Slave Empire - The Crystal Ship Read online

  Then Shadowen had reappeared at the same instant he had disappeared, she thought, but the Ship told her it had sent Shadowen back several hours ahead. Rayne shook her head in bewilderment. Did that mean any outside time was accessible from the void dimension? Could the Ship re-emerge at any time in the second dimension? Of course, Scrysalza replied, there was no time in the third dimension. The Ship could re-emerge into the second dimension a million years in the past or future, an hour before it had disappeared, or a few days after. Whenever it chose, in fact. That was how the dimensions worked, and why the transfer Net took no time to move a person from one point to another.

  Of course, Rayne mused, she should have known that all along, but she had been under the impression that time literally stopped in the third and first dimensions. Not so, the Ship assured her, it merely did not exist in a measurable form. It did not pass in a continuum, as it did in the real universe. She pondered this for a while, fascinated by the ramifications and possibilities this concept offered. If they re-emerged a million years in the past, would she cease to exist, since she had not existed then? No, the Ship replied, her personal time would be unaffected.

  In that case, she could return to Earth two thousand years ago, and live there amongst her people, before it grew polluted and sick. The prospect brought a pang of sadness and longing. It was a bittersweet possibility, for, although she could return to Earth in the days of its beauty, she would have to leave behind her brother, her friends, and Tarke. She would not be happy, Scrysalza told her. She would be out of her time, and, although she would know what the future held, she would not be able to change it. If she told people who she was and where she was from, they would think she was insane and lock her up. Time travel, Scrysalza explained, was extremely dangerous, and to be avoided whenever possible.

  Rayne sighed and toyed with the frothy green moss on which she sat, trying to ignore her gut’s hungry rumbles. She did not want to stay here for decades, she thought, growing older while time outside stood still. Scrysalza was stealing her life from her, and had no right to do so. At this thought, the Ship’s warm presence fled, and she sensed its distress as it departed. Scrysalza did not want to harm its friend, but nor did it want to return to reality and allow the Envoy to awaken so soon. How many times, she wondered, had the Ship stolen time from the Envoy in this manner, earning decades of peace while it slept.

  Yet the Envoy’s personal time must be passing, just as hers was, so why did he not awaken? Her common sense told her the Envoy would not sleep for decades while in the third dimension, he would awaken soon. Not soon enough for her, however. She wanted this to be over with, to return to her life and pursue her dreams. This was, quite literally, a waste of time. Yet if she could not find the Envoy, how could she awaken him? Her dread of the confrontation had now become a strong urge to get it over with, to fight and maybe die, anything but this useless limbo. She rose to her feet, gazing around at the outlandish, misty scenery.

  “Scrysalza!” she bellowed. “Scrysalza! Wake up that damned parasite! I don’t want to stay here any longer! I will kill him, Scrysalza! I promise you, if you wake up the parasite, I’ll kill him, and you can return to your nebula, free! Isn’t that what you want? Aren’t you my friend?”

  The wind’s distant moaning in the tunnels answered her, and she bellowed in another direction. “Scrysalza! I know you can hear me! Take us back to the second dimension, now!”

  The parasite will kill you, came a whisper in her mind. The Ship’s sentience was barely in contact, a brush against the fringes of her mind.

  He won’t, she denied. I will kill him; it’s what I’m here to do. It’s my destiny. Come back, she pleaded, talk to me.

  The Ship’s presence flooded back, longing for the touch of another’s mind. Rayne welcomed it and fed it sympathy and compassion, the emotions that seemed to nourish it, just as pain fed the Envoy’s mind. She explained that she wanted to go home, just as Scrysalza longed to return to its nebula, and that she had friends and family waiting, just as the ship did.

  Scrysalza sympathised, shying away from these longings a little. They had each other, it offered; they could comfort each other in lieu of their kin. It was not the same, Rayne replied, they were different species, different psyches, and besides, she needed to eat and there was no food on the Ship. She would die soon, she told it, unless she was returned to her world. The Ship tried to persuade her that she could eat what it made for her, but she refused. She wanted to kill the Envoy, or leave; that was the choice she gave it, and it shied away from the decision.

  It did not want to lose her company, which meant so much to it after its loneliness, and was hurt that she wished to leave. Rayne assured it that she did not want to leave, but neither could she stay indefinitely. She had her life to lead, and Scrysalza had its nebula to return to, once it was free. The Ship yearned for its home, and she used the thought of it like a carrot.

  Wake up the parasite, Rayne urged, then you can go home to your kin, free forever.

  Scrysalza responded with a rush of intense sorrow that made her weep. In reply, she fed it images of the nebula it had shown her, a warm flux of bright stars and glowing gasses, through which crystal ships sailed like bits of fluff on the wind, sparkling in the light of many suns. The Ship’s sorrow turned to anguish and an intense longing for its home.

  Her blatant coercion shamed her, but her wish to help this gentle alien entity goaded her. Wake up the parasite, she insisted. Take me to him so I can kill him; return to the second dimension.

  The Ship gave a wordless cry of longing, and she sensed space and time warp as it obeyed. Brilliance surrounded her, and she shut her eyes against its blinding glare. Spots danced on her retinas when she opened them again, and she blinked. She stood in a dim, rosy chamber beside a sea of seething redness.

  “Collision alert.” Scimarin’s warning broke into Tarke’s reverie, along with several alarms. The ship surged, the stars wheeling outside as it twisted away from the massive entity that rose into being like a whale rising from the ocean’s blue depths. The Crystal Ship appeared like a ghost, taking form in the blackness, solidifying into being as it broke through into the second dimension.

  The Shrike gripped the arms of his chair as the artificial gravity responded to the sudden appearance of a massive object so close by. The repellers pushed the ship away from it, causing a sideways pull that almost made him fall out of his seat. Streams of lambent light pierced the ship’s hull and illuminated the bridge with lurid beams of pure energy. The vast, scintillating crystal entity slid past the screens and disappeared as Scimarin turned away, spinning through space.

  “Stabilise!” Tarke ordered. “Re-orientate!”

  Golden light crawled over the screens as the ship used Net energy to swing to face the Crystal Ship. The massive, sparkling creature’s weird brilliance made him squint. Several Atlantean cruisers tumbled away from the Ship, thrust aside by the shockwaves of its rising. Energy shells sheathed them, and most shot away to a safe distance. Tarke’s heart pounded from the shock of the Crystal Ship’s sudden appearance. He sensed the beacon-like sweep of a powerful mind reaching out to touch those around it, and slammed his shields into place.

  Its colossal crystal wings extended, spears sliding out to form an even greater span as it spread them in the solar winds and sailed towards Atlan. Its size now had to be around five or six hundred thousand kilometres across, three hundred thousand of which were its wings. He wondered what had happened aboard it to cause it to re-emerge. Had Rayne failed, and if so, why was she still alive? Shadowen’s continued existence assured him of that, but the Ship’s ominous flight towards Atlan indicated that she had not won, either.

  “The Atlantean ships are preparing to fire,” Scimarin informed him, and he cursed.

  “Open a space line to Tallyn.”

  The screen slid from its slot with impossible torpidity, and it seemed like minutes before the link was established and Tallyn’s saturnine face appeared on
it.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Tarke demanded. “You can’t attack the Ship. If you do, I will retaliate.”

  Tallyn gestured to someone off the screen. “You’ll retaliate? Who do you think you are? You’ve got one ship, so I’d say your position is precarious at best. She’s failed. We must defend the planet.”

  “Don’t be a fool! You can’t harm a crystal ship in space. It’s too powerful. What do you think you can do to it? Look at it, it’s as big as one of your moons, and it uses Net energy like the sun produces heat. The girl’s still alive. She might still defeat the Envoy, but your interference could jeopardise that.”

  Tallyn glanced sideways, probably at one of his screens, Tarke guessed, then faced him again. “Can her ship contact her, find out what’s going on?”

  “Scimarin?” Tarke addressed the console in front of him.

  “Shadowen’s communications with her are still blocked,” the ship replied.

  Tarke said to Tallyn, “No, we have no contact, but you’ve got to give her a chance. You can’t harm the Ship in space anyway. It’s futile to try. You’ll have to wait until it’s entered the atmosphere. I’d advise you to start evacuating the population instead.”

  Tallyn shook his head. “We won’t have time to evacuate more than a fraction.”

  “That’s better than none.”

  “How do you know the Ship can’t be destroyed in space?”

  “Didn’t she tell you?” Tarke asked.

  “She might be wrong.”

  “I doubt it. She has an impeccable source.”

  “Endrix.” Tallyn rubbed his brow. “Very well, we’ll wait a few hours, but no more. I have orders to try to destroy that thing before it reaches Atlan.”

  “You can’t.” Tarke broke the link.

  For several minutes, he stared at the gargantuan entity, an impossible glass ship sailing through space on a gust of solar wind, then addressed Scimarin.

  “Can you transfer me aboard that thing?”

  “No. The crystalline entity is saturated with Net energy. Its waveforms are erratic and unpredictable. I can’t match them.”

  “There has to be a way to get aboard. I suppose you can’t get close to it, either.”

  “No,” Scimarin replied. “It has invisible energy shields so strong they bend light. Nothing would get close unless the entity wanted it to.”

  “Can you contact it?”

  “I have no idea what sort of communications it uses, or what language.”

  Tarke sighed. “Call Endrix, then. Maybe he can help. He should. He’s supposed to be her guide. He must be hanging around here somewhere, watching.”

  Tarke sensed the beacon of thought sweep through the ship, skip across his shields, and vanish. In that moment, he wished he had not created such strong mental shields, or used them to such good effect. The mind touch, he realised, came from the Crystal Ship. Whether it was the Envoy or the entity itself, it offered a way to communicate, and he cursed his tardiness in realising it. All he could do was open his mind and hope it tried again. He filled his mind with an image of the human girl, showing his friendship towards her and his wish to help her, and waited.

  Rayne backed away from the seething, glowing red sea. This was a far larger chamber than the one she had been in before. The blood beasts roiled in a veritable ocean, their lurid light filling the massive space. The presence of the Envoy mere metres away horrified her. He appeared to be dormant, his massive bulk, larger than four conjoined blue whales, languishing in the red sea. The thick air was full of mist and odours, dominated by a musky stench that was unmistakably male.

  The Envoy’s sleek, glistening hide was stretched over a shapeless bulk, rather like a seal, but lacking any of that creature’s charm. She could not make out a head or tail, or even limbs. The Envoy seemed to be a featureless slug. Other creatures crawled over him, stroked and soothed him with long, tentacle-tipped limbs with multiple joints. The females, she guessed. A fraction of his size, they were long tubes of rubbery flesh sprouting spidery limbs in random places. They also lacked features, but sucked up the blood beasts through the open end of their tube bodies. Her hand itched for a laser, and she wished for one with all her heart.

  The gentle touch of the Ship’s mind was puzzled by her strange thought, not understanding the concept of a weapon. She tried to calm her frightened thoughts, not wanting to alarm the Ship. A sound behind her made her whirl to peer into the red dimness where tube bodies crawled on thin limbs. Thousands of them infested the chamber, piled atop one another in an obscene orgy of stroking, sliding sliminess. She stood on an oasis of bare flesh, surrounded by females.

  Rayne suppressed a shudder, noting several tunnels through which the females crawled in and out. Some of the tunnels appeared to have been chewed through the Ship’s flesh. She questioned it, and the answer added to her horror. The Envoy used the Ship’s blood to procreate, releasing sperm into the fluid in which the blood beasts lived. The females laid their eggs in it too, and the young hatched in the deep tunnels of the ship’s circulatory system. From there, the young females chewed through the walls and migrated to this chamber to lay their eggs in the fluid.

  The damage they caused hurt the Ship, but there was nothing it could do about it. Rayne wondered how Scrysalza had become infected with the parasites, and it explained that it had happened when it had been young, in what it called ‘the days of its hunger’. During a rapid growth phase in its youth, it had scooped up tonnes of cosmic dust to feed its growing body, and, in the process, had unwittingly consumed the hard, spore-like eggs released from dead ships the parasites had killed.

  One had hatched into a male, which had lain acquiescent while he grew, not triggering the Ship’s defences. By the time he was large enough to take control, it had been too late to kill him. This was how all young ships were infected. If they had only avoided infection at this crucial stage, they could not have been infected as adults. Their soldier beasts would have slaughtered the parasites before they became mature.

  Rayne shivered as a female brushed past her, heading for the sea with an awkward paddling gait. They seemed oblivious to her, and she wondered what they would do if they became aware of her. Nothing, the ship assured her. They have little intelligence and no instinctive reaction to such a phenomenon. It did not, however, recommend waking the Envoy, since his reaction was not so predictable. Rayne longed for a weapon again.

  Scrysalza’s puzzlement prompted her to explain her need, and the Ship’s mind recoiled from the thought of an edged weapon capable of penetrating the Envoy’s soft-looking hide. Nevertheless, it understood the necessity, if she was to kill the Envoy. Its soldiers, it explained, carried their own weapons. She asked if it could transport a laser from her ship, but the notion of such a tiny, metallic object perplexed it, and finding such a thing in the confines of her metallic shell daunted it. She had to remind herself that to the Ship, she was barely large enough to see, and a thing the size of a laser was too minute for it to sense.

  Stepping aside to let a female paddle past, she pondered the problem. She could hardly kill the massive Envoy with her bare hands, and even attacking him with an edged weapon seemed ludicrous and suicidal. She had no idea where his brain was, or even his head, and nothing said his brains were in his head. Sticking some sort of spear into him and hoping he would bleed to death assumed he had blood, which was not a certainty either.

  Struck by a thought, she asked why there was only one male parasite on the Ship, for surely it had gathered more than one male egg in its youth. It had, Scrysalza replied, but when they reached maturity, the males had fought for domination, and the strongest had killed the rest. The information depressed her, for if the Envoy was capable of fighting it must possess weapons such as teeth, claws or poison. Despite its slug-like appearance, the Envoy was more dangerous than she had first imagined.

  How was she supposed to kill it? She asked the Ship if one of its soldiers was capable of killing the
Envoy, and it replied that several hundred would be required. In order to gauge the difficulty of her task, since the Ship knew more about the Envoy than she did, she asked to see one of its soldiers. A bulge in the wall that she had thought was part of Scrysalza’s flesh detached itself and moved forward. So the soldiers were right here, under her nose, but invisible, she marvelled as she studied the horse-sized beast.

  Compared to the parasite females, the strange, pinkish-grey creature, tipped with black on its extremities, had a weird beauty. It walked on four limbs, and another two were curled close to its chest. It resembled a centaur, with an upright torso supported by a horizontal abdomen. Its legs were strangely jointed and its feet splayed and delicate, suited to walking in slime. It possessed a small, sleek head with a large mouth and no eyes or ears, and sharp crystal claws tipped its forelimbs.

  Rayne had to remind herself that it was part of the Ship, and controlled by Scrysalza’s mind just as she controlled her hands and feet. That was why its flesh was the same colour as the Ship’s, and it possessed no sensory organs, since it needed none. Just as she could send her mind into her flesh to heal it, Scrysalza controlled all aspects of its body. The soldier stopped in front of her and waited, turning its head on a short, graceful neck. Somehow it reminded her of a deer, although she could not really see the resemblance. She thanked the Ship, and the soldier returned to its place in the wall.

  Rayne considered the problem once more. The soldier did not appear to be terribly fearsome, armed only with the crystal claws and perhaps teeth. The Ship interjected a startling and disquieting thought into her musings. The soldiers used their claws and teeth on smaller invaders, but they also possessed potent venom that would kill just about any life form ever evolved. That was what could kill the Envoy, if several hundred soldiers injected him with it. Rayne slumped, dismayed, and shuffled aside to let a groping parasite past.