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Stardust: Labyrinth
Chapter 4 - Vestibule

Chapter 4 - Vestibule

Chapter 4 - Vestibule

(in which there is a delve into a deep dark dungeon, and where we learn more about Altair)

> "YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL ALIKE"

>

> --Colossal Cave Adventure

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"So, I just..." Yangchen said, fidgeting with a small colorful rock. "I just hope all of you stay safe. I know you've been in some crazy shit but I don't want to hear about you getting sliced up or shot or vaporized."

Iraklijs frowned. "I tend to do worse when people are worrying about me. But, thank you anyways Dorji."

As soon as the pod began to decelerate from orbit, the screen of the rover's computer displayed an incoming call from Tekatl. Yangchen picked it up.

"I was very very very busy so I couldn't respond immediately," the satla said, "but why exactly do you need, need the heavy artillery?"

Ekut took her turn to do the explaining. She did it very thoroughly, to a minute level of detail that everyone else considered frankly excessive. Tekatl had an expression on her muzzle that even Iraklijs understood as 'I want you to stop yammering and get to the point but I'm too polite to say it'.

Tekatl cupped her chin with one of paws, thinking. "How do you know this... fractal beast isn't a sapient, thinking being? I would not approve invading a site with current inhabitants."

Altair blinked in Iraklijs' pocket. Blinked with a bit of apprehension.

Ekut thought for a moment, then began a much more concise explanation. "I highly doubt that. First of all, it stopped upon crossing a highly arbitrary line on the floor; if it was a soph then it would chase us down. Especially given how we busted down the door and how Iraklijs fired at it. Second of all, what kind of sapient robot would have no means of manipulating objects?" she held out her datapad, showing a few still images of the beast. "No hands, no tentacles, no signs of anything like that. No signs of decoration aside from the form itself, no signs of... anything."

Altair finally spoke up, having been quiet during the whole incident. "But sapience comes in many, many forms."

Ekut continued. "And in all encounters with the Silent Empire, even trespasses into their space, some non-verbal warning has always been given by manned vessels. While we have never encountered an individual of the Silent species, if there even are any left, it's safe to assume that they would AT LEAST FIRE A WARNING SHOT INSTEAD OF ROLLING AT US!"

Tekatl squinted. "Makes, makes sense. Be careful, okay okay?"

"My first name translates to 'careful'," she smirked. "Don't worry."

The bquaa curled up and made a trilling sound before speaking. "Spots sincerely hopes that we did not just ensquanderize a first-contact opportunity."

Zkeh hissed. "If it'ss really just a bot and not a thinking machine, we'll have ssuch an opportunity later... we could explain, right?"

"Wrong!" Tekatl barked. "There have been only a few instances of communication with the Silent Empire, mostly by the bquaa but also by an unknown Terran ship, and they relied on the Clearing Circles to use some kind of protocol to communicate with their vessels."

Spots squinted. "Do you mean the--" (an unpronounceable mess of gurgles echoed from their mouth) "--disks? Do not we have one onboard?"

Tekatl shook her head. "Had, had... Lost during that fateful raid on the bquaa station. Lyiue had the only one we brought. He was carrying it for analysis at the station, when the Deep Tide attacked. While running, he dropped it and it, it shattered. We'll have to do without. Maybe you will figure something out, I don't know, know..."

"Spots remembers now..."

Ekut rubbed her hands anxiously. "You all should have listened to me when I said we need proper weapons. But what's done is done."

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The call was soon over, and the wait for the pod was spent looking at the desolate landscape of the bottom of the crater. It was a beautiful void, truly alien yet fascinating in the deepest of ways.

"You know," Iraklijs said, pointing at the spike-studded yet fully natural ground, "I figured out another reason these guys probably aren't sapient. No windows, seemingly no cameras... no signs of the ground being disturbed by anyone walking or driving out. Yes, sapience varies, but enjoying some kind of environment is universal. Even the Blue Web spreads its tendrils over all the nice mountains. Even the kseldani," he gestured to Tsip, who was blankly staring at the glass outside, "build their concrete hives in nice places and spend a long time wandering their halls for lack of better things to entertain themselves with. I don't think there's anything that actually thinks here."

His rant was interrupted by the ping of the analyzer finishing its carbon-14 scan from one of the platinum-alloy shards.

Ekut squinted at the display. "Circa 14000 years old. Give or take a thousand. When this place was built, the Ice Age on Earth ended, and you humans were just starting to make farms instead of hunting mammoths. I'll give you that, it's way sooner than we even began subduing Shaugna. At least you kept your megafauna around. Even the saberteeth."

Iraklijs coughed. "No, we didn't. We then fixed our ancestors' fuckups."

After the advent of genemodding in the very late 21st-early 22nd centuries, many extinct species, particularly the most famous and interesting ones, were resurrected. Paleolithic life like mammoths and sabertooth tigers was revived via frozen DNA samples, while dinosaurs and Cambrian lifeforms were reconstructed from scratch. Contrary to fears driven by sensationalist media and outdated science fiction, these revivals did not result in any notable incidents. They were considered unremarkable by the 23rd century, and could be found in zoos on many human worlds, while Archeopteryx in particular were a current pet fad.

"Right, right," Ekut smirked. "Only took you over a decimillennium to figure out that wrecking the environment is bad."

Iraklijs sighed, while Spots and Zkeh laughed. Only Tsip somewhat sulked. Humans and kseldani simply could not live down their species' bad habits.

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Soon, the pod landed on a parachute, essentially a now-charred conical heatshield covering a cube-shaped crate. With Zkeh's help, the shield-cap was removed, exposing the contents of the crate to the group's eyes.

The requisitioned weapons were all there, packaged in nanofoam. Spots looked through the crate, unpacking the instruments of destruction. "What else did you requisition, Ekut? A nuclear mortar? A nanodisruptor canister?" the bquaa pulled their snout into something resembling a smile, but to Iraklijs they just looked like a sock-puppet.

"Well, I wouldn't want to blow the whole place up," the kaziil said as she grabbed a gatling laser and adjusted its grips for her form. It looked somewhat like a wheel of camcorders stuck to the end of a chromed assault rifle, with lots of cooling vents.

"Would you?" Altair chimed. "Would you really?"

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Ekut just grunted.

Around an hour and a half was spent assembling the piece de resistance: the Zaptech MPPB-29 particle beam cannon. It looked like a Maxim gun from Earth's first world war: essentially a barrel on wheels, with a shield, both painted black. However, the shield was much larger, similar in size to a riot shield, and it had four wheels instead of two, the back end of the gun forming a platform for the driver to place their legs on. A massive battery pack formed the seat, and mounted to the shield was a control panel with lights, levers and a large viewscreen. It was something between a weapon and a vehicle. Its nickname, Ducky, was spray painted on the enemy-facing side of the shield alongside a stencil of a rubber duck, both yellow.

"My favorite golf cart from hell," Iraklijs mumbled as he secured the back wheel axle.

This thing did indeed serve the crew well on excavations in unstable or remote regions. It blew away a whole gang of vr'rok highwaymen on Rha'kkzaym, served as a bargaining chip in negotiations with some ty-uc-kch rebels in an unnamed asteroid belt, and even cut through a thicket of strangler-trees on Akeruh.

Now it was time to see how well it would handle robotic monstrosities older than human society.

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The crew, armed to the teeth with their weapons of choice and riding on the Ducky, rolled into the corridor. Zkeh was carrying on his back a large square container, holding a day's worth of water and food rations. Aside from the hum of the motor, the clattering of wheel protectors, and their nervous breathing, there was no sound whatsoever. Altair was safely tucked away, with a singular headlight in the middle of the shield providing illumination.

"How fast is this thing, just in case," Tsip said.

"Normally to save power it goes this slow, slightly faster than walking," Iraklijs said, looking away from the steering joystick. "But if needed it can go 40 kilo per hour. Not good for the motor or the wheels especially on rough terrain but it can save our lives."

"Can it do a wheelie."

Iraklijs chuckled. "Not advised."

"I kept forgetting to ask. Why did you name it... 'Ducky'?" Ekut said.

"Long story. Maybe after. Would take hours," the human said as he sped up the self-propelling cannon.

They passed the area where the robotic beast attacked them earlier that day. There was no sign of it, and the hatch was tightly sealed. No piping, no screaming. Still, there was no real relief. Everyone felt like they were being watched. Watched from every direction, from each hole and each star-like light. They kept their weapons at the ready.

Soon, the corridor ended, sharply transitioning into a steep staircase with steps too tiny for human feet.

"I'm not driving this thing down stairs," Iraklijs said. "It's not meant to. We'll crash."

The bquaa made a low whistling sound, imitating the robot's screaming and thus startling everyone. "Dismount, follow Spots. Zkeh, be ready to drag the duck down if needed."

"My heart skipped a beat," Ekut snarled as she looked down, into the gloomy expanse of the vestibule below. "We'll fall too if we try to tip-toe down this thing. Toes hurt just looking at it," she said as she replaced the hook on her grapple-pistol with a magnetic plunger-like head. "Monopole-infused alloy," she said as she removed the Faraday-cage shroud over it.

Iraklijs was suddenly glad that his cybernetics were mag-proofed. There was a loud clunk as Ekut fired at the floor near the staircase's top, then unspooled the cable enough to allow the five explorers to clip themselves to its length.

It was very fast, like a bungee jump minus the rise back up. With a single swoosh, the five were safely down on the vestibule's hard floor, the fall mitigated by the low gravity.

"Wow..." Altair echoed.

It was like a cathedral; or at least it seemed that way despite its modest size. The high, vaulted ceiling was criss-crossed with impossibly complex fractal patterns that made the eyes water, which only intensified at the ground level, and the floor seemed to smoothly transition into gnarled furniture and machinery of unknown purpose, all illuminated only by faint pin-lights and Altair's own glow. A few such objects were loose, on the other hand. Like in the hall, there was no sound here.

There were three doorways. One was small, square, and beside the unusable staircase. Another was very tall, but so thin that any humanoid's shoulders would brush against the rim. The final one was very wide, like the slot of an extinct mailbox, but so low that one would need to crawl to traverse it.

And all three silently gnashed like hungry maws. The doors themselves slid vertically, up and down, up and down, up and down... the smoothness of the mechanisms was marvelous, considering their age, but the effect they had on the ability to navigate the complex was disappointing. There was no other path.

"What now?" Iraklijs said as he detached from the carbon-nanotube rope.

"Try to deactivate somehow," Spots said.

"Well I don't exactly see any switches anywhere here."

Zkeh pranced off into the distance, getting lost amid the abstract sculptures of the vestibule. "Wait, where are you going," Tsip called out.

A scraping sound made the remaining four explorers jump. Everyone readied their rifles and cannons.

But it was merely the sound of Zkeh rolling some kind of barrel-shaped hunk of ruin-material out to the middle of the vestibule. "Choose," the beaked alligator said. "We sshould not ssplit up. Ssplitting up... death. We chohjozra have a millennia-old tale, the tragedy of Rkzikhchar... jusst do not."

"Just like some of our the tales of the Gadarti," Ekut said.

Spots realized what he was trying to do. "Square door first."

The others watched with curiosity as the alien alligator built up momentum, guiding the ribbed barrel into the singular jaw of the sliding door.

A loud CRRRUNCH! echoed through the halls.

The 'barrel' was clearly solid, if perhaps made of a different and less dense alloy than the rest of the complex, yet the downwards-slamming door still crushed it like a foot stomping on a can of beer. Nevertheless, the chomping of the mechanical jaw ended, forever driven into the concavity that it created.

"Let uss go," Zkeh hissed, panting.

"You have an unique approach to problems, Tkhezi," Spots said. "Unique... unique... noted," the bquaa then hugged him tightly.

"Just because it didn't bite--" Ekut said, then shook her head. "Ah, just go in."

They slipped between the crushed cylinder, the jammed jaw, and the white wall.

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The corridor was much narrower than the entrance hall, and the makeshift entrance was even more so, thus there was no sense in trying to take the Ducky through. There were no star-lights, and not as many hatches and creases. Altair's light was almost uncomfortably bright in such a cramped space.

"So, Altair," Tsip asked. "I'm not so close to your owner and the rest, third away trip with you all. What even are you. What even is an aspect-shard," they said in their usual dull monotone.

The crystal blinked green, somewhat startling Ekut. "There is no equivalent to my status in any of your cultures, but the time I called myself a guardian angel was not an exaggeration. I am a three-dimensional shard of a nine-dimensional entity's essence, rendered from solid diamond and infused with the infinitely regressing intricacy of its splendor. Said entity's name is..."

Around ten seconds were filled by indecipherable clicks, growls, purrs and random phonemes that only a being with two voiceboxes, such as a Chimera, could pronounce.

"...and she is responsible for..."

Altair prattled off a meandering series of completely unrelated and oddly specific natural concepts, from tropical coniferous forests to resurgent calderas to alpine glaciers specifically of a small size.

"This is only a small, condensed version of my being, of course... I would not want to confuse you."

"I think you already did," Tsip said.

Iraklijs just patted the crystal's side.

The distraction stopped just in time for Spots to avoid slithering right off a sheer cliff. They recoiled back with the intensity of a canned snake.

The five peeked into the dark void, and saw nothing until Iraklijs held out his crystalline friend, who focused its light downwards.

Thirty meters below, according to the rangefinder, was something that they could only categorize as a layered set of flexible monorails suspended in a seemingly bottomless abyss. Resembling cars on a highway more than trains, variously-shaped fractally-grooved pods zipped above and below branching and curving pathways, disappearing into tunnels on the other side of the ravine-like void, the taut cable-rails merging like rivers on a map. Considering there was no noise of any kind, Iraklijs surmised that they were levitating over and under the 'rails'.

"...is this their transport?" Iraklijs said.

"Maybe not passengers," Ekut replied. "But they still have to be carrying something."

Spots squinted, looking at the transport hub. "This isn't a path for non-vehicles. Nope nope. Go back..."

The group took the usual measurements and visual recordings, and turned around to see that there was no longer a 'back'. Only fifty centimeters behind them was now an impenetrable wall.