Overlord

26

Aston tried his best to swallow down anger and frustration. And, he had to admit, no little dose of fear. Everything had turned bad so quickly, it was hard to credit, but this argument was getting them nowhere. They were back in what had become casually called the green cavern, where the greenium was brightest. Where the pool with the strange door at bottom sat placid and calm on the far side from where they stood.

Reid kept demanding that they fight their way out. Now they were aware of the enemy, of its limitations, they could concentrate bright lights to hold the chitinous creatures at bay and battle back to the surface. Sol Griffin refused to accept that. The creatures could, he assured them, easily back around like they had before and trap them, hem them in. They had done it once, though the party had no way of knowing how. They could do it again. Perhaps they were able to grab the ceiling of the tunnels like cockroaches and scuttle silently above, as Jen had suggested before. Or perhaps there were cracks and passages hidden in the darkened folds of rock that the scientists hadn’t seen.

“We wait!” Sol shouted, anger tinging his loud voice more than ever.

“Wait?” Reid demanded. “For what? For a host of angels to fly down and lift us up through the rock?”

“Don’t be absurd. Until someone comes. Until a rescue is effected. Thankfully those things are clearly reluctant to come in here. I think it’s too bright for them with this much greenium glowing from the walls, and our halogens keeping it all charged. We’re safe in here, so we wait.”

“And how long will our batteries last on those lights?” Aston asked. “I have to agree with Reid. After all, who’s coming? The remaining staff at the base are hardly trained to rescue us, and they don’t have the manpower. And besides, they don’t even know right now that we need rescuing. No one does!”

“Someone will come when we don’t go back topside,” Sol insisted. “Wong knows the team has enough supplies for a maximum of three days. If we don’t return after three days, he’ll know something is up and send a rescue party.”

“Really? Is that pre-planned?” Aston asked. “Because it seems bloody unlikely to me. After all, no help came for the previous team, and they were down here long enough to die!”

“Not true,” Sol Griffin said. “We came. We’re the help.”

“Oh, really?” Aston’s anger was finding new heights. “You expect us to believe we’re a rescue mission? We’re a second effort, another team sent down here based on the assumption the first team was long dead and gone. Admit it! You expected to find bodies at best. That Jen survived is close to a miracle. We were no rescue team.”

Sol remained tight-lipped, cheeks red with barely contained rage. Aston thought perhaps the man was getting close to the end of his tether, that all his preparations, all his expectations, had been blown far out of the water. After all, who could possibly have expected this turn of events?

Maybe Sol and SynGreene had thought the previous party lost, or maybe poisoned by the greenium somehow, something basically mundane. Attacked by mantics? Stories of pale-skinned hominids? Strange red knives in the chests of centuries-old corpses? Everything they had found had to be well beyond anything Sol had planned for.

“There might be another option.” They all turned to see Jen Galicia standing behind them. Standing unassisted, Aston noticed, as she ate another ration. The food and water must be finally giving her some strength. But she was still pale as milk, trembling with the effort of remaining upright.

“What option?” he asked.

“There might be a clue in the photos I took of the shrine. I need a new battery for my camera.”

A battery was quickly sourced from Marla Ward and they fired up Jen’s camera, huddled around to look at the small screen on the back. She flicked through pictures of a shrine, a strange, smooth arch with a stack of flat stones beneath, pictographs on its curving sides. Another shot showed a small stone cairn, and behind it rows and rows of pictographs on the wall.

“It’s like someone wrote a novel,” Slater said. “With the notes Professor Murray Lee made in the journal, maybe we can decode at least some of this.”

Aston pulled the small book from his jacket, flicked through the pages. He looked at Sol. “Give us some time with this first.” He glanced at Reid. “Yeah? Just some time to maybe understand better what’s happening?”

Reid let out a grunt of annoyance and turned away. He barked at Tate to watch the two tunnels leading away from the far side of the lake, then went to stand by the tunnel leading back.

“Looks like you’ve got some time,” Sol said with a grim smile. “If you can figure out anything useful, we’d all be very grateful.”

Aston moved with Jen to sit on a rounded rock, and Slater sat on Jen’s other side.

“Let’s see what we can do,” Aston said, finding the first of Murray’s translations and holding the book open for the others to see.

Sol Griffin had moved to guard one of the tunnels on the far sides of the lake, Ronda Tate moving to stand at the mouth of the other. Terry Reid still watched intently down the only tunnel they knew would lead them out again.

Aston, Slater, Jen, Syed, and Marla sat in a tight group near the lake’s edge. The team muttered to each other, picked unenthusiastically at food and drink, biding their time, until eventually Aston, Slater, and Jen had done all they could.

“Okay,” Aston called out. “I think we have all we can get.”

“What does it tell us?” Sol asked.

Aston laughed darkly. “Not much and nothing good. As far as we can figure it, someone lived down here. No idea who or what they were, the pictograph in the journal is simply translated as ‘people’ or ‘the people’. They lived beneath the earth for an indeterminate length of time. But some of these people ate the ‘shining fish’, which we suspect, from the context, is some kind of taboo. There are lots of sections, great chunks of text, that we can’t translate. We’ve done our best to guess.”

“How confident are you that it’s right?” Sol asked.

Aston shrugged. “In broad strokes, I think we’ve got the gist of it. More people ate the fish and were either driven away or left on their own. Either way, they were outcasts from the people in general. Something happened, some event we can’t figure out, and the outcasts… awoke, we guess, something bad. Murray translated the bad thing as ‘overlord’. Murray suggested a number of different translations — Master, Ruler, Leader, and Overlord. But it’s overlord that he stuck with for the rest of the text after that.”

“Overlord of what?” Marla asked, looking around them. “The great lord of the dank green caverns?”

Aston smiled. “I guess so.”

“And what is this overlord?” Syed asked. “What manner of creature? A person or something else?” She didn’t seem too bothered by the revelation, Aston noted. If anything, she appeared eager to know more.

“No idea,” Aston said. “But it seems the overlord sent its minions after the people. Again, that’s the word Murray used. Minions.”

“Those nasty-ass creatures that took Gates,” Reid said bitterly from across the cavern.

Aston glanced over, but Reid still stared ahead, down into the blackness, keeping his distance from the group. Aston looked back to their notes. “Okay, so it seems that enemies came, who wanted to control the Overlord. They brought people with them and fed their heads to the overlord, or something like that.”

“They did what?” Syed said, eyes wide. Her eagerness seemed to wane.

“That’s the best we can figure,” Aston said. “Those victims then became like the creatures, the mantics we guess, and fought the people. It was a kind of civil war down here. The people were driven back, and they took up shelter in new caves, where there were none of the shining fish to be found.” He tapped the page with one forefinger. “This last bit is perhaps oddest of all, but our best guess is they come out from time to time to get what Lee called ‘bloodstone’.”

Slater held up the dagger they had taken from Murray’s chest. “We think it’s this stuff, the same stone as the blade that killed Lee. It’s like a kind of ruddy obsidian. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it before. But I think maybe it’s the only weapon that might work effectively against the mantics.”

“Is that all we’ve learned from this?” Sol asked. “That crazy story and that our only chance might be hand to hand combat with stone age weapons? That’s not much use at all.”

“No, it’s not,” Aston said quietly.

“Too late to worry now,” Reid called out. “I see mantics down this tunnel. It seems like they don’t want to get too close right now, but they’re getting bolder by the minute.”

“The glow of the cavern hurts their eyes,” Slater said. “But I guess they’ll get over that soon if they want us badly enough.”

Aston handed the journal to Slater, hefted Gates’ rifle, and moved to join Reid. He caught glimpses of glistening black far away in the darkness.

“I’ve got movement too,” Tate called out.

Sol turned back to his tunnel, straining to see into it. After a moment, he nodded. “Yep. Me too.”

Reid turned to Aston, his eyes narrowed, haunted. “We’re surrounded.”