5
Lornia’s pulse quickened. The machine flared into life, its lights winking and then beginning to burn steadily.
It was real!
The machine was waking, and that could mean only one thing: that a ship had crossed through the first knot of the wormhole and was now making its way toward Tralam.
It was true. The machine was coming back to life, resetting its systems and humming with an energy that she had not seen from it in centuries. Whoever was nearing the door, they’d come past most of the obstacles that the machine had set up to protect itself.
That ancient machine that was older even than she was.
Lornia swallowed hard as she realized, fully and completely realized, that she was about to come face-to-face with other beings for the first time in so very long.
Fear made her entire body tremble. The docking stations! They were above the fortress and the tubes that led from the docking station to the machine’s control room and the rooms and corridors in which she passed her time were now cut off from the fortress itself.
The beasts!
Did they still roam? Had she spent all these years believing she heard noise where there was none simply because she was so lonely and perhaps growing a little insane from that loneliness?
What if there were beasts there? Whoever was arriving at the door, they would be killed immediately by those creatures. Worse, they might arrive only to find themselves with no entry into the machines holding room, become discouraged, or believe that the machine was no more—and leave again.
That last part was what galvanized her into action. She moved fast, her nude body glowing in the dim light falling in from outside the fortress’ broken windows and air locks. She had to dress, and she had to find weapons. If those that were coming needed assistance, she must be there to provide it.
She paused, her feet stirring up a small eddy of dust from the floor below. Her brow wrinkled and thought and fresh panic spiraled into her, making her nerves tighten and her skin prickle with gooseflesh.
What if it were the humans?
What if it was the humans coming to try to lay claim to the machine?
Humans could not be trusted. They were the enemy of the entire known universe: all of them.
She should know. Her race had given birth to that race, and they had watched it develop from a toddling species that could have been capable of great deeds to a species obsessed with war and bloodshed.
The machine… Her eyes shifted away from the fading light and back along the corridor toward where the machine stood. The floor began to vibrate below her feet, a sure sign that the machine was growing in strength, crying out for what it needed.
Crying out to be released from its prison.
Her breath lifted and dropped her full breasts in rapid cycles of inhales and exhales. Her pulse sped up to a speed that threatened to make her dizzy and lightheaded. Sweat broke out along her high brow and ran down the long, highly knobbed column of her straight spine. Even her palms held a light sheen of perspiration within them as her fingers curled inward, her nails raking against that delicate flesh and her agitation.
If it were humans, what would she do?
Sure it was humans perhaps it would be better to do nothing. To simply wait and to see if there were indeed beasts willing to kill the human intruders as they attempted to make their way through the fortress into the room where the machine stood.
Where she stood.
She was the machine now. Not in whole, but in large part. She’d been implanted with so much of the machine; so much of it rested below her skin, and her immortality had been the only thing that had kept her alive during that ordeal.
Franchine’s insanity had been all-encompassing. He had been sure that if he could take one of their kind, implanted with everything that the machine also held, back into either of the closed-off universes, that he could not only live for all time, but that he would be the most powerful creature to have ever drawn breath.
And he would’ve been. That was why she had had to kill him. He had implanted in her the need to be obedient to him; he had instilled in her sleeping brain the order to never harm him.
But he’d been foolish and arrogant even in that.
His command had been to do no harm to him.
He had not mentioned killing.
It was a simple difference, but she had still been enough of herself, her brain had still had enough logic and reason as well as a motion to make that simple differentiation that had allowed her to overcome the programming that he had placed within her.
