Chapter Fifty-Seven
If not for the magic of perception,
Nothing would exist.
It is the spark of the universe.
-—Parvii Inspiration
Like a visitor to a municipal aquarium, the woman stood in front of a large clearglax plate, gazing out at the marine shapes swimming in the water, but it was murky out there and she was having some difficulty discerning what she was seeing.
Nothing was as it seemed here. This was not an aquarium, and she was not a full-sized human. Tesh Kori felt dampness in the air, and pulled her coat tighter around her shivering body. Back at the grid-plane, Noah still had not returned to consciousness after almost two days. She’d been worrying about him when she went to the window wall, and had tried to calm herself by looking out into the flowing river. But it was having the opposite, disturbing effect on her. She tried to peer deeper into the water.
On her right, she heard her companions working to open a stone door that none of them had noticed before, in what had appeared to be a solid rock wall. That morning, Anton had discovered the almost unnoticeable door, and now they were using cutting tools on it.
Standing at what looked like a wall of water, she’d been thinking about perception, and the old Parvii saying about it being the spark of the universe. She wondered, as she had before, what the architect of that aphorism had in mind when he or she came up with it. Didn’t perception extend to all of the senses, and not just to what you could see? Yes, of course, and at the moment she considered her various known senses and one that was not so easy to identify, lying just beneath the surface of her consciousness. Humans and their tiny Parvii cousins called it the sixth sense, but other races had a different number for it, since they had more or less senses. But the various sentient races were in universal agreement: this level of awareness existed.
Through the clear plates, Tesh saw frothing out in the river, and large, blurry shapes swimming toward her and then veering off to one side or the other, getting enticingly close to the glax without allowing her to see what they were. She touched the thick window wall, the coolness of it, and frowned.
There is danger here, she thought. And she was about to call for her companions when she heard Anton shout.
“Tesh! Get over here!” He stood in an open doorway, where there had been none before. The others were behind him, moving around inside another chamber. Their voices were murmurous, agitated.
Hurrying over there, she saw an additional chamber fronting the river. While smaller than the main chamber, it had a window wall as high as the other one. She went inside, and her nostrils wrinkled as she picked up a revolting stench.
Death.
In one corner, she saw the blackened, charred bodies of Humans jammed up against the rock wall—men and women who seemed to have been trying to escape but had no way out. She noted burned, bloody Guardian uniforms on some of them, while the clothing of others, and most of their skin, had been burned off. The victims had pitted eye sockets, seared-off hair, and scorch marks on their melted, horribly burned faces.
“This explains where thirty of the missing Guardians are,” Dr. Bichette said.
Anton shone a flashbeam on the walls, went around and rubbed his hands over the surfaces, checking them. “But what could have killed these people?” he asked. “We came through the only door, and it was sealed from the inside.”
“A locked-door mystery,” Eshaz said. His bronze-scaled face, usually taciturn, showed concern now, in the downturn of the reptilian snout and the nervous gaze of the slitted eyes. “I don’t like it in here.”
“This was supposed to be a safe room,” Anton said, “where they could get away from attackers. I suspect the other Guardians are around here somewhere, too, in additional safe rooms, or maybe up on the surface. They were trying to get away from something.”
“And it got them anyway,” Bichette said. “I think Eshaz is right. This place gives me the creeps. Let’s go.”
“I was just about to call for all of you,” Tesh said, as the group moved toward the door. She pointed at the window wall and the blurry, swimming shapes out in the current. They had moved over to this chamber now and were continuing their strange water dance, getting closer and closer without revealing details of their features. They were large, the size of canopan sharks or dolphins.
Something flashed in the water, but for only a second, a glint of color. Red.
“Hurry,” Eshaz said, pushing his Human companions toward the door. “Those are hydromutatis, swimming shapeshifters. They’re still here from the time when this planet was controlled by the Mutati Kingdom.”
As they reached the grid plane and boarded, Eshaz added, “I have heard of worlds with large bodies of water, where all of the hydromutatis could not be killed off by the Humans who took over.”
“I’ve heard the same,” Tesh said. “Hydromutatis are much more elusive than terramutatis or aeromutatis, and are very difficult to hunt down.”
Eshaz nodded his scaly bronze head. The grid-plane shook as he boarded, from his great weight.
“But the hydromutatis are sealed off from the chambers,” Anton said. “They couldn’t have killed the Guardians.”
“The creatures are rumored to have telepathic powers,” Eshaz said. “They are also called Seatels.”
As Tesh took a seat and watched Subi Danvar work the controls, she felt a tingle in her mind, and heard what sounded like pounding against the walls of the bunker, like a heavy surf slamming into a bulkhead. Or like Diggers burrowing their way through rock and dirt.
She heard a mechanical whine as Subi tried to start the engines. But they didn’t catch. At the window wall, she saw scores of Seatels, their features clearly visible now, with smoldering red eyes and undersized heads.
Suddenly, a lance of light from one of the Seatels hit the grid-plane and fried the engines, so that they would not start.…