Dark Beneath the Moon (39 page)

My heart thrummed painfully as adrenaline pumped into my limbs.
Fight or flight
. This creature was
Chron
. This was the species that hated humanity with such an irrational hostility that it had tried to wipe us from existence. The species that, according to the Corvids, desired the extermination of every other species they encountered. They had chased my ship, captured me and my crew, and I had no idea what they planned for us. In an instant my mind measured the distance to the door, calculated the most advantageous point to hit it, considered the usefulness of the datapad as a weapon.

I don’t know what might have happened if I’d acted on those instincts, but three things stopped me.

It held a covered tray of something that smelled suspiciously like bread. And the plates of its face shifted into something suspiciously like a smile.

And my knees went inexplicably weak. I staggered back a few steps, fetching up against the edge of the counter and clutching it with my free hand for support.

The smile disappeared, and the Chron spoke to me in a language that sounded like a cross between the chittering of beetles and the whistling chirp of birds. I wondered how to convey the idea that I didn’t understand. If I shook my head, it might think I was simply saying “no.”

Pita piped up and said, “I think it’s asking if you’re feeling all right.”

I stared down at the datapad in surprise. “You got that?”

“I told you before, there’s a trans-cymatics sound library in the translator,” she said. “It takes the sounds, turns them into visuals, and compares them to the database. It’s a basic vocabulary, and like I said, out of date, but I’m confident.”

“Do you think it understands nodding for yes, and head-shaking for no?”

“File says standard body language is understood. But don’t clasp your hands. That’s a rude gesture,” she advised.

“Wow.
Okej
then.” I looked to the Chron and nodded slowly. The momentary weakness had passed. My worry hadn’t, though. My symptoms had magnified considerably.

The Chron said something else, and I waited for Pita’s translation.

“I think it’s asking if you’re hungry.”

“Well, it does seem to be offering me food,” I said. I nodded again.

The Chron motioned with the tray that I should retreat to the gurney, which I did. It moved into the room and set the tray down on the counter where I’d found Sord’s datapad, lifting the cover to reveal a plate and shallow bowl beneath. Then it backed away, motioning me toward the tray with a graceful gesture of its long-fingered hand.

The plate held what I would have sworn were two slices of Rei’s cinnamon
pano
, and the bowl was filled with a clear liquid I assumed to be water—cold, judging by the slick of condensation coating the outside walls of the bowl. I picked up a slice of the bread, took a bite, and nodded in what I hoped was a combination of
thank you
and
this is good
.

The Chron nodded, and said something. The inflection actually made it sound like a question, although I couldn’t be sure that anything like that conveyed the same meaning in their language.

“Pita?” I asked.

“Give me a second.”

I smiled tentatively at the alien and took another bite of bread while I waited. It cocked its head at me quizzically.

“Um, Pita?”

“Oh, for—okay, this one is tricky. It’s saying something like,
You are not of the others?
But I’m not sure who these ‘others’ are.”

“Well, how can I ask for clarification?”

“Here, show it this.” The datapad’s screen changed and a series of Chron symbols—letters forming intelligible words, I hoped—displayed across it. “I think it says
Who are the others?
”

“You
think
it says that? You’re not sure?”

“I’m doing the best I can with information that’s over a century out of date,” Pita snapped.

With much trepidation, I turned the datapad around and held it up so that the alien could see it. The planes of its face shifted slightly, the expression unreadable. Finally it met my eyes and nodded. Opened a cupboard, and a square of light displayed on the countertop near my tray. With one long, scaly finger, the alien sketched a symbol in the square of light, the lines appearing out of nowhere as if the light were paper and its finger, a pencil. Except that somehow, colours were represented, too. I knew before it was even finished exactly what it was drawing.

The letters
P
and
C
bracketed a stylized atom with a red nucleus, all underscored by a heavy red line.

The “others” were PrimeCorp.
Kia inferna
?
What could all of this mean? My stomach churned again, and I pushed the plate of bread away. I couldn’t eat any more. I wasn’t sure if the nausea came from fear or whatever was wrong with me.

“No.” I shook my head, hoping the alien could read the truth in my eyes. “Pita, how do you say,
no, we are not of the others
?
Put it on the screen, would you?”

After a moment, the symbols changed, and I showed it to the Chron. It nodded, seeming satisfied, and chittered something again.

“
The others ally with our brother enemies
,” Pita said after a pause. “
They war against us.
”

Sankta merde
, I thought.
I’m making what amounts to first contact with an alien species. I have to be so careful here. What are “brother enemies?
” I remembered Fha mentioning a schism in the Chron—two sides ranged against each other. A civil war. I supposed that, coupled with imprecise translation, could be described as “brother enemies.”

“Pita, you have to be extra careful to get this right.” I considered my words. “Say,
we do not want war with you. The others are our enemy as well, but we are not here to war with them.
We only want to get home
.”

“
Merde
, you want me to ask its life story while I’m at it?” Pita said. But in seconds, the alien words flashed onto the screen. She was getting faster. Or sloppier, I thought with a pang of worry. Again the Chron read it and nodded.

“We have to find out what happened to everyone else,” I told Pita. “Can you ask it where the others—no, wait, don’t use that word. Do you have a word for crew, or friends, companions—something like that?”

“See what I can do,” she said, and in a minute I was showing the Chron the words. The answer this time was longer, and I hoped Pita would be able to get all of it.

“It says,
you had sickness,
” Pita translated. “
We took you from companions. They are there in the boxes. You are here to be well. We have remove the bad machines.
”

“They are there in the boxes? What does that—” I broke off, realizing what else Pita had translated.
We have remove the bad machines.
My nanobioscavengers? They’d—what? Somehow filtered them out of my blood? All of them? I glanced down at the red, sucker-like markings on my arm. A sudden fear chilled my skin, making it feel clammy and prickled with phantom pain as if stuck with dozens of pins. Much as I feared what might be going wrong with my bioscavs, it terrified me even more to think that these aliens might have completely removed them. How would my body react to that, after decades of relying on its microscopic helpers to keep me healthy?

And overall, since I’d woken up, I felt worse.

The Chron said something else, breaking me out of my reverie. Pita translated quickly. “
Fear you are the danger here.
”

“We’re the danger?” I frowned. “That doesn’t make sense. We don’t have any weapons.”

“All I can do is tell you what it said.”

I puzzled over the words. “Do you think it means we’re
in
danger?”

“Could be,” Pita said unhelpfully.

Before I could ask Pita to frame a question to find out more, an alarm sounded from the corridor outside. The Chron pulled open a drawer and scrabbled around, coming up with a small, round, button-like object. It motioned for me to hold out my right arm—the one not encased in the resin sheath—and clipped the device onto my t-shirt sleeve. It chattered something.

“
To keep safe
,”
Pita said without waiting for me to ask.

The Chron mimed something enclosing me—a force field of some sort? Then it held up a finger in a “wait” gesture, said something else, and left. The door slid closed behind it.

“Uh-oh,” Pita said.

“Uh-oh what?”

“It said
your companions.
That doesn’t sound good.”

I had to agree. Without really thinking about what I was doing, I reached out and put a hand on the door. It slid open immediately, and I poked my head out into the empty corridor. I saw the Chron disappear around a corner and, datapad in hand, started after it.

THE ALARM CONTINUED
to blare around us. “Now look what you did,” Baden whispered to Maja, and winked at her.

“Keep moving,” Hirin muttered, and stepped through the doorway.

Footfalls on metal decking echoed from somewhere ahead of us, and as one, we froze. But they faded almost immediately, so whoever was running wasn’t running towards us.

After the first turn, the wide corridor curved out ahead of us. It followed the same arc as the hallway in the brig area, as if we were in one section of a circular ring.

“Only one option,” Maja said breathlessly.

“Stay close, everyone,” Hirin said. He reached out as if to take Maja’s hand but stopped short of touching her, obviously remembering that she still wore the force field generator.

“I’ve been thinking,” I said. “The field zapped Viss and me when we tried a fast attack, but the aliens were able to pick up trays and use medical stuff. I wonder if a slow, easy motion—” Not waiting for anyone to stop me, I gently reached out and put a hand on Maja’s arm. The field tingled when my hand passed through it, like a frizz of static electricity, but it didn’t repel me.

Hirin nodded. “Good to know. Thanks, Sord.”

It wasn’t much, but the chill had gone from his voice. I felt unreasonably gratified at his approval, and instantly hated myself for it. Was I actually beginning to
like
these people?

No. It had to be merely that for the moment, we were brothers and sisters in arms. I distracted myself from those weird thoughts by concentrating on where we were.

The space station—I was still of the opinion that’s what it was, and the surroundings seemed to confirm it—was rough-and-ready, not sleek and completely finished like a corporate office building planetside. Sagan Station was like that, but this one must have been slapped together in a hurry. Maybe it wasn’t even finished yet. The main corridor was a long octagonal tube with support arches reinforcing the eight-sided shape at intervals. Cables and wiring ran along the walls, most of it in recessed channels, but some looped haphazardly through plastic hooks or simply ran along the metal floor next to the wall. Control touchpads appeared at intervals on the walls, but they were useless to us without better knowledge of the Chron alphabet.

A door to the left as we started down the hallway bore a label we couldn’t read. Maja put a hand to it. It slid open to reveal a small, square room, dimly illuminated by the light admitted by the open door. Crates and boxes stamped with Chron symbols stacked along the walls. She hesitated. “No-one there; should we see what’s in the boxes?”

“I don’t know how much time we have, but I’d trade this fork for a pin-beam laser if I found one,” Rei said.

Baden and Viss pulled open a couple of the nearest crates. “Food supplies.”

“I can’t imagine anyone storing weapons right outside the brig,” Yuskeya noted with a grim smile.

What I assumed to be storage hatches lined the angled upper parts of the walls. I opened one out of curiosity, but it was empty.

“Sord, keep up,” Yuskeya told me. “I’m not going hunting for you if you get separated from the group.”

“I care about you, too, Protectorate,” I retorted. In truth, though, I knew my best chance of making it out of here in one piece was to stick with the group.

The next door, also on the left, opened into more storage space, filled with more non-lethal items.

“This is definitely a Chron station,” Gerazan said as we hurried along the corridor. “I’d almost swear we were back in the artifact moon. The shape of the hallways, the symbols, even the colour of the walls.”

“Except it’s cleaner here,” Yuskeya said.

“Not so dusty.”