I left the village, avoiding the high traffic civilian roads- those led deeper into the surrounding ice, anyway- and I found one of the least used ranger paths out of the Erin-Vulur tribal home. The path led into a tunnel, which snaked out and up, taking me along a route that would lead me ever further away from the village. Each of these tunnels had iron hatches in them at several points, to deter potential invaders from other tribes, but it had been a very long time since the last tribal war, and longer still since the Erin-Vulur feared invasion. I found the iron hatch and fished around inside my furs for the key, which I wore on a string around my neck. It didn’t look much like a key, appearing instead to be a featureless cylinder of the same iron as the portal, but it contained some of the Deepseeker’s magick. As long as I held it, the key would work in any of the ranger’s doors. In the hand of any other, it was little more than a useless lump of iron. I slotted the little iron cylinder into a matching groove in the door and was answered with a satisfying clunk inside the thick portal. I leaned forward into the portal, and it scraped open, clearing a thin build up of shaved ice out of its path.
I stepped through the portal and closed it. I was now standing in a tunnel barely wider than my shoulders, a rough-hewn, ill-maintained straight shaft through the ice. Driven into the walls of the shaft, there was a ladder line of iron spikes, set at half-spear intervals. I sighed, rolled my shoulders to loosen them, and began to climb. At least I didn’t have to climb this one by axe.
The surface was just as unforgiving as usual. The ceaseless, scouring force of the furious winds made me stumble as I came out of the ranger tunnel onto the featureless surface of Ravanur’s icy skin. I slid the concealing imitation boulder back into place, covering the tunnel from prying eyes. I then reached into a crack in the side of the rock and hit a hidden switch, causing the securing bolts to fall into place, fastening the cover to the hidden iron ring at the mouth of the tunnel. Periodically, a storm would rip the top off of one of our tunnels, but short of that kind of force, the secret routes of the rangers remained so, secluded and hidden from any who would wish to do our tribe harm. I wondered then if the metal god was a good or a bad one. If it was a malicious god, according to the stories, it could make me tell it all of my secrets- like the locations of all the entrances to the home of the Erin-Vulur. I shuddered. Hopefully, it was a good god, but if it was a bad one… I resolved then that if the metal god turned out to be an enemy of my people, I would force it to kill me in battle rather than be made to betray my tribe.
I unfolded my map and looked at it for a while, noting the position of the burug I had killed relative to the location of the village. It was a day and a half’s walk from here, though if I found an old burug tunnel, I might be able to follow its relatively smooth contours toward my target, and bypass some of the difficulties of overland travel. Bringing up the recent burug paths I knew about, I mentally overlaid the paths onto the map and selected the one I was going to take. A day and a half. Just a day and a half until I stood face to face with a god and the world changed forever. Was I ready for something like this? Shaking my head, I hiked my pack up further on my shoulders and set off for the burug tunnel. There was only one way to find out.
…
I had no problem finding the home of the metal god. Roughly two days after I had set out from the tribal village, I got out of the old burug tunnel I had chosen to follow, preoccupied with my own thoughts. The tunnel had been utterly free of any sign of the great insect that had made it, and that didn’t make a lot of sense. Though the massive adult burug that had made the tunnel had been slain, typically within those tunnels a ranger would find burug eggs or larva. Even this far from the village, they would be exterminated outright, but there was no sign of that either- no shattered pieces of chitin, no flash-frozen blood or ichor, no grooves in the ice from heavy blows. This tunnel had emptied and stayed empty. There weren’t a lot of things that scared a burug; they weren't really smart enough to actually know fear. For something to drive away all of the juvenile insects that should have been here… A rumble of thunder vibrated the ice beneath my feet, and I looked up, out through the open mouth of the tunnel. In that moment, I knew exactly what had scared the beasts away.
The sky in front of me was covered by a solid column of black, hundreds of spears wide and three times as high. It was lit from within by brief, startling flashes of blue light, occasionally spitting out a bolt of searing blue that gouged up great chunks of ice and flung them high into the air, only to be caught in its lazily rotating mass and swallowed. I was standing inside a great storm. Green lined clouds stretched in concentric circles past me, seeming to extend out to the horizon. The wind whipped around me, howling for my blood. Its rage blew me back and forth as I got to my feet. I kept one arm thrown across my face to protect it from the flying ice. I quickly tugged a scarf across my mouth and nose and crouched to preserve my balance against the rushing violence of the storm. I understood now that the pillar of roiling blackness that I was looking at was the storm wall- the place in the heart of a great storm where the violence of the wind was the strongest. I knew that the eye of the storm would be a place of calm, near serenity, shielded from the tempest’s own rage, and I was sure that if the god I had seen was inside the storm, then the eye was where he would be. I just had to get inside. It was strange that the god had chosen a blizzard to be its ward; every Erin-Vulur ranger had to reach the eye of a blizzard before he was considered worthy of his ink. I had crossed a storm wall before- every one of my comrades had as well, some of us multiple times. Surely a god would have known that. Was this some kind of test? If it was, I was ready for it.
I reached inside my furs, into a pouch I kept tucked under one of my arms for safekeeping. Inside it, there was a set of goggles, with thick lenses shaped from precious quartz that the Deepseeker had found under the buried peak of the Erin-Vulur village. I strapped the goggles over my eyes to protect them and put the pouch back within my furs. Next, I spread protective balm over any of my skin left exposed, from a clay jar I kept in my pack. This would keep the storm's cold, harsher even than the ambient cold of Ravanur, from leeching heat from my body. A powerful enough storm could freeze even someone protected by powerful Deepseeker magick if they weren't careful, and the strange breastplate I wore under my furs would do nothing to protect me from a lightning strike. Even though I was experienced, every time I crossed through a storm, I took my life into my own hands, and a storm shaped by the hand of a god was no exception. No sense in waiting around. I checked the claws in the tips of my boots, drew out my twin climbing axes, and sprinted toward the storm wall, diving to the ground as I drew near to the roiling barrier. As I dropped prone to the ice, I slammed down my axes, getting a grip with the sharp points, and scrabbled with my clawed boots, getting purchase against the ice. Lying face down like this, made it less likely I would be ripped up by the storm, and hopefully it would also protect me against the chance of a lightning strike. I pushed with my feet, reached out with one hand, slamming my axe down hard a few hand-spans further, and then dragged myself forward. It was like climbing, a little more dangerous though, and my body fell into the familiar seeming rhythm with ease. Within moments, I was fully surrounded by the storm wall.
The time I spent within the god's storm wall was like a fever dream. Sensations passed across my body in waves, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. I was cold, even with the blessing I wore, and the wind seemed to be trying to rip the hides off of my back. I was in total darkness, concentrating on the indistinct impression of the little bit of ice in front of my goggles and not daring to lift my head. Each breath was a labor, as most of the air was sucked away from my mouth before I could take it in. I had to expend precious effort to remain calm in the face of it. Every so often, lightning would play across the inside of the storm wall, and a nightmare skyscape would reveal itself to me in the afterimages burned into my eyes. I saw towers of clouds growing upward to the unseen heavens before they were smash
ed into curling wisps by icy boulders, flung by the storm like they were pebbles. Through it all, through the light, and impact, and the terrifying, all-encompassing noise of it all, I persisted in my driving rhythm, dragging myself ever further into the storm wall.
I don't know how much time passed, but abruptly, with little warning, the noise dropped from bone-pulverizing to merely deafening. I had done it; I had breached the god's storm wall. I was exhausted and sore, so much in fact, that I didn't hear or feel the heavy footsteps approaching me, until something seized me by the back of my furs and lifted me off of the ground like I was an infant. I yelped and tried to fumble for a spear, but my captor simply shook me, enough to rattle my brains in my skull without killing me. I immediately stopped struggling, and instead, I twisted in the massive grip- and then froze.
The god was a two and a half spears tall, and clearly much stronger than any of the Erin Vulur. It seemed clear to me now that the metal was not actually its skin, but rather some kind of heavy armor, similar in function to the glacial plate that Stormcallers sometimes summoned to protect themselves. All of its movements seemed a little too-smooth, demonstrating a grace that wouldn’t have seemed possible in armor that heavy. I had the sense that if I tried to reach for any of my weapons, it could pluck them from my hands with deft ease, and fling me into the storm like a discarded puppet to be destroyed. The god’s helm bent towards me, and presented me with the broad, quartz plate that took the place of any facial features. For a moment, the plate was opaque, a glittering metallic sheen reflecting the bright strobes of lightning in the storm wall before us. As I watched, the metallic sheen faded away, leaving the crystal perfectly clear, so that I could see inside. What I saw- more than anything else I had witnessed since I had seen the star fall from the sky- stopped my heart in my chest.
Staring back at me from within the helm, there was a face I would never forget. She looked simultaneously like and very much un-like one of the Erin-Vulur. Her features were less angular than those of my people, her jaw more gently curved and her cheeks soft and un-lined. Her skin was darker than my own; the color of new leather, and her mouth was narrow, framed by red lips that seemed, even now, to be on the very edge of smiling. It was her eyes, though, that fascinated me. They were rounder than mine, and set a little deeper beneath her hairless brows, but the actual eyes themselves were fascinating. Deep, liquid brown eyes gazed back at me from beneath thick lashes, instantly intriguing, staring into my own eyes with an intensity that shocked me. My heart was beating again, very fast, as I met those endless eyes and wondered just how much she could see. Could she see into my mind? My soul? If she had, at that moment, all she would find would be a single thought, echoing through my head. Beautiful. She is beautiful.
...
Chapter Five: The Djinn and the Bear
Joanna
I frowned through the faceplate of my power armor at the man I had captured. He was just looking back at me, not making any attempt to break free- despite the collection of weapons lashed to his pack. He was dressed in furs and hides, and seemed not overly bothered by the lethal cold he was wandering around in. He had just crawled through my storm-wall the way one might scramble through the gap under a chain-link fence. “‘Bas, let him see my face. Maybe if he sees I’m not so much different than him, he can carry a message back to his people so I don’t have to kill anyone else.” The AI didn’t say anything, but a moment later, the eyes of the warrior focused directly onto mine. If I hadn’t been holding him half a meter off of the ground by the back of his furs, I might have taken a step back away from him when our eyes met. They were not the eyes of a human. Though he looked like a human- two eyes, two arms, two legs, generally symmetrical features- the eyes were something else. His eyes were canted, with an even more prominent epicanthic fold than someone of old Asian ancestry. I remembered a theory I had read, that those eyes had evolved to protect the vision of people living in cold, windy climates. It would certainly make sense here, though I still didn't understand how life could exist at negative one-hundred fifty Celsius degrees. His eyes had no whites- or at least his sclera wasn't white. Rather, they reminded me of the eyes of a polar bear, orbs of deep glacial blue framed in wild, feral brown. The polar bear impression was made even more striking by the fact that his skin and hair were both an utterly colorless white. He stared into my eyes with a ferocious intensity that was both worrying and intriguing. I felt something like electricity crackling back inside my brain, traveling down my spine-
"Try speaking to him." Barbas' voice was neutral. He wasn't paying attention to the alien hunter's eyes; he was reading all kinds of data from the suit, and from the enhanced sensors that we had mounted up high on the Terraforming Engine tower behind me. Something about the man made him nervous.
“He won’t be able to understand me,” I said, for the first time feeling somewhat foolish about speaking out loud to what was essentially my imaginary friend. For a moment I was glad that the alien couldn’t understand me. He probably thought I was talking to him.
"I know," Barbas replied, his tone clinical, emotionless. How could he be so… uninterested? We were talking about First Contact here! Well, technically, shooting the strange, ice-clad woman a few days ago had been First Contact, but still. Oblivious to my thoughts, or at least pretending to be, Barbas continued. “Even though he can’t understand you, he just reacted to the sound of your voice. If you keep talking, you can keep him reacting, and I can get more detailed information from the electromagnetic spectrum scans I’m running on his brain right now.”
"You can read his mind?" I had blurted the question before I realized how ridiculous that sounded. Barbas could read my mind, or at least I couldn’t come up with a compelling argument to prove that he couldn’t. Though he was riding on tech lacing the inside of my skull, he was essentially just reading the "computer language" of electrical impulses flickering across my gray matter. Chances were, even if he couldn't read the alien's actual thoughts, he could get the gist of what the warrior was thinking, the broad strokes of the picture he painted. I was pretty sure that Barbas was reading my thoughts because he deemed it unnecessary to answer my question. How else would he be able to talk to you- and more- in your dreams, stupid? I shook my head. This wasn’t the time. I needed to focus.
Gently, I set the warrior down onto his feet, and then took a step back away from him. If he went for a weapon, he would die, very quickly. Barbas and I had not been idle. The tower now sported a gauss rifle emplacement, a scaled-up version of the technology that made my revolver work. Regardless of the surrounding weather conditions, that gun could fire a tiny steel ball several times the speed of sound through anything inside my storm wall. It wouldn’t leave much more than a smear of a human- or a humanoid- skull behind it.
I raised my hands, palm out toward the warrior, hoping that the gesture meant the same thing to him that it did to me. Peace, I thought at him, willing my intention to reach him, language barrier or not. I hadn’t had the time to try to speak to the ice-woman earlier, killing her had been completely necessary. This- those eyes- this would be different. It wouldn’t be a tragedy. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
The alien man seemed unconcerned by the language barrier, utterly unsurprised that I spoke a language he had never heard before. He mimicked my gesture, holding both hands out in front of him first and then slowly, carefully, slipped his pack off of his shoulders and lay it down on the ice. He took a step away from his weapons, towards me, and though I tried not to, I took an involuntary step backward. He cocked his head to the side, seeming confused by this. Shit. I can’t fuck this up. I pointed to myself with the broad metal thumb of my armored gauntlet. “My name is Joanna,” I said, slowly and with exaggerated diction.
He pointed at me with his index finger- I noticed that his hide gloves did not cover his fingertips, and black, glossy claws extended from each finger where his fingernails should have been. “Mie-nay-miss Joo-ah-nah,” he repeated, his mouth making clumsy p
iecemeal of the unfamiliar sounds.
I shook my head and then pointed to myself again. "Me," I said. "Joanna." I pointed at him and said, "You…" then paused. He didn't say anything this time, he simply cocked his head slightly to the side again, the gesture reminding me uncomfortably of the curious movements made by a feral dog I had seen when I was a little girl. It could have been pure curiosity, or it could have been him wondering if I was good to eat. I repeated the little sequence, pointing at myself, and saying, "Me, Joanna," then pointing at him and saying, "You…" and pausing. Pattern recognition. It was one of the basic foundations of human cognition, our greatest strength, and our most exploitable weakness. If he recognized this one, maybe…
Alien Romance Box Set: Alien Former: Sci-Fi Alien Romance (Books 1-5) Page 7
