Chapter 23 - Aftermath
Rousing and recalling what had happened to her, Kryslie tried to struggle free of Vila, but only succeeded in making her stumble slightly. Her own body felt limp, without energy, though now the lack of feeling in her legs had gone. She could feel where Vila’s hands were gripping her, holding her in position over her shoulder. There was little to see from that position, only the ground. When her eyes finally focussed, Kryslie identified the stone floor of the beam-in chamber.
Vila stopped with a jerk. She stood on the tile mosaic in front of the tunnel to the farmlands and then slowly turned around. Her body tensed and then began to shake. Her legs collapsed under her, bringing Kryslie’s head closer to the floor and letting her prisoner roll off her shoulder.
Kryslie felt the aura flow into her from where she touched the stone. She imaged it pushing the vile chemicals from her system, burning off the drug-induced lethargy. She lay motionless, still in no condition to fight again. When Vila rose, swearing, “To Jyx’s midden with the damn Tymoreans,” Kryslie rolled over to see what had angered the other woman.
No more than two body lengths away, a large pool of blood spread around the half-severed neck of an Aeronite infiltrator. The dead man’s dark, whiteless eyes were fixed and seemed to be staring at her, pleading.
Wincing with the effort, Kryslie tried to push herself up to see more. She had a fleeting glance of three more bodies, all dead in the same manner, before Vila gave her a savage kick and knocked her down. Studying the brief memory, Kryslie noted first that the dead were all wearing palace guard livery. They must have taken the uniforms from genuine Tymorean guards.
With a vicious anger fuelled jerk, Vila yanked Kryslie up by holding the back of her neck.
“You bastards claim to be nice, peaceful, do-gooders…not only won’t you help us, you kill people like gutter rats.”
Kryslie tried to turn her head for a better look around, succeeded slightly, but then spotted a detail that Vila hadn’t. She saw two more bodies, beyond the original three, and these were Tymorean. The glow light from above reflected off the white in their staring eyes.
They were killed like the others, throats slashed and they had not been dead long. Their blood pooled around their necks, had started to dribble down a slight slope in the stone floor forming into a pool, mixing with blood from the nearest dead Aeronite.
Vila seemed to notice where Kryslie was staring, and gave her prisoner a derisive shake.
“Never seen death before?” she demanded. “Some great hero you are! Weak! You Tymoreans are all weak. Get used to it, gutter filth. It’s what your precious benefactors want to do to all my people. But it is what is going to happen to all the power infested Royal elite. We are going to liberate the commoners and help them rise from the muck heap where you keep them…”
Getting no response from her prisoner, Vila released her and let her drop. When the younger woman still didn’t react, Vila strode around the dead and went to the capsule that was still half within the tunnel. She input the entry command on a keypad, and the hatch door cracked open.
Kryslie felt Vila release her, but could do nothing to control her landing. Her mind was in the midst of an intense premonition.
The creeping pool of red blood between the Tymorean and Aeronite bodies, that was beginning to obscure the tile mosaic on the floor, mingled and turned to glittering gold and silver. The bodies vanished, and the tile mosaic changed from the mesa glyph to another. One she had seen before in the Temple of Dira. This vision was important, she knew.
She came back to awareness to find Vila strapping her into some kind of coffin like capsule.
She heard Vila muttering, “Come on Jordan. How hard is it to snatch one helpless baby?”
With her prisoner securely tied, Vila began to pace the chamber, outside the capsule. The steps sounded more like she was nervously fidgeting, than patrolling or strolling. She would occasionally glance in at her prisoner, and at those times, Kryslie stayed still. When alone again, Kryslie tested the restraints and as the drug wore off knew that she would be able to break free.
Finally, she heard other people outside of the capsule.
She listened to a male voice ask, “Have the pipes been fixed?”
Another male voice, “Yes - we just need to start the timer before we leave.”
The first said, “Set the timer for fifteen minutes, then follow us in the second capsule.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Vila looked out and asked, “Where is the baby?”
The male voice, Jordan’s she assumed, “I don’t know. I found five men in the nursery and when I finally got into the inner room they were guarding, there was a woman there, with a red headed boy. He was walking, looked to be four or five – not a baby. It was a trick! I almost got myself killed for a trick!”
“I have the girl Kellex wanted,” Vila told him as they entered the capsule.
Jordan glanced at Kryslie and his expression might have been Kellex’s own.
“Come on, this has been an expensive exercise. What killed the rear guard?”
Vila spat on the floor. “Tymoreans, I guess.”
Jordan looked around, seeing the two extra bodies. “Two of these aren’t ours,” he noted. “The warriors who were with me upstairs are all dead.”
“Then these killed the others before they died.”
Jordan took a final long look before saying, “Let’s get out of here. We’ll…”
Kryslie didn’t hear the rest of his sentence. Twice in a very short time, she was gripped by a forceful premonition that sent a surge of power through her. Truth came to her as clearly as if she were reading a transcript. “No, the palace guards would use stunners first, and then if that didn’t work, they would physically overcome the intruders. They would want prisoners for questioning, not to slash their throats. And just as surely, if the Aeronites had killed the palace guards, they would not kill themselves. Whoever had done the killing here had known that the force shielded armour and stealth suits were not proof against deliberate, forceful, knife thrusts.
As if sharing her premonition, Kryslie felt her brother in her mind.
“Where are you?”
In rapid words and images, she showed him. She felt his anger at the deaths.
“I’m coming down…”
“No! I‘m coming good. I will be able to get free. Jordan and Vila are here. They have father, or rather, they’ve sent him to Kellex. I will let them take me to him. But you must stay with Llaimos. And there is something else. They were doing something to pipes - setting timers.”
“What pipes?”
“They didn’t say, and I cannot sense where. My mind is still fuzzy - but you have less than fifteen minutes to find the place.”
A jerk shook her as the capsule began to move. “We’re leaving. The capsule moves along the tunnels. The last two Aeronites will be taking the other one.”
“Which tunnel?” Tymos demanded. And she knew he was running. “Give me a picture.”
His presence vanished briefly as he transmitted down to the beam- in room, hoping to catch the last Aeronites, to question them.
Tymos held his foster mother and brother as Tanya began to shake in reaction. Llaimos was filled with frustration at being so helpless.
“We are safe,” Tymos assured his foster mother. “And if Jordan has sense he will retreat.”
“I thought he was you,” Tanya blurted. “Until Llaimos ran away from him. Then Lord Stenn reacted. Who was he?”
Tymos gave a terse answer. “One of us who is rogue.”
Stenn blurted, “Where is Krys?”
“I called to her,” Jonko added, worried.
The sense of the images his twin had sent him finally came to him. “She encountered Vila,” Tymos told them. “Zacary drew her out.”
“Is she alright?” Keleb asked. “Why doesn’t she come here? And where is Zacary?”
Tymos sifted through the mental impressions. “Vila had some drug on her knife. Zacary had it and slashed her. She will be right again shortly, but she is letting Jordan and Vila take her back to Amik. The Aeronites have our father there.”
Stenn paled. “And Uncle Perrin?”
“I don’t know,” Tymos admitted, shaking his head. “I just know that your father has lost contact with the entire group. We can’t worry about them now. Stay here …”
“Where are you going,” Keleb demanded, alarmed by what he sensed from Tymos. His friend didn’t answer. Instead, he was jogging out the door.
As soon as he was out in the passage, outside of his father’s suite, he transmitted to the beam-in cavern. He had touched his sister’s mind, felt her weakness and the fuzziness of her mind. She had shown him the dead men, and the capsules. She wasn’t there, but one capsule was.
Tymos adjusted his eyes and scanned the room. He noticed the glowing trails his sister had mentioned, all over the outside of the capsule.
Two more Aeronites still had to return here. Where were they? Did he have time to wait for them? No, nor to try to block the tunnel to Reva. He had to find the pipes they had sabotaged.
He felt torn by conflicting needs. Yet, really, he had no choice. Kryslie was as competent as he was, so was their father – they would find ways out of their trouble. Llaimos couldn’t, and as the highest-ranking Royal on the Estate, he had the whole Estate to protect. And now, if Kryslie was right, two Aeronites were sabotaging the vital heart of the Estate.
Some instinct caused him to stop and examine the chamber. He adjusted his eyes to look for other clues. The bodies on the floor, the walls and the door to the maintenance tunnel, all glowed when looked at in the UV end of the light spectrum, but the glow stopped at the open door.
His feet took him to the door in four strides, the glow went within, and was on the rungs of the ladder leading up to the basement of the King’s Palace.
He reported what he had found to Arden, in terse unemotional phrases. The Guard Captain promised to send a team down there.
Not wanting to waste time climbing up the ladder, he transmitted up to a point in the basement. The image coming from some of his father’s memories. Thinking on the problem in hand, roused other memories. Ideas flashed through his mind, were examined and discarded. Pipes of all kinds existed under the palaces - water, waste, air, conduits for power. Two images stayed, the huge cavern with the air circulation machinery, and the room with the pumping equipment where water from the distant storage basin was raised into the cisterns to feed the kitchens and drinking water taps.
Tymos found the top of the steps and looked around. The glowing trails went in all directions.
He began to move towards the great air pumps, thinking that timed switches suggested explosives, but he felt it had to be more than that. Time was running out, and he couldn’t check all places.
He spoke to Arden, raised the alarm, and told him to send down engineers in protective suits.
Coming closer to the chamber, Tymos moved quietly, listening intently for unusual sounds. A timer might be silent, but men moving around might make enough noise for his sensitive ears to hear above the humming of the compressors. He studied the room, using his eyes adjusted to see far away, to search for signs of interference. It took him a while to realise that there were no glow trails there. Had he made the wrong choice to come to the air chamber? Was the real sabotage somewhere else?
“Arden,” he spoke softly into his headset. “How close are the engineers? The air room is empty.”
“The duty crew are suiting up. I will send guards to the water chamber. Do you need help?”
“No, I will check here, but I cannot do both places.”
“Understood.”
He ignored the orders going out to the guards, his eyes were already scanning the criss-crossing pipes and the visible workings of the machines.
Down here, the memories of the Governors were little help. Xyron knew all about the machinery and how it worked, but he hadn’t needed to come down here in years. The workings had grown.
Feeling the need to hurry, Tymos tried to hurry his survey, even though he knew it wasn’t wise. The saboteurs would not have made their interference obvious.
Moments before his internal time sense reached zero, he ordered Arden to, “Shut down the air and water machinery.”
With a solid ‘thunk’, the compressors stopped pumping and whirred to a standstill. Seconds later, something clicked - loud now in the silence. A spurt of flame, quickly quelled by fire suppressant, drew his attention to one section of the workings. His mind identified the section, and his eyes scanned the blackened area for damage.
“Why block the inward air? Was it so they could recycle the existing air?”
Tymos studied the cross over section where internal air mingled with fresh. His eyes finally spotted the base of a long narrow cylinder. He would have to climb to examine it. When he was lying on top of one of the silent compressors, he reached for the cylinder and eased it into view. A tube went from it, into a small hole in one of the pipes. A soft hissing told him that the gas was slowly escaping from the cylinder. He closed the valve and read the gauge. It showed the cylinder as nearly full: the gas must just have started escaping. Any that was in the air system, wouldn’t be spreading with the fans off.
Tymos had no way of knowing what the gas was, but it had turned the clear plastic tube to a muddy brown.
Sounds below him heralded the arrival of the engineers.
“Up here,” Tymos called, and the team leader climbed up to join him.
The engineer took in the situation, listened to what Tymos could tell him and said with assurance, “We can take it from here, Prince Tymos.”
With a nod, Tymos handed the cylinder over, and began to climb back down. He hadn’t heard from the other group of specialists, and he wanted to check if the water system was not compromised as well. Once on the floor, he transmitted himself directly to the water chamber, arriving to face armed guards. He was recognised, and the weapons were lowered.
“What happened here?” Tymos asked immediately.
The team leader of this second group of engineers approached and reported. “So far, we have found nothing that is suspicious.”
“Let me have a look around too,” Tymos asked, with his mind already concentrating on what his adjusted eyes were inspecting. He scanned each section of piping and machinery, noticing absently, that there were no glowing trails here either and in part of his mind he realised that the trails and the sabotage were unrelated. Despite a lack of evidence of sabotage, he was certain that there was something to find.
“Check the colour of the water,” he suggested as the idea suddenly came to him. “They connected a cylinder to the air system, the gas going in was brownish.”
Several engineers moved to obey, going to collect sample vials and pulling tools from their utility belts.
“Who normally has access here? It needs an authorised pass doesn’t it?” Tymos asked the team leader who was still beside him.
“Only the duty crew. That’s all of us here, and Frellen. The access codes change each shift.”
“Frellen?” Tymos asked. “He’s not here?”
“No, Sir. When the lockdown order came, he was on a personal errand. He had to go to his quarters, not to the safe area down here.”
A prickle tickled Tymos’s spine. He would need to find Frellen; he may have been compromised.
“Keep looking. If I notice anything I will let you know.”
He moved away, thinking hard. Unlike the air circulation chamber that was of necessity wide open so the air could be channelled to these lower levels as well, the water chamber was merely an enormous pumping station.
How had the aliens known where to come? Tymos thought immediately of Zacary. He had betrayed Krys, but he would have had no reason to be down here to know the layout, and he couldn’t have done any sabotage - he was upstairs. Could it be another of Kellex’s puppets? Had it been Frellen, and he was drawn away to lead the saboteurs here? If he was, where is he now? Where were the last two of the Aeronite saboteurs?
Tymos asked Arlen to locate Frellen, and the response came quickly. He was not in his quarters.
He was summoned before he could think further about the missing man.
One of the suited up engineers, was holding a cylinder. This one had a tube that was connected to a vertical pipe. It was much wider than the one he’d seen in the air chamber.
As he studied it, the engineer explained, while he pointed to where wire was wound around the plastic. “I believe there was some kind of stop valve in the tube that broke when current went through the wire. We can’t tell how much of the substance in the cylinder has seeped out, but it won’t have mixed far, with the pumps off. We can easily flush this section.”
“I will leave you to deal with it,” Tymos announced. He felt a lessening of tension knowing the sabotage had not had the intended effect, what ever it was. But his concern for the missing Frellen, had not abated. He moved away from the engineers and went to where the nearest pipe entered a tunnel. There was enough room for a man to walk alongside the pipe, for maintenance purposes.
When he decided to enter it, one of the watchful guards silently followed him.
On emerging from the second tunnel, having followed it all the way from where the pipes came up from below, he heard Arden requesting his attention.
When he replied, Arden reported, “The beam-in room is empty. We have removed the bodies and that second capsule is gone.”
“Understood,” Tymos gave the customary reply.
“They are gone then, Prince Tymos,” his guard shadow suggested. “The devils that done the damage?”
“It seems so,” Tymos said, but he wasn’t convinced. He was still feeling shivers down his spine - warning him of something. “However, Frellen is missing.”
“Do you think he helped do this?” the guard asked, tensing for action.
“Not willingly,” Tymos hoped that was true. “I want to find him.”
Tymos continued his search until a new voice spoke to him via the headset.
“Prince Tymos, come and talk with me.
Without realising it, he stopped moving, and his guard escort nearly walked into him. For just a moment, anger flared. He needed to find Frellen, had to know where he was and if he had helped the saboteurs.
“Get others to help your search,” Tymos said, resigned to obeying Governor Xyron. “And don’t assume that all of the aliens have gone, or died. I will be in the security control room.”
He hardly heard the expected agreement, as he moved aside to transmit up several levels and into a different palace.
In the control room, he saw Xyron immediately. He was still clad in the white coveralls he used when performing scientific investigations in the field. He gave the Governor a slight bow of greeting, less than normal as an indication that he was acting in his father’s place, and was for the present, Xyron’s equal. Though he did not feel anything close to being an equal.
The Governor’s first words, although sounding like a polite query, felt like a rebuke.
Reining in his first instinct of making an angry retort, he noticed Xyron watching him as he rephrased his answer. “Llaimos is in Father’s quarters with Stenn, Jonko and Keleb. I will know, immediately, if he is in danger.”
“And your sister?”
“She is fine…” Tymos summarised what she had encountered, done, and intended.
For a time, Xyron considered the description of the capsules used by the aliens to travel along the underground tunnels.
Tymos found himself pacing the control room, oblivious to the irritated glances from Arden. He stopped abruptly when Xyron said, “Being a leader does not mean doing everything yourself. It means being available to oversee the larger picture.”
“Do you mean I have to just sit here?” Tymos snarled.
“It means being available to do what only you have the skills and knowledge to do and let those trained to do lesser things…do them.”
Some of the anger drained from Tymos, as he realised some of his irritation was frustration, and some a build up of power within himself. “There is something going on around here that I cannot see…”
“Perhaps if we move to the chairs yonder, out of Arden’s way, we could figure it out together.”
With a terse nod, Tymos agreed, although he was still too twitchy to sit still.
“Is there anything else that has happened here, that you haven’t mentioned? What is making your power stay at such a high level?”
It was the mildest of reminders, but it doused the activity in his mind and cleared it of the irrelevant. In a microsecond, the true cause of his unease became blindingly clear.
Tymos spoke slowly. “Something is making trails wherever it touches, wherever it walks. The analogy is poor, but picture the slime trails of snails and slugs. I can see them only when I adjust my eyes to see in the UV end of the spectrum.”
Xyron tensed then, his attention fully focussed. “Where have you seen them?”
“All around the beam-in chamber, the walls, the capsule when it was there, around and on all the bodies. I thought it was related to the Aeronites, because the trails went up the ladders to the basement and then went in all directions. But they were not in the air chamber or near the water pumps, not even on the cylinders.”
Xyron gave Arden an abrupt order as he stood up, “Have a member of each guard group report to Surijon immediately.” He went to one of the nearer communications panels and spoke to Surijon, who was one of his brothers. The terse phrases were highly technical, but the meaning came into Tymos’s mind. Some of the guards would soon have the means to see the trails and to look where they went.
Only then, did the realisation occur to him that he should have followed that enigma up, and not obsessed over the missing engineer.
Xyron returned, and spoke softly. “I have just spoken to Jono, he instructs you to do whatever you must, to ensure that Llaimos remains safe.”
As Xyron continued to speak, Tymos felt shivers running up and down his spine. What if his search for Frellen, had been imposed on his mind to keep him away from Llaimos?
“…Jono is going to force the Aeronite air fighters away from Dira and the Temple. As soon as he does, you must take Llaimos to the Temple. One of us, either myself, your father, your sister or yourself, must be with him.”
The shivers he felt up and down his spine became an unpleasant prickling. Then, as he wrestled with the implied suggestion that he go and wait with Llaimos for an attack that might not come…his whole body was subjected to an icy atavistic chill.
It came from Kryslie, far away in Amik. It was not a telepathic sending, but coming through the deeper twin bond. He had a vision of what she was seeing, the glowing trails, the hooded figures, and then he heard one word in his mind, “Ciriot.”
The Ciriot, the true enemy, were in Amik. The Ciriot were in the palace.
As that message faded, another sensation replaced it. Trouble. Trouble here.
With a terse, “The Ciriot are here,” he ran from the control room, paused briefly outside to sense the location. He had received a mental cry of alarm and terror, not clear like he received from his twin, but an intense emotion. He had no sense of where or from whom the alarm had come, but he used the ‘there’ of where he needed to be as his focus, and trusted the Guardians of Peace to take him there as he transmitted.