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slits. It was encased from neck to foot in a one-piece, tight-fitting garment
of a dark metallic-weave material.
Brigid had never scrutinized Balam closely back at Cerberus he'd never
permitted it, erecting a quasi-hypnotic shield to mask his appearance from the
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ape-kin who held him captive.
Her visual inspection of the mummified corpse only confirmed what she had
suspected. There was an eerie calm forever frozen on its cadaverous face, a
quiet repose that went deeper than mere dignity. A kind of placid malice was
stamped there, too, a sense of superior purpose and pitiless logic, but no
real passion of any kind.
She took her hand away from the humped crystal form, and the smoky vapor
within it immediately swirled around the figure of the Archon again, obscuring
it from view. She touched the cocoon again, and the vaporous substance
immediately faded away, revealing the corpse. The crystal ovoid seemed to
function as a self-contained stasis unit, an encapsulated survival system that
had malfunctioned. Carefully constructed, it froze a subject in an
impenetrable bubble of space and time, slowing to a stop all metabolic
processes.
Theoretically the Archon could have waited forever to be released except this
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Axler, James - Outlanders 02 - Destiny Run unit had malfunctioned, protecting
the creature sufficiently from the air and the elements so it didn't
decompose, but not preventing mummification of the tissues. It could have lain
there like that for twenty thousand years or twenty.
Brigid walked next to the stairway, testing her weight on the first few steps,
then walked up to the gallery. A transverse ramp overlooked a big, hollow bay.
Within it, nestled inside a cradle of massive clamps, was a saucer-shaped
object, perhaps twenty feet in diameter. It had a silvery, metallic
appearance, as bright as a newly minted coin. The alloyed skin was perfectly
smooth and seamless with no surface protuberances of any kind.
Descriptive adjectives bubbled through her mind scout ship, chariot of the
gods, air horse.
Bright symbols were painted in red on the gleaming hull. These were not the
indecipherable hieroglyphs, but Khalkha prayer inscriptions, sacred formulas
intended to confer the might of the wind into the air horse.
Her lips twitched in a humorless smile. One of the clansmen, perhaps the Tushe
Gun himself, had failed to find the entrance hatch to the small vessel and
hoped that by daubing mystic words on it the secrets of its wind-borne power
would be revealed.
She left the gallery and returned to the lower deck. She walked deeper into
the ship, footsteps ringing hollowly from the metal floor plates, the echoes
captured and lost in the silence. Yellow shadows chased themselves across the
high, convex ceiling. Shapes loomed up and out of the golden-hued mist.
One shape she recognized. It was twelve feet tall and looked like a pair of
solid
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Axler, James - Outlanders 02 - Destiny Run black cubes, the smaller balanced
atop the larger. The top cube rotated slowly, producing the steady, almost
subsonic drone of sound. A faint whiff of ozone pervaded the air around it. It
was a duplicate of the power generator in the subterranean Dulce installation,
and it obviously still functioned, even if the stasis unit did not. The
machine must have been self-perpetuating to have lasted this long, feeding its
energy cells from some power source she could only guess at.
Rising around her was a complexity of electronic relays and connections like
no machines she had ever seen. The extent of the circuitry faded into the
darkness where the golden mist didn't reach. The panels bore an intricate
arrangement of keys and readout screens marked with the hieroglyphiclike
symbols. In the center of one console glared a red, backlit triangle, bisected
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by three vertical, round-topped lines.
A metal-framed rectangle of deep, glossy black hugged the curve of the wall
above the main console. It looked like polished obsidian, ten feet in length
and three in height. Four chairs, apparently molded out of one piece, rose
from the floor before it. They were small and too narrow to comfortably seat
even her own neat rear end.
Opposite the console stood a vertical arrangement of armaglass slabs, forming
a hollow cylinder. The slabs were bound together, held upright by ropes and
rusty chains. She paced around them and found a wooden door, reinforced with
crudely hammered-out lead sheets, forced between a pair of armaglass sections.
The door was heavy, but it had no knob or latch. Working her fingers between
the wood and the armaglass, she was able to tug it open a few inches and see
what lay on the other side. Two thick metal pillars rose from the deck plates,
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Axler, James - Outlanders 02 - Destiny Run each one six feet tall, and mounted
on top of each was a sphere that looked as if it had been sculpted from
quartz. Between the pillars the floor lifted slightly, like a dais. Atop it
was an interlocking pattern of hexagonal metal disks, exactly like the
emitter-array platforms of the mat-trans gateways.
Mystified, Brigid inspected the area around the armaglass enclosure, and she
found wooden crates marked with the number twelve, a collection of picks and
shovels, a makeshift table holding the remains of a meal of mutton and bread,
medical instruments and tech manuals written in Russian. She recognized most
of the instruments as simple blood-testing equipment, a microscope and a
small-
scale fermentation tank. A small bottle contained a handful of yellow tablets.
The label on the bottle was printed in Russian Cyrillic, and though she
couldn't be sure, she thought the tablets were pain medication. She also saw
power cables snaking off randomly and to no obvious purpose, precision tools,
rad counters and a stack of batteries.
Returning to the control console, she saw the subtle marks of recent use upon
the panels. Someone had manipulated the banks of buttons and keys not shaped
for human use. She studied them silently, ignoring the steady, icy prickles
spreading deeper through her body.
After a few minutes of thought and examination, Brigid began delicately
pecking at the console keys. The sequence she chose was largely guesswork,
following the intricate linkages and the marks of fingers upon the buttons. On
impulse, she passed her hand over the panel glowing with the triangle symbol.
A shimmering image rippled across the dark rectangle, swam, shifted, then
broke apart into countless separate yet similar black components, then swirled
again to acquire a new shape.
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