Before the dust settled, Gill ran past the soldier toward what appeared to be a large hole in the wall, leading to the city. He jumped over the smoldering debris—mostly impossible to identify—hoping that the rebels had better things to do than waste their batteries on his tail.
He got out of the spaceport without further incident, and the central square of Ropolis opened in front of him. On his left, he spotted the statue of the black triangle raised by Baila some sixteen years before, to mark his displeasure with the city’s architects who had announced the birth of the first artificial intelligence. Today’s invasion was the last chapter of that spectacular story.
The main square was devoid of statues or buildings, except for a pair of train terminals riddled with holes that bordered a ring of golden handrails, right in the middle of it. Gill had never been to Ropolis, but just like any Antyran, he knew what was behind the handrails: the most incredible form of relief in the whole Antyran system, the Blue Crevice!
Antyra’s star was shining on the handrails, turning them into a ring of fire. Despite the lack of an atmosphere, the various particles stirred up by the explosions along with the smoke of the materials heated up by the dawn’s light slowly began to form a bluish mist, dense and sinister, blurring the heinous wounds of a colony that used to be the capital of Antyra III…
Another group of soldiers burst out of the spaceport, running to the crevice. Once they reached the handrails, they jumped over without the slightest hesitation.
Not wanting to remain alone in the glaring light, exposed to some trigger-happy townsfolk and unsure how long his suit could handle the heat, he ran after them.
And then… he saw it! Although its width didn’t exceed two hundred yards, its depth was a different story altogether. The lights on the walls allowed him to peer into the staggering abyss for more than forty miles! The probes had charted it four times that much, and still hadn’t finished the job.
Viewed from above, the chasm loosely resembled a rhomboid with irregular margins due to the shifting of the fault lines, which also fused its walls together. The fabled veins of blue ore, some thicker than ten feet, ran through the grayish-yellow rock throughout the entire depth of the chasm.
A huge maze of tectonic caverns could be reached from the walls of the abyss. They mostly followed the rift, and many could reach miles in length, their floors being covered by giant rocks detached from the ceilings during earthquakes.
He saw the rails of the transparent elevators along the walls of the abyss, which not long ago brought the Antyrans from the depths to the surface and all the way back. As expected, the cabins were thoroughly destroyed, their torn carcasses still hanging on the tracks. Here and there, large ceramic windows embedded in the stone betrayed the tracks of the spiral trains leading to the entrances of the underground city.
Gill had no doubt that the lower levels remained largely pressurized because, as far as he remembered, the inhabited galleries had large automatic doors able to protect them in case of calamity. How long would they be able to hold off the assault? Only time would tell…
Where the entries to the largest caves had pierced the walls of the abyss, the Antyrans had built large terraces for elevators. The first domes of the colonists and several ore refineries were built at level 4, right on the floors of two large caverns extending in opposite directions from the crevice. Level 4 was currently deserted.
A second wave of colonization saw the first artificial platforms built on the floors of several large caverns at greater depths. They were easy to build from compressed ore tailings melted by microwaves—a more practical solution than moving millions of tons of rocks piled on the floors of the natural caves.
The last rush of construction spilled into the deepest tunnels dug by the flames of the miners. That was why, in time, the ramifications of the city became colossal, following the richest ore veins.
Gill saw hundreds of black dots falling tremendously quickly into the abyss—each of them was a soldier invading the subterranean city. There was no other way of entry, so he grabbed the hot handrail and abandoned himself to the mercy of the hungry void, which sucked him into its infinite bowels. Very soon, however, he started his jetpack to slow down, since the speed of a free-falling object in the absence of an atmosphere will quickly increase to ridiculous values.
The first entrances appeared to have been breached and assaulted by powerful units. Gill couldn’t see much in the speed of his fall, but he glimpsed the lights of some massive explosions flashing along the dark corridors. If he had the unfortunate idea to enter, he would have landed in the middle of the fighting.
The battle raged fiercely as he descended. Surprisingly, the townsfolk were fighting much stronger than anyone could have imagined. Surely Baila hadn’t dreamed of such opposition, although His Greatness should have anticipated it. After all, the black triangle in the central square was his masterpiece, and any inhabitant of a city owning such a gift would have known how much love to expect from the prophet…
After a short while, it appeared that he had reached the front line. Each time a pressurized door was breached, the fiery outflow of air brought countless pieces of debris in the crevice, along with a thick cloud of dust. In addition to these hazards, he had to avoid all kinds of floating devices parked nearby that followed the temple troops. Among them, he recognized the black spheres, the sinister neural inductors from whose effect he was now shielded inside the exoskeleton.
Around him, hundreds of fighters were flying in all directions like swarms of licants caught in the whirls of the vardannes.
A small spark of light entered a tunnel a thousand feet above him, and a violent flame erupted, followed by the gallery’s depressurization. As soon as the air went out, a dozen or so soldiers rushed in the entry breached by the jelly patch and disappeared into the darkness, followed by various hologuided devices. However, in a blink of an eye, a rebel ambush threw them back into the crevice, in more pieces than they had entered. He had to look upward to avoid the rocks, fragments of blast doors, and mangled soldiers sucked into the void. Some of them were probably alive, knocked unconscious by the blasts.
He wanted to pass the bulk of the fighters, but the further he descended, the rain of debris became thicker and faster. Surely he was now close to the center of the city because the entryways were large and bright. And here most of the soldiers were amassed.
“Where’s your weapon?” a threatening voice barked in his helmet.
He turned around, surprised, to find the owner of the voice. A soldier was falling nearby, followed by another one. No doubt they believed him a deserter, their lenses pointed at his chest, ready to shoot.
“What’s your unit?” the angry soldier shouted again.
Gill had no idea what to say. He shook his head while he thought of something to buy more time before they figured out he wasn’t one of them. Slowly, as if by accident, he started to slide closer to the nearest wall.
Driven by inspiration, he made a sign that his holophone was broken.
“Can you hear me? Come with us to sector 19!” the soldier ordered. “Switch on the backup transmitter!”
“I’ll hook him to my holophone,” said his companion.
Holding a cable pulled out of his exoskeleton, he approached Gill.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Gill muttered between his teeth.
“What did you s—” the first soldier began, surprised, but he didn’t have time to end his sentence because both of them had reached the grid distortion that Gill had placed in their way.