The Terminal War: A Space Opera Novel (A Carson Mach Adventure) (14 page)

Buildings with fluted pale-sand-colored columns and crumbling render on their front elevation towered over them, creating deep shadows between the narrow passages.
 

Dead, green-black vines wilted over walls and crumbling bricks. Mach stepped over a number of them that had snaked across the ice-encrusted stone floor, the flags of which were cut perfectly, the mortar of choice between them glittering under the translucent frosting as though it were made of something alive.
 

“Incredible,” Beringer said, scanning around, looking at every small detail, occasionally stopping to gaze closely at a protrusion from the side of a building. “Carvings,” he said. “Worn away by the ice over the generations. They’re like gargoyles from old Earth cathedrals.”

Adira regarded them with suspicion and gently elbowed Beringer to keep him moving. Mach continued forward, staring into the abyssal darkness ahead of them. To their left, the side of a building stretched up for at least fifty meters or more. A gable overhung the top. Stone abutments held it aloft. Through the window, Mach thought he saw movement, but when he stopped and blinked to clear his vision, he realized it was just his movement shifting the shadows.
 

They continued until they reached the end of the narrow alley. They came out to a wider street, at least wide enough to accommodate ten people side by side. Mach sighed quietly, relieved to be out of the oppressive darkness, although he didn’t like the open much more—it made it easier for them to become targets.
 

Like the alley, the ground was made up of precise, interlocking stone flags—the edges sharp and the mortar lines accurate to within hundredths of millimeters. “Great engineers, these so-called Saviors,” Mach said, raising his manacle and sweeping it across the street so that Kortas could get a view. The vestan Guardian didn’t respond through the constant stream of static.
 

“What do you think these were?” Adira said, pointing up the row of buildings on the opposite side of the street. They were about two stories high with flat roofs. Intricate filigree ironwork surrounded the circumference of the buildings, making Mach think of the roof terraces back on Fides Prime.
 

“Perhaps a governmental building,” Beringer said. “Given its aspect and central location, it would be ideal as a town hall or seat of government—or whatever these proto-vestans have as a hierarchy if anything at all.”

“Any idea how old all this is?” Mach said to the archeologist.

“I can’t be accurate yet. If I’m allowed to take a sample of the stone, I’ll be able to date it once we’re back on the
Intrepid
—I have my gear there.
 
For now, I’d say, given the architectural style, that this predates anything I’ve seen of vestan culture by some considerable time. So much so, I would say this isn’t even vestan. Whatever that thing was that dragged the Guardian away might not even be the original species that dwelled here.”

Mach’s manacle chirped and Kortas’ voice—faint and distant—crackled through the static for a few seconds. “The city is the original,” the Guardian said. “I’ve… with… Saviors. They built…”

“So this proto-vestan thing,” Mach said, “is what exactly, a predecessor?”
 

“Too early… tell yet… please hurry… time’s running out for Afron… mind corrupt…”
 

“I hear you,” Mach said. “We’re on it.”

The manacle indicated the end of the conversation.
 

Turning to the others, Mach indicated the direction toward the heat source. “We’re going east from here,” he said. “At the end of the street, we’ll need to go left. Let’s stick to one side. Adira, you watch for movement on the left, Beringer, you’re taking the right. I’ll take the front.”

The three of them took the formation and stuck to the left side of the street. They reached the end without incident and turned left into the next street. At the end of the hundred-meter-or-so section, they saw two narrow towers reaching up to the icy dome above them like needles. Between them, a metallic gate slowly swung open then shut, ringing out like a bell with each crash against the fittings.
 

“We’ve got wind,” Beringer said.
 

Mach tuned his suit’s scanners to the atmospheric setting and the wind direction and speed flashed up in small green text on his HUD. It was blowing south to north—the direction in which they were heading. It only moved at a few kph, so there was no fear they’d be blown off balance.
 

“This means that we’ve got a breach somewhere,” Adira said. “Or further back there’s a tunnel leading out to the planet’s surface. Otherwise, where else is the wind coming from?”
 

Mach looked over his shoulder back down the street toward the cliff. A few darker spots on its surface indicated that there might be some tunneling there somewhere. He noted it as something they would check out once they’d confirmed the heat source and found Afron. They scurried quickly toward the clanging gate and slipped beyond it into a courtyard. A series of statues on fluted marble columns stood before them in a long row. Th carved stone objects resembled myriad different species—or at least variations of a single a species.

“What do you make of these, Beringer?” Mach asked.
 

“Ungodly,” he whispered as he inspected the forms one by one, slowly proceeding down the narrow walkway created by the statues. “Look at these things… their forms… truly alien.”

“We’ve got ourselves a real freak show here,” Adira said. “I’ve never seen anything like these before. They’re like some nightmare creation of some lunatic’s mind.”

Mach inspected the first few, craning his neck to look up at them as they in turn peered down at him. For a fleeting moment he thought he saw life in their stone eyes, but when he blinked and took a breath, he realized it was just his imagination.
 

The creature he was looking at had three stumpy legs. Fat and bulging, the tripod form held up a bloated torso with no arms. On a flat neck, an almond-shaped head was cocked to one side, eyes situated on the far sides. A thin slit for a mouth rose up at the edges as though it were planning some nefarious plan.

The next one wasn’t much prettier. A biped this time, long and lithe with grotesque, flaccid breasts that hung below its waist like billiard balls in socks. The stone was carved in such a way as to give it a kind of scaly texture. The face was an almost comical rendering of a human mixed with the lizard-like horans. Small tusks protruded up from the thick bottom lip.

“This place gives me the creeps,” Mach said as he continued to follow Beringer and Adira down the uncanny causeway that led to a long, narrow building with a domed roof. The front of it was oval in shape, columns holding up a heavy stone lintel, the shadows were dense in the space, obscuring the door, giving it the feel of an open mausoleum.
 

“Are you seeing all this, Kortas?” Mach asked. He stopped in front of the columned oval frontage, leaving the processions of nightmares behind him. Knowing they were there made the hairs on his neck tingle as though he expected them to animate suddenly and attack him.
 

Stranger things had happened. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure the damned things were still sitting atop their columns—they were, much to his relief.
 

Kortas’ voice broke through the static in a rare moment of clarity.
 

“I’m seeing this,” the vestan said, his words light with a sense of disbelief to them. “I can’t quite believe it, but I’m seeing it. Listen, Carson Mach, I must apologize to you for the way I’ve acted since you arrived. It’s clear to me now that I, and the other Guardians, have grossly misunderstood the situation here.”

Mach glared at Adira. Her lips were pressed ready to unleash a sarcastic retort.
 

“Apology accepted, Kortas,” Mach said. “Let’s just work together to figure out what’s going on, shall we?”

“That’s gracious of you, Carson Mach. Thank you. I need to let you know that what you’re seeing there appears to us to be one of the ancient savior temples. We thought they were long gone, destroyed when the system’s sun weakened and the planet froze. Only the Garden of Remembrance remained free of the permafrost incursion.”

“Makes me wonder what else is on this rock that you don’t know about,” Mach said. “Why didn’t the Saviors communicate with you about this place? Surely they must have known it was still here.”

Silence. Kortas’ breath caught, and the lack of words dragged out into a tense moment. Mach realized the implications of what he had just said: it meant that the Saviors, the very creators of the vestan species, had lied to their twenty Guardians. Their mind-link wasn’t an open and honest exchange. The Saviors were only communicating what they wanted the Guardians to know—and nothing more. What did these Saviors do that was so bad that they had to withhold that information from their very creation?

“Please enter the temple,” Kortas replied, ignoring Mach’s question. Mach let it go, partly out of sympathy for the Guardian, and partly out of a desire to get this over with as quickly as possible.
 

“What are we expected to find in there?” Adira said. “Is this part of our mission to find Afron, or something else entirely?”

“It’s all related,” Kortas said. “I need to know what’s inside. That will enable us to…” He trailed off, sadness in his words.
 

“Go on,” Mach said. “We need to understand if we’re to help you.”

Another moment of silence filled the dead air, then came taut, pregnant words. “It’ll enable us to confront the Saviors.”

The words landed like a nuke.
 

There it was, plain and simple: the force behind the vestans’ existence was not one of benevolence, but of secrecy and clandestine motivations. That the Guardians would feel the need to confront their dead-but-not-dead progenitors told him nothing here was as it seemed, not even to those tasked with guarding it. Their whole existence was a lie.
 

“I hear you,” Mach said. “We’re going in.”

Adira and Beringer raised their rifles. Mach took point and edged into the gloom. Before they got through the oval porch of columns and into the shadows, something above on the lintel shifted.
 

Adira and Beringer raised their rifles. Mach took point and edged into the gloom. Before they got through the oval porch of columns and into the shadows, something above on the lintel shifted.
 

A body came hurtling down at them.
 

Mach jerked out of the way, stumbling backward, grabbing Adira’s arm and pulling her out of the way. He toppled into Beringer behind him, who was too slow to move. They hit the deck in a heap as the body thudded against the ice-covered flagstones with a dry crack of bones.

“What the hell?” Adira said, pulling herself out of the pile of bodies.
 

Mach scrambled to his knees and raised his rifle toward the lintel. A shadow shifted and was gone. His heart raced and he turned his attention to the body in front of him: the thing was desiccated, naked, its skin pulled tight around bones that had snapped as if they were hollow, dry twigs. The face was pulled into a scene of horror, the lips pulled back over dried gums, teeth snapped and crooked. It had no eyes, just dark, dry sockets.
 

A voice crackled over the comms, the static returning. “Afron,” Kortas said, “it’s… Afron.”

Mach stood up, edging closer. The poor guardian’s skull had been neatly cut, the dome of his head removed, the brain cavity completely empty.
 

“My God,” Beringer said. “My God—”

His words were cut off with a strangled sound. Mach spun to see Beringer being dragged out of the courtyard toward the west edge, through a gap in the wall he hadn’t noticed before.
 

“Beringer!” Mach yelled, getting no response. He and Adira set off in pursuit. The dark, shadowy figure had its arm around Beringer’s neck. They disappeared once they got beyond the boundary wall made of densely packed irregular boulders.
 

“Heh…” Beringer said over the comms before the connection was cut.
 

Babcock led Tulula to the guts of the ship and entered his lab. Squid Three followed and rested in its bowl-shaped docking station, giving the little AI droid faster access to the servers and machines spread around a semicircular workbench.

Motion sensors quietly clicked and the room filled with bright light.
 

An array of tools, wires, and shiny red electronic boards spread around a square table to the left. Tulula gazed at them. “That looks like horan tech?”

“It’s Squid Three’s project. We’re trying to decipher the latest encryption keys. No luck so far.”

“Hopefully we’ll have more finding this, what did you call it? … A mole?”

“It’s human espionage jargon for a spy. No need to think too hard about our language quirks.”

“I think I understand. It’s like when Mach calls somebody a dickhead?”

Babcock paused for a moment and thought about correcting her, but decided against it. Salus Common was constantly evolving with the deeper integration between fidians, humans and now vestans. Nobody could say with clarity what was right or wrong linguistically anymore.
 

“Let’s get down to business,” Babcock said. “This might take a while.”

He activated a holo-keyboard, transferred the comms logs to its terminal, and gestured Tulula to sit.
 

She shuffled in front of him and peered at data streams running across the screen. “Where do you want me to start?”
 

“With the message payloads. If anything stands out, like an odd word or a pattern of corruption, drill down on it. I’ll search the transmission data.”

“There’s thousands of them.”

“That’s the nature of the beast, I’m afraid. I’ll grab us some strong coffee.”

Babcock left Tulula and Squid Three analyzing and headed to the mess.