There was no transit, no travel, no delay. Katja stepped through the Gates of Death and found herself in a long room that seemed to be a laboratory. A centrifuge steadily whirred in the corner. A faucet on the side of the room was dripping into a metal sink. Those were the only sounds, beside the sound of her own breathing and her heartbeat in her eyes.
"Hello?" she said uncertainly in Samthyrian, looking around. No one answered.
She had never really considered what she would find on the other side, but now that she was there, she realized that she had also never expected just to find herself in an empty room. There are few times in our lives in which we are truly without any idea what should, or even could, be done next. Katja had once met someone with serious and consistent problems with his short-term memory. If you set such a person in a familiar, information-rich environment, he can usually think of what to do; he will do the usually expected thing, or look around to see his options. But if you put him in a room with nothing but blank walls and close the door, he will stand in bafflement, perhaps frustration, in a room he cannot remember entering for a purpose he cannot discern and in which he has no discernible options. She began to have some notion how he might have felt. While Katja remembered everything that had happened recently, all of that was literally in another universe. She did not know where she was. She did not know why she was here, of all places. She could say nothing about the planet. She did not know whom she should contact, or how to contact them. It might as well have been blank walls in an unfamiliar room with no discernible future.
She sighed. Should she stay here and wait for someone? Should she go and try to find someone? Why did the Tanaver keep throwing her into unfamiliar situations? For that matter, why did she keep letting them do so?--As if she could stop them.--But that was hardly an excuse here, since they had asked her permission to throw her into a new universe for a mission for which she was woefully unqualified, and she had accepted.--But there was nothing to do, in any case. "A dangerous meeting," Kubiri had said, and now she had no options but to go and try to find it.
All this puzzlement about what to do next, however, was wasted, for the matter was decided for her. Before Katja had even finished arguing with herself, before she had been able to take more than a step from the point where she had been standing, the doors at both ends of the room burst open and men poured through them. They were dressed in black from head to toe, with helmets on their heads and objects in their hands that were very clearly some kind of terrible weapon. Katja put her hands in the air, with one hand still holding her bag, and tried to collect her thoughts -- so difficult to think clearly in a foreign language when there are men with guns suddenly surrounding you!
She tried to say something, but was beaten to it. "Who are you?" someone shouted at her. She tried to say something again, but the response was apparently not swift enough. "Who are you? What did you do to the rest?"
"I am Katja Ilkaiomenen," she said in a rush, trying to get it out before they shouted at her again. "I am with the Tanaver, I...."
"Who are you?" someone shouted again. But this time it was a boon, because all of a sudden Katja remembered that Kubiri had said she must make something clear from the beginning.
"I come with the cure! For the plague you are facing!"
They did not shout at her again, but one of the soldiers -- for such she supposed they were -- said, "What do you mean, the cure?"
"I am Katja Ilkaiomenen, I am the ambassador for the Tanaver Alliance. We want to provide assistance in your struggle with Symbiosis. I have the cure."
The soldier who had spoken last, snapped an order to one of the others -- not, it was not an order, he was saying the man's name, Samuel -- and that soldier stepped up and waved at her something that was, to her relief, not gun-like.
"None of the external signs," he said. Then, to Katja, sharply. "Put your bag on the table. Remove your belt, put it on the table. Slowly!" When her hand moved down, he snapped even more sharply, "Slowly!"
She complied, and he waved his device over both, and then opened the bag and waved his device over the contents.
"Samuel!" the authoritative soldier said.
"Nothing explosive that I can find, but for the rest, I have no idea, sir. It needs to be analyzed."
"Yohan, keep an eye on her." One of the soldiers with an especially nasty-looking weapon stepped up and pointed it at her. "Bachir, alef-one quarantine, high alert. Let's get off this insane planet." Then, raising his voice, he said to the whole room, "Moving out!"
And they moved out, Katja at Yohan's gunpoint. A dangerous meeting, she thought to herself. Do not enter except with courage, she thought to herself. Right roads, she thought to herself. But if it happens that there was an acidic edge to these thoughts, perhaps no one will blame her.
They pushed her steadily, and not quite gently, through empty halls and past empty rooms, across an empty courtyard and down an empty stairway and through more empty halls with empty rooms. The emptiness was not silent, however, and that made it all the more uncanny. It was as if the entire complex had been busy just minutes before everyone had vanished into thin air. Machines dinged and whirred off in the side rooms. In many of the rooms and in some of the halls screens hung on the wall, flashing pictures and murmuring conversations to no one at all. Somewhere in the distance a bell was ringing, and ringing, and ringing. All of the hustle and bustle and hurry and flurry of civilized life went on, noisier and more active, in fact, than any Sylven building ever would be, but here there was no one living any of it.
Once, and only once, was there more, and that was outside. They had come out into bright, sweltering sunlight, sticky and humid, and Katja, who was wearing her original snowgear, found it disorienting. She stumbled down the steps and slipped to the grown. As one of the men helped her to her feet, she saw it off to the side.
It was a man, or what was left of a man. He had dark brown skin with jet black hair and was wearing a uniform of some kind whose original color had been light blue. But his face and arm were covered, and his uniform soaked, with blood that was drying but not yet dried. He had been ripped open, and one of his arms were missing.
Katja gagged and put her hand over her mouth as the soldiers pushed her forward. It was several minutes afterward, away down the road, when she was finally able to choke out, "What did you do to him?"
One of the soldiers, she thought the one that had been giving the orders before, turned to give her a long look, but no one answered her question.
Down the road they went, then left across a field. The grass was thick and green. It was dotted liberally with a daisy-like flower, white ray florets in a halo around yellowish disc florets, which for some reason would particularly stick in Katja's mind for days to come. It was an idyllic scene, contrasting with the sick feeling she had inside, and everything seemed to stand out too much, crowding the attention. They soon came to a ship in the middle of the field, with a few soldiers managing what looked like some kind of mounted gun. Up the ramp they went, with the mounted guns being stowed away with surprising speed behind them. The door closed. The ship lifted off.
Katja hoped that they would not kill her. How sad and absurd it would be to fail my mission entirely within an hour of having stepped through the gate, she thought.--Kubiri had said that she had been chosen for it because she could do it. He had warned her it would not be immediately easy, but she could do it.--That was comforting.
But she still hoped that they would not kill her.
[1468]
