Dark Space: Avilon (43 page)

They joined the squad of sentinels to shield themselves from the wind with their transport.

Moments later, a matching transport melted silently out of the hazy sky, a dark shadow with no running lights. The shadow set down beside them and dropped its loading ramp with a soft
groaning
sound. The
Blackies
finally abandoned their defensive stance, holstering their rifles on their backs and rushing up the ramp of the second transport. They came back carrying out heavy-looking pieces of drilling equipment, and crates of explosives.

Destra watched them with a frown, feeling vaguely like she was forgetting something. Suddenly she realized what that was.

The Gors were supposed to have set down here already, so where were they? She was about to key her comms for an update from the
Tempest,
when she heard a quiet hiss close beside her ear.

Destra whirled toward the sound just in time to see the swirling darkness shimmer and then take shape before her. Torv appeared, naked and bony as ever. He bowed his giant, skull-shaped head and then bared his teeth at her. “You honor us with your presence, Matriarch.”

“Thank you,” she managed, her words conveyed by her suit’s external speakers. “Where are the rest of your people?” she asked, looking around. When she didn’t notice either them or their transports, she went on, “And your ships?”

“They are cloaked. I do not smell Sythians nearby, but we must not be fools and sit in the open like a herd of sapsiri, waiting for them to catch usss.”

Destra nodded, as if she knew what
sapsiri
were. She pulled a handheld scanner from her belt and activated the holo display so that Torv could see what it was. The display showed a scan of the surrounding area and highlighted all the living things it could detect as glowing dots. Cavanaugh’s squad appeared, a cluster of green dots behind her and to her right. Torv was a yellow dot in front of her, and Atta a green one right next to hers.

“It does not show my creche mates,”
Torv replied.

“They are cloaked,” Destra explained.

“Yesss . . . this means that any survivors smart enough to hide are invisible to usss. At least we shall find the dumb ones.”

Destra smiled.

“Come, we must go,”
Torv said, turning to leave.

Destra took Atta by her shoulders and said, “I’ll be on the comms at all times. If you want to contact me, just say my name, okay?” Atta nodded. “And be
careful.
If you run into any Gors, make sure to tell them that we’re their friends. You’ll have one of them with you to help you explain.”

“I know,” Atta replied. “He’s right here,” she added, reaching out to grab something invisible standing beside her. The air seemed to flicker and take shape around her small black glove.

Destra realized that there was a cloaked Gor standing right beside Atta. Her first instinct was to pull Atta away, but she forced herself not to react, remembering that a starving Gor had been visiting her daughter every night for weeks and he’d never hurt her. Destra pulled Atta close for a hug and then withdrew to an arm’s length. “I love you.”

“I love you, too, Mom. You’d better go. The Gors are in a hurry to find their families.”

Destra smiled and nodded. Before she turned to leave she walked up to Sergeant Cavanaugh. “Good luck,” she said.

Cavanaugh set the crate of explosives he was carrying down and nodded to her.

“Be careful out there, Councilor. Keep your comms open.”

“I will,” Destra replied, leaving Cavanaugh and his team, and Atta, to run after Torv. The Gor had already disappeared in the swirling darkness, but she found him easily enough with her scanner. A solitary gray silhouette appeared in the distance. The icy surface of Noctune gleamed with reflected light from the sun. Destra’s footsteps crunched loudly as she ran.

As soon as she reached Torv’s side, he turned to her and said,
“We are not far from the nearest tunnel entrance.”

“Good,” Destra panted. She was forced to jog beside the Gor to keep up with his longer strides, and she was already out of breath from running.

Torv’s idea of
not far
turned out to be another twenty minutes of jogging. By the time they reached the entrance of the tunnel, Atta called to say she missed her mom, and that the grumpy soldiers had just started drilling through the ice.

Torv waited for them to finish speaking. Destra ended the call and turned toward the gaping black entrance of a Gor tunnel. She saw the air shimmering endlessly as armored Gors de-cloaked and descended into the tunnel. A few of them carried Gor crechelings swaddled in ISSF uniforms.

Destra stopped in front of Torv. He was waiting to one side of the tunnel, his slitted yellow eyes scanning the horizon.

“This is it?” she asked.

He nodded.

Destra turned to peer into the tunnel. It descended steeply below the ice, and disappeared into darkness. Pulling the glow stick off her belt, Destra shone it into the tunnel. A dozen Gors appeared, waiting just inside the entrance.

Torv turned and entered the tunnel. Destra followed, walking between his creche mates. They hissed at her as she passed by. Destra grimaced, unsure whether those hisses were good or bad.

Once they reached the front of the group, they began following the tunnel down. It dropped steeply, and Destra had to struggle to keep her footing. The higher gravity on Noctune helped her not to slip, but it did nothing to help her shuddering legs.

Her glow stick only lit about a dozen meters of the tunnel before dissipating into darkness, but it was enough to see that the walls of the tunnel were whorled and furrowed with claw marks. Destra ran her hand along the nearest wall, feeling the grooves through her gloves. She remembered Torv saying that the Gors had dug their tunnels hundreds of meters below the surface, and she began to wonder how they’d accomplished that using just their bare hands and feet.

Another half an hour later, Destra’s legs were burning and shaking so much from the continued exertion of walking downhill that she was tempted to sit and slide the rest of the way.

Her comm piece trilled in her ear, distracting her. The call was from Admiral Hale aboard the
Tempest.

“Hello, Admiral,” she said, gasping for breath. She was exhausted.

“Councilor, why haven’t you made contact yet?”

“I’ve just entered the tunnels with the Gors,” she said. “No sign of survivors yet.”

“Our sensors detect you are very close to some of the ruins. Right on top of them actually. The resolution isn’t clear enough at this range to pick out whatever tunnel you’re walking in, but it looks like you’re going to discover the ruins before Sergeant Cavanaugh does.

Destra felt excitement trickle through her, breathing new life into her weary body. “I’ll keep you posted if I find anything down here besides ice.”

“Be sure that you do. Hale out.”

The comm went dead. Destra studied the walls and floor with her glow stick as they descended. There was no sign of any ruins. . . .

Suddenly she ran into something solid. She cried out, and slitted yellow eyes turned on her. She’d run into Torv. He hissed and pointed at the ground in front of them. Destra walked around him and he blocked her way with one thickly muscled arm. A deep, black hole had opened up in front of them. Beyond that, the tunnel came to a dead end. Shining her glow stick into the hole, Destra saw that the walls were smooth and sheer all the way down. It was a narrow chasm between two opposing walls of ice.

“We must climb down,”
Torv said. As she watched, he lowered himself into the hole, using his arms and legs to push against the walls and slow his descent. Thick cords of muscle stood out on his arms as he slid down into darkness. Destra shook her head and called after him, “I can’t do that!”

Torv gave no reply. He’d already dropped out of sight. Destra turned and came face to stomach with another Gor, this one armored and glaring down at her with the glowing red optics in his helmet. She held her ground, determined not to be afraid.

The Gor held out his arms and hissed at her.
“Climb on, human.”

Destra blinked up at him. Hesitantly, she climbed up his torso and wrapped her arms around his neck. Then the Gor eased them down into the chasm, just as Torv had done. Unlike Torv’s silent descent, this Gor’s armor scraped long furrows into the ice, making a noisy
screech
all the way down. The chasm abruptly widened at the bottom, and they fell for the last ten feet, landing with a noisy
crunch.

The icy ground shuddered with their landing, and little bits of snow fell from the ceiling, glittering in the light of Destra’s glow stick.

She climbed off the Gor and struggled to find her footing. Here the ice was slick and smooth underfoot. They were standing in some type of cavern, crisscrossed with a maze of strange, leaning pillars of ice that connected the floor to the ceiling and opposing walls to each other. Destra wondered if this area had been dug like that for a reason—to prevent cave-ins perhaps.

Then she noticed how smooth the walls and floor were. Absent were the Gor’s claw marks. Her eyes narrowed at that, and she wondered how the Gors had dug this tunnel if they hadn’t used their claws. Realization dawned, and suddenly she saw all those leaning pillars of ice for what they really were—

Twisted girders and fallen beams. They were coated with ice, but otherwise too straight and angular to be either natural or carved by Gors. The walls and floor weren’t gouged with Gor claw marks because they hadn’t dug this tunnel. This one was formed by the crumpled shell of an ancient skyscraper.

“Torv!” Destra said, looking around for him.

“Yess?”

He was standing right behind her. “Do you know what this is?” she asked.

“It is Noctune. Are you feeling well, Matriarch?”

“No, I mean . . .
this!”
She gestured to their surroundings. “Your people didn’t dig this tunnel, Torv.”

“No. It is a natural opening in the ice.”

Destra regarded the Gor with a wild grin. “It isn’t natural, either. You’re standing inside the ruins of an ancient civilization.
Your
civilization, Torv, and probably ours, too.”

The Gor’s expression grew slack and he turned in a slow circle to study their surroundings.
“I do not see any . . .
ruins.
Only ice. And we only meet humans when the Sythians force us to fight and kill you. How can you say that humans once live on Noctune?”

Destra’s smile broadened. “Why else would Gors be bipeds? You are humanoids with two eyes, ears, arms and legs. You have hands with opposable
thumbs.
If you had evolved all on your own, it would be a great coincidence that your species so closely resembles ours.”

“I do not understand,”
Torv said.

“Just trust me. We’re your creche mates, Torv. We always have been.”

Torv hissed at that.
“Then the Sythians force us to kill ourselves during the war. This only adds to the blood price that they owe.”

“Yes,” Destra agreed. She decided not to mention that the Sythians were also related to both Gors and Humans. Instead, she put a comm call through to the
Tempest,
intending to inform the admiral of her discovery.

The only answer was a
crackle
and
hiss
of static, followed by an error
beep
and an audible announcement from her comms: “Connection failed.”

Destra grimaced. There must have been too much interference. She called up to Sergeant Cavanaugh instead, but again, came the static followed by the error tone and explanation.

Feeling a sudden pang of worry for Atta, she tried to contact her daughter. When the connection failed for a third time, she tried running a diagnostic to determine the problem.

“What is wrong?”
Torv asked.

“I can’t reach anyone on the comms,” she said.

The diagnostic reported the cause of the problem as
unknown interference
.

“Frek,” she said, and glanced up through the dark chasm over their heads, wondering if the ruins were somehow responsible for that interference. Then something occurred to her. Gor telepathy was supposed to work on quantum principles, and it had an incredible range—up to ten light years.

Destra turned to Torv. “Can you contact your creche mate, the Gor we left on the surface? There’s something wrong with my comm system.”

Torv hissed at her. “I cannot, my Matriarch. That is why we must
search
for survivors rather than simply call out to them. The tunnels interfere with our ability to communicate unless we are very near to one another.”

“I guess that explains why I can’t contact anyone . . .” Destra went back to peering up at the dark chasm over their heads. “Is there any way you can get me back to the surface?”

“We must keep searching for survivors, my Matriarch. There is no time to waste.”

“What if we run into trouble?” she asked, trying a different approach. “We’re all alone down here, and I can’t call for help.” Having said that, Destra realized that the rest of the Gors hadn’t joined them at the bottom of the chasm. “Where are the others, Torv?”

“They go to hunt. The crechelings shall not survive if they do not eat soon. The others remain to guard the entrance of this tunnel and make sure that nothing stalks us from behind.”

Struck with a sudden insight, Destra said, “Can you tell one of them to go back to the transports?”

“Yess, but why?”

“Have him go tell my daughter that I’m fine. Tell her that I will be out of touch for a while, but that hopefully I’ll see her soon. Then tell her that we’ve found the ruins, and they should all join us down here. The Gor you sent will show them the way.”

“I tell them, but we cannot wait for them to arrive. We must go on.”

Destra nodded. “That’s fine. I’ll go with you. That was our agreement.”

“You have much honor, my Matriarch. We shall not soon forget your concern for our fate.”