My mouth hung open. “But… I…”
“You did everything you could to be respectful and not a weirdo creep,” Suri said. “And if you’d been creeping on her when she was still growing up, we’d have had words. But you didn’t, and you weren’t, and now she’s an adult with drives and needs like any other adult woman. I was the one that taught her how to relieve herself, remember? I get it.”
For the first time in a long time, I blushed. Hard.
“Look, lover.” She leaned forward. “Even if I hated it – even if I was a right jealous bitch who wanted you all to myself – what the hell could I do about her? You and Karalti are linked at the brainstem. You share her thoughts and feelings, she shares your thoughts and feelings. She gets hungry when you do. You get her fuckin’ hot flashes, for fuck’s sake. You could love me more than anyone in the whole wide world, spend days in bed with me, raise some kids, and you and I would STILL never be as intimate with one another as you and her will be every day of your lives, for the rest of your lives. I can’t compete with that, so I won’t. I’ll love what I have, as much of it as I have, for as long as I have it.”
To my surprise - and, I admit, my embarrassment – I felt my eyes start to get hot. Suri reached for my hands, and I let her take them. She smiled, and squeezed them tightly… and as she did, I felt something that was almost a shadow of the Bond pass between us.
“She’s, uh…” My voice was dry and husky, and I had to pause to cough. “She’s going to go into heat again, soon. I can tell. If you're making bets, place them for sooner rather than later.”
“Hopefully while we’re not down in Al-Asad,” Suri said. “That might be a bit awkward.”
That choked a laugh out of me, and the laughter broke the spell. I leaned in and kissed her, lingering over her lips, then stood up straight. “Thanks. I mean it. It’s not going to get rid of the guilt, but next time I feel guilty, I’ll remember what you said.”
“Good.” Suri got to her feet, her armor clanking as it settled. “Ready to go?”
“Yeah.” I smoothed back a strand of her hair from her face, and stepped back. “You?”
She nodded, her golden eyes clear and determined. “Yeah. It’s funny… after seeing Nicolas and Jacob outside of Al-Asad, it hit me. The prison’s really gone. There’s only ruins left now.”
***
The place where Bhakat Kasir had stood was now a gargantuan sinkhole plunging into the earth. The desert surrounding the ruins of the fortress poured over the sides of the hole like the Niagara Falls. The destruction had revealed the ruins of smaller buildings around the site... evidence of a civilization long buried beneath the desert.
“Holy shitsnacks.” I leaned over Karalti's shoulder as she caught a thermal and glided around the edge of the sinkhole. My eyes couldn't penetrate the darkness beneath. “That's big enough for us to fly into.”
“I think we're going to have to,” she replied. “We can’t get in by ground. We’d be squished.”
She was right. There was nowhere stable enough to attach a rappel line. Even as we coasted around, one lip of the hole broke away under the weight of the sandfall gushing over the side.
“Okay, we're flying in,” I called back to Suri. “Get ready for a fight as soon as we hit bottom.”
She nodded, gripping the saddle with one hand, the other bracing her sword over one shoulder.
Karalti dropped into a shallow spiraling dive, dipping out of the thermal so she could come in slow. She easily cleared the sinkhole, three times larger than her wingspan, and descended in a lazy arc toward the ground. We passed the ruins of the prison complex on the way down, open tunnels and steel wreckage, the rubble of the fortress. But even though the very bottom was choked with debris, the cavern complex into which the fortress and prison had collapsed was even more vast than the hole itself. The remains of Bakhat Khasir looked like a tissue crumpled in the middle of the floor.
“Yeah... I remember this place.” Suri kept her voice down, but even with the wind rippling over us, every sound seemed to echo like rifleshot inside the cavern. “I remember passing through here. Scared the shit out of me. I'd never seen this much space in my life.”
“This must have been the eyrie for the dragons who lived here,” Karalti said. “Look at all those doors.”
The doors she was referring to were big dragon-sized niches in the walls, many of them cross-bored with perfectly round tunnels that had to have been made by the patient gnawing of sandworms. As I noticed that, Karalti gasped, and flicked a wingtip to steer us toward the largest cavern entry: a huge open oval with two smaller openings to either side.
“Look! That's a Queen's apartment!” She sounded like a kid who'd just rushed down the stairs to the Christmas Tree.
“Really?” I said. “How do you know?”
“It's the biggest. And it has three doors! Because you mark your door with smells when you go inside your house, right? The Queen's Door is only for her, so it always carries her scent. Other people use the side doors,” she replied.
“Stay on task,” Suri said to her, as she veered toward the door. “We need to land. I can show you to the ruin complex from here.”
“Right.” I slid to my belly on Karalti's back, and Suri did the same. “Okay, girl. As quietly as you can.”
Karalti flared her horns, the newly- formed small membranes near the base of her tail, and opened her arms and legs to create drag as she glided toward the ground. She landed on a patch of sand, taking the rolling impact with her knees, and sunk down to a four-limbed crouch.
Suri winced. “Damn. Still loud. Every sandworm from here to Dalim probably heard that one.”
“I weigh like eight tons. I can't really stop from making SOME noise.” Karalti snorted, head darting curiously as she straightened back up onto her feet. “I smell something interesting.”
“Like?” I stood and checked myself over. Weapons, potions, armor, keys, testicles. All in order.
“Like magic.” She leaned over to let us down. “Really powerful magic, but it smells sweet. It reminds me of...”
I hopped to the ground as she trailed off. “Like what?”
Her crests clamped to the sides of her head, and she rumbled with something like embarrassment. “It smells... like a nest. A place where people and things were born.”
Suri and I lit torches as Karalti concentrated, shifted down, and donned her new Fox Striker armor. She fitted the heavy cold iron gauntlets of the Baru on last, flexing her hands.
“Always feels weird to take this shape just after I've been flying for a while.” She swept her hair up into a high ponytail to keep it out of the way, and tied it back with one of her braids.
“Stick to P.M. if possible, guys.” Suri's voice piped up from my HUD instead of her lips. “One thing I figured out about this place was that the less noise you make, the better.”
That reminded me: Rin. I held up a finger, and opened up the group audio chat with her. “Okay, Rin, we’re in. Nothing exciting to show you yet, but we’ll send anything your way once we spot it.”
“Okay!” Rin was already waiting on the end of the line. “Be sure to send me any weird languages you find. I’ve got a stack of books here with me. I might be able to translate some things, and if I can’t, I can at least try and identify the language.”
“Copy that.”
Suri took point, her shoulder-mounted launcher loaded and ready to fire. The hope was that the noise it made would blind any Sandworms that attacked us... and give us enough time to run from the Level 45 monsters like a pack of wussies. Karalti and I both carried torches, the light barely seeming to penetrate the darkness forward or back. Every tiny sound put my back up... and now and then, we felt distant rumbling through our feet.
“Man, this is creepy,” Karalti grumbled. “I thought the sewers were bad. I can smell sandworms everywhere.”
“Yeah.” The odor – a weird musky smell that reminded me of pillbugs under a wet log – was so strong that
I could smell it as well. There were no carvings to send to Rin, no indications of civilization. Suri paused at a corner, looked around, and then turned into a tunnel the size of a subway. There was a great big capsule lying in the middle of it. It was about the size of a motorcycle, smooth and yellow and seamless.
“The hell is that?” I brought the Spear around, in case it started trying to hatch. Karalti held the torch up to it, but the creamy surface was opaque.
“It's warm,” she said. “But not very.”
Suri swallowed. “Yeah. You don't wanna touch that. I'm pretty sure it's worm shit. Let's just keep moving.”
“The worms reuse their tunnels?” I asked.
Suri nodded. “Yeah. They kind of patrol around the center of the ruins.”
It was a long hike - a hike with a disturbing lack of mobs. A few times, I thought I heard something behind us in the dark, but there was nothing but loose rocks, shifting sands, and air that was getting progressively warmer as we went deeper into the earth.
“How did you get out, anyway?” I asked Suri.
“I told you the gist of it already,” she replied. “Dug through the wall and got out. We followed old mineshafts down to that big chamber, and got slaughtered there by monsters we couldn’t see in the dark. I woke up back in my cell, wondering if it had been a bad dream. But the escape tunnel was still there, so I tried again, and again. Made it out on the sixth try by skirting around the ruins and climbing a lot of stairs. We’re talking like… fifty flights of stairs. And… oh wow. It’s still here.”
“What?” Karalti cocked her head, burbling quietly to herself.
“This.” Suri led us to a crack in the tunnel and stopped. It was a tight fit, barely wide enough to let her through. Karalti and I had an easier time of it. I could imagine how she'd found it: the giant worm barreling down the hall, her need to escape somewhere, anywhere, so she wasn't crushed. I could hear her breathing turn ragged as we squeezed through, leather and metal scraping against rock. After several minutes of crawling, climbing and contortion, we broke out into the ruins of what had to have once been a giant factory.
The city was lit by an artificial sun, a sphere of plasma surrounded by slowly rotating rings of soot-blackened aurum. The town was more open plan and better preserved than the city buried under the swamps of Ilia. There was a block of housing that took up perhaps a third of the complex that sprawled out beneath us. The rest of the buildings were clearly industrial: warehouses, pump stations, turbines, refineries connected to huge copper-toned pipes and tanks that might have been used to store mana or oil. Now, after thousands of years, every join, seam, and rivet were streaked and ringed with thick, bright green rust. The remains of huge stone scaffolds lay around this underground village, some of them reaching all the way up to the cavern ceiling. All were surprisingly integral, though the buildings leaned against one another like tired concert goers, some half sunk into the ground as if crumpling to their knees. At the very end of the complex, just visible through the wreckage of a collapsed crane, was the pillared face of a temple carved right into the red desert stone.
“Oh wow! Wow wow wow!” Rin squealed over the vidlink as I showed her the feed. “Look at all that! Guys! This could have been a Warsinger construction site!”
“Why would it be underground?” Karalti leaned out over the ledge. “It’s not big enough. How would they get the Warsinger out of here?”
“In pieces!” Rin replied. “It’s like how they assemble spacecraft. Some parts are made in one location that specializes in, say, heat-resistant alloys. They ship their parts to another factory that specializes in composite bonding, and so on and so forth… they probably manufactured key components down here in secret. Mercurions build underground, and we use artificial suns like that, so…”
“This was a Mercurion settlement?” I eyed the ruins with interest.
“The architecture isn’t very, umm, Mercurion-esque. Those buildings look kind of human to me, but like barracks, almost.”
“That’d make sense if they were a military engineering corps of some kind,” Suri replied. “I didn’t think of any of this stuff when I was passing through here. All I wanted to do was get out. I climbed down the wall, jumped down onto the ground, and… shit.”
I sidled up to her. “Probably better to shit on the ground than while cliffhanging, yeah.”
“No, you arse. Look at the fuckin’ ground.” She pointed down toward one of the ‘streets’ between buildings.
I frowned, not seeing anything out of the ordinary... until the sand rippled, and a small, white-carapaced [Sandworm Larva] arced out of the earth like a playful dolphin. As soon as I noticed the first one, I began to see them all. Hundreds, if not thousands of baby sandworms writhed just below the surface of the sand, so well camouflaged in the eerie overhead light that it had tricked my eyes.
“Oof.” I winced. “That's not good.”
“Fuck! These weren’t here when I passed through.” Suri squeezed a handful of her hair, then pointed to a hillside of collapsed rubble against one of the cavern walls. There was a worm shaft right in front of it. “There was a big tunnel over there that led up to a second city level. That’s where the stairs start. They fed out into some buried surface ruins beside an oasis. Some Huura - nomads – were staying there on their western passage. That's how I got out of the desert: the Huura took me on as a caravan guard, and I travelled with them to Dalim.”
“We’re not getting out that way.” I frowned. “It's not a big deal. We can get back out through the sinkhole with Karalti's help, but how the hell are we going to get inside that temple?”
“Well, I don't hear any of the big bastards,” Suri said. “But if there's eggs and babies, the Sandworm Queen has to be around somewhere.”
Ah yes: the Sandworm Queen. The Level 100 Sandworm Queen. I made a face.
“Vash says most insects don't take care of their hatchlings,” Karalti said. “She might just lay them and go somewhere else?”
“Plan for the worst, then expect it to be worse than that,” I said. “I think I know a way we can get over there without touching the ground. I'm pretty sure I can use my Jump ability to get over those roofs. We'll use that caving gear Rin made for us to build a highline and get over that way.”
“We don't have that much cable, do we?” Karalti scratched her chin.
“No, but if we string a line between here and one of those buildings, we can pull the cable out and do it again.” I looked to Suri. “Suri should be strong enough to pull out any rock mount we set up.”
“Yeah, and if I'm not, the three of us together will be.” She nodded. “Let's get it done.”
Chapter 47
The longer I lived in Archemi, the more I found myself grateful for the stuff I'd learned in the Army. Unlike some other branches of the service, the 72nd didn’t have any single specialization. Our job description had been 'everything'. Needed trenches dug? Army. Pylons laid? Army. Shield generators surveyed, installed, and protected? Guess who they called to go mountaineering.
This wasn't my first zipline installation, and it wasn't Suri's, either. We hammered pitons into the rock, set up harnesses ready to go, and when we were done, Suri handed me a length of coiled cable. I slung it over my shoulder and turned to face the open expanse of sand and tilted stone below.
“Alright, ladies. See you on the other side.” I nodded, tensed, and sprung out into a leap.
Jump V took me a full fifty feet into the air, some real Spider-Man-type shit. I Shadow Danced just before hitting the roof. It buffered the fall, cancelling out most of the impact damage and shaving off about twenty HP. We didn't have that much cable, and I had enough AP to use Jump about four times when not in combat, so I had to carefully pick which houses I leaped to. Suri and Karalti watched from above as I landed on an onion-domed roof close to the center of the complex, and used it to secure the other end of the line. It wasn't quite halfway over: ziplines couldn't be completely taut. I wasn't sure we had quite
enough cable for a proper whippy zipline, but Archemi's physics - while realistic - were possibly slightly more forgiving than real life on that point: the same level of forgiveness that allowed Karalti to fly and me to jump around like Jiminy Cricket.
Once I tied the last knot, a little notification sprung up. [Zipline: Integrity 1000/1000]
“Oh. That's useful.” I jiggled the cable a bit. It rippled with a satisfying 'woob woob' sound, so I gave the girls the thumbs up and got ready to play catch.
Suri sent Karalti down first. She clamped a hand over her mouth and clung to her rope as she zoomed down, spinning the whole way. I opened my arms and caught her as she flew by, halting her before she rebounded.
“Wheee!” Her delight and her laughter both echoed through my mind. “That was fun!”
“Highlines are pretty great, second only to rappelling out of a chopper when you’re hovering over water,” I said. “Your dick grows to at least twice its normal size as soon as you jump out the door, and if you didn’t have a dick, you grow an honorary one.”
Suri was down next, riding the zipline and dropping a rappel like someone who'd done it a thousand times before. When she was down, she seized the cable, gave it an experimental tug, and then hauled on it. We had hammered it in pretty hard, and it didn't budge until Karalti and I took up behind her. With the three of us pulling, it snapped loose and flew over to us. Even that was enough to excite the baby sandworms: they began writhing over one another in the spot where the cable fell, mandibles snapping. They were only about eight feet long, their bodies white and soft, but their heads were armored with dark, glossy chitin.
“Gross.” I grimaced. “Why couldn't it have been lava? Or sharks?”
Karalti hissed. “Don’t jinx us.”
“We could probably take 'em,” Suri said. “Likely get some good EXP from killing these little buggers.”
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