The three fighters surrounded the escape pod, noses pointing outward to take on any who might challenge them. Eliana wasn’t sure how those fighters maneuvered, but they had no difficulty slowly creeping back toward the ship, keeping the distance between them and the escape pod to a minimum.
Guided by the acquisition beam, the pod floated into the bay and descended to the deck with nary a bump nor a scrape.
Eliana moved closer to the window. “How smooth is the exterior supposed to be?” Faint striations—uniform in the direction they followed—coated its surface. The shallow ridges lacked the scorch marks she would expect to see if someone had attacked the pod and blasted it with e-cannon fire. So maybe the grooves were just part of the design?
“It should be smooth,” Dagon murmured.
The anxiety clawing her stomach increased another notch. “Wouldn’t there be scorch marks or something if it had come under attack?”
“Not necessarily. But the markings would be more random. These are uniform, so they may have simply resulted from the pod crashing through the walls of the qhov’rum.”
That lent her some hope.
Magnetic clamps rose from the hangar floor and locked onto the pod with simultaneous thunks.
The three fighters darted away to perform some kind of scouting maneuvers before returning to the hangar.
When the large door slowly began to close, sealing the silent darkness outside, she glanced up at Dagon. “I need to be in there when they open the hatch.”
“Eliana,” he said softly, her name carrying a reluctant protest.
“I know,” she said when he offered nothing more. “I know what we might find inside it.” Every gruesome possibility had played out in her head at least a hundred times in the days it had taken them to reach this point.
They might find a dead Lasaran. Or a dead Yona. A dead gifted one whom Eliana had succeeded in getting into the pod but had failed to retrieve before death claimed her. A gifted one who had escaped the attack on the Kandovar only to die when the escape pod’s systems malfunctioned and robbed her of the life support she needed. Or the body of a gifted one who had been brutally slain by Gathendiens who had found her first. Or simply the empty clothing of one of Eliana’s deceased immortal brethren.
Her throat thickened.
Whenever a vampire or immortal died, the peculiar symbiotic virus that infected them swiftly devoured him or her from the inside out in a desperate bid to continue living, leaving nothing behind but their clothing and weapons. If one of her immortal brethren had died in that pod, likely the only thing that would enable Eliana to identify her would be the scent left behind on a pile of clothing.
If Dagon’s men tromped around inside the pod first, she might lose that tenuous connection.
“Please,” she murmured. “It’s important to me.”
After a moment’s hesitation, he nodded. Uncrossing his arms, he rested a hand on her back.
Eliana drew comfort from the light touch. She knew he merely wished to spare her if opening the pod revealed the worst. But she tenaciously clung to the hope that she might instead find a healthy gifted one who simply hadn’t been able to fix whatever had gone wrong with the pod’s communication system. Or perhaps an immortal who—like Eliana—had slipped into stasis and whose heartbeat had slowed enough that the Ranasura’s scans couldn’t detect it.
As soon as the hangar door sealed, Dagon pressed his free hand to the reader beside the entrance, then typed in a code.
She took a step toward the entrance as a door slid up.
“Wait.” Catching her arm, he drew her back and nodded to the dozen or so soldiers behind her.
Eliana had been so consumed by her thoughts that she’d forgotten about the security contingent he had ordered to meet them there.
The soldiers strode into the hangar and moved to surround the escape pod. All aimed weapons that reminded her of the network’s grenade launchers back home, but these fired white-hot balls of energy.
Only when the men were in place did Dagon escort Eliana inside.
Maarev, Liden, and Efren disembarked from their fighters and joined them as Dagon and Eliana moved to stand in a gap left by the security team.
Dagon heard footsteps behind him and glanced over his shoulder.
Adaos and Secondary Medic Salok positioned themselves some distance away, a hover gurney and a bag full of emergency equipment at the ready.
Dagon gave them a nod, then faced forward and addressed Maarev. “Open it. But make no move to enter.”
Maarev approached the pod.
The rest of the soldiers tensed, as did Eliana.
“The grips have all been sheared off,” Maarev murmured as he studied the white exterior.
A young engineer by the name of Lanaar jogged over to him, handed him a kada, then backed away.
Maarev pulled a corner off the palm-sized device and dropped the larger piece. The falling piece of tech expanded to a hoverboard the length of a man’s arm and just wide enough to support his feet.
Maarev stepped up onto it, then thumbed the piece in his hand. Rising smoothly, the board carried him up to the pod’s hatch.
“Why is the hatch so high?” Eliana asked softly. For the first time, she evinced no excitement over discovering yet another new alien gadget as she put it.
Dagon kept his eyes on Maarev. “To prevent the pod from filling with water when opened after an ocean landing.”
“Oh.”
Chief Engineer Cobus appeared at Dagon’s elbow with a small silver globe in one hand and a small data pad in the other.
A clunk claimed everyone’s attention as the hatch shifted outward a few inches, then began to roll to one side.
Maarev swiftly dropped down to the floor, stepped off the hoverboard, and raised his weapon.
Light spilled forth from the pod.
Silence reigned for several interminable seconds.
Dagon took the ziyil and tablet from Cobus. He tossed the ziyil up and tapped the tablet’s screen. The silver ball halted midfall and hovered in the air. His eyes on the ball, Dagon slid his finger across the screen in a snakelike motion.
The ball zipped up and darted through the pod’s entrance, disappearing from sight.
Streaks of light shot out of the hatch, then vanished.
When Dagon again moved his finger on the tablet, the ziyil floated out of the pod and lowered to hover a short distance away from them.
Dagon looked down at Eliana. “Are you sure you want to see this?”
A muscle leaped in her jaw. “Yes.”
He tapped the screen.
A three-dimensional hologram formed around the silver ball, re-creating every scanned surface of the interior of the escape pod.
The empty escape pod.
Though no human, Lasaran, or Yona—live or dead—occupied the space, someone clearly had at one time. Wrappers from nutrition bars littered the floor. What appeared to be discarded clothing formed a shallow pile in one corner.
“Son of a bitch,” Eliana snarled and stepped forward.
Dagon caught her arm. “Wait.”
Radiating anger, she pointed at the hologram. “That clothing belongs to one of my friends, Dagon.”
“You’re certain?”
“Yes. But I won’t know which one until I get inside. None of us brought much clothing with us because we all decided to defer to Lasaran customs and adopt their mode of dress once we reached Lasara. So whenever my friends got bored with the limited wardrobe they packed, they would mix and match each other’s clothes. I’ve seen at least three of them wear that.”