2-54: The Spider
Varis leaned in close.
"What?” I asked.
"Do you actually have a plan for what we're going to do when we meet this woman?"
"I was kind of winging it, the same as I've been doing ever since I got here," I said.
She hit me with a flat stare. I could feel a bit of irritation and dissatisfaction coming through the link. It’d been a while since I'd felt something like that.
"What?"
"Don't you think this is a time that calls for a little more than winging it?"
"I mean… I was going to appeal to her sense of avarice and her dislike of the empress."
"What makes you think she dislikes the empress?"
I looked up at the massive gate we were about to walk through. Now that we were up closer to the castle, I could see that it didn't exactly look like Castle Grayskull up close and personal. It was just one of those things where we were looking at an alien society creating something and tackling it through the lens of human pop culture.
Which was something humans had been guilty of since the very first days of authors exploring what it would be like to go from the Earth to the moon and giving people a glimpse of a future that would come in less than a century.
The stonework here looked a little lumpy. I turned to Tmors.
"So what's up with that lumpy stonework? Is that some sort of building material you had on ancient Livisqa or something? Like Roman roads back on earth?”
He looked up at the lumpy rock all around us and then back to me.
"Actually, that's the result of an Ancient fortress being subjected to the heat of a nuclear blast."
"And the thing survived it," I said, letting out a low whistle.
Now that I looked a little closer - and at the risk of looking at everything through the lens of Earth pop culture, which was pretty much humanity's superpower and how we managed to process all the weird shit that was going on out in the wider galaxy - I did have to admit that the surface looked a little like Godzilla's skin. I shuddered to think of what it must’ve been like to be someone in an ancient keep like this dealing with a nuclear blast.
"So was this, like, a living museum or something at that time?"
Tmors shrugged. "Nobody has any idea what it was. All the records from that time have been destroyed by the numerous wars that happened between then and now. We just know that this is an Ancient keep that looks sort of like others designed by livisk who were no doubt trying to match Ancient perfection, but it's made of a different material that’s unlike anything we’ve ever been able to duplicate.”
I looked up at it and I blinked again.
"Wait, when you say this is an ancient keep..."
He smiled. It was a thin sort of smile.
"This material bears no resemblance to any sort of building material you'll see in any of the antiquity sites on any other part of Livisqa,” he said. “At least not the antiquity sites featuring fortresses built by ancient livisk.”
I reached out to touch the wall. There was a part of me, an irrational part I was well aware of, that screamed I shouldn't touch something that had been near enough to an atomic blast to be melted by said blast.
But there was a more rational part of me that knew an air burst - hell, even a ground burst - would clear away the radiation within a few months at worst depending on weather patterns.
I touched the material and then pulled my hand away. It didn't feel greasy. There wasn't any ash that flaked away in my fingers or anything like that. I let out another low whistle as I stared.
"Damn," I said, finally getting what he was saying without coming out and saying it. "You have an entire castle made out of Ancient building material.”
"It certainly is Ancient building material," he said, grinning and putting his finger against his nose.
"I like how you're saying something without actually saying something," I said, grinning at him. "You're very good at that."
"Why, thank you," he said. "I like to think it's a valuable skill to have, working for the Spider."
"So how does the empress not know that you're sitting on this treasure trove down here? I thought she was big on finding Ancient ruins.”
He shrugged. "Mostly because we don't tell anybody about it, and so I would be terribly obliged if you kept your mouth shut. At least until the opportune moment. One could risk their life letting something like that slip to someone with a boss like the Spider, of course.”
I hit him with a sharp look. He was hitting me with a sharp look of his own, the kind of look that said he knew way more than he should know. The kind of look that said he was wise to my game.
“Of course,” I said.
I turned and focused my attention on the long hallway in front of us. "Your Spider Lady has an interesting sense of interior design."
Sure enough, she totally did have a design sense. Whether it was a good design sense was up for debate.
There was a long hallway running down towards what seemed to be a central room, and it was lined on both sides with a bunch of torches. Or at least they were modern lights meant to look like torches. It definitely leaned into the whole techno-medieval aesthetic they seemed to be going for here. Not that I knew a lot about what the medieval period even looked like here on Livisqa, but you get the point.
"This is fascinating," I said, looking up and around. "Was it already decorated like this, or did your boss do it?"
"Some of it was already here, and some of it the Spider fixed up,” Tmors said.
“I see," I said, looking up and all around and then back to him.
"If you would follow me, please.”
"What was that all about?" Varis said.
"Did you hear that?" I said, barely able to contain my excitement. "They have a whole castle down here made out of Ancient building materials. I didn't even know the Ancients built castles. Why the hell would the Ancients build castles?"
"I have no idea," she said. "I didn't know they did that sort of thing either."
She was looking up and around at the place with new eyes as well. She seemed suitably impressed by everything. Like it was something that was hitting her for the first time.
"It just makes no sense," I said, shaking my head. "You would think a technologically advanced civilization would have a more advanced sense of how military tactics work."
"Unless they have some sort of technology we don't know about. Something that made the waging of warfare circle all the way back around to people holing up in keeps and trying to keep invaders out," she said with a shrug.
"I suppose so," I muttered, still looking around and trying to make sense of it all.
We kept walking until finally we came to a stop. I saw the telltale shimmer of a shield in front of us. The kind of thing that wasn't going to go anywhere anytime soon.
“So what is your grand plan? Or are you still making it up as you go along?” Varis hissed under her breath.
"So is that shield a livisk original, or is that courtesy of the Ancients?" I asked Tmors instead of responding to her irritated question.
"I wouldn't know what you're talking about," Tmors said, turning to stare at us.
More particularly, he looked down at the weapons at our sides. He turned to regard Jeraj, though I noted that he gave Yana a pass. Which had her hitting him with an indignant look. Like she didn't enjoy that he was looking at all of us like we were dangerous creatures he was about to allow in the presence of his master, but she didn't rate.
"I want to let you know now that there is no point in trying anything with your weapons. As soon as you walk into that room, you're going to be enclosed in a shield bubble. One that will cut off everything,” Tmors said.
"Okay, so we won't be able to..."
I trailed off. There was something about the particular way he worded that. Something that pinged at the danger centers in the back of my brain. This guy seemed to be very good about wording things in a way where he was giving something away without actually letting us know he was giving something away.
You had to dig for the hidden meanings with this dude.
"Wait a minute," I said, frowning. "So when you say it cuts off everything..."
"Let's just say that you have an incentive to spend as little time as possible negotiating with my boss," he said, the faintest hint of a smile passing across his face as he said it. “Not if you want to continue to draw breath.”
"Right. Nice safety tip. Good to know," I said, staring at the guy and then looking over at the entrance to what I could only describe as an Ancient throne room. Like it was literally an Ancient throne room. It was the kind of stuff that would have the anthropologists who studied this sort of thing back on Earth in a tizzy trying to figure out exactly how the hell all of this worked.
I shrugged and stepped forward. Like magic, the shield in front of me dropped. Though no sooner had we stepped into the room than the shielding popped back up again, glowing all around us, and I turned to stare forward at the throne.
"I hope you know what you're doing," Varis muttered under her breath. There was still that irritation coming through the link. It said she was very annoyed with me, but she was going to hold her tongue for the moment.
"You and me both," I said.
"Don't think I didn't notice what you did just there."
"What did I do just there?" I asked, turning to hit her with a smile.
"Talking to Tmors instead of talking to me about whatever your plans are," she said.
Her teeth were practically grinding at this point. She definitely wasn't happy about that.
"I'd hoped you wouldn't notice," I said.
"Well I did notice.”
"As much as I would love to sit here and listen to a lovers' quarrel, could you perhaps address me? We do have some very important things to discuss."
I jumped just a little, and then I turned to regard the woman who sat on top of a throne that looked like the kind of thing that had been assembled from the broken parts of a bunch of stuff that had been salvaged down here over the years. I looked her up and down for a moment, which earned me another irritated flash of jealousy through the link from Varis.
I turned and arched an eyebrow at her.
"Don't go getting any ideas," she said, hitting me with a smile.
"I would never dream of getting any ideas," I said, reaching up and taking her hand.
Our fingers intertwined with one another. I gave her hand a squeeze, and I felt a sense of the sure knowledge that no matter what happened, Varis would always be right there beside me. She returned that squeeze and smiled back at me.
"I know," she said. "I just wanted to make sure."
"This is very sweet and everything," the Spider said, rolling her eyes as she leaned forward in her throne. “But we do have business to discuss.”
I noted that her chair seemed to be from some fighter craft or another. I wondered what its vintage was, but it definitely looked comfortable. Had that come from down here, or from up above?
"So you've gone to all the trouble of bringing us here," I said, smiling and sketching a mocking bow at her. "Could you maybe tell us exactly what it is that you want?"
"That's easy," she said, licking her lips and hitting both of us with a gleam in her eyes that I would describe as avaricious. "I need you to bring me the Terran Fox."