“You want to do what?” the Verdanti woman behind the desk asked.
It had taken over an hour, but we’d eventually been called back to the office of one of the DSC officials. That official had sent us along to another one, who had sent us to the head of the department, who gaped at our request before passing us along to another office entirely.
Our latest official was a slender green woman who wore a complicated bag over her mandibles, some kind of medical mask I assumed. She mostly looked professional, but the slight tremor in her antenna revealed her nerves.
“Go to the source of the problem,” Zander repeated. “Whatever sciency place the team that brought back the disease had visited. We’ll check it out, see if we can find any signs of what first caused the disease, and bring it back for your people to study.”
The woman’s antenna trembled again. “Impossible,” she told us. “We tried sending a team a few days ago. The disease somehow breached their protective suits in a matter of hours. It is too dangerous.”
Zander’s mouth curved up in a slow smile. “Lady,” he drawled, “I live for danger.”
“We’re both immune,” I told the Verdanti woman flatly. She turned to look at me properly for the first time and I saw her eyes widen as she recognized me. “We can go gather samples of whatever is in the site that might have caused the disease. If you give us the right equipment, we’ll even package them in no-contam boxes for you.”
“But the protective suits -”
“We could double up the boxes,” Zander suggested lazily. “And we don’t have to bring ‘em straight back here. Could leave them a ways outside the city, and you could send some robots over to check’em out when you’re ready, maybe.”
The woman held still for a moment, then twitched her antenna in a way I had learned indicated agreement. “Give me a moment,” she told us. Then she turned to the audio strip on the side of her desk and started typing in a code.
I glanced towards Zander as the Verdanti woman talked to someone on the other side of her strip in the native language of her species, the words all buzzing and clicking together. “Robots aren’t a bad idea. Why not send them in instead? You could still watch from afar and offer advice.”
“Where’s the fun in that?”
“This is serious,” I told him with a frown. “Lives are at stake.”
“Sure, sure,” he said with a sigh. “Still, it wouldn’t work. For these kinds of investigations, you need to be there. Your own senses will pick up on things that a ‘bot just can’t detect.” He pointed at me and grinned cheekily. “There you go, that’s your first lesson in adventuring. Use your senses, especially your common sense!”
I hummed noncommittally and looked back at the Verdanti, ignoring the way Zander grumbled at his joke being ignored. The woman spoke for half a minute longer, then twisted a dial on the audio strip to end the call and looked back at us.
“You have our permission,” she told us in the universal standard language with a decisive click of her mandibles. “I will arrange for you to be given appropriate sample boxes directly. We have decided you must quarantine from our entire population for ten days when you return from the site. This will ensure you do not act as passive carriers.” She paused, then waved one of her jagged arms back and forth in a gesture I couldn’t quite parse. “We are willing to agree to your terms. If you find something that can help our bioengineers in their work, and if our doctors can confirm that you do not carry the disease. If these conditions are met, we will grant your petition to leave the planet before the overarching quarantine is lifted.”
“Deal,” Zander said immediately. “Now, where is this site?”
“In the middle of North Rainforest.” The woman pulled a folder out from under her desk and flipped it open, and we both leaned forward to look. “The place is overgrown and hostile. It has proven extremely difficult to map. The team had been slowly working on it for years and just discovered this particular site ten days ago.”
I blinked in surprise. This entire pandemic had started just ten days ago? That meant the disease was moving unusually fast.
“The site is… well, you can see a scan right here.” The picture itself was grainy and low-quality, but it still clearly displayed a vast structure made of some mottled material I didn’t recognize with a dark opening in the front. It looked natural, almost like a cave, but the way it just popped up in the middle of the forest didn’t fit with the surroundings at all. “We have never seen anything like this before. The scientists tried to sample the cave’s external material to learn more. However, they could not cut into it.”
Zander leaned forward and furrowed his brow. “Huh,” he said after a moment. Then, after another pause: “And the crew got sick after going inside?”
“Correct.”
“So whatever caused this, it must be in there.” He cracked his knuckles and grinned at the two of us. “This’ll hardly even be a challenge.”
I frowned as I looked back towards the picture. There was something ominous about that structure, to my eyes.
Somehow, I doubted this would be as easy as Zander thought.
~
Reaching the site was easy, once we were given the coordinates. I landed my ship in the open field that surrounded the giant structure, keeping far back just in case. Zander landed his own speedcraft next to mine, so I looked the vehicle over idly as I waited for him to exit it. The craft was such a garish red. I liked vibrant colors, but red always struck me as too extreme to be used in a casual manner.
I turned from the ship to look out towards the structure again. Even from a distance I could tell that the material it was made of looked… different. The structure was mostly built of large hexagons, each one a slightly different shade of grayish-green, with one of the hexagons near the top broken into two slabs that leaned into each other. It looked almost like the structure could be made from rock. The whole thing felt strangely familiar, though I couldn’t quite place why.
A hissing noise came from Zander’s ship and moments later the half-Xinian man emerged, carrying two large rucksacks over his shoulders. He offered the smaller one to me and I settled it over my own shoulders with a small grunt. One of the shoulder straps chafed at the place where the carapace on my shoulders melded back into my scales, but I was able to adjust the strap until it no longer rubbed the wrong way.
“We’ve got the no-contam boxes collapsed in these, plus some essential tools,” he told me with an easy grin. “Just the basics for now. We can go scope out the place for a few hours, then come back and fetch more gear if we need it.”
I nodded and followed him as he set out towards the structure. It was larger than I had expected from the photo, easily ten times bigger than the office building we had been in before. As we approached it I could tell that the material flowed seamlessly from one hexagon to the next, apart from the place where the structure had broken down.
When we finally reached the structure I put out one hand and gently rested it against the outer wall. It felt smoother than I had expected, but not like metal or glass. Something different, more… alive?
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
“This is odd,” I whispered.
“Yeah,” Zander said from next to me. I glanced over to find that he was also examining the outer wall, though he was running both hands over the surface slowly. “Doesn’t feel constructed, but it’s way too uniform to be natural.”
“Stranger things have happened,” I murmured as I tested a claw against the wall. Hard, the Verdanti woman had said, and hard it was; I couldn’t scratch it at all.
“Hmm,” Zander said with a frown towards the wall. Then he shrugged and took a step back. “Well, this looks more like a puzzle for the material scientists of the universe than for the likes of me.” He raised his eyebrows and looked over at me. “Ready to go in?”
I nodded and followed him to the entrance. The opening was hexagonal in shape as well, though part of it was buried underground. I realized as I stepped through the entrance that I was holding my breath, and that made me smile. I was actually feeling nervous about this whole adventuring idea. How quaint.
At first the floor on the inside was dirt, but it sloped down quickly until we were walking on a material that seemed to be the same as what the outer walls had been made of. The inside of the structure quickly faded to darkness past the entrance point, so Zander pulled a lantern and a flashlight out of his rucksack. The lantern cast a circle of light all around us, and he handed it off to me; the flashlight he flicked on and aimed straight in front of us.
The broad beam of light showed a… hallway? Yes, it looked like there were walls inside the structure too. Zander swept the beam around to show rough walls to either side, and a rough surface overhead. There was at least one gap in the left wall, though. Perhaps there were side passages.
He hummed in interest and started walking forward, motioning for me to follow him. I did so, though I drifted to the side so I could run a hand against the wall. It felt… rougher, somehow. Not quite the same material, perhaps.
We wandered down the main hallway for a while, ignoring the occasional side paths that opened up, until we reached a dead end. I was ready to turn back, but Zander stopped me and pointed up with a mischievous grin. When I tilted my head back I was greeted with the sight of a hole in the ceiling, one that appeared to lead to an upper floor of some sort.
“Clever,” I told him. “How do you intend to get up there?”
He settled his rucksack more squarely on his shoulders and tied his flashlight to his belt with a quick knot. Then he paused, and something shifted. I can’t describe it well. One second he was the same as usual; the next, he was different. Taller, maybe, but all in the legs.
He crouched down, then leapt into the air to a height that I would normally have considered impossible. He managed to grab onto the ledge above us with one arm, then used that grip to hoist himself onto the second floor with a grunt.
I watched him the entire time, intrigued despite myself. One does not live in the universe as long as I had without learning a few things, and I knew the legends about the Xinians. Immortal, yes, but that was merely a side effect of their true ability: reality warping. A Xinian could change the world around them to suit their whims, and indeed, most Xinians chose to live on planets that they had transformed to their own liking. No one knew how the ability worked, as the species was not interested in sharing their secrets with the scientific minds of the universe.
Zander must have warped reality to give himself stronger legs. I hadn’t realized that he would have Xinian powers as well; I had thought the half-Xinians just had immortality. That did raise questions. If he could change the world around him on a whim, why not eradicate the disease with a wave of his hand, or convince the officials to let him leave with a thought?
My musings were interrupted as a rope ladder fell down from above, the last few rungs clattering against the ground. Zander’s face poked out over the edge to look down at me. “Are you coming?” he asked.
I set aside my questions as I gripped my lantern awkwardly in one hand and started climbing up to the second floor. Zander’s business was his own. As long as he didn’t use his powers on me, I would be content.
~
We had wandered through the upper floors of the structure for almost an hour now, but we hadn’t found anything of interest. Just more walls, more passageways, more occasional holes in the ceiling.
Well, we had discovered one interesting fact: the strange material that this structure was made of apparently blocked radio waves. Neither of us could access the databanks on our ships while we were in this place, nor could we communicate with the outside world at all. We didn’t need outside data just yet, though, so we’d decided to keep pressing forward until we found something more informative.
The current passageway we were following felt like it was moving back in the direction of the entrance, though it was several floors up from where we had started before. I tried to mimic Zander and look in every direction as we walked, but as time went on I was feeling more and more out of my depth. I knew myself well, and it was normal for me to feel uncomfortable when I tried something outside of my area of expertise. Still, I probably wouldn’t rush into another exploration like this after we had achieved our objective.
Zander certainly didn’t look uncomfortable. He was fully alert as he watched the world around him, waiting for any signal that his surroundings had changed in an interesting way. He had already murmured a few observations into a voice recorder that he carried in his front jacket pocket, and he’d even asked for my thoughts about a few patterns we had seen on one of the walls we’d passed. I was fairly certain they were random, not intentional art, but he’d still left a positioning beacon by the markings so he could return to them later for deeper study.
“Up ahead,” he said suddenly, and I blinked in surprise as I realized that I’d been staring at him. I shifted my gaze forward and saw that we had arrived at another dead end. Yet something was different this time.
Something was… growing out of the wall? That couldn’t be the case, yet it certainly looked that way. A strange scraggly mess of vines emerged from the wall ahead, with tiny purple flowers dotting the vines here and there. To the sides the passageway opened up to reveal a long surface of wall, and I could spot other clusters of vines off in the distance.
“How are they growing here?” I asked aloud, not that I expected Zander to know. “No light, no water, no nutrients…”
“Must be something about the strange material this place is made of,” he responded. “Anyway, wanna bet this is what caused the disease? It’s always some weird animal or weird plant.”
He had already set his rucksack on the ground and pulled out one of the no-contam boxes. I took a second one out of my own bag to have at the ready, since we had promised to double-box any samples we collected. Personally, I wasn’t sure that the vines were the culprit, but they seemed as good a place to start as any.
Once the boxes were set up, Zander got to work pulling part of the cluster of vines out of the wall. “Need to get some of the roots,” he grunted as he worked. “Never know just what those science types might need, so -”
There was a pop sound and he stumbled backwards, vines in hand. He had only pulled out part of the plant, but the rest of the cluster suddenly went limp as well.
From in front of us, somewhere inside the wall, there was a rumbling sound.
I froze and looked right at Zander. He was frozen as well, and his eyes had gone wide. “Uh oh,” he murmured.
Another pop came from further down the wall, and I looked over to see that the next cluster of vines had gone limp. The rumbling noise in the walls increased.
Zander dropped the vines and grabbed my arm, which made me jump in surprise, but he was just turning me to make sure he had my attention. His eyes were dark and serious - had I ever seen him look actually serious before?
“Run,” he told me.
Then he took off at a sprint down the hallway.
It took me a moment to realize what was going on. Then I gasped, dropped my rucksack, and started running as well.
Zander was ahead of me at first, but I had the advantage of having a body that could run on two or four legs. Once I dropped my lantern and got down on all four feet I was able to catch up to him quickly. Something in Zander’s body shifted again, and suddenly he was leaner, more streamlined. In this new form he was able to keep up with me, even when I ran at my top speed.
The two of us sprinted through the hallways, passing occasional positioning beacons as we went. All around us the structure was still rumbling and groaning and making noises that sounded horribly ominous. I didn’t have time to contemplate what could happen, though. I was entirely focused on getting back to the entrance as quickly as I could.
When we reached the final ledge I jumped down recklessly, landing in a tight roll so that my carapace could absorb most of the impact. Then I was off in a mad dash back towards the opening. It hadn’t been that far away. As long as we could get there in time -
My feet dug into dirt sooner than I expected. I stumbled to a halt and stood there, gasping for breath, as I stared at the wall ahead of me. A wall where there had once been an opening.
Next to me Zander cursed in three different languages. I might have joined him, but it felt like there was no breath left in my lungs, no way for me to speak.
We were trapped.