No ships. No enemy armada. No hordes of rabid monstrosities with knives for fingertips.
“Where is everyone?” Kyra breathed.
“Long range?” Kreon asked.
Kyra swung her console up to face him. Tris didn’t know they did that.
“Nothing,” Kreon confirmed. “I’m beginning to think you were right.”
Kyra eyed him sideways. “Which time?”
“Something here is not right,” he said, his voice betraying tension. “Do you still feel it?”
Kyra wriggled in her chair as though suddenly uncomfortable. “Yeah, it’s… weird. Aren’t you getting it? It’s like… darkness. Despair. I’m not sure I want to go down there.”
Kreon’s head snapped around to look at her. “It’s coming from the planet?”
“It’s everywhere.”
He stabbed a few controls on his console. “Are you getting anything from the planet? Power readings, life signs? Geological activity?”
Kyra shook herself again, making a visible effort to compose herself before turning her attention to her console. “No,” she said, after a few moments. “Nothing.”
Àurea leant forward to read the display over her shoulder. “That’s impossible! At least half a million people live on Oracle. The temple guardians, their acolytes, priests, the seminary, support staff… their families…”
“All gone,” Kyra confirmed. “Unless something is scrambling our scanners.”
“To what end?” Kreon peered through the canopy at the dirty brown orb of the planet. “No-one comes here by accident. Such a deception would fool no-one.” He returned to his display, tapping a few icons. When he looked up, his face was ashen. “I read no atmosphere. The entire planet is dead.”
Tris heard Kyra’s sudden intake of breath. It took him only a second to cotton on to her line of thinking. “Is it—? You don’t think—?” The cold knot in his stomach had spread to encompass his entire body.
Kreon turned in his seat to give Àurea his undivided attention. “How much do you know of the structures on this world? Is there a Portal down there?”
Àurea considered. “A Portal? You mean the Gateway to the Gods?”
“An alien artefact shaped like a door frame, that pre-dates our exodus from Earth?”
“Then yes. It’s our most holy religious icon. That ‘Portal’ is the Oracle this planet was named after.”
25
As the planet of Oracle grew to dominate the viewscreens, Tris could feel the dread in the cockpit. No-one spoke; no-one needed to.
Only Àurea was seeing this kind of devastation for the first time. Her eyes, wide as saucers, were glued to the view outside the canopy. As they got closer, faint brown tendrils could be seen reaching out from the planet. Surface dust, Tris guessed, mixed with the remains of the atmosphere, bleeding off into space. There was no transition from vacuum, no turbulence, no violent heat of re-entry. The slight lurch as thrusters kicked in told him that gravity was still in effect, but beyond that their trip down to the surface went unchallenged.
Kyra brought Wayfinder in low, flying over a tortured surface of parched and cracked wasteland. The landscape resembled the moon, or Mars, as close as Tris could tell; great peaks and troughs rolled by beneath them, with no signs of human habitation. The only movement came from fissures they passed over, some of which emitted thin vapour trails.
“Steam,” Kyra said, the single word shattering the cockpit’s tension. “The core must still be active. I’m reading those crevices as hydrothermal vents. I think this used to be an ocean.”
“I’d heard that Oracle had extensive oceans,” Àurea piped up, “and only one major landmass.”
“Not any more.” Kyra made a few adjustments on her console. “I’ll head towards the highest point. That ought to be their continent.”
Minutes rolled by in silence, as all four of them studied the view on their screens.
“Got it.” Kyra was the first to speak again. “Structures, up ahead, definitely man-made.”
“Or something-made,” Kreon muttered darkly.
Kyra flew low over the buildings, giving them a good glimpse of stone temples and column-lined boulevards. The physical destruction was severe, but not absolute; Tris found himself thinking of Roman ruins he’d seen on his whirlwind trip around Europe.
“There,” Àurea said, reaching between the front seats to point at something on the nav console. “That structure matches the description in the old legends.”
“Legends concerning what, exactly?” Kreon asked her.
“The discovery of this place. The founding of our first Holy Temple beyond Earth. My people—” she hesitated, then corrected herself, “the Lemurians, they settled this region of the galaxy because of this structure. I seem to recall it was mentioned in sacred texts they brought with them.”
“Take us down,” Kreon told Kyra. “If this structure was indeed known to the race that created us, and that knowledge was deemed significant by our ancestors, the answers we seek could be contained within it.”
Tris held a hand up for permission. “Ah, hang on a minute there. The ‘race that created us’? Created humans, you mean?”
Kreon turned a confused expression on him. “Yes, Tristan. The Kharash seeded us, and oversaw our rise to civilisation. I believe they were also responsible for elevating the Siszar. Don’t they teach this in school anymore?”
They assembled by the boarding ramp for a comms check. Excepting Àurea, who wore her massive Ingumen armour, they wore bulky, old-fashioned vac-suits from Wayfinder’s inventory. The full-face transparent helmets felt a lot more secure than the flimsy vac-mask that had fitted to Tris’ prize Aioro jumpsuit, but that little luxury was long gone now. Tris hefted the rifle he’d chosen and test-fitted his chunky glove around the handgrip. It would do, but fighting in these things was going to be an awful lot of effort. He’d retained the glaive, attaching it to the vac-suit’s waist, but he didn’t feel limber enough to do much with it.
He watched Kyra coil her swords around her suit’s waist and wondered if it would hamper her mobility much.
Please God don’t let us get attacked by a room full of monsters.
“Our mission,” Kreon began, raising his voice for the audio pick-ups in his helmet, “is to discover what these people knew about the Black Ships. It is clear that they have visited this world, leaving only ruin behind them. This will happen again, to world after world, unless we find a way to prevent it. I believe that somewhere in the building before us, an answer can be found — and find it we will.”
Kreon’s grav-staff was already strapped across his back. He lifted his rifle. “Tristan. I have updated my rules of engagement.”
Tris slung his rifle and gave a mock-salute.
“One,” Kreon said, ignoring him, “do not shoot me. Two; shoot neither Kyra, nor my daughter. And three; please refrain from being shot yourself.”
“What do we do if we find survivors?”
Kreon’s face darkened “There will be no survivors.”
The hatch slid open and the ramp extended to meet broken flagstones. With no obvious signs of resistance — no signs of anything at all — Kyra had chosen to put them down in a wide plaza. The huge columned portico of the temple rose on the far side, ancient and forbidding. Tris took a firm grip on his rifle and followed Kreon towards it.
Cracked stone steps led up to a row of heavy bronze doors. They’d have been a bugger to get open, but three of them were already ajar; one had broken off its hinges at the top and sagged back against the frame.
“No bodies,” Tris observed, his voice loud in his ears.
“Absorbed by some unknown mechanism, along with all other organic matter,” Kreon responded.
“Digested,” Kyra added.
Tris shuddered.
They went in.
Expecting pitch-blackness, Tris was surprised to find artificial light glimmering from the vaulted ceiling. “They left the lights on,” he observe
d.
“A back-up generator must have survived the attack,” Kreon said. He activated the shoulder-mounted lights on his suit anyway, so Tris followed suit. The room they’d entered was enormous, all pale dressed stone. It had the look of an expensive hotel lobby; beautiful, but not a great source of esoteric information. A bank of what had to be elevators dominated the centre of the back wall, flanked by doors leading off deeper into the structure.
“This place is enormous,” Tris muttered. “What are we even looking for, anyway?”
“Àurea,” Kreon turned to his daughter. “Recommendations? Should we proceed up or down?”
Without its holographic effects, her armour was less sinister. “I… would assume that offices and ceremonial rooms would be further up, with storage and records below, but that’s just a guess. They’d never let someone with my bloodlines get anywhere near a temple.”
“Loader? Care to weigh in?” Kreon still had the talos in his backpack, which he’d adjusted to fit over the bulky vacuum suit. In his spare time since the prison break, however, Loader had upgraded himself with wifi, allowing him to access the Warden’s transceiver without needing a direct and grisly connection.
“Most of the building is still operating on residual power,” the talos drawled. “However, two sections are drawing significantly more, to an order of several thousand magnitudes.”
“Data storage really munches the juice,” Kyra hypothesised. “And maybe environmental control? Struggling to normalise the atmosphere or something?”
“ALI has isolated the primary power source to an area approximately twenty-seven metres below your current location.”
“That tears it,” said Kyra. “In case this place wasn’t creepy enough, I guess we’re headed into the basement.”
The first body was waiting for them in the elevator. Slumped back in the far corner, it had been a male, of indeterminate age. Not armoured — in fact not wearing anything that seemed remotely appropriate for the harsh, desiccated environment. He was dressed in a gauzy gown, transparent now but with filaments running throughout it that must have created patterns of light before its battery died. Tris had seen Sera wearing something similar. This looked more like an elaborate robe rather than evening wear though.
“Probably came from somewhere that still had air,” Kyra suggested. “You guys mind sharing?”
No-one replied. They just shuffled into the elevator car and stood with their backs to the corpse.
It was a good thing the power was on. Tris had been in too many stairwells lately, and none of them had ended well. Then again, his recent experience with elevators was less than ideal. Still, if he was going underground on a planet inhabited by ghosts and corpses, he’d rather do it with the lights on.
The elevator descended smoothly. If it weren’t for the body in the corner, Tris could almost imagine nothing was wrong outside the stone-lined steel box. The mirrored doors could have been polished yesterday. The glow from the control panel flowed past a series of engraved marks, charting their journey downwards. It was… perfect.
Until the car wrenched to a halt.
Tris bounced off Kyra, but managed to keep his feet. The others, combat veterans all, hardly moved an inch.
“Are we there yet?” Tris could hear the tension underlying Kyra’s sarcasm. This wasn’t fun for anyone.
Kreon studied the console. “We appear to have stopped at—”
“I caused the car to stop,” Loader drawled from Kreon’s backpack. “Apologies for the abruptness, there was no way to extrapolate the correct floor from scans alone.”
Tris cottoned on quick. “So this is the level where you found the power on?”
“This level alone is drawing more power than Wayfinder can generate,” came the reply. “ALI predicts a high likelihood of data storage in the vicinity.”
The doors slid open on an otherwise unremarkable lobby. Kreon and Kyra exchanged a look. Kyra stepped out, uncoiling her swords. Maybe she just felt better with them in her hands? “Here’s hoping we recognise it when we see it,” she said.
The others followed her out and picked the widest of the three directions. Tris could already tell this place was a maze; the sheer scale of it suggested hundreds, if not thousands of rooms, all interlinked by miles of corridors. What they really needed was the one piece of sci-fi tech Kreon had yet to rustle up — one of those omnipresent beeping thingumies, that got louder when you got closer to whatever you were looking for. A scanner? Locater? “Hey Kreon, can’t we scan this level for what we’re after?”
He shook his head, but Loader piped up from the backpack. “Plug me into a terminal and I will be able to guide you.”
The walls had been fairly featureless so far, but the corridor ahead opened out into another lobby. Wide doors on the far side gleamed an ominous black; a terminal was set into the wall beside them, perhaps indicating the entrance to a secure area. Kreon went straight over to the terminal and placed Loader on the deck beneath it. He quickly performed the same hot-wiring trick he’d done back in the prison, using the same cables that had once linked the talos to his implanted transceiver. Tris made a face at the memory. Hopefully they’d been washed since.
It took him a minute to make the connections, then he stood back, waiting. It wasn’t long before Loader gave his report.
“This terminal is slaved only to the door, but the area beyond it appears to be high-security. If you connect me to a computer on the other side, I should be able to locate the information.”
There was a hiss of gasses escaping, and the doors slid open. The light within was tinged red, giving the place an even more hellish vibe. Kyra led the way once more, swords held out in readiness. Àurea followed her, though Tris noticed she’d left her ceremonial weapons hanging from her waist in favour of a rifle. Kreon waited to disconnect Loader until they were all through, but mercifully the doors stayed open. Getting locked in down here was pretty high on Tris’ list of biggest fears right now.
Two more bodies awaited them as they moved deeper into the red light. Like the man in the lift, these two had died of exposure rather than foul play. They were both well preserved, considering they’d been dead for a while…
How long?
Àurea had mentioned losing contact with her agent here six months ago. Could it have been that long? Sure as hell the Church wouldn’t be in a hurry to let people know their centre of faith had been wiped out.
Àurea’s gasp was audible over their comms.
Kreon spun to face her, his hand going to her arm. “What is it?”
“Nothing. It’s just… their belt pouches? And their badges. The designation… father, I think these men were Sculptors.”
Tris frowned, searching his memory for the term, but drawing a blank.
“Ah, guys…” Kyra’s voice contained an odd note of caution.
“One moment,” Kreon told her. “Àurea, what do you mean? Are these—”
“GUYS!” Kyra was insistent. “You really need to see this.”
Kreon blew out a frustrated breath and turned towards her. Tris went too, checking the power charge on his rifle for the umpteenth time. He was well equipped this time, he reminded himself. Grenades dangled from clips built into the vacuum suit, pouches on his thighs bristled with extra ammo and power-packs, and his glaive was nestled into the small of his back.
Ready for anything.
Anything except what confronted him when he joined Kyra at a low railing.
They were on a balcony. The room it gave onto was enormous. Hundreds of feet deep, it plunged away into invisibility below them; similarly the ceiling vanished upwards, lost in the swirling of whatever trace gases had survived down here.
But the room’s size was not the problem.
It was the contents.
Directly in front of them, not ten metres away, the glass capsules started. There had to be thousands of them, racks upon endless racks stretching in all directions. A complex network of tubes and wires led from e
ach capsule back to the supporting framework, presumably carrying power and nutrients…
Because inside every capsule was a twisted nightmare of flesh and metal, an abomination with knives for hands, pistons for legs, jagged metal blades protruding from spines, elbows, faces…
“Transgressors.” Àurea’s single word distilled an eternity of horror.
Tris leaned closer, bending over the railing to peer at the malformed monster in the nearest tank. It was floating in a thick fluid, translucent but tinged red by the lights. He could see the face, half of which was missing, could see the place where dozens of cables had been grafted into the torn flesh. He looked at the eye, the only one remaining, which was fixed and staring, heavily bloodshot and tense with hate.
It blinked.
“Arrr!” Tris leapt back, his rifle bouncing off the railing with a deafening clang. He cringed inwardly as the noise reverberated back and forth, receding slowly down the chamber. He waited until the last echoes faded, when the others gave up peering into the distance and all eyes turned to him. “It’s alive,” he said, by way of apology.
“Indeed.” Kreon’s tone was grim. “Hence the extreme power requirements. Maintaining so many… lives… in suspended animation.”
“That’s why they’ve got such a good back-up generator,” Kyra added. “Don’t want those things waking up on you every time you have a power cut.”
“But they are awake,” Tris protested. “It looked right at me.”
“Dreams,” Àurea said, striding forward to the railing. “They are flooded with chemicals to ensure their sleep is filled with rage and violence.” Even through her mask’s electronic filtering, she sounded sick. “It helps to keep them in optimal physical condition.”
They passed several long moments in silent contemplation. Tris’s revulsion was almost a physical thing. That anyone could do such deliberate and sadistic harm to another person was unthinkable. To have done it to so many… “I’m glad they’re dead,” he said at last. “This world deserved to be torn apart.”
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