NOVEL NEXT 61: Two Halves Made Whole
The interior of the black structure was a realm of silent, geometric majesty. The corridor they entered opened into a hall so vast it seemed to swallow the beams of their helmet lights. The architecture was unlike anything they had ever conceived. Vast, soaring archways intersected at impossible angles, and the walls were adorned with intricate, repeating patterns that seemed to draw the eye into dizzying, fractal depths. The floor was a mosaic of a dark and golden metal, its surface a complex tapestry of geometric shapes that shimmered under their lights.
They moved forward cautiously, their footsteps echoing in the cavernous space. Strange, inert machinery, also forged from the dark and golden material, stood like silent, monolithic sculptures. Some were colossal, easily the size of the Phoenix, their purpose a complete mystery. Others were more delicate, intricate arrays of rods and spheres that hinted at some unknown, ancient and advanced science. Faint, blue and gold ambient light emanated from panels embedded in the walls and ceiling, casting a sterile glow that did little to dispel the shadows.
"The scale of this place…" Luo Zuri murmured, her pilot's mind trying to process the sheer dimensions. "The portals between these halls… they're massive. Easily ten meters high. As if they were built for beings at least five meters tall."
"Or for moving large equipment," Dmitri added, his logistical mind immediately assessing the practicalities. "This was a place of industry, of creation."
They passed through another colossal archway into a smaller antechamber. Here, the signs of recent, more familiar habitation were starkly out of place. A cluster of empty crates was stacked against one wall, their dull grey ceramic a jarring contrast to the gleaming gold and black of the structure itself.
Casimir knelt to examine one, running a gloved hand over its surface. "Director," he called to Dmitri, "these crates… The material is the same ceramic composite as the armor on the skeleton we found. The same as the helmet."
So, they had been here. The mysterious humans who had salvaged the Provider's ship had once also taken shelter within this colossal, alien edifice.
Throughout it all, Ervin felt a growing sense of profound unease. It was more than the unsettling geometry of the place, more than the oppressive silence. It was a feeling he couldn't shake, a prickling sensation at the back of his neck, as if something were following them, watching from the deep shadows just beyond the reach of their lights. He thought he could almost hear a whisper at the edge of his hearing, a faint, sibilant sound that vanished the moment he tried to focus on it.
The others, absorbed in their discovery, moved on, stepping through another archway into an adjacent hall. Ervin paused at the threshold, a sudden, inexplicable wave of foreboding washing over him. The air seemed to grow colder, the whispers in his mind momentarily sharpening into something almost coherent, a language he didn't understand.
He felt a dizzy spell, the vast hall momentarily tilting, the intricate patterns on the floor seeming to writhe and twist. He squeezed his eyes shut, bracing himself against the archway. When he opened them, the feeling had passed, but his disorientation remained. He had lost sight of the others.
"Dmitri? Guowei?" he called out, his voice sounding small in the immense space. He took a few steps in the direction he thought they had gone, his boots clanging on the golden patterns on the floor. He entered a new corridor, its walls lined with the same unsettling, geometric patterns. "Kyreth? Anyone?"
He keyed his comms. "This is Ervin. Does anyone read me? I've lost visual."
Only static answered. A cold knot of fear tightened in his stomach. He was alone.
In the other hall, the rest of the team had stopped, their attention captured by a massive, inert device that resembled a stellar observatory. Dmitri was the first to notice Ervin's absence.
"Where's the Reverend?" he asked, turning around. The archway behind them was empty.
Kyreth scanned the corridor they had just come through. "He was right behind us."
"Ervin?" Guowei called out, his voice sharp, authoritative. There was no reply. He immediately tried the comms. "Sekhon, report."
The silence that followed was heavy, absolute.
Dmitri's face, visible through his helmet's clear visor, was pale. The jovial logistics director was gone, replaced by a commander facing a sudden, inexplicable crisis. "ARI," he snapped, "what's Sekhon's position?"
"I have lost his signal, Director," ARI's calm voice replied, a chilling counterpoint to their rising panic. "His comms are unresponsive. He appears to have moved outside of local transmission range, though that should be impossible within this structure."
"Backtrack," Dmitri ordered, his voice tight. "Now."
They retraced their steps, their movements now hurried, their awe replaced by a gnawing dread. They returned to the antechamber with the ceramic crates, then to the main hall. There was no sign of Ervin. No footprints other than their own on the strange, metallic floor. No sound but the echo of their own panicked calls.
He had simply… vanished.
Dmitri felt a cold sweat break out on his forehead. The unsettling feeling of being watched now had a name: predation.
"Everyone," he ordered, his voice a low, controlled command that barely concealed his fear. "Form a tight perimeter. No one goes anywhere alone. Guowei, Casimir, on point. Luo, Kyreth, watch our rear." He turned his head, his helmet light sweeping the oppressive darkness. "ARI, maintain a constant 360-degree sensor sweep. I want to know the second a dust mote moves."
The team closed ranks, their weapons raised, their backs to each other, a small, fragile island of humanity in a vast, silent, and suddenly undeniably hostile place.
The oppressive silence pressed in on them, a tangible weight that made every breath seem loud, every clank of their armor a sacrilege. Dmitri stood in the center of their tight, defensive circle, his mind racing. Ervin was gone. Vanished. And this place, this vast, dead cathedral, felt like it was holding its breath.
"Director," ARI's voice cut through their helmet comms, calm but with an undercurrent of analytical curiosity. "I am detecting anomalous acoustic signatures. Faint, high-frequency emissions, in the ultrasound range. They are irregular, but patterned."
"Can you pinpoint the source?" Dmitri asked, latching onto the first tangible clue they'd had.
"Negative," ARI replied. "The signals are diffuse, reflecting off the complex geometry of these halls, creating a complex echo chamber. It is almost impossible to triangulate a precise origin. However," it added, and a new overlay of shifting blue waves appeared on their HUDs, "the echoes are providing me with a crude but effective sonar map of the surrounding architecture. The structure is far more complex than external scans suggested."
Dmitri stared at the expanding, ghost-like map. It was a labyrinth of interconnected chambers, shafts, and corridors, stretching in every direction. With no sign of Ervin and no other leads, the faint, ghostly noise was all they had.
"Alright," he said, his voice a low command. "We follow the sound. Move as a unit. Guowei, Casimir, take point. Kyreth, Luo, you have our six. Let's go."
They moved out, a tight, nervous cluster of light and steel in the overwhelming darkness, their path dictated by the whispers of an unseen, unheard source.
---
Ervin was lost, but he was not wandering. The narrow corridor he found himself in had begun to wind slowly, inexorably, upwards. He had tried to turn back, to find the grand hall he had left, but every branching path seemed to lead him back to this same, ascending spiral. He no longer felt fear, not in the sharp, adrenal sense. It had been replaced by a strange, unsettling compulsion, a sense that he was being drawn towards a destination not of his own choosing.
And then he began to see it.
At first, it was a faint aura at the edge of his vision, a shimmer of deep purple and electric blue that seemed to bleed through the very walls of the corridor. It was not a reflection; it persisted even when he closed his eyes, a burning afterimage on his retinas. As he climbed higher, the glow intensified, pulsing in a slow, hypnotic rhythm, a silent beacon in the darkness that both repelled and compelled him. He could feel it, a thrumming, resonant power that vibrated in his bones, calling to him...
---
Dmitri's team pressed on, the sonar map generated by ARI's analysis of the ultrasound whispers growing more detailed with every step. The faint noises seemed to be coalescing, becoming less diffuse.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
"I am now detecting modulations within the signal," ARI reported. "There are distinct, repeating patterns. It almost sounds like… voices. Though the frequency and structure are not consistent with any known language, alien or human."
They had entered a new section of the complex, a vast, vertical shaft that plunged into darkness below and rose into an equally inscrutable gloom above. Walkways and ledges spiraled around the shaft's perimeter at various levels. The voices, faint and ethereal, seemed to be echoing up from the depths.
Dmitri led them to the edge, peering down. Far below, in the abyss of the shaft, they could see faint, moving lights
---
The upward spiral ended abruptly. Ervin stood before a door, a perfect, seamless surface of the same dark golden metal that made up the floors. As he approached, feeling the pulsing light burn behind it, the segments of the door parted silently, sliding into the walls with a motion that was both mechanical and organic.
He stepped through, and the door sealed behind him.
He was in a smooth, curved, egg-like chamber, its walls glowing with a soft, internal golden light. The air was warm, still, and hummed with a palpable energy. The auras of purple and blue were gone, replaced by this serene, all-encompassing golden radiance.
---
"Down there," Guowei whispered, pointing. The team crowded the ledge of a high walkway, looking down into the vast, open space of the shaft.
Far below, perhaps thirty meters down, they could see them. At least five figures, tall and slender, their forms indistinct but vaguely humanoid, moved with a slow, ritualistic grace. They were gathered around a larger shape, a hulking creature whose form was lost in the shadows, but whose sheer bulk was unmistakable.
"What do we do?" Luo Zuri murmured, her hand tightening on her pistol.
Dmitri held up a hand for silence, his mind racing. Attack? Observe? Retreat? He quickly opened a private comm channel with Guowei. "No hostile action. We don't know what they are. We observe. Follow them."
They began to move along the upper walkway, trying to keep the figures below in sight. But the architecture of the place seemed designed to disorient. The upper levels were not parallel to those below. The walkway they were on soon curved away, plunging them back into a dark, enclosed corridor, and they lost sight of the strange assembly in the depths.
---
In the center of the golden, egg-like chamber, a single black pedestal rose from the floor. And upon it, held in a delicate, almost reverent clasp of golden metal, was a mangled, fragmented object. It was part dark, like volcanic stone, veined with a metallic, artificial-looking lattice, and part shattered, crystalline structures. It was broken, incomplete, but Ervin knew, with an instinctive, gut-wrenching certainty, that this was the heart of the entire complex. This was the source of the power he had felt, the whispers he had heard.
He felt his feet moving forward, his hand rising, his body acting on an impulse that was not his own.
You have come.
The thought wasn't his. It was a cascade of fractured, alien concepts—geometry, time, an unfulfilled need that was not biological but ontological. He staggered, clutching his head, a gasp escaping his lips, then reached out.
---
"Ervin?" Casimir asked, turning to a sudden premonition, his face etched with concern.
It was too late. The attack came from nowhere, and everywhere, at once.
Reality itself seemed to tear.
Casimir Stephanov, simply… came apart. A shimmering, blade-thin void, no thicker than a thought, appeared in the air beside him. It passed through his hardsuit, his body, with no sound, no resistance. For a horrifying instant, he stood perfectly still, bisected. Then, his two halves slid apart and collapsed in a heap of armor, flesh, and steaming viscera.
"Contact!" Kyreth roared, his training kicking in as he raised his rifle. But there was nothing to shoot at. Another non-Euclidean slice appeared, this time horizontally, and passed through his torso. His upper body slid cleanly off his legs, crashing to the obsidian floor. His rifle clattered beside him. He was dead before the echoes faded.
It was as if a find-and-replace command was executed on the very fabric of spacetime.
Dmitri Ganbold saw Kyreth fall and reacted with the cold pragmatism of a topscaler facing a hostile takeover. He didn't try to fight. He grabbed Luo Zuri by the collar. "Back to the Phoenix! Now!"
They turned to run, but a third shimmering void appeared directly in Dmitri's path. He tried to swerve, but it was too fast. The slice was impossibly thin, impossibly sharp. It passed through the side of his helmet and diagonally through his head, shearing away a section of his skull and the brain within.
Dmitri's eyes went wide with a final, silent shock. He dropped to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut, a gush of blood and neural tissue spilling onto the floor.
Luo Zuri screamed, stumbling back, her mind reeling from the carnage as more slices appeared in her path.
Yao Guowei ran, but his legs were cut off by a suddenly appearing slice. He gasped briefly, before being cut apart in an instant as more segments materialized inside his body.
The first of ARI's drones took a glancing hit and fell to the ground. The second made it back to the shaft, before it too was downed.
---
From Dmitri's perspective, the world went dark for a fraction of a second. A non-moment. An infinitesimal pause between one thought and the next. He experienced a fleeting sensation of… a system diagnostic.
NEURAL_LINK_INTEGRITY: SEVERED
REROUTING_COGNITIVE_PROCESSES...
BRIDGE_PROTOCOL: ACTIVE.
REBOOTING_SENSORY_INPUT...
And then, the world came back.
He was looking at Guowei's fallen body with his own eyes, feeling the cold obsidian floor against his cheek. But he was also looking down at his own body from the perspective of a drone laying by its side. He saw the grotesque wound on his own head, the cauterized tissue, and felt the fine link to the drone almost visualized in his mind. He felt the phantom sensation of his missing skull, and simultaneously, the cool metal of the drone's chassis.
He was in two places at once. He was one mind in multiple bodies. He was Dmitri Ganbold. And while he did not know how much time had really passed, he knew he was not dead.
"ARI," his own mouth said, the words feeling both physical and like a synthesized audio output from the drone. "Get me out of here." The command was calm, clear, his voice utterly unchanged.
His mind was refusing to process what he was seeing. Dmitri's body was a ruin, yet he was speaking, thinking, commanding.
"You will have to carry me," ARI's voice prompted, now feeling to Dmitri like an internal co-processor, a part of his own thought process.
Snapping out of his shock, Dmitri scrambled forward.
As he half-headed body of the director lifted the remnants of ARI's drone onto its back, a single, terrifying thought echoed in his mind, over and over.
The substrate doesn't matter. It doesn't matter at all.
---
The moment Ervin's fingers brushed against the fragmented black object, the golden chamber dissolved. The serene, egg-like walls twisted, the glowing light collapsing into a nauseating vortex of non-Euclidean geometry. Corridors folded in on themselves, floors became ceilings, and for a terrifying, disorienting instant, Ervin felt his own physical form stretch and contort with the warping of space itself.
He didn't scream. The raw, primal terror was subsumed by a singular, overwhelming imperative that flooded his consciousness. Take it. Protect it. It is everything.
His hand closed around the object. It was cold, its surface a bizarre fusion of smooth, dark stone and the sharp, unnatural edges of crystalline lattice. The instant he held it, the chaos subsided. The golden chamber reformed, the door sliding open as if to release him, its purpose fulfilled.
He stumbled out, his mind a maelstrom of alien concepts and fractured understanding. A veil had been pulled back, and he had glimpsed the faintest outline of a plan so vast, so ancient, that it dwarfed the concerns of his own life, the mission, even the colony. A chain of cause and effect, of events past and future that spanned not just worlds, but the entire universe, had converged on this single, impossible moment. He didn't understand it, not in any rational sense, but he felt its truth with the certainty of divine revelation. He had been a piece in God's great, unknowable plan, and his purpose was to be here, now, to retrieve this object.
Nothing else mattered.
He moved with a compulsion that was not his own, his feet carrying him through the twisting, golden corridors. He needed to get out, to deliver the object. To whom? For what? He didn't know. He only knew it was the most important thing that had ever existed.
He found his way to a vertical shaft, a familiar abyss that plunged into darkness. He saw a walkway below, a path back to the others. But as he stepped towards it, the structure groaned, a deep, resonant sound that vibrated through his very bones. The corridor he was in shifted, the walls sliding, the floor tilting. The path back was gone, sealed by a seamless golden wall. He was cut off.
The movement pushed him forward, onto a narrow, precarious ledge overlooking the vast, dark chasm. He looked for a way forward, a way down, but there was none. He was trapped. He clutched the dark object to his chest, its cold, alien texture a strange comfort.
Then, he saw it. On a ledge a few meters below, one of ARI's combat drones lay crumpled, its chassis damaged but its optical sensor still faintly glowing. It was active.
Moments later, a figure emerged from a dark corridor onto the same ledge as the drone. It was Dmitri Ganbold. Ervin stared, horrified, at the grievous, cauterized wound that had sheared away a portion of the Director's head. And strapped to Dmitri's back, its own chassis sparking and damaged, was ARI's second drone.
"Dmitri!" Ervin called out, his voice echoing in the vast shaft. He took a step closer to the edge, the narrow ledge crumbling slightly under his boot, and he staggered, nearly losing his balance.
Dmitri looked up, his eyes wide, his expression a mixture of shock and a strange, unnerving lucidity. "Ervin! Hold on! I'll… I'll find a way up to you!"
But Ervin knew there was no time. The structure was still shifting, groaning around them, alive and unstable. He didn't understand why, but he knew, with that same divine certainty, that the object could not be lost here. It had to survive.
"There's no time!" Ervin shouted down, his voice filled with a desperate urgency. "This object… it's the key! It's more important than any of us! You have to get it to safety! You have to protect it!"
He didn't wait for a reply. With all the strength he could muster, he threw the black, fragmented object. It tumbled through the air, a dark, spinning shape against the gloom, and landed with a heavy thud on the ledge at Dmitri's feet.
The moment it left his hands, the structure shifted again, violently this time. The ledge beneath Ervin's feet buckled and gave way. With a final, startled cry, he and the damaged drone on the ledge below him plunged into the darkness.
Dmitri scrambled to snatch the object, clutching it to his chest. He felt… nothing. No connection, no whispers, no sense of cosmic importance. It was just a cold, heavy, broken thing. He stared at it, then up at the empty ledge where Ervin had been, a profound sense of confusion washing over him. The key to what?
He assumed Ervin was gone, another casualty of this impossible place. His own survival was now the priority. He turned and traced his steps back through the corridor, the strange object held tight in one hand, the weight of ARI's drone a heavy burden on his back. He found his way back to the rover, climbed inside, and sealed the door, the silence of the cockpit a stark contrast to the chaos that had just unfolded.
Ervin's descent was a brutal, chaotic tumble through darkness. He slammed into unseen beams, scraped against jagged walls. His last conscious thought was of the object, safe in Dmitri's hands. His mission was complete.
Then, his fall was broken by a steep, sliding slope of what felt like sand. He slid, tumbling, until he came to rest in a soft pile at the bottom, the impact jarring the last bit of consciousness from him.
When he woke, it was to a world of muted light and shadow. He ached everywhere, his body a constellation of bruises and fractures. He opened his eyes, and the first thing he saw were figures standing over him.