Chapter 40: The Planet of all Times, Part Four

120,000 years before the Rubicon’s launch

The history of the Senatorial Fleet Marines’ orbital landings had always been one where ­- when mentioned ­- people looked at the floor and changed the subject, for how little they achieved for how much they tried. This was easily imagined by the complications of getting squishy bodies of flesh and bones unharmed out of space and onto the ground at speed and against determined enemy resistance – but still, Private Lavern’s landing on LL5 was still one of the tougher ones. As the pod containing Lavern detached from the Toucan when the latter came under fire, the little computer the pod was fitted with tried to guess its altitude over the planet’s surface and started the deceleration only for the whole pod then to hit an invisible time tunnel, be pulled along for a bumpy ride for a while and exiting the tunnel system in a vastly changed environment, as suddenly, whole cities appeared in the atmosphere – much, much higher up – and for the pod’s computer: much, much closer ‒ massively changing the time to impact for the computer, which panicked and put all power into the thrusters slowing down at high g, endangering the still frozen marine inside, slightly expanding Lavern’s face. It was all for nought, nonetheless, as the pod soon slammed through the dimmed-grey equivalent-of-a-glass-roof of a very large and very long building which was in the center of one of the higher-flying cold and silent cities. Upon further travel, straight down through the large hall, the pod slammed into muddy ground, which was not what one would expect from a city that looked to be made from very tough steel from afar. The mud did soften the impact, and the thrusters had done their job, but there was still a lot of force to be spread out, splitting open the pod, ripping the marine from his stasis support waking him up harshly and worst of all, throwing Private Lavern straight out the former door, his rifle the other way which got stuck in a strange soft and small hill like a thrown dagger.

What saved the marine was simply a combination of his combat armor with reinforced structures surrounding the meek human, the medcomp predicting the impact correctly – already administering FAC as the city came into sight – as well as the not-so-unimportant-but-completely-unknown-to-the-marine-fact that the dominion over gravity the Tripodes held to keep their cities afloat created a field of very low gravity around them – meaning the pod was much lighter on impact than it should have on LL5, which actually had slightly higher gravity than Earth, being much larger but massively hollowed-out by the Tripodes.

Lavern – who had entered the pod in complete calm back on the Rubicon ‒ expecting a simply bodyguard mission ‒ in the normal timeline (or circle) was wholly unprepared to be rudely slammed awake stuck helmet-first in a mudhill. As he stuck there, the first thing he was slightly aware of were the medcomp’s comments on his condition and internal bleeding, but the severity of the situation did not immediately enter the half-frozen mind of the confused sniper. Even worse, his combat armor immediately warned him of movement in the air above him, and in the first thawing thought of a mind coming back to reality, Lavern activated the cloaking field of his suit which surprisingly still worked, giving him some time to moan, push his helmet out the mud and roll onto his back, trying to spot his rifle, which wasn’t far away but that was absolutely not the problem with what he saw. He wiped his visor a few times, but yup, his rifle had stabbed someone to death. And that someone had been as strange as their death, for it was a pyramid about half his height with greying-brown decaying skin and a bloodied eye with the new LR12 stuck in it. Laven hoped this race had soft eyes, as the long – almost man-high ‒ rifle was prone to damage, needing extensive care before and after battle. Interestingly, said stabbed pyramid – which revealed itself to be tri-sided had already been half-buried in the mud and as Lavern looked around, there were thousands of them in the same state, some completely decomposed, some still recognizable as far as this could be said about them, and some even turning their one giant eye towards him with a hint of disgust. Laven wasn’t stupid: He had crash-landed in the graveyard of an alien species and already committed a sinful act and would have to explain himself.

- Sorry mate, that was a freak accident. Like, holy shit. Where even am I?

The eye fixated on Lavern didn’t respond, not even a blink. Maybe there was a moan, Lavern was not at all sure about anything at that specific moment.

Still hearing warnings of incoming movement, Lavern stumbled to his feet, feeling a sharp pain in every single sinew and fiber of his body, but still had to endure the unnatural sounds of his rifle being pulled out of a large eye. It (the rifle, not the eye) seemed largely undamaged, the transport frame had still been on, but remembering the proximity alert, the latter came off quickly, since something was coming on his scanners above him, and quickly.

It made a whole lot of sense, a burning, disintegrating pod had just crashed into some kind of burial site and Lavern had once seen a documentary on how angry elephants got when someone walked around in their go-to-perish-spots. The Marine sniper was cloaked for another 7 minutes until the energypacks would run out and have to be recharged somehow, but his stricken pod was clearly visible and he had left a clear trail in the mud of where he had moved. It would not be hard to find him and bury him half-alive like the others here, he thought. But logically, there was only one spot where an enemy could appear ‒ walking over rotting half-corpses with pointy tips and slippery skin was surely not the approach of the foe more experienced with the hall of the dying. It had to be the hole in the roof the pod had created, and his proximity warning pointed the same way, so he did just the same with his rifle, wiping some dirt off the scope.

What appeared in the cracked ceiling could ‒ of course ‒ be friendly, possibly the Toucan looking for him. Maybe his pod got detached by accident, he wasn’t sure. But then again, they would try to hail him via intercom, and that was working fine and completely silent, blocking out the moaning of the zombified pyramids and that noise it made when parts of their skin fell off like an utterly disgusting avalanche, revealing a familiar rib structure below, making them feel a bit more akin to the lone sniper.

What eventually did make an appearance in the hole and started beaming a red-hot scan towards the pod was sniped immediately by Lavern, tumbling out of the sky and onto the ceiling of the hall of the damned once more, this time, just cracking it a little and screeching off the side until it fell out of sight. Lavern had based his decision solely on the appearance of the thing, it was either a one-person craft or a large drone, and it was ugly ‒ like a squashed ant with too many things welded to it ‒ not in the slightest related to the shiny ships the Senatorial Fleet used and not even remotely related to the clean, metallic, arching, almost Gothic architecture the sacks of meat built when they were still more alive than now.

In any case, it was time to move. Lavern looked around, but the hall of moaning was huge, ginormous, he thought. Any direction was a good direction to start walking and the dead, decaying, and complaining ‒ so he thought at least ‒ pyramids were neatly lined up along walkways, albeit walkways of wet mud that had to be kept wet by some complicated system underneath, a thought that was of no help at all to Lavern, unless he wanted to try alien mud water. He kept walking for about half an hour, uncloaked as to save his energypacks and used the scope on the rifle to check the distance to the walls, which was between 2 and 6 kilometers, underscoring the absolutely massive disposal site he had found himself in. There wasn’t really a plan, he just kept walking, maybe one of the pyramids he would pass had just gotten buried and was still talkative, but for that, he seemed to be walking the wrong direction, as they become more skeletonized, which enlarged their creepy eyes on each side by a lot. At least, he was in a shelter and didn’t have to build one out of decayed pyramids ‒ although they would be ideal for said endeavor with their long side ribs and eyeholes to cross them through. It could even be a shelter with several floors. Ah, the thoughts of someone way in too deep a situation he had no understanding of.

- Ah, welcome back, disturber of peace.

- Who ... I’ve never been here before!

- Never mind, that’s what we always say.

- How did you get my frequency?

- Look around.

Lavern looked around, pointing his scope up, down, and at the nearest half-dead, who ever so slightly closed his eye when the barrel was pointed at it.

- No, you genius. The structure. You really think a race that builds this cannot contact your little helmet?

- Mhm, makes sense, doesn’t it. But who are you?

- Rikkis is my name. But there are many Rikkisses, since our language was developed at haste.

- Okay, and what the hell do you want from me?

- I could use a hand, haha. Saw you take out that Miric, and I will need to cross some paths with them. Meet me?

- You sure you won’t just arrest me for disturbing your dead?

- Nah, they’re all idiots who did this to themselves. I’ll explain later. But do not step on them, I know them all somehow.

- Where do I even go?

- See, there is a substantial tunnel network underneath you.

- To keep the mud wet, ya?

- Oh that, yes, that as well. Minor function of it, but how perceptive of you ... anyways, all those decaying idiots you see around you need to be ... how do I put this in terms you will understand ... wired together, like a network.

‑ The hell are you trying to accomplish here?

- You are asking one of the few people on this planet who don’t really know.

- How on Earth - or whatever this hellball is called – do you not know the purpose of a freaking huge graveyard with a sprinkling system and intranet for the dead which is located on a fucking flying city on your goddamn planet OF WHICH YOU NEED TO TELL ME THE NAME AT SOME POINT.

- Ha, now that’s a fun story. We call this planet LL5 simply because one day, someone came and said it was. Never really held a vote or anything to change that.

- You just answered the least pressing part of my questions.

- The one you screamed at me. I thought that indicates importance.

- No, it indicated frustration with the situation in general.

- Oh, what do you know about the situation in General?

- Nothing, nothing at all, that is what I mean you crazy alien!

‑ So how can you be frustrated if you have no clue what’s going on there?

The sniper covered his visor with his gloves.

- It’s a place, yes? ‘General’?

- Sure, our main hub. What happened?

- I have no fucking clue. We just say ‘in general’ for the entirety of the situation I find myself in.

- Ah, my apologies. We’ve got limited data on your language in particular. It’s denoted as ‘low-class human’ here, is that correct?

Lavern thought for a moment.

- How about we go back to the topic at hand ... No, strike that. Where do I find the nearest tunnel?

- Take 12 steps ahead and search the ground for an elevation of about the height of your foot.

Lavern did as commanded and found a small handle loosely covered by wet mud, wet mud that by the looks of it had been mixing with decaying aliens for a while. He thanked his Endosuit for the rebreathing apparatus and his exoskeleton for keeping it safe in the crash, or he likely would have just blown his nose off with his rifle.

- I guess I just pull?

- You see any hands around you that aren’t yours?

- What?

- I’m trying to tell you that we’re a low-hand-use race. Just tap it trice and step back.

The autotranslator in Lavern’s helmet refused to transmit the reply, as he used his indicator finger to tap the handle thrice. As he stepped back, the ground parted in front of him, reminding him of an old adventure book on the gods he once had read in school. It revealed a trainlike system, rails carrying various things in pods, such as tripodes, mud, water – and many, many wires running all over the place.

The sniper scratched his helmet.

- So, if you guys have no hands, how the fuck did you build all of this?

- Well, we do the science, of course. Then things like you do as they are told.

- You used human slaves?

- No, I mean things with arms and hands. Ours fly, though.

- You could have just said worker drones. ­­

- Well, NOW I know the term.

- How the frick are you so advanced but so bad in interactions with other races? You realize I am among the lowest ranks in my fleet and even I would handle this quicker.

- You know a guy called Basil? He’s from your race, thank him for that. He basically made sure that we spent a few hundred thousand rotations around our sun fighting instead of developing normally.

- Ha. That’s my captain. What a legend.

- How unsurprising of a response. Look. Routed a pod for you. The large one with the bodies on it. Get on it.

- Fuck that, I am not getting on the barge of the dead.

- It’s going to clear out, just give it some time, it will deliver the bodies to the burial mounds and then it’s all yours and you can zip over to my command station.

- Somehow, man, I gotta be honest with you. You totally do not sound like a guy in a command station. I don’t know what the fuck is happening here but I am sure you’re not the elite of your society as well, huh?

There was a pause in the line, a pause Lavern seriously enjoyed, even though he had to squeeze into the barge of the dead and make sure not to be on the lifting platforms for one of the dead or half-dead Tripodes waiting for their plantation spot, as he didn’t want to end up just being stuck up halfway into the mud. It was time to get out of the graveyard, the rest of the planet could seriously not be worse.

Finally, Rikkis was back on the line, as the sniper watched the first pyramid be lifted up by a platform on the barge and rather unceremoniously was stuck up through the mud, planted like a tree from below, the tiny claws on each end hanging off the triangle lifelessly. Then, the barge simply shot up a net anchoring around the helpless triangle, sprinkled some water and then some mud into it, and moved on to the next bolt-gun burial. It was a disturbing sight and a great background for the sniper to watch as Rikkis finally started to explain stuff.

- Ok, you are not wrong. I am not considered the elite of my race simply because I am a very early example, ok? Early as in I was born a looooooong time ago, when we were still living in mudhills.

Lavern burst out laughing.

- Ah, how beautiful it is to see the circle of life.

- What? Oh you mean we start and end in mudhills?

- Yea, and that is kinda funny.

- Oh, so the death of Billions is a joke to you, lower-class human?

- Well, if they’re all like you, then...

- THEY ARE NOT THEY ARE IDIOTS I TOLD YOU.

- Okay, ok. Tell me more. So you are an early example of your race?

- Yes, your creative geniuses call us Tripodes.

- Makes total sense.

‑ And so, over the – as I said – very very very long time, we developed rapidly because some guy with 10 legs came over and taught us everything...

- Fucking hell, you mean Tafu? Briefly met the guy, he was on my ship.

- Yes, that guy. Taught us how to develop and fight the invaders your beloved Captain Basil rerouted to our planet on your behalf.

- Basil usually has his reasons.

- Who cares anymore. We won, or rather, will have won.

- How do you know that?

- Very simple. One of our guys came back from the future and told us so.

- Nothing else, just that?

- Just that. Then he sodded off again to whoknowswhere.

- Okay, so the war is won, cool. Can you take me to the rest of my crew so I can get home to my ship?

- No.

- Why?

- Because you didn’t listen carefully. The war WILL be won. We still have to fight. It will be over in a few hundred thousand more rotations. And I need you for that.

- Erm, so what’s the situation, what’s the plan, command post inhabitant?

- We’re in deep deep mud here. And not the good tasty kind of mud. More the mud you’re covered in right now.