Chapter Six
The Tunnels
Before Mace was the string of saw-toothed mountains that he’d observed prior to landing. As he approached them, the center mountain rose and swelled until it looked like someone had taken a bite out of a rock and then pushed the rock halfway into the ground.
If he was close enough to see his destination so clearly, any potential enemies could see him as well. For that and other reasons, he had to be careful. Eyes could conceivably be upon him even though he was approaching from a direction the ship’s data indicated was safe. Had they seen him spiraling down from orbit? Parking his starship? He couldn’t say, but he knew that from this point onward, he had to assume he was being observed.
As he drew nearer, he detected other footprints in the crystallized dust: prints of numerous creatures of a wide variety of weights and sizes. At some point in the past, this plain had been densely populated. People had swarmed toward this mountain and its caves, perhaps a perceived route to safety. He was clearly not the first to seek shelter here, and he would not be the last. He was just the next.
In less than an hour, Mace reached an entrance tunnel to the underground. He slowly descended into an expanding underground civilization, New Xaxxis.
The ship’s databank contained instructions about the paths to take, the branches marked by written and carved signs. The path underfoot was rough and uneven, insufficiently smoothed by the friction of countless passing feet. He traveled deeper and deeper along the underground switchbacks.
From time to time, there were holes torn in the rock walls, through which he glimpsed sections of the different levels. The first was crammed with detritus, like a vast junkyard. Perhaps it just served as a buffer to the surface radiation.
The second level had some makeshift dwellings, and he glimpsed a few miserable people cooking or otherwise scratching out a subsistence living. They looked sick to him. Radiation sickness, he guessed. They were too close to the surface.
The third level was a hangar holding a wide variety of speeders and cargo vessels. Turbolifts brought goods and people up from the lower levels or raised them to the surface.
As impressive as this was, it was nothing compared with the fourth level, vastly larger and the site of a great city: New Xaxxis, successor to the ruins above.
It looked to Mace as if New Xaxxis had been built within a breathtaking geode, one many klicks in breadth. Entire sections of the city were suspended from the cavern roofs by enormous cables. Titanic crystals grew everywhere, sprouting like kultu vines around the apartments and skyways, and droids were climbing and pruning. Seeing it all, he could guess the origin of the cavern’s ancient nickname: the Glass Abyss.
Mace followed a branching, winding series of tunnels, following his mental map and carved wall markings. From time to time, he caught more glimpses of the city through breaks in the rock, then sank beneath that level. Had that been the third or fourth level down? He was descending more rapidly, the path steeper. Instead of a city, he glimpsed now, when gaps in the wall allowed it, what seemed to be industrial levels. Hundreds of workers, droid and biological, worked at vast curing and weaving facilities.
Some tunnels were natural paths carved by water erosion or volcanic activity. Others had been created by mining machines. Some were coated with some kind of glassy substance. He suspected this was the result of some living creature chewing and digesting its way through rock. According to the ship’s databank, Hillians were the creatures that produced one of the most valuable consumer products in the galaxy: Hillian silk. They were said to be large enough to have needed a network like this to travel through—but did they have the ability to create it?
Little was known of these creatures, and some of what was “known” was almost certainly incorrect—an inevitability in a galaxy so vast. Some called them spiders, others a species of worm. What was certain was that they produced silken cables strong enough to anchor or suspend floating cities. According to reports, Hillians could feel and sense the world, possessing great intelligence, but could not truly think.
His mind combed through what else he’d been able to absorb on the flight here. The Metagosan depths were rumored to be crawling with creatures of multiple limbs and endless hunger. Insectile, eel-like, and sando-aqua-monster-like beings were said to live in vast, uncharted underground lakes and rivers. The word nightmarish was often used to describe the creatures, a rare poetic description from the ship’s otherwise dry databank. Perhaps no one who had seen those depths directly had survived to testify.
Interesting. According to the databank, only levels four through seven were totally safe. Mace assumed the top three were vulnerable to solar radiation. But what of the bottom three, levels eight through ten? According to his old friend, survival in the depths meant following the Path of Sa’ad, the matriarchal clans that tended the spider-worms. The Sa’ad had lived underground, in balance with these life-forms, for thousands of years. The flood of beings had overloaded and upset the ecology, and straying outside the safe zones was perilous…or so it was said.
Mace suspected he would soon learn this for himself. He was already starting to build an internal map of this world: ten levels, each roughly disklike. A stack of dejarik boards, perhaps.
Qui-Gon would have approved.