by Rick Partlow
“Stop whining,” Victor admonished him, lumbering up behind us, seemingly unaffected by the hard landing. “You sound like a little baby.”
I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, then opened them and found my vision clearing. We were near the edge---way too near, given how little control we’d had coming in---of a sandstone plateau, bare except for the persistent green film of algae that seemed to cover almost every surface. A hundred meters away, closer to the center, the matte grey delta of an assault shuttle squatted on its landing treads, staring at us like a bison bull debating a charge. Normally, if we’d had a full squad down here, I would have sent a team to check on it; but there was just the three of us, and the shuttle was cold on thermal and its belly ramp was sealed up tight. Anyway, if there’d been anyone left to guard it, they would have come and checked on the life-pod by now.
“Come on,” I urged the others, setting off to the north side of the plateau. We’d spotted the trail on the way down and it looked like the only path the Cultists could have taken off the flat stretch of sandstone.
It wasn’t much: just a slightly worn, slightly flatter strip of rust-colored rock and sand, mostly free of the terraforming algae, but I wondered what had made it. Had the Predecessors carved it with lasers millennia ago, a broad avenue leading from this landing site to their base? Was this barely-visible mountain track all that was left of that?
The trail led upwards, gently at first into the rolling hills past the plateau, but then more sharply as the mountains loomed ahead. They were worn and rounded by rains that no longer fell on this nearly dead world, weathered from a time when it had weather, but all that did was make the path more slippery. I tried to be vigilant, tried to remember to keep watching our rear approach, but as the kilometers dragged on and one stretch of lichen-covered rock began to look much like another, I fell into a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other trance and counted on my helmet sensors to warn me of any danger.
And finally, they did. The blinking red icon in my Heads-Up-Display jarred me from my fugue and I dropped to a knee, raising my right fist to halt Sanders and Victor, who were spaced out ten meters apart on the trail behind me. There were a few large rocks by the side of the trail and I ducked behind one, taking a moment to concentrate on the sensor readings.
A touch on the control pad fitted to the armor on my forearm showed me a more detailed display; the warning had come from what the audio sensors had determined was a scrape of a combat boot on sandstone, and an echo pattern that showed at least one Tango thirty meters ahead, where the trail angled downward and narrowed into a draw.
I turned and waved the others forward, not wanting to trust that the enemy wouldn’t be able to detect our transmissions this close. I signaled that I was going to head down into the draw and I wanted Sanders to go off-trail and climb up the other side in order to get behind them, while Victor waited here until I broke radio silence.
I could see the frown in Victor’s eyes through his faceplate and I knew he was disappointed that he was being left back. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him or didn’t feel I could rely on him; but this was going to require silence and stealth, and Victor and Kurt were both blunt instruments. I signaled to Sanders that I was going to give him ten minutes before I started down the draw; he responded with a grin and a thumbs-up, and scrabbled up the slick rock beside the trail with barely a sound.
I watched him climb slowly and carefully over the bare sandstone, half wanting him to speed up and get it over with, and half glad he was being cautious. Finally, he dropped behind a ledge and disappeared from view. I tried to follow his progress as best I could with my helmet’s audio sensors, but he was a lot stealthier than whoever was in that draw, and I lost track of him quickly. I’d set a timer in my HUD counting down from Sanders’ departure, and when it reached about a minute, I tapped Victor on the shoulder and told him to watch our backs, then I went down on my belly and began high-crawling along the trail.
The path climbed upward for another few meters, then curved to my left before it headed down into the draw. I stopped there at that curve and edged slowly around, my Gauss rifle cradled in my arms. The trail followed the draw downward and abruptly terminated in a cliff face. I blinked, wondering if I was missing something, and it only took a second to see that what I was missing was a cave.
The entrance wasn’t very large, maybe a couple meters tall and half that wide, jagged and crooked like a dark slash across the rock face. My pulse quickened as I realized that this was what Marquette had described in his message to me…then quickened again when I saw the guards. There were three of them, dressed in the scavenged battle armor they’d stolen from the Sung Brothers, as spread out as the narrow end of the draw would allow, their pulse carbines aimed outward.
They looked intimidating behind their mirrored visors, but I wasn’t impressed with their tactics or their initiative; if they’d been Recon vets, they’d have had a lookout posted up in the…
The unmistakable sound of a discharging Gauss rifle made my head snap upward towards the rock ledge overhanging the cliff, just in time to see the fourth guard falling backwards from his hiding place, a gaping hole blown through the back of his helmet.
Okay, maybe they have some Recon guys after all, I admitted, but so do we.
The three Cultists in front all looked instinctively upward and outward, thinking someone had sniped their buddy from somewhere far away, but I could see Sanders sliding down towards the ledge from the outcropping where he’d been concealed just above them. I took advantage of their momentary panic and put my targeting reticle on the chest of the closest of them, who I guessed was a woman by her height, then pressed the trigger pad.
I was moving my point of aim before she fell, letting the twisting kick of the electromagnetic launcher pull it to the right towards one of the other two guards, but they were finally doing the smart thing and falling back through the cave entrance, spraying wild bursts of laser fire to cover their retreat.
“Victor!” I yelled into my helmet mic. “Sanders! Follow me!”
I dug the spiked soles of my boots into the sand and sprinted after the Cultists, straight into the cave entrance, firing off a full mag from the hip as I went. The one thing we couldn’t afford was for them to bottleneck us at that chokepoint, and the only way I could think to prevent it was to keep them running, even if it meant alerting the others that we were here.
I saw sandstone spraying off the walls as my shots tracked them and then…nothing. I didn’t understand until I followed them through the twisted, sandstone entrance and found that the cave expanded outward into a darkened amphitheater that my infrared filters couldn’t penetrate, and that the rock inside was a different, harder mineral than the sandstone outside. It was smooth, too, unnaturally smooth and I nearly slipped as I ran. I couldn’t see the guards I was chasing, but I knew they couldn’t be more than twenty meters ahead of me.
I decided to take a risk and switched on my Gauss rifle’s integral weapons light, an infrared flashlight built into the fore-stock. It would reveal my position, but it wasn’t as if they didn’t already know where I was, and it was better than running blind into an ambush. The cavern around me lit up green in my helmet’s infrared filters, but the light still didn’t penetrate to the edge of the cavernous chamber, and I still didn’t see the guards.
I didn’t see the two-meter-wide circle of blackness right in the middle of the floor, either, until I’d already fallen into it.
“Shit!” I blurted, dropping my rifle as I tried to scrabble at the edges of the hole.
They were glass-smooth and coated with slippery lichen, and I was falling into nothing, my stomach twisting and my sense of what was up and down disappearing in a wave of nausea, and I fought to keep from throwing up inside my helmet. I cried out again, sensing that this fall was too far to survive, that I would be broken on the rocks below and die here on this fetid shithole, far away from the only people I loved.
***
But I
didn’t.
I didn’t die, and, after a few seconds, I finally understood that I wasn’t falling.
I was floating. Floating slowly downward, deep into whatever this thing was that clearly wasn’t a cave. I tried to press out against the walls of the tube, or whatever it was, but they pressed back with a spongy force that wasn’t physical.
Artificial gravity, I thought in wonder. It was something that human scientists had been trying to develop for decades, ever since it had been discovered that you could generate it in Transition Space as a function of the Teller-Fox drive. But so far, the altered physics of T-space were the only conditions that could produce it.
For us, I corrected myself. Because clearly the Predecessors had solved that mystery.
By the time the transport tube deposited me wherever it was that I’d gone, my breathing had calmed down and I had the presence of mind to pull my rifle away from my chest harness, where the sling had retracted it when I’d let go of it, and point it out ahead of me. It was still totally black, so devoid of light that not even infrared could show me any details, and on thermal I only caught a diffuse blue haze.
I stepped off to the right of where I’d touched down, then keyed my weapons light again. And froze in utter and complete wonder. I’d been deposited deep inside the hollow mountain, inside some sort of vast, fathomless underground installation left here eons ago. Stretched out as far as my light beam could reach was an endless landscape of mechanisms that seemed more sculpture than machinery---liquid, flowing curves and vague, hazy edges that almost made me wonder if the things were really there.
Tall spires hovered precariously above me, while vaguely rotund mushroom shapes squatted in dark menace. Flickering shadows played teasingly at the edges of the cone of light, and I had the absurd thought that something more horrifying than I could imagine was about to burst from those tricks of the light and devour me. The sight literally took my breath away; I realized abruptly that I’d been holding my breath and gasped in air, trying to free my mind from the mesmerizing clutches of the alien architecture. I’d been on the Tahni home-world, but there was something about his place that made even Tahn-Skyyiah seem home-like, that made the Tahni seem like our brothers.
“Victor,” I transmitted on the suit radio. “Sanders. Do you copy?”
Nothing. I tried again and still received no answer, and I wasn’t reading their IFF transponders either. It wasn’t a huge surprise; God knew how far below-ground I was, and they were presumably still topside, looking for me. And I was…here. Wherever that was.
I saw a faint, white glow off to my left that didn’t come from my weapons light; it was in the visible spectrum, and I didn’t understand why I hadn’t detected it before. I edged toward it, remembering to check my threat display but seeing nothing except for a blank square of pale green; something down here was shutting out every sensor in my helmet. Even the audio analyzers were unreliable; the sounds down here were dampened somehow, like there was nothing solid off which they could echo.
The glow was like the sound; it didn’t reflect off of anything else and it didn’t seem to share its faint light beyond itself, as if it didn’t exist in the same reality. But I could see, as I drew closer, that it came from a wall of what looked like glass, shimmering and opaque, but somehow growing clearer and more transparent as I approached, as if it knew I was here.
Inside, frozen in time, preserved since an age long dead, was another of the things that Anatoly had shown us in his vault. Looming a good head over me, it was bipedal and basically humanoid in shape, but definitely not human. A long, angular face, cut with dark striations that I wasn't sure were natural, stared at me with large, liquid eyes that seemed to seek mine out. A spiky, swept-back mane of what might have been hair stretched back from the oversized cranium, adding to the creature's already-considerable height.
It was a Predecessor. If I hadn’t been sure before, I was now. It was the holy grail, the thing so many people had sought for so long…and as I stared at it, unable to look away, I wondered if it would be satisfying to true believers like Israfil. Was this God big enough for them? Because to me, it seemed somehow…familiar. It wasn’t human; it was barely humanoid, and the things of its making were not things that could ever come from a human mind, or even be totally comprehended by one.
But it also wasn’t totally beyond the realm of experience. It wasn’t an energy field, or a gas cloud or a giant amoeba, or even something as simultaneously strange and yet cliched as an evolved cephalopod. No, this was something I swore I could identify, something that didn’t come from some other galaxy or from a planet where the air froze or the oceans boiled; it came from somewhere very much like Earth. It didn’t seem right somehow, didn’t seem like a coincidence that could happen on its own.
The Tahni were very much like us, but we had evidence now that their evolution had been tampered with at some point, somewhere deep in their past, five hundred thousand years ago or more. Sophia subscribed to the school of scholarly thought that believed the Tahni had been modified to be more like us, and that it hadn’t worked out well. But these things, these Predecessors, they’d presumably evolved somewhere on their own, without interference. Somewhere close enough to Earth conditions that they started terraforming every planet they came across to be more like Earth.
The only post-secondary schooling I’d had was the required NCO learning annexes in the Corps, but I’d been married to an evolutionary biologist for years, and some of that had rubbed off. Feathers that had become hair, eyes that had evolved to sense light in a spectrum which humans could see, a body that had evolved for something close to our gravity, those all pointed to one conclusion.
I was pretty sure I knew where the Predecessors came from. There was only one world I knew of that met all those criteria and showed no evidence at all of genetic tampering in its evolutionary cycle, the only world in the Cluster which had evolved humanoid, intelligent life on its own at least once before. That world was Earth.
Then somebody shot me.
Chapter Twenty
The blast came from almost point-blank range, the flash blacked out my visor and a burning flare of pain sent me stumbling backwards, slipping on the glassy floor. The infrared light blinked out as my rifle slipped from my fingers and my back hit the floor, and I could see the shadowy figure of the Cult fighter looming over me just two meters away and my training and instincts took over. I didn’t try to grab the rifle, not at this range, just swept my pistol out of its shoulder holster and pointed it instinctively without trying to use the sights, squeezing off four rounds as fast as I could press the trigger.
I didn’t wait to see the effects, didn’t even bother to check my display to see how badly I was hurt; I just rolled to my left and scrambled away from the area. I couldn’t see where I was going, couldn’t see much of anything without the weapons light, but I ran anyway and ignored the pain. Whatever didn’t kill me wasn’t worth thinking about.
Another flash of laser fire exploded somewhere off to my right and I ducked in that direction, defying the shooter’s expectations and driving straight into him, firing off the rest of the magazine ahead of me. I rammed straight into the Cult fighter, my shoulder impacting his chest and knocking him backwards. I dropped the pistol and grabbed my rifle by the receiver, slamming the stock down over and over into the man’s helmet and neck. I couldn’t see his face, just an indistinct outline on thermal, but I felt the crunch of the visor shattering and then the bones of the face beneath it splintering under the impacts.
Another shot, from behind me, and a searing agony in my right side. I rolled off the body, biting down on the pain and swinging around the Gauss rifle. I fired into the source of the laser flashes, spraying the tungsten slugs across from left to right, and the automatic laser fire jerked upward, arcing into the endless black above and yet still not seeming to light it up.
There was silence. I grabbed at my side and cursed between clenched teeth, limping over to where the Cult f
ighter had fallen. I flashed my rifle’s light on him and saw that he’d taken two slugs in the chest and his blood was pooling across the dark floor. I kicked the laser carbine away from him, then put a round through his faceplate just to be sure.
My shoulders sagged and I drew in a painful breath, finally taking a glance at the medical scan in my HUD. The armor had absorbed a lot of the lasers’ energy, but enough had gotten through to leave me with a couple nasty burn-throughs and some serious soft tissue damage in my chest and side. No major organs hit, and I wasn’t bleeding out, thanks to the armor’s coagulants and my pharmacy organ; but I did have two cracked ribs, which meant any movement of my upper body was going to come packaged with a lot of pain after the drugs wore off. At least the armor meant I didn’t have to see the wounds. I got a little queasy at the sight of my own blood.
I had to find Israfil and the rest of his people fast, before the nanites drained me too much trying to heal me. I swapped out magazines in my rifle, retrieved my handgun and reloaded and re-holstered it, then took a moment to shine my infrared weapons light around. One direction looked as confusing and promising as the other.
The anti-gravity tube thing had dumped me out back off to the right of my current position. I shrugged and headed left, shaking off a wave of fatigue that was washing away my adrenalin high. I wanted more than anything to sit down in some corner and rest, to let the painkillers and the nanites do their thing. I considered for just a moment heading back to the lift device and seeing if it would take me back up to where Victor and Sanders were, so I could bring them down here for backup. I rejected the idea because I didn’t know if Israfil knew I was down here yet. If he decided to go to ground in here, it could take us a long while to find him, and God knew what he might get his hands on in the meantime.
