FALAHA'S JOURNEY: A Spacegirl's Account in Three Movements

Episode #46

Fifth day of ninth week, year 267.

With Baro's assistance, Eyuran was taking us through a short shift to the place from where, these past few days, Hunters kept appearing. The visits were random but persistent, distracting Eyuran from gathering supplies. Each time more and more creatures appeared and Eyuran could finally breathe in peace when we left the camp. Other than that, it was awfully quiet, and since I'd woken up none had paid us a visit. It was weird. Did the owners of this ship know we were here and were simply waiting for our move? Or had we managed to remain unnoticed? Or were we simply not considered a threat, but were to be dealt with eventually if we became an eyesore to someone? Were we heading into a trap?

When the shift was over, bringing us closer to one of the walls and leaving the huge chunk of space behind that would have taken us numerous days to traverse on foot without the machine, we continued to move in complete darkness, relying only on Bradoh's sensors, and with our stealth camouflage on.

Besides our options already discussed, another open question remained—with Quennah gone, what were we going to do without transport if we found survivors? With potential lives on the line, we couldn't stay here longer, wasting our time on finding a ship, nor could more people than us three go anywhere away from this alien Enclave without one.

Using one of the possibly smaller enemy vessels besides the Enclave itself didn't look like a promising idea either. From what I'd learned, the Baali did not require any kind of craft to travel in space—their extremely advanced soma gave them the DIVE ability to move between the stars as they pleased. But it wasn't just soma; their bodies were built that way too. It also meant they were able to move freely within this ship regardless of the distance in question. Even with Falaighnn it was impossible for us to spacewalk without spacesuits. Our disadvantage was so enormous that every effort seemed hopeless. How does one defeat someone so powerful?

Another thing that saddened me was that we were facing Ancestor's children and they were determined to destroy us by any means possible. It wasn't the kind of meeting I imagined having. Was Baro right and they weren't excited to find us living here? Was war really all that was left for us?

We had not decided yet what to do regarding the unknown green-eyed person—there were many potential answers to this problem. Each of the hypotheses required more evidence to determine the likelihood of alternatives, and each required its own course of action. So the mystery remained to be solved. Then, there was that strange presence I felt before the Enclave appeared. And my unusual dreams... Were these things related?

"We're here," Eyuran said.

We were near the 'root' of a giant tube. There were smaller ones as well, but we set our eyes on this one, since it was leading from the wall and down under the scrap. This was one of the places Eyuran had spotted the creatures appearing from.

The weird material the tubes were made of was actually composed of pure carbon, its very unusual allotrope. I haven't seen anything like it used by our people and its strength was extreme; those tubes had crushed our ship designed for immense pressures and forces like an eggshell. Yet the tubes were able to move and bend in some way when catching ships, so these constructs were also very elastic. This carboform was possibly known to us, but maybe we weren't able to create it? The Flow this ship originated from was probably older than ours. Was it something there that our Flow still lacked, or weren't we sufficiently advanced enough yet?

Doing a quick math on dimensions and the distance from the tube, gravity measurements and other necessary calculations, the next step was to dive inside, right into the center of its presumed cavity, since there was no other way to get in without using the opening mechanism. The fewer signs of our presence and activity there were, the better, and we didn't want to attract anyone by inflicting even the slightest damage.