Chapter 20
Clue
Kelen knew what her husband would say before he uttered the words.
“I will turn myself over to them.”
“Kyber!” She grabbed his arm, but his word was resolute. As much as she didn’t want him to be taken prisoner again by his brother, there was no other solution. Her husband would not sacrifice the lives of others for his own safety.
He refused to look at her, but continued to stare eye-to-eye with the colonel. After a few tense moments, Pfeiffer let out a loud sigh. As he parked himself in front of his monitor, his door signaled he had visitor. It turned out to be Lieutenant Colonel Williamsburg and Major Baffrey.
“Where are we on Operation Jeef?”
Apparently Kelen wasn’t the only person giving the colonel a quizzical look. The officer appeared nonplussed.
“Isn’t that what you said those little creatures called themselves?”
“Uhh, yeah,” Jules managed to answer first.
Williamsburg gave them the update. “I’ve requested a Kergocian battle cruiser to be delivered. It’s due to arrive within three hours. That means it should dock, barring any unforeseen circumstances, before the Seneecians. I was also informed it‘ll be carrying one hundred ninety-eight troops, including crew.”
“Good. That’ll give us time to brief those soldiers before the Seneecians arrive.”
“Why a Kergocian cruiser?” Mellori questioned.
“Kergo Ai has a hands-off treaty with Seneecia,” Baffrey explained. “It’s rather lenient. Not so much a peace treaty as it’s a ‘you leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone’ agreement. The ship will be manned by Kergocians. The Seneecians won’t challenge it. Even if they did, they won’t try to stop it.”
“We hope,” Cooter wryly remarked.
“What are we going to brief them on when they get here?” Sandow asked.
“Can you draw up some maps of the areas you explored?” the colonel countered.
“We can do better than that. We have the chip from Jules’ tablet that the Seneecians failed to find when they confiscated all our materials,” Kelen offered.
Everyone turned to see the navigator holding up the microchip that was no bigger than his little fingernail. “Give me another tablet, and I can download all the pictures and schematics you’ll need.”
“I don’t have one handy, but that shouldn’t be a problem.” Pfeiffer hit the comm button. “I need a tablet delivered ASAP.” He looked at the others. “Anything else?”
“That’s a solid beginning,” Kelen told him.
“So you plan to head out to Neverwylde before the Seneecians arrive? Is that it?” Mellori asked to clarify.
“That’s the plan,” Williamsburg confirmed.
“And you plan to use Kelen and Kyber as bait, to keep the sneeks from realizing our true intentions?” Cooter continued. Turning to Kyber, he added, “Sorry. Old habit.”
“No offense taken,” Kyber assured him. “And to answer your question, I guess you could say we will be more of a diversion than bait.”
“Decoy,” Dox inputted.
They were interrupted by the arrival of a yeoman who’d brought a tablet. Jules took the instrument from the young man and hurried to replace its CPU with his. Pointing to the monitor on the colonel’s desk, he asked, “May I, sir?”
Pfeiffer gave him permission with a wave of his hand, and Jules proceeded to link the tablet with the outpost’s computers. As it did so, Jules ran the images through the holo projector, enabling everyone to see. It took less than a dozen still shots before the lieutenant colonel let out a breathy whistle.
“Dear God.”
Fullgrath chuckled. “Wait’ll you see the vids. Those’ll blow you outta your skivvies.”
“Oh, sweet heavens, what is that?” Williamsburg exclaimed.
Jules paused the shot. “That is what we call a Hoov.”
“Those bastards are at least seven feet tall and voracious meat eaters,” Mellori explained.
“And they’re intelligent bastards,” Cooter added.
“One of them was wearing a translation necklace,” Sandow commented.
Kelen inserted, “Believe it or not, they weren’t the worst that planet had to offer.”
They perused another fifty or so still frames before Pfeiffer asked Jules to close down the graphics. Kelen noticed how pale the three officers’ faces were.
The colonel dropped into his seat. “You were damned lucky to get off that planet when you did.”
“We agree,” Kyber concurred. “We doubted we would have lasted another couple of weeks if Duruk had not honed in on our signal.”
Pfeiffer gave him a confused look, but it was Baffrey who remarked, “Signal? Am I missing something? I thought you said during your interrogations that your lifepods landed on the planet. That your ship was swallowed up by the tegris.”
“It was, and we did.”
“Then what signal are you talking about?”
Pfeiffer waved a hand for attention. “Let’s clear a bit of confusion here. Kyber, you said your ship sent out a distress signal when it came in contact with the wormhole, right?”
“Correct.”
“So how was Duruk able to pinpoint your location on the planet?”
Kyber pointed to Dox. “He built a transmitter out of odd parts we found.”
“You found?” Baffrey repeated.
“Yeah. Hold on. I have a vid here.” Jules rifled through the tablet’s databank, then turned the holo back on for them to watch. It was a slow scan of the room where they’d found the piles and piles of confiscated goods Hoov and its people had collected and stored. Every so often the camera zoomed in on one of them, including a lingering shot of Dox pulling out several unidentifiable items and stuffing them inside his uniform.
Pfeiffer turned to Dox. “Where is that transmitter?”
“They took it.”
“They who? Duruk?”
Dox gave a single nod. “Said it was Bollian.”
The colonel stiffened. “Did you say Bollian?”
Kelen sensed her husband alerting to the man’s unease. “Is that supposed to mean something?”
Pfeiffer turned to her. “Are any of you familiar with the Prai Mer Principle?”
She shook her head, as did Kyber and several others, but Mellori raised his hand.
“I am. It’s supposed to solve the problem of the teleportation of matter over extreme distances.” Seeing that the other crewmembers weren’t connecting, he cleared his throat and tried again. “Right now in order to get from point A to point B, you have to take a ship and travel for days and weeks on end to get there. Unless, of course, you happen to find a wormhole that kind of takes you in and spits you out close to your destination. But we all know that sort of phenomenon happens more frequently in fiction than in actuality.
“Rumor says the Prai Mer Principle was developed by the Bollians. According to what we know, they claimed they could transport solid and living matter from one location to ano—”
The engineer paused as everyone realized what he was saying. Kelen saw Kyber glance at her, then exchange looks with the others. Pfeiffer noticed their expressions.
“What?”
“Good Lord, it never occurred to me,” Mellori whispered. “I never connected the dots.”
“What are you talking about?” Williamsburg asked, more forcefully.
Kelen turned to the lieutenant colonel. “There were platforms there that did just that. They allowed us to transport from one part of the planet to another.”
Jules went back to the tablet. “Hold on. Let me show you.” He dialed up a still photo of the stone slab from the garden temple. “See that right there? See those colored buttons? We were able to figure out where each one of those buttons led to.”
Williamsburg went over to examine the holo more closely. Kelen saw him studying the pattern. “There was a slab nearby, about three by three meters in size. If you stood on it and pressed the button, you were teleported to the corresponding location.”
“If that location was dangerous, all you had to do was remain on the slab and it automatically returned you to your previous location,” Massapa expounded.
“There was only one exception to our using it,” Cooter continued. “There was a weight limit. Don’t know exactly what that was, but we could only transport one of us at a time.”
“Wait a minute. Wait a minute.” Fullgrath held up his hands. “Sorry. I don’t get what all the fuss is about. So we found a way to transport ourselves from one place to another. What’s the big deal? We got teleporters all over the place.”
It was Mellori who answered him. “Yes, we do. But those are used mainly for packages and whatnot. They aren’t used for live cargo. And definitely not to send anything from one planet to another. Plus, we aren’t able to send anything over such a vast distance, much less through space itself.”
The weapons master grunted. “We weren’t sent to another planet.”
“How do we know that for certain?” Massapa countered.
The implication left them speechless. After a few moments of contemplation, Kleesod spoke up. “We later found some of the panels destroyed, like someone was deliberately sabotaging them to prevent us from using them.”
Baffrey addressed Jules. “Do you have any other photos of those panels?”
“I have several. I took pictures of each one we encountered.” He began randomly flipping through the shots when Pfeiffer suddenly shouted.
“Whoa, whoa. Back up. What was that previous picture of?” the colonel demanded.
Jules reversed the flow one photo at a time until he was ordered to stop. It was the pile of skeletons they’d found in the nonagon. The colonel pointed to the holo again, turning around to look at them. “What are those? Are those skeletal remains?”
“We found those in one of the locations,” Cooter offered.
Sandow chimed in. “Someone had piled up the bodies. We don’t know who did it. And there was no way I could decipher the cause of their deaths.”
Pfeiffer hurried over to his desk and hit the computer’s audio button. “Computer, voice verification.”
“Verification matched. Hello, Colonel Pfeiffer. How can I help you?”
“Display only known photo of a Bollian. Include physical description.”
A picture appeared in midair. Kelen gasped in surprise. Her shock was echoed by the others.
It was the holo of a two-armed, bipedal humanoid, approximately one meter in height.
And its head was undeniably cubical in shape.