by A. K. DuBoff
With Kyle and Nia at the front controls, Kira and Ari strapped into the back passenger area.
Nia examined the shuttle’s navigation instructions. “Do you know anything about these dome districts, Kira?” she asked.
“We’re going to Dome 5, right? I think it’s the seedy part of town, from what I’ve heard. Not sure why an ex-government worker would be hanging out in those parts, but we’ll go where we’re told.”
Once the Raven was in position, the shuttle dropped from the belly of the ship and descended through the atmosphere. Unlike on their previous visit, it was still broad daylight, and they were able to get a full view of the city’s five domes as they approached. Kira tried to spot the valley from the air with no luck.
The shuttle set down a hundred meters from one of Dome 5’s entrances, which was little more than an overhang and a sliding door.
Kira and her team stepped outside, and a wave of intense heat washed over them.
“I really don’t like this place,” Nia muttered.
“You’ve been saying that about everywhere we’ve been recently,” Kyle shot back.
She sighed. “Why can’t we ever get assignments on planets with tropical beaches?”
Kira smiled. “Because we only go where there’s trouble, and no one wants to cause a fuss in a paradise like that.”
“Man, now I’m craving a drink with a tiny umbrella in it,” Ari grumbled.
They stepped through the entry doorway into an intermediary space between the outside and the main set of interior doors.
Two sentries standing inside the door stiffened as the group approached the security checkpoint.
“State your business,” the first sentry asked, placing a hand on his holstered sidearm as he surveyed the group’s armor and weapons.
“Captain Kira Elsar with the Tararian Guard,” she stated. “Our orders should have been filed this morning.”
The sentry’s colleague nodded.
“Yes, residents have been requested to stay in their homes. You should have a clear path to your destination,” the first sentry replied.
“Thank you.” Kira inclined her head and continued past them.
The dome’s interior was less flashy than Kira would have imagined, for a civilization so reliant on technology to survive the planet’s harsh environmental conditions. She’d seen pictures of the city before, but she realized those had probably been of the central districts. Any metropolis had an area that never made it onto the tourist brochures.
They followed a map depicted on their wristbands, since the light armor didn’t include a faceplate with HUD. After a half-kilometer walk, they arrived at a five-story, plain concrete building.
“He… lives here?” Nia questioned with a raised eyebrow.
“You know as much as I do,” Kira replied. “Come on.”
The group headed inside. A reception desk was three meters from the door inside the small lobby, which was framed by hallways marked with stairway and elevator access.
Behind the front desk, the receptionist looked like she was about to call for backup. “Who are you?” she demanded.
“Tararian Guard. Ellen Calleti said she let you know we were coming.”
“Yes, we got the request. You can’t go up like that, though.” The woman looked them over head to toe, her gaze lingering on their weapons.
“We don’t go anywhere unarmed,” Kira replied.
“Our policy—”
“It’s not up for negotiation,” Kira cut her off.
The receptionist folded her hands on the desktop. “Leave your weapons here, or I’ll need to ask you to leave.”
Kira glanced at her exasperated team members.
Kira looked the receptionist in the eyes, locking her in a telepathic link. “You’re going to let us pass with our armor and weapons, just as they are,” Kira said in her mind.
The woman blinked rapidly and placed a hand on the side of her head. “Uh, go on inside. Third floor.”
Kira inclined her head. “Thank you.
“You just used telepathic control on her, didn’t you?” Kyle whispered once they were beyond earshot of the front desk.
“Seemed preferable to a sonic blast,” she replied.
Nia got a wistful look in her eyes. “Things would be so much easier if you could do that on all of our ops.”
They boarded the elevator and took it to the third floor. As soon as they stepped out from the elevator car, a guard posted at the security gate sprang to his feet.
“Hey, you can’t—!”
Before Kira could initiate a telepathic link, the three members of her team had rounded menacingly on the guard.
“Open the gate,” Kira commanded, looking him in the eyes.
He fumbled for the controls, and the gate unlocked with a harsh buzz.
“Have a good afternoon,” Kira said as she walked by.
When they were past him, she turned to her team. “We need to find this Edgar guy.”
Nia consulted her wrist display. “This picture in his file is terrible, but we could probably identify him in the rec room, if he’s there.” She pointed to a directory on the wall with navigational arrows.
Kira nodded. “Let’s check it out. If he’s not there, he’s probably in his room.”
The rec room, as it turned out, was empty. During her brief glance inside, Kira also decided that it looked far from recreational.
Having struck out in the first place they looked, the group continued on to the location of Edgar’s assigned quarters, further into the facility from the elevator. To Kira’s surprise, they didn’t pass any nurses or orderlies.
“Shouldn’t there be more people working here?” she commented to her team.
“Maybe they were sent home with the martial law state,” Kyle speculated. “Just kept critical personnel.”
“Clearly it was the B Team,” Kira replied. “The security is a joke.”
“In all fairness, they’re not used to telepaths and Guard soldiers,” Nia pointed out.
Ari nodded. “I’d be intimidated by me, just sayin’.”
Kira rolled her eyes. When she checked the door numbers ahead of them, she saw they were close to Edgar’s number. “Ah, there it is.”
Bars covered the small window mounted in the door at Kira’s eye level. Inside a narrow bunk was along the left wall and a man sat in a solitary chair facing a gated back window.
“Can you get the door open?” Kira asked Kyle.
He glanced at the electronic lock. “No problem.”
Within ten seconds, the red light had turned blue.
“Wait here,” Kira told her team.
She slowly opened the door to the room. “Hi, Edgar. May I come in?”
He made no indication that he’d heard her, so she stepped inside.
“My name is Kira. I want to talk with you about the pit beneath the facility in the valley.”
Edgar went rigid in his chair. “The voices. The voices are evil!”
“I know.” She crouched in front of the man and stared into his eyes. “I’m here to help you,” she told him in his mind.
He looked back at her, his eyes filled with longing. “Make them go away,” he thought in response.
“I’ll try,” Kira replied, not willing to promise an optimum outcome after what had happened with Cynthia Hale. “But to do that, I need you to be open with me.”
Edgar nodded. “Please. I’ll do anything to make it stop.” The words in his mind were accompanied by a profound feeling of being trapped.
Kira thought back
to Cynthia and how she had been defeated by that sense of confinement. Though it had been too late for Cynthia, Kira had a chance to save this man.
She set her jaw. “Edgar, show me what you saw at the facility,” she instructed telepathically.
“They don’t want me to.”
“Then we’ll make them.”
Kira dove into his mind. A tiny beacon flashed in her mind’s eye, marking the information that Edgar wanted to share but was presently incapable of accessing. She clawed her way toward it, grasping the end of a thread. Holding onto the delicate strand that snaked through his mind, she traced the memory.
Flashes and bursts of emotion washed over her. Darkness. Fear. Whispers. Pain.
It filled her mind, burning behind her eyes.
Perspiration formed on Edgar’s brow. “They’re too strong,” he said in Kira’s mind.
“No. We’re stronger.”
She redoubled her efforts, fighting deeper into his mind as the programming tried to yank the memory from her grasp. But Kira refused to let go. She forced back the mental blocks, skirting around them and pressing inward until the edges cracked.
As she got deeper, the sense of being trapped swelled within her.
They won’t control me, and I won’t let them have this man any longer.
With a final surge, Kira broke through the barriers guarding Edgar’s hidden thoughts.
The desired memory hit her in a wave, threatening to overwhelm her in a torrent of negative thoughts.
“Stay with me, Edgar!” she shouted in the mind of the tortured man. Experiencing the storm that had been raging inside him, she was astonished he had been responsive at all.
Edgar cried out, piercing the silence in the small room.
Kira stayed focused on him as she sorted through the flood of memories. Somewhere, there was a clear path to show her what she needed to know.
At last, a series of images came to the surface. She recognized an exterior security door similar to the facility entrance she’d encountered on the Gaelon dwarf planet and then a control room—but this time, the doorway to the underground was already open.
A half-lit hallway stretched before her as she relived Edgar’s memory. She walked in his footsteps, down the path, to a stairwell carved directly into the stone, as though the very rock had reformed in the desired shape.
The staircase descended on a wide spiral around a central column. There were no landings, so there was no sense of how deep it went, only that it was far.
After what seemed like an eternity in Edgar’s mind, the end came into sight. An open door ahead led to a hallway hewn of the same stone as the stairwell. A persistent hum filled the air, which had made Edgar feel on edge, but he pressed forward.
Through the doorway was a lobby with four corridors leading in different directions.
A middle-aged man with dark features stood in the middle of the lobby, sporting a pleased smirk. “This is a very important assignment,” he said.
Kira watched through Edgar’s eyes as he nodded. “I’m here to serve. What will I be doing, exactly?”
“Come with me.” The other man led Edgar through a labyrinth of hallways.
Kira tracked the movements at first, but after seven turns, she found herself second-guessing her memory of the opening moves.
“Take notes,” she said aloud to her team.
In Edgar’s mind, she rewound the memory and began replaying it from the moment they left the lobby. “Second corridor from the left, third right…” She continued relaying the instructions until her host halted.
Kira held up her hand to indicate a pause to her team. Telepathically, she prodded Edgar to proceed.
Tears formed in his eyes. “They want to hurt you,” he told her.
“I won’t let them.”
“You aren’t prepared for what’s coming.”
The memory advanced, but there were no more twisting hallways. Ahead, the path led to a cavern eerily similar to the one Kira had been to on Gaelon. At the center of a chamber, a black pit plummeted toward the core of the planet.
“This is it!” Kira told her team. “The pit is seven meters straight ahead of the doorway.”
“Got it,” Nia acknowledged.
Kira was about to disengage from the memory, having retrieved the information they needed, but whispers rose from the darkness. They beckoned to Edgar, and he cast his gaze around the room as he approached.
Once at the edge, Edgar looked downward to find the source of the whispers, but he couldn’t see anything more than half a dozen meters into the hole.
“What is this?” he asked his guide.
“This is their home. We offer them an escape.”
The whispers intensified. Fear welled inside Edgar, but he was frozen in place. Within the pit, jewels of light illuminated along the walls in strange patterns that he had never seen.
But Kira had. It was the same form as she’d seen replicated on Gaelon.
She wanted a better look, but Edgar tore his gaze from it, trying to back away from the pit. Something was holding him in place, and his limbs went rigid. Kira’s own breath was forced from her chest as she relived the memory with him.
As the voices continued to swirl in her mind, one rose above the rest.
This one wasn’t a memory.
“Kira, you’ve come back.”
Kira’s blood ran icy through her veins. She’d know that presence anywhere.
“Reya.”
CHAPTER 19
Kira composed herself. She couldn’t allow Reya to sense any fear or doubt. “You’re supposed to be dead.”
“Your weak mortal bodies can’t contain us. Hale’s death was a setback, not an end.”
Kira had already figured as much, given what they’d discovered over the past several days. “Where are you hiding?” she asked.
“Whatever you’re trying to do, it won’t work,” the alien replied.
“That wasn’t an answer.”
“You already know where I am. We know you’re coming.”
Kira was careful to guard her thoughts. She wasn’t sure how she was communicating with the being, exactly, but she couldn’t risk playing into the alien’s figurative hands. The likely explanation was that Edgar was functioning as some sort of conduit.
“You should know by now that we won’t stop until you’re no longer a threat. Submit, and you don’t have to die,” Kira continued.
“We will never submit to beings lesser than ourselves.”
At least Kira could say she tried. Killing was never her first choice of action, but when an enemy wouldn’t hear reason, it was the only path to take. Reya’s stance made the decision to use deadly force a little easier.
“In that case,” Kira continued, “we have nothing more to discuss.”
“We haven’t given up on you, Kira. You can be so much more with us,” Reya beckoned her with a musical lilt to its tone.
Kira mentally scoffed at the alien. “You’re still using that same line? I’m doing just fine on my own, thanks.” She tried to sever the connection, but something was stopping her.
“It wasn’t a request,” Reya bellowed, swelling in her mind. “You will join us and fulfill your purpose.”
“No!” Kira struggled against the mental vise closing in around her.
“Obey! Kill your friends and come to us. You will become what you were meant to be.”
Against her will, Kira’s hand twitched toward her handgun, her gaze shifting to her team.
“Yes, it will be so easy,” Reya prodded. “Slaughter them and relish their deaths.”
“Never!” Kira struggled against her, forced inward by the being’s immense power.
d as her strength faded. A moment later, she couldn’t sense the AI.
She was alone in the darkness.
A burst of energy surged through her. She shredded the mental bonds that had shackled her and lashed out against Reya.
“You will not control me!” Kira snarled in her mind.
Reya recoiled from the sudden outburst, then gathered itself for another assault. “Obey!”
“It’s too late, Reya. You’ve lost.” Kira sent a telepathic spear toward her would-be captor, and Reya screamed in Kira’s mind as the attack found its mark. “We’re coming for you, and you can’t stop us.”
Before the alien could react, Kira sealed off the connection inside Edgar’s mind. The aliens wouldn’t be able to get to him again.
In front of her, Edgar was staring at Kira with a mixture of shock, confusion, and awe. His full attention was on her, but he looked like he wanted to get as far away as possible.
Kira looked down at her hand and noticed the claws poking through her gloves.
Then the pain hit.
“Argh!” Kira dropped halfway to the floor before she caught herself with her hands.
she asked the AI.
Ari was at Kira’s side before the AI could say anything more. “Are you okay, Kira? Aside from the Robus thing, that is.”
“Yeah,” she told him, careful to avoid slicing him as he helped her to her feet. “Minus the part about all of my nerves feeling like they’re on fire.”
The claws receded, and Kira’s skin tingled as the nanites reabsorbed.
“Well, that was unpleasant.”
Edgar blinked slowly as he took her in, now appearing more fascinated than concerned that she’d just transformed into an alien creature before his eyes. Whatever meds they had him on must be good.
“What are you?” he finally asked.
“That’s a long story.” Kira crouched down to look into his eyes again. There was still fear in his gaze—not of her, but of the Trols’ returning.
Kira inclined her head to Ari to let him know she was okay, and he returned to the hall. She brought her attention back to Edgar.
