Renegade (36 page)

“That is the temple of the tenth caste,” Chis said quietly. In the neighbouring bed, Chis’s tavalai companion began to cry softly as the translator converted those words. “It has stood for nearly fourteen thousand years.”

“I’ve been neglecting my studies on tavalai history,” said Erik. “Remind me.”

“Not just tavalai history,” said Chis. “Chah'nas built the temple. Chah'nas have nine castes. For a long time chah'nas-tavalai relations were poor — both of us suffered under the hacksaws. The AI Age ravaged both peoples, but the chah'nas had the worst of it, because the chah'nas fought back. Tavalai made attempts at fighting, but when they met with disaster, we compromised and found some uses for ourselves, amongst the AI.

“When the AI were finally destroyed by the Parren Alliance, the parren adopted chah'nas as their right-hand assistants, and viewed tavalai as cowards. But when the chah'nas needed help overthrowing the parren, who were far less well-suited to rule than the chah'nas, they turned to us. And we became their managers, during the chah'nas empire, and chah'nas began to accept that we were better at many things than them.

“It is the tragedy of the chah'nas. They are linear thinkers. For all their brutishness, they are fair-minded and always give competitors their due. Tavalai earned their respect in management, and so managers and bureaucrats we became. The chah'nas called us their ‘tenth caste’. They meant it as a compliment. Chah'nas have trouble finding a place for anything outside of their language and social structures, so they carved out a special place for tavalai. They even built the temple, here on Merakis, which they knew we valued, to become a part of the Spiral Progression.”

Erik knew of the Spiral Progression. It was what Merakis was famous for — a succession of temples and monuments, built by each successive ruling race. Together, those monuments told the history of the Spiral, from the Ancients to the Fathers, skipping the hacksaws (who had no interest in monuments) to the parren, then the chah'nas, then the tavalai. And now, perhaps, back to chah'nas again. Was this why Fleet had allowed the chah'nas back first? To erase this mark on Merakis’s surface that offended them, and perhaps to build a new one?

“But the tenth caste became our prison,” Chis continued. “Chah'nas move up and down their castes at will. Tavalai were granted a caste of one, and chah'nas could not move into it, yet tavalai could not move out. We had no say in command, no say in laws, or little. We squabbled over matters of governance, over various small wars and disagreements. Chah'nas called us ‘troublesome’. No doubt they were right.

“All the minor species chafing under the chah'nas came to us to indulge their troubles. And we listened, because tavalai will always listen to anyone with a story to tell, and a trouble to share. There is an old joke the chah'nas used to say; they said that among friends, a trouble shared is a trouble halved… but that among tavalai, a trouble shared is a trouble multiplied, retold, translated into five hundred tongues and turned into opera. Chah'nas found out our plotting with other species and threatened, and relations soured to the point that uprising and war were inevitable. We stabbed them in the back, brought their Empire down, and they’ve never forgiven us. We keep the Temple of the Tenth Caste in pristine condition, as we do all our history, to remind us.” He took a deep breath, and blinked back tears. “And now it is gone.”

P
H-1 thundered
and rocked through a light reentry, turbulence fading as speed reduced. Nav feed showed their position closing on Teras Tihl, ETA ten minutes. There were five major archaeological sites on Merakis, but Teras Tihl was the centre, the one that everyone in the galaxy knew. Trace reacquired the visual feed as communications with
Phoenix
reestablished… that wouldn’t last long, low orbit would take
Phoenix
out of coms range soon, one reason Erik hated her being down here.

Lieutenant Dale wasn’t happy either, giving her a grim look behind his raised visor, restraint bars securing him opposite amidst a row of Alpha Platoon marines. Trace ignored him, visor down, observing the orbital feed. PH-1’s own feed replaced it as Lieutenant Hausler got a better view. From forty thousand meters the surface of Merakis looked barren, red-brown like a desert. Deep colours swirled, like liquids mixing, only nothing liquid had fallen on that surface for a hundred million years. Once, long ago, before a massive meteor strike had removed most of the atmosphere, there had been sparse life. Now, the only things living were visitors.

Upon the top of a plateau, many kilometres wide above the surface, small, flat structures made a pattern. They spread wide enough to make a town, but without the clutter. PH-1 dipped into a steep bank, spiralling about the settlements as it descended.

“
Scan reads clean,
” came the co-pilot’s voice. “
Nothing else airborne.”
The drone they’d sent down first showed nothing nearby, and Merakis surface was devoid of hiding places. The chah'nas who had been here were long gone over the horizon. They could return, but they’d give plenty of warning with the drone aloft.

One of the buildings below was smothered in smoke, drifting across the others in the faint breeze. As they dropped closer, Trace zoomed enough to get a clear look at whatever it had been. A central, circular foundation beneath smouldering rubble. Separate wings, also destroyed. In what might have once been a courtyard, temporary dwellings, metal and modern, torn and scattered across the landscape like the remains of a shuttle crash. Scientific settlements, where visitors might stay while research was done. Trace did not think the tavalai would normally despoil the site with a settlement even a few days permanent… but they’d been in a hurry.

“
There’s another one,”
said the co-pilot, Ensign Yun. “
Over by the Father’s Pinnacle.
” Trace looked. Sure enough, by the base of the pinnacle, more strewn wreckage. The pinnacle itself had been invisible from higher altitudes, the same colour as the red-brown ground, tall and thin. It did not look as though there would be anywhere near it to hide. Further about the monument ring, the Cho’ar’as, primary work of the Chah'nas Empire. Huge, monolithic walls of stone, casting several shadows in the mixed light of local ‘night’.

“Are there internal spaces in the Cho’ar’as?” Trace asked. It seemed surreal to be speaking of it in an operation. These were the great symbols of childhood textbooks, deep in tavalai space. When Trace was a child, Merakis had been far away from any human territory. Now, here they were… only somehow, the chah'nas had gotten here first.

A longer pause… clearly the pilots did not know. Nor did her marines. “
Major, there are a few internals in the Cho’ar’as,
” Kaspowitz confirmed from up on the
Phoenix
bridge. “
Better check them to be sure.
”

“Copy Lieutenant.” Looking at the mess chah'nas fire had made of tavalai temporary settlements, she didn’t hold much hope.

PH-1 came down before the Temple of the Tenth Caste with a roar of thrusters. Trace dismounted with Command Squad, Third Squad and a Heavy Squad, while PH-1 lifted once more to fly Lieutenant Dale and the rest over to the Pinnacle. They spread, and walked in the light gravity amidst the scattered wreckage, sections of once-pressurised habitat shining dull silver amidst structural honeycomb and civilian internals. Bits of furniture, parts of bathroom fittings. Tavalai bodies. A few wore environmentals, but all were dead. There were chah'nas footprints on the sand, and a few of the bodies had extra holes in them, delivered at close range.

Trace left her marines to the search for survivors and clues, and surveyed the wreckage of the temple. It had had great domes, she knew. The circular foundations visible from the air had suggested as much. All was gone now, just great piles of collapsed masonry. Away from the ruins, the great Tiras Plateau stretched as flat as the surface of some great boardgame. Only the surreal outline of other monuments broke the featureless expanse. Above, looming huge on the horizon, was Gorah — huge and red-brown like Merakis, in partial crescent from the system’s primary sun. The great bulk of the gas giant fell across those rings, casting them to invisible shadow.

Beyond, and above, several more visible moons. The largest was Shek, larger again than Merakis. They too were in crescent, and the light from them fell silver upon the sands. And far, far more distant still, the dull red glow of the system’s outer-binary stars, circling a common centre every three days, which in turn orbited the primary star every eighty-five years. It was night upon the Tiras Plateau, yet the sky was alive with light, red-brown from Gorah, silver from the neighbouring moons, and red from the far-off binary dwarfs. A magical display of orbital mechanics, the turning gears that ran the universe, beautiful, majestic and cold. This was a world that had never known darkness, just an endless play of colour and shadow upon the rock and sands.

Sand crunched as Private Arime came to her side. “
Hell of a thing,”
he murmured on proximity channel, looking at the ruins.

Trace nodded slowly, gazing about. “Fourteen thousand years ago,” she said. “Chah'nas built this thing. I finally get to see it, and I’m a single day late.”

“
It’s like a bad marriage breakup,”
said Arime. “C
hah'nas and tavalai. This place was like a monument to love. Only the tavalai betrayed them, kicked the chah'nas out but kept the house and the jewellery. And now the chah'nas came back to destroy it in a jealous rage.”

“And we let them,” said Trace.

Arime looked at her.
“Major, are you okay?”
Trace glanced at him in surprise.
“I don’t mean to… it’s just… well. You’ve been stewing.”

Trace smiled. Irfan Arime was just a private, and she was a major, but he’d been Command Squad for five years, and few knew her better.

“I have been stewing,” she admitted. “I miss Stitch. And I miss Fly, and all of them.” She looked back to the smoking ruins. “I miss knowing what I’m for.”

“
We’re for Phoenix,
” said Arime, with certainty. “
That’s what I’m for.”

“I’m Kulina,” said Trace. “I’m for humanity. Five hundred billion souls, and all the trillions still to come. And in a place like this, I look about, and I wonder if even that isn’t too narrow a viewpoint.” She gazed across the monument-dotted horizon. “All these species. All these souls. The karma goes everywhere. We Kulina try to separate out the fates of humans from all these other fates. But this war is over now, and I’m no longer sure we can.”

Arime smiled. “
That’s too deep for me Major. I’m just a grunt.”

She hated it when they said that. “No you’re not. No one is.” She put a hand on his armoured shoulder, and trudged toward the ruins.

The search for survivors was pointless. On tacnet, Trace watched as Lieutenant Dale led several squads into the small exterior doors in the massive, smooth stone walls of the Cho’ar’as. Even on vid screen it looked incredible, walls three hundred meters tall, sheer and smooth rock, cast with red and silver light in the Merakis night. Low gravity made it easier, but still it was hard to imagine how such walls had been put in place. Monuments on Merakis could take decades to build, even with modern technology. But once standing, they stood for tens of thousands of years. Usually.

“
Major,”
came Lieutenant Hausler’s voice from above, where PH-1 was maintaining a steady covering orbit. “
It looks like some kind of vehicle has crashed over by the Ancients’ Meridian. It’s only small, looks like it might be a low gravity runner of some sort. You want me to come down and give someone a lift over?”

“No,” said Trace. “You keep your orbit, I’ll go over myself.”

She called the rest of Command Squad and they set off at a jog. The Ancients’ Meridian was only a kilometre away. It was the reason all these other monuments were here, the one that had started the whole Spiral Progression on this world. Trace felt almost guilty for her eagerness to head this way, and ran easily in the low-G, as suit comp readjusted armour tension for more give in the joints.

Closer, and the low arcs of stone resolved more clearly. Three semi-circular bands, or arches, in ascending angles above the horizon. Meridians, of a sort. From a distance, they looked almost disappointingly simple.

Nearby they reached the vehicle that Hausler had seen — it was indeed a low gravity sled, powered aloft only by retros and flyable only on low-G worlds. It had been shot down, and several more tavalai lay in the wreck, dead beneath the arcs of stone they’d most likely dedicated their lives to study.

Trace left her marines to the examination, and walked beneath the great arcs. Upon the ground beneath them, several perfectly circular mounds. The tallest was central, directly beneath the stone arcs’ midpoint, like someone had buried a perfect sphere in the sand. At outer-lying points, where planets might circle a sun, smaller spheres emerged. Looking up, Trace could see how the moons and rings around Merakis followed these great, arcing lines across the sky. It was an observatory of sorts, a model frame from within which to view the great, complicated expanse of the Merakis system. At different times of the day or night, she recalled reading in her children's textbook at school, shadows from those worlds would fall at significant points among or upon these spheres. Times could be told, and certain mathematical formulas would repeat with endless precision.

But more than that, some scientists said — the Ancients’ Meridian modelled much of the near Spiral. Some of those formulas at play in the movement of shadows on the sand described exact distances of light between major systems where further Ancients’ monuments had also been found. Other formulas described relative motion of those systems, the kind of coordinates that starship navigators knew by heart. Kaspowitz was going to be so jealous, she thought, looking about in awe.