She bowed to him and held onto her robe to ensure her breasts didn’t fall out again. “Thank you for your time.”
She took her leave to process what had been experienced, and swam back into the residential district of the city, larger multilevel chambers. There were many entrances around it which Undine swam in and out of. Inside was where her people slept, clustered together tightly within the darkened waters.
It was a natural state. Ancient Undine on their home world often slept in this manner to discourage other forms of aquatic life from attacking them in their sleep. All it took was an Undine to awake and make the call to rouse the hundreds of others nearby to jump to action, killing any unwanted guest instantly. Unless of course it was the Architect’s soldiers, their weapons, technology, and numbers were unmatched.
Nereid looked at the two to three hundred people in her designated chamber grouped together as they slept, and wondered how she was going to get a comfortable sleep. There was no privacy, and as far back as she could remember she was fine with that. But the talk with the human, Pierce, it not only triggered more of her father’s memories, but also human habits such as having a private place to rest.
She swam over to one of the less densely packed areas of the chamber, and turned her face away from the rest of her slumbering people. She tried to imagine that she was alone and that she had her own quarters aboard a human-made starship in the cosmos.
Nereid returned to her superiors the next day, and presented them with an engram orb, the copy of her recent memories in the form of pure psionic power. The thoughts within the orb she presented showed the brief conversation she had with Pierce. Impressed with the progress she had made, she was ordered to return and pester him with more questions, namely the ones he refused to answer.
When Nereid returned, Pierce replied with subtle grunts as he sat on the floor of his chamber with his back to the wall, and his hands up to his knees. Nereid tried everything to get him to open up, and reveal more about Earth, humans, their mission, and the empire. Who do humans worship? Pierce refused to cooperate, Nereid thought back at some of the memories McDowell had, memories of him interrogating a terrorist. People were more forthcoming if you either tortured them, or found a way to earn their trust. Torture was out of the question, what he been through for the last two years was enough pain, and even then, they had made little progress.
Nereid offered her hand to Pierce, and smiled at him. “Come with me.”
He looked up at her with his rough appearance. “To where?”
“Outside of these walls, I suspect you haven’t been let out since your arrival.”
“I can’t swim very well in water, and as for breathing under it . . .”
She touched his hand and thought briefly about a psionic shield protecting the two of them. As her eyes opened, her gifts had brought it into reality. The two shared a psionic barrier; one that had enough heat and oxygen within it to keep him alive.
“You will be fine with me,” she reassured him as she guided him out of his cell, through the palace and into the undersea city.
Swimming wasn’t necessary as her telekinetic powers allowed them to glide above the various structures that adorned the ocean surface below. She spent hours showing Pierce the marvels of the city he had been imprisoned in for two years. The arching towers, the enormous sleeping chambers, the elegant central palace. A school of fish floundered past them as they traveled toward the city limits while extremely faint white light from the surface above beamed down upon them.
“This is outstanding,” Pierce said.
“Most of our species resides here,” she said as they hovered up top of a nearby sunken mountain, wormlike aquatic creatures slithered away in fear of their presence. “The rest of us exist in smaller cities throughout the planet.”
The two watched the city from their higher prospective as Nereid explained to Pierce more about her people, the goddess that brought them here, how the cities were created; by extracting silicon and other minerals out from the sands below, and fusing it together with the aid of adept psionics. The more they talked, the more McDowell’s recent memories of arriving in the system formed in her head. She had to remind herself several times she wasn’t an EISS agent masquerading as a UNE Hammerhead officer.
“So, in some ways we’re just like your species,” Nereid said. “We arrived here from the stars and were faced with the challenge of making it our home.”
“It has most certainly been a challenge for us,” Pierce said, and sat down within their psionic bubble. “Us . . . I’m likely the last one left of my ship.”
“Your ship was destroyed?”
“We arrived at the white dwarf, the star we call Sirius B. There was a planet with abandoned structures on it; we traveled inside one to explore it. That’s the last I saw of the ship, we were attacked by aliens.”
“How did they look?”
“They were armored, they attacked us with lasers; some had spears and shields and the others had laser cannons attached to their hands.”
Nereid grimaced, what Pierce described to her sounded exactly like the Architect’s loyal followers. She tried to recall more of McDowell’s memories, hoping that she could confirm the attack Pierce talked about. She saw the fortress . . . no tomb, tomb of the goddess. Its layout and design. It was built by the goddess and then later converted into a tomb for her in the aftermath of her demise, and therefore was the foundation of the Architect’s rise to power with the technology that existed within it.
The information he revealed helped her unlock more of McDowell’s past before arriving at the system. He was a rather important agent within EISS, even had access to secret command codes and security protocols in regard to Earth’s defenses. Her superiors wanted her to gather everything about Earth and while Pierce didn’t reveal much, the memories within her did. But most importantly, Pierce revealed that the Architect’s control over the system could come to an end, provided humans lent their support.
The Undine lacked ships of their own after the fall of the goddess. Wormholes didn’t help either without the aid of EVA suits and from what Pierce told her, they would need one to travel to that planet where the tomb was located. The educational engrams she received as a child did suggest that the tomb was where the Architect forced the Nereids to activate the goddess’s technology, and was where the trap to keep the Architect in the system was activated. There must have been something there that could be used against the Architect, something that could result in the Undine and Poniga being free of their slavery. And humans could be the ones that could make that happen. They just needed guidance.
Nereid submitted her engram orb to her superiors the next day, though she carefully doctored it to omit memories of Earth from McDowell’s mind and her wavering devotion to the Architect in light of her new discovery. The more she looked at her superiors and the elders that controlled their society, the more she was reminded of the situation McDowell had to deal with living on Earth. A collective of five species known as the Radiance Union had quite a bit of influence over the UNE government to the point where some laws were passed, not because the UNE deemed it necessary, but rather Radiance wanted it done to slowly ease the human race into joining their collective. Agents like McDowell were periodically tasked with assignments to prevent Radiance from gaining too much control over Earth via covert-op missions. As much as humans valued the friendship between them and Radiance, they valued freedom more.
Nereid saw a similar situation brewing as the elders of her people submitted to the will of the Architect, and allowed its armies to inspect the city at random times to search for any signs of a resistance growing. The elders saw it as a means of keeping their people alive as the Architect could have them wiped out in a bloody siege that would turn the oceans of their world red. The Undine and the Poniga were not free, freedom being something humans greatly valued. Freedom being something all species living in the system must be able to experience.