34. In search for a crystal

Marius was surprised that, after breakfast, Nox was ahead of him to reach for the Sceptre, the key to Nexion’s personal dimension.
“I have questions,” She said to his unasked ones before she broke out a cheeky smile, “And I like it in there. Have you noticed that you’re more…you in there.”
“I noticed you,” He replied candidly and was rewarded with Nox’s fair skin flushing pink. Distracted, she fussed with the sceptre.
 
The next moment, they were in the datasphere’s version of the Annex. Blue lines of ordered data zipped through the space in silent, reassuring ways. It was a complete change from the chaos of red that was the Shard’s datasphere.
 
“Good morning, Nexion. I want to discuss trapping of the shard, “ The floating Nox turned her glowing blue eyes to the equally blue eyes of interconnected neon, “How do we capture the Shard?”
 
“ONCE THE CRYSTAL IS CONNECTED, IT WILL HAVE A DRAWING ACTION ON THE SHARD. EXTERNAL ACTION IS REQUIRED TO MOVE ON AND GUIDE THE SHARD THROUGH CIRCUITRY I NO LONGER HAVE ACCESS TO.”
“Can you tell us where these circuits would be located in the Spire?”
“I HAVE LOST ACCESS TO THE LOWER LEVELS PAST STORAGE.”
Nox and Marius shared a look. They had wanted to travel further than T1 thinking it was the heart of the Shard’s domain. It seems they’d been correct, but in hindsight, the altercation on T1 had shown them just how powerful the Shard was.
“What lies beyond T1?” Marius asked.
“TRANSMISSION CONNECTION FOR THE NEW CRYSTAL AS WELL AS THE TRANSIT NEXIS.”
“Really into the Underdeep,” Nox commented, reminding herself of another question.
“The Deep Craven. The Shard said it saved them. Who are they, and have they always been here?”
“THE ANCESTORS OF THE DEEP CRAVEN WERE A NATIVE RACE. THEY WERE CAPTURED BY THE SHARD AND MANIPULATED IN THE DEEP CRAVEN OF NOW.”
“How long ago?” Marius asked, fascinated.
“I HAVE NO REFERENCE FOR HOW LONG. ANY ANSWER WOULD BE CONJECTURE.”
“Hasn’t stopped us before,” He murmured a reply that made Nox giggle.
 
It wasn’t long before Jaden and Fureva-Yung also appeared in the datasphere pocket dimension, the mission to find the crystal firmly in their minds. But Marius had other things in mind.
 
There were rooms still to open at the levels we were on yesterday, and one had a few boxes left un…rifled through,” A glint of something predatory flicked through his eyes.
“We can make a quick stop at B1 and 2 before heading down,” Jaden sighed, taking hold of the datasphere key and clicking it.
 
The crew quarters were much as they’d left them the day before. The Deep Craven stayed clear of the well-lit spaces in favour of their dugout caverns. With no need to disturb them, the party went straight to the locked doors and opened them up. In the boxes, they found a few shins, a couple of io and a cypher that Marius quickly claimed.
 
“I just need a minute. Don’t watch.” He stepped into one of the empty rooms to install the cypher.
“Why does she do that all the time?” Fureva-Yung asked with a puzzled expression on her face.
“It’s what makes him special, isn’t it?” Nox replied, understanding Marius' desire to be all he could be, but annoyed he still felt he had to hide it.
“It makes her special?” Fureva-Yung asked, incredulous.
“Incorporating the cyphers?” Nox was unsure they were talking about the same thing.
“Oh. That!” Fureva-Yung had been thinking about something else.
 
Once Marius was ready, they took the elevator to T4, where Nexion had said the crystal was stored. The elevator doors opened, and Fureva-Yung stepped out. Ahead the smooth white wall of the Spire was broken, leading into new caverns. A few metres into the dark earth, a hole several metres wide led up to the B floors and down into darkness. Fureva-Yung could hear the skittering of tiny legs below.
Marius followed Fureva-Yung searching for the crystal. He, too heard the skittering and joined her beside the hole.
“What is it, Furry?”
“The little machines.”
“How many?”
“Big mob.”
“Come on, how many, really?”
Fureva-Yung rolled her eyes. She liked the simplicity of the Deep Craven’s counting system. One, two, Big Mob, what else was there to know?
“Five or six,” She replied, disappointed.
 
Jaden stepped out next, stowing the sceptre on a bag on her back. She looked around the space and headed for a set of double doors to the right of the lift. Nox was the last to leave. She looked around from the elevator, saw a broken piece of wall to the left that looked appealing and moved in that direction, focused on finding the crystal.
 
Fureva-Yung and Marius entertained themselves with a spot of fishing from the hole. A robot jumped up, and Marius grabbed it and threw it back down the hole, missing another by inches. Two more robots leapt up. Fureva-Yung dodged the first, catching it just as Marius had. The second took her by surprise and landed on her face, blinding her temporarily. Jaden joined in the fun, pulling out the wand. Looking down the hole, she aimed the sceptre at it, and it disappeared into the datasphere.
“A problem for later,” She said with a smile, “Or Nexion.”
Fueva-Yung pulled the robot off her face with her free hand and smashed the two together before dropping the whole mashup down the hole, hitting a third. Nox was not interested in tangling with the robots. Her attention on finding the crystal as soon as possible, then the shard’s minions wouldn’t be a problem. Instead, she leapt into the air, hovered a metre off the ground, and let the others ‘play’.
 
Marius didn’t exactly feel like he was playing. It had all been good fun until he climbed up nearby for him to punch. He gave it a solid hit with his light gloves, but it kept going, returning the attack.
“I can hear more,” Fureva-Yung said, watching Marius again hit his robot, only for it to survive and hit him again.
“It's a tough little bugger!”
 
“If we’re going to have more company, we should spread out and find that crystal,” Jaden said, moving away from the hole and returning to the double doors. As Jaden passed by, Nox took her shoulder and glided along behind her. The doors would not open, and on scanning found they probably needed the Fureva-Yung magic arm. Jaden brushed that thought aside and bypassed the mechanism. The door slid open a crack before wedging fast in place.
“Does it matter if I hurt the door, do you think?” Nox asked Jaden as they assessed the problem.
“Shouldn’t think so.”
Taking Jaden ambivalence as acceptance, Nox reshaped the centre of the two doors to allow enough room for them both to squeeze through.
 
“And that!” Marius punched his adversary, and the shell buckled under his hand, “Is that!” He picked up the now broken machine and prepared to toss it down on one of its companions. Fureva-Yung was also watching the new group of robots climb their way up. Her chain hung loose in her hand, ready to whip the first one to come into range.
 
Nox and Jaden peered into the dark room and let out their tone of approval together.
“Oooh!”
Most of the shelves in the old storeroom were empty. Still, here were items to be gathered for those who knew how to look.
“I’ll go high, you go low,” Nox said, pushing herself through the door and up to the highest shelving.
Jaden nodded and scrambled in after her, searching under shelving and in the dark corners.
“Hey, don’t start without me!” Marius complained good-naturedly just as a robot came in range. He threw his dead robot at the new enemy, and they both fell from the wall and back into the dark. But before Fureva-Yung could whip out at one within range, the three remaining robots stopped.
“That’s a change in tactics,” Marius commented as Fureva-Yung looked around for something she could throw. Pieces of broken masonry were everywhere, but nothing big enough. Looking through the broken wall behind her, she saw a pile of rock and earth fallen from the floor above and down into the floor below. Beside it, two robots lay, burned and very dead. She put down a select piece of wall as big as her head and checked the two robots, poking one to ensure it wasn’t just bluffing. A black and blue electrical scar was the only mark she could see on either robot. Looking up, she noticed the two scorch marks were angled towards another double door. She picked one up and went to find Nox.
 
“Look, this one and another were lightningafried.”
“It has been lightningafried,” Nox smiled, handing a few treasures of her own to Jaden before taking the robot,” Thanks for the warning.”
 
“There’s more skittering from down the hole!” Marius called, “More incoming!” Fureva-Yung went back to the hole as Jaden and Nox gathered further away to look over their treasures. Besides the usual spare parts, Jaden found an artifact called a Scullion, a type of rebreather for swimming underwater.
“Ominous but useful,” Jaden mentioned, placing the Scullion inside Bellyache. Nox was intrigued by an iotum that was not the usual Furrian Compact or Sacristan Empire technology. With a spark of intuition, Nox realised it was a shield for the mind, protection against mental attack from Sacristan technology. With reverence, she handed the piece to Jaden. Informing Jaden what it was, she made the older woman swear to make Nox something special with the piece.
“Yeah, I can just see it now, a shield against mental attacks,” Jaden eyes glazed over, imagining the design before snapping back to the present, “It shows you they fought against powerful AI enemies.”
 
They split up, Jaden heading back to the hole to help with the next wave of robots as Nox floated around the broken wall into the next room.
 
In the hole, the newest spider robots, as they were now being called, also stopped just out of range. Fureva-Yung went off to collect boulders when Marius decided he’d had enough of waiting. Using his newest installed adhesion cypher, he climbed down into the hole, head first, his every contact with the wall sticking him in place.
“Where’s Marius,” Jaden said as she walked to the hole to find it seemingly abandoned. With a thought, she looked down the hole to see Marius head-first crawling towards the robots.
“Remember that time we talked about this sort of behaviour?”
“Nope,” Marius replied without taking his eyes off the robots ahead, “You’re welcome to come down here and tell me all about it.”
Fureva-Yung, her arms ladened with rocks, returned at that moment, saw the fuming Jaden and took a position on the other side of the hole from her wrath.
“If the rocks don’t work, you can throw Jaden,” Marius laughed as the robots moved in for the attack.
 
Fureva-Yung hit one with a rock. It fell away as three others all went for the Marius bait. Still, he found fighting upside down difficult as he missed punch after punch. Fueva-Yung lined up another shot, and two spiders fell, clattering to the ground far below. The earth shook, and the rocky surface of the hole shivered, spilling rocks and dirt down the hole. It was time for Marius to go, but the surface was now looser than it had been, and the going was slower. The robots attacked again, only his superior speed stopping him from being hurt as he dodged out of their way.
 
As Marius climbed, he drew the robots with him, and soon, they were back in chain range again. Fureva-Yung put down her rocks and reclaimed her chain. She whipped it down, hoping to knock one of the spiders on Marius off the wall. Instead, she whipped Marius square in the face with the chain. Stunned, Marius lost grip of the wall and fell back into the pit.
 
On the other side, Nox examined the remaining robots and the closed door. Like Fureva-Yung, she determined whatever destroyed the spiders came from inside the room. She scanned the door and realised it was unlocked. Just inside the doors, however, two metal coils sat on either side. Pulling herself into the corner next to the door, she pulled out a monitor Fureva-Yung had placed in a bedspring for her. Holding it out, she connected to the robot and saw through its mechanical eyes as she opened the door. Inside she saw the two coils, and they started charging up to strike. Behind them, a blue shimmering force field protected another door. Nox saw nothing else as the coils hit the monitor with twin energy bolts. The energy fried the monitor and continued up Nox’s arm, lightningifrying Nox. The others heard a sudden yelp from the other room.
 
Fureva-Yung heard the yelp but could do nothing as Marius fell away from the wall. As he shook his vision clear, his hand reflexly reached out and grabbed the end of the chain. He swung now like bait on a line for the swarming spider robots around him.
“Pull me up! Pull me up!” Marius yelled as he swung back towards the wall, smacking into a robot that fell off the wall. Fureva-Yung did as she was told and pulled up the chain, landing Marius in a rush.
 
Nox scanned the room and realised the mechanism at the door was set up for attacking robots just like the monitor and not living beings. She palmed her face at her stupidity and entered the door. Beside one of the columns, she found a switch and turned them off, sure that Marius' many cyphers would probably set them off. The room was bare besides the coils and the blue force field blocking her path. She was floating in place, contemplating the shield, when Fureva-Yung's head poked around the corner.
“You are too young to smoke,” Fureva-Yung said, pointing to a wisp of smoke still rising from Nox’s hair. Nox damped it down with her hair in embarrassment.
“I can’t work out this force field,” She turned back to the shimmering curtain in front of her, “It’s not the same flavour of technology as the rest of the Spire. I’ve not seen anything like it before.”
“Force field?” Fureva-Yung said quizzically. As usual, she stepped forward, her arm out, ready for the door to acknowledge her. She hit the force field and was pushed back with such violence she smashed heavily into the wall opposite.
“What out for the shield?” She said as Marius and Jaden poked their heads into the small room.
“What shield?” Marius stepped in, also hit the shield and flew back. This time, Fureva-Yung was there to catch him.
“Wow! That was fun!” Marius stared at the blank door in awe.
“Wait, you can’t see the blue force field?” Nox asked, looking around her companions. None of them could discern the shield was present until they made contact.
“I guess that’s the technology of the Order of Sync and Trace,” Jaden commented from the door as Marius turned the columns back on. They hummed back to life, but nothing happened to Marius as Nox had feared.
“What? They look like they should be on.”
“I turned them off so they wouldn’t hit you.”
“Why would they hit me?”
 
Nox returned to the force field, a new idea forming. It could be waiting for a specific mechanism before opening. She pulled out her black pendant and held it into the force field. The shield flickered but did not disappear. Instead threw Nox back. Once more, Fureva-Yung caught her companion.
“I don’t think it has authority,” Nox said, tucking the pendant back under her clothes. It was the pendant's first response to anything other than the blue people. Whatever lay beyond the door, the Order itself had thought important.
 
“Hang on,” Outside the tiny room, Marius took the Sceptre and clicked the button. In a flash, he was back in the datasphere. He still couldn’t see the shield but noticed a mangled pile of red shapes pined like a bug to the ground by a set of blue vines. He pulled the red shapes free and clicked the key. Nothing happened.
“Ah…” He clicked it again. This time the key sent him back, and he found the collection of shapes was the spider robot Jaden had forwarded to the datasphere while at the hole. It was now a mangled mess of components that Jaden was happy to take off his hands.
“That was a pile of red shapes in the datasphere,” He said, putting it all together. “The red shapes in that fight. We’ve seen the Order fight Malignant Shards the whole time and never knew it.”
 
In the room, Furev-Yung picked up another rock. She tossed it at the door. It hit the metal with a clang and fell to the ground just before the shield. They’d helped get rid of the robots.
“An inanimate object can get through, but a humanoid can’t,” Nox mumbled. It was opposite the two columns at the door. They allowed flesh bags through while destroying robots. She sighed in frustration. They could come back. What else was there in this place?
 
“You could reshape the wall beside the door,” Marius suggested.
“We do not have to destroy everything,” Replied Fureva-Yung picking up her rock.
“Maybe my pendant just needs…upgrading,” Suggested Nox as she pulled herself past her friends and out into the next room, past the hole in the ground.
 
Marius stepped around the wall to see Nox reading a display scrolling up a semicircular pillar.
“I think…,” Nox started and then paused as she looked through a thick window into another room full of machinery, “I think…this is a readout on what is happening in that room. Information is repeating. See the same symbols?” The others gathered around the column but couldn’t make sense of the scrolling shapes and figures. After the hundreds of symbols she’d catalogued in her Numenera book and the hours she’d sat with Fureva-Yung trying to decode her language, Nox thought she was starting to see the patterns. She grabbed the column and propelled herself across the space to a control panel directly in front of the window.
 
 
 
On the other side, three columns connected with thick cables to a central hexagram-shaped column that, in turn, linked to the back of the room by a wide conduit.
 
“Here they are again. The same information about the machine in that room only here you can adjust the numbers.”
“What’s it made of, kid?” Marius asked Nox. She scanned through the glass into the next room. The glass was thick and infused with heavy elements. She pushed through and eventually felt the substance on the other side. The machine was radiating a huge amount of energy. It was an incredible find, but nothing she could use just right now.
 
“Okay. So that is very cool and amazing, and I wish I knew more about it,” Nox finally said, turning to the group, “But it is making or just radiating energy. Maybe enough energy to run this place, but nothing that will help open the shield.”
 
They left the room, Fureva-Yung scouting ahead into the west corner of the level. A closed door opened to her magic arm, and she revealed another storeroom. There she found a cypher that would make her undetectable to something looking for movement. It seemed like just the thing they needed to get through the super bouncy shield. She returned it to the shield room, downing it in one swallow. As suspected, the shield did not bounce her back, and she could use her arm to open the door.
 
Along the left-hand wall, three stations sat ready for use. The first was empty, showing a depression a half metre across and down. The other two held large crystals suspended by metal frameworks that looked like they could move them. On the right-hand side, a pile of storage boxes sat. Marius eyed them from the other side of the force field but said nothing. Fueva-Yung dragged the boxes through the shield for Marius to look over before even attempting to touch a crystal. Leaving the third crystal firmly where it was for the time being, Fureva-Yung investigated the framework for the second. She found that it did support the crystal, making it easier to move. She pulled the framework out of the conical recess.
 
Lights flashed, and from somewhere, an alarm sounded. Fureva-Yung looked at the group helpless on the other side of the shielding with no clue what to do next.