Graham McNeill - I, Mengsk

The lander touched down without fuss and within moments, the side hatch opened and a tall figure emerged into the twilight world of Van Osten's Moon.

Valerian recognized him immediately, and his heart hammered on the cage of his ribs.

There was no mistaking the powerful cut of the man, even from this distance.

His father.

Arcturus Mengsk descended the ladder and began the trek to meet his son. Valerian saw that the man was dressed similarly to himself, with heavy-duty work wear and rugged boots. Like Valerian, his father carried a pack over his shoulders and moved with the natural assurance of a man used to being in control.

As his father approached, Valerian took the time to study him. Arcturus's hair was still dark, but the first signs of gray were appearing at his temples and in his beard. Only in his mid-thirties, his father's ongoing war against the Confederacy was evidently aging him prematurely—though he was still an imposing, proud figure.

Despite the thin atmosphere, his father seemed untroubled by his exertions, and maintained a steady pace toward him over the rough terrain.

He waved al his son and, despite himself, Valerian waved back.

His mother had once told him that people often found themselves going out of their way to please his father for no reason they could adequately explain. Valerian wondered if he too had been affected by that reality-warping effect.

Arcturus dropped over a fallen slab of rock and took a deep breath of the thin air.

"Bracing, isn't it?" said his father.

Valerian removed the aqualung canister and said. "That's it? That's your greeting after eight years?"

"Ah, you're angry," said Arcturus, pausing and taking a seat on a smooth boulder. "A natural reaction, I suppose. Do you need to berate me for a while before we talk as men? It won't do any good, but if you feel you must, then go ahead."

Valerian felt the angry outburst he had planned to deliver wither in his breast and the angry retort on the tip of his tongue become stillborn.

"Right" he said. "I might as well get mad at these rocks for all the good it would do.”

"Words spoken in anger are just hot air, Valerian. They rarely hurt, so what's the point of them? There are no words as ultimately destructive as those which are ultimately considered."

"You'd know about that," said Valerian. "The UNN is making you look like some kind of crazed madman."

Arcturus waved his hand. "No one believes what's on the UNN anyway, and the more they vilify me, the more people are waking up to see that I have the Confederacy worried."

"And do you? Have them worried?"

His father stood and came over to him, looking him up and down as though inspecting a prime specimen of livestock. "Oh, I'd say I do. The Confederacy is about to fall: I can see the cracks widening with every day that passes. My father and your grandfather knew what they were doing, but they weren't thinking big enough."

"And you are?"

"Very much so," said Arcturus, nodding in the direction of the cave mouth Valerian had been heading for. "Now what say you show me what's been occupying your time on this barren rock?"

Valerian nodded and set off without another word, picking his way down the slope toward the yawning cave. Its scale was immense and it took them a further hour to reach the bottom of the canyon, the towering cliffs wreathing them in shadow and cold.

The surfaces of the rocks were smooth and glassily transparent, as though vitrified by intense heat and striated with what looked like gleaming metal. Perfectly round gemstones were buried within the bean of the rock.

"Fascinating," said his father. "The surface has an igneous look to it, but appears to be metamorphic. Do you know the substance of the protolith?"

"No," said Valerian, suddenly wishing he knew more about the formation of rock and had more specialist equipment here. "I don't even know what that means."

"Ah, no, I suppose you wouldn't," said Arcturus. "Metamorphic rocks come about when a preexisting rock type, the protolith, is transformed into something altogether new."

"What sort of thing could cause that change?"

Arcturus pressed his hand against the rocks, resting his forehead on the smooth face of the stone. "Usually it's caused by high temperatures and the pressure of rock layers above, but tectonic processes like continental collisions would do it as well. Any sufficiently large geological force that causes enormous horizontal pressure, friction, and distortion could cause this, but I don't think we're looking at any natural phenomenon here."

"Why not?"

"Because whatever caused this transformation—if it even was a transformation, didn't take place over geological spans of time: I think it happened virtually overnight. But then I've just arrived. I'm sure you've looked more deeply into the geological formations already."

Valerian hadn't had the chance to go any deeper than observational study, but suspected his father already knew that, and was bandying about his knowledge in an unconscious display of superiority.

"Of course," said Valerian, attempting to reassert his power. "My studies have shown that this formation is a blend of natural forces and artificial engineering. See here, where the natural camber of the rock has been molded and interfaced with what looks like some kind of metal reinforcement"

Arcturus looked closely at the rock Valerian indicated. "Yes, like a neosteel rebar in plascrete."

Valerian waved his father onward. "Come on, let's go inside: it's quite something. You'll not have seen anything like it."

"Don't be so sure—I've seen a lot these last few years."

"Nothing like this," promised Valerian.

His father stood in the center of the cave, though to call it such was to vastly diminish its unbelievable, incomprehensible scale. It was a gargantuan cathedral of light and stone and metal, fashioned deep in the bean of a mountain by an ancient race of gods. For surely no beings but gods could have hollowed out so massive a peak and not have it collapse in the millions, probably billions of years since they had first devised the means of its construction.

Gracefully curving ribs of rock soared overhead, each one thicker than the hull of a battlecruiser. Corbels the size of siege tanks jutted out of the walls and airy flying buttresses supported hanging finials and graceful descending archways of stone. Distance rendered them slim and delicate, but Valerian guessed most were at least twenty meters thick.

The very walls seemed to shimmer with internal bioluminescence, scads of light darting along the lengths of metal set in the stone like flickering embers of electrical current. Gems pulsed with a faint glow, as though in time with an infinitely slow and inaudible heartbeat.

Fluted stalactites descended in tapering spears, penetrating the roof like an inverted crown of ice pushed through the mountain's summit. A light mist hung in the upper reaches of the enormous cavern, a cloud system that kept the air moist and reduced the internal humidity.

The interior of the cave seemed to point even more conclusively to a deliberate hand in its creation, its scale making a mockery of any such human constructions. Entire fleets could fit within this enormous cavern andm for all Valerian knew, perhaps they had.

"It's incredible," said Arcturus, and Valerian was surprised to hear genuine emotion in his voice. "I've never seen the like."

"Told you," said Valerian, pleased he had been able to surprise his father.

"And you think this is alien?"

"Don't you?" replied Valerian, surprised at the question.

"I suppose it's possible," conceded his father, "but even if it's true, what does it matter? Whoever built this is long dead and gone."

"Aren't you curious about who built it? What great secrets we might learn from them?"