36

BALANCE

The silver room was aglow, pulsating with coloured light as though it were a creature from the depths of the ocean, beckoning its prey toward a violent end.

Nikola was seated cross-legged on the floor like a schoolboy taking lessons. His black eyes, twice their normal size, were transfixed on the holographic display churning out petabytes of information. A fierce headache pounded across his skull; he'd had about as much as his brain could take.

Nearly six hours had passed under the constant duress of gentle earthquakes. Six hours in which the alien creature had tried its best to bring its captured engineer up to speed with millions of years of its species' knowledge. Above all things, it did not wish to spend its remaining time burrowed in a mountain.

Tesla shook his head as the holographic projection blurred in and out of focus – not a fault with the display but rather his eyes giving out. His brain had exceeded all its information buffers and no matter how many times he ran his hands through his tussled hair, no more was going into his mind until he'd slept and fed (not necessarily in that order).

"How are you going?" Helen whispered, kneeling down beside him with a bottle of water. He was wavering in and out of a trance, something she had not seen since the those twilight days of New York and the wars that followed.

Normally he's snarl at her offering but he accepted it with a nod.

"My ancient Egyptian is getting better," he joked softly. "Though I now know how a computer feels when it runs out of disk space." He sighed, scratching his head leaving his hair sticking out oddly on one side. "I've learned their number system – much easier that trying to count in bloody birds."

"Ibises..."

"Whatever. If we make it out of here alive I'm going to earn a killing in the aerospace industry."

He perked up when Helen shot him a scornful look. "Nikola, I am sure you are well aware that it would be irresponsible to saturate the world in advanced knowledge."

"I've been doing it my whole life," Nikola protested. He took a reluctant sip of water and instantly wished she'd acquiesced his request for wine. "From what I've experienced, the more information you feed into the world the better it becomes. None of that 'bleeding hearts' mumbo jumbo about knowledge tearing the earth to shreds. You know what destroys the world? Turf wars based on ancient fiction."

"Evidently you're forgetting the part where several secret organisations fought each other for the right to hunt you down during the wars and it wasn't because of your fangs."

"I disagree. Besides, there's a vast chasm between deliberately creating methods of destruction and hastening our collective intelligence."

Helen still didn't think leaking alien intelligence was a good idea but short of killing Nikola there wasn't much she could do about it. She turned to check that the creature was still in the corner. It was, watching them. The creature barely moved save to tap some of its extensions on the ground, shifting the holographic screens for Nikola.

"Damn... Do you have any idea how close we were to faster than light travel? Maxwell would love this! If it wasn't for Einstein and a whole generation of terrified physicists we might have actually got there. I told him he was a near-sighted idiot – you were there, you remember?"

Oh, she remembered...

"Focus, Nikola. We're stuck in a mountain with an alien that'll eventually lose patience."

"About that-" Nikola prodded the screen. He'd learned how to manipulate its interface, flicking to the schematics of the ship they were sitting in. "When the ship ploughed through the mountain, the rock tore through the hull and dislodged its navigation system. At some point, it looks like three thousand years ago, the creature convinced a group of early humans to repair the outer hull. There was nothing it could do about the internal systems..."

"Until now."

"It's not just the difficulty of fixing them – it's the size of the entry points. A creature that large would not be able to reach the sub-level shafts. You're meant to access them through panels on the outside of the ship but as it's buried in the rock-"

"-it can't reach them without moving the entire ship – which it can't do," Helen finished. "And so all this time it's been waiting. It didn't want a primitive ape with a club anywhere near the delicate electronics so it idly bio-engineered something better, as you do. Did you learn anything about what species it is?"

Nikola shook his head. "No. I'm pretty sure that's deliberate. I have access to specific knowledge. The only thing I know is that it prefers to communicate through thought. The metal lining of the ship has a faint current running through it that picks up on the electrical disturbances emitted from its body and these are translated to the ship computer through a basic binary code. Ancient vampires picked up a whisper of this gift but mostly it morphed into vivid nightmares. Not a very useful mutation. It made them paranoid and strong believers in mysticism."

Helen touched the floor, her palm against the cool metal. She could feel it buzz softly against her skin but the information it transmitted was beyond anything she could translate. "Speaking of, I hope those vampires and immortal are playing nicely with each other."

"They've probably run off by now." Nikola went back to the screens and brought up the ship's schematics. "I don't like the look of that shaft," he prodded its image with a claw.

"Ugh!" Ashley's elbow hit the ice cliff, dislodging a glittering hail of crystals. She was spinning on the line, coming back in to hit the ice again. This time she lodged her pick into the ice, bringing herself to a stop. Her radio buzzed at once, Henry's frantic voice on the line. "Re-lax..." she grumbled at him, digging her feet into the wall as well. "This is why I never take you anywhere. You panic at the slightest thing."

'You nearly fell off a cliff!'

"Safety rope, moron!" Poor Henry. "Give me a bit more rope, I think I can see the edge of the cave."

Two hours later, Nikola crawled over to the side of the room where Helen was meant to be keeping watch. Instead she'd dozed off, her head lulled to one side. He settled himself beside her, tapping her gently with no regard for her need to rest. "All right. I can fix this ship." He paused whilst she roused slowly, then continued, "The question is, should I?"

Helen yawned and leaned closer to Nikola, her breath warm against his neck. "I don't fancy being a snack."

He turned his head a fraction.

"No I'm being serious," he insisted. "Look at it, Helen. Really look at it. As far as the rest of its race is concerned it had an unfortunate accident and never returned. If we fix his ship then they'll know all about us – know that we're capable of learning."

"And if we kill it – then one day they're going to find out. How friendly are they going to be then? Whether we help this creature or not, these things can come and go as they please. Trying to help an injured person and failing is very different to killing them and hiding the body, Nikola. I really don't want to be responsible for an intergalactic war. Seriously – it is not on my bucket list."

Nikola's sounded almost disappointed. "Have you finally gone soft then? A hundred years ago you might have killed it if only to lay it out on your father's dissecting table to see what it's made of."

"You're confusing me with John. I never tried a vivisection on you."

"I blind-sighted you with my charm and good looks. Ow..." she'd prodded him again. He usually deserved that. At least she wasn't shooting at him any more – he must have done something right. "I know you're all into 'saving the world' these days but I don't trust this thing. You've met full blood vampires and immortals – this creature is at the heart of them both, it's not exactly a picture of chocolate and roses."

"This lifeform is the balance of the two. Who knows, perhaps two wildly violent species equals something docile?"

The terrifying creature in question lifted its heavy body. Its limbs scratched against the floor as it peered down at the tiny biological experiments. To a lesser species, they would be as meaningful as lab rats but this creature had a strong sense of regard for life.

"I understand your reservations, engineer," it purred out in a strained, half-electronic tone as though some other device was assisting it to speak. "You are born of a violent world, whose life will be brief and end in fire. I have calculated that the probability of your extinction in the next ten million years. If you survive it will be in a shadow of your current form, pushed under the earth to the caves from which your mammalian ancestors arose. Should I be, as you calculate, malevolent and choose to return to this world for the purpose of corruption, you will be long dead before I can make the journey. We will pick over the carcass of your civilisation."

Nikola wasn't sure if that was meant to freak him out or calm him. He was translating for Helen in a hushed whisper and when he was finished, Helen lofted her eyebrow at him. Nikola just shrugged.

"However," it continued, taking a step closer, "we are explorers. It is our charge to watch life rise and fall – it is our study."

"That's why..." Nikola realised, lifting his hand briefly to his lips. "It left a fail safe in our genetic code so that when he – it – finally left this planet our ecosystem wouldn't be corrupted. Immortals – Vampires, we kill each other off until there is only one left and then humans do the rest. In the grand scheme of things, genetically speaking, the interference is minimal."

"Help me and I will leave you with a glimmer of hope – a taste of deeper breadth of life than you could possibly unearth here."

"I knew it didn't make sense," Helen whispered. "My father spent his life studying the origin of the vampire and immortal. The trail always went cold around the same time. Human legend turned into genuine myth as the written texts ran out. I tried tracking the ancestry through genetic markers in ancient remains. I thought perhaps that they were a single, fluke mutation in an individual that had been passed on but there was never a soul point. One day a cluster of two distinct abnormal species simply appeared as if they'd materialised out of thin air."

"The gene is recessive unless two of the same species breed. I studied human custom and thought it unlikely that this would occur – I was wrong. The vampires made a point of inter-breeding with their kin thus sustaining their species for longer than I had anticipated. Humanity is – unpredictable."

"I think I understand Egyptian royalty now," Nikola's mouth was hanging slightly open. There was method in their incest and all their obsession regarding pure bloodlines had some basis in fact.

Tesla was folded awkwardly into a hexagonal shaft and he was not happy about it.

"Go on – get your butt in there!" Helen muttered, giving him a little push.

Nikola peered down the silver-lined tunnel. It stretched onward until its surfaces converged, heading deeper into the mountain. It was a tight fit but Nikola was tall, not wide and with a bit of shuffling he managed to start sliding.

"Are you sure you don't want to crawl down it?" Helen called after him as he started to vanish.

"And slide out of control, face first towards the navigation systems? Pass..."

"Oh for christsake just get down there and fix the damn thing, Nikola!" she huffed, not entirely happy with being left along with an alien creature she couldn't converse with. Well, that wasn't strictly true. She could read ancient Egyptian, she just couldn't speak it. Hell, the only reason Nikola could was because he spent half a century fantasising about meeting living vampires.

"I'm fixing it – I'm fixing it..." he groaned, feeling his pants and feet slip against the silver. He put the torch between his teeth, holding out both hands to steady himself. That worked for half a second before the tilt of the tunnel overcame the fragile traction he had with it.

He started sliding, picking up speed as panel after panel raced by his face. It was the only way he could tell how fast he was moving in the otherwise featureless tunnel. The it was getting colder, a layer of dense – dust-laden air churning toward him. He could smell a faint trace of electrical smoke which, despite his abject terror of falling, made him grin. There was something comforting about the fallibility of a highly advanced spaceship. They weren't perfect – just a couple of rungs ahead on the evolutionary ladder.

"Oh shit!"

Thump.

The tunnel ended without warning in the ceiling (stupid, idiotic design!) of a room. Nikola was on his back like an insect flipped the wrong way. He groaned, sitting up – torch still between his lips.

The navigation room was mangled and blackened from a raging electrical fire several thousand years ago. Molten silver had congealed on the floor, taking with it pieces of quartz that formed part of the main system. Nikola had to hunch over in the confined space, ducking under part of the ceiling which had been pushed in by the rock on the outside.

"What a mess," he whispered. It was worse in person. He felt a flutter of panic in his gut. Maybe he couldn't fix it after all.