Swarmworld Arcturus 3: Komodo
By Brandon Perdue
Maris splashed through another shallow pool, submerged nearly to her knees. Grime and sweat matted her dark hair; the messy bun she’d started the day with was thoroughly compromised. Dirt from the nameless faun’s grotto streaked her pants and jacket. Water flowed in through the tops of her boots. Even after climbing out of the pool onto uneven, sharp-rocked ground, each step squelched and dragged with moisture.
Maris pressed on between tall, pointed rocks the color of storm clouds. After a few steps she dropped to her knees. Every anchor she possessed failed at once. Every tether snapped. And for a while Maris just existed, and that only barely. Finding the lost faun had felt like something important—like destiny. Stupid word. Stupid idea. She hadn’t meant to wake the faun up. She hadn’t meant not to, but if she’d known that waking it would lead to her fighting Gilfaethwy, fighting Lynd… if she’d known it would lead to her home in flames, she would’ve filled that hole the faun was sleeping in by hand, if that’s what it took.
Eventually, water splashed Maris’s face. She wanted to remain stone, but the salt stung her eyes. Sitting up became standing up became walking, just a little further.
The nameless faun had reached the edge of the sea that occupied the rest of the petal, all the way to the tapered upper end. He had waded out into the sea and hunched, and was using his claws and tail to splash water onto himself. This, Maris realized, was the first time she’d seen the faun in direct sunlight. A thick layer of dirt, dust, and gravel darkened most of the faun to mottled tan, like the brown sugar Mother liked to sprinkle on the top of cakes, but the dermal plating beneath looked pale. The faun stood upright on his back legs, which were large and powerful, while splashing at the waves with his much shorter front limbs, something between a leg and an arm. His segmented tail was as long as the rest of his body, from pointed nose to hips. As the faun washed the crystalline structures growing on its shoulders and wrists, they caught the sunlight and glowed a soft, cozy crimson.
“I guess I can’t blame you for wanting to get clean,” muttered Maris. Draping her jacket over a broad stone, she waded into the surf. The pool she’d landed in when they arrived on this petal had been tepid and brackish, and she felt like it had only transformed the dirt on her into mud. The rolling water of the sea looked clearer, at least. If being dry wasn’t really an option, she could at least be less grimy.
As Maris washed, her faun had progressed to dipping his head in and out of the water, occasionally going further out from the beach before retreating back to the shallows. Maris thought of how the faun’s nose had been resting in a shallow pool back in the grotto where she found it. Those handprints she had left on his nose were probably gone now, and something about that made her a little sad.
“Why did you bring me here?” she asked loudly as the faun surfaced again.
The faun paused, tilted his head to one side, then looked out toward the sea.
“What’s out there that you want?” Maris asked. She knew the faun wouldn’t talk back. She also hoped she’d be wrong. Being wrong would be convenient. She let the surf crash against the faun’s legs in peace for a few seconds before shrugging. If the faun had been responding to her previous question when he looked out to the sea (and she thought that he had been), then the lack of any response meant he couldn’t give a useful indication here. Which ruled out…well, not much. Sand. Rocks. She probably could have guessed that the giant robot didn’t want rocks.
“I’ll go with you. Nobody’s trying to kill us anymore, so…” Maris took a step toward the faun. The faun shuffled half a gigantic step away from her. She abruptly felt like she’d been kicked in the side, like vermin. “Well, go on then,” she shouted, throwing an arm toward the waves. “If you don’t need me, just go!”
The faun’s head jerked upward, and it took Maris a moment to realize it wasn’t in response to her. A winged shape descended from the sky above: a long, articulated faun body, almost serpentine, with four large wings, two to a side. From a distance, the shape of the wings, and of the faun’s torso, reminded Maris of the bird biots, but this creature was much, much larger. It trailed a long tail behind it, even longer than her faun’s. A needle-sharp head perched at the end of an equally long neck.
Maris recognized this faun from her research. The name stenciled onto its wings confirmed it. Zilant—a wyvern-type.
Zilant slowed, firing retro rockets to pull into a hover. Like Hati and Gil, Zilant had been tamed, and equipped with human technology. Zilant spread its wings, less for flight than for display. Maris saw her faun bristle, tail sloshing in the surf.
A pair of disc-shaped drones detached from their creche on Zilant’s back and zipped toward her faun. He shifted his stance in the water and swung his long, articulated tail up out of the surf. The nearest drone smashed into an uncountable number of pieces. The other drone pulled back to a greater distance and opened fire with its coilgun.
Her faun lunged, dozens of tons of living hardware forcing through the surf. Before she could dive for cover, the resulting wave tackled Maris and slammed her to the ground. The rocks cut through her pants and sliced up her palms. Dazed, she rolled herself into the pool she’d used to wash, trying to keep her head down as the fauns engaged.
The world failed to erupt in lasers and explosions. Maris peered over the lip of the pool. Zilant had landed on one of the shoreline’s larger crags, clinging to it with stone-shattering claws. The wyvern shook its head, its neck armor rattling.
A splash behind her drew her attention. A man in a vac-suit stood knee-deep in the water. The smooth, glossy shell of the suit was a flexible yellow polymer over a pale body glove. A rigid helmet protected his head and hid his face behind an opaque visor. Maris could see what she thought was a weapon attached to one hip. She groped around in the water around her for a rock small enough to throw and sharp enough to at least irritate the man, if it came to that.
He stopped about ten meters from her. “Let’s not do anything hasty,” he said, voice filtered through the helmet.
Maris stood, slowly. “We didn’t attack Gilfaethwy. Gilfaethwy attacked us,” she said.
“What?”
His confusion caught Maris by surprise. “You must think we’re dangerous,” she said, though she was unsure if that was a statement or a question. “Why else send a soldier after us?”
“Ah,” the man said. “In fairness, your faun did smash one of my drones. But I’m not a soldier. I’m with ASTERA.” He tapped an insignia on his suit. ASTERA was First Wavers, mostly. Mother worked with a few of them from time to time. Explorers, albeit heavily-armed ones.
The man held his hands out wide, showing they were empty. Then, he brought one hand to his neck and touched his helmet release. His visor slid up into his helmet, then the helmet itself folded back to rest behind his head. He had a short beard with a few days’ messy fringe. His dark hair was peppered with white, his face carved in angular lines. His eyes, ice-pale, looked weary.
“My name is Deniz,” he said. He pointed at the winged faun. “That is Zilant.”
“I know which one it is.” Maris bit the words into small, sharp fragments. She didn’t want Deniz thinking she was some dumb kid. She was allowed to think that of herself, but that privilege was exclusive.
“Then you have us at a disadvantage,” Deniz said. He returned to holding both hands up, fingers spread, palms facing Maris.
“I’m Maris,” Maris said.
Deniz pointed two fingers at her faun. “And…that?”
Maris shook her head. “I don’t know his name.”
“Well,” Deniz shrugged, “have you given it one?”
“Him.”
“You’ve given him a gender but not a name?”
“I didn’t ‘give him’ anything.” Maris recoiled, drawing into herself. Deniz had that tone that she sometimes heard from adults, especially First Wavers. That you’re young and foolish tone. “That’s just what I felt when…” Her brow furrowed. When was it, exactly, that she’d gotten that impression?
“Sometimes they make these connections,” Deniz conceded. “But I have it on good authority that Zil likes having a name and doesn’t mind if it’s an alien one. To them, I mean.”
“I don’t think he’d want me giving him a name,” said Maris. She looked ruefully at her faun, still bristling in the direction of Zilant. Both mechafauna looked ready to glass the entire beach. “He doesn’t seem to care for me. I think he’s looking for something. Or somewhere.”
Deniz nodded slowly. “Looking for somewhere,” he repeated. “How about we call him…Komodo? It’s not a name, just a classification. We’ll just pronounce it with capital letters.”
Maris looked at the nameless faun. Komodo.
Komodo lashed his tail irritably in the surf. Somehow, that fit.
She nodded at Deniz. “Okay.”
“Now,” Deniz continued, “let’s see if we can get these two someplace where they can smash each other without getting water in their internals. ASTERA has a research vehicle a few klicks up-petal from here.” He gestured out to sea. “They’ve got bays large enough for Zilant and Komodo.” Deniz fished into a pouch of his suit and took out a headset. “Since he doesn’t have communications equipment installed yet, this will let us keep in touch. It’s fairly short range, but it’ll do.”
“Nobody’s going to install anything on him. In him. Whatever,” Maris said.
“If he doesn’t like you enough to let you give him a name, he probably isn’t going to let you decide if he gets mods, either,” Deniz pointed out. He extended the headset a little further toward her. “Our techs will stick strictly to assessment and repair, you have my word. Like taking your dog to a vet.”
Maris only knew what a dog was somewhat abstractly, but she thought she understood what Deniz meant. She took the headset and fixed it to her ear.
*
Getting Komodo to let Maris back into the control sphere in his chest proved easier said than done. The faun didn’t relax until Deniz boarded Zilant and guided the winged faun half a kilometer away and behind a large outcropping where Komodo couldn’t see it. Even then, Komodo kept his head pointed in Zilant’s general direction while opening the armor plating that protected the control sphere in his chest.
As the sphere closed and the interior illuminated, Deniz’s voice came through Maris’s headset. “Can you hear me, Maris?”
“Yes.”
“The ORV knows that we’re coming. Just try to steer after Zilant and I.”
Maris gripped the control gauntlets. She didn’t want to admit that, as far as she could tell, she’d never really steered Komodo anywhere. “Will do.”
Zilant clambered over the rocky shore and pushed off, cruising low over the water, heading up-petal. Maris tilted the control gauntlets, trying to coax Komodo to go in that direction. “You kept trying to swim that way before,” she grumbled.
The faun responded by plunging into the water.
“I guess we’re swimming,” she said, for her own benefit as much as for Deniz. “I don’t know how to make him fly.”
“As far as I can tell,” said Deniz, “he probably can’t. Zilant could really only glide before we added some ion thrusters to go with the wings. And Komodo doesn’t have wings.”
“He flew from my petal to this one,” Maris pointed out.
She heard Deniz chuckle and immediately felt a bit stupid. “Komodo has a gravity batten. It would be more accurate to say that he sort of threw himself from one petal to another. That’s actually how we detected you coming here; when one of those things activates, it’s pretty hard to miss. Did you not know that?”
Maris wondered how dumb Deniz thought she was, not knowing any of this. “I’ve never heard of a gravity batten, so no, I didn’t know that,” she replied tersely.
“They’re not common. There’s no reason for you to have known what one was.” Except that my faun has one, Maris thought. “A wild faun just letting someone in like this is kind of unprecedented. When we detected an active gravity batten, we assumed—”
The control sphere darkened around her, but it took her thirty seconds to realize it was because Komodo was diving deeper down. “We’re diving,” Maris interrupted.
“Diving? Why?”
“I’m already tired of you asking me questions I don’t know the answer to.” She tried moving the control gauntlets, but they felt heavy. Deniz said something else, but his voice came in disconnected fragments. “Deniz? Can you hear me?” She could tell he was talking, but she could only guess at what he was saying, and he didn’t seem to be responding to her.
She was cut off.
Komodo plunged deeper. What little sound came through her headset was distant and garbled. With the control sphere transparent, Maris felt like she was in the water herself, unprotected, dragged deeper and deeper by some unknown current. They’d gotten so deep that everything outside the sphere appeared impenetrably black. She saw shapes moving in the deep where the black was just a little more black, just a little more deep, before melting again into the uniform dark. Could Komodo protect her if one of those shapes, rather than vanishing, resolved into a toothy, grinning maw?
“Maris?”
Maris jolted in her seat as Deniz’s voice came through, loud and clear once more. “I can hear you,” she said. “Where are you? I thought Zilant couldn’t swim.”
“You’re right, and Zil is very envious. I’m following you with a submersible drone, a few dozen meters off your tail. You’re still heading deeper. Bring it around and I can guide you back up.” He paused. “And if Komodo sees this drone, please ask him nicely not to break it.”
“How else can I tell you that he doesn’t listen to me?” Maris said. She heard a trace of bitterness in her voice that she wasn’t proud of, but she was disappointed to be on her own again, despite Deniz’s assurances.
“You are in the control sphere. You can turn that faun around.” Komodo shuddered. Deniz’s voice sounded a little more clipped. “You need to turn that faun around. Now.”
Maris gripped the control gauntlets again. She pulled. They barely moved, and Komodo’s trajectory didn’t change, as far as she could tell. “Come on,” she muttered. “Work with me. Why did you let me in if you won’t work with me?”
“Look, you don’t have a lot of time,” Deniz said.
“I’m trying!” Maris snapped. “Giving me a time limit isn’t helping.”
Deniz didn’t say anything. Maris didn’t say anything. Komodo continued forward. Maris started to wonder how Antillia’s sea could possibly be this deep.
“I know this isn’t easy,” said Deniz finally.
“This has been the worst day of my life,” said Maris.
“Okay, listen,” Deniz said after a few uncomfortably-silent heartbeats. “Your time is up. Komodo is taking you to a place we call the Ziggurat. Stay where you end up. Don’t wander. Don’t leave the sphere. I don’t have time to explain why, so just trust me on this.”
Maris pulled harder on the control gauntlets. Not that it mattered. Komodo didn’t respond to her. He forced them deeper and deeper, the outside turning the deepest black Maris had ever seen. She felt her stomach twist, like she had just before they had launched from home to space.
And then, suddenly, Komodo’s head broke the surface of the water.