They found themselves near the wall, above a transparent elevator parked on a broken track. Due to their tremendous haste, they punched through the roof and scattered in pieces on its floor.
The war remained somewhere above Gill’s tail, and the time had come to sneak into the city—hopefully, before his luck ran out, as he had no way to avoid the debris coming faster and faster from above. But there was the small problem of getting through the closed gates…
A shiver froze his head spikes. Some agents falling into the crevice were screaming with un-Antyran voices in their holophones while their suits were ripped to pieces by infernal machines. He glanced at a dead body on a terrace, its helmet punched in three places. One of these bizarre weapons was still squirming under the visor… some sort of artificial licant?
How did the townsfolk build such devices under the eyes of the Shindam’s officials and Baila’s agents? Well, the Antyran government never stuck its tail in the deep tunnels, which hid all sorts of rumored secrets, like the distilleries of forbidden aromas. And after all, the Ropolitans had the brightest minds of the Antyran civilization on their side, the architects of the artificial intelligences.
As he began to think seriously about turning back to search for a broken door, he saw a black gap opened among the bluish veins. The gate was missing! Had it been blown away by the soldiers? He had no idea, but since there was no one nearby, it seemed a good place to try his luck. He stopped his fall and landed on the edge of the entrance.
The gallery in front of him didn’t seem as dark as he expected, being lit by a row of jelly patches glued at regular intervals along the wall. He realized with surprise that they were not simple lights but exploding charges left behind by the temple soldiers.
The laser sensor of the first bomb scanned his holophone as he walked nearby and turned off without exploding. Surely a rebel wouldn’t be so lucky if he ventured in the area.
Gill had walked more than a hundred yards inside the gallery when cries of horror suddenly burst through his holophone, followed by several short laser pulses that lit up the depths of the tunnel. He had no way to find out what was happening, but Gill didn’t need much imagination to understand that the soldiers in front of him had a problem. He stopped, undecided if he should run back or keep his ground. Instinctively, he steadied his feet, waiting for another decompression shock, but it didn’t come. Instead, from somewhere deep in the tunnel, the pulsing patches turned off their eyes, one after another.
Gill had no doubt that the darkness that was coming quickly toward him had killed the initiates. He set his helmet to the infrared spectrum, hoping to see the cause of this unexplained phenomenon. And then he saw it: a swarm of metal licants! After a few moments, the flying projectiles detected him and rushed to punch his visor.
Panic stricken, he pulled the space in front of him. The metal licants entered the distortion and found themselves thrown thirty feet backward. They kept advancing, but they fell again and again in the same loop, unable to touch Gill, who was struggling hard to make sure no uninvited creature evaded his net.
The things didn’t insist for long. All of them stopped at once, turned back, and disappeared into the darkness.
Gill didn’t know what to make of this. Maybe there was an operator beyond their little eyes who had noticed his small un-Antyran maneuver? The bracelet could be a terrific weapon in anyone’s hands, and he didn’t want to spill its secrets…
He tried a few hesitating steps forward, ready for the next attack, but it never came.
When he reached the place where he saw the explosions, he found several black bodies coiled on the floor, their spacesuits torn apart by the sinister swarm. Some of them still had hungry metal licants inside of them, throbbing with excitement while ripping the tender meat. Fortunately, the devices appeared to be too passionate about what they were doing to attack him. Or maybe they had their orders.
After another mile through the gallery, he found that it ended in a compact wall. Since he couldn’t find any trace of a secondary tunnel or even a hole, no matter how small, he couldn’t understand its purpose—a fake entry, a trap?
He turned back, chagrined at the thought of having to come up with a new plan, but then he froze. To his great surprise, the way back looked nothing like the way he had come from! The side walls were gone; in fact, they had been sophisticated holograms. Mirages on top of mirages, mirrors everywhere—no wonder the attackers ended up decimated!
He was at a crossroads of at least six major galleries. Less than thirty feet away, he saw a group of rebel fighters armed to the gills. He stretched his arms to show them he was disarmed, and shouted through the holophone, “Don’t shoot! I surrender!”
He was fully aware that his life hung by the tip of the tail, and yet he felt no trace of fear; his metamorphosis into a Sigian soldier had become almost complete. He waited, tense as a spring, ready to jump into a distortion at the smallest sign that someone would aim a laser lens toward him. But the townsfolk didn’t make any hostile gestures in his direction. On the contrary, he had the feeling they were waiting for him.
Now he had no doubt that his little confrontation in the tunnel hadn’t passed unnoticed; otherwise, why would they lift the veil of camouflage that hid their secrets?
Just when he opened his mouth to greet them, he closed it again because he saw their eyes through the transparent visors—and they were shut!
After watching them closely, he noticed a row of transparent suction cups on their head spikes, with plastic wires going to their backs. They were connected to the virtual reality! Surely not asleep but in some sort of deep trance. How it was possible to keep their eyes closed but still see and move as if they were awake? Could they have holoscanners connected to their kyis? And above all, who was handling their bodies? Could it be that their consciousness was sheltered in a parallel reality, or did they have other masters hidden in the dark tunnels?
Gill began to understand Baila’s hurry to wipe them out. The architects created abominations damned from the first pages on the Book of Creation Inrumiral, Antyrans perhaps missing their kyis or perhaps missing their own lives… They had broken all written and unwritten barriers, spoken or unspoken pledges… They mocked Zhan. If they were left unchecked, who knew what else they would defile?
The group stepped out of his way, letting him go. Without a word, one of them pointed a finger to a narrow tunnel.
Soon, he reached another closed door. As he approached to search for a console, it opened widely. Without hesitation, he moved past another group of trance warriors that was about to exit. He went through another door some fifty yards away, which opened into an oval enclosure before locking behind him.
After several moments, the green light on his forearm alerted him that breathable air was being pumped into the room. He approached a gate made of thick silvery steel, which, to his satisfaction, opened automatically. Behind it was the city of Ropolis!
The second stage of expansion, he thought. He walked into a giant cavern, very tall and narrow, split at the middle by a horizontal platform. The walls were dark yellow, like most of the crevice, and on the left side, they were traversed by an incredibly shiny silver vein. A purple rock slab about a hundred yards tall rose from the floor, close to the right wall of the cavern.
The artificial floor of the city was opaque and black, yet the streets were cast in transparent ceramic. They meandered in all directions, leading to countless other tunnels opened in the huge walls. If he looked down, he could see the natural bottom of the gallery four hundred yards below, covered in mounds of rock detritus of all sizes and shapes, piled during the eons.
On his left, the platform ended in a gentle slope cut by artificial terraces. Several blue or orange domes were scattered on them. At the end of this small hill, the wall climbed vertically for about a thousand feet, joining the right wall in a pointy archway. The alley on which he stepped was bordered by identical orange domes, probably the homes of the miners.