by J. N. Chaney
“Dressler, you ready?” I asked, turning my attention to the doctor.
She stood at the door, working a pad in her hands as usual. “Yes, Captain.”
I prepped the teams, making sure everyone was clear on their jobs. When our large troop assembled a few short minutes later, I turned and said, “Go ahead and open it.”
She keyed something into the pad and looked at the door expectantly. True to form, it slid open without a sound. The light from the hall only touched a meter or less inside, then it was nothing but yawning black.
Rackham, Abigail, and I led the way to the entrance, the rest following behind us. Sanchez hung back with Davon and Dressler, who joined them behind us.
As much as I wanted to investigate, I knew rushing in was out of the question. That didn’t mean I had to be patient. “Siggy, what do you got?”
“Nothing yet, Captain.” He said it over the main channel, so all present could hear. “I do not detect any signs of movement or power.”
“Can you get the power back online?” Rackham asked beside me.
“I’m afraid not, Lieutenant,” Sigmond said apologetically. “However, the probability of a hostile attack is under ten percent.”
“That’s good enough for me.” I turned on my rifle light and led the way inside.
The only noise came from our movements as we walked along the metal flooring. The little beam didn’t do much to penetrate the dark and I had to take in the space short sections at a time. Where most of the other rooms we’d investigated opened directly to a large main chamber, we appeared to be in a hallway. By my estimate, they spanned a little over two meters. On my right were two doors.
“Locked,” I said after trying the first one.
“I won’t be able to open them until the power is restored,” Dressler whispered over the comm.
I didn’t like leaving any area unchecked and ordered one of my crew to stand guard. Rackham did the same. Sanchez offered up two of his men to the next door, easing enough of my concern that I felt better about continuing on.
The rest of the hallway was bare, and it ended a few meters later, spilling out into another expanse of black. As I moved deeper into the room, my light fell on something hanging from the ceiling that looked like thick black ropes. Odd, I thought, peering as I took another step forward to check it out and froze when my foot landed on something soft.
“Everybody stop,” I ordered.
“Jace, what is it?” Abigail’s voice came over both the comm and from behind me, thick with concern.
“Not sure,” I told her. “I stepped on something.” Up to this point, the floors had been so pristine that they almost looked like a mirror. I’d been so eager to investigate the hanging object that I hadn’t checked my surroundings.
Embarrassing mistake.
“Don’t move,” said Dressler. “Let me have a look at it.”
“Is the room clear?” I barely moved my lips to speak as she entered.
I knew she had a handheld flashlight because she wasn’t carrying a rifle. Not wanting to aim my own weapon at myself or jostle too much, I followed her instructions, hardly daring to breathe. Her light came up behind me, bobbing with her movement and casting shadows in front of me. A bead of sweat rolled down the side of my face, but I didn’t attempt to wipe it away.
The doc crouched gingerly beside me. “Hmm,” was all she said. She stood a moment later and shined her light on the floor, sweeping it from side to side before something caught her eye and she began to move forward.
“Dressler, what the hell are you doing?” I said through gritted teeth.
She waved a hand over her shoulder without turning around. “Sorry, Captain. It isn’t anything dangerous. Just a large wire. It leads in here. They all do.”
“Hold on, doc,” I told her. Finally able to move again, I followed her with my light, careful not to point it directly at her. Satisfied that she’d stopped, I checked the ground and found more wires crisscrossing and overlapping. Even more hung from the ceiling in a chaotic mess reminiscent of a spiderweb. At first glance, they looked as though someone had tangled them up on purpose or just laid them down haphazardly, but the more I looked, the more I realized there was a pattern to it.
Dressler let out a loud gasp that had me rushing to her side. I didn’t have to ask why she’d chosen to react that way. All of the wires coalesced in the middle of the room to a central hub. She pointed her light through a gap at what looked like a reclining armchair. I could just make out the profile of it from the side. There, resting on the side of the chair, a white hand waited silently in the dark.
10
“Form a circle around whatever the hell that thing is,” I ordered everyone. “Siggy, I thought you didn’t detect any lifeforms in here? What the hell is that?”
“Correct.” he replied. “Sir, I don’t believe it is alive.”
My eyes hadn’t left the hand as I watched for any sign of movement. Considering we were all still alive, he was probably right. That didn’t mean I was about to take any chances. “Doc, can you verify?”
With the better view, I could see that it had been restrained to the chair with the wires and more of the black tubes were connected all over. The body was thin and frail, like it had been here a long time. All the previous Celestials we’d encountered had milk white skin, smooth and clean. This one’s flesh looked like cheap plastic, wrinkled and almost translucent in places.
“Gods,” Abigail whispered under her breath.
The tension in the room ratcheted up as Dressler eased up to the chair, more careful than I’d ever seen her before. Good, she was finally learning. I moved closer too, keeping my rifle aimed at the head. Only Abigail and Rackham were brave enough to do the same. Everyone else in the room kept a relatively safe distance.
I almost felt sorry for the poor bastard. What had he done to end up like this? What did he have to do with Athena’s message? The obvious discomfort that the thing had endured while alive might have tugged on my sympathy, but I wasn’t sorry he was dead. Better him than us.
“Dead,” Dressler confirmed. I couldn’t see her face, but I thought she sounded almost sad and I wondered if she felt some empathy for the creature or a sense of loss at not finding it alive to study.
I took a few more steps until we were level with each other. “You sure?” I asked, peering down at it. The face was frozen in place, its eyes closed. Thin lips pressed together tightly, forming a rigid line, still as a statue.
Dressler nodded. “This is an unknown class, but its major organs are still in roughly the same place. Blood flow has ceased. I’d be quite surprised if it were alive.”
“What are all these tubes?” Rackham pointed at the Celestial’s neck. They spilled out around the chair, covering it completely, and snaked out across the ground.
She walked around the body, shining the little light as she went. “I don’t know. I need time to examine everything here. Weeks, perhaps.”
“Dr. Dressler,” Davon said from the other side of the room. “You should take a look at this.”
She shoved a hand through her hair and walked to where the Sarkonian was standing, his flashlight shining on something.
I took the moment to check in with the teams guarding the unopened doors.
“Nothing to report,” Octavia confirmed.
“Let’s hope it stays that way,” I muttered. Satisfied, at least for the moment, I motioned for Abigail and Rackham to come with me and see what the doctors were up to. Once out of the wire jungle, we found them and Major Sanchez inspecting the wall of computer systems that spanned from ceiling to floor, dark and still as the dead Celestial in his chair.
Dressler held the light in her mouth so both hands were free to skim the wall. “Got it,” she exclaimed, the words muffled.
“Got what?” I asked.
She waved us closer. “Watch,” she instructed. The doctor laid her palm on a small plate jutting out ever so slightly from the wall. It glowed to her
touch. “I wonder if it’s reacting to my proximity or something else,” murmured Dressler. She laid her hand on the pad again and it glowed to life
“What is that?” I asked.
“A button,” she responded impatiently, as if that were obvious. “More specifically, a control switch of some kind.”
“And what does the button do?” I asked.
Dressler studied it, then consulted her data pad before answering. “It might be the activation mechanism for this room’s function. It’s hard to know for certain.”
“Perhaps we can turn on the power to the room,” suggested Davon, curiosity apparently getting the better of him.
Sanchez was surprisingly quiet, observing with a watchful eye. Had Vick been here, he would have vocalized his opinion and likely demanded that we first let a barrage of Union scientists look it over. Davon seemed to be more ambitious.
“Only one way to find out,” Dressler spoke up.
It took a moment for me to understand her intention. “Hey, don’t—” I started to order, but I was too late.
She pressed the device until it clicked and locked into place, still glowing. I tensed as a low hum started from behind the wall. The chamber’s overhead lighting woke up, flooding the room in brightness that burned my eyes. I threw an arm up at the sudden transition and slowly blinked away the spots to see that everyone else had done the same.
“Everything okay in there, Captain?” Octavia asked over the comm.
“Yeah, Dressler just decided to start pressing buttons that ought to not be pushed,” I complained.
So much for her being cautious.
“Sigmond, are you getting this?” she asked, completely ignoring me.
A section of the wall surrounding the button she’d pushed lit up in an array of multicolored lights. Now that my eyes had adjusted, I could see a decent stretch of the wall in one glance. It wasn’t just one terminal, but a collection of them.
“Yes, Dr. Dressler,” he replied. “Quite fascinating. It appears we’ve found the security surveillance hub.”
“Not found. We were led here,” I said, recalling the signal that brought us down into this pit of a tomb in the first place. “Siggy, now that the power’s been turned on, is there any sign of Athena? Scan for that transmission. See if she’s sending it again. Look for anything.”
“The system is still rebooting,” answered the Cognitive. “I will continue to scan in the meantime.”
I hadn’t expected a different answer, but the disappointment still ran deep. Athena was long gone, if indeed she had ever been here. Not only did all our questions remain unanswered but now there were more. I didn’t have time to ponder them though because Rackham jerked around to stare at something off to the side. Abigail seem to notice as well, stiffening beside me. I turned, but there were only hanging wires, swaying gently.
“See something, Rackham?” I asked.
He nodded. “Those wires weren’t moving before. I thought someone walked through them, but everyone’s over on this side of them.”
I opened my mouth to tell him that he was being paranoid and there was nothing here but us and the corpse, but then I saw it for myself.
A cluster of cables moved on the other side of the room far removed from any of my team. I exchanged a look with Abigail and the lieutenant and motioned with my hand to tell them I was going to move forward. The cables twitched again as I edged closer and tried not to think about being strangled to death by sentient wiring.
A few steps later and another retracted to the ceiling, parting like a curtain. Each forward movement incited the same reaction until I had a clear line of sight to the Celestial in the middle of the room. As I watched, the cables continued to move away from us, organizing themselves into pillars around the corpse.
“What the hell is happening?” muttered Rackham.
The wires covering the chair began to writhe, moving the Celestial’s body. It was in that moment that I realized these wires were the chair, and in only a few seconds they began to unfurl from their previous shape and reform again, changing until the seat went from reclining to upright, shifting the corpse so that it faced away from me.
I jerked my rifle up when the chair twisted, bringing the front to face us.
“Hold your fire, Jace Hughes,” a voice rasped out of the mouth of the porcelain corpse. “We have much to discuss.”
11
It wasn’t my self-control that stopped me from emptying my magazine into the decrepit being before me so much as the shock at the fact that it spoke at all. Add to this that it used my name and we had ourselves one hell of an unprecedented situation on our hands.
Despite being surrounded, the Celestial didn’t appear bothered. If it was, I certainly couldn’t tell.
It stared back, unmoving, through the flat slits I guessed were eyes. We regarded each other like that for a long moment before I decided to respond.
I kept my eye down the sight of my rifle. “How the hell do you know my name?”
“I know much about you, Jace Hughes,” said the creature.
“I’m not in the mood for games. If you want to jerk me around, I’d just as soon shoot you here and now,” I said.
Granted, I probably wouldn’t, considering he was the first Celestial we’d found on Tartarus since we’d taken it. Keeping him alive seemed like the better option. Intelligence gathering and all that.
He considered me briefly before tilting his head in a feeble nod. “I have no such intention. I know your name because I am the Overseer assigned to what you call Tartarus. I see all that happens inside this facility.”
The Overseer tilted its head. He lifted his hands, both still encircled by wires, and gestured to himself. “This organic vessel is only part of me. The rest resides in the system.”
He spread his arms wide to encompass the entire room. At the same time, all the displays flickered on, showing camera feeds all over the metal planet. Vick and Grennet in the meeting room, Dressler’s lab, the chambers we’d discovered. The images cycled and depicted unfamiliar places yet to be explored. That was a surprise.
I returned my attention back to him. “You’re hooked into the central core of this place.”
“That is correct. I am in many ways like your Sigmond…and Athena.” His voice didn’t have the same quality as theirs. It was more lifelike, less synthetic. His body was also physical and seemed to possess humanoid nuances, certainly a sign that he wasn’t altogether as alien as I thought.
But all of this could’ve been a ruse to draw us in and gain our trust. I couldn’t let my guard down, not even for a second.
An indignant cough came over the comm but I ignored it at the mention of our missing Cognitive. “Did you have something to do with Athena’s message? Where is she?” I took a step forward.
The Overseer didn’t react to the blatant hostility in my tone or my threatening advance. “Your vitals are spiking, Jace Hughes. I recommend you take a breath.”
“I don’t give a damn about my vitals,” I snapped. “If you know something about Athena, you’re going to tell me.”
“Athena’s location is not known to me. After Titan fell, and her capsule recovered, the Engineers—”
“Hold it,” I said, tossing up a hand to halt his explanation so I could absorb what he was telling me. Nothing he’d said so far made a whole lot of sense. “What Engineers? Is that what Tartarus is, a planet full of Engineers?”
The Celestial cocked his head slightly, regarding me with a searching gaze. “Perhaps it would be best if I start at the beginning. I think then you might understand better what has happened and what may yet occur.”
“Yeah, why don’t you do that, Overseer? Or whatever the hell your name is,” I said, trying to keep a handle on myself. Staying calm was vital. The more information I could pry out of him, the better I could assess what was going on.
“Our kind bear no names,” he replied mildly. “However, you may designate one if you wish.”
I had no interest in naming him, but I didn’t want to keep referring to him as Overseer either. That didn’t sound right, even if that was what he did. It contributed to the surveillance implication that I was trying to avoid. “Fine. You can be Carl,” I said, giving him the first name that came to mind. “Now, I believe you were in the middle of telling us a story of some kind.”
The wires began to move again, shifting the newly minted Carl from a seated position to one of standing. I tensed as he did so, as did everyone else in the room.
“I assure you all, no harm will come to you from me,” the Celestial promised, glancing around apprehensively at the various weapons pointed in his direction. “Please be at ease.”
“Not a chance,” I grunted. “We have nothing to lose by keeping weapons on you and everything to lose if we don’t.”
A pained expression crossed over his pale face, but it was hard to say if that was an emotion or a response to something else. “Very well,” he continued. “Tartarus was built and installed in its present location quite some time ago. A thousand of your standard years, I believe.”
More questions buzzed in the back of my mind, but I suppressed them for now to focus on one.
I lowered the rifle a fraction and peered at the Celestial around it. “You said vessel… Tartarus is a ship?”
When he nodded, his mouth stretched again in what might have been a smile. There were murmurs from behind me, a few of them coming from the Union and Sarkonian soldiers, including Rackham.
A ship. I supposed that made a certain kind of sense. Tartarus was just a bigger version of Titan, now that I thought about it. Why hadn’t that possibility crossed my mind before? Or Sigmond’s, for that matter? He should have figured this out or at the very least brought up the possibility. I decided to berate him later, once all of this was over with.
