The flashing red light above the door changed to green and it opened. The pair, former master and student, waiting outside made their way through. Beyond was yet another hangar, all that there seemed to be on this part of the rocky station. Air hissed from the vents around the sides of the room as atmosphere flooded back, repressurizing the previous vacuum.
Secured to the floor was a destroyer-class vessel, a sleek high-end transport ship. Painted in a gunmetal grey, it was silent in its berth but closed weapon arrays arounds its sides hinted at its more deadly capabilities. Its weaponry consisted of far more than mere defence lasers.
A group of people strode down the ramp, astronauts in their white suits eager to stretch their limbs. Ten such people disembarked, a few less than the average crew size for such a vessel. No doubt the rest were cleaning up on board or preparing for customs checks.
After the station crew gave the new arrivals the standard questioning and shakedown, they drifted off in groups to spend their limited time on whatever they felt like. Most would go and get drunk somewhere in the station, regardless of the cost of alcohol in the middle of nowhere.
After the initial group had disappeared, a few others made their way down the ramp. These were a little more uncomfortable in the lack of gravity, bouncing their way along and pushing themselves back towards the floor with little bursts of air. They were given a kinder treatment than the void sailors, the station crew unwilling to offend a figure of potential power. Not just anyone was able to secure a spot on a destroyer-class.
One such person descended who caught Kik’s eye, not just because he responded to Reem’s wave. He wasn’t wearing a spacesuit, not even a breathing mask. His unshaven head poked out from above a black half-cloak. It covered a set of armour, plates and bands of a grey metal, which extended down to his waist. Beneath that was a white trenchcoat which went down to his knees at the back but was cut higher at the front.
What also surprised Kik was that he moved comfortable in the microgravity, using no thrusters - only magnetic boots. How was it possible to have a person who understood living in space yet didn’t follow its rules?
Once the man was past the security check, he beelined to Reem and, by extension, to Kik.
“Good to see you again!” he said, shaking Reem’s hand. “Have you found me a way to Icros?”
“Hello, Cormen,” Reem replied. “Yes, you’ll be ready to leave within the hour. Are you off on another rescue?”
“No, it’s not an animal this time. Some archaeologist dug something up and he really wants me to take a look at it. But what are we standing around here for? Talk while we walk.”
The group moved through the station parallel to open space. He didn’t have his bearings very well, but Kik assumed that they were moving towards another hangar. The man, Cormen, seemed to notice that there was a third person with them as they travelled through the tunnels. Perhaps he felt Kik’s gaze on his neck.
“And who might you be? I don’t believe you’ve had the pleasure of meeting me.”
Reem turned around and floated along backwards, facing them. “This is Kik. Kik, meet Cormen Dietrid. Cormen’s your next passenger.”
Cormen spoke out. “Passenger? So you’re a captain are you? I see.”
Kik raised his eyebrows. “You’re the first person I’ve met to not be surprised about that.”
“Well I’ve certainly met stranger folk. The galaxy is vast and full of unknowns. If we worry about the little ones, how will we ever spot the true questions?”
Kik nodded. “So you’re an answerer of those questions?”
“Not so much. More a gatherer of those answers. I like to think of myself as a librarian of sorts.”
Kik took a moment to reply. “Well I look forwards to working with you, Mr Librarian.”
“Likewise, assuming you know what you’re doing. Does he know what he’s doing, Reem?”
“Well enough. He’ll get you where you need to go.”
Kik took the opportunity for a segue. “So where is it you’re heading to? I heard a jungle world mentioned, but nothing more than that.”
Cormen smiled. “Ah little child, the land of Icros is a vast and wild place full of terrors known and unknown...”
Cormen continued to elaborate on the numerous and mysterious dangers of the jungle, but Kik tuned him out and tried to remember what he had read. If he recalled correctly, the planet Icros had frequent volcanic activity. It was hot and humid there as a result, and the skies were darkened with ash. The jungles there were without doubt special, but he couldn’t remember what made them such. It was something to do with the ash.
“...which has brought many a man and beast to their knees. Its mere presence...”
Reem coughed and both of them startled in guilt, for different reasons. “We’re here.”
Opening the door before them, Kik was granted a view of the Benefactor.
Going through the pre-departure checks, Kik settled Cormen into his parents’ former room. He sent Reem off to collect his personal effects, having left a few items in his room that morning. They were mostly tools but he didn’t want to leave anything behind.
Everything checked out green. The navigational computer went to work calculating departure routes. All that was left was to retrieve his belongings from Reem and the final takeoff sequence.
Kik met Reem by the ramp. He was slightly out of breath, having rushed from one end of the station to the other fast enough to satisfy Cormen’s schedule.
“Here are your things,” Reem said, passing over the few items that Kik had left behind. A torch, his reading glasses, a used flare gun. A few other odds and ends.
“So this is goodbye?” Kik asked.
“Only for now. You’re to come straight back here after you finish. This station is supposed to be some sort of base of operations for you. You’ll have your room secured unless you disappear for a few months. I can keep it open for at least the next two shipments of workers, before the place starts getting a bit more crowded. There shouldn’t be any need for the space until then.”
Kik grinned. “I guess I’ll see you later then. I’ll be back before the next orbit.”
Reem snorted. “Since the orbital time around the sun is approximately fifty years, I would certainly hope so. I’ll see you next time, and don’t forget to find me a fighter to pilot.”
He floated off, unhurried.
Kik stopped to check on Cormen before departure, but the person in question was recording a spoken diary entry. His voice echoed out through the airtight door as he described a struggle to find an ancient artifact, the hunt stretching across multiple worlds. Kik moved on. He would be fine. Fools, after all, were immortal.
Strapping himself into the cockpit, Kik broadcast a departure warning across the ship. He wondered if he had ruined Cormen’s recording. It didn’t matter if he had, though. There would be plenty of time in the trip to waste.
Blasting his way free of the opened hangar doors, Kik set his heading towards the first jump point on the way to Icros.
All up, the trip took a week. The Icros system was three jumps away from Rymez. Kik took a little extra time, despite Cormen’s impatience, to harvest fuel along the way. That way he didn’t need to detour via Lanos or another world to maintain his emergency reserves.
Along the way he had a little while to research Icros. It turned out the special thing about the jungle was that none of the plants could photosynthesize. In fact, none of the plants were really plants at all. Normal plants wouldn’t be able to survive the eternal night beneath the clouds of ash on the surface. Instead the jungle was made of colonies of fungus, who fed on heat from the lava, radiation and ultraviolet light piercing through the clouds. It seemed the volcanic activity unearthed more than just magma. It also brought up all sorts of radioactive isotopes to the surface.
On the journey, Kik got a single quick chance to talk to Cormen, when he poked his head out to ask for meals for the trip. Other than that he stayed inside the room with the door shut.
After giving him the meal pouches, Cormen was about to disappear back into his quarters before Kik managed to call out.
“How come you don’t wear a void suit when you’re in space?”
Cormen turned, considering his answer. “I suppose I would rather not have to rely on a final line of defence. I mean, you don’t intend to decompress the ship, do you?”
“No, but if accidents happen then you’ll die.”
“But if the main system can fail so can the backups. You’ll be more cautious of a potential accident if you don’t have a backup system set up.”
“That sounds like a dangerous philosophy. Especially when you’re in space.”
“That depends on the way you apply it.” He disappeared back into his quarters and shut the door behind him.
Luckily for Cormen, his risky behaviour was not put to the test on the final two jumps. Travelling through deserted systems, they encountered no pirates, solar flares, roaming asteroids or other hazards.
Finally they reached the orbit of Icros. Its surface was blanketed in a light grey by the thick clouds of ash. The occasional peak of a supervolcano stretched their way through the clouds like the head of a giant, spewing their igneous breath around them. The light from their near-continuous eruptions stained the skies a deep ruby.
The Benefactor was guided towards a solitary orbiting station at Cormen’s urging. Once they had docked Kik was given a short break to collect some basic equipment - some food, water and other survival gear and weapons. Not a minute after they had arrived, Cormen decided Kik had taken too long and barged into the storage room.
“Alright, get out. We’re heading down.”
“Wait, at least let me get a change of clothes! I’m still in my spacesuit!”
“Do that once we get planetside. You can’t wear your normal clothes there anyway. Just get moving and we’ll speak on the way down.”
Cormen hurried Kik off the ship to pay the boarding fees. He then dragged him down a few levels.
“Where are we going?” Kik asked. “I hope you know your way around here because I certainly don’t.”
“Yes, I do, I do,” Cormen told him. “The dock is just ahead.”
The pair emerged into an open bay with two giant grey planes inside. The size of Kik’s corvette, engines and fuel tanks composed much of their mass. They seemed to be built for surface to orbit passenger and cargo transport. Black scarring across the front of the craft indicated some sort of burning heat had marked its nose and wings.
“Aboard the left one,” Cormen said, purchasing two return tickets from a machine by the entrance. “Departure is in five minutes. We need to get through security, get on board and get buckled down.”
The pair managed to find a pair of empty seats in the crowded passenger compartment. Looking around, Kik spotted all sorts of people with all kinds of baggage. From families seeking a new home to refugees, to merchants to sailors just looking for a day off, the plane was crammed with those from all walks of life. Cormen without his void suit drew all sorts of attention. Although then again if the craft depressurised on reentry a void suit wouldn’t protect anyone from the fire outside.
As they lifted off, Kik spoke to Cormen. “So the screens say we’re headed to some place called Mox. Are we meeting anyone there?”
“Yes. My team are there. They’ve been waiting for a few days now. That’s one of the main reasons why I’m in such a hurry, because I’m already running late.”
“Oh? So what is this team of yours? Arere they librarians too?”
“No, they’re more like hired help.”
The plane shuddered as it entered the first layers of atmosphere. Kik kind of wished he had a window or viewscreen. Reentry always gave a nice view.
“So anyway,” Cormen asked Kik, in part to distract himself from the sickening shuddering. “How long have you had your own ship for?”
“Just over a month now. I’m new to living on my own, but I think I’m handling it well.”
“You seem to be. Have you run into any real problems yet?”
“Nothing a combitool and some hull sealant can’t fix.”
Cormen paused for a bit. “It seems you’re getting along on your own then, but you might want to be a bit careful. What would you do if your warp cannon was damaged?”
Kik scowled. “Would it make a difference if I had another person with me? It’s not like we could fix it with the tools on my ship. If anything, they’d just use up the oxygen faster. And I don’t really want a lecture on safety from Mr. ‘I don’t need spacesuits in space’.”
Cormen shrugged. “I was just trying to offer some friendly advice. If you don’t want any then that’s not my problem.”
“Good.”
Looking back on the conversation later on, Kik thought he had been a bit harsh - Cormen seemed like he was genuine in his desire to help. However, there wasn’t a good chance for him to apologise as the noise of reentry rose to a shrieking howl. He held on to the sentiment for later.
The landing of the spaceplane was abrupt and without warning. One moment they were flying, as flat as ever and with no way to look out the window, and the next the cabin was shaking and the bottom of the plane was screaming from friction with the ground.
When the plane ground to a halt Kik started to rise from his seat, but Cormen held him down. “We’re not finished yet. They won’t let us out until the plane is decontaminated. If any spores take root in the city it could be catastrophic.”
Kik nodded and sat down again. A few other people who had tried to get up returned to their seats when they realised that the doors wouldn’t open yet.
A few boring minutes passed before they were cleared. The doors hissed open, moist air flooding the compartment. The faint white tint of a chemical mist floated in. Kik sealed his helmet just in case but Cormen walked through, unaffected.
“It’s not poisonous, not anymore,” he said. “Don’t worry, just relax stretch a bit. You won’t have much opportunity to let your hair down on the rest of our journey.”
“Does that mean we’re going to be cramped? Inside a vehicle or something?”
“Well, most of our trip will be through hot zones. Make your own assumptions.”
Kik sighed. “I was hoping to get a chance to walk around. I’m fine if I’m on my own, but being stuck in a can with a bunch of sweaty, complaining strangers isn’t my idea of a fun trip.”
Cormen shrugged. “We’ll see what we can do about that.”
Sergeant Olaf Rinkor read through his annual report and sighed. His squad of six hadn’t done so well this year.
The Dark Horse mercenary company were not the most well-known, or the most respected. They were not the best equipped, nor were they the best trained. They were far from the most numerous - they had a grand total of a dozen members. But they cost an affordable amount to hire, and they got the job done as long as it was within their abilities.
The problem was, just getting the job done wasn’t enough anymore. With border growth long over and nobody left for the military to fight except pirates, more and more people were going freelance. With all the trained ex-military units turning up on the market, a small group like his didn’t have much to make them stand out. That didn’t do wonders for their bottom line.
They needed a reputation, but they couldn’t get one if they didn’t have any work. Which was why he found himself on Icros, and even giving discounts for ‘old time’s sake’. He just needed the work, regardless of how little he would gain from it. Odd jobs like this could pass the time, but they wouldn’t make much - unless their client was late and had to pay them for their time spent waiting. And there was nothing Olaf liked more, at least at this point, than money for no effort.
This dream of free money, however, was set adrift as Olaf realised that the person who had just come through the door was their client. And he had some kid in a void suit with him.
The city was quiet, without the buzz of machinery that Kik was used to hearing. The dome around it blocked out the breeze from outside. The clouds above combined with the tinted glass dome to plunge the outside into total darkness. Inside was brighter, mostly due to the thousands of small lights dotting the dome. A few were broken, creating islands of dimness where the dark outside seeped through the restraining walls.
The weather inside was calm, if a little too balmy for Kik’s liking. The heat seeped through his open helmet and covered his entire body in moisture. If he wasn’t wearing an absorbent bodysuit, he no doubt would have drowned in his own perspiration. A hot breeze blew from vents leading down below, deep into the earth. It didn’t help with lowering the temperature.
Following Cormen into an unremarkable grey building, Kik looked around the small and dank room. Its temperature was a stark contrast to the warmth outside, but the moisture content remained at the same unpleasant level. Small globes around the walls provided scant illumination for the meetings inside.
A few small groups of people were collected in groups, discussing something or other. Many of the conversations were amicable, but there were a few gathered in quiet hissing matches. The participants were applying as much emotion as possible without being overheard. These were soon settled by swift exchanges of money and a disgruntled handshake or two.
Cormen headed off towards some man sitting by the wall. Kik supposed he was large, but he somehow didn’t give that impression - he was hunched and distracted, browsing through a dataslate. His dirty blonde hair hung over his eyes and his black shirt and shorts were rumpled.
“Olaf!” Cormen called out. “Are you not going to greet us?”
The man sighed and put the slate down. “Cormen. Glad you’ve arrived, finally. Are we going to head off now?”
“Once we’ve gathered all the equipment, yes. Have you got the suits and transportation?”
“Yes, we got some for all six of us, and for you. I don’t know what you’re going to do about the kid though. Is he coming?”
“He is. You’d better hurry up with finding him an envo suit because we’re leaving in a few hours.”
Olaf shook his head. “I’m not a miracle worker, Cormen,” he said. “I’ll see what I can scrounge up but I can’t guarantee anything. It takes time to fit a suit.”
Kik interjected. “Can I say that the ‘kid’ is right here? And couldn’t we just buy a ready-made suit? I’m not an uncommon size. Or we can get an imperfect one and have it altered. That shouldn’t take as long as making one from scratch.”
Olaf shrugged. “Ideally the suit would cover your body and be loose enough for you to move around. You might be able to get away with it, though. We’ll try buying one first. Otherwise I’ll speak to my dwarf, he might have a spare suit in your size.”
Kik nodded and turned to Cormen. “So are you going to wear the suit this time?”
“Hey, I’m reckless, not stupid. Don’t confuse the two, please. Of course I’m wearing a suit, while we’re outside a sealed environment at least.”
The group moved to a small store stocked with survival gear. Kik had a short conversation with Olaf as his measurements were being taken, exchanging pleasantries. The man was nice enough but even Kik could tell how much he focussed on work. He was making conversation but he didn’t mean it. He was scoping out a potential future customer, not making friends.
The shop’s owner, an old man who was less noticeable than the glasses he wore, brought out two small environmental suits. They were coloured a brilliant yellow, black exclamation marks patterning the front and back. The vision panels were small and square, granting little in the way of peripheral vision.
“Try this on”, the shopkeeper said to Kik. “These should fit better than anything else I can put together in a day.”
One suit was too tight and the other too loose, but that was what Kik was going to be stuck with. Rolling them up over his arm, Cormen paid and the group left to prepare for their departure. Kik stayed behind for a minute to purchase one or two survival essentials - a replacement flare gun, some tablets to help with radiation and some insect repellent. The latter came in a bottle almost the size of his arm.
“Thanks for your business,” the old man told Kik. “Try not to die out there.”
The group met up near the edge of the dome, Kik, Cormen and Olaf arriving together. The other five members of the ‘hired help’ met them there, standing around three vehicles. One was a large truck, with tracks as tall as Kik. It had a boarding ramp at the back, with the rear set aside for decontamination. The front was capped with a massive ram, more for ploughing than battering. The outside was marked with hand-sized windows and the antennae of a sensor array poked out the top.
The other two were two-man, four-wheeled bikes. They were open-topped contraptions of simple but effective design. Each packed an underslung, forward mounted light machine gun.
“That’s a lot of firepower,” Kik remarked, before he spotted the five people who would accompany them - three women and two men. His opinions changed.
All five wore environmental suits similar to his own, obscuring their entire bodies. Theirs, however, was painted a camouflaged black, blue and grey. Plates of armour, metallic or otherwise, were liberally strapped across their bodies. Their protection had a thrown-together feel to it. It wouldn’t have been out of place for one of them to be carrying a rusted manhole as a shield.
Their weapons were not quite as ragtag. They were five rifles, emblazoned with the mark of Suerado Industries - probably some military issue. A few nonstandard attachments dotted them - an optical scope here, an underslung grenade launcher there, an infrared scope there. Three of the rifles were loaded with solid shot and the last two with batteries for lasers. One of the members carried a second rifle over her shoulder, this one as tall as her. Its split barrel of white material connected onto a black stock and trigger system. A magazine the size of an outstretched palm slotted into the top of the rifle, next to a high-magnification scope.
One of them waved to Olaf, who had changed into his own suit while he had waited for Kik. Based on their gestures they were speaking, but whatever the subject was, Kik couldn’t hear any of it.
While the group was talking he changed into his own suit. It was loose and uncomfortable but it would keep him alive. Going over its functionality from the control panel on his wrist, he realised it was quite similar to his spacesuit. It was more durable, but it regulated the temperature less. It was also missing a few features like compressed air thrusters and helmet lights. He also couldn’t open up his visor to talk. He would be relying on radio and hand signals the entire time he was in the suit.
Walking over to the group, Cormen grabbed his arm and typed on his control panel. Once Kik was connected to the group radio he let go. “Can you hear me know?”
Kik gave him a thumbs up.
“Good. Everyone, we’re leaving. I’m going to rethink paying you boys by the hour if you keep dawdling like this.”
“I’m being paid by the hour?” Kik asked.
“Not you, the others. I have no idea how you’re paid. I thought that would have been worked out already.”
Kik sighed. “It’ll get taken care of, I suppose. Nobody ever seems to know what I get paid, myself included.”
Olaf chuckled. “I wouldn’t want to be you.”
“Alright,” Cormen continued. “This will be a three-day trip. It shouldn’t be too big a deal, as long as we don’t piss off a hive.”
“So the insects collect in hives?” one of the women asked. Kik hadn’t heard any of their names, and wasn’t even sure which one was talking.
“That they do,” Olaf said before Cormen could start waxing on. “But as long as we stay at ground level we won’t have a problem. The nests are below ground or at the top of the canopy.”
“Alright. Anything else we need to know?” one of the women, probably the same one, asked Cormen.
“How about what we’re actually looking for?” Olaf asked.
“Nothing now. I won’t tell you that until a day or so before we arrive. But if it’s what I think it is, it will be worth our time. I can’t wait to get my hands on it.”
The group set out right away, Cormen not wanting to delay any longer. Four of the mercenaries stayed outside on the bikes, a pair driving and another pair acting as spotters and gunners on the back. The female mercenary with the heavy weapon and Olaf stayed inside the larger vehicle with Kik and Cormen. Olaf parked himself on the sensors while the other mercenary drove.
The small convoy drove out onto a ramp to the surface as the doors to the city shut behind them. Once he was outside, Kik could see that the blackness of the glass wasn’t all tinting. Black patterning irregularly covered the dome, growths of fungus from spores attracted to the light. It wasn’t visible from inside, but from outside the patchiness of the light emitted from the dome was obvious.
The tracks and wheels of their vehicles churned up the ashy and rocky ground as they reached ground level. The surface of the planet was a hellscape. The only colour around was black, every organism unwilling to cede any light that struck it to its peers. Red and orange light from volcanoes and lava tinted the rocks, bouncing off the clouds of ash and giving the feeling of a permanent sunset.
Then there was the fungus. Its structures were everywhere. Beneath and on top of the rocks. Climbing the sides of the mountains and volcanoes. Floating through the air in spores. Climbing towards the sky in massive constructs, heedless of the lava that burnt at their bases in their search for life-giving energy.
The only place they did not rest were the lava flows themselves. These stretched across the landscape, carving tunnels of volcanic rock through the otherwise soft and pliable ash composing the ground.
There was also evidence of living creatures, as rare as it was. Collapsed fungus towers were chewed out, consumed by the hungry creatures of the land. Tunnels were dug beneath the ground, emerging in massive holes dotting the landscape. Flying creatures swooped through the skies, visible only as glints of reflected light against the greater darkness.
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The first day passed with little incident or trouble, although Kik was informed that this wasn’t a ‘hot’ zone yet. The real fungus infestation would begin when they emerged into an area with more radiation. This area was just starting to heat up volcanically, with most of the radioisotopes sealed far below the surface. Fungus was stronger elsewhere, and so was the rest of the ecosystem with it.
That night the two quad bikes were pulled inside the main vehicle. The rear contained a small airlock where the bikes and their four passengers were disinfected and the bikes were later stored. Half of the group still sparkling clean from their chemical bath, the eight people gathered on the floor to sleep.
That night they were awoken by trembling. Debating on whether to move or not, the noise slowly grew closer until it was all around them. The floor shook and metallic objects around the vehicle trembled. A glow of light shone in from outside the windows. Compared to the previous darkness out there it felt as if day had dawned.
Getting up and looking out the window, Kik expected to see a flow of lava bearing down on them, or something equally catastrophic. Instead he could see thousands upon thousands of bodies rushing their way past. Each of them had a small light emerging from their mouths, granting him a view of a field of lights to rival any galaxy.
The bodies rushing past were the size of cats, although they had multiple legs and were able to climb sideways along vertical surfaces like this truck. This had to be one of the insect species native to Icros.
The group held their silence and kept as still as possible, even if they couldn’t be heard from outside. None of them wanted the creatures out there to realise there was flesh behind the metal shield. The vehicle might not be broken by their attacks but it could easily be damaged - especially the exposed sensors. And none of them wanted to test a species honed by survival on a world of fire like this.
Eventually the trembling faded into the distance, and the ominous glow was sucked in by the surrounding dark. Peace returned to the world, for now at least.
Everyone in the vehicle let out their held breath and relaxed - everyone except for one person. The shortest of the mercenary crew had never woken. His snoring inside his suit had drowned out the noise and trembling from outside. With a few shakes of their head and silent laughs, the crew returned to their rest. All were relieved that one person, at least, was unconcerned enough to sleep through an insect stampede.
Olaf, Kik and Cormen met on the next day to discuss the march of the insects. Olaf was for the most part paying attention to his sensors, listing in and giving the occasional thought.
“Something’s set them off,” Cormen said. “There’s no way they’d swarm out of season like this.”
“What were they, anyway?” Kik asked.
“Firestrider ants. They looked like a well-developed swarm, too. What we saw was their hunters, leaving the nest as a single pack.”
“Unusual behaviour.”
“Yup. Normally they’re ambush predators, drawing their prey in with the light on their head. When they get close enough to strike, snip with the mandibles.”
“Any idea what could have caused it?”
Cormen shook his head. “It would have to be some pretty big thing. It’s possible that seismic activity destroyed their nest. Did you see any bugs without the lights, mixed into the swarm? If so then it was a migration. They would have been in the middle, protected by the hunters.”
“No. I might have been looking in the wrong direction, though.”
“Shame. That would have helped a lot in determining the cause.”
They lapsed into silence for a minute, before they were interrupted by a call from outside.
“One of you, take a look out the right windows. There’s something going on in that direction.”
Peering out, Kik and Cormen spotted a cloud of smoke rising. Unlike the dark grey ash kicked out by the volcanoes, this was a dark yellow, reflecting the light of the lava perfectly. Kik pulled out a compass and tried to figure what direction it was in, but despite being placed on a nearly flat surface, the needle span without direction.
“Which compass point is that smoke coming from? My compass isn’t working properly. We must be near a concentration of iron or something like that.”
“There aren’t any compass points here,” Olaf told him. “This planet doesn’t have a magnetic field. That’s why there’s so much solar radiation.”
“Oh. Any other way of finding out which way it is?”
“It’s in the direction of the sunrise, that’s all you need to know. If you arbitrarily take that as East, as charts tend to, then it would be east-nor-east.”
Kik nodded. “Do you have any of those charts? I want to figure out what’s in that direction.”
Olaf passed him a datachip. “There are some on there but they aren’t the newest. Topography tends to change fairly quickly around here. You can trust the mountains to stay, but not much else. And even those disappear sometimes.”
Thanking him, Kik slotted the chip into his datapad and opened it. Looking over the terrain in the location indicated, there seemed to be dense fungus forests in that direction.
“Somebody’s doing some backburning,” Cormen joked.
“That might be more accurate than you think,” Olaf said. “I’m trying to analyse the smoke, but it’s hard with so little ambient light. All I’ve been able to get out is large amounts of carbon. It’s no doubt due to some sort of burning fungus, and chemicals from those could no doubt cause the colouration.”
“Sounds like the sort of think that would happen everyday in a place like this. Look at all this lava around, for the void’s sake.”
Kik consulted the graph again. “There aren’t any marked active volcanoes in that area. How old did you say this map was, Olaf?”
“About three months. It could be a newly emerged volcano. Or more likely there are settlers trying to clear out a space to put down some buildings. There are crazier people out there. So they burn some stuff, make a little too much smoke, and you have some angry ants running away.”
One of the outriders cut into the conversation. “You got that resolved now? I wouldn’t have brought it up if you get this hung up over it. It’s kilometres away from us and it’s not likely to matter to us at all.”
“Yeah, just let us…”
Whatever Olaf was about to say was cut of by a tremor in the ground. A larger cloud of smoke rose, from close to where the first had emerged. This time it was the dark grey of ash.
“Yeah, looks like that’s a volcano,” Cormen said to nobody in particular. “It even has the earthquakes to match.”
The vehicles had to slow down for a short time. The tremors died out straight away, but creatures emerged from their burrows and streamed past the convoy. Insects ranging from fingernail size to the size of one of the quad bikes barrelled across the landscape, away from the source of the destruction. The most valuable survival instinct in this place was to not get too close to the places where the ground trembles.
The bikers watched the passing insects with drawn and readied weapons, keeping an eye out for trouble. Their concern was meaningless though, as none of the passersby so much as glanced at them. They had only one instinct ruling their minds - stay away from eruptions.
Once the land had settled again, or as much as it could after the seismic disturbance, the group proceeded.
The remaining day and a quarter passed in a blur. As the fungus jungle grew thicker, the truck was forced to take the lead, bludgeoning the black formations aside. They gave way like dust before the steel plough, their tops collapsing to the sides away from the vehicle’s path. The trail of destruction they left behind made Kik feel a little uncomfortable, but it was far better than walking.
As they closed upon their destination, the land grew clearer of the fungus. It was present but it climbed towards the sky rather than hugging the ground. Pathways opened up through it, more than wide enough for their vehicle.
As they wound their way closer and closer, the land took on less of a twisted shape. The fungus colonies grew straighter, but they were shorter.
“It’s because there’s less radiation around,” Olaf told Kik when he asked why that was. “As simple as the fungus genome is, it’s not immune to radiation. That mutation often causes them to grow in odd directions - at least that’s the most obvious mutation that appears. As the ambient radiation decreases, the radiation will fuel less fungus but in exchange they aren’t destroyed as quickly by their own source of food. Be glad you weren’t born as a fungus. It’s not a nice life.”
Just a few minutes’ drive away from reaching their destination, they ran into a problem. A deep ravine stretched as far as the eye could see in either direction. Untouched rock along its walls, only just starting to be covered in fungus, showed it was a new addition to the landscape.
The problem was solved quickly and efficiently. A metal plate was extended to cross the gap, biting into rock on either side. The quad bikes drove across with no difficulty.
The truck, however, had a bit of a problem. It was too wide to fit on top of the bridge - obvious, really, since the bridge had to be thinner than the truck to be stored inside it.
“All right, guess we’re walking,” Cormen said.
“It would be better to take the truck around the long way,” Olaf told him.
Cormen’s eye took on a manic gleam. “I have waited this long. I am not going to wait another hour while we circumnavigate this ravine. Get our stuff out of the car and loaded onto the quads. We. Are. Walking.”
Nobody able to argue with the agitated Cormen, their equipment was stacked on top of the bikes in the passenger seat and tied down. The rest was carried by the other six people, Kik included. He groaned under the bulk of the tent, but at least he wasn’t the truck driver, who had to carry both of her weapons alongside a cooking stove. To her credit, she bore it stoically after initial complaints about Cormen’s lack of baggage.
The man in person was driving one of the two bikes, racing ahead to the landing site with the short mercenary on the other. He was unable to contain his excitement about what he was going to see - so much so that he had neglected to tell the others about what it was. From the hints he had annoyingly dropped through the day, though, Kik had an idea that it was old - very old - and had something to do with weapons or starships.
The second group of walkers trudged behind, burdened down by their loads. Their feet sunk into the soft floor, part ash and part fungus. The path was flat, which was good, because they probably wouldn’t have made it if it wasn’t. Nothing came over the radio but laboured breathing.
Finally catching up to Cormen and the dwarf’s location, the group dumped their loads in a heap before bending over or collapsing. Kik’s shoulder was on fire from where the load had been pressing into his back. His helper obviously had not adjusted to human pain levels yet.
Standing straight, Kik flicked on a torch and shone it across the scene. Cormen was nowhere to be seen, as was his bodyguard. The two bikes were there and switched off, though, so he couldn’t have gone too far.
Wandering towards the camp, Kik looked around. There was a set of communications equipment set up atop a fungus colony, the only connection to the rest of the galaxy. There was a pair of small tents and ruts in the ash where a vehicle had previously been sitting. A series of different trails led away from the
Cormen emerged from one of the tents, his head held low. “There’s nobody here,” he said over communications.
Olaf’s head shot up. “What do you mean, nobody’s here? Weren’t we expecting someone?”
“What do I mean? Vanished! Disappeared! Spirited away! Vamoosh! Dorix - the archaeologist - was waiting for us here. He said so. There was no reason for him to leave before we arrived.”
“Could he have just decided that what he had found was worth keeping for himself?” Kik asked. “His vehicle is already gone.”
Cormen brought a thumb to his faceplate as if to bite his nail, but dropped it again once he remembered the glass before his face. “I don’t think so. He was quite excited about sharing his discovery. And he’s not the sort of person to pack up and leave all this…” he waved to the tents and communications behind him. “There are meal packs still left in there, strewn across the counter. He’s even got his datapad with the page saved on the book he was reading. No, nothing can be that important.”
Olaf frowned. “You mentioned a datapad. Could that have his notes on it?”
Cormen’s head shot up. “Maybe. I’ll go have a look.”
He emerged clutching it to his chest like a baby. “Let’s see. No, there’s no record of his findings on here. There IS a diary, though. The last entry is…” he clicked his tongue. “Six days ago. That was just after the last message I received from him. No, there’s no new information in here.” He sighed and tossed the datapad away. “
Olaf looked around. “So what now?”
“Well, we explore the wreck, of course. Perhaps we’ll find some clue.”
“And where is this ‘wreck’?”
“Underneath us. The entrance is inside the tent.”
Four of the eight gathered inside the tent, just beyond the decontamination area. Of the others, one mercenary started setting up the camping equipment. Another watched over the site and Olaf went through the other tent to find anything else that might be useful. The last one took one of the quad bikes and tried to follow the missing vehicle’s tracks.
“So I think it’s about time I owe you an explanation,” Cormen said to the group gathered above the tunnel into the earth, Kik along with two of the female mercenaries. “Beneath us, through that drill hole in the ground, is the wreck of an escort - approximately destroyer size - from just over four hundred years ago, before the tech wars. We weren’t able to pull much out of it but we did get one potentially important device, protected enough to survive the crash and years of seismic activity. As to what it is, I was kept in the dark as much as you have been so far. Unfortunately, that is now missing, so we need to find out what happened to it. I have no idea what we’re looking for, but anything might be helpful.”
The pair of mercenaries nodded and rapelled down first, using their banded armour as a makeshift harness. Cormen and Kik climbed more slowly, using handholds on the walls. Kik held the strap of his light in his teeth, giving him some indication of where the next grips were from the bouncing, swaying beam.
The dirt walls of the hole suddenly cut out beneath Kik’s feet, replaced by the slightly rusted metal of an ancient ship’s hull. Looking beneath his feet, there was only a little over two metres of space below, so he slid down using the rope as an aid.
Straightening up, he looked around. Cormen and the others were already splitting up and looking for hints to their situation along the strangely-shaped hallway. Kik realised that he was actually standing on a small pile of dirt, rock and ash lying beneath the hole, caused by crumbling from the hole above. Judging by the positioning of the doors along the walls, the ship was buried at a forty-five degree angle to the surface. Most of it would be stuck even further beneath the earth.
Peering through the doors one by one, Kik judged that this part of the ship had been picked clean. Even the electronics on the door locks had been taken apart and scavenged.
The ship didn’t seem that impressive, although it was amazing that it was still intact after four hundred years of seismic activity. Many of the hull plates were slightly buckled and there was rust around where water had once leaked from broken pipes, but the ship still retained its original shape.
Delving further into its depths, Kik saw the other members of the search party rummaging through empty storage containers and checking behind hull plates, looking for anything that might be of use.
Some ways further beneath the earth, the divided corridors merged again into a single passageway connecting the split fore and aft of the ship. Unfortunately, the aft of the ship was no longer reachable. The engine room and everything once further back had been crushed without mercy by the pressure from above. The roof plating along the corridor kissed the floor plating. They left only gaps too small for a cockroach to squeeze through, and no doubt the space further back was similarly squashed.
Unsurprisingly, none of the doors in the area were removed - they were needed to support the failing remnants of the roof around the rear of the craft. A few had holes lasered through, but the two intact doors closest to the crushed metal had been left completely untouched.
Kik felt a sudden urge to take a look inside. Who knows what he would find, in an untouched room on a centuries-old vessel? It wasn’t part of the objective, but anything he found would be valuable, right?
Going through the door was obviously not an option, so he had to figure out a way around. Each of the rooms was separated by a small amount of space behind the walls. Normally this would be occupied by machinery, storage and wiring, but the crew needed some way to access this…
Pulling off a hull plate he found the entrance to a maintenance tube. It was so narrow that the edges of his loose-fitting suit caught on the edges. But he was used to cramped spaces from his own ship. This much presented little challenge.
Sliding open a hatch on the left wall of the maintenance shaft, Kik was confronted by a maze of wires and signal carriers built into the wall itself. The level of detail was astonishing - thousands of wires covered the back of the plating, visible as lines of blue-tinted oxides insulating the streams of energy. Now, of course, the wires were dead - they had been for many years, as soon as the ship’s power supply, whatever it had been, had failed.
Shining his torch inside the space to get a better look, Kik was able to unclip one of the hull panels from the outside. It fell into the room from outside, the clatter deafening in the silent, still air.
Shining his light inside, the first think Kik noticed was the writing. It was spattered in a brown ink across the walls and ceiling like the commandments of a mad god, or bloody markings left by a ghost. It was written in messy handwriting, too small for him to read.
The second thing he noticed was the dried blood. Its stains were present across the entire floor, although its marks mostly remained on the join between the floor and one of the walls. It hadn’t pooled where the bottom was right now - rather it was against one of the side walls. Evidently the craft’s position had shifted over time, and where down had been was down no longer.
The third thing he noticed were the bodies. Three of them lay face-down, sprawled in a heap against the wall. They were still wearing beaten and scuffed void suits. Ominous stains of dark red against the off-white material indicated that was where the blood had originated from.
He took a moment to steady his breathing, noticing he was starting to gasp. There was nothing to fear from centuries-old corpses.
Going over to the bodies, Kik stretched all three of them out. Judging by the spacesuits, one was female and two were male, although they could have been crossdressers for all Kik knew. There wasn’t that much left of their bodies to determine by, only bone and a few wisps of skin and flesh. Bloody rips in the suits, stretching from navel to upper chest, had let in enough air to mostly decompose two of them. The injuries on these two weren’t from these tears, however - large dents in their helmets indicated a crushed skull beneath. The blood leaking from these tears was due to blunt force, not cuts.
The third body was definitely male. This one was much better preserved, although the skin on his face was jet black beneath his visor. It was unclear whether this was from decomposition or just his natural colour.
He had been killed by the dagger thrust into his chest, just above his heart. Perhaps he had been the one to do it to himself - bloody marks on his gloves matched stains on the handle of the knife. Or perhaps the marks were left by his last attempt to pull out the blade that was killing him. It was his own dagger, for certain - the sheath for it sat upon his belt. The only tear in his suit was this, the small break left by the thrust.
Wrenching the weapon free, Kik looked it over. The blade seemed to be made from some sort of bone or ceramic, certainly not metal. It was straight at the base but the blade thinned and took on a wave pattern towards the end, like a flamberge. The hilt was plain, untarnished metal, with a single white crystal on the pommel as decoration and weighting. When he swung the blade against the metal wall, it bounced off without leaving a mark. It seemed it was no use against armour, but at least the weapon wasn’t damaged by the impact.
Kik tried to sheathe it. The sheath held it with no problems, its metal unmarked by the passage of time, but the strap wasn’t quite as durable. The leather snapped when he tried to lift it by that part. Instead he just dropped the blade, sheath and all, into his storage pockets.
With little else to learn from the bodies, Kik moved on to the writing on the walls. He recoiled for a second, realising they were all written in blood, and then realised what he had just been doing. Now wasn’t the point to be getting scared. He made out a few of the inscriptions on the walls.
“Death comes for all.”
“Where is the sun? Where is the light?”
“How many days have I sat here, talking to myself…”
“All dead, all dead. Only me left.”
“They speak to me, but I don’t listen. They’re dead and gone. I don’t hear anything.”
“I can hear the daisies, swaying in the breeze…”
The writing was a mess of sentences, scrambled together. There was no order or reason to them, if anything they seemed to grow more erratic the further he read. In some spots layers upon layers of writing had been scrawled over every surface. Some of the handwriting was messy, some was neat, and there was no way of telling which came first. But as he read, Kik was repeatedly drawn to one statement, in simple block letters, situated in the middle of the ceiling and separated from the other writing by a foot of space.
“REMEMBER CALATHOR”. And beneath it, in smaller letters, “Never forget, never forgive.”
Reading this over a few times, Kik suddenly felt a chill against his neck. It was probably just his imagination. Probably. But whatever the case, he didn’t want to stay in that room any longer. He scrambled out the way he had came in, squeezing his way past wires into the crawlspace between rooms. Free in the hallway at last, he let out a sigh of relief and gave a quick shiver. He replaced the missing plating and moved on, forgetting that he had initially come to look for clues.
The four met again beneath the hole and shook their heads. None of them had found anything useful - the wreck had been picked clean. There weren’t even any notes left behind. It seemed Dorix had been busy over the course of his search.
Returning to the surface, they were met just outside the tent by Olaf running up to them.
“Thank goodness I found you. We couldn’t reach you when you were underground - wherever you were must block comms signals. Something bad has happened.”
“What?” Cormen asked.
“That’s… well… you’d better see for yourself. Coloz is hurt.”
The mercenaries with them stiffened. “Where?” one asked.
“She’s in the other tent being treated. Elana, you can head there now - she’s unconscious but I think she’s stable. The rest of you, come with me. We need to figure out what happened.”
The marks of an explosion were clear across the ground. A blast zone several metres in diameter marked the base of a fallen fungus colony. A sheet was lain across the ground, with a small bloodstain poking out of the edge.
“You don’t want to look under that,” said Olaf as Cormen tried to approach it. “There are the remnants of two legs underneath.”
Cormen stepped away carefully. “So what did this? It’s obviously no natural occurrence - it was an explosion, not some sort of volcanic activity.”
Olaf held up the rifle he was holding. “Her gun. Or, more precisely, the underslung grenade launcher on it. It hit the ground next to her and exploded. She was lucky to keep the rest of her body, and she was also lucky that it was concussion and not frag or plasma.”
“You have plasma grenades?” Kik asked.
“Not officially, no. But either way, we need to figure out how this happened.”
Looking around, the other three started going over the nearby area for hints. Kik instead went and looked at the gun.
“You’re sure it was the grenade launcher?” he asked Olaf.
Olaf sighed. “What else could it have been? She didn’t use a grenade at any other point on this trip, and there’s no grenade round in there. It was definitely loaded before.”
“Then somebody else shot it at her.”
Olaf turned to face Kik. “What do you mean?”
“The rifle isn’t damaged at all by the explosion, it barely even has any ash on it. The grenade had to have been fired from a distance for that to happen. I’m guessing the person who shot it stood far enough away they wouldn’t be hurt themselves, and left after putting the rifle beside her body. They probably erased their tracks along the way. I’m just curious about how they got the rifle away from her in the first place...”
Olaf chuckled, which turned into a laugh.
“What are you doing?’ Kik asked. “Why laugh? This is hardly a joking matter.”
Olaf grinned behind his mask. “Why am I happy? Why would I not be? It wasn’t an accident. Somebody did this to Coloz. That means I have someone to take my anger out on. We’re not alone in this jungle.”
Smoke billowed into the air from volcanic vents and fungus colonies stretched to the air, the same as usual. Nothing had changed - yet everything had. Nature was no longer the only foe. The group eyed the surroundings in anticipation of approaching danger.