Aeolus Solaris
It's not easy to think straight with a gun pointed at your head.
My every muscle was tense, holding me perfectly still - but for a quivering in my legs - as the Inquisitor's right arm circled my neck while his left held a slug gun to my temple.
His attention, however, was focused not on me - except, perhaps, for a taut awareness of any movement I might make - but instead on my liege, Lady Erian Li Halan, who stood glaring at him with iron determination, her unwavering rapier poised to pierce his ribs. This standoff had already lasted nearly a minute, with no word spoken or gesture exchanged. Only their glared intent communicated the coiled conflict ready to burst forth at the slightest move any made.
Caranzo, Erian's bodyguard, began to slowly - almost imperceptibly - move to my left, but then halted at what was surely some sign of recognition from my captor, perhaps a flick of the eye or tilt of the head. I couldn't see it from my vantage.
I tried not to notice the subtle checks and counterchecks being made around me. I instead attempted to pray. As I said, it is hard to collect one's thoughts when a cold steel gun barrel is impressed upon one's temple. Nonetheless, I endeavored for a moment to let go of the world and open myself to the Pancreator's grace, silently reciting the litanies that had been so assiduously taught me in theurgic seminary.
It was not easy. The rite I attempted normally required that I recite the litany aloud, accompanied by a series of gestures. Without these components, the proper enactment of the rite was unassured.
As the cadence of the rhyme culminated, I released my internal, mystical flame with an exhalation of breath - so slight I hoped it would not garner the attention of my too-attentive host. With the rising and release of the flame, the rite was complete. As I felt the buoyant, airy jacket of divine protection wreath me, I lunged forward and away from the gun.
It fired. The bullet sparked against the immaterial field of force that surrounded me, richoceting across the room. The Inquisitor's arm released me and I ran forward as fast as I could, escaping any further attempts to snare me.
I turned and saw the robed fanatic crumple to the floor, Erian's rapier buried to the hilt in his torso. He had released me only because his arms had become too weak to hold me, robbed of vitality by the sword thrust into his heart.
I said a prayer for his departing soul, hoping that its light found its way back to the Empyrean. I feared, however, that the weight of its own anger and intolerance would keep it mired in this universe, a ghost hungry for both vengeance and release.
I drew the sign of the jumpgate in the air, thanking the Pancreator for his grace and the theurgic secrets that had protected me from harm.
"Are you all right?" Erian asked, looking at me with some concern as she withdrew her rapier, now slick with the Inquisitor's blood.
I nodded. "Yes. You don't need to worry about me. I'm sorry I let that happen."
"Don't be," Cardanzo said, moving past us to examine the passageway from which the Inquisitor had come. "He was quick. But I don't see any more of them. If he had companions, they're somewhere else in the complex."
"Then we shouldn't waste any more time," Erian said, heading to the passageway. "The sooner we reach the control room, the quicker this ends."
Cardanzo slipped into the darkness ahead of her and she followed. I fell in behind them, feeling my way along the dark walls, following the faint sounds of their footsteps and breathing. I felt safer now, cloaked in grace, but knew it was no guarantee that we would survive this foray into the past.
A faint light came from somewhere ahead, from down a side passage. We followed it. It soon led us to a circular room lined with glass windows, now empty of any electric life. The glow came from a weak everlight hung from the ceiling, an orb set to burn a millennium ago by its Second Republic makers. It still performed that duty, lighting the room enough for us to see the desks and control panels that promised access to the think machine entity buried beneath the complex.
Two other passageways led from the room, each into more darkness.
Erian spoke into her whisper pin. "Julia? I think we found it. Can you backtrack and follow our scent here?"
I couldn't hear the response; the speaker was hidden in her ear, its words whispered only for her.
She nodded. "Okay. Don't be surprised at the body." She then looked at Cardanzo and I. "They're coming. Ong should have no trouble picking up our scent."
"I can't figure out how to restore the power," Cardanzo said "It may mean going down into the generator."
"We don't have time for that," Erian said in exasperation. "Besides, that's probably where the rest of the robes are. Let's hope Julia can figure it out from here."
By 'robes,' I knew she meant more Inquisitors. I looked around the room, hoping to find something I could do here. Until the think machine's power was restored, however, I had nothing to lend.
The rest of our crew arrived within 15 minutes. Onggangarak was the first into the room. He had traveled the low-ceilinged passageway on all sixes, but stood on two legs at his full 10-foot height once he entered the room. The Vorox nodded and bowed to Lady Erian as he did so.
He was immediately followed by Julia Abrams, who simply nodded at all of us and immediately got to work examining the terminals, her tools already in her hands. As a member of the Charioteers Guild, she was qualified to operate and repair all manner of high-tech devices.
Entering behind them a few minutes later was Sanjuk oj Kaval. An Ur-Ukar, she could navigate the darkness better than most of us, for she had spent the first years of her life in the dark caverns of Kordeth. "I think there's someone coming," she said. "I'll go back and find out who."
Erian nodded to Ong, who dropped once more to six legs and started to follow Sanjuk. The Ukari stopped and shook her head at him. "You're too big. There's no way they won't hear you in these halls."
Ong turned to Erian again. She nodded and motioned to another corridor. "Perhaps you'd best keep watch on one of the other passages." He was there in seconds, disappearing into the darkness. I turned to watch Sanjuk again, but she was already gone.
"Got it," Julia said matter-of-factly. "The circuit breaker was hidden under this panel. Give it a few seconds and the power should start cycling."
Almost immediately, lights began to flicker and glow across the panels, and the glass screens flared with life. We could see passages displayed on the some of the screens, places we had been and others I didn't recognize. On one screen, the darkness was filled with a glowing red bulk, an odd shambling shape. "What is that?" I asked, my voice displaying perhaps too much of my nervousness.
Everyone looked concerned at the image until Julia laughed. Her chuckle was a strange thing here, echoing through the dusty chamber. "It's Ong," she said. "That's an IR camera. It's watching his passageway." She motioned to the passageway Ong had gone down. "At least we can keep an eye on him, in case anything happens."
"All right," Erian said. "Let's get to work. Can you bring up Doramos's files?"
Julia sat down at one of the swivel chairs and began typing at one of the terminals. "Let's see... It shouldn't be too hard. I mean, this place was meant to monitor his work, after all."
"Yes," I said, "but the files we want won't be so obvious. If they were, they would have been distributed in some other cache or datafile before now."
"Well, c'mere then," Julia said. "A lot of this is in Latin, and I can't read it."
I came and looked over her shoulder at the file names. I was no stranger to data libraries - the Church maintained quite a number of its own - but this one seemed unique, designed to baffle the casual reader. File names were in Latin, with ostentatious titles - clearly codewords of some kind or other. We didn't have all day to decipher them.
"Alustro," Erian said. "Sanjuk tells me there are five more Inquisitors in the first foyer. If they follow our trail, they'll be here within 10 minutes."
"I understand," I said. I had to figure out Doramos's codewords in a scant few minutes - surely impossible; no other Second Republic figure was so arcane as Doramos, the World Architect whose terraforming skills had reshaped the Known Worlds. Here, in a long-lost complex buried beneath Pentatuech's Megiddo Desert, he had hidden a number of important files, keys to his methodology that any guilder - or Eskatonic priest, for that matter - would surely contemplate murder to get. That's why the Inquisition, who followed the same leads we had, were out to prevent anyone from finding it. Their irrational hatred of technology extended even to the work of a man the Republican patriarchs considered to be a saint. They would kill to ensure that nobody got it.
I had to get back to basics, review what cosmology Doramos had worked from, and hope to find a clue there to his naming conventions. We couldn't open every file, hoping to find the one out of hundreds that we needed. Julia was awakening them as fast as she could, only to discover simple and well-known terraforming programs (well-known within those technical schools, that is; rare elsewhere); we couldn't waste our time with them.
I knew that Doramos had used codes based on the Omega Gospels, the collected sayings and stories by and about the Prophet and his disciples. The file we searched for promised - according to all the sources we had followed - to reveal some of the secrets of Pentateuch's wild weather patterns. Hence, a title displaying some weather event from the Omega Gospels would be most appropriate.
I asked Julia to engage another monitor, so I could perform a separate search. She lit the one next to me and I scanned its file name list. There - about half way down: "Aeolus Solaris." It was from Paulus IX, the chapters concerning Saint Paulus, the Prophet's starship pilot. The Divine Starwind, the invisible wind that blows through the void, enlightening the wise, guiding the lost and damning the sinful.
I awakened the file and read the Latin text - a whole tome hidden in electric pathways. "This is it," I said. "It must be. There are words I don't understand, but it's definitely meteorological."
"Which one?" Julia asked. I told her its title and within seconds she had a data-crystal copy in her hand. "Let's go."
Ong suddenly burst into the room, panting hard. "Golems! Coming this way!"
Erian looked confused, staring at the monitor that watched his passageway; it was blank. "I don't see anything."
Ong growled. "They're coming! They shot at me!"
"They've probably got IR baffling," Julia said, heading for the passageway we had arrived from, pulling Erian with her. "The camera won't read them."
Cardanzo motioned me to go first and then fell in behind me, with Ong guarding our rear. We didn't even shut down the machines.
"Go right!" Julia yelled.
"But that's not where we came from," I said, barely able to see their moving figures in the dim light that now receded behind us.
"Sanjuk says the Inquisitors are almost here; she advices going right," Julia yelled back.
I followed. We made two more turns, leaving me not only in the dark but completely lost. I jumped when something brushed past me, only to breathe a sigh of relief when I realized it was Sanjuk.
She tsked and whispered: "All too blind. I'll have to teach you some dark steps, so you don't trip over yourself."
"Where are they?" Erian whispered to her.
"Behind us. They're heading for the control room." A distant blaster shot echoed its way to us. "And I guess they've found Ong's golems."
"How appropriate," Erian said. "Let's use the diversion to get out of here."
"This way," Sanjuk said, moving past Erian and Julia to lead us through the darkness. She had spent much of our time here mapping passageways; I was amazed how quickly she had come to know them. A true Scravers Guilder.
As we moved on, the roar of slug guns joined the high-pitched whine of blaster fire. I didn't know whose weapons were which, but I certainly did not want to confront Second Republic-era Protector class golems to find out. It was ironic that those who hated technology were now confronting its vanguard.
I said a prayer for them and hoped that, if they survived, they would gain a bit more respect and awe for the works of our ancestors, and not so quickly move to destroy things that could fight back.
We had our treasure, our datafile. Our patron would be glad to get it, and his rewards would fund our passage onwards through the stars, ever seeking the culmination of Erian's quest, delivered in a vision by the Gargoyle of Nowhere. A quest whose very goal is still unknown to us but whose shape is constantly revealed in clues and mysteries as we seek it out, buoyed and buffeted by the Aeolus Solaris.
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