12

 

 

ELISSA BARELY BOARDED the lower level of the Room of Lost Souls when the trouble started. Someone had turned on the gravity to the entire station, which had Vilhauser bleating excitedly—apparently, he hadn’t figured out how to do that either—and some of her team had trouble initially just because they forgot to turn off the gravity in their boots. Then, two of her soldiers—Kuether and Maichle—refused to walk to the stairs beyond the landing platform.

They were simply too scared.

Dryden wanted to send them back to the ship, get replacements, but Elissa didn’t. She ordered them to remain near the door, facing the stairs, in case the strangers tried to get to the Discovery.

At least, that was the solution. To get to that solution, she and Dryden had another round of private discussions, and Kuether and Maichle went back and forth like scared children, following one instruction and then another. If the strangers were watching, they would think her team completely incompetent.

And then Vilhauser wanted to take his little band of scientists and head to that secret room—without protection, without help.

“They’re scientists,” he said. “We’ll be fine.”

She wouldn’t give him the courtesy of an argument. Scientists were dying in pursuit of knowledge throughout the Empire, often at the hands of other scientists who had defected to the Nine Planets, scientists who believed that whatever the Empire was working on had to be evil, and therefore had to be stopped.

“You will go nowhere until we figure out what we’re facing,” she said to Vilhauser in a tone she’d never used with him before.

She could see his face through his bubble helmet. His eyes were wide. She had startled him.

She finally set up her team in a proper recon formation—the two cowards and the scientists would remain here, others would fan out over the stairs, and the rest would work their way up.

She would head to the secret room first. She knew how many of the strangers were there. That gave her a small advantage. Then, if need be, she would contact the unidentified transport, which was probably where their leader was hiding out.

She had just gotten her team to the stairs, when Calthorpe contacted her from the bridge.

“Commander, they’ve figured out that you’re on the Room. A group is heading your way.”

“How many?” she asked.

“They seem to be bringing in specific people. It started with two heading toward you from the secret room, but I see eight more people on the move. I think you’ll be facing ten. And of those ten, nine have those reinforced environmental suits.”

“And weapons?” she asked.

“Something that looks like laser rifles,” Calthorpe said. “But those are only the visible weapons. And I can’t tell from here what their capabilities are.”

“All right,” she said. “Update me if you get more.”

Then she turned her attention to her team. They had all heard Calthorpe as well.

“I’m going to greet them,” Vilhauser said.

“You are going to listen to me,” she said. “We’re going to assume they’re hostile. Then we’re going to—”

One of the soldiers facing her started, and she stopped. Four of her people immediately moved into attack position, backs straight, rifles at the ready.

Her heart pounding, she turned.

Ten people faced her, people she didn’t recognize, in environmental suits so thin they looked like skin. The only way she could tell the difference between the armored suits and the unarmored suit was that the armored suits looked a bit more rigid, particularly over the torso.

Unless she missed her guess, only one suit had no armor. That suit belonged to the man in the center.

At least, she thought the person facing her was a man. He was taller than the average space-faring person, with very broad shoulders and a military posture. But that was all she had to go on. She couldn’t see his face except as a shadow through his gray visor.

They didn’t even wear helmets. The environmental suits had some kind of hood component, which looked both more efficient and more constraining at the same time.

She had no idea how long they’d been watching, which made her want to curse out her people, even though the problem had been hers. Calthorpe had warned her. She shouldn’t have been taken by surprise.

Yet somehow she thought the strangers were farther away—that they had just left that stupid secret room.

“You got the secret room open!” Vilhauser said, sounding like a teenager meeting someone famous.

The idiot had used the speaker on his helmet, so he broadcast to the entire landing area.

“Doctor,” she snapped through the private comm. “Shut up.”

He moved toward the strangers and Dryden tried to hold him back. Obviously, Vilhauser wasn’t listening.

“How in God’s name did you get that room open?” he asked the strangers.

The strangers didn’t reply. Hell, they hadn’t even moved. But she did. She stepped in front of Vilhauser so that he couldn’t even see the strangers.

“If you don’t shut up,” she said, “I will personally send you back to Discovery, and you won’t be conscious when I do it.”

He gave her a sideways glance, clearly startled that she had spoken to him like that. At least he hadn’t shut off his internal comm link yet.

Then she faced the strangers. “You’re trespassing.”

“Oh?” The person without the armored suit spoke. His voice was deep and male. “We thought this place had been abandoned.”

He spoke with an accent she didn’t recognize. And she couldn’t tell from his tone whether or not he was telling the truth.

It really bothered her that she couldn’t see his face.

She raised her chin slightly. “The Room of Lost Souls is property of the Enterran Empire. Didn’t you see the postings?”

Because of the postings, she would have been within her rights under Empire law to shoot these people on sight. But she also knew she would get in trouble for that, because they had opened that secret room, and they did seem to have some knowledge of the way that the Room of Lost Souls worked.

“The maps we have state that this place had been deserted for generations. The maps also state that we should avoid it.” The stranger tilted his head just a little. “That admonition intrigued me.”

He didn’t call the Room by its designation, the way that someone from the Empire would. Anyone, really. The Room of Lost Souls had worked its way into myth long ago, and anyone from this sector would have acknowledged that.

She asked, “And you are?”

She deliberately phrased the question that way, because she wanted him to decide whether he would tell her his name, his rank, or the name of the group he represented.

Instead, the bastard didn’t answer. “I take it you’re from the Enterran Empire.”

“Yes,” she said, deciding to give him that. He nodded again, a little, as if in acknowledgement, and as he was about to tell her who he was, Vilhauser grabbed her arm.

“I need to talk to him. He got the secret room open.”

The idiot didn’t use his internal comm. He said all of that through his speaker. He shattered the delicacy of this initial contact.

“Technically, I didn’t get the room open,” the stranger said as if Vilhauser had spoken to him.

His reply clearly started Vilhauser. It startled her as well. She wondered what the stranger meant by technically.

He continued, “Give us a little time. I had no idea this place belonged to someone. I’ll get my people out of here.”

So he didn’t want a confrontation either. Good. Clearly, the Empire’s presence worried him. She opened her mouth, but Vilhauser spoke first.

“I’d rather you show me how to get into that room,” he said.

She resisted the urge to throttle Vilhauser. She kept her gaze on the stranger, knowing she was at a disadvantage. He could see her expressions—and probably her annoyance at Vilhauser—and she couldn’t see anything about him or his people.

“We need to check out your people,” she said. She didn’t want to be surprised again. She wasn’t even sure about their weapons.

“Why?” the stranger asked. “We all know this base is empty.”

She wasn’t talking about the emptiness of the base. She was more concerned with the fact that these ten people seemed to have no concern—indeed, no understanding—of the danger they were in from the Room itself.

Or maybe they weren’t in danger. Maybe they had no idea what the Room did to most people in the Empire.

Maybe they truly were strangers.

She wasn’t sure how to express that, without giving too much away. So she said, “Your people seem to have no trouble in this base. Plus, we didn’t see you entering this part of space.”

He straightened. Just a bit, but enough for her to notice. She might not have noticed, though, if she had been watching his expression. She was looking for anything that might give her a clue about him, and his posture was about all she had. Everyone around him had remained still.

She needed her soldiers to behave like his people. Hell, she needed the idiot scientists to behave like his people as well.

The stranger did seem surprised that she hadn’t seen his ship, but she wasn’t sure what that surprise was. Had they cloaked and he was astonished they had done so? Or had they slipped in through an opening in the information shield?

“I’m not sure why you would have expected to see me,” he said.

Damn. He was playing the same game she was: Be coy, don’t give too much away.

So she decided to give him more information, information he would know if he had somehow come through the shield.

“We’ve posted most of this region, informing ships to turn away. We also state that anyone who gets through will be considered trespassers and might get shot on sight.”

“Apparently, your postings aren’t as numerous as you thought,” the stranger said. “And it sounds like they make idle threats, since we never saw a ship of yours on our trip here.”

That statement matched what her people had experienced. But she wasn’t going to say so.

“You might not have seen us,” she said, “but we should have seen you. We had an information shield in place.”

“An information shield,” the stranger said as if he hadn’t heard that term before. “You believe that we would have passed through that on our way here?”

“I know you would have,” she said. “There’s no other way here. You would have had to go through our sensors.”

“And you don’t think there are gaps in your sensors,” he said.

“There aren’t,” she said firmly, even though she wasn’t certain.

“And yet we’re here,” he said. Was that sarcasm? What was it about her that provoked sarcasm today.

“You could’ve cloaked,” Vilhauser said in that same excited voice. She knew where his statements were leading. He was going to ask the damn stranger if he had stealth tech, and she needed to stop it now.

“No cloak is good enough to mask against our sensors,” she said loudly, and she was glad she did, because Vilhauser had actually added the words “stealth tech” before he realized he had said too much.

“Doctor,” Dryden said to Vilhauser through the comm, “please let the Commander handle this.”

She was both grateful and irritated at Dryden for speaking up. She needed to concentrate on the strangers, but she was having trouble. She was not a diplomat, and this situation was beyond anything she had done before.

She said to the stranger, “You came in a small ship, one that cannot have traveled through deep space.”

“So,” the stranger said, with amusement in his voice, “now you know the capabilities of my ship. Have you flown one like it?”

“I know, based on the size and the power configuration, that it couldn’t have traveled here on its own. That’s a short-range vessel. If I had to guess, I would say it’s a troop transport.”

That tiny movement again, the one he probably didn’t even know that he did. It was a tell of some kind. She had identified the ship’s function. But if it were a short-range vessel designed for carrying troops, then where was the mother ship?

“Until you people showed up,” the stranger said, “I had no reason to bring a troop here.”

“So what are you doing here?” Vilhauser managed to ask before Elissa could speak up.

The stranger said, “We’re exploring. None of us had been here before.”

“And somehow you got into the secret room,” Vilhauser said.

“It didn’t look secret,” the stranger replied. “In fact, I’m not even sure what you’re referring to as the secret room. We’ve found some doors that were harder to open than others, but we didn’t find any hidden spaces at all.”

Vilhauser tried to shake off Dryden, but Dryden pulled him back. Not even Dryden could stop this idiot from taking over the encounter. “The secret room is the door inside—”

“What’s the point of your exploration?” Elissa asked over him, hoping the stranger didn’t take this little internal conflict as a sign of weakness.

The stranger turned toward her. He seemed to have some sort of reaction to Vilhauser, but she couldn’t’ tell what it was. Contempt? Mockery? Amusement? Relief that this little Empire team was horribly inept?

The stranger said, “The point of our exploration is what’s always the point of exploration. Information, mostly. But I have to admit, there’s just a bit of an adrenalin high going into a new place, particularly one that’s been deserted for this long.”

Someone who came to the Room because it existed? That definitely marked this little group as not from the sector.

“Did you expect to find something here?” she asked.

Vilhauser wasn’t moving now. Apparently this interested him too.

“Of course not,” the stranger said. “This place has been abandoned for a long time. Abandoned places get scavenged. I figured there would be little here, except of exploratory or informational value.”

He kept repeating the word “information.” She found that curious. “What are you trying to find out?”

“Your guides and warnings seem to give this place mythic powers,” the stranger said. “We wanted to see that.”

Your guides. Not the Empire’s guides. Not the guides all over the sector. Your guides. As if he weren’t from here.

There was more to this transport’s arrival on the Room of Lost Souls. These people weren’t afraid of the Room’s deadly history; they knew how to open complicated doors; and they could turn the gravity on in the entire station, something the scientists had been completely unable to do.

This was more than a sight-seeing trip, and she was a bit insulted that the man speaking to her thought he could fool her this way.

Maybe she should stop dancing with him. Maybe she should be even more direct.

“I don’t believe you,” she said.

He actually turned toward her, which made her realize he hadn’t been looking at her full on before. He paused for a moment. Had her statement startled him? Was he trying to decide whether or not to be honest with her?

Then he said, “You don’t believe that we were interested in a place called on all maps the Room of Lost Souls? Who could avoid such a place?”

“Anyone with an instinct for self-preservation,” she said.

The soldiers behind her shifted. Dryden said softly, in their comm, “Commander….” as if warning her.

But she ignored him.

The stranger tilted his head again. “You keep threatening that something bad will happen. Are you going to kill us for visiting here?”

She guessed they were both putting everything on the table now. He wanted to know if they would attack. She had threatened him before. She could threaten him again.

She was about to when that damn Vilhauser meddled yet again.

“No, no, of course not,” he said. Then he turned toward her, grabbing her arm. She wanted to shake him off, but he had a determined look. He wouldn’t give up, unless she dragged him out of here—which she was going to do if he didn’t fucking settle down.

“For god’s sake, Commander,” Vilhauser said, and he still was using his speaker, probably because he figured the broadcast would allow the strangers to side with him. “We need to talk to these people. There are at least thirty of them and they all have the marker.”

She wanted to hit him. Just knock his bubble helmet loose and see how he reacted. She clenched a fist against her side, the side that the stranger couldn’t see.

“You,” she said to Vilhauser, “are here on my sufferance. One more word, and I’ll send your people back to the ship.”

She kept that on speaker too. It was already clear to the stranger that she had problems in her ranks. She was going to let him know that the problems weren’t with her soldiers, but with the idiot scientists.

Vilhauser’s determined look became something more sinister.

“Actually,” he said, “you’re here because of me, and you have no right to order me around.”

Son of a bitch. Didn’t he know what he was doing? He was hurting all of them. He was hurting the entire empire.

Then someone chuckled. She turned toward the sound. It had come from the strangers.

“Fun as this all is,” the man said, “it has nothing to do with me or my people. We had no idea we were trespassing, so we’ll leave. Just give us thirty minutes and we’ll be out of your way.”

Finally, progress. She was about to agree when the Room—moved. There was no other word for it. It felt like a ship with the power down, drifting in space. It made Elissa dizzy for a moment, and off-kilter.

Vilhauser pin-wheeled his arms to keep his balance, nearly hitting one of the other scientists. The strangers spread their legs farther to catch their balance, as if they’d done this before.

“We lost two,” Dryden said softly into the comm.

Elissa glanced behind her, saw that Maichle and Kuether had fled through the door they were supposed to be guarding.

So much for any pretense of professionalism. Now the strangers knew just how deeply terrified her people were.