The Ruins of Anthalas (The Ember War Saga Book 2)

by Richard Fox

  “So this planet is exactly the way the Xaros found it?”

  “That’s right. Fascinating, isn’t it?”

  “Or horrifying, depends which side of annihilation you’re on. How’s the armor?”

  Lowenn rolled her shoulders and tried to hike up her leg armor. “The atmosphere controls are fine, better than breathing this hundred percent humidity, hundred-degree air. The augmetics make it feel like I’m not wearing fifty pounds of armor and make carrying this thing,” she raised her rifle slightly, “not that bad. The suit chafes. Is there some way to scratch my back?”

  “The suit will fit you better the more you wear it, and there’s no way to scratch your back.”

  “Damn lowest bidders,” Lowenn said.

  ****

  Elias slammed into the deck, his weapon-bearing arms up and ready. Floodlights flipped up from his shoulders and the top of his armored helm. Light poured forth, illuminating a wide passageway just tall enough that Elias could walk upright. Pipes marked with loops and swirls ran along the ceiling next to a wide air vent.

  Elias took three steps away from his landing point, the magnetic linings keeping him secure against the deck. Bodel landed behind him, the light from his suit adding to the glow around them. Kallen and the Karigole weren’t far behind.

  “No gravity, no air or temperature regulation,” Kallen said.

  “Hard vacuum is an effective preservation medium—for nonorganic material, that is,” Lafayette said.

  “You saying this ship is in mothballs?” Bodel asked.

  “That would appear to be the case. Now … let me read the signs,” Lafayette pushed off from the deck and floated toward the ceiling. He ran has metal fingertips over a brass panel stamped against a pipe.

  “Water, air … and power. How odd, I’ve never seen construction with the three so close together. The second and third order effects of a rupture in any of these lines … it just isn’t safe.” He tugged at the corner of a label plate and it came free. “I don’t know if it’s age, but this construction is shoddy. The pipes look cast, not additive manufacturing like from a 3D printing facility.”

  “You said ‘power.’ We can follow that back to an engine room?” Elias asked.

  “I believe so.” Lafayette pointed down the passageway. “That way.”

  The armor’s footsteps were heavy as they had to lock against the deck with each step. Lafayette preferred to float along, pushing against the bulkheads or grabbing a handhold along the pipes to propel him along.

  Kallen stepped around an intersection and her gauss cannon arm snapped up.

  “Got a body,” she said.

  A Shanishol bobbed against the ceiling, its bare skin desiccated and shriveled like a dry corn husk. Its bare hands, feet and head—once neon blue—had faded to gray. The ratty jumpsuit it wore looked too small for the Shanishol wearing it, with torn patches and portions ground threadbare from friction.

  Elias grabbed the body with two fingers and tossed it toward the deck. A stiff arm snapped at the forearm as it bounced off.

  “Oops,” Elias said.

  Lafayette put a boot against the corpse chest and pushed it gently to the ground.

  “Well?” Bodel asked.

  “He’s dead,” Lafayette said.

  “So glad we brought you. Who knows where we’d be right now without your powerful skills of observation,” Kallen quipped.

  “Have you considered why he died and who left him in here?” Lafayette asked. “Based on what the Alliance’s probes picked up on this civilization before the Xaros found them, the Shanishol took great care of their dead. Leaving a body out like this is uncharacteristic … and he isn’t decomposed beyond moisture loss. He could have died from vacuum exposure.”

  “Maybe there’s a hull breach we don’t know about,” Kallen said.

  “Anyone else starting to get a bad feeling about this?” Bodel asked.

  “What’s the matter, Hans? Iron heart but lily liver?” Kallen gave Bodel a little shove.

  “Piss off, you know I don’t like ghost ships,” Bodel knocked Kallen’s hand away.

  “Ooo,” Kallen’s voice rose, “look everyone, the ten-foot-tall killing machine is afraid of ghost cooties.”

  “Piss. Off!”

  “Hey!” Elias stomped a heel against the deck. “Quit acting like Marines. Focus. Both of you.”

  “The engineering section is ahead,” Lafayette said. He lifted the Shanishol body up and pushed it away.

  The passageway ended, opening up into a wide platform. Elias focused his lamps into tight beams of light and swept them across the platform. The light ran over a round hatchway twice as tall as any of the Iron Hearts. Lengths of metal bars had been jammed into hinges on the doorframe and welded over the seals.

  “Looks like a barricade,” Bodel said. “That should be one of the connecting passageways to the other cubes.”

  “Found engineering,” Kallen said.

  Elias brought his beams around to line up with hers. There was a double set of doors, a brass panel bearing golden Shanishol script across the top. But there was more, something else that sent a chill down Elias’s spine. A swath of red paint passed through the spotlights and over the side of the doors. Elias lifted his lights and opened them wider.

  Giant Shanishol letters in the same red covered a wall several stories tall and almost as wide as a destroyer.

  “Put your spotlights to the upper left and bring them across,” Lafayette said. “So I can read it.

  The Iron Hearts did as asked.

  “‘The ... prophet … is … false.’ How odd,” Lafayette said.

  “They wanted everyone to know it, too,” Elias said. He walked over to the doors and dug his fingertips into the metal and shoved it aside. “Come on.”

  Elias ducked beneath the doorframe and swept a light mounted next to his gauss cannons over the floor. A walkway led into darkness.

  “Sure, why not?” he muttered. He traced his light down the walkway and found a silver frame in the shape of a globe, spars of sparkling metal running up and around it like lines of latitude and longitude.

  Tremors went through the walkway as Elias walked toward the globe. He stopped and looked back at the entrance. Kallen was on his side of the door, looking at a bank of dead control panels with Lafayette.

  “This isn’t that sturdy,” Elias said. “Bodel, stay on the other side and keep an eye out.”

  “No problem,” Bodel said.

  The globe shimmered where Elias’s light touched it, seeming to pull light into it as he ran his spotlights up toward a ceiling that his lights couldn’t uncover.

  Lafayette flew over and set down next to Elias. He took a data wand from his armor and touched it to the metal.

  “Omnium?” Elias asked.

  “It is indeed. The control panels around the wall are fried out. Perhaps there’s something in the base of this lattice we might find useful,” he said.

  Lafayette bent over and gray hands reached through the darkness toward him.

  Elias swung over Lafayette’s body and smashed aside something that crumbled beneath his blow.

  “Contact!” Elias set his lights to full power and wide angles and lit all the space around him. A Shanishol corpse, spinning like a top from Elias’s strike, bumped into another floating body. And another. And another.

  “Sweet mother of God,” Kallen said.

  Elias looked up and saw hundreds of bodies floating around them. Men, women and children Shanishol, all ashen faced, their mouths locked open in a final gasp for breath. Elias felt a stab of fear in his guts and hated the reminder of the inherent weakness of his body.

  “A revolt, perhaps?” Lafayette said. He opened a panel in the floor and swept a small light over the wires he found. “This cube broke off from the rest of the ship. The captain decided to suffocate them all instead of shoot his way in and risk damaging an engine. Reasonable.”

  “You’re awful calm,” Elias said. He pushed away anoth
er body that rose up from beneath the walkway.

  “You’ve been a soldier for a while. You haven’t seen worse?”

  “You ever seen a pleasant battlefield?”

  “No.” Lafayette fished out a tag from within the open panel and tapped a finger against his face plate. “This electrical work is primitive, lacking several engineering advancements we normally see. They aren’t even using fiber optics. But I wonder ….”

  The Karigole pushed off into the air and grabbed a wrung at the top of a safety fence and swung beneath the platform.

  “Eureka! That’s the word humans use for discovery, correct?” Lafayette said. “I always thought the ‘that’s funny’ were the most important in science, but I guess humans have different standards.”

  Elias keyed his jump pack to get him in the air then used thrusters on his forearms to push him down. Below the walkway and underneath the platform holding the giant globe was a machine that looked like a rotten fang, the tip pointing away from the globe. The fang, much too large to get through the doors into the engine room or the passageway to the other cubes, was made of the same metal as the globe, but patterns swirled across the surface, just like the carapace on a Xaros drone.

  Elias raised his weapons and a hand retracted into the forearm housing, a spike snapping out to replace the hand. His feet hit a deck plate and locked against it.

  “This is what we’re here for,” Lafayette said.

  “What is it? Sleeping Xaros?” Elias asked.

  “No, don’t be ridiculous. It’s an Omnium reactor. The lattice above must be a containment field.” Lafayette flit between control stations around the edge of the room surrounding the reactor.

  “How do you know that?” Elias asked.

  “Because this,” Lafayette said, reaching out and tapping his fingers against a control station covered in buttons and levers, “is labeled ‘Reactor Control’ in Shanishol.”

  “You just … read it?”

  “Not everything has to be difficult. But what will be difficult is getting the reactor out of here. The cube was built around the reactor—the reactor wasn’t installed into the cube,” Lafayette said.

  “You’re asking the wrong guy, Lafayette. I’m a fighter, not an engineer.”

  “I know what we’ll need. But we need support from the Breitenfeld. Do you know an engineer skilled with explosives who has something of a death wish?” Lafayette asked.

  “Let’s get out of this cube and get a line of sight on the buoys. As for your engineer, I have someone in mind.”

  ****

  Hours later, the Marines stopped in a patch of boulders not far from rising hills at the base of the mountains. Hale ordered a rest break, sending Cortaro and Yarrow scouting ahead.

  Hale took a food pouch from his pack and raised his visor. The heat hit his exposed skin and he winced as his pores went into overdrive, starting to sweat. He opened the food pouch and shook out the tube of paste that constituted the main meal. Tiny black letters on the dark green label promised tuna with noodle flavor. Field rations were a combination of ultra-dense nutrients and carbohydrates mixed with appetite suppressors. One tube the size of two of his fingers would, theoretically, get him through a day under combat conditions.

  “Ugh, what is this, spackle?” Lowenn asked as she sniffed at her tube.

  “Chicken cacciatore,” Standish said, his mouth half-full of paste. “You want my beef stew?”

  “No, I want food that won’t look the same going out as it does on the way in,” she said.

  Bailey spat out a mouthful of water and laughed. “Sir, I like this one. Can we keep her?”

  Hale, his appetite lessened by Lowenn’s metaphor but still hungry, sucked on the tube and swallowed the bland paste that had the consistency of applesauce.

  Steuben, who’d volunteered to keep watch, was perched against one of the boulders, his head rotating nearly one hundred and eighty degrees on his neck as he scanned their perimeter.

  “Hey, Steuben,” Bailey said, “what’re you going to eat?”

  “We do not eat while in battle. My body maintains everything I need for several weeks of sustained—” The alien moved like lightning, his hand shooting toward Bailey, a glint of metal caught in the air.

  Bailey rolled to the side and fumbled with her gauss carbine.

  “Oye! What the hell are you playing at?”

  “Forgive me.” Steuben leapt from the boulder and landed with the grace of a cat near where Bailey had been sitting. He reached into the tall grass and picked up his knife. An insect that looked like a nightmare version of a caterpillar the size of Hale’s forearm writhed on the tip of the knife. Blue blood seeped down the blade.

  Marines scrambled to their feet and kicked at the grass around them.

  “It was trying to drink the water you’d spat out,” Steuben said. He brought the insect close to his nose and sniffed at it. Steuben opened his mouth, and his forked tongue licked away a bit of blood.

  “Steuben,” Hale said “I’m not sure if you should—”

  The Karigole’s jaws distended and a maw of fanged teeth bit the insect in half. Dark blood spurted from the carcass and a smell like wet garbage filled the air. Marines groaned and protested. Lowenn dry heaved.

  Steuben chewed, his mouth muffling the sound of cracking chitin. He held the blade that still impaled the squirming remnants out to Hale.

  “It’s fresh. Not bad,” Steuben said.

  Hale looked away and shook his head.

  “Why, Steuben? Why would you eat that?” Orozco asked.

  “You’re the one eating extruded plant matter full of pharmaceuticals and designed to remain edible after being buried for a century, but I’m the one who must explain myself?” Steuben wrapped his lips around the insect and sucked it into his mouth.

  “Sir!” Gunney Cortaro ran into the boulder field, Yarrow right behind him. “Sir, you’ll want to see this. Looks like …Steuben, what the hell is in your mouth?”

  Steuben’s jaw crunched down on the insect, which cracked like he was eating a whole snow crab.

  “Show me,” Hale finished the last of his paste and stuck the empty tube in his pack. They’d leave no trash for anyone, or anything, to find later.

  ****

  It looked like a corral, one meant for livestock two or three times the size of cattle. Wooden posts every few feet were strung with thin brass-colored wires. Wooden beams ran across the top of the corral, and the same brass wire was looped over the top in swirls that swung gently in the breeze. Within, the dried-out remnants of a creek that had once ran through the corral cut a slight depression through the enclosure.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Cortaro said to the Marines as they approached.

  The posts were sunk into something that looked like dried concrete. Tiny craters covered the surface like air had bubbled and leaked up while the material was still being poured. The area within the corral was almost the size of a football field, the ground nothing but a sea of grayish mud.

  Hale stopped a little beyond arm’s distance and looked at the ground. Grass and ferns stopped several inches from the corral; a neat line ran around the perimeter that no grass had encroached beyond. He looked up at the fence, which towered almost three times his height.

  “Standish,” Hale said, “you grew up on ranch, right? This look familiar?”

  “Well, sir, thing about getting cows in and out of pens, you got to have a gate. I don’t see one here,” Standish said.

  “Looks like the concentration camps the Chinese set up after they captured Darwin,” Bailey said.

  “It’s too tall,” Lowenn said. “The gravity here is almost Earth standard. Local animals bred for food or labor shouldn’t be able to jump over anything even half as high.”

  “There’s a lot to this planet we haven’t seen yet,” Hale said.

  “Great,” Standish said. “Giant cow-sized rabbits that want to eat my face.”

  “The little one is right,” Steuben said
. He picked up a rotting log and tossed it at the fence. The brass wires cut through the log without effort, frictionless. Lumps of wood plopped into the mud. “Only intelligent species, those that knew the danger of those wires, would be dissuaded from pressing against it.”

  “I said no touching!” Cortaro yelled. “If there’s an alarm, we are done. Don’t you get that?”

  “My apologies. I keep forgetting how useless your noses are. I can smell the remnants of birds and insects along the wires. Animals strike this fence regularly. If I was monitoring this place, I wouldn’t care to investigate every single disturbance,” Steuben said.

  “How about you let us know before you do something like that?” Hale asked.

  Steuben clicked his teeth together twice, Karigole body language for OK.

  Lowenn tapped at the side of her visor, taking pictures with her armor’s camera. “I don’t understand why the Shanishol would need something like this. Or ….” She leaned close to one of the posts. “This is wood, local wood by the looks of it. It doesn’t look treated or refined at all, and it’s sunk in concrete that looks almost primitive.”

  “What’s your point?” Torni asked.

  “The Xaros arrived here thousands of years ago. This structure must predate that. How can this wood not have rotted away?”

  Wind whistled over the wires, moaning like a long-lost ghost.

  “Not the answers we’re here for,” Hale said. A raindrop hit his gauss rifle with a smack. He looked up, and a red drop spattered against his visor. Red rain sprinkled around them, coating their armor with a pink film.

  “Yarrow, tell me this isn’t blood,” Standish said.

  “Nope,” Yarrow pressed the tip of a data wand attached to his forearm rig into a drop of rain. “It’s plain old water. Must be some dirt or something in the droplet that’s giving it the coloration.”

  “Let’s go. We’ll skirt around the enclosure. Mark the location. We could use this as an extraction site in an emergency,” Hale said.