She caught herself caressing the steep angle of a nesting alcove and quickly withdrew her hand. Mother was often cruel. But sometimes kind. Mother had sometimes allowed her to sleep at her side. She recalled the cool, dry scales against her cheek, heard the trill and mutter of the body at her side.
This was not home. It was your prison.
The calm, cool voice that reminded her of these things sounded like Tove. It brought a queer mix of apprehension and a strange longing. Prison. Home. The lines blurred from day to day. No one else would understand that. Not even Tove. From the age of six, Maeve had known nothing but the Sceeloid life, until Splitdawn raiders found her, freed her. Killed Mother. There would always be a part of her that missed this, that would miss the warm stink of the ferric acid and the sense of belonging it raised in her. With something like a homesick pang, she turned away from the structure.
Maeve pressed ahead. Her suit was auto-mapping her progress. Sceeloid used rock-morphing tech; this one was no different. Stations and vessels were grown to meet the needs of the crew or the hive that inhabited it. Judging from the high number of interface ports and control spines, Maeve guessed that this had been a research installation when the Sceeloid were here. That was why it was unlikely males came here; the female Sceeloid were the thinkers and scientists. The rooms were smaller. The IR reads in her helmet made the Sceeloid markings stand out in a phosphorescent green. The signs indicated high rad levels beyond the next hatch.
That meant the core must lie beyond.
A timer popped onto the HUD, reminding her to check in with Corsair and Veradin. Rolling her eyes, she chinned the vox open. “Found the core.”
A hissing static was her only response, not the customary chime that meant the message went through. Maeve frowned. She hated it when the suit acted up. It, like Wedge, was one of the few things she truly trusted in her life. To have a system error was equivalent to a personal insult.
She tried the vox again. “Respond.”
A hiss. Distant squeal. What might have been Corsair’s voice came from very far away. She tapped the side of her helm against the nearby column. The signal line wavered, then dropped. She triggered a query to diagnose the problem and decided to head deeper into the core room while it ran.
She would try again when she returned to Wedge. The ship’s transmitters were far more powerful than the suit’s vox relay. Corsair and Veradin were on their own for now.
Maeve felt the core before she saw it. It was like having your bones itch. Even at low output, it bathed the room in blue, giving the nightmare twists and spires of the control interface a whimsical look.
At its center sat a roughly oval shape, like the egg of some fantastical beast. A lattice pattern of control spires wrapped it like a protective framework, supporting it and feeding off it. She knew that each spire, although looking randomly placed, served a function, sending power to different systems.
///Query return: Vox functional.\
The message flashed in her HUD. Maeve stopped, impatiently swiping it from view. Being this close to the core was known to play havoc with vox. She turned, searching the thick, twisting ropes for what she needed. It could tell her about the shield status. Sceeloid casing could withstand for centuries. A natural fault was unlikely. Powering it down would be a matter of starving it from the gravity fields that fed it. Just had to find the right filter. She bent under the arc of a low-slung set of lines and trained her suit’s light onto the core’s base. The sharp, boxy lines of the device she found nestled there seemed alien when compared to the organic Sceeloid tech. Eugenes were a race that craved symmetry. The Sceeloid knew none of that. No effort had been made to hide this plainly intrusive device.
Someone had been here.
Maeve traced the spire with the light of her torch. The limb twisted up and around to disappear into the higher terrace, a location that only Sceeloid could traverse. The color and texture made it a higher-function line, something that might manage atmo, energy dispersion or security. Perhaps even all three.
She hunkered down over her discovery and used her combat knife to pry open the cover. Unfamiliar circuits and nodes filled the inside. With a thought, she pulled the higher res optic into use on her visor. The tech looked to be a mishmash of scavenged Sceeloid and something else, likely Human. She picked out a timer node, a signal receiver and traced the circuit to a cutter.
Maeve grunted, settling back on her haunches. Someone was playing for keeps with the reactor core. Not a simple kill switch to power down, as Maeve had intended. This was rigged to spark an override and reduce this outpost and the rock that housed it to superheated gas.
She stood and tried the vox again. The light from her helm floods glistened off a dark trail of fluid on the deck. She panned the torch to follow it. The layer of frost on the floor was disturbed in spots. The gummy yellow liquid split into two erratic paths, occasionally coming together before disappearing into the darkness beyond the reach of the core’s blue glow.
Maeve went very still. Her heartbeat jumped into the red zone, triggering an alert on her HUD. Mouth gone dry, she triggered open the motion detectors on her suit. Until now she’d not bothered with them. They drained battery time, and it had seemed a waste of power.
The scrim of her visor lit up with the ghostly green hollow circle, providing a 360 of her location for a range of 200 feet. Nothing moved.
She lowered the field definition, refining for heat signatures dimmer than her own. Signatures more likely to thrive in Sceeloid environments.
A red dot appeared on the sensory horizon. Behind her. To the right. It blinked twice, moving nearly twenty feet between the two pulses.
She turned, pulling her weapon up.
It moved fast, the thin legs outstretched as it hurled through the air at her. It impacted her suit with a force that seemed impossible for its compact size. Her boots left the deck before she had time to curse her laziness in not activating the magnetic soles.
She jumped back, fell, scuttled. Blindly, she gripped at the thickest part of the creature’s body as it clung to her chest. Pushing the suit’s power into the red, she gave a ferocious yank and flung the crab away. She glimpsed tawny yellow skin stretched over six legs, each ending in a poison-filled barb, before the dark swallowed it. Ripper-crab.
Mother had shown her one once. The stuff of nightmares.
Someone had released it. Likely to guard their nasty little core-melting box.
A yellow icon flashed across her HUD.
///Breach foam deployed\
She looked down, panting. Vicious gouges marked the chest plate of her armor. Incredible. Her suit’s shell was a saprese-alloy. A cutting torch would have taken a day to get through one layer.
Although her suit monitored her systems down to the last drop of blood, she did a quick check. Nothing hurt. Watching the corner the ripper-crab had disappeared into, she climbed to her feet.
On reflex, she tried vox, and cursed, suddenly remembering. None of the links would connect.
Warily she stepped back, keeping her light on the corner where her welcoming party had disappeared. There’d been no new movement on the motion detector, but she was not about to look away. She backed up and slid one foot across the threshold.
A familiar nightmare shape sprang at her faceplate, engulfing her world.
Thirty-Three
Asher’s heart clenched. “No.”
Veradin looked at him across the open mouth of the stasis box with a stupid crushed expression on his face. The interior was dark and empty.
His stomach went tight and hard. He ignored the idea of clearing the rest of the room, looking for dangers or any Humans that might still be conscious. He knew he looked desperate. Because that’s what he felt, balls to bones.
The stasis box was larger than Asher had expected. He realized why. In their hurry to extract it, the Humans had cut away sections of the surrounding equipment to lug it out of Picus’s lab. The thought of such a careless and
rough act drove a spur of irrational anger through him.
He leaned into the dark interior. Things left there were like the discarded remnants of some bad dream: tiny filaments connected to electrodes. Rubbery tubes. He drew up a handful of cloth. With a sickening lurch, Asher recognized the soft maroon fabric. It had come from one of the absurdly expensive dresses Kelta had bought for Erelah. She’d insisted on clothing Erelah as “a lady of her station ought to be.”
Asher could not envision her going into this coffin willingly, considering her fear of dark, cramped spaces. She must have been so afraid when he’d not yet returned with Jon and her only chance at survival.
I’ve failed her all over again. Gone. She’s gone. Asher tested the thought, like a tongue probing the empty socket of a missing tooth. It refused to hurt. Because she was there. Somewhere.
The only sound was the idiot ping of the tracker. The frequency had settled into a steady tone: target found. Well. Not really.
There was a crunch of plastic, a last protesting squawk as he crushed it beneath his boot. In the resulting silence, he could feel Veradin’s stare and imagine the accusation there. Asher decided he could own that. Also, he could make it right.
“We search. Room by room,” he said. He pointed at the sterile-looking walls and rows of gleaming metal equipment. “This area, the equipment, the beds, look…medical. She was sick. That means they’d keep her nearby.”
His brain kicked in a dozen other scenarios for Erelah, each more dire than the last.
Not helping.
“Cover more area if we split up.”
“In ten minutes Maeve shuts the core down,” Veradin said. Then they were on borrowed time. No core meant no atmo, no anti grav. It meant floating in the dark in unfamiliar territory with their air running out and the cold of the big black slowly clawing its way in.
“Then we get her to stop. I’m not going anywhere without Erelah.”
Veradin nodded with grim agreement, then touched the earpiece for his vox. His stare remained on Asher. “Maeve.” After a moment he shook his head. Tapped at the vox more impatiently. “Try yours.”
Asher triggered the link that fed to Maeve’s suit. Nothing. “Something’s wrong.”
“You think?”
“Get back to the rally point. Maeve should be done by now.”
“I’m not going any—”
“Neither are we if we got no ride,” Asher snapped. “I’m getting Erelah. But we need to know that we’ve still got an exit. Vox could just be down. Could be nothing. Could be something. If we’re going to search, we need more eyes, and we need to move fast. We need Maeve.”
Veradin swayed. Asher could see the argument under the man’s surface. When was he going to realize he had no other choice but to trust him?
Finally, Veradin spoke. “Give me three minutes to find Maeve. Don’t go far.”
Thirty-Four
Jon leaned into the intersection. The corridor resembled the others they’d seen in the installation so far: bland walls, lights on the brighter end of the spectrum affixed to the ceiling. It was complete with the now-customary litter of unconscious bodies.
Deciding it was clear, he pushed off the wall and followed the curving corridor. Periodically he’d pause to tap at his vox. From Maeve, there was still no response.
He took a right, then froze.
Maeve lay against the entrance to the tunnel that led back to the Wedge.
He raced over. The damage was impressive up close. There were six equally spaced gashes across the upper body of her power armor. Breach foam, streaked with congealed blood, pushed out of the holes.
He crouched over her, uncertain of where or how to touch the suit. The actuator lights were all dead. A faint movement of the helmeted head told him she was at least alive.
Jon tapped his vox, this time connecting with Corsair. “Found Maeve. She’s down, unresponsive.”
“Say again.”
“Found her. She’s alive. Pretty bad off. It looks like something chewed up her suit.”
“She do the job?”
He rolled his eyes. “What part of unresponsive don’t you understand?”
Jon scanned the corridor. There was nothing else out of place that would account for her strange injuries. The creeping sensation up his spine coalesced into a firm dread.
“Leave her. Get back to the Wedge. See if she’s rigged—”
“She’s injured.” He flipped his vox to receive. No way he would leave someone here, vulnerable. But in the suit, Maeve weighed nearly four hundred pounds. Couldn’t come close to even dragging her back to the Wedge.
Good thing Sela had shown him how they open.
Thirty-Five
The walls of the new room were smooth, coated in some substance that seemed sprayed on. Asher touched the glossy surface. It was slick, like plasteel. A closed door led off the room; the symbol painted on the wall near the doorway had an ominous sense, like a warning. It reminded him of a stylized pictogram of a poisonous flower. It matched no other sigil he knew, but its placement and size meant it was important.
He crossed to the doorway and, with an elbow, nudged the flat metal bar he’d come to recognize as the Humans’ door controls. There was a disquieting clicking. The door remained shut. Locked.
Unlike the comparatively eerie peace of other corridors where the Humans had dropped where they stood, this room seemed to be the epicenter of violence. Of the four bodies on the floor, three were dressed in white; the fourth appeared to be a soldier. Against the wall, a table was on its side, one of its metal struts bent and torn straps dangling from it. Asher got the sense someone or something with enormous strength had been held captive upon it.
What where these people toying with here? Had they placed Erelah in further danger?
Acrid rage made him grind his teeth. If the people in this room were not already out, he would have torn them apart with his bare hands.
Something moved behind him. He heard the slither of fabric.
He turned. The body dressed like a soldier released a weak cough. He was propped against the wall, legs outstretched. One of their oddly shaped sidearms lay near the lifeless hand. Asher strode closer, in one move kicking the weapon away and drawing aim with his rifle. The man startled awake, reaching for a gun that wasn’t there. The move must have hurt because he grimaced, clutching his side.
His eyes widened when he realized Asher’s presence. He stiffened, thrusting his back against the wall. He had to realize he was trapped.
“Not interested in killing you,” Asher spoke slowly in Common, studying the Human’s face for a reaction that told him he understood. Some of the Human soldiers that had invaded Tintown seemed to know the language. Hopefully, this was one of them.
The kid relaxed slightly.
“Can you understand me?”
The soldier took in the chaos of the room, the bodies, and upturned furniture before regarding Asher. He nodded. “What—”
“Where is she?” Asher had no time for answering useless questions. He tightened his grip on the rifle. “The woman from the sleep box.”
“Look. This wasn’t my idea—”
“You didn’t answer my question.” He grabbed the front of the soldier’s clothes and lifted him away from the wall.
“There. Through there.” The man groaned with pain, flinging his hand toward a sealed door to the left. “She took Erelah in there. She’s armed, dangerous. I fear she may hurt the girl.”
“Who?” He tightened his grip on the man’s clothes.
“Northway.”
He scowled. That didn’t make sense. “She wouldn’t do that.”
“She’s been taken over by something. A being called Tristic.”
A wave of ice flooded him. He felt the fear on two fronts: the terror of Erelah’s memories wedged deep in his skull, and his own recollection of her reluctance to talk about the Sceeloid half-breed. It was that reluctance that told him how badly that creature had hurt her.
“That’s impossible,” he heard himself say.
The expression on the man’s face changed. For the briefest moment, he thought he registered a smirk, but it was gone too quickly. “Perhaps she underestimated Tristic.”
Asher released his grip on him, registering a distant relief over no longer touching him. There was a wrongness radiating from the man that Asher didn’t care to explore. For now, there were more urgent matters to deal with.
Asher turned his frown to the door and strode over to it.
He pounded its surface with a fist. It was solid, thick and very likely blast-proof.
He turned back to the soldier. “Open it. Now.”
Thirty-Six
Maeve was far heavier than she looked, even without the armor. The Eugenes woman was Sela’s height, but a mountain of muscle and ropey hair. With one final grunt, Jon pulled her over the lip of the airlock and into the Wedge. He released her, and she flopped bonelessly. The back of her head collided with the deck.
He winced. “Sorry.”
There was a wet sound from deep in her throat. Her eyelids fluttered.
Jon grabbed her legs under his arms and dragged her to the division between the mid-ship hatch and the aft compartment. There were no crew benches here. Considering the craft’s origin, he was not surprised.
Did Sceeloid even sit? As a captain in the Regime, he was privy to as much intelligence briefing as the next Eugenes officer, but most of the engagements with Sceeloid were in the border colonies, far from his assignments on the Storm King. He had a cursory knowledge of the race, and most of that had come from the slanted lens of superiority with which the Eugenes viewed the Known Worlds. According to the Eugenes view, Sceeloid were unsophisticated beasts, carnivores, and incapable of advanced achievements.
Allies and Enemies: Exiles, Book 3 Page 13
