by T. F. Grant
But damn, it felt good to put that mangy cur Aleatra on his ass. It felt like freedom. For the first time since he had arrived in this misbegotten hole in the space-time continuum, Bookworm began to like the place and saw that if he played things right, he’d make is way here.
Margo reached out a hand and stroked his face. “Thank you for that,” she said. “He deserved it and more.”
“Good to have you on our team,” Bookworm said. There had been a time, less than a day ago, when he would have recoiled from such a human touch, but he wasn’t hiding anymore.
Margo shook her head. “I must stay.” She gestured to her brother. “We must stay with the Crown.”
“Why, sister? You know what they are, what that piece of shit is. You are free here.”
“We are”—Margo glanced at Tai—“repugnant to the people of this station.”
Tai’s face became hard, his jaw clenched, he wanted to say something. Bookworm could see it. He knew that look from the mirror.
Margo’s head dropped, and she walked away after Aleatra.
“Say something,” Bookworm said. “Say anything, Tairon Cauder.”
Tai glanced at him. “Her choice.” He rolled his shoulders.
“And then there were two,” Bookworm said. “Just me and Sara left now.”
“Yeah.” Tai sucked air over his teeth. “You better hope that some of those people in the pods join you.”
“Why?”
“Because the Venture is valuable, and there’s only two of you own it now. Walk careful, Dylan, my man, and keep your guns loaded.” He thought for a second. “You any good with a blade?”
“I know which end’s the sharp bit.”
“Then you better buy a couple. I know a blade smith up on twelve that does good work.”
“You think I need a knife?”
“Knives are quiet, and they don’t run out of ammo.”
“Great, just call me frecking Athos.”
“Who?”
“A man who read too much, used guns and blades, and always had problems with women.”
“You have trouble with women?”
“Not any more. Now I only shag ones I don’t like. And the problems went away.”
Tai laughed.
Now seemed the right time. “Cauder, listen, I need a lockup,” Bookworm said. “A big lockup.”
“Oh? Tell all, Dylan.” Tai glanced around to check nobody could hear and still leaned in close to ask, in a whisper, “How many books you want stashing?”
Bookworm bit his lip. He needed help. He couldn’t do this alone. But could he trust this mercenary sod? No, of course he couldn’t. But a deal was a deal on Haven. “We need to deal. I’ll give you thirty percent of what I make.”
“Nope. Seventy.”
“Oh, for freck’s sake, half. That’s where this is heading, right?”
“Yup.” Tai stuck out his hand. “Deal.”
Bookworm took it. “Deal.”
“So how many?”
Bookworm leaned in close and whispered, “I lost count a decade ago, but I think it’s like a hundred thousand or so, could be more.”
“Holy shit!” Tai’s grin got larger. At this rate, he’d own a fleet.
TWENTY-ONE
Sara couldn’t get those terrible, wet sucking sounds out of her head. She felt the back of her skull where one of the creature’s tentacles had bored a hole into her brain. All she could feel now was a rough patch of matted hair. The wound had sealed shut, somehow.
She sat up and squinted. At first she couldn’t tell where she was, but as the sleep or drugs or whatever it was that had knocked her out wore off, she heard it: a cacophonous din all rushing in at once like the tidal waves of Urelia.
Words and sounds flooded into her, demanding attention. And the curious thing was she understood everything.
Kronac whistles were still whistles, but they now formed images and concepts in her head just like regular words. Even the small flying insects that resembled gnats made sense to her; their weird little buzzes, generated by rubbing their legs against their exoskeleton, made her smile as one particular gnat made a humorous quip about his fellow gnat’s inability to find a mate.
A moment later, a sense of tragedy came over her when she heard the second gnat lament that he would be dead within the hour, that his chance of leaving a legacy were over, less than a day after his coming into being. Tears welled up, and she stifled a sob as yet more words and thoughts and consciousnesses threatened to overwhelm her.
“Sara, you can understand me, yes?”
This voice, definitely kronac, came from somewhere beneath her. Sara looked down and realized she was sitting in a leaf bed atop a tree within the kronac level.
The voice was familiar: Tooize.
His snout pushed through the leaves next to her. Broad feathered shoulders followed as he climbed the branches and joined her. “This is our tree. You like?” he asked, every word crystal clear as though he were a human speaking common Anglic.
“It’s incredible,” Sara said, smiling as the sadness waned and the miracle of what Tooize had done for her came into sharp focus. The voices seemed to fade away into the distance, becoming a low rumble of life. Her brain was quickly adapting to filter out the noise. “I can hear everything, understand everything… how do you cope with it all?”
“You become accustomed to it. I’m glad we can now understand each other.” The kronac reached an arm around her shoulders. “I’m sorry for not fully explaining the gift. I knew you’d never agree if you knew beforehand. No one would.”
The thought of that squid-like creature came to mind, making her stomach clench with queasiness. “What was it?”
“We call it a weaver. It creates new pathways in organic matter, new neural connections in brains and other organs. That particular weaver was bred to reroute language centers. It’s harmless and painless, but we have come to realize that to some species it isn’t appealing.”
“That’s quite the understatement. Can we get down? I’m feeling a little dizzy up here.”
Tooize scooped her up with his top pair of arms while, using his lower pair, he brought them down the tree and safely to the floor.
Kina was sitting on a wooden bench by a small rock pool, drinking from a glass. Beside her stood a table upon which, collected in jars and plates, was a meal of water and what looked like hash browns and some bright yellow round fruit.
It resembled her… oh God, she had nearly forgotten about the Gift of Knowledge. She checked her inner pocket for the amber sphere, but it had gone. She spun round, looking aimlessly, trying to remember what had happened before the procedure.
Kina turned to face her. “Looking for this?” She held the orb between her thumb and index finger. Sara rushed forward, and Kina handed it to her. “It’s pretty.”
“Thank you,” Sara said, putting it back inside her jacket’s inner zip pocket. “I thought I had lost it.”
“Take a seat,” Tooize said, gesturing to an empty chair next to Kina, by the table. “And feel welcome to eat, drink. You need it. For recovery.”
When Sara had sat and started to eat and drink, Tooize sat on a rock by the pool’s edge. The area was within a small clearing no wider than twenty feet in diameter. If she concentrated, she could hear some fish talking, waxing lyrical about the strange shadows moving on the surface of the water before going into some trivial talk about the temperature and food levels. She smiled, still disbelieving that she’d been given such a gift.
As if reading her mind, Tooize spoke. “You’ll want to understand these gifts of language and knowledge. I will explain, but please no interruptions or questions until I’m finished. We kronacs are better at expressive thought when we have time to formulate concepts. Some of our kind, the elder seers, spend years considering their point before making it. It has taken me a day to find the words for this. Is this okay?”
“Of course,” Sara said. “Take all the time you need. I’ll be quiet and li
sten.”
Kina leant over and whispered, “You did great during the procedure, by the way. The weaver said you were the easiest subject it’s ever worked on. It was impressed with the shape of your lobes.”
Sara raised an eyebrow and only got a cheeky smile in response.
Tooize shifted his legs until he sat cross-legged.
His feathers lay flat, and he inhaled long and slow. “Old-Leaf explained the nature of the orb and the signal to you. He also explained that someone else received the signal. That other was myself. You see, many years ago, before I took work with Tairon, I managed my own ship and would salvage resources under the guidance of Sivither. He discovered an escape capsule floating among the icy debris that surrounds the dead planet.”
Sara’s heartbeat began to speed up as Tooize, her kronac advocate, explained things. She felt herself becoming part of something much bigger than herself. She waited for him to continue as she sipped on the water.
“Kina and I managed to recover the capsule, wrecking my ship in the process, which is why I now fly with Tai. Within that capsule were a number of books on Xantonian culture and technology, which naturally, went to the Drifts. There was another object there which did not. A beacon. One exactly the same as yours. I cannot speak of how the Drifts come to be in the possession of the one you now own, but they didn’t know about ours.
“Sivither managed to connect it to our organic computers. For years he analyzed it but got nothing from it. The constantly swirling vortex inside spoke of much hidden knowledge, but it appeared to be inert. Until yesterday. At the same time your beacon received a message so did ours. It was like a message from the Gods, if there is such a thing. In a short pulse of binary neutrino transmission, the beacon transposed a message through our organic computer: a treelike system that interprets data and prints the results much like the Drifts’ enzyme-imprinting of their DNA books.”
Tooize cut off, giving Sara time to process everything. Kina had apparently heard all this before, as she couldn’t stop watching Sara, presumably for her reaction. Sara’s heart was now thudding against her chest, a hundred questions forming on her lips, but she held on to them, not wanting to upset the kronac or throw him off his preplanned speech.
A few seconds later he began again.
“The message we received via the beacon gave us the name of your ship and one crew member. You. The full message was: From the ship, the Venture, to co-navigator Sara Lorelle…” Tooize made a cutting gesture with his hand. “Nothing else. The message finished. We corroborated this result with the Drifts. They received the very same. My thoughts are finished. You may ask questions now, if you have any.”
Sara nearly choked on a dozen questions waiting to come out, but she composed herself, thought rationally, and tried to give the kronac the time and respect to ask clear, specific questions. She didn’t know if she’d get another chance, not knowing where any of this was leading.
“Where did the message come from? I mean, how and from where was it transmitted?”
“We can’t prove it with physical evidence, but as the message was sent as a binary neutrino pulse, we believe it’s from the planet. The Drifts have observed neutrinos from it before, and their research on items and artifacts recovered from Hollow Space indicate that neutrino-stream communication was a Xantonian technology.”
“So that’s why you don’t believe that the planet is dead?”
“It’s a difficult position to hold given the evidence, but yes, that’s what I believe.”
Sara swallowed the rest of the water in her glass, enjoying the cooling sensation. “So if it came from the planet, who or what sent it and why? How did the originator know we were coming before we had even made the decision to make the hyperspace jump, and how did they know my name?”
“All those questions are answered by one clear answer,” Tooize said as though he wasn’t going to continue, but a few seconds later, added, “The message was sent by your own ship’s artificial intelligence, the one you call Telo. It was sent after the hyperspace jump was made. This is a theory the Drifts have had for some time. When ships make the jump into hyperspace, they first enter a time bubble.”
“A what?”
“A delay between the start point and destination. For two hours, your ship was held in this time bubble before appearing in Hollow Space. It was during that window that your ship’s AI found a way to send a message. We have all come to the conclusion that it was trying to communicate something about Hollow Space or the planet, but as we’ve observed many times over, magnetic and silicon-based technologies cease to work in Hollow Space. The whole process would have taken fractions of seconds to you, but in our timeline it was close to two hours.”
“Whoa,” Sara said. “This is some seriously heavy stuff. How do you know for certain it’s from Telo and was sent during the time bubble? Is that even possible?”
Kina spoke up on that one. “Yeah, time bubbling is a Quintilian physics thing. Totally can happen. We’ve observed small, random pockets of them within the system a number of times. It’s weird when you get stuck in one. Most of the time you don’t even know, but those on the outside say that your ship suddenly stops for a few minutes and then moves off again. It’s only happened to me once, but the Drifts who keep watch have noted a few more over the years.”
“Kina is right,” Tooize said, his feathers shaking. “It’s standard theory. As for how we know it’s from Telo, that’s simple. It is the only thing that would have known it was in a time bubble due to its quantum processing, and the signal was of computer origin, which means only another computer would have been able to interface with it remotely.”
Sara leaned forward. “So that means there’s a working computer on the planet, right? And if there’s a working computer there, it means that the Hollow Space effect isn’t natural, but is localized and perhaps generated by… someone!”
Both Tooize and Kina smiled at her, nodding as she finally got it.
“And that’s why Tooize gave you the Gift of Language,” Kina said. “Not only to communicate with us, but to communicate with whatever is down there.”
“Wait, we’re going to the planet? I thought no ships could get through the atmosphere?”
“The Drifts have found a way,” Tooize said. “But we need your Telo and a ship.”
“Telo was stolen,” Sara said, “but we were so close! It’s why I wanted to go after Linus. That bastard had it with him when we were in the elevator.”
Kina shook her head with frustration. “Why didn’t you say? We could have stopped him.”
Tooize’s shoulders dropped for a moment, and his face muscles tightened into a grimace, probably realizing how close they were and had let it slip out of their hands. “This makes things difficult. But not impossible.”
“Can we track him down?”
Kina groaned. “We can, I suppose, but it won’t be easy. You see, Linus would have no use for a crystal quantum AI unit. In fact, there’s only one reason for him to carry such a thing into the dark levels.” The color drained from Kina’s face as she looked at Tooize. Even he, the great and strong kronac, looked as though he had shrunk away from the prospect.
“What is it?” Sara said. “After everything we’ve had to put up with so far, it can’t be that bad, right? Who would buy the AI, Miriam? A Drift?”
“Far worse than even the Red Cauder,” Tooize said. “Jhangeloshkoshvosheksich.”
“What?” Sara asked, unable to take it all in, even with the Gift of Language.
Kina turned to her. “Jhang, a giant frecking space dragon.”
Sara was speechless, wondering if her gift was faulty and mistranslating. “A dragon?”
“Yeah, girl, a dragon whose lair is somewhere in the dark levels.”
“And you’re going to make us go in there and find it, aren’t you?” Sara said, suddenly not feeling so great about life.
Kina flashed her a wicked smile, exposing those sharp canines. If she weren’t
so damned sexy, Sara would run a mile.
***
Musty, old, and dangerous. A mix of oil, sweat and the acrid scent of fear and adrenaline. No. Sara did not like the dark levels one bit. She choked. Her throat tightened as Tooize bolted the three-foot-thick graphsteele door behind them, closing them off from the comfort of the kronac level.
“This is insane,” Sara said. Not even the sturdy feel of the shotgun in her hands gave her the confidence needed. “Space dragons? Seriously, this is crazy. I thought I had seen everything when I witnessed the giant maggot structures of Euconid.”
“I heard they’re amazing this time of year,” Kina said, switching on her night-vision goggles. Sara followed suit. The darkness lit up in shades of green.
Everywhere she turned she saw movement, making her skin crawl. A thousand voices chittered and chattered, and it took her a few moments to filter it out. Luckily the insects and bugs and bacteria that lived within these dark levels were small enough that their voices didn’t carry over the sound of their movement.
Tooize took point. He wielded a huge cannon requiring three of his considerably strong arms to carry. If there ever was a gun that’d kill a space dragon, it looked like that.
Its wide bore promised death at extreme high-caliber. The pack on the kronac’s back carried the dozen shells. The cannon had a canister that held three at a time. Even that did not bring her comfort.
Somewhere far off she heard the growls of eager vuls. The thought of the crazed gen-modded beast came to her, and it was all Sara could do to not shoot her shotgun wildly into the shadows.
“Relax,” Kina said, “We’ll be just fine if we just stay calm and follow Tooize’s lead. This ain’t no Tai Cauder operation. There’ll be no recklessness here.”
“Thanks,” Sara said. “I needed that.”
Sara received a gentle shoulder bump from Kina and nod of the head. Of all the crazy that Sara had experienced since coming here, at least there were a few shining moments, Kina being the most obvious.
