by George Tome
How did the townsfolk build such devices under the eyes of the Shindam’s officials and Baila’s agents? Well, the Antyran government never stuck its tail in the deep tunnels, which hid all sorts of rumored secrets, like the distilleries of forbidden aromas. And after all, the Ropolitans had the brightest minds of the Antyran civilization on their side, the architects of the artificial intelligences.
As he began to think seriously about turning back to search for a broken door, he saw a black gap opened among the bluish veins. The gate was missing! Had it been blown away by the soldiers? He had no idea, but since there was no one nearby, it seemed a good place to try his luck. He stopped his fall and landed on the edge of the entrance.
The gallery in front of him didn’t seem as dark as he expected, being lit by a row of jelly patches glued at regular intervals along the wall. He realized with surprise that they were not simple lights but exploding charges left behind by the temple soldiers.
The laser sensor of the first bomb scanned his holophone as he walked nearby and turned off without exploding. Surely a rebel wouldn’t be so lucky if he ventured in the area.
Gill had walked more than a hundred yards inside the gallery when cries of horror suddenly burst through his holophone, followed by several short laser pulses that lit up the depths of the tunnel. He had no way to find out what was happening, but Gill didn’t need much imagination to understand that the soldiers in front of him had a problem. He stopped, undecided if he should run back or keep his ground. Instinctively, he steadied his feet, waiting for another decompression shock, but it didn’t come. Instead, from somewhere deep in the tunnel, the pulsing patches turned off their eyes, one after another.
Gill had no doubt that the darkness that was coming quickly toward him had killed the initiates. He set his helmet to the infrared spectrum, hoping to see the cause of this unexplained phenomenon. And then he saw it: a swarm of metal licants! After a few moments, the flying projectiles detected him and rushed to punch his visor.
Panic stricken, he pulled the space in front of him. The metal licants entered the distortion and found themselves thrown thirty feet backward. They kept advancing, but they fell again and again in the same loop, unable to touch Gill, who was struggling hard to make sure no uninvited creature evaded his net.
The things didn’t insist for long. All of them stopped at once, turned back, and disappeared into the darkness.
Gill didn’t know what to make of this. Maybe there was an operator beyond their little eyes who had noticed his small un-Antyran maneuver? The bracelet could be a terrific weapon in anyone’s hands, and he didn’t want to spill its secrets…
He tried a few hesitating steps forward, ready for the next attack, but it never came.
When he reached the place where he saw the explosions, he found several black bodies coiled on the floor, their spacesuits torn apart by the sinister swarm. Some of them still had hungry metal licants inside of them, throbbing with excitement while ripping the tender meat. Fortunately, the devices appeared to be too passionate about what they were doing to attack him. Or maybe they had their orders.
After another mile through the gallery, he found that it ended in a compact wall. Since he couldn’t find any trace of a secondary tunnel or even a hole, no matter how small, he couldn’t understand its purpose—a fake entry, a trap?
He turned back, chagrined at the thought of having to come up with a new plan, but then he froze. To his great surprise, the way back looked nothing like the way he had come from! The side walls were gone; in fact, they had been sophisticated holograms. Mirages on top of mirages, mirrors everywhere—no wonder the attackers ended up decimated!
He was at a crossroads of at least six major galleries. Less than thirty feet away, he saw a group of rebel fighters armed to the gills. He stretched his arms to show them he was disarmed, and shouted through the holophone, “Don’t shoot! I surrender!”
He was fully aware that his life hung by the tip of the tail, and yet he felt no trace of fear; his metamorphosis into a Sigian soldier had become almost complete. He waited, tense as a spring, ready to jump into a distortion at the smallest sign that someone would aim a laser lens toward him. But the townsfolk didn’t make any hostile gestures in his direction. On the contrary, he had the feeling they were waiting for him.
Now he had no doubt that his little confrontation in the tunnel hadn’t passed unnoticed; otherwise, why would they lift the veil of camouflage that hid their secrets?
Just when he opened his mouth to greet them, he closed it again because he saw their eyes through the transparent visors—and they were shut!
After watching them closely, he noticed a row of transparent suction cups on their head spikes, with plastic wires going to their backs. They were connected to the virtual reality! Surely not asleep but in some sort of deep trance. How it was possible to keep their eyes closed but still see and move as if they were awake? Could they have holoscanners connected to their kyis? And above all, who was handling their bodies? Could it be that their consciousness was sheltered in a parallel reality, or did they have other masters hidden in the dark tunnels?
Gill began to understand Baila’s hurry to wipe them out. The architects created abominations damned from the first pages on the Book of Creation Inrumiral, Antyrans perhaps missing their kyis or perhaps missing their own lives… They had broken all written and unwritten barriers, spoken or unspoken pledges… They mocked Zhan. If they were left unchecked, who knew what else they would defile?
The group stepped out of his way, letting him go. Without a word, one of them pointed a finger to a narrow tunnel.
Soon, he reached another closed door. As he approached to search for a console, it opened widely. Without hesitation, he moved past another group of trance warriors that was about to exit. He went through another door some fifty yards away, which opened into an oval enclosure before locking behind him.
After several moments, the green light on his forearm alerted him that breathable air was being pumped into the room. He approached a gate made of thick silvery steel, which, to his satisfaction, opened automatically. Behind it was the city of Ropolis!
The second stage of expansion, he thought. He walked into a giant cavern, very tall and narrow, split at the middle by a horizontal platform. The walls were dark yellow, like most of the crevice, and on the left side, they were traversed by an incredibly shiny silver vein. A purple rock slab about a hundred yards tall rose from the floor, close to the right wall of the cavern.
The artificial floor of the city was opaque and black, yet the streets were cast in transparent ceramic. They meandered in all directions, leading to countless other tunnels opened in the huge walls. If he looked down, he could see the natural bottom of the gallery four hundred yards below, covered in mounds of rock detritus of all sizes and shapes, piled during the eons.
On his left, the platform ended in a gentle slope cut by artificial terraces. Several blue or orange domes were scattered on them. At the end of this small hill, the wall climbed vertically for about a thousand feet, joining the right wall in a pointy archway. The alley on which he stepped was bordered by identical orange domes, probably the homes of the miners.
The street was patrolled by several Antyrans in trance.
“Don’t shoot! I surrender!” Gill shouted through the speaker, his arms stretched out horizontally, according to the war customs.
“Who are you?” a voice asked through his holophone—strangely, he couldn’t see any soldiers moving their lips.
He grabbed his helmet and slowly took it off his head.
“I’m Gillabrian,” he said simply.
CHAPTER 10.
Many stories were told in a whisper, with feigned disgust and sometimes a dash of envy, about the mining city. It was rumored that deadly secrets lay hidden in the deepest tunnels, secrets that the Antyrans outlawed by the Shindam’s cowardice or hunted down by the temples’ assassins were trying to keep buried as far as possible from the prying
eyes of both sides; that things had spun out of control and that terrible abominations were being cooked in the printers buried inside the caverns. Of course, most of them were exaggerations born from the overactive imaginations of some gullible Antyrans who believed that any fantasy was possible and loved to wrinkle their spikes for a good night story. Yet, some of the rumors might just have been true, because if under the dome at the surface there was some pretense of an administration, deep underground, the reality didn’t follow any official master plan.
According to the legends, the cursed city—as Baila had called it sixteen years ago—was hiding the bixanid62 players. Whoever smelled the bixan seeds was expelled from his or her shell right in the sublime trance of the virtual realms. How the realms looked, how the bixanids played the games populated with artificial intelligences weirder than the most fertile imagination could have conceived, the Antyrans outside Ropolis could only assume. Few Antyrans were allowed to reach the deepest underground levels, and the ones who already lived there never came out to tell.
No doubt the archivists were loathed by the temples because they dared to shake off the dust from a past they wanted forgotten. But if the archivists were hated, the architects had passed this stage when they started to flirt with the idea of creating artificial intelligences to work for them. Promptly, the prophet decreed that the suggestion was “the ultimate heresy.” Zhan, and only Zhan, had the right to give life from stardust mixed with teardrops seeped from his temple. And yet, some architects worked on it, and the punishment for their transgressions had to be death. Hence, their exodus on Ropolis began.
In the last decades, the city had become the center of heretical research, and many fugitives running from the Zhan’s Children assassins found a safe haven in the dark tunnels of the crevice. Even the black triangle in the main square didn’t frighten anyone; in fact, it did little more than show Baila’s impotence to reach the underground levels, where he actually wanted it installed.
Therefore, the best-kept secret of the city, the deepest hidden, was this one. It was known with certainty that the town was the hideout of the AI creators, but no one knew for sure where to find them. The Shindam’s orders came on secret channels, and the AI crystals were delivered in like manner—most of the time, cleverly slipped out in the ore freighters. The acronte Regisulben, although officially angry that he had lost control of the mines, closed his nostrils and worked with the architects on their terms, knowing all too well that this was the only sensible method to keep them alive, far from Baila’s long claws.
But the Shindam had ceased to exist. The wall between the architects and Baila’s blind fury disappeared, and the prophet took over the council’s most terrible weapons.
Baila wasn’t excessively concerned by the wild rumors about the domes for group mating, nor the four healing platforms for sex switches and banned transplants alleged to exist at level 9. But the architects had to be annihilated before they did more harm. They were the ones hunted by Baila’s massive attack against the world, and that was why his army’s mission was to gouge Ropolis out of the planet’s crust.
Several hours passed since Gill had burst into the underground, and the battle was heating up. A dozen dazzling explosions reverberated strongly into the cavern, followed by the muffled rumblings of collapsing rocks. After each blast, violent trepidations stung him through the boots, and the air became hazy due to the dust raised from the cracks in the walls. The air turbines were powered to full speed while the Antyrans disappeared inside the domes, protected by their own filters. The problem, as Gill knew all too well, was that the planet’s dust was unlike any other one: on Ropolis, the dust killed. The blame lay, of course, in the lack of an atmosphere. If on the other planets the wind and especially the water polished the tiny particles, on Antyra III, that didn’t happen. The specks of dust were little more than toxic needles, their edges sharper than a sarpan, and they had the interesting habit of sticking to any surface, destroying the joints of various installations with amazing ease. If someone were to breathe them, the unfortunate victim could expect a slow and excruciating death. That was why the floors and walls of the inhabited caverns were microwaved to vitrify them. But the shockwaves opened deep cracks in the walls, releasing the dust and raising a deadly fog over the domes.
A loud noise approached from the left wall before gradually spreading upward and to Gill’s right, until he was surrounded. The sound of the battle resembled the heavy breathing of a monstrous guval lurking in the caverns. The beast had undoubtedly smelled the hole where he lay hidden, but it deliberately prolonged the waiting to torment him, to play with him without haste, to circle him, knowing he had no way of escaping this time…
When he jumped into the Blue Crevice, he didn’t hear anything due to the lack of an atmosphere. Here, on the other tail, the noises were carried through the stone strongly amplified. And the agonizing wait, the uncertainty, was driving him out of his smell. He would have preferred to be outside in the middle of the fight than helplessly waiting for the battle to reach him.
After a painfully long wait, the blasts started to wind down; they were fewer and far between, farther and farther away… Then, as if by magic, they stopped altogether. Gill was expecting to see Baila’s soldiers roaming the streets, but surprisingly, they failed to show up. Was the defense of the city so fierce that the rebels fought off the attackers? He could only hope to find out soon.
The trance fighters had brought him into a rudimentary orange bedroom consisting of a stone floor on which half a dozen nests were scattered in total disarray. Their synthetic fluff was colored in strident shades and, judging by the smell, unchanged for a long time. He was hoping to be treated well, although two of them were guarding the entrance—he doubted that they were there only for his protection. Most certainly, they had the mission to prevent him from roaming freely through Ropolis, at least till he had a chance to meet the architects.
An unnatural cold trickled into his body, reminding him of the old stories about the ten merchants who became lost on a stormy night while crossing the Ricopa Glacier, one by one lured to their death by Dedris’s malefic aromas. He was alive, with the bracelet on his arm, but the rebels knew. They already knew too much, first from the holofluxes, where Baila streamed desperate calls for his capture—unprecedented in all of Antyra’s history—then from his little playing with the metal licants.
All the smells were leading to the artifact, but he couldn’t tell the truth and hand over the fate of Sigia on the tails of some strangers. He would have to meet the architects to smell if he could trust them, to find if they were going to help him hide from Baila’s revenge without asking too many questions, to see if they were going to be allies or enemies.
The door opened suddenly, and two rebel soldiers in trance appeared at the doorstep, armed with laser lenses. The air in the cavern had become clear again, so they could go out safely even without a spacesuit helmet.
“Follow me,” the same voice told him on the holophone; again, he didn’t see any soldiers moving their lips.
“What happened with the attack?” he asked them.
No one answered his question.
“Were they repulsed?” he made another vain attempt to start a discussion.
“Follow me,” the voice repeated in the same neutral tone.
A four-seat, driverless magneto-jet steered by an artificial intelligence was waiting for them near the dome. They started off quickly, Gill sitting in a front seat and the two silent guards in the rear seats. The cockpit was transparent, so he could see the landscape in all directions, which was a very nice thing in case he might be forced to flee again. They turned toward the left wall of the cavern on a gentle slope between the domes. The road led to an irregular opening at the edge of a small plateau above the buildings.
As soon as they drove into the gallery, Gill felt he had stepped into the magical realm of Melchida the Greedy: they were inside a geode greater than imagination could conceive, its gray walls
covered in large purple crystals, magically shining in the lights of their jet. Unfortunately, his unconscious companions—so accustomed to the riches of the mining planet—didn’t let him gaze at the crystal wonders around them. A small magnetic platform hurried up with a twitch, changing the direction several times to follow the meanders of the geode. Sometimes the walls were so close they almost touched their jet.
When they reached the end of the formation, they found another small crevice leading to a wide, twisted gallery dug into a dark green conglomerate, without crystals. From place to place, other magnetic elevators or tunnels opened on its sides. The floor was covered in a thick layer of mining dust, patched here and there by black hydrocarbon blobs. In several places, Gill could see streaks and circular marks left by some heavy containers dragged to the platforms. The deeper ones had stirred a snowlike salt.
Near the largest exit, the gallery was horribly torn on the right side of their path. They could barely squeeze around the hole, yet the magnetic field was still working. Something big had fallen through an elevator shaft and smashed the massive rock wall like a shell, biting the tunnel’s floor. Through this hole, they could gaze at the inhabited cavern they just left. Gill could see the mangled debris of some metal containers holding blue lumps of ore scattered around several destroyed domes, close to the road they had just followed into the geode. He couldn’t understand how the cavern remained pressurized if the temple soldiers reached so close to it, but undoubtedly, the architects had installed several safety measures to guard the precious atmosphere of the underground city from the insatiable hunger of the vacuum.
After they passed the crash site, the road continued with ups and downs through various shafts and deep caverns. Although the caves were huge at first, they slowly became smaller and darker. The last ones were little more than small uninhabited holes linked by artificial corridors. Finally, the jet reached a glass elevator and began to descend vertically for several miles.