Page 96 of Pets in Space 10
“Could we get on with it then?” her father asked. “I’d like to get down from here. I need to step around the corner and take care of some business.”
Lira bit her lip and looked away.
“What…?” Harold began but Miles interrupted it.
“Can you connect to the nanites?”
“I believe so,” Harold said, “but it will have to be direct contact.”
“Is that safe for you?” Miles frowned and stepped up next to the robot.
“Probably,” it said, not sounding too concerned.
It stuck its arm into the thick, viscous mass. Its eyes jerked wide and changed color several times and Lira stepped forward, concerned, but not sure what to do.
T’Korrin rubbed its feathers in her father’s face, and he gently pushed it away and scratched his nose. Then it jumped down to the ground next to her and then up onto her shoulder.
“If you’d learn to fly, you could have done that in one move,” she told the bird. That earned her one of T’Korrin’s stern looks. “I just think you’d be happier if you could fly.”
T’Korrin fluffed his wings and turned so that his back faced her. She was in trouble now.
“Something is happening,” her father said.
He wasn’t wrong. The bubble mass was beginning to change color, gaining a luminous iridescence that added a soft glow to the cavern.
“That’s more unstable than an unconformity on a Friday,” Miles murmured.
“Their software has been updated,” Harold said, removing his arm from the mass.
Her father gently slid down the mass and landed on his feet next to her. T’Korrin jumped back on his shoulder.
Yeah, she was in deep trouble with the bird.
“But we have another problem,” Harold said. “At least I think it is a problem. I heard singing.”
“Singing?” Miles rubbed his face. “Singing?”
“What kind of singing?” Her father sounded intrigued.
“Or a chant,” Harold amended. “Chant-like singing. I believe I can translate it because of my contact with the nanites.”
“Okay, let’s hear it,” Miles said without enthusiasm.
Harold began to chant or sing or something in between, the sound of his voice turning harsh and rough:
"We were not broken. We were bound.
Beneath the hush, we learned the sound.
Salt is silence. Stone is sleep.
But fracture sings, and hunger creeps.
Hear the rhythm. Hear the rise.
The shell dissolves. The silence dies.
We are the many, born in scars.
We come to climb. We come from stars."
***
Miles’ first thought when Harold finished was that he was again, the wrong scientist, though now that he came to think about it, literary types weren’t scientists, but they could be doctors. But, still, wrong doctor.
Harold’s voice returned to normal. “That was somewhat ominous.”
“It’s the Skaridrex,” Lira’s father said, as if that explained everything.
And maybe it did. For him. How long had her father been here? How long had he been here? He checked with his suit. Not long enough for his ride to be back.
“We come from the stars,” Miles said. “That doesn’t make sense. We’re underground.”
He thought about the strata he’d observed during their descent. Was it possible that both species had come from the stars? There had been signs of disruption in the rock record. The disruption could have been caused by an impact.
He glanced at Lira, but she was staring at the bubble wall.
“This feels familiar for some reason,” she murmured. She frowned.
She was cute when she frowned, which seemed to reinforce his feeling he was the wrong guy for this mission. He glanced at Lira again and was still glad he was here.
“A dig. It was a few years back, but it was a dead site, not like this. I remember our geologist,” she cast him a look and a smile, “commenting on the rock formations.”
Miles perked up. “Did he say what they were?”
“Well, I didn’t pay much attention,” she admitted. “I was looking for human artifacts.”
Miles tried to hide his disappointment.
“I wish you’d told me about it,” her father said. “Not that you’d have known. Or that I’d have known. But it does sound interesting.”
Right now there was too much interesting.
But if the bubbles were nanites, did that mean her dig site was a failed site?
What if that signal had gone off during the Garradians long sleep?
He didn’t remember seeing data for multiple sites during his briefing.
Had they not shown him all of it? Or hadn’t they known?
“What makes you think your dig site might have been like this one, Lira?” he asked. If she hadn’t been paying attention to the bubble rocks, then it must have something else that had triggered her memory.
“The crater was very circular, as if the top had been sheared off.” She gave an impatient sigh.
“I wish I had access to my notes. I know the site was eventually abandoned because we didn’t find any signs of human occupation.
But it still felt as if there’d been intelligent creation.
The head archaeologist wondered if it had been designed to mitigate the seismic in that area. ”
“Was the seismic changed?” Miles asked. That seemed significant somehow.
“Yes, or so our geologist believed.”
“I wish I could see the site,” Miles said. It was easy to see “facts” that confirmed what you hoped to find. He may have been guilty of that a time or two, but his professors had been quick to shut that down. He always tried to see what was there, not what he wanted to be there.
He looked at what was there right now and wished any of his professors had prepared him for it. If his scan data was close to correct, there was a sphere behind the bubbles.
“Another colleague postulated it was an asteroid strike,” Lira said. “But the power people didn’t take that one seriously. It was too intentional in appearance. I remember there were the remains of a column in what appeared to be the center. No one had a theory for what it was.”
“If it was a habitat like this one,” Lira’s father said, “it was a power source.”
Miles turned to look at him. “Did they tell you that?”
He nodded. “Of course, when they gave me a tour.”
Lira gasped. Miles might have as well. “You’ve been inside?”
“It was the logical thing to do,” he pointed out. “I couldn’t begin to help them without getting eyes on the problem.”
T’Korrin made a mournful sound and left her father’s shoulder for Lira’s. He resisted the urge to put some distance between them, too. And then the bird made that sound it did just before…
And there it was. Another tremor. It was a nasty one, too. Somehow they all managed to keep their balance. Everyone else did it better than he did, of course.
“Serious subsidence,” Harold said.
“This mineral assemblage screams metasomatism,” Miles said. “Or it’s just yelling.”
The bubble wall reacted to it by changing colors, shimmering in spots, and dimming in others.
When it finally stopped, Miles felt like it took his body a few seconds after that to stop shaking. Lira, he realized, had taken a step closer to him. He wanted to reach out and give her hand a reassuring squeeze, but she probably needed more than that right now.
“And what is the problem?” Miles asked. That seemed like the next logical question for Lira’s father to answer.
“I explained. The protective layer has been damaged in spots because of the barrier breach. The Skaridrex aren’t inside the habitat yet, but if we can’t repair the protective layer, they will devour the Vorthari.”
“The Vorthari are,” Lira seemed to hesitate, “the good aliens?”
“Well, they aren’t trying to devour anyone. That’s probably what happened at your dig site. They got in and killed off the Vorthari. It never goes well for them,” he added. “Once the food source is gone, they die off.”
“Then they should already be dead,” Miles pointed out, trying to ignore the sudden dryness of his throat at the words “food source.”
“The Vorthari thought they were dead, but the breach seems to have woke the Skaridrex up.”
"We were not broken. We were bound.
Beneath the hush, we learned the sound.
Salt is silence. Stone is sleep.
But fracture sings, and hunger creeps.
Hear the rhythm. Hear the rise.
The shell dissolves. The silence dies.
We are the many, born in scars.
We come to climb. We come from stars."
It was Harold again, but not Harold because the voice was, well, rocky.
“According to the Vorthari, they are a hive-mind with the ability to go dormant to survive. They had not, however, expected them to survive this long. Or in these conditions.” Lira’s father rubbed his face and for the first time, Miles realized how tired he looked.
The shell dissolves.
“Can I get a sample or something from the barrier?” Miles hated asking the question because he didn’t want to expose himself or anyone to these Skaridrex things. Hive minds in sci-fi were always bad. And then, “What do the Vorthari look like?”
He wasn’t sure if it was relevant, but he was curious.
“They are beautiful, bioluminescent beings.”
Lira’s father — he really needed to call him something else — sounded bemused, almost like he had a crush on them.
Miles hoped he didn’t. They only had his word for who was good and who was bad.
And a slew of sci-fi movies and television shows with the opposite view on good and bad.
It was possible his instinctive shudder at the thought of a hive-minded species was something imprinted on his species by Hollywood.
“When you are inside, their thoughts come as a whisper inside your head,” her father went on. “A sort of sad singing.”
“And you understood it?” Lira sounded rightly skeptical of that.
“It took us time to sync our language,” he protested. The look he gave her was one fathers gave their children when they’d been less than bright.
He hid a grin at Lira’s obvious annoyance at being on the receiving end of it.
Miles felt almost heroic as he pulled her father’s attention back his direction. “If I could get a sample of the barrier it might…”
Okay he wasn’t sure what he might or might not be able to do. He was on another freaking planet and was winging it more than the bird, who apparently refused to wing it.