“You don’t want to know,” Chiraine said.
While Narcissa worked, Chiraine and I returned below decks to check on the Inspector and maybe see what we could scrape up in terms of a communications module.
“Are you okay?” I asked. “Did Qualt do anything to you?”
She turned to me. “Why? You worried about me or something?”
“Actually, yes.”
“Well, I was worried about you. You were gone a lot longer than eight hours.”
“Yeah, it wasn’t a straightforward mission by any means.” I filled her in about our encounter with the Mayir patrol. “If it wasn’t for Narcissa, we would have been toast.”
“Yeah, she’s something, isn’t she?”
I thought I detected some weirdness in her tone, but I didn’t make anything of it. I told her the bad news about the Rhya wardships.
“It was a long shot, anyway,” she said.
“In any case, the Mayir know something’s up in Roan Andessa,” I said.
“Did you see any of their ships?” Chiraine asked.
“No, but I’m positive the scout team reported in when they captured Ana-Zhi. On our way out we heard a lot of activity and saw a lot of drones.”
“How long before they come looking for us down here?”
“Hard to say. I’m still hoping their EMR isn’t strong enough to penetrate this far down, but who knows?” I stifled a yawn. It was late and I was definitely feeling exhausted.
“What about Qualt?”
“What about him?”
“Could we use him as a bargaining chip?”
“No, Ana-Zhi was right. He’s damaged goods. The Mayir aren’t big on failure.”
“I hate to say this, but why are we keeping him around, then?”
“I don’t know. We’ll see what Ana-Zhi has to say about that once she wakes up.”
“Oh yeah.” Chiraine grinned. “That’ll be good.”
Back down in engineering, we checked in on the Inspector. It darted from control unit to display to KB station—definitely on a mission, but I wasn’t sure what it was up to.
“Excuse me,” I said.
At the sound of my voice, the Inspector stopped and turned towards us, floating in line with my head.
“I wanted you to know that the ship is damaged. It’s not major, but the power weave is blanking. We’re trying to fabricate a replacement part: a discharge retainer in the isolator module. Once that is repaired, we’re going to leave this area. Do you understand?”
I was kind of hoping for a head nod or some other gesture of acknowledgement, but the Inspector just stared.
“We’re going to go to the storeroom and see if we can find something that will allow us to communicate with you.”
Still no reaction.
“Will you come with us?”
Nothing.
Chiraine and I looked at each other. “I’m pretty sure it understands you,” she said.
“Remember, higher intelligence.” I smiled at her.
“Right.”
The main equipment storage room was right below the hold and it had its own inventory KB. I let Chiraine take the lead because my eyes were actually getting blurry from lack of sleep.
She ran a p-search and came up with several items which could be used as comm units, but none had the right interface.
“Not even the TL3?” I asked. That was the standard translation module used to power the ship’s main comms as well as remote comms and Auras. Supposedly its AI knew over six million forms of communication.
“Of course the TL3 can translate Rhya,” Chiraine said. “But we need a neuromodulation interface to get the data into it.”
She was right. Whenever we communicated with the Rhya, they used either their magnatae or some kind of ship-based broadcaster.
“We have to find something that will work with the Rhya’s physiology. Maybe some kind of bio-magnetic interface.”
As she continued to search, I asked, “So what exactly did you do to kill the external comm?”
“I didn’t kill it. I just told Qualt that I had. I put it into testing mode so it wasn’t actually broadcasting.”
“Smart.”
“Not really. If he had spent, like, fifteen more minutes digging into it, he would have discovered what I did.”
“Okay. Smart and lucky.”
“Yeah, lucky,” she said.
I was feeling incredibly wiped and couldn’t stop yawning. I think it was the aftereffects of twelve hours’ worth of adrenaline rush.
“You mind if I just close my eyes for a second?” I sat down on the floor with my back against the wall.
“No problem. I’ll keep looking. They’ve got to have something here we can use to—”
Chiraine continued to talk, but I drifted off.
7
Normally I take a lot of drugs to help me sleep. And these drugs inhibit dreaming. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I had a vivid dream. At best, I remember brief flashes of dreams.
But now I was in a full-bore, heavy duty dream state. And the weirdest thing was that I was aware that I was in a dream. I was lucid dreaming.
I walked on a trail that wound its way along a ridge overlooking a bleak volcanic landscape. The air was unbearably hot, burning my mouth and throat with the smell of sulfur.
I made my way to the edge of the cliff. Below me rivers of lava flowed down cliffs into bubbling pools. A dark castle loomed over a vast plain of fissured stone. The castle was shrouded in a toxic-looking mist. It struck me as somehow familiar.
Before I could place it, my thoughts were interrupted by a deep rumbling sound that ran through my body. Then I saw loose rocks jump and move and the ground shook, as if something impossibly gigantic stepped close by.
I spun around, and saw a hill of boulders behind me tremble and collapse, sending an avalanche of stone towards me.
Somehow I managed to clamber up on a rocky outcropping and just barely avoided being swept over the cliff by a torrent of stones.
An ear-splitting cry sounded, chilling me to the bone and making my legs feel like rubber. I fought to remain standing as I watched a colossal creature dig its way out of the stone hill.
The monstrosity resembled a gigantic scorpion, easily twenty meters long. Its tail was as thick as a tree trunk but segmented like a worm’s, and ended in a single
