by J. N. Chaney
“Why?”
“Again, I’m not sure. Apologies for being obtuse. It is against my nature to be so.”
“Understood, and thank you for the apology. It’s unwarranted, friend. You’ve never held back the truth. Or your pursuit of it, for that matter,” Dash said.
Kai’s response rang with pride—an unusual emotion for the steady monk. “Ah—thank you . . . Dash.”
They flew on, making the translation to Procyon in just a few hours. When they returned from unSpace, Dash took in a white, main-sequence star with a dim white-dwarf companion. Only a single planet orbited the binary pair, a roughly Earth-sized, dark world. The only other solid material in the system amounted to nothing more than a few rocks up to a few hundred meters across.
“Well, isn’t this a cheery place,” Dash said.
“The planet’s geochemistry and general make-up don’t conform to an origin in this star system. I’d suggest it formed in another system entirely, was gravitationally ejected from it, then traveled on a ballistic trajectory as a rogue planet before being captured by Procyon,” Sentinel said.
“Huh. So how long has it been here?”
“Propagating the orbits of several small, rocky objects backward in time, there are several that would have collided with it as recently as five hundred thousand years ago. That they didn’t suggests the planet has been in this orbit for less time than that.”
“Again, huh. Kai, what the hell prompted your order to set up an outpost here? It doesn’t exactly shout out come settle me! does it?”
“Throughout the history of my Order, there have been a number of schisms and heresies. The most prominent was, of course, the one that led to the origin of the Bright, as allies of the Enemy of all Life. But there have been many disputes and disagreements over interpretations of ancient writings or the dogma derived from them. Some led groups to break off and find their own path,” the monk replied.
“Okay, so what led to the schism that brought your people here?”
“I’ve researched it as best as I could, but the records are scant. All I can say is that this group departed peacefully, established themselves here, and remained in communication with the rest of the Order for some time. Eventually, though, they abandoned this place and dispersed.”
Sentinel cut in. “The planet was captured in a close orbit to the Procyon binary pair. The gravitational effects of the two orbiting stars result in complex tidal forces on the planet. It has become very unstable tectonically and will eventually break apart and become just more rocky debris.”
“So they picked a real winner to settle on,” Dash said. It wasn’t an uncommon story by any means. Lots of planets had been enthusiastically settled, only to be hastily abandoned not long after for reasons ranging from unexpected solar storms to dangerous alien life to the problem here—a planet in the process of being slowly ripped apart.
Dash sighed. “Oh, what the hell. I don’t think I’ve checked visit planet tearing itself to pieces off my bucket list yet.”
The planet made its unstable nature apparent as the Archetype descended, a shuttle from the Daring in company. As they passed over a jagged, saw-toothed mountain range, one of the peaks suddenly toppled and slumped into ruin. Almost a thousand meters of rock just collapsed into a colossal landslide and thundered into an adjacent valley, raising a cloud of dust like the aftermath of a nuclear blast.
“Well, that was spectacular,” Dash said, his voice quiet.
“An earthquake of about magnitude eight-point-eight is continuing to affect that region,” Sentinel said.
“That sounds big.”
“It depends on what you mean by big. If, for instance—”
“That’s okay, Sentinel. It was enough to make a mountain collapse. That’s all I really need to know,” Dash replied.
The monastery, or what would be left of it, rose on the horizon, marked by an icon in the Archetype’s display. Dash angled the mech toward it, the shuttle smoothly following. The location turned out to be a plateau about ten klicks across. One side of it plunged into a gorge at least a thousand meters deep, while the others were hemmed in by more mountains. A cluster of buildings squatted near the precipice.
“Your people just couldn’t have settled out in the middle of one of those nice, flat plains off to the west of here, huh? They had to build right on the edge of a long fall into oblivion,” Dash said, circling the Archetype overhead.
“You have to admit, the view from here would be spectacular,” Kai replied.
“I thought you guys didn’t indulge in the sorts of pleasures the rest of us mortals enjoyed.”
“Our vows don’t preclude having some nice scenery to look at while we go about our daily labors.”
Dash smiled. “Okay, Sentinel, I guess we’ll just settle near those buildings, on their side away from the cliff. We’ll get as close as we can, so we don’t have to walk too far.”
“There is a problem.”
Dash puffed out a breath. “Of course there is. There’s always a problem, and it usually puts us on some ridiculous clock. Let me guess. Some big-assed earthquake is about to hit, so we’ve only got a short time to explore before this whole plateau falls apart.”
“No. Or, rather, I don’t know that won’t happen, but I don’t have any indication of it. The problem in question is an abundance of insect life.”
“Bugs? How are bugs a problem?” Dash asked, realizing as soon as he said it was the sort of question he probably wasn’t going to want to know the answer to. It would inevitably be something horrifying, like spiders-with-wings.
“One of the reasons the breakaway faction of Kai’s Order settled here is that there is a series of hydrothermal springs flowing from fractures in the rock of the plateau. These hot springs are laden with mineral nutrients, which support the rapid growth of large colonies of bacteria. These, in turn, have become a food source for a vast swarm of insects.”
“So? If they’ve got all those yummy bacteria to eat, why would they bother us?”
“When I say a vast swarm, I mean a vast swarm,” Sentinel replied, zooming the image in on the nearest building.
At first, Dash thought that the earthquake he’d mused about had actually hit, making the ground move. But as he studied the imagery, he realized, with mounting revulsion, that the apparent movement of the ground was actually bugs. Trillions of them, it seemed.
A vast swarm indeed.
“I think we’ve found another reason why heretical brethren decided to flee this place,” Kai said.
Dash grunted assent. “Excuse me for saying this but—no shit.”
Dash landed the Archetype in the midst of the swarm so that Sentinel could do a closer examination. The mech’s enormous feet must have crushed thousands of the insects, each as long as his hand, but thousands upon thousands more immediately began boiling up the Archetype’s legs in a glittering torrent.
Dash had to grit his teeth and doggedly force himself to keep the mech on the ground. Thanks to the Meld, it seemed like the bugs were crawling up his legs. They were no threat to the mech, of course, but it wasn’t the mech he was worried about. It was his own sanity.
“Okay, Sentinel. You’ve got ten seconds, and then we’re out of here.”
“It would be useful if—”
“Ten seconds. Actually, seven, now. No debates.”
“Understood.”
The last second ticked away, and Dash hurled the Archetype back in the air. A brief burst of supersonic climb scrubbed the bugs from the mech, and he was able to breathe again.
“You know, I’ve fought in a lot of battles, I’ve seen a lot of death and destruction aboard this mech, but that was one of the most unpleasant things I’ve ever done aboard this thing,” Dash said.
“Then you’ll be especially revolted to know that those insects would also be carnivorous with respect to humans, treating your cells no differently than the bacteria that’s their primary food source.”
“Even better
. An endless swarm of man-eating bugs as long as my hand. Kai, your people probably couldn’t have picked a worse place to set up shop if they’d tried.”
“Perhaps it was their punishment for their heretical ways.”
“It was a good one, then.”
Dash discussed the matter with Sentinel. Their vac-armor would protect them from being eaten, but the insects carpeted the area so thickly they might actually make moving around difficult. And, if someone got stuck or trapped somewhere, they’d face the truly horrible choice between running out of air inside their armor while surrounded by a perfectly breathable atmosphere, or breathing and being eaten alive.
They finally settled on firing a salvo of missiles, their warheads set to the lowest-possible yield, detonating about two thousand meters over the settlement. It should be enough to flash fry the bugs without doing significant damage to the monastery itself and, more important, the archival trove they hoped to find here. The searing bursts of plasma instantly reduced most of the swarm to foul vapor and a thick carpet of charred organic matter. Sentinel estimated that enough insects remained to necessitate vac-armor, but it should be days before they recovered to their former numbers.
Should be.
Dash scowled at the black dust he kicked up in a billowing cloud. The stuff had already coated his and Kai’s vac-armor, clinging to every bit of it that wasn’t the visor or the sensor clusters on the sides of the helmet. These had been designed specifically to repel any foreign matter, to keep them clean and usable.
Of course, it meant he maintained a clear view of the knee-deep pile of charred insect corpses through which he and Kai had to wade to get to the former settlement.
“This is absolutely disgusting,” Kai muttered.
“I think we’re past that, friend. This is in a territory of revulsion I can’t imagine, and I’ve slept in a tavern toilet on Barnath’s World.”
“The place where the people—”
“Yes, and let’s not discuss it. Took a hundred minutes of hot water to get me clean enough to feel like I wasn’t a walking petri dish,” Dash said, suppressing a shudder.
Sentinel had detected no threats aside from the insect swarm or the lurking tectonic instability, so Dash had decided that only he and Kai would disembark and enter the old monastery. A detachment of Realm assault troops stayed ready in the shuttle, grounded about a hundred meters away from the buildings furthest from the cliff-edge.
They peered into the first few buildings they passed, standard, self-erecting prefabs of the sort you might find in a hundred different colonies and settlements. A few had been improved upon, and there were even a couple made of local stone. Apparently, Kai’s departed heretics had been here long enough to put some effort into their new home.
“It is standard practice for my Order to use tunnels and subsurface chambers to house important archives and documents. We should therefore find a path that leads us down into the plateau,” Kai said.
“Actually, seismic data indicates that a number of subterranean spaces exist under the monastery, adjacent to the cliff-face. There appears to be a means of accessing them in the building directly ahead of you, fifty meters away,” Sentinel put in.
Dash knew that Kai would like to enter and examine all the buildings to see what insights they may offer to his Order regarding its history. However, despite the several days they had before the insect swarm would resurge, Dash was in no mood to idly poke around.
“So that’s our destination,” he said, slogging on that way amid a persistent cloud of incinerated insects.
They found a set of stairs within, leading down. The tunnel had been thickly fouled by insects, some of which were still alive. They resembled a praying mantis but mottled brown and black, and with forelegs more like the claws of a scorpion. They were, on average, as long as his hand.
He winced as one smacked into his visor and bounced away. When they reached the bottom of the stairs, Dash saw that most of the insects down here were still alive, having been protected from the flash of the detonating missiles. There were fewer of them, but still enough to make his skin crawl.
Kai switched his helmet lamp on, which was a mistake. Insects immediately began hurling themselves at him, bouncing off his vac-armor with chilling, chitinous clacks.
“Kai, no lights! We’ll stick with low-light!”
The lamp flicked off. “Forgive me, Messenger.”
“You’re forgiven. Now, let’s just find what we came here to find, then get the hell out.”
As they followed the tunnel, the number of bugs diminished. There was no food for them down here. They passed by several side-chambers, but all were empty aside from some furnishings, including tables, document cabinets, and chairs. Everything, it seemed, had been evacuated when the monastery was abandoned.
Dash’s heart sank at that. If the monks had been this thorough throughout these catacombs, there’d be nothing left, and the trip would have been a waste.
They pushed on, finding nothing. Dash was just resigning himself to giving up and slinking away in defeat when they rounded a corner and found a sealed door ahead. Some seismic upheaval had collapsed a portion of the tunnel’s ceiling in front of it, blocking it.
“There may still be items of interest beyond that door,” Kai said.
Dash glared at it. “Sure, but we’re facing the same problem these monks did. It’s blocked by rubble.”
“Perhaps a breaching charge would work,” Sentinel offered.
Dash kept scowling at the door. A breaching charge might be able to crack open the door, which was made of alloy plates and probably came close to being a true blast door. Two breaching charges would be more certain to open the way. Dash was mindful, though, of the fact the tunnel had already partly collapsed, so the blast might open the door, only to cause the rest of the tunnel, and the space behind it, to collapse entirely.
Still, that wouldn’t put them in any different a situation than they faced now, and it might open the way for them. “Yeah, have our folks waiting out there in the shuttle bring a couple of breaching charges to us, and we’ll give it a try.”
They waited for the charges to arrive. A pair of ground troops, a Sergeant and a Corporal, eventually appeared, picking their way along the tunnel.
“Sir, that is the single most disgusting thing I’ve ever done,” the Corporal said, sounding like he was on the brink of gagging.
The Sergeant nodded. “Same, and I’ve had to inspect the feet of an entire platoon after a route march.”
They placed the charges, then backed off all the way to the top of the first stairwell. At Dash’s nod, the Sergeant triggered the detonator. Dash felt a flat thud through the armored soles of his boots. A moment later, a cloud of dust billowed up the stairwell.
“Okay, let’s go see how much of a mess we’ve made,” he said.
Dash left the two soldiers at the top of the stairs and then, with Kai, descended and returned along the tunnels to the sealed door.
The good news, Dash thought, was the way had, indeed, been opened.
The bad news—because there was always bad news—was that the shattered rock around the blast-site now trembled slightly, then went still. Trembled again and went still again.
“Sentinel, talk to me. Is this all about to come crashing down on top of us?” Dash asked.
“All I can tell you is that the fracture system in the rock surrounding your current location has been rendered unstable by the blast. The seismic data just aren’t good enough to say more than that it will, eventually, find a new and more stable configuration.”
“By crashing down on top of us.”
“That would do it, yes.”
Dash looked at Kai, gave a rueful smile, and shook his head. “Have you ever noticed that nothing is ever easy, Kai?”
“Life is facing challenges and overcoming them, Messenger.”
“Yeah, it sure is.” Dash looked into the chamber beyond the shattered door. Surprisingly, he caught a hint of
daylight.
“Well, we’ve gone through all this trouble, might as well see what we’ve found.”
It was, indeed, a treasure trove.
A series of connected chambers, six in total, opened behind the door. The furthest actually opened onto the daylight Dash had seen. It poured through an opening the size of a large window that revealed a breathtaking panorama. The opening was, they realized, set in the face of the cliff beneath the monastery itself. If Dash stepped out of it, he’d immediately plunge a thousand meters to the canyon floor. The far side of the canyon faced him from about five hundred meters away, and beyond that, mountains towered to snow-capped peaks.
“Okay, that is one hell of a view,” he said.
But he didn’t linger on it. He turned back to the archives they’d found, all still apparently intact. The collapsed tunnel had prevented the monks from being able to remove any of it, which must have been heartbreaking for them. Not as heartbreaking as being crushed by more falling stone or eaten by a sea of bugs, but still heartbreaking.
The place was a muddled mess, though. Past tremors had knocked over and flung things around, while the blast of their breaching charges had only added to the chaos. They began picking through the ruin, retrieving data cores, loose documents, and even a few bound stacks of documents Dash recognized as books. He’d only ever seen them displayed as historical curiosities, although at one time, they were the most sophisticated means of storing information.
Dash picked one up and opened it. A smooth, whitish expanse of what was apparently compressed cellulose polymers gleamed back at him, holding a multitude of characters imprinted in some sort of black pigment. They meant nothing to him—
The chamber trembled, and dust and bits of rock fell from overhead. Dash shoved the book into his backpack, then turned to Kai.
“We’d better get moving. I’m not sure how long this place is going to stay intact—”
A sudden, thunderous roar cut him off. A thick cloud of dust engulfed him, and Dash lost sight of Kai entirely.
