Swarmworld Arcturus 4: Beithir
By Brandon Perdue
Maris, safe in the control sphere at Komodo’s heart, surfaced a few moments after the faun’s head. The transition from murky ocean depths to stark, hazy light forced Maris to blink away the ghosts that had swum in her periphery, moving in the impenetrable black of the water.
She had never felt their direction change. Despite her efforts to coax Komodo to turn back, to return to shore or even just swim closer to the surface where she could connect to Deniz in Zilant, the faun had continued to descend, deeper, deeper. She’d tried pulling on the control gauntlets with all her strength, but they barely moved, and when they did, the faun did not seem to care.
At least they were not underwater, but there shouldn’t have been anywhere not-underwater for them to be. Water streamed down the armor plating of Komodo’s chest, rippling blotches of color over Maris’s control sphere view. There were shades of brown—dark and rich like soil, light and golden like sand—and shades of gray, pale yellow, and a few almost-greens. The palette didn’t belong to any part of Antillia she knew.
Komodo turned around to face the way they had come. They were standing on a flat surface, which looked like some kind of soil or sand had been meticulously leveled. This level stretched for hundreds of meters to either side of them. In front of them, a sharp slope of the same sort of material connected this plane to another, higher by a little more than Komodo’s standing height. Set into the slope was a pool of water, rectangular and sitting at a steep angle. The surface of the water, too, was at the same angle, but, in blunt defiance of gravity, perfectly placid. That’s where they must have emerged from, but Maris didn’t quite understand how it could be. Tiers just like this one continued up, one after another after another.
The haptic harness nudged Maris in the chest several times, just gently enough to not hurt. The nudges had rhythm, almost in time with her heartbeat; almost, but too quick, and quickening still. The control gauntlets trembled. She slid her hands out of the gauntlets, uncertain if the faun was trying to shrug her off. Then the faun shrugged her out, popping open the chest armor that protected the control sphere and dumping her onto the ground below.
Maris stumbled, tried to plant her feet, but she was still dizzy from the abrupt inversion of exiting the sloped pool. She caught herself on the springy ground. She thought of Deniz’s warning: Don’t wander. Don’t leave the sphere. She prepared for her lungs to suck vacuum, or explode; for her skin to burn. But she could breathe. Her eyes burned as if she’d plunged her head into a bloom of acrid smoke. The helmet Deniz had given her took only a moment to close, protecting her from whatever irritant was in the air.
She spun and looked up at the Komodo. “I’m getting tired of you spitting me out,” Maris coughed, but, predictably, Komodo did seem to care. The faun stood on his hindlegs, letting his forelimbs hang at his sides, sharply-angled head pointed dreamily upward. His eyes lit, coruscating shades of purple, and he rose to his full height, taller than any of the structures in Maris’s home settlement.
And the faun stood still, other than the shifting colors of his eyes.
Maris wished there was someone here who would understand her frustrated arrgh, or the way she threw her arms outward. Even on the beach, she’d been able to look up and see, distantly, signs of human habitation: the distant shapes of the settlements on the opposite petals, the glimmer of small spacecraft, the shining line of starry bursts that etched the tower-city of Corax across the sky. Here the sky held no ships and no stars, only gray-brown haze and limitless horizon. Was this what it was like to be on a planet? Maris had never heard of—what had Deniz called it?—a “ziggurat.” Maybe that was a type of planet. But if it was, from what she knew, it wasn’t the same type Earth had been.
She walked to the edge of this tier, where the ground struck downward at a sharp but consistent angle. The toe of her boot chanced the very edge. Looking down, Maris saw more tiers, each the same width as far as she could tell, each uniformly below the previous tier and separated by a scrub-fuzzed slope of the same angle. Soupy fog obscured everything more than half a dozen tiers below her. Something moved down there, bubbling red, but it was too far below her to make out any detail. But the simple fact that they might not be as alone here as she thought pushed Maris away from the edge. Thunder rumbled.
It was like they were on the middle step of a gigantic staircase, but each “step” was taller than Komodo, who could flatten a velo under one of his feet. Maris felt cold dread at the idea of beings so large that Komodo would need to watch their step.
The ground trembled; Komodo had started moving, step by ponderous step. The faun’s thick tail swept just over Maris’s head as he dropped to walk on all fours, scaling the slope up to the next tier by digging his claws into the springy soil. Maris jumped onto the faun’s left hindleg just before it lifted off in a long, plodding stride.
Komodo climbed three consecutive slopes in a few claw-assisted bounds. Each footfall jolted Maris hard, and there wasn’t much she could hold on to that wouldn’t leave her with crushed fingers. She did her best to balance on the middle of Komodo’s hindfoot, keeping her extremities out of reach of any of the ankle or toe joints that flexed pulverizingly as the faun walked.
At last they ran out of tiers to climb. The ground there was barer than the lower levels, littered with small dark stones and larger heaps of pale stone. No, not stone—bodies. Faun bodies. Fauns with too many pairs of legs, fauns with wings or fins, sharp faces like Gilfaethwy’s or blunt, almost friendly-looking snouts. Each faun was impaled by a spike of dark metal, contorted in an infinity of death throes. What Maris had taken to be small stones were, in fact, the bodies of biots, crumpled, contorted, mangled—dead in every way imaginable. She could identify a few biot configurations, but a troubling number of them were damaged beyond recognition. She did not know what unsettled her more: this mass extinction of biots or the cruel, ritualistic execution of mechafauna.
She had never seen a dead mechafauna. Here she counted fourteen. There were more, but she couldn’t stand to keep counting them.
Komodo slowed, and Maris took the opportunity to disembark. The faun kept moving, slowly, tremulously, among the dead. Its eyes winked purple every few seconds.
“Did you know all of this was here?” Maris asked aloud. By now she was certain that Komodo wouldn’t respond, but in the face of this much death, she needed to talk to someone.
The faun was no longer moving quickly enough to prevent her from keeping up on foot, and she got a close look at the lifeless mechafauna that Komodo passed by without so much as a glance. No two were quite alike, but they all showed massive damage: melted armor plating, missing limbs, mangled chassis, blunted claws. She put her hand on (she was pretty certain) the shoulder of a quadrupedal faun. The faun was on its back, skewered through the midsection and facing vacantly skyward. The shoulder plating looked less like metal than stone; it reminded her of the fossils in the Corax museum’s collection, a small sampling of long-extinct species from Earth, dead so long that their bones had mineralized. Maris considered removing her glove so that she could really feel the texture of the material, but her brief time without her helmet, and Deniz’s warning, made her think better of it. Maybe she could ask Deniz what this place was when she saw him again. If she saw him again. She didn’t like the idea that he was the last person she’d ever see, even if his guidance might have been helpful.
There was a peal of thunder, closer this time than before. Maris had never experienced a real storm; the petals had artificial weather systems that produced clouds, wind, and rain, but every time they had a downpour, Mother mused that it was nothing compared to a real storm. Maris couldn’t imagine wind and rain capable of wiping entire cities off the map. If this place was a planet, and it had actual weather, she didn’t want to get caught in it.
When she caught up to Komodo, he was standing over another dead faun, shoulders hunched. This one’s body looked blackened and misshapen by intense heat, like it had fallen through a star. Its head, with a single eye on either side like the Komodo’s, was pointed directly skyward, mouth hanging open. A large coilgun took up most of the inside of the mouth. A lattice of deep grooves crawled from the eyes down the sides of the head. Maris brushed her fingers across the grooves; they were nearly as wide as her fingers, and they didn’t look like they were supposed to be there. For a moment, she imagined them glowing red.
The end of Komodo’s pointed snout slid down and nearly touched the dead faun’s own, and Maris couldn’t help but notice a resemblance.
“Is this your…”
She paused: because she didn’t know how to finish that sentence, and because, in the fossil-like shape of the dead faun, she could make out writing. Human writing. She wiped her hand across it, and the stone flowed aside in an uncomfortably unstonelike manner. Beneath, she could read a word in the same sharp serifs that she’d seen Zilant’s name written in: Beithir.
With incredible care considering his size, Komodo nudged Maris with the tip of his nose. Maris, one hand still on the dead faun called Beithir, placed her other hand on the pointed tip of Komodo’s nose. Next to where she placed her hand, she saw the faintest outline of a handprint: her own. Komodo hadn’t quite washed them completely away earlier.
“You came here for Beithir?” Maris asked. “Did you think you needed a human to help because…” Because someone had installed that coilgun in Beithir. Someone had painted that name onto Beithir’s armor.
The single eye that was turned toward Maris pulsed gently lavender. Everything went very, very quiet.
Thunder interrupted the moment, closer than ever. Over the edge of the summit, the same way they had climbed, appeared a horned head, but not like an animal’s, not like Gilfaethwy’s. The rest of the head was irregularly shaped, without obvious eyes or other features. The creature continued to lurch up the slope between tiers, more and more of it coming into view. It was humanoid, or at least more humanoid than any faun Maris had ever seen, though the proportions were far from human. The giant’s torso was broad, twice as wide as it looked like it should be. Ridged armor plates, glassy black, met in the center of the torso, creating a crooked seam that ran down the center of its chest like a scar. Through that gap, something red and unsettlingly fluid glowed. Each of its arms were long, too long for the proportions of the rest of its body. They were segmented, with spikes at the shoulders and elbows. The creature’s legs were mismatched, and neither looked much like the rest of it; the right leg looked similar to a faun’s, multi-jointed and ending in large claws that dug into the ground. The left leg had angular, hard edges and a squared-off foot, scribed with some sort of writing too faded and scratched to be legible. The left leg was longer than the right, giving the creature its unsteady, arrhythmic stride.
The countless dead biots strewn across the summit of the ziggurat rattled and quivered and screamed.
Energy bursts vaporized chunks of the ground around Maris. That thing was shooting at her. Komodo’s tail slammed down hard enough to knock Maris off her feet, but it blocked several more energy blasts from hitting her. The armor plating of Komodo’s tail baked.
Maris crawled toward the relative shelter of Beithir’s husk as Komodo reared up again. His head levered open and Komodo’s laser cannon splits the air. The beam struck the red giant dead center, but the giant’s main body undulated, twisting immaterially. The energy beam just seemed to drain through it. It looked undamaged—wholly untroubled by Komodo’s most powerful weapon.
The giant strode across the field toward Komodo. Each mechanical titan swung claws and blunt-armored fists into cataclysmic impacts. Komodo’s superheated claws cut into the giant more than the laser blast had, throwing sparks and gouging its black armor. With an impact louder than that oncoming thunder, the giant punched Komodo in the midsection with a spiked fist, cracking armored polymers capable of dissipating the impact of coilgun slugs.
The giant brought its long arms up to guard itself, and Komodo’s claw attacks stopped landing. Strike after strike proved useless. But when the giant chose to strike, Komodo’s efforts to protect himself were too slow. Another swift blow nearly breached through Komodo’s torso, and the faun dropped to all fours. The giant bent and grasped Komodo’s face in an armored hand, palming the faun’s face, digging in spined fingers. The faun gaped open-mouthed, silently screaming as his energy cannon flickered, but failed to fully ignite.
Maris scrambled under the structure of Beithir’s head for cover, though she wasn’t confident it would actually protect her from much. This must be why Deniz warned her not to get out of the control sphere. She might not have been much safer there, from the way the fight is going. At least she would feel like there was something she could do.
She crawled up into Beithir’s mouth, finding slim footing alongside the coilgun’s assembly. This looked, to her untrained eye, like a larger coilgun than the ones equipped on Gilfaethwy. Corrosion clawed at the conducting coils. Maris searched for anything that looked like a power switch. If the coilgun still had power, and ammunition, and she could figure out how to make it fire, then maybe…
Metal wailed. The giant threw Komodo to the ground, or Komodo wriggled out of the giant’s grip, Maris wasn’t sure which. The vast machine toppled, making the ground shake. Maris came face to face with Komodo. Grooves were carving themselves outward from his eyes, grooves like those around Beithir’s dead stare. They burned and simmered. The faun—her faun—is desperate. She considered the coilgun again, still cool, still untried, and realized she was desperate, too.
“Let me in,” Maris said.
The Komodo responded by opening his control sphere.
Maris felt the faun shudder as she climbed into the cradle. The harness snapped over her, strapping her in. The giant rained blows on Komodo’s back.
“Let me handle your arms,” Maris said. “I’ll defend. Keep us moving and strike with your tail.” She had no idea if this was even how it worked, but the control gauntlets suddenly firmed up, feeling weightier than she’d ever felt them. Komodo was already rising to fighting position again as the control sphere’s interior illuminated, showing Maris the outside just in time for the giant to swing its fist from the right.
Time moves a little slower. Maris pulls the right control gauntlet, and Komodo’s right forelimb bats away the attack.
Komodo whips his spiked tail across the giant’s path, forcing it back a step. The giant fills Maris’s view from the inside of the control sphere. She can see mechanical parts within its chest cavity, huge pumps thrumming like organs in a thick, red-black fluid. The crevice down the front of its armor looks like an open wound that refuses to bleed.
A spear slithers into the giant’s grip. Komodo hits the giant with a short burst from his mouth laser, though again the giant barely responds. It raises the spear, the tip angled just for Maris, as if the giant can see her inside of Komodo’s control sphere. She twists the control gauntlets as the giant thrusts. Komodo’s claws respond, grasping for the shaft of the spear to deflect it. She feels Komodo lurch, and the haptic harness punches her in the side.
A few seconds later, Maris is still alive. Her attempt to deflect the spear didn’t quite work, but Komodo had used its tail to shift its weight and correct for Maris’s imprecise control. The spear had scraped across the Komodo’s flank, but not penetrated its armor.
This seems to take the giant by surprise, if only for a moment.
The giant heaves, using the shaft of the spear as leverage to throw Komodo across the top of the ziggurat. The faun lands heavily, but Maris thrusts the claws downward before impact, breaking the fall. Komodo rises again, ready to–
The giant is too fast. It slams shoulder-first into Komodo, sending the faun sprawling again, this time off the top of the ziggurat entirely. Komodo falls to the next tier, smashing hard to the surface and still rolling, over the next edge, and again, and again. If not for the harness, Maris would be batted around the inside of the control sphere until her bones were jelly. Her head strikes the cradle at a bad angle, painful even through her helmet.
The fall stops. Maris can hardly see; her vision is gauzy. She can make out a shape that she thinks is the sloped pool they arrived through, or one just like it. One last plan tries to form in her mind, but it’s like every neuron in her head has been knocked out of place. She can’t put it together.
A shape grows in the softly wavering pool, not a trick of the light but a gradually-materializing object, bone-white. Then the surface of the water explodes outward, raining seawater on Komodo. A vast shape, broad and tapering toward a fluked tail, with three fins on either side, emerges into the air above. The mechafauna is one of the aquatic variants, but Maris can’t identify it immediately. Reaction thrusters fire to keep the cetacean shape aloft, its ribbed bulk bobbing precariously in the air, as it curves around to open a gaping, gurgling mouth. Another faun leaps from it, quadrupedal, with a sharp head with three eyes on each side. Maris’s breath catches. Gilfaethwy? They can’t handle another enemy, not like this.
The wolf-type’s graceful impact places it between the giant and Komodo, and now Maris recognizes the bristling shoulders, especially as the bulk of them pops up to reveal missile packs. With a hiss and a flash, several projectiles draw spirals of trailing smoke through the sky, pushing the giant back a step. Gilfaethwy doesn’t have missile packs, Maris realizes—this is Hati.
“Bowen, is that you?” Maris asks.
“No, sorry,” Lynd’s voice shivers over her helmet comm. “You’re going to have to get by with just me.” Maris feels tears burn at the corner of her eyes. Relief swirls within her, no matter how out of place at this moment. Lynd offers the answer to her next question before she asks it. “Bowen’s… recovering. Hold on.”
Magnetic tethers snap from the cargo mounts at Hati’s sides, clamping onto Komodo’s body. Hati kicks off the ziggurat with all the force she can, flinging both herself and Komodo to the cetacean faun as it loops back toward the exit to the Sea of Antillia. The last thing Maris hears before losing consciousness is the crash of thunder.
***
Maris sat, legs crossed, at a small table next to the high windows that opened onto the spacelanes ships followed in and out of Corax. A few distant stars twinkled as they moved—small ships too far away to identify as such. The view was framed by her home petal on one side and a densely-forested petal on the other. She’d never been there.
A bowl of potato soup (probably made with one of Mother’s potato strains) languished on the table in front of her. There wasn’t anything wrong with it — the food in the ASTERA canteen was as good as anywhere else, since they had access to produce grown across the bloom. She just didn’t have much appetite.
She’d gotten an explanation of everything that had happened while she had been occupied with Komodo. Gilfaethwy had started acting strangely while being unloaded at Corax. That’s when Gilfaethwy went feral. Lynd couldn’t control him. Hati couldn’t subdue him.
As for what happened to cause Gilfaethwy to go wild—rabid is the word that Deniz used—Maris couldn’t get a straight answer. She had a suspicion that Deniz knew, or at least knew more than he had been willing to share with her so far. He also wouldn’t tell her much about the Ziggurat, though at least he vaguely implied that, if she joined ASTERA, such information would come with the job. Then he offered her the job.
This, she had observed at the time, was blackmail. Deniz had countered that it was coercion, at worst.
By the time Komodo had dived to the Ziggurat, Deniz had called in help. Recovery teams had already managed to reactivate Hati, in case Gilfaethwy wasn’t as subdued as he appeared. The cetacean transport faun Hafgufa, which was near Corax at the time, could dive deep enough to follow Komodo, but could only carry a smaller faun than Zilant. Lynd had volunteered.
Across the canteen, Maris saw Lynd receive his own lunch, then scan the room until he saw her. He limped over to her table. His plate landed with a clatter, scattering a few stray legumes.
“That seat might be taken, you know,” she said.
“I know it is,” Lynd said. “I just took it.” He collected the escaped legumes again and prodded something mashed with a fork. “You aren’t eating.”
“True.”
“You should eat something.”
“True.” Maris looked down and stirred her soup slowly, but still didn’t actually bring any to her mouth. “I don’t think I’m ready to go home,” she said finally.
“You don’t have to stay there. You can always come back to Corax after. It’s not going anywhere.”
“That’s not how I meant.” Maris wished the table was a bit wider so that there would be more space between her and Lynd. They were too close to talk about serious subjects. “I don’t want to have to explain things to people. Where I’ve been for the last several days, that it was me in that faun during the attack, that I’m leaving the bloom…” And I don’t want to face Bowen, she added silently. “Mother came here yesterday, so she knows. I don’t think I owe anyone else anything.”
“So you’re definitely leaving?” Lynd was particularly fixated on staring at, rather than eating, his lunch.
“Yes,” Maris said. “Kardashev II has space for Komodo and I. We’re a matched set.” Hati had let Lynd in without much fuss, apparently, and with Bowen recovering from battle with Gilfaethwy, and Gilfaethwy recovering from fighting Komodo, Hati and Lynd were the only faun-handler pair back home. Where Hati was willing to accept a change of handlers, the Komodo had demonstrated to several ASTERA personnel that it had no intention of allowing anyone inside that wasn’t Maris. “I feel bad that I won’t be around to help rebuild,” she clarified self-consciously.
“I’m sure we can handle it,” said Lynd. Maris abruptly felt guilty for her anxiety. Lynd’s eyes didn’t have the same spark to them that she remembered from only days earlier. When she looked at him, and at the brace that currently clamped around his hips and right leg, she felt the guilt pace around in her chest cavity before settling down again. Even if she hadn’t been fully in control of her faun when he was fighting Gilfaethwy, she wondered if Lynd would be in this state at all if it weren’t for her. Maybe that look in his eyes indicated he felt the same about Bowen. “But you don’t have to be a matched set, or whatever. Just because Komodo won’t let anyone else handle him doesn’t mean that you have to do it. Some fauns are just wild.”
She would have thought that the two of them almost dying within the span of a few hours, both in the control spheres of fauns they didn’t expect to be piloting, both in the face of circumstances they still didn’t understand, would have brought them together. But the way things felt to Maris now, Lynd might as well have been all the way back on Earth.
“I have to be with Komodo,” she said. Maybe she could have offered some explanation. She hadn’t told Lynd about Beithir, or her suspicions that Beithir and Komodo were connected somehow. Or that Komodo wanted her to do something about it, apparently.
Or, maybe most importantly, that she thought Komodo was lonely.
She pulled Lynd into a hug before they said their goodbyes. She didn’t exactly want to, but she felt that she should want to, if she could only coax that part of herself out of its den with treats and ear-scritches. She didn’t hold too tight; she didn’t want to somehow squeeze in just the wrong place and undo the work of several doctors and centuries of medical technology. She hoped that it didn't feel too impersonal.
Maris deposited her bowl, still full of untouched soup, in a recycler and boarded a lift down to the shuttle launch that would take her to Kardashev II. She’d return home to Ophan someday, but not today. Not until she’d figured things out with Komodo. After ASTERA had stopped trying to inspect him, Komodo had gone back into a sort of hibernation. Deniz said this was probably due to the damage suffered. She didn’t know how long her faun would sleep this time.
She just knew she would be there when he woke up.