by M. G. Herron
Three seconds later, the center of the oval grew dark and then solidified, filling with what seemed like a thin sheet of black water.
The rift, Eliana thought. Just like the one at the top of the pyramid I came through to get here.
When Eliana stared into the inky blackness, she began to make out shapes of the landscape on the other side. She saw massive roots plunging into thick fissures in the ground, and beyond the cracks, a sheer metal wall curving away from her.
Remethiakara stepped through the rift with a faint ripple. The darkness parted and then came together behind him. The black ripple disappeared a moment later, and the tentacles slithered back into the wall as if they had never been.
Eliana found herself alone in the chamber for the first time. The big meteorite of deep black and rough steel grey stone that the alien called a star shard sat on the floor near the helmet. She was hoping for a more explosive result when she knocked the star shard out of the light beam.
And then what—had Remethiakara noticed something?
It chilled Eliana that he’d left her behind without an explanation. She was just a plaything to him. How old was he? In his perspective, she was an insect. A brief flame of life that flickered and died in a few decades.
What a perspective shift.
Eliana stood. She blinked several times to clear her aching head, and walked around the chamber, searching, circling. The only thing resembling a door or exit was a rectangular crack set into the flat wall. It had no handle or doorknob that she could find. A green glow seemed to shine through the crack, but the line was too fine to see through it to what lay on the other side.
Eliana turned back to explore the rest of the chamber and smacked her parched, dry mouth. There was no obvious bathroom or place to get water, either. The part about bodily functions hadn’t been included in the historical visions. That set her to wondering what else had been held back…and what Remethiakara had twisted to suit his own nefarious purpose.
Would more details about Remethiakara be in that vision-machine? Would it be able to tell her how Rakulo’s tribe came to be involved? And could she access them, like a computer?
The mound remained in that podium-like form with the small star shard and her ring set into it. She grasped it between two fingers and tried to pry the ring up. It wouldn’t budge. It was stuck, the carapace-like material holding it fast.
She stopped trying to lift it, and instead, lay both hands on either side of the ring. She focused, concentrating, and a thrum of electricity—like putting your hand on the rubber-coated outside of a live wire, or holding one of those shock stick games at a carnival—buzzed into her hands and forearms, numbing them.
The wall in front of her twitched and undulated.
Eliana gasped and withdrew her hands. The wall instantly smoothed out again. She drew several shallow, quick breaths. What would happen? It was like using a computer for the first time when you were a kid. Except this computer had pipe-thin tentacles that jabbed into your ears without asking.
Well, she had come out of that experience unscathed, hadn’t she? Eliana inhaled and let out a shaky breath, then placed both her hands back on the pedestal.
The walls rippled again, but nothing happened. She concentrated harder, and slowly the wall pinched together and began to grow out toward her. Distinct forms began to take shape, and Eliana thought one bulge looked a lot like her own laptop at home. She concentrated harder.
The chamber lit up with another phosphorescent flash. An invisible force shoved Eliana back from the pedestal.
Remethiakara stood over her. He squinted his big orb-like eyes at her, then crossed the room and picked up his helmet. He fitted it onto his head again.
“I have killed men for less than that,” he said through the walls. “You would do well to mind yourself.”
Eliana licked her lips, her thoughts racing. Should she apologize? Did an apology show weakness? What was the best move here?
Clearly whatever had drawn his attention outside had distracted him from his anger at Eliana for knocking the big shard to the ground. Eliana glanced toward the wall where the rift had formed. “Did you find something out there? What happened?”
“Nothing you need to concern yourself with.”
“Okay. Um…” Eliana glanced back at podium-like object where the ring was still mounted.
“That star shard is too weak now to make another trip back to your world, if that’s what you were thinking,” Remethiakara said.
He crossed the room and picked up the star shard in both hands.
“This one, however…”
Eliana thought she sensed some emotion in his voice. Desire? Nostalgia? Maybe if she could get him talking…
“When did you first go?” Eliana asked. “To my world? To Earth.”
“Long ago.”
“What happened?” She licked her lips. “Please. Among my own people, I’m an anthropologist. I’m a good listener.”
His face was hidden now, so she gazed into the inscrutable reflective mask. Eliana had the predatory impression that he was wondering at which temperature she would cook best, or how long she could bleed before she stopped breathing.
She forced herself to stare into the blank black face of the helmet with an expression as neutral as she could manage, digging deep into herself. She thought about open air green spaces, about curious children, about the turtle that crawled to the edge of the log, reaching…
“I depleted my last star shard,” Remethiakara finally said, “trying to fix an anomaly that has plagued my people for millennia.”
Eliana inhaled sharply through her nose. The star shards…
“But I have found more, thanks to you. I owe you for that kindness…”
“Oh,” Eliana whispered under her breath. “Oh, no.”
It’s all my fault. Eliana had led him to the star shard. That’s why he was keeping her alive. That’s why he tolerated her insolence.
Could she play this to her advantage?
“Those people out there,” Eliana said. “The Kakuli people, the humans. What do they have to do with you? Or the star shards?”
“I brought them here,” Remethiakara said.
Eliana blinked. “From my planet? You brought them from Earth?
He nodded.
“But why?”
He reached a black hand toward the podium and removed the ring. It had been immobile a second before, impossibly stuck when Eliana tried to lift it, but Remethiakara’s gloved fingers plucked it out effortlessly. The podium fell back into its mound shape, and dimpled back into the soft chair-like shape.
“I can show you,” Remethiakara said.
“I’d really rather not.”
“No harm will come to you.”
Eliana thought for a long moment. There seemed to be no way out of this place unless this strange alien wanted her to leave. She needed him to trust her. Or at least keep her alive long enough to find another way out.
And in truth, she desperately wanted to know more about Rakulo’s people. Why were those carvings of Kakul’s moons in the Mexican jungle marking nothing? That was why she came to Kakul, to search for clues. Archaeological evidence was one thing, but this was a direct line of sight into history itself. Or, at least, into one interpretation of it.
Eliana cooperated, lowering herself into the cavity that was shaped to cradle her body. She was expecting the way it moved ever so slightly beneath her now, breathing. Not accustomed to it, but at least she knew what to expect.
Remethiakara stepped up next to her, casting his shadow over her.
He gestured with the ring in his hand, and the tentacles came out from the wall again. They curved around Eliana’s wrists and ankles, but this time she didn’t resist. Their touch was gentle, slightly ticklish. They wrapped around her ankles and wrists, supporting her gently, no longer squeezing.
She only stiffened slightly as the smaller tendrils went into her ears.
Eliana breathed in.
It was not for several days that Remethiakara and his kinsmen realized that these People, strange furry creatures, so like them in structure and yet so different, had the mistaken impression that Remethiakara and his kin were some kind of gods.
These people were intelligent beyond their primitive means. They had the concept of the number zero, and built great temples to honor the gods they believed in—gods which did not exist. But they had strange customs, too. They lived in a dry country, and often resorted to sacrifice of living creatures and their rivals in an attempt to bring the rains, a sort of request to the gods.
Remethiakara’s people had seen other species sacrifice animals in their travels among the stars. It didn’t bother them, but they deeply loathed the waste and inefficiency. So Remethiakara lent the shamans a star shard, and showed them how to capture the life energy of a sacrificial victim and use it to feed their crops, similar to how his people used the star shards to build and repair their breathing generation ships and build the complex technological mechanisms through which Remethiakara’s people incubated and nourish their young.
Humanity was overjoyed with the gift. To honor their generous gods, they held an enormous celebration.
But eventually Remethiakara and his kin had to move on. This was a wonderful planet, but his kind had evolved to travel the galaxy. They were not content to stay in one place. Being apart from their living ships for so long, an emptiness had begun to grow in their hearts.
Eliana blinked and another thousand years passed.
Remethiakara and his kin descended to explore a desert in another galaxy, a long way from Earth. There they found a dangerous, terrible virus deep underground while they were mining for star shards they thought had fallen here. One by one, Remethiakara’s companions began to grow sick. Their feathers fell out, they began to bleed from all orifices of their bodies. It was a terrible wasting virus. Remethiakara depleted the vast majority of their star shards trying to devise a way to save his suffering companions’ lives.
Eventually, he too grew sick. He was not able to reverse the effects of the virus for his companions in time. Unable to keep down any food or water, they each died from dehydration, one by one. When Remethiakara was the only one left, he finally managed to construct an anti-virus and save himself.
He survived, but he was left heartbroken and alone. And as the last member of his species in this sector of the galaxy, it was now Remethiakara’s responsibility to sire children. This was a difficult task. Due to the purposeful manipulation of their life span, it was remarkably difficult to sire children. The process took a great many years and was fraught with failure. Yet Remethiakara took this responsibility on himself.
Eliana blinked.
An unknown time passed while Remethiakara considered his options. It would be easier to accomplish his new mission with more star shards. But he had used up his reserves saving his own life. There was only one place where he was certain a star shard could be found.
He used the rest of his energy reserves to take his ship back to Earth. When he arrived, the people seemed to have some distant memory of him, in stories passed down through the generations. Yet their greeting was subdued. They had become beaten down and tired in the thousand years he had been absent. Constantly embroiled in tribal warfare with their neighbors, fighting amongst themselves, and in the middle of the longest drought they had ever experienced, the tribe he had once taught had lost the star shard.
Remethiakara wanted to teach them again. He could help these People, and in return for saving them from self-destruction, they could help him.
It would take a long time—capturing the minute amount of life energy released through human sacrifice was tedious in comparison to infusing shards with the energy of a star. But he couldn’t make more star shards with the power his ship had left. He could, however, help this human tribe end the drought, and then use the leftover energy to create and power an incubation chamber that would allow him to sire healthy children.
But not here. Not on Earth, where these people were constantly under threat and fighting amongst each other. It was too dangerous. In just a few days, Remethiakara hatched a new plan…
Eliana blinked a final time, and she was suddenly looking out at a vast rift. Remethiakara stood among a gathering of a dozen shamans at the top of a great stone pyramid. A line of hundreds of people extended down the pyramid steps and zigzagged across the plaza.
One by one, the people walked up to the top of the temple and offered themselves to Remethiakara. It had taken some convincing, but once the shamans were on board, it had been easy enough.
When the blood of thousands washed the courtyard, the stone city with all its temples and offices and observatories and market squares and ball courts was transported through the rift, to an uninhabited planet Remethiakara had prepared on the opposite end of Earth’s spiral galaxy.
Eliana blinked again.
The tendrils slithered out of her ears. She stood slowly, as if in a dream. The power of the visions was that they felt more real than reality. Remethiakara waited near the far wall. She walked over to him.
He pressed a hand against a small section on the wall by the door, a flat panel she hadn’t noticed before. The door slid into the wall. Green light from the other chamber flooded into this one, and the alien gestured for Eliana to enter ahead of him.
She walked into a chamber that was, in size and shape, the mirror image of the one from which they had just come. The whole structure made a circle, with the flat wall bisecting the two chambers. Beyond that, the similarities between the chambers ended.
Lined up along the curved outside wall of this new chamber were twenty massive eggs made out of the dark purplish black carapace or scale-like material. In the floor in the center of the room was a hole like a drain, from which hundreds of tendrils snaked out. Ten or more tendrils led to each egg, pumping that glowing green fluid into them.
When Eliana thought of the tendrils that had just been in her ears, her gorge rose. She fought down the urge to vomit as Remethiakara came into the room.
He hissed under the helmet when he saw that a handful of the tendrils at the left of the room had been severed. Two of the eggs were no longer connected. Green fluid leaked out onto the floor.
The helmet muffled the horrible hissing sound, but it came out harsh and obviously full of pain. The alien darted forward and bent down, lifting the tendrils gingerly in his hand.
And that was when another figure, sticky and dripping with clumps of the green fluid, stood up from cover behind the incubation equipment and kicked an egg with his foot.
39
Power Hungry
The man in the loincloth gripping the big knife became obscured by the sphere of spinning steel rings. Amon focused his eyes back on the holograms displaying the power levels and molecular stability of the translocation. He had the focus area switched to manual, and was trying to keep the disassembly keyed in on the young man’s body, and not send any rebar or mesh netting with him. The bright light finally consumed the man’s form, and then he was gone. Jeanine, Reuben and the others approached up the ramp.
“Remove that cage!” Amon called to them. “Clear the area.”
“You got it,” Reuben said, giving Amon a thumbs up.
“I’ll get a saw,” Jeanine said.
Amon sagged with relief. He didn’t know what had removed the wormhole, but he said a silent prayer of thanks to whoever it was.
Amon confirmed Rakulo’s reassembly, and then switched the Translocator back to automatic focus. The cage of rebar and mesh they spent hours building needed to go. His team unhooked the mesh netting, cut the rebar where it had been welded to the floor, and carried the cage into the hall.
“I should have gone with him.” Amon checked his own transponder bracelet to make sure it was working. It blinked back a confirmation. “Eliana might need my help.”
“There’s some freaky shit going on over there, Amon.” The look on Reuben’s face told Amon all he needed to know.
“Tell me about it.”
Reuben just shook his head. “That thing they call Xucha—it’s powerful. Rakulo looked like he was about to face death itself, but at least he knows what he’s getting into. What if he’s walking into a trap?”
“What if he’s already dead?” Amon turned to the FBI man. “Agent Moreno, can I borrow a sidearm? Yours or someone else’s, I don’t care.”
“Do you even know how to use a gun?” Moreno asked.
Amon looked at him, his expression deadpan. “I’ve had some experience recently.”
“Well, it’s not exactly protocol—”
An alert whooped from the holodeck. Dr. Badeux rushed to the control panel and gazed over Reuben’s shoulder at the message.
“What is it?” Amon demanded.
Dr. Badeux’s face paled and his eyes widened. He looked at Amon. “Amon, it’s Stanis Rachmaninoff. He’s saying that the MegaPower reactor has been breached.”
“What happened?” Amon demanded. “I thought they fixed the access tunnel. I was there when they were doing it! The reactor was untouched.”
Enzo shook his head. “He says they did. He says…” He swallowed. “He says that someone came through the Translocator platform. They thought it was Fisk Industries sending supplies. Three people went to retrieve the supplies…but it wasn’t supplies. The three astronauts who went looking for supplies were killed.”
“Oh god.” Amon put his head in his hands.
“Son of a bitch,” Agent Moreno said. “It’s Lucas, isn’t it?”
