Chapter Sixty-Two
We Parviis are greatly advantaged by our size, or lack of it, depending upon your perspective. With the enhancement of our magnification systems we can appear to be what we are not, while still retaining what Humans are not.
—The Parvii View of Evolution
In the thunder and blur of the mysterious explosion, Tesh, Anton and their companions felt an emptiness in the pits of their stomachs, and a sensation of extreme speed. Subi shouted that stabilizers had automatically extruded from the undercarriage of the grid-plane, attaching the craft to the floor of the bunker. Inside the cabin of the plane, objects were flying around and things were slamming into the outside of the fuselage.
Everyone held on, and they made heroic efforts to protect the still-unconscious Noah. After attempts by the others, Eshaz was able to reach Noah and wedge himself in a corner by the command console, while keeping a powerful, protective grip on the Human.
The movement settled down, and as Tesh looked at Eshaz, who was shifting his hold on Noah, she thought the Tulyan looked almost maternal, the way he cradled the unconscious man’s head and kept a blanket over him. It seemed incongruous for her to be feeling positive thoughts about one of her mortal enemies, but she couldn’t avoid the feelings.
As if he were a doctor himself, Eshaz checked the healing pad on one side of Noah’s head, satisfying himself that it was still secure and pumping nutrients into the wound. The reptilian Tulyan looked up. For a moment he exchanged glances with Tesh, and she saw kindness in his slitted, pale gray eyes. Then Eshaz again focused his attention on Noah, and whispered something to him.
Through the thick windowglax of the bunker, Tesh saw that the river was no longer visible. Instead it looked like they were in outer space, with blackness and flickering dots of light marking distant suns.
She heard Anton and Subi wondering if the cosmic view might be caused by some sort of a projection mechanism, but suddenly she had an entirely different, much more startling idea. Could it possibly be?
Abruptly, she ran to the exit hatch and touched a button to open it. Without waiting for the automatic stairway to descend and lock into place, she jumped out of the grid-plane and landed on the floor of the bunker.
“I’ll be right back!” she shouted. “Everyone wait here.”
Before Anton or any of the others could react, she ran for a passageway.
She heard shouts of confusion and concern behind her, with Anton running after her with the others, calling her name. “Tesh! Tesh! Where are you going? Come back!”
But none of them could keep up with her, or begin to imagine where she had gone.…
Tesh did something only a Parvii could do. To anyone observing her, she seemed to disappear. She was miniature now, having switched off the magnification system that made her look as large as the giant Humans. She ran with a blur of speed, much faster than she could have moved in her magnified state, which interfered with her natural abilities. Like most Parviis, Tesh preferred her normal size. It provided her with so many more intriguing options, involving speed, access, and personal safety.
She stood in what looked like a rocky passageway now. She touched the walls around her, felt the cold hardness. And knew something with absolute certainty.
This is not rock.
Finding the subtle but telltale burrowing marks she was looking for, she entered a minuscule opening in the stony surface, like a bee entering a hive hole. Once inside, she followed the traditional maze of passageways and now-dormant signal scramblers, designed to keep intruders and probing electronics out. She knew the way well. It was essentially the same in every podship.
Within moments, she located the large sectoid chamber, the nerve center of the pod, still glowing with a faint green luminescence and humming in a barely audible tone. This surprised her, and gave her hope. But the walls were hard, as if fossilized. Could the creature regenerate itself, coming back from its long dormancy? She had heard of cases where this had actually occurred, and of others in which the sectoid chamber was the last portion of the creature to die, like a heart that continued to beat but no longer had the strength to sustain the rest of the body.
Tesh’s own metabolism had been going at full speed, driving her forward. Suddenly it slowed, and she moved ahead cautiously. In shock, she stared at the unmistakable remains of a skeleton lying on the floor ahead of her, humanoid like herself and around the same diminutive size, with streaks of dark green and black on the bones.
A long-dead Parvii, one of her own people.
She murmured an ancient, silent prayer over the body, felt an immense welling of emotion. Even though her kinsmen were numerous, she had always been taught that even one death was significant, since it was a loss suffered by the swarm.
If uninterrupted by calamity, Parviis lived comparatively long lives, substantially more than her own seven hundred twelve years, but they were still mortal. They could be killed in accidents, or could fall victim to specific, odious diseases.
While this one lay on its side now, it appeared to have died and rigidified in a crouching position, as if it had wanted to spring out into space and rejoin a swarm, but perhaps had been too injured to do so. Crouching for a time after death, the Parvii’s flesh and internal organs had fallen away, and sometime afterward the bones fell over.
It was as Tesh had suspected. Their grid-plane had not landed in an abandoned Mutati military bunker at all. Rather, they had entered the cargo hold of what had originally been a podship that crashed into the riverbank centuries ago—and which was subsequently found by Mutatis and converted to their purposes. Hence the thick glax windows, ceramic airlocks, and added rooms. The Mutatis must have had some means of communicating with their hydromutati cousins from there, the Seatels, perhaps through some sort of technology that interacted with the telepathy of the Seatels.
Later, perhaps from an adverse military operation, or a disease, the Mutatis no longer occupied the bunker. For some reason, the Seatels were left behind. Then, when Noah’s Guardians arrived, the hydromutati telepaths killed them … and were about to kill Noah, Tesh, and the rest of their group when the planet exploded.
But why had the podship crashed on Plevin Four in the first place? Something must have gone wrong with the Parvii pilot … an illness, a misjudgment? Or some failure by the podship itself. Such events were rare, but over the course of millenniums did occur.
Another realization hit her.
We are no longer on Plevin Four. It doesn’t exist anymore.
The cosmic blackness and flickering, distant suns were stark confirmation, seen around drifting chunks of the dead world. The podship, even with improvised Mutati window walls, had survived the explosion. In its present state, with the body as cold and hard as stone, the podship had effectively armored itself against the explosion, and this had not been compromised by the Mutati alterations.
The planet is gone, and we are drifting in space. What happened?
She could not imagine. An entire planet! She had been in the midst of a huge explosion.
Above all, Tesh could not shake the intense sadness over her lost comrade, even though she had never known him personally. But she had no time for emotion.
Podships were hardy creatures, and it might just be possible to revive this one. She had to hurry. The bunker was tightly sealed, but soon her companions could run out of air. She did not have that problem. It was one of the principle advantages of Parvii evolution.