by Dorian Dawes
A massive set of stairs and pillars led up toward a gaping sixty-foot-wide entrance to the temple. Two great statues guarded the opening, each a hundred feet in height and facing the other. They were powerful bird-like creatures standing upright and wearing robes masterfully carved to give the illusion of fabric. In their outstretched talons, they helped each other hold aloft a large dark orb.
“I don’t think anyone is going to have a difficult time finding this place now,” Talisha said, her voice shaking.
That was an understatement. The temple noticeably jutted out still several hundred feet above the canyon walls. It’d be a black blot on the horizon for hundreds of miles.
“Then we best hurry,” Bluebird said, taking the lead.
Talisha nodded. She quickly typed out some commands on the holographic panel on her gauntlet. Her ship closed its doors and took off into the skies. She’d programmed it to circle the perimeter and feed constant updates to her helmet.
Inside the temple was a wide-open chamber with a long hallway that seemed to stretch on into infinity. A set of stairs on either side led into dizzying passages all spiraling upward. Lining just about every wall were displays of piping and plaques with incomprehensible writing. It looked nothing like the style and make of Talisha’s ship or armor. That slick organic feel and the avian flourishes were completely missing. This was an industrialized nightmare of a building.
Directly in the center of the room was another statue, about half as large as the two guarding the entrance. It was another Valran, this one gangly and naked from the waist up. It wore only a set of black robes made from the same dark material as the building’s slick walls. The eyes were inset with red crystal and its beak was open in a permanent, threatening roar.
“Where do we go?” Bluebird asked. “It’ll take years to navigate this place.”
“That’s why we have scans of the building to form us a map,” Talisha said. She held her gauntlet, palm open in front her. A detailed holographic map appeared directly over her hand. “There, quickest route to the center of the temple. There’s an active power fluctuation. We keep along this path, we should find what we’re looking for.”
“Just what exactly is it are we looking for?” Rogers said.
Talisha stared at the statue, shuddering as she passed beneath its frightful gaze. “Answers.”
IN DOVER TOWN, a crowd of onlookers stood outside as the skies darkened with the signature gray-green colors of the IGF military. Earlier that day, the shipment of guns they’d bought with the money obtained from selling Rogers to Plymouth arrived, and they’d been distributing them to the town’s first militia. A line of men and women had formed in front of a truck handing out blasters and assault rifles. The sense of celebration and excitement quickly turned to unease as the shadows of wyverns and drop-ships passed overhead.
All eyes fixed on the armed forces flying in. Murmurs and confused whispers arose. The sense of security brought on by the supply of fresh munitions seemed suddenly false. Each civilian and new militia member suddenly understood a simple truth about their place in the galaxy. No amount of guns would protect them, nor would any elected government. Security was but a comforting illusion. There could be no safety for them so long as their lives could be cut short by those who’d long since deemed them disposable. They were no different than the trash they despised, begging for scraps in the streets or scavenging the ruined husks of bombed out cities. They had no more freedoms than the android they’d sold to arm themselves.
The child Rogers had nicknamed Brick had felt fear only twice before in his short life. The first was when he’d gotten locked in the shed behind his dad’s house. Sheriff Rogers had been there, ripping the door clean off the hinges to rescue him. The second time was watching the sheriff leave town, abandoning him for reasons the kid couldn’t understand.
Staring up at those planes and ships, he felt that fear again. He’d never seen their like before, but he knew what weapons of destruction looked like. He had plenty of old toys his parents had given him, modeled after military tanks and planes. The things in the sky were no toys.
Brick’s fat little fingers gripped his mother’s skirts tightly. “Mom, what’s going on?”
She didn’t answer him. Her mouth quivered. “I was a little girl last time the skies looked like this.”
“What does it mean?”
She turned to look at him, eyes turning suddenly soft. “Don’t worry about it, all right? We’re gonna be just fine.”
He didn’t believe her.
COMMANDER MATTU’S MOUTH fell open as the temple came into view in the distance, draining him of all composure. He’d witnessed some stunning works of architecture, but nothing like this. Not even the skyscrapers of Turelius Prime could compare to something this massive and foreign.
In the time since the temple had risen out of the ground, it’d shifted in structure, bringing with it feats of uncanny geometry. Stairs had formed along the outside, stretching off into nothingness, while the whole of the building precariously balanced off a single point. The Valran Temple should have been an impossibility by all known laws of physics, and yet it stood in complete defiance of those laws.
One of his aides brought a datapad revealing new scans taken of the structure. “Sir, you’re not going to believe this.”
“I’m not believing what I’m seeing before my own damn eyes but go ahead.”
“Well, the temple’s changed since it rose from the ground. It looks completely different from the earlier scans taken of it.”
“So it has some other functions, machinery getting activated, shifting purposes. We’ve seen stuff like this with our wyverns, right?”
The aide shook his head. “No, sir. Not like our wyverns at all. There are mechanisms stored within a Wyvern’s systems to facilitate the shifting of function. The temple has no such detectable mechanics. The new features were not previously part of its structure.”
“What are you trying to tell me?” Mattu said, almost chuckling even as his palms sweat. “That this thing is just…growing these new parts of itself?”
The aide nodded, eyes bulging out of his skull with shock and terror. “Something’s changed. Something’s—”
“What? Something’s what? Out with it! What the hell is going on?”
The aide gulped and shifted nervously. He reached up with a sweaty hand to adjust his glasses. He coughed once or twice, seemingly afraid of making a reality of the words about to come out of his mouth.
Mattu had seen this shit before. He’d been informed of an uprising where the rebel fleet had completely wiped out a squadron of IGF soldiers. The scout had seen the charred bodies personally but was so afraid of delivering his message. If the words came out his mouth, he’d have to believe them. The scout had vomited on the floor but moments after finally delivering the report. Mattu’s aide had the same sickly expression across his face.
“Something has…awoken, Commander.” The little man was shaking. “New biomechanical components seem to have sprouted up within the temple.”
Mattu turned on him, hands clenched tightly behind his back. He glared at the man, not out of anger, but out of a refusal to accept what he’d just been told. “Let me get this straight, it’s alive?”
“It is now,” his aide whispered. “It wasn’t before. Something has changed it.”
“Right. Thanks for the report,” Mattu said. He clamped a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Try and keep this between us. We’re headed into battle, and this’ll scare the men into getting themselves killed. You hear?”
“Right. Of course.”
“Good man.”
The aide hurried off, sweating buckets.
Mattu turned back around to face the windows, hand clamped over his mouth as they drew closer to the structure. They were near enough now that he could see the outside of the temple transforming before his very eyes. More formations appeared on the outer edges, spikes and partitions and the like. It almost seemed to him lik
e the temple was reaching out with each new addition and walkway; like antennae grasping for the world around it, touching, sensing, feeling.
He had a terrifying thought, that the temple might not be content with merely filling every possible gap in the canyon. With as little as anyone knew, there was very little telling where it might stop. It might just decide to cover the globe, pulling the entire planet inside the giant ebony horror.
“It’s a fucking building,” he had to remind himself.
He chose to land the drop-ship on the outskirts of the canyon, a good distance away from the monolith. Settling so far away from the structure meant thinning his forces more than he’d originally anticipated, but his fear of the temple extended to fear for his men. He kept envisioning a nightmare scenario where it engulfed them all in its ever-reaching growth.
In the time it took for them to set up camp and establish a guarded perimeter, the building had sprouted several new appendages. There were new statues of bird-like humanoids reaching out with grasping talons and screaming open beaks full of fangs. Piping had grown all along the outside, forming new shapes and strange alien symbols. It was a chaotic mishmash now, hardly recognizable from the trapezoidal monolith that had originally sprouted from the earth.
Some of the men cast uneasy looks toward the temple.
Mattu barked at them. “Eyes outward, men! We’ve an army of untold size approaching this location. I want a well-defended perimeter. No one comes in or out of this temple, is that clear? We are the 497th!”
There were affirming nods, but they did little to still the general air of unease that pervaded the camp. Mattu couldn’t blame them. He called his generals and lieutenants into his tent to debrief them as much as possible without committing treason. None of them took the news well that he’d be taking a squad of soldiers into the temple. There were shouting and arguments up until he silenced them all with a single look.
“My orders come directly from the Council of Thirteen,” he said in a low voice. “Feel free to lodge your complaints though. I will be retiring after this mission and will be all too happy to file your grievances personally.”
That shut them up long enough. He hoped they would complain. The more unrest caused in the wake of this disaster of a mission the more he might be able to do something with it if he somehow managed to survive all this.
A new set of stairs and a new opening had formed atop the canyon walls several feet away from the perimeter. He chose a squad of men and women all wearing heavy power armor meant to survive even the toughest blasts. The only downside was that the armor was clunky and lacked mobility. They couldn’t even turn their heads right or left and would have to shift their entire bodies. This left them susceptible to surprise attacks from the flank or rear.
Commander Mattu rejected the powerful protective suit for standard grade body armor worn over his uniform. It was smaller and made up for its lack of protections in the increased mobility. He would be hanging behind his squad in order to protect their backline. He’d be better suited for mobilizing against threats from either direction.
More sculptures of Valran faces and bodies emerged. They’d multiplied by the hundreds, arms lunging outward with clawed talons. The squad would have to pass beneath those frozen hands to enter the temple. It kept them all hesitating before the unending blackness.
“Forward!” Mattu hollered. “Sooner we nab that warp-technology, sooner we can get out of here and off this planet. Ya hear me?”
The squad, four men and women, all raised their rifles in an acknowledging hurrah. They marched forward, but he could see their cautionary glances back at the camp. They marched into the unknown, leaving their comrades behind to defend them.
Chapter Nine
A HORDE OF grayish-blue vessels uncloaked over the surface of Archimedes IV—a fleet comprised of a hundred corporate armies all gathered for a single purpose. Madame Inspector sat in her office eyeing the images of the mobilizing army with an insidious smile. Drones had monitored the rising of the temple and the IGF encampment. The government thought they could get between her and the temple. How cute.
She reached out, fingers curling about a microphone on her desk. She’d only ever used it a few times, not being the type who enjoyed making announcements. There were the occasional prepared speeches such as holidays and employee anniversaries of those few elites beneath her who actually deserved such treatment. Even then, the tool was only to reinforce the notion of upward mobility within the Plymouth Corporation. Work hard, don’t question your superiors, and one day you too might earn public approval and the envy of your peers.
Today, she used it for wholly different reasons. For years she had bitten her tongue, expressing only the barest minimums of her disdain. She was finally going to tell them all the terrible truth. If they thought her a bitch before, they had no telling what was coming next.
She leaned back in her chair, kicking her feet onto the desk. One hand clutched around the microphone, while the other drew lazy smoke circles in the air with her cigarette. She was invigorated. This was true power, a dictator on their final day in office.
“Listen up, insects and ingrates.” Her voice was a low, hideous snarl. “That temple is Plymouth property. It is worth more than all your lives put together. It’s worth more than the lives of your children and grandchildren. I want you to grasp the weight of your own pathetic insignificance, not because I am trying to disillusion you. I want to free you from the weighty burden of individuality, of diversity, of trying to make your pitiful lives count for something.
“Accept it. Embrace it. Let it define you. You are fodder for a greater purpose. Get our people into that temple and retrieve the goods, even if you have to kill every dirty little refugee on that planet to do so. Get reckless. Detonate their armies with your own exploding wreckage if you have to. Play kamikaze. Your lives meant nothing anyway, nothing in comparison to the honor and reward that will be bestowed upon you for your sacrifice.
“Nothing in life. Everything in death. Death is meaning. Death is power. It’s the only power any of you little pissants will ever know. Make the most of it.”
It was the most honest thing she’d ever said in her life. Her fingers curled around the microphone cord. It was an antique, several times as old as she was. Someone had given it to her, or maybe it had been an impulse purchase back when she did such things. Regardless, she had affection for the old thing. It was one of the few items in her personal possession she held any emotion toward.
Madame Inspector watched the holographic screens. Her fingers flicked across the illuminated panels to switch to the camera view of one of Plymouth’s own wyverns. They’d finally arrived at the IGF encampment. She stood quickly, the microphone shaking with her own eager excitement.
Her mouth opened in breathless anticipation before she lunged and yelled, “Open fire!”
CARRIER VESSELS WERE still highly experimental, not even approved yet for purchase by the IGF military budget committee. Carriers were far larger than a drop-ship and could contain twice as many ships and tanks for transport. Their real benefit over the drop-ship was their firing power. Drop-ships were defenseless liabilities that had to be constantly guarded on all sides by a smaller fleet of protective ships. A carrier could defend itself with a host of long-range missile cannons and cutting-edge shielding technology.
The range on the cannons was the key to everything. A drop-ship had to land in the middle of the battlefield in order to most effectively deploy its troops, while a carrier could soften the enemy up from afar while its armies unloaded. The IGF military had hoped to have them acquired by now. Those delays would give Plymouth every advantage they needed.
A barrage of missile strikes from afar sent foot soldiers sprawling for cover and decimated a grounded wyvern. The IGF’s tanks responded by blasting the carrier’s heavy shields. It was only a matter of minutes before the desert around the canyon had become a war zone of explosions and bullet fire. Planes crashed with each othe
r in midair, and wyverns engaged in their own powerful duels. A hail of purple blaster fire came from below as soldiers dug themselves in behind metallic shields and barriers. Ships fell on both sides in fiery wrecks smashing into the desert sands below.
Where Plymouth had an undoubting tech and numbers advantage, there were none who could hold a defense like the IGF military. In the short time it’d taken them to set up camp and establish a perimeter, they’d constructed bunkers and powerful turrets. Their reputation for quick deployments to fend off invading forces was well-earned.
Ching Shih and the Red Fleet waited a safe distance away from the fight. She had her ships positioned on either side of the battlefield waiting for the precise moment to strike. Timing was everything.
She had provoked Madame Inspector’s blind rage, then tactfully hidden away. The inspector’s ire would be directed at the IGF military so long as the Red Fleet kept out of sight. The IGF had set up camp in front of the very thing Madame Inspector wanted and become the more immediate threat.
Ching Shih was one who knew the art of patience and biding one’s time. That did not make her idle. She piloted a cloaked one-man vessel into space, keeping her troops in immediate contact via headset. Her position would not be on the battlefield, waiting with her soldiers to strike. There were other dangers that needed to be dealt with.
She’d left her retainer of personal guards planet-side, feeling their abilities would be better suited on the battlefield. She knew well what she was getting into. Taking on the Mayflower by herself was a fool’s errand, one she would’ve scoffed at in her younger days, but Ching Shih would not have survived as long without the ability to gamble hard and win big. She couldn’t afford to send a larger force against the Mayflower for risk of them being spotted and prompting Madame Inspector to destroy the planet. A much smaller vessel could skate by nearly undetected. Furthermore, she didn’t wish to split her forces. They would be outnumbered against the armies of Plymouth and the IGF and needed to be at their full strength.
