Page 32 of Spectral Seas (Spectral Worlds #2)
P EEEMMMMMM…A SOFT chime rang through the chamber, easing Abby back from the escape of a light nap. His augments pasted an array of data against the inside of his lids. The chronometer told him an hour had passed. He opened his eyes to Leta. She was back at her seat on the sofa, staring off or watching something on her ocular augments. Abby couldn’t really tell. Soren was seated to the side of the small table, his back straight, his eyes closed. He was meditating or sleeping. Abby wasn’t sure of that either.
Peeemmmmmm …The chime sounded again.
Abby rose from the sofa, panned his hands across the front of his shirt to smooth it out, then slipped on his coat. “It’s time for us to join the others outside,” he said. Soren and Leta both returned from wherever their minds had been, shared a glance, then rose as well. Abby suspected that they had telepathically spoken to each other. In the past, he would have made the effort to listen in, but he’d grown to trust Leta. If there were an issue with Soren, he believed she’d let him know. “Remember,” he added, “if we find something, we don’t have to do anything. Our job is simply to take note and report back, not to draw any attention.”
“We’ll find something,” said Soren. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be here.”
“All we have to do is confirm what exactly that something is. We’re of the same interest.”
“The Bureau and the Syndicates?”
“Listen,” said Abby, “we’ve been getting along fine. We need to agree that we’ll wait until we return to the Alpha Plane to report what we find and take no action here.”
Soren turned to Leta, back to Abby, then in a mockingly congenial tone said, “Agreed.”
“Let’s go,” said Leta. “They’re waiting.”
~*~
Abby pulled back the tarp door to find Sss’kallion and his guards waiting. Sss’kallion had pulled his hood back to reveal his blue scaly head and his vacant inferno eyes. The Viridians waited as well, but a comfortable distance from the Indici. Uhggwa nodded to Abby and the Umbra as they stepped out.
“I trussst everyone isss ready,” said Sss’kallion. He then turned toward the mouth of the mine and started walking. “Thisss way, if you please.”
“Isn’t it strange how the mines mirror each other?” Leta softly said.
“It’s not a coincidence,” said Abby. “Planar physics stated simply is that matter manifests differently across the spectrum. But one thing we’ve learned from archeological digs is that the natural formations—mountains, volcanos, caves—are often mirrored across near planes. This is the case with the crystalline veins of the Indicus Mine. Ancient miners carved the caverns then strip-mined to harvest the vertical vein of crystal just as they did in the Viridis cavern and in so many other planes. ”
“You said ancient. But they’re still harvesting today.”
“The caverns and the mines were created over eons. Long before the age of Mortals.”
“Right. We learned that in the academy.”
“That’s right. The archeological studies suggest that the main caverns were carved in the time of the Ancient Ones. The vertical vein was strip-mined in the time of the reptiles and, not coincidentally, by the ancestors of the Indici.”
“The serpent men.”
“As they were called. The horizontal vein was created in the modern epoch—modern being a relative term, our guess from around the time bubbles were built.”
“And how do we know this?”
“The technology for the gardens is different. They’re nurtured and harvested from the resource rich core of the horizontal vein. Again, archeology suggests that this technology was introduced during the first Omni invasion.”
“But the mines aren’t the same on every plane,” said Leta. “Are they?”
“No. Not by precision,” said Abby. “There’s no doubt that the architecture shared designers, but each is unique. They’ve just been created in such close proximity of the veins that they seem to be the same.”
“This place feels different.”
“I know what you mean. It’s the absence of workers. Otherwise it’s not much different than the one on Viridis. It’s bright, clean, there are similar rows of syndicate labeled containers, but it lacks the bustling crowd of syns that filled the Viridian mine. Without them this is just a silent, eerie, blue walled tunnel. But then, I’m used to crowds.”
“Me too,” said Leta.
Though the mines were incredibly close in comparison, they weren’t exactly the same. Apart from the lack of workers, there were physical differences. Abby noticed that there were fewer side corridors. Two-hundred and fifty meters into the cave, they reached the third shaft to the crystal gardens. At the same point in Viridis, they’d reached the fifth.
That these two corridors lined up was no coincidence to Abby.
Sss’kallion stopped and extended his arm into the mouth of a side corridor. “Thisss isss the entrance to the sssaphire gardensss. I’m sss-sure that you will find everything in order.” He then led them into the smaller tunnel.
Just as the emerald gardens had illuminated the end of the Viridian corridor, the end of this tunnel gleamed bright sapphire blue. As the group progressed toward the light at the end, a dark morphing blot formed to the right side. As they drew closer, the blighted silhouette squiggled into form—the robes of a monk. It wasn’t until they were meters away that Abby could see the queue of synthetic workers trailing behind. They trudged slowly and constant, their bald heads dropped forward, and each with their left hand on the huge pack burdening the worker before them.
“ Ghuahh ,” said Leta.
“What is it?” asked Soren.
“They have no face.”
Sss’kallion was quick to respond. “They have no need,” he said, as if it were a preposterous notion that syns would ever have a face at all. Flatly, he added, “They are androgynousss, fasssceless vesssels. They are all that isss required.”
Leta turned her gaze away from the queue. “Of course,” she said.
“I asssure you, they do not fret. They are created to ssserve. Cuh-um, come. We’re almost to the garden. ”
Silently, she chipped to Abby, “Can you believe that? It was better when the tunnels were empty.”
“Yeah, it’s disturbing. But I don’t think they’re bothered.”
“How can they exist that way?” she asked.
“Sss’kallion’s right. They don’t know any other. Anyway, we’re almost there. Let’s do what we came to and get out of here.”
~*~