“Jesssss, light hurts us.”
“How did I get here? Where is this?”
“You are underground, in a bunker with a telepathic dampening field.”
“I can’t be stuck in here. I need to get out.”
Not even creatures on the moon could surprise me anymore. Since I’d met Kronos, I came to expect anything.
“I’m afraid we cannot do that. You are in danger, Jess. The enemy ships have surrounded Earth. The Devorans fight but they may not win. We cannot give up our location.”
“How do you know that? Who are you?”
The creatures eyes came closer to me. I hadn’t feared Kronos, so I wouldn’t fear this creature, I told myself. Whatever it was. The creature touched my arm and then I understood, all at once. They were telepaths. And as our skin touched, I saw a species that evolved from the same stardust as humans, except when their primordial soup was jettisoned to an abandoned orb, they’d landed here — on the moon.
They were smaller than humans, with grey skin and fragile bones. They called themselves the Fengari and our moon,Fengar. They looked like people except the crystals embedded in their skulls, their third eyes. The creature who spoke to me was a woman… Fryx.
She was a medic, and they’d rescued me when I’d come falling out of the sky. They lived underground and their telepathic abilities were strong, more potent than anything I’d experienced with the Devorans.
When she let go of me, she whispered, “Welcome, ssssissster Jessssss.””
“Fryx,” I whispered her name.
“Yes,” she smiled, “You understand.
Yeah. I understood. But I still needed to find a way out. A way back to Kronos. A way to let him know I was alive before he traveled too far away from me.
If there was a telepathic dampening field, and I could only experience the connection through touch, he’d have no way of tracking me that I could think of.
There was no way to find me, and no way for me to find him.
> I thought.
Even if it was too dark to see her, I sensed the creature nodding in the darkness.
FOURTEEN
KRONOS
There wasno sign of her, Morpheus told me. She couldn’t have disappeared into thin air, I countered, a point which he reluctantly agreed with, as if such a thing were in fact a possibility. She doesn’t know how to pilot a ship. If she managed not to run out of fuel, she could hardly exceed light speeds or navigate through the solar system.
“She must be close…” I whispered.
We fended off another attack from Taurean confederates. Support troops weren’t coming fast enough. Battling the Taureans was difficult. They didn’t fear death as much as they feared telepaths. They had very little guard against us so they settled for guerrilla attacks with heavy artillery.
The Taureans had assured us the confederates were a fringe group, but fringe or not, they were well supplied with ships and reptilian warriors who hardly needed sleep or fuel.
Devoran culture is a culture of peace. We left conquest in our past, and terror, and colonization, and misuse of our telepathic powers in a distant past that the Taurean guerrillas were intent on bringing out. We fought to defend ourselves or the innocent, not for the purposes that the Taureans fought.
After a few more attacks, we’d suffered damage to the lower decks and an issue with the engine coils that even a direct interface couldn’t fix quickly. The one benefit to sitting dead in the water with only one of our support ships lingering near by was that I had time to consider the Jess problem again.
Morpheus entered the bridge.
>
I nodded and urged him to my ready room where we could speak in private.
“What have you discovered?”
