The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 Read online

  The two of them spent a few moments sweeping away dust and snow to reveal a large symbol on the floor of the dock. It was black in color, perhaps three meters wide, and more or less in the exact center of the room: an oval shape, with a circle centered inside it, and four curved lines-- two long, two short-- protruding out from each side.

  “That look like a spidership to you?”

  Brazel squinted. “A little, maybe? It’s awfully stylized if it is.” Spiderships were the Benevolence’s short-range, single-pilot fighter ships. They were basically a metal oval with a viewport in front and eight arms on the sides, which could be used for propulsion, manipulating objects, or precise aiming for weapons. Spiderships’ ability to shoot in virtually any direction made them deadly in larger numbers, although the more of their arms they devoted to combat the less maneuverable they became. A typical Benevolence capital ship would have dozens on board, if not more.

  Grond squatted, scraping at the symbol with his fingers. “It looks like it’s just been painted on, and more hastily than I’d expect from dwarves. It’s too sloppy. What’s it doing here?”

  “No idea. This isn’t Benevolence space. And I can’t imagine a bunch of dwarven scientists being real big on attracting their attention, either.”

  “Okay, gnome, you got me. Now I’m curious.”

  “Oh, sure,” Brazel said. “We just found a suggestion that Benevolence are involved with whatever’s going on, which means that this thing just went from weird-but-passive to actively dangerous, and now you get interested.”

  “Let’s find an elevator,” Grond said. “See how deep this station goes. There have got to be dorms somewhere, at least. If we don’t find anything useful, interesting, or expensive in an hour, we’ll give up and split.”

  “Deal,” Brazel said.

  It didn’t take long to locate the lift-- it was in the back of the loading dock, just past where the transports were parked. There was only one other floor for it to go to, and the descent took several minutes. The basement floor was clearly deep below the surface.

  The lift glided to a stop. Grond pulled Angela off his back and snapped his wrist, popping her limbs into position, the string crackling with energy. Brazel took a step back, his hand on a gun at his waist.

  Nothing happened.

  Grond nodded at Brazel, who moved forward to pull the door open. Grond was the better shot and Angela by far a deadlier weapon, so it made more sense for him to have his hands free. Brazel grunted, the heavy doors at first refusing to separate, then catching and sliding apart smoothly.

  The doors opened into what was obviously the laboratory/work space of the station. When the station was operational, this would have been bustling with activity; there was equipment and tech everywhere in a large open room, with doors leading to smaller rooms or other labs around the outside.

  The station was clearly no longer operational. The entire room had been torn to bits; furniture overturned, equipment smashed, the ashy evidence of small fires everywhere. Most of the lights had been shattered; the few that remained shed a shaky glow over the room. Half of the doors had been torn from their hinges and the remainder were blocked off with rubble and wreckage.

  “Bodies?” Brazel asked.

  “Don’t see any,” Grond said.

  “Five minutes. Mark.”

  The two separated quickly, picking their way separately through the room and searching for anyone, living or dead, who could shed some light on what had happened. Grond threw a few larger pieces of equipment out of his way, looking to see if anyone had been buried. Five minutes later, they met in the center of the lab.

  “Not a thing,” Grond said. “Not a drop of blood, either.”

  “And somebody did this on purpose,” Brazel said. “This isn’t an earthquake or a natural disaster. The walls are still standing, everything upstairs is fine. Somebody-- or a bunch of somebodies-- came down here and did this intentionally.”

  “Our package?”

  “I doubt it, if we were even right about the package being a person. Can you imagine a dwarven male pulling off something like this on his own? It’s generally all they can do to summon the willpower and the luck they’d need just to get away from the clans. I’ve never even heard of one using violence, much less anything on this scale. No, this wasn’t dwarves, unless it was a separate clan entirely, and they’d have killed somebody along the way. Where do you think the dorms are?”

  “Only two ways to go,” Grond said. “Back there through all the shit they’ve piled up, which will take longer than I like, or back through one of those halls there.” He pointed back toward the lift; there were halls stretching in either direction out of the near corners of the larger lab.

  “Let’s check ‘em out,” Brazel said.

  Grond nodded, taking the lead. The hallway did indeed lead to living space; and living space for the females, at that, judging from the luxury of the furnishings. The hall opened up into what was obviously a common area, with a bar, comfortable chairs and couches and tables, and even a small stage tucked into a corner. A traditional dwarven hearth sat in the middle of the room, directly underneath a ventilation duct to keep smoke and gases from the fire from filling the space. Another corridor to individual rooms continued on past the common room.

  The individual dorms were occupied. The pair checked the first three rooms they reached. Each room had either one or two beds, and each bed had a single dwarven female in it. All were either dead or deeply unconscious.

  Brazel pulled off a glove and checked for a pulse. “I think she’s gone, but it’s hard to tell. She’s clammy, but ... shit, this could be suspended animation.” He pivoted back the faceplate of his helmet and wrinkled his snout, taking a deep sniff of the room. “She doesn’t smell dead. I don’t smell rot at all, but I don’t know if I would in a place like this. There wasn’t anything alive on this rock other than the dwarves; I don’t know if there’s even really enough bacteria around to decompose them properly.”

  “Look at her hands,” Grond said.

  The dwarf’s knuckles were bloody and bruised. Her clothing was filthy, too, with small rips and tears everywhere.

  “Go check a couple more of them,” Brazel said, and Grond slipped out of the room silently. The other dwarf in the room was much the same; no clear pulse or signs of life, with the only signs of violence being damage to her hands.

  Grond was back in two minutes. “Four more, same stuff. One’s got a nice gash on the side of her head but she might have just gotten hit by something while they were ripping their lab apart. And I found this on the floor in one of the rooms.” He held out a club that had once been a table leg; it had clearly been ripped from the table and used to pound on things for a while. The business end of the thing was beaten to pieces but there was no blood on it anywhere.

  “So they wrecked their own lab,” Brazel said. “And they were frenzied enough about it that most of them did it with their bare hands. And then they just came back in here and laid down quietly and died. That’s ... ominous.” He suddenly felt a strong need to have his envirosuit completely back on, pulling his glove back on, closing his face mask, and double-checking all of his seals; breathing the local air seemed like an incredibly bad idea at the moment.

  “I told you I hated ice planets,” Grond said.

  “You know we’ve got to check on the males now,” Brazel responded.

  “Yeah. We do,” Grond said.

  They abandoned the female wing of the dorms and moved to the males’ wing. This was much smaller: rather than an opulent common room, the hallway opened into a barracks, with plain bunks stacked three high set along one wall and simple cubbies along the other for the dwarves’ sparse belongings.

  There was a pile of bodies in the middle of the room. All had been strangled with identical lengths of black wire.

  Neither spoke, moving to the pile and carefully pulling the bodies out, looking for survivors. There were eighteen bodies in all; each one of them was ra
ther unambiguously dead.

  Under the pile was a second symbol. This one, rather than having been quickly painted, looked to have been roughly scratched into the floor with something sharp.

  “Time to go?” Grond asked.

  “Time to go,” Brazel confirmed.

  The lift was still settled at their floor, and it was all Brazel and Grond could do to keep from running to get back to it. The ride back up felt incredibly slow.

  GROND, said the boat.

  “We’re on our way back,” the halfogre responded. “Get warmed up to leave as soon as we get there.”

  WE HAVE A PROBLEM.

  “I do not want to hear about a problem right now.”

  YOU SAID NOT TO TELL YOU IF THE MOONS WERE MOVING.

  “That’s right.”

  I FEEL COMPELLED TO IGNORE THAT ORDER.

  “I fucking know the moons are moving, Namey,” Grond snapped. “They’re orbiting. That’s moving. That’s what moons do.”

  I WOULD NOT CHOOSE THE WORD “ORBITING” TO DESCRIBE THE MOTION OF THIS MOON.

  Brazel and Grond looked at each other.

  “What word would you use?” Brazel asked.

  CRASHING.

  “Crashing.”

  CRASHING. THE MOON IS MOVING TOWARD OUR POSITION AT A RATHER ASTONISHING RATE OF SPEED. I CALCULATE WE HAVE TEN MINUTES UNTIL IMPACT.

  “Crashing on us?” Grond said. “How the fuck is it crashing on us?”

  I HAVE NO IDEA, the Nameless responded. THE MOON ABRUPTLY DREW TO A STOP IN THE SKY AND THEN JUST AS ABRUPTLY CHANGED DIRECTION AND BEGAN HURTLING TOWARD US. IT IS ACCELERATING.

  “This elevator needs to go fucking faster,” Grond said.

  I HAVE ALREADY BEGUN TAKEOFF PROCEDURES, Namey said. PLEASE HURRY. THE MOON WILL OBLITERATE EVERYTHING FOR SEVERAL KILOMETERS IN EVERY DIRECTION WHEN IT IMPACTS THE PLANET. IT WOULD BE AN EXTINCTION-LEVEL EVENT WERE THERE ANY PREEXISTING LIFE ON THE PLANET.

  “Shit. The miners.” Brazel said. “See if you can get any communication with the settlement on the other side of this rock and let them know what’s coming.” As if they’ll believe it, he thought. Maybe if they made sure they were underground in time ...

  I THOUGHT OF THAT ALREADY, Namey replied. I HAVE RECEIVED NO COMMUNICATION FROM THAT SETTLEMENT EITHER. I HAVE BEGUN RUNNING DIAGNOSTICS ON MY COMMUNICATIONS MODULES.

  The two exchanged a look again. Had whatever happened to the research station happened on the other side of the planet as well?

  A million years later, the lift finally slid into position on the top floor. Grond wasted no time, slamming the doors open. They fled for the front door.

  Only to be stopped by the closed airlock door in the reception area.

  “Oh, fuck,” Grond said. He threw himself at the door, muscles straining, putting everything he had into shoving the door open. To no avail. The door was simply too big, even for him.

  I ESTIMATE FIVE MINUTES, the Nameless said.

  “Get your ass around to the back of the building!” Grond shouted. “There’s a loading dock! Meet us outside! Fucking now!”

  ON MY WAY.

  Grond had much longer legs than Brazel, and was in much better shape than the gnome was. There was no time to wait for him, and no time to be polite about it. He snatched Brazel up from the ground and tucked him under one arm, running through the station at top speed back toward the loading dock, hoping he remembered the way. He saw the silhouette of the Nameless as it landed beyond the entryway, and sped out to the ship.

  And then he looked up at the sky.

  He had thought that the sight of one of Shithole’s moons careening toward him would be the most terrifying thing he was going to see that day. It was not. The thing that had thrown the moon was.

  He stood, jaws hanging open, until his partner punched him in the ribs.

  “Go,” Brazel choked. “Shockwave alone will kill us before it even hits. Keep running.”

  Grond tore his eyes away from the thing in the sky and sprinted toward the Nameless, which was several feet off the ground, engines roaring, before he even reached it. He leapt for the hatch, hitting the floor and rolling, then bellowing for the ship to move as he spun back to his feet.

  “What the fuck is that thing?” he said.

  WHAT THING? Namey asked. Grond felt the ship accelerating under his feet.

  “Just head the fuck away from the fucking moon!” he shouted, heading for his room. The cockpit was Brazel’s, and sized for gnomes; Grond had a copilot’s chair in his quarters that allowed him to see anything Brazel could see from the pilot’s seat.

  “What the fuck is that?” he said again.

  He heard a strangled gasp from his partner and realized that Brazel was only now seeing the thing-- he’d been facing the ground in Grond’s arms before they got aboard the ship.

  The moon had been torn from space and thrown to the earth by the arms of an angry god.

  It was immense; it defied immensity. Grond and Brazel had once encountered a deep-space teleporter that, for a brief moment, they’d mistaken for a moon. This dwarfed that object by an order of magnitude; it made the moon it had hurled look like a child’s toy. It bore the faintest resemblance to a spidership; a central sphere, with dozens if not hundreds of tentacles extending from its equator. The tentacles themselves were composed of more connected spheres; Grond had the horrible feeling that if they were somehow severed from their parent, they would grow their own arms rather than die.

  It hung in the sky, its arms moving, horribly alive and organic, synchronized and pulsating as if to a terrible celestial song that only it could hear.

  The Nameless accelerated.

  WE ARE AT SAFE DISTANCE, the ship reported.

  “Not safe,” Brazel mumbled crazily. “Never safe. Not from that. Keep going. Faster. Hit tunnelspace the second you fucking can.” He’d never encountered or heard of anything living that could enter tunnelspace on its own. Could it still reach them? Those tentacles had to be dozens of kilometers long.

  The moon crashed into the planet’s surface, obliterating the mountain and everything beneath it, sending out a shockwave so great that it would circle the planet’s surface three times before settling down. What little atmosphere 00901213 had burned. The ice sublimated, escaping the planet’s gravity before refreezing in the cold of deep space. If there had been anything alive anywhere on the planet, underground or not, the earthquakes would have killed them by now.

  The thing took no notice of them at all. It hung in the vacuum, watching the destruction it had wrought, and Brazel lost sight of it as his boat finally leapt into tunnelspace, heading home, heading to safety.

  Neither of them spoke for a very long time.

  ####

  About Luther M. Siler

  Luther Siler was born in 1976. He lives in northern Indiana with his wife, two-year-old son, two dogs, and two cats. In his spare time he teaches middle school. The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 is his first commercially available work.

  He only occasionally refers to himself in the third person, and writing this is making him slightly uncomfortable. He is also godawful at smiling for pictures.

  Luther Siler’s blog: http://www.infinitefreetime.com

  Follow @nfinitefreetime on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/nfinitefreetime

  Like Luther Siler on Facebook

  Also by Luther M. Siler

  SKYLIGHTS

  August 15, 2022: the Tycho, the most advanced interplanetary craft ever designed by the human race, launches from Earth on an expedition to Mars. The Tycho carries four passengers, soon to be the most famous people in human history.

  February 19, 2023: The Tycho loses all communication with Earth while orbiting Mars. After weeks of determined attempts to reestablish contact, the Tycho is declared lost.

  2027: Journalist Gabriel Southern receives a message from a mysterious caller: "Mars." Ezekiel ben Zahav isn't talking, but he wants Southern to accompany him for something-- and he's dangling enough mon
ey under his nose to make any amount of hardship worth it.

  SKYLIGHTS is the story of the second human expedition to Mars. Their mission: to find out what happened to the first.

  Available in print and digitally.

  THE SANCTUM OF THE SPHERE: THE BENEVOLENCE ARCHIVES, VOLUME II

  “Go rob that train.” Nice, normal. An everyday heist.

  But nothing is ever normal for Brazel, Grond and Rhundi.

  A simple act of motorized larceny quickly explodes into a galaxy-spanning adventure for the two thieves. Blade-wielding elves, a fast-moving global war, a secret outlaw space city, incomprehensible insectoids and one impossibly lucky human are just the start of their problems. And that’s before they learn that someone from Grond’s past has gotten the Benevolence involved …

  What is happening on the ogrespace moon Khkk?

  Who are the Noble Opposition?

  And what is the secret of THE SANCTUM OF THE SPHERE?

  Available in print and digitally coming April 28, 2015

  About the cover

  Cover Design: http://www.selfpubbookcovers.com/diversepixel

  (Considerable thanks to the cover designer, Yvonne Less, who I have not met. The story for BA 7 was in an annoying holding pattern until I saw that image, and then everything immediately fell together. I know s/he didn’t literally design that cover for me, but damn if it didn’t feel like it.)