for a demonstration of what it can do."
The commotion of voices and movement subsided shortly as all of the crew and perhaps all of the civilians in the stands had come to their feet.
The cryptikon sensed Iggy's intent and made the control interface appear: a concave sheet of dark gold with violet-hued funnels punched into its surface. One could not determine whether this was an image or a solid object. If it was an image, then why did shadow fall from it? If it was solid, then why could Iggy pass his hand through it? And the funnels, the violet holes, curved in a manner or direction that defied normal geometry, able to be seen from any angle, and they contained miniature scenes that appeared shockingly real.
"This is the directory," Iggy said, moving a hand over and through the disturbing field of shape and color that lay suspended below the cryptikon. He stepped back and gestured to invite others to approach and examine. Many came forward but only a few moved close to the funnels of strangely real scenes.
"Be careful now," Iggy said, "those of you nearby. We are going to travel to Essiia. It may become crowded in here."
The Cryptikon Room of the Essiin museum appeared instantly in the middle of the Freedom's gymnasium. The museum room was filled with Essiin museum patrons, all of whom were startled. Seconds later an alarm sounded, apparently in the museum. Some Navy crew members already within the museum image bumped into Essiin, causing each to shout in shock and surprise.
Iggy watched everything, studying the various effects of the encounter. He spoke quietly into his shiplink, directing the visual recording of the event. The control interface - the "directory" - had disappeared when the Essiin museum room appeared. Some of the crew in the gym should have occupied the same space as some of the Essiin, yet no one touched at the instant of appearance. As museum personnel arrived, answering the alarm, Iggy observed how they emerged from the limits of the Essiin part of the scene like ghosts that became solid.
"They are recording this, too," Zakiya said to Iggy, seeing image recorders in the hands of museum employees. "They were waiting for another visit from you, Iggy."
"Yes," Iggy agreed, distracted. "It is manipulated by some entity or machine, yet it is too complex! What we can see and what the Essiin can see are different, even though we seem to occupy the same physical space. What we can touch and what they can touch are different. Yet we can share sensory input on many things. The controlling forces must operate at or near the scale of individual atoms! The required data processing must be far too large and far too efficient to succeed at such interstellar distances! It's magic and we are ignorant savages!"
Iggy ended the museum encounter and gave the crew a long length of time to recover from their experience. He had to begin speaking again to end the excited discussions.
"I ask everyone to be as quiet as possible now," Iggy said. "We will visit an old ship on which there are three dead men and one who is almost dead. One of the dead men is Alexandros Gerakis."
The contact with the lost starship proceeded slowly as a few of the crew took turns entering the cabin of the sleeping Patrick Jenkins, then the room where three stasis coffins held the other three men. Image recorders continued to send the event to everyone not physically present.
Iggy ended the demonstration and put the cryptikon away. He sat down. Horss directed the crew to sit down and wait for Admiral Demba to resume. Zakiya answered Sammy's excited questions until the crew eventually became quiet.
/
"We are assuming," Zakiya said, "the encounters you've experienced are synchronized in time, even though the locations are half a galaxy away from us. We don't have even a theory for how this is possible. We don't have a theory for how this could be faked. Even if we are all having a shared hallucination.
"We have another cryptikon on this ship. You saw the two on the lost ship. They were all discovered in one archaeological site by Igor Khalanov and Phuti Mende when they were crew members on the Frontier. It was the last voyage of the Frontier. We kept the cryptikons for probably selfish reasons, although I seem to remember the Navy was part of the cause. I think we must have established that they were communication devices but none of us remembers that fact. Khalanov and Mende seem to be the only ones who can make them work.
"The three men in stasis coffins are Alexandros Gerakis, Koji Hoshino, and Setek-Ren. Doctor Mnro thinks they can all be revived. Patrick Jenkins is the one who is still alive. He was the Frontier's biologist. Aylis has examined him and she has determined his health is declining rapidly. Given his state of extreme isolation and a probable history of stressful events, it's amazing he is still alive. There appears to be no available stasis coffin for his use, even if he could manage to get himself into one. We need to move the Freedom to him as soon as possible.
"We know the approximate location of the lost ship but the search area is still very large. It is also possible there are enemy ships we would encounter. Our jump capability, while certainly impressive, does little to assure our survival against the quantity of ships the enemy possesses. We don't know enough about them. All we know is that they also are jumpships. We also know the starliner Titanic was destroyed by several thousand of these jumpships.
"We know the enemy military is called the Fleet. We know they are human. We know that some of the Fleet are also officers in the Union Navy. Admiral Etrhnk is one of them. It is not clear why this situation exists. It is not clear why the Union remains apart from this other population of near-barbarians beyond the border of the Union. They could easily overwhelm the Union and conquer it although, in a sense, they already control the Union.
"Finally, we know a humanoid alien race probably controls both the Union and the Fleet."
It took a moment for this last news to register in the already overloaded minds of much of the crew. After a period of shock and then expectant silence, Zakiya caused a holographic image of the aliens - recorded by her ocular camera - to appear next to her.
"They are quite beautiful," Zakiya remarked. "I recorded pictures of two of them in the presence of Admiral Etrhnk when he attempted to abduct me and Sammy from the ship just before our departure. As you can see, one of them seems genuinely concerned for Sammy, so I have some hope that they will not ultimately be our enemy. Their intentions made no sense to me, especially since they behaved in rather human fashion. Above these aliens is yet another force, an entity called the Lady in the Mirror. This entity also has human aspects but seems violently irrational. It is able to annihilate anything it touches - except a cryptikon. This is the Lady in the Mirror!"
Zakiya released the image from her internal data storage. It even shocked her again as the projection system presented the image in stunning detail in the midst of the gathering of Navy personnel. She had not realized how well her visual augments had captured the brilliant apparition and its threatening aura of lethal energy. Her own organic memories had focused more on her emotional reaction to the monster and now the blazing details of the destructive power of the Lady's mirror frightened her once more and even more than it had when she first experienced it. Most of the Navy crew nearest the projected image actually reacted to it by trying to retreat.
Zakiya turned off the motion and the sound of the projected image, then let the image fade from view. She waited while the reactions of the crew went through its cycle and finally subsided.
"Wow!" Jon Horss said loudly and in a way that seemed to further settle the crew.
"This is all part of the adventure Sammy and I had," Zakiya spoke into the silence of the meeting. "Captain Horss and Freddy were with me and their recordings helped create the more realistic image you just saw. It may still sound like fantasy but I promise you it is real."
Zakiya paused again. There was no more discussion among the crew on the deck and very little in the stands of the gymnasium, as though everyone was finally shocked to silence. She continued.
"So, we are gathered here to explain all of this and to warn you of the dangers we may face. We are also here to ask you to make
a decision. We who instigated this situation by stealing the Freedom have no right to require your participation, but if you wish to remain with us you must do so under our command, as a military crew. For those of you who don't want to further endanger your lives we will find a safe place to leave you. This includes our Navy crew members. We will not come back for you.
"We need your decisions within the next two days. We will choose no more than two locations at which to return those unwilling to stay on the ship. The locations cannot be where transfer would be too dangerous for us or for the local population.
"Finally, because none of you know these men we want to rescue, we would like to introduce them to you. Through the cryptikons, we've recovered all of the machine data from the lost ship, including personal journals.
"It is, by the way, unfortunate that we cannot also recover the men the same way. All of reality, in the final analysis, is information. If transmats and gates can hurl us across vast distances, then why can't cryptikons also process the data of our existence from one location to another? Perhaps they can. We know nothing of their science, it remains as magic to us.
"We have selected several journal entries of these four men, from a time in which they are faced with a great decision: