Outcasts, page 23
Rosa remembered: at one time she had existed and knew she did. That had been her life, here on Netherop and on Gao in Paraiso. Now she was no longer certain. Perhaps she existed and no longer knew it. Perhaps the prion disease had finally damaged her brain too severely—or the dust had deprived her of oxygen for too long—and now the pearl ambience was all that remained, a permanent vegetative state.
Or simply death. The final light, forever. That, she could embrace. Welcome, even.
But she saw now there were other states of being as well… frightening potentials she had glimpsed when the rift in the tel opened during their approach. What if she only thought she existed and never had? What if all her memories were mere phantasms, spontaneous fabrications arisen from the quantum soup of the spinning, primordial galaxy? What if Netherop and Paraiso and Samson and her children and grandchildren were all just dreams?
That, Rosa could not bear, not even for a breath. If she was actually even breathing.
The final possibility, the most chilling of all, was that she did not exist and did not know it. That she was just a thought in another being’s mind, a form on some cluttered page… brought to life only by a pair of passing eyes, or the sound of a speaking voice.
What if that was Rosa, and no more?
Too cruel. So much needless suffering, so much pain without cause or purpose. No children, no Samson, no Gao… no escape from Netherop, for her or anyone. She would not allow—
Choose.
The voice came from within the pearl ambience, pressing in from all sides, wispy and sharp and unforgiving, unyielding and insistent.
Choose.
Rosa spoke. Or at least she imagined she did. “What?”
The choice is yours.
This time, two voices spoke as one, still unyielding and unforgiving, but now a chorus of opposites, one deep and booming, the other wispy and sharp.
It is your state. You decide.
Rosa stared into the pearl ambience and saw that it was withdrawing around her—just as the passage had opened ahead when her Sangheili abductors had sent her forward alone—creating a small egg of space for her to inhabit.
“Who are you?”
Silence, then: We called ourselves the Veiled Ones. Then we became the Lost Ones. Now we call ourselves Nothing, and that is well with us.
Rosa lifted a hand and touched the cocoon of pearl ambience. It felt real.
“Are you…?”
Rosa hesitated to ask, knew the question would betray her nescience and inexperience. She presented herself as a hard case, a jaded recluse and an embittered skeptic, but what was she really? She had been living in a village in the jungles of Gao for more than three decades, not traveling the galaxy with her old friend John-117, not consulting for ONI as she was now, not studying protogenic civilizations, or training in the dos and don’ts of talking to ghosts. She was an old woman returning to the world of her birth not because she wanted to see it again before she died, but because of what she had done to leave it… because of what she had sacrificed to give her children a home where they would not die starving and thirsty and sick with heat.
She regretted nothing. Commander Petrov had intended to leave Rosa and her family marooned on Netherop so she could extract her own soldiers instead. But that did not make Rosa innocent. She had returned because she needed to, because she had been called back by a force she could not deny… by her own conscience. Or, by…
“Are you… Forerunners?”
The pearl ambience closed in so fast and tight that all Rosa saw was a flash, and her body was filled with a pain so crushing and agonizing that she knew it was real, that she existed and knew she existed, because there was no other way to feel this awful, no way she could hurt this badly in a dream, no way that another mind could be so cruel.
“I choose existence,” Rosa gasped. “I know I exist.”
The pearl ambience faded, slowly, but the agony remained. The crushing remained.
You must call us Nothing. We do not exist.
“I will call you Nothing,” Rosa promised. “You don’t exist, and I don’t know that you don’t exist.”
No one must ever know that we do not exist. You did not hear us.
“Who would I tell?” Rosa gasped in pain. “You’re a hallucination.”
The pearl ambience continued to fade. The agony did not.
You will take them all when you leave. They who stay… they will not exist.
“When I leave? I don’t… I don’t have the strength—”
You have chosen. The pearl ambience vanished completely. The pain remained. You exist.
The pain mounted. Rosa felt the entire tel pressing inward, compressing her lungs, squishing her organs, squeezing the veins in her neck. She grew dizzy and tired and weak, and a dark curtain threatened to fall inside her mind.
She chose not to die, not then. Not there.
Then she began to move, or at least to feel as though she were moving, sometimes sliding along through the dust as though descending a child’s slide, sometimes being pushed upward through a squeeze tube. And she began to feel stronger.
The darkness lifted inside her mind. Her lungs began to hold back the pressure, and the weight on her organs diminished. The dizziness vanished and her vigor returned—almost at once—and the veins in her neck felt free and open.
Rosa shot from the dust like a teop from a straw into a dark emptiness. Her pain did not swell, or even spike, and once she had picked herself up from the base of the wall where she’d impacted, she discovered that she felt better, healthier than she had in years. No dizziness, no nausea. Her limbs did not tremble when she required them to move. Her breath came with little effort.
Was the prion disease… gone? Or just the symptoms?
A pale light filled the chamber, not the same pearl ambience that had enveloped her when she lay buried in the dust, but a brighter, whiter color that she recognized as a glow coming from the walls themselves. She was in a vault not much larger than herself, with no apparent entrance or egress. Nothing but dust, glowing yellow, almost gold, all around her.
Rosa touched it. It seemed solid and granular. Real.
And on her. She was caked in dust, but not yellow dust like on the vault walls. It was pale, the color of her own flesh. She tried to brush it off, discovered she could not, even when she scraped at it with her fingernails. It was part of her now, a second skin.
Rosa turned in a circle, still trying to sort out whether she was dead or alive, whether she existed or had never existed, whether this was just a hallucination or something she actually saw.
The wall started to recede before her, just as it had for her Sangheili abductors—just as it had when they sent her on ahead alone. She experienced an urge to move and walked, and the wall receded further. The effort did not tire her. The farther she walked, the better she felt.
Her mind was no longer clouded.
How long she continued, Rosa could not say. The passage opened in front of her, but only if she continued in the same direction. When she grew thirsty, a spring poured from the wall. A pang of hunger, and purple fruit dropped from the ceiling.
Like she was dead and in paradise. Or maybe just dreaming of it.
Finally, the wall stopped receding. She turned in a circle, wondering if the tel wanted her to go in another direction. But she remained at a dead end, watching the gray dust slough off the tunnel face ahead. Rosa stepped forward and wiped her hand over the dust, hoping that perhaps a little encouragement would keep the passage moving.
Instead, she found herself looking into a faceplate.
She wiped the surrounding area clear and saw the blocky form of an ODST helmet emerging from the dust. But it was covered in an opalescent skin similar to the armor her abductors wore. Confusing.
Rosa continued to clear the rest of the helmet and the shoulder pauldrons and the torso armor. All covered in an opalescent sheen, all definitely ODST armor.
She stepped back. The figure lunged forward, collapsed to its knees, then looked up. A sound came from the voicemitter on its helmet, but it was too dust muffled to understand.
Rosa stepped forward and wiped the dust from the nameplate on the torso armor. It was covered in the same opalescent material, the letters beneath barely legible.
S. LEGOWSKI.
She cleaned the dust from around the voicemitter, and a female voice finally asked, “Rosa? You’re alive?”
“So it seems,” Rosa said. “And you too… or so it seems.”
CHAPTER 17
A circle of blue-yellow light brightened the cloud of nanodust ahead, and Olympia Vale breathed a sigh of relief. First Squad had been crawling through the drainage tunnel for the last half hour, and now the end was in sight. That did not mean they would reach the Guardian killer before Thel ‘Vadam and his warriors… but it meant something. They had to deal with the tel inhabitants, in one way or another, and that would take time.
She stopped and deactivated her helmet lamp, then spoke over her helmet comm to the rest of her team—Iyuska, Petrov, and the seven troopers on their hands and knees behind her.
“Lamps out. We have light ahead.”
The glow vanished from the haze around her.
“I hope that means we’ll be out of this dust soon,” Iyuska said over the comm channel. But unlike Vale and the ODSTs, she was not wearing a sealed helmet, so a little external voice spill occurred even when she spoke quietly into her mic. “Whatever these nanomachines are doing to my lungs, it can’t be good.”
“Not as bad as what will happen if you draw attention to us inside this tunnel,” Vale said. “Cut the chatter.”
“Yes, ma’am. Whatever you say, ma’am.”
It wasn’t technically insubordination since Iyuska wasn’t in the military. That didn’t mean Vale wouldn’t order her old friend to be left behind—gagged and restrained, if necessary—until the situation ahead grew clear. Unfortunately, Iyuska had been positioned near the front of the line, so she could offer her expertise if Vale needed it. And squeezing a squad of fully armored and loaded ODSTs past her would not be easy in such tight confines. Iyuska would get banged up, and the maneuver would cause more noise than Iyuska’s voice spill.
Fortunately, Vale had alternatives. She opened a private channel to Golly, who was second in line, between her and Iyuska.
“Corporal, hang back a little. I need to reconnoiter ahead… quietly.”
Golly acknowledged with a single comm click, and Vale scrambled forward on her hands and feet. It was a bit awkward because the tunnel was only a meter in diameter. She filled it almost completely in her Mjolnir armor and could not help occasionally scraping the ceiling and walls, which added to the layer of nanodust already clinging to the alloy plates and put even more into the air. But the circle of light grew rapidly larger, and soon it was as large as the tunnel itself.
Vale extended an arm, trying to establish the distance to the mouth, and estimated the passage ended just past her fingertips. Yet she still couldn’t see beyond the opening. Thinking the nanodust had started to collect on her faceplate again, she tried to wipe the stuff off and ended up with lines of glistening beads in front of her eyes. Droplets.
Mist.
Vale moved to the end of the passage and found herself looking into a room full of fog. It was illuminated by the same blue-yellow light she had seen from deeper inside the tunnel, though the glow was so diffuse it seemed to arise from within the vapor. The floor of the chamber glistened with a film of water, steadily trickling in her direction and running into the tunnel beneath her. Directly ahead loomed a pair of parallel hedges. Draped in shaggy, leaflike shadows, they ran straight ahead until they vanished into the distant murk.
Vale switched to thermal imaging and confirmed that the shadows draping from the hedges appeared to be plants. Probably crop plants, judging by the fruit and seeds they carried. When she pushed her head out of the drainage tunnel and looked in both directions, she could see more hedges. They were spaced every couple of meters, for as far as could be discerned through the fog.
No images appeared hot or mobile enough to be animals—much less Sangheili warriors—so she left the tunnel and did a quick reconnaissance ten meters in each direction. The chamber was so large that the only wall she could locate was the one next to her. Its face was rugged and knobby, so it had obviously not been cut by the same technology as the drainage tunnel. Five meters above her head, the wall began a gentle curve inward, suggesting a huge barrel-vault ceiling, then disappeared into the brilliance of a blue-yellow cloud bank. The vastness was almost overwhelming. Through the thick fog, she could not even be sure she was seeing into the corners.
Vale peered down the drainage tunnel and commed, “Clear so far. Come ahead.”
She kept watch as Golly and the others emerged one by one, then had Sergeant Sahir divide the squad into three teams to reconnoiter.
Once the scouts had departed, Vale led Iyuska and Petrov to investigate the nearest hedge. The heart-shaped leaves and draping stems hung in an opaque curtain that extended from just above ground level to a meter overhead. She pushed a glove through the foliage and opened a hole, revealing a cascade of sickle-shaped fruits the size of her thumb. Behind the fruits, the plants themselves seemed suspended in a bank of gently swirling mist. Their roots were bare, dangling above one another in an inverted stair-step pattern. Other than the plants themselves, no support structure or growth medium was apparent.
“What do you make of all this?” Vale asked.
“Looks like we found their garden.” Petrov plucked a sickle-shaped fruit off its stem and bit into it, made a sour face, then peeled it and popped the pink meat into her mouth. Then she smiled. “Oh, yeah, confirming that. Definitely their garden.”
“I think Spartan Vale was asking about the technology,” Iyuska said. “At its heart, it’s basic aeroponics.”
“This isn’t basic anything,” Petrov said. Aeroponics was a common provisioning method used aboard colony ships and in long-term habitation domes. It was similar to hydroponics, except the nutrients were delivered via mist instead of water. “There’s no support structure or atomizer system, and this… this place is way too large to be considered a closed system.” Petrov raised her hands toward the ceiling to indicate the entire chamber.
“All true… for Tier Three technology,” Iyuska said. “But what we’re dealing with here is at least Tier One technology, maybe even Tier Zero. Where we use foam or plastic to create a support system, they use nanomachines to have the plant create its own support. Where we create a nutrient slurry and aerosolize it, they have a nanobot collect the necessary molecules—maybe even create them—then attach them to a water molecule and vaporize the assemblage through internal agitation. Who needs a closed system when you are the system?”
Vale shook her helmet. “Not what I’m asking. We need to figure out what Tier One technology”—she gestured at the aeroponics hedge, then at the rough-cut wall next to them—“is doing inside a Tier Six mine. Whoever dug this place did it using coal power.”
“Actually, they were on the cusp of Tier Five,” Iyuska said. “Those running machines of theirs may have used coal to turn the charging turbines, but when they were down here, they ran on batteries. They never would have survived the carbon monoxide problems, otherwise.”
“Not the point.” Vale tried not to speak through clenched teeth. “The jump between Tier Six and Tier One—or Tier Zero—is huge. Somebody brought this technology here.”
“Well, that’s rather obvious,” Iyuska said.
“And then they stayed,” Vale said.
“Again… obvious.”
“Why, though?” Vale turned to Petrov. “The technology on the rest of Netherop didn’t jump ahead like this, did it?”
“No. Not that we ever saw. Only in here.”
“So… why is the tel different?” Vale asked. “Why did the newcomers confine their technology to the tel and—as far as we know—only the tel?”
“Because maybe they didn’t want to draw attention?” Petrov surmised. “They came to Netherop to hide.”
“From who?” Iyuska asked. “The Forerunners? That’s who they used their weapon against, and why would anyone need to hide from…? Oh. Oh, that’s bad.”
“What’s bad?” Petrov asked.
Vale understood the nature of Iyuska’s concern—probably in more depth than she did. Unfortunately, ONI intelligence relating to the Gravemind was highly classified, and even if it hadn’t been, the thing’s account of the Forerunners’ treachery came from a single known source—which made it little more than hearsay. And the source was… vile. In Vale’s opinion, its story had rationalized an act of vengeance so horrific it would have been evil no matter how the Forerunners had betrayed their creators.
Had they even done it.
“Commander, how well do you remember your Earth history?” Vale asked at last. “Specifically, the twenty-second century, when the Marsman couldn’t deliver on his habitat-ship project and vanished with the passengers’ money?”
“Uh…”
“They found him in the Amazon?” Iyuska said. “Living in an off-the-grid mansion with the Khabnathwa people. He had convinced them he was their god-king… and single-handedly destroyed the last uncontacted culture in South America.”
“It’s like that.” Vale raised her hands toward the ceiling. “All we know about the Tier Six civilization on Netherop is that it was created by simple but industrious miners….”
“True…” Iyuska said. “But that’s not why we’re here. Nobody cares about Tier Six. We’re interested in the fugitives—the Tier One civilization.”
“I know that,” Vale said. “I’m here for the weapon, right? But you’re missing the point.”
“Which is?”
“What if they’re still in hiding here?”
Iyuska stared into the fog for a moment, thinking…. “Impossible. It’s surely been at least tens of thousands of years since the Guardian was destroyed.”
“And it’s only been five hours since our insertion force was destroyed,” Vale said. “You’re the one who said the tel technology might even be Tier Zero. Isn’t that transsentience?”
