Relics of War

Stepping into my environment suit, I pulled it up my legs and slipped my arms in. My wings fit into sleeves and an atmospheric regulator went on my back. I slapped the hexagonal button on my chest and the suit contracted down to size, then put on my helmet and twisted the valve at the base to pressurize it. The Polganite homeworld’s oxygen concentration is lower than human-standard and while I could breathe that as an aven, the elevated carbon dioxide would still kill me dead.

I grabbed my tool kit and followed Professor Tzichkir into the airlock with Lenka, Artym, and Marcus, closing the door behind me. The Professor tapped at a screen on the wall with one of her midlimbs and cycled the airlock. Filing out into the harsh F-class sunlight, I saw destruction everywhere. Off in the distance stood the downtown skyscrapers, husks of metal girders you could hear creaking and groaning in the wind if things were quiet enough, and squat ruined buildings surrounded the city square where we’d set up our camp: a series of inflatable field buildings pressurized to a one-bar breathing mix and air-conditioned against the relentless heat of the tropics. Like my suit they were covered in reflective silver coating. A rusty Polganite landship sat wrecked in the approximate center, a four-tracked behemoth with twin turrets. It’s sobering to look at, if human history went a bit different we could’ve ended up like this too.

But anyways, seven centuries after the thermonuclear termination of the Polganite Forerunners’ civilization, I along with the rest of Professor Tzichkir’s xenology expedition got to pick through their ruins and buff up our Scholarship records. Hopefully Mom isn’t too worried.

“Vexan,” Professor Tzichkir said. She wore a voder on her head along with her breathing apparatus; the Quassep can’t speak human languages unassisted. “You and Lenka go check out that building over there, we haven’t looked at it much yet.”

“Got it,” I replied, then grabbed a shovel from the tool rack and followed Lenka. She wore a lupen-shaped suit with a helmet that accommodated her snout and big pointy ears, and a tail sleeve, all covered with silver foil coating.

“Take a sample bin too,” Lenka said. I picked one up, a simple metal box we tossed interesting objects in. As a pack robot—er, underscholar, it was my job to haul that stuff around while full scholars like Artym and Lenka did the delicate work. I followed her across the square to a row of ruined storefronts. Debris from the collapsed facade covered the sidewalk, I started shoveling.

“What are we looking for?”

“Try and see if you can find the cash register or a safe,” she replied. “We haven’t gotten many paper bills yet.”

“Looks like this was a teevee store.” I pulled a dented metal box out of the rubble, finding the cathode-ray tube on the front smashed in. Lenka started shoveling as well and pulled out part of a wooden shelf. This building was pretty wrecked, but all things considered three of four walls still standing wasn’t that bad. This area was one of the best-preserved, south of Ground Zero for the nuclear blast which devastated the city. We know there were actually two warheads fired at it, so presumably the other failed to detonate and is still lying somewhere in the ruins. Watch your step.

With a dinging noise, my shovel struck something.

“Now that was weird,” Lenka said. I scooped off more bricks to reveal a rectangular brass box lying on its side.

“I think I found it,” I picked it up, the grid of buttons on the top and the drawer underneath sure made it look like a cash register.

“All right, let’s see if we can get it open.”

I sat it down, a bell inside dinged again. Then I took my shovel and jammed it into a crack in the pavement to hold it in place. With a thump, I felt my feet shift. Lenka must’ve heard it, she turned to face me and we locked eyes through our visors before the ground gave way and I plunged into darkness.

“Ow…” I said, staring up at the opening a good five meters above me. A dangerous fall if I was back home, but thankfully the two-thirds gee kept me from breaking anything. I sat up to find I’d fallen on a length of railroad track laid across the flattened bottom of a circular tunnel which receded away into blackness in both directions. A subway. We’d seen subway stations on the surface, but they’d always been caved in or blocked. Well, at least we knew where one of the tunnels was. I’d fallen through what looked like an access hatch in the roof hidden under debris.

Lenka peeked her head out over the hole to look down.

“I’m okay!” I shouted up.

“Hang tight, I’ll go get the ladder!” She turned tail and sprinted off.

My shovel lay next to me, I grabbed it and stood up. If not for my suit and the thin air I could probably do a jump-flap and grab the top of the opening.

I pulled my flashlight off my belt and shone it around. The subway tunnel went off into darkness in both directions, with wires overhead and flanged tracks at the bottom. Behind me was an open space connecting two parallel lines, with some equipment panels mounted on the walls. All remarkably well preserved on account of the dry desert climate and lack of sunlight. I walked over and looked down the other tunnel, seeing a large open space further down.

“Down there, Professor,” I heard Lenka say, then a wedge-shaped Quassep head peered over the edge.

“And what have you found?” Tzichkir asked.

“A subway!” I shouted up. “Looks like there’s a train station down this tunnel.”

“Stand back.” I did so, and chunks of concrete fell to the tracks as she widened the opening. Tzichkir jumped down to the bottom, her hulking six-limbed Quassep form taking up most of the tunnel.

“Let me see your suit.” She moved my wings aside with her big forelimbs to examine the breathing pack on my back. “Doesn’t look damaged. Diagnostics?”

“Diagnostics check out.” I tapped at the screen on my wrist.

Lenka dropped down before anyone could tell her no, landing on all fours.

“Stay up there!” Tzichkir said to Marcus and Lucia. “Get the ladder anchored down! Let’s take a look at these tunnels.”

“Seems like a standard Polganite design.” Lenka switched on her flashlight. She had another light on her helmet for when she needed her hands to run—lupens can’t run bipedally.

We headed down the far tunnel, stepping along railroad ties until we reached the open space. It was an underground subway station all right, with a high curved roof and stairs on the opposite side leading up to an entrance now thoroughly buried—not a sliver of sunlight shone in.

“Beautifully preserved,” Tzichkir said, shining her flashlight around. The black floor tiles were smooth and immaculate save for a thin coating of dust. In the center stood a bronze statue of a Polganite: a six-segmented being with twelve spindly limbs similar to an oversized Terran centipede, reared up into an S-shape. A plaque at the base was inscribed with circular script doubtless identifying whose statue it was—probably some war hero or national founder.

At the foot of the stairs was a covered booth with a door in the side hanging open, a sign the occupant had fled when the sirens went off. Everywhere you looked in this city you saw things like that, one moment people had been going about their ordinary lives, the next their world was ending.

My eyes and flashlight went to a bench with a little round object sitting on it. I walked over and picked it up, brushing the dust off. It had a rectangular screen at the top and rows of buttons below.

“Looks like you’ve found a mobile phone,” Lenka said.

On the wall next to the bench hung a laminated poster showing a planet encircled by telecommunications cables, an advertisement for the consumer internet they’d been building before the Terminus Wars. Lenka started taking the poster and its frame off the wall while I walked over to a nondescript black door. It stood slightly ajar, I opened it and peered into the small maintenance tunnel behind.

“Wait…” I said after I’d closed it. I looked again. To the left the tunnel went off into darkness, pipes and wires mounted along the side. But to the right there was a little hatch in the wall.

And over the hatch shone a dull red light.

“There’s…” I said. “There’s a light in here.”

“A light?” Lenka said, coming over and looking inside the tunnel at the light fixture. “Oh shit.”

“What is it?” the Professor was next. “That shouldn’t be possible.”

“Could someone else have been here before us?” Lenka asked. “Looters maybe?”

“No, I chose this city precisely because there’s been no documented expeditions here since humans made contact, and it’s too far into the tropics for Polganites to travel.”

The Forerunners, like the Age of Prosperity capitalists, had burned so much fossil fuels that planetary warming made the equator permanently uninhabitable. Stuck in primitivism since their ancestors used up all the resources, the Polganite survivors could never make it back down here.

“We haven’t seen any evidence of offworld looters either,” Tzichkir added. “Everything here is consistent with the city remaining untouched since the war, which makes that—” she gestured with one of her midlimbs towards the door, “—all the more mystifying.”

“Could it be something nuclear?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Tzichkir replied. “The Polganites did make limited use of nuclear batteries, but the odds of one still producing a charge after this long are remote indeed.”

“What about a secret shelter?” We hadn’t found any of those in this city but we guessed they must exist—all the assholes who started the war in the first place made sure to build top-tier shelters hidden so the riffraff couldn’t get in. But you don’t want to stumble into one; they tend to be booby-trapped.

“This is a strange place for one,” Tzichkir replied. “A private shelter would not be so easily accessible from a public area.”

Lenka and I stepped into the corridor. Unfortunately, the door was too small for Professor Tzichkir, Polganite doors are narrower than human ones. (And boy is that weird to see at first.) The hatch under the light sported a handle coated in flaking rubber, I grabbed and turned it with a metallic creak. Inside was a steel ladder stretching down into darkness. I took a little light ball off my belt, pressed the button to turn it on, and dropped it down. It dinged off the sides and came to rest maybe a good twenty meters down, illuminating a gravel floor.

“That seems deeper than it should be,” I said. “Looks like there’s a room or something down there. Any idea what it could be?”

“I don’t know,” Lenka replied. “We should have Artym take a look.”

He’s doing his professorial thesis on the Polganite Sun Empire, which controlled this territory before the war.

“We could go down and check.”

“No,” Tzichkir said. “Let’s head back to camp, I want a full survey scan done first.”

“Right.”

We headed out back down the subway tunnel back to the hole, where Marcus and Lucia had lowered an unrollable metal ladder. I climbed the ladder after Lenka, followed by the Professor. Artym was waiting up top, gathered around the hole with everyone else. She filled him in on our discovery, told him to grab the portable ground scanner and get it set up in the subway station.

---

After dinner, Artym showed us the results of his survey in the lab tent. He gathered us around the circular desk in the center, tapped some buttons on the surface, and a hologram appeared: a three-dee cube showing our section of the city and everything below it, open spaces traced out with green lines.

“This is the square,” he said, and zoomed the hologram in. “Along the east side is the subway tunnel, running north to the station under this street. Deeper down under that is this.” The display highlighted two parallel tunnels a good distance further down, the ground scan made them look like fuzzy tubes.

“A second subway system?” Tzichkir asked.

“Indeed, and it appears to have been secret—that shaft in the train station is the only access I could find in this area.”

The ladder shaft appeared as a ragged line going down to stop at the side of the left tunnel. The scanner’s resolution was rather poor, it’s only really designed for looking under rubble piles and into buried basements.

“Secret subways have been found in other Sun Empire cities,” Artym continued, “So my guess is this tunnel connects the State Square to the north with the airport outside the city. Likely an evacuation route for the leadership. The right tunnel, however, leads to this.” The projection followed the tunnels north to a rectangular space connecting them. The left one continued on, presumably to a station under the State Square, while the right stopped at a huge void that looked like some kind of multi-level buried structure.

“Is that a bunker?” I asked.

“It appears so. The scanner also picked up vibrations coming from inside, suggesting something is still operating. Likely it is the power source for the light we found.”

“Still running, after seven hundred years?” Lenka asked. “The Forerunners got virtually all of their energy from fossil fuels, they never invested in anything long-term.”

“There is a pipe underneath, it could be carrying water to a hydroelectric generator.”

“But the bearings would wear out,” Marcus said.

“Maybe they’re magnetic,” I suggested.

“Whatever the case may be, that’s what the scanner indicates,” Artym said. “I can’t tell what type of bunker it is, could be military command.”

Command bunkers are one of the rarest—and grisliest—finds: they built those things to withstand the megatons’ worth of warheads dumped upon them, but more often than not wound up with all the exits buried under rubble, sealing the occupants in what became elaborately expensive tombs.

“This is an odd place for a continuity-of-government bunker though,” Tzichkir said. “I’ve never seen evidence of the Sun Empire constructing shelters off subway tunnels, unconnected to any state buildings above. What about structural integrity?”

“Standard analysis indicates no hazards. But we should beware of possible toxic gases in the lower tunnels.”

“I’ll let the Patrol know we’re going to be working underground,” Tzichkir said. The Star Patrol has a dirtside base on the other side of the planet, part of a Free Trader spaceport where people go to barter with the isolationist Polganite homeworlders. “Make sure to check the sensors in the suits. I want you and Lenka to start investigating first thing tomorrow.”

---

I guess they started earlier than that, because by the time I walked out of the shower for breakfast their suits were gone. I snarfed down some Krazy Kurls cereal and was pulling my suit on when Tzichkir came over from the lab.

“Good,” she said when she saw me getting ready. “I want you to go down and help Artym and Lenka. They’re checking outside the bunker entrance.”

“I was hoping you’d say that.”

After cycling through the airlock, I grabbed a sample box again and made my way back into the subway tunnels and down to the ladder shaft.

I peered down, the shaft was narrow and the rungs so close together I’d have trouble fitting the toes of my boots in. Holding the sample box out over the middle I dropped it down to land with a clunk, then descended the ladder. The gravel bottom I’d seen earlier was the floor of another circular subway tunnel with a track running down the middle. Artym and Lenka had set up some portable light fixtures leading down the tunnel to my left as I entered from the ladder shaft. Having to go traipsing around in enclosed spaces was annoying, for this sort of distance I’d rather fly.

Taking my communicator from its holder on my belt, I flipped it open and called Artym.

“This is Vexan, are you still outside the bunker?”

“Da, come on down,” Artym replied. “Mind the wires, they’re still live.”

I looked up at the power lines running along the top. Following the lights, I came to an open rectangular gallery connecting the two tunnels. The left tunnel, the one I’d walked down, continued on into darkness, while to my right was a solid concrete wall. Starting with a track in the gallery, the right-side tunnel led off the way I’d came. A three-car subway train sat on the track, two passenger cars (the lead one with a driver’s cab) and an empty flatbed up against the backstop. I walked around the train to find Artym and Lenka standing outside a big metal blast door in the center of the concrete wall. Artym had a panel to the left of it open and was tinkering inside with a wrench while Lenka stood next to a wheel-handle. Mounted above the door was another illuminated red light fixture.

“Excellent, you’re here,” Artym said, picking up a crowbar from his toolbox. “Hold this for me.” He stuck the crowbar into the panel, I watched as he put it against a metal rod and pulled. Something inside the wall clunked, then clunked again when he moved it back.

“Just pull it back like that?”

“Yes, but be careful. It’s spring-loaded.” He stepped aside to let me take the crowbar, then grabbed the wheel with Lenka. “Now!”

I pulled the crowbar back, and they turned the wheel. With a metallic creak, the bunker door popped open.

“Help me with it,” Artym said, and we went over to push it fully open. Along the side of the door frame were the metal latches I’d pulled back, and inside a drab concrete tunnel ran off to the left. A symbol was stenciled on the wall right behind the door.

“What’s that mean?” I asked.

“Sun Empire Military Command,” Artym replied, then took out a computer slate and held it up in front of a row of text below it for a translation. He whistled. “Imperial Research Division. Could be a cryptography or signals intelligence facility.”

“Well, what are we waiting for?” Lenka switched on her flashlight and headed in. I followed after Artym, carrying the sample box. The hallway led down a slight slope into a large open atrium.

“Wow.” Artym shone his flashlight around it. The roof was perhaps four (Polganite) stories high, with walls sloping in towards the top and windows in the sides, one of which had another red light shining behind it. The floor was concrete, with some tables off to one side and grates running down the center. A boxy piece of equipment stood against the wall outside the tunnel, with cables and a faint thrumming noise coming from it.

“I think we found your hydroelectric generator,” Lenka said, pointing her flashlight down at the water flowing under the grates.

“Don’t touch it,” Artym replied. “Thing’s seven hundred years old, one gentle kick would probably break it. Incredible it’s lasted so long.”

Beside the tunnel entrance was an open door with what looked like a long black bag lying at the foot of the stairs behind. I shined my flashlight on it and stepped back in revulsion.

Not a bag. A Polganite corpse, a shriveled six-segmented body with stick-like limbs and raisin eyes. Tattered clothes clung to it, pockmarked with holes.

“Eurrrg,” Lenka growled upon seeing it.

“There’s…there’s another one over here.” Artym pointed behind a table to a corpse clad in black, and a Polganite rifle lying beside it.

“Some sort of guard?” Lenka asked.

“Not just any guard.” Artym knelt down and wiped some dust off a glyph on its helmet. “Security Service, under the direct control of the Emperor.”

I looked from the guard behind the table to the door with the first body.

“Something’s not right,” I said. I pushed the door halfway closed to reveal a cluster of bullet holes. “He shot this guy!”

Artym slid the rifle aside and picked up an empty brass cartridge. “Someone was definitely shooting. Bring the sample box.”

I went over to him and opened it up. It was almost too small, but he managed to fit the rifle in diagonally, then tossed a few more cartridges he found in before carefully removing the soldier’s helmet and pistol and putting them inside as well.

“Why would he shoot over there?” Lenka asked. “Did someone break in? That other guy doesn’t look like a solider.”

“I don’t know, let’s go up and see.” Artym handed the sample box back to me. “Careful not to step on him.”

The Polganite stairs were narrow, with two other bullet hole-riddled corpses before we reached the second floor. We entered a room that looked to have been a mess hall, judging from the kitchen equipment behind a counter. A good dozen corpses were grouped towards the back of the room, and another Security Serviceman’s body lay slumped by the door. The wall behind him sported bullet holes and dark blue stains that corresponded to the color of dried Polganite blood.

“And whoever they were shooting, shot back,” Artym said.

“This is creepy,” I said. It wasn’t as disturbing as it would have been with humanoid corpses, but even so I felt sick.

“Indeed,” Lenka said. “This was a massacre.”

“What makes you say that?” Artym turned his flashlight to her.

“Look how they’re clustered towards the back, especially the corners. And see the bullet holes on the wall behind them? They brought them in here, then stood at the front and mowed them all down. The ones in the stairwell tried to make a run for it.” She walked over to the pile of victims and took a pistol from under a desiccated four-fingered hand. I opened the sample box for her to put it in. It made sense she’d be the one to deduce all this, lupens are genetically-engineered intelligent predators after all.

“But shoot their own people?” I said.

“The Sun Empire’s brutality rivaled that of the Marxist states of pre-Collapse Terra,” Artym replied. “The Emperor ruled by total internal control, any dissent had to be crushed in the swiftest and cruelest way possible. This was not some minor installation, not if the Emperor’s own men were here. Come on.”

He led us up the next flight of stairs to another large room, this one filled with tables on which sat what looked like chemistry equipment. A crate of small vials sat by the door, I picked one up and examined it.

“Any idea what’s in this?” I asked Artym.

“I think that’s the number 63 on the label. Substance 63, but that doesn’t mean anything to me. Be careful, it might be dangerous.”

I opened the sample box and carefully placed it inside, then got out my tablet and took a picture of the crate. A second door led to another room, full of cabinets and crates for vials. Out the dirty brown window I could see across the atrium to the third-floor window on the other side, cracked and full of bullet holes.

“These vials must’ve been what this facility produced,” Artym said. “What have we here?”

A desk between two cabinets had a computer sitting on it, a bulky behemoth consisting of a metal box filled with a rack of silicon circuit boards with input devices and a cathode-tube monitor next to it. Artym leaned in to examine it.

On the wall to the right, across from the window, hung a periodic table of the elements as Polganite scientists represented it, but over that and most of the rest of the wall someone had painted a line of swirling yellow text. I took out my tablet again, centered the words on the screen and the translation appeared above:

THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS.

Evil pervaded this place, I could almost feel it. This was a world destroyed by hatred, and everything here reflected that.

Which made me jump out of my skin when I heard a thump and a loud crash. Artym fell—right onto a crate of glass vials.

“You okay?” Lenka asked, walking over.

“I—tripped over a corpse,” he replied. One lay on the floor between the computer desk and its chair. He started to stand back up, then grunted and grabbed his right leg. Sticking out of his right thigh was a piece of glass, tainted with blue liquid. “Shit.”

“Did it cut your suit?” Lenka asked.

“Yeah. In my leg.” He went to pull it out.

“No, don’t!” Lenka shouted. “Let me see it.” She’s from Gadsden—they make everyone serve in the citizens’ militia there, and fortunately for Artym one of the things they teach is first aid.

“Just be quick with it,” Artym said.

“All right.” She yanked the glass shard out and pressed a bandage over the wound. “Keep pressure on it.” Then she turned to me. “Call the Professor and tell her we have a problem.”

“We might have a bigger problem than just that.” I picked up a smashed vial of liquid. “I think I know what this stuff is.”

“What?”

“Bioweapons,” Artym said. “That’s what they made here—the chemistry equipment, the secrecy, it all makes sense.”

“It couldn’t jump the biosphere barrier though, right?” Lenka asked.

“I’d rather not find out,” Artym replied. “Polganite biochemistry mimics ours in many ways, and native parasites have infected humans before. It may be possible.”

“Call the Professor, now.”

I opened my communicator, hands trembling. “It’s…IT’S A BIOWEAPONS LAB!”

“Say again?” Tzichkir replied.

“It’s a bioweapons—” Lenka snatched the communicator from my hand before I finished the sentence.

“Artym’s been exposed!” she shouted into it.

“I’m calling the Patrol,” the reply was immediate. “Get out of there.”

She closed the communicator, I took it back and she helped Artym to his feet. I picked up the sample box.

“Leave it!” Lenka said. “Help me with him.”

“Hang on.” I took a vial from one of the crates, sealed it in a sample bag, and stuck it in my pocket.

“Good idea,” she said, and I lifted Artym’s other arm.

“This is going to make my thesis much more interesting,” he joked.

We got him down the stairs and out the big blast door, stopping so he could sit outside by the ancient subway train.

“I think I know what happened,” I said. “The lab was designed to survive the war and keep producing bioweapons. Even after the nuclear exchanges there was still plenty of fighting, they must’ve been planning to ship them down the tunnel to the airport.”

“Then why the massacre?” Lenka asked. “And who killed the guards?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the scientists grew a conscience and stopped working. That sort of thing happened on Terra, there’s a few cases where people refused to launch nuclear weapons even when they thought a strike was coming in, only to later realize it was a false alarm.” These people here might have been monsters, but perhaps the war gave them a glimpse of just how far their evil went.

Artym made a choking sound and leaned forward.

“Are you—” Lenka started. He pulled his faceplate off and vomited, then started gasping. She pushed it back in place before he could breathe any more toxic air.

He took a few deep breaths from his suit supply, then said:

“I think I’m infected.”

“Oh shit,” I said.

“Must be something bacterial.” He lifted his faceplate and puked again, then started coughing.

“We have a major problem here.” Lenka opened her communicator. “Artym is sick. He’s vomiting.”

“Make sure he keeps getting clean air, otherwise he could get carbon dioxide poisoning. The rescue mission is twenty minutes out.”

They would’ve launched on a ballistic arc from the Patrol base to us, on a planet the size of the Polganite homeworld the travel time would be about half an hour.

“That may be too long,” Lenka said, then turned to me. “Since it can infect him we have to assume…”

“We’re vulnerable too,” I replied. It could jump the biosphere barrier from Polganites to humans, and avens were engineered from humans while lupens used human DNA in their uplift process. I felt sick to my stomach, and hoped it was psychosomatic.

“Can you walk?” Lenka said to Artym, and managed to help him partway to his feet before he collapsed back down. He shook his head. “I doubt we can carry him up the ladder, it’s too narrow.”

“I know I couldn’t,” I said. “Is there any other way out?”

“There’s probably an escape tunnel in the bunker, but I have no idea where it would be or if it’s still unblocked.”

I looked at the train, then got up and walked over to the tunnel for its track.

“This tunnel goes to the airport, right?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Lenka replied. “We checked the satellite maps and found a structure that seems like the exit.”

“And it’s still clear?”

“Should be, there’s no signs of cave-ins or earthquakes. Why? It’s not like we can carry him three kilometers down it.”

“No,” I said, then turned and pointed to the subway train. “But that can.”

“You’re kidding. There’s no way that still works.”

“Artym said the power lines are still live.” The front car had an armature on top contacting the wires. And as far as I know, electric motors shouldn’t degrade if kept away from water and rust. Dry desert air and darkness are perfect for preservation.

“It’s worth a try,” Artym groaned.

“Help me get him through the door,” Lenka said. We loaded him into the first car, on the floor between the side benches. “Do you think you can drive this thing?”

“Guess we’ll find out.” I went into the driver’s cab up front. A control panel was arrayed below the curved windshield, down lower than if humans had built it. But just because aliens made it didn’t mean there’d be no rhyme or reason to how it worked. The purple lever at center was probably the throttle, and the big yellow button next to it an emergency stop—that one was easy, such a thing is supposed to stand out. I needed a power switch. I checked behind me, on what looked like a breaker panel. At the top of it was a little lever, I pushed it over to the other setting.

A light above the windshield turned on to illuminate the track, and glaring white fluorescent bars blinked on in the cabin ceiling. A few made popping noises and went out.

“That’s really bright, but I think I got it.” I squinted, and put my hand to the throttle. The last time it was used, there had been a bustling civilization on this planet.

“Wait!” Artym groaned. “Parking brake.”

He pointed to a lever sticking up from the floor; I pulled it back and heard something clunk below.

“Let’s see if this still works.” I eased the throttle up. The motors let out a wailing electrical hum and a few sparking sounds, and with a jerk the train lurched forward. “All right, we’re moving!” The train left the gallery and entered the tunnel.

“Speed up!” Lenka said. “The whole track might not be powered; we need to get as far as we can.”

I pushed the throttle all the way forward. The wind whistled and the motors hummed as we built up speed. My communicator beeped, I flipped it open.

“I have you moving at thirty kilometers per hour and accelerating, what’s happening?” Tzichkir asked.

“We got the subway working.”

“You what?”

“This tunnel leads to the airport; can you have the rescue team meet us there?”

“Yes, I’ll tell them. Keep your communicator open.”

I turned back to Lenka and Artym.

“They’ll be waiting at the airport,” I said.

“He’s not doing very good,” Lenka said. I could see blood seeping out from his nose. Shit. I looked back to the track.

“Oh, shit!” The train swept past a subway platform crowded with Polganite corpses and knocked a few aside. For an instant I thought we derailed, but the motors kept on humming. The lights kept flickering intermittently, and the ride was about as rickety as you’d imagine a 700-year-old subway to be.

Artym tried to sit up, I heard him coughing again.

“He’s getting worse!” I shouted into my communicator. Whatever he had, it acted fast. I wondered if the feeling I had was really psychosomatic.

Cables dangled over the tracks ahead of us, the train thumped into them and the lights went out.

“That’s it, no more power.” I saw a circular white spot ahead, growing. The end of the tunnel.

“Brake!” Lenka shouted.

I pulled the lever back, the train jerked and it broke off at the base.

“No brakes!” I mashed the emergency stop a few times, nothing happened. “We’re gonna crash!”

Lenka kicked at the door on the right side of the car, it popped off.

“Get ready to jump!” she said. Ahead, the tunnel opened to a subway station partially filled with sand on account of the collapsed roof, the sun shining in. Three people in power armor stood alongside the edge of the platform, the navy blue-and-white suits making them a good seven feet tall. Lenka hauled Artym to the door and the instant it cleared the tunnel shoved him out before jumping to the platform and skidding to a stop on all fours.

I dove out sideways, spreading my wings to slow before landing belly-first in a pile of sand. I looked up and watched as the train cars shot away and slid up the sand at the back of the station, crashing into the wall and piling up like an ersatz model railway set.

“You okay, son?” one of the armored Patrolmen held out a hand, talking through the speakers in his helmet.

“Get back!” I climbed to my feet. “I’ve been exposed!”

“Our suits are sealed, don’t worry.”

Another man in a powersuit loaded Artym onto a walking stretcher, helped by two medics in regular environment suits. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the sample bag with the vial inside, fortunately unbroken.

“This is what he was exposed to.” I handed it to the first Patrolman. He must’ve talked on the radio, a third medic came up and took it from him.

“Follow me please, we’re going to get you decontaminated and give you a checkup,” the medic said. I followed her up the sandy hill out of the station and on to the ruined airport tarmac. To the right was a wrecked terminal, and across from that sat a Star Patrol dropship, a vaguely wedge-shaped craft with a pair of stubby radiator-wings and a narrow ramp open under the nose, painted to match the suits. The medics rushed Artym into the airlock and cycled him through.

I breathed a sigh of relief.

---

Artym made a full recovery, including his broken wrist from being pushed out the train, but if the rescue team had gotten to him any later…

Lenka and I tested negative, turns out we weren’t exposed. (Or it never got inside our suits.) Professor Tzichkir forbade anyone from going into the subways again, and we wrapped up the expedition two weeks later. If anyone investigates that lab again they’re going to be using robots. I don’t know when that will happen, but I do know one thing:

I won’t be there when they do. Leave the studies of post-apocalyptic alien planets to the existential risk scholars, I want something more hopeful.