Chapter 12

Now that she was in possession of an actual, genuine secret, Olyrean discovered that she wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.

Her first instinct was to run and tell everyone on the team about it. She had gathered some intelligence, after all, and she was on the team as the intelligence expert, though really she just wanted to preen and hear some praise from the others. Well, not from Brugga. He could choke on a Snood. But hearing it from everyone else would be nice.

But then she remembered the strange orders that Veezeebub and Tordle had given to her before coming here. Her whole secondary mission of finding the previous team was supposed to be strictly ‘need-to-know’. Would the rest of her team qualify?

Trying to call SPECTRA up for some clarification on that point was a complete failure, though. Her bracelet didn’t even put the call through. She still had no idea how exactly to control it. As far as she could tell, she wiggled her fingers uselessly at it, and the device just made good guesses at what she wanted. It was up to its own internal whims whether or not it delivered.

So Olyrean decided, rather than telling the others, to do some investigating of her own. Very quickly she ran into the problem that she had no idea how to do that.

Opening the secret passage herself was a total bust. She had memorized which of the statues it lay behind by noting its pose–a sort of bowing, rather aggressive hip-thrust–but upon returning to the hallway, she found to her dismay that the statues appeared to have been moved. Not merely shuffled around–their poses had changed, as if they continued their strange dance when no one was around and simply froze when they were being watched.

That had to be magic at work. Olyrean had known a little magic back in her home universe, though mostly just enough to do some party tricks. She didn’t know how to approach magical statues.

Watching to see whether someone used the passage again was probably the best bet, but her spy drones kept getting shooed away. So she watched them personally, lingering in the hallway or just nearby, keeping a careful eye out and just waiting for something to happen, trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible.

It might have been a little solace to her to know that this was what most intelligence work usually consists of, but untrained as she was, the tedium made her incredibly antsy. How long would the wait be to see if anything happened? What if someone were watching her?

She was nervously contemplating this possibility when someone called out to her: “Hey! Olly!”

She froze in the middle of the hallway and glanced frantically around, searching the faces of the priests passing by. Had she been noticed? But then, who among these strangers would know to call her Olly?

There came a quick pattering sound, and a sharp voice right in her ear, behind her: “Hey, over here!”

Yelping, she spun to find Korak standing there, watching her. The lizard-man seemed startled by her yelp, and the frill around his neck flapped outward with a sudden fwumf. But soon he had recovered, patting it back into place, and was eyeing her warily.

“Korak,” she breathed. “You scared me half to death.”

“You still look healthy enough to me,” he said, looking her up and down. “Should I call a medi-drone?”

“No, I mean–nevermind. What is it you want?”

“I wanted to see what you were doing instead of giving me the intel I requested.”

Olyrean sighed. It wasn’t really intelligence that Korak wanted, it was more market research. He wanted reports on Quizbarling spending habits for whatever plan he was cooking up to win them over. She had drones out and about watching the locals barter with each other, but she didn’t know what she was going to tell him. Quizbar didn’t really have much of a market economy. “I’ll have it for you tomorrow,” she lied. “Did you really need to follow me, just to bug me for that?”

“No,” he said. “I was also curious whether you’d keep going back to these statues. You seem obsessed with them.”

“What,” she spluttered, “I–this is the first time I’ve–no I’m not!”

Korak side-eyed her, pupils narrowing and widening, and then said very casually, “I’ve followed you for three days in a row now.”

“What? How?!”

“Like this,” he said, then dropped to all fours and scuttled up the wall to hang upside down from the ceiling. “You don’t look up much,” he called.

“I look up plenty! Get down!” Olyrean furtively jerked her hands towards the floor, as if she could yank him down herself, and glanced around frantically. The lizard was attracting attention.

Korak dropped, twisted midair, and landed on his feet with a little plap. “So, what is it about these statues that has you so interested in them? What’s so special about them?”

“There’s nothing special,” she said, ears burning. “I just come here to…to think, that’s all.” What a disaster this was. She had to shoo Korak off before he clued the Quizbarlings on to her interest. “Now, if you’ll please excuse me, I have to–”

She didn’t get much further, because she realized, with horror, that Korak had motioned over a passing Quizbarling priest. “Hey you, priest,” he said bluntly, as her jaw hung upon. “What’s up with these statues?”

The priest, one of the few chubby Quizbarlings she had seen, gave the lizard-man a friendly smile. Then his eyes took her in as well, and his smile grew broader. “Ah, it’s you,” he said. “Interested in them, are you? We’re all wondering why you’ve got your eye on these.”

It took a moment for Olyrean to realize what he was saying. “What?!” She was very aware that she had been saying that a whole lot today.

“Well, sure. Everyone’s seen you admiring them. They are very beautiful, aren’t they?” The priest sighed, turning to the awful, creepy things with solemn reverence. “They’re angels,” he explained. “The race The Radiant One created to serve him, and to serve mortals. It is said in ages past they acted as his messengers. I think they bear some resemblance to your friend, Radiant Shell, don’t you?”

The comparison was completely insulting, of course. Moyom’s shell shone with iridescent color, she was beautiful, while these…these angels were blank and lifeless. The only resemblance was that the number of limbs was just about right. “Oh, of course,” Olyrean managed diplomatically. “That’s why I’ve been so drawn to them. Because I admire their beauty. Absolutely the only reason.”

The priest gave her a vapid smile and departed with a wave. She whirled on Korak in a fury, only to find him no longer there.

“Hey,” came his voice from above her.

She looked up to find him clinging to the ceiling. He cocked his head quickly to the side and shot her a sharp little smile. Already there were holo-screens flickering into life before his eyes. “Get that intel to me as soon as you can, if you don’t mind,” he said distractedly. “Thanks.”

And then before she could say anything, he was scuttling away, his tail whisking back and forth.

She cursed under her breath and looked suspiciously at the passing Quizbarlings, who only offered her bland smiles. Who didn’t know that she had been watching these statues, at this point? If anyone hadn’t, Korak had certainly let them in on it just now. It might already be too late to do anything. She had to move quickly, before word spread any further…

***

So that was how she found herself approaching the hallway of strange statues by night, with Jack at her side.

He had seemed the best to tell. She had considered telling Moyom, too, but while the Ixxari was her friend and could keep a secret, she didn’t know what a diplomat might do for her in this situation. Other than go and talk to someone about it, which was the last thing Olyrean wanted. Jack had promised to keep his mouth sealed, and as a soldier he might actually be able to do something useful.

They scuttled through the shadows. She had been worried that with all his heavy armor that Jack would make a lot of noise, but there was something built into it that turned his heavy footsteps into a quiet pneumatic hiss. It was comforting about hearing that steady mechanical noise just behind her, as they crept forward through darkness.

Once they got to the statues themselves, they relaxed a bit. No one was here. Jack paced up and forth down the hall, fiddling with some small glowing panel on his power suit. He gave a low whistle. “Hoo-eee,” he said. “Yeah, definitely picking up some divine readings here. Big spikes on each statue.”

“You can detect that?” said Olyrean. “Divine magic, and all?”

“Well, sure. Magic’s always a pain in the ass. Gotta keep an eye out for it. Otherwise things get hairy. One minute you think you’re just invading some planet of petty feudal kingdoms, then some old man in a bathrobe starts mumbling at you and the next thing you know you’re turned into a sheep, or gravity’s gone backwards, or all your men have fallen asleep and you need to kiss them to wake them up…or, uh, something like that.” He flipped the panel closed. “So you say it’s behind one of these statues, huh?”

Olyrean watched as he pressed more buttons on his powersuit and began to methodically knock up and down the walls of the hallway. The AI built into his suit, he told her, would analyze the reverberations to determine where exactly the hidden passage was. She couldn’t help but think that he was so much more prepared for this than she was.

He waved her over. “Here we go,” he whispered to her as she approached. “It’s behind this one.”

She regarded the statue that he pointed out. It was doing a sort of crooked, hip-swaying bow. Nothing like the position she remembered it being in. “The guy I followed did this,” she said. Reaching out, she caressed its arm in the same way that she could remember the hooded figure doing. “And the statue moved.” But for them, the statue remained silent and still.

“Probably takes some sort of spell to trigger it. Or maybe some kind of special token. Enchanted amulet, that sort of thing. Did you see him holding anything?”

She shook her head and he hummed thoughtfully to himself, scratching his boxlike jaw. Then he stepped forward and began to pull on the statue. She thought he was being a bit silly, at first–these dancers were not small, in fact they towered above the both of them, and had to weigh tons–but her mouth dropped open as slowly the statue began to move. A portion of the wall behind came with it, cleverly attached to the base.

When a gap large enough for them to step through had opened, Jack stepped back. He hadn’t even broken a sweat. “Suit does most of the work,” he told her when she asked. “Well, really, the vast majority of the work.”

The passageway yawned before them uninvitingly, the moonlight not reaching far into it before it disappeared into a wall of black.

For the first time on Quizbar, Olyrean was afraid. She was more aware than ever that she was here as a guest of aliens that, though they seemed normal enough, might have very different ideas about how guests ought to be treated in certain circumstances. Like, say, if they were caught sneaking about in secret tunnels. However friendly they were, they had disappeared a previous team.

“Little spooky, isn’t it?” Jack whispered, and Olyrean glanced at him in surprise. She hadn’t expected that he might have the same thoughts. Indeed, she had a difficult time imagining him as being afraid at all.

She took the opportunity to try out a little bravado. “Well, I don’t think we need to worry that much,” she said, putting her hands firmly on her hips in a very no-nonsense fashion. “After all, what would the Quizbarlings do if they caught us? I can’t imagine them doing anything harsher than asking for an apology letter.”

“Oh, you never know. It’s always the quiet ones. I remember a mission on one planet–Ungola Reem. The Ungolans were quiet too, nice and friendly. Looked like talking seals, bright blue, very friendly and welcoming. Took in multiple teams. Loved doing tricks. Until they met our science officer. Crab-man from Mictor III.” He shuddered. “I had to bring his shell home to his family.”

Rather than delving into that dark hall right away, Olyrean opted to send in some of her spy drones. She retrieved them from a little black spy fanny-pack strapped about her waist. These drones were shaped like little worms, and she (somehow) brought up their video and audio feed on her bracelet as they slithered away into darkness. But it was only moments before whatever signal they were sending back dropped dead.

“I thought that might happen,” Jack whispered. “I bet it’s some kind of magic again. It’s always mucking things up. Well, what do you think we should do?”

Olyrean blinked. “You’re asking me?”

“Well, sure. You’re the intelligence expert. It’s your mission. What next?”

Jack was asking for orders from her. The tips of her ears burned, and Olyrean was glad for the darkness that hid them. Tentatively, she took a step forward toward the passage. “I think,” she whispered, looking up at the yawning darkness, “We should go in.”

Jack went ahead of her, and she practically clung to his back as the rectangle of moonlight from the entrance receded behind them. Only a few steps in, they found her little worm drones, tangled in a ball and mewling helplessly on the ground.

“Wait,” said Jack, as she bent to pick them up. From somewhere within the chest of his power armor, a compartment popped open with a hiss, and from it he retrieved a pair of very high-tech looking goggles. “Ah, yeah,” he said, putting them on, “There’s some sort of divine magical field. That’s what stopped your drones.”

“But I saw someone come into this tunnel, and he never came out. I think he must have walked through it.”

“I don’t think it’s meant to stop people. More likely it just keeps things quiet in here, absorbs speech, stops spying devices, that sort of thing. Though we should be able to hear each other once we’re past it. We can go through if you want.”

She took a deep breath, scooped up her poor drones, and zipped them away in her pack. “Yes,” she said confidently.

And then she immediately felt much more uncertain when Jack pointed out that they ought to close the entrance behind them if they went any further. A few seconds of grunting, and he had pulled the statue back into place and thrust them into utter blackness. But she was only alone in it for a few moments before she felt Jack thrust something cold and metallic into her hands.

“Here,” he said, “Extra goggles. Put them on. There’s divine energy all over the place here, it’ll let you see your way.”

She slipped the goggles over her ears and gasped. She could see the hallway, now, painted in a golden light that clung to the walls like dew. And the divine field that had stopped her drones, as well, like a shimmering membrane draped from ceiling to floor. It was as if the hallway had been painted with a loving spring sun, never too bright, only radiant with warmth and life.

“Oh, it’s beautiful,” she breathed.

“Eh?” said Jack. “It is? Oh, that’s just the settings you’ve got, you can change it if you want, like this–”

He reached out and flicked a switch on the side of her goggles. All at once the beautiful warmth was replaced with a miasma of red and purple, like the divine energy was like a living wound carved into the very world itself, gaping and broken and foul. She clasped her hands to her mouth to stifle a shriek.

“See,” said Jack, “It’s just the way you look at it.”

He helped her fiddle with the goggles until they had found a setting that let her perceive the divine energy without being overwhelmed by either its beauty or its horror. To her eyes, it now seemed that everything was bathed in a cool, yet soothing blue that played along the walls like light reflecting off of water. It filled her with a strange sort of calm.

They continued down the hallway in complete silence, not knowing the way or what they might find, or who might be lying in wait or even listening to them. The divine light illuminated walls that seemed to stretch on forever.

She could not help but imagine watching figures in the darkness. Hands, waiting to pull her away. Foolish, she told herself. Jack was with her. No Quizbarling would be able to do anything to her while he was around.

Unless, of course, they met The Radiant One himself. The priests said he was away on ‘divine meditations’, and would return if he was needed, but he was a god, wasn’t he? Perhaps he could be anywhere he liked at a moment’s notice. Perhaps he was watching them right now.

Fear of displeased, divine eyes marking their progress kept her silent for a while. But as is usually the case with gods, the idea that one might be watching can only keep people afraid for so long. Eventually Olyrean relaxed her guard.

“Jack,” she whispered. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Go for it,” Jack whispered back.

“Have you faced many gods?”

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

“Eh?”

“I mean, when you go to liberate planets. You killed one on mine, after all–”

“Oh right, uh…he was a, ummmm…hold on…a lava dragon sort of guy, right?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Um’Thamarr.”

“Yeah, sorry. I forgot.”

“No apology necessary.” He could not see her smiling fiercely in the darkness. Few things could make her more glad than the fact that the very people who killed Um’Thamarr did not even bother to remember his name. “Did you ever face any others?”

“Oh, sure. Probably dozens, over the years. Worst one was…well, I forget his name. Something unpronounceable, I’m sure. Drove a few planets insane through their dreams, that was his shtick. Nasty. Lots of tentacles, kept regenerating.” He paused. “I think we ended up dropping him into a sun.”

“I see,” she said. Quiet settled between them for a few moments, broken only by the hiss of Jack’s boots. “What do you think about The Radiant One?”

“What, as a god?” Jack kept walking forward, keeping a hand against the wall. “Well, if he’s got enough juice to make the fleets keep their distance, then he’s the most powerful one I’ve heard of. Lucky for us he’s friendly.”

“Yes,” said Olyrean. “But what if it turns out he’s not? What if we find that something…bad…happened to the last team.”

“Ah,” said Jack. “Well. That would be a pickle.”

“What would we do?”

“Do?” Jack thought for a moment. “Well, I don’t know there’s much we could do. I’d try my best to get you guys off-planet immediately. And it would mean war between The Radiant One and America, for sure.”

“But how would that even work?” Olyrean asked. “He can teleport any fleet away, can’t he? Or make them disappear.”

“Yeah, well..”

“Jack,” Olyrean said, “What if The Radiant One…what if he’s actually…The Big One?”

The universe is full of little gods, petty ones whose divine power is pretty limited. A stone age tribe might start out worshiping a piddly little Goddess of the Local Drinking Puddle and God of the Particularly Tasty Berry Bushes. The main protection such gods offered was to get everyone to stop pissing in the potable water and all over their primary food source.

As a culture becomes more advanced, they move on to bigger and better gods–gods of puddles were set aside for gods of rivers, of lakes, gods of the sea, and with each step their divine might only became more magnificent and impressive. It’s only natural, then, that they’d extrapolate out and come up with the idea of The Big One. The God of Everything, No Really, Absolutely Everything This Time, No One Above Them, The Buck Stops Here. This concept tends to emerge even in universes far toward the mundane side along the magic axis in possibility space, where gods rarely bother to show up. Indeed, among cultures there the idea tends to surface even quicker, perhaps out of embarrassment once they discover that the little gods they worshipped were really just the product of some priests jerking them around.

The Big One might be a personalized god, a force, or some sort of cosmic concept–no one was really sure, because the existence of The Big One was entirely theoretical. Of course, that didn’t mean that it didn’t exist. It might just be that there existed no culture advanced enough yet to make direct contact with The Big One. After all, there was clearly a pattern where cultures discovered new and more powerful gods as they scaled up in size and technological achievement.

But Olyrean had been giving it some thought, and if there was any society that might have grown big enough to get The Big One’s attention, wouldn’t it be America? They had already come across some humongous gods that made planetbound ones look puny by comparison, like Vackshi, the Prawn of the Void, or Boxxis, god of free interstellar delivery.

And really, she wasn’t the only one. Nobody liked to talk about it much, and it certainly wasn’t the official government line of the UWA. But Americans who kept up with such things could not help but wonder quietly to each other. (Americans having a weak notion of ‘quiet’ by temperament, this meant that they posted long rambling screeds on the Omninet on the subject where everyone could see, rather than screaming their opinions in the middle of a crowded street while firing guns into the air as was traditional when it came to public discourse):

What if this was it? What if Quizbar was where it would happen, what if this was just the way The Big One decided to make contact? And if The Radiant One were The Big One, then would he CLICK NOW TO WIN A YEAR’S SUPPLY OF OMEGA-COLA!!!

Jack answered her question with a long silence. Finally, though, he laughed. “Even if he were The Big One,” he said, “If he starts a war with America, my money’s on us. We’ve never lost. We always find a way.”

“Oh, we don’t know that.”

“No, really. Now, sure, there have been some setbacks. Some real dark times, like when we were invaded by The Universe Made Entirely From Blood. Just gigantic psychic flesh-sacks pushing through into our reality, all over the republic, mind controlling people and eating them–I guess their universe wasn’t made entirely out of blood, now that I think about it. There was a lot of guts and viscera. And teeth. Bit of an odd thing to call it, when you get right down to it–”

“No,” Olyrean interrupted him. “I mean so much of the history’s just gone. We might have lost a war in the past, we just don’t know.”

“Oh, I know,” said Jack. “I was there for them all.”

It was Olyrean’s turn to answer with a long silence. So long, in fact, that it just didn’t end until Jack himself broke it. “It’s true!”

“If you say so,” Olyrean said, uncomfortably. She liked Jack, and didn’t want to argue with him or point out how what he was saying was clearly impossible. His cybernetic brain implants might be malfunctioning. It made her a little sad.

But Jack only chuckled at her recalcitrance. “If you don’t believe me, you could just say so.”

Olyrean sighed. “It’s not that I don’t believe you,” she lied. “It’s just, that would make you…who knows how old.”

“Faster-than-light travel,” Jack said proudly. “Time dilation kept me young and full of vim and vigor while the universe zipped on by.”

“Nobody uses FTL that much!”

“Not nowadays, I know. You’ve all got these portals, now. Much more convenient. Going off on missions used to be much more dramatic, lots of sacrifice, tears, pretty ladies waving goodbye as you go off into the great unknown. So imagine my surprise when I’m shot halfway across the universe on a spaceship, off to some unexplored region of space that no American has ever seen before, and by the time I arrive I find out the UWA have portaled there ahead of me and have been sitting around for centuries.” He shook his head ruefully. “Lots has changed, too. But the military picked me up, brought me up to speed, and now I’m here, still fighting for the republic! Just like I have ever since the day we first launched off from America Prime. Or Earth, as it used to be called.”

“Earth,” she snorted. “I suppose you know which species founded America, then.”

“Of course. It’s a little fuzzy, I’ll admit, but I can remember that it was us humans. Dogs were there too, I think.”

Olyrean couldn’t help but laugh. “Humans founding America? Dogs I could buy, but humans?”

Jack turned to grin at her. His teeth were aglow with divine residue. It collected on his armor, as well, but not his skin, and with the rest of his face hidden in darkness, he looked like little more than a floating smile. Olyrean was suddenly struck with the image of that happy grin, floating through the endless void of space, traveling on forever, so far from home.

“I’m pretty sure that’s the way it was, anyway,” he said, tapping the side of his head. It produced a hollow dinging sound. “I know my brain’s got some holes in it.”

“Even so, you should tell your story. I’m sure there’s historians who’d be interested. That is, assuming you really go all the way back.”

“You think I haven’t tried?” Jack barked a laugh. “There’s even some books out there based on what I’ve told. No one particularly believes them. Hell, you don’t even believe me!”

Olyrean made a series of conciliatory mumbling noises that gave the impression of a denial while not quite actually being one.

“Ah, don’t get upset. I don’t care. The way I see it, it’s probably best for all that history to be forgotten anyway.”

“Oh? Why do you say that?” Olyrean asked.

“Because what use is history, anyway?” Jack waved a hand at nothing in particular, as though gesturing at all the detritus of years long gone. “All it does is get people’s heads stuck in the past. They get all wrapped up worrying about who waged war on who a thousand years ago, or get stuck wanting to ‘make their ancestors proud’. As if their ancestors would have any idea what to think of how people live now. As if their ancestors would care. None of their ancestors gave much thought to how their descendants thousands of years down the line would live. And believe me, I would know. So why should the future–or the present, I suppose–care what they thought?”

“But you seem fond of your stories,” Olyrean murmured. “Isn’t that a sort of history?”

“Nah, that’s not history. That’s just stories–a little adventure, to get your blood pumping. The times you had, with the people who were there, that’s worth taking away. Not history, not really. The way I see it, the only thing worth learning history for is so you know how to avoid it. Or break it, if necessary. Hah!”

He fell silent and for a time there was nothing but the sound of their footsteps, as Olyrean digested his words. She had never been particularly big on history herself, but it seemed such a forlorn thing to uproot yourself from time so completely. “Well,” she said at last, “You rescued me from my world. I think that’s history worth remembering–OW!”

Jack had pulled up short and she had walked face-first into the back of his power armor. Rubbing her nose, she glared up at him and was about to ask him what in the world he thought he was doing. But then she saw what he was staring at and the words died in her mouth.

They had come to a stairwell. Except to their eyes, it looked like something else entirely. So saturated were the stairs with divine energy that it seemed a portal sinking into the floor, twinkling and full of light that beat with a soft pulse, like bioluminescent fish in the dark depths of an ocean, like a scattershot of stars across the empty void of space, only living, breathing, welcoming…

“What,” said Olyrean hoarsely, “what…”

She wanted to say, what if The Radiant One is down there, but the words died on her lips. She was fascinated. Even if he was at the bottom of that stairwell, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to resist the pull. The divine energy was simply too sweet to ignore.

Silently, Jack started down the steps, and Olyrean followed close behind. A sense of utter awe hushed the both of them. Even their breath seemed loud, in this holy place. Branching away from the stairwell were other hallways down which their footsteps echoed. Whatever these hidden halls were, it seemed that they honeycombed the Grand Temple proper. But they did not divert down any of these halls. No, there was no question of where they were bound.

Down the stairs, where the divine energy shone like a beacon, like a sun. A song rose in their souls as they descended, a song of hope and perfect goodness, a song of bliss and charity and of love.

There was light at the bottom. Not just the light of divine energy, but true light, from sconces in the walls that held perfect mounds of gently glowing crystals. A mound of crystals might seem like an odd thing to describe as perfect, but that was how everything was here.

It was all perfect.

At the bottom of the stairs was a perfectly small, square room with perfect stone walls, so smooth that it was hard to tell whether they had been carved or worn away by time. The room was bare, perfectly so, except for a perfectly small stand and a perfectly round washbasin full of perfectly pure water. Tucked in one corner was a perfectly humble bed, little more than a cot.

Only Olyrean and Jack had their goggles on, so they could see so much more. They saw the roaring flames of divine power, true and right and whole, that made this small room grander than the most ambitious palaces ever built by mortal hands. They could see the washbasin was not merely stone and water, but a font of all water, in all universes, all realities, flowing forth forever across the stars. And the bed was no mere bed, but rather it was the resting place of a king, a King of Kings, no, more than that–a being so great that hosannas must be sung to his name, and he would not do something so mundane as sleep in this bed, no, his rest was something esoteric and unknowable to mortals, it was a rest that defined reality, there existed concepts of light and dark because the owner of this bed felt the need to sleep–

Jack pulled off his goggles. “Woo,” he said. “Trippy.”

Olyrean did the same. Even with the goggles off, there was still a sense of awe here, the heavy weight of something unseen, but no longer was her mind overloaded with visions of endless halls of light. “Have you ever seen anything like that before?” she breathed, unsteady. It still felt as though fireworks were being set off in her soul.

“No, I can’t say that I have,” Jack said solemnly. He fiddled with a panel on his power armor and gave a low whistle of appreciation. “Divine energy through the roof here. And it’s just the residue. If I had to guess, I’d say that this is where The Radiant One sleeps.”

Olyrean resisted the urge to correct him that nothing so simple as sleep could possibly happen here. This was a place pregnant with power and creation, and a deep sense of good. She let her gaze slowly drift across the walls, the floor, and though there was nothing there she felt as if she was drinking in an infinite amount of detail.

Then her eyes reached a corner of the room and stopped. She blinked.

“Uh,” she said, “huh.”

“What is it?” asked Jack.

“There’s a computer in here.”

There was. In the corner, sitting on a small table of worn wood, a computer beeped and booped cheerfully. Small lights on its display blinked, utterly normal, in electronic defiance of the divinity that surrounded it. In fact, the entire little set up, table and computer and all, was so aggressively mundane that all at once the sense of awe and wonder vanished like a popped bubble, and Olyrean felt rather foolish that she had ever been so overwhelmed at all.

They both approached the chirping pile of electronics. Jack stood peering over her shoulder as Olyrean prodded at the touch screen. “This is American,” she said.

“Well, that would be likely. Unless they’ve got some bird around here that can poop out electrical components.”

There was no password or login screen, no biomarker identification. There was no onboard AI to help guide the user either, as there was with most computers. Only a silent list of program icons. Olyrean panicked slightly. She didn’t know much about working a computer without the AI guide.

“Oh, move aside,” Jack grumbled, collapsing into the small wooden chair in front of the desk, which by some holy miracle did not shatter to splinters beneath him. “Kids these days, no idea how to do anything without AI.”

“I suppose you didn’t have AI back in the day?”

“We did,” he admitted. “But I can remember before it got into absolutely everything. Oh, hey, he has solitaire on here.”

Unfamiliar cards popped up on the screen and Jack immediately began moving them around. Olyrean watched this for a few moments. “Uh,” she said after a while, when it became clear Jack actually intended on playing the game, “perhaps there’s something, uh, more interesting to be found here.”

The cards disappeared. “There’s really not much here. It looks like he barely uses it…Oh, there’s some pictures…” Jack opened a photo-viewing program. But all the Radiant One had in there was mostly blurry pictures of streams and creeks, and one of what might have been either a bird or an odd-shaped cloud, depending how you looked at it. “Oh, this might be interesting.”

Another program opened, this one popping up a window with a video of their faces and a text field beneath. It looked to Olyrean like some form of vidcomms, though the format and style was archaic, and she said so.

“It is,” said Jack. “And it is archaic, because this is what the military uses. They don’t care about making things flashy and smooth, just about making it work. Politicians use it sometimes, too.”

“Is there any way to see what he’s said?” Olyrean asked, and was surprised by a twinge of guilt. Snooping, she had to remind herself, was her job, and whatever else The Radiant One was, Americans had gone missing on his planet. Notion of privacy would just have to be set aside.

“Well,” Jack muttered, “that’s the weird thing. I can see here that he’s had conversations, but it looks like any records have been erased. Or they were never kept to begin with. Normally for accountability you’d need authorization to do that, but that means someone with military rank or civilian accreditation must have…hold on…” from his power suit, he pulled out a wire and plugged into the computer. After a few moments, he shook his head and unplugged it again. “So, the records have been erased in a way that’s irrecoverable. At least from this side.”

“So what does that mean?” Olyrean asked. “The Radiant One has some sort of private, secret communications link with…who?”

“There’s no way to tell.”

Olyrean really did not know what to make of all this. She still felt completely out of her depth. But she reminded herself of a litany she had read in a book of ancient American philosophy: Fake it Until You Make It, and took a stab at it anyway. “Well, maybe it doesn’t mean anything at all. Would it be that unusual for a planet’s leader to have some sort of private communications with the American side? For negotiation purposes, or something like that?”

“No,” said Jack with a frown. “But what would be unusual is that we wouldn’t know anything about it. We’re the liberation team, we’re supposed to be getting all applicable intelligence, here. I’m security, why wasn’t I informed? You're the head of intelligence. Why weren’t you told?”

Frankly, Olyrean could absolutely see SPECTRA leaving out important details like this. But still… “Maybe,” she said, “they didn’t know.”

They paused in silence before the computer, each of them lost deep in thought. So deep, in fact, that it took them a moment to realize that there was a new sound, here: voices echoing down the hallways, and drawing closer.

“Shit,” Jack said when he realized, and then said “shit,” again, this time softer, when he realized his initial declaration was too loud by far and was now pinging along the hallways as well. He pulled his goggles back on, trying to ignore the blast of glory to his eyes, and with a finger to his lips he pulled Olyrean back into the dark, away from this sacred place.

They tried retreating back the way they came, but the voices seemed to be coming from that direction. Ducking down a side hallway didn’t solve things. It soon became apparent that the acoustics of this place were playing tricks on them, as the voices seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. It was a conversation in Quizbarlish, but too far and echoed too much over itself to make much sense of.

Not knowing where to flee, and inspired by her luck the other day, Olyrean directed Jack to take random turns in the warrens of these hidden halls. But random chance, having favored her so heavily before, apparently decided she was due for a bad run. Soon they could see candlelight playing off the walls from a distance, and it seemed that no matter which way they ran, the candles followed.

They finally found themselves at a dead end, corralled into an alcove bare except for two statues of the many-limbed ‘angels’ at either end. Olyrean fought back panic. These were Quizbarlings, and Jack had his power suit so there was no chance they could actually harm them. The worst that would happen is that they’d be caught and have to explain themselves.

That is, of course, unless they had The Radiant One disappear them ‘on vacation’ as well.

They chose a statue at random to hide behind. Olyrean ducked down and crawled beneath its legs. Jack, meanwhile, drew a breath and pressed a button on his suit, which with a series of clicks and hisses shrank and compressed itself closer to his body as he squeezed behind it. They waited there, holding their breath, and it was not long before approaching candlelight began to dance along the walls, and snatches of conversation reached their ears:

“–see, we do very important work.” A placating, almost pleading voice.

“Uh huh.”

“We have a, well–you might say, a unique perspective on such matters, but we still require from our members the utmost loyalty to The Radiant One, and I am, er, ah–”

“You can say it.” This second voice was dull, taciturn, flat–really quite unlike any Quizbarling Olyrean had heard, all of whom had made the effort to at least appear friendly. “You think I’m lacking in faith.”

“Well, er, ah, I, um–”

“It’s fine. It’s a fair accusation.” A sort of quiet despair entered this second voice, now. “I suppose I just wanted someone to talk to.”

The owners of the voices reached the alcove. They were both tall figures draped head to toe in robes and with their faces buried in the shadows of deep cowls, each carrying a candle. One of them fidgeted fretfully. “I wish I could help you, I really do. Perhaps you could–”

“–try prayer?” the flat voice cut in, and it took Olyrean a moment to realize that it was spoken with venomous tones of mockery. Quizbarlish didn’t lend itself well to insincerity. It took the other figure a moment to realize it, too, and when it did it stepped back as if struck. “Meditation, perhaps?” the owner of the flat voice went on. “Communing with nature, maybe. No, Brother, I have tried all this, and none of it worked. I appreciate your sentiments, but spare me the platitudes.”

“I will pray for you,” the other figure said softly.

“That hasn’t worked either.”

The two figures made their way to one of the statues–the one on the opposite end of the alcove, thankfully–and one of them reached out to caress an outstretched stone arm. As Olyrean had seen in the hallway a few days before, there was a click, a groaning rumble, and then the statue began to move, revealing the moonlit hallways of the temple proper. The two figures stepped out into the silver light.

But before the statue closed behind them, one of the figures–the owner of the sharp voice–whirled around to scan the room from which they had come. The moonlight lit his face in the depths of his cowl, and Olyrean could see who it was.

It was a face she had seen before, the day she came to the Grand Temple. The middle-aged Quizbarling who had stood out in a sea of happy, smiling faces with sorrow written plainly on his features.

The Quizbarling twitched his hood forward, and shadows fell across his features once again. He lingered for a moment while his companion waited for him. Then he turned and was gone.