IN LONG, GRACEFUL strides, Sabira ran the length of the cavernous spiral arm. Each footfall sent lightning storms through her skull and down her arms. She didn’t pause or break her stride until she caught up with Zonte and the robotic monstrosity currently inhabited by Orion. Through panting breaths, she explained what had happened with Zika, Spear, and Gabriel.
“He’s the one that killed her?” Zonte pursed his lips into a straight line.
“He is.”
“And Gabriel, he didn’t . . . ?” Zonte mimed a shooting action with his hands.
“He wanted to.”
“We need to keep moving,” Orion said. “We’re getting close.”
Zonte looked back the way Sabira had come, as if trying to spy her grandfather being led back to their ship. “It’s what Maia would have wanted.”
“I said the same thing.”
“What’s that on the back of your head? I just noticed.” Zonte reached up to touch it. Sabira grabbed his hand before he could.
“Don’t.”
“What happened?”
“Warseer wanted to see if my skull could hammer through these crystal walls or not. Turns out not.”
“You alright?”
“Worst headache of my life, but I can still see straight. Gabriel showed me how to take some of the forma in my clothes and turn it into a bandage.”
“I can do that a bit better for you if you like.”
“This’ll do for now. Let’s just keep going.” We still don’t know where Daggeira is, or how close she might be to the Hara.
Suddenly, the whole structure rumbled and shook. The floor lurched. Sabira fell to her knees, head blaring. Zonte dropped to his hands and knees beside her. The shake ended as quickly as it began, but the vaulted crystal continued to vibrate like a struck gong.
“What under the rocks?” Zonte murmured, getting to his feet.
“Quake?” Sabira suggested.
“Impact,” Orion said. “Big crunchy one. Moon wreckage falling to the surface. That’ll be just the start.”
They decided to hurry. For the next hour, no other impact quakes shuddered the bastion, but a new wave of echoes rolled down from the way ahead. The strange sounds grew steadily louder as they approached, eventually resolving into a huge, industrial chugging. Soon, each chug clarified into a myriad of separate pulses and grinds, cycling together in complex syncopation.
“Is that coming from the Hara?” Sabira asked.
“Seems likely,” Orion said.
“The Hara, is it a machine?” Zonte asked
“I thought it was a location,” Orion said. “The word ‘hara’ is from an ancient Tierran language. Means ‘a body’s center of gravity.’ Could still be a machine, though. Could be a machine in a location.”
“Guess we’ll find out soon,” Sabira said.
“Let’s hope we find out first,” Zonte said. The veil lifter on his chest had been sounding its mechanical pulse while they spoke. It flashed, momentarily bathing the corridor in green light. Sabira’s veil lifter hadn’t been working since the fight with the big killer robots. Strange, she thought, how after all that violence, one of those abominations was now their ally. The mind inside its body was, at least.
“When we get to the Hara, whatever it may be, I’ll be the one to go in first,” Orion said.
“What?” Sabira asked. Why shouldn’t I be the one?
“We still don’t know what’s really waiting for us,” Orion explained. “Could be this Godsfall weapon. Could be another trap. And we won’t know until one of us gets there.”
“Don’t you trust your blood-father?” Zonte asked.
“I don’t even know my father. Whatever happened to him here, his minds are not his own. So if this is all some kind of elaborate ruse, this body is expendable. I’ve got plenty of others. Plenty of other minds, too, if needed. If things get glitchy, you two have more to lose.”
“I keep thinking about how Daggeira called that body you’re in an abomination,” Sabira said.
“We were taught that autonomous machines go against Divine Will,” Zonte offered. “No machine should replace what a living being can do.”
“Technology is technology,” Orion said. “Mechanical, biological, psychological, doesn’t matter. It’s all imagination poured into form. Whether it’s poured into mineral, organic, or mental form, all technology has the same source. Because a body is made of metal instead of meat doesn’t make it an abomination. Just another embodiment of thoughts and ideas. In this case”—he knocked on his own central core—“literally so.”
“Speaking of Daggeira,” Zonte said. “Where did she go?”
“Wish I knew.” Sabira gestured toward some of the openings in the spiral’s walls. “Last I saw, she ran down one of the smaller side tunnels. Must still be out there somewhere. We should see her coming. Her stealth field was drilled by your jammer the same time as Spear’s. Knowing her, she’s still trying to win this race.” And sorry, Orion, but so am I.
Zonte’s veil lifter splashed green light. Sabira checked their surroundings. Still no sign of Daggeira.
A deep rumbling shuddered through the bastion again. It wasn’t as strong as the last, yet they felt the vibrations through the floor for several long seconds.
After a while, they spotted something new in the distance. Rows of large machines waited quietly in single-file queues on either side of the wide spiral arm. The larger-sized transports of the convoy.
“Look, they’re moving.” Zonte pointed to the line on their right. One by one, the whole queue moved a few meters forward, then stopped. Soon after, the row to their left did the same.
“Any idea what they’re doing?” Sabira asked.
“Waiting their turn for something,” Orion said.
The vaulted spiral ended in a towering archway, giving the sense that whatever lay beyond rose higher still. The line of transports stretched through the archway toward a pair of structures. Their outer walls merged seamlessly with the crystalline floor and arched inward to create seed-like shapes about ten meters tall. The structure on the right opened. Harsh light emanated from within, silhouetting the nearest transports. One of the machines rolled inside, and the aperture closed behind it. Again, one by one, the queue of automatons moved forward. Then the same process happened for the left row.
“Looks like they’re being eaten,” Zonte said.
“Maybe they are,” Orion said. “Those are molecular reformatters. Reformatting the quantum signatures of every atom into smart-matter forma. Or something equivalent. This whole bastion, all that crystal, is some kind of smart-matter.”
As they neared, Sabira noticed the things eating the transports extended farther back than they first appeared. They connected to an edifice so huge its edges were hidden from sight, even through an archway two hundred meters high and wide.
Zonte gulped. “That’s the Hara, isn’t it.”
“Must be,” Orion said. The huge mechanical chugging sounds had grown loud enough that they had to shout to be heard.
Sabira grabbed Zonte’s arm. “Stay close to Orion and me. We’ll get through this.”
“We’re the first ones here, does that mean we win?” Zonte asked.
“We’re not there yet, keep your eyes open,” Orion said. “When we get to the end of this, we’ll know.”
Sabira turned around and walked backwards for a while to keep an eye on anything coming up behind them. Other than the periodic shifting of the transport queues, nothing stirred. The rows of automatons provided too many blindspots for her liking, but someone would have to sneak past her watch to get to their cover. Without a working stealth veil, Daggeira couldn’t have made it that far without being seen.
“Dancer’s tits!” Zonte exclaimed.
Sabira turned back around and froze, awestruck at the sight. They stood directly under the archway. The spiral emptied into a dome, easily soaring seven hundred meters high. Swarms of airborne drones soared on whining hover pods. In the center of the dome loomed the edifice they couldn’t fully see before: a massive three-sided pyramid bulging with an embedded hemisphere. Its circumference extended to a perimeter several dozen meters inside the three vertices and curved up below the pinnacle of the huge trigonal. The entire thing appeared to be made of the same substance as the spiral corridors, dark purple crystal marbled with black and veined with dull gold.
“See on top of the pyramid?” Orion pointed up, drawing their attention to its pinnacle. A red globe extruded from the top of the ceiling. Long straight arms extended from it like rays of light frozen solid. The largest ray pointed straight down, interlocking with the top of the pyramid.
“The Hizashi,” Sabira said.
“My father’s ship.”
“I see openings all over the pyramid. Even a few down on the ground level,” Zonte said. “I guess we’re supposed to go in? That must be Godsfall.”
“Indeed,” Orion said. “Remember, let me go first.”
“Go right ahead,” Zonte said.
“Agreed,” Sabira said. “You first.” For now.
Orion took no more than six steps into Loshan Bastion’s great central dome before a cone of energy trapped him within glowing swirls of blue and green.
Sabira shot her arm out, stopping Zonte in his tracks. “Don’t move.”
“It’s emanating from one of those flying drones,” Orion said.
Sabira raised her palukai and gazed overhead, trying to spot a drone stationed above them. Tilting her head back exacerbated her stabbing headache. “So many zooming around up there, so many different altitudes, I can’t spot our culprit.”
Zonte sighted his laser pistol overhead as well, scanning back and forth. “I can’t find it, either. What should—”
The voice of Subaru Hanada reverberated through the dome, drowning out Zonte’s words and the cacophonous mechanical chugging. He no longer spoke in some language Sabira’d never heard before, but in precise Khvaziz.
“Congratulations on reaching the Hara of Loshan Bastion. However, we require only minds with organic substrates. The neural algorithmic clone may pass no farther. Since you have arrived at the Hara at the same time, a slight extension of the challenge is required. We will bequeath the superweapon to the one who first reaches the heart of Godsfall. The three organic humans may proceed.”
Sabira and Zonte looked at each other. “Three?”
Orion shouted, banging his metal fists on the energy cone, “RUN!”