I cough and sputter through the dust, finally opening my eyes. It's everywhere. My tongue feels like sandpaper and my eyes struggle to adapt to the low light. A throbbing pain in my left shoulder makes me wince. Must have fallen on it.
Where is everyone? And where is the sandstorm? I roll to the side and look around me. Left, right, up...all darkness. All silence. I can't even see what hole we must have fallen through. I can smell the sharp scent of dirt and something else I can't place. Is it...perfume?
"Jabari?" I call, but my voice comes out as a cough. I sputter and reach up toward my goggles, hanging askew around my neck. Thank the gods these have a strap. I fit them around my eyes and activate the night-vision setting. There.
The world washes out in a haze of black and green, but I can see. At least, more than I could before. My wrecked sand speeder lies only a few yards away. How long have I been out? Without the guiding light of day, there's no way to tell.
I appear to be in some sort of underground pit, though the purpose of it remains entirely unclear to me. I stifle a gag and hope it's not a tomb. I've had quite enough of tombs.
"Lee-Ra?" I call again, my voice hoarse but not consumed with coughing this time. No response.
Well, I think grimly, looks like you're on your own. I put a protective hand over the ion blaster at my hip and creep forward.
The cave, or whatever it is, seems to stretch on forever. The floor is sandy piles just as above, but there's more moisture here, for one thing. After walking a few minutes, I see some semblance of light plastered on the walls. I move closer, activating the Analyze skill on my specs.
<Mycellium Luminatus. A rare form of biolumenescent moss.>
"Interesting," I mumble, peeling some off to take back to the lab. Orin will love this.
I pass by Jabari's sand speeder, but no Jabari. Curses. I look to the sky again, searching in vain for where we might have fallen through. He told me to watch out, and I didn't listen. In a way, this almost feels like my fault.
If anything happened to Jabari or Lee-Ra or Ansen...
I shake my head. No. Nothing will happen to them. Not on my watch.
Wait, my communicator. I tap my temple, praying that my team members are in range. Jabari? I project. Lee-Ra? Ansen? Anyone?
Warm, crackly static fills my ears and I nearly rip the thing off. Damn it.
Finally I come to a room not unlike the center of a wheel. A circular opening stretches before me and four tunnels form the spokes, jutting off in four different directions. Not forgetting the point of this, I try to pull up my map in one of the enhanced goggles' many screens. A dire message flashes before me: <Locator Signal Lost>.
I hate when that happens! All this technology and I still can't track my movements underground. I grimace and try to remember where we were in relation to the temple above. If I keep walking, perhaps I'll be able to access it from below. Perhaps I'm already underneath. But which tunnel should I choose? And where are my teammates?
As if in answer, I hear a cry from the leftmost tunnel. Jabari! I draw my blaster and run toward the tunnel, shouting, "Jabari! I'm coming!"
A cold, scritchy sound echoes through the sandy halls, like millions of fingernails scraping a chalkboard. "Where are you?" I scream. The piles of shifting sands are gone; I run now on hard stone.
"Suma?" I hear his voice call out, mixed with the crackling explosions of the ion blaster. He's close.
"I'm coming!" My footsteps pound against the stone floors, echoing off the walls with only the glowing moss and faint shapes of night vision to lead my way. Flickers of pulsing light off to the left nearly blind me. That way.
Before I have time to take stock of the situation, I feel a gruesome crunching sound underneath my boots. I look down in horror. Hundreds if not thousands of glittering black beetles skitter underfoot and crumble under my boots. "Suma!" Jabari screams, flailing madly in my direction. The tiny buggers crawl up his legs and latch onto his arms, hanging on tight even as he tries to shake them away. He fires off another blast, sending them flying for only a moment before they converge on him again.
"It's a trap!" Jabari groans, breathless. "They won't stop!"
I fire off a shot into the center of the swarm, blowing another legion of them sky-high. It's not enough. "We've got to get out of here!"
"There's a...gate or something!" Jabari says between shots, jerking a thumb behind him. "It's written in some weird language though, I can't read it--ack!" He swats his face as a scarab climbs higher.
That gives me an idea. Time to put my work as a Scholar to use. "I'll figure out the gate, you gotta hold these off a little longer. Can you do that?"
"Doing my best, Suma!" For the first time since I've known him, he sounds scared. I've got to hurry.
"That's my man," I stumble through the piles of scarabs and lifeless shells. Where are they all coming from? In the dim light, I can't see the source. But the door that Jabari mentions lies only a few yards away.
The bugs continue to snap at my boots and up my trousers, but a couple well-timed blasts to cover my tracks keep them at bay for the most part. I only hope Jabari comes out okay in all of this.
As the inscribed door comes closer, I can see the outline of faint golden runes. Are my eyes deceiving me? I switch my goggles to magnification and run a finger over the symbols. Of course he couldn't read it. This is the language of the Metal Men. Of the Mechanics. That means...we're close. That this wasn't a detour after all.
Reaching way back in my mind, I recall long days stooped over pages of old musty Mechanic lore. And here it was, right in front of me. The gravity of the situation isn't lost on me, however; as momentous a discovery as this is, I've got to disable the trap. I only hope this gate will give us the answer. Or at the very least, we can open it and run to safety. Holding my breath, I read the inscription:
We are metal, we are men
Guarding our sacred word
The Mechanics they made us
They taught us
They shaped us
But they were not our friend.
We slumber
We sleep
We while away time
In hope that one day we will find
Someone to free us and just let us live
Never to use the word "mine".
The raw emotion of the prose startles me. The Metal Men. They wrote this. They just wanted to be part of society, after all. They wanted to be their own species, unbeholden to the Mechanics. Beautiful.
But how did this solve the puzzle of the scarab trap? My mind flits through possibilities, growing ever more frantic as the shouts of Jabari's plight echo through my ears. Never to use the word 'mine'...what did they mean? What did they want?
Fezrak, I whisper, barely audible.
The deafening screeches of the scarabs finally stop, and Jabari drops to his knees as the door rumbles open.
Love, I think to myself in awe. They just wanted love.
YOU ARE READING
Suma and the Five Scrolls
Adventure"I became a Scholar of New Alexandria in order to avoid the sandy wastes, not get lost in them. That plan hadn't worked out so well." Join Suma, Jabari, and team as they race across the Wastes to find a hidden artifact that could unlock a dormant sp...
