The Cache

by James Brogden

  It was true. She hadn’t considered it that way. At least she hadn’t told them about the mural and its effect on her. Bad enough that he thought she was an idiot; if he suspected that she had been polluted by the Outside he might very well throw her to the crawlers. The doctrine was implacable, first daughter or not. ‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ was the best she could come up with.

  ‘What would please me would be for you to stop running around the lower reaches like a child playing hide and seek, and live up to your responsibilities by marrying Hadzor Jaax and bearing him a son!’ he snapped.

  She stared at him, horrified. ‘You still think there can be an alliance? When they are worshipping the Outside? Father, they’re spitting in the face of everything we believe! How can you say this?’

  ‘I can say this, daughter, because we are starving. It’s that simple.’ He wouldn’t face her, and she realised that what she had taken for coldness was the bleak despair of a trapped animal. ‘Now go and clean yourself up. And get rid of this!’ He tossed the medallion back to her.

  The evening’s gruel was thin on sustenance, but there was enough awkward silence for a banquet. The last time they’d had fresh protein had been the discovery of a nest of foot-long albino centipedes, and just remembering the smell of their frying made Lyse’s mouth water. When she’d been very small her father had once brought home an oilskin-wrapped package that he had presented to his family with great ceremony. The lettering on it had long since faded and nobody knew what the contents were, and once it had been divided up amongst the family she’d received little more than a dice-sized lump, but even that had been enough to send her bouncing off the walls for the rest of the evening.

  The awkward silence was broken by the arrival of a nervous-looking sentry, who announced that Hadzor Jaax was at the gate demanding to speak to the clanfather. He had the prime adjutant with him, accompanied by a squad of arbiters. Lyse’s father shot her a cold glance and rose from the table to accompany the guard. She excused herself and returned to her sleeping alcove – not just because of the day’s shocks, but also because there was a metal grille in the wall above her pallet that carried sound from the surrounding passageways if the airflow was in the right direction.

  She pulled the curtain closed and stood on her pallet with her ear pressed to the grille, and found that she could hear the argument that was unfolding.

  ‘My daughter is no thief!’ her father shouted. Her heart glowed at that. He might be furious with her, but would never side with anyone against her no matter how wrong she was.

  ‘She was found in the vat hall, where she had no right to be,’ replied Jaax, his voice low and controlled – amused, even. ‘She even identified herself to one of my men, and threatened to have the arbiters called.’ Jaax’s chuckle was thick with the arrogance of power. ‘Be careful what you wish for, wouldn’t you say?’

  A woman’s voice – Prime Adjutant Domitia, cold and without inflection: ‘Calm yourself, Sutomore. If she has taken nothing, you should have no fear of her being searched.’

  ‘This is not fear!’ snapped her father. ‘This is outrage! This accusation is baseless slander! An insult to my family and beneath the dignity of your office.’

  ‘Have a care how you tell me to do my job,’ Domitia said, her voice steely.

  ‘My apologies,’ he replied. ‘Nevertheless, prime adjutant…’

  There was only one way this could end and Lyse didn’t need to hear any more. Her father would capitulate, their chambers would be searched, the medallion would be found and Jaax would murder her – probably not until she’d bred him a healthy son, but all the same. It would be easy to throw the object down a shaft beyond recovery and feign innocence, but to discard a piece of ancient tech like trash felt worse than wasting food. She needed a place to hide and a way of finding out what the medallion was, and she knew one person who could supply both, assuming that he was still alive and sane enough to not kill her on sight.

  Cracius the Eremite. The ancient tech-priest of no hall and no clan.

  Some said Cracius was the oldest living soul in the Spike. Some said that he had exiled himself after a failed attempt to overthrow the prime adjutant’s predecessor. Others whispered that he stole and ate children. All Lyse knew was that Brother Putorius considered him to be a dangerous heretic in possession of outlawed knowledge, and right now that was exactly what she needed.

  She scooped up some uneaten food into a flask for an offering, gathered the rest of her things and slipped away.

  For as long as anyone could remember Cracius had lived in a region called the Cyst, which scavengers like Lyse made long detours to avoid. This was, quite simply, because it was haunted.

  It lay half a mile below the hab-halls but not quite as far as the lower reaches, and its effect was felt differently by those foolish enough to get close. It caused dizziness and disorientation, spinning you around and spitting you out in a different location. Sometimes it provoked profound unease, the sense that you were about to plunge into a bottomless shaft or were being followed by unseen things. Worst were the hallucinations: of being asphyxiated by gas, or burned alive, or chased down tunnels boiling with hordes of crawlers. If you bullied your way past all of this by brute willpower, you came to places where the straight up-and-down passages and shafts were blocked by curving bulkheads of strange, leathery material. Anyone with any sense took the hint and kept well away, unless they were a half-mad tech-priest or somebody desperate enough to be looking for him.

  She knew she was getting close when the shadows in her peripheral vision began to scamper, and the pressure that had been building in her head began to feel like hydraulic pistons on either side of her skull. She gritted her teeth and forced herself forward, trying not to be distracted by the leering faces that she knew weren’t really there. When a tall, multi-limbed silhouette clambered out of the walls of the passage ahead she nearly blundered into it, convinced that it too was an illusion. Cracius’ form was bulky with robes over a metal carapace that wheezed and creaked, and was hung about with arcane devices and amulets. Without warning, articulated mechanical claws gripped her wrists and she was hauled off her feet to be held, kicking uselessly, in front of a face that glared from within a thick transparent dome.

  ‘What is it?’ rasped a voice, distorted through amplification. ‘Human,’ it continued, as if the question hadn’t been meant for her. She was turned this way and that, inspected. ‘Three-seven point two kilograms/malnourished… Female/possibly/err percentile one-seven point zero-four. What does it want?’ After a moment he shook her like a doll and repeated, ‘What does it want?’

  It seemed she was being addressed after all.

  ‘Master… Cracius,’ she gasped. It was hard to breathe with her weight hanging off her arms. ‘I have… food.’

  ‘Food, is it?’ She was hauled closer for a more detailed inspection. Behind his protective visor, Cracius’ face was wizened with age, his eyebrows like white wire brushes, and parts of his bald skull were plated with riveted metal from which tubes drained a brackish-looking fluid. He must have been satisfied with what he saw because he grunted and let go, and she dropped to the floor. ‘Let’s have it then,’ he ordered.

  She fumbled for the flask of leftovers. A segmented tentacle emerged from amongst his robes, took the flask, and withdrew. ‘I assume this is payment for some favour you are about to waste my time by requesting,’ he rasped.

  ‘I have something,’ she replied, and showed him the medallion. ‘Can you tell me what it is?’

  He peered at it, and grunted. ‘Possibly. First, though…’ He reached within himself and pulled free a tube. An intravenous needle tipped the end, from which a bead of blue fluid welled. ‘This. It will help with the hallucinations. Shield your meat brain.’

  She looked at the needle. No way was she sticking that in any part of her. ‘I’m fine, thanks.’

  He sh
rugged. ‘Come with me,’ he said, and set off down the passage, his heavy footfalls making the floor shudder. She ran to catch up. Grasping hands came out of the floor to grab at her ankles, but they weren’t really there. She focused on the tech-priest’s disappearing back and followed him.

  Master Cracius’ cell was so crammed with tech that she wondered how he managed to move around. There were teetering piles of machinery, wires, gears, pistons, valves, data-slates, even a small pyramid of broken servo-skulls, and a hundred other things that she couldn’t begin to identify. In only one place was anything clear: a section of wall that bulged outward slightly and appeared to be made of a different substance to the rest – something dark and pearlescent – the wall of the Cyst. It was covered by a mosaic of data-slates connected by venous cables, their screens scrawling with glyphs busily writing themselves.

  The tech-priest took the golden medallion to a device that looked like a giant overturned spider on a lectern, and placed it in the centre. Then he detached one of the cables from deep within his robes and inserted it into the spider’s head, whereupon its legs spasmed and curled themselves over and began to probe at the medallion with surprising delicacy. Meanwhile, ugly slurping sounds came from within Cracius’ carapace as he ingested her leftovers. She tried to ignore how the bulge of wall was growing, because she knew it wasn’t really happening, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from its distended swell, like a pregnant belly gravid with horrors, or the smaller bulges roaming around as whatever was on the other side seethed to be born…

  In an effort to distract herself she asked him, ‘What makes the hallucinations?’

  ‘Sequence/iteration/else/cogit-failure,’ he muttered. ‘That’s not the question you need answering.’

  ‘It isn’t?’

  ‘Null/else/this: you must be aware that this place was once populated more densely than is currently the case. You’ve seen the evidence everywhere.’

  Lyse nodded. ‘We find remains sometimes, but not often. Crawlers ate most of them long ago.’

  He turned to regard her. ‘Have you never stopped to think what the crawlers actually are?’

  ‘I don’t understand. They’re just… crawlers. Messed-up meat.’

  ‘Yes, well, we’ll come back to that later. Anyway, before the Spike became what it is, her name was the Spira Tenebris, and she was a battleship.’

  Lyse knew ‘battle’ well enough. ‘What’s a ship?’ she asked.

  ‘Don’t interrupt. Now, the crew complement of the Tenebris numbered in the hundreds of thousands – virtually a small city…’

  ‘What’s a–’

  Cracius glared at her, and she shut up.

  ‘A city that had to be provisioned,’ he continued. ‘From stores containing enough to feed a quarter of a million mouths for the few weeks of a campaign.’

  Lyse continued listening in the hope that he might say something coherent.

  ‘Keeping track of those stores was the responsibility of the master sergeant victualler. This,’ he said, indicating the medallion, ‘is the Victualler’s Seal.’ He waited, plainly expecting her to be impressed.

  She looked at him. ‘And?’

  ‘And it contains stock data, location and access codes for all the food caches on board, you ignorant oaf of a girl!’

  She sat up straight. ‘Wait – did you say food?’

  ‘Yes, I did. And mark you, I’m not talking about spit-roasted rat or this corpse-starch slop.’ Her flask fell out from within his robes, empty now, but she didn’t rush to collect it. She didn’t want to think about where it had been. ‘I’m talking about protein bars, vitamin supplements, freeze-dried ration packs, water-purification tabs, cal-gel… things your taste buds couldn’t begin to dream of.’

  ‘Well, where are they?’

  The spider device probed the Seal some more while the tech-priest muttered words which might have been prayers to the Machine-God, or equally curses. Abruptly, the central amber stone burst into life, and a glowing apparition sprang into the air above it. Lyse drew her knife and backed away. ‘It’s a ghost!’

  He squinted at her. ‘In a way, yes, it is. This is the Spira Tenebris as she was, in the time of your grandmother’s grandmother.’

  The apparition was long and sketched in a network of bright geometric lines, like a picture of a bone scratched in fire, but it wasn’t flat; it rotated slowly, and it wasn’t a smooth bone but wickedly pointed at one end and heavily flared at the other and jutted with angular excrescences along its length.

  He was still squinting at her. ‘Do you recognise this?’

  ‘No. Should I?’

  ‘Var/aspect/exec,’ he muttered, making further adjustments, and the phantom swivelled from a horizontal to a vertical alignment, the sharp point uppermost. ‘How about now?’

  Lyse shrugged. ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking at.’

  He sighed with irritation and pointed to the top, where it curved into something like a fang. ‘This is where the prime adjutant and her arbiters have their quarters. Below that, the hab-halls of the five families. Then down through a mile of wreckage and devastation to the lower reaches where crawlers make their nests and the air is poison and the djinn fires burn eternally.

  ‘Much data is lost, but either the grav-generators failed or else it happened during the first moments of upheaval when the Tenebris was open to the immaterium. The shafts that you clamber up and down were once halls and galleries, thronging with people and the glorious song of countless machines. Now all is silent,’ he murmured. ‘All is dark. It is the Spike. Our home.’

  She stared, wondering at the strange melancholy that had come over him. Then she burst out laughing.

  His voice was a low growl. ‘I did not realise I was being amusing.’

  ‘I’m sorry!’ she sputtered, trying to stifle her giggles. ‘It’s just that what you’re saying…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well it’s nonsense, isn’t it? You’re insane.’

  Instead of being insulted, Cracius seemed to consider this seriously. ‘That is entirely possible,’ he admitted. ‘In which case you’re not going to like this.’ The spider probed a third time, and the image filled with fire-spark points, each orbited by a tiny ring of numbers and figures. ‘Each one of these is the location of a cache of provisions. Food, to you. Unless I’m insane,’ he added drily.

  ‘But…’ she stammered. ‘But there are so many of them!’ Enough food to last a few thousand people for centuries. And it wasn’t just something to fill bellies, it was freedom from the tyranny of scraping a hand-to-mouth existence, freedom from the Jaaxes’ control over the vats, freedom from her obligation to marry a man she loathed.

  ‘Correction: there were so many of them.’

  One by one, the fire-sparks began to die.

  ‘No…’ she whispered. ‘No!’ They were disappearing. She grasped at the image to stop them, but her fingers just closed on empty air, and they kept dying inexorably. She turned to Master Cracius. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘The Seal is updating its records. Your ancestors plundered those caches long ago. But look.’ He pointed, and she turned back. Two fire-sparks remained. One, which was just a plain glowing icon with no halo of orbiting figures, was in the middle of the image, close by a sphere of empty space. ‘That one,’ he said, ‘is this,’ and he indicated the Seal. The second fire-spark was ringed with numbers and was a lot lower down the Spike, almost at the very bottom. ‘That one,’ he said, ‘is a cache that has not been plundered. Yet.’

  Its depth explained why it hadn’t been found before. It was in the lower reaches. Crawler territory. Dangerously close to the djinn fires and the kind of place you never went without protective gear, weapons and a full support team – none of which she had.

  ‘Well that’s–’ she said, and was interrupted by a high-pitched wail com
ing from a servo-skull that had floated from its perch amongst the stacks of equipment; its eyes were flashing an urgent red.

  ‘Visitors,’ commented Master Cracius. The skull glided over to him and he connected a cable, communing with the device. ‘Friends of yours,’ he added drily. ‘Jaaxes and a squad of arbiters, headed by the prime adjutant herself, no less. You should be flattered.’

  ‘Can you hide me?’

  He shook his head. ‘Domitia and I have an understanding, but I am of no hall and so my influence is limited. I will not detain you, but that is the most I can offer.’

  ‘Thanks for nothing.’ She held out her hand. ‘I’ll have my tech back.’ When he hesitated, she waved her knife. ‘Let’s you and I have an understanding too, then – a quarter of whatever I find, or else I see how much damage I can do to your funny little tubes before the arbiters get me.’

  He laughed, and it sounded like stones rattling in a bucket. ‘Half. I will input the cache’s coordinates so that the Seal directs you to it.’

  ‘Done.’

  He made his adjustments to the device’s sliding switches, muttering in his arcane machine language, and returned it to her. She saw now that rather than a medallion it was a compass, suspended in a gimbal of rings that allowed it to rotate in three dimensions.

  ‘It will now point to the cache at all times,’ he said, then added with a dark amusement that she did not like, ‘though it will not guide you through whatever is in the way.’

  As the servo-skull’s shrilling grew louder, Lyse fled.

  Down, then. Except that if Master Cracius was to be believed, down had once been along. The idea of being able to walk in a straight line for more than a dozen yards without obstacle was simultaneously fascinating and so alien that it threatened to overwhelm Lyse’s imagination, so she pushed it aside and concentrated on finding a way down to the last cache. If she could find it without being killed by crawlers, and then open it, and if there was anything left, there might be something that she could use to barter with Domitia for her freedom. It was a ladder of ‘mights’, any rung of which might slip from under her footing and send her plummeting to her death.