The Den Den Mushi's receiver clicked dead in Dusty Digby Oval's thick-furred hand. He stared at it, his bushy, coal-dusted handlebar mustache twitching with indignation. "—output potential of the eastern vein is—" he finished saying to the empty air, before sputtering. "He hung up! I was mid-stats report! That's a breach of operational continuity!" He slammed the receiver down, making the little shell shudder.
A fine, grey powder sifted down from the ceiling of the rough-hewn tunnel, landing on his reinforced helmet with a sound like falling pepper. He blinked, his small, bright eyes tracking upwards. The triple lenses of his "Sullen-Light" lamp illuminated the arched rock above. A network of hairline cracks, previously sealed by mineral deposits, was now creeping across the surface with a faint, gritty snap-snap-snap.
"Huh," he grunted. "Subsidence. Probably from that idiot surface explosion. Inefficient blast wave propagation, disturbing my worksite." He made a mental note to charge the cost of re-stabilization to whatever department was responsible.
Then the world decided to argue with his assessment.
The sound began as a deep, groaning complaint from the mountain's gut, a sound of stone being asked to do too much. The cracks in the ceiling widened, vomiting thicker plumes of dust. Small pebbles, then fist-sized chunks, began to rain down, pinging off his helmet like uneven hail. The steady thump-thump-thump of distant drills was swallowed by a much closer, much angrier roar.
A miner, a young human with a face pale beneath its grime, came pelting around a bend in the tunnel, his own headlamp swinging wildly. "MR. OVAL! MR. OVAL!"
Dusty planted his wide feet, his thick wombat tail slapping the ground for balance. "What is it? Spit it out! You're disrupting the seismic dampening with your panic!"
The miner skidded to a halt, chest heaving. "The tunnels! The support beams in sector seven, they're—" Her voice was cut off, not by her own breath, but by a wave of force that hit them like a physical blow.
From the passage behind the miner, a solid wall of choked, grey dust billowed forth, rolling like a tsunami. It was followed by an apocalyptic, grinding CRUNCH—the sound of a million tons of rock having a violent disagreement. The roar was all-consuming that vibrated in Dusty's teeth and filled his skull. The lanterns strung along the tunnel walls swung crazily, throwing leaping, monstrous shadows.
Instinct older than quotas took over. Dusty didn't think; he dug. With a speed belying his blocky shape, he lunged forward, his powerful arms shooting out. He didn't gently pull the miner—he yanked her off her feet like a sack of loose ore, spinning and hurling them both backwards just as the ceiling where the young lady had been standing ceased to exist. A waterfall of shattered rock and splintered timber crashed down, filling the space with an impassable tomb of rubble.
They landed in a heap, coughing and sputtering. The air was now solid with dust, tasting of chalk and shattered flint. It coated their tongues and filled their noses. The roaring settled into a menacing, continuing rumble, the sound of the mountain settling into its new, uncomfortable shape.
Dusty shoved a boulder off his legs and sat up, swiping a furry arm across his goggles. He looked down at the miner, who was curled up, shaking. "You okay? Structural integrity? Limb functionality? Report!"
The miner coughed, a raw, racking sound, and looked up, his eyes wide with pure terror. Then she looked past Dusty, back toward the deafening rumble and the settled dust cloud. Her horror deepened. "The others… Jori and Fen… they were right behind me… we have to—"
She scrambled to her feet, but Dusty was already moving. He leaped up with a surprising spring, grabbing the woman's arm not with compassion, but with the firm grip of a foreman preventing a catastrophic safety violation.
"No time!" Dusty barked, his voice a gravelly shout over the mountain's groans. Another section of ceiling twenty feet behind them collapsed with a lesser, but still final, whump. The tunnel was shrinking, dying from the inside out. "The collapse vector is propagating! This shaft is becoming overburden! Personal survival is now the primary quota!"
"But—!"
"A dead miner's output is ZERO!" Dusty roared, and then he ran, dragging the spluttering woman with him. He didn't just run; he burrowed through the choking air, his thick tail acting as a rudder. His helmet light cut a jerking swath through the dust, illuminating fleeing rats and cascading streams of pebbles. The comforting, weighty embrace of the mountain had turned traitorous, every groan a threat, every crack a promise of burial.
"Come on, you lump of low-yield shale!" Dusty yelled at the miner, his words punctuated by pants. "Leg drive! I've seen gravel move with more purpose! Your life depends on a personal best, so set a new record!"
They stumbled around a bend, and the distant, blessed speck of daylight from the main audit appeared—a blurry, greyish rectangle at the end of a nightmare tube. Behind them, the roaring chased them like a hungry beast, eating the tunnel mouth by mouth. Rocks bounced around their boots. The world was reduced to the slam of their feet, the burn of dust in their lungs, and the shrinking circle of light ahead, which grew steadily brighter, clearer, and more beautifully, wonderfully open, as the darkness and the roar closed in at their backs.
-----
The Dreadnought Thalassa moved through the submerged tunnel like a wounded leviathan seeking its ancestral den. The jagged, blasted edges of the coral gate scraped against its hull with a sound like grinding teeth, sending shudders through the deck plates. Inside the command deck, the air was thick with the smell of fear-sweat and overheated machinery. The weak, flickering light from the consoles painted everyone's faces in shades of sickly green and anxious amber.
Bianca, her knuckles white where she gripped a console edge, stared at a readout that pulsed with a slow, dying rhythm. "Like, um, we need to get there already," she whispered, her usual rapid-fire speech slowed by dread. "Life support is, like, about to—"
The ship jolted violently, as if a giant hand had slapped it from below. Everyone was thrown sideways. Aurélie slammed into a crystal panel, her free hand snapping out to grip a conduit. Galit wrapped his long neck around the back of his chair. Charlie yelped, his pith helmet flying off to roll across the tilting deck with a hollow bong-bong-bong. Ember clung to a railing, her sketchbook pressed to her chest like a shield.
"What is the geological anomaly?!" Charlie cried, scrambling on all fours after his helmet.
No one answered. The Thalassa pitched upwards sharply. There was a moment of stomach-dropping weightlessness, a roaring rush of water cascading off the viewports, and then a sudden, shocking stillness.
The main viewer, previously filled with the chaotic swirl of water and debris, cleared. The grinding, straining noises of the ship ceased, replaced by an echoing, cavernous silence so profound it felt like pressure on the eardrums.
They were no longer underwater.
Galit was the first to move, his hands darting over the silent sensors. "I believe we have arrived." He looked over his shoulder, his sharp emerald eyes scanning the crew. "Is everyone alright?"
Charlie, now clutching his recovered helmet to his chest like a treasured artifact, pushed his glasses up his nose. "I believe my cardiovascular system has undergone a significant stress test, but structurally, I am… operational."
Bianca helped Ember to her feet. "Like, yeah. We're good. Battered, but good."
Aurélie, still gripping the pommel of Anathema, her stance coiled, asked the critical question. "What do the sensors say? Is the atmosphere breathable? Should we disembark?"
Before Galit could respond, the main view screen flickered to life. Not with an external image, but with a complex, rotating glyph of interlocking circles and angular script that hurt the eyes to follow. A voice filled the chamber, genderless, ancient, and carved from polished stone. It did not speak through the ship's speakers; it emanated from the very walls.
"Welcome to Sector Zero: Triple Ten Gate. Scanning."
A beam of soft blue light swept through the command deck from an unseen source, passing over each of them, making their skin tingle. It focused on the ship's control interfaces, the cracked crystals, the damaged conduits.
"Damage assessment in progress. Vessel identification: Dreadnought Thalassa. Identification verified. Scan complete. Original schematics retrieved. Cross-referencing. Assessment complete."
An ominous, rhythmic THUMP… THUMP… THUMP began to echo through the vessel, deep and mechanical, like the heartbeat of a colossal machine. It was followed by a series of sharp, metallic clacks and whirring sounds from the corridors outside.
"Automatons deployed."
The heavy door to the command deck hissed open. Not with the Thalassa's familiar sigh, but with a sharp, hydraulic snap.
They filed in. Dozens of them. Small, round-bodied things of burnished brass and dull copper, shaped like stout diving bells ambulating on four jointed, delicate-looking legs. Where a face should be was a single, large circular lens that glowed with a gentle, unwavering blue light. They moved with a silent, eerie coordination, pouring into the room and spreading out without a glance at the living beings pressed against the walls.
Bianca, Charlie, Ember, Aurélie, and Galit scrambled to get out of the way, flattening themselves against consoles and arches. One automaton stopped before a cracked view-screen, extended two thin arms tipped with tools that glowed white-hot, and began slicing out the damaged panel with terrifying speed. Another detached a grating on the floor with a swift twist of its limbs and descended into the ship's bowels.
"So, like…" Bianca whispered, her voice filled with equal parts terror and awe. "Are they… like… cleaning up?"
Suddenly, with a pop of static, a familiar figure flickered into existence near the central console—translucent, watery, and strained. It was Halia, her flowing silver-blue hair frozen mid-ripple, her large eyes wide. "Oh! Well, this is…" Her image distorted violently, stretching and compressing as if someone were probing her digital soul. She flickered, her voice breaking up. "—a little too personal, don't you think? Please, my core protocols are not a public—"
"Halia!" Charlie rushed forward, ignoring the automaton that brushed past his legs. "You're back! Your matrix is restored!"
Halia's image snapped back into focus, though it wavered at the edges. "Well, not quite back, dear scholar. I am being… borrowed. The facility's master system is using my linguistic subroutines as a translation buffer. It's rather rude, honestly." She gestured gracefully as an automaton began dismantling the console she was projected from. "But well done on finding a… a…"
Her matrix flickered again, pixels scattering. When she coalesced, she looked briefly, profoundly confused. "…a place with such dreadful interior lighting. It's all so… metallic."
Bianca cut Charlie off before he could launch into a lecture on ancient holography. "Is there, like, anything we can do? They're, like, taking the ship apart!"
Halia opened her mouth to answer, then vanished in a shower of digital snow.
The stone-carved voice returned, echoing through the chamber as the automata worked with relentless, silent purpose. "Repairs are in progress. Projected completion is twenty-four hours. Final systems synchronization and historical data assimilation will be completed in thirty hours."
Aurélie watched an automaton seamlessly weld a new plate over a ruptured conduit, the weld perfect and gleaming. She slowly released her grip on her sword. "It appears," she said, her voice low, "that we should simply stay out of their way."
Bianca nodded, though her engineer's soul was clearly in agony. "Like, yeah, but… they're just, like… doing it. Without, like, asking! What if they, like, 'fix' something that wasn't broken?"
Galit, who had been observing the automatons' patterns with tactical scrutiny, interrupted. "How about we look around? This is a secure facility. They are focused on the Thalassa. You can come back and… supervise their progress later."
Bianca pressed her lips together in protest, but the logic was sound. Charlie, however, had already been captivated by a new thought. His eyes were huge behind his glasses, darting from the ancient glyphs on the walls to the impossible craftsmanship of the clockwork repairmen.
Galit didn't even need to finish. He simply said, "Charlie. This is another ancient facility. Wouldn't it be…"
"A catastrophic failure of academic duty to not survey it immediately?!" Charlie finished, already bolting for the open door, his satchel bouncing. "The historical implications! The cultural data points! The very architecture is a pre-Void Century vernacular! I must go and see this!"
Galit shook his head, a faint smirk touching his lips. Bianca's frustration melted into gleaming curiosity. "Okay, like, he's right. That's, like, super fair. I, like, wonder what else is here. Power sources, material science… like, maybe even a snack bar."
Aurélie glanced at Ember, who gave a small, determined nod. The silent swarm within Aurélie settled, soothed by the presence of a plan, even an uncertain one. She gestured towards the door where Charlie had already vanished.
"Shall we," she said, "go and see what our hosts have been guarding for nine hundred years?"
They stepped off the Thalassa's deck and onto the floor of the Triple Ten Gate. The air was cool and still, carrying the faint, clean scent of fumes from the automatons' welds and the deep, mineral smell of untouched stone. The cavern was unimaginably vast, its ceiling lost in a darkness dotted with thousands of soft, self-contained points of light—not crystals, but something else, like fireflies set into the rock. The walls were smooth, curved, and seamless, rising to meet the ominous vault. And in the center of it all, suspended in a cradle of silent, glowing magnetic fields, was a ship. It was sleek, black, and shaped like a predator from the abyss, a silent testament to a world that had forgotten how to build such things. All around it, hundreds more of the brass automatons moved in a silent, endless ballet of maintenance, their soft blue lenses the only eyes watching over a dream of the ancient past.
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