Daughter of Time 1: Reader (21 page)

Waythrel recoiled as if struck. The elegant web of thought became scrambled for a moment, and it used its many arms to balance along the walls of my cell. The eyestalks rotated wildly around the room, unhinged, disoriented. Slowly, the web reformed, and the long alien body relaxed, the eyestalks calming and turning slowly toward me. I lowered my head.

“I’m sorry, Waythrel. You would not have believed me otherwise.”

“You frighten me, Ambra.”

“I know. It’s too much power for an Earth mind. I
feel
that inside. Seeing our history, I
know
it—we are not wise enough. But this power
is
mine, good or bad. Perhaps both.” I raised my head and leveled my sightless eyes toward my Advocate. “And I was gentle, Waythrel. I don’t have to be so gentle.” I could feel Waythrel recoil instinctively from the implication of my words. “The Dram will be helpless, at least the number around us on the ship. I can handle that number. They will not understand what is happening and will not target me before I have incapacitated them all.”

I shook my head in disbelief at where things had brought me. “I have seen it all, Waythrel. You must trust me. Report my words back to the Resistance. The Dram will want Xixian scientists there to try to explain and capture the mystery of my power over the Orbs. Irony—they need you even as they don’t trust you! Fill their ranks with fighters. Tell the human who plans with you what I have said.”

“The human?” Waythrel asked with astonishment. “How do you know?”

“I can
see
him, Waythrel. I can see him in my future, and I can see him as a distortion in the matrices of space-time. Thel’s little seeds are sprouting so quickly, I can’t even keep track of them as they grow within me. Soon, we will go to him and to the heart of the Resistance. I will meet him before the end.”

“The end?”

“The end of many things. The beginning of the end of the Dram.”

“If these things are true, then my heart will rejoice.”

“Stop being silly, Waythrel,” I smiled. “You don’t even have a heart! Your translators are too poetic.”

“The sentiment is the same.”

“Yes, but it will be mixed with grief. Terrible grief. Tomorrow we head for Earth, but we will not find it.”

31

We must admit with humility that, while number is purely a product of our minds, space has a reality outside our minds, so that we cannot completely prescribe its properties a priori. 
—Carl Friedrich Gauss

The trip into space was far grander than anything I had known or would know again. After the Sortax introduction to space, followed by the nightmare in the smugglers death holds, and most recently the detention cell in the Dram warship, the Emperor’s ship was majestic. It was the largest spacecraft I had ever been on, easily twenty times the size of the Sortax training craft. The energy needed to bring that thing out of the Dram world gravity must have been colossal. It was also finely crafted, at least for the Dram, and certainly compared to the warship they used to kidnap me. Inside it seemed that no effort had been spared in creating a luxury ship for the ruler of the galaxy. Spacious corridors of plush fabrics led to high ceilings in rooms that housed the most complex technology and the finest materials and decorations. Dram-style art hung from the walls, typically their favored weavings of desert plants into carpet-like hangings and floor coverings painted with images from their histories and mythologies. They meant little to me, and often were hard to even decipher. I suppose human images would be equal nonsense to alien life.

We weren’t given long to observe. The guards firmly escorted us to the bridge where the Emperor and its entourage awaited us. By the time we reached it, the ship had already ascended into space, using some sort of artificial gravity, I suppose, to keep things from being pushed vertically during liftoff, and keeping everything normal now that we were technically in zero-g. When we entered the enormous command center, I was struck by the panoramic windows built into the walls, now showing nothing but the blackness of space interspersed with the pinpricks of white starlight. I marveled at the engineering, the materials science that allowed windows to be placed there under the incredible pressure from inside pushing against the vacuum of space. Whatever the material was, it was tough or perhaps was aided by some sort of energy field that lessened the outward forces on the windows. It sure made for a spectacular sight, almost like floating out in front of the ship in the darkness.

The windows dimmed dramatically as the system’s star swung into view, its oppressive red now confined by the blackness of space around us. Its light was still intense, in fact, more intense now that the atmosphere didn’t absorb the radiation, and there was an automatic filtering of the light by the windows to protect those within the ship. The starship continued its arced course, and the red sun moved across the viewing area, as shadows shifted sharply from one side to the other around me.

Waythrel and I were brought forward to a small raised platform at the foot of the Emperor’s throne. I suppose this was where those granted audience with the Emperor were placed. I looked around and noticed the fifteen or so Xixian scientists hunched over various pieces of equipment. I hoped these were not true scientists but a Xixian team trained for combat. I glanced toward Waythrel and probed its mind. Waythrel seemed to understand my concern and clearly formed the answers to my question.

The forces are in place as you have requested, Ambra. So are the Dram troops, as you have noticed. There are at least forty of their elite guard. I hope you are up to this.

I impressed upon its mind that I was.

The Resistance will be here upon my signal through the Dram Orb string, after which they will make the jump to this system. We will have only minutes to escape from this ship and board a Resistance freighter. At any moment we could be destroyed by a Dram warship. It will be perilous. And finally, what of the Emperor? We dare not risk injury to the Emperor. It could mean terrible retaliation.

I smiled, and spoke out loud. “Don’t worry, Waythrel. It won’t be pretty, but we’ll be okay.”

Waythrel acknowledged me only by bending several eyestalks in my direction. Alien sarcasm! Well, I couldn’t blame the poor Xix. I was the one-eyed woman leading the blind.

I sensed it before anyone else in the room stirred. There is nothing in the galaxy like an Orb. Not even the complexities of the Xixian mind matched the convoluted and intricate maze of space-time that churned just beneath the surface of those spheres. My sensitivities let me feel the local space-time distortions from the Orb acutely. The Orbs reached out and touched so much in the star system. I had noticed it off-handedly before, but now it was so much more clear. It was as if the extruding and receding tendrils of power from the Orb had a purpose: tending,
gardening
, the majority of their efforts reaching out to the Dram home planet. Thel had spoken of it.
Gardeners
. Could it be true? I felt the energies reach through my body, and a tremor ran through me. What were those tendrils
doing
?

Waythrel sensed my reaction. “What is it, Ambra?”

“We are close,” I managed to get out through a dry throat.

Several Dram officers clicked to the Emperor, and soon the Orb became visible to all through the viewing windows. In the visual realm, how boring the sphere seemed! But whatever effect the Orbs had on the sight of those around me, I could sense within their minds the stirring of awe. Some religious, some exclusively scientific, but all knew the power in what we approached. The portals through time and space planted around the galaxy by the mysterious Ancient Ones, left for billions of years to be discovered by species too primitive to understand how they even functioned, or why.

My translator echoed the Emperor’s tones. “We have reached the Sacred Orb of the Dram! It is now time for the heretic to prove its truth and worth, to open the Orb and reveal the power of the divine, or to fail and expose itself to be a fraud of the Evil Force.”

How I hated these dramatic moments of voodoo, made worse by the fact that the Emperor was a hypocrite who sided with the Naturalists anyway. Sanctimonious hypocrisy mixed with extreme power – nothing was worse, especially when the authorities could soon be deciding exactly how to torture you.

The Emperor turned to Waythrel. “Your client is ordered to open the portal.”

“Ambra, obey the Emperor’s command.”

I sighed and inhaled deeply, closing my eyes.
Okay, buddy, get ready, ‘cause here it comes!

I went deep inside myself, to that place where my unique sense opened up to me and occupied all my consciousness. To my sixth sense, the Orb flared like a supernova. I felt its energies as nearly overpowering. I held steady, focused, and reached toward it.

This time it was more straightforward. The pressures are far weaker without a Dram warship chasing you through space. And my powers had grown in so many ways even in the short time since I had opened the last Orb. Add to that my confidence that I could do it, and that in my bright path I had seen it happen. All I had to do was dance with destiny.

I felt the equivalent of gasps from those surrounding me, even from Waythrel, as I unlocked the Orb. Visually, it was quite a light show, as if the dark surface suddenly became a multidimensional maze of lasers, a many-layered tunnel in space erupting before us, seeming ready to swallow the ship whole.
As indeed it was
. It took some concentration to configure the Orb to remain open without drawing the ship inside, and even so, I think everyone on board felt the space-time tugs. A subtle anxiety seemed to sit deep within all.

I opened my eyes and glared at the ugly cockroach on the throne. “There,
your majesty
,” I spat out. “Is that what you were looking for?”

The Emperor and other Dram were too transfixed to hear me. Even the guards were staring up at the heavenly-hell of the endless and structured light of the Orb. I noticed with satisfaction, however, that the Xixian team was not. I spoke mentally to Waythrel to send the signal. It nodded, pressed a device on the translator and breathing device around its neck, and transmitted both to the Resistance forces and the Xixian team below.

And that’s when everything went nuts.

32

Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. 
—Friedrich Nietzsche

It was a few seconds before the Dram realized what was happening.

The Xixian scientists immediately began to immobilize, but not kill, Dram warriors with special devices they had concealed. As the giant insects began dropping to the ground, a cry went up from crew monitoring space. I’m not sure whether they had detected Waythrel’s signal or were responding to the small fleet of Resistance ships materializing from the Orb String and opening fire on surrounding Dram warships escorting the Emperor’s vessel. Whatever the reason, I had to act quickly, before they turned the firepower of the ship on the emerging craft. The Resistance had been instructed not to fire on the Emperor’s ship. How could they? I was onboard, and I was the only reason that they were here. They had to get me off this ship and safely away.

I spun and faced the rows of ship technicians, pilots, and weapons staff. Their intense thoughts in the midst of combat struck my awareness harshly. How quickly they revealed their presence to my mind!
If they only knew
. One by one, I struck them. Focusing thoughts tightly, it was a mental slap the likes of which these creatures had never known. A second or two for each, and then the next, and the next, on and on like dominoes I dropped them. When I had incapacitated those at the consoles, I took on the soldiers, who were now in a deadly fight with the Xixian team. The Xix had done well, and piles of soldiers lay in front of them. But the insects were like ants from a nest, pouring in through the many doors along the walls of the room. The Xix were being overwhelmed: two had already fallen to Dram weapons, lying charred and twitching in a growing wreckage caused by the Drams’ less elegant weapons.