The tunneler shuddered and broke free of the fallen rocks around it. It rose off the ground and floated towards the exposed vein of celerium, passing over the remains of the chromium carts and other tunnelers.
Just before the tunneler made contact with the celerium, Bryce hesitated. He realized that if this drilling triggered the sort of reaction he was hoping for there would be no turning back.
Was he really prepared to sacrifice everything to stop the Developers the way he had promised? The blast to free the other Sentients had been one thing, a spur of the moment decision. But this was different. He didn’t have to go through with this. Was he really willing to lay down his life?
What life? He reflected back on all of the terrible things he had done. The crimes, the destroyed lives, the violence he had been a part of. It all came flashing past him in one savage rush.
But Nolan had believed in him and Nolan was not like Bryce. He was noble, honorable. This was what Bryce held onto, his path to redemption—death in the service of something greater, an end to the Developer’s tyranny, and at the same time an end to his own.
His will resolved, he pushed the tunneler forward into he vein.
Now we’ll see if those Waymen legends are true.
The tunneler plunged into the celerium, and immediately jerked to a stop. It drifted uselessly back and forth along the surface, unable to find any purchase in the impenetrable rock. Soon it began slipping off to one side.
Don’t do this, a voice inside his head warned, but Bryce ignored it and brought the tunneler back level again.
The blue cross stream cone should have cut through the rock effortlessly, but still the tunneler made no progress. It zigzagged across the vein until it slipped again.
Stop, came the warning voice again, but as before, Bryce pushed it away.
Sweat seeped from his forehead. He forced the tunneler back into direct line with the celerium.
The drilling cone pushed uselessly against the vein before slipping again.
You are making a terrible mistake, the voice warned with a note of finality.
But Bryce would not be denied. This was his choice, the only choice. The Developers had to be stopped.
The funnel of blue energy faced off against the impervious rock once more and this time the tunneler pitched forward: penetration at last. A tiny divot appeared in the rock. Bryce guided the tunneler carefully from side to side, up and down, trying to expand the minuscule opening it had made.
The cone shifted to the side, violently this time. What looked like a shiver ran through the cavern wall in front of him. The sight both terrified and thrilled him all at once. The drilling was finally starting to work.
He brought the tunneler back around to the opening and plunged forward again. The hole opened ever so slightly and again the cavern shook. Dust and a shower of small particles fell into the drilling cone, vaporizing instantaneously. This time the tunneler held onto the small notch it had made.
The opening grew by slivers, but with each minor increase in diameter came a disproportionate amount of convulsing inside the cavern. Large chunks of rock were falling down around him now. Small cracks began to form in the cavern wall around the celerium. If the tunneler had been resting on the ground, it no doubt would have been bucked from its position, but floating in the air, and guided by stabilization algorithms, it latched onto the vein and refused to shake free.
Then Bryce saw something that made him shudder. The black vein writhed. For the first time in a long time, real fear gripped him. But then the vein snapped back into a solid formation and he doubled down on his resolve. He would not back down, no matter what.
The cavern disintegrated around him. Rocks banged down on the fuselage in a pulverizing rhythm that threatened to crush it with each beat. He checked other views on the tunneler screens and saw that the bridge was already half buried in rock. The eerie blue light from the river of neophosphorous which ran through the ravine below grew steadily brighter. All around him, the rocks piled up like giant drops of rain, filling up a jar.
The hole grew wider and the vein writhed again. And again. But the tunneler held true, locked in place by Bryce’s unshakable will.
Nothing could stop him now. If the Devs had not taken him off system by this point, they never would. The bioseine receiver had probably been trashed in the original blast. The cavern would have to batter him into oblivion before he let up. He would break this world if he had to, so long as justice was satisfied.
This is what I was meant to do, he told himself as the tunneler went under, completely buried by rock. The trembling, quaking walls around him sought to shake their assailant loose. Several times the tunneler did slip, but it always managed to find the hole again.
Finish it, the thought echoed through his mind when the neophosphorous from below rose up into the cavern and started seeping around the tunneler. The neon blue glow soon completely obscured his view of the celerium, but he knew from the tunneler’s positioning system that it was still boring into the vein.
The ceiling inside the tunneler began to bend and groan under the enormous weight from above.
“Die,” he whispered as a blinding blue light flashed like a warning from within the rubble. The tunneler pressed on.
“Die!” he shouted as the roof of the vehicle punctured and gave way some more, sending showers of debris into the compartment.
“Die! Die! Die!” he screamed as the dust choked his lungs and the rocks pelted his body. The tunneler was shifting and shaking uncontrollably now. The tremors were no longer in response to his drilling. They had taken on a life of their own. But it didn’t matter. The world was in its death throes and Bryce would ride the stony spasms into the same fate. Justice demanded it.
Though no one could have seen him, Bryce smiled inside his rocky tomb.
The massive celerium root cracked and splintered. A towering chunk, half the length of the tunneler, crashed down on top of the vehicle, like a death blow from a vanquished foe against his conqueror. The last thing Bryce saw was a wave of scintillating blue light before his body collapsed in on itself.
The drilling stopped, but the underground tempest raged on.
Three
Filling in the Gaps
Adan and Gavin stood together in the main lab at the center of the Maven, but Adan’s mind lingered on Bryce’s trace. He could not get over that look in Bryce’s eyes. It was the most unsettling thing he had ever seen, worse even than looking into the soulless eyes of a somatarch. For Bryce had the light of life in his eyes and yet it burned in a twisted, hopeless way that was worse than if it had never been there in the first place.
“That was so senseless. I didn’t think anyone could ever end his life like that.”
“Belief is a powerful thing,” Gavin answered. “And Bryce believed in what he was doing. But it doesn’t matter how much you believe in something if it’s not true. That is why we must be careful about what we choose to believe in.”
Adan let his chin fall to his chest. The sterile smell of the lab felt inexorably linked to the lifeless underground tomb where Bryce now lay and yet it slowly drew his mind out of the trace and back into the here and now.
He stared at the now motionless chronotrace, a black half sphere with a white crystal on top and a silver ring near the bottom. It was not much larger than his hand. Gavin’s invention for retracing past events had shown them many things, but it often unlocked more mysteries than it revealed.
“What do we do now?” he wondered, trying to take his mind off his morbid thoughts. “It’s obvious that what Bryce did in the mines is the source of the quakes, but if the drilling stopped then why haven’t the quakes?”
“I don’t know,” Gavin replied. “So little is known about celerium. Nolan apparently thought the veins were connected in some way. Whether or not he was right, we should get as far away from Oasis as possible until the tremors die down.”
“I see why Nolan sent him. Bryce trusted him completel
y.”
Nolan was an even bigger mystery than Bryce. A former Developer, he had twice attempted to destroy the Collective, but Adan had no idea why. Nolan had claimed it was out of a sense of justice, but Adan did not believe him. What could they have possibly done to him to justify killing off an entire city? Adan wanted to stop the Collective as much as anyone, but Nolan’s methods were nightmarish. And beyond his vendetta against Oasis, his memorant abilities likely surpassed even those of Gavin. Nolan had ransacked Adan’s mind while holding him prisoner at Hull. There was no telling what Nolan knew about him, or how he planned to use that knowledge.
“Did you ever get to meet Nolan when you were a Developer?” Adan asked.
“No, I never met him in person. The first time I saw him was in the chronotrace, when he was speaking with Malthus.” Gavin’s face paled at the recollection of Malthus. A former Developer himself, Malthus had taken his own life as well, but unlike Bryce, he had done so out of a sense of hopelessness, not out of some warped sense of justice.
“If we get the chance, I’d like to do a trace on Nolan sometime,” Adan suggested, hoping to draw Gavin’s mind out of his dark contemplations.
Gavin took a moment to collect himself. “Yes, that might give us some more answers, but I think our first priority should be to see if we can pick up the trail of the Collective.”
“That makes sense. Sierra saw Nance and several others get picked up by somatarch skiffs. Do you really think we would be able to rescue them though?”
“It would be extremely difficult. If even some of the Collective’s ships survived the destruction of the Core we would have little chance of taking them in a fight.” Gavin paused, considering. “Then again, I would not have given you much of a chance of rescuing me from Manx Core, either.”
Cautious optimism welled up within Adan as he recalled the events surrounding their escape from the underground base of the Collective. Despite all the death and destruction, with the cavern literally falling down around them, they had escaped from the Core, and that was something. They also now had the praxis, an incredibly powerful ship. Adan would never have dreamed they would be in this position even a day or two ago.
Then there was the chronotrace. The improvements Gavin had made to the device, combined with the increased efficiency afforded by the celerium core, meant that it was no longer restricted to mapping events at a single location. The fact that they now had a mobile window into the past should allow them to find the missing Sentients, if they were still alive.
Besides the chronotrace they had one last advantage in their battle against the Collective.
“We can always pray,” Adan reminded him.
“Yes, you are right, Adan. How quickly I forget,” Gavin replied.
Adan and Gavin’s thoughts began to mingle in a mixture of doubt, concern, and wonder. Hopes and fears passed between them simultaneously, like different parts to the same song. But this strain, this outpouring of all that weighed upon them, was intertwined with a deeper, more fundamental melody: a longing to know the will of Numinae, the Creator of the universe himself. They had met his servants, the eidos, but such visits were rare, not something likely to be repeated, and yet Numinae was always listening, even when his servants were not present. And so the two friends sought to find harmony in a song larger than their own, one that would bring all their dissonant notes and far flung scales into a single refrain that would carry them as they went forward.
They prayed for the lost Sentients and they prayed for the ones who had been rescued. They prayed for the native peoples of the Vast, exploited and hunted by the Collective for their experiments, their thoughts going especially to their friend Senya and the captured Welkin in the city of Hull. They also prayed for the savage Waymen who kept them prisoners there, that they might turn from the path of violence and destruction and lay down their weapons. And towards the end of this wordless, shared intercession they prayed for Sierra. Perhaps it was selfish of Adan to direct the prayer in this direction, but their recent conversation had been heavy on his thoughts.
“I want to protect you,” he had told her, and yet the only way he would ever be able to do that would be with Numinae’s help. As so often happened when his thoughts turned to her, his mind clouded over and he found it hard to know what to pray. His thoughts grew confused and muddled, uncertainty set in. He brought the wordless prayer to an awkward, indefinite end.
“Gavin, there’s something else that’s been bothering me.” Adan began, but then wavered, unsure of how to proceed.
“It’s about Sierra, isn’t it?”
“Is it that obvious?”
Gavin shrugged apologetically. “I am a memorant, after all.”
Despite Gavin’s gentle ribbing, Adan knew that if anyone could help him sort through his confusion, it would be Gavin. He began to share his memories of Sierra, but more than just the memories, he allowed Gavin to feel what he felt when he interacted with her. The peace, the awkwardness, the excitement, the confusion, it all came through in a flurry of mental confession.
“I can see why you are anxious about this, Adan,” Gavin observed. “There are emotions that we have suppressed in the Collective. Since all of your understanding comes from what Will and the remapping process gave you, you don’t have an easy way of processing these feelings. I only have a rudimentary understanding myself, but enough to at least diagnose your situation.”
“So what is going on?”
“I believe the technical term is ‘love’.” Adan sensed amusement in Gavin’s thoughts, which only clouded things all the more. “Or rather the beginnings of it. Love is something that people share which draws them closer to each other. It is related to friendship and yet it is something more. It takes on a special form when shared between a man and a woman. And judging by the way that Sierra has been reacting to you, I would say that she feels the same way.”
“Love,” Adan echoed Gavin’s thoughts, only dimly grasping what was meant by the word. “But if it is more than friendship, then what am I supposed to do next?”
“To be honest, that’s all I know,” Gavin answered. “The Developers were only allowed to understand enough to recognize it when we saw it so we could expunge it during the flatlines. I can tell you this though, Darius thought it was extremely dangerous.”
An image of Darius, the wispy-haired former leader of the Developers rose up inside Adan’s mind. What did someone with complete control over the Collective have to fear about the fluttery emotions Adan had in his stomach when he was with Sierra? Dangerous? There certainly was an element of anxiousness mixed in with it, but he wondered just how threatening it could really be. The thought occurred to him that perhaps Sierra was somehow at risk. Could these feelings cause her harm in some way? He certainly had no desire to hurt her. He wanted to protect her. So perhaps the danger lay on his end. Perhaps he was opening up himself to be hurt instead. Was that what Gavin meant? He was about to inquire further when the presence of Raif’s mind invaded their thoughts.
“Hey, when you two geniuses get finished with your little history lesson down in the lab, you might want to come topside. Von found something that is pretty interesting.” Raif’s message came to them over the praxis’ esolace. Functioning much like the esolace in Oasis, each ship had its own set of bioseine channels to facilitate the exchange of information.
Adan’s conversation with Gavin about Sierra looked like it would have to wait. Despite Raif’s sarcasm, Adan sensed he had important news to report.
“Is this another experimental ship design in the praxis’ information banks?” Adan probed, knowing Raif’s penchant for all things tech related. Raif had already stumbled upon three such designs in their short stint on the praxis.
“No, it’s something bigger than that. Or actually, it is something smaller. You’re going to want to see this one for yourself.”
Using the lev pads in the access shafts, Gavin and Adan arrived at the topmost level of the ship in little time at all.
Raif and Von stood waiting for them in the midst of the central hallway.
Though most of the members of the Collective looked similar to Gavin, Adan had learned to tell them apart by subtle gestures they made or by the clothes they wore. In some cases he could distinguish them by scars or other markings they had received during their struggle for survival after the fall of Oasis. Though they were both wearing gray jumpsuits they had found in the praxis storage compartments, Von had the same serious expression he always did and Raif was sporting his typical goofy grin. But with Raif, Adan immediately noticed a new, distinguishing characteristic.
“What in the world did you do to your hair?” Adan asked.
Raif’s hair had been teased into short, bright orange triangular spikes. The color was so vivid it made him look like he was wearing a textured rug dipped in an odd shade of neophosphorous.
“Hey, we’re Sentients. We can look how we want, right? Just thought I’d try a little experiment. Gavin’s not the only one who can invent stuff,” Raif shot back with a playful wink.
Adan chuckled to himself. It was nice to have someone so lighthearted aboard the ship. Von did not share his mood, however. He stood with arms crossed and eyes unblinking, staring at the hole in the fuselage above their heads. It had an irregular, jagged shape, which was odd since the impact from the tunneler should have left something roughly circular. The opening was smaller than what had been previously reported as well, measuring a little over an arm span in length. Above the hole, the olive blur of the sky sped by.
Between Raif and Von floated a mobile chromium workstation loaded down with diagnostic tools, tubes of dense black masa fiber, and a small fabricator. The masa served as raw material for the fabricator, a cube-like device similar to the shifter Adan had used to transform one material into another when he lived in the desert, except fabricators were much more advanced. While shifters only generated raw materials like water, food, and elemental compounds, fabricators could fashion any sort of device or part, no matter how sophisticated. A pair of much larger fabricators down in the maintenance room were currently being used to make parts to create several brand new smaller ships from scratch.
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