“If it wasn’t ‘deactivated’ then, it probably is now,” I suggested, although this was only going to make him feel worse. Then something grim occurred to me.
“Actually, it could also turn out to be part of a giant war machine that we’ve just rudely awoken. It might try to destroy us now,” I continued. I’m not sure the miner believed me, and I didn’t really accept that theory myself, but stranger things have happened in hell. We stared at each other awkwardly.
“Well, I’d better get back down there and see what we have to do to keep drilling,” the miner said before returning to his post. My current theory was that the delay was the cult’s fault. First of all, if you put enough fanatical computer science worshipers inside Mount Amdahl (plus the residue from Hyperion’s mind), you’re eventually going to get a landscape of silicon and wire. The majority human-operated mining syndicates of Las Médulas would probably return to exploit this transformation once we’d cleaned house. If they knew what their thoughts would do to Mount Amdahl, who knows what they might convince themselves of in their bid for mineral wealth?
Fortunately, the drill passed through the robot carcass layer without issue. My attention to my studies was wavering due to the recent distractions, though, so I decided to take a walk and get back some of my sanity. In practice, I was confined to a radius of about 500 feet before one of Ulysses’ crew insisted that it would be dangerous for me to go further and tried to stop me. I wanted to protest, but much to my dismay, I had no reasonable objection, so after a few halfhearted laps, I gave up and returned to my laptop, did a couple dozen jumping jacks to burn off extra energy, and went back to hitting the books. I’d been reading for nearly half a minute when Haxabalatnar came over.
“Our next session’s in five minutes. You ready to join us?” he asked. I nodded, got up, and followed him. Maybe I shouldn’t have done the jumping jacks.
“I once thought you weren’t a martial arts teacher,” I said to Haxabalatnar as I walked him to a makeshift arena, where we would be joining about a dozen other people in my “cohort.”
“It turns out that you can learn how to teach,” he responded curtly. “You can’t teach someone how to learn, though.”
At least with this group, Haxabalatnar wouldn’t have to worry about unteachable subjects – he actually had the opposite problem. My cohort was full of crazy driven people (myself included) who had to be the best at everything they do, lest their souls collapse from the pressure. This meant many of the sparring matches devolved into bloodsport that Haxabalatnar had to break up before they turned into murders. Just my luck that I’d be placed with a bunch of tryhards; it’s a wonder they hadn’t broken any of my bones yet.
Someone else took the lead as I was practicing a throw, I heard a cracking noise, followed by someone shouting, “What the fuck? You just broke my nose!” I guess that when your nose breaks, the last thing you have on your mind is witty banter. We promptly followed it up with enough profanity to turn Mount Amdahl into a realm of blasphemy. I figured I should get out of the way. I can do CPR, but I can’t set a bone so that it heals properly, especially without medical equipment. After a few minutes, it was apparent we weren’t getting any more training done today, so I wandered back to my books and was actually surprised when Hax came over, looking dejected.
“We have a lot to learn,” he said glumly. It seemed about right.
And just like that, it was time for lunch. I smelled something rich and savory floating on the wind and heard a bell faintly tinkling. Who in their right mind rings a bell when food is ready? That’s positively Pavlovian. For all my kvetching, it worked. I took my place in line, picked up some roast meat I suspected had been carved from an unknown hellbeast (or perhaps just a longhorn cattle), added some locally sourced vegetables (Mount Amdahl has surprisingly good onions) for fiber and vitamins, and topped it off by recognizing the chef of the day.
“Charlotte! So good to see you. I hope you’re doing well?” it said, preempting my own attempts at a greeting. Looks like Aux’s service daemon was doing pretty well for itself.
“Aux’s death will soon be avenged,” I responded.
“I guess that’s pretty neat.” Not exactly what I was expecting to hear, but...on second thought, what sort of expectations should I have? My understanding is that daemons aren’t supposed to be truly sentient, though the difference between the daemons I can summon and the creations of titans is huge. Maybe I was reading into it too much. I stuffed food into my face for a bit and tried not to think too hard about it. In that, I failed.
“How did you manage to not vanish into nothingness when Aux died?” I asked the daemon, after finishing my meal, dumping my silverware for cleaning, and heading back into the queue.
“I try not to think about it,” the daemon told me. It just kept preparing food like I wasn’t there. Out of curiosity, I tried edging my hand closer and closer to where it was sautéing more vegetables.
“Please, don’t do that.” When I drew my hand back, it again kept preparing food like I wasn’t there. That only made things more ambiguous.
“Why not think about your existence?” I continued.
“Humans don’t automatically die when their parents do, right? I’d have to guess there’s some sort of hardware/software combination keeping me going. If Aux was smart, it might even be in my own body.”
That sounded like something a robot would say. In fact, running daemon code from a robot body seemed like a stroke of genius to me. All I had to do to take advantage of it was build a sufficiently advanced robot... Okay, maybe that was going to be more difficult than it initially appeared. I considered asking Aux’s service daemon to donate its body to science, but it seemed very unlikely that it’d be receptive to that course of action.
“Could you pass the collard greens, please?” someone asked behind me. I’d forgotten that I was inconveniencing other people. Still, I grudgingly handed the source of a voice their beloved vegetables. They smiled briefly at me, and then moved around my apparent position in the line. I extracted myself because I had more work to do.
The next few days almost blended into one another, but for the growing depth of the borehole. Every day, the miners hit an arbitrary meaningless milestone that wasn’t 100% completion. Occasionally, Hector called to tell me he’d intercepted some scouting cultists, or Haxabalatnar impressed some new and potentially useful fighting technique on me, but I finally achieved complete and utter boredom about at the 2/3rd mark.
“Charlotte, what’s with you? You’re not even trying anymore!” Hax shouted at me when he noticed my pace of activity slackening during one of the lessons. I hadn’t noticed, and my current sparring partner (a middle-aged woman named Margaret) hadn’t noticed, but apparently this sort of apathy does not pass by Haxabalatnar without comment.
“What’s the point? I’m just going to be shooting chthons in a bit,” I responded.
“Haven’t you said this before?”
“Yes, but this time I actually mean it. Make this worth my while, Hax.”
I just made Haxabalatnar facepalm.
“I mean, I could try to incorporate firearms training into this, but then everyone else here would kill each other! Too much pent up rage, not enough discipline-” he began, before realizing just a bit too late that badmouthing his students was not a particularly effective method of pedagogy.
“Hey, be nice! The rest of us pay good money for this,” Margaret said, looking poutier than even the one time I’d misjudged a strike and punched her in the face. She’d gotten me good in return for that.
“The way I see it, guns are inevitably going to jam or run out of ammo. You don’t want to be helpless just because you had a gun fail, right?” Hax suggested. He wasn’t paying attention to the drills anymore, and the rest of his students were beginning to look impatient.
“Either get back on track, or I’m canceling my lessons and gettin
g a refund,” someone said. That shut Hax up, even though I knew he had a point. He brought a bottle of some daemonic booze with him the next time he showed up to complain about teaching to me.
“I wish I didn’t have to train assclowns, but this is what Agnus is paying me for,” he whined, opening up the bottle and draining about half of it in one go. Turns out it was Corona, which implied that anything we’d nabbed from Weldy’s stash was long gone now.
“At least, he’s paying us.” I quipped. If I’d gotten that one out before he started drinking his beer, he probably would’ve gone slower. He seemed a bit less moody now, though...maybe that was the alcohol?
“He probably isn’t paying Azure. At least not with money,” I added after a moment.
“I don’t think Azure really needs money. I think she’d ask if she did.” Hax shrugged, and drained his beer bottle in the rest of the silence that followed.
“I shouldn’t have done that. Too much beer gives you a beer gut,” he mumbled. Then he threw the beer bottle with all his might. It soared for a while; for a few seconds, I thought it was going to land on the head of some unfortunate miner, but instead it simply shattered on an otherwise nondescript patch of ground. Good thing we wear shoes out on Mount Amdahl – you don’t want glass shards or worse perforating your feet.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but watching you and Azure prance through the flowers like Dionysian nymphs puts a lot of stress on a man of my persuasion.”
I burst out laughing. So much for letting Haxabalatnar vent!
“Okay, that’s less worse than I was expecting,” he quipped. I managed to restrain my laughter after a few moments.
“I’m concerned that you’ve been having too much fun and aren’t taking our job seriously. If we die out here, Sigmar is going to plunge the entirety of hell into a new dark age. The Christians will be right about something for once. Plus, we’ll be dead!”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but why are you telling me this? Going after the Arbalest was my idea in the first place,” I responded. He raised an eyebrow.
“I live here! Well, not literally here, but in this dimension, I guess? Honestly, I don’t know. I think there was some alcohol in that alcoholic beverage.” I burst out laughing again, and only stopped when it turned into a coughing fit and left me spitting up wads of mucus on the grass.
“With jokes like that, you should be suffocating under a mass of womanflesh,” I said, once I regained the power of speech.
“You’d think, but the women I meet tend to either be married – or monstrous.”
“You distinguish?” Finally, I managed to reestablish some equilibrium because saying that at least made Hax snicker.
“You’re not too keen on much beyond your job, are you?” I was beginning to feel like I might be pushing into inappropriate territory by mentioning it.
“Last I heard, there’s only a few hundred feet left to go. This is the worst time to be thinking about what I do in my spare time,” Haxabalatnar said. It sounded like he was trying to talk himself out of this line of conversation. I don’t blame him; things were getting awkward.
“I’m going to do my personal exercises now. Nice talking to you,” he said. Good of him to pull out now before things got even more embarrassing. Those damn miners needed to hurry up! We were losing our minds waiting for them to finish drilling into Mount Amdahl.
In the end, it took the miners of Las Médulas five more days to break through to a cavity in the cultists’ compound. I’m pretty sure that I felt their relief when their drill finally met with air, though had I been directly responsible for supervising them, I would’ve chided them for assuming they were finished without putting down at least a camera to make sure everything was in order. That onerous duty fell to another foreman, whose accompanying rant about doing things correctly the first time was so loud and unhinged that it was soon drowned out by half a dozen strangers complaining about the noise levels. The cacophony eventually wore off, and the miners used some cables to slowly lower some measuring equipment into their tunnel.
The noise returned to its previous overbearing level when (as far as I could tell) the foreman recognized the cave they’d pierced into as a match for some elusive magical signature they’d learned to associate with the Amdahl cultists. Either way, it meant that the borehole had succeeded. The compound we’d built on top of Mount Amdahl nearly devolved into a drunken carnival as the news spread; Hector had to divert some of the mercenaries he’d sent on patrol to restore order. It was lucky for me that he did. Having to deal with the rising inanity of this place as we reached ever closer was dislodging crucial information about magical theory and gun safety from my head. We’d clearly reached a point where I could no longer simply train ad nauseam. Breaking into Mount Amdahl would put my newfound knowledge to the test, and I was looking forwards to it.
“Okay, so we’ve got a big hole that’s at least half a mile deep. How do we get down without breaking our necks?” said a nearby stranger.
“Bitch, it’s called slant drilling,” another answered.
The miners seemed... less formal now that were done, even after their attempt to party had been forcibly terminated. A few of them glanced over at the huge pit as if they thought a huge spurt of flame or evil magic would burst out of it and kill everyone. To be honest, I wasn’t sure how we’d make our way down, how long it would take, or where we might end up. The few miners that were operating a recon camera had assured us that their tunnel did not end in a bottomless pit – they described what they broke into as an unused storage room. Unless the cultists were particularly oblivious to loud machinery, or the complex was even larger than initially expected, they would have noticed the hole in the ceiling and would act accordingly.
“Oh, I know what we can do! Let’s have them use the wall-climbing daemon!” said someone in a yellow hardhat.
“Hey, that’s a great idea! As long as it doesn’t freak out and try to kill them,” responded someone else in an orange hardhat. I really hoped this wasn’t an actual risk, but it was probably safer to take our chances there than it was to rappel down manually. It turns out that the “wall-climbing daemon” was a chunky railed platform with thick, spider-like legs that supposedly could crawl up and down very steep (even vertical) walls and cliffs while keeping its passengers relatively safe and comfortable. It was probably slower than just rappelling down, but we needed to save all of our energy for the upcoming battle.
“I fucked your mom last night,” said the wall-climbing daemon, in a metallic (albeit well-lubricated) voice. Okay, we could at least keep our muscles at the ready...
“Who’s been swearing at this thing? You’re not supposed to do that!” shouted the worker in the yellow hardhat. I’m still no telepath, but I could swear I felt a wave of shame and guilt pass through the mining team.
My phone buzzed. I picked it up.
“Charlotte, this is Hector. We are ready to launch a frontal assault on the Amdahl cult. When should we do so?”
“I need to consult with the miners; give me a second,” I responded before asking how quickly the wall climber would lower us down.
“Shouldn’t be any longer than 30 minutes,” said one of the miners. The hardhat people nodded in agreement, and I relayed this to Hector.
“I’ll give you a call five minutes before I want you to start, okay?” I then told him.
“We’ll be ready.”
Time to try the wall climber. It lowered itself and opened up a space in the railing for me, Azure, and Haxabalatnar to clamber in. Once we’d made our way to the center of its platform, it activated a high-pitched alarm that sounded suspiciously like the beeps a truck makes when it’s backing up. Then, it slowly raised itself and took its first steps towards the mineshaft. I put down the backpack I’d been loading for the invasion so I didn’t have to worry about it messing up my center of balance.
&nbs
p; “Use the railing to secure yourselves, bitches,” the daemon told us. We did as we were told, in spite of its rudeness. Once it had reached the lip of the mineshaft, it abruptly shifted into its slope-climbing mode, and everything became white knuckled terror as the daemon haphazardly jammed leg after leg into the sides of the shaft. The platform wobbled, I nearly fell down. And yet at every moment, I failed to spill over the guardrails, and the daemon failed to lose control of its limbs-
“OH SHIT-”
Apparently a chunk of the tunnel gave way. The daemon flailed desperately, plunged into the tunnel, and took us with it. I must’ve screamed bloody murder for at least a whole minute before noticing I wasn’t dead.
Thanks to the magic of slant drilling, the wall-climber had managed to embed a claw in the rock, slowing its descent but making for an exceptionally rough and bumpy ride. If the constant stream of “FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK” meant anything, this was not how the daemon expected to use its claws. Both of my companions were also clinging to the railing for dear life. Haxabalatnar looked like he was about to shut down from panic, but Azure just seemed annoyed by how rough our ride was. I’m guessing I was somewhere in the middle. One stray bump could’ve sent us headfirst into the ceiling, splitting our skulls open and leaving little more than entrails and blood to inconvenience one of the cult’s janitors. The only upside was that we were sliding far faster than our timetable required and could easily save a few minutes if we survived.
You can imagine that this wasn’t a great time for me to take a call, but someone in the world apparently disagreed because my phone was buzzing yet again. Once I felt like I wasn’t in immediate danger of dying (two rings), I picked up.
“Holy mother of God, you’re still alive!” shouted the person on the other end; he was barely audible over the screech of abrading metal and bouncing rocks.
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