Shadows of Mars (Broken Stars Book 1) I.O. Adler (read people like a book TXT) 📖

acts as a power source and has an engine. Each section can pull or push each other along by some kind of beam. Where one goes, the others follow like links in a chain if they’re not joined up. They even change their order as needed, but a lot of that is automated. I can’t explain it better yet.”

“Then don’t. But can you seal off the section of the ring where the visitor docked their ship? Leave that behind?”

“I don’t know. I can try.”

“Do it. And we’ll need those flight chairs again.”

Carmen remained in the hall. “Wait. We can’t just run. We don’t know who’s here. What if it’s Mom?”

“Safe to assume it’s not,” Barrett said. “And more importantly, if this ship was stolen, they might be angry. They might also make the air we’ve been breathing in here into something which might kill us. Enough questions. Get in here.”

“Then maybe it’s not Mom. What if it’s this She Who Waits? She didn’t sound angry. She was willing to communicate. We have to at least try to meet with them.”

Agent Barrett wore an exasperated look. He approached and held out his hand.

Carmen backed away. “Jenna, close the sphere and stay inside.”

“I can’t allow that,” Barrett said.

“I’m not asking you for permission. Running is a mistake. If the spheres are connected then their ship follows us wherever we go. You both stay here. If something bad happens to me, you’ll know, won’t you? Can you see each part of the ring?”

Jenna hesitated. “I can. Sort of.”

“Then you’ll be my eyes. Tell me where I need to go. Now get the door.”

“Car, are you sure? I’m scared.”

“Yeah, me too. But we’ll never find Mom if we run.”

Barrett stepped back and the door went instantly solid. Carmen touched the smooth material and wondered how big of a mistake this was. She began to move down the hallway in the direction they had been.

“Jenna, hope you’re listening. I guess there’s not really much choice on which way to go if it’s a loop. Keep trying to look. Can you see Mom?”

Her sister didn’t answer and remained silent as Carmen continued to walk. Either she was heading towards a reunion or a meeting with the real owner of the ring of spheres.

She felt suddenly self-conscious and wondered how big a train wreck her hair was after their journey. An insane thought, she knew.

She stopped to lean on the wall and caught her breath. Exhaustion? Surely. But her heart hammered. She felt light-headed. The air? No. Nerves. She was either going to find her mother impossibly alive or come face-to-face with…what? A bug-eyed alien? Another robot? And why wasn’t Agent Barrett with her?

According to him, he was trained for this sort of thing, if that was even possible. But she wondered if behind his cool demeanor he was also scared. And what was she? An out-of-work wastewater tech, a musician with hearing loss, and a caretaker of a grumpy father with bad kidneys and a failing liver.

Play it cool.

Like that piece of advice would do anything against what she was about to face. Was She Who Waits psychic? Did she spit acid? Did her kind eat people and assimilate them? Was her mom among them, a pod person or a drone with a brain leech connected to her ear and part of a hive mind?

Her instincts told her to run back to join Jenna and Barrett. They should be running, not walking, back home. The Agent Barretts of the world could face down the little green men. But knowing humanity’s luck of late, Earth might send someone like Peter Vogel to broker their peace.

She almost laughed at the thought of Peter offering to lob prayer missiles at a group of babbling aliens who worshipped anything besides his One True Deity.

She hadn’t searched for her mother so long or come this far to let fear stop her. She kept walking and kept a hand on the wall to fight the sense of being off balance. Soon she was able to proceed without the help.

The ring felt much larger than the original spaceship she had visited. If the place comprised multiple spheres, then there must have been hundreds of them. It felt as if she was on a long gym track, but she realized the lack of features might deceive her.

There hadn’t been any intersections or doorways. The bathroom had vanished and she guessed it lay somewhere behind her. Or, judging by everything she had seen, any room could become a bathroom within the ring.

“Am I going the right way?”

Her sister still wasn’t responding. Now she felt truly alone.

Without windows in view, Carmen had no sense of how much room the ring had on either side of the corridor or if the outer wall was only a thin barrier between her and space. How had her mother done it, trusting a fragile vessel on top of a rocket to protect her from the hundred ways in which space would try to kill her?

An open portal stood on the outside wall. She paused.

“Jenna, tell me what you see,” she whispered. “Jen? Come on, answer. I’m at a door.”

She gave herself a countdown from five before stepping forward and looking inside.

Unlike the austere monochromatic gray of the sphere ring, the room beyond was a chamber with thick columns made of what might have been stone in green, orange, and red. The marble-like pattern also ran along the walls in swirls of sparkling blue. The ceiling was bright turquoise and glowed with a soft light. A path of black and crimson led to the far side of the chamber.

A single freestanding pillar stood at the end of the path. It didn’t quite rise to the roof. The surface of the pillar might have been clear, but