“Why now?” We’Nkrak raised his voice, too. “I’ll contact the road workers from—”
“Too late! Rigulia decided to let the Grammians handle Antyra. That includes the Sarkens in the council, your delegates. They know about the Grammians and didn’t argue… too much.”
The two Sarkens threw angry looks, but Sirtam didn’t care. He rejoiced to see them so upset.
“When do they reach Antyra?” asked Omal, his hopes revived by the news. He’d be able to hibernate…
“The Grammian ships will arrive shortly. I’m sure they’ll give you their full support, but don’t forget that we’re counting on you to find the artifact. Starting today, you’ll only use the Rigulian protocols when talking with the natives,” he reminded him loudly, to make sure the ambassador wouldn’t repeat the mistake, whatever it was.
“In two or three weeks we’ll find where the device is hidden anyway,” Rassgan said, grinning. “With or without Grammia!”
“Our road workers have a plan,” said Sirtam, turning toward the two Sarkens. “Explain it to Omal,” he ordered Rassgan.
“I might have told him already, were it not for your interruptions,” Rassgan complained. “We sent four hundred highway beacons to chase the photons of the distortion wall and triangulate the center of the bubble. We already know the trajectory of their planets in space-time, so we can find out where the device was when the distortion ended. A trivial calculation, really! Maybe not for Sirtam, but—”
“Omal 13, if you don’t find anything sooner, our ‘friends’ will give you the location of the artifact,” said Sirtam. “Just hold on for a bit longer. End of transmission!”
***
He was falling and spinning at breakneck speed in the dark abyss, and nothing could save him. A roller coaster of intricate yellow patterns flashed before his eyes.
Gill woke up from the strange sleep to the sound of the alarms screaming on the ship’s decks. At first, he didn’t understand where he was, but then he remembered: he was a fugitive hiding in the ventilation system of a troop carrier, hunted everywhere by an army of fanatics armed to the tip of the tail.
What happened? He was about to get to his feet, but he realized it might not be such a good idea, given the narrowness of the pipe. More worryingly, the world didn’t spin only in his dream; the whole ship was rolling like a pinwheel. He immediately started to crawl to reach the ventilation opening of the soldiers’ bedroom, to spy on their movements.
The floor was covered by fluff from the deserted nests due to the haste with which they left them. The last soldiers had just finished dressing in the mimetic black suits captured from the Shindam; the angry eye of Zhan was painted, rather clumsily, on their chests. They quickly sank in the exoskeletons pulled from the racks, latched the portable jets and breathing recyclers onto their backs, and disappeared in the dark corridors.
The finding wasn’t exactly reassuring, particularly the breathing tubes. Gill had to decide fast if he should follow them into the unknown or wait for the transporter to return to Alixxor.
The violent rolling of the carrier slammed him to the wall. What madness were the temples up to this time? Maybe they attacked the alien ships in space, he thought, horrified. If so, lingering in the helpless tin box had a great chance of ending up badly.
Gill tried to push the grill into the room, but it was too much for his powers. The cover had been fastened tightly; no matter how hard he pressed, he couldn’t push it from its hinges. He felt time leaking through his fingers like the white sand of Antyra II. He imagined the troop carrier floating, oblivious, in front of a huge laser lens that was about to endow it with a brand-new opening. How could he reach the racks of equipment? He had no tools, except for the bracelet…
The solution came quickly, but this time, he couldn’t follow it that easily: I’m going to drag the space behind the grill and step inside. His inability to understand how the bracelet worked worried him greatly. He was afraid that jumping through the grill might kill him. Or maybe not. The longer he thought about it, the more he became convinced it was going to work. The bracelet didn’t just compress the space; otherwise, each time he had jumped, he would have passed a high-pressure wall of air, heated to at least several hundred degrees. More likely, the artifact could bring a distant patch nearby through a shortcut in the very fabric of the space-time continuum!
Still worried that he might have made a flawed assumption, he decided to go along with it. He could see enough of the floor through the narrow slits to do the jump; he anxiously grabbed a square of space, and holding his breath, he stepped in the distortion.
In the next instant, he found himself on the bedroom floor, with all his limbs still attached to his body! He turned his head in disbelief at the ventilation grill, unable to grasp what he had just done.
Another wild tumbling reminded him he had no time to waste, so he eagerly grabbed a couple of black suits like the ones worn by the soldiers. He knew he had to find one exactly to his measurements because in the vacuum of space, the suit had to fit tightly on the body to avoid a nasty wound or an even nastier death. Luckily, the second one fit perfectly.
The exoskeleton extended once he touched it. After he put the helmet on and felt the pressurization in his hearing lobes, he calmed down a bit: no one could recognize him now. As soon as he finished dressing, he rushed to the corridor, wobbling on his feet.
The hallway was long and narrow, the only lights being the blue laser beams of the alarms60 leading to the rear exit.
The rear access hatch dangled open, allowing him to peer outside. At first, he didn’t recognize the view, but then he had to admit he knew the place, in spite of the terrible carnage visible through the open door. Dozens of huge, contorted cranes lying on top of massive piles of debris were all that was left from the Ropolis spaceport! The temples had launched the first serious attack of a new civil war, and the victim was the mining town itself!
If he needed further proof that Baila had lost his scent, he had it before his very eyes. Their economy had collapsed, and the cold was threatening to wipe out the Antyran civilization, yet the biggest urge of the sublime prophet was to attack the mining world, right under the nose of the aliens. The future doesn’t smell good, he thought, shaking his head in disbelief.
The ship stabilized about two thousand feet from the ground. It couldn’t fly any closer to the landing platform, which was full of debris—most of it still smoldering. Large pieces of metal, craters, twisted cranes, and pipes littered the area. No pilot in his right tail would try to land among the wreckage piled on the runway.
However, floating above the city didn’t seem to be a smart option, either. As he was thinking about staying in the carrier for the time being, he noticed another ship of similar design approaching them. Fresh troops for the invasion? he thought. Soon, he was going to find out… or maybe not, because two orange, bright globes burst from the skeleton of a mangled crane somewhere on his right. They quickly approached the nearby carrier and started to creep along its fuselage, as if they wanted to caress it with their warm light reflected by the black paint of the ship. The spheres seemed animated by a sinister life of their own, a pair of carnivores lustfully sniffing the fear of their prey before launching a savage assault. When they reached the right engine, they finally found what they were looking for. In an instant, both of them burst toward it.