Western Research Hub
Krandermore, Survivor’s Refuge
1956.2.23 Interstellar
The woman on the screen appeared to be in her mid-forties, although Janus knew that age indicators were misleading in the present-day Cult and probably more so among the ancients at the time of First Landing. She was petite, caramel-skinned, and green-eyed, with a few wisps of brown hair escaping from her headscarf.
“My work is done here,” Dr. Jahangir said. “I’ve packed all the irreplaceable equipment into one of the crawlers. A group of aspirants has agreed to escort me as far as the frost line. Some of them offered to come the whole way, but I’m as wary of them as I am of the coldside cave dwellers aping their corporate ancestors—including the mercantilism of Ancient Earth.”
Janus watched the recording closely. This was a woman who’d come to a strange world, a biologist and explorer, someone who’d tried to fix an insurmountable problem on her own.
“I’m so tired,” Dr. Jahangir admitted. “I had such high hopes for the extremophiles of the aberration zones. There are so few planets in the galaxy to have developed life, let alone the variety we’ve found here, and I thought the conditions in what my colleagues have taken to call the Dead Fields would produce something unique and survivable, but everything here is either stupid or predatory or both.” She rubbed her eyes. “I started crying for no reason at breakfast today, and—”
The holo cut off, and the timestamp jumped several hours forward. The doctor looked both more tired and more composed. She was wearing an aspirant suit with the helmet under her arm, and she had swapped the headscarf for a cooling headcap. “I’m leaving. This will be the last record I leave in the Western facility, as it has proven impossible to maintain a reliable planetary network. The cowards in orbit have abandoned us, but that’s freeing in a way. I don’t have to listen to their endless arguments.”
She stared at the recorder defiantly. “I remain convinced that the answers are here, on Krandermore. This ecosystem has flourished on the thinnest of margins through constant change and adaptation. If humanity is unable to do it, I will do it for them. Jahangir, out.”
***
Cave System Entrance, Below the Carver Institute
Krandermore, Survivor’s Refuge
4453.3.3 Interstellar
Dr. Jahangir’s last entry was on Janus’s mind as they drove toward the secret entrance. They were moving slowly, less than fifty kilometers an hour, because they had to drive by starlight. Even with their implants turned all the way up, the landscape was a fuzzy green haze that shifted and sometimes burst into static. The stars were fierce pinpoints of light in the empty sky.
Above them, the city loomed. The Carver Institute had been built on top of a mesa. Like many old settlements, it was sited around one of the transmission pedestals. Unbeknown to the settlers, the pedestal was located on top of, and connected to, the Eastern Labs, and the Cult had managed to keep that secret for over two-thousand five-hundred years.
Even the Cult hadn’t known the full details about the facility’s secret entrance, or if they had, that information had been purged from the Consensus’s records. That part wasn’t so surprising to Janus; his home had been purged by Red Donnika to prevent information they disapproved of from spreading.
What surprised him was that they left the facility intact for him to find.
“That’s the entrance,” Ryler said, designating the location in their retinal displays.
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Janus and the others parked their buggies nearby, and the Motragi rangers expertly camouflaged them to look like the surrounding rocks.
Then, the combined team of aspirants, rangers, and one jungle dragon made their way to the entrance of the caves.
“Will Fury be okay?” Lira asked.
Fury barked silently, and Janus gave her a thumbs up. Among other surprises, Fury could go several minutes in a near vacuum without breathing, long enough to make it to their destination.
There were dozens of cave openings in the cliff face. Of the ones at ground level, there was nothing to distinguish the one Ryler was leading them to. It was, perhaps, a bit larger—wide and tall enough that a crawler could have at least partially driven in. It was also warmer than the frigid exterior, and after a short distance, Fury’s gills unfurled, and Janus was able to detect a thin atmosphere.
On Irkalla, a cave like this would have been sealed and turned into a storage area. Two things prevented that here. One was the Cult’s prohibitions on exploring the caves, citing everything from toxic waste to remnants of the plague. The second was staring at Janus and the team from a small, rocky shelf.
The locals called them fire slugs, although, from Janus’s first observation, they were neither slugs nor on fire. They were some kind of giant salamander, roughly the size of a monitor lizard, with wide, toothless mouths and slimy skin.
“Watch your feet, and don’t let them touch you,” the veteran ranger warned. “That slime on their body will melt right through your suit and give you a nasty burn.”
“They don’t look like slugs,” Mick commented.
Janus laughed. “I know. They should probably be called caustic giant salamanders.”
Mick looked at him and said, “I respect the hell out of you, boss, but you suck at naming things. How about Burn Skinks?”
“Meltmouth monitors,” Lira said.
“Sizzlemanders,” the veteran ranger said. When everyone stared at him, he asked, “Was this an aspirants-only thing?”
“No,” Janus said. “Sizzlemanders is pretty good.”
Fury barked at the sizzlemander on the shelf, and it slithered away, leaving a trail of hissing goo.
The team pushed farther into the cave.
It was bigger on the inside. The cave opened up into several large chambers that Janus and the team were mostly able to make out with sweeps of their suit lights. The temperature was even warmer, now climbing above 20°C, and Fury seemed comfortable. There was a decent amount of sulfur in the air—not enough to do instant damage, but nothing Janus would have wanted to breathe for an extended period of time. More sizzlemanders watched them from the cave walls and green, murky pools.
“I’m surprised you don’t want to catalog everything, Janus Invarian,” Koni said. “Is this not an interesting new environment?”
“Something about it gives me the creeps,” Janus said.
A sizzlemander clambered out of a small opening in the cavern wall and froze as their suit lamps swept over it.
Another one of the creatures dropped from the ceiling and landed on a ranger’s back. The ranger’s gun went off as he shouted and tried to get it off, and then his shouts turned to screams.
“Get it off him!” the veteran shouted.
The sizzlemanders were in motion, now, moving along the walls like schools of fish toward prey. One skittered down a column of rock, and Janus saw a ruined void suit at the base of it and the melted remains inside. “Run!” he said.
Mick managed to get the angle to shoot the sizzlemander off the screaming ranger’s back, then pulled the injured man along as they followed Ryler toward the back of the cave.
The fleeing humans were like the sounding of a dinner bell. More and more of the hissing, slimy creatures came rushing out of holes and dark corners or splashing out of acidic pools. Janus almost tripped over more partially melted remains, and he realized his and Ryler’s mistake.
The Cult hadn’t managed to convince the Carver Institute not to go looking for the Eastern Labs. Everyone who’d tried over the years had been eaten.
“We’re almost there!” Ryler said.
Janus tossed a pair of gas grenades behind them, but the sizzlemanders kept coming, their coating of acidic mucus protecting them from the grenades’ contents.
The rangers started to fire as they fell back, but their bullets had little effect in the crazy moving dark of the cave, and any creature they managed to injure or kill was replaced by two more.
“Here!” Ryler said.
“Get us in,” Janus said.
“I’m trying!” Ryler said frantically. “It won’t open with all these things so close to the entrance!”
Fury turned on the creatures and roared. She drew in all the oxygen she could and let it out as a long and bright stream of fire that lit the entire space and maxed out Janus’s suit’s audio receptors, and the swarm of sizzlemanders fell back in surprise and terror from her attack, melting before the light.
A large section of the cave wall slid aside. “I got it!” Ryler said.
“Everybody in!” the veteran ranger ordered.
Mick lobbed a flashbang behind them, firing short bursts while the team scrambled into the airlock. He squeezed in last, just as the outer door sealed shut, and the decon cycle began. “Nothing like a good bug hunt, right, boss?”
“Yeah, Mick,” Janus said, slumping against the wall and gathering Fury into a grateful hug. “Never again.”
After five minutes and several rounds of sprays and light shows, the inner lock hissed open.
They’d reached the Eastern Labs.