The Sanctum of the Sphere: The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 2 Read online

  There was an actual door there. It was locked. He shot the mechanism out and kicked the door open.

  “Oh, shit,” he said, and yanked it closed again.

  There were considerably more than two hundred bugs surrounding the train now. Two thousand might not even have been accurate. Each of them was only a fraction of his size, but there was no way he was shooting his way out.

  He looked around. Okay. Can’t go up. Can’t go backwards.

  More boxes came down from the ceiling, creating a second barricade between Grond and the back of the train. He started tearing through the ones underneath him, initially just throwing them out of his way and then being a bit more careful once he remembered what he’d seen in the ones he’d already broken open.

  Only one direction to go.

  He activated his microtorch again, burning a hole through the bottom of the train. He was lucky. Since the thing walked rather than rolled, most of the machinery was on the sides. He could hear the bugs coming, knocking the boxes out of the way, and he took a few shots toward the hole in the ceiling as he worked, bringing down more cover as he did.

  He cut a hole big enough to fit through, lifting the metal plug out and tossing it out of his way. There was nothing but dry ground underneath him.

  “Braze. You said they were coming out of holes in the ground, right?”

  “Yeah. Listen, Namey thinks we ought to start strafing. Apparently there are bigger bugs coming …”

  “Gimme a minute. Lemme try something first.”

  He took a deep breath and stomped on the ground as hard as he could. And felt it give.

  It took three more stomps before he fell into darkness.

  Two

  The tunnel Grond had bashed his way into was surprisingly round and even, and painted everywhere with the same phosphorescent stuff that had been glowing on the train. It wasn’t sized for him, not at all–but it was close enough. He’d lived with gnomes for most of his adult life, so having to stoop once in a while wasn’t such a big deal, and the very narrowness of the tunnel meant that the bugs would be unable to swarm him.

  He hoped.

  “Okay, Braze, I’m underground,” he said. “Have Namey keep tabs on me and let me know if I get off track. Heading toward the cliffs.”

  “That’s crazy,” his partner responded.

  “Fighting ten thousand bugs is crazy. This is just difficult.” The cliffs had been what he and Brazel had originally been worried about. They were no more than a couple of kilometers away from the level ground giving way to an enormous canyon–and their map of the train’s path had it going straight over the canyon–or, perhaps, given its legs, straight down. They had both figured that having Grond off the train before it got there was probably best for everyone. Now he was heading directly for the canyon.

  “Just keep me on track,” he said, hunching over, holding the box like a spear, and hoping his direction sense held up underground. The goggles were doing a decent job of illuminating the tunnel around him. Hearing was going to be a problem, because the echoes were going to be a mess and he was making an awful lot of noise, sacrificing silence for speed. The bugs were probably able to pick up the vibrations he was setting off by moving through their tunnels. He’d let that become a problem before he wasted energy worrying about it.

  His luck held for a few minutes, when the tunnel abruptly widened into a larger chamber–which let him stand up, but gave him nowhere else to go. The only way in was the way he’d come. There was nothing moving in the chamber with him.

  “How close am I?” he asked.

  “A hundred meters, maybe,” Brazel said. “And you’re farther underground than you were when you started. Not by much, but you’re definitely descending. What’s going on?”

  “Dead end,” he said. “And I didn’t really see any branches in the tunnel before I got here.” He could always go back–the likelihood that the tunnel that he’d stomped his way into was a single one-way tunnel with a room at one end and no other way up seemed low, but he didn’t see any reason to press his luck.

  “Nothing down there with you?”

  “Not yet,” he said.

  Which was exactly when the clicking started.

  Why do I ever talk? Grond thought. Life had been so much easier, in some ways at least, when he hadn’t been allowed to.

  The clicking got louder, coming from opposite sides of the chamber. A loud rumbling sound accompanied it.

  Something was coming through the goddamn walls. On both sides of him.

  Okay. He put the pistol away. He had enough room to maneuver in here, provided that it was just a couple of search parties coming after him and not the entire insect army. Maybe they hadn’t bothered. He’d left them the train, after all. He set the box down on the floor between his feet.

  He pulled his Iklis sniper’s longbow off of his back and snapped his wrist, flipping the bow’s arms into position and extending the energy string that generated his shots. The bow’s name was Angela, and she was his most prized possession. And she was just about perfect for situations like this, because she killed what she hit and she didn’t need to be reloaded. Which was exactly what he needed right now.

  The wall to his right started coming down. He pivoted and fired three shots in rapid succession into the hole. Something keened and a gout of greenish-yellow blood exploded into the room.

  The thing on the left side got into the room before he had a chance to shoot it.

  “Ugh,” Grond said, and shot it anyway. He wasn’t exactly sure how an insect managed to adapt to chew through solid rock, but this thing had, and it had done so by evolving into something that was almost all mouth. Dozens of rows of buzzsaw-shaped teeth, attached to a body much more squat and muscular-looking than the rest of the insects possessed. He spent a split second wondering how it managed to walk without falling over, since it looked so horribly weighted toward its head and teeth, then cleared his head with a shake and focused on killing it. Two shots from Angela did the job. A dozen more took out the smaller insects behind it, but not before several of them had managed to spit their flame-goo at him. One singed a shoulder as he dodged out of the way. He swung back around to the right where the first bug had started to break through. Nothing else came through. He switched back to his pistol and picked up the box, grunting again with the weight of the thing.

  Please let the tunnel go the right way. He tossed the crate through the hole and shoved his body in after it, only losing a few square centimeters of skin to the rocks along the way.

  It did. It went in both directions, in fact–farther along toward the cliffs, where he wanted to go, and back toward where he’d come from. He turned right and headed for the cliff.

  “Brazel, come find me,” he said. “Are the bugs chasing?”

  “Most of them are ransacking the train,” Brazel responded. “Their numbers aren’t what they were when you were back there. A lot of ‘em have gone back underground. Namey can’t figure a way to tell if they’re headed your way. He says there’s life signs everywhere down there.”

  That was comforting.

  He heard scrabbling from behind him and redoubled his pace. Brazel had said he was a hundred meters or so from the face of the canyon. He had to have gone that far by now, right?

  The tunnel abruptly bent off to the left.

  In the distance, he saw something moving.

  The scrabbling, clicking noise continued behind him, as the insectoids got closer.

  “Solution soon,” he said into the comm.

  “You’re a meter from open air,” the gnome said. “Go back toward where you were a bit.”

  “Back is not the word I wanted to hear, here,” he said. “There are things back there that were trying to eat me a few minutes ago.”

  “You heard me,” Brazel said. “Back toward them. Not far. Five or ten meters.”

  That was the last he heard, as the bugs spotted him and charged his way. He started shooting. There was no lack of targets.
Every time he killed one, the rest just pulled its body down and climbed over it. He fired a few shots into the ceiling, hoping to trigger a tunnel collapse. No luck.

  Then the tunnel behind him exploded.

  The blast threw him to the floor and shook the ceiling loose where he’d shot at it. A small rockslide blocked the passageway. He started to turn to look behind him, tearing his goggles off in pain from the amplified light.

  Wait. Light?

  A smoking hole four meters wide had been blown into the side of the tunnel. Outside, the Nameless. He couldn’t see Brazel, but he was pretty sure that the gnome was smirking. The ship’s cargo bay was pointed toward the hole, wide open.

  “Jump, will ya?” the gnome asked. “We’ve got stuff to do.”

  Grond picked up the box from where he had dropped it and leapt to freedom.

  “So what do you think is in there?” Brazel asked. The box sat on a table between them. The Nameless was in tunnelspace, heading out of Khkk’s system. They were still waiting for Rhundi to get back to them with drop coordinates.

  “We got paid to steal it and deliver it,” Grond said. “Nobody said anything about not messing with it in between. You think the second raid on the train was a coincidence? Or did somebody decide to send an army to steal the same object that somebody else sent the two of us to steal?”

  “They kept ransacking the train after you got off of it,” Brazel said. “And they didn’t really spend a lot of energy chasing you down. Then again, who knows if they even knew you were on there, or what you were there to do. Rhundi’s got her people digging into their politics. For all we know it was just a raiding party and we got really unlucky. Nothing tried to follow us off-system. I’m not going to worry about it until we have to.”

  Grond shrugged and pulled the box over to his side of the table, then ripped the wooden lid off.

  He looked inside for a moment, then glanced across the table at his partner.

  “Ooh,” he said, his eyes widening.

  “Please don’t say ‘you have to,’” Brazel said. “Or any variant of that.”

  Grond reached into the crate and pulled out an enormous, terrifying-looking rifle. It was long enough to have filled most of the box, matte black in color and unornamented. The scope looked substantial enough to study surface features on nearby asteroids.

  “Ain’t that the purtiest thing I ever saw,” Grond said. “There’s two of ‘em in here. And ammo.” He pulled out a handful of magazines.

  “They hired us to rob a train for a couple of guns and some ammo?”

  “Pretty guns,” Grond corrected. “Be nice. They’re bigger’n you.” He rummaged around in the crate a bit more.

  “Oh, and these, too, I bet. In fact, just these, I think.” He pulled out a wallet full of data chips. “Who knows what’s on ‘em, but I bet they’re not usually kept in with the rifles. I bet those are a happy accident. And–huh–what’s this?”

  He removed a small, simple-looking statue, perhaps thirty centimeters high. It was a simple sphere, made of a dull, dark grey metal, on top of a hexagonal base made of wood. There were faint lines traced on the sphere, but other than that there was no ornamentation or detail of any kind.

  “You still got those goggles handy?” Brazel asked. “Go put ‘em on and take another look.”

  Grond shrugged and went to get his goggles. Brazel walked around to take a closer look at the statue, running his fingers over the lines. He paused, a confused look on his face, and set his ear against the side of the sphere. He closed his eyes, listening.

  “Something I need to know about?” Grond asked, returning to the room.

  Brazel blinked. “It’s humming,” he said. “And I’m not completely sure, but I feel like it’s vibrating a little bit too. Check it out.”

  Grond put a hand on top of the sphere. “I don’t feel anything,” he said, then paused and listened carefully for a moment. “Or hear anything, either. But you’ve got better hearing than I do.” Gnomes had excellent senses of smell and generally had better ears than ogres did. This was particularly true in Grond’s case, since his ears were badly misshapen after years of keeping himself alive as a pit brawler.

  “I’m not convinced,” Brazel responded. “Namey, you picking up any audio from this thing?”

  VERY SLIGHT, the ship responded. AND THERE IS A MINOR HARMONIC VIBRATION AS WELL. THE MATERIAL THE STATUE IS MADE OF IS INCREDIBLY DENSE. I CANNOT DETERMINE THE SOURCE OF THE SOUND OR THE VIBRATIONS.

  Brazel ran an experimental fingernail over the surface of the sphere. The material was fairly hard as well.

  “You can’t tell if it’s hollow?”

  I CANNOT, the ship confirmed. PERHAPS IF YOU COULD CUT OFF A PIECE OF THE SPHERE, I COULD ANALYZE IT MORE THOROUGHLY, BUT I SUSPECT THAT MIGHT ANNOY YOUR CLIENTS.

  “Probably right,” the gnome agreed. “Grond, anything?”

  “Take the lights down, Namey,” Grond said, and the ship followed orders, plunging the room into darkness. Grond slid the goggles back on. There was no trace of the glowing ink on the statue, nor on anything else in the box other than the box itself. He picked it up and looked underneath the base. Nothing there, either.

  “It’s clean,” he said. “Bring ‘em back up.”

  The room re-illuminated itself.

  “I’m concerned about that buzz,” Brazel said. “Namey, any signals coming out of this thing? It’s not some sort of beacon, is it?”

  NOTHING I CAN SENSE. IF IT IS BROADCASTING IT IS WITH AN EXTRAORDINARILY NARROW ENCRYPTED POINTBEAM. WE MOVE TOO FAST IN TUNNELSPACE FOR SUCH A THING TO BE EFFECTIVE. I NOTICED NO TRANSMISSIONS WHEN IT WAS BROUGHT ABOARD.

  “Also, electronics don’t generally vibrate,” Grond said. “You don’t need moving parts to send a signal. This has got something mechanical inside it.”

  Brazel ruffled his fur for a moment and shrugged. “I still don’t like it. But there’s still not much of a reason to worry about it.”

  “I’ll find a new box to put everything into,” Grond said. The old one had been rather beaten up in the escape from the bugs. “And I’ll make sure that it’s dense enough to block signals. No need to let them track us.”

  “Could we EMP the thing? Just to be sure?”

  “Probably electronics in the guns,” Grond said. “A lead-lined box ought to do the job.”

  INCOMING COMMUNICATION, the ship chirped. IT’S RHUNDI.

  Rhundi was Brazel’s wife and the mother of their fourteen children. They’d been married for longer than the gnome really cared to remember, most of the time. She’d been a fence when they met. Nowadays she considered herself a respectable businesswoman, which hadn’t really made her any less of a fence. Almost all of Brazel and Grond’s jobs came through her extensive network of contacts, which was exactly how Brazel liked it. She did all the legwork and negotiated the contracts, and he just executed them. She owned a resort on Arradon, out in the fancier edges of gnomespace. It had been mostly paid for with Brazel and Grond’s jobs, a fact he enjoyed reminding her of from time to time.

  “Good afternoon, dear,” Brazel said.

  “Morning, actually,” Rhundi replied. “I just got into the office.”

  “Got anything for us?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Drop coordinates. It’s in dwarfspace. You’re looking for 9013LV.” Dwarves were notorious for being unsentimental about place names. All but the oldest of their settlements had serial numbers instead of actual names.

  CALCULATING A COURSE, Namey interjected.

  “Don’t bother quite yet,” she said. “Drop’s not for two weeks for some reason. I think they thought it was going to take you guys a lot longer to steal the box. Come on home for some R&R in between. There’s no point in hanging about in dwarfspace for any longer than you have to.”

  “Any details yet on whether we’re gonna be chased down over this thing?” Grond asked.

  “Nothing,” Rhundi replied. “The theft made news all over the system, but because of
the other bugs, not you. You literally managed to walk into the opening salvo of a minor war. Some sort of ongoing tax dispute that just exploded into something bigger. I’ll send a dossier for you to read with the details.”

  “I’m good,” Brazel said.

  “I was talking to Grond,” Rhundi responded. “I know you don’t read.”

  Brazel ignored her.

  “Anyway,” Rhundi continued, “I think you’re good and the attack was just a coincidence. But I’ll have my people keep an eye on Khkk for a few more weeks just to be sure. And I’m probably going to have a word with our contact about it, too.”

  Brazel grinned. Have a word with generally meant extort more money from when Rhundi said it in these circumstances.

  “Who are we meeting?” he asked.

  “Her name’s Smashes-the-Stars,” Rhundi replied.

  “Friendly!”

  “Yeah. Anyway, she’s a front–she’s not the actual client–but she’ll be who meets you at the drop location. It’s on-planet, and I’m sending coordinates now. There won’t be an exchange. I’ll let you know when we’ve been paid and you go give them the box.”

  “Might have gotten a little busted in the escape, unfortunately. Grond’s repackaging everything. There’s a couple of guns, some datachips and a statue in there.”

  “I don’t care if it’s a dozen adorable human children, dear,” Rhundi said benignly. “If you’re giving it to them in something other than the crate you found it in, it had better still be in the crate inside of your new box. Especially if there’s any kind of artwork in there. Last thing we need is them deciding you tried to forge something.”

  Brazel sighed theatrically. “I’ll have Grond put the box back together,” he said.

  “Grond will put the box back together, but not because Brazel told him to,” Grond replied, a smile on his face.

  “Sounds like a plan,” she replied. “I’ll see you guys when you get home. And stay safe.”

  “Always,” Brazel said. “Tell the kids I said hi.”