[original fiction, 10k words (this chapter), idthink this needs any content warnings though they do walk along the edge of a very deep shaft for a bit at one point]
1. The Door
You do not understand time as I do. It is possible that you are reading these words many thousands of years before I write them; that I write further in your future, as you reckon such things, than any text you regard as ancient lies in your past. Some of those who lived in the times between ours coined the term 'incient', the inverse of ancient, for texts from my time or later. I am personally of the belief that this began as a lazy joke, with which my language is now sadly burdened.
It is also possible that you read this many thousands of years in my future, but if that is the case I can do less to accommodate your understanding. We may differ in our understandings of the asymmetry of time, but my one privilege, in the scale of the history I can describe, is the absolute certainty that time is asymmetry. Though I or my words might visit your time I cannot grasp it as I would any point in my past.
Whatever temporal distance lies between us, know this: I have touched an anciency that dwarfs it. Our universe is old. It was old beyond comprehension even when the tree of life we share as origin took root. The world that was our cradle is, as I write this, four and a half billion years old. I am reasonably confident that this is as true for you, in your time, as it is for me now. To my knowledge, no member of my species is born at a time at which that world was noticeably more or less than four and a half billion years old.
But our lost homeworld – of which you may nevertheless be a resident – was not an early riser at the dawn of the universe. Planet formation predates even the sun around which that world orbited by about twice our homeworld's age. In my time we know little of such life as those older worlds may have nurtured.
That they nurtured life, however, is now beyond my capacity to doubt.
Consider the maths with me, as much as it is possible to consider such figures as these. It took three billion years for our ancestors to evolve the most basic forms of complexity, and you are most likely reading this about a billion years after they did (I am a little less confident of this relation than of our shared relation to the age of the planet itself; the rounding margins are perhaps one order of magnitude smaller).
On other worlds, life got a head start on us by some billions of years. As you read my descriptions, you might look for trends and tendencies visible at the scale of five or ten thousand years. Project those trends forward another ten thousand, and then repeat that projection cumulatively a hundred thousand times. Whatever you have imagined might sketch the nature of our cosmic neighbours at the time when our homeworld first formed; or those neighbours might have some billions of years greater an advantage on us even than that.
Small wonder, then, that my distant ancestors, among whom you may number, found the heavens silent. Possessing as I do now a first glimpse of how our neighbours communicate, I can assure you that you are not alone; you simply lack the right kind of ears to hear those who watch over you. Whether you will find this comforting or not, I cannot say. I am too used to the inscrutable dealings of beings greater than myself to be much changed by the discovery.
I speak here of the commanders who dispatched my unit and many others to the planet we came to call, simply, 'Nine'. The war they fight exists at a scale beyond my comprehension in terms of economics, territory and even, I suspect, era. There exists between those officers and Admiral Esta – the highest-ranking person ever to have spoken directly to me personally – a command and bureaucratic structure whose staff likely number in the billions.
As such I do not know why we were deployed to Nine. All deployments feel punitive, and this one, by its remoteness and the monotonous bleakness of Nine's grasslands, only a little more so than others, but I could not identify a failure or fault for which punishment might have been assigned at the level of the entire 7847th Armada. Perhaps Grand Admiral Dervun made a faux pas at some gathering between their peers and their superiors, and our redeployment was petty revenge. Perhaps one of the War Lords to whom Dervun answered lost a front in some other galaxy and was reassigned; perhaps they only lost a game of chess. I can neither know nor care.
This is not to say that I do not care about the war, or that I do not hate my enemies. I am a soldier; to be a soldier is to hate. The hatred is more fundamental to soldiering than anything else, than loyalty or camaraderie or politics. Indeed, the hatred does more to explain soldiering than even the pay, or the promise of food and board. As I have learned, the hatred lasts long past the point at which resupply stops coming. This is a story of hatred, because all its protagonists are soldiers. It is as simple as that.
The military organisation of which I am a member is called the Interstellar Fleet of the Federation. Who or what was once Federated I know not, just as I do not know what wealth our enemies the Commonwealth held in common, nor which parties originally formed our foes the Alliance, nor the language from which arises the name of our adversaries the Affenstrin. I have fought all four, and hated their soldiers and been hated by them.
As I have mentioned, I serve in the 7847th Armada of the Interstellar Fleet. I could not tell you whether being almost eight thousandth in order would place us early or late in the combined column of the Fleet if such were ever formed. The 7847th is divided into Battle Groups whose ships number in the hundreds; the unit I command is the Marine of the 24th Battle Group. When the 7847th formed up to sail for Castevas, we fell just ahead of midway down the line.
Our orders were to deny Castevas system to the Commonwealth. What became of that objective is largely beside the point of my tale. We deployed to Castevas and found a Commonwealth fleet already battling Affenstrin. The action was disastrous for all sides. It converged on the system's fifth planet, a gas giant of almost stellar mass, and eventually degenerated to terrestrial squabbling over Castevas-5's menagerie of moons.
All present seemed to agree that one moon in particular ought to be the objective, but by the time planetfalls began, command structures were so disrupted that units were deployed to any lump of rock in reach. So lost were we all that I was never told why the moon to which we of the 24th were assigned was designated the ninth, but by chance it happened to be the moon all sought.
Planetfall went no better than the 7847th's arrival in-system. I should have landed a small army, complete with armour, artillery, air cover and engineers. The Commonwealth had boots on the ground before us, though, and with those boots a scattered handful of interceptors who tore my dropships to pieces. I made it to the ground with three platoons, half my staff, and one drop of light vehicles.
The Affenstrin did better getting to ground but only in the sense of reducing the Commonwealth presence; I estimate they ultimately landed less force even than we did. It was these three wretched, malprovisioned armies that then began the race to our goal, and mine, by a hair, that arrived first.
Our briefing declared Nine an ancient moon – ancient in stellar terms, so far beyond human eras that they cannot meaningfully be applied. Long since tectonically extinct, it had a wet oxygen atmosphere and comfortably walkable gravity. Some billions of years of wind and rain had performed a grand averaging of its terrain. Its highest mountains were rolling hills a few klicks above sea level, and almost all its land was covered in a high, gentle golden grass of limited nutritional value. Its apex predators were a few centimetres long, and we never saw evidence of native mammals, reptiles or birds.
Only one place on the planet is different, and that is where we headed. Our cylegs handled the grass well; the vehicles were hopeless and we quickly abandoned them. For eight days we had the clear lead, until the Commonwealthers scored some victory we could not identify over the Affenstrin and were able to bring their scattered armour to the task of breaking trail. By the fourteenth day they were on us and I was forced to deploy two of my platoons as rearguard and press on with the third, carrying only a scout's complement of arms and ammunition.
On the seventeenth day we saw on the horizon the silver haze and discordant fogs of warped time around our destination, and behind us the pall of smoke from the wildfires that marked our rearguard's defeat. The next day we came upon the boundaries of the ancient battlefield with Commonwealth hoverscouts walking their long-range fire towards us. Where the hearts of my soldiers ought to have quailed, at stepping from grassland to the ravaged, slick grey of chronium frosting on bare rock, pursuit drove us on without hesitating.
Of our progress through the timescar I can say little. You will understand if you have been through one yourself, and if not nothing I describe will mean anything. It was not my first experience of warped time, but I have never spent so long or gone so deep before. Whatever the protagonists of the time wars fought about, they fought here at great intensity.
At points we moved among their fortifications, some ageless and some crumbling to dust at our touch. The aftershocks of their weapons lingered here and there, readily identifiable by the boiling uncolour smoke they bled into the air. We made it through with moderate losses considering the circumstances.
As we found the footing beginning to improve after what seemed hours of short-stepping over slippery chronium, the worst visual effects of the timescar likewise began to fade. We found ourselves at the rim of a stepped depression, neatly circular and kilometres wide. The ground was a plain and world-weary concrete, cracked in places although nothing seemed to grow in the cracks.
Each step was about five metres wide and two deep. Two of my soldiers, Pras and Vittar, had suffered malfunctions in their cystems, and all of us were low on charge and fatigued, but working together the steps proved little challenge relative to what we had already overcome. The light had the glazed quality of an eclipse, and it was hard to judge the time of day, but for a few hours we descended steadily and without sign of our pursuers.
I called a rest stop on instinct, a field captain's long-honed instinct for the looming moment when their soldiers' effectiveness is at an end for the day. The step on which we rested was just like the others, and the far side of the depression appeared no closer. We could not see back the way we had come, but Sornten sent an airbuoy fifty metres up and the rangefinder marked the near edge of the steps a little over sixteen hundred metres away.
Of the millions of Interstellar Fleet personnel who had entered the system with the aim of delivering soldiering to that place, we numbered fourteen.
After a time in that drab, unchanging light, we pressed on. Vittar had restored some function to their cylegs and overall the mood was one of relief. Counting the steps or judging the distances seemed the goal of an addled dreamer and so we did not bother. At the centre of the depression lay an indistinct, dark shape that was slowly resolving into the opening of a vertical shaft.
It was at about that point that we saw the first markers. Dufore almost stepped on the row of plastic placards, on neat little stands at the back of the step we were descending onto. They were numbers, four of them in a row as if placed there by archaeologists mapping out the site. There was no dust on them, no particulate accumulation of any kind.
We paid them little mind and kept moving. If the sun passed overhead, if the day turned at all, we could not tell. We passed more numbers, descending, and Dufore began counting; they corresponded neither to the number of steps nor linear spatial distance. There was, however, a mathematic progression to them, a curve that bore some relation to the ground we covered.
Ahead, the hole grew larger, while the haze of timescar visible on the far side of the depression looked no more close or distant than it had when we arrived at the top of the steps. We are not fools, you must understand; we knew our heading took us into a strangeness we could not conquer. We went on because behind us were enemies and around us was a near-perfect no-place. As long as the strange light delivered sufficient power to our cystems to keep moving and synthesise sustenance, there was no reason to abort our mission.
After another rest stop, we came to a step on whose vertical face had been daubed writing in startlingly familiar script. It was a soldier's prayer, brute and lacking in poetry, the characters lightly embellished versions of those used throughout the Interstellar Fleet. It was reassuring; though it was unsigned, it felt like the hand that painted it might have belonged to someone much like my soldiers, removed only by a few hundred years of relatively linear history.
It became clear that the shaft we approached was far larger than it had first appeared, that the quadratically-descending numbers in some way charted a spatial distortion. Our cystem clocks were useless, decalibrated since crossing the timescar, but other diagnostic measures were intact and suggested we had consumed almost four days' worth of nutrition. I called a longer rest-stop at that discovery.
While we camped as best our refugee inventory allowed, Aranani, my second, peered out along the step we stood on and drew my attention to a muddy shape a few hundred metres away. Mindful that visual estimates of distance were unreliable in this place, we proceeded with appropriate operational caution, only to find that space behaved perfectly fine as long as one stuck to the same step.
The shape turned out to be damage to the step above, a chunk of concrete a little under a metre long and half that thick at its thickest, broken from the lip and fallen to the step on which we stood. Plastic plaques stuck onto the face of both affected steps offered banal warnings to mind one's footing, in what was clearly an antecedent of Alliance script.
The damage appeared accidental. Nothing was revealed in the broken concrete except the torn ends of steel reinforcing mesh, though Sornten probed the metal and measured its temperature a little higher than human body temperatures. I quietly ordered them not to speculate aloud on that.
Rested – and we did feel rested, to at least some degree – we continued. Dufore, Aranani and Yarbe discussed interpretations of the numbers on the plastic placards, which continued to descend with us, and agreed that we were by this point two-thirds of the way to whatever start-point they marked. The hole ahead now appeared larger than the depression ever had as we descended it. Looking at the steps on the far side made me feel crosseyed.
We came to a place where the steps were more seriously damaged, a small landslide of rubble where something, a large industrial cysuit or small landing craft, perhaps, had slammed into the steps hard enough to plough a shallow furrow. Again there were the Alliance caution notices. Here we could see through to the ground beneath the concrete, which I was troubled but not entirely surprised to see was chronium. In fact it looked like it might be solid crystal chronium, not just a thin coating on the earth or rock beneath. I did not need to order the unit to steer around the rubble.
Our cystems had fed us for a week since our passage through the timescar. Either our Commonwealth pursuers had given up the chase, been less fortunate than us in the crossing, or been caught by the Affenstrin. Sornten's airbuoy continued to show our trail clear, though it claimed the outer edge of the depression was only about five klicks away.
By this time, we had become adept at the descent, maintaining a smooth rhythm and sharing the work of helping Pras and Vittar down each time. I retained little of the authority of my rank, and little of the distance I had long been used to from the enlisted and non-comms in my command. There was a pleasant reminder of the brotherhood I had felt in the century-distant days of my training. We talked little of the mission and our destination and less of hope; even Gogi, the youngest among us, began reminiscing like an old veteran.
We crossed a step at whose lip had been painted a line alternating black and yellow segments with sharp diagonal edges, a symbol old enough that I believe I can rely on any possible reader of this text to recognise its warning. I called a temporary halt and sent parties along the step in both directions, hoping to find any text that might explain why this step had been singled out.
Waiting was hard amid such featurelessness. I had told my soldiers not to go beyond sight, and that I would summon them back with a flare; we had tested the flare to ensure it would not run too badly afoul of the twisted space around us. The soldiers had begun to play a sort of storytelling game at rest stops, lacking anything like dice or cards, and though I did not join them I enjoyed listening to them trying to one-up or trip one another.
Distracted by that, I did not notice immediately when the team sent counterclockwise began their return. That was Sornten and Aranani, and it was not until they were close enough that I could make out Aranani slowly waving their arm that I spotted them and launched the flare to recall Dufore and Ermsan. I told the soldiers to stay at their game and went a little way out to meet Sornten and Aranani.
"You found something?" I asked when they were in earshot.
Aranani nodded, and Sornten showed me an image on their wrist monitor. It showed a stretch of the line just like any other except that in the middle it was broken by a black rectangle, framed by a yellow border. On the rectangle was a grid of white squares, broken into nine sections of three by four squares each. The squares were not uniform, with some standing out more clearly than others.
"This isn't what it looked like," Sornten said, their voice a little unsteady. "Camera might be on the fritz."
I stood a little straighter, seeing in Sornten's manner the first signs that the strange setting was getting to them. Like most of my soldiers, they had not been inside a timescar before. Now, what they needed was an officer to report to. I said, "Explain."
"S'like, when I looked at the letters they were letters, like the numbers on those cards." Head down, they glanced sideways at Aranani. "But they make your eyes feel funny. Uh, sir. And then, this on the cam."
Aranani met my gaze, their lips working fretfully. They knew, as I did, exactly what Sornten was describing. We had seen chronoscript before. That they had not explained on the spot meant they shared my concern for Sornten's, and the other less experienced soldiers', psychologies. Even with all they had seen so far, it would be disconcerting to some to learn they stood atop markings made by one or another faction that had fought in the time wars themselves.
Still, if there was chronoscript here, there would be worse and stranger below. I said, "It's an old technique. Our writing, and the Alliance's, the Commonwealth's, the Affenstrin, and several others, they share some roots. The squares in your photo roughly match those shared roots, and they trick your eyes into seeing our language's version of those characters." It was not a lie, at least if you take 'trick' to mean something more like 'magic' than 'illusion'. The Federation has never succeeded in synthesising the ink needed to produce chronoscript that actually works.
"Huh. So everyone sees it in their own language?" Sornten raised their head. "Handy."
"Very," I nodded. "What did it say?"
"'Alpha threshold'," Aranani said with a shrug. "Not very informative."
Sornten looked to them a moment too slowly to see, as I had, Aranani carefully martialling their face to downplay their concern. I have relied on them as my second for many reasons over the years, but above all else I value their quick wit for this kind of social nicety. Soldiers are often afraid. Aranani was a master of making fear mundane.
Taking my cue from them, I kept my voice coolly disaffected. "Still, we'll be careful going down the next step. It's probably nothing, but just in case." Alpha threshold. First of four known warning levels established by consensus among the belligerents of the time wars. I was surprised only by two things; first, that we had not seen such a warning any earlier, and second, that I had not thought to look out specifically for it as the journey stretched and grew stranger.
We returned to the group and I gave instructions for a more cautious approach to the next step. As they got to their feet and gathered themselves, I brought Aranani over to Ermsan and told them what Sornten had seen. Ermsan, the only other surviving officer of our company, was also the only survivor who had been in my command the last time Aranani and I had ventured into a timescar, and as far as I knew was the only other one present who understood the significance of the presence of chronoscript.
Across the threshold we went. I had told the soldiers it would be anticlimactic and so it was. The danger lay not at the threshold but beyond it. We would all need to be vigilant beyond this point (as if we had not been already). In my experience, though, the best way to ensure the enlisted are vigilant is to prevent them becoming paranoid and let their primal sense of self-preservation do the rest of the work. Quietly I suspect the chronowarriors' placement of their warnings reflects a similar principle.
Veiled though the light felt, it was rich in the wavelengths on which our cyleaves feasted. We were not visited by the rain showers that had been commonplace in the grasslands, but we were fluid-efficient and the air was by no means dry; our condensers kept us topped up. We still had not seen either the distant sun of Castevas or the nearby giant of Castevas-5 in the sky, and I was not astronomer enough to judge whether that could be true of undistorted lunar motion. We also saw no stars.
Even without more than routine field maintenance, our cystems are capable of a small degree of self-repair, and Vittar's was beginning to recover. Pras' cystem remained incapable of delivering any power to their cylimbs, and their movements grew slowly stiff as their xylem hardened. No-one complained about the extra labour of conveying Pras down the steps, but I began to worry about their vulnerability should our pursuers regain our trail.
The soldiers' story-game began to show signs of their discomfort with our destination. At first, the foes they had thrown at each other to fight were our adversaries, an escalating progression of Commonwealth and Affenstrin and even Alliance units swooping down out of the sky to be defeated in inventive and spectacular ways because of our shortage of conventional ammunition. After we crossed the alpha threshold, though, they began to imagine incient dangers as well. I stopped them at the first mention of prespectors.
At the limit of what we could see out to our flanks along the steps, we passed another landslide. Dufore wanted to go and inspect it, but I vetoed the idea. It was visibly a long way in a space defined by underestimation of distances, and anyway it looked much like the previous one we had passed.
Yarbe announced that we had reached five sixths of the way down the numbered sequence we had been following. Whether by coincidence or not, the next set of numbers we encountered were the first to only have three digits, and the plastic markers were a different colour and shape. Sornten picked one up, turned it over, and drew our attention to an imprint on the underside that might have been a manufacturer's logo or an ornate composite character in a dead script.
A day after we passed the alpha threshold, by the reckoning of our cystems, we came to another step with a yellow-and-black warning boundary. This time I put Aranani in charge of the soldiers and went myself with Ermsan to see if we could find the expected beta threshold label. We must have chosen poorly on the fifty-fifty of which direction to try, despite counterclockwise being the shorter direction to a label at the previous threshold, because we walked a long way before seeing anything.
Without finding a label, we reached a place where the step we were on was obstructed by a shattered concrete block. We estimated its size and realised it was probably a complete piece of one step, four metres long and two or three thick. Where it had landed, its edge had smashed into the step hard enough to embed it quite deeply, and the step itself was webbed with cracks, some wide enough to accept a flat hand.
Although the feat of strength that must have flung the block there may sound awesome, to us it was in a way reassuring, like the soldier's prayer. In my time there exist many mechanisms of war with the strength to throw such an object, and there are few expressions of soldiery more fundamental than throwing a rock at someone. If vast beings had battled here then, for all its strangeness (and as we already knew), this was a battlefield.
Equally primal was the shiver of fear as we crossed the yellow-and-black line to drop to the next step and go around the blockage. Though I fancy I saw Ermsan's cylimbs stretch several metres as they descended ahead of me, the impression was gone in a moment, and the fear was more for the immediate practical concern that the loose block above might slip and crush us than the strangeness below.
After we made that traverse, it did not take us much longer to find the small chronoscript marking that, sure enough, read 'beta threshold'. We took a moment and our cameras to confirm that it was definitely chronoscript, and I could not resist making myself wince by squatting down to look at it closely and waving my hand over the paint, disrupting the effect in a way that sent sparks and static across my vision.
We returned to the unit, where Aranani had been drawn into telling part of the story of our previous venture into a timescar. Our arrival cut them off early in the telling, before they described anything I would not have risked adding to the imaginative repertoire of our nervous personnel. There was not privacy to impart that concern to Aranani, though.
We descended again, the dark shaft ahead now so wide that it appeared a small sea whose far shore was lost in what, if one did not look closely, one could treat as mist. What we could see of the shaft's insides shifted. Sometimes it looked carved into a complex mural; sometimes we thought we saw ladders or scaffolds; sometimes there was the graphite sheen of chronium.
At some point the material underfoot ceased to be concrete and became stone. The difference was subtle in the muted light. The concrete had borne the signs of its pouring; the surface of the stone was a little darker and weathering had sanded any toolmarks off. What weather, we could not guess; we had seen none, but even then we understood we walked on a structure built unthinkable years earlier.
Ahead, a distant step appeared dark and broken, but as we approached the lumps resolved into industrial shapes, the arms and cabs of what were unmistakably earth-movers and small tractor-cranes. They were parked neatly against the back of the step, wide enough to take up most but not all of its flat, in a column that stretched from a point some way off to our right into the distance at the edge of sight to our left. There must have been thousands of them.
All showed some signs of age, but the patterns of aging were not consistent. Here would be a crane whose long arm was almost completely rusted, so that it might collapse under its own remaining weight at an injudicious touch. Parked just ahead of it was an excavator whose bodywork paint was fresh, and whose bucket gleamed with new steel teeth.
The lettering on their control surfaces was reminiscent of Commonwealth script, and I could identify some words from context, but not enough to decipher it all. No vehicle we inspected had any fuel or battery charge. Sornten and Yarbe improvised a way to measure the pressure in the surviving hydraulic systems and found it always low, but to varying degrees.
Ermsan came to stand beside me as I watched the soldiers climb over the machinery like children at play. Quietly, they said, "Sir, there's a lot of materiel here. I'd like to assemble a scavenging party."
I frowned at them. "What do you hope to find?" None of the vehicles we had checked had shown any signs of military styling or equipment.
They turned their head to look between us, back over their shoulder towards the shaft at the centre of the depression. I was able to watch their expression closely as they did so, long-familiar features in unfamiliar light. Their brow heavy and furrowed, their lips pressed to a thin line. Not an expression of fear.
They said, "It'd be good if we had some cable for…" and jerked their head towards the shaft. "Y'know, for rappelling. If we have to, I mean, sir."
I considered for a moment. It would be good to have rope, even without the imminent possibility of a descent. We would have to be able to be sure any cable we took was untouched by time along its full length, though, and industrial cable would be far heavier than our needs merited. And there was the question of whether we would even be able to recover it from whatever locked-up vehicle we found it on.
"No," I said. "Not now." If the 24th Marine had landed intact, I might hardly have spoken to Ermsan at all, and I would certainly have felt no need to share my reasoning with them. I offered, "We'll assess the situation when we reach the rim. Yarbe says we're close, and these are hard to miss. We can come back if we find we need something."
"Sir." Ermsan answered with a stiff nod. They were about to step away when Aranani's approach caught our attention.
Without speaking, face carefully impassive, Aranani pointed to the edge of the step. Along it was painted a stripe of alternating yellow and black. Almost certainly the gamma threshold. Without thinking, I took a half-step forward, away from the edge.
We called over Sornten and Dufore, and I sent them out along the step in opposite directions, paired with Aranani and Ermsan, to find the chronoscript warning label. To placate Ermsan, I told them to note the position of any promising cable or other salvage they spotted.
The remaining soldiers began a new round of their storytelling game, this time by unspoken consensus focussed on the machinery. They imagined finding one machine that still had power and using it to break loose blocks of step and send them tumbling down towards a fanciful monster as it crawled its way out of the shaft.
The tale hit a snag when Sujib, who had inaugurated the game and often acted as a sort of referee, said, "Wait, hang on. Wouldn't the digger slip on the chronium? Remember what it looks like under these." They patted the stone on which they sat.
"Na," Gogi answered, lifting an arm to point at the nearest set of treads. "Look at the grip. 'S spined with something. Scoops've got diasyn on the teeth too. Prob'ly adapted for workin' on chronium." They looked round and saw my eyes on them. They shrugged. "Grew up on an agri. You learn what to look for on a tractor."
"Was it all of them?" Jieruk asked, slouching on their elbows.
"All I checked." Gogi shrugged again.
"Then the steps were built after the ground all turned to chronium?" I said, without really meaning to have spoken aloud. Chronium was not naturally occurring but formed in timescars as an aftereffect of time war weaponry. The kind of crystallisation we had seen under the landslide was rare to a degree I doubt my soldiers truly appreciated. If the steps we had traversed lay atop a field of crystallised chronium then whatever we approached had done unspeakable violence to time.
"Guess so," said Gogi when no-one else spoke. There was a long, uncomfortable silence, as if the others understood there was some significance to my question but not what that might be. I wished I had gone with Sornten and left Aranani in charge here. Finally Sujib struck up the game again, and I was left to wonder what ancestor of the Commonwealth had built this place, and why.
I saw Ermsan and Dufore returning and fired off the flare to recall Aranani. Both parties confirmed that this was the gamma threshold. Ermsan had not seen anything worth salvaging. I did not share with them my speculation about the chronium, feeling a little embarrassed at having given the soldiers something else to worry about.
We crossed the gamma threshold, and I wondered that we had still yet to see anything that merited even the beta. I had crossed an alpha threshold once before, and balked at beta that time. Yet here we were, over a day inside a beta threshold and hard-pressed to identify any ill effects. The precise meaning of the time war threshold system may not be known, but we nevertheless should have expected some trouble by that point.
We descended, rested, and descended again. By this point the shaft that marked our goal was close enough to feel within reach. Indeed, there was something vertiginous about it, a disconcerting sense that if one tripped or slipped descending a step, one might tumble all the remaining distance head over heels and roll into the pit without being able to regain control. With excellent timing, Aranani made a joke more or less to that effect, and I watched it work its way through the soldiers, the relaxation of their shoulders and postures.
What seemed only a few minutes after that, we let ourselves down the face of another step and found ourselves looking at a message painted on the stone. It was upsetting for two reasons. First, it was clearly unfinished, the final character ending in a messy, jerky line as if the person drawing it had been attacked in the middle of painting. Second, the characters were completely unfamiliar.
That was the first point at which I knew, regardless of the fate of the 7847th, regardless of whether any Federation ships survived in Castevas space to send reports or distress signals back up the chain of command, that we would be reinforced. The complex pictograms, drawn half a metre high on this wall, belonged to a language either ancient or incient enough to be completely unknown, and yet they were painted atop stone laid by recognisable antecedents of the Commonwealth, inside a gamma threshold.
I did not think at that time of how chronoscript ended up painted atop that same stone. I did think of the fact that there had been no signals from orbit since we entered the timescar. It had been something of the order of ten days. Given the ruin of the Armada it was not unthinkable that we were, for the time being, stranded. After all, even our closest pursuers had lost contact with us. That isolation had not then fully set in.
Early on the eleventh day, at least according to our cystems' nutrition records, we came to the final step. It was much the same as the thousands that had preceded it, except that instead of the next step below, there was the top of a precarious scaffold, pitted and crumbling with corrosion, its metal panel holed through the middle and cracked to the corners. The final rim of the stone had the yellow-and-black stripe of the delta threshold.
Beyond that was the shaft. I had feared it would descend indefinitely into darkness, and was thus relieved that the bottom was visible. The pit had about the proportions of a drinking beaker, roughly half as deep again as its diameter. By sight, it might have been five klicks across, but there was no haze or mist obscuring anything before us. The city laid out down there was disconcertingly clear to see at such distance.
I say city but even from the rim we could see that it was not a unified space of human habitation. Rather it was as if a scientific research outpost had been expanded to the scale and horror of a refugee camp. The buildings were low, the sturdiest of them permatemp boxes less than a dozen metres high. They were laid out in divisions, some concentric as if they had been established to study earlier camps they surrounded, some divided by clear battle lines where I could see small fortifications.
Where the ground was open, it was conspicuously flat and slightly reflective, and in a few places smaller shafts – only tens or hundreds of metres across – descended through it into darkness. Across the centre of the pit ran a shallow chasm whose shape was more natural, though it looked like it had once been much deeper until its rim was filed and sanded down to this depth. We could see into the chasm from our high angle, and there stood, at the centre of all, the structure that must have occasioned the original excavations and exploration here.
I will describe that structure in detail later; from the rim we could see only that it was large, of or covered in pale stone, and approximately the shape of a door. It set about our shoulders a weight of determination close in tenor to foreboding. Our attention was more on the immediate challenge. If we wanted to get any closer, we had to descend the side of the shaft somehow.
Immediately in front of us was a scaffold, as I have said, but it was clear that it would not survive any attempt on our part to descend it. I pushed on one of its struts, carefully, and the metal disintegrated at my touch without even transmitting much of the force of my cylimb into the structure – which must, after all, at seven or eight klicks high and only a few metres thick against the wall, be alarmingly precarious.
Fortunately, that scaffold was only one of many that rose around the walls, some of which looked much more sturdily-built. They did not completely obscure the bare rock through which we were to descend, which was unmistakably coated in chronium. In places huge frescoes had been carved, their figures human but much else about them unrecognisable. If our estimates of the size of the place were accurate, these carvings were kilometres high. No machinery of that scale was in evidence.
We set out along the rim, testing the platforms we passed by the simple expedient of shoving them. None impressed us with both stability and durability, though at the same time none fully collapsed or fell away from the wall. Aranani and I held a brief, worried conference about Pras' limited mobility. Ermsan joked in an aside to me that even had they found a full drum of cable up on the earth-movers and cranes, it would have been a pittance beside the pit.
Another concern was the light. Although the bottom of the shaft was well-lit from above, in that uncanny, ubiquitous light we had become used to, the outermost areas, against the bottom of the walls, were in shadow, and so by extension was the descent. I believed my marines would be capable of descending seven or eight klicks of scaffold well within the life of their cystems' batteries, but we had been almost a fortnight on the steps that our instruments told us were only a handful of kilometres top to bottom. What if the same distortion applied to the vertical?
We went along the final step, seldom more than two abreast, close to the stone rising on our left. The scaffolds were not evenly spaced, but their peaks were far enough apart to mean a significant period of walking between each. The soldiers' game matched their footsteps, skirting nervously around precipices and cliffs and the still-absent weather.
By that time I was becoming used to checking my cystem to reckon the time, ordering rest stops every six hours or so. I did not need to call another stop before we found our way down. Four rods rose above the lip of the step, each thicker than our cylimbed arms, and bent over at the top to meet in the middle at a lumpen device, from which hung a tendril descending into the shadow below. The rods continued down into that gloom too, vines spreading between them weaving a cage and also plunging into the chronium wall like roots.
We recognised the material as our own immediately, though if the elevator shaft – that seemed its obvious design intention – reached all the way to the bottom then this was easily the largest structure of its type any of us had ever seen. We could not find a way to connect directly to it with our cystems, but Vittar and Sornten inspected the bark closely and declared that it appeared healthy and still living.
Carefully, Sornten climbed out onto the vines and looked down, reporting after a moment that they saw several enormous cyleaves jutting out, lower down the structure, far enough to be out of the shade and thus presumably keeping the whole thing alive. The lift cable was less familiar but clearly part of the same system and hung stiff with no slack. If it was over five kilometres long, it was possible that the only weight pulling it taut was its own, but it might also have still been supporting its elevator car.
The soldiers began to devise a plan for our descent, and left me with a moment to think that I wish I had been spared. There was no question that we stood now before an example of Federation technology, or at least its precursor. That familiarity was more disconcerting than much of what we had already seen. A technology like the one that had kept us alive for the month we had been on Nine now stood before us as a relic of the time wars, as ancient to us as it might be incient to you.
That early predecessors of the Federation had been here perhaps explained the scattered evidence of violence we had passed in our descent, given that we had also found writing that seemed related to the antecedents of our enemies. I assumed then that had we descended some other path across the steps, we would have seen Affenstrin scripts or their precursors too.
We lacked the equipment for a proper rappel down the elevator shaft, lost in the timescar. Our cylimbs could ensure us the sustained arm strength for a climb but not the hand or grip strength, since their support necessarily ended at the wrist. The shaft was too wide to chimney down, even by, as one of the soldiers suggested, placing one's back against the cable and one's feet against the vine walls.
It was Nireba, whose record included a gold and two silvers in wrestling at the 7847th's Fleet Olympiad, who had the breakthrough. What they suggested was an intricate two-person leg-lock that, stiffened by careful application of cylegs, would serve as a friction hitch. We would then descend in pairs, embracing at the shoulders in place of tethering to the cable itself. It enabled us to rely on our cystems for all stamina-critical points, and as an added benefit, Pras could use the technique despite their cystem being almost completely rigid.
All that assumed that we would not be in shade so long that we ran out of power altogether. Once Nireba and Vittar, whose cystem was well-recovered and who had been fascinated by Nireba's ingenuity, had proved that it was also possible to ascend using the technique, we practiced extensively. Nireba and Vittar even figured out a way to transfer from the rope to the walls, which were readily climbable for short distances.
We rested, practiced some more – by this point any sense of urgency from our pursuers had completely faded – and paired up for the final descent. Nireba and Vittar went first, then Sornten and Yarbe. Aranani and I went third, then Sujib with Gogi, Pras with Mahosh, Issor and Jieruk and finally Ermsan and Dufore to watch our rear.
The descent settled into an easy rhythm. Nireba's leg-lock was not uncomfortable, except for a gentle pressure across the front of one shin which built slowly as we went. Our cystems really did do most of the work, so that the main task, at which Sornten was particularly diligent, was ensuring no-one got carried away or careless. Even the gloom was not as bad as it first seemed, once our eyes adjusted to the first shadow we had been in in two weeks.
There was a slight tendency to rotate about the cable as we descended, so that one alternated facing the open shaft or the chronium wall. The chronium bore the regular grooves and scrapes of mining tools, and I did not voice the thought that it could not, therefore, be a coating that had formed after the Commonwealth dug this pit. Instead I waited, fruitlessly, for us to descend to some stratum below the chronium. I know, now, that Nine is not entirely composed of chronium to its core, but we did not reach that inner layer during that phase of our descent.
Nor could we form any impression of the fresco we descended past. Several times we passed deep near-horizontal crevices in the face that must have been the lines of a grand design. The elevator had stuck its roots into those crevices, and we contemplated using them for rest stops. Conscious of the tacit time limit of our cystems' power reserves, though, we pressed on.
Facing the opposite direction, the warping of space that had clouded our view of the far side of the steps abated in the pit itself. I grew satisfied that the pit was about the size it appeared. Big enough that it provided no visual references for our progress, but not so big that we had to worry about running out of power. The woven vines curtained the view, so that we could not make out much coherent detail or worry too much about the height.
While I still had my back to the wall, Aranani called for a quick pause in our descent. When I returned my attention to their face, which was only a hand's span from mine, their gaze was fixed on a point behind me. I tightened my legs against theirs and adjusted our embrace enough to give me freedom to follow their fixation.
A yellow-and-black-segmented stripe was painted, laser-straight, horizontally across the wall. How its authors had managed to get paint to stick to chronium, I do not know. Right behind my head, so that I could not easily see it even at full crane of my neck, someone had added white paint atop the yellow and black.
Carefully, Aranani lifted their arm to take a photo and showed it to me on their wrist monitor. The white paint was obviously a later, cruder addition. The characters had the irritating half-familiarity I was by that point used to; these, I judged, were an ancient antecedent of the letters printed on my own uniform. That would be commensurate with their addition by whoever had built this lift, presumably for the benefit of passengers who could not climb out to wherever the 'official' marking was along the wall.
Knowing what the previous four thresholds we had crossed had been labelled, it was easy to fit the squiggle in Aranani's photo to the shape of an 'epsilon' character. In my knowledge there was no fifth threshold in the time-war classification, and I wanted to tell myself that the label was a prank, that after all it was not written in chronoscript. The threshold's being painted directly onto chronium dismissed that thought.
Nireba climbed up the vines to our level and was about to ask the cause of the delay when they saw the threshold. They closed their mouth and looked at me, lips pressed thin. I knew better than to try to outright lie. "Back to your station, Marine. The lieutenant and I needed a moment to decipher the sign."
They did not immediately do as bidden, turning to look at the scrawl. Their angle was, if anything, worse than mine, until they let go of the vines with one hand to hang off and stretch their neck. I worried at their grip and wondered if I would be able to catch them if they slipped, but said nothing.
"Threshold..?" They said, tentatively. "I don't recognise that first one, sir."
"I didn't ask you, Marine. Return to your station."
"The captain and I will tell you if there's anything you need to know," Aranani added hastily. "Right now we need you leading the descent."
Nireba ducked their head. "Sorry, sir, right away."
With that, the descent resumed, and proceeded largely without incident. My ankles did grow sore, but we could see through the gaps in the vines the structures of neighbouring scaffolds getting broader as they widened towards their bases. I was touched by a flutter of pride that our lift needed no such excesses of material and space. We descended past the enormous cyleaves that kept it alive, hundreds of metres long, arching gracefully into the pit, so much larger than the limits we knew on our contemporary cystems.
By the time we reached the bottom, the elevator shaft was surrounded by scaffold foundations on all sides and deep in gloom. Nireba called up that they had reached ground, and I authorised them to cut us a doorway in the vines. We could not, after all, use whatever mechanism our forebears had. I stumbled when it was mine and Aranani's turn to disentangle our legs, staggering against the chronium and slipping immediately to the floor for want of purchase on its slick surface.
My ankles hurt and my feet tingled with recovering circulation. I felt a little bruised by the fall, and allowed myself a moment to gather my wits. In that moment, I glanced at the wall and saw a dull patch on the sheen, a flat line that became obvious as my eyes traced it. I could not be sure then, though I later confirmed, that it was another yellow-and-black threshold, on which I would eventually find chronoscript that labelled it zeta.
I got to my feet and out through the hatch that Vittar had cut, and did not mention my discovery even to Aranani. We waited while the rest of the soldiers finished their descent, peering through the depths of the gloom. All around us were the footings of scaffolds neighbouring the one we had descended, some of heavy beams and others of lightweight pipes. We did not risk prodding them to see if they endured, and only hoped our mere presence would not be enough to induce a collapse somewhere above.
The ground was slippery and lumpen, chronium again. It has a surface that reflects slightly even when there is no light to reflect, almost enough that it seemed to glow around our feet. Chronium crystallises into a form not unlike well-burnt tree bark, sections a few centimetres long and wide with relatively smooth tops and deep cracks between them. I felt that not-quite-even mosaic under our feet and knew we stood on ground untrodden for millennia.
We did not linger long in the shade, conscious that our cystems yearned for the light currently being monopolised by the cyleaves of the elevator shaft – if that was what it was; we had encountered no lift car – above us. On stiff ankles, walking on the chronium was particularly uncomfortable and unsteady, so that we all had stumbles and trips. Where a falling body struck a scaffold beam, there were deep, throbbing notes from the rickety towers above, but nothing fell on us.
It was some minutes before we emerged into the light, and then we did so all at once. The edge of the shadow was very hard, although once we were out of it our own shadows were indistinct. Everything was the dull grey-purple of chronium, every shape and building before us. The air was as clear and tasteless as glass. There was no dust; any dust left behind by the last explorers to precede us would be under the chronium, or turned to it.
Above us loomed the scaffolds. In front stretched the city, or what had seemed a city from high above. As we walked between chronium-coated structures, past the low shapes of chronium-coated vehicles and devices, some recognisable and others not, through battle-lines and over pits and craters that the chronium had preserved, the 'city' showed more its true nature as an agglomeration of camps intended to be temporary.
From the heights and shapes of some of the more familiar vehicles we could estimate the thickness of the chronium layer on the roads they had once driven to be a matter of several centimetres, in places perhaps as much as ten. The soldiers who had not been with me on the previous expedition on which I had entered a timescar noted this with awe. For myself, Aranani and Ermsan, who remembered our own awe at a faint dusting of chronium that we knew to be the work of centuries, the reaction was a fear we knew we could not let show.
Vertical surfaces were less thickly coated than horizontal, so that the flat-topped cabins all looked like cake slices with a layer of icing on top. Those cabins existed in several different sizes and combinations, different enough that we could tell which camps originated with different organisations, though the chronium hid anything that might have served for identification. There were also in some camps the lower, sloping shapes of fabric tents, purple-grey spines dangling from their encrusted guyropes.
Though we passed obvious signs of fighting, some of it clearly intense, we saw no bodies, not even as gentle grave-mounds in the chronium. Chronium preserves, but it does not form quickly enough to preserve much in the way of human tissue. If not for the total stillness of the air and concomitant lack of weather effects, the survival of the tents would have been uncanny.
Navigation was difficult with the limited perspective of Sornten's airbuoy, and for Pras' sake we went slowly on the slippery ground, but after weeks of the steps, and even the elevator shaft taking hours, the final walk was short. We made our way around the permatemps of what I assume were the oldest camps, and there, across a narrow strip of flat ground, was the lip of the chasm.
As we walked towards it, I became conscious of a crunching sensation to my steps. I looked down and saw my feet pressing into the chronium where previously it had resisted any impression of my weight. I scuffed my foot and the chronium crumbled around it. Against all reason, the chronium was thinner here.
With my toe I brushed clean a small patch of the layer underneath. It was pale, milky in a way that gave the impression of slight translucence, and very smooth. Rather than slippery, though, my boot sole gripped it quite well. At first I wondered if I had stumbled on something buried there, but the same material extended all the way to the edge of the chasm, where the chronium was only a thick frosting, not even fully crystallised.
Whatever the white stuff was, the chasm walls revealed it to have a roughly columnar structure. It had rolled and folded back on itself as it formed, like thick mousse, and the raw rock face, only faintly sheened with chronium, had discoloured streaks amid the white. In the bottom, which was less than fifty metres down from our vantage, the rock pooled and merged, retaining some of the liquid shape of its formation. The flat plaza on which we stood was clearly an artificial creation, though the surface bore no toolmarks at all.
Perhaps because of the thinness of the chronium, no means of descending the final stretch survived. There were a couple of places, as we walked along the lip, where off-colour corrosion stains suggested pitons or support struts had once been driven in. Our cylimbs were sufficient to cushion that kind of drop, if we could have been sure of the footing at the bottom, but I ordered Nireba and Dufore not to try when they suggested it. Pras, at least, needed a better option.
Though it meant extending our journey and moving away from our ultimate goal, we walked back along the edge of the chasm towards where it approached the wall of the pit, until the bottom began to rise to meet us. I assumed then that the chasm had once been a much deeper rift, with the white rock stretching up to the steps above, and some time-war project had dug out the cylindrical shaft around us to facilitate their archaeologists' study. I already had at my disposal most of the evidence needed to overturn that theory, but at that time my mind was still shielded from the truth by the limits of my imagination.
We reached a place where the drop from flattened ledge to lumpen chasm-floor was only ten metres or so, and Dufore asked again for authorisation to jump down. This time I let them, and when they had no trouble landing, let the rest of the unit follow. We got Pras down by means of a rather undignified half-toss, half-drop.
In the bottom, there was just enough chronium on the white rock to keep footing uncertain. We slithered and stumbled down, the light never quite dimming enough to match the canyon walls as they rose above us. It was at once claustrophobic in a way that nothing else inside the timescar had been, and uncomfortably exposed. For the first time in a long time I thought of the enemies who might have been pursuing us.
Eventually we came to the feature that lay at the heart of everything we had traversed. The white rock here had again been cut or polished flat and smooth, and its chronium coating was nothing more than a faint layer of dust. Two buttresses, both cut to that same absurd precision, hunched out from the chasm wall, as if warding off the disorder of the natural rock face. Their vertical alignment revealed the small discoloured striations where rolling folds had been smoothed in the finish, but there was no evidence of attendant cracks or crevices in the surface.
Between them stood the door. There could be no question that that was what it was, although it was of the same white stone and so were its hinges, which were each taller than a person. It stood almost the height of the chasm's side and about as wide, so that if one were to stand in front of it as it swung outward – which appeared to be the direction it would open – one would be swept aside and possibly crushed against the buttress.
There is more to be said about the door, but at that moment some perturbance of the light caught our attention and all of us turned to crane our necks up at the top of the canyon wall behind us. Up there, silhouetted against the off-colour sky, was the distinctive wide, angular shape of a Commonwealth spider-tank.
I'm working on chapter 2, it probably won't come together quite as fast as this one did. Also I might put these on smashwords/itch in more ereader-friendly versions with a pwyw, if I can draw a cover design I'm happy with.
also yes there are a lot of steps in this but none of them are The First Step, I'll get to that one later
Update: Chapter 2 is here
