Daughter of Time 1: Reader (15 page)

“But we lost them. We are safe now.”

“Initially, I had hoped so. But the chip was able to broadcast even through that series of dimensional portals you led us through. We intercepted communications as soon as we entered Xixian space. Dram warships were signaled and will arrive here by hyperspace any moment.”

“Can’t Xix protect us?” I asked with a growing desperation.

“Not overtly, Ambra. We dare not risk the Dram destroying our home world. And believe me, they can. They can be
terrible
.”

My breath came in gasps. I was so tired from the journey that I could hardly think. It took an effort even to scan the near past or future to see around me. “What do we do?”

Thel again sounded sad. “There is nothing to be done. Our ship is without power. The damage from the Dram attack, and even more so the trip through the Orb, has left us floating in space, life support barely functioning. Before Xixian ships can come to our aid, the Dram will be here, right off the String from the Orb. We cannot fight, and we cannot run. We will have to be more clever than that. We will allow ourselves to be captured.”

“Why?”

“Don’t think that Xix has not been informed. They now know everything about our journey and will study the recordings of the Orb traversal. They will soon be convinced of your powers, Ambra, which are beyond even what I might have expected. But they will help only indirectly, or directly later when the time is ripe.”

“Time? We won’t have time! The Dram will kill us!”

“Kill us? Perhaps many of us, but not you, Ambra. They have seen what you have done. They will put together the information from the chip and the activation of an Orb. They likely already know that an Earth Reader, of potentially great power that they were tracking, was aboard a ship that traversed through an Orb. Nothing like this has been accomplished before. The Dram will do all that they can to learn this secret, to have this power. They will not kill you, not yet, not until they believe they have exhausted all avenues to gain this power for themselves. They will preserve you, Ambra, although they will not be kind. But you must survive! A little while, no matter what they do to you. I promise you, Xix will come. Somehow, we will come. You are our hope, and the doom of us all if the Dram control you.”

“Control me? How?”

“Don’t think of such things. Word is out. Xix will come. You must hang on, Ambra.”

A sharp rapping on my navpod window shook me out of thought. A Xix pilot was standing outside, motioning for me to exit. I stepped out and looked around. The ship was dark still except for emergency lighting. The crew was mostly gone. The ship did look wounded, at death’s door.

The pilot spoke. “Thel is coming. The rest of us are assembling near the entrances. A Dram warship has locked onto us, and we are being pulled into a docking position. They will be here momentarily.”

Just then a door beside the elevator opened, and Thel moved in. Thel and the pilot spoke in the Xixian language, and then the pilot walked off to the elevator and disappeared within it. Thel walked over and crouched beside me.

“They are coming, Ambra. The slaughter is merciless. They are killing all Xix and scanning humans for your chip, killing those who do not match. We don’t have much time, and I need to tell you something before they arrive.”

My mind was swimming. Why couldn’t we run? Hide? Something? Sitting, waiting for them to take us, it made no sense to my panicked mind. And something was forcing itself to my awareness, something ominous, something familiar. It felt as if the room were adopting some shape in my mind, a place I had seen before but had not visited.
Déjà vu
. Part of me knew it must be important, but I could not focus.

“Listen to me, Ambra!” Thel had gripped my shoulders, all its eyes bent toward me. “A last physics lesson to take with you.”

Physics lesson? Had it gone insane?

“Sentient thought is a
field
. A
physical
field like an electromagnetic field or a gravitational field. This won’t make sense to you, but it is a truth of the Cosmos. Now, grand unification theory marries all the forces of physics. Not as your scientists would have hoped, something far grander, and far more subtle. But a consequence of these two things is that sentient thought is coupled to the space-time matrix. The more sentient thought, the more complex it becomes, the more coupling. Advanced civilizations with many billions of hyper-intelligent beings can so distort space-time that this effect can be measured as small perturbations in the orbits of their planets.”

I was shaking my head, not understanding. This was all gibberish.

“Ambra, thought
itself
sends ripples through space and time. We of Xix had always wondered if this could lead to communication through the space-time matrix.”

I heard explosions and screams, the sounds of conflict and stamping of feet. I would have retreated to a corner and hid, but Thel’s strong grip kept me in place.

“Communication?” I could only stammer out.

“Telepathy, you would call it. But nothing mystical or magical. You sense distortions in the space-time fabric, Ambra. Thought contributes to this matrix, hence, with your great sensitivity, you can sense those thought ripples. You can
read
minds.”

I shook my head again. “Thel, no, I can’t.” The sounds were closer, louder. The elevator signaled that it was heading downward. What had called it?

“You can, and you
did
. Ambra, how did you bring us to Xix?”

“I don’t know, Thel. I just saw the way.”

“You saw a way through the Orb, but to where? You couldn’t have known
yourself
where Xix lay. Yet what was the last thing I said to you before we entered the Orb?”

My mind raced. The elevator had stopped below and had begun its ascent. There was no time left. Something was coming. “I don’t know! You said you wanted to go home once more!”

“Yes! Don’t you see, Ambra? My thoughts were strong for home, and you picked them up, needing a path through which to aim in the Orb. You
read
my thoughts, Ambra, just as you
read
the past and the future. Both are embedded in the space-time matrix.”

“It can’t be true…”

“Ambra, listen to me. It is. Don’t turn away from this! You must develop it and harness your powers. You will need all of them to survive what comes next.
Believe
in yourself, Ambra.
Survive
. You are what we have been waiting for.”

Suddenly Thel flung her arms in several directions, one of them striking me and driving me to the floor in pain. With a crash and a flash of light, Thel fell to the floor, charred and smoking, eyestalks filmed over and gray. Lifeless.

Behind Thel were several Dram infantry, weapons aimed in my direction. One stepped forward, raising a strange device toward me. I crouched lower, tears streaming down my face as I looked at what was left of Thel—alien,
other
, one of
Them
, yet my teacher, my healer, a force in the cold of space that cared for me. Thel was not indifferent or hostile. Thel was another thinking being that had spent its last moments to help me.

Tears for this death, and also for my failure to prevent it, dropped out of my sightless eyes. Now the vision that had been lurking on the edges of my awareness locked mercilessly into focus with the present. Now I remembered. I
had
seen this before, in my terrible vision of the future—a vision where Thel died beside me, the vision that had driven me to warn the Xix, and to find a way to pass through the Orb. I had seen this death and had opened the portal to prevent it as much or more as to escape the Dram warships.

But it had
not
saved Thel. My actions to prevent the future fit into the chain of events leading directly to it.
Why
? Because I had not looked closely enough. Because I had not examined carefully and considered the details of my vision. It did not console me that there had not been time, that the Dram attack was imminent and forced me to act. But in this it was clear that the future and its complexities were not to be taken lightly. I wept bitterly for my naïveté.

I examined the immediate present. The Dram soldiers put down a scanner and spoke in their hideous clicking language. Two armed soldiers raced beside me and lifted me harshly to my feet and dragged me forward in front of the leader.

“They are property of the Dram. Resist not otherwise they are eliminated,” came the clumsy sounds of the Dramian translator.

I went limp and was quickly hustled by the soldiers through the Xixian ship and onto the Dram warcraft. Along the way, I stared helplessly down at the bodies of Xix and humans, side by side, gunned down and left to rot by the Dram army. I felt a terrible anger grow inside of me, like I had never felt before, even after everything that had been done to me.

I vowed as their troops tossed me through the ship that I would find a way to avenge those that died, for what the Dram had done to me, to my world, and to all the worlds beneath their savage rule.

23

He who has a why to live can endure almost any how. 
—Friedrich Nietzsche

It wasn’t long before they came to question me.

I had been thrown harshly into some sort of holding cell, which, like the rest of the Dram warship, had been made simply, efficiently, and with such a harsh sense of purpose that it bordered on architectural cruelty. Like the underwater chamber on the Sortax home world, the same strange metals and luminescence embedded inside the materials characterized the construction. Armed guards were posted outside my cell, which was surprisingly open. There were only three walls, the fourth some sort of invisible force field that let in light and air but resisted firmly any attempts to press against it. The harder one pushed, the harder the invisible wall became. I managed to slowly press a few fingertips half an inch or so through the resistance, but that was all I could manage.

The guards never glanced in my direction with their eyestalks. They seemed to have no fears of my escape. I suppose dumb humans don’t score very highly in the “escape risk” column. And that pretty much was the reality for me. Soon I gave up and sat down in a corner facing the invisible wall, knees pulled up to my chest and my arms wrapped around them. But I didn’t cry. Something else was inside me. So much anger and determination.

Suddenly, a Dram officer appeared from nowhere, clicking to the guards, who deactivated the shield wall. The officer entered with a guard alongside. It was shorter than the guards, dressed in a less militaristic outfit, and it carried no weapons. Its eyestalks were surrounded with small bubbles that seemed to float around the central eyeballs but without touching them.
Hi-tech alien glasses?
I wondered to myself. The insect bent its body nearly in half, the lower abdomen and its legs parallel with the floor, the upper part of its body and “head” at nearly a ninety-degree angle to the rest, the eyestalks and little bubbles pointed toward me.

“They are it, which opened the Orb?” it began as the translator barked the broken English at me.

Thel had admonished me to survive, but I could not bring myself to reply to these killers. The insect head tilted left, then right, seeming to seek a better view of me and my silence.

“They are it, which opened the Orb?” it repeated. Still I said nothing.

Then it began saying what I assumed was the same thing over and over in one Earth language after another. After ten or fifteen of these repetitions, it began to get irritating, and I figured speaking to this thing was better than getting a tour of badly translated Dram in all of Earth’s tongues.

“English,” I spat out angrily. “I speak English.”

The insect was quiet, just staring at me.

“They are it, which opened the Orb?” it rang out again.

“Yes, for God’s sake. Now, can we move on beyond this?”

The insect pulled out a small device, horribly reminiscent of the one the Sortax representative on Earth had nearly killed me with. Before it could activate the scanner I shouted out loudly, startling the bug and causing several of its many back feet to retreat slightly. The guard partially raised its weapon.

“Careful! You have to use the
lowest
setting on that thing or you’ll kill me, and then I won’t be any use to you. I am a powerful Reader, and I am far more sensitive to the space-time matrix than others.”

“Applicable is this?” it asked.

“Yes! Try the low setting. You’ll see.”

The Dram officer adjusted the device and aimed it at me. I tensed, but it was not painful. A bit like having several different-colored laser beams flit over your eyes at very low levels. Compared to the Orbs, such simple, boring patterns.

“They are much highly cannot be measured.” The Dram turned off the machine. “Why negative the Sortax explain rather to us?”

“Because they are stupid squid-heads,” I added helpfully.