The Tomb World Ch10 (Patreon)

With their third and final captain now formally introduced to the Gotari, the Terrans and Gotari were finally able to really begin making strides in diplomacy. As their translators got more and more fluent in translating either language the Terrans allowed to see more of the society the Gotari had built for themselves on this mysterious world. The previous construction had been unideal for their biology, favoring more wide-open spaces and swooping architecture. Whereas the Gotari needed tighter more claustrophobic spaces for them to move around in.

They were a strictly arboreal species who needed their homes to be built more tree dimensionally than the Terrans were used to. The Carkic were the most monkey-like species in the Union, and even they did better on flat ground than the Gotari. And while Humans had descended from arboreal apes they were far from natural tree climbers any more. The human body was built for extended upright locomotion, throwing objects, and fine motor skills with their hands. What took a human gymnast years of training and exercise to accomplish a Gotari could manage as soon as they could stand.

Daniels was familiar with how different physiologies affected things like civil architecture. During his time aboard the Astaroth and later the Tartarus he had visited Balter and Kaydo. He had seen how the Balikstro had confined themselves the alpine highlands of their world and maximized that space with impressive efficiency and grace. Kaydo had been more in line with the urban sprawl Daniels was familiar with on Earth, with everything scaled up to accommodate for the hulking Trike physiology. And more recently aboard the Staff of Lore Daniels had visited the abandoned city of Greveir, an ancient desert city comparable to Earth’s own Petra but on a much larger scale. It was a city that seemed more like a cross between a termite cathedral mounds and prairie dog burrows. So while Daniels was impressed an integued by what he could see, he wasn’t at the point of wide eyed gaping. Like Eliza and Sam.

Daniels and Tom had been much too large to fit into the Gotari buildings Fezzen and the others had tried to show them, so only Eliza and Sam were able to go in. They had been impressed with the open multi-level arrangement filled with rope bridges and nets draped over the walls. Daniels and Tom had tried to peek through the doors and windows of the soldier barracks they had been shown, but couldn’t really get a good view inside.

Foric remained outside and apologized to the two of them. “I didn’t realize that you would find our barracks interesting. They’re quiet literally the most boring and functional buildings we have.”

Daniels smirked “We’re aware of how barracks tend to be. Its less about seeing their building and more about comparing the differences. Your people and my own have very different philosophies about architecture and its very interesting to see at play.”

“How do hyoomahn buildings typically work?” Foric asked curiously.

“Their a typically flat space with walls dividing it into some smaller rooms. Some are very open plan, while others are just several boxes attached to a single hallway.”

Foric’s tail curled into a J-shape, “And they are all one level?” he asked in wonder.

“No, they have multiple levels, but not like yours. Its more like a second flat level stacked on top of the first. Actually give me a second,” Daniels said as he opened up his personal assistant on his wrist and navigated to his photos. “That’s me and my parents in front of my childhood home.”

Foric looked over and scanned the photo “Its very, pointy at the top. What does that accomplish?”

“Its for diverting rain. Prevents it from pooling in one spot and dripping through. Do your people not have to worry about that sort of thing?”

His tail curled into an S-shape. “Its different here on the Planet-city. During the shadow season there is little rain. And in the sun season the metal on the surface will start to bake. So the weather patterns are strange here. And there are large parts of the city that stay very hot year round, some sort of radioactive-decay. The decaying elements heat a sealed chamber, and the chamber radiates heat out across the planet, its how we don’t freeze solid during the shadow season. But some of that infrastructure has broken down and the heat meant to cool a whole district gets leaked into one spot. The water that finds its way there creates a geyser system using old pipes.”

“Have you identified which elements are decaying, might make it easier to figure the age of this place?” Daniels asked.

“We have, one of the first things the first explorers did. The chambers use elements we don’t understand, in ways we can’t even begin to figure out.” Foric said with a dismissive shake of his head.

“I take it that’s a common theme here” Tom rumbled, speaking for the first time in several minutes.

“More often than not. The few breakthroughs we have had are impressive.”

“Is that how you got those antigravity engines?” Daniels asked, remembering the strange blue glowing engines the Gotari used in the quad-ships.

“Not anti gravity. Reactionless thrust.”

“That’s impossible.”

“That’s what we thought, it violates Kendal’s principle of energy. But here we are, with a reactionless drive.” His tail made a flicking motion Daniels understood to be like a shrug. “You would need to ask an engineer about it. I’m a military man not a scientist, I just need to know how fast it can move.”

“That tracks.” Daniels murmured.

“Tracks what?” Foric asked.

“Just a phrase, it means I am intimately familiar with your mindset.” Daniels explained.

Foric’s tail shifted again, and so did his feet. Daniels had been trying to learn the Gotari body language as best as he could, but this was new to him. “You don’t strike me as a scientist, or science type. I might be misinterpreting this, but you seem more like me, a military man.”

Daniels frowned “In a sense.” He said casually. They had agreed on several subjects to keep from the Gotari. One of which was the Hellworlder fleet, they felt that directly aligning themselves with a military force would complicate matters more than they wished. Especially since that military force was unrecognized and currently classified as space pirates. many within the Hellworlders still thought of themselves as organized pirates rather than a military force committed to acts of piracy. “Terrans don’t have a specific military force any more, that’s all handled by that big space government I mentioned.”

“Your people leave something as vital as their own defense to a foreign government?” Foric pressed suspiciously.

“Yeah. Technically we’re a member of the Union, and have just as much right to join their armed forces. But certain politics have barred my people.”

“And yet you feel like a soldier to me.” Foric continued pressing.

“Well, our military is disbanded, but those veterans didn’t just disappear. We made our own communities and raised our kids with military discipline. Tom, Sam, and I all chose to later get a formal military training which made us well suited for our current mission.”

Foric’s beak like mouth worked in small circles as he pieced out what Daniels had just said. “I think I understand. Its common for military younglings to follow their parents footsteps. Fezzen chose to be a watcher because of me. And your saying this training made you desirable for an exploration mission?”

“Yes. My ship is staffed with people like me to take care of its daily running, while the science crews focus on their research.”

Foric made a chirping sound in his throat. “I think I understand. That may have been a wise decision, science types often get to obsessed with digging to realize they struck something dangerous.”

“The swarm?” Daniels asked.

Foric nodded. Previously they had been reluctant to fully explain where it came from. But part of these diplomatic talks were for Daniels and his people to get a better idea of the threat they were facing so that they could better inform the fleet. “we had been staring at the planet city with a hungry abandon for centuries. Being made of metal it would sometimes appear like a star in the sky. And unlike the so called ‘wandering stars’ of old this star would vanish at seemingly random times. Turns out we could only see it when it was creeping behind  Forak, and only if our world was in the right spot. The vanishing star was the subject to many legends, but the truth was even more fantastic than we could imagine. When we made telescopes one of the first things we did was point them at the vanishing star. We couldn’t make out much detail, but we could see that it was a completely metallic moon. Eventually we sent up rockets with satellites, and we saw that it wasn’t just made of metal, but a planet sprawling city. It confirmed that we were not the only life to ever exist.”

Daniels nodded his head, “Confirmation of alien life is always a pivotal moment in every species. My people had a nearby world called Mars, and we were obsessed with the idea of little green Martians.”

Foric looked confused “But Ehl-ai-zah is pink.”

Daniels laughed, “first off we refer to her skin color as white, or Caucasian. Second, while Eliza is a Martian, she descends from human colonists who went to that world much like yours came here. Mars turned out to be a desolate world with no life at all, and was the second celestial body we colonized outside Earth.”

“I see. Yes I understand the comparison. After the discovery was made my people put a great amount of resources into reaching the Planet-City of Forak. Satellites, rovers, manned expeditions, permanent outposts, and finally self-sustaining colonies. Several colonies where set up around various points of interest, the colony that would become Moulvus was sent here because of the access shaft that led into the deepest parts of the planet.”

“The one you guided us down.”

“The same. It extends many, uh, you called them keeloh meetirs?”

“Yes, that’s our word for that general measurement. Though I’m fairly sure your measurement is longer than a kilometer.”

“Yes, well, the shaft goes very far down and connects with many of the planet’s subsurface layers. Cargo docks, warehouses, and huge train tunnels to move goods around. As well as power cables, defunct generator districts, and underground habitation districts. This very hanger bay was what we assumed to be a warehouse, we chose to make it into a base since it is centrally attached to many of the underground tunnels. Moulvus is in another warehouse structure.”

“Plenty of opportunities to explore and develop, must have been a popular location.”

Foric flicked his tail dismissively “It was actually our parent nation’s third choice. The other two spots were secured by our rivals before we could arrive. One we judged to be the planet’s capital district. The other appeared to be a large academy area.

“What kind of academy, art, science, military?”

“We weren’t sure, either way our assumption was wrong. It was a military base for coordinating a defense of the Planet-City. It had seemingly been attacked before the inhabitants of the Planet-City vanished. Some sort of apocalyptic attack.”

“How are you certain?”

“Evidence, lots of evidence that the people were destroyed quickly and without warning. There was just too much left behind to be anything else.”

Daniels frowned “Are you sure it was an attack?”

“No, its just the only conclusion we came to by the evidence, why do you ask?”

“There’s a lot of myth around the people who built things like this planet. We don’t even know if it was one civilization or many. What we do know is that they disappeared in a very short time. One theory is genocide. Another is that they somehow ascended in mass to a higher plane.”

“You can’t believe that?” Foric challenged.

Daniels shrugged “That’s just the common rumor. Its been so long since their disappearance that we can’t be sure of much.”

Foric grunted “yes, well whatever happened the originals vanished. They left behind this city, and their technology. Our homeworld flourished as we began sending back relics, and in turn more and more scientists flooded to the Planet-City. The Colony over the military academy went through a sort of hostile takeover and ousted their leaders from their nations military and ran the base like a technocracy. Tried to make a scientific utopia.”

Daniels glanced towards Eliza who was listening to an energetic Fezzen explain something with big hand waves and tail flicks. “I understand what you mean. Mars tried something similar.”

“Tried?” Foric asked.

“Scientists still need laborer’s, and the utopian ideal soon morphed into a more aristocratic society. The families of scientists and later arriving business tycoons began to horde power and land. There’s still a focus on learning and industry, but also a power structure that keeps the working class from rising to high. It’s a complicated political mess.”

“Yes, well this technocracy never got to that stage. Because the Orginals didn’t just leave behind tech, but also weapons.”

“You think the Swarm is a weapon?”

“Its our best guess, either that or an experiment gone horribly wrong and sealed away until some greedy morons released them. But I think they’re weapons, their too organized and deadly to be anything else. You fought them yourself, how can they be anything else?”

Daniels recalled Sam’s reports of handling the breachers, completely impervious to gun fire and capable of rapid regeneration. “I’m leaning towards weapon as well, but what use is a weapon like the swarm?”

Foric looked at Daniels curiously “Rapid regeneration, advanced coordination, the ability to rapidly breed and repopulate by consuming raw organic matter?”

“I mean one so blindly aggressive and uncontrollable.”

“We assume that the Orignals somehow had a way of controlling them, and right now they’re in an autonomous state. Killing anything that draws their attention and growing their numbers. When they were first released they tore through that colony, spawning more drones as they went. Then they charged after the other colonies, nearly thirty by that point, and attacked. As word of the menace spread the people within the capital region made a desperate move and activated something they barely understood. A powerful electromagnetic field generator.”

“We were wondering about that, it has to be more than just an EM field generator to fully block out our instruments like it does.”

“Indeed, but that is beyond my knowledge. It prevented signals from getting in or out unless you them on a very specific sort of frequency. It cut off the swarms ability to communicate with each other, and we were able to kill what was left below the field at great cost. But a portion escaped beyond the field and attacked the home world. They multiplied in the oceans before striking at the land. By the time we took care of our own menace the home world had already fallen and the swarm began to build the hive.”

“And now they’re using the carbon in Forak’s atmosphere to continue reproducing.” Daniels guessed.

“Yes, but its very slow.”

“And they don’t leave unless someone blunders in or sends radio signals out into space.”

“So it seems. We have only been able to start interpreting their control signals in the last several cycles.”

Cycles around the gas giant that translated to several decades in Earth time. Daniels hadn’t expected to get such information out of Foric so soon. He could tell that Foric, much like Daniels, didn’t have the patience for politics. He just wanted to get Daniels up to speed so they could begin working together at finding a way out of this situation. Foric hoped that the arrival of Daniels and his crew meant a change for the better.

“You said you were reading their signals, how?”

“I have told you before that I and Fezzen are Watchers, our organization has been watching to swarm for many years. And after a while we have begun to interpret what different fluctuations in the Hive’s frequency meant for Swarm movements.”

Daniels smothered a smile, “Could you show me?”