FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

"Ah, there it is." Xen pointed out the shuttle's front window at a tiny black shape on the horizon.

Marissa watched the tower grow larger as the shuttle approached and reached out to clasp Seth's hand. Astra's announcement that her probes had found no trace of the Hive had been music to her ears. Now they had a chance to find some answers, assuming the towers really were connected to the space-time rifts. Which meant a chance for her and Seth to be reunited with the girlfriend they'd been ripped away from.

"Since you two have spent some time in one of these towers before," Edison said with a glance at Otto and Shakira, "I assume you found a few ways to get into it."

Shakira nodded. "At first, we had to use a broken window to get in, but found several outer doors later. Whatever the thing's power supply was, it seemed to have been drained and only some doors, lights, and a few gadgets were still operational. Not enough juice for systems that would've been bigger power drains. We both assumed the remaining power was mostly being used to keep the tower floating, so we're lucky we didn't accidentally turn too many things on and cause that system to fail."

"The main doors were on the bottom section of the tower," Otto added. "There were others near the top that we guessed were for aircraft or hovercars or something similar. And the tower was surrounded by floating platforms that had their own power sources. Twelve of them. That was how we got inside when we arrived. We climbed onto the lowest one and it lifted us up to a platform on the tower. That's where we found the open window."

"We figured the platforms were the former occupants' version of freight elevators."

"I'm slowing our approach in case there are any automated defense systems," Xen said.

"Also in case someone's still living in the tower," Edison added. "We don't want to spook 'em by coming in hot."

"Yeah. I'd really prefer not to get shot down after coming all this way."

Marissa chuckled at the thought. Yeah, that'd be just our luck, wouldn't it?

"Were you able to learn anything about the occupants?"

"When we first started exploring," Otto said, "we found some chairs that had four armrests, so they probably had four arms. Other than that, the furniture was built more or less like something you'd find on Earth, so the aliens probably had two legs like us."

"We found locking mechanisms on a number of doors that used handprints," Shakira continued. "Not handprints, exactly, or we wouldn't have been able to use them, but the 'buttons' had indentations shaped like the aliens' hands. They had two big fingers and a thumb, just like a lot of the other aliens we've met here -- the zorai, the shonari, and from what I've heard, mulathi and mekharans as well."

"And quite a few of the bioengineered people created on Earth," Kamala added, holding up one of her four hands.

Roger laughed softly. "That seems to be a common trait among the species of the Milky Way, aside from humans. Interesting that the detail that sets us apart from everyone else turned out to be kinda superficial."

A chuckle rippled around the passenger compartment, though Marissa noticed Graham appeared to be too nervous to join in. She figured he'd come along just because Zuri had wanted to join the excursion team. Marissa had noticed the young woman seemed to have taken a liking to the medieval-era kid and he'd kept hanging around her, probably because she'd gone out of her way to include him in conversations and help him understand the world he'd suddenly found himself in.

Otto stared out one of the windows for a moment. "Not sure if this means anything or is just a coincidence, but the tower we lived in for a year was in a desert, and so is this one."

"Interesting," Hitomi said. "That could mean the aliens who built the towers evolved in a desert environment and therefore preferred to inhabit similar ones."

"Hmm." Kamala cocked her head. "Then it's possible that they're snake-people with four arms like the mekharans and myself. Maybe they are mekharans, but from the distant future thanks to the space-time rifts."

"That would be pretty cool." Roger grinned. "Of course, there are other desert-dwelling life forms they could've descended from, like scorpions or spiders."

Kamala shivered. "I hope it's not scorpions. I know I'm not someone who should talk about something not looking right, but scorpions just freak me out. They look wrong. Like something that shouldn't even exist."

"I've had the same thought on occasion," Seth said with a chuckle. "Same for spiders. Way too many legs."

Marissa snickered suddenly. "Well, given the way our luck seems to work, I'm sure it'll turn out to be something even worse."

---

"This is about as close as we can get," Xen said as the shuttle hovered above the platform at the top of the tower. "We shouldn't land here, either, just in case whatever's holding the structure up can't handle the extra mass."

Kamala slid the side door open as everyone else released their seat restraints, stood, and stretched. She grasped one of the handles beside the door with both left hands and leaned out for a look at the other shuttle circling around to find a platform on the far side and the pair of shuttles at the bottom of the tower. The excursion team had split up to cover more ground and meet up in the middle of the tower. Since Otto and Shakira had been in one of these before, they'd also decided to split up, with Otto joining the half of the team entering the lower doors and Shakira staying with the top half.

Kamala slithered off the shuttle and onto the platform, winced at how hot the metal was, and was immediately thankful that this side was in the shade cast by the topmost level of the tower. After soaking up heat from two suns all day, the surface on the other side probably would've burned right through her skin.

Roger, Seth, Marissa, Hitomi, and Tank joined her. Shakira paused to give Otto a kiss and stroke his cheek before stepping onto the platform.

"See you in a few hours."

He nodded. "Let's see if we can find out how to get back home."

"I sure hope so." She waved as Edison gave his wife a kiss and joined the others on the platform, then Xen guided the shuttle to a safe distance and found a landing spot.

Shakira motioned at a diamond shape in the tower wall and everyone followed her over to it. A rhythmic clanking sound on the far side of the tower accompanied by a matching vibration in the metal indicated Lopez walking off the top of the other shuttle and onto the tower's surface. He probably wouldn't be able to fit through most of the inner doorways, but at least he could use the powerful electromagnets in his footpads to give the outside walls a detailed scan.

Kamala glanced over the platform's edge and spotted several members of the team the Lochleys had gathered hopping from the shuttles to a set of outer doors on the bottom level, followed by Kalnar Lask. She smiled at the sight. As soon as the shonari engineer's cracked hoof had healed enough for him to ditch his crutches, he'd wanted to take a look around the tower. With his background combined with the rest of the team, maybe they could figure out what kept the tower floating.

"Hold on a moment," Shakira shouted over the dwindling roar of the shuttles as they finished depositing the separate crews and moved away to land. "Let's wait for them to set down and turn the engines off."

Kamala glanced down again and saw Xen jogging over from the shuttle, crouching, and launching herself up to one of the lower doors. Xen grabbed on to the edge, pulled herself up, and disappeared inside.

The shuttles landed and the engines powered off, and Kamala realized what Shakira had been waiting for. Aside from the slight whisper of a hot breeze ruffling the others' hair, the air was silent.

"Just like the tower we used as shelter for a year," Shakira said softly. "Whatever the mechanism keeping this thing in the air is, it doesn't make a sound. At least, none in the range of our hearing."

Tank spoke into her comm. "Lopez, are you detecting any sounds from the tower?"

"There is a faint vibration from machinery operating inside, but my microphones aren't picking up any sounds. Something may be suppressing or nullifying any audio output."

"Ah, that kind of makes sense," Roger said. "Any civilization capable of building something like this would probably be able to build devices that mask out unpleasant sounds."

"And I imagine something keeping this much mass hovering in the air for centuries would be pretty loud without it." Kamala tossed off a lopsided grin. "We'll have to be sure we don't accidentally turn it off. Might end up deaf."

Tank sighed and turned back to the diamond shape Shakira had pointed out. "Just what I needed to fuckin' hear."

---

"Welcome to … well, whatever the hell this is." Otto's voice echoed around the huge chamber as the team spread out from the door they'd just passed through. Zuri and Graham stayed near him, probably because they'd spent more time talking with him than many of the others.

Gasm stuck her hands into her flight suit pockets and took a slow look around. She'd loaned Tickles her fighter and ordered her team to patrol the sky over the tower's vicinity in case any unwanted guests showed up. Gasm herself seemed to have joined the ground team just for a change of pace. Earl had tagged along, as had several of the other "cowboys," and he'd stayed close to her while conversing softly with her.

"We didn't do much exploring around this part of the other tower," Otto continued. "We assumed this was the equivalent of an engineering section -- reactors, heating, cooling, waste and water management, and so on. Most of the machinery was inoperative so there wasn't much to see. And given the level of disrepair the place was in, we didn't want to risk a big chunk of metal falling on us or some other goddamn thing."

"Can't say I blame ya," Earl muttered. "I once had a bridge almost fall out from under me because the wood was rotten. I took one step across it and my foot went clean through it."

"Ugh, that had to be a heart-stopper." Otto winced and turned to watch Xen's science team and Kalnar examine some nearby consoles. At least the gadgetry in here was active. "We spent most of our time exploring the levels above this because we entered through a broken window about one-third of the way up from here. That area had an open space that looked a lot like a mall with restaurants and other businesses lining the walls. The stuff we found in there had spoiled a long time before we arrived, but we were able to find some emergency rations that were edible."

"You're lucky you were able to eat any of it," Gasm said.

"Not really," Kalnar said. "It's a little odd when you think about it, but most species in the Milky Way are able to eat the same kinds of foods. Though I suppose it can be explained by all of our planets and bodies being made of the same basic components -- elements produced from stars going supernova and then accumulating to form our homeworlds, the same molecules coming together to eventually lead to our current forms, most of us based on the same amino-acid proteins, and so on." He shrugged. "That could also explain how so many of us are sexually compatible despite being unable to reproduce, as well, though I'm not an expert on biology."

"As a zorai might say, what matters is that it works." One of the scientists chuckled and a couple of others laughed along with him.

"Fair enough." Kalnar grinned and continued examining one of the consoles.

"Holy shit," one of the other scientists blurted, and everyone spun toward her.

Uh-oh. Otto caught himself holding his breath. What's about to go horribly wrong now?

"Wonderful," Xen grumbled. "Palomo, what did you do?"

"Nothing, ma'am. I was just looking at this display and suddenly everything on it was translated into English."

Kalnar turned from her to stare at the console in front of him and then cocked his head. "The same happened with this monitor and the touch-screen controls under it."

"I'll be damned," Earl said. "How did they know what language we speak?"

"Someone's been watching us," Otto said a split-second after the realization sank in.

"Studying us?" Gasm stared at him for a moment and then glanced around as if expecting enemy troops to appear out of the shadows.

"Apparently. And whoever -- or whatever -- they are, they know enough about humans to be fluent in at least one of our languages."

"Uh-huh." Xen stepped aside and motioned at the door as if preparing to order everyone to evacuate. "Exactly how worried should we be?"

Otto shrugged. "I'm afraid to find out."

---

"Looks like you were right," Marissa said as the group took a slow look around the hangar at the top of the structure. The room held several dozen vehicles that she assumed were shuttles. They had black paint jobs with red trim like the tower and were long and narrow with sharp angles.

"Otto and I didn't find any vehicles, so we figured whoever lived there had evacuated before whatever led to everything being powered down." Shakira shrugged. "The big doors in the ceiling resembled hangar doors, so we put two and two together."

Hitomi walked over to the nearest vehicle and pointed at its door. "There's an indentation for a hand with three digits, just like the one beside the door that let us in here." She placed her hand in the indentation and pushed. The door popped straight out with a soft hiss, then slid back along the length of the shuttle. She leaned in, took a quick look around, and glanced over her shoulder. "Three seats in front and three in the rear, each with four armrests. The back of the compartment appears to be for storage."

"The rest of these are identical on the outside, so they're probably set up the same way inside." Kamala slithered over to take a peek. "The control panels are smooth, so they're probably touch-screens. Displays could be in either the consoles or in a HUD on the windshield. Maybe both."

"Cool. Maybe we can take one of 'em for a spin before we leave." Shakira laughed softly and turned to the back of the room. "Ah, the door on the left should lead to a repair shop and the one on the right should take us deeper into the tower."

"We can check out the shop later," Seth said. "I'm eager to see what else we can find."

"The upper levels of the other tower seemed to be for command centers or administrative offices." Shakira strode toward the door on the right. "That was where Otto and I found a communications center, figured out how to get power to it, then, eventually, figured out how to get it working. We sent a distress call and were picked up a few days later."

"You're lucky someone was close enough to pick it up." Marissa slipped her hand into Seth's as they followed Shakira.

"We're also lucky we didn't turn off something vital or cause a system failure by diverting power to the communications array." Shakira took a quick breath and rushed on as if forcing herself not to dwell on certain recent events. "Right outside this door should be a lot of storage space for spare parts and whatnot. The level below is where the offices or whatever are. The levels under those appeared to be crew quarters, though we found other quarters -- maybe for the civilian population -- in the lower half of the tower, along with places that appeared to be restaurants, medical clinics, electronics stores, and so on."

She pressed her hand into the now-familiar alien handprint control beside the door and it slid aside. She led the others past a series of rooms filled with metal crates and parts that were probably replacements for the shuttles' inner workings, or maybe supplies to be transported somewhere else -- or both. She pointed at a door at the end of the hall.

"We found a lot of elevators as well as stairs. Since there was no power to much of anything, the lifts didn't work, so when we couldn't find any stairs, we had to just climb up the shafts to get to other floors. The elevators here should work, though."

She pushed the handprint button and the door opened into a lift that was spacious enough for all of them to squeeze into. The ceiling was higher than any other lift Marissa had been in, so she guessed the aliens who built it must've been seven or eight feet tall. Shakira studied the holographic panel.

"Hmm. Well, if the top button is for this level, then the next one will take us down to the second."

"Assuming these people's thought processes were similar to ours," Kamala said.

"There's one way to find out." Shakira tapped the glowing, golden, diamond-shaped button. The lift whirred for a few seconds, then the door opened to a different hallway. "Yep, this looks a lot like the administrative section we found on the other tower. Well, the lights are on, but that's the only major difference, as far as I can tell."

She led the team to a large room at the end of the corridor, opened the door, and stepped through. Marissa followed her and took in the consoles filling the circular room.

The house I grew up in could've fit in here with room to spare. Even if it's not a control center, it must've been for something important.

She counted eighteen consoles around the walls and another nine in the middle of the room, all of them elongated diamond shapes of varying lengths.

"These aliens sure did like that shape," Roger said.

Hitomi shrugged. "It's also possible that this might just be one particular architectural style."

"Yeah, that's true." He tossed her a lopsided grin and walked over to one of the consoles in the center. "Well, I guess we should see if we can find any records that might tell us more about this place."

"As long as we're very careful about which buttons we push," Shakira muttered.

"We'll do our best." Kamala slid up to another console and pondered the symbols on its smooth surface and in the holographic display above it.

Both groups of symbols flickered and then morphed into English text and Kamala reared back.

"What the hell? Are you guys seeing this?"

"Yeah." Shakira shook her head slowly. "Wish this could've happened in the tower Otto and I were stuck in. We might've gotten off that planet a lot sooner."

Marissa walked over to another console and found more English text and graphics on its touch-screen surface and the holofield above it. In the corner of her eye, Hitomi turned abruptly to stare at something behind her and waved to get everyone else's attention. She pointed and Marissa turned around and nearly jumped out of her skin at the sight of the figure that had appeared out of nowhere.

It was at least seven feet tall, just as she'd guessed, and appeared to have evolved from something similar to an arachnid. It had two digitigrade legs, four arms, and four bioluminescent orange eyes with double pupils. It had no nose, but did appear to have four slits in roughly the same place that might be used for breathing. The mouth was a bit oddly shaped but was close enough to human to make the alien's smile recognizable.

"Hello." Its voice was feminine and had an accent that sounded Irish, of all things. "I suspect you have a few questions."

---

"Uh … a few, yeah," Shakira stammered once she'd steadied her breathing and her pounding heart slowed almost back to normal. "The first being, you're not gonna do something horrible to us, are you? I mean -- no offense intended, but we've run into a lot of aliens who've tried to kill us -- or worse -- recently."

"None taken. And no, I intend no harm." The alien tilted her head and quirked the left corner of her mouth up slightly. "I was wondering the same about you for a few minutes, but after monitoring you closely, you appear harmless enough."

"Well, we've been trying not to touch anything without knowing what affect it'll have. We're just exploring and trying to find out what this place is. Oh, this thing in my hand is a communication device. I'm just getting an image of you to send to our other teams." Shakira raised her comm slowly, snapped a photo, and sent it to Otto and the other two excursion teams. "Look who we've found."

"We've got one here, too," Otto replied, and someone from the other teams reported the same thing. "She just appeared out of nowhere and asked if we had any questions."

"Same here."

"My name is Roh'Kala," the alien said. "Well, I am what you would call an AI who is based on an organic person with that name, which may be considered ironic given how she felt about synthetics until she encountered a few from Earth. I have copies of her memories and personality matrix. Each of these facilities has a similar copy of her serving as one of a pair of central control units."

"And I'm the other half of the pair," a male voice said before a human with a similar accent blipped into existence beside the Roh'Kala facsimile. "I'm her husband, Timmy McBride. Well, an AI copy of the original Timmy, as you may have guessed. They were married, so each of these towers has a copy of both to keep us from getting lonely."

Ah, they're holograms. Okay. "You hinted that Roh'Kala didn't have a positive opinion of AI?"

"Her species, the zaekakli, were wiped out by several different forms of synthetic life. The zaekakli once had a vast empire spread over more than half of the galaxy, but their numbers were reduced to a handful and scattered in every direction by AI-controlled nanobots that consumed everything in their path and used it as raw materials to construct more of themselves."

"Ships, buildings, mountains, even people," the McBride AI said. "The original Timmy saw recordings made by the few who escaped, and I have all of his memories of the screams of pain and fear from those who were disassembled at the atomic level because they weren't fast enough." He shivered. "Lucky me."

Jesus. Shakira shook her head slowly and tried to think of something comforting to say while the hologram of Roh'Kala walked over and put both right arms around him. The arachnoid alien took a slow breath before continuing.

"The survivors were gradually reduced to almost nothing in other conflicts over the centuries. A few of those battles were against other organics, but the majority of the remaining zaekakli were killed by synths. My people had towers like this one on hundreds of planets, serving a variety of functions ranging from security outposts to civilian science stations, but many of them were repurposed to support a few thousand survivors and keep them from further harm. A new means of transportation was installed, giving the towers the ability to vanish from one place and reappear in another when the nanobots or other hostiles were detected."

That sounds like it could be the space-time rifts.

"It bought the zaekakli some time, but that's all it did," Timmy said. "Eventually, Roh'Kala was the only one left. She and a small military force were the last of her species in the whole galaxy, and had been fighting a losing battle against a species of synths that wiped out their creators. They were forced to hide on Proxima Centauri b, which was uninhabited at the time. They went into stasis to mask their life signs, but eventually, the synths found them. A few of the zaekakli were revived in time to fight back, but they and the synths killed each other. Most of the hibernation units were damaged in the battle and the occupants died."

"All but one." Roh'Kalla sighed. "She was found by the first Earth starship to explore outside the Sol system. The landing team had a number of synths among them, and she panicked when her hibernation unit revived her and she saw them surrounding her. Timmy was a reporter covering the mission. He was able to get through to her the idea that these synths were friendly. As she was the last of her kind, I suppose she trusted them because there was no point in fighting on."

"I hope the AI she met didn't prove any of her suspicions right," Hitomi said.

"They did not, much to her surprise. They remained friendly and helpful. Roh'Kala learned to communicate with them and the human crew, and during her first few months with Timmy, she picked up his accent and ended up talkin' like a fuckin' leprechaun." The Roh'Kala AI grinned and reached over to nudge Timmy's shoulder. "Anyway, not long afterward, they began working on ways to bring the zaekakli back from extinction."

"These towers." Timmy waved a hand around. "Well, some of 'em, at least. Roh'Kala knew the locations of a few and her new friends helped her track them down. From there, they found the coordinates for more, and so on. The towers were used for storing genetic samples as well as housing survivors, so each one has a considerable collection of zaekakli genetic material. Roh'Kala was originally a warrior, but she took on a new purpose and learned the sciences necessary to preserve the samples and use cloning and gene editing to recreate enough of her people to give them a big enough gene pool."

"She and Timmy eventually had their brains installed in cybernetic bodies so they could continue their work beyond the point where they would've succumbed to old age, but because all of these facilities have remained dormant, we're guessing the project is still ongoing. Or maybe something interrupted it."

"Well," Edison said, "for one thing, this particular tower isn't in the Milky Way anymore."

"Yeah, something triggered a 'jump' and when we came out the other end, we didn't recognize any of the constellations." Timmy shrugged. "Our navigation system couldn't detect any other towers, jumpgate beacons, or other ships. We kept investigating and discovered that we appear to be in an elliptical galaxy."

"Yep. People from the Milky Way -- and probably from numerous other galaxies, as well -- got here by falling through space-time rifts that seem to appear at random and vanish within seconds. This quadrant of the galaxy seems to have a high rate of rift activity that's led to thousands of people appearing here over the past few millennia and finding their way to a planet where they settled. They named it Last Stand."

"Which brings us to why we were investigating this tower," Shakira said. "When we found out that similar structures had appeared in this galaxy and the Milky Way, and that the towers seem able to move around without anyone seeing how it happens, we thought there might be a connection with the rifts." She arched an eyebrow. "So … how exactly do these towers move around?"