Ascending - James Alan Gardner [40]
“Very most fast,” I said. “We were strengthened by entering the sun. That is how we escaped from the Earthlings and the stick-people.”
“Bloody hell,” Uclod said. He swept his hand over his brow, as if wiping off sweat. “Finding a secret like this—it’s like dynamite, missy. Worse than dynamite: pure antimatter. If hopping into a star doesn’t destroy FTL fields but actually makes them stronger…if the Shaddill have deliberately misled us for centuries about the limitations on our FTL envelopes…” He shook his head. “But how could they get away with it? Our people must have run tests—experiments to measure FTL field collapse. That’s the sort of thing engineers do! And if the Shaddill still managed to fool everybody down through the centuries…hell, the Shads will go ape-shit that we’ve discovered the truth. They’re probably after us already. What are we going to do?”
Lajoolie stood, her movement not making a sound. “Whatever you decide,” she said, “I’m sure it will be wise. We’ll leave you to think in peace; when you want, I’ll bring you food.”
She bent over him, cupping her hands gently around the globes of his ears and touching her lips to his bald scalp. It was a most intimate gesture—the kind that makes a watcher embarrassed and angry and lonesome, all at the same time. Then she turned and walked silently away.
As she passed, Lajoolie took my hand in a firm grip. She led me from the room…and I felt so subdued, I went without argument.
9
WHEREIN I LEARN ABOUT OUR ENEMIES
Bone Appétit
Lajoolie’s hand felt cold holding mine—so cold her blood must have been the temperature of slush. It irks me that aliens never have the correct body heat: they are always too warm or too cool, and too hard or too soft, too dry or too damp, too hasty or too slow, too stupid or too annoying. Sometimes, they are also too strong…which is why I had no choice but to hasten behind the orange woman as she dragged me away from the bridge.
Partway down the corridor, Lajoolie stopped and placed her free hand on the glowing yellow wall. I did not see anything special about the spot she touched, but after a count of three, the opposite wall opened with a faint sucking sound. It revealed another corridor, taller and narrower than the one we currently occupied. When Lajoolie moved forward, there was no room to walk beside her; therefore, I trailed along behind, trying not to feel like a little girl being pulled to the place of teaching machines by her older sister.5
We soon came to a branch, a pair of even narrower bronchial tubes forking left and right. Lajoolie escorted me to the left where the corridor spiraled upward into a wee cubbyhole of a room. Bony ridges jutted from the room’s side wall, making flat surfaces with curved-up lips at the front. Clearly, these were shelves…although if I were a Zarett, I would not go to the inconvenience of growing bones in my lungs, just so people had someplace to put their belongings. The shelves held bowls which appeared to be bone too—suggesting that someone had chopped off parts of Starbiter’s skeleton in order to obtain containers for soup.
That was quite icky indeed. Even worse, there were cups on the shelves too: big bone cups, which reminded me of skulls. They did not have facial features, but they were almost exactly the size and shape of a half-rotted wolf’s head I found in the woods when I was twelve. There were also bone utensils of recognizable types—spoons, spatulas, and so on—plus a variety of objects whose purpose I could not divine. Some were long and thin, others were boxy, and a few were so oddly shaped (all curlicues and spikes and knobs) that one suspected they had no actual use at all;