The door opened on a long, long corridor. It seemed to stretch out ahead of them endlessly, never bending, never rising or falling. It was the same dimensions as the door, tall enough to allow a giant to pass, but so narrow they wouldn’t be able to walk more than two side-by-side.
It had the same construction as the winding corridor they’d passed through with Brisk on their last trip. The floor was textured metal, the walls made up of featureless white panels, the ceiling set with intermittently placed blue-white lights.
As they stepped through, Miles noticed something additionally weird about the corridor. There was something wrong with perspective.
Normally a space like this would have the look of shrinking as it got further away, with the straight lines seeming to converge on the vanishing point. That wasn’t what was happening here. When Miles stared down the corridor, it was almost like perspective didn’t even exist. The corridor faded out to milky indistinctness with the distance, but it took up as much visual space at every point along it.
It created a bizarre fun-house-mirror feeling that set Miles on edge.
Without the normal visual cues, Miles had trouble gauging the corridor’s length. It could have been a hundred meters long or a hundred miles. Only the way that the distant details faded out gave him any clue.
“Trin, how long is this?” Miles asked. He was reluctant to start walking down a corridor that had no features and seemed to have no end.
Trin must have already been scanning, because he answered straight away.
“This one, it is twenty-eight hundred meters until something hard.”
Two-point-eight kilometers. Not too long.
Miles did some mental calculations. If they walked at a sustainable pace, that might take them thirty or forty minutes. Estimating on the high side, that could be an hour and a half for the round trip.
The cautious walk through the forest room had taken half an hour, with another twenty minutes of fighting the Orbellius ghoul and looting the campsite.
They’d had a four-hour limit from their point of entry, with about an hour spent so far. The corridor might add another two to that, if they spent any time at all investigating the far end.
Miles didn’t want less than an hour of slack in their schedule, not when the consequence of missing the deadline was facing the terrifying unknown of being inside the dungeon when it reconfigured.
“We don’t have time,” Miles said, eventually.
“Untrue, we have an abundance of time,” Lestiel said. “A leisurely walk along this passageway and back will still afford us around fifty-five minutes to investigate the terminus, with three minutes to spare in case of unexpected delays.”
Three minutes??
“Three minutes isn’t enough slack,” Miles said. “I want at least an hour of slack on every visit.”
“Twenty-five percent of your entire time budget? That’s preposterous,” Lestiel said. “Are you overly predisposed to accidents? Perhaps you have a propensity for tripping over your feet, or getting lost in straight tunnels?”
Miles felt his face get hot as he struggled with how to make himself understood.
He’d just taken for granted that his ideas of safe working would be universal. Obviously, they should leave a generous amount of time for the unexpected when they were visiting such a dangerous, unfamiliar place, but Lestiel seemed genuinely confused, and even Trin was giving him a skeptical look.
“We don’t know what might delay us,” Miles countered. “A door could drop down behind us, and we’d need time to open it, or we could get injured in a way that slows us down. One of us could be knocked out and need to be carried back—”
“It’s true,” Trin interjected, “That happened once.”
“—We just don’t know all the threats.”
Lestiel looked from Miles to Trin, then to Torg.
“Well, I’m continuing, even if I go alone,” Lestiel said. “Abandoning me here would be a violation of contract, but since you’ve been convenient so far, I’d be willing to pay you on a pro-rata basis for the time you’ve accompanied me — perhaps fifty percent of our agreed fee.”
Miles seriously considered it. He looked between Torg and Trin, trying to gauge their reactions. He felt like Trin wanted to continue on. Torg was unreadable.
“I want to see,” Trin said. “We go, we look, we cut loose if boring. Still lots of time.”
“I will have no desire to linger either, if the terminus is ‘boring’,” Lestiel said.
Cltick. ‘Go,’ Torg said.
Miles rubbed his forehead. It looked like he was outvoted. Is that how we’re making decisions? If they just went to the end, looked, then came back, that would still leave them forty or fifty minutes of slack. He might be able to deal with that level of risk.
“Okay, go,” Miles said. “Just to the far end and back. We won’t have any time to spend when we get there.”
“Wonderful,” Lestiel said, drawing the word out as if he’d been waiting for children to come to the obvious conclusion. He turned and started striding down the corridor.
After a few seconds of hesitation, Miles followed.
***
At least one mystery was solved as they traveled down the corridor. The strange perspective effect of the passageway turned out to have a physical cause.
Miles noticed it after they'd traveled a few hundred feet. The corridor was getting wider. The floor was sloping subtly downwards, the walls were getting further apart, and the ceiling was angled up.
All of the sides were diverging at the precise rate that would create a perfect forced perspective. The effect from the start of the corridor had been to counteract the apparent shrinking of perspective, but it seemed like a lot of effort to go to for an optical illusion.
What was the point? To make it harder to judge the distance?
It couldn’t only have been affecting him. Except in the case of truly alien vision systems, perspective was a consequence of geometry, straight lines converging on a point. There were definitely species out there whose visual systems were different enough to his that it might not have had an effect on them, beings who saw through their skin, or through energy fields, but the people with him then didn’t seem to have that going on.
Trin and Lestiel both had eyes with pupils, and presumably retina-analogs. Unless their visual processing was doing something obscure, they should have had the same impression.
Torg had at least four eyes that Miles had identified, but from the scraps he could remember from college physics, he didn’t think that would result in vision that was too different.
As the silence in the corridor started to feel oppressive, he decided he could at least check.
“Is anyone getting a weird perspective effect here?” he asked the group.
“What is that?” Trin asked. “Did not translate.”
“Perspective. Things seem smaller when they’re further away.”
Lestiel slowed, turning to give Miles a sidelong look. “Did you just say that distant objects look smaller to you?”
“Ohh,” Trin answered. “Perspective. Yes. For this tube, it gets bigger as it gets far away. It tricks you.”
“Yes,” Miles said.
“You as well?” Lestiel said, looking at Trin. He seemed to find it amusing. “Do you mean that if I were to move further away, I would look smaller to you?”
“Yes,” Trin said. “That’s how it works.”
Lestiel picked up his pace, putting distance between them over the course of a few seconds.
“Do I appear to be shrinking to you?” he called back.
Clitchk. ‘Yes,’ Torg answered, this time.
“Oh no! I’m shrinking. Help me,” Lestiel called.
“Aren’t you meant to be a scientist?” Miles shouted after him.
Lestiel slowed, letting the group catch up. “I’m a scientist with functioning perception. How common is this?”
“It’s probably pretty common,” Miles guessed.
“This explains so much about the cultural psychology of certain species.”
“How do you see the world?” Miles asked.
Lestiel spread his arms as he replied. “I see the world in its naked truth. Energy, matter, space, and transitions. I can taste the weave and hear the song of its physical rules.”
“Can you see through the wall?” Trin asked.
Lestiel hesitated for a second before answering. “No.”
“What about inside of bodies?”
“You’re all somewhat transparent, yes.”
That just left Miles confused. What kind of vision did Lestiel have?
Miles let his Eyes of the Emigre fade and switched to Eyes of the Altruist for a second, inspecting Lestiel properly for the first time.
The man had almost no internal structure. No brain, no stomach, no lungs, no heart. The glowing light only seemed to highlight one ‘organ’, a large ellipse that ran vertically from his neck down to his hips. It had thick walls and pointed ends, with an inner edge that was dotted with sharp protrusions. It kind of gave the effect of a sideways mouth.
Lestiel must have noticed Miles watching, because he twisted his head to look back at him. The man’s expression didn’t change, but the oval inside him stretched open slightly, revealing new glowing shapes through it.
Miles let Eyes of the Altruist fade. He found he didn’t really want to understand what was going on with that.
Lestiel was smiling as he turned back to face forward. “I don’t recognize it as a trick of perspective, but this passageway is reminiscent of Morchis architecture. Its ratio of expansion mirrors that of their stations.”
They continued on in silence. The passageway continued to expand. The ever-shifting black and white of Lestiel’s skin strobed as they walked, the strange effect taking the natural light and shadow of the passing overhead lamps and turning it into something stark and absolute.
After twenty minutes, walking down the passageway was closer to walking through a hangar. The wall tiles were the same size as further back in the corridor, but they’d multiplied. The floor sloped upwards behind them, the ceilings had vanished into the gloom above. The overhead lights had grown huge, but the light from them was weaker in comparison. It was a strange environment, but at least it wasn’t as claustrophobic as the passageway at its start.
After a few minutes, Miles felt himself relax. The corridor was straight, and it was straightforward. There were no crate-shaped cloak roaches, there were no unlikely angles. It was clear, with good visibility, and they were making good time. After the conversation had died out, it seemed like boredom would be the biggest threat.
It was the first time since they’d entered the artifact that Miles didn’t feel like he had to be on guard, and he took advantage of the lull to check his index.
Name: Miles Asher | Traditions: Harmonizer | Index Value: δ#1,2#0##
Fundamental Properties:
Strength (0)
Durability (1)
Speed (0)
Reactions (0)
Will (0)
Authority (2)
Authority (0.26)
Spells
Close Wound (Grasping)
A weft of harmonizing energy brings together the free edges of a tear, sealing the join in materials which are co-bondable, such as cellular membranes, metal compounds, woven fabrics, and homogenous molecular surfaces.
Temporary Enhancement (Grasping)
A temporary matrix of harmonizing energy alters one of a being’s fundamental properties by an amount in accordance with the weaver’s authority.
Hasten Renewal (Grasping)
A weft of harmonizing energy spreads from the weaver to their target, greatly speeding the being’s natural recovery by an amount multiplicative with the weaver’s authority.
Strike the Disharmonious (Tentative)
With a weft of harmonizing energy, the weaver rips the authority from a disharmonious target, degrading its existence and claiming the confiscated authority for themself. While held ready, discordant presences will ring loudly in the weaver’s awareness.
Core Effects
Eyes of the Emigre
Embeds a matrix of harmonizing energy within the being’s mind which will reveal to them the meaning of any plain text or spoken language.
Eyes of the Altruist
Embeds a matrix of harmonizing energy within the being’s mind which reveal to them the health and ailments of a witnessed being.
Miles had cast Strike the Disharmonious on the Orbellius ghoul, and he’d felt a change that had stuck with him. It was the opposite of the light, fragile feeling he’d had after exhausting his magic; a weight and a solidity.
As he read his index, he realized that there’d also been a change on his listing.
Strike the Disharmonious claimed to be able to confiscate a target’s authority, and the litany he’d experienced when he’d cast it had backed that up.
He’d wondered if that meant he’d get a temporary boost to his authority fundamental, but it seemed like it had given him an additional Authority property instead. The 0.26 figure must be his index’s assessment of the authority he’d taken from the Orbellius ghoul. He just didn’t know what it meant for him.
Would it enhance spells that used his authority, or would only the highest be taken into account? Would it contribute towards his magical stamina?
He had at least one spell that made use of his authority directly. Temporary Enhancement. It should show him if his new authority fundamental combined with his existing one, or had some other use.
Miles pressed his hand to his own chest and tried to remember the spell’s litany. He’d cast it without the help of his index before, but it had been days ago, and the language of the various litanies was blurring together.
Something, something, that which it is? Maybe I should write them down.
He tapped the screen to cast the spell from his index, focusing on his fundamental reactions.
In their self, they are complete. In a harmonious world, everything is, in itself, complete. It is that which it is.
Miles felt an impression of a robed being standing alone at the peak of a mountain. Their pose was one of readiness, their empty hands held up as if to catch something, their head held at an angle to see and hear everything around them.
The dense lump of energy in Miles’ stomach spun up, faster than before, and a hot energy flooded along his arm.
He felt the spell take hold, and the air turned to molasses.
He was watching the world move around him at three-quarters speed. He felt like he was underwater. He tried to walk faster, and while his body responded to his thoughts the moment he had them, his legs lagged behind. It was like trying to walk with weights tied to his limbs.
This is what increased Reactions feel like.
He’d only tried this once before. When he’d first got the spell, he’d tried boosting every fundamental property to get an idea of what they did, but back then he’d only had an Authority of one. Now… He checked his index.
Name: Miles Asher | Traditions: Harmonizer | Index Value: δ#1,2#0##
Fundamental Properties:
Strength (0)
Durability (1)
Speed (0)
Reactions (2.2/0)
Will (0)
Authority (2)
Authority (0.26)
Spells
Close Wound (Grasping)
A weft of harmonizing energy brings together the free edges of a tear, sealing the join in materials which are co-bondable, such as cellular membranes, metal compounds, woven fabrics, and homogenous molecular surfaces.
Temporary Enhancement (Grasping)
A temporary matrix of harmonizing energy alters one of a being’s fundamental properties by an amount in accordance with the weaver’s authority.
Hasten Renewal (Grasping)
A weft of harmonizing energy spreads from the weaver to their target, greatly speeding the being’s natural recovery by an amount multiplicative with the weaver’s authority.
Strike the Disharmonious (Tentative)
With a weft of harmonizing energy, the weaver rips the authority from a disharmonious target, degrading its existence and claiming the confiscated authority for themself. While held ready, discordant presences will ring loudly in the weaver’s awareness.
Core Effects
Eyes of the Emigre
Embeds a matrix of harmonizing energy within the being’s mind which will reveal to them the meaning of any plain text or spoken language.
Eyes of the Altruist
Embeds a matrix of harmonizing energy within the being’s mind which reveal to them the health and ailments of a witnessed being.
His second Authority fundamental had been added to his existing one to boost his Reactions. Not the full amount, point-two instead of point-two-six. There must have been some inefficiency involved, but most of the additional Authority had contributed — and it hadn't been used up.
He’d thought the confiscated authority would be temporary, but it had been an hour since he’d taken it and it was still there.
He had to assume that Strike the Disharmonious wasn’t a route to building an arbitrarily high Authority, or the Harmonizer tradition would be much more popular. Magic seemed relatively rare, and if this was an easy route to power then Ialis would be full of stupendously powerful Harmonizers. The additional authority couldn’t be permanent, but he wasn’t sure at what point it would fade.
As he walked down the corridor, the team around him moving in slow motion, he felt another hot pulse of energy flow down his arm.
The spell refreshing.
Could he keep this up for as long as his magic lasted?
I should have used this in the fight with the ghoul.
If this was the effect of just a little over two points of authority, maybe he'd misspent his delta. How much difference would a third or fourth point make? Maybe there was a cap or diminishing returns, but he wouldn't know until he tried.
There might also be another way to enhance it.
The index offered and showed the magical enhancements to his fundamentals, but that wasn't the whole story. If he wanted to get stronger, he could pay delta to have his strength magically enhanced, or he could work out. Could he also find a way to exercise his Authority?
The Orbellius ghoul had possessed some small amount of natural authority or else he wouldn't have been able to confiscate it. It must be innate to Miles as well.
If he could find out how Authority worked in the original pre-index tradition, maybe he could get some off-index enhancements to it.
Miles was still under the effect of his increased Reactions when something slammed against a wall panel ahead of them.
The panel deformed with a noise like a sledgehammer hitting sheet metal, a rounded bulge appeared, the edges gone white where the metal had stretched. The bulge quickly became two as whatever was on the other side punched it again, trying to break through.
Miles wasn’t the first to react, Lestiel had turned to look at the same moment Miles had heard the noise, but with the world moving so slowly, he was the first to take action.
He grabbed for the pistol at his back, his arms moving like they were stuck in syrup. He swung the weapon out in front of him, the barrel swaying as he overshot his target and had to correct it. Within a few seconds, it was pointing straight at the weakening panel.
Something slammed into the panel again, and cracks appeared where the metal was reaching its limit. A fourth strike, and the metal gave way. A furred hand punched through into the open air.
Miles didn't immediately lower his weapon, but he started feeling the strain and emptiness of magic taken too far, so let the enhancement spell end.
Another hand emerged, and together they tore a wider hole open in the panel. They were followed by the head of a gray-furred Eppan, who looked around at them, blinking.
"Who all is out here?"
Miles' Eyes of the Emigre had given the Eppan the voice of an older woman in his mind, but he didn't have enough experience with the translation magic to know whether that was demographically accurate.
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"I am Lestiel Dunverde, journeyman scholar of the Danis Institute," Lestiel said. "This is my team of contracted inadequacies."
The Eppan squeezed the rest of the way out through the hole, catching themself and dropping to their feet. They stood up, looking around.
The newcomer was about a foot taller than Trin, closer to Miles’ height, with gray fur covering their body and three ear-like flaps that hung down around their head.
They were wearing a black synth fabric trench coat over a construction-yellow jumpsuit, with belts and pouches strapped all over it. A backpack hung from their shoulders, dangling a coil of yarn-thin rope and several tools of ambiguous purpose. There was some kind of tech strapped around their wrist like an elongated smartwatch.
They must have been incredibly strong to punch through the metal wall tiles, but they weren’t rippling with muscle. They looked as sleek and slim as Trin did, maybe more so, with the extra height.
"Howdy, Lestiel, Inadequacies," the Eppan nodded at Lestiel and then the others in turn. "I'm Fran San-san-quirren. Quick question — any of you all know where the exit is?"
Miles stepped up to answer. He pointed back down the corridor. “About an hour that way. You can cut straight across the forest, the exit’s on the opposite side.”
“But don’t take our flying disk!” Trin added.
“An hour?” Fran asked. “What’s that as a distance?”
“About three kilometers,” Miles said.
“Mm-hm,” the Eppan hummed. They looked in the other direction. “And what’s down that way?”
“Few hundred meters until a we-don’t-know,” Trin answered.
“Hmm.” Fran looked one way then the other, then back to the group. “Now, I’m not going to steal your platform, but I am looking to get out. A bunch of plant things broke out behind me when I was three rooms in, and I can’t get back to my exit. You all mind if I tag along with you?”
“I don’t have an objection,” Lestiel said. He surveyed Miles and the others, as if checking it was fine with them.
“That sounds okay,” Miles said. He looked at Trin.
“Sure, is fine. Come on, granny.”
“What the— How old do you think I am?”
“Hundred.”
“I am eighty iterations old and you sound like you should still be in the pouch.”
They set off walking down the passageway.
If Miles' translation magic had interpreted Trin right, then Fran was a woman a lot older than Trin. Eighty iterations was about forty years, so she was chronologically older than Miles as well. That added weight to the idea that his Eyes of the Emigre magic had some way to embed implicit details about a sapient into the voice impression it gave them.
It was odd to see Fran moving around without a team. Miles knew from his previous visit that a healer at least was mandated by the Gilthaen administrators, so either Fran was a healer herself, or she'd come down with one and left them behind.
"Are you down here by yourself?" Miles said.
He tried to make the question sound as casual as he could. He didn't want to make her feel like he was interrogated.
"Yeah, where is your team?" Trin asked. "Are they dead?"
Miles winced.
"I don't dive with a team," Fran answered. She didn't seem offended by the questions, even Trin's.
"Don't the Gilthaens make you bring a healer?" Miles asked.
If there was a loophole that let a team go down without one, that was bad news for his fledgling business.
"Sure they do. You're looking at her. I'm my own healer, my own scout, fusilier, phantom, and surveiler. I'm a jack by trade.”
Miles gave Fran an appraising look. He couldn’t sense any magic from her, which meant she must be a tech specialist. That was a lot of ground to cover for tech. Like Trin’s scanner, a lot of tools took skill and training to use.
“I didn’t know that was a thing,” Miles said.
“It’s a thing,” she replied. “Took a lot of years to get here. I started out as a scout using one of the old Doster scanners. A Doster B20. Then I inherited a needler gun and started shooting people with combat stims in the middle of fights. It turned out that that’s sixty percent of a surveiler’s job. I got some brain mods for aiming and picked up some skill with a pistol and found myself doing triple duty as a fusilier. The team kept getting smaller, the payroll kept getting cheaper, and eventually I was the only one doing the dives.”
That was a lot for Miles to absorb at once. Brain mods? It sounded like she was a one-woman scavenging team. That must have made trying to fill ad-hoc openings on other teams convenient. She could take basically any role, or even hire herself out as a full team.
And she doesn’t have to split her fee.
“That’s cool,” Trin said. “Maybe I get a brain mod.”
Miles considered the same for a moment, but decided he didn’t want a brain mod.
Hearing the two Eppan sapients talking to each other was making Miles more aware of the differences between the two.
Trin’s speech had always been kind of clipped, but Fran’s translation was completely fluent. Eyes of the Emigre had even given her translated voice a slight accent, kind of rural, without evoking any particular region.
Miles struggled with how to politely ask how she was so much more eloquent than Trin, before he thought of a way to poke at the subject.
“Are you and Trin speaking the same language?” he asked.
“Your translator’s giving you a different sound for the two of us, huh?”
“A little.”
Fran glanced at him and then at Trin. “You from the homeland, Trin?”
“Yes. Prime planet.”
“Well, that’ll be it,” she said, answering Miles. “I’m from an out-of-iteration colony. Lel-hitel Colony, Iteration twenty-six six-oh-seven. We speak a conlang out there called Standard-22. It’s meant to be smoother to translate into the big spiral groups than the Eppan native languages. A few people around the weave do that. Even with good tech, not everything comes across easily.”
“Do I come across okay?” Miles said, suddenly worried about how Spiral translation tech was portraying him.
Click. ‘Simple,’ Torg said, the first time he’d spoken in minutes.
“Yeah, that’s what I’m getting too,” Fran said, “but that’s all subjective. If you’re talking to a culture with a more expressive language than yours, you’re going to sound like a child no matter what you do, since you’re only gonna be using a subset of their speech. Less expressive, you could end up sounding pretentious, if you say something their translator has to swap in some obscure grammar for. If it’s a context-heavy language, then you’ll be seen as a little obtuse. To me, you come off like a textbook. Nobody’s gonna have trouble understanding you, but you’re not gonna be moving anyone to tears with your poetry, you get me?”
Miles’ Eyes of the Emigre translation was one way. It only translated other sapients for him, and not the other way around. Fran’s experience must just be how English came off when translated into Standard-22 by the common translation tech spiral sapients had access to.
“Yeah. I get it. I can live with that,” Miles said, then caught what Torg had said. “Wait, Torg, I sound simple to you?”
Clack. ‘Yes.’
“But you speak in one-word sentences.”
Cltick. ‘Sufficient.’
“Your friend is impressively eloquent,” Lestiel said. “Concise and clear. I wish you were all as succinct.”
They were coming to the end of the corridor.
Close to the far end, the word corridor no longer seemed to apply. The space was cavernous, and only the fact that there hadn’t been any turn-offs or complications made it seem like a passageway at all, rather than a single incredibly long room.
The door at the far end was set into the wall close to the ground. It looked absurd built into such a huge wall, like the entrance to a dollhouse, but as they approached, Miles saw that it was the same dimensions as all of the other doors they’d seen so far, tall and narrow.
Trin immediately went and started interacting with the control panel.
Fran watched over his shoulder from a few paces back, her head-flaps half raised. She kept looking like she was going to step forward and take over, only to hold herself back.
After a minute of interaction, the screen put up a big ‘No’ glyph and went blank.
Fran’s head-flaps flopped down.
“It’s okay. I know how to do this,” Trin said. “Torg, smash this.”
“Hold, up,” Fran said
She stepped up, edging Trin out of the way and putting a gray mid-paw to the panel. As soon as she touched it, the ‘No’ symbol vanished, and the original interface reappeared.
“On these upper levels, it usually only locks the person who messed with it out. Someone else can still—” Fran’s sequence of taps ended with a large, ‘Yes’ character, and something within the wall started grinding. “There’s ways around it. You can get a masking field generator, that’ll stop it personally locking you out, but the deeper ones just shut down if you screw up.”
Miles listened to the grinding sound. The door would open any second.
“Hey, can we use Brisk’s formation?” he said, trying not to sound worried.
Trin glanced back at him, then started moving. Torg didn’t even do that. He just stepped up to stand at the front of the group, covering Trin and Miles with his body.
Torg was both the physically toughest of any of the three of them, and he was wearing his new rainbow-hued breastplate, which made him the best choice to take the lead. Trin was next, providing ranged and scanning support, with Miles in the rear to spot anyone who needed medical attention.
Fran seemed to understand what they were doing without prompting. She stepped up to stand behind Torg, drawing a pair of wildly different pistols from inside her trench coat. Lestiel just stood to the side, watching the formation come together with bemusement.
A handful of seconds after Fran had bypassed the console, the door started sliding open.
The light from the corridor was eaten up by the darkness on the other side.
The blackness beyond the door was impenetrable. The light cast from the passage only illuminated a few feet of the next room before vanishing, showing a few white ceramic floor tiles and not much else.
Miles felt a second of fear, then let his Eyes of the Emigre fade and switched to Eyes of the Altruist.
In the darkness, glowing shapes appeared. There were two bodies, and after his recent experience, he recognized them straight away.
“There are two Orbellius in there,” he said.
Lestiel said something, but Miles didn’t understand.
With his translation magic inactive, Lestiel’s voice had a rhythmic, overlapping, musical quality to it, like a chorus of voices singing, austere and profound. It gave Miles a completely different impression of the sapient.
Fran said something, also unintelligible. Miles didn’t want to drop his Eyes of the Altruist to try and understand her.
The gray-furred Eppan put one of her pistols away, then pulled what looked like a silver bean from her coat pocket. She tapped it against the wall and threw it through the open door.
The bean started glowing mid-air, casting a bubble of yellow-white light that expanded as it came up to full power. By the time it landed, it was lighting up the entire next room, somehow without being too bright to look at itself.
The room beyond the door looked like some kind of medical station. There were half a dozen metal benches, with monitors at the foot of each. Cabinets dotted the walls, sharing space with large opaque vats and pieces of obscure equipment. There were floating platforms placed around the space, circles of textured metal about two feet in diameter, their undersides set with blocky levitation units, their top sides strewn with scattered medical equipment.
Miles quickly identified the source of the glowing shapes, but at first glance they didn’t make sense.
The places where Miles had seen the Orbellius shapes were occupied by dead bodies. One looked like a Hurc in bulky all-encompassing armor. Its head and right arm were obscured by a toppled bench and the armor had been torn away from its left arm, allowing Miles to recognize the species.
The other was a narrow figure in close-fitting robes of a black bat-wing-type material. It was crouched with its back to a wall. Miles couldn’t tell the species, and only knew they were dead because the Orbellius was the only structure that had shown up on his Eyes of the Altruist.
With the Hurc, the Orbellius anatomy was oriented on the part of the body hidden behind the bench. For the crouched figure, it was roughly central.
“Orbellius there, and there,” Miles said, pointing. “The people seem like they’re dead.”
Having pointed out his readings to the others, Miles let Eyes of the Altruist fade and switched back to Eyes of the Emigre.
The Orbellius didn’t seem to be moving, but after the battle in the forest room, Miles was on edge at the sight of them. He drew his striker from its pouch and put his free hand against his chest, ready to cast an enhancement.
“That’s some nice armor,” Fran said, peering around the edge of Torg’s body to look through the door. “A Veesler set. Veesler Aegis, maybe. It’s got an energy reduction field and built-in combat stims. And that thing in his hand’s a high-caliber autopistol. No way the dungeon made this stuff at this level. Too good and too specific. These guys were divers, and not level one divers at a guess.”
“How would they get here?” Miles asked.
“Maybe they started deeper and were taking another route out, or maybe the planet brought their bodies here in the shuffle. I couldn’t tell you.”
As if roused by the voices, the two corpses began to stir.
“Are you sure they’re dead?” Fran asked, confused.
“Orbellius ghouls,” Miles said.
“Orbellius what?” Fran asked.
The thin figure crouched against the wall leaped to its feet and started sprinting straight at them.
Now that it was upright, Miles recognized the species. They were like the mage vendor on Delatariel Station, and the bookseller in the Ishel Corporation Lounge. A tall, narrow figure, with two legs, six arms, and a face that was almost featureless, save for a central ridge and a pair of eyes.
This one had an additional feature; a fleshy sphere was embedded in its gut, occupying the space the stomach would on a human. It looked like the sapient had died by being disemboweled and an Orbellius had taken up residence in the hollow.
It moved as quickly and unnervingly as the bookseller had, scuttling at them across the ground, the motion of its membranous robe making it almost seem to flow towards them.
“Stop!” Miles yelled. “We don’t want to fight.”
The rushing ghoul didn’t listen.
Fran aimed one of her pistols and fired. A beam of energy like a silver thread appeared between the barrel and her target. The beam intersected the ghoul’s face and its head exploded. It kept coming.
“Target the Orbellius in its stomach,” Miles rushed out.
Both Trin and Fran fired their weapons this time, both aiming at a spot just under its left armpit.
No!
“That’s not the stomach!”
Fireflies pierced flesh, which then exploded under the effect of the silver beam. The ghoul lost an arm but didn’t stop.
It was suddenly on top of Torg, swiping at him with a claw-tipped hand. The attacks were landing, but the claws weren’t doing much when they caught chitin, let alone the breastplate.
Torg had his ax ready and swung it in a low arc. The blade cut through the exposed flesh of the sphere in the ghoul’s gut, tearing it open.
The thing went down with a chemical smell and the sound of escaping air.
“This is a new one for me,” Fran said, voice frantic. “I’ve seen moving dead before, but what’s the Orbellius connection?”
“This deceased Morchis has a non-sapient Orbellius taking refuge within its body,” Lestiel explained, his voice academic. “It seems as if they’re controlling it via a network of electrostatic hairs.”
Miles picked out the word Morchis from Lestiel’s explanation. He finally had a name for the six-armed species.
“Could any Orbellius do that, if it wanted?” Fran asked.
Deeper into the room, the armored figure rose to its feet.
The body of the Hurc had been decapitated at some point. Its neck was a jagged stump. Its skeleton jutted up out of the wound in broken spikes, with tangled and minced flesh hanging off it in places. Its head was long gone, visible nowhere in the room, but it had a new head now; a fleshy sphere, resting on a throne of snapped bones.
The Orbellius’ tendrils flexed as the dead figure took a step forward.
“I think the one we fought in the forest understood guns,” Miles said, too late.
The ghoul was already raising its arm, aiming the autopistol directly at them.
Miles dashed forward, his hand slapping against Torg’s back. The litany for Temporary Enhancement came to him almost on its own.
In himself he is complete. In a harmonious world, everything is, in itself, complete. He is that which he is.
Miles had a clear mental image, a muscular figure standing in a deep cave, gray-robed and bare-fisted, expressing the idea of absolute endurance. The mountain could fall and he would not be crushed.
Energy rushed from Miles’ spinning core and flooded out of his arm, the spell taking hold.
At the same moment, the ghoul opened fire.
All Miles saw were flashes of light. There was a noise like thunder, and Torg’s chitin rattled under his hand from the impacts hitting the other side of his body. Nothing passed through, the rest of them were sheltered behind his enormous form.
At a pause in the onslaught, Fran leaned out and fired a shot at the ghoul’s ‘head’. This time the thread of energy didn’t reach its target. It seemed to fizz in the air, about an inch away from hitting. Dark stains appeared on the surface of the Orbellius, but they didn’t seem fatal.
Miles tried his own shot, pointing the striker at it and firing, but it had almost no effect. There was a brief flare of light in front of the ghoul’s body, but none of the striking energy got through.
With his free hand, Miles tried casting Strike the Disharmonious. He focused on the note that came in the first stage of the spell, and he actually managed to call it, the ringing sound filling his ears, but when he looked at the armored ghoul there was no disharmony. It was just the same pure note as always. Even the ghoul’s weapon wasn’t giving off any dissonance.
“It’s the reduction field,” Fran said, frantic. “We’re going to have to go hand-to-hand.”
A moment later the ghoul’s pistol burst back into life, firing a tight cone of glinting metal at them.
Fran slapped Torg’s back, and that was all the cue he needed to charge into the stream of projectiles. He barreled forward, knocking the ghoul’s gun aside with a swing of his ax, then brought it down in an overhead chop at the Orbellius controller.
An armored arm came up to block him, and the ghoul landed a punch below Torg’s breastplate that cracked chitin.
Fran was sprinting too. The gray Eppan slid to a stop behind the ghoul, taking advantage of its distraction to strike it with a mid-paw punch. The hit landed with a colossal slap, and a visible wave of distortion rippled across the sphere’s surface.
The ghoul staggered, managing to take a single step before Fran leaped into the air and struck it with a spinning kick. The Orbellius snapped free from the body and went flying across the room.
Lestiel appeared in its path, raising his hand and stopping it with his palm. He caught the ball one-handed, inspected it, then squeezed it between his hands. The Orbellius vanished like it was being squeezed out of existence.
“Wonderful,” Lestiel said, beaming at them as he laced his hands together. “I didn’t think that I would get a live sample. This will be extremely useful.”
In the middle of the room, Torg slumped to the floor.
His body was leaking milky white fluid, a pool of it a meter wide already spreading out from him.
Miles found himself crouching next to him. Torg had fallen down face-first, and all of the wounds were on his chest.
“Help me turn him over,” Miles said.
Fran crouched and flipped Torg over like it was easy.
Now that he was face-up, every injury the autopistol had inflicted on him was visible. There were probably more than a hundred wounds, each a tiny, narrow little crack in the chitin which fluid trickled out from.
Miles switched into his Eyes of the Altruist and tried to assess the damage.
Shapes sprung up over his vision, and he found he could see the projectiles. Every tiny flechette that had hit Torg was marked by a glow of angry red, the magic highlighting the problems as well as the internal structure.
Most of the projectiles had been stopped just inside his shell, and Miles felt like he should be grateful for that, but it was the ones that hadn’t which he was worried about. A couple of the mystery organs deeper within Torg’s body had been pierced, and those seemed to be the source of most of the fluid.
Fran asked him something, but he didn’t have time to try and work out what.
Miles didn’t answer. He just placed his hands over one of the punctures and started casting Close Wound. He had no trouble remembering the litany. He felt the truth of it.
These wounds are aberrations. In a harmonious world, the many are one. The cuts must close. Such should it be.
Hot energy flowed from Miles’ core to his hands. Light flared between his hands and Torg’s shell.
When Miles took his hands away, he found the spell hadn’t just closed one of the punctures, it had closed all of them that had been under his hands. He repositioned and cast it again, then again, mending whole areas of shell at a time.
By the third casting, he’d closed the biggest sources of the leaking fluid. He was feeling weak and light-headed, but he judged he had a little more in him before he was fully spent.
He turned his attention to the internal injuries.
Two separate internal structures were pierced. They couldn’t have been absolutely vital because Torg was still alive, but Miles didn’t think that any being who used blood could survive internal bleeding for long.
He pressed his hands against Torg’s shell and cast Hasten Renewal.
In time this being will heal. In a harmonious world, he is forever his final self. He is that which he is.
As the hot energy flashed from his hands into Torg’s body, Miles had another vision. This time it was of Torg himself, sitting on the ground in an indistinct room, his arms and legs pressed together in a pose of rest or meditation. This was a future where Torg had healed from his injuries. The magic was reaching out to this ideal image to force it into the present.
Through his Eyes of the Altruist Miles saw the wounded shapes pull themselves closed. Some of the scarring where he’d cast Close Wound faded at the same time.
He held the spell for as long as he could, ten seconds, twenty, until his head was buzzing and his vision was getting dim around the edges. When he started to worry that he might faint, he let the spell end, pulling his hands away.
On the ground in front of him, Torg began to move. He shivered at first, then shook more violently.
Fran reached down and pressed a metal cylinder to one of the cracks in his chitin, pushing a button at the back. There was a hiss and a click, and she withdrew it.
An injection?
Over the next few seconds, Torg calmed down. Soon, he was resting peacefully on the ground.
“What was that?” Miles asked, watching as Fran slid the cylinder into a pocket on her waist.
“About two hundred seln,” she said, then when she caught Miles’ expression, “Wide range painkiller.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
Torg’s internal wounds had closed, but there were still lots of the projectiles buried in his body, including inside the structures that had since closed up.
The Purify spell that Miles had briefly considered had claimed it could degrade objects ‘inimical to the target’s existence’. Maybe if he had that spell now, he’d be able to deal with the buried projectiles. Or maybe not. He was already at the limit of his magical endurance.
“I think he’s stable, for now,” Miles said.
He looked at Torg, then at the door out of the room. How long did they have left to get out? They were going to have to carry the huge sapient the entire way.
“This is really going to mess with our timetable.”
Fran reached down and grabbed Torg by the edge of his shell. She pulled, and hoisted him up into her arms.
“Hooh. He’s a big one.”
“You can carry him?” Miles asked.
The Eppan looked like she was suffering under the strain, but she had him completely off the ground, and she somehow still looked balanced.
“Artificial muscle fibers. I can carry him a ways.”
“I might be able to help you when my magic recovers. Hasten Renewal might help with recovering from the strain, or if I enhanced your Strength.”
“Magic, huh? Well, sure, we can try that.”
Over in the center of the room, Trin was trying to get the dead Hurc out of his armor, and failing. He grabbed the being’s dead hand instead, trying to drag him, but giving up after a few seconds.
“What about stuff?” he called.
In addition to the Hurc’s armor and weapon, there was the Morchis’ black robe, and a whole room full of medical tools and equipment. They hadn’t even looked in the vats, let alone searched the cabinets.
Miles belatedly checked his comm. They were about a hundred and ten minutes into their four-hour time limit. One hundred and thirty left. The walk back would take forty minutes if they were moving at a quick pace, and looking at Fran, he didn’t think they’d be moving at a quick pace.
“We can take two minutes to grab anything that won’t slow us down,” Miles said.
Miles helped Fran carry Torg to the door while Trin went wild behind them.
***
> Financial Status [§]
> §4,037 (-§800 Charges Medical Services Ialis Corporation)
> §4,837 (+§4,113 Recovered Equipment Purchase auth. Ialis Corporation)
> §724 (+§166 Payment Services Rendered auth. Lestiel Dunverde)
> §558 (+§50 Scavenger Assist Award auth. Ialis Corporation)
> §478 (-§30 Charges Ialis Descent Fee)
Miles looked up from his comm to watch Torg being taken away on the flat-backed drone. As soon as it was outside the building, it changed direction, heading off toward the entrance complex's medical pagoda.
They'd done it. Their first contracted dive. And one of them had almost died.
Trin had managed to recover a lot from the medical room in the short time available. The Aegis armor, the autopistol, and a case full of unusual chemical compounds from an unlocked cabinet. He hadn't stuck to the 'that won't slow us down' requirement, but looking at what their haul had sold for, Miles thought it would be rude to complain.
Trin had wanted to keep the armor, but it wouldn’t fit any of them, and apparently getting it adjusted would cost a significant portion of its value. In the end, the full sale value of all the equipment had been split five ways between them.
Lestiel had been contractually entitled to an even share, and all of them — Lestiel included — had decided that Fran deserved to be cut in as well.
Even after the split, Miles had been left with over four thousand seln.
I think we're in business.
Miles didn't even mind Lestiel taking a cut. Both Lestiel and Fran had chipped in to help with the cost of getting Torg seen by a real healer.
Their Draulean client had since boarded his ship, but Miles hoped he'd get what he wanted from his samples.
Miles' comm buzzed with an incoming message, from Torg.
> Torg > Miles
>
> Formation bad.
Miles let out a breath that was too sad to be a laugh.
> Miles > Torg
>
> Yeah. It didn’t go great. I'm sorry, Torg.
He was glad that Torg was well enough to be sending messages, but angry at himself that it was necessary.
Miles had called out to use Brisk's formation because it had seemed smart. Brisk, despite betraying them, had been a more experienced scavenger, and in the moment it had made sense to put the most durable of them in the front with the rest sheltering behind.
With time to reflect and with knowledge of the consequences, it only really made sense if he considered Torg to be expendable, which Brisk probably had.
Torg wasn't invulnerable, and if he wasn't expendable then they had no place using him to soak up bullets.
Looking back, they could have done literally anything else. They could have used the wall for cover, they could have just left. With a little more time to think, Miles might have guessed the ghouls knew how to use weapons, and they hadn't been that short of time.
He wouldn't let it happen again. Nobody on the team was going to get hurt by design. And if some got hurt anyway, then Miles would have an answer to it.
With the payment from the sale of the equipment, some of the pressure of their situation had lifted. They could pay rent. They could upgrade their equipment. Miles could search for a magic instructor.
They had time now, and no excuse not to spend it getting ready for their next job.