It took Hawk a minute to spot what Em had seen. A rippling movement in the warm off-white crystals behind them, small, slight, sneaky. Its refractions were visible a bare second when Hawk turned, and then vanished. Which told her something (or someone) was not only watching her and Em, it was listening.
“Don’t move,” Hawk whispered.
“You’re assuming it can’t hear us.” Em also whispered.
“I know. But I don’t want the military to hear us either.” She gave her friend a definite look.
“Oh. Oh!” They said. “Are you going to sneak off?”
“May…y…yes I am.” Hawk said, all her hesitation evaporating as she spotted Kaiser gingerly making his way down the rope ladder.
“You sounded hesitant there for a second,” Em said.
Hawk tilted her head at Kaiser. “I am not going to spend however long it takes to drill through the crystal smiling up that man’s ass.”
“So you’ll leave me to do it?” Em said, harshly…and then grinned. “Sorry, babe. You’re just so fun to fuck with. I’m happy to stand here and smile in the fucker’s face, as long as I get to punch him a couple times before all this is over. Go see what kind of alien nasty we’re dealing with and I’ll keep them from realizing you’re gone until it’s too late.”
“Well, when you put it like that.” Hawk muttered.
She studied the geode wall of milk-colored crystal. After a few moments, she spotted it. There was a very small opening in the walls, bordered by an army of crystal. With that august guard, it almost escaped solid observation. Certainly, she only spotted it now because she was desperate, and looking for it. The military would probably have found it, just as soon as they broke through.
“Alright, Em. If I’m not back in ten minutes, tell Captain Spectre that we’ve already got a hole.”
“Yeah…but Hawk, it doesn’t make sense. They did a full sweep of this place.”
“It’s hard to see,” She said.
“But—” Em sputtered for a moment. “But they should have found this.”
“Well, I found it. Just tell them, okay?” She said, and began making her way to the newfound exit.
It actually took a bit of a jump to reach the opening from where she’d put her plastic sheet. She had to brace one hand on an outcropping that seemed coated with sugar…tiny crystals that each dug into her palm like a thousand needles. She left a palmprint of blood on that ledge, with a second one on the crystals she gripped to swing into the opening.
It was very well hidden, a seemingly natural outcropping. The soft, milk-shaded spires of crystal roiled across the walls for perhaps ten feet, before giving way to a more pedestrian gray stone. Hawk stepped (and bled) onto this with some appreciation. Something she could stand on that wouldn’t cut her. What an excellent thing.
She knelt, searching through her pockets for something she could wind over the bleeding palm…but she’d left all her first aid supplies in the kit. Damn it. Well, she could go ahead without. Most of the shallow cuts were sealing off, anyway. She was alright to go forward.
Slow steps, first careful and wincing steps across a million million crystal points, then gritty on the unfinished, seemingly natural stone. It felt the way nails on a chalkboard are heard. How long had this structure been here? In its own time, not the fast flare they saw on the other side of the Rift. There, geological time moved with glacial, generational slowness. Here…who knew? Step by step into this tunnel. It felt damp, she realized. As if it were taking her somewhere humid.
It was, she realized. Well, maybe not the humid part, but it was taking her somewhere, and it wasn’t going to be anything she’d recognized. If there was life, it had adapted to the sort of universe that could produce Glass ashes and energies that sapped organic compounds of life. It’d be life with no sun, no weather as she knew it, no rain. Unless she was wrong, and there were somehow stars and comets and galactic spirals ahead…but she didn’t think so. There’d be a freshness to the air, an evaporative cheer. That wasn’t here. Each breath was wet, though not unpleasantly so. It felt like a cellar. It felt like a cave.
The occasional echo told Hawk a cave indeed lay ahead. A cave that might be filled with unknown, unknowable life. And she was walking out to face it, not only without any kind of armament whatsoever, but without even a first aid kit.
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So maybe she’d go a little bit farther, and then go back.
The hum of the drill was distant, so now she could hear something else: The howling of wind past an unseen opening. It screamed with a thousand hauntings, and tasted slightly of metal. Not like radiation. More like blood. And she could smell something heady and sweet with floral botanicals. The prospect of a place filled with life was rising like dawn. She crept closer, testing each step just in case the ground should prove unstable. The last thing she wanted was to twist an ankle while she was crawling through these darkened hallways. Pushing off with her legs, she got a solid grip on the way out of this place. She swung forward, pulling with her upper arms, getting her blood all over the stone, because of course she was. In fact, half the wounds on her palm reopened from this effort. But she’d pulled herself out of a hole, out of a rock seated on another, larger spire of crystal.
And what she saw from here was breathtaking.
It could have been like a great cave, except that implied that its walls and floors and ceiling all behaved as matter should. Here, it did not. She watched as a trickle of water, racing across the face of the crystal she stood upon, followed a course leading not down but up. It made something nearly like a mobius strip, spinning around and up and beneath a rock, before finally joining the main spire of crystal in a downward flood to the ground below.
There was a ground. There was a whole, great universe here, down in the dark where it could glow like ten thousand jewels across the face of the night. Their clump of crystals, the hole that lead to the world that Hawk knew, all of it, was a singular point high above, where one might expect to find clouds and sky. It was a place of subterranean in between, the definition of liminal, and a thousand great spire-like crystals rose from that dark world up and out, as if these were bridges to other places like hers. They’d been calling these pocket universes. Now it felt as if Earth itself, and all the starry universe therein—the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxy, Alpha Centuri, Orion, the solar system—were the pocket, and she had come out into the real world at last.
I refuse that. I rebuke that. My world is the real one, this one is nothing more than the pause before a plunge.
There were vines with leaves bleached pale, crawling across the face of her entry point. There were also flowers, purple and multi-petaled, possibly some variety of clementis. Would there be clementis down here? She scoffed at her own ignorance. She’d read the briefing. There’d been an entire greenhouse, stocked with whatever Naomi Studdard chose. Of course there could be clementis down here. There would be varieties of roses, and the vegetables their garden club were growing. Maybe. They’d gotten an entire population of highly evolved, sentient apes out of a single pregnant female and her eventual son. The students had kept their 4H projects in the greenhouse. God only knew what could be down there.
One stress at a time, Hawk thought, and reached for the vines.
The branch nearest her was thick, nearly the size of her wrist. The odd leaf and flower still budded off from this thickness, as if the parent plant couldn’t quite accept that beauty must be awarded to the young and vivacious. She thought that it could almost support her full weight…maybe. She wasn’t going to test it.
Beneath her feet, the gray stone that housed the geode-like structure they were drilling through seemed eggshell fragile. And beneath that, nothingness all the way down. She got a heavy sense of vertigo, the world spinning in a thousand apparent directions, and she had to kneel on the edge of the trop down…where there were lights. One great blaze, like a star in all this dimness, shone radiant and clear. It looked rather like the light filtering though all this milky quartz.
Alright. We need to go back and let them know—
“What are you?” A voice, sudden and genderless and above all else, loud. The whole rock reverberated with it.
She was very still, hoping it didn’t mean her.
“Of course I mean you. I mean all of you. What are you, that you break this seal?”
It was a Voice, the way the Ape had been an ape. These were Words and they were meant to be obeyed, and she found herself torn between the urge to let go of the sides of this hole and grovel, and hold on so that she wouldn’t fall. And even that—falling—seemed to pale beside the terrible act of ignoring the Voice, of holding to the rock, holding to her own life.
But she wasn’t going to capitulate. She was Hawk West, survivor of her mother’s overwhelming flakiness, champion of undesirables like Ants, and wife of a man who would never have just sat here and allowed someone to scare her back down a hole. She knew that she should speak next—Alex had taught her sometimes any answer is necessary, even one that makes you cringe. But she couldn’t think of a goddamn thing to say that would make sense to the unknown Voice, so she fell back on decades of much loved science-fiction. “We’re peaceful explorers and we’re looking for some of our own kind. They’re lost. If you could—”
“Silence!” Said the voice, not loudly. It did not need to be loud. And it did not say another word. Rather, she heard a scrabbling sound as something crawled across the geode-scape towards her. She had no problem filling in teeth, because it had wet and garbled breathing. It had claws, because she could hear them scrabbling across the stone. It was big, because only something big would breathe and move quite like that.
“Hello?” Hawk said, softly. “Are you still there?”
“Silence!” Said the Voice, and it, the claws, the breathing, were all nearer.
“There’s something out there. You need to be careful,” she whispered, to the unseen Voice.
A single line of crystalline fluid dripped down from somewhere above her head. Hesitant and horrified, she looked up.
The first thing she registered was the eyes. There must have been a thousand of them, in a myriad shades of blue and gold. All had odd pupils, like some sort of deep water thing. Phosphorescence glowed around its main pair, however, set into a feline-like head, powerful jaws, and teeth as radiant white as one could ask. All of this she caught in a handful of seconds.
And then it went for her throat.