by Max Carver
“Oh, not this crystal-ball horseshit again,” Naomi muttered, and Bartley snorted his agreement. “Look where it got us last time,” she added.
“Quiet,” Alanna said, with a cutting look at Naomi and Bartley. “Let her work.”
“Work? That isn't work,” Naomi said. “Did everybody miss the part where she failed out of the Antikytheran Society? Washed out. Didn't make it. She's just a rockhound, nothing else. She doesn't have secret abilities and powers to access the technology of the ancients. She's not a gatekeeper.”
Iris flushed dark crimson, clearly hearing Naomi's remarks, but she kept her eyes closed and continued what she was doing as if she heard nothing.
Eric took the opportunity to look around at the colossal statues, most of which were just larger versions of creatures they'd seen on the way in. Four were spaced equally around the perimeter, with a sizable archway halfway between each statue—their group had emerged through one such archway. These four statues were monstrous demonic versions of a predatory sharp-beaked bird, a needle-toothed amphibian, a bat hanging upside down, and a spider on a web made of chains.
At the center of the room stood six mantis-style insect statues like the one they'd first encountered, the one Bartley had mistaken for a gray alien. These six supported an oval-shaped marble slab. Atop the slab sat a seventh bug, much larger and more fearsome than the ones below—it seemed to be clad in spiked armor, and its scissor-like mandible was spread open as if ready to attack.
Malvolio had called it a “bug altar” for good reason. It looked exactly like an altar for making offerings to the giant mantis-type statue.
“Friggin' bug worshipers,” Bartley muttered, rolling up alongside Eric.
Naomi gunned her scouter and broke out of line. She swerved around Iris and drove in a long, fast orbit around the entire room, slowing as she passed the arched tunnels leading out.
“Okay, good news,” Naomi said, parking alongside Bartley. “Every way out leads uphill. So we've officially hit rock bottom. Happy? We can start heading up, and I vote for that path.” She pointed across the room, toward the archway directly across from the one they'd emerged from. “Because that's the opposite direction from where the worm is.”
There was a rumble high above, and echoing explosive sound.
“What was that?” Alanna stiffened. She stood by the dump truck, waiting for Iris.
“Blasting,” said Eric, Bartley, and Naomi at the same time. Hagen, still in the cab of the cement mixer, nodded.
“Someone's still at work up there,” Hagen said.
“We need to go now,” Bartley said.
“Let's see what Iris thinks,” Eric said, watching the geologist.
“You really believe she's all magical and can navigate underground using just her sensitive little arm hairs?” Naomi asked.
“You said she was leading us into a dead end,” Eric said. “Now we have three possible ways up to the surface.”
“And a long, long way to go before we reach it.” Naomi stepped closer to Iris. “Come on, little pixie girl. What do your twinkly little toes say we should do next?”
Iris finally opened her eyes. The look on her face was so icy that Naomi halted in her approach toward the girl, even though Iris didn't actually look her way at all.
Instead, Iris walked away from everyone. She wasn't heading for any of the three tunnels, but directly toward the spider statue.
“I don't think that's the way out,” Bartley said, but Iris didn't even acknowledge him.
“Where are you going?” Alanna asked. Surprisingly, Iris ignored her, too.
Iris knelt in front of the spider statue, and again she closed her eyes.
“I think the geologist's a bug worshiper, too,” Bartley whispered to Naomi.
It was a weird sight, Eric thought, Iris acting like some sort of ancient pagan from Earth, bowing down before an idol—not a golden calf, here, but a spider made of black rock, with rows of obsidian eyes.
Iris stood and stepped up onto the low, wide slab of the marble pedestal supporting the statue. She touched one of the stone legs, as thick as an elephant's, rough with a stone imitation of bristles. Then she reached up and ran her fingers over its long fangs.
“What are you doing?” Alanna snapped.
A heavy rumble sounded in the walls, and dust spilled from above.
“That's close!” Naomi shouted. She withdrew the prepared plastic explosive from her coveralls. Beside her, Bartley lowered his industrial hammer and chisel from their upright traveling positions.
“Bring it, worms!” Bartley shouted. “Come give me a big smile with those big dirty teeth.” He looked from one dark archway to the next. “Come on!”
Despite the huge rumble, no giant worm emerged from the tunnels, walls, or floors to attack them.
Instead, the web of steel chains around the spider statue grew taut. Then the chains began to retract slowly into the wall, as though each one were being pulled by a hidden winch, with a series of ear-splitting clanks as one dusty link after another vanished through holes in the wall behind the spider.
With a groaning, scraping sound loud enough to wake the dead, the slab pedestal on which the spider perched slid backward. As the spider moved back, drawn by its own web, a hollow cavity in the floor became visible beneath it. A narrow hidden ramp sloped away into darkness below.
“This is it!” Iris beamed at Eric as he rolled closer to her. “This has to be it.”
“Has to be what?” Alanna asked.
“Yeah, last I checked, we were looking for a way out,” Bartley said. “Not a crawlspace under a demon spider statue. We have to go up. This is down. Up good, down bad.”
“This is where the real treasure lies,” Iris said. Now she actually had the wide, exciting, gleaming eyes of a fervent cult member, like she really had been worshiping the giant spider after all.
“Are we still on treasure? I thought we were on survival,” Naomi said. “I guess I didn't get the update.”
“Whoever is down here, destroying these ruins...this is what they're after. But we got here first.” Iris beamed, dancing in place like a kid on Christmas morning who really had to pee. Another blast sounded somewhere above, shaking the ceiling. A thin cloud of rock dust belched from one of their three potential escape routes. Iris's smile faltered. “They could be right behind us, though.”
“Who?” Alanna asked, looking up. “Caffey Industries? They're after old alien relics?”
“I don't know whether it's Caffey or not. I don't know what form it may take, but you can be certain that the hand of the Ptolemaic Society is hidden within the form,” Iris said.
“This is getting to sound like a bad spy novel,” Naomi said. “Now Earth's gatekeepers are involved? Way out here at the edge of nowhere?”
“The Ptolemaic Society are dangerous,” Iris said. “Without them, Earth and the Alliance could not have transported their forces to star systems that declared independence. The greedy rulers of Earth could not have waged war for thirty years on rebel colonies who only wanted their freedom.”
“I don't want to re-litigate the war here,” Hagen said, finally climbing down from the truck. “But young folks today may not remember that quite a number of those colonies happened to be in debt, and 'freedom' just happened to liberate certain interests from their contracts. And heck, entire mines and factories just happened to be 'liberated' from their Earthling owners—”
“And then bombed,” Iris said. “Out of spite, I suppose. And the people who lived near them? They just had to be bombed, too.”
“In war, there's collateral damage—” Hagen began.
“Earth destroyed a golden age because Earthlings were so greedy, so hungry to stay in power, so adamant that they should control, you know, no big deal, just all of human life,” Iris said. “So now every colony world is a bombed-out shell, a ghost of what it was in the Big Times. We live in the ruins and shadows of what Earth, and their loyalists, chose to burn down. We're lef
t to pick through the wreckage of a formerly great interstellar civilization that lasted less than two hundred years. That's the legacy of the war, granted to us by Earth.”
Hagen and Iris stared burning daggers at each other for a long moment, and then Alanna stepped in.
“Enough politics,” Alanna said. “It's gauche. Iris, you say there's something down there that would be extremely valuable to the gatekeeper societies?”
“Yes, ma'am, but there's no time to explain—”
“Then I want it,” Alanna said. “Take a couple of these mine workers with you and go get it.”
“Okay,” Iris said. “Bartley obviously needs to stay out here to hammer the worm if it comes back...”
“Damn right,” Bartley said. If Iris had meant to appeal to his warrior's pride—likely bruised after he'd missed out on most of the last battle while flat on his back
—it had worked. He seemed to puff up in his exoskeleton seat, his hands gripping the controls tight, like he was about to enter a video-game championship.
“I'll take the other miners,” Iris said. “Eric. And Naomi.”
“What's that?” Naomi's head whipped toward Iris. “You think you're going to take me somewhere?”
“You obviously don't like me, but I want you to see we're not wasting time down here,” Iris said.
“Time is being wasted already. You have twenty minutes to go down and come back,” Alanna told them. A rumble sounded overhead. “Fifteen. Hagen, make sure we're all ready to fly out of here the second they return.”
Eric left his suit running so his arms could continue their sluggish start-up process. He jacked out of the exoskeleton and plugged back into his leg braces. He stepped down from the rig's seat, his useless meat-puppet legs passively dragged along by the ugly robotic structures encasing them.
Iris, still smiling like a cat who'd caught the biggest mouse in history, led the way down the newly revealed ramp under the spider statue. Eric looked up at the huge arachnid's fearsome visage—not exactly inviting—and then followed her down.
“All right,” Naomi said, shaking her head. “I'll come with you, but only to make sure you get back up here fast. I don't want to stand around waiting while you two grope each other in the dark.” Naomi double-checked her mining helmet before following after them.
The passage was so narrow that Eric's exoskeleton had been obviously out of the question. The ceiling was so low that even Iris had to duck.
“If there's a worm waiting at the end of this with its mouth wide open, I'm feeding both of y'all to it,” Naomi muttered. “I won't even feel bad.”
The tunnel was fairly short and ended at a stone archway. Iris peered through it, screamed, and leaped back. Eric caught her. She was warm and wiry in his arms.
Chapter Thirteen
“Oh,” Iris said, looking ahead at the archway, then up at Eric. She blinked and pulled away, blushing. “I guess they're not real. Or maybe they're dead.”
Eric looked past her. The light in his mining helmet fell on two fearsome beetles the size of bulls, their shells like armor, clusters of spikes radiating from their heads and joints, and enormous mandibles that could have snapped a person in half. The giant beetles were hideous and intimidating, but they were not moving at all.
“Looks like they were placed here to try and scare intruders,” Iris said, easing out through the archway.
“Worked on you,” Naomi snorted.
“These aren't statues.” Iris touched the shell-armored leg of one beetle. The leg alone was taller than her. “They're preserved. Dried. Mummified.”
“Look at that.” Eric pointed toward the top of one beetle as he stepped through the archway. The beetle was draped with what looked like a frayed old blanket stitched with the same flower-and-insect language they'd seen before. Atop the blanket was a long pad of dried leather strapped to the beetle's back. The other beetle had the same thing. “Those look like...saddles?”
“Imagine riding one of these into battle,” Naomi said. “They'd make Hannibal's elephants look like pussycats.”
“There's four stirrups per saddle,” Eric said, looking between the two beetles. “These people must have ridden them two at a time. Maybe one to control and steer the beetle. The other to use weapons, maybe throwing spears or arrows.”
“Or maybe they had four legs and two arms.” Iris blew dust off a colorful but faded fresco on the wall nearby. Sure enough, it depicted gray six-limbed mantis-style insects, like the first statue they'd seen, riding the armored beetles to war. The gray mantids wore bronze armor and slung blades, hammers, and arrows against their enemies. Their enemies were also beetle-mounted mantids, but fire-ant red instead of gray.
More battle scenes spread across the wall, depicting the gray mantids ultimately defeating the red mantids...then eating them.
“So the people who built all of this weren't bug-worshipers,” Eric said. “They were bugs.”
“Wow,” Naomi said. “You can figure out anything once someone explains it to you with pictures, huh, Eric?”
“Do you have a problem with me?” Eric asked.
“I have a lot of problems with all of this. I think I've made that pretty clear. Now we've seen the battle-beetle mummies and the bug-war comic book on the wall, so let's head up and out.”
“There's gold back here,” Iris said from a couple meters away. “Lots of it.”
“I can wait another five minutes.” Naomi walked over to see where she was looking.
A series of alcoves had been set into the wall. The first held musical instruments, including a decorated animal horn, a pair of wooden drums laced together with leather, and a xylophone framed in bone.
Another alcove held war hammers, axes, and blades. Aside from the spider statue's chain web, these weapons were the first steel they'd seen among the artifacts.
Next was a huge display of insect statues made from gold and precious stones. Below these were urns full of gems and oval-shaped gold and silver coins etched with insect and flower images.
“Okay, I feel like we're in line for hazard pay here.” Naomi began filling the pockets of her coveralls with jewels and gold coins. “No reason to mention this to Hagen or Alanna, right?”
“I'm not saying anything,” Eric told her. He was about to start filling his own pockets when Iris spoke up.
“Ew! More bugs,” she said. Eric joined her at the next alcove, which had a shelf of mummified bugs that looked like ticks the size of terriers, dried and preserved like the giant beetles.
“Maybe...pets?” Eric suggested.
“Gross.” Naomi hurried past them.
“Or food.” Iris pointed to the upper shelves of the same alcove, crammed with clay jars labeled with carved images of bees, flowers, leaves, and grubs. “This whole place makes me think of a pharaoh's tomb—treasure, weapons, preserved food. A powerful and wealthy ruler buried with plenty of possessions to take into the afterlife.”
“And plenty of his friends, too,” Naomi said, from deeper in the chamber. “Ugh.”
A row of preserved, dried mantis-bugs faced them, each one the size of a small horse like the statue they'd first seen. They had dried into a shriveled brown color, their bodies held upright by suits of bronze armor decorated with leaf and flower designs. Helmets enclosed their elongated heads, with visors to protect their now-hollow eye sockets. Medieval weapons were mounted on their backs—blades, hammers, and axes, just like in the frescoes.
“Guess the pharaoh needed warriors in the next world,” Iris said. “These may have been sacrificed when he died.”
“And servants.” Naomi pointed to another row of dried-up mantids, these much smaller than the warrior ones, squatting on the floor and bound in chains. “So if this is Pharaoh's tomb, where's Pharaoh? Back there?” She pointed toward another small arch at the back of the room.
“Looks likely to me,” Iris said.
The three of them proceeded single-file through the narrow passage and reached what had to be
the burial chamber. A golden sarcophagus dominated the small room; it was the size of a king bed, and its lid depicted a gray mantid covered in jewelry, flowers, and gold-leaf armor, a crown encircling its antennae.
“Look at that.” Naomi pointed her light at the wall just above and behind the huge sarcophagus. “They even have a...” She took in a sudden sharp breath, and her face trembled in a way Eric had never seen. It looked like she was on the verge of tears; in the months he'd known her, Eric had grown to doubt she was even capable of crying.
She turned and ran away from the sarcophagus room.
Puzzled, Eric studied the image that had seemed to upset her. It was a huge butterfly on the wall, rendered in jewels and precious metals. Below, almost out of sight, a gray mantis was depicted, unadorned and collapsed as though dead, as if the butterfly had emerged from the mantis's body, glorious and beautiful, leaving the gray husk behind.
“What upset her?” Iris whispered.
“I don't know,” he whispered back.
“Go check on her.”
“Me? I'm not good at...stuff like that.”
“You know her better, and she doesn't like me. Go. I have work to do, anyway.” She gestured at the murals of hieroglyphs and flower-and-insect letters on the wall.
Eric reluctantly turned to catch up with Naomi. Somewhere above, the earth rumbled. Another blast. If Iris was right, someone was blasting their way down, searching for the tomb of the bug emperor.
He still didn't understand the significance of the tomb, other than as an interesting historical find. But Eric had grown up on a staunchly rebel world, with a father and two brothers who'd served in the rebel military. His loyalty to the Colonial League of rebel worlds ran bone-deep. He couldn't help but see the Ptolemaic Society, the gatekeepers who served the Earth Alliance, as a dangerous enemy. Armistice or not, Eric had a hard time trusting Earthlings or those who had allied with them.
Eric reached the large treasure room, guarded by the armored dead bugs. Naomi sat on a weird, oval-shaped marble bench in the treasure room. She was slumped forward, her face in her hands, and she didn't even look up when he entered.