by Rick Scott
She places her hands on her hips. “Please. I led them away from you. Besides you got out okay, didn’t you?”
“You didn’t plan that!”
“So who cares if I did or didn’t. I should be more ticked at you for botching the whole job.”
I grind my teeth but can’t really think of a good comeback to that. That’d be two things I’ve botched tonight. I better quit while I’m head. “So you finally ready to go now?”
She narrows her eyes. “Are you?”
I am not liking this chick. “Let’s go.”
As we start to head off, I notice she’s going in the wrong direction. “Hey, you lost? The South wall is this way.”
“I’m not headed that way.”
“What?”
“I need to go East.”
“But we’re all headed west. We’re going to the Vale of Sorrows.” And then I add with a bit of vitriol. “To save your sister.”
Aiko comes to a halt and I fear I just said something I shouldn’t have. She turns to me with daggers in her eyes. “What do you know about my sister?”
“Not much,” I say quickly, realizing I may have just triggered a far bigger nerve than I bargained for. “Just that she’s trapped in a labyrinth and Val needs my help to tank the guardian to it.”
She huffs out a breath. “I’d be interested to know what else she told you.”
“If you come with me you can find out for yourself.”
“Maybe. But like I said. I got somewhere else to head first.”
“What? Where?”
And then she gives me a smirk. “If you come with me, you can find out for yourself.”
She spins on her heel and takes off again in a run.
I sigh. Now I understand why Val considers her such a pain in the neck.
I dash after her and when we reach the gigantic eastern wall we leap to it using wall run, sprinting vertically up its surface. I expect Aiko to stop at the top, but instead she leaps off with a somersault, casting Shadow Copy in the process.
I hate to admit it, but it’s about the darn near coolest thing I’ve ever seen. I replicate her move, jumping into the cold night air, flying unbounded by gravity. As I cast Shadow Copy, I catch a glimpse of Stormwall in its entirety. Chaos reigns as the city devolves into turmoil, and my heart sinks, as gravity begins to take its hold on me again.
I’m sorry, Diana. I’ll be back to put this right.
Somehow.
As Aiko and I plummet back to the earth, we land with a bone shattering impact, losing our shadows, and then carry on running into the night.
Chapter 27: The Short Straw
“Bruce, you’re going to want to come and see this.”
Bruce Peters stiffened and stared blankly at the sonar technician standing in the doorway to his office. When you were the man in charge, hearing those words could only mean one thing: problems. Just how big a problem usually depended on who was uttering the doom impending phrase, and coming from the sonar tech, Bruce’s stomach was already queasy with anxiety.
He managed to give the tech, Carl, a nod. “What you got?”
Carl, a slim black man in his thirties with close cut hair and a full beard, shook his head slowly. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
Perfect. “All right show me.”
Leaving his office within the stasis observation lounge, Bruce followed Carl to the lift and traveled down twenty levels to the lowest floor in Citadel. Bruce prepared himself as the elevator car slowed. This far down the ambient heat was unbearable and made even more so by the energy converters that feed upon it. The doors opened and he was hit by a blast of oven hot air. It had to be well over fifty degrees Celsius down here.
It was completely dark save for the dull red glow that came from the energy converters humming below them. Set in an array that stretched across the half kilometer wide floor, the converters were each the size and shape of a small building, with massive cooling fins that made them resemble giant electrical transformers. The converters used cells that turned thermal heat directly into electrical energy at an efficiency rate of 80%. With the limitless heat from this far below the Earth’s surface, their energy needs would always be met. So long as they had the nanites to keep the cells rejuvenated.
Carl stepped out into the heat, clearly used to it, and clambered down the gangway that hung a couple of stories above the field of converter banks.
“Remember not to touch the rails,” Carl said as he headed toward a habitat box set up at the end of the gangway.
Bruce was thankful for the reminder and tucked his hands into his pockets for safekeeping. Touching bare metal in this place would likely leave a second-degree burn. The hab was only a few hundred meters from the elevator, but by the time they reached it, Bruce’s coveralls were already soaked with sweat.
A small airlock ushered in a blast a cool air as they entered and then the inner door opened to allow them entrance into the RV sized control station that housed the brains for the external detection equipment. Bruce went from sweating to freezing as the way too cold air chilled his damp clothes.
Carl took a seat at the command station at the center of the room and fired up the old holographic screens. As head of maintenance and engineering, Bruce knew the sonar system well. It was standalone, totally separated from the online servers that ran Crystal Shards and was perhaps one of the oldest systems in existence, aside from the energy banks outside.
Their documentation on anything this old was sketchy at best. Most of their records dated back to only three hundred years ago, to after the Great Encounter, when the city was first attacked by a Builder. And even then, the details were sparse and seemed more myth than fact; tales of giant monsters and heroes, no doubt embellished over time and muddled by the two decades of zero electronic records that followed, know to them as the Dark Period. No one was certain of what caused that either, but most historians speculated an EMP device might have been used to defeat the Builder, destroying their prior history and anything else electronic in the process. If that were the case then those twenty years of being sent back to the stone age must have been horrid. But even that was just speculation. The only thing they knew for certain was that over 70% of the population didn’t survive.
Following that, the Sonar system was made standalone so that if ever the AIs did hack into the main Shards, they wouldn’t be able to access it to pinpoint their physical location and send another Builder their way. That was how the AIs had found them the first time, according to the records. Even housing the system in the depths of the city was another peculiar design choice that Bruce surmised might have had to do with the upper levels being breeched and contaminated and the power room becoming the last bastion during the attack.
That was the nightmare scenario that had been passed on to him from his predecessor almost forty years ago. His entire career Bruce had prayed that he wouldn’t be the one to finally draw the short straw and have a Builder show up on his watch.
But now he feared the straw had already been drawn.
Bruce looked at the blue, three-dimensional imagery on the holoscreens. Citadel was portrayed as a vertical cylinder stretching over a kilometer long. All around it were root like appendages, that represented the various habitat levels. Further out, stretching as far as 500 kilometers, the space was dotted with small specks that resembled stars. Only someone as skilled as Carl could guess what they actually were, but anything denser than the existing bedrock would show up as a dot.
“So what am I looking for?”
Carl touched a few holographic keys and 90% of the specks disappeared, leaving only a scattering at the far edges of the display. “These objects all moved about fifty meters in the last 24 hours.”
Bruce’s stomach fell through the floor. There had to be over a hundred of them. “Any idea what they are?”
Carl shook his head. “I’ve been doing this for over 15 years and I’ve never seen anything like this. I’ve seen things move bef
ore. Small things, but nothing this size. And so many.”
“How big are they?”
“Big as a bus maybe. Hard to tell with just the passive sonar though. The only way we could to tell for sure would be to send an active ping, but I wouldn’t recommend that.”
“Are they builders?” Bruce asked.
Carl let out a nervous chuckle. “That’s what I was going to ask you. Smaller than what the history books says, but then again, we could be only seeing the drills bits.”
Dear lord. “And they’re making tunnels?”
“Again too hard to tell without a ping, but I assume so.”
“What direction are they headed? Are they coming toward us?”
“So far their headings seem random. I don’t have a lot of data yet, but if I were to liken it to anything, I’d say they’re behaving like ants in search of food. Just milling around.”
Bruce grimaced. “Do these movements correlate with the vibration readings we’ve been getting?”
Carl released a sigh. “I wish I could say yes, but no. That’s something else entirely. And still present. Getting stronger too. If I were to venture a guess, these may be scouts or drones…for whatever is making that vibration.”
Heaven help us…this was it. Bruce swallowed back the dry lump in his throat. “Who else have you told about this?”
“Just you.”
Bruce exhaled shakily. “Let’s keep it that way for now. The last thing we need is another panic.” Or some other reason for Dennis to try and throw him under the bus. “Keep monitoring and report your finding only to me. Understood?”
Carl nodded slowly. “Yes sir.”
Bruce left the control center and reentered the heat of the power room, his thoughts running amuck. He’d have to disclose this to the rest of the board eventually, but not right now. On top of the nano crisis, this would simply be too much.
At least that’s what Bruce told himself.
If he was completely honest, there was a far more selfish reason for him not wanting to disclose it. Dennis had already canned his idea of sending out another broadcast signal for at least another month. But if Dennis knew about this, the software engineer would likely make the ban permanent.
And he couldn’t allow that to happen.
If this was to be the end, their final days; then no way would he be facing it without his family whole. Even if it summoned every Builder on the planet, he would send out that signal again and bring his daughter home.
He vowed himself to it.
Bruce Peters would not die without seeing his little Gilly alive once more.
Chapter 28: Rookie
Morning breaks and I’m dog tired.
Aiko and I ran for half the night through the forest, me mostly just trying to keep up with her as she navigated the pitch blackness with her elven night vision. Once certain we were far enough away from Stormwall, and not being followed, we bunked down in small glade atop a hill, and caught some sleep in the boughs of a willow tree.
That was about five hours ago and now the predawn sky has me stirring restlessly with aching legs and a throbbing back. I look across from me and am half surprised to see Aiko still sleeping soundly on the branch next to me. I watch the rise and fall of her chest as she snores gently. Her elven features are actually quite lovely when not being marred by her abrasive personality. I still can’t believe I’m out here with her, heading who knows where, instead of meeting back up with Gilly and the others.
The thought brings on a heaviness. And even more so, when I recall everything that transpired last night. The stuff with Braxus, the guards, Diana. It weighs me down to a point of despair. Things seemed so easy when all I was doing was trying to earn enough money to cure my mom. Defeat a World Boss. That was it.
Now things are complicated and messy and I feel myself being pulled in so many directions at once. I need to help Val Helena to save Becky, I need to help Diana to save Storm wall, I need to help my brother to save Citadel. And now I need to help Aiko to… do who knows what?
It’s enough to almost make me wish I hadn’t come here. To have been selfish and just stayed in the Shards to save my mom and go back to the simple life of mining with Gilly. I know that it’s all impossible, but given the circumstances, the bliss of ignorance sounds pretty good right about now.
Val Helena was right. Once I made that decision to leave the Shards, everything did change and not all of it for the better. If Mom were here, I’d tell her everything right now. The whole truth right from the beginning and ask her what I should do. She was always so good at breaking things down simply and making the right answer clear.
A gut-wrenching sob comes from nowhere as I think about her more and more. My mom…alone in the hab, perhaps wondering if I’m alive or dead. It all feels like too much and I almost want to just give up and go back home. I wipe my eyes and choke back another sob as tears begin to flow. I shouldn’t be crying like this. But just like with Braxus, I simply can’t help it. It’s how I’m built. Maybe Aiko was right, maybe I am just a stupid little kid. Maybe I shouldn’t be here at all.
A bird chirps and lands on my shoulder.
It startles me at first, but then I recognize it as one of Wilbur’s pigeons. Great…one more responsibility I’ve picked up out here. I sniff back my tears and cradle the cooing bird in my hand before removing the small leather capsule strapped to its leg. Popping it open, I find a scroll within and read the latest updates on Brookrun. It lifts my spirits a little, but not much. The mine shaft access is complete as is the forge, and the new instalments Gilly added have begun production. I think back to Gilly again and wonder if she’s okay. She’s probably worried sick about me too.
I look at the pigeon in my palm and get an idea. Pulling up my HUD for town administration I check on the homing pigeon and search through the options for sending it back. The default is set to Wilbur, but I enter Gilly’s name as town administrator and it accepts!
All right!
I can send her a message now. I can let her know I’m okay!
I turn over the paper and begin sending my message. It’s a bit like sending a PM only the words appear on the paper as if by nano printer.
Gilly!
I’m okay! Both Aiko and I made it out of Stormwall. Aiko says she has something to do before we can meet up with you again. I’m not sure what, but I’m hoping it won’t take too long. Please keep heading west and get as far away from Stormwall as you can. We’ll meet at the entrance to the Wilds as planned. We can keep in touch by sending the pigeon back and forth between us. Use your HUD to send it back to me and not Wilbur. How is everyone else?
I really miss you. I hope we meet up soon.
Love,
Reece
“Don’t tell me you’re over there writing some love letter,” Aiko says, suddenly awake and staring right at me. “I heard you crying your eyes out. What happened? Did your little girl friend dump you?”
Embarrassment flushes my face red hot as Aiko lets out one of her condescending laughs. I bite my lip, wanting to curse her to the ground, but then I see her countenance change, becoming perplexed and concerned almost. “Whoa, take the murder out of your eyes, kid. It was just a joke.” And then her words soften. “Are you okay?”
The last thing I need from Aiko is her pity.
“I’m fine,” I say sharply and jump down from the tree, more to hide my embarrassment from her than anything else. I release the pigeon. “Let’s just get going so I can get back to the others.”
I walk away from her to the top of the knoll and then stare out at the mountains in the distance, watching as the small bird takes flight. In the early morning light I can just make out Stormwall. The gates are open and there are masses of people outside, both North and South. At least I think they’re people. I’m really too far away and the light too weak to make out any more detail than that. What was Braxus up to?
But then I stop myself. I can’t keep obsessing about Braxus. Can’t keep going back a
nd thinking about my decision not to kill him and its consequences. I’ll never be able to focus on my true mission if my mind keeps going back there. I need to do things one step at a time. Get to the Vale, save Citadel, save my mom. That’s what’s important to me. Braxus and Diana would have to wait.
My stomach sours even as I think it. But it’s what I have to do right now. To get past the guilt. To move on. And maybe to stall on doing what I know I still can’t do yet.
I look back to Aiko who’s still lounging in the tree. “You ready?”
She releases a sigh as she slips from the branches and lands gracefully in the tall grass. “Fine, pretty boy, let’s go. But I need some breakfast first.”
* * *
After materializing some dried fruit and nuts from our inventory we set off on our trek through the forest. The air is still cool and our breath frosts in the growing morning light as we make our way through ever thickening oaks and willows. We’re following a trail of some sort, I think. But Aiko seems to know where she’s going and presses on dauntless, so I don’t question her sense of direction. It feels like we’re headed south a bit and the forest grows denser by the hour.
“So where are we going?” I ask her by mid-morning, the sun now strong and shimmering through the treetop canopy and creating intricate patterns on the forest floor. “And how long is whatever it is we’re doing going to take?”
Aiko doesn’t answer right away due to the fist-full of trail mix she just shoved into her mouth. I wait for her to finish chewing and swallow before she finally says: “We’re headed to the Silken Hollow to kill a witch spider.”
I stop dead in my tracks. “A what?”
She pauses and gives me an eye roll as she looks over her shoulder at me. “Did I stutter?”
“What the heck is a witch spider?” It sounds dangerous and creepy. And dangerous. “We got other places to be, you know? Do we really have time for this?”
She starts off again. “Trust me, for what we have to do this will be well worth it.”
