A storm had hit Dendril City.
As a planet, Ialis was unusually flat. There were low hills and dips in the terrain, but there were no extremes. No mountains, no valleys. There was a water ocean hundreds of kilometers wide that Miles would have been able to wade across without getting his neck wet.
Since the planet’s surface was only a thin crust on top of an immense technological construction, it didn’t have the geological activity needed to produce high peaks or deep oceans, and that same consistent elevation had something to do with the storms.
The long runaways of flat terrain would let them travel for thousands of miles without breaking up, swallowing local weather systems and picking up enough energy and speed that they could shut down even an advanced hub like Dendril City.
It didn’t help that all of the transport platforms were open-topped.
Outside the window, the wind whipped at the buildings, lashing them with rain, pushing any floating platforms that tried to brave the weather off course. In some places the plants growing up around the black spires had been torn away from their anchoring roots, leaving meters-long vines to flail in the air, slapping against the closest neighboring towers.
Miles watched enviously at small ships flying back and forth from the city — disks, darts, bulbous cigars — their alert lights blinking at him through the rain like passing cars. With real engines, powered stabilizers, and roofs, the ships were able to navigate the wind, coming and going from the landing pads that were otherwise invisible.
A few of the smaller ships were even flying through the city. Tiny personal craft, too small to carry more than three or four people, crept cautiously between towers, pausing to connect to the docking levels of different buildings.
“No that is not it,” the Ankn survivor complained.
Miles took the comm unit back from the beetle-like sapient, staring at the screen dejectedly.
“The settings say Ankn,” he said.
“It’s not very good for me,” the rescued scout replied.
The Ankn patient Miles and the others had been caring for had been awake for the last few days, and talking like a person for the last two of them. Her recovery seemed to involve slowly re-growing from a larval stage back to the point of being an aware and communicative sapient.
Privately, Miles was likening it to a human recovering from a severe head injury, but his patient had actually been regrowing her body. Limbs, eyes, manipulators, and wings had all grown out from what had been an almost featureless chitin body.
A couple of days before, she’d woken up briefly and asked for a comm unit so she could call her mom, then fallen back into another period of regenerative sleep. Now, she was still lying on a padded mat on their apartment floor, but she had two sets of five legs running along each side of her body, a face with eyestalks and mouthparts like a crab, and a pair of stubby wings growing from her collar that definitely weren't big enough to let her fly.
Miles brought the comm back up, paging through the options.
The device had a number of screen presets that would tune it for the visual systems of different species. The Ankn setting skewed the interface to bright yellow on an indigo background, but apparently, that still wasn’t good for Milli.
Milli had told them she’d been as thoroughly deceived by Brisk and Captain Rhu-Orlen as the rest of them. Taken on as a scout from another refugee processing station just outside Iteration 27,145, she’d been contracted out by her clan to the captain in apparent good faith, only to be left for dead on her first dive.
Miles had started wondering how many novice salvagers the ship had run through before it had got what it was after.
On the comm, Miles found a setting for auto-configuration. He pressed a physical button to trigger it and held it in front of Milli’s face.
“Can you tell me when it looks clear? It’s running through some permutations.”
Milli watched the screen diligently, while Miles let his gaze wander around the apartment.
It was a week since they’d moved into the apartment, and it was starting to show. They’d all made small changes to make the space a better fit for themselves.
Torg had made his resting spot in the top corner of the room official by secreting some kind of hard wax around the spot, making himself a cocoon of crusty yellow glass-like material.
He’d also put an equipment plate up on the wall next to the cocoon, where all of their diving equipment was now hanging, stuck to the perforated blue metal by some kind of material-agnostic magnetism that was a natural force in the weave.
Torg’s breastplate, ax, and autopistol were in one corner.
The autopistol had cost Torg about a third as much seln to reload as he’d sacrificed by refusing to sell it, but he had insisted, and Miles hadn’t wanted to argue against them upgrading their group’s firepower.
The rainbow-shimmer surface of the breastplate still showed the puncture marks made by the gun that was now its neighbor, damage that Miles hadn’t been able to fix even with his improved Seal Wounds spell. Maybe too much of the armor had been destroyed by the impacts, or maybe the material was too inflexible for his magic to pull together. He’d seen the spell move around the torn edges of cloth, skin, and chitin before, but he’d never seen it make new material to help plug a gap.
At the opposite corner was Trin’s equipment. The tall-barreled firefly pistol, his armored fabric cap, both his old scanner and his new one, and a utility belt stuffed with light sources, noisemakers, cloud pellets and cloud dispersers.
The new scanner was meant to make Trin a lot better at his role. It had three small screens, each capable of showing a separate sensor channel, an expanded bank of control keys, and a directional transceiver that could do active scans and even mess with other tech, if Trin was right about knowing how to program it. It was bulkier than his last one, two feet long and meant to be worn on a strap. To Miles, it had an unfortunate resemblance to a keytar.
Miles hadn’t spent much money expanding his own dive equipment. The equipment board held his holstered striker pistol, freshly recharged off the apartment’s wall outlet, a little clip-on belt pouch with a couple of light beans inside, and his robe, hanging like a shirt from its collar.
There were a few of his personal trinkets up there too. The dungeon's impression of a cell phone that he’d found in the forest room, and the costume jewelry ring he’d decided to stop wearing when it had started to turn his skin blue.
The robe hanging from the board had seen some improvements, too. Miles had found a pop-up tailor’s stall in the Ishel market level and its Morchis proprietor had sold him on the idea of tidying it up, getting the fit to work a little better for him, and reinforcing the inner lining with some kind of energy-absorbing foil.
Miles had expected the custom work to take a couple of days and a few hundred seln, but the tailor had made the changes in about two minutes with a piece of articulated tech, and had only charged him forty seln for it. They’d even replaced the temporary ‘healer’ symbol on the front with a longer-lasting dyed version.
Most of the rest of his spending had been on personal clothing. He was finally out of the clothes he’d fled Earth with.
He’d ditched his shirt and cargo pants, replacing them with a pair of tapered black pants and a long-sleeved white shirt. He’d swapped his threadbare sweater for a loose thigh-length jerkin made of dark red fabric, and to help cope with the frequent rain he’d added a dirt-brown cloak to his wardrobe, cut to local Ialis fashion and made from hydrophobic plant fibers.
He felt a little overdressed in the apartment, but he was hoping it was the kind of outfit he’d be comfortable wearing to Thouco Tower.
The loss of storage from losing his cargo pants worried him, but he’d bought a few belt pouches to try and make up for it.
“Oh, there it is. I see it now,” Milli said, little eyes bobbing on the end of her eyestalks.
Miles pressed the button that froze the fine-tuning process, and another tap saved the setting. He passed the device to Milli’s grasping hands with a smile. She took it and brought it up to her face, staring intently at the screen.
“It is searching. It is searching. It has found me! Ugh, so many messages. Delete, delete, delete.”
“Are you going to contact your family?” Miles asked.
“Yes, I am. I will say, ‘Mama. I am talking to you from the hill of the dead! Oooh’.”
“Or maybe, ‘Hey mom, just wanted to let you know I’m alive…’”
“The hill of the deaaad. Oh no, demons, mama! The stories were true!”
“Maybe I should message her.”
“No. I will write it. But we should touch now.”
Miles pulled his comm from the pouch on his belt, it’s still a little tight in there, and tapped it to Milli’s. The two devices communicated, sharing contact details, and they separated.
He was pulling his comm back when he froze, seeing an unread message waiting for him on the screen.
> Fran > Miles
>
> Hey there Miles, hope you're making out alright. Listen, pal, I've got a contract to show some weekenders a weird time in the dungeon. Adventurers. Do you know what I call them? Thrill-seekers. They want to go in, kick some bugs around, and make out with some new conversation pieces. Nothing too serious. I'm thinking I'll run them through a few rooms on level 3 and take a chute down if we get the chance. The thing is, they want a dedicated healer on the team and they’re NOT stumping up for an Ialis Corp temp. Where do they expect me to find someone on short notice, right? What would you say about signing on for a one-timer tonight? We’re not planning anything daring. A simple in-out. Well, what do you say?
Is this a job?
Miles tapped out a reply.
> Miles > Fran
>
> Hey, Fran. Can my team come? What are they paying? Do they know I'm only a Tier 1 healer?
He stared at his comm, waiting for a reply. A minute passed with no new messages, and Miles was forced to face the fact that not everyone was always on top of their comm.
After another minute of waiting, the door to the apartment slid open and Trin walked through. He was still wearing his pink one-piece jumpsuit, the chest and pants covered in pockets, with his tote bag hanging from one shoulder.
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“Hello Miles. Hello Milli,” he said, otherwise ignoring them and heading straight to the wall on the right of the door.
He reached into his bag and started pulling out handfuls of transparent plastic sheets. Fliers. Each was a rectangle of printed plastic that showed a photo of a ship alongside a price and a description.
The entire wall was already dotted with promotional flyers from retailers. Weave ships, personal transports, resort holidays, and personal equipment, all beyond their ability to purchase.
Trin had never explained why he was always sticking them up there, but Miles thought it was probably aspirational, Trin’s version of a vision board.
“Here’s good one,” he said, holding up an ad for a second-hand shuttle. “Only forty thousand.”
It was a tired-looking vessel about the size of an RV. It didn’t even have a euphospher drive. It was probably just running on upscaled levitation units.
“Maybe in a few years,” Miles said, encouragingly.
Trin ignored him and turned away to finish sticking his sheets to the wall.
What are you even sticking those up with?
When Trin was done he collapsed onto the bed, grabbing one of Miles' books from the neat stack at the end and idly scrolling through it. Miles thought it was the book on Orbellius natural history he'd got from the Exchange after their last dive
Torg returned a few minutes later. He carried a sweet, fruity smell into the apartment with him, clicking at the three of them before pulling down the sheet walls of the washing cubicle and stepping inside. A few seconds later the sound of splashing liquid started coming from the chamber, along with the faint odor of nitric acid.
The apartment was way too small for all four of them.
"We need a new place," Miles said.
Trin pointed at the flier for a five-bedroom apartment suite stuck to the wall.
A thousand seln per week. Right.
It took several minutes for Fran to respond, and Miles didn't immediately hear the buzz when she did. He spent the time talking to Milli, only noticing the message after she'd finished telling him about all the people she'd been in touch with.
> Fran > Miles
> Yeah, you sound like a diver. They’re not paying you, I am. I’ll give you 200 seln to come with us, and that’s me taking advantage of you. I’m thinking you’ll accept it because you don’t have anything better to do. If I’m wrong then I go to the next person on my list. For your information, that’s going to be a really sketchy Purir called Desolate. Happy for you to bring anyone you want so long as it’s on your dime. I’m not putting up any more seln for tag-alongs. As for the Tier 1, don’t sweat it. I’m a Tier 3 healer myself.
Miles lowered his comm, thinking.
If this offer had come four days earlier when he was fresh off the Lestiel Dunverde dive, he would have turned it down. He was still sore from being burned by Rhu-Orlen’s crew, and two hundred seln wouldn’t have seemed worth the risk to him. Now, he was not only down to a little over two thousand seln, but there hadn’t been any sign of work or opportunities for days.
He wasn’t the type of person to rush into danger, or even into an awkward conversation, but when an opportunity appeared in front of him, his fear of missing out expanded until it outweighed every other fear.
The paranoid part of Miles’ mind was telling him that this might be the last chance he ever got. Meanwhile, the logical part of his mind was helping him justify it.
It would be a good way for him to get experience in the dungeon, and it was a good networking opportunity. Showing Fran that he was reliable might improve his chances of getting more work from her in the future, and having her along would make it a relatively safe trip, thanks to her experience and abilities. Despite only just meeting her, she seemed up-front, and he trusted that.
He didn't need to work very hard on talking himself into it. His remaining concern was who he could take with him.
His first thought was that he’d want to bring his team, Trin and Torg. But split three ways, the two hundred seln would be less than seventy each. He wasn’t sure that was worth it for any of them.
He looked up at where Trin was reading.
“Trin, do you want to come on a dive with me for sixty seln?”
“For six hundred seln?”
“Sixty.”
“No.”
“It’ll be good experience I think," Miles persisted. "It would be with Fran San-san-quirren from the dive last week and a bunch of adventurers.”
Trin’s head flaps lifted slightly for a few seconds, then flopped back down. “No. I’ll stay. Don’t want to miss a big-money job.”
Maybe Torg?
Their lancer was in the corner of the room, now, out of the shower and basking in his heat lamp. He’d been trying to find them another contract nearly every day since he’d recovered from the last dive, but he must have heard Miles making the offer to Trin, and he hadn't spoken up about wanting to go.
“Torg?” he asked, just to check.
Click. “Tired.”
Okay. Could I go on my own?
As soon as Miles asked himself the question, he thought of another option. Task. The apprentice was looking for a trip into the dungeon, and with Fran along, this could be one of the safest possible ways for him to experience it. It also meant Miles would have someone else he knew there.
Sitting on the floor next to the bed, he tried to think of any downsides.
Task could die, or I could die, or Task could be really annoying after spending more time with him, or Task could accidentally kill us all with a spell.
After a couple of minutes of thought, Miles concluded that his judgment of what kind of downsides were likely or even possible wasn’t calibrated right.
He used his comm, sending the apprentice a message.
> Miles > Task
>
> Hey Task. Remember you said you were thinking of going on a dive into the artifact? Would you like to come on one with me? It would be me, one other more qualified diver, and three clients. The pay isn’t great, 100 seln, but I think it’s worth it to get more dungeon experience. It might be dangerous though.
He re-read it a few times, then sent it. Unlike with Fran, a message came back less than a minute later.
> Task > Miles
> Hello Miles. I thought you had forgotten me. Yes! I’d like to come with you very much. When do you want me? I can be ready straight away. Just give me a few moments.
> Miles > Task
>
> It would be tonight.
> Task > Miles
>
> Yes. I'm excited.
> Miles > Fran
>
> Hey Fran. Yes, I'm up for that, sign me up. I'm bringing another new scavenger with me. Let me know the time and the client species so I can read up and I'll be there. Thanks.
Fran came back promptly with a meet-up place and a time, which Miles forwarded to Task.
He turned his attention to the equipment panel on the wall. The short-notice dive still wouldn’t be until after dark, so he had plenty of time to prepare.
***
Miles pulled his robe down over his jerkin, pushing it over his pants to hang around his thighs.
The thing had been baggy and ill-fitting when he’d bought it, but now it fit him comfortably. The thick defensive foil running along its inside gave it a little more weight and a little more shape, and made it actually feel like armor. Its new cut didn’t interfere with his movements no matter how he ran or jumped around the apartment, and with his synth fabric belt strapped around it, it lay snugly against his body at the waist before flaring out slightly over his legs.
He took the holstered striker down from the board and strapped it to the back of his belt, then clipped on the belt pouches holding his index, his comm, and a handful of the little light beans he’d discovered through Fran on his last dive.
He wore his runner’s pack on his back with a few more miscellaneous supplies; pen knife, water bottle, foodpacks for every biochemistry that would be represented on the dive, as well as a couple of medical reference books wrapped in the plastic sack some of his clothes had been delivered in.
Outside, the disruptive wind had eased off, but the rain was still coming down hard, so Miles threw on his brown cloak, clipping it at his throat and pulling up the hood. When he brought the sides in front of him, the natural balance of tension in the fabric pulled them together to hug his body. At least he wouldn’t have to worry about arriving wet from the platform ride.
“I think I’m ready,” Miles said to Trin.
Milli was taking a shower in the cubicle, and Torg had gone back out as soon as the wind had eased off.
Trin was sitting by the window, his comm held loosely in a mid-paw, and his eyes obscured by the black band of a simulator. Miles didn’t know if Trin was running a training simulation or watching entertainment, and he wasn’t about to ask.
Trin lifted the simulator band and looked Miles up and down. “You look like you’re going to romance meeting.”
Miles looked down at his clothes. “You mean a date?”
“Clothes are too fancy.”
“Maybe,” Miles said. He’d picked them with the idea that they’d be appropriate for dives and for the nicer places like Thouco Tower. What did Trin want him to do, buy two sets of clothes? “I want to make a good impression on Fran and her clients.”
He checked the time on his comm, then replaced it in its pouch.
“It’s time for me to go.”
“Goodbye Miles, my friend!” Milli called from the shower, her voice warring with the sound of the cubicle’s mister.
“Bye Milli, bye Trin.”
Miles pressed the access panel to open the door, which slid open.
He was just about to step out into the corridor, when a familiar sound made him freeze in place.
It was a kind of tune, electronic tones playing a simple four-note song that repeated. It took a few seconds for Miles to place it, his heart beating hard for a reason he didn’t immediately understand, until he turned and looked at the source.
The sound was coming from the cell phone stuck to the equipment plate. The screen was lit up with an incoming call.
Trin tore off his simulator, looking around the room until he spotted the cell phone.
"Miles your thing is singing."
"Yeah," Miles said.
"Will it explode?" Trin asked.
Instead of answering, Miles stepped back into the room, letting the door close behind him, and slowly approached the equipment panel. He took one step towards it, then another.
The phone's screen was showing a distorted face, the mockery of a contact’s info screen, with a vaguely human head that looked like it had been smeared into the top right corner of the photo by an oily thumb. Where on a real Earth cell phone the contact name would be displayed, there was only an unintelligible mess of lines.
He looked at Trin’s concerned face. He didn't think the Eppan really knew what was happening. He wasn't sure he knew what was happening.
He pulled the phone off the panel and pressed the off-color accept button.
He didn't want to hold the phone up to his ear, but was working off muscle memory at this point.
"Hello?" he said.
"Hi honey," a voice on the phone said.
It sounded like a woman in her twenties, speaking English with an American accent.
"Hi, who is this?" Miles asked.
"I'm stopping at the store on my way home. Do you need anything?"
"No, I'm good, but who is this?" Miles asked. "How are you calling me?"
The woman laughed. "You want that? You want that? Well, okay, honey."
"I don't want anything. Hello? Is this a robocall?"
"You know I love you. I love all my children. Anyway, I’ll be there soon."
The call ended with a beep, and the screen went blank.
Miles tried to turn the phone back on, pressing the screen, pressing everything that looked like a button, but it remained dead. It was as if it had never been turned on to begin with.
“Did that thing talk at you?” Trin asked.
Miles didn’t answer. He felt shaky. He hadn’t recognized the woman on the call. He doubted there even had been a woman on the call. This had to be like the other things they’d seen in the dungeon; the audio version of a sleeping bag with no openings.
I bet it wasn’t even connecting to anything, Miles told himself. It was just playing back made-up audio that was on the phone when it was manufactured, or however the dungeon creates things. It was just acting like a cell phone acts.
Miles found that explanation comforting. Not comforting enough to bring the phone with him. He left it in a bundle of his old clothes, stuffed into the corner of the room.
Despite the shock of the call, he still had an appointment to keep. He tightened his cloak, left the apartment, and took the elevator to the departure level.