“I’m all but settled on there being life here,” Cyrus said. “I’m sure of it. I just hope they can help us.”
“Probably,” Crystil admitted. “But withhold judgment, OK?”
He didn’t respond, concerning Crystil.
Then, suddenly, the cavern opened up into a massive chamber. The cave still sloped downward, but the area had expanded. Up ahead was a wall, but below the wall, Crystil saw a hole in the ground. The dew of the cave was overwhelming by now, and Crystil almost felt like she could taste water.
“Man, can you imagine if we found the monster’s nesting grounds?”
Annoyed, Crystil turned.
“Really? Really? You went there?”
“Sorry,” Cyrus quickly said.
Realizing his sincerity, Crystil’s anger—which rose from a fear that he was right—slowly faded. She remained on guard, though, unable to shake the possibility.
Crystil crouched near the edge of the hole and looked down. The light on her goggles seemed absurdly bright, but what caught her attention was what she heard.
It sounded like the gentle flow of water.
“You hear that, Cyrus?”
“Oh yes, sounds like our salvation.”
She threw her legs down first, and had Cyrus grab her arms to gently drop her down. When he’d dropped her as far as he could go, Crystil gave the OK. Much to her relief, she barely fell a foot before softly landing on the ground.
“Come on, Cyrus, easy fall.”
He came shortly behind. His entry was not as graceful, as he needed to catch himself. Blinded by the night vision goggles, Crystil tried adjusting them, but the brightness of the light remained.
Then it hit her.
“Oh. Oh, boy.”
She removed her goggles and looked at a series of torches guiding them down a long, narrow hallway.
36
Celeste’s eyes jolted open, and her ears perked up to the sound of silence. The pod did not pump oxygen. The heart rate monitor did not beep, and no other medical devices measured her vitals. For a couple of seconds, before her mind caught up, she wondered if she’d died. When the pod opened and she sat up, though, she knew she had beaten the poison.
“Welcome back, Celeste,” Cortanus said. “You made a faster than expected recovery. In fact, you got out thirty hours earlier than originally scheduled.”
Celeste almost didn’t believe Cortanus. If she wasn’t naturally trusting, she would’ve thought someone had programmed the ship to say this to make her feel stronger.
“I… wow. Wow. Thank you. You saved me. And… Cyrus! Crystil!”
She jubilantly yelled for them, but didn’t hear even a toe tap. She didn’t put much thought into it as she felt joy, but when she swung her feet over the pod and stretched out, the giddiness ebbed and she developed a gnawing feeling.
“Are you sure it’s been thirty hours earlier than scheduled? What does that mean since I talked to Cyrus?”
“You spoke to him this morning. It is now almost the evening of the same day.”
They said they’d wait two days for me. They said they’d wait for me to wake up so we could all go exploring. And… they didn’t.
Why? Why did you leave early?
“Where are they, Cortanus?” Celeste said, concern palpable in her voice. “Where did they go? Did they leave without me?”
“Yes,” Cortanus said. “They left a few hours after you first awoke this morning.”
“What?!?” Celeste said, feeling rare anger toward her brother and friend. “How could they?? I… They said they’d wait for me. They’d wait!”
“The monster attacked the ship and drained nearly all of our water supplies. We are down to about two weeks.”
They did the right thing, then.
If it even matters at this point.
She sighed, saddened and upset, but chose to focus on what she had—her health.
“A complete recovery, Cortanus?”
“Yes.”
“How did I recover so fast?”
“Your body has an unusual ability to heal. This is the fastest known poison recovery relative to the mass of your body.”
The fastest? I can’t believe that. I guess Crystil was right.
She didn’t feel satisfied with that answer—surely, Cortanus must’ve used drugs and surgery to help her recover faster. But when she pulled up the patient files for herself on the commander’s tablet, none of them mentioned surgery. The only drugs used were to keep her body in a coma state.
“I can’t believe it,” she said. “Wow. I…”
She remembered Crystil’s words about the funeral rites, and how it gave her the courage to fight without any fear. Celeste figured there were literal funeral rites for her. But whether Crystil and Cyrus did them or not mattered little now. She finally understood the main point. She’d fought through poison that tortuously brought her to the brink of death. If she could survive that, what was an instant death at the hands of the monster?
She could not, however, apply that same confidence to her two teammates. She knew they wouldn’t do anything stupid, but the thought that the creature might find them…
“Well, while we’re here Cortanus, tell me what’s new. What have you discovered about this planet?” she asked as she went back to the research lab.
“Cyrus managed to grab a scale from the monster,” Cortanus said. “And in analyzing it, we found it will not decay and will not perish from natural causes.”
“Oh,” Celeste said. “I take it, though, from the level of specificity in that statement that it could be killed?”
Celeste spoke with hope instead of confidence.
“Yes.”
“Do bullets harm it?”
“Bullets can damage the scale, yes. We do not have an understanding of the creature’s neurological system, so it’s impossible to say if it would feel pain.”
“That’s fine, it’ll make it harder to beat it, but we can beat it. By the way, you never said where Cyrus and Crystil went.”
“They said they were going to the cave you went to before.”
That put an unexpected bad feeling in Celeste’s stomach. When she’d first thought of them, she thought of them approaching the surface as she had. But they certainly wouldn’t stop there. They’d go down further where they’d almost certainly run across creatures they weren’t prepared for.
Think, Celeste, think. Are they really in danger?
No, doesn’t seem likely. They’re too cautious and too careful to get ambushed.
But…
Suddenly, feeling the spirit of the soldier fill her, she broke out of the research lab and headed to the armory. As she held her hand up to verify her identity, she tilted her head up and spoke to Cortanus.
“I’m going to go find them. Keep the ship locked until one of us returns. I don’t like them being out by themselves, and they’re going to need all the help they can get. Especially with the limited time we have left.”
“Are you sure, Celeste? Going out right now, in the middle of the night, puts you in a treacherous situation.”
“I know,” she said as she grabbed a pistol, night-vision goggles and a dagger to cut through the thicket. “But Cyrus and Crystil already put themselves in that treacherous situation. I know for the first few hours I’ll be in an even worse one. But when all of us get together, it won’t be quite as treacherous. And if it is too dangerous, I want to be with them.”
Celeste grabbed a backpack, stuffed five days of supplies in, and headed for the airlock. It opened easily, and as Celeste stepped on, she had a weird feeling. She felt like it wasn’t supposed to be this easy. But as the airlock platform descended, Celeste brushed that nagging thought.
Once the platform touched to the ground, she quietly walked toward the edge of the ship and looked out into the night sky. The creature soared through the skies south of the forest. It was her chance to gain some ground without the need for silence.
Immediately, she spri
nted. She kept her pistol in her hand in case anything attacked her, but nothing came. Though she did not have the energy to sprint even half the forest, she covered far more ground than normal, pushed by adrenaline to find Cyrus and Crystil. She only hoped they hadn’t gone too far into the cave—they wouldn’t die, she felt sure, but lost was far more possible.
Celeste walked to catch her breath but never stopped moving. She eventually came to the thicket of flowers… and saw they were still there.
“Really!” she yelled. She kept her eyes peeled to the sky, her vision frozen on the darkness as she ducked back into the forest, but the monster was nowhere to be seen. She gave it several minutes before she made her move through the thicket, its opening wider than she remembered.
The terrain became mountainous, but it only increased the adrenaline coursing through her.
37
“Are you sure about this? There’s no way you’re sure about this. No one could be sure about this.”
Cyrus continued blabbering as Crystil silently looked ahead.
“We really shouldn’t be doing this. We don’t have Celeste. We could use an extra person and her intelligence in these spots. I’m sorry Crystil, but we should just turn around. Think of what we’ve learned! There’s a cavern here with torches leading down. That’s so not the work of a lupi. We can go get Celeste, prepare her, and return! Plus, it’s daylight, so we don’t have—”
“Enough, Cyrus,” Crystil said, firmly but without the usual coldness in her voice. “We’ve come this far, we go until we sense danger too great for the two of us.”
“I’m starting to think you have a different definition of danger. In my great book of definitions, danger means—”
But before he could continue, Crystil had already advanced, her gun cocked straight ahead. The only thing worse than two of them going down was just one of them, so Cyrus reluctantly readied his flamethrower and followed closely behind.
The torches alone confirmed they had found some sort of civilization, and everything else added to that notion. The perfect circular shape of the caverns. The smooth ground. It looked like the kind of tunnel a human would design.
Lost in his thoughts, Cyrus kept walking when he bumped into a still Crystil. Frightened, he apologized profusely, but Crystil put a strong hand on his shoulder, to shut him up. He heard the sweet, gently splashing sound of a liquid falling into…
Water? Water?!?
“Do you—”
“Definitely not turning back now,” Crystil said, and Cyrus not only agreed, he wanted to push past danger if it meant finding water.
They slowly crept forward, one foot planting before the other lifted. The noise of the liquid got louder. Cyrus wanted to stay pessimistic in case something besides drinkable water gushed, but he couldn’t imagine anything else the way this liquid sounded.
The tunnel seemed to never end, an endless descent that felt more like an intelligent trap than an actual path. But then he saw it—the wide mouth of the cave opening. The ground flattened out and opened into something he could not yet see.
The sound of the liquid abruptly stopped.
The silence left Cyrus feeling incredibly nervous.
A creature moved, its footsteps ever so soft.
It sounded like it had more than two feet, but Cyrus couldn’t pinpoint how many. He wasn’t sure he wanted to. He grabbed Crystil, about ten feet from the entrance, and they leaned against the wall.
“We sure we want to do this?” he asked in a whisper.
Crystil nodded, her eyes steeled.
“We’re prepared for one creature. Let’s go.”
Cyrus gulped as he held his flamethrower up. He followed Crystil into the cave, and they quickly swiveled around. They saw nothing, but then Cyrus saw a door with one torch at its peak.
“I’ll bet you the water’s on the other side,” Cyrus said, his voice a nervous mess. “That’s how they do it, right? Tease you with—”
“Cyrus,” Crystil said.
They heard a deep growling, a growl that echoed so quickly and from so many different directions they could not pinpoint its origin. Cyrus suddenly felt like a balicae would leap out and maul him.
“Lovely,” Crystil said, her voice hardening.
They heard more footsteps they could not locate. Cyrus couldn’t understand how this could happen.
“Forget the water, let’s—”
“Throw on your NVG, Cyrus.”
But before he could move his hand to the goggles, the creature emerged.
“Lupi,” Crystil said.
“Yes, lupi. Let’s not stick around to find out that we’re in lupi city.”
The lupi growled, revealing its sharp incisors, so fine they looked like they could cut through Omega One like it was a block of melted cheese. It crept forward, between them and the doorway.
About ten feet from Cyrus, the creature paused. It let out a high-pitched howl which would’ve been melodic in any other circumstance. Cyrus imagined the possibilities and shook at the thought that this was a call to the monster of the night.
Many more monsters—fortunately, more lupi—appeared. They formed a half-circle around Crystil and Cyrus, creating a blockade between them and the door. Cyrus began to reconsider if this was better than the beast up above.
“I don’t think we need it spelled out any clearer, Crystil. The guards won’t let us into the water club, so let’s go.”
Crystil tightened her grip on her rifle, so much so her hands turned white. But Crystil said nothing in response. Because there is nothing but brute force, and not in this spot, Cyrus thought. She remained in her place, even as more of the lupi growled.
“We can try again when we’re more heavily armed with Celeste. We can’t do this alone, Crystil. Crystil?”
She shot him a quick look, but her gaze returned to the lupi in front. She’s become too focused on battle. She’s too eager for it.
“I’m backing away,” Cyrus said
He had only set one foot down behind Crystil when a lupi lunged.
With unerring accuracy, Crystil fired her rifle, and the creature skidded on the ground, dead by the time it reached their feet. The other lupi roared furiously, the deep growl reminding Cyrus of balicae. He fired his flamethrower in an arc, thinking he had given them a heat wall. He changed his mind when he heard the furious cries of the lupi.
“Run!” Crystil ordered as she backed away.
They sprinted back up with the sounds of massive paws lunging behind them. Howls echoed throughout the cavern, so omnipresent Cyrus wondered if the lupi would ambush them at the entrance to the hole to safety. If they aren’t already also waiting at the top of the hole.
He turned around and fired a blast of the flamethrower every few seconds, but that only slowed down the lupi, not stopped them.
“How much further up?!?” he yelled.
“Just go!”
His legs felt the burn of an uphill climb, but the sight of the torches coming closer together gave him hope. The growling and snarling behind him, however, took away that same hope.
The ground flattened, and they came to a wall. Unexpectedly, Crystil wrapped one arm around Cyrus and pulled him close.
“Climb up on my shoulders. That’s too high for us to jump.”
“What?!?”
“I’ll hold them off with my rifle—”
A sudden series of shots destroyed Cyrus’ hearing, but he understood fully what needed to happen. He gave one last long blast from the flamethrower and quickly used Crystil to climb. He pulled himself up to safety. He quickly turned around as his hearing slowly returned to the sound of more bullets firing from the rifle.
“Crystil!”
Cyrus extended his hand down and waited. The rifle continued firing, but Crystil’s hand didn’t grab his. He looked down and saw her firing at lupi he could not see.
“Don’t bother! Jump up here!” he yelled. “Crystil!”
Finally, she jumped, grabbed his hand, and ne
arly yanked him down. He regained control and pulled up Crystil.
Suddenly, a heavy weight yanked them down. Cyrus swore as a lupi dug its teeth into Crystil’s foot. But he then watched in amazement as Crystil calmly shot the lupi. He quickly pulled to safety as the lupi jumped, but not high enough, to catch them.
“I knew that would come in handy,” Crystil said as she pulled back the clothing over her foot. The foot had lost all its skin, revealing the titanium replacement.
“Guess their teeth aren’t quite as powerful as they look,” Cyrus said. “I ain’t testing it with my skin, though. Given you have no skin, I’m gonna guess I would have no foot.”
Crystil smirked but laid on the ground to calm herself. Cyrus felt the same way and laid down on his stomach. A long, calming silence came. Even the howling and barking of the lupi could not disturb their peace, and the pack eventually gave up.
“The water is on the other side of that door,” Crystil said.
“I know,” Cyrus said, even if he still held doubts about it being actual drinkable water. “And they’ll be waiting for us the next time we go back down there. I know you’re commander, but if you—”
“Don’t bother,” Crystil said. “Let’s go get your sister.”
Cyrus slowly got to his knees. He examined his flamethrower and, according to the small display on the top of the gun, had less than half a tank of fuel left.
“How many rounds do you have, Crystil?”
“About a hundred and thirteen. So a little over half.”
It was enough for Cyrus to believe that, if they had to, they could wage a battle against the lupi. But they sure couldn’t wage a war, even a short one, without Celeste.
38
The open mouth of the cavern invited Celeste to find Cyrus and Crystil. It promised safety from the monster of the sky.
But it also promised the unknown, traps that Celeste could not prepare for. Even if the natural light faded when the cave swirled at an angle, at least she would know she could run back to the safety of daylight. But the further in she’d go, the harder an escape would be.
Kastori Revelations (The Kastori Chronicles Book 1) Page 16
