Flinx Transcendent_ A Pip & Flinx Adventure - Alan Dean Foster [146]
Because they were leaving this place behind physically did not mean it would be out of his mind any more than it had been absent from his recurring, often cryptic dreams.
Having had the newly arrived Tar-Aiym artifact described to them by Flinx, Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex were eager to see it for themselves. In her capacity as a security officer for the United Church, Sylzenzuzex had a professional interest in any kind of unauthorized and unrecorded weapons system. And while Clarity was primarily interested in Flinx's health and well-being, she had to admit that she was not entirely devoid of curiosity regarding the visitor herself.
“It's really that big?” she asked as they stepped out of the shuttlecraft and back into the holding bay in the underside of the Teacher.
“No.” He didn't smile and was not joking. “It's bigger. You'll see.”
Booster's tired and now distant sol-type star boasted the classic array of rocky inner worlds and outer gas giants. Heading outsystem in normal space, they passed several of these uninhabited, unnamed orbs. It was not necessary to skim so close in order to make rendezvous with the artifact, but the two scientists would not hear of leaving without using the opportunity to make at least a few nominal measurements in passing.
When the Teacher began its approach, everyone gathered in the ship's control room to have a look out the main foreport. Despite what Flinx had told them of the relic, Sylzenzuzex still confessed to bemusement as she gazed upon the spherical object that occupied the space forward and slightly to port.
“Where is it, tlacchk?”
“You're looking at it.” Standing behind her, Flinx gazed out at the alien sphere from which he had barely escaped with his life some half-dozen years before.
“You mean,” she clicked, “it's in orbit above the surface somewhere?”
“No,” he told her. “I mean that's it. The vessel. The Tar-Aiym weapons platform.”
It did not matter that he had described the artifact to them. Saying that a vessel was planet-sized was one thing. Trying to comprehend the actuality of something so immense was, as he knew well, entirely different.
It looked just as he remembered it from the encounter years ago, when he had been forced to explore its outermost level while being pursued by human assassins, rapacious AAnn, and—one other. He forced himself to push the disturbing memories into the past, to file them in the overflowing folder of similar unsettling incidents from his history. It was all over and done with, and for the sake of everyone he needed to concentrate on the present.
As a planet the cloud-swathed globe was not especially impressive. As a ship, an artificial construct, it exceeded anything humanxkind had ever contemplated except in moments of drugged engineering fantasy and conceptual delirium. Stippled with flecks of yellow and dark red, the thick gaseous cloud cover shone a dreary bronze in the faint light of the distant sun. Leaning over the forward console, Clarity pointed as an irritated Scrap struggled to keep from slipping off her left shoulder.
“Look there, in the northern hemisphere. Is that a storm?”
Flinx looked to where she was pointing. He knew what the vortex she had singled out portended. The storm was as artificial as the colossal mechanism that had created it.
“I'm pretty sure it's a sign that our presence has been acknowledged,” he told her. What he did not add was that the Tar-Aiym artifact, which was twice the size of the Earth, might be putting forth a welcome because it remembered him from last time.
The Teacher might subscribe to the same theory, but all it said was, “I am receiving a directional signal.”
“Follow it,