Lord Zee
CycloneErelvath
Iurrthellir
Vasall, Sky Haven District
Night had fallen over western Iurrthellir. In truth, it had come a few hours too early, and was decidedly less dark than one could have expected; yet none of its inhabitants had seen anything strange in this. The revolution of the Garden-world had presently brought it into Jalaryias' shadow, an event known to occur roughly halfway through the former's orbital year, plunging cyclically growing and shrinking areas of its surface into a darkness faintly illuminated by starlight reflected from the gas giant and thus causing the succession of night and day to fluctuate in an odd, if regular manner. However matters might have stood, the nightfall would have been rather difficult to appreciate in Vasall for someone with complete optic perception, as the tiered nature of the city was such that all of its layers save the uppermost ones were cast into gloom. Yet the curious sensory organs of the Iurrkhal, scattered about their constantly shifting forms, were fully capable of detecting even such minute alterations as occurred in the lower sections. For them, the darkened sky, deprived even of the faint, reflected luminescence of the distant sun, was as visible as it would have been from a fully exposed plain, and, as was ever the case, there had been no delay in acting accordingly.
As every night, the inhabitants had been swift to retreat into their individual habitacles, sliding purposefully along the superimposed stretches of pillar-mounted roads and crawling their way along the paths spiralling around the stems of the titanic columns themselves, rising or descending to an adjacent stratum or, more rarely, several. Their motions, scrutinised by the unblinking gazes of the patroller drones, were orderly and practised, each retracing their way, without any major deviation, to their allotted dwelling in a metropolis-spanning pattern which was repeated six days out of eight, every time reiterating itself in perfect imitation of the previous occasion. The entire city was a single well-oiled mechanism, its innumerable parts moving in global coordination at a steady rhythm. And, just as a mechanism, despite pulsing with activity it would have seemed hollow and lifeless to those accustomed to different forms of civilisation. Here, no one slid out of line, at least not where they could be seen (and there were precious few places of that sort); no one stopped at intersections to exchange words with an acquaintance, or hailed a friend a few yards away, or even gestured in acknowledgement at incoming passers-by. No, everyone hurried along, their non-motory pseudopods limp along their formless sides, lest one of the metallic overseers descend upon them, clattering and whirring in programmed menace. And, of course, no one found this unnatural.
Yet, although this was not obvious from the citizens’ demeanour, Shadow Zone periods were a special occasion. An early nightfall meant an early end to the working day for many. No one deluded themselves that this was a fruit of the Combine’s generosity or considerateness; this apparent gift was, in truth, a measure to better exploit the singular conditions brought about by this stage of the orbital cycle by rerouting power from several facilities to certain particular installations measuring and absorbing the solar radiation filtered through Jalaryias’ mass, which apparently possessed unique physical properties. More obviously yet, it was additionally aimed at preventing any illicit activity which might have been carried out with the advantage of an extended period of darkness. Indeed, a curfew was technically in effect in such occasions, albeit its actual enforcement was generally supposed not to be very thorough. Nonetheless, far was it from any Iurrkhal to fail to appreciate these additional few hours of respite. Though brief, the day did not seem to have been any less fatiguing; and the utmost bliss for the vast majority of them was to laxen their simil-musculature with a controlled sequence of neural vibration while relishing the intimacy of their minute receptacles, a feeling that had been dear to their species since the subterranean beginning of its evolutionary saga, millions of years before.
Yet not everyone was presently creeping homewards in eager expectancy. Though, to a distant observer, it would have seemed that the entirety of Vasall was swarming with motion, upon closer inspection it would have become apparent that certain zones were still, almost deserted amidst the rushing torrent of motion. Some of them were nested deep at the city’s core, surrounded by sheer metallic walls and the luminescent crimson eyes of surveillance devices; others were scattered about its outskirts, humming wastelands of steel and ferrocrete dotted with emitter towers, radar emplacements and other, more outlandish constructions; and, lastly, perched high atop the northern edge of the uppermost layer, the Sky Haven. The others were such as to excite at least the fleeting interest and curiosity of those passing them by, as they momentarily pondered what governmental secrets and energy-warping processes might be concealed therein; but no one passed by the Haven, and no one thought of it. That was not the familiar synth-soil of their nation, however occult its own workings might have been; that was Covenant space. Something different altogether. As far as most of them knew, the laws of physics themselves might have been functioning differently in there – and, to an extent, they knew this to be true, as that was where the sleek, silent voidships alit from their flight through the cold darkness of the over-sky, and whence they disappeared once again on their inscrutable errands. That was unknown, forbidden ground. Yet not everyone was merely hurrying in as broad as possible a detour around it.
Atvall lengthened his body and wrapped it around the edge of the cubical structure – probably a hangar of some sort – behind which he was skulking, peering out from the concealing shadow of the overhanging reticulate grill above. The empty space that lay beyond it was perfectly still and silent in the dim planet-light, the shadows cast by the strange armatures and rows of identical storage depots surrounding it barely reaching two feet into its dry, smooth surface. Combine patroller drones did not come this far in their rounds, and they had left behind the last one a good eight segments before; nevertheless, he could not suppress the uneasy feeling which skittered along his internal sensory web like a dust spider on the hunt. This was no longer the city he had known as his home; this was the domain of the Covs, the periphery of their shadow empire. Dire rumours circulated among the factory personnel about what exactly their strongholds were like; some imagined them as nightmarish lairs of flesh and machine, fused together in unimaginable shapes and sinisterly alive; others as catacombs of indescribable devices and Vraslil monstrosities floating in liquid-filled vats; others as desolate, unnaturally silent architectural enigmas; many as some of all those, and other things yet. Thus far, the third group seemed to be the one closest to the truth. By his reckonings, they had already come quite far into the district; yet, thus far, they had not come upon anything that was moving, or, much less, alive. Everything was strangely immobile; atavistic sensations of something novel and unexplored, possibly fearsome, stirred within him as he withdrew and signalled for his companions to follow him into the shade of the nearest construction.
Slowly, carefully, they edged their way along the wall and into the largely exposed space beyond. True, there was no sign of activity, living or automated, anywhere near, but with the Covs one never could be certain of anything. Their senses themselves could have been deceiving them, enthralled by unknown machinery; no precaution was too extreme. If worse came to worse, though, they always had each other to rely upon. There were three of them – Atvall himself, Illver, from the power plant near the factory, and Tvaalil from the minor data node. An assembler, a lesser regulator and a sifter adjunct; one could not go any lower than this in the Combine pyramid. Their lives were not, strictly speaking, unendurable, considering what their forebears had traversed centuries before; but by no stretch of the imagination could they be called satisfactory. While some might have been content with knowing they existed to further the cause of the Combine, this sentiment was by no means universal, especially when offset by the knowledge that an imperceptible motion from the inscrutable upper spheres could very well spell ruin, or worse, for them and an indeterminate number of their peers for reasons they could only guess at. The appearance of immovable solidity was, when one thought of it, just that; the structure they formed and contributed to hold together was in truth frighteningly mutable, prone to arbitrary and inscrutable shifts. Not everyone perceived this uncertainty, or thought much of it; but those who did found it more oppressive than the weight of the iron grid constraining every second of their lives for years on end.
There were not many alternatives to their state. Indeed, for a long time there had been none at all. Finding a more secure spot was, as far as anyone knew, not something that depended on them. Leaving the system altogether was a plunge into unknown danger, something an Iurrkhal would be as eager to contemplate as voluntary self-termination, and which was, in essence, not so different from it. The Vraslil were not something one could appeal to, and the Covenant did not even lend itself to that thought. For centuries, then, they had endured. Then the Concordat had come. It was distant, lying far away in that outer void only the Covs braved; it was vague and insubstantial as a hallucinatory mirage over the ocean; it was something no one truly knew with any degree of depth. But it was something. Somewhere, miles away, was a place free from the metallic chaos of the Combine and its eternal, invisible threat, where life-enhancing technology was doled out to all, there were no ubiquitous patroller drones, no drastic production plan policies, no toxic machine chambers or cutting gears left exposed for material economy, and, most importantly, no vast, unseen pseudopod ready to descend at random and inexplicably alter the entire course of one’s life, if such was to be left at all. Somewhere, there was freedom.
They were now past the outer storage areas. There, beyond that railing, if Tvaalil’s information was correct, lay the core of the sector. There, the strange voidships stood ready to depart towards different worlds. True, none of them knew how to pilot one, much less how to actually find the Concordat if they did manage to take off; but surely the Covs would not have overlooked such precautions as spare instructions and charts. After all, their proverbial efficiency could not simply benefit them alone. Speaking of Cov efficiency-
“Quiet.” came Illver’s vibrations behind him in a pulse of laboriously low frequency. His sonic detection, refined by years of work with conduits and generator links, had already proved invaluable in avoiding Combine patrols on their way; now, it seemed its usefulness in such a capacity was decidedly not expired. “Something is moving there” he gestured tentatively towards a convexly recurve wall, perpendicular to the railing, about two dozen yards away from them, “Sounds like a drone, but strange… As if it was… bipedal?” The last word was decidedly more of an interrogative than an assertion. They all knew, of course, the Covenant’s designs were nothing like what they were accustomed to. They knew, also, that most sapient life in the system was, actually, bipedal – Erelvath was actually the exception. And yet, no creatures walking on two limbs had ever existed on its surface. That was something else, something alien. Why the Covs would tinker with it they could not fathom, and certainly not in that moment, with those regular metallic steps, now audible to all three, growing closer and closer.
Without exchanging a single word, they slid towards the point where the wall intersected a small building adjacent to the railing. If that thing’s vision was linear, they should have been safe. If not, well… Atvall tightly gripped the miniaturised particle emitter in his formless appendage, the small conical object seeming even more helpless than himself now. It was no more than a repurposed welding tool, set to maximum power, for all that was worth. Even as he had prepared it, he had been fully aware that it was unlikely to have much effect even on a Combine patroller, let alone a Covenant construct if at least a fraction of the voices concerning their fabled technological superiority was true. And yet he had taken it with himself nevertheless, keeping a potentially useful – potentially vital – appendage occupied. The feeling of its smooth plastoid surface against his malleable constitution and, more importantly yet, the knowledge that he was carrying something which could damage, perhaps even destroy, a hypothetical danger did not entirely reassure him, but he found it unconsciously reassuring. His defence might well have been laughably inappropriate and insufficient to fend off anything the group was likely to encounter, but there was at least some defence to speak of, and this was what mattered most.
The steps were now perfectly discernible, resounding from just behind the edge of the thicker section of fence which ran along the railing where it was closest to the wall. Moments later, a shape appeared beyond it. It was dark and indistinct, being heavily obscured by the railing; but, from what they could detect, it was taller than an Iurrkhal, slender, and it advanced with rigid, regular motions. The glimmers reflected from the parts of it briefly passing through patches of planet-light belied its metallic composition, and, at intervals, gleams of artificial purple light could be discerned. The figure disappeared behind a particularly thick blot of shadow, cast by some sort of broad pole standing near the railings; then, unexpectedly, it reappeared, now striding perpendicularly to its previous trajectory and into the empty stretch in a corner of which the three were now huddled. Illver had been right: it was bipedal, and generally similar to the off-worlders they had seen in holo-images, having likewise two forelimbs and a protrusion at the top of its body, known as a “head”. However, its similarities with forms of sentient life, however alien, known to them ended there. Its steel form was lined with tubes and cables, the very fact they were exposed hinting at their extraordinary resilience. Its head did not contain a set of varied organs, but was instead formed by a single, enormous optical receptor, its violet light cutting through the penumbral gloom of the premature night. In its perfectly symmetrical upper limbs, ending in sharp, bladed claws, it held an oblong device, small light emitters on it shining in the same tone as the machine’s visor. A weapon of some sort, clearly entire classes of power over Atvall’s emitter. It was all he had feared to imagine, and more yet. Whoever had designed this could not have been a stable Iurrkhal. Not even the Vraslil, to his knowledge, created such monsters. But the Covs were something else altogether.
Having entered fully into the diminutive square, the machine paused, its armoured hind limbs clattering to a halt in parallel positions. Slowly, measuredly, its head began to swivel to the side opposite to that of their corner. At a fairly narrow angle, it stopped; then, just as deliberately, it spun in the other direction. Towards them. How much was that? Fifteen, twenty degrees? At least twenty more, and there would have been no avoiding its implacable, unblinking gaze. By the looks of it, it could cover the whole circumference if it wished. Fifteen. Ten. Nine? Seven? Then, it froze in place. How broad was its zone of vision, anyway? Were they already in it? He felt his pseudopod involuntarily raising the emitter to the level of the machine’s main sensor. Useless – whatever it was it was holding, it could probably vaporise them all from where it stood. All the more than before he was conscious of the completely illusionary nature of his precaution.
But the mechanical sentry did not turn to face them. Its head swivelled back to its original position, and, not a second after, it had resumed its march. In less than a minute, it had disappeared among the depots to the other side of the square, the sound of its heavy, armoured steps gradually fading away in the distance. Tvaalil was the first to recover – gently nudging his companions, he slid forward, headed in the direction of the opening in the railing from which the machine had come. Soon, all of them had resumed their cautious, stealthy advance, crawling through the narrow gateway, across the short, winding pathways among buildings that became less and less identifiable as they went on.
Paths, openings, apparently identical squares, tunnels and, at one point, what seemed to be a bridge suspended over some sort of chasm plummeting down to the intermediate layers; in the measure that they delved further and further into the depths of the Covenant district, the surrounding architecture grew increasingly bizarre and outlandish, utterly unlike what they had known Vasall to be. One could almost think they were on another planet, or, worse yet, in a Nucleus, one of these Cov fortresses whose very existence on the surface of Erelvath was unsettling to more than a few. But, fortunately, this was not the case, and, however surreal the environment became, it could not warp distance itself. There, that vast, dark mass of a building rising against the shadowed skyline could not conceivably be anything else than what they imagined it to be. That was, then, the goal they had come so far and risked their lives themselves to reach. Their appendages were aching from exhaustion, and they could feel their under-sides unpleasantly warm with the accumulated friction; but it did not matter. There, within those walls, beyond the service shaft whose position Tvaalil had gleaned by fearfully sifting through restricted administration data while in a place he definitely should not have come close to, was the ultimate ticket to freedom. Freedom from all they had escaped, and from the heavy, crushing dread which still hung over them now. Here was the foot of the gigantic structure; here the narrow opening itself – far too narrow. Every inch was painful, and each of the numerous bends, too many to count, brought with itself the fear of remaining stuck there, to slowly starve while seeing nothing more than darkness for the entirety of their few remaining days, if they would have been fortunate enough not to be found by maintenance drones before that time. But there was point where the size of the duct or some protruding mechanism blocked them; the pain could not last forever; and, at length, there was light.
Atvall was the first to emerge, instinctively flattening himself in the shadow of some large stacked containers. The others followed suit; and it was not immediately that they realised there was sound as well as light. From beyond their cover, came a variety of intermingled noises – the metallic clattering and whirring of drones, the sliding of other Iurrkhal, the skittering of what they could only presume were Vraslil legs. There were voices, as well, both the vibrations of their kin and insectoid clicking and chittering; though they understood both, most of them were too distant to be intelligible, and the others were odd enough in their own right. Most intonations were unrecognisable, and, though single words could be distinguished well enough, they were placed together in the strangest of manners, as well as intermingled with grotesque imitations of Vraslil snapping, and accompanied by an even more ghastly mimicking of Iurrkhal vibrations by what were presumably Vraslil themselves. The Covs, it seemed, did not even speak in a normal language.
With extreme caution, feeling his entire body grow abnormally tense with terror, Atvall extended himself as much as was strictly necessary to gain a view of what was happening on the other side of the containers. They were near one of the walls of a large, brightly lit hexagonal room; in his position, he could not see its ceiling, and did not dare gaze upward just then. Standing in a rough semicircle were several large, curvilinear forms, which he recognised as voidships – transports, if he recalled that scheme properly. There were open hangar-like doorways in what were apparently their backs, with ramps leading up to them, and in and out of those there hurried some forty lifter drones, larger and bulkier than those he was familiar with, but otherwise fairly similar to them. They appeared to be carrying large, metallic crates of some sort out of the craft, stacking them in a point outside his field of vision, then returning to pick up more. At the centre of the formation, apparently unconcerned by the drones’ comings and goings, stood a rather diverse group of figures, engaged in conversation. There were three Iurrkhal, eleven- no, twelve Vraslil, and seven more shapes the sight of which made Atvall reconsider his previous thoughts on no entities worse than the machine they had encountered outside created by the bio-engineers. Larger than any of the speakers, these hunched aberrations stood upon two pairs of limbs, the rear ones almost entirely shapeless. Despite the disturbingly organic texture of what was supposedly their skin, their appearance suggested that at least parts of them were metallic, though it was unclear just which parts. Their fanged, split mandibles were still, but he could have sworn there was a glimmer of suppressed ravenous hunger in their expressions, if they could be called such.
Eager to divert his attention from the creatures, he focused upon what the group was saying. Though he could now hear them more clearly, their bizarre, mongrel speech made it impossible to fully understand more than sparse snippets of their conversation. He could distinguish the expressions “mining operations… scheduled begin… days… not urgent, but it… be completed”, as well as several disconnected grammatical units; but, just as he was beginning to make sense of them, the group began to separate, with all but one Iurrkhal and three Vraslil backing away. Realising that they would have been more likely to spot him now that they were no longer engrossed in their exchange, he swiftly withdrew, dragging back Illver and Tvaalil, who had in the meantime followed his example. Not daring to exchange even a single word, they waited for the sound of sliding pseudopods and rapidly tapping legs to disappear; then, hearing that those who had remained had apparently resumed their conversation, slowly edged their way beyond the corner of the container a second time. Indeed, there only remained four Covs, with their bestial guards, in the midst of the semi-circle; even the drones, having seemingly unloaded the voidships, were making their way towards a doorway in one of the walls at the furthest end of the room.
Once again, he strained to discern what was being said. One of the Vraslil was speaking; as his sight zoned in upon him, Atvall idly noted that the tip of his proboscis was, unlike that of the others, noticeably asymmetrical – there were two broadly spaced hooks on it instead of four. Anon, the words that came from that figure, interspersed as they were with alien sounds, crackled through his neural system and resonated through his ganglial nodes in such a manner as to immediately make him forget such details and agonisingly cling to every utterance, comprehensible or not. “…reach Concordat sanctuary… leaders alerted, only must… full authority, has… deniability… cybeasts provide factor…” The Vraslil’s interlocutors swayed in agreement, then, at his gesture, moved alongside him in the direction whither the drones had carried their load, followed by the monstrosities, which proved surprisingly agile for their size and ungainly appearance as the doors of all voidships but one at the semicircle’s edge began to quietly close.
Atvall turned to his companions. None of them said anything; the situation was clear. This was an opportunity they could not have dared to hope for. Of course, they would have to share the journey with the Covs and their monsters, risking discovery and a probably very painful execution every moment; but it was either that or take their chances with one of the other ships. Even if they somehow managed to open it, now that they were there each of them was, in truth, less confident in their ability to commandeer it and leave planetside without being shot down by some defence battery, let alone avoid pursuit by the Covenant war fleet – trained pilots, all of them – and make it to the Concordat in one piece. No, if there was a realistic possibility for them to achieve their much-coveted dream, this was it.
Casting a glance around the room to ensure the Covs were not in sight, and that there were no cameras (miraculously, there were none - no visible ones, at least), the three hurried towards the voidship’s entrance. They did not even pay much thought to how audible their movement might have been; every part of their bodies was strained to a tremendous extent, their focus entirely on their destination. They were slow, much too slow; but no, here was the door, and here the interior chamber. It was larger than Atvall had expected; but all he saw for the moment was that it was empty. Pausing the merest of moments to ascertain that nothing was moving inside the vessel, they plunged into an unlit darkened corridor, then another, another yet, some sort of auxiliary engine room, another corridor, a small, apparently – hopefully – out-of-the-way chamber. Illver pulled a sliding panel to a close behind them, plunging them into complete darkness. There was, as far they could feel, no manner of locking the entrance; they could only hope the Covs would not inspect the entire ship before leaving, or that they had already done so.
But, at least, they were still in a position to hope; and that was all that mattered.
Iurrthellir
Vasall, Sky Haven District
Night had fallen over western Iurrthellir. In truth, it had come a few hours too early, and was decidedly less dark than one could have expected; yet none of its inhabitants had seen anything strange in this. The revolution of the Garden-world had presently brought it into Jalaryias' shadow, an event known to occur roughly halfway through the former's orbital year, plunging cyclically growing and shrinking areas of its surface into a darkness faintly illuminated by starlight reflected from the gas giant and thus causing the succession of night and day to fluctuate in an odd, if regular manner. However matters might have stood, the nightfall would have been rather difficult to appreciate in Vasall for someone with complete optic perception, as the tiered nature of the city was such that all of its layers save the uppermost ones were cast into gloom. Yet the curious sensory organs of the Iurrkhal, scattered about their constantly shifting forms, were fully capable of detecting even such minute alterations as occurred in the lower sections. For them, the darkened sky, deprived even of the faint, reflected luminescence of the distant sun, was as visible as it would have been from a fully exposed plain, and, as was ever the case, there had been no delay in acting accordingly.
As every night, the inhabitants had been swift to retreat into their individual habitacles, sliding purposefully along the superimposed stretches of pillar-mounted roads and crawling their way along the paths spiralling around the stems of the titanic columns themselves, rising or descending to an adjacent stratum or, more rarely, several. Their motions, scrutinised by the unblinking gazes of the patroller drones, were orderly and practised, each retracing their way, without any major deviation, to their allotted dwelling in a metropolis-spanning pattern which was repeated six days out of eight, every time reiterating itself in perfect imitation of the previous occasion. The entire city was a single well-oiled mechanism, its innumerable parts moving in global coordination at a steady rhythm. And, just as a mechanism, despite pulsing with activity it would have seemed hollow and lifeless to those accustomed to different forms of civilisation. Here, no one slid out of line, at least not where they could be seen (and there were precious few places of that sort); no one stopped at intersections to exchange words with an acquaintance, or hailed a friend a few yards away, or even gestured in acknowledgement at incoming passers-by. No, everyone hurried along, their non-motory pseudopods limp along their formless sides, lest one of the metallic overseers descend upon them, clattering and whirring in programmed menace. And, of course, no one found this unnatural.
Yet, although this was not obvious from the citizens’ demeanour, Shadow Zone periods were a special occasion. An early nightfall meant an early end to the working day for many. No one deluded themselves that this was a fruit of the Combine’s generosity or considerateness; this apparent gift was, in truth, a measure to better exploit the singular conditions brought about by this stage of the orbital cycle by rerouting power from several facilities to certain particular installations measuring and absorbing the solar radiation filtered through Jalaryias’ mass, which apparently possessed unique physical properties. More obviously yet, it was additionally aimed at preventing any illicit activity which might have been carried out with the advantage of an extended period of darkness. Indeed, a curfew was technically in effect in such occasions, albeit its actual enforcement was generally supposed not to be very thorough. Nonetheless, far was it from any Iurrkhal to fail to appreciate these additional few hours of respite. Though brief, the day did not seem to have been any less fatiguing; and the utmost bliss for the vast majority of them was to laxen their simil-musculature with a controlled sequence of neural vibration while relishing the intimacy of their minute receptacles, a feeling that had been dear to their species since the subterranean beginning of its evolutionary saga, millions of years before.
Yet not everyone was presently creeping homewards in eager expectancy. Though, to a distant observer, it would have seemed that the entirety of Vasall was swarming with motion, upon closer inspection it would have become apparent that certain zones were still, almost deserted amidst the rushing torrent of motion. Some of them were nested deep at the city’s core, surrounded by sheer metallic walls and the luminescent crimson eyes of surveillance devices; others were scattered about its outskirts, humming wastelands of steel and ferrocrete dotted with emitter towers, radar emplacements and other, more outlandish constructions; and, lastly, perched high atop the northern edge of the uppermost layer, the Sky Haven. The others were such as to excite at least the fleeting interest and curiosity of those passing them by, as they momentarily pondered what governmental secrets and energy-warping processes might be concealed therein; but no one passed by the Haven, and no one thought of it. That was not the familiar synth-soil of their nation, however occult its own workings might have been; that was Covenant space. Something different altogether. As far as most of them knew, the laws of physics themselves might have been functioning differently in there – and, to an extent, they knew this to be true, as that was where the sleek, silent voidships alit from their flight through the cold darkness of the over-sky, and whence they disappeared once again on their inscrutable errands. That was unknown, forbidden ground. Yet not everyone was merely hurrying in as broad as possible a detour around it.
Atvall lengthened his body and wrapped it around the edge of the cubical structure – probably a hangar of some sort – behind which he was skulking, peering out from the concealing shadow of the overhanging reticulate grill above. The empty space that lay beyond it was perfectly still and silent in the dim planet-light, the shadows cast by the strange armatures and rows of identical storage depots surrounding it barely reaching two feet into its dry, smooth surface. Combine patroller drones did not come this far in their rounds, and they had left behind the last one a good eight segments before; nevertheless, he could not suppress the uneasy feeling which skittered along his internal sensory web like a dust spider on the hunt. This was no longer the city he had known as his home; this was the domain of the Covs, the periphery of their shadow empire. Dire rumours circulated among the factory personnel about what exactly their strongholds were like; some imagined them as nightmarish lairs of flesh and machine, fused together in unimaginable shapes and sinisterly alive; others as catacombs of indescribable devices and Vraslil monstrosities floating in liquid-filled vats; others as desolate, unnaturally silent architectural enigmas; many as some of all those, and other things yet. Thus far, the third group seemed to be the one closest to the truth. By his reckonings, they had already come quite far into the district; yet, thus far, they had not come upon anything that was moving, or, much less, alive. Everything was strangely immobile; atavistic sensations of something novel and unexplored, possibly fearsome, stirred within him as he withdrew and signalled for his companions to follow him into the shade of the nearest construction.
Slowly, carefully, they edged their way along the wall and into the largely exposed space beyond. True, there was no sign of activity, living or automated, anywhere near, but with the Covs one never could be certain of anything. Their senses themselves could have been deceiving them, enthralled by unknown machinery; no precaution was too extreme. If worse came to worse, though, they always had each other to rely upon. There were three of them – Atvall himself, Illver, from the power plant near the factory, and Tvaalil from the minor data node. An assembler, a lesser regulator and a sifter adjunct; one could not go any lower than this in the Combine pyramid. Their lives were not, strictly speaking, unendurable, considering what their forebears had traversed centuries before; but by no stretch of the imagination could they be called satisfactory. While some might have been content with knowing they existed to further the cause of the Combine, this sentiment was by no means universal, especially when offset by the knowledge that an imperceptible motion from the inscrutable upper spheres could very well spell ruin, or worse, for them and an indeterminate number of their peers for reasons they could only guess at. The appearance of immovable solidity was, when one thought of it, just that; the structure they formed and contributed to hold together was in truth frighteningly mutable, prone to arbitrary and inscrutable shifts. Not everyone perceived this uncertainty, or thought much of it; but those who did found it more oppressive than the weight of the iron grid constraining every second of their lives for years on end.
There were not many alternatives to their state. Indeed, for a long time there had been none at all. Finding a more secure spot was, as far as anyone knew, not something that depended on them. Leaving the system altogether was a plunge into unknown danger, something an Iurrkhal would be as eager to contemplate as voluntary self-termination, and which was, in essence, not so different from it. The Vraslil were not something one could appeal to, and the Covenant did not even lend itself to that thought. For centuries, then, they had endured. Then the Concordat had come. It was distant, lying far away in that outer void only the Covs braved; it was vague and insubstantial as a hallucinatory mirage over the ocean; it was something no one truly knew with any degree of depth. But it was something. Somewhere, miles away, was a place free from the metallic chaos of the Combine and its eternal, invisible threat, where life-enhancing technology was doled out to all, there were no ubiquitous patroller drones, no drastic production plan policies, no toxic machine chambers or cutting gears left exposed for material economy, and, most importantly, no vast, unseen pseudopod ready to descend at random and inexplicably alter the entire course of one’s life, if such was to be left at all. Somewhere, there was freedom.
They were now past the outer storage areas. There, beyond that railing, if Tvaalil’s information was correct, lay the core of the sector. There, the strange voidships stood ready to depart towards different worlds. True, none of them knew how to pilot one, much less how to actually find the Concordat if they did manage to take off; but surely the Covs would not have overlooked such precautions as spare instructions and charts. After all, their proverbial efficiency could not simply benefit them alone. Speaking of Cov efficiency-
“Quiet.” came Illver’s vibrations behind him in a pulse of laboriously low frequency. His sonic detection, refined by years of work with conduits and generator links, had already proved invaluable in avoiding Combine patrols on their way; now, it seemed its usefulness in such a capacity was decidedly not expired. “Something is moving there” he gestured tentatively towards a convexly recurve wall, perpendicular to the railing, about two dozen yards away from them, “Sounds like a drone, but strange… As if it was… bipedal?” The last word was decidedly more of an interrogative than an assertion. They all knew, of course, the Covenant’s designs were nothing like what they were accustomed to. They knew, also, that most sapient life in the system was, actually, bipedal – Erelvath was actually the exception. And yet, no creatures walking on two limbs had ever existed on its surface. That was something else, something alien. Why the Covs would tinker with it they could not fathom, and certainly not in that moment, with those regular metallic steps, now audible to all three, growing closer and closer.
Without exchanging a single word, they slid towards the point where the wall intersected a small building adjacent to the railing. If that thing’s vision was linear, they should have been safe. If not, well… Atvall tightly gripped the miniaturised particle emitter in his formless appendage, the small conical object seeming even more helpless than himself now. It was no more than a repurposed welding tool, set to maximum power, for all that was worth. Even as he had prepared it, he had been fully aware that it was unlikely to have much effect even on a Combine patroller, let alone a Covenant construct if at least a fraction of the voices concerning their fabled technological superiority was true. And yet he had taken it with himself nevertheless, keeping a potentially useful – potentially vital – appendage occupied. The feeling of its smooth plastoid surface against his malleable constitution and, more importantly yet, the knowledge that he was carrying something which could damage, perhaps even destroy, a hypothetical danger did not entirely reassure him, but he found it unconsciously reassuring. His defence might well have been laughably inappropriate and insufficient to fend off anything the group was likely to encounter, but there was at least some defence to speak of, and this was what mattered most.
The steps were now perfectly discernible, resounding from just behind the edge of the thicker section of fence which ran along the railing where it was closest to the wall. Moments later, a shape appeared beyond it. It was dark and indistinct, being heavily obscured by the railing; but, from what they could detect, it was taller than an Iurrkhal, slender, and it advanced with rigid, regular motions. The glimmers reflected from the parts of it briefly passing through patches of planet-light belied its metallic composition, and, at intervals, gleams of artificial purple light could be discerned. The figure disappeared behind a particularly thick blot of shadow, cast by some sort of broad pole standing near the railings; then, unexpectedly, it reappeared, now striding perpendicularly to its previous trajectory and into the empty stretch in a corner of which the three were now huddled. Illver had been right: it was bipedal, and generally similar to the off-worlders they had seen in holo-images, having likewise two forelimbs and a protrusion at the top of its body, known as a “head”. However, its similarities with forms of sentient life, however alien, known to them ended there. Its steel form was lined with tubes and cables, the very fact they were exposed hinting at their extraordinary resilience. Its head did not contain a set of varied organs, but was instead formed by a single, enormous optical receptor, its violet light cutting through the penumbral gloom of the premature night. In its perfectly symmetrical upper limbs, ending in sharp, bladed claws, it held an oblong device, small light emitters on it shining in the same tone as the machine’s visor. A weapon of some sort, clearly entire classes of power over Atvall’s emitter. It was all he had feared to imagine, and more yet. Whoever had designed this could not have been a stable Iurrkhal. Not even the Vraslil, to his knowledge, created such monsters. But the Covs were something else altogether.
Having entered fully into the diminutive square, the machine paused, its armoured hind limbs clattering to a halt in parallel positions. Slowly, measuredly, its head began to swivel to the side opposite to that of their corner. At a fairly narrow angle, it stopped; then, just as deliberately, it spun in the other direction. Towards them. How much was that? Fifteen, twenty degrees? At least twenty more, and there would have been no avoiding its implacable, unblinking gaze. By the looks of it, it could cover the whole circumference if it wished. Fifteen. Ten. Nine? Seven? Then, it froze in place. How broad was its zone of vision, anyway? Were they already in it? He felt his pseudopod involuntarily raising the emitter to the level of the machine’s main sensor. Useless – whatever it was it was holding, it could probably vaporise them all from where it stood. All the more than before he was conscious of the completely illusionary nature of his precaution.
But the mechanical sentry did not turn to face them. Its head swivelled back to its original position, and, not a second after, it had resumed its march. In less than a minute, it had disappeared among the depots to the other side of the square, the sound of its heavy, armoured steps gradually fading away in the distance. Tvaalil was the first to recover – gently nudging his companions, he slid forward, headed in the direction of the opening in the railing from which the machine had come. Soon, all of them had resumed their cautious, stealthy advance, crawling through the narrow gateway, across the short, winding pathways among buildings that became less and less identifiable as they went on.
Paths, openings, apparently identical squares, tunnels and, at one point, what seemed to be a bridge suspended over some sort of chasm plummeting down to the intermediate layers; in the measure that they delved further and further into the depths of the Covenant district, the surrounding architecture grew increasingly bizarre and outlandish, utterly unlike what they had known Vasall to be. One could almost think they were on another planet, or, worse yet, in a Nucleus, one of these Cov fortresses whose very existence on the surface of Erelvath was unsettling to more than a few. But, fortunately, this was not the case, and, however surreal the environment became, it could not warp distance itself. There, that vast, dark mass of a building rising against the shadowed skyline could not conceivably be anything else than what they imagined it to be. That was, then, the goal they had come so far and risked their lives themselves to reach. Their appendages were aching from exhaustion, and they could feel their under-sides unpleasantly warm with the accumulated friction; but it did not matter. There, within those walls, beyond the service shaft whose position Tvaalil had gleaned by fearfully sifting through restricted administration data while in a place he definitely should not have come close to, was the ultimate ticket to freedom. Freedom from all they had escaped, and from the heavy, crushing dread which still hung over them now. Here was the foot of the gigantic structure; here the narrow opening itself – far too narrow. Every inch was painful, and each of the numerous bends, too many to count, brought with itself the fear of remaining stuck there, to slowly starve while seeing nothing more than darkness for the entirety of their few remaining days, if they would have been fortunate enough not to be found by maintenance drones before that time. But there was point where the size of the duct or some protruding mechanism blocked them; the pain could not last forever; and, at length, there was light.
Atvall was the first to emerge, instinctively flattening himself in the shadow of some large stacked containers. The others followed suit; and it was not immediately that they realised there was sound as well as light. From beyond their cover, came a variety of intermingled noises – the metallic clattering and whirring of drones, the sliding of other Iurrkhal, the skittering of what they could only presume were Vraslil legs. There were voices, as well, both the vibrations of their kin and insectoid clicking and chittering; though they understood both, most of them were too distant to be intelligible, and the others were odd enough in their own right. Most intonations were unrecognisable, and, though single words could be distinguished well enough, they were placed together in the strangest of manners, as well as intermingled with grotesque imitations of Vraslil snapping, and accompanied by an even more ghastly mimicking of Iurrkhal vibrations by what were presumably Vraslil themselves. The Covs, it seemed, did not even speak in a normal language.
With extreme caution, feeling his entire body grow abnormally tense with terror, Atvall extended himself as much as was strictly necessary to gain a view of what was happening on the other side of the containers. They were near one of the walls of a large, brightly lit hexagonal room; in his position, he could not see its ceiling, and did not dare gaze upward just then. Standing in a rough semicircle were several large, curvilinear forms, which he recognised as voidships – transports, if he recalled that scheme properly. There were open hangar-like doorways in what were apparently their backs, with ramps leading up to them, and in and out of those there hurried some forty lifter drones, larger and bulkier than those he was familiar with, but otherwise fairly similar to them. They appeared to be carrying large, metallic crates of some sort out of the craft, stacking them in a point outside his field of vision, then returning to pick up more. At the centre of the formation, apparently unconcerned by the drones’ comings and goings, stood a rather diverse group of figures, engaged in conversation. There were three Iurrkhal, eleven- no, twelve Vraslil, and seven more shapes the sight of which made Atvall reconsider his previous thoughts on no entities worse than the machine they had encountered outside created by the bio-engineers. Larger than any of the speakers, these hunched aberrations stood upon two pairs of limbs, the rear ones almost entirely shapeless. Despite the disturbingly organic texture of what was supposedly their skin, their appearance suggested that at least parts of them were metallic, though it was unclear just which parts. Their fanged, split mandibles were still, but he could have sworn there was a glimmer of suppressed ravenous hunger in their expressions, if they could be called such.
Eager to divert his attention from the creatures, he focused upon what the group was saying. Though he could now hear them more clearly, their bizarre, mongrel speech made it impossible to fully understand more than sparse snippets of their conversation. He could distinguish the expressions “mining operations… scheduled begin… days… not urgent, but it… be completed”, as well as several disconnected grammatical units; but, just as he was beginning to make sense of them, the group began to separate, with all but one Iurrkhal and three Vraslil backing away. Realising that they would have been more likely to spot him now that they were no longer engrossed in their exchange, he swiftly withdrew, dragging back Illver and Tvaalil, who had in the meantime followed his example. Not daring to exchange even a single word, they waited for the sound of sliding pseudopods and rapidly tapping legs to disappear; then, hearing that those who had remained had apparently resumed their conversation, slowly edged their way beyond the corner of the container a second time. Indeed, there only remained four Covs, with their bestial guards, in the midst of the semi-circle; even the drones, having seemingly unloaded the voidships, were making their way towards a doorway in one of the walls at the furthest end of the room.
Once again, he strained to discern what was being said. One of the Vraslil was speaking; as his sight zoned in upon him, Atvall idly noted that the tip of his proboscis was, unlike that of the others, noticeably asymmetrical – there were two broadly spaced hooks on it instead of four. Anon, the words that came from that figure, interspersed as they were with alien sounds, crackled through his neural system and resonated through his ganglial nodes in such a manner as to immediately make him forget such details and agonisingly cling to every utterance, comprehensible or not. “…reach Concordat sanctuary… leaders alerted, only must… full authority, has… deniability… cybeasts provide factor…” The Vraslil’s interlocutors swayed in agreement, then, at his gesture, moved alongside him in the direction whither the drones had carried their load, followed by the monstrosities, which proved surprisingly agile for their size and ungainly appearance as the doors of all voidships but one at the semicircle’s edge began to quietly close.
Atvall turned to his companions. None of them said anything; the situation was clear. This was an opportunity they could not have dared to hope for. Of course, they would have to share the journey with the Covs and their monsters, risking discovery and a probably very painful execution every moment; but it was either that or take their chances with one of the other ships. Even if they somehow managed to open it, now that they were there each of them was, in truth, less confident in their ability to commandeer it and leave planetside without being shot down by some defence battery, let alone avoid pursuit by the Covenant war fleet – trained pilots, all of them – and make it to the Concordat in one piece. No, if there was a realistic possibility for them to achieve their much-coveted dream, this was it.
Casting a glance around the room to ensure the Covs were not in sight, and that there were no cameras (miraculously, there were none - no visible ones, at least), the three hurried towards the voidship’s entrance. They did not even pay much thought to how audible their movement might have been; every part of their bodies was strained to a tremendous extent, their focus entirely on their destination. They were slow, much too slow; but no, here was the door, and here the interior chamber. It was larger than Atvall had expected; but all he saw for the moment was that it was empty. Pausing the merest of moments to ascertain that nothing was moving inside the vessel, they plunged into an unlit darkened corridor, then another, another yet, some sort of auxiliary engine room, another corridor, a small, apparently – hopefully – out-of-the-way chamber. Illver pulled a sliding panel to a close behind them, plunging them into complete darkness. There was, as far they could feel, no manner of locking the entrance; they could only hope the Covs would not inspect the entire ship before leaving, or that they had already done so.
But, at least, they were still in a position to hope; and that was all that mattered.