Читать книгу Sinner - Sara Douglass - Страница 5

The four craft crashed through the barriers between the outer universe and the planet, exploding in raging flames, creating the portal that later races would call the Star Gate.

The creatures inside fought for control of the craft, fought even knowing it was a lost cause – the craft had ceased to listen to them hundreds of years previously. But even when death was only moments away, their hands clung to navigation mechanisms, hoping to somehow save their cargo … and maybe even save the world to which they plummeted from their cargo.

It was useless. Most of them were drifting ashes by the time their flaming craft smashed deep into the surface of the planet.

Most of them. One, like the four craft, survived.

Within days the craft had shifted comfortably into the pits created by their violent arrival, accepting the waters that closed over their surface. For three thousand years they dreamed. Then they woke and began to grow, spreading their tentacles deep beneath the land, reaching out, each to the other. Their metalled surfaces and walkways and panels and compartments hummed with the music they had learned in the millennia they’d travelled the universe. But this music the craft kept to themselves, not letting it mix with the sound of the Star Dance that filtered through the Star Gate.

The Survivor occasionally woke from his own deep sleep, wandering the corridors of the craft and those hallways that extended between each craft, looking, looking, looking, but never finding.

“Katie!” he would cry, “Katie! I don’t know where it is!”

His searching always left him physically and emotionally exhausted, and within days of waking he would wander disconsolately back to his chamber, and there lie down to sleep yet again.

His dreams were disturbed, wondering why he’d survived, and yet not his comrades.

Wondering what the craft needed him to do.

Wondering whether the cargo was safe.

Wondering whether it would ever be claimed.

Wondering.

Aeons passed.