DIG DEEP

Across the vast Centauri Cluster, ancient ruins lie hidden beneath the rocks and debris – buried remnants of those who came before us. An endless cycle of civilizations, human and Celestial, rising to glory then crumbling into dust. Worlds abandoned and forgotten until a new generation arrives to build on what was left behind, layer upon layer upon layer.

For the Arkships arriving now, those left wandering the blackness of space for millennia, these ruins offer hope. Scouring these empty worlds, we find scattered remnants of advanced technology we can use to jumpstart our understanding, giving us a foundation upon which to stand. In the bones left behind, we find a skeleton we can build on.

But not all ruins are benign. Some conceal far more than crumbling stone and discarded machines. Following the path of those who came before us, we hope it will not lead to our own collapse and despair. Digging down, down, down through the depths, will we discover the secrets of our long-term survival, or unearth unimaginable horrors that should have remained buried?

“It’s a wasteland.” Even in his armored encounter suit, Brian hunched against the wind and rain. Around them was a crazed mosaic of blocks and gullies, perilously slanted slabs of stone.

“It’s a ruin,” Reese corrected.

“The difference?”

“Someone lived here. We could, too,” she pointed out.

“Yeah?”

“Power readings, remember?” Reese reminded him, “Someone left the lights on.”

“Or the reactor in meltdown,” Brian grumbled. They chose their route carefully, scaling slopes and rappelling down drops. The entire world was like this: ruin interlocking with ruin. Dead now, but these were the ashes of a civilization that had lasted for centuries. Its end had been sudden and catastrophic. They bombed themselves into oblivion, or someone had come from outside to do it. A global nuclear bombardment so long ago that time and half-lives had erased even that.

They found a way down soon after, attaching lines and lowering themselves carefully into a low space of columns and empty-socketed buildings. Whoever lived here had loved tiny windows too high for a regular human to look through and hated straight lines. And died, Reese understood. And had not, despite the power readings, left any lights on. Their suit lamps scrubbed at the gloom in every direction, finding only more of the same. Street after curving street, little windows up close to the low ceiling. Art, occasionally: faded metallic colors shimmering back a gleam of blue-grey or orange. One concave wall held a complex design of circles and connecting lines, abstract painting, or a map of the city center.

“We can live underground,” she said. “Like these people did. Once we find out how they did it.”

“They didn’t,” Brian said flatly.

“What?”

“Whoever built this, they were different from the people up top. Those were all big flat slabs. This is all circles. This was the surface. Whoever came later paved over and forgot them.”

The thought made her shiver. The ruins above were over a thousand years old and dead. How long had they lived, before the end? And how long had this deeper layer of habitation lain, untenanted, before those other unknown people had come to settle here?

Soon after, they found that the surface-dwellers had not forgotten their buried predecessors. Instead, when their own world had been under the hammer, they had dug down. There were signs of makeshift settlement, and re-edification of the curve-walled spaces. Refugees from above had come here, and… What? There was not enough trace of them to suggest they stayed around for long.

“They died,” Brian pronounced flatly. “The whole surface got lit up with broken atoms, Rees. Probably they were already sick with it when they came.”
“There is enough rock above to shield them. I want to find out where they went. Power signatures, right?”

“You think they’re still alive down there?”

“Maybe,”

Brian shook his helmeted head. “What’ll that look like? We uncover a civilization of blind cannibals, it’s on you.”

“If you’re this damn pessimistic you should have stayed on Earth,” she said.

“I was born on-ship,” he pointed out. “Not everyone got to sleep all the way.” And there was more to that rant, the division between Loafers and Lifers, as they were called, but it would have to wait because they had found a hatch.

Black metal, set into the floor. Untouched by corrosion, indented with weird, eye-leading patterns. Four meters across, octagonal. Utterly out of scale and style with anything around them.

For a moment they just looked at it. Then Brian started to speak, and she raised a gauntleted hand to silence him.

“But-”

“Brian, you were going to say this has bad things behind it and I do not want to hear that. It leads down. The powered sections. Working technology. Cheery robots telling us our wish is their command.”

“And then murdering us.”

“Brian will you just… help me get this open.”

If it had not been for the others before them, they would not have been able to. Someone with a better understanding of technology had been there already. They found opened panels, and exposed wiring. With a little power borrowed from their suits, the vast hatch separated into triangular sections and swung silently open. Reese inched to the edge and looked down.

“They left the lights on,” she breathed. Her voice shook. The scattering of green-white illumination was a long way down. The space the hatch opened onto was cavernous, a world beneath the world. The metal flank of some vast machine extended away into the dark. The long, rippled trails that streaked to its sides were stone, deposited by thousands of years of dripping water. Yet the lights were still on, and she could hear a deep and distant thunder, barely more than a vibration, that spoke of cyclopean engines still active in defiance of entropy.

They let themselves down into the abyss. The pallid lamps hung in the air around them like a sick constellation, suspended by fragile gossamer traces. Brian reached out to one, and the half-seen thread shaved off the tip of his glove, an infinitely keen line.

On the ground at last, the timeworn flanks of stilled machines rose on all sides: not a city but some unthinkably huge factory floor or industrial zone. Even as they caught their breath, they heard metal on metal, the approach of some denizen. Ducking under the housing of the nearest dead engine, they waited.

What passed them was a skeletal framework made of metal that walked like a man, trailing a litter of broken wires and ducting. As it passed into the gleam of a hanging lamp, they saw its plastic-looking innards writhe as though the light fed them. Ancient repair mechanisms knitted together cords and components that were unspooling again a moment later, over, and over, repair and decay in an endless cycle. And then it was lost to the dark, only the receding clack of its steps vouching for it.

“That’s a problem,” Brian said.

“An opportunity,” Reese corrected him. “Salvageable technology. We can learn from it.” Desperately clutching for the positive.

They pressed on, feet cracking the thin skin of waterborne stone that had coated the floor, searching for signs of the refugees’ progress. Ahead, a great irregular panel had been pried from one of the engines, and they quickened their pace. There was light inside, a bluish radiance different to the hanging lanterns.

She was so eager to see what was there that she almost fell into it. There was no floor, just a sheer descent to a lower level. Brian grabbed her belt as she tipped forwards, and for a moment she hung there, looking down. Understanding.

When he dragged her back, she stood for a moment, catching her breath, ordering her thoughts.

“You were right,” she said, at last. “This is no place for us. We need to move on. There will be better worlds.”

If he was surprised, he said nothing of it, just nodded. They made their way back to their rope in silence.

She’d looked down and seen them. The denizens of this dead place. She couldn’t even say if they were the builders of these engines, or of the curved homes above, or refugees from the surface. There had been hundreds of them. Time and running water had layered them with a skin of stone, erasing features, fixing them forever in the attitude they died in. Crouched in a great mass, arms extended to ward off whatever unthinkable force had snuffed out their lives. Spines arched; heads thrown back. Human enough for her to read the horrors of their final moments. Whatever had wrecked their world had not spared them.

And past them, through the gaps in the floor, a deeper level, lit red with other lamps. Girders and holes and slow-turning wheels. And past that, at the very edge of sight, a chasm scattered with needle points of white, and doubtless there were more, deeper in. Worlds of the dead, all the way down. She would report that to the ark. Not a world to settle, or even scavenge. Not a world to live on. Only a place to die.