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On the other side of the mirror is, apparently, a hexagonal corridor with a metal grate for a floor, unnaturally harsh white light shining up from beneath it. The walls and ceiling are paneled in some stranger black material. The air smells…weird. He feels lighter, as though his body is suddenly a third of its usual weight, because in fact it is.
Within seconds of his arrival, an alarm goes off. “Intruder, level four,” says a disembodied voice in a language he doesn’t recognize at all.
“The Martian navy doesn’t permit its ships to be captured,” he tells Blai matter-of-factly. “Though the boarders should have known that. I can’t imagine what they thought they were going to achieve.”
"- my books?" And also his mace and armor but this doesn't actually seem like the kind of environment where those are enormously useful, it's just that they were so expensive.
Fair enough, it's not like he knew any of the people who died.
“We made—copies.” Taldane doesn't have any of the words he would like to use here. “We have—machines that can store and manipulate information very efficiently. Paper books are obsolete for practical purposes.”
He grabs a tablet, loads up the scans of Blai’s books, and hands it to him, quickly demonstrating how to swipe to turn the page. (Technically these are highly classified MCRN files but the regulation obviously wasn’t intended to prevent him from sharing them with the person they stole the originals from.)
"Thank you."
He flips to the back and finds a prayer for dead people to recite, aloud but softly.
He bows his head again as Blai prays. He should probably clarify whether, since gods are apparently real, there are also afterlives. Not now. He can’t think about that right now.
Right now he needs to figure out how to take his ship back.
(According to the prayer there are absolutely afterlives and Blai's religion has very strong opinions about which ones it is okay to go to.)
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