Swarmworld Arcturus 1: Maris

By Brandon Perdue

The thump and tremor of the passing mechafauna rarely woke Maris anymore; once every week for five years gave her plenty of time to learn to tune out the noise. Mother never had become accustomed to the passing of the giant machines, though, which meant Maris did not get to sleep in on convoy day if she was inside the house. Sleeping on the roof was nearly as good as sleeping inside, as the weather on their petal was quite temperate. Lights from the opposite petals glowed softly above in wavering pools; Maris could only just make out the shapes of the structures scattered along them in small clusters. She liked the reminder that there were people beyond just her immediate neighbors. Maris had seen images from the settlement library of what Earth’s sky looked like at night, the borderless sweep of countless tiny points of light. Those images always made the night sky look so distracting.

The bloom’s five petals were opening by the time the mechafauna strutted past. Maris was awake. The shade under the house’s solar panels hid the bags under her eyes. There were two, both quadrupeds, Gilfaethwy and Hati, what most of the people of Antillia called “wolf-types.” Gilfaethwy was in the lead, lifting a mechanical foreleg in a slow, fluid motion that made him nonetheless look unhappy to be operational. Gilfaethwy’s spine arched high, bristling with solar collectors. Layered dermal plates shuffled over the faun’s internals. The titanium-alloy containers secured to Gilfaethwy’s flanks looked all the more rigid by comparison, wreathed in mist from the faun’s coolant exhausts. Gilfaethwy’s paired coilguns, on either side of his head, looked almost like horns.

Maris’s rooftop was a few meters lower than Gilfaethwy’s eyeline, though she would show up bright on the faun’s sensors. Gilfaethwy’s jerking gait paused as it passed.

“How far out are you going?” The lupine faun’s mouth did not move. The filtered voice came from a speaker mounted under his chin.

“Good morning to you, too,” Maris said. She slung her pack over one shoulder. “Just a few klicks. The ridgeline.”

Gilfaethwy seemed to sigh. The middle eyeholes on each side of Gilfaethwy’s head wept another tendril of mist. “There’s no point asking if you have permission, is there?”

“No, not really.”

“If you fall off I am not turning around.”

The lupine mechafauna resumed walking. Maris stepped off the roof and gripped the rungs of a ladder attached to one of Gilfaethwy’s containers, allowing Gilfaethwy’s stride to sweep her along. Gilfaethwy’s mist crept around her in threads, humid and clinging. As her home receded into the distance, Maris clambered onto the ridged top of the container.

“Is this new?” she asked, reaching for a bristled array of antennae.

“New communications equipment. More stable when the bloom is closed.”

“Poor boy.” Maris reached between armor plates to pat the dark gray of Gilfaethwy’s endoskeleton.

“He doesn’t mind.”

“And he told you that, did he?”

Gilfaethwy didn’t miss a step as they talked. “You know that he doesn’t ‘tell’ me anything. If you really wanted input on what we strap to the fauns, you could have become a handler.”

“You’re in a mood today.” Maris laid back atop the container and rested her head in her hands, her orange field jacket bunched around her shoulders. It swayed gently in perfect rhythm. The two mechafauna were facing the pinion, the central structure where the bloom’s petals met; Maris caught the moment when Antillia’s petals locked into place for the Arcturan day cycle. The two mechafauna were in the rolling countryside now, surrounded by fields of long, blue-green grasses. Behind them, up-petal, robotic diggers trundled in neat rows, harvesting carrots and radishes. The radishes were Mother’s handiwork.

Hati picked up the pace and came alongside Gilfaethwy. Though they were both wolf-types, Hati was sleeker and lower to the ground. The faun moved like it was up to something.

“Knock it off, both of you,” came the voice of Hati’s handler. “Bickering with passengers is not how someone becomes, or remains, a handler, Lynd.”

“Right. Sorry, Bowen,” Lynd answered from inside Gilfaethwy’s control sphere. Cool mist puffed from the forward-most of the three holes on each side of Gilfaethwy’s angular head.

“Where are you headed today, Maris?” Bowen asked. Hati’s immovable expression always looked skeptical to Maris. It felt like Hati was judging what Maris was doing, every convoy day. Feeling that Hati had a low opinion of her was worse than knowing that Bowen did. Bowen had always treated Maris and Lynd like he knew the universe better than they did, just because he had a few memories of Earth and they didn’t.

“Scanning biots,” said Maris. “Only up to the ridgeline. No going out of bounds or anything.”

“Uh-huh,” said Bowen.

“Really!”

“I’m not sure if I’m more concerned that you’re going out of bounds again, or that you still think you are fooling anyone about it,” said Bowen.

Gilfaethwy puffed coolant. Hati’s face was impassive, as it always was.

***

The regular passage of the mechafauna had worn a trail from Ophan, Maris’s home settlement, to the Highway, the only artificially-constructed road on the whole bloom. Gilfaethwy and Hati walked alongside the Highway, as their weight could damage the embedded solar panel lattice. Lightweight, one- or two-person velos occasionally zipped by. Hati picked up the pace enough to move in front of Gilfaethwy, and Lynd let Bowen put a little space between their fauns. The line of the Highway stretched out in front of them for kilometers, rising along the length of the petal toward the bloom’s pinion in a gentle curve.

The two-faun convoy paused at a copse of trees to drop Maris off. Gilfaethwy crouched, almost settling like a dog tucking in for a nap, so that Maris could climb safely down the cargo container and then drop a short distance — no more than a meter — to the blue grass below. Maris waved them off as Gilfaethwy rose to standing again and followed Hati as they continued their trip down-petal toward the pinion, bound for the glittering tower-city of Corax.

It was nearly two hours since blooming, and the sky was pale blue. Maris tapped the biometric charm clipped to her wrist to switch it to silent mode. She headed uphill, away from the trees scattered along the Highway. As she put more distance behind her, the Antillian bluegrasses grew taller, more unkempt, until they nearly reached her waist. She came to the bottom of the ridge: a rough escarpment between the lowlands that ran up the middle of this petal and the plateau that dominated the trailing fifteen percent or so. A set of caution beacons ran along the base of the escarpment, but they held no power over Maris.

The pitons and rope she’d left in the rock face were still there; eventually someone would discover and remove them, but it could be weeks or months before anyone that safety-minded would travel this particular part of the petal. The ridge was only about ten meters above, and Maris scrambled up the rock face quickly, pulling herself onto the plateau. The grass grew here, too, and waved rhythmically. Small winged biots swooped with the beat, occasionally dipping down where the grass was thickest.

The biots, like the fauns, were native to the Swarm of which this bloom, Antillia, was just one fractional part. The bloom, and the Swarm as a whole, had no organic fauna that humans had discovered, though both the small, innocuous biots and the massive, less innocuous mechafauna had at least techno-organic components. Their purpose was still something of a mystery.

Maris slid her scanner from her bag. She had dozens of images and video recordings of these biots. She’d even managed to coax one into landing on the back of her hand once, where it perched for about thirty seconds, shuffling its iridescent wings and gripping her fingers with its four grabby limbs.

“Remember me?” Maris extended a hand toward the nearest biot. She wasn’t sure if this was literally the same biot who had been so social before; they were almost impossible to tell apart. The biot had a pair of trapezoidal wings tucked against its ovoid body. It hopped on its four spindly legs and flexed its wings, sending ripples of iridescent color from shoulder to wingtip. Then it leapt, sailing neatly between two meter-tall blades of grass.

Maris followed, trying to walk lightly and unobtrusively while still keeping up with the small creature. This particular type of biot was prone to spooking. After a short pause, the biot hopped again, adjusting its course a little. Maris kept a comfortable four or five meters between them, and stopped moving whenever the biot landed. After the third hop, the biot scuttled over and inspected a particular blade of grass. Maris couldn’t tell what was special about this blade of grass; it was no taller or shorter than its neighbors, no more or less blue-green. She brought up her scanner to record what the biot was doing. After about fifteen seconds, the biot grasped the blade of grass with its beak-like manipulator, snipping it neatly, and tucked the grass against its body. In a few quick hops, it disappeared across the grasses, blending into a shadow a short way ahead.

Maris covered the distance quickly. The shadow was a hole in the ground, the edges uneven. The height of the grass around it made it hard to see from more than a meter or two away; she might have walked past it half a dozen times on previous visits. Peering carefully down into the hole, light scattered from not one, but three or four sets of biot wings. The hole was large enough that she could climb down, even with her pack still slung over her shoulder. What little sunlight slipped through the gap illuminated firm ground not far below.

Maybe this was why there were caution beacons. Hidden holes opening into caverns below. Unstable ground, maybe. The smart thing to do would be to note the hole’s location and go do some of the scanning she’d intended to do, safely aboveground. She could come back when she wasn’t alone. Maybe she could convince Lynd to come with her on a day he wasn’t handling Gilfaethwy. Maybe she could tell Mother, who would notify someone of authority to send people to check out the hole (or at least surround it with more beacons). On the other hand, Maris was here, now. She climbed down.

Her right boot found a solid foothold in the darkness just below the lip of the entrance. Her left found what seemed to be another. That second foothold gave way as soon as she tried to put more of her weight on it. She slid down into the darkness in a shower of dirt and gravel, landing in that lone patch of sunlight. The biots fluttered anxiously. Her biometric tag buzzed gently, warning of a sudden, but not immediately concerning, spike in Maris’s heart rate.

She pushed herself up on her elbows. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could see that she’d fallen into a larger chamber than she expected. She was on a narrow ledge. The light drifting in from the jagged hole above illuminated the stony floor, only a few meters down, of a large cavern. The walls of the cavern were far enough into shadow that Maris couldn’t gauge how large it really was, the ceiling high above. In the darkness, the biots perched like butterflies on a heap of pale rock, angular and sprawling. Maris turned on her scanner’s flashlight and shined it toward the biots. It wasn’t a rock formation they were perched on.

It was a mechafauna.

The massive machine sprawled across the cavern floor, legs splayed almost haphazardly. It looked like it had too many limbs, until Maris realized that one of them was a long, multi-segmented tail, stronger-looking than the whiplike tails of the wolf-types. Powerful hind legs dwarfed a set of shorter forelegs, but each foreleg ended in three-fingered, articulated hands. Each finger ended in a claw half Maris’s height. The head, resting on one of the forelegs, was long and angular, sharper than Gilfaethwy’s and having only a single eye on each side, and it didn’t appear to be a coolant exhaust like on the wolf-types. The tip of its nose rested in a shallow pool of water. The whole faun had to be at least thirty meters nose to tail, and clusters of crystal grew on it where the biots congregated.

Maris was prostrate on the far edge of the pool from the faun’s head. It looked almost like the faun had its head cocked, regarding her curiously with its left eye. The eye was just a flat, featureless circle; she couldn’t even tell if it was some kind of lens or just a seam in the faun’s external plating. That lifeless eye frightened her more than any part of the faun.

Maris got to her feet. She had landed on the side of the pool opposite the faun, but shallow water a few meters across wasn’t going to stop the faun from abruptly lunging the distance and swallowing her whole or…whatever a faun might do. She swept her scanner over it a few more times. The biots flexed their wings. The faun stayed motionless. Her heartrate slowed a little; if it were going to make any sudden moves, wouldn’t it have done so by now?

“Who are you?” Maris asked. She splashed over, finding the pool not even knee-deep, and pressed her palm into the layer of dirt and dust on the faun’s nose. Whoever this was, it’d been down here for a long time.

The faun did not stir. Maris had never gotten this close to a wild faun — and it must be wild, or else it wouldn’t be alone down here — but she thought outright physical contact should have triggered something.

She swept her scanner along the length of the mechafauna again, this time dragging the pool of light more slowly to take in what details she could. All of the external armor was the same flexible Arcturan alloy common to most mechafauna, with no additional plates or mounts added for defensive equipment or cargo. There was no fan of solar panels, no defensive coilgun, no thrusters. No name painted on the side.

Maris crawled all over the inert faun for the better part of an hour, but she didn’t find any identifying marks or way to wake the thing up. Eventually she turned her attention to climbing back out of the grotto. Several attempts (and painful scrapes) later, she emerged back onto the plateau. It would still be hours before Gilfaethwy and Hati passed by on the Highway again; Maris didn’t want to wait and started walking. She walked up-petal for nearly an hour before a passing velo let her hitch a ride for the last leg.

Back at home, Maris used the house terminal to link the main dataline from Corax. Accessing the mechafauna record took only a moment. The screen populated with datastream-overlayed images of nearby mechafauna first. Gilfaethwy and Hati were front and center, since they were likely nearly home from their day-long convoy run to other settlements of the bloom. The third faun displayed was Selket, which normally stuck close to the pinion; farther away than Maris’s mystery mechafauna for sure. Ta Prohm, the faun in the settlement of Gren, looked most like the one she found in the cave, a little like pictures she’d seen of Earth reptiles; but its legs were much shorter and more uniform, and clawless. Besides, the people of Gren had painted the plates on Ta Prohm’s back all sorts of festive colors. The last images showed wild Encantado and tame Hafgufa, both aquatics which didn’t resemble her faun at all.

Maris slid the main record of known mechafauna to the fore. The list was sorted alphabetically by default, which didn’t help since she didn’t know the faun’s name. Likewise, the second filter, date of first contact, was useless to her.

Her hand stopped, hovered just shy of the key to move to the next sort. Somebody had to have encountered this faun before, certainly. The faun was a little off the beaten path, but this was the most thoroughly-explored bloom in the entire Swarm; every meter of the petals had been traveled and subjected to automated scans by survey drones. Delicate equipment now tracked nearly every measurable variable of the bloom’s ecosphere, monitoring for anything that strayed outside of human-habitable standards. Missing an entire mechafauna, even concealed, sounded impossible.

Maris next filtered the data by configuration. No two fauns were identical, at least as far as anyone knew, but they broadly fit into certain body types, like the wolf-type to which both Gilfaethwy and Hati belonged. She skimmed, sliding categories away that clearly didn’t fit: wyvern, cetacean, cervine, procyonid. The rest gave her images, most laden with metadata giving locations, distances, behaviors, atmospheric conditions — anything recorded about a given faun, wild or otherwise. Some mechafauna were still almost entirely mysterious, only observed once or twice on blooms with extreme environments. But even the handful of wild mechafauna that remained on Antillia were thoroughly documented. The faun in the grotto somewhat resembled Zilant, a wyvern-type in use by the ASTERA exploration unit, but that faun had been considerably modified years ago; they weren’t the same.

The door to the house hissed open. “Oh, I didn’t expect you to be home,” Mother said. She shared Maris’s dark complexion, though Maris was a few centimeters taller. She wore a light yellow tunic characteristic of laboratory work and pants with cuffs slightly flared.

Maris quickly thumbed the control that would save her terminal state for later and switched to her biot scans before Mother came close enough to see what she was doing. “Did you take those today?” Mother asked.

Maris nodded.

“You know,” Mother said, resting her hands on Maris’s shoulders, “Dr. Negedu’s team in Olympic might be looking for someone with your skills.”

“Are you trying to kick me out?”

“No, no, not exactly,” Mother demurred, “but…”

“But you think I lack purpose,” Maris filled in.

Mother shrugged. “I don’t want you to be a cog in a machine,” she said softly. “Just consider it, will you?”

***

For the next several days, Mother expected Maris to do shifts with her team of geneticists, working to tailor various Earth plants to survive and thrive in the environment of Antillia. The bloom’s ecosphere was similar enough to Earth’s own environment that many of the species brought to Arcturus by the Second Wavers were able to grow there, albeit with difficulty, but Mother was chasing the sort of yields that could be expected of genetically modified crops on Earth, enough to let the human population of the Swarm grow, not just sustain itself.

The next convoy day, Maris rode out along the Highway on Gilfaethwy again. She’d told Lynd about the mystery faun the night before, though she’d sworn him to secrecy. Lynd wouldn’t give her up, at least unless she went missing for so long that it started to worry Mother. Maris felt somewhat at ease that, if the worst happened, at least Lynd would have an idea of where to find the body.

When she reached the entrance to the grotto, she lowered a collapsible ladder and secured it to the rim of the hole. Anchors drove into the wall to keep the ladder in place as she climbed down. There were more biots this time, at least eight, hopping and gliding around the nameless mechafauna. They’d spread blades of grass and other small objects across the faun’s back, and perched on the crystalline growths. The faun itself looked just as inert as it had before.

Using a multitool she’d borrowed from Lynd (without asking), she found the seam that defined the lower edge of the faun’s face. Gilfaethwy and Hati both had their control spheres in the head, beneath the faceplate. She slid the end of the multitool under the faun’s lip.

“I’m sorry about this,” she said to the faun, laying her free hand on its nose as gently as she could manage, not far from the handprint she’d left on her last visit. She powered on the multitool and lifted.

Nothing happened.

Maris pulled, and even with the multitool increasing the effective force considerably, the faun’s faceplate remained firmly set. As Maris started to feel the strain in her shoulder, she heard a hiss, and the faceplate started to move. It hinged upward so quickly that Maris was nearly struck by the top edge. Beneath, an intricate lens assembly occupied most of the faun’s muzzle, with a large generator of some kind near the back, between the faun’s eyes. The control sphere she’d expected to find was nowhere to be seen. Did it not have one?

She started trying to multitool on any seam she could find, anywhere multiple armor plates met. Finally, the chest plate seemed to give, and shifted up and away, revealing the glossy black surface of a control sphere.

The leading face of the sphere slid back in strips. The sphere interior did not resemble what Maris had seen of Gilfaethwy’s sphere at all; there were no terminals or screens, no control yokes — just a seat, in a sort of armature. The seat looked like it approximated ergonomics without quite understanding them. It gave her the impression of one of those motion simulator rigs she rode as a kid.

She’d spent every waking moment of the last several days thinking about the faun. On her first visit, she’d been scared to see it wake up. Abstractly, she thought waking it was the right thing to do, but seeing it move and rise in this dark, confined place, twisting, shaking, testing its actuators, shaking off years untold, moving, sliding, heedless of the small creature that hadn’t been there when it went to sleep. A god, a monster, dazed from slumber, stumbling through the motions of a routine as dimly felt as the gravitational force of a passing comet.

Experimentally, Maris sat in the solitary seat in the hollow of the sphere.

She felt, more than heard, a low rumble go through the entire body of the mechafauna, almost like a growl. The spherical shell slid closed around her. For a moment Maris was plunged into darkness. She tried to stand, but a harness snapped into place over her shoulders and upper body. The inside wall of the sphere illuminated to display the outside, as if both the sphere and the exterior armor were entirely transparent. The air around her hummed. The head swung left, then right.

“Hello,” Maris said. Lynd had often told her that fauns didn’t really communicate with language, but maybe they just didn’t like talking to Lynd. “I’m Maris. Do you have a name? Or something I can call you?” She ran her fingers over the interior of the sphere; it looked smooth but felt stippled in a complex pattern. “I know people name fauns, but I’d rather call you what you want to be called.”

Maris felt a tickle near her ankles, and another along her forearms where they rested on the seat. Argamatter crawled up the armature column in front of the seat, like clay possessed, and shaped itself into a pair of tubes, her own shoulder width apart and the right size for her arms to fit inside. She reached her right hand toward one of them.

The faun shook. Maris withdrew her hand, and held both near her body to avoid accidentally touching anything. With a lurch, the faun stood, crashing through the ceiling of the grotto. Several square meters of dirt and rock tumbled down around the faun, scattering and glancing off its armored hide. The head swung around again.

“How long have you been down there?” Maris asked. If the faun even knew she was there, she couldn’t tell. Since she couldn’t find the nameless faun through the network, she couldn’t discount the possibility that she was the first human to discover it. “There have been some big changes around here. Maybe—”

She stopped. Now that the faun was out of the grotto, she could see in all directions. The curvature in the petal meant that she could see her settlement from here, several kilometers up-petal. And the settlement was burning. Maris uttered something she’d heard Mother say under her breath sometimes when things were going bad. As Maris gaped at the cloud of smoke rising from her home, the faun slowly turned its head back in that direction until it, too, seemed to be staring into the flame.

Her world is on fire.

The faun starts not just to move, but to run.

He manages the short drop over the ridge without flinching; for a faun, the distance is more akin to a high step than a real obstacle. The landscape whips by. Maris has never traveled on a faun moving this fast. She’s never traveled inside of a faun at all.

The settlement grows larger. Maris can pick out the individual structures. The moot hall is ablaze. The lattice of scanning equipment on the roof of the weather station is shattered and strewn about. Other structures look caved in. Fear howls within Maris, fear that her home is gone, that she has seen Mother for the last time, that everyone she’s ever known — her entire world — is already dead.

The faun reaches the edge of the settlement. Maris’s house looks unscathed; at least that’s one less thing for her to juggle in her panicked mind. Hati lies in a heap near the settlement’s perimeter, her armor pitted all over. Hati sparks and leaks some kind of purple fluid.

“Hati!” Maris shouts. She has no idea if her voice is played outside the control sphere. “Bowen! Lynd!” She feels hollow. There’s a void in her, left by the life she didn’t know was ending.

Then the thick black smoke gives way, and a faun steps out of it. A fleece of coolant mist wreathes the faun, so much that at first Maris can’t make out much but a vague impression of the faun’s shape. Maris hears the crack-crack-crack of a rapid-fire coilgun mount, and several shells tear through a nearby barn where the agribots are kept.

This faun is attacking, destroying her home. She doesn’t know of anyone with hostile fauns, and wild fauns don’t have coilguns. All she knows about this faun is that it is an enemy.

Maris’s faun makes the same judgment. It pushes off the ground with its forelegs, rising to a bipedal position.

Then the enemy faun’s head breaks through the mist, too.

Gilfaethwy.

Maris shouts Lynd’s name as Gilfaethwy’s coilguns start to spin.