The Champion (14 page)

Becca slowly backed away from the pack, then turned and strode down the corridor, Crazy George only a step behind her.

Hulsey waited, not moving, not speaking. Despite her obvious anxiety, Quentin sensed steel in her demeanor. She didn’t want this job but was resigned to doing it anyway.

Moments later, Becca and George returned with Bumberpuff.

“That’s all of us,” Quentin said.

Hulsey stared at Bumberpuff for a moment, then locked eyes with Quentin.

“All of you,” she said. “You’re
sure
?”

Hulsey drew out the last word like she wanted to believe, but had witnessed firsthand the horrid result of a lie. If that result involved the “cleaner machines,” Quentin prayed telling the truth would keep his friends safe.

“I’m sure,” he said. “You have my word.”

She nodded, still doubtful. “If you want to live, do exactly what I tell you. What you see next might be ... upsetting.”

“We don’t want any trouble,” Quentin said. “We’re looking for a Human man and woman that may have been brought here recently, several days ago. All we want to do is find them, then we’ll leave.”

Hulsey laughed, but there was no humor in it.

“I can help you find them,” she said. “But none of you will leave here. Ever.”

15

Visitors

THE ROBOTS CLEARED AWAY
from the floor, but not the ceiling or walls. Hulsey led Quentin and the others to the exterior hatch. It was open — that should have vented Rosalind’s internal atmosphere into the vacuum of space, but everything seemed fine.

Quentin followed Hulsey out of the ship, stepping into a shallow, silvery dome. The dome was made up of tightly packed robots, the same kind that had come close to carving him and his teammates into little, messy bits. Some of the robots glowed, lighting up the area as clear as day. Under his feet, a gleaming starship hull so smooth that the soles of his shoes slid, and he had to watch his step or he might fall on his ass.

Hulsey walked to an open spot in the hull: a hatch that led inside. She pointed down.

Quentin hesitated. His teammates stopped behind him. He heard metal on metal; a few of the silvery robots had followed them out of Rosalind and were scuttling around the improvised dome.

Hulsey folded her hands in front of her.

“You have to go in,” she said. She tilted her head toward the robots. “If you don’t, this is the end of the line.”

Crawl into the belly of an alien starship and take his teammates with him? If Hulsey was right, Quentin didn’t have any choice.

“What happens to Rosalind?”

Hulsey looked at Becca. “Are you Rosalind?”

“Not me,” Becca said. “Rosalind is the ship.”

“Ah,” Hulsey said, nodding like she should have already figured that out. “You might want to say your goodbyes now. Prawatt ships ... they usually go insane. They shut themselves off after about thirty or forty years. Due to loneliness, we think.”

Thirty or forty years
 ...

That phrase finally made it hit home: Hulsey wasn’t just making empty threats. She truly believed Quentin and his friends were never leaving again. But there had to be a way out. There
had
to be.

Hulsey was a young woman, maybe in her late twenties. Her blue skin showed League of Planets heritage, definitely, but was a lighter shade than Don Pine’s.

“What about you, Hulsey?” Quentin said. “How long have you been here?”

“I was born here.” She pointed into the hatch. “Right down there, in fact. And if you have kids, that’s where they’ll be born, too. Now please, stop stalling ... that only makes them mad.”

Quentin stepped to the opening: inside waited a ladder made of polished metal rings that blended seamlessly with the wall, which itself gleamed just as brightly as the hull upon which he stood.

“What happens when we enter?”

“I’ll take you to a large room,” Hulsey said. “There, the Portath will meet you. They will be armed. If you or your friends make any sudden moves, you will all die.”

She took a step closer to Quentin, her purple eyes pleading for him to do what she asked.

“The Humans you came looking for, I know where they are,” she said quietly. “They’re alive.”

Jeanine ...
alive
.

Quentin turned to face his teammates.

“We’re going in,” he said. “Don’t mess with anyone or anything. We can find a way out of this, I know we can, as long as we keep calm.”

His teammates nodded. They looked frightened but ready for anything. Except for Bumberpuff, who didn’t have any physical expression Quentin could yet identify, and for John and Ju: the Tweedy brothers just looked
mad
. Quentin prayed to High One they would control themselves, that they really understood the situation’s gravity.

Quentin knew he had to move before his courage failed him. He stepped into the hatch and descended.

16

The Portath

HULSEY LED THEM
into strange, gleaming corridors. The floors curved slightly down toward the center, which made for awkward walking. The walls were also curved up toward a smooth, arched ceiling lined with the same kind of ring-rungs as the ladder leading down from the outer hull. It made Quentin think of some artist’s abstract vision of a steel spine.

“Hulsey, where are we going?”

“I told you, to meet the Portath,” she said. “Once that is done, hopefully I can take you to the Stretch so you can see your people.”

“The Stretch? What’s that?”

“You’ll see soon enough,” Hulsey said. “As long as you continue to behave, that is — life is cheap here.”

Cheap, but not so cheap that he and his friends had been killed right off. That was something, at least.

The corridors curved and twisted, intersected with others, and not just on the horizontal plane — hallways came in at all angles. The silvery robots scurried along walls and floors, but never on the ceiling. Maybe they couldn’t navigate around the curved bars.

Hulsey stopped at an oval-shaped door, one that meshed perfectly with the curved hallway. Anywhere Quentin looked on this ship, there wasn’t a straight edge in sight.

She turned, faced Quentin and the others.

“You have behaved, and that is good,” Hulsey said. “However, this is your final warning. In this room you will meet the Portath. If you fight, you will die.”

John loudly hocked a loogie. He glared at her as he spat it onto the polished floor.

“Lady, you’re just a big bag of fun,” he said. “You must be awesome at parties.”

“Mega-awesome,” Ju said. “I wish you’d been around for my junior prom.”

Hulsey stared at the spittle for a moment. Quentin wondered if they were done for, but the red-robed, blue-skinned woman simply shrugged, then faced the door. It slid downward, vanishing into the floor, revealing a large, round, domed-ceiling room.

She entered. Quentin hesitated. How would the Portath react? Even Hulsey didn’t know for sure. Would they attack? He felt fear bubble up again, not for himself, but for the others — he wished he’d come alone, that he hadn’t dragged his closest friends into this.

Doc Patah slid next to him, fluttering at eye level.

“Young Quentin, now is not the time to second-guess yourself,” he said. “We came of our own free will.”

Years earlier, Quentin wouldn’t have known the difference between an angry Harrah or a happy one — or probably even a dead one, for that matter — because the wide mouth and sensory pits always seemed to look the same. Now, however, Quentin knew Doc’s expressions as well as he knew John’s sneer, or Kimberlin’s patient stare, or Becca’s small smile. Doc Patah was afraid, but not angry, and he wasn’t blaming Quentin for anything.

“Doc, how the hell could you know what I was thinking?”

“You’re not exactly what one would call
mysterious
, Quentin,” Doc said. “As your kind says, you wear your heart on your sleeve. We’re here with you. Go forward and we will all face this together.”

Quentin glanced at the others. Game faces, each and every one. They were afraid but ready for whatever came next.

He stepped into the room. The others followed.

Inside, a few robots scurried around the room’s outside edges, where the curved walls met the slightly curved floor. A dozen oval-shaped doors dotted the room, like organic valves of some monstrous steel beast.

Ju looked at each of the doors, his eyes darting from one to the next. “I hope they don’t gas us like the Prawatt did. Getting gassed makes me fart.”

“Everything makes you fart,” John said.

“Be
still
,” Hulsey hissed. “Don’t talk — they are coming.”

The doors, all twelve of them, slid open, and Hulsey’s words from back on Rosalind flashed through Quentin’s mind:
What you see next might be ... upsetting
.

He had once thought the Ki, Sklorno, Quyth and Harrah were “alien,” and once upon a time they had been. Now they were just teammates, coworkers, friends. He had then thought of the Prawatt as alien because they were more machine than animal, yet he’d grown accustomed to that species as well.

The creatures that poured through the oval doors? The word
alien
had never felt more accurate.

They didn’t walk on the floor, they
swung
, glowing tentacles reaching out to wrap around a gleaming ceiling-rung, the roundish body arcing down and forward then back up again. No, not
tentacles .
.. some kind of long
extrusion
, like squeezing a half-full balloon in your fist and seeing a bubble of it pop from between your fingers, or the toothpaste shooting from a tube if toothpaste and tube were one and the same.

Dozens of them flowed through each of the twelve doors, a pulsating, boneless
horde
glowing every color of the rainbow and then some. Patterns flowed across their bodies, up and down the random extrusions that acted as both legs and arms, across black-dotted skin — lines of red and blue and orange flowing one way, yellow and black and red another, green-ringed circles of purple expanding and contracting, even more garish combinations — far more than Quentin could track.

Within seconds, he and his friends were surrounded. Each of the bizarre creatures held what looked like a stubby rifle. Endlessly flashing colors reflected off the floor, the curved walls and the domed ceiling, turning the room into a maddening kaleidoscope.

“Quentin,” Becca said, “they’re
beautiful
”

Had he not been in an area of space from which no one escaped, and on a massive ship he knew nothing about, he might have agreed with her. The living lightshow pulsed and thumped, made it hard to focus on any one being.

“Stay sharp,” he barked, his voice that of the quarterback calling out signals loud enough to be heard over a hundred thousand screaming fans. “Wait for them to make the first move. Don’t do anything to provoke them.”

He looked around for Hulsey, hoping she could tell him what was happening, but she was suddenly nowhere to be seen — Quentin and his friends were on their own.

The Portath didn’t have heads, at least not any Quentin could make out, just the roundish bodies and various extrusions. And those glassy dots, they were
blue
, not black, the only spots of permanent color on the mesmerizing, shifting skin.
Hundreds
of them on each and every creature, some so small they looked like tiny jewels while others were as large as golf balls. Were those
eyes
?

As a unit, the aliens came forward, slowly tightening the circle. They didn’t walk as much as they
flowed
. Their central bodies extended protrusions, three or four at a time, tips pressing down on the floor and pulling the roundish bodies along like soft, squishy versions of long-pointed medieval maces rolling downhill. These weren’t fixed appendages, like a Sklorno unrolling a rasper then rolling it back up again — the creatures extruded the limbs as needed, then reabsorbed those limbs when their purpose had been served.

Some of the rubbery limbs didn’t reabsorb: the ones that held weapons. Portath guns had a different shape than Quentin had ever seen, but there was no mistaking the general configuration of a squat barrel — out of that would come a bullet of some kind, or an entropic effect to dissolve tissue, or an electrical charge that would stun, possibly even kill.

The Krakens instantly formed a circle. They stood shoulder to shoulder, facing out at the surrounding threat, Doc Patah fluttering above and in the center.

“Stay still,” the Harrah said, his hissing voice louder than Quentin had ever heard. “There are too many of them, we can’t fight our way out of here.”

“We could try,” John said. “They’re gonna kill us anyway — we might as well have a little fun.”

Ju’s big hands balled into big fists. “I like fun. John’s way sounds better. We’re Krakens, we should go down swinging.”

The Tweedy brothers were about to make a mess of everything — Quentin couldn’t let that happen.

“
Don’t move
, dammit,” he said. “If they wanted us dead they would have killed us already, so don’t give them a reason to change their minds.”

The ring of glowing, pulsing Portath parted. Through the gap walked Hulsey. Two other Humans came with her, a white-skin and a pink-skin, both wearing red robes identical to hers. They pushed a lev-cart before them. Atop that cart were seven golden chokers, fixed circles of metal just like the one around Hulsey’s neck, just like the ones around the necks of the two Humans.

An image flashed through Quentin’s mind, one from his childhood on Micovi: the shock collars worn by the
indebted
, people who owed more than they could ever repay. The courts ordered those people into lifelong contracts with their debtors. Once a collar went on, it almost never came off.

“
Slaves
,” Quentin said. “They mean to make us slaves.”

He squatted into a fighting stance. Maybe Ju was right — maybe it was better to go down swinging.