Date Point: 3Y 8M 2W 5D AV
Derktha, largest city in all of Vauz
Kavor Lekhei had always loved the night sky. As a boy he had lain beneath it – within running distance of the tunnels, of course – and had imagined connecting the brightest of stars into a series of lines which, with a bit of creativity, became the characters in his stories. Mighty Mutheng, for instance, the slayer of the hated Fordithrye, and his companions Zurvir and Hellek.
Even now, in his older years, he still distinctly remembered the stories he used to tell to his younger siblings and cousins, and the love for the stars that had spawned them. That was why he had, against the wishes of his parents, found employment as an astrologer and eventually gained the position of Astrologer to the High Lord.
His calling had required him to keep unusual hours as needed for his observations, and to stand outside for the majority of the night when the sky was clear. Many thought such a thing was dangerous, that the night belonged to evil, but Kavor enjoyed the silence, the calm and quiet; it simply seemed holier than unholy no matter how you looked at it. Usually it was extremely boring as well, with nothing at all happening.
Tonight, however, without the aid of any lenses, he had witnessed the flash of a star exploding in the heavens. Exploding, and then falling away to the west in a trail of fire. That was not the same as other falling stars; those streaked across the heavens before vanishing in a flash, and if they struck land they did so with a cataclysmic boom.
This falling star was entirely the wrong way around.
“Very strange…” he said, noting it down onto his most current sheet of newly pressed paper. “Almost certain to be a sign… or portent of some kind.”
He flinched as a deep and resounding roar rolled in from the cursed mountains to the north, a sure sign that the Dark One, an evil god-thing that made its home in that place, did not approve of whatever had just transpired. Kavor held his breath, waiting for whatever came next… would the Dark One arise as it had in ages past, sweeping down upon the land and crushing or burning any unfortunate enough to be found above ground? It seemed unlikely, it had slept uneasily for centuries after all, but when you considered the falling star…
“I must speak to the High Lord,” he determined, packing his things away in a hurry. “He must be made aware that there are great things afoot-”
There was another rumble from the mountains, and this time it lasted far, far longer. There would be no way such a thing would go unnoticed in the underhalls, and Kavor’s presence would be expected along with a suitable explanation of what was happening and what was to come.
He hurried a little more; it was best not to keep the High Lord waiting, and considered his words as he lumbered back towards the safety of the tunnels, making his way through the carefully disguised entrance and into the true city that lay beyond.
Derktha was far and away the most glorious of the undercities in the known world, its halls having been designed and refined by the countless generations who had lived there, and the halls of the High Lord were the most ornate of them all. Gold and silver adorned intricately carved stone, and perfectly cut gems split the incandescent lights of the great hall. Those dim lights, and the technology required to produce them, were one of the few secrets of the ancients that had survived the coming of the Dark One and the long years thereafter.
The High Lord, Zola Mun, sat atop his throne with as much regality as he could muster, looking remarkably stupid in the process. He was young, and a poor imitation of his father, but he still put on the airs of greatness he had not earned.
“Approach, Kavor,” he commanded, waving his Astrologer forward when the court finally realised Kavor was there. They had been busy worrying about what the trembling had meant, had been postulating theories of all sorts, and now that Kavor finally arrived they treated him with a deference normally far too absent.
Kavor knew the situation was grim, but he enjoyed their suddenly respectful attitudes nonetheless. He walked along quietly, going at his own pace until he was suitably positioned before the throne, and then he gave the respectful grunts and squats as was customary. “High Lord, I bring word from the surface.”
“We want word of the Dark One, Astrologer,” High Lord Zola replied irritably, adopting the affectation of annoyance he assumed by habit whenever something unexpected occurred, or whenever he didn’t understand something. Kavor suspected he thought it made him seem in control, when all it did was make him seem like a spoiled idiot.
Nevertheless, Kavor played the politics and it was a lot easier to win when your opponent was a buffoon. “Of course, High Lord… I was of course intending to get to that. The Dark One rumbles, more than he has in my lifetime, but it was only because of my other news that we can gain some insight into this.”
This did not seem to please the High Lord, although remarkably little did if you didn’t include idiotic babble and fucking everything he saw. “Will the Dark One awaken?”
The entire hall held its breath, waiting for Kavor’s answer. Now was his chance to deliver portent and information all at the same time, and in a way that would be impossible for the foolish boy to ignore. “Without knowing the nature of the fallen star, it seems inevitable.”
Uproar ensued, continuing some time in spite of High Lord Zola’s insistent demands for silence. When he finally had it, he resumed his seat and tried not to look too terrified. “This fallen star… what are you speaking of?”
Kavor bowed his head, as if he was lost in thought, and waited for the moment that the crowd was straining to hear his voice. Then, finally, he spoke. “A flash in the sky lit the red horizon, and streaked with white fire to the west as though fleeing the Dark One and finding safety on the ground! The Dark One howled when he realised his quarry had escaped him, and now threatens to rise once more to reclaim it!”
“What is it?!” hissed the High Lord, captivated. “Some weapon we could use against the Dark One?”
Kavor had no idea, but ignorance wasn’t any reason to forego a good story. “Perhaps! It is a thing of mystery, High Lord, and demands an investigation before the Dark One can hide it away once more! Perhaps it could even be… the Chosen One.”
Again the hall was plunged into a chaos of competing conversations, although far more muted than before, given the subject at hand. The Chosen One, a story passed down from generation to generation, was the promised saviour of their beloved world. The Chosen One would deliver them from the evil of the Dark One, and restore the people to the surface of their world. Besides the accursed creature itself, the Chosen One was the nearest thing they had to a religion.
The High Lord rose, shouting for silence once more, but this time he remained standing when his will was finally observed and obeyed. “It shall be so, then! The Astrologer, along with two other Elders and their entourage, will travel west to where this fallen star now rests! I require the blades of those brave enough to make the overland journey, and risk their fate at the predations of the Dark One.”
The hall was silent as those present looked between each other, none of them willing to be the first to embark upon the suicide mission. Kavor, for his part, was staring around in shock and terror, and would have preferred to send someone younger and more expendable in his stead.
“Cowards!” the High Lord growled, accusing them all somewhat hypercritically. “Very well… I shall reward those of you who go with riches, and should you fall in the line of duty your families will enjoy the spoils instead.”
A far better arrangement as far as anybody could be concerned, Kavor thought, not that it helped him in any way, shape or form. He’d rather be poor and alive than rich and dead, and no doubt most others would agree, so that meant he’d be travelling with a pack of idiots and mercenaries.
“I shall go,” the young Lord Groddi declared, stepping forth from the crowd and proving Kavor’s suspicions entirely correct in regards to the latter possibility. “I shall protect you and your noble quest, Astrologer.”
Young lords Vaday and Irivir soon joined him, and that meant an entourage of significant size. Three lords had volunteered, but their own men would enjoy no more luxury of choice than Kavor himself had. That was fine, he’d have someone to share his misery with.
“Who else shall you choose to bring with you, Astrologer?” the High Lord asked in a surprise move.
At first Kavor was so confused about the question that he had no idea what kind of answer to give. “Who else?”
The High Lord smiled. “The other Elders. I did say there would be three.”
Kavor had no idea. In his opinion any Elder would be as useless as another, with the exception of those too decrepit to move, and those he named would undoubtedly bear him a grudge for the rest of their lives; it was much better to have the idiot ruler making those kinds of decisions. “Perhaps the High Lord could deem this old man worthy of guidance in this matter? I had thought someone spry, but beyond that my wisdom fails me.”
The idiot was delighted to discover his wisdom being deferred to, and immediately began counting off those he thought worthy or otherwise, finally making the decision to send Elders Tak and Borivud with him. Searching the crowd for their faces, Kavor was darkly amused to find the two adopting very obviously false expressions of happiness.
“That will teach you for laughing at me,” Kavor muttered unkindly, recalling at how they had all snickered as he had performed his noble profession in days gone by; if he was to be doomed then at least he’d be taking a couple of them with him.
“Perfect,” the High Lord decided, clasping his hands in a gesture of self-congratulation. “Now, you must all prepare to depart as soon as possible; if this really is the Chosen One I will not leave them to be hunted down and destroyed by the Dark One before they have a chance to strike.”
+++++
Record 573-Black-08
+Recovered from C11-Orange-712-Yellow-6+
“And it works!” exclaimed the cheerful face that filled the camera’s frame. “Looks like it’s taken a few knocks…”
“What was he even doing with that thing?” another voice, female, asked. “I’ve seen a lot of shit, but I never thought I’d kill a man who was pleasuring himself at the time.”
“Maybe there’s something on here he thought was worth pleasuring himself to,” the grinning male said, turning the camera towards a uniformed female with scarlet hair. “… Not that I’d know anything about that sort of thing.”
She rolled her eyes like she didn’t believe him. “The man was killing people from up on his little hill. I might not be getting paid anymore, but I’m still law enforcement and I don’t need to know anything more about him than that.”
“Nice speech,” the male replied, causing her nose to blush.
“Be quiet and see if he had anything useful apart from that stupid toy,” she ordered. “Weapons and ammunition especially. Somebody has been going around burning people to death, and if we run across them I’d like to give them the same treatment we gave Mister Dies-While-Fucking-His-Own-Hand here.”
“Yeah, no problem,” the male acknowledged, turning the camera towards the ground.
End Recording
+++++
Date Point: 3Y 8M 2W 5D AV
The Governess, crash-landed on C11-Orange-712-Yellow-6
Jennifer Delaney. Mid-twenties, space-babe adventurer and beginner-mode survivalist, professional explorer and accidental bank robber, and most recently of all a castaway in uninhabited space.
Things could be better.
They could be worse as well; she still had power and heat, which was good considering the winter wonderland going on outside, and she had enough of a kinetic drive left working to make very short hops. Not that she wanted to risk catching another of whatever had hit her in the first place.
“How long can we stay here?” Old Jen worried. “Whatever attacked us might be on its way.”
Jen assessed her situation, counting the assets available to her should she decide to go play in the snow at night. The risks involved in that particular adventure did not stack up against staying on the ship and simply monitoring the sensors for anything that approached.
“Out there I have no information, no warmth, no proper lighting and no power,” New Jen replied. “I’m staying put until there’s a real danger.”
She’d made a good argument, and Old Jen was silenced by it. She used the time to take a proper look at the big fucking hole that had been punched in the engineering section in just the right spot to cut off all power to the main kinetic drive without destroying everything else around it. That meant it was repairable, but had that been by luck or by design? The latter possibility didn’t do a bloody thing to ease her concerns.
Still, that gave her a chance; she was smart, she had a stack of owners manuals and she knew enough not to stick the fork in the toaster without unplugging it first. She’d even packed a good bit of spare conduit, thanks to her experiences watching Adrian waste a small mountain of the stuff back on the Zhadersil.
He would have been handy to have around, at least when he wasn’t causing a disaster simply by existing in a given place. Actually it would have been nice to have anyone around, now that she was getting to think about it.
“It’s okay,” she told herself before she started having an anxiety attack. “There are people here of some type, so you’re not entirely alone even if they do want to kill you.”
The threat of panic subsided slowly, and once it was gone – or at least unlikely to rise in a hurry – she didn’t feel like doing much except going to sleep. With that in mind, she set alerts to wake her should anything untoward occur, and nestled into the comfort of her seat to sleep until dawn.
It arrived to greet a purely overcast day, and Jen waited until she’d had a good breakfast and had done some preliminary study of the manuals before she’d rugged up and ventured out into the world beyond. Her first steps upon the alien world, although apparently not the first made by intelligent beings, still filled her with a rush of exhilaration as sharp as the bite of the cold mountain air.
She’d packed her planetary sampling kit, determined that this would not be a simple walk to see the sights of the world that may well be her home for many years to come. If she couldn’t leave it was time to get to know it a little better.
“Good air,” she observed as the instruments measured it as nearly optimal for human habitation. “Background radiation very slightly elevated but not to dangerous levels. No airborne microbiological hazards, or at least not here… looks good so far.”
“Except for the people who tried to kill us,” Old Jen reminded her. “As things go that’s quite the downside.”
“I don’t need to be told that,” New Jen replied, not rising to the fight. She still wanted Old Jen gone, and that wouldn’t happen unless she stopped having the conversations. Then she just had to get off world and get some company before she really did go mad.
That was when she was polled by her ship’s automated sensors. Something was trying to get into the Governess.
She looked back at the way she came, judging it to be about five minutes of hard running before she could arrive. “Bloody fucking hell.”
Anything could happen in that time.
Not exactly what she expected to happen, though. She arrived, pushing her body to its limits against the Earth-standard gravity, and regretting the fact she hadn’t bothered to exercise under its full strength during her journey, and saw her ship being lifted away into the sky under the power of some invisible force.
“What the fuck…” she said, pulling out her datapad and taking remote control of her ship. “Oh no, that is not happening…”
At her command the Governess sprang to life, lurching against what had grabbed it and, with a clang of metal striking metal, revealing that it was nothing more than a cloaked vessel of some kind making off with her only means of transportation. The efforts of her starship were completely futile in comparison to those of the invisible vessel, however, and it soon became very obvious that not only was it happening but that there was absolutely nothing she could currently do about it.
“I’m not sure what we did to deserve this sort of thing happening to us all of the time,” Old Jen reflected unbidden.
“Shut it,” said New Jen sharply. Things weren’t entirely screwed just yet, because she still had the datapad and she still had her life, and as long as she had both of those she’d be able to find the people who were trying to kill her and take all of her stuff and jam a lifetime of regret well and truly up their arses.
No sooner had she decided that vengeance was definitely the course she wanted to take than four small robots peeled away from the invisible ship above, dropping into the snow and resisting their impact with a sharp burst of kinetic force. They were crab-like things, no larger than the size of a small horse, but they each carried a plasma gun large enough to label them as psychotic killing machines rather than helpful maintenance robots.
Jen stared at them a moment before they had a chance to become aware of her presence. “That’s just fucking great…”
With no food, no shelter, and – extremely stupidly – no gun of any kind, the choice was simple: it was time to start running again.
+++++
Date Point: 3Y 8M 2W 6D AV
Vicinity of Derktha, largest city in all of Vauz
“There’s no way it’s natural for it to be this cold,” Elder Borivud complained, drawing his heavy cloak more tightly against the fur of his body. Like Kavor, his family was of common stock, and the cloak was dyed in the drab, depressing colours that such families were limited to, a far cry from the vivid combinations of hues that acted as the heraldry of Tak and the young Lords.
Once upon a time their people would have had little need for clothing to warm them against a light snowfall such as this. Their ancestors had been more heavily furred, and better adapted for the vagaries of the surface world, but the long years underground had thinned their fur and any resistance to the extremes of temperature that could be found in the surface world.
“Don’t be a child!” Kavor snapped, irritated at the uselessness of the old man. “This is nothing compared to the coldest days of deep winter.”
“I’ve heard stories of men being frozen alive,” Elder Tak noted sagely, spouting the usual nonsense that served to impress idiots who didn’t know any better. “Can you imagine such a thing, young Lord Groddi?”
“Such a thing is beyond my experience, Elder,” Lord Groddi replied politely, although it was clear to Kavor that he could not give a shit about anything the old man had to say. “I would have thought a man would die from the cold long before he actually began to freeze.”
Not a complete idiot, Kavor was interested to observe; the young Lord Groddi had not suggested such a thing because it was merely what he had assumed, but rather as a subtle barb to hint at the Elder being a total nitwit, although that fact was self-evident as far as Kavor was concerned.
“You would think that,” Tak said, “but there are stories of men frozen forever in ice but still in possession of their minds. You see, their bodies froze so quickly that their very life was trapped inside, unable to escape.”
Groddi glanced to Borivud to see him nodding along sagely, and then at Kavor who most pointedly did not. Instead the two of them shared a knowing look that told them something more of each other than they’d perhaps expected to find.
“And I imagine they’re still there to this day?” Kavor asked conversationally. “Trapped alive in the ice?”
“Oh yes!” Tak replied. “Although the records are unclear as to where.”
“It must be somewhere very cold fold them to stay frozen during high summer, then,” Kavor continued. “Otherwise your story wouldn’t make any sort of sense, would it?”
“Of course it’s somewhere cold all year around,” Tak snapped back, annoyed at the implication he didn’t know what he was talking about. “Otherwise they’d all just thaw out and die normally!”
“Hold a moment!” Groddi interrupted, quickly communicating with the other two young lords and drawing everybody into the cover afforded by the forest and the bleach-white sheets they carried as camouflage.
“What is it?” Borivud demanded, looking around with his head exposed until he was forced back into hiding.
“Buzz in the air,” Groddi hissed quiet, “just like the stories said.”
“The Dark One?” Borivud asked in a more strangled tone. “Here?”
The buzz became more prominent, sweeping over them from the east and giving no other sign of anything being out of the ordinary. They remained still until long after it had gone, waiting for it to return at any moment and put an end to all of them.
Then, as they were about to continue, the buzzing began to return. “It’s coming back…” Groddi noted. “Stay perfectly still!”
“If we stay, we die,” young Lord Irivir countered. “I, for one, intend to live! Men, scatter!”
“Men, hold!” Groddi snarled at his own men. “Go and die, fool! We shall see who is right.”
They stared at each other for a moment, hatred in their eyes, and then Irivir, along with his men, was gone. A blast-wave of heat and several truncated screams of agony later, and it was clear who’d been correct in their exchange.
“Well,” Groddi said, a little unsteadily, “I suppose that proves the camouflage works.”
“It was a good plan,” Kavor said. “It is a pity that young Lord Irivir had to prove alternative courses of action so unwise, but now we know.”
“Now we know,” Elder Tak agreed. “Does this mean we go home? The Dark One must have finished His work…”
Kavor growled, baring his teeth at the stupid old man. “And then what? We wait for death? If we press on, perhaps we can find some evidence as to what the Dark One found so interesting?”
“The most likely thing we will find is our doom,” Elder Tak shot back. “Just because you have nothing worth living for-”
Kavor punched him in the face, drawing blood from his withered old snout and knocking him to the ground. Kavor followed him down, continuing his violence until Groddi and his men reluctantly pulled him away.
“And you three are supposed to be wise men?” he asked in disbelief. “Little wonder the kingdom has begun to decay.”
Tak ignored the chastisement, staring with pure, undisguised hatred at Kavor. “You will regret that, Astrologer!”
“Shut up!” Groddi snarled. “You will both behave or so help me I will take the gifts and leave you all behind!”
“What did I do?” Borivud whined, then shrank before Groddi’s glare. “… fine.”
Kavor did not shrink, but did at least reply with a curt nod. He would not be cowed by this would-be warrior, not with a simple glare at any rate, but for the time being he would abide by the rules. He could enact a proper revenge later; there were many dangers in the surface world, after all, such as accidentally falling off a cliff, or being blinded by having your eyes stabbed out. All sorts of things.
Young Lord Vaday finished packing the camouflage back up and joined them at the head of the procession. “What are we waiting for, Groddi?”
“Nothing further, Vaday,” Groddi said, giving one more warning glance to the three Elders. “Ensure you do not break from the plan as Irivir did, I would not wish to lose you as well.”
“I am not a headstrong idiot,” Vaday replied, “and I have the benefit of experience from his mistakes. I will be careful, but I will not flee.”
“Gather the gifts,” Groddi instructed, pointed to the carefully sealed packages. “Take one for your group, I shall take the other.”
“Do you want the furs, or the Gavaktsi?” Vaday asked. “I will be most displeased if you say the furs.”
“Gavaktsi is a delicacy, you should want to take it,” Groddi replied, although he didn’t seem to want it any more than Vaday did, and Kavor didn’t blame him; the mould may be considered to be a delicacy, but that merely meant it was very expensive and rarely consumed. Those with more… ‘refined’ tastes made certain competitions about the tastes of various batches, but as far as Kavor was concerned it tasted much the same as vomit.
“I’m not taking your foul-smelling ball of muck,” Vaday replied flatly. “It was these Elders who decided it was worth taking, although why you’d want to make the Chosen One your enemy I’ve no idea.”
That had been Borivud’s idea, along with the rest of the gift-giving process. He’d reasoned that everybody enjoyed receiving gifts, and apparently since he actually enjoyed the disgusting taste of Gavaktsi he had decided that the Chosen One would as well.
“Fine,” Groddi said unhappily. “Just get back into position so we can start moving again.”
There was a rumble from the mountains to the distant west, emanating from their presumed destination, a sound of shifting earth that gave them all pause.
Groddi gave Kavor another look. “You’re sure?”
Kavor wasn’t sure at all, but he wasn’t going to let uncertainty and fear colour his reputation any further than it might have done already. “I am sure.”
+++++
Planet Cisco, Alpine region of northern continent
Jennifer Delaney was, for want of a better term, snow-boarding down the treacherous slope of the mountainside. Her board was a piece of hull debris that had been the closest thing to match a proper board, and her reason was the four very aggressive killer robots who were zipping down after her, assisted by their own kinetics.
All of them were trying to outrun the avalanche.
Being from Belfast and a not particularly adventurous family, Jen had never actually done any sort of skiing in her life, and even with the substantially improved reflexes and core body strength she was having a difficult time of figuring it out. The problem was that she only really had the one shot at it, with any mistake leading to either being burned to death or buried in ice, or some horrible mix of the two.
“Trees, rocks, poorly placed fucking shrubberies…” she said, counting off the dangers that could immediately bring an end to her desperate bid to escape. She didn’t even know how close the robots were behind her, or even if they still were; the roar of the avalanche was a thunder that engulfed the world around her, and she could only focus on the path directly ahead.
And it did take all of her concentration; the landscape was flashing past so fast that she had to give all her attention to identifying each and every threat that lay ahead, trying to plot a course between them that would require the fewest movements as possible.
“Duck the branch,” she instructed herself, carefully crouching into a balanced squat in order to avoid the thick branches of a particularly sturdy tree. A few heartbeats later she heard the satisfying crash and noise of twisting metal that rose above the rumble of the landscape, informing her that a small victory had been won. That brought her down to three remaining robotic death machines, so it was still far too early to celebrate.
“Rock!” she spotted, shifting to the side to slice left. She narrowly avoid a sharp rock protruding from the snow-covered terrain, but there was no follow-up explosion to indicate another small win.
The next obstacle was less avoidable; the slope dropped away sharply, a drop of fifty feet or more into an older, thicker forest of conifer-likes. No chance to stop, the avalanche would get her if the robots didn’t. No chance to drop, the fall would cripple her and the robots and ice would do the rest.
“This is a bad idea!” Old Jen exclaimed as they raced towards the edge. “Bad idea! Bad idea! Bad id-”
“Fuuuuck!” New Jen screamed as she came to the end of the slope, as much in defiance as in raw terror. The momentum, in combination with her own sudden lunge towards the safety of the treetops, launched her out into the empty sky as the three remaining robots veered for safety only to find the rush of ice and stone instead.
Jen was left at the top of a tree, ignoring the painful prickle of the needles as she held on with all her might, and remaining there until the mountain finally grew quiet.
Lost on a mountain, marooned in space, and stuck at the top of a tree… all in all, today could have been a better day.
At least she still had her health.
+++++
The Mountains of Czird, two days west of Derktha
“Look up there,” Groddi pointed out to Vaday. “The mountain has crumbled as if from some great battle.”
Vaday looked in the direction and studied it well. “It is clear of the heavy snow and ice the other peaks carry,” he observed. “The trees are all broken… do you think the Chosen One was caught in such a thing?”
Groddi thought the concept of the Chosen One to be a quaint story with a lot of wishful thinking, a story of hope best told to children. Hope was important, however, and he had not argued against it in others, no matter how fanciful their beliefs. “If he was, I am sure he survived.”
“Then the saviour we seek must be somewhere around here,” Vaday replied, looking around eagerly. “Do you think he’s big?”
“The size of the Chosen One has nothing to do with his power,” Elder Tak declared, joining them at their position atop the small ridge. “He may be gigantic, or he may be as big as…”
He trailed off, pointing a finger at a slight movement in the distance. “As whatever that thing is…”
Groddi followed the gesture to see the small biped that prowled the mound of debris. That it wore clothes was obvious, unless its fur was extremely well tailored, but the only other observable facts were the hairless face and its non-membership in the Agwaren race.
He dropped to the ground and ensured Tak and Vaday followed in suit. “Do not allow it to see you,” he told them. “We have no idea what it is…”
“We need to get a better look at it,” said Vaday. “It might be the Chosen One!”
“Chosen One?” Tak asked in disbelief. “It isn’t even Agwaren! And it’s so small!”
“You just got through telling us that size meant nothing,” Groddi observed. “But Vaday is correct regardless of whether it is the Chosen One or not. We need a better view.”
“Getting close may be dangerous,” Tak warned. “It is clearly not of this world. It may be a Krevu, such as those in mythology. They are harmless creatures in appearance but will viciously tear the flesh from lone wanderers.”
“A good thing we are not alone then,” Groddi remarked, wondering how this mad old man had achieved any kind of recognition. Simply being older than everyone else was no cause for giving respect. “I was considering an alternative, however. I will keep watch. Vaday, go and find Kavor and get his lens. Tak… go back and ready the gifts just in case.”
He watched them go, making sure they weren’t going to simply walk away and take up position somewhere else, and turned back to look at the strange biped picking debris from the pile.
“What are you?” he whispered, watching the thing move around with otherworldly grace. He wondered whether anything that moved with such beauty could be an agent of evil.
He supposed that they would have to see.
+++++
Planet Cisco, Alpine region of northern continent
Climbing down a wannabe-conifer was about as pleasant as climbing down the real thing, with plenty of discomfort caused by taking hold of branches covered in needles, and despite it taking longer than she might have liked, Jen got to the bottom having only nearly killed herself twice.
There was no sign of the deadly robots, which was either very good or very bad, depending on how optimistic you were feeling. Jen suspected they were all still buried under several tonnes of ice, rock, and other debris, but she wasn’t about to make assumptions when the result of being wrong was to be burned alive.
That was why she had not simply run away in the hope that they wouldn’t be able to find her; if she wanted to feel safe, she had to be sure that they weren’t going to fight their way free and come after her, and that meant slowly picking over the debris with and deliberate care.
“It doesn’t look like anything could have survived this,” Old Jen observed, failing to be overwhelming negative for once. “But I don’t think we should stick around, even if they are wrecked.”
That was a sensible notion, New Jen thought. Any half-decent setup would soon realise that the killer robots had themselves been killed, and would send others to come looking for those responsible. Jen didn’t think she’d survive if that happened – she’d barely survived the first time – and figured her best bet was to hide rather than run.
If she could find a suitable hidey-hole close to the area, she might even be able to see whatever came searching the area, and if the robots did, by some small miracle, drag themselves out of this pile of debris… well, she’d see that too.
“I think I saw a split in the cliff down towards that direction,” Old Jen said helpfully, pointing out a thin crevice in the rock about three meters up the cliff face.
It was narrow, possibly too narrow, but New Jen figured that if she could get in there it might turn out to be perfect. The fact that getting to it would require her to climb up the exact same cliff she’d just fallen down was an irony that was not lost on her, but it was fortunately a deeply fractured outcropping of stone and offered plenty of safe handholds. She was clambering up the wall and examining the crevice within mere moments, and in a surprisingly pleasant turn of events discovered that it was about as close to perfect as she could expect it to be.
The crevice was a split in the stone that opened out into a more substantial cave where birds had clearly been making their home for a considerable length of time. None were home now, probably because it was winter, but the floor of the cavern was littered with all kinds of debris and a tunnel seemed to retreat into the darkness where her eyes could not follow.
“Moment of truth now,” she said to herself as she pressed her way into the gap. It was tight, almost too tight, and she had to draw in her diaphragm just to scrape her way through, but eventually she was inside and able to rest properly.
“Once upon a time I wouldn’t have been able to make that,” she told herself, recalling her slight pudginess before her abduction. That had transitioned into a starved gauntness when she was forced to ration her supplies, and later into the taut, well-defined body that Cruezzir and three months cross-country had given her.
Old Jen missed that pudgier version, the girl of Earth, but if she’d been here today she would have been killed thrice over, and that was all the evidence New Jen needed to see to know how little that old version of her was worth.
The cavern itself was flat-bottomed for the most part, although it trended downwards towards the back tunnel where no light fell. Fortunately she had retained her instruments, and the light of the displays was more than sufficient to send light a decent distance down the dark corridor. It was narrow, uncomfortably so at the furthest point she could see, and was small enough to demand she crouch to get through it at all, but if she was in a pinch and needed to get deeper into the caves she reckoned she could manage it.
So if worst came to worst, at least crawling into a mountain was an option.
“Well… if worst comes to worst, at least crawling into the mountain is an option,” she said to herself, and started scooping the accumulated debris into a pile so that she didn’t have to rest on cold, hard stone. It was mostly sticks, but also included coniferous needles and bits of straw; all combined to make a very basic mattress that was not exactly chiropractor approved, but better than nothing.
It was shelter, it was safety, and it was, for the moment, all that she had. She only wished she knew how much longer she would need to deal with it.
Maybe the afternoon would bring other opportunities.
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