AN: We are back to the regular upload schedule of Tuesdays and Thursdays. I just forgot to upload this yesterday. There have been over 30 new members who joined the House of the Reaper, too many names for me to list. So, I just want to say thank you to all of those who like my work too much as to take that step forward.
Without further ado, I'm resuming public releases.
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Octavia's curse hung in the dead air, and Mark followed the line her beams had carved.
Far down the cavern, at the edge of where the helmet lamps still held coherent shape, the dark began to take on shape. A row of tall, destroyed silhouettes the light couldn't fully reach.
"Marcos." Mark kept his voice on the private channel, low. "Are you getting this?"
"Yeah, I'm getting it alright," Marcos said back. "I'd say more, but I assume you'll want eyes on the floor before I start narrating my hypothesis."
"Smart," Mark said as he tapped two fingers against the side of his helmet. The white pillars of his lamps dimmed to a passive trickle, and his vision shifted as, with just a thought, the armor developed a night-vision composite that swept down over his vision.
What had been a narrow stripe of illumination spread out into a green panorama as his suit synthesized the trace photons it could find with the soft radar mesh his armor was firing into the gloom. Beside him, three more visors performed the same trick in unison. Severus's rifle came up half an inch as his targeting overlay snapped to life. Aurelia took a small, sharp breath while Octavia didn't make a sound at all.
The facility was monstrous.
The ceiling sat almost a hundred meters up, ribbed with a lattice of dead cabling and dark conduits that ran in long arcs from one wall to the other. The walls themselves had the same glassy bore-pattern they'd seen on the cavern outside, only here the surface was cratered and chewed by impacts in a rough belt running from waist-height up to about thirty meters. Some of those craters were so deep he could see darker rock behind them, where whatever had hit had punched all the way through.
The floor itself told a worse story.
About three hundred meters in front of them, in a horseshoe formation that bowed away toward the deeper end of the cavern, stood the reason Octavia had cursed.
There were roughly twenty of the autonomous sentinel mechs, which caused Mark's stomach to tighten. He'd faced two of these things and come out the other side with a vault to show for it, but a single one of them had nearly whiped them all out, had it not been for the Shepherd's weaponry. Twenty was not a number he wanted to write home about.
But after taking a better look, he noticed that none of them were standing under their own power.
Some leaned at impossible angles, propped against each other in a kind of frozen domino chain. One had been split clean across the chest, its upper half lying ten meters from its lower half, the inside of the cut polished smooth as if a planer had been run through the cross-section of high-grade steel. Two more had lost their heads entirely. Another stood headless, but on its feet, its torso plate caved in where something the size of a small car had punched through and out the back.
"Keep your eyes open for anything," Mark said. "And stay close."
"Yes, my lord," Severus answered, voice level. He brought his rifle up and tucked into Mark's left.
Aurelia had already begun cataloging what she was seeing. "Sir, look at the impact pattern on the walls. The line stops about a third of the way in. Whatever did that was shooting towards the outside."
"Probably from that end." Mark gestured with his chin at the far end of the horseshoe.
They started moving, and the closer they got, the more of a story the shapes were able to tell. The autonomous units had set themselves up in a wide arc, weapons facing inward toward a single point, toward a glint of metal that the night-vision had been struggling to parse at a distance.
When they crossed into the gap between the rear ranks of the autonomous mechs and that something, their feet stopped on their own.
It was easily five meters taller than the mechs around it. Where the autonomous units had been all function with an angular and faceless body on those backward-bent legs, the thing in the center was unmistakably a person made of metal. A head rode on a clean shoulder line, with what could've been read as a jaw or mouthplate beneath two recessed visor sockets, both of them dark. Two arms ended in articulated hands big enough to cradle a truck. The torso plates were thick where they needed to be thick, narrower at the waist, and the legs were knee-forward, the way a human's are, rather than the legs of the smaller machines.
It carried weight in its design, and it appeared to have a center of gravity to it. It held a posture that, even leaning with one knee buckled outward and one shoulder torn back to expose internals, it looked like it had been built to fight back.
"Twenty meters," Aurelia said softly. "Give or take a meter."
Octavia hadn't said a word in over a minute.
When she finally did, her voice was low and almost reverent. "That's a piloted unit."
She stepped forward without checking whether the rest of them were following, knowing that they weren't going to stop her. Mark noticed a slight change in the way she walked. Her arms were slightly out from her sides, her head canted back, her gold visor tracking up the chassis with a hint of recognition.
"Severus," Mark said. "Stay on rear. Aurelia, guard the perimeter."
"Aye, my lord," Severus murmured.
Mark followed Octavia. The closer she got, the more she took in. She circled the buckled left leg. Crouched at the seam where the foot armor met the ankle joint. Stood again. Walked the line of the lower torso with one gloved hand a breadth from the metal without ever touching it.
"What is it? Talk to me," Mark said.
"I'm trying to figure out how this is here." Octavia's voice was thinner than he'd heard it, sandblasted down to something uncomplicated. "Mark. I've never seen anything like this. Not in the IUC files Marcos has, or even in any tech my people ever fielded. But it all just feels right. The way the hip joints are made, the placement of the ankle gimbal, and these reverse stabilizer ports along the spine plate. Whoever built this knew what they were doing, the same way my people knew what they were doing."
She was already moving up and around to where the chest opened on a seam.
"This should be the cockpit." She tapped a finger close to a section of the plate that had been crumpled inward like wet paper, ringed by long pressure stress lines. "Here. You see the seam? Two-stage separator. Outer shell hinges away. Inner pod ejects independently if the outer can't release. This one took a hit and therefore didn't."
"You're sure about this?" Aurelia asked from twenty meters back, her voice clipped over the comms.
"I'm sure the way I'm sure my own hands are mine," Octavia replied
Mark tilted his head to look up the height of the chassis. "Alright, I have my own conclusions, but I want you to give me the big picture. What do you read in this scene?"
Octavia stepped back and gave herself another long second to take it all in. Then she raised one hand and traced a slow line from the cratered wall behind them, down through the destroyed arc of autonomous mechs, up to the buckled humanoid in the middle.
"They were attacking it," she said. "From that side. The autonomous units came in toward the deeper part of the facility, and this one set itself here and held. The wall damage starts where its line of fire would've started. The crater pattern pushes inward, showing they were trying to get past it."
"To go where?" Severus asked, his rifle still trained on the gap between him and the autonomous wreckage.
"Doesn't matter yet," Octavia said. "Just look at what stopped them."
Mark looked.
He'd thought the autonomous units had been carved up by ballistics. Some had. The shells littering the floor between them, fat ugly things the size of trash cans, lay deformed and blackened where they'd hit and fallen short. He nudged one with his boot. It rolled half an inch and stayed where it was, the casing too crushed by its own impact to roll any further.
But the smooth cuts were something else.
He counted seven of them across the bodies of the mechs in front of him before he gave up counting. They were long, mirror-clean cleaves that had passed through layered alloys like a hot knife through butter. None had any ragged edges, meaning that whatever had made those cuts had moved fast enough to cleave right through.
"I doubt this was done with any ballistics," Aurelia said, having arrived at his shoulder at some point. "Probably done by some sort of blade."
"That's a blade running at velocities that should not be physically possible," Octavia corrected. "I want to see who or what made them."
She turned back to the humanoid mech and looked at its hands. The right hand was empty, its fingers half-curled, and the left arm ended at the elbow in torn metal.
"It must have dropped its weapon here somewhere." Octavia's gold visor swept the floor, then narrowed on a long, dark shape lying in the dust about thirty meters from the chassis. "Over there."
She walked over, and Mark trailed behind her. The thing on the floor turned out to be a blade roughly twelve meters long, straight, with a guarding crossbar still attached to the hilt-end. The cutting edge was so thin that Mark could only see it because the night-vision picked up a different reflectance off the spine. It had been destroyed across the middle. The far half lay another eight meters past it, half-buried in a dead mech's pelvis like a wedge in a stump.
"It got its arm taken before it could finish the swing," Octavia said. "Once it lost the blade, they closed in and tore it apart."
She put her hand on the tip of the sheared half for a moment. Her shoulders moved once, like she was breathing through a thought.
"What's running in your head?" Mark asked. "Give me your best guess."
She straightened.
"Two possibilities. The autonomous units got a bad signal, probably an external hack or a corrupted update, and turned on whoever was supposed to be running this place. That's one. Or they woke up on their own and decided the leash was too tight." She turned to look at him. "Either way, it was a mutiny, and this thing was making a last stand."
Aurelia had been listening. Her voice came in low. "If it was a hack, Sir, then that means someone got inside this place hundreds of thousands of years ago. Someone who wasn't supposed to."
Severus, still on rear watch, made a small sound of interest. "A war inside the family, then. Even better."
"Yeah, yeah. Let's keep moving," Mark said. He didn't like the prickle climbing the back of his neck. "From the sight of things, the information Marcos had gained from the one who gave up is either outdated or flat out wrong. I'm leaning towards the latter, so I'd like to see what it was they were defending."
They threaded through dead autonomous mechs with care, and as they walked, the ground turned into a crust of pulverized armor plating, spent shell casings, and crystallized coolant that crunched under Mark's boots. There were sections of the floor that had been blown out entirely, which forced them to walk along the edges of those holes, keeping a respectful distance while peering into pits that descended into a black they couldn't read even with the night composite cranked.
"I wouldn't lean over that," Aurelia called when Severus paused at the lip of one of them. "If your foot slips, you're going to find out how deep we don't know it goes."
"Aye, that's a fair point," Severus said and stepped back.
The wreckage thickened the further they walked.
Past the first ring of autonomous mechs, they found a second, smaller knot of fallen units, though these ones were not in formation, but rather tangled into each other as if they'd been swept into a corner. Beyond that, the shapes of more humanoid mechs started showing up, lying destroyed among the autonomous wrecks. Some were as torn as the autonomous units. Some had clearly fallen from a height, their backs broken where they'd met the floor. Mark counted four piloted mechs in that stretch alone.
"None of these cockpits ejected," Octavia said as they passed one whose chest had been peeled like a tin lid. "None of them. Whatever happened in here, the pilots rode their machines into the ground."
"Or they couldn't get out fast enough," Aurelia said.
"Same thing," Octavia said as they continued walking.
The facility itself wasn't a single room, but a long corridor that bent and re-bent on itself, which was probably a deliberate choice for somebody who didn't want a clean line of sight from the door to the deep end. They walked for what the suit told Mark was eight hundred meters, then a thousand, but the destruction never quite let up.
There were stretches where the floor had been melted into glassy pools, and stretches where a wall had been peeled like a banana. He counted forty-seven distinct mech wrecks before he gave up and stopped counting, and that was probably half of what was actually there. Many were folded into each other so tightly he couldn't tell what was what.
Roughly a kilometer in, the corridor opened into a wider basin, and Mark stopped walking on the lip of it.
There were two more piloted mechs in the basin. They were alone, locked together in the middle of the floor like wrestlers who'd both gotten the kill in.
The one on the left had driven a long, tapered weapon that was something halfway between a spike and a sword, all the way through the chest of the one on the right, pinning it. The one on the right had driven a similar weapon up under the jaw of the one on the left and out through the back of its head. Both were on their knees, and both were leaning on each other for support that neither of them needed anymore.
Octavia stopped at the edge of the basin and didn't go any farther.
"This is it," she said. "That's our answer right there. You don't fight your enemy like that, let alone a stranger. The whole point is to kill him as fast as you can. You only die in each other's arms when you used to know each other's names."
For a long moment, no one spoke.
"All right," Mark said at last. "Now we've got our story. Let's see where the story was going."
Past the two paired mechs, the basin narrowed back into a corridor for another hundred meters and then opened out a final time onto the back wall of the cavern, where two things waited.
One was an elevator set into the rock face like a square shaft, maybe forty meters on a side, its open mouth framed by buckled track rails and guides. The car itself was sitting at the bottom of whatever shaft it ran in, dead and dark.
The other was the stairs, which ran in a wide, switchbacking descent down the right-hand side of the elevator shaft, their lower turns vanishing into the darkness. They were definitely built for Strathari people since each tread was about three feet deep front to back, and the drop from one tread to the next was a solid two feet. Walking down them was going to feel like walking down a stage.
"Strathari were big," Aurelia said, examining the geometry. "How tall had you said they were? Eleven, twelve feet?"
"Yup," Mark said.
"Then this is comfortable for them," Octavia said.
"Oh yeah," Severus said with fascination. "This is fantastic."
Mark looked back at his three Elites. "Alright. Holster your weapons. We're going to be on these for a while."
Octavia and Severus stowed their weapons while Aurelia checked her sidearm and set both her gauntlets to receive a quick draw if she needed it. Mark stored his railgun in his inventory, and the four of them began their way down.
Each step was its own small drop, and after the first hundred, any normal human's thighs would've been burning, even with the suit's servos taking the worst of it. After three hundred, they had given up speaking and were just moving. After five, the rhythm of it became its own kind of trance.
The cavern grew quieter the further they went, and the dust thinned while the temperature climbed by a few degrees, then by more, until their suits were venting cool air around his face on a low, steady cycle. There was no sound but their boots and the faint creak of armor at the joints.
When the staircase finally hit a landing, Mark's HUD told him they were five hundred and seven meters below the cavern they'd left.
"My Lord," Severus muttered, planting his hands on his thighs for one breath. "I am going to feel that walk back up tomorrow."
"Yeah, you and me both," Mark agreed.
The four of them stood at the foot of the stairs and looked around. The space at the bottom of the stairs opened into a circular room, maybe two hundred meters across, with a high domed ceiling and walls that fell away into deeper shadow on either side. In those shadows, Mark could pick out the squared mouths of several corridors leading out in a fan.
Above each corridor, there was a sign. A strip of dark metal carrying the same alien glyphs Marcos had translated for them up at the door.
Mark counted them by feel. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.
Seven halls.
One of them, the third from the left, was visibly bigger than the others. Its mouth was easily three times the height and twice the width of any of its neighbors.
"Marcos," Mark said. "We're at a junction and need you to translate for us."
"From your left to your right, Mark," Marcos started. "The first hall reads Mech. Or as close to that as I can pull from the dialect. The second reads Housing. The third, which you've correctly noticed, is the largest, glosses to something close to Aerial Vehicles. The fourth says Ground Vehicles. The fifth, Energy. The sixth, Mechanical, though I would render it more accurately as Systems or Infrastructure. That is most likely your reactor block, your data hubs, the bones of the place. The seventh, the one farthest to your right, is the one I can't fully nail down. The closest English word I have is DNA. It could also read as Genome, or Biology, or Lineage. The Strathari concept folded those together."
Mark stood for a moment, taking it in before making a decision.
"Mechanical first," he said. "If anything is still drawing power down here, it's drawing it from somewhere. I want to see the systems before we trip anything we shouldn't."
"Sound logic," Severus said.
"DNA will be second," Mark continued.
"Even sounder," Severus stated with a nod.
The Mechanical hall was wide and tall, and as they walked through it, the walls on either side carried embedded conduit-trunks running in steady parallel from the hub deeper into the rock, each one as thick as Mark's torso, though whatever had run through them was long gone.
It took ten minutes to reach the room the corridor served. The ceiling vaulted at the end, and the room past it could have held a small town.
A single immense reactor sat at the center of the chamber, or what had been one. Its outer containment shell was peeled back in three jagged petals. The core inside was a melted ruin, frozen now after eons of cooling, but still bearing the unmistakable shape of something that had failed catastrophically and from the inside out. A long line of secondary turbines ringed it at intervals. Every single one of them had been holed by ballistic fire or torn open by the same blade-cuts they'd been seeing all morning.
"Looks like they weren't just aiming for the mechs," Aurelia said softly.
"Looks like they scuttled the place," Mark said. "Whoever was on the right side of this fight tried to deny the facility to whoever was on the wrong side."
Severus's voice came in from the doorway. "And whichever side that was, they at least partly succeeded. This room's dead."
Mark stood there for a moment more. He had hoped the facility would still be functional enough to be used, ripe for Marcos to pick over the schematics. It would've been a generation of advancement in an afternoon. Instead, all he was looking at was a tomb for a fire that had gone out a quarter of a million years ago.
"All right," he said. "Time to go check out the DNA room."
The DNA corridor was the seventh and the farthest. Walking, it felt different from the rest of the place. The dust on the floor was undisturbed, untouched even by the passage of the war. Whatever had happened up in the cavern had chosen not to make its way in here.
After about three hundred meters of unbroken corridor, the wall on the left side began to glow with a faint, even, blue-tinged seep that came through the seams of inset panels along the wall. The first panel they passed, Aurelia ran a sensor wand along it. Her HUD flashed something at her, and she made a small surprised sound.
"It's drawing," she said. "Low, steady. Probably under five percent of whatever this hall's original intake was. But there's a current still running."
"Marcos?" Mark asked.
"I have eyes through your suit, Mark," Marcos stated. "I see it. The bus running this hall is segmented. It's possible the rest of this facility went dark, and a deep subroutine kept this section alive specifically... And given the condition of the rest of the facility, there would only be one reason to do that."
"To preserve something," Mark said after a moment of deliberation.
"Correct," Marcos confirmed.
The corridor ran another fifty meters and ended at a door. An oval-shaped slab that had partially retracted into the wall and never finished the job sat about three-quarters open. A plume of soft blue light leaked out from the gap.
Mark looked at his Elites and stepped through.
The room past the door was wide and low-ceilinged, perhaps fifty meters across and thirty deep. The walls were lined floor to ceiling with cylindrical tanks, rows of them, each one easily a meter and a half across and three meters tall. Inside each tank, a soft blue light pulsed at a tempo so slow it could've been mistaken for stillness. Whatever was suspended in those tanks was held in a clear medium that caught and refracted the glow, and the refractions painted the floor of the room in a slow tide of pale blue.
In the center of the floor was a shallow well in the metal, three steps down, with another tank set into the lowest point of the well. This tank was bigger than the others and was set horizontally rather than vertically.
The upper half of its housing was clear, and inside it was a person with a long and lean body. Their shoulders were broader than a human's by a measure Mark recognized at a single look, because he'd stared up at exactly those shoulders for over a year of his life.
This was a Strathari.
This one was wearing a suit Mark had never seen, something layered and segmented, plates of dark alloys running over a darker undermesh that hugged the body underneath. The suit was badly damaged, and the body inside the suit was worse.
The right arm was gone at the shoulder. The right foot and ankle were gone, the lower right leg ending in a sealed stump where the suit had clamped down over the wound and frozen the bleeding. Half of the face on the left side was destroyed, where something had taken a piece of the cheekbone, the temple, and the orbital ridge, with the eye on that side missing entirely.
The mouth and its remaining eye were closed.
Aurelia's hand had come up to her chest plate without her seeming to notice, while Severus had taken a half-step backward and gone still. Octavia, on the other hand, took one step forward and then stopped, like she didn't trust herself to take another.
Mark's throat had gone tight in a way he didn't have a name for.
"Mark." Marcos's voice was quiet in his ear. "Look at the readout above the tank."
Mark looked at the small panel in the wall above the well, which was alive with a single moving line. A slow, steady blip of Ups and Downs with pauses.
Mark's own pulse synchronized with it for a beat before he caught it doing so.
"That's a heartbeat," he said.
"It is," Marcos answered. "Slow. Astonishingly slow. Approximately three beats per minute. But it is a heartbeat nonetheless. It appears that you may have just stumbled upon a stasis pod, and whoever this is, they're still in with us."
For a long moment, no one in the room spoke, and the light from the smaller tanks moved slowly across the floor.
Mark stepped down into the well, very carefully, as if the air in the room could be broken by clumsy footsteps. He looked at the face of the person in the tank. At the closed eye. At the half that wasn't there anymore. At the slow, steady pulse on the panel above.
"I guess," he said. "Anahrin wasn't truly the last one."
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