Toc238718037” class=“calibre9” id=“Toc238718037”>

“Clarity. Clarity!”

She mumbled something incoherent. As consciousness slowly returned and she once more became aware of her surroundings, she realized that Flinx was holding her up with one arm beneath her back. Above him, Pip and Scrap continued to circle in confusion, utterly bewildered by what had just transpired below them. Tears were running down Flinx’s cheeks. He looked thoroughly, completely, absolutely miserable.

Good, she thought.

The first thing she did when she regained full control of her senses was to smack him across the face as hard as she could.

“What was that?” she growled wrathfully as she sat up, pushing his arm aside. “Yelling at me like that, trying to get me to shoot you….” Furious, she looked around. “Where’s that gun? Give me another chance….”

Her words trailed away. Searching for the pistol, her gaze encountered a third visage. Memory came racing back. Though the face she was staring into was not human, she thought she could put a name to it.

“Fluff?” she mumbled hesitantly.

The giant Ulru-Ujurrian smiled hugely, showing gleaming white teeth. His kind being the only true telepaths ever discovered, he replied to her straightforwardly and without hesitation.

“Clarity-friend! Good to see Flinx-friend’s best friend again!” Paws that could pulverize rock embraced her, pulling her close to a furry chest and threatening to smother her. When Fluff finally let her go she was gasping for air. “Sorry hug you so hard.” The Ulru-Ujurrian’s mental apology reeked of genuine contrition. “Sensed life-danger to Flinx-teacher and had to come quicklike.” Marvelously and quite unexpectedly, the huge ursinoid winked. “Always still keeping an eye on Flinx.”

He stepped back and she saw that he was not alone. Flinx’s hulking savior was flanked by three other familiar figures. She recognized them as well: the thoughtful Moam, the appropriately named Bluebright, and Softsmooth, festooned with more rings than any of her companions. A fourth stood off by himself, glaring at her.

“Interruptions. Always interruptions.” An Ujurrian of few words, Maybeso promptly folded himself and disappeared into the hovering disk that constituted a dark hole in midair. Having done his job of locating Flinx, the most enigmatic of all the ursinoids had returned to wherever it was he went when he was not participating in the communal tunnel digging.

Rising shakily to her feet, she extended an arm to provide a perch for a returning Scrap. As soon as the poor minidrag landed and coiled around her extended arm, she began to stroke and reassure it. Her bewildered serpentine companion was trembling with insecurity.

“It’s all right, Scrap. Everything is all right,” she whispered soothingly. Her gaze shifted to the watching ursinoids. “I’m fine, Fluff. I understand now what happened and why you did what you did.” Turning, she glared at Flinx. “You I’m still mad at.”

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Clarity!”

She put her free hand to her head. “Okay, okay! Stop projecting on me or I’m going to start crying myself.”

“It was the only way,” he told her helplessly. “Remember how Fluff and his friends responded when I was in danger from Coldstripe’s people, back when you and I first met? Fluff and the others reacted again when I was on Visaria recently and was threatened there. I figured—I hoped—they would come to my aid once more if I could initiate similarly threatening conditions. But,” he mumbled contritely, “the threat had to be real.”

“Fooled us,” Bluebright declared, her loud-thinking buoyantly cheerful.

“Fooled me, too.” Clarity gazed across at Flinx. “What would have happened if your friends hadn’t responded to the apparent danger and come to your aid? What would have happened if they’d been—late?”

“I would have projected onto you.” His tone was as serious as she had ever heard. “Tried to deflect your intention, or at least affected your emotions enough so that your shot would have missed.”

She was staring at him. “Are you sure that would have worked?”

“No,” he told her quietly, “I was not. But when I commit to something, I commit wholeheartedly. I don’t know how to do anything halfway.” He paraphrased Truzenzuzex. “With all of civilization at stake, extreme measures are justified.”

“You committed to me,” she reminded him forcefully.

He swallowed hard and looked away. “I said I was sorry.”

She was quiet for a long moment. Realizing they had intruded on something profound, the normally inquisitive Ujurrians responded with uncharacteristic silence.

“I’m sorry, too, Flinx,” she told him firmly. “Not necessarily about failing to shoot you. That remains to be determined.” He stared blankly at her taciturn expression. She managed to hold it for a moment longer before throwing herself into his arms. “The galaxy may die, the galaxy may survive,” she declared soberly, “but one constant remains unchanged throughout: the profound obtuseness of the human male.”

The quartet of Ujurrians looked on as the two human-friends embraced.

Moam thought frankly at Softsmooth, who was standing next to him. “This is all part of the human game. Not civilization game. It is less important.”

“No—more important.” Softsmooth was insistent, and the four of them immediately fell to soundless arguing.

With the traumatized minidrags once more put at ease and Clarity (more or less) reconciled to Flinx’s desperate effort, he did his best to explain to the curious Ujurrians the rationale behind his ruse.

“I had to make you think my life was in danger.” He tried not to lose himself in the plate-sized yellow eyes that were staring candidly back at him. “The last time that happened, on Visaria, you came through one of your tunnels in time to save me. You also did it years ago, at Coldstripe. Now I need your help again.” He paused. “Everybody needs your help.”

“The big danger is coming.” Moam was making an observation, not asking a question. “We know. We showed you.”

Flinx nodded. “There was a weapon devised by the people who once inhabited this world. I was able to convince it to attack the oncoming Evil. It did not have enough of an effect to deflect the danger. So I thought I would ask if there’s anything more you can do.” He tried to sound encouraging. “Maybe you could ‘dig’ one of your tunnels in front of it and it would fall in?”

A sequence of amused grunts emerged from deep within Bluebright’s chest. Nearby, Fluff was apologetic.

“Cannot dig a hole that big, or at that distance, Flinx-teacher. Maybe in few billion of your years. But do not have that kind of time. Do not have enough minds or hands.” The rings on his fingers pulsated softly, emanating subdued internal hues. “We have done all we can do by passing along the warning, which we got from the dead people’s alarm machine on world you call Horseye and local people call Tslamaina.”

Stepping forward, Softsmooth loomed over the two humans. A massive but soft seven-fingered paw came down to rest on Flinx’s unoccupied shoulder. Huge eyes full of wisdom that were at once childlike and incomprehensible peered down into his own.

“We can do no more and there is no more we can do, Flinx-friend. Outcome of all games, end of biggest game, is in your hands now. You were the key, you are still the key.”

Flinx suddenly felt both small and vulnerable, and not because the hulking Ujurrian was so much larger than he was. He spread his arms helplessly. “The key, the key! You keep telling me that, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to be the key to! Or the trigger: it’s all chaotic and confused.”

“Is usual condition of life and universe,” Moam pointed out without hesitation. “You have seen and experienced enough of it to know that, Flinx-friend. Only help we can provide is keep you alive.”

“That’s not good enough.” His frustration threatened to broker a return of one of his devastating headaches.

Clarity leaned toward him. “Be thankful for small favors, Flinx.”

Fluff came forward. Standing side by side, the two ursinoids were a dominant presence. “We simple folk, Flinx. We play at our game. We keep you live. We dig our tunnels. That what we do.”

A new thought caused Flinx to pause a moment before responding. “Maybe that’s what happened to the Xunca. The race that built the alarm system that’s centered on Horseye. You told me years ago that they ‘went away.’” He eyed each of the Ujurrians in turn. “Maybe they made a tunnel similar to the kind you’re digging, and they went ‘away’ through it.”

The Ujurrians exchanged looks along with thoughts. “Our tunnels can go far places through interesting ways. Or interesting places through far ways. But not far or interesting enough to get away from evilness that is coming.”

“If we could do that,” Moam added, “we would already have made the going. And asked you to come with us,” he added as an afterthought. “Would miss Flinx-friend, Flinx-teacher.” Turning, he lumbered with great dignity toward the hole that was hovering in the atmosphere. “Cannot save ourselves, Flinx-friend. All falls to you.”

“But I don’t know what else to do,” he wailed earnestly. Clarity put an arm around him while Pip snuggled closer against his neck. Each, in their own different and distinctive way, sensed and was reacting to the suffering he was undergoing.

Contrary to his hopes, the only thing the Ulru-Ujurrians had left to offer was compassion.

“Flinx-friend hurts.” Reaching out, Softsmooth patted down his red hair with a paw that was large enough to cover his entire head. “We hurt for Flinx-friend. But this is a tunnel he must dig for himself.” She shook abruptly, fluffing out the fur that covered her head and upper body. “You are the key. Find what you must unlock, or this game will be the last game. Ever.”

Pivoting, she moved to rejoin Moam. Bluebright followed. Only Fluff lingered a moment longer. The thoughts he projected were tinged with heaviness and regret.

“So much burden for one small thinking fella-being. I sorry it you, Flinx-friend. I glad it not I. Try avoid situations like just now.” Enormous eyes shifted to Clarity. “Next time maybe we not dig fast enough to save.”

One by one the Ujurrians stepped or jumped back into the opening in the aether. A deep rumble followed Fluff’s disappearance, following which the hole snapped in upon itself like a circlet of interdimensional elastic and was gone. Nothing remained to indicate that anyone other than Flinx, Clarity, and the two minidrags had ever been there.

Well, almost nothing. Bending down, Flinx picked up half a handful of gray-brown fur and lifted it to his nose. It smelled strongly of myrtle and musk: Softsmooth. Turning, he found himself once again surveying their implausible environs. Any xenologist in the Commonwealth would gladly have given up several years’ stipends for the privilege of spending a single day in such surrounds, and here he could not enjoy it for a moment because—because he was some kind of stupid, enigmatic, inscrutable key.

He shook his head. Following procrastinating visits to worlds as diverse as Visaria and Jast he had resolved to do whatever he could to try to save the Commonwealth. Someone else might have said “to fulfill his destiny”—except that he did not for an instant believe in such nonsense. It was all so much superstition and silliness.

There was nothing nonsensical about the Great Evil, however. His reluctant, innermost self had been thrust outward to perceive it. It was as real and remorseless and dangerous as his dreams of a normal life were wish fulfillment.

“Flinx? Are you all right?” Clarity was looking at him with concern. Such a simple gesture. Such an essential one.

“I’m unchanged,” he responded carefully. “Whether that makes me all right or not I don’t know and I no longer much care. But since you ask—yeah, I feel ‘all right.’” His words relieved her evident alarm.

Alarm.

He thought back. Back to when he had gone to New Riviera to reunite with Clarity. What was it that Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex had told him a small coterie of their fellow researchers had learned about that mysterious apparatus that had been left behind on Horseye by the long-vanished Xunca?

He remembered. Two sources had been recorded. Down through the millennia the incredibly ancient mechanism had been monitoring not one but two locations. One was, of course, the threat represented by the Evil that was coming out of the Great Emptiness. The other was something unknown that was located in a unique region of space known as the Great Attractor. A point in the continuum that all local galaxies were shifting toward. An inexplicable physical anomaly with the energy of ten thousand trillion suns. It was utterly unique in the universe. No known physics or mathematics could account for such an incredible concentration of energy.

Could the Xunca?

Contemplating the anomaly, Flinx and the two scientists had previously speculated on whether the Xunca had actually considered constructing something capable of moving entire galaxies, including their own, out of the path of the oncoming menace. It had remained just that, nothing more than speculation. But what if, he found himself wondering, the Great Attractor, or something at the heart of that fantastic force, was actually designed to do something else? The instrumentality on Horseye not only monitored both sites, it also sporadically sent some kind of signal through a deviation of normal subspace toward an unknown third location. According to Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex the scientists studying the Xunca mechanism had not even been able to determine how the information was being sent, much less what was being transmitted or what might be on the receiving end.

Constant monitoring of the approaching threat he could understand. Constructing and monitoring something capable of moving an entire galaxy, much less several, out of the way of that threat was a physical undertaking that could barely be comprehended by mere organic entities. But why the third signal? What did it consist of, where was it being beamed, and what was it intended to accomplish?

Perhaps nothing, he told himself. Maybe it was an unintentional byproduct of the monitoring/alarm system. Maybe it was only an inadvertent leak of deformed radiation into subspace. Having latched on to the thought and fallen into speculation, he could not let it go. Always, ever, eternally curious, and usually to his detriment, he needed an answer. Where and how to find an answer to a question that some of the Commonwealth’s finest scientists had only recently learned to ask? He was stuck on an uninhabited, long-dead alien world in the middle of the sterile Blight, cut off from any planetary information shell, with access only to the library that was part of his ship’s mind.

Not quite a dead world, he reminded himself. Something was tugging at his arm.

“Where’d you go?” Clarity asked him intently.

“Hmm?” He blinked. “I’ve been right here.”

“No.” She smiled perceptively. “I know that self-inflicted stasis. You went somewhere. I’m sorry to break in, but I couldn’t take it anymore. The silence, and the distance.”

“Sorry,” he apologized. “Something one of the Ulru-Ujurrians said got me to thinking.”

Her expression twisted. “I don’t think I like the sound of that.”

“It just sparked a question,” he explained, a little too quickly, a little too disingenuously. “Not a solution. Just a question.” Looking past her, he nodded in the direction of the Krang’s silent contact platform. “The only drawback is that I have to ask it of the machine.”

She looked around sharply, then back at him. “Again? If I didn’t know you better and appreciate what putting yourself under those transparencies costs you in terms of physical and mental wear, I’d say you were getting addicted to the experience.”

He had to smile. “Hardly. It’s every bit as tiring and draining as you say. But I don’t have any choice. Even if we had access to the Terran Shell itself, the answer I need isn’t available there. Or from any humanx knowledge resource.” His expression reflected the helplessness he was feeling. “I have to try, Clarity. It might be the last thing I can think of to try.”

She chewed her lower lip. “I wish you’d wait until the others are back.”

He shrugged. “Why? Would Bran somehow make the experience easier? Is Tru’s presence going to lessen the strain? Can Syl find a way to keep me from burning axons?” He shook his head. “I’d rather do it and get it over with than have to listen to their advice and deal with their worries.”

Her tone was subdued almost to the point of inaudibility. “What about my worries?”

Reaching out, he did his best to reassure her. “This will be the least amount of time I’ve ever spent on one of those contact slabs, I promise. I’ll just make contact, pose my question, receive an answer or a rebuff, and slip back out.”

She looked up at him. “You make it sound as harmless as requesting a zoning change on a piece of undeveloped property on Nur.”

“Okay,” he acknowledged, “so there’s some risk involved.” He indicated their alien surroundings. “Look where we are. Consider where we recently were and what I experienced beyond the Rim. Compared to that and everything else you and I have been through, soliciting the answer to a single question from an alien machine I’ve already been in contact with counts as a minor diversion.”

She sniffed. “I don’t know why I bother to raise concerns: you’re going to do what you want to do anyway.”

He straightened. “I’m going to do what I have to do, Clarity. You, of all people, should know that.” Reaching up to stroke Pip, he started deliberately past her. As he headed down the wider-than-human aisle toward the distant dais, she watched him go.

It seemed like she was always watching him go.

As soon as the skimmer settled gently to ground and its loading ramp deployed just inside the entrance to the alien monolith, Truzenzuzex, Tse-Mallory, and Sylzenzuzex disembarked. Seeing the human female sitting by herself, Syl wandered over and proffered politeness.

“Sirrintt, Clarity. You are feeling well?”

“As well as can be expected, Syl.” She nodded past the thranx in the direction of the two senior scientists. “How did it go? Did you find the solution to everything—or anything?”

“I’m afraid not.” Settling back on all six legs, Syl used both truhands to pull down her right antenna and commenced preening. “There’s certainly much to see and learn—there is an entire city to explore, after all—but we found nothing more remarkable than what was expected. As a xenoarchaeological expedition it has been a great success.” She gestured regret. “Insofar as finding something to use against the advancing threat, it has been a total failure.” Continuing to groom, she looked back over her thorax. “My Eighth and his companion try to exude optimism, but at hearts they are realists.”

Clarity nodded understandingly. “Well, as long as they search without expecting to find anything they won’t be disappointed.”

“Chilarr-ah-Ksa!!tt, so true it is,” the security officer agreed. Looking past Clarity, she found herself searching the area immediately behind her friend. She could not frown—inflexible chitin rendered thranx facial expression virtually nonexistent—but she gestured her sudden distress.

“Where is Flinx?”

“Speaking of optimism…” As her voice trailed away Clarity raised a hand and pointed.

Sylzenzuzex had no difficulty identifying the distant solitary figure mounting the dais. Responding to her loud, sharp whistle of exclamation, Truzenzuzex and Tse-Mallory hurried over to see what was happening.

Clarity sighed knowingly as they approached. “I guess we’d better get ready for another concert.”

“But what is he doing?” As he tracked the progress of the familiar tall biped, Truzenzuzex could not hide his puzzlement. “Why is he going to submit himself to the stress and strain of reconnecting with the alien device? It has already indicated it cannot do anything to inhibit the advance of the approaching peril.”

“I believe,” she explained, “that he intends to ask it a question.”

Tse-Mallory was also tracking the progress of the tall redhead. “What kind of question? A question about what?”

“I don’t know. Flinx doesn’t tell me everything that goes on in his head. I think he’s doing his best to spare me.” She gestured in the direction of the platform. “You can ask him yourself when he’s finished. Maybe he’ll even get an answer to his question.”

“He didn’t say what the question was?” Truzenzuzex persisted.

“No.” Despite telling herself that this time she was not going to watch, she felt herself turning to join the others in gazing at the distant dais. Flinx had assured her he was not going to be under its influence for very long. That was small comfort, but she would take what she could get.

“But doesn’t… ?” Sylzenzuzex began. Then her antennae flattened back against her head as she winced.

Thunder filled the Krang’s interior as tame lightning emerged from the structures protruding from its walls and began to crawl ceilingward. The deafening, clashing howls of alien music assailed their ears even as flaring bursts of luminosity skipped off their retinas like stones on the flat surface of a lake. The Krang was alive again; with sight, with sound, and with presentiment. Beneath the inner of the double domes, Flinx could be seen sprawled out on the operator’s platform, Pip coiled tightly above his head. Young man and ancient machine were talking again.

Reduced to the status of mere onlookers, his companions could only shield their eyes and ears and wait for the esoteric conversation to end.

AGAIN, CLASS-A MIND. I HAVE COMMUNICATED WITH THE SHIP OF THE BUILDERS. THE ATTEMPT FAILED.

“Yes.” Flinx spasmed slightly beneath the inner dome. Above his head Pip twitched and contorted, acting as a lens for his projections.

YET YOU SEEK AGAIN. I AM A WEAPON. I HAVE NOTHING MORE TO OFFER.

“I disagree. You have knowledge. I would posit a question.”

ASK.

“There is a world inhabited by three indigenous intelligent species. My people call it Horseye, the locals call it Tslamaina. Buried near one of its poles is the visible portion of an extensive instrumental complex that was put in place by a race called the Xunca, who dominated this entire portion of the galaxy before the time of the Tar-Aiym and the Hur’rikku.”

I HAVE KNOWLEDGE OF THE XUNCA. SOME. THEY WERE A GREAT PEOPLE.

Already the Krang had confessed to knowledge beyond the fragments that had been laboriously accumulated over the centuries by Commonwealth xenoarchaeologists. So excited was Flinx by the machine’s revelation that he put aside the question he had come to ask in favor of another. “What—what happened to them?”

THEY WENT AWAY.

Went away. The Ulru-Ujurrians had said almost exactly the same thing.

“How did they ‘go away’?”

THAT IS NOT KNOWN.

Dead end. He returned to his original question. “It’s thought that the instrumental complex on Horseye is part of an incredibly old and advanced warning system. Even though those it was intended to warn have ‘gone away,’ the device they left behind continues to function. My people have been able to determine that it is monitoring the approach of the Great Evil and also the most energetic, dynamic region of known space, a phenomenon that we call the Great Attractor. But in addition to monitoring and recording these two events, the system also sends out a sporadic signal whose meaning and content we have not been able to decipher.

“I want to know, I need to know, where this signal is directed and if possible, the purpose behind it.”

The half-million-year-old machine that was at once an instrument of war and an instrument of art did not hesitate. Hesitation was a defect reserved for organic sentients.

SEARCHING NOW.

Flinx waited. Something remarkable happened.

Nothing happened.

It happened for a moment, then several moments. The several moments stretched into a period of time lasting longer than any comparable period of time he had spent on a Tar-Aiym operator’s dais without anything happening.

Was it possible that just then and now, at that particular instant of time, the half-million-year-old mechanism had finally failed? It was a possibility he was allowed to ponder for barely an instant before a response was forthcoming. When it did, there was no indication on the part of the instrumentality in which he lay that anything unusual had transpired.

MUCH TO SEARCH. THEN HAD TO SIFT WHAT WAS SEARCHED.

“Did you learn—anything?” Muscles convulsed as Flinx arched his back against the unyielding composite material beneath him.

LEGEND. OF THOSE WHO WENT AWAY.

Flinx was patient. “Can you be more specific?”

ONE SIGNAL TO MONITOR THREAT. ONE SIGNAL TO MONITOR DEFENSE. ONE SIGNAL TO LINK THE TWO.

Was it possible? Was it even conceivable? Had the Xunca, before they “went away,” built something they believed might be capable of defending against the oncoming Great Evil? If that was the case, why hadn’t this hypothetical weapon already unleashed its unknown potential on a threat that had now shifted nearer than ever? Flinx thought hard.

A menace looms. The threatened man raises a defensive weapon to protect himself. But he has a choice: he has time to flee. So instead of firing, he simply runs away. A safer option than standing and fighting when the outcome of the clash is unpredictable.

And in his haste to run away, he leaves his unused weapon behind. But the unfired weapon remains bound to the danger. Sporadically, if the Krang was to be believed.

Where was the weapon? What was the weapon? The Great Attractor? How did you fire, how did you pull the trigger, on a cosmic phenomenon that blazed with the energy of ten thousand trillion suns?

Very carefully, he decided. That was assuming the fantastic inferences he was making were in any way, shape, or fashion accurate, and he was not just wish-dreaming.

“The signal that intermittently reaches out from Horseye—it’s not designed to activate the defense?”

NO.

“Why not?”

ASK THOSE WHO MADE IT.

Back to square one. “Do you know where this defense is?”

I CAN PROVIDE COORDINATES.

Flinx’s spirits rose. Something solid, something tangible, at last!

“Please provide.”

Though the Teacher essentially flew and maintained itself, years of crisscrossing the Commonwealth and the AAnn Empire had given Flinx a certain amount of insight into the basics of interstellar navigation. When the Krang offered up a simplified set of stellar coordinates, Flinx quickly set them against what he knew. They made no sense. He projected his confusion.

I WILL SUPPLY VISUAL REFERENCE.

An image formed in Flinx’s mind. It moved and shifted, changing size and perspective. Slowed, enhanced, enhanced again. Eyes shut tight, locked in communicative stasis, he inhaled sharply when it finally resolved.

“Useless,” he finally thought. “Impossibly far away. Of what conceivable use is something situated at such a distance?”

ASK THOSE WHO MADE IT.

Infuriating. If he did not know better he would have thought the machine was mocking him. It was doing nothing of the kind, of course. Simply responding with minimal waste and delay to his inquiries.

“I am patently unable to do that,” he replied as calmly as he could manage, “since those who made it have ‘gone away.’” Almost as an afterthought he added, “Perhaps you can suggest another means or method of ascertaining the potential usefulness of this hypothetical defense?”

The last thing he expected was a response. No, that wasn’t quite correct. The last thing he expected was a positive response.

GO THERE.

Being locked in cerebral stasis did not prevent Flinx from coughing slightly. “I’m afraid I don’t have adequate means of transportation. Even if I did, I wouldn’t live long enough to complete the journey.”

BOTH LIMITS ARE WITHIN REACH.

If he had been in full control of his body, he would have sat up. “What did you say?”

THERE EXISTS A POSSIBILITY.

“I don’t understand. Can you explain?”

TO ACTIVATE THE DEFENSE, THOSE WHO MADE IT HAD TO BE ABLE TO REACH IT. THEY LEFT BEHIND THE DEFENSE. THEY LEFT BEHIND THE WARNING SYSTEM. THEY LEFT BEHIND A MEANS BY WHICH SUCH THINGS WERE LINKED.

THE DESTINATION OF THE THIRD SIGNAL.

Flinx could hardly contain his excitement. His elation communicated itself to Pip. Her coils began to contract against the top of his head, playing havoc with his red hair.

“How can we tell if this link still works?”

The Krang’s response was typically terse. GO THERE.

“How is that possible?”

I CAN PROVIDE COORDINATES.

For the second time in the past several minutes Flinx found himself mentally articulating an anxious appeal. “Please provide.”

The Krang proceeded to do so. This time Flinx was able to reference the location. Not only was it nowhere near as extreme as the set that had been given for the Xunca defense, the locality lay virtually next door, within the boundaries of the Commonwealth itself.

Somewhere to go. Something to seek out. Not a solution, not an answer, but at least a bona fide destination. He fought to make his muscles work, to slide free of the platform and out from beneath the blinding, binding influence of the glowing, luminescent domes overhead. Locked to his thoughts, sensitive to his emotions, the Krang sensed his struggle.

DO YOU WISH TO TERMINATE EXCHANGE?

“Yes!” Flinx all but shouted silently. “Terminate contact now, please.”

COMPLYING.

There was a brief instant of delay, a second of disorientation, and then he felt himself starting to emerge from stasis as contact was broken. At the last possible instant of contact, something remarkable occurred. It was not that the ancient weapon/instrument offered concluding words to the exchange so much as it was the nature of that parting, which was unprecedented in Flinx’s experience with both the Krang and the much larger but related weapons platform. It was, however, characteristic in its conciseness.

GOOD LUCK.

He blinked. Gazing upward, he found himself looking through twin domes that were once more untinted and perfectly transparent. He could see the distant, permanent haze that hovered near the top of the Krang. His recovering ears still rang with the dying echo of ancient alien music. Sitting up, he swung his legs off the dais and stood. When he started to stumble, he heard a voice calling out to him from a figure that was now running in his direction.

“Flinx, Flinx! Are you … ?”

“I’m fine!” he shouted back to Clarity. “Just a little shaky, but okay!” Extending an arm back to the platform he waited while Pip used it to climb up onto his shoulder. All around him the Krang was silent and still. And conscious, though he alone of his entire species had shared thoughts with that cold, primal intelligence.

Mounting the dais with long, graceful strides, she was in his arms in a moment. “Please,” she pleaded as she hugged him tight, “please don’t do that anymore! I can’t take watching you lie there writhing and twisting like you’re in constant pain all the time. If you have to talk to someone, talk to me. Leave sentient alien weapons to themselves.” Drawing back, she met his eyes and he could see the quiet anguish in her face. “It’s aging you, Flinx. Every time you subject yourself to its influence, every time you make contact, you come out a little older.”

Bending down, he kissed her gently on the forehead and ran a hand down the back of her hair. “Clarity. Clarity, charity, emotional parity, if there’s one thing you should know about me by now, it’s that I was born older.”