CHAPTER SIX
ROSLYN RESEARCH FACILITY: Uninvited Guests
ARi helped me step down out of the tunnel. I found the chair next to one of the consoles and dropped into it. My reserves were low and I wasn’t in any hurry to push them. The last thing I wanted was to pull into my stamina and become a liability.
“We’re making good progress.”
ARi glanced back at me but her attention was split between where she was standing and whatever was happening further in the tunnel. It had been that way for most of the day. “I think after the next one Roslyn and I should be able to reach the start of the residential level.”
“Are you guys ready for me again?” Kyle said as he walked by heading toward the tunnel. Yumi followed behind him. She had been staying close to him ever since the incident at the bottom of the elevator.
“You better give Roslyn about ten more minutes.” ARi said.
Kyle dropped into one of the other chairs with a long exhale and stretched his arms over his head before letting them fall. Yumi sat cross-legged on the floor beside him, her back against the leg of his chair. He reached down without looking and rested his hand on her shoulder.
At this point we’d all had to put on our rebreathers. But even through the device the constant phasing of material as we tunneled left a metallic taste in the air. The light in the observation room was dim. Mostly coming from the cradle chamber itself. Rosslyn had found a supply of chem lights though, and we spread them across the floor of the tunnel, and they lit the opening in an eerie green glow.
Tanya had been sitting against the far wall for a while, watching Maddie and Erica.
“Does the air bother you at all?”
Maddie looked at her. But, didn’t say anything.
Tanya nodded slowly, Maddie and Erica had been quiet for a while now.
“It didn’t seem to bother you on Adaeya either.” She said, adjusting her rebreather, still watching them. “I’ve been thinking about that. Kobold biology seems to be able to adapt to pretty harsh environments.”
“I was thinking about something else too.” She continued. “I don’t think I remember seeing any mammals there either. We saw plenty of reptiles, amphibians, dinosaurs, in a pretty significant variety. And it wasn’t just the wildlife that caught my attention. It was the plants. The ferns, the grasses, the giant bamboo trees.” She looked over at ARi. “It’s very unlikely that these things would evolve the same on two completely different worlds.”
“The kobolds were on Earth before the dinosaurs,” ARi said.
“Right, but when a civilization colonizes a world, they don’t arrive empty handed. They bring their crops, their animals.” She looked at Maddie and Erica. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Earth hosted a kobold colony and ended up with all of the same fauna. I think the kobolds brought it here.”
“You think that a lot of the early life on Earth was brought here?” I asked.
“Not all of it,” Tanya said. “Earth had its own life before the kobolds arrived. And over millions of years the two things mixed. That’s why Earth ended up with both mammals and reptiles. and Adaeya didn’t.”
“Earth has had five major extinction level events,” she said. “Some of them are easy to account for. Geological events, volcanic activity, asteroids. The one that killed the dinosaurs sixty-six million years ago left a crater in the Yucatan and an iridium layer in the rock record.” She paused. “But some of the largest extinction events in Earth’s history are still more of a mystery.”
“Like the Devonian?” Tim asked from the doorway.
Tanya looked up as Tim stepped into the room and leaned against the wall. “My dad was an archaeologist,” he said. “I mean, it’s not paleontology, but what can I say? History was kind of a thing growing up.”
“The Devonian is the one that’s always bothered me,” she said. “It happened three hundred and seventy-five million years ago. It was almost exclusively marine. The oceans essentially died, and most of the life on land was largely untouched.”
She let that sit for a second. “But that’s not even the strangest part. It’s the pattern. You look at these events across Earth’s entire history and the selectivity of them is just — it’s wrong. One event strips the oceans clean and barely touches the land. Another one comes along millions of years later and does the opposite. And in each case, it’s almost like what survives is selective.”
“I know I’m a physicist,” Kyle said. “This isn’t my area of expertise. But even if something slammed into the ocean, like an asteroid, wouldn’t it affect the land too?”
“It’s not just that,” Tanya said. “The kobolds had been on Earth for millions of years by then. At that point you can’t even really call it a colony anymore. That civilization would have been on Earth longer than any human civilization in history.” She shook her head. “Some of these events just don’t add up. That civilization should have been advanced enough to intervene. And we should be able to see some sign that it even existed here, but we don’t. It’s like they just disappeared.”
ARi glanced over at Maddie and Erica. They hadn’t said a word in a while. They were just staring into the middle of the room, not really focused on anything. They were also being uncharacteristically quiet for a conversation that was literally about kobolds.
“Their homeworld was under siege,” she said, almost to herself, as she straightened up against the wall.
She squinted at the two of them for a moment, lost in thought before glancing back up to Tanya .
“Their civilization had lost its political standing. Adaeya was being culled.” She continued. “When the enemies of the Kobold empire fell upon their world, the Ascended declared it contested. That’s the only thing that kept their species from being wiped out entirely. Their enemies started fighting each other in orbit over the planet. That’s what the Matriarch had been told. That’s what’s in their stories.” She shook her head. “But think about it. This wasn’t a fight over a couple of worlds. I think it was much bigger than that.”
“When the kobolds lost their empire, wars would have started across the galaxy,” Tim said.
ARi looked over at him. “The kobolds would have fought back. That war wouldn’t have stayed in one place. It would have touched every world that was part of their empire.”
“So the Ascended declared Adaeya a contested world,” I said. “But that would only stop the fighting ‘there’.”
ARi’s eyes moved back to Maddie and Erica. “What do you think?” she said. She got up and walked closer to them on the other side of the room. Or are you just going to continue to sit there and watch?”
The way she said it instantly put the entire room on edge. I was already on my feet. And Kyle was slowly pulling Yumi up off the floor.
“The Earth’s been culled before, hasn’t it?” she asked.
Maddie and Erica looked back at her with blank expressions.
“Why don’t you let me answer for you? That signal was a beacon. I mean I had to make some assumptions in my original translation. The kobold earth colony didn’t just vanish. It was culled. You didn’t even allow the kobolds to defend their empire, did you?”
“You contested all of their worlds. ARi’s voice was cold now. It was never the enemies of the Kobold Empire who purged Adeya. It was you. You stripped their worlds. and set them up for these competitions.”
The quiet was palpable. And Maddie and Erica continued to stare at nothing in the middle of the room.
“But even in death they tricked you somehow. We were never supposed to be here, were we?”
Nobody said anything for a moment.
“Um, ARi, You want to explain to everybody else?” Kyle said.
“The extinction events,” Yumi gasped. “I think they were Earth’s version of the Great Fall.”
“I do too,” Tanya said. “And that means life on our world has been culled, harvested, repeatedly for hundreds of millions of years”
“I don’t understand why they would let us get to a point where we could fight back,” Tim said. “Why would they let humanity get this far in our development?”
“I don’t think they did,” I said, a cold reality settling in. “Not on purpose anyway. Look at the gaps between these extinction events. We’re talking about millions of years between each one. Our entire species has only been on this world for about three hundred thousand years.”
I shook my head. “They left Earth to recover after their last culling. Only to come back and find that not only did human civilization claim this world while they were gone, but that we have our own guide now.”
“This whole thing is bullshit,” Kyle said, standing up from his chair. “The Ascendancy, the contests, the wars. We’ve been looking at it like it was something that just started happening to us.” He shook his head. “It didn’t just start. We’ve always been part of this. We just didn’t know.” “So the Ascended just sit there watching us from on high, playing God with their goddamned games.” He focused his attention down to the blank stares on the kobolds. “You know what? Fuck this game. And fuck them too. I say the first chance we get, we flip this game board and break their shit.”
“Kyle, I’m not sure how yet, but I’m pretty sure we’ve already started to flip the board.”
She leaned toward Erica slowly.
“Haven’t we.”
Yumi walked over and knelt in front of the kobolds. If you’re not gonna contribute to this conversation I’d ask that you please give our friends back and fuck off.
Maddie and Erica looked at each other all at once, then back up at Yumi and ARi.
“What?” Maddie said. “Why are you guys staring at us?”
Roslyn’s projection stepped out of the tunnel wearing a miner’s helmet perched on her head and a pair of dusty overalls. She brushed nonexistent dust off her shoulders with great ceremony.
“All right, Kyle, all you,” she said, and then looked up and took in the room.
The silence. The weight of whatever had just happened looming over everyone like a storm.
She looked confused, her hands still mid-brush.
“What did I miss?”
“We had some uninvited guests. But I doubt they’re going to be back for a while,” ARi said.
I don’t know how much time passed before I found myself back in the cradle chamber. At some point the weight of everything had pulled me down onto one of the cots along the back wall. I’d stopped fighting it. My reserves were still climbing and there was nothing useful I could do. I’d closed my eyes and let my thoughts drift back over everything Tanya and ARi had laid out. Without any real evidence or proof it’s all speculation, right? But I wasn’t doing a very good job convincing myself. My thoughts shifted to what happened with the Wraiths in the observation room. I tried to bring it back up with ARi but she insisted that we wait to talk about it.
I was still turning it over when I became aware of something close. Too close.
I opened my eyes.
Roslyn was nose to nose with me, her projection inches from my face, studying my features.
I threw myself backward off the cot and hit the floor.
“Gavin, you need to get up,” she said, completely unbothered. “They’re going to need you.”
The vault door scraped open just wide enough for them to squeeze through. ARi came in first, followed by the others, all of them moving with urgency.
I pulled myself up off the floor and looked at Roslyn. “Ros,” I said. “We’re going to have a conversation about personal space.”
ARi came through the vault door and leaned against the wall for a second, catching her breath.
“While you were resting, something came through the ceiling in the corridor,” she said. “It was a construct we haven’t seen before, small and fast, and the Wraiths took it down before it got any further. But there were others probing the walls further down. Roslyn and I filled the corridor with stone and metal, everything we had in inventory.”
“When I projected into the residential area I could see battle damage,” ARi said. “Scoring on the walls, debris on the floor. We could hear gunshots. It sounded like a firefight.” She paused. “It means they’re still alive, Gavin! But we could also hear more of those bipedal constructs moving through the corridors.”
“Did you say constructs? As in plural, more than one?”
“Unfortunately, But that’s not the worst part.”
“What could possibly be worse?” I asked.
“This,” Tim said as he stepped forward and dropped something onto the floor in front of me.
It hit the ground with a heavy wet thud. The legs alone spread nearly three feet across the floor, bladed and jointed, most of them sheared off or bent back from the fight. The body was low and flat, cracked open down the middle. Whatever was inside it wasn’t entirely mechanical. There was tissue in there, dark and fibrous, threaded through the machine components like it had grown around them. Where the body had split open it was leaking. A slow thick ooze spread across the floor and lit the room from below in an intense cold blue-green light.
Erica crouched down next to it, looking at the puddle spreading across the floor. “The second it came through the ceiling it started spraying this stuff,” she said. “It got it on Maddie before we could put it down, and she’s still trying to get it off.”
Tim cut in. “This is obviously a counter to our Wraiths.”
“Architect, it took all eight of us to take this down.”
I looked at the thing on the floor for a moment, thinking it through in my head.
“The corridor isn’t going to hold them for long,” Roslyn said. “There are hundreds of those things trying to tunnel through to the cradle chamber right now.” She looked at me. They all did. “Gavin, we need to make a decision. We either seal ourselves in the cradle chamber and reactivate the cradles early, or we go through that tunnel and fight our way to the survivors.” She paused. “But if we go through that tunnel, we need to understand we’re fighting our way back.”
Nobody said anything for a moment.
“ARi, can we activate the shielding around the chamber without actually getting into the cradles? It won’t do any good to go save them if they can just destroy the cradles while we’re gone.”
“Yeah, I think I can do that. But I’d have to put it on some kind of timer. I won’t be able to shut it back off from the outside.”
“Let’s go save them, Gav,” Tim said, giving me a slow nod.
“You already know what I’m going to say. I want to find my mother and sister.” Tanya said.
“I don’t see much point in getting back in that cradle if we’re just leaving the world to die while we’re gone.” Kyle said, pulling his thick leather hood over his head, checking his bracers.
Yumi was already spawning drones. I pulled up my architect menu and did a quick check on my reserves. With the window in front of me I ran my fingers down the projection, until I found Red and Charlie’s names on the list.