Page 30 of Spectral Seas (Spectral Worlds #2)

“S TARE TOO LONG into the abyss and you know what happens,” said Leta.

“What’s that?” Abby asked.

“You were doing it again.”

“Oh. Right.” He pivoted around to face her. “I must’ve dozed. I feel a lot better.”

“Sss’kallion says we’re almost there.”

Abby rose to his feet in time to see their dragon escort radically veer ninety degrees upward. He tilted his head back, admiring the maneuver as the beast disappeared into the mist above them, then straightened his neck back forward in time to witness the face of a mountain materializing from the mist just meters away.

In a panic, he threw up his arms to block the collision only to see that they had become translucent. A quiver coursed through him, followed by a rush of fire. The mountain, the hover pad, and those travelling aboard, all vanished. He found himself alone, floating, surrounded by white.

But only briefly .

He was jerked forward as the white rapidly sucked away to darkness. Leta was pulling on his coat. A thin, pulsing strip of fluorescent blue streamed above the canopy, illuminating round, smooth bored walls. He realized they’d flown into a tunnel mined into the side of the mountain wall.

“Are you okay?” Leta asked.

It was like the time he physically slipped out of phase to avoid crashing into one of the NorEast Meg’s towering ziggurats. Leta had been there too.

“Yeah,” he said. His eyes darted to the others aboard, all with their backs to him. “You stopped it before…” His gaze was drawn back to the rhythmic flicker of the passing lights. The cyclic stroboscopic effect washed out his eyes and made his stomach swim.

“Abby?” asked Leta.

“Yeah. Sorry,” he said. “I’m all right.” He put his hands to his knees and let his head drop. The flash was more tolerable reflecting off the deck of the disc. The blinking gradually slowed, then stopped altogether.

His nausea alleviated, Abby straightened upright. The craft had reached the end of the tunnel and rested against a curved wall in the same shape of the disc. Directly before them, centered in the wall, was a door with a lit porthole window. Abby assumed the door was the entrance to or toward a lift, but without warning, the wall and the door within it slid upward, and though he couldn’t physically sense the motion, he could tell by the series of recessed lights passing upward that they were rapidly descending.

The recessed sconces picked up speed as they rapidly passed by so that they too became a pulsing stream. Abby deduced each flicker of light was a level into the mine. He focused on counting them and after a hundred had passed, the platform slowed to a stop .

Abby looked back up above the canopy to the pinpoint of light far up the surrounding smooth walled tube. His augments registered the vertigo inducing height at three-hundred meters. As he was measuring, the silo appeared to turn. He realized that it was the disc itself. It slowly spun one-hundred and eighty degrees to face a curved door in the wall. As they spun, the door simultaneously slid open to the side. The hover pad then glided out of the vertical tube into a vast manmade cavern. In contrast to the gloomy prefab Syn village they visited in Viridis, this space was well lit and floored with well-manicured fruit and vegetable gardens.

“Would you look at that,” said Leta as the disc slid forward over the gardens.

“The lack of fog?” asked Abby.

“No. Though that’s a nice change. I meant, look at all of that fresh food, none of it synthetic.”

“Volcanic soil is extremely fertile,” said Abby. “It contains all the minerals that a plant could want. All of the minerals we depleted from the soil in the Alpha Plane.”

“True,” she said. “Thank goodness the Farm Plane has the optimum soil.”

“But most of the food from the Farm Plane is factory synthetic. Though it may all be blue, I’ll take fresh produce over something crafted from a beetle slug vat any day of the week.”

They passed a few robed workers tending to a fruit tree. “The food may be fresh, but the workforce is synthetic,” she chipped. Though the Syns were in robes, they wore no hooded cowls, revealing the pale fleshy pate of their heads to be bald and blue.

“They did give us the technology,” said Abby .

The hover pad continued to glide over the rows upon rows of small bushes and trees toward a large round spot on the floor of the opposing side of the cavern.

“The layout of the gardens,” chipped Leta. “It’s so similar to the Viridis mines.”

“It’s no coincidence,” said Abby. “They’re proximate in spectrum.”

When their disc reached the large round spot, Abby found that, contrary to Viridis mine, there was no pool, only a huge, strip-mined hole. The disc flew to the center, stopped, then as they had before, descended into the vertical shaft.

They continued down until they reached opening of the wide mouthed mining cavern—at the same depth of the subterranean gardens in Viridis—then the disc came to a rest.

“We have arrived,” said Sss’kallion. He gestured to a large tented pavilion to the side of the ledge. “You’ll find ssseparate accommodations for each of you. You may refresh, and when we reconvene, we can tour the gardensss.”

~*~