by Rick Partlow
Hell, he was an artificial alien, maybe he was thinking that he wanted to go mate with the smilodon for all Deke knew.
He shook the thoughts off, spared Donald Yu a wave and then started walking towards the landing zone Kara had indicated as the cutter began spiraling downward towards it. The craft's belly jets were screaming, slowing its descent and throwing up clouds of dust and debris that made Deke pause and cover his face with an upturned arm. The cutter settled centimeters into the soft dirt on heavy-duty landing skids and the engines gradually powered down until Deke could lower his arm and approach closer.
He stopped as the belly ramp began to lower, waiting about twenty meters away and watching the swathe of light stretch out from the opening to paint the dry grass with shadows. He could sense Cal and Kara coming up behind him, but not Trint. The paranoid cyborg was probably hanging back just in case, but Deke shrugged it off. These guys had a spaceship with proton cannons; they didn't need to be sneaky.
Deke didn't recognize the three mercenaries that came down the ramp to meet them, other than that they looked about the same as any of the rest of Chang's crew, dressed in mismatched gear and sporting visible bionics. But apparently they recognized him.
"Captain Conner," the one in the lead said with a nod that made his rainbow-colored dreadlocks whip back and forth. "Sorry we took so long to find you...is everyone okay?"
"Where are my wife and brother?" Cal asked perfunctorily before Deke had the chance to answer the man's question. The heavy worlder strode purposefully past Deke, an expression on his face that could have scared off the saber-tooth. "Are they on board?"
"Uh, Captain Mitchell," the tall man with the multicolored hair and two bare-metal arms dithered, "um...I'm supposed to take you back to Mr. Chang and he'll tell you..."
Cal didn't slow down his stride, just marched right up to the man and grabbed him by the front of his flight jacket, lifting him off the surface of the ramp with one hand and looking up into his eyes with a cold, blue gaze. One of the others on the ramp, a short-haired female wearing an armored vest, went for a gun holstered on her chest, but Deke was faster. His pulse laser jumped into his hand and he aimed it between her eyes, shaking his head in a silent warning.
"Let me rephrase the question," Cal said in a quiet rumble. "Where the fuck are my wife and brother?"
The big dreadlocked one didn't even try to break Caleb's grasp, just raised his hands palm-forward.
"They're okay, as far as we know," he insisted quickly. "There's just...there's been some kind of incident and they're kind of...trapped."
Cal set him back on his feet but kept the hand wrapped in the man's jacket.
"Trapped where?"
Deke could see the struggle on the mercenary's face as he debated telling something he really knew he shouldn't. In the end, the real and present threat of Caleb Mitchell proved to be more intimidating than the distant orders of Robert Chang.
"On the other moon," he finally admitted. Then gritted his pointed, metal teeth and finished. "On board a Predecessor ship."
Caleb didn't say a word, but Deke summed up the situation for him.
"Oh, shit."
Chapter Twenty-One
Mitchell:
By the time we reached orbit around the other moon, I'd calmed down enough that I only wanted to rip Cutter apart with my bare hands. By the time we reached the capitol city on the moon's largest continent, I'd settled on just putting a shot right through his forehead: nice, clean, businesslike.
"Just stay calm," Kara whispered as she walked by my side down the cutter's boarding ramp and into the afternoon sun. "Give him a chance to explain what happened."
"I am calm," I grated out quietly, hearing the hollow pounding of my own steps on the ramp. "I think shooting him is a measured response. Hell, he can just resurrect himself, right? So it's not even really murder."
"Do as you wish to him, Caleb," Trint told me from behind my right shoulder. I didn't have to look back to know that his expression mirrored mine and was no more pleasant. "I will make sure none of his people interfere."
I cursed under my breath, knowing that I wasn't going to kill him. Yet.
As intent as I was on Rachel and Pete and determining Chang's responsibility for their current situation, I stopped in my tracks halfway through the courtyard when I saw the aliens. I'd seen their like before, on the Corporate Council base at Petra, but those had been genetic reconstructions with programmed memories; little more than biological robots. These were different in a way I couldn't quantify, more raw and real and infinitely more scary.
But they seemed content to watch us as we passed, their liquid gaze following me especially, I thought. They creeped the hell out of me.
Cutter's people led me through a confusing maze of corridors and broad, open areas under low roofs until finally we came to what seemed like some sort of throne room with a three-way piece of furniture inhabited by three of the Predecessor aliens. I couldn't read anything from their posture or their faces, but they also seemed to be waiting for us, or for me.
Robert Chang was standing there by them and he was certainly waiting for me.
"Captain Mitchell," he began, his tone contrite, "let me assure you, I..."
"Cutter," I interrupted him with a slash of my hand in the air, "unless you want me to do something you'll regret well into your next life, just take me to them now."
"Of course, this way," he said, turning to lead us into yet another corridor. The mercs that had accompanied us didn't follow, I noticed.
It bothered me that Cutter didn't seem as scared of me as I'd hoped. Then again, the fucker was ten shades of crazy.
When we reached the ship, I nearly forgot why I was there. Just the sheer presence of the thing rocked me on my heels. Floating there on a cushion of nothing for thousands of years, still filling the chamber with its inner light, it seemed like some ancient god waiting here in its temple for the chance to return again.
"Did you try getting in?" I asked Cutter, feeling a lot more subdued than I had a few moments before.
"The Triumvirate---that's what I call the three rulers here---wouldn't allow it," he told me. "They insisted that it had to be someone related to them by blood that got them out." He shrugged. "I could have forced things, but by then we'd found an emergency beacon that the cruiser had launched that told us where all the drop pods had landed, so we knew where you were. I thought it would be simpler to just go retrieve you."
I frowned, unconvinced, but didn't comment. It was plausible.
"How do you get in?" I asked him.
"Place your bare hand against the nose."
"Wonderful," Deke muttered from behind me.
I ignored him and stripped off my right glove, tucking it into my belt. I walked toward the ship at what I thought was a normal pace, but it seemed to take forever to reach it, as if it were drawing away from me. When I finally reached it, it felt like the bulk of it was rushing up at me and I raised my hand defensively, without thinking, and then it was against the surface of the ship's flattened nose.
There was a sensation that wasn't quite like touching anything solid or real and then I wasn't outside the ship anymore. I wasn't quite sure where I was for just a moment, but then I was stumbling forward and Pete and Rachel were rushing forward to catch me.
"Cal!" Rachel exclaimed, throwing herself into my arms. "Thank God!"
"I thought we were going to be stuck in here forever!" Pete said, clapping me on the back.
"I'm just glad you two are okay," I said, sighing with relief.
I took a moment to look around and saw a lot of nothing. The interior of the craft was as empty as a taxman's heart.
"What the hell?" I murmured. I reached out towards the unadorned green bulkhead and trailed my fingertips against it...and everything changed.
"Jesus!" Pete snapped sharply and I could feel Rachel jerking in surprise where I still had an arm around her.
One instant, the ship's interior had been ab
solutely empty, bare from stem to stern, and in the next it was fully equipped with furniture, equipment and holographic displays. I stepped closer to one of the displays and saw that it was showing the outside of the ship, where Trint, Kara and Deke were apparently arguing with Cutter about something. The display next to that one showed the exterior of the palace somehow, with Cutter's mercenaries milling around nervously, watched by the vigilant aliens.
The largest one, near the center of the ship, showed a view of a planet from space. I couldn't be sure, but I thought it looked like the system's habitable planet---the only habitable besides the terraformed moons. It was blue and green and inviting, yet somehow foreboding. I shook my head and checked my headcomp, running back the memory of the change in the craft's interior, thinking maybe it had been too fast to follow with my conscious mind. But even running it back a microsecond at a time showed no transition. One moment it wasn't, then the next it was.
"Cal," Rachel said quietly, tugging at my arm.
I looked over to her and saw her staring at the furniture that had materialized out of the walls. There were several acceleration couches as well as what looked like a long row of bunk beds.
"What is it?" I asked her.
"These chairs and beds," she said, her voice cracking slightly, her eyes haunted. "They're not like the furniture I saw in the city, the stuff those aliens use. They're designed for humans."
"You're right, Rache," Pete said and I saw his eyes go wide at the realization. "What the hell's going on, Cal?"
It was a good question, but I couldn't answer it. I couldn't speak, couldn't think, couldn't move. Because something was crawling up my neurolink, through my headcomp and right on into my brain. I knew it was happening, and I knew how: the same way that Cutter had wormed his way into that Naga officer's thoughts using his headcomp, though I somehow sensed this was not a destructive intrusion. I felt as if I were suspended in a twilight haze outside of time, my vision frozen on an image of Pete and Rachel staring at me.
Then I wasn't with them anymore. I wasn't on the ship, I wasn't even on the moon anymore as far as I could tell. I was somewhere in orbit over the Earth, but it seemed much different than the Earth I knew. The continents seemed larger and more amorphous than the ones I'd seen in my days at the Academy, and there was water where there should have been land across North and South America. But there were lights in the darkness as the Western Hemisphere turned its back on the sun, lights that stretched across what would become the Baja Peninsula.
"That was our civilization," he said.
I turned, somehow not surprised to see him there. He was two meters tall, with liquid eyes set in an elongated face marked with striations down each cheek. His hair was feather-like and stretched up his head like a mane; his skin was the consistency of soft, well-tanned leather; he had two thumbs on each hand and his knees bent digitigrade. He wore clothing of a sort: short breeches that reached to those backwards knees and straps that crossed his deep chest, adorned with pouches of some sort.
He was a Predecessor, yet he was standing beside me as if it were the most natural thing in the world, speaking to me in English. And stranger still, I accepted his presence as normal.
"We began our rise from savagery 65 million years before the evolution of humans," he went on, his voice a pleasant baritone that seemed quite odd coming from that too-wide mouth. "We had just begun to stretch beyond the confines of our cradle." The view shifted and I could see the reflection of sunlight off orbital stations, and then further out to domes dug into the craters of the Lunar surface. "Before it came...the World Killer."
An asteroid, a large one with a hard, rocky core. I couldn't tell that from the image, but I knew it, both from school and from the dreamlike certainty of this vision. It descended quickly, striking the center of the Predecessor civilization as if it were aimed for it.
"Why didn't you deflect it?" I wondered, my own voice sounding strange in my ears in this altered state of reality.
"We didn't detect it in time," he told me. "It came in off the ecliptic and didn't trigger our early warning systems until far too late. Our attempts to divert it were futile."
The asteroid struck with a flare of heat and a dust cloud seemed to cover the Earth as death spread across the face of the planet. Time sped up and I could see a few more rockets rise from the surface of the ruined world, heading for the orbital stations or the moon bases.
"Those who could, fled the destruction," he confirmed. "There were not many of us left, no more than two thousand. Yet we survived...and thrived, out there in space."
I saw the orbital stations grow into cities, built from raw material mined out of the same sorts of asteroids that had destroyed their home. Their colonies spread to Mars, then out to the Jovian moons...but not back to Earth.
"Why didn't you go back?" I asked him. I didn't elaborate, because I knew somehow that he was inside my thoughts.
"The planet was a hellish nightmare for centuries," the...well, I couldn't really call him an alien, could I, when we shared the same homeworld? ...the Predecessor explained. "At first, we thought of trying to re-engineer the planet's atmosphere back to the way it was, but that seemed like a huge expenditure for a project with little chance of succeeding. And we saw that a new sort of world would rise from the fires of the old...a world, we thought, we might have a hand in."
"You mean us," I reasoned, looking into his huge, soft eyes. "Humans."
"We are not your creators, Caleb Mitchell." I thought there was a tone of amusement in his voice. "We merely...encouraged certain evolutionary lines and discouraged others. We tried a different method with the race you call the Tahni, with not quite as much success, I am afraid."
"You left," I said. "You left and scrubbed away any sign of your existence on Earth, in orbit and even on the moon. It wasn't until we explored Mars that we found any evidence of you. Why?"
"You must understand, millions of years had passed. We were not as an ephemeral race as yours, mind. We were longer lived and slower to change. But we had spread throughout this galaxy, and we thought you deserved a chance at your own birthright. We left you the jumpgates, and we knew that eventually you would use their existence to puzzle out the mysteries of Transition Space. But we also knew that there were dangers out there, dangers we might not be around to spare you from."
"That's why you sealed us into the Cluster," I presumed, nodding. Or I thought I was nodding. As far as I knew, this whole conversation was taking place inside my head. "So why did you leave us this exit? Weren't you worried we would find the Northwest Passage and expose ourselves to those dangers?"
"Captain Mitchell," the thing smiled at me, somehow. "This is not the Northwest Passage."
I sat up with a start, not least because I hadn't remembered laying down.
"Cal!" Rachel said, stepping over to the bunk I was lying on. "Are you all right?"
"What happened?" I asked her, glancing around. Trint was standing beside me while Deke, Kara and Cutter were all sitting in the acceleration couches just a few meters away...and I don't know how, but I had a sense we were moving. "How did you guys get on board?"
Rachel and the others stared at me for a moment, then at each other, as if waiting for the first one to explain it.
"You let us on board," Deke told me, levering himself up and coming to stand next to me. "Then you told us to strap in..."
"Then you collapsed on that bed," Rachel put in. "You scared the hell out of me."
She still looked scared, I thought. They all did, except Trint and Cutter. Trint wore what I had come to recognize as a thoughtful expression while Cutter... He looked excited.
"Where are we going, bro?" Pete wondered, looking very young to me all of a sudden.
"The planet," I told him---told all of them. "The ship is taking us to the planet."
Even as I spoke the words, the central holographic display changed from a view of deep space to one of the system's habitable planet. It turned enigmatically bene
ath the view of whatever leftover piece of Predecessor hardware had been viewing it these last few tens of thousands of years.
"Why?" Rachel asked.
"How do you know that?" Kara interjected before I could answer the first question.
"This ship has been waiting for us," Trint answered for me. All eyes turned toward him, even Cutter's. "It has been waiting for humans or Tahni to find it, for at least twenty thousand years. Since the Predecessors left the Cluster."
"I talked to one of them," I told them. "An AI of some kind, I guess...it looked like a Predecessor, but it had to be a computer."
"You talked to it?" Pete said, confusion evident on his face. "It looked like a Predecessor? Bro, you've been right here with us the whole time!"
"We didn't see anything," Rachel confirmed. I could tell from the look that she was giving me that she was having a problem believing all this. I didn't blame her one bit.
"The ship's AI penetrated my headcomp through my neurolink," I explained to her. "That's why it couldn't talk to you: you don't have one."
"What did it say to you?" Kara wanted to know. "Why is it taking us to the planet?"
"This system isn't the other end of the Northwest Passage," I explained to her, sliding to the edge of the bed. "It's a corridor, a hub...and the way out it still locked shut."
I stood up, motioning to the image of the planet in the central display. "The key to the door is on that planet, and the AI wants me to be the one to decide whether to open it or not."
"Why you?" Kara asked me, frowning. "Was it because you were the first person with a neurolink to board the ship?"
"I guess so." I shrugged. "It didn't exactly come up."
"No," Cutter said flatly. "It is not just that you were the first person to board the ship, Captain Mitchell." He smiled. "This is more of a sword-in-the-stone scenario, I believe."
