Survivor (18 page)

She worked her legs but with each movement,
she sank deeper. She tried to think back, to remember. There was
something about sinking sand; you weren't supposed to struggle, but
she couldn't stop with the sand sliding down her throat,
threatening to drown her.

The sand was up to her arms. She was only
just keeping them up, enough to keep her nose free, enough to keep
breathing. Even that was getting harder as the sand pushed in on
her chest, constricting her lungs. She couldn't fight it
forever.

Her eyes stung with sand, which refused to
fall out. Her mind ran in circles. She couldn't face the thought of
being suffocated by grit.

The sand reached her nose. Even though she
fought with every ounce of strength, she couldn't keep her head up;
she sank beneath the desert. Nova held her breath for as long as
she could but it wasn't enough. Her mouth burst open and she
breathed deeply.

She expected the dry crystals to fill her
mouth, scrape her tongue, gums, and throat, and then gag her.

Instead she breathed air.

She opened her stinging eyes. She was lying
on top of the sand, covered in loose grains. They filled her hair
and every crease of clothing. There were crazed patterns in the
sand all around her; sweeping arcs extended out from her arms. It
looked as though someone or something had thrashed about on the
sand.

"Grishnak!" Nova cursed, slamming her hand
down. Another vision, a hallucination.

She laid her head on her forearm and sobbed.
She hated to cry, but couldn't stop it. She wept for her sanity
which she was sure was long gone.

It took a while to bring her gasping breaths
under control, at which point she pushed herself into a sitting
position. Strands of hair had come loose from her hair tie. The
wispy threads curled and kinked about her ears and down her neck.
Everything was covered in sand.

She got to her feet and ignored her burning
arms. The grains of sand had scoured her skin and left red gashes
down both sides.

"Cal, can you hear me?" she said. There was
no response. She held her breath, waited. Without Cal and Crusader
she was truly alone.

She was met with silence.

"Shit. Shit. Shit." She kicked the sand.

If there was something wrong with their
communicators again, she was going to find the merchant that had
sold them to her and make him eat them.

She made it to the trees and her eyes
scanned around the sand. There were no tracks or pieces of
equipment. Wherever the aliens were, they'd taken all of their
tools with them.

"What if they've already left," she
whispered to herself. She stared up at the sky.

Nova wasn't sure what she expected to see;
what hint the stars could offer her that the aliens were up there
somewhere, on their way to reclaim their rule over the
galaxies.

"Codon?" she whispered. Her only reply was
the cool desert wind blowing across the sand.

There was only one place she could think to
go: back into the tombs.

She pushed forward through the trees until
she got to the tunnel entrance. Vines dangled over the sandstone
and trees leant forward towards the open door.

"You move almost as quickly as the sand,"
she said, just to hear a familiar voice.

A weight was lifted from her shoulders when
she still saw no sign of the Ancients. She shouldn't really feel
happy, it meant that they were probably about to kill the rest of
human civilisation, but after the trauma of the last twenty-four
hours, she found it difficult to care.

She stepped into the crypt. Unlike before,
glowing lights didn't light her way down the tunnel. Perhaps they
were only on when the Ancients were around; without them there was
no need for fancy lights. It didn't make much sense for
bioluminescent colonies. There was so much about the Ancients'
technology that she didn't understand; she didn't stop to ponder
it.

The dimly lit sandstone tunnels were
familiar. She'd only been down a few times, but it was enough; the
way was burned into her memory. It was like scar tissue that never
disappeared. But like a scar, it was laid over other memories;
scenes from her childhood were marred, distorted, barely visible to
her mind's eye. At that moment, she didn't notice the missing
memories, much like she didn't notice the loss of skin beneath her
physical scars.

She kept an eye on the floor, searching for
Codon's footprints, while also searching the darkness in front of
her. There could still be Ancients lurking in the tunnels, or
something else. She shivered as she thought about the desert beasts
that might enjoy the relative safety of the catacombs.

Her gun was in her hand, ready to fire. She
was exhausted, half-mad, and probably beyond saving but it was an
improvement to the complete hopelessness she'd felt before going to
sleep. She was trying to accept whatever the time vortex had done
to her, wrestling with reality. It didn't come easy.

She came to the small room where the two
aliens with yellow eyes had spoken. She could see ghosts of them in
the air. She remembered watching them talk, connect palms, and then
one of them walk away.

As the room spread out around her, she was
distracted by the carvings in the walls; they were different
compared to the last time she was here, covered in a dark layer. It
looked like soot. The carvings were only just visible beneath it.
She stared around at the scribbled words and pictures of strange
creatures with heads as long as their legs and ships the size of
planets.

She was so engrossed in the panorama that
she tripped over a fallen brick and sprawled forward. Her arm
smashed into the ground and her gun skittered across the floor, out
of sight. Her hip landed on top of the glowball and its light
blinked out.

Nova's jaw smashed into the rocky ground.
She let out a hiss of pain. Her chin stung with the force of the
impact. She opened her eyes but couldn't see a thing. Even her hand
held up in front of her face was invisible.

She reached down for the glowball, but it
had come unclipped from her waist.

"Grishnak."

She got onto her hands and knees. She felt
along the rough ground for either her gun or the glowball. The sand
was rough beneath her palm, tiny grains making gouges in her skin.
The crystals wedged under her fingernails and coated her hands in a
fine layer of dust.

She went slowly. The last thing she needed
was to smash her head open on the brick wall. In the darkness, the
small room felt infinitely huge. She crawled for what felt like
hours and still didn't reach the other side. Sand sifted between
her fingers with no sign of her belongings.

She pushed forward. There wasn't even a
shred of light for her eyes to adjust to. There was just her and
the darkness. She was utterly and thoroughly sick of the planet and
of the Ancients. If she never saw another ever again, she would die
happy.

Her hand came to rest on something cold and
smooth. It was metal under her hand but didn't feel like her gun.
She pulled the object closer and ran her hands along it. It had one
hollow side. It almost felt like…

"A helmet!" she squeaked and tossed the
helmet away from her body.

Her eyes whirled around the room, wildly
looking for the rest of the Ancient. There was no sound of movement
in the darkness.

She took a few deep breaths and kept moving.
Further on, she found her gun. She clutched it tight in her hand
and brought it close to her chest. She didn't have to see it to
know where the right button was. One swift click and a beam of
light shot out.

It filled the room with bright white light
that reflected off of the walls. The helmet rested in the corner, a
shiny ball amidst the sand. Her glowball wasn't far from it,
nestled in a small crater of sand. She clipped the glowball back to
her belt and surveyed the room.

A carving caught her eye. It didn't belong
amongst the others; it had been engraved on top of some of the
drawings, a scar. The letters were chillingly familiar.

Put it on the podium. NT

Nova stared at the letters with a gaping
mouth. The words would mean nothing to most people, graffiti by
someone desperate to leave their mark. But to Nova, they
represented something more. The letters were her own, even the
signoff at the end. It was hers. Her initials were carved over the
ancient walls. NT; Nova T-.

Nova what?

Her heart constricted in her chest and
pushed adrenalin through her veins. She'd forgotten her last name.
Her breath caught in her throat as the realisation struck. She had
no idea how she could forget something which was so much a part of
her. Her name. It was the same as her home planet… another orphan
in the streets.

Tears welled in Nova's eyes. Her last name…
name. Same. Game. Tame. Lame. Blame.

Words echoed around her head. Thoughts of
her name were pushed out by the tumult of nonsense. She clutched
her head in her hands and squeezed her eyes shut.

That only made it worse.

She forced her eyes open, making herself
focus on the only point of interest. The words. Her words.

But how could that be? She'd left this room
only the night before and there'd been no writing. There was no way
her words could suddenly appear on the wall.

Her heart beat faster in her chest. The
overwhelming confusion and madness from the day before crept up her
spine. Her skin rose in small bumps and her breathing became
hoarse. A hand gripped her chest and squeezed.

"I didn't write that," she whispered.

"But I must have," she replied. "That's my
signature."

"Someone copied it."

"I don't think so."

She stepped closer to the letters and
reached up a single, tentative index finger. She traced the
letters, one after another. The letters were too familiar. If she
was going to carve on the wall, it's exactly how she'd do it, what
she'd say. There was no way for her to argue it, she'd left this
message.

"But when?"

She stepped away from the letters, whirled
around, and surveyed the room. Her eyes took in things they hadn't
noticed before. Tiny details which would have been so obvious if
only there weren't so many voices whispering into her ears.

"The lights," she said, spelling the clues
out to herself. "The dust and soot. There's no sign of anyone."

She whirled around in a circle. This wasn't
the next day. This was the future. It could be decades or even
centuries from the moment that she'd fallen asleep in Codon's
ship.

Her hands shook uncontrollably, sending the
light from her gun zipping around the room. A hard ball of panic
blocked her throat. Somehow she'd accidentally fallen into the
future. That was why Codon was nowhere to be seen. That was why Cal
didn't reply; his motor would have powered down years ago.

"They got out," she said. It was the only
explanation. There was no sign of the Ancients' bodies. They had
escaped from Archalon and made it to the rest of the universe.
There was probably nothing left; no Jagged Maw, no hunters, no
Confederacy. If Codon had succeeded in killing the Ancients, there
would be bodies.

"The helmet!" Nova whirled back to the
corner of the room. It was still there, glinting in the bright
light. She spun around, but there were no other parts. The helmet
was the only piece of Ancient left in the room.

She frowned, bent down, and picked it up. It
was only then that she noticed her hands. They were covered in
black soot up to her elbows. The helmet was similarly dusted with a
fine layer, broken up by her fingerprints.

"What the-"

She looked around. The layer of soot here
was thin. It was enough to dust her fingers maybe but not enough to
coat the helmet and her arms. The helmet had come from somewhere
else. Some-when else.

She hadn't been trying to break through the
time vortex, it was an accident. She'd tripped and fallen. She'd
been annoyed, but it wasn't the bone-crunching anger she'd felt
before, and yet somehow the helmet was here.

"An accident," she whispered. She turned the
helmet over in her hands.

A sticky grey substance coated the inside.
She curled up her nose, but reached her soot-covered hand in
anyway. Her fingers came away sticky, a mix of grey, red and green
strung between them. The flesh looked dead, diseased.

"Diseased," Nova said, cursing herself for
talking out loud. If she wasn't bordering on madness before, she
certainly would be if she kept talking to herself.

She looked again at the massive letters
carved into the wall. If she'd left that note, it was from the
past. Somehow, she had to make it back again. If she'd written it,
there had to be a reason.

What did it mean? Leave it on the Podium.
Leave what?

She glanced down at the helmet. There was
only one thing in this room which didn't belong.

Her head spun with the implications. Her
future self had left a note in the past, but she had no idea what
it meant, or why she'd leave it.

"So I know where it is," she whispered. It
was the only thing she could think of. For some reason her future
self wanted to know where the helmet would be.

She couldn't argue with herself.

She carried the helmet to the small podium
set in the centre of the room. She put it down the right way up so
that the insectoid eyes stared straight at the entrance door. It
looked like it belonged there, overlooking the darkness.

Nova stepped away from the podium and the
helmet.

She looked around the room. There was
nothing else. No clues and no help. She made a mental note that
when she carved massive letters into the wall, she would add a
sub-note, instructions.

"But I've already been here," she said. Her
head pounded with swirling thoughts. Her logic ran around in
circles.