Chapter 747: Into the Abyss
Chapter 747: Into the Abyss
The planet came up red through the void.
Not the dusty orange red of old photographs Noah had seen of Mars in history files. This was deep, saturated, the color of something that had been burning for a long time and had settled into it. From up here in open space it looked almost beautiful. The kind of thing you wanted to keep looking at right up until you understood what you were looking at.
Noah held out both hands.
Rael looked at them. Then at his team. Then back at Noah.
"You’re serious," Rael said.
"Thirty seconds," Noah said. "Or you can find another way down."
Rael grabbed his hand. His team followed, Mara on one side, Pix on the other, the remaining two closing the chain. Brooks took Noah’s left hand without ceremony and nodded once.
Noah looked at Storm above them, the black scales catching no light, just a shape against the stars, already angling toward the planet below.
Then he blinked.
The heat hit them before the ground did.
Not gradually. All at once, the full weight of a planet that ran significantly hotter than anything in the habitable range, the air above the surface moving in slow visible waves that distorted everything past thirty meters into something that shimmered and lied about its shape.
Everyone except Noah reached for their gear simultaneously. Beast core regulated cooling systems activating across six suits, the material doing what it was built to do in environments that would cook an unprotected human in minutes.
Noah stood there in his jacket.
Pix looked at him. Then at his own temperature readout. Then back at Noah.
"He’s not wearing cooling gear," Pix said.
"I can see that," Mara said.
"It’s showing forty eight degrees surface ambient," Pix said. "He’s standing in forty eight degrees in a jacket."
"I can see that too," Mara said.
One of the others, the quiet one at the back whose name was Soren, said nothing but looked at Noah with the expression of someone updating a file they had thought was complete.
Rael said nothing. He was looking at the horizon, jaw set, doing what Rael did which was refuse to show that something had landed on him.
"Maybe SSS ranked really is a different category," Mara said, mostly to herself.
"It’s not just rank," Soren said quietly. "Look at him. That’s not heat tolerance training. That’s something else."
"Stay focused," Rael said, clipped and final.
His team looked at each other briefly and then looked away and Rael stared at the horizon and said nothing else about it.
Noah was already looking up.
Storm was up there, circling, the black wyvern turning slow arcs against the red sky, and even from down here Noah could see it. The way Storm’s neck kept moving. Not the easy scanning motion of a predator reading terrain. Jerky. Reactive. His head snapping to one direction and then another and then back, like something kept pulling his attention and he kept losing the thread of it.
’You feel it too,’ Noah thought.
The system pinged at the edge of his vision.
[STRONG ENERGY SIGNATURE DETECTED]
[CLASSIFICATION: UKNOWN]
[DIRECTION: UNCONFIRMED]
[WARNING: ADVANCE WITH CAUTION]
Noah looked at the readout for a moment. Unknown classification. The system had categories for everything it had encountered. Harbinger, beast, awakened, void energy, chi, dragon. Unknown meant something it had no prior reference for.
He closed the notification and looked at the planet stretching out around them.
Red rock, fractured and old, the surface covered in formations that had been shaped by something other than wind and water erosion. The angles were wrong for natural geology. Too deliberate. Too consistent in their wrongness.
"Move out," Brooks said. "We cover ground before we make any decisions about going further."
---
They found the first evidence twenty minutes in.
Rael spotted it. A section of rock face that wasn’t rock face, the surface too regular, the material slightly different in color from everything around it, and when Pix ran his scanner across it the readout came back as processed alloy beneath a layer of oxidized coating.
"Construction material," Pix said.
"How old," Brooks said.
"Scanner can’t date it precisely. Centuries at minimum. Could be longer."
They stood in front of it. A wall. Not a natural formation. A wall, built, buried under the planet’s surface shifts until only this section remained visible, jutting from the rock face at an angle that suggested the structure it had belonged to was mostly underground now.
"Someone built here," Mara said.
"Someone built here," Noah confirmed.
"In our solar system," Rael said. He wasn’t being dismissive. He was doing the math the same way everyone else was doing it. "This close to Earth and we had no idea."
"The EDF surveys never reached this far out," Brooks said. "The planet registered as uninhabitable. Nobody looked closer."
"Someone should have looked closer," Rael said.
Nobody argued with that.
They kept moving.
The evidence accumulated as they walked. More wall sections emerging from the rock. What looked like the remains of a road surface beneath their feet, too flat and too even to be natural, the material holding its shape despite everything the planet had done to it since. A structure half buried in a collapsed hillside that was too large and too symmetrical to be anything except deliberate.
Advanced, Noah thought. Whatever had been here was not primitive. The construction methods, the material choices, the scale of what was buried under this surface, this had been a civilization that knew what it was doing.
And staying undetected even by the EDF again was another subject matter.
And then they found holes.
---
The first one was wide enough to swallow a building.
Perfectly circular, the edges clean, the walls going straight down into darkness that the eye refused to resolve into a bottom. The rock around the rim had a specific coloration, darkened, the surface of it glazed the way surfaces glazed when something very hot had been applied to them for a very long time.
Not an impact crater. Not a geological event. This had been made from the inside. Something had drilled up through the planet’s crust from below, or drilled down from above with a heat source that would make a military plasma cannon look polite.
There were more of them.
As far as they could see in every direction, the holes were distributed across the landscape, dozens of them visible, the same perfect circles, the same glazed edges, the same impossible depth.
Pix was already scanning. "Infrastructure," he said, his voice going somewhere quieter. "Underground. The scanner is picking up structures at depth. Intact structures. A lot of them."
"How deep," Brooks said.
"That’s the problem." Pix looked at his readout. "I can’t find the bottom."
"Scanner range is what, five kilometers?" Rael said.
"Six point two," Pix said. "And I’m not finding the bottom."
The group stood at the rim of the nearest hole and looked down into it and nobody said anything for a moment.
Brooks pulled out a probe unit. Standard issue, self propelled, camera and sensor package, thirty minute battery life. She set it going and it dropped into the hole and the light from it diminished and then became a point and then became nothing.
They waited.
Twenty minutes. Twenty five. The readout on Brooks’s unit showing the probe still descending, still transmitting, still not finding the bottom.
Thirty minutes.
The probe’s battery died somewhere in the dark below them.
"We need orbital support," Brooks said. "Covert ships, deeper sensor arrays, something that can map what’s down there before we consider going in." She opened her comms. "Vanguard station, this is Brooks, we need—"
Weeeeeee....Wooooshh~
The sound came from everywhere at once.
A screech that hit the chest before the ears caught it, the frequency of it traveling through the rock beneath their feet and up through their boots and into their bones, and everyone on the team took an involuntary step back from the rim except Noah who took a step toward it and looked up.
Storm came out of the sky like a dropped stone.
Black scales and blue lightning, the electricity arcing off him in every direction as he dropped, his wings folded flat against his body like a diving falcon.
His eyes were locked on the hole, and he hit the air above it still diving and the shockwave of his passage knocked dust from the rim in a ring and then he was gone, straight down, the blue of his lightning visible for three seconds after he disappeared and then that was gone too.
Everyone stared at the hole.
"Was that," Mara started.
"Storm," Noah said.
"Your dragon just," Pix said.
"Yes," Noah said.
He looked at the hole. At the glazed walls. At the dark below. He could still see a faint pulse of blue far far down, Storm’s lightning bouncing off the walls as he descended, getting smaller, getting dimmer.
Noah looked at Rael.
Rael looked at Noah with the expression of someone who already knew what was about to happen and had not yet decided how he felt about it.
"You snooze, you lose," Noah winked.
He stepped back from the rim, one step, two, and then he fell backward into it with his back to the dark and his face to the red sky and a smile that Rael was going to remember for a long time, and the planet swallowed him.
Rael took a step forward.
"Don’t," Brooks said.
"We should be following him," Rael said. "That’s our team lead going into an unknown shaft of unknown depth on an unknown planet and we’re standing up here—"
"You are not on his level," Brooks said flat and final.
She wasn’t cruel.
It was just true, the way certain things were true and pretending otherwise helped nobody. "Stop competing with something you can’t compete with and focus on what you can actually do up here, because that is what this mission needs from you right now."
Rael went very still.
He could feel his team looking at him. He didn’t look back at them. He looked at the hole and at the red sky above it and kept his face where it was.
"Yes ma’am," he said in embarrassment.
---
Noah fell.
The walls of the shaft blurred past him, the glazed rock close enough to touch, the heat radiating off them different from the surface heat, deeper, older, like the planet was breathing through these holes and this was its exhale.
Far below him, the blue pulse of Storm’s lightning flickered and moved and got no closer.
’Of course,’ Noah thought. ’Of course you’re already gone.’
He looked at the walls rushing past. At the darkness below. At the distance between him and the blue that kept shrinking in the wrong direction.
"Equip Striders," he said.
The black boots assembled around his feet in the half second of a blink, the void energy locking each component into place, and Noah reached out and put both hands against the shaft wall and pushed.
His body swung, momentum redirecting, and his feet found the wall and caught and then he was running.
Downward. Circular. The Void Striders driving him at a speed that turned the glazed rock surface into a blur, the friction nothing, the wall curving under him in a tight spiral as he ran the circumference of the shaft in a continuous helix descent, faster than falling, faster than Storm at a casual dive.
The blue light below grew.
’Come on,’ he thought, grinning at the dark. ’Where are you.’