Chapter 888: |
The first creature came through the southern wall of the instrument room at the fourth hour of the morning, eleven days after the highland garrison’s arrival.
It did not come through the Gate. The Gate was sealed and monitored and the seal held. It came through a section of the facility’s foundation stone on the instrument room’s southern side, a section that had not been part of the original Gate mechanism but had been in contact with the Gate’s pressure field for one hundred and ninety years.
Urrak saw it first because Urrak was on the instrument watch and his station was the one closest to the southern wall. He heard the stone before he saw the creature: a low sound, not loud, somewhere between a groan and a scrape, the sound stone made when something was moving through its internal structure rather than against its surface. He rang the bell cord twice, which was the alert signal, and stepped back from the wall with his weapon drawn.
The creature emerged from the stone the way water emerged from a saturated surface. The stone did not break. It did not open. The creature moved through the stone’s molecular structure at a point where the contact with the Gate’s field had degraded the stone’s resistance to Abyss pressure. What came through was approximately the size of a large hunting dog: angular, asymmetrical, appearing to be made of compressed darkness that held its shape through density rather than through any biological membrane. It had no visible eyes. It moved in the way that things moved when they did not fully understand that they were operating in three spatial dimensions rather than in a continuous field: turning in directions that were not quite left or right or up, catching itself, adjusting.
It was, for two seconds after emerging, disoriented.
Urrak put two wounds into it in those two seconds. The wounds took. It bled something that was not blood, darker than dark, and it made a sound that had no equivalent in any acoustic category Urrak had heard. It registered him. It turned toward him.
Oshrak and two Yurakk came through the instrument room door at a run, responding to the bell. The Yurakk were equipped for close quarters. The instrument room was close quarters by any measure.
What followed took forty seconds.
The creature was killable. This was the most important thing it demonstrated about itself in those forty seconds: it could receive damage, and sufficient damage stopped it. It took six wounds in total. The last two came from Oshrak, who had seen in the first three seconds that the creature’s movement patterns repeated at intervals and had timed the fourth and fifth applications of force to the intervals where the creature was not turning toward a new target.
The instrument room smelled of nothing.
Oshrak had his people at stations within thirty seconds of the creature’s dissolution. He checked every wall surface. He checked the floor. He checked the corner where the southern wall met the eastern wall. He found the point of entry: a section of the southern wall where the stone’s surface temperature was elevated by five or six degrees relative to the surrounding stone. No visible damage. No opening. Simply warm stone.
He sent for Aliyah.
She arrived within two minutes, already dressed, already carrying the instrument materials she needed. She pressed her palm against the warm section of stone and held it there for a long moment with her eyes closed.
"The stone here has been in continuous contact with the Gate’s field for the entire history of the facility," she said. "I knew it was a potential weakness. I have been reinforcing it with the void compound as part of the maintenance sequence." She opened her eyes. "Whatever came through found the section that was most recently applied and had not fully cured."
"It was small," Oshrak said.
"Yes. Whatever that was, it was not a primary entity. It was a probe. The directing intelligence sent something through the weakest available point at a scale small enough to test whether the passage was possible without triggering the Gate’s seal mechanism." She was already opening her compound kit. "It learned two things from this. First: passage through compromised stone is possible. Second: what passes through is intercepted."
"It will not send another," Urrak said from his position near the eastern wall. He had not lowered his weapon. He had also not moved away from his instrument station. He had been watching the readings throughout.
Aliyah looked at him. "The readings?"
"The third Keystone dropped eight percent when the creature came through and returned to its previous deviation level after it dissolved." He showed her the log. "The directing entity’s rhythm briefly interrupted. Like a breath held."
Aliyah read the log. She looked at Urrak for a moment with the expression she used when a person demonstrated a capacity she had not yet mapped.
"That is very precise observation for someone who was also fighting," she said.
"I was not fighting," Urrak said. "Oshrak was fighting. I was watching the instruments because someone needed to."
She nodded once. She went to the southern wall and began applying void compound to the warm section in the thorough overlapping layers that maximum penetration required.
Vor’gath arrived in the instrument room twenty minutes later. He had felt the creature’s emergence from his sleeping quarters at the facility’s northern end and had not come running because running was not his pace and the bell had already rung. He stood at the southern wall where Aliyah was working and put his hand near the section she had treated, not touching it.
"It tested," he said. "And it found out what it wanted to know."
"That passage is possible?" Aliyah said.
"That passage is opposed," Vor’gath said. "This matters more to it than the passage itself. Now it knows how much force the opposition has." He lowered his hand. "It will calculate from that."
Khao’khen found Oshrak in the supply corridor an hour after the creature’s dissolution and asked him to walk the full facility perimeter with him. They walked it in the cold morning air, Oshrak pointing out each section of foundation wall and identifying which were older stone and which were newer repair work from the Order’s maintenance cycles.
The older stone was the concern. Stone that had been in continuous contact with the Gate’s field for the full one hundred and ninety years of the facility’s existence had been exposed to that field’s effects for the longest duration. If the probe had found purchase in the most recently applied compound section, older sections that predated several compound application cycles might have their own degraded areas.
"Survey it all," Khao’khen said. "Urrak has already started. Have two of your Yurakk work alongside him. Three people surveying goes three times as fast."
Oshrak nodded. He was the kind of garrison commander who did not need the reasoning explained but who absorbed it when it was given because it told him how to extend the principle to cases that had not been anticipated yet.
They completed the perimeter in forty minutes. The morning had lightened. The highland warriors on the ridge above were changing their watch rotation. The facility was quiet in the specific way it was quiet when everyone in it understood the situation and was working accordingly.