by Richard Fox
Roland pulled up his HUD, but the only thing he could access was the drop ship’s telemetry. They were still on course to a narrow isthmus. He activated an IR receiver on one side of his helm, hoping it would tap into stray data going to Lady Ibarra.
“Stop it,” Nicodemus said over a two-way channel.
Roland shut off the receiver. Nicodemus, his assigned partner for the mission, was a few yards away from him, his Armor still as a statue, his gaze locked on the ship’s ramp.
“Why are we going in blind?” Roland asked. “The Legion set down half an hour ago, but we’ve got nothing from them…this isn’t how we operate.”
“You’d rather ride a torp into the dirt?”
“If it means going in with my eyes open, then yes. Load me into a torp.”
“This isn’t an assault, Roland. This is a deliberate operation with tens of thousands of troops and a logistics train from the fleet to the excavation site. Slow and purposeful,” Nicodemus said.
“But why no—”
“We are the Lady’s Armor. Our only concern is her immediate safety, not the location of the other lances or where the Legion’s set up.”
“How can we protect her if we don’t know what’s happening down there?” Roland asked. “What if the Qa’resh left behind defenses or—or the Terrans beat us here and—”
“Don’t tempt fate. Lady Ibarra’s in contact with the landing party through quantum dots. If there’s something we need to know, she’ll tell us,” the older armor soldier said.
“Will she?” Roland asked, regretting the words as soon as he said them.
Nicodemus half-turned around, his helm’s optics on Roland. “Why were we chosen for this honor, Roland? Of all the lances in the Nation, why are we—Martel’s own Templar—to accompany the Lady?”
Roland bit his lip, unsure what answer to give. Should he tell Nicodemus of his doubts about Stacey now? The thought almost sickened him. That she could be monitoring this conversation was a possibility, armor-to-armor, tight-beam IR or not.
“She’s…giving us a chance to redeem ourselves,” Roland said. “After we failed to bring back the Aeon from Ouranos.”
“We cannot let her down again. We cannot.” Nicodemus turned back to the ramp.
“Forgive me, sir.”
Nicodemus raised a hand slightly, then let it settle back against his side.
“Brace for landing,” came from the pilot.
Roland looked out a porthole. There was nothing but an abyss of tan cloud cover and a darker band of the world’s sea on the horizon.
“Lock and load,” Colonel Martel said.
Roland cycled gauss shells into the twin-barreled cannon mounted on one forearm. An ammo belt connected to the rotary cannon as it hinged up from his back and snapped next to his helm. The barrels spun with a quick function test. He put one hand to the grip of his Gustav rifle mag-locked to his armor, but he didn’t run a charge through the vanes of his rail gun. The strong magnetic fields would wreak havoc on the lander’s systems.
“Most of us were Iron Dragoons…once,” Morrigan said. “If the good colonel would allow us a slight indulgence? An old lance tradition?”
“The chant is older than Gideon’s command,” Martel said. “It fits.”
“I am Armor,” Morrigan said.
“I am fury,” Nicodemus intoned.
“I…” Roland struggled to get the words out, thinking of Aignar, Cha’ril, and even Gideon fighting the Kesaht at that very moment. “I will not fail.”
Thrusters boomed from the lander and deceleration tugged at Roland within his womb. His feet pressed against the inner wall for a split second before the ship landed hard. The ramp fell open with a clang, and Nicodemus and Morrigan were the first out.
Roland stomped out and into a thick, desert-colored fog. He unsnapped the Mauser and held the barrels with his other hand as he took up his assigned position to the right of the ramp. He made out shadows of nearby structures: short pyramids with a small dome in place of the upper half and a mountain in the distance.
“Going to infrared,” Roland said, anticipating that the optics switch would let him see farther. Instead, the new feed was a wash of red and static.
“What the hell?” Morrigan asked.
“UV’s no good either,” Martel said. “Stay with your standard optics.”
Roland went back to spectrum visible to the naked eye. The surroundings were a soup of fog and muted sound, like they were in a snowfield. He heard Lady Ibarra and her entourage making their way down the ramp and a brief conversation between her and her bodyguards.
Shadows moved in the distance.
“Contact.” Roland spun up his rotary cannon and aimed his Mauser.
“Now, now,” Stacey said as she walked up beside Roland. She stood slightly taller than his knee servo.
Roland took a step in front of her, shielding her as the shadows materialized into humanoid shapes.
“Ferrum!” came from the fog.
“Corde,” Roland replied and shut down the rotary cannon and lifted the barrel of his Mauser. He’d wondered why the operation order included an old-fashioned spoken challenge and password. Now the instructions made perfect sense.
Marshal Davoust, his power armor’s faceplate bearing a red Templar cross and five stars, came out of the fog, heavily armed legionnaires following him. The marshal didn’t salute Stacey as he approached—spotlighting senior leadership in a potentially hostile environment was a dangerous move—but gave her a quick nod.
“My Lady.” He removed his helmet, revealing a bald pate streaked with sweat. “We’ve established a perimeter around the Ark. There’s some sort of mineral in the fog that’s attenuating our IR comms more than we can compensate for. We’re still radio silent. All contact is through quantum dot.”
“And the structures?” Stacey asked.
“No activity from them or the pyramids in orbit.” Davoust swallowed hard. “But…but there’s something you need to see, my Lady.”
“Have our scouts found the entrance to the Ark?” She looked toward the mountain peak looming in the distance.
“Still searching,” Davoust said. “Drone range is limited, but they’ve cleared over half the outer hull. The lower edge is covered in the…I don’t know how to explain it. Follow me, please.”
Stacey flicked her fingers back the way Davoust came.
“Perimeter,” Martel said over the lance’s channel, his voice tinged with static in the close range.
Roland went into the fog, stopping a few yards to one side of Stacey and Davoust as they spoke to each other in Basque. He kept a slow pace to match the shorter legs of the un-armored party.
“Comms range is garbage,” Morrigan said. “You go too far into this soup and you’ll have to send up a flare for anyone to find you again.”
Roland thought back to the ocean of Ouranos, where he’d had to throw Marc Ibarra out of the shallow depths to find their way to Trinia’s island. He smirked, remembering just how much the older Ibarra had complained about the maneuver.
Davoust led them to a building, one of the squat pyramids with a dome in the place of the upper half. The walls were covered in what looked like thick vines, each the width of a man’s arm. The vines, all a dirty-metal color glinting from within, crept out of the packed earth and up the sides, reaching a few feet over the top onto the alabaster material of the roof.
Roland switched between his optic filters as he examined the vines, but they appeared dormant.
Stacey held up a hand and one of her bodyguards gave her a leather pouch. She removed what looked like a flint and it glowed to life and floated around her hand. She waved her palm over the vines and an afterglow emanated along the path.
“It’s…not Qa’resh,” Stacey said. “Not exactly. I can feel something there…”
The crunch of boots against sand sounded through the fog. Roland brought his rotary cannon online and turned toward the noise.
A half dozen legionn
aires came out of the fog, gauss rifles in hand and dirt clinging to their legs. An officer went to Stacey and Davoust and a brief conversation followed.
“Track up,” Martel said through the lance channel. “Crunchies found something Lady Ibarra wants to see in person.”
Roland sent a mental pulse through his umbilical, and armored panels snapped to the outside of his legs and treads shifted out with the whirl of gears. His hip gyros extended and his upper body shifted back as his legs went flat to the ground. His treads bit into the dirt and the legionnaire officer climbed onto him.
“Secure,” he said, and Roland thought he recognized the voice. “Head north. Fifteen degrees.”
“What am I looking for?” Roland drove forward, the sensation of moving on his treads sending a prickle through his legs. Armor used their travel configuration when speed was of the essence, but the dust the tracks kicked up could give away their position to a watching enemy.
“You’ll know….you’ll know it when you see it.” The officer gripped the rail-gun housing on Roland’s back with one hand and then crossed himself.
Roland continued past more of the structures, all with the same vines gripping their base and walls.
“You sound…are you the same Union Armor I ran into on Oricon?” the officer asked.
“Major Aiza?” Roland asked.
“That’s me. Glad I didn’t have my men drill you with anti-armor grenades,” Aiza said. “Nice having you with us. Worst ride’s better than the best walk, yeah?”
“Union and the Nation should never have been at each other’s throats,” Roland said. “The Kesaht threat is reason enough for us all to be on one side.”
“Yeah, you used to be Union. Why don’t the dogs on Earth get that?”
Roland thought to Gideon, a soldier determined to kill aliens on the field of battle with the fury and determination of legend. Why his old lance commander had been so incensed and ready to kill Nicodemus and Roland when the two crossed blades on Nunavik had grated against Roland’s mind for weeks.
“Hatred runs too deep for some,” Roland said. “They see us as traitors.”
“Or abominations.” Aiza shifted uncomfortably. “Terrans get any of us procedurals born after that damn Hale Treaty…it’s a death sentence. Who kills someone just because of how God brought them into the world?”
“You still wonder why the Union’s against us?” Roland asked.
“Not hard to see why. But you left them.”
“I did.” Roland tried to zoom in on new shapes wavering in the fog. “Templar fight for all of humanity. The Union…the Union turned away from that. What’s that in the distance? Looks like…Xs?”
“That’s it. Slow down,” Aiza said, hopping off before Roland came to a stop. The lance transformed back into their walker configuration.
Stacey waltzed past Roland and rapped her knuckles against his leg. He followed, Gustav in hand and rotary cannon sweeping from side to side.
She made her way up to one of the X shapes, each nearly ten feet tall and made out of a dark rock that looked like basalt. It was embedded in the ground, and a single strand of the same vines wrapped around the end of each segment. More of the Xs spread out into the fog, all spaced too far apart to be much of a defensive measure.
A breeze picked up and a bit of cloth flapped around the other side of the X.
Roland stomped ahead of Stacey.
A corpse was tied to the X. Humanoid, but far larger than the average man. A tattered, decayed robe hung from the body, the flesh the same dirty-metal color as the vines. Its head hung low from the shoulders.
“My, my. This is like a crux decussata. Romans had more than one cross for crucifixion…” Stacey went to the foot of the X and looked up at the corpse’s face, hidden from Roland’s view. “It’s not flesh, is it?”
“It reads the same as the vines. Inert. Inorganic. Could it be a statue?” Roland looked back at the other Xs and made out more bodies attached to each one.
“If this is a statue,” Stacey said, leaning close to the foot bound against the cross, “it would put da Vinci to shame.” She looked up at the face and froze, then backed away, her hands slapping at pouches on her belt.
“What’s wrong?” Roland stepped between her and the body.
“Anthalas,” she said. “This is just like Anthalas. Look at the face. Look at it!”
“My Lady, are you—”
“Look!”
Roland touched the side of the corpse’s head and it wobbled slightly. Placing a finger just beneath the chin, he raised it slowly. Empty eye sockets stared into Roland’s optics. The face was contorted, frozen in a moment of pain and terror, lips curled back over teeth. Roland could have sworn he heard a rasp escape the open mouth.
Sparks of light flashed in the sockets.
Roland snapped his hand back and the head swung down, tearing loose from the neck and crumpling against the ground in a cloud of dust.
“They’re all different,” Major Aiza said. “Every one of the X crosses has a body. Seem to be the same species.”
“This…this was to be expected,” Stacey said. Even with her expressionless face, Roland could feel the fear behind her doll eyes. “This place would have his touch.”
“Who, my Lady?” Davoust asked.
“Malal,” she said. “It could only be him. He…no. To the Ark. To what we came for.”
****
The Ark formed as Nekara’s sun burned away the fog. The ship had no symmetry that Roland could make out. The pearlescent hull soared into the sky, ending in sharp points and ridges, like a great conch left behind as a memento of an extinct ocean.
The air settled as the armor and Stacey’s entourage approached. Roland couldn’t hear the waves from the nearby ocean or noise from the defense perimeter the legionnaires built around the Ark just fifty yards away.
A chill breeze wafted over the Ibarrans, cold enough that the bodyguards adjusted their armor against the sudden change.
Roland craned his helm up, trying to find the apex of the Ark in the low clouds.
“It’s bigger than anything in our fleet,” Marshal Davoust said. “Bigger than even the Vishrakath’s asteroid ships. How we’ll ever get it off world will be a—”
“This ship came here of its own power,” Stacey said. “It will leave the same way.”
Davoust put a hand to the side of his helmet.
“There’s an entrance three hundred meters to the east,” he said. “Along with some…artifacts.”
“Keep moving,” Stacey said.
Roland looked back to the field of crucifixions. His optics counted thousands, and from what he’d overheard between Davoust and Stacey, the entire Ark was surrounded by more.
Millions more.
The lower hull of the Ark was covered by vines that reached several stories up the hull. The vines clung to the milky-white metal, the same material he’d seen on the Oricon station—where he’d been captured by Nicodemus—and the Qa’resh research station on the dead planet Nunavik.
Rudimentary patterns appeared in the vines as they moved closer to the entrance. They were twisted into rows of what Roland first thought were lines of music. The image shifted to a humanoid shape in a simple robe, staring at the sky. The alien had narrow, almost fey features with sharp ears and tiny bone protrusions at the chin.
“I’ve seen this kind of art before,” Roland said. “Trinia’s people, the Aeon; they had carvings like this.”
“These were not Aeon,” Stacey said. “They were victims of a different form of extinction. The Aeon died to hope, died to their own hubris. These people…were slaughtered.”
“Not mass suicide?” Nicodemus asked. “There are aliens that chose to extinguish themselves before the Xaros armadas got to their planets.”
Stacey stopped at a mural, one depicting a throng of the same aliens around the Ark. A lone figure hung over them, arms outstretched and rays of light emanating from its body.
“What do
you know of the Qa’resh?” Stacey asked.
Morrigan glanced at Roland, then tilted her head toward Stacey.
“They saved us from the Xaros,” Roland said. “Sent the probe that contacted…contacted Earth and helped us retake the planet.” Roland was careful not to mention Marc Ibarra.
“True. They set up Bastion and helped us win the Ember War,” Stacey said, “but there’s more to them than that. Much more. A truth they didn’t share with the galaxy as they posed as the savior of all intelligent life against the Xaros threat.
“They were an ancient civilization. One that flourished and took control of the Milky Way many…many years ago. They had wormhole jump drives to cross the stars, technology millennia ahead of where we are today…but they had a problem. One that vexes us—well, most of us—the same as it did the Qa’resh.”
She looked down at her metal hands and continued.
“They died. No matter what they learned, the technology they possessed, they still died. And for those as powerful as the Qa’resh…this was a problem they could not abide. They did not believe in an afterlife. They wanted immortality that they could grasp and control. So they set out for a solution. And after a time, one of their number found a solution.”
“The one called Malal?” Roland asked.
“Indeed. He discovered that sentient minds—minds with imagination…soul—could tap into an energy within the quantum fabric of the universe. The ability to conceive of a future, make decisions that affected the quantum state of—I can only explain it in Qa’resh mathematics. Suffice it to say that a living, intelligent mind possessed an iota of power to reshape reality. And Malal learned how to harvest that energy.”
“Harvest?” Nicodemus looked back to the crucifixions.