Science Fiction Gothic Things Home

Lost You are better lost than found. - Joseph Conrad One good thing about the NoSaNoOs Dominion, Meshil reflected as she bought a meal from the dispenser; the machinery was reliable. Nothing ever broke down, at least not from neglect. However, while she was walking back to her berth along the inner corridor wall of the cruiser which was taking her to Millimillenary, the ship shuddered and there was a faint feeling of acceleration, something which was rarely, if ever, experienced on a NoSaNoOs ship. She paused, glanced about then shrugged. She was standing over her berth, about to jump down into it when a dull boom sounded somewhere in the distance and the ship skewed violently to the left. She fell (crushing the drink container), rolled over and scrambled through the hatch. The translucent door sealed shut above her and, surprisingly, a second door closed behind that, dark grey, the same colour as the ship’s outer hull. A calm voice spoke from her notepad: "Warning. This ship is under attack. Please remain in your berth." She sat up against one wall and stared at her notepad, a nervous, disbelieving smile on her face (this had to be a joke), then she crawled over to her notepad and asked it for more information. It started to draw the "please wait" logo and froze halfway through. There were a few more vague lurches as if the ship couldn’t make up its mind about which direction it was going, then a second dull boom sounded followed by an ear-splitting crack. The ship seemed to accelerate straight down, lifting her off the floor; she waited for gravity to return, and it was only when she looked up to follow her notepad as it drifted past that she noticed that her berth had been ejected from the body of the cruiser; she was in free fall. The cruiser – looking like a rodent-nibbled doughnut – spun slowly as it receded (or her berth was turning as it departed), framed by the window-port. By craning her neck, she could see another berth flying from the cruiser, a stubby teardrop shape thrown off into space. She was trying to follow its course when a brilliant, silent blue-white glare marked the destruction of the cruiser. She hadn’t been looking at it directly, but it left an oddly-shaped purple blur on the retina of her left eye. The capsule rotated around her and accelerated away from the explosion; she settled to the floor, her things gently raining down around her. She picked up her notepad as it fell; it was still frozen halfway through drawing the "please wait" logo, and didn’t respond when she tried to restart it. She simply sat there for a few moments, with no idea what to do next; she was used to getting help from her notepad in such situations. Not that she usually found herself in this particular situation… Presently the acceleration ceased; the only thing she’d been able to think of doing was to finish her meal, a series of experiments in trying to open the containers carefully so that the food didn’t spill out and float away. It hadn’t yet sunk in that she’d narrowly escaped death and was lost, light-years from civilisation; people had always been treated like royalty by the NoSaNoOs. Someone would be along to pick her up soon, she was sure. Some time later - she was having trouble estimating time without her notepad - she noticed that the screen had cleared; it was working again. She grabbed it eagerly and interrogated it. After apologising for being out of service for so long – the cruiser had given it a huge amount of data just before the explosion – it reported that an unidentified assailant had destroyed the ship and all but three of the escape pods. One of these was unoccupied and was acting as a marker beacon to indicate the site of the attack; the other two had automatically headed for the nearest system capable of supporting life, as the berths on their own had only enough atmosphere for twelve hours. When she asked the notepad where they were going, it said that apart from an arrival time of two hours, no information was available; the system was uncharted. The fact that the cruiser had downloaded most of its data to her notepad during the attack lodged somewhere inside her, cranking the vague sense of panic up one notch. It was a measure of desperation that shook her confidence in the NoSaNoOs. She spent the two hours alternately trying to contact the other capsule (her notepad responded slowly – it was still shuffling immense amounts of data around its insides) and see their destination out of the window, with no success. Going through the passenger list, she tried to work out who the other survivor could be. Most of the passengers had gotten off the ship at the previous stop; the only ones onboard at the time of the attack had been her, a Bythian security detail (they always travelled as "security details" or "military assignments" – she’d never seen a Bythian on holiday) and three Maracites… Dory Valanthyri Ogre Jherek Kailys had been asleep in his berth during the attack; he’d woken (from dreams of being pursued through the Labyrinth by some huge, many-legged beast with triple-hinged jaws) to find the berth spinning lazily through space. His sister Sho and Anrad, their Reptile, weren’t with him. He floated in the middle of the capsule, cloak swirling around him like black dye dropped into a glass of water, and tried to wake up fully. He ran his tongue over his teeth, inhaled deeply through his nostrils then screamed wildly, a shrill, wavering note which was mostly absorbed by the thick grey floor-lining of the capsule. He inhaled, screamed again and again until his throat was raw; by this time he was properly awake. He yawned, then idly punctured his pale-scarred wrist with one sharp incisor and sucked some blood from the opening. It healed with unnatural rapidity. He made an assessment of his possessions; notepad, guitar, staff, and a leather bag containing some drugs, his tarot, his jewellery and ritual implements. His first impression of the situation was that his berth had been ejected from the ship as part of an elaborate test by his Reptile, to see what he’d do on his own. He peered out of the window and watched the distant stars slowly rotate; about half an hour later, he remembered his notepad, a battered antique with a hand-tooled leather cover. Crimson symbols appeared briefly on the obsidian screen before fading; when he read that the cruiser had been destroyed and that his sister and their Reptile were probably dead, his pupils dilated and his breathing slowed. He’d been told, before they’d left Raummir, that this might happen; he’d dismissed the possibility as remote, another lesson in the infallible wisdom of his Reptile. No matter how he analysed the situation, his mind kept circling back to this fact; his Reptile and his sister were gone. On the one hand, he felt a terrible sense of loss; on the other, the idea that his situation was so important that his Reptile had given his life to put him into it. He couldn’t imagine what would necessitate such a sacrifice. Perhaps he would dare to ask Fiveskulls, later. He reached for the bag and retrieved a length of supple copper wire, silver barbs at one end spaced four fingers apart... Trying to decide who she’d rather find in the other capsule was difficult. She had heard some unsavoury things about the Bythians, and being an AnarchArtist, she would prefer to stay as far away from the NoSaNoOs’ military police as possible. On the other hand the Maracites also had a dubious reputation, despite being nominally human. Secretive to the point of practically inciting rumours and speculation; they rarely appeared during the day. The few Maracites that she’d seen had prominent canine fangs, dead white skin, masses of blue-black hair and vague smiles which suggested that they knew something no-one else did. In the past on Earth they’d been subjected to pogroms until they’d been given a planet of their own. Some said they were Extians; others said they were agents of the Bythians. Some said they were the product of biological warfare gone wrong, or that they dealt in human slaves. Many said they were blood-drinkers. The information in her notepad about the Maracites was sparse; it said their homeworld was called Raummir and that they worshipped Darkness. There was a picture of Raummir (a fairly unremarkable-looking grey sphere covered with faint grid-lines) and a lengthy index of preferred Maracite music, none of which was stored on her notepad except for a three-minute composition called "Choralone", in which an echoed and distorted voice spoke seemingly unrelated words over the sighing of a choir and occasional bass tones. Another faint sensation of acceleration indicated that the capsule was changing course, perhaps for insertion into a landing orbit. She’d drifted into the centre of the capsule and had no purchase to move closer to the window, so she tossed her notepad as hard as she could towards the padded floor; this provided sufficient impetus to push her towards the window-end of the capsule where she grabbed hold of a handful of grey carpeting. The view showed only stars; not even a glow which might indicate that there was a planet nearby. She floated there for a few minutes, watching the slow movement of the constellations outside; suddenly, metal walls with a faintly purplish hue appeared around the capsule’s window outside, as if a huge machine was swallowing it. Annoyed at the feeling of impotence, she asked the notepad if it could show her what was going on; the capsule lacked external sensors other than a kind of radar, which showed that she was near the opening of an irregularly-shaped shaft; in horizontal section, it resembled a squared-off comma. Just before her capsule had entered the structure the other capsule had been seen following hers, so it was possible she’d be able to dock with it and share any information they had. An hour later, the capsule was still moving down the unlit shaft, and the entrance was visible only as a tiny mauve spot in the distance. She could see occasional details on the walls pass by, and the capsule was moving quite rapidly; this structure must be huge. She was discovering how frustratingly close to intelligence her notepad was; it could answer her questions quickly and in detail, but it wouldn’t help her beyond that; she had to ask the right questions. She felt the sensations of an anxiety attack hovering over her; she grimaced and performed the visualisation her AnarchArtist Cabal Leader had taught her. It seemed to work better in free-fall; within moments she felt the panic retreating. She was floating towards the window end of the capsule when it suddenly moved towards her, slamming her face against the transparent material with enough force to cause a nosebleed. "Ah, testure," she cursed, pressing her sleeve against her face and watching droplets of red drift away to smear against the walls of the capsule. Some of them drifted downwards and then accelerated to the floor of the capsule; watching them, she could imagine a gravitational field slowly moving up through the capsule; something had gripped the bottom of the berth and was dragging it downward, throwing her up against the window. Now the field was moving through the capsule, grabbing objects (empty food cartons, her bag full of spare clothes, her notepad) and pulling them downward. She felt the ghostly effect grab her feet and pull her down also; she dropped to the floor at a leisurely pace, landing in a crouch. In a rush, her sense of orientation settled; she was on a floor again. She was about to interrogate her notepad again when the capsule suddenly split into five sections, divided like a piece of fruit. Five curved walls fell away from the base-plate of the capsule and the transparent window fell, glancing off her elbow and hitting a nerve. When she’d recovered her composure, she asked her notepad to show an old black-and-white flat video (The Marx Brothers, "A Night At The Opera"); she focused the display down to a brilliant white blur the size of her thumb-nail, bright enough to show the walls lying arranged around the capsule, rolling back and forth, raising faint clouds of dust. She crouched there for a moment, trying to breathe as shallowly as possible, wondering where she was. A few moments’ thought led her to conclude that when her notepad had said "the nearest system capable of supporting life", it had chosen this, a space station or starship of some kind, and she was in a docking port. It was all too much, she thought, trying to order her situation in her mind, focus on one thing at a time. First things first; atmosphere? Her notepad said that it contained nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide in proportions that would support human life, albeit somewhat higher in oxygen than normal. Water and food? Nothing obvious here; the space she was in was approximately twenty metres long and there was a port set into one wall, with no visible controls on this side. Being an AnarchArtist she was familiar with the process of hacking electronic locks, and her notepad had a series of procedures for opening doors with no obvious doorknobs or buttons. She gathered her things, then aimed her notepad at the door and started a standard routine named "Dorlock". A few seconds later, it made a giggling sound to indicate success and the door slowly ground open, a seven-sided section about three metres tall appearing in the wall. She picked up her things from where the capsule had split open and went through the hatch. The corridor beyond was just as dark as the docking port; the door slid shut behind her. Guided by the light from her notepad, she began to explore the passages. Dory had finished mourning his sister and their Reptile (but the puncture wounds along his back were still inflamed and weeping) by the time his capsule bumped up against a wall; he had been preoccupied, or he would have seen the approach to the structure. His notepad told him in a few terse words where he was and what he’d need to do to enter the other ship; he spent a few moments composing himself, then gathered his possessions together and wrapped them in his cloak. He aimed his notepad through the window at the mauve metal hull; it used a thin blue laser beam to search for an access port, instructed it to open. The capsule was buffeted by escaping air, drifting away from the other ship then slowly settling back into position, the window end of his capsule partially inside the irregularly-shaped hatch (in profile, something like a letter "K" with a curved back). He grabbed his bundle in one hand, notepad in the other and positioned himself with his face pressed up against the window. The end of the capsule blew off and the air inside propelled him into the other ship, where he rebounded off the walls in near-vacuum until his notepad could find the controls and instruct the outer hatch to close. For a few moments, he stared out into open space, the starlight diamond-hard, tears evaporating from his eyeballs in the vacuum. It took almost a minute to find the right combination of signals to fill the hatch with air, by which time Dory was near unconsciousness, his eyes and nose aching, ear-drums feeling like he’d been sitting too close to the speakers. The hiss of air was accompanied by the twanging of his guitar strings complaining about the changes in pressure they had just suffered. He decided to get some more sleep and wait for his body to recover some balance before continuing; his eyes rolled back into his head and he drifted up against the outer hatch. "Can you identify this station?" "Unknown." "Any records of anything like this?" "No records in current storage." "Access Illegal Entry routine. Locate controls." The notepad beeped, shot out a needle-thin line of blue laser light which flickered over the wall for a few seconds, then displayed a pointer to a section of wall a few metres away. It didn’t look any different from any part of the corridor; the notepad showed a set of irregularly-shaped panels which were apparently heat-sensitive. She held her palm against the right-most of these for a few moments; the wall felt cold, but not uncomfortably so. When after about thirty seconds nothing had happened, she tried the next panel along, with no better results. As soon as she touched the third panel along, something creaked behind the wall and overhead lights came on, a thin line of violet-blue, almost painful to look at. She discovered that if she held her hand against this panel, the lights increased in brightness until her notepad beeped a warning about excessive levels of ultraviolet radiation; touching the second panel reduced the brightness. When the lights had been completely dimmed, another sound came from behind the wall, sounding for all the world like a frog croaking. She could almost imagine that it had said the word "bob"; she raised and lowered the light levels four or five times, just to hear this sound, then left them at a level which didn’t hurt her eyes, but didn’t provide as much ambient illumination as she would have liked. She had visions of small alien things lurking in the recesses of the corridor, which was, in cross-section, the same shape as the shaft her capsule had spent so long in traversing. She began to explore the corridors. The quiet snickering of Fiveskulls woke him from dreams of drowning in his own blood. Physically, he felt better, healed; he was floating a hand’s width from the hatch that had closed on the vacuum outside. He could feel the emptiness, endless darkness so close, so easily accessible that he shivered with the desire to order his notepad to open the door and let him out again. Self pity, said Fiveskulls. "Shh." Dory muttered in reply, irritatedly. Morbid self pity, they repeated. You didn’t perform the Mourning properly, and you’re feeling guilty about them dying and you can’t handle this on your own so you want to die also. Dory’s hand closed around the pendant, five cold grinning pewter skulls the size of his index finger-nail, strung on a loop of leather around his neck. Well, they continued, get with it. Secure your perimeter. "Tell me something I don’t know," he sighed. Their cold laughter rang inside his head as he gathered up his cloak-bundle and notebook in the darkness and started to look for an inner hatch. Meshil had been walking for hours, her notepad turning on the lights ahead of her and dimming them behind; the path she’d traced, when displayed on her notepad, showed a series of long curves first to one side, then the other. About every three kilometres she came to an intersection of three corridors, and she’d been taking the right-most one each time. She’d been wandering along with no definite plan in mind for that long before it occurred to her that these corridors had to have some purpose; there had to be rooms, or machinery access panels, or something, along them. She paused a few metres along from the last intersection and instructed her notepad to look for more controls. Within moments, she’d found a door leading down an abbreviated, narrow shaft into a small room. Lit by the notepad, she found three holes in the walls which poked diagonally downwards into the ship like fingers in a glove, each about one metre in diameter and three metres deep, half-filled with a thick syrupy fluid. She could imagine them being used as sleeping places for some kind of alien that didn’t mind sleeping in goop. She scooped some of it out and examined it; translucent mauve, the consistency of partly-set jelly. Despite her notepad declaring it chemically neutral, she wasn’t game to taste it. She wondered how much trouble she’d get into if she used the spaces for a toilet and the aliens objected. It wasn’t likely; the ship felt abandoned. The rest of the room was undetailed, no furniture, left-behind clothing, no controls, not even an on-suite data service. She climbed up into the main corridor and checked the next six rooms; they were all the same. She wrote a routine for her notepad which would unlock the rooms and scan the space; she just had to poke the notepad into the hole. After checking twenty-three rooms and finding no variation between them she gave up on them and just kept walking. As she passed the next intersection, a column of bright pink light as wide as her head sprang into being behind her, connecting the ceiling and the floor. When she stepped away from it, it faded; it came back on when she walked through the intersection again. Her notepad reported that it was low-intensity unmodulated laser light; harmless. She stood watching it for a few minutes, then continued onward, trying to ignore the feeling that she was being followed. Dory had floated through the inner hatch and into a gravitational field which dropped him on his hands and knees. He’d found a wide, semicircular space with a low ceiling that he could reach up and brush his fingers against. The airlock he’d entered from was one of nine similar doors spaced around the curved part of the room; between the hatches were long, oval windows of thick, scratched glass which afforded a view of space. The scratches were on the inside. In one of the airlocks he found a discarded metal tube, about the same size as a human thighbone, scarred with blue-green rust; idly, he picked it up. It felt a lot lighter than it looked. Through the left-most of the windows he could see a faint red glow, as if there was a planet just out of view. He examined the other airlocks in turn; they were all empty. He located a hatch at the back of the room which led into a kind of amphitheatre, nested semicircular sections arranged haphazardly down to a pit about six metres across with some thick purplish fluid in the bottom. If he’d stepped into it, it would’ve come up to his knees; with typical Maracite fastidiousness, he didn’t try this. He poked one end of the metal tube into it, stirred it idly; then sweeping back his cloak to keep it out of the fluid, he lay down flat along the lowest step, pushed his face into it and swallowed a couple of mouthsful. It had a faint, perfumey taste, reminiscent of rose scent, but didn’t seem poisonous. In leaning over to drink it, he accidentally dipped Fiveskulls into the fluid; they complained bitterly, silently. He dried and polished them on a scrap of black cloth he found in one of his many pockets, then sat back against the steps with his eyes shut, listening to the oppressive silence. After a while, he instructed his notepad to play some music while he explored the rest of the amphitheatre. There were some concealed controls set into the steps near the middle of the curved part of the steps, nineteen irregularly-shaped heat-sensitive panels. Methodically, he began operating them one after the other, then in combinations while the music echoed off the walls. A particular sequence of six panels activated a beam of pink light which ran from the floor to the ceiling along the flat side of the amphitheatre; having made that much progress he set his notepad down near the panels, told it to figure them out. He picked up his guitar, tuned it and idly played along with the music, watching the beam of light flicker on and off as the notepad experimented. Meshil had finally given in and used one of the holes in the rooms for a toilet. While climbing out of the room, she heard a distant tapping sound coming from the right, the part of the corridor she hadn’t explored yet. She poked her notepad out of the hole and asked it to look down the corridor; it showed her as far as the next curve. Nothing. Cautiously, she got out of the shaft and walked towards the tapping sound. As it got closer, she realised it was something metallic clacking against the floor in a complex rhythm that, try as she might, she couldn’t figure out. She began peering nervously around the slight curves in the corridors to try and anticipate whatever was approaching. When she finally saw them, she was relieved; four machines about waist-height, resembling five-legged tables – or six-legged tables with one leg missing; the legs weren’t arranged evenly. Perhaps the fifth doubled as some kind of manipulator. At the moment, they were using all five legs to walk on, which explained the odd sequence of sounds. Made of some roughly-finished dark purple metal with fairly ordinary-looking mechanical jointed legs, they walked down the corridor in single file at casual-strolling speed, giving her plenty of room to walk around them. She followed them for a few minutes, then daringly ran in front of them and stopped in their path, expecting to be pushed out of their way; instead, they sensed her presence and halted. When she stepped aside, they continued. She followed, watching their precise, crab-like movements for a few minutes more, then tested the weight-bearing capacity of the hindmost. It was a lot stronger than it appeared; it didn’t slow down when she jumped up and sat on it. The ride was smooth, even if the surface was rather hard. They headed back the way she’d come; when they came to the intersection, the first two turned off to the left while the second two turned off to the right, taking her with them into darkness. When she got her notepad to turn the lights on, the corridors seemed the same. While she was wondering if she could possibly sleep under these conditions, she drifted into that state, one leg falling over the end of the machine, swaying back and forth with the gentle walking motions. His notepad dropped the volume of the music briefly to announce that it had established a link with the controls in the amphitheatre. Dory finished playing along with the song before reading the rest of the assessment; the controls were for something like a monitoring or communications system. He could enter a series of nine coordinates -numbers between 1 and 93 - and the column of pink light would show severely elongated views of different parts of the ship. Dory got his notepad to compensate for the distortion and idly spent two hours looking at empty corridors, empty conical expanses, rows of empty K-shaped bays, more empty corridors, a couple of views of space, another corridor – This one had a pair of machines walking down it. The second machine had a girl lying on it, her arms outspread, one leg dangling over the end of the machine. She appeared to be dead. He noted the coordinates of that view and then tried to work out where the machines were going and what the coordinates for the next view might be. While he was doing this, the machines stepped out of range of the viewer. He kept changing the coordinates and found that by incrementing the fourth and decrementing the sixth numbers, he could follow her progress, at least for the moment. He pushed his notepad’s image-processing capabilities to their maximum and got a close-up of her face. She had an AnarchArtist’s hairstyle and clothing; better than most humans, he thought. She’d be at least someone half-way interesting to talk to if she were alive. Unfortunately, his notepad wasn’t smart enough to search all of the combinations of coordinates and report if it found anything interesting; after ten minutes of intricate programming, he managed to get it to scan the entire range of coordinates, watch the view for three seconds and note if anything had moved in that view. His notepad gave him an estimate for how long the entire scan would take to complete: approximately sixteen and a half thousand million years, and two hundred and twenty-two days, Fiveskulls laughed derisively. Dory reworked the routine, taking into account the minimum persistence-of-vision of his notepad’s video matrix. It could scan the alien display two hundred times a second; taking three scans as fast as possible and seeing if there was any change between the first and third, he got a revised figure: only two hundred and fifty millions years. Fiveskull’s laughter at this almost made him want to tear the ornament from around his neck and throw it out of the airlock. Dory revised the routine again; sixty times a second, his notepad would pick a coordinate at random, scan two frames and compare them. If they differed, the coordinates would be stored in a file. He created a table of the coordinates which had already been checked and started it off. While it was doing this, he experimented with the controls some more, trying to find some relationship between the scenes being displayed by the pink column of light and the coordinates he was entering. After a few minutes, he revised the scanning program and confined it to variations of the first six coordinates; he found that changing the last three produced variations on the same themes, similar rooms. He was building a tentative model of this structure in his head by playing with the controls. After twenty minutes of seemingly random scanning around the structure he stopped, fingers suspended over his notepad, paused in thought. There was a brief period of blankness, as if trying to remember something he’d dreamed long ago, then it all fell into place and he said to himself, "It’s toroidal. First coordinate divides the structure into slices, second subdivides those slices... third and fourth coordinates divide the slices up along an axis at right-angles to the first and second; fifth and sixth determine distance from the axis to the outer hull." Very good, murmured Fiveskulls. We knew you’d figure it out eventually. Dory found the machines carrying the girl, followed their progress as the sixth coordinate decremented to zero and then started increasing again; she’d just moved through the core of the ship. He began to wonder exactly where the amphitheatre was; he hadn’t seen it while scanning through the ship. When she woke up, feeling thirsty; the machines had stopped. The first one had sidled up to a bulge in the corridor wall; the second one was trying to do something similar, but her leg was in the way. She pulled it up onto the top of the machine and it shuffled over to a second bulge in the wall, settling against it with a click. She got off the machine and examined one of the unoccupied bulges; it had faint indentations, perhaps marking points where the machines could extrude contacts for a power system to recharge themselves. The corridor stretched off into darkness in one direction; the other ended halfway up the side of a broad, shallow-sided conical pit, the intersection of seven other corridors. The ceiling was a similar conical shape, a mirror of the one below it. Confronted with this sudden multiplication of possibilities, she backed away, her notepad turning on corridor lights as she went. Her thirst kept reminding her that she wasn’t onboard a NoSaNoOs ship; she had to fend for herself. She paused for a moment to consider this; there wasn’t any data service to tell her where the facilities were; there were no Medicals (staffed by aliens who’d studied the human form all their lives) in case she got sick; there were no food dispensers. She felt another anxiety attack lurking somewhere inside and pushed it aside hastily, knowing that she’d have to deal with that feeling eventually. Keep exploring, she told herself; maybe something would come up. She came to another intersection of three corridors; the now-familiar beam of pink light sprang into being. This time, it flickered fitfully, turned off, then came on again – and it was displaying what looked like part of a human figure, stretched along the Z-axis almost to the point of being unrecognisable. At first, she thought it was some kind of alien, but a few moments’ work with her notepad provided a corrected black-and-white image; a young man with long black hair, a cloak wrapped around his shoulders. He was looking back at her. For a few seconds she didn’t know what to do; then she waved. The man on her notepad display tilted his head to one side and smiled, revealing elongated canines. This must be one of the Maracites from the cruiser, she thought. "Hello!" she said, before realising that the communications system didn’t carry sound. She could see that he held a notepad; she tried to get hers to link with his through the pink laser-light, but something was interfering; they wouldn’t hand-shake. She typed "Hello" and got her notepad to display the word before her; he read it and bowed his head, hands clasped before him. She almost fainted with relief, discovering that she wasn’t alone on this ship, but settled for laughing hysterically. I thought you were an alien, at first! She typed at him. He stared back at her for what seemed like five minutes (but was actually about thirty seconds) before he typed something at his notepad which displayed a series of ornate, barely-discernible characters, which read: "I am an alien." The word "am" was emphasised. "Well, you’re a Maracite. That’s okay, I’m not prejudiced. Where are the others?" There was an even longer pause; his face betrayed no emotion.. "They died in the attack." Meshil didn’t know what to say to that; not knowing what kind of attitude Maracites had towards death and mourning, she decided to simply leave the subject alone. "Where are you?" "Near a docking port. Near the hull. I don’t know exactly where." "You wouldn’t know where I could get something to drink, would you?" "Try the fluid at the bottom of the chamber behind you." "Is it safe to drink?" "It didn’t kill me." Yeah, but you’re an alien, she thought. She went back to the conical pit, awkwardly slid over the smooth-tiled sides (the tiles were irregularly shaped; she found herself trying to see where they repeated) to the bottom where she crouched down, lifted a handful of the fluid to her mouth and tasted it gingerly. She spat it out; it tasted like perfume. She got her notepad to search for hidden controls in this chamber; it pointed to an indentation near the point where the walls became the ceiling, a niche about the same size as the jelly-filled tubes in the rooms she’d found earlier. She was beginning to get an idea of the general size of the aliens who’d built this ship, if nothing else; about a metre tall. She climbed up to the niche and examined the controls, two circular raised surfaces set into the wall to the right of the indentation. Her notepad told her that each surface had nineteen touch-sensitive segments arranged around the centre, vaguely reminiscent (to her) of the NoSaNoOs’ circle-within-a-circle symbol. Cautiously, she touched one of the outer segments; nothing happened. She pressed harder; again, nothing. Her notepad reported that the switch was registering contact; it was plainly the wrong button. She tried them all, then in combinations; when she pressed on the middle one and any of the outer ones, a quiet hissing came from the base of the cone; when she looked down, she noted that the fluid level had risen. She went down to taste it again; bad, but not as bad as before. Almost edible. Some experimenting with both contact surfaces eventually gave her access to something like water mixed with gelatine, potable enough for her to drink until she’d satisfied her thirst. She imagined hordes of the little aliens emerging from the seven corridors to lap at the fluids being provided by whoever sat in judgement over the pit. When she got back to the intersection where the Maracite’s image had appeared, the beam of pink light had been turned off. She sat down near the junction and read through her notepad, searching for information about nutritive requirements. After turning off the inter-ship communications system, Dory sat and thought for a while. He assumed that when his Reptile hadn’t arrived on Millimillenary, the local Maracites would start looking, using both their own ships and whatever support they could coax out of the Bythians; he tried to work out how long this would take. We were fourteen hours away from our destination, prompted Fiveskulls; Dory counted on his fingers, in binary: "An additional six hours to establish that the ship is late; two hours to determine that it has been destroyed; another two hours to determine where the ship had been and where it hadn’t; fourteen hours for the Bythians to situate us. Say, six hours for a Maracite ship." His notepad reported that it had been twenty-seven hours since the cruiser’s destruction. "So either someone will be here very shortly..." Or? "... or someone won’t. Let us suppose that the cruiser was attacked and destroyed by the Bythians themselves, for whatever reasons they have for doing such things. They will try to obscure the actual nature of the incident. It will be somewhat more difficult for the Maracites on Millimillenary to find out what happened, but find out they will. This means that they will be here later rather than sooner. We wait." As if we have a choice. And the human? "She waits also. I doubt that the Bythians will be as concerned for the welfare of an AnarchArtist as for a Maracite. We could ransom her to her kind and win some influence." That would mean locating her and rescuing her, also. "And that depends on just how large this craft is. Well, if we get the opportunity to do so..." Meshil’s notepad was sophisticated enough to determine if the fluid was dangerous, but that was all. Some of the combinations brought up a warning; she climbed back up to the control niche and pressed the contacts again, clearing away the old fluid and replacing it with other varieties. She found one combination of contacts that produced thick jelly, a disturbingly arterial shade of crimson; it was safe to eat and almost tasty, reminiscent of lemon butter. She ate as much as she could hold then climbed out of the pit and settled back against the corridor floor, waiting for the Maracite to turn the communications system back on. She’d searched the area for controls which she could use to activate it herself, but it was a one-way thing, apparently; she’d have to wait until he wanted to speak to her. She considered getting her notepad to figure out how to re-open the communications channel from her end, but the programming was beyond her. She found and read some notes on the different protocols used by notepads to communicate, with a view to understanding why her notepad couldn’t interface with the Maracites through the alien communications system. While she was reading, the two table-machines walked past her towards the conical pit. She looked up as they passed, but didn’t take any notice of them until, about thirty seconds later when there was a splashing sound. She got up to look; they’d both fallen into the fluid – she’d left the level significantly higher than it had been when she found it – and were weakly waving their legs about. Feeling guilty, she climbed down to the base of the pit and tried to pull them out, but they didn’t seem able to stand on the surface of the pit. Watching them flail about like beetles lying on their backs, she wondered if they were actually part of the ship or if they’d been left by someone else who’d been stranded here; then she remembered the recharging stations. Still, it was hard to accept that they weren’t smart enough to avoid this room. Eventually, she settled for grabbing one of them by two back legs, dragging it up the side of the pit and pushing it out into the corridor. It stood there, wobbling slightly, alternately lifting its feet and waving them about as if to dry them. She went back for the other machine; it had stopped moving. She pulled it out of the pit and back to the recharging stations. The intersection of corridors where the Maracite had contacted her was in view, so if he turned the pink light on, she’d see it. The second machine lay on its side, motionless. She knelt next to it, searching for an access port or a control panel or even a bolt or screw she could undo to check its insides; the body seemed to be a single unbroken piece of metal, with the sort of raised panels and ribs that some manufacturers built into notepads to make them look more interesting. The legs were attached to this by mirror-surfaced ball joints. She lifted a leg, released it; it stayed in that position for a few seconds before slowly, jerkily sinking to the floor. She tried standing it up, but it just fell over again, legs bowing out around it. The other machine had stopped shaking its limbs and had frozen, two of its feet raised slightly. She sighed, shook her head sadly and went back to reading her notepad. Dory was watching the corrected view from his notepad as the scenes flashed by; it was still going through the coordinates at random. There wasn’t anything to differentiate one corridor from the next; if it wasn’t for the display showing that the coordinates were changing, he could almost imagine that he was looking at the same corridor over and over again. Then, something flickered in the display and was gone. Dory paused the routine and worked his way back down the list of recently used coordinates; more views of empty corridors, empty docking ports, empty conical pits, then - A pit very much like the one that the human was feeding at; its coordinates indicated that it was quite near her location. It looked like someone had set up camp in this pit; holes had been gouged in the walls and ropes strung across, supporting tatters of cloth, the remnants of an elaborate system of hammocks. Poking out of the fluid at the base of the pit were triangular ribs, long, thin thigh bones and a large, flattened skull. From what he could see, they weren’t human remains; the skull was too big. He considered asking the human to find the pit and examine it, to see if the alien had left any artefacts or implements behind that might indicate its species. You should be trying to work out where you are, Fiveskulls chided. "Does it matter? When they come to rescue us, they’ll be able to find me. We don’t need to know where she is." Yes, but that dead alien is worth investigating. Tell the human how to locate it. Then, when they come for us, they can find her as well. Dory mused. "We could take the remains back to Raummir for burial." Meshil had fallen asleep while reading; when she woke up, the pink light was on again, the severely elongated image of the Maracite regarding her impassively. She started the video correction routine and typed at him: "My name’s Meshil Gossard. What’s your name?" He seemed somewhat taken aback at this. After an embarrassingly long pause he typed back "I am Dory Kailys. I have a request." Meshil decided to give him a taste of his own superior-attitude medicine; she simply stared back at him with a faint smile on her face until he typed, "Proceeding through the third tunnel on the left in the conical pit nearby and keeping to the middle corridors, you will find another pit with alien remains at the bottom." Dory found himself slipping into Reptile-deferential mode here. "I would be grateful if you could take the time to investigate these remains. You might find something useful there." Meshil shrugged. "I don’t really have anything better to do. Hey, do you think you could get our notepads linked through this system? We could pool information and perhaps even locate each other." "I will investigate the possibility." Meshil got up, stretched and headed off down the corridor, leaving the two dead robots behind. Feeling hungry, she stopped off in the conical pit and ate some more red jelly, washing it down with the clear fluid she’d started to think of as water. When she’d finished, she felt full, and yet somehow still hungry. She put this down to the alien food and unfamiliar circumstances. She climbed up the other side of the pit and walked down the corridor, her notepad turning the lights on as she went. She no longer turned the lights off; she thought of this as a way of marking the places she’d already been to, in case she got lost and looped back. Two hours later, she’d reached the pit that Dory had described. There was a faint haze of dust in the air, drifting about between tattered-cloth- decorated ropes. On the floor in the passageway leading up to the pit, she found a roughly triangular piece of flat, dark-grey slate about the size of the palm of her hand. When she picked it up, it vibrated faintly for a few seconds, then stopped. Perhaps it was the alien’s equivalent of a notepad. She pocketed it, then climbed down the sides of the pit to where the alien skeleton lay half-out of the fluid at the bottom. At first, she thought the skeletons of two aliens had become entwined; after carefully moving the bones out of the fluid one at a time and placing them against the shallow sides of the pit, she established that it had four arms and four legs. In life, it would have been almost three metres tall, four shallow sets of angular ribs which had been attached to a fist-thick spine forming two chest cavities. Perhaps, she thought, considering the extra limbs, it was a Siamese twin. Some corroded rings of metal at the bottom of the fluid were all that remained of the alien’s clothing; she supposed that its internal bacteria had caused the decay. She felt slightly ill at the thought that this food-pit might be connected to the one she’d been eating from, and worse when she considered that the tubes she’d been using for toilets might also be connected to the pits somehow. She put this out of her mind by making a thorough search of the surrounding tunnels. In one of them she found a second skeleton with just as many arms and legs as the first (so much for that theory, she thought) and another piece of slate. She put this in her other pocket; when brought close together, the two slates began to vibrate violently (communications system feedback?). She went through the expanded libraries of information in her notepad, but couldn’t find any reference to aliens that resembled the bodies she’d found. The second alien’s ribs formed a cage over a faint layer of blue-grey dust on the corridor floor with five metal rings; the remains of its clothing, she supposed. She picked the rings up and played with them, quiet clinking noises in the suddenly oppressive silence. Meshil wondered what she’d leave behind if she died here; some metal grommets from her boots, some buttons and catches from her coveralls, interface hardware, her currency button and her notepad. She shivered. At the edge of her vision, she saw a flickering pink light reflecting from the edge of the corridor; it was coming from one of the other tunnels. She followed it to where Dory had turned on the communications system and tersely told him what she’d found. He rewarded her with a list of settings for the emitter system of her notepad that would allow it to piggy-back signals on the pink laser-light; within moments they were talking face-to-face, in three-dimensional colour with sound. "I must ask you to exchange an encryption key with me. I will explain why when our link is secure." Instead of asking secure from who or what, Meshil complied, reciting some words from the AnarchArtist Manifesto and compiling the result as a key. She sent it to Dory, who replied with a key of similar complexity; the displays blinked, faded and resumed in two dimensions with slightly poorer sound quality. "What’s wrong?" She asked him. By way of reply, he sent some images he’d captured from his notepad’s random wanderings through the ship; tall, thin humanoid figures with flat, axe-shaped heads. "Bythians... from the cruiser?" she asked, before realising that it was a stupid question. "I have no way of telling," Dory replied, a curious lilt in his voice as if he found the question amusing. "The Bythians that I have located are perhaps thirty degrees away from you, around the core of the ship. There might be more. I am scanning for them. In the meantime, I suggest you proceed inwards along the path you have been following. Before you leave that pit, I would ask of you that you would select one of the alien skulls and a thigh-bone to bring with you." "Why?" "I collect them. I will buy them from you when we meet. I am certain that my kind will rescue me; those alien artefacts will pay for your rescue also." She shrugged, picked up a thigh-bone almost long enough for her to use as a walking-stick and the second skull, which proved uncomfortably awkward to carry and too large to fit in her bag. She found a length of alien rope which had fallen from its mooring – it was more like an elastic section of gut than woven fibre – threaded it through two holes at the base of the skull (two sets of legs, two spinal cords, why not, she thought), slung it over her shoulder and set off. Dory was sitting cross-legged before his notepad which had extended holographic fields all around him, displaying several flat screens of data. One of them was tracking Meshil as she made her way slowly towards the inner surface of the toroidal ship; another was randomly searching coordinates and looking for movement; a third was displaying places where he’d found Bythians onboard. So far he’d only found three of them, but he was certain that if they’d come after any possible survivors of the attack, there would be more. He leaned back to consider this. The Maracites had always maintained good relations with the Bythians, if for no better reason than the fact that each race was known to drink blood. Dory’s Reptile had told him that the Maracites had made a deal with the NoSaNoOs long ago, securing a special place amidst the other human factions. This deal had allowed them to build and pilot their own starships, had secured them a planet of their own and had arranged protection for the Maracites against the rest of humanity. Maracite starships were still controlled by the NoSaNoOs – the Maracites told the ships where they wanted to go, and the NoSaNoOs flew the ships to that destination – but the Maracites had the most autonomy of all humans. Perhaps they were after the AnarchArtist, Fiveskulls insinuated slyly. In which case, it might be to our advantage that we let them find her. Dory’s head dipped towards his right shoulder to indicate that he didn’t entirely agree with this. "The Maracites and the AnarchArtists have a common foundation. She and I are more alike than you and I. Or the Bythians and I." Fiveskulls merely hissed at him. We’ll see. Won’t we. Meshil clambered up the side of another pit to the control niche, only to find that the controls had been damaged – vandalised – with some triangular-pointed implement; they wouldn’t respond. Wearily, she slid down to the corridor, the alien skull bumping behind her, and kept walking. She felt weary, but not tired; her nose had started running after inhaling some dust from the pit with the alien remains, and she staggered slightly as she walked. She kept on doggedly until she got to the next pit; finding the controls intact, she ordered it to produce the red jelly then almost fell down the sides to the bottom, where she greedily scooped it into her mouth with both hands. Somewhere off in the distance – from the direction she was travelling in – a distant boom sounded, like the thunder of an approaching storm. She ate until she felt bloated, but it didn’t satisfy her hunger. She got her notepad to examine the stuff again; there were some molecular structures similar to carbohydrates and one that was very close to being protein, but she guessed they weren’t close enough. She tried to work out how long it had been since she’d eaten real food; the last meal she’d had aboard the NoSaNoOs cruiser was only a light snack. She tried a few variations of the controls (she heard another distant booming sound), even the ones that produced awful tastes, but still felt hungry. She somehow found the strength to crawl up to the control niche, set it to produce water, then carefully went back to the bottom of the pit and drank her fill. At least she didn’t feel thirsty; it would have been too much if the ship had been incapable of producing water, as well. She fell asleep, half-lying in the fluid, trying to work out how long she could go without real food, trying to work out how far away the storm was that was making the sounds of thunder. Dory considered the screen which was tracking the Bythians. There were twelve of them now, four groups of three, methodically searching the section of ship they’d docked with; their trails slowly spiralled out from the point where he’d found the first group. One team seemed as if it was following a path which was slowly converging on the one being traced by Meshil. He briefly considered contacting the Bythians through the control system, with a view to distracting them. If they’re here, they bring all of the NoSaNoOs’ knowledge with them, Fiveskulls advised. They might have already tapped into the communications system. "In which case, they would know that we are here and that we are using the communications system as well. They wouldn’t be searching for us; they would be heading straight for us." That second team is heading straight for her. Perhaps one of the others heading straight for us. Dory muttered sourly, "Why don’t you ever have anything cheerful to tell me?" I’m not your Reptile. I’m not here to cheer you up! "I am beginning to receive that impression from you. Distinctly." After considering the possibility that three armed Bythians might enter the amphitheatre at any moment, Dory considered his defensive capability. If he was willing to sacrifice his notepad, he could focus the display down to a point long enough to burn a hole in the first Bythian that came through the hatch; this would leave him with two angry Bythians, no intelligence- gathering capability, out of communications and worse, with no music. He went through the contents of his bag; some drugs, one of which would give him a maniacal degree of strength, enough to disable perhaps two of the Bythians. There was his ritual dagger, which had a monomolecular edge and would easily serve to dismember anything that attacked him. The only problem with using the dagger for a weapon was that it would be tainted and unfit for ritual use afterwards. He would have to drop it into Raummir’s sun, find a replacement and go through the consecration ceremony again. The first time he’d done this, the ritual had almost killed him. He tried to decide, again, if the Bythians were after him or Meshil. Surely, if they wanted to kill her, they need not have destroyed the entire cruiser? He had to conclude that this measure of desperation was aimed squarely at his Reptile; Maracites of Anrad’s calibre were notoriously hard to kill. Which meant that if the Bythians found him, they would be more likely to kill him than not. Which meant that if he directed them to where they could find Meshil, perhaps they would not find him before the rescuers arrived. Like a chess-player, Dory went through all the possible permutations, giving equal consideration to all options; some of which might have been construed by a human observer as callous, self-serving treachery. All the while he kept foremost in mind what he imagined as the path his Reptile had intended him to follow. Fiveskulls was appropriately silent. Meshil awoke at the bottom of the pit, realising with a start that she was, allowing for differences in anatomy, lying in exactly the same position as the dead alien she’d found. She weakly struggled out of the fluid, feeling feverish and wretched, a foul taste in her mouth. She lay along the side of the pit, breathing raggedly, wondering if she’d feel any better after a drink. It no longer mattered that she’d slept in the fluid; she didn’t care if the pits were connected; she intended to use this one for a toilet after she’d eaten and drunk. She didn’t think she had the energy to climb in and out of one of the corridor-side rooms. After drinking and eating, she set off down the corridor, grimly placing one foot in front of the other, the alien skull bumping against the small of her back, knowing that she’d have a livid bruise there, eventually. She passed by three intersections, the randomly-spaced booming sound becoming louder, before she realised that the next corridor was too short; it ended in a hatch similar to the one which had closed off the docking shaft. She’d almost forgotten how to access the controls for this kind of door; she had to run Dorlock again. The hatch opened up onto a balcony which ran off in either direction, the two arms slowly curving forward. Directly before her was a semicircular platform which extended out from the balcony; she slowly moved to the rail, eyes wide, staring out at the immense expanse of clear wall before her. She’d reached the inner side of the doughnut-shape. The balcony appeared to run all the way around the inside, and similar rings of balcony were ranked above and below her; despite the crystal clarity of the huge picture-window, the inner wall of the ship faded off into the distance on either side. It was too big to be seen in its entirety. The inner section of the ship – the hole in the doughnut – was enclosed and filled with a crimson mist. As she watched, a black shape loomed out of the fog, slowly turning in free fall, and hit the window directly in front of her, making a frighteningly loud boom. She shrunk back against the hatch before realising that this had been happening for a long time, and the chances of the window-wall breaking just as she’d reached it were ludicrous. She lay back against the wall next to the hatch, slid down to the floor and lay there, watching the irregular, undetailed black shapes slowly circulating in the mist, occasionally rebounding as they collided. She briefly considered pointing her notepad out into it, to try and see the other side and get an estimation of the diameter of the inner space, but it was all too much effort. It was too big. She’d marched through what seemed like an endless succession of empty corridors to no end. She just wanted to lie here and go to sleep and to not have to deal with it. She keyed her notepad, turned on the nearest column of pink light and tried to contact Dory; nothing happened. She sat up and tried again, with no better result. Either Dory had turned off his notepad... "Or the Bythians have him." The thought chilled her. It had been some hours since she’d last spoken to the Maracite, and in that time they might have found him. She’d slowly been coming around to his point of view, that the attack on their ship had been a Bythian attack on them; the secure feeling that the police were there to protect her had long since evaporated. She could almost believe that she didn’t want to be rescued, at least not by the NoSaNoOs. She was lying huddled against the wall, almost on the verge of hyperventilating, when something in the distance caught her eye. It wasn’t another huge black shape spinning in the fog; it was aligned with the balcony she was on, right on the edge of her visual range; something was slowly moving towards her. She aimed her notepad at it and magnified the view; her hands were shaking so badly that she had to steady the notepad on the floor before she could get a clear view of them. Three Bythians, marching towards her along the inside wall of the ship, weapons drawn. That set it off; she curled up into a foetal ball and gave in to the anxiety attack that she’d been putting off for so long. Ten minutes later, when she finally regained control of her breathing and no longer felt as if she were having a heart attack, she managed to look up again; the Bythians were less than a hundred metres away from her. This almost set off another attack. She used the last of her strength to get to her knees. They were within range of their weapons when something loomed out of the fog to her left, something much bigger than the shapes which she’d seen bouncing around. She turned to face it; it looked like a giant gargoyle with glaring green eyes. A thin beam of blue shot out of its gaping jaws and drew a dot on the glass which widened to a circle about three metres in diameter. The Bythians had halted to watch this display. Abruptly, the blue beam grew drastically brighter and burned through the wall; a circular section of glass blew outward, bounced off the gargoyle-ship and fell away. The blue beam formed a conical field with Meshil’s platform in the middle; when the Bythians tried to penetrate the field, their weapons bounced off it. One of them aimed its concussion gun at her and fired, to no effect. She crouched there, arms around the alien skull, shaking with fear. The source of the beam widened also, changing the shape of the field from a cone to a conical tube. A second beam sprang into existence within the first – the familiar hissing sound of an impeller field – and a figure stepped out of the mouth of the gargoyle. It was Dory. He stood there for a moment, his head tilted slightly to one side, that odd smile on his face – the same one he’d had when she first saw him – then he held out his hand to her. Weakly, she stood and stumbled over to where the impeller field cut into the platform, gingerly stepped up onto it and followed him into the ship. Once inside, the fields turned off and she watched impassively as the three Bythians were swept out into the red fog in a rush of atmosphere. Their ship dipped up and away from the hole as the jaw-hatches closed. Meshil almost collapsed; Dory managed to overcome his distaste for contact with lower orders of humanity to hold her in his arms. He found that it wasn’t as repulsive as he’d thought. The ramp which led up to the jaws of the gargoyle opened out into a circular space dominated by, of all things, a large four-poster bed; clothing, books and assorted furniture were scattered about. Sitting on the end of the bed was a female Maracite, her face a white blur amidst the dark drapes and bedclothes. Meshil could sense some kind of barrier between her and Dory, something in the way he refused to look at her or even face in her direction. She forced herself upright and whispered to Dory: "I owe you my life." He looked down at her with some hesitation, one incisor indenting his lower lip. "Your life is owed not to me, but... to..." She could almost feel him trying not to indicate the female Maracite. Meshil glanced at her; she, in turn, looked over at a rounded grey metal form which crouched in the darkness near the ramp. It stood up on four short legs and delicately stepped over the clothing on the floor, two thin, double-jointed arms extending from the front to gesture in a manner that she found somehow reassuring. A voice spoke from the machine. "We greet you, human. Our name is Halan-Parl-Feylen-Triis, of the Moridani. We arranged your rescue." One more shock didn’t seem to make any difference to Meshil; she’d just narrowly escaped being shot by the Bythians, so meeting one of the most dreaded enemies of the NoSaNoOs Dominion in person didn’t make much difference. She opened and closed her mouth a couple of times without managing to say anything coherent, then whispered, "Do you have anything to eat?" The front of the Moridani’s battle-armour dipped down, conveying a sense of bemusement. "Our Maracite associates will have some human food onboard; perhaps Dory Valanthyri Ogre Jherek Kailys might locate it." As Halan-Parl-Feylen-Triis spoke Dory’s second name, the woman sitting on the end of the bed hissed. The Moridani extended one of its front arms towards her. "This is Vali Pereni Spahn Theral Khazhanka. I can’t be entirely sure, but I have the idea that she and Dory are of different Maracite factions." "Factions isn’t the word," Dory hissed, his eyes slitted. "She... the Pereni have... they..." Whatever their differences, it was plain that Dory could barely bring himself to describe them. The woman gave a low, quiet laugh. "Our... factions... differ on a religious point." Dory rounded on her and pointed a quavering index finger at her. "They were better before Last Rights!" She snarled back at him. "After! Only a Valanthyri could be so –" Meshil held up her hands. "What in the name of the First Cause are you two on about?" Both Maracites rolled their eyes up in tolerant amusement. Vali smiled at her and whispered, "Never mind. I’ll find you some food."

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