by A. K. DuBoff
We exited the hangar and took the lift up to the level with Central Command. We were buzzed in at the main door.
Colren greeted us from the center of the bridge. “We weren’t expecting you so soon.” His eyes narrowed when he saw Toran carrying the piece of sheeting. “What’s that?”
“That requires some explanation,” Kaiden said.
The four of us got situated in the conference room.
Kaiden folded his hands on the tabletop. “First off, I saw nothing on Crystallis that would prevent a regular person from setting foot on it. The cloud cover is a hindrance, but once at a lower elevation, it’s more or less like any other world.”
The commander frowned. “I was told it was impossible.”
“Well, either we missed something, or your information was inaccurate,” Toran replied. “Lore and legend can have a way of twisting the truth.”
“What did you find down there?” Colren prompted.
We took turns explaining the events that had occurred since our departure for the planet. The commander sat quietly while we recounted the details, and he became visibly more engaged when we got to the part about the valley and the cavern entrance.
“Now, it does appear that only people with specialized skills can access the Archive,” Kaiden explained. “However, it might not be the people alone. My Laeric is rusty, but I think there’s mention of three artifacts.”
Toran placed the piece of sheeting, which had dried, on the table.
Colren’s face paled. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”
My eyes widened. “You knew about this?”
“Like you said, legend and lore… it’s difficult to know what’s accurate.” The commander sighed. “Let’s hope these are instructions.”
He tapped on the tabletop and made an entry. A moment later, a beam of light projected from the ceiling passed over the piece of sheeting. To my right, a black rectangle two meters in diameter appeared in the center of the previously blank wall. The black was soon replaced by a scanned image of the sheet.
“Now to find out what it says…” Colren murmured, making additional entries.
The image of the screen flipped to its mirror image, and the contrast adjusted so the dark gray lettering stood out from the surrounding black sealant residue. White outlines appeared over the letters, and an overlay of blue text appeared above the original.
“It’s indeed Laeric,” Colren said.
The opening text read:
Those who seek knowledge must be willing to work as one. Three must come together with their artifacts of power. What was done is not fated to always be. Join as one to seize destiny.
Beneath the cryptic phrase were three additional blocks of text containing a string of numbers. The first was labeled as Valor, the second as Spirit, and the third as Protection.
Colren tilted his head. “Hmm. Apparently, we didn’t get the translation right before.”
“Spirit doesn’t sound as fun as Magic,” Kaiden said.
Toran looked thoughtful. “I rather like Protection.”
“Valor has more of a ring to it than Strength,” I said.
“Regardless of the preferred translation of the discipline names,” Colren continued, “there remains the matter of acquiring these artifacts and how they will be used.”
“What are the numbers?” I asked.
“Need to run an analysis,” the commander replied. He selected the three number blocks and instructed the computer to evaluate the sequences. After ten seconds, blue text appeared on the screen with the numbers arranged in a different format. “They’re coordinates.”
Kaiden nodded. “Makes sense, given the context.”
“Coordinates to what?” Toran asked.
“We’ll have to map them,” Colren responded, his fingers already moving over the tabletop. He removed the imprinted sheet and leaned it against the side wall.
A hologram of a star map appeared above the table. Three red dots lit up.
“Looks like planets,” Kaiden observed.
“They’re far apart. We’ll need to jump to get a closer look at each,” Colren stated.
My stomach turned over. “Great.”
“Which one would you like to investigate first?” he asked.
“I’d vote for going after the Spirit artifact, since Kaiden has a better handle on his abilities than us at the moment,” I suggested.
Toran frowned. “I’ve been practicing, too.”
Kaiden’s gaze flitted between us. “Considering we have no idea what kind of challenge we’ll face, a physical or defensive type engagement might be more straightforward than one involving magic.”
I nodded. “That’s a good point.”
“So, me first?” Toran asked.
“Sounds good,” I replied.
“Okay, I’ll arrange the jump to those coordinates. Stand by.” The commander rose from the table and gave us a parting nod.
My chest constricted. “Ugh, I’m not looking forward to more jumps.”
“They get easier,” Kaiden assured me. “You may even stay conscious long enough this time to experience the sensation of your heart being at your feet.”
“I think that’s right around the time I blacked out last time.”
He smiled. “Ah, then you still have the joy of tasting blue and seeing the sound waves.”
I crossed my arms. “That sounds more like a bad drug trip.”
Kaiden shrugged. “They like to leave the synesthesia out of the travel brochures.”
I scowled. “No wonder they always put civilians under while in transit.”
Toran nodded. “But, we need to be alert the moment we arrive. Five minutes to get our bearings rather than two hours of grogginess while working off the sedatives.”
“I dunno, I could go for a nap right around now,” I said.
Kaiden grinned. “Nonsense! That’s what stims are for.”
“Ten minutes until jump,” a woman announced over the intercom.
I sighed and followed my companions toward the door. “Fantastic.”
8
I wished I hadn’t stayed conscious during the jump, but I did.
Kaiden’s irreverent description didn’t do the real thing justice. The initial transition into hyperspace was definitely the worst, when all sense of physical order evaporated, but the remaining duration of the jump warped what little remained of my sense of reality. As I heard colors and tasted sounds, the only constant was my heartbeat—though it was occasionally in my feet and other times in my chest where it should be. I focused on the rhythm and tried to relax.
I had no definitive sense of time passage while in hyperspace, but eventually the synesthesia subsided and the pressure holding me against the bottom of the pod lessened.
A chime sounded over the speaker in the pod, then the synthesized voice of the ship’s computer stated, “Jump complete.”
The seal on my pod released with a hiss.
Shaking slightly, I released my harness and pushed up the pod’s lid.
Kaiden sat up in the pod next to me, wearing only his shipsuit base layer. “Hey! You made it.”
I smiled back weakly. “I’m a quick study, I guess.”
Toran squeezed out of his pod. “I’m with Elle: jumps are terrible.”
“Better than spending years in transit.” Kaiden exited his pod and started donning his outer clothes.
I hauled myself up, bracing on the edge of the pod while my senses settled. “It’s still better than sitting through one of my old chemistry teacher’s lectures.”
Kaiden raised an eyebrow. “That bad a class, huh?”
“He liked to use the analogy that chemistry was the literature of molecules, and would proceed to explain chemical reactions as though it was a bizarre love triangle.”
Toran and Kaiden blinked, then burst out laughing.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Tha
t class sounds amazing!” Kaiden exclaimed.
“Oh, it was, the first year. Yes, the joys of living in a small town when you get the same teacher multiple times. And it was all fine, until he was the teacher assigned to teach Sex Ed, and those analogies reversed.”
The two guys completely lost it. Kaiden dropped his staff on the deck he was laughing so hard, and Toran had to lean against his pod, doubled over. Whether they genuinely found it that amusing or they just needed to release some of the tension from the events over the past few hours, I was happy to see them unwind.
I casually got dressed while I waited for them to regain some semblance of composure.
“So, anyway,” I said when their faces were less red, “just remember that valence electrons are promiscuous temptresses.”
The two men continued snickering while they finished getting dressed.
“Thanks, Elle, I needed that,” Toran said while securing the final clasps on his armor.
I gave a little curtsy. “Happy to be of service.”
“We should assemble our goodie bag of random helpful things,” Kaiden suggested.
“Good call.” I crossed my arms. “Where do we do that?”
“Tami?” Toran suggested.
I nodded. “She did say she’d help out with anything we need.”
“That was before we trashed her shuttle,” Kaiden pointed out.
“Well, we wouldn’t have needed to rip everything apart if we had a bag like that in the first place, so…” I faded out.
Kaiden bowed his head. “Tami it is.”
We returned to the hangar five decks below. Though we considered calling over the comms to make the request, it seemed more polite to go in person so we could apologize again for the mess.
Not surprisingly, Tami didn’t look pleased to see us.
“You’re back. What can I do for you?” she asked with the forced friendly tone of a disgruntled service worker.
“Hey, hope it wasn’t too much trouble to clean up the mess on the shuttle. Sorry about that,” I said, feeling it best to address the issue before asking for a favor. “We had a situation.”
We explained the circumstances to Tami, and her demeanor softened as soon as she realized what we’d been up against.
“That was a creative solution,” she said when we finished. “I’m glad you were able to work it out.”
“Yeah, us too,” I replied. “We were hoping to stock up so we don’t find ourselves in a tough spot like that again.”
“Camera, rope, tape, and paper, for starters,” Kaiden said.
“Tactical accessory pack, basically.” Tami nodded. “We can definitely set you up. Are you heading out again already?”
I looked to my companions. “Not sure, exactly.”
“I guess we need to figure out where on the planet to go,” Toran said.
“All right,” the mechanic said. “If you’d like to finish planning, I’ll gather some materials for you.”
Kaiden nodded. “That would be great, thank you. We’ll call down when we’re getting ready to head out.”
“Sounds good.” Tami turned back to her work.
“Well, that went a lot better than I feared it might,” I whispered while we walked out of the hangar.
“Nah, people in her position are used to picking up after people who make way bigger messes than we did—like getting ships blown up,” Toran said.
“I guess that’s true.”
Kaiden glanced over his shoulder to make sure no one was nearby. “So, about the Protection artifact… how are we supposed to find it? Coordinates to a planet aren’t specific enough to find an item.”
“Colren didn’t seem concerned,” I said.
“Well, Colren also has a crew to manage and bosses to report to.” Kaiden directed us to the side of the hallway and stopped. “As long as the ship is moving, it looks like we’re making progress. And as soon as he sends us down to a planet, it’s on us to deliver, not him.”
I scowled. “You think he brought us here only to dump us off and hope for the best?”
“I wouldn’t put it past him. You’ve seen how much he dodges direct questions.”
“My hope was that he’d warm up after we produced something, which we did.”
“A copy of some text off of a crystal column?” Kaiden scoffed. “Sure, it’s not nothing, but the guy has been tasked with stopping the Darkness. Yeah, a thing they just called ‘the Darkness’ because no one knows what it is. I’ve been involved in this for a week, but the Hegemony has known about it for three months. If they’ve been working on a solution for that long and have turned to us for a solution, they’re all kinds of desperate. You better bet he’d do something like turn us loose on a planet and hope for the best.”
My stomach dropped. “Stars! You think it’s really that bad?”
“I had my suspicions, but I thought maybe I was being paranoid. Based on how he reacted when we brought in that duplicate, though… I think I’d greatly underestimated the situation.”
“All right, no more joking.” I hugged myself.
“No, please do,” Toran said. “I shouldn’t have tried to stop you before. We need to stay sharp, and the best way to do that is by not getting wound too tightly.”
Kaiden massaged between his eyes. “I really wanted this whole thing to be overblown theatrics—the Hegemony following some ancient lore because they thought it would play well in the ratings, while they actually have a real plan going and we’re a distraction. Now, I’m starting to think we are the plan.”
“Yeah, we said ‘we should go here’ and a jump was scheduled within minutes,” Toran said. “People in Colren’s position don’t take orders from people like us under normal circumstances.”
I sighed. “Guys, what have we gotten ourselves into?”
“We didn’t get ourselves into anything. The trouble found us,” Toran said.
“How’d you come in contact with an infected crystal, anyway?” I asked him.
“I was doing maintenance on a crystal interface console.”
“Wait, you know how those things work?”
“The interface, yes,” he confirmed. “Like I said, I’m an engineer by trade.”
I turned to Kaiden. “What about you?”
“There was a crystal in one of the fields I was monitoring for my internship research. I used it for check-ins since it was the most convenient to get to.”
“So, it was everyday life. It really was random,” I said.
“Unless there’s some validity to Colren’s statement that the reality we’re living in now was part of a universal reset no one remembers,” Toran pointed out.
“Is that possible?”
“At this point, I’m willing to believe anything is possible,” Kaiden replied. “But even if it is, it doesn’t change what we’re up against now and what we have to do. They’re looking to us for answers.”
“Our part isn’t going to be finished when we seal the Archive, is it?” I asked.
Kaiden shook his head. “That’s looking less likely the more I learn.”
“I meant it when I said I’d do whatever it takes,” Toran said.
“Me too,” I murmured. “Even though it’s on us to solve, we’re the lucky ones. We’re here—not trapped in a suspended state of nothingness.”
Toran shook his head. “I hope they don’t know where they are or what’s happened.”
I hoped so, too. The few seconds I was floating in nothingness before I materialized on the Evangiel were some of the most terrifying moments of my life. I can’t imagine what it would do to a person to have that stretch on for hours, let alone months. “No sense worrying about things we can’t control, as my mom always used to tell me,” I said, trying to stay positive. “Let’s just focus on getting them out of there.”
He nodded. “Right.”
“The question remains, how do we find the artifacts on these worlds?” ques
tioned Kaiden.
“Well, we know your pendant reacts with the magical energy, right? Maybe we can use that somehow,” I suggested.
He didn’t look convinced. “That was within a couple hundred meters. Searching an entire planet is a completely different scale.”
“There has to be some way, though, right? There must be a signal or something we could scan for,” I insisted.
“You know, you might be on to something with that,” Toran said slowly. “I had a bunch of equipment I’d carry with me for the interface console maintenance, of course, and some of the electronics would go haywire if they got too close to the crystal. I think it’s safe to assume they do put off a measurable energy signature, but I can’t say from how far away it could be detected.”
I shrugged. “Sounds worth investigating.”
Kaiden nodded. “I’ll vote for anything that saves us from aimlessly wandering hostile continents looking for clues.”
“I’ll talk with the comm tech and see if we can figure something out,” Toran offered.
“In the meantime, I don’t suppose I could take a break? I really wasn’t joking about that nap,” I said. “It was dinnertime when I materialized up here—not that that has bearing on the new body, necessarily… I dunno.”
“Yeah, now that you mention it, I’m starving,” Kaiden said. “Why don’t we grab a quick meal and then we’ll get you some sleeping quarters?”
“Sounds good. Toran?”
He shook his head. “I’ll eat while I work. I’ll reach out when I have something.”
“Okay, good luck,” Kaiden bid as he led me toward the lift.
We walked several meters down the corridor in silence.
Kaiden glanced over this shoulder and stopped; we were alone. “How are you holding up?” he asked.
“Keeping the freak-outs at bay, so pretty good.” I forced a smile.
“I can still barely wrap my head around any of this.”
“You seem like you know what you’re doing.”
He chuckled. “Then I’m faking it well. This is so far beyond anything I would have done in my normal life.”
“You seem pretty outgoing.”
