“We don’t know what they want,” Maria said.
“They’ve made no demands?”
“No,” she said. “They only said he is with them, and he is safe.”
The leaders of the Builder’s Guild sat on Maria’s communicator as if they were sitting in her office. She could see every wrinkle on their faces, every ounce of their fears, and every doubt in their minds.
“Is that exactly what they said?” one of the members asked.
“Why?” she wondered.
“Could he be with them?” he continued. “As in, on their side.”
“Absolutely not,” she responded. “We think that’s what they were trying to imply. Maybe they are simply trying to deceive us; maybe they just need to buy some time.”
“Time for what?”
“Time to prevent us from preparing for war,” she said. “The truth is we don’t know. But we need to be ready for anything. The one thing we know about the Machinists is that they are dangerous and they have no trouble murdering people.”
“We are only builders, Maria,” one of the members said to her. “We are not soldiers.”
“We don’t want you to be soldiers; we are only asking you to build. Build ships, great ships we can use to defend ourselves, ships we can use to defend the people. Even ships we can use to fight back.”
“We will help,” the leader said. He was a tall man with a thin face and sallow cheeks.
“We’re putting together a plan,” Maria told him.
“What kind of plan?” he asked.
“A rescue plan,” she said.
“Good,” one of the members barked out.
“What do you mean ‘good’? If we want to discover their plan of attack, we can’t send in a rescue team and hope for best,” another member shouted out in response. “We need to find out what weapons they have before we can take them on.”
“There is no action without planning,” the leader stated. “Let us start from the beginning and worry about the endgame if we get there.”
No one responded or shouted out.
“We will build your ships,” he told her. “Be well.”
“And you,” she said.
With that the communication ended. Maria sat back in her chair, placed her hand over her forehead, and tried to imagine what Lucas was going through.
He had been protected and sheltered his entire life. Not once did difficulty knock at his door. Until the day his father came home and said he had cancer.
With all the technology and advances humans had seen and discovered since the box arrived on Earth, cancer was still a something that had not been conquered. The box revealed secrets about the universe, secrets about physics, but it was not written by humans. It was not built by beings who knew the secrets of human anatomy.
That was still something humans needed to learn on their own. And cancer was something no one had learned enough about.
It was still something any person could die from. And Lucas’s father did. It was the first taste of real life Lucas ever experienced. Less than a year ago, he was suddenly sitting on the council with no real understanding of what that meant. He only understood it was a task he could not walk away from.
Maria wondered how someone so naïve would survive surrounded by some of the toughest men in the solar system, a world away from his own. She could only imagine him being swallowed whole by the Machinists.
That’s when the beep sounded. It echoed between her office walls like a siren, reminding her she had a message waiting. She finally opened the message. It was from Lucas, and it was only one sentence long.
“They know about the Nekuia.”
She was motionless, soundless, even thoughtless. What did that mean? Who knows about the Nekuia? The Machinists?
And was the message really from Lucas? Not just anyone could send her a message through that system, but it could still be accessed by a handful of people. And Lucas was kidnapped. He was naïve and weak enough in Maria’s mind to be taunted, to be tortured, to be turned.
The first thing she did was turn on her communicator and ask for William.
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