by Aaron Crash
The gargantuan entryway into the structure was up ahead. The three crept along, lights from their helmets plunging through the vacuum and lighting their way. Blaze kept his fusion shotgun ready. Elle held her plasma rifle in both hands, though she’d attached a snare sphere to the side of her hip for easy access.
Blaze wasn’t sure how big the entryway was. Maybe a thousand feet by five hundred feet? Distance was hard to tell. But steps led down into the guts of the ruin. They started down the broad stairs, which were haphazardly uneven, like the people who’d created them didn’t care about function or were in a hurry. The ceiling was hundreds of feet above them. Were the Etrusca giants? It seemed so. They kept close to the walls.
Right away, Blaze saw this antique was different than the other ruins he’d seen. Most of the time, the Etrusca artifacts were solid geometric shapes devoid of any markings or art. This place, though, had carvings on the wall—friezes in the metal.
The shapes in the wall looked like tentacles of some great beast or wrapped tails. Lengths and lengths, coils and coils, of black snakelike things writhing and yet trapped, frozen in the metal. And every now and again, the coils would break and something akin to a face would peer out, two slits for eyes, a hole for a nose, a slit for a mouth. Were those ears? In all the coils, it was hard to tell.
“Pinche creepy shit,” Blaze growled.
“We can’t destroy this.” Elle was taking video through her helmet, trying to preserve this. “There aren’t many Etrusca ruins that have art on the walls. But this place…this place… What if the Onyx energy brings these snakes to life?”
“Don’t know if they are snakes,” Blaze said. “Maybe it’s tentacles. Do you see the faces?”
“Not sure they are faces,” Elle murmured. “Everything seems so big, and yet, kind of small in a weird way. Are you sure we should wreck this place?”
“We’ll only wreck a part of it. Take video. We’ll send it back to the Union’s eggheads and apologize.”
“Not the IPC?” Elle asked.
“The Union cares about history and art and shit. The IPC only cares about money, and there’s not much of a market for haunted old space crap in a dangerous part of space.”
Cali was quiet, walking between them, touching her bracelets, over and over, almost as if they itched. She was scared. He didn’t blame her. His heart rate was spiking, adrenaline flooded his system, and his breath came in bursts.
Blaze’s display showed the Onyx energy about an eighth of a mile down. That only scratched the surface, since the thing was a thousand miles deep. The Lizzie’s scanners could only go so deep, but the staircase went for miles and miles and miles down.
If they came across a Godzilla monster here, they’d be screwed. They’d never faced a mile-long demon, but with Xerxes and the power he generated, that was a definite possibility. Blaze felt small, hopelessly young, and stupidly Human walking down the stairs.
“Funny,” Cali whispered, “the steps themselves are small, but everything else is so big.”
Elle tripped, and Blaze caught her. “Damn steps are so uneven. Maybe the Etrusca built them for people they didn’t care about.”
“Maybe. Or maybe their craftsmanship was just shitty.”
They came to a landing, maybe a half mile long. The stairway had widened so they couldn’t see the other side. The murals in the side continued, miles of snakes, or tentacles, or penises, for all they knew. And the faces, staring down, trapped in the rock.
“The stairs keep going down the other side,” Elle said, gasping. She was scared too. The place didn’t feel right. And it wasn’t that most Etrusca sites were full of Onyx energy—this was the first time they’d seen a cluster inside a ruin. Was it coincidence this ancient structure also had the art on the walls? Was it art? Or was it a spell trapping the beast and its victim in place? Was the colossal place a prison?
No way to know.
They started across the landing, where there was another structure floating above the smooth metal floor, only it wasn’t floating. Not exactly. It was mysteriously fixed in place despite the lack of gravity. It was a cube, five hundred feet by five hundred feet, with the same tentacle/face pattern as the wall.
Static buzzed and snapped over comms. That was weird, and in their line of work, weird wasn’t anything good.
In the distance, something lay on the floor. “Stay here,” Blaze said. “I’m going to run over there and see what’s ahead. But we are running out of time.” He glanced at the timer. They had six minutes left. They were going to be late.
“But the Onyx energy is under the cube,” Elle said.
“Do you see anything under the cube?” Blaze asked.
“No.” Elle’s voice buzzed as he jogged over to what lay on the floor.
It was a small spacecraft, decades old, maybe even a shuttle pod. The make and model weren’t familiar, but the ancient American flag was there, thirteen stripes and seventy-five stars, so it was obviously Human. It was only about twenty feet long and narrow. The side door was open. Blaze shined his helmet lights into the thing, and two figures, one big, one small, in spacesuits, lay sprawled against an old cracked table. The place was a jumble of junk and wreckage. Nothing in there, and no Onyx energy, only the two in the spacesuits, their helmets off. The little one, a ten-year-old girl by the look of her hair, had white flesh, desiccated but not rotted, since rot required bacteria, and space had none of that crap.
The girl lay next to what had probably been her mother. The woman was in the same state, hair floating frozen above her head. Her eyes had popped and spilled onto her cheeks.
Nothing in the ship. Blaze turned and ran back to the others.
Elle and Cali wandered around under the cube, looking for the Onyx energy. Their helmet lights cut through the gloom. But nothing was there.
“Gunny,” Ling called through comms. “We are nearly ready. You should back—”
Static ripped through the link, cutting them off. A voice whispered in their ears, You….so warm. This place, so cold. The snakes slither and slither for millennia, eating their tail. Eating their tails over and over. Eating their cold, cold tails. You are so warm. Hold me. Hold me in your warm, warm arms. Hold me in your warm mouth.
Blaze shivered. He hated ghosts. Hated them even more when they got all chatty and bizarre.
“You connected to Xerxes?” Blaze asked. He swept around them with his light, but there wasn’t anything he could see.
The voice wheezed in his ears. Demon kings and the archdukes of madness. They are as cold as the ancient metal here. We came here, Lisbeth and I, and little Natalie. We came here because so many of our crew were dead. So many ships, a graveyard of ships, we fled. But death found us. Starving, dying of thirst, no oxygen. I did it. I released their helmets. I killed them!
“Above us!” Cali screamed.
In the serpentine coils, there was an opening they’d missed before. And from the opening dropped a spacesuit, the visor black until Blaze’s light flashed across the helmet. Inside was a dead man, his face pale, his eyes unseeing, black.
Nothing in space would rot the body, but that shit was dead inside the nanofiber armor. And yet, it was moving.
The dead man in the spacesuit landed and stood in front of them. Filthy energy emanated from the insane ghoul.
And still it chattered on through comms. The graveyard of ships. The neutron star and the light dying. We escaped here, researching the Etrusca, but the Ancient Ones don’t want us to know. They want us cold. But you, you are warm. Like my wife, so warm, so wet, my wife, my wife, my wife dead in space. All of them dead in space. Dead. Cold and dry. Cold and dry. Little Natalie, cold and dry.
Cali went to open a bracelet, fear on her face, her breath coming in gasps.
Elle saw it. “Cali, no, this isn’t a big deal. It’s just a ghost, some scientist I think. Ease back. Ease back, okay? We don’t need you to open your bracelets. Nod if you understand me.”
The Mormon woman nodded fea
rfully.
The dead man in the nanofiber struck, clamping onto Blaze with preternatural strength.
Ling’s calm voice filled his head. “Blaze, we are losing Xerxes. While in the end, I have let go of the results of our chase, I know it would vex you greatly for our quarry to escape.”
“Nombre de Dios, Ling, not the time. You come to get us. I think the ship will fit. Blast the metal if it doesn’t.”
The dead man threw Blaze to the side but not before plucking the fusion shotgun from his hands.
Blaze rolled and came up with his double-barrel sawed-off.
Cali was backing up, her hands on those goddamn bracelets. Capturing her again would be about a million times harder than this dinky little specter they were fighting, fusion shotgun or not.
A snare sphere rolled across the floor and Elle raised her hands, both covered in spiderwebs, ready for the spell.
The ghost triggered the fusion shotgun, and Elle was forced to duck the blast. The sunlight energy created a blinding noontime inside the ruins as the ball of fusion hit the cube above them. The coils seemed to writhe in the star-fire light, almost like they were coming alive. A few of the mouths howled, or Blaze thought they did, though that couldn’t be possible.
He sped forward and jammed the shotgun into the back of the ghost and pulled both triggers. Salt and iron shot scattered off the armor as the spirit howled in agony.
No! Iron and salt, so cold, but your bodies, so warm and wet. Hold me, kiss me, hold me, kiss me, alone in the snakes. Alone in the snakes watching the dead come. And the dead will come when He comes. When the lord and master comes. The Etrusca knew! They knew, and they trembled!
The fusion blast didn’t create a hole in the cube. No, the metal coils simply consumed the star fire.
Around them, the walls writhed. Then the cube shook and twisted and trembled above them. It was coming apart, the coils were moving, and the screams, the screams of those faces created sound, even in space. Impossible, but Blaze couldn’t hear a thing over their howls of pain and terror.
What was this place? What were the Etrusca? Did he really want to know?
Cali was on her knees, her face twisted, and she was opening her bracelet. That was the last thing they needed. Whatever was coming, not even Cali would be able to contend with it. Well, maybe she could, but then she would be out of control, and who knew what might happen then?
Blaze ran to her and grabbed her arms. His visor clicked against hers. They had air inside their helmets, and air carried sound waves. That was how physics worked. The Etrusca ruins, those screaming faces, seemed beyond physics. “No, Cali. We’ll be leaving soon. We can make it out. Believe me, if we need you to fight, I’ll open those bracelets myself.” Blaze had a trigger on his display to do just that. He had marked the control Cali Bad Dog. Might as well have called it Cali Armageddon.
The cube above them continued to shudder and boil, as did the walls around them.
Elle snarled out Onyx speak, the ghost gave a last howl, and the Onyx smoke curled around the spacesuit, twisting around and around as the snare sphere sucked in the vile energy. And then it was full. Red warning lights winked around the circumference of the snare sphere.
Elle threw her head back. Her ecstatic shriek blew through comms, cutting through the cacophony of the metal faces all around them. “It’s so beautiful, Blaze. Can you see the Onyx around us? Could this be the Onyx Gate? Could this be it? The Etrusca knew! They must’ve known!” She was crying tears of blood.
The writhing snakes and howling faces weren’t beautiful by any stretch of the imagination. What was wrong with his sister? Maybe the blood was messing with her vision.
“I’m coming, Gunny,” Ling spoke kindly. Then they could hear the engines of the ship.
Blaze scooped up Cali and charged Elle. His shotgun had come loose from the dead man’s hands and floated above him. He hooked a hand through the strap. Then he shoved a shoulder into his sister. “Elle, we are leaving. Come on. Come on, sis, don’t demon out on me now.”
That seemed to strike some sense into her.
They bolted out from under the convulsing cube. Then the whole thing came apart, and it splashed down in coils and faces and madness, mayhem, and murder. Between the tentacles, shapes seemed to be swimming, but Blaze couldn’t see what they might be.
Tentacles reached for them, miles and miles of living steel. And from the walls, other tendrils reached out. The place was coming alive.
The Lizzie Borden thundered overhead. Plasma cannons sliced through the metal snakes flopping around them.
The starship spun, and the cargo bay doors dropped open. Blaze hurled himself, Elle, and Cali, into the bay. He tore Elle’s plasma rifle from her grip, stood, and opened the gun up, full auto, emptying the chambers and blasting tentacles reaching for them.
Two of the writhing limbs grasped the cargo door. The door mechanisms whined in protest as they tried, and failed, to close the doors.
Blaze shot through both tentacles, and the doors slammed shut.
“Okay, the cargo bay is secure,” Ling said in a mellow voice. “We’ll be leaving now. My apologies for what we are about to do, my dear, long-lost Etrusca friends.”
“No fusion weapons,” Blaze yelled. “The place seems to eat the stuff.”
Ling didn’t reply. Bill clicked, but God only knew what the stick insect was saying. Probably something like, “I hate you all, and let’s get the hell out of here!”
The Lizzie stormed forward. Blaze didn’t pause to check on Elle and Cali. Their VHIs were still a hundred percent. They’d be fine.
Stumbling as the ship buckled, he stayed on his feet and tore through the cargo bay and down the second-deck corridor. He burst into the bridge. In front of him, he saw a forest of grasping, clasping tentacles.
Ling gave the blue-fire engines more juice, and they sped through the limbs, and in seconds, they were out of the structure. An instant later, the SWD engine kicked in. He heard the deep moan of the universe bending to the will of his ship. And then they were flung forward, riding another spacetime wave.
Blaze clicked his display to see behind the ship. The Etrusca structure was buckling, miles and miles and miles of coughing, erupting metal. The entire continent shape was a mass of waving tentacles, a monster the size of Australia, and then it was gone. He switched to the science displays, and where the Etrusca ruin was had become dead space.
He understood enough about SWD engines to know that they wouldn’t have destroyed the Etrusca ruins. So where had it gone? For a second, he thought he could still hear the screams of the faces, and then he heard nothing but silence.
Blaze dropped to his knees, sweat pouring from every pore, his own stink lingering in his nose.
“This shit is getting too intense,” he muttered. “I wanted to hunt demons, but I didn’t sign up for this, Arlo, you bastard. And if you were here, I know you’d be saying the same thing.”
He glanced again at his display. At the very edge of his vision, he saw Xerxes wink out of range.
They’d lost him. And space was a huge place. The archduke was gone.
FOURTEEN_
╠═╦╬╧╪
Hours later, Blaze slid into Elle’s room. Trina was there, on a chair, getting an Ojo de Horus tattoo on her chest. Elle had the sonic needle and blessed ink in her hands, working on the eye to protect Trina from demon possession. Though that seemed such a small fry after what they had encountered in the past couple of days.
An incense cone burning in a brass bowl wafted smoke into the room around tall candles on stands dripping wax. Of course, this was Elle’s room, and so it was freaky deaky to the deakiest. Various posters of movies, rock bands, and Huaxia anime covered the walls where there weren’t red-and-black tapestries.
“Any sign of Xerxes?” Elle asked.
Blaze couldn’t help but growl, “Not yet. But I’m not turning around.”
Trina tried to get up, but Elle soothed her back. The auditor win
ced. “If another pocket anomaly disables our spacetime wave, we’ll be trapped again. And I doubt we’ll see another Etrusca ruin out here to kickstart our engine. This is insane.”
“Insane is in the job description,” Blaze replied. “You’re pretty crazy yourself, allowing us to tattoo an ancient Egyptian symbol on your skin. You do know it will only work if it’s permanent, right?”
“Point taken.” Trina leaned back. She wore one of Elle’s silk robes, the shoulder pulled down so the skin above her heart was visible. As was about a thousand miles of her cleavage.
“I have to agree with Trina here,” Elle said, caressing the woman’s red hair while she worked. “If we can’t find Xerxes, what’s the point of taking the risk?”
“We’ll find him,” Blaze said, determination like concrete in his gut. “Bill and Fernando are on it, trying to boost the public IPC scanners. And I’m thinking you might be able to cast a find spell.”
Elle laughed. “That simple snare had me crying tears of blood. You saw how I was. If you hadn’t pushed me out of the way, I would have gladly let that Onyx energy in the tentacles and faces take me. No, I can’t, Blaze, not for a while.”
Blaze noticed Trina was relaxing into Elle’s touch even as the sonic needle marked her skin with the blessed ink. Blaze liked the freckles marking her skin. He wondered if she was freckled everywhere, and he spent a minute enjoying that thought.
Then he snapped out of it. “Okay, Elle, no spells for you. We’ll just have to hope Bill and Fernando can work a miracle. They’ve done it before. I have high hopes.”
“And if we can’t find Xerxes?” Trina asked.
“We have to,” Elle said. “He’s the closet lead we’ve ever had on the location of the Onyx Gate. And if he knows where we can find Granny and Arlo, that could really help us.”
“Why?” Trina asked.
“So I can beat on that pinche cabron for a while,” Blaze said fiercely. “And Granny knows which spells Elle needs. More than that, it’s a little too convenient for them to up and disappear. I mean, it’s like they left the universe. I come home from the Corps, and Arlo is simply gone. No forwarding address.”