Lisa wasn’t quite sure how she had got from there to here. Auntie Gorta had just asked her to close her eyes again, dear, and when she opened them, she was somewhere else.
She was also holding a shovel, and directly in front of her was a hill. It was covered with pale yellow fluff grass, which told her just how far from home she really was. Fluff grass didn’t grow on the continent where she lived, and this was the first time she had seen it in real life. Humans hadn’t ever settled here. The landscape was pretty, with a wide, flat, open prairie, and a wind laden with a sweet scent like hay.
She checked the things the goblins had given her: a vial containing a Potion of Truth from Uncle Birtle, which he promised would reveal the lies of the Founders to anyone who drank it, thus recruiting them to the goblin cause, and the comb Auntie Gerta had given her, which Lisa had used to fasten her hair.
Lisa couldn’t see the point of the potion. It wasn't as if she was going to have the opportunity to pour it in anyone's drink. On top of that, Uncle Birtle had told her that it tasted of liquorice, as if that was somehow a good thing. Auntie Gerta had rolled her eyes, and exclaimed Men! Lisa agreed. Why not make it taste of something nice, like chocolate or strawberry? The comb was much more useful, as it would allow her to talk to Auntie Gerta when she wore it, even though she was somewhere completely different.
A transparent image of Auntie Gerta materialised in the air next to her.
“There it is!” she said, looking at the hill with satisfaction.
Lisa was not impressed.
“It’s a hill.”
“What you want, dear, is inside it. You just have to do a little bit of digging.”
Lisa looked at the spade. Then she looked at the hill. She felt like the princess in the stories, locked into a barn with a mountain of straw and orders to turn it into gold by morning.
“Oh yes, I’d love to spend the next ten years digging up an entire hill,” she said sarcastically.
Auntie Gerta clicked her tongue with impatience.
“The entrance is close to the surface,” she said. Her transparent form drifted over the ground, circling around the mound until it came to a section that looked no different from any other. “Cut straight into the hillside here.”
Lisa sighed, and got to digging. Despite her complaints, the work wasn’t hard. The fluff grass didn’t have a tough root network, but she sliced it up into squares of turf anyway, and peeled it back so it could be replaced later. The soil underneath was rich and dark, and would have been good for farming. This place was so flat, compared to the land she had grown up in, and didn’t have horn trees that needed to be cleared.
“Why didn’t we settle here?” she asked Auntie Gerta, as she laboured. “It seems like perfect farming country!”
“We planned to,” Auntie Gerta answered. “This facility was intended to be the first outpost on this continent. We prioritised Alpha One—what you now call the City—because it didn’t have any oversized herbivores like you get here. Those can be very dangerous. And so are the apex predators which feed on them. Did you know there is a kind of giant flatworm here that’s nearly twenty feet long which likes to jump out and land on its prey, then crush it and slowly digest it?”
Lisa paused in her digging and looked around her in alarm.
“I did not,” she said, and began digging faster.
“I don’t think there are any in the immediate vicinity.”
“Not helping!”
Lisa had lived all her life on a farm, and she was accustomed to hard work. Within a few hours—with many nervous glances over her shoulder for giant predatory flatworms—her spade struck something metallic and hollow. A door. She set to with a will, and had it cleared out in very little time.
It even had a door handle. She twisted it, and heard the hiss of escaping air as it unsealed.
“Why isn’t it locked?” she asked.
Auntie Gerta gave her a blank look.
“It was never designed to be locked. Why would it need to be? There isn’t any other intelligent life on this world capable of opening doors except humans.”
“Our cat at home can open doors,” Lisa said.
“Humans and cats,” Auntie Gerta conceded.
“But you said the Founders changed everything so that they could continue to be in charge of the City, instead of handing over control to the colonists. Why didn’t they at least put, I don’t know, a heavy-duty padlock on this place?”
“All they needed to do was make sure no-one remembered its existence, or had access to vehicles that could travel this far. We brought you here using a hoverbike Uncle Birtle cobbled together out of spare parts.”
Lisa had been a little sorry to have missed her first experience of flying, but on hearing that she decided that maybe it had been for the best.
“And presumably,” Auntie Gerta continued, “the Founders thought letting several tons of earth and vegetation accumulate on top of it over the centuries would keep people out.”
“Little did they know…” Lisa said with immense satisfaction.
“Indeed. You remember what you need to do?”
Naturally Lisa wasn’t getting a uterine pod for free. Auntie Gerta had a task she wanted Lisa to carry out first.
“Go to the control room, get the spindle and bring it back to you.”
It wasn’t really a spindle. Auntie Gerta hadn’t said what it did, but when she described the shape—a wand-shaped object with circular disc and a knob on the end—and that’s what Lisa had immediately thought of.
“That’s right, dear. Once you’ve got it, I will tell you how to access the uterine pods this place has. And I’ll be behind you every step of the way, just in case.”
“Okay.”
“And hurry. One of the Rangers is on his way here as we speak.”
“What?” Lisa asked in alarm.
The Rangers were the servants of the Founders. They guarded the City, and enforced the laws.
“He’s half-way across the ocean already,” Auntie Gerta said briskly. She clapped her hands. “Chop chop!”
For the second time that day, Lisa found herself entering a mysterious and forbidden subterranean lair.
Founder Gabriela was sitting by her pool and sipping a cocktail made from a hitherto undiscovered exotic fruit one of her boys had brought back for her from a small island in the southern hemisphere. Two more of her boys were engaged in their daily wrestling practice on the lawn. She had ordered them to do so without their uniforms on, and was enjoying the flex of lean sculpted muscles as they each tried to gain the upper hand against the other.
She was ruminating on the reward she would bestow upon the victor when one of the Shepherds appeared by her side. They never bothered her unless there was a problem.
“What?” she asked, annoyed.
The Shepherd bowed.
“I deeply apologise for disturbing you, madame, but a rebel aligned with the goblins has infiltrated a forbidden zone at a site which our files have listed as Beta One.”
“What!?” she exclaimed, sitting bolt upright and accidentally spilling half her drink. “Why am I hearing of this just now?”
“The alert only came in a few minutes ago, madame. I have dispatched the closest Ranger to apprehend the rebel.”
“Right,” she said, setting her drink down and absentmindedly flicking the sticky juice off her hand. “Okay. That’s a start. But I fear this will require my personal intervention. Rangers! Attend!”
The two young men stopped their wrestling, turned and saluted her.
“Gear up,” she said. “We’re going on a trip.”
Lisa walked along the corridor, Auntie Gerta’ transparent form drifting along behind her. As she advanced, lines of light bloomed in the ceiling. She recognised them as lighting strips, the same kind the Elders had at the village centre. Some of them were no longer working, or only capable of emitting a dim light, which left the corridor in alternating patches of light and darkness.
She was watching ahead of her when there was a sudden hissing sound from behind. She screamed and whirled around, expecting a giant flatworm or something, but it was just Auntie Gerta’s avatar emitting ghostly noises and flickering. That wasn't much better.
“Auntie Gerta?” Lisa’s own voice sounded lonely and scared.
“…signal … hsss … blocking … krrrrr … transmission!” Auntie Gerta said.
It sounded like Lisa's link to Auntie Gerta through the comb was no longer working properly. Maybe all the tons of soil above them were getting in the way.
Lisa looked behind Auntie Gerta to the distant rectangle of light that was the door. She turned and stared further into the facility, where the feeble strip lights faded into darkness.
She couldn’t think of anything she wanted to do less than walk into it. There might be giant flatworms outside, but in here there could be anything. Maybe she should go back to the entrance and try to speak to Auntie Gerta again.
But if she did that, it would be that much harder to go in a second time, knowing she was doing it alone. She thought of Sara, sitting by the windowsill at home, with her head buried in her apron, shaking with silent sobs.
Lisa had to fix this!
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
She took a deep breath, clenched her hands into fists, and marched determinedly down the corridor.
Eventually it opened out into a massive bay. She gasped, and flattened herself against the wall of the corridor. It was full of giant mechanical dragons, each frozen with outstretched claws or gaping fanged maws. She peeped out into the huge, semi-dark space, her heart beating rapidly with terror, praying they wouldn’t see her and suddenly come to life. More lights were coming on in the bay, and she exhaled as she realised they weren’t dragons at all. They were agricultural machines. That one there was a plough, the one next to it was for seeding potatoes, that one over there was a crop sprayer.
She felt a spurt of anger at the Founders. They had all these fantastical devices, and presumably the ability to make them, but they forced all the colonists to toil on their farms by hand.
She was beginning to have a lot more sympathy for the goblins.
She stayed there for several minutes, trying to work up the courage to advance into the bay. The machines were still and silent, and probably wouldn’t work after being left unused for so long anyway, but if they did wake up, they would still be able to crush her easily. Some of those wheels were higher than her head.
It was only the thought of the Ranger on her tail that persuaded her to move. She scuttled quickly across the bay, and realised she was leaving a line of soil footprints behind her. The Ranger would be able to track her easily.
She hurried to the door on the opposite side, which led to a series of rooms with workstations and monitors, which she recognised because the Elders used them for announcements and commendation ceremonies, and because they were used in the village schools. Beyond that were relaxation areas and bedrooms. None of this was what she wanted, but Auntie Gerta had said the control room—and the labs with the uterine pods—would be downstairs.
Eventually she found a stairwell leading down.
It wasn’t until she followed it that she realised how truly massive the facility was. The hill on the surface was just the tip of the iceberg. She passed rooms that must be the laboratories, presumably for studying samples or breeding new kinds of seeds that would grow in native soil, and more of the rooms that held monitors and workstations. There were rooms full of engineering benches, with tools lined up on the walls, and boxes full of spare parts.
Some of the rooms were open, but many were locked behind transparent glass doors that had no locks or doorhandles, and no obvious way to get through.
There was even a creche, with tiny little seats, boxes of dusty, faded soft toys in the corner, and the type of wall covering that could be drawn on with marker pens and then wiped off. There was a story board higher up on the walls, which went all around the room and showed the colony’s history.
The first panel portrayed the building of the interstellar spaceship that had made the voyage here from Earth. It explained that space travel was extremely expensive, and the larger the mass of the ship, the greater the cost in fuel. Moreover, any human travelling outside the protective heliosphere of Earth’s sun would be subjected to a greater concentration of cosmic rays. It was therefore much cheaper and easier to send a fleet of miniature spaceships, each one weighing less than a hundred kilograms. Inside each was a mining drill, an ore processor, a 3D printer, and a computer holding the colony database, which included the digitalised consciousnesses of a selection of colonisation experts.
The second panel showed the many light years the ships had spent travelling, and the third showed the surviving ones finally arriving at their destination. Once they had arrived in the new system, they selected an asteroid with the right trace elements, and started mining feedstock, allowing the printers to churn out robots.
By the fourth panel, the robots had mined and processed enough materials to build a larger ore processing station and space habitat. In the habitat they printed out human embryos, using genetic records from Earth, and gestated the first colonists in uterine pods.
The fifth panel showed the different kinds of humans who had started the colony. There were the founders, who project managed the expedition; the techs, who made sure all the equipment and robots worked the way they were supposed to; and the surveyors, who were the explorers, geologists and naturalists. The latter studied the colony planet and worked out how to integrate Earth life into an alien biome without upsetting the balance and causing a mass extinction event.
Once all the surveying and testing had been completed, the colony facilities were built and launched, setting down at various sites across the world, all of which had been identified as suitable for colonisation.
Alpha One, the first facility, started printing embryos for the settlers, who would constitute the majority of the population. Each strain of human had been created specifically for their roles. Techs were small, nimble-fingered and good with systems. Surveyors were agile with good sight, hearing and sense of smell, and high endurance. The settlers—Lisa’s people—were made to be physically strong and adaptable, and were the only variation capable of ingesting native plant and animal life.
The founders were designed to be emotionally intelligent, noble-minded strategists, putting the needs of the colony before their own.
“Only they didn’t,” Auntie Gerta had said, when she and Uncle Birtle had been telling Lisa all this. “We didn’t know it, but some of the digitalised minds inserted into the project had other ideas. They must have been planning to hijack the colony from the beginning.”
The Founders had mothballed the facilities on the other continents, including the one in which Lisa now stood. They had altered the records, and made themselves into the absolute rulers of Alpha One, the place Lisa knew as the City. Only a handful of techs had escaped the purge, and gone into hiding, emerging years later as the goblins.
Lisa stared at the creche in front of her, realising just how much her world had lost to the greed of the Founders. The creche had never been used. The toys had never been played with, and the walls had never had small fingers inexpertly drawing wobbly houses and smiley suns on them.
It seemed such a waste.
But if there was a creche, there would be uterine pods.
Lisa found them further along the corridor, but they were behind one of the locked glass doors, which didn’t respond to her attempts to open it. She had never seen them, or even heard them described, but she was looking at rows of shiny plastic pods, each one big enough to hold a small baby, with a little glass viewing chamber at the front, and various control buttons down the sides. That had to be them.
Lisa abandoned that door reluctantly. She needed to find the control room and retrieve the spindle before the Ranger got here.
She found it on the next level down, a circular room with monitors and workstations all around the wall. There was a pillar in the centre, which Auntie Gerta had said was the central core, whatever that was. And sticking out of a slot was a spindle, exactly as described.
Lisa took hold of it cautiously, held her breath, and tugged. It slid out easily.
Nothing happened. No monsters jumped out of the walls. No trapdoor opened beneath her feet to plunge her into a dark, rat-infested prison.
Alright, she’d done it. Time to get back to Auntie Gerta, and find out how to open the door to the chamber full of uterine pods.
Founder Gabriela was sitting in her private jet as it sped across the ocean towards the Beta One facility. She had dispatched a team of Rangers to search for the goblin burrow near Settlement Thirty-Eight. The Shepherd in charge of the squad was streaming the view from one of Ranger’s visors so she could track their progress. A second monitor showed the view from the Ranger who had just arrived at the Beta One facility.
“You mean we don’t even know what this girl’s motive was?” she asked the Shepherd in exasperation.
“We would need to investigate her background, madame. My Ranger on site would have done so, but then we received the alert that she was at the Beta One facility, and I dispatched him in pursuit. I ordered the replacement team to prioritise finding the goblin burrow—I am deeply sorry if I have misjudged.”
Founder Gabriela sighed.
“No, you made the right call. If we find the burrow we can get rid of the little wretches once and for all.”
Finally. After all these years.
What did the goblins want with Beta One? She thought they’d settled for living out their existence in their strange little virtual reality. Sometimes they even enticed settlers into uploading their minds into it. On one hand, Gabriela found this blatant theft both insulting and annoying, but on the other hand it did conveniently remove the worst of the troublemakers from the farming settlements, and if Gabriela started running low on idiot farmers she could always get the Shepherds to whip up an extra batch.
How long had the goblins been looking for the other colony sites? Gabriela thought she had sufficiently camouflaged them, but evidently not. Maybe she should have gone with her first instinct and had them destroyed, but she’d wanted to keep them as a backup in case anything went wrong.
The voice of the Shepherd interrupted.
“Do you have any further orders, Madame?”
“Just keep me updated.” Gabriela cut the call.
She watched the screen showing the Ranger from Beta One as he advanced into the facility, then exclaimed in irritation as the feed cut out in a fizz of static. Well, she would be there herself soon enough. Once she arrived, there would be a total of three Rangers on site—including the two she had with her—and that was probably overkill.
It wouldn’t take much to subdue one little settler girl.
Lisa stood in the central control room with the spindle in her hand. She needed to return to the surface and speak to Auntie Gerta. She turned towards the door, but stopped.
There was a tall slender figure striding towards her along the corridor. The Ranger!
She dashed around the other side of the central column out of sight. But there was nowhere else to hide, and the Ranger had already seen her. There was no help for it. She was going to be caught. Quickly she shoved the spindle into her waistband at the small of her back, and stood straight against the central column.
The Ranger moved so silently she couldn’t hear his footsteps. She could see a dim reflection, though, in the shiny metal texture of the wall panels. He arrived in the doorway and looked around.
“I have drones out,” he said. “I can see you perfectly well.”
Lisa didn’t reply.
He moved unhurriedly into the room. He seemed more interested in the control panels and the central column that Lisa herself, although he didn’t touch anything. He did a circuit of the room, before stopping and tilting his head at Lisa. The visor hid his eyes, making his expression seem cool, remote and disinterested.
“You were holding something,” he said. He held out his hand. “Give it to me.”
“I don’t know what you mean!”
He sighed.
“I won't have any difficulty taking it from you. You might as well hand it over.”
Lisa glared at him, then darted around the column and bolted for the door. He caught up with her easily, snaked an arm around her waist and lifted her up in the air. She swung at him wildly but he ducked the blow, somehow trapped both of her arms with one of his, and retrieved the spindle. He seemed to know exactly where it was.
He put her down, but kept one hand around her upper arm while he studied the spindle, holding it out of her reach.
“Where did you find it?”
“The goblins gave it to me,” Lisa lied.
His mouth pursed in thought. She couldn’t help noticing he had nicely shaped lips. Some of the girls in the village had sighed over how handsome the Rangers were, and now that she was this close to one, Lisa could see the attraction.
She scowled at him to cover it up.
He tucked the spindle away in a loop at his belt, and then pulled her along the corridor that led to the way out.
“Founder Gabriela will know what to do with it.”
“The Founders have been lying to us for hundreds of years!” Lisa said, as she was dragged in his wake.
“Is that what the goblins told you?”
“You can see it on the walls of the creche!” Although it didn’t show the story of the Founders’ betrayal, which had happened afterwards.
“Goblins lie,” the Ranger said. “And my loyalty is to the Founders.”
Maybe Lisa could get him to drink the Potion of Truth, but how she would be able to accomplish that she didn’t know. It wasn’t as if she would be able to force it down his throat. Uncle Birtle really hadn’t thought his delivery medium through properly.
They went up the stairs and onto the ground level. The Ranger was looking increasingly annoyed, and once or twice he looked around him sharply, as if he heard something.
“What’s wrong?” Lisa asked uneasily.
He shook his head.
“I can’t even get a comms relay via my drones. There is something awake in this facility, and I fear it may be hostile. The Founders would have abandoned it for a reason, after all.” He looked down at her. “Why did the goblins send you here?”
“They wanted me to take the spindle to the control room,” Lisa said.
“Spindle? You mean the…” His hand went to the spindle at his waist. He breathed in and out, as if attempting to main control of his temper. “It’s not a spindle, you little idiot.”
“What is it then?”
“Never mind.”
By this point they were hurrying through the chamber of agricultural machines.
“What’s going to happen to me now?” Lisa asked.
“I will hand you over to Founder Gabriela, and she will decide what to do with you.”
Nothing good, Lisa concluded. The Founder wouldn’t want her spreading tales of everything she had learned to the rest of her family or Settlement Thirty-Eight.
They emerged out into daylight. Lisa blinked rapidly as her eyes adjusted. Auntie Gerta’s transparent form re-appeared, but only Lisa could see it, because she was the one wearing the comb. Auntie Gerta’s expression was agitated.
“Did you get it?”
Lisa flicked her eyes to the Ranger and back.
“I had hoped—” Auntie Gerta said, then stopped. “The Founder is less than an hour’s flight away. She will be here soon. Can you escape?”
Lisa rolled her eyes. Stupid question! Of course not. Still, she had another idea.
“There aren’t any flatworms around, are there?” She asked the Ranger nervously.
He scanned the area around them, and while he did so Lisa took the Potion of Truth out of her pocket and quickly emptied it into her mouth. Ugh. Liquorice. The Ranger had been so distracted by the spindle he hadn’t thought to check her for any other contraband.
“I see no signs of them,” he said. “The drones will alert me if—”
She put her hands on his shoulders, stood on tiptoe, and pressed her mouth to his. His lips felt as nice as they looked. He stiffened, but didn’t immediately throw her off, so she slid her hands around his neck and deepened the kiss. He made a sort of protesting noise. His hand came down on her shoulders.
Before he could push her away, she flooded his mouth with the potion.
His eyes widened and he tore himself out of her arms, but by then it was too late. He staggered, and then sat abruptly on the ground.
“What—?” he said, putting a hand to his head. He slumped back, unconscious.