Sarah Zettel - Reclamation

Panair swung the transport to the left and they lurched up a steep incline. The lights showed up nothing but rocks, boulders, and mud.

“Approaching the Unifier shelter,” Panair announced.

Avir looked out the window automatically, but there was nothing there except stone and shadow. The terminal on Panair’s board showed a smooth-sided dome, glowing with incandescent light and heat in the infrared spectrum.

Avir felt her beating heart rise until it filled her throat.

The white dome drifted into view. The transport ground to a halt and the door lifted itself open. The security team leapt out and dived straight for the dome’s entrance, leaving Avir, Ivale, and Nal trailing, a little stunned, in their wake.

“What…!” shouted a man’s voice inside the dome.

Avir stepped under the canopy over the entranceway but couldn’t see anything through the open door except piles of camp equipment and Panair’s back.

“Stand still and be identified,” barked Panair.

“All right, all right, I’m standing. Look, here I am.”

Avir stepped sideways, squeezing between the wall and a stack of storage crates. Panair, dart gun out and ready, faced a bony, brown-bearded man with a hand lamp and a tool belt raised up over his head. Behind him, incongruously, a fire burned in an empty crate. Next to it, an artifact lay on a pallet of blankets, staring at the ceiling. Its mouth moved constantly, but it made no sound, nor was it paying any attention to what was going on around it.

Avir, forgetting dignity and propriety, hurried to the artifact’s side. She knelt and unsealed her glove. She touched its skin. It was clammy and goose bumps prickled its dusky surface. Its eyes were glazed over and flickered back and forth, seeing something, but nothing that was in the room. Nal knelt beside her and also touched the artifact. He measured its pulse and fever with his expert hands and his mouth tightened.

“What did you do here?” Avir demanded of the bony man.

“It’s hard to explain,” he said. “Who in the backwaters are you lot?”

In answer, Ivale removed his helmet. The man saw Ivale’s bald head and the neck of his scarlet rappings.

“Vitae,” the Unifier croaked. “Jay…”

“You will be questioned about him before long,” Avir stood. “But first you will explain what has happened to this artifact?”

The Unifier cast about as if he needed to try to identify what she was talking about. “Broken Trail?” he said finally. “I…” His gaze slid sideways to the security team. Two stood beside the door. Two more stood on either side of the dome and one had stationed herself beside the open hatchway in the floor. Avir wondered for a moment if the Unifier was going to make some escape gesture. She hoped not. If they had to dart him, it would be hours before they got any information at all.

But he didn’t. He just sighed so heavily that his bony shoulders heaved. “It would be easier to show you.” He tilted his head to indicate the trapdoor.

“Do so,” ordered Avir, and she switched to the Proper tongue. “Bio-tech, tend the artifact. Stabilize her if you can.”

“You hold my name,” said Nal absently. He was busy fumbling in his tool belt for analysis patches.

Panair climbed down the rope ladder first, followed by one of his Beholden. After a long moment, he shouted, “Clear!”

“Go,” Avir said to the Unifier.

With another resigned sigh, he fastened his tool belt around his waist and climbed down the ladder like it was something he’d been doing all his life.

Avir envied his poise as she herself descended. The ladder wriggled and wobbled under her weight. She was very glad to see the Unifier didn’t dare to grin at her when she stood beside him. Avir was not surprised to see the string of lights that led down the corridor and glinted off curved walls of translucent silicate that held back drifting shadows.

This was Avir’s first chance to see the shadowy containers up close. She leaned toward the wall, pressing her hands against the smooth, cool surface. She watched the blobs that moved with a fluid grace and random pattern. She swallowed hard. It was as if they stood in a vein the Ancestors had sunk into the world and were now surrounded by the blood the Vitae had sworn by for all their centuries.

Ivale and six of the security team descended the ladder, one by one. Panair waited until the last of them were down before he gestured for the Unifier to lead them onward.

The shadowed corridor was one continuous archway extending toward a second drop. The Unifier took them down another rope ladder and down a second corridor toward a brightly lit arch. Shadows drifted silently past them and Avir felt them like a weight sliding across her skin.

The archway opened into a chamber. Avir’s gaze slid over the more ordinary ruins—the empty tables and rotted chairs. It caught for a moment on the banks of empty sockets and gleaming stones. Then it swept the room, trying to take in everything at once. She saw tanks of gelatinous matter bulging from the walls. Bundles of capillary-like tubes pressed against the chamber’s walls. Blobs and nodules of silicate, all seamless, held viscous liquids that rippled like the shadows in the corridor did. Star-shaped patterns pressed against the skin of what could have been a table. Nerves. The liquid pulsed in the smooth bank of empty sockets against the far wall as if controlled by a heartbeat.

There was no question of it in Avir’s mind. This place was alive.

Avir felt her own breathing become shallow. “How big is this place?” she asked, not caring about the hushed tone the Unifier couldn’t possibly miss.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve mapped out about ten square kilometers’ worth of tunnels. Not that it’s done that much good.” There was a smirk in his voice. “Half the stuff back of the walls and tanks didn’t even show up until we’d had the lights on twenty-four hours. And you should see what’s down there.” He nodded to a second archway.

“Ivale, see what you can find out about this place,” she said, already halfway to the other arch and barely aware that the two Security Beholden had closed ranks to follow her.

Avir knew she was letting herself get distracted. Exploration should wait until they had the proper personnel, but she kept right on going. There was no light, except what was at their backs. One of the Beholden raised a hand lamp to light her way.

Ahead, the corridor curved. A burst of red light flashed off the smooth, clear walls. It flashed again, and again. Avir’s steps quickened. The footsteps of the Security Beholden echoed as they marched behind her.

She rounded the curve and the pulse of light hit her right in the eyes. Dazzled, she dropped her gaze and raised her hand. She saw the reflection of another flash on her own boots. The shadows under the surface of the corridor roiled as if in response. The intensity of the light faded as her faceplate darkened.

At last, Avir could look up again. She stood less than a meter from a cavernous opening. The corridor came out near its ceiling, but the floor, if existent, was invisible. The far wall was likewise lost in shadow. From darkness to darkness stretched more of the Ancestors’ veins. Avir knew they must be enormous, but the cavern around them made them look like silken threads. They crossed each other and spread out again at every angle. It was a geometrician’s dream. It was the work of a thousand spiders over a thousand years. The ruby light flashed down the threads like bottled lightning. A single strand flashed on the edge of her line of sight. A dozen lit up right in front of her. Ten meters below, five, now ten, now twenty, horizontal strands pulsed with light and then blacked out all at once. Pulses of light raced up and down the verticals, chasing each other through the network of threads.