“Mega-awesome,” Ju said. “I wish you’d been around for my junior prom.”
Hulsey stared at the spittle for a moment. Quentin wondered if they were done for, but the red-robed, blue-skinned woman simply shrugged, then faced the door. It slid downward, vanishing into the floor, revealing a large, round, domed-ceiling room.
She entered. Quentin hesitated. How would the Portath react? Even Hulsey didn’t know for sure. Would they attack? He felt fear bubble up again, not for himself, but for the others — he wished he’d come alone, that he hadn’t dragged his closest friends into this.
Doc Patah slid next to him, fluttering at eye level.
“Young Quentin, now is not the time to second-guess yourself,” he said. “We came of our own free will.”
Years earlier, Quentin wouldn’t have known the difference between an angry Harrah or a happy one — or probably even a dead one, for that matter — because the wide mouth and sensory pits always seemed to look the same. Now, however, Quentin knew Doc’s expressions as well as he knew John’s sneer, or Kimberlin’s patient stare, or Becca’s small smile. Doc Patah was afraid, but not angry, and he wasn’t blaming Quentin for anything.
“Doc, how the hell could you know what I was thinking?”
“You’re not exactly what one would call mysterious, Quentin,” Doc said. “As your kind says, you wear your heart on your sleeve. We’re here with you. Go forward and we will all face this together.”
Quentin glanced at the others. Game faces, each and every one. They were afraid but ready for whatever came next.
He stepped into the room. The others followed.
Inside, a few robots scurried around the room’s outside edges, where the curved walls met the slightly curved floor. A dozen oval-shaped doors dotted the room, like organic valves of some monstrous steel beast.
Ju looked at each of the doors, his eyes darting from one to the next. “I hope they don’t gas us like the Prawatt did. Getting gassed makes me fart.”
“Everything makes you fart,” John said.
“Be still,” Hulsey hissed. “Don’t talk — they are coming.”
The doors, all twelve of them, slid open, and Hulsey’s words from back on Rosalind flashed through Quentin’s mind: What you see next might be ... upsetting.
He had once thought the Ki, Sklorno, Quyth and Harrah were “alien,” and once upon a time they had been. Now they were just teammates, coworkers, friends. He had then thought of the Prawatt as alien because they were more machine than animal, yet he’d grown accustomed to that species as well.
The creatures that poured through the oval doors? The word alien had never felt more accurate.
They didn’t walk on the floor, they swung, glowing tentacles reaching out to wrap around a gleaming ceiling-rung, the roundish body arcing down and forward then back up again. No, not tentacles ... some kind of long extrusion, like squeezing a half-full balloon in your fist and seeing a bubble of it pop from between your fingers, or the toothpaste shooting from a tube if toothpaste and tube were one and the same.
Dozens of them flowed through each of the twelve doors, a pulsating, boneless horde glowing every color of the rainbow and then some. Patterns flowed across their bodies, up and down the random extrusions that acted as both legs and arms, across black-dotted skin — lines of red and blue and orange flowing one way, yellow and black and red another, green-ringed circles of purple expanding and contracting, even more garish combinations — far more than Quentin could track.
Within seconds, he and his friends were surrounded. Each of the bizarre creatures held what looked like a stubby rifle. Endlessly flashing colors reflected off the floor, the curved walls and the domed ceiling, turning the room into a maddening kaleidoscope.
“Quentin,” Becca said, “they’re beautiful”
Had he not been in an area of space from which no one escaped, and on a massive ship he knew nothing about, he might have agreed with her. The living lightshow pulsed and thumped, made it hard to focus on any one being.
“Stay sharp,” he barked, his voice that of the quarterback calling out signals loud enough to be heard over a hundred thousand screaming fans. “Wait for them to make the first move. Don’t do anything to provoke them.”
He looked around for Hulsey, hoping she could tell him what was happening, but she was suddenly nowhere to be seen — Quentin and his friends were on their own.
The Portath didn’t have heads, at least not any Quentin could make out, just the roundish bodies and various extrusions. And those glassy dots, they were blue, not black, the only spots of permanent color on the mesmerizing, shifting skin. Hundreds of them on each and every creature, some so small they looked like tiny jewels while others were as large as golf balls. Were those eyes?
As a unit, the aliens came forward, slowly tightening the circle. They didn’t walk as much as they flowed. Their central bodies extended protrusions, three or four at a time, tips pressing down on the floor and pulling the roundish bodies along like soft, squishy versions of long-pointed medieval maces rolling downhill. These weren’t fixed appendages, like a Sklorno unrolling a rasper then rolling it back up again — the creatures extruded the limbs as needed, then reabsorbed those limbs when their purpose had been served.
Some of the rubbery limbs didn’t reabsorb: the ones that held weapons. Portath guns had a different shape than Quentin had ever seen, but there was no mistaking the general configuration of a squat barrel — out of that would come a bullet of some kind, or an entropic effect to dissolve tissue, or an electrical charge that would stun, possibly even kill.
The Krakens instantly formed a circle. They stood shoulder to shoulder, facing out at the surrounding threat, Doc Patah fluttering above and in the center.
“Stay still,” the Harrah said, his hissing voice louder than Quentin had ever heard. “There are too many of them, we can’t fight our way out of here.”
“We could try,” John said. “They’re gonna kill us anyway — we might as well have a little fun.”
Ju’s big hands balled into big fists. “I like fun. John’s way sounds better. We’re Krakens, we should go down swinging.”
The Tweedy brothers were about to make a mess of everything — Quentin couldn’t let that happen.
“Don’t move, dammit,” he said. “If they wanted us dead they would have killed us already, so don’t give them a reason to change their minds.”
The ring of glowing, pulsing Portath parted. Through the gap walked Hulsey. Two other Humans came with her, a white-skin and a pink-skin, both wearing red robes identical to hers. They pushed a lev-cart before them. Atop that cart were seven golden chokers, fixed circles of metal just like the one around Hulsey’s neck, just like the ones around the necks of the two Humans.
An image flashed through Quentin’s mind, one from his childhood on Micovi: the shock collars worn by the indebted, people who owed more than they could ever repay. The courts ordered those people into lifelong contracts with their debtors. Once a collar went on, it almost never came off.
“Slaves,” Quentin said. “They mean to make us slaves.”
He squatted into a fighting stance. Maybe Ju was right — maybe it was better to go down swinging.
His friends clearly felt the same.
John and Ju started screaming obscenities at the aliens, begging each one they looked at to come and be the first to die.
Crazy George bent at the waist, put his left hand on his knee. He grinned, circled his right hand inward: come on, let’s do this.
Becca had her fists out in front of her and a snarl on her face. Quentin felt an unexpected flush of love and admiration for her; Becca, his Valkyrie, a warrior that would submit to no one.
Bumberpuff started to shake, his metallic body creating a rattling sound that screamed danger to all that opposed him.
Kimberlin spread his long tree-trunk-thick arms, making himself look as big as possible.
“We can’t kill all of you,” Mike said, his
bass voice booming off the domed ceiling. “But those few that live will remember who you fought this day.”
Hulsey stared, horrified. She held up her hands, palms out, fingers splayed, a gesture that said just stop, just listen.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “They don’t want to make you slaves, you’ll become trainees.”
She believed what she was saying. Quentin felt pity for her, that she had been born here and probably didn’t know what being free actually meant. Then the Portath ring closed in behind Hulsey, tightened, and those thoughts vanished.
He didn’t want to fight, didn’t want to hurt anyone, but there was no choice. Frustration and fear for his sister and his friends finally overwhelmed him, pushed all rational thoughts aside — his temper bubbled, blossomed, and this time, he welcomed it.
“Kimberlin makes a hole,” he screamed, his quarterback growl instantly galvanizing his friends, telling them that there was a plan, that they would act together as they did on the field. “Tweedys guard his flanks, everyone else protect their backs and follow them to the nearest door. Everyone ready?”
John ripped off his shirt and screamed. He flexed his rippling muscles. Obscene tats scrolled across his body.
The others let out their individual war cries, their barks of agreement. They would not be enslaved. They would not die on their heels.
The Portath’s amorphous bodies pressed in, tightening the circle like a throat about to swallow down a bite of food. Colors flashed, protrusions waved, weapons came closer.
“All right, Krakens, here we—”
A deafening electrical crack cut off his words as he reactively flinched away from a simultaneous blinding blue flash. It hadn’t come from the Portath — the light and sound had come from one of his own, from Cormorant Bumberpuff.
The Portath backed away, the ring finally expanding instead of contracting. They stared at Bumberpuff, as did the Krakens, the former threat and the plan to attack suddenly forgotten.
The Prawatt captain stood there, stumbling slightly, thin curls of smoke wafting up from his porous body.
“I don’t feel well,” Bumberpuff said in a weak, strained voice. “I felt this once before, back on Sanctuary ... when ... when ...”
Black arms and legs snapped stiff, stuck straight out from the X-body. Bumberpuff stood still for a moment, then slowly tipped, picking up speed — before Quentin could reach out and stop the fall, the rigid Prawatt clanged against the metal floor.
A sheen of holographic blue rose up from the center of the X, swirled and shimmered, wavered, then began to take the shape of a Human body. The head coalesced, showing the face of a woman ...
No, not a woman — the face of a girl.
“Portath,” the hologram said. “I am the Old Ones of the Prawatt Jihad. You must listen to me.”
There floated the blue-tinged image of a teenage girl with a pierced nose and well-sculpted hair hanging over one eye. A scarf hid her neck, the frayed ends dangling down past her waist. A strap ran from her left shoulder to the bag on her right hip, a bag that had once held a computer when computers were a thing people carried around with them.
Quentin stared at the hologram of Petra Prawatt: an uploaded consciousness nearly seven centuries old that had given rise to one of the galaxy’s most dangerous threats.
The Petra hologram looked around the room.
“There are enough of you here,” she said, her words sounding from Bumberpuff’s still form. “That’s good. Witness what I have to say. Can any of you translate my words for the Portath?”
Hulsey stepped forward.
“I can,” she said.
Petra nodded. “Excellent. First, however, an image that needs no explanation.”
The hologram of Petra sparked again, shifted, twisted. The shape of the girl bent into something else ... a starship. It floated there, a fuzzy image hovering a few feet off the ground, slowly coming into greater detail.
Quentin had never seen the like of it, not anywhere, yet the shape made terror flutter in his belly, made his heart hammer the same way it had during his days in the mines when he’d first seen a roundbug crawl from a shadow-clad crack in the rock. The ship was all that was wrong. The ship was instinctual, irrational fear of the dark hammered into mind-shearing reality. It was all thin jutting angles, all bumps and bristles and irregular biological shapes, an abstract artist’s rendition of a mechanical spider or fly or flea or misshapen centipede, were that spider/fly/flea/centipede stretched out, magnified and transformed into something that could hunt prey among the stars.
The hologram finally crystalized into a sharp, finished image.
No, not like a spider/fly/flea/centipede, something more delicate and yet more dangerous ... something like a wasp.
Almost as one, the Portath let out a hideous sound, the wheels of a ground truck screeching against concrete, a noise filled with anguish and rage and hate that transcended any language barrier.
“Hulsey,” Quentin said, shouting to be heard over the insanity. “What is that ship? Why are the Portath so angry about it?”
She trembled, staring at the image as if she didn’t have the power to look away.
“Ships like that drove the Portath from their own galaxy,” Hulsey said. “Ships like that nearly wiped the Portath out of existence.”
The hologram shifted, changed: once again a teenage girl hovered above Bumberpuff. The Portath stopped screaming — Petra had their undivided attention.
“Now, translate,” she said. “Make sure you get it right.”
Hulsey nodded. When Petra spoke again, Hulsey’s robe went from red to rapidly shifting patterns of color, patterns similar to the visual cacophony that flashed along soft Portath bodies.
“We have seen them,” Petra said, pounding her left fist into her right hand. “We call them the Abernessia. There is time before they arrive, but make no mistake — they are coming, and when they get here they will ravage our galaxy exactly as they ravaged yours.” Her holographic face wrinkled with fury. “The Abernessia will slaughter all of us, system by system. The Milky Way governments — including the Portath — must unify. Together, we can stop the Abernessia. We can defeat them.”
Quentin’s heart hammered. Somehow, once again, he was at the flash point of war.
The Prawatt god calmed herself. She adjusted her shoulder bag, swept the hair from her eyes.
Hulsey’s robe flashed madly, a crazy, endless pattern of colors and shapes and swirls as she caught up to Petra’s words. When Hulsey’s robe returned to red, the Prawatt god continued.
“Your kind fled the Abernessia once. If you flee again, they will find you again — someday, your descendants will run out of places to hide. The Prawatt and the Portath must forget about our conflicts and work together to stop this invasion. The Human, HeavyG, Prawatt and Harrah sentients you see before you, they are my messengers, my proof that I can work with other species. Do not harm them. I want them and the ship they came on to return to me, along with your answer.”
Petra’s hologram blinked out; she was there one moment, gone the next.
“Huh,” John said. “Guess she didn’t want to stick around for a kibitz.”
The Portath backed away from the center of the room, away from the Krakens. Quentin tried to watch them, tried to focus on the next thing he had to do to keep his teammates alive, but his brain was elsewhere. His thoughts swirled around one obvious, horrible fact — his sister hadn’t been targeted by the Creterakians, by Gredok, by Anna Villani or any of the other crime lords that wanted to control how he played on Sundays.
The guilty party? None other than the living god known as Petra Prawatt.
This had all been about getting Bumberpuff into the Cloud, in front of the Portath, where he could deliver that message. Jeanine’s life — and Fred’s — had been put at risk for this. Quentin’s predictable reaction to save them had been part of Petra’s play.
One of the Portath rolled forward, colors flashing
all over its waving protrusions. Quentin readied himself, felt his friends doing the same, when a second Portath rolled out of the pack, blocking the first’s path. The second one was larger, possibly the largest Portath in the room. It’s skin flashed madly, a hectic pattern of reds and oranges.
“Hulsey, what’s happening?”
She watched for a moment more, observing the exchange.
“The smaller one is Taker of Souls,” she said. “He wants to kill all of you. Bloodletter says you need to live so you can give Petra information on the Abernessia.”
Bloodletter ... Taker of Souls ...
For once, Quentin found himself admiring the goofy names of the Prawatt.
The two Portath flashed brighter, with increasingly spastic color patterns. They started screeching at each other. The first one, Taker of Souls, stretched protrusions higher, trying to make itself look bigger, just as Mike had done. The larger one, Bloodletter, actually shrank, compressed in on itself. Quentin at first thought Bloodletter was showing submission, but it wasn’t that at all — the Portath seemed to be in some kind of fighting stance, more at-the-ready than ready-to-surrender.
The screeching suddenly stopped.
“A challenge has been issued,” Hulsey said. “Bloodletter and Taker of Souls are both leaders of this ship. They will fight to see who wins.”
John clapped. “Sah-weet! Let them booger-bags mess each other up. Can we watch?”
“You must,” Hulsey said. “They are fighting over you. If Bloodletter wins, you go free. If Taker of Souls wins, you die.”
John didn’t seem as excited about that.
“Bummer,” he said.
The horde of Portath thinned, individuals moving to the oval doorways, reaching up to the rungs and then swinging off down the corridors.
Bumberpuff stood, helped to his long feet by Becca and Kimberlin.
Quentin glared at Bumberpuff, wondering if the captain had been a knowing participant in Petra’s ploy or just an unwitting pawn. If it was the former, it was a betrayal so deep Quentin didn’t know how he would react.
“Hulsey,” he said, “when does this fight take place?”