I picked my way through the wreckage, finding almost nothing of value. My suit’s diagnostic told me that the nutrient stores in my suit’s tanks were still fairly full, and I wouldn’t run out of synthetic sustenance for quite some time. It would be a little bit of a strain, not having the wonderful dream-meals that Barbas constructed, but the truth was, I hadn’t actually physically eaten since I had left the Earth. The suit handled all of that, very efficiently, and I was happy to say those systems were still working fine. Even as those thoughts crossed my mind, I felt the subtle pulse of cool relief spread from a place in my neck down through my body, as my armor injected a burst of saline solution into my big veins. I was going to be fine. I was going to survive, and, if need be, I would deal with the natives. I had tried being nice. I had tried diplomacy. But they had killed the messenger, and then they had tried to kill me. The tigress didn’t do diplomacy much, either. Maybe I should have been the one born with fucking fangs.
I looked up, shining my headlamp at the way I had fallen, trying to determine if climbing back up was a possibility. It didn’t look like it was. The cavern I was standing in was actually more of a narrow, pipe-like crevasse, extending nearly straight up into the darkness. Blocking most of the upper limits of that twisting, uneven shaft was a truly massive piece of glacial ice. I was incredibly lucky it had wedged where it did. If that had landed on me, I would never have gotten out from under it. I would have been ground into paste, armor or not, and no one would ever have found my body. I wondered how far down I had really gone. My suit’s communication network wasn’t picking up signals from any of my equipment, but that could be for a couple of different reasons. Either I was so far down that nothing was reachable, or everything I had built had fallen and smashed into pieces. Neither scenario would help me much. I needed another way out.
I spent the next half an hour examining the little cavern, searching the walls for any signs of weakness, any inkling that there was a way out of this pit. I didn’t find anything on the first pass, but when I activated my suit’s sonar array and started pinging the walls at random intervals, an exit presented itself. One wall was reading as covering a hollow place. Hopefully, it wasn’t just another small cavern with no exits. Taking a deep breath, I set myself and then, yelling like some kind of Kung Fu fighter in a movie, I drove my shoulder against the ice. This time, with the full weight of my armor and the full leverage of my augmented legs and abs, I smashed straight through the ice, sending shards flying everywhere.
I stood in a crooked, downward sloping passage, leading down into unknown darkness. Likely it was little more than a random crack in the ice, or a tunnel bored by one of this moon’s strange, sub-surface creatures. It was a strange thing, standing inside a glacier and knowing that somehow, against all terrestrial logic, there was life all around her. How did it all survive? How did it get here? Before I could get caught up in the ‘deep questions’, I sighed and trudged into the darkness. There was only going to be one way out of this mess, and that meant moving forward. Even if the way forward was also the way down.
…
I proceeded like that for what seemed like days, but what might only have been a couple hours. Passages wound about through the ice, sometimes crossing each other, sometimes coming to a dead end. I would climb what seemed like dozens of meters, only to find myself struggling down a shaft so steep it was practically vertical. Twice I found little pocket caverns like the one I had fallen into, and I searched what wreckage had gathered there. I found only twisted scrap and shattered ice, the remains of a month’s hard work. Once, I even found a crumpled, ice-white humanoid body, battered into a pulp. I couldn’t tell if it was the Stormwalker or someone else. Hell, I couldn’t tell if the corpse had been male or female, it had been so thoroughly destroyed. I passed it by and continued my search of the cavern, and then, finding nothing, I moved on. Time passed by and I grew more and more tired as the nitrogen balance in my suit dropped lower and lower. The despair I had felt trapped beneath the chunk of ice began to trickle back into my chest as the old familiar anger that had saved me, began to gutter and flicker with inaction. I had just begun to think I was going to die again when I saw it. In a narrow hole, a ‘room’ barely wider than the passage I was following, there sat the Fabricator, wedged at an angle into the frozen floor, practically framed in a shaft of dim light.
I dashed forward and seized the hefty little machine, checking it over for damage as if I was a child that had just tripped and fallen to the floor. It was blessedly intact, barely even scratched, and for a moment I just stood there, cradling it to my chest and wondering what the hell they had made the little indestructible box out of. The machine’s internal power source was still good, and as soon as I touched it, my wireless network finished negotiating its formidable firewall and connected. The machine immediately began chattering loudly, little slots opening up in its impervious shell and spewing forth a cloud of nanites like strangely animate wisps of black smoke. I followed the path of the nanite cloud with my eyes, watching them rise up toward the wreckage, trapped in a crush of ice shards in the ceiling. This had apparently been a crevasse like the one I had fallen into, and a similar situation had occurred here.
Part of a standing work lamp jutted from the ceiling, one of its bulbs miraculously intact. There must still have been some charge on its capacitors because it was giving off an inconsistent, crackling blue light- the shaft of illumination I had seen when I first spotted the blessed Fabricator. The nanites swirled across the wreckage, and some of the metal and plastic dissolved where they touched. Then they shot back towards me and began to whirl and circle about my armor, erasing scratches and tears in the metal, patching the hole in my hermetic seals in a bare instant. A moment later, the buzzing and chattering sounds stopped, and my suit’s monitors told me that once more I was completely protected from the atmosphere of Chalice. I smiled grimly. At least something was going right in this whole mess. With the Fabricator, I could do almost anything. Sure, I would have to program it myself since Barbas was somehow missing, but I could do that. I knew how. The tigress didn’t need anyone.
I reached over one shoulder and slid the Fabricator into place, feeling a groove open in the little box just large enough to fit the retaining pins jutting from my suit for such a purpose. With a click, the device secured itself to my armor, and I was ready for what came next. I could do this. I could absolutely survive whatever Chalice threw at me. I was ready, and I was going to teach that frozen, shitty moon who the boss was here. A loud rattling, clicking sound from behind me startled me out of my self-congratulation and I whirled quickly, my hand falling to the butt of my gun.
Filling the passage I had just come from, there was something that seemed to have come out of a nightmare. It was hideous and segmented, plated with glossy black chitin that seemed to glisten in a manner that seemed… unclean somehow. Its head was that of an ant, though it had entirely too many mandibles where its mouth was. I couldn’t really see much of its body past its first segment, but even the little I saw was large and insectoid, armored in chitin, and possessed too many legs. “Hi,” I said weakly. “You must be a burug.” Volistad had told me about them. Barbas had shot one of the big ones with the Tower’s gun, but I hadn’t been able to go see the body.
According to Volistad, they were Chalice’s consummate predators, strange insects that tunneled through solid ice with disturbing ease, feasting on whatever kinds of life existed deep within the ice. This one seemed ready to feast on me. My armor, apparently, meant little to its ravenous insectoid brain. It made that clicking sound again, and I watched its mandibles ripple and twitch as its wide jaws worked, dribbling greenish fluid onto the ice beneath it. The viscous drool smoked and sizzled away into vapor, and when it was gone, the ice was pitted and scarred, as if it were flesh scarred by acid. I opened my mouth to curse, but the burug suddenly shot forward, propelled by its many legs, gnashing its jaws in anticipation.
I didn’t even think about it. I tu
rned on my boot heel and ran, scrambling for the passage on the other side of the room, down into further unknown and darkness. I couldn’t fight something like that, not in quarters like this. My choices were run or die. It seemed that Chalice wasn’t done trying to kill me. But I wasn’t finished either. I was going to give that damned creature and its stupid moon a run for its money. I put up my hands to protect myself from whatever I might run into in the dark and sprinted. Damn whoever decided to send me here, I thought. Damn them directly to hell.
...
Chapter Eight: Sojourn
Volistad
Traveling the network of tunnels around and beneath my tribe’s village wasn’t actually particularly hard, largely due to the diligent work of my former comrades, the rangers. The frozen skin of Ravanur was always shifting, moving and changing. Cracks would open in a day and close in a week. Burug would carve tunnels in their incessant search for food, and then those tunnels would collapse. Very rarely did my people actually cut our own passages- the ice moved enough that it was barely worth the effort. Instead, we marked the ways we found, exploring the twisting labyrinth daily and keeping a running knowledge of all of the paths through the ice near our home. This meant that getting from the Deepseeker’s hidden sanctum to Joanna’s old campsite wasn’t particularly complicated; once I left the tunnels that the ranger’s had no record of. The hard part was remaining unseen.
I moved carefully through the tunnel network, reading the scrawled shorthand ranger-sign scratched into the ice at regular intervals. The trick was staying in the tunnels that were just old enough to be somewhat riskier to use. No one wanted to use an old passage that might collapse or close on them without warning. Passages more than seven days old tended to be avoided. They were traveled only by whichever unlucky ranger had been assigned to scout out the dangerous trail. I stuck to those riskier routes, trusting my former comrade’s instinctive wariness to work to my advantage. For the most part, it worked. I passed beneath the tribal home of the Erin-Vulur with little trouble, completely avoiding being seen in the process. Once I got close to the fallen campsite, however, it was a completely different story. Warriors and Stormcallers alike, crawled all through the passages near where Joanna’s tower had fallen.
This proved to be a true test of my stealth. I spent an hour hidden in a tiny crack in a tunnel ceiling, observing my tribesmen and their movements, finding the pattern. Of course, they didn’t follow a pattern of movement exactly, no one did, especially warriors looking out for danger. Falling too rigidly into a pattern would leave an opening for someone like me to exploit. But searching for someone or something always caused people, warriors or not, to follow established methods- and I knew my people’s methods. A hidden route would present itself, and when it did...
Now. I slipped from my hiding spot, pleased with how smoothly my new crystalline armor moved. I didn’t feel hindered at all. I stepped carefully, following far behind the shadow of the latest ranger on scouting duty, making sure not to scuff or scrape the ice beneath my feet. He led me in a circle, through a deteriorating burug tunnel and out into a passage that was much smoother, more neatly shaped. This one had been made by a Stormcaller, and a talented one at that. It was one thing to stir up the winds like all of the other wind shamans, but only a skilled few could wield power with such fine control as one would need to bore a specific route through the ice. This had been the way the warriors had used to get to Joanna’s campsite. I shook my head. They had sent a full war party- that was the only reason to dig a direct passage like this. Why would the elders have gone so far to destroy her? She hadn’t posed a threat to us at all, except for the Stormcaller she had apparently killed, but that had been self-defense. Something else seemed wrong about all this. How had they mustered so much force so quickly? Yes, the Erin-Vulur could scramble a quick strike force with little effort- the rangers were always out and about, and it was a simple matter of leaving ranger sign with new orders near the intersections in the patrolled tunnels. But to get all of the warriors, all the Stormcallers- to muster the tribe as a large war party- that took serious coordination. That took planning. It hit me like a slap across the face. They had meant to destroy Joanna from the start. They hadn’t sent me to learn about her, they hadn’t sent me to strike up some kind of accord- they had sent me as a distraction while they got ready. They had used me. Had Nissikul known? Did I really want to know the answer to that question?
The war tunnel wasn’t empty. Workers from the village moved back and forth, dragging scrap metal from the destroyed tower away down into the darkness, where no doubt they were preparing it for transport back to the tower. Steel and iron were never wasted by my people, and the kind of metal used by a god, would doubtless be better than whatever iron we could carve out of the frozen mountain beneath our village. I grimaced. I needed another way out. I had been seen here, and I really didn’t want to have to hurt any of my own people to escape, even if they might not show me the same courtesy. I stepped back into the ranger tunnel and turned, just in time to see the ranger creeping up behind me, ax brandished.
I lashed out; my body reacting much faster than my mind could have processed the situation. I twisted, slapping the side of the ax head with an open palm and knocking it from the ranger’s grip. Before he could react, I curled my fingers and hit him in the throat with my knuckles, pulling the blow just enough to avoid crushing his windpipe. He gagged, but could not otherwise make a sound or raise any alarm. Continuing my assault before the unfortunate ranger could regain his balance, I hit my forehead into his, and when he reeled, I hit him across his jaw, right in the sweet spot. The warrior crumpled to the ground, and dropped, crouching over his prone form for a moment and listening hard for any sign that someone else had heard the brief scuffle. No alarm was raised, and there was no sound of running boots. I huffed out a sigh of relief. That had been close. I glared down at the unconscious man. If I had been a second slower, I would have been the one lying face down on the ice, only I would have had a nice ax sticking out of the back of my skull, and wouldn’t that have gotten some attention- I stopped in the midst of my internal grumbling, and then narrowed my eyes into a mischievous grin. I had an idea.
…
When the next ranger to come through on their patrol route, found the crumpled form of her comrade lying in the middle of one of the side-passages, she immediately raised the alarm, causing everyone nearby to come running. I watched from behind a stack of scrap in the war tunnel as several warriors and a Stormcaller came running, passing by my hiding place and continuing on towards the place I had left the luckless ranger. The workers, on the other hand, retreated to the bottom of the tunnel, away from the possible danger. Doubtlessly whichever warriors weren’t immediately responding to the downed ranger would instead be guarding the vulnerable civilians. The sum result of the whole thing was that I had a moment, a clear path to the surface. I broke from cover and sprinted up the slope, my boots gripping the ice with incredible steadiness, maintaining my grip with no trouble at all. I ran as hard as I could, pumping my legs despite the burning in my thighs, and burst through the exit onto the surface of Ravanur.
It was very cold outside; not that I cared. Though my personal warmth was not in the least bit affected by the lethal temperatures, I could still feel them, even if they didn’t bother me. The sky was clear, but night had fallen, and Palamun’s veiled face was slightly smaller in the sky than he would be during the day. I lit out, away from the war tunnel entrance, moving away from the lines of scrap collection, which I knew would be resumed very soon. I moved quickly to the nearest hump of heaved ice and took cover behind it. I waited. I couldn’t hear any pursuers. Good. Now I just had to wait for the scavenging party to leave so that I could approach the site where Joanna’s camp had stood. It was getting on towards the evening, and those workers would be heading home soon, even with my little distraction.
I lay flat on the ice, just behind the crest of the little hillock, and peered out carefully, tryi
ng to get a sense of just how badly Joanna’s campsite had been destroyed. I knew they had destroyed her tower, that much had been obvious. But the Deepseeker had spoken as if the entire campsite had been erased, and that just didn’t seem likely. He also seemed very sure that Joanna was alive. The two ideas didn’t seem to make sense in my mind. If her camp had been utterly razed, then surely she was dead. If she was alive, then surely her formidable strength and weapons could have helped her to repel my people and win the day. It didn’t quite make sense.
I peered out over the ridge, towards where the tower had stood like a great monolith amidst the storm. At first, I didn’t realize what I was looking at. But then I saw it, the carved groove in the ice marking where Joanna’s divine storm had marked the boundary of her territory. And inside it… there was nothing. I frowned and squinted, willing my eyes to focus. But it remained the way I saw it. There was nothing inside that boundary. No campsite, not even wreckage or ruin- just emptiness, as if a great hammer had come down and driven a massive hole into the ice. As I stared at that emptiness, I thought of Joanna falling into the darkness, unable to do a thing. How could she have survived? If she had fallen into a crack in the ice, there would be no way for me to know how far down she could have fallen. “Well, there is one way,” I corrected myself under my breath.
Alien Romance Box Set: Alien Former: Sci-Fi Alien Romance (Books 1-5) Page 13