Bridal Jitters by Jayne Castle

into her area of expertise. They werepartners. He had to respect her instincts.
    He allowed himself to be drawn away from the window. She pulled him deeper into the room.
    “Down,” she whispered, dragging him down behind a large quartz chest. “Hurry.”
    He crouched beside her, the mag-rez gun in hand. “I hope you know what the hell you’re doing.”
    Before she could respond, an inhuman shriek of mingled rage and despair rent the gloom of the alien zoo. It echoed endlessly off the walls. Sam froze, his hand tightening convulsively around the gun. Beside him, Virginia shuddered.
    “What in the name of Old Earth …?” Sam whispered.
    A very human shout went up, a high, keening cry of terror.
    “There’s something in there.”
    Chaz, the tangler, Sam thought.
    “… Get outa here …”
    Another alien scream rose, joining the crescendoing wail of the first. And then a torrent of screeches, shrieks, howls, and dreadful cries arose. There was a hellishly mournful quality to the unnatural sounds, as though whatever had once inhabited the small cells had been aroused from their centuries-deep sleep to protest the disturbance. The cacophony of otherworldly cries drowned out the screams of Chaz and Drake.
    The vast zoo room began to darken. The green gloom seemed to thicken and grow dense. Sam followed Virginia’s gaze. They both looked out the narrow window. It was like looking into the depths of an alien sea.
    “Dear heaven.” Virginia said in amazement.
    He knew what was going through her mind. There was no such thing as night and day in the ruins. The glow of the quartz was always steady. True, there had been more than the usual number of shadows in the zoo chamber, but there had been light, and it had remained at a constant level.
    Until now.
    Only the chamber in which they crouched remained luminous.
    Jagged shards of green lightning flashed outside the narrow opening, shattering the heavy darkness that enveloped the zoo. The alien shrieks grew louder.
    More lightning sizzled. As Sam watched, an acid-hued bolt of energy illuminated some thing that floated in midair outside the window. He caught a glimpse of a green phantom so gossamer thin and transparent that he could see straight through it to the opposite wall. As he watched, another specter joined the first.
    “UDEMs,” Virginia whispered. “When Chaz untangled the trap he must have disturbed some.”
    “Whatever the hell those two things are, they aren’t standard-issue energy ghosts.” Sam probed cautiously, feeling for the telltale trace of psi energy emitted by normal unstable dissonance energy manifestations. What he picked up with his para senses felt wrong. He cut off the probe immediately. He did not want to draw the attention of the strange specters.
    “If they’re not UDEMs, what are they?” she asked very softly.
    “They’re energy ghosts of some kind but not like any I’ve ever dealt with. Look at the way they move.”
    “As if—” Virginia hesitated. “As if they’re headed somewhere.”
    “Yeah. Right toward Chaz and Drake.”
    “But that’s impossible.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    She was right, of course. UDEMs were not sentient beings. They certainly weren’t the ghosts of long-dead aliens, although more than one or two hucksters and con men had tried to convince the gullible of that over the years.
    Technically speaking, UDEMS were nothing more thanballs of residual psi energy left behind by whatever had once powered Harmonic technology. The only reason they were called ghosts was because they tended to drift through the ancient corridors like ghosts.
    Green lightning zigzagged through the misty darkness outside the window. More ghosts drifted past the opening, streaming toward the entrance of the zoo chamber.
    “Damn,” Sam said. “What the devil is going on out there?”
    “I don’t know, but I can tell you that this is Chaz’s fault,” Virginia said grimly. “He set them off. I knew there was something strange about