by Rachel Caine
No result.
We both stepped aside as Starcurrent’s skinsuit—which I’d never figured out how ze put it on in the first place, with all those tendrils—suddenly was absorbed into zis body. Ze flattened several tentacles and filaments against the glass, and then ze resonated it. That was about the only word I had for what ze was doing. I felt the subharmonic rumble ze emitted, and it seemed to me that zis appendages quivered at the same frequency. An answering tone came from deep within the temple, eerie as hell. What followed didn’t sound like language—just bass rumbles and high-pitched hisses—but Starcurrent was flushed with triumph and zis head ruff was standing up when ze turned to us.
“It says, ‘Welcome, singer in the deep, you are known.’”
I stared. “You mean, it knows you? Personally?”
“No. Only my people. I believe it is being polite.” Since Starcurrent had said zis people had stories about the ruins, it tracked that ze could interface with this tech and we couldn’t. Maybe these ancient aliens had kept tabs on the Abyin Dommas for some reason.
“Okay,” Chao-Xing said. “Carry on.”
I wasn’t sure I was totally down with that, but I nodded.
Starcurrent sang to the door a little more. A lot of it I couldn’t hear at all, just a distant sense of vibration; ze was singing in ranges that human ears couldn’t hear, I supposed. The occasional bass rumbles startled me. When the song moved into frequencies I could hear, it sounded heartbreakingly beautiful, and lonely, and incredibly alien.
Starcurrent went quiet, and the door slid up, showering silvery dust.
“Great work,” I said to Starcurrent, who gave me four tentacles up as zis skinsuit formed again. Having a built-in seemed like a hell of a time-saver.
A hiss of stale air wafted over us, and C-X was all over it, scanning like a pro.
“Same mix as before?” Even if it was, my helmet was staying on. In vids, there was always some dumbass who was like, “The air is breathable!” and stripped off his gear without running necessary tests. Hell, even if the lung cocktail was breathable, it didn’t mean there weren’t spores that could grow into chest-bursting monsters inside your torso.
Vid monsters aside, we could be allergic to a thousand things here, and I wasn’t about to succumb to anaphylactic shock.
“No new toxins or pollutants. Zara, take the lead.”
I flashed Chao-Xing a cocky grin and a high sign. “Well, I’ve kept us alive this long. Go, Team Z.”
“Mind on the mission.” She was terse, as well she might be. We’d gotten this far. Lots of others might have too, and still ended up as dust under our feet. I needed to stay focused.
The gray corridor ahead was featureless, dull crystal lined with shards like the ones that made music on Firstworld. They didn’t react to our passing, and I damn sure wasn’t going to ask the Abyin Dommas to sing again; no telling what that would do inside here. Prelim scans showed a maze of sharp turns that led to an open space deeper in.
I kept my eyes on my H2 and let it do the analysis, and it immediately lit up with an alert when it detected a difference in the crystalline structure running beneath us. Crouching, I checked the floor and said, “These might be pressure plates.”
I didn’t dare step on one, but I lightly touched a fingertip down. Nothing. Still, better not to risk it, so we skirted them as we pushed deeper. Maybe because the place had recognized Starcurrent, we were logged as permissible visitors? I wished I had asked Bacia if any of the other teams had included an Abyin Dommas; that info could have helped me make some educated guesses.
I should have asked for full records on all the other teams, but I figured they would have said no regardless. Fine. I was used to doing without, and that included info too.
We got through the maze without casualties, and I let out a heavy sigh of relief that probably wasn’t warranted. My whole damn spine was tight. This feeling hung heavy, dark and dreary. Pervasive dread. Probably came from breathing in filtered dead-people dust.
Not helping, brain.
Turning in a slow circle, I took in the heart of this ancient, alien temple, an open space filled with more of the shining crystal. It also ringed us on all sides. The shards marched up the walls, vanishing into a vast, shadowed expanse. Given how rough I’d come up, this was beautiful, but I couldn’t shake the thought that the shards also looked like weapons poised for launch. Dropped with enough velocity from the upper reaches? Instant impalement.
I thought of Bea, and the way she’d so gloriously sung to make the crystals light up . . . but maybe that wasn’t a good thing here. Human voices might trigger something worse than “Welcome, you are known.”
But hey, we had an honored guest. “Starcurrent, stay ready to sing if shit goes sideways.”
“Always ready,” ze said. “Is interesting.”
Starcurrent had an ice-cold view of interesting, because I was freaked the hell out. My skin was crawling under my suit, and I wanted to wash all this silver shit off me. Who knew what the long-term effects of the stuff were? I checked the coordinates Bacia had given us. According to that data, we were right on top of whatever they wanted so bad. It was cold enough that I could see my breath.
I looked down. Under us, beneath the crystal, curled a shape. I couldn’t tell what it was at first . . . it was too small to be a ship, and too big to be an artifact.
It took me a long few seconds to let the shape seep into my brain, and just as it did, Chao-Xing said, in a voice as tight as a bowstring, “Bacia wants us to rob a grave.”
“Fuck,” said Starcurrent.
Or, at least, that was how the translation matrix interpreted the strangled sound ze made.
Both Chao-Xing and I were frozen, staring at the cloudy mass beneath our feet. Now that I was looking down, I could see sigils etched in the floor, but I couldn’t read them.
“Nadim? Anything in your database like this?” Worth a shot.
“It’s like the glyphs from Firstworld,” he said after a brief delay. “But there are some minute differences that may affect nuance.”
“Give us the big picture,” Chao-Xing said.
“‘Here rests the fallen god-king, life-eater, song-swallower. Tread not upon him; never speak his name. Let him return to dust and may the silence never be broken. Death comes for any who forsake the way.’”
“This sounds like a damn Egyptian tomb curse,” I said, as the chills got worse. Normally I wasn’t one to say stop in the face of adventure, but . . . “Are we sure we should be messing with this? You know, certain doom. Death hexes.”
“Do not wish to raise the dead,” Starcurrent said. Sounded sensible.
“You had to put it that way,” Chao-Xing muttered. “There’s no other way for us to gear up against the Phage. And we know they’re a real threat.”
I saw it too. Letting visceral fear keep us from helping our Leviathan? I wasn’t about to walk away from that fight.
With a sigh, I said, “It has to be you, Starcurrent. We need you to open the tomb. We don’t know what will happen, so when it opens, you grab whatever’s in there and run for the exit. You’re the fastest. Don’t wait for us, just move; get the goods out of here.”
“Do not approve of this strategy,” ze said.
Chao-Xing met my gaze, and I read a certain understanding in her dark eyes. “She’s right. As long as you get out, Nadim and Typhon will be safe. This is . . . an acceptable risk.”
What she meant was, we were tolerable collateral damage, when you weighed us against the fate of the Leviathan. I didn’t have a smile in me for this moment, but I did offer a firm nod, silently agreeing with her judgment.
“Zara, no!” The sharp cry came from Nadim on my remote.
There was no time to argue. With real regret, I whispered, “Sorry,” and switched off the link unit. If this shit went bad—and it might—Nadim didn’t need to see it live. He’d feel it, and that was bad enough. This . . . this was the best way for me to protect him. Bea would have
to help him get through this.
Bracing myself, I said to Starcurrent, “Sing that thing open. It’s go time.”
It wasn’t quite that simple, of course. Starcurrent began singing, and the shards glowed a soft amber, then rippled with a rainbow of colors. Like being trapped inside a prism . . . only the flickering light took on an ominous rhythm. A warning strobe, I figured. Starcurrent must have known that too, because zis tendrils shook, flared, and turned bright red at the ends.
Ze sang zis heart out, and I heard the crystals singing back. It was like a duet, an operatic argument, and then . . .
Then the floor melted in a square, like honey on a hot plate. The shards flared brighter than my eyes could stand, and I looked away, squeezing my eyes shut. Heavy vibration shook through me, and that deep buzz crawled up from the soles of my feet through every bone in my body.
“Going!” Starcurrent shouted, and I blinked away afterimages. Ze was a blur of movement now, and when I finally had unobstructed vision again, ze was already out of the pit, hauling the curled-up body wrapped in a profusion of tentacles. Ze moved like lightning when ze needed to, and when I blinked again ze was gone, even as the walls and ceiling began to rumble without benefit of zis singing.
Didn’t sound happy.
And then the lights went out completely.
Chao-Xing instantly triggered the emergency glow strips embedded in her skinsuit, meant for just this kind of problem, but everything looked the same now, three paths to the exit and no visible clue which one was the right one. Which way had Starcurrent headed? I thought I knew, but a mistake might be deadly. My head hurt from the flashing lights and the rumbling. Was I getting enough oxygen? I hope my suit’s not compromised. My feet felt heavy.
“Zara!” Chao-Xing shouted at me, and I snapped back into the moment. “This way!”
We raced through the maze that led out the silver between-life-and-death door, and as we did, something knife-edged and as long as my arm slipped out of the darkness above us without even a whisper. A crystal shard, a monster of one with edges sharp enough to slice titanium. I dodged, gasping, and it hit the floor behind us and stuck point-first, vibrating there.
A second later, a whole forest of them dropped, and if we’d still been standing there we’d have been cut to ribbons.
We made it into the tunnel. The shards on the walls were dark, and more than big enough to do real damage if they were fired at us. I stared at them, forgot to watch my feet.
“Down!” Chao-Xing shouted, and tackled me to be sure I did it. We hit the gritty floor hard, and I barely avoided getting a crystal in my skull as it fired into the opposite wall.
We had to stay down, because the crystals kept breaking loose and shooting across our heads. I inched forward and hit another pressure plate.
The deluge paused. Something clicked in my head. “Get off me! I think we can control the flow,” I shouted, and rolled to my feet, keeping my weight on the plate. “This is an off switch! Hit the next one while I’m on it!”
In answer, Chao-Xing leapt for the next plate and landed like a cat, crouched, staring at the shards and ready to drop if she had to. I could hear both our breaths in the silence. No shit, we’re both scared to death. “Okay,” I said. “So, in theory, if you stay on that one, I can jump ahead of you to the next one. We can leapfrog through.”
“Don’t miss,” she said.
“Obviously.”
I balanced. It was a long jump, and no way to build up momentum; this would all be down to precision and strength. Coiling all the power in my legs, I released it in an explosive move that sent me arcing past Chao-Xing. Too much, too much, damn it . . . But I landed at the far edge of the plate, nearly overbalanced, and settled back on my heels just in time. I crouched and took a minute.
“Ready?” Chao-Xing asked.
“Go.”
She leapt, landed with perfect balance. My thighs burned. I’d never trained for the long jump, but I’d been rebounding off objects in the Zone for years. Maybe that was what I needed—a new angle of approach. I took two steps back on my plate and used the wall to kick off as I went sideways and back out again. This time, I landed square on the tile, and I grinned at Chao-Xing like this was a game we were playing.
“Nice,” she said.
But I noticed she didn’t try to copy my trick. Back and forth, we made the jumps, regular as a pendulum. Our timing had to be spot-on as we angled and arced past each other; the slightest misstep would bring down a cutting crystal rain. My skin stung from a hundred tiny slices; the silver dust was constantly abrading our skinsuits, and I could feel it working its way through. Chao-Xing couldn’t feel any better, but her progress stayed steady.
In the maze, it was hard to see how far we’d come. I had a feeling these plates were designed for a much larger creature that could hit each one in a long stride. Bacia’s people were huge, I remembered. It seemed like for human-sized visitors, two was the minimum number required for survival, preferably with an Abyin Dommas to sing for entry and make a quick getaway.
“I’m so tired,” I wheezed, rubbing a cramp from my calf.
At least we could rest between jumps. I squatted, head between my knees, and tried not to imagine how freaked Nadim must be. Chao-Xing gave me about sixty seconds before signaling with a snap of her fingers. “If we wait too long, we’ll freeze up.”
“Muscles or emotions?” The joke fell flat since she didn’t smile.
“Both. You’re up, Zara.”
This next leap would push us around the corner. Mustering my strength, I hit the wall hard and almost overshot the plate. My heels hit the edge, and I scrambled backward and caught myself on my hands. Enough weight, good, but now I was even shakier. Chao-Xing soared past me, but her grace was fraying, and her breathing had ragged edges when she stumbled to one knee. There was no way in hell Marko could’ve run this gauntlet with his bum leg.
From here, though, I could see the distant doorway, a rectangle of twilight against all the crystal that wanted to be our tomb. Five more jumps, max. You can do this. Nadim and Bea are waiting. This time, I didn’t need Chao-Xing to prod me. Despite my aching joints, I stood on my own, straightened my shoulders, and launched.
Solid landing. Back and forth we went, gathering momentum like aerial dancers who performed on silken scarves. I swore Chao-Xing even added some twirl as we got closer to the exit, so close to safety I could taste it. On my last leap, my ankle bent sideways, and I screamed. The crystal came at me so fast, but Chao-Xing moved like a mother lion, more of a dive than the swan-like ballet leaps she’d been doing, and she hit me with her full weight. We went rolling together, as one, toward the doorway with shards raining down around us.
The frantic motion saved us from impalement. We were both bleeding, but together, we managed to pull each other upright. A few steps, and then Starcurrent was there, supporting both of us with all zis tentacles. I’d first registered the strength of the Abyin Dommas when one came aboard to help Nadim out of dark sleep, but now I appreciated how helpful that power could be.
“You stowed our cargo?” Chao-Xing managed to ask.
“Secured. Returned to aid companions.”
“Thanks,” I said.
We waited out the silver rain of pollen, and once it was a drifting mist, we limped toward the Hopper, and I activated my remote link with Nadim. He was immediately talking. “Zara! Do you hear me? Starcurrent said—”
“We’re fine,” I cut in. “Both Chao-Xing and I have minor injuries, no more. We’ll be home soon.”
“Don’t ever do that again.” He sounded furious.
“Nadim—”
“I mean it. Once, you said I’m not a child, so I shouldn’t trust everything the Elders say, but if I’m not a child, then you must trust me. You think you’re protecting me, but not knowing is worse, and that is not a choice you should make for me.”
Chagrin cut through the network of pain. I had a lot of small aches, some burning slices, but he was r
ight. “I hear you, and I’m sorry. Let’s talk about it more when I get back.”
“Fine,” he snapped.
Oh, he is not fine.
Neither was I, totally, but we were all alive, having survived that death trap of an alien temple, so there was no quelling the satisfaction as I climbed into the Hopper. Starcurrent got in back, solicitous due to our numerous flesh wounds, I assumed. As Chao-Xing got in, I said, “Thanks.”
“You would’ve done the same for me.”
FROM A FRAGMENT OF DATA CODEJACKED FROM THE SLIVER
Rumored to be the personal log of Bacia Annont (provenance unverified)
[unreadable due to damage]
. . . history shall not repeat. I have given sanctuary and safety to many hunted beings here; some races are extinct beyond these tiers. I have built an empire, and I am safe. Should my lineage be revealed, many of those beyond our shields would seek to eradicate me. What I do here I do for protection. For preservation. I defend what I am, and I defend those who take refuge here.
No gods shall walk my space. Yet I must find a god to learn how to destroy one.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Binding Pain
I LEANED FORWARD in my seat and groaned. My skinsuit was shredded here and there, but thankfully, the Hopper had its own oxygen supply. Warm blood trickled down my lower back and my upper thigh. No gushers, so it wasn’t life-threatening, but I could use a minute with EMITU when we got back. I wasn’t about to jinx us with the word if. After what we’d been through on this dead world, I had full confidence in Chao-Xing and Starcurrent.
Something was bothering me, though. The shimmer of discomfort made it hard for me to focus as Chao-Xing took us up. This low, the space lasers shouldn’t be an issue, but . . .
If there was no life on this planet, what was directing the weaponry?
That question popped into my head as something exploded directly below us, rocking the Hopper. Chao-Xing was already taking evasive action, and Starcurrent had three tentacles wrapped around the seats for additional support.
