A Tale of Arcane Space: Lost & Found

Cori stepped forward, one fist raised high. "A salute and thanks to Captain Guan Liang, for his guidance, wisdom, peacekeeping, tactical savvy... and for his very generous promise of equal shares on this haul! To the Captain! ENDURANCE!"

All raised their fists in salute, and called out as one. "TO THE CAPTAIN! ENDURANCE!"

An indignant meow cried out, and all looked down to see an orange tabby wrapping itself around the captain's legs. Everyone laughed, and Liang reached down to pick her up. "Now now, Abnegazar, we haven't forgotten about you. Endurance, let us salute our cat, and her feline husbands Wrath and Ghast, for their valiant hunting, and for being such adorable snuggle-wumpkins, yes you are, yes you are!" Everyone chuckled at that, and Abnegazar rubbed her forehead happily against the captain's chitinous chin.

"Whose turn is it to make lunch? Enrique made breakfast... I want you all well-fed before we reach the find!"

Lindauriel raised a hand. "Mine, sir. I spotted some basilisk shoulder in the fridge, mind if I use that?"

"That's why it's in there defrosting, my elven friend. Have your way with it, and spare no expense on the trimmings!"

Three hours later, everyone (save Norrish, who'd excused himself early in the meal to help George with some careful maneuvers) was seated around the common area's table, making very contented sounds.

The captain tapped on his abdomen. "Lindauriel, that was phenomenal. My own mother back on LuFengChao couldn't have made it better."

"Hear hear!" Snowdrop held up another nugget of the red-glazed meat on her fork. "How did you cook it so perfectly?"

Cori nodded with great enthusiasm. "Pro tip, Lindy -- girls LOVE a man who can cook. You're going to go far with those hands."

Lindauriel winced, but at the same time felt his cheeks grow very warm indeed at Cori's husky declaration. "The trick is that I didn't cook it in the oven. I cooked it..." he held up one hand, and a short column of silver flame arose from his fingers. "With divine fire. Perfect control over temperature, and it always cooks evenly, inside and out."

Enrique's jaw dropped. "Is that allowed? I mean, using a divine gift for something so basic as cooking?"

The elf grinned. "It's not only allowed, it's encouraged. Food is an important part of the life-cycle, so those able to bring joy to life through food, by whatever means one has available... that's practically a holy act."

Coriolis held up her side-dish plate. "You still need work on your vegetables, though. A blind pufferfish could've chopped and steamed these better."

The captain made a tsking noise as he watched Lindauriel's shoulders slump. "Cori, Cori, Cori. When the main course is perfection to this degree, I'm inclined to make allowances for minor shortcomings elsewhere."

"I'm just saying, he can't rest on his laurels if he expects to improve."

Lindauriel bit into his own helping of steamed broccoli -- and winced. He'd oversalted them. Again. "Well, you learn by failing, they say."

Cori opened her mouth to say something more, but the captain caught her eye first, his eyes bright green as he shook his head, and she relented.

The loudspeakers beeped, and Norrish's voice came on. "Uh, Cap? Everyone? You might want to get up here!"

Moments later, the entire crew was at the bridge, staring at the monitor. The asteroid looked to be a typical huge chunk of rock that one might see in any asteroid field in any part of the galaxy.

Enrique cocked his head to one side. "Looks like a giant gray unshelled peanut."

"Norrish, are you sure we're at the right place?"

"Unquestionably, Cap. I orbited around this rock from several different angles, and no matter what direction I went in, the shard kept pointing right at the center of that. Also, the sensors are giving readouts that make absolutely no sense. I was hoping Cori could take a closer look."

Already sitting at her station, the Goblin was reading through the sensor logs. "I've never seen anything like this. One moment." She tapped at her keyboard, and then with a flick of her fingers sent an image from her station's screen to the main monitor. "It's hollow. Well, sort of. The exterior is one solid mass about fifty meters thick, but once you get past that, it opens up and becomes a giant chamber packed with much smaller rocks, and then in the center of that..." The center of the superimposed graphic was a solid red color. "No idea. It's resisting analysis. Might be something metal, maybe even Urutromium, but it could just as well be one giant mass of shit-cooked broccoli, for all I can tell. And before you ask, I've already tried scrying into that. Mercury just goes blank, no reading at all."

Enrique came over to Cori's station, looking over her shoulder. "That makes no sense. Is something actively jamming your scrye?" Cori could only shrug.

The captain turned to look around. "Anyone else have any ideas?"

George's heptagon face appeared on the monitor, next to the graphic of the "hollow" asteroid. "I concur with Cori's analysis. I'm cycling through other scans, to see if anything else anomalous happens."

Snowdrop shrugged. "Beats the cloke outta me, Cap. I'm just here to hit things and shoot things."

Lindauriel stepped closer to the monitor, eyes narrowed. "George, can you do a passive infra-red scan for me, please?"

"Certainly, Reverend Moonblossom. Full surface?"

"'Lindauriel' is fine, George -- but yes, thank you."

Coriolis raised an eyebrow. "I could've done that," she muttered under her breath.

Captain Liang was suddenly standing behind her, and bent down to whisper in her ear. "Yes, but you also could have chosen not to make yet another crack about his broccoli, but here we are. Let it go, Cori."

George's scan took a minute to complete, and then the results were displayed on the monitor, replacing the earlier graphics. "George, can you zoom in on... there? He walked up to the monitor, twirling his fingers around one spot that seemed warmer than the rest.

"Working.... There. Oh, that's odd."

Lindauriel glanced back to Cori. "Ummm... can you scrye that area, please? I just want a basic top-down exterior visual."

"Well, let's hope that doesn't get blocked either." She bent over her mercury again, this time visualizing a simple scrying "eye" at the point indicated on the map, as if she was standing on that spot and looking down. The mercury rippled... and a clear image appeared, of a square hole cut into the rock, and mirrored surfaces along the inside of the hole. She swiped, and this image moved to the big monitor.

Lindauriel snapped his fingers in rapid-fire sequence. "Pip-pop-bim-bam and DEMOLISHED. Yes!"

"Reverend, care to translate Elvish slang for the rest of us?"

Lindauriel turned back to face the crew. "Sorry, Captain. But I know exactly what that is. A solar chimney. Cori, can you get a depth reading on that hole?"

"Not from here. Captain, permission to deploy a remote drone?"

"Granted. Go on, Lindauriel."

"Okay. We know the inside of this rock isn't all the way solid. It's packed with little rocks... like bio-foam peanuts in a shipping crate, cushioning whatever that mystery mass is. But whatever that thing is... it needs sunlight for something. Those mirrors redirect the sunlight that hits that chimney, and bounces it down deep into the rock. Ancient tombs on at least half a dozen known worlds used to use similar principles, to draw in natural light for the workers to use while building the tomb, before arcane lamps or electricity were discovered. Something inside that rock built that chimney to feed it light."

Norrish waggled a finger. "Wait a second. The metallurgist claimed the shard was made from materials used in the Sun-Geyser War, right? A lot of the ships used back then were solar powered!"

Coriolis was frantically typing away commands on her console. "Captain... speaking of SG-war materials... I just realized something. That outer layer of rock isn't a natural formation. It shows the same signs of being made through molecular fusion as the shard does."

George spoke up. "I have a hypothesis, Captain. The mass inside the asteroid somehow managed to attract a large collection of nearby rock, fused the outer layer into a solid shell in order to better hide in the asteroid belt, and then crafted the chimney in order to maintain a trickle of inbound energy for fuel purposes."

"I have drone-readouts, sir." Cori's eyes went wide. "That shaft goes down fifty meters and then opens into the main chamber. While the light is getting focused by the mirrored walls, it's not all that hot. With enviro-suits, we could fly down into that, easily."

"Excellent work, everyone." The captain stood up, and scratched at his mandibles with a fingernail. "Enrique, you said shuttle three is still working fine, yes?"

"Yes sir. Two needs a few patches, take me three hours tops. One's going to need about twice that, though."

"Snowdrop, help Enrique with shuttle two. Cori, Lindauriel, you'll take shuttle three down and investigate the chimney."

Cori snapped off a salute. "Sir, yes sir!"

Lindauriel paused, but nodded. "Yes, sir."

"On your way, then."

After the two had left via the left, Norrish turned to the Captain. "Sir, why send them together? Things between them seem, oh I don't know, kind of tense right now."

"That's exactly why I sent them. Now's as good a time as any for them to sort this out. Best to file down that thorn now, before it draws blood later."

The trip down to the asteroid in shuttle three was short, polite, and all but silent. Neither looked at each other. After touching down on the asteroid's surface, the shuttle fired grapple-beacons into the rock, and the pair stripped down to their unitards in order to better fit into the enviro-suits. Lindauriel allowed himself one quick glance at the way the stretchy material strained against his crewmate's chest, and then shook his head as he busied himself with his own suit.

"Endurance, this is Coriolis. Considering how deep scans seemed to get blocked, I'm going to assume that we'll lose audio contact once we clear the main chamber. If that happens, we've both got a flare gun -- if a green flare goes up the chimney, it means we reached the bottom fine. Yellow flare means something weird is going on, and we need help. Red flare means we're in the shit, and you need to leave us behind. Got that?"

"As your captain, I reserve the right to countermand a red flare order. Just saying, Cori. Head on down, we'll stay in contact as long as we can."

As their boots' clinging-enchantment kept them from floating away, Lindauriel gestured to the chimney's opening. "Would you like to go in first, or shall I?"

"What gave you the idea to do an infra-red scan?"

He gestured, and an apple-sized sphere of divine fire appeared above them, spinning and dancing as he pointed here and there, burning strong in spite of the lack of air in the vacuum of space. "Well, I guess I'm predisposed to think about fire and heat. I idly wondered if it was possible that anything could be alive inside this rock, and life usually requires heat, so... infra-red." He leaned over the edge of the chimney, and looked down, the fire casting a beautiful light across the mirrored walls.

"You first then, cleric. If something strange happens heat-wise, you'll realize it before I do. Let's jet down, but slowly. Feet first, just in case there's false-grav in there."

As they descended, using their backpack's jets to thrust slowly downwards, Cori threw a lit glow-stick down ahead of them, which idly bounced along in free-fall. "Norrish, can you all hear me? We're about half-way down."

"Yes, but you're starting to break up a bit."

She glanced up. "Route our communications through the drone, and have that hover over the opening. That might help."

A moment passed, and Norrish's voice came in again. "Testing, testing?"

Lindauriel smiled in his helmet. "Much better signal. Good thinking, Coriolis. Okay, about to hit the opening... oh boy." He felt his skin go cold as recognition hit him in the gut. "Lady, Mother, and Queen, Three Sisters Protect...! Cori, get down here, shine your suit lights here with mine. I want to make sure we're seeing what I think I'm seeing."

Cori descended further, joining her colleague just outside the end of the chimney -- and upon looking down, she immediately hit the braking thrusters. "Holy motherfucking sun-geysering shitballs. Endurance, please tell me the video feed is getting this. Please."

"...it is." The captain's voice was awestruck. "Mother of Emperors, I never would have thought this was even possible, not in my wildest dreams. Or nightmares. Sun-geysering shitballs indeed. Lindauriel, if you'd be so kind, please move closer, we have to confirm this."

The cleric swallowed nervously, praying out of old habit. "'Let thy embrace wait but one more day, honored Queen. Let this not yet be my time.' Fucking perdition." As he looked down, and his suit's lights played across the surface, it was unmistakable. Before them, half buried in the rubble that filled much of this chamber... was a giant face, made of scarred metal, its eyes like immense walls of dark crystal. About half of the light from the chimney was hitting the edge of one of those giant eyes, which seemed to drink up the light, absorbing it. "That's the head of a Sun Golem, alright." He turned, and shined his light further down the chamber. "And that's the torso it's attached to. Can't see the limbs, but they might be buried."

Cori descended further. "The head alone looks to be twice the size of our ship, I had no idea these things were so freaking huge. Norrish, you're the history buff. Weren't all of the Sun Golems accounted for after the end of the war? And melted down as part of the peace treaty?"

Norrish's voice was gasping -- was he hyperventilating? "Officially, yes. But there's always been stories, you know? That one or two were taken into distant systems and hidden by their pilots, refusing to surrender the fruits of Goblin and Orcish technology and arcane research to the accursed Human Hegemony. N-no offense, Enrique."

"None taken. The Hegemony were fascist assholes. I'm glad they're long dead."

Norrish took a deep breath. "Cori, I need you to check something. In the center of the golem's forehead, there should be a big crest, like on an old knight's helmet. In the center of that crest, there should be a small icon. Can you two find it, please?"

"Checking now. Lindauriel, help me look." The two floated towards the giant forehead, their lights playing across the giant golden crest. The crest itself was like a giant crescent moon, turned on its side, with a large circular disk near the base, also in gold. The two adventurers looked at that disk, then to each other, and nodded, heading towards it in unison. They landed in the rough center of it, and Lindauriel detached his camera, attaching it to a sticky-foot tripod, which he then set down near where they landed. He bent over to face the lens. "This still working?"

"So far so good, comrade. You find the icon?"

"I think this is it here," Cori noted, looking down at a black and red metal square, about the size of a dinner plate, affixed to the golden crest. "It looks like... you seeing this? A figure of a robed Orc, gender uncertain, arms raised in celebration, or maybe a dance. It's standing in a puddle, I think."

Norrish's breathing became labored again. "Oh, Sun. Oh shit. Oh fucking perdition. That's a puddle of BLOOD, Cori. You just described to perfection the symbol of GraveDancer, the largest and most powerful golem ever created -- and I can see it on your camera, plain as dawn. Cap, we're never going to get that thing out of there -- but can I ask them to take the icon, and bring it back to the ship? We'll need proof. This... this is much bigger than a salvage job now."

"Agreed. Coriolis, let's make this official. As your captain, I'm ordering you to detach the icon, and return to the ship. Assist her, Lindauriel."

"Aye-aye, sir," they said in unison. Cori reached down and pulled, but the icon didn't budge much. "Lindy, you grab one side, I'll pull the other. We pull straight up on three."

The chaplain growled under his breath. "Bracing... okay, ready."

"One... two... THREE!"

With the two of them working together, the icon popped free from its housing, each of them holding a side -- and in that moment, their audio channel was interrupted by a new voice:

PILOT MISSING. REPAIRS REQUIRED. REPAIR CREW IDENTIFIED. TRANSLOCATING...NOW.

In an instant, Coriolis, Lindauriel, and the Icon they held together, all vanished in a flash of purple light.

On the bridge of the Endurance, a silent shock filled the room. The captain broke the moment, pointing urgently at the screen. "That was a teleport effect! George, I want a trace on that 'port -- where did it come from, and where did it send them?" He turned to Enrique. "I want Shuttle Two spaceworthy as soon as possible! Take Snowdrop, and move your feet!"

With a squeak of an "Aye aye, sir!", Enrique shot down the hallway like he'd been launched out of a railgun, Snowdrop trailing behind.

"Teleport trace completed, Captain." George's voice sounded worried. "Source and Destination are identical -- the Sun Golem. While I can't scan the interior of the Golem to confirm, I am ninety-three percent certain that both Coriolis and Lindauriel were teleported inside it."

Norrish turned to look at his captain. "Sir, their suits were fresh, so even if there's total vacuum in there, the suits will keep them alive for another three days or so, assuming there's no other problems waiting inside that thing."

"Let's not assume anything. The clock is ticking, we have to find a way to get our crew out of there before they starve or suffocate. Keep trying to hail them, Norrish."

"Aye, sir."

***

A wave of vertigo hit Cori's senses like a sledgehammer, and she leaned forward, trying to find her balance. Lindauriel moved in much the same way, and their helmets banged together.

"AH!"

"Rat-shit, that hurt!"

Shaking her head to clear it, she glared at Lindauriel. "Stop complaining. Walk it off, Lindy." She winced, one gloved hand checking her visor for cracks.

"You know, I'm getting really sick of that na-- wait a second. Where are we?" The priest stood up, looking around in surprise.

The room they were in was well-lit, colored various shades of red, black, and gold, all along the walls, floors, and ceiling. Except... "I think we're inside the Golem. Look there." On one wall, a door was decorated with the same design that was on the icon they both still held. "Endurance, can you hear us? Cap? Norrish? George? Hello?" She threw up a hand in annoyance. "Nothing. Of course."

Letting go of the square, Lindauriel checked the readouts on his wrist computer. "Huh. We've got full life support in here. Air, warmth, the works." He reached up for his helmet. "Shall I?"

Cori shrugged. "You want to test it, fine, but don't come bawling to me if I have to save your ass from suffocating."

The priest rolled his eyes. "You're the heart and soul of compassion, First Mate." He released the seals around his neck, and lifted the helmet. Nothing dramatic happened. "Air smells clean. Pretty nice, actually." He set the helmet on the floor, and shut down his suit's systems to conserve power.

Cori walked over to the door, and it slid open automatically. No sudden change in pressure... "Looks like this whole compartment's got air." She touched the wall. "There's a very faint vibration. Power's definitely on, at least a little. Lucky us." She pulled off her own helmet, running her gloved fingers through her hair. "That felt like a teleport."

"Are they always that bad? I've never been 'ported before." He leaned against one wall, still a little dizzy.