Spirit Unbreakable

Reniko stood by the door to Orborok’s cell. She had a Flimsy clutched in her hand. Dertrik’s two men were staring at her warily and it was their constant attention that finally made her walk through the door. Orborok turned with a sneer on his face, but refrained from his behaviour of the previous day.

“Cooled off yet?” Reniko asked. She felt herself again no longer intimidated by the creature before her.

“Was that your intention in leaving me in this cage for so long?” Orborok replied, “I think it would be better for both of us if we hurried this along. Then I can be free to do as I please.”

Reniko did not let herself be baited and instead passed the Flimsy through the bars of the cell. “This is what I have found regarding your species. It might be a lot to take in.”

Orborok did not respond, but instead he read the text at an amazing speed. It wasn’t long before she realized that he probably understood what he was reading on the Flimsy better than she did. He was, after all, one of the three people that had used nanites to manipulate her mind. She shifted uncomfortably for a few minutes and decided that she would leave.

“I’ll come back later and you can tell me your thoughts,” she murmured but was stopped from leaving by Orborok who had his hand up gesturing for her to wait.

“I’m almost done,” he replied. He passed the Flimsy back to Reniko who looked astounded.

Orborok took in her reaction as she took the Flimsy and scoffed, “I am going to assume that your knowledge intake is a slower process. Pathetic.”

Reniko returned his scowl. “Do you want to help or not?”

“I can offer little assistance myself. Agger was the one that was most familiar with the nanite technology. I am not sure of her expertise with gene manipulation. I would think that it would not be much as it looks like this was kept from all of us, including Trokar if he was tampered with as well. You would have to go back to the source with this one, back to Druagg, to the First Rük.”

Reniko looked at Orborok in puzzlement. “First Rük?”

“Trokar always reported back to Druagg even though he was a black. He talked to someone called the First Rük, the leader of our home planet, Druagg. He supersedes the blacks, sends them out to subdue other worlds. If all Rük have been manipulated, it would have been by him.”

“So you think that if I could get my hands on a sample of the First Rük’s blood that it would be pure, unaltered?”

“It would be the only one unaltered, if it is, as all Rük come from him.”

Reniko leaned against the wall in thought staring into Orborok’s cell. “How old is this Rük if all of your species comes from him?”

“I would think very old. I know very little of my home planet. As I am a grey, my responsibilities lay here. I only know what little I overheard from Trokar when he was in council with the First Rük.”

“Your planet, Druagg, is there address for an interstellar bridge?” Reniko asked hopefully.

Orborok gave out a bellowing laugh, “We came by ship to conquer this world, not by an interstellar bridge. As the ships were destroyed by your people, and Trokar by your hand; the way to my world has been lost forever to you. I suggest you either kill me now or set me free. Your little project has come to a standstill.” He continued laughing and Reniko’s face turned stern.

“In all the time that you have known me, Orborok, have you known me to give up? Even when the odds are all against me?” Orborok stopped laughing and stared into Reniko’s fierce eyes. That look made his head reel with pleasure. He neared the bars of his cell, his body drawn towards her.

“Ah, those wonderful eyes,” Orborok said. He reached through the bars trying in vain to catch hold of Reniko, but she was too far away.

“You better get comfortable Orborok, because I will not give up trying to save your species, even if you think you don’t want to be saved.”

“You care too much about things that you shouldn’t,” Orborok shouted at her as he watched her leave, “Maybe you should start to believe what all we Rük are taught. Some things aren’t worth saving.” The eyes that met his gaze after his words were eyes he could not comprehend. Reniko’s eyes were full of empathy for a broken creature, one that didn’t even understand his own worth. Unlike the fiery eyes from before, these eyes filled him with rage.

When the door to the cell shut and Reniko turned around she saw the Rimca was leaning against the wall waiting for her.

“You hear all of that?” Reniko asked.

Rimca pushed away from the wall and started walking down the hall. Reniko followed along. “I think you should take up his advice and just give up already. He doesn’t even want to be ‘saved,’” Rimca replied. Reniko could understand how she felt. Rimca had been thoroughly abused by the Rük and would probably harbour resentment for that for the rest of her long life.

“You really think I should take advice from a person who has never had the experience of choosing between right and wrong, between love and hate. He doesn’t know what he’s really saying. He is unable to make a choice. He is merely telling you the choice that was made for him. Are you telling me that if that was you in there, that I should honour your words and kill you because that was the only option that was allowed to you?”

“I don’t exactly believe your analysis of the data,” Rimca replied. Her words were crisp and curt. Reniko could tell that she didn’t want to continue the conversation. But she couldn’t let it go. She wanted Rimca to understand what Orborok was going through.

“Rimca, did you see the way that Orborok reacted to the various emotions I displayed in there?” Rimca nodded.

“Did you notice that he was extremely drawn to my anger, but at the same time repulsed by my pity?” Again Rimca nodded.

“It’s because he understands the anger and can comprehend the way I feel, but pity is something new to him. He has never been around people who feel that way and has never felt it before. His body rejects the feeling and is unable to comprehend it so his response is anger.”

“I hate that,” Rimca said. She was clutching her hands tightly against the Flimsy she was carrying, “I hate when you make excuses for their actions.”

Reniko sighed. She hated how childish Rimca acted sometimes. She was so stubborn. “Rimca have you ever thought of using your Sight to draw out the truth from Orborok.”

Rimca shuddered at the thought. “I wouldn’t want to see the truth about him or any Rük. It would give me nightmares.”

“Maybe you should try and use your Sight, like you did to me in Rownie, on Orborok and just focus on the truth of what he feels towards me. I think it would be a very enlightening experience.”

“I think you are out of your mind if you think that Orborok is going to let me Sight him. Besides, you don’t have the Sight, so how could you think you already know what I would find there,” Rimca said. It was a final statement; a closure of the topic.

“What did you come down here for anyway?” Reniko finally said staring at the Flimsy in Rimca’s hand.

Rimca looked at the Flimsy and then back at Reniko. “Malik asked me to get you and meet him at Level Five in the Archives. He told me to bring something I had been working on with Rae.”

“Level Five? As in the interstellar bridge?” Reniko asked.

Rimca just shrugged, “I have no idea what he is up to.”

When the lift finally finished its decent to Level Five and opened its doors, Reniko found the entire room washed in a soft light. Her hand was still tingling slightly from the reactivation of the Levanith nanites in her system which she had shut off with the same electromagnetic pulse that had shorted out the Rük nanites in her system. She hadn’t thought about the effect that would have until she interfaced with Sentralon on getting to the archives. Luckily, Sentralon had been able to fix the shorted Levanith nanites with a small injection of fresh nanites.

Malik was just pulling the white sheet off the large ring that made up the gateway for the interstellar bridge. Level Five was one enormous sterile room. The room, Reniko guessed, could hold fifteen or twenty Teoko inside of it. The gate was wide enough to fit at least three Teoko abreast, so when the sheet started falling to the ground Malik hurried out of its way so as not to find himself enveloped by it. Reniko watched the sheer fabric fall in ripples casting silver shadows in the folds. The enclosed space was filled with sudden breeze as the fabric finally settled to the ground. She had a sudden flashback of the rippling pool of water that had covered the gateway back on earth. She wondered if when activated the bridge looked like a pool of water. She had been unconscious when she had gotten through to Vespen and didn’t know how long she had been unconscious; she only remembered that in her mind she had never gotten wet.

She stared at the giant gateway. It was set near the back wall of the room which was to her left as she stepped off the lift. On the opposite wall to the bridge ring was a large hanger bay door. It was sealed shut and Reniko wondered where it went to, seeing as this part of Sentralon Castle was underground.

“What is on the other side of that door?” Reniko finally asked, her words echoing in the large empty space. And why is this the first time I’ve noticed it?

Malik, who had been staring at his handiwork with Rae hovering close by, turned to regard Reniko. “I reveal a gigantic ring from under a sheet and you are asking about a door?”

“A giant door,” Reniko said and headed in the opposite direction of the ring. Rimca stood where she was and regarded the pair of them.

“I do have important things I am supposed to be doing right now. I have hundreds of Microgates to get up and running. Seeing what is behind a really big door is not helping in that venture,” Rimca said knowing that her irritated words would not get past Reniko’s curiosity.

Reniko reached the other side of the room and saw a panel near the doorway. She touched it with her tattooed hand and the room shuttered as the doors drew open. A cold blast of air entered the room in a violent hiss causing Reniko’s long chocolate braid to whip around her head violently. After the sudden frigid blast of air had subsided to a gentler breeze, Reniko opened her eyes and watched the night sky appear before her. Sentralon Castle was built on a cliff side and it seemed that this large doorway opened up about a third of the way down that cliff side. A large platform was on the other side of the doorway and Reniko felt drawn to it. She walked out onto the stone platform and glanced out past the ornamental and functional railing that encircled the platform. Looking up, she could see the castle looming overhead, a black shadow blotting out part of the starry sky. Two of the moons were at their zenith in the sky and illuminated the mountains off in the distance. Reniko could hear the rush of one of the many waterfalls that cascaded down the back of Sentralon Castle into the deep darkness of the river down below. A dense forest lay down on the valley floor though Reniko couldn’t see it in the glow of the moons.

“Didn’t know this was here,” Reniko said as Rimca finally joined her at the railing looking up into the starry sky above, “Orric and I have never really explored this part of the sky.”

“Must have been for the Teoko to come and go. I didn’t know that they went to Earth,” Rimca said.

“Well, Earth does have a large amount of folk tales about Teoko. We called them dragons on Earth. None of the stories were really nice though,” Reniko replied.

“Are you done staring off into the night?” Malik asked. He was standing near the doorway impatiently, “I now know how Rimca felt when she was trying to show us the Microgate.”

Reniko turned back to Malik and nodded. “Why are you uncovering the interstellar bridge anyway?”

“Do you remember that passage I started translating this morning about the third ship that left Earth and continued its exploration?” Malik asked.

“You finished it?” The three of them perambulated back into the room and made their way back over to the only other object in the room, the interstellar bridge.

“I did. They were extremely detailed reports. They gave a lot of coordinates to the many planets that they visited. Most of them were uninhabited, but they sent back a large amount of burst transmissions with all the scientific data that they had accumulated. I didn’t bother translating that. What I did translate, and why we are here, was the last known location of the ship. They had just sent coordinates of the planet they had encountered and were never heard from again.”

“You have coordinates that might lead us to some Levanith,” Reniko stated. Her hope was overwhelming her other thoughts and her mind was reeling with the consequences of actually contacting others of her species.

She felt a warm gentle hand on her shoulder and turned to see Rimca’s solemn face, “How long ago was this?”

“Their last transmission was sent in 945 LE, five years before the Rük invaded Vespen.”

Reniko gave a half-hearted smile at this piece of information. “That was well over a thousand years ago Malik. Why are we here?”

“Well, I know that they probably had another gate ring with them from the information I read. At least they were building one so that other Levanith could join them on their voyage if they desired and others could go back home to their families. I think they finished constructing it shortly before their last transmission. I thought that since we had coordinates we could see if their gate was still operational and find out what happened to them.”

“It sounds good in theory, Mal, but we can’t just blindly walk through a bridge hoping that their gate is still active. If their ship was destroyed we could end up frozen in space, or on a hostile planet. Just remember that if there is no gate for it to connect with, the bridge will randomly establish within a variable distance of the input coordinates. I know, because when this gate in Sentralon wasn’t active I just fell from the sky on Mo’an Delar. I can’t say it was the most pleasant experience I had, but I was fortunate I didn’t fall from higher in the atmosphere or I would have been a smudge on the ground,” Reniko said defensively.

“I gather that is where I come in,” Rimca said and put her hand in the pocket of her skirt. When she pulled her hand out she opened it and showed them both a tiny dragonfly that was sitting on her palm.

“That’s a dragonfly,” Reniko said.

“It looks like a dragonfly,” Rimca said, “but it is actually a compilation of nanites in the form of a dragonfly.”

“The purpose of which is?” Reniko asked as Rimca motioned for Reniko to take the delicate black and blue striped insect. Once free of the nanite dragonfly Rimca started tapping the surface of the Flimsy that she had carried down with her. The little dragonfly took off from Reniko’s hand and flew over to where Malik and Rae stood. Rimca shifted the Flimsy so that Reniko could view what was on it. Reniko saw the crystal clear image of Malik and Rae staring back at her from the surface of the Flimsy.

“It’s an image recording device. I think it was made for this exact purpose,” Rimca explained as she tapped lightly on the surface of the Flimsy and brought up another display, “It also takes readouts of the chemical makeup of the air, detects radiation levels, and a whole lot of other things that I haven’t even begun to look into. The best part is that it is user friendly. Even if you don’t understand all the readouts, it tells you pretty plainly if it’s okay for Vespen inhabitants to go wherever this Kiwessa goes.”

Reniko paused for a moment, unfamiliar with the Vespian term that Rimca had applied to the nanite dragonfly, “Did you just call it a small flier?”

Rimca nodded, “It was better than the name that the Levanith who created it had given it.”

“Which was?” Reniko asked.

“Remote interface device for toxicity and viability of organisms. I’m sure that sounded really nice in Levanith.”

“Kiwessa it is,” Reniko said. Her excitement had been gradually returning since Rimca had shown her the Flimsy. “So when do we do this?”

Rae stepped forward a bit and gestured to the console that was three metres to the right of the gate. “We just need either you or Malik to give authorization for us to access the interstellar bridge.”

“Can we give that a new name too?” Reniko asked as she walked over to the console and placed her palm on the console activating it like she had with the door previously.

“I vote for Star Gate,” Malik said.

“Space Bridge would be more accurate,” Rimca interjected.

Rimca looked at both of them and grinned. “I say we call it ERB.”

Rimca and Malik looked at each other. Looking at Reniko in unison they said, “ERB?”

Reniko just grinned again.

“Why must you humanoid lifeforms abbreviate or shorten everything? First our name and now the interstellar bridge? If we are voting about this we say we should continue to call it the interstellar bridge,” Rae interjected.

“I’m just really curious where Renny got the idea for ERB,” Rimca said ignoring Rae.

“Back on Earth the first two scientists to come up with a theory involving matter crossing from one point in space to another through a tunnel-like shortcut were Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen. They called it the Einstein-Rosen Bridge in history and I just thought that E.R.B. sounded like a good abbreviation. They started Earth’s understanding of interstellar bridges after all.”

“We aren’t on Earth, Renny,” Rimca replied, “and I will never call it ERB.”

“How do you remember that kind of stuff?” Malik asked.

Reniko shrugged. “I really like science. I studied it a lot back on Earth and Einstein is very intrinsic to the history of science.”

“Have you decided on a name yet?” Rae asked suddenly, having given up on convincing the rest of the group to just keep the name that they already had.

“I guess Space Bridge is fine,” Malik said conceding to Rimca’s suggestion.

“I’m still calling it ERB,” Reniko finally said. Malik and Rimca just sighed.

“Let’s start, shall we?” Rimca said and nodded for Rae to begin.

Rae’s hologram flickered out and instead the console that Reniko had activated began siphoning through a series of commands.

“We have accessed the corresponding data from the science files that were received from the Levanith ship. We should be able to get an accurate planetary rotation and exact coordinates. If there is a functioning gate on the other side than the bridge should connect with it.”

Malik, Rimca, and Reniko all remained silent as they stepped away from the gate unsure what would happen when it completed the bridge. A sudden flurry of activity began to happen on the surface of the ring starting from the floor and radiating up. The cold grey metal that made up the ring suddenly started to glow a pale blue as energy built up within it. Reniko remembered that pale blue light. It was the light that had lured her to the cave back on Earth; the cave holding the ERB on Earth. When the blue light coalesced there was a crack of energy that radiated into the room making the hairs on Reniko’s arms stand on end. Within a heartbeat the centre of the ERB distorted. To Reniko, Malik, and Rimca who were standing in front of the ERB it looked as if the wall had twisted into a tunnel. Must have been underwater on Earth, Reniko thought and frowned in puzzlement, why hadn’t all the water gone through the bridge back on Earth?

“Rae, how exactly does the ERB work? It’s not like a black hole sucking in all matter close to it,” Reniko finally asked; her last words a statement as everything seemed to be staying in place, including the three people in the room.

“As long as we establish a bridge through an ERB –” Rae said as she reformed her hologram. She paused when Malik and Rimca gave a stony glare at her at the use of ERB. She continued on heedless of their warning glares. Reniko was her master, so of course she was going to go along with her, “the ERB has control of what matter passes through. Anything that exerts a constant pressure along its entire surface will be unable to pass through. Therefore, it does not draw air from our atmosphere. It is only when a viable change in pressure along a portion of its surface occurs that it allows matter to pass. At that moment you will feel a slight draw of air from the room.”

“What made you think of that, Lyss,” Malik asked.

“I’m pretty sure the gate back on Earth was underwater. I was just wondering why it didn’t pull all the water through that was sitting on top of it.”

“Shall we see what is on the other side?” Rimca asked. Reniko and Malik’s response was to move closer to Rimca so they could view the image feed on the Flimsy. “All right, let’s do this.”

Rimca maneuvered the Kiwessa to the bridge that had formed in the gate and they felt a sudden wind pull past them as the small device winked out of existence. In a mere matter of seconds it was transmitting data again, but only a faintly image could be seen.

“Did it end up in space?” Reniko asked. As she voiced her concern, she noticed the readouts in the corner of the Flimsy were telling them that the atmosphere was viable.

“I think it is just dark where ever it is,” Rimca replied, “I can fix that. It’s equipped to see in the dark.” Rimca went through a series of commands and suddenly a grey image appeared on the screen. Reniko tried to discern the details of the room. She realized that the Kiwessa had landed on a nearby wall and was facing the ERB. She could see the glow of the surface which was extremely bright now that they were seeing through photocathodes.

“Reniko, we are receiving a signal from the ship that the Kiwessa has entered. It is asking for authorization to access ship systems. We are unable to get it to comply. It is asking for direct confirmation that we are Levanith. Therefore, to get past the room that the Kiwessa has entered you will have to go through the ERB,” Rae interjected.

Reniko looked a Rimca who was still observing the images that the Kiwessa was sending. “I think it should be okay,” Rimca finally spoke, “There is no sign of habitation on the ship. No life signs and in the Space Bridge room there are no bodies. It has been over a thousand years. I’m sure that whatever happened there has cleared out. It is up to you, Renny. You are the one that has to go.”

Reniko made to speak and was interrupted by Malik. “I don’t think that it should be Lyss’s choice. I think that I should make the call on this one.”

Reniko glared at Malik. “That doesn’t seem fair.”

“Well, I know you well enough that you never weigh the risks properly, are impulsive, and therefore are predictable in your response.”

“Which is?”

“When do I leave?” Reniko just frowned.

“Seeing as this was my discovery to begin with, I think that I should get the final say. We can’t just have the leader of Vespen suddenly dashing across the galaxy through a Space Bridge.”

“We agree,” Rae interjected.

Rimca nodded. “Malik makes a great point.”

Defeated, Reniko conceded. “Fine. What say you?”

“I say that we look at the data that the Kiwessa has collected and come back to this tomorrow. It is getting really late and we are not exactly prepared to go exploring a possibly abandoned Levanith ship.”

“Logic overrules impulsivity,” Reniko said and sighed, “I hope you realize that we have a council meeting tomorrow. That means that all three of us are going to be tied up for most of the day. How exactly are we going to get prepared for this?”

“Well, we could always ask our chief of security to come along to protect our Wayann,” Malik suggested.

Reniko smirked at the idea. “Dertrik would have personally murdered me if I would have done something like this without his permission. He is still brooding about the Orborok incident.”