Ember's Echo (The Nimbus Collection Book 2)

by D. C. Clemens

  ~

  9 December 3131 S.E. – A troubled Dr. Powell came to me not long after I awoke from my mandatory rest period imposed upon me by my lovely wife—it is truly a blessing we get to work together, and without her I would already have been a wreck from lack of sleep. Anyway, Dr. Powell went on to explain that, after careful study of the solar storm data, he uncovered an unusual energy signature underlying the storms expected interference just before all the instruments became too scrambled to detect anything more. He only has a small sample of this layered signature, but he remains confident enough to say that this can’t possibly be natural. He believes something or someone deliberately used the solar storm to cover for an artificial jamming signal and that this had to be the real reason our equipment was affected so significantly.

  Admittedly, I could not help but be a little skeptical. If someone was indeed disrupting our communications, then why only do it during a transient solar storm? And why haven’t they gone ahead and done more than that? I withheld these misgivings to myself. I told him to inform Mr. Harris of his findings, but he replied that he already had. The officer apparently didn’t seem worried, or as worried as he would’ve liked him to be. Hoping to put him at ease, I’ve asked him to keep me updated and to do what he thought best under his own prerogative, but that there simply wasn’t enough information to take any more precautions than we were already implementing. He reluctantly stated that he couldn’t say for certain that any danger was imminent and that there was still a possibility (a strong one, in my mind) that this was an unknown natural phenomenon. Still, he left observably vexed.

  ~

  12 December 3131 S.E. – Mr. Harris made an odd appeal of me earlier today. He informed me that he was going to borrow a shuttle and take his subordinates to run through some training drills where they wouldn’t disturb us. While I didn’t quite understand the need, after some thought, I sanctioned it. Mr. Harris had never asked for anything before without some merit, so I decided that he must have seen some troubled circumstance that I couldn’t foresee. In any event, it was a good idea to keep everyone sharp and, at the very least, occupied. However, what struck me more than anything else was how matter-of-factly he sounded when he made his petition. I wouldn’t say we had become friends, but in the short time we’ve known each other I thought I had pinned down his demeanor; unceremonious, boisterous, personable, and reliable. But he’s been distant and quiet as of late. It’s hopefully a passing mood. We do have a three year mission to face, after all.

  Update: I cannot for the life of me understand why, but Harris has just taken the shuttle to the Revel. He hasn’t responded to any of our hails.

  Update: By the Sacred! What’s going on?! Our cruiser is preparing to land and its current trajectory will have it right on top of us! This is absolute madness! It has to be Mr. Harris who is behind this, but I cannot think of a rational explanation as to why he would be doing this.

  Update: The ship landed adjacent our camp and we finally received a message from Harris. He has ordered everyone to gather at the main camp. I don’t know what’s happening, but something is obviously very wrong. Everyone is afraid and confused. Our communication relay is no longer working. Our techs believe it was sabotage.

  Update: I don’t have much time. A freak sandstorm just overtook the camp and I’m losing contact with our party. Harris and his people are still in the cruiser. Something is out there. Those of us who can will take our chances on the speeders and try to send out a distress signal. Sacred help us.

  End of log.

  Chapter Five

  We all procured a moment to think of an explanation to the processed words: epidemic, chaos, active, hum. It was Emory who was the first to chime in on the party line.

  “Can’t say any of this makes sense to me. Why would the security officer suddenly order the cruiser to land, wreck it, and then abandon it? This doesn’t fit anything I’ve experienced before. Though, so far, I’m the closest to winning.”

  “Orders, captain?” asked the lieutenant.

  “There are still no bodies here and we can’t pick up any of their microtech signatures,” replied Kiran. “We need to find them, or at least discover what exactly happened. Lieutenant, you’re with Briannika. Each of you grab a speeder and head to the city ruins. If they did indeed flee, they would likely try to hide out there. Emory, Fife, continue searching the camp for anything we missed. The rest of us will see if we can find anything else on this ship.”

  The fading footsteps of our captain headed for one of the two elevators at the center of the deck with the purpose of using one to make for the upper levels, which contained the inaptly named living quarters. Vasilissa and I went to the engineering deck located above the labs at the stern end of the ship. As Hardy had already described to some degree, the engineering deck was an absolute mess. The core in the half-moon shaped deck was sealed off by heavy blast doors to prevent that catastrophic malfunction, and the control panels and terminals were either shelled by gunfire or ripped apart by thermal detonators, going by the ashy residue the explosives left behind. However, there wasn’t a speck of blood anywhere and nothing to show who was once here.

  “Why waste a perfectly good ship?” I asked aloud.

  After taking a second to think, Vasilissa answered, “Someone didn’t want them to escape.”

  “Escape from what?”

  “That’s what’s worrying me.”

  It didn’t take long to wander through the rest of the ship’s passages and compartments, most of which did not share the same scene as the one we had left in the engine room. No items appeared misplaced or carelessly raided, only set down in mid-use, as if everything was expectedly waiting for their owners to return at any minute. Failing to find anything that could be considered an answer, we left the ship and made for the camp. There we joined the similarly unsuccessful Emory and Fife just as nightfall and her obedient stars were beginning its overthrow on this side of the world. Thanks to the thermal and night vision judiciously included in the optical nanotech in our eyes, natural darkness was no deterrence to our mission. In any case, our regular sight was still not made completely useless due to the unhindered light given off by Ember’s two full moons. Our larger group then embarked on the shuttle to aid in the search of the ruins.

  For half an hour we scanned the despondent city from above, observing sand-encrusted buildings that once were and others that still tried to be, until the lieutenant seized our attention on the comm link.

  “Captain, we think we found something. Here’s my feed.”

  Our group connected with Brent’s eyes, his vision being broadcasted to a microscreen being displayed within our eyes, a screen that supplanted only a small part of our actual sight and which merely required a minor shift of thought to observe it almost as clearly as Brent was seeing it. The lieutenant was facing a semi-buried, crumbling building of a brick façade, yet it did not seem to have been devoured as ruthlessly as those around it. Eight stories were still exposed above the world’s unrelenting siege and its own debris. The lieutenant fixated on a long shattered window, situated just a couple of feet above the gradually swelling ground. On a cracked edge to Brent’s right was a stain of parched blood. It was so faded and trifling, adding up to no more than five or six drops, that only their accompanied scout could have detected it with its sensitive sensors.

  “We’re sending in our scout to investigate further,” said Briannika.

  The orb of silver came forth when it heard its name called, gliding through the inflicted ingress, soon being swallowed by the darkness within. We switched our feeds to its senses. Caved by the narrow paths and crevices, only the whispering hum of the drifting scout could be heard as it made its way deeper inside. From a few fissures on the walls and ceiling, unsullied moonbeams beamed their way into some dusty corners, but shadows occupied most rooms, forcing the heavy lifting to be done by the green-tinted night sensors. What this building used to be was difficult to discern at first. Everyth
ing was extensively worn down and eaten by voracious time, including many sections of the floors and ceilings. I was certain even its original inhabitants would have failed to uncover its intentions. There was then a room that gave me reason to speculate. Outlined in a rectangle, six heavily rusted metal legs remained intact near a window, a lingering existence of an ancient bed. Several other rooms left comparable remnants of furniture.

  From just above the beset structure, our shuttle hovered and scanned the inside of the apparent apartment complex as best it could. The walls were fairly thick and made with a unique layer blend of brick, steel, and stone. This didn’t appear to be the case for a majority of the buildings surrounding it, leaving the impression that this category of building carried some great significance and was older than the rest. The invisible beams swept across the failing edifice, using the countless gaps, cracks, holes, and gashes to generate a detailed virtual map of the structure’s innards. However, there were still several spaces that remained dark and unknown. Hardy sent the scout-bot to move through these veiled places, seeing as the virtual map did offer any other points of note. Most of the unseen areas were near the bottom of the building and, as I was looking over the scans, I spotted a peculiar blackness spreading beneath what used to be the first floor. I requested for Hardy to explore this disguised place, which the captain permitted by saying nothing against it.

  When the mechanical eye arrived in the proposed area, entering a room more spacious than we had seen yet, the scout’s sharp lights exposed what must have been a long lobby desk in the corner of the room. Alongside this desk was a square orifice upon the floor, its lid left gaping, baring its secrets to those who looked. On closer inspection of the cellar entrance, we could see that the dust and sand had recently been disarranged by some scuff marks. On Captain Kiran’s cerebral orders, the scout was told to take the plunge. There was a ladder that journeyed down the artificial alcove, its metal rungs frayed and unstable looking, if not completely missing, but it only went down ten feet. The beginning of a long, narrow, concrete-lined tunnel laid at the bottom of its descent, with no knowledge of where it could lead. Even the combination of powerful lights and the extra visions the scout possessed was not enough to puncture the unfathomable darkness lumbering at the other end of the tunnel. Applying its short-range radar, our drifting pathfinder quickly revealed that this was not the only tunnel of its kind, discovering many different underpasses and scattered ladders with every emitted pulse. Despite centuries of neglect, it was remarkable how well the tunnel system had stayed relatively unbroken, feasibly facilitated by the almost nonexistent seismic activity on this planet.

  Some portions of the dust coated floor was cluttered with freshly made boot prints, some distinct, others smudged. Our mechanical ally moved down the preliminary trail, guided by the jumbled sets of prints, hovering past secondary pathways on each side, most leading to their own darkened riddles, if they weren’t made impassable by unplanned collapses, anyhow. It looked as if all the tunnels were connected to others, amassing to create a wild maze that would swallow lost souls into eternity. There was also the occasional room, most of them large and bare. Staining nearly everything was a yellowish decay, but whether it came from faded paint or a kind of mold was not yet clear.

  Suddenly, after traversing some two hundred yards down the rabbit hole, we found the first indications that abundant life was once present on this hollow world. There was a room to the right, doorless and spacious, where two slim bones of sullen gray lay on the floor, just peeking out from the entryway. They were quasi-dust, possibly the bones of legs, but there was no other half discernable on the desiccated body. Creeping deeper into the tunnels revealed copious samples of varied bones in various states of decay, though it would take expert analysis to label what part of the specimen most of the bones belonged to. The few complete skulls presented slender oval sockets, about half as large as those found in humans, a narrow forehead, and elongated jaws containing broad teeth. Even with all the constructions exhibiting their one time existence, those were merely trace memories of their past, but these organic fragments were once the true carriers of their souls, something that needed to be respected, or face the ire of the Gods. What was notable was how often there would be a pile of comparatively pristine skeletons stashed in a corner of a room. While I was no expert on the deterioration rate of extraterrestrial bones on alien worlds, I thought it strange that a fair number of remains endured over a millennium in exposed air. Perhaps these bodies were not from such a long time ago?

  I soon came to the easy conclusion that the interlacing passages and rooms were an elaborate system of bomb shelters, not extra living areas. Nevertheless, these temporary shelters must have converted into a long term solution for those trying to escape whatever was happening above them all those centuries ago.

  For ten rigid minutes our scout followed the trodden path, at times following a cold trail that led into secondary tunnels before intermittently picking it up again. As our metal friend pressed on incessantly and unwaveringly, we waited with unhurried breaths somewhere in the sky. Then, with a little beep, the scout’s radar detected some motion at the fringe of its fifty yard range. The explorer hurriedly closed in on the path that would lead it either to the relief of a life discovered or the dismay of an enemy gained. As the scout steered into a channel as unremitting as the first, the discrepancy repeated itself at the end of the hall. When the bot had crossed halfway down the passageway, a shady figure at the other end of the path sprang out from behind a corner. All went dark in that instant. The connection was severed, and so was our connection to the underground world that we now confirmed was occupied by something other than corpses.

  “Was it destroyed?” speculated Fife.

  Under his breath, Emory mockingly replied, “No, Hardy’s just lazy.”

  The sarcastic response was met by a hard slap to the helmet.

  I was sure a cat fight would have ensued if an annoyed Captain Kiran did not say over the group channel, “Rookie, go support the lieutenant and Briannika. You three follow the scout’s path and find out who’s down there.”

  “Yes, sir,” the three of us stated in unison.

  The shuttle slid open one of its side doors and I hopped down the five feet onto the building’s roof. Not having the luxury of time or working elevators, I simply used my suit’s capability to absorb a great deal of force, in combination with my vida-reinforced leg muscles, to leap down the rest of the eighty feet to meet my comrades at ground level. The force on my body equaled the force of someone jumping out of their top bunk bed. Following me was our second scout-bot, unfazed by what had happened to its comrade.

  As we moved through the narrow halls and the crumbling walls to get to the shaft that led to the underworld, we each attempted to review the video our first agent had recorded before its presumed demise. The images were difficult to assess using the regular and night visions, the scout having been too far away for its lights to comprehensively illuminate the hazy figure. Thermal imaging was the most revealing. It presented a partial humanoid form pointing what looked to be a pistol directly at the screen. Aware that an enemy of some kind, at least toward machines, was present in the bowels of the city, we were forced to move cautiously after we dropped into the underground passages, not allowing eagerness to precede imprudence. The lieutenant took point. Well, in the strictest terms, the scout took point ten feet ahead of us, so as to help light our way and provide an early warning obstacle for possible enemies. I was sandwiched between the lieutenant and Briannika.

  It was a markedly more primal sensation personally gazing into the grave confines of the underpass. As we encroached deeper into the oppressive warrens, the walls closed in tighter, as if cowering in our presence, allowing each of our steps to endlessly reverberate down the halls, confessing the true silence that embraced us. The tunnels were a consistent seven feet high, making it just two inches tall enough for Brent, the tallest of our trio by a couple of inches, to walk w
ithout too much awkwardness, though piles of fallen rubble did force us to stoop more than a few times. Certainly, neither Captain Kiran nor Vasilissa would have been able to maneuver effectively through passages made for less lanky species. The width of the conduits also worsened the mild sense of claustrophobia this place couldn’t help but to create, not permitting two scrawny humans to stand comfortably side by side.

  The more I saw of each incomplete, bony husk, the more I believed the tunnels themselves had shrunk until their creators had suffocated. There was even a couple of moments I felt the air within my helmet become thick and dry from such thoughts. We were careful to step over the heaps of dust the former living creatures had become, for we didn’t want to disturb a peace that they didn’t seem to know during their last days. But any sense of uneasiness was pushed away by training, necessity, and by the fact that the lights shining from our helmets and weapons provided enough radiance to dispel much of the unnerving darkness, which would likely continue to tyrannize these walls until Ember was extinguished. We marched on, striding through the little clouds of dust that hung in the sparse air. We gave each room we passed a cursory glance, if the doors permitted the act, but we dedicated most of our attention on reaching the last point of contact we had with the scout.

  About midway to our objective, our boots became fastened to the ground, like those of a statue on a pedestal made from the same block of marble. Our radar detected a fleeting disturbance some forty yards down a tunnel to our left, opposite our destination. While the three of us remained motionless, our scout went ahead to investigate the reason for our hypnosis. Using the scout’s eyes and ears, we only saw rubble and heard the far off rumor of some sand trickling down a crack in the wall or ceiling. Assuming our radar must have picked up nothing more than some concrete or stone peeling off the walls, our bodies relaxed, or as much as they could in this constricted space, and we continued on our way.