by A. K. DuBoff
“Whoever this architect was, they’re fired,” Nia joked.
“Wouldn’t that be more of a structural engineer?” Kyle asked.
“They’d do the load ratings on the stairs,” Nia replied, “but I think it’d be an architect who’d make the call between a stairwell versus an elevator.”
Ari stopped short in front of Kira. “We’re here.”
Kira peeked around the last bend and saw a metal door in front of Ari—unmarked and with no window or accompanying control panel. She tried to get a reading of the space beyond, but the same interference she’d experienced on the surface prevented her suit’s sensors from penetrating the walls.
Kira focused on the door. “Is it unlocked?”
Ari pushed on it, and the door swung inward.
“You first.” Kira used her right arm to swing the door wide while Ari rushed in to assess the interior with his weapon drawn.
“Clear,” he announced. “I mean, there’s nothing to see.”
With the door open, Kira’s HUD completed the map of the other side. Another long corridor stretched ahead. This time, though, the walls showed a heat signature—and were pulsing in temperature from warm to hot every three seconds.
“Ummm…” She waited for her team to offer additional commentary.
“Please tell me we aren’t about to walk down the esophagus of some giant space monster,” Nia said from two steps up the stairwell.
“And all of you laughed at me before.” Ari shook his head.
“It’s not a circulatory pulse,” Kyle observed. “I bet you these are cables relaying data bursts. They heat up when the signal passes through and diffuse the heat into the stone in between the bursts—keeps it from overheating and melting.”
“The signal for telepathic control?” Kira asked.
The soldier nodded. “That would be my guess.”
“Where’s the origin point?” Nia asked. “The cables have to run somewhere.”
Ari pointed ahead with his handgun. “Only one way forward.”
Kira tried to suppress the disquiet nagging at the back of her mind. They wanted me, and this is a place designed for my people. It can’t be a coincidence.
The team advanced down the corridor for another hundred meters before an exit was visible up ahead.
“There’s a larger chamber,” Ari observed. “More than one, I think.”
The end of the corridor fanned outward until it blended with the smooth walls of a domed chamber twenty meters tall and twice as many wide. Three other corridor entrances, identical to the one they’d traversed, were positioned at equidistant points around the base of the walls. In the center of the space, a bundle of thick cables funneled into a rock formation that resembled the wave forms on the surface, only with the arches curving outward from the structure like petals of a blooming flower.
“Yeah, I’m at a complete loss,” Kira admitted.
“Fok, really?” Kyle eyed the rocks. “I guess it makes sense to use the same substance in the transmitter.”
Kira nodded. “Leon’s team is calling it ‘valteron’—presumably because of the Valta connection and similarity to ateron.”
Ari shrugged. “Makes sense.”
“But, we’re still missing a critical piece here—we have the transmission equipment, but where is the signal coming from? Where are the Trols?” Nia questioned.
“I have no idea.” Kira looked around, but there were still no signs of life. “Let’s check out the other corridors.”
They cautiously made their way across the chamber. Though Kyle and Nia tried to remotely interface with the computer system, they couldn’t find a signal compatible with their suits. With the external processor still up in the control room—or whatever it was—at the surface, they had no other way to access the system. The best option was to do a visual inspection and see what information they could gather the old fashioned way.
The first corridor on the right terminated forty meters down at a stone monument, which resembled a miniature version of the structure in the center of the main chamber. Cables disappeared into the stone ceiling, and there were no other signs indicating the structure’s purpose or if it extended beyond what was visible in the corridor.
The second corridor mirrored the first, though when they reached the end, there wasn’t a stairwell; instead, there was a pit.
The team’s HUDs indicated a potential tripping hazard up ahead, and they slowed their pace as they approached.
“What is it?” Kira frowned at the dark nothingness two meters in front of her.
The round pit was roughly ten meters across. Its walls were the same stone found elsewhere in the facility, but it resembled natural stone more than the smooth, concrete-like finish on many of the floors and walls. No wind or sound came from the opening. Its only distinguishing feature was that the temperature increased the deeper the hole went—until the sensors cut out at approximately three hundred meters. At that depth, there was still no sign of the bottom.
“I didn’t think this could possibly get any weirder, but mission accomplished,” Nia stated. She took a step back from the pit.
Ari craned his neck over the edge. “There’s no way we can get down there.”
“If we had a kilometer of cordage we could,” Kira said. “But seeing that we don’t, it’ll have to wait.” She turned to go.
“You came to us,” a chorus of raspy voices said in her mind.
Fok! Her pulse spiked.
She listened for more, and then ventured a mental call. “Hello?”
There was no reply.
Kira took a slow breath and cleared her mind. “We’d like to speak with you,” she telepathically called out to the voices. “We don’t want to be enemies.”
Silence.
Kira sighed.
“Don’t need to ask me twice,” Nia hurried away.
When they were ten meters away, Kira addressed her team. “I didn’t want to say anything by the pit, but I made contact with the Trols. Briefly. They said, ‘You came to us’. A chorus of them.”
Ari tensed. “Where they… down there?”
“I don’t know!” Kira took a shaky breath. “Maybe they’re everywhere. These beings aren’t like anything we’ve dealt with before. They don’t seem to have bodies.”
“Why aren’t we running for the door?” Nia asked.
“Because we haven’t completed our investigation. Hea
ring those voices was disconcerting, but we always figured they’d be watching us. And I’m supposed to be trying to communicate with them. Until they take physical action to harm us, we proceed.”
“If and when they act, it’ll already be too late,” Ari replied.
Kira continued undeterred.
While it wasn’t a reality Kira was eager to face, she accepted the risks that came with her position. And, if the aliens wanted her, she’d gladly sacrifice herself to save the rest of her team.
“The rest of you should head back to the surface,” Kira stated. “I’ll scope out the last corridor and then meet you up there.”
“Leave you here alone with them?” Ari shook his head. “No way.”
“You stay, we all stay,” Kyle agreed.
Nia reluctantly nodded her head.
“Fine, but at the first sign of trouble, you run. Don’t worry about me,” Kira instructed.
“With all due respect, ma’am, that’s our call to make,” Kyle said as he passed by her.
Kira sighed, but the sentiment warmed her heart. She would’ve said the same thing in his shoes.
They retraced their steps and then crossed through the central chamber to the final unexplored corridor, to the left where they’d first entered. The space was immediately a stark contrast to the areas they’d encountered elsewhere.
Notably, there were rooms. The surroundings reminded Kira of a less polished version of the MTech lab on Valta, with doors along long corridors and windows looking into labs and medical rooms. The details were missing from this place to make it a direct comparison, but something about it kept jogging her memory.
“I think there might be another way down here,” Kyle said.
“What makes you say that?” Kira asked him.
“If these rooms are ever supposed to be occupied, it doesn’t make sense to bring in people via that stairwell. I bet the far end of this hall leads to another exit.”
Ari shrugged. “One way to find out.”
“If there’s a more direct way out of here, I’m all for it,” Nia agreed.
They continued down the central corridor, which branched to various side passageways servicing other labs and storage areas. Their suits’ sensors mapped the corridors that weren’t obstructed by a sealed door, and their HUDs updated to display a labyrinth spanning thousands of square meters.
Nia groaned as the HUD refreshed with a new branch of hallways. “There’s no way we can go through all of this right now.”
“Hopefully the data you’re downloading will shed some light on the purpose of this place,” Kira replied.
Kyle scoffed. “Pretty sure its singular aim is to keep us guessing.”
Kira tightened the grip on her weapon. “Maybe that’s the key. We keep talking about what we’re seeing, but what about going to the underlying why? What were the Trols after?”
“Well,” Nia began, “we know they were in league with the Mysarans.”
“I guess that would explain why there are person-sized corridors here, and a breathable atmosphere,” Kira said. “Still, why would beings that can project their consciousness across light years need a bunch of Tarans?”
Ari frowned. “You said they feed on negative emotional energy, right?”
“They at least need it to maintain control of their host,” Kira replied.
“Starting a civil war would be a good way to get people in a bad mood,” Kyle pointed out.
“They did go to great lengths to pit Elusia and Mysar against each other,” Nia agreed.
Kyle nodded. “Yeah. And MTech had a bunch of armor and weapons stashed in the lab, right, Kira?”
“Yes, but that part doesn’t make sense,” Kira responded. “I get that the Robus were supposed to be soldiers to fight on Mysar’s behalf, but their physical modifications would make it difficult to use conventional weapons.”
“Not to be Mr. Contrary over here,” Ari interjected, “but how closely did you look at the rifles you found?”
“I was a little distracted by trying to not get caught,” Kira admitted. “Why?”
“You should probably see this for yourself.” Ari gestured toward a chest-height window in the wall.
Her stomach knotting, Kira walked over and looked inside. “Oh, fok.”
The window overlooked a storeroom containing racks of rifles. Unlike the weapons Kira had used throughout her career, these had no hand grip or trigger.
“No…”
“It looks like these would mount directly to the armor, likely with a mental control chip for firing,” Ari completed for her. “These soldiers of theirs were designed for nasty killing, end of story.”
It’s wrong on so many levels. Kira tore her gaze away from the storeroom. “Why not just drop a bomb at that point, for such indiscriminate destruction?”
Nia’s face looked pale. “Because it’s not about who’s getting attacked. It’s about the suffering on both sides.”
Kira’s stomach dropped. “Shite, you’re right.” She shook her head. “I kept looking at it from a Taran vantage—what they’d have to gain, what they’re working toward. But no. We’re just like food to them.”
“And now they’re getting ready for the harvest,” Ari murmured.
“How very poetic.” Nia gripped her handgun a little tighter.
Kyle scowled. “No, we’re missing something. Why go through the effort to develop Robus?”
“Maximum killing potential equals maximum suffering inflicted?” Kira speculated.
“Not buying it,” Kyle said. “This is a race that can construct an artificial planet. They must have a larger play than watching a single system tear itself apart through civil war.”
“Whatever their aim, we’ve learned what we came here to find out,” Kira continued. “It’s clear they mean harm, and this facility is where they mean to bring soldiers to retrofit them into killing machines.”
“Time to go?” Nia asked eagerly.
Kira nodded. “Yeah, come on.” She turned to head back in the direction they’d come from.
“What about locating the alternate exit?” Ari reminded her.
“Oh, right.” It wasn’t like her to forget a lead like that.
That was true. “Mapping out that exit sounds like a great excuse to avoid going through that center chamber again,” Kira told her team.
Nia picked up her pace in the direction of the suspected exit. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
“Wow, Nia, you really don’t like it down here.” Kira chuckled.
“How are you even remotely okay with this place?” the lance corporal shot back. “You said yourself that there were alien voices taunting you in your head.”
“Jasmine’s keeping me in a happy place,” Kira replied.
Ari led the team along the path he’d mapped out toward the likely alternative exit point.
Based on Kira’s own evaluation of the map, his guess looked sound. Most of the corridors seemed to feed into one central pathway, which extended the full length of the map their suit sensors had been able to populate. The far end, however, appeared to terminate in a shielded door.
Ari was the first to reach the barrier. “It’s locked.”
Kyle joined him by the control panel next to the door. “We have the encryption protocol saved from before. This shouldn’t take long.”
He synced with the panel and input the necessary commands. The door bolt slid open with a satisfying clang, which was followed by the hiss of the seal releasing.
The two men braced on either side of the door with their weapons pointed ahead. Kira took up position next to Ari, with Nia on the other side by Kyle.
To their relief, only an empty, four-meter-wide tunnel was waiting for them on the other side.
Nia lowered her weapon. “You know, after our experiences over the last couple of weeks, it’s really nice to walk through an entire facility and not get shot at.”
Kyle groaned. “Fok, Nia, now you’ve jinxed us.”
“We’re not out of here until we’re out of here,” Ari reminded them.
Kira nodded. “Don’t let your guard down.”
They forged ahead.
The floor sloped upward at a shallow angle suitable for transporting materials on a hover cart. Kira expected it to switch back on itself and exit somewhere close to the control room, but their HUDs showed the trajectory was a straight shot for eight hundred fifty meters ahead.
Thanks to the low gravity, the team was able to lope up the hill and cover the distance quickly. Kira kept watch on the shadows playing on the rough stone walls of the tunnel.
They slowed their pace as they neared the end.
Kira paused to look back down the tunnel while the others continued ahead. The lights had turned off down in the lab area where they’d come from.
She turned back to face her team. “All right, let’s see where this dumps us out. Then we can circle back to the control room to retrieve that data drive.”