The warm, salted breeze should feel good on her skin. The waves lapping at the sides of the Gate Walker’s hull should soothe her ears. She should be drinking down the outdoor air - the first fresh air she had tasted in weeks - like sweet ambrosia.
But Khadam could not feel the joy of being free.
She stood on the outer hull of the gatewalker. Her hedrons devoured every last grain of sand, and the old, broken ship was nothing more than a lone island in the ocean, with waves lapping at its hull.
Barbaric as they were, all this air had once belonged to the nomads. This ruined ship had once been the foundation of their sandy empire. And she had erased it all. Every last trace of them.
So much death. And for what?
The Herald. The old prophets said he would be the last being alive, because he would destroy everyone, and everything. The Bringer of Change and Ruination.
So what did that make her?
On the one hand, she was lucky. She had found the Herald. In all this vast, empty expanse, she had found him - not as an almighty nightmare - but in the form of a child. Naive and trusting and weak. How much easier could it get?
On the other hand...
How am I supposed to kill a child?
Khadam inhaled deeply. Filling her lungs with that salt-scented air. Staring up at the night sky. The stars closest to the scar were occluded by its glowing light. The scar, as far as she could tell, hadn’t changed at all, which meant the light dam was doing its job.
With a flick of her mind, she pulled her eye implants over her eyes. Tiny lenses slid out from beneath her eyelids, building themselves into a kind of telescope that covered her cornea. It was a stiff feeling, but it let her see the scar in great detail - a faded, white light. A crack in the sky, with edges billowing with white mist. And there was the light dam, a black speck, frozen in transition against all that unfolding brightness.
The architects built the light dams. One for each scar. The fact that the dams still worked, that this scar hadn’t changed at all… It was almost miraculous.
And the stars beyond were so peaceful. Twinkling, and quiet.
She stifled a yawn. Khadam flicked her mind again, summoning another injection of hormones to keep her awake. It had been three days since she’d seen his face. And more, since she last slept.
There was a chance that the naive child was only a form of the Harbinger. A disguise. She didn’t know how that would be possible, but she didn’t want to take chances. What if he knows where I am, now?
What if he doesn’t?
Either way, Khadam didn’t want to sleep when there was so much to do. So many plans to work through, once she got off this planet.
The ground rumbled. A gentle earthquake that disturbed the lapping of the waves and made the sands on the distant shoreline shift and ripple. The earthquakes were supposed to happen. What else would you expect, when you’re carving out the center of a planet? And she had set up all the proper safeguards. And, Finder himself was watching over the hedrons.
Still. It made her stomach turn.
Khadam stood up, stretching her arms over her head, as she walked up the gentle slope of the hull. Back towards the cargo door. There was a dry spot on the metal, where the poles had once been. That ancient skeleton, hung up like a standard.
Khadam had forgotten to tell the hedrons to leave the skeleton alone. So, the hedrons devoured it, and turned it into spare materials. Any one of her hedrons now could be made of molecular bits and pieces of human remains, but she tried not to think about that.
Inside the gate walker, all the lights were on, but it somehow felt emptier than before. The hulls were huge, and even though Finder was somewhere down here, part of his mind monitoring the hedrons, another part still trying to guess another gate’s coordinates (good luck with that), the space was large enough that she couldn’t see him as she walked through the cargo holds.
Khadam found a terminal, and began to flip through a few of her hedron’s control groups.
There were billions of them now, most of them underneath the planet’s crust. They were burrowing and emptying out the lower regolith, and the cooler parts of the mantle, slowly consuming the liquid stone down there. Drinking it in, and using it to print new structures.
She checked to make certain they were being careful around the crust immediately below the Gate Walker. The geologic signals looked stable enough, but she widened the exception zone another hundred miles, just to be certain. All the sand was unpredictable, and she didn’t want her ship to suddenly sink beneath the waves.
Then, she took one of the hedrons and followed its camera through the subterranean structures. In the cavernous spaces below the world, the hedrons were knitting new bones together. Metal cables and wires held the ever-hollowing planet together, and pillars of freshly-printed stone, hundreds of miles tall, kept the crust intact. The interior of the planet would soon be a porous entity, like a massive, spherical sponge made of rock and metal.
It was about creating space within mass. The extractor needed both to remain stable. But it would be days until the hedrons were finished. Weeks, maybe, if anything went wrong, and Khadam always expected something to go wrong. Building an extraction engine wasn’t exactly the most predictable process. Architects were better at working at such scale. But all the architects...
She was on her own.
Once the hedrons finished creating the outer structure, then she would have them build the extractor itself, at the center of the planet. She would need a few million heat-specialized hedrons to make that happen. Simple enough to make, in theory.
And then, if all the tests went well, she would have an engine for creating light.
But for now, she had to wait. So, Khadam wandered the hidden places of the ship. Aimlessly. Looking for things to fix, for problems to work on. But everything was flowing so smoothly, thanks to Finder’s help. How lucky she had been, to find him. How lucky that he had crashed on this planet, too. Not just a machine, but an intelligent construct that still had its mind in place. Maybe we should seek out his old factory, once we get off this planet. I’d like to see where he was made.
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Life support was still sound, now that all the leaks had been fixed. And the cargo hold was still a mess that she would never clean up, because why? Who’s going to see it? Her feet carried her up the steps, through the corridors, and into the old habitation quarters. She didn’t know why she was going up there. Maybe to feel a sense of normality. Maybe, to not feel so alone.
The cold chambers were still there. Their lights, still blinking quietly. Their glass, still opaque that enough she couldn’t see inside. The info panel lit up. It didn’t recognize any of her impulses, so she had to turn it on manually.
A body, perfectly frozen.
Short, black hair. Slender, maybe even petite frame. Skin as pale as a barren moon. A woman? It was hard to tell. The dream disease glistened on her skin. Black, glistening chunks of skin and flesh, carved away in strangely geometric patterns. Unnatural. There were blue-black lines - jagged, almost pixelated veins - running across her chest, and up her neck. It was awful to look at her face. The flesh from her right cheek, running up to her eye. Dissolving, crumbling. Being unmade.
Shivers ran down her spine as she looked at their changing faces. Has it progressed since I’ve been here? Khadam shoved her disgust down into the pit of her stomach. She refused to let it control her. Leaned into it, until her forehead was pressed against the glass. She didn’t think so - the cold chamber was insulated against the light, and should prevent any growth - but it was always so hard to tell.
She stared a while longer at the woman. All the others were in the same state.
Remember this. This is why, she thought. This is why you have to kill him.
If the old prophets spoke true, this dreaming sickness was nothing compared to what would follow in the Herald’s wake. Instead of millions of years, the Herald would bring the change sweeping across the universe in a thousand. A hundred. Or fewer.
But he’s only a child. It rose inside her, again. That feeling of something being off. Why?
“Khadam?” Finder’s voice interrupted her thoughts.
He was floating in the hallway behind her, his spherical bulk taking up almost the entire corridor. His claws hung under his body, curled inward. Almost protective.
“You appear distressed,” Finder said, “Are you still worrying about the other human?”
“He’s not a hu-” Khadam stopped herself. She wasn’t sure what he was.
“You haven’t slept. Do you fear that he will find you?”
“I don’t think he knows anything, Finder. He’s barely a teen. By our standards, he’s basically a newborn.”
“Then, perhaps you could speak with him again to make sure? To find out what he knows.”
Khadam felt the blood rushing to her face. It was the last thing she wanted to do. “He’s the enemy, Finder. I have to kill… He must be destroyed.”
She had already explained this to him. Finder, it seemed, couldn’t wrap his mind around the concept of the Herald, or the old prophecies.
“Is it not best to analyze an enemy in depth, to understand it? Is this not worth the risk?”
The scientist in her wanted to. A large part. To find out why he had been chosen. And why so young? To find out everything about this Poire that she could. Part of her still disbelieved he could be the end of all things.
But that face. The dreams.
The visions. Millions had seen him, had seen the destruction he would wrought. She had seen it.
Rodeiro had told her to anticipate the unexpected. What was he talking about, if not this?
“It’s too dangerous, Finder. Right now, we’re too vulnerable. What if he’s lying about what he is? I don’t know what he’s capable of, and if he finds out where we are right now… well. Right now, I know where he is and that’s enough. The sooner we get off this planet, the better.”
“Oh. In that case, I bear good news!” Finder bounced up in the air, his claws clicking excitedly. “I found a gate.”
“An open gate? How-” Khadam’s eyes were wide with disbelief. “When did- Wait, Is it safe?”
“I haven’t tested it yet, but I have reason to believe that it may be.”
“What reason is that?”
“A healthy signal, with more than adequate light to power our side. And the data suggests a breathable atmosphere.”
“Light? You’re sure.”
“Yes.”
What were the chances of that?
It must be slim. The Old Grid still had light, but it had four working extractors. Some random gate, in the middle of nowhere… what were the chances?
That doesn’t mean it's safe, Khadam thought. But still, this was astounding. Another chance to get off this damned planet, in case things went wrong. Khadam ran forward, and wrapped her arms around Finder, awkwardly hugging his body’s sphere. Careful not to freeze herself on the cold fire of his repulsors. “Incredible. You are an incredible machine, Finder.”
“Good,” Finder bobbed his body, nodding at her. “Then you must get ready to leave. I will help you collect your-”
“I’m not leaving,” Khadam said. “I mean, that’s incredible, Finder. But I’m not going to open some unknown gate, on the hope that it’s safe.”
“But I opened it for you. I spent so much time working on it.”
“And I can’t thank you enough. But unless we have a way to verify what’s on the other side, I’m not going through.”
Finder’s expression didn’t change. The animated eyes on his screen stared at her.
“Okay,” Finder said, after an awkward pause. “Then my task here is done. If there’s anything else I can do for you, please let me know. I am here to serve you.”
She patted him one more time on the dome of his body. “This is still huge, Finder. If nothing else, this means we have a backup plan to get off this planet, right?”
“Right.”
“And I could still use your help monitoring the hedrons.” Thanks to his core, he was better at handling the absurd numbers of hedrons than she was, at detecting micro errors and other bugs that - if projected across billions of drones - could still impede her plans.
Together, they went back down to the main terminals. Finder didn’t say much over the next few hours, as they monitored the hedrons. Still carving out huge pockets in the magma and ancient, volcanic basalt. Still building the skeleton of what would become the engine.
When Khadam started yawning again, Finder suggested she try to sleep. “Humans cannot go forever without rest.”
He was right. And every hour that passed, sleep became more tempting.
So that night, curled up in the cargo holds with too many blankets and a warm cup of freeze-dried earl grey tea, Khadam finally went to sleep.
The dream came. Just like it always did.
Only, tonight, it was interrupted.
A metal claw, jostling her shoulder. “Khadam.”
“Not yet,” she mumbled.
“There’s something wrong with the scar.”
She was sitting up before her eyes even opened. She blinked into the darkness of the hold. “Lights!” she shouted, and the lights poured down from the lofty ceilings, illuminating all the metal debris and cargo containers. All those hundreds of printers, now stacked against the walls.
Ignoring the painful dryness of her mouth, and the stiffness of her joints, Khadam pulled herself up. And jogged to the nearest terminal, where the scene was unfolding onscreen.
The hedrons in the mantle were still working, all that magma cooling into hard, black rock as the spaces above were hollowed out. Hundreds of millions of the drones were buzzing in squadrons through the chasms. And there were more hedrons flying up on the surface, still drinking up the dunes and turning them into more solid, structural material.
Khadam kept flipping through the control groups, until she found one floating … in the atmosphere? Why would they be up there?
Millions of metal orbs, flying up in a long string. Stretching up towards the scar. The crack in the void was flickering, like some black thunderhead illuminated by flashes of lightning. She could see tendrils of white light crawling out from that unnatural void.
New cracks were forming in the scar. Some disappeared… but many did not.
She flipped through the groups, until she found the ones closest to the scar.
“No,” she gasped.
Thousands of those small, polyhedronic bodies were covering the high towers of the light dam. Millions more, eating away at the black discs that held the whole structure together. Repurposing that precious matter into something far less useful.
“How could this happen?”
As she watched, one of the connectors was broken apart. A jagged tower began to lean, crashing into its neighbors. Ropes and lassos of blue light scattered down the tower’s length.
And as it fell, the scar continued to grow.