Chapter 23: Shaking Ground — Part 5

Susan nodded, putting out a warning to the tribe to stay away from her house until further notice.

Shadow followed Susan through the mist to a boat, then onto the boat. Susan looked back at her, surprised. “You’re still conscious, and you aren’t delirious.”

“Not much worse than a head cold.” Shadow said, coughing.

Shadow couldn’t see the terrain, was feeling too under the weather to concern herself with the suicide pace Susan set across the bog. She worried about her crew, and through sheer will kept her immune responses in check. A scientist met them at the entrance to an underground facility, an inhuman and dangerous creature. Instinctively, Shadow began searching for its weaknesses, finding a few obvious ones and filing them away in case she needed to exploit them. She followed Susan inside, ignoring the shivers the alien’s appearance sent up her spine. Shadow handed the Prodigy crystal to the alien. It chattered almost affectionately, studying the crystal with curious palpi, moving it this way and that. When it spoke, it was with a mix of awe and determination.

“This technology originated with an alien species, the format is theirs, and easily manipulated. I can reconvert the information, but it will destroy the crystal. The crystal cannot be duplicated. It is missing core molecular structural components that would allow this.” The scientist said.

“It’s a RES scanned Prodigy crystal, and was never meant to be used more than once.” Shadow explained.

Leading them to a special chamber within its facilities, the alien placed the crystal gently into a metal box that was attached to a hollow glass cylinder. It took some adapting on the part of the alien, but soon the machine and the device were integrated. Roughly the size needed to hold an adult human, the cylinder was filled with viscous blue tinted liquid. Lasers shot through the cylinder, scanning the crystal horizontally and vertically, and from all sides. Lightning pulsed through the liquid within, and the crystal slowly lost physical cohesion, breaking into smaller units, the movement of those units governed by the lasers until they formed a glowing cloud of plasma. Two infants grew rapidly from spasmodic plasma floating in the center of the cylinder. One was a boy, the other a girl, and both had pointy ears and green eyes. Their red hair flowed through the water in the cylinder, their fingers and toes spreading out into long, thin digits.

They were almost elfin in appearance, the result of the symbiont interfacing with the children as they grew. The process took several weeks to complete, the scientist working unerringly at its monitoring stations, exchanging its position every day or so with another of its kind. Shadow had collapsed to her knees within the first hour of the process, the point when she knew that even if there was a problem, the fetuses had developed to a point where they could survive. Shadow’s sword lay across her lap as she sat, and though it might not have seemed so, she could have risen from that floor with brutal speed.

Rather than waste energy, Shadow closed her eyes, extended her senses, and let time pass. When she opened her eyes again, some five weeks later, she felt a thousand times better. She moved only to bathe, to eat, to drink, and even so, she only did this every few days. Her body, apparently, had survived integration. The symbiont had also made itself a part of all the others. Roxy and Ferret held hands, sitting near her while Xeti, somewhere nearby but out of her line of sight, spoke quietly with Susan. The twins had reached the age where they could be released from the production chamber, but Shadow had missed that time. David, Roxy’s twin brother, snuggled with Didi in a corner of the room, off to Shadow’s left. Shadow could not recall how she knew his name. She knew the symbiont had completely changed her. The rest of her crew was already completely enhanced. They had adapted quickly, and Shadow, perhaps because she had chosen to remain conscious, had actually taken longer. She knew David’s name and his relation to Roxy, and a great deal of other things that had happened during her trance.

“How long have I been in meditation?” Shadow asked Susan, once she found the woman.