Chapter 7

  Dalexia was a pane of glass. She liked to imagine she was the ornate kind, like one of those stained glass windows in a church on Earth. But, being that she existed in only two dimensions, she couldn’t tell. She felt the third dimension. People were looking at her, their gazes parallel to the plain of her body. They looked through her.

  “Dalexia, snap out of it,” Pelp said, and he snapped his finger.

  She shattered, and a three-dimensional person shimmered out of the falling fragments of glass.

  Dalexia opened her eyes. She was lying on the floor on the bridge of the Expedition 7. The layer of composite material over the metal of the hull was cold against her cheek, hands, and ankles, and she felt her body losing heat through her clothes. She sat up and immediately felt a little warmer.

  Her mind was hazy, but things were coming back to her. She took stock of who and what she was, a female clone of Dalex, a human man who had died and been resurrected by aliens. She had all of his memories and none of his maleness.

  Pelp, the real-life fantasy dwarf she had just met, was sitting cross-legged a few feet in front of Dalexia. He gave her a concerned look. “How do you feel?”

  “Flat,” she said.

  “That’s how everyone feels the first time they break through darklight. Well, almost everyone.”

  He looked at Seventh. The male android cloned from his female counterpart was still standing in the middle of the bridge, unmoved since the E7 had hit the side of a black hole and smashed through a magical film of what Pelp called “darklight.” Thanks to Pelp’s last minute intervention, they had avoided getting sucked into the black hole and instead had traveled to some alternative space. The transition had caused Dalexia’s glass episode, but it didn’t seem like Seventh had been affected at all.

  “How are we doing, Seventh?” Dalexia asked.

  “The ship is in the same state as before traversing the barrier around the black hole. Shields are holding. Life support systems are fully functional. Benefine stores are nearly depleted.”

  All of the monitor screens on the bridge were blank. Before the ship hit the black hole, they had shown a field of stars when not focused on a particular object in space. Dalexia couldn’t tell if the screens were broken or if the ship was literally just surrounded by blackness.

  Dalexia’s legs felt like jelly, so she didn’t stand up yet. “Where are we?”

  “Unknown,” Seventh said.

  “This is definitely Gaia Omega,” Pelp answered. “I can feel the pull.”

  “The pull?” Dalexia asked, but as soon as the question left her lips, she felt it too. Her strongest sensation was the feel of the deck she was sitting on. Gravity was pulling her down to the floor. But there was something else pulling on her. It tugged at her hair and pulled her clothes against her body. It wasn’t a strong force, but it was noticeable. Something to her right was gently and inevitably drawing her away.

  “You feel it?” Pelp asked. “Seventh noticed it right away. No one knows what it is, but everyone experiences it.”

  “I don’t like it,” Dalexia said. She shivered. “It’s like wind, but… without the wind.”

  “Huh,” Pelp said. “I’ve never heard it put like that before, but I think I get it. I quite like the pull. I can’t sleep without it anymore.”

  “Are we in this colony of yours?”

  Pelp shook his head. “Probably not. I was away from home on a digging excursion, looking for strangium.”

  A horrifying thought occurred to Dalexia. “How far away?”

  “It’s hard to say. Distance works differently in Gaia Omega than anywhere on the Seven Worlds. And when you’re walking through miles of tunnels and then digging your own, you lose track of how far you’ve gone.” He noticed her expression and grew worried. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because the Expedition 7 is big,” Dalexia said. “Really big.”

  She paused, trying to recall the specifications Seventh had given her upon first arriving on the ship, but he spoke up before she could remember, saying, “In rough terms, the Expedition 7 is approximately one hundred and eighty-six miles long, twenty-five miles wide, and twenty miles tall. The entire ship transferred through the hole in the darklight without incident.”

  Dalexia thanked him for the reminder about the ship’s size and said, “If we just plopped down in the middle of Gaia Omega, close enough to your colony, we might have crushed some or all of it.”

  Pelp’s expression brightened. “Oh good, you had me worried for a moment. The darklight doesn’t work like that. We still need to do a little more mining before we break out of this pocket and into the cavern.”

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  “Huh?”

  “When you first pierce the darklight and go through the hole, you end up in a sort of intermediary space where we are now. This is where we find most of Gaia Omega’s precious metals. You can stay in this pocket as long as you want and mine to your heart’s content, but there’s no air. Eventually, you suffocate and die. Luckily, this place—this starship—has its own air, so we don’t have to worry about that yet.”

  He stood up and looked around the bridge. “Where’s the exit to this place? I want to show you something.”

  Seventh led them to one of the ship’s airlocks. They passed several holes in the hull along the way, left behind after their fight with the aliens around the black hole. Where once those holes had shown stars outside the ship, now they all peeked into deep blackness.

  They found an air lock and Seventh used a bit of molding gel to produce a space suit in Pelp's size. The dwarf gave it a curious look, at which point Seventh explained the garment's purpose.

  "Oh, I won't need that. I've had enough of a break with air again that I won't need to breathe for another few hours if it comes to that. There's plenty of time for my demonstration."

  Since Dalexia's armor came with its own oxygen supply and Seventh didn't breathe, they continued into the airlock and cycled it to vacuum. All of the air rushed out of the compartment. A small window on the exterior door showed more blackness outside.

  Pelp unhooked his pickaxe from his backpack and gripped it with both hands. "It's really no different than digging through any other rock or sediment."

  "Hold on," Dalexia said. "How can we hear him?"

  They were in a soundless vacuum. The only reason Dalexia and Seventh could hear each other was because of radio communicators.

  Seventh only shrugged.

  "Are you talking about the muteness?" Pelp asked. "That caused us some trouble early on, too. Like my breathing, my voice is publicized to be heard even in darklight pockets, and my ears work too. There's no time limit on those like there is my breathing."

  Seventh let out a skeptical snort. "If you say so."

  Dalexia watched the android out of the corner of her eye. He didn't seem to be taking the magical element of this well. Dalexia couldn't truly be sure Pelp’s "publication" claims were magic, but it sure seemed like the stuff of fantasy. Still, it worked. He didn't seem to be using any advanced technology. There were some simple-looking gadgets strapped to his backpack, but nothing like an oxygen tank or a special communicator.

  The outer door of the airlock opened, directly exposing them to the blackness outside. It was like standing at the threshold to a room with the lights off, but the lights in the airlock didn’t illuminate anything within the blackness. They might have been staring into a hole or a solid barrier that came right up to the airlock exit.

  “See how it shimmers?” Pelp said. “The parallel waves moving left to right?”

  Dalexia cocked her head to the side. “No, I don’t.”

  “Watch this.”

  Pelp raised his pickaxe and swung it against the blackness. The tip of the pick hit something solid, and the blackness cracked, revealing it to be a thin dark barrier over the airlock exit. A bit of light spilled through from the other side, along with a hiss of air.

  Pelp hit the thin black wall again and chipped a head-sized hole in the material. More light shone through, revealing a chamber on the other side with glittering walls and a rocky floor. Air gushed into the airlock through the hole. Whatever this new chamber was, it had an atmosphere.

  With a third swing of the pick, Pelp collapsed most of the wall. It fell like a thin pane of broken glass. Watching the dwarf use his pick to pull away the leftover pieces gave Dalexia a familiar sensation, like she had once been broken glass herself.

  Pelp reattached his pickaxe to his backpack and stepped carefully into the chamber outside the airlock. Dalexia followed. Her armor informed her that the air around her was breathable, almost identical to the gas composition on Earth. She sniffed, and smelled a wet, mineral scent.

  “This is the cavern,” Pelp said, spreading his hands out to encompass the new space. He pointed back inside the belly of the E7. “There intermediary space is still there, but we can now pass between the two points.”

  It was bright enough in the chamber to see without any extra light, though it wouldn’t do for reading. Large crystals like quartz stalactites stuck out of the ceiling at odd angles, giving off a faint blue glow that gave the chamber a dusky feeling. A narrow river ran through the cavern, flowing out of sight into a different part of the space. The stone around the river was thick with purple fuzzy moss-like substance. A three-legged creature with a flat face and long antlers watched Dalexia and Pelp curiously from the other side of the stream. It didn’t seem particularly afraid of them, and looked too delicate to be a threat.

  “Most of Gaia Omega looks like this,” Pelp explained. “Though the chamber with the colony is much bigger. And there are some variations to the flora and fauna. That creature over there is a platehorn. They’re all over the cavern.”

  Dalexia turned around and looked back at the Expedition 7. The only part of the ship she could see was the opening into the airlock. The rest was buried into the wall of the cave. She walked up to the face of the wall and put her hand against the stone where the hull of the E7 should have been.

  “You can dig a hole a mile long through that rock and wouldn’t find your ship,” Pelp said. “It looks like it’s buried, but it’s not. The only way in is the entrance I just made. If you went back inside the ship and used one of its other exits, you would end up in a completey different section of the cavern. It might come out a few feet away, or maybe several hundred miles.” He shrugged. “It’s impossible to say until you try.”

  Dalexia hummed and said, “Freaky.”

  She walked back to the airlock and stood just outside it. Seventh still stood in the decompression chamber. His eyes ran across the interior of the cavern, carrying with them an annoyed glint.

  “It’s kind of pretty,” Dalexia said.

  “It is impossible,” Seventh said.

  “You really don’t have a scientific explanation for any of this?”

  Seventh shook his head. “I do not, but that is not what I am referring to.”

  He finally walked out of the airlock and into the cavern, crossing the rocky floor until he stood at the edge of the river. The platehorn’s head pivoted as it stared at him, not a single bone in its body preparing it for fighting or flying.

  “That thing must not have any natural predators,” Dalexia mused to herself.

  “Oh no, it does,” Pelp said. “Platehorn are just very stupid.”

  Dalexia joined Seventh at the edge of the river. “Can we drink the water?”

  “That’s not water,” Pelp said. “And definitely don’t drink it.”

  Dalexia took a closer look at the clear liquid running by her. It certainly looked like water. “Are you sure?”

  “He is right,” Seventh said. “It is not water. It is liquid benefine.”

  “Oh,” Dalexia said. She bent her knees and crouched, feeling the chill air wafting off the stream. The liquid bubbled, like something beneath the surface had burped. She looked upstream for the source of the liquid and saw only dimmer depths of the cavern where the crystalline light wasn’t so bright. The river flowed on and on, endless as far as her tiny picture of this brand-new world extended.

  “Oh.”

  https://www.patreon.com/wjeffersonsmith