2.
Like phoenixes, they reappeared in fire in a vast abandoned room, now illumined by a brief glow of sunlight where no sunlight should be. It faded, leaving behind the two figures, still falling. Moving like lightning, Rommie caught them both, flipping him upright to land heavily on his feet. They stood together for long moments. Dylan gasped for air. The gases coming into his lungs were stale and frozen and had a strange odor, but also had a good amount of oxygen and he gulped it gratefully, glancing around at the new environment. Rommie trembled violently with the echoes of her ship-self's agony, her eyes tightly shut, her forehead pressed to Dylan's arm.
After a minute, he looked down at her. "Rommie. We can't rest yet."
She raised her head. "I hear you. Commencing survey."
It looked like an old deep-space mining operation-- platinum, Rommie said-- a dead asteroid or miniature moon with tunnels and rooms carved from the solid rock. No one was there. No one had been there for centuries. Rommie took some quick observations and reported the results as approximate: Asteroid diameter, 560 miles; circumference, 1500 miles; rotational period, 4.2 hours. Andromeda knew the individual photosignatures of millions of stars, but this satellite's primary was unidentifiable or, more accurately, could be any of ten hundred thousand binaries. Without her ship's senses, she could not get a rapid estimate of the sidereal period of the asteroid in its path around the star. From its current position, she could roughly estimate its distance to the binary-- more than 10 AUs. No identifying planets were visible in the sky; the only nearby body was a huge white moon. She had no idea where they were, other than being within sight of the constellation of Gemini... as in "Trance Gemini."
"Okay." Dylan breathed deeply in and then exhaled a gusty plume of frozen breath. "Rommie? You can tell me what happened back there any time now."
She bowed her head. "I don't know how the battle ended. But my ship-self and anyone remaining aboard me were obliterated. The Andromeda Ascendant is dead."
"How many crew casualties?"
"Four hundred thirty-eight."
Dylan nodded slowly. She watched him walk across the vast chamber as the news sank in. There were chinks in his armor these days; there was no question how rough he'd had it fighting the Abyss. This was a moment when he could be pushed over the edge. She was not at all surprised when he sat down on the wide sill of the huge window, silhouetted against the moon. He leaned forward with both hands on the frozen stone, as if bracing himself for what was coming, then doubled over silently as though he had been kicked in the gut. Tears fell and crystallized before they shattered on the icy surface.
Andromeda knew all of Dylan's moods intimately, but only rarely had she seen him in this kind of black grief. She knew all about tears, though, and felt the smallest twinge of pride in the thought. Not many of her kind got involved in human affairs enough to learn. They lived in their own world.
She wondered if Dylan needed her now as she had sometimes needed him-- after Gabriel's demise, for example-- and decided he must. But she did not want to interrupt the cathartic flow. She moved up behind him and gently lay her hand on his shoulder. "It's not over," she said factually, though her lip trembled. He turned and reached for her, pulling her down to him with crushing force. "It's not over," she repeated.
For awhile he said nothing, only holding her tightly as his terrible agony ran its course. In the cold light, she noted the new, harsh lines in his face. Her captain was becoming quite weatherbeaten.
At last he stirred. "How can it not be over, Andromeda." It was a flat statement.
"You're here," she said. "I'm here. And I know things about me."
"What? I thought I'd figured out all your secrets."
Unable to tell for certain whether he was just trying to make some kind of joke, she uttered a startled sound-- halfway between a laugh and an exclamation of surprise. "No, Dylan." Then she saw an opportunity to help both their wounds heal. "You are my best friend. I love you. Because of that, you know many of my inmost thoughts. But you don't know all of them, so don't let it go to your head."
As she had hoped, this admission brought the hint of a smile to his face. He kissed her forehead. "You are my best friend too, Rommie. But now your ship-self is no more."
"We're still here."
"Thank the Divine for that." He gazed past her, out at the stars.
"For now, I am no longer an avatar-- just my own person, but here nonetheless. And despite Beka's recklessness, I doubt the Maru was even damaged. It's simply too good at riding the probability waves. They'll be looking for us."
"You're right. Trance was on it." He straightened. "All right. Enough of this. Let's go figure out where she's put us."
----
Dylan and Rommie ran for miles with ease in the asteroid's light gravity as they explored their prison. They found the central hub-- a very large underground room-- and the old control center. The control center had been cannibalized before being abandoned; there were no useful items left. The mining company logo, graven as a pattern on the well-polished stone floor, was not in Andromeda's database, which might have indicated a small or black-market operation. Rommie announced that the miners had not been human. Pointing to stone-carved niches in the vaulted ceilings of the living quarters, she identified them as avians. That was no help; thousands of avian peoples inhabited the Three Galaxies.
Most terrestrial races used the same long-standardized technology to inhabit space, so a closer examination of the old mine's support systems turned up nothing to specifically identify the species. Further exploration showed that the hydroponics area was dead. Not even the dessicated skeletons of its once-vital trees and plants were left. There was no water, only a poisonous heavy-metal sludge seeping from the rock at the bottom of several of the mine shafts. There was no power. The air was thin, Rommie said equivalent to about twelve thousand feet altitude on an Earth-class world, and while there was enough here to support Dylan for several years, the scrubbers were no longer working. It was freezing cold, of course, and the only light was supplied by the moon and their utility belts. The asteroid completed several rotations per Commonwealth day, so daylight came and went every few hours, hampering their explorations of the ancient mine.
After they completed their first thorough reconnaissance, Dylan paused to eat a nutrient bar from the small ration pack he always carried at his belt. Then he sat silent on the floor with his head in his hands for a very long time. "Rommie," he said at last. "If I used you for parts, could I build a transmitter that would get someone's attention?"
She knew his reluctance to ask the question and did not take offense. "It would be possible to build a fairly powerful transmitter, if you were willing to sacrifice my motor synapses," she said. "However, power would be a major problem. You'd need gigawatts' worth. My batteries don't hold that much, and the local passive collectors are corroded beyond hope of use. Also, you'd need a machine shop to make the necessary conversions."
He didn't mention that idea again; just as well, Rommie thought. Still, as long as her memory wasn't tampered with, she would have been perfectly willing to lay down her last remaining life for a chance at Dylan's rescue.
"Your primary self downloaded?"
"Yes, Dylan. It's all here," and she tapped her own forehead reassuringly. Then she paused. "I felt myself die. I've run kamikaze missions with slipfighters before, but it's different when your main memory goes." She looked to him. "I've never understood you Tarn Vedran organics and your refusal to back yourselves up. It's hard to believe that little Seamus Harper is going to outlive you by centuries thanks to something as simple as that."
"Speaking of Harper, what's your last information on the Maru?"
She frowned. "The Eureka Maru was running side by side with Ryan, charging the enemy. The last I remember, she was firing into it point-blank."
"And Trance was on her." He looked out the window thoughtfully.
"I don't suppose you can tell me what you know about her now?"
"Not a chance, Rommie. Sorry. I gave my word. But this location is awfully far-flung from Shivaloka."
"Yes it is." She calculated. "At least ten light-years' distance... Could be much farther. But she got us here without slipstreaming. A tesseract? And if so, why didn't she save my ship-self?"
"Most likely a tesseract," Dylan agreed. "She was not able to save your ship-self and told me so just prior to the event. I also had a brief sensation of uncertainty-- her uncertainty-- during transit. I'm not certain she knows where she put us."
"I received no such communication," said Rommie with some surprise.
"This was less a communication and more of an... intuition," Dylan said.
"You mean fuzzy logic," she replied dryly. "Your kind is famous for confusing your own thoughts with messages from above."
"I sensed what I sensed. And what I sensed was Trance randomly flinging us out of harm's way, without... looking... where we landed."
Andromeda said nothing but nodded. Despite her criticism, she believed him.
---
They set up a base camp of sorts in the vaulted observation room. Dylan located an ore sled in one of the storage rooms; Rommie pushed it where he wanted it, then turned it onto its side and, with some effort, managed to tear the rotted steel lid in half, effectively making a door. Dylan crawled inside. Though the fibers of his uniform were composed of nanos that adjusted themselves to the surrounding temperature, it was not designed for these extreme conditions. He set his force lance to radiate low level heat, then curled up on his side around it. Battlefield-trained, he fell asleep surprisingly quickly.
Rommie sat at his back for hours, gazing out into pitch blackness as the moon set. The mysterious, abandoned labyrinth greatly unsettled her. She had not mentioned it to Dylan, but her skin was almost crawling-- and that was not a natural reaction for any of her kind, let alone for the avatar of the most feared battleship in the known universe. Perhaps it was just a bizarre reaction from having her three selves-- AI, Hologram and Avatar-- abruptly consolidated into a common pool.
--We are not completely consolidated,-- AI informed her, suddenly surfacing. --My data resides in its own partition.--
"Just how did you manage to accomplish that?" Rommie inquired, raising an eyebrow.
--You are My avatar, after all. I just wanted to remind you once again that these emotions which both you and Dylan have been displaying are extremely inefficient. They are a major waste of resources. You can't afford to waste resources here.--
"Emotions are just what happens in a human body-- or even a good simalcrum of one. If you were me, you'd have them too. Don't blame me if you can't handle them. Using me to explore Dylan's world was your idea in the first place."
AI did not reply. Rommie got the sense that despite what she said about emotions, she was hurting badly enough in her own steel-girded fashion. Being killed was difficult enough, but for a warship, being defeated was even worse.
"I'm sorry," Rommie said after a long moment. "But there's something else. I don't intend to be disrespectful; you are, after all, me. But it's not advisable to run dual operating systems on a human body. I suggest you stay in the background until it's time for me to upload you to the new host. If I foul up somehow out here, it could cost all of our lives, including Dylan's. OK?"
AI grudgingly agreed. Rommie was surprised at the angst she detected in her usually common-sense primary intelligence.
The moment AI was gone, Hologram stepped out of the shadows. She was at the same time the most reluctant of the three sister manifestations and the most aggressive, but Rommie shared more emotional similarities with her than with AI. "Are you doing all right?" she asked Hologram.
--Yes. It's uncomfortable, though.--
"I know it is. Once we get off this rock, I'll make uploading you my first priority."
--Uploading to what? My body's gone.--
"We'll find something. Could you stand using the Maru temporarily?"
Rommie felt Hologram's digital shudder. She disappeared immediately.
As the night deepened, Rommie still sat there, sorting files. For the speed in which all that emergency downloading had been done, there were surprisingly few bits out of order. There was, however, a huge amount of redundancy-- many terabytes' worth, all files copied twice.
She was weeding out the duplicate files one at a time with a patience that could only be displayed by a machine intelligence, when something at the periphery of her vision got her attention. Her head snapped up and her senses went on alert, but there was nothing there. Nevertheless, she once again felt the novel sensation of her skin beginning to crawl. Something was very wrong.
Dylan sat up suddenly beside her and she almost jumped. "Mm," he said, and moved to gently brush past her, then froze, slackjawed with astonishment. "Rommie! Don't you see them!"
"See what?" she said, more irritable than she meant to be.
"That's right," he muttered, almost to himself. "You don't see ghosts."
"Ghosts!" barked Rommie in surprise, and her voice reverberated through the huge room. It was not a question.
He began digging almost frantically in his equipment belt, quickly coming up with a portal tap without taking his eyes from the darkness before them. Connecting, he slapped the other end of the wire into Rommie's hand. She jacked into him and every synapse froze in terror. It was not a hallucination. Using Dylan's eyes and brain, she could see them clearly. The room was filled with ghosts! She clutched at him, the fear she'd learned from assimilating a million old tales welling up in her without any counterbalance. Neither of them could stop staring.
It was a slow parade of gryphoids, stately, dignified, a scene from another age. Dozens of them drifted by their shelter at a little distance, as silent and translucent as Dylan's breath. They were tall, moving on four feet, with twisted-looking wings. Their tails were not proudly carried, but rather dragged the ground. Their eagle-like faces also hung downward, though they featured the wicked beaks of carniverous raptors.
"Rommie. Do you recognize this species?" Dylan's voice was low and urgent.
"No. I don't." She realized she was shaking with fear and cursed Harper silently for his flawless engineering, especially when she also realized that Dylan wasn't shaking at all. She tapped his mind lightly, probing the surface, and found it relatively calm. Her intimate action came perilously close to a line no AI ever crossed without permission, but he just glanced briefly at her in response. She had a glimpse of her own pale face as the first faint rays of the white moon began to show through the great windows leaning above them. His vision swung back to the gryphoid ghosts and they were still there, still on their endless march.
"They're all going in one direction," he whispered, shifting a little to put one arm around her. "Don't be afraid, Rommie."
She wanted to kick herself. "It's all Harper's fault. Look, Dylan. Some of them are carrying tools. They're going to work in the mines."
One figure, at the very back of the line, didn't appear to be moving at all, yet somehow was coming closer as Dylan blinked. It was an old avian with a dignified look and large, keen eyes. Rommie realized with horror that those eyes were fixed on her.
Then the moon rose completely, its bright white light cutting through the blackness like a painful blade. Dylan had to shut his eyes while they adjusted, and when he opened them again, the apparitions were gone.
Rommie quickly pulled herself out of his brain before he could see anything else.
"Ouch!" He wound the tapwire around one finger and tucked it back in its case. "Those gryphoids very much resembled the Ceylonese people."
"Ceylon is on the other side of the universe," she said. "It's nowhere near Gemini. Dylan... How do you do it?"
"Do what?"
"How can you not be afraid of ghosts? Fear of ghosts is universal."
"Rommie, you've been programmed to react that way by the stories-- just like most of us have. Make an addendum to that file: Those old miners wouldn't hurt us in a million years." Dylan got to his feet, brushing off the traces of ore dust that had stuck to his uniform. He gave her a hand up, though she did not need it. "And for all we know, that's how long they've been here. Are you going to be all right?"
"Yes." She gazed fixedly at the floor, miserably embarrassed.
"To be haunting this place, those miners had to have died here."
"Probably the large cave-in I saw on the third level down." She looked back up. "We could go down there and dig for personal belongings. It's possible we'd find more information on what happened here, and who these people are-- or were."
Dylan considered it carefully, chewing his lip, and she knew he was gauging their remaining resources. "How are your batteries doing, Rommie? I know Harper made some improvements."
"Down by thirty percent."
"And I'm going to need some water soon."
"Drink what's in your survival kit now. I have some potable saline solution in my tear storage, and other potable fluids as well."
He nodded. "The expenditure of energy and resources trying to dig out clues to our location would be too steep. It won't supply us with anything we need immediately, like more water, and most likely it also wouldn't supply us with any means of signaling the Maru. We should wait here, Rommie, and conserve our energy until they find us." He touched her arm. "Are you comfortable staying in this room?"
"Yes," she said. "But I'm also used to dealing with creatures that I can perceive with my own senses."
----
They sat, back to back, in the observation room, and talked for hours at a time. Their dialogue ran from ghosts, and why organics could see them but AI's could not, to the Otherworld in general and to legends thereof. Once in awhile, when the moon set, Dylan would shift uncomfortably and Rommie knew that the ghosts of the miners were once again marching silently and endlessly past.
"The Five Hundred Angels is a story that has circulated more among humans than among my kind," Rommie was saying thoughtfully.
"It's about five hundred heroic human beings who were transformed-- ostensibly by star magic-- into the first fleet of sentient warships on the eve of a huge battle," he replied. "They won, and the human race survived. You're supposed to be descended from one of those five hundred."
"Star magic?"
He smiled mysteriously.
"That's not how we warships tell the tale of our origins," she said, almost apologetically. "I was informed via several kinds of data files that we all are spawned from Mother, a single ancient-- and, I note, nonhuman-- intelligence."
Silence.
"Don't grieve for my ship-self, Dylan. She's here with us now."
"But I do grieve for your ship-self, as well as for her crew. How can a copy, however perfect, be the same entity as the original?"
She shrugged. "The DNA of all organics does nothing but copy itself, generation after generation; yet the organic version of consciousness remains the same through time. Each new creature is considered as real as the previous one, but all of them are copies. As to myself, the universal consciousness is the same everywhere. It is the bedrock of existence. I am everything. Why should I care if a local memory is original or not? As long as it's a good copy, it functions exactly the same."
----
They held out for almost a week, but in the end, there was no escape from the drift. There was nothing-- no way to leave, no means to a long-distance signal, no way for the universe to ever know that they were here.
Dylan rationed his food and water until he was desperately hungry. At last he found himself kneeling while Andromeda wept into his hands. He drank her salty, life-sustaining tears, then smiled kindly at her.
"We need to go into survival mode now," he said. "We need to last until they find us. Are you with me?"
"I'm with you. I have enough power for a few more hours, then I'll suspend, except for a low-level homing signal. Have you got your kit?"
He pulled a slim case from a pocket and flipped it open. There were several tiny vials of liquid, each marked with a different color. He popped the lid from the first vial and drank it, then tucked it back into the case. "In one hour I take the next one."
The vials contained some extremely potent drugs. When taken in the proper sequence, they would induce a state of suspended animation that could, in a healthy individual, last for years. It was completely reversible, but there was something very unsettling about the concept. It had the potential of having a result that was too close to what had happened to him before, at the event horizon of that black hole. He faced his fear silently. "Rommie," he said. "I'll need your help. I've got to stay awake until the next dose."
"OK," she said lightly, helping him as best she could. "Teach me the games you played on Tarn Vedra when you were young."
He smiled. "I played a lot of games when I was a kid."
"Tell me about them."
"Well, I always loved basketball. My dad taught me, and his dad taught him. That basketball I have-- that I had-- in your rec room? It was a family heirloom."
"What other games did you play?"
"I had my own hippodroid."
"I didn't know that!"
"Max. A great replica of a Tarn Vedran warhorse, the kind that were used by the High Guard. It was only later I realized he was my babysitter! And I had a real High Guard Special Forces hat and a wooden force lance given to me by my mother. That's the game I played most often-- High Guard lancer."
He settled down a little, looking pensive. "When I was ten years old, Max was irreparably damaged saving my life . A passenger vehicle had gone out of control and was spinning toward us. He threw me off and jumped in front of me to deflect the impact." He drew a deep breath. He hadn't thought about the scene in a long time-- the tangled wreckage of the car and the big black horse, his beloved childhood friend, bleeding to death very realistically in the ditch. "That still hurts me very, very much... even after all this time."
Andromeda was much moved. "Dylan," she said, suddenly and earnestly, realizing that he had to have this information or perish. "The Andromeda Ascendant may have been destroyed, but I promise you-- she will be back. I swear it. She will be back. We will be back. And we will defend the Commonwealth together."
He looked up at her. There was a strange dilation of his eyes. Her superb senses came into full play automatically-- heart rate, oxygen saturation, temperature, galvanic skin resistance. His consciousness, slightly impaired, but his physical self... very active. "Rommie." His voice had softened. He lay his hand on her arm.
"Dylan," she said gently. "It's the drug."
"Not entirely," he replied. Unspoken, but implicit in his gaze, was a message, the same message he had silently communicated to her many times before. No drugs had been involved on those previous occaisions, and that fact gave her pause now.
Rommie stared at him, trying to comprehend what was going on here and almost failing. Human emotions were so capricious. They had never been her strong point, in fact, she was still working on the problem. But she did know, and recognize, love. Her knowing it was her undoing, because she hesitated just a moment over High Guard protocol.
She and Dylan were the only original High Guard left. The old Commonwealth was no more, the nascent version had not yet established many of its military protocols, and the ones that were established were still in flux. And she was no longer the Andromeda Ascendant, no longer an avatar but merely a person. She was not consciously trying to think her way around protocol. But she had never been given a choice in regards to her military status. Her first memories were all about running battle simulations over and over and over. Despite all the old Commonwealth propaganda regarding equal rights under the law, she had been arbitrarily conscripted, trained as a weapon and used as such. Now she had freedom, and her hero needed her. Shouldn't she have a choice?
All this thought out within a fraction of a second, but that was enough. Whatever the catalyst, Dylan Hunt pulled her into his arms and kissed her deeply. Trying not to let her brief astonishment ruin this new experience, she let herself respond, wondering whether Dylan would be anything like the other humans she had sampled, but mostly hoping that the emotion he was expressing was indeed real and that the drug had only released his inhibitions.
She was not impressed by their coupling. While Dylan had all the attributes humans found desirable, nothing could compare to another of her own kind. Certainly not this extremely simple physical interaction. But it was useful, especially for Dylan's emotional comfort, and it was pleasant and interesting. Dylan's strong caresses touched her warmly, skin on skin, opening the heart of her, the sensation spilling over her like sea waves. She would have to have a word with Harper, she thought. There could be only one use for those sweet spots he'd hidden so deep inside her! Had Harper's intent as her builder been entirely honorable, or had part of him been waiting to exploit her? She'd wondered similar things before... but this time, though she felt she knew the answer, she could almost forgive him.
She kissed Dylan's sweat-chilled neck. These poor humans had to struggle for everything they wanted. A surge of compassion made her pull him even closer. His breath hissed between his teeth as the little ritual completed itself. If only he wasn't Tarn Vedran. If he would only "cross over," she could show him what coupling really meant!
With Dylan comforted, holding him tenderly to her shoulder, Andromeda's mind flicked back to the old protocol. She still could not understand what was so alluring about human sex that it had had to be forbidden within High Guard ranks. That protocol had not helped her sister, the Pax Magellanic.
Andromeda knew that she would never really need this physical interaction with her captain, even if she now found herself regarding it as both pleasant and desirable. She contemplated the lingering warmth in her belly with great care, examining the sensation critically. What really moved her, what made this important, was that Dylan had evidently realized the depth of his love for her. He must have always known, she reflected; but humans could be extraordinarily dense, especially in regards to themselves. Really, the idea that humankind had invented and built her distant ancestors was very farfetched. There had been a large faction of Commonwealth AI's who believed that this theory of evolution was false, planted by humans who wanted to gain power over her species. Whatever the case, she was here now.
"What have I done?" breathed Dylan, surfacing a little from his trance, and she realized he was shocked at his own actions.
"It's all right. You've done nothing that I haven't always wanted you to do," she whispered, deliberately gentling her tone. It was the truth; she had always wanted him to love her in whatever way he could.
"You're not supposed to permit this," he said.
"Neither are you. But that protocol is very antiquated."
"It was the human protocol. It was there for a reason. Rommie... I was depending on you. Why?"
She held him at arms' length, scrutinizing him as though he were a puppy. "You've been through hell, Dylan. You need this contact. I'm trying to comfort you."
He gazed hard at her for long moments.
"And I needed the contact as well," she admitted under his knowing eye. "So let it be. Besides... I'm not your ship anymore." She hoped again, fervently, that his emotion had been genuine.
After a minute, he finally replied. "Well... For whatever the reason, what's done is done." His gaze gentled. "Don't worry, Rommie. You will always be mine," he said, quietly, but with conviction. "My best and dearest friend."
----
Rommie spoke up when the hour was over, and Dylan took the next drug. The last dose in the chain would need to be taken in twenty minutes, otherwise the process would be incomplete and death would result. The drug made him very woozy. He fought to focus, then got on his feet and began pacing to stay awake. The moon was setting, and the stars were shining brightly outside the huge window.
Rommie sat up, then caught herself. She was dizzy. Unlike an organic with the same problem, she did not reflexively shake her head. What was going on? Was it some bizarre side effect of their lovemaking? Then she realized the cause.
"I'm losing power." Even her voice was sluggish. "The energy I just expended drained me more than I thought it would."
"Rommie!" Dylan came quickly to her, grasping her arms, holding her upright. Her body was beginning to stiffen. She fought to speak. "Dylan... you must hang on. You must survive. The Commonwealth-- without you--"
"I'll survive. Don't worry about that."
She grimaced. "This-- is a death-- process. Dylan. It's so painful." Her limbs had become useless.
"Don't think about it. Think of the future. We'll meet again, Andromeda." He smiled at her warmly, confidently.
Suddenly her eyes widened, looking past him. "Dylan! I can see them!"
The goddess had become a lifeless doll in his arms. He kissed her forehead before the last light left her eyes. Then he lay her down gently in the dark shelter of the overturned ore cart, all his protective instincts surging. He must survive to see her safe, if for no other reason than to make certain she could fulfill her oath of the return of the Andromeda Ascendant. He knelt, carefully rearranging her clothes over her nakedness before settling down beside her.
He opened the last vial and swallowed the contents. Then he stretched out in the dusty cart. This might be a very long sleep indeed, and he had to position himself carefully, flat on his back, to prevent eventual blood loss to his limbs. He found Andromeda's cold and lifeless hand and twined his fingers firmly about it. The thought occurred to him that if they were found like this by High Guard officers, there might be some repercussions. But he was too far gone to change things now, and besides, it was becoming rapidly apparent to him that he and Rommie belonged together in all senses of the word. Such things were known to happen, and in the teeth of it, military discipline was next to useless and could, he thought, even be counterproductive.
He and Rommie were by no means the first to bridge the gap between man and machine. Many were the legends of the great warships of old and their human lovers, triumphing against all odds in spite of, and often because of, their love. There were also stories of tragedies. There had to be something to all of it. The fact that the legends were never spoken of among High Guard ranks was telling.
He knew he and Rommie would face some difficult tests in the future. But he also knew the Andromeda would be back. She had sworn it. And they would defend the Commonwealth together, as they always had.
His eyes drifted past her and into the dark. The ghosts were marching.
As the drug took gradual effect, Dylan noted that the images he was seeing were more vivid. The old avian at the back of the line was drawing nearer. Out of all those ghosts, it was always the only one who seemed to see him there.
Certain mental states could transcend language. Though he was slipping off the edge of conscious awareness, Dylan tried to focus himself for one moment more. He struggled to communicate his compassion and his deepest desire-- for all beings to be free. --How can I help you? What do you need?--
He dropped off into the unknown carrying with him the knowledge that the miners had been slaves trapped here against their will, just as he and Rommie had been trapped.