“Do it, Captain.” Irie nodded. “Cass wanted to destroy that Alpha thing. This way, we can.”
“It would be a worthy battle,” Val agreed.
And a profitable one, too, the captain thought with a groan, before nodding. “Fine. Point us at Alpha, and we’ll kill it for you.”
Epilogue: Stranded
Light.
Light washing through the darkness, starting gently at first, and then growing brighter until it consumed everything else before it, becoming brilliant and dazzling.
“Ugh.” A groan, and the woman realized that her mouth was full of something dry and choking. The form on the table wretched and coughed, gagging on the substance that fell from her mouth like slivers of bark and dust.
As soon as Cassandra Milan moved, her body felt resistance, but it broke easily into plates of similar dry, desiccated fragments that slid from her body to the floor to smash into powder. Blue-scale. It had formed plates of material over her body in a protective, suffocating blanket, or a cocoon.
Oh god. I’m alive, was her first thought, and then, Eliard? But her eyes did not reveal the handsome, rakish captain of the Mercury Blade. Instead, they showed her in groggy, wavy focus that gradually grew sharper and clearer, the form of the creature that had been Argyle Trent, freed from its containment cage and standing over her, watching in silence with its two small orbs of eyes.
“Shit!” She panicked, rolling from the metal desk to fall with a heavy thump on the floor. Her limbs ached. They felt stiff, and she wondered how long she had been imprisoned like that, inside the blue-scale virus.
But the thing that had once been a human scientist had not moved, it just opened and closed its slightly pronounced, not-human jaw and clacked its teeth in the air, as if tasting her.
“How did you get out?” she croaked, seeing the remains of the glass containment, shattered on the floor. Had the thing’s pincer finally managed to find a weakness that had eluded it for decades? Or had there been some station-wide malfunction? An accident?
She shook her head, trying to focus on what she could see around her. Any weapons? Only one of the shards of glass, almost as long as her arm. She grabbed it, and felt the sting of the glass as it cut her palm.
“Ach!” Her blood oozed around the cut as she dropped her improvised weapon, only for Cassandra to see that her blood was no longer a bright and vital red, but a deep, deep blue.
“What the hell have you done to me?” she groaned to Argyle, to the blue-scale virus, to the Adiba Research Station itself.
Clack. The creature made a snapping sound with its small and discolored teeth, turning to lope with a gait that reminded her of a dog walking on hind legs toward the door. Once there, it paused, turning around to look at her once more. Clack.
“Do you…you want me to follow you?” Cassandra was finding strength in her voice, and now in her limbs too as she slowly raised herself from the floor to look at the waiting thing. It was still vaguely humanoid, still with its head that was wrinkled and bare, with eyes that were more insectile than human. Argyle Trent just looked at her, waiting.
“Well, I guess you haven’t eaten me yet…” Cassandra took a step, and then another.
Clack. The creature turned and walked out of the medical laboratory, disappearing around the corner. Cassandra looked at the smashed instruments, the dead console screens that had told them about the Q’Lot serums, and she remembered the panicked look in Irie and Eliard’s faces. (Val never appeared panicked by anything, it seemed.) She remembered the urgent shouts and the fighting. With no other way to explain why she was still alive, she decided to follow the creature.
Argyle was waiting for her at the end of the corridor, waiting to see her follow as it turned and shuffled off in that alien gait once again.
“Hey! Can you understand me?” Cassandra shouted to it, but it did not answer nor pause. As Cassandra followed, she realized that her body was not quite so broken as she had thought it to be before. Her body was stiff, and aching, but that was all. Her legs were not in pain, they felt strong even, and her arm—
Cassandra looked down to her forearm where she had been bitten by the mutant rat-thing, seeing that she had the puckered mark of scars across her arm, but the wound was healed. Something looked odd about the injury, and when she brought her arm up to her face, she realized that the scar appeared to be tiny florets of white lines, like radiating ripples, or a lichen.
How long have I been under there? she thought, moving a hand up to her features, her shoulders. Everything felt normal. No strange growths, no loss of hair, no pincers in place of hands. Her skin was still a healthy and normal human tone, but that didn’t mean there weren’t changes happening invisibly, on the inside.
How long did it take for this poor guy to turn into the crab-man? Cass thought in horror. Was her body going to do the same? Was she slowly turning into a monster?
My cut. It was then that she realized that her hand did not hurt at all, either, even after her recent cut. The blue blood had welled and formed a thick covering over the injury and felt as strong and flexible as green wood. “I heal fast, then?” she muttered to herself, lengthening her stride to catch up with the wandering monster ahead of her.
Argyle led her through the station, pausing only to shuffle toward a lift door and, with his claws, wrench open the metal doors with a squeal. He did it as easily as if he were ripping fabric.
I don’t want to turn into a monster. Cassandra’s lower lip quivered. Is this how it happened? Did Argyle spend days, months, or years knowing that he was losing himself? The thought made the House Archival Agent’s legs suddenly lose their strength as she leaned against the wall. A part of her wondered if she even wanted this new life that had been mysteriously given to her.
Clack. Argyle Trent climbed through the gap that it had made in the doors, and as Cassandra neared, she could see that it led not to a lift, but directly to the bottom of the lift shaft with the lift cubicle somewhere far above them. On the other side of the shaft was a hole in the wall that had seemingly been broken, scraped, or blasted out to reveal the darkness of another corridor in the metal.
“Did you do this?” Cassandra whispered as she watched the monster disappear into this blackness. No, he was trapped in his containment cell, she thought. Something else must have made this. But then, how did the creature know of it, trapped inside its cell for decades?
With nothing to answer her questions, she had no choice but to follow Trent, hesitantly, into the darkness. Her eyes suddenly adjusted, revealing the shape of the passageway that they were walking through in crisp, monochrome detail. The blue-scale virus in her blood had apparently been able to change her vision as well, when she needed it.
This had once been a service duct of some kind, narrow, with the walls edged with thick ceramic and steel pipes that must have spun heat and water and whatever else around the station, keeping it alive. Now, however, nothing hummed or chugged with machinery, and there was no light, not that either of them needed it.
“Did you save me?” Cassandra called out as they trudged.
Clack. Argyle did not turn as he made the noise, and the agent wondered if that was an agreement or a dismissal.
They came to a crossroads of service tunnels, and Trent paused, twitching his—its—head one way and another, before finally choosing the direction that seemed to appeal to whatever alien senses Cassandra thought she had to look forward to. They continued walking, and at the next curve of the metal service tunnel, she was suddenly hit by a smell. It was sickly-sweet, and fragrant like blossom. It reminded Cassandra of her time in the Archival Study Gardens, smelling the heady scent of honeysuckle waft over her screens and books as she would sit with her back to a tree. It was a nice smell, until she wondered just what it was doing down here.
The smell grew stronger, more fragrant, almost overpowering as she followed Argyle’s loping trudge, and he followed the curve of the tunnel as it subtly changed color. The monochrome was fadi
ng as a brighter glow replaced it. The glow returned the normal tones and hues to the pipes around her, and Cassandra knew that her alien eyes had readjusted once more to this new parameter.
The glow continued, but started to diminish as Argyle’s steps slowed at the final turn. Cassandra noticed that the pipes and the floor were now dusted with a light silvery-blue color, and when she paused to focus on it, she saw that it was another type of the blue-scale virus, only this one was tiny and delicate. It covered everything, every pipe, every metal bulkhead and panel. And it grew in depth and spread as it reached the mouth of the chamber that Argyle had stopped outside of, until it frilled the edges like moss.
This was the chamber that the light had been emanating from, but had now faded, to be replaced with...stars.
Stars meant outside. Stars meant decompression. The still-human thoughts ran through her mind in a moment, but she wasn’t gasping for air, and neither was she dying. It was then that she saw that the chamber Argyle had brought her to was really a blasted-open crater in the side of the Adiba Research Station. Stretched across its frilled edges, protecting her from the vastness of space beyond, was a gossamer membrane like spider’s silk. She had never seen a covering such as this that could hold all of the pressures of a spaceship inside, or the radiation of space outside.
That wasn’t all that was impressive about this room-like crater. On their side of the membrane, every surface had been colonized by growth. Blue-green moss frilled every surface, before erupting into long green shards of plant life, like a tropical garden. Large, beautiful orchid-type bell flowers sprouted here and there, their petals glowing slightly with a vibrant blush of pink, purple, red, or sunshine yellow.
“It’s…it’s beautiful, but I don’t understand…” Cassandra breathed, in awe at the garden.
Clack. The creature that had been Argyle Trent made another rasping snap of its teeth, before turning more fully to stand and stare out of the garden crater and into the stars.
It was then that the glow returned. It was a light that washed over the entire station, and it grew brighter and brighter until it blocked out the stars behind it, and even the plants in the crater.
And in the dazzling, bright light, the woman who had once been a House Archival Agent, and then a space pirate aboard the Mercury Blade, saw the side of a vast, coral-like structure glide toward the crater.
The Q’Lot ship was docking with the station.
THANK YOU
Thank you so much for reading the Mercury Blade Boxed Set which includes the first three stories in the Valyien series. I am so excited you took the chance to read the stories and I really hope you liked them. If you could leave a review for me, that would be awesome because it helps me tell others about my books.
The adventure continues in the fourth book, A.I. Uprising! Will Cassandra escape the Q’Lot? Can Captain Eliard Martin and the crew of the Mercury Blade really trust Ponos?
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Valyien Boxed Set 1 Page 35
