DANCER’S TITS, IT’S cold!” Zonte exclaimed when the airlock opened. Chill air bit through their insulated suits and bubble helms.
Sabira, Gabriel, and Zonte stepped out of the airlock, and a ramp extended from the ship to the landing platform. The dome the Shishiguchi had descended into had already contracted shut overhead. It was almost completely dark, except for the ship’s running lights and a few diodes along the dome's interior emitting a sulfurous glow.
“The jumpsuit will collect and regulate your body heat. You’ll feel warmer soon,” Gabriel said. “Sensors read frigid temps inside the bastion. Still much warmer than outside on the surface.”
“Let’s not go outside,” Sabira said.
“So how are we supposed to get anywhere?” Zonte asked. “Doesn’t seem to be any doors.”
As if in reply, popping sounds like cracking ice emanated from the base of the dome. An arch of glowing diodes outlined an airlock slowly cycling open. The three of them looked at each other and shrugged.
“I’ll check it out,” Sabira said. “Wait here.”
She glided quickly down the ramp and stopped in front of the airlock. Exposed mechanics pulsed and turned to dilate the portal, reminding her of biomech components, though she couldn’t see any biological aspects.
On the other side of the portal, a dim tunnel, about five meters wide and high, curved out of sight. Criss-crossing diodes blistered the arched ceiling, offering more of the same pallid illumination. Every surface was smooth and featureless, colored dark purple and marbled with black.
Sabira turned back and realized the bulk of the Shishiguchi rested in a pit much deeper than the platform she stood on. She had never seen the outside of the ship before. In the shadowed dome, with most of the vessel below her line of sight, she still didn’t have a good sense of its appearance. It landed vertically, and odd curves shaped the contour of the brazen hull.
“Passage looks clear,” Sabira transmitted. “No movement. But I can’t see deep far.”
“Cal, can you hear us?” Gabriel asked.
A clicking sound was followed by Cal’s voice. “I hear you.”
“Good. We should have clear communications up to a few hundred kilometers,” Gabriel said. “But we don’t know what kind of interference we might come across. If our signal goes out, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything’s happened to us. Got that?”
“I see you.”
“Good. Now, unless there’s an emergency, keep the comms clear. We don’t want any distractions. Alright, Zonte, Sabira, let’s go in.”
Zonte, untrained for such low gravity, stumbled down the ramp. Gabriel reached out to steady him and almost stumbled as well. They eventually recovered their footing and joined Sabira at the airlock.
In her old infiltration crew, Sabira had regularly trained for a variety of gravitational environments. She deftly arced farther into the tunnel but had to stop every few strides to let Gabriel, and then Zonte, catch up. Soon, due to the curve of the passageway, the airlock and the landing platform were well out of sight.
Gabriel studied his device again. “The internal atmosphere still reads clean, no toxins or viral agents. And we’re headed west. I wish this thing had link capabilities. It’s frustrating to access it by hand, especially with gloves”
“Link?” Zonte asked.
“An augmentation. Most second diaspora have them. It works with my nanotech colonies to connect with other people, nodes, devices, all that.”
“So that’s how you control machines with your mind,” Sabira said.
“When you put it that way, it sounds like magic,” Gabriel said. “But it’s common n-tech in the Constellation. Except for the third diaspora, of course.” Unlike the second diaspora, the third relied on genomic enhancements instead of n-tech colonies to survive the perils of extended space migration and new environments.
“And first diaspora, too.” Sabira turned to Gabriel, but he was farther behind than she’d assumed. “I’ll scout ahead a bit while you two find your feet. How do you activate the shields?”
Once they caught up with her again, Gabriel showed them how to activate their personal energy shields. “Hold off for now. These are designed for fending off boarding parties, not extended combat. Soon as there’s a need, though, don’t hesitate. Not for a heartbeat. In the meantime, let’s activate those veil lifters.”
Once activated, the orbs came alive with a soft green radiance. Sabira’s gently hummed against her chest. Vvrrllmm. The hum cycled faster until it flashed emerald light, washing ethereally across the bruise-colored tunnel. While her orb cycled up again, Zonte’s flashed from behind her.
Until they activated the veil lifters, Sabira hadn’t realized how quiet it was. Every spaceship, including the Shishiguchi, had its own ceaseless background murmur of engines and life support. Eventually, it passed beyond notice. Loshan Bastion, however, was truly silent. The only noises were their own.
Along the way, several openings to other spirals intersected their passage. The tunnels looked similar to the one they followed, though some were much smaller. Several descended under the dwarf planet’s surface. And everywhere, the same smooth, dark uniformity. Though she couldn’t say why, a sense of deep antiquity, of the profoundly ancient, permeated the bastion. Sabira couldn’t shake the feeling that they were the first living beings to walk these spirals for a deep long time.
Gabriel checked his device and called Sabira to wait as he and Zonte caught up. “We’re headed almost due north. If the passage keeps spiraling, which seems likely, we’ll be headed east soon.”
“We’ll loop all the way around before we head west again,” Sabira said.
“If we’re trying to get to the center first, going around in circles doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Zonte said.
“No, it certainly doesn’t,” Gabriel agreed. “If we can find intersections leading west, maybe we can zigzag to the center.”
An hour later, they entered a hub where two more passages intersected. One headed directly west but was too small to traverse without crawling on hands and knees. They unanimously rejected that route. Another headed southwest, tight enough they’d have to walk single file and crouched over. They picked that one. After confirming with Cal they could still reach him on comms, they headed in.
As they walked, occasional clattering echoed up from unseen distances—the first noises they’d heard since leaving their ship. Twice they switched to other passages that led more or less in a westerly direction. They walked upright again, but a sharp ache had wormed into Sabira’s upper back from being hunched over so long. At each intersection, they checked with Cal, Gabriel read his device, and they decided whether or not to veer into the new passage. The communication signal grew fainter with each check.
Four zigzags and another hour later, they emerged into a westward spiral that seemed about the same size as the original tunnel leading from the landing platform. For all she knew, it was the same one, but mentioning it wasn’t going to help anyone’s morale.
“I spent all this time preparing for the Constellation,” Zonte said. “Learning new languages, new tech. We were so close to our new life.”
“We’ll get there,” Gabriel assured him. “It seems to be a universal constant that there’s never a straight path to the things most important to us.”
“Our way got detoured, that’s no lie,” Sabira said. “We’ll still get to the other side.”
“So what do you plan to do?” Zonte asked.
“Whatever I need to do to get us through this,” she answered.
“Sorry. What are you going to do when we get the Constellation? What do you want for Sabira’s new life?”
“One thing at a time.” She gestured, indicating the long arc ahead.
Her belly grumbled. It had been hours since they ate, and she was feeling irritable. She clenched her jaw in frustration and drew a gun. “Let’s mark this wall. So we know which way we’ve come.”
“No, wait!” Gabriel insisted. “We haven’t run into trouble yet. Let’s keep it that way. Blasting holes in walls might be seen as a hostile act.”
“Think so?”
“Truth is, there’s no way to be sure.”
“Gabriel’s right,” Zonte said. “I don’t think we should shoot anything, not unless we really have to.”
Sabira grunted her assent, holstered the pistol, and continued to lead the way.
They followed that passage another half hour until it terminated into a far more cavernous structure. Its arches peaked nearly two hundred meters overhead. Misty tendrils drifted under the high vault. No seam, rib, or strut marred the blackish-purple walls, veined with dull gold. Blisters of interweaving diodes illuminated the way with thin sulfurous light. They stood in silence for a moment, taking in vast, towering emptiness.
“I’m sorry,” she said, breaking their awed quiet. “If I had let Orion open fire when he wanted, we’d be safely to your Constellation by now. Not wherever in all the hells this is.”
Gabriel rested his gloved palm on her shoulder. “Even though you were prepared to leave your old world behind, that doesn’t mean you stopped caring about family, about the people you loved. You’re a warrior, Sabira. A warrior whose heart has been opened by the eon sacrament. Don’t be so ready to close it once more.”
“Trying to protect them put you all in danger. After I failed Maia, after Rain . . .” Memories flashed. Plasma fire tearing Rain from her desperate grasp. Maia falling from her arms, a steaming hole blasted through her chest.
“You were not the one who failed them,” Gabriel said.
“Both of them, I had both of them in my hands when . . .”
“That wasn’t your fault.”
“Saying it doesn’t make it true.” Sabira gestured at their surroundings. “We’re trapped here because of me.”
“The burden of leadership isn’t in making the hard choices, but in shouldering their consequences.”
“I’m no leader.”
“What under the rocks? Come see this.” Zonte pointed to a green patch on the wall where their smaller tunnel met the great spiral arm. The patch resolved into coherent shapes the closer Sabira studies.
“It almost looks like—” Zonte started.
“Like our glyphs,” Sabira finished.
“Almost like I can read them. But I don’t actually know what any of them mean.” Zonte brushed his gloved fingers over the markings. “Feels like stone.”
Sabira touched the wall and recognized the smooth texture even through the glove. “Not stone. Crystal.”
Gabriel studied his device. “This big spiral runs to the southwest. We should get moving.”
The massive vault continued in a long slow arc. The smaller tunnel they had left was soon lost from sight. Even in that immense open space, the sense of the profoundly ancient weighed upon her shoulders, as if time and deep memory counteracted the dwarf planet’s light gravity. Occasional gusts of icy wind blew against their backs, accompanied by a far-off, echoing din, practically urging them to go faster. But caution was smarter than haste. For now.
Zonte walked beside Sabira. “I heard what you said to Gabriel. You did right, asking Orion not to shoot.”
“Doesn’t feel right.”
“Maia thought all khvazol deserved a chance at liberation. I do, too. Maybe I don’t believe in the Gods anymore, but I still believe there’s . . . I don’t know. Something. If the Servants hadn’t attacked the Embassy, your friend Daggeira probably would’ve drank the eon, too. She could’ve been one of us, with a little more time. Maybe she still can. She let us go in the pyramid hangar. We let them go outside the Gates. As deep weird as all this is, it feels like one of Maia’s synchronicities, don’t you think?”
After another hour, none of the cross tunnels they had passed led in a more westerly direction. And none were as high and wide as the one they followed, though the last was nearly a hundred meters from side to side. It had ramped steadily downward as it curved out of view. At each intersection, more oddly familiar-yet-unreadable glyphs marked the walls.
“Gabri—briel—you he—me?” Cal’s voice came through thin and choppy.
“I told you to keep comms silent unless—”
Cal’s voice cut Gabriel off. “Can you—me?—lot of noise—Can—”
“Cal, is something wrong?” Sabira asked.
No answer.
“What happened?” Zonte looked around worriedly.
“I’m not sure,” Gabriel said.
“The old man?” Sabira suggested.
“Possibly.” Gabriel’s golden eyes glittered in the thin light. “I keep seeing traces of thermal signatures at the farthest edges of those side tunnels. But never enough to get a clear read.”
As if in answer, an icy breeze slapped their backs. Inside her helmet, tingles bristled over Sabira’s scalp. A building wave of noise, interspersed with shrill bursts and low-frequency thrums, echoed through the crystal vault.
“Shields!” Gabriel called.
Interlocking energy streams flashed around each of them before fading into a shimmer. Sabira drew one of her pistols and turned into the gust. They were still within sight of the widest intersection they had passed. Blasts of cold wind and a harsh cacophony issued from its shadowy maw, followed by a surging wave of motion.
Thousands of machines poured through the archway, from the size of Sabira’s fist to larger than a grank. Extractors, cargo haulers, automatons, and maintenance drones. Some on legs, some on wheels, some zooming overhead on hover pods. Gray and white and black and yellow and red and purple. Striped and patched and monochrome. The flood of mechanicals turned into the larger spiral and drove quickly toward them. One wave of machines roiled over the floor, another wave soared about thirty meters above. They clattered and droned, screeched and hummed. The noise grew deafening with their approach.
Zonte, hands shaking, raised his pistol to the oncoming horde. Sabira recognized how closely intertwined bravery and foolishness often were.
“Hold your fire,” Gabriel said.
The swarm of machines rushed upon them. Sabira danced away from the larger ones. Most of the smaller ones maneuvered deftly around her. An odd probe occasionally bounced off of her shield. But they seemed more intent on getting to their destination than smashing her beneath their tide.
Zonte attempted to leap out of the path of a heavy-treaded vehicle. He misjudged his landing and sprawled face-first bounced off the floor, and then off the side of a multi-legged robot more than twice his height. The impact sent him spinning through the air. Some smaller drones couldn’t avoid his flailing limbs. Each new impact caused him to tumble and crash into more, until he finally settled on the crystalline floor.
“Zonte is down!” Sabira maneuvered toward him through the chaotic mechanical stream.
“I’m alright,” he transmitted. “The shields work. Embarrassed, tho—”
“Roll to your left,” Sabira shouted. “Do it now!”
He rolled. Heartbeats later, another heavy treaded vehicle rumbled through where he had just been.
“Stay where you are,” she said. “No more big ones coming. The little ones will go around.”
As quickly as the tide of machines fell upon them, they were gone. The strange echoes trailing in their wake were deeper than those that had announced their arrival.
Sabira deactivated her shield and helped Zonte to his feet.
Gabriel patted him on the back. “Nothing to be embarrassed by. Truthfully, I think this was a good sign. That convoy is heading the same direction we are.”
“It could mean we’re heading in the right direction,” Sabira admitted. “It also probably means Loshan Bastion is preparing something for us when we get there.”
“Oh, I’m sure of it,” Gabriel said.
“Well then,” Zonte said, brows arching, “let’s follow the herd.”
“I’m thinking you should stay behind,” Gabriel said to Zonte. “Wait at the archway where we entered this big spiral. You survived initial contact on an alien world with unfamiliar gravity. But only just. From here on, we can be sure it will only be more dangerous.”
“I know I’m not trained for this like you two,” Zonte said, “but there’s three of them out there somewhere. Should be three of us, too.”
“And when we run into them, if something happens to you, that will be my responsibility,” Gabriel said.
He tried to teach me about facing the consequences of leadership. Now he’s scared to face his own.
“Then you never should have let me come in the first place, because I’m not going to abandon you two now. See me, if something happened to you, or to them back at the ship, and I didn’t do everything I possibly could to help, I’d never be able to live with myself. And besides all that, I haven’t saved Sabira’s life yet.”
“Maybe you just did and don’t know it,” Gabriel said. “Eon visions can be devilishly hard to interpret at times.”
“No, this wasn’t it,” he insisted. “We were in a big tunnel, a lot like this actually. But there was a creature, like a giant spider, about to kill you—”
“You mean, like that big machine with all the legs you just bounced off of?” Gabriel asked.
“No. I’m telling you . . . it was different. You still need me here, with you. I know it.”
“It’s too godsdamned late to second guess ourselves now,” Sabira said. “We have shields. We have each other. And we have a long way to go. We should catch a ride on one of the bigger haulers.” She indicated they should follow as she jogged toward the receding convoy.
Gabriel bounded after her. “Keep moving, but don’t touch those things. At least not yet.”
“Why not?” Zonte managed to lope behind without falling. “That man, the one who may or may not be Orion’s blood-father, said we had to get there first. Don’t we need to be fast?”
“Yes,” Sabira agreed. “Fast as possible.”
“There’s too much we don’t know yet,” Gabriel cautioned. “He called this a bastion, but a bastion of what? For who? For all we know, those automatons could be the Final Masters he mentioned. Could be weapons, another trap. Catching a ride might be seen as an aggressive act. We’ve been snared in one trap already, we can’t afford to spring another.”
“We also don’t know what Grandfather Spear is doing,” Sabira countered. “Could be riding one of those things straight to the Hara while we speak. And Daggeira, she’d cave in this whole place on all our heads, if it meant not losing to me.”
“Precisely why we can’t be the ones to make the first mistake,” Gabriel said. “We have more than pride and glory to be concerned with. Everyone on the Shishiguchi is counting on us. We can’t make foolish decisions in our haste.”
“It still feels deep slow,” Zonte said, “but Gabriel’s right.”
Sabira rubbed her gloved fingers back and forth along her chest. She couldn’t feel the contour of her scar through the thick jumpsuit. Every instinct urged her to use any tool, any weapon, any creature she could if it meant victory. Yet, her heart pulled toward Gabriel’s wisdom.
Listening to that same pull is what landed us here. Is what kept me from letting Orion open fire on Grandfather Spear and Daggeira. How can a warrior live with an open heart?
Ahead of them, the convoy pulled farther away, leaving only a fading jumble of echoes in its trail. The three of them ran behind, small bouncing insects in the colossal emptiness.