Hatchling

by Chris Fox

“But not along the ground,” I pointed out, then knelt to show her what I meant. “See this? This corridor must see a lot of traffic, or the spiders would web it. They haven’t in a long time, so those webs must not be worth putting up. I don’t think you’re wrong about us being near some sort of hive. Rava, do you want to range ahead a bit and see if you can find a branching corridor, or a way to another level that isn’t crawling?”

  Rava gave a nod, then trotted silently off into the darkness. I lost sight of her more quickly than expected, and blinked a few times as the HUD updated her profile. The armor superimposed an outline of a dark metal that coated her entire skeleton, which wasn’t unusual for anyone with a cyber harness.

  What was unusual was the metrics the armor ascribed to the metal. Magical dampening? Did that make her more resistant to spells? Interesting, and potentially useful information. I’d have to ask her when she got back. I didn’t know much about cyberware, or how it functioned.

  I turned to the rest of the squad. “Everyone get close, and watch the ground and walls behind us. I want to make sure we detect spiders as far out as possible.”

  Nods all around, and the group retreated into a compressed knot with all our backs to each other. The dim illumination made every shadow crawl, though when you looked more closely you saw nothing more than a few wayward spiders, nothing like the horde that had followed us.

  I tensed when I heard crunching from the direction Rava had come, but eased when my sister came trotting into view, her leathers nearly invisible in the darkness. She came up to our knot, and licked her lips before speaking.

  “One corridor is webbed off,” she whispered, then darted a glance over her shoulder as if fearing something were behind her. “Something was…aware of me. I can’t describe what it was like. But it didn’t like me. At all. It wanted me gone. Jerek, what is this place? I thought it was a ship. Why are there spiders, and drakes, and…depths, I don’t know what else? It’s like we stepped into Horror Dreadnaught.”

  Briff shivered beside me, an odd reaction from a dragon. His wings bunched up close to his back. “I don’t like survival games. I don’t want to be trapped in one. Jer, how are we going to get off the ship? The Remora needs an engine, and we don’t know anything about this place.”

  He wasn’t wrong. I didn’t have a solution, nor did I have the luxury of time to come up with a plan. We needed to keep moving. Of that I was certain.

  “Let’s take it one step at a time,” I decided aloud. My gaze landed on my father, and I realized I could see the whites of his eyes, like a stallion about to bolt. “This isn’t as bad as it appears. This ship is massive. We just need to navigate around the spiders, and find a place where we can catch our breaths. Worst case scenario I could always missive Nara or Frit, but I don’t know if they’ll come, or if we even want them to. Let’s solve this on our own, if we can.”

  Rava gave a confident nod, and the tension bled from her. She even smiled, and in that moment I saw my father in her. “All right then, I’ll get back on point.”

  We moved out in silence. My little speech seemed to have galvanized people, and I have to admit I liked the way Vee and Kurz were looking at me. There was respect there, and maybe something more from Vee.

  We prowled up the corridor Rava had explored, and as promised the webbing thickened, though not to any sort of dangerous level. Dozens of tiny spiders moved on the webs, but again they seemed to lack the directed consciousness we’d seen from the swarm that had killed the arachnidrake.

  That raised so many questions, but until I had more data there were no answers.

  We finally reached a four-way intersection, and the corridor to our right was completely barred with webbing. Spiders scuttled in and out of the mass, but there was barely enough room for the small ones. At least nothing large could come out of that corridor.

  That left three directions to choose from. I nodded at Rava to go straight, and she trotted silently up that corridor. The rest of us followed, and after about a hundred meters the webbing began to thin.

  We reached another corridor, where the webbing was thicker. Rava turned to me, and I shook my head no. It wasn’t worth risking. We backtracked, and tried another corridor.

  The process was exhausting, but two hours later we still hadn’t run into a serious threat, and must have covered several kilometers of ground.

  “Jerek,” Briff called suddenly.

  I paused and turned. It wasn’t hard to guess what had drawn his attention. We’d passed a narrow doorway shrouded in darkness. Briff disappeared inside.

  “Rava, Dad, follow Briff,” I ordered. “Vee, Kurz, watch the door please.”

  We sprang into motion, and I followed my team inside. The doorway spilled into a wide room about thirty meters across. It was broken up by floating tables, with a number of unfamiliar apparatuses on them. Some sort of workshop?

  Shelving ran along the back wall, and when I saw what they were covered with I began to salivate. “Those are knowledge scales!”

  I sprinted across the room, and skidded to a halt at the base of the closest shelf. There were easily fifty scales on this shelf alone. Priceless, and filled to the brim with ancient knowledge.

  “We. Are. RICH!” my father yelled as he pumped a fist in the air. “Every library on Kemet—”

  “Kemet no longer exists,” Kurz broke in, smothering the mood. I glanced back to find the soulcatcher standing in the doorway. I guess technically he was guarding it, though really that fell on his sister, who still stood outside.

  “The money is nice, but it’s about more than that,” I pointed out. “This is about finding a way off the ship. This room is some sort of workshop. These knowledge scales are probably some sort of reference library for whoever worked here. If we explore them we can learn more about the ship. That may tell us where we can locate an engine, and since this place is on the way back to the Remora we’ll only take what we want to carry, and come back for the rest.”

  My father gave a grudging nod, but still zoomed to the far shelf and began pocketing scales. I couldn’t blame him. We’d lived in poverty ever since Mom had left, and this was enough wealth to retire on any world in the sector. Maybe for all of us.

  Only then did I realize that there was precisely one person in my squad who understood the significance, and I’d asked him to stand guard. “Briff, would you mind trading places with Kurz so he can help me look through these scales?”

  “Of course, Jer.” He seemed relieved, and squeezed his bulk through the narrow doorway to stand with Vee.

  That left me as an untended kid in a candy store. I love knowledge, and there was every possibility these things had been sitting here for ten millennia or more. Who knew what glimpses into the past they would offer?

  I approached the shelf and looked for any sort of identifying marks that might tell me which scales were grouped and why. There was nothing.

  “Wait,” I murmured to myself. “What about the armor?” I grinned. “Guardian, can you hear me?”

  Nothing. I waited a few more moments to be sure, but there was no response.

  Okay, not the end of the world. I fed a bit of fire to the armor and asked it to categorize the scales, just to see what it would make of them.

  Each scale adopted a bar directly underneath it, most of those bars nearly filled, though a few were closer to the halfway mark. Was that their capacity for storage?

  I reached for the scale on the far left. There was no reason to expect that whoever’d made these organized them the same way we did on Kemet, but in the absence of anything else to try I figured it was worth a shot.

  The moment my gauntlet brushed the scale it flared to life, and an illusion of a disembodied female Wyrm head appeared over it. “Ego sum Thekmet. Quomoo protest his mihi ministrant?”

  “Oh, thank the Maker.” I relaxed, just a hair. Finally something going our way. The language was ancient draconic. Pure, and unaltered, and easy for me to converse in. “Okay, Thekmet, can you give
me a catalog of your relevant contents?”

  The Wyrm’s eyes flashed, and lines of scrolling text appeared in the air all around it. They were grouped into dozens of topics. Most seemed centered around a single topic, with an icon to represent the contents.

  “You’ve found something far more interesting than I have.” Kurz’s voice startled me, and I spun to find him staring at the illusion my knowledge scale had conjured. “I believe we are looking at a resource map.”

  I blinked a few times as I turned back to the map and tried to find what he meant. It wasn’t until I spotted a familiar icon, one corresponding to the Catalyst we called Sanctuary. I looked closely at the other icons, and realized they must all be Catalysts. That was what Kurz meant. Magical resources.

  “And this room….” I spun to the tables, filled with apparatuses I didn’t recognize. Golden tools in all shapes and sizes, even a boomerang, of all things. “This is an artificing chamber. Magic items were made here. And this is a research library….” I spun back to Thekmet. “Can you display the location of every Catalyst in the galaxy?”

  A map popped up, and hundreds of dots flared to life all over the Milky Way.

  “Well, shit,” my father muttered, gaping at the map. “I don’t know if that’s worth nineteen billion credits, but I bet that will fetch a pretty penny.”

  I grinned back at Thekmet. Who knew what else the room contained?

  9

  I rubbed at my eyes, then leaned back against the wall. I’d been sitting for hours, long after the rest of the squad had gone to sleep. The current knowledge scale detailed the geopolitical climate of the day. It broke down the galaxy by the dragonflights that dominated that area, and if it was accurate, then our sector used to be primarily air, earth, and water Wyrms. That part tracked, as they were more common on Kemet, though all eight were represented.

  What had happened to the dragonflights, and why? That part was maddening, because all the knowledge these scales contained took place before the battle that had marooned my ancestors here. There wasn’t even a clue as to what had driven them here, and from what I could see there wasn’t a force in the galaxy that could have challenged them.

  So what had happened? If I could have reached the Guardian, I bet he’d have had a lot to say about it, and now I actually had some context to understand his perspective.

  “Are you still at it?” Vee’s whisper was quiet, but it made me jump, and the knowledge scale clattered to the floor with a metallic ring, extinguishing the illusion it had been displaying.

  Vee moved to join me against the wall, and slid down next to me, her shoulder touching mine. “If you don’t sleep, you won’t be able to lead us. Exhausted minds make mistakes.”

  Her scent penetrated the mind fog, and I blinked away all the extraneous thoughts. “You’re right. I wish I could say I was up because I can’t sleep, but to be honest…nothing like this has been discovered. Ever, to my knowledge. This data doesn’t exist in our sector. Not even Shaya or Ternus have it, or Virkon, or any of the others.”

  “That’s a good thing, yes? The treasure map is ours and ours alone.” She stifled a yawn with one hand that made the gauntlet on her environmental armor creak. It was ancient, but she seemed to love it.

  “Definitely a good thing.” I looked up at the ceiling as a distraction. “The question is…nineteen billion credits good? I don’t think so. This might make us rich personally, if we can find someone to sell it to who won’t kill us and take it. I don’t think it solves our problem though. We need something bigger.”

  “Huh, huh.” The words came from Rava’s bedroll, a couple meters away. I’d thought she’d been asleep. Rava rolled over with a mischievous smile. “I bet you want to give her—yeah, I got nothing involving ‘bigger’. I’m more interested in the ‘we get rich’ part. This archive. These scales. Can we hold them back and sell them as a crew?”

  “That’s the plan,” I gave back immediately, without thinking. These people were my crew. My family. “If we can make it back to the Word of Xal, or all the way to Shaya, then we could probably get rich. I don’t like abandoning the fleet though.”

  “It’s not our choice yet,” Vee pointed out. She rested a hand on my shoulder. “We have one task. Find a priceless treasure. If we happen upon a spelldrive, or a way to fix the Remora, all the better. If not, then you will find another way. That is why you are captain. No one else can, Jerek.”

  Rava’s snort made it clear what she thought of that, which was probably a good thing as otherwise Vee was going to inflate my ego to unmanageable levels.

  “I did learn a bit about this ship.” I nodded at the numbers rune-etched onto the wall. “Draconic numbers give the range as part of the number. If you have, say, the number 7, out of, say, nine total numbers, it will be spelled 7 of 9. We’re on the 409th level…out of twelve hundred.”

  “Clever.” Vee offered a smile that made me wish we were alone. She tucked her ponytail into her armor, then plucked her helmet from against the wall. “We make for the center of the ship then?”

  “That seems the best plan.” I glanced at the others to find Kurz sleepily packing his bedroll, and Briff standing with a yawn and a stretch of his battle-scarred wings. They made him even more intimidating, though he seemed to have no idea, of course. “If I’m oriented correctly we want to move down the corridor to the left. That will take us to a main access tunnel, which leads to the elevators on this level. From there if we can find a functioning lift maybe we can maneuver down to the six-hundredth level and have a look around.”

  We fell into formation with Rava sleepily taking point. No one mentioned breakfast, which with Briff was never a good sign. They all knew how little rations we had. They’d have been right to blame me for not asking them to grab the food bars as we left, though in my defense we’d been in a bit of a hurry.

  “Jerek,” Rava called, a bit louder than I’d have liked.

  She stood about ten meters ahead, at a T junction. Two of the three corridors were walled off with webbing. The last was completely bereft of webs or spiders. I crept up to join her, and studied the one available corridor. It led the exact opposite direction.

  I faced the way we needed to go, and studied the webbing. A knot of frustration had been growing for a while now, and it had begun to pulse into true anger. We were being herded.

  “We’re going this way.” I nodded at the corridor on the right. “Just let me make a hole first.”

  This was my chance to show off, and I took full advantage. I poured fire into my fists, then added a layer of void. I amped the magnitude as high as I could, then flung my spell at the webbing.

  A cone of purple-tinged flame boiled into the corridor. Everything it touched burst with a tiny pop, the remains consumed by the void a moment later. When the spell cleared, the first fifteen meters of the corridor were cleared.

  There’d been a chance that the entire corridor was webbed, but that seemed like a waste of spider-power, if I were the head arachnid. Thankfully it wasn’t. There was some webbing beyond, thick ropy strands, but they ran along the ceilings and the right wall.

  “Briff, you’re up.” I nodded back to the hatchling. “Take point. If it crawls I want it incinerated with that plasma thing you do.”

  “Jer,” Briff hissed in a wounded whisper. “You know about my…inability.”

  “That was years ago,” I countered, then nodded up the corridor. “This is your chance to redeem yourself. You’re not a second year asked to fill in for a fourth year. You’re a badass Wyrm who’s part of a badass squad. Handle it. I know you can.”

  Briff straightened. Then he gave one of those too-toothy grins. “You’re right, Captain.” He bounded up the corridor, then paused before the first large cluster of webbing.

  A swarm of dark spiders flowed from what must be some sort of nest in the wall. Hundreds of fat black spiders with angry red markings swarmed toward the hatchling.

  “You got this, man.” Rava moved to stand just b
ehind the hatchling. “I’m not even a little worried.”

  “I am.” Briff’s eyes widened, and he glanced between Rava’s leather-clad form and the spiders.

  Then his chest swelled like a bellows, and his neck elongated a good half meter. His whole body contracted, and then expelled a ball of gold-white plasma that splattered into the mass of spiders.

  Hundreds died with tiny inhuman shrieks, and the rest spun as one, racing back into the crack in the wall where their nest lay.

  Briff turned and offered us a smile. “Looks like it’s clear.”

  I trotted up and clapped my friend on the wing. “Great work. Keep moving, bud. Rava, pick off anything that gets past him. When you run out of grenades let me know and you can have mine.”

  We pushed up the corridor with Briff roasting swarms, and Rava picking off stragglers with enthusiastically hurled grenades. She only had to use two by the time the corridor spilled into a larger room.

  That room was swathed in patches of webbing, but only in the occasional corner. Most of the floor space was covered by pulsing egg sacs of varying sizes. The largest towered over our heads, and nearly brushed the shadowed ceiling.

  “Huh,” Briff commented. “At least we found the elevators.”

  He was right. Four sets of double doors stood on the opposite side of the room…beyond the eggs.

  10

  I raised both hands defensively before me, though none of the egg sacs had done anything more than pulse disgustingly. The squad tensed all around me, and Briff stepped ahead of us protectively, which made me love the hatchling even more.

  “We’re making for those elevators,” I decided into the comm. Everyone had their helmets on. Depths, I might never take mine off again. “Briff, make a path. Don’t hit any egg sacs unless you see a—”

  I trailed off and froze, one foot still in the air, about to follow Briff into the egg chamber. Three of the large eggs had begun to tremble violently, their entire mass quivering…as if something inside were suddenly seeking a way out.