by Mina Carter
It also looked abandoned. He couldn’t see any lights on the hull and the hangar was dark and forbidding. But it was definitely where the AI was taking them. Within seconds, they passed through the bay doors, lights snapping on just in front of them and revealing the hangar section by section.
“It looks creepy,” she murmured, a note of apprehension in her voice that betrayed her feelings. “Like there’s no one here.”
He slid her a sideways glance. Sometimes he forgot just how much she’d been through. She was human, yes, and even a normal human would have perhaps struggled with the transition from life on Earth to that of Latharian society. But not only had she had to contend with an entirely new alien civilization, from what she’d said, it seemed her life hadn’t been an easy one. It had been one of violence and strife, culminating in her own people sentencing her to death.
Anger filled his chest at that thought. How could any society sentence a female to death? Especially one as dynamic and alive as Indra… it was a crime against the goddess herself and he sent up a prayer of thanks that Liaanas had brought her to him.
He did not deserve her, but that had to be a sign from the lady herself, surely? That she’d removed Indra from her own people, who had not valued her or cared for her, and put her in his path. He was Vesh. He would give his own life to protect her… not because of his vows but because, no matter what crimes she thought she’d committed, her life was worth more than his.
“I don’t think there is,” he replied.
The shuttle turned slowly, and they got a glimpse of the other two moving in concert. As one, all three touched down gently, the lights above them creating a small circle of visibility—a world of their own, with the darkness beyond pressing in.
Abruptly, the lights on the AI’s console all winked out and the door clunked as it began to open.
“Well,” he said, standing and making sure all his weaponry was in place. “We’re here. Wherever here is.”
He made sure to exit the shuttle first, hand at the ready to pull the blaster from its holster. A quick scan of their surroundings revealed most of the hangar was still in darkness, hiding whatever else might be out there. The skin at the back of his neck itched. Automated defenses were still a possibility but, given the AI had brought them here away from the raiders, seemed increasingly unlikely.
He spared a glance as the others joined them, leaving their own shuttles. For the first time, the sight of Keris M’rln didn’t fill him with apprehension. What better weapon against an AI than another AI?
“What in the hells is going on?” Seren K’Vass muttered, keeping Gracie at the center of their group, shielded by his larger body. With amusement Nyek realized all three “Lathar,” the AI included, were shielding their humans. Perhaps something in the Latharian genetic makeup forced them to become protective… But that would not account for M’rln. She had no DNA, Lathar or otherwise.
“I have no idea,” he replied. “But the AI from the crash site brought us here for some reason. What that might be, though, I do not know.”
Lights snapped on in sequence, leading them away from the shuttles and toward an interior bulkhead door. He nodded toward it. “It appears, though, that our presence is required. Shall we?”
There was no sense staying with the shuttles, so without waiting for an answer, he headed toward the door, the others in the group at his heels. Their footsteps rang against the deck plating, loud in the silence of the abandoned hangar.
“We’re being watched,” Indra murmured at his side.
He nodded. “I know. I feel it too.”
And he did, the hairs still raised on the back of his neck. He didn’t believe anything biological was watching them but rather someone viewing them remotely. He just hoped if it was the AI, the thing hadn’t gone mad. If it had… well it was just as likely to amuse itself leading them through the maze of a long-ruined base and then vent them to space when it got bored.
“I can’t access anything remotely,” Keris added, her flat mechanical tones jarring to his senses. “All access points are locked down tightly, but I can tell you one thing. This place might look abandoned, but the internal sensors work just fine, which means there’s a generator working somewhere. It’s almost like someone decided to shut down certain areas deliberately.”
Nyek frowned as they reached the doorway. A quick motion had Seren maneuvering ahead of them to secure it as they all moved through into the corridor beyond.
Why would someone deliberately shut down parts of the base if they were fully functional? It didn’t make sense.
“Can you access environmental controls? Or lighting?” he asked. If they could get control of the first, he would breathe far easier knowing that neither the AI nor anyone else could open the airlocks and vent them to space.
“I’ll give it a go. Might need to find a physical access panel and jack in directly, though.”
He nodded, concentrating on their surroundings. The corridor was as empty as the hangar had been, dust motes dancing in the air as lights snapped on. They extended down the corridor to the left.
Watching them for a moment, he deliberately turned and started the other way. The lights didn’t auto-illuminate, just as he’d suspected, and within a couple of steps, a bulkhead activated and slammed shut in front of him, almost taking the tip of his nose off.
He shrugged as he took a deliberate step back and turned.
“Well, looks like we’re headed that way then.”
As creepy secret bases went, this one had to be at the top of the list. Indra shivered and drew a little closer to Nyek’s comforting presence. A hint of a smile crossed her lips as she noted the other humans had all done the same, sticking close to their Latharian partners.
Even Stephens, although he was trying like hell to hide it. She wouldn’t, not when Keris’s metal skin would protect against pretty much anything. Probably up to and including a nuclear strike. But men… and their egos.
It seemed she wasn’t the only one to notice the sudden clumping together of the humans as Nyek raised an eyebrow at her.
“We’ve all seen this movie,” she told him. “Abandoned space station in the middle of nowhere, plucky crew sent to investigate and a mysterious overseer controlling everything.” She pointed upward at the lights.
“Yeah,” Gracie added. “This is normally the part where the idiot of the group wanders off with ‘be right back’ and then dies a horrible death…”
“Or some carnivorous alien leaps out from the shadows, picking us off one by one.”
Indra glared at the shadows, trying to pierce the gloom around them. Anything could be hiding in the darker ones. Abruptly she wished she’d eaten more carrots when she was younger. But since all the food had been vat-grown fungi, reshaped and flavored to look and taste like something else, it probably wouldn’t have helped.
“Bugs,” Stephens commented with distaste. “It’s gonna be bugs. It’s always bugs.”
Instantly Indra resolved to find some cockroaches to put in his bed when they got back to the Izal’vias. Guy had a serious bug problem, perhaps some desensitization therapy would help him. That, or the vid would provide endless hours of amusement.
Before any of them could say another word, the lights all snapped on around them. Indra caught her breath, squinting against the brightness. They illuminated everything, revealing every surface of the metal-walled corridor.
There was nothing hiding in the shadows, and nowhere for anything to hide. The walls were all smooth and unmarked, no holes that looked like they’d been created by claws or anything else.
“Holy shit,” Gracie breathed. “The base is listening to us.”
“Something is,” Stephens agreed. “The timing there is too coincidental. And I don’t believe in coincidence.”
Indra groaned. Somehow the brightness made the abandoned nature of the base even worse. “Great… the only problem is now I’m expecting to see bloody handprints on the walls or on a window or somethin
g.”
Nyek chuckled, shaking his head. “Humans are incredibly pessimistic.”
“Absolutely,” Gracie said, the blaster she’d obviously purloined from Seren held in a low grip. “We come from a planet with a shit-ton of predators, so it’s a survival instinct. Expect the worst, and you’re never disappointed.”
“She’s also a glass half-empty type,” Stephens added. “Miserable cow.”
“Suck it up, muscles,” Gracie threw back and then winked at Indra. “Marines. Muscles are required, intelligence not essential.”
“Hey! We’ll have less of that! You might hurt my delicate feelings.” Stephens chuckled and then looked around again as they moved down the corridor. “As long as we’re not likely to run into those bastard Krin things, I’m all good.”
Krin. Indra shuddered again. She’d heard stories from Stephens and Gracie about the multi-armed alien monster they’d faced that had decimated an entire colony. From what she’d heard, it was the bastard child of a kraken and everyone’s worst nightmare. Certainly nothing she’d want to face. Ever.
The group fell quiet as they were escorted through the corridors, each section lighting brightly ahead of them. The complete lack of other people and the stale tang in the air highlighted the fact that this place had been abandoned for years. It had that… empty feeling disused buildings back on Talax-Four had, with less broken glass and rats all over the place.
A memory teased at the back of her mind. There had been one place like this. With that odd feeling that was a cross between secret base and government experiment facility…
She and a group of other Tazvarth had been chasing down a Keranth ganger on their patch and he’d disappeared down into the sewers of the city. When they’d followed, they’d gotten ridiculously lost and stumbled on an old subterranean complex.
The hackles on the back of her neck had gone up as soon as they’d gotten into the place. At the first sight of an operating theater, complete with restraints on the bed, she and the rest had hightailed it the hell out of there. But she’d never forget the place, or the symbol on the door. Like an A wrapped around the number seven. All very odd.
“If we see any operating theatres,” she muttered. “I am so nope’ing the fuck outta here.”
“Right with you, sweetheart,” Stephens replied, already moving past her.
A dangerous growl caused them all to swing around, sure something had crept up behind them.
With a snarl, Nyek crossed the space between him and the marine in a blur of movement, slamming him up against the wall. His face was a rictus of rage.
“You do not call her that!” he spat, holding the burly human easily off the floor by his throat. “You do not use any endearment for her. In fact, you do not get to even look at her. Understand?”
Holy. Shit.
Indra had never seen anyone move so fast in her life. Her heart in her throat she leaped forward, desperate to get between them before Keris leveled the pulse rifle she held at Nyek’s head.
“Hey… hey… it’s just a figure of speech,” she said urgently, managing to get herself between Nyek and Stephens. The marine was already gasping for air and starting to turn purple. How the hell Nyek was managing to hold him off the ground so easily with just one hand, she had no idea, but he was. Instantly, she re-evaluated how much stronger the Lathar were than humanity.
“Hey… look at me.” Pressing closer, she put her hands on Nyek’s bare chest and then slid them up to his neck. “Please, Nyek… let him down. It didn’t mean anything. There’s nothing between us. I swear.”
Nyek looked down, his gaze capturing and searching hers with searing intensity. Then, after what seemed like a millennium, he nodded and dropped Stephens in favor of wrapping his arms around her.
She smiled, relief rolling through her. Looking into his eyes, she had no doubt Nyek would have killed Stephens on the spot. “Thank you.”
Looking over her shoulder, she motioned to Keris to get Stephens out of the way. The AI hurried to obey, her faceplate blank as she helped the gasping human to his feet. No one spoke, the tension in the group so high that just one spark could set a blaze going.
It took a door opening ahead of them to break it. Keeping his arm around Indra, Nyek started toward it in silence, his head held high. Indra caught Gracie’s worried look and shook her head. She could deal with Nyek. She would deal with him. No one else needed to get involved.
The door opened into another corridor, but this one had windows all down one side. Indra sucked in a breath at the scene laid out before them. The windows looked out onto a large hall filled with row upon row of huge combat bots.
“Drakeen,” Nyek breathed at her side, his voice hushed with awe. “I’ve never seen so many of them in one place.”
“They look like bigger versions of the ones back on the ship.” Indra kept a step or two back from the windows, chills crawling down her spine. She’d thought the things were bad enough in motion, but to see them sitting there, not moving. It was somehow worse.
The door at the end of the corridor opened and they moved on hurriedly. Beyond it was a large room. The center was dominated by a large table with screens embedded in it with more stations around the walls. One entire wall of the room was glass, opening onto a view of… Indra wasn’t entirely sure what she was seeing. It looked almost like the inside of a beehive with rows upon rows of hexagon cells in spiral formation rising from way below their level to far above.
“Whoa, this place looks like some fancy starship bridge. You know, one of those top-of-the-line warshi—” Gracie stopped midway through her sentence, obviously realizing that human tech was a lot less sophisticated than Latharian technology.
“This was to be the savior of the Latharian people,” a new voice sounded behind them, making them all jump and turn to aim. Three red laser sights speared the chest of a woman standing behind them. Indra frowned. How the hell had she managed to creep up on them?
Then the woman flickered and she realized they were looking at a hologram. An incredibly lifelike, realistic hologram, but a hologram nonetheless. She wore a long flowing gown, her hair piled on top of her head in delicate curls pinned by jeweled flowers. Instantly Indra felt grubby and dowdy. Shit… if this was what Latharian women looked like, why the hell was Nyek interested in her?
“Are you the avatar of the base, or of the AI we recovered?” Nyek asked, lowering his weapon.
“I am… was Miisan K’Saan,” the woman stated. “Thank you for recovering me from the shuttle and bringing me here. I was… somewhat cramped in such a tiny vessel. This base suits me much better.”
The two warriors rushed to intake breath. Indra slid a glance sideways to Nyek.
“Does that mean something?” she asked in an undertone.
“Miisan K’Saan was the emperor’s litaan,” he murmured. “His twin sister. She’s been dead for years.” He raised his voice, addressing the woman in front of them.
“You mean you are an AI modelled to look like the Lady K’Saan?”
She shook her head, a small smile on her lips. “I was created with active brain scans mapped onto an advanced-level AI neural network. I am Miisan K’Saan in all things apart from the biological.”
Nyek inclined his head. “Then greetings, Lady K’Saan. Can I ask… why have you brought us here? And why now? You were installed in a shuttle before. You had ample time to reveal your presence and the location of this base.”
The woman walked forward and Indra felt the instant tension in her alien lover. He held his ground, not moving as she reached him but standing right in front of them as she searched his face.
“The time was not right before. Nor were the warriors I met… the fact they were warriors. I do not need Latharian warriors.”
She looked directly at Indra and smiled. “I need women. Welcome to T’Razed, Indra of the Tazvarth.” Her gaze moved on to find Gracie. “Gracie of the Shadows. Your arrival was foretold by our high priestesses many generations ago.”
“Whoa, whoa… time out,” Indra backpedaled, sweeping a hand through her hair. “How the fuck do you know our names? And where we’re from. I never told anyone what my gang affiliation was.”
“Yeah.” Gracie’s voice was hard. “I’ve not been part of the Shadows project for a long time. How did you know that?”
Miisan smiled. “We are the Cabal. For centuries we existed in secret, forming and shaping Latharian society from the shadows. Our numbers were countless, and our reach wide. Our seers knew all and saw all… even the coming of the plague—a virus that would wipe out our species. We built this place…” She spread her arms indicating the window behind them. “But the plague progressed faster than even we foresaw.”
“Why? Was one of them blind or something?” Stephens broke in.
“Please ignore him.” Gracie sighed. “The male of the human species is, for all intents and purposes, a complete idiot.”
Miisan chuckled. “I am sure in time, you will discover that the fate of humanity and the Lathar are intertwined. To answer your question, Jay Stephens, yes, one of our seers was blind but that did not stop her visions. The fault was entirely the Cabal’s. We did not have the correct pieces in play and were forced to adapt our plans at the last moment. A decision had to be made and I alone was left to pass on the knowledge of the Cabal that it might save both our species.”
“You’re talking about the coding discovered in humanity’s genome?” Nyek asked. “Your son decrypted your notes.”
“Indeed.” Miisan smiled and her hologram flickered again. She looked up, a mild look of concern on her face. “My apologies. This base has been abandoned for many years and the generators need time to spool and buffer power. We will talk again. Meanwhile, please enjoy the hospitality of the base. Stay within the lit areas and avoid Sector Four.” An odd expression crossed her face, just for a second, but it was gone before Indra could work it out. “That sector has sustained some damage and may not be safe.”
