Muses of Roma (Codex Antonius Book 1) (37 page)

“Is this it?” Kaeso asked.

Cordus studied the terminals doubtfully. “This is too utilitarian for the Muses. I think this is a mundane data monitoring room. We should keep going.”

Kaeso, Lucia, and Cordus found more rooms, all empty of Cariosa and all used for mundane purposes: a bunk room, bath room, and more pantries with nothing left but empty boxes, cans, and packaging strewn about the floor.

At the end of the corridor, another hall ran left to right, a perpendicular cap to the first corridor. Kaeso shined his helmet lights in both directions. More doors lined the hall within the reach of his lights, and then darkness beyond.

“So which way?” Kaeso asked.

Cordus turned left and right, shining his helmet lights down each corridor. “Right.”

“Another guess?”

Cordus didn't say anything. Kaeso grunted and led them to the right.

All they found were more doors; some open, some locked. No Cariosa attacked them. They found no tabulari altars, only mundane rooms common to any fallout shelter. The monotony of their inspections weighed on Kaeso's focus, and his mind wandered to the fate of his crew rather than the task before him. He struggled to return his attention to the inspections. A lack of focus in this place would kill them all.
This was all so much easier with that damned implant.

A blank wall greeted them at the end of the corridor.

“Left corridor it is,” Kaeso said. Cordus was quiet again, and Kaeso saw a scowl through his helmet. The boy looked as frustrated as Kaeso felt. They were wasting time with all these room checks, time that allowed the Praetorians to either attack
Caduceus
or follow them down here.

When they got back to the main corridor, Kaeso said, “We're going all the way to the end before we check any doors.”

Cordus nodded. “That might be best.”

Lucia said, “What if we pass a room with Cariosa and they cut us off from the elevator?”

“We have to take that risk,” Kaeso said. “We're running out of time.”

Lucia frowned, then nodded. She proceeded down the left corridor.

This one was as long as the right one, with the same ratio of open and closed doors. They took it slow despite Kaeso's urge to hurry to the end. They shined their helmet lights into the open doorways just to ensure the rooms were empty. He wanted to get to the end of the corridor quicker, but he still shared Lucia's fear that the Cariosa could cut them off. A token inspection was better than no inspection.

At the end of the hall, an open metal door hung on one hinge. Their helmet lights illuminated a stairwell.

Kaeso paused. “Everyone still,” he ordered.

Lucia and Cordus stopped moving.

He used his eyes on his helmet display to enhance the external sound in the corridor. He heard the breathing systems on the suits of Lucia and Cordus, but beneath them, a low hum rose from the stairs.

“Enhance your external audio,” Kaeso said. “What do you hear?”

Their eyes flit about their helmets as they adjusted their audio, then they listened.

“A generator?” Lucia said.

“No,” Cordus said, staring wide-eyed at the stairs. “Voices.”

“Are you sure?” Kaeso asked. When he concentrated further, he thought the sound could be voices, but it seemed more mechanical to him.

“Yes. I am a Vessel, remember?”

“You know what they're saying?”

Cordus took a few steps toward the door. “It is chanting, but I cannot make out the language or if they are saying words at all.”

Cordus took a few more steps forward.

“Careful,” Kaeso warned.

“Light is coming from down the stairs,” Cordus said. “I think this is the place.”

Lucia exhaled. “Are we really going into a den of Cariosa?”

Cordus looked at Kaeso. “This is where we need to go. I am sure of it.”

Kaeso's mouth turned dry. He shuddered as he remembered the hideous faces leaping out of the dark, sunken eyes, swollen necks, pale, hairless skin, their teeth yellow with purple gums. In all the missions he'd performed with Umbra, he’d never been as terrified during any of them.

Kaeso swallowed once and then said, “Turn off your helmet lights.”

He switched off his light, as did Lucia and Cordus. A dim green glow came from down the stairs. As he watched, the light seemed to flicker and change to red, then blue, and then various other colors.

“Let's go,” he said. He held up his pistol and entered the stairwell.

“Wait!” Cordus said, startling Kaeso. “I hear something from the main corridor.”

Kaeso enhanced his external audio again and pointed his helmet back toward the T-intersection. It was completely black that way, so he closed his eyes to focus his hearing. He barely picked out the sound, but he knew it immediately.

He turned and hurried down the stairs. “Time to move. Someone just activated the elevator.”

Kaeso hurried down the stairs as fast as the darkness and his own caution allowed. The farther down they went, the brighter the lights grew and the more varied they became. The humming also grew louder. Kaeso could tell the voices made most of the sound, but not all—antimatter generators, which would’ve powered the whole complex, reverberated beneath the voices. Between the voices and the generators, he no longer heard the elevator motors bringing down their unwanted guests. Kaeso hoped they wasted time searching every damned door in the corridors just like he had.

Kaeso stepped onto a landing and descended one more flight of stairs. At the bottom was a half-opened door. Beyond it were the bright flickering lights, the voices, and the generators. Lucia pulled Cordus behind her and against the wall, then aimed her pulse rifle at the door. Kaeso lifted his pistol and peeked through.

A metal landing overlooked a vast cavern. A staircase descended to the left, but the door blocked his view of the cavern floor. The lights and the humming came from below. To see them he’d have to open the door further. He pushed against it, and it inched forward, scraping the metal grate below it. The sound did not overpower the humming or the voices in the cavern, so Kaeso pushed a little more until he could fit his whole body through the opening. Once through, Kaeso eased his head over the edge of the grate.

“Gods,” he breathed.

In the cavern’s center, a holographic projector displayed a large translucent globe fifty feet in diameter. Videos flickered inside the globe, showing images Kaeso didn’t understand at first. Creatures like land-based octopeds slaughtered other octopeds with small axes in each tentacled hand. The video shifted, and the octopeds now destroyed each other with cannons. The video changed again, and the octopeds fought in starships.

Starships that looked exactly like the first bulky freighters Roma built for way line travel.

Those starships rained bombs on a planet until the whole world seemed covered in white antimatter plumes. After the bombing, the octopeds were slaughtered by a bipedal species with feathers and long beaks in vicious hand to hand combat. With the octopeds out of the way, the bird-like species started fighting each other, obliterating a planet with antimatter bombs, and then in turn being slaughtered by another alien species.

The videos went on, through dozens of species, each more exotic and strange than the last. Each following the same pattern of events.

Surrounding the holographic projector and filling up the vast cavern were hundreds of sleeper cribs filled with human beings. Some cribs were broken and destroyed, and Kaeso quickly saw the reason. In between the sleeper cribs, dozens of Cariosa stood or swayed before the projector. Some watched the videos with enraptured gazes on their pale, sunken faces, while some gnawed on the bones, dry entrails, and other human remains they took from the broken sleeper cribs.

Answers the survival question,
Kaeso thought, trying to keep the bile from rising in his throat. Had he not worn an airtight, stench-free EVA suit, he doubted he could’ve kept from retching.

Kaeso looked to his left. The metal staircase wound its way down along the cavern wall to the bottom. To his right, the walkway snaked along the cavern wall and ended at a platform that appeared to have a control station.

Lucia and Cordus stared at the spectacle below. Lucia seemed grimly disgusted, while Cordus looked more sad than horrified. Kaeso nudged them and motioned to the control station to the right. They nodded and followed Kaeso past the open door.

The control station was a hundred paces away. Kaeso glanced down at the Cariosa, bracing himself for the inevitable screams once they noticed the mundanes creeping along the walkway above them. He also watched the holographic projection they worshiped. It flickered and changed, displaying new alien events, mathematical formulae, and diagrams he did not understand.

A way line node map suddenly displayed. The map showed alpha way lines connecting one node with another in a pattern Kaeso did not recognize. But after studying the map a moment, he recognized the patterns in one quadrant—it was the same pattern that made up human space. He recognized the nodes of the Roman Republic, the Zhonguo Sphere, and the Lost Worlds. Kaeso determined that all human populated space was connected to the unknown way line nodes of previous civilizations through one node.

Menota.

There must be other alpha way lines in this star system, Kaeso thought. Maybe next to one of the six gas giants that made up the outer—

He placed his right foot into empty space where the metal walkway should have been. He waved his arms, dropped his pulse pistol, and lunged for the railing to his left to avoid plummeting to the cavern floor dozens of feet below. His pistol hit a sleeper crib, producing a clang that echoed throughout the cavern. Kaeso whipped around toward the Cariosa.

They all looked up at him as one. They stared at him for a breathless moment and then screamed with one voice. The Cariosa who were chanting around the projector rushed through the rows of sleeper cribs, while the ones feasting on the sleepers dropped their grisly meals and joined the chanters.

They raced to the stairs leading to Kaeso, Lucia, and Cordus.

Kaeso looked from the open door to the infectees charging up the stairs. He, Lucia, and Cordus
might
make it through the door before the infectees got there. Might…

He turned back to the chasm in the walkway and the control station beyond. The railing and support beams on either side of the walkway were still intact, but twenty paces worth of metal floor grating was gone. To get to the control station, they’d have to creep along the six-inch wide beams while holding the railing.

Lucia cursed, then brought her pulse rifle up and aimed at the landing near the stairway door where the infectees would emerge. “Orders?” she yelled.

“Control station,” Kaeso said. “We won't make the door in time. Go!”

He shuffled along the support beam, keeping a tight grip on the railing. He stepped around areas where the railing connected to a vertical pole welded into the support beam, but those areas only delayed him a few seconds. Cordus followed him closely, while Lucia slung her rifle over her shoulder and followed Cordus. Both moved in jerking motions with a vice grip on the railing.

With ten paces to go, the infectee screams grew louder, and Kaeso felt the support beam shake. He looked back to see the infectees on the platform racing past the open door toward them. Cordus tried to look, but Kaeso yelled, “Ignore them! Move!”

Cordus whipped his eyes back to the railing and his feet. He shuffled faster to keep up with Kaeso.

Kaeso reached the end and leaped onto the grating where the walkway continued to the control panel ten paces away. He turned, grabbed Cordus's hand, and yanked the boy behind him. He then took Lucia's hand and pulled her to safety.

Lucia turned, unslung her rifle and aimed at the oncoming horde. They charged forward, high-pitched shrieks echoing throughout the cavern, their footfalls shaking the walkway so badly that Kaeso wondered if it would collapse.

No second-guesses now
.

When the first infectees came within range, Lucia fired. Two shots blew apart the heads of two infectees. They fell to the grate, the infectees behind them tripping over their twitching bodies. A pileup ensued which delayed the horde's progress a moment.

Kaeso pulled Cordus toward the control station, jumped up two steps and looked down at the terminal. Fortunately the interface was in Latin, but he had no idea how to get the information he needed.

“What do we do?” he asked Cordus.

The boy stepped up to the terminal and studied the interface. A terrible shriek came from the infectees, making him wince. Kaeso glanced behind him and saw the infectees arrive at the chasm. The crush of infectees from behind caused several in front to plummet off the platform and splatter on the broken grating and sleeper cribs below. Some attempted to jump the chasm, but the distance was too great even for their Plague-enhanced muscles. They howled and screamed as they made it less than halfway across before falling. Lucia held her fire as they jumped.

He turned to Cordus. The boy brought up file structures on the terminal screen and methodically opened each one.

“What can I do?” Kaeso asked.

“Stop distracting me.”

Kaeso looked back up at Lucia. The infectees shuffled along the support beams now, just as Kaeso had done. Lucia easily picked them off when they got to the middle, but Kaeso worried about the charges left in her pulse rifle. Dozens more infectees waited for them on the other side of the chasm. What happened when Kaeso, Lucia, and Cordus were ready to leave? Would they have enough ammunition to get through those swarming infectees and back to the ship?

“I think I have it,” Cordus said. He had brought up a list of files that looked to be in the hundreds.

Kaeso watched the file sizes with growing dismay. “It'll take hours to upload those to
Caduceus
.”

“We do not need them all,” Cordus said. “Just those linking Roma with the Muses.”

“Do you know which ones we need?”

Cordus studied the file list. “I think so. Cariosus naming conventions appear similar to the Terran strain.”

“How long?”

Cordus glanced at the howling infectees. “Fifteen minutes.”

“Get as much as you can in five.”

Cordus turned back to the terminal, his eyes losing focus. This was the part—among many—where failure was most possible. If the Cariosus hosts built their interface to only be accessed by Cariosus Muses, then the whole mission was for nothing. Cordus would not be able to direct his Muses to upload the terminal’s contents to
Caduceus’s
tabulari.

Cordus's lip curled, and his eyes twitched with effort. He stood like that for almost a minute. Lucia's pulse rifle continued firing behind him, and the infectees howled and screamed. Kaeso wanted to put a hand on Cordus's shoulder, to see if he was still awake, but it was pointless to disturb a Vessel while communicating with the Muses. They ignored everything while the Muses had them.

Cordus blinked, sucked in a breath, and then grinned at Kaeso. “I am in.”

The infectees stopped shrieking at once. Kaeso turned to see them standing still on the walkway staring at Cordus, their hollow faces blank. Lucia fired at three more infectees stopped midway across the support beam. Their bodies dropped to the cavern floor, but the other infectees did not flinch.

“Lucia, hold your fire,” Kaeso ordered.

Lucia stopped shooting, but continued aiming at the infectees on the support beam. “What's happening?” she asked without turning around.

“Cordus?” Kaeso asked, but he looked as confused as Kaeso felt.

“Centuriae!”

Kaeso’s eyes darted to the infectees across the chasm. A woman with the same swollen neck and hairless body as the others stepped forward while the infectees around her stepped back.

Cordus said from behind him, “I hear you.”

Kaeso turned to him. The boy stared at the woman, his brow furrowed.

“You should speak so my friends can hear you,” Cordus said.

“Terran,” the infected woman said in a clear voice. Her voice sounded sane and human, though with the robotic cadence Kaeso heard in other Vessels while the Muses spoke through them. But what made him shiver was how all the other infectees around the woman whispered “Terran” at the same time.

“You are of the Terran strain,” the woman, along with the other infectees, continued, “but they do not speak through you. How is this?”

“I do not know,” Cordus said. “I was born this way.”

“Are the Terran strain coming to destroy us?” The woman's voice and the whispers of the infectees sounded fearful.

“They do not know you are here,” Cordus said. “They think they destroyed you already.”

“Yet you are here,” the woman said. “They will find us soon. We are all that is left. We have been reduced to this. To feed on our own kind. It has driven us mad.”

“You were already mad,” Cordus said. There was no sarcasm in his voice, only sadness at stating a simple, heartbreaking fact. “You were incompatible with humanity. You drove them to…this.”

The woman stared at Cordus. “Perhaps we erred. That is irrelevant. We do not want to die.” The woman cocked her head. Then her voice, and the whispers of the infectees, said, “We cannot let you tell the Terrans we are here. We cannot let you leave this cavern.”