On Memiklon

Then Mala wondered if she might be hallucinating as she watched Rampart being lifted up by one of the Memiklons and deposited back onto the platform.   This feeling of unreality deepened when she saw a crowd of the entities encircle the platform, their bodies pulsing with light and shifting through subtle changes of shape.  The platform steadied, its tilting movements not ceasing entirely, but with shallower angles and less frequency.  They continued their downward movement toward the city at the bottom of the valley.  Mala pulled herself up, back into the seat, grabbing the sides of the controls and holding tightly.  She heard voices and glanced around.  The captain and Science were seated nearby on the deck, talking softly.  Davalos was unconscious, tethered tightly to the railing.  Stasia had regained her footing. 

Listening to the captain's surmise of what was happening cleared Mala's head.  What he said made sense.  There must be more than one faction of society here, and some of them obviously weren't happy about an alien presence.  Mala took silent inventory of her own situation.  Fortunately her only injuries were bruises along her right side.  Her ankle ached, but she tested it, and found it would hold her weight.  Then she sagged back into the chair, still holding on, not trusting their ride to continue its steadiness.

She turned her awareness to her internal cybernetics, checking through its functions.  Though it was undamaged, it lacked any connectivity, except to her armpadd.  The hoverdisc's power distribution system was damaged, so it was impossible to do a diagnostic on the plasma compression generator, fuel cells or nozzle thrusters; their condition remained unknown.  Mala wasn't concerned about the distribution section linking to the workstation controls.  Her own cybernetics could bypass the controls.  ~But we have to find some way to fix the power net or this platform's going nowhere!  Not on our own.~  They would eventually have to move the disc back to its main engine and integrate the two, to make it off planet and back to the Arcadia.  With the Memiklons' technology based on completely different principles, she knew that might be a major problem.

Watching the eerie beauty of the creatures, Mala found it hard to look away from them.  But she didn't enjoy the thought of how dependent on them the away team had become.