Flinx Transcendent_ A Pip & Flinx Adventure - Alan Dean Foster [201]
It was late and she was nervous. Not because of her striking environs: in the course of her monthlong stay on Comagrave she had grown used to the breathtaking solitude and grand surroundings of the vast underground chamber. No, as a recent graduate embarking on her first field assignment, she feared making a mistake or incorrectly entering data into the relevant sybfile.
The strange feeling that now crept over her caused her to turn from the communit over which she was laboring.
One of the hundreds of thousands of identical transparent cylinders that lined the interior of the immense underground chamber stood nearby. Tinted indigo, swathed in fragile vitreous golden filaments like fossilized baby's breath, it had been carefully removed from its place among its ranked fellows so that it could be studied more easily. The difficult move had entailed stretching and repositioning the dozens of delicate conduits and strands that connected it to the row from which it had been extricated. Held in suspension within the cylinder, or pod, was a slender, long-faced being of somber mien and spindly build.
Searching for the source of the odd sensation that had caused her to interrupt her work, she eventually found herself looking down at her feet. A dark wetness had pooled up beneath her left sandal. When she inclined her foot to one side, the dampness made contact with her bare skin. Frowning, she bent over to examine the liquid. It had not come from the protein drink that still sat upright on the console in front of her: the container was intact. Then what was its source? Raising her gaze, she followed the shadowy trickle. It led sideways to the base of the cylinder. Her eyes suddenly got very, very big.
The cylinder was open. Seeping out the bottom was the rest of the gel it had contained. The elongated horizontal eyes of the slender being inside were wide open and staring straight back at her. As she looked on, too frozen to scream, yell, or say anything, one of the being's two upper limbs started to twitch.
Rising from her chair she stumbled backward, tripped over a storage case, and fell. Dazed, she picked herself up. As she did so, her gaze happened to fall over the side of the walkway that was occupied by the archaeological station. Beyond stretched the immense preservation chamber, one of many buried deep in the bedrock of Comagrave. Like the others, this one held several million of the planet's indigenous inhabitants, each conserved for posterity in individual, highly oxygenated, gel-filled cylinders.
Row by row, tier by tier, room by gigantic room, each of them was opening.
Dimly, in the back of her simultaneously enthralled, terrified, awestruck mind, it occurred to her that this defining moment might make a worthwhile subject for formal observation. But despite her excellent training she was too paralyzed by the sight to pick up her communit or her recorder. No one would have blamed her.
Before her eyes, in their ritual gowns and ceremonial preservation attire, the Sauun of Comagrave, who for hundreds of thousands of years, out of collective racial fear of some unknown, irresistible peril had sealed themselves away far beneath the surface of their planet, were starting to wake up.
Donning survival suits, Tse-Mallory and Sylzenzuzex went out and brought Flinx and Pip back to the Teacher the instant the resplendent red sphere vanished. No explosion marked its passing and nothing remained in its luminescent wake to indicate that it had ever been. One moment it hovered in the exact center of the protective plasma bubble; the next it was gone, leaving behind only a lonely figure in an unscarred survival suit floating in white emptiness. Whatever had obliterated the vessel crewed by members of the Order of Null had not harmed Flinx.
Upon determining that his warped, crazed half sister Mahnahmi had lapsed into an infantile regressive coma from which she showed no sign of emerging,