New to Other-Terrestrial? Check here! Or if you need to, jump to the beginning of the episode here!

---

Tred had gotten some of the terminals functioning.

Most had been dark when he came in here, but they were hardy engineering lines, part of the larger power system of the ship itself.

They were meant mostly for the computers of each section to be able to communicate with each other.

But engineers being engineers, they had also put in a method for human communication: a message board.

He saw posts from power engineers all over the ship, talking about what they saw where they were.

Tred posted his situation.  He got replies immediately from others, confirming that all signs of reactor breach had disappeared.

But the power system was still in flux, and they did not yet know why.

“Does anyone have eyes on Reactor Seven?” he asked.

No one did.

Why would that reactor be cut off from the others?  It implied something was going wrong, but he did not know what.

It was the nearest reactor to him, but he did not know if he could get there.  He had to get out of here – there was enough ambient radiation that it was a bad idea to just wait for rescue.  He’d have a dangerous dose in less than an hour at this rate.

The most direct path to Reactor Seven was blocked.  He couldn’t even get there right now.  He could go deeper in, up, then out, but he did not know where it was safe.  If it was disconnected from the grid itself, then there was bad damage around it.

He got a notification; he was getting a signal, but it was strange.

His first thought was that it was alien; coming from that horrible alien megastructure, maybe.  But it wasn’t strong enough to be that.

Yet it had a complex pattern, it wasn’t just junk from some broken equipment, which would have been his second guess.

“Convert to sound,” he said.  His system blatted at him that it had no systems for parsing the data.

His heart suddenly raced.  “Use StarAngelDecoder,” he ordered.

Words played in his ear.

“Tred?  Tred, I don’t know if you can hear me . . . it’s Jophiel.  Something’s wrong, Tred, please hear me . . .”

“Jophiel?” he returned.  He did not know if his message could possibly reach her; he was just broadcasting a radio signal over the open.

“Tred!” she cried, her signal getting stronger.  “You can hear me!”

“I can receive your signal,” he said.

Her people spoke in radio waves, he recalled.  Of course, she was just . . . yelling, and he was getting the signal.

But he shouldn’t be able to get it.  The fusion reactor’s shielding should be blocking her.  Which meant that it was damaged!

“Jophiel, what are you seeing?” he asked.  “You said something was wrong.”

“Yes, there’s something wrong with the reactor here.  It started turning off, but there’s still a problem.  I don’t know what it is, but it feels . . . wrong.  I’m worried.”

“Are you in danger?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she replied.  “Maybe.  But I’m worried about the rest of your ship.  I can’t see or hear anything out there.  What’s going on?”

“A lot of stuff,” he told her.  “Just try to hang on, okay?  I’m going to try and figure out how to help you.”

“Okay, Tred.  Thank you . . .”

He got onto the board again, messaging the other engineers.  While he waited for a reply, he looked again at the ship’s power data.  It continued to fluctuate . . . perhaps Reactor Seven still had some connection to the power grid and it was largely the communication lines that were cut?

It had spun down, but it would still have a lot of residual heat.  If it was not containing it well, it could spill out super-heated plasma that could cause massive damage.

But . . . he could eject it.  It would not just be a plasma venting, but an ejection of the whole reactor.  It was a messy thing to do, but . . .

He looked at the message board.  Answers to him were all over the place.  He hadn’t really explained it all well enough.

There might not be time.  He didn’t know how long the reactor might last before it started leaking.

“Jophiel?” he called.

“Yes?”

“I have to get your reactor out of the ship,” he told her.  “It’s . . . going to put you outside.”

She was quiet a moment.  Then; “Okay.”

“You can survive in empty space for awhile, right?”  He thought that had been said in briefings.  Yes, it had!  He knew it.  But right now his mind was racing too hard to feel sure of anything.

“I can,” she told him.  “But not forever.”

He did not know if he was sending Jophiel to her death or not.  The uncertainty somehow made it worse.

“I’ll do everything I can to get you back inside a reactor soon,” he told her.  He hesitated.  “Do you trust me?”

“I do trust you, Tred.”

He let out a deep breath, and pressed the button to eject the reactor.

*******

Jaya wished she could have a painkiller, but at this point her entire vascular system was breaking down.

Her breaths came in short gasps, struggling to fill lungs that were filling with fluids.

The lights in the closet were turned high, but she could barely see anything.  That she could see at all was only due to enhancements; natural eyes would be blind by now.  A natural body would simply be dead.

Was this even a blessing, she wondered?

“Alexander,” she whispered through cracked lips.  No sound came out.

Was the man alive still?  It mattered that he live.  But she could not make herself move anymore.

She felt the door open; she was touching the wall, she realized.  She had not been aware of it.

Someone loomed over her.

Her eyes opened wider, trying to see them, and show that she still lived.

“Help him . . .” she mouthed, hoping they understood.

The person was not wearing a spacesuit.  She saw their hair, it floated in the lack of gravity.

Had atmosphere been restored?

It was likely a man, but she could not focus and see more than that.

The man’s head shifted, looking to Alexander.  There was an air of decision about him.

He reached out, and took her arm, pulling her with him.  Pain lanced through her at the touch.

“No,” she mouthed.  It had to be Alexander!  Her death had to be worth something, and it was his life that mattered now.

But the man did not hear her, and moved her out of the closet.

There was nothing that could be done to save her.  This much damage to her entire body could not be healed.  There was nothing left of her to salvage.  That this meant that Alexander could not be saved either did not even occur to her in her current state.

She became suddenly and startlingly aware that there were two other presences.  She felt more than saw them, and once she looked, she could make out their forms.  For a moment, she thought it must be a team of Response officers.

But no.  Those were not Response.

She found herself trying to look, but her vision was blurring more.  Fading, she realized, as death took hold.

In the dimming of life, their shape was not human, not any species she knew.  It was not like life.

Two beings, who simply watched, and waited.

She looked again to the one who was pulling her.  But she could not even move her lips now; she had faded too far.  Thoughts themselves became something she could not form, and darkness took her.

---

< Ep 13 part 34 | Ep 13 part 36 >

New to Other-Terrestrial? Check here! Or if you need to, jump to the beginning of the episode here!

---

“What the hell did we just see?” Kat asked, her voice barely a whisper in the darkened room.

The lights had dimmed, flickering.  Something seemed to be wrong with their vessel.

“We just saw . . . how the Leviathan at Terris came to be here,” Brooks said slowly.  His mind raced, trying to understand the implications of all he had just witnessed.

No one had known what happened to the Leviathan after it plunged into the Terris sun.  Many had presumed it dead, some alien act of madness like its attack had seemed.

The Voidfleet and Sapient Union government as a whole could not accept that.  Without proof of its death, they had to accept the possibility that it could come back out.

The system remained a cursed place, and the memories of the horrors were a wound that would not close.

Even if no one truly believed it could have survived.  What could not only plunge into a star but then survive staying there?

It was long dead.  Still a threat in death, for what it signified about the dangers of their universe.

But not alive.

Now, Brooks had seen it come out of a star a million times more intense, and be unperturbed.  It had survived that star going hypernova.

It was still alive in the sun at Terris.

“When the gate collapsed,” Kell said.  “It became trapped in our universe.”

“Did it kill the star?” Brooks asked.

“No,” Kell said.  “The star would inevitably die.  But it was tipped into an early death – by this observatory.”

“Are you saying we caused this?” Nadian asked.

The room around Brooks was suddenly white.

He turned in place, looking for the Present Mind.

“Tell me what I just saw,” he called out.  “Why did you show me this?”

It was in front of him then, startlingly close, and he had to crane his neck up to look at its featureless, armored face.

“You and your people, the most overriding question that lingers in them is why the Terris event occurred.  Now you see.”

“The star – the gate – collapsed.  It became trapped in our universe,” Brooks said slowly.  He wanted confirmation.

“Yes,” the Present Mind told him.

“But why Terris?  Why did it attack us?”

The Present Mind was silent for a time.  “Its reasoning is beyond me.  The system you call Terris was, perhaps, just in its way.”

“You’re saying that by sheer goddamn chance it attacked an inhabited star system?” he demanded.

“It did not attack your system, Captain.  It only passed through on its path to the star.  I can tell you with certainty that it was not even aware of your presence.”

“Bullshit!” Brooks spat.  “It killed millions of us!  It engaged our fleets and broke their backs!  Do you know how many-“

“You betray your own, tiny, bias.  You believe the Terris event calculated; but do you even know if the Great One went to other star systems before that one?”

Brooks fell silent.  Then; “Show me that, then.”

“Your singular desire does not sway me,” the Present Mind replied.  “This event, what I have shown you, was due to the overriding question in the heads of every one of you who has come within the enabling bounds.  Even those outside, I can hear the question echoing.  Thus, I have shown you.”

Brooks felt his knees start to buckle, and he dropped down.

“So all of it, all of the suffering and misery at Terris, it was just . . . random?  An accident, as this Leviathan blundered towards another star?  Hoping to find a way back to where it came from?”

“Yes,” the Present Mind told him.

Brooks felt broken.  One of the most defining events of galactic history . . . and there was no deeper meaning?

“Are they even intelligent?” he asked.  “Or do they always act this irrationally?  Are they even aware of what we do, that we exist?”

“Intelligent – yes.  In their own way.  I cannot say for certain, but my creators observed moments of intelligence, even brilliance.  But the Great Ones operate in their own system of logic, and in their own way and in their own time.”

“Was it able to use the star in the Terris system to escape?” he asked.

Let it be gone, he thought.  Please let it be gone.

“I do not know,” the Present Mind replied.  “It may simply be in the core of the Terris star, deciding what to do next.”

Brooks struggled to think of what to ask next.  He opened his mouth to speak – he did not even know what he might ask – when the Present Mind shifted, turning away from him.

“My attention diverts elsewhere.  My creators have come.”

*******

Apollonia’s mind felt different than it ever had before.  Even the scant few times when she had gotten a contact high off drugs, it had not been like this.

Her mind felt expansive, widened to a point where she could entertain more than one thought at once, multiple – endless.  She felt/heard herself talking to herself in a million of her own voices and wanted to scream, to pull back in and curl into a ball as the cacophony threatened to overwhelm her.  A sensation of falling that she could not stop until it peaked, and she knew she should be feeling nauseated, except she had no physical body, she could not see or feel or be her body.

Finally she could take no more, and she screamed.

She felt like she screamed for an eternity, but it did no good.

Little by little, though, she began to comprehend herself.  She did not narrow it down to only a few thoughts, but she could . . . focus on one, even while the others ran.

No, that was not it, she realized, her thoughts growing exponentially.  She thought all of these things at once.

She saw the Craton; not simply the room from the table she had laid down upon.

The altar, she corrected herself.  She was the apex of the movement of the higher balances that even their tiny bodies bound to lower dimensions disturbed.  The disturbances of the higher balances tipped into her now, largely from the two whose lives had just been extinguished, trading one set of chemical reactions, life, for another, decay.  Also the energies of those present, their horror and terror and frustration.  She picked out individuals in the crowd.  Their pain was overwhelming, and she felt a new exponential growth of thoughts of her own sorrow and sadness at their pain, even anger and self-hate.

She could not stop what Cathal had done, but she saw that the formations in their minds were already countered by motions above that would tip their states into new ways.

They would not remember this.  It was a subtle and clever manipulation of the eddies and currents from above, she thought, but recognized as well that this was new to her.

And ephemeral.  Her consciousness had been enhanced to this, but . . . only for a time.

Would she remember any of it?  She could not view her own mind as she did theirs.

It had to be.  Cathal – Cathal the traitor, Cathal the friend, Cathal the bringer of revelation.

This was what it must have been like for the ancient prophets to touch God, she thought in a remote line of thought.

To touch hell, another thought.

Outside of the room, she could see every room, every surface of the Craton.  It was badly damaged; the streams of radiation had damaged thinking crystals and disturbed lines of power and people, poisoning and wounding both ship and crew.

She did not know if it could be saved; for all she saw, she did not understand it, from these endless angles even their simple geometries seemed to make no sense.

Outside of the ship, a tiny distance away to her mind’s eye, were the Others Like Her.

No, not like Her.  They were Great Ones, and she was only a Beginning One, a bud of a tree that became aware enough to dream of the day it would bask in the sun.

Oh, but now she saw, her consciousness spreading even further out; she saw how their shapes and balance were bringing together the material to create the great star.  Not Now, but Then, they were only seeing Then along with Now, because that was the shape that this section of space had been twisted into for this ‘moment’, thanks to the temple.

The Great Ones cooperated, altering the reality to conform to their plans.

Where the balance of their power came to rest, the levels of reality were driven together, a doorway – a highway that allowed the free flow from higher to lesser levels and back.  Through it, even she could return to exist on just the mundane levels.

Was that her out?  But no, not yet.  The thought now of returning to that tiny, stunted shape was terrifying.  Like the thought of cutting off one’s own body.

She looked in all ways, all directions up and down and all the other endless types, to find something.

There; a small intrusion that stabbed like a knife through layers.  It damaged nothing, but its crudeness and ugliness were immediately apparent.  It could be ignored, but it mattered to her for some reason.

She saw within and without the temple.  Inside were tiny, tiny shapes – beings she knew.  One was vastly larger than the others, though she still dwarfed it.

Kell.  Or rather, the thing that played Kell.  It gazed at her, and for the first time she could truly see all of his horror.

A disgusting tear in the layers that should not be.  Created by the hubris of tiny beings who thought themselves great; it insulted her in infinity and the finite through being neither.

But her mind looked past that as well, and she saw the others.

A single tiny presence that she knew.  She could not even remember what its name was, only that it mattered in some way, and she did not want it gone, as its balance was tipping it.

The Present Mind of the temple abased itself before her, and she ordered it; return those beings.

The Present Mind obeyed.  The little vessel that was part of the station, that had been sent forth in time and space to answer a burning question suddenly turned – moving back towards the temple.

“Why do you obey?” a thought of hers asked.

“You Speak with Its Voice,” she was told.

Of course, she could see that.  She and it – it?

What was it?

She was she.  Herself.

Apollonia Nor.  A meaningless cluster of sounds that she had made up to rid herself of her birth name, at least partially.  Yet still holding to the last sound, a thread of the past she could not bring herself to abandon.

She and It were separate!

They were not one being, but they were . . . fused.  The Embrion, the Beginning One, longing for a full definition and balance that could not exist until it was birthed into the lowest levels of reality.  Through her, somehow connected to her by sheer chance at birth, its grasping presence holding desperately to hers.  Both parasite and savior, all of the times that it had felt her fear, when she’d been in danger, and it . . .

It had acted, lashing out like a baby to swat at the sources of pain.

Becoming more and more aware, more powerful, and more precise with time.

Her mind collapsed back into herself, into a single thread.

The after effects of it all were too much, though.  Memories of infinity lingered, and her conscious mind, too, stopped functioning.

---

< Ep 13 part 33 | Ep 13 part 35 >

New to Other-Terrestrial? Check here! Or if you need to, jump to the beginning of the episode here!

---

Jaya found herself slipping in and out of consciousness.

She could see a steady pulsing alarm light.  It was a radiation warning alarm, telling all crew to evacuate this section of the ship.

These are working offices, she thought.  There would be thousands of people here.

She had acute radiation syndrome, she knew that.  She felt nauseated, confused.  Her vision  faded out at the edges, and what she could see was dim.

She could not hear the alarms in the room beyond, but there should be a sound.  Her uniform had popped its hood over her head.  Between the two, she knew that must mean that the hull had also been breached.  She was in a vacuum.

Her back touched something, and it hurt.  Her reaction was to spin to face it, but her body moved slowly, barely listening to her.

It was the ceiling; she had drifted into it.

So the gravity was out as well . . . or . . . something like that.  Her mind was not working right, and it made it hard to think.  Another symptom of the radiation.

She didn’t know how much; but it must have been a massive dose.

Something else drifted into her field of vision.

It was Alexander.

Her memory of where this was and why she’d been down here came flooding back.

Alexander was unconscious, looking in even worse shape than she was.

His uniform had also sealed over his head, though she thought she could see damage to it in places.  It was hard to tell.

Straining herself, she reached for him, taking his arm.  It hurt her skin to even touch him, even with gloves on her hands.

Ah, right – she was probably burned over her entire body.  Even inside.

The pain made her cry out, but she grit her teeth together, turning it to a sound of anger.  She tightened her grip on Alexander’s arm.

Every room had fortified areas for an emergency.  Beds could be space capsules, but the security closets provided more protection against radiation.

Flailing her foot until she found a surface, she kicked off, dragging Alexander with her.  Somewhere . . . somewhere was the closet.

There it was.  She saw the door, trimmed in yellow for emergency.  It was flashing in the darkness to draw attention to it.

Whoever had thought of that detail should get an award.  She would have had a much harder time finding it with her dying vision otherwise.

The door opened, and she saw that some boxes had been stored in here.  Bad form, Alexander.  She’d write him up later over that.  These were supposed to stay empty.

But there was still space.  She went in, dragging Alexander in after.

The door closed.

“Medical assistance has been summoned,” a computer voice said in her ear.

“Tell them . . .” she croaked.  “Tell them to save Shaw first.”  Her voice was a rasp.  But it was Alexander who had all of this knowledge that was vital right now.

Radiation exposure like this.  This was how her brother had died.  Walking into it like it was nothing, to save his ship.

She could not even say she had done that.  She just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The radiation alert flashes suddenly changed; they were flashing out a new pattern, one that sounded even more urgent.

She knew what it meant, but her hazy mind had trouble thinking of what.

Oh, she realized.  It meant a fusion reactor breach.

The reality of that sunk into her slowly.

---

The wailing alarms panicked Tred more than the blow that had shivered the entire ship.

A lot of big things could have caused that blow that were bad, but not catastrophically bad.  A missile impact that burst outside the armor, a slow-moving asteroid or something.  Not good, but the Craton would survive those.

But a fusion reactor breach was something that could rip apart even the Craton.

He had read hundreds of reports on such occurrences.  Fusion reactors were a well-understood technology, rendered as safe as was possible.  But when you harnessed that much power, there was always danger.

His system had incomplete information on what was even happening, even on the emergency channels.  He saw the information growing, getting more thorough, as reports came in from the automatic systems.

He paused as the original source of the problem was reported; a burst of gamma rays that had come out of the temple megastructure.  The estimates on the power of the burst varied by orders of magnitude; which meant they knew nothing.

But any gamma ray burst on any of these levels of power was an astronomical-scale event.  A star or something like that, dying!

There was no star nearby.  He scanned over the data a couple times before he could accept it.

Well, it had been a gamma ray burst, he could only think.  He moved on.

The burst hadn’t hit them; at those energy levels they’d just all be dead instantly if it had.  No warning or even a moment of pain.  But it had been near enough that it had played absolute havoc with the ship’s systems – and its magnetosphere.  That had weakened, and charged particles from the Van Allen belt around them had seeped in.

The magnetosphere was back up, but thousands of people in the ship would have gotten radiation exposure far above safe levels.

The next part was what caused him to rise in his seat.  The stream of particles had hit Reactor Three.  The magnetic fields within the reactor itself, that held in check the fusion reaction there, was destabilized.

People in the restaurant around him were screaming, the staff trying to move them to one of the safety bunkers.

He got up and ran for the elevators.  He had to get down there.

Some elevators were shut down, others packed with people.  But Tred knew every route to engineering, for every reactor.  He took ramps, running until he was out of breath, and then walking until he could run again.

He came to an area where the gravity was off, and he turned on his magnetic boots and tromped on.  Security airlocks accepted his credentials and let him through, and past one of them was vacuum.

He did not have a space suit, but he had his uniform on, and it was an ersatz spacesuit.  He triggered that mode, and his suit hood popped out and over his face, sealing itself at the neck.

Taking an air tank from a panel, he connected it to his suit and went on.

The lights were out here, and further down the hall he found Response Team One, evacuating civilians and fighting to contain two leaking cooling conduits.

This was physical damage, he saw.  Something, some piece of junk, had hit the ship.  Or something on the ship had exploded.

He had to get to Reactor Three before it blew.

Pirra was not here, she was the Response Officer he knew the best.  He only saw Kiseleva, her second in command.

When the woman saw him, she waved furiously for him to go back.  He shook his head.

“I have to get to the reactor!” he yelled.

He didn’t really need to yell over the radio, but his words had the effect.  Kiseleva made a chopping motion toward one hall.  That way, it seemed, was clear enough.

He ran down there.

His suit screamed out radiation warnings; he could see nothing, but he found cold routes past those hotspots, going deeper.  Yes, something had definitely hit the ship, and as he opened one door, he stumbled back.

It was a piece of another ship, embedded into the Craton.  It had penetrated hundreds of meters to be this far in, and that meant that dozens of decks had been vented to vacuum.

It was a piece of hull.  He could see on it part of a logo, too scorched to be made out.  But there were a couple of letters; EN’S GH.

The Raven’s Ghost had been destroyed, he realized.

Probably, he thought, her own reactor had breached and ripped her apart.  Then her remains had crashed into the Craton.

There were still flames from oxygen leaks, and a gap that vented down into space.  Thousands of cables and pieces of deck jutted out in the gap, any one of which could rip his suit – or him.

But he had to get across here.  The reactor room was on the other side.

Someone slammed into the wall behind him, shaking it.  He turned and saw another engineer.  He did not know the man, but he looked just as terrified.

“We gotta get across!” the man called over radio.

Tred nodded.  “We can run and jump it.”

The man hesitated, then nodded.  Tred knew it wasn’t hard, not in microgravity.  But it was terrifying.

He jumped, thinking about how frightening and dangerous and stupid this was after he pushed off.

His radio did not broadcast his scream.

But he made it, and moments later the other engineer did the same.

The door to the reactor room had sealed; radiation warnings were going off, but Tred’s personal detector showed nothing.

“I think it’s safe inside now,” he said.  “Relatively, at least.”

They forced the door open, and went in.

Everyone in here was dead or dying already.

The amount of rads that flooded through here would have knocked them out instantly, Tred told himself.  It was better that way.

The Reactor was in a bad way, though.  The first layer of magnetic buffer fields had already failed, and had been incinerated.  The second was about to fail and the third was already flickering.

“We have to get the core plasma out of the ship!” he yelled.  The other engineer nodded.

“Through that door!” he yelled, pointing.  The door was shut.

They pushed off, going over, when the second field failed.  There was a flash of light, and something exploded as the second field generators were incinerated; backup equipment breaking down, already damaged and unable to shunt off the heat properly.

Red-hot pieces of metal flew over, and Tred saw a turbine rip free, spinning itself apart.  A shower of pieces was being thrown off, shifting as the piece tumbled, and in moments it would riddle them-

They hit the door, and in a moment of miracle, it opened automatically.

The other engineer gave him a shove in, and then hit the emergency door shut button.

Tred realized too late what he was doing, but he barely even got it in time; the heavy door shielded Tred, but already the debris was flying their way.

A few pieces flew in before the door was fully closed.  The rest hit the door, the outer wall, and the other engineer.

Tred screamed again as he saw red coat the window on the door.

That man had just died, he realized, frozen in place.

It couldn’t be in vain.

He turned, looking for the emergency shunt controls.  It was a large lever on the wall, and he put in his security code.  The computer did not even respond, it was not working here.  Nothing was working.

Except, hopefully, the manual lever.  It was normally kept under heavy cover, locked and even disconnected from the system.  But those precautions were connected mechanically to the rest of the systems in a way that meant, when things got damaged, it automatically came out and was ready to use.

It was not easy to turn.  Normally two were supposed to do it.  He would just have to do his best.

Grabbing the lever, he wrestled with it, turning it slowly.

He heard a loud metal thunk.  Then the warning klaxons changed again, and something huge rumbled.

The reactor core was venting, he realized.

He had just saved the ship.

---

< Ep 13 part 32 | Ep 13 part 34 >

New to Other-Terrestrial? Check here! Or if you need to, jump to the beginning of the episode here!

---

Alexander raced to the door when the announcement came.

Opening it, he ground to a halt against the door frame.  “Commander Yaepanaya, I’m so glad you’re here!”

He had gotten a brief reply from Jaya just a few minutes ago, asking just how important his situation was.  He had told her ‘vital’, and she had agreed to come.

She did not look very pleased, though; her face showed both weariness and slight irritation, but she nodded calmly.  “You said it was important.”

“Yes,” he said.  “Yes, come in!”  He jogged back towards his computer.  “I have a lot of evidence here, but I’ve made a discovery that I think could be of grave importance to the ship’s safety.”

“Go on,” Jaya said, following him over.

“Father Cathal Sair is a Cerebral Reader,” he said in a rush.  “And that’s not wrong or bad, of course, but if he’s hiding it we should know, shouldn’t we?  I mean-“

“We do know,” Jaya told him.  “His status as a CR is known to us.”

Alexander looked shocked, mouth agape.

“It is his personal business,” Jaya said.  “He is not employed or even a citizen of the Union, so it was not made public information.”

She began to turn.  “If that is all-“

“No!”  Alexander said.  “Tell me – are there any other CRs that you know of on the ship?”

Jaya looked more annoyed.  “It is their personal information if there was-“

“I’m not asking for names!  Are there two CRs – or more?”

Jaya frowned.  “I will only answer this because you already have a low-level clearance.  There are only the two.”

Alexander nodded slowly, realizing that he was not in the wrong here.  “There’s another.  One who hasn’t revealed themselves.  Look at my data.”

He brought it up.  “I noticed that unexpected and unique errors have been cropping up in the DNA I’ve been building for an agricultural project.  These events do not line up with known encounters of strong cosmic winds or rays.  But what they do synch up with is every time Father Sair or Apollonia Nor walk by my DNA.  Every time the public data shows that they’ve walked by, I’ve gotten these mutations.  But they don’t account for every incident – so that means there is another source.”

He paused for a breath, and Jaya held up a hand.

“I know what you’re about to say!” he continued quickly.  “I checked Ambassador Kell’s data, but he doesn’t fill in the gaps.  He doesn’t even come down here, Commander.  I think . . . no, I feel confident this means that there is at least one more CR on board the ship.  I have been trying to look through the public data to find out who – but that’s taking some time, since it has to check the entire population!”

He swallowed.  “But there’s something even more important here.  My data shows that there is similarity between the radiation that they are emitting . . . and that which was recorded, in my plant DNA, during the incident at The Chain.”

Jaya’s eyes snapped to him, widening.

He nodded.  “I know that whatever happened there was dangerous.  It threatened not just The Chain, but the Craton, too.  I know that . . .  something strange happened there, that Apollonia Nor and Kell were both involved in its resolution.”

“How do you know all of that?” Jaya demanded.  “And what else do you know?”

“I know what I’ve heard in rumors and . . . well, my wife is a Response officer.  Whether or not I want to, I learn things,” he admitted.  Suddenly it seemed a bad idea to be telling this to Commander Yaepanaya.

But Jaya began to nod slowly.  “How certain are you?  That these CRs are emitting radiation similar to the . . . event at the Chain?”

“Very,” he said.  “The evidence is clear.  Whatever it is, it’s so subtle that our radiation detection systems don’t pick it up.  But it’s got unique qualities that only they share.  There is a connection here.”  He paused, swallowing.  “Is this . . . dangerous to the ship?”

Jaya knew that it was.

She had not been completely involved in, or aware of all details of what had happened at The Chain.

Until she had become Acting Captain for months at Ko.  Then she had been able to access things of a higher secrecy.

She could not tell him, but it all made sense now.  The strange powers of CRs, no one could explain them.  It had something to do with zerospace.  Many had theorized, but not found evidence.

But here, this man may have found it.

A CR was a host to an Embrion, just as Michal Denso had been at The Chain.  An unborn Leviathan.

There was a noise, then.  Jaya could not register what it was before she was thrown by the impact, hitting the wall with a hard thud.

She saw flashes in her eyes, and a peculiar alert went off in her ears.  She knew instantly what it meant:

She had just been hit with a massive dose of radiation.

---

Apollonia’s body strained against the invisible bonds that held her, and Cathal watched her with pity in his heart.

This was the moment he had to decide.  He could strike with the knife.  With the spilling of her blood, her life would end.

And then the Embrion that was a part of her would migrate to the takwin he had prepared.  Its power would become something he could control.

But if he just waited . . .  she might Awaken.

He could not bring himself to kill her.

He had been told to.  But he would not do it.

If she lived now was up to her.  It was not guaranteed.

There remained only one thing he could do to help her.

The knife pressed against his robe, cutting through it.  He dragged the blade against his skin, pushing harder.  The pain was a sharp jolt as his skin parted under its edge, and he felt the warm trickle of his own blood as it ran down his chest.

“In my blooded hands . . .” he hissed out through the pain.  “I shall guide Thee to our Truth . . .”

The cut dragged out over inches, the sharp pain turning to a fire across his chest.  First one side, then the other, two crossing lines.

“My spirit . . .  and my faithful . . .”

He dragged the knife away from his body, the x-shaped furrows the blade had left on him reflected in the apparition that was before him.

He gazed into his reflected eyes, but in them he no longer saw himself, but the Other, the Little One Who Speaks.  It slept, it dreamed.  In its dreams, it shared with him a mote of its power and its knowledge.

“Show me now,” he breathed.  “Give me a touch of eternity.”

It stirred.  Its slightest movement that he felt all through his body and soul.

He was an unworthy husk, a shell of a being.  He had only this one gift, the most wonderful of services to perform for the universe.

Tears slipped from his eyes, as the Little One Who Speaks obeyed him, and he saw within the Craton everything.  Every secret, every lie, every corner.  Even what he did not understand he would remember.

The ship burned, part of it ablaze; the spillover of the death of the Dark Star, channeled through the temple by accident.  The event that had led to its abandonment.

Thousands of people on the Craton were dying at this moment, poisoned by the stream of charged particles let in by even the brief weakening in part of its magnetosphere.

One life there, he saw, was Alexander.

Such a good faithful, he thought.  He truly liked the man, his presence here had been missed.

He should not have to die like this.

---

Pirra felt the blood running down her face, down her body.  She did not remember being hurt, or know where it came from.

Her blood, the blood of everyone here, was flowing across the floor, up towards the altar.

Just like it had for the Source on the pirate ship.

She shook with rage, her helplessness from that moment returned, and she loathed it.

Her very being wanted to charge his man, to kill him with her bare hands.

But she could not move.  She could not do anything.

Even when something hit the ship, shaking it, and she knew she must be needed . . . she could do nothing.

Her vision of Cathal doubled; there appeared to be a duplicate of him up there, like a mirror reflection, hovering just in front of him as he slashed himself with his knife, leaving a bloody, x-shaped wound on his chest.

Then he threw his head back, and she no longer saw the reflection.  Instead, she grew weaker and weaker.  The room was starting to spin, and she felt herself start to fall.

---

< Ep 13 part 31 | Ep 13 part 33 >

New to Other-Terrestrial? Check here! Or if you need to, jump to the beginning of the episode here!

---

“I don’t like the look of this,” Nadian said.

It was a sentiment that all who remained were sharing.

Brooks, Kat, and Nadian had been watching their approach to the dark star with trepidation.  Kell seemed unfazed; and in the back, Fromm was burying his head in his hands, mumbling to himself.

The man had been a terrible pick for this, Brooks thought, with both pity and frustration.  If Apollonia had been here, she’d still be capable.

But it made him glad to think she was safe.

“Whatever defenses this thing has, I doubt they can hold up if we start diving into the star’s corona,” Kat said.

“We already are in it,” Brooks said.  “A star this big, its corona will be massive.  We must be inside it by now.”  He glanced about the room.  “If this vessel is using magnetic fields to protect itself, what I’m most worried about is when we hit the chromosphere.  This star is highly active, and the chance of us hitting a plasma jet are high.  We’re lucky we haven’t already-“

“Incoming,” Nadian said.

Brooks looked out, and saw that just what he had spoken of was blasting towards them.  The speed of it, well tens of kilometers a second, far too fast for them to avoid even if they could have controlled the ship.

They flinched as the jet of plasma hit them.  It seemed to engulf the ship completely, and Brooks knew that he was about to die.

Yet nothing happened.

He rose, cautiously.  The entire screen was covered in a brilliant glow.  It had to have been dimmed significantly, and he could see patterns in the plasma that showed the lines of magnetic field that had caused the plasma burst.

“Kell,” he said, his voice hoarse.  He felt shaken and weak from the realization that he was not about to die.  “Is the ship all right?”

Kell did not answer him.

Instead, he found himself once again in that white space of nothingness where he had encountered the Present Mind earlier.

Maybe this was what being dead was like, he thought with grim amusement.

“You are not dead,” a voice replied.  It was his own voice again, but speaking out loud, coming from everywhere.

He scowled.  “Do you have a default form?  Take that and show yourself, Present Mind.”

It appeared before Brooks, and his heart jumped again as he realized just what it was he was looking at.

It was a massively tall being, just over three meters in height.  Its body was shield-shaped, its head armored and fused into its trunk, leaving no details exposed.  Very long and thin legs came from what one might expect to be the shoulders, and smaller arms were folded up on the lower, pointed tip of its body.

It matched the descriptions of those who had seen the Source; the ancient, withered body that had been in the sarcophagus that the Greggan pirates had discovered.  But this was not a withered husk, resembling instead a living being.

His heart pounded faster, gazing up at the face that showed nothing.

It was one of the creators of Kell’s kind, those who had once ruled the stars and molded the universe like clay-

“My creators are many and varied,” the Present Mind said.  There was a hum of words from within its shelled head, but its real voice was directly into his mind.

Only now it did not mimic him, but was alien and intrusive, almost staggering him by its very strength and leaving behind a strange feeling of numbness.

“You see why I attempted forms more familiar to yourself,” it said.

“Is the ship in danger?” he asked the thing, trying to push through the impression it left in his mind.  There were thoughts, alien thoughts, left in him that were hard to understand.

“No,” the Present Mind replied.  “Your panic is unbecoming.”

The rebuke was annoying, but he ignored it.  “Where are we going?  Why into the star?”

“You are moving into position.”

“Position for what?  As obvious as this may all be to you and your creators, to us it makes no sense.”

“To see,” the Present Mind replied.  There was a stronger sense of the last word in his mind, as if it meant far more than the simple word implied.

“Explain, please,” Brooks said.  “What can we see?”

“My creators could see all of the universe,” the Present Mind told him.  “Where they could see, they could be.  But the universe of their time was smaller – and it grew.  It grew so large that to see those distant places was to look into the past.  Thus, the Enablings of Seeing were constructed.  This was among their greatest, harnessing the dark heart of this unnatural star to view more than the mundane universe.  With it was the hope to understand more – to understand all.”

The voice paused.  “But they miscalculated.”

Brooks felt nearly overwhelmed by all of the words sent into his mind.  But he needed to know more.  “Miscalculated how?  Is there danger still?”

“My creators understood time only as you do; a linear path one must follow.  It fit the universe that was observed – all except for the Great Ones, who they still desired to understand.  In creating this station they had hoped to learn the truth of them.”

The Present Mind paused.  “But instead, they destroyed the gate.”

The gate.  Kell had called it that as well.

If it meant a gateway to zerospace . . . he could see the logic.  There was a connection between gravity and zerospace portals.  It was how the Craton was able to move itself without reaction mass.

So this star, being as massive as it was, was it also a zerogate?

“Are you saying this station broke the star itself?  Is it destroyed in . . . at my point of linear time?  Is that why we don’t see it?  Is this a simulation?”

“Such a massive object cracked the reality under it, allowing free passage,” the Present Mind told him.  “But such an object could not stay stable.  I do not know if this was a mistake of the Great Ones or if this station destabilized the star.  But it became unstable . . .”  A note of regret came into its feelings.  “For which I am responsible.”

It shifted suddenly.  “The story begins.”

“What story?” Brooks asked.

“The one you wished to know.”

Brooks found himself back in the ship.

“We’re going deeper,” he heard Nadian say.  He was looking at something on a panel, and glanced up to look at Brooks.  “I’ve got a map of our location.”

“How did you do that?” Brooks asked, feeling unsteady on his feet.

“Careful,” Nadian said.  “The Present Mind packs a bit of a punch.”

Brooks could not hide the surprise on his face.  “You spoke to it?”

“Yeah,” Nadian said.  “I think we all did.”

“Why didn’t you mention it?” Brooks asked.

“Same reason you didn’t,” Nadian replied.  “Either you also had and were holding it back, or else I was the only one and you’d think I had gone nuts.”

Which was fair, Brooks thought.

Kat spoke.  “Fergus definitely had – that’s how he ‘figured out’ how to operate the controls.  I think that he asked it the wrong questions and got some bad advice.”

Brooks looked at her.  “It told me about the temple,” she said.  “That it’s . . . like an observatory.”

“One that was meant to observe Leviathans,” Brooks added.  He looked to Kell, whose expression was set grimly, almost daring Brooks to ask him something.

He looked back to Nadian instead.  “You asked it about the controls.”

“Yeah, well, a little.  It’s not the best teacher, but I got some idea.  Look – here’s where we are, I think.”

The screen outside was just a brilliant glow.  Sometimes in it he could see patterns of plasma flow within the star.

Over that a flat image appeared of a sphere with distinct layers.  There was a dot that likely represented them.

“It looks like we’re still in a convection zone, though the layering of this star is more complex than any I’ve seen,” Brooks said.

“Probably because it’s so massive,” Kat said.  “I estimate this one has almost a hundred million solar masses.  About as big as has ever been theorized.”

“My god,” Brooks said.  Such an object was far beyond what he could even imagine.

At this scale it would not even be a true star, living off the fusion of light elements.  Its core would be so dense and massive that it would collapse . . . leaving the star with a black hole for a heart.

“We’re speeding up,” Nadian said.

“You didn’t find out how to alter our course?” Brooks asked.

“The alien space station voice in my head didn’t get to that part,” Nadian replied.  “I’m not sure that it can even do it.  It seems like we’re locked in . . . to something.”

Kat pointed.  “I see something out there.”

Brooks and Nadian followed her gaze, and after a moment he realized that there was something in the star.  It was so huge that it filled the screen.

Only a general shape was visible; something massive, parts of it moving, feeling their way forward through the star.

It was not just some strange shape of plasma.  It was alive.

“Nothing could live in this,” Nadian said, rapt with both awe and fear.

“Except a Leviathan,” Brooks said.

As if the ship had heard his words, it all suddenly rocked, their view altering as the ship abruptly began to turn.

“What’s going on?” Kat cried, the ship shaking.

“It’s changing course!  It’s taking us back out of the star.”

Nadian grabbed Kat, pulling her with him towards the floor for safety against the rocking.  Brooks could not tear his eyes off of the shape before them.  They were withdrawing and turning, and he tried to follow it around, but it began to shrink from view.

Tobias Fromm staggered forward, putting out a hand towards the screen.

“No . . .” he said throatily.

The ship was accelerating at an insane speed, and they came out of the star in moments, moving at a rate that must have been a notable fraction of C, Brooks thought.

Yet as it came to a stop, he felt only the slightest tremor.

They held their position, Nadian and Kat slowly getting to their feet and staring with him.

The surface of the star erupted as something came out.  Dwarfed by the star, it still drew all attention.

It magnified on the screen, and Brooks felt himself nearly white out at the sight of it.

Its surface shimmered and reformed, from a slagged, scorched mess to wholeness, as if traversing the raging power of the dark star was only a mild inconvenience.

“No, no, no . . .” Fromm moaned, pressing his face to the glass.

Brooks understood why he was yelling.  He, too, recognized the Leviathan.  He could never forget it, and even his system noted key details that confirmed his thought.

It was the Leviathan from Terris.

“The story you want to know.”  The voice of the Present Mind had said.  The story of the monster that had destroyed a star system.

“No!  No!  No!” Fromm screamed, pounding his fists onto the wall-screen.  He was doing it with reckless abandon, the bones in his hands crunching, and Brooks stumbled over, trying to grab his flailing limbs.

“Help me!” he called to Nadian.

He could barely control one of the man’s arms, but as he did the man thrashed his whole torso and neck forward, smashing his head into the wall instead.

“I see it every night!  I can’t get it out!” he screamed, his voice bloodily hoarse.

As was the wall; Brooks tried to leverage him away from it, but even as he pulled him to the floor, the man began to bash his head back onto it, leaving bloody splatters.

Nadian took his other arm, and they tried to pull the man away from that, but there was almost no place to take him.  He struggled with inhuman ferocity, continuing to hit himself until Brooks could hear his skull crack and break, each subsequent impact causing more damage.  His words became garbled nonsense, and he flailed his limbs so hard that they could not even keep ahold of him.

Breaking free, he staggered, running towards the back of the ship.

Kell was there, and caught him.

“Rest,” Kell said softly.

The man sagged in his grip.

Brooks and Nadian both rushed over.

Putting his fingers to the man’s neck, Brooks felt no pulse.  Nothing at all.

He looked to Kell, whose face looked only slightly withdrawn.  “He will dream of it no more.”

“He was there,” Nadian breathed.  “He was from Terris, wasn’t he?  Originally.”

Kell nodded.

“Something’s happening to the star!” Kat called.  “I think it’s going to go nova!”

They turned back, seeing that the star was swelling rapidly.  The Leviathan was still there, and was swallowed up.  Brooks wished that would have been the end of it, but he knew it would not.

The outer layer was growing, reaching towards them.

“Someone get us the hell out of here!” Nadian called.

“Too late!” Kat screamed.

The star had swollen so large it could have encompassed the whole of the Sol system.  And then it tore itself apart.

Brooks could not help but to throw himself back, as pitiful a gesture as it was.

He could not imagine the energy and heat that must have been washing over and around them.

In the bizarre, sped-up way of everything they had seen, though, the explosion faded.  Through a milky fog they could see the stellar remnant left behind;

A black hole, one large enough to be the heart of an entire galaxy.

Perhaps their galaxy, Brooks thought in awe.

“Where’s the Leviathan?” Kat asked.

“Gone,” Brooks said, his voice a croak.  “Gone somewhere else.”

---

< Ep 13 part 29 | Ep 13 part 31 >

New to Other-Terrestrial? Check here! Or if you need to, jump to the beginning of the episode here!

---

Father Cathal Sair held the dagger in his hand.  It was made of a dark metal or perhaps even stone that seemed to eat the light that touched it; only at very certain angles did it glint, giving a view of itself as something more than a solid shadow.

“The infinite callous cold calls to us all,” he spoke softly, reverently.

Yet all present heard his words, hung on them.

Even Pirra, it seemed to Apollonia.

The Dessei’s eyes, already much larger than a human’s, were open to their widest, fixed on the man.

“In its frozen, unfeeling, endless depths the Dark sees Our worth . . . sees that we are wanting, lacking true form and purpose.  It gives us a finality that befits our stature,” Sair said.

His eyes lowered from the knife, beads of sweat on his skin sparkling in the lights of the glowing spheres.  His eyes moved across them all.

Apollonia felt them linger on her, felt a . . . a longing, in them.  For her.

It pulled at her, and she leaned forward in her seat.  So did others, and for a moment she felt a flicker of jealousy; she was the special one here.  She was always the special one, it’s why people loved her.  Why they tolerated her.  Why they hated her.

“Yet there is a deeper mercy for us.  While we are nothing in the sight of the Dark, to the Elder Ones, the true rulers of the universe, we are the Pale Reflection.”

Slowly, he lowered his hand, his eyes moving again to Apollonia.

She felt her heart race.  The crowd turned, all together in a disturbing act of synchronicity, to look at her.  They waited.

Cathal’s fingers curled slowly, beckoning her.

Apollonia did not realize she rose, but she found herself halfway down the aisle.  Then she found herself on the stage.

“Lay yourself down to rest,” Cathal said to her softly.  There was love in his voice, she realized.

He did not have to say the words.

Neither did she.

She was laying on her back then, looking up at him.  Sadness rent his face, and she smiled.  “Why are you sad?” she asked.

“It will be over soon, Apollonia,” he said, so softly.

She felt something hit her cheek, reached up a hand.  It was wet.  With a tear?

“In the ancient times, the Great Ones were all.  All was of their flesh and their will.”

Four men appeared; they were of average appearance, their faces calm.  All wore very simple, light-blue robes, and two held large metal censers, suspended by brass chains from highly decorated poles.

The censers looked, like the altar, to be ancient.  Pirra’s unease grew, but she found she could barely even contemplate moving.

It was like when she was half-asleep and aware of it; a part of her could feel the desire to slip deeper, to fall back into slumber.  But she fought it, almost rocking back and forth, her heart fluttering faster as she tried to force her body and mind to move.

Smoke began to pour from the censers.  It smelled strangely, almost making her want to cough.

But it was soothing, too.

She felt herself going slack.  Her mind, drifting into that dream state where she was still aware – but that was all.  Unable to act.

“In the darkness the Great Ones first gave birth to light and created, from the shapeless, forms for life to inhabit,” Sair said.  He was looking at Apollonia, his words seemingly for her alone.

Next to her, two of the men drew back the sheets on the other altars.  These, too, were of ancient, crumbling stone, but indented, like rectangular bowls.

The men crawled inside, crossing their arms.

“Our forms are sacred to this day,” Sair breathed, stepping over to stand above one of the men.  “In the night of the universe they will remain sacred.”

The wickedly black knife in his hand thrust down, into the throat of the man.  He coughed, once, blood splattering his lips.  But otherwise he remained still.  His blood seeping from his body slowly.

“And to the darkness we shall return,” Sair said.

He moved and slashed again, cutting the other man’s throat.

“Insignificant yet mighty.  Tiny, and yet beloved.”

Pirra felt the horror of seeing these men die; she did not know who they were, but Father Sair had just murdered them.

Yet no matter how much she knew she should spring up, seek help – she could not make herself move.

The blood pooling around the two men began to crawl up the sides of the bowls.  It bridged the gap between the altars, squirming and flowing through the air, moving towards Apollonia.

She was still, staring up at Sair.  A look of . . . confusion, or possibly doubt, appeared on her face, but only for a moment.

Father Sair reached down, stroking a bloody hand across her cheek.  He said something, quietly, but the words were not audible.

Apollonia suddenly spasmed, her eyes rolling back into her head, her entire body convulsing.  Something formless, invisible, held her wrists and ankles to the altar, and she did not fall, but only continued to writhe, gasping for air.

Wanting to scream, but unable.

---

< Ep 13 part 28 | Ep 13 part 30 >

New to Other-Terrestrial? Check here! Or if you need to, jump to the beginning of the episode here!

---

“On my signal, hit the button.  And remember!  You have to mean it,” Fergus called.

His signal was weak, the radio in his suit just barely able to reach through even the one airlock door.

Nadian was ready on the button.  “I still think this is too dangerous, Fergus.”

“We always put our lives on the line, Nadian,” the man replied.  “This time, I’m going first and you’ll get second-fiddle.”

Brooks stepped up to him.  “You really don’t have anything to prove, Fergus,” he said quietly.  “Your place in history is assured from what you’ve done already.”

Pride, just stupid pride, Brooks thought.

The man leaned closer.  “I have an inside advantage,” he said quietly, pointing up.  Brooks did not understand for a moment; then he realized that the man must have had his own contact with the Present Mind.

Brooks did not get a chance to pursue asking the man about it.  Fergus saluted jauntily, then turned to face the outside.

He had attached a high-strength graphene cable onto the airlock wall, and he tested it now.  It had been attached onto the stone with molecular hooks.  It couldn’t grip in as well as might be liked, but it was still more than strong enough to hold Fergus.

“I’m ready,” Fergus said.  “Open it up!”

Nadian hesitated.  Brooks watched the man.

“You don’t have to help him do this,” Brooks said.

“I wish I had thought of it first,” Nadian said, and hit the button.

The airlock door disappeared, and there was another rumble as the air went out.  

Fergus was taken out as well, slowly feeding out line.  His data came down the cable.

“Can you receive me?”

“Yes, we can hear you,” Brooks replied.  His signal was weak, but hopefully with the cable they’d be able to keep hearing him.

The man spooled out several meters.

“It appears that this is a ship that is moving,” he called.  “I can’t see the temple anymore.  Och, we’ve traveled far . . .”

“Can you see anything else?” Nadian asked.

“There’s a superstructure of the ship, it’s entirely blocking my view forward.  But I see gas clouds.  I think . . .”  He faded a few moments.  “I think I see the star.  Stars!  It is out there.”

“Get back in here!” Brooks called.  “The radiation will fry you!”

“My sensors aren’t detecting a damn thing, Captain.”

“They can be overwhelmed.”

“If that’s the case I’m dead already,” Fergus said.  “I’m not feeling any pull, getting any rads.”

“You are drifting towards the fore of the ship,” Nadian said.

“My initial thrust was probably unbalanced,” Fergus said.  “Not an issue.”

Fergus was drifting off to the left, slowly heading out of sight of the airlock window as he went further.

“To be honest, lads and lass, I think that . . . yes, I’m certain – we’ve been bamboozled.”

“What do you mean?” Nadian asked.

“I think we’re in a craft, aye.  But the craft is inside a bubble, projecting what it wants us to see!  Carnival ride, like I said.”

Brooks got on the line.  “I am highly skeptical of that, Fergus.  You felt what we all did when we passed through the Lens.”

“Do you have a better explanation?”

Brooks did not.  He looked to Kell.  “Is this real, Ambassador?”

Kell said nothing.

“Ambassador, I need you to-“

Fergus’s voice cut through.  “Going out farther, but don’t worry, I’ll let you all hold my awards when we get back!”

“Fergus, I suggest you come back now,” Brooks said.

“Nay, Captain!  I dinnae think you of all people would be this cowardly!”

He could see Fergus getting smaller.  The spool of cable went up to 300 meters, but Fergus hopefully wouldn’t go that far . . .

Brooks got a ping; he was receiving other data from the cable, and it was registering an unexpectedly increasing pull.

“Fergus, are you feeling anything?”

“Only the sense that I’m going to find this outer wall soon.”  The man’s voice was breaking up more – interference from stellar wind hitting the cable, Brooks thought.

The sensor was showing that the pulling force was increasing.

“Fergus, are you feeling any pull?” Brooks asked.

“Pull?  Well I’m moving, so . . .”

“Stop for just a moment.  The cable has strange readings.”

“I swear, Captain, I-“

“Just stop for one fucking moment,” Brooks snapped.

The man started to slow.  But he did not come to a stop.

“Just stop, man,” Brooks messaged.

“I . . . I’m trying to, Captain.  I stopped the line, but it’s . . .” he broke up a second.  “-avity is pulling me!”

The line was still pulling out several centimeters a second, the motor for pulling it was not strong enough to bring it to a halt.

“Can you reel yourself back in if I put in the emergency stop?”

“I dinna know!”

“Try climbing back!”

“The pull is getting stronger!”

They couldn’t see Fergus anymore, he was well past the edge of their vision, but Brooks could see the cable being pulled hard against the edge of the outer airlock door.

The cable would take far more pressure to break.  But if the man could not return, it was hardly any better.

“. . . trying . . . myself back . . .”

“Why is the signal degrading so quickly?” Kat asked.  She moved over towards the windows and pointed.  “There!”

Brooks rushed over, and saw that the man had been pulled straight out in front of the ship now, visible through the touch-created windows they had made earlier.  The cable seemed to stretch strangely, as if it was going around something that was there but invisible to them.

He was holding onto the cable, trying to pull himself back, but it was pulling out as fast as he could climb.

“I’m hitting the emergency brake,” Brooks said.

The line jolted, and Fergus’s hands slipped free, only still connected by the hook – at the back.

“He can’t reach it!” Kat cried.

Nadian rushed over and started digging into his bag.  “I’m going out for him!”

“We don’t have another cable,” Brooks said.  “You can’t hold onto that line if he can’t.  And at least he’s connected.”

“Then I’ll go into the airlock and start pulling it in myself!”

Brooks looked to Kell.

“Can you pull him in?”

Kell looked up at him this time.  “Possibly.”

“Try,” Brooks said sharply.

Kell watched him a moment, then went towards the airlock.  He looked through the glass.

“Kell,” Brooks said softly.  “Can you pass through this?  I’ve seen you move in ways that let you just . . . ignore walls and impediments . . .”

Kell looked slightly amused.  “Observant.  But no.  In this place, the structure is built in all places I can reach.  I cannot circumvent it.”

“. . . straining . . . suit . . .” the words came in.

“We only have one more space suit,” Kat said softly.  “If we open this door, we’ll lose the air in here.”

“Damn it!” Brooks yelled, pounding his fist into the wall.

“It is already too late,” Kell said.  He nodded out the airlock window.

Brooks looked as well.

The base of the cable was rocking on the wall.  Its molecular hooks had failed in most places.

“Fergus!” Brooks called out.  “Do whatever you have to to get back!  The cable is-“

It ripped free from the wall and flew out of the airlock.

Brooks felt his jaw drop, and he looked out towards where Fergus was visible outside the ‘front’ window.

The man was receding rapidly, his arms flailing.

And he was starting to glow.

Heat, Brooks realized.  The star before them was larger than before, filling their view.  And Fergus was falling into its light and heat.

“He was right,” Kell said quietly.  “There was a bubble around us, one that protected this vessel.  He has left it.”

Fergus’s spacesuit burst into flames, burning away completely.  Inside, he was already a torch, and his flesh burned, leaving only a gaunt skeleton that likewise was incinerated in moments.

Kat covered her mouth in horror, and Brooks leaned against the wall heavily.

The man had been obnoxious, but his death was senseless.  If only he hadn’t been so foolish.

And if Kell had helped.  He looked up at the being, who was watching him coldly.

“Yes, I let him die,” Kell said.

“You could have told us if you knew!”

“You would have questioned it.  Doubted it.  Wanted to test it.  That fool would only have been emboldened in this desire to go out.”

“He did not have to die, though!”

Kell smiled, slightly.  “Yet now you understand the seriousness of the situation.  This room, all of your speculations have been correct.  It is a vessel, it is an experience to educate.  But at no point is it under an obligation to keep you alive.”

---

< Ep 13 part 27 | Ep 13 part 29 >

New to Other-Terrestrial? Check here! Or if you need to, jump to the beginning of the episode here!

---

“What in God’s name is that?”

Brooks had been looking under the consoles, seeing if he could find a hatch to view the inside workings – without success.

When he heard Fergus’s question, he came out.

At first he did not see it.  The field of stars outside of their view all looked the same.

But then he saw the faint ripple.

“It looks like the surface of a pond,” Nadian said.

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Kat added, leaning in close to the screen.  “Is it just a distortion on the cameras?  I don’t know how empty space could be having that effect.

“It is real,” Kell said, from across the room.  He leaned calmly against the wall, staring out unblinkingly.

Brooks also peered out, trying to gauge the size of the ripples.

It was growing larger.

“We’re moving towards it,” he said.  “We’re going to hit it.”

“Ambassador, what the hell is it?” Nadian asked, turning to look at the being.

“It is a veil,” Kell said.  “To you, perhaps a lens.”

“Will it kill us though, that’s the question,” Fergus said.  He also turned towards Kell.  “Now would be a really nice time for yeh to share what yeh know, Ambassador!”

Kell ignored him.

Brooks came closer to him.  “What will happen to this ship – to us – when we go through it?”

“It will be unpleasant,” Kell told him.

“Will we survive?”

“In what sense?”

Fergus let out a curse, and Brooks almost echoed the sentiment.  Now was not the time for cryptic nonsense-

“You had best step back, Captain,” Kell said.

A shiver went down Brooks’s spine.  Was Kell turning hostile?

He stepped back carefully.

“We’re about to hit it,” Kat said.

“We will pass through,” Kell said.  “Mind your mind.”

The distortion was more extreme closer up, the stars behind it turning to strange lines that moved erratically.

It swept over them.  Whatever Brooks had expected to feel, it was not what he felt.

The floor, the entire room, seemed to fall away, to shrink and disappear into nothingness.  He felt his sense of self grow in directions he could not name or understand, encompassing more space than was possible.

But something was there, engulfing him – constraining him.  He felt it in all possible directions he could feel – visions in his eyes that he could not possibly understand, flashes of lights and movement and shape that made no sense, that his mind could not make sense of.

But all encompassed in that strange presence that horrified him.  It congealed slowly into something that almost made sense.

He saw bulging eyes, screaming mouths lined with thousands of needle-sharp teeth, flesh that seethed and glistened, slick with corruption and its own barely-restrained hate.

And then he felt the presence.

“Kell?” he whispered.

The eyes, which had henceforth been peering in all directions, moved to look at him.  He felt the attention as a physical, stifling presence.

The complexity of the structure of flesh that surrounded him staggered him, a single being – yet so vastly complex and faceted that he could not map it, not even take it all in.  Yet there was something unmistakably familiar that he could see was the being he knew as Kell; some aspect of this madness of flesh and eyes and impossible layerings, distilled down into a familiar shape.

“How could you ever grasp it?” a thousand voices whispered, all of them speaking as one.

He suddenly collapsed back in on himself, finding that he was standing just where he had been.

His feet felt planted so strongly that he could not move, and it took him several moments to reassert control over his body and relax slightly.

Staggering against the wall, he looked for the others, noting absently that the entire shape of the room had changed.  Nadian, Kat, and Fergus were all still standing where they had been, and all seemed to be running through the same feelings he had just experienced.

But had they seen Kell for what he was?  Did they understand what it meant?  And that he was the reason they had even survived passing through the lens?

Because Brooks could understand now, that without something to constrain them, their minds would have spread until they became a diffuse nothingness that could never reassert itself . . .

A scream tore his thoughts, causing him to stagger.

Tobias Fromm thrashed, falling, his hands clutching his head.

“Stay out of my mind!” he screamed, his legs kicking desperately, like a man trying to evade a predator.

Away from Kell.

Kell looked at the man, regarding him like a worm.  “Pathetic,” he said.

“Kell,” Brooks said, finding that he was short on breath.  “What are you doing?”

“I looked in him,” Kell said calmly.  “He is no Apollonia.”

Nadian staggered towards Kell.  “What did you do to him?”

“He is unhurt.  He simply did not enjoy my looking,” Kell said, with a shrug.

“Fromm, you all right?” Nadian asked, trying to take the man’s arm.  Fromm shook him off.

“No, I’m not fine!” the man yelled.  “You brought me here, Nadian!  You brought me to this hell hole!”

“Quiet,” Brooks said.  “There’s something new outside.”

His voice was calm, but gathered all attention.  All eyes followed his to look out the windows.

“What is that?” Fergus asked.

“It looks like a collapsing ball of gas,” Kat said.

Which, Brooks thought, was probably right.

There was a huge cloud of gas; they were in the more diffuse edge, and though it obscured their vision somewhat, they could not miss what lay in the center.

The gas was rotating, faster and faster, falling together under the power of gravity.  Collecting – and heating up.

“There was no nebula near us,” Nadian breathed.  “Where are we?”

There was no answer forthcoming for him, and they could only continue to stare as the gas collapsed inwards, heating up until it glowed.

Time seemed impossible to keep track of, even Brooks’s system was no help, having stopped working.  It was as if eons of time were flashing before their eyes.

The pressure grew greater, greater, until jets of gas blasted from the poles of the dawning star.  So much energy unleashed that even the mundane matter was accelerated until it was just streaks of energy.

More gas than seemed possible condensed into the star, until – with a flash that was nearly blinding – the critical threshold was hit and fusion began.

A star was born.

It was dwarfed by the cloud around it, despite its size that would have to be huge, he thought.  A massive body, hundreds of times the mass of the sun.

A shockwave radiated from it, the first massive burst of cosmic wind, rippling through the gas.  The whole room shuddered as it passed.

The remaining gas, Brooks knew, should be blown away by that explosive birth.  But while it was pushed back, it soon stopped and then continued to fall into the star.

It grew larger and larger, feeding on ever more dust.  It was only a sphere, but Brooks could tell in some way that this was no ordinary star, it was now swollen far beyond any star that existed.  It began to dwarf even the cloud that birthed it, but more continued to fall inwards towards it, until it was larger than any star that could even exist in the universe as it was.

As it was . . .  but not as it had been.

“A primordial dark star is birthed,” Kell said, his voice a toneless chant.  “A gateway to a higher reality.”

Fergus moved forward, reaching out to touch the screen.

“This can’t be real,” he said.  “There was no nebula near us, like Nade said.  No star would collapse this quickly and form.  This is . . . this is a simulation.  Some kind of bloody amusement park ride!”

He punched the wall, his knuckles bloody.  “I dinnae believe any of this!”

“The whole room is different,” Nadian said, looking around.

Whereas before it had been taller than wide, now it was different; the ceiling was low, close to their heads.  But the room was wider.

And there was a new, open door.

Fergus staggered towards it and peered through.

Brooks came closer to look in as well, but it was only the size of a large closet.

Or an airlock, he realized.  On the other side was another door.

Fergus looked at him, grinning.  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Brooks replied.

“What?” Kat demanded, coming over as well.  “Oh Christ, Fergus, you want to go out there?”

“I don’t even believe there is an ‘out there’,” Fergus said.  “I think this is all some kind of illusion.  For all we know this bloody temple is a theme park and we just turned on one of the rides.”

“You don’t really believe that,” Nadian said.

“No,” Fergus admitted.  “But I don’t believe this is real, either.  It may be some kind of simulation.”

“So why is there an airlock then?” Kat asked.

“Because we may be in space, but it’s only projecting the rest,” Fergus replied, gesturing.  “I’m not totally daft.  We’ll test my idea first.  Do we have any sensors?”

Brooks cursed as he realized that he’d left his bags out in the hall before he’d come into this room.  At the time it had seemed wise in case he needed to move quickly without its weight and bulk.  But all of his gear was in it.

“I’ve got a camera, but it won’t go through this stone,” Nadian said with a shrug.

Mumbling to himself in annoyance, Fergus dug into his bag and pulled out a small figurine.

It looked suspiciously like himself, but with an enlarged head on a spring.  He gave it a playful poke, grinning at the others.

“I’ll be the first out there,” he said in amusement, putting the bobblehead down in the airlock.

Stepping back, he looked for controls.  “Kell, me chap, could you help me with this?”

Kell did not even look over.

“Brooks, can you get him to help?”

“I won’t,” Brooks said.  “I am against this idea of yours, Fergus.  Even just testing it.  We don’t know what any of this does.”

“All the more reason for his help!  He understands it.”

Which did seem true, but looking at Kell, Brooks had the unnerving thought that Kell simply saw more, but did not really know anything more about this technology than they did.

He went over.

“What do you think of his plan?” Brooks asked Kell quietly.

“I think if he kills himself, my mood will be improved,” Kell replied.

“You really hate him,” Brooks said in surprise.

“He meddles in things he does not comprehend, and has no understanding of caution.  He thinks these are merely puzzles to be solved for his entertainment.  But I know it is far more than that.”

“How?” Brooks asked.  “You knew that that was a . . . a dark star, you called it?  One formed from dark matter?”

Kell looked to him with utmost solemness.  “Such knowledge is encoded in my very being.”

Fergus called out.  “I think I’ve got it!” he said.

Brooks looked over and saw that Fergus had gotten the airlock door closed.  In the middle was a floor-to-ceiling window view into the room.

“This one will open it,” he said.  “It’s a mighty clever gadget, to be sure.  Ya see, it doesn’t react to touch, but to intent when you touch.  I bet I could get this to give us some strawberry ice cream once I prove myself right!”

Brooks came over.  The man could end up venting them all.  “Are you certain?”  He was looking to Nadian.

Nadian hesitated, and Fergus saw that Brooks was appealing to his hated competitor, and spat at the floor.

“I figure out their machines, and this is how you treat me?” he raged.  “I’ll show you ungrateful cunts.”

He smashed his hand down onto the controls.

Through the thin window, Brooks saw the far door open – simply disappearing, not even moving – and there was a slight thump that he could feel.

The bobblehead flew out on the blast of escaping air.

“Hah!” Fergus said.  “As I called it, ye doubting ninnies.  It’s an airlock!”

He stepped away, while Brooks continued to peer out.  In the darkness beyond the airlock, he could see stars.  They were still, so that meant the ship was not spinning, at least.

He heard sounds behind himself, and looked back.

Fergus had his bag, and was pulling out a roll of something large.

“What is that?” Brooks asked.

“My spacesuit,” Fergus said, still grinning.

“You can’t really be thinking of going out there!” Kat said.

“Oh, but I am,” Fergus said.  “And I’ll be the first!”

---

< Ep 13 part 26 | Ep 13 part 28 >