by Dante King
The ordered stones I’d noticed were only the first of five. As we traveled a straight path through the first gap, we turned left onto a path created by the second line of stones. When I reached out and touched one, the tan-colored dirt adhering to it fell away. Underneath, the stone was completely black and appeared to reflect no light.
I was awestruck. The name “Void Temple” meant so much more than the words could possibly convey.
After the second line of stones, we turned right and circled a third ring of shorter stones within the second ring. They were still taller than me, and Nyna’s warning reminded me to keep my desire to jump and peek over in check.
We passed another gap in the stones, though this one seemed to have been caused by damage. Stubs of stones peeked from under the tan soil. When Nyna saw me looking, she took my hand and pulled me on.
“We don’t go across the broken stones,” she said. “Others have and learned the hard way. Don’t ask me how or why, but if you step across them, you get burned to ash. I haven’t personally witnessed it—but once I found a vrak’s foot there. The stub at the ankle looked like it had been forgotten on a grill for a night.”
I gave her a military salute and a lopsided grin before following her on. We turned left at the next gap, then right, then took another right, and finally reached the last circle of stones. These only reached up to my shoulders, and though I could see over them, I didn’t stick my head over to peek. I was dying to see, but we’d have an unobstructed view in just a few steps.
I was beginning to feel something, but I couldn’t put my finger on what. Something was telling me I was heading in the right direction. I was making something, somewhere, happy. The feeling was like a soft, loving caress from a cadaver.
Yes. Gather them here. Gather our artifacts in this place. We are pleased.
I wished they’d stop doing that. There was something in the words and the tone that set my teeth to chattering. The Lakunae had given me power, endurance, and strength. They’d also shanghaied me, but that was another matter. I’d made friends, found lovers, and was saving a whole planet I hadn’t even known existed before. Yet I couldn’t get rid of the suspicion that there was more to this than the simple quest they’d sent me on. It was like someone had baked me a birthday cake and frosted it with buttercream but spiced it with tiny shards of broken glass.
When we reached the final gap, Nyna halted and stopped me with her hand. Then she closed her eyes, crossed her arms across her chest, and fell silent. I watched her for several seconds and wondered if she was speaking to the Lakunae. It wouldn’t surprise me if they themselves had constructed the temple and required the offering of someone’s time in order to enter. That could explain why the curious vrak hadn’t survived. They weren’t a patient species.
I wondered if it might be nothing more than a ceremony, something she did out of reverence. Out of respect for the difficult thing she was going, bringing a stranger to her cherished temple, I waited silently for her to finish whatever she had to do.
About a minute later, Nyna opened her eyes, raised one finger, pointed it toward the gap, and slowly stretched her arm out. To my surprise, her finger stopped in mid-air as if it had hit something. When she drew her finger back, there was a soft, electronic beep, and a round-cornered door materialized.
I gasped. Even though it slid open without a sound and appeared to be made of the metallic equivalent of the stones surrounding it, the shape of the door was unmistakable. This wasn’t a temple. It wasn’t even a building of any kind.
It was a starship.
It was mostly buried underground, but whether it had crashed or the original crew had concealed it, I couldn't be sure. It still had some power—enough to open the hatch on top and bring us down. There had to be power to make the dust-covered crystals dangerous, too. Without the ship being operational, though, I had no way to see what its capabilities were. I couldn't even tell how big it was.
Nyna motioned for me to follow her while she leaned left and right to check behind me. If anyone would understand her caution, it would be me. If I was right, she was holding on to a secret that any leader would kill for. The worst of them would want to use the starship to dominate the entire planet. The Martian government could use the technology to enhance our own struggle against the Xeno. It could turn the tide of the war.
The door slid closed, just as silently as it had opened, and everything went black. For a moment I wondered if I’d been struck blind, if the Lakunae hadn’t wanted me to see the interior of their temple, after all. But immediately the ceiling of what turned out to be a three-foot-wide cylindrical room illuminated and cast an eerie light over us.
“Hold on to me,” Nyna said as she took my hand in both of hers. “In a second, we’re going to—”
Too late. For a second, the floor fell out from under me, and I braced myself against the wall—we were moving down into the bowels of the ship fast enough to make my stomach feel weightless.
We fell for what seemed like a full minute before the elevator came to a stop and the door opened onto—darkness. Nyna walked comfortably and confidently out into the ink ocean as though it was bathed in the same eerie light as the elevator. She was home.
On her second step, lights began to flicker to life, revealing a wide room with a collection of shelves, boxes, and artifacts I couldn't even begin to guess the purpose of, along with tables and woven baskets. The room smelled musty.
In the far corner to my left there was a bed that appeared to be made of sticks and twigs, expertly lashed together. The mattress was a collection of furs and blankets woven in the same pattern I‘d seen among the Ish-Nul. Boxes on the floor were festooned with bits and pieces of technology. Some appeared to be discarded bits of trash Nyna may have acquired from a junkyard. Others were most definitely Void-tech.
“This is my home,” Nyna said. “It’s not much to look at, but it’s safe. You saw what it took to get down here. Nobody’s going to figure that out by accident.”
“What did you do back there?” I asked. “How did you get the door to appear?”
“Oh, that? The door has always been there. That’s why I’m safe and snug. The lift is here with me, so nobody can follow me down, as the villagers told you. I’m not sure how many tried, but someone must have or they wouldn’t say it, right?”
I shrugged. “Sounds right to me. Another thing they said… how do you communicate with the Void Gods?”
Nyna giggled, then stopped and covered her mouth when she noticed my serious expression. “Oh, you didn’t listen to Timo-Ran, did you? He’s got it in his head that I have some way to just chat with the Void Gods or something. You know, like we’re old friends and like to garden together and swap recipes.” She socked me playfully in the shoulder. “Don’t be disappointed. I do have a bunch of their stuff. Look!”
She walked over to the shelf that ran alongside her bed and picked up three small objects before handing them to me. One was tube-shaped, about five inches long, and had a complex-looking pattern of thin filaments inside, all made of the same black Void-tech material Ebon was made of.
The second was a pyramid of about the same size. It was a lot lighter than it looked, but I couldn’t see inside to determine whether it was hollow.
The third looked like an ordinary spoon, except for the fact that it was made of Void material. I turned it over several times and held it up to the light, but didn’t discover anything new.
“I call that one a plud,” she said. “I don’t know why. It just seemed like the name fit, you know? One of those things that seems to go together.
“This one,” she said, pointing to the pyramid, “I call the pyramid. I haven’t thought of a better name for it yet—but it’s kind of a dull thing, so I don’t look at it a lot. It’s light, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, trying to disguise my disappointment. “But, I thought I’d be able to come here for answers. Like, where my people are.”
Nyna frowned and set her bac
kpack on her bed. “There’s a lot here to look at, a lot I don’t understand. Maybe the answer can be found somewhere among all this?” She waved her hands at her collection of Void-tech.
“Maybe.” I glanced around the room. “But tell me: what do you know of the temple itself?”
“Not a lot, I guess. I know it’s old, and it’s been here a long time—long enough to grow those dust-covered crystals on the surface that look like pylons. But they could be part of the temple too. It has one room—this one—and, well, that’s about it.”
“I think it’s something more,” I said. “Do you know what a starship is?”
She shook her head.
“It’s like a hovership, only bigger, faster, and far more powerful. Starships are able to leave the planet. Sometimes, they have massive weapons their crew can use to defend themselves or destroy their enemies. Nyna—this is a starship.”
She turned around slowly, hands on her hips. “If it’s a starship, it’s not very big. How big did you say they were supposed to be?”
“There must be other rooms somewhere,” I said. “A hidden doorway or something like that. There might be a control panel somewhere, and all we have to do is flip a switch to power the rest of the ship. It could be a power connector that’s come loose, or a display panel you haven’t found yet.” I paused. “How did you find the entrance to the temple in the first place?”
“There was a storm,” Nyna said, “a bad snowstorm. There wasn’t a lot of wind, but it was coming down thick, piling up high. I started thinking I might be able to use the snow to my advantage. Since it packs so nicely, I wondered if I’d be able to build a kind of tent out of it, you know? I wasn’t sure if it would work, but I was getting kind of desperate. I was worried I’d get buried alive. So when I was picking my way through the rocks looking for a place to start building, I saw the snowflakes bouncing off of the temple door—no snow ever collects on it. I forgot about my snow house plan and found my shelter somewhere else. When the storm passed and I could come back, I tried to find it again. It was almost like I could see it, but not really. Like when you know there’s food cooking far away, and you can almost tell what it is, you know…”
She trailed off and stared at the pyramid. I got what she meant. Especially after my encounter with the Lakunae, I’d had many such experiences. Intuition could be a powerful thing if you were open enough to listen to it.
“Oh!” Nina suddenly said, startling me out of my thoughts. “I almost forgot I have Spirit Watcher.”
She lunged for her backpack, dug around inside, and threw the device over her head.
“Wow,” she whispered.
“What do you see?” I asked.
“You were right. This place is a lot bigger than I thought it was.” She turned her head slowly to the left, then to the right, up a little, then down.
“Damn,” she breathed. “We’re more or less right in the middle of it. I see… power conduits, I think. And nodes. And so much information. It’s amazing. I can see layers upon layers of information. Just… wow.”
“Anything that could lead us to some kind of secret door.”
She studied her surroundings for several seconds before answering. “There are two doors, actually.There and there.” She pointed with her head. “But they’re broken. Or the thing that opens them is broken, I think. It’s there, under my bed. Will you…?”
I didn’t wait for her to finish her sentence. As carefully as I could, I lifted her bed from the floor and set it against a wall. The floor was the same dark material as the walls and ceiling. The spot under her bed was completely smooth and featureless.
“Here?” I asked as I kneeled down and waved my hand at the floor.
“Yeah,” she said, kneeling next to me.
She tapped the floor with a finger, shook her head, and tapped somewhere else. She bounced back a second and cocked her head. Then she explosively pushed the floor with her palm, and a trapdoor popped opened.
“I found it!” she exclaimed.
The door was heavy, but she managed to lift it, and we peered inside. There was a control box of some kind with strange circuits. The boards themselves were translucent rectangles, about fifteen inches on the long sides, four on the short sides. There were no wires, diodes, nanochips, or anything else I recognized as technology. All I saw was tiny scratches.
Nyna yanked one of the boards free and held it up to a light on the wall. The scratches were perfect fine lines, circles, squares, and other shapes, combined in intricate patterns on both sides of the board.
“Can you fix it?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she whispered, “I think I can. But it’s going to take some time, probably days. It’s like learning how to skin an animal. You mess it up the first few times, figure out what doesn’t work, right?”
“Yeah,” I said.
I was happy for her, but I was also disappointed I couldn’t ride into battle piloting a huge Void-tech battlecruiser. All I’d have to do is park it above Thaz’red, fire a shot or two into the dictator’s palace, and demand Tortengar release his slaves immediately, including the Ish-Nul and any of my shipmates. If he refused, I could fire another few shots and collapse the place on top of him. That would be one problem solved.
Then, I remembered the communicators I’d taken from the guards at the powerplant. I’d gotten so used to them, I forgot the power they held.
“What about these?” I asked, holding them out to her. “Any chance you could change their frequency so that I can use them without Tortengar’s thugs listening in?”
She carefully took them from my hand. Her forehead creased as she inspected them.
“Oh, I can do a lot more than that,” she said. “This design is primitive. These things are capable of doing so much more. Did you know that if you put them on your head, you can hear what someone on the other end is saying?”
“Yeah,” I said, relieved they hadn’t gone to waste.
“Gimme a minute or two,” Nyna said as she curled her fingers around the communicators. “You’re gonna love what I do with them. But I don’t think we have time to fiddle with this door right now. We’ll come back.”
She dug in her backpack for a second before withdrawing a Void-tool that looked like someone had tried creating a screwdriver but ended up with something more like a corkscrew. She poked at the communicators for a minute and sent sparks flying twice before she declared victory.
She turned her face to me, her eyes visored by the Spirit-Watcher, as she grinned. “Not only can you talk to someone all secret-like now, but you can do it from a long way off!”
I held my hand out and inspected the devices. They didn’t look any different. “How far will they work?”
“No idea,” she admitted, her smile unwavering. “Maybe forever, but at least from here to Thaz’red.”
“Wow.”
“Pretty neat, huh? I can see all kinds of things with this Spirit-Watcher. Things I couldn't see before. It’s like I can see how stuff is supposed to work, like those communicators. I can see how the blue circuits are supposed to work, too, but they’re a lot more complicated, it’ll take a while.”
“Of course I understand. How long do you think you’ll need?”
She turned her head back to the open hatch, studied it for a few seconds, and looked back. “Not sure. At least a short cycle. Could be a couple of long cycles.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “I need to return to the village. What can you tell me about Thaz’red?”
Deep lines of concern creased her brow. “Thaz’red is a pretty complicated city. It’s been destroyed and rebuilt so many times, nobody knows what to do anymore. Instead of fixing things, they usually just weld whatever broke and use it for the foundation of the thing they want to put on top of it, you know?
“They don’t believe in recycling—not really. They just keep piling more crap on top of old crap until all they’ve got is a big, confusing pile of… well, crap. All the streets are crooked. All th
e buildings are connected to all the other buildings. There are no signs on the street. And either people run around bullying others, or they’re being bullied. It’s a bad place.” She set her jaw. “I should go with you.”
I laughed and pointed at the hatch on the floor. “You think you can tear yourself away from this?”
“It’ll keep,” she said. “What happens if you break something, or you run into a door you can’t get through, and you need it fixed? Or if the vrak’s mech breaks down, are you going to give him your new gun and let him shoot it around your head?”
“Okay,” I said as I held my hands up in surrender. “You’re coming along. We’ll probably need a hacker anyway. Just do me a favor.”
She raised her eyebrows questioningly.
“Keep your pretty head down, okay?” I said. “I don’t want to lose you.”
She smiled again. “I feel pretty around you already. But you can say it as often as you want. I won’t complain.”
Nyna gathered her tools back in her backpack, closed the hidden trap door, and led us back to the elevator. We didn’t talk on the way up, but she did take the opportunity to reach her hand up the back of my shirt to rub my back. Her hand was soft, warm, and comforting.
“You got a plan?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I’d like to go into Thaz’red and smash everything until I find my troops, but I know that isn’t wise. Instead, I’m going to split everyone into two teams. We’ll spread out, but not too far, and make our way to Tortengar’s palace.
“From what you told me about him, I don’t think he’s tough enough to fight me himself. Instead, I think he’ll have a lot of guards, most of who will be untrained thugs who like to smash things. They won’t be a big problem.
“But it’s also likely that he’ll have a few well-trained and well-paid elite troops. You saw what he did at the powerplant. I expect the next batch to be meaner than them.”
The elevator stopped, the door opened, and we stepped out into the dusk.
“Are you worried?” Nyna asked. She’d removed the Spirit-Watcher and was looking up at me with concern.
