7
The beasts! Lornia paused, her legs trembling with exertion and her chest rising and falling rapidly from both fear and that running she’d just been engaged in. She stood, back pressed against a wall, as she listened for the creatures.
The machine had come to full life now. All around her, walls had begun to twist and break away and fall into nothingness. Her terror was growing with each step. Soon the fortress would not hold any longer, and the machine would be freed from its long sleep.
The machine that had the power to open every door to every universe ever born and standing—and those dead and deserted as well.
The roaring and gnashing sound to her left broke her out of that reverie. She turned, laser at the ready. She fired at the thing shambling toward her and then she fired again. It went down in a blur of matted fur and teeth. Vomit rose in her mouth, and she had to swallow it down so she could run again, her legs moving faster than she had ever imagined that they could or would.
Time.
It was never on her side. Already night had come and another dawn too. Day was there but it was already heading toward a zenith, and she ran onward. Time sometimes stood still in Tralam, and while she knew it moved on outside those walls, she didn’t know if it had moved on too far, if they had already left or not.
Beings.
Faces.
Voices.
Faster, run faster!
She did, streaking past the broken and buckled walls and never daring to look out of them. The pull of the outer gravity was strong, and she found herself running but getting nowhere. Her hands arced downward and she screamed, a desperate and lost sound in the wind rushing inside the falling fortress.
She grabbed a handhold on one wall and then she went up the remnants of that wall, breaking away from the gravity and running with her body arced outward. That she was running on a wall, her body horizontal, didn’t occur to her. It didn’t even seem odd. She was fighting for survival now, fleeing both beasts and the breaking of the walls that kept tumbling huge boulder-like stones onto the floor.
The place she’d broken into had been sealed for so long that not even space dust had been able to enter. Everything smelled sterile and abandoned. The grit on the floor cut her bare feet, and still, she ran onward.
Night came. The beasts were behind her now, and perhaps they had given up, because she no longer heard them crying and howling. That meant nothing, and she knew it. Many were silent killers, or had been back before they had been walled off from the rest of Tralam and hit with the weapons that everyone had said would put an end to them forever.
There had been a few who had survived, as she had long suspected. They’d either not known to breach the walls or had been unable to. Tralam’s sheer size might have been what kept them from her; perhaps they had fallen into the usual patterns exercised by predators. Eat, procreate, eat the closest prey, and become prey themselves.
If they were capable of breeding, and clearly they were, then there was a high probability that was exactly why they had ignored the few survivors of that forgotten war. That and the fact that the rooms around the machines were the most fortified, and Franchine’s creations had likely devolved over the centuries rather than evolving. Their environment had probably not been conducive to evolution after all.
A phlegmy, ear-splitting scream resounded around the hall. Lornia didn’t have to look back to know what was coming at her; a killing machine bent on murder and feasting on her flesh.
There was a blocked door, and she raced for it, hoping to open it before she was caught. Her hands came out, and she ran toward the wall, trying to remember the codes she had stopped using long ago.
Her hands met the thick metal of the door—and passed through them!
A startled scream came from Lornia’s mouth. Her head turned, and she screamed again as she saw a monstrous thing with thick and scaly skin and a set of long incisors pounding toward her, its short arms outstretched and its far-too-intelligent face wearing an expression of sheer hunger.
Her legs moved, and she was through the door and running.
That confused her. The sound of the beast’s body hitting the door and that faint and angry roar from the other side made her blink. She paused, her body doubling over as she tried to get her breath back.
The beast screamed and battered at the door, but it held. Lornia backed away from it. She’d come to a part of Tralam that had little damage, and she looked around herself. The docking station was not far now, and she shouldered her pack a little higher before heading that way.
I’m changing. The machine’s coming to full life, and it’s changing me as it does.
No matter. Keep moving.
That voice inside her hard, diamond-sharp, and practical, couldn’t keep the bigger worry from coming up.
What will I become?
“That’s a dock!” Drake cried out the words as Talon slid sideways and away from the controls. Drake grabbed them and guided the ship, now limping badly and heeling hard to the left—and away from the docks. Talon found his footing and the two of them got the ship onto the dock and settled in.
Drake took a long breath. “Well, we’re in.”
