A Crisis of Aesthetics and Pride

[King Ghidorah]

I do not know how long I have been here, but I am well and truly transfixed by the sight before me. Across billions of years and almost as many worlds, it is the most beautiful, most insulting thing that I have ever seen; Superlative art, and an abomination without peer.

I am looking up at a plane of concave stone the size of a stadium– an inclined wall of a cavern: dark, rough and unshaped by any force save time and the cold, weathering winds that twist and howl through this underground chamber. It is but one facet of a massive, irregular space fit to swallow a small city. It is not the geology, however, that so captures my attention: Except when it melts, cracks, boils or explodes, geology is just about the most boring thing there is. No, what enraptures and infuriates me, an assault upon the senses, and indeed upon sense itself is what lies embedded within.

It is a monster, in the most glorious and terrible sense of the word. Three serpentine necks coil within the stone, only partly exposed to the air, but I know that each one is as wide as a riverbed and long enough to wrap several times around a skyscraper (such an arrogant word for so fragile and earthbound a structure, and such a vividly remembered sensation). Each neck terminates in a reptilian head, a proud, sneering countenance crowned with twisted horns; a heavy brow over crimson eyes, a sneering muzzle lined with jagged teeth several times the size of the average tool-using sophant’s entire body. Two of them dangle, slack-jawed and lolling softly in the moaning wind. The third is half-turned, embedded in stone. At the other end, the necks are all three attached to a single golden torso, a glittering expanse of armored, overlapping scales.

Every other aspect of the thing comes in pairs. Two massive, predatory legs: defined, articulate and ending in grasping talons. Two mighty tails, sinuous and strong, terminating in spiked clubs. Two shining, leathern wings, each fit to cast a township into shadow. The entire body gleams with a soft, golden light, the only source of illumination in the cavern – everything else is cast in shades of dim yellow radiance and dancing shadow. It is glorious – peerless. And it is dead.

The legs are twisted – broken, compressed into the stone. The eyes are clouded to a muddy brown, and blood, shining electrum, drips from its jaws, creating a scintillating metallic lake upon the floor. Its wings, what little is visible of them, are in tatters, bent, battered and shredded. Effulgent, impenetrable scales lie cracked and shattered, the exposed flesh beneath shrunken and dry. Armored hide hangs in strips, like banners from rafters of exposed bone.

It reeks of ozone, of burning meat, electric vengeance and old rot. The smell fills the cavern, so dense it resists even the churning howl of the breeze.

The work of my life, if something I have so thoroughly enjoyed can truly be called work, has been the true appreciation of all that is great and good, all that is complex and beautiful within the universe. Likewise, it is my firm and cherished belief, my most certain knowledge, that the worth of a thing can only be known when it is wrecked, ruined and gone. That moment – that destructive illumination, gives me peace, purpose, and unparalleled joy. Typically, to see so mighty and exquisite a creature brought low, reduced to rot and ruin, even after the fact, would be a divine privilege.

There’s just one problem, one thing that paralyzes my mind as aesthetic serenity and apocalyptic outrage clash. That corpse up there is me.

 

[King Ghidorah]

I have arisen – again, I know not how long ago - from a spreading ocean of my own half-congealed lifeblood in a wingless and larval form: I am reduced to an embryo, tiny, small enough to curl up upon the pupil of my own rotting eye. My brother-minds lie dormant, undeveloped, their craniums fused with my shoulders – I am an I rather than a we, a paradigm not wholly unfamiliar but nonetheless revolting. My astral senses have abandoned me, my neck is practically nonexistent, and I lack even a single tail!

The form of my legs, at least, is unaltered, but the one and only thing I seem to have gained is hands. As disgusting as their appearance may be (Across all the languages in the entire galaxy, ‘fingers’ is quite possibly the worst word I have ever encountered) I cannot deny their utility. Forelimbs, let alone the power to grasp, to manipulate, is something I have not possessed in eons.

Worst of all, there is no rumble within, no cosmic furnace roiling in my chest– the power of a galactic catastrophe, the roar of a storm that consumes worlds, is gone. There is but the faintest whisper, an ember in the dark to animate this miniscule, diminished form.

And yet still I cannot deny the enthralling spectacle of my own desolation. Of all things, my own value is that which I have known most thoroughly and completely. I stand at the apex – the oldest and most perfect being which the universe has produced. I, and only I, of all thinking beings, know the true loss that the decaying hulk entombed in this cavern wall represents. The hypnotic chasm of that knowledge is overwhelming – matched only by the rising fury of this unforgiveable assault upon my dignity.

I make a fist with one clawed hand, and the faintest arc of golden lightning sparks across my knuckles.

How did this happen? I am King Ghidorah – the final name upon the lips of grieving and doomed billions, a plea and a promise unparalleled in the history of the cosmos. Though I have returned the fact remains that something, some potent and unknown force, struck me down to begin with – and judging from the state of my corpse, it seems to have happened very long ago…

A sharp sound intrudes upon my attention, carried upon the gale.

Clack

Crack!

“Fuck!”

This planet – and I think it must be a planet, the air is too thick for a mere asteroid – is inhabited. There is someone else present, an interloper approaching my tomb, and with that fact alone, my path forward becomes clear.

This is not the first time that I have been defeated, cast down, humbled. This is not the first time I have rebuilt myself from scraps, although never before have I been brought to such a catastrophically low ebb. I will do as I have always done – I will abide, and I will conquer. I will nurture the spark within me until it is once again a roaring furnace of astral force, and as it grows, so too shall I. I will return to my full glory and I will make of this planet, wherever it may be, whoever may here dwell, a fitting headstone. I shall discover how all this has come to pass, and my vengeance will be immaculate and terrible to behold!

…But before any of that, I will kill this person who has stumbled upon my grave.

I would likely do that anyway, but this ground, this cavern, is mine: a monument to an ultimate truth. This place is a sight for my eyes alone.

More voices, closer now, though the wind and the irregular terrain makes distance hard to judge.

“Are you okay?”

“Ow. No I’m not fucking okay! My goggles just went out. Krade, how close are we?”

“I dunno man. It’s hard to say. This is a third-hand tricorder with a second hand prospecting suite bolted on, and its not doing too hot – all I can tell you is that the stationary rig wasn’t wrong: there’s an ore deposit down here kicking off an unreal amount of energy. Whatever it is its lighting up the spectrometer like you wouldn’t believe; I don’t think some of these elements even have names. If we find it, we’re all stupid-rich, end of story, so shut up and keep walking.”

With an effort of will I tear my gaze from the sublime paradox of glory and the unthinkable and bare my teeth in savage glee. It sounds as though my guests are, after a fashion, looking for me, though they do not know it yet.

How utterly appropriate. Perhaps, before they expire, they can tell me where we are.

 

[King Ghidorah]

* * *

All told, considering the nature of their work, Krade, Jewels and Flipper had been extremely lucky thus far.

One of the largest problems with running a mining concern on a moon as geologically active as Inverxe, especially a small mining concern operating on a limited budget, was that deep-strata prospecting could be a bit of a nightmare.

Even leaving aside the vicious horrors that infested the ice-world’s interior (and the vicious horrors creeping across the arctic surface, for that matter), and skirting the whole issue of rampant tectonic instability being a persistent hazard, once you got below the upper strata of bedrock you would sometimes encounter massive, superhardened igneous formations: Batholithic domes composed of folded layers of nigh-impenetrable granite that laughed at ground-penetrating radar and appeared on all but the most powerful of orbital survey scans as great dark masses of mystery and frustration. If your plucky mining startup wanted to catch a jump on the competition by exploiting whatever undiscovered mineral wealth might lie below one of these igneous shrouds and couldn’t afford to buy time on one of the Hub’s top-of-the-line space-based geo-analysis suites, well, that meant sending a survey team into the maze of underground caverns that honeycombed Inverxe to an unknown depth.

It was dangerous, and it was time-consuming. Surveyors were frequently ambushed by locusts, abducted by mind flayers, buried alive by sudden tectonic shifts, or dragged screaming into the dark by nameless horrors. Sometimes they would simply wander off, the latest victims of the miasma of hopelessness and madness that suffused every aspect of life on Inverxe.

But when it paid off? When a team returned with a fix on a rich vein of unexploited ore and a high-gain teleportation beacon in place to send in the dig teams? Fortunes were made, and this particular expedition looked as though it was shaping up to pay off in a big way. Not only that, but it was the smoothest run that any of them had ever had.

They’d taken a low-altitude transport craft, a dumpy gray clunker shaped like an electric razor, from a fortified mountaintop outpost to a deep crevice about 30 kilometers away. ‘Corporate’, which at the moment consisted of a guy named Ted, the CEO and founder of Deeptide Mineral Extraction, LLC., had identified this tectonic fissure as the best means of descent below the depth of their target batholith to the strata they intended to investigate. Transfer from the shuttle to an opening in the wall of the crevice – their chosen point of ingress - including moving the stationary survey rig, a precarious operation to say the least when conducted mid-air, had taken about half the usual time. Although they had come armed with high-wattage plasma pistols and decked out in company-issue environmental hazard gear, they’d found a defensible cavern of adequate size, made camp and gotten the rig assembled and booted without so much as a peep from the resident horror-show.

And, almost immediately, they’d gotten a hit - A relatively small but impossibly dense deposit of exotic ores suffused with bizarre radiation and micro-gravitational anomalies. Such a trove of novel xenomaterials would fetch an obscene price on the open market.

The survey team could, at that point, have placed a teleport beacon and gone home. Instead, they’d secured their camp, messaged corporate with the initial survey scans, and ventured further into the underground labyrinth in order to confirm their find. Of all the many ways to get killed on Inverxe, one of the most insidious was hope betrayed: one let-down bad enough and the moon’s sinister, predatory ennui could swallow you whole in a single gulp. All three of them had been doing this job long enough to know that before they got their hopes up too high, it was critical that they make sure that what they’d found was real.

It was Jewels that first began to suspect something was wrong.

“Guys,” she said, as they picked their way down a scree pile by way of rock-hammers and carbon-fibre cable, “Something is bothering me. Have either of you ever been this deep this long without having to shoot something?”

“Oh, fuck, don’t say that,” said Flipper. “Can’t we just appreciate that this planet has handed us a win for once? I don’t know about you but this is not what I was on planning on doing with my life.”

“No,” said Krade, sliding the last few feet to the bottom of the slope and pulling a modified tricorder from one of several pouches on his belt. “She’s right. We’ve got no life signs, motion, no nothing within five hundred meters, and I haven’t heard or seen a damn thing since we got here. Even if these caverns are a closed system...” He tailed off, frowning beneath his respirator.

Carefully, Jewels navigated the last couple of meters to the tunnel floor, knelt to tighten the strap on her boot, and turned to help Flipper in the last portion of his descent. The image-enhancement suite in his goggles had abruptly died several chambers back, and without it he had only the low-light lenses to rely on, which were practically useless in the pitch darkness beneath the moon’s surface.

“I mean, I’m glad things are going so smoothly,” she said, “but this is creepy, right? We’ve got to be a kilometer-and-a-half underground. There’s usually at least, like, an antisocial headcrab lurking in the corner.”

“Goddamn it,” said Flipper, quietly, stepping gingerly down to join the other two. He put his hand on Jewels’ shoulder, more for the sake of navigation than any gesture of comradery, and the three of them set off down the tunnel.

As they walked, Krade ran a gloved hand along the glassy wall. “Old magma tube, maybe,” he muttered.

Flipper was the first to notice the light.

“Up ahead,” he said, pointing. “See where the tunnel bends? There’s like, this soft yellow glow. It’s dim as hell, but I… oh, shit.”

All three surveyors reached for their weapons.

Stark in the soft golden haze, a bestial, horned shape stepped into view, claws flexing at its sides, hide glimmering bronze in the underground twilight.

 

[King Ghidorah]

***

‘Ahh,’ I think aloud, as the three hominids in their awkward protective gear and ridiculous little masks train their weapons upon me, ‘Futility.’

All three of them jerk at the sensation of my voice in their minds – at least, I assume so. My mental powers are as diminished as the rest of me. I cannot even tell what they are thinking, would not know what language to address them if I had not already heard their speech.

That is disappointing, but hardly the low point of my day. As much as I’ll miss experiencing the taste of their fear, I know much of the next part by heart.

I rush them. The largest one opens fire first, arcs of plasma erupting from the weapon in his hand. It burns as it splashes against my scintillating bronze chest, each bolt lighting this narrow side-tunnel with the actinic brightness of a newborn star. As the light washes over me, all three now joining the barrage, I shield my only functional pair of eyes with one arm and appreciate anew just how I far I have fallen. Although these weapons are not able to slow my advance, let alone slay me, they do bring me pain, do blacken my scales and sting my flesh.

Pain, from such insignificant creatures; From such puny weapons! There was a time that such an insult would have driven me to heights of rage and bloodlust fit to shatter continents!

However, the eons have been long, and I have learned… patience. I am sure there are those who would disagree, but they and all who knew them (their very worlds!) live only in my memory, so it is my prerogative to decide which of us is correct.

I do love the word ‘perogative’. There is something grasping about it, something that yearns and controls…

In less time than it takes to say I have closed the distance, my talons striking sparks from the ancient stone as they propel me unstoppably forward. Two of the hominids break off their attack when they realize I am not going to stop, trying to scatter, to flee. One, the largest, turns to run back down the tunnel while another, the smallest, attempts to dart around me, doubtless believing me fully blinded by the glare of his remaining companion’s weapon.

I have stared into dying suns, and this person is not moving quickly – presumably he is the one whose injured cry first drew my attention. It is not a gamble that goes well for him.

I reach down and I grasp him by the throat as he stumbles past, and the centuries-agone sensation of my claws digging into yielding flesh stirs something within me. The barrage ceases as I pull my victim into the line of fire, darkness descending like a shroud following the blazing crescendo of plasma-fire. He screams, cut off with a satisfying crunch as I close my fist around the vertebrae in his neck and, wrapping my other hand ‘round his booted ankle, launch his body overhand at his fleeing comrade, The impact is loud, meaty and thick. Something audibly snaps, though within coward or corpse I cannot say. Both of them, alive and dead, are sent tumbling and rolling along the tunnel floor amidst the clatter of debris and a cry from the one among their number who yet stands.

“Flipper, NO!”

The last of them is visibly torn, clutching their weapon tightly in both gloved hands, a moment of panicked indecision whether to fight or flee. I cannot tell whether this one is male or female, and frankly I do not care. I bellow a cackling howl, carrying laughter and triumph and glorious oblivion. In that moment I step forward, a great, purposeful stride, until I am practically standing on their boots.

I look down, and they look up, their eyes concealed by lenses of some sort, expression hidden behind a segmented mask. Foul smoke rises from the blackened trails that criss-cross my glorious golden hide. Belatedly they attempt to step back, and I grab them by the face, holding them in place by the sheer pressure of my grip. The strange eyewear cracks against my palm, and bone creaks beneath my fingers. I can hear their breath through the mask, shuddering and deliberately slow.

Within the arena of the mind, I address them.

‘There is something within you that sees the grandeur and terror of golden eons rushing towards you and, bereft of hope, stands. It is foolishness – heresy, even. But it is heresy I could almost respect, were it not attached to something so lowly. And so I grant you a privilege: You shall provide me with information before you die. Feel honored. Generosity is neither my habit nor nature.’

My chosen informant does not say anything. The only outward sound is the In the back of the tunnel, limp and lightly dusted with stony debris, the fallen coward groans.

‘You will answer,’ I continue, ‘Precisely. Do you understand?’

A noise escapes their throat, something which I cannot quite hear properly.

‘Speak. Clearly.’

Momentarily, I increase the pressure of my grip.

“Yes!” they gasp. “Yes, I understand! I’m sorry.” They take several more shuddering breaths and, with visible effort, drop their weapon and raise their hands in a halting gesture of supplication. The gun clatters on the smooth stone floor of the tunnel, unnaturally loud in the enclosed space.

“Please. Just tell me what you want.”

 

[King Ghidorah]

***

Living and working on Inverxe, especially working undergound on Inverxe, for a company that couldn’t yet afford proper security teams, tended to have a winnowing effect on the population. Anyone who couldn’t function in extreme conditions and under the threat of imminent death didn’t usually , in any sense, last very long.

Jewels had been a surveyor for Deeptide for almost three years. She knew she could handle herself, and so did anyone else who worked with her for any length of time. She had been threatened by some of the best in the business, and successfully fled, quite pointedly not screaming, from some of the most terrifying wildlife the planet had to offer.

Even so, she was finding it very difficult to function at the moment. There was something about having her head palmed like a basketball and squeezed to the point where she could actually feel the stabbing pain of her skull starting to flex by a two-meters-and-change golden lizard-beast which paradoxically both shut down much of her ability to reason and laser-focused her attention.

She didn’t move. She didn’t think about how much her head hurt or how cold she suddenly felt. She didn’t question the imperious voice, dripping with condescension, scorn, and ancient malice, which echoed in her mind.

‘Where is this place? How far under-ground? What planet, and what system? How long has it been since the Crystal Chaos shattered the Spacehunter Nebula?’

Jewels felt her boots leave the floor of the tunnel as a grip like an industrial vice took hold of the front of her eviro-suit. The pressure on her skull eased and then vanished as the draconic creature removed its other hand from her head, and she found herself staring through the spider-web cracks in her broken goggles, past the top of a serpentine muzzle lined with teeth that would give a xenomorph a run for its money and into a pair of predatory crimson eyes completely devoid of even the slightest mammalian compassion.

‘Is the name of King Ghidorah still whispered across the quaking stars in reverence and fear?’

The surveyor gathered some saliva on the back of her tongue and swallowed it, forcing her throat to open, her mouth to work. When she spoke, she didn’t recognize her own voice. It was too thick, and far too quiet.

“We’re, uh, we’re about one and a half kilometeres under the surface of Inverxe. In the Crossroads. I don’t… I apologize. Deeply. But I don’t know what any of those other things are.”

There was a moment where nothing moved. Nearby, Krade groaned. Further down the tunnel, as if in reply, there came the faint howl of an underground air-current.

‘Then you are useless to me. Now. Tell me about yourself.’

Jewels’ brain locked all the way up.

“Uh?”

The beast growled, a lilting bass rumble, like an old man’s laughter heard through the barrel of a cannon.

‘Tell me about yourself. Why are you here? Where do you come from? What do you do? What is the geometry of your life, and what shape will it leave when you are gone? ’

Jewels explained, haltingly at first, her mind jammed with stress and not sure where this was going, but the simple fact that as long as the beast was listening to her talk it wasn’t brutally murdering her made it remarkably easy to continue. She talked about growing up poor on Cevanti, surrounded by ruins and the certainty that things used to be better than this. She talked about the joy of escape, riding on fire out into the black, where maybe the best days weren’t all in the past. She outlined what a surveyor did, and why. She talked about stalking through the predatory capitalist jungle of life on the Hub, and the distinctively fraught brand of primal comradery that one could only find in mountaintop fortress-settlements populated by fortune-hungry debt slaves, serious-minded ore-extraction professionals and half-crazed adventurer-prospectors. She lamented the grinding madness of the ennui that seemed bred in Inverxe’s volcanic bones, and described the many horrors that waited in the ice, the twilight and the dark.

She avoided talking about Flipper and Krade. Eventually, her shining tormentor interrupted her.

‘That will be enough. You are lacking in scope, in scale, in impact, but your life is not without a certain limited… merit. It will be interesting, watching you burst.’

Jewels felt the clawed hand holding her up twitch as its owner adjusted his grip, felt the moment of tension as the creature began to pull its arm back, and abruptly knew that she was about to die. She could see it with crystal clarity: this golden ogre was going to catapult her, head-first, into the granite floor, and she was going to shatter and splatter like a porcelain doll filled with vat-grown protein paste.

“Icangetyoutothesurface!”

The words came out in a rush, no space between them. They were more like a gasp, choked out without thought in a continuous stream of forced syllables, hollow and slightly metallic through Jewels’ secondhand respirator.

The creature paused. Its expression shifted, but the surveyor was unable to read its inhuman features. Again, its voice echoed in her mind, jagged and afire with a hungry and terrifying intensity.

‘Explain.’

 

[King Ghidorah]

***

As appalling as the idea that I could require assistance might be, this mewling mammal ( a female, from what she has told me of her tale - ‘Jewels’ she calls herself ) has raised a valid point. If I am to do more than just merely exist, I must leave these caverns; And satisfying though it would be to dash the life from her body and leave her crumpled and wasted upon the rocks, I am not so foolish as to sacrifice the opportunity to pursue loftier destructive goals for the sake of a relatively paltry moment of instant gratification.

After all, I can always kill her after we have escaped this place.

Jewels (a name of which the beige little creature is certainly unworthy) tells me of a beacon – a teleportation device intended as both a method of egress and a means to return here in greater numbers. A device which I do not know how to operate.

I growl my disdain – and am struck by the unexpected.

Awakened by my suppressed ire, something rises within me; the astral well, the source of my power, that which had been reduced to a mere ember, stops sputtering and catches ablaze, burning low but steady. Brilliant yellow energy crackles across my arms and down my spine, flares in the back of my throat, flashes behind my eyes. My captive quails as a stray arc singes her clothing.

The golden lightning is mine again. I stretch out my free hand and a roiling, spitting arc of aurelian cosmic force bursts from my palm and shrieks down the tunnel, striking the other two mammals where they lie. There is flash, and a scream, and what had been a pair of intrepid surveyors becomes a pile of scorched meat and burning equipment.

Suddenly, I am in an excellent mood. It inspires me. Gently, mockingly, I peel the broken eyeware from Jewels’ face and throw it over my shoulder as I pin her with the regal weight of my regard.

‘You will lead me to this beacon, and you will release me into the world, and, perhaps, an opportunity for you to escape me will present itself; it is unlikely, but I concede that in my current state it is a possibility. Alternatively, you will burn here, in the dark. I will breathe you in and devour your bones, and you will be forever forgotten by everyone except me.’

There is a moment where she cannot speak: baffled, I should think, by the sheer magnitude of what I represent.

Eventually, she makes the obvious choice.

Climbing and grasping, scrambling through ancient tunnels reeking of fire and damp stone, over scree piles and underground rivers, it takes us several hours to reach our destination. Finally, just as my patience is beginning to wear thin, Jewels leads me to an unremarkable hemispherical cavern. The space is cast in stark shadows by the harsh white light of a series lanterns, square boxes affixed to the walls by metal spikes; They flank a group of rugged orange tents containing racks of equipment covered in flashing lights, small switches and screens scrolling meaningless numbers and shapes. In the center of the chamber, beside a pile of still-packed bed-rolls , there is a cylindrical black mass of wires and glowing green display surfaces festooned with antennae, forked metal, and strange spinning tubes.

It is cramped and still, the faint hum of electronics and the palpable absence of its fallen custodians blending to create a satisfying desolation.

My guide pulls a dark green case from behind a broken stalagmite and kneels down. She releases a set of clasps, removing its cover with visible effort. There is a hiss of escaping air.

“This is it.” She states, insultingly calm.

I narrow my eyes, suspicious. Over the course of leading me to this place, Jewels has grown visibly less agitated. Through observation, I have learned more about her during our sojourn – enough to know that she is unusual in her ability to sublimate her fear when presented with a task.

I am (disgustingly ) reliant on her to do as she has said if I wish to leave this place within an acceptable timeframe. I cannot have her attempting anything… clever.

‘Very well. Assemble the device. But know this: I am older than this planet, and possess abilities for which you have no name. Should you be considering some sort of ruse, some plan to abandon me here…’

I loom behind her, my eyes ablaze with astral charge as she begins removing components from the box, arcane in their complexity and function. When she speaks, her voice is flat and even, only the slightest quaver betraying the depths of her anxiety.

“I understand. And look: I get it. You’re really, really scary. So I’m scared, okay? I’m terrified, more than I think I’ve ever been in my life. You win: you’re the worst, good job. But I’ve had a couple of hours to think about it - and I did think about it, you’re not wrong – and leaving you down here wouldn't do me any good, because the information is already out there that there’s something in these caves worth an obscene fortune.”

Deliberately not looking at me, she continues to assemble the beacon. I let her defensive sarcasm pass unpunished, for my mind is occupied by a far greater trespass upon my dignity.

The impudence. The dizzying presumption! I begin to pace, stalking a tight circle around the strange machine at the center of the camp. The only thing down here of any worth is my own mummified cadaver, and that is mine! It is not a resource, not some petty bauble to be squabbled over by limited creatures with small, venal minds! It is a monument, a testament to the highest of truths: Entropy, Glory, and Me.

Unaware of my rising anger, Jewels continues to talk.

“Not that that probably matters to you. But it matters a lot to my boss, and to the people he’s already filed a claim on these caverns with. Even if I leave you here, before long there’s going to be a full mineralogical extraction team showing up –

I grab her by the scruff of the neck and spin her around, lifting her off the ground and holding her by the shoulders mere inches from the astral furnace crackling between my jaws.

‘Who. Else. Knows.’

 

[King Ghidorah]

***
Jewels’ plan was simple. She’d come up with it on the way back to the camp, navigating in the dark by the light-up pitons and phosphorescent paint that her team had used to mark their way through the depths – an emergency fallback measure that Krade had insisted on, tricorder be damned.

He’d always been cautious, for all the good it had done him in the end.

There was a comm unit in Jewels’ mask, and the stationary rig had a powerful enough relay built into it to make radio contact with corporate, but she didn’t dare use it; The surveyor had no idea how acute the monster’s senses were, and the radiant golden brute had made it obvious what would happen if it suspected she wasn’t cooperating.

No, this required subtlety. The creature didn’t seem to be too good with technology beyond a kind of general familiarity, which meant that as long as she could convince it she was doing something necessary for the beacon to function she might be able to use the rig to send a text message. Then it would just be a matter of delaying their departure long enough for Ted to get a heavy-weapons squad from the settlement wall to come stake out the Deeptide transmat receiving platform (formerly Ted’s basement and four tonnes of secondhand teleporter). She’d send the beast through first, and it would all be over but the crying.

That was assuming Ted was able to convince the sentinels to set an ambush and not just, say, destroy the receiver. And assuming bolter-fire could even stop this thing. And that Jewels wasn’t incinerated in the next fifteen seconds.

‘My boss!’ she gasped. ‘My boss, Ted. But for something this major he’ll have filed a claim with Kaalakiota, so that cat is well out of the bag. Way out of the bag. Like, the bag is completely gone, so even if you got the cat back –

The creature growled and pulled her closer to wall of golden energy crackling across its jagged teeth. It’s jaws creaked open and she saw the glow in the back of its throat, smelled old hair and burning electronics as her eyebrows began to crisp.

Jewels screamed, the shrill sound echoing in the enclosed space. ‘Sorry! I’m sorry! Please! This isn’t helping anything – you - you still need me!”

Slowly, hesitantly, the jaws closed, and the roiling yellow sparks subsided – but the creature still didn’t put her down. If anything, its grip dug more deeply into her shoulders, threatening to puncture the outer thermal layer of her protective gear.

Kaalakiota – this is the corporation you spoke of earlier. They operate a space-station.

“Yes!” shouted Jewels, forcing the terror back down, struggling to keep herself under control. “Yes. You’re impressive – like I said, you scare the crap out of me. But – and please, please don’t take this the wrong way – they’re a little bit beyond you. I was obviously wrong – you care about whatever it is that’s down here. It’s obviously yours.”

She paused again, continuing more slowly after several steadying breaths. “I get that. But the corporation has unlimited resources, and unlimited guns. If they know about it, and I don’t see a version of this where they don’t, then even if something happens to Ted, people are not going to stop coming for it.”

Suddenly, the draconic creature released its grip. Jewels’ boots hit the ground in a puff of disturbed dust, and she felt an absurd giddy satisfaction at not falling over immediately.

With an abrupt jerk the monster turned away and, unleashing a deafening screech, blasted one of the tents to flinders: Golden lightning erupted from its throat, spiraling through the air, almost too bright to look at. It washed out the glow of the lanterns lining the cavern walls, turned the orange fabric to ash and cinders on contact, ripped into the racks of electronics in a shower of sparks and an eruption of blue-tinged fire. The cave wall behind the tent burst, sending bits of shattered stone pinwheeling through the camp, and the entire mess collapsed in a flaming heap, billowing toxic black smoke and tiny arcs of lingering golden energy.

Now Jewels fell over, scrambling backwards on her hands until she was backed up against a stalagmite.

Looming above her, its body backlit by the flames, a silhouette of primal terror plucking the strings of atavistic fear, the beasts voice echoed in her mind:

I will not accept this…this abomination! These scuttling administrators, bureaucrats and laborers, there is nothing they have built that I have not destroyed ten thousand times over! They are a footnote. Their corporation is a footnote! This PLANET is a footnote! What claim do they have on what is MINE?!

Another bolt of lightning shot from its hand, reducing another tent to fire, smoke, and molten slag.

The creature turned to face her once more, a great glittering shadow, the flames reflected across the thousand facets of its golden scales as aurelian lightning danced in its eyes.

‘Assemble the device. Work quickly. My departure has become… urgent.’

 

[King Ghidorah]

***

While my captive labors, scuttling to and fro amidst the smoke and dust in search of this or that component and performing occult calibrations which I do not care to witness, I watch the fires. They twist and dance, bringing to mind grander vistas of flame, towering infernos alive with branching, twisting golden lightning: Billowing walls of pyroclastic doom which swallowed continents, boiled oceans and transformed worlds. I remember the heat rising beneath my, beneath our wings, the triple-perspective exultation as my brother-minds and I rode the firestorm we had made, an effulgent beacon of death, nothing less than the three faces of fate. For just a moment, I can taste the despair, resignation, and burning dreams of a species eons gone.

Amidst my reverie, an intrusive detail catches my eye – the billowing smoke from the burning tents is being drawn by ambient air-currents towards a tunnel I had not previously taken note of. I would like to see where it leads – Jewels and her hapless, doomed companions must have gotten down here somehow, after all – but I do not dare let the mammal out of my sight until she has completed her task.

“It’s ready.”

I return to the present, snapping my gaze back to my captive, wondering just how long I have been lost in fond reminiscence and idle speculation. Long enough for the plasma-score marring my scintillating hide to repair itself. And long enough, it seems, for Jewels to scavenge an intact set of eye-ware from the unburned section of her camp and transform her collection of modular technological detritus into a conical blue antenna, reaching nearly to her waist, textured with miniscule, softly glowing tracings I recognize as circuitry of some sort. The thing is affixed to a chromed hemispherical base ringed with smaller antennae and tiny robotic armature, sitting atop an unremarkable metal plate which she has bolted to the dusty stone floor.

I stalk over to it, my talons clacking softly against the igneous floor as I circle around. It is certainly a communications device of some sort, but as to its precise function I must take her at her word.

‘How,’ I demand, approaching to the point that she is forced to step back as I loom above her, ‘Does this beacon work?’

Jewels raises her gloved hands in a gesture of supplication. “It’s remote controlled. I radio in to corporate, and they use the beacon to lock in a teleportation fix on the coordinates I give them.”

I stare down at her. The woman seems nervous – but then, that is only appropriate. Her end is fast approaching, and I have made no secret of that fact. Still, I cannot help but grimace: I have decided I do not like Jewels.

Of course, I do not like anybody – not in the sense typically intended when the term is bandied about. A certain appreciation, fascination even, with the character and paradigm of the individual as measured against the broader society is the closest I believe I am capable of to ‘affection’, but I am given to understand that affection between individuals does not typically end in blood-drenched screams amidst golden lightning and searing cosmic winds.

There is something about Jewels, specifically though that I have begun to actively disdain: not the boilerplate contempt in which I hold all lesser creatures, but a needling sense of irritation which sets me on edge in a way to which I am unaccustomed. It is a feeling I have not experienced in eons, not since the Xillians arranged that awful alliance with Gigan.

Jewels makes a gesture whose meaning I do not understand, tapping the side of her head with one finger.

“Do you want I should….?”

I growl, and take a step back, turning away, granting her the space necessary for whatever it is she must do. The sooner I am free of the obligation not to end her, the happier I will be.

Behind me, something clicks. The machine in the center of the room – not he beacon, the ‘rig’ – beeps twice.

“Ted, do you copy? Awesome. We’re set? Then do it now…Okay. He’s still here. What the hell, Ted. Do it now! He’s looking at me Ted! I think he’s starting to realize I’ve fucked him DO IT fucking NOW TE-

 

[King Ghidorah]

There is an azure flash, a tide of blue light and strange geometry, and a familiar twisting sensation as space folds in around me. In the breadth of a thunderclap, before I can take a single step, let alone rip Jewels’ conniving head from her treacherous shoulders, I am somewhere else.

I have enough time to register a dimly-illuminated room, concrete floors and banks of battered machinery, technologically advanced and softly humming. I shift my weight and my talons scrape across metal and glass. Mammals wearing worn body-armor surround me in a semicircle, bulky weapons leveled.

A shout:

“LIGHT IT UP!”

And then -

Cacophony

Explosions ripple across my glittering flesh, continuous bursting impacts from multiple directions tracing lines up my thighs, across my mighty shoulders, pounding my chest. The air fills with shrapnel, with glittering debris and miniscule drops of metallic fluid. Plasma, not the pitiful arcs wielded by Jewels and her ilk but a focused and sustained blast, roaring and burning like a star, strikes me full in the gut, hammering me backwards into a metal surface with the irresistible force of a runaway planet. I crash through, knocked from my feet, only to impact something less yielding. An atonal droning fills my hearing, and the world seems to slow down. I am sinking in a strange sensation: the feeling that I am watching my life happen to someone else, watching from very far away.

I try to push forward, to shield my face with my arms and stand tall against the barrage. It is only then, as I witness close-up in agonizingly slow detail while scales buckle and burst and ringlets of gold-and-silver blood fountain from the stony flesh beneath that I realize the strange shining dust in the air is fragments of my own armored hide, that the shining fluid which falls like rain upon my feet is my own effulgent ichor.

Black smoke is rising from my gut, and the floor is slippery beneath my talons.

They are killing me.

The realization rings through the fog of my racing mind with the clarity of a finely crafted bell: They are killing me.

Men, mortals, upjumped paramecium.

Those whom I have trampled in their scuttling billions beneath my mighty stomping feet.

Until this moment, I had thought that I knew anger: When I was forced to flee the Spacehunter Nebula before the advance of the Crystal Chaos, I believed myself furious. When the Balefire Knight turned back my siege of the Earth, humbling me time and again, I thought I knew rage.

As it turns, I was wrong about that.

On the other side of mere wrath, beyond apoplexy and even frenzy, I find something quiet, steady and cold. Within myself, I find a place to stand, and driven by that silent triumph of offended pride my astral furnace blazes skyward.

For a moment, for the first time since I awoke to this diminished existence, I feel like me.

Everything snaps into focus, and the proper flow of time returns. Golden light ripples across my ravaged body, and I shine. Hardened bullets, armor-piercing micro-rockets, bolts of phase-modulated plasma shatter and splash against me, but I no longer feel them. Lightning dances across the bleeding ruins of my hands and rises in the pit of my throat, crackles behind my eyes, erupts from my wounds to trace the paths of my leaking blood.

I fall to one knee, the concrete cracking beneath me and. I raise my arms, as though in welcome.

‘Die.’

I cannot see what I am doing – the air is too full of smoke and debris, of bursting shells and gleaming particle-beams, my eyes too full of blood – but I do not need to. The halcyon storm which blazes forth from my hands, bolt after twisting bolt of actinic golden force, sweeps back and forth across the room, sparing nothing and no-one. Again and again my power lances forth, rending flesh, twisting metal, shattering stone. I curl back my lip, open wide my fearsome jaws and I scream, astral charge bursting from my throat, increasing the pace and volume of my irresistible assault!

Arcane machinery explodes in showers of fire and ember. White-hot sparks fly as concrete cracks and bursts. Mammals are screaming as they buckle and burn, barely audible above the crackle of my power – and I am laughing, long and loud, the warbling lullaby of a dying cosmos.

My throat is full of my own boiling blood, but I do not care.

 

[King Ghidorah]

Eventually, I realize that there is no longer anybody returning fire. The screams have subsided, and nothing stands to challenge me. I cease my barrage, and as I reign in the astral well within the golden light shining forth from my ravaged flesh flickers and fades.

Immediately I buckle, barely catching myself on one tarnished and broken hand as I pitch forward and vomit a gout of glittering electrum. The precious fluid drips from my singular serpentine maw, bubbles forth from my flaring nostrils, pooling on the cement. I attempt to rise, but am immediately overcome with a wave of vertigo, forced again to my knees by a crushing sense of weakness as the scent of burning metal fills my world.

Bizarrely, water begins to fall from the ceiling in an omnidirectional spray, quickly dousing the flames. Ordinarily, this would annoy me tremendously, but at the moment I have more serious concerns.

My wounds burn. I can feel them knitting, my body slowly beginning to rebuild itself, but my physical form is in ruins. Looking down at myself I see a cracked and blasted expanse, sundered scales and pitted flesh oozing streams of metallic blood. There is a crater in my midsection where their plasma-lance came within a hair’s-breadth of burning through to my internals: a pit of carbonized and melted flesh that, with my regenerative powers limited as they are in this form, could take days to heal.

Still, I am triumphant, and that vindication of the natural order of things fills me with a calming sense of distant bliss.

I look out upon this shattered and burnt chamber. It is smaller than I had thought, filled with the smoking plastic shells and twisted metal wreckage of computers and consoles, shards of free-hanging display-screen and racks of roasted and sparking equipment scattered across the scorched, blackened floor. Lying immolated and broken, armor shattered and weapons fallen, my would-be killers are strewn haphazardly about the room, leaning against bent structural panels, splattered across smoldering equipment or crumpled in corners. There is a large device several meters in front of me, dominating the center of the chamber. It is roughly the size of one of my true, titanic form’s toenails, built into the ceiling; much of it is collapsed and burning atop a circular metal platform which forms its base. This, I realize, must be where I was standing when I arrived: a receiving platform, or perhaps the teleportation device itself. The plasma-lance punched me through some part of that machine and drove me bodily into a load-bearing wall.

Slowly, painfully, I turn my head. The wall behind me is worked stone – and it bears my silhouette: a cracked but unburned section at the center of a starburst of blackened and melted rock spattered with golden gore. In that captured moment my hands are curled into vicious claws, my head turned to the side, jaws open in feral defiance.

Fighting to stay conscious, I bare my teeth in savage pride.

I almost do not see the rotund mammal crawling across the floor towards a door in the far wall, trying to sneak out of the room.

I cough a bolt of golden lightning in his direction. It is dimmer than it should be – weak, but still lethal. However, it does not find its target, earthing itself instead in a heap of shattered plastic. Still, although it has not found its mark, the display does serve to attract his attention. He rolls over, panics scrambles backwards on his elbows until he is hidden behind the shell of a console.

‘Where,’ I ask him, straining to focus my thoughts, ‘Do you think you are going, little speck?’

 

[King Ghidorah]

***

Ted wasn’t having a good day. Make no mistake, it had started out fantastic: the news that you haven’t wasted your inheritance setting up a private mining concern on a barren volcanic moon and are, in fact, going to be rich beyond the dreams of avarice is the kind of thing to put a spring in a man’s step and a song in his heart. He’d double and triple-checked the survey data, realized that whatever his team had found was outside his limited expertise, and sent the scans to a consulting geophysicist on the Hub - who immediately replied with some paperwork representing an unholy cross between an NDA and a marriage contract and began bombarding Ted’s inbox with the intellectually-curious equivalent of spontaneous multiple orgasms.

Skimming the increasingly-manic correspondence, Ted got as far as ‘novel physical properties’, ‘potential military applications’ and ‘functionally unlimited energy source’ before, riding a wave of giddy vindication, he’d closed out of his e-mail client and immediately filed a claim through Kaalakiota’s mineral-rights management system.

The CEO, chief minerologist, and (following recent cashflow problems) operations engineer of Deeptide Mineral Extraction LLC had just been in the process of pulling a mining team off of what had up until now been the company’s greatest success – a slightly disappointing vein of iridium, not as rich as initial scans had suggested but enough to keep everything limping along for another year or two- when things had started to go wrong.

The first sign was a strange reading from the stationary survey rig. Following the manually-sent databurst which had put him in such a wonderful mood, he’d instructed the rig to redo the scan at a higher resolution, and stream the results directly to his private databanks. He’d set it to ping him directly if any secondary deposits resembling the anomaly poised to make all of his dreams come true were lurking in nearby strata. Shortly after the instruction was sent, the rig started giving him phantom readings – pinging Ted’s console at regular intervals, always showing a secondary deposit of roughly the same size, but never in the same place. More than that, the energy levels in the new deposit were increasing – at a miniscule rate, yes, but there wasn’t enough data-over-time to make any confident predictions; It could just be stochastic noise. However, it could also be the prescient rumblings of a logarithmic increase curve.

Ted had had no idea what, in this context, that could mean. It couldn’t be a criticality thing – if it was then the primary deposit, which was literally thousands of times larger, and denser by several orders of magnitude, would have had an explosive supercriticality event decades ago.

And, to top it all off, the ghost-readings were getting closer to the rig.

Ted had left his office and pulled out his tricorder, monitoring the pings in real-time as he made his way to the combination control-suite/teleport dock in the basement which he’d burned almost 5% of his initial capital setting up. He’d just been settling in in front of a suspended, touch-sensitive smart-glass display pane, adjusting the climate-control in the stone-walled underground chamber and getting the ergonomic gel-cushioned chair adjusted for his prodigious weight when the missing context arrived.

Just like that, his good day was over.

It was a text message, sent directly from the survey rig, bearing Jewels’ ID code and flagged ultrablack priority; That meant that either massive amounts of money were being lost in a sudden and unexpected way, or employees were dead, also in a sudden and unexpected way. Possibly both.

Ted was used to the feeling of a certain amount of tightness in his chest: he was in terrible physical shape, and living on Inverxe for long enough gave everyone an anxiety disorder eventually. The sheer chill, however, the weight he felt behind his sternum as he pressed his thumb to the hanging display and opened the message made him feel ill. He flicked an icon in the corner of the pane, dimming the overhead lighting strips, which suddenly seemed far too bright.



Boss. Find is Confirmed. Something else down here 2. Some kind of dragon, intelligent, nasty, tougher than a xenomorph. Claims the deposit is his. Krade and Flipper are dead.

It’s making me assemble the beacon. U Need to prep the receiving room 4 an ambush, get some sentinels from the settlement wall. Heavy weapons, armor-piercing. Ammo is scarce since the Hub got hit, they’ll need moeny.

If I don’t send him through, this thing is going 2 murder me, but it can NOT be allowed 2 leave.

Please don’t just shut down the receiver. Don’t think U would, but still. I don’t want 2 die down here. Not after Krade and Flipper. Not like this.

Jewels



The words stropped like a straight-razor down the fibers of his spine.

If it had been one of the others, Ted probably would have just shut down the receiving platform and used the scan data to raise some extra capital on spec. He’d have bought some high-end mercenaries and sent his mineral extraction teams in rolling deep, with instructions to retrieve the survey-team’s remains, if there was anything recognizable left.

The thing was, Ted liked Jewels – had a bit of a crush on her, if he was being honest. Her survey team had hired on as a package deal, and it was obvious from the start that they were more than just coworkers, that their particular method of coping with life on Inverxe involved a tightly-knit polyamorous trifecta. It wasn’t something he felt he could compete with, so he’d elected to focus on being competent management rather than potentially cratering his ambitions by pursuing a doomed effort at workplace romance.

Ted knew he was a bit of a bastard. He’d used people ruthlessly in pursuit of establishing his company, exploited people who trusted him. You wouldn’t know it to look, but he had even killed a couple of times, if not quite in self-defense then at least in defense of his interests. Even still, he wasn’t a psychopath, not entirely the heartless corporate raider he aspired to be; He had felt every betrayal, even if it got easier with practice, and now he had been presented with a situation where the profitable choice wasn’t necessarily the one he could live with.

So he’d done as she asked. He’d bribed and wheedled and cajoled the heavy-weapons team down off the settlement wall, the guys kept in reserve against Inverxe’s greater terrors. The half-crazy ex-corporate mercenaries were decked out in half-functional scavenged power-armor, armed with tarnished secondhand bolters, grease-crusted miniguns firing mercury-cored molybdenum ammunition, and even a single-use anti-tank directional plasma-grenade.

Ted had, in spite of a long moment of second-guessing and a shouted argument with a heavily armed man who could have broken him over his knee like a cheap ration-bar, locked in a teleport solution on the strange, roughly man-sized mass of unknown energy and exotic matter. He’d hidden behind a secondary engineering console as the entire plan went straight to hell in a storm of flying shrapnel and bursting mini-rockets, roaring plasma-fire and crackling golden lightning.

And now, after a brief effort at escape, he was back behind that console, soaking wet and covered in someone else’s half-cooked blood, with a monster’s sinister voice whispering in his brain.

He peeked around the corner.

The thing was in bad shape – gleaming like gold in the glow of the flickering, broken overhead lights and the rapidly diminishing fires, it was surrounded by a pool of sparkling mercurial blood, which continued to trickle from many deep wounds, forming strange hydrophobic patterns as it mixed with the water that continued to rain down from the building’s fire-suppression systems. The draconic creature was on its knees, propping itself up with one arm, seemingly unable to stand. Its breathing was heavy, and golden fluid dripped from its jaws, oozing between jagged, saurian teeth. One of the strange secondary faces fused with its shoulders was scored by rocket-fire, exposing glittering bone.

Ted had never been so scared of anything in his life.

As he watched, the beast settled back on its haunches until it was leaning against the wall, it’s head lolling as it visibly battled to stay awake. With a gurgling hiss that sent a shudder through its body, it raised a battle-scarred golden arm, placed its hand against the dent in the wall where the plasma-grenade had driven it into the stone, and with an audible Crack! crunched a handhold in the stone.

Shaking, it pulled itself back up to one knee. Turning its head, two crimson eyes bored into Ted’s own.

Ted couldn’t help but notice that, in spite of its exertions, in spite of the fact that it looked more like a corpse than not, the thing wasn’t bleeding quite as much as it was before.

‘I asked you a question, you repugnant mammalian slug.’

“Uhhh….Upstairs. Outside. Sir… Are you a Sir?”

The thing screamed; The sound warbled, a rolling wave of shrill, manic anger, trailing off into a wet, hacking cough. Ted ducked back behind the console, but unable to escape the voice in his head.

‘You will not presume… to question me. Now. I am to understand that we are within brief walking distance of this planet’s surface, yes?’

Ted’s mind was racing. Part of him, a foolishly brave part which he usually only listened to when making business decisions, was telling him to grab one of the guns and try to finish the thing off, but he wasn’t sure he’d even be able to lift them, let alone survive long enough to take aim and fire. Another part of him was saying he should just run. A third part said ‘call for help’ a fourth said ‘try and be useful’. Yet another screamed about how much it was going to cost to replace all this equipment, quickly silenced by a pragmatic self-assurance that he had actually gone for the expanded insurance package; That was why he’d had to lay off his operations engineer.

‘ANSWER ME’

Ted bolted, scrambling to his feet with more agility than he would have credited himself with. In rapid succession, two blazing arcs of crackling cosmic energy scorched lines across the blackened, water-slick floor, took chips out of the wall. It was a near-miss; they twisted past his body, burning his clothes and singing the hair off his back. The rotund CEO slammed into the door, nearly slipped and fell as he hammered at the keypad – why had he installed a keypad?! A handle would have done just fine!

Another golden blast shrieked across the room, blasting the door clear out of its frame. Metal shrapnel scored Ted’s face, lodged in the rolls of fat on his neck, opened cuts across his arms and chest. He felt a warm stream running down his side as blood began to flow.

Clutching his face with one meaty hand, the man lumbered out of the room, rebounded off a bare stone wall, and ran. Driven by sheer panic, his heart hammering dangerously in his chest, he mounted the pre-fab metal stairs at a pace that would have done an athlete proud.

Close at his heels came the lilting, half-musical echo of the beast’s rage.

 

[King Ghidorah]

Ted pounded up the second flight of stairs, his breath heaving painfully and the ringing of his trainers against the metal steps almost overpowering the sound of his own pulse. He felt dizzy, but he didn’t know if that was down to blood-loss or the unaccustomed burst of physical activity, couldn’t tell if the warm wetness running down the inside of his plaid shirt was sweat, water or his own blood.

It didn’t matter. He didn’t think the monster was following him, but he also didn’t know how long it would stay down – and if there was one thing he was certain of, it was that the beast was absolutely furious.

Ted stumbled out into an alcove at the back of the ‘lobby’ – really just the ground floor apartments of the tiny pre-fab worker-housing tenement he’d purchased and renovated for use as his center of planetary operations, but with all the non-load-bearing walls ripped out, fake potted plants flanking the elevator, and a particle-board reception-desk in the middle of the black-and-white tiled linoleum floor.

The reception desk had been a bit of wishful thinking on Ted’s part. The settlement, Fortress-Polity 428A, was more of an overbuilt base-camp than anything else: a walled mountaintop staging-area for the mining industry around which its several-hundred inhabitants’ lives revolved. Everyone who came here had either already lined up work before they left the Hub or they were operating their own hustle. He’d initially hired a good-natured local prostitute to fill the position for a couple of weeks, but nobody had ever walked in the door who hadn’t already contracted with the company remotely. However, there was something to be said, in the Deeptide CEO’s mind, for what the desk represented.

Now, fleeing for his life, he thundered past it, crashed into the plexiglass sliding doors with a bone-rattling smack and tumbled out into the street, where he lay gasping in the freezing concrete gutter.

Staring up at the re-enforced plasticrete façade of his building, Ted watched his labored breath misting in the air as he waited for his pulse to slow down.

No primal warbling screech signaled his approaching doom. No indestructible golden dragon appeared to blast him off the face of the planet in an eruption of lightning and scorn.

Out of immediate danger, the fraught entrepreneur began to calm down – and as his brain started to work on something more than its most basic instinctual level, he began to realize that something (disregarding the obvious) was very, very wrong.

FP-428A, leaving aside the fragments of people’s lives that accumulate in any lived-in space and excluding privately-owned and extensively renovated premises like Ted’s own, was very bare-bones. The settlement had been constructed with hard-wearing functionality in mind, and in that spirit it did not have a hard-to-engineer and maintain dome over the top – rather, the temperature inside was maintained by an artificial atmospheric inversion layer, a convective barrier that prevented heat from escaping the top of the shallow, walled crater in which it was built. Even when the outside weather was positively lethal, the ruggedly-designed machines kept the temperature in the crater at least livable.

It shouldn’t have been so cold.

Ted rolled over, still gasping for breath, his shirt sticky with blood and sweat, and with great difficulty pushed himself to his feet. He looked in one direction then the other, panning his gaze up and down the main thoroughfare upon which his business was located. At one end, the space-dock and jumpship hangars, a silent elevated expanse punctuated by small domed structures; At the other, the low-walled industrial complex that housed the fortress-polity’s critical infrastructure. In between, there was only the broken-tooth brutalist facades of the businesses and residential blocks, interrupted by the occasional grid-plan cross-street, covered in intricately layered graffiti ranging from the transcendent to the obscene and adorned with mostly non-functional holographic signage.

Sight nor sound, not a single living soul was in evidence. As the singed hairs on the back of his neck rose and a fresh shot of adrenaline trickled like ice into his veins, a terrible thought flowed across the front of Ted’s brain, a soft summer wind soaked in venom.

You bribed a fully-armed heavy-weapons squad off the crater-wall. That was almost forty minutes ago.

What was it Jewels said about ammunition supplies?

Something black and chitinous and larger than a man scuttled across the second floor of his building, little more than a blur in the corner of his eye by the time he turned to look. A growl drifted softly from the shadowed doorway of the featureless work-house across the street, underscored by a rapid insectile clicking. The Deeptide CEO spun as quickly as he was able, but saw nothing.

Ted took a step back, then another, not sure where to run.

Something thick, viscous and sour-smelling dripped onto his shoulder. The clicking sound came again – only this time, it was right next to his ear.

 

[King Ghidorah]

***

For the first hour after the teleport beacon blazed to life and banished her golden tormentor from the caverns, Jewels was mostly okay. She celebrated, doing an incompetent but enthusiastic moonwalk around the spot where the thing had disappeared and shouting incoherently. She moved the remaining supplies to one side of the cave, shoveled debris over the diminished but-still-smoldering fires and scavenged herself some bottled water and a freeze-dried meal, eaten with gusto while seated atop an empty plastic packing crate.

It was only then that she thought to call Ted and ask why she hadn’t been extracted yet.

It was only then that she discovered Corporate was no longer transmitting.

Jewels tried other channels, other contacts: her landlord, the people who lived down the hall, her favorite bar, the space-dock, even the shuttlecraft pilot who’d ferried them into this hell-hole.

Nothing.

She fixed her mask back in place, took a deep breath and let it out slowly, forced herself to stay calm. She adjusted the fit on her enviro-suit, tightened the straps on her boots, re-armed and restocked her personal gear from the remaining un-burned stores and calibrated her new goggles. She busied herself for as long as she could with minor but potentially necessary tasks – and then she hooked the stationary rig up to the beacon, and used the rig’s onboard utilities to run a back-trace for the Deeptide receiving platform.

Jewels cursed aloud.

It wasn’t there. Worse than that, the most recent signals told a story of some sort of rapid, catastrophic and irreparable failure, a one-two punch of massive mechanical shocks that had taken the entire system offline.

The lonely surveyor sat down on the dusty igneous ground and stared into the middle-distance.

It didn’t make sense. Even if that shining monster had survived their ambush somehow, had slaughtered the sentinels and destroyed the receiving platform, it couldn’t very well have cleared out the entirety of the FP – not this quickly, at any rate. She should have be able to call someone.

Jewels could sense her resolve fraying: the mighty psychological dynamo powered by simple necessities identified and handled, the mechanism which drove her forward under extreme stress, threatening to overload. As it sparked and stalled she could feel the loss welling up – thoughts of the people she absolutely could not think about right now, because there was not time to mourn – and dove instead into the further peril of her situation, fed the dynamo a problem and forced it to spin.

Even if she could scrounge enough food and water, setting a distress signal and waiting for rescue, sadly, wasn’t an option. The simple fact was that if something had happened to Ted (something golden, perhaps, which breathed lightning) then she was the only one left with a legal claim on whatever lay within these caves. Almost everyone on this frozen rock was about two weeks and one bad day away from being a pirate, a corpse or a psychopath, and if Ted was dead, which was seeming increasingly likely, then whoever showed up would probably be on Kaalakiota’s payroll. How convenient would it be for them if the only barrier to staking a claim of their own disappeared down the bottom of a nearby tectonic ravine? No, if she was going to try for a rescue, she would need to be found somewhere that any Kaalakiota-aligned rescuers couldn’t immediately identify her as a problem.

Besides, left alone in the dark, on Inverxe, after what had happened, she would probably either go completely mad or just take the dive without anyone’s help.

Jewels screwed her eyes shut. She clenched her hands inside of her sturdy gloves and counted to ten. Then she stood up.

“Okay,” she said aloud, her voice sending quavering echoes through the caves. “I’ll need the cold-weather gear, and enough rations for the trip back to base. I’ll need as much climbing gear as I can carry. I’ll need the distress beacon.”

She paused, shut her eyes again. She could feel the dry air flowing past her, the cool of the deep caves replacing the heat of the recently-extinguished fires.

“And I’ll need a sample. Because fuck if I’m getting killed without finding out what we died for.”

 

[King Ghidorah]

The trip back through caves, scrambling down now-familiar slopes, grasping for handholds on ancient stalagmites and trudging through barren tunnels marked by paint and piton was an entirely different experience when undertaken alone; It was the first rule of subterranean exploration – never go in alone – but it wasn’t as though Jewels had a choice in the matter. Even so, on top of everything else, there was something deeply transgressive and not-at-all comfortable about descending unaccompanied into the hollow depths of the frozen moon.

She was almost thankful for the solitude. It kept her on edge, kept her nervous, the habits of survival on Inverxe not permitting her to relax without someone watching her back. The constant frission of adrenaline anchored the lonely surveyor in the now, didn’t allow her to think too much. As the hours ticked past, however, and by rock-hammer, cable and boot she drew closer to her goal, certain things became harder and harder to avoid.

If Jewels was going to find out what all this was about, she was going to have to pursue that mysterious golden glow from which the draconic murderer had emerged – and for that to happen, she would have to walk down that tunnel.

She would have to pass the bodies.

As Jewels prepared to descend the final, fateful scree-pile, as her gloves closed on the graphene cable that still wended its way down to the tunnel floor, she honestly didn’t know what would happen next, didn’t know if she would be able to handle it. Every mental trick and coping mechanism she’d ever developed was already redlined, and it was anybody’s guess how much more she could take.

The rugged, steel-lined soles of her boots touched the smooth, dusty surface of the tunnel floor with a muted crunch. Jewels swallowed hard. She turned, adjusted visual field of her goggles with a hand that only shook a little bit, and began walking.

For all her apprehension and bottled-up emotions, the lonely surveyor almost walked right past them. They burned and blasted remains didn’t look like Krade and Flipper anymore, didn’t match the picture in mind – they barely even looked human. The monster’s lightning had charred them to the bone, blackened what flesh remained until it was puckered and shrunken, practically the same color as the stone on which they lay. Their clothing and equipment was equally ravaged, fused with their bodies, the bodies in turn fused with each other. It was horrifying – grotesque; but bizarrely reassuring.

“You’re not here,” Jewels whispered. “Neither of you are here anymore. This isn’t you.”

Blinking hard to keep the tears from coming, Jewels turned her head way and marched on. If she started crying now, it would all come out, everything she’d been forcing down, and if that happened she was going to die down here. Something might come shambling out to throw itself to its death at the bottom of the ravine, might ambush a future survey team, weeping and laughing in the dark, but Inverxe was not kind to people who lost their composure. Jewels would break down eventually – that was guaranteed - but if she didn’t do it somewhere she felt safe, with people around to keep her anchored, then it would all get twisted up by the ice-world’s oppressive psychic miasma and that would be the end.

She continued on, past the plasma-scored walls, past the footprints of the beast charred into the rock – and then she saw the glow. It was dim, soft, almost hazy – the mellow gold of melted butter, a shade that Jewels hadn’t seen in years. She increased her pace, her steps ringing out, echoing off the stone. Somewhere nearby, the breathy moan of an underground air-current rose and fell.

Rounding a corner, one hand on her weapon, Jewels stepped out into the light.

The first thing to hit her was the smell. It had been present, she realized now, to a greater or lesser extent for the past couple of hours: but something about the angle, about the way the howling wind moved past the entrance to the tunnel from which she’d come, kept it from encroaching in earnest. It was the reek of ancient death and electrical fires, clotted blood and storm-clouds. Ozone and agony, rainwater and rot: almost sweet, but also jagged, and intense to the point of being overpowering.

The second thing, almost a shocking, was the sheer sense of scale.

Jewels was standing in the largest underground chamber she had ever seen. It was so broad that even with her goggles set for maximum magnification she couldn’t get a clear idea of its actual size. It was deep enough that it had its own weather, the ceiling lost behind a silky mashed-potato haze of condensed water vapor, reflecting creamy shades of bronze; Jagged tips of stalactites the size of residential blocks poked down through the clouds, dripping steady streams of clear water that spattered and plinked on the cavern floor far below. The ground was cluttered, uneven and wet, covered with broken mounds of obsidian shot with veins of diamonds. The gems reflected the amber light which suffused the entire chamber, glittering from the shadows, shining saffron. Conical stalagmites that might have been hollowed out and used as four-bedroom houses rose from the floor seemingly at random, flanked by vast fields of their lesser brethren; Some of them were so tall that they connected with their ceiling-bound counterparts, forming great skyscraping columns adorned with the melted-candle rock-formations that only millennia of flowing water could create.

Whispering and howling through it all, there was the wind. The sound of it never entirely stopped, only changed direction and tone, volume and pitch, like a slide-whistle played by a man who had never heard music. It ruffled Jewels’ enviro-suit, raised the hair on the back of her neck, formed condensation in the stubble on her scalp.

The place was like a city, could have housed a city - not just some petty Inverxian fortress-polity either. And there was a pull to it, a directionality, some strange quirk of geometry and optics suggesting that everything was sluicing towards one end of the metropolitan chamber: the end where the glow was brightest.

It didn’t feel real. That made it easy.

Jewels watched, from somewhere outside herself, as she picked and scraped across the water-slick obsidian mounds, careful not to slip lest she cut herself to ribbons on a pile of razor-sharp volcanic glass. She wandered, detached, navigating fields of stalagmites, using her rock-hammer to smash the smallest ones when no clear path presented itself. She slid down the face of a rock-formation with the appearance of a waterfall in full flood – and the glow grew brighter, and the smell, impossibly, grew stronger.

Finally, she turned a corner, rounding the circumference of the largest boulder she had ever seen and ducking through an archway formed of petrified, flowing stone. From atop a triangular promontory formed of ancient granite she stared out over a buried volcanic basin, a lake of glittering gold and silver - and hanging above it, the size of a mountain, one with the cavern wall, a winged titan, the three golden faces of perfect cosmic terror.

Jewels shut down. It wasn’t the collapse she had been fearing – those emotions were still locked up tight. It wasn’t even the primal horror that the thing represented, the psychic echo of ten-thousand burning skies which, even dead, radiated from it like a prophecy of doom.

No, this was her brain, her stupid, rugged brain, making connections in spite of – or perhaps because of - being soaked in stress-chemicals. Making connections it was unable, at this point in time, to handle.

The first intuitive leap was the obvious resemblance to the golden beast who had so gleefully ruined her life. The weird half-formed heads on her nemesis’ shoulders, the extended neck, the shining metallic hide– and that cruel, serpentine face, here repeated in titanic triplicate. Her monster was unmistakably an undeveloped version of this.

“It was a baby,” she muttered, not really hearing herself speak.

The second, much weirder connection, the one that was making her vision swim with funny little shapes and her knees feel weak, was that she had seen this thing before.

Growing up on Cevanti, the poorest of the poor, in a ruined Markovian slum just outside of the energy-barrier, Jewels had not exactly been a model citizen. In particular, she only remembered the week following her sixteenth birthday in flashes; on the happy day in question she had drank two liters of some wine a friend of hers had made from fermented fruit peels mixed with some kind of fluid that he claimed he’d found inside a dead zoid. That hadn’t felt good, so she’d chased it with some weird blue mushrooms she’d found growing on a busted barrier-node, and she was off to the races.

‘The races’ in this case, turned out to be a week of extremely irresponsible behaviour, fueled by the most vivid, and occasionally terrifying, hallucinations. She had, or so she was told, after doing a lot of things that subsequently made her a minor legend in the social circles she ran with at the time, jumped on a stolen hover-bike with a busted stabilizer fin and soared off into the forest singing a foul little song that she seemed to be making up on the spot. The next anyone heard of her it was six days later, when she was found wandering in a dehydrated daze about four blocks from her family’s squat, still hallucinating and miraculously unhurt.

Most of what had happened after she left the city that day Jewels didn’t remember, and most of what she did remember didn’t make sense. But one of the clearer recollections from her week-long blackout, one which she had always assumed hadn’t really happened, and had in fact mostly forgotten about until this moment, was an image of a golden three headed dragon – the thing in the wall, alive and powerful, terrible and strong - soaring over a shining city, surrounded by golden lightning and billowing flames. The image was grainy, wavering, changing colors, but even so it possessed tremendous depth – it spoke of glorious spires and flawless design, elegant architecture merged seamlessly with pristine public spaces. It made even the nicest parts of Markov look like a toilet, and part of the reason she had been so eager to dismiss it as weird drugs and bad alcohol (aside from the three-headed monster, because that obviously wasn’t real) was because it hurt too much to think that such a place had ever existed.

The image was associated with a female voice, soft and bright, confident and personable, repeating the same thing over and over again: that part she remembered with much greater clarity. It sometimes appeared in her dreams.

Designation: King Ghidorah. Threat Level: Multi-Planetary. Status: Neutralized.

Neu-Neu-Neutralized. Neu-

Designation: King Ghidorah -

Neutralized.

Threat-Threat-Threat-level-… -ing Ghidorah.

Neutralized.

Jewels’ knees hit the stone. She was still holding on, the dynamo was still spinning, but other mental components simply refused to cooperate. Something inside her, something that simply couldn’t handle this one more thing, had reached its limit.

The lonely surveyor slumped sideways. Her cheek pressed softly against the strangely warm stone, and finally, mercifully, with the underground winds whispering in her ears, she lapsed into a stark and dreamless sleep.

And that's act one in the can! Tune into my next thread: Swiggity Swenomorph, Ghidorah fights some Xenomorphs.
(It won't actually be called that)