The Exiled Earthborn (26 page)

Lucas jumped when he saw a pair of eyes peering at him from an adjacent tree. It was Toruk, who had somehow managed to scale the massive trunk in complete silence. He was munching on something else this time, a piece of charred meat skewered on a sharpened branch. Where had he gotten that? Lucas was further surprised when Toruk spoke.

“I know you truth.”

His Soran was heavily broken, but understandable.

“What?” Lucas said, incredulous. “You speak Soran?”

“Yes,” Toruk said. “Small.”

“How?”

Toruk took another bite of his meat.

“White Spirit Seat of Great Knowledge. Learn many thing.”

Seat of great knowledge? It took Lucas a minute, but he thought back to how he’d learned Soran for the first time in, the programmable captain’s chair aboard the Ark, which transmitted training through neural wiring. Zeta must have a similar model in the Khas’to settlement somewhere.

“Need learn new ally tongue.”

The words were scattered, often pronounced wrong and lacking any semblance of grammar, but it wasn’t bad for probably, what, a few hours in the chair at the most between rescue missions? Alpha must have programmed it for him on the fly. Toruk continued.

“I know you truth.”

“My truth?” Lucas asked. “What truth?”

“White Spirit say you mountain people. You no mountain people. You
Mol’taavi
people.”

No more wild sounds came from the forest; the night was completely still as the two of them spoke.

“Mol’taavi?” Lucas asked.

“Mol’taavi.” Toruk said, pointing upward at the moon overheard. “Fall from sky. You brothers of Saato. Sisters of Valli.”

“Saato? Valli? I’m sorry I don’t understand.”

“You forget. All forget. Mol’taavi home ancient Oni. Saato, Valli first man, woman. Rule over Great Jungle of Ak’tai. Cover all Mol’taavi. Jungle burn. Oni sent here.”

Lucas was trying to make sense of all this.

“Sky demon turn Mol’taavi white ash. Now sky demon burn Makari jungle. Saato, Valli spirit send you. You help. You kill sky demon with White Spirit and Oni. Bring great magic. Great courage.”

Another creation myth, it seemed. Toruk and the Oni apparently believed the giant moon, Mol’taavi, to be their original home where the first Oni, Saato and Valli, lived. After their forest was destroyed, they came here, to Makari. Was that right? And who were Lucas and the Guardians supposed to be? Some sort of resurrected spirits of the old homeworld? Falling from the sky probably had helped bolster that myth.

But what good was attempting to explain Earth and Sora now to this man? That the Xalans weren’t demons, that their technology wasn’t magic. Such concepts would be impossible for Toruk or his people to comprehend. Lucas now knew what it must have felt like for Alpha to try to explain to them how a water-powered null core opened a rift in space-time for intergalactic travel. So Lucas decided to go along.

“Yes, it’s true. We are from Mol’taavi, but you can’t tell anyone. Saato and Valli’s spirits are not supposed to interfere with the Oni,” he improvised.

Toruk smiled broadly, which was odd for a man as menacing looking as him strapped with ancient and modern armor and weapons and the claws of a dozen dead Xalans around his neck.

“I knew, I knew,” he said, still smiling. Lucas had apparently made his day with his confirmation.

Lucas had a flashback to a conversation he’d had with a drunken Maston a few months back.

“Kyneth and Zurana were the first two Sorans. They arose out of the Blessed Forest a few million years ago and gave birth to our entire race.”

Two original humans in a place of lush greenery. Taking into account Earth’s own similar tale and now this new Oni story, this was starting to sound less and less like coincidence. There was a connecting thread here that was starting to gnaw at Lucas. Why there were planets of humans scattered across the galaxy had always been a mystifying thought. As they branched out to new worlds, it appeared there was an answer out there somewhere, but Lucas felt like he’d put together three pieces of a thousand-piece puzzle. Alpha would be better at analyzing this, were he not occupied with attempting to save civilization itself.

Toruk had his hand stretched out and Lucas realized he was offering him a piece of his cooked meat.

“Uh …” Lucas said as he eyed it.

“Even brother of Saato need food. Eat.”

Lucas was rather famished and took it from his hand. It crunched when he bit into it, but the taste was pleasant, almost pork-like.

“Not bad,” he said. “No good food on Mol’taavi these days.”

Toruk tried not to fall out of the tree as he burst with laughter.

It wasn’t until the next day, when they rounded the back side of the mountain, that Lucas caught his first glimpse of the Dead City. Dark stone towers could be seen rising from the jungle above the tips of the trees. Toruk’s bloodwolf had returned to them a few hours ago and it was somehow communicated that Maston was indeed in the city, and there were no other enemies nearby. How the two managed to converse in that level of detail was a mystery, but one that would remain unsolved, because the bloodwolf bounded back into the jungle after receiving fresh orders from Toruk.

A few of the Oni started whispering to each other when they saw the pillars, and they clutched their weapons a little tighter. They’d progressed through the jungle without incident, invisible to Xalan forces, but that was no longer what they had to fear if the rumors were to be believed.

Eventually the trees started to thin out and glimpses of a wall could be seen up ahead. It was cracked and broken down. The rock it was made of was dark and smooth. Lucas presumed it was volcanic, but now was not the time to ask Toruk for a history lesson. As they moved inside the city, they began to get a scope of its size, something that couldn’t be seen from the forest. Though many former buildings were no more than piles of decaying wood at this point, many were chiseled from the same black stone and stood resolute against the greenery that had engulfed them. They could see the wall curved around the city, and the towers they’d seen from the jungle were a few hundred feet high. There were six of them stretching back toward the eventual end of the city, which seemed to be quite far away. Only two were fully intact; the rest had been broken off at various points.

Though simple homes stood at the outskirts, the buildings became more ornate as they moved toward the center of the city. What black-stone buildings were not destroyed had glyphs and murals carved into them. The outer wall of what appeared to be some sort of temple had an interesting scene in the stone. A dozen Oni knelt before two figures, each with their right hands raised. Behind them was a large sphere. Mol’taavi.

There were no references on any of the murals to the Xalan invasion like there had been back in the Kha’sto cave village. Lucas assumed the city had been destroyed too fast for such stories to be told here.

Lucas’s wrist map told him Maston was still about a mile away. This really had been a massive metropolis once, and Lucas couldn’t even see the outer wall anymore through the maze of structures.

The jungle was silent here. Lucas had long grown used to the cries of various alien animals out in the forest, and the quiet was unsettling. When he rounded the next corner, stepping over a collapsed statue, he understood why no living things dared to tread here.

In front of them was an open stretch of town with a central stone sphere. All around it lay the bones of countless creatures, each in various stages of decay. Some of the bones had been swallowed into the ground by encroaching moss or vines, others lay atop the greenery.

There were few full skeletons to be found, so it was hard to tell what many of them were. Some of the bones were tiny, others enormous. Toruk picked up an odd-looking one and turned to Lucas.

“Vornaa,” he said.

It didn’t take long to find a human ribcage, then a skull, and another, and another. If this was the creature’s feeding grounds, it appeared it had caught many Oni over the years. Lucas was surprised to find a few Xalan skulls amid the bone piles as well. Did this thing eat its own? Was it even Xalan at all? Lucas shivered involuntarily as he moved around the spherical statue and saw a huge skeleton, picked clean, with bones shining a brilliant white. The skull was larger than he was, and it had at least three rows of foot-long teeth. An obvious carnivore. It had long arms, legs, and a tail, but if Lucas didn’t know any better he’d say the shape of the skull looked rather … prehistoric, to borrow from Earth’s timeline. Lucas saw another similar creature in pieces a few dozen meters away, crumpled up against a collapsed pillar. What the hell was this thing to be able to take down rival predatory beasts this large?

Lucas kept his eyes fixed on his surroundings, as did the Corporal, Toruk, and their respective men. He glanced down at the map and saw Maston’s signal was coming from just a little further ahead. They moved out of the graveyard clearing and into a section of destroyed buildings, which were tricky to navigate. Lucas hopped from stone to stone, the stability sensors in his suit steadying him. The Oni leapt with no such aid, but didn’t seem to need it.

Finally, he stopped short when he found there was no place left to jump. Rather, a large hole stood in front of him, newly disturbed dirt around its edges, blackness obscuring the view of what lay inside. But according to Lucas’s locator, he knew what he should find. Maston.

As he reached the lip, he opened his palm and shone a light from his mesh fiber glove into the opening. He could see the ground about a dozen feet down. Without hesitation, Lucas leapt down. His suit took all of the impact, and the other eight quickly followed him, eager to get out of the open where unknown dangers lurked.

But underneath the Dead City, things felt hardly less imposing. The crater had torn a new entrance to an underground catacomb system built by the original occupants of the city. It smelled of dry mold and everything was coated in a solid inch of dust. Stone tombs stood upright all around them, visages of those within them etched onto the lids. But there was only one coffin that interested Lucas, one made of metal and glowing blue a few feet ahead.

Lucas quickly scanned the cryochamber and the results matched what the indicator had told him. Despite being battered and cracked, the pod was still intact, and Maston was alive inside it. Lucas used his knife to pry open the stuck hatch.

Inside was Maston, far too peaceful-looking for the present circumstances. He had dried blood on his forehead and neck, some sort of injury sustained during the crash, but nothing too serious according to the sensors. Lucas fiddled with the controls, which were still functioning. It must have been why Maston was still under while Lucas had been forced awake. Swirling his hand around, Lucas undid Maston’s restraints and an orangish liquid flooded through small tubes into his veins.

Lucas jumped when Maston’s eyes sprang open, jolted awake by the chamber’s wake-up cocktail. They immediately dilated from the sunlight shining down into the hole, though it became clear he couldn’t actually see much of anything.

“Who’s there?” he said hoarsely, and Lucas offered him his canteen.

“It’s Lucas,” he said.

Maston blinked rapidly, attempting to clear his eyes, and tried to sit up, pushing the water aside.

“Why are
you
waking me up? Have we landed yet?” he slurred.

After successfully sitting upright, his next move was to try to stand.

“Maybe you better stay seated.”

Maston remained surprisingly calm as Lucas gave him the rundown of the events of the past few days. He didn’t hyperventilate the way Lucas had when confronted with the enormity of the situation. Years of military training had forged his nerves for moments like this. Or he’d just experienced disaster too many times to be shaken by it now.

“And this place?” he said when Lucas reached the end of the tale. “What is it?”

He looked around the crypt and out the sunlit hole in the ceiling.

“They call it the Dead City. It was a metropolis before the Xalan invasion, a ruin after. But there’s something that lives here now. Something very dangerous, and we need to get the hell out of here.”

“What is it?” Maston asked, eyeing the Oni and the Xalans suspiciously. Both parties returned his glare. The Corporal nervously glanced at his wrist readout. There was the faint signal of a heartbeat.

“Something so deadly that two separate civilizations tell ghost stories about it,” Lucas replied. “Can you walk?”

Maston brought himself to his feet and nodded.

“Bring anything for me?”

Lucas motioned to the Corporal who unslung a Soran energy rifle from his back and handed it to Maston. They hadn’t hauled along any armor, so he’d have to make do with just his bodysuit and a spare pair of boots.

“Use it well, Soran,” the Corporal said coldly. “I hope you prove to be worthy of this much risk.”

“I am,” Maston replied curtly.

“Must go,” Toruk said impatiently. He was right, they’d already wasted too much time down there.

They hoisted each other out of the hole and back into the sunlight, which was already fading at the end of yet another exceptionally short day.

They were moving much faster now, keeping low and bounding from rock to rock quickly and quietly. Maston was keeping up, and seemed to have lost little of his strength in the chamber. The tall, dark obelisks cast long shadows over the remains of the city. They ran past the crumbling temple and returned to the boneyard clearing.

The dwarf sun was now directly above the central spherical statue that Lucas assumed was a representation of the moon Mol’taavi. But there was something else atop the stone, bathed in the white light. Something that moved ever so slightly.

“My prey comes to me. Strange.”

The voice came from the Corporal’s translator collar, much to everyone’s surprise. It was intercepting and interpreting the brainwaves of whatever lay before them.

Lucas crept closer, Natalie trained on the top of the sphere. The figure shifted again.