“I will draw up the necessary permission forms and see funds transferred to your department accounts within the next cycle,” Longaard said. “It will be down to you to draw up your own research questionnaires and decide on a line of inquiry. Once you have made first contact with the enclave you will report to me at a scheduled time via uplink tablet. With it we can establish a vid connection and I will know your exact location. After that we can make a final decision on your future on this program.”
Nal’ai couldn’t help but feel as though the professor’s optics had focused on her as he spoke.
Meeting over. Nal’ai stood up, feeling dazed. “Thank you so much for this opportunity, Professor Longaard,” Kolli was repeating effusively as they both backed towards the door. Nal’ai wasn’t listening to the response – they were barely out into the corridor before she snatched Kolli by her collar and rammed her up against the wall.
“What in the name of the Great Web are you doing?” she hissed, antennas rigid with anger. Kolli smirked in that infuriating, smug elf way.
“Getting us through second year.”
“By copying my research notes? Word for word?”
“You threw them out,” the tall, pale elf pouted. “I was doing a service to the academic community by rescuing them from the garbage.”
Nal’ai let her go out of pure exasperation, turning away before spinning back to face her again.
“I nearly failed this year because of you! I can’t count how many hours of sleep I’ve lost because of you! Helping you to bed when you come home half-spliced, comforting you when your idiot ex dumped you, writing half of your essays. You never tidy the room, you rarely do the cooking, you’ve never once cleaned the pantry–”
“Nal,” Kolli said, and embraced her. “Nal, Nal, Nal. I’m sorry.”
Nal’ai tried to pull away, but found she couldn’t.
“I’ll make it right, roomie,” Kolli said, patting the krxix’s head softly, in between her antennae. “Promise. I’m just taking this cruddy course to get some breathing space and re-sit my NATs. Then I won’t have to redo the year. Once we reach the enclave, I’ll dedicate all my time to helping your research. Besides, I got us a trip to Martian town. Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted?”
“It is,” Nal’ai sniffed, breaking the hug and looking at her roommate. “You promise you won’t mess this one up for me?”
“Swear it on the contents of every vault on the Crucible,” Kolli said with a pretty smile, holding up her elongated first and third digit. “Elf fem-scout’s honor. It’s going to be the best trip ever.”
They packed to leave the next day. Nal’ai woke early, too nervous and excited to sleep. With Kolli still snoring in her bed across from the krxix’s webrest, she stole into the corridor’s pantry and helped herself to some flesher grubs from the humid depths of the live food bin. Then, still wearing her pajama bottoms, she returned to the bedroom and went through her handwritten interview prep one more time. She didn’t want to turn the desk lamp on for fear of waking Kolli, but she also didn’t need to – with her compound, multi-hued eyes, her krxix eyesight was as good in the dark as it was in the light. Besides, dawn was starting to give the window blinds a silver lining.
Outside, beyond the student habitation high-block, she could hear Hub City beginning to wake up. The window frame rattled as hover traffic increased, the monotonous grumble of personal fliers and bigger cargo units coming down from the west stacks reaching into the cluttered, darkened room. She knew that right now the illumination strips would be automatically shutting down, and the first raw-eyed store owners and foot commuters would be making their way out into the street far below. Storefront security grids would be rattling off, shield protectors flashing away, diner stoves heating up, neon closed signs blinking to open. In the neighboring inner-city campus of Hub University, the morning crowd would be heading to lectures and the library, replacing those damned souls who had worked through the night.
She glanced at Kolli, sorely tempted to let the elf sleep through and leave her behind. There was no way she was serious about becoming a Martian Studies student. But if she did abandon her, Longaard might find out, and Nal’ai had already ridden her luck as far as she dared with the supervisor. Ticking her mandibles, she began to pack, making sure her personal uplink tablet was secured in the bottom of her rucksack before gently shaking Kolli awake.
“Today’s the day,” she said as the elf groaned and rolled over. “Your life as a Martian Studies student starts now – we’ve got a hoverbus to catch.”
Only the public laws of Hub City prevented its martian inhabitants from fortifying their communities. Nal’ai had no doubt they would if they could – the zone surrounding the Borreal enclave would’ve been blocked off by bastion walls and overlooked by automated ray cannons and intrusion deflectors. As it was, there was no immediately obvious way to tell that the hoverbus had passed onto the Borreal martian collective. For a couple of streets at least, it just looked like any other part of the downtown nexus, albeit unusually quiet for the time of day. Then they saw the domes.
While the full-on militarized zones favored by the peoples of Mars were forbidden within the bounds of the city, that didn’t stop the enclaves from building the structures they were most familiar with. The looming residence blocks and grav-towers of the nexus area gave way abruptly to a cluster of sloping, circular structures, all an uninspiring shade of matt-gray. They grew rapidly from the size of a small detached habitational unit to domes as big as hangar barns. Many were stamped with martian script printed in blocky letters, though the hoverbus was traveling too fast for Nal’ai to be able to decipher them. She glanced at the route map holographic on the headrest of the seat in front of her. Only a few minutes until their stop.
“When we get off, you let me do the talking,” she said, turning to Kolli. Her roommate had spent most of the journey with her legs up, chewing popgum and flicking through the latest copy of Hub Scandal. She grunted, not looking up from an article about the break-up of Solstice 5 on the eve of their supposed comeback tour.
“And remember, don’t call them little grays, or greenheads, or warmongers, and don’t call the enclave ‘Martian town’,” Nal’ai added sternly.
“Gotcha,” Kolli said, turning the page.
“Final stop, Borreal enclave,” chimed the hoverbus’s automated announcer. End of the line. Nal’ai gave Kolli’s legs a kick and they both got up. The transporter’s doors squeaked open.
Before them the enclave’s dome primus squatted like a gargantuan, gray-shelled crustacean clamped to a rock. Nal’ai recognized it from the research she’d done before the trip, though it was hard to mistake it for anything else – it was the largest of the martian structures surrounding them, a towering semi-sphere of armored plates, stamped with great blocks of text that Nal’ai now recognized as an independent variation of the martian creed of Nova Hellas. Six purple and green banners with more script fluttered on either side of the main concourse leading to the dome’s large portal hatch.
The building’s sheer size, impressive though it was, wasn’t the most surprising thing about the whole scene. What was shocking was the total lack of a single living being or intelligent construct in sight. The rockform boulevard lay totally deserted before them.
“This is quite the welcoming party,” Kolli said.
As though to underscore her words, there was a hum followed by the rush of anti grav boosters as the hoverbus turned in the street behind them and swept back along its route, leaving them in its wake.
Nal’ai didn’t say anything. She felt the first stirrings of panic. This wasn’t what she had planned for, and she was very much a planning kind of person.
“What now?” Kolli asked.
“Well, we could knock…”
The two students exchanged a glance.
“You’re the expert,” Kolli said. “You first.”
Nal’ai clenched her mandibles, checked her antennae were straight, and b
egan to walk towards the hatch port. The banners rattled and fluttered against their poles on either side, a counterpoint to the distant, muffled grumbling of the city. The dome loomed ahead, its bulk stark and gleaming in the morning light. It felt as though they had stepped through into a different dimension. Nal’ai wondered briefly whether they actually had.
The hatch towered over them – up close it was even bigger than it had seemed from the street. She came up short in front of the flush metal surface and, after taking a second to quell the churning in her stomach and the rigid krxix lockdown urge in her limbs, reached up and knocked.
There was no response, besides a very faint whirring noise. Nal’ai looked around for evidence of a monitoring device hidden in the dome’s curvature above them.
“Think they’re watching us?” Kolli asked, reading her mind.
“Professor Longaard said he was friendly with this enclave,” Nal’ai said, glancing back down the boulevard towards the deserted street. “He said we’d be made welcome.”
“Maybe the enclave is deserted,” Kolli suggested unhelpfully. “Maybe they’ve all gone back to Nova Hellas? Perhaps they’ve been abducted by–”
“Martians,” Nal’ai finished sarcastically.
“Hey, I don’t have to be a fancy Martian Studies second trimester student to know graylings don’t like their own kind going rogue,” Kolli said. “Perhaps Nova Hellas has sent a strike force to round them all up and take them back? Or maybe they’re all dead.”
She said the last word with undue, morbid relish. Nal’ai clicked irritably.
“You read too many bad terror novels, Kolli. Nova Hellas would rather pretend rogue enclaves like Borreal just don’t exist, rather than waste time and resources bringing them to heel. The existence of independent martian communities outside the control of Nova Hellas is a source of unspeakable embarrassment to the loyalist elders. They’re an unmentionable taboo.”
“No need for the lecture, Professor Nal’ai,” Kolli said. “All I’m saying is something’s not right here, and we–”
A thunk stopped the elf in her tracks. Nal’ai’s antennae twitched and she took a sharp step back as the iris of the portal in front of her slid open, exposing the darkness of the dome’s interior.
In the gaping space a short, green-gray figure stood waiting. They had a bulbous, smooth cranium and eyes as large and black as jet. The creature was clad in a rubberized white vacuum suit overlaid with plates of purple blast armor. At barely half of Nal’ai’s height, they didn’t even come up to Kolli’s slender waist.
They said something, too quick for Nal’ai to understand.
“My name is Nal’ai,” she responded in her best Mars cant. “And this is my companion–”
The hatch portal slammed shut. Nal’ai found herself staring once more at gray metal.
“Well, that went well,” Kolli said into the stunned silence that followed. “What time is the hoverbus back?”
“Hey,” Nal’ai shouted, and began to bang on the hatch. The thought of failing her entire degree lent force to her blows – she’d never be accepted back in the web nest if she crashed out. “I’m a student at Hub University! I’m top of my gacking class in Martian Studies! At least tell me why you won’t let us in!”
“I don’t think they care,” Kolli said, lazily blowing a popgum bubble.
The hatch opened again. Nal’ai, still knocking, almost fell in. She froze, teetering, on the threshold, and found herself staring down the barrels of several dozen ray guns.
The first martian had been joined by a lot more, and they were all armed. Two had crackling green energy leashes too, grasped by their extra exo-arms. Straining against the bonds were half a dozen martian hounds, razor-muzzles slavering, beady eyestalks swiveling as their six-limbed, furless bodies twisted and jerked just a few paces from Nal’ai. The air hummed with charged weapon systems and feral snarling.
Nal’ai and Kolli raised their hands.
“Looks like they care after all,” Kolli said, lips splattered with burst popgum.
The greeting party scanned them and their rucksacks before marching them inside. The hatch sealed with a thud that made Nal’ai shiver, thrusting them into darkness. Her eyesight adapted, just in time for her to be momentarily blinded when the lights blinked on. She felt something hard in her back – a ray gun, she suspected – and stumbled forward.
They were in a wide, curving chamber that arced away to the left and right, following the outline of the dome’s outer walls. A tunnel leading deeper into the structure lay ahead, its own walls and ceiling similarly curved. The lights were recessed into strips underfoot, between smooth, glassy flooring plates.
The martian behind her said something. She kept walking. They were taking the corridor leading into the heart of the dome primus.
She snatched a glance sideways at Kolli. The elf was wide-eyed and clearly afraid, though she was trying to hide it. The martian party behind them exchanged a few quick-fire words among themselves, their hounds still yapping at their heels.
“We’re just Hub Uni students,” Nal’ai tried to say. “We come in peace.”
“Xaybeen laey,” snapped the martian behind her. She’d understood that one. Keep quiet.
She was already wishing they’d just gone back to the hoverbus stop after she’d knocked the first time.
The tunnel arced first left then right, passing by more portal hatches. Eventually the party halted outside one. A pair of the diminutive martians stepped in front of Nal’ai and held another quick-fire discussion. She could only pick out a few words, but it sounded like they were arguing – elders ready, intruders, orders, exterminate. Eventually one seemed to relent and, with their three long fingers, entered a flurry of digits into a keycode pad. The hatch iris whirred open.
“Ul-yex,” one of the martians ordered her. Go.
She stepped forward onto what appeared to be some form of gantry, Kolli at her side. Immediately a spotlight fell upon them, and a great rush of voices swelled to meet them. Nal’ai flinched and raised her two right arms to shield her compound eyes as they adjusted.
They were in a greater chamber that the krxix took to be the heart of the dome primus. Its ceiling followed the curve of the outer structure, while its floor was tiered like a vast amphitheater, with hundreds of concentric rings occupied by a sea of little gray-green men. In the pit forming the chamber’s center an oval platform hovered, raised up from the floor by anti-grav units. It was an air dais, rotating slowly, occupied by a half-dozen figures who stood apart from the throng of martians beneath them. From a distance they looked similar to those below, except they were altogether taller and more slender. Nal’ai recognized them as elders, the leader cast subspecies of the martian race.
The spotlight remained glaring down on the two captured students as the gantry underfoot shuddered and began to move. Nal’ai realized it was another hoverplate. She could feel the grav suppressors thrumming up through the soles of her feet as it carried them down towards the waiting dais. The chatter of the martian horde below redoubled, echoing around the chamber’s lofty ceiling.
“How’s this for a welcoming party?” Nal’ai hissed to Kolli.
“This is normal, right?” the elf replied nervously. “Like, they do this with all their visitors?”
“Totally.”
The hoverplate docked seamlessly with the dais, and their guards ushered them onto the larger platform with more prodding. Nal’ai and Kolli found themselves surrounded by the elders. They turned in a semi-circle, looking from one haughty, black-eyed face to the next.
One of the martian leaders stepped forward. Like their kindred they were tall, taller even than an elf like Kolli, though that was partially due to the fact that their long, skinny neck-stalk accounted for a quarter of their height. Their painfully slender body was clad in a form-fitting purple vacuum suit, along with a robe that hung lightly from clasps at their shoulders and elbows. The silken garment shimmered from deep blue to light purple,
shifting beneath the spotlight. It was the only thing that differentiated them from the others.
“My name is Eyxyx,” the elder declared in the standard tongue. “I am the current chief elder of the One True Independent Mars Enclave of Borreal. I require you both to identify yourselves, for the records.”
“My name is Nal’ai Sho,” Nal’ai said. “And this is Kolli Betan. We’re–”
“Nal’ai Sho and Kolli Betan, you have been found guilty of conspiring to besiege the One True Independent Mars Enclave of Borreal. After a long and thorough trial, the Council of Elders have unanimously agreed on a verdict of guilty-as-charged. The sentence is death, to be enacted immediately.”
Nal’ai and Kolli both began to shout, but their words were lost in the roar of approval that rose from the onlooking crowd. The dais shifted slightly, and Nal’ai caught a humming noise rising over the chaos. In a total panic, she looked down and realized the circular floor that constituted the base of the amphitheater was slowly levering open. Beneath it was a pit, dug into Hub City’s bedrock and apparently filled with a sea of snapping, razor-sharp maws – a pack of martian hounds, chained beneath the amphitheater like gladiatorial beasts.
“We haven’t done anything,” Kolli was screaming. “We’re just here for the course credits!”
“This is merely a sentencing court,” Eyxyx rasped. “The judgment has already been passed, and it will not be rescinded. We shall take ‘we’re just here for the course credits’ to be your final words.”
The part of the platform Nal’ai and Kolli were standing on began to retract. Nal’ai staggered and had to snatch onto her roommate to avoid falling.
“Longaard sent us,” she shouted at Eyxyx, desperately. “Professor Longaard!”
For a second she thought the slender martian hadn’t heard her over the noise rebounding around the chamber.
Then Eyxyx raised one bony hand. The retracting dais froze, the two women teetering on its edge.
Tales From the Crucible Page 7