by Craig Allen
Sonja pulled up the flight patterns of the hoppers above. “No flight paths are going anywhere near Monster Island. I don’t know why. Maybe…”
“Maybe they’ve already destroyed them.” Cody’s shoulders tightened. “All the more reason we should check.”
“Bad idea.” Bodin put a hand on Cody’s shoulder before he could respond. “Egg, either the fliers are okay, or they’re not. If they’re okay, there’s no point in drawing attention to them. If not, there’s nothing we can do for them in a tiny hopper.”
Cody hated to admit it, but Bodin had a point. “In that case, we should find out what’s there.”
Bodin covered his face for a moment. “You’re crazy, Egg. But I guess we got to know what’s going on. If a rescue ship shows up and a shitload of ships pour out of that plateau, they’re going to be in for a real nasty surprise.”
Cody faced Sonja. “You’re in charge. You say no, and we won’t do it.”
Sonja took in a breath and let it out slowly. “Hell. Bodin’s right.”
She reached for her console, hesitated, then flicked at a holosymbol. Power built in the reactor, redirecting to the engines.
“We’d be better off hiding in space,” she said at length. “If your transponder trick works, we might even be able to get to the outer edge of the system. But first, maybe we should do some recon.”
Cody brought the transponder online and verified it was broadcasting the decoded signal, praying he hadn’t missed anything. They waited until no ships were close by to see them rise out of the water, which didn’t take long.
Sonja inhaled sharply. “Here we go.”
She pulled back on the stick while depressing the pedals in the floor. The hopper shifted, lifting off the shelf, sending silt into the water, and then rose. A moment later, they broke the surface. Water ran down the canopy as the hopper cleared the surface and rose higher. The ocean fell beneath them, and as they gained altitude, Sonja extended the hopper’s airfoils. All around them was nothing but water.
They leveled out and headed toward the plateau. Not long afterward, someone noticed them.
“Contact.” Sonja pointed at the HUD. “They’re about fifty klicks out, closing at nine hundred kph.”
“Looks like they’re going to pass two hundred meters over us,” Cody said. “I recommend we don’t divert course. They might get suspicious if we do.”
Sonja kept the hopper level and straight. It had dropped in altitude but maintained its course.
“What if they squawk at us?” Bodin asked.
“They don’t speak like we do. The radio is useless to them.” Cody hoped they hadn’t learned to speak in addition to using technology.
The hopper grew closer, its airfoils extended. After a few moments, it passed overhead, never changing course. Soon, it was out of sight.
“It worked.” Cody let his breath out. “Plateau is next?”
“Yep.” Sonja pulled back on the stick, and the hopper’s elevation increased. “We’ll check it out, and then we’ll get space under us.”
Cody watched the water race by. And hope we don’t get caught.
Chapter Fifteen
The water gave way to the beach and then to the dish trees, shrubs, and red reeds that covered the land. The reeds formed geometric patterns that stretched to the horizon. The patterns would remain for a time then change completely. Cody couldn’t make sense of them.
On gravimetrics, another hopper passed by—the sixth one they had seen since they emerged from the ocean. It, too, passed by without noticing.
“So far, so good.” Cody watched the other hopper bank to the south and continue on its way. “Well, they see us as one of them.”
Sonja pointed at the gravimetrics on the HUD. “There it is. Well, Cody, looks like you were right.”
A hopper rocketed upward, leaving the plateau itself. It angled nearly straight up as it launched itself into orbit. External mics registered a sonic boom as it continued to climb and rapidly vanished into space.
Cody stared at the plateau below them. “I wonder what’s down there.”
“Let’s find out.”
As Sonja dipped the nose of the hopper, they fell toward the planet. From their altitude, the plateau looked like a thimble but got larger quickly.
“Ain’t no reeds or plants on the plateau anywhere,” Bodin said. “Just like last time.”
The plateau loomed before them, dredging up bad memories in Cody. He, Sonja, and Bodin were the only ones who had survived the crash of the Spinoza.
Sonja hovered the hopper next to the plateau just below the summit. “All right, what now? Cody, do you see anything?”
Cody went over the sensors, still relying on passives. “Nothing.”
“Well, there has to be something around here.” Sonja circled the plateau, keeping the nose pointed at it. “Those hoppers didn’t just come out of nowhere.”
“True,” Cody said. “But I don’t see where.”
Bodin wagged a finger at the plateau. “Gotta be a code or pass phrase or some shit. No way a gate or whatever would just open for anybody who—”
A crack split the mountainside, growing larger until it became a cave. The top of the plateau angled backward until the entire plateau had split in half, creating the largest cave mouth Cody had ever seen. The cave extended downward into darkness.
“Oh, shit.” Bodin cringed. “Think somebody saw us?”
Cody checked gravimetrics. The tunnel went back a good ways, and indications of some sort of gravimetrics showed up but nothing resembling a ship.
He double-checked the sensors to be sure. “We must’ve triggered something to open it.”
“What, so it opens for anybody?” Bodin asked.
“Or anyone with this transponder.” Cody pulled up the sensor scan of the tunnel on the HUD. “And I do mean anyone.”
“Jesus,” Sonja said. “You could fly a couple dozen hoppers side by side through that hole.”
“Or one battle cruiser,” Cody said. “Do we go in?”
“Fuck that.” Bodin waved his hands in the air. “What the hell would we want to go in there for?”
“To find out what they have?” Sonja suggested.
“We know what they got.” Bodin pointed at the opening. “That’s where they’ve been hiding everything. Let’s get back into space, hide, wait for the rescue, and then tell everyone what we found.”
The gates to hell remained open as they argued. Cody tried to scan the interior, but all he read was a tunnel angling down for at least a hundred meters. Everything was distorted after that.
“There’s another possibility,” Cody said. “If we don’t go down there, then it will tip them off that something is off about us.”
Bodin scratched his cheek. “That’s a good point, Egg.”
“I guess that decides it.” Sonja pushed the stick forward. “Hope we don’t get spotted.”
The hopper lurched forward and entered the tube. Darkness enveloped them. Cody flipped on night vision, and everything visible outside the canopy became as bright as day. The hopper continued to descend into the downward tunnel.
For about fifty meters in, the outside of the tube was covered in some plasteel substance similar to the hopper launch tubes on board the Washington. Past that, the artificial tunnel changed into smooth rock. They saw no signs of other ships, thankfully.
Sonja did a double take at her console. “You guys want the bad news?”
“No, but give it anyway,” Bodin said.
“The tunnel closed behind us.”
Cody checked the sensors. “Confirmed.”
“Aw, don’t say that.” Bodin hung his head low. “How the hell are we getting out of here?”
Cody pointed at the main doors. “It stands to reason that when we approach the exit, it will open again when it detects our transponder.”
“I hope so.” Sonja gripped the stick more tightly. “We’ll see how far down this rabbit hole goes, first.”
They continued down the rocky tunnel, which was rich with metallic ores. Cody noted a gold vein just under them. The place would have been a miner’s dream at one time in human history.
He magnified a section of the wall. “I don’t see how this cave could be natural.”
“It looks like it was dug out.” Sonja highlighted sections of the cave wall on the HUD. “See there. That’s too smooth to be natural. I’d say a plas-torch.”
“That’s an awful lot of torches,” Bodin said.
A light flashed on Cody’s sensors. “There’s an opening ahead.”
“A way out?” Sonja asked.
Cody raised his eyebrows. “Out of the tunnel, at least.”
Sonja slowed the hopper to a few tens of kilometers per hour, maneuvering in a sort of hover-flying mode but still descending deeper into the cavern. The surrounding cave grew larger all at once as they emerged from the tunnel. Even with the night vision up on the HUD, Cody still couldn’t make out the far end of the cave. More importantly, though, he could easily make out the immediate vicinity.
Docking platforms lined the walls, more than Cody had ever seen on any station in known space. Hoppers were launching and landing, each a single blip out of many on gravimetrics. The entire chamber buzzed with hoppers, flying from platform to platform or simply flying randomly throughout the massive cavern. He counted over a hundred hoppers.
“Well, damn.” Bodin pointed. “Look at that.”
Toads scurried across the platforms, between and on top of the hoppers. They were connecting coolant hoses and, in some cases, loading torpedoes. They moved with the efficiency of any human crew.
“I’m matching speed with the other hoppers,” Sonja said. “They’re not flying too fast, at least.”
“The more we blend in, the better.” Bodin gritted his teeth. “We get spotted, we’ll be in some real shit.”
“Good point.” Sonja waved a finger at Cody. “Better bring up the tint. It’s in the environmental controls.”
Cody ran through the menus and found it. The canopy would tint automatically to block out brighter light. He set it to manual and darkened the windows while the HUD itself compensated so they could still see clearly.
Between the launch pads, the red reeds fluttered back and forth all along the walls, but the reeds were different, far longer than Cody had ever seen them get. The shorter ones were six or seven meters while others were many times longer. The cavern looked as if a million octopi had attached themselves to the walls.
Bodin pointed ahead. “What the hell is that thing?”
Attached to the cavern wall between two launch pads was a mass of red reeds growing out of a large mound. The reeds fluttered in a nonexistent breeze, and even the mound underneath undulated. The whole living mass was a good fifty meters across. From the outer edges stretched more reeds, the biggest Cody had seen. The base of one monstrous trunk was easily several meters thick, and the tentacle itself stretched along the wall for as far as Cody could see. From the larger tentacle stretched additional tentacles, like branches from a tree trunk. Some of those branches stretched to the top of the cavern and disappeared into the rock.
“They’re like the red reeds, only larger.” As soon as Cody said it, it made sense. “The reeds above ground are just part of these things, like fingers. And those”—Cody pointed at the massive lump of reddish matter—“are the bodies.”
“Wonder how many there are?” Sonja asked.
“Look for yourself.” Bodin pointed all over the cavern.
Dozens of them clung to the walls all around the cavern, some mounds larger than the one in front of them, but all had giant red reeds sprouting from them. One tentacle shifted, lifting into the air, passing over a docking platform, and then settled back down against the wall once more. The toads wandering around the platform didn’t react at all.
“How far down are we, anyway?” Bodin asked.
Cody tracked their descent on the hopper’s logs and calculated it. “Based on our rate of descent, we’re about five hundred meters below the surface. It’s about twenty degrees warmer here than above ground.”
Bodin whistled. “Hope it’s a dry heat.”
“Washington’s scans couldn’t go this deep,” Sonja said. “There was no way we could have known about all of this.”
“All they had to do was shield the entryway,” Cody said.
They flew within thirty meters of one wall. On a landing platform, a toad stood in front of a landed hopper. Metallic sleeves covered its body, which moved with the creature seamlessly—just like power armor.
“Full can for a toad.” Sonja shuddered. “They’re awful enough in the raw.”
“Yeah, but look at it,” Bodin said. “That toad don’t look right.”
Once Bodin mentioned it, Cody couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed it right away. “That toad doesn’t have a central arm.”
The central arm of a toad was all it had in combat. It wielded weapons with that hand, from spears to coilguns, and it used the claw to grab hold of prey and crush them. Removing the arm left it with four more claws, but they were nothing compared to the nimble central arm that could be on top of the toad or bottom, depending how the creature oriented its body. Taking that arm away was like declawing a cat and removing its teeth.
“Christ,” Sonja said. “Did someone cut it off?”
“How would anyone manage that?” Cody asked. “Unless the toad agreed to it.”
Sonja faced forward again. “And why would a toad allow—whoops.”
An alarm went off, flashing the word “proximity.” A hopper was flying nearby, just off their starboard. Sonja started to adjust course, but when it became clear the hopper would miss, she kept it steady.
“What the hell?” Bodin pointed at the hopper. “Look at the pilot.”
The hopper flew close enough they could see the occupants. They were toads—or at least had been. Their heads had shriveled considerably, and their eyes had increased from barely noticeable to a diameter much greater than human eyes. Large foreclaws handled the control systems expertly as it sat in a seat modified for the toad’s biology. Like the toad in the power armor, the central claw was nowhere to be seen. Cody couldn’t even see a stump where it had once been.
The copilot was even odder. The mantis-like head identified it as a behemoth rider, but the head spun around on a swivel like a human head instead of the immobile head common to riders. It had two large eyes instead of the multitude of eyes spread evenly around the head. The mantis’s face resembled a disproportionate human face. The mantis reached up for the HUD, revealing humanoid hands instead of the stringy tentacle-like appendages.
Once the hopper passed, Sonja focused ahead of them once again. “Are those a species we haven’t seen before?”
“I don’t believe so.” Cody tried to see inside any other hoppers, but they were too far away. “I think they were altered.”
“Somebody remade them?” Bodin scratched his head. “What could do that?”
“The same thing that could imagine the idea of space travel.” Cody pointed toward a platform large enough to hold a Kali-sized vessel, supported underneath by girders and massive reed tentacles. “The same thing that taught the creatures of this world how to build all of this. And how to use it.”
“Cody, check the gravimetrics,” Sonja said. “There’s something weird below us.”
A good two hundred meters below, scattered all over the floor of the cave, were dozens of signatures. Even with the daylight scopes cranked to maximum, Cody had a hard time making anything out on the cavern floor.
“They look like grav-engines.” Cody tried to fine-tune the sensors. “I can’t tell from here.”
“Let me get closer.” Sonja angled the hopper down, reducing their altitude further.
Cody hoped that wouldn’t make them stand out.
Seconds later, his sensor readings became clear. He counted a dozen vessels. Some were just skeletons, but others were nearly f
inished. Each of them was a variant of the old Kali-class space vessel.
“Oh no.” Sonja altered the trajectory of the hopper. “Look at that.”
On the cavern floor, surrounded by construction platforms building Kali vessels, was a much larger vessel, one close to completion. Creatures in power armor swarmed over the hulk, putting hull plating in place. The design was familiar, but Cody ran the size of the vessel through the hopper’s recognition systems, hoping he was wrong. Seconds later, he found he wasn’t.
“They’re building a warship,” he said.
“They’re building the Washington, that’s what.” Bodin put his hand to his head. “Jesus, they’re trying to duplicate it.”
“And they’re about done.” Sonja pulled up a passive scan of the massive vessel. “They’re working on the Daedalus struts now. That means they’re only weeks away from completion.”
Kali creatures swarmed over the skeletal vessels that surrounded them. All that effort was at least as great as humans had put into building spaceships during the Spican War. That many ships could easily start a new war.
“They didn’t build them in orbit because we’d notice.” Bodin scratched his head. “Why didn’t they do this shit in the globular cluster? We probably wouldn’t find them there.”
Cody zoomed in on the warship. “There’s still the chance they could get spotted, even in the globular cluster. But underground is more difficult. And there’s nothing to say that you can’t build one of these things on the ground. Antigrav plating can keep sections from collapsing until you get everything ready.”
Sonja chewed her lip for a moment as she adjusted course again. “How much time would it take to put all this in place?”
“Ten years,” Cody said. “I’d bet money they started this once they discovered the automated factories on the battle cruiser Kali.”
“And they been busy ever since.” Bodin shook his head slowly as he took it all in. “We gotta nuke this shit.”
Cody couldn’t agree more. With all those ships, the toads could do more than start a war. They could win one.
