by George Tome
The hallway was long and narrow, the only lights being the blue laser beams of the alarms60 leading to the rear exit.
The rear access hatch dangled open, allowing him to peer outside. At first, he didn’t recognize the view, but then he had to admit he knew the place, in spite of the terrible carnage visible through the open door. Dozens of huge, contorted cranes lying on top of massive piles of debris were all that was left from the Ropolis spaceport! The temples had launched the first serious attack of a new civil war, and the victim was the mining town itself!
If he needed further proof that Baila had lost his scent, he had it before his very eyes. Their economy had collapsed, and the cold was threatening to wipe out the Antyran civilization, yet the biggest urge of the sublime prophet was to attack the mining world, right under the nose of the aliens. The future doesn’t smell good, he thought, shaking his head in disbelief.
The ship stabilized about two thousand feet from the ground. It couldn’t fly any closer to the landing platform, which was full of debris—most of it still smoldering. Large pieces of metal, craters, twisted cranes, and pipes littered the area. No pilot in his right tail would try to land among the wreckage piled on the runway.
However, floating above the city didn’t seem to be a smart option, either. As he was thinking about staying in the carrier for the time being, he noticed another ship of similar design approaching them. Fresh troops for the invasion? he thought. Soon, he was going to find out… or maybe not, because two orange, bright globes burst from the skeleton of a mangled crane somewhere on his right. They quickly approached the nearby carrier and started to creep along its fuselage, as if they wanted to caress it with their warm light reflected by the black paint of the ship. The spheres seemed animated by a sinister life of their own, a pair of carnivores lustfully sniffing the fear of their prey before launching a savage assault. When they reached the right engine, they finally found what they were looking for. In an instant, both of them burst toward it.
The two fireballs helped him reach the sensible decision to bail out of the carrier, to avoid the unpleasant situation of ending the day scattered in many pieces over the landing strip. He pulled the space as far as the grid allowed. One more step and he’d be outside. Unfortunately, that was the precise moment when he ran out of time. The terrible explosion of the nearby carrier’s right engine ripped its wing altogether. In the next second, it came crashing into Gill’s ship.
The shock threw him up from the floor and smacked his head into the pipes on the ceiling, which started to twist along with the whole carrier, spitting liquids and hot radioactive gases everywhere. Still dizzy from the impact, Gill pulled the space again and grabbed the thick pipe above his head to drag himself out of the doomed ship.
Just when he left the transport, he was surrounded by a wall of fire. His hearts sank, waiting for the explosion of the fusion reactors… Yet by an incredible stroke of luck, they survived, sparing him from a million-degree cloud of hot gas that would have turned him into walking plasma.
Gravity was not nearly as strong as on Antyra I, but the distance to the ground was decreasing sharply. After several long seconds, he found out how to start the backpack jet from the controls on the left wrist of the exoskeleton. In this way, he could accelerate or slow down with a simple hand motion.
The ships were falling into complete silence. He knew they were coming after him like a pack of guvals—it was enough to lean his head back to glimpse their twisted silhouettes a short distance above, entangled in a deadly whirlwind ready to pull him in. Against his instinct, he turned his fist to the ground to accelerate as fast as he could.
The carriers exploded when they hit the runway. Even though he was quite far from them, the hot gases ejected from the blast threw him around like a piece of rag just as he was about to land. Luckily, the frame of the exoskeleton saved his tail from any serious injury.
The crane from where the rebels—or whatever they were—fired at the carrier resembled a fluorescent sea creature due to the swarm of hologuided jelly patches fired by the invading troops. The soldiers detonated them all at once, turning the crane into a cloud of metal shards that pierced the nearby buildings like a salvo of rikanes. The suicidal attack was a very profitable exchange, though, because nobody from the second carrier got out alive.
There was still opposition after the return of the gods! A proof that cowardice was not a disease of the space era, as many were tempted to believe, but a tough shell that could be broken during hard times, like today.
Who were the ones who took arms against Baila’s army? Most likely repulsives like him, determined to go down fighting. And for the first time since the beginning of the madness he didn’t feel alone. A voice whispered in his gills that the temples would fail to occupy the whole city in one day, that they wouldn’t be able to destroy it without a trace. Maybe he’d find allies to hide his tail from the prophet’s fury.
Scenes of utter chaos were unfolding around him as far as he could see. The spaceport—which was built on a higher platform than the rest of the city—had been thoroughly wrecked, except for a small terminal a few thousand feet from him. Dozens of Antyrans in patchy spacesuits were running out of it. On Zhan’s eye, what were they doing in the middle of the battle? He noticed several soldiers handling portable jets. The first such group took off in great haste toward one of the troop carriers, which hovered at five thousand feet above them. Obviously, they were Baila’s agents on Antyra III. If the prophet had no use for their services anymore, it couldn’t bode well for the rest of the city…
Half of the city dome was gone, collapsed over the buildings, and the other half wasn’t looking too good, either. The attackers had torn it with lasers, and it seemed that only its ambition to defy the laws of gravity was keeping it from falling to the ground. The city’s atmosphere had vanished into space—there was nothing to keep it in place—and along with it went the pressurization of the Blue Crevice,61 the rift on top of which the Ropolis dome was raised.
Not a single building remained undamaged on the surface city. Some only lost their windows, but many ended up pulverized by the decompression.
The first rays of light crept between two large, yellow dunes at the horizon, heralding another star-rise. The plateau around the town was scattered with millions of bits of colored debris, contrasting the monotony of the sand. Jets, trees, fragments of buildings, food from the distribution centers, black spots of ore, trains, cranes, and elevators, all ended up sucked in by the vacuum’s insatiable hunger and thrown several miles away from the city.
Gill could see the domes of other cities or mining colonies in the distance, some large and majestic, others less than a thousand feet in diameter; in one place, around twenty domes meandered along another huge crevice opened in the rich crust of the planet. All were under attack from Baila’s spaceships. One by one, they ended up sliced by lasers, spilling their bountiful content over the scorched sand of the plateau.
For a brief moment, the star-rise blinded him, and then he saw an enormous pile of contorted metals lodged deeply into the planet’s crust. He wished he didn’t recognize the thing… It was an artifact fallen from orbit, one of the stellar shields! Gill looked again at the sky as if he could be mistaken, as if the majestic silhouettes of the barriers could still be there, with their edges magically lit by star-rise, to protect the cities from the deadly twilight… But a black void was grinning defiantly into his face from the place where they should have been. Thirty years of colossal building, the proof of the Antyrans’ genius and tenacity, was destroyed in a heartbeat. Gill felt his blood boiling up to his head spikes. So much work, so many resources wasted… for what?
A cloud of debris floated aimlessly near the spot where the shields once stood. Now and then, metallic fragments rained down, striking the dunes with bright flashes of light.
The landing place wasn’t exactly the best place to hide, and not only due to the battle raging around him. He had to find a shelter—idea
lly, before the star incinerated him with its merciless rays, now that the space shields had fallen. Already the flames of the dawn were burning like a giant oven, and the cooling devices of his spacesuit were showing signs of being overwhelmed. He started to run among the debris scattered on the runway while listening to the nearby war chatter.
“The blue triangle, engage the crevice!” ordered a commanding voice.
“Forcing in at seven! Walk behind for cover,” exclaimed a worried soldier.
“Take care! The others had—”
“… under attack!” the voice from a moment ago yelled in panic. “Fire! Fire! They’re coming from behind! Send… aaaargh!” The transmission ended abruptly, leaving no doubt about what had happened.
“On Zhan’s eye!” the commander cried in anger. “Blue triangle, go to seven!”
After Gill reached the end of the runway, he ran inside the spaceport through the crumbling gateway of a public terminal, now little more than a pile of rubble.
Heavy fighting was still taking place inside the building. Not far from him, in what once was a beautiful glass dome, a soldier was watching the corridors on the second level.
“They fired from above! Take cover!” he yelled through the holophone as he propelled a jelly patch from his launcher.
The pulsing jelly buzzed through the room, guided by the soldier from his portable holophone, on which it faithfully broadcasted the hologram of its surroundings. In the end, it stuck on a ceiling not far from them. The soldier touched a button; a short blast erupted, almost invisible in the absence of an atmosphere, and the entire gallery came crashing down in a hurry, followed by a huge cloud of dust.
Before the dust settled, Gill ran past the soldier toward what appeared to be a large hole in the wall, leading to the city. He jumped over the smoldering debris—mostly impossible to identify—hoping that the rebels had better things to do than waste their batteries on his tail.
He got out of the spaceport without further incident, and the central square of Ropolis opened in front of him. On his left, he spotted the statue of the black triangle raised by Baila some sixteen years before, to mark his displeasure with the city’s architects who had announced the birth of the first artificial intelligence. Today’s invasion was the last chapter of that spectacular story.
The main square was devoid of statues or buildings, except for a pair of train terminals riddled with holes that bordered a ring of golden handrails, right in the middle of it. Gill had never been to Ropolis, but just like any Antyran, he knew what was behind the handrails: the most incredible form of relief in the whole Antyran system, the Blue Crevice!
Antyra’s star was shining on the handrails, turning them into a ring of fire. Despite the lack of an atmosphere, the various particles stirred up by the explosions along with the smoke of the materials heated up by the dawn’s light slowly began to form a bluish mist, dense and sinister, blurring the heinous wounds of a colony that used to be the capital of Antyra III…
Another group of soldiers burst out of the spaceport, running to the crevice. Once they reached the handrails, they jumped over without the slightest hesitation.
Not wanting to remain alone in the glaring light, exposed to some trigger-happy townsfolk and unsure how long his suit could handle the heat, he ran after them.
And then… he saw it! Although its width didn’t exceed two hundred yards, its depth was a different story altogether. The lights on the walls allowed him to peer into the staggering abyss for more than forty miles! The probes had charted it four times that much, and still hadn’t finished the job.
Viewed from above, the chasm loosely resembled a rhomboid with irregular margins due to the shifting of the fault lines, which also fused its walls together. The fabled veins of blue ore, some thicker than ten feet, ran through the grayish-yellow rock throughout the entire depth of the chasm.
A huge maze of tectonic caverns could be reached from the walls of the abyss. They mostly followed the rift, and many could reach miles in length, their floors being covered by giant rocks detached from the ceilings during earthquakes.
He saw the rails of the transparent elevators along the walls of the abyss, which not long ago brought the Antyrans from the depths to the surface and all the way back. As expected, the cabins were thoroughly destroyed, their torn carcasses still hanging on the tracks. Here and there, large ceramic windows embedded in the stone betrayed the tracks of the spiral trains leading to the entrances of the underground city.
Gill had no doubt that the lower levels remained largely pressurized because, as far as he remembered, the inhabited galleries had large automatic doors able to protect them in case of calamity. How long would they be able to hold off the assault? Only time would tell…
Where the entries to the largest caves had pierced the walls of the abyss, the Antyrans had built large terraces for elevators. The first domes of the colonists and several ore refineries were built at level 4, right on the floors of two large caverns extending in opposite directions from the crevice. Level 4 was currently deserted.
A second wave of colonization saw the first artificial platforms built on the floors of several large caverns at greater depths. They were easy to build from compressed ore tailings melted by microwaves—a more practical solution than moving millions of tons of rocks piled on the floors of the natural caves.
The last rush of construction spilled into the deepest tunnels dug by the flames of the miners. That was why, in time, the ramifications of the city became colossal, following the richest ore veins.
Gill saw hundreds of black dots falling tremendously quickly into the abyss—each of them was a soldier invading the subterranean city. There was no other way of entry, so he grabbed the hot handrail and abandoned himself to the mercy of the hungry void, which sucked him into its infinite bowels. Very soon, however, he started his jetpack to slow down, since the speed of a free-falling object in the absence of an atmosphere will quickly increase to ridiculous values.
The first entrances appeared to have been breached and assaulted by powerful units. Gill couldn’t see much in the speed of his fall, but he glimpsed the lights of some massive explosions flashing along the dark corridors. If he had the unfortunate idea to enter, he would have landed in the middle of the fighting.
The battle raged fiercely as he descended. Surprisingly, the townsfolk were fighting much stronger than anyone could have imagined. Surely Baila hadn’t dreamed of such opposition, although His Greatness should have anticipated it. After all, the black triangle in the central square was his masterpiece, and any inhabitant of a city owning such a gift would have known how much love to expect from the prophet…
After a short while, it appeared that he had reached the front line. Each time a pressurized door was breached, the fiery outflow of air brought countless pieces of debris in the crevice, along with a thick cloud of dust. In addition to these hazards, he had to avoid all kinds of floating devices parked nearby that followed the temple troops. Among them, he recognized the black spheres, the sinister neural inductors from whose effect he was now shielded inside the exoskeleton.
Around him, hundreds of fighters were flying in all directions like swarms of licants caught in the whirls of the vardannes.
A small spark of light entered a tunnel a thousand feet above him, and a violent flame erupted, followed by the gallery’s depressurization. As soon as the air went out, a dozen or so soldiers rushed in the entry breached by the jelly patch and disappeared into the darkness, followed by various hologuided devices. However, in a blink of an eye, a rebel ambush threw them back into the crevice, in more pieces than they had entered. He had to look upward to avoid the rocks, fragments of blast doors, and mangled soldiers sucked into the void. Some of them were probably alive, knocked unconscious by the blasts.
He wanted to pass the bulk of the fighters, but the further he descended, the rain of debris became thicker and faster. Surely he was now close to the center of the city because the entryways were
large and bright. And here most of the soldiers were amassed.
“Where’s your weapon?” a threatening voice barked in his helmet.
He turned around, surprised, to find the owner of the voice. A soldier was falling nearby, followed by another one. No doubt they believed him a deserter, their lenses pointed at his chest, ready to shoot.
“What’s your unit?” the angry soldier shouted again.
Gill had no idea what to say. He shook his head while he thought of something to buy more time before they figured out he wasn’t one of them. Slowly, as if by accident, he started to slide closer to the nearest wall.
Driven by inspiration, he made a sign that his holophone was broken.
“Can you hear me? Come with us to sector 19!” the soldier ordered. “Switch on the backup transmitter!”
“I’ll hook him to my holophone,” said his companion.
Holding a cable pulled out of his exoskeleton, he approached Gill.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Gill muttered between his teeth.
“What did you s—” the first soldier began, surprised, but he didn’t have time to end his sentence because both of them had reached the grid distortion that Gill had placed in their way.
They found themselves near the wall, above a transparent elevator parked on a broken track. Due to their tremendous haste, they punched through the roof and scattered in pieces on its floor.
The war remained somewhere above Gill’s tail, and the time had come to sneak into the city—hopefully, before his luck ran out, as he had no way to avoid the debris coming faster and faster from above. But there was the small problem of getting through the closed gates…
A shiver froze his head spikes. Some agents falling into the crevice were screaming with un-Antyran voices in their holophones while their suits were ripped to pieces by infernal machines. He glanced at a dead body on a terrace, its helmet punched in three places. One of these bizarre weapons was still squirming under the visor… some sort of artificial licant?