Charlie picked up Kalligeneia’s gun.
He fired it twice at the ceiling, just in front of Allambree, timing it just right so as to make the rubble land on the rushing machine.
A large section of the ceiling poured down. Some of the pieces hit Allambree, but most of them crashed down on the device. Of course, they didn’t break through the force-field, but they unbalance it and sent the killer off at the wrong angle again.
Charlie fired twice at the rear of the attacker. He didn’t break through, but the force of his barrage seemed to push the machine forward, farther off position.
Allambree got up and ran back down the stairs.
The alien robot turned on Charlie and then took a moment to calculate. The captain saw his face on the display at the front of the killer machine.
Umbra fired. Her gun wasn’t quite as big as the one Kalligeneia had produced, and again the blast wasn’t enough to break through, but the explosion pushed the attacker off to Charlie’s left a surprising distance.
Charlie aimed straight at the video screen in the front of the device and he fired. As his shot hit, the yellow force-field became opaque and then shattered into the illusion of broken glass.
He took aim and fired again. The machine moved to the side and he missed.
He aimed again.
The alien device turned suddenly to the side and smashed itself into Umbra’s face. She dropped her weapon and tumbled backwards. The machine continued past her and out of the room.
Charlie ran over to the white-haired woman. One of her horns had been snapped and her jaw looked broken. There was red blood pouring from her mouth and out over her ivory chest and shoulders.
Allambree crawled over. He had a thick piece of wood sticking out of his calf muscle. He took Umbra and pulled her close to his chest.
Her teeth were broken. Her lips had burst. The roof of her mouth had shattered. If he looked at the top half of her face, she was beautiful, her fur was beautiful. The lower half was a horror show.
“Goodbye, my friend. I hope you come back and I hope we’re friends again.” Allambree cried shamelessly.
Charlie followed the machine’s path out of the room. He found a broken window which it had flown out of. The attacker knew when to retreat.
7
Kalligeneia and Umbra were dead. Allambree was injured. The killer robot was still out there. Charlie brought the big man a medical kit from one of the shuttles and watched as the archeologist used the futuristic gels and coins to play his own doctor. A few minutes later, he could walk with only a slight limp.
“I’m glad you didn’t die again,” Charlie said to Allambree, with a frown, as they walked back up to the shuttle they had arrived in.
“I wouldn’t have lost much. I’m new. The women had been alive for a long time. We’re all going to suffer for losing their memories.”
“I’m still glad you didn’t die.”
“We need to find out who built that machine. I don’t think Nayara could have done it. No. She couldn’t have. That means there has to be intelligent life on one of those planets she’s visited. Do you know how long I’ve waited to meet a living intelligent alien? A parallel peer? I’ve read literature. I know the culture of dead cosmic minds. But imagine if we could actually have a conversation with them? Charlie, I’ve dreamed about this all my life. I’m sure I dreamed about it in every life I’ve ever had. I don’t care if I die again, or a few more times, just make sure that I get to stick around after we meet the aliens.”
Allambree wasn’t a pilot, but Charlie had no idea how to control the shuttles. Allambree had at least seen it done a few times. The lift off was bumpy and the ship seemed to lurch to the left and the right and back again as they left the Crystal City.
“It’s crazy to think they could die like that and not remember,” Charlie thought out loud.
“Mm. It’s a mercy.”
“We seem to die a lot. I wonder if it’s been like that since the mission began, or if this is new.”
“We’re not Gods. We live like Gods. We have a better Mount Olympus than Zeus and Ares ever dreamed of, but we don’t have the thunder. We’re still mortal. We’re flawed,” Allambree replied in a deep and sad voice.
Charlie noticed. “You and Umbra, you were close?”
The archeologist nodded solemnly. He looked like he was holding emotion back. “I loved her.”
“But… you’ve only been here for a few days. Has it been a week yet?”
“It only took one.”
“Did she-”
“Yes. She loved me too. We were talking about getting married.”
“Married? Seriously?”
“Truly. She was my heart.”
“Then you get to start all over again.”
“Maybe. Or maybe it won’t happen this time. She’d had years of life since her birthday. The Umbra who wakes up today in the Genesis Chamber won’t be the same person. Well, she will be, but she won’t really. She’ll almost be her.”
“She’ll be the same heart, the same soul,” Charlie argued.
“Maybe. But maybe she’ll be just different enough that we won’t get along this time. At what point would her experiences make her an actual fair dinkum different person than the Umbra I knew?”
“You won her in hours last time. Give yourself a few weeks and you’ll find each other. Be patient,” Charlie advised.
They were flying over a thick green forest. The trees were deciduous, but the oversized plants grew so densely that it made Charlie think of a jungle. The growth must have gone sixty feet or more up from the forest floor. He recognized many of the species of plants, but there were others mixed in which were completely unfamiliar.
A grove of trees wore a cross-hatched pattern along their trunks. Their leaves were green and yellow and they made Charlie think of pineapples. A flock of thickly plumaged emerald birds flew through the trees in formation. Something like a heavy moss grew on top of some of the trees. The trees all looked healthy, despite their passengers.
The forest gave way to a crystal clear lake, surrounded by beautiful white sands. There looked to be something like little sand castles resting just outside of the reach of the waves, but Charlie assumed that that must have been an optical illusion.
Just as the beach was disappearing behind them, a large animal, something like a rhino or a hippo, ran out of the bushes and began galloping through the sands and down to the water.
The ship lurched. Charlie fell out of his seat and banged his arm against the wall. There was a loud sound, as if something had crashed into the shuttle. They turned briefly upside down and then began to yaw forward towards the ground.
Charlie smelled smoke.
The alien death machine passed in front of the ship. The central holographic display was a mess of digitized information, but he could see it through the window. It was still firing on the side of their shuttle.
“Parachutes?” Charlie asked.
Allambree looked at him for just a moment, and then wordlessly began typing away on the control panel. A blue light appeared in front of Charlie’s face. He couldn’t see anything else. Not the ship, not the window, not even Allambree sitting next to him.
He reached out and felt a hard surface just a few inches in front of him. It was curved, as if he were inside of an egg.
His stomach told him that he was falling and falling quickly.
Then there was a sudden stop and he found that he couldn’t move at all. For just a moment he wasn’t sure if it was a function of the blue light or if he was paralyzed.
It was a minute or more before movement began to return and the blue light started dissipating. What has been a solid wall of color was changing into a blue mist with holes and flaws. He could smell smoke and salt. He could see sand through the azure cloud. He was on the beach.
Charlie stood up and moved forward, waving the smoke away. It had substance and weight. It felt almost like pushing water away, if water defied gravity.
> Past the smoke, he could see the burning and smoldering ruin of the shuttle, not more than ten or fifteen paces from where he had stood up. Charlie backed away and found Allambree. He was pulling a rifle of some sort out of an upended storage compartment. The fire was only inches from him.
Charlie put a hand on his partner’s shoulder.
Allambree looked over, smiled and nodded. “Good on ya!”
They turned and ran together for the water. Before they got half way, the shuttle exploded in a massive and blistering burst. Charlie was lifted up off of the ground and came down again face and stomach-first into the sand. Allambree stumbled as well, but was quick to get up and push Charlie to his feet again.
They ran to the water and didn’t stop until it was up to their waists.
“I don’t see the robot anywhere,” Allambree whispered, still scanning the skies.
“Stay low.” Charlie began leading the way into a crop of reeds. They were a beautiful light green color. Instead of breaking, they bent when he touched them, almost like hoses.
Starring from behind the reeds, Charlie watched the killer robot rise up and then fly off. It was heading in the direction they had been before the attack. It was going to the Marble City.
November 2281
Captain Sally Brightly’s starship looked ready for the scrapheap. Deep metal scars had been cut into the hull. A vast section had been dyed pastel pink with exotic energy. The pock-marks across the metal corpse made the machine‘s skin look like the surface of a moon. It was visibly leaking atmosphere and fluid, and as it glided through space the engines made a grinding noise which gave the impression that the vessel was being dragged across a stone surface.
The cameras drank her in, as if the UUS Einstein was a warrior returning from combat. Brightly and her crew had traveled farther out into the galaxy than any other ship in history. They had visited and calculated more than two dozen worlds with life forms on them, and more often than not, they had had to fight and kill some of the local monsters in order to leave.
She was famous across Earth and the colonies. She was a hero. They had made dozens of movies about her. There were currently two long-running serials chronically her adventures.
“Sally” was the most popular name for new baby girls that year.
Her estranged husband Kevin was running for Governor of New Jersey.
The planet Hermes-11 was under strict control. The battleship Mandela had been locked in a defensive orbit around the site for over two years. A defensive satellite system even more serious than the one around the homeworld was under construction. The Einstein turned over her controls to the Mandela and slid awkwardly underneath and into docking position.
The propulsion system was smoking and repair crews had to be dispatched immediately from the Mandela before the Einstein’s doors could be allowed to open. As Sally and her officers finally emerged they did so through a cloud of blue mist and to the sound of hammers and buzz-saws working feverishly to prevent the entire chamber from venting.
She was 49 and despite all of the advantages of modern technology, she looked it. Her face was hard. There were disfiguring scars shaped like hands and claws across her jaw and neck. A bright red vein in her neck appeared to glow. She herself was a tiny paragon of muscle, standing no more than 5’3”, maybe 5’5” with her boots on. She wore combat armor, and three firearms were visible hanging from her belt, leg, and shoulder.
She turned her head back and forth, surveying the room reflexively for threats, then turned to the hostess and smiled widely. She stepped forward with her hand out to shake. “Princess Delilliyah, it’s so wonderful to finally meet you in person.”
The young hostess reached out and shook Sally’s hand. The handshake was rougher than she expected.
An incredibly tall man who had been standing behind the princess stepped forward. “Captain. I’m so excited to meet you. Leonard Blythewood. I’m in charge of the excavation. This is my assistant, Allambree.”
The two scientists were about eight feet tall, designed for living and working on low-gravity planets like Hermes-11. Doctor Blythewood looked to be in his sixties. He had a long red and white beard and eyebrows which stuck far out from his face, almost like an animal’s whiskers. When she reached up and shook his hand she couldn’t help but think of Neanderthals.
The doctor’s assistant was a young Australian man with short hair and an incredibly stupid grin on his face. Despite herself, Sally frowned. She hoped she wasn’t there to placate her fans.
“I’ve read your book, Blythewood. I’m amazed at the way you translated their language using simple mathematics.”
The old man smiled humbly. “It came to me in a dream. The Muses put it there.”
Sally arched her eyebrow, straining her neck to meet the professor’s gaze. “The Gods?”
He laughed quietly. “I’m surprised that a woman could travel to the corners of the universe and doubt their existence.”
She shook her head and looked back towards the abused hide of her ship. “The universe has no corners or edges or ending. And it has no Gods but us.”
He pointed at the Christian cross around her neck. “You’re an atheist?”
She ran her fingers over the silver chain. “Of course Jesus exists. Jesus is everything good in us. He lives in us. But the world is as we make it. I’ve traveled farther than anyone, and I’ve never seen morality outside of the human race.”
“So you’re a monotheist?”
“Sure.”
The cameras were rolling the whole time. The princess guided the captain and the professor from the hallway and into another room. Allambree was left behind, as were Sally’s crew.
In the lounge, they were joined by industrialist Werner Gilliam who had been sitting with one of the young and beautiful servers. He sat with his hand on her thigh and a warm smile on his face. She was giggling.
As he saw Sally walking in, with the princess and the professor, he stood and bowed slightly. He spoke in a low and rumbling voice. “Captain Brightly. My children are going to be so jealous.”
“My ship uses one of your engines. I’m very pleased with the performance. Thank you.”
Gilliam laughed. “Of course you do. I’ve worked very hard to make sure all of my potential customers know that you do. But before you leave, I want to have a word with your engineer. We have an upgrade ready for you.”
“I’m not authorized to budget for that,” Sally apologized.
He laughed again. “You should be charging me for the bragging rights. It would be my honor to outfit you.”
“What can you tell us about the technology down there?” Blythewood asked Gilliam.
“Stunted. Horrible, unnecessarily so. Incurious. They learned to do what they believed they needed to do, and never wasted a penny pursuing anything else. I’d call it Spartan…. But the Spartans were never this angry. Imagine if Montezuma ruled the Spartans.”
“Did they ever leave the planet?” Sally asked.
Gilliam shook his head. “No. They would never have had any interest in that.”
The professor elaborated. “We haven’t found many books, only a hundred or so which have survived. They’re more graphic novels than real language. But I don’t know how we’ll ever publish them. They’re terse manuals of torture, interrogation, revenge. Their humor seemed to have been limited to what we’d call physical comedy – the worst and most vicious kinds. They think it’s funny – I – I was reading one of the texts over this afternoon – they think it’s funny when people die. There’s no way around it. Murder equaled humor for them.”
Sally was skeptical. “Are you sure? I mean, humor can be so hard to translate.”
“I’m sure my findings will be debated for centuries, but I don’t see any way around my conclusions. The people of Hermes-11 were monsters. You and so many other good people have donated lifetimes of service to finding a parallel civilization. But it’s a good thing we never met these ones. It’s a good thing
they didn’t have battleships and spacecraft. If they had found us…. Well, they would have brought Hell with them.”
The natives of Hermes-11 had varied in height from twenty to thirty feet. They were long and thin. Their feet ended in two hard hooves and their hands in two sharp pincers. The gravity on their world was one third that of the Earth and so they built great spires and sky-scrapers which reached far up into their sky. They always ended in sharp points, like their claws, like their heads.
They were dark-skinned, and aside from their hooves and pincers, their flesh was even softer than ours.
They had had cars and buses, and even early forms of flying transportation, but these were not made available to the general population. A system of trains was used to move the workers from place to place. The workers were the ones who could not fight. In their society, status was gained by defeating other people in combat. The custom was to remove the left hand of your opponent, and thus deny them citizenship. Without the left hand, a native of Hermes-11 became a slave.
At first glance, their cities appeared to be filled with artwork. There were statues everywhere all with the same theme. They appeared to be screaming metal men, women, and children overcome by waves. The truth was that the “statues” were the actual then-still-living bodies of Hermetic people which had had molten metal poured on them. They were frozen in the terror and pain of their deaths. Then their bodies would be prominently displayed throughout the cities. Often multiple victims would be placed together or upon one another to create even more horrific displays.
Professor Blythewood led his guests on a tour of the best-preserved of the Hermetic cities. About ten minutes into the visit, Princess Delilliyah had to excuse herself and go back up to the ship. The statues were just too graphic. The faces had been perfectly preserved through millennia. The pain was right there, in shining and corroded metal, as if the torture had occurred only days before.
Captain Sally Brightly had traveled the galaxy and she had seen dozens of men die under horrific circumstances. But even she was bothered by what she saw on Hermes-11. Most of the towers had fallen over. Yellow roots had burst through most of the streets and covered the dead buildings like funerary shrouds.
The Secrets of the Universe (Farther Than We Dreamed Book 1) Page 24
