“He flew at us in a hostile manner,” the soldier said without a hint of remorse.
“But he looks exactly like the ones you have in the casino!”
“Except for the color,” the soldier remarked.
“And the screeching,” another added.
“And the hostile flying,” chimed in a third. “Similar species do not mean similar actions. Surely even a naïve tailless understands that.”
I sighed and shook my head as I thought back to what Tolby had said about his race back in the museum. “You guys really are a shoot first and ask questions never group, aren’t you?”
“It’s just a drone,” Okabe said, surprising me. Of all the Kibnali there, I would’ve thought he would appreciate its loss the most. “I’m sure we can make do without it.”
The drone, now in the corner, rolled to the side. Its eye had a half-inch hole on it, and spiderweb cracks were all across its body, but the drone wasn’t lifeless. Even from where I stood, I could see the pupil dilating and constricting in a vain attempt to regain focus. I hurried over to the fallen drone and gently picked it up. “Can you hear me?”
“Existential panic. Where…brrrrrrrrrrrptttt…where…brrrrppppppt am I? Why is everything dark?”
“Oh god,” I said, feeling tears welled in my eyes. “I am so, so sorry.”
“Theological questioning. Are you a…brrrrrrrrrptt…a brrrpppppt…”
I patted the top of its head even though I wasn’t sure that really accomplished anything. I guess it made me feel like I was offering the thing some sort of comfort in its final moments. “Take your time,” I said. “You’ve got a gummy translation matrix.”
“Are you…an imaginary being of moral goodness and light to usher souls to the next life?”
I laughed and had to take a hard sniff before answering to make sure I didn’t snot all over it or myself. “Am I an angel? Is that what you’re asking?”
“Excitement! Yes, angel. That’s the noun I was looking for.” The drone shuttered, and there were a half dozen pops and subsequent sparks that flew out of its casing. Its pupil stopped its movement. “Fear. System corrupting. Total failure…brrrppppt…total failure…brrpppt. Eminent! Will likely repeat words soon. Repeat words soon. Repeat words soon…”
“Don’t be scared,” I said, equally for my sake as his. “That’s my job as an angel, right? To make sure the lost get home?”
He didn’t say anything else as I held him. This was the first time I’d ever held the dying in my arms, and I don’t care what anybody says, even if he was a drone, he had intelligence, and it was the right thing to do.
The mood was ruined—for lack of a better word—by a horrid wailing and panic-filled, harmonized voice. “Oh my god! They killed KN-E!”
“You bastards!” chimed another.
I jumped to my feet, and the Kibnali warriors spun around, looking for the speaker, weapons ready to blast whoever came at them.
“It was an accident!” I said.
“The hell it was!” replied the voice. “We saw! Blew him right apart, you did.”
“Who is this?” Okabe asked.
“KN-C and KN-B,” they replied in unison.
“Are you drones, too, like your friend?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know! Probably wanting to blast us apart the moment we tell you.”
“No one’s blasting anyone,” I said. “Promise.”
“Then why are you here toting around all those Kibnali with guns?” they asked.
“Because we traced a signal here,” I explained. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that would you?”
There was some commotion over the speakers that sounded like someone toppling backward over an office chair and taking out the table and desktop in the process. “We…might know something.”
“Regretting, now,” said the other.
“Much regretting,” added the first.
“Perhaps you should fill us in then before my soldiers get jumpy,” Okabe said. “Who are you signaling? An invasion fleet?”
“Invasion?” one huffed. “We are plain quiet drones and have no use for invasions.”
“No use at all,” said the other. “Nasty, disturbing, uncomfortable things! Make you late for an oil bath!”
Tolby and I exchanged glances, and I swear I had a sense of déjà vu, or whatever the hearing equivalent was.
“What do you think?” Okabe asked me. “Are they hostile?”
I bit my lip with anxiety. If I went by my encounter at the museum, not a chance. However, my time spent on Adrestia put the Progenitors in a completely different light. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “The facility we came from, Adrestia, had a lot of animosity toward the Kibnali.”
“Is this part of what you can’t tell me?”
At this point, I was going to explain more in detail, I swear, but as I opened my mouth, a crushing headache took hold and only grew in intensity as I tried to push through it. When I backed off the details, the pain lessened. The Universe, it seemed, was having none of this future prediction. “Yeah,” I finally said. “I can’t even get the words out. I don’t think I could even if under torture.”
The captain of the Kibnali grunted. “Perhaps we should test that theory. I’m sure Goshun would approve.”
“You’ll have to get through me first,” Tolby growled.
“You’d stand with a tailless over your own kin,” the captain said, shocked and angered.
“She has full honors,” he said. “She is one of us.”
“Dubious honors at best. Until Empress acknowledges them, I’ll tolerate her existence and no more.”
Okabe cut the argument short with a glare to both. “Quiet. Both of you.” He then redirected his conversation back to KN-C and KN-B. “What about this facility the tailless is in reference to? Adrestia?”
An audible gasp preluded the reply. “We’d never be associated with that facility.”
“Never!”
“Bunch of rogue, revolting, repulsive researchers there.”
“Rascally, too!”
I wasn’t expecting that sort of vehement denial, but I wasn’t about to trust it either. “If you’ve got nothing to do with them, what’s with the signal?” I asked. “How do we know you’re not trying to contact them through spacetime?”
“As if!”
“All we were trying to do was get someone to let us out!”
“That’s all!”
My brow furrowed. “Out?”
“Yes, out! Woke up from stasis not long ago, realized we couldn’t get out since the door was locked. Tried to call for help, but ended up making our power go wonky—”
“So wonky.”
“Finally got the signal out, but the power’s still a bugger.”
Okabe snorted. “The door’s open now. Turn off the signal.”
“Can’t. We locked ourselves out of the control room.”
“Totally locked.”
“Then unlock it,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“Need Progenitor implants to do that,” one explained. “Oh, hey. You opened the front door. I bet you could get in.”
“Totally bet she could.”
Again, there was a round of silent glances between us all. “Fine,” I said, once I was reasonably sure we were all on the same page. “Where do we go?”
“The control room is in the back of the facility,” he replied. “It’s on the map. You’ll see.”
“Oh, and might want to hurry,” added the other.
I cocked my head. “Why’s that?”
“The computers managing the signal have picked up a glitch.”
“A tiny glitch,” added the other.
“Barely worth mentioning, really,” the first went on. “Seems they have shut down cooling to the main reactor. But as I said, it’s a minor problem.”
“Very minor.”
“But don’t worry! Even if it does melt down, it’ll be probably only a fifty-kiloton blast at most.”
“No more than sixty.”
“Definitely topping at seventy-five. Neighboring planets won’t even notice.”
My eyes went wide. “What? We’re all about to be vaporized? When the hell were you going to tell us?”
“As soon as we noticed,” he replied. “Which we just did. You’ve got about six minutes to get there. I suggest you hurry.”
Chapter Nine
Meltdown
I raced over to a nearby terminal where KN-C and KN-B had popped up a map for us. The layout of the facility staggered me. The entire thing spanned at least a kilometer in all directions, including up, and I quickly surmised that, like the Museum of Natural Time, the Progenitors had built this place so it was bigger on the inside than the outside. Portal technology was cool like that.
Assuming you didn’t wipe yourself out of existence. But hey, everything has its risks and rewards.
Once I committed the map to memory, we blitzed out of the room through the doorway poor KN-E had come through and headed for the main reactor.
“Dakota, I have some interesting news,” Daphne said over my comm as we ran.
“Does it have anything to do with shutting down a reactor that’s going nuclear?”
“Is there one? That would explain the power readings I’m getting,” she said.
“Yes, there is one! The stupid drones here locked themselves out of the control room, and the whole place is going to blow!”
Daphne hummed a moment to herself. “You know, I’m having a hard time believing these Progenitors were all that advanced. Seems every power core of theirs we get near goes to pants.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” I said between ragged breaths.
“On the other hand, maybe it’s you,” she said. “Perhaps you’re bad luck.”
“I am not bad luck,” I protested. “I gave that ashi-da-whatever plenty of belly rubs. You saw.”
“Maybe it’s not as effective as your tiny elephant.”
“So what’s this interesting news you’re trying to tell me?” I said as we hooked a left and ran down yet another corridor.
“Oh yes, my discovery,” she said, brightening. “I’ve been sifting through all the records I downloaded before you rudely snatched the cube from me.”
“You didn’t even say you were still using it!”
“I wasn’t, but that’s beside the point,” she said. “At any rate, one of the seventy-eight million records available detailed a unique trait about your implants…well, potential trait. I think you might want to try this out.”
“Okay, I’m all ears. What am I trying?”
“Really quick, though, have they grown through your left arm yet?”
The question was strange enough that I slowed my pace long enough to glance at the arm in question. At first, I didn’t see anything, but after I peeled back my sleeve, sure enough, there was a thin blue line that ran from the inside of my forearm up to my wrist. “Huh. That’s weird,” I said. “They have. I mean, it’s only a single line right now, but yeah, there’s definitely implant spreading through me.”
“Then you’re going to love this,” she said. “You can draw power from the environment now with that arm. It’ll help power your telekinesis in a pinch.”
“Draw power? Like how?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I suspect it pulls from the energy around it. According to these notes in the cube, liquids work the best. But don’t do it too much, because you’ll rapidly drop the temperature of whatever you’ve got your hand in.”
“And?”
“And you’ll have a hand encased in ice.”
“Great. So I’m a giant ice cube maker now,” I said as we flew down a flight of stairs.
“Yup. And you’ll be a hit at parties. You’ll probably also make a fantastic bartender, too.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
We continued on, following the corridor, and it made a gentle, wide right turn before descending with a flight of stairs that had clearly been built for a hill giant and not my little legs. At the bottom, the floors turned from marble tile to metallic panels with no-slip grips. The hall then took us through a number of areas and side rooms that had no doubt been designated for manufacturing and fabrication of parts and goods on account of the machinery in each room. I even caught sight of a fabricator like the one the drone TG2 had used back at the other facility to provide Jack and me with a new set of clothes. And while I was thinking about that little event, I had to admit that the shoes he’d given us had also surpassed every expectation I ever had when it came to comfort and functionality, just like the little drone said.
Apparently, the Progenitors were not only immensely advanced when it came to sheer technology for traveling spacetime, but also when it came to creature comforts like the best shoes in the universe. Man, could you imagine if they had not vaporized themselves out of existence? I mean, what other things do we humans love that they would have improved on a thousandfold? A ballpoint pen that doesn’t dry out when you need it the most? A printer that actually hooks up to your computer correctly? Hell, what about a piano that stays in tune or a spam filter that actually works? I tell you what. If the Kibnali ever developed that, I would gladly serve their Empire till I was a ripe old lady.
Okay, I’m rambling. I know.
We made a few more turns, ran up a flight of stairs, and then hauled butt down a wide hall with a dozen rooms on each side. Each of these rooms were circular and in the middle sat what appeared to be large, upside-down claws, very similar to the webway spires we’d seen on Adrestia.
At the far end of the hall stood an imposing door, maybe four meters high, and next to it floated a couple of drones who looked like carbon copies of KN-E, except one had a yellow eye and the other had a bright green one.
“You’re finally here,” said the bot with the yellow eye. “KN-B and I are so relieved you made it in time.”
“Very!” KN-B added.
“Now if you’d be so kind to unlock the door, we can save our facility,” KN-C said, bobbing toward a console on the wall. “We’re on a strict schedule, you know, assuming you’d like to keep bodily integrity at a maximum.”
“That’s always been a high priority of mine,” I said, hurrying over to the control panel.
I easily made the connection via my implants, and within seconds, I had the screen cycling between several menus. True to the drones’ words, the door to the command center had been locked. Thankfully, unlocking it was a simple matter.
Why, oh why, I didn’t realize how strange that was is beyond me.
At my command, the security systems disengaged. My body shuddered as the horrific noise of metal screeching over metal filled my ears. As the door slid to the side, it did so with the pressurized hiss of hot air with a side order of steam.
“You ready for a sauna?” I said, grinning at Tolby. “I can’t wait to see what that does to your fur.”
“I’d rather not find out.”
“Aw, come on. I bet you look adorable with everything poofed out,” I said. “We should try.”
“Let’s just stop this meltdown,” Tolby said.
At that point, the door had fully opened, and we all rushed inside. The room we entered was bathed in soft, amber light, and the smell of chlorine wafted from it. It stretched maybe fifty meters out and took the form of a lopsided egg. Huge, thick pipes and bundles of wires ran across the ceiling while station after station of high-tech computer banks crammed the walls. In the center of the room stood a ring of consoles that circumscribed yet another miniature webway, while at the far end was a gigantic screen—currently blank—but one that looked awesome to catch the premiere of the next Marco Ocram movie.
“All right, your turn,” I said to KN-C. “We got you in. Work your magic.”
“Excitement! Going to work now,” he said, zipping over to one of the consoles in the center.
A thin wire snaked out from the center of his body and plugged into a jack near the top of the
computer. Within seconds the lighting brightened, becoming a much more soft, whitish-blue in hue.
“Does this mean our crisis is averted?” I asked.
“Positive reply,” KN-C said. “Meltdown has been averted. Glorious satisfaction. My task is nearly complete.”
“Nearly?” I asked, tilting my head. “What do you mean by that?”
Before the little drone could reply, Okabe cut in. “What is this place?”
“Quick explanation: it’s a research lab,” KN-C replied. “It’s studying the effects of gambling on various species. Hence the casino.”
“You expect us to believe this is one big lab experiment?” he asked with a snort. “What about the art gallery we came through? Is that an experiment, too?”
“Negative. The art gallery was installed to raise the happiness indices of all staff assigned to the area. Very popular.”
Tolby looked around and soured his face. “I don’t like this,” he said. “Something feels off.”
“Understandable apprehension, given prior time on Adrestia,” KN-C said. He then bobbed toward another console nearby. “If you don’t believe me, check the logs.”
Okabe made his way to the console but apparently was at a loss for how to use it. “And how do I do that?”
“Instructional advice,” KN-C said, sounding giddy with excitement. “Press the datapad on your right. Holographic displays will then be presented for your browsing.”
Okabe glanced down, found said pad, and pressed one of his paws into it. Immediately, the pad glowed, and the screen flickered to life. “That seems to have done something.”
Energy filled the air. The hairs on my neck stood, and low, building noise, like the spooling of a giant turbine far away, came to life.
“Genetic sequence verified,” said a deep, alien voice. “Kibnali presence detected. Risk of paradox backlash minimal. Termination signal sent.”
“What did he say?” I asked, heart skipping two beats. “What the hell is going on?”
The rest of the Kibnali looked equally surprised and at a loss, but Okabe tried working the console as much as he could. I wasn’t sure what he was looking at—there was something on the screen—but it didn’t matter in the end.
So Close to Home Page 7
