The street was patrolled by several Antyrans in trance.
“Don’t shoot! I surrender!” Gill shouted through the speaker, his arms stretched out horizontally, according to the war customs.
“Who are you?” a voice asked through his holophone—strangely, he couldn’t see any soldiers moving their lips.
He grabbed his helmet and slowly took it off his head.
“I’m Gillabrian,” he said simply.
CHAPTER 10.
Many stories were told in a whisper, with feigned disgust and sometimes a dash of envy, about the mining city. It was rumored that deadly secrets lay hidden in the deepest tunnels, secrets that the Antyrans outlawed by the Shindam’s cowardice or hunted down by the temples’ assassins were trying to keep buried as far as possible from the prying eyes of both sides; that things had spun out of control and that terrible abominations were being cooked in the printers buried inside the caverns. Of course, most of them were exaggerations born from the overactive imaginations of some gullible Antyrans who believed that any fantasy was possible and loved to wrinkle their spikes for a good night story. Yet, some of the rumors might just have been true, because if under the dome at the surface there was some pretense of an administration, deep underground, the reality didn’t follow any official master plan.
According to the legends, the cursed city—as Baila had called it sixteen years ago—was hiding the bixanid62 players. Whoever smelled the bixan seeds was expelled from his or her shell right in the sublime trance of the virtual realms. How the realms looked, how the bixanids played the games populated with artificial intelligences weirder than the most fertile imagination could have conceived, the Antyrans outside Ropolis could only assume. Few Antyrans were allowed to reach the deepest underground levels, and the ones who already lived there never came out to tell.
No doubt the archivists were loathed by the temples because they dared to shake off the dust from a past they wanted forgotten. But if the archivists were hated, the architects had passed this stage when they started to flirt with the idea of creating artificial intelligences to work for them. Promptly, the prophet decreed that the suggestion was “the ultimate heresy.” Zhan, and only Zhan, had the right to give life from stardust mixed with teardrops seeped from his temple. And yet, some architects worked on it, and the punishment for their transgressions had to be death. Hence, their exodus on Ropolis began.
In the last decades, the city had become the center of heretical research, and many fugitives running from the Zhan’s Children assassins found a safe haven in the dark tunnels of the crevice. Even the black triangle in the main square didn’t frighten anyone; in fact, it did little more than show Baila’s impotence to reach the underground levels, where he actually wanted it installed.
Therefore, the best-kept secret of the city, the deepest hidden, was this one. It was known with certainty that the town was the hideout of the AI creators, but no one knew for sure where to find them. The Shindam’s orders came on secret channels, and the AI crystals were delivered in like manner—most of the time, cleverly slipped out in the ore freighters. The acronte Regisulben, although officially angry that he had lost control of the mines, closed his nostrils and worked with the architects on their terms, knowing all too well that this was the only sensible method to keep them alive, far from Baila’s long claws.
But the Shindam had ceased to exist. The wall between the architects and Baila’s blind fury disappeared, and the prophet took over the council’s most terrible weapons.
Baila wasn’t excessively concerned by the wild rumors about the domes for group mating, nor the four healing platforms for sex switches and banned transplants alleged to exist at level 9. But the architects had to be annihilated before they did more harm. They were the ones hunted by Baila’s massive attack against the world, and that was why his army’s mission was to gouge Ropolis out of the planet’s crust.
Several hours passed since Gill had burst into the underground, and the battle was heating up. A dozen dazzling explosions reverberated strongly into the cavern, followed by the muffled rumblings of collapsing rocks. After each blast, violent trepidations stung him through the boots, and the air became hazy due to the dust raised from the cracks in the walls. The air turbines were powered to full speed while the Antyrans disappeared inside the domes, protected by their own filters. The problem, as Gill knew all too well, was that the planet’s dust was unlike any other one: on Ropolis, the dust killed. The blame lay, of course, in the lack of an atmosphere. If on the other planets the wind and especially the water polished the tiny particles, on Antyra III, that didn’t happen. The specks of dust were little more than toxic needles, their edges sharper than a sarpan, and they had the interesting habit of sticking to any surface, destroying the joints of various installations with amazing ease. If someone were to breathe them, the unfortunate victim could expect a slow and excruciating death. That was why the floors and walls of the inhabited caverns were microwaved to vitrify them. But the shockwaves opened deep cracks in the walls, releasing the dust and raising a deadly fog over the domes.
A loud noise approached from the left wall before gradually spreading upward and to Gill’s right, until he was surrounded. The sound of the battle resembled the heavy breathing of a monstrous guval lurking in the caverns. The beast had undoubtedly smelled the hole where he lay hidden, but it deliberately prolonged the waiting to torment him, to play with him without haste, to circle him, knowing he had no way of escaping this time…
When he jumped into the Blue Crevice, he didn’t hear anything due to the lack of an atmosphere. Here, on the other tail, the noises were carried through the stone strongly amplified. And the agonizing wait, the uncertainty, was driving him out of his smell. He would have preferred to be outside in the middle of the fight than helplessly waiting for the battle to reach him.
After a painfully long wait, the blasts started to wind down; they were fewer and far between, farther and farther away… Then, as if by magic, they stopped altogether. Gill was expecting to see Baila’s soldiers roaming the streets, but surprisingly, they failed to show up. Was the defense of the city so fierce that the rebels fought off the attackers? He could only hope to find out soon.
The trance fighters had brought him into a rudimentary orange bedroom consisting of a stone floor on which half a dozen nests were scattered in total disarray. Their synthetic fluff was colored in strident shades and, judging by the smell, unchanged for a long time. He was hoping to be treated well, although two of them were guarding the entrance—he doubted that they were there only for his protection. Most certainly, they had the mission to prevent him from roaming freely through Ropolis, at least till he had a chance to meet the architects.
An unnatural cold trickled into his body, reminding him of the old stories about the ten merchants who became lost on a stormy night while crossing the Ricopa Glacier, one by one lured to their death by Dedris’s malefic aromas. He was alive, with the bracelet on his arm, but the rebels knew. They already knew too much, first from the holofluxes, where Baila streamed desperate calls for his capture—unprecedented in all of Antyra’s history—then from his little playing with the metal licants.
All the smells were leading to the artifact, but he couldn’t tell the truth and hand over the fate of Sigia on the tails of some strangers. He would have to meet the architects to smell if he could trust them, to find if they were going to help him hide from Baila’s revenge without asking too many questions, to see if they were going to be allies or enemies.