Tales From the Crucible

by Charlotte Llewelyn-Wells

  “Aaaahhh!” The floor suddenly gave way beneath her feet, one side of it swinging open with an ominous creak she barely heard as she plunged through the gap. She tried to grab for the edge, but she was too far away. A second later she hit the ground and fell over flat onto her back, all the wind knocked out of her and her right ankle throbbing dangerously.

  Roz stared up at the hole she’d fallen through, too stunned to think straight. A trap. She’d fallen into a goblin trap. That was bad, that meant that looter goblins would be heading to check on what had set it off. She needed to get out of here, she needed to…

  “ggGUurrrgllle…”

  Wait, what was that? Roz stared blearily around the cavernous space she’d fallen into – it was surprisingly big, given how the refuse tended to fill any voids – and looked for the source of the sound. She couldn’t see much beyond the general shape of the hole. Why weren’t her night-vision goggles working?

  Because you’re not wearing your goggles, genius! They were built into the ventilator, and she hadn’t put it back on yet. The light of her holographic display had turned off, too. Groggily, Roz slapped at her left glove until the light came back on. Okay, there was the ceiling, maybe… ten feet up? Ow, no wonder her ankle hurt so bad. She tested it with a grimace. She could move it, but it sure didn’t feel happy about the process. Not broken, though – that was good.

  “ggGGGUUURRRGgllleee…”

  That noise was not helping her headache any. Roz turned her head to the left and–

  “GGGUUUUURRRRGGGGLLLEE!”

  Roz rolled away from the edge of the hungry gurgle pool, which seeped toward her in a steady, bubbling green wave. She managed to keep it from touching her – if it did it would immediately start doing damage – but even as she rolled, she inhaled the telltale stench of the pool’s psychic fog. It was rank, the smell of moldy death, like a blighted orchard or a…

  … a delicious slice of cherry chocolate cake…

  “No!” No, it was trying to mess with her head! Roz needed to get out of this chamber, before the smell overwhelmed her. She groped at her neck for the ventilator, but there was no time – the gurgle pool was coming on fast, faster than she’d ever seen one flow before. She crawled backward until she hit the wall, then flashed her light desperately around the room, hoping for some refuge that wasn’t through the ceiling.

  Nothing. No new holes, no tunnels, no escape hatches other than the one she couldn’t reach. Maybe she could jump up to it… Roz tested her foot again with a wince. Not likely. She might be able to climb, but not before she…

  … come over to the pool to find what you’re seeking – we know where it is, we know everything in the dump…

  Roz shook her head to try and clear it and looked around for a place out of the pool’s reach. This one was moving pretty fast, but she doubted it could climb a wall. She’d find a place to hole up, and then–

  Crrruuuunch! One of the walls began to move. Roz pushed to her feet and dashed for the first likely place she could see – a little triangular ledge just to the right of the gurgle pool, a few feet off the ragged floor.

  She did a staggering hop around the edge of the pool, which sent a tentacle out toward her but couldn’t quite make contact, and crawled up onto the ledge. It was partially covered by a rusty metal sheet, and as long as Roz tucked her feet in tight, kept her breathing slow and steady and didn’t move, maybe…

  … maybe you can find what you’re looking for right over here… come, look closer, bring your little light and look…

  Oh no, the light! Roz turned off her projector just as the shuddering crunch of the mobile trash door came to a halt.

  “Back up, you!” a harsh voice called out. “Back up now!”

  “Use the fire on it, Snart,” another voice suggested. “Damn pools only respect one thing.”

  The other voice didn’t reply, but a second later a jet of white-hot fire shot into the cavern, right into the center of the gurgle pool. It shriveled around the edges, collapsing in on itself with a guttural cry. A moment later a looter goblin stepped into view, the flamethrower it carried still lit and ready at the muzzle.

  “What set this thing off?” he said with a grunt, staring curiously around the room. Roz couldn’t look away. One more step inside, maybe two, and then he’d see her for sure. Would they take her captive and try to ransom her, or just steal all her equipment and turn her out at the edge of the dump? Or even worse, would they cut their losses and burn her to slag right where she crouched?

  “Nothing in it, then?” the other goblin asked. They both once had bright blue hair, but where most goblins were fastidious about keeping their vibrant colors visible, these ones had let gunk and oil settle in, dulling most of their locks to a dirty blue-gray. Their gear was solid, though – they had on tougher overalls than Roz was wearing, and heavy spike-tipped boots.

  “Not a thing, Brikt. But something set it off, and – wait.” The goblin took another step into the room. “What’s that?”

  “What’s what?”

  “That thing on the wa–”

  Squeak! Whatever the goblin had been about to say was interrupted by the clatter of a cyber rat – maybe the very same cyber rat that Roz had stunned – crawling into the chamber through the hole in the ceiling. It clung to the ceiling easily with its magnetic paws, and bared its shiny, sharp teeth at the goblins.

  “Those rats again!” The goblin called Brikt swore and threw a heavy lug nut at it. The rat danced out of the way, then crawled casually back up through the hole. “This is the worst bunch yet, I swear! They set off a trap three tunnels over yesterday, the same way! Didn’t catch one of them, thanks to those nasty paws of theirs.”

  “A rat.” The goblin Snart nodded his head, like he was convincing himself of something. “Of course.”

  “Come on, let’s leave the pool to regenerate and see if we can’t catch that little bastard.” Brikt stomped off, and after another moment Snart followed. The hidden passage closed with another groaning crunch, and a minute later the room was empty except for the sad, burbling croon of the wounded gurgle pool and Roz, still clinging to the ledge like a spider, eyes wide and unseeing in the darkness as she slowly pulled herself together.

  By the time the psychic fog of the gurgle pool had completely worn off, Roz had recovered a little of her gumption. Of all the dumb ways to die, getting dissolved by a gurgle pool was close to the very top. Even worse than being eaten by cyber rats.

  “That’s enough of that,” she murmured to herself, as she pulled her ventilator back on. The pool wasn’t emitting its chemicals any more, too concerned with healing itself to bother with her, but she needed the relative freshness of her rebreather after the time she’d just spent bare-faced. How much time had passed since she’d crawled in, anyway? Roz checked the clock function in her glove.

  Nine hours! How was it possible that she’d been in here for nine hours already? It didn’t feel like more than half of that. She tried to straighten her legs out and groaned. Okaaay, maybe she had been sitting in one place for a little longer than she’d realized.

  Roz sighed and lifted her ventilator just long enough to pound a protein bar and a sachet of water, then carefully slipped a numbing patch down her overalls and stuck it to her ankle. Relief flowed through her, and when she stood up, her legs held.

  Okay. Time to get out of here. Roz sprayed a layer of Stik-Tite onto the palms of her gloves – it was something that Spire climbers liked to use to improve their grip strength – and grasped the nearest length of pipe jutting out of the wall. She was going to pull herself out of this hole, find that darn chariot, and make it back to Mr Tsaagan before time ran out. No excuses.

  Her pep talk was easy to think, much harder to do, but after ten minutes of grunting and straining, Roz finally levered herself back into the tunnel above the trap. She left it open – the looter goblins might notice if she tried to close it – and reopened her map. “All right, show me the way.” Two hundred more feet
in this tunnel, then up and through into a different section of the dump.

  Roz moved slower than before, more cautious now – not to mention her ankle still hurt, despite the numbing patch. But she was making it, she was getting there. She avoided more traps, went silent at the first hint of scratching or squeaking and kept her ventilator on even when her cut began to itch beneath the strap. No more fooling around – she was on a mission, and she wasn’t going to fail.

  By the time she got to the projected location of the chariot, Roz’s energy was starting to flag, so it was a relief to finally stop moving. “It should be… here.” Roz shined her light on the dump in front of her. Nothing but gutted waste barrels.

  Clearly time had taken its toll on the layout of this section of the dump. Roz had an ace in the hole, though. She’d brought along – after arguing with Grizl for almost half a precious hour – the electronic brain and imaging arm of his Deep-Down scanner, attached to a special battery pack that would give her enough juice for a thirty-second scan. It would penetrate deep into the junk pile and give her a three-dimensional view of whatever was behind the outer layer up to ten feet back, but she wouldn’t have long with it.

  “From here…” she looked at the section in front of her, one of the barrels sporting a bright orange hazmat symbol “… to there.” She pointed at a broken pipe about thirty feet away. It was a decent swath of metal – the odds were good that she’d catch at least part of the chariot with a scan, as long as it was still here. Please still be here.

  “Okay.” She aimed the arm of the scanner at the wall in front of her and took a deep breath. “Here we go.” She flipped the switch, and immediately felt the battery inside her pack begin to heat up.

  Move, move… Roz stepped slowly but steadily down the tunnel, careful not to trip or slide or do anything else to mess with the picture she was taking. Three feet… six feet… ten feet… The battery was really starting to heat up now, leaking its uncomfortable warmth through her overalls and into her skin. Twenty feet–

  The heat dropped off instantly, the battery completely exhausted. It didn’t melt down, thank the Architects, but she wouldn’t be getting any more use out of it, that was for sure. Roz took off her pack and set the battery aside, connected the Deep-Down’s brain to her glove’s hologram setup, and began to review her images.

  “What a mess,” she muttered as she examined the first few feet of data. She’d tried to hold the scanner steady, but there was plenty of noise in the picture. Still, it was good enough to give her a general idea of what was back there, and so far – no chariot.

  “C’mon.” She kept searching, her heart sinking with every new foot of distance displayed. Plenty of junkyard scraps, a few pieces of ships here and there, but nothing strikingly saurian like the chariot. “C’mon, don’t do this to me.” Nothing… nothing… all the way at the end now, and her heart was down in her boots. “Please, please, ple–” Wait. There, at the very edge of the scan. That was the start of an elegant scalloped curve, the material extremely high-density compared to the stuff around it. Roz fumbled up a comparison picture that Mr Tsaagan had given her. Yep, same base.

  Yessss. Now, to get to it.

  That part was surprisingly easy, actually. A little judicious use of her field kit’s pocket blowtorch, and Roz had burned herself a path through the barrels. There was even a little alcove back by the ship that she could fit into if she hunkered down. Perfect.

  Roz stacked a loose barrel in front of the hole she’d made, just in case, then crawled through the narrow gap and shimmied her way out right onto the chariot’s platform. It was oily, and a little hard to get a purchase on, but Roz dug her toes in and pulled up the original picture again. She needed one of the front hubs for an antigravity generator – Mr Tsaagan already had one himself, and he was looking for a perfect match for it. That meant taking the one with the least damage.

  “All this work for the sake of authenticity,” Roz murmured, as she reached for her blowtorch again. She would just cut away an entire front section in order to avoid potentially damaging the hub with a prybar or magnetic screwdriver. It was bizarre to her that the saurians would go to so much trouble to get something that they could probably replicate in minutes. But then, they did have one of the oldest civilizations on the entire Crucible. Perhaps it made more sense to a species used to treasuring its past to also treasure its sense of age. “Good news for me, anyway.” She edged over to the side of the platform, raised her blowtorch, and–

  It went out. Roz frowned. “What the…” She checked the fuel bottle – still half full. She tried to re-light it, and it sparked up with no problem. “Okaaay…” She leaned forward again and–

  It went out. Again. This time, it didn’t spark when she tried to re-light it. Roz sighed. “Of course.” Why would anything at all go smoothly? “Fine.” She reached into her field kit for her magnetic screwdriver. It could find and attenuate to the fastenings in the hub, and while it was slower, it would get the job done. She reached over the edge and–

  The screwdriver flew out of her hand and stuck to the far side of the alcove. Roz stared.

  “What?” That shouldn’t have happened. That wasn’t how the magnetic field in the screwdriver worked, it didn’t just leap toward any old piece of metal. She gritted her teeth. Something was wrong here, seriously wrong, but Roz couldn’t just leave, no matter how much she wanted to. Prybar it was, then. She jerked the thing out of her kit, gripping it tightly with both hands, and crawled to the edge of the platform. She looked down at the antigravity generator and–

  “Whoa!” This time Roz knew she was responsible for losing the prybar, but she couldn’t help it – the chariot’s antigravity generator just below her was glowing with light, looking like it was a few seconds away from blasting her head off. “What the hell?” It was impossible. There was no way the chariot still had any sort of active power source after so long, this had to be a trick of some kind. Another goblin trap, maybe, or… or…

  Or maybe, it was something else entirely. Roz remembered her parents talking to a creature made of pure light once, that lived in an ancient temple. A spirit, they had called it. Could this be…

  I might as well try. Roz coughed to clear her throat, then gingerly pulled off her ventilator. “Um… excuse me?” she said softly. “Is there anyone living here?”

  There was no reply, and she began to feel stupid. Maybe I’m just seeing things. She leaned over to reach for her prybar–

  And found it floating in the air right in front of her, inside a cloud of pale light. Roz gulped, then took hold of the prybar very slowly. It released easily into her grasp. “Uh… hello.”

  “Hello, little one.”

  Roz grinned despite herself. She knew it! It was a spirit, an actual spirit! She’d only seen one from a distance before. “Hi! Wow, are you – are you really a spirit?”

  “I am,” it replied simply.

  “That’s…” She shook her head helplessly. “That is so amazing. I’m so honored to meet you.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Why? Because… because I’ve never met someone like you before,” Roz said, after a moment’s consideration. “I thought spirits were usually associated with religious places. Temples and churches and things.”

  “Many of us are. Many are not. We are not a monolith.”

  “No, of course not.” That would be dumb – like saying all goblins were engineers. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “I am not offended.”

  “Great! Great. So, um…” Roz bit her lower lip, then regretted it as she tasted her own sour sweat. “What are you doing here?”

  “I like to explore this place. There are many potential containment suits within it, but I have not yet found one that entirely suits my needs. When I am not searching, I come back here to rest.”

  “Oh. So, the chariot is like… your home, then?”

  “It is as close as I can come without a containment suit.” The light seemed to
waver for a moment. “Some spirits go without, but I prefer to be enclosed.”

  “I see.” So basically, Roz was going to be prying a piece off a spirit’s home. Lovely. “I don’t mean to cause you trouble, but I really need a hub off one of the antigravity generators down there.”

  “You wish to… to diminish my place of rest? In doing so, you diminish me.”

  That was definitely offense in the spirit’s voice. “No! No, I’m not trying to diminish you, I promise. I just really, desperately need that part, and I didn’t know you lived here when I made the deal for it, and I’ve tried so hard and it’s been a pretty terrible trip so far, and…” Roz fought back the quaver in her voice. “I need it, or I’m going to lose my best friend.”

  The spirit was silent for a moment. “Who is your best friend?”

  Roz resisted the urge to wipe her eyes – her gloves were foul. “Her name is TRIS, she’s a robot that belonged to my parents. They’re gone now, but when I was little, TRIS took care of me when they weren’t around – she was my nanny, my friend, my teacher… even when I slept at night. TRIS is damaged, really damaged, and she’ll be scrapped for parts if I don’t give the people who own her now this hub in the next…” She checked the time. “Seven hours.”

  “There are some robots here and there in the dump,” the spirit related quietly. “They’re mostly in pieces. Some were treated very poorly.”

  “Well, that’s not gonna be TRIS if I have any say in it,” Roz said. “Which, uh… do I have any say in it? Will you please let me have a hub?” She held her breath as the spirit seemed to consider her request.

  “Sometimes I think I would like to leave this place, but moving about in the open is… disturbing to me.”

  “Oh.” Roz wasn’t sure what the spirit was trying to say, but she waited it out.

  “I need containment to feel safe, but I would enjoy seeing more of the world. Do you think TRIS would allow me to join her?”