Chapter Six: Pulvis Ex Machina

Dagger was the first to set foot against the black ground of Vlissik. It was like a religious ceremony of mourning, watching her heavy armoured boot crunch against the dirt beneath. Dirt, dust, ash, all indeterminate and uniform. It could have been mineral, it could have been charred plant material, or it could have been the particles that had once made up a person, all twisted into fire for the briefest moment and left to scatter in unbreathable breeze.

“Come on,” she said, emotion surgically removed from her voice, “we’ll be walking about ten minutes. Don’t stop or we’ll leave you behind.”

They said that Vlissik had once been a barren desert planet, billions of years ago, back when the sky hadn’t been empty and the Sun had been a main-sequence yellow-dwarf star. The extinct original inhabitants of Enfirnia had terraformed it over the course of millennia, turning it into the longest-lasting footprint of their kind. Now it was back how it had been in ancient times. A wasteland. Once outside the cave, we could see what it had been. Twisted skeletons of buildings jutting from the sky, just waiting for the gentle erosion of wind to eventually brush them away. In the distance, I could just about see the space-elevator where it had fallen, its dark form stretching from one side of the horizon to the next, having wrapped almost three times around the planet before finally coming to rest, the apical space station smashing against the empty ocean floor like a flail. I could see no water anywhere, no plants, not even cloth. A few handfuls of glass littered the ground like crystals, the only thing that stood out from the black.

Maybe this was the Hell Dagger had spoke of just earlier. Maybe this was hell.

And the sky…

The skies of Enfirmia were littered with spacecraft. Ships, stations, space-elevators, orbital rings... But I’d never once looked to the sky to see a solid rainbow of white steel reaching like a claw across the sky, the Arkolt ring staring us down with a million eyes. Even worse were the distinct bumps along the side, at least ten of the Titan Sphereships, each with the power of a full Enfirmian fleet, and even those were just the ones I could see. We were encircled, surrounded by the biggest spacecraft in existence, one that could end us in seconds if it realised we were here.

I realised I was shaking. Not because I thought we were going to be attacked, or obliterated by beams from the sky. I was shaking because of the sheer isolation, the desolation, even surrounded by soldiers of my own army. We were standing on an empty world, seen through a million metal eyes, walking on the ashes of billions.

We were alone.

“Horrible,” Konzor shuddered, and I knew exactly what he meant. This wasn’t war for him. This wasn’t honour. It was murder, nothing less. Genocide.

“I can’t believe the Arkolt aren’t seeing us,” I whispered, though there probably wasn’t much need. There was nobody to hear us.

“It’s probably our main advantage,” Dagger said from the front of the group, “these suits are invisible to long-ranged scanners. Only issue is, we nearly never get into ground-combat against the Arkolt, and we haven’t scaled it to spaceship-level, so it barely matters.”

“Good for us now though,” said a Trigan named Xal.

“I never liked stealth,” Konzor responded.

“That,” said Dagger, “is because you have the subtlety and precision of a mallet.”

“Nothing wrong with a mallet. Mallets are better than this. You hit the thing and it dies. This sneaking around? Not for me. No honour in it.”

“Look around you, Kon-kon,” she kicked something that hopefully wasn’t a bone, “honour was the first casualty of this war. Now shush, we’re almost there.”

The entrance to the lab complex was invisible at first, a simple blackened cave wall. I assumed there had to have been some kind of cleverly disguised secret entrance, but then Dagger ran her fingers against it, and I realised there was simply too much dust to see. When she brought her hand away, her gauntlet was darkened with powder and a dim metallic sheen could be seen where she’d wiped.

“Okay, hang on,” she commanded, pulling the rucksack from her back. We all watched in mild fascination as she retrieved a small, head-sized sphere, which extended three narrow legs at the flick of a switch. Dagger swept aside a small pile of debris so she could set down the little ball, only to quickly pile it all back up, the machine mostly hidden from sight.

“What’s that?” Konzor asked, “some kind of bomb?”

“A decoy,” Dagger explained, “we’ve been recording the signals from this part of the planet ever since the Arkolt took it. This machine will mimic the usual signals for as long as it’s active, whilst supressing anything new they could send, in both directions. It means if we get seen, only the Arkolt within the field will know.”

For as long as the machine is active.

I couldn’t even imagine what it’d mean if the entire Arkolt super-mind noticed our presence. I didn’t want to imagine.

Next, a small turret was set up near the lab entrance, big enough it had required four soldiers to carry this far. With pinpoint precision, it shot out a beam not dissimilar to the Arkolt weapons, carving a five-meter archway through the blast-doors before promptly catching fire, thankfully extinguished by the near-vacuous atmosphere. Darkness lay behind the opening, a darkness that would swallow us all.

“Into the breach, eh Greenie?” Konzor said cheerily, naturally the first through the hole, “All clear.”

“Come on,” Dagger ordered, following right through. I sighed, trying to remember each horrible decision that had put me here, before finally entering for myself, nearly last of us all.

I’d subconsciously expected to encounter more Arkolt architecture –mechanical eyes and indestructible beam emitters following our every move – and was struck by a sort of primal relief when I realised it was simply a small, dim, grubby-looking corridor. The type of place that would usually haunt horror stories, made utterly saccharine by the horrors outside. It was probably almost exactly how it’d been left all those years ago, but dirtier, and without the clutter indicative of human habitation. No mould either; clearly the Arkolt had sterilised this place as they had the entire planet, albeit less violently. It was haunting in a different way, however. At some point, at some time, activity in this place had simply… Stopped. There were thumbprints and footprints where dead men had tread, lockers still guarding personal belongings that would never be retrieved, a shower-block filled with half-depleted toiletries. No bodies though, no skeletons, no piles of empty clothes. I didn’t know where they were. I didn’t want to.

A succession of blasts knocked me from my stupor as Dagger opened fire against something across the hallway. Seconds later she stopped, and the enemy fell dead. It looked nearly exactly like the Arkolt intruder from earlier, but maybe one tenth the size.

“Won’t they hear us?” Konzor whispered, as though by whispering he’d take back the sound of guns.

“They know we’re here,” Dagger said, though she sounded unsure, “of course they do. They just haven’t attacked us yet.”

How reassuring.

In spite of that fact, no further Arkolt encounters were had for the duration of our exploration. It seemed they were as apprehensive of us as we were of them. Or more likely, it was a method of psychological warfare, and it was working like a charm, because I was about ready to open fire at the smallest flicker of shadow.

As we went, our surroundings grew less uniform, and in any other context I might have found it all fascinating. In one room I saw a single glass sphere, twenty meters wide with crimson lightning cackling from edge to edge. In another, hundreds of organic brains were all fused together within a transparent tank, connected by lengths of wire and bubbling distressingly away. Yet another seemed to hold a single black cube, with utterly flawless edges, lacking any kind of scratch or dimple, hovering cleanly off the ground at head height. I couldn’t guess what these might be, machines so different to anything I knew. Completely foreign, yet apparently useless and unremarkable compared to the man we seeked.

Konzor opened fire for a single moment, and stopped just as fast. We all swivelled to look at him, eyes wide as black holes.

“Saw something scuttling,” he muttered, “on the ground. Like an insect.”

“Don’t waste your bullets if you see it again,” Dagger remarked. I could see the sheen of sweat on her face. “Stamp on it if it gets too close.”

From the corner of my eye, I saw one too, something tiny with four little tooth-pick legs, staring right back at me. Then another, as we continued. And another. Not swarming, not encroaching, but watching us as we progressed. We swept our guns towards them, and they scattered, but neither of us attacked. We were insects ourselves, standing in the palm of a giant’s fist, waiting for it to close.

“Alright,” Dagger raised her hand to pause our march. She checked something on her helmet’s HUD, “I think this is it. Weapons out, alpha team look ahead, beta team get rear, delta, gamma, the flanks.” She stepped forwards, brushed the dust from a keypad and carefully tapped in the code. Subsequently, the doors slid open, granting us access to the chamber beyond.

And still, the Arkolt didn’t attack, even as we felt their eyes all over us. They didn’t do anything at all.

“Oh,” I twisted around to see the chamber, “holy parent, holy…”

It was a large room, bigger than any we’d seen thus far, surrounded by all the Arkolt technology I’d expected to see implanted around the base, white computers practically coating the walls and ceiling, with mechanical arms the size of tree-trunks hovering in place, hands completely limp. Cables, black and silver, trailed from the ends of the chamber like needles on a sea urchin, all coming together at a single point in the middle. Professor Zanzikai, the man himself, strapped to a seat by all four limbs, all four of his robotic arms stripped away save for the single interfacing-rod which was plugged into a cube-shaped Arkolt computer. His head was completely enclosed within a headset, eyes, feelers, and teeth hidden by the machine, his expression replaced with a single pearly paleness that was unnerving, even over everything else. Pipes and tubes extended from his helmet and his chair. I knew what they were probably for, and I wished that I didn’t.

“Steady,” Dagger crept across towards the hooked-up man, carefully avoiding any patches of Arkolt technology on the ground. We followed close behind, guns ready, especially watching the immobile limbs. From little gaps in the ventilation and between the servers, the tiny spy-bugs watched us, just tempting us to attack them. This felt wrong. After the intense battle in space, this felt completely wrong. We shouldn’t have made it so far, certainly not without combat. Konzor especially was twitchy, probably feeling cheated out of the most spectacular death one could imagine. I half-expected him to ambush one of the constructs out of pure stir-craziness.

Slowly, she reached towards the professor, ready to unhook one of the pipes.

“Don’t,” he spoke for the first time, clicking mandibles translated into my own language as fast as he said it, “not yet.”