Chapter 5:
Lornia’s pulse quickened. The machine flared into life, its lights winking and then beginning to burn steadily.
It was real!
The machine was waking, and that could mean only one thing: that a ship had crossed through the first knot of the wormhole and was now making its way toward Tralam.
It was true. The machine was coming back to life, resetting its systems and humming with an energy that she had not seen from it in centuries. Whoever was nearing the door, they’d come past most of the obstacles that the machine had set up to protect itself.
That ancient machine that was older even than she was.
Lornia swallowed hard as she realized, fully and completely realized, that she was about to come face-to-face with other beings for the first time in so very long.
Fear made her entire body tremble. The docking stations! They were above the fortress and the tubes that led from the docking station to the machine’s control room and the rooms and corridors in which she passed her time were now cut off from the fortress itself.
The beasts!
Did they still roam? Had she spent all these years believing she heard noise where there was none simply because she was so lonely and perhaps growing a little insane from that loneliness?
What if there were beasts there? Whoever was arriving at the door, they would be killed immediately by those creatures. Worse, they might arrive only to find themselves with no entry into the machines holding room, become discouraged, or believe that the machine was no more—and leave again.
That last part was what galvanized her into action. She moved fast, her nude body glowing in the dim light falling in from outside the fortress’ broken windows and air locks. She had to dress, and she had to find weapons. If those that were coming needed assistance, she must be there to provide it.
She paused, her feet stirring up a small eddy of dust from the floor below. Her brow wrinkled and thought and fresh panic spiraled into her, making her nerves tighten and her skin prickle with gooseflesh.
What if it were the humans?
What if it was the humans coming to try to lay claim to the machine?
Humans could not be trusted. They were the enemy of the entire known universe: all of them.
She should know. Her race had given birth to that race, and they had watched it develop from a toddling species that could have been capable of great deeds to a species obsessed with war and bloodshed.
The machine… Her eyes shifted away from the fading light and back along the corridor toward where the machine stood. The floor began to vibrate below her feet, a sure sign that the machine was growing in strength, crying out for what it needed.
Crying out to be released from its prison.
Her breath lifted and dropped her full breasts in rapid cycles of inhales and exhales. Her pulse sped up to a speed that threatened to make her dizzy and lightheaded. Sweat broke out along her high brow and ran down the long, highly knobbed column of her straight spine. Even her palms held a light sheen of perspiration within them as her fingers curled inward, her nails raking against that delicate flesh and her agitation.
If it were humans, what would she do?
Sure it was humans perhaps it would be better to do nothing. To simply wait and to see if there were indeed beasts willing to kill the human intruders as they attempted to make their way through the fortress into the room where the machine stood.
Where she stood.
She was the machine now. Not in whole, but in large part. She’d been implanted with so much of the machine; so much of it rested below her skin, and her immortality had been the only thing that had kept her alive during that ordeal.
Franchine’s insanity had been all-encompassing. He had been sure that if he could take one of their kind, implanted with everything that the machine also held, back into either of the closed-off universes, that he could not only live for all time, but that he would be the most powerful creature to have ever drawn breath.
And he would’ve been. That was why she had had to kill him. He had implanted in her the need to be obedient to him; he had instilled in her sleeping brain the order to never harm him.
But he’d been foolish and arrogant even in that.
His command had been to do no harm to him.
He had not mentioned killing.
It was a simple difference, but she had still been enough of herself, her brain had still had enough logic and reason as well as a motion to make that simple differentiation that had allowed her to overcome the programming that he had placed within her.
Lornia drew a shuddering breath and then moved onward. Part of her did not care what type of being was currently working its way through the obstacle course and the maze of time and space that held fast the machine.
It could be humans, and it might not be. She would not know until she saw them face to face. There was only one way to ensure a face-to-face meeting with the beings currently heading toward her, and that would be to make her way to the docks.
Or at least try to.
She wavered. The beast wars had been violent and awful. Before that experiment had implanted the war-machine within her, she’d been a gentle creature. Her areas of study and interest had been in botany and science. Gentle sciences, the science of bringing water from dried lands. The science of bringing food forth from places that were barren.
That was what had made her so desirable to the others who had sought to hold fast the doors on either side of the universe. With her assistance, they could eat well and always have clean water to drink.
She had sought only solitude, as ironic as that was now. She’d relished the idea of being someplace where she could spend her long years making things happen, things like growing food in the crevices of the ship floor. When she had imagined solitude, back in those years, she had imagined working for as long as she liked without interruption and speaking to those that she passed in halls and sat with at the communal table for meals if she felt like it, but no other time.
She wanted solitude. What she had gotten was silence. But that silence was about to be broken.
Lornia hurried now, her bare feet moving toward a hallway that she had not gone down in at least a hundred years. The arsenal, what was left of it, sat at the end of that hallway and her shoulders tensed and her breath sucked in, dragging her stomach toward her backbone as she took a few now hesitant steps past the doorway that led to that hall.
The doorway was half shut, and had been half shut for a very long time. No lights remained in the hallway that sat shrouded with vast webs from the Orb spiders that had died decades ago, just one more victim of extinction there in that forgotten place.
She made her way down the hallway with all of her senses alert. The Orbs might be dead but who knew what may have come into those rooms during her absence? Nothing. There was nothing there. Relief hit as she finally made her way to the vaulted door of the arsenal. She paused before it, her forehead wrinkling with thought.
What would she need? What was left of that arsenal anyway? So much of it had been used during the wars with the fearsome beasts, and she had not cared for the arsenal, which she now regretted. She’d been more interested in simply surviving what was unable to be killed with a mere weapon.
Lornia’s fingers spun the door lock, and it opened with a rusty wheeze. She tread inside lightly, allowing her eyes to grow used to the dimness before moving forward toward the racks and shelves where the weapons lay. Dismay hit. Time and the elements had taken their toll on those weapons, despite the airlock. Many had gray-blue dots of dampness upon their grips and triggers. Would they even work now?
She took a laser from one wall and aimed it toward an already-destroyed weapon. A quick and rapid burst from the laser made short work of the weapon she had fired upon. The weapon that she had destroyed lay cracked and broken, without even enough power to implode or explode in the face of the laser’s pointed ray.
“One laser is not enough.”
No, not at all. If she were to make her way to the docks, those long since deserted docs, and safely, she would need much more than a single laser. She was afraid to continue to test fire any of the weapons that she pulled down, so she contented herself with taking those that showed the fewest signs of wear and disuse. She strapped long ammo belts across her narrow waist and then over her slender shoulders. She wore those ammo belts well. A laser weapon hung from each slim hip, and additional weapons rested in the belt right below her flat belly.
Lornia strode back out of the arsenal room and then paused. She alone knew where those weapons were. What if she needed more later? It would not do to leave the room open in case whatever was coming to that door turned out to be an enemy. She hastily locked it and then exited down the hallway and back toward the central corridor.
The light had changed, shifting toward a violent orange color. That meant that evening would not be far away. Time was strange there and evening might last for mere moments or for entire moon phases. She stared at the light. Perhaps it would be better not to try to go to the docks. She had no idea if the beings that were arriving would be arriving before she could make it to the docks or if they would be arriving far after she had arrived there.
There was nothing at the docks, no type of food or supplies. If there were indeed beasts along the way that she had to fight, she would need strength and sustenance as well. Tralam was vast; it had been built to hold thousands. It had been built to be a refuge for those who would hold the weapon prisoner, but in the end, so few had come in, so much of the fortress had never been used. Could not be used because there was simply nobody to use that space.
She would retrace her footsteps back to the gardens. She took a large bag and began to gather the large fatty nut-breads that grew below the wide and glossy leaves of their trees. A single nut-bread could sustain her for several days. Her appetite was poor, and had been for a very long time. Those who were coming might be large of appetite and in need of much nourishment, so she packed as many as she could readily carry on her back into a pack.
She added in a dozen of the juicy, puce-colored vegetables that could be eaten raw because they were so easily digestible, as well as some fruit and a few starchy roots just in case she needed them.
She added in herbs and salt, that common denominator of all universes. Without salt, there was no life. Next, Lornia found a large bag in which to carry a good supply of the freshwater from her pool and then found herself unable to carry it. Some hasty rearranging of weapons and the pack that she carried enabled her to finally take the water along as well, but the weight was heavy, and she wondered how far she would be able to go under all of it.
She stood there, uncertainty freezing her feet to the floor once more. She was part of the machine. She had strength, that she knew, but that strength was mostly untested. She had had no cause to have to fight anyone other than her insane partial creator after her awakening. She’d never tried to journey through the fortress before either. She’d been content to stay in the sections of it that she knew the best and to let the rest rot away.
That was no longer an option.
Lornia set off, heading toward a series of switchback hallways and tunnels that would, eventually, take her to the docking stations.