Marshall Thomas: Soldier of the Legion

“Hold it,” Snow Leopard was breathing hard. I stopped and waited. “All right, guys, it’s a little tight here. I just got through, but I had to take my helmet off. You can’t get a good grip…with your comtops on. When you get here, take your comtop off and keep your nose above the water. Push the comtop ahead of you, then pull yourself through with one arm.”

I heard a chorus of off-channel curses up ahead of me. That wasn’t what I wanted to hear either.

We moved on, water rushing past me. Suddenly the tunnel narrowed drastically. My comtop struck the limestone ceiling. Priestess’s boots thrashed in the water, glanced off my faceplate.

She cried out, gurgling, “No!” I grabbed her boots and tried to steady her.

“Priestess, are you all right? Answer!” I felt the beginning edges of panic. I triggered my flash. It lit up the water, and sent eerie liquid shadows flickering over the rocky ceiling.

“I can’t do it, Thinker!” She gasped, hyperventilating. “I can’t get through! I can’t move!!”

“Priestess, Thinker, Snow Leopard-you still with us?”

“Nothing to report,” I replied.

“Get out of there,” he ordered. “Now! We’ve all done it, even the techs. You have to take your comtops off, or you won’t have room to get a grip on the rocks and pull yourself through.”

“Priestess…” We were stopped and my claustrophobia closed in. “We’ve got to get out of here, Priestess! Have you taken off your comtop?”

“No.” She almost sobbed.

“Do it! Mouth against the ceiling! Then move out. I’ll be right behind you!” I knew if she didn’t move, we were probably both going to die. Miserably. I forced myself to unlink my comtop. Icy water poured in. I shook uncontrollably. Wrenching the comtop off, I slammed my face up to the bitter stone roof, sucking desperately for air. Only a few mils clearance, a few mils between life and death. I saw Priestess’s pale, frightened face, a fragile mushroom in a river of ink. She’d done it.

“Oh, my God.” A horrified whisper, barely audible. We both felt the cold wings of the angel of death.

Priestess kicked off into the dark, leaving me alone, numb with terror.

I took a deep breath and forced myself forward, the water swirling all around me, into the narrowest portion. Tons of rock above me, an immense presence, the tunnel almost full of icy water. Blind and deaf and shaking with fear, kissing that obscene stone, I heard the music of the stars. I felt the slimy walls. The earth held me in its teeth. My hands tore at the rocks, and now I edged forward, slowly. I forced my head between two great rocks, thrust the comtop ahead of me, and pulled myself through. I popped up into a wider portion, water streaming from my face. Air! An unfocused green glow. A limestone shaft, heading gently up.

“Thinker! Are you all right?” Priestess’s voice echoed down the shaft.

“I’m fine,” I gasped, stretched out on the rocks, exhausted. “Be right there!” Eagerly, with shaking fingers, I put my comtop back on.

We made our way out of the stream and eventually found ourselves walking upright but slightly stooped due to the low ceilings, deep within the cramped catacombs, the bowels, of the dead city. We fanned out through the corridors.

“Beta, Snow Leopard. Keep alert. Fire v-min at any movement.”

Ghostly stone doorways loomed all around us, leading to past worlds, deep inside the earth. Only the dead lived in the dark of this tomb.

Priestess and I moved in tandem. More chatter crackled on the net, the lifies moving into position, Coolhand and Psycho tracking the Scaler. My tacmod silently extended the tacmap. Doorways and corridors branched off everywhere. Priestess and I moved along a wall, scanning our surroundings carefully.

It was a silent, dead underground city, glowing a faint green through our faceplates. A phantom city carved from stone, empty doorways gaping blindly at us like the eye sockets of ancient skulls. The rot of history covered this world. We could sense it, we could see it all around us, crumbling under our boots, floating specks of the past, settling on our litesuits. The air carried the cold breath of the dead.

We turned a corner and sloshed through ankle-deep slimy water. I saw Snow Leopard up ahead, at the end of a long corridor.

He raised a hand and spoke quietly on all channels. “Hold fast!” We stood immobilized.

Priestess whispered to me on private. “Sorry about that mess back there, Thinker. I kind of panicked. I kind of thought…we were going to die.”

“Yeah. I noticed that, too.”

“Beta! On me! We’re going in.” Snow Leopard’s voice crackled in our ears. We moved up fast, crouching, our comtops scraping the rough ceiling.

A crumbling stone staircase led up to a blackened doorway. Another bleak dark corridor. The ceiling was a little higher now and we could stand upright. We moved forward cautiously at a fast walk. My tacmod showed the others up ahead. The walls flowed past us, featureless. If anything had been here, it was long gone.

The corridor ended in a vast, darkened hall, a cavern cut out of the rock. We stepped in cautiously and I triggered the darklight on my E. The sheer size of the place dwarfed us. It was like a cathedral of stone. I stopped breathing. Facing us, glowing a mysterious green, stood two massive stone figures, carved right from the face of the rock wall.

The two great sentinels, a male and a female, stood side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder, clutching fantastic implements. The entire chamber was evidently their crypt. Even through the mold, I could see the fine, clean features of those two incredible messengers from the long dead past. Vertical lines of spidery runes spoke to us from so long ago that we could understand nothing. In between the runes were figures-thousands of people, from far away and long ago, from ages lost to history, engaged in elaborate, mysterious activity. These must have been the ancestors of Andrion 2’s human inhabitants. There were colors, faint pale colors in the green of the darksight, and I realized that it had all once been blazing with color, brilliant, radiant color, all the way down here in the bowels of this fossilized city. This had been the pinnacle of thousands of years of development and sacrifice and learning and culture. What had happened to them?

“Thinker! Move it!” Priestess pulled at my arm. I had been transfixed for a moment, lost in the past. I tore my eyes away from them. There was another dark doorway, right in the wall, between the massive legs of the two great figures. We trotted forward, our E’s pointed up ahead. The doorway led to a long straight tunnel, plunged in eternal darkness, far beneath the earth.

“Priestess. Wait.” I raised a hand to the corridor wall. I could see it in the darksight, haloed in green. The walls, the walls-my holy God! The walls were lined with life-sized figures, ghosts from the ages, carved and painted, a long procession, males and females, faded and peeling, hundreds of them, thousands of them, along both sides of the corridor, carrying strange devices, holding up banners that had not seen the light in thousands of years. Phalanxes of brutal soldiers, troops of sweating laborers, streets full of long-haired girls dressed in sheer garments, hundreds of little children holding hands. A royal court, a golden king and a silvery queen, and princes and princesses, and torches and incense and great ships and magnificent palaces. Heavenly landscapes, forests and rivers and waterfalls and great far-off mountain ranges. All of this, following us along that corridor.

“Priestess-look at…”

“They’ve been dead a thousand years, Thinker-let’s go!” I tore myself away from the wall, and followed Priestess into the dark. All those long-dead people. I never asked for this. The world up above in the sunshine was beautiful-why would anyone live down here?