Chapter 8

 

The inside of the complex looked like an upscale resort. Exactly the sort of place Vaughn would never be. So in some weird way, it seemed almost less intimidating to know it was a clandestine extraterrestrial outpost.

The deeper they went, the more evidence accumulated that the place was not what it first seemed.

Warily, she peered through a semi-frosted window into what was obviously a surgical suite. “This is where the rumors of alien probes come from.”

Dejo glanced past her. “Every Earther approved for off-world emigration would have universal translators implanted.”

She perked up. “Would Rayna have one of those? Is that a way you could track her?”

A noncommittal noise, not quite a snort, garbled in his throat. “Seems like the IDA and council authorities would’ve explored that route already.”

Vaughn quirked an eyebrow upward. “Because the powers that be always do the right, smart, obvious thing.”

He huffed again, conceding the point. “If the specific implant information is here, if she has an implant, it might be possible.”

Vaughn bounced restlessly on her toes. “So that’s a definite maybe?”

“If her translator connected for updates,” he said with a hope-quashing frown. “But the translators are meant to work independently for long periods of time. Hers would be so new it might not have updated yet.”

She resisted the urge to kick something. The one time she needed a computer update…

“Let’s keep moving,” Dejo said. “The compound may have other protections that the drones didn’t identify, and I’d rather not be here longer than we need to be. The data core is this way.”

Despite her full agreement on not encountering more distressors or plasma rays, she couldn’t help but gawk as they hurried down the central corridor lined with poster-sized images that extruded as 3D holograms as they hurried past. Each poster was a lonely-looking alien and each hologram featured a couple, plus a few threesomes or moresomes, limbs of various colors and textures entwined. The humans were mostly female and all beautiful and practically beaming with joy, while the aliens were all…well, Vaughn presumed they were doing their various versions of smiling. Most of the aliens were humanoid-ish, although there were some—

“Vaughn,” Dejo called sharply.

She jerked away from a closer examination of one of the holograms and hastened to catch up.

He smirked at her. “That was a Jaxian metal-lord. They are known for exuding precious metals from their pleasure organs.”

She did everything in her power to not blush. And failed miserably. “On Earth, we call them studs.”

He snorted.

At the end of the corridor, they came to a locked portal, and Dejo held his tablet to a raised panel in the middle. The panel beeped, a complaining sound, and he tensed. Vaughn did the same—if he wasn’t liking something, neither was she—but the doors slid soundlessly aside.

He peered through. “Is this too easy?”

She stayed at his side. “You tell me. I’ve never gotten caught for scavenging before.”

“I’ve never gotten caught either.” He flashed her a grin.

More than the ease of their journey so far, it was his smile that took the edge off her worries. With his help, she’d find Rayna. Everything would be okay. That must be why she smiled back at him so dumbly.

This part of the complex was most obviously alien. Technology she didn’t recognize bristled in the walls and the proportions were not meant to be pleasing to Earther eyes. Dejo seemed perfectly at home though. At one point he plugged the tablet into a port in the wall. He studied the information, then grunted to himself.

“What?” Her uncertainty bubbled up again.

“I wasn’t able to remotely access these systems before because the sabotage had severed the connection. So I didn’t know how much data would remain or what condition it would be in.” He shook his head. “I knew there would be a lot, but…”

“Isn’t that good?” She pursed her lips. “That means more profit for you.”

He grimaced. “Yes. But it’ll be a lot to carry out, especially if it’s been corrupted.”

“I’m strong,” she said. “I might not know your technology, but if there’s one thing I learned early in life, it’s how to pull my weight.”

He gave her a cryptic look. “I’ll hold you to that then.” He disconnected his tablet and the wall beeped then illuminated with a very clear ‘this way’ flicker of lights.

They followed the flicker down the corridor to another locked door that this time opened without any more effort from Dejo.

She glanced at him, impressed. “You just tell it what to do and it listens?”

“It’s what I do,” he reminded her.

She followed him inside.

It was a good thing he allegedly knew what he was doing, because she was lost.

“Uh, Dejo. Are you sure we’re in the right place?”

He grunted abstractedly, as if that was an answer, and held the tablet out, turning in a slow circle.

There were no monitors or keyboards or touchscreens or even the touch-less tech like the interactive 3D holograms. Not even huge banks of supercomputer cabinetry.

The cylindrical room, hollow in the center, mostly looked like a pet store’s aquatic department with rows of aquariums full of fish. Except that instead of bubbling water, the tanks were full of slowly churning multi-colored goo, and instead of fish, tiny brilliant lights flashed in the goo.

Like miniature lightning shooting through Jell-O. And the rows of tanks went at least five stories. Straight down.

She walked to the railing at the center of the room that overlooked the lower levels. “This is all a computer?”

“A neural network,” he said distractedly. “Not one of the more sophisticated ones. They should have consulted with me. I could’ve…” He trailed off into another language that seemed to feature an inordinate number of references to “larfing”.

Leaving him to his larfs—whatever those were—she backed away from the railing and wandered to the closer tanks. Some were dark, missing the lightning flashes. Others were completely empty. In some, the goo had shrunken and hardened into ugly mottled lumps. Dejo had said some of the data had been stolen, corrupted, or destroyed, and she supposed this was the result.

She stared into one tank with a withered mass at the bottom. The way it had dried, collapsing into itself in loose twists, it looked like a mummified brain.

What if this one had held the info on Rayna?

She swallowed hard, only then noticing a faint miasma in the air and a hint of a perfume, like a cloyingly sweet air freshener meant to disguise the smell of something else, something less sweet.

Dejo detached one of the drones from his tablet. Instead of flying free though, it was attached with a microwire. He pulled out one of the still operational tanks from the wall and dunked the drone into the goo. The little flattened bumblebee sank to the middle of the tank and flashed.

Dejo flicked his fingers over the interface, and the twinkling of the drone and the goo fell into rhythm—Vaughn peered into the tank—like they were talking.

Suddenly, both the goo and the drone went dark.

Vaughn frowned. That didn’t seem—

All the tanks began to flash.

Well, not all. Only the ones with working goo. The lightning strikes moved around the room and, when she sidled to the railing and looked down, into the levels below. The striations of light synchronized, the whole three stories pulsing like a silent heartbeat. Dejo’s fingers flew through the hologram controls above the tablet.

And again, all the goo went dark, except for one tank across the room and maybe thirty feet down the wall.

“Larf it,” Dejo muttered. “Of course.”

She peered over the railing. The wall was sheer, and now that she was looking at it with a sinking feeling that she knew what was coming next, it looked much deeper than five stories.

They both circled the room to the point above the single lighted tank and stared down.

“You transferred all the data to that goo, did you?” She clenched her hands on the railing. “Can you…move it closer? Or upload through the drone?”

He scowled at her. “If I could remote access it, I wouldn’t have needed to come here at all. Two nights ago, I would’ve skimmed what I wanted and been out of here, and you never would’ve even seen me.”

Never had his help finding her sister.

The words hung unsaid in the air.

He took a steadying breath. “There is far too much data, and much of it too precariously partitioned. I transferred everything I could salvage to the most stable gel it could find.” He pointed. “That one there.”

“Larf it,” she muttered.

He shot her a startled look.

She waved her hand. “I might not have a universal translator, but I can guess what it means.”

With a grunt, he unspooled more of the cable that had connected the tablet to the drone. Eyeing the distance to the lighted tank, he kept unspooling.

She frowned at him. “You’re going to toss the drone down there?”

“I already told you. The data needs to be retrieved physically. I’m going to toss myself down there.”

She choked. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

He cocked one eyebrow. “Yes. That is the translation. Good guess.”

She kept sputtering. “That line is never going to hold you.”

“It’s strong enough.” He stepped to the edge.

She grabbed his elbow. “I’ll do it.”

He stared at her. “No.”

“Run the numbers in your head,” she challenged. “If the line is strong, and I know you are strong, you can pull me up with far less risk. I can’t lose you.” She swallowed. “Not if I’m want to find Rayna.”

The yellow rings around his irises were wide and strangely tinted in the low light. “I won’t let you fall.”

Climbing over the railing with a hundred-foot drop below her was the hardest part.

No, leaning her weight back, trusting the micro thin cable as she got into rappelling position with Dejo’s vest rigged as a makeshift harness around her groin, was the worst.

Wait, no, staring up at his taut, doubting expression as he played out the cable while she descended, that was definitely the worst.

She was the one who didn’t trust him, but she was literally putting her life in his hands, and yet he was the one giving side eye. Not fair.

Apparently life wasn’t fair anywhere in the universe.

The surface of the dark tanks felt like smoothest glass, but her combat boots clung well enough as she backed slowly down toward the one lighted tank. The microwire was so fine, it would’ve sliced through her fingers, so Dejo had wrapped a thick layer of something like tape, and her knuckles were white with strain even though he was doing most of the work.

As she got closer, the glass started to hum under her soles. The gel was pulsing with all that bottled lightning.

When she reached the right tank, the hum was vibrating her bones with an agitation almost as bad as the sub-aural distressors. Setting her boot soles, she popped the frame on the tank, sliding out the drawer, and peered inside.

The gel was almost as white as her knuckles, energy flaring deep within but also emerging at the surface in a haze of tiny electrical sparks.

Carefully, she disengaged the whole drawer from the frame. The Jell-O wobbled inside but didn’t slosh. When she clutched the drawer to her chest, the thrum seemed to go through her. Rayna’s location, the fate of the other missing women, it could be in this glowing goo. She couldn’t even breathe around the static.

A plink on the cable sent another vibration through her and she looked up.

Dejo stared down, his big hands gripping the line.

She nodded, and he began the slow, steady haul upward.

With her arms clamped around the tank, she couldn’t do more than keep her boot soles braced against the glass, her knees bent and her weight hard back. Like she was crawling across the floor, except without using her hands and straight up.

When she was almost at the top, he looped off the cable and reached down to her. “Pass up the tank.”

For a split second, her hands spasmed. This could be what she needed. This was all he wanted. He certainly didn’t need her anymore.

His yellow-bound eyes narrowed. “Vaughn—”

She boosted the tank up to him.

He disappeared over the railing, out of sight, and she clung to the line, her thighs burning with the strain of holding herself perpendicular to the fall. Inadvertently, against her will, she glanced down. Her knees shook, and one of her boots squeaked on the glass as her footing slipped—

“Vaughn,” he said sharply. “Give me your hand.”

He reached down. Though he had on fingerless gloves, the palms were sliced from the microwire. Virulent green blood stained his fingertips.

She clamped her fingers around his wrist.

With one heave, he had her over the side of the wall. She crumpled to a puddle at his feet next to the tank, her legs refusing to hold her.

He fiddled with something on his tablet before dropping to a crouch on one knee beside her. “Are you all right?”

“I just committed my first intergalactic felony.”

“At least you didn’t fall,” he pointed out.

But wasn’t it a kind of fall? She’d pursued justice to the end of her career and good name, but the moment a loss threatened to become personal, she’d thrown principles into whatever dark void they came from and followed a thief wherever he led.

“Do you…” Her voice broke and she tried again. “Will we find Rayna?”

He looked down at her. “Parts of the data are still heavily encrypted.” When she groaned and took a breath to complain, he put one fingertip over her mouth. “But we’ll find out soon enough.”

The mineral tang of his blood and the sweat on her upper lip swirled into a strange, primal mélange that no computing system, however complex, would ever replicate or even explain.

She huddled on the floor of the data core of a secret extraterrestrial base. “Is this what you needed a partner for? To carry up the gel?”

“No. I needed someone for the next part. To carry the data out.”

She frowned. “It’s not that big. If I got it up here, you can carry it, easy.”

“To be more specific, I need someone to carry me.”

She blinked.

He put his hand over the tank. “The gel is dying. Once we disconnected it, it won’t last long. As damaged and degraded as it was, with no one to maintain it, there wouldn’t be much left anyway. I need to get the data out of the neural net.”

She frowned. “But you said there was too much to transfer remotely.”

“Too much for anything but another neural net.” He tapped the side of his head. “Once I get it all in here, I can download it to the data gel on the Onoffon.” He wrinkled his nose. “Which is much more advanced than this.”

Of course it was. She leaned her head against the wall behind her. “So…why do I need to carry you? You’re kind of heavy, you know.”

He stared at the gel, which already seemed paler than when she’d first grabbed the tank. “Hivre bones get dense after the age of descent,” he muttered distractedly. He rubbed his mouth, as if he realized he was babbling. “Holding the data in me is…tricky. I’ve done it before. But never so much, not all at once. I need to capture the data before it dies. But you may have to…guide me.”

It couldn’t be trickier than what they’d done already. “Okay.”

He stared at her. “Okay?”

Was that too much for his translator? “It means—”

“It basically means larf it.”

She couldn’t help herself: she chuckled. “Sometimes, yeah.”

“Then okay.” He went to both knees beside her and grasped the tank.

She started to push to her feet, thinking he was going to rise.

Instead, he lifted the tank of computer brain Jell-O, set one corner to his mouth, closed his eyes, and drank it down.

She gagged. Some of the thick, gelatinous goo leaked from the corners of his mouth, but the mini lightning bolts went down his throat. Light gleamed from the thin skin in the notch at the base of his throat, then flared in the visible veins at his temples and in his eyeballs when his lashes flared open.

“Dejo!” She reached for him.

But he held up one hand to stop her. Light leaked from the cuts left by the microwire in his palms.

He swayed on his knees and let out a shuddering breath.

“Greetings, lonely ladies of Earth.”