The hallway was utterly unlit, still and apparently undecorated. “Styx?” Erik asked. “Can you still hear me?”
“For the moment, yes,” she replied. “But the deeper you move into the Krim Quarter, the further you will be from functioning Tsubarata communications networks. I am unsure of their range, and will probably lose contact beyond a hundred meters.”
“I thought all the power was out on those doors?” Alomaim wondered, looking behind them. “The Human Quarter main door could only be opened manually.”
“A performance by the tavalai,” said Styx. “The doors can have their power restored at the touch of a button. But the tavalai love their show of antiquity, and love equally to pretend that they have left these spaces unexplored for the past millennia.”
“I dunno,” Brice murmured as they ventured down the hall, panning their lights around. “Looks pretty untouched to me.”
“Untouched, and unexplored, are two different things.”
“You know, Styx,” said Cruze, “you’re very cynical.”
“Of the tavalai?” said Styx, with what might have been disdain. “Always.”
“They were trouble in your time too, huh?” Brice wondered.
“Yeah,” Alomaim muttered. “They objected to being massacred and enslaved by machines. Difficult creatures.”
This time, Styx held her metaphorical tongue.
The dark, still hush of these halls felt different to those of the Human Quarter. There were no colourful, faded scenes from a long-remembered homeworld, for one thing. The krim homeworld had been a hot, sulphurous place of salty, bracken pools, harsh mountains and scrubby plains. Its long cycles of volcanism had periodically rendered most life on the surface extinct, and so the most successful life had thrived in the enormous cave systems through the rocky crust, lava-carved and running for many thousands of kilometres.
In those warm caverns, away from harsh sunlight and volcanic fallout, entire eco-systems had thrived and evolved, and eventually arrived at the krim — carnivorous, tribal, omni-sexual and swarming in the dark. Cannibalistic, in their earlier periods, and sometimes in their later. Rapaciously intelligent yet of limited perception, and in their harsh, confining caves always desperately short of something — short of air, short of light, short of patience, short of space. Short of mercy. Krim had not evolved on a world of plenty as humans had, and their evolution had reflected that elementary curse.
Erik was not surprised that they hung no nostalgic scenes on these walls. The krim were the children of an unloving mother, and had been let loose upon the Spiral to do unto others what their parent had done unto them. And Erik could not help but think, as many humans had thought before, that there was some sort of poetic justice in that the final strike had not been entirely at the children, but at the murderous bitch who had spawned them all. Earth was being recovered by endlessly patient and nostalgic people in heavy-duty environment suits, setting up huge terraforming structures that would eventually filter the poisons from the air, to be followed by genetically modified algaies that would do the same for the soil. In another thousand years, it was said, Earth could be repopulated with the genetic material of the original species that had been smuggled offworld. Another few hundred years after that, it might even be habitable again by humans. But of the krim homeworld, there would be no recovery, ever.
“Captain,” said Styx, her voice crackling as they moved further from live coms, “I will put the cache’s location on your glasses. Go to it, and be careful of tavalai booby traps, I think we are about to break contact.”
“I copy Styx,” Erik confirmed, seeing an icon blink on his menu. A blink, and the map revealed itself upon the lenses. “I’ll contact you as soon as we’re back in range.”
He indicated to the right, where the map said to turn, the marines falling into a reflex protective formation about him as Alomaim approached the corner and shone the flashlight around. Then he beckoned them after — Brice next, then Erik, with Cruze watching their rear. The blank icons informed Erik that their coms were no longer sending or receiving. Alomaim glanced back at him repeatedly, and Erik realised he wanted to know the next turn, but did not want to raise his voice. Erik indicated two more doorways up, on the left, and Alomaim nodded, walking slow and cautious, panning his light. As his light went one way, Brice’s went the other.
There was no particular logic to silence in this place, Erik thought. Without coms, they could surely just talk, given how old and utterly deserted were these halls. But caution seemed wise, given that State Department could have bugged the walls, and Styx was wary of tavalai claims to have left this place alone. He did not, however, think that tactical logic was behind the Lieutenant’s instinct for silence. Everything just felt different, somehow. Krim had not designed their Tsubarata Quarter, so there was nothing in the architecture to suggest their hand. They’d merely occupied a tavalai space, much as humans had in the Human Quarter, and had either removed all their decoration, or just as likely — knowing the krim — had no decoration to begin with. Erik found himself nearly holding his breath, his heart thumping with an anxiety nearly as strong as the aftermath of people shooting at him. Humans did not belong in this place. Somehow, he just felt it. Tavalai had welcomed Phoenix to the Tsubarata with their usual formal grace, but in these halls, he did not feel welcome.
Alomaim arrived at the next indicated doorway, and tried the open button, knowing well it would not work. The obvious confirmed, he put the L-shaped flashlight in his pocket and hauled the door open with his hands. Most minor station doors were designed for that with the power out, to prevent them from becoming impassible obstacles to later visitors. When there was comfortable space, he recovered the flashlight and peered inside. And froze, staring.
Erik did not sense a danger, as Alomaim did not seek cover. He just stared, and panned his light about, and Erik had to force himself to formation discipline, and not rush to look least his marine Lieutenant give him one of those looks marines gave spacers when they were screwing up. Alomaim finally gestured Erik to follow, as Brice watched the front-corridor, and Cruze the back.
Erik peered in. The room ahead was wide, with internal partitions removed, and filled with bunks. These bunks were tightly crammed, stacked four-high to the ceiling, and filled the space with a maze of steel frames. The aisles between them were narrow, and all of it so unnecessary to human eyes, as the tavalai would not have granted the krim insufficient space to sleep everyone separately if they chose.
“Sleeping quarters,” Alomaim murmured, his voice low in the manner of a man chilled and shivering. “Right near the command nerve centre. Damn hive species.”
It was a known evolutionary phenomenon, in the Spiral. Some species were individualists, and others were hives. The hives were usually trouble — like the krim, like the sard. And perhaps, some said, like the hacksaws… though Stan Romki and others frowned on classifying hacksaws in any similar category to anything organic.
“All the hives do this,” Erik murmured, following Alomaim’s lead, placing his steps carefully between the bare frames. “Eat, sleep and shit together. No concept of personal space. Their only sense of self is in relationship to a group. Without the group, they’re nothing.”
“Comforting,” said Brice from behind, following them in with similar cold disbelief. “If it means we can be sure they’re all dead.” All the krim had gone home, she meant, when the homeworld came under threat. Krim would rather die together than live alone. And that, Erik thought, really did make Styx an exception to the hive rule. She’d been living alone with her drysine survivors for a long time, locked in their little asteroid base. Hacksaws, Romki insisted, were infinitely more flexible than krim or sard. They adapted, drysines in particular. And apparently, deepynines too.
The next room stopped Alomaim cold. “You’re fucking kidding me,” he muttered, with uncharacteristic expression. But he moved in steadily, and Erik saw another room converted from its original office-space intent. This
one was wide and narrow, with a glass partition for a far wall, as in many open-plan offices. The room beyond the glass was bare, but the present one bore a row of holes in the floor, with steel frames and water nozzles. Against the glass partition wall were a series of podiums, each mounted with some kind of glass display.
“Toilets,” Brice observed as she came in behind Erik. “You weren’t kidding about them shitting together, Captain.”
“They evolved in caves,” said Erik, panning his light on the floor holes as he passed. “Huge crowds of them, in limited space. I read someone saying there’s no distinction between instinct and culture with krim. This is how they lived, and no cultural evolution ever changed it, technology or not.”
“Captain,” said Alomaim, paused before one of the podiums. His flashlight lit upon an object within a glass case. It was a military helmet, Erik saw as he approached. Human, and quite old, with no sign of modern taccom attachments. A high-velocity round had torn a great gash through its side, peeling it open like a sword-wound. Erik peered at the letters on the helmet rim. ‘US Marines’, they read.
“United States Marine Corps,” said Alomaim. “Circa maybe 2500? I recognise the design.” Erik glanced at him. The young Lieutenant looked quite emotional. “We owe them a lot of our organisational structure, insignia, ranks and such. They got hammered early, krim picked the biggest threats first. And they just didn’t fucking retreat, even when they should have. Didn’t have the weapons, didn’t stand a chance.”
“Didn’t fucking quit,” Sergeant Brice said grimly, watching on.
“Hooyah,” Cruze added. The others echoed it.
“War trophies,” Erik summarised, walking to the next podium, where another helmet rested. “Our people were down the hall, begging the Tsubarata to end the krim occupation, and the krim were sticking war trophies in their own Quarter.” He shone his light on the next helmet. “This one’s Indian, I think the next one’s Chinese. All the big militaries, the ones that gave them the most trouble.”
It was like walking into an old war museum back on Homeworld… and yet, not like that at all. That history had been old and dead for a lot of comfortable Homeworld civilians. Erik recalled being taken through similar artefacts in a school tour as a kid, and how annoyed and even shocked he’d been at the behaviour of some children — laughing, talking, acting bored and playing pranks on their classmates, showing no real respect for their history. Humanity was thriving, powerful and prosperous as never before — well on their way, at the time, to winning their last and largest war against the tavalai. For many civilians, a thousand years was simply too long ago to care, whatever the continuous strands of history that linked these past events to the dangerous present.
But his father and mother hadn’t waited for the expensive private school to take the Debogande children on such tours. They’d visited once a year themselves, escorted by representatives of veterans’ groups, and made large donations toward those groups and to the Homeworld museum itself. Some of Erik’s earliest memories were of historical displays, old weapons and uniforms, and pictures of the dead, all explained to him in hushed and reverent tones by his parents, family and veterans alike. He had no doubt that buried somewhere in those early experiences lay the seeds of his later decision to wear the uniform.
Those visits to the museums, with his family and not with the school, had been the most real, and the most moving. But they were nothing compared to this. Those had been displays by humans, for humans. This was a small corner of the war left unfinished, and frozen in time. It felt of things left unresolved, and debts left unpaid. How he could still feel that way about an enemy species that had been annihilated from the galaxy forever, Erik was not entirely sure. Except that for all the fashionable bleating of some human ‘universalists’ back home, about how every species needed to be as concerned for the welfare of others as their own, there was such a thing as love of one’s own above all else. And when it came right down to it, every human, and probably every tavalai, and every parren too, would always put their own people first.
“Sir,” said Cruze. “I know these are historical artefacts and the tavalai are preserving them, but I think these really belong to us.”
“I agree,” said Erik. “But they’re too big to take with us, and we’ve got a job to do.” He looked at the last podium display case, up the end of the row. Within it rested a small figure of a buddha, no larger than the palm of his hand. A trophy taken from some Asian temple, perhaps, and no doubt uncontaminated as most such Earth artefacts today were not, or its location in the krim toilet facility would have harmed all the krim here.
Erik reversed his flashlight and smashed the glass. It felt wrong to disturb something so old, but right as well, and he picked up the buddha, and showed it to the others. The buddha sat crosslegged in calm meditation, eyes closed, a serene smile upon his lips. He was very well made, ceramic and gleaming with polished glaze — an expensive prize, perhaps from a very important temple, ransacked as punishment for one or another uprising.
“He doesn’t belong here,” said Erik, tucking the figurine into an empty pocket. “He’s been meditating in this hellhole the best part of a thousand years, and now he’s coming home.”
The room beyond the glass wall was Styx’s destination. They searched the floor atop of the final location, until Private Cruze found a slim gap in the hardwearing carpet. He peeled it away, and found floor panels below, which after some effort and hammering finally came up to reveal stairs down to a tight, cramped room below. Alomaim went first, and found walls racked with krim weapons — 700 years unused but still functional in the cool, dry air.
“Better strip them down to be sure,” he advised as he passed the rifles up. “They’re not going to go mouldy or rusty without humidity, but you never know.”
“Also have to figure out how the damn things work,” said Brice, looking them over, dubiously. “Looks standard magfire, but…”
“Oh I know how they work,” her Lieutenant told her. “I wrote a paper on it in officer school, krim weapons and tactics in the Occupation War.”
“Fancy that,” said Brice. “Something useful comes out of officer school.”
Alomaim smirked, moving from rifles to grenades. “Yeah, go figure.”
Trace’s suit was giving her multiple warning lights, systems overheating, thermal shielding at critical, life support struggling to keep internal temperature below 45 Celsius. But the blast-furnace air had cooled to a still-murderous 200-plus degrees, and so long as she kept her movements slow and steady, the best-engineered armour in all Spiral armed forces would not melt, shut down or implode. She hoped.
“Chenkov, ready next ahead! Keep that flanking door shut!”
“It’s shut Major,” came Chenkov’s reply from back at the Vault airlock. “That flank’s secure, I’m ready on the next one.” At the rear she could hear gunfire and explosions as Second Section laid down fire on sard forces trying to get around their rear. With Chenkov closing doors on them that he wasn’t supposed to be able to access, they weren’t finding that easy.
Kono hit the door frame opposite her, too well drilled to need handsignals. “Go Chenk,” said Trace, and the heavy steel door shot open. Trace put a frag grenade in, closed her eyes as even her faceplate shield couldn’t block all the resultant flash, then followed Kono in as he went low, and shot a sard who hadn’t expected them there. Another returned fire from between the room’s big vertical storage tanks, and Trace shot him through the chest from the doorway, the impact upending the sard armour in mid-air, shoulders hitting the ground with the feet still rising.
“Spread and move,” said Trace, heading for the flanking wall and advancing. “Make it fast.” The room was water storage and recycling, she thought — rows of big tanks making corridors between. Several were holed from her frag grenade, pouring water that turned immediately to steam in the shimmering air. Zale shot another sard on the overhead walkway, none of them breaking stride, weapons panning.
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br /> “Door down,” Chenkov told Corporal Rael at their backs. “They’re going to hit it, can’t tell how long it’ll hold.”
“Moving up,” Rael informed them all, as Trace paused with her back to a power unit by a service corridor entrance, and glanced back past Zale to the kid, scuttling at their rear, effectively fire-support. She still had the safeties on his chain guns, however. An antennae-camera showed her the service corridor was clear, and she went down it first, whatever the frustration that would cause Kono, who didn’t like her leading. Chenkov’s tacnet map showed her the fastest way in, and with Chenkov in established control over the vault coms and other main systems, the remaining sard had little idea where the attackers were or where they were going, and if they figured it out, they’d typically find one of their own heavy steel doors blocking their path.
The service corridor took her over the bodies of two more dead, unarmored sard, then she paused at the next corner and stuck the antenna around once more. And had it promptly shot off by rapid fire that chewed the corridor exit and sent steel fragments raining off her armour. Trace might have sworn at Chenkov for not seeing sard defences ahead, but he was a spacer, and inexperienced at this form of warfare, and she’d have been wasting her time.
Instead she targeted fast, switched shoulder-facing on her back launcher, and sent a missile streaking around the corner to explode somewhere near the source of fire. She sent grenades and rifle fire after it, as did Kono as he stepped in behind her, standing while she crouched. Fire came back, but less accurate, and Trace ran to next cover along the wall — a heavy generator unit apparently under repair, as she figured this for a repair shop. Bits of it were blown off by incoming fire, then Kono and several others sent missiles and grenades and blew much of the workshop ahead to flaming hell.
“Move!” she told the others, without time for their usual caution. “Next ahead right, I’m down to one missile.” Kono would like that — it meant she had to stay back. He pushed ahead with Zale and Terez, Trace behind, between workshop aisles of vault machinery laid out for repair, heavy chains above to move it around. A lot was now wrecked and on fire, amid armoured sard bodies that marines put new rounds through to make sure, and some unarmored ones who’d been caught in the open when the breach air had come boiling through.
Kantovan Vault (The Spiral Wars Book 3) Page 42
