Calpurnia stepped over the struggling pile of bodies, picked up the probe that Lyth had been using and rammed the sharper end—which wasn’t all that sharp—into the door’s control panel. It cracked and splintered and the probe drove deeper.
Sparks flitted and fizzed brightly. They used electricity, then—or something with the same general properties.
Marlow gave a sigh and let go of the doors and straightened, massaging his palms.
A whining cough sounded behind me and I whirled. Juliyana had the alien weapon in her hands, pointing at the struggling creature in Dalton’s and Lyth’s grasps. It fired a charge…bolt…a miniature version of the ball of whatever it was that the mothership fired. The ball slammed into the creature’s neck. Perhaps the armor wasn’t as strong there, or perhaps their weapons really were that lethal. The ball went straight through the armor.
The creature flopped and grew still. Lyth and Dalton rolled away, both breathing hard.
I whirled to confront Juliyana, my fury building. “Why did you do that?”
She lowered the weapon. “It will give the alert if we leave it alive.”
“We could have neutralized it!”
“You can’t even open the doors, here,” she shot back. “And I’m not on a rescue mission.”
Jai gripped my shoulder. “We have a weapon. Leave the rest for later, Danny.”
I nodded. It was good advice. I pummeled my fury into a corner and told it to stay. “What else does it have on it?”
Fiori was already searching the thing. “Get the helmet off,” she said shortly. The medic was in charge.
“I’m standing at an open door,” Marlow reminded us. “Make it fast.”
“I think this might be a flashlight of some kind,” Yoan said, turning a black stick over and over in his hands, pressing everything on the exterior that looked interesting. His expression reminded me strongly of his father, who wore the same intrigued, absorbed look when he puzzled over a piece of machinery, trying to figure out how to make it work.
Bright light flared from the end of it, dazzling everyone standing in the way.
Yoan prodded again and the light switched off. “Yep,” he said happily.
Dalton positioned himself behind the head of the alien body, put both boots against the thing’s shoulders, and found a grip at the bottom edge of the thing’s helmet and hauled.
The helmet resisted for a moment, then popped off like a bottle cap.
I think we all gasped, each and every one of us, for the head beneath the helmet was human.
—34—
“My brain just turned inside out,” Sauli said, staring at the human corpse between us. “They’re…us?” It was a man in the suit, his face bloody, his sightless eyes a pale brown and very normal. He even had a scruff of a beard growing in. His skin was dark, but no darker than the range of skin colors I’d ever seen.
“Door, people!” Marlow hissed. “We can’t stay here.”
“They’re not us,” Jai said decisively, staring at the body. “Their technology, their ships…they could not have developed a completely different form of technology with no one in the Empire noticing.”
“Why couldn’t they?” Marlow demanded. “We did exactly that in Sarov.”
“That was one tiny piece of tech,” Jai argued. “This is a whole culture built around technology we’ve never seen before. I don’t know who these people are, but they are not from any world or location known to us. For now, we have to treat them as the aliens we thought them to be. Up, up, everyone. Marlow is right. We can’t linger here.”
I got to my feet. “We find a shuttle, or an exit that Lyssa can connect to, and we get the fuck off this ship.”
“There might be others,” Dalton pointed out, as Fiori opened her mouth to protest.
I didn’t have time to argue with him. “Juliyana, you have the weapon. You’re on point.”
She nodded and moved out of the room, the weapon lifted and her fingers resting on a plate mounted on the side of it. I presumed that was the trigger device.
I followed her out and glanced at the double layers of doors, my worm brain tapping at me once more. But I didn’t have time to deep-think my way to whatever I was trying to tell myself.
The corridor outside the room we’d been in was nearly as wide across as the room itself, and just as white and bright as the room was now the lights had been turned on.
There was a stub of corridor to the left, and a solid wall at the end of it. Ours was apparently the last room along this corridor.
Juliyana was facing to the right, watching down the length of the corridor and waiting for us to step out and form up behind her before moving off. Whatever her problems were these days, she remained an excellent soldier. All the adventuring had sharpened her instincts for the work.
I moved up behind her and peered down the corridor. It was lined with doors just like the one I had stepped through. There were dozens of them, until the corridor turned a corner and disappeared. My heart sank.
“More holding cells?” Marlow breathed, right behind me.
“Seems so,” I murmured back. I looked over my shoulder to check that everyone was bunched up behind us. Sauli stood examining the door controls on this side of the door.
“Sauli!” I hissed.
He held up a hand, not looking at me. Then he reached out and hesitantly touched the panel. Then a second touch, elsewhere on the pad.
The doors slid shut, the inner ones beating the layer on this side by a fraction of a second.
Sauli grinned, looking pleased. “A closed door won’t raise any alarms,” he murmured, joining us.
“What did you do?” Jai asked, his tone still curious. He didn’t seem to be stressed at all about our current situation.
“When I touched the panel, colored squares lit up. The red one closed the door.” Sauli shrugged.
“Maybe it will work on the other doors?” Dalton said to me, coming up to my other side.
I
