Chapter 13
“What do we do, Will?” Rayne asked.
“I’m not sure,” I replied.
“They can’t just leave us down here,” she said. “Can they?”
“Well, looking around at our circumstances, I think they’re in the position where they can do whatever they like,” I said.
“That didn’t help me feel better,” she grumbled.
“I’m nothing if not honest,” I replied with a shrug.
I looked up at the trapdoor we had fallen through again and tried to formulate a plan of how we could get out of this chamber if we really needed to. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that we could chisel indents into the thick glass wall and climb out of it that way. It would take ages, of course, and the glass was definitely not going to be easy to cut into, but if we were that desperate, then I at least had a backup plan.
Rayne let out a growl of irritation and sat down. She leaned against one of the walls and put her elbows on her bent knees, and then she tilted her head up so that she could look up and out of the hole. Bob came and curled up beside her. For an artificially made robot companion, he was impressively intuitive.
“We have a way out if we need it,” I told her as I sat down beside her. “But a part of me thinks that this is a test.”
“What do you mean?” she asked. “How can sitting at the bottom of a dark, waterless well be a test?”
“Maybe they’re trying to see if we really do have good intentions,” I said. “If we’re willing to give up our time and wait to speak to them, then they’ll let us out. On the other hand, if we start breaking things, they’ll either kill us or leave us to die. They need to know if we’re trustworthy.”
“I mean, they could have just asked,” she sighed.
“Actions speak louder than words,” I said.
“You’re surprisingly wise sometimes,” she said with a look of respect on her face.
“I just wish I came up with the phrase myself,” I said with a wink, and she laughed and jokingly jabbed me in the ribs.
There was no way to measure time down in the pit we were stuck in. There was no light, no clocks, and no movement that we could check to gauge how many minutes or hours had crept by. We sat there for a long time, and I even closed my eyes and shut my brain off for a while. I didn’t sleep, of course. I could never properly fall asleep in a situation like the one we were in, but I just took the moment to recharge my brain. I had a feeling it was going to be a long day.
Patience was a virtue, but it wasn’t always mine. After what felt like three or four hours, I started to get restless, and Rayne wasn’t far behind me. I got to my feet and stretched out my seized-up muscles, and then I started to walk aimlessly around our small cell. I needed to let out the extra pent-up energy somehow, so I ended up jogging in circles like a runner doing mini laps.
Rayne didn’t join in. Instead, she just paced back and forth. Apparently, patience wasn’t one of her virtues, either. She clearly wanted to activate the escape plan that I had cooked up, but she didn’t want to be too premature in suggesting it.
However, I was on the same wavelength by that point. We had waited for long enough, and it was time to do something more than hang around our cell.
I came to a halt and took out my gun.
“Finally,” Rayne said when she saw me.
“I gave them enough time,” I said. “Now, it’s time to get out of here.”
Instead of shooting at the walls, I was going to use the butt of the gun to break the glass. If I had used the laser or bullet settings, I was sure that it would have just bounced right back at us, so in this case, brute force was our main hope. With that in mind, I marched over to the wall and raised my arm, ready to strike.
“If you wouldn’t mind leaving the walls as you found them, that would be great,” a voice suddenly said.
I froze and looked around to see where it had come from. Eventually, I looked up, and that was when I saw the head poking over the edge of the hole. It was too dark to make out any of its features from this distance.
“We figured that we had left you in there for long enough,” the alien said. “We just wanted to see what kind of people you were.”
I glanced at Rayne, and she nodded. I was right about it being a test after all.
“Well, thanks for not killing us on sight,” I called up to them. “We know you’ve been through some tough times recently.”
“Well, about half of us wanted to shoot you before you could even set down,” they said.
“Which half were you on?” I asked.
“You’re not dead, are you?” they replied.
“No,” I said.
“Then you know which side I was on,” they chuckled. “Stand in the center of the room.”
Rayne, Bob, and I moved to the middle of the floor, and as soon as we were in position, the floor began to lift up. It was a bit of a squeeze for all of us on the small platform, so we had to clutch at one another as the lift slowly brought us back up to the corridor.
When we reached the top, Rayne and Bob hopped off first, followed by me, and then we found ourselves face to face with the first Kytr local we had met.
The alien was short. I was six feet, and the creature before us was barely pushing four. It was muscle-bound, with meaty legs and strong arms, and its whole body was covered in a thick layer of coarse, navy-blue hair. It had huge, black eyes that looked cute now, but I was sure they could look terrifying in the right conditions. It had two stumpy horns on top of its head, as well as two large ears that stood at attention like a German Shepherd’s. It had a small snout for a nose and a large mouth. It had large, callused hands, and big, shoeless feet. The rest of its body was covered in a black boiler suit.
“My name is Callora,” the alien said. “I am the Queen of the Kytrans.”
“Damn,” Rayne said with a grin.
“Are we supposed to bow?” I asked.
“What’s that?” the queen asked.
“Oh, it’s a thing we do on my planet if we meet royalty,” I said. “Not that that’s a common occurrence.”
“I see,” Callora said. “Well, there’s really no need for any of that.”
“Great,” I said. “I wasn’t sure how to do it properly anyway.”
“I see,” she chortled. “And you are?”
“Will Ryder,” I said.
“And I’m Rayne Trader,” Rayne said.
“Nice to meet you both,” Callora replied.
“That was quite the welcome you gave us,” Rayne said.
I shot her a look that told her to watch herself, but my partner only shrugged.
“We can’t be too careful,” Callora replied in a stern voice. “We don’t know who the Karaak are working with, or who they have conquered. We’ve been expecting them to return, but we’re not sure if they’ll show up in their ships or ships they’ve stolen from other planets. You know, so we’ll let them get close enough to the planet to destroy us.”
“Well, that certainly isn’t us,” I said.
“Which leads me to the question of why you’re here,” the queen said. “Thanks to the radiation around our planet, we don’t get many visitors, but you were willing to risk your lives to get here. The main reason you’re alive right now is because I’m curious as to why two strangers would be so determined to contact us.”
“Well, there’s a simple answer to that question,” I said.
“Which is?” she asked.
“We heard about the Karaak attacking your planet,” I replied. “And yet, you’re still standing here in front of us. We want to know how you survived.”
“Not all of us did,” the queen said with sadness in her eyes.
“But some of you lived,” I pressed. “And that’s why we’re here. We need to know how.”
“Why?” she asked. “Are the Karaak coming for you, too?”
“We’re currently trying to keep what little is left of the Lilacron race alive,” I explained. “The Karaak destroyed their homeworld, and only a few of them managed to escape. But the Karaak are going to come back to finish the job, and we need to be ready when they do. We also have it on good authority that they’re going to be heading for my homeworld not long after they finish with the Lilacrons.”
“I’m very sorry,” Callora said. “It must be a very difficult time for you.”
“It is,” I admitted. “But if there’s a way that you could help us, we’d appreciate it. Anything you could tell us about how to resist the Karaak could be the turning point for the Lilacrons and for my people.”
“Walk with me,” the queen said after a moment of studying us, and she turned on her heel and led the way down the corridor.
Rayne, Bob, and I kept pace behind her, until she took us around the corner to a rickety lift inside an equally rickety elevator shaft.
We stepped into the box of bolts, and Callora closed the door behind us. She then pressed the button on the wall to the right of her, and the elevator began to take us down further into Kytr.
“We used to have a population of eight billion,” Callora said.
“That’s about the same as my planet,” I replied.
“Well, now we have just under six,” she said. “We lost two billion lives when the Karaak attacked.”
“That’s six billion more than any other planet would have had, though,” I said.
“You have an overly positive outlook on life, don’t you?” Callora said, amused.
“Yes, he does,” Rayne chuckled.
“Hey, if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry,” I said.
“You have a point,” Callora said.
We reached the bottom of the elevator shaft, and Callora opened the door and led the way through a few more corridors until we reached a door. This one was actually visible and wasn’t set seamlessly into the rockface like most of the others had been.
However, instead of reaching for the handle, Callora looked at the wall on the right that was adjacent to the door. She pressed her hands in two specific places on the wall, and suddenly, a hidden door slid away.
“Where does the other door go?” I asked.
“Straight down a hundred feet,” she replied. “Like I said, we can’t be too careful.”
Callora walked through the secret doorway she had revealed, and after I glanced at Rayne we followed the queen into the room.
My night vision switched off as soon as we walked into the huge chamber. I blinked a few times as my eyes adjusted to the warm, bright lighting inside the enormous cavern we had found ourselves in.
Callora had led us to one of the mines, only it also appeared to be a kind of common area for many of the people of Kytr. There was a makeshift infirmary in one corner of the room, a canteen in another, and what had to be thousands of people that scurried around the room. Torches provided a bright orange light that bounced off the glass and gave everything a cozy glow despite the sobs and wails that I could hear every so often.
A small group of Kytran soldiers started to walk toward us with their weapons at the ready almost as soon as we entered the cavern. Their faces were lined with fatigue, yet their hands were steady as they watched us. But Callora waved them away, and after a brief hesitation, the soldiers stepped back, though they didn’t disappear completely.
I looked down and saw there were still tracks on the ground that must have been laid down by the miners, and when I followed the trail with my eye, I spotted more of the rails along the walls where they disappeared into various caverns. It would have made sense if the whole operation had shut down to accommodate the survivors who were hiding in the mines, but a moment later, a line of carts filled with black glass and black sand trundled along one of the tracks.
“Welcome to Kytar,” Callora announced as she held her arms open wide.
“Wow,” Rayne said. “It’s insane to believe all of this is below the surface.”
“Impressive, isn’t it?” the queen chuckled.
“Have you always lived below ground?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied. “But we have had to move a lot of our population to this hemisphere. The Karaak focused their attacks on the other side of the planet which caused a number of major cave-ins. Luckily, we’ve always had evacuation plans in place in case of emergencies, so we were able to move many of our people to safety.”
“Did you choose to live underground because of the radiation?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “We are a subterranean people. We have always lived underground even before the star of the next closest system went supernova. The radiation killed many of the surface species, but it has been beneficial to us. It keeps the marauders away, and that includes the Karaak.”
“So they didn’t find a way through?” I asked.
“Not quite,” she said with a grin. “The smaller ships were a complete loss. The larger ships were able to get close enough to attack, but they were limited in what they could do. Most of their power had to go to their shields.”
“It makes sense,” I mused. “Based on what we’ve seen of their ships.”
Callora nodded and then squinted at us. She chuckled and then pointed to me.
“There’s no radiation down here, thanks to the stone,” she said. “You don’t need to keep your protective gear on. And, I should warn you, many Kytran consider it rude to hide your face.”
I glanced at Rayne, who didn’t look sure, and then tapped the neckline of my suit. The headpiece retracted into the neckline and disappeared, though I left the breathing tube in place. I ran a hand through my hair and smiled at Callora, who looked pleased to see an actual face and not just a gray, anonymous figure before her.
“That’s better,” she said to me while Rayne took her headpiece off as well. “It’s nice to put faces to names.”
“So, was it just the radiation that turned the Karaak away?” I asked.
Callora gave us a knowing smile, and then she turned and beckoned us to follow her. She was very cagey about how they managed to beat the Karaak, and that didn’t sit well with me. She had firsthand knowledge of the destruction the Karaak left behind, and she also knew that the bastards were engaged in a quest to destroy the rest of the universe.
Yet she seemed almost reluctant to help us to avoid the same fate. But why? Maybe she wanted something in return.
It seemed immoral in my eyes to bargain with something that had the potential to save billions, but I had to admit that I understood her position. Her people wouldn’t have too much left to bargain with, and they must have been in desperate need of supplies, no matter how good their plans had been. The weapons they had used against the Karaak were the only real thing of value they had, so the Kytrans would hold onto that until someone offered something they felt was worthy of an exchange.
I just hoped we could find whatever it was.
“This way,” Callora said to my relief, and then she led us toward what looked like the infirmary.
As we passed the medical tent, I could see the place was packed. The groans and moans were almost deafening, and the people I thought were probably the doctors and nurses were running around like mad people. I could smell blood as well, and red stains coated the floor like paint.
Callora greeted a few of the injured, but she never stopped moving. She led us into one of the tunnels, which was too narrow for the mining carts, so at least I didn’t have to worry about tripping over a rail. The walls had been buffed and carved with various designs, and torches had been placed at regular intervals. It was clearly a hallway rather than a mine, a fact driven home by the soldiers that lined the path and glared at Rayne and I as we went by.
The hall opened into a large room that echoed with every sound. A long, oval table made of the same black glass sat in the center of the room, surrounded by chairs that were far too short for me and Rayne.
Six Kytrans stood around the table, locked in an intense discussion. No one looked at us until Callora cleared her throat, and then all six aliens turned to us in eerie unison. Three of them looked mildly interested to see us, but the other three looked ready to rip us limb from limb. At least we now knew who had wanted to kill us.
“Hello,” I said when no one else spoke. “I’m Will, this is Rayne, and this is Bob.”
Three of them nodded politely in greeting, while the others huffed in disapproval.
“These are my most trusted advisors,” Callora said, and then she pointed at one of the friendly ones. “This is Bysern, he’s my second-in-command.”
“Nice to meet you,” Bysern said.
“These aliens have heard about how we bravely fought off the Karaak,” Callora said proudly to the six Kyterans. “They are interested in finding out how we managed it. It seems the tale of our victory has spread through the galaxy.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that we’d actually just pieced it together based on the information we’d stolen from the Karaak, so I kept quiet. I nudged Rayne when she started to say something, so she smiled and waved at the advisors instead.
“That’s right,” Rayne said with a nod. “We were hoping to learn from your success.”
“What have you told them?” one of the older Kyterans asked with a stern tone of voice.
“Nothing yet,” Callora said with a quick glance at me.
“So, there is a weapon,” I said, and a flutter of hope danced inside my stomach.
“There is,” she replied and shared a look with some of her advisors.
“Here it comes,” I whispered.
“Now, I believe that we might be able to help each other--” Callora said.
“Seriously?” Rayne huffed in disbelief even as I nudged her again. “You’d rather trade than share? After what the Karaak did to your planet?”
“You would do the same in my position,” Callora snapped.
“I don’t think I would, no,” Rayne said. “I don’t think I would be able to handle having millions or even billions of deaths on my hands because I was greedy and decided to start cutting deals.”
“How dare you!” Callora suddenly shouted so loud that Rayne jumped. “Accusing me of greed! I would like to remind you whose planet you are on, and that your head is only on your shoulders as a courtesy.”
Rayne opened her mouth to reply, but I grabbed the Wildern woman’s arm and pulled her behind me. I heard Rayne grunt as she tried to wriggle out of my grasp, but I nudged Bob to block Rayne’s path.
“That’s enough, everyone,” I interjected. I understood Rayne’s frustration, but these people were devastated, and I couldn’t blame them for trying to leverage what little they had.
“Good choice,” Callora hissed, and then she regained her composure. “We are short on a lot of supplies, as I’m sure you’ve guessed. We have had to move six billion people into a hemisphere capable of supporting four at the most. We have hardly any medical supplies, and we’re running low on food, weapons, you name it. And because of the radiation, it’s almost impossible to bring in what we need. There is a space station nearby where we could pick up many of the supplies, but we still need to get it here, and we don’t have enough ships to do that.”
“And you think we can help you find a way to get those supplies to you,” I guessed.
“Yes,” Callora replied. “And it’s not just a matter of the ships. We need a safe route through the radiation that the ships can follow. We used to be able to map the radiation belt, but the Karaak wiped out most of the technology we used to track the waves. All we know for sure is that the Karaak attacks changed the patterns.”
“Oh, well, that’s no big deal,” Rayne muttered behind me, and I could feel her roll her eyes.
“If we find a way to get the supplies to you, you’ll tell us about the weapon,” I said. “That’s the deal?”
Callora turned back to her advisors. The other Kytrans looked far too nervous to actually advise her. It was a heavy decision, and to some of them, it might have felt like they were giving up too much. None of them wanted to be responsible for making the wrong choice.
But the queen knew that she needed us just as much as we needed them. She couldn’t turn us away now, and there was no way I was going anywhere now that I knew they really did have a weapon that could fight the Karaak.
“Alright,” Callora said. “Deal.”