever the attackers were throwing at them. Then the small-arms fire started, and she ducked behind the wall. She didn’t bother to arm herself since she couldn’t hit the broad side of a battlecruiser in her condition.
Just as quickly as it had started, it all stopped when Vakar closed the giant door behind them. Eva nearly gagged on the cloud of fear emanating from two of the quennians. As for the other two . . .
“Our superiors will not be pleased,” Orana said, smelling like cold rage.
“With respect, First Scientist,” Vakar said, “our superiors can lick my cloaca.” He still smelled like nothing at all.
Chapter 23
Save Point
By the time everyone got out of the temple and back to where the ships were parked, they found two piles of wreckage and a conspicuously absent El Cucullo. No sign of the quennian in the isolation chamber, but no sign of creepy-crawlies, either.
Not wanting to attract unwanted attention by signaling her ship, Eva assured them Min would circle back around at least twice before giving up on Eva as lost. So they sat, or stood, or paced in the musky dirt, which looked extra silly with the jaunty bounce in each step caused by the lower gravity.
The sun was still high because of the planet’s relatively long cycle. Eva found this cruelly appropriate.
She refused to look at Vakar, except when he wasn’t looking in her direction. Being angry at him made it easier to avoid asking him questions and having to hear answers she wouldn’t like. It also helped that her vision was still hazy.
Sitting cross-legged on the ground, aching in every bone and muscle, she listened to him extract the scientists’ story piece by piece. Research mission, everything fine until someone opened the mystery box and reached a hand in. Goodbye hand, goodbye person, hello creepy flesh-eating body snatcher. Apparently it was a machine, lots of machines, something like nanobots but vastly more complicated and possibly Proarkhe in origin.
So, they captured the former quennian with an isosphere and stuck her in the isolation unit, then went back to exploring. Ultimately they found their Proarkhe artifact—sounded like a big rectangular container, the way they described it, with inscrutable controls—but couldn’t figure out how to get past the lizard thing, so they waited for it to leave. At some point it got eaten by the nanobots and then they were really stuck.
One of the quennians, Volucia, bounded over to where Eva sat. “You came here looking for the Wraith?”
Eva scowled and didn’t answer.
Volucia smelled embarrassed. “I meant no offense. I was simply curious.”
“Yeah, scientist, professional nose-poker. I get it.”
“We were puzzled as to why he would bring a blind person on a sensitive
mission,” Volucia continued. “You must have been very frightened when he battled the odogong.”
“He—” Eva stopped herself. Sure, why not. One lie was as good as another, wasn’t it? It was that kind of cycle. “Yeah, I was petrified. Couldn’t move a muscle. He had to carry me out of there like a defenseless baby.”
“Really?” The quennian looked at Vakar, who was sifting through his ship’s pieces.
“Oh yes. And that was after he saved me from the, what did you call it? The hungry darkscreamers?”
“He did that as well? Fascinating.” Her smell shifted from curiosity to something subtler; Eva’s translators vacillated between interest and amusement.
Eva leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees and her chin on her hands. “You should go ask him about it.” She lowered her voice. “You know what they say about Wraiths?”
Volucia tore her eyes from Vakar to look down at Eva. “That they are noble warriors who take vows of celibacy in pursuit of righteous causes?”
“They what now?” She’d never heard that before. Eva sniffed. The woman was . . . teasing her?
“You are a very strange woman, Captain Alvarez. I wish you the best of luck in whatever errand brought you here.” Wagging her head, the quennian trotted over to talk to Vakar.
Eva wondered whether he would tell the truth or not, if Volucia asked. She didn’t know why she cared; clearly the woman had already pegged her for a liar.
And she was, wasn’t she? Not all the time, not to everyone, but enough that she could hardly take the high ground when it came to honesty. She’d even used an alias with Vakar, easy as breathing. And yet.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of El Cucullo, which touched down in a cloud of dust.
“All right,” Eva said, slowly rising to her feet. “All aboard.”
Vakar watched the scientists move, maintaining his position.
Is that how it’s going to be? Eva thought. Is he going to wait for me to ask him to come?
He stood still, and Eva couldn’t tell what he was looking at behind his mask. Still couldn’t smell him. Was that how he’d felt all those years, watching her on La Sirena Negra, not knowing what was going on in her head?
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