There was a long quarter-moon curve of dark shadow at the door’s right side where it stood ajar. The door was so huge it was almost like a natural thing, a cliff face. It gave Neb the same feeling of disconnection as looking at the stars.
‘Damn,’ Gray said. She too was standing up in the transport. ‘Did someone beat us to it?’
But as they took in the scene they saw the door had been open a long time. Grass and dust and debris had blown through the gap, forming a thick carpet on the floor beyond.
Meathead cut the engine and silence flowed into the world. They dismounted and approached the door cautiously, on full alert, weapons out, every step controlled and careful. The darkness beyond the door seemed like a foreboding physical wall. Neb gripped his rifle tightly and felt tension ripple across his back and shoulders. At the door itself Mallory got down on his hands and knees and nudged through the layers of dust and branches and leaves carefully, but he found nothing. ‘Clear,’ he said quietly, but even still his voice seemed loud. It was oppressively silent. Someone is watching us, Neb thought, and as soon as the thought formed it refused to go away. He felt they were terribly exposed standing outside this monstrous door, as if the compound beyond was a place of fear buried deep in the collective memory, a place that everyone else knew to avoid.
Buzz pushed on the huge door with his hand, and Neb half expected it to move, but it stayed utterly still.
They moved forward. Anna took point, Mallory following, then Buzz, then Gray, then Neb and Meathead. They stepped carefully, trying to be silent, but after only a few paces Neb planted his boot and a twig snapped loudly. Nobody looked at him or said anything, but he could sense their silent disapproval.
The huge door was at least four meters thick. Neb touched it as they passed and it felt cold, more like Earth metal than the other Main constructions they had encountered. And yet, of course, this construction was not really Main. It had been built by whatever human-like civ that the Emorists were part of. The Emorists may have used Main tech, he reminded himself, but they were not Main.
The team took a few more steps into the darkness, tense and quiet. They paused and listened, but there was no sound.
Buzz turned on his weapon light to its lowest setting.
Neb gasped and took a step back. And for once he wasn’t the only one -- he heard a sharp intake of breath from Gray and Meathead also.
‘What the fuck,’ Mallory said. Even he sounded slightly unnerved.
Inside the door, standing against the wall, were two huge figures, twice Mallory’s height or more, made of a material like glinting black stone. They were silent and still but the light seemed to lend them movement. They seemed in every way like statues, yet Neb was certain they were machines. Each one held a long black sword in its right hand and a multi-tailed whip in its left, each thong of the whip tapering from the thickness of a heavy cable down to near-invisibility. The figures were carved with heavy armor and helmets that obscured their faces, and to all intents and purposes they looked indestructible. But they had clearly not moved in a long time -- each was covered with dust and scattered with bits of leaves and debris.
‘Don’t touch them,’ Buzz ordered.
Who in their right mind would want to touch them, Neb wondered. Even Meathead and Mallory weren’t that stupid.
The team risked using some more light to examine the temple space. The ceiling was high enough to be invisible somewhere far above them. The floor and walls were of a similar material to the gate guardians. They pushed further inside and the darkness receded reluctantly ahead of them. Neb’s feeling of being watched intensified. Each footstep or quiet cough was magnified a thousandfold. Their lights moved like blades as they explored the huge space. They seemed to Neb to have walked much further than the length of the temple as seen from the outside, but finally they reached the other end.
There was another enormous door there, very similar to the first, and it too stood open. The team exchanged glances.
‘Opened from the inside?’ Gray asked. There were no marks on the door or its surroundings, no evidence of a struggle or a fight.
‘Could be,’ Buzz said.
They went through cautiously. There were no guardians this time, just plain walls inside. In the tunnel beyond the ceiling sloped steadily downwards and the floor upwards, funneling them into a smaller but still large tunnel. It had a broad, flat floor, the ceiling high over their heads. It sloped gently upwards, traveling in a straight line.
They were not far in when Buzz held up his fist and they stopped dead, dropping into defensive positions. There was another tunnel ahead, opening to their right, smaller than the one they were in. Further ahead they could just make out a seond tunnel on the opposite side. They listened intently to the silence, but there was no indication of another living or moving thing being in there with them. On the map, only the main tunnel was shown -- the side tunnels just faded out into stubs as if they led nowhere. But in the reality of the compound those tunnels clearly continued deeper into the compound. It just added to Neb’s growing sense of fear. They were under the mountains now, he thought, and probably beyond the Circle Wall. The idea seemed transgressive and terrifying.
Finally, after what felt like several kilometers but was probably only a few hundred meters, they could sense a change in the air and knew there was something different ahead. They paused to listen. The heavy blackness gathered around their little pool of light resentfully.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Neb cocked his head to one side. Had he heard a faint sound, like a scratch or scrape? He looked to the others but none of them had reacted, and it was easy to imagine things down here. Buzz was already giving the sign to move on.
Around them, the architecture of the place changed. The tunnel had been unadorned to that point, but ahead the decor was luxurious -- shiny polished black walls and floor with streaks of yellow and green running through them. On the ceiling were pinpricks of brightness in the patterns of unfamiliar constellations, casting a faint collective light.
Ahead the tunnel opened out into a large space, and the darkness lightened. The team communicated silently through hand gestures, breaking into two groups, one left and right. This felt like the point of maximum danger. They moved forward cautiously and the ambient light got stronger. It was dim, but in this dark place any light seemed powerful. They burst out into the larger space in attack formation.
There were no enemies. But within the space was a tree of gargantuan proportions, at least 200 meters tall and almost as wide from tip to tip. Its trunk was so large it seemed more like a gently-curving cliff face. They felt dwarfed beneath the spreading branches, which spread far over their heads. The tree was very like an oak, if one had been scaled up to an almost unfathomable size. The trunk was weathered and worn, the imperfections of its patterns hinting at an unseen symmetry. Knots and gnarls that would be the domain of insects in the normal world were scaled up to be human-scale features. Neb felt dizzy as he looked up and tried to find the top of the tree, the height giving him a sensation of falling backwards.
The chamber was not carved in a smooth shape, but instead the walls curved and undulated fractally. Neb guessed the design was following the shape of the mountain above. The whole space and the huge tree felt almost organic, in a confusing way, as if such spaces and such great trees were a natural part of the order of things.
Neb was staring at the tree slightly open-mouthed when he caught some movement with the corner of his eye, right at the edge of his vision. He reacted instinctively, sighting with his rifle, and that movement set off the others, who dropped into defensive postures like instantaneously falling dominoes.
‘Where, Doc?’ Buzz whispered, scanning the tree.
‘Fifty meters up, towards the left,’ Neb answered softly. ‘But… I couldn’t see anything for sure.’
‘Getting spooked, Doc?’ Mallory breathed.
‘Fuck off, Mallory,’ Neb whispered back, not loud enough for Buzz to hear.
But if there was anything there, they couldn’t see it, and they eventually returned to neutral alert.
‘Eyes,’ Buzz said. ‘Keep together.’
All around the space passages led off in every direction, some of them even larger than the one they had come in, others not much taller than the humans. In places the huge branches of the tree brushed the walls of the surrounding mountain, and they could faintly make out ladders and rope bridges that led from the tree into high-up tunnels.
‘What the fuck were these Emorists even doing in here?’ Gray wondered. ‘What’s the tree about? Is it even a real tree?’
‘The overlay thinks it is,’ Mallory answered. Neb checked, and the description read: Great Meridian Oak, sacred to the Emorist cult.
‘Wonder what would happen if we fragged it,’ Meathead said.
‘Let’s not find out,’ Buzz answered curtly. ‘Keep moving. We need to find this fucking printer.’
They circled the huge space slowly. Neb tried to keep a count of the number of tunnels that opened off it, but he stopped after fifty. The Emorist compound was enormous, stretching far out beneath the mountains. He was just thinking that looking for the printer here was a fool’s errand when Meathead said loudly, his voice echoing like a stone dropped into a well: ‘Fuck me, I think I see it.’
He was standing at an impregnable-looking door that opened directly off the main chamber. It had a small glass window set into it, and he was crouched down slightly to look through. The light from within was strong enough to light up his face and show an expression very close to wonder.
They took it in turns to look through the little window. When Neb’s turn came he had to stand on his tiptoes. The view inside was slightly distorted, as though the glass -- or whatever substance he was seeing through -- was very thick. The room beyond was curved almost into a clam shape, and near the back where the ceiling met the floor was a shiny black stone altar. Sitting on top of it was a machine that Neb was certain was the printer. It was much smaller than he had expected, a cuboid shape about half a meter square. It looked like a thick frame surrounding a translucent interior, vaguely like a semi-transparent crate. Inside was an almost quasi-corporeal light, changing and moving slowly, like drifting water. Shapes that reminded him of Main symbols faded in and out of being, but it was impossible to know if they were actual symbols or just random perturbations in the light. He found it hard to take his eyes from the machine. For the first time, he had the sense that he was a primitive person engaging with dangerous technology from beings unreachably far beyond him.
Neb examined the door to the room. Beside it was a huge gear wheel, but that wheel in turn touched an even larger wheel, so big it arced down beneath the floor level of the tree chamber. Other wheels and gears were mounted further up the wall around the door. There was no evident control mechanism or obvious way of activating any of it. Neb noticed two small holes on either side of the door, each about two centimeters in diameter, and he touched one curiously. Were they intended for a winding mechanism, maybe? It would hardly prove to be that simple.
Buzz turned away from the window. ‘Options?’
Anna was looking at her map. ‘My Main Seeker skill just triggered,’ she said. ‘This whole room is a Level Two secret.’
‘Any indication of where to start?’
‘None, sir.’
‘I say we go down and find the bottom of that machine,’ Mallory said, nodding at the huge gear that dipped below the floor surface. ‘Looks like a hint to me.’
‘Or up the tree,’ Meathead suggested, leaning back to look up into its endless height. ‘It looks easy to climb.’
Buzz clearly didn’t like either of those options. ‘Doc?’ he said. ‘Any thoughts?’
Neb felt disorientated. The size of the tree and the surrounding space, the endless dark tunnels of the compound, and now Anna’s skill triggering when his own did not… He couldn’t shake the feeling they were way out of their depth. He looked at the map, trying to see any pattern in the way the tunnels were laid out, but it seemed chaotic. None of it made any sense to him. Yet there had to be some organizing principle in its construction, some way of making sense of the enormity of the place.
‘I think there must be --’ Neb began.
But then Mallory roared: ‘CONTACT!’