by Celeste Raye
Margie spoke up from behind them. “I know how.” All the men standing there turned to face her. She was flanked by the other women, and as she stepped forward, the other women fell into step.
There was an uneven number of people on that ship. Drake was the only one there without a mate. That thought hit him hard right in the middle of his heart. The women walking toward him were all strong and powerful women in their own right. They had all found mates who were equally strong and equally powerful. Where was his mate?
Why in the hell was he worried about such a thing, and now? It wasn’t something that he thought of much, but here lately he’d been considering that more and more. Maybe having women aboard the ship, women who were so obviously mated to the other men there, was making him soft and sentimental.
Marge spoke again, shattering his thoughts. “You tried to go in before, didn’t you?”
Drake nodded. “I did, and with no success.”
Marge came closer. A glow lifted up through the layers of her skin. Jeval reached out a hand, but she ignored it and stepped closer yet to Drake. Her voice lowered and changed a bit. “The door is the way out. The way in is not the door.”
More riddles. Irritation sizzled along his central nervous system. “Please just speak plainly.”
Talon said, “It’s not her talking; it’s the Oracle.”
This again. All right. Let it be. Drake said, “Can the Oracle speak plainly?”
Marge lifted a hand. Her fingers pointed to the far left side of the slash of pure light and energy. “We go in by what we would imagine would be the exit. When you fly into a space rip—”
“You get out by flying horizontally until you break free of its grip!” Talon turned back to the controls, taking the ship away from the light and toward the darkness beyond it.
They all stood there, not speaking as the ship soared toward what looked like emptiness, but wasn’t, because as the ship hit that space, it changed.
A pulse ran through the ship. A loud cracking sound rang out. Jenny loosed a small scream and Marik grabbed her and held on, his face wan and his features gone deathly still. Jessica’s hands went to her weapons, something that was a little funny since the enemy was space itself.
Talon shouted, “I need help!”
He did. The ship was plummeting downward, falling so fast that Drake’s feet left the deck and his head hit the top of the ceiling. Pain shot through his skull. Margie and Jeval were holding onto the bolted down chairs and Marik and Jenny had been thrown a few feet away. Jenny was crying, and Marik was trying to reach her. Just as Drake was sure the pressure was going to snap his neck, the gravity changed, and he was slammed back to the floor so hard he heard his spine creak.
Blade groaned from somewhere nearby and stood. Talon cried out again. The ship buckled and shifted back and forth as they all staggered toward the control panels and the co-captain’s consoles.
Margie was on the floor, curled up now and not speaking. Jeval hovered over her, his hands resting on her skull and face. Blade moved as fast as he could given that he had a wound in his cheek now; a slice of skin was missing, and Jenny went to him and tilted his head to one side before calling for medication and bandages.
The darkness was complete. It was lightlessness that Drake stared at, awed and terrified at once. That darkness was so…so empty and so pervasive. There was nothing, not even a faint glimmer. He’d seen deep space and its darkness before. This was not that. This was a blackness that was so complete, not even the powerful beams of the ships guiding systems could cut through it or lighten it.
Talon spoke in a strained voice. “I can barely see my controls! I know we need to go to the east, but goddammit, where is east? The controls are spinning so much that I can’t tell.”
Blade said, “No idea. The whole world feels upside down and backward.”
Margie said, “Maybe it is. Go with your gut, Talon.”
Talon said, “Great. Thanks. I’ll do that.”
The sarcasm made Drake chuckle despite the grimness of the situation. The ship buckled and tore through the atmosphere. The space unfolded all around them, threatening to suck them in and lose them in its grip. It was too late to go back now.
They’d passed the point of no return.
Light burst into being. Someone screamed. The hull of the ship let out a long scream and Drake was sure that Margie had gotten it wrong somehow, or she had been used by the Oracle that she carried within her womb to take them all to their destruction.
Then it appeared: a crumbling and monstrous thing made of some material that resembled brick and gable but wasn’t. Tralam was there, in all its ruined glory, and the ship sailed right into its maw.
Chapter 7:
The beasts! Lornia paused, her legs trembling with exertion and her chest rising and falling rapidly from both fear and that running she’d just been engaged in. She stood, back pressed against a wall, as she listened for the creatures.
The machine had come to full life now. All around her, walls had begun to twist and break away and fall into nothingness. Her terror was growing with each step. Soon the fortress would not hold any longer, and the machine would be freed from its long sleep.
The machine that had the power to open every door to every universe ever born and standing—and those dead and deserted as well.
The roaring and gnashing sound to her left broke her out of that reverie. She turned, laser at the ready. She fired at the thing shambling toward her and then she fired again. It went down in a blur of matted fur and teeth. Vomit rose in her mouth, and she had to swallow it down so she could run again, her legs moving faster than she had ever imagined that they could or would.
Time.
It was never on her side. Already night had come and another dawn too. Day was there but it was already heading toward a zenith, and she ran onward. Time sometimes stood still in Tralam, and while she knew it moved on outside those walls, she didn’t know if it had moved on too far, if they had already left or not.
Beings.
Faces.
Voices.
Faster, run faster!
She did, streaking past the broken and buckled walls and never daring to look out of them. The pull of the outer gravity was strong, and she found herself running but getting nowhere. Her hands arced downward and she screamed, a desperate and lost sound in the wind rushing inside the falling fortress.
She grabbed a handhold on one wall and then she went up the remnants of that wall, breaking away from the gravity and running with her body arced outward. That she was running on a wall, her body horizontal, didn’t occur to her. It didn’t even seem odd. She was fighting for survival now, fleeing both beasts and the breaking of the walls that kept tumbling huge boulder-like stones onto the floor.
The place she’d broken into had been sealed for so long that not even space dust had been able to enter. Everything smelled sterile and abandoned. The grit on the floor cut her bare feet, and still, she ran onward.
Night came. The beasts were behind her now, and perhaps they had given up, because she no longer heard them crying and howling. That meant nothing, and she knew it. Many were silent killers, or had been back before they had been walled off from the rest of Tralam and hit with the weapons that everyone had said would put an end to them forever.
There had been a few who had survived, as she had long suspected. They’d either not known to breach the walls or had been unable to. Tralam’s sheer size might have been what kept them from her; perhaps they had fallen into the usual patterns exercised by predators. Eat, procreate, eat the closest prey, and become prey themselves.
If they were capable of breeding, and clearly they were, then there was a high probability that was exactly why they had ignored the few survivors of that forgotten war. That and the fact that the rooms around the machines were the most fortified, and Franchine’s creations had likely devolved over the centuries rather than evolving. Their environment had probably not been conducive to evolution af
ter all.
A phlegmy, ear-splitting scream resounded around the hall. Lornia didn’t have to look back to know what was coming at her; a killing machine bent on murder and feasting on her flesh.
There was a blocked door, and she raced for it, hoping to open it before she was caught. Her hands came out, and she ran toward the wall, trying to remember the codes she had stopped using long ago.
Her hands met the thick metal of the door—and passed through them!
A startled scream came from Lornia’s mouth. Her head turned, and she screamed again as she saw a monstrous thing with thick and scaly skin and a set of long incisors pounding toward her, its short arms outstretched and its far-too-intelligent face wearing an expression of sheer hunger.
Her legs moved, and she was through the door and running.
That confused her. The sound of the beast’s body hitting the door and that faint and angry roar from the other side made her blink. She paused, her body doubling over as she tried to get her breath back.
The beast screamed and battered at the door, but it held. Lornia backed away from it. She’d come to a part of Tralam that had little damage, and she looked around herself. The docking station was not far now, and she shouldered her pack a little higher before heading that way.
I’m changing. The machine’s coming to full life, and it’s changing me as it does.
No matter. Keep moving.
That voice inside her hard, diamond-sharp, and practical, couldn’t keep the bigger worry from coming up.
What will I become?
“That’s a dock!” Drake cried out the words as Talon slid sideways and away from the controls. Drake grabbed them and guided the ship, now limping badly and heeling hard to the left—and away from the docks. Talon found his footing and the two of them got the ship onto the dock and settled in.
Drake took a long breath. “Well, we’re in.”
Talon said, “I don’t even want to know how we’re going to get back out.”
Margie wept softly, her fingers clutching at her belly. Shock was written all over her face, and her features had changed, softened and shifted in a way that said the Oracle had gone silent and now Margie was alone in her head.
They all managed to shake off the damage as Talon set the engines to a locked idle to prevent theft of the ship but enable them to get a running start if it was needed, and Drake was really positive that it would be.
Weapons were gathered. Drake’s weapons were as familiar to him as the shape of his own body, but as he checked them, his mind went back to the bigger questions.
Would he have to kill this crew of people he had brought along with him? The power within Tralam was said to be so strong that it could corrupt any and all.
What if he was the one to be corrupted by it?
Would they have to kill him?
His eyes met Jeval’s. His mind immediately went blank and smooth. Jeval could read, scan minds and secrets, and keeping as far from Jeval as possible had been his defense against that but he didn’t know just how much of his thoughts Jeval could actually read without touching him.
Maybe too much of them.
They all went to the bay door and stood there, all of them grim and worried. This would be either what saved them all or what killed them all.
There was only one way to find out which it would be.
Drake reached for the bay door. He stepped out and onto a dock that was so ancient that it looked incredibly unsafe, all crumbled and broken. That did not bode well, but they were there now, and there was nothing to do but go forward.
The station hung at a cantilevered angle away from Tralam’s outer walls. The sloping floors of the dock tunnels swayed sickeningly with each step. Drake’s breath caught and held as he navigated a particularly weak spot, calling to the others to be careful there.
They pressed onward and then came to a heavy door. Rust and faded splashes marred it. Drake knew that whatever had killed the beings whose bones lay behind them had killed them as they’d tried to run for the station.
“Did any of you see any other ships up on that dock?”
Talon said, “No.”
“I wonder if they all left then.” Drake’s words made his heart beat too fast. What if they had gone? What if Tralam had been deserted and the weapon was now hidden in some other desolate and unreachable section of the universe?
His feet carried him along the tunnel. The tunnel’s expanse smelled old and unused. There was no sign of life. A few painted signs, so faded that the words on them could not be made out, hung from the ceilings. Words had also been placed on the wall, and Drake paused, his hand coming up to wipe the dust away from one wall. He asked, “Any of you know what this means?”
Marik spoke. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Talon? Blade?”
None of them had ever seen it before, and Drake turned away from the rune-like writing, and they began walking again, treading carefully.
Further along, there were bones, brittle and crumbled into small heaps of dust and the occasional fragment. Those heaps of bones continued down the hallway, and Drake’s hands stayed close to his weapons. The bones were old, yes, but who knew if whatever had killed the beings who had once inhabited those bones was still a threat?
The floor’s slope got more intense and then leveled out before going back to a steep upward climb, and an even steeper drop again. It was like climbing hills back on his home planet, and Drake had to remind himself to slow down, to breathe and not let his curiosity and need to get to that weapon cause him to harm himself with a fall or other injury.
The lights were mostly gone; here and there one flickered, buzzing and hesitant. Control panels, smashed and broken, framed the walls in a few spots. They didn’t bother stopping to examine them as they were clearly useless now.
Was everything here gone and dead?
Drake didn’t think so. There was an undeniable current of energy flowing through the place. He just didn’t know what that meant or whether that was a good sign or not.
They came out of the tunnel, and as they did, a shout rang out. It was a shout of warning and Drake’s eyes took in the massive and lumbering thing, one eye glaring from its misshapen head, and his hands dropped to his weapons.
Weapon fire came from behind the beast. The others in his party immediately went into defense mode. Weapons came out and fired. The thing just kept coming.
A woman ran along the wall, up high and right where it met the ceiling. The oddity of that made Drake’s attention waver for just one second, just long enough for the beast to get a swipe in. That swipe sent him flying backward. Pain exploded into his system, and along with it came a sensation not unlike the feeling of fire trailing over his skin.
Grayness swam along the edges of his field of vision. One thought came through his pain: how in the hell was she running that way?
The woman leaped to the floor. The floor cracked and broke beneath that leap. The others were trying to fight the beast back from him, but they were failing; the beast seemed to be immune to the fire of the lasers! It had lost limbs, but new ones were growing so fast that at several points of its body, three limbs grew where only one had been before.
The weapon that the woman drew looked archaic, ancient even. Nevertheless, it seemed to be the only thing capable of felling the beast. It went to all six of its knees, screaming in a high-pitched voice that buzzed through Drake’s head like a band saw. He scrambled on the floor, doing his best to keep from throwing up as the pain grew worse and his body rebelled against the fiery agony that scrolled over his flesh.
The woman pounced on the beast, leaping onto its back. Her arms, very long, incredibly slender, and so pale that they may as well have been made of moonlight, wrapped around its neck and then cut off its breath. She spoke in a voice so husky and so low that he could barely hear it through the remnants of the scream still echoing through his brain. He didn’t understand the language that she was using and his vision had gone too blurry to see her
face and to read her meaning there.
Jessica stepped forward, pointed her laser directly at the one staring eye on its forehead, and pulled the trigger.
No! Drake’s scream was all in his head, mingling with the last fading vestiges of the beast’s horrible bellow. He expected the woman who jumped onto that thing’s back to fall over dead as well, a victim of the laser that it cut through the foot-thick skull of that creature and finally killed it.
She had moved to the side just in time it seemed because just then her feet, bare and also slender and pale, appeared on the floor again. His hand came up and his arms slid forward. The tips of his fingers brushed against the top part of her foot, feeling bone and flesh that was as cool and unyielding as marble. He managed to get only a few words out, “What are you?”
Then everything went black.
Lornia gawked at the beings staring back at her. Humans! At least some of them were. She had no idea what the three other males might be. She searched their faces, hoping to try to reconcile the physiology with the memory of one like them that might be hidden within her brain, but nothing would come to her.
She said, “You have come far, travelers.”
They all continued to gape at her, but none spoke. Frustration set in. Once upon a time, when the founding members of the Federation had calm, she had learned to speak their language. She had not spoken it in so very long that she was not sure that she could.
To complicate matters, she had spoken so little over the centuries, as there was no one there to talk to, that she was not sure that she even remembered how to go about using her ability to speak.
Lornia cleared her throat and tried again. “Travelers.”
Had she said that correctly?
The face of the man who resembled the fallen one cleared a bit. He stepped forward, his dark eyes holding a question. Lornia felt a jolt of recognition, and her eyes flicked away from that man’s face to the profile of the man writhing on the floor in agony.
It was him!
Her dream lover! Confused and slightly dazed, she took a fast step back and away from the man who had gripped her foot before losing consciousness. The one who looked like the one on the floor said, “Help him.”
