Music of the Spheres (28 page)

Kenny was the first one to break the silence. “Why wouldn’t
you share this with us? I mean, confirmation of alien cultures aside, the fact
that one of them might invade and destroy us is information I, for one, would
like to have had.”

Justine answered before Alex had a chance. “If we did know,
the first thing we would have done is work towards improving the quantum drives,
and on weaponizing Kinemet. Eventually, someone would notice that much Kinemet
being used.”

“It’s more important for us to ‘Emerge’,” Alex said. “You
heard his last words. Only once we are Emerged will we be able to defend
ourselves. I don’t know what that entails, but I’m sure if there were any other
option, Ah Tabai would have mentioned it.”

Michael turned to Yaxche, “He spoke Mayan. The Song of the
Stars mentions a time when a great number of your people vanished during a
war.”

“Ahyah,” Yaxche said. “The Great War.”

“Then…” Michael started to say, clearly working through the
facts.

But before anyone had a chance to add to the conjecture, the
ship’s console lit up and an alert sounded. On the holoscreen, the faint
twinkling of stars turned pitch black as they were blocked out by an enormous
object.

It had taken the
Ultio
five hours to travel from the star
beacon
to the space port. The alien ship made the trip in five minutes.

∞

Everyone’s eyes were glued to the holoscreen, watching as
the outline of a ship began to coalesce several kilometers away.

“It’s huge,” Kenny said in a hushed voice. “At this
magnification, I would say it’s at least fifteen-hundred meters long.”

The architecture of the vessel was unlike any craft Alex had
ever seen on Earth. It was as if the metal of the hull were made of pure
electricity. It glowed and swirled in continuous motion, a dance of solid
energy.

The nose of the vessel extended out in a gently tapering
cone. The ship’s body was shaped roughly like a tube, and ended in a long taper
at the back. Overall, the vessel somewhat resembled a narwhal.

As the ship neared, Alex was suddenly awash with the
overwhelming sensation of Kinemet. He shivered.

“I can feel it, too,” Justine said. “The ship itself is
built from Kinemet!”

Once the alien vessel came within half a kilometer, it
stopped and floated at that position.

“Is it the Kulsat?” Kenny asked. No one replied. “What are
they doing?”

“Maybe they’re scanning us. Wondering who we are,” Michael
said.

At the same time, Justine and Alex nodded.

“Yes,” Justine said. “I can…” She gave her head a slight
shake. “I don’t know how to describe it. When I try to use my
sight,
I’m
just overwhelmed by the Kinemet out there. It’s like looking directly at the
Sun. But, I feel like they are
looking
at us with the
sight
. Like
they are
looking
at me—”

Her words were cut off abruptly, and when Alex glanced at
her, he saw that she was transforming into quanta before his eyes. There was a
look of panic on her face in the moment before she completely turned to light.

Everyone else took a step back as Justine’s essence, her
collection of photons, floated toward the monitors and through them. They all
flickered out as she passed them, and then came back to life when she was
through.

Her photons then continued to drift into the hull of the
Ultio
and finally out into space. Unconfined by any material barrier, her essence
shot toward the alien ship, almost as if she were being sucked in through a
vacuum tube.

“What the hell?” Kenny asked.

“It’s not her,” Alex said. “It’s got to be
them.
They’re taking her.”

Michael gasped. “Why her?”

“She’s the only one of us who is a full Kinemat. I’m
incomplete. They probably aren’t even aware of my existence.”

“What are they going to—?” Kenny started to ask, but the
hull of the alien ship brightened to a blinding level, and lance of pale light
shot out toward the underside of the
Ultio.

Kenny screamed, “They’re targeting the engines!”

Before anyone could brace themselves, the impact knocked
them all to the floor.

Michael let out a cry as he fell, and it looked as if he
might have broken an arm.

The electrical systems in the bridge stuttered. One
interface console exploded in a shower of sparks, and a panel on the other side
of the room popped off, the wires spitting and hissing.

Yaxche, looking frightened out of his wits, had an arm
wrapped around the back of the captain’s chair.

The lights flickered off and on, and the artificial gravity
generator failed. Alex lost contact with the floor, and floated up, smacking
his head against a control panel.

There was a secondary explosion, and then the ship listed to
port.

Just before the holoscreens went dark, Alex saw the alien
spacecraft turn away and leave, as if confident their attack had been a fatal
enough blow.

Alex held enough hope that that wasn’t the case, right up
until the air filters shut down, and the entire electrical system fizzled out.

They were adrift in space. Their ship was disabled, and
their life support system was non-functional.

The temperature on the bridge started to drop at an alarming
rate.

“Alex,” Michael called out. “Can you do anything?”

He could quantize himself, but he had no awareness in that
state. In doing so, he might be able to save himself, but there was no way he
could navigate the ship or help the others. He pushed his senses out to see if
the electrical system was repairable.

“I’m sorry, the generators and batteries are completely
melted.”

“What about the Kinemet?” Kenny said. “If it fissions,
that’s all she wrote.”

Alex shook his head, then realized no one could see the
motion. “It’s not there. They must have taken it when they took Justine.”

After a few moments, Kenny said, “Is now a good time to
panic?”

“Wait a minute,” Alex said. He could feel the chill creep in
to his bones. The bridge was nearing the freezing point.

The
Ultio
was only a few hundred meters from the
space port, and though it was falling away, it was an agonizing thought that
they were so close to salvation.

When Alex had been saved before, he was in a quantized
state, and had no memory of the events, but if he made one giant assumption…

He concentrated, and pushed his
sight
out toward the
space port. He had the sense that it was wrapped in something similar to the
Kinemet dampers because when his consciousness reached the outer hull of the
complex, he could not push his way in.

There had to be some kind of way to communicate with the
space port’s computer system, to let it know there was a ship ready to dock. In
the case of a disabled ship, they had to have made a provision for some kind of
manual override.

He searched the entire surface of the space port, but after
the first pass, he had not found any way in.

Willing himself not to panic, he continued his search, and
it was only at his second pass over one of the large elliptical bay doors of
the hull that he spotted a slight protrusion sticking out a few centimeters. It
was a tiny metal rod.

He used his electropathic ability and sent a small shot of
energy into it.

Slowly, the bay door started to open, and Alex could feel a
magnetic tug coming from within. He returned to his body.

Kenny was wild-eyed. “What’s happening? We’re drifting the
other way now!”

“The space port dock has us. It’s pulling us in,” Alex said.

Michael cried out with joy. “You did it.”

“I’m not sure it was enough,” Alex said. “Maybe I only
postponed the inevitable. Even if we were to manage to get one of those
portable quantum drives attached to the
Ultio,
we’d be dead five minutes
after arriving near Pluto.”

There was a sharp jarring as the ship came to a stop, and
Kenny and Michael scrambled in the dark to manually open the cabin door and
lead the way to the main hatch. They opened it to reveal the inside of the alien
space port.

The rush of fresh oxygen was pure heaven.

37

Alien Space Port :

Alpha Centauri :

Standing on one
of the metal walkways along the pier inside the alien space port, Michael surveyed
the damage to the
Ultio
. A full third of the hind section, where the quantum
drive and Kinemet had been, was simply missing. The ship was as good as
scuttled.

“Maybe destroying our ship was incidental,” Michael said,
though to no one in particular. “They wanted the Kinemet and Justine, and
didn’t give us a passing thought.”

Kenny glanced up and frowned.

“What now?” Alex asked, sitting down near Yaxche, who had
found a spot on the floor to rest.

Michael rubbed the stubble growing on his chin, and winced
when he moved his arm. Not broken, but still sore.

The hangar itself was several hundred meters wide in every
direction, laced with rows of berths, metal jetties, elevated piers and several
walkways floating at various elevations. It looked as if the port wasn’t meant
for ships much larger than the
Ultio
.

All of the docking bays in the hangar were empty. The
jetties were lined with large discs on the end of cylindrical beams. Michael
guessed they served as dock bumpers. They gave off a steady electromagnetic
hum.

When Michael and Kenny had opened the main loading door from
the
Ultio,
they’d been able to manually extend the ramp. Although the
electrical systems were dead, and the few small fires had been extinguished,
the structure of the
Ultio
was still unsafe. The ship groaned
periodically as metal beams collapsed and the contents shifted and fell.

“I’m not sure,” Michael said finally. “But we should try to go
back in and get food and water. Maybe some blankets or something and make a
camp out here.”

“What about Justine?” Kenny asked, but the only answer
Michael gave was the hard set to his jaw.

The aliens—he assumed they were the Kulsat—had abducted her,
and there was nothing Michael could think of to help.

∞

They spent the next fifteen minutes making quick excursions
back into the
Ultio
and gathering supplies and enough equipment to make
a camp.

Kenny set up a makeshift table using a few storage containers.
He brought out several holoslates for testing, and finally found one that
wasn’t damaged. As he worked on it, tapping, swirling and wiggling his fingers
on the haptic console, Michael looked over his shoulder.

“We should conserve the battery,” he said by way of
suggestion.

Kenny smiled. “No need. There’s a wireless electrical
current running through the complex. It’s powering the computer directly. I’m
going to see if the space port has a network I can hook into. Maybe we can
download a manual on how to get into the living quarters on the other side.”

Alex had already tried to use his electropathy to open the
large door at the far end of the hangar, but had reported that there wasn’t any
kind of switch or lever that he could find.

With Alex’s help, Yaxche had used cargo netting to create a
hammock between two vertical beams. When Alex went back into the ship to look
for a blanket, the old Indian sank into the netting and closed his eyes.

“Are you all right?” Michael asked, approaching tentatively.

Blinking his eyes open, Yaxche gave him that big grin. He
spoke, and his clip-on translator repeated, “Ahyah. Old men get tired. I just need
a nap.”

Laughing, both in relief, and at the Mayan’s equanimity in
the face of everything that was happening, Michael said, “Quite a mess we got
ourselves in.”

“Ahyah,” Yaxche said back. “As they say, ‘Out of the pot and
into the fire’.” His grin widened into a full smile.

Before Michael could say anything more, Alex raced out of
the wreckage of the
Ultio,
his eyes wide.

“What’s wrong?” Michael asked, his heart speeding up.

Alex headed straight for Kenny and the holoslates. “There’s
something happening. I could feel the electromagnetics activating on one of the
other docking bays.” He pointed to the holoslate. “Are you able to do any scans
on this?”

Kenny shook his head. “No, the external sensor on this unit
is damaged.”

Just then, one of the magnetic dock bumpers on the next pier
over began to extend.

Kenny stood up, his face flush and his eyes bright with trepidation.
“Are the Kulsat coming back to finish us off?”

A huge circular section of the hangar wall, the bay door, faded
to an almost perfect blackness. The ring of the opening had a vague whitish
glow to it. That was the energy barrier Kenny had theorized about earlier.
While they were inside the
Ultio
being pulled into the dock, they’d been
unable to see what was happening.

Michael could feel his hair tingling with the electricity as
a new alien ship appeared in the opening.

It was less than a quarter of the size of the
Ultio
. As
with the ship that had attacked them, the hull of the new alien ship looked to be
made of Kinemet—the entire surface glowed and swirled, though the colors on this
ship were a kaleidoscope of reds and yellows. Its shape was very similar to the
bird-like designs of gull-wing planes from Earth. Michael guessed that this
ship could serve a dual purpose as a spacecraft and an aircraft. The front of
the ship resembled the coned head of a bird, with a beaked nose that came to a
point.

Michael’s first impression was of a phoenix.

When the vessel had fully entered the bay, the docking
bumpers adjusted themselves to uniformly secure it. The hangar wall solidified
once more, sealing the area against the void of space.

The four stood there with mouths agape during the entire docking
procedure.

Kenny took an involuntary step back when a hatch on the side
of the alien ship opened. A broad, rectangular patch of the ship’s hull faded
to empty space.

A platform held by two large metal arms protruded from the
gap and began to descend to the hangar deck.

On the platform stood two aliens.

Both of them were bipedal. One of them was significantly
taller than the other, standing almost three meters high, and it was extremely
thin. The second alien was a great deal shorter, the top of its head level with
the other’s elbow.

When the platform stopped several centimeters above the
dock, the two aliens stepped off and approached the waiting humans.

The shorter alien wore clothing that was alarmingly close to
the ceremonial outfit Yaxche wore. Calf-high boots with beads and tassels were
pulled over long beige pants. The alien’s torso was wrapped with a tzute style
cloth, intricately designed in geometric shapes and earth-tone colors. A scarf
hung loosely around the neck, decorated with brightly colored baubles. The
alien reached up and removed the feathered headdress, and Michael looked on the
face of a being from another world for the first time.

—And it was human. The small man was dark complexioned, with
black hair and a long forehead. High cheekbones framed a broad nose and wide
brown eyes. He resembled a Mayan Indian.

He gave them an easy smile.

Michael was speechless.

A moment later, the taller alien, dressed also in what
Michael guessed was a ceremonial outfit—though it was one he had never seen
before, made of some kind of shiny material and arranged in several folds and
layers—also removed its mantle, an oblong cap with several long spines
protruding from it.

Michael gaped at the tall alien.

She had the same basic features as a human girl, but the
lower part of her face was drawn forward to end in a narrow jaw and tiny chin.
Her thin lips framed a small mouth set also in a welcoming smile, and her eyes
were overlarge and elliptical.

Instead of hair, she had what looked like the down of a bird
that, as far as Michael could tell, ran from the top of her head, where it was
white, to the back of her neck where it turned a light shade of yellow and extended
down behind her clothes. Michael could not see her ears, if she had any, and
the skin on her face and the front of her neck was bright yellow and fuzzy.

Together, the pair of aliens approached the four humans and stopped.
The shorter alien genuflected.

Michael, the politician of the group, recovered from his
astonishment and bowed. He stepped forward.

Kenny reached out instinctively to stop him, but he smiled
at the younger man. “It’ll be fine. These are not the Kulsat.”

The shorter alien spoke in Mayan, and a split-second later,
Michael heard English words come from somewhere near the alien’s collar.

“I offer my greetings to you. I am Ah Tabai, a Sentinel of
the Collection.”

The alien extended both arms and clasped Michael’s hands in
welcome. He glanced at Alex. “It has been a very long time since we first
discovered you, Sky Traveler. I am glad you have endured.”

Ah Tabai then took a step toward Yaxche, and bowed deeply.

“Grandfather,” the alien said. Michael remembered from
something Alex had said that it was a general term of respect for one’s elders,
regardless of the blood relationship. “You have traveled a great distance to be
here.”

“Ahyah,” Yaxche said, a look of surprise on his usually calm
face.

Ah Tabai motioned to the other alien, who made a quirky nod.

“My companion is—” He made a high pitched sound, for which his
translator found no suitable match in English.

As if realizing this, Ah Tabai said, “You can call her Aliah.
She is also a Sentinel. You would know her home star system as ‘Gliese’.”

With that, the tall birdlike alien woman made a chirping
sound and tilted her head almost perpendicular to her shoulders. The translator
in her suit said, “Pleased to meet you.”

Michael said, “I’m afraid you are not finding us at our
best, but on behalf of my friends here and our home world, I am glad to meet
you, and extend our friendship to you.”

His tone grew somber. “We were attacked by an alien ship—the
Kulsat?—and they took our friend.”

Ah Tabai’s eyes widened. “They did?”

“Her name is Justine,” Alex said. “She is the first and only
one of us to become a full Kinemat—she has Emerged.”

“That is why they took her,” Ah Tabai said. “It has happened
in the past. They will try to find out as much about your system from her as
they can.”

“Is there anything you can do?” Michael asked. “Can you
rescue her?”

Ah Tabai dropped his eyes. “By now they have taken her back
to their home system.” He glanced at Aliah. “We hurried from Gliese the moment
we detected the beacon in this system was active, but it is obvious we were not
quick enough, else we might have been able to save her.”

Kenny raised one finger. “Uh, excuse me. From ‘Gliese’?” he
asked.

Ah Tabai smiled, “Yes. Gliese is the closest member world of
the Collection to this system.”

“But—” Kenny glanced at Michael. “If you only left there when
we arrived
here,
that would mean you traveled, like, twenty light-years in
a little over eight hours!”

“Yes,” Ah Tabai said, as if this were obvious.

“That’s unbelievable,” Kenny said. He looked at the alien
ship with wide eyes. “You can travel at, what—” He did a rough calculation in
his head. “—thirty-
thousand
times the speed of light?”

“You are mistaken in your calculation,” Ah Tabai said, as if
talking to a child. “It took us that amount of time to get from our planet to
the beacon in our system at light speed.”

“Then…?” Kenny glanced back and forth between Michael and
the alien, but Michael couldn’t figure it out either.

Ah Tabai said, “When we use the star beacons, we say that we
travel ‘outside light’. It is by the Grace that we do this. Only inside a
system do we travel by light—though the beacon and the space port in this system
are too close for light travel.”

“So it’s instantaneous between the beacons?” Kenny asked. He
glanced at Alex and Michael. “It took us over four years.” Stunned, he asked Ah
Tabai, “What kind of engine can do that?”

Ah Tabai said patiently, “When we travel outside light, we
use the Grace. All star beacons occupy the same space outside light.”

Kenny stared. “The Grace. What does that mean?”

Ah Tabai put up his hand to forestall more questions. “I
will answer everything as well as I am able. For now, you must listen to me.”

He looked at each of them in turn to make sure they were
paying attention.

“As much as I longed for the day we would meet, I had hoped
you were more advanced than this. If your friend is the only one of you who has
Emerged, then your world is in terrible danger.

“Now that the Kulsat are aware of you, they will gather an
armada and prepare an invasion of your home system.”

Michael blanched. “We thought coming here was our only hope
to save Alex.”

Ah Tabai nodded. “It was. We do not have much time. We must
board my ship and return you to your world without delay.”

His eyes reflected the gravity of his words. “You need to warn
your people the Kulsat are coming, and try to defend yourselves against
annihilation.”