The bright, clear notes of a violin, accompanied by a compliment of timpani and the frenzied high-pitched plucking of a zarousa reverberated from the angled stamped-regolith ceiling of the cavernous Greathall.
The music rushed from near the narrow entrance of the long office, flowing over the pews and chairs as it went. It expanded as it travelled, resonating and reverberating in the pie-slice geometry of the large hall. The excited orchestration wrapped around the governor, encircling his broad frame, and bouncing from the wide, curved wall of diamond-glass at which he stood overlooking the red sand dunes of the Antani desert.
Advisor Illiat, a tall, rotund man in a maroon robe, shifted his weight uncomfortably as he came to a stop. The tasseled rope tied about his waist magnified every slight movement with its swing,
"Illiat, I know of the attack on the mine already. Prepare the vessel," The governor ordered.
"At once, governor. I of course would be remiss in my duty to not inform you of the danger of visiting an active terrori-" he fell silent as he caught the governor's reflected stare.
"Prepare the vessel, I want to inspect the scene myself." The governor's tone could cut diamond-glass.
Akmetr Fatzl nursed his pod of mulch-beer slowly, trying to stay unnoticed in his corner booth at the tiny Edge of Forever bar.
He took in the white salt-block walls that were decorated with derelict mining tools and rusted scrap parts. Dark wood beams ran up the walls and across the low ceiling. Tourists to the edge of the habitable world had pinned hundreds of scraps of low-value currency upon which they signed their names.
Akmetr briefly pictured the conflagration that fire hazard was sure to invite.
There were only a few booths beside his own, and six red diner stools fronted the rust-patinaed steel bar. A screen on the wall played a rerun of an old scorchball match.
It wasn't easy to avoid eye contact with the three rugged miners drinking and laughing at the bar, but he was damned sure going to try. He wasn't ready to work tonight.
Akmetr had sized the men up when they entered. Three men, one of which was a giant, and one tiny. All three wore the casual muscle of hard labor, and he was sure even the mousey one could be trouble in a fight. They sported the logo of the civilian support corps on their dirty jumpsuits. Their close-cropped scalps were crisscrossed with the scars of countless industrial mishaps. They took turns glowering in his direction between gulps as if the slender twenty-something in a clean Governorate peacoat didn't belong in a run-down frontier bar.
Akmetr pointedly studied the label of his mulch-beer.
PROUDLY BREWED at Demet, using pristine water melted from the southern ice cap. It flows northwards, picking up the dry bitterness of the spirelands, before being aerated and softened over the falls of Akbinn. It is there we ferment it with the sweetest sucro-fungi from Forest Moss to develop a rich, powerful aroma and pleasantly grainy mouthfeel. Produced under official license. Drink deep, fala, for the Governorate provides plenty.
There was a little map of the journey the water had taken to get to the brewery. Conspicuously missing was the Gypsum Crater Exclusion Zone, where one of the wildly radioactive Second Era meteorites had come to rest. Akmetr knew that the zone just about touched the river. He wondered if the water leeched radiation from the crater. He wondered if gypsum had an identifiable taste.
Ah, the beginning of the Second Era, thought Akmetr, recalling the flowery prose of the history textbooks he'd been forced to study in primary.
The resetting of fortunes, the halving of the world, the decapitation of the First Era when the asteroid-swarm flattened the northen hemisphere into the thousand horizons of salty craters. The cleansing of nations from the very face of the globe tha...
Something large and wet landed on the table with a loud thumpsh. The blooded, furry head of an Oajrn rolled to a stop on his table, staring up at him with its three dead eyes. Akmetr jumped as the miners laughed raucously at the bar.
"Get out of here, govvy man," the largest of the three shouted. He had salt-and-pepper hair, a face like cottage cheese, teeth that looked to have been chewing gravel for decades, and a voice to match. "Go back to Ardentil and give our regards to the Governor."
Akmetr briefly considered pulling rank and flashing his medal of office while reading them the riot act, but he was a long way from backup. He pulled his communicator from the watch pocket of his dark olive peacoat. OUTSIDE RANGE, the face read in bright, segmented tungsten-orange letters. The bar's optical link to Antani City via the switchbacks must be down due to the dust storms common to the Edge. No matter, he was partially here to try and make connections with the locals anyhow.
Before he could respond to the big one's provocation, the bartender tried diplomacy. "Knock it off, Jank. Stick this in your gullets and try to be civil for once." The miners happily took the packets of snacks and made celebratory gestures as they ripped open the bags.
Akmetr stood up slowly and walked to the end of the bar, a few seats from the men. He leaned on it as he watched them greedily inhale the crisps. "You got me good, Jank. Where's the rest of the Oajrn? I'm gonna guess you guys didn't eat it, you still look hungry."
"Hit it on the way in from the mount'ns." Jank said, spraying crumbs onto the bar. "Thought it might make a good hood ornament but you looked so sad that I wanted you to have it, govver."
Akmetr's face turned curious. "You drove 600 miles down from the mines, past Kirch, past PerdÃt, past Antani city, down through the security at the Shear switchbacks, and all the way northwards again to the Edge of Forever just for happy hour?"
He paused to catch his breath. "Seems like a long way for some mulch-beer." Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the bartender wince as he said it.
The smaller of the three miners - Aroe, judging by the tag on his jumpsuit - piped up. "Not for us, we know a shortcut. Ow!" He yelped as the third miner, the average-height, above-average-ugly miner Modd, elbowed him hard.
"What's it to you, govver?" Modd growled, visibly agitated. Jet-black stubble framed a mean face, his coal-dark eyes were flanked by wrinkles.
"Nothin', just caught me offguard is all. A shortcut down the Shear? Must come with wings, fala. That's a three mile jump. You guys are crazy. So what they have you minin' up there?"He pointed at their uniforms. "MINE 7XG? That's a tellurium mine, right? I always loved the look of tellurium."
Akmetr wisely deflected away from the revelation about the shortcut. Playing dumb seemed like the safer path here.
Jank puffed out his chest. "Tellurium's gold, we mine palladium. Think it's used to make engines or somethin'," he said proudly. "You know those huge cargo trucks they use 'cause the sky is broken and the seas is acid? We're the reason they can move at all. We're kinda the key to the whole economy if you think about it."
Akmetr put on an impressed look. "No shit, Jank? Well, I guess I owe you guys a drink then. I'd bet it even came here on one of your trucks." He winked at the bartender as he popped open a fresh Demet Amber Mulch. "Get these guys your best. We're gonna party!"
The giant Jank and the mouse Aroe cheered as Modd stared suspiciously at the back of Akmetr's head.
By the second round of Garbian brandy, Akmetr and the miners were getting on swimmingly. They had joined his table,
"One more round, Tam!" Jank shouted at the bartender. Pretty soon, I'll be able to afford it!"
"Coming into some money, Jank?" Akmetr asked with a grin.
"Uh, I mean, not a lot, " Jank hedged. "I'm gonna get rich when I retire and write a book about the monster."
Aroe sat his tiny body up straight, looking a little concerned. Modd shot Jank a look that could bore a hole in a diamond.
Akmetr lowered his voice conspiratorily. "What's that, Jank?"
Modd interjected hastily, "It's just a legend between the boys in the mine, it's nothing."
Jank leaned toward Akmetr, lowering his voice and settling into the cadence of a pre-teen camp counsellor telling a ghost story to a circle of seven-year-olds. "The Monster of 7XG lives in the deepest drifts of the mine. When work stops and everyone holds their breath, you can hear it chewing, chewing, chewing through the Erg stone."
Akmetr raised a brow.
"Sometimes it sounds like an echo. You'll be grinding away with your hand tool and when you stop, the noise keeps going a little too long. Sounds like it's just a little ways away, on the other side of the rock. Sounds like someone, something, is right on the other side of the rock, listening back at you."
Tam the bartender had brought the bottle of Garbian brandy over with some rather squished sliced bread. She stood, rapt, waiting for Jank to continue.
"Sometimes it almost sounds like music, like it's trying to lure you into the stone. Near the end of a shift one night, we had a guy go missing. We heard the monster growl, the cavern shook, by the time I turned around he was just.. gone. The little shaft he'd been making was turned back into smooth stone!"
Tam gasped, Aroe shivered. Modd rolled his eyes.
Akmetr cocked his head and asked, "Smooth stone? like, the hole where he was caved in?"
"No. It was like... it was like he'd been sealed in with plaster. Where there had been an alcove was just.. warm salt rock. When we started digging in that direction all along that wall, we kept hitting new salt. Nobody wanted to end up sealed in so we just kind of.. went another way."
Modd was visibly agitated, shifting in his seat. "You shouldn't be telling him this, Jank. Leave it be." He stood from the table, downed his and Jank's tumbler, and stormed out of the tavern.
Tam refilled his drink and sat down where Modd had been. "Go on, Jank." she cooed.
It was fully midnight by the time Akmetr left the Edge of Forever bar. Jank and the boys drank on Akmetr's dime, the Governorate's dime, until Jank and Aroe had fallen asleep in the corner booth. Modd had stormed off for a walk and disappeared hours ago. Aroe had made it clear Modd was probably headed for the brothel across the parking lot. He made a show of lamenting he couldn't afford it himself, yet.
Akmetr stepped out into the crisp night air, and made his way to the corner of the rectangular white salt-block building. The moonslight shone from two different directions, causing everything to have two shadows. The salt-dust storms of the flats had calmed during the evening and the noxious air was clear. Combined with the white saltflats' reflections, it was quite easy for Akmetr to see into the midnight desert for tens of miles.
He made a note that the miners seemed to be expecting to come into a large amount of money. He made a quick hand-drawn map illustrating what little details he could gather of their shortcut, and ambled into the salt-gravel parking area. He turned to look south over the blocky tavern. In the far distance, and yet still right above the bar due to their height, loomed the impossibly high, brown stone cliffs of the Shear.
He could make out the lights of the switchback security gates at Antani Canyon to the southeast, where he had driven down from the mesa. He could also see the red glow of the optical link aimed at the Tavern's repeater tower, which meant his communicator should now be working. He checked again. It wasn't.
The icy tops of the Erg Ranges, under which the miners worked, peeked over the vertical cliffs of the rim to the southwest. No easy way up or down there.
In every other direction an infinite expanse of white salt disappeared over the northern curve of the salt horizon.
"You think it rully go on ferever?" came a meek voice behind Akmetr. He turned to find a woman, haggard and strung out. He stole a glance towards the bordello across the parking lot, where a side door was propped open.
"As far as anyone knows." he said. After a moment, he continued.
"Maybe it stretches up and over the north pole and back down again until you reach the southern ice cap. We can't really go north because of the radiation," He looked around at the salt flats, her sickly complexion and scraggly hair and remembered where he was. "...but I'm sure you deal with that all the time," he added sheepishly.
"Uh-huh." She slow-blinked away his embarassment dismissively. "I know someone who come from out there." she was unsteady on her feet, and her speech was slow and slurred enough she could be sleepwalking.
"You know someone who lives deep in the Horizon?" Akmetr's eyebrows grew wings.
"Op', here he come." She reached down to pick up a poofy powla that had arrived and begun whining at her feet. It looked like a white sphere of long fur with dark, round eyes in the moonslight's harsh contrast. "Ain't you the cutest thin' in forever? Who's momma's little..." she trailed off as she began shuffling through the salt-gravel towards the bar.
Akmetr chuffed and shook his head as she left.
crunchcrunchcrunch - the sound of someone running flat out on salt-gravel - caused him to spin around. He began to raise his arm defensively just in time for Modd's fist to connect with his jaw.
His world became darkness.
Akmetr awoke to complete darkness. For a moment after he opened his eyes he wondered if he had gone blind. His coughing breaths reverberated as if in a large, hard-walled space.
Beyond dark - cave dark, he thought. He waved his hand around in front of his face. He saw nothing but his brain tried tricking him into feeling like he could almost sense-see it with some sort of sight-beyond-sight.
He felt around for his communicator, coming up empty. His pockets were definitely empty - in fact, they were completely gone because his peacoat and uniform were missing. He became aware that he lay in warm, viscous liquid and that it coated the back half of his undergarmented body.
"Wh.." He fought the urge to call out as he remembered bits and pieces of the night before. The three rough miners, a stomach full of mulch-beer. Modd's face as he beat Akmetr senseless in the parking lot. Being stuffed unceremoniously into the rear seat of a rattling truck, the ensuing painfully bumpy ride and the base of the Shear growing closer and closer between bouts of unconciousness.
In the inky blackness, he sat up and felt for the edges of the slippery puddle. An ichor of petroleum suffused the damp, warm atmosphere. His imagination provided flashes of oil barrels leaking; a piston lubricated with black liquid pumping in cutaway; a dark view of a broken-down truck abandoned, disabled, and pooling its lifeblood into the dead solitude of a cavern. The images sped up and the truck fuzzed over with rust and ferro-lichen and began to fall apart as it aged rapidly. He imagined his skeleton splaying out, slowly falling apart in the ever-drying sludge puddle as centipedes and spiders claimed his flesh.
He listened intently to the dark. A tiny skittering as some bug or other moved, a slight bass rumble from far off - probably a generator, he surmised. He detected no breathing besides his own, no shifting of weight or large movements.
Some metal part of the truck's corpse popped as it cooled, causing air to glug in its tanks and a fresh drip of fuel oil began to fill the puddle.
Akmetr stood and shuffled his socked feet around in the sludge. He felt the floor of the cavern with his feet - rock scraped into small ridges like a roadway being resurfaced. The texture was a tell-tale product of the Governorate's giant mining drills.