by R. A. Nargi
“Okay, clear!” Galish announced.
“Take us out,” Ana-Zhi said.
He keyed the thrusters and we slowly eased away from the space station, running on interval power. As Ana-Zhi had warned, there was a brief lurch and hiccup in the IDS and I was pressed against my seat. But then the wonky component kicked in and everything went back to normal.
It took a good hour to get over to the Fountain and get in position. The Rhya had very specific instructions and navigation vectors which they transmitted directly to us.
Up close, the Fountain didn’t look anything like a fountain at all. It was a massive ringed structure, kind of like a Kreider-Johnston torus—bristling with solar mirrors, sensor arrays, and navigational beam turrets. The center of it was an open space crackling with blue energy and a miasma of light.
We joined a small flotilla of craft waiting to enter. Most of them were the odd, organically-shaped vessels of the Rhya. These were research vessels, freighters, and wardships that the Rhya used to provide aid to the Obaswoon. But in front of us was the crimson-colored Lamprey-class scout of the Mayir, with its sharp angles and bat-like stabilizers. Beyond it was the Faiurae cutter, glossy and swooped in appearance. They must be looking over at our floating junk pile and laughing their asses off.
“It might be another couple of hours until we get through this queue,” Ana-Zhi. “You might want to get Dr. Port-a-Potty set up with her gear so we can get to work once we get through.”
I was about to tell her to do it herself, but I decided not to. It would help with the pretense if I were to order the crew about.
Back in the main hold area I found Chiraine struggling with some equipment crates. The other crew members seemed to be ignoring her.
“Need some help?”
“Does it look like I need help?” she huffed. “I don’t even know where I’m supposed to set up.”
I had spotted an engineering bay on the way to the bridge. It seemed as good a place as any. I grabbed a crate and called to Yates, “Help us get set up. On the double. We won’t have much time once we break atmosphere.”
He raised one eyebrow questioningly, but didn’t complain. Between the two of us we got Chiraine’s gear moved into the bay, and Yates stayed to helped her assemble the system.
6
Two hours later, it was our turn to go through the Fountain. I’m not sure what I had expected, but the sensation was unbelievable.
First we passed through what looked like some sort of electro-charged plasma cloud—with bolts of energy spidering around the hull of the Freya. The interior lights blinked out for a second, as did the artificial gravity. I felt myself strain gently against the seat’s acceleration straps and then, suddenly, my entire world collapsed in on itself.
It was a million times more trippy than the most intense substance Lirala ever got into. Lights, objects, everything around me stretched out until the bridge was a mass of colored strings. The strings blurred and pulsed—and then it was like I was looking into a gigantic bubble swelling outwards.
The ship shuddered and just like that, things were back to normal. Except there was a big green planet in front of us. Yueld. Home world of the legendary Sky Reavers. And, hopefully, the location of the Kryrk.
No one said anything for a few moments. Everyone must have felt as disoriented as me. But Ana-Zhi seemed to recover quickly. She started the ship’s diagnostics and told Galish to steer us away from the other craft emerging from the Fountain.
Then Ana-Zhi took me aside. “You know I’m not keen on this charade. Not keen at all. We don’t have much time to begin with and dicking around like this for the benefit of some Shimese stoolie doesn’t strike me as a particularly efficient use of that time.”
“Yeah, well, you’re a Beck Salvage employee—same as me—”
“I get your point, junior. But I beg to differ about the ‘same as me’ part.”
I took a step closer to her and tried to appear menacing. “We’re both under orders,” I said. “This is the way it’s going to be.”
She put a hand on each of my shoulders. Maybe she meant it to be a friendly gesture, or maybe she was getting ready to knee me in the groin. “What I’m saying is, you and I need to work together. For appearances’ sake. Obviously I run this show. But it can’t look that way to the stoolie. Therefore, our brains need to be on the same wavelength.” She moved her head towards mine until our foreheads were touching. It was extremely uncomfortable. “Get it?”
I stepped back. “Yeah, sure. That’s what I was going to say. We need to work together.”
“Good boy.” She patted my cheek. “Now why don’t we have a little briefing with the stoolie.”
“Chiraine,” I said. “Her name’s Chiraine. Use it.”
Ana-Zhi started to retort, but the Freya jolted suddenly and began to rumble and shake as we hit the atmosphere.
“Galish, make sure no one’s sniffing up our butt.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“And run us along the equator. But not too low.” She turned to me. “If that’s okay with you, Captain.”
I didn’t say anything. Just turned on my heel and led the way to the engineering bay.
Chiraine was there, hunched over a datapad. “I can’t believe this junk pile’s ancient geo-pos system actually works, but I’m getting data.”
“Like I said, she’s old but she works.” Ana-Zhi crossed her arms.
“What do you have for us, Chiraine?” I asked.
She called up an animated map on her screen. “We need to get to Roan Andessa. Here.”
“No can do,” Yates said. He had been lurking in the doorway.
“That’s where the node we have to tap is located,” Chiraine said.
“Well, then, that’s going to be a problem.”
I wanted to ask why, but I thought it might look bad if the captain was the guy asking the dumb questions.
Luckily, Chiraine pressed him and Yates explained that the city of Roan Andessa had been colonized by the Obaswoon. And the Rhya didn’t want more advanced civilizations having contact with the Obaswoon. During previous missions, the Beck Salvage team had seen Rhya wardships and security drones patrolling the city’s ground perimeter and airspace. The area was completely restricted.
“It’s impossible to fly in or even go by ground,” Yates said.
“I never said anything about flying in—or driving in.” Chiraine accessed a new screen on her datapad. “We come in from below the city.”
“I didn’t see any tunnel boring equipment on the manifest, did you, Galish?” Ana-Zhi said.
“There’s a natural tunnel,” Chiraine said. “According to this.” She mirrored her datapad to the engineering bay’s wall display, and an image filled the screen. It looked like an old, hand-drawn map.
“What are we looking at?” I asked.
“A seventh-century survey map showing the mesa where the city of Roan Andessa was to be built. At the time of this map it wasn’t much more than a fortress.”
“How did you even get that information onboard?” Ana-Zhi asked. “It’s not something the Rhya would allow.”
Chiraine shrugged. “I smuggled it on board. In one of these.” She reached over to a compact interface box with a small glass orb set in a depression along one side.
I had never seen any piece of gear like that. It looked hand-made. “What is that thing?”
“Biklode resonator,” Chiraine said as if it were obvious.
“Yeah, that doesn’t help.”
She removed the glassy orb from the resonator and held it up. It was the size of my fingertip and the inside of the orb swirled like a cloudy sky.
“This is a biklode. A high-density data storage unit. Uses crystalline maps. Highly shielded and very secure. I have all my research on it.”
“Clever,” Ana-Zhi said.
“Yeah, well. No one wants to disappoint the Shima. This is a pretty high stakes venture.”
“Tell me more about the m
ap.” I stepped closer to get a better look.
Chiraine enlarged the image and highlighted an area on the map. “This is labelled ‘the Well of Forever’ in the Yueldian language. It’s an actual well or pit and it was a deeply-significant religious site. According to my research, the early Yueldians used to throw criminals and heretics into this well.”
“I’m not following,” I said.
“The Well of Forever connects with this.” The display changed to a machine-generated readout. “An EMR scan of the mesa. See here? This is a lava tube. It forms a natural shaft. Straight down. And this thing at the bottom. It’s a cave.”
“What are we talking about, size-wise?” I asked. I was trying to make sense of Chiraine’s various charts and maps and scans.
“The EMR shows the mesa to be 625 meters high. Shaft itself runs 590 meters. That’s not bad.”
Yates shook his head. “It doesn’t matter how high the mesa is. There’s no way to get to that cave entrance. If it even exists.”
“Why’s that?”
“The local megafauna,” Yates said. “Cthulians. Nearly wiped out the 2322 mission.”
I wracked my brain for any knowledge of cthulian. Luckily Piettow had implanted something about the creatures. I closed my eyes and recalled what I knew.
Cthulians were gigantic swamp-dwelling bipedal carnivores. Vaguely humanoid in shape but with a squid-like head from which sprouted a mass of tentacles. Their appearance was reptilian, with a thick scaly skin, heavily-muscled limbs ending in three-toed claws, and vestigial appendages that resembled small wings emerging from their shoulder area. Stretched to their full height, cthulians reached around 100 meters—although apparently they rarely stood straight up on their hind limbs.
“Yeah,” I said. “We don’t want to mess with hundred meter tall giants.”
“Really, Captain?” Ana-Zhi Agrada taunted. “These cthulians are only a class 6 hazard. If there’s no other way into the city, I’m not sure we have a choice. At least according to the mission protocols.”
“You ran mission protocols on this?” I hadn’t pegged her for a by-the-book kind of person. Especially one who would throw protocols back in my face.
“Just doing my job, Captain. It turns out that the chance of us encountering a cthulian is less than twenty percent. Apparently there’s not a large population of the beasties. So what do you say?”
Both Chiraine and Yates looked at me expectantly.
“I need to think about this for a bit.”
“Don’t take too long,” Ana-Zhi said. “The Mayir and Faiurae are bound to notice if we hang around Roan Andessa.”
“As will our Rhya friends,” Yates said.
I walked over to the main hold to consult with Xooth and Obarral, but only the little Plargond was around. He was stretched out on a bench, dozing, but snapped awake when I walked close to him.
“Where’s Obarral?”
“Infirmary. Checking supplies. I think he thinks you will get injured soon. Wants to be ready. Not good to have dead captain, right?”
“Injured? Me? What are you talking about?” It took me a few minutes to realize that this was an example of Plargondian humor. Ha ha.
“I need your opinion on something.”
“Yes?”
I explained about our need to access the node in Roan Andessa, and Chiraine’s idea to use a lava tube to covertly enter the city. Xooth nodded but didn’t say anything. Then I told him about the cthulian hazard, and brought up Ana-Zhi Agrada’s mission protocols.
“We not use those!” he cackled. “Stupid.”
“The protocols?”
“I have own protocols!” He jabbed at his head.
Yeah, think for yourself. I get it. “What do you think of the plan overall?”
“Could work. If caves are clear. Six hundred meters you say? We take sled. Shoot straight up like a yastnod.”
I wasn’t sure what a yastnod was, but the idea of taking a sled made sense—depending on what we had on board. I knew that a good-sized hover-sled could haul a couple of crew members plus whatever equipment was needed. And if its z-field generator was tuned properly, there was no reason the sled couldn’t ascend 600 meters.
“Wear exosuits to be sure, but no problem. I think.”
“So you think we should do it?”
“That’s why we here, right? Find Kryrk. Get rich. Then spend more time sleeping, okay?”
I found Ana-Zhi Agrada in her quarters and told her that I had made a decision. We would send a team to explore the lava tube and enter the city through this Well of Forever that Chiraine had located.
“Well done, Captain. Exactly the decision I would have made. Now have you given some thought about who should go?”
I hadn’t, but it seemed pretty straightforward. “Yates, obviously. Xooth as well. Just in case there’s any trouble. Chiraine, so she can lead them to the node.”
“You started off well enough with Yates and Xooth,” she said. “But the princess isn’t allowed in the field. She’s too valuable.”
“How will we find the node, then?”
“She can brief Yates on the location. He’s studied the city data as well and can get to where he needs to go. We’ll also want to send Galish to drive the sled because I’m ninety-eight percent sure that Yates would wrap it around a stalactite or something.”
“Agreed.”
“That just leaves one more slot. Supervisory in nature.” Ana-Zhi stared right into my eyes.
“Me?”
She barked out a laugh. “No, not you! As far as I’m concerned you’re as much a princess as Chiraine. No, you’re staying right here. I’m going myself. I’ll run the mission and keep the boys out of trouble. Like I usually do.”
That was fine with me. I didn’t sign up for anything beyond hanging out on the ship for three days and acting like I was in charge.
“If we wipe, Obarral can get you back home to your Uncle Wallace.”
“What do you mean wipe?” That must be some spacer lingo that I wasn’t familiar with.
“I meant if we don’t come back, Obarral will be your ticket out of here. But let’s not dwell on that unfortunate possibility.” She looked up at a nav display which displayed the Freya’s position on the planet. “It looks like we’re almost there.”
We returned to the bridge and I watched as Ana-Zhi activated the Freya’s lower hull cameras and sensors. The bridge’s main display split, showing various angles of what we were flying over. But it was fairly disappointing. You couldn’t see much beyond a sea of swirling mist, occasionally punctuated by a jungle-covered mesa or rocky peak.
Yueld was a swamp planet, mostly unsuitable for habitation by anything other than cthulians and the creatures they preyed upon. Despite this, the ancient Yueldians had managed to eke out a civilization with cities and farms built on the vast stone mesas that rose out of the swamp. They also colonized both of Yueld’s moons and built an orbiting fortress.
“Coming up on Roan Andessa,” Hap Galish announced.
“Any sign of the Faiurae? Or Mayir for that matter?”
“A couple of Rhya wardships and a freighter, but other than that, the area’s looking pretty clear. One or the other of our opponents are probably loading up the Kryrk right now, while we prepare to go on this wild goose chase.”
That was an odd thing to say. Even as a joke. “What makes you think that the Faiurae and Mayir are after the Kryrk as well?”
He smirked at me. “What are you, stoned? Of course they’re after the Kryrk.”
I searched my mind for the mission competitive analysis that would certainly have been implanted as part of my briefing, but came up blank. Piettow must have messed up. Maybe with all the frantic, last-minute prep, the competitive analysis was accidentally left out of the package.
I glanced at both Galish and Ana-Zhi. “Tell me about it.”
“We don’t have time now,” Ana-Zhi snapped. “We’re about to go in.” Turning to Galish, she asked, “Di
d anyone bother to check the ion lances? If not, this might be a real short trip.”
As we descended into the mist, most of the crew—except for Xooth—huddled in the bridge. On the other side of the ship, the Plargond was manning our single gun turret.
“Slowly,” Ana-Zhi told Galish. “I don’t want any surprises.”
You couldn’t see anything outside of the portholes except for swirling water vapor which caught the shafts of light from the Freya’s spotlights.
Ana-Zhi turned to Yates, who had his eyes locked on a scanner display.
“Anything?” she asked.
“Plenty of lifeforms down there, but I’m not picking up anything as large as a cthulian.”
That was a relief.
“What about you, missy? You find this cave of yours yet?”
Chiraine was studying her own datapad which was linked to the ship’s EMR array. “Not yet, but according to the topographics, it’s right at the base of the mesa, southwest quadrant.”
All of a sudden Yates called out. “Something coming in fast. And it’s big!”
“Image it! Xooth, you seeing anything on your scope?”
“No lady!” His voice sounded frantic through the comm. “Not yet!”
“Keep your eyes locked on it!” Ana-Zhi shouted. “Yates?”
“Two hundred meters and closing. Way too fast for a cthulian. And the image isn’t making sense.”
“Obarral, tell me that the proximity plates are charged.”
“Of course they are, darling.”
“Good, then everyone. Prepare for impact!”
What?!
I didn’t have time to do anything but grab onto an acceleration strap. Then the ship jolted, a warning klaxon sounded, and the lights dimmed—just for a second—as the hull’s proximity plates discharged a cloud of energized particles into the mist. The ship lurched again, but the guidance system quickly righted the Freya.
“Calm down everyone, we scared it away,” Yates said.
“What was that thing?” I asked.
He peered at his datapad. “Based on the size and rate of movement, the match I’m getting is a K’Lortai Dragon.”