The fences shook and groaned as the giant spaceship’s thrusters burned a mile away. We all watched the vessel that brought us here begin to lift off the surface. The Angor’s primary vessel was a sight to see. Memories of the smaller Angor ship lowering to my hometown flashed in my mind. Despite Ulison’s promises, I didn’t believe half of what he said. I was glad Indie seemed to agree with my hesitations.

  Palora took another ten minutes to completely vanish. Beyond the fence, a hundred Angor remained, along with Leruf and two other Vezo. I assumed our ally had requested the position, but it might have been punishment. Ulison knew that Leruf had betrayed the Accord code, but despite that, he’d freed his friend from the shackles. It showed me that Ulison had a heart.

  “Okay, everyone. Back to work,” Indie said. She leaned toward me. “Be careful. Come home tonight.”

  “We will.” I jogged off before Abbyl and the others arrived at our barricade.

  Desmond and Miya waited for me near the supplies, where we gathered our things. After we had the gear, we moved across the colony to the emergency escape. Instead of lowering the entire section of fence, Miya used her tablet, and the metallic door hissed and opened. We had to crouch through it, and waited for it to reconnect and lock from the inside.

  It was bright out, the sun hot and swollen. I slid the backpack over my shoulders, already feeling sweat forming. With the lake as our target, we began to walk. We were higher than the body of water, and could make it out as a speck in the distance. The trek there would be much easier than the constant incline home, and we hoped to cross the gap in three hours each way.

  I was growing used to bringing the GR-852, and kept it slung into a loop on my pack. Desmond carried his at ready, not willing to take any chances. The landscape was fairly open here, allowing us to see for miles in every direction. I glanced at the colony walls, appreciating how secure the camp looked from this position.

  Home. I couldn’t believe I’d called it that. It was incredible what a couple weeks of turmoil could do to someone’s perspective.

  We made plans for the future, while Desmond offered a few jokes and Miya regained some of her spirit.

  “Will they let us come with you?” Miya asked.

  “Where?”

  Desmond poked my arm. “To Alruna, what do you think?”

  “You want to join us? We’re going to be fighting the Cepra.”

  “That’s not entirely the story,” Des reminded me. “You’re only going to the Alruna system to capture a Dread. There’s a big difference.”

  “Regardless, there will be fighting.”

  Miya kicked a pebble, sending it bouncing across the shale. “You and Indie will be there. I think we should be as well.”

  I saw her determination. Des had it too. He put something in his mouth. I assumed he’d managed to find more toothpicks. “We’ll see what they say. If you really want to come, I won’t try to stop you.” I tried to play along, but the truth was, I didn’t want my real friends being compromised. Out here on Dicore, we understood the dangers. Stingers. Weather. Climate. Hellrats. We could plan for those, but with the Angor and their mysterious Surial benefactors, there was no predicting what might occur.

  “Let’s take things one day at a time. First we need to investigate your blinking light, then we can focus on the next obstacle.”

  “The Rusa are important, Colton.” Miya stared at the ground ahead, careful not to trip on the changing landscape. The shale was gone, replaced by a dense grass sprouting up between rocks. I crouched and touched the vegetation. It was rare to see on Dicore, and the fact that things could thrive here gave me hope.

  “Why do you say that?” I inquired.

  “It’s clear they disappeared ages ago, but the fact that their consoles don’t work unless you or Indie are in proximity of the room is the most fascinating part,” she said.

  “I admit that has me intrigued.” I checked our distance traveled to find we were halfway to the goal.

  A breeze blew against my face. With each step, it increased in velocity, until it was growing difficult to walk without using a hand to shield my eyes.

  “I think we should find shelter!” Desmond shouted over the wind. He indicated the thick black clouds that were racing toward our position.

  “Another storm!” From the colony, the skies looked clear for miles and miles. The inclement weather came from nowhere.

  We stopped, trying to find a spot to wait out the impending rain.

  Miya used her tablet, switching to the old satellite images from the Rusa’s files. “This is old, but not much should have changed on the terrain.” She pressed her finger to a series of hills a mile to the west.

  “Fine. Let’s hightail it!” Desmond ran as fast as he could, and I held back, knowing my legs were capable of much swifter speeds than them. I hadn’t tested my limits, but this wasn’t the time to develop my newfound skills.

  When we entered the hilly region, the clouds started to unleash their fury. Thunder boomed overhead as the rain began to release. We scanned the area, searching for shelter.

  “Over here!” Desmond led us to an opening, which turned out to be a small section of amnesty. The hillside had crumbled, leaving an outcropping above us. Water splashed on the rocks, dripping to the ground. It was muddy, but if we stayed crouched with our backs pressed to the wall, we’d be dry.

  “Great. Abbyl will find out we’re not at camp,” Desmond muttered. “I was supposed to start working with her tomorrow.”

  “We’ll make it,” I assured him. The temperature dropped by a good ten degrees, and Miya’s teeth were already chattering as the downpour continued to barrage the region.

  An hour later, we were still there, hiding from the rain. Water pooled around our feet, and we were lucky the boots the Angor had given us were impermeable.

  “What else did your father’s tablet tell you about the Angor?” Miya asked, breaking the silence.

  The wind howled through the hills, screaming like a wounded ghost.

  “I haven’t really had time to scour it.” I flipped a tablet from my jumpsuit pocket, powering it up. A few errant drops fell on the screen, and I wiped them off. This apparatus held my notes. I’d left the main tablet securely in my room, not wanting anything to happen to it.

  There were so many files on the device—most of it the speculation and ranting of the Loyalists, making it difficult to distinguish lies and fabrications from reality. I still hadn’t ventured into all the Morse code exchanges, but I expected it was largely complaints and posturing.

  “Anything on the barges?” Des asked.

  I’d run a search, retrieving over a dozen results, and had scanned the documents, mainly finding comments from the illegal media sites my father had access to. The speculation ranged from human testing facilities to bioweapon engineering bases. The Loyalists didn’t give it much attention initially, but from what I read, they’d focused on the barges more in the last five years. We discussed it while the storm raged above us. It was moving toward the colony.

  “The storm should distract Abbyl and the Angor,” Miya suggested.

  “True. The curse becomes a blessing.” Desmond chewed his toothpick.

  Five years. What had happened to draw the attention of the Loyalists? I recalled my own barge. That was when the dome construction plans made their way to my desk. Thunder cracked, and forks of lighting spread over the dark sky while I contemplated that time of my life.

  I’d decided to test a theory earlier that week, and had typed something into the search field.

  Rusa.

  There were no results.

  Then I typed Trum, the Angor home planet. Hundreds of comments surfaced. Nothing surprising. The Loyalists would have been extremely interested in discussing the Angor’s origin world. I’d tested one more.

  Cepra.

  A single result, which I’d copied onto this tablet along with anything connected to it.

  I cleared my throat, nervously tapping the highlighted missive.

  Loyal2theEnd – Just wondering if anyone else has heard the name Cepra? My cousin works at a barge out past Seattle, and said she found a file on her supervisor’s desk. She read it. Saw the name Cepra connected to the dome construction blueprints. You heard this before?

  I followed the thread, and speculation rose, but no one could explain anything about who or what a Cepra was. I clicked the user’s name. There had been hundreds of comments from him in the chat rooms. I searched the term cousin within his threads, and found more results.

  Loyal2theEnd – I mentioned my cousin last week. She’s missing. I can’t contact her, and no one will give me an answer as to where she went. I suspect foul play. Can someone in Seattle check this out for me.

  I closed the tablet, looking at Miya and Desmond. “Why would they refer to the Cepra in a file regarding the domes?”

  Desmond shrugged. “I assume they mention them frequently. When we were in a war with an enemy, do you think we’d never utter their name? We did it constantly.”

  I bristled at this. “Fair point.”

  “It’s clearing up. We should be able to make a break for it.” Des looked at the sky, and I craned my neck to follow. It was clear a mile to the north, and the clouds were moving quickly.

  “I’m ready if you guys are.” I splashed a step from our shelter, letting the rain softly douse me with warm drops.

  Five minutes later, we were out of the storm. Angry flashes of lightning arced in the direction of the colony, and we kept going, moving faster to make up for lost time.

  When we finally neared the lake, we’d been gone for five hours. It took another hour of careful hiking to crest the body of water.

  “Almost there,” Miya said.

  Trees rose from the lakeshore, standing higher than any we’d seen on Dicore yet. Noises emerged from the forest, and we tried to stay out of the dense sections, afraid more atrocious local animals might be waiting for us to venture into their lair.

  Shrubs grew thicker, and moss enveloped tree trunks at the far side of the lake. The water itself was dark, indicating it was deep. It was shaped like a kidney, probably two miles at its longest, and one mile wide at the narrowest point.

  The sky was clear, with soft opaque clouds hanging high above us. In the tree cover, it was a few degrees cooler, and I was thankful. For a moment, I forgot I was on Dicore. The place reminded me of a lake an hour or so away from Fayetteville, where the mosquitoes were the size of bumblebees, and the sand was always hotter than coals.

  “It should be here.” Miya leaned against a tree, and I unslung my pack, feeling the sweat on my back where it had been pressed against me. We had no idea if the signal on her tablet was coming from a minuscule marker, or a giant piece of equipment.

  “I don’t see anything.” Des lowered his weapon, squinting up into the trees, then at the lake’s shore. The sand was red and damp. Des hopped from the sparsely grassed ground and sank a few inches into the beach. “Let me have a peek at the map.”

  Miya passed it to him after a final glance. We were directly on the marker. “Maybe it’s like their satellite images. Their system is remembering something that used to be here,” I suggested.

  The young woman shook her head. “No way. Every single marker is active in camp. This one will be too.”

  “But there’s nothing here.” I sat to give my legs a rest.

  Desmond walked to the water and lowered near it, splashing the liquid with his fingertips. “We’re missing it.” He held the tablet with the other hand, and looked at the screen. “This blip is… what? Twenty yards wide?”

  “Maybe thirty.” Miya stepped over my legs and stood near the sand with her hand on her brow like a visor.

  Des gave her the device and undid his boots, tossing them beside me. He rolled up his pants and stepped in.

  “What are you doing?” I took my boots off too, thinking it might be a refreshing change after the long hike.

  “If thousands of years have passed, or however long ago the Rusa were here, then the terrain has changed. This lake might have been smaller. Or larger. Or simply not existed at all.” Des stopped a short distance away, when the water was up to his knees. “The marker could be indicating a place that’s now covered by…”

  He stepped to his right and sank.

  “Des!” Miya shouted, tossing the tablet behind her. She dove after him.

  I moved in a flash, heading straight for the spot where Des had vanished. Miya swam up, her hair clinging to her forehead. “I don’t see him!”

  I remembered what Ulison had told us. We could breathe underwater. Without another thought, I went beneath the surface. The murky, dark lake glowed in my vision. I spotted bubbles rising from below, and followed them into an opening in the lakebed. It was a metallic tube, blue with black paint like the structures of the colony. This had been made by the Rusa.

  I held my breath but didn’t feel a burning in my lungs. Without giving it too much of my attention, I kicked my feet, swimming deeper in the corridor. Lights flashed on as I passed sensors, and I found Desmond at the bottom, staring through a porthole window. He clutched the bars of the door and looked at me with wide eyes. He would be out of air soon.

  I drifted beside him and peered into the glass. There was a second door, with another porthole. More lamps lit up as I neared it, and I understood what had captured his interest. A case sat in the center of the room, beyond the airlock. Softly glowing blue beams blinked in a circle around the container, revealing a body within it.

  Before we could investigate, Desmond began to swim away. I briefly considered trying to gain access without him, but ended up following him to the surface. Miya was frantic. The relief in her expression broke my heart.

  She wrapped her arms around Desmond, and then me. “I thought you guys were goners.”

  Desmond shook his head like a wet dog and smiled at her. “It’ll take more than a tube in a lake to end me, my friend.”

  “What did you find?” she asked.

  Des and I exchanged glances. “Something big.”

  “I’ll see if I can get inside. If there’s air, I’ll come back for you.”

  “Hold on, Colton.” Des grabbed hold of my shoulders, squaring me to him. “We have no idea what that room contains.”

  “You saw… it’s a body,” I reminded him.

  “A body!?” Miya squawked.

  “Yes. It was preserved. In a… chamber?” I wasn’t sure how to explain what we’d encountered.

  “This could be one of them,” she whispered.

  “The Rusa?” I hadn’t been able to make out any of the features from outside the underwater room.

  Miya stared at the lake. “Who else?”

  We’d come in search of a clue to help our cause, and to learn more about the Rusa. The fact that I could access their computer systems because I had Xeno was too important to ignore. Director Ulison hadn’t mentioned the Rusa at all, and didn’t seem to find the colony’s previous inhabitants valuable. But I could tell there was a connection. As much as I didn’t trust Ulison, I wanted to believe his story about the Unity War, and our common enemy in the Cepra. But how did they connect to the timeline?

  “Go. Check it out. Be careful. Don’t touch anything until I’m there with you,” Miya warned me.

  “I won’t.” Without another word, I returned to the entrance. Once again, the lights activated on my arrival, and I set a palm on the round handle. It spun instinctively, and I entered the airlock, along with a portion of the lake. Without me doing anything, it automatically drained the water. I considered returning to gather my friends, but curiosity won.

  The second airlock door opened when I touched it, and I used a ladder to lower to the floor. Lights began to glow all around the space, and I realized what was before me. This was a spaceship. Beyond this room was a bridge, with a windshield. I watched as a few phosphorescent creatures swam by, chasing a food source. It wasn’t big, probably around the same size as the Meteors, but far different than the Angor designs.

  The black symbols we had at the city were painted over the bulkheads, and a single chair centered the cockpit. The screens matched the ones at the colony’s control room. This was clearly Rusa.

  My bare feet stepped on the smooth metallic floor, and I left small puddles of water in my wake. The wall held numerous rows of containers, but one thing drew my gaze. The chamber was the focal point of the ship’s cargo hold. Soft hums escaped from it, and my stare followed the blue light circling the entire circumference of the box. The glass was dark, and I couldn’t see the creature inside.

  We had three months before we departed for Alruna, and now I was face to face with one of the beings we thought might be extinct. Somehow I was connected to this alien.

  Miya’s words of warning echoed in my mind, but I couldn’t help myself. I set a hand on the glass, and instantly regretted my decision. The chamber buzzed and chimed, shocking me. I stumbled to the floor, while the lights surrounding the being grew brighter.

  The eyes opened with awareness that it had been awoken. The confusion, then the understanding, all in the span of a second. I stood slowly, staying a few yards away from the chamber. We stared at each other, and I swallowed.

  “Hello. My name’s Colton Beck, and I come from Earth.” I tried to keep the waver from my voice, but failed.

  The chamber’s door hissed air and steam from a vent, and opened. Ice crystals melted along the interior of the glass, and I spied a dozen or more tubes stuck into the being. She glanced at them, then to me.

  “Hello, Colton.” She spoke English. “Are you of the Class Five Rusa?” She remained still while the tubes began unclasping behind her.

  “I…” I didn’t know how to answer her. She was completely naked, and I respectfully kept my gaze at her face. Her skin was dark, her hair black, her eyes a deep chestnut brown.

  She squinted, and I caught the slightest smirk in the corners of her mouth. “I see. I suppose this is the proper moment.”

  “How…” For the first time since dying and being reborn, I thought I was about to have another Xeno attack.

  “There is much to tell you, Colton. But my mind is foggy.” The final tube released, and she stumbled out of the chamber on wobbly legs. I rushed to her, catching the woman before she fell to the ship’s floor.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39