“The glasses started transmitting… I know, they interact with local networks, but this was different. They’re still doing it. I think whatever Styx loaded onto them when she sent me the coordinates are working as some kind of code, talking to these local systems, opening doors.”
“Well she’s drysine,” said Erik. “The temple is Tahrae, they worshipped the drysines.”
“Used drysine technology to build it,” Trace added meaningfully. “So of course Styx can talk to it.”
“Think she uploaded that onto your glasses on purpose?” Erik asked. “Without telling you?”
“Wouldn’t care if she did,” Trace admitted. “In fact I’ll give her a fucking kiss when I get back.”
Private Krishnan stifled a laugh. “I’m sure she’ll love that, Major.”
The corridor was much like the ones in Doma Strana — black and smooth, but without any functioning light, and no side doorways that Erik could see. “You think there’s some kind of central computer system?” Erik wondered. “Still functioning after all this time?”
“It’s not impossible,” Trace admitted. “But the door functions could be just isolated. Doma Strana piped sunlight in from outside, the power requirements aren’t big, if they used solar recharge they’d keep running indefinitely.”
“Definitely some kinda breeze in here,” Krishnan observed, smelling the air. “I guess it’s so windy, they could just have small openings, like ventilation. Wouldn’t take any power.”
“Sure as hell no heating,” said Erik, flexing his aching shoulder. It was a relief to be out of the wind, but still the temperature was below freezing, their breath pluming before them. “So we’re thinking this place is… twenty six thousand years old?”
“Built about the same time as Doma Strana,” Trace agreed, leading them left up an oddly-shaped, but perfectly regular, spiralling staircase. “Not hard to build without anyone noticing you’re building it, using drysine cutting tools and taking centuries to do it. Whatever plan was behind this place, it was long-term.”
“A plan for what?” Krishnan murmured, looking nervous that the Major was leading up the staircase with her weapon still slung. Trace seemed certain this temple was deserted.
“My guess?” said Trace. “Secrets.”
They emerged into a high-ceilinged room, lit by a single beam of white light from a small, high window. That beam of cold sunlight made a diagonal white stripe across the smooth black stone. It added to other white, diagonal stripes within the stone itself — white marble of some kind, Erik thought. The natural striations within the mountain, polished and incorporated into this chamber’s design, like white stripes on a black tiger. The effect was surreal, and austerely beautiful.
“Here,” said Trace, stepping on silent, bare feet into the middle of the chamber, pulling off the cap and stowing it in a pocket to clear her vision completely. “The glasses are showing me icons. There’s low intensity communication happening between them and the chamber… over here it’s showing me a planet.” She pointed at one featureless wall. “And over here another planet.” Pointing another way. “There’s some kind of script… it doesn’t look like the main parren stuff, it could be Klyran, I don’t recognise it.”
The ceiling above made a high dome. Erik thought it looked like photographs he’d seen of very old Christian churches from Earth.
“Were there any other passages the way you came down?” Erik asked, searching for any sign of a door. “Or other icons on your glasses, showing other ways to go? I mean it has to be larger than just this room and some vertical levels and stairways, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” said Trace, looking around in wonderment. Their voices echoed beneath the cold, silent stone. “Unless we’re missing something right here. Private, hand me my boots.”
Krishnan did that, and she prepared one for her foot while wandering to a new wall… and something hissed. Then a section of wall began to move. “Cover!” Trace demanded, moving back to another wall and unslinging her rifle fast, while Krishnan did the same against the opposite wall, and Erik pulled his service pistol.
There followed a hush of stale-smelling air, not quite a breeze, just a movement, a breath upon the skin. The panel turned aside, on bearings that shuddered only a little with the wear of millennia. Then stopped, with a soft, final thud. Krishnan pulled small night-vision goggles from his pocket, but paused as faint lighting flickered down a passageway beyond, as though beckoning them in.
“Oh no way,” he breathed.
“Does it look clear to you?” Trace asked quietly, unable to see the whole way down from her position.
“Clear from here,” Krishnan replied.
“Same here,” Erik echoed. And Trace put her rifle carefully on the floor, and resumed pulling her boots on. “We’re going in?”
“You bet your ass we’re going in,” said Trace, with something approaching excitement.
Erik grinned, somehow finding her enthusiasm infectious. “Major, just a thought… I don’t know if you’ve played VR games at all?”
“Only training sims, you know that.”
“Well, in any of the games I used to play, back in another life when I had time for fun and games? We go in there, we’ll get attacked by ancient robots, booby traps and zombies before we’ve gone ten yards.”
“Well, you should be an expert then,” said Trace.
“Does that mean I get to take point?”
“Hell no,” Trace replied, finishing her other boot and taking up her rifle. “This one’s for the marines. You stay between us and back three steps. Private, left and right, real slow and careful.”
“Major,” Krishnan agreed, moving cautiously forward with rifle ready, peering down the corridor. Trace came up on his right, glancing back at Erik to judge his spacing, then nodding when Erik moved to the correct spot. Erik switched the pistol to his left hand, grimacing at a flash of pain in his shoulder.
“I’m serious about those booby traps,” Erik murmured, trying not to make an echo down the corridor. “These systems are still working after twenty six thousand years. That means they’re built not to age. They could have put anything into these walls.”
“They wouldn’t have opened the doors,” Trace said confidently. “They’d have locked us out, and booby trapped the waiting room. Too risky to booby trap the corridors. Things stop working after so much time, a wall or a locked door is the best defence, no moving parts to fail.” She gestured them forward.
“Maybe it just wants us inside to trap us here for the next twenty six thousand years,” Krishnan murmured, walking carefully, his rifle ready. “Maybe that’s the trap.”
“Could be,” Trace agreed. “But Styx has this location now, and our enemies do too. This place has officially been discovered. We have to take advantage of being the first inside.”
The corridor ended in a stairway, not far from the entrance, but invisible in the blackness until they were close. Trace and Krishnan climbed on either side, rifles ready, while Erik remained several steps behind and toward Trace’s side of the hallway.
Atop the stairs, the black stone opened into a tall, circular chamber, and Trace pocketed her glow-stick in favour of a wide-beam flashlight which she clipped to the side of her rifle. Krishnan did similar, panning wide to reveal inlaid patterns on the stone walls, and crumpled cloth about the perimeter of a circle on the floor.
Erik stared at the circle, creeping forward as the two marines made a circuit of the walls. The floor circle was inlaid with gold, and contained a seven-pointed star and scrawling, alien script. At each point of the star lay crumpled cloth, black and folded, and appearing to contain… something. As he came closer, crouching to peer in the poor light, he saw that the contents of the cloth were bones, and the cloths themselves were dark parren cloaks of the kind worn by Aristan and his acolytes.
“Seven bodies,” he told the others quietly, and his voice echoed in that ancient hush. So many millennia since words had been spoken in this plac
e. Before each of the bodies lay a staff, also like Aristan had held. Erik reached and tried to pull one of them apart — traditional parren pole-arms were one-third blade beneath the deceptive sheath. But the sheath would not budge. “They’ve got their koren with them. They’re ceremonial weapons, so these guys would be acolytes of some kind. Tahrae, I imagine.”
“Ceremonial deaths,” Trace replied, sweeping her flashlight over them from a wall. “I don’t know what the seven-pointed star is. But there’s seven of them, and they’re entombed in here, so maybe a ritual suicide.”
“Guardians,” Krishnan murmured. “Sealed in to guard whatever’s here, forever. Maybe they just sat here meditating until they starved.”
“Quite possibly,” said Trace. “Sounds like the kind of thing Tahrae would do.”
Krishnan frowned, still circling. “This part of the wall here looks like a curtain.” As his light illuminated it properly for the first time. He crept toward it.
“Careful with those bodies,” Trace told Erik. “Plenty of cultures don’t like people interfering with the dead. If they’ll booby trap anything, it could be corpses.”
“I hear you,” said Erik. He gave up trying to remove a pole-arm sheath. Rusted tight, he thought. There was so little moisture in this air, yet still the blades had rusted, a fractional degree every thousand years. After so many thousands of years, there’d be nothing left. The lacquered wood shafts fared better, treated against moisture and bacteria, but even they looked dried and stale. Erik prodded gently at the inside of a paper-thin remnant of cloak sleeve, and a bone powdered at his touch, crumbling on the floor like sand.
“Whoa!” shouted Krishnan, leaping back from the curtain-section of wall he’d opened, as Erik fell flat and Trace braced herself for shooting. In the glare of flashlights, the swinging curtain revealed a familiar, single-red eye, fronting a big, armoured, spider-like body.
For a long, heart-pounding moment, the three humans stayed dead-still, braced for shooting as Krishnan’s echo faded from the walls. A while later, no one had died, and Erik’s heart began to recover. “Drysine drone,” he said, levering himself carefully off the floor with his good arm. His right shoulder throbbed once more, jarred in the fall to the floor. “Looks dead.”
Trace crept forward around the wall, then peered past the curtain at close range. “I don’t know if they’re capable of playing possum,” she murmured. “Drones aren’t that subtle.”
“It’s drysine,” Erik disagreed, pistol still pointed at the drone’s single eye. For whatever good it would do. “If any hacksaws could be subtle, drysines could.”
“Usually they make some kind of noise, just running,” Trace added, listening closely. “Even drysine powerplants aren’t advanced enough to be quiet. This one’s dead silent. I think he’s gone.”
“Could have gone into some kind of shutdown mode,” Krishnan disagreed. His voice was shaky, suggesting he’d received the worst fright. Abruptly face-to-face with a drysine drone, unarmored, was a death sentence if it was live and hostile. “And that signal from your glasses could be about to wake it up, Major.”
“That’s possible too,” Trace admitted. “I just don’t know how even one of these things could still be alive that long. There might be a power recharge here somewhere, but there’s no powerplant, only very light solar, far too weak to power this monster. The ones in Argitori were in good condition because they’d never gone into shutdown, they’d constantly repaired themselves. And the ones in the Tartarus were in total vacuum — no rust, no bacteria, no decay. This one’s been sealed into an atmosphere with at least a little moisture in it for twenty thousand years with no power. The steel’s too advanced to rust, but I’d say his insides are dead and rotting.”
It sounded obvious when put like that, with Trace’s usual calm logic. Krishnan took a deep breath, and lowered his rifle. “So why’s the drone here then?” He looked at the seven ancient bodies about the star on the floor, then back to the drone. “Guarding them? Making sure none of them changed their mind about suicide, tried to get out?”
“Maybe,” said Trace, moving past the curtain and into the small alcove with the dead machine, peering closely about at the walls. “Unless we find some kind of record, I’m not sure there’s any way to know.”
Erik peered more closely at something amidst the robes, and the powdered white bone of a collapsed skull. It looked like a blob of black rubber, withered with age, but when he touched it, it fell apart in microscopic strands, and faded to dust.
“This is cybernetic,” said Erik. “They had some kind of cybernetic uplink implants, hard to tell what they were, they’re so old. I’m no augment specialist, but it looks completely different from what we have.”
“The Tahrae worked hand-in-glove with the machines,” said Trace. “Makes sense they’d take augments from them too.”
“No way they’d trust just any parren with advanced network augments,” Erik murmured. “The drysines’ network technology was the biggest edge they had on organics. They’d only share with the most trustworthy. These guys were the elite, the ones the machines trusted.” He stared at the drone, crouched and thinking. “I think they ran here. They were losing the war, the Machine Age was ending, the drysines and Tahrae were both being slaughtered. Their own people had turned against them. Everything they’d known was about to become extinct.”
Trace nodded slowly, peering at a small hole in a wall. “Here’s something,” she said. “Looks like a lens.” She took off her AR glasses, and held them before the hole where the tiny projector could be directly in line. “Come on Styx, do your thing.”
Something flashed on her glasses, then a series of thin lasers beamed from the surrounding walls. Caught in their midst, Erik stared, then stood and moved back to a wall as the holography resolved into a humanoid figure. Resolution was limited, the holograph little more than a moving line drawing, in glowing blue light. It resolved even now into a parren face, rotating even now to face them… or to face Trace, Erik thought, as she occupied the location that had activated the hologram. The eyes were indigo, like most parren, wide and haunting. The hairless scalp was covered with a tight skullcap, and his collar was wide. Erik wondered how it was possible to read significance into clothing, given how many times fashions could change in twenty five thousand years.
The humans stared… and Erik realised that if there was sound, they were going to need translation. He fumbled for his pocket unit, a constant habit for a commander amongst aliens, and flipped it on just in time.
The parren began speaking, in strong alien vowels that echoed within the stone. But the translator gave only static. “Dammit, it doesn’t understand the tongue!” Erik exclaimed.
“Must be Klyran,” said Trace, putting her glasses back on and blinking on icons. “Come on Styx, don’t tell me you forgot to load a translator function…” And she nearly grinned in amazement, as Erik’s translator began speaking English. Erik spared an incredulous glance, and Trace nodded affirmation — Styx had indeed loaded a Klyran translator to the glasses, having only just figured out that language herself, and perhaps anticipating an encounter like this. Romki insisted that ‘genius’ was a completely inadequate term to describe what Styx was, and again, he seemed correct.
“…I do not know how to do more than doubt,” the translator intoned, without emotion. The parren’s voice held far more feeling than that. The alien words seemed tired, almost drained. “We stare at the abyss, and I see blackness. Blackness everywhere. I knew only to follow the path of hope and harmony. I never sought this conflict. I never sought this slaughter. I know that history will not know this of me. That my enemies will seek to erase all knowledge of who I am. Who I was.”
“Drakhil!” Erik breathed. “It’s Drakhil, it has to be!”
“To any who may find this, know only that I followed the path. I have many regrets, but no apologies. What I did, I did for the greater harmony. The harmony that lies beyond one’s people. Beyond one’s fait
h. Beyond one’s self. I was on the path, and together, the machines and I, we would have reached it. Perhaps in some distant time, far from now. But the path was laid, and it would have lain completed, in time. Given time.” A deep, holographic sigh. “But time was not granted. The coming of the great harmony has been delayed, perhaps forever. Or perhaps you, whomever you are who reach this, and hear this, can restore the path. It takes only a will. Unbending. Unbreaking. Forever.”
Those wide, alien eyes seemed to stare through stone. Erik took a quick glance at Trace, emerged from the alcove beside him, and found her mesmerised. “Such a heaven shall not be in my time. Nor shall the first stone on its path be laid by me. But perhaps, I think, by others. In time. The machines tell me that we have barely days until the end. Our bases fall, our fleets shrink. Our losses long ago became unsustainable. They will chase us until the ends of the universe. No one will hide us. Nowhere is safe. Everything that we are, that we were, is fated to die.
“But there is harmony in hope. There is harmony in continuations. In seeds, that planted deep, will one day grow in the rain. Know that I have planted seeds. Most cannot be found. Will not be found. The galaxy is vast, and the summer rains wash away all trails. This information cannot be granted to just anyone. Only the worthy can know.
“If you are listening to this message, then you, dear listener, are worthy. Follow the trail, as you have followed this one. For I have written a diary. Five copies I have made.” Drakhil raised five fingers, in case there was any doubt. “Their locations can be found in the data that follows. Be patient. Once found, the diaries reveal much else. Secrets, beyond imagining. Secrets to things that must now be destroyed, and fall to ruin, least they come into the hands of unworthy enemies. Resurrect them, you can. In the right hands, they could restore harmony to the Spiral, and set us all on the path to peace.”
Drakhil’s lips moved, in a faint, bloodless smile. “To be harmony is to accept one’s fate, and not complain. One’s fate is not one’s to choose. Know this, and across all this expanse of time and space, we shall be brothers, you and I.”
Kantovan Vault (The Spiral Wars Book 3) Page 9