Riko Den Haag was already nervous. This was supposed to be a simple snatch and grab before the exploit was opened. Easy money. But he couldn’t help feeling worried.
They had gotten in past the guardians easily enough. Their stolen keys let them slip past the security net deployed by the survey crew which was scanning the planet in for a location to install their Dominator for the upcoming exploit. The passphrases had worked to allow their ship to land directly on the rogue world's surface, in the deep cavern indicated by their client.
It wasn't his first time visiting a reality engine before an exploit began, and Riko always found it unnerving. The knowledge that something immense was there, just sleeping not far away, was unsettling. Yet their intelligence was good, getting them access into the long-dormant chambers of the engine, frozen for who knew how long.
The team was on a mission to steal any progenitor relics that had not yet been repurposed by the engine. All exploits used Dominator systems that worked by forcing an outside will into the reality engine. This provided the toe-hold needed to slowly circumvent the Overmind the Progenitors left behind to control the engine, until finally replacing it entirely. That was the only way to bend a reality engine to the will of those who sought to exploit it. Unfortunately, in the process, it destroyed whatever had been there before, the mind and whatever clues or artifacts it controlled.
Now that they had secured passage inside, he ordered his team to disembark and informed their passengers of the arrival. Their ship had entered a natural cavern on the surface of the worldlet. All around was frozen as close to absolute zero as made no difference.
Riko and his people wore heavy-duty environmental suits, the best money could buy. Real licensed Proxima versions, not the crappy knockoffs that would have saved a few thousand Soul coin. This was not the time to cheap out. Riko's small crew had only four members: himself, their navigator Vortal, a tall, thin space elf woman; the Talonian Mygostis, who kept the ship's systems running; and their reality engine communications specialist, Riko's wife, Janli. She gave him a toothy smile as they checked each other's equipment in the ship's cargo bay.
"Where are the priests?" Mygostis asked.
"No idea," Riko grunted. "I've told them we're here. The rest is up to them. Let's get in there. We take everything that isn't buttoned down. The priests are only here for information. They said we can have whatever we lay hands on."
The Talonian clacked her claws together happily. "Then we've turned a profit on the mission already, just based on the fees they paid us to get here."
"Don't let your guard down," Riko advised. They stepped out into the frozen cavern. The ship's lights didn't extend very far. Riko switched on the lamps on his helmet and proceeded. The four fanned out in a diamond formation. They'd worked together for several years now, and while he didn't entirely trust the Talonian or the space elf, but so far the shared danger and promise of profit has kept the team functioning. They needed each other if they hoped to make it out here in one piece.
Janli moved out ahead of him using a scanner to look for points of interest. "This way," she said. “Detecting a faint power signature.”
"After all this time?" Riko asked, not sure he believed it. But that was progenitor tech for you. It could survive in the harshest conditions for untold billions of years. Riko and the others made for the power signature. Moving through the frozen, silent cavern, Riko found himself checking the readouts on his suit every minute or so. Not that the suit would fail, and if it did, he was dead anyway, so there really wasn't any point in worrying.
Then their lights revealed the shrine. It was 10 meters tall and twice as long, carved from some shining metal or rock that picked up the light and refracted it back into his eyes. It was astonishing, a long table standing in the center of the cavern, with nothing around it. There was an inscription written on it in characters he couldn't read. The letters gave him an uneasy feeling.
"The priests will want to know about this," he whispered. It certainly didn't look like the sort of thing his crew could easily make off with, so it would be better to gain the goodwill of their patrons by informing them of a discovery.
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"Indeed we will," came a voice in his earpiece. He turned. He wouldn’t have thought the priests would’ve caught up with them this quickly but there they were, lights bobbing through the darkness as they entered the chamber. There were three of them, all wearing the symbol of the Order of the Progenitors, as well as an icon he didn't know, with a torch and a sword.
Riko himself was a devout Church of the Void member, but the Order’s soulcoin was too good to pass up. He had agreed to this commission quickly when offered it. Two of them were carrying a device of some sort between them, a round orb that glittered similarly to the shrine in front of them. The foremost of the Progenitor-worshipping priests approached. "So our information was correct. Well done, Captain."
Mygostis stepped forward. "What are you planning?" she demanded. "I've heard of these altars. They are Progenitor relics. They say that the souls of the Progenitors themselves live inside them."
"So they do," the priest said calmly. "We have seen traces of these at other reality engines. They are targeted early in the exploit phase and destroyed to prevent the addition of unwanted variables. It's standard exploit doctrine. One cannot risk a reality engine’s overmind becoming aware before the Dominator is in place."
"Indeed," Riko agreed. "That's what happened with that disastrous exploit a few cycles back in the Sol system. My team and I lost our shirts. We're still trying to recover from it."
"In that case the Overmind was aware before it was even found. Many in the galaxy found that particular exploit upset their plans." The priest turned to his fellows. "Put it down.” The other priests set down their relic, and now Riko was sure it was made of the same substance as the shrine in front of them. He didn't like that at all.
"What are you doing here?"
"I suggest you be on your way, Captain. We have work to do," the priest said calmly. "You do not wish to be here longer than you must. I suggest you return to the upper level and search for artifacts there.” The two men with him bent to begin doing something to their device.
Alarms were blaring in Riko's head. "Stop right there," he snarled. "I want an answer to what's going on."
"Captain, when we negotiated the contract you told me you didn't ask questions of your customers. It was one of your selling points, was it not?"
"That was before I saw someone messing with a reality engine Overmind. Look, I may be a thief, but I'm not stupid. We keep a low profile in these things. I don't know what would happen if one accidentally woke up too early."
"And yet, we do," the priest said almost dreamily.
"All right, I've had it," Riko snarled. "Grab them," he ordered his crew. And then as the priest in front of him raised a hand, he saw too late that they were all holding weapons.
The priest fired even as Mygostis began to run and Janli screamed in horror. A stabbing fire laced Riko's gut, followed by cold oozing through his body. His legs gave out, and he fell to the ground. In his ear, he heard his wife's dying screams and the sound as Mygostis was cut down by one of the other priests.
The leader of the priests moved past his field of vision. Riko could no longer move. His gaze was failing, but he struggled anyway.
"Don't bother," the priest said. "Even if you weren't dying now, you will be momentarily when we wake the lost one from its slumber."
Even though he was dying, even though his surprise warred with his anger, Riko managed to blurt out, "You're waking the Overmind with no controlling Dominator, but that will kill you too."
"We are martyrs. We have made our peace. Rest easily, Captain, knowing that you have helped us strike a great blow for freedom in our galaxy."
Riko's gaze was fading. He tried to chant a death song, but his breath was gone. He could no longer feel any of his body. Cold stole through his body, freezing him to the rock of the planet.
His suit tried to compensate, even after its user's death. Riko's body could have been maintained in more or less the same condition as when he died indefinitely. But about five minutes later, the Third Inquisitorial Squad of the Cult of the Awakened, a subset of the Order of the Progenitors, activated their carefully designed bomb.
It did not deliver an explosive. That would have had far too little impact. Instead, it delivered knowledge in a form that the sleeping Overmind would not be able to resist. They had spent years working on this plan, as they studied the freed entity called Kronos, ever since the Grand Patriarch had called a secret crusade. Now that they had proof of the lies most of the galaxy had been telling for the last 5,000 years, the Church was no longer content to sit on the sidelines and allow theological squabbles to go on.
There were heretics within their own rank who would need to be dealt with, true, but this would be the start of something important. Something glorious. After today, nothing would be the same.
The inquisitors gave their lives gladly, even as the reality engine ripped their bodies apart. It kept their consciousnesses aware, even as they were being unraveled at a molecular level so that it could parse them and determine whether what they were saying was true.
The inquisitors knew they had done what must be done. The rest was up to the Overmind.