CHAPTER FOUR: Precipice Tales

No sun ever shone on Makemake.

Oh, the sun was visible. But, at close to four-and-one-half billion miles away from the star whose gravity tentatively ensnared it, a being standing on Makemake’s surface would observe the sun as nothing more than an unusually bright glare in the permanent night. Also visible through Makemake’s tenuous atmosphere was the sun’s coronal glow, making it look like a never-ending, static explosion in the distant sky. The shadows it cast were long and absolute, and the blackness of Makemake’s unlit parts was complete. Makemake travelled in relative darkness through space, uncared about, unthought about, and, for the most part, completely unknown to sentient beings.

Not that it travelled alone, of course. Its three-hundred-and-ten year sojourn through the outer reaches of the Drift took it through the myriad chunks of ice known as the Precipice, so-called because it marked the complete end of civilization, and the beginning of the vast nothingness that was the Periphery.

The Precipice, cold and lonely as it was, did have something to offer: on Charon were sacred crypts, housing literally thousands of generations of human kings, queens, emperors and priests, and the outermost Gravity Pyre on Pluto was the Drift’s first line of defense against the Peregrine. Pluto had also, in the last few decades, become home to the Glyphids, and like them or not, the Glyphids had soon transformed it into a bustling hive of frantic, insectoid activity.

But no life dwelt in the Periphery. It held only bitter cold, silence and death. The abandoned bunkers of Eris had once proved a thorn in the Peregrine’s side, but they had long ago fallen silent and still. Some thought the mysterious ruins of even-more-distant Sedna haunted, and stories told of expeditions to the remote world yielding nothing but disappearances, curses and corpses. The Peregrine’s Starship drifted somewhere even further out, tumbling along its slow, erratic orbit.

And so, Makemake sat on the Precipice, staring at the edge of space with indifferent eyes.

But the eyes of Sa’Til were anything but indifferent. Indeed, they fairly seethed with ambition, resentment and wrath as he stared out into the star-spattered blackness of the Periphery. Are you somewhere out there? He scanned the sky as if he could see the inconceivably distant Starship, wondering if it was within his field of vision right… now.

The Starship had been temporarily located once, long ago, by Human scouts during one of the Peregrine wars. Calculating that it would pass relatively close to Eris in a century or so, the Humans had begun construction on a military outpost on the planetoid, complete with massive surface-to-space ballistic weapons and hangars for attack flitters. After one-hundred-and-eight years of preparation, the Battle of Eris took less than one-hundred-and-eight hours.

The initial barrage from Eris had caught the Peregrine completely unawares, ripping massive chunks of irreplaceable alien technology from the behemoth-sized Starship. The Peregrine, panicked, had fired fusion weapons at the base, missing the flitters full of troops with cutting gear that landed on the ship’s hull, but destroying the hangars. Thousands of warriors had died in an instant.

The Peregrine had descended on Eris like the flail of an angry god, dumping billions of tons of radioactive acid on the surface and pummeling the installations with the Starship’s plasma cannons before sending the Saurian Vanguard in to finish the job.

The Human troops on board the Starship, expecting to fight the Saurian troops they had faced on their homeworlds, were decimated by hordes of previously unseen cyborgs and robots, but three generations of training did not produce weaklings; the guerrilla war aboard the ship had lasted fourteen years. When the Peregrine finally killed the last of the warriors, he had the man’s disfigured corpse personally delivered to Titan by way of a suicide squad of Rantors who killed ninety-five people before blowing themselves up inside government buildings, killing fifty more people. The Peregrine was not a tactful loser.

After the Battle of Eris, the Starship had drifted on through the Periphery, never to be located again. It was now accessible only by way of the Aether Gates, the portals built by the Ancients to give quick access to the five Gravity Pyres. A sixth Gate took one directly aboard the Starship, and was ostensibly added by the Ancients should the need arise to board the elusive vessel. The Gate was put to exactly this use in the Last Peregrine War, almost ten years ago.

Terat had boarded the Starship after foiling the Peregrine’s assaults on the Pyres, destroying his cyborg manufacturing plants before facing off with the monstrous alien himself. The Concordance was notoriously tight-lipped about the exact outcome of the fight, but Terat was still alive, and the Gates had been kept open. This, coupled with the fact that the Saurians no longer served the ancient alien, seemed to indicate that he was no longer much of a threat.

But was he dead? No one outside the Concordance knew. They liked playing their cards close to their chest, which was probably why, for all their protestations of benignity, no one ever seemed to trust them.

Pffft. The Concordance. Sa’Til had once been one of them, a soldier. More than a soldier; he had been Terat, hereditary champion of Gavelor, descended from an ancient line of warrior-kings. But that had of course come to its end…

…but no mind, Sa’Til mused. Best not to dwell on such foolishness. He was far more powerful now than he had ever been in their service. He missed the knowledge, the purpose and the pride that came with being Terat, but being what he currently was (whatever that was. Warlord? Leader? Soldier of Fortune?) was far more comfortable. More laden with possibilities. More… exciting.

And as Sa’Til detected motion in the night sky, and realized he knew what that motion was, he felt that very excitement very deeply, in a very real sense. It was not the Starship, but it was a stepping-stone to getting there, and that was almost as exciting, if not more so, than finding the Starship. For the flitter descending to Makemake’s surface carried with it the promise of uncertainty, and uncertainty was what truly drove men to greatness.

* * *

“And do you know why that is?” Sa’Til said in an informative tone.

Sa’Til, Maw and Guardian sat cross-legged in one of the roomy upper chambers of Breakdown Temple, beneath Makemake’s surface. The labyrinthine archaeological site was vacuum-sealed, with a sole Power Core somewhere in the maze providing oxygen, so the three of them could breathe the musty air quite comfortably.

“No. Go on,” Maw said.

“Because the value of power lies in its uncertainty. We crave power so we can do anything we want. Powerlessness is predictable, mundane, confining. But power… power, my friends, knows no bounds. Power is the ability to wake in the morning not knowing how the day will end. Power is doing whatever you wish and being able to deal with the consequences without knowing what they will be. Ergo, power is uncertainty.”

They had only been speaking for a few minutes, but Guardian could already tell that the Human was quite insane.

Not that he could blame him, compared to what he’d been through. From what Guardian had heard, the man had single-handedly won a war for the Concordance about twenty years ago, only to have them unceremoniously give him the boot after he went AWOL for a few months. There was even a version of the story in which Sa’Til had been forced to kill his own son on Concordance orders.

That couldn’t be true, though, could it?

“My people have a similar belief,” Maw said. “We hold that chaos restores the elements to their natural positions, and that perpetual chaos is in fact the purest form of justice there is. In a single being’s individual belief, there is only folly and false conviction. But when chaos, or uncertainty, as you call it, is put into play, that individual’s real worth is discovered. His natural place in the universe is restored.”

“And the truly powerful,” Sa’Til asked, seemingly genuinely interested. “Does their position remain unchanged?”

Maw was silent for a moment, and Guardian could tell from the sound of muscle flexing and neck vertebrae cracking (the conditions in Breakdown Temple were ideal for Guardian’s echolocation skills) that he was mulling the question over.

“Yes,” he finally said. “I suppose it does. If they are faced with true chaos, true challenges, but remain where they are… that is a form of power.”

But Guardian was an excellent judge of truth. He could, with relative ease, determine not only if the speaker was lying or not, but also the degree of truth to the lie, the degree of its importance, and whether or not it was a rehearsed lie or one fabricated on the spot. He could tell that Maw was being slightly dishonest, humoring Sa’Til for some reason or another. Why? Weren’t they supposed to be on this guy’s side? Evidently, there was a complex negotiation in progress here.

“Excellent,” Sa’Til drawled, his normally thick, rich voice rendered somewhat less authoritative by the echoing chambers of the temple. “It seems we have much to discuss in the coming days. We are more alike than I had dared to hope.”

“Days?” Guardian asked.

“Why, yes. You did not think our negotiations would be something accomplished in a matter of minutes, did you? I mean, after all, you’ve come all this way… you don’t think we should get to know each other a little better?”

“Frankly, no,” Guardian said. “Don’t get me wrong: you seem like a nice enough person and everything, but we’re not out here to make friends.”

Guardian heard muscles tense and armor creak a second before feeling Maw’s hand on his arm. “Be patient. We are here to find out how we can all profit from what you have found, and besides, Sa’Til is our ally now. It would be a foolish warrior indeed who fights beside those he does not know.”

“But I don’t want to be a warrior,” Guardian mumbled to no-one in particular.

* * *

Hours later, Guardian had settled onto a portable flexicot that Sa’Til had provided for him. It was a luxury most Ophions would have denied themselves, but then Guardian was not most Ophions.

He did not require much in the way of physical comfort; the chalk-seal floodlights that lit the chamber did not trouble him, obviously, and although the cold rendered him somewhat sluggish, it was not terribly bothersome.

Maw lay on the bare, sand-covered stone floor across the chamber, having predictably shunned the flexicot offered to him. Maw had repeatedly offered Guardian the extra blankets, no matter how often Guardian had refused them.

The more Guardian thought about this, the stranger it seemed. Ophions were supposedly distant cousins of the Carneans, and Maw had to know this. But if he knew they were both reptiles that did not find the chill uncomfortable, then why offer him the blanket?

Guardian pondered as he listened carefully to the sounds of the temple, and eventually his thoughts drifted. Breakdown was a relatively recent discovery (in a place such as the Drift, something that was mere centuries - rather than millennia - old, could be considered recent) made by Human colonists. It had been a time of progress and technological innovation, and prospecting miners had come to Makemake, seeking unclaimed worlds to mine metals from the rock and extract liquids from the ice.

They hadn’t dug far into the methane and ethane ice when they came upon a curiously uniform rock surface. Digging deeper, they came upon a colossal gate set directly into the surface, a gate that no amount of explosives or drills could open. Eventually, the miners went back to mining, and the gate became little but a curiosity for those scant few who could be bothered to venture so far out from the civilized systems.

Then, one eccentric had gotten the idea of attempting to utilize Ancient technology on the gate. He went to the Concordance and begged them for help, reasoning that whatever lay beyond the gate must be very valuable indeed, if it was kept so well hidden and secure. Although the Concordance initially refused, saying that Ancient technology should not be utilized for something so trivial, they eventually caved. The eccentric was an influential one, and without his support, the Concordance could never achieve unity among the Human worlds; they lent him a flitter powerful enough to transport a Power Core vortex to the planetoid.

It had taken months of careful angling and counter-weighing of two of the mysterious power sources, but eventually the gate had opened to unveil… nothing. Granted, the ancient, interconnecting chambers had walls engraved with unfamiliar patterns, glyphs and symbols that had to be at least hundreds of thousands of years old, but there were no hidden treasures, no new technologies, no biological remains, nothing that could really constitute any kind of significant archaeological find.

The eccentric had nonetheless founded a permanent expedition in the temple and attempted to map it. The gate had been re-sealed after an airlock had been installed elsewhere in the complex, and a steady influx of professors, students and even occasional treasure hunters began arriving.

However, they did not leave quite as often as they arrived. The exploration was conducted in fairly hazardous conditions, with cramped tunnels twisting endlessly through total darkness. Power Cores had a limited range of direct effectiveness, and blocked passageways could therefore turn into death traps for anyone not carrying a Power Core of their own. Furthermore, the endless labyrinth of tunnels was easy to get lost in, and many simply disappeared.

Eventually, interest died out. The Human Worlds went to war again, and the economy fell on hard times. The eccentric lived just long enough to go bankrupt, his fortune squandered on countless expeditions trying to finally find something of real value in the tunnels. He attempted to give the temple (if indeed it was a temple) his name, so that people would at least remember that, but it had never caught on; people already had another, far more sinister name for it.

The one thing that seemed to offer any kind of value in the Makemakean tunnels were the indecipherable glyphs that scrawled on forever through its walls, and quite a few attempts had been made to interpret them, and the efforts all had one thing in common: they had left the attempting academic utterly and completely insane.

Respected professors of linguistics, history, xenopsychology and many other fields, psychics, telepaths, psychometrics and even a few hopeful amateurs: all had tried, and all had gone mad. Some did so over long periods of time, leaving it arguable if it was understanding or the lack of it that had driven them out of their mind, while others left little doubt that the writing itself was the source of it, claiming at least a cursory understanding of the writing within a few weeks, only to be reduced to babbling, incoherent lunacy within another few weeks.

Theories on what the glyphs actually said naturally ran the entire gamut of likelihood or the lack thereof, but were usually disproved with a simple statement: if you’re not mad, then you’re wrong. In any case, the twisting maze of tunnels had acquired the moniker Breakdown Temple, or simply Breakdown.

Guardian could not sleep. His musings were making him uneasy. Could he be affected by the insanity-inducing glyphs, even though he couldn’t read? And why would Sa’Til pick here, of all places, to meet them? He made a mental note to inquire on the topic during the next round of ‘negotiations.’

There was the tiniest pat sound from the other side of the chamber. The noise was muted, slightly moist and almost infinitesimally soft, but clearly audible to Guardian’s sensitive hearing. Guardian exhaled through gritted teeth and inhaled through flattened nostrils, sounds that registered as a pair of grunts to humans, but were in fact carefully textured with a variety of ultrasonic frequencies ideal for echolocation.

Guardian concluded that the source of the sound was Maw’s face, and that it was turned toward him; Maw had blinked. Maw’s eye was open, and was looking directly at him.

Guardian was unnerved. He tried to ignore it and sleep, but, unsurprisingly, the knowledge that three-hundred-and-fifty pounds of carnivorous warrior were quietly watching him made this activity difficult.

* * *

“Forgive my importunity, but I have to ask: why did you want to meet us out here on the Precipice?”

Guardian’s question was followed by a silence. Maw and Sa’Til had been discussing why the Gravity Pyres were located exactly where they were, and the Ophion had grown quite bored. In his boredom, he was reminded of where they were, and began to further doubt the sanity of a man who would choose such a locale as a meeting place.

“I mean, I can understand wanting to meet away from the public eye, and all, but isn’t this…” Guardian gestured at the dry emptiness around them. “…a little too much?”

Sa’Til worked his jaw, pondering something.

“It is a fair question. I suppose now is as good a time as any to tell you.”

Guardian cocked his head, surprised and apprehensive.

“I have for some time now been seeking the exact location of the Peregrine’s Starship,” Sa’Til explained. “Originally, my search was of low priority, and the only motivation the various technologies and information the ship might contain, but when I ascertained the nature of the ‘device’ that the two of you found on Lair…”

Guardian heard Maw tense at this.

“… I quickly abandoned my current pursuits and gave my search for the Starship my undivided attention. I raced to Makemake as fast as I could, to position astrographic sensors that a former associate of mine discovered years ago on Roots. They are gathering telemetry as we speak.”

There was another silence, and Guardian could tell that Sa’Til was gauging the other beings’ reaction.

When Maw at last spoke, his voice was uninflected, matter-of-fact.

“And what is it you think our… ‘device’ does?”

Sa’Til’s answer was equally level and unemotional. Guardian realized that they were looking directly at each other.

“I believe that it generates an omni-directional mass-displacement energy field that counteracts whatever force emanates from the Gravity Pyres. I believe that, when placed aboard the Peregrine’s Starship, the Device could potentially guard against the effect of the Pyres, and see the Lightship safely through their spheres of influence, and permit whoever is at its helm complete and unhindered access to every world in the Drift.”

Guardian had to admit: he was mildly impressed.

“That’s more than even we know about it,” Guardian said.

He could hear and smell Maw’s disapproval at this revelation, but it had the desired effect, inflating Sa’Til’s already planet-sized ego, making him a bit chattier.

“I… extrapolated most of it. My spies simply told me what it was supposed to be capable of, and the rest is scientific guesswork.”

Maw seemed to pick up on the tactic.

“How did these… ‘spies’ of yours hear of the Device’s capabilities?” the Carnean asked.

“A raid, by the Glyphids, on one of my bases in the Cronian system. The being in charge of the base – a former colleague of yours, I believe, Guardian – was questioned by the Glyphids about the Device. Recording apertures I had installed in the base relayed the entire conversation to me, albeit indirectly.”

“We only found the Device a few weeks ago. How could the Glyphids know so fast? And how could you know they knew so fast?” Maw continued, but he’d pushed too hard. Sa’Til clammed up.

“The Glyphids are telepaths; there is little they do not know. And me… I have my methods.” Guardian heard Sa’Til smile. “But all this is inconsequential. Gentlemen, we hold in our hands the key to ultimate power over the lives and fates of everyone in the Drift. When I find the Starship – and I will find it – no power in the world will be able to stop us.”

“Agreed,” Maw said. “What do you propose?”

“My ship, the Starlight, is currently in the Jovian system, awaiting my return. We will go there by flitter, and deposit the Device there, where my associates can take a closer look at it. Also, the Starlight is a considerably safer place to keep it than… wherever it is you’re currently keeping it.”

“You’ll understand if we’re somewhat reluctant to tell you that right now,” Maw said.

“Of course,” Sa’Til responded calmly. “And you’ll also understand why I’ll want you with me everywhere I go from now on. That is why I’ve taken the liberty of destroying your flitter, after I determined there was nothing of value still on it. No harm done.”

“What?” Guardian barked.

“I was outside on the surface when you arrived. I allowed you to enter the temple, and then planted three packets of Glyphid napalm gel on your flitter, which I detonated with this,” he explained, producing a chalk-seal detonator with a jury-rigged antenna attached to it.

Guardian and Maw could do little but gape.

“Again, this is all of no great import,” Sa’Til said, his voice gentle and firm as he placed the detonator in the gear bag beside him. “My flitter is outfitted to carry all three of us in safety and comfort. I propose we make our way there now.”

“Now?” Guardian countered, suddenly reluctant.

“Yes: now,” Sa’Til muttered, standing and fastening his gear bag to his armor. “Seeing as how the two of you have quite forced the issue, further philosophical speculation will have to await a better time-“

That was as far as the Human got, because a dull thud reverberated through the chamber, either causing or carrying with it vibrations strong enough to loosen a considerable quantity of pebbles and silicate sand from the temple ceiling above them. Guardian rose quickly, crossbow at the ready.

“An explosion,” Maw said flatly, still sitting cross-legged on the floor.

“Yes,” Sa’Til drawled, his eyes scanning the ceiling. “West of us, close to the… oh, no.”

“What?” Guardian demanded, but he already knew the answer.

* * *

Sa’Til and Maw lay prone on a scant, irregular ridge of red methane ice on Makemake’s surface, their respective plasma rifles trained on the landing site of Sa’Til’s flitter… or what was left of it.

Sa’Til watched through his magnifying scope, dismayed, as the Glyphid drones meticulously picked through the wreckage of his flitter, its remains scattered across a good eighty feet or so in the weak Makemakean gravity.

“They must have used a combat flitter, possibly the one that got them here, to ice your one. I can’t see any heavy weapons, and they don’t have any Soldiers with them,” Maw’s guttural growl came through Sa’Til’s mask with crystal clarity, despite the scant gases available to transmit sound between them.

The mask was a mysterious artifact he’d found on Roots a long time ago, shortly after he left the service of the Concordance. Although textured like stone and completely opaque from the outside, it weighed next to nothing and was almost invisible to the wearer, casting only a thin, maroon film over the world viewed through it. It produced its own, stable oxygen field, and when combined with the pressurizing and temperature-insulating properties of his armor, protected him completely from the bitter cold and vacuum on the planetoid’s surface. Sa’Til had never seen another quite like it, and prized it dearly.

Which was why Maw’s making his comment was so unnerving. Sa’Til had never before spoken with any Carnean, let alone Maw specifically. Maw himself was wearing an armored spacesuit of his own people’s design, with a layered, portcullis-like visor. So how did Maw know Sa’Til would be able to hear him, given the mask’s singular rarity and the extraordinariness of its capabilities? Did he just assume, or was he somehow familiar with the properties of the mask?

“Yes… and unlike the two of you, I had not the foresight to park my flitter closer to the airlock,” Sa’Til said gently, assuming that if he could hear Maw, Maw could somehow hear him.

“They would have found it soon anyway,” the alien grumbled, not bothering to take his eye off the Glyphids.

Well. That confirmed that. Sa’Til was further unnerved.

“What do you suppose they’re doing here?” he asked the Carnean.

“Well, it could be they’re just expanding their territory. This is, after all, the Precipice, and no-one is likely to try to stop them from taking over this place. Or even care, for that matter.”

“But what could the Glyphids want with this frozen lump?”

“A staging area of some sort? Who knows? We’d better get back below. If I know Guardian, he’ll be nervous enough to shoot anything coming through the ‘lock soon, and I’d rather do it before he reaches that level of paranoia.”

***

“Well, what in the Seven Desolate Voids of Hell do we do now?”

Guardian’s question seemed hollow, even to him. Sa’Til and Maw had said they’d seen at least sixty Glyphids heading towards the airlock; in fact, it was a small miracle they hadn’t found them and killed them already.

“There’s only one thing for it. We have to head further into the temple, find the Power Core and build a new flitter, then fight our way through enough of the Drones to blast off of here.” Sa’Til spoke softly, infuriatingly calm as he loaded his antique shotgun shell by shell, alternating green buckshot with red hi-ex incendiary cartridges.

“Are you out of your mammalian mind? There have to be over a hundred miles of tunnel beneath us, less than thirty of them mapped, we have no idea where the Power Core vortex is, and sixty-plus Glyphids will be pouring through here looking for us in a few minutes. No. I say we lay down our weapons and try to work something out. They don’t necessarily shoot on sight, you know.”

“I have to say, Guardian is right,” Maw said. “In fact, the harder we make it for them to find us, the more likely they are to assume we’re hostile.”

Sa’Til filled the shotgun to capacity, slung it, and eyed the reptiles carefully. “Three things. Number one: they destroyed the flitter, meaning that they either mean to kill us, or ensure we only leave here in their custody, and Glyphids are not widely known for taking prisoners. Number two: in the kind of confined space we’ll be fighting them in, numbers are a logistical advantage only, not a tactical one, and I for one have more than enough ammunition on me to kill sixty Glyphids, and I’m certain you brought more with you than just your good looks.” Sa’Til’s grin was thoroughly unappreciated by its audience.

“And number three?” Guardian asked.

“Number three… we’re carrying the future of the Drift. It’s more important than you, me, those Glyphids or anything else on this rock. If that’s not worth fighting for, killing for… dying for, then I simply do not know what is.”

***

The initial passageways led to a nine-foot abutment that overlooked a sloping atrium with openings to six other passageways, all of them shrouded, unlit by the decades-old chalk-seal excavation floodlights positioned in most of the open chambers.

“If reading those damn glyphs makes you half an insane as whoever built this, I’m very impressed. What the hell is all this for?” Guardian said.

“I’d say that was academic, if it hadn’t driven so many academics out of their minds,” Sa’Til retorted, jumping the six feet and absorbing the impact with his knees. He was in better shape than men half, no, a third his age, and proud of it.

He heard Guardian snort a remarkably human snort of contemptuous amusement as he slung his crossbow and climbed down. Maw jumped, landing almost noiselessly on Sa’Til’s immediate right, but he caught the tiniest hiss-whrrrr of hydraulics of some kind from the Carnean’s armor, breaking his fall. Amazing. One day, he’d have to get a good look inside one of those things.

“Care to pick a number?” Sa’Til said to Maw, gesturing to the openings.

To his surprise, Maw simply nodded past Sa’Til, and when he turned, Guardian was systematically testing the corridors, placing his head inside each opening in turn and grunting into them.

Finally, after he reached the fourth one and grunting into it several times, he said: “Here. This one goes the furthest.”

“What about those two?” Sa’Til challenged him, waving his hand at the last two openings.

“They just lead back to the first and third one.”

Maw led the way, with Guardian following. Sa’Til stared in after them, considering something, considering everything. The Glyphids couldn’t be far behind them, but no-one ever went far beyond the first score of antechambers and vaults of Breakdown; lack of purpose to such a voyage, coupled with the temple’s general reputation for causing insanity. What if they were here for a different reason? What if they didn’t know or didn’t care to find out that anyone was here? How far into the tunnels would they follow them?

“No offense or anything, but I’d rather have you in front of me then behind me,” Guardian’s voice came from down the tunnel.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see, thought Sa’Til, and adjusted his slung shotgun before proceeding further into the eldritch ruins.