Page 46 of Neverwylde 6
“Good Lord, it never occurred to me,” Mellori whispered. “I never connected the dots.”
“What are you talking about?” Williamsburg asked, more forcefully.
Kelen turned to the lieutenant colonel. “There were platforms there that did just that. They allowed us to transport from one part of the planet to another.”
Jules went back to the tablet. “Hold on. Let me show you.” He dialed up a still photo of the stone slab from the garden temple. “See that right there? See those colored buttons? We were able to figure out where each one of those buttons led to.”
Williamsburg went over to examine the holo more closely. Kelen saw him studying the pattern. “There was a slab nearby, about three by three meters in size. If you stood on it and pressed the button, you were teleported to the corresponding location.”
“If that location was dangerous, all you had to do was remain on the slab and it automatically returned you to your previous location,” Massapa expounded.
“There was only one exception to our using it,” Cooter continued. “There was a weight limit. Don’t know exactly what that was, but we could only transport one of us at a time.”
“Wait a minute. Wait a minute.” Fullgrath held up his hands. “Sorry. I don’t get what all the fuss is about. So we found a way to transport ourselves from one place to another. What’s the big deal? We got teleporters all over the place.”
It was Mellori who answered him. “Yes, we do. But those are used mainly for packages and whatnot. They aren’t used for live cargo. And definitely not to send anything from one planet to another. Plus, we aren’t able to send anything over such a vast distance, much less through space itself.”
The weapons master grunted. “We weren’t sent to another planet.”
“How do we know that for certain?” Massapa countered.
The implication left them speechless. After a few moments of contemplation, Kleesod spoke up. “We later found some of the panels destroyed, like someone was deliberately sabotaging them to prevent us from using them.”
Baffrey addressed Jules. “Do you have any other photos of those panels?”
“I have several. I took pictures of each one we encountered.” He began randomly flipping through the shots when Pfeiffer suddenly shouted.
“Whoa, whoa. Back up. What was that previous picture of?” the colonel demanded.
Jules reversed the flow one photo at a time until he was ordered to stop. It was the pile of skeletons they’d found in the nonagon. The colonel pointed to the holo again, turning around to look at them. “What are those? Are those skeletal remains?”
“We found those in one of the locations,” Cooter offered.
Sandow chimed in. “Someone had piled up the bodies. We don’t know who did it. And there was no way I could decipher the cause of their deaths.”
Pfeiffer hurried over to his desk and hit the computer’s audio button. “Computer, voice verification.”
“Verification matched. Hello, Colonel Pfeiffer. How can I help you?”
“Display only known photo of a Bollian. Include physical description.”
A picture appeared in midair. Kelen gasped in surprise. Her shock was echoed by the others.
It was the holo of a two-armed, bipedal humanoid, approximately one meter in height.
And its head was undeniably cubical in shape.
