Chapter Text
“Rock And Stone!” I raised my good arm along with my team to return the stranger’s shout. He pulled out a weapon of some kind, shouldered it, and fired at a steep angle towards the cavern floor. By the whistle of the projectile, it could only have been a zipline, but the angle was far too steep, and the anchor had this weird bulb on it the size of my head. As the projectile thudded into the floor, the bulb burst, and a sphere of brown plascrete foamed up on the end of the zipline. The stranger came zipping down the line at a speed that would give R&D a heart attack and slammed into the plascrete with a ‘POOOMF’. As he clawed his way out of the puffed-up plascrete, I got the first good look at our hero.
He was Deep Rock, alright. His armor was a patchwork of different colors and styles, incorporating elements of various company kits. His upper torso was encased in the cylindrical chestpiece of the mk2 driller armor, the rim of which was adorned with several small screens facing inwards. His abdomen was encircled by the chunky belt of the Scale Brigade. Steam slowly wafted from the shoulder vents of the mk6 gunner suit’s backpack, complete with the ammo belt that wrapped around his right hip. Above his shoulders rose a variety of strange antennas and wireless nodes, giving him an odd silhouette. His boots featured the chunky kneepads of the mk5 scout’s kit, and his sleeves were adorned with the wires and gizmos of a mk4 or 5 engineer suit. His gauntlets were chunky, encasing his entire forearms, and a thick drop-pod-grade power cable ran from his backpack to his left gauntlet, which had a keypad and several gizmos- I recognized the internals of a grapple gun. His right gauntlet had a display the size of my hand and a few buttons and gadgets of its own, after a second I recognized a cannibalized plasma pistol integrated.
The armor was covered in dirt and grime. There was glyphid blood, dried mud, and scorch marks all over. But this was no slob. His scale brigade belt buckle shone in polished gold, and the joints of his exoskeleton glistened with a finely maintained layer of grease. The hair that wreathed his face was platinum white, so clean and bright that I momentarily mistook it for an honest-to-Unkar halo. His sideburns were tastefully trimmed and combed, and his beard flowed in two neat braids down his front, woven with small circles of metal and hollowed out bullet casings, all of which sparkled in the spotlights of Tillie above us. This was a dwarf of both taste and discipline.
“ ‘Bout damn time they sent someone!” The stranger picked up my pickaxe as he approached and offered me the handle. I took it from him slowly, as if it were a holy relic. He looked at us expectantly. “Well? What news?”
Mikeal was the first to shake off the shock. “Who are you?” He demanded, and stepped forward. “Are you the one responsible for the destruction of team #14450’s black box transmitter?”
“What? Oh, that.” The stranger said. “Well what did you expect? You guys cut contact out of nowhere, I had to get your attention somehow. That black box hadn’t been touched for months, I thought it was fine.”
“Destruction and theft of company property is far from ‘fine’.” Mikeal said through clenched teeth. “You have committed crimes against the company and are to return to the space rig for judgment. Now identify yourself or Karl help me I will kill you where you stand.”
“But I am Karl.” The stranger looked perplexed. “Didn’t Zakhary brief you before coming down here?”
Another wave of shock washed over me. By the gods. It really was Karl. The dwarf of legend. I was stunned. Truthfully, I had known it was Karl the second that coilgun round pierced the hiveguard. But to hear him say it out loud…
I planted my pickaxe’s head into the ground and knelt, bowing my head. “It’s an honor, sir.” I heard Khris and Skully do the same next to me.
Mikeal stood his ground, though his voice quivered with a combination of annoyance and reverence. “There…was no briefing. The entire company believes you’re dead. Our mission was to investigate the black box signal. Once we found your tracks, we were reassigned to tracking you down and bringing you in.”
“Stand up, all of you.” Karl said with a twinge of annoyance. We did. He looked down his nose at Mikeal. “You weren’t told of my mission at all?”
“From the sound of it, not even mission control thinks you’re alive.” Mikeal replied as the rest of us got to our feet.
“Sounds like we have some catching up to do.” Karl said. “Come. We’ll talk at my base. The bugs down here can get mean. Well, mean-er”
After a couple taps to his left gauntlet, a small motorized assembly made its way down the zipline, powered by a couple cargo crate batteries and supporting a net of thick straps clearly designed for hauling large minerals. He helped us attach our standard zipline hooks to the assembly, and soon we were all ascending the zipline like a minecart train, despite the steep angle.
Karl himself merely raised his left gauntlet and grappled ahead of us.
The ride up took a couple minutes, and I had a moment to think. The traitor we’d been tracking had been Karl all along. Our duty to the company was to arrest him and drag him back to the space rig. But this was Karl. He’d been down here for a couple centuries at least, and apparently had been creating new weapons and technology in that time. I wasn’t sure if we could take him if we wanted to.
And that was another question. Did we want to? This was Karl. The legendary graybeard. We miners fought and drank and died in his name. And here he was in front of us. He was real. He’d touched my pickaxe. My mind was still reeling from that alone. I would never wash that handle again.
“Wha’ we do now, Mikeal?” Skully piped up. “Fight him?”
Mikeal was silent for a moment. “No. He’s apparently down here on company orders. We need more information on his mission.”
“He mentioned Zakhary. Does anyone know a Zakhary?” Khris said. We all shook our heads.
“We’ll follow him home and talk. Keep your guns loaded.” Mikeal said darkly. “Where’s Molly?”
She was trotting her way up the cavern wall, doing her best to follow us. A quick tap to my hud showed our team’s readiness.
Khris could use a couple hundred sentry ammo. Mikeal had depleted a couple magazine’s worth of auto cannon shells. Skully had used one satchel charge and needed to top off his flamethrower fuel, and I could use a couple fistfuls of rifle and shotgun ammo.
My shoulder twinged painfully when I craned my neck to look at Molly. I could also use some red sugar.
As we reached the top of the zipline and started to unhook ourselves, we were greeted by a collection of robots. There were two intact Mini M.U.L.E.s, white with hand-painted red crosses on each side, three grunt guard Steephens, Tillie, and one other millipede-style bot, which had an internal engine chugging away in fervor.
This new bot was imposing, to say the least. Its frame was the same as Tillie’s, around 2 meters tall, the same wide, and 6 long, supported by 6 mini M.U.L.E.s. The front was a sheer armored slope, with two floodlights mounted on top. The lights from a Bosco were embedded halfway up, just above a small hand-embossed plate that read “Billie, the Battle Millipede”. Two weapon barrels pointed forward, and could move up and down in slots in the front armor.
But behind the front armor was where things got interesting. The movement mechanism for what was obviously the main weapons was exposed, I assumed for repairability. At about knee height was a set of storage containers.
As I came around to the side of the machine, I heard Khris gasp behind me. He excitedly stepped up to inspect it further, but even I was impressed with what I saw. The weapons that stuck out the front were coilguns, the barrels of which ran the length of the machine. They were mounted to a pivot point in the middle to aim up and down, and had a small mechanism that allowed a round to be dropped into the barrel at that midpoint.
“By Unkar…” Khris breathed. “These are the biggest coilguns I’ve ever seen. No wonder you could kill that dread. How did you get the materials?”
“Ha. You like it?” Karl said. “Took me a decade and a half to scrounge up the coil pistols. And the ammo isn’t easy to come by either. But it’s worth it for those big bastards. I can’t exactly fly away to some space rig in the sky when one shows up.”
“Where did you get the coilguns?” Mikeal asked darkly. “Gunner’s don’t give up their weapons easily.”
“Watch your tone.” Karl said darkly as he collapsed the zipline ‘minecart’ assembly down to the size of a jadiz chunk. “I only scavenge equipment after their mission ends. Besides,” his voice softened as he turned around. “Who do you think makes those little burial chambers for their armor?”
Mikeal seemed taken aback slightly.
“How on earth are you powering them?” Khris asked, still engrossed in the machine.
“About a dozen breach cutter batteries each, charged by a rockcracker engine.” Karl said. “Just those two shots depleted the batteries completely. He’s charging them back up now. Those containers below the barrels are for ammo, both mine and his, and there’s this nice strong winch on the back.” He walked to the back of the machine and placed the minecart on the winch hook.
“What for?” Khris said, following him around the machine.
“For lifting things, hauling stuff, getting him out of a crevice.” Karl counted off on his fingers. “You never know when you’re gonna need a good winch.”
“What’s that on top?” I asked, pointing. There was a stripped-down turret assembly mounted to the dorsal surface, without its weapons. Just a pointer tool. In front of it was a static box-shaped thing pointed at an upwards angle, whose purpose I didn’t recognize.
“Oh, that’s the secondary weapon. A hurricane launcher. The laser pointer is the targeting system, which works in conjunction with my own pointer.” The elder dwarf flexed his wrist, and his right gauntlet emitted a laser pointer beam. He pinged a point far down the tunnel, and all the robots got and started moving that direction. “I’ve programmed him with a couple premade functions too. At the push of a button, he’ll create a spiraling holding pattern of missiles, and bring them down to take out a whole swarm on command.
But listen to me, yapping like some overexcited greenbeard. Sit here, scout, let’s have a look at that arm.”
I sat down as Karl opened up my armor and inspected the injury. He called over one of the white Mini M.U.L.E.s, “C’mere Roxxy,” which opened its deposit slots to reveal red sugar and other medical supplies. I took the glowing red chunk that Karl handed me as he started applying a bandage.
“Not a bad splint,” he mused as he locked my armor back up. “Considering you had a dreadnought chomping for your dick.”
“Is that what those screens on your armor are for?” I asked as we all got up and started following the bots. “Targeting the missiles?”
“Yes!” He said excitedly, tapping the rim of his large collar where the small screens were mounted. “Well, that and my other HUD functions. I hate the way those headsets sit on my face, and I can’t exactly get those fancy implants down here.
That kind of took me aback, since I had never heard of any implants. I used the AR headset, and I always assumed that Khris and Skully’s HUDs were just projected onto their goggles. But now that I thought about it, I had seen them respond to pings and other HUD communications without them, and Mikeal rarely wore headgear at all. Did I have those implants? I was in stasis for several months on my voyage to the space rig when I was first hired, and I was unconscious for several hours a day in my sleep pod. When was the last time I took off my headset? Would I have even noticed a lack of HUD?
“You don’t have it.” Mikeal noticed me touching my face. “Most prefer the implants, but you clearly don’t mind the headset, and the company doesn’t spend money on them if they don’t have to.”
That put me at ease. Putting in implants without permission wasn’t totally out of line with company policy, but avoiding spending extra money on equipment was much more in line with the DRG I knew.
“How do you build these bots?” Khris asked. “I mean, how are you making the gasses for welding?”
“Oh!” Karl excitedly started explaining the chemistry. “It all starts with Magnite, believe it or not…”
We all trotted to catch up to the robots, then set into a steady walking pace as Karl led us deeper into His Kingdom.
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Khris kept up conversation with Karl about the chemistry of welding, passing his tablet back and forth as they drew up various reaction chamber designs. Every so often, we would reach a junction of the tunnels, and Karl would ping a direction and keep walking. I kept my tablet out and scanning, to map our way back.
While he was distracted, I whispered to Mikeal. “What kind of damage do you think Billie is capable of?”
Mikeal grunted before whispering back, “With coilguns like those? He could bring down any piece of mission-critical equipment the company makes. Even drop pods.”
“Even black boxes?”
Mikeal nodded, his expression sober.
After a whole hour filled with more information about the chemical, thermal, and physical stress limits of various materials than I ever cared to learn, we finally reached Karl’s home base.
“Unkar’s balls…” I breathed.
The megadozer tunnel deposited us on a high ledge in a huge cavern. The whole place was aglow with spotlights and luminescent plant life. The cavern floor was roughly twenty meters below us, covered in thin tall pillars which rose up to support Karl’s base. Piled high between the pillars was a scrapyard of company equipment, literal tons of it. Chunks of refineries mixed with dozer treads, pumpjacks, drill heads, and a million other pieces of defunct machinery, enough to make Khris’s eyes bulge out of his head.
Taking center stage in front of us was the main body of the base, an huge bulbous mound of plascrete and earth towering thirty meters above us, glowing like a jack o’lantern from within. It was covered in indents and pockets, all brimming with supplies and minerals of various kinds, sorted and organized by a crew of over a dozen Steephen glyphids that scurried from one pocket to the next. A flock of Bosco drones buzzed around the cavern, carrying equipment or repairing the terrain.
A huge ledge circled the entire cavern, clearly dug out by a megadozer, with other tunnels going off in all directions. Plascrete ledges dotted the outer wall of the cavern, each with a pair of sentry guns. As I watched, a drone came up to one and refilled its ammo, the bullets clattering as they fell into place.
“How long did it take you to build all this?” Even Mikeal couldn’t hide the awe in his voice.
“Almost my entire lifetime.” Karl said with a grin. “Come, I haven’t had anyone to show this to in three hundred years!”
We approached the main structure using one of many plascrete bridges, only as wide as Khris’s standard platforms. Tillie automatically scuttled away, following a ramp down to a lower platform, where she plopped down with a satisfied *Bweep bweeeeo*. Another small crew of Steephen bugs started busily attaching hoses to her, giving her the air of a queen surrounded by many attendants. Billie climbed up the side of the base to a platform that gave him a commanding view of the cavern, and a trio of Bosco drones carrying fuel for his engines quickly appeared to serve him.
The interior of the main structure was surprisingly clean in contrast to the scrap heap outside. Carefully carved stone pillars supported a vaulted ceiling, almost like a reverent cathedral on the homeworld. The walls were covered in niches, storage for a truly immense variety of materials and gizmos. Some were simple cubbies, others were clearly funnels fed by the mineral pockets the Steephens had been filling outside, some were maintenance access pipes for various chemical storage systems.
As we entered the main ‘hive’, the Roxxane mini mules scuttled up the wall into purpose-built shelves, settling down in the rafters amongst dozens of sleeping glyphids, some of which perked up at our approach before settling again.
The whole place was clearly handcrafted in the style and quality of the ancient masters. It must have taken decades to complete, if not centuries.
“Please, sit.” Karl dragged out several ornate chairs of various materials, one of finely carved wood, another of stone, two more of smelted and forged metal. He sat in a tall-backed throne, padded with restitched seat covers from a drop pod.
Once we had all settled, he said “Let’s start with the basics. What do you want to know about my operation?”
“It would be easier to list the things we do know.” Khris volunteered. “It’s practically nothing.”
“You really didn’t receive a briefing?” Karl looked perplexed. “This place is somewhat secret, but surely if you’re here for me, Zakhary must have told you something.”
“Let’s start there.” Mikeal asked. “Who’s Zakhary? From which space rig?”
“He’s my contact with the company. From Space Rig 5.” Karl looked even more confused as we all shook our heads in silence. “What?”
“Unkar’s beard.” I breathed. “How long have you been down here?”
“Pretty damn long, dingus. Obviously.” Mikeal said, but his voice lacked its usual biting sarcasm.
“What?” Karl said,.“What happened to Space Rig 5?”
“Space Rig 5’s fusion reactor was damaged by a fragment of the rockpox comet.” Khris said slowly. “Lost with all hands. Its debris is currently in a deteriorating orbit, set to crash down next decade over the fungus bogs.”
Karl sat back against his chair. “What?” he said softly. “All hands?” We nodded.
“When did you lose contact with…” I didn’t mention the name, didn’t want to emphasize the death of his friend.
“15 years ago.” He said.
“That…that lines up.” Mikeal said. “I’m sorry.”
I was flabbergasted to hear Mikeal apologize for anything, but remained silent.
“Well.” Karl sat up. “Comes with the territory, I suppose.”
“What your mission?” Skully had been picking his teeth with his pickaxe the whole time.
“I’m investigating the connection between the Kursite infection and the Ommoran phenomenon.” He flicked his wrist, and a knee height table walked over on Mini M.U.L.E. legs. It was a large screen longer than a dwarf was tall, cobbled together from several terrain scanner tablets.
Karl flicked his wrist to pull up an image of the planet. “Hoxxes is more than just a rock. It’s alive. The stone itself can think, can feel. And most importantly, it can evolve.” He gestured to me. “You. When did life emerge here?”
“The oldest fossils are around six million years old.” I said, “But multicellular crawlies started about fifteen million ago, we thinks.”
“And the oldest glyphid?”
“Only about 700k, but those are just little buggers, half the size of modern swarmers.” I said.
“And what’s special about glyphids?” He asked. “Compared to crawlies on other planets.”
“They’re rock.” I said. “Their bodies have stuff that you can only find in very old stone. Can’t be grown biologically, only carved with acid and absorbed.”
“And how long have the big bois been here? With armor?” He said with a knowing smile.
I saw where he was heading now. “Twenty years after the company landed. You’re talking about the crazy fast evolution, huh?” It was the great mystery of the company’s xenobiologists, and a personal topic of interest. I started on a rant. “They grew to current grunt size in just 20 years. We started bringing guns, they started growing armor just ten years after. We deployed BET-C’s, the whole Xynarch family sprang up in just 60. Those evolved from microscopic straight to current size. Nobody has seen life evolve this quick, on any planet. Not us, not the knife-ears, not the horn-heads, nobody.”
“Precisely.” Karl leaned back in his chair with a grin. “For all other life in the universe, across thousands of known planets, adaptation at this scale and speed is impossible. But there is one thing to compare it to.”
The screen changed to show a pistol. Just a normal, single shot breach loading pistol. No magazine, no safety, no ironsights. Just a chamber, barrel, handle, and trigger. It was so old, I had never seen one on a mission.
“This is the first weapon deployed by the company. Just a simple handgun, carried by an exploration officer as a keepsake. An antiquated trinket, even at the time.” The screen changed to show a driller’s pistol. “Eventually, though, the guns got stronger.” Now it showed a bulldog revolver “They got larger, more powerful.” It showed my M-1000 rifle. “And finally, it began to diversify.” Several guns showed up, including the minigun, autocannon, Warthog shotgun, and coilgun. “All of this progress, in just 50 years.”
“So…bugs is guns?” Skully scratched his chin.
“I’m saying the bugs are crafted. By intelligent life, deep in the core.”
“But that’s…” Khris started. Mikeal looked skeptical too. But I piped up.
“That makes a lot of sense.” I stood up, the weight of the realisation made my eyes bug out. “Every glyphid has a stone in its head. No gray matter, no brain as we think of it. We always assumed the neural network was spread across the body, like insects on other worlds. But that stone, the one that can’t be made biologically? What if that is the brain? It has an incredible complex structure inside, like a crystal, but with severe imperfections. So many imperfections that the crystal couldn’t have grown that way. But what if…it’s a kind of circuit board? A control unit.”
“We can get into all the nitty-gritty later, lad.” Karl stood. The screen on his right gauntlet was flashing red. “Perimeter’s been breached. Corespawn Attack! Weapons free!”
We all followed him as he dashed from the hive into the main cavern, which was abuzz with activity. From one of the drilldozer tunnels I heard a racket of sentry gun fire, which abruptly cut off. Then the sound of footfalls, hundreds of them, as the crawlers rushed into the cavern in a purple tide.