Yes, Jace, Gehenna answered and Khoth could hear that her tone was small and sad.
Khoth must have made a slight movement, because Jace’s turned towards him. “What is it, Khoth?”
“It will be safer if we eject the bodies into space after Gehenna is done,” Khoth said, “rather than return with them to Earth. I fear your General Intoshkin may not heed our warnings about the dangers of performing autopsies on the bodies.”
Jaced nodded jerkily. “Yes, you’re right about both things. He will think we’re smarter and can handle this better than the Alliance. Or he’ll think it's just worth the risk to know what we’re up against.”
“I believe you know enough about what we are up against, do you not agree?” Khoth asked quietly.
Jace nodded again. “Some part of me wishes… with the Osiris greater technology--”
While I have not viewed all of the Osiris’ databanks, I found no indication that it’s function is anything other than a war craft, Gehenna stated.
“Don’t you know more about it? Weren’t you created by warring factions of Precursors or something?” Jace asked her.
A few long seconds ticked by before she answered, It is more complicated than that. I do not believe we have time to discuss it. We are already in orbit.
Jace jerked as if struck and his heart rate increased as did Khoth’s. “Well, we will discuss it, Gehenna!”
Yes, Jace, she answered, but was already moving in another direction towards the core, ostensibly, while the two of them started again towards the shaft with handholds that resembled a ladder. Jace braced his feet and hands on the outside of the rails.
“All the way at the bottom, right?” Jace asked.
“Yes,” Khoth confirmed.
He had a feeling that Jace knew better than he did where the cockpit was. He had only his memories while Jace had the AI. But just as he thought that, there was a little “bubble” from Gehenna on his HUD saying “FYI” and giving him the schematics of the ship. He thanked her, which got him a floating smiley face in return. He shook his head. Gehenna was… different. He wondered what her makers had intended her to be or do. Perhaps she was just a prototype model, one that had failed. Yet she had been imprisoned within the Osiris so that indicated she was dangerous. Unless the Osiris had simply trapped her in there itself.
Too many possibilities, Khoth mused. But we must get to the bottom of her and the Osiris’ origins so that we can control them instead of them controlling us.
Jace slid down the ladder and Khoth followed him. They went down three levels. Jace’s boots squeaked against the rails as he tightened his grip to slow his descent. Khoth did the same so that they didn’t end up on top of one another. As soon as Jace had cleared the bottom, Khoth slid down the rest of the way.
“Wow, ah, I don’t really want to touch this,” Jace was saying. “I don’t want to touch anything. It looks slimy.”
The young man was looking at a U-shaped control console that wasn’t metal, but appeared to be made of a segmented chitin. He realized as his suit scanned the ship, that what he had been assuming was calcanth or some variation thereof was not, but more of this organic chitin.
He recalled faintly from VI training that Khul ships were potentially grown as opposed to built. But since on a cycle to cycle basis he hadn’t had to worry about what the Khul ships were made of--the Precursor weapons took them down regardless--he had filed that information away in the deep recesses of his brain. He had been so emotionally compromised when he’d gone after Daesah, that he hadn’t even noticed this fact back then. Now, the skin between his shoulder blades crawled and he wished he remembered that training better.
“They grow this,” Jace was saying as he gestured around them. “Out in deep space, they…” Jace shuddered. “The Khul we’ve seen aren’t the only ones there are. There are others that use organic material, digest them and secrete this and other things. All the components, all the structures, everything we see came from one of them.”
Khoth nodded slowly. “In the early days when the Khul ships were examined it was theorized that they were organic, at least their interiors were and then they were cloaked in calcanth.”
“I would be amazed by what they can do, but since they’re just out to turn us into sludge to be used for their purposes, I’m just going to say that this is gross,” Jace said.
Khoth snorted. “I tend to agree.”
There was no seat before the U-shaped control console. The Khul were too large for this and their bodies were not made for sitting in chairs. Jace would have to lean forward considerably to adjust many of the controls that appeared to be joysticks made of flexible chitin pieces that glistened with a layer of slime. Jace suddenly pulled his arms close to his sides. His breathing was erratic again.
“Jace?” Khoth came up behind him and placed a hand on Jace’s left shoulder. “What is it?”
Swallowing hard between every few words as if trying not to be sick, Jace asked, “Did you know that there are pipes or tubes or veins or whatever throughout the ship filled with the larvae?”
Khoth froze and his gaze swept the windowless space--it was ovoid and the walls were crosshatched with what he had thought was a design, but now thought differently--but managed to say, “No, but that is all the more reason to get control of this vessel for if this ship is full of the larvae, the Hive will be full of larvae and fully grown Khul.”
“Right. Absolutely, right.”
His words had broken Jace from his horrified paralysis. The young man went over to the controls and--with an expertness that Khoth found quite impressive--started to manipulate the switches and levers as if he had been doing so all his life.
Khul language in red pictographs appeared on formerly blank spaces on the console. The Khul language had been difficult to decipher and, even now, it was believed that they were not fully understanding the deeper nuances of it as the Khul’s insectile brains were far different than most of the species in the Alliance. But Jace, at least insofar as those pictographs used on the ship, appeared to have no difficulty at all.
