“I’m sure there’ll be plenty of time,” said Nate. “Hope? C’mon.”
• • •
“I ain’t so sure I like us splitting up,” said Kohl as they walked slowly down the tunnel. Grace’s sword was out, held low. The tunnel, while curved, was plenty wide for a swing of the weapon.
She sighed. “Me either, but I don’t like us missing the signal or getting eaten by robots either.”
“Signal’s been here for a hundred years or more,” said Kohl. Stubborn/stubborn/grumpy.
“Signal might be waiting for someone to trip the trap.” Grace shrugged, realized Kohl couldn’t see it, and said, “Anyway. Thrill of discovery, right?”
“Sure, Gracie,” he said.
“Asshole.”
She couldn’t see his face, but she’d heard the smile in his voice. She smiled herself. It’s good to have friends. Who’d have thought all you had to do to find them was to have an alien menace threatening everything you know?
Their lights picked out the movement in more detail as they got closer — an iris of sorts, no other word for it. Three pieces of metal making up a circular door in the tunnel were closing, opening, closing, getting caught and jammed on something on the ground. The ‘something’ turned out to be an Ezeroc claw, the right shape and size to come from one of the crab-sized aliens. Grace looked around the tunnel. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said.
“Fucking Ezeroc,” said Kohl, like that explained everything.
“No,” said Grace. “Look, this tunnel is fine and all, but those things? You know, the owner of the claw? They’re big, Kohl. Too big to get down here.” She keyed the comm. “Nate? Hope? Guard up. We’ve found the remains of an Ezeroc.”
“Hardly remains,” said Kohl. “Looks like just an arm.”
“Copy that,” said Nate’s voice. “Where there’s an arm, there’s the rest of the insect.”
Kohl’s face brightened through his visor. “I was starting to miss shooting those fuckers,” he said.
Grace clicked the comm off. “So I figure, behind this door? Will be a bigger room. Big enough to hold a crab Ezeroc. And there will be one of two other things.”
Kohl cocked his head at her. “Spill.”
“There will be an alternative route to the surface where this crab came down from,” she said, “or this will be just like Absalom Delta. The alien version of the Republic, doing experiments on Ezeroc, and getting fucked over it. It’ll be a closed room filled with aliens wanting to suck our insides out.”
“I’m hoping for an … alternative exit,” admitted Kohl.
“Me too,” she said. “Still. A hundred years is a long time for this door to be doing this.” She walked closer, playing her light over the claw. Grace had no clue how long the organic material of an Ezeroc would last. It was meat, sure, but what it was made of was well outside her knowledge space. Smelled a little like crab when you cooked it with plasma, but that was about the only relationship she could draw. But she was certain that — this world being lifeless, with a poisonous atmosphere was well below zero — something should have happened to the claw. Some kind of perishing. Desiccation. Rot, maybe, if there were bacteria here at all.
Who was she kidding? There was bacteria everywhere. If for no other reason than the little bastards would have hitched a ride on the Ezeroc themselves.
This particular claw didn’t look like it had seen much of the ravages of time. There wasn’t any … liquid … around the end of the stump on the other side of the door. The planet they were on had an atmosphere (of sorts) so the alien’s blood wouldn’t have boiled off into a vacuum. So, let’s say evaporation, the old-fashioned way. Which might have sucked more of the moisture out of the claw. Which didn’t look the case.
“Uh,” said Grace. “I think it’s fresh.”
“C’mon, Gracie,” said Kohl. “I don’t see how. You said yourself there was no life down here.”
“I don’t mean it’s right off the shelf,” said Grace. “I mean, it’s not been here a hundred years.”
“How long you reckon?”
“Less than a hundred,” said Grace. “More than a day. I don’t know.”
“That’s not super specific.”
“No,” she said. “That the door is working is good news. The aliens … the other aliens … made this place to last.”
“Eh,” said Kohl. “I’m more worried about it shutting after us after we remove the claw. Wait one.” He walked forward, power armor clanking against the floor of the tunnel, and reached out for one of the three door seals. He was tugged off balance for a moment until he found the rhythm, then Grace watched with a little bit of horror mixed with awe as he leaned back. Kohl’s armor whined for a moment, then the door seal bent, then tore free. He dropped the piece of material — some kind of metal — on the ground with a clank. “There.”
“Kohl,” said Grace. “That was a piece of alien tech. Priceless by any measure.”
“It was in the way,” said Kohl. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER SIX
WHEN NATE HAD set off away from Grace, he did it like he always did: with regret. It wasn’t just that she was fine to look at, but he wanted her at his side. He’d known her for less than a couple of months, but it felt like he’d been missing her his whole life. It was the kind of sentimental nonsense he’d never bought into, the kind of thing Annemarie — the Emperor’s sister — would have laughed at him for. She would have laid those cool fingers on his arm, like she had a hundred times before, and said Nathan, you’re doomed. Or she might have said, Nathan Chevell, you have found out what it means to be a king.
She wouldn’t say any of those things ever again though, because she was dead. She died after Nate had left the Emperor’s Black. After he’d got his metal hand and metal leg. All of House Fergelic, heads of the Prirene Dynasty, were gone.
Nate shook himself. Annemarie was long dead, but Grace was alive. Alive, and she wanted him like he wanted her. And that was … happiness. Like he hadn’t felt in a long time, if ever.
“Cap,” said Hope.
“Yeah, yo,” said Nate.
“Lost you for a second,” she said. “Did you hear what I said?”
Nate played back the last thirty seconds in his mind. Tunnels, check. A bunch of circles cut into the walls, an iris with three petals that sealed. Hope nattering over the comm. “Yes.”
“What did I say?”
“Uh…”
“You weren’t listening, were you?” She was leaning next to one iris, lights from her rig playing over it. “Doesn’t matter. This is a door.”
“They made you an Engineer because you can work things like that out? Wow.”
She turned and gave him a glare through her visor. “I—”
“No, seriously,” said Nate. “I’m glad we’ve got your hands on the fusion reactor that powers our home.”
She made a sound that wasn’t at all polite. “I was saying, what do you think is behind these doors? There’s a few of ‘em.”
“Alien stuff,” said Nate. “Is the signal back there?”
“No,” said Hope.
“Then let’s keep going,” said Nate. “We’re burning air here. We can come back and play with your dead alien friends when we’ve tracked down the real reason we’re here.”
• • •
Chamber, check. Round, check. Full of weird round gizmos, check. No lights, nothing that looked like power, just a big fucking room with round things arrayed in … yeah, a circle. “They got a whole sphere-slash-circle thing going on here, don’t they?” said Nate.
“Aliens,” said Hope, like it explained everything. Here, it probably did. “Anyway. This is where the signal is coming from. Near as I can determine, these round things,” she pointed at the spherical objects on the floor, “are making it.”
“All of them?”
“Maybe.”
“That’s not specific.”
“We’ve been here less than thirty seconds,” said Hope.
“Give a girl a chance.”
“Right you are,” said Nate. They’d got the call from Grace and Kohl a few moments ago — remains of an Ezeroc, which was of moderate concern — and he felt like he needed to do a circuit to make sure nothing horrible would leap out to eat their faces. “You do your thing, Hope. I’m going to … walk.”
She waved a hand at him, not listening as she bent over one sphere. There we go — the benefits of command. The respect and admiration of the people who serve under you. He smiled though. It was good to see Hope working again, to see her living again. Reiko might have been a bitch, and a liar, and a traitor — to her own wife, which was a thing Nate could never countenance — but she’d been Hope’s wife. You couldn’t just turn those kinds of feelings off. Leastways, if you could then Nate didn’t want you on his crew.
He started on his circuit of the room, careful to not touch anything. It wasn’t so much a fear of upsetting Hope as a natural, healthy concern for being killed in ways he couldn’t predict by alien technology. There had been no evidence of security here. No locked doors. Aside from the iris portals, but Nate figured on those just being out of power, not locked. A good pry bar and swearing would grunt one open without too much trouble. Hell, if he could get his metal fingers through the cracks of one he might worry it open himself. No, whoever had built this place had relied on something else for security. Something Nate couldn’t see, feel, or touch, and that worried him.
It could have been that there were Ezeroc here. That kind of thing didn’t need security: anyone walking into an Ezeroc lair, well, that was a problem that would solve itself.
More likely though, this place was different tech. Energy barriers, or some damn thing. The power ran out, like an old battery, a long time ago. Just a trickle of juice keeping the … whatever it was … broadcasting a signal to the stars. Hoping someone would hear. This planet had been spinning in space. Maybe there had been more broadcast sites a hundred years ago. Maybe this site had rotated like the dishes humans made. Maybe these particular aliens were just spraying noise into the hard black, hoping someone would hear.
If that last was the case, what were they saying? Something desperate. They had to know the odds of someone hearing them were a million, billion, even trillion to one. They had to know it would take a long time for help to arrive.
Nate shivered in his suit. He sure hoped the signal wasn’t stay away. Old time mariners had put dragons at the edge of the map, and this place sure felt like dragons might have lived here, once. Dragons that looked like insects, that used people for fuel, and demolished worlds.
He made the back of the room, the curve of the wall heading into the black above. Circles and pyramids. There were pyramids on Earth still — although it was no great secret that large parts had been remade as the ravages of time continued. For architecture to be common across two species, that said something. Maybe these aliens had been to Earth. Maybe there were shapes all intelligent life liked. Maybe—
A cracking sound, like the shearing of an ice flow, interrupted his thoughts. Hope screamed, and Nate spun in place. His blaster cleared its holster before his brain even engaged. Nate’s metal fingers had closed on the grip, and were already squeezing the trigger as the Ezeroc drone fell from above. His shots blew chunks off it, three good, clean hits before it hit the ground, smoldering. Not a lot of fire, because of the lack of oxygen and all, but plasma still gave its loving caress of heat.
Silence. Then a slow, low rumble.
“Hope,” said Nate. She was huddling down, visor turned up. “Come on over here now.”
“I…” said Hope. “It was, uh…” She pointed to one of the spheres. “And then it, uh.”
“It’s okay,” said Nate, eyes up. There was light breaking in from above, the entire roof of the cavern irising open on three leaves. And then, with a cruuuunch, the roof stopped opening. Nate moved towards Hope, eyes still up, looking for more Ezeroc. No movement. Nothing. He got to Hope — eyes checking for a moment the fallen drone, lying still — and snared the back of her rig. He pulled her back, as gently as he dared, to stand with him against the curvature of the wall. Her breathing was loud over the comm, their shoes scuffing as they huddled together near the wall.
No movement. Nate’s blaster moved across the space, seeking something, anything. The gloom was almost total, a thin, reedy light coming in along with drifts of sand from above. The chamber had opened to the outside. Then stalled, or locked up, or some damn thing. Nate relaxed a shade, stood a little taller, and said to Hope, “Wait here.” He clicked the comm to Grace and Kohl. “It’s Nate.”
Nothing but a gentle hiss of static. Too much rock and stone between them and him. He clicked the channel back to Hope. “I’m just going to check it out.”
“Cap,” said Hope. “I … I didn’t mean to…”
“It’s okay, Hope,” said Nate, edging out into the cavern. Sand drifted low and slow, eddying around the floor. He approached the fallen Ezeroc drone. Nudged it with his boot. Nothing. He flipped it over, checking it. Plasma charring — score one for the home team — pocked its carapace. One of its claws was mangled, crushed like it had been through an industrial press. Nate looked up again, checking out the roof. “You know, I think it got stuck up there. I think you triggered something down here that opened the roof up, right, and that thing fell down. I think it might have been trying to get out when the roof closed.”
“Out?” said Hope. “Why?”
“Beats me,” said Nate. “Maybe everything down here was dead.” He holstered his blaster, then grabbed the Ezeroc corpse, dragging it. It felt light enough, and he wanted it away from Hope so she could keep working without being terrified by the damn thing. At least it wasn’t one of those crabs. He’d never be able to move one of those.
Light flickered, a low blue glow, and Nate paused. Vertical strips around the wall — eight in total, running floor to the edge of the roof’s iris — were lighting up. “Uh,” said Nate. “Hope?”
“I think I turned it on, Cap,” said Hope. She was walking back towards the spherical gizmo she’d been next to. “I gave it a jolt with some EM radiation—”
“Hope?”
“I used a radio on it,” she said. “Like it was using on us. And then the Ezeroc, and the roof, uh.”
“Hmm,” said Nate. “I figure these folks were waiting on a response from someone.”
“Folks?”
Nate waved a hand. “Whatever. They were calling for help, or something like it.”
“Or it was a trap,” said Hope.
“Now why, for all the stars, would you say a thing like that?” said Nate. “That is an unpleasant thought.”
“Guess we’ll never know,” said Hope. That was when the center of the ring of spheres flickered like a holo stage, and Nate saw his first glimpse of what these aliens looked like.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“HUH,” SAID KOHL. “Now there’s a thing.” He had his plasma cannon pointed down the room, his armor’s lights bright and clear in the gloom. They were in a good-sized spherical chamber, perhaps the same size as the Tyche’s cargo hold. Arranged around the room were spheres set into the ground. The spheres had lids, the lids opened, the contents long gone.
Grace nodded. The room was also littered with … pods. Like the pods Ezeroc encased humans in to use as a fuel. These were all flaccid, sacs empty and dry. The feeding pipes on the floor traced their lines back through a huge hole in the far wall. The hole wasn’t manufactured, not the smooth, clean circular shapes used by this species. No, it’d been busted out, chunks of rock still lying on the ground. Inside the hole, visible from Kohl’s lights, was the husk of an Ezeroc Queen. It was attached to the feeding pipes, head bowed, a coating of dust visible over the top of its carapace. Nate was right, the Queens looked like an armored locust, but with shorter legs. “I guess this was a party,” she said. Around the Queen was a bunch of pale eggs, all sealed, waiting.
“Ain’t no way this is a party,” said
Kohl. “There’s no beer.” He walked across the room, boots of his armor crunching over the flaccid, dry sacs on the ground. Dust puffed out in the wake of his steps. “Gracie?”
“Asshole.”
“I think we missed whatever happened here.”
“No, Kohl,” she said. “We didn’t miss anything.” She walked over to one of the open spheres, shining her light inside. “Here.”
“Uh,” said Kohl. “What am I looking at?”
“You’re looking at the alien version of Absalom Delta,” said Grace. “I figure this room was a … a farm.”
“Like an ant farm?”
“Like,” agreed Grace. “Put something in these pods. Put a Queen in here. Wait for the … party to start.”
“You saying they experimented on their own people?” said Kohl. “That’s inhuman.”
“That’s entirely human,” said Grace. “That’s the point. Anyway, here.” She pointed at the wall, one sac attached there large, torn open. “Here’s your source of the crab.”
“Huh,” said Kohl. “Well, sure. That’s where it came from.” He turned around the room, light playing against the walls, the roof. “Where’d it go? I mean, sure, it tried to bust out. Someone shut the door on it. Cut off its arm, made it pissed off, whatever. But it was never getting out that way. No, too damn big to fit through. So it made a hole. Why?”
Grace looked around. There was no shell, no empty carapace of a large crab in here. It’d be hard to hide something like that. There was nowhere to hide it anyway. The Queen had made her nest in here, had done a bit of hatching, then … died. The crab had … done what? “Oh, no,” said Grace, her heart skipping a beat. She looked again at the eggs.
“I don’t like that tone,” said Kohl. “What’s going on?”
“Kohl,” said Grace. “You know how they use us as food?”
“Sure,” said Kohl. “I’m hoping to return the favor one day. They smell a lot like crab when they’re roasting—”
“What if they can use anything as food? Like, themselves?” She nudged an empty sac. “There’s this shit.” She pointed at the eggs. “And … those. A dead Queen over her brood, waiting. They, I don’t know, the rest made an exit. One big crab to hold the door. And then the rest got out.”
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