For the Love of Gelo! (19 page)

“R
emember,” said the Vorem centurion, “this is what you are looking for.” He held up a sheet of parchment. It was a schematic diagram of a cylindrical object: a complex technological jumble of wires and coils and turbines with four curved tubes radiating from its sides. It was the same image we'd been shown every day for two weeks.

And so we set about our work. On General Ridian's orders, we were searching the Midden for a salvageable hyperdrive.

“I do not like this,” I heard an Aeaki hiss under her breath. She was heavyset, with cyan-and-pink plumage. An Eka, I remembered. I wasn't sure what she didn't like: being conscripted by the Vorem, being forced to work with enemy Aeaki clans, or desecrating the sacred Midden of Hykaro Roost. Perhaps it was all three.

From listening to the Aeaki chatter among themselves, we'd learned that as soon as the Vorem landed on Kyral, they'd started searching the Midden. Presumably, this was Ridian's whole purpose in traveling to the planet. He needed a hyperdrive to get back to Voryx Prime.

At first, emissaries from various Aeaki clans complained to Ridian about this violation of their ancient customs. As Eyf had said, once something was offered into the Midden, tradition dictated that it should never be removed. These Aeaki asked why the great and powerful Vorem Dominion needed to sift through the relics of their past anyway. Ridian gave no answers.

The next day his thirty legionaries rounded up two hundred Aeaki—both from clans that were loyal to the Dominion and clans that had never surrendered—and took them prisoner. From now on, said Ridian, the natives would do his digging for him. Whichever of them found a hyperdrive would earn an unspecified reward. Those who complained would be made permanent slaves. Or worse, disintegrated.

The Aeaki feared the Vorem, and so they accepted the indignity. Some were glad to see their rivals imprisoned. Others whispered darkly among their own clans.

Meanwhile, the conscripts dug through Kyral's past, looking for a hyperdrive that matched the diagram. Lately, they had been joined by four new prisoners: Little Gus, Hollins, Becky, and me. Nicki and Eyf hadn't been captured with us in the theater. Other than that, we knew nothing of their whereabouts.

Each morning we were led up from our coops and out into the Midden. Armed legionaries watched us, as we spent the day poking through the last remnants of a bygone civilization. The Midden was huge, a rolling landscape of offerings from countless generations of Aeaki, heaped dozens of meters high in some places.

Ornim and Chayl searched beside us. Despite the circumstances, I was glad to see a couple of familiar faces. In bits and pieces, I'd been able to glean the story of what happened to them on Kyral.

As the
Phryxus II
approached the planet's surface, it was attacked by Ridian's trireme and shot down over the jungle. Luckily, they all survived the crash landing. Unluckily, their communications systems were critically damaged—which was the reason they never contacted Gelo. They decided that Hykaro Roost was their best hope for repairing the ship and possibly still finding a nyrine quantum inducer, which is what they'd been sent for. But as they approached the city, they were ambushed by a group of legionaries. After fierce fighting, the three of them were taken prisoner. This was the last they'd seen of Kalac.

As I dug through a pile of ancient furniture, I could see the black skyscraper—the place Ridian had called his “palace”—towering above the other buildings of Hykaro Roost. Kalac was in there, somewhere. Still alive, I hoped. Lately, though, I was finding hope in short supply.

“Look, a toaster,” said Little Gus, startling me. He was prodding a shiny metallic object with his foot. “Wait . . . ” he said. “Guys, there's still toast inside.”

“Please don't eat eight-hundred-year-old toast,” sighed Hollins.

“Too late,” said Little Gus as he chomped into what looked like a black doorstop. His smile faded. “You know . . . I don't think it was toast after all,” he said quietly.

“Get back to work,” yelled the nearest guard.

The humans and I could talk among ourselves in their native language, as the Vorem had no idea what we were saying. Still, the legionaries wouldn't tolerate too much idle chatter. We had a job to do.

Nearby, Becky called out in Xotonian: “Oh my gosh! Is that a hyperdrive? Oh wow!” She waved at something under a mound of debris. Dutifully, the legionary took a look. Becky was pointing at an old bathtub.

“No,” said the guard. “That's a bathtub.”

“Are you sure?” asked Becky. “Isn't that the antimatter intake valve?”

“That's the faucet!” growled the guard. “Stop wasting our time!”

“Sorry,” said Becky, feigning innocence. “I was confused. Can I see that picture again?”

“No,” said the legionary.

Becky pulled some variation of the same trick at least five times a day. It had no purpose, really, other than to annoy our captors. She considered that an end unto itself.

“One of these days,” she said quietly in human as the legionary returned to his post, “I'm going to find an energy blaster in this pile of junk. Then I'm going to vaporize these creeps.”

“I doubt it,” I said. “No Aeaki would toss a weapon into the Midden. Not while there were other Aeaki left to shoot.”

“Come on,” said Becky, “you haven't given up that easily, have you, Chorkle?”

Another day passed without a hyperdrive. As the sun dipped low, the legionaries rounded all of us up to return us to our cells. After a thorough pat-down—they wanted to make sure we weren't hiding anything dangerous—we marched through Hykaro Roost in a long single-file line. Every twenty prisoners or so, a pair of armed Vorem marched beside us.

“I don't get it,” said Little Gus as we walked. “Why isn't Ridian looking for some sort of communication equipment? He could contact another Vorem ship to come and rescue him.”

“I don't think he wants to call home,” said Becky. “After all, he screwed up pretty big back on Gelo. The only thing he wants is to return with the Q-sik.”

“Where do you think it is, anyway?” Hollins whispered to me, as if the legionaries could suddenly understand his language.

He'd asked me before, and I had no answer. All I could do was shrug. I had no idea where the Q-sik was. I guessed it had fallen out of my pack somewhere on Kyral. This was, without a doubt, the single stupidest thing I'd ever done. When you misplace something—an umbrella, your keys, maybe even a Feeney's Original Astronaut Ice Cream bar—it might seem important. But the fate of the universe doesn't usually hang in the balance. I wondered if this was the worst mistake ever made in the history of Gelo.

The guards led us through the darkening streets toward our new home. Hykaro's skyscrapers loomed above us. But instead of going up, we descended broken stairs into the ground.

We followed a dark, moldy passage past several rusty doors. At last this passage opened into a vast underground chamber lit by a few dim Vorem lanterns. The remnants of gilded tile clung to the ceiling in scattered patches, offering no clue as to what the entire design might have been. Around the walls were six arched shapes, about five meters high and built of slightly different masonry. To one who has spent most of its life underground, they looked very much like walled-up tunnels.

This was our prison. Our captors had filled the space with rows of temporary cells. Each one was a box of fine metal mesh with a heavy door on it. Apparently, mobile internment camps were a specialty of the Vorem Dominion. As a dark joke, the humans referred to these cells as “the coops”—mainly because of the two hundred birdlike Aeaki who were caged around us. The sound of their squawking and flapping and occasional fights filled the air with noise. Our fellow prisoners were only scared into silence when a loud roar echoed through the chamber.

That was Pizza, locked away in his own cage. After the fight we'd had in the theater, the thyss-cat had been captured too. As Little Gus recounted, proudly and often, it took six Vorem to drag him down here, and he fought them every centimeter of the way.

A legionary opened the door to our own coop and waved us in.

“Home, sweet home,” said Hollins, stepping inside.

“Did you want us to fill out a timesheet, or are you guys keeping track of our hours?” Little Gus asked the legionary.

“Shut up,” he said. Then he locked the coop behind us with a little octagonal key that he kept on his belt.

After all the prisoners had been secured, most of the guards marched back up to the surface. They always left two legionaries to stand watch throughout the night. Whether these were the same two night guards each time was a matter of some debate. It was impossible to tell, as all the Vorem legionaries wore identical black armor.

We sat down and tried to make ourselves comfortable—as much as that was possible in a six-meter-by-six-meter wire cell—while we waited for our dinner. The contents of our coop were modest: a couple of woven Aeaki blankets and a plastic jug of water. If “nature called”—as Becky had said—you had to persuade one of the legionaries to take you out of your cell and lead you a little ways off to take care of it. Usually, you just had to hold it. It was a miserable place, and so it matched my mood.

Soon came the familiar sound of a squeaky wheel. Our food was delivered by an old male Aeaki rolling a rusty cart between the rows of coops. His eyes were cloudy, and his feathers were brown with faded highlights of red and orange on his wings and throat. He never spoke, and none seemed to know his name. The old Aeaki didn't occupy one of the cells, and he returned to the surface once his duties were done. The other prisoners despised him for being a “Vorem collaborator.”

The old-timer distributed the typical Aeaki fare—seeds, nuts, and berries wrapped in leaves. Twice a day, he pushed four of these packets through the slot in the door of our cell. We ate them eagerly. Picking through mounds of refuse was hard work, and we had nothing else.

Since our capture, we hadn't seen any sign of General Ridian himself. Neither had we seen Taius. I hated General Ridian, but somehow my feelings toward Taius were even worse. I tried my best not to think about him. When I did, such anger swelled in my z'iuk that I thought I might be sick. The others felt the same way. Yet somehow they couldn't stop talking about him.

“I totally called it with Taius,” said Little Gus, not for the first time. “Remember? Red eyes: evil. When I say stuff, you all should be writing it down.”

“You also said anyone who liked your soup couldn't be all bad,” said Hollins as he cracked hard seeds between his teeth.

“But did he like the soup? Did he
really
?” asked Little Gus. “Or was it all part of his cover?”

“I can't believe I had a crush on that guy,” said Becky with a sigh.

“Wait . . . you
did
have a crush on him after all?” said Little Gus, deflating like a punctured oog-ball. “Come on! He's not even human, and you voted against him, and he's—he's got pointed teeth!”

“Mysterious loner,” said Hollins with his mouth full.

“Shut up,” said Becky. “Doesn't matter anyway. When we break out of here, he
won't
have pointed teeth anymore. I'm going to knock all of them right down his throat.”

This brought them to their second most frequent topic of conversation: escape.

“If only we could sneak something down here from the Midden,” said Hollins. “A piece of metal or something. Maybe we could pry the door off its hinges.”

“How?” I asked. “The guards search us every day before we return to the coops. Even if they didn't, the two night guards would hardly stand by and allow us to remove the door of our cell. Not to mention the fact that the door looks like it could withstand an awful lot of prying.”

“All right, fine,” said Hollins.

“Maybe, when they're leading us back for the night, we could make a break for it,” said Becky.

“And what's to stop the Vorem from shooting us in the backs?” I asked. None of the humans had an answer. I will admit, I was hardly a font of optimism these days. And it was easier to shoot down their ideas than to come up with any of my own.

“Well, I guess it's up to Nicki and Eyf,” said Little Gus, shrugging.

Perhaps they were still out there somewhere, hiding among the ruined buildings of Hykaro Roost. Once, a few days earlier, I thought I'd seen a little white speck soaring high in the sky above the Midden. It might have been my imagination or a fluttering piece of plastic refuse, but maybe . . .

I refused to let myself think of it. After all, we'd had such incredibly bad luck—ever since the Core-of-Rock reactor had failed, now that I thought of it—why should I expect it to stop anytime soon? Nicki and Eyf were probably dead. Kalac too. The rest of us would be next. Then, after that, Ridian would locate the Q-Sik—wherever I had managed to drop it—and destroy the universe.