Williams stayed silent as Bailey got up and went back into the galley to clean up, leaving the soufflé on the table before him. Bailey found a way to make it happen back then, take leadership control of an unexpected crisis.
Rise or fall, I can’t run away, I have to do this. “Thanks, Chef.”
“Cool runnings.”
Williams gnawed away at a piece of the soufflé.
The soufflé was the best Williams ever had. Had Bailey backed down that night, he wouldn’t be eating it right now.
BAILEY RAN a damp cloth across the surface of his cutting board, removing blotches of spilt sauces and tiny fragments of vegetable trim after a day’s worth of cooking for the ship’s crew. He watched as Williams strode out of the mess hall with pep in his footsteps and a brimming smirk on his face.
Hugo, his sous-chef, approached him from behind having overheard the story exchanged minutes earlier. “So, how did that soufflé you made back then turn out?”
Bailey snickered, and knocked his fist on the cutting board he wiped clean. “Came out flatter than this board!”
Uncontrollable laughter from the two shrieked from their mouths, nearly causing them to fall over.
20 FOSTER
The Architect’s ship
En route to Sirius C system, Interstellar space
May 22, 2050, 00:48 SST (Sol Standard Time)
Foster had awoken to the sound of her prison cell door opening. Her surprised and disoriented body crawled away from the cold hard bed and watched two overlords toss a robed Poniga into the cell, slamming the doors shut as his face hit the floor. She limped next to him, fatigue still in her eyes and legs. She reached down and wrapped her hands around the Poniga as she lifted his head to face her, it was Mavron.
Blood trickled down his face from the large gash across his forehead as she helped him move over to the bed to lie down, and recover from whatever beatings Architect forces put him through. No doubt punishment for their failed escape attempt through the wormhole. Foster cringed at what they might do to her since she was the one that pushed for it to happen when it opened unexpectedly.
And what an escape attempt that was. A random wormhole opening from behind with none other than Williams and Rivera at the other end, too bad she and Mavron didn’t make it through. What Williams and Rivera were doing in that strange chamber, and how they figured out how to open a wormhole was another story. One she hoped to hear after finding another way off this ship. Sirius was indeed full of mysteries and it would seem her crew had begun to unlock some of them.
Mavron grumbled a long-winded sentence in his native tongue, one she couldn’t understand. He gently pushed her away and folded his hands together, his eyes shut while faint light began to emanate from his folded hands. Slight blue and purple waves of light rippled around his body, it was psionic energy, Foster had seen it enough times to know what it looked like.
The semi-dazzling light show stopped, his hands lifted and unveiled a shimmering white, glowing orb, she suspected this was the same object he tried to show her earlier. It psionically left his hands and floated in front of Foster’s face as he leaned his body back up to face her.
Foster merely looked at the stunning, but strange-looking orb floating in front of her. It moved with her as she tried to tilt her head away from it. “I’ll pass,” she said, and pushed it back toward him, only for it to get shoved back toward her with his mind.
Mavron said something to her; probably ‘I insist’ or something similar. At least that’s what his facial expression suggested. Foster swallowed and braced herself as the orb hovered toward her forehead. It pushed into it like a single raindrop falling into the middle of a pond.
Everything around her went dark. She wasn’t herself, she felt different. She looked at her body to find she was a man, a young man at that. The darkness faded away, suddenly, she saw that she was a Poniga by the looks of the maroon robe and the strange off-world landscape in the distance, similar to that of the Poniga home world.
She became fluent in the Poniga language as if she had been speaking it her whole life, she was experiencing someone else’s memories, experiences, and knowledge. She obtained data about the Lyonria wormhole network. Smaller gates connected planets together within a system, the Sirius system was full of them, left behind by the Lyonria when they used it as a base and also to mine minerals. Midsized gates were strong enough to connect to wormholes located in different star systems, larger gates were typically found in the depths of space, these were capable of sending ships to either different parts of the galaxy, or to distant galaxies in the universe.
Then there were the grand gates.
These were special ones, only found inside a room in the top spire of their central travel hubs. These gates were not only powerful enough to link to any type of wormhole across the cosmos, but were powerful enough to open a gateway to an alternate plane that existed outside of normal space and time.
Ten years before, there was an incident within the wormhole network after a planet that orbited Barnard’s Star went offline suddenly. As a result, it forced all nearby gates to lockdown. Only the smaller, inner system gates were able to operate normally, as they were separate from the primary wormhole network. The lockdown drove the Architect insane.
He was close to figuring out how to use the gates to leave the system, and escape from a trap a goddess had set, her name was Tiamat. A trap he couldn’t disable, since it, like Lyonria technology, was based on complex programming that took him centuries to master. Rather, centuries for the Poniga and Undine to figure out. It was the job of the Poniga to uncover and excavate Lyonria ruins and artifacts. The Architect then forced the Undine to use their psionic powers to unlock its secrets, and present their findings to him. New discoveries about Lyonria technology were used to further his knowledge of the Lyonria wormhole network, and how to unlock Tiamat’s trap. These memories and thoughts, they all had belonged to Mavron. He was once a laborer tasked with unearthing buried Lyonria artifacts and bringing it to the Undine ocean world known as Meroien. Foster was witnessing and experiencing the enslavement of Mavron and his people.
Foster saw a glimpse of the other plane of existence from the memory engram. It was the source of the Architect’s power, where he supposedly became a godlike entity thanks to mysterious beings that lived deep inside of it. Anyone that ventured inside for a prolonged period of time died, at least their physical body did, only to be reborn into something much greater. The Architect, from time to time, had used the gate in the Lyonria hub to send Poniga and Undine he favored on a journey to transform and ascend them into a higher state of evolution.
The trance ended, hurling Foster to the floor.
Her body jerked repeatedly as if an electrical shock had hit her.
21 NEREID
Xal’oxnia
Meroien, Sirius C system
Clock Error: Error source: unknown interference
Xal’oxnia was the capital city of the Undine, located deep below the darkened oceans of their world Meroien. Meroien orbited the brown dwarf star of Sirius C, which in turn orbited around both Sirius A and B. Heat from the three stars contributed to the warm weather of the ocean planet as well as the warm temperatures deep in the oceans despite the lack of light the planet received from its parent star.