Will’s brows knit together; he raised a tentative palm and rested it on the surface. He pulled the hand away as if expecting the cube to feel extremely hot, but evidently it was not because he pressed his palm onto the exterior once again a moment later.
“Remarkable,” he said. “It’s already dispersed the heat. That should be impossible, given our present-day science.”
“A lot of the tech the Ganymedeans had was supposedly impossible,” Horatio commented.
Rhea was reading a weak signal.
“Are you guys getting that?” she asked.
“Getting what?” Horatio replied.
“There’s a signal…” she said.
“No,” Horatio said. “We read nothing.”
“It’s possible her comm system is malfunctioning,” Jairlin suggested. “She did take quite a battering back there.”
“It’s more likely her Ganymedean mind-machine interface is picking up something human tech can’t,” Horatio said. “How do you think she’s able to activate the Ban’Shar when no one else can? It’s the subtle differences in her interface. If this object is Ganymedean, it’s entirely likely she’s the only one who can communicate with it.”
Now she understood why her head would have raised a fortune on the auction block.
A hologram appeared before Rhea: a woman, dressed in a pristine white robe. Though her hood was raised, long black hair flowed out from beneath the rim of that hood.
“Welcome, Mistress,” the woman said. “You have returned.”
“I’ve been here before?” Rhea asked. If that was true, then it must have been before Veil and her Black Hands had taken up residence. Or perhaps the woman was referring to a time before the ship had crashed.
“I have prepared your quarters,” the woman replied. Rhea noted that she had not answered the question.
“Who are you talking to?” Will asked.
A panel slid open in the cube, forming an entrance. It was dark inside.
She glanced at Will whose mouth had dropped.
“This was part of my ship,” Rhea said.
“If this was your ship, then you were part of the invasion force that came to Earth,” Miles said.
“She didn’t participate in the Great Calming,” Will told him. “You know she didn’t.”
Miles nodded. “You’re probably right.” But still, his features had darkened.
Maybe she had directly participated in the Great Calming. Or maybe she hadn’t. Either way, for some reason the possibility that she might have been involved didn’t bother her anymore. Perhaps it was because she knew she wasn’t that person anymore. The Rhea who lived today would never wipe out half a planet. Never.
Or perhaps it was merely because she was curious about what resided inside this cube.
She returned her attention to the hologram.
“Who am I?” she asked.
“You instructed me not to directly answer questions from anyone ever again, even you,” the woman said. “As such, while I can let you inside, I can do no more. I denied entry to the others who came, just as you ordered.”
That would make some sense. If Khrusos had captured Ganymedeans, he would have tried to use them to open this cube. Yet if Rhea was his slave at some point, she would have opened it for him, as she did just now. Unless Khrusos didn’t know, which seemed unlikely.
She approached the opening, and when she took a step inside, a glow lamp lit up overhead, illuminating a black corridor.
Will started to follow her.
She looked at him and raised a hand. “I have to do this alone.”
He seemed about to contest her, so she added: “I’ll share my video feed with you. If anything happens to me, you can rush inside.”
He opened his mouth once more, but then reluctantly nodded and stepped back. She shared her feed and watched her view count increase to match the number of members in the party.
She entered, and the hologram vanished. Once beyond the threshold, she took a few tentative steps, then glanced over her shoulder. The entrance remained open. She could see Will and the others watching anxiously beyond, their headlamps creating bright cones of light that cut through the darkness.
She turned around and continued forward. Her feet echoed off the hard floor, sounding muted in the tight confines. The arched ceiling smoothly joined the walls on either side, and was just the right height for her, with about a handspan to spare above her head. White dots the size of pinpricks shone in the round surface, forming archways of light that added to the overall glow.
She reached an L intersection and slowly rounded the bend. She was ready to deploy her Ban’Shar…
But no one waited to ambush her. Instead, the corridor opened into a room roughly the size of a cargo container. The corners where the floor and ceiling met the walls were rounded, forming a seamless surface as if the entire room had been cast from a mold.
The room was empty save for a lone pedestal in the center.
Rhea approached it.
The top portion of the pedestal ended at waist height, terminating in a flat, elliptical surface that sloped forty-five degrees toward her body. There was a handprint cut into that surface, with a thumb placement on either side—it could support either the right or left hand. Without pausing to think, she rested her intact hand onto the imprint. Her palm and fingers were slightly smaller than the stamp, so for a moment she thought nothing was going to happen.
But then nozzles opened along the left and right sides, and thousands of black dots poured out. Insects. Crawling up the surface of the pedestal. Toward her hand.
Rhea didn’t move.
The insects flowed onto her fingers and skittered up her arm. She felt them all, their tiny, sharp feet seeming like small razors against the metal of her flesh. They ignored the Ban’Shar, swirling around it.
The insects crept up her shoulder, then began to spread across the remainder of her body.
That was when the agony began. Those tiny razors dug into the raw elements composing her armor. Thousands of them gnawing at the same time, firing off the pain sensors embedded in the metal.
It was so intense that she was forced to shut
