by Ashanti Luke
He gave Cyrus another brusque pat on the back that rattled his aching shoulder. Paeryl smiled widely as his words still hang in the air, which to Cyrus, was more disturbing than any scowl or grimace.
But Cyrus appreciated all this. As oddly as it had been presented, everything had been laid out on the table, and as Cyrus had no idea what would even constitute crossing Paeryl, he felt he had everything laid out as well—except for one thing.
“I have something else to ask of you, so I’ll just get right to it. I need to borrow one of your levs to check out something in the Miasma. Something that pertains to my son and my best friend. I assume because of the Eos, going into the Miasma would be too dangerous for you, especially since the trip will be about fifteen hours each way in a midspeed lev. So, I need you to teach us how to pilot whichever lev we can borrow.”
“What are you looking for?”
“I’m not sure, but whatever caused the war six hundred years ago also killed my best friend, indirectly caused my son a life of exile, and lies somewhere in the Bereshit Scar.”
“Well, you can have your lev, and I will train you myself, but keep in mind, too much dalliance and what rations we do have will run out, and Set, merciful as he is to those that have received the Eos, can be most savage to the uninitiated.”
“If you don’t mind, I would like to have my colleagues examine your Eos—under your supervision of course.”
“Not a problem. But if you wish to accept the Eos, you must be initiated in the Cave.”
“My men and I will observe any of your customs within our ability while we are in your hospitality.” Cyrus bowed his head slightly and Paeryl put his hand on his shoulder.
“That is most excellent to hear. You shall have your training, your reconnaissance, and the use of any lev of your choosing. Just be sure to let me know as soon as we are winning again.”
Cyrus did not fully understand Paeryl’s words, but even through his strange, histrionic manner, his inflection was clear. The Chthonic Miasma, the cold dark shadow that shambled across the planet like a scourge, would soon overwhelm the crater that they called home. Their respite from this generation-long darkness had been taken by the Archons, and it would not be long before those same assailants descended on this place. The walls were closing in on them from both sides, and the only possible recourse lay in finding what had twisted the universe so far off its intended course. Cyrus was sure some sort of clue rested somewhere within the crater created by the comet that had changed the fate of this planet itself, but he had his doubts as to whether or not that clue would shed a deeper understanding on his, and Paeryl’s, situation. But these people had helped him at a point where he himself was not sure of what could have saved him. So he owed it to them, and to Dari, to find out whatever he could to help.
nineteen
• • • • •
—You okay, Dari? You’ve been acting strange for the last few days now.
—Yeah...
—Is it because mom’s been gone?
—Nah, it’s not that. I’m used to her work trips now. It’s just...
—Is it trouble?
—Nah, it’s just I don’t know what to get you for your birthday. Tomorrow’s August already, your birthday’s only four days away, and I wanted to get you something stellar cuz it’s gonna be the last one we have together for a while. But I don’t know what to get you.
—That’s it? You shouldn’t worry about that Dari. I already have everything I need.
—I still wanna do something.
—Well, you know, just having you and mom here and maybe doing something as a family would be nice.
—Is mommy gonna be here?
—Well, she doesn’t know yet. We’ll see.
—Oh... I got a question, Dada.
—Okay, have at it.
—Were you born at the same podcenter as me?
—No, they closed the place I was born. I was born when they still held extra-uterine births in hospitals.
—Do you know what time they opened your pod?
—17:38, August 4th, 2462.
—Ha, so you really were born at night.
—Yeah, but not last night.
—I like it when you say that, even though I’m usually in trouble when you do.
—Do me a favor, Dari.
—Okay.
—Don’t worry so much about what to do for my birthday. Best thing you could do for me is take care of your mom while I’m gone.
—Okay, Dada. But...
—But?
—I still don’t want you to go.
—I know. Most of me doesn’t want to go either, but part of me knows that I need to go, that somehow, what I do is gonna be important. That’s why they asked me instead of someone else.
—I know you’re good at what you do, but why you? Why not someone else’s dad?
—Well, sometimes we have to do things that hurt now, so that the pain for us or others can be fixed later. We have to just take the pain we can, so we can stop the pain we might not get up from. As much as I complain about how things go in the Uni, if I didn’t go to help colonize a new world when they asked, I would have to shut my mouth from then on out—and I’m not really prepared to do that.
—I guess I see your point, but I still don’t like it.
—Well, one day, you’ll have to make a decision that hurts someone to help someone else, and you’ll understand that like and dislike really don’t factor in.
—Maybe. I just hope, when that day comes, you’re around to help me through it.
—Me too, Dari. Me too.
• • • • •
“You all know I wouldn’t bring you here if I didn’t have to, but I have something I need to do for myself and for my son; it might be dangerous, and I am going to need help.”
Tanner held his hand above his head. “I’m in,” he said matter-of-factly.
“You don’t even know what it is.”
“Nor do I need to.” He let his hand return to its original position on its lap.
Cyrus nodded and continued, “I need two more of you to go along. Obviously, it will be best if Davidson and Torvald stayed here to continue their research, but the nature of the venture might require some of your skills and knowledge Milliken.” Milliken gave a nod that communicated both approval and acceptance.
“Which leaves Toutopolus, Jang, and Uzziah; honestly, I would prefer Uzziah comes along...”
“Just in case the monkeys bust through the vent,” Uzziah interjected with a sense of levity that seemed a little forced and yet still sincere.
“I’d rather think of it as contingency, but yes.”
There was a grumble among them, but when the commotion settled, Uzziah, Milliken, and Tanner all nodded in quiet approval.
“We will have to borrow a lev from the Apostates, preferably one of the smaller, faster ones, and we need to see if they have any geological surveying equipment.” Cyrus seemed to look inside himself for a moment, as if he had something to say but was searching for the appropriate words.
“So what is it that has gotten you off your kilter?” Jang asked, standing to talk for no discernable reason, “You didn’t seem this shaken inside that monkey shit prison.”
“It’s a little complicated,” Cyrus looked up, his eyes quivering with emotion, but still wide with determination, “I’ve just been charged to look for information in the dark side of the planet. I’m not sure exactly what I’m looking for, but it lies somewhere within the Bereshit Scar. Paeryl’s men can’t go because it is too far into the darkness.”
“So what did you see in that room that brought all this about?” Uzziah asked, almost standing himself.
“Well, like I said, it’s complicated,” Cyrus seemed contemplative for a moment, and then turned halfway back to the iris, “As a matter-of-fact, it might be easier for me to just show you.” He then turned completely and entered the code again. The iris opened and Cyrus motioned to the scientists, beckoning
for them to enter the strange room behind him.
• • • • •
Uzziah set the grav-lev down at the edge of the enormous depression in the surface of the planet. They had cut the lights about three kilometers from the two-hundred-kilometer-wide indentation, and then had set down behind a protrusion alongside the rim. Milliken had procured a surveying datadeck from one of Paeryl’s technology specialists. The deck had been found in one of the levs they had ‘apportioned,’ what they called their frequent thefts from the Ashan cities and bases.
They had arrived at The Bereshit Scar, the impact crater that had been created by the comet—fancifully coined the Bereshit Egg by its discoverer—that had knocked Asha on its side and had provided the planet with its ocean, setting up the conditions that allowed life to exist on an otherwise barren volcanic rock. Uzziah ran a ten-K scan of the area, found it clear of any activity, and then proceeded with their descent into the hole. The lev they had borrowed from Paeryl had also been used for environmental surveys, and Milliken and Cyrus had selected it from Paeryl’s garage as it provided both valuable sensors and a quicker lev drive.
They turned on the lighting so Milliken could observe the walls of the cavern as they descended. He would watch the walls and then return to his holomonitor every few seconds to check readings the craft’s sensors gathered as they slowly moved down the rim. He murmured almost unintelligibly as he scampered between the windshield and his monitor. “There is a large vein of quartz. There was unmolested volcanic activity here. There’s shale. There is some marbling near the bottom.” Then, after returning from the window, something in the monitor screen hovering in front of the control deck demanded a moment of pause, degenerating Milliken’s murmuring into a considerably less scientific, “Wait a second. What the hell...”
Cyrus and Tanner immediately moved to either side of Milliken’s chair, which he now, in stark contrast to his earlier scuttling, seemed fastened to. Uzziah instinctively stopped their descent. He looked over the holoscanner and zoomed out the image to check for any threat he might have overlooked.
“What?” Cyrus demanded. The magnitude and scale of the crater was overwhelming, and it limited Cyrus’s patience for Milliken’s silence.
“As far as I can tell, the vein in front of us goes around the entire rim of the crater. And in two different striations.”
“Okay, so assuming I wasn’t trained in geological surveying, explain to me what just knocked you on your cred stick.”
“Gold. Each vein is about 650 kilometers long and about four hundred meters thick, and, according to these readings, is full of gold deposits.”
“So what does that mean to us?” even as Tanner asked it, Cyrus remembered the cables of the orbital station when they first arrived.
“Okay, let me spell it all out for you. Gold is a very dense metal found usually in flakes because it doesn’t really react to anything easily. Because of this, if you compressed all the pure gold ever mined on Earth—even including the last six hundred years that we missed travelling here, it would all fit in a room about the size of Paeryl’s garage. This vein alone however, even if these readings are wrong by 30%, should contain more pure gold than we could fit inside seven of those garages—that’s a lower end estimate. And if that’s not enough to get your core running, they’ve been mining this crater constantly from the very beginning.”
“Oh,” was all Tanner could muster as Milliken nodded to Uzziah and they continued down the side of the large bowl.
Then, Uzziah killed the lights and stopped the craft abruptly. “I got a blip,” he informed as he cycled through the range increments of the hologram to reveal two crafts that appeared to be about the size of the assault lev that had pursued them through Eurydice. As Uzziah shifted the focus of the hologram and zoomed in on the vehicle, they could all see that it clearly was an assault lev, but something about it was very strange. The guns on the top had evidently been removed, and the turret there had been fitted with two large, unwieldy looking tubes. The tubes had cables and piping that ran from them to the sides of the turret. Uzziah engaged the lights and began moving again. “Whatever reason they are here, that reason has not presented itself for a while.” He tracked the hologram down the side of the crater to the bottom of the assault lev, which not only rested on the ground, but had been moored in by dust and dirt. He then scrolled up on the hologram and focused on the tubes that had replaced the cannon and autoguns.
“What were they thinking?” Uzziah allowed escape under his breath.
“Are those what I think they are?” Milliken asked, recognizing what he had only seen in a videogame.
“Extraplanetary lasers,” Uzziah’s confirmation hung over everyone’s head like an edged pendulum.
“Were they mining the gold with it?” Cyrus intoned as they moved closer to the tanks.
“Highly doubtful. Asteroids were mined with ship-to-ship lasers before the Uni, but trying to mine gold with an S-to-S laser would be like shaving your head with a lawn razor.”
“So what were they using them for?” Tanner asked, trying to take in as much as he could in the swath the lights of the lev cut through the gelatin of moonless darkness around them.
“Maybe this,” Uzziah added as the craft began to swing to its left. For a moment they looked at the hologram, expecting it to shrink and pan, but they quickly realized the holographic imager, in this case, was not necessary.
As the lev rotated on its z-axis, the world before them panned right in the ultra-white beams of light from the lev. The lights revealed a tunnel opening, cut in a large, precise square about eighteen meters wide in the face of a slab protruding from near the base of the crater.
They looked at each other wordlessly as Uzziah pantomimed a set of commands over his holomonitor. A diagram and some figures that only he could see spread over the screen. Before anyone could ask about the readings, the craft was already moving forward. “Nothing jumpin’ inside and it’s plenty wide for a good K,” he increased speed as the lev dipped forward slightly to match the decline of the causeway.
They moved at a relatively high rate of speed down the smooth-honed tunnel, but the kilometer seemed to take much longer to traverse than it should have. “There’s an opening about another two K down.” Uzziah was focused on his instruments and piloting, and his delivery was matter-of-fact. They sped along for another long minute, and then, Uzziah suddenly slowed the craft to a crawl. “You getting readings for any kind of volcanic activity?” Bewilderment was clear in his voice.
“No, shouldn’t be. Most of the rock around us seems to have been formed by cooling magma, not actual volcanoes, and as far as I can tell, that all stopped millions of years ago. Why?” Milliken’s voice seemed to also be infected by Uzziah’s bewilderment.
“Because according to my temperature readings, it’s getting warmer—considerably warmer,” Uzziah added.
“What do you mean warmer?” The bewilderment spread to Cyrus.
“I mean, the surface is an insane forty degrees below. Around us now is just around zero, and thermal scans show it only gets warmer ahead.” Uzziah’s words came out in a scoff but were still perplexed.
“I don’t see anything dangerous ahead,” Milliken assured.
The craft began to move again, slower than before, and after another grueling minute passed, Uzziah slowed again. “There’s an opening up ahead. A few blips, but nothing is moving.”
They passed into a large cubic chamber about a hundred meters wide. There were various vehicles abandoned there, some obviously designed for mining, others were cargo lorries or earthmovers. As they passed through, Uzziah panned the lights across the chamber. There were three laboratory levs lining each wall. Evidently something had been studied here relatively extensively, and yet the vehicles had all been abandoned. They looked like they had not been operated or moved in years, but they did not look as if they had sat motionless for centuries. There was not much wind or sand to erode away their features, but the mixtur
e of humid salt-air would have taken its toll on the metals and alloys that these vehicles were built from. They might not have been used recently, but whatever they were used for was ongoing, which was probably why they had been left here rather than moved to a place where their presence would not arouse suspicion—even if whoever left them here assumed no one would be crazy enough to stumble upon them.
They passed through the chamber into another perfectly square corridor, this one level. Then, as they passed slowly into the tunnel, they all saw it—the pinpoint of light hovering at the vanishing point of the artificially cut cavern. Uzziah stopped the ship instantly, prepared to reverse, and he double and triple checked his gram readings, zooming them out to their fullest extent.
“What is it?” Impatience or anxiety or both fueled Cyrus’s question as he leaned forward and squinted.
“According to these readings… it’s nothing at all, but thermals say it gets warmer for the next two K. What do you have Milliken?”
“Uhh,” Milliken was focused on something on the holomonitor, gesturing over the flat image floating in front of him. “Uhh,” he muttered again, settling on an image and moving closer to it to get a better look. “According to this, there’s a very large… uh nothing… in front of us.”
Everyone turned to Milliken except Uzziah, who stayed focused on his own controls and readings. Milliken expanded the floating monitor image and then waved his wrist so that the image turned to face the others. On the flat image was a three-dimensional rendering of the striations in the rock in front of them, they could see the hollow of the tunnel they were following leading to an enormous cavern, and inside the cavern, just as Milliken said, the image displayed nothing.