Pandemonium

By Matt Rossi

---

The sky was dark. Dark like crushed violets, or the inside of my eyelids. That was the first thing I noticed when I opened them, actually, because I had to blink and make sure that I actually had. There was an odd sheen to the grey-violet sky, light reflecting into my eyes from nowhere.

"Looks like you came through that in one piece."

I turned my head and my eyes slammed shut as pinpoints of fire blossomed in the black. Opening them was agony. I saw that he was wearing a helmet. The mask of it looked menacing, with a dark vitrium filter and a bug-eyed transparent plate over his face. Jannah's eyes (his really distinguishing feature... without them he'd be just another tall dark vagabond with a spaceship, at least visually) flashed with that strange verdant light that I believe reflects his untrained Electrokinesis.

Over his shoulder I could see the remains of the ragged old Blue-829 Bisklamons shuttle we'd tried to descend in, leaking fluid and shattered in ten places. It looked like a cockroach that had stayed too long in one place and failed to escape the descending boot.

"How long was I out?" My voice sounded alien to me, high-pitched from the helium managing to hiss into the suit.

"Ten minutes. The good news is that Ahriman is still up in orbit, but the bad news is that between the atmospheric build-up from that plasma storm coming our way and the complete and utter wreckage of what was once a promising shuttle, they might as well be back on Eisenschoepfer." His green glass eyes flared up again with that unconscious display of his Gift. It happened most when he was angry. "I can maybe salvage the engines out of the Bisklamons, which means that if we somehow find an entire rest of one around here somewhere, we could conceivably get out of this alive."

"What about the others?"

"Maybe two kilometers away. You were right about that plasma strike... I saw the ship take a direct hit from a particle blast, lit the whole thing up like a phosphorous grenade."

"We have to get to them."

"What?" He sputtered as he yanked me to my feet, nearly dislocating my shoulder in the process. "What, do they beat the sensibility out of you people in your Æon training or whatever? If you and that ISO Chromie weren't trying to beat each other here so bad...."

"Forget what was; focus on what is, on what can be changed. If we stay here, we die." I tried very hard to remember my first lessons, back when I was an aspirant Clear and studying the wisdom of Herzog. "Alone, you and I will die. Alone, the crew of the ISO ship dies, and none of us accomplish anything else. Together, the possibilities increase."

He snorted at me, his eyes the color of verdigris, but he didn't try and contradict me. Taller than me by a foot and obviously tempered in a more physical direction than I have been, I was afraid that he'd decide to use his strength to win the argument.

Instead, he shook his head wearily.

"I hate it when you're right. I hope you don't make a habit of it. We ought to get moving before that plasma storm hits us."

She was very pretty.

I wish I could say that didn't matter, that I made my decision to come along completely without noticing her night-sky hair, her jet black eyes, the rich topaz of her skin.

This would be complete Kani droppings, of course.

I was elbows deep in Ahriman when she arrived. God bless Alex Cassel and his legacy... of all the Jump Ships for my ancestor to have stolen during the great comeuppance, he picked a sweet one. Ahriman is a Tornado Wasp Jump Frigate, and it looks a great deal like a ninety-five meter Rhinoceros Beetle made out of complex silicates, but it can make planetfall.

Which means I can work on it without a suit, something I greatly enjoy doing. My forearms were slick with her fluids, gold and green up to the elbows, when Gunnar came running up to the pad.

"Nialamquar! There's a... she can... she's wearing a badge! And some fancy kind of uniform... she knew my name!" I looked up from the neural cable linkage into his skinny face. Like most of my cousins, Gunnar lacks the Gift and tends to look up to those of us who have it a bit too much for his own good. "Please come quick, Nialamquar!"

"Gunnar...." I didn't want to hurt his feelings, and I didn't believe him, so I decided to humor his whims and see what was what. "Fine, I'll be right there. If you see Timon, tell him to come in here and finish the connections before this packet seeps out."

"Right away, Nialamquar!"

The boy ran off like a puppy playing fetch, and I dragged myself out from under the great beast and wiped my arms clean, regretting for the millionth time the quirk of fate that made me Nialamquar, like my mother and her father and his mother before.

Nialamquar of the Nialamquar, able to trace my heritage back to a handful of trapped Orgotek, Legions and Norca who escaped the destruction of Earth... if you believed the folk tales. If you were more interested in the truth, my ancestor was Garbage Reclamation Officer Avril Jannah, who deserted the pirates of the Sixth Fleet and ran from the great duel between Verethraghna and her sister ships and convinced a score of friends to help him.

We Surge-Riders have a saying: Sons of Traitors, daughters of Heroes. We can only prove the first part.

Dreading Gunnar's latest folly, I stepped out of the dilapidated old barn we'd converted to a Maint Bay, and there she was in her immaculate Æon dress uniform, all gold and blue like a revenant from the old stories.

And pretty.

But I mentioned that part already.

"You'd be the 'Nialamquar?' My name is Jalines Pelikovchka, and I'm here representing the Æon Institute." Absolute imperturbility, almost like ice, as she looked me up and down. I know that between my fluid-stained cotton shirt and the ragged Sixth Fleet leathers tucked into my homemade boots, I looked every bit the pirate that the Autox say we are, and it made me damn uncomfortable.

"I'm the Nialamquar. Dafid Jannah Nialamquar, son of Serana Jannah Nialamquar, daughter of Aeson." I held out my hand in a very old gesture, palm out and open, showing her I was unarmed. It didn't matter that she could already see that; among psys, it's important to make the effort. "What can we do for you?"

"What makes you assume I want anything?"

"Nobody comes to Iron-Bringer unless they want something. Not even us. And we're from here. Besides, how long has Æon been gone from the Three Million?" That made her frown, and I pressed on for that gap in her impenetrable manner. "Even here on the Fringe, we hear things. Especially when it's the Tribes who do a lot to carry what little news is left."

"Since you seem to value directness, I'll be blunt." She walked right up to me and got in my face, which was pretty damn impressive considering I have at least twenty-seven centimeters on her and a little more than thirty kilos. "Have you heard of a planet named Pandemonium?"

"Big hunk of crystal right on the line between the Confederation-in-name-only and the Aquilans? Yeah, I've heard of it. What's that got to do with the price of Coalition erotic art on Qinshui?" She was so close I could smell her, faint cinnamon and lilac. Quite distracting. I could feel two dozen sets of eyes from my tribe all around me, weighing this exchange cautiously. What does it mean?

I was wondering that myself. The name Æon has a lot of weight out here on the Fringe, at least with those of us who still know it. A thousand thousand folk tales have sprung up in their wake, tales of the old Earth and the paradise it used to be, tales of the golden age of humanity led by the ideal message of the Æon Trinity. My own people like to tell stories of the death of Earth and our ancestors from the Norca and the Legions... and from Æon. Like all folk tales, they're blown up out of all proportion. And like all folk tales, it really doesn't matter; they have a power totally independent of the truth. As leader, I couldn't afford to succumb to their lure any more than I could to her.

"My superiors have discovered that the Aquilans have decided to allow an embassy of sorts from the races of the former Confederation, or as they call all of us, the fleshly beings. Only one embassy. As you might expect, Æon would very much like it if I am that embassy...."

"Ah. And since you aren't all that close to Pande, you need yourself a Jump Ship."

"Not only that. The Aquilans are said to be living piezo-electrical crystals, communicating through radio waves. There are devices that can translate their speech into sound and back again, but our reports indicate that the Aquilans find the delays inherent to the process to be offensive and inelegant...."

"You want an eek." I must have grinned like a starving diata, because I could see the smile reflected on my people's faces. They believed I was getting the best of her, but I knew better. She'd led me exactly where she wanted me to go. "There must be some reason you can't wait for an Æon ship or a porter."

"There is. Besides the fact that none of our people have ever been to Aquilan space, the ISO are also on their way to Pandemonium... indeed, according to my superiors, they have known of this opportunity for longer than we have. Speed is of the essence." She looked around at our rag-tag campground, at the barn with the Tornado-Wasp half-eviscerated, and back to me with dispassion in her loam-black eyes. "I have heard that the Ahriman is the fastest ship on the Fringe... I was hoping to see it in one piece."

"Stick around an hour, and you will." I held out my hand to her. "I suppose you already knew that before we had this conversation."

"I had a feeling." She had a firm handshake, but brisk. It was very discouraging.

Fortunately, I don't discourage easily.

The plasma storm decided not to wait.

The trailing edge of it slammed down on us just as we reached the ISO ship.

If you've never seen a Pandemonium plasma storm... and I know you haven't, unless you are one of two people other than me... avoid the experience. First comes the wind. Or what is called the wind, although calling it such is to display a mastery of understatement.

It's full of shattered crystal moving at up to three hundred kilometers an hour. In the first five minutes, the vitrium surface of our HE Suits was peeled of all added pigments, scarred and pitted from hundreds of impacts.

"Jalines." Jannah yelled over the howling winds, our comm-units useless even at close range with the building interference from the storm. "The energy in the air is like a goddamn EMP already... if a strike lands, there's not much I can do about it."

"What good would going back do?"

"At this point, not squat. How are you hanging on?"

"Splendidly, if it weren't for the fact that I'm talking like Cobalty the Chromatic!"

"Beg pardon?"

"Never mind... it was a synth holoshow I used to watch when I was a child. You shouldn't even ask." I noticed the sound at that point. It wasn't even a sound, exactly... underneath the horrible sound of quartz against vitrium there was a deep ululation that made my suit thrum along with the ground.

I am not trained well enough to truly know the future, but like all Clears, I know that occasional flashes can come whether they are wanted or not. This was one of those times; I knew that a subsonic vibration was going to make the ground under his feet explode and kill him.

I knew this, and so I acted. I leapt, wrapping my arms around his waist and throwing as much force as I could into the leap. Behind us, the sound became audible as it built in force, and the first explosion started. Crystal flung itself into the air and refracted light in great shining arcs, scintillating fields of every color there is.

It was so beautiful I forgot it was going to kill me.

To speak like a human requires a device that I do not like; it is inelegant and fails to convey so much nuance. I prefer the language of photons, of frequency and wavelength. So much can be said with a few subtle shades of red. But to be understood, I make the sacrifice and speak like a human.

I am Wideeye Starfinder, and I serve the Interstellar Scientific Organization in my own way, with the gifts of my intellect. I am a scientist.

It is my greatest desire to know the stars. And now, to know that they forgive me.

Things were fine at first. We heard of the Aquilan decision to allow a group of those composed of flesh to meet with them. Having never seen an Aquilan (no one alive has; the last to see one was Connal Nalmat, centuries ago) I was deeply intrigued. My superior, Preceptor Jjhe-Gru, felt that I was the appropriate choice for leader of the mission, for my native language of light was closer to their radio speech than any other within our ranks. I was ordered to be the one to make this contact at any and all costs.

Great Shining Ones, that I had not listened to her words.

Although bearing the envy of my fellows was difficult, I ignored it, and even asked Jaltos to join us as my navigator. As a Phyle of the Coalition races, he was familiar with the engines.

I was granted a Lyudmov craft, powered by an old but reliable starfall drive, and assured of our lead I ordered Irin-jha to set course to Pandemonium.

We arrived, upon which I ordered the ship into a high orbit... and not five hundred seconds later, a Tribal Jump-Frigate opened a Tesser portal into Aquilan space in a lower orbit than our own!

My lights flared, I was so stunned. Irin-jha, my Security Officer and a most formidable Qin female, actually exclaimed. I felt myself becoming saffron, and I struggled to compose myself so that my disquiet would not be visible.

"Brigands." Jaltos hissed, his entire body achieving a vibration that made him look rather fearsome. I often wonder about his species; which Phyle is he, exactly? "We should wipe them from space."

"Incorrect; that is a Tornado-Wasp of Sixth Confederation Space Fleet commission, and it outguns us. Combat is not the path we should take." Irin-jha 'looked' at me from inside her war-biosuit with fluid ease, as harmonious as she could manage considering the circumstances. "They are signaling us."

"Let us talk with them, then."

The imager created a perfect recreation, but not of what I was expecting. There was a large human male wearing a Sixth Fleet uniform that had obviously been mended repeatedly and with little regard towards maintaining its beauty, but he sat in the command chair and did not address us. The shorter human in the gold and blue clothing, of a style I did not recognize, she spoke.

"I am Jalines Pelikovchka of the Æon Institute. May I ask who I address?"

I took a few moments to look at her with my front eyes. She had a rigid bearing, and looked young to me, too young to speak for the semi-legendary Æon.

"Being... my pardons, as my translator does not always meet the demands of the speech-sounds. I am Wideeye Starfinder, and this craft flies as directed by the Interstellar Scientific Organization."

"Ah." She looked unsurprised, which she most assuredly was not. "I don't suppose you would be willing to depart and allow us to make first contact with the Aquilans?"

"My apologies, but as we arrived first, why should we not be the ones to establish a linkage? I see no reason to leave." I felt myself going aquamarine, my skin-lights brightening. They were closer than we were! They were going to beat us to the Aquilans!

"My race is not one that easily accepts defeat. Ask anyone." I looked over at Jaltos and Irin-jha, trying to decide what to do.

"Well, stay if you want to. As soon as the atmosphere relents, Captain Jannah tells me we can be landing this ship right at the base of the Egg-Orbital on the southern landmass. I believe that craft is a Lyudmov Trawler... and if I'm not mistaken, they don't normally make planetfall very easily, do they?" Her smug slit-eyed face went right up my spinal tubes. And that is when I made my error. I had worked with Irin-jha before, and I held her in high enough regard that I'd taught her some basic colors.

So I flashed a few of them at her.

"Easily or not, I am going to be the first to make contact with the Aquilans, woman of Æon." I turned my attention to my crew, just as Irin-jha pressed the attitude control, and the entire trawler shuddered.

The image of the Æon woman was saying something, but I confess I had no idea what it was. I was busy.

We fell into the atmosphere like a stone into a pool, if that stone were being flung. Irin-jha strained to alter our angle of attack so that we wouldn't be consumed by re-entry friction, and Jaltos grinned at me from his elongated maw with what looked to be triumph. There was no time for me to request an explanation of what the triumph was.

"I've thrown all the reaction mass into the rocket drives, so we'll have exhausted our fuel supply in ten minutes... by then we'll have entered the upper atmosphere." Irin-jha's featureless glass 'face' did nothing to convey her mood. "We have to gamble on making a landing, or gamble on being able to alter our angle enough that the atmosphere skips us back into space."

"No choice at all." My translated 'voice' sounded tinny and flat to me, conveying so little of the meaning of my lights. "We skip, the hull shatters. Land or die." I tried to get a passable scan of the planet, but the atmosphere was all agitated helium crashing in great storms that released enormous electrical charges, creating a kind of ionized plasma, and everything was a stream of conflicted colors.

When I looked through my side eyes, Jaltos' grin was gone. And looming, filling the forward view, deep black-purple clouds waited for us with blazing blue and yellow teeth, crackling about the edges of the storm.

I panicked.

I don't like admitting that, but it's a fair assessment. I was lying on my back with Jalines laying across my legs (that part, I didn't mind so much) and I could practically taste the electromagnetic surge building up.

So just as the damn thing was about to kill us, I let loose with an EMP, and I put a lot of myself into it... the eek equivalent of a howl of outrage. The two fields hit each other and nearly blasted the grey bits out of the inside of my skull, but it was a lot better than letting the particle fountain cook us.

"That was... impressive."

"Not really." I dragged myself to my feet, my head humming along with the sheer power of the planet. It was almost seductively active, a magnetosphere the likes of which I'd never really encountered before. The occasional full-body shiver kept sweeping from my head down, like a whetstone scraping against vanadium steel. "I'd ask how you knew that was coming, but that would be silly of me. How far to the ship?"

Her eyelids flickered for a moment, making me think of years and years ago when I slept with my siblings in the children's pads, when my mother was Nialamquar. My sister Mercy's eyes used to move around like that when she slept.

"This way. It's not far."

"Anyone left alive?"

"Hard to say. Too much going on around us; it makes the threads intersect, and I can't follow them...." She stopped explaining and cocked her head to the side. "I suppose you don't really care about the explanation."

"Bingo. Let's walk... and let's hurry about it."

It didn't take long, even with the occasional upsurge in background radiation or more subsonic vibrations setting the crystals to exploding. Now that we knew that they were there, it was easier to tell that they were going to happen.

Then I crested a rise of dark grey stone flanked by ten pillars of crystalline Gallium Arsenide, and the great hulk of the Lyudmov was before us. The ISO symbol on its hull was a scintillating emerald, and the belly of the beast was submerged in shattered rocks and jagged quartz. Dozens of gouges and scrapes testified to the rough landing; it looked like Leviathan with his spine cracked in five places. Even worse, there were more than two dozen blisters from atmospheric plasma strikes visible, and I was sure there were more hidden beneath it.

I know energy. The inside of that ship had been heated up till the air burned away the lining of the crew's lungs or the vitreous humors of their eyes.

It was a killing field.

"We're here." I looked back over my shoulder at her, wondering if she'd ever seen a dead body, knowing she was about to see quite a few. "Maybe I should go in first...."

"No. This was my idea, remember?" She walked past me, heading down the slight hill towards the ISO ship. "Let's get this over with."

Their screams had been so... boring.

I am not insensitive to the horror of their deaths. They were, after all, my crew. Some of them, like Jaltos and Irin-jha, I had known for years. But the sound of their deaths was this thin sound, like boiling water escaping a steam vent, not at all like the brilliant full-spectrum pulsations of one of my people when the nervous system begins to fire rapidly and the light strobes, testifying to the rich life of the victim and how much more she would do if given the chance.

A scream, at one uniform pitch and at maximum volume... how can that compare?

I do not remember much of what happened after Irin-jha managed to get the angle of descent aligned with the atmosphere. Jaltos had screamed something about 'They'll follow us!' but he had been wrong.

Not as wrong as I had been.

When we flew into the storms, I learned exactly how wrong that was.

They tore the ship apart, blasted pure electrons peeled away from the helium atoms into the hull, smashed waves of positively charged helium ions in a hideous plasma that burned their way through the hull and blasted half of my crew dead in the first ten seconds.

From there, all is pain. Pain and a great sorrow. They trusted me, and I killed them. Killed them for my ambition.

Lying underneath the body of my friend Irin-jha, protected from death by that last unselfish act yet pinned underneath the remains, I waited for death.

It was not granted me.

With the sound of metal detaching from metal, the iris- door to the bridge fell inward as they pulled the emergency release. The sound of their glass boots against the metal of the floor caused me a new surge of pain, and I wept from all four eyes at the realization that Irin-jha would never make that sound again.

A beam of light accused me with its photons as the man swung his palm in my direction.

"Hey, over here! The Captain's alive."

They stomped over, their feet ringing high and clear, and each step made me want death. The female tended to my wounds with her hideously small face filling my front field of view, her tiny eyes like wheels of blackness surrounded and supported by stellar flux, tiny sunspots that almost compensated for the flat expanse of her face and her wretchedly skinny pointy nasal limb, her flat white teeth occasionally visible from behind her excruciatingly thin slit of a mouth.

"How do you feel?"

"Leave me. You have won... the Aquilans are waiting."

"They can wait longer. And without your help, none of us are going anywhere, so it's pointless to sit here and feel guilt. Unless you want to indirectly help kill me and Jannah." Her clarity of vision shamed me.

I nodded my head weakly and allowed her to check my wounds. My lower legs were burned, and I felt a few cracked bones throughout my body, but compared to the rest of my crew I was fortunate. Thirty-seven dead.

While she tended to me, her companion busied himself amidst the control systems.

"There's no way this ship's salvageable. Pretty much every single system on it is currently a mass of melted components fused together. How is he?"

"I... shall live. You may address me directly."

The male walked over to me, a rather interesting flare of green light erupting from his eyes, and helped the female lift me from the floor.

"Okay, then... since I know that you're more or less in one piece, how about helping me figure out what supplies you've got on board and how they can keep us alive?"

I flashed green back at him. He seemed to take it as an affirmative.

I have spent most of my life in training for the day when I and my fellows would return the banner of the Æon Institute to the worlds our ancestors left behind. I have studied anthropology, exo-biology, sociology, diplomacy and worked to perfect my Gift, spending hour after hour struggling for the unbroken line, the most exact vision possible.

However, I never experienced anything like seeing a rogue frigate pilot and a Chromatic scientist cobble together a rocket sled from a Lyudmov Trawler's escape pods and a Bisklamons shuttle's engines.

"Okay." Jannah sat in the back of the pod, the exposed wiring from each engine within reach of his hands. Due to the plasma strikes that crippled the ISO ship, he'd found it impossible to wire the engines into the pod's systems. This meant he had to become those systems. "You'll have to pilot the pod manually according to Jalines' sight while I provide the engines with enough power to burn through the reaction mass. Everything set?"

Starfinder pulsated in a green and orange pattern, and the patch on his coat translated.

"You are aware that once you engage the engines, this becomes the equivalent of a missile? There will be no way to stop if we miscalculate the course."

"Then I'd like to request that you don't mess up the math, Starfinder."

"Actually, I think I know a way to stop the pod. It won't be a fast way, but it might work." The two of them looked at me, utterly at a loss, and I took a moment to savor it. The cramped matte-black interior of the pod made me feel slightly claustrophobic, and any measure of relief was welcome. "Have either of your ever heard of a human named Magellan?"

They shook their heads.

"Here's what we need to do."

The human named Jannah and I constructed makeshift attitude controls for the pod... which was never intended to travel in a horizontal manner... and put Jalines Pelikovchka's suggestion into effect, bolting the makeshift package just above the rear accessway panel.

Then it was time.

Sweating inside the tight confines, I brought the micro- thrusters on line and built up a slow pressure within the air tanks, waiting for them to achieve tolerance kilogram per square centimeter.

When we achieved it, I flashed white along my back.

In the reflective black of the view-portal, I could see an elongated reflection of Jannah... who was already fairly stretched out for a human... as he reached out and grabbed the two cobbled-together power transfer devices.

Then the entire capsule lit up in blue and yellow as he discharged electrical energy he'd stored up from the atmosphere, effectively becoming a converter that directed the planet's enormous stores of energy into the rockets.

A roar like a Mgitu airwhale forcing air through itself, and red light flooded the pod right through the walls, so bright and warm that it seemed to be reciting the third act of my favorite play, Crimson-yellow-carnelian-orange.

Then... we moved.

The ride was... unpleasant. The din of the engines, the sound of the polymer hull of the pod scraping against the quartz of the planet, the vibration riding up my torso and penetrating every one of my wounds to the accompaniment of savage, grinding pain.

Behind me, I could hear Jannah grunting as the energy he channeled attempted to feed back into him. Jalines, for her part, kept tapping the attitude controls while keeping her eyes shut tight, a disconcerting image to say the least. We shuddered our way through the desert of quartz in this fashion for some one hundred and ninety seven seconds, constantly increasing in speed and barely avoiding the exploding fountains of energy and crystal or the iron pyrite dunes. Once we broke the barrier created by the air resisting us and moved beyond the speed of sound, the shockwave created a field of powdered crystal all around us, and a halo of soft indigo light filled the view.

The rockets finally ran out of fuel, screaming in a constantly ascending way that made my digestive slit ache against my breast, and with a final burst of energy Jannah sent lightning down his forearms and into the explosive bolts we'd placed around the mounts.

Anticlimactically, the sound of the rockets had so deafened me that I could not hear them blast away. There was still a great deal of unpleasant sound, but blessedly, I could no longer hear it, merely feel it as it ground my injured joints together. This continued for another five minutes.

I saw Jalines turn and shout something to Jannah, who was covered in sweat and looked somewhat deflated, but he nodded and I can only assume that he could hear her.

Ahead of us... a tower of opalescent fibers, like spun diamond, stretched up into the sky and dominated the horizon. I had never seen such a structure in my life; it was titanic, yet paled in comparison to the huge spike and spine encrusted globe that it mated to. Inside it, tens of thousands of lights could be seen moving from point to point, as if it were a giant of my race attempting a song.

We were headed right at it.

I forgot that my translator device had a limit to how fast it could convert my lights to speech at this point, which is just as well. For I am sure that what I said wouldn't have been appreciated, and I really don't know if there were Aberrants in Jannah's family.

Even if there were, I'm sure they never engaged in that kind of activity.

Jannah reached back and slammed his fist into the makeshift pad I'd latched on, and the restraining belt sliced in half. There was a tense five seconds where I became intensely afraid that the idea would prove untenable and we would die when the pod crashed into the Egg-Orbital's tether at several hundred kilometers an hour.

Then the deceleration yanked at the pod, throwing us all forward... except for Jalines, of course, who knew it was coming... and we began to slow.

"I told you it would work!" Over the buzzing in my head, I could hear her yelling.

I did not feel the need to respond.

Somewhere between deploying the jury-rigged solar sail from the back of the pod (it tore off ten seconds later, but by then it had slowed us down enough for friction to do the rest) and the pod finally coming to a stop, I blacked out.

I woke up to Starfinder's clawed hand wrapped around my shoulder, shaking me. Not a good feeling, even through my leathers, and if I wasn't already so drained that I felt like a discarded charge pack, I probably would have jumped.

He flashed several colors at me, and the translator squawked.

"Are you intact, Dafid Jannah Nialamquar?"

"Gunnar, when I wake up I'm going to kick your teeth in." Granted, it's hard to tell with a Chromie, but I'm pretty sure he didn't expect that answer. Jalines poked up around his shoulder.

"He's fine."

"Are you sure? His answer made no sense...."

"Trust me, he's fine." She stepped over to the exit panel and began putting on her HE suit. "C'mon... we have to get dressed."

"You know, that's what I love about you, Jalines... you're so sentimental."

"Judging by where your eyes go, I would have guessed it was my hindquarters." She tossed my suit to me. "Get dressed, already... we have a bit of walking to do."

She's a sweetheart, isn't she?

Of course, I did look at her backside the whole time I got dressed. I didn't say she wasn't perceptive.

Outside the ship, blown grit was carried by in what was a light wind for Pandemonium. It was merely a hundred and twenty kph or so, just enough to make every step a struggle. I held my hand up, palm in a cup, and caught what appeared to be grains of gold. The shine was a little off, though, and I suspected it was iron pyrite.

The pillar was a few hundred meters away. I and Starfinder walked together, mainly because I had to carry him due to his mangled right leg, and Jalines took the lead and steered us around a few patches of unstable ground.

Once we were there, of course, we had a whole new set of problems. I set Starfinder down as gingerly as I could against the thing once Jalines gave me the okay, then walked around it trying to figure out what to do next.

"This thing's lit up like an ion drive." I looked over to Jalines, who had this strange expression on her face, similar to the one my mother often got when she found me up to my usual antic disposition. "Are you getting anything from it?"

"No. I... it's somehow resisting me. Nothing... like staring into nothing...." She shook herself all over, her hands convulsing into claws. Perhaps especially because we were all wearing these damn Qin bioglass suits, we looked like a series of statues that had been defaced or eroded. "I can't believe we spent all this time and effort getting here, and now we can't think of what to do next."

I found that more disturbing than the pins and needles pain in my hands from powering the rockets, more disturbing than the particle fountains or the erupting crystal shards or the wind or any of it. Seeing her exhausted and on the edge of giving up was painful, mainly because she'd been the goad keeping Starfinder and I moving this whole time.

I looked over at him with what I knew was a pretty desperate expression.

"Jannah." He sat up straighter against the pillar. "Can you interrupt the flow of power inside the tower, or even alter it to a certain degree?"

"I might be able to. Why?"

"I have a hypothesis about our hosts. I need you to prove it. If you would?" He fluttered his front set of eyes. I think that was the closest a Chromatic comes to a concerned look; I know I wasn't looking very good at that point. But I knew we were rapidly running out of options, so I concentrated on the tower, on the electrons and ions I could "see" running up and down it.

It was entirely too much power for me to control it. It would be like sticking my hand in a river in an attempt to divert the flow of water. I couldn't do that.

I could, however, make waves. Bearing down on the imaginary place inside my mind, I exterted pressure through my Gift and into the tower. The trick was to get the energy present to do the work for me, sending the negative stream into the positive and creating a series of small particle collisions within the flow. Then I created surges, one of the oldest tricks in the eek book, seeking nothing more spectacular than a nice prime number sequence of electron/ion reactions. It was actually kind of fun.

And then it happened. Something... some kind of security or corrective 'program' to use a completely inaccurate huamn word... tried to diagnose the fault.

I jerked like an arcing static charge as I contacted the equivalent of an Aquilan computer. It wasn't like a synth, more like a quick... but it was to a quick what a quick is to an abacus. My whole body felt spastic, and I could barely control the trembling of my muscles.

I felt so small.

"You've made contact?" Jalines was speaking to me, but I barely heard her. How could I pay attention to her, when there was a whole new way of thinking, of understanding, just on the other side of some small concept I...

"Y--es." I forced myself to speak. I don't remember how. I think it was the old Surge-Rider in me, the part of my mind that remembered that you don't desert your allies. The Sixth Fleet, yes, but not your allies. Longing to abandon everything and throw myself into the stream, I instead cut the contact. "They... I think they know we're here now. They'll come and collect us."

Then I dropped to my knees and the world went grey, while symbols I couldn't understand whirled in my mind like quartz crystals in an Aquilan wind.

Once they knew where we were, the Aquilans indeed "came and collected us" as Jannah put it. I tried to catch him as he fell, but only succeeded in keeping his head from hitting the ground. Even with his helmet, I didn't want him to injure himself further.

Starfinder and I watched over him for a few minutes, unsure as to what he meant, when we heard a sound like hundreds of chimes and looked up.

Above us, a triple-helix spiral of faceted opal-like material floated.

From inside it came the Aquilans themselves. Specifically, an Aquilan. At first, to be honest, I had no idea what it was. It seemed to be several dozen irregular fragments of quartz with iron pyrite deposits glittering inside or formed on the ends, each orbiting a center-point dominated by a semi-sphere of crystal and metal extruding spines like a miniature of the 'city' above us.

It drifted down from the spiral and floated to the area in front of us, slowly whirling about itself and refracting the available light into tiny rainbows.

Then the three of us lifted up into the air and were taken up into the spiral.

From there, accompanied by the being itself, we were transported inside the spiral (which provided a very post- surrealist view of the world through its distorted transluscent body) to a chamber apparently intended for us. They even went out and emptied the pod of a few items, like bedding.

No move was made to bring a translation device to us, and inasmuch as we didn't have one of our own, we were forced to wait until Jannah reawakened.

Being his usual self, he took his time about it, but I wasn't inclined to blame him. Instead, I took the time to examine the city with my Gift.

It was even larger than we'd understood. Somehow, the Aquilans had their own form of the Grav-Crystal, and their version was much more durable and reliable... and could be inverted in function. Much of their Egg-Orbital was made of the material; as a result, if they so chose, they could lift the city off of the tether and float it around the planet.

There were hundreds of the Aquilans in the city. I could not understand much of what they did from moment to moment... much of it merely seemed to be the equivalent of floating in complicated patterns around the city, stopping and starting again at random.

"Did someone get the name of the Gutterpunk who kicked me in the head?" I tore my attention away from the city and back to the chamber. Starfinder was seeing to Jannah, who was a washed-out color with dark bags under his eyes. I could see the stubble on his face much more clearly now that his tan had become sallow. But he was smiling, and I found myself infected by the expression.

"I was wondering if you were going to sleep all day or not." As I knelt by his side and looked him over, the Aquilan who had been our constant companion since they'd come for us decided to float closer. Jannah looked at it in wonder.

"So they really are like that."

"Yes. Can you...."

"I can try." He closed his eyes and leaned back on the makeshift bed. After a few seconds, the Aquilan spun on its axis and moved even closer. Jannah whistled. "You wouldn't believe how complicated their language is. My God. Do you remember the particle eruptions that nearly killed us?"

"Yes." Starfinder moved over so he could look more directly at Jannah. "They were quite the nuisance."

"To us." He opened his eyes and stared at nothing. "Not to them. Each one of those eruptions was the birth of a new Aquilan. That's where they come from. That's what they are."

We digested that in silence.

"And...." Jannah's eyes clouded over for a moment as the crystal mass spun about us at an odd angle. "They now understand that I meant no harm when I... killed that first one near the ISO ship."

I looked from his face... the most honest display of pain he'd let us see since this all began... to Starfinder's. The Chromatic pulsated in soothing deep blue tones.

The Aquilan orbited around the room in a very animated manner, far more so than it had before.

"It says that they will be glad to take us up to Ahriman in... actually, it said something that translates closest as 'one hundred trillion cycles of hydrogen.'"

"Approximately nineteen point five standard hours." Starfinder blinked his front eyes, as if mildly surprised that everybody didn't know how to measure time by light frequencies.

"Anyway," Jannah continued. "It's happy to be able to talk with us."

"Not as happy as we are, I suspect." I laid my hand on his shoulder, while Starfinder looked speculatively at the Aquilan.

"Can you imagine what the world looks like to them?" he asked me, his modulated voice carrying none of the excitement I knew he must be feeling.

Because I felt it too.

"No. Isn't it fantastic?"

The three of us stared at the unknown, in the form of our floating host and his transluscent world.