“I don’t really know how to describe it,” Cassandra said. “It really did seem like no time had passed between the time that the Covra invaded and when the Denynso released us. I was in the bakery when I was attacked. It happened so quickly that I was still holding the loaf of bread that I had just gotten. When they broke the lock on us, it was instant, as if I had fallen asleep while I was standing there and had snapped awake. At first, I had no idea what had happened. Then I looked down and saw the bread in my hand. I was still gripping it, but it had petrified. When I looked up at the baker, wanting to ask him what had happened, I saw that he was dead.”
“Dead?” Elon asked.
“The hatching within his body had started early and he was already too far damaged to survive when the Denynso came to rescue us.”
“I’m sorry that you had to see that.”
Cassandra had gotten a faraway look in her eyes as she spoke of what she had gone through, but she suddenly shook her head, dissipating the expression so that she focused on him again.
“What does that screen do?” she asked.
She had pushed the conversation completely aside, ended it forcefully and absolutely, so that he had no means of continuing it in that moment. Elon felt a surge of guilt as if somehow, he felt that he should have been able to protect her even though she had been locked by the Covra many decades before he was even born. He followed her gaze to the screen that had caught her attention.
“It shows what is around the ship. It allows the pilot to navigate the ship even when the defense shields are up and cover the windshield in the cockpit. The pilot can use it to see what is ahead, but also what is on either side of the ship and even what is above, below, or behind it. The technology was primarily designed with the goal of protecting the ship during attacks. By being able to see everything that is happening around it, the crew would be able to make decisions about what actions to take.”
“It must be nice to feel like you are always being guarded,” she said. “Like you always know what’s happening around you.”
Elon knew that the sentiment was about far more than just the ship, but he didn’t want to push Cassandra any further. He wanted to say something else, anything else, to keep up the connection that was gradually building between them. He wanted her to keep talking, telling him more about herself. She was reaching for a smaller screen that Elon knew showed some of the floors of the ship and Elon was starting to say something to her when he heard voices coming toward them. Cassandra turned around sharply, staring at the door as if frightened of what she might see until Rain appeared there with the other men close behind.
“Elon,” she said, “do you know what these are?”
Rain was holding her palm out to him and he stepped up closer to look at the small rectangular objects that she held. He looked at them without touching them and then held out his hand so that she could tip the objects into his palm. He brought his hand up closer to his face to look at them and used the tip of his finger to push them around on his palm so that he could examine them.
“No,” he said, shaking his head and looking back up at her. “I’ve never seen them. Where did you find them?”
“In the emergency lights,” his fellow crewmember said.
“Heggs said that they aren’t part of the primary technology,” Rain said. “They turned the lights on and off when we pressed them.”
Cassandra came to Elon’s side and she took his wrist to lower his hand so that she could look at the objects. His skin tingled where hers had touched and he found himself wishing that she was holding him that way on purpose rather than just as a means of looking at something he was holding.
“Do you recognize them?” he asked, looking down at her.
She looked up at him and shook her head.
“No,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like them.” She looked at Rain and the other men. “What are the emergency lights?” she asked.
“They emit a specially enriched light designed to sustain life during an emergency situation,” Elon explained. “They are one of the pieces of experimental technology that was just approved for use in operational vehicles.”
“They are only meant to be used in emergencies?” Cassandra asked.
“Yes,” Elon said. “They were designed to sustain the crew even if they encountered an emergency and had no power and dwindling supplies. The hope was that this would enable crews that might be detoured or find themselves in hazardous situations would be able to persevere longer, hopefully, long enough that rescue crews would be able to rescue them.”
“If they can find them,” Cassandra murmured.
Elon felt his heart clench at the words. He knew that she was thinking of those first, inevitably terrifying moments and days when the Nyx 23 crew realized that they were disconnected from Earth and the mission control that would be able to identify their location and bring them home. Though the StarCity that the crew had traveled on was equipped with sophisticated tracking and navigation systems designed to not only permit them to get wherever they intended to go, but also ensure that mission control would be able to find them wherever they went, Elon had learned that the assault by the Valdicians on Penthos had destroyed those systems. The intricate and unknown weapons that the creatures had used were able to get within the inner workings of the ship and sabotage those particular systems while also assuming control over the actual operation, forcing them on another trajectory that brought them to the crash site on Uoria.
Elon saw Rain look at the crew member she was now calling Heggs, her eyes slightly narrowed as if something had just occurred to her.
“Why were you so upset that the lights had turned on?” she asked.
“I knew that that wasn’t where the light switch was,” Heggs explained. “It didn’t make any sense.”
“No,” Rain said, turning slightly toward him. “That’s not it. It was more than that. You were terrified that I turned that light on and demanded that I turn it off.”
Elon looked to Heggs.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
They had been traveling and working together for several years and he felt that he could trust Heggs, but now he was feeling unsteady, as though he needed to question everything. Heggs looked back and forth among the faces of everyone in the group, almost imploring as if he was looking for any of them to sympathize with him. Finally, he sighed, his shoulders dropping.
“I’ve heard rumors,” he said.
“What kind of rumors?” Rain asked.
“I heard that some of the results of the tests involving the emergency lights weren’t as promising as the development teams would want people to think. They isolated the positive results and used them for their applications for government and military approval.”
“What do you mean the results weren’t as promising as they would want them to be?” Rain asked.
“What I heard is that the emergency lights proved incredibly effective, but also volatile. In certain situations and environments, the lights didn’t operate as they were intended to.”
“What happened?” Elon asked.
“I can’t be sure that any of this is true,” Heggs said.
His voice was weaker, almost tremulous as if he wanted them to simply let the conversation go rather than pushing any further. Elon couldn’t sympathize with him. If this man knew something that could possibly mean that anyone who used the ship could be in danger and hadn’t said anything, Elon no longer felt the need to stand behind him.
“What is it that you’ve heard, Heggs?” Elon demanded.
“In some of the tests, the emergency lights worked in reverse of what they were supposed to do.”
“What do you mean?” Cassandra asked.
“Rather than producing extra oxygen and letting out nutrients that the crew could absorb through their skin, the lights began to break down the oxygen in the room and draw vital nutrients out of them. There were a few tests where the ship itself began to collapse.”
E
lon felt himself shudder.
“Why did you never say anything?” he asked.
“Like I said, they were just rumors. I didn’t know if there was any truth to it, and I didn’t want to compromise our mission based on something that I had just overheard.”
“You should have approached command,” Elon said. “You should have told them what you had heard. It doesn’t matter what you thought about it or even if it was true. It is the responsibility of every one of us to make sure that the ship and the crew within it are kept as safe as possible. That is the reason that we were chosen to be a part of this mission.”
“What he should have done or what he didn’t do doesn’t really matter now,” Rain said. “That can’t be changed. What does matter is that we still need to figure out what these things are and why they were put in place.”
“And who put them there,” Cassandra said. She looked at the objects in Elon’s hand again. “Is it possible that they are actually a form of protection?” she asked.
“Protection?” Rain asked.
“What if the rumors that Heggs heard were true? Even though the technology was put through, if someone knew about what happened in those tests, they might have started working on a way to combat those reactions.”
“Why do that rather than revealing the potential for that to happen and ensuring that the technology wasn’t put into ships until it was perfected?”
“It would be too complicated and time-consuming,” Elon said, what Cassandra was saying starting to clarify in his mind. “There are several levels of approval that any new technology has to go through before it is fully accepted and allowed to be used. Once it has progressed through a higher level, the lower levels are not able to make any changes to their original evaluation. This is meant to ensure that each of the levels does their job as thoroughly as possible, but it means that if someone on one of the first levels of approval wasn’t aware of those results until after the technology had been passed along to the next level, they wouldn’t be able to just do something about it. Their only recourse would be to wait until the technology went through the rest of the levels to ensure that they didn’t uncover the same results, and then file a request for additional review and amendment of findings. That can take weeks, even months, to go through the committees, and if they did get the opportunity to do the amendment, they would need to provide extensive evidence. By the time that all of that was accomplished, something horrible could have already happened.”
“So instead they started to develop technology that would combat the potential disaster, hoping that they would be able to finish that in a shorter time,” Cassandra said.
“These pieces are there to prevent the emergency lights from malfunctioning?” Heggs asked.
“Could be,” Elon said. “That would mean that this ship is even safer than we originally thought.”
“And if you’re wrong?” Rain asked.
The rest of the group looked at her and Elon felt the hope that had started to build inside of him fading.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“You are only conjecturing,” she said. “You don’t know. Just as easily as these could be something meant to protect those on the ship, they could be something designed to create danger. We don’t know.”
“So, what are we supposed to do?” Heggs asked.
“We have to keep looking,” Rain said. “We need to check every emergency light to find out if they all have these, and then we need to find out what they are and what they do. The army wants to leave very soon. We are running out of time.”
“Elon hasn’t finished showing me all of the controls,” Cassandra said. “I haven’t been able to check the mechanics or make sure that it is safely functional yet.”
“That will have to wait,” Rain said. “For now, I think that it’s more important that we find the other emergency lights and see if they have those switches on them. From there, we can decide what we’re going to do.”
Though he could sense the tension that Cassandra was feeling and the urgency she felt to examine the ship itself, she didn’t argue. Her compliance was a reminder of the strange dual balance that they currently had within the ship. Michael and Cassandra had obvious respect for Rain and her leadership, harkening back to the mission that they had served together so many years before, while he and Heggs were kept on the outside, distanced from the relationship and maintaining their own sense of hierarchy between them. It suddenly felt as though there was a question of validity within their tenuously combined forces. Was Rain more in control because of the status of their previous mission, and by merit of their establishment both on Earth and on Uoria long before the others? Or was Elon more in control because he and Heggs were contemporary to the technology that they were using and much of the conflict in which they were embroiled, somehow making them more valid?
Chapter Twenty-Six
It felt odd to be back in the ship and George felt on guard from the moment that he stepped inside. There was a different feeling within the vessel, almost as though they were actually walking through a different ship, a different space than he had inhabited before crossing the desert to the compound. There was a slight chill in the atmosphere, but he felt it within himself rather than on his skin as he passed through the main section of the ship and started for the infirmary.
He had hesitated to go along with the man who had come to the compound to retrieve him. George didn’t recognize Mhavrych as someone that they had encountered or who was in the compound, but he assured him that he knew Maxim, and mentioned that Ivy asked for him. George had felt an immediate surge of protectiveness when Mhavrych said her name. Though he and Ivy had not had the opportunity to spend much time together since her arrival on Uoria, he still considered her one of his closest friends. He knew that it was often viewed as inappropriate for a scientist to consider his assistant a friend, especially when that assistant was a young, attractive woman, but George had never fallen into that entanglement with Ivy. He could honestly say that he had never even felt a glimmer of attraction toward her or desired anything more of the long hours that they spent alone together in the lab than the professional cooperation that they used to push his research forward. Instead, he admired her for her intelligence and willingness to challenge herself in all that they did, throwing herself completely into any project or offshoot that he presented to her without question. Even when they realized that work that they were doing was a dead end or that they weren’t going to be able to accomplish what they thought they were, she was never discouraged. Instead, she boosted his spirits by reminding him that even a failure in science is an opportunity to learn, and encouraging him to use what he had discovered through his most recent thwarted research to fuel the next exploration.
Their time in the lab together had allowed him to learn about her and he had come to appreciate having her there to listen to him when he needed to talk. It was a relationship that was meaningful, but one that had been threatened severely by their separate journeys to Uoria. He hadn’t anticipated her going to the distant planet with him to work on the biological research projects that he had planned. She had told him that she wouldn’t be able to attend with him and George admitted that he had been angry with her for being so willing to give up the opportunity that the trip offered. This was a chance for her to see, experience, and learn things that she never would have if she remained on Earth, and for them to build on their knowledge and create new projects and experiments. That anger, though, had only been increased when she had shown up, unexpected and unannounced. Her sudden appearance had created tension in the relationship with the Denynso but also hurt Zsilvia.
He already knew by the time that Ivy arrived that he was falling in love with the Denynso woman, but she hadn’t yet come to terms with her feelings for him. Ivy’s intrusive arrival had not only shown that she had an impetuous, somewhat arrogant streak that he hadn’t seen before, but had also alienated Zsilvia from him, sparking within her the uncertainties
and discomfort that nearly prevented them from ever being together.
In the time that had passed since that difficult time in the Denynso compound, Ivy and Zsilvia had gotten to know each other and were beginning to consider one another friends. It was a relief to see his mate feel comfortable around Ivy and to know that he could resume the alliance with Ivy without risking hurting Zsilvia in any way. Though he relied far more heavily on Zsilvia for companionship and support, no longer feeling as though Ivy was the only person in his world who he could trust, he liked knowing that his work was no longer being held back and that he could feel confident knowing that he had someone familiar with him now that he had made the decision that he would not be returning to Earth.
This had made it so that hearing that she needed him brought George into immediate action, even though he didn’t know Mhavrych or how he could be connected to Ivy. Zsilvia had encouraged him to go, reassuring him that she would be fine in the compound for a short time without him. George didn’t like the thought of them being apart. Ever since they had gotten out of the laboratory in the University, he had gone to great lengths to make sure that they were close to each other as much as possible. Being together meant he knew that she was safe and he could do whatever he could to protect her. If they were apart, even if it was only for a short time, he would question every moment if she was safe or if she was facing the same type of unexpected danger that they had encountered when they were in the University lab before Samira and Ty’s wedding.
Getting to the ship had been far faster than George had anticipated. He had prepared for another crossing like the one that they had undertaken when they first headed to the compound, but instead, Mhavrych had led him down into a quarry and then through tunnels that brought them out into another section of the desert. Before he could even fully process what was happening, they had arrived at the ship. Now he was hurrying toward the infirmary that had until less than two days before housed the wounded people they had brought out of the University, thinking the worst.
The Alien's Tensions Page 22
