“She’ll be safer aboard the Tempest, Ma’am.”
“I already had to leave one child because it was supposed to be safer. I’m not going to make the same mistake twice.”
“Yay!” Atta said.
Admiral Hale regarded her with a frown. “Very well. Get down to the hangar. I’m sending Sergeant Cavanaugh’s squad with you. He told me the Black Rictans were the first ones to explore Noctune. Now that experience is going to be of significant use to us.”
“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”
The admiral arched an eyebrow at her. “Why not?”
“Because Sergeant Cavanaugh is hostile toward the Gors. He still remembers them as our conquerers. He could start a war down there.”
“I’ve had him guarding the Gors’ aboard this ship long enough to know he doesn’t have a twitchy trigger finger. He won’t attack them unless ordered to.”
“Just because he hasn’t done anything yet doesn’t mean—”
“This is my operation, Ma’am. If you don’t like how I’m running it, you can stay out of it.”
Destra sighed. “Very well.”
“I’ll alert the Gor transports that our team is joining them on the surface. You’ll explore with the Gors, that way if you do run into any survivors, at least they’ll know you’re friends and it won’t turn into a bloodbath.”
Destra nodded. “I’m sure the Gors will be happy to have us along.”
* * *
The transport rattled and shook around them. Destra stood with Atta, strapped in along one wall, surrounded by six Black Rictans. Cavanaugh and his squad were encased in the shiny black armor of Zephyr light assault mechs. Destra wore an insulated black vac suit, stolen from the Tempest’s old Nova pilots’ lockers. Atta wore her custom-sized bright yellow vac suit.
The atmosphere on Noctune was breathable, but too cold to comfortably inhale, so it had to be filtered and heated by climate controls inside their suits. The temperature was forty below freezing, and that was during the planet’s dim, daylight hours. The night side sat at a cozy seventy-five below.
Destra watched on the opposite side of the transport as Sergeant Cavanaugh checked his weapons. His features glowed blue in the light of the displays inside the Zephyr’s helmet. All of the Black Rictans were armed with two primary weapons—one ripper rifle, and one cutting beam to help them dig through the ice. In addition to that, they had drills to carve tunnels, and plenty of explosives to blast their way down.
Admiral Hale had identified one place in particular where he and his engineers had determined the ruins were in the best condition and not too far below the surface.
The Gors had been rerouted to that location, and now all of them were going to land together on the ice field, some fifty feet above the ruins.
Cavanaugh finished checking his weapons, and he looked up. “Listen up,” he said, his external helmet speakers crackling to life. “Our Zephyrs can’t detect cloaked skull faces, so we’re at their mercy. By now you’ve all met our exalted diplomat and translator. She is our first and only line of defense while we’re down there, so keep your fingers far away from your triggers, and hopefully we’ll all live through this. Councilor Heston, is there anything you’d like to add to that?”
Destra smiled, feeling suddenly more hopeful about this expedition. “The sergeant is right. If I had my way, we wouldn’t even be armed, but the admiral feels that since the Gors are a race of warriors, they will respect us more for having brought our weapons with us.”
The transport shuddered and began bucking under them. Destra paused, waiting for the turbulence to pass.
“Soon we’ll be landing on the surface. Our purpose on Noctune is different from that of the Gors. The admiral wants us to excavate a path down to the ruins as quickly and safely as possible. The Gors, on the other hand, are looking for survivors. They have agreed to leave one of their warriors with us as a liaison, and I have agreed to go with them and use our technology to help them in their search.”
A few of the Black Rictans traded glances with one another. Destra noticed and asked, “Is there a problem, soldiers?”
“You’re the only one with a translator, ma’am. We need you with us in case we run into any skullies.”
“First of all, they’re not skullies or skull faces, they’re Gors, and it’s beginning to look like we’re related to them, so you should start thinking of them as us. Second of all, the Gors can understand us. They’re telepaths. And third, my daughter is going to stay with you on the surface, since she appears to be able to understand the Gors without the need for a translator.”
“She speaks skull—I mean . . . Gor?”
“She can hear their thoughts without the need for actual words. The Gors tell me this is something unique to our children, because their minds are still open and receptive. I don’t know if that’s the actual reason, but whatever the case, you will have a translator with you.”
“A kid translator,” one of them sneered. “You’re leaving us in the hands of a six-year-old! What if she thinks it’s funny to see the Gors rip us apart?”
“I’m seven,” Atta declared.
“Same difference, kiddie.”
“My daughter is not a psychopath,” Destra growled.
“Enough back talk, Rictans!” Cavanaugh said. “As far as you’re concerned she’s the queen and you’re all her designated boot-lickers. Our job is to dig, Councilor Heston’s and her daughter’s is to keep the peace with the Gors. We’ll be in constant comms contact with the councilor, so if there are any incidents that our little miss can’t handle, we can always patch her mother through. Since the Gors seem to respect mother figures, it might stop them from eating us if we do the same.”
The next thing that all of them heard was the pilot’s voice crackling through the troop bay. “We’re four klicks out from our designated landing area, approximately five minutes until landing. Sensors have detected a strong crosswind near the surface, so be prepared for turbulence on the way down.”
Turbulence was an understatement. The transport shuddered and shook around them as if it were about to fly apart. At times the deck leapt straight up with dizzying speed. At others it dropped out beneath their feet, and they felt like they were free-falling toward the surface. Destra expected her daughter to start crying, but somehow she remained stolid and silent the whole way down.
Destra watched out the dark porthole-sized viewports in the side of the transport. Someone turned down the lights inside the troop bay, and the view beyond those portholes snapped into focus. Destra saw a vast, icy plain appear, shining purplish blue in the weak daylight of Noctune’s distant sun. Snowflakes swirled in the transport’s landing lights.
They settled down with a barely-perceptible jolt and then the troop bay came alive with the sounds of Zephyrs unbuckling from the walls, and mechanized feet clanking around inside the narrow space. Destra waited until the mechs had finished blundering around before she unbuckled herself and Atta.
Then came the groan of hydraulics and the boarding ramp began to lower at the back of the transport. No sooner had the ramp dropped than Cavanaugh’s squad moved out, marching out in perfect synchrony. Destra took her daughter by the hand, and cautiously followed them. They stopped and stood at the top of the ramp, gazing down on the alien surface of Noctune. The wind whistled by the opening, and snowflakes came swirling in, dancing around their feet.
Destra started down the ramp and immediately felt herself growing heavier. No longer shielded by the artificial gravity field aboard the transport, she felt the full force of Noctune’s 1.25 standard G’s.
Walking out onto the ice, Destra’s boots crunched in the snow. The cold began creeping in despite the insulated layers of her flight suit. Her heater started up, running current through heating elements woven through the inner lining of the suit.
It was hours after sunrise where they had landed, but it looked like the very tail end of twilight. Destra looked up and saw star
s shining through the clear, purple-black sky. Looking out to the horizon, she saw a dim blue-white sun. Destra struggled to imagine what Noctune had been like back when there’d been humans living here in densely-populated cities. Had it been this dark?
Turning in a quick circle, Destra looked around for the Black Rictans.
She was disappointed to find them standing in a defensive formation, their backs to the transport, their guns raised and tracking the icy wasteland for targets.
An icy wind blew, scraping up thin shavings of ice and snow and tossing them against Destra’s faceplate with surprising force. She staggered, and little Atta almost fell over.
They joined the squad of sentinels to shield themselves from the wind with their transport.
Moments later, a matching transport melted silently out of the hazy sky, a dark shadow with no running lights. The shadow set down beside them and dropped its loading ramp with a soft groaning sound. The Blackies finally abandoned their defensive stance, holstering their rifles on their backs and rushing up the ramp of the second transport. They came back carrying out heavy-looking pieces of drilling equipment, and crates of explosives.
Destra watched them with a frown, feeling vaguely like she was forgetting something. Suddenly she realized what that was.
The Gors were supposed to have set down here already, so where were they? She was about to key her comms for an update from the Tempest, when she heard a quiet hiss close beside her ear.
Destra whirled toward the sound just in time to see the swirling darkness shimmer and then take shape before her. Torv appeared, naked and bony as ever. He bowed his giant, skull-shaped head and then bared his teeth at her. “You honor us with your presence, Matriarch.”
“Thank you,” she managed, her words conveyed by her suit’s external speakers. “Where are the rest of your people?” she asked, looking around. When she didn’t notice either them or their transports, she went on, “And your ships?”
“They are cloaked. I do not smell Sythians nearby, but we must not be fools and sit in the open like a herd of sapsiri, waiting for them to catch usss.”
Destra nodded, as if she knew what sapsiri were. She pulled a handheld scanner from her belt and activated the holo display so that Torv could see what it was. The display showed a scan of the surrounding area and highlighted all the living things it could detect as glowing dots. Cavanaugh’s squad appeared, a cluster of green dots behind her and to her right. Torv was a yellow dot in front of her, and Atta a green one right next to hers.
“It does not show my creche mates,” Torv replied.
“They are cloaked,” Destra explained.
“Yesss . . . this means that any survivors smart enough to hide are invisible to usss. At least we shall find the dumb ones.”
Destra smiled.
“Come, we must go,” Torv said, turning to leave.
Destra took Atta by her shoulders and said, “I’ll be on the comms at all times. If you want to contact me, just say my name, okay?” Atta nodded. “And be careful. If you run into any Gors, make sure to tell them that we’re their friends. You’ll have one of them with you to help you explain.”
“I know,” Atta replied. “He’s right here,” she added, reaching out to grab something invisible standing beside her. The air seemed to flicker and take shape around her small black glove.
Destra realized that there was a cloaked Gor standing right beside Atta. Her first instinct was to pull Atta away, but she forced herself not to react, remembering that a starving Gor had been visiting her daughter every night for weeks and he’d never hurt her. Destra pulled Atta close for a hug and then withdrew to an arm’s length. “I love you.”
“I love you, too, Mom. You’d better go. The Gors are in a hurry to find their families.”
Destra smiled and nodded. Before she turned to leave she walked up to Sergeant Cavanaugh. “Good luck,” she said.
Cavanaugh set the crate of explosives he was carrying down and nodded to her.
“Be careful out there, Councilor. Keep your comms open.”
“I will,” Destra replied, leaving Cavanaugh and his team, and Atta, to run after Torv. The Gor had already disappeared in the swirling darkness, but she found him easily enough with her scanner. A solitary gray silhouette appeared in the distance. The icy surface of Noctune gleamed with reflected light from the sun. Destra’s footsteps crunched loudly as she ran.
As soon as she reached Torv’s side, he turned to her and said, “We are not far from the nearest tunnel entrance.”
“Good,” Destra panted. She was forced to jog beside the Gor to keep up with his longer strides, and she was already out of breath from running.
Torv’s idea of not far turned out to be another twenty minutes of jogging. By the time they reached the entrance of the tunnel, Atta called to say she missed her mom, and that the grumpy soldiers had just started drilling through the ice.
Torv waited for them to finish speaking. Destra ended the call and turned toward the gaping black entrance of a Gor tunnel. She saw the air shimmering endlessly as armored Gors de-cloaked and descended into the tunnel. A few of them carried Gor crechelings swaddled in ISSF uniforms.
Destra stopped in front of Torv. He was waiting to one side of the tunnel, his slitted yellow eyes scanning the horizon.
“This is it?” she asked.
He nodded.
Destra turned to peer into the tunnel. It descended steeply below the ice, and disappeared into darkness. Pulling the glow stick off her belt, Destra shone it into the tunnel. A dozen Gors appeared, waiting just inside the entrance.
Torv turned and entered the tunnel. Destra followed, walking between his creche mates. They hissed at her as she passed by. Destra grimaced, unsure whether those hisses were good or bad.
Once they reached the front of the group, they began following the tunnel down. It dropped steeply, and Destra had to struggle to keep her footing. The higher gravity on Noctune helped her not to slip, but it did nothing to help her shuddering legs.
Her glow stick only lit about a dozen meters of the tunnel before dissipating into darkness, but it was enough to see that the walls of the tunnel were whorled and furrowed with claw marks. Destra ran her hand along the nearest wall, feeling the grooves through her gloves. She remembered Torv saying that the Gors had dug their tunnels hundreds of meters below the surface, and she began to wonder how they’d accomplished that using just their bare hands and feet.
Another half an hour later, Destra’s legs were burning and shaking so much from the continued exertion of walking downhill that she was tempted to sit and slide the rest of the way.
Her comm piece trilled in her ear, distracting her. The call was from Admiral Hale aboard the Tempest.
“Hello, Admiral,” she said, gasping for breath. She was exhausted.
“Councilor, why haven’t you made contact yet?”
“I’ve just entered the tunnels with the Gors,” she said. “No sign of survivors yet.”
“Our sensors detect you are very close to some of the ruins. Right on top of them actually. The resolution isn’t clear enough at this range to pick out whatever tunnel you’re walking in, but it looks like you’re going to discover the ruins before Sergeant Cavanaugh does.
Destra felt excitement trickle through her, breathing new life into her weary body. “I’ll keep you posted if I find anything down here besides ice.”
“Be sure that you do. Hale out.”
The comm went dead. Destra studied the walls and floor with her glow stick as they descended. There was no sign of any ruins. . . .
Suddenly she ran into something solid. She cried out, and slitted yellow eyes turned on her. She’d run into Torv. He hissed and pointed at the ground in front of them. Destra walked around him and he blocked her way with one thickly muscled arm. A deep, black hole had opened up in front of them. Beyond that, the tunnel came to a dead end. Shining her glow stick into the hole, Destra saw that the walls were smooth and sheer all the wa
y down. It was a narrow chasm between two opposing walls of ice.
“We must climb down,” Torv said. As she watched, he lowered himself into the hole, using his arms and legs to push against the walls and slow his descent. Thick cords of muscle stood out on his arms as he slid down into darkness. Destra shook her head and called after him, “I can’t do that!”
Torv gave no reply. He’d already dropped out of sight. Destra turned and came face to stomach with another Gor, this one armored and glaring down at her with the glowing red optics in his helmet. She held her ground, determined not to be afraid.
The Gor held out his arms and hissed at her. “Climb on, human.”
Destra blinked up at him. Hesitantly, she climbed up his torso and wrapped her arms around his neck. Then the Gor eased them down into the chasm, just as Torv had done. Unlike Torv’s silent descent, this Gor’s armor scraped long furrows into the ice, making a noisy screech all the way down. The chasm abruptly widened at the bottom, and they fell for the last ten feet, landing with a noisy crunch.
The icy ground shuddered with their landing, and little bits of snow fell from the ceiling, glittering in the light of Destra’s glow stick.
She climbed off the Gor and struggled to find her footing. Here the ice was slick and smooth underfoot. They were standing in some type of cavern, crisscrossed with a maze of strange, leaning pillars of ice that connected the floor to the ceiling and opposing walls to each other. Destra wondered if this area had been dug like that for a reason—to prevent cave-ins perhaps.
Then she noticed how smooth the walls and floor were. Absent were the Gor’s claw marks. Her eyes narrowed at that, and she wondered how the Gors had dug this tunnel if they hadn’t used their claws. Realization dawned, and suddenly she saw all those leaning pillars of ice for what they really were—
Twisted girders and fallen beams. They were coated with ice, but otherwise too straight and angular to be either natural or carved by Gors. The walls and floor weren’t gouged with Gor claw marks because they hadn’t dug this tunnel. This one was formed by the crumpled shell of an ancient skyscraper.
Dark Space: Avilon Page 41