by A. R. Knight
Several Amigga began the project, which led to what we saw up above, a sampling of an earlier creation. Vee says he doesn’t know much about what happened after the early humans were developed, but things went wrong soon after the Amigga gave us sentience.
“You’re too hard to control,” Vee says. “They wanted something pliable. Something more capable than Flaum, but less dangerous than us. What they wound up with had too much freedom.”
Humanity pushed back. Fought against their creators for a chance at their own destinies. Which is when Vee arrived, along with other Vincere forces. They were told the Sevora had taken a species, told that humanity had lost itself and needed to be eradicated.
“The Vincere probably think they succeeded,” Vee says. “I landed with another five Oratus. The whole engagement was kept secret, to keep other species from finding out what happened here.” Vee snorts, laughs at this. “We were told it was to keep the fear of the Sevora in check - if the enemy destroyed a species, it might destroy others. But the real reason? To keep the Amigga’s goals hidden from the rest of the galaxy.”
Which is why, when five Oratus proved unable to wipe out the humans, the Vincere proceeded to obliterate the entire base from orbit. They fried everything for kilometers, burned the land to bury a species, to hide the Amigga’s failure.
“Which is why I’m surprised to see you standing there,” Vee says. “You shouldn’t exist.”
“Sorry to disappoint,” Viera snaps. She still hasn’t lowered her miner, and I’m not about to tell her to.
“Looks like you’ve got two choices, Vee,” I say. “Either you prove, somehow, that you’re not going to try to kill us, or Viera roasts you right here.”
The Oratus keeps his eyes angled towards me, his half-tail swishing across the ground. “Do you know what it feels like to have your own people fire at you? Assume you’re dead and burn the skies around you?”
“That’s a hard no,” I reply.
Vee laughs, but it’s a broken thing. Nothing of the manic glee Sax had when he chuckled about his murderous rampages.
“It doesn’t do much for loyalty,” Vee replies, then gestures at himself. “I’m old, I’m breaking down. Nothing but hunting rats in the darkness and talking with that projection up there for far too long. You’re offering a new life. Potential.”
Something here, though, doesn’t add up. What’s an Oratus doing sitting here in the dark when all he has to do is flip these vents?
I ask the question. Vee blinks.
“Vents? I don’t know anything about any vents,” Vee says.
“Didn’t the projection tell you?”
“We trade insults. I tell it stories and it listens,” Vee cocks his head. “You, though, are something else. A human. Perhaps it trusts you more than the creature sent to destroy its civilization.”
“Vee makes a good point,” Viera says. “Why would we trust an Oratus?”
“I think I can help with that,” T’Oli says. “If you’ll stand still, Vee, I can give you a chance to prove yourself.”
The Oratus starts, looks up, just as T’Oli drops from the ceiling. The Ooblot splashes onto Vee and flows around the creature’s head, spine, and around his claws, becoming a robe, albeit one with a pair of eyestalks sticking out from the top, above Vee’s head.
In a moment, the Ooblot hardens, locking Vee’s claws out. Stiffening a hold on the Oratus’ neck.
“There we go,” T’Oli says. “Now, if you try and do anything, I can break all of your arms and your neck in a moment! Pretty neat, right?”
Vee makes a choking noise and T’Oli shivers the section around Vee’s neck.
“A little tight?” T’Oli asks, and Vee tries to nod. “Sorry ‘bout that. We’ll just have to keep adjusting till we find the perfect fit between deadly and flexible.”
Vee looks more than a little upset at the situation, his vents flaring, but when he notices Viera still hasn’t lowered her miner, when he tries flexing his claws and finding the Ooblot really does have a hard hold on him, Vee sighs and dishes me a resigned stare.
“Think we can work with this, Viera?” I say.
“I’m not putting my miner down.”
“Fine by me.” I point towards the back of the room, towards another door heading deeper. “Guessing the third vent is that way. Vee, would you lead on?”
The Oratus doesn’t fight this time and, with Viera behind him and me taking up the rear, we head on towards the third vent.
What Vee’s saying, about humans being a failed Amigga experiment, I shuffle into the back corner of my mind. Even if it’s true, there’s nothing I can do about it. And there’s something deeply satisfying about knowing we’re an experiment the Amigga failed to destroy.
Unlike the first two, the third vent doesn’t require a winding staircase or a hallway maze to get to. It’s just a straight shot along a wide corridor, a gray one with thick doors spaced evenly on either side. Each door has a dead control panel next to it, and a range of numbers plated in tarnished bronze on the surface.
“What are these?” I ask Vee as we trod along.
“I don’t know,” Vee says. “By the time our force arrived, they had already sealed most of this base.”
“The humans?”
“The Amigga that oversaw the experiment, the one they all said was the cause of the problems. It locked everything away. The only thing we found here were traps.” Vee hisses. “Almost all of us were lost when we entered. Rooms sealed around us. Gasses and fire.”
“How’d you survive?” Viera says.
“I ran,” Vee replies. “We realized what was happening, and it was my job to cut off the power. I wasn’t fast enough.”
I take a closer look at the plate of a door next to me. 50-75, it read. I trace the numbers with my finger. The grooves aren’t precise. These were etched by hand, not by machine.
“Before, most of the base sat above this place,” Vee continues. “I was so deep my mask couldn’t send out any communication. Once the rest of the team was lost, the Vincere decided they didn’t want to risk any more.”
“So you hid down here while everything burned?” Viera says.
Vee twitches his stump of a tail. Doesn’t reply and keeps moving.
The third vent, on the other side of the corridor, is surrounded by dark terminals. Some sort of basement control center. Vee, at T’Oli’s gentle instruction, flips up the vent and sends the orange bursting up the lines along the ceiling.
Around us, all those same terminals fly to life. At first the screens display blues, reds, angry reams of text flying around that I can’t read before they’re gone. Then they fade to a single logo, one I recognize because I’ve been taught to know it all my life. Taught to revere it.
A circular star, with a halo, black against a white backdrop, though I’m used to seeing it on stone.
Ignos.
Viera sees the icon too, guesses its meaning. T’Oli and Vee, though, stare at us like we’ve lost our minds.
“Something interesting?” T’Oli asks.
“The icon,” I say. “There in the middle. What is it?”
“No idea,” T’Oli says. “Vee? You can talk now.”
I give the combo Ooblot and Oratus a side look as T’Oli, with a shimmer around Vee’s neck, loosens his hold on the Oratus.
“I think that it’s best to keep hostages on edge,” T’Oli says at my look. “A tight throat means this Oratus isn’t going to forget I can crush his neck whenever I want.”
“I won’t,” Vee rasps, his hissing even more hoarse now. “As to your question, I don’t know. These designs can mean anything.”
Part of me wants to dive into the Cache then and there. I’ve never, I realize, actually looked for Ignos in the bracelet, never tried to find anything on the god my entire tribe has believed in. When neither Sax nor the Sevora that lived in my mind mentioned him, I figured Ignos simply wasn’t followed in the wider galaxy.
And yet, here he is. I know that�
��s the same design as the one carved into the top of my tribe’s Tier. I want to trace the connection, to think about —
“Hey,” Viera interrupts my thinking as she moves aside the sole exit door. “Something’s happening.”
Vee-T’Oli goes to peer out, then turns back to me. “The doors are open.”
That’s not all, though. I’m hearing a noise, one that starts low and grows, echoes off the walls and pours around us. A sound unmistakable and amazing.
Humans. Screaming.
“Go,” I say after a moment. “Let’s find them!”
With Vee-T’Oli in the lead, the three of us head out of the room, take the first left into an open door, into an orange-lit cavern where, piled on each other like the stacked full crates of nutrient goop in a shuttle, are dozens and dozens of tubes.
Immediately inside the door, there’s a ramp leading to the base of the cavern, where the tubes rise three-deep, each one almost double my own height. They’re filled with a black liquid, and all of them have red lights blinking on top. And a few, the ones from where the screaming pours, are open.
“No,” I say, because I can’t think of another word to describe the things hanging from those tubes, their harnesses keeping them suspended in the air.
They’re not human, not really. Like the project in the upper level, these things are malformed. Limbs are in the wrong places, or have the wrong number. Too many fingers, too few arms. As if some child were building figures out of clay and didn’t care if they misplaced bits and pieces.
“Maybe your people were right to bomb this place,” Viera says to Vee. “This, this is terrifying.”
The floor at the base is coated with spilled black liquid, a puddle that grows as more of the tubes begin to hiss and burst open. More yowls, hoots and strange hollers join the growing chorus as things better left dead find themselves alive.
“Let’s go,” I say. “I don’t like this place.”
“And leave them?” Viera says to me. “They’re suffering.”
“Do you have the energy to shoot them all?” I reply, motioning towards all the tubes. “Or are you going to climb to every tube and stab whatever’s inside?”
“I bet we could release them,” T’Oli says. “Figure those consoles back there have a way. Usually how these things work.”
Release them? I look from our door across the way to the closest tube, at a thing with three eyes, no nose, and a wide mouth open in a permanent scream. It senses my glance and meets me, and in those three eyes I see six deep blue pupils.
“I....” I have to fight down a sudden surge of nausea.
“Human,” Vee hisses, and though I’ve never seen a Oratus look sad, I can tell this is it. “Now you see.”
What I do see is that we need to get out of here.
“Come on.” I lead the way out of the tube chamber, back into the hallway.
The others, thankfully, follow. I’m not sure I could’ve turned back after them if they hadn’t.
As we go down the hallway, I glance at all the other rooms - now open - as we pass. They’re also orange-lit, also filled with tubes and the crying of those within them. I start to run. Anything to get away from those screams.
We head through the second vent room, then beyond to the maze of corridors. Only now, with the orange lines glowing along the ceiling, it’s not all that difficult to follow them and find our way through to the smaller room with the first vent, and the way to the stairs.
With the light, though, the dark hallways become storybooks, tales of horror, their walls lines with gouges, miner-caused blast marks, and unmistakable red stains. Metal junk couples with bits that look like bone, claws, or other parts.
Finally, when we reach that smooth stair up, I stop and breath hard. Then turn to Vee.
“What happened here?” I ask. “This, this... I don’t understand?”
“This was not us,” Vee replies after T’Oli loosens its grip. “I told you, there was a fight. A push back against the experiments here, before the Vincere were called. War leaves scars, human, on all it touches.”
“You can stop it with the philosophy,” I reply. “If you came after the fight, what did you find? What was here?”
“As I said. Traps.”
“But nobody fighting back?”
The Oratus shakes his head. “Other than those things, those failed experiments, nothing. Only the projection.”
I lean against the wall. Vee said there were multiple Amigga here. And, apparently, plenty of humans, at least of one type or another. If there was a fight, and if nobody was left here, then what happened to the winners?
“Kaishi,” Viera says. “As much as I’d like rest, I think we have to leave, as fast as possible.”
She’s right. But we can’t just run. We’ll die out in the ash lands too.
“The projection told us it would help if we opened the vents,” I say.
“If you can trust it,” Viera replies.
“We don’t have a choice.”
6 Caught
Stunned. Again. Sax is getting real tired of this. First Gar back on Scrapper Station, and now the Belloch, whose name he doesn’t even know. It’s sloppy, it’s inexcusable, and it’s one more tick on the long list of people Sax owes vengeance.
But now he’s in a prison prism, surrounded by three glistening sheets of pure disintegrating energy on a wet floor. The water’s licking at his scales, his talons. It’s moving, and in one direction, which has Sax wondering for a moment if he’s been dumped in a river.
Then he gets his head around. Sees the harsh reality. He’s in a waste-water basin, and what’s coming down his way is all the leftovers Astre’s Spire doesn’t use. The smell’s more industrial than natural, meaning they didn’t put Sax in the sewer, but instead where all the chemicals from the Spire’s factory floors run.
The prism itself consists of four diodes, three on the bottom and one above, each about three meters apart from one another. They’re connected by slim silver bars that Sax could snap in an instant if the act of doing so wouldn’t start a chain of unstable combustion throughout his body.
More than one prisoner’s been disintegrated that way.
Looking beyond his death cage, Sax sees the trough he’s in is pretty small, and from the sounds of it, there are others near him, each with their own waste-water pipe sending fluid down to the purifier. Above, there’s tiny lights casting a placid white, barely enough to see the edges of his cage.
Getting up takes effort, takes time. It’s a puzzle re-assembling his nerves, though every connection made is a rush as senses come back online. When Sax finally crouches on his talons, when the slime’s dripping off him to join the rest in its rush downstream, the Oratus blows out his mouth and vents with a hissing roar.
The sound echoes around the chamber - Sax has no idea how big it is - and, a moment later, it’s followed by second hiss, this one lighter, surprised. Instantly identifiable.
“Bas?” Sax asks.
“I’m here,” his pair answers from a few troughs away.
“Me too!” Engee announces. “They took you, huh?”
Sax expects Plake, Coorvin and the others to be here too, but there’s no other responses. After a moment, Engee starts dishing the details of their capture. How she and Bas went to the Wildfire as promised, how it was absolutely jammed, and how, after queuing for a table, a green Whelk came their way and offered a special setting in the back.
“I was opposed,” Bas clarifies at this point. “The Whelk seemed too nervous.”
“But who doesn’t want special service?” Engee says. “Although, perhaps it was suspicious. They shot us not long after we sat down, then we woke up here.”
“The Belloch running the place knew I’d be coming,” Sax says. “How?”
“Oh, they asked where Bas’ pair was. I told them you were back at the ship,” Engee chirps. “I mean, was that wrong?”
Teven. There’s a reason the Vincere doesn’t let them near the fron
t.
“It’s not worth worrying about,” Bas says after a second. “We need to find a way out of these prisms.”
Sax is about to say he has an idea when a doorway shunts open above them, blindingly lit, and several silhouettes come in.
“Find a way? No, no, there’s no need,” says a new voice, watery and thick. “Stay here, stay comfortable. You’re much more valuable that way. Yes, yes you are.”
Sax plumbs the air with his vents, catches a scent beneath the chemicals. Fresh-molted feathers, the tart scent of a Vyphen’s mucous layer.
“Frayk?” Sax asks the shadow, which turns to one of the others.
“How does it know my name? It shouldn’t, shouldn’t know that,” the Vyphen says. “I don’t want it talking. Not at all, at all.”
There’s another flash, then. Bright and overwhelming.
Sax comes to as he falls. It’s a second blind panic - his muscles still stunned and the only thing around him is black and bang, Sax hits a wall. Rolls as the flood of watery chemicals slides over him, pushes him on. Sax can’t feel his claws enough to try and grab on.
The Oratus rockets around another bend before his stomach falls out as he plummets long seconds in the dark, not knowing if he’s going to live or die or what when splash. Sax sinks beneath the oily surface, and he’s piecing his nerves together as he goes, gets one swing of the tail, a couple pushes of the talons and Sax is almost out when he’s sucked away again.
It’s a fight to keep his chest above water, to suck in the stale, briny air through his vents. Those moments come in flashes as Sax thrashes his way through the pipes.
Until, at once, it’s over.
Sax catches a glimmer of dense yellow and then the pipe ends, launching Sax out into the air. The Oratus crashes down, splashing into a deep and, as he gets his head above the surface, small lake.
Thick yellow-green gas obscures a lot, but Sax can still see the lake itself is a bubbling concoction of chemicals, and it’s cleared away a zone of rock around the shores. Beyond those few meters, though, Rathfall’s true rulers begin.