Trapped On Talonque: (A Sectors SF romance) (42 page)

She exited the useless pleikn chamber, slamming the door angrily after Nate and Thom exited. She headed to the flyer bay. Crossing the broad expanse with rapid strides, almost reckless in the gloom, she stopped at a large panel of jeweled switches and symbols, inert and colorless. “This is the original system, or backup as you call it. Shall I try the activation sequence?”

“Nothing to lose—go ahead.”

She handed Nate the lamp. “Point the light on the wall panel for me, please.” She began the activation process. Gradually, as she played her graceful fingers across the gems, switches and symbols, the board came to colorful life. An encouraging hum emanated from the display.

Suddenly, there was a fat sparking snap, and many of the lights came on in the flyer bay. Not with the full brilliance Nate preferred, but at least bright enough to see without the hand lamps, which Nate and Thom snapped off.

“This is progress,” Thom said.

“If you say so.” Bithia clearly wasn’t impressed. “I’ve no idea how long the power will last. We mustn’t try to activate too many things, because the system was never designed to run the entire base.”

“All right, you tell us, since this is your place, where to next?” Nate kept his tone amiable. He had no great expectations for this excursion, but he was interested in seeing whatever she wanted to show them.

“There are the storerooms. A spare pleikn might have been left there—”

Nate shook his head. “I doubt it. Any other priority choices? Your personal quarters maybe?”

Bithia gave him a reproachful look. “Remembering how my quarters at Nochen were handled, sealed with no attempt at preservation, I’m not eager to investigate the corridor here.”

“Ma’am, the place we ought to be going is wherever you think your father might have left you a message,” Thom said with a gentleness that was unusual for him. “Ain’t that what you want to see, bottom line?”

She hung her head for a moment, toying with her gilintrae, rolling it around her wrist, then nodded. “Yes, you’re right. I admit it.”

“But?” Nate prompted. “You’re afraid there may not be a message. Want us to go first, check his quarters or wherever we need to go, see what the conditions are?”

Bithia stood straighter. “No, but thank you. As you said about your trip to the warehouse, even if there was a message, you might not recognize it for what it is. I need to stop being foolish. If he left me a message, or anything at all, it’ll be in the central control room where he had his workspace, where he loved to sit and direct all activities, talk to the researchers and the students about new finds and discoveries. That place was the hub of his existence on an expedition. The others—the ones who’d served with him in the field before—used to joke he could go for days at a time without leaving his chair in the central room, except for brief moments. He had to be in the middle of the activity, eating and sleeping there oftentimes. New discoveries were his passion.”

“Lead the way.” Nate stepped aside to let her pass.
I know this is hard for you.

I appreciate your understanding.
She sent him a warm flood of affection.
I’m scared of what we may find.

Not moving as rapidly, she took them to the corridor outside the flyer bay and went to the left. A few yards down the hall, Bithia easily activated a door that opened onto a dark stairwell extending up as far as the beams of the lamps reached.

“More climbing.” Thom stretched to unkink his back and grimaced.

“My aching knee,” Nate said. “Getting a workout.”

“Not all the way to the top.” Bithia was already close to the first landing. “If the base power was on, we’d have a different way to go, antigravity assisted, but as things stand, stairs are the only option.”

Trailing Bithia, Nate and Thom ascended three levels of darkened stairs, the backup lighting providing only sparse illumination in certain areas.

“Kinda warm in here, ain’t it, for a place with no power?” Thom asked as he climbed the third set of stairs. He took off his big, fur-lined jacket and stuffed it sloppily into his pack.

“My father assigned one of the student teams to engineer a heating system using the volcano’s magma chambers. The students were also to stabilize it, so the Sleeping Goddess couldn’t erupt again. My father worried about the villages. So he had the team redirect the magma to another peak farther on into the range. There were no people at risk there, because the area is totally uninhabited. At least in my time.” She chuckled. “Probably still is. The farther you go across the mountains, the more desolate the terrain becomes. I’ll never understand how Sarbordon’s people made it across.”

“Probably something worse drove them,” Nate said. “That’s usually the case in a mass migration.”

“My father was quite pleased with the results of the students’ work.”
 

Nate found it interesting how casually she discussed this achievement the Sectors technologists and engineers couldn’t have duplicated. Drawing heat from the volcano’s energy, perhaps, but not stabilizing the whole volcanic system to ensure eruptions would occur only where you wanted them to. Obviously, there was a lot to learn from this vanished civilization. “Would a report of relevant data be somewhere in the files here?”
 

“Of course. I told you my father’s most precious possession on any expedition was the data he gathered. I hoped to find some extra data chips sized for my gilintrae while we were here, so I could try to preserve more of the expedition’s records. Of course, I planned to recharge it too with the pleikn that unfortunately isn’t here anymore.” She laughed somewhat bitterly and stopped on the landing, although the stairs continued to wind as far as the eye could see in the gloom.

“The stairs take you to the crater,” she said, pointing upward. “We used to go there sometimes to enjoy the crater lake, especially after the students heated it.”

“The whole lake?”

“Yes. Something to do with geothermal exchanges. Not my area of expertise, sorry.” She laughed. “Light over here, please. We need to open this door to access the central areas of the base.”

Thom leaned over, pondering the gloom they’d climbed from. He stared upward next. “Gives me an uneasy feeling, all this darkness and empty, abandoned space.”

Nate raised his eyebrows. “Getting sensitive in your old age?”

Thom didn’t appear bothered by the good-natured teasing. “Don’t seem right, such a big base, all deserted.”

Nate had to admit he instinctively became more relaxed when he left the stairwell and heard the access door close snugly behind them. Bithia chose the left corridor again and headed off, her pace slowing as the corridor curved.

“After this curve the hall opens into the central area,” she said, whispering as she paused.

Nate took her hand, giving it a reassuring squeeze. They strolled on, hand in hand, Thom following at their heels, until the area came into view.

There were two men standing in the middle of the alien control center.

Bithia gasped. Nate shoved her behind him with one hand, blaster in his other. Thom flattened against the opposite wall, his blaster at the ready.

With Thom guarding his six, Nate inched forward to peer around the curve. The two men stood in the exact same spot, staring at the corridor.
Both men have their eyes shut.

“Holograms,” Nate said. “I think we’ve found your message.”

Her eyes widened, and she whispered something under her breath Nate couldn’t catch. The next second, she darted past him, raced the last few yards to the edge of the nerve center and hopped down the three stairs into the well of the central area. She stopped a yard or so in front of the two holograms.

“My father,” she murmured, voice choking on a sob as she stared at the person on the left. “I don’t believe it. It truly is him.” She reached out with one hand, then let it fall to her side before her touch could break the illusion that the real man stood waiting for her.

Nate followed more slowly, Thom at his back. Now he studied the representation of Fr’taray, who was taller than Bithia and had the same basic facial features, only he was the masculine version, heavier and older. The family relationship was glaringly obvious. His bearded face was peaceful, calm. His hair was the same dark blue and purple as hers, brushing the gemmed collar of his dark blue one-piece garment. He appeared poised to walk away but looked like he wanted to tell them something first, as if he’d waited to impart vital information that only he could reveal. Nate hoped for Bithia’s sake that the subliminal impression was true.

“Who’s the other guy?”
 

Bithia shook her head, reluctantly taking her gaze from her father’s face to focus on the companion hologram. “I never met him. He wasn’t on our expedition—oh!” She glanced at her wrist, where the heavy gold identification bracelet set with red and purple gemstones rode loosely. “See? It’s his. He’s M’negel.” She held her arm close to the arm of the hologram, and Nate realized the bracelets were identical.

It bothered him to be viewing a lifelike hologram of a man who’d ended up a dead, burnt corpse in Nochen sometime after leaving this message, whatever it might contain. And it bothered Nate to be bothered. Excess imagination wasn’t one of his standard problems on a mission.
This isn’t exactly a mission anymore, and we’ve never been sent to explore a millennia-old, abandoned alien facility either.
He took a deep breath and studied the second hologram’s face, trying to suppress the image of the man as an ashy corpse clutching the red box.
 

“You never heard of him? No one ever mentioned his name?”

Bithia shook her head again. Tiring of the subject of the unknown M’negel, she walked to the nearest console and started flipping gemmed levers, pushing symbols in a deliberate sequence.

“Do you want us to step outside so you can hear the message in private?” Nate asked.

She shook her head emphatically and stopped what she was doing to respond. “It can only be played once and will be gone. I want the two of you to hear it with me.”

“Only once? An inefficient idea,” Thom said. “What if the contents got played by accident somehow?”

“Originally, it would have been set for infinite replay. But once those in charge took the pleikn out, then this device also has a finite auxiliary power, as you call it. We’re seeing the images because the power’s drained to the last level. The device displays the image of what is contained as a warning to take action or lose the data. Or so I’ve been told. I never heard of it actually occurring before. It would take eons for the power to drain away.” She stopped and grimaced at what she’d just said. “I guess I must be glad enough power remains to display the image and play the message once.”

Thumbnail lecture on holographic-messaging technology over, she turned to the controls. “Here we go. Listen carefully.”

Nate stopped her. “Wait. We aren’t going to understand it, are we? I mean, neither of these guys speaks Basic.”

“Neither do I, you know.” She seemed amused at the idea. “You didn’t realize? You and Thom hear me in your own language because of the way I speak and project to you mind to mind simultaneously. I’ll project to you what I hear my father say, translated to a format your minds can understand.”

“Even me?” Eyes wide and mouth gaping in astonishment, Thom rubbed his head. “I tested negative on any test for latent psionic abilities.”

“I guess the lady has more than enough for the three of us,” Nate said. He flipped a mental switch, activating a top-secret, special data-recording implant of his own. There might never be a way to play it, if he didn’t make it home, but at least there’d be a chance. She’d tried to save the course home for him, and he was going to try to save her father’s last message for her. “Whenever you’re ready.”

“Now.”

She flipped over a sapphire triangle on the far left corner of the board.

Her father took a breath and opened his eyes, gazing straight ahead. For the space of a few heartbeats, he said nothing, apparently mulling over what he wanted to say. Nate could hear subdued noises, as if other people were talking, coming and going in the same space where they now stood. It was eerie and unsettling. He caught himself checking the perimeter for the people making the sounds. The deep voice of Fr’taray brought his attention sharply to the hologram.

“Bithia, I’m leaving this message for you just in case. I’m not actually sure why, but something odd is going on back home, and I don’t like the feel of it. We’ve been urgently recalled. All the expeditions in this quadrant have been summoned, the research canceled. I believe it may be a total recall, everywhere. I don’t know.” He ran a hand over his face, his expression more tired than serene now. “Definitely one of the things I intend to find out. Whatever it is, it’s totally unprecedented in my career.”

And he doesn’t much like it. Used to giving orders, not taking them.

“I requested a three-day delay so you could come with us and was refused in no uncertain terms, even when I sent more detail. I sent a private message to the representative of our expedition’s sponsor, which went unanswered. An affront which has never happened, not to
me
.”
 

Now Nate could tell he was annoyed. Maybe even a little worried.