Muses of Terra (Codex Antonius Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page B

her com. Though her helmet cameras recorded everything, talking through her experiences helped calm her nerves.
    “There’s a tunnel on the ceiling,” she said, scanning the opening as she walked beneath it. “Looks like the one I’m in, but it goes up. The main tunnel is still pulsating, so I’ll stay on the path. Not sure how I’d climb up there anyway.”
    “It makes you wonder what their physical bodies are like,” Varo said, excitement returning to his voice. “Why do they like the blue lights? Why is it so dark? How can they find their way around the vessel when its corridors twist and turn so—?”
    Lucia said, “Varo, you’re babbling again.”  
    Despite her nervous stomach, Ocella grinned at the annoyance in Lucia’s voice.
    “Forgive me if I’m excited about the greatest discovery in human history since the Muses.”
    “Yes, the Muses turned out so well for us,” Lucia replied.
    “If you ignore the whole enslavement part, the Muses have been a good thing for humanity,” Varo said. “Granted, like any Saturnist, I’d prefer we not have an alien virus controlling us, but Muse technology has only benefited humans.”
    “Who’s to say we wouldn’t have discovered those technologies ourselves?” Lucia said. “It’s been a thousand years since Antonius overthrew Octavian Augustus. A lot could’ve happened during that time.”
    “But it would not have been the efficient track to where we are now. Technology had not changed much in the millennia before Antonius. I just don’t believe we’d be traveling the stars without the Muses.”
    Lucia snorted. “You’re a Pantheist. Won’t the gods strike you down for admitting that?”
    “I speak the truth. The gods do not strike down people for speaking the truth.”
    “If I could interrupt,” Ocella said, “I’ve entered an actual room.”
    While Lucia and Varo debated, Ocella had turned a corner to her right and entered a cavernous, crescent-shaped room. Though she couldn’t see around the crescent’s inner curve, the room looked two hundred paces from tip to tip. It had a clearly delineated floor and hazy, blue oval shapes covering the walls on either side. Ocella looked up. The oval-lined walls disappeared into the gloom above.
    “Centuriae,” Varo said, “can you take a closer look at the walls?”
    Ocella walked over to a human-sized oval to her right. It seemed made of the same chitinous material as the rest of the ship, yet brighter and more translucent than the black, vein-lit material around it. She thought she could see a shape inside. She eye-tapped the radar on her helmet display.  
    Her helmet showed a frozen, tentacled creature. It looked like a Terran octopus—three-feet tall, bulbous head, and eight tentacles. The creature’s tentacles, however, each had three fingers and a thumb.
    “There’s your alien, Varo,” Ocella said, staring at the creature. Ocella had watched the archive holos Kaeso retrieved from Menota, and they included this same creature. But seeing it on a holo and seeing it in the flesh were two different experiences.
    “Unbelievable,” Varo breathed. “This must be their version of a sleeper crib.”
    Lucia said, “Or a meat freezer. There are hundreds of them.”
    Ocella aimed her helmet’s radar at the ovals around the creature. Each one contained a similar octopod in a different frozen position, as if the creatures had been dumped in and flash-frozen. Octopod cells went as far up as her helmet’s radar could see, and to the left and right.
    “Wait, Centuriae,” Varo said. “Turn to your left, twenty paces from your position.”
    Ocella aimed her helmet’s radar to the left and walked toward the ovals on the wall. She saw what caught Varo’s attention—another section of frozen creatures. But these had leathery wings wrapped around their bodies and a head resembling a Terran shark. Twenty more paces to the left was another species. This one had limbs and appendages sprouting from all