Pala Eydis stood at the entrance to the bay. The bay door was open, and water rippled and tossed in the square pool. The blue glow shed from the ceiling was so dim that she could see the ghostly luminescence of the organisms swimming just below the water’s surface. The station shuddered again, and sea sloshed onto the floor. She had heard Tarkos’s warning that the station sank now, and she knew the sea would encroach into the bay, squeezing the remaining atmosphere to equalize the pressure. Eventually, only a few bubbles would remain, crushed against the ceiling, and then the station would collapse and the debris would settle onto water that had compressed till it had the hardness of iron. But long before that happened, the Ulltrian that remained here would leave.
Or rather it would try to leave. Eydis had her own ideas about that.
The black Ulltrian ship crouched before her, covered with barbed spikes that bent back to vicious, uneven blades. It looked more like a thing designed to tear flesh than to traverse space. As she stared, it shifted. The barbs on its hull twisted slightly, bristling. She caught her breath at the terrifying sight. It made the ship seem like a huge, predatory spider, watching her patiently, waiting for her to step forward into its lair.
But Eydis also smiled—a brief, nervous smile, but a genuine one. Because she knew this ship. The Ulltrians had called this class of ship Krau-kadga. Space gnasher might be the best translation. She had studied the design, and had seen one on the Ulltrian homeworld—broken, half gutted, but still with many functioning systems. And she had studied, and mastered, those systems.
“I know you,” she whispered. “And I know an old monster is in you.”
A protesting beep told her that Tarkos had fallen out of communication range. The hull of the city and the growing span of water were not permitting the cruiser to transmit inside, she assumed. Telemetry from Bria’s suit told her the Sussurat still breathed, and now approached her, growing closer. That would mean Bria had made it to the end of the spoke, and hurried along the outer ring. But Bria would not be here soon. Eydis turned on her radio.
“Commander?”
The Sussurat grunted.
“I’m at the ship,” Eydis said. “It’s a design that used to hold a single Ulltrian, sometimes along with one Kriani servant.”
She activated the quantum computer wrapped inside her gut. Her implants felt around the ship, touching its fields. Nothing. No information, no communications channels. Just a hiss of random noise.
Eydis took a deep breath. Had any human ever been so alone? Thousands of light years from Earth, in the dark bay of a sinking station on a sunless planet, she faced a black ship that housed an evil monster. She shook all over. The hammering of her heart sounded loud in her ear, thundering in the soft sounds of the space suit. But she whispered to herself, “I’m going to do this. For my brother and mother and father. For Iceland. For the Atlantic. For our sun and sky. For the Earth.”
She set her suit to a multiband transmission, and said, very slowly, in the guttural, snarling language of the Ulltrians, “I am the human Pala Eydis, and I declare myself your equal, and call you to fight me here, limb to limb.”
No response. The ship remained quiet. The Ulltrian might be so appalled by the challenge that it would simply hit her with a particle beam from the ship, smearing her across the bay in an instant. But then it might not. It might take her seriously, and feel compelled to come outside to fight. Or it might just pause in curiosity.
And it needs its samples, she told herself. It wants trophies.
“What said, human?” a voice growled in her ear. Bria. “What do?”
Eydis would have liked to explain to the Sussurat that she was tricking the Ulltrian into opening its ship, so that she could try to hack its systems. But she did not trust the security of their transmission protocols, and she knew sound vibrations could be read off a helmet. She told her suit to mute the Sussurat’s transmission, and translate them to text in the corner of her visual field. Again she transmitted at the ship, “I am the human Pala Eydis, and I declare myself your equal, and call you to fight me here, limb to limb, or submit to my domination.”
A crack of thick, blue light appeared on the underside of the hull, between the three legs that held the ship off the deck. The blue light spread, outlining a rectangular door. The barbs in the rectangle folded back into the metal surface, and then the rectangle hinged down till one edge lay on the deck, forming a ramp.
She held her breath. The ship was open. Its shields came down. She could suddenly hear its systems, transmitting their incessant buzz.
A long moment passed, while her hopes trembled on the edge of despair. Then her quantum computer chimed silently in her brain: it had achieved a clasp with the systems of the space gnasher class ship. She made a fist and bounced it off her thigh, triumphant and relieved. She told her computer to transmit the protocol program she had prepared.
A single black leg, like the limb of a huge black spider, reached down and tested the ramp.
Eydis could not help herself: she began to pant. The sound of her own breathing filled her helmet, a sound like panic. The bottom of her visor fogged over. She tried to slow her breath, but it made her feel like she might suffocate. So she let herself gasp.
It was coming now. An ancient, evil thing.
But no. A second leg stepped down on the ramp. And she saw then that the legs were too short, with only a single joint. She recognized the shape of them then. A Kriani. One of the slaves of the Ulltrians. Its ant-shaped body came fully into view now as it stepped down the ramp and faced her. Radar pinged off her suit. Behind the Kriani, a robot of black metal dropped down from the ship and then crept along the deck, an obscenity of knives and pencil thin arms, walking on four blade-like legs.
The Kriani spoke in heavily accented Galactic. “I have come to collect you.”
“You think I’m helpless,” Eydis whispered, in English, mostly to reassure herself. “Your master is going to be surprised. Because I come with your own secrets, wrapped in my ape skull. And I know how to use them.”
_____
An e-year before, Eydis had found a space gnasher ship in the soft ground before an old tower in the abandoned city of Kir-DaKu.
Long ago, Kir-DaKu had been an important city on Dâk-Ull, the Ulltrian homeworld, the world that most Galactics called The Well of Furies. The denizens of that planet, the Kriani, lived as the slaves of the Ulltrians. The Kriani called the city the Abomination Nexus, because the ancient Ulltrians had made their war plans from its low, obsidian buildings. The Kriani had forbidden Eydis from entering the center of the ruined city. But Eydis had received permission to study a temple on its outskirts. And that had been enough.
The gleaming stone towers of the city had tumbled. Thick, inhospitable brambles grew to clot the streets. Dâk-Ull was a world punished by hurricane winds, frequent quakes, and fiercely aggressive organisms. Nothing abandoned could last in the perpetual onslaught of the unforgiving environment. The temple she had been permitted to study—one of countless shrines to war and evolution on Dâk-Ull—lay also in rubble, its great blocks pulverized to small stone strewn in the shadow of a leaning black tower a hundred meters high.
The Kriani had given her permission to excavate. The Kriani there hated, both officially but also with genuine feeling, the past in which the Ulltrians dominated their world. Though the Kriani were often strange to Eydis, this hatred she found very easy to understand. The Kriani had been more than slaves of the Ulltrians. They had also been food for their young: Ulltrian larvae grew within a Kriani host, parasites metamorphosing into carnivores that chewed their way to birth and ate their dying host when free. What Eydis struggled to understand was not the hatred of the Kriani, nor their desire to push their history aside, but the way in which at one time, eons before, the Kriani had found their fate normal.
Official rejection of the values and institutions of the Ulltrians meant that where the Kriani permitted Eydis to investigate, she had free reign. History, with all its horrific details, they would leave to citizens of the Galactic Alliance. For the Kriani, giving scholars access to Dâk-Ull was a small price to pay for a chance at future membership in the Alliance.
So Eydis had dug in solitude, when the winds fell below hurricane force and the sky did not hammer the ground with green hail. Day after day, her excavation robots lifted burnt rocks, plotting out a three-dimensional model while they worked. She reviewed the materials, managed the speed of their excavation, and struggled to decipher the writing on scraps of metal they found. It was slow work, mostly without novelty.
Until they unearthed the probability field generator.
A robot had stopped working, and doglike it stood in the rubble, a light on its head blinking. It shifted as she approached, as if it were proud to show her what it had found. And there before it, in a heap of crushed stone and shreds of something like plastic, lay a black barb, as long as her leg, broken but still connected by black cables to something under the rubble.
She knew immediately what this meant. There was a ship here. Likely a gnasher class, not only the smallest ship the Ulltrians had made, but the smallest ship with probability drive ever made in the known galaxy. Such a ship could be had only by the most powerful of Ulltrians—what were called, in their own language, “Clade Masters”—a phrase with all the weight for Ulltrians that “King” would have had among those who believed in the divine right of monarchs.
For a moment, Eydis turned in place, looking around. She felt a momentary fear that someone else had seen it. The Kriani would claim any such find immediately. This was precisely the one kind of thing they wanted to reclaim from their past: technology that could be studied and used. But there was nothing moving among the hard, spiked plants that made a low cover stretching to Kriani settlements huddled on the horizon.
She almost felt disappointment. Part of her, she realized, had looked around with a natural human drive to shout in triumph, to thump her chest and say, “I’ve done it! I’ve struck a great find!” She threw her arms up and smiled, fighting back a shout.
She got to work. She sent mole robots down, to make a few strategic measurements. They bored small tunnels, the width of her fist, until they hit the hull. From their return data, she discerned the ship’s orientation—it lay flat on its belly, having no doubt crashed right through the temple wall during the battle when the Ulltrians were driven off their own homeworld. It would have a single hatch, under the nose.
She called all the robots of the dig. They hurried to her, a pack of eager metal canines. She gave them new programs, releasing all their safety protocols. They tore at the earth, indifferent to the damage to their own limbs. Before second dawn, when the world’s dim neutron star rose above the horizon, a narrow tunnel went down from one corner of the temple, through brown stone and hard-packed soil, to the black nose of the ship.
She crawled into the dark, hands before her, her supplementary oxygen tanks scraping at the tunnel ceiling. Dust quickly covered the lenses of her breathing mask. She pushed on, till her hand hit one of the black probability flanges under the ship. She held up her light.
This time she did shout aloud: another lucky break. The door to the ship was slightly ajar, damaged from the crash. That would mean much of the interior would be destroyed, but if it had been sealed, she would have no way to get inside without revealing to the Kriani that she had already done so.
The robots had dutifully cleared sufficient space under the ramp. One of the robots now pulled the ramp down at her command. She pulled a cloth from inside her suit and carefully polished the robot. Then she sent the robot up the black ramp, its lights blazing as it entered the ship.
She watched through the robot’s eyes as it climbed to the top of the ramp and paused. She stared around, taking in the full pan of its cameras.
The base of a seat was before the robot, a black saddle that would stretch all the way to the front of the ship and the backup hard controls. The low robot could not see to the top of the seat, but along one side four gray husks of legs hung down.
An Ulltrian. The pilot, a Clade Master, lay dead within.
She made the robot climb a pipe that ran along the wall, moving slowly, carefully. A fall in here would do no harm to the robot, but it would leave a distinct mark.
At the limit of the wall, the robot swiveled its head around and peered down. The whole Ulltrian lay there. Though it had rotted away from internal bacteria, and the shell of it had mostly collapsed, she could see that it had been huge, large even for a Clade Master. The Kriani, she had no doubt, would know this Ulltrian by name. It would have committed atrocities recorded in some Ulltrian tome shelved now in their neglected Library of the Tides.
Eight legs, four on each side. The two claw-like prialps around its head were out of view, probably having fallen off to lay on the floor. Its eyes were collapsed, the hard lenses cracked and gray. Its tail, sometimes called a “stab,” lay fallen over its back. She could see that it had been so large it must have been hard for this Ulltrian to walk with the organ suspended over itself.
To a terrestrial eye, the stab resembled a scorpion tail, and the Ulltrian might have seemed like a giant scorpion, but with an irregular gathering of huge eyes at its front and flanking its mouth. Some human scientists had tried to call the stab a penis, but the name did not stick. The Ulltrians were ambi-sexual; they exchanged sperm through clasped stabs, in mating rituals so violent that limb loss was common, and death not unheard of. Then when the fertilized clutch of eggs reached maturity, the Ulltrian attacked a Kriani with the stab, and injected one or two eggs inside its abdominal cavity. The size of a stab was a sign of honor, but some Clade Masters, she suspected, had become like peacocks, weighed down by the display of their rape organ.
She magnified the view, and looked, very carefully, at the placement of each limb, focussing on where the tip of each long black leg met the hull. The right foremost limb set neatly into a cavity in the floor. She sent the robot climbing along the uneven ceiling structures, and then down the wall to the floor, till it crouched by the Ulltrian’s forelimb.
The robot gently blew air over the limb, clearing away dust. She gingerly reached one of the robot’s excavating instruments out and pulled on the limb, lifting the tip out of a cavity in the floor. A crystal the size and shape of a bullet stuck through the chitin of the limb, surrounded by a faint fuzz of fiber optic cables.
Eydis made the robot reach one metal claw forward and crack the desiccated exoskeleton. The chitin split into shards and the crystal fell free. Using a delicate probe limb, the robot moved the gleaming stone into its hopper.
Eydis slowly backed the robot out, gently blowing dust around its steps as it retreated, to cover over its tracks. When the robot climbed down to her side, she reached into its hopper and seized the crystal. She held it tightly, feeling its silky, cool surface against her naked skin. She raised the fist, and shouted once in triumph, making dust drop from the tunnel’s ceiling.
She had it. She had the quantum key of a Clade Master. Any Ulltrian system on the planet would answer to its authority, and drop its secrets into her grasp.
She started to crawl up the tunnel, but then stopped, hesitating while the robot hummed beside her, waiting for her to go before it could cover her tracks. She put the crystal into a pocket on her shoulder, and buttoned it tightly. Then she turned back to the ship and crawled through the narrow crack of the door, holding her light out. She stood on the uneven ramp and looked down at the Ulltrian’s corpse.
The Ulltrians had infected Kriani history like a disease. And every alien she met—not just Kriani, but the Thrumpit scholar here also studying the Ulltrians, and the Neelee that had transported them both to this world, and the Kirt that had serviced their ships—all of them assumed that humanity would be lost, wasted, crushed like insects in the way of a great, turning wheel, if the Ulltrians had not been destroyed. Eydis resented all the fear. She had tired of digging in the ruins of their atrocities.
“You’re not so frightening,” she said, forcing her voice to be loud and bold. She would have spit on it, but that it would leave her DNA on the scene. “You died and rotted, like all the species you killed.”
The black corpse lay there, unmoved. But her heart began to pound. She felt the conviction, looking at the shriveled corpse, that she might see an Ulltrian again. A live Ulltrian.
“And if you ever come back, if any of you are left out there, don’t come to Earth. Because we will fight you like no one ever fought you before. We will find the way to wipe you out again.”
She crawled down into the tunnel and climbed up to the blue and white dawn on Dâk-Ull.
Behind her, robots pressed the ship’s ramp closed and packed dirt under it. Then they retreated, filling the tunnel as they ascended.
_____
Eydis stared at the Kriani. The evil-looking robot stepped around the ramp, walking sideways, and stood between the Kriani and herself. But she could still look the Kriani in the eyes, peering right through the skeletal form of the robot.
“On Dâk-Ull,” Eydis said in Galactic, transmitting her voice over audio, “the Kriani are free. You could be free also. You could join us, and oppose the Ulltrians. You could live a long life and not end up food for their maggot children.”
The Kriani spread its antennae wide, normally a sign of surprise, but she understood this was meant as sarcasm, to say, what a surprise to think a Galactic would preach freedom, the only thing they had to offer. “I serve willingly,” it said. “I serve the masters of evolution.”
“I know,” Eydis said, her voice hushed with sorrow. “But I had to ask, before I did this.”
She used the override protocols she had found on Dâk-Ull, sending the codes to the ship. That gave her access. She immediately transmitted a program that sent wave after wave of shut-down commands, in a continual and furiously fast loop.
The robot listed, and then fell to the side, collapsing into a heap of angular limbs, like a knot of cables and swords. Eydis raised the laser that Tarkos had given her. The ship did not respond, it did not fire on her. The Kriani flung its antenna out, this time in genuine surprise. It had expected the robot to harvest Eydis immediately. It had expected the ship to protect it.
Eydis shot the Kriani between the eyes.