She was heading toward the heart of the ship.
The lighting was also different here—more blue-green and not nearly as bright. In fact, as she strode deeper and deeper, the light dropped off substantially until she was walking in twilight, just on the cusp of absolute darkness.
Ei’Brai’s presence in her mind was calm, expectant. He knew by now what she was about. He wouldn’t try to stop her. It was time.
She could no longer see the walls as she walked. They’d long since receded into darkness. There was a light integrated into her suit that she could turn on with nothing but a thought, but she held that in reserve, letting her eyes adjust to the gloom.
The blueprint inside her head told her she’d reached the point where all the ship’s corridors converged like spokes to a central point. She slowed down, every sense on alert.
A wall of cool air slapped her in the face. She’d just walked into a vast, open space.
Her eyes drifted to a small pool of reflected light. It rippled.
She froze. She’d been here before. Except she’d been on the other side of the glass, looking out, from inside Ei’Brai’s mind.
She squared her feet with her shoulders and stepped out onto the railed gantry that led to Ei’Brai’s domain. She leaned out and darted looks up and down over the side of the railing. Every deck had its own service-gantry leading to hundreds of gangways circumnavigating the core habitat, identical to the one she occupied. They seemed to go on for miles in each direction.
She strode up to the glass, reached out a hand to touch it, and lifted her chin. She cleared her throat, though she wasn’t speaking aloud. “Show yourself to me.”
He didn’t answer. But she felt him inhaling, burgeoning to the fullest point, limbs languidly drawing together to a tight star as he exhaled in an enormous whoosh, sending himself shooting like a torpedo down many deck levels toward where she stood, peering through the glass.
He stopped his rapid descent by throwing his arms out, the membranous webs between them billowing, creating friction. He constricted the flow of the squeeze to a trickle and came to a full stop opposite her, while at the same moment a pair of soft lights came on, illuminating his environs so that she could see him, fully.
She flinched and berated herself for it. She knew he’d make a dramatic appearance.
She’d had some inkling, of course, that he was an aquatic creature before now, but nothing could have prepared her for the fact that each of his eyes was larger than her head, or that his longest limbs appeared to be five times the length of her body or more.
His many arms twined around him as they regarded each other, just a few inches of air, glass, water between them. Each of his eight arms was studded along its length with pale, semi-transparent suction cups, a large portion of which brandished a prominent, barbed hook curling over the top, clearly meant to shred prey as it was dragged relentlessly toward his mouth, currently hidden from her.
In the murky light he was creamy white, shimmering with a metallic sheen, alternately silvery and golden. Every languorous, sinuous movement drew her eye to the light reflecting off his gilded, iridescent skin. He was mesmerizing.
Tears pricked the backs of her eyes. She hadn’t expected him to be beautiful.
Though she tried to remain guarded, he picked up on her mental state. Proximity seemed to be a factor. She felt an even greater sense of the multiple layers of his racing thoughts. She could almost see, as well as sense, the multiple brains beneath his translucent skin.
His mantle swelled in an almost child-like expression of pride. He bobbed in place. “My appearance pleases you?”
One of two tentacles extended toward her, far longer and thinner than his arms and terminating in a leaf-shaped club. Suction cups, with serrations, like teeth, flattened against the glass where her own hand rested. His words reverberated in a hushed timbre, full of surprise. “Unexpected. Your kind is indeed dissimilar from the Sectilius.”
As he spoke, his skin flashed crimson and glowed with an inner luminescence. Simultaneously, he fed her the meaning behind the primitive communication. It was a cordial greeting, meant for an age-mate. It implied that he felt connected to her, that he was grateful for her presence. He called her friend.
She nodded slowly, unable to take her eyes off him, but ready to broach the subject she was there to tackle.
But he distracted her again. This time forcing a flash of insight into how he perceived her, both visually and mentally. Through his eyes, she could see herself in almost microscopic detail. Small, by comparison to him, he divulged that her body was also small by Sectilius standards. More fleshy, soft, rounded, than a typical Sectilius female, though, he’d decided that he preferred her appearance to their more angular, muscular structure, for no other reason than it was more like his own, if only in an abstract way.
He saw her as upright, tightly controlled. Her jaw was set with determination and her eyes were expressive, burning with an inner fire—a fire he knew to be rare and valuable—juxtaposed against the hair, flowing wild around her head, similar to the way he perceived her internal landscape—disorganized, fluid, organic.
He saw her decisiveness, her duty, her compassion, her sense of responsibility as most desirable traits. He presumed her to be the very pinnacle of humanity, the ideal specimen. Perfect.
She leveled her gaze on the eye closest to her. He was unblinking. That was a little unnerving. She pushed that feeling down as irrelevant and put steel in her internal voice. “Perfect for what purpose, Ei’Brai?”
He pivoted slightly, his arms curling around himself. He was calculating the reorganization of the micro-robotic squillae to prevent a minor hull breach. But she knew those were calculations he could literally do in his sleep. He was not truly preoccupied by them. That was a misdirection.
“Quit pretending to be distracted. Quit putting me off. What do you want from me?”
“You know. You’ve always known.”
She wanted to scream with frustration. She wracked her brain for any kind of hint of what he might be referring to, but came up blank.
He waited for her to reply, his limbs drifting around him on a silent current. His only intentional movement was the slow undulation of the fins on either side of the conical mantle above his eyes.
Her muscles tensed to such a degree that the suit’s internal sensors brought up a prompt, asking her if she was experiencing a muscle spasm. “I know that you’re doomed, that you’ve decided to try to bring all of us down with you. You’ve managed to keep Alan, Tom, and myself here while the others escaped. But for what? To keep you company, until the moment the asteroid hits? You would sacrifice us, too—so that you won’t be lonely in your final hours?”
“None of us are doomed.”
It was a flat statement of fact—she could see he was completely convinced of its truth.
“What?” Was he mad? There’d been moments she’d suspected….
“Dr. Jane Holloway, you are the key that will unlock all of our futures. Terra’s future as well. We can still fulfill the primary mission.”
He didn’t sound crazy. He sounded calm, certain. That was so damn infuriating.
“We? You—”
It struck her, suddenly, what he must mean. He’d been obliquely feeding her clues all along. One of the first things he said to her was that he wanted something from her—not them—her. He’d told her, “You are home,” which she’d dismissed as a cultural reference, a welcoming gesture, a throw-away. But there was the moment he described the command hierarchy of the ship…the journey to Castor and Pollux…the download…his satisfaction when she’d gotten herself out of the gel…the computer’s greeting in the infirmary only an hour before….