by J. N. Chaney
Bertilak glanced at him. “You sure? Could they just be playing dead?”
“I don’t think so. I think they are very much genuinely dead.”
He informed Mol and Tanner. “Suggest you land and check it out anyway. Maybe there’s something useful in the wreckage,” Tanner said.
“Aye, sir,” Thorn replied, then nodded at Bertilak. “Mol, you copy that?”
“I did. We’re on our way in. Once Sergeant Twomey reports the site secure, I’ll let you know.”
“Roger that.”
Now it was Bertilak’s turn to circle, watching and waiting while the Gyrfalcon touched down and the Marines debussed. They immediately spread out, half the squad heading for the wreckage, the other half taking up covering positions. Thorn noticed they struggled to barge their way through the swampy goo, but even so, in less than five minutes, Twomey’s gruff voice rattled over the comm.
“Objective secure. Can confirm, there are no live squids down here.”
Thorn relaxed, tucked his talisman away, and glanced at Bertilak. “Shall we?”
“Indeed we shall,” the big alien replied, turning the Jolly Green Giant through a tight bank and descending toward the crash site. A few moments later, he set the Giant down a couple of hundred meters from the crash site. Mol hadn’t been so bold, just dropping the Marines off, then climbing again and taking up station circling overhead.
“I had visions of getting stuck in all that muck and didn’t really feel like having to dig my poor baby out so she could lift again,” she said over the comm.
Thorn fastened the visor of his helmet closed and checked that the pressure integrity showed green. “Wimp,” he shot back.
Mol snorted over the comm. “Wait, what was that? The sound of someone about to step into knee-deep shit?”
Thorn laughed, then he made his way to the airlock and stepped out.
Sure enough, his foot plunged through the boggy surface, sinking halfway up his calf.
“Well then,” Thorn murmured.
Now it was Mol’s turn to laugh. “What’d I tell you? Not just shit, but knee-deep shit.”
Thorn tugged his foot out of the mire with a wet, sucking sound. “Does that ever bring back memories.”
“Good ones?” Bertilak asked, stepping out into the bog with a mischievous smirk.
“Oh, hell, not at all.” Thorn looked around at the bleak, flat swamp-scape, nothing but greys and browns and the occasional patch of scum-green under the leaden sky. “If I hadn’t joined the ON, I’d probably still be mucking out shitholes not too different from this one. Oh, and Mol? You’re wrong. It’s not knee-deep at all. My knee’s still got a good five centimeters before it’d be submerged.”
“Well, don’t I feel the fool, sitting up here in my comfy crash couch and missing all the mucky fun down there.”
Thorn flipped a finger at the circling Gyrfalcon, then began slogging his way toward the wreckage, Bertilak at his side. The big alien barely seemed to struggle as he moved, and that was despite wearing nothing but a pair of sandals on his feet. His sole concession to the potentially hostile environment was a simple rebreather that fitted over his nose.
And even that much didn’t seem necessary, Thorn thought, seeing as the Marines had all removed their vac-helmets and slung them from their tactical harnesses. “I gather, Sergeant Twomey, that the air is, indeed, breathable?”
“That’s what the air tester told us, sir. Although, before you open your visor, a word of warning. This planet really does stink—literally like a sewer, in fact.”
Thorn stopped and fumbled at his helmet clasp. “How badly?”
“Imagine your bunkmates have been out all night, drinking cheap booze and eating protein tacos. Those same people—drunk, gassy, and snoring—join you in a sleeping bag made of plastic for the next ten hours. Now, imagine the air being made of that.”
“Hey, sounds like you, Buck!” one of the Marines said to another, earning a flung clod of mud for it.
“Alright, Marines, let’s keep our eyes on the prize, shall we?” Twomey snapped.
Thorn wrinkled his nose at the sudden wave of stink that flooded it. “Holy shit—”
Twomey smirked. “I did warn you, sir.”
“Yes, you did. Doesn’t mean I can’t still bitch about it.” Thorn slung his own vac helmet, then slogged his way to the edge of the crater plowed into the mire by the crashing squid shuttle. Bertilak stopped beside him. Thorn glanced down at his feet, or where his feet would be if they weren’t buried in blackish mud.
“Is that—I don’t know, uncomfortable? Gross, even?” Thorn asked.
Bertilak looked down, then back at Thorn. “Doesn’t really seem to bother me.”
Thorn nodded. Of course not. Bertilak was the equal to any situation he faced, after all. And that applied to the Jolly Green Giant as well, which rested on top of the slimy mud as though sitting on a solid pad of blastcrete.
“In any case, I hate to say it, but I don’t think there’s much of value left of our Nyctus friends or their ship.”
Thorn gave a glum sigh. The forward part of the shuttle might be submerged in the swamp. But judging from the amount of debris scattered around, he doubted even that. The chunk of hull that remained sticking out of the brown water was probably all that remained intact.
“Hey, Lieutenant Stellers? Come have a look at this,” Twomey shouted.
Thorn started to turn, immediately regretting that he’d stood in one place for more than a few seconds. The mud now was knee-deep. He squirmed his foot back and forth, the way he’d learned in his previous life as a mucker, breaking the suction enough to pull free. At least the vac-armor boot stayed securely on his foot. More than a few times, he’d left his boot buried in the thick, tarry goo and hobbled with one foot bare back to solid ground. It brought back a vivid memory of feeling sludgy goop oozing between his toes, which made him both shudder and wonder how Bertilak put up with it. Some memories, Thorn concluded, have a weight to them. This was one such moment.
Thorn kept trudging until he finally stopped beside Twomey. The Marine Sergeant gestured at something protruding from the bog a few meters away.
“What is that? Some sort of—whatever those things that hold up docks are called?”
Twomey gave a theatrical shrug. “You mean pilings? Could be, sir. Whatever it is, though, it ain’t natural.”
Thorn nodded. It was a cylinder of some clearly synthetic material, vaguely similar to concrete, with several corroded metal rods protruding upward from it.
“Another one over here!” a Marine called, pointing at another spot about ten meters away.
Bertilak pointed. “And one over there, I think.”
Thorn made a huh sound. “What the hell are they?”
Twomey shook his head. “They’re obviously man-made.”
“And definitely not made with native materials,” Bertilak put in.
“Let me try something,” Thorn said, touching the pocket containing his talisman, then extending a slice of his awareness around them. He tried a few different approaches, finally settling on earth-magic as the best way to suss out these mysterious pilings. They stood out, solid and distinct from the watery sludge surrounding them. Thorn took it in for a moment, then he let the effect dissipate and whistled.
“Don’t keep us in suspense, my friend!” Bertilak said.
Thorn put his hands on his hips. “Well, there are a lot of these things, and by a lot, I mean literally dozens. And that’s only within a klick or so of where we’re standing. They’re different heights, and a bunch of them are buried, but they’re sunk right into the bedrock.” He nodded back toward the wreckage. “That’s what did them in. They slammed into a half-dozen or so of them as they touched down, which kind of ripped them apart.”
“What do you want to do, sir?” Twomey asked.
Thorn glanced around again. “Well, I’d hate to leave here with a mystery just hanging like this.” He reached for his comm. “So, I think w
e’ll bring down some expertise. Hecate, Stellers here. Request permission to send Mol back up to retrieve Specialist Hackett. We’ve found something we’d like her to look at.”
Thorn chuckled at the pinched expression on Hackett’s face as she jumped out of the Gyrfalcon. Mol immediately lifted again and resumed circling.
“Don’t worry, you’ll get used to the stink,” Thorn said.
“What a horrifying thought,” Hackett replied, stumbling to a stop and frowning at the exposed pylon a few meters away. “So that’s one of our mystery objects?”
“It is.”
She extracted an instrument from a belt pouch, something that resembled a handgun. Kneeling and aiming it at the pylon, she touched the trigger. A brilliant spot of laser light appeared on the concrete-like surface. She held in place for a moment and studied a small display on the back of the instrument.
“Definitely artificial.” She glanced up at Thorn. “Though I don’t imagine you needed me to tell you that.”
“Uh, no. Worked that part out all by myself,” Thorn replied.
“Well, I can’t tell you a whole lot more. I mean, it’s mostly calcium aluminum silicate, with a bunch of trace elements present.” She thumbed a control on the gun-like spectroscope, then narrowed her eyes. “Some pretty distinctive isotopic ratios, which means it probably originated on this planet.”
“Not from around here,” Bertilak said, gesturing around at the bleak expanse of mud.
“No, not from around here—” She suddenly cut herself off.
“What is it?” Thorn asked.
Hackett held up a hand, thumbed the instrument to another setting, then aimed and fired it into the mud. The results displayed made her go hmmm.
“Are you puzzled, Hackett, or just naturally dramatic?” Twomey asked.
“Some of both,” she replied, standing. “Anyway, it’s not these pylons that are the really interesting part of all this. It’s the mud.”
Thorn lifted an eyebrow. “The mud? Why?”
“Because it’s mostly pelagic sediment.”
“I’d pretend I don’t know what that means, but I wouldn’t be pretending,” Thorn replied.
“Pelagic translates from an old Earth language called Greek. It roughly means open sea or open ocean.”
“Hate to break it to you, but this doesn’t really look much like an ocean,” Twomey said.
Hackett put her spectroscope away. “Not now, no. But it was. I’d say we’re standing on what used to be the abyssal plain of a hydro world. And this”—she swept an arm around—“is what you’re left with when you drain almost all of the water away.”
After a moment of silence, a breath of wind ruffled the thick, reeking air. Thorn finally broke it.
“So where did the water go?”
“No idea. But if I had to venture a guess, I’d say it has something to do with these,” Hackett replied, gesturing at the pylon with the toe of her boot. “Someone’s been terraforming this planet. And whatever tech they used was probably mounted on these.”
“That doesn’t sound like something the squids would do,” Twomey said.
“No, it certainly doesn’t,” Thorn agreed. “It doesn’t sound like the Nyctus at all.”
Thorn decided to do one final scrying before remounting the Jolly Green Giant and ascending back into orbit. Since he didn’t have to worry about any magical opposition, he immersed himself more fully in the arcane effect, sweeping his perception across the surface of the planet, intending to reach out to the mist-shrouded horizon in every direction. Sure enough, he detected more of the mysterious pylons. Hundreds of them, in fact, roughly arranged in rectangular groups of anywhere from ten to a hundred, each group spaced from five to ten kilometers apart.
He’d have to add that bit of knowledge to the data and imagery Hackett had collected, he thought, and was about to end the effect and clamber back into the Giant when something plucked at his eldritch attention. Whatever it was, it was buried about half a meter deep in the mud, about twenty meters away from Bertilak’s ship.
Thorn looked at that spot, then at Bertilak, who was standing behind him and waiting for him to clear the airlock. “Care to spend a little longer here?”
“Doing what?” Bertilak asked.
“Digging.”
Bertilak cocked his head in a quizzical look but slogged along after Thorn as he picked his way to the spot where something was buried. The Gyrfalcon rumbled a few hundred meters away, Mol using enough thrust to just keep her resting lightly on top of the bog. She obviously saw that Thorn and Bertilak weren’t boarding, her voice buzzing over the comm.
“Hey, sir, can’t help noticing you guys are walking away from Bertilak’s ship. Anything you care to share?”
“Yeah, Mol, just wait one moment. I noticed something here I want to check out.”
“Roger that.”
They reached the spot. There was nothing to see, of course. Thorn resigned himself to retrieving an entrenching shovel from the Gyrfalcon, but Bertilak waved the idea aside.
“Where is—whatever this is?” he asked.
Thorn placed the toe of his boot on a specific point on the sodden ground. “Right under here.”
Bertilak nodded, then he knelt and slammed his hand down into the muck. He felt around for a moment, frowning, before his face brightened.
“Ah, what have we”—he pulled—“here?”
Something caked in black mud emerged from the swamp, dripping brown water as it dangled in Bertilak’s hand. It looked like a strap or belt of some sort.
“Is this what you were looking for?” he asked.
Thorn used a brief burst of magic to confirm that this thing was, indeed, what he’d detected. “That’s it, yeah.”
“Then, unless there’s anything else you’d like to do here, I suggest we both retire to my ship and clean ourselves up.”
Thorn looked down at himself, his vac armor caked with slimy muck nearly up to his waist, everything above that thoroughly spattered. Bertilak was just as grimy, the dark splatters only accentuating his greenness.
Thorn gave a rueful smile. “Yeah, let’s do that.” He looked around, then started wallowing his way back toward the Jolly Green Giant, Bertilak following. “Honestly, I’ve seen enough black, gooey sludge to last me a couple of lifetimes, thanks.”
3
Morgan drifted, residual eddies and currents slowly pushing her one way, then the other. She ignored them and concentrated instead on the battle that raged in her mind.
She didn’t really remember how, or when, but somehow she’d come aboard a Nyctus ship. Now she floated in a large tank of water, one big enough to offer her a great deal of freedom of movement. Still, though, it wasn’t the endless expanse of water that was Tāmtu. After experiencing that, the enormous sprawl of Radiance-lit cities, the vast and empty abyssal plains, and the stupendous depths of a mighty ocean trench, this water tank felt like a prison.
Which is, of course, exactly what it was.
The Nyctus didn’t call it that. They called it protective—er, she didn’t properly remember the word they’d used. Something like custard? Anyway, they’d told her it was protective custard, and that she was only here as their honored guest, but she knew better. She could see further and deeper into their thoughts than even they knew, so she saw glimpses of the real reason they’d taken her away from Tāmtu and her friends.
They wanted to show her the way. To bring her to truth. Some of the shamans who constantly pressed against her thoughts called it reeducation, a word that somehow had a sinister ring to it, even if Morgan didn’t quite know what it was. But it didn’t matter. The Nyctus who thought about reeducation weren’t nice about it. Their feelings and impressions, clinging to the word like spider webs, were dark and unpleasant. Reeducation was something you did to somebody, whether they wanted you to or not.
So Morgan dug in her mental heels and resisted being reeducated.
The strange part was that she wasn’t even rea
lly sure why she was resisting. On the surface of it, the Nyctus were still her friends. Even if they now glared with angry light and not the soft, womb-sac glow of the Radiance, they were still her friends. And yet, they weren’t. Something had changed on Tāmtu. In fact, everything had changed.
“Now then, child. What is your purpose?”
She looked at the doll a moment longer, then lifted flat, empty eyes to the Nyctus and spoke without hesitation.
“To kill Thorn Stellers.”
Those were the last words she remembered speaking on Tāmtu. In fact, that was her last, complete memory of Tāmtu. After that, it all became a blur, as a wave of dark compulsion engulfed her. The concerted efforts of a dozen shamans started pressing at her thoughts, trying to reshape them, like they were molding clay. But she resisted, quashing their efforts. She didn’t want her thoughts reshaped. Not more than they already were, anyway. So a dozen more shamans joined in, all of them pushing and shoving at her, constantly jostling her thoughts and emotions, trying to break through her outer shell of denial and dig into the essential core of who and what Morgan was.
They hadn’t succeeded yet.
They’d come close, though, and more than once. Those times, when they’d found a chink or weakness, a stray thought she’d let slip, she collapsed in on herself. She became a hard, compact knot of stubborn defiance, as tough and unbreakable as a pebble. The Nyctus had beat on her defenses relentlessly, but they hadn’t succeeded in breaking her. They’d only been able to influence her most shallow thoughts, the everyday stuff of being Morgan.
She looked at Mister Starman, who the Nyctus had found and returned to her, right after the Radiance changed from comforting blue-green to furious orange-red. They’d wanted her to remember what Mister Starman represented: her father, Thorn Stellers.
Now that was one thing about which she and Nyctus agreed. They hated Thorn Stellers and wanted him dead.
So did she.
“The human girl continues to resist,” the Herald said, gliding to a stop before the dais where the High Shaman of the Nyctus held court. He assumed a hunched posture, his tentacles drawn in about his body, his bioluminescence flickering with the inconstant pale yellow of subservience. Shrunken like that, he awaited a reply.
