Chapter 11 - Hallway
(in which there are pods, and dust, and living metal)
> "Anger's my meat; I feed upon myself, and so will starve."
> --Volumnia, Coriolanus (William Shakespeare)
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Altair suddenly chimed in, after a pause, interrupting Giil's wailing. "Emotional reset successful: autotraumectomy performed, memories dulled. Light ought to be at normal intensity now," it then lit up in Iraklijs' pocket. "I do not believe I missed anything... oh, greetings, dal-ghar. Yes yes I remember."
Gill snarled something, and an even more high-fidelity translated voice echoed from the crystal, rather than Iraklijs' datapad. The human himself only sighed softly at his companion stealing the spotlight.
"An abominable intelligence?! In your clothes?! I do not trust it, and I am less inclined to trust you, human," she hissed. To an uninformed observer, it sounded as if Altair had a case of split personalities.
Altair beeped a few short words in the dal-ghar-language. Giil thrashed against her restraints. Tsip and Ekut exchanged glances.
"Look... Altair, this isn't the time for... you know what, shut it and just act as my translator," Iraklijs fumed. The negotiations felt like they were about to go pear-shaped.
Altair chimed in a low octave, but complied. Its owner began speaking, holding the pyramid close to his mask-and-scarf-covered mouth. "Forgive us for this... look, miss Tuz, please calm down. We can explain. First... clarify. You were not an explorer, yes?"
"Yes," her infuriated voice replied.
"So... the Silents... kidnapped you and your crew? I've never heard of that even being a thing. But we... don't know much about them. And at this point I don't even know what to believe. Does your promise... still hold?"
Giil looked even more offended. "You cur. You unprincipled, loathsome untamed peasant. How dare you imply that I would ever break a complete oath?"
Iraklijs sighed. "Insulting me isn't gonna increase your chances of seeing a star again," he then put Iraklijs to the side, and turned to look at Zkeh, who was curled up on the floor and staring curiously at what was happening. Ekut was impatiently pacing from side to side, and generally looked like she had a bad feeling about all this. "Go wild on this bubble, Zkeh. Just... take care to not behead her."
Zkeh sprinted over to the cell and lifted his mattock. Giil instinctively cowered as he swung his bejeweled weapon from side to side, carving out the bubble's edge with a series of quick motions. It did not break like glass, but rather like sheet metal, if sheet metal was transparent. Only the vibrations of the mattock's blade allowed it to be cut so easily, and after less than half a minute the shell clattered to the ground, and an instant mist flooded through the corridor caused by warm, semi-humid air contacting the dry and frigid atmosphere. Ekut, meanwhile, looked away, having noticed some kind of movement down the hall.
Giil immediately began gasping for air, and her serpentine body convulsed in fear and shock, instinctually trying to break free from her crucifixion-esque shackles, yet failing.
"YOU FUCKING GADARTI!" Ekut yelled. "SHE HAS NO OXY! YOU WILL MURDER HER!" the kaziil howled as she sprinted towards the suffocating dal-ghar. From her pack she took out an emergency breathing mask and a small, bright blue tank. "Hold her down, everyone!"
Zkeh, Iraklijs, and Tsip each restrained different parts of her body as Ekut, acting with haste without a lack of precision, clipped the translucent, stretchy device over Giil's snout. She began taking very deep, relieved breaths, and swearing quietly in her native language.
"I am ssorry..." Zkeh leaned towards Altair, who cheerfully translated.
"Please, strangers, get me out of here... please..." Giil's voice echoed forth. "I'm sorry! Please forgive me! Do not leave me to die! Forgive!"
With a few careful, much lighter strokes of the mattock, like those of a sculptor's chisel, the manacles holding the dal-ghar to the wall fell off. Iraklijs took a few photos of them and the shell, and collected small shards of both as samples.
Giil, meanwhile, stretched her back with a sickening popping crunch. It indeed sounded like she did not move from her pose within that bubble in many years. "I... cannot communicate how utterly thankful I am! I thought I would... perish here..."
Her tail was unusually stiff compared to the way dal-ghar generally moved... and more importantly, she immediately became sluggish. "Cold... the cold..." she whimpered through Altair. "The embarrassment... but also the... so cold..."
"Don't panic," Iraklijs said, and took out a jar of emergency thermal gel. A smooth yet viscous clear liquid, in a transparent bottle with a broad nozzle on it. He gestured Giil to lay down, and sprayed down every millimeter of her scaly body. The gel immediately formed a thin, matte layer that felt almost indistinguishable from the scales, except for being slightly waxy to the touch. While doing so, he noticed several incisions on her back, and one large one at the top of her head. The scales around these incisions seemed grayer and more metallic than normal, but Iraklijs chalked it up as simple discoloration.
"Not cold anymore... thank you, kind skin-on-two-legs," she growled.
Tsip curiously looked down at the procedure being performed. "Why don't we use this instead of the coats."
"Cloth makes it rub off," Iraklijs said.
"Why would cloth be necessary then."
Iraklijs burst out laughing, then stared Tsip in the eyes. "The Agency isn't a fucking nudist colony, that's why. It'd be ridiculous."
"Why."
"Because most of the member species wear clothes in their homelands, it'd be distracting," Iraklijs grew more exasperated.
"Why. I do fine with clothes, why not the other way."
Only then did he notice that Altair 'helpfully' translated the entirety of their exchange. All he could bring himself to is sigh and facepalm. "Because... because I said so."
Zkeh walked up to them. "You look like Sspotss, lady Tuz... a lot like Sspotss... I ssupposse that between how humanss and relmai look like, and between how we and ssatla look like, it only makess ssense that ssomeone would look like the bquaa," he tilted her head. "I guess I am no longer the only sscaly one here. Fellow reptile..."
Giil hissed menacingly. "The bquaa look like us. We do not look like them. Things that are higher, do not look like things that are lesser. And you, chohjozra, are a hater of all things noble and all things of the sacred hierarchy."
His ear-fins flared out. Zkeh took out his mattock and made it vibrate for a few moments. Giil shook her head, terrified, and coiled up. The chohjozra re-sheathed his impromptu weapon and, with one of his arms, made what everyone else guessed was a rude gesture in his culture, but seemed to stand down.
Iraklijs furrowed his eyebrows and glanced at her with the vilest stare that anyone had ever seen him give anyone. Only solidarity and a general respect for life stopped him from pulling out his revolver. To have his fallen friend degraded like this in the same phrase as a still-living friend... right after being rescued...
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Ekut stared off into the distance, having waited out the sideshow that went on behind her. "Giil, try to recall... Did you hear anyone else when you were imprisoned?" she said.
The dal-ghar pressed her lengthy fingers to the sides of her head. "...yes. I believe I could hear my dear captain's voice from somewhere down this hallway... I don't remember anything else, or for how long I could hear it, only that it stopped soon after I was locked in," she pointed in the direction the four had walked in to find her.
The group walked and slithered forwards.
In a pod just like the one they found Giil in, was the shape of a dal-ghar, without a hood.
The shape was tightly wrapped in threads of reflective metal.
It did not move.
Giil simply stared into its blank, caved-in eyes.
To Iraklijs, it looked like a mummy, and not of the Egyptian kind, but of the natural kind. Yes, it had wrappings, but such minute ones that it looked more like a body simply encased in metal. It was blatantly, obviously dead, in a deeply morbid way like a shriveled-up insect one might find on a windowsill. The lady lowered her head, and Zkeh hissed sadly. Iraklijs had never seen anything like this happen to a sapient being... the scene somewhat reminded him of his visit to the dark city of "Paradise", where he watched its eldritch inhabitants shove a captured and cocooned True-Human Organization agent into a slimy, translucent pod that resembled a placenta with a toothless maw. The scene stuck with him, like all other things he saw in that asteroid. But at least there, the person was alive; he breathed, he twitched, and he metamorphosed, and he had a good life ahead. But while that was a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, this was more a spider's handiwork. Not warm, wet, and alive. But cold, dry, and dead.
"Altair, do not translate this," Iraklijs shook his head, then cleared his throat. "Everyone, what do we... do with him?"
Ekut paced around. "Take a sample," she said after thinking for a few moments.
Zkeh growled. "Let'ss not dissturb the dead... it would be bad kghyihza for uss all... only acceptable coursse of action with a corpsse iss to burn it, or, preferably, eat it... neither iss possible here..."
The chohjozra were somewhat infamous for cannibalistic practices in their culture. Everyone in the group knew, though, and all who frequently interacted with aliens of any kind grew desensitized to various repulsive (to them) social mores.
Tsip was already kneeling beside the bubble. "Who cares. He's dead anyway. Find out what's inside."
The sole human, meanwhile, grimaced. "One of my rules: do not plunder graves or tombs or anything like that. Nothing that has a corpse in it."
Thus the opinions of the group were divided. While they voiced their concerns and disagreements, Giil coiled up before the pod, and tucked her head into the coil. This was the dal-ghar gesture of mourning someone deeply respected. How could they do anything to this object of almost-worshipful sorrow?
Ekut simply looked away, a tacit gesture of backing out from her plan.
"Tell me when you're ready to go with us, Giil," Iraklijs spoke through Altair. "Losing a friend is hard... I lost Spots not long ago. I am shattered inside, but I have to press on. And so do you."
"I am now..."
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They made their way down the hall. Most pods were empty, and some contained dust, but none had any captives, living or dead. The piles of dust were identical in size and color everywhere. By around the fifth pile they passed, the group's curiosity was piqued enough to override the feeling of danger.
Zkeh broke a small hole through one of the pods and Tsip reached in to scoop a sample of the dust.
Iraklijs carefully touched it. "Feels like... flour.... or..." he rubbed some of it between his fingers. "...bone meal."
"Not good," Tsip said. "Not good at all."
Iraklijs took out a small organic-material analyzer, which looked like an opaque test tube with blinking lights and a tiny screen, then poured some of the dust inside. He then squinted at the readings screen and nearly dropped the analyzer in shock. "This is relmai bone dust, mixed with what appears to be discolored fur scraps of the same. Holy shit."
"Not good."
Ekut was aghast. Rarely had Iraklijs ever seen her so distraught in all the years he knew her. Zkeh and Tsip were more confused than anything. The rescued dal-ghar was silent and motionless.
"We... have to check the other piles," Ekut shook her head.
Without enthusiasm, but with anxiety, they checked one of the other dust-bearing chambers in a similar way. It was full of oschee chitin dust, with some broken antennas and a shriveled-up compound eye.
Another pod had a pile of dried, powdered glubb-enn cytoplasm. Yet another had ground-up Abyssal scales and the no-longer-glowing remnants of a photophore.
"...no. No no no no no. This feels like a goddamn horror movie," Iraklijs said.
"So they have been kidnapping folks of various species and drying them for some reason," Tsip said. "But why did Giil stay alive."
"I guess one needs to first be cocooned before being turned to dust," Iraklijs said. "The main question is why--"
He took a glimpse of Giil's back-of-head as she slithered around.
The gray metal around the incisions had suddenly grown, like mold on a damaged apple. Iraklijs grimaced and immediately figured what was happening. He whipped out Altair, who flickered and beeped as its gyroscope was momentarily overloaded. "Giil. Lay down," he said as he took out a tiny universal painkiller shot and a scalpel from his medkit.
"Why...?"
"There's living metal growing on the back of your head. It started spreading since we took you out. This won't hurt much."
The dal-ghar's eyes widened, but she complied.
It did hurt much. So much for the experimental 'universal' shot. The other three had to hold her down as she yelled, convulsed, and clawed at them and at the air. But Iraklijs' hand was steady, and the afflicted scales were excised alongside a bit of flesh. He then poured some hemostatic powder on the bleeding wound, and discreetly scraped some of the living metal from the chunk of flesh, as a sample.
"Sorry, m'lady, if I didn't do this you would have ended up like your captain."
Giil hissed something incoherent, but seemed fine.
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The hallway seemed almost endless. After just a few minutes of walking, they heard footsteps. Inhuman footsteps. They picked up their pace, but the footsteps were faster. The noises were just outside of the radius that Altair illuminated. Then finally the source came into view.
It was a doppelganger-creature, a chimerical mix of the explorers' features, just like the one that confronted them in the sea-chamber and like the one that showed up in Iraklijs' dream.
"Hey!" Zkeh snarled as they turned around. "It'ss thiss creature again...!"
Giil's eyes widened again as she recalled a traumatic memory. She stopped in her tracks and began quietly reciting some kind of litany.
Horizontal body. Human legs. Tail-hand. Tentacle-arms. Antennas on head. Human face. It was either exactly that one, or a clone of it. It sprinted forwards, nearly leaping with every step.
Everyone stopped, to conserve stamina. Evading it was useless. Guns were raised.
"Don't fire yet," Iraklijs said. "But keep aiming."
"But keep aiming but keep aiming but keep aiming but keep aiming," it mumbled as it slowed down slightly, then focused its eyes on Giil. Said empty, black eyes suddenly bulged to the size of melons, grotesquely distorting its head. It walked towards the dal-ghar, tentacles outstretched and head tilted at an angle that would break any normal neck.
"Warning shot!" Iraklijs yelled, and fired the revolver over its head. "Stand down, freak."
It stretched its arms to wrap them around Giil's torso and head. "Warning shot! Warning shot warning shot warningshot warningsh--"
BANG!
It staggered as the bullet lodged in its forehead, spraying living metal over the nearby floor and walls.
BZZZZT!
A quick sweep of Ekut's needle-laser, manifesting as a thin bright purple beam and a headache-inducing hum, cut its stretchy arms right off.
ZAP!
A bolt of artificial lightning exited Zkeh's electrolaser, making sparks fly from the creature's body as a huge gash was blown into it.
It still staggered.
BANG! BZZT! BANG! ZAP! BANG! BZZZZZT!
...
Everyone's ears rang like a million tiny bells at once. Especially Ekut and Zkeh's.
Its mutilated, metallic-gelatin body still writhed on the floor. Iraklijs gnashed his teeth as he stomped on its neck and pulled off its mangled head, not caring how much it resembled his own, then threw it into the air and punted it down the hallway like a soccer player. He then kicked the limp body a few times, before pistol-whipping its tail-hand until all its fingers broke.
Iraklijs was interrupted by Zkeh. The chohjozra nudged him aside as he ran in, mattock in full vibration, and hacked the doppelganger into multiple ragged pieces, making sure no joint was still attached to another. Any revival had to be prevented. At least there was no blood and no viscera.
The human knelt down as he collapsed from stress and exhaustion, physical and mental. "My God... what even took me..."
Ekut, Tsip, and Giil simply stared, their mouths and eyes wide. The kseldani, in particular, had spent the whole 'fight' fumbling with their carbine's safety.