Chapter 9: Phaon

Thorn and Bug returned from their scouting out the miner's camp. It was nearing dark again. They had been gone a full day and Leon told them that no one had returned from below. He was getting worried.
"What did you find?" he asked the two. Bug shook his head and looked to Thorn to give the answer.
"Leon! I think we're in trouble man." Thorn sat down and, taking of her boots, rubbed her tired feet. "The miner's been killed by a third party. And I believe they have been in THIS cave too! Remember that no one could understand that there was NO demolitions equipment here?"
Leon nodded.
"Well, the miner's had a mine, of course, but no demolitions equipment either!" Thorn paused for a breath, "I think someone has stolen it, the same someone that wasted the three brothers!"
Leon shook his head, but his stoney face showed no emotion. Picking up a rifle, hand gun and knife, he started for the cave entrance. Once there, he carefully scanned the countryside. Then he turned to Bug and Thorn.
"I'm going to go scout around and make sure we aren't being observed ourselves. Why don't you two set about getting things ready. I think we should head down to the ship and find out what happened to the others."
While Bug and Thorn set about getting things ready, Leon headed out of the cave.

Leaving the cave, Leon set about to carefully climb the scree hill above him. He had to use caution as he did want to set off a landslide and it was certainly unsettling to have a large immobile boulder suddenly rock or shift beneath him. Climbing up steadily higher, Leon found he had to use handholds to pull himself up once he left the scree slope. The view was breathtaking. Phaon was setting, turning the sky into fields of purple. But despite his vista vantage, Leon could see nothing.
Suddenly there was a bright flash and an explosion nearby. Dirt and rocks pummeled Leon, some breaking his skin (take 1 hit). Somebody had just shot at him, though Leon couldn't see where the shot came from. Still, he wasn't about to stay in the open as a target. Ducking down, Leon tried to find cover, but it was obvious he was exposed to shots from many places. Another blaster shot landed nearby. Leon guessed it came from across the valley. For the sniper to be able to get any kind of accuracy at that range, he must be very good. Feeling that he was a sitting duck if he remained out in the open, Leon ran wildly down the scree slope. For some reason, no further shots were fired and he was able to make it back to the cave.

Thorn and Bug stopped when they heard something like blaster fire, followed by an explosion. Then there was another. Bug's reaction was to hide, but Thorn crept cautiously to the cave entrance but she saw nothing further. She watched for several minutes until Leon reappeared.
"Someone just shot at me twice. Nearly hit me too!"
"Who shot you? From where?" Thorn asked.
"Couldn't see precisely. It came from somewhere high up across the valley."
Leon prompted her to finish packing and dragging Bug out from his hiding place, Leon pulled out his rifle, ready to return fire should someone shoot at them as they tried for Onzlo's dam.
"Do you think it's still wise to go?" Thorn asked him.
Leon shrugged. "If we stay here, we don't know what happened to the party. If we don't warn them, they could come up into a trap. If we leave someone behind, then that person could be ambushed."
"They could ambush us easily as we tried to exit that ship. There appears to be only one egress point," Thorn reminded him.
Leon looked back at her, trying to decide what to do.

Solo and Joe searched around engineering. The place was a mess but after a few hours, they found what they were looking for. It was a heavy monstrosity, but the heavy cutter also carried an inherent a-grav field which help offset its immense weight so that it was feather light and maneuverable. Joe had found a few smaller models as well. They would need them if they were to cut a path for the larger unit out.
Joe looked around him. What seemed to interest them the most was the lit up instrument panels. Obviously, some systems were functioning, even after all these years.
"Hey Solo?" Joe asked.
"Yea what?" Solo replied, trying to steer the cutter around some debris. "Hey, professor! You want to give me a hand by cutting some of this debris away?"
Joe returned and obligingly cut down some of the cables.
"Hey don't you think its odd that the power would be on after all this time?"
"How would I know," Solo replied. "Maybe. Why, you suspicious about something?"
"I don't know," Joe replied. "Naw, it's probably nothing. I mean a big ship like this would have to have redundant systems. I mean, it isn't that strange that some systems would be up and running."
Solo didn't think that Joe sounded convinced, but for the moment, he was too busy steering the cutter to speculate.

Tessa climbed the wet rungs of the ladder, unhaunted by any fears Jessine might have had for coming back up the long climb. Finally, topping the unfamiliar wall of Onzlo's plasticrete dam. The day was almost done, but still, the view was breathtaking. Having been forewarned about the cold water, Tessa had wrapped her legs in plastic sheeting sealed by a heat seamer. It seemed to do the trick as she waded through the cold rushing water. Several times, it seemed as though something bumped into her legs. She though they might be fish but she couldn't see them through the water's rushing film. Around her, heretofore unseen alpine mountainsides jutted abruptly skyward from the valley floor. There were trees miles farther down the valley but here everything was rock and lichen, but still starkly crisp and beautiful. She had only Raymont's directions to go by. Having been reborn in the stomach of the dead ship, she had reemerged to a new world of cold wilderness. Looking to where she was told the cave would be, she called out to Bug, Thorn and Leon.

Suddenly Thorn gasped. She pointed toward Onzlo's dam and they both saw that Jessine had come out and was calling to them to come down into the ship. Then, Leon noted the pulse of the blaster as it arced down the opposite slope and impacted into the river, throwing steam and water up in a splash that simply drenched Jessine.
Leon fired back, but noted that the energy from his own weapon seemed insufficient to carry its way across the valley with any semblance of accuracy. It was as he feared. They were very much outgunned.
Tessa had run back toward the dam while above Leon and Thorn, another blaster impact on the cliff above them rained down rocks and small boulders all around them. There was the immanent danger they were all going to be buried alive.
Without even thinking about it, Thorn made the dash for the river. Another blaster shot ignored her, but careened into the cave mouth. Whoever it was had an excellent vantage.
Just as Thorn had reached the river while Jessine had lowered herself over the plasticrete wall, Leon made his own sprint, yelling for Bug. Regrettably, much of their intended equipment and food supplies had to be abandoned, but Leon saw no choice.
Running down the slope, he slipped and fell painfully (5 hits), suffering an painful jolt. Just then Bug zoomed up and grabbing Leon by the hair, pulled him to his feet and continued to pull in panic, trying to drag Leon the distance to the dam.
"Get away from me!" Leon yelled, tearing Bug's panicked claws and some of his own hair off his head. "Get out of here!"
Having reached the limit of his courage, Bug was more than happy to comply and Leon saw him zoom down past the dam wall just as Thorn was topping it.
Leon travelled with remarkable speed and heard another explosion far behind him. Taking the river in great unhampered strides, he too cleared the wall quickly and descended until he was just behind Thorn. Below them was only darkness.
As they descended, Jessine warned them about the cold pool at the bottom. The room first room they came to was flooded. The water was chillingly cold. Onzlo's ladder and plasticrete wall had come straight down, obviously entering the ship where severe damage had breached the vessel all the way through the interior. Above them, were the torn edges of other decks, conduit and cables strewn everywhere. Rocks and mud had flowed down into the hole and several large boulders lay propped over smashed equipment. Though Onzlo's ladder had descended straight, the ship itself had come to be buried, not quiet level. Assuming that the bow had buried itself toward the craterlake, the deck had come to rest with about a seven degree tilt portside down, while the bow also was turned down about 26 degrees. The water had collected into a pool at these ends of the ship. Tilting away from them, the aft and starboard sides seemed dry, though dripping condensation was everywhere. Looking in that direction, they could see several rows of what looked like benches, some flat, some angled. One of them had lights going.
Jessine told them that this was part of the ship's sickbay and that the operating bed had already been used to treat Raymont for hypothermia and herself for a fall. After they entered the water, Jessine took them to a stateroom where they could clean up and get warm again. It too was powered though the rest of the ship seemed dead. It was here that they discovered that Jessine had left during her fall and that it was Tessa who was with them now.

"Well, I think this must be the auxiliary control," Raymont announced after they had cut their way through the bulkhead. Solo simply grunted. He had wanted to find the bridge, but it seemed that part of the ship had been savagely destroyed and it would take many days of excavation to reach what probably no longer existed. Theorizing that the auxiliary bridge could have survived, Raymont and Solo had searched all day for it. It was all Solo could do to pull Raymont away from searching bunkrooms for plunder. Still, Raymont had managed to find a undamaged portable Ono-Sendai micro computer with mental linkset, another 319 Galatian crowns, a stone globe that didn't seem to do much but was pretty and felt warm, and a old fashioned broadsword that he had grabbed, admiring its keen edge and mirrour finish. Thus far, Solo ignored all the treasure. He felt there was time for that later, but for right now, he wanted more answers.
Both men wandered around the chaos of the wrecked room. Fire had damaged much of it. Some of the control panels were melted and charred corpses were propped across from these stations. Even the air had a burned smell to it, mingled with the strong stench of decay. Strangely, as in other parts of the ship they had come across, power was on here also, on those stations that had not been destroyed. The personnel here were merely dead rotting obscenities which stank so bad that both Raymont and Solo's noses stopped working altogether, as if in protest. Solo shrugged. It made sense that an auxiliary control station would have an independent power source on a big ship like this.
Looking about the room, Solo came to rest his eyes on a working station. It seemed to have something to do with astrogation. There was also a blinking light on next to it. The redness of the light haunted him as if it were a message from the dead.
Raymont came up to him. "Well, daddy-o, there doesn't seem to be much here in the way of loot. What do you say we get back to the others. Maybe Grangeboy was able to find out something useful from that computer room I found."

Solo nodded. They headed back, climbing up two decks to try and intercept Joe and see if his knowledge had uncovered anything.
As they cut their way through the debris, creating a channel for later exploration, they eventually came back to the computer room. Inside, they found Joe at work on the computer consoles.
"So what have you uncovered," Solo asked him.
"I'm not sure," Joe said. "I think that these are mostly military codes though there are some star charts too that were here to be erased. They probably started to erase files when the ship started to crash, but they never got very far. I'm not sure that any files were actually erased."
"And `Genesis?'" Raymont asked.
Joe nodded. "Yep, that one topped the list. I've been reading it until you two appeared. Want to take a look? It's a really long file. Would make a great big book."
Solo shook his head. "Maybe later. Just give us the gist of it."
Joe exhaled, perhaps for effect. "Well, really it's a rewrite of history, based on some key archaeological finds. It's like a knowledge bank that says that mankind wasn't always the dominant species. It mentions the Daysanj as once being masters of the human race and the reason we are found across the stars. We entered space as their slaves."
"Sounds like a bunch of bad theory to me," Raymont commented.
"Maybe," Joe replied. "But if its true, then I, and now the both of you would be considered heretics for having forbidden knowledge."
Joe looked back at Solo. "What are you thinking, Solo?"
Solo looked back at him. "I don't know. Part of me is thinking that we should finish erasing that file."

Raymont, Solo and Joe made their way back to the stateroom. As the doors opened, they were surprised to see Bug, Leon and Thorn also present in the room. Raymont smiled and was about to give up a greeting when the worried look in their eyes stopped him. Tessa summed it up in one word.
"Trouble," she said.
Before she could explain, there was a vibration in the floor and walls around them, then a distant muffled sound that grew louder until something of a hollow roar reached them. Scrambling out of the room, they ran as fast as they could over the sloped floor and entered the sickbay, where they found the air thick and choked with dust. On the far side they could see that Onzlo's hole had collapsed somehow. More huge boulders had crashed down into the ship, filling the center of the room so that it appeared like a small hill had built up there. From above, like a waterfall, water was rushing into the room, finding its way from somewhere above. There one egress to the outside had vanished. They were buried alive hundreds of feet below the surface and the cold water at their feet was rising.

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