I brought up the control display for the fabricator. It came to life with a high, whirring whine, and a shimmering cloud of nanites emerged from it in a stream, circling into a halo around me. Barbas knew what I wanted to do. No more searching through cracks in the ice, no more following winding paths. I wasn’t trying to preserve some delicate machine, and chances were, where we were going, we wouldn’t be coming out. Barbas programmed his instructions into the fabricator with his usual consummate precision, and the halo of nanites dipped, spiraling down to bite a circle into the ice beneath my feet. I drew my pistol, for all the good it would actually do me, and closed my eyes. The ice began to dissolve beneath me, ground into fine glacial sand by the microscopic teeth and cutters of the tiny machines, and slowly I began to descend. I was going to meet my fate one way or another.
…
Volistad
Nissikul woke up with a shout, and I quickly followed, reacting to her cry of surprise. I leaped to my feet, snatching up my greathammer with one hand and staring all around our campsite for a target. Was someone here? Had the Dark Ones sent some kind of agent to attack us? I spun and scanned the whole area, taking a step towards the abyss beside our camp and peering down into it, just to be safe. Nothing. There was no immediate danger. I turned to Nissikul and found her staring away into nothing, her black eyes wide. “Nissi? What is it?”
“Your god, Vol. I know where she is.” She turned her head sharply, watching something I couldn’t see, her gaze tracking slowly downward.
“What?”
“I know where she is! Joanna! I can see her!”
By this time, Thukkar was awake, and he clambered unsteadily to his feet, using the nearby ice wall as support. “What’s going on?”
I was already moving, packing my sleeping furs and supplies back into my pack and making sure that the dukkar seal corpse I had field stripped was ready for travel. “Pack your things,” I snapped. “We need to move.” I looked up at Nissikul. “Where is she?”
“Far below,” she groaned. “Going lower, and moving very fast.”
“The Dark Ones,” I growled. “They must have a hold of her. Can we catch her?”
Nissikul shook her head. “No. She must be making some kind of direct path down, like a Stormcaller’s war tunnel.”
“Can you do the same?” Thukkar cut in. “Can’t you just guess which way she’s going and open a passage directly towards her?”
Nissikul closed her eyes and concentrated, saying nothing for a while. “Not possible,” she finally answered, straightening. “Ravanur’s skin is too thick. I could not move that much ice, not without help from at least eight of my brothers or sisters. I don’t know how she’s doing it.”
I looked over the edge of the chasm again. “What about this? Can you tell how far down it goes?”
Once again, my sister closed her eyes and focused. This time, I could see little arcs and bands of light refracting around her fingers, as if she had just dropped a handful of crushed ice over a glowstone. It was strange; I had never seen that before. This time, we had to wait quite a while for her to speak again. When she spoke, her voice was strained. “It goes all the way down.”
“Where?” I asked, frowning. “All the way down to where?”
“All the way down to the stone. This chasm goes down hundreds of spearcasts, and I’m certain that it goes all the way down to the stone flesh of the Great Mother Herself.” She looked back up at me, and I saw naked fear there, reflected in her vast, blank eyes. “Vol- I don’t know if I can go down that far. To walk on the naked skin of Ravanur- that seems like blasphemy.” She clenched her remaining fist and walked over to the edge of the seemingly endless pit, then leaned out over it and looked down into the depths.
I took a long look at Nissi, her missing arm, her battered, bruised body, the hollow, haunted look around her eyes, and in the same look, I took in Thukkar’s battered frame and unsteady stance. They were in bad shape. If there was going to be a fight- and I could feel one coming- they were in no shape to do much besides dying needlessly. “I’ll do it. You just take me as far down as you can go, and then you and Thukkar can make a camp and wait for me. I’ll go get Joanna myself. If someone’s going to offend Palamun, it might as well be me. I’m already dead, after all.”
“Vol-” Nissi began, but I cut her off with a sharp wave of my hand.
“No Nissi, we don’t have much time. We need her. The Erin-Vulur need her, and if we don’t get to her, Palamun only knows what the Dark Ones have planned.” I shouldered my pack and began to check over my weapons. “Come on, we need to go, now.”
Nissikul grimaced, then knelt and touched the ragged stump of her right shoulder to the ice. She spoke a few hard, percussive syllables, and once again I saw the shimmering cloud gather, this time all around the stump of her arm. She straightened up, quickly, like someone drawing back swiftly from a poisonous stinging insect, and when she did, there was a new arm, the twin to her left, attached to her shoulder. It was black as pitch and cold as the darkest heart, and as I watched, black tendrils like veins grew from the black shoulder and branched out into the flesh beneath. She quickly resettled my cloak about her bare shoulders and rewrapped it about her more securely. “Alright. Vol, Thukkar, stand… there.” She pointed at a section of the frozen cliff beside the abyss and gestured for us to move over to it. “And sit down. If you fall off, I will have no way to protect you. You will certainly die.”
“Well,” Thukkar grumbled, hobbling over with the aid of one of my iron short-spears as a cane. “That’s encouraging.” He took his place on the indicated section of the cliff, and I helped him sit, following suit and sitting down myself a moment later.
Nissikul stepped forward, close to us, and raised both of her hands, turning them so that her palms were facing down. She took a deep, cleansing breath, and muttered something almost inaudible.
“What?” I asked.
She grinned. “I hope you’re not afraid of falling.” The ice all around us split, at once, with a collected, echoing crack like the snap of an enormous leather whip. Three perfectly straight, perfectly smooth cuts appeared in the frozen surface, and our chunk of glacial ice began to slide down into the darkness, unrestrained. At the last moment, when I was sure we would pitch forward or backward and be sent tumbling into the abyss, segmented, insectoid legs shaped from Stormcaller witch-ice rose up beneath our falling perch, and they scrabbled at the wall, slowing our pace almost immediately. I watched, fascinated, as the hideous legs scrabbled down the abyss walls, lengthening and shrinking as the tunnels expanded and contracted, all beneath the iron will of Nissikul.
“Hold on Joanna,” I muttered, my hammer gripped tightly in my fists. “We’re coming.”
…
Joanna
The nanite-tunnel spit me out of the bottom of the glacier in a great plume of powdered ice, and to my surprise I found myself falling, dropping through nearly fifteen meters of empty blackness before I hit the ground. Barbas, however, had been prepared for this, and before I could crash at incredible speed into the stone, the AI fired a series of jets built into my armor’s legs just for this purpose. Really, I should have thought of it myself, but it was hard to think tactically when it was my body dropping like a stone into unknown depths. I slowed dramatically, and instead of plowing into the ground at something near terminal velocity, I just landed very hard, cracking some of the ancient, craggy stone beneath my feet and sending up a flurry of dust, shaved ice, and shards of rock. I didn’t stay still. I turned, quickly, snapping on my headlamp and raising my gun to aim into the darkness.
Barbas accessed my suit’s sensor package, and there was a loud PING as a pulse burst from me and surged out into the darkness. Deftly, the djinni translated the data into a visual overlay on my Heads Up Display, and for a moment, I could see a massive, cavernous space, outlined in a faint, bluish holographic glow. We were completely beneath the glacier- miles below the surface- and we weren’t alone. “Bodies,” I whispe
red, the mounting terror threatening to rise up and choke me. “Those are piles of bodies.”
Barbas fired another blast of sonar, a stronger one this time, and as the wave of sound passed through the great cavern, I could see them more clearly now. Hundreds- no thousands of corpses, most of them humanoid, piled into frozen mounds all around us. I stepped closer to one of the piles of the dead and shone my light on them. They were humanoid, like the Erin-Vulur, though some of them had a coating of light fur now limned with frost. They lay sprawled and tumbled in death, though none of them showed many signs of injury. I couldn’t tell how they died, except to guess that they had been frozen to death. There were men, women, children, the elderly, all of them dressed in a wide variety of clothes, furs, and armors- and each one of them simply stared out into the darkness with the same empty, wide-eyed expression. This cavern was a vast, multi-species mass grave, and I could not have done more than guess at what killed them all.
“Joanna. Look.” A green glowing arrow appeared to one side of my HUD, and I turned until it transformed into a diamond superimposed over my field of vision. What Barbas was indicating was indistinct in the dark, and my light didn’t reach quite far enough. I stepped forward, careful not to step on any of the frozen, uninjured dead, and continued moving until my light fell across what Barbas had indicated. It was a short, squat structure, shaped like a miniature Egyptian pyramid and standing perhaps a meter above my head. The top, where there should have been a sharp point, was flat as if the very crest of the structure had been sheared off. I walked a slow circle around the structure and I found a door deep into one side, cutting a rectangle out of the otherwise slanted, solid wall. Without speaking, Barbas fired a third blast of sonar into the little building, and this time, the scan returned nothing new. According to the sonar, the pyramid was solid.
“It’s shielded,” I muttered under my breath, and approached the door.
Barbas cut in quickly. “Should you really open that? I mean, what’s inside?”
“Nothing good,” I replied simply, and reached out one hand to touch the door. The hard metal door broke into four pieces and retracted into its frame, opening before my gloves could even touch its solid surface. My light revealed steps, hewn with machine precision from the stone, descending down into darkness. Before I could think too much about it, I stepped forward, my pistol raised before me, and I descended the steps.
When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I found myself in a large room, this one carved from the surrounding stone with the same inimitable precision that had shaped the steps behind me. When my boot touched the perfectly smooth floor, a light came into the room, an indistinct gloaming filling the air with shifting shapes and writhing shadows. The strange un-light didn’t actually seem to drive back the darkness at all, but at once it made it possible to see, though dimly, as if I was seeing the room through a dense haze of smoke. The room was empty but for a single, dominating presence. A perfect, sharp-edged, rectangular monolith took up the entire center of the room, so black it seemed to eat the false glow around it, and its edges shimmered as if seen through a heat haze. I glanced at the environmental data in the corner of my HUD. Minus one-hundred degrees Celsius. The air here was warmer than the surface of Chalice, but by no means any less lethal in its cold. “What is that?” I whispered.
Barbas’ voice trembled in my mind, filled with- was that awe? “It’s… it’s beautiful.”
“What?” My suit’s sensor package lit up like a lightning flash, and two dozen different scanning signals erupted from me, all of them aimed and firing full blast at the monolith. “Barbas!” I snapped, bringing up the control screen to my sensor set. “Careful!”
The djinni didn’t answer me. I tried to cut off the multi-spectrum barrage, but the controls wouldn’t respond. Barbas had locked me out! That kind of broad sensor blasting was a good way to collect data, but it was also a massive broadcast, capable of being picked up by anyone, and anything. I didn’t know what the monolith standing silently before me could do, but I knew that even if it was harmless, whatever else lived down here could definitely hear us. As if in response to my thoughts, the surface of the monolith suddenly split, the perfectly smooth, seamless shape bisected neatly by a brilliant glowing line, from top to bottom. The two halves began to slide apart, and more of that horrendously bright light spilled out, so stark and inexorable that it seemed a physical thing, dribbling out of the divide in the monolith like liquid starlight. “Barbas!” I screamed. “What are you doing?”
The djinni’s voice flickered through a half-dozen octaves, high-pitched one second, a deep basso the next. “I’m… in there, Jo. The missing part.... I just need to reach in there and… take it back.”
The opening in the monolith was nearly broad enough for a person to step through it now, and amidst the nearly liquid light vomiting forth from within, I could make out the vague shape of a person- a man, tall and lean, covered in muscle. I realized that my fabricator had been activated, and the familiar shimmering stream of nanites was flowing all around me, being sucked into the light like dust into a vacuum. The silhouette within the light became sharper, more solid, and it began to move. It took a step forward, one hand reaching out from the light towards me, and with horror, I saw it. The fingers that emerged from that shining torrent were little more than metallic bones at first, bound by glittering artificial tendon, but they took shape before my eyes, sheathed in muscle, cloaked in skin. They were the color of coffee. I knew that hand. “Barbas?”
The AI’s voice filled my mind suddenly, sharp and desperate. “Jo, I’m sorry, I’m not the only one inside-” He cut off for a moment, and the silhouette became more distinct as it took another step towards me. Bright, emerald eyes came to life in a grinning skull, and a familiar face began to crawl its way into its proper shape. I realized in a moment of sickening horror that the stream of nanites bringing this body to life were streaming in and out past me and drawing from the best source of material they could find: the mounds of the dead outside the pyramid. Barbas’ voice returned, and it wasn’t right, too deep, too hard, a tone of vast amusement coloring every word. “You should be happy, Joanna. I’m here, really here. We don’t ever have to be-” He cut off again, and the body in the monolith doubled over in pain, clutching at its belly. Pain stabbed in at both of my temples, and almost immediately it was squashed by a wash of narcotic bliss as a painkiller was injected into my body to counter it. I felt twisting, horribly invasive sensations all over my body, and through the drug haze I dimly realized that my armored suit was retracting all of its connections from my body. It was trying to spit me out. Barbas’ voice crashed into my skull, fully his for just a moment, the voice I knew, the voice of my qarin. “It’s here, with me. You have to run, Jo. It has what it wants now, and it doesn’t need you! You need to RUN!!”
I couldn’t think, I could barely feel. All I could hear was Barbas’ scream crashing into my head. “RUN, JOANNA! RUN!” I turned, even as my suit tried to eject me, forcing the metal limbs to do my bidding. There was a loud BANG from somewhere behind my head, and I smelled sharp, acrid smoke inside my helmet. Barbas’ voice cut off mid-phrase, and I knew what he had done. He had overloaded my suit’s communications array, made it impossible for him to network with me. He wasn’t himself, and he knew it. My Qarin knew that he was dying, that something was consuming him, and he had cut himself off from me. I stumbled up the stairs, frantic, knowing that the Barbas taking shape behind me would be coming for me. I hurt everywhere. The systems that had withdrawn from my body had not done so gently, and I could feel the sticky warmth of blood against my skin in several places. My feet pounded the stone steps, but even as I reached the door, even as my helmet light showed me the nearest mound of bodies to the door dissolving beneath a prismatic cloud of nanites, I felt a grip like a pneumatic vice clamp down on my shoulder.
I twisted, remembering the gun in my nerveless grip, and I jammed the barrel back into the side of the person who had grabbed me.
But before I could pull the trigger, my assailant kicked me in the small of my back, sending me hurtling forward into the darkness, as if I had been launched from a catapult. He did not, however, let go of the pauldron protecting my shoulder, and it tore away as if it had been made of tin, dislocating my arm as it went in a sudden burst of sickening pain. I screamed and crashed into another pile of corpses, but I was too terrified to stay down. I scrambled to my feet, realizing that to my horror that I had lost my grip on the gun. My suit, still only partially connected to me, did a sloppy job of slamming my shoulder back into its socket, and I almost passed out from the pain. By the time I got myself back together, he was walking towards me with unflagging purpose.
It was Barbas, as I had seen him in my first dream. He strode through the punishing cold, naked and perfect as a newborn, his face split into a wide predatory grin. “Joanna, come on. We both know I can’t just let you leave.”
Alien Romance Box Set: Romantic Suspense: Alien Destiny: Scifi Alien Romance Adventure Romantic Suspence Trilogy (Complete Series Box Set Books 1-3) Page 48