by A. K. DuBoff
Face flushed, I followed her back to the lift. “I’ll check with the commander.”
I’d prepared myself for some gentle ribbing about the new relationship, especially from Maris. She had always struck me as the kind of young woman who’d get wrapped up in other people’s relationship drama. Just like I had a tendency to joke around when I was stressed, she was seeking her own distractions to ease anxiety about the terrifying unknowns. Nonetheless, the teasing was annoyingly out of place amid our present bid for survival.
After a quick call to Colren about our desire to practice, he directed us to use an unoccupied storage room on the hangar level. After exiting the lift, we headed to the right, past the fighter pilots’ quarters, until we reached a series of larger doors labeled numerically as cargo holds. All the nearby doors had a biometric lock, currently in red ‘locked’ mode.
I frowned at the lock on the first door. “I wonder if our credentials will open it?” I extended my hand to the scanner and placed my palm flat against the surface. The device let out a harsh beep.
“That would be a ‘no’,” Kaiden observed. He peered down the hall. “Hey, I think I see a green light further down.”
The three of us continued another twenty meters to a door that did not appear to be locked like the others. Kaiden brushed his hand over the control panel, and the door opened with a hiss. Beyond, a five-meter-by-ten-meter storage room was completely empty.
I smiled. “Now we’re in business.”
Kaiden stepped inside. “Point any attacks toward the inside. We don’t want to blow a hole in the outer hull.”
“What if there’s something combustible on the other side of these walls?” Maris asked.
Kaiden and I exchanged glances. “Well, let’s not bust through any walls, then,” he replied.
Maris was silent for a moment. “Maybe this is an opportunity for me to try something out. We’ve needed a lot of shields around us, right?”
I nodded.
“This might be a good time for me to practice some of that defensive magic,” she continued. “Like, put a shield around this entire room.”
Kaiden placed a hand pensively on his chin. “You know, that’s not a bad idea. It would contain my magical attacks so we wouldn’t have to worry about damaging the ship.”
“Except, we’d be trapped in the shell with the fireballs or lightning or whatever,” I pointed out.
Maris’ eye lit up. “Unless I can maintain different sets of shields—one around the room and individual ones around us.”
I raised an eyebrow. “That’s kind of a jump from what you’ve been able to do in the past, isn’t it?”
“We’re down here to learn new skills, aren’t we?” She strode confidently into the center of the chamber.
“We are, indeed.” Kaiden followed her inside. “Elle?”
I sighed. “Guess the only way to find out is to try.” I stepped inside and spotted an interior control panel next to the door. After flipping the lights on and closing the door, I joined my friends in the center of the chamber. “Have at it, Maris.”
She took a slow, deep breath and closed her eyes. “Okay, a shield. A big shield.”
Purple sparks danced around her hands, casting a cool glow on her form-fitting clothing. The sparks shot upward toward the ceiling and arced in all directions to form a circular dome. With the rectangular shape of the room, the dome’s edges brushed up against the side walls while open floor space remained in front and behind.
“I don’t think it would be a good idea for the bubble to extend into the other storage rooms,” I stated.
“Can you do anything about the shape of the shell, Maris?” Kaiden asked.
“I’m not sure.” Her brow furrowed with concentration. Slowly, the shape of the shell began to elongate to better fit the proportions of the chamber, reaching almost to the ceiling and stretched into a curved oval footprint that covered most of the deck space.
I smiled. “Hey, not bad!”
She grinned. “It’s actually not that hard now that I’m doing it.”
“See how else you can augment the spell,” Kaiden suggested.
A second wave of sparks passed over Maris’ hands, but as soon as they reached her fingertips, the larger shield began to shudder. “Gah!” she groaned. “So much for this being easy.”
“It’s just like when you have the individual shells around us,” Kaiden said, though I suspected he was making it up to keep Maris from giving up. “Since Toran isn’t here, pretend the room is him.”
Maris raised an eyebrow. “He’s big, but he’s not room-sized.”
“Then make this one smaller and work up from there,” he replied. “Practice the nesting and then bring it to scale.”
She took a steadying breath. “Okay.”
The shell brushing the confines of the chamber shrunk until the dome was only five meters wide. Then, Maris’ hands glowed once more with purple sparks. They extended from her fingers and fed into three smaller domes, one around each of us.
“It’s working!” she exclaimed with a giggle.
“Shed the self-doubt, Maris.” Fire danced across Kaiden’s palms. “Now make this area bigger so we can start to play.”
Maris fed the larger shell until it filled the room. “I’ll just have to keep it simple for now.”
“All right,” Kaiden agreed. “Now, we need to let attacks pass through our personal shells and get blocked by the room shell and the other personal shells.”
“And how am I supposed to do that?” Maris sighed.
“I don’t know. The same way we can do anything else.” Kaiden sent a tiny fireball toward the side wall—no bigger than the end of his thumb, but enough to help Maris focus on controlling the properties of each shield. The lower-temperature orange flame passed through both barriers and struck the wall, leaving a black smudge. “That’s what we don’t want to happen.”
Maris rolled her eyes. “I got that, yeah.”
“Again.” Kaiden repeated the move with another tiny fireball. The orb shot through the inner defensive shield but then sputtered when it reached the outer layer.
Maris grinned. “Just need to picture what I want it to do!”
“While you two keep up with that, I’m going to work on my flips.” I drew my sword in preparation for my own practice activities.
We spent the next half-hour playing around with our various skills. Maris was only able to maintain each shield for two minutes initially, but she eventually improved her concentration enough to keep the large one active for nearly five minutes at a stretch. I hoped we wouldn’t need those skills in the future, but it was comforting to know it was an option for any prospective engagements.
Kaiden eventually grew tired of practicing with scaled-back fireballs and stood back to watch me practice my forms. “You’re looking like a seasoned pro with that sword.”
I smiled over my shoulder while I continued to practice lunges. “Feels like it, too.” I flourished the sword over my head and pivoted on the ball of my right foot to face him. “This ancient muscle memory or whatever it is we got from the artifacts is awesome.”
“Some of these skills we woke up with in the bioprinter, which is even weirder,” he replied, tossing a loose flame between the palms of his hands.
“It doesn’t make any sense, but this magic is a part of me,” Maris said. “I can’t believe I went most of my life without it.”
I stopped my exercises. “Looking back, it’s like something was always missing.”
“I know what you mean.” Maris swelled the latest iteration of the outer shield until it touched the side walls. “After this practicing, I feel even stronger.” The sphere continued to expand, its edges passing through the bulkheads into the adjacent chambers.
“Whoa, Maris, dial it back,” I cautioned.
Her faced paled. “I’m trying” she exclaimed. “It’s like something else is fueling it.” Purple sparks
danced on her fingertips.
The flame Kaiden had been playing with suddenly flared to the size of his torso. “Stars! What…?” He threw his hands wide and the flame dropped toward the deck, fizzling out.
Maris’ shield, on the other hand, continued to grow. Hoping to break her concentration, I ran over and grabbed her right wrist, twisting her arm behind her back as gently as I could.
She sucked in a sharp breath, and the purple shields dissolved. “What just happened?”
I shook my head. “It was like an energy surge or something.”
Kaiden frowned. “I’ve never had that happen before.”
A chirp sounded in my ear, startling me. “Dark Sentinel team to the bridge! We have contact.”
13
I raced down the corridor toward the lift with my comrades. “Contact with what?”
“The aliens?” Kaiden speculated.
My heart skipped a beat. “Is that what caused the magical energy surge?”
His frown deepened. “If it was, then we know even less about them and their capabilities than we imagined.”
“I can’t believe this is happening,” Maris moaned.
I couldn’t, either. Not only was my civilization about to meet genuine aliens for the first time in recorded history, but I was going to be a part of that experience. No matter how many times I thought about it, I couldn’t help feeling giddy despite the danger. No longer was I some anonymous girl from a backwater world—I would be in the history records as someone who was present during what would no doubt be a landmark moment in our civilization, no matter how the events unfolded.
Taking a deep, steadying breath, I tried to mentally prepare myself for whatever was about to happen. “We need to say something about the magical surge.”
Kaiden nodded. “Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.”
We took the lift to the bridge level. As we exited, I spotted Toran marching down the corridor ahead.
“Hey!” I called out.
He glanced over his shoulder then halted when he spotted us. “Good, you got the summons.”
“Do you know anything about this ‘contact’?” Kaiden asked.
The large man shook his head as we reached his position, and we continued down the hall toward the bridge. “I’ve just been going over the data about the anomaly. I was about to have a conference with the team working on it in the Capital, but then the alert sounded.”
“I kind of thought we’d have to wait a long time for something to happen,” I admitted. “There are still several unpaired worlds, so I was thinking that pattern would be complete before the aliens appeared.”
“Maybe our presence here has altered the plans,” Kaiden suggested.
“Let’s hope the aliens are happy to see us,” Maris said.
“Yeah, here’s hoping.” I didn’t have any faith that would be the case.
We reached the entry to the bridge and were buzzed through the door. The usually calm techs were visibly rattled, eyes darting and a slight tremble to their hands. Colren stood in front of his seat, dividing his attention between the holographic data display and the enhanced image overlaid on the front viewport.
The previously faint anomaly was now a bright point of light. When my eyes adjusted to it, my breath caught in my throat as I realized that the light wasn’t the only change. An object was coming through. “Stars!” I gasped. “What is that?”
Kaiden tensed next to me. “I think it’s a ship.”
The craft was recognizable as such only because of its present location and behavior. From its appearance, I would have thought it a clump of organic matter, like moss viewed under a magnifying glass. Thin tendrils looped around each other to form a roughly cylindrical shape, and the craft’s dark coloration was only visible because of the bright light from the anomaly behind it. The more I looked at the form, it reminded me of the tentacle monster and ground covering we had encountered that morning.
“Is it alive?” I murmured.
“I don’t know, but that’s what I saw in my vision,” Kaiden said. “It’s coming true.”
I swallowed hard. I couldn’t get a clear sense of scale from my vantage, but I got the impression the ship was nearly a kilometer in length—far larger than our own vessel, and with unknown firepower. All the same, seeing it put me in an aggressive mood. “We can’t let them invade. We need to stop it!”
“They’ve already begun the invasion, Elle,” Toran said with uncharacteristic grimness in his tone.
“It’s not too late to turn them back.” I stepped forward to the dais with the captain’s seat. “Commander, we’re here.”
Colren didn’t take his gaze off the ship as the final section of it cleared the anomaly. “This is the moment that will define our future.”
“Whoever they are, they mean us harm,” I said.
He nodded. “I know.”
The alien ship had no visible engine wash, but its movements made it clear that it wasn’t traveling on inertia alone. It moved away from the anomaly, looking like it was coming for us, but then halted twenty kilometers from where it had emerged.
“Helm, pull back to fifty thousand kilometers and hold,” the commander ordered.
“Aye,” the helmsman acknowledged, and the front view began to shrink as the ship pulled away.
“We’re just going to let them hang out here?” I questioned.
“Of course not,” Colren replied. “We’ll do our best to drive them back through whatever that anomaly is, but the Hegemony fleet hasn’t arrived yet. We thought we had more time to prepare.”
My heart pounded in my chest. “What if the rest of the alien fleet comes before our backup?”
“We’ll evaluate our options at that time,” he replied.
I took a deep breath. “Commander, there’s something else going on. We were practicing magic on the lower deck, and there was some sort of magical energy surge. It happened right before we got the alert from you.”
Colren’s scowl deepened at the end of my statement. “We noticed some strange activity, too, in the device we use to interface with the Master Archive.”
“What is that, anyway?” Kaiden questioned.
I’d been curious, myself. The commander had mentioned it on several different occasions, but never more than a reference in passing. Considering that he had disclosed there were only four such devices known to our people and this ship had one of them, I would have thought he’d make a bigger deal out of it.
Colren glanced out the front viewport, the site of the anomaly now only a bright point in the distance. “I suppose it’s time I showed you.” He led the way off the bridge. “I must admit that I wasn’t entirely forthcoming about this device and its supposed capabilities.”
“We can’t help you if you don’t share information with us,” Toran said.
“And that’s why I’m showing you now. It wasn’t necessary before,” the commander replied.
Kaiden brushed his hand across the small of my back as we turned to follow the commander out. “We’ll get through this,” he whispered just loud enough for me to hear.
I flashed a slight smile. “I know we will.”
Colren led us back in the direction of the lift and then continued past it. I’d originally thought the corridor dead-ended just after the lift, but the commander touched the wall panel and a compartment opened to reveal a biometric scanner. He placed his palm on the device, and a portion of the wall slid to the side.
I exchanged surprised looks with my team members. “A secret passageway on a spaceship?”
The commander cast me a cautionary glance. “And it will remain need-to-know.” He stepped through the opening into the chamber beyond and we followed him inside.
The room had a similar aesthetic as the bridge, with control stations situated around the perimeter of the seven-meter-wide round room. At its center was the device that was clearly the main attraction—a transparent orb suspende
d on a chrome pedestal. The meter-wide orb glowed with soft blue light.
“Is this crystal?” I asked.
Colren sealed the entry door behind us. “All analyses point to yes, but we have never been able to carve crystals. This device and the three others like it are the only instances we’ve ever seen the crystals in a form other than their natural shape.”
Kaiden twirled his pendant in his fingers; the crystal at the end of the chain glowed brightly with proximity resonance. “What does it do?”
“More than you could ever imagine.” The commander approached the orb and placed his hands on either side of it. As he made contact, the intensity of the glow increased momentarily, then darkness filled the center of the sphere.
“Stars! It’s infected,” Maris exclaimed.
“No,” Colren replied. “This is a ‘no signal’ notification, of sorts. Before the Master Archive was sealed, this is how we extracted information.”
“How?” I asked. It looked more like a giant crystal ball than anything capable of downloading information about past–or, potentially, future—events.
“There’s a visual interface for the hyperdimensional link,” Colren explained. “The user would navigate through a series of visual cues. For example, a digital maze with multiple branches, and at each turn, a world. The selected planet could be spun backward through thought commands to view its past states at the saved reset points.”
“Thought commands? Like, telepathy?” Kaiden asked.
Colren nodded. “The crystal forms a sort of cybernetic connection with the user so long as they are in physical contact with the sphere.”
“Just like how we make a reset point by touching the crystal,” I realized.
“Any world can be viewed?” questioned Toran. “Even uninhabited worlds without a crystal interface?”
The commander inclined his head. “There appears to be a passive record stored at regular intervals, though we’d have no way to access it for a reset without the interface. Anyway, this system sounds more interesting than it was useful in reality. Over the years, researchers figured out how to translate the visual feed into raw data for analysis. That’s how we observed the record gaps we eventually connected to the Darkness.”
