The Stargazer's War - Chapter 2.14

Chapter 2.14: Hatching Day

Xavier rushed in to join us in Lucy’s upper deck with his shirt half tucked in and his hair still wet from the shower. “It’s happening?”

“Strap in,” Lucy instructed him. “We’re leaving.”

“It’s happening,” I acknowledged him, my hands cupping the egg close enough to feel its inhabitant shifting within.

Xavier quickly obeyed, taking the seat to my left given that Charlotte had already claimed the one to my right.

She scowled at me. “You shouldn’t even be up here. We agreed to keep that thing confined to the lower deck.”

“We’ll be airborne,” I countered. “What’s it going to do, figure out how to work the airlock?”

“You’ve said yourself you’ve seen these things teleport. If it escapes—”

“It needs me, Charlotte.” I cut her off. “It can’t reach the infinite sea from down here, so I’m its only source of qi. That last thing it’ll do is try to leave.”

“And the first thing it’ll do is try to eat you,” Charlotte said.

“It won’t.”

Xavier clapped me on the back. “I believe in Cal. He knows his charge better than we do.”

“It’s a void beast, not a child,” Lucy said.

“It’s both,” I insisted. “Right now let’s worry about making sure we clear out the entire nest, okay?”

Lucy sighed. “Brace for liftoff. It’ll be a bit bumpy as we shake these branches free. Lift in three… two… one…”

If ‘bumpy’ was an overstatement, Lucy’s demand we strap ourselves in was downright excess. I felt a faint vibration in the seat below me as we burst through the canopy that’d regrown in these past five months, and then the ride was smooth as butter. Threads, the egg moved more than my seat did.

I kept one eye on it and the other on the window in front of me as Lucy covered the short distance to the voidbeast nest. This early in the evening, the avian monsters would’ve been just rousing, checking on their eggs before embarking on their nightly hunt. We had to hurry if we wanted to be get them all.

Even from above I could spot the signs of the creatures’ presence, a swath of ebonleafs showing signs of decay all the way at their tops, hundreds of feet from the nest at their roots. Someone from planetary administration must’ve noticed the damage. I wondered why nobody had come out to take a closer look.

The extermination itself took twelve seconds. I counted them. Twelve seconds of sustained death and destruction rained down from above, the roar of impact and the crashing of fallen ebonleafs piercing even Lucy’s hull to reach my ears. The jungle itself quaked with the devastation, birds and bugs erupting from the canopy around us to escape.

Then it was over. Silence stretched over us, a sense of finality settling in. We’d all but announced our presence here. Any moment now, a ship would hail us asking questions to which we didn’t have good answers.

“Did you get all of them?” Xavier kept his voice low, seemingly almost hesitant to break the somber quiet.

“I doubled the target radius as per our projections,” Lucy said. “Unless some of them were further afield than we expected, the nest is eradicated, but there’s…”

“Good.” Unexpected relief knotted in my throat as I choked out the word, my own connection to the egg in my hands clashing with my history with void beasts. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Cal, before we go—”

“Can this wait?” Charlotte interrupted Lucy’s comment. “We don’t have much time before admin finds us.”

“There’s a distress signal,” Lucy blurted. “It’s garbled, like it’s been bouncing around, but its there. Somebody needs help.”

“Then it’s a good thing the Left Eye is on their way,” Charlotte snapped. “We need to go.”

I blinked. “Hold on. Why weren’t we receiving it before?”

“It’s coming from the crater of the nest,” Lucy said. “Something must’ve been blocking it or…”

“Something’s opened up,” Xavier finished. “We need to go down there.”

Charlotte rounded on him. “Are you insane? We’re here illegally, remember?”

Urgency and excitement mingled in Xavier’s voice. “The Gardener’s quarry. It’s there. It has to be. There’re caves or tunnels or something that those blasts exposed. Whoever’s signaling for help is probably trapped down there with whatever the Gardener wants us to find.”

Charlotte froze. “Shit.”

“Language.”

I wrenched my eyes away from the egg in front of me. “So, what, we either leave now and go without the Gardener’s boons or we wander into some tunnels with admin on our heels? I vote the former.”

“We don’t have a choice,” Charlotte hissed. “Xavier accepted her deal. It was one thing when admin’s notice meant us getting caught and being unable to fulfill our end, but now a path is open. It’s possible we can still find the thing, so not doing it isn’t just failing; it’s reneging.”

I paused as I reached the same conclusion she had. “Shit.”

“Language!”

“Sorry,” I muttered, my mind elsewhere. “Maybe one of her boons can be her help getting out? She has to be strong enough to keep the Left Eye off our backs.”

“It’ll have to be,” Charlotte said. “Lucy, get us down there.”

“Are you certain?”

Charlotte sighed. “Unfortunately, yes. Godsdamnit, Xavier.”

Xavier held his hands up. “It was a good deal! Don’t worry, my love, we’ll find victory beneath the earth and emerge stronger for it!”

Charlotte groaned. I bit back one of my own as my attention snapped back to the egg in my hands. I’d promised Lucy it wouldn’t risk it escaping, but I couldn’t very well leave it behind while we went galavanting off into whatever tunnels Xavier seemed certain we’d find. It’d die without me. My mind raced as we began out descent, running through my nonexistent options until I came to the only real conclusion. Lucy wasn’t going to like it.

I unbuckled myself and leapt to my feet.

“Cal? What’re you…”

“I’ll be right back!” I answered Charlotte’s question over my shoulder as I darted towards Lucy’s soulspace. “I’ve gotta grab some things.”

I clutched the egg to my chest with my left hand as I raced for the garden. Nick’s trees awaited me, saplings in their own right as they’d begun to wind around each other. I snatched a pair of sheers off the wall and cut free a twig, thin and pale grayish-green and roughly a foot long. I let the tool drop to the dirt in my hurry to leave.

Next stop I dashed to my bedroom, straight for the drawer where I’d left the final piece I needed: Cedric’s rib bone. I stashed it in my pocket, and made for the upper deck, only to stop as I heard voices coming from the kitchen. I followed them to find Charlotte and Xavier frantically stashing canned food and water bottles into a pair of backpacks.

Right. We’d need that too.

I moved to help, but Charlotte spared one glance for the egg still in my hand and waved me off. “Go to cargo. You’ll need tools.”

I nodded and ran back into hall, continue past the way out to make for the cargo bay where Charlotte and Xavier had toiled away to make their focuses. I left the egg on the workbench while I grabbed a backpack off a shelf and went to work stuffing it with anything I thought I might need: a small hand drill, some qi-vacant adhesive and twine, and a basic etching tool. Considering our destination, I also took a set of headlamps, a folding shovel, a pick, and a coil of rope. I lingered for a moment, considering what else I might bring, Lucy’s voice reached my ear.

“Ships incoming. ETA two minutes.”

I cursed. Time to go. I slung the pack over my shoulders. It’d have to be enough.

The airlock was open and the gangway waiting for us when I made it to the upper deck. I went right for it.

“Cal!” Lucy shouted. “You’re not taking that with you.”

“I’m advancing!” I yelled back, already halfway down the ramp to the still-hot stone below. “Too dangerous not to!”

“Cal, if that thing—”

“Over here!” Xavier’s call interrupted Lucy’s warning.

I followed his voice to a spot a few yards from the crater’s center, just beneath Lucy’s rear engines. The tunnel entrance itself was little more than a hole in the ground, scarcely three feet across. Compared to the hundred-foot-deep crater it’d taken to expose it, the vast area of jungle we’d glassed to purge the void beast nest, it didn’t look like much.

“Buy us time!” Charlotte yelled to Lucy as she crouched over the hole, shining the light of her holopad in to glimpse at its depths. She looked up at Xavier and me when I arrived. “Eight foot drop.”

“Downward to glory!” Xavier shouted with a fist in the air. Without waiting for anything resembling a plan, he folded his arms across his chest and jumped into the dark.

“Godsdammnit, Xavier,” Charlotte groaned.

“All clear!” his voice echoed from below.

Flashing me a chagrined look, Charlotte sat on stone and dangled her legs into the hole before making the jump herself. The egg still clutched to my chest, I did the same.

I landed in a crouch upon a smooth stone floor. Immediately I cycled my sense meridian, vibrance fading from the world as detail came into view. We stood in a tunnel, some six feet wide and eight feet tall. It stretched out as far as our extremely limited light could reveal, darkness seeming to box us in. Primitive stonework lined the floor and walls, solid pieces of rock ground to flatness and to fit together in gridlock with neither grout nor mortar. Pieces of said stonework littered the floor around us, the remnants of our sloppily-made entrance.

I felt as much as saw the light dim around us. I glanced up to find a layer of something had covered the entrance. Lucy clarified.

“I placed a woven holo to cover your tracks,” her voice cracked from my holopad, distorted somehow despite her proximity. “It won’t stand up to scrutiny, but I’ll do my best to keep eyes off it.”

“You’re an angel, Lucy,” Xavier said.

“Be safe down there,” she replied. “And Cal, keep that creature of yours on a tight leash. It never should have left the soulspace.”

“I will,” I told her. “Charlotte, any idea what this place is?”

“A Sil ruin, almost certainly,” she answered. “I didn’t do much reading on them because they aren’t supposed to be important, but from what I remember they were a race of pre-industrial sophants that died out well before humans made it to Ilirian. They’re a historical curiosity but not much else.”

I scowled. “That can’t be right. This place’d be, what, a few thousand years old? How is it still standing?”

“There’s enchantments running through the walls,” Charlotte offered. “Not sure what they do, but they look complex. More complex than I would’ve expected for a supposedly pre-industrial species.”

“So there’s more going on here.” I nodded. “Makes sense. Whatever the Gardener is looking for probably redid the enchantments when it moved in. Any mention on the localnet of a ruin out here?”

Charlotte shrugged. “Can’t check. Admin’s almost certainly eyeing this place like a hawk by now. Don’t want to risk network traffic.”

“Understood,” I acknowledged as I rifled through my bag for the headlamps. I passed them out. “Which way?”

She pointed down the southeast passage. “Distress signal’s coming from that way.”

Xavier clapped her on the back. “Let us waste no time!”

His booming voice echoed through the empty tunnel, resounding again and again just loud enough I almost didn’t notice the faint chink from just beside my left foot. I froze.

Xavier started off, his axe still strapped to his back as if no monster would dare attack such a brave hero.

“Xavier—” I called after him.

“People need our help, Caliban!”

“Xav, stop.” I tried again.

Charlotte turned to stare at me. “Shit. Now?”

I paled and nodded. A second chink echoed through quiet passage as another piece of eggshell fell to the floor.

The void beast was hatching.

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