by Crucible
an expanse of scrub brush and arroyos as vast as a minor continent – it was somewhat more inviting than most of his home planet of Republic.
The city occupied a large, flat ledge on the southwest side of a huge mesa. There was nothing that looked like an aero-port, but there were two conveniently large open areas on its western edge. The Aves alighted there, their mighty maneuvering thrusters kicking up dust devils that spun away in the wind as quickly as they formed.
As soon as the skids were on the ground, the side hatches opened up and eight Warfighters jumped out of each craft. From Quentin, Lt. Warfighter Taurus led four warfighters in a dead run to establish an outer perimeter. From Leo, Lt. Warfighter Moon led his squad up toward the main thoroughfare that led to the heart of the city.
Moon was Sapphirean, raised in the industrial zones of Jutland Province. Small and slight, he could be mistaken for a girl, especially underneath his tactical gear and facemask. But Moon was a veteran of landing teams on Meridian, Winter, Aurora, and the infamous EdenWorld beach party and had already earned three Fearless Conduct pins, which were redeemable for merchandise throughout Pegasus’s shopping areas. On Winter, he had led a search team on a forty-klick hike in hostile weather searching for TyroCommander Redfire. On EdenWorld, he had retrieved an errant wally-ball from a lagoon where robo-sharks may or may not have been sighted. On Aurora, he had stood between Prime Commander Keeler and a fully-stocked bar during the departure reception at the Tower of Carnage.
Moon confirmed the initial scans, “All clear, Landing Team. You may exit.” Lt. Scientist Morgan was the first man who wasn’t a warfighter to emerge from the ship.
He took a quick whiff of the air. “Crap on a cracker,” he muttered. “Facemasks everybody. It smells like burning sulfur down here.”
Ash fell from the auburn sky. It had already coated most of the town, creating a kind of morbid winter landscape beneath a sky still smokey and red. The empty buildings and houses were arranged like tombstones amid a neat grid of broad avenues and wide side streets.
“It looks like Christmastime in Hell,” said the second person to emerge from Quentin, Technician Tulare Anansi, who grew on Sapphire’s subarctic continent of Boreala, one of the few places on either world where Christmas was reliably associated with snow. Flecks of ash quickly spotted her dark skin.
Morgan activated his Spex and surveyed the nearby buildings. The nearest were residential, by his best guess, single story structures, squarish, with soft round curves at the peaks of their roofs. Some of the roofs had caved in. He always wondered about people compelled to live with walls and empty space between each other. It seemed like it would be difficult to maintain the cohesion of a community when every family had their own dwelling unit, rather than share common ownership like in the towering habitats of Republic.
“This city looks like it was abandoned long before the attack,” Morgan said. His next words were drowned as a pair of Accipiters appeared from the high cloud banks and buzzed over the expedition. Morgan rolled his eyes. “Prophets!” he cursed. Accipiters could fly silently. The only reason to fly loud was to advertise the military’s presence and intimidate the enemy. He guessed this was Taurus’s idea.
“Technician Ing?” he called.
“Right here,” Ing said. Ing came from the City of Research on Republic, and had impressed Morgan on Aurora by deducing that some large ceramic urns found in the caves there had been used as toilets and not, as some in the party had unfortunately thought, as face-washing basins.
Morgan gestured toward the largest building that sat at the edge of the town. “That’s the largest structure. It’s probably a government building.”
”Or a shopping mall,” Anansi suggested. “Perhaps both. Aurora and Winter combined those functions.”
“With any luck, it will contain some kind of records,” stated Ing the obvious.
“Right,” Morgan said. He checked his CommUnit. “Moon and Taurus, are we clear to proceed?”
“Clear,” said Moon.
“Clear,” said Taurus.
Morgan, Anansi, and Ing began walking toward the building, flanked by a pair of warfighters. Almost as soon as they stepped on the roadway, it collapsed underneath Technician Ing and he fell into a shallow, eroded chasm beneath it.
“Ing,” Morgan shouted! “Are you all right?”
Ing reported, almost casually. “Hey, these roads are constructed of a kind of plasticized igneous rock supported by an interlocking sub-strata. It also appears to be in a state of extreme disrepair.”
“Ing,” Morgan repeated. “Are you all right?”
Ing’s arm appeared at the top of the pothole. “Little help?” Morgan and a warfighter pulled him up. “Tends to confirm the idea that this city was abandoned a long time before the MegaSphere blew up.”
“How long do you think?” Morgan asked.
“The best I can do is a guess. I’m thinking maybe around three hundred years.” Ing brushed himself off. “Onward, comrades, the primary building awaits.”
Pegasus – The UnderDecks
Hunter was unconscious when Queeqeug returned. His eyes opened when Queequeg pressed the bio-medical repair patch onto his arm. “I brought you water and stuff,” Queequeg told him.
“Thanks,” Hunter muttered, lifting the water bottle to his mouth. He drank sloppily, the way a desperate man would.
“So, what’s with the mask?” Queequeg asked, while Hunter was still choking down the water.
Hunter did not answer until he had managed to drink enough to regain his color and vital signs, and begun digging into the emergency nutrition pack. “I’m sort of unwelcome on this ship.”
“Oh, so it’s not because you’re ugly or anything,” Queequeg said.
Hunter grunted, and opened another nutri-pack.
“But you do smell bad,” the cat added.
“Thank you,” Hunter told him.
“And I should remind you, my sense of smell is four hundred times as acute as yours. So, I don’t need to see your face to know who you are.”
Hunter grunted.
“So, where are you going to next?” Queequeg asked.
“Curiosity?” Hunter asked.
“Not really,” Queequeg paused to lick the back of a forepaw. “I’m just hoping I won’t have to worry about running across you again. I’m on a mission, you know.”
“I recall that you were,” said Hunter. “I once had a mission. I was going to join this ship’s crew, and lead the rest of the stowaways out of hiding. But TyroCommander Lear put a stop to that. I underestimated her ruthlessness. She had them all rounded up, put into cryostasis. She sent some of them back. Then, when we got too far out, she simply arranged to have them stranded on some of the planets we’ve visited.”
“How?”
“They were flown to Independence and Aurora on secret, unrecorded flights of Aves, left in remote areas with their memories wiped.”
“Really,” Queequeg yawned. “That’s so-o-o-o-o-o interesting.”
“It was senseless,” Hunter spat. “We were no threat. We could have helped. We just weren’t official. A thousand light years from home, what difference would it have made?”
“Yeah, she didn’t like it when I peed on her command chair, either,” Queequeg consoled him.
“I am the last one who remains down here, although a few have managed to assimilate into the crew without being noticed.” He stiffened. “But that was never an option for me.”
“Well, now that you’ve given up on that plan, crazy guy, what’s next?” Hunter looked up despondently. “I have no choice but to survive until Pegasus reaches the next sufficiently civilized world, and put myself off there.” Queequeg twitched. He had sensed the arrival of another presence. A brown creature, with needle-y teeth and tiny black eyes stared, waddled out of the darkness and stared at them.
“That’s a rat!” Queequeg hissed. “A filthy, verminous, disease-carrying rat!”
“Are you going to kill it
?” Hunter asked.
“I don’t have a gun!” Queequeg puffed out his fur and hissed at it. The rat waddled away.
“That’s right, run!” Queequeg called after it. He settled back down. “How are you going to get off the ship.”
“I’ll need to over-ride the controls on a lifepod,” Hunter told him. “It shouldn’t be too difficult. They weren’t designed to be difficult. The hard part will be getting access to one.” Queequeg swished his tail. “Command codes are pretty easy to break. If you wanted to join the crew though, I could probably arrange that, too. My boss is … The Boss.”
“Your Keeler’s cat,” Hunter realized. “Why would you do that for me?”
“Because it would irritate TyroCommander Lear.”
The brown rat waddled back into view.
“Our friend is back,” said Hunter.
Queequeg rose from his haunches. “Hey, Squeaks, why don’t you just find a nice X-Term-O-Bot to end your miserable life, because if I do it, I’m going to play with you first to satisfy my sadistic need for amusement.”
In the darkness behind the rat, a second pair of red rodent eyes appeared in the darkness.
Then, another pair appeared. Then several hundred appeared at once.
Queequeg was just beginning to wonder how bloody his paws were going to get in the ensuing massacre, when the mass of rats charged on them.
The Surface
“Rook, Jordan,” Taurus’s voice crackled in their headsets. They turned to see her make a
‘come here’ gesture, and the made double time to join her underneath Quentin’s wingblade.
“You gentlemen are lucky,” Taurus told them when they stopped and stood at attention in front of her.
“Oh, yeah,” said Johnny Rook, who just loved hearing the word “lucky” fall from Taurus’s full, sexy lips, which he couldn’t actually see beneath her rebreather mask, but could visualize perfectly.
“Pack it in soldier,” she told him. She held up her arm. “There’s a patch on your right forearm. Touch it.” She demonstrated, a gold shimmer swam around her for a split second.
Rook, Max Jordan, and the others did as she did. There was a brief sensation of energy surrounding them.
“You’re the first team to use the personal shield, based on a design transmitted from the Atrex Stinkmonsterworks on Sapphire, based on technology derived from the Polergeist suit.
They’ll let you take a few hits before your armor even gets damaged… if they work.” Johnny Rook activated his first, and Max Jordan almost at the same time.
“It feels weird,” Max Jordan reported.
“In a good way,” Johnny Rook added.
“Like being surrounded by a…” words failed Max Jordan.
“It’s basically a scaled-down version of the coherent energy field that surrounds Pegasus,” Taurus explained. “It cycles regularly so you can breathe, but if you need to eat or piss, you’ll have to deactivate it… or else, a thin film of urine is going to form between the shield and your moisture repellent-uniform.”
Rook and Jordan stared at her.
“Urine is sterile, boys. Now, scout the perimeter from the ship to the river,” she ordered.
“Link with Shriek-647 for aerial recon.”
They turned to go, and then Taurus called Max Jordan. “Max, Pegasus reports that the ship with your mother and TyroCommander Redfire has disappeared after an encounter with an alien ship.”
“I know,” Max replied levelly.
“If you wish to return to Pegasus…” she began, but Max simply turned and walked away from her.
“I have a patrol,” he said.
Morgan, Ing, and Anansi reached the large building at the edge of the Mesa. By Republic standards, it was very small, about fifteen stories in height, shaped a bit like a sliced pyramid set stop a diamond shaped base. Both were coated in dust, but the sliced pyramid part had been black, and the base had been white. Both were constructed, so said the Spex, of a kind of slick plasticized concrete.
There was a sign in front of the building, carved on a triangular stone were the words.
“Crucial Hydrocarbons.”
“That’s an odd name for a city,” said Anansi.
Ing saw it differently. “I am guessing, this was a ministry, or perhaps an industrial combine of some kind.”
There were three slabs of metal secured over the entrance. “The entrance appears to have been sealed,” Morgan observed.
Ing followed with another obvious statement. “We’ll have to find another way in…Oh, look, there’s one.”
One corner of the building had been smashed in by a roof detached from one of the town’s other buildings. They walked across an expanse of dead maroon-colored grass that crunched beneath their boots, and carefully picked their way inside.
The interior was almost as dark as anything possibly could be. Ing took out two rolls of adhesive lighting strips and stretched them along the walls. The additional light revealed a long corridor, walls constructed of interlocking blocks of plasticized concrete. There were doorways every two or three meters.
“This looks like a Sub-Ministry. The Sub-Ministry of Crucial Hydrocarbons, maybe,” Ing suggested.
Morgan was studying a framed poster depicting some large, cranelike structures protruding from a body of water. Large ships hung in the sky overhead, shaped like pinched cylinders and tapered at both ends. “This looks a lot like the old digitypes of the extraction rigs from Republic’s colonial era.”
“Planetology noted that the planet was exceptionally rich in hydrocarbons,” Anansi remembered. “Maybe this was a mining colony like Republic originally was. “
“True, but Republic was rich in rare minerals, like palladium and element 151,” Morgan argued. “Hydrocarbons are common throughout the galaxy. In fact, the ancients used to burn them to propel their vehicles.”
“What a waste of good hydrocarbons. Still, it is a possibility,” said Anansi. “Sapphire’s hydrocarbon reserves had been almost completely depleted by the previous civilization. The early colonists had to extract them from the atmosphere of the outer planets. That’s how the Mining Guild originated.”
Morgan grunted. Sapphirean history did not interest him. And, as an aside, Anansi was wrong.
“They certainly used a lot of them,” Ing observed. “Most of these buildings are constructed of a kind of plasticized concrete, like the streets. The windows are made of a kind of polymer resin.”
Morgan was studying another poster. It consisted of the word, “Innovation” superimposed over the picture of a seabird standing on a beach, breaking open the shell of a crustacean with a small rock. “There is no such thing as a bad idea,” it read underneath.
“Obviously, they’ve never been drinking with Commander Keeler,” Anansi muttered.
“Hey, look,” Ing said, holding open a door on which was affixed a representative male form. “A euphemism.” He held the door for a moment, then, his eyes slid right. “Excuse me,” he said, and disappeared inside.
Morgan moved on to another poster. This one was more badly decayed than the others, but roughly recognizable as a map of the planet with cranelike structures superimposed over it.
There might have been text at the bottom, but it was corroded beyond recognition. Morgan studied it. The planet had no true continental structures, just dry highlands, and basins filled with thick, sticky water.
Ing returned. “I just urinated in a room that probably hasn’t been used in 300 years!”
“Stop acting like a Sapphirite,” Morgan snapped. Then, cheeks warming with embarrassment, he turned to Anansi. “I’m sorry if that offended you.”
“Think not of it,” Anansi had moved onto another next poster featuring the image of an athlete. The word “Goals” was superimposed over it. The legend beneath read “What each of us achieves, we all achieve.”
“I wonder if they had some religious significance,” Ing wondered. “Maybe this mining concern was also part of a relig
ious order of some kind.”
“Look at this one,” Morgan said. The poster was faded, a little, but still clear underneath its glass cover. It showed a huge machine on treads boring into the side of a mountain. In the foreground, the word “Redoubt” was printed in a military-like stencil script. “Ensuring our survival when the solar flares return,” it read. “The Redoubt Consortium. Crucial Hydrocarbons, Diamond-Star Construction, Industrial Elements and Works, and twenty-five other companies.”
He was interrupted by Prime Commander Keeler’s voice in his COM implant. “Could you guys up the resolution on your scan-cams?”
“I didn’t know you were linked in, Commander,” Morgan adjusted the resolution. “Any thoughts?”
Keeler sounded unusually well-engaged. “Those posters suggest that inhabitants constructed some kind of underground bunkers to survive the solar flares. It makes me wonder whether any of them could have survived.”
Morgan was skeptical. “A poster doesn’t mean they actually built any.”
“True,” said Ing. “But when I worked in the Sub-Ministry for Transport Infrastructure in the City of Collective Purpose, they had an entire department tasked to making posters to build support for public works projects. Remember the City of Vantage Reclamation Facility?”
“I don’t remember that one,” Morgan admitted.
Ing shrugged. “It never got built. Nobody liked the poster.”
“Do we have a schematic of the building?” Morgan asked.
“Tasking an Accipiter to make a scan,” Pegasus Flight Control confirmed.
“We probably should have done that before you guys went in,” said Commander Keeler.
“Somebody note that for future reference. Where the Hell is Alkema?” (Pause) “Well, pull him off her. I need someone to note things for future reference.” An Accipiter paused over the building and bathed it in scanning beams. A schematic began to appear in their guidance systems. AI performed forensic analysis, following where the power and data conduits converged to determine the most likely locations for laboratories and data storage.
“There’s a sub-basement level with three massive data storage banks,” an analyst in Pegasus