The Translocator: The Complete Saga by M.G. Herron

Author:M.G. Herron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MG Publishing LLC
Published: 2019-02-01T16:00:00+00:00

32

Star Shards

Eliana was carried through the dark rift and into a dim chamber filled with the smell of ozone. She couldn’t move her limbs on her own, couldn’t do more than take a small breath and hold it as they stepped into that strangely cold and heavy darkness.

Her body shivered involuntarily. She couldn’t clutch herself to warm her skin. She still felt the hard armored arms of Xucha and that suit he wore holding her up. Only her eyeballs moved. He took two steps, and paused. Panic rose to her throat like a choking ball of ice.

Shapes and angles began to resolve themselves into objects in the dimness. Ambient light glowed in the semi-circular chamber from a few sources, but very faintly, a tenth of the light of a normal room at home.

Her eyes darted about. As she took in the strange place—what she could see of it—her panic slowly subsided.

A green glow seeped under a doorway set into the far, flat wall. Another faint shine bled through the translucent skin of a mound on the floor to her left, at the edge of her peripheral vision. A chair? A couch?

Above that and across the wall, a bank of controls made a little alcove. The control unit reminded her of Amon’s holodeck for the Translocator but…very different at the same time. It was not made of plastic or metal, but of a living plant-like material. Bulbous growths emerged from the wall seemingly at random. She slowly came to understand that these growths were controls—nodes and levers and dials and buttons, but of a kind that she had never seen on Earth.

This was not a cave, or even a prison cell. It looked more like a shop. A lab.

Again she thought of Amon. Amon.

Being angry at him seemed, now, like a frivolous luxury. Would she ever see him again? Would she ever have a chance to apologize?

From the right, a crystal of some kind set into the ceiling emitted light. It shone down on three round metallic orbs lined up on a shelf—the devices that Rakulo called “Xucha’s demons,” arranged like basketballs on display in the fancy office of an NBA executive…only, no, that wasn’t it. Executive was the wrong description. Those things were weaponized robots. Lined up on a low shelf, the orbs were covered in oily black stains and scorch marks. Metal-handled instruments lay haphazardly among dirty and stained rags on a shelf below. One of the orbs had a huge gash in the top. A second orb was pocked with bullet-holes.

Several indentations, like spots for more of the machines, sat empty.

The final source of faint light came from the middle of the chamber, where the large carbonado that Xucha had taken from Lucas in the Translocator lab hung suspended in a beam of blue light.

Blue light sounds weird, but that was the best way she could think of to describe it, for the vertical beam seemed to both swallow the light and give it back in equal parts.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.